The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eight days ago, I spoke about the composition of the human being and about the different parts of his entity. If you refrain from the finer gradation which we have discussed at that time, we can say that the human being disintegrates into three members: body, soul and mind. A consideration of these three human members leads to the big principles of human life, to the same laws of the soul and of the mind as the consideration of the outside world leads us to the principles of the physical life. Our usual science only knows the principles of the physical life. It knows nothing to say about the principles of the soul-life and the spiritual life on the higher fields. But there are the same laws in these higher fields, and these laws of the soul-life and the spiritual life are undoubtedly more important for the human being than what happens externally in the physical space. But the lofty determination of the human being, the comprehension of our destiny, the understanding why we are in this body which sense this life has the answers to these questions can be found solely in the higher fields of the spiritual life.

A consideration of the soul-life shows its big basic law to us, its developmental law, and the law of reincarnation. And a consideration of the spiritual life shows us the law of cause and effect, the law which we exactly know in the physical world that any effect has its cause. Any action of the spiritual life has its cause and must have its cause, and this spiritual law is called the law of karma. The law of reincarnation or re-embodiment consists in the fact that the human being lives not only once, but that the life of the human being proceeds in a whole number of repetitions which had started once and will once find an end. Starting from other conditions the human being as we will still see in later talks enters in this law of reincarnation and he will overcome this law later again to move on to other phases of his development. The law of karma says that our destiny, what we experience in life is not without cause, but that our actions, our experiences, our sufferings and joys in a life depend on the preceding lives that we have made our destiny to us in the past lives. As well as we live now, we create the causes of the destiny which meets us when we are re-embodied; this is the cause which forms the destiny of our future life.

Now we want to get involved a little more exactly in these ideas of the soul development and the spiritual causing. The law of reincarnation or re-embodiment deals with the fact that the human soul appears and lives on earth not once but many times. Of course, only somebody can completely realise the immediate factuality of this law who advances so far using mystic, theosophical methods that he can study in the psychic fields of existence as the everyday human being in the external fields of the sensuous life and facts. Not before the higher facts take place before his soul-eyes as for the sensuous human being the facts of the physical world take place before his physical senses, reincarnation is a fact to him. There is also still a lot that the human being does not yet realise today according to its real being, but he can see it in its effects and, therefore, he believes in it. Reincarnation is something that most people cannot regard as a fact and are not accustomed to consider it as an external effect, and, therefore, they do not believe in it. Also the phenomena of electricity are such that every physicist says that the real being of electricity is unknown to us; but people do not doubt that something like an entity of electricity exists. They see the effects of electricity, light and movement. If people were able to see the external effects of memory with their physical eyes, then they would not doubt that there is reincarnation. One can still recognise memory. Nevertheless, one has to make oneself familiar with the external expression of reincarnation to get used to the idea gradually to be able to correctly see that which theosophy calls reincarnation.

Hence, I would like to consider those facts purely externally which are accessible to everybody which everybody can observe to which he is not used only to take the right points of view. However, if he did so, he would say to himself: I do not yet know reincarnation as a fact, but I can assume like with electricity that there is such a thing. Who wants to see the external physical facts in the right light, must carefully pursue the law of development which we perceive everywhere in the outside world thanks to the scientific research of the 19th century. He has to ask himself: what happens before our eyes in the realm of life? I note from the start that I want to touch this fact only in general because I speak on Darwinism and theosophy in the next talks. All those questions which are connected with this part of this lecture are connected with doubt and ideas whether theosophy would be disproved by modern Darwinism. I answer these questions in the talk which I hold a week from today.

We have to understand this development correctly. In the 18th century the great naturalist Linnaeus (Carl L., 1707–1778, the father of modern taxonomy, Systema naturae, 1735) still said that as many botanical genera and animal genera exist side by side as have been made originally. This opinion is no longer shared by any naturalist. The more perfect living beings one assumes have developed from more imperfect organisms. Thus natural sciences have transformed that which one once could observe only side by side into a temporal succession. If now we ask ourselves: by which means is it possible that development occurs by which means is it possible that in the sequence of the different species and genera in the animal and plant realms an interrelation does exists? Then we get to a law which is darkish for our natural sciences, but is connected with the law of physical development. This is the fact which expresses itself in the so-called heredity. As everybody knows, the descendant of an organism is not different from its ancestor.

So the similarity of ancestor and descendant confronts us. The variety originates from the fact that a difference is added to this similarity in the course of time. It is, so to speak, a result of two factors: of that in what the descendants are like their ancestors, and of that in what they are different. The variety of the animal guise and plant guise comes into being from the most imperfect up to the most perfect one. Never would anybody understand why the difference exists unless the law of heredity were there. One could also not understand why the descendant is different, so that this difference is added to the similarity. This connection of similarity and difference gives the concept of physical development. You find it in the plant life, in the animal life and in the human life. If, however, you ask: what develops in the physical realm, what in the plant life, what in the animal life and what in the human life? Then we receive a drastic difference between the human life and the animal life. One must have realised, one must have completely thought through this difference, then one does not stand still where the physical researcher stands still. One feels constrained to advance; one has to extend the idea of development substantially. Only the old habitual ways of thinking cause that the human beings cannot come to higher levels of development.

I would like to make this difference of humanity and the animal realm clear to you now. It expresses itself in a fact which is unquestionable, but is not enough taken into consideration. If, however, one has conceived it, it brings light and absolutely clarifying. One can express this fact with the catchword: the human being has a biography, the animal has no biography. Of course, the owners of dogs, horses or monkeys will argue that an animal has peculiar, individual inclinations and an individual existence in certain respect, and that one can write, hence, also a biography of a dog, a horse or a monkey. This should not be doubted. But in the same sense one can also write the biography of a quill. However, nobody denies that it is not the same if we speak of a human biography. Everywhere are only transitions, gradual differences, and that is why that which preferably applies to the human being also applies to subordinate beings in the transferred sense, it can even be applied to external matters. Why should we not be able to describe the qualities of an ink-pot? But you will find that a radical difference exists between the biography of a person and the biography of an animal. If we want to speak of that which of the animal interests us to the same extent as the biography of the individual human, then we have to deliver the description of the species. If we describe a dog, a lion, then our description applies to all dogs or lions. In doing so, we do not need to think of biographies of excellent human beings. We can write the biography of a Mr. Lehman or a Mr. Schultz. However, it differs substantially from any animal biography, and it is for the human being of the same interest as the description of the species for the animal life.

With that is said for everybody who thinks that way completely exactly: the biography signifies for the human being what the description of the species signifies for the animal. Hence, in the animal realm one speaks of an evolution of the species and the genera; with the human being one has to set in with the individual. The human being is a species for himself, not in the physical sense, as far as the human being is on the highest level of animality, for it is the same with the human being as with the animals concerning the generic : if we describe the human being as a species, we describe him in such a way, as we describe the lion species, the tiger species or the cat species. The description of the individual of the human being is substantially different. The individual of the human being is a species for himself. This sentence, completely understood, leads us to a higher concept of describing the evolution within the human realm. If you want to inform yourselves about the generic of the human being, about his exterior guise for this is the generic of the human being , then you will resort to the concept of heredity like in the animal evolution. Then you know, why Schiller had a particular form of the nose, a particular physiognomy; then you derive his guise more or less successfully from his forefathers. The biography of the human being goes beyond that. It only concerns the radical difference of a human being from all other human beings. Of these two fields the generic is not important for the idea of reincarnation or re-embodiment. The other field matters which we distinguish from the generic as the real soul, as the inner life of the human being, in what one differs human beings from anyone.

You all know that everybody has a particular soul-life and that it expresses itself in sympathies and antipathies, in our characters, in that which we recognise as the peculiar way how we are able to live out emotionally. As well as performances of the lion have the specific imprint of the lions, of the lion species, the specific performance of Mr. Miller or Mr. Lehman has the specific imprint of these individual souls. We can only consider the temperament and the character of a person as the individual of a human being. However, we already find the same everywhere in the animal realm what we have considered as characteristic of the human soul. There we also find sympathies and antipathies, inclinations, desires, even particular characters. Ignoring finer differences again, we call the sum of the animal habits the manifestation of the animal instincts.

The natural sciences of the 19th century tried to explain this instinct, this soul element in the animal like the external guise, namely by means of heredity. One said that the animals accomplish certain activities, and because they have done many activities often and often these activities imprint themselves on their beings, so that they become habitual; then they appear transmitted to the descendants as particular instincts, for instance, if one coerces certain dogs to run fast, because one uses them for hunting. Because of this exercise the descendants of these dogs are already born with the instinct of fast running as such disposed hunting dogs. Lamarck tries this way to explain the instincts of the animals; they should be inherited exercises.

However, a real consideration shows very soon that just the intricate instincts cannot be transmitted and connected with any inherited exercise. Just the most intricate instincts show in their very nature to the observers that they are impossibly due to heredity. Take a fly which flies away if you come close to it. This is an instinctive reaction. By which means should the fly have acquired this instinct? The ancestors did not have this instinct. They would have to get the aware or unaware experience that not getting up is injurious to them under certain circumstances, and thereby they would have got the habit of flying away to avoid the damage. Who has a real overview of the interrelationship is hardly able to say that so and so many insects got to be used to fly away to not be killed because they have experienced that they are killed. They would have to stay alive in order to pass these experiences to their offspring.

So, you see, it is impossible to speak of heredity that way without getting involved in the gravest contradictions. We could speak of hundred and thousand cases where animals do something just only once. Take the pupation, for instance: this is done only once in life, and from it follows strikingly that it is not possible to speak of heredity in the soul-life like in the physical life. Hence, the naturalist puts the sentence completely aside that the instincts are inherited exercises.

Here we do not deal with a transmission of direct experience in the physical life, but with an effect of the animal soul-world. We speak a little more exactly about this animal soul-world in the next talks. Today we can be content with the statement of the impossibility to speak of the transmission of soul qualities of ancestors to descendants in the same sense as one speaks of heredity in the physical realm. However, the human being has to bring an interrelationship into the world if he generally wants to see sense and reason in the world; he must be able to refer any effect to its cause. He must be able to refer to causes what appears in the individual soul-life what appears within the human individual as sympathies and antipathies, as manifestations of temperament and character.

The human beings have different qualities. Hence, we have to explain the difference of the human individuals. We cannot explain them in another way than that we introduce the same idea of development in psychic fields as we did it in the physical. How senseless would it be if one wanted to believe that a perfect lion has grown as a species suddenly out of the earth or that an imperfect animal has suddenly developed? How impossible is it that the individual of the human being has developed from the uncertain? We have also to derive the individual as we derive the perfect genus from an undeveloped genus. Nobody will honestly explain the qualities of the human soul like the bodily qualities if he really does think.

What is connected with the body, what is caused by the fact that I have weaker hands than my fellow man is physical heredity. Because I have a weak body, my hands will be weaker than those of another who has a stronger body. Everything that is connected with the physical body and its development is inherited, but not that which belongs to the internal soul-life. Who would attribute Schiller's (Friedrich S., 1759–1805, German classic poet) characteristic, his talent, his temperament et etcetera, or Newton's talent to their ancestors (Isaac N., 1642–1727, English physicist, mathematician and philosopher)? Someone who closes his mind is able to do this. But somebody who does not close his mind cannot come to such a consideration. If the human being is his own species as a soul-being, the intricate soul qualities which face us with this or that being must not be attributed to his physical ancestors, but to other causes in the past which were somewhere else than with the ancestors. Because the causes are only assigned to the individual human being, they have only to do with the individual human being. As we cannot find the lion in the bear genus, the individuality cannot be derived from another human being, but only from the human being himself because the human being is the individual of the own species. That is why he can be derived only from himself. Because the human being brings certain qualities with him which determine him also like the species determines the lion, they have to be also derived from the individual itself. We get that way to the chain of different incarnations which the individual person must have already experienced just as the lion species. This is the external approach. If we look around in the physical life, it appears to us only understandable if we are able to go beyond mere heredity and to think a law of reincarnation which is the principle on the soul level.

For someone who is able to observe spiritually no hypothesis but a conclusion exists here. What I have said is only a conclusion. The fact of reincarnation exists for somebody who can rise to direct observing with the methods of mysticism and theosophy. In the last talk, we wanted to learn to microscope theosophically, so to speak. Today we want to state that theosophists are so far advanced that sympathies and antipathies, passions and wishes, briefly, the character exists as fact there before the soul-eyes like the external physical body stands before the eyes of the physical observer. If this is the case, the soul observer is in the same situation as the external researcher, then the soul observer has the same facts, then he observes the intricate structure, that light guise, which is embedded in the external guise, also as external reality, like the external guise is reality for the physical observer. This auric structure expresses the fact for him that he deals with a lofty, perfect living soul-being, with a differentiated, organised aura equipped with many organs like we deal with the lion as a being, which has many organs.

If we observe the soul, the aura of imperfect savages, it seems to be relatively simple; it appears in simple colours, appears in such a way that one can compare the contrast of this simple aura, this undifferentiated aura poor in colours of a savage and the intricate aura of an European civilised human being with that of an imperfect snail or amoeba and the perfect lion. Then we exactly pursue the development in the realm of the soul even as the aura. Then we see that a perfect aura can only originate on the way of development, while we see that the aura if we go backward was a more imperfect one. Somebody who is able to observe in this realm can get an immediate observation of the soul-life itself.

If we ascend to the spiritual life, the physical law of cause and effect faces us in the higher life, the law of karma. This law of karma means exactly the same for the spirit as the law of cause and effect, the law of causality, for the external, physical phenomena. If you see any fact in the outer physical world if you see a stone falling down, then you ask: why does the stone fall? And you do not rest, until you have found the cause. If you have spiritual phenomena, you have to ask also for the spiritual causes. The spiritual facts are close to us! The one is a person whom we call a happy one, another is condemned to misfortune for his whole life. What we call human destiny is included in the question: why is this and that?

Before this “why” the whole external science stands completely helplessly because it does not know how to apply its law of cause and effect to the spiritual phenomena. If you have a metal ball and you throw it into water, a particular fact happens. But the fact becomes another if you have made the metal ball glowing first. You will try to get the different phenomena clear in your mind concerning cause and effect. You also have to ask in the spiritual life: why is one person not successful compared to another person? Why do I succeed in this but not in that? This results in recognising the cause that a certain fact shows a particular characteristic in reality. Because I have heated the metal ball first, the water starts boiling. It does not depend on the water, it depends on the change which the metal ball has experienced before and that causes the destiny of the metal ball. Thus the destiny of the metal ball depends on the conditions it has gone through before. It depends on which phenomena approach the ball with a following experience in order to keep to the example.

We have to say: any action which I do contributes also to my spiritual human being, changes my spiritual human being as the heating-up has changed the physical metal ball. An even finer thinking is necessary here than in the realm of the soul. One has to realise here with patience and rest that an action changes the spiritual human being. If today anybody steals anything, this is an action which stamps the spiritual human being with a lower quality as if I do a good action to a human being. It is not the same whether I do a moral action or a physical one. What the heated up metal ball is for the water, this is the moral stamp for the human being. Just as little as something physical remains without effect for the future, just as little the moral stamp remains without effect for the future. Also in the spiritual realm there are no causes without corresponding effects. From that results the big law that any action must necessarily produce an effect for the spiritual being in question. The moral stamp must express itself in the spiritual being, in the destiny of the spiritual being.

This law that the moral stamp of an action must come into effect at any rate is the law of karma. With it we have got to know the concepts of reincarnation and karma. People argue various things against these concepts; however, nothing can be argued against their general character by the real thinker. The human life shows us in all its phenomena, and the external facts prove that development exists also in the spiritual life that cause and effect also exist in the spiritual life. Also those who do not stand on the theosophical point of view have attempted to find cause and effect also in the spiritual fields, for example, a philosopher of recent time, Paul Rée (1849–1901, German philosopher, The Origin of Moral Sensations, 1877), the friend of Friedrich Nietzsche. He attempted to explain a spiritual phenomenon externally by means of development. He asks: has conscience always been there in the evolution? Then he shows that there are human beings who do not have what we call conscience in our evolution. He says that there were times in which such a thing like conscience was not developed in the human soul. In those days, the human beings different from us made particular experiences. They found that if they carry out certain actions these actions result in punishment that the society takes revenge on those who are injurious to the society. Within the human soul a feeling developed of that which should be and of that which should not be. This was transformed in the course of time to a kind of heredity, and today the human beings are already born with the feeling which just expresses itself in their conscience something should be or something should not be. Conscience developed that way, Rée thinks, within the whole humanity. Rée showed here nicely that we can also apply the concept of development to the soul qualities, to conscience. If he had advanced a step more, he would have come in the field of theosophy.

I would like to tell a phenomenon in addition, this is the phenomenon that we can exactly indicate the point in the European history of civilisation where one speaks of conscience first. If you follow the whole ancient Greek world and trace the descriptions and accounts, you do not find a word, not even in the ancient Greek language, for conscience. One had no word for it. It may be especially remarkable to hear what Plato tells about Socrates. In all Socratic dialogues the word is not yet included which appeared in Greece later only in the last century before Christ. Some think that the daimonion is conscience.

However, this can easily disproved, and, hence, it cannot be considered seriously. We find conscience only in the Christian world. There is a drama trilogy, the Oresteia by Aeschylus. If you pursue these three dramas, you see that Orestes stands under the immediate impression of the matricide. He has murdered his mother because she killed his father. Now it is shown to us how Orestes is persecuted by the Furies, and it is shown how he turns to the court and the court acquits him. Nothing else appears than the concept of the gods taking revenge externally. There the process expresses itself in the fear of external powers. Nothing of that exists which the concept of conscience includes.

Then Sophocles and then Euripides follow. With them Orestes faces us quite differently. Why he feels guilty this faces us here in another way. With these poets Orestes feels guilty because he now owns knowledge to have done something wrong. And from it the word conscience forms in Greek and also in Latin. Having a knowledge of one's own action, being able to observe oneself, being with one's own action this must have developed first. If now Paul Rée were right that conscience is a result of general human development that it develops out of that which the human being observes, because he is punished for that which harms to the fellow man, and, hence, harms to himself if he does anything that is not for the purposes of a reasonable world order. If this were the cause, this conscience would had undoubtedly to appear also in general. Because the external inducement takes place in the same sense, it would have to appear with bigger human masses; it would have to appear in a tribe at the same time, would develop as a general quality of the human species. Here one would have to study the Greek history as a soul history. At that time when in Greece with individual persons the concept developed which we do not yet find in older Greece, there was a period in which really the public unscrupulousness was the order of the day. Read the accounts of the time of the wars between Athens and Sparta! We cannot consider conscience as a general quality of the human species like the qualities of the animals.

Another objection is made: if the human being lived repeatedly, he would remember his former lives. However, one cannot understand this from the start why this is mostly not the case. One has to realise what memory is and how it comes into being. I already explained last time that the human being lives in the present developmental stage, indeed, in the astral and spiritual worlds but that he is not aware of these two worlds that he is only aware of the physical world and attains in the future and on higher levels what some human beings have already attained today. The average human being becomes aware of soul and spirit only later. The average human being is aware in the physical world and lives in the worlds of soul and spirit. This is due to the fact that his real force of thinking, the brain, needs the physical world to be able to work. Being physically active means becoming aware in the physical life. In sleep the human being is not aware. Who develops with mystic methods, develops his consciousness also in sleep and in the higher states. It makes the remembrance possible of that which the human being experiences in the course of life. Because his brain exists in the physical world, he remembers what meets him physically. The remembrance of the human being extends farther who works not only with the physical brain but can make use of the soul material to be aware also within the soul like the everyday human being is aware within his physical body. Even as the imperfect animal does not yet have the ability of the developed lion, but will have this quality once, also the human being who does not yet have the ability to remember the former lives will gain it later.

In the even higher fields it is difficult to get spiritually to the insight into the interrelation of cause and effect. This is possible only in the spiritual world if the human being is able to think not only in the physical and astral bodies, but in the purely spiritual life. Then he is also able to say of every occurrence why it has happened. This field is so lofty that a lot of patience is necessary to acquire those qualities so that one can understand cause and effect in the spiritual life. Who is aware in the physical and lives only in the astral and the spiritual worlds has only the recollection of his experiences between birth and death. Somebody who is conscious in the astral world remembers his birth up to a certain degree. However, who is conscious in the spiritual world sees the law of cause and effect in its real interrelation.

Another objection is included in the question: do we not come there to fatalism? If everything is caused, the human being is subjected to fate saying to himself time and again: this is my karma, and we cannot change our fate. One can say this just as little as one can say: I cannot help my fellow man, and it makes me so hopeless that I cannot help him; I must despair to make him better, because it is his karma. Somebody who compares the law of life with the laws of nature and knows what a law is will never come to such a wrong view of the law of karma.

The way how sulphur, hydrogen and oxygen combine to sulphuric acid is subjected to an unalterable law of nature. If I act against the law which lies in the qualities of these substances, I never achieve sulphuric acid. My personal performance belongs to it. I am free to combine the substances. Although the law is absolute, it becomes effective with my free action. This also applies to the law of karma. An action which I have done in the past lives entails its effect in this life. But I am free to work against the effect, to do another action which possibly cancels injurious results of the former action lawfully. As according to the unalterable law a glowing ball, put on the table, burns the table, I can cool the ball and put it then on the table. It does no longer burn the table. In the one and in the other case I have acted according to the law. An action in the past induces me to an action; the effect of my action in the past life cannot be removed, but I can carry out another action and change the injurious effect to a useful effect, only that everything takes place according to the laws of spiritual causes and effects. The law of karma can be compared with an account management. On the left and on the right we have certain amounts. If we add on the left and on the right and subtract them from each other, we receive the account balance. This is an unalterable law. Depending on my preceding transactions the account balance is positive or negative.

Even if this law works definitely, I can still add new items and the whole balance changes as lawfully as it has changed once. I am caused by karma particularly, but at every moment the account balance of my life can be changed by new registrations. If I want to add a new item, I must only have added both sides to see whether I have a cash flow or debts. It is also the same with the experiences in the account balance of life. They adapt themselves to life. Who can see how his life is caused can also say to himself: my balancing is active or passive, and I have to add this or that action to cancel the bad in life to be gradually relieved of that which I have accumulated as my karma. We regard this as the big goal of human life: the relief of karma which was caused once. It depends on every single human being to find goals to balance the account of life.

Thereby we have the two big laws, the law of the soul-life and the law of the spiritual life. Today the question already arises: what does originate between two lives, how does the spirit work between death and the next birth? We have to look at the human destiny in the time during two lives and want to go through the stations between death and a new life. Then we see what of faith, knowledge and religiousness can penetrate the western knowledge. The big laws address not only to the senses but also to the spirit and to the soul, so that the human being understands to speak of cause and effect not only in the physical but also in the spiritual life. For that which the great spirits said will come true; time will tell that we understand the world only partly if we only take what we hear, see and feel. We have to ascend to completely understand the world and investigate the laws. That is the very striving of the human being. We have to learn where from the human being comes and to which future he goes. These laws must be searched for in the spiritual world, and then we understand Goethe's saying, who was a representative of theosophy, and recognise what he wanted to say with the following:

Nature, mysterious in day's clear light,
Lets none remove her veil,
And what she won't discover to your understanding
You can't extort from her with levers and with screws.

Faust I, verses 672-675

Not until the human being advances beyond the merely personal if he is aware of the overweight of the individuality, of the higher personal if he understands how to become impersonal how to live impersonally how to let prevail the impersonal in himself, he lives from the civilisation involved in the external form to a future culture full of life. Even if it is not that which theosophy regards as its highest ideal, it is also not the last ethical consequence which we draw from theosophy. It is a step to the ideal which the human being learns to live only then if he does not look at the personal, but at the eternal and imperishable. This eternal and imperishable, the buddhi, the core of wisdom which rests in the soul has to replace the very rational civilisation. There are many proofs that theosophy is right with this view of the future human development.

However, the most important matter is that forces make themselves noticeable in life which should be really understood to fulfil us with their ideal. This is the great thing with Tolstoy (Leo T.,1828–1910, Russian writer) that he wants to lift out the human being from the close circle of his thoughts and deepen him spiritually that he does not want to show him the ideals of our material world, not of our anyhow arranged social life but the ideals which are able to appear in the soul only. If we are right theosophists, we recognise the forces which work in the world evolution, we do not remain blind and deaf towards that which shines to us as theosophy in our present, but we recognise these forces of which is normally spoken in theosophy prophetically. This must be just the typical of a theosophist that he overcomes darkness and errors that he learns to correctly evaluate and recognise life and world. A theosophist who withdraws and faces life cool would be a bad theosophist, even if he preached about a lot of theosophical dogmas.

Such theosophists who guide us from the sensuous world to the higher worlds who themselves behold in the super-sensible worlds, should also teach us, on the other side, to observe the super-sensible on our physical plane and to not get lost in the sensuous. We investigate the causes which come from the spiritual to completely understand the sensuous which is the effect of the spiritual. We do not understand the sensuous if we stand still within the sensuous, because the causes of the sensuous life come from the spiritual. Theosophy wants to make us clairvoyant in the sensuous.

That is why it talks of the “ancient wisdom.” It wants to make us receptive to the spiritual. It wants to transform the human being so that he can see the higher super-sensible secrets of existence clairvoyantly. But this should not be obtained by lack of understanding of that which exists directly round us. Someone would be a bad clairvoyant who is blind and deaf to the events of the sensuous world, to that which his contemporaries are able to accomplish in the direct surroundings. Moreover, he would be a bad clairvoyant if he were not able to recognise that of a person by which in our time the human beings are guided to the super-sensible. What is the use in us becoming clairvoyant without being able to recognise what lies as our next task directly before us?

Answers to Questions

Question: In which relation are the single animals and their type to the human being?

The animal as a type being corresponds to the human being. The animal as a type is not subjected to reincarnation, just as little the single animal. The lion type, for example, is individualised gradually and in connection with higher beings it experiences phases in its future development that we can anticipate but cannot call human-like because they are not similar to the human being and least of all to the future human being. Read up with Haeckel in his Wonders of Life about the point in time when life originated first on earth. Animals cannot become human beings. The single animal can never become a human being.

Question: Is the prayer anyhow justified according to the theosophical view?

The prayer existed at all times of evolution. It signified to the first Christians not only the means of communion with God. The prayer should completely evoke in the Christian what Tolstoy describes as a mood in the human soul and feels that he is penetrated by it. The higher the things are for which the human being asks, the better it is. Prayers in order to get exterior things are not in the sense of early Christianity. “Yet not my will but yours.” What is the will of the Father in the old Christian sense? It is that will which shows the primal law of all world evolution. I want that my results and wishes are so perfect that they correspond to the sense of the Father's will, to the spiritual world law that they do not differ from the big spiritual world law.

If I have any prayer by which I aim at an arbitrary petition which arises from my everyday nature, from my arbitrariness, then the prayer is not held in the sense: “Yet not my will but yours.” However, a prayer of this kind exists unless the object of the petition is drawn down to us, unless our will should go through, but if our will is lifted up, if one strives for apotheosis with it, for the divine, the Christian resurrection of the soul. Because theosophy only wants the understanding of all religions, it agrees to that. The human being may thereby get to conflict with theosophy because he does not understand his own religion. Someone who knows Christianity and its methods and the prayer belongs to the methods of Christianity, because it is a means of the communion with the divine universal soul knows that it is not contradictory to theosophy.

Question: What does the theosophist think of the Christian baptism?

If we want to understand baptism correctly, we have to go back to its original significance. Baptism originally signified one of the first stages, which the human being gradually passed to the higher knowledge. It existed as a so-called trial by water in the ancient mysteries. It belonged to the ceremonial actions which were connected with the fact that the human beings were taken up step by step to the highest profundities. These ancient mysteries were nothing else than cult sites and schools of wisdom. Baptism was the first trial of initiation. It was not only an external form, but connected with particular degrees of knowledge.

The person to be baptised had to have developed certain virtues in himself; then the baptism was given to him. Above all one demanded from the persons to be baptised of the ancient mystery religions that they had acquired in life what one calls firm self-confidence, the capability to rely always on themselves. This trait of character was connected with the fact that one sought internally for the kingdom of God in the human being in the deeper mystery religions, and that only those were allowed to belong to the higher community who had found direction and goal in themselves, who were able to trust themselves. The internal transformation was the keystone of a curriculum to these pupils.

This was the case in the mysteries. Then there came Christianity and put what had been taught in the mysteries as a truth before the whole humanity. This is a quite significant mystic fact that now not only those can become blessed who are initiated into the mysteries, but also those who only believe. With it the baptism became a so-called sacrament of the church. This baptism is the continuation of an ancient rite, the trial by water in the mysteries. Here is a point where we have to believe in spiritual knowledge or we do not progress. The actions which are carried out integrating somebody into the community are in such a way that something spiritual is connected with them that is not only an external formality, but something that is connected with the whole spiritual life of the community, so that something really takes place from the spiritual point of view with the person to be baptised.

This is a quite fantastic thing to the materialist. But for that who knows something about the higher planes of existence it is also a fact. The external Christianity also destroyed a lot of internal spirituality. However, we must not forget if we want to understand such an action that we are not allowed to draw down it to our present materialistic world view.

We find two important cultural currents in the present. The one shows itself in Darwin (Charles D. 1809–1882 English naturalist and writer), which has already peaked, the other in Tolstoy, which is in its beginning.

Numerous of our contemporaries who occupy themselves with the questions which deal with the name Darwin are probably of the opinion that Darwinism signifies a sort of final truth; that on the other hand everything that the human beings thought once is overcome, and that at the same time this finally found truth is something that is valid up to the most distant future. Many people cannot imagine that the opinions of the human beings are something absolutely changeable. They have no idea of the fact that the most important concept which we find just in Darwinism, the concept of evolution, is applicable not less to the spiritual life than to the natural life, and that human opinions and human knowledge are subjected to evolution above all. Not before you want to take an overview of a bigger time of evolution of the human spirit, it becomes clear to you that truth, knowledge and views of a certain epoch developed out of the former points of view, have changed and that they change in future again.

Theosophy would fulfil its task little unless it applied this concept of evolution to the great phenomena of life, of the spiritual life above all. That is why we do not consider the narrow ken of a present human being but from a higher point of view what is connected with the name Darwin. Besides, we have to go somewhat far back in time, because nobody can understand those phenomena if he puts them only before himself if he does not consider them in connection with other, similar phenomena. Theosophy enables us to consider these phenomena in the corresponding broad context. Theosophy looks at the development of the human mind in the different forms of existence, as we have got to know them in the last talks. This human mind, this human being, as he is today and as he is since millennia, is nothing ready, nothing finished. He will no longer be the same as today in millennia and in even more distant times. In order to understand how he places himself in the world today and looks at his task in the world at first, we have to emphasise the typical peculiarities of the present human being. However, to be able to do this, we have to extend our view so that we do not overestimate certain concepts, certain ideas which we have.

It is in particular a concept which the human being today overestimates too much: this is the concept of conscious human activity, as well as today we understand our consciousness. Whenever the human being considers art, technology and the like which comes from him, then he has the concept of conscious activity, of conscious thinking in certain way in the background.

He does not notice at all that there are round him in the world activities of art and technical activities which are at least as significant as the human activities, however, differ from them by the fact that the human being carries out his activities consciously; since the human being is intellectually active in the world. In the end, everything that the human being undertakes is a realised human thought. The house lives first in the mind of the architect, and if it is ready, it is a materialised idea. But we also find such materialised thoughts, otherwise, in the world. Look only once impartially not through the glasses of the present world view at the regular movement of the stars, and you find that a universal thought forms the basis of the universe like a house is based on an idea.

How should the human being be able as astronomer to force this construction of the universe in mathematical and other laws, how should he be able to find the laws of the universe if these laws were not included in this universe itself first? Or take to resume another example the dens which an animal, the beaver, carries out. They are so artistic, of such a mathematical regularity that the engineer, who studies these matters, must say to himself: if he had the task to build the most suitable under the given circumstances, he could carry out nothing more suitable, nothing more perfect according to the gradient of the river and the requirements of the beaver's mode of life. Thus you can pursue the whole nature if you pursue it only impartially, and you see everywhere that what the human being consciously accomplishes in thoughts, transforms into reality is around us and is infiltrated with thoughts.

We are used to call an instinctive activity what the animal accomplishes. We would also call the artistic den of a beaver, the ant heap, and the beehive instinctive activities. However, thus we get around to understanding that the human activity only thereby differs from this activity round us that the human being knows about the laws of his activity that he has a knowledge of it. We just call that an instinctive activity which is performed by a being that is not aware of the laws according to which it works. If you look at two beings much differing in their development like the human being in his conscious activity and, for example, the beaver or the ant this way, you notice the big difference between the human conscious mental activity and the unaware, instinctive activity of a relatively imperfect animal. Between these both activities there are innumerable many degrees. We can also describe those which the human being has gone through in a long, but compared with the aeon, short prehistory. We are led in the course of these talks today I can only indicate it to former levels of human cultural activity, to the human ancestors in a bygone time, to the so-called Atlanteans whose culture declined long ago and whose descendants are the cultural creators of our present human race. If we pursue the mental activity, the whole way of human activity in the environment with these Atlanteans, who were our predecessors before many millennia, and see with which means the theosophical world view gets to know the mental activity of these ancestors, then we would realise that it does not stand back so far from our present mental activity like the activity of the animals that, however, our Atlantean ancestors were substantially different from our contemporaries. These Atlantean ancestors were absolutely able to erect big buildings, absolutely able to control nature; but their activity was more instinctive than the completely conscious activity of the present humanity. It was not as instinctive as that of the animals, but more instinctive than that of the present humanity.

The history of the ancient Babylon and Assyria tells about skilfully erected buildings, and our architects who study them assure us that they were created so extraordinarily that the conscious activity of modern architects is not yet so far to accomplish what in those days the human being was able to accomplish on relatively unaware levels. You must not take offence to the word “instinctive.” It is only a small difference between the mind of the modern human being and that of the former one. If we traced back the activities, which in order to express myself a little bit popularly people perform more mechanically, more in a feeling way, more intuitively than consciously, then we would come to our Atlantean ancestors who worked much more instinctively than the human beings of historic times. Thus we can say that we can pursue the human mental activity historically up to a time in which the mental activity did not yet exist to the present-day degree, even did not exist in the beginning of the Atlantean age. We have also to admit on the other side that the human being develops in the future again to quite different mental abilities than his mind has today. So, our present-day reason which is the typical of the present human being is not something that is everlasting or even is invariable, but it is something that is developing. It originated and develops to other, higher forms.

In what does the activity of this mind consist? We have already indicated this. It consists in the fact that the human being more and more overcomes the merely instinctive of his activity and clearly knows about the laws which he applies in the outer life, clearly also knows about the laws which have come into being in nature. If, however, this mind itself is developing, it has gone through apparently different levels of development; it is advanced from relatively imperfect levels to a higher level in the present, and it still ascends to others. If we look back to the Atlantean ancestors, we see the mind arising first in its daybreak, and then it develops up to a culmination to be replaced in future by a higher mental activity. This mind cannot develop at one go. It must realise, so to speak, gradually what is its task. From stage to stage it must walk if it wants to know about the laws which are in our nature and which it itself realises. This can only happen successively. What should this mind do? It should understand the things round itself, know about them. It has to recreate them in his inside, has to recreate as concepts what is outside in reality. It has to gain this knowledge bit by bit. However, this knowledge must correspond to the outer things. But the outer things are manifold. The things which we can pursue in the world are spirit, soul and external physical reality.

Reason did not come into being in the soul in one go to understand this external nature in her whole variety. The human being had to acquire the different kinds of reality gradually, the spiritual, the psychic and the physical. It is very interesting to pursue how it acquires them. The human being is not able to understand the things outside in the world, before he has not acquired them in the loneliness of his reflection. The human being would never be able to understand an ellipse as an orbit of a planet unless he had acquired the laws of the ellipse, the forms of it in loneliness before.

After he has found the concept in himself, he sees it realised also in the outside world. Not until the human being has created the knowledge in him, he can find it in the outside world materialised. We have to get clear about the fact that this has happened on the most different levels of the development of reason during the evolution of our human race. The human reason had at first to make a concept of the picture he can see in the outside world to itself to understand it. As a rule, the human being recognises his inner life first. This is the mind, the soul. Only bit by bit he gets to the concepts of his surroundings. You can observe this with every child. It does not have a concept of the lifeless nature at first but that of the soul. It hits the table against which it has stumbled because it regards it as of the same kind. It is also in the cultural development that way. We have to observe an epoch of the cultural development which the researchers have called animism. In the whole nature the human being saw animated beings, in every stone, in every rock, in every spring he saw something living because he himself was alive and can form the concept of life from his inside. Thus the former human races also have the concept of the mind at first, then that of soul and life, and last of all they acquired the concept of the external mechanical, lifeless.

If we look back in historic times, at the time of ancient India with its Vedas and the Vedic philosophy, and study these ancient world views, we find that the human beings had a concept of the spiritual in the most comprehensive sense. The concept of the spirit lives in these old, marvellous documents. However, the ancient peoples were not able to understand the individual spirit, the special mind. They had a great idea of the all-embracing world spirit and its different transformations in the world, but they were not yet able to look into the individual human soul, to grasp the spirit of the human soul. They had no concept of psychology in our sense, of that which one calls spiritual science or humanities which will only be a real spiritual science once. They thought the spirit, but did not understand the individual mind. If we pursue the rudiments of cultural development up to the beginning of Hellenism, we find that in that time even those who call themselves philosophers apply the concept of the soul to the whole world. Everything is ensouled with them. If they have to understand the individual soul, their understanding fails.

At first the human being forms the general concept of the spirit and the general concept of the soul. But only later he approaches these concepts mentally to understand them in the single being. In the whole Middle Ages we can pursue that the human being does not yet penetrate into the individual mind. I would like to mention Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) here only. Who studies the philosophy of this predominant spirit finds that he has an all-embracing concept of a world life, a concept of life in its highest significance. The whole world is life to him, in every stone, in every star he sees life. Every single part of the universe is to him a member, an organ of the universe. He looks up to the stars as enlivened beings. He also considers the individual human being strictly in this sense. In the living human being he sees only a stage of the general psychic human life. He calls the human being, who stands physically before us, spirit spread out in space, life spread out in space. He understands death as nothing else than contracting life in one single point. Expansion and contraction are the phenomena of life and death for him. Life is eternal. That life which appears to us in the physical is life spread out in space, life that does not appear in the physical is contracted life. Thus life changes perpetually extending and contracting. Except these both qualities of Giordano Bruno's comprehensive concept of life I may still quote the concept of the sky, a concept which science has not got by a long stretch which one would have to study, in which one would have to become engrossed to return to the comprehensive idea of the sky. However, also Giordano Bruno was not yet able to understand the individual living being, the special being.

However, the possibility to understand these individual living beings develops just in this time. There one only starts understanding the processes in the human body; there one starts understanding how the blood flows in the body how the activities of the body take place. What we call physiology today started taking shape at that time. If you look at the naturalists of the past, like Paracelsus (1493–1541), then you see that these have no concept; at that time the human cultural development had not yet created the concept which has the mastery over our world view: the concept of mechanism. The concept of mechanism was grasped at last. The human being understood at last what a machine is. Not until after Giordano Bruno and Paracelsus the scientific thinking starts developing the concept of the machine, the concept of the mechanical.

We have seen how in the course of time the development of human mind has successively grasped the concepts: spirit, soul, life, and mechanism. Now the reverse follows in our development. After the human evolution had grasped the concepts, it applied them to the outer things, and the first epoch is in this regard the application of the concept of the machine to the surrounding reality. One wants to understand not only the machine, but one applies the concept of the machine also to the single being. The application of the concept of mechanism is the characteristic of the epoch of which only few centuries have elapsed. The 17th century belongs to this epoch. If we go back to it, we find the philosopher Descartes (René D., 1596–1650). He applies the concept of mechanism to the animal world. He does not differentiate between the animal and lifeless things, but he considers the animals and plants as beings which are on par with automata, as beings completely merging in purely mechanical activity. For humanity had advanced so far that it could grasp the concept of mechanism and apply it to nature but could not apply the concept of soul and spirit to the individual being. Thus the human being saw as it were through the plant, animal and human souls. There he could grasp nothing; he was not able to consider the plant, the animal and the human being as something higher. Indeed, the external shape of any being is mechanical. Any being on the physical plane is mechanical. Reason conceives this lowest level first. It understands the physical body of the different world things, and it understands it quite naturally as a purely physical, mechanical activity at first. This was the epoch of the mechanical understanding of the world and the epoch of the non-cognition of any higher reality of the world at the same time. This epoch extends till our time. We see how today the human being tries hard to apply the concept of the mechanical to the outside world; we see how Descartes understands plant, animal and human being mechanically, because the physical human body is also mechanical. Hence, also the assertion that the human being is only a machine.

Then the great discoverers and the big technical activity of the mechanical world, the industry, come. We see reason and the mechanical concept celebrating their biggest triumphs. It penetrates up to the single living beings, and it understands them in their physical-technical interrelation. While in the 18th century one could not yet understand the living together of the animals and plants mechanically, the 19th century was able to do this. Development is not the essential part, but that a relationship exists between the beings. Evolution is not the typical of Darwinism; for a theory of evolution existed always. You can go back to Aristotle, to the Vedic philosophy, also with Goethe, you find everywhere that a theory of evolution existed at all times. Also in the modern scientific sense there is already in the beginning of the 19th century a theory of evolution, the Lamarckism. Lamarck's theory considers the animal world in such a way that it ascends from the imperfect to the perfect up to the physical human being. But in those days Lamarckism could not yet become popular. Lamarck was not understood. Only the middle of 19th century was mature to understand the theory of evolution mechanically. The experience of the external physical life had advanced so far that this marvellous building could be collated which Darwin has put up. Darwin did nothing else than to put up and grasp in thoughts mechanically what surrounds us.

The next was that the human being grasped the idea of the physical relationship of the material human being with the other material organisms. This was the last, the keystone in the building. We get to know the significance of the keystone if we speak about the philosophy of Ernst Haeckel.

If we apply the concept of development to the human beings themselves, we find that it is comprehensible that a level of development of the spiritual human being must be the conquest of the spiritual thought. Darwinism has occupied this field by means of purely external causes, by the law of the struggle for existence. Hence, it signifies a necessary developmental phase of the human culture, and we understand from the necessity of its origin the necessity of its overcoming. Thereby we extend our look understanding Darwinism as a phase of the scientific development. Only prejudiced people argue that Darwinism considers the world, the facts as they are real. One knows the facts; they were there always; only the way of thinking is different. If you read Goethe's essays Story of My Botanical Studies, you find almost literally what Darwin describes in his way. Also in Goethe's Metamorphosis of Plants you find a lot. Goethe supports a by far higher, much more comprehensive theory of life on the same facts. It is a theory from which modern science will get something higher than Darwinism is. This is the Goethean theory of the interrelation of the organisms. But like any phase of development must be gone through, the study of Darwinism also had to be gone through. The whole situation in the middle of the 19th century enabled humanity to become ripe to introduce mechanical thoughts into the animal and plant realms. This powerful thought has expressed itself in the mechanical struggle for existence of the living beings. It has its origin in a particular kind of the human life itself.

Beside his observations, Darwin referred everything that was of importance for his theory to the doctrine of Malthus. It is this doctrine of the growth of population and food which induced him to establish the external struggle for existence as the principle of perfection. Malthus represents the principle that humanity reproduces faster than the supply of food. The availability of food increases slowly in arithmetic progression, like 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - and so on, the population grows exponentially, like 1 - 2 - 4 - 8 - 1 6 - and so on. If this is the case, it is natural that with the unequal growth of food in proportion to the growth of population a struggle for existence originates. This is the hopeless so-called Malthusian principle. Whereas Malthus only wanted to draw logical conclusions from this principle in the first half of the 19th century which meant the way of living together, a possibility to further civilisation, to improve the conditions of human life, Darwin said to himself: if this principle holds sway in human life, it is the more sure that the struggle for existence is everywhere. Hence, concerning Darwinism you recognise the clearest that the human being starts from himself. He transfers what he observes in himself to the external nature. The purely mechanical principle of the war of all against all which has become the principle of the way of life in the 19th century faces us in Darwin's theory again. I do not want to speak of the fact that the scientific investigations do no longer allow us to adhere to the principle of the struggle for existence, but I want only to emphasise that the application of the principle is not necessary.

However, we have also to understand that anything comprehensive, anything ultimate was not given with the fact that the human being understands the whole environment mechanically. In the beings something else than the mere mechanism exists. We have seen that the mechanism, the external physical guise, is only one part, only one of the elements of which the world is composed. Because we understand the external appearance we even understand the lowest part of the beings existing around us. Any phase of the human cultural development also has its negative aspect; any phase shows its extremes. Somebody who would have seen clearly in the time of the blossoming Darwinism would have said to himself: indeed, the development of the mechanical thought must happen; but this thought is not yet suitable to understand life, soul, and mind in the special being. First we must learn to apply Bruno's ideas of the all-embracing world life to the individual special being which stands before us then we are able to gradually understand the world round ourselves in transparency up to the spirit. Today we can only apply the concept of the mechanical to the single beings. In future one must succeed in finding the concepts of life, soul and mind again in the single beings. We must become able to look at the plant not only with the eyes of the mechanically thinking physiologist, but with the eyes of the scientist rising to higher stages of life. We must ascend to the concepts of soul and spirit. These concepts were already grasped in preceding epochs; modern humanity has to learn to apply them. This would have been the idea of anybody who surveys the matters completely.

Still another idea, another cause was obstructive there. This was to consider oneself satisfied with the mechanical concepts of the world and to believe that with it, with the mechanical point of view, everything is achieved that the mechanism explains everything. These spirits existed also. This was in the time when one defined the purely material the be-all and end-all, the time of Büchner (Ludwig B., 1824–1899, materialistic philosopher), Vogt (Karl V., 1817–1895, materialistic philosopher) and also concerning his concepts, not his research Haeckel. This is the other extreme. In between were the careful spirits who could not rise to a higher understanding of the world matters, who had, however, a dark feeling that they had only understood a part, own a part only. These are the careful researchers who understood the right thing; they said to themselves that they are on a level where they could not yet investigate everything, and who revered what they could not investigate as the unfathomable in humility. For those researchers the feeling had to join that behind that which they found something unknown is hidden toward which they do not have a vocation to intervene with their mechanical thinking.

Now we want to ask once which researchers have thought in such a way, and there we meet one who belongs to this epoch who writes: “I take the view that all organic beings which have lived on this earth are descendant of a prototype which was animated by the creator.” This is a careful researcher, a researcher who understands the external world mechanically, but cannot get to the recognition of life and spirit; he keeps to the idea of a creator and reveres him in humility. The same researcher may also be quoted against the radicals who appeared in the wake of Darwinism. One also wanted to explain the language mechanically.

What this researcher spoke out of his feeling is the point of view which the theosophist must take up toward the Darwinist theory of evolution. He shows us a great overview of the evolution of our race; he shows us that Darwinism is only a phase which leads to the concept of life, to the application of the concept of soul and spirit. As we have a mechanical science today, we have a science of life, a soul science and spiritual science in future. This is the viewpoint of theosophy; and it wants nothing else than to anticipate what the future has to bring to humanity. It wants to point whereto we go, and one has to emphasise that this theosophical view just agrees with the careful researchers who have found the right viewpoint by themselves. For these words did not come from an obscure Darwinist who could not get rid of his traditional prejudices who wanted to connect religious prejudices with Darwinism, but from one whose competence you do not doubt: they issue from Charles Darwin himself!

Life and form are the two ideas which have to lead us through the labyrinth of the world phenomena. Life perpetually changes into thousand and thousand forms. This life expresses itself in its most manifold shaping. It could not manifest in the world unless it appeared in new forms again and again. Form is the manifestation of life. But everything would disappear in the inflexibility of the form, all life would have to lose itself unless the form were continuously renewed in life unless it became the seed again and again to create new forms out of the old ones. The seed of the plant grows up to the organised form of the plant, and this plant must again become a seed and give existence to a new form. It is in nature everywhere that way, and just it is in the spiritual life of the human being. Also in the spiritual life of the human being and humanity the forms change, and life keeps itself in the most manifold forms. However, life would ossify unless the forms were perpetually renewed, unless new life emerged from old forms.

As the ages change in the course of human history, we see life changing in these epochs into the most manifold forms also in the big history. We have seen in the talk on Theosophy and Darwin in which manifold forms the human cultures and history have expressed themselves. We have seen some of the forms in the ancient Vedic culture of India. We have seen these forms changing in the ancient Persian epoch, then in the Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian epoch, then in the Graeco-Latin culture and, finally, in the Christian culture up to our time. However, this is just the significant of the mental development of our time that more and more a common life pours forth into forms, and our age may be almost called the age of forms, the age in which the human being is taught in every respect to enjoy life in the form.

We see the dominance of form everywhere. We have Darwin as the most brilliant example. What had Darwin investigated and delivered to humanity in his theory? The origin and metamorphosis of the animal and plant genera in the struggle for existence. This shows that our science is oriented to the outer form. What had just Darwin to say and explained openly? I have shown that he emphasised that plants and animals enjoy life in the most manifold forms that, however, according to his conviction there were primal forms which were animated by a creator of the universe. This is Darwin's own saying. Darwin looked at the development of the forms, of the outer figure, and he himself feels the impossibility to penetrate into the life of these forms. He accepts this life as given; he does not want to explain this life. He does not at all look at it; he rather asks only how life forms.

If we consider life in another field, in the field of art. I want to speak only of a typical phenomenon of our artistic life; however, I want to illuminate it in its most radical appearance just in this regard. What a lot of dust did the catchword naturalism not meant in the bad sense blow up in the seventies and eighties! This catchword naturalism completely corresponds to the character of our time. This naturalism appeared most radically with the French Zola (Emil Z., 1840–1902, writer). How stupendously he describes the human life! But he does not look directly at the human life, but at the forms in which this human life expresses itself. How it expresses itself in mines, in factories, in city quarters where the human being perishes in immorality et etcetera Zola describes all these different configurations of life, and all naturalists describe the same basically. They do not look at life, but only at the forms in which life expresses itself.

Look at our sociologists who should deliver the dates how life has developed and should develop in future. The catchword of the materialistic historical view and of the historical materialism became a talking point. However, how do the sociologists consider the matter? They do not look at the human soul, not at the inside of the human mind; they look at the outer life how it represents itself in our economic life how in this or that area trade and industry blossom, and how the human being must live as a result of this external configuration of life. The sociologists consider life this way. They say: we do not concern ourselves with ethics and the idea of morality! Provide better external living conditions to the human beings, then their morality and way of life progress by themselves. Yes, in the form of Marxism modern sociology has asserted that not the ideal forces are the most principal, but the external forms of the economic life.

All that shows you that we have arrived at a phase of development in which the human beings look preferably at the form of the external existence. If you take the greatest poet of our present, Ibsen, then you just see him looking at this form of existence and almost falling into despair, so to speak. For he is filled with the warmest feeling for the soul-life, for a free life, he despairs of the forms that have come into being. I mean Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906, Norwegian playwright and poet). He shows life in the most different forms, he shows us how living in the forms always causes contradictions, how the souls perish and atrophy under the pressure of the forms of life. It is really symbolic for the oblivion of soul and spirit finishing his poem When We Dead Awaken (1899). It is, as if he had wanted to say: we modern human beings are enclosed so completely in the external form of life which we have mastered so often ... and if we awake, what shows the soul-life in the inflexible forms of society and view of the West? This is the basic trend of Ibsen's dramas which finds expression in his dramatic will, too.

Thus we have thrown some sidelights on the western culture of form. Considering Darwinism we have seen how the form culture is directed to the external mechanical life of nature, and how our soul is clamped in completely measured forms of life and society. We have seen how this was achieved slowly and bit by bit, how our fifth, the Aryan race, went from the spirit of the ancient Vedic culture, which imagined life ensouled as a result of immediate observation, through the Persian, the Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian cultures, then through the Graeco-Latin culture with its view that the whole nature is ensouled. With the Greeks even the philosophers conceive the whole nature ensouled.

Then there came Giordano Bruno in the 16th century. He still finds life in the whole nature, in the whole universe, in the whole big star world. In even later time, life climbed down and is completely entangled in the external form. This is the deepest level. I do not say this disparagingly, because every point of view is necessary. The external form, what develops from any sprout makes the plant beautiful. Our cultural life is externalised in many respects, has attained the most diverse external form. This must be like that. Theosophy has to understand this as an absolute necessity. Least of all the theosophists are allowed to reprove. Just as once the spirit-imbued and life-imbued culture was necessary, the form culture is necessary for our age. A form culture came into being in science, in Darwinism, in naturalism, and in sociology.

In the middle of this consideration we have to hold still and ask ourselves: what must happen in our spiritual-scientific sense when the form has found expression? The form must be renewed; new, embryonic life must come again into the form! We will consider the necessary reversal of the human mind again in the series of talks entitled Basic Concepts of Theosophy.

Someone who considers Zola's contemporary Tolstoy carefully and impartially at first the artist from the point of view which I have just given will already find that with the artist the viewer of the different types of the Russian people, possibly of the soldier type which he described in his War and Peace (1869) and later in Anna Karenina (1879) another keynote prevails than in the naturalism of the West. Everywhere Tolstoy seeks something else. He can describe the soldier, the official, the human being of any social class, the human being within a gender or a race he seeks the soul, the living soul everywhere which expresses itself in them, even if not in the same way. He demonstrates the simple, straight lines of the soul but on the most different levels and in the most different forms of life. What is life in its different forms, what is this life in its diverse variety? This goes like a basic question through Tolstoy's creative work. From here he finds the possibility to understand life also where it cancels out itself apparently where this life changes into death. Death remains the big stumbling block for the materialistic world view. Who accepts the external material world only, how should he understand death, how should he cope with life, finally, because death stands like a gate at the end of this life, fulfilling him with fear and fright? Also as an artist Tolstoy has already advanced beyond this point of view of materialism. Already in the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) you can see how artistically the most material is overcome how there in this figure of Ivan an entire harmony is produced in his innermost life. We have an ill human being before ourselves, not his body is ill but his soul.

We hear it and see it in all words which Tolstoy says to us that he is not of the opinion that in the body a soul lives which has nothing to do with the body; but we hear from his words that he finds the expression of the soul in the physical expression that the ill soul sickens the body that the soul flows through the veins of the body. We see from this form of artistic representation how life is found. A peculiar view of death faces us there, not as a theory, not as a dogma, but in the feeling. This idea gives the possibility to understand death not as an end, but as outpouring the personality into the universe, as disappearing in the infinite and as retrieval in the great primal spirit of the world. The problem of death is thereby artistically solved in marvellous way. Death has become fortune in life. The dying human being feels the metamorphosis of one life form to the other.

Leo Tolstoy as an artistic contemporary of the naturalists was the viewfinder of life, the questioner of the riddle of life in its different forms. That is why this riddle of life had also to be in the centre of his soul, of his thinking and feeling in scientific and in religious respect. He attempted to investigate this riddle of life that way; he also sought for life except the form, where he met it. Hence, he has become the prophet of a new epoch which must overcome ours, an epoch which again feels and recognises life in contrast to the configuration of natural sciences. In Tolstoy's whole criticism about the western civilisation we see nothing else than the expression of that spirit which represents a young, fresh, child-like life which wants to pour it into the developing humanity which cannot satisfy itself with a mature, indeed overripe, in the external form expressed civilisation. This is the contrast between Tolstoy and the western civilisation. From this point of view he criticises the social system and the life forms of the West everything in general. This is the point of view of his criticism.

We have seen in Darwinism that the western science has come to understand the forms of life that, however, Darwin said to not be able to understand anything of life which he presupposes as a fact. The whole western civilisation is based on the consideration of form: we look at the external form in the evolution of the minerals, plants, animals, and human beings. Wherever you open any book of the western science, it is the form that has priority. Remember again what we have already thought of: that just the researchers of the West admit that they face the riddle of life and are not able to penetrate it. The words “ignoramus, ignorabimus” sound toward us time and again if science should give information about life. This science knows something how life develops in forms. However, how this life itself behaves about that it knows nothing. It despairs of the task to solve this riddle and says only: ignorabimus. There Tolstoy found the right word, the right principle considering life itself. I would like to read out a crucial passage from which you see how he represents the point of view of life compared with all science of the forms of life:

“The wrong knowledge of our time” (of the West) “supposes that we know what we cannot know, and that we cannot know what we really know. The human being with wrong knowledge believes that he knows everything that appears to him in space and time, and that he does not know what is known to him by his reasonable consciousness.

It seems to such a person that the general welfare and his welfare is the most unexplorable object. His reason, his reasonable consciousness appears to him almost as unexplorable; he appears to himself somewhat more explorable as animal; the animals and plants appear as still more explorable beings, and the most explorable thing is the dead, endlessly distributed matter.

Something similar takes place with the human vision. The human being turns his look always unconsciously upon the most distant objects because their colours and contours appear to him the simplest: upon the sky, horizon, distant fields and forests. These objects appear to him the more certain and simpler, the more distant they are, and on the contrary, the closer the object is, the more manifold are its contours and colours.” – “Does not the same take place with the wrong knowledge of the human being? What is known to him certainly his reasonable consciousness appears to him unexplorable because it is not simple, however, what is inaccessible to him the limitless, everlasting matter seems to him easily explorable because it appears simple from a distance. However, this is just the opposite.”

The western scientist considers the lifeless matter as his reliable starting point. Then he observes how the plants, animals and human beings build themselves up out of the chemical and physical forces; he observes how the lifeless matter moves, conglomerates and finally produces the movement of the brain. But he cannot understand how life comes about: because what he investigates is nothing else than the form of life. Tolstoy says: life is next to us, we are in it, we are life; of course, if we want to understand life observing and investigating its forms, then we never understand it. We only need to see it in ourselves, we only need to live it, and then we have life. People who believe to be unable to understand it do not understand life at all. Here Tolstoy starts with his consideration of life and examines what the human being can conceive as his life, even if the refined, overripe way of thinking cannot understand it along the lines of simple thinking: if you want to understand the form correctly, you have to look into the inside. If you want to investigate the formal laws of nature only, how do you want to distinguish a meaningful life from a meaningless life?

According to the same higher principles the organisms are healthy and the organisms fall ill; exactly according to the same principles of nature the human being falls ill as he is healthy. Tolstoy expresses himself again characteristically in his treatise On Life (1887): “As strong and rapid the movements of the human being may be in the fever delirium, in insanity or death struggle, in drunkenness, even in the burst of passion, we do not accept the human being as living, do not treat him as a living human being and allot the possibility of life to him only. But as weak and immobile a human being may be if we see that his animal personality has submitted to reason, we accept him as living and treat him correspondingly.”

Tolstoy thinks that the outer form gets sense for us unless we study it only externally, but if we try to directly understand what not form is what is mind only, and what is the essential part. We cannot understand the true life if we try only to conceive its form; but we understand the forms if we move from life on the forms.

However, Tolstoy did not understand his problem only in this scientific way; he understood it also from the moral side. How do we come in our human form to this real life, up to the lawfulness of the external form? Tolstoy got this clear in his mind asking himself: how do I and my fellow men satisfy the need of our own well-being? How do I satisfy my immediate personal life? Going out from the configuration of the animal life, the human being has no other question than: how do I satisfy the needs of the external form of life? This is a low view. Those have a somewhat superior view who say: the single person has not to satisfy his needs, but he has to adapt himself to the public welfare to fit into a community. He has not only to provide what satisfies his own external life, but he has to ensure that this form of life is satisfied with all living beings. We should fit into the community and subordinate to the needs of the society. Numerous personalities, numerous ethicists and sociologists regard this as the western ideal of the cultural development: subordination of the needs of the single to the needs of the community. However, this is not the highest goal Tolstoy says , because what else I have in mind than the external form? It refers only to the outer form how one lives in the community how one fits into it. These outer forms change perpetually. If my single personal life is not directly meaningful, why should the other lives be meaningful? If the personal welfare of the single human life form is not an ideal, an ideal of the public welfare cannot originate from the summation of many single forms of life. Not the well-being of the single, not the well-being of all can be the ideal: this only concerns the forms in which life only lives. Where do we recognise life? To whom should we submit, if not to the needs dictated by our low nature, if not to that which the public welfare or humanity dictates?

Life of the most manifold forms is that which longs for well-being and happiness of the single and the community. We want to understand our moral, our innermost ideal not according to external forms, but according to that which results as an ideal from the inside of the soul, from God who lives in it. That is why Tolstoy resorts again to a kind of higher organised Christianity, which he considers as the true Christianity: do not look for the kingdom of God in external gestures, in the forms, but inside. Then you understand your duty if you understand the life of the soul if you can be inspired by the God in yourselves, if you listen to your soul. Do not be wrapped up in the forms, as large and immense they may be! Go back to the original unified life, to the divine life in yourselves. If the human being does not take up the ethical and cultural ideals from without, but allows rising from his soul what rises in his heart what God has lowered in his soul, then he has stopped living only in the form, then he really has a moral character. This is internal morality and inspiration.

From this viewpoint he attempts an entire renewal of all views of life and world in the form of what he calls early Christianity. Christianity has externalised itself according to him, has adapted itself to the different life forms which have come from the culture of the different centuries. He expects a time again, when the form must be penetrated with new internal life when life is seized immediately. Therefore, he does not get tired of pointing in new forms repeatedly to the fact that it is necessary to understand the simplicity of the soul, not the intricate life which always wants to get to know something new. No! The fact that the simplicity of the soul must meet the right thing that first of all the confusing of the external science, of the outer artistic representation, the luxurious of modern life must be connected with the immediately simple that emerges in the soul of everybody no matter in which life form and social system he is: Tolstoy regards this as an ideal. Thus he becomes a strict critic of the various cultural forms of Western Europe; he becomes a strict critic of western science. He states that this science has solidified bit by bit in dogmas like theology, and that the western scientists appear as the real dogmatists imbued with wrong mind. He is hard on these scientists. Above all, he criticises the ideal, which is striven for in these scientific forms, and those who consider our sensuous well-being as the only goal of any striving.

For centuries humanity intended to develop the forms highly and to regard the external possession, the external well-being as the highest. And now we know that we do not have to reprove this, but have to consider it as a necessity , well-being should not be limited only to single social ranks and classes, but everybody should take part in it. Indeed, nothing is to be argued against that, but Tolstoy opposes the form in which this is tried to achieve by the western sociology and the western socialism. What does this socialism say? It takes the transformation of the outer forms of life as starting point. The material culture should induce the human being to get a higher level of living. Then one believes that those who feel better who have a better external livelihood also have a higher morality. All moral endeavours of socialisation are directed to subject the external formation to a revolution.

Tolstoy opposes that. For this is just the result of the cultural development that it developed the most manifold differences of ranks and classes. Do you believe if you develop this form culture highly that you really get to a higher cultural ideal? You have to understand the human being where he gives himself form. You have to improve his soul, to pour divine-moral forces into his soul, and then he reshapes the form from the soul. This is Tolstoy's socialism, and it is his view that a renewal of the moral culture can never arise from any transformation of the western form culture, but that this renewal has to take place from the soul, from the inside.

Hence, he does not become the preacher of a dogmatic ethical ideal, but the furtherer of a perfect transformation of the human soul. He does not say that the human morality increases if the external situation of the human being is improved, but he says: just because you have taken the external form as starting point, your dismal circumstances of life came into being. You are able to overcome this life form again if you reshape the human being from the inside. In sociology we have, just as in the Darwinist scientific consideration, the last branches of the old form culture. On the other hand, we have the incipient stages of a new life culture. As we have the descending line there, we have the ascending one here. As little as the old man, who has got to his determination, to his life form, is able to be renewed completely, as rather from the growing up child the new life form arises from internal stimulation, just as little a new life form can arise from an old cultural nation.

That is why Tolstoy regards the Russian nation, which is not yet taken in with the cultural forms of the west, as that nation within which this future life has to originate. Considering this Slavic people, which still looks at the European cultural ideals in dull indifference today at the European science as well as at the European art , Tolstoy states that in it an undifferentiated spirit lives that has to become the supporter of the future cultural ideal. His criticism is based on the big principle of evolution, on that principle which teaches the change of the forms and the perpetual merging of life.

In the tenth chapter of his book On Life one reads: “And the principle which we know in ourselves as the principle of our life is the same principle according to which also all external phenomena of the world take place, only with the difference that we know this principle in ourselves which we ourselves must carry out however, in the external phenomena as something that takes place without our assistance according to these principles.”

Thus Tolstoy positions himself in the forever developing and changing life. We would be rather bad representatives of spiritual science if we could not understand such a phenomenon correctly; we would be bad spiritual scientists if we wanted to preach ancient truth only. Why do we make the contents of the ancient wisdom our own? Because the ancient wisdom teaches us to understand life in its profoundness because it shows us how in the most manifold figures the one divine appears again and again. A bad representative of spiritual science would be that who would become a dogmatist, who only wanted to preach what contains the ancient wisdom, who would withdraw and would face life cold and distantly, who would be blind and deaf to what happens in the immediate present. The doctrine of wisdom has not taught the ancient wisdom to us, so that we repeat it in words, but live with it and learn to understand what is round us. The development of our own race, which has disintegrated into different forms since the ancient Indian culture up to ours, this development is exactly described and predetermined in that ancient wisdom. There is also spoken of a future development, of a development in the immediate future. One says to us that we stand at the starting point of a new era. Our reason, our intelligence, they attained their configuration as a result of the way through the different fields of existence. The forces of our physical intelligence have attained their biggest triumphs in the form culture of our time. Reason has penetrated the principles of form and masters them to the highest degree; it produced the big and immense progress of technology, the big and immense progress of our life. Now we stand at the starting point of that epoch in which something has to pour out in this reason that must seize and form the human being from within.

Hence, the theosophical movement has chosen its motto and is dedicated to establishing the core, the rudiment of a general human fraternisation. One must not make distinctions of views, classes, religions, gender, and skin colour; one has to look for life in all these forms. Our spiritual ideal is an ideal of love which the human being experiences as the kingdom of God if he becomes aware of his divinity. Theosophy calls the culture of intellectuality manas; it calls buddhi what is filled with the inner being, with love, what does not want to be wise without being filled with love. As our race has got to the manas culture because of its reason, the next will be now that we get to the individuality imbued with love where the human being acts out of the higher, internal, divine nature, and neither is wrapped up in the chaos of the external nature nor in science nor in the social life. If we understand the spiritual ideal this way, we are allowed to say that we understand this ideal correctly and then we are also not allowed to misjudge a person who lives among us who wants to give new life impulses to the human development.

How nice and congruent with our teachings is something that just Tolstoy says concerning the view of the human being in his directness. I would like to read out a passage that is distinctive especially of his moral ideal: “The whole life of these human beings is turned upon the imaginary increase of their personal welfare. They see the personal welfare only in the satisfaction of their needs. They call personal needs all those living conditions upon which they have directed their reason. The conscious needs, nevertheless those upon which their reason is directed always grow as a result of this consciousness ad infinitum. The satisfaction of these growing needs closes up the demands of their true life to them.”

Tolstoy says: however, the personality does not comprise the reasonable consciousness. Personality is a quality of the animal and the human being as an animal. The reasonable consciousness is the quality of the human being only. Not before the human being advances beyond the mere personality if he realises the preponderance of the individuality over the personal if he understands to become impersonal to let the impersonal life prevail in himself, he leaves the culture entangled in the external form and enters a future culture full of life.

Even if that is not the ideal of theosophy and also not the ethical consequence which we theosophists draw, it is a step toward the ideal, because the human being learns to live only unless he looks at the personality but at the eternal and imperishable.

This eternal and imperishable, the buddhi, is the rudiment of wisdom which rests in the soul, it has to replace the civilisation of mere reason. There are many proofs that theosophy is right with this view of the future development of the human being. However, the most important one is that similar forces already make themselves noticeable in life which we have to understand really to fulfil us with their ideals.

This is great with Tolstoy that he wants to lift out the human being from the close circle of his thoughts and to deepen him spiritually that he wants to show him that the ideals are not outside in the material world, but can stream only from the soul.

If we are right theosophists, we recognise the development, then we do not remain blind and deaf towards that which shines to us in the theosophical sense in our present, but we really recognise these forces of which is normally spoken poetically in theosophical writings.

This must be just the typical of a theosophist that he has overcome darkness and error, that he learns to appreciate and recognise life and world.

A theosophist who withdraws, who faces life cold and distantly, would be a bad theosophist even if he knew a lot. Such theosophists who lead us from the sensuous world to a higher one, who are able to behold super-sensible worlds, they should teach us also to be able to observe the super-sensible on the physical plane and not to be carried away with the sensuous.

We investigate the causes which come from the spiritual in order to completely understand the sensuous which is the effect of the spiritual. We do not understand the sensuous if we stop within the sensuous, because the causes of the sensuous life come from the spiritual one.

Theosophy wants to make us clairvoyant in the sensuous; therefore, it talks of the ancient wisdom. It wants to reshape the human being so that he clairvoyantly beholds the lofty super-sensible secrets of existence, but this should not be purchased with lack of understanding for that which exists immediately around us.

Someone would be a bad clairvoyant who is blind and deaf to that which happens in the sensuous world, to that which his contemporaries are able to accomplish in his immediate surroundings and, moreover, he would be a bad clairvoyant if he were not able to recognise that of a personality by which in our time the human beings are led to the super-sensible. And what is the use in us becoming clairvoyant and not being able to recognise the next task immediately before us?

A theosophist must not withdraw from life; he has to understand how to apply theosophy directly to life. If theosophy has to lead us to higher worlds, we have to bring the super-sensible knowledge down to our physical plane. We must recognise the causes which are in the spiritual. The theosophist has to stand in life, has to understand the world, in which his contemporaries live, and has to recognise the spiritual causes of the different epochs of evolution.

In these talks I have repeatedly pointed to the fact that the theosophical world view does not lead the human beings away from the work in the sensuous field that it does not lead to fantastic, illusory fields as the adversaries of this world view suggest so often. I have rejected this repeatedly. Today I have to emphasise this in particular before we enter the world which the human being transmigrates between death and a new birth. For the adversaries of the theosophical world view are inclined only too easily to explain everything that I describe in this field as something imaginary, as something completely fantastic. Nevertheless, someone who is able to look deeper in the nature of things recognises these super-sensible worlds that are beyond the sensuous world as the real nature of all beings. As well as nobody is able to construct a vapour machine unless he knows the being of vapour, nobody is able to understand and to explain what takes place before our sense-organs unless he knows the being of the psychic and spiritual. The causes of the physical are in the super-sensible, in the supra-physical. As true it is that we climb up to the higher fields, it is true that we try to understand this super-sensible being only to be able to work here in this world. We have to know the nature of the super-sensible to bring it into the sensuous world. That is why this must be emphasised because we enter fields that escape completely from the sensory eye. To the sensory observation the human being is dead at the moment when the psycho-spiritual has separated from the physical. No eye and no ear can give information of the human destiny in that time when the human being progresses to a new embodiment after death.

We want to consider this destiny between death and rebirth. For this purpose we want to become engrossed in two fields of our existence which belong to our life which belong also to our life like the sun and the moon and like all things which are on our earth. The human being only equipped with the physical senses knows nothing about these higher worlds. He lives in them; however, living in a world and knowing about it are two completely different matters. The German philosopher Lotze (Hermann L., 1817–1881, German philosopher) and also the poet and philosopher Hamerling (Robert K., 1830–1889, Austrian poet) expressed very well again and again that if the human being were without eyes and ears the whole world around us would be dark and silent. Only because we have these sense-organs the world gleams in colours and sounds. We must say of this world that we only know as much of it as it is accessible to us by our sense-organs.

Just an interesting book has appeared which tells of the soul-life of a lady—Helen Keller (1880–1968, American author, The Story of My Life, (1903)—who became deaf-mute and blind at the age of one and a half years and has still developed a wide-ranging and virtually ingenious soul-life. Imagine clearly once how the world, which gleams and sounds to the other human beings, must appear to such a human being, and we imagine how to a blind-born whose eyes are operated the world, which had no colours before and was without light, gleams and is enriched with new qualities; then we have an idea of the human being who awakes from the sensory view, who comes from the darkness to light like after an operation. About the everyday world lies a soul-world which is real for that whose spiritual eyes are opened. Theosophy also calls this soul-world the astral world. One has argued a lot against the term astral world because one believed to find a medieval prejudice. But not without reason this world has been called astral by those who are able to behold in the soul-world. For just as colours and sounds appear to the physical senses, all those facts appear as true realities in this astral world which we subsume with the terms: desires, instincts, passions, impulses, wishes and feelings.

Just as the human being digests as he sees and hears, he wishes, has passions and feelings. He lives in the world of passions, impulses, desires, feelings and wishes, as well as he lives in the physical world. And like the physical eye if it faces another human being sees his physical qualities, the opened spiritual eye sees what we subsume as soul qualities. Just as the physical senses can distinguish electricity from light or light from heat, the opened soul-eye can make a distinction between an impulse, a desire, which exist in the soul of the fellow man, and the feeling of love, devotion, and piety. As heat and light are different, love and piety are different in the soul-world. Because these qualities gleam to the opened soul-eye like colour phenomena, which are full of sounds like the astral, they were called astral.

Here I have to insert some occult ideas. We understand them as those ideas which refer to the super-sensible which can only be obtained by such whose spiritual and psychic senses are opened. Nothing is absolutely hidden. Wishes, desires and passion are hidden only for that whose soul-organs are not opened. We can recognise with our soul-organs which qualities of the soul-world the human being has in him. As he faces us with a particular countenance, every human being faces us with a particular countenance of his soul. As he has a physical body, he also has a body gleaming in the soul-light which is bigger than his physical body in which he is wrapped up like in a light cloud which gleams in the most different colours.

I mention both intentionally, because both exist. One sees some of the qualities that refer to thoughts and ideas shining, other only gleaming. One calls this light cloud that is invisible for the usual eye however, visible to the seer the human aura. It contains everything that I have called soul qualities. We can make a distinction just between those qualities which the soul has because it inclines towards the sensuous because it clings to the sensuous, to the desires which come into being because the human being desires the sensuous and those which concern unselfish devotion, feelings of love or piety. If the aura is irradiated with feelings that come from the lower instincts that are connected with the material life, various figures, lightning-shaped or other figures of blood-red or reddish-orange or reddish-yellow colours flow through the soul, while everything that is connected with nobler feelings, with nobler passions, like with enthusiasm, with devoutness, with love, appears in the human aura in marvellous greenish, greenish-blue, blue-violet and violet-reddish colours.

Thus the human being has his soul on one side pointing to the material, longing for the material, clinging to it, and on the other side this soul is equipped with the opposite pole with which it rises to the noble and is glowed through and flowed through with the noble again and again. Between these both qualities the soul-life is split. Those who live in the green, blue, violet colours go through many reincarnations to acquire these nobler qualities to themselves. The soul is equipped with the lower qualities at first, with impulses, desires, passions, instincts. It must have these, for the soul would not have what we call the desire for the sensuous in the occult philosophy, the soul would not get round to acting in the sensuous world. The fact that the human being is active in the sensuous world that he acquires property, forms tools with the materials of the sensuous world for his life results from the human desires for the sensuous life. This desire is the only driving force for the still undeveloped soul in the times in which it goes through its first reincarnations.

The youthful soul is induced to act only that way. If the soul walks then through the reincarnations, it brings itself to work more and more not only out of the desires, but out of knowledge, out of devotion and love. Thus the soul progresses on its pilgrimage through the world from desire to love. This is the way of the soul: from desire to love. The desiring soul sticks to the physical-sensuous. However, the loving one can be penetrated by the spirit, obeys the spirit, and fulfils the commandment of the spirit. This is the difference of the age of the souls. The young souls are the longing ones, the ripe souls are those which love, which make the spirit work in them. In the soul-world or in the astral world we see this soul body of the human being gleaming in its different qualities, and we can thereby distinguish the degree of maturity of a human soul. All qualities which we can observe in this soul body come from the devotion to the sensuous or from the devotion to the spiritual.

Now we also understand what death means, actually. We want to try to understand the concept, the idea of death once with this idea just won. What happens at first when the human being dies? That which has followed not only the physical principles in his physical body up to now, but what has also complied with the soul principles: the hand which has moved in accordance with the feelings which have surged through the soul, the look which has looked out into the world because it has been carried by the spiritual qualities in the soul, the countenance which has changed its expression depending on the soul , everything that has obeyed the soul in life goes its own ways after the death of the body.

The human body, in so far as it is a connection of physical and chemical forces, does no longer follow the impulses of the soul but the physical forces of the world which has now completely claimed it for itself. It belongs to the external physical world from now on, and nobody who has only occupied himself with those who have ignored this can decide about the fact that the psycho-spiritual, which has controlled the body, has disappeared, because now the psycho-spiritual is merely accessible to the open eye of a clairvoyant person. We will hear in the last hours, which deal with the theosophical basic concepts, how the human being already gets opened his eye for the higher life in this life and becomes aware of that which I have told. But you see from the start that the post-mortal destiny of the spirit can only be understood from the point of view of the super-sensible. Somebody who occupies himself only with natural sciences does not have a vocation to recognise anything of the spiritual. The human being was equipped with physiological-chemical forces. He does no longer control them after death; then his “body” is only a soul body.

What had lived in him as wishes, desires, passions, love, enthusiasm and piety was not engaged in the physical-chemical principles, and it has drawn them rather in its influence. The soul is there after death as it was there before, only not intermingled with the physical body. If the human being consists of mind, soul and body during his physical life, as we have seen, he consists of mind and soul after death. And as the human life takes place in the physical world, it also takes place in the higher world, in the soul-world or in the spiritual world. These are the places of residence which the human being has to go through, the soul-land and the spirit-land.

Let us look at these closer. One can look at them, the astral world or mental world, as at our physical world. As there are the most manifold natural forces in our physical world, like heat, electricity, magnetism, there also are the most manifold forces. These can be divided into particular groups which we must get to know because we can thereby gain an insight of the destinies of the soul after death only. There we have the lowest class of soul qualities, the real world of desires which the occultist calls the region of desires. It is that world which is generated in our soul by its lowest propensities to the physical body. All those emotions of our soul express themselves in the world of desires which come from the desires of the soul for the physical. This is the lowest form of the soul life, the region of burning desires which one has called the burning fire of desires in mysticism.

Let us now look ahead at the nature of the consideration; this explains to you which difference exists between the life in the body and the life without body if you look at this soul quality which is connected with the burning desires. What is desire for the soul living in the body? The soul desires a physical object, a physical satisfaction. The colour of the burning desire, which streams out of the soul as electric current streams out of a point of a needle, changes only if the desire is satisfied.

The current changes immediately if the desire is satisfied. Then the fire stops burning. This is a significant moment for the soul researcher if a desire finds its satisfaction. It looks for the soul observer as if a fire is extinguished with water. The fact that this fire can be extinguished with giving satisfaction results from the fact that the human being has a body. The sensual desire can be satisfied only sensually. There is the palate which desires something tasty. At the moment, however, when no palate is there, it is impossible to satisfy the desire. The soul clings to the feeling, to the sensuous world. The desire can be satisfied as long as the soul is connected with the body. At the moment when it is no longer connected with the body it cannot satisfy the desire, and that is why the soul suffers inexpressibly. This is one of the conditions which the soul has to go through in kamaloka. It has to get to know that condition which allows the desire to exist but shows the impossibility of satisfaction. Then the soul learns gradually to take off the desire. This is an idea which the human being has to attain if he wants to get a concept of that which happens between death and a new birth. We get to know the further processes only after we have cast a precise look at the soul-world and the spirit-land.

Before I describe the destinies between death and a new birth, I want to describe this group of soul qualities and processes exactly which we find in the super-sensible world. The desire was the first. The second is the psychic stimulus, that which is not directly a desire. However, what surrounds us if we speak of the human sensuousness is connected with the sensuous. It is the stimulus which expresses itself in nobler colours which signifies the joy of devotion to the immediate sensuousness. It provokes the sensations of colours and forms round us, of smells approaching us. We call this susceptibility to the sensuous, this weaving and living with the sensuous organs in the environment the force of the emotional stimulus.

Another region of the soul-life is the region of wishes. The wishes refer to the fact that the soul feels sympathy for that which lives in its environment, and, hence, turns its emotions to this object of the environment just in the form of a wish. It does no longer live only with the senses in the sensuous environment, but it fulfils itself with the feeling of love for this environment. However, it is still completely fulfilled with selfishness, with egoism. The theosophists call that soul love which is still fulfilled with egoism the real quality of the soul wishes, the region of wishes. With it we have got to know the third group of soul experience, the region of wishes.

The fourth group is that where the soul no longer tends to anything in the surroundings, but to that which lives in the own body; where the feeling tends to that which occurs in the own body as weal and woe, as pleasurable sensations and as reluctances. We call these internal waves of the feelings in the own existence, this self-desire, this desire for existence with every being the fourth group of soul forces. And the fifth group leads us from the region of desires to the region where the soul pours out in sympathy.

Everything that we have got to know up to now was connected with desire, with the fact that the soul has referred the matters to itself. Now we get to know the matters where the soul spreads out its being, where it sympathises with other beings of its surroundings. There are two types. First we deal with love of nature and then with the love for our fellow men. We call this fifth group of soul facts soul-light. Just as the sun gives off its physical light, the soul gives off its light if it sympathises with the world, if it wraps it, if it illuminates it with the light of its love. This appears to that person, who only has organs for the physical, as something illusory. However, it is much more real for somebody who has spiritual eyes and ears than the table and the walls round us, much more real as the light of the physical flame.

The sixth group of soul facts is that which the occultist calls the real soul-force, what fulfils the soul with enthusiasm for its task in the world, the affectionate devotion to the duty which shines in marvellous violet and blue-violet colours. This forms the spiritual light which gets the driving forces and impulses for the human activity from the soul. This is developed in particular with philanthropical human beings. These feelings accompany the big devoted actions of the human soul in the physical world. These are the experiences of the sixth group.

The experiences of the seventh and highest group are the forces of the most real spiritual life. It is there where the soul no longer refers to the only sensuous with its emotions, but where it makes the light of the spirit shine in itself where the soul addresses itself to higher tasks than it can get in the sensory world where its love goes out to that spiritual love, which Spinoza (Baruch S., 1630–1647, Jewish-Dutch philosopher) describes at the end of his famous Ethics where he speaks of the fact that the highest pours into the soul and that it reappears as God's light.

We have observed and pursued the aspects of the human soul from the selfish desire up to the spiritual all-love. These seven levels of spiritual facts meet someone everywhere in the world whose eye is opened. The world shines not only in colours and sounds not only in acoustic phenomena, but shines also in the world of wishes, desires and passions, shines also in the world of love effects. All that is reality. And if the soul is taken away from this scene, it is on another scene which differs from the external sensory scene in this respect that this external sensory scene only offers what eyes and ears and the other senses can perceive at first. The sensuous just covers the soul because the soul expresses itself in the sensuous. Thus the soul comes to the fore only by the sensuous. The soul hears by the sounds of the language, feels by touching et etcetera.

The spiritual eye sees beyond that, it sees the sheer nature, the nakedness of the soul facts. If the soul is taken away from the scene of the senses, it lives in the soul-world. These are the experiences of the soul in the soul-world which it goes through immediately after death. There it lives in a world free of all physical and chemical forces, in a world of suffering, of desires and impulses. At first it has to develop everything that can be developed there. Uncovered, that is without physical cover, it is given to that which flows to it and through it. It purifies itself gradually by these qualities flowing through it, while it gets to know the desires without being able to satisfy them. There the soul learns to live without the physical body. There it learns to be a self without physical desire and without physical pain, without physical feeling of well-being and without physical discontent. There it does no longer feel as a self at first.

The incarnated soul feels as a self because it is in the body. The soul in the body says to its body “I”. However, if it wants to say “I” after death, it gets to know the feeling of the body without being able to live it. If it stopped this, it learns to regard itself as a soul. The human being learns to regard itself as a soul in the fourth region, and the more often the human being has gone through this region, the longer his pilgrimage has lasted, the stronger his sense of self is developed, the more he knows also when he is re-embodied to say “I” not only to his body, but also to his soul, the more he feels as a soul-being. This is the difference between a human being, who has gone through many, and a human being, who has gone through few incarnations. The advanced human being feels as a soul-being.

Then the human being also gets to know this higher region which we have called soul-light, soul-force and the spirit soul. There the human being settles and works. One is used to calling these highest regions of the astral world the summer land in the theosophical literature. This is that region in which the soul moves on the spheres of sympathy, on the spheres where it learns to live in pure love for the environment and in pure love for the colours. Only if the human soul has gone through these different regions after death, his mind, his third part, the highest part of the human being, is enabled to leave behind everything astral that is filled with wishes, desires and passions and which still clings to the sensuous. And only what of the soul belongs to the spirit, what has developed spirit in the soul lives on, after the human being has cast off the tendency, the desire for the sensuous.

The soul now enters that region where it has to do nothing more with the forces which go downward. Because the spirit penetrates it completely, it enters the devachan, the real spirit-land. The spirit-land which the soul experiences takes up the longest time of the life after death. The time of purification in the kamaloka is relatively short. Afterwards, in the devachan, the soul acts out the experiences which it has obtained in the earthly, physical world freely and uncheckedly, so that it can work in love in this physical sensuous world. The spirit cannot come completely to expression in the physical-sensuous world. We acquire experiences between birth and death perpetually. But these are got hemmed like a plant is got hemmed in a rock crevice. In the spirit-land the soul strengthens and invigorates itself. The next lecture deals with this stay of the soul in the spirit-land.

It shows which destiny the soul has to go through in the time longest by far between death and a new birth. The astral world still appears as something depressing destined to take off a lot. The spirit-land is a realm which one not needs to fear. Nothing connects the spirit flowing through a soul with that which tends to the only sensuous-material. We will have to describe the destiny which the human being experiences there and which should reveal the true nature of the human being to us on account of the experiences in the devachan. Let me only mention one matter. It could seem easily that the single regions of the astral world lie on top of each other like single layers. This is not the case. They are to be understood more like different states of consciousness. Not the place changes in which the human being is, but the state of consciousness changes. The soul land, the spirit-land is everywhere around us. Everywhere a soul-world and a spiritual world is around us, which like colour and light light up if the soul becomes able to use the spiritual eyes, the spiritual ears. This makes the whole physical world disappear to the soul. Just as you could see a veil and if the veil sinks you can see behind the veil, the soul experiences what takes place in the world of desires if it removes the veil of the sensory touching, seeing, and hearing. Then another world comes to the fore round it, a world which was there also round it before, but was not experienced, which is experienced now. It is another state of experience which the soul undergoes. It is a metamorphosis of the human life not a change of place or region. The human being advances step by step on his pilgrimage of life.

This teaches us that we have to seek for the reasons of the sensuous. We want to look at the super-sensible in order to go back strengthened that way into the real world with the full consciousness that we are not only sensuous beings, but that we are beings with soul and mind. With this full consciousness we work in the world hard, full of courage and more confidently, as if we only thought that we are only sensuous beings. It is that which the theosophical world view brings immediately. It has to make the human being not more inefficient, but stronger, more courageous, more audacious. This is not the right theosophy which draws the human being off from life. We want to provide the knowledge of the super-sensible because in the super-sensible the origin and the nature of the sensuous are to be sought. All true recognisers and occultists have said this at all times, and this is also to be found in the inspired writings of nations of all times. And it sounds to us from our own mystics, particularly from the marvellous, artistically perfect literature of the East. We find there a passage in the Upanishads with which I would like to close this consideration today which speaks of the interrelation of the sensuous-limited and the super-sensible, the eternal. It shows how the sensuous-limited comes from the eternal, how the single spark comes from the flame. The flame remains a whole, something permanent, even if the sensuous spark dies away. The single sensuous phenomenon separates from the eternal and returns to the eternal again. The Upanishads say: “As well as the sparks issue a thousand and one times from the well burning flame and are of equal nature, the manifold beings issue form the imperishable and return to it again.”

We stand at an important point of the development of the spiritual human being between death and a new birth where he moves from the so-called soul-world on the spirit-land or realm of spirits. The human being has been released as we have already heard last time in this point from all that binds him that makes him cling to the physical-material existence. All wishes, desires and passions, all his tendencies to the physical, to the material existence have fallen off from the spirit-man. They do no longer disconcert him in his further development, and then this spiritual human being goes through the spirit-land for long time which is normally called devachan in the theosophical literature. Deva is a divine being, a being that has its reality only in this field of existence; it has no physical body, but a body, which only consists of substances of this spirit-land. The human being has been as it were a companion of these beings in a higher region.

We must not imagine and I would like to emphasise this over and over again as if this devachan is to be sought for anywhere else in space. This spirit-land is around us, it fills our world approximately in such a way as the air fills the physical world everywhere. It can only not be perceived by those people who are only able to make use of their physical senses. If the physical sense is closed and the spiritual eye is opened, the world shines around us in a new light. It takes on new qualities. Then the human being sees things that he has not seen before. As well as that which I have described eight days ago as an astral, as a soul world exists only for the corresponding soul organs, the spirit-land exists for the spiritual eye.

It is difficult to design a picture of this area of reality. You can imagine that this is difficult, because our language is not made for these higher areas of existence. Our words are only appropriate to the everyday life. Any word is assigned to a sensuous thing. However, we must make use of these words if we want to describe the totally different worlds to which we ascend. Hence, one can only speak comparatively, in a more symbolic language of which I must make use to describe it to you. This land is constantly around us, the open eye of the seer sees it. It shines round him as it shines to the human being if not only the physical body, but also all those astral qualities, like desires, impulses, passions which chain him to the physical existence have melted down from him, like the snow melts down from a boulder if the sun shines on it.

The only thing of the spirit-land the human being knows during his physical existence is his thought. However, the thought is only a weak image, a shadow-image of this spirit-land. Normally human beings also say who cling to the physical that the thought is no reality. One also hears saying that something is “only a thought.” For that, however, who knows how to settle down into the world of thoughts who knows the significance of the thought life who knows how to live in the thought life as the usual human being in our world, for that the life of thought gets a different significance.

In no other way than by the means of thought the spirit-land can communicate itself to the human being. The thought life corresponds to this higher spiritual reality. Someone who is capable to behold into this spiritual reality learns to distinguish in it. For him the regions of this higher reality separate as here on our earth the different regions separate for the physical eye. I speak figuratively saying this, but it corresponds to the facts. As well as we have the solid earth's crust which consists of rock and of the solid land, a particular region corresponds to it also in the spirit-land. To the oceans, to the waters of the earth corresponds another particular region; and the atmosphere of the earth corresponds to a kind of atmosphere in the devachan. But these three regions of the devachan are related to the experiences on our earth in a certain way. Everything that you can experience in the physical that you can experience as physical objects which are round you, everything that you see with the eyes, perceive with the senses constitutes, so to speak, the solid crust, the dry land in the devachan. There you see spiritual archetypes of everything that you perceive here with the physical eyes.

But this archetypal land looks very different. If you look at a physical human being, a certain part of the room is filled with his physical organisation. On all sides you see nothing else of the human being. However, for the seer the so-called aura attaches itself as we have described it last time. In the spirit-land or devachan this is completely different. Its reality is related to the physical picture of the human being as the physical reality is related to a photo.

In the spirit-land everything that is filled out with the physical matter is, so to speak, left blank, is a hollow space. If the human being descends again to the physical, the hollow space fills with physical matter again. There is radiant existence, radiant organisation where nothing is in the physical world. Hence, it shines through some things what the first Christian initiates called the higher light of aeons. This organises the human being and connects him with the spiritual world. Thus the human being does not exist in the spirit-land where he exists in the physical. He exists just beside himself, except the physical space which he fills.

If the seer enters the spiritual world, he beholds everything filled with higher reality that appears blank round the things to the physical eye. This is filled with brilliant and radiant light. This light is another light than that which composes the aura of the soul. The human being is not only this soul-aura. This aura is traversed by a higher aura. While the aura of the soul shines in a softly gleaming light, this higher spiritual aura, which remains still visible if the physical body of the person has fallen off, shines brightly; it is not only something smouldering, but something blazing. It also has a particular quality by which it is distinguished from the astral aura. This is the fact that one can see through the spiritual aura, while one cannot see through the astral one. Any spiritual region is completely transparent for that which is in the spirit-land.

This is the lowest part of the spirit-land which I have described now. If the seer ascends to even higher regions, he experiences the all-encompassing life. This all-encompassing life flows through all things. It is the liquid element of the spirit-land. As well as a sea or a river appears to us with its peculiar colours, this all-encompassing life appears to us as an ocean or river of the spirit-land. It shines in colours which can be only compared with the colours of the peach-blossom. In this all-encompassing life you do not find such irregularly shaped rivers and oceans like here on earth, but quite regularly shaped ones, so that the comparison would be much better with the heart and its veins.

The third that can be experienced is the atmosphere of this land. However, this atmosphere is composed of that which we can call the sensations here on earth. One perceives, so to speak, the airy sentient world completely penetrating the space of the spirit-land; there one is able to perceive the universal feeling of the whole earth. However, this feeling also penetrates us from without, like the wind or the storm, like lightning and thunder in the physical atmosphere. There is no longer our own feeling and sensing. The human being has there cast off his own feelings. There the feelings of all the others approach him. He feels one with the feelings of others. Grief and pain flow through this spiritual world like lightning and thunder. You can probably imagine that the insight into this world gives another understanding of reality. Someone who looked once at this sea of human and animal sufferings and joys has seen what it, actually, means: suffering and being glad, what it means that the passions are raging. He then has another concept of war and peace of the world, another concept of the “struggle for existence.” The human being experiences also something of that between death and a new birth.

Then an even higher region comes. You must not imagine these regions in such a way that one proceeds from one place to the other. They all are into each other, they penetrate each other completely. The fourth region is related to our earth only a little, whereas we can perceive qualities in the three regions mentioned above which refer to our earth. Here we already get in touch with higher natured beings, with the beings which are possibly never embodied on this earth. Here those forces face us that already extend beyond the physical. What the human being performs out of the purely ideal, the pure thinking, a purely benevolent attitude, out of love, what the human being performs beyond the physical realm comes from forces that become visible in this region. These regions of the devachan always surround the human being, work perpetually on him. Someone who has intuition, inventiveness creates things which are not images of our earth; he creates something that is brought in from a higher region to our earth. This comes from this fourth region.

One does not need to believe that what is not aware to us does not exist in this sphere. We are not allowed to believe that if a single human being does not perceive these things they are also not there. Someone who comes into the world with a special genius brings it with him from his stay in this region of the devachan.

With it we have arrived at the border, which has to do a little only, as we saw, with our life on earth, which contains, however, what gives just a higher shine to our earth and is intended to be brought down immediately to the sensuous existence what still depends on the sensuous existence, too. The human being can form no work of art, can construct no machine if he does not comply with the physical reality. With the work of art he must study the material.

The other three regions of the devachan which are even higher are regions, which are still less connected with the earth, which, so to speak, shine from a very different world. If the human being ascends to this region either as a seer or in the time between death and a new birth , then he takes everything from it that I would like to call the heavenly spark which the human being brings in to this world. It is that which appears to him as the divine, as the higher spiritual, as the actually idealistic, which comes as higher moral, as higher religiousness and subtler spiritual science into the physical world with him. The human being takes from these three higher regions of devachan any wisdom, any higher shine of existence, which he brings as it were as a messenger of God in to this physical world.

Once again I would like to emphasise that it concerns states of consciousness what I have described, so that the human being can still stay at one and the same place in his consideration, while round him the different regions of devachan light up and appear to him as a much richer reality than the reality is which the physical eye can see, the physical ear can hear or the physical hand can grope. I would like to compare it again and again with a human being who cannot be aware of his physical eyes and ears. Last time I have already pointed to the interesting biography of the blind and deaf-mute American Helen Keller. We look there into a spiritual life which is very different. Imagine once how the world would appear to you if you had no ears and no eyes. Those were the capacities of Helen Keller. Today, however, she has successfully completed a university study and owns an education like one who has successfully completed a university study. We see there how this Helen Keller has already created a wealth within the physical world which has basically different shading, has another nature than what, otherwise, the physical human being owns. She herself says: “People who are of the opinion that all sensory impressions come to us through the eye and the ear were surprised that I notice a difference between the streets of a city and the ways in the country. They forget that my whole body reacts to the surroundings. The roaring of the city whips up all my nerves. The discordant, tumultuous with its strident impressions, the simple rattling of the machines is even more torturing for the nerves because my attention is not deflected by brightly varying pictures like with the other human beings.” Already for this peculiarly organised nature the world is completely different round her. Even more different it is if at the moment of death the physical eye is no longer the intermediary if the impressions do no longer approach us from without. The seer can describe this because he is able to pass the gate of death by means of his mystic contemplation in certain respect.

Imagine you would have red glasses which make everything appear in reddish hues. The world thereby gets a quality that it does no longer have immediately if you take away the red glasses. As well as you take away the red glasses, you give everything away at the moment of death that your eyes and ears make of the environment. What the human being has of the spiritual world in his surroundings as it were as something veiled or coloured, with which his eyes and ears were marked, appears to him now, begins to gleam if I may make use of a Goethean expression from a rich, varied, manifold world. I have described last time what flames up in the astral world. If the human being has now cast off the wishes, desires and passions which induced him to spend some time in the astral world, he comes to new states. Then the veil falls off from his astral eyes, he enters that world which just as our physical world is irradiated by the sun is irradiated by the light of aeons as the Christian mystics called it, that light which can shine from within also to the human being if he has opened his spiritual eye. This light penetrates the whole spiritual world. In the more or less long periods the human being experiences the states between death and a new birth which I have described to you. The human being gets to know the regions of the spirit-land really, he gets to know what it means if the physical matter disappears. Where physical matter is are now hollows. There is nothing. Very different regions of existence appear.

In the Indian Vedanta philosophy a saying is especially practised which the mystics said to themselves over and over again. This saying is practised in the corresponding languages everywhere, and this saying is: thou art that. If the mystic says this to himself again and again, he thinks that the human being is not really only that which is enclosed in his skin physically. The human being could not exist as a single being in the universe; he is connected with forces and levels of existence which are beyond his physical body, so that there is reality to which he belongs, wherever he looks. As he separated from this reality, every other human being is separated from this reality. There the human being experiences that he is basically nothing else than a leaf of a big tree. This tree signifies humanity. Like a leaf withers if it falls off from the tree, the single human being would have to perish if he wanted to separate from the tree of humanity. But he is not able to do this! The physical human being does not know this only; however, at this level it comes true to him. If the human being comes into the world with a disposition which is not merely materialistic which does not cling to the sensuous-physical existence only, he comes into contact with the spiritual world. The more he rises to an idealistic attitude, the more he is able to have an idea of something higher, the more he is able to act out in this world of the spirit. In this world the human being is enclosed in manifold physical connections: here the human being is enclosed in family, people, and race; there he has his friends. It is all connections in the physical world.

He experiences these connections again in the spirit-land. There he only realises the friendship completely. There the sense of togetherness, the feeling of adherence to his native land becomes clear to him to a large extent. There it lives out what here the relationship in the physical world signifies. He now lives within the world of the archetypes. The more he has turned the sense to one of these connections here, the more he has to realise in the region of the spirit-land, while he is enclosed here in the physical body by the physical reality. Like the plant if it is planted in a rock crevice cannot develop in all directions, the same also applies to the human spirit.

Here in the physical cover the qualities are constricted. Only a small part of that appears which he owns as friend love, family love, patriotism et etcetera. If the human being can develop, however, as the plant on free field, his being also lives out freely if he is no longer enclosed in the physical cover and comes back with increased forces. Who has experienced a higher sense of family, lives it out here intensively and will then enter life again with a particular sense of family.

In this region the human being experiences what I have described as “all-encompassing life”. He experiences the liquid element in the spirit-land. There we see if we obtain an insight as a seer someone slowly brightening up who already developed a sense of the “all-encompassing life” on earth, which weaves and flows in all beings. That means developing religious devoutness. The devout human being raises his sense to the “all-encompassing life” flowing through everything. The human being freely lives out the religious devout sense in this second region of the devachan. This sense appears strengthened and invigorated at the new birth. Here we see the human being rising up above the barriers which this incarnation has put to him in the physical life. We see the Hindu, the Christian experiencing their particular kind of the “all-encompassing life” in the devachan if the barriers have fallen and a bigger unity is produced in this region.

In the third region, we discover the archetypes of grief and desire, of joy and pain where this element surrounds us like the atmosphere surrounds the earth. If the human being settles down in this region, he learns to develop a sense of unselfish devotion to everything that suffers in the world, to everything that can rejoice in the world. No longer sensory desire and sensory pain depress him. He no longer knows any difference between his pain and the pain of others, but he knows what desire and pain are in themselves. We learn to recognise the reality of grief and pain. We get to know the great philanthropists here; all those who can appear in the world as the geniuses of philanthropy, the geniuses of charity, as great creators of philanthropic connections of sympathy and goodwill, of human community are in this third region and attain their abilities there.

In the fourth region, the human being takes up what he realises using the earthly forces and abilities, using the qualities of the earthly things with his intuition, his inventions and discoveries. Here are those who serve their fellow men in the new life as artists, as great inventors or in some other way with brilliant ideas, with encompassing view of the world, with encompassing wisdom. Depending on how the human being has developed these or those qualities already in this life, the work of the consciousness lasts in the devachan longer, of course. It is a state of the highest bliss. What limited and hampered him on earth has fallen off from him. Now he freely unfolds his abilities. All obstacles have been removed. The human being feels this possibility to spread out his wings in all directions to let flow his increased forces then again into the physical incarnation and to work even more vigorously and energetically on earth. This appears to him as a state of the highest bliss. The religions of all times have described this bliss as the heavenly salvation. Hence, devachan also appears with different religions as the so-called kingdom of heaven.

The time in devachan is not of equal length for all human beings. The uneducated savage who has experienced a little of this world only who has applied his mind and sense only a little has a short stay in the devachan. The devachan is basically supposed to elaborate what the human being has learnt in the physical, to unfold it freely, to make it suitable to a new life. The human being, who is on a higher level of existence who has collected rich experiences, has to process a lot and, hence, has a long stay in the devachan. Only later, when he is able to look into these states, the stays become again shorter up to the point where the human being can immediately walk after death again to a new incarnation because he has already experienced what is to be experienced in devachan.

There are even higher stages which are beyond devachan to which the human being will walk when he has already developed his higher being. We have to imagine this is also spoken figuratively that every human being passes that region of the spirit-land between death and a new birth which is beyond the connection of all earthly, and that devachan extends into far higher regions of existence where from the human being gets the divine forces he brings in as a messenger of God to this world. The messengers of God come from this region. Also the uneducated human being, however fast he may hurry through it because he has to look a little in it because he can unfold a little in it, must spend short time at least between death and a new birth in this region of devachan which is the freest from all earthly bonds. There all gravity of the earth has fallen off from him. There he takes share in the breeze which flies from the divine world to him, which penetrates him between death and a new birth. Those who have got to a higher level of existence stay here longer. They obtain the possibility to descend with particular wisdom, with particular spiritual forces again to the earth to help as higher natured individualities their fellow men.

The guides of humanity stay in this region for longer time. Also those who are transported away from the world are to be found here, beings whom the theosophical literature calls masters, those beings whose development is far beyond what still sticks to the present human being. The longer the human being can delight in the contact of these beings between death and a new birth, the purer, the nobler and more moral he enters the earthly scene again. The more he has again seen to it that he has become pure, noble, and idealistic on this earth, the longer he can share of the air which blows in these parts of the devachan.

This is the way the human being has to go through on his pilgrimage between death and a new birth. These are states of consciousness, not different places. The human being does not go from one place to the other wandering through these regions. On the contrary, one could say that they disappear, fade away, but only in such a way, as for example the outer physical world disappears if you close the eyes or block the ears. But as it becomes dark and silent in this case around you, it becomes clear and bright round you in that case, and a new world rises.

What is to be said about the time which the human being has to spend in this devachan can be decided only according to the experience, of course. Only that is able to say something about it who has any anyhow natured experience in this field, who is able to remember his own former incarnations or who can consciously as a seer attain an insight of the luminous world of the spirit.

It is very different according to the developmental state of the human being how much time he spends in devachan. But one can approximately find the time which the human being spends in the heavenly world. You find it if you multiply the earthly lifetime, the time between birth and death, with a number which lies between twenty and forty. The time depends on the development the human being has achieved but also on the physical lifespan. If a child soon dies after birth, you need to multiply only the time of life by twenty to forty, and you receive the time of the stay in the devachan. Who has a long life has to go through long and important states in devachan and has also to feel a lot of that which one calls the beatific sensations of devachan in mysticism. This life in devachan differs quite substantially from all that the physical eyes or generally the physical senses can imagine.

Even if the concepts, the words with which I have described this region could be only approximate, I tried to describe as faithfully, as accurately as possible. These regions themselves do not belong not in their substance, not in their real being to the deepest nature of the human being. This deepest nature of the human being, which Giordano Bruno calls the monad, the highest spiritual-living in the human being comes from even higher worlds. I tell something of these even higher worlds the next hour which deals with the basic concepts of theosophy. Then I also speak about the way how the capacities of the human beings have to develop to take a look at these higher worlds. The mystic describes not only what he sees in them, but he is already allowed to describe also how the human being can get round to developing his dispositions to take a closer look at these worlds.

At the end, I would like to do only few remarks.

It is common practice that those who first hear something of the described region of the devachan say that this region is an illusion, something illusory; because it reminds of its shadow-image, the thought in the physical life; it must also have a less real existence than our physical world. However, this is not the case. To somebody who has obtained insight in this higher world it has become clear that in it much stronger, much higher realities exist than in our physical reality. One gets to know the physical existence in its true significance if one is able to see it in the light of these higher worlds. As well as a piece of steel can be before you but you do not suspect that it entails electric or magnetic forces, an object of the physical world can extend before you, but you do not suspect that it contains a much higher being. Hence, also those who knew something of the coloured and sounding world describe it in the most shining colours and describe the sounds, which penetrate to their spiritual ear, in the most marvellous words. The old Pythagoreans spoke of the music of the spheres.

Nobody else knows the music of the spheres than someone who has an insight into this world of the devachan. Many people think that it is something figurative, something symbolic. No, it is something of the highest reality. From the spiritual world the rhythmical melodies sound toward us which are the cosmic forces of the universe. The cosmic forces are rhythmical, and we hear that rhythm if we are able to use the “devachanic ear”, and that inexpressible bliss occurs which the mystic is able to perceive. If everything of this world disappears, everything escapes from his attention what sounds by the senses, and then he describes the impression of the devachan.

The human being has to go through this between death and a new birth. There he is a sprout of the new reincarnation. He is the grain of mustard seed, which lives through the devachan time to a new incarnation. The German mystic Angelus Silesius (born Johann Scheffler, 1624–1677, mystic and religious poet) who spoke so many beautiful moving words in his Cherubinic Pilgrim (1657/1674) described the sensation and the whole being in this marvellous mystic book briefly and clearly in a saying, how the spirit lives from death to a new birth as a seed which prepares itself for a new existence to unfold new and higher forces. Angelus Silesius says with the following words what every mystic knows that the heart giving off the spiritual light is able to radiate:

A grain of mustard seed is my mind;
If His sun shines through it,
It grows, equal to God, with joyful delight.

Someone who puts the task to himself to describe the relation of the modern cultural life to the theosophical view of life must not pass the phenomenon Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Like a big riddle Friedrich Nietzsche stands in the cultural development of the present. Without doubt, he has made a deep impression on all our thinking contemporaries. For the ones he was a guide, for the others a person against whom one has to fight most intensively. He stirred up many people, and left many very effective results of his work. An extensive literature about Nietzsche has appeared, and today one can open almost no newspaper some years ago this was even more the case without stumbling against the name Nietzsche or without finding cited his way of thinking directly with his sayings, with his thoughts, or, otherwise, any echo of him. Friedrich Nietzsche has deeply taken root in the whole structure of our age. He stands there like a phenomenon, also already for a mere viewer of his life.

He came from a Protestant parsonage. In 1844 born, he already shows a great interest in all religious questions on the high school. Some notes of this time show not only a premature lad, but also a human being illuminating some fields of the religious questions with brilliant brain waves. During his university studies, he is not only interested in his professional studies so that he belongs to the most excellent students but also in the general problems of the human development. He already performs a lot in the field of philology in his youth, more than others can perform in a whole life. Before he conferred a doctorate, a chair was offered to him at Basel. His teacher Ritschl (Albrecht R.,1822–1889, German theologian) was asked whether he could recommend that Friedrich Nietzsche should take this. The famous philologist answered that he could only recommend Nietzsche, because Nietzsche knew everything that he himself knew. When he was already a professor and wanted to confer a doctorate, it was said to him: we are not able to examine you! Nietzsche, the associate professor, conferred a doctorate; one reads that on the certificate! This is a sign how deeply one esteemed his mind. Then he made an acquaintance that was decisive for his whole life. He made acquaintance of Schopenhauer's philosophy, in which he settled in such a way that he made not the philosophy but the personality of Schopenhauer (1788–1860) his guide, so that he regarded him as his educator.

The second important acquaintance was that of Richard Wagner (1813–1883). From these both acquaintances the first epoch of Friedrich Nietzsche's spiritual life developed. This happened in a quite personal way. When Nietzsche was a young professor in Basel, he went, so often he was able at times any Sunday , to Triebschen near Lucerne. At that time, Richard Wagner occupied himself with Siegfried. There the most works of Wagner and the deepest problems of the cultural life were discussed with the young Nietzsche in the spirit of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Wagner often said that he could find no better interpreter than Friedrich Nietzsche.

Considering the writing The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), we find that Richard Wagner's art is moved into such a light that it appears directly as a cultural-historical action which shines for centuries, even for millennia. Seldom such an intimate relationship existed like that between the younger pupil and the older master who got to know his ideas, with which he was bubbling over, anew in an intellectually stimulating way, so to speak. They faced him friendly with their effects like from without, so that he was able to arrange them in the right light. It was a phenomenon that had never existed before. Wagner was happy who could say that he found somebody understanding him, as few people were in the world; Nietzsche was not less happy who looked back at the times of the ancient Hellenism of which he believed that the human beings still created divine things at that time, in contrast to that time he calls the decadent one. In Richard Wagner he saw a resurrection of the rarest kind, a human being who owned such a pure spiritual content in himself as it is seldom found in life.

Only from 1889 on, a lot was written about Nietzsche. People who repeat his words pay attention to his works only after this point in time. However, those who already occupied themselves with Nietzsche about 1889 knew that he had lighted up like a comet beside Richard Wagner, up to about 1876, that, however, he was nearly forgotten then. Only in the smallest circles one still spoke of him. Then he wrote his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) by which he became known again. Then a writing appeared by which he seemed to smash everything that he had considered once as his own. This was The Case of Wagner (1888). Thereby he became known again. Those who occupied themselves with Nietzsche separated in two factions. Georg Brandes (1842–1927, Danish critic and scholar) held lectures on Nietzsche at the University of Copenhagen. Nietzsche had become not only a university professor in young years even if he retired soon for reasons of health he also was accorded the honour of becoming an object of university lectures. This news probably brought consolation to his darkened soul; however, it could not save him from the menacing mental derangement. Then the news came that Nietzsche went incurably insane. This is more or less the outline of his outer life.

As I have already mentioned, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music was his first writing. This was born from a rare absorption in Schopenhauer's philosophy and from an absorption in art as it faced him in the work of Richard Wagner. Who wants to understand what this writing means as Nietzsche's daybreak, and also wants to understand his life must explain it out of a threefold consideration. First he must explain it out of his time with which Nietzsche lived intimately. I myself have tried to explain Nietzsche in this way objectively. One can show him secondly as a being which one allows to arise from his personality. There he is one of the most interesting psychological, psychiatric problems. I have also tried to show this in a medicinal magazine in an article about Friedrich Nietzsche. Thirdly one can show him from the spiritual world view.

His first writing The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music delivers important clues from the theosophical point of view, from a spiritual world consideration. Our age is the age of the fifth principal race of humankind of which two others have led the way which had to develop other forces than our principal race. Our fifth principal race has preferably to develop thinking and reason. The preceding principal race is the Atlantean one which lived on the continent that is now on the ground of the Atlantic. These human beings did not yet have reason, had not yet developed intellectuality, but memory preferably. One of these preceding principal races was the Lemurian one. This still was on the level of imagination.

Our principal race has to develop the intellectual life. Since some centuries in particular, the European humanity is developing the intellectual force, intelligence. Our great philosophers, up to Kant and Schopenhauer, are completely involved in this development of our principal race.

As to them the big problem became the question: what is the significance of the human thought, how can the human being recognise anything? These questions became the big riddles of existence to them. Now, however, something quite peculiar takes place for our principal race. Thinking which the philosophers have brought to the highest development was detached for our time, so to speak, from its mother soil. Our time has developed thinking in the purest and most marvellous way in science concerning the external technical life. But these thoughts or, actually, these ideas tore us out of nature.

The human thought is only a picture of something much higher that we have discussed in the preceding talks; it is a shade, an image of the spiritual world. The thought is a spiritual being. Modern times developed thinking powerfully; however, one has forgotten that this thought is nothing but the shadow-image of the spiritual life. This life transmits, so to speak, the spiritual forces to us, and then we get the idea. That is why the origin of the thought, of the idea was mysterious, in particular for the philosophy of the 19th century. The thought, the idea itself became appearance. One forgot that the thought has its origin in spirit as Jacob Böhme says. When one had tried in the modern times to look for the primary sources of existence, to penetrate to that primary source which one had lost and about which one did no longer know that it has its origin in the spirit one could find it only according to Schopenhauer's philosophy in the unreasonable blind will; however, the thought is nothing but a simulacrum which our imagination offers to us. Thus the world became idea on one side and will on the other side. But both do no longer have their origin in spirit, only in the mere appearance. How could it be otherwise that this materialistic philosophy sought for a support of the spirit in an element which any unbiased observer can find directly in the world where the spirit exists as such only in the form of a blind will, as a proliferation of nature? This is just the personality. Indeed, one had forgotten that something spiritual is in the personality; but one was not able to deny the personality as such.

In Schopenhauer's philosophy, the spiritual human personality was at least accepted as the highest; the personality that stands out by its ingenuity or devoutness or holiness and shows as it were a level of development within the rest of humanity. Thus Schopenhauer became hard and showed the average human being as manufactured goods of nature; however, from the dark impulses of nature single great personalities emerge. This view had an effect on Nietzsche.

But something else had an effect on him. By means of thoughts and ideas we can never experience anything of that which flows in the unreasonable will. Schopenhauer finds the true being of the chaos of the basic instincts in music. That is why Schopenhauer was not able to penetrate this simulacrum to the being which expresses itself in the will, but the being of music became a solution of the riddle of the world to him. Everybody who is familiar with the questions of mysticism knows how somebody can get to the view that music offers a solution of the riddle of the world.

There is music not only on the physical plane or the sensuous world but also in the higher worlds. If we ascend through the soul-world to the higher spiritual worlds, something of a higher music sounds to us. Not the music which we perceive on the physical plane; for it is no allegory but reality: the movement of the stars in the world, the growth of plants, the feeling of the human beings and animals appear like sounding words! That is why the occultist says: the human being finds out the secrets of the world only if the mystic word which exists in the things speaks to him. What Schopenhauer found is an expression of a higher fact, something that is much more significant than what he understood of it; for it sounds with him only into the physical ear. We call the principle manas that outlasts time and extends to the eternal. This manas finds its physical expression in the sounds of music which come toward us from the outside world. Schopenhauer expressed something absolutely right, and Nietzsche took up this thought. He felt with the whole wealth of his mind that somebody who wants to express himself about the world's secrets with mere words is not able to do this in the same way as the master of the sounds can express himself about the world's secrets. Therefore, Friedrich Nietzsche just as Schopenhauer regards the musical expression as the expression of the higher world's secrets. Thus the way was shown to them to the ancient times of the old Greeks where art, religion and science were a whole where in the mystery temples the mystery priests, who were scientists and artists, arranged the destiny of the human being and of the whole world in grand pictures before the soul.

If we look into the temple, we find shown the destiny of the god Dionysus. This was the solution of the riddle of the world. However, Dionysus had descended to the matter and had been dismembered, and the human mind is destined to release him who is buried in the matter and to lead him up to the new splendour. While the human being seeks for his divine nature in himself, he wakes the god in himself, and this awakening is the awakening of the god who had found a kind of grave in the low nature. This big destiny of the world was shown to the mystes not only sensually, but also spiritually in a magnificent way. This was the primal drama of the ancient Greece. We go back to far-off times, and from this core the later Greek drama comes. The drama of Aeschylus, of Sophocles was only art; however, it had arisen from the temple art. Art, science and religion had separated from the temple art. Who looks back at these primeval times sees something more profound from which the human understanding and conduct of life have come. The living god Dionysus was the great figure of the Greek mysteries. Nietzsche within the circle of Wagner did not recognise but suspect this.

It was a big dark inkling, and from it his view of the nature of the Greeks before Socrates resulted. At that time, the human being was not one-sided, but the Dionysian human being drew on unlimited resources. Because everything is imperfect, the Greek created the redeeming religion and wisdom and later also the redeeming art to himself. Hence, what later appeared as art Nietzsche regarded as an image of the primal art only that he calls the Dionysian one. This still seized the whole human being not only the imagination one-sidedly, but all spiritual forces. Later art was only an image.

Thus the concepts Dionysian and Apollonian face us in his works. By means of them he has an inkling of the origin of all artistic life and the language by which the old Greeks expressed themselves. This was a language that was music at the same time. In the middle, the drama was staged, around was the choir, which showed life and death in powerful sounds.

Then others who were familiar with the circle of Wagner also showed this destiny intimately. Above all, you find it described out of the spirit of the Eleusinian mysteries in the book: The Sanctuaries of the East (1898) by Schuré. Edouard Schuré (1841–1929, French esoteric) not only described what Nietzsche only suspected from imagination but from spirituality. Nietzsche just wanted that, but he did not achieve it. On this basis, the whole materialistic way of thinking of our time became a big riddle to him: How did the human being come from this time in which he expressed himself as a riddle of the world to the prosaic materialistic time? For others this may be a prosaic riddle of reason; however, what others want to treat and solve with reason, mind and imagination it became a problem of the heart to Nietzsche. Nietzsche had merged with his time like parents with their children. However, he could not be glad about the time, but only suffer from it. Nietzsche was able to suffer; but not to be glad. The solution of the Nietzsche problem lies therein.

He regarded Wagner as the renovator of the old Greek art which expresses the highest secrets in sounds. The old human being should ascend to the superman, to the divine human being. One needed the human being who extended beyond the average human beings. There Schopenhauer came in the nick of time. According to Schopenhauer the human being was average manufactured goods. The human being became the psycho-spiritual human being who is not on the earth but floats above the earth, and the dramatic music was used as means to get beyond the human being. Nobody wrote so reverentially about Richard Wagner like Friedrich Nietzsche in his essay: Wagner in Bayreuth in 1876. However, the everyday had become something deeply detestable to him. Therefore, he also combated what David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) expressed in his work The Old and the New Faith (1872).

There exists another writing from the beginning of the seventies, a writing without whose knowledge one cannot understand Nietzsche at all. From this writing it follows that Nietzsche suspected that problem of our time which we recently called the Tolstoy problem also just like the great problem of the Greek culture. He suspected that our time, which just passes, is lacking something. The external figures are that in which birth and death prevail forever. We have seen how any plant lives in its figure between birth and death, how whole nations pass between birth and death, how the most marvellous works are subjected to birth and death. But we have also seen how one thing remains that defeats birth and death and makes the old rise again in new incarnations. Tolstoy showed this life which the seed of a plant carries over to a new plant and appears there again.

And again: our present human race is embodied in forms which have birth and death in themselves. We rush towards a point in time which will recognise life itself. Nietzsche had recognised that our time suffers from the consideration of the figures, not only from the consideration of the figures in the natural sciences, but also in history. From this sense he wrote his significant writing about the advantage and disadvantage of history, about the historical illness. The human beings go back to the most distant primeval times and want to look at the rudiments of culture, from people to people, from state to state. However, birth and death live in everything. While we stuff ourselves with historical knowledge, we deaden that life which we have in ourselves. We deaden what lives in eternal present in us. The more we stuff our brains with history, the more we deaden the will for life in ourselves. If we look back and estimate what that means, then we see that we can only find anything considering the human life, considering ourselves directly. Thereby we get closer to a new future.

Nietzsche points to this new culture-epoch which we have to regard as that of form and figure. That lives in Nietzsche. He believed in the art of Richard Wagner, he regarded it as the renewal of life, as a new Renaissance. Wagner was much more realistic than Nietzsche. He stood completely in his time; he said to himself: the artist cannot do the third step before the first. And when Nietzsche came to Bayreuth in 1876, he saw something strange. He saw that the ideal he had got of Wagner was too big, that it was bigger than what Wagner could fulfil. As Nietzsche had a dark inkling of the origin of the Greek tragedy from the mystery time and of our whole time from the primeval times, he also had an inkling of the fact that a future culture, which is not based only on reason, must come from the spiritual powers slumbering in the human being even today.

He suspected this, and he confused this with that which was there already. He believed that the big riddle of the future was already solved in the present. What he had to argue against Socrates is that our culture had become one-sided by his influence that it had split on the one hand in a culture of reason and on the other hand in a soul movement. Therefore, he also mocks Socrates and combats the Socratic culture, the culture of reason.

When Wagner's pieces of art set faced him in Bayreuth, he became disloyal, not really disloyal, because he had never seen Wagner correctly, he had assumed that Wagner had realised what he had dreamt of as a future ideal; there Nietzsche said to himself: I have seen something wrong.

The adult Nietzsche became disloyal to the young Nietzsche, and the hard words are not directed so much against Wagner than against what he himself had been in his youth as an admirer of Wagner. One cannot really be an adversary of anybody; one can only be his own adversary. He said to himself: I feel all my youth ideals compromised. He stood in midst the ruins of a world view and had to look around at something else. Then this became the “new Enlightenment.” He wanted now to inspire and enliven what he had rejected once. He wanted to obtain life out of the dead matter as science treats it. He himself became a student of the form, of the external figure which passes us by in birth and death forever.

And now understand the profound theosophical truth that three essential conditions exist in the world: the external figure which is subjected to birth and death which comes into being and passes, appears again, which rushes from form to form in life. The second is life which is the expression of the soul. The soul breaks the form to be reincarnated in a new form. And the third is consciousness of its different degrees. Any stone, any plant and in the higher degrees any human being has consciousness. So we have three conditions in the world: form, life and consciousness. These three represent a world of the bodily, a world of the soul and a world of the spirit.

This is the wisdom that is made gradually accessible to the world again. This is also the ancient wisdom of the mysteries of which Nietzsche had a dark inkling which he could not express clearly from which he suffered and which he longed for as a new life that should arise from our culture. Now he himself was entangled in the natural sciences. He had no eye for the fact that consciousness lives in life and ascends to higher and higher figures. This is the course of the world. Consciousness takes that from the form which is worth to be pulled out to higher formation. Thereby we have a development of the things from form to form, from one condition of life to another condition of life where life remains and the forms and figures show higher formation. He did not understand the consciousness that develops and goes into higher and higher figures. Nietzsche saw the form only; he did not understand the moving agent that comes to the fore in always higher form.

Thus he realised the return of the things and beings, but did not realise that they re-embody themselves in higher and higher forms. Hence, he taught the “eternal recurrence of the self-similar form.” He did no longer know that the consciousness returns on higher levels. This is the thought to which he was influenced by the natural sciences: as well as we are here, as we are sitting here, we were there countless times and will be there again. This must impose on the thinker who does not know that the consciousness does not return in the same figure, not in the same form, but in a higher figure, in a higher form. This was the second state of Nietzsche's development.

The third state is that in which still spiritual life was inside of Nietzsche's soul which he could not get out, however, in such a world view of the mere form. Indeed, he did not know that the higher fields of existence were closed to his mind; however, the mighty urge lived in him for these higher fields of existence. The human being developed higher with his figure, from the animal up to the human being, however, this development cannot be finished. As the worm developed to the human being, the human being must develop further. From that his idea of the “superman” (Übermensch) originated. This Übermensch is the future human being. Compare him with the corresponding mystic idea, and then you find that they border on each other closely. The urge in the human nature which expresses itself also in us is the urge for spiritualisation, so that one can even now find the God-man on the bottom of the soul who appears from the future world as Nietzsche's big spiritual ideal which he strives for.

If you do not only look at form and figure but also at life and consciousness, at soul and spirit, this superman appears in his true figure, he appears as the whole human being who hastens to the higher spheres of existence. As to Nietzsche this thought existed in the seminal state, but he could express himself only with words of the naturalist. As the human being has developed from thousand and thousand figures, he must also develop in higher figures to the superman. When Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy, he stood before the gate of the Greek mysteries, he stood before the gate of the temple of Dionysus, but he could not unlock the front gate. Then he struggled on and wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra: once again he stood before the gate of the temple and could not unlock it. This is the tragedy of his life, his destiny. If the ego of a single human being is suffering vicariously, is sympathetic to his time, to the psycho-spiritual, then something particular happens to this ego. Everybody who knows the phenomena of the astral world knows what must ensue to this human ego if it faces nothing but riddles and gates which do not open themselves to it: before every question is something in the world of soul and spirit that is like the shade of this question that appears as a pursuer of the soul. This seems to the materialistic thinker a little bit peculiar at first. But this man who stood before Christianity and did not know how it develops, before our philosophy, before the materialism of our time and desired a new Dionysus and was not able to bear him from himself this man stood there like before shades of the past. Thus as to Nietzsche, indeed, beside the figure of Christ that of the Antichrist stood in the astral world, beside the figure of the moralist the immoralist. What he knew as philosophy of our time stood besides as negation. That tormented him like a pursuer of his ego.

Read Nietzsche's last writings, his Will to Power (posthumous fragments), and his Antichrist where he describes the ghost, the criticism of Christianity, the criticism of philosophy in his nihilism. He does not get out from these matters; the moral of our time inhibits him which cannot get out from good and evil which does not want to recognise karma, although it strives for it. Finally, the eternal change of the figure appeared to him like the recurrence of the eternal similar figure. The fourth work has not come to an end. He wanted to call it Dionysus or the Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence. Thus only the urge of the single ego for the superman remained.

Nietzsche would have had to see into the human self and to recognise the divine human being, then that would have lighted up to him which he longed for. So, however, it seemed inaccessible to him. It was only the urge of his inside for seizing these contents. He called it his will to power, his striving for the superman. With the whole intensity of his nature he found a lyrical expression in Thus Spoke Zarathustra which is soul-raising, is soul-amusing and soul-consuming as well, also sometimes paradoxical. This is the shout of the present human being for the God-man, for wisdom who, however, only got to the will to wisdom, to the will to power. Something lyrically brilliant can arise from this urge. But something that can seize the human being in his deepest inside and lead up to these heights cannot arise from this urge. Thus Nietzsche's figure is the last great empathy out of materialism, the human being, who suffered tragically, perished tragically in the materialism of the 19th century and points with all longing to the new mystic time. Master Eckhart (1250–1327, German mystic) says: God has died so that I also die away toward the world and become a god. Nietzsche also says this in a prose saying: “If there were a God who could stand it to be no god?” Nietzsche says that there is no God! He did not understand Goethe's saying:

Unless the eyes were like the sun,
How could we see the light?
Unless God's own force lived in us,
How could delight us the divine?

What brightened up in our time so much and what he felt as grief had to be consumed. I do not want to say that his illness has to do anything with the cultural life. What he longed for but could not get was the theosophical world view. He felt longing for something that he could not find. He himself felt this in some nagging expression of his life. That is why his last writings also contain a longing for life which he wants to conjure up from the form, and then still a lyrical outcry for the God-man in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Then the destruction of everything that the present cannot give him which he attempted in the writing The Will to Power or in The Eternal Recurrence which remained fragments and were published now from the estate. All that lived in the last time in this tragic personality of Nietzsche and shows how one can suffer in our time if one does not rise to a spiritual view. He himself expressed this in a poem Ecce homo in which he shows his riddle of life to us:

Yes, I know where from I hail!
Ever-hungry like the flame
I glow and consume myself.
Light becomes all I can catch,
Coal all that I leave behind:
There's no doubt, a flame I am!

In the talks on the basic concepts of theosophy I have allowed to myself to outline a picture of the nature of the human being and the so-called three worlds: the physical world, the soul-world and the spiritual world. It will be my task after New Year to develop the most important theosophical insights about the origin of the human being, about the origin of the earth and the heavenly bodies generally. With it the big outlook presents itself for the theosophical world-picture.

Today, however, I would like to make some remarks how the inner development of the human being has to take place if he himself wants to get to a conviction of the matters that the theosophical world view announces. But I ask you to take into consideration that a big difference has to be made between that development of the human soul and the human mind which enables someone to understand what the theosophist announces as his truth, his knowledge and experience, and a second level. A higher level is only that which enables someone to get to such insights and experiences. I would like to say that one must make a distinction between an elementary level of the development which leads so far that one becomes able to say to that what the experienced mystic says: I understand, I can mull over it in myself, I can empathise and accept it as truth within certain limits and a higher level with which one is enabled to make experiences in the soul-world or the spirit-land. Today the first level should occupy us. The second level concerns the real clairvoyance, and as far as generally remarks can be publicly made about this real clairvoyance, it occupies us in a later lecture.

So, how one gets to a kind of own understanding of the theosophical truth, this is the question which occupies us today. Do not believe that I can give more than only few remarks; for that education which the human soul and the human mind have to go through in order to get to that understanding to some extent is an encompassing one. It requires a long, long time of an internal study, and, needless to say, all necessary details cannot even be touched in the course of a short lecture. What I am able to say to you is related to that what the personal lessons give in this field like the instruction how to use a microscope or a telescope which you can receive in the laboratory or on the observatory.

For the time being, I want to note that for most people real lessons in this field can only be attained by a personal teacher. It may appear to somebody, as if the human being could get it by own attempts to develop internal abilities, soul forces, spiritual view with himself and it may seem deplorable that in this important field of life personal instructions should be necessary. Only the way how such an instruction is gives a sufficient guarantee that the human being can get by no means to an anyhow natured dependence on another. The esoteric teacher appreciates and honours nothing more than human dignity and self-esteem. Someone who teaches mystic and theosophical development gives nothing else than advice, and the loftiest teachers in these fields gave nothing else than advice and instructions, and it is completely up to the discretion of the human being to what extent he wants to obey them or not. It depends on the human being himself which task he sets to his own soul and mind; the appreciation of the human freedom is so strong that by the teachers nothing else is given than advice and instructions. With this reservation everything must be understood that can be said anyhow in this field.

The most important education in this field does not consist in particular external measures but in a quite intimate development of the human soul. All important levels of this development take place in the deepest inside of the human being. The human being is transformed, and nobody, not even the most intimate friend, needs to notice anything of it. Thus the mystic develops in rest and seclusion, thus somebody develops who wants to get to the understanding of the worlds of soul and spirit. Nobody this must be emphasised again and again needs to change his everyday profession, needs to neglect his everyday duties even in the slightest or to take away any time from them if he devotes himself to an internal mystic education. On the contrary, someone, who believes to be supposed to use a special time to his mystic education who neglects his duties and, hence, becomes a bad citizen, a bad member of the human society because he tries to get a general idea of the higher worlds, soon convinces himself that the least is achieved in such a kind in this field.

This inner development takes place not tumultuously but calmly, in completely internal rest. And I definitely mention today that I give no “particular” instructions, but only a description of such a way whose observance, however, demands one thing from the human being, and this one is at the same time that without which never own higher experience is attained: this is patience. Who does not have steadfastness and patience, who cannot endure and cannot obey the internal rules again and again calmly achieves nothing at all as a rule. There is only one possibility by which somebody can achieve something without observance of these rules. Then, however, one has advanced very far in the development of the human being. This is the case if one was in former lives already on a certain level of clairvoyance; then the way is much shorter and completely different. The teacher, who has to give the concerning instructions, soon knows that and he has only to eliminate the corresponding obstacles towering as an embankment there.

Therefore, it is no good idea as a rule to seek for a mystic development without personal instructions because almost for every human being the right way of this development is different, and because someone who gives the instructions must know his pupil exactly not in the usual sense of the word, but in the spiritual sense of the word. However, the esoteric teacher needs to know nothing about profession, life-style, members of the family or experiences of the pupil; he needs to obtain an intimate knowledge of his soul and mind and the corresponding level of them. The way how the esoteric teacher gets this cannot yet told today but in the talks on clairvoyance. Moreover, the internal development is linked with particular results for every person. Who starts his path must be clear in his mind that in his being particular qualities will appear. These qualities are symptoms of the internal development. They are, so to speak, evidence of this internal development, and they must be observed carefully. The esoteric teacher must know how he has to interpret these symptoms. Then only the development can take place in the right way.

The development of the inner human being is a birth, the birth of soul and mind. This is not meant figuratively, but in the true sense of the word as a fact. And a birth in this field is not without results, and one must know to treat these as an esoteric teacher. I had to say that first.

Now you will approximately be able to put the questions to yourselves which are normally put as first if one hears of the basic teachings of theosophy, of the teaching that the human soul was embodied already often, returns often, of the teaching of reincarnation and of the balancing justice, of karma.

You will ask how one can understand this. This is the big question which approaches every human being. There is a golden rule which one has to obey; then everybody gets to this understanding once. This is a common experience of those who have really undergone the concerning exercises. There is no human being who cannot obtain this understanding of reincarnation and karma in the easiest way. However, one would like to say with Goethe: “it's easy, to be sure, but easy tasks take effort” (Faust II). For few people find the right decision, the steadfastness and the patience to acquire particular processes of soul and mind that are necessary for this understanding. This golden rule is: live in such a way, as if reincarnation and karma were truth; then they become truth for you. It seems as if this has to be attained by self-suggestion. But this is not the case. You know the mystic symbol of the snake biting its own tail. This symbol has different profound meanings; one of them expresses itself in this golden rule.

You see that the precondition gets intertwined in certain way like the coiling snake does it. How is one able to do this? If reincarnation is a truth, it may not be vain that certain human efforts have an effect on the human soul, and these effects must later become nature. One of the big laws which the human being establishes and has to test intimately with himself is expressed in an Indian writing with the words: what you think today you become that tomorrow.

Who believes in reincarnation has to realise that a quality which he develops within himself, a thought which he memorises bearing it again and again, becomes something permanent in his soul and has to appear in this soul time and again. Above all one who looks for a mystic development makes the attempt with himself to give up inclinations he had before, to get new inclinations only by the fact that he looks after the thought intimately and connects it with this inclination, virtue or quality and incorporates it into himself, so that he is thereby able to transform his soul by his own will. This has to be attempted exactly as a chemical experiment has to be attempted. Who has never tried to transform his soul, who has never come to the first decision to develop the qualities of perseverance, steadfastness, and of the calm logical reflection and has never remained firm and if he does not succeed in a week, then he has to use a month, a year, or a decade-, such a human being can recognise nothing of this truth with himself.

This is the intimate way the soul has to go. It must be able to incorporate qualities, thoughts, and inclinations. The human being must be able to appear in the course of a certain time with whole new habits by his will-power. The human being who was careless before must have got the habit of being precise and exact, not by external coercion, but by his own will. If this happens with minor qualities, with minor things, then it is particularly effective. The clearer the things are which he recognises with himself, the more surely he gets to true knowledge in this field. As soon as he is able to objectively observe a movement of the own hand, a facial expression, an unimportant habit with himself at first, as if he observed it with a fellow man, then he can incorporate something that he wants only by his will-power instead of the habit, of the inclination et etcetera. Someone who does this is on the way of understanding the big law of reincarnation. Just as an experienced chemist can give instructions about the processes in the laboratory, someone can also give you such instructions which he has attempted. The highest is achieved by minor changes.

Now, we deal with karma, the big law of fair balance. We get to know it if we live in such a way, as if karma were a truth. If you are hit by any accident, by pain or anything like that, try once to have the idea again and again: this pain, this accident stands there not like a miracle in the world, but must have a cause. You do not need to investigate the cause. Only someone who can overview karma can really recognise the cause of a stroke of luck, of pain et etcetera. But you must have a mere feeling to devote yourselves to it and to feel that such an action, such a pain or such a joy must have a cause, and that it must be a cause of future events. Who penetrates himself with this sensation and considers his life and that which overwhelms him from without in such a way, as if karma were a truth, will see that it becomes comprehensible to him. Someone attains the knowledge of karma who is not angry if anything happens to him, but is able to stop the annoyance and imagines that just as a stone gets rolling if it is pushed and is detached according to a necessary principle in the world that that which annoyed him must have a necessary cause. As certainly as you wake up tomorrow morning if all circumstances remain as they are and you keep well and fit, as certainly you get to the understanding of karma looking at life in this sense.

These are two preconditions for somebody who wants to experience a spiritual education. These are two preconditions for every pupil that he considers life this way. He does not need to devote himself to the thoughts immediately in such a way, as if they were truth. He has to leave it open: maybe they are true, maybe they are not. He should have neither doubt nor superstition, because these are the most important obstacles. If anybody is qualified to observe life in this sense, then he is qualified, actually, only to receive mystic lessons. And still a third thing is necessary.

No esoteric teacher gets involved in teaching a human being who is inspired by superstition, by the prejudice of the crudest kind or is inclined to judge without reason or devotes himself to any illusion. This is the golden rule that before the human being wants to attain the first level he has to attempt to free himself from any aimlessly wandering thought, from any superstition and any possibility which could take illusion for reality. Above all the esoteric pupil has to be a reasonable person who devotes himself only to the strict sequence of his thoughts and observations. If you devote yourselves in the sensuous reality to a prejudice, a superstition, it is soon corrected in the sensuous reality. If the human being does not think logically, but fantasises, then the correction is not so easy. Hence, it is necessary, before you enter the soul-world and the spirit-land, to be absolutely certain in your thought-life and to be able to practise strict control of your thoughts. Who is easily inclined to speculative fiction, superstition and illusions is not qualified to enter the nursery school of spiritual science. One may easily reply: I am free from speculative fiction, superstition and illusion. One is easily mistaken about this. Absence of any prejudice, speculative fiction and illusion, and absence of superstition, these are the matters which must be acquired by strict self-discipline; these are matters which are not to be got so easily by any individual human being. Imagine how most people have aimlessly wandering thoughts and are not able to strictly control their thoughts by their own will-power.

Now we consider life. You cannot free yourselves completely from the external impressions. Hence, it is necessary to select a short time every day. The short time suffices which is necessary without interfering with your duties even if these are five minutes, still less, they suffice. But then the human being must be able to tear out himself from all that the sensory impressions offered to him that he has taken up with his eyes, with his ears, with his sense of touch. He has to become blind and deaf toward his whole surroundings for a while. Everything that pours in us from without connects us with the sensuous, with the everyday life. This must be silent for a while. An entire internal rest must take place. If this internal rest, this removing of all sensory impressions has taken place, then all recollection of previous sensory impressions must be quiet. Consider once how the human being is always connected with everything temporal and spatial that I have mentioned, with that which comes into being and goes by. Try once to test this for a little while. Take the thought which passed your head one minute ago and test whether it does not contain anything transient. Such thoughts are good for nothing for the internal development.

All thoughts which connect us with the limited, with the passing must be silent. If this rest is produced in the soul if that which surrounds us as age, century, people et etcetera is removed, if the internal silence has taken place for a while, then the soul begins speaking by itself. Not immediately; but it is necessary that the human being gets it to speak first of all. There are means and instructions which engender this inner language of the soul.

The human being has to dedicate himself to such thoughts, ideas and sensations which are not descended from the temporal, but from the eternal which have not been true only today, yesterday and tomorrow, not only a century ago but are always true. You find such thoughts in the most different religious books of all peoples. You find them, for example, in the Bhagavad Gita, the song of the human perfectioning. Also in the New and in the Old Testament, in particular in John's Gospel from the thirteenth chapter on. You have such thoughts, which are especially effective for human beings who belong to the theosophical movement and are given to them in the little book Light on the Path, also in the first four sentences of this book.

These four movements, which are engraved on the internal walls of any initiation temple, these four sayings do not depend on time and space; they do not belong to any human being, any family, any century, any generation; they extend to the whole development. They were true before millennia and are true after millennia. They wake the slumbering forces and get them out from the inside. Indeed, this must be made correctly. It does not suffice that one thinks to understand the sentence. The human being has to make such a sentence revive in his inside. He must allow radiating the whole force of such a sentence in his inside, he has to dedicate himself completely to it. He must learn to love such a sentence. If he believes to understand it, then only the right point in time has come to let light up it again and again in him. It does not depend on the intellectual understanding, but on the love of the spiritual truth. The more the love of such internal truth penetrates us, the more force of the inner beholding arises to us. Such a sentence must occupy us not for one or two days, but for weeks, for months and for years; then such soul-forces awake in us. Then there comes a particular moment when still another illumination happens.

Who announces theosophical truths by own experience knows this inner contemplative life. He announces theosophical truths to you today, tomorrow. They are part of a big theosophical world picture which he beholds with the internal force of his mind and soul. He turns the look into the soul-world and the spirit-land; he turns the look away from the earth to the solar systems investigating them. But this force would soon expire in him unless he gave it new nourishment every morning. This is the secret of the esoteric researcher. The big picture of the world and humanity, which he has let his soul penetrate hundred upon hundred times, penetrates his soul every morning again. It does not matter that he understands all that, but that he learns to love it more and more; that he ministers every morning looking up in devotion to the great spirits. He has learnt to overview the whole picture in few minutes. Gratitude runs through him for that which it has given to his soul. Without this path of devotion one does not get to clearness. However, from this clearness he has to coin his words. If this is the case, he is only destined to really speak about the truth of mysticism, to speak about the truth of theosophy and spiritual science. The spiritual researcher does it that way, and everybody has to do it that way, and begin in the simplest, most elementary way until he gets to the understanding of these teachings. The human being and the cosmic beings are profound, infinitely profound. You achieve anything in this field only with patience, endurance and love of the world powers. These are forces that are powerful in the inner world like electricity is in the external world. They are not only moral forces, but also forces of knowledge. If the pupil allowed such truths to live in him for a while, if he has exercised and accepted them in gratitude toward those who revealed them to him, then a moment comes, which happens for everybody once who allowed rest and calmness to develop. This is the moment when the own soul starts speaking when the own inside starts beholding the big eternal truths. Then the world is suddenly illuminated round him with colours he has not seen before. Something becomes audible for him that he never heard sounding before. The world gleams in a new light; new sounds and words become perceptible. This new light and this lustre shine to him from the soul-world, and the new sounds which he hears come up to him from the spirit-land. One sees the soul-world, one hears the spirit-land. This is a feature of these worlds.

If you yourselves want to look for the development in this field, the observance of many single rules belongs to it because only in general lines I could indicate how such a thing takes place, how you get to know it. These single rules should be strictly observed as the chemist must weigh and measure the smallest substances with the subtlest instruments which he needs for a compound. You find a description of those rules which can be given publicly in my writing How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? These rules are special instructions how you have to go this way. They also demand the most intimate patience and endurance. These rules were never published before. Realise that the esoteric lessons have been given only in secret schools, and also today they are given only in secret schools because they are intimate going from person to person.

It does not help to look for instruction by special things, which you read or hear as fragments, and to try them independently. That is useless to you as a rule. All instructions you can receive from the most different sides there are almost shops which recommend such instructions! are nothing else than small fragments of the big book of the esoteric education. Who uses them has to realise that he gives himself up to certain dangers. It is not advisable to the single person to let these things approach him by economic activity, things which refer to the internal transformation of the soul, which refer to the greatest, to the most significant of the soul.

All that approaches you in this field by recommending for money is not only worthless but also dangerous in this case. This must be said because today so much approaches the human being in this field. Those rules, which are given in How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?, are descended from ancient traditions Because it is necessary today to give a picture of truth compared with the things which press forward from all sides to the human beings, because it is necessary compared with these instructions to give a picture of truth once. Therefore, the masters of wisdom gave the permission to publish such rules. There is only the possibility to publish a bit; everything else must be excluded. The most important can be told only from mouth to ear.

What you find in How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? is harmless in contrast to a lot of other instructions. Only such things have been informed which do not harm to the human being even if they are not carried out with patience and steadfastness. Even if they are not carried out with steadfastness, they cannot do harm. Nobody can suffer damage from them. This had to be said because I have been asked how it is that recently a sum of such rules have been informed. It depends whether you have organs for the soul-world to become conscious in the soul-world like for the sensuous world. As you have eyes and ears in the body, you must have organs in your soul and spirit to be able to perceive the soul-lights and the spirit-sounds. Who is experienced in this field and is able to see sees these organs developing in the aura of anybody enclosed like in a cloud of light who is engaged in internal development. With undeveloped people the aura is formed cloud-like.

If the human being sleeps, it hovers above the physical body because the astral body separates from the physical body. Then it is visible like two spirals curled into each other like nebulous rings. They coil themselves into each other that way to disappear in further spirals in the uncertain. Such two interwoven rings form the aura with the sleeping. If the human being experiences an esoteric development, the aura becomes more and more distinct. The ends of the spirals disappear going to the indefinite, and both spiral formations fitted into each other organise themselves. More and more they become a particular, enclosed structure, and then they show certain organs which appear in this aura, and which one calls chakras. These are the senses of the soul which are developed. This development takes place under no other circumstances. The structures are tender, they must be nurtured. Who refrains from this will never really be able to enjoy a mental view. This soul-eye must be nurtured by the human being suppressing all negative sensations and feelings within him. The chakras cannot come out if the human being becomes angry at every opportunity. He must stay equanimous, he must have patience. Annoyance and rage do not let the soul organ come out; also hastiness and nervousness do not let them develop.

It is also necessary that the human being takes off in particular what is exceptionally hard to be taken off in our civilisation, namely the desire to perpetually find out the newest. This has a big influence on the soul-eye. Who cannot grasp fast enough at the newspaper, and if he has found out anything must immediately inform another, who cannot keep to himself what he hears and sees and who cannot suppress the desire cannot get to the development of his soul. It is also necessary that the human being learns a particular way of judging the fellow men. This is hard to achieve: absence of criticism. Understanding is necessary instead of criticism. If you immediately confront your own opinion with that of your fellow man, it suppresses the soul development. We must listen to the other first, and this listening is an exceptionally effective remedy of developing the soul-eyes, and who attains a higher level on this path has to owe it to the fact that he has stopped criticising everything, judging everything. How can we see into the soul? We are not allowed to roundly condemn the criminal, but also to understand him, understand the criminal like the saint. Understanding everybody is necessary. This is the higher, occult listening. If the human being persuades himself this way by firm will not to assess his fellow men, also not the remaining world according his personal judgement, according to his opinion and his prejudice, but to take in them silently, then he can receive occult forces. Every moment where the human being intends: now I do not think any bad thing that I wanted to think about my fellow man every such moment is a gained one.

The loftiest sage can learn from a child, and the simplest human being can say: what does the child talk to me, I know this much better! However, he can also say: what does the sage talk to me, what is it of use to me? Not until he listens to the stammering child like a revelation, he has created in himself the force that streams from the soul.

You must also not expect that the soul-eyes are there already tomorrow. Who combats rage, annoyance, curiosity et etcetera, removes obstacles at first only which lie as embankments before his soul. This must be always repeated. Always new efforts are to be done. The occultist can assess how the tender structures develop. If the human words have forgotten “wounding”, if they are no longer sharp and harsh, if they have become mild to understand the human being, then the chakra awakes in the larynx. However, the human being must practise for long time until that is perceptible to him. In the human being only an ocular point, then the first attempts developed to form a lens, and quite slowly and bit by bit the physical eye came into being in millions of years. The soul-eye does not require so long. With the one it lasts few months, with the other longer time.

You must have patience. Once the moment comes with everybody, when these tender structures can be seen and if the human being continues these exercises properly, in particular if he develops certain virtues which can develop now and again also in the life of a long-suffering human being. There are three virtues that he must still develop, and that make him almost a seer. They must only exercised in proper strength, with intensity: self-confidence with humility, self-control with mildness and presence of mind combined with steadfastness. These are the big levers developing the spiritual organs. However, these three virtues lead to gruesome negative virtues if they are not paired with three other virtues, with humility, mildness and steadfastness.

These remarks can be made. These are picked out examples how the esoteric pupil experiences them on the three levels which one calls preparation, enlightenment and initiation. In the esoteric training there are these three levels: preparation or catharsis, enlightenment and initiation. The preparation is suitable to equip the human being in such a way that the tender structures of the soul can come forth. He attains the possibility to behold in the soul-world by enlightenment, and by the initiation he attains the ability to express himself in the spirit-land. It may appear as something difficult that I have described today. Indeed, it is easy, however, it also applies to it that the easy is difficult.

Everybody can walk the esoteric path, it is closed to nobody. In the breast of every human being are the secrets. It only requires serious, internal work and the fact that the human being can free himself from all obstacles that inhibit this intimate inner life.

The most distant and biggest in the world comes to our knowledge most intimately. We must be aware of that. The greatest sages of humanity attained the great truths in the same way as I have described it to you. They attained them because they found the way in their inside, because they knew that they must practice patience and steadfastness in these performances. If the human being deepens his inside this way, if he rises from the external thoughts to the thoughts which signify eternity, then he stokes the flame up in himself that shines over the soul-worlds. If the human being develops the higher qualities of calmness, rest and peace inside and the qualities which we have mentioned, then he fans the flame, so that it will maintain. If the human being is able to be silent and no longer sends words into the world but love so that that which should be life becomes a service, then the world begins sounding to him. This is the Pythagorean music of the spheres. This is not a symbol but reality. I could make remarks about the path which leads to a narrow gate. Everybody can come to the narrow gate, and it is opened to him who does not save means and pains, and he finds what he has got to know in the great world views of humanity: the eternal and only truth and the way of life.

Note to the reader:

The text of this lecture is not to be regarded as literally spoken that way. It is rather a more or less extensive summary based on two incomplete transcripts.

In this lecture, I want to give a picture of the theosophical world view that is completely free of any dogmatism, while I want to show its characteristics with the help of some phenomena of our Central European cultural life. It is not a matter of importing any foreign oriental world view but of showing that theosophy is life and must become life. It is no new Gospel, but the renewal of sensations deeply rooted in the human soul.

We have to be interested most of all how geniuses, affiliated to us, are filled with the theosophical world view. Thus Lessing believed in reincarnation. In Herder's writings, we find ideas of reincarnation. We find them with Schiller in his Philosophical Letters (1786), in the Letters from Raphael to Julius (Christian Gottfried Körner in Schiller's Thalia) and in On the Aesthetic Education of the Man in a Series of Letters (1793/94). Novalis also believed in it. In particular, we find a theosophical world view in the later works of Goethe. Indeed, this can surprise at first, but who occupies himself with the study of Goethe, especially with the profound Faust drama, immerses himself more and more into that which I try to explain. What I try to tell now has arisen very easily to me.

Goethe was a theosophist according to his whole nature, to the innermost sense of his life, because he did never accept any limit of his knowledge and work. Goethe was determined by his whole disposition to the world view we represent here. He was convinced that the human being is deeply connected with the world, and that this world is nothing material, but active, creative spirit; his world view was not an uncertain pantheism, but he believed that we can attain a living relation to God.

As a seven-year-old boy he collected the sunbeams and enkindled a little candle; he wanted to enkindle a sacrificial service by the fire of nature. In Poetry and Truth he says: if we oversee the different religions, we find a common core of truth in them. The sages of all times always showed the swing of a pendulum between the higher and lower self,

When Goethe had returned home after his Leipzig study and after a severe illness, he devoted himself to mystic studies. He decided to express what took place in him, the whole urging, in the Faust drama; in the legend in which the Middle Ages wanted to describe the fight between the old and the new world views.

The 16th century did not think that one could progress to redemption by the own soul force; it let Faust perish. However, Goethe did it. After he had represented Faust as a striving human being, in the first version of Faust, he put him on a new basis in the nineties of the 18th century. In his Faust Goethe shows the development of the human being from the lower to the higher soul forces and as we will still see also in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.

His view was: only somebody who has passed the stages of development, who has felt attracted to the divine, who has passed doubts, has the full conviction, has gained the confidence and has brought himself from disharmony to harmony. His Faust is a song of human perfection. We need not to seek for the way to perfection in the Bhagavad Gita. We find the big problem also in the Faust. Goethe sets himself the task in his Faust to uncover the secret of evil.

Goethe uses the Prologue in Heaven to show the intention of his drama. The physical world is a reflection of force relations of the super-sensible world. With the words of the Prologue in Heaven Goethe describes the world of devachan, the sounding world. He represents it in the picture of the Pythagorean music of the spheres:

In ancient rivalry with fellow spheres
The sun still sings its glorious song...

Who says there that it concerns a superficial picture only says something superficial.

He also says at the end of the Ariel scene:

Hearken! Hear the onrush of the Horae!
In these sounds we spirits hear
The new day already born.

Goethe always speaks of the sounding of the spiritual world.

Theosophy speaks of three worlds: of the dream world, of the astral or soul world and of the mental or spiritual world. The emergence of the spiritual eye produces immense changes in the dream life first. If the new beholding, the new world becomes accessible, it is very regular. Of course, one must not found any science on what the human being experiences there. The student or chela has to learn to take this consciousness of the astral world along with him from the dream into his day consciousness. Later then he experiences the spiritual world in the dreamless sleep.

The consciousness of the astral world expresses itself in pictures, the consciousness of the spiritual world in spiritual hearing. The Pythagoreans called it the music of the spheres.

Still an important principle of the human being appears in the Prologue: the principle of karma. Who knows that Goethe knew the mystics of the Middle Ages thoroughly, does not speak of external pictures if Goethe says:

The spirit world is not sealed off
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Go, neophyte, and boldly bathe
Your mortal breast in roseate dawn!

Dawn or “aurora” is an expression which is familiar to the mystics. Jacob Böhme's first work was called: Aurora or the Rising of Dawn.

From the start, Faust strives beyond the limits of the physical life. The portrayal of the earth spirit is completely given in technical-mystic terms, a wonderful portrayal of the astral body of the earth, of the imperishable soul cover spiritually created from the fruits of life. The earth spirit is no symbol; Goethe considers him as a real being. He supposed that in the planet planetary beings are and have their bodies, like we have our bodies of flesh. Goethe's creed was: the earth spirit taught him not only to consider but to feel and sense the uniform being of stone, plant, and animal up to the human being. He taught him the brotherliness of everything created up to the human being, the crown of creation. He also expressed his creed as 35-, 36-year-old man in The Secrets. A pilgrim walks to a cloister. He sees a rose cross at the gate. The rose cross is the symbol of the realms of nature; stone, plant, animal = cross, roses = love. Goethe himself says later that each of the twelve personalities represents a great world view or world religion in The Secrets. The aim of the pilgrim was to seek for the true core of the world religions.

In the first part, we see the young Faust being full of sensation and disharmony. With the help of the tempter Faust has to lead his lower self through all mistakes. In Mephistopheles Goethe created the picture of an ancient idea that is included in any profound wisdom. He tried to solve the problem of evil. Evil is the sum of those forces which oppose the progress of human perfection. If truth consists of the further development, any obstacle is a lie. Mephistopheles is called the spoiler, mephiz, the liar tophel in Hebrew. He leads through all kinds of experience of the lower self.

At the end of the first part, Faust stands differently before the earth spirit; he attains the insight that it is possible to really recognise the self. After he has finished the errors, he gets to the spiritual world by purification.

Faust dies at an old age, and there he becomes a mystic. In the conversations with Eckermann (Johann Peter E., 1792–1854) Goethe says: for the initiate will be soon evident that a lot of profound is to be found in this Faust.

The descent to the mothers: in any mysticism the highest psychic is female; cognition is a conception process. The fire on the tripod is the primary matter. The realm of the mothers is the primary source of all things; the spirit comes from there. A moral qualification is necessary to enter the spiritual world devachan in the language of theosophy. The aim of theosophy is to lead the human beings upward. The human being must make himself appropriate and worthy of that. When Faust leads Helena upward for the first time, he breaks out in consuming passion and, hence, Helena disperses.

Faust should fathom the profound secret of the human nature, how body, soul and spirit combine.

Spirit is the eternal; it was before birth and will be after death; soul is the connection between spirit and body; it tends more to the body first then to the spirit in the course of development, and with the latter to the everlasting. The development of the spiritual eye supports that.

In Faust you are now led into the laboratory in which Homunculus is generated; Homunculus becomes wonderfully understandable if he is understood as a soul that has not yet incarnated. Homunculus has to receive a body. Goethe shows the gradual development of the bodily in a magnificent picture at the Classical Walpurgisnight. Proteus is the sage who knows how the physical metamorphoses proceed. Homunculus has to start with the mineral, and then the realm of plants follows. For going through the plant realm Goethe uses the expression “es grünelt so.” [ Note 1 ]

Sexuality appears only on a certain stage. Eros combines with Homunculus: The human being comes into being from the connection of the male aspect of the soul and the female one.

Faust's loss of sight shows: the physical world dies for him; the internal vision rises in him. A magnificent picture of this process: “And as long you do not have this dying and becoming ...” The mystics express it in such a way: “for death is the root of all life.” And: “who does not die, before he dies perishes, before he dies.”

In the final picture of Faust the Chorus mysticus says:

All that is transitory
is only a symbol;
what seems unachievable
here is seen done;
what's indescribable,
here becomes fact:
The eternal-female
shows us the way.

In any mysticism the striving human soul is female. The connection of the soul with the world secret: the spiritual connection is expressed with the mystics as a wedding of the lamb. Goethe expressed this view even deeper in The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.

Goethe himself said of the last passages of Faust in the conversations with Eckermann that he wanted to show Faust ascending the Montserrat. In the poem The Secrets it is indicated. Parzival, the traveller through the valley. When Faust lost his eyesight, he got the possibility to quickly develop. There he came to the higher regions, to the devachan, we would say. However, Goethe also needed Catholic ideas. Thus he let Doctor Marianus appear in the “neatest cell.” This indicated: the release from anything sexual, being above man and woman. That is why he also added the female name with masculine ending to him. Now asexuality takes the place of uni-sexuality. He had completely awoken in buddhi. Buddhi, the sixth member, had got the upper hand over all the other members.

Note:

Es grünelt so: the verb “grüneln” is a nonce word: being or becoming something that reminds of green; the translation of this sentence reads: “the air smells fresh and green.”

Before Christmas, in the first cycle of these talks, I discussed the basic concepts of theosophy so far that I can probably venture to begin with the discussion of the most important question which there can be for the human being that of his own origin and goal. In the last two talks I tried to show that the theosophical world view is the basis of Goethe's works, and I try to deepen this Goethean world view from the theosophical point of view in the next talks. Today, I have inserted this talk because it probably joins both talks, which I held during the last fourteen days, about the theosophical idea of the origin, of the descent of the human being, spoken in the modern sense of the word.

Somebody who speaks today about the origin of the human being has to take that into consideration which the present natural sciences have compiled about this topic in the second half of the 19th century. You may assume that the results of the natural sciences are something absolutely certain that they are something against which one cannot struggle. Just this scientific idea about the origin of the human being has undergone such a fundamental change in the course of the last years that hardly one of the younger serious researchers stands even today on the same point of view on which the Darwinist research stood. Somebody who concerns himself with this science knows how strong these changes are. You know that the scientific materialistic point of view still took for granted more or less before short time that one has to derive the human being generally, the whole human being from lower animal ancestors that one has to imagine that our earth was once inhabited by imperfect beings and that the human being himself gradually developed through slow perfection of these beings without any influence of other forces up to his present summit. Today this purely materialistic point of view is shocked by the natural sciences.

One has believed that this scientific point of view has one single counter-pole. One has only regarded these two cases as possible until the foundation of the theosophical movement: either the natural evolution theory in the sense of the materialistic world interpretation or a supernatural creation history, as well as it is shown in the Bible. The Bible and the natural sciences are still established like two polar opposite matters. One has also imagined that the biblical idea of six creation days would have completely controlled the old times and that only the modern times which have progressed so marvellously far substituted it for a natural creation history. However, one left aside one matter. One did not know that the ideas, which the opponents of our so-called supernatural creation have formed to themselves in the last time and with which they struggled against the Genesis, the Six-day Work, are also for the so-called orthodox Christian doctrine and its adherents not older than at most 300, 400 or 500 years. All those who have generally concerned themselves with the investigation of these matters scholarly did not really take the Bible as it is available to us literally before this time. Taking the Bible literally, the view that its contents are to be taken literally was never shared by the serious, also Christian, researchers in the former centuries.

We can go back to the times in which Christianity originated. It arose from older world views. However, we cannot enter into discussion of that today. I would only like to point to the fact that we have in the outgoing age of the Greek philosophy a creation doctrine which goes back to the name Plato, and that this doctrine is most nicely developed with Aristotle. Plato says: God forms the bodily world according to his ideas, which are the models. Also the human body came into being from the archetype, the idea of God. What lives in this body as human consciousness is an after-image of the divine consciousness. The goal of human knowledge is recognising what God recognised. Striving for this goal the human being realises that his spirit must be eternal, because it is an eternal idea of God. Aristotle, the neo-Platonism, the Christian Gnosticism, they all live in such ideas of the origin and the goal of the human being. In the Christian Gnosticism we have a creation doctrine which I have to characterise to show you how little applicable the ideas were which the opponents of the supernatural creation history have recently still formed.

One imagined that in the course of times, since primal times, the human being was developing, that he did not have the same figure, not the same being as today, that he developed up to this being finally. In the end, one imagined that in different lower animal forms reminders of the former shaping of the human being exist. It is somewhat difficult to make these ideas clear to anybody because they are unfamiliar to the modern human beings. What faces us as a physical human being did not exist always in such a way as it is today. It was more similar to animals, and those animals who are most related to the human being also show such a condition approximately as the human being had at that time. If we go back to still older times, we come to more and more imperfect creatures. This was the view of the Gnostics. They did not suppose as the materialistic view does it that the human being came into being by himself from the lower animal kingdom; but they were clear to themselves about the fact that from a being that was still similar to a monkey the human being could never have developed unless a higher being had grasped and developed this being up to a higher figure. One could make that quite clear if one wanted to talk about it out of former ideas. But it suffices to show that the Gnostics had another creation doctrine than one normally states.

You find it clearly expressed with St. Augustine. He did not teach the faith in the literal interpretation of the Bible, but he imagines the development of the beings in such a way as I have just demonstrated. He imagines the influence of a spiritual world which achieves a perpetual rise of the being, while the external process is really that we were physically imperfect beings first, that then a spiritual influence took place and we became physically advanced beings, that then a spiritual influence came again and that we became then again higher beings until the highest spiritual influence took place and the human being developed as a human being. This approximately is the view of St. Augustine. He considers the Six-day Work in the Bible as a beautiful allegory. He is of the opinion that one can no longer pass such a view, as I have developed it as a gnostic one, in the purely gnostic form. He imagines that in the concepts of the Bible external allegories must be given because the large mass cannot understand it if one speaks in such abstract higher ideas. Hence, the creation history should be revealed figuratively, as well as it is commensurate with the popular ideas. You can find the same with Scotus Eriugena, with all great church teachers of the Middle Ages, also with Thomas Aquinas and up to the 14th century. You can explain the real course of the Western scholarship and science to yourselves if you get it clear in your mind.

Then, in the 14th, 15th centuries, this old evolution doctrine disappears. More and more it becomes apparent that the faith in the literalness of the Bible becomes authoritative in the church. We have to retain these facts. In the following centuries the human being is no longer familiar with them. All memories of such interpretations of the Bible had got lost, so that in the 19th century people believed to give something quite new with a natural creation history. Indeed, according to the materialistic way of thinking of the newer time, this creation history completely became materialised, while one faced it with spiritual concepts once. The creation history by Darwin and Haeckel has nothing to do with the real scientific facts, has nothing to do with that which one might investigate. There was also a natural creation history once; it was interpreted in the spiritual sense only, so that one deals not only with material processes, but also with a spiritual impact.

The facts have clearly spoken during the very last years, and numerous researchers have returned again to a more non-material view of development. However, there we have another researcher, Reinke, who has made his discussions about development in an anti-Darwinist way, significant in particular for us, because he returned to the old ideas without knowing the old evolution doctrine. He speaks of perpetual “impacts” of spiritual kind which evolution has experienced. He called these impacts dominants. This is a scanty outset of a return to former ideas. Development is said to progress no longer by itself, by purely material forces from imperfect to more perfect beings, but a more perfect being can only originate from an imperfect one because a new dominant strikes, a new force impact of spiritual kind which causes the progress, in contrast to the materialistic doctrines of Darwin, Lamarck, Haeckel et etcetera This term exactly reminds someone who looks deeper at the matter of something that Heine said: “poverty comes from pauvretè.” It is the paraphrase of the matter with another word. Only the theosophical world view again gives a creation history which faces up to the documents of the religious confessions in such a way, as the researchers till 13th, 14th centuries faced up to them, and let us now develop this creation history with some words.

If one wants to recognise the human being concerning his origin, one has to get clear about the nature of the human being. Someone who takes the view that the human being is only the connection of these physical organs: hands, feet, lung, heart et etcetera up to the brain has no other need to explain the origin of the human being than from material forces. That is why the question becomes different for him than for someone who considers the human being as an entirety. He considers the human being as a being that consists not only of body, but also of soul and mind. We have already seen to what extent the human being consists of three members: body, soul and mind. Body, soul and mind are the members of which the human being consists. What one calls psycho-spiritual has been subsumed by the modern psychology in one single concept, in the concept of the soul. The confusion of the modern psychology is that it does not differentiate between soul and mind or spirit. Theosophy has to point to this over and over again. What is soul-being from one side, what feels and imagines and thinks about the everyday things, all that is also soul for us theosophists.

The spirit begins only where we notice the so-called eternal in the human being, the imperishable. Plato said of it that it feeds itself with spiritual food. Only the thought that is free of the sensuous that rises to the character of eternity that is seen by the spirit if the spirit does no longer see through the gates of the senses outward but looks into his inside, this thought only constitutes the contents of the spirit. The Western researcher knows this thought only in one single field, in the field of mathematics, of geometry and algebra. There are thoughts which do not flow towards us from the outside world which the human being creates only from his inside, intuitively. Nobody could obtain a mathematical theorem only from observation. We could never recognise from observation that the three angles of a triangle amount to 180 degrees.

However, there are thoughts that do not refer only to space, but are pure thoughts that are free of sensuousness and refer to everything else in the world, to minerals, plants, animals and in the end also to the human being. Goethe tried in his morphology to give a botany of sorts which has such thoughts free of sensuousness. There he wanted to fathom how nature lives in its works. Someone who sinks and delves with feeling and sensation in that which Goethe gives in his theory of metamorphosis experiences something in it like a big raise to the etheric heights. If you are raised higher and higher to the recognition of such thoughts which are modelled on the mathematical in space, you get to the great mystics who inform us about soul and spirit. Hence, the mystic also calls mysticism “mathematics” – mathesis , not because mysticism is mathematics, but because it is built up corresponding to the sample of mathematics.

Goethe was such a mystic. He wanted to establish a world which raises us from the only psychic to the spiritual. What the human being does with his reason in the everyday life this sensible understanding of the immediate temporal and transient reality is raised to a higher level, into the pure thought-world. You can there experience something in yourselves if you rise to the pure thought if you can abstract from the sensuousness-imbued thoughts what belongs to the eternal. Theosophy calls this first element of the spirit also manas. I have tried to translate this term with “spirit-self” in my Theosophy. It is the higher self that separates itself from that which is limited only to the earthly world.

As well as now the thought can be raised to a higher sphere, the world of feelings can also be raised to a higher sphere. That world of joys and desires is apparently a lower world than the world of thoughts, but if it is raised to the higher regions, it is even higher than the world of thoughts. The eternal in the feeling is higher than the thought. If you raise the feeling to the higher spheres like the thought in mathematics, then you experience the second being of the spirit. The academic psychology only knows the lower feeling. It acts as if everything amounts to nothing more than the lower feeling. But in our world of feelings this eternal lives as a rudiment, and theosophy calls it buddhi. I have given it the name “life-spirit”, as the second spiritual being of the human being. Raise your thoughts up to the recognition of an eternal, and then you live in manas. Raise your feeling and sensation up to the eternal, and then you live in buddhi.

This life in buddhi exists only as a rudiment with the present human beings. The human beings can already think manasically sometimes if the thinking is regulated, is subjected to the logical world principles. However, there is also a thinking which wanders around aimlessly, that has got a thought and immediately another thought, always alternating. This is the everyday thinking. There is a higher thinking that is logical and coherent that feeds itself from the eternal according to Plato and is blessed with the eternal. If now a feeling has risen to this world, to such a world principle, it lives in buddhi. This means nothing else than a kind of eternal principles of feeling. Who lives in the everyday life can also err, can also stray with his feeling. However, someone who experiences the eternal norms of feeling in himself as the thinker experiences the eternal norms of the manasic thinking has the same certainty and clearness of feeling in himself as the thinker has clearness of thinking. Theosophy describes this as a spiritual human being who experiences the spirit in himself. This was also the deeper substance of Christ. The human being experiences Christ, lives with Christ, and participates in Him. Christ is the same as buddhi.

If the mere external will which is the mostly unconscious in the human being rises to the highest world principle it is hard to talk of this highest development of the human spirit, one can only indicate it then one speaks of the true spirit, of the spirit-man or, with a Sanskrit term, of atma. For the human will can be purified from the personal. These are the three members of the spiritual: manas, buddhi, and atma. As a substance is dissolved in water, these three members are dissolved in the soul. Where everything intermingles, the human being cannot normally make a distinction of that which wanders there aimlessly. Hence, the modern psychologist describes a real chaos as soul.

If that which lives out as the highest spiritual in the soul intermingles with the lower qualities of the soul, if it appears as a lower feeling, if it enjoys life in desire instead of love, we call it kama. Kama is the same as buddhi, only buddhi is the selflessness of kama, and kama is the selfishness, the egoism of buddhi. Then we have in ourselves our everyday reason which wants the satisfaction of our personal needs. We call this reason, in so far as it expresses manas, ahamkara, the ego-consciousness, the ego-feeling in the soul. So that speaking of the human soul we can also speak of buddhi which enjoys life in kama, and if we speak of manas or the real spiritual of thinking, we speak of the reason which enjoys life in the ego-consciousness, in the ahamkara.

I tried to show the gradual education of the human being, the purification of the human being from the psychic to the spiritual, in a book that I wrote some years ago, in my Philosophy of Freedom. You find there in the concepts of the Western philosophy what I have shown now. There you find the development of the soul from kama to manas. I have called ahamkara the ego, manas the “higher thinking”, the pure thinking, and buddhi not yet pointing to the origin the “moral imagination.” These are only other expressions of the one and the same matter. With it we have recognised the psycho-spiritual nature of the human being. This psycho-spiritual nature is embodied in that which the external natural sciences describe to us. This psycho-spiritual nature is, actually, the human being. It has something like a cover around him: the external physical corporeality.

The theosophical view is that the psycho-spiritual nature of the human being existed sooner than the present figure, than the physical corporeality of the human being. The human being did not originate in the physical but in the psycho-spiritual. This psycho-spiritual, atma, buddhi and manas, forms the basis of all physical creation. Plato also speaks of it if he says that the spirit of the human being must be eternal, because it is an idea of God. What develops as forms on earth approaches the eternal spiritual part of the human being.

We can imagine now that we are in a very distant point of the past. There we have the psycho-spiritual nature of the human being on one side. I believe that the materialistic thinking of the present is hardly able to imagine this psycho-spiritual nature. That is why since centuries the modern thinking is not accustomed to imagine the psycho-spiritual. On the other side, we have the sensuous life in the very distant past. How have we to imagine the sensuous life? The natural sciences teach us that we come to a human being of imperfect figure investigating the beings in the relics of the layers of earth. Going back farther we find times in which the human being was not in the present figure on earth. Only monkeys and related animals existed. Going back still farther we find that also the monkeys were absent and that only lower mammals existed. Still sooner there were reptiles and birds, and still sooner we find animal species of immense size and mightiness, the saurians, the ichthyosaurs. They lived in other way than today. Then, farther back, we find even more imperfect animals, until we come to an age where we cannot prove that there was any living animal. Physical life must have existed there in a still plant-animal form.

Theosophy points to conditions of the earth development of which is also spoken in science: the earth was not always the solid mineral ground, on which we walk today. It was in a liquid-soft condition once. If you look at certain earth formations, at mountains, you can still detect how they became hardened from a soaking-liquid condition. The whole earth was once still in an igneous-hot condition like an immense fire body. Theosophy points to the fact that still sooner a gaseous, an etheric condition of the earth existed. Everything that exists now in solid or liquid or airy condition on earth existed also at that time in a quite subtle etheric condition. You can imagine it approximately if you take a piece of ice; this is a solid matter. You melt it, and then it gets to a liquid, watery condition. You evaporate the water, while you heat it up. Then you have again in an airy-vaporous condition what was liquid before.

The whole earth was once in a much finer, thinner etheric condition. Akasha is the finest form in which before primeval times everything was in the etheric condition that meets us now as solid, liquid et etcetera on earth. The solid granite of our primeval mountains, all metals, all salts, all kinds of limestone, everything that is on our earth now also all plant and animal forms existed at that time in this subtle akasha. Akasha is the subtlest form of matter.

The human body is composed of all substances of the earth. All the kinds of matter are found in any chemical composition in the human body. At that time all these substances were in the akasha state and in this akashic matter now the psycho-spiritual being of the human being incarnated. This was another figure than that of today. In this akashic matter everything was still undifferentiated that differentiated later. Everything was in it that became mineral, plant, animal forms later. In this akashic matter in which the human being incarnated all animal forms were still contained, just as everything that became human form later.

If one wants to form an idea about the processes within the earth development which happened in these primeval times, one must strictly distinguish the duality. The human being is a duality; he is composed of two beings. On top is the divine-spiritual core of the human being: atma, buddhi, manas. In this divine-spiritual human being, the desire lives to become a human being. It drives him down. Descending he forms a cover from this desire, an astral body. On the earth animal-like beings formed, resulting from the still uncertain earth masses. These beings came from a still earlier earth state, the old lunar state, and a previous incarnation of the earth.

When this old moon had finished its cosmic existence, beings remained like a seed which had lived on the old moon; these were beings which were neither animals nor human beings, they were between animal and human being, a kind of animal-humans. They came out again, when the earth started to form. In these animal-humans the wildest impulses, instincts and desires lived. They could not yet take up the higher spirituality in themselves at first; they had to experience a purification of their astrality to be able to take up the higher principles in themselves. These are the physical ancestors of the human being of which Gnosticism, St. Augustine, and the scholastics speak. These were animal-like figures which lived in a more malleable body material than the physical matter is today, much softer than the lowest animals have it, for example, the jellyfishes and molluscs. These were beings which lived in a translucent corporeality, partly in very beautiful forms, partly in quite grotesque forms. They had no upright posture, they lived in swimming-floating posture; they had no marrow, this formed only later, still no warm blood, they did not yet have two sexes. They lived with all that later became plant, mineral, and animal like in a common astral state of the earth. At that time, the astral body of the earth had all earthly beings in itself. This astral earth consisted of the astral bodies of the human animals and was surrounded by a spiritual atmosphere where the monads, the spiritual human beings lived. These spiritual human beings waited above, until they could unite with the astral bodies below. But at first these astral bodies were not yet purified enough; everything impulsive of the animals, the instincts and passions had to be largely separated. They were eliminated as particular astral structures. These isolations took place repeatedly. These isolated structures hardened, and the other realms of our earth came from them.

We have to imagine that two astralities were there, an upper purer one and a lower denser one. The upper one, descending deeper and deeper, has an effect on the lower one. Thereby this separates the coarser parts from itself. The separated parts are condensed. The other realms of nature, which are now round us, come into being that way. The human being himself keeps the finest parts to himself. Thus the whole environment was connected with the human being; he separated them from his nature.

The astral matter below was condensed to reptile-like animal forms; they were still cold-blooded. They were not shaped like for example an ichthyosaurus from which we find leftovers even today. There are no leftovers of these formations at all, because these bodies were fine, soft bones only existed much later. The psycho-spiritual being unites first with these formations from above; both fertilise each other. More and more a densification of the matter takes place. It merges into an igneous-liquid state. This was about the middle of the age which we call the Lemurian one. This age preceded the Atlantean one. This igneous-liquid mass is criss-crossed by currents which condense gradually more and more to the later bones; the respiratory organ and heart organ with the bloodstream, the different organs of the human body form from these currents. Everything that is too coarse for the human being is separated repeatedly. For example, the wildness of the lion is separated. Outside an animal form of coarser substance comes into being: this later becomes the lion. In the human being his courageous, his aggressive qualities remain. The cleverness and cunning is separated; it forms the being fox outside, and the human being keeps to him what he can use of cleverness.

Then another developmental state of the earth follows. It became more compact, more solid. The human being was thereby forced to adapt himself to this more solid structure of the physical life on earth. He was able to do this only because he handed over a part of his being to the coarser materiality. From this part of the human being the first most imperfect animal world originated. Thus this is as it were a shell which the human being cast off once. It originated from the human nature. However, the true human nature thereby ascended to a higher level. The human being was freed from the impact which he had from the lower animal world. We see these last creatures which the human being repelled deposited in the first layers of earth. These are crustaceans, shellfish which the human being separated from himself. He became a somewhat purer being that way. It is like in a solution in which coarser parts have settled down. The further development takes place in such a way that the human being again hands over a part of his nature to materiality. Worms and fish originated from that. This is a cover again which the human being cast off.

In the second state, the human being had taken on a matter which is like our airy matter. The human being was incarnated there as an aerial being. It may seem peculiar to the materialistic thinker, but someone who familiarises himself with theosophy finds that the other creation history is a speculative fiction and that this theosophical creation history can already be evident to the everyday reason. Because the human being embodied himself with his soul in more delicate matter, in aerial matter, it was possible that he cast another cover off, that he separated animals from himself. At that time, the earth had already built up a somewhat more solid skeleton, and the human being formed in that which one calls fire mist. One speaks there of the sons of the fire mist. This came about because the human being cast his covers off which developed then to birds and reptiles on the other side. However, when the human being had advanced so far when he had advanced to this fire matter, he was able to take up a new impact from without. As well as we have seen in the outset of our earth how with the physical matter that united which the psycho-spiritual human being had cast off as the coarser nature, he united in the period of which we speak now and which already parallels states of strong densification of our earth, with higher spirit. At first this happened because buddhi descended and became kama. The human being thereby became warm-blooded differing from the lower cold-blooded beings. Also other creatures became warm-blooded on earth.

Up to a certain point of development there were only cold-blooded and passionless beings; the others originated in the middle of the Lemurian age. Also the two sexes developed from one. The human being repelled the lower beings which still live on as reptiles and when he was already warm-blooded, he repelled the birds from himself. Because of these separations he became mature to take up the spirit in his first figure. This is the race that appears as mind-endowed for the first time. In the Lemurian age, the human being came to a densified materiality, he became fleshly. This is the Lemurian human being. He lived on our earth at a time in which a lot of the old fire matter still existed. In this Lemurian age, the whole race completely perishes by volcanic catastrophes caused by the fire. Only some remain and live on.

The Atlantean period took place in the regions that are today covered with the floods of the Atlantic. Here once again something is separated from the human being: the higher mammals come into being. The human being still had the nature of the higher mammals in himself at first. He still had in himself what one calls apes. They all are separations of lower parts of his nature. The human being developed to a higher level only because he cast off the lower parts. What I called ahamkara came to the fore. In the first Atlantean time, ahamkara appears with the corresponding development of memory and language in the human race. Self-consciousness became consciousness of egoism. Hence, the first Atlantean time is also a time in which more and more the harsh egoism developed. We will still hear and read to which excesses the developed ahamkara led. The higher mammalian nature was cast off, so that we must not regard the apes as ancestors; rather we have to regard the human being as the first-born on our earth.

The human being exists incarnated in akasha, and everything that exists besides him was gradually eliminated by him. The human being and the animals adapted themselves to the relations and circumstances and became what we can get to know today. Paracelsus knew this and said that the human being himself has written down the letters of his whole being. So we must not regard the ape as an ancestor, but as a descendant of the original human being. It is strange that this theosophical approach reminds, quite elementarily, of a remark of the naturalist and botanist Reinke (Johannes R., proponent of neo-vitalism, 1849-1931). He says in his book The World as Action that the ape does not appear as an ancestor of the human being but as a degenerated human being dropped out of humanity.

This view agrees quite exceptionally with that which the natural sciences teach in these fields. They teach that the very first rudiment of the human brain, of the childish human brain in particular, is very similar up to a certain degree to an ape brain but that the developed human brain differs from the ape brain. So that the ape brain looks like something that takes a completely different course of development. However, the Darwinist view wants to base its theory of the relationship of the ape with the human being on the first impression. At that time, the human being cast off the ape nature, so that he could develop freer, upward to nobler qualities. The apes thereby degenerated and developed in another direction. The ape is not at all to be regarded as an ancestor of the human being. However, this furthers the human development.

After the human being had developed buddhi, kama and ahamkara, he was able to receive the first principle of the spirit again in himself: manas. Manas, the logical thinking, the inferring thinking developed since the last time of the Atlantean age and in our whole fifth age from this refined human nature. Thus the human being had to experience wisdom in egoism, in ahamkara, after he developed buddhi first up to kama; thus he had to lead a selfish life. But then wisdom developed again in purer form, so that the human being is able today to think logically. He ascends once to a higher kind of spirituality working out the buddhi nature from the kama nature and from the everyday feeling in order to ascend to even higher levels of spirituality. We speak of it later after we have got to know the levels of development still more exactly.

I could only outline the theosophical view generally speaking. This is the evolution theory, the theory of the origin of the human being in the theosophical sense. This is the descent theory which is destined to substitute that which has suffered essential losses by the real scientific facts in the last time.

Nevertheless, I would still want to read out some words of the botanist Reinke to show that my explanations do not completely contradict the scientific ideas and that today it is necessary to think a new kind of “creation history”. He expresses the following there: “It is clear from the start which deep contrast exists between this view that I have just explained and the view and research method of our science. We do not look for theories generally but rely on facts. Hence, the natural sciences would have to bring themselves to confine themselves to facts only. Up to now, the facts do not at all exist. I must protest against it if the case is shown as if zoology, anatomy etc. have delivered the facts. If a picture should be derived from it, it is fancy.”

At the same time, this naturalist does not yet understand that it is impossible to receive a view of the origin of the human being from the external facts one day. One is never able to do this, because the origin of the human being was not in the sensuous but in the psycho-spiritual. Not before one ascends from the sensuous to the psycho-spiritual if one ascends to a view that is no longer fantastic but spiritual, we can get again to a descent theory really satisfying the human being. Leading the human being to a satisfying descent theory is the task of theosophy. The “natural” creation history can no longer give satisfaction today. On one side, the need for spiritual knowledge makes itself noticeable, and, on the other side, the facts have disproved the evolution theory. The natural sciences are never able to say anything about the origin of the human being. If the origin of the human being is to be recognised, it can only happen in the sense of spiritual knowledge. Leading the present again to such spiritual knowledge is the task of the theosophical world view.

Answer to question

Question: Were the crustaceans the first living beings which were separated?

The crustaceans were not the first living beings, which were separated. Of course, these were mono-cellular living beings. However, these were not like the present-day mono-cellular living beings, they were in quite different conditions.

Question: How has one to imagine the fiery-liquid surface of the earth in the Lemurian age and the existence of beings on it?

Not the total surface of the earth was in the fiery-liquid condition, only the residential place of the beings was fiery-liquid. With the separation of the mineral beings something existed like a kind of leftovers, already almost like an impact of a skeleton which could accommodate beings that have taken on any solid shape. Palaeontology can only verify what had taken on solid shape.

Question: Is the future separation furthered by vegetarianism?

It is hard to speak about that because this question, even more than other questions, challenges the human feeling. However, I would like to speak impartially about the question. Indeed, the further refining of the human being is eminently supported by vegetarianism. With it should not be said that it is possible and good for any person to live as a vegetarian. The question is another if one asks whether one should become a vegetarian, than if one asks: what does vegetarianism achieve? Vegetarianism fosters the spiritual intuition and is also advantageous for the actions. At the same time, it is also a question of heredity. However, I would like to oppose a prejudice.

Indeed, in these fields the materialistic thinker can have an experience reaching up to a certain degree, but not a sufficient one. One says that people have become weak due to vegetarianism that they cannot stand the vegetarian way of life. This is right and is wrong. It is right that many people who occupy their thinking only with kama manas who have merely sensuous objects as content of their thinking and to that the usual scholarship, law, physiology or also medicine belong where the content of the ideas are merely taken from the sensory world , do not find everything in vegetarianism that they need. For all those who think, imagine and feel in the area of reason which is directed upon the sensory world, come to a point where they can collapse due to vegetarianism. There are many people of such kind. However, it must not be. I have got to know people in this field who themselves were learnt thinkers who were physiological, historical thinkers with whom it was not possible that the brain was properly nourished if they lived only vegetarian.

But the case changes immediately if the human being develops spirituality. As soon as he gets to the spiritual cognition, as soon as he lives in the spiritual, then it is possible that he can exist with vegetarianism. Then vegetarianism furthers the spiritual life, and the human being advances so far that he has an even higher future in prospect. I speak of this higher future in the next talks, on the 16th February, 23rd February and 2nd March where I speak about Goethe's Secret Revelation.

Question: What has one to understand by a psycho-spiritual being?

We will still see where the spirit has its origin. We have to imagine this spiritual impact within the human development as an influence coming from without. With it a view of nature is not injured or the opinion is justified that this is a dualism. Also hydrogen and oxygen give water. But someone who knows that does not need to be a dualist.

Question: What was there really as a human being, before the spiritual impact took place?

Up to a certain point the human being is the triad: mind, soul and body. If we advance somewhat upward, we have the bodily-psychic human being on the earth, connected with the physical of the earth. This bodily-psychic human being is incarnated there at first in a much finer and brighter matter than the later human being. A densification perpetually takes place there. That is why we also speak of the so-called “sons of the fire mist.” We deal there with a configuration of the human being. However, I would not like to portray this figure in a public lecture because if one puts it just like that it looks bad. The preconditions do not exist to understand this figure.

In the "fire mist" the incarnations happened in akasha at last. Physics of our time has no knowledge of this akasha. What we now have as an impact is the rudiment of eternity, the spirit, if we speak of spirit with the present-day human being, we speak of eternity. The consciousness which it concerned at that time was not at all the same as the consciousness in the hypnosis or in the trance states. It exists, approximately, in an especially lively dream. This was the condition of consciousness before the impact of the spirit.

Question: Why has any progress to happen by densification of matter, whereas we consider the delicate matter as progress?

The general form of consciousness was illuminated, but also limited by densification up to the material development of the senses.

Question: Is the akasha substance an etheric or astral substance?

The astral substance is the higher substance. The akasha substance stands between the physical and astral matters. It is the most delicate physical matter, in which the thought can develop immediately.

Question: How could one perceive the human being in these delicate conditions?

In the time when the human being was still aerial it was possible to perceive him by hearing, as a vibration, but not with the eye.

Question: Which influence did the impact of the spirit have on sexuality?

With the impact of the spirit the single beings became uni-sexual. Before both sexes existed in one being, it was hermaphrodite. At that time, the reproduction was similar to that of our mono-cellular beings.

Question: What is the origin of the theosophical world view?

One taught in pictures once. This is no longer possible today. Hence, one has to express the ideas in a language understandable to the reason, especially for our scientists. One should consider these matters as the physicist considers his, as a useful working hypothesis. This gives conviction bit by bit.

When Dr. Steiner was asked to tell some additional details about the process of the separation of the ape, he answered approximately in such a way:

Imagine an ancestor who has two descendants. One of these descendants can take up the divine spark in his form. He develops upwards and becomes a human being. The other descendant has a form created from coarser substances; he cannot take up the spark. He develops downwards and becomes an ape.

In this and the two following talks we want to occupy ourselves with what Goethe called his apocalypse, his secret revelation.

We have seen, among which lofty brotherhood Goethe counted himself. He was convinced that knowledge is not anything that is ascertained once from a human point of view but that the human cognitive faculty can develop and that this soul development is subjected to principles about which the human being needs to know nothing at first, just as little as the plant knows the principles according to which it develops. The general theosophical teachings of the developing cognitive faculty comply completely with the Goethean approach to life. In various ways Goethe expressed this view.

He now answered a question that he tried to answer in infinitely deep way that he approached when his friendship with Schiller became closer and closer. This friendship was hard to make because both personalities stood spiritually on quite different ground. Only in the middle of the nineties (of the 18th century) they met forever and complemented each other. At that time, Schiller invited Goethe to contribute to the Horen (Horae), a magazine in which the most beautiful products of German cultural life should be made accessible to the public. Goethe promised his cooperation, and his first contribution in this magazine was his apocalypse, his “secret revelation:” The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1794/95).

It concerns the great connection of body and spirit, of the earthly and the super-sensible he wanted to demonstrate, as well as the way which the human being must take using his developing cognitive faculties if he wants to ascend from the earthly to the spiritual.

It is a question that the human being must always put to himself. Schiller had demonstrated this problem spiritedly in his way in the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. This treatise, little known and studied, is a repository for somebody who approaches this riddle. Goethe was thereby inspired to comment the same question and he did it in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily which he annexed later to the Conversations of German Emigrants.

This fairy tale leads deeply into theosophy. Theosophy says also that the contents of knowledge of our soul are dependent any time on our cognitive faculty, and that we can develop this cognitive faculty higher and higher, so that we gradually do not have anything subjective as contents of cognition in our souls, but that we can experience objective world contents. The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily shows the development of the human soul to higher and higher insights, because all human soul forces can develop not only the human intellectual capacity. All soul forces, also feeling and willing, can penetrate into the objective world secrets. But you have to eliminate everything personal.

This fairy tale is so profound that it is worthwhile to consider it more intimately. It leads us into the depths of Goethe's world view. Goethe himself said of it to Riemer (1774–1841, Goethe's secretary) that the same applies to it as to St. John's Book of Revelation that only a few find the right thing in it. Goethe put his most profound ideas into it that he knew about the human destiny. He was always very reserved about it: he said if hundred human beings were found who understand it correctly; he would give an explanation of it. They were not found up to his death, and the explanation was not given. After Goethe's death, a big number of attempts to explain were made which were collected by Meyer-von Waldeck (1824–1899, German writer). They are partly valuable as building stones, however, cannot fathom the profound sense.

The question could appear: why did Goethe put his real life secret into such a fairy tale? He himself said that he could speak on such a question only pictorially. He did the same with it as all great teachers of humanity who did not want to teach in abstract words who treated the loftiest questions in pictures, symbolically.

Up to the foundation of the Theosophical Society it was only possible to give this highest truth pictorially. Thereby comes about what Schopenhauer so pleasantly called the “choir of the spirits,” if the spark is enkindled in the souls like by hieroglyphics. Where the world view became completely personal, completely intimate to Goethe, he could express himself only in this form. One finds two important clues in Goethe's conversations with Eckermann.

Later Goethe still expressed himself in two other fairy tales more intimately, in The New Melusine (1807) and then in The New Paris (1810). These three fairy tales are the most profound expression of Goethe's world view. In The New Paris he says in the end: “whether I can tell you what happens further, or whether it is expressly forbidden to me, I do not know.” This should be a hint to the sources of this fairy tale.

These fairy tales are revelations of Goethe's most intimate approach to life and world view. The fairy tale The New Paris points clearly to the sources from which it comes. It begins: all clothes drop from the boy's body, everything drops from the human being that he has acquired within the culture in which he lives. A man, young and nice, approaches the boy. This welcomes him joyfully. The man asks: do you know me? The boy answers: you are Mercury. This I am and I was sent by the gods with an important order to you!

Let us look at these three fairy tales as Goethe's most profound revelations. At first the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. The fairy tale immediately begins mysteriously. Three fields are brought forward to us, a this-worldly one, a yonder one and in between them is a river. It shows the world of body, soul and spirit, and the path of the human being to the super-sensible world. The near side bank is the physical world, the yonder one, the country of the beautiful lily, is the spiritual world; in between is the river, the astral world, the world of desire.

Theosophy speaks of the soul life in the physical world, of this mortal world, then of the devachan which the soul experiences after death, but also if it got free of anything personal by means of an esoteric development already here in the physical world. Then it can ascend to the beyond, to the kingdom of the beautiful lily; then it finds the way to the yonder bank, where the human being constantly strives for, the way to the home of his soul and spirit. The river in between, the astral world, the current of desires and passions separating the human beings from the spiritual world must be overcome.

A bridge is now built across the river and the human being gets to the kingdom of the beautiful lily. This is the goal the human being strives for. Goethe was completely familiar with the significance of the lily in medieval mysticism. He was, so to speak, initiated in the secrets of the mystic world view and knew the alchemical efforts of the Middle Ages. After he had recognised the deepness of mysticism on one side, he also met the trivial reflection of it in the caricatures of literature.

In the first part of Faust, he still shows us humorously that the problem of the connection of the human being with the beautiful lily stood before his eyes. In the Easter walk you read before he makes the acquaintance with Mephistopheles of the efforts of the human being in a distorted alchemy.

My father was a worthy commoner,
who in good faith, but in his own eccentric way,
laboured at fanciful speculations...
...
...
there a mercurial suitor, the Red Lion,
would in a tepid bath be married to the Lily...

This is a technical term of alchemy: lily signifies Mercury. According to the theosophical world view Mercury is the symbol of the wisdom the human being strives for, and lily that condition of consciousness in which the human being exists if he has obtained the highest. The marriage of the male with the female in the human soul is shown here. “In a tepid bath” means in the alchemical sense “being released from the fire of desires.”

We speak of ahamkara in theosophy, the striving of the human self which wants to enclose the highest. This human principle striving at first in selfness is shown in alchemy as a lion which has been freed from selfness, from desires and passions, and is allowed to combine with the lily. Even if one did no longer know a lot of the true alchemy in mediaeval times, one had preserved the names. All higher truth stands in the etheric shine before us if we approach it, released from stormy desires, from the lion of desires which were cooled down in the tepid bath. Then the human mind can find the lily, the eternal-female, which attracts us; he can have the union with these truths of the spiritual worlds. This is a way which the souls have always gone in the fullest clearness. Mystic is somebody who strives for the clearness, the highness, and the purity of the views.

There must not be sympathy and antipathy of wisdom, but only an unselfish being merged in it. Because one does not feel any passion with the truths of mathematics, no quarrel is possible; if human sensations came into question, it would be also argued whether two times two are four. In the same etheric shine all higher truths stand before us if we express this attitude. It was this serenity in all that Pythagoras called catharsis, purification. Goethe described this whole way with its intimate secrets in his fairy tale because our colloquial language is not really suitable to show these matters. Not until we succeed in describing that in coloured pictures which lives in the soul of the mystic, we find the language to describe the highest form of the human consciousness, the lily.

One likes to represent mysticism as something unclear. But unclear is only somebody who does not find the way to the heights. The mystic strives for the most precious clearness of the concepts in pure etheric height, free of harsh immediate reality. We need to acquire the concepts only which lead us to this country of clearness. Goethe looked for this country of clearness, he strove for mathematical knowledge. In Goethe's estate I found a notebook fifteen years ago. This confirmed that Goethe concerned himself with mathematical studies even during later years, even up to the highest problems. Like a real gnostic he made his studies on nature and the human soul. Because of his intuitive spirit he could also behold the archetypal plant, for example.

But as he was hard understood concerning the archetypal plant and animal, he was still less understood concerning the soul-life. I remind of the conversation with Schiller in Jena in 1794. Goethe expressed himself to Schiller in such a way that he said that an approach of the world and its contents could be probably found which does not pick the things to pieces, as science does, but which shows the connecting band of all forms, which points to something higher, something uniform behind all sensuous phenomena. Goethe drew his archetypal plant, a formation which was similar, indeed, to a plant, but not to living ones which you can perceive with outer senses, and he said to Schiller: this is the essentiality of plants, the archetypal plant, this is the connecting band of the plants; but this archetypal plant lives in no single plant, but in all plant beings. It is the objective of all plants.

He answered to Schiller's objection that his archetypal plant were an idea: “If this is an idea, I see my ideas with eyes.” At that time, Goethe showed how he stands to the spirit; there is an intuitively beheld plant for him which lives in every plant being. Only an intuitive beholding can perceive the objective behind all sensory things, only thinking free of sensuousness can attain this. The will-o'-the-wisps of the fairy tale show us how thinking can develop to objectivity. Who cannot rise toward Goethe's view does not understand what he means; at that time even Schiller did not correctly understand what Goethe meant, but he did his best to penetrate into Goethe's world view. Then the letter of the 23rd August, 1794 came. This broke the ice between both spirits.

Goethe hid a lot of his higher spiritual beholding in this fairy tale. Let us now try to penetrate into the fairy tale.

You read: In the middle of the night, two will-o'-the-wisps wake up the old ferryman who sleeps on the other bank in the spiritual world, and want to be ferried over. Fro the kingdom of the lily he ferries them over the river whipped by the storm. They behave discourteously, dance in the small boat, so that the ferryman must say to them that the small boat topples over. Finally, after they had arrived at the bank with effort, they want to pay him with many gold pieces which they shook off from themselves. The ferryman rejects them and says sullenly: It's a good thing that you have not thrown them into the river which can stand no gold and would have wildly foamed and devoured you. Now I have to bury the gold. However, I myself can be paid only with fruits of the earth. He does not let them loose until they promise three cabbages, three artichokes and three onions. Then the ferryman hides the gold in the abysses of the earth where the green snake lives. This consumes the gold and becomes radiant from within. It can now walk in its own light and sees how everything round it is transfigured by this light. The will-o'-the-wisps meet it and say to it: you are our aunt of the horizontal line. The will-o'-the-wisps are its cousins who stem from the vertical line. These are ancient expressions, vertical and horizontal, which were always used in mysticism for certain soul states.

How do we come to the beautiful lily? - The will-o'-the-wisps ask. Oh, it lives on the other bank, the snake answers. Alas! We have nicely made our beds, from there we come! The snake informs them that the ferryman is allowed to ferry over everybody to this bank but not back to the other. Are there no other ways? Yes, at midday I myself form a bridge, the green snake says. But this is not convenient to the will-o'-the-wisps, and that is why the snake points to the shade of the giant who himself is powerless, but is capable to do everything with his shade. At sunrise and at sunset the shade lies down as a bridge across the river.

The snake tries, after the will-o'-the-wisps had gone away, to satisfy a curiosity which had tormented it for long. On its wanderings through the rocks it had discovered with its feeling smooth walls and manlike figures which it hopes to recognise now with its new light.
It creeps through the rock and finds a room in which the portraits of four kings are put up. The first of the kings is of gold, he is decorated with a wreath of oak leaves. He asks the snake where from it comes: from the abysses where the gold lives! What is more marvellous than gold? The king asks. The light, the snake answers. What is more refreshing than light? The conversation, the snake answers. Then it looks at the remaining kings, the second is of silver, decorated with a crown, the third is of ore, he is decorated with a laurel wreath, the fourth king is misshapen and composed of all these metals.

Now a bright light spreads; an old man with a lamp appears in the vault.

Why do you come, although we have light? The golden king asks. You know that I am not allowed to illuminate the dark. Does my empire end? The silver king asks. Late or never, the old man answers. The bronze king begins: when will I get up? Soon, the old man answers. With whom should I combine? The silver king asks. With your older brothers, the old man replies. What will become of the youngest? He will sit down.

During this conversation the snake looked around in the temple.

Meanwhile the golden king says to the old man: how many secrets do you know? The old man answers: three. Which is the most important? The silver king asks. The obvious one, the old man answers. Do you want to reveal it to us? The bronze king asks. As soon as I know the fourth one, the old man says. What do I care, the composed king murmurs to himself. I know the fourth, the snake says, approaches the old man and hisses something in his ear. The old man shouts with booming voice: the time has come! The temple resounds; the metal statues sound, and at this moment the old man disappears to the west and the snake to the east, and both roam the abysses of the rocks very quickly.

So far for the moment the contents of the fairy tale. Schiller writes to Cotta: “The public will still find out something, one reads the resolution in the fairy tale.” We are in a point where we want to begin with the resolution. Because we do not want to go too far afield, we have to get some ancient expressions of the secret doctrine clear in our mind to understand the pictures: flames signify something certain to the mystic. What did Goethe show in the flames, the will-o'-the-wisps symbolically? The flames which are the will-o'-the-wisps represent the fire of passions, of the sensuous desires, of the impulses and instincts. This is the fire which lives only in warm-blooded animals and in the human being.

Once there was a time when the human being did not yet have the same figure as today. This fire was not there before the Lemurian race; before it was incarnated in the human body, there were any desires and impulses in this race. The human being became a longing, wishing being by the penetration with the warm-bloodedness, kama manas. The fish and reptiles belong to the cold-blooded animals. That is why mysticism makes an even stronger distinction than the natural sciences between cold-blooded and warm-blooded beings.

At that time, in the middle of the Lemurian age, a moment happens at which the human being develops from lower to higher stages. This moment is called in the myths, in the Prometheus legend, the bringing down of the fire. About Prometheus it is told that he had brought it down from heaven, and he was forged to the rock the physical, mineral human body.

The sum of the desires, emotions, instincts, and passions is the fire which pushes the human beings to new actions. In theosophy this flame is called the emergence of the human self-consciousness, of the ability to say "I" to oneself. If the human being did not get round to becoming the flame, he could not have developed the self-consciousness and with it he would not be able to ascend to the knowledge of the divine. There is a lower self-consciousness, the self-consciousness, and a higher one. The lower nature of the desires and the higher one of the consciousness are linked in the human being. The physical human being originated by the penetration of his self with the blood, with the flame. The flames of the will-o'-the-wisps show the emergence of the self-consciousness within the impulses, desires and passions. This is kama manas as we say in theosophy. With it the human being lives in the physical world at first, on this side of the river.

But the home of the human being in which he stays before he is born is beyond the river, in the spiritual world. The ferryman ferries the human being from this spiritual world over the river of the astral world to the physical, this-worldly existence. However, the seeking soul strives incessantly again back to the land beyond the river; but the ferryman nature cannot bring them back. That means: if they found him also on this bank, he would not accept them, because he is allowed to ferry over everybody to this bank, but nobody to the yonder bank. The snake says this to the will-o'-the-wisps. Natural forces have brought in the human being by birth to the physical world. If the human being wants to be brought back to the higher worlds during life, he must do this himself. There is a road back. The self can collect knowledge. Gold is the occult symbol of knowledge. Gold and wisdom knowledge correspond to each other.

The lower humanity also has the gold of knowledge represented by the will-o'-the-wisps and becomes a will-o'-the-wisp if it does not find the right way. There is a lower wisdom which the human being acquires within the sensory world, while he observes the things and beings of this sensory world, makes ideas of them and combines them by his thinking. However, this is wisdom of mere reason. The will-o'-the-wisps want to pay the ferryman with this gold which they take up easily and cast off easily again. But the ferryman rejects it. Wisdom of reason does not satisfy nature, only that gift can have an effect on nature which is connected with the living forces of nature. Immature wisdom makes the river of the astral foam, it does not accept it. The ferryman demands fruits of the earth as a pay. The will-o'-the-wisps did never enjoy them. They did never strive for penetrating into the depths of nature, but they must still pay tribute to nature. They must promise to fulfil the demand of the ferryman soon. This demand comprises fruits of the earth: three cabbages, three artichokes and three big onions. What are these earth fruits? Goethe takes these fruits which have skins representing the human covers.
The human being has his three covers, his three bodies: the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body. Within these covers the core of the human being lives. In these bodies which surround it like sheaths the self has to gather the fruits of an incarnation after the other. Earth fruits must be gathered. These fruits do not consist of the knowledge of reason. The ferryman demands these three bodies as a contribution to nature. Goethe hid this teaching intimately in his fairy tale.

The gold comes to the snake. This is the gold of real wisdom. The snake was always the symbol of the self that does not keep to itself, but is able to take up the divine in selflessness, to sacrifice itself, gathers earth wisdom unselfishly, creeping in the “abysses of the earth.” It ascends to the divine not unfolding egoism and vanity, but trying to make itself similar to the divine. The snake in its unselfish striving takes up the gold of wisdom, it penetrates itself completely with the gold and thereby it becomes luminous from within. It becomes luminous as the self becomes if it has advanced to the stage of inspiration where the human being has become internally luminous and full of light and where light radiates toward light. The snake notices that it had become transparent and luminous. Before long one had asserted to it that this phenomenon is possible. It was green before, now it is luminous. The snake is green because it is in sympathy with the beings around, with the whole nature. Where this sympathy lives, the aura appears in bright green hues. Green is the colour in which the aura of the human being appears if mainly unselfish, devoted striving lives in the soul. Now when it itself has become luminous from within, the snake does see, before it felt only in its striving endeavours. All leaves seem to be of emerald, all flowers are glorified most marvellously. It sees all things in a new, glorified light. The things appear in such luminous emerald hues to us if the spirit flows from them toward us, if light radiates toward light.

Now after it has become luminous and has taken up the higher divine nature in itself, it also finds the way to the subterranean temple.

The sites, the mystery temples, in which in former times the truths were announced, were deeply hidden in the caves and abysses of the earth There light faces light.

Indeed, up to now the snake was compelled to creep without light through these abysses; but it could probably distinguish the objects by feeling. It perceived objects by feeling which revealed the forming hand of the human being, above all human figures. Now it is in the possession of light, and light faces it. It finds the temple and four kings therein, and the old man with the lamp approaches it. The man with the lamp signifies the ancient wisdom, the ancient wisdom of humanity which is only light and does not shadow which contains something that modern natural sciences cannot understand. Goethe says profoundly that the lamp of the human soul only shines if another light which the soul must produce is shown. It is the same view which he expresses in the saying which he placed in front of his theory of colours and about which he says that these are the words of an old mystic:

Unless the eyes were like the sun,
How could we see the light?
Unless God's own force lived in us,
How could delight us the divine?

Theory of Colours. Didactic Part

After the snake's eye has become sun-like because the light of the divine is enkindled in the snake, the light of the ancient wisdom of the world shines toward it.

The fire of passion has changed to the light. The fire which has changed in the earth to the light of wisdom is able to shine toward the bringer of wisdom, the “old man with the lamp.”

The snake looks at the four kings with amazement and reverence. Amazement and reverence are always the soul forces that bring the human beings forward and upwards. It beholds the golden king first, and he starts talking: where do you come from? From the abysses where the gold lives, the snake answers. What is more marvellous than gold? The king asks. The light, the snake answers. What is more refreshing than light? He asks. The conversation, the snake answers. In the conversation wisdom comes to the fore intimately for the human being, this is more refreshing than the great revelation. Does one not think of the Platonic dialogues in this discussion of the king with the snake? There were world secrets expressed with few words, few sentences. Goethe wants to explain: what is in the temple and happens there concerns the highest secrets of human development.

Which alchemy transforms the things that way? It is the initiation. Even the modern theory of evolution takes the perpetual transformation of the things as basis. The temple has to be subterranean at first, it is closed to the most human beings; but now the moment approaches when it is open to all human beings. It wants to send the gold of wisdom which has become light from human being to human being.

Who is the golden king, and who are the other three kings, the silver one, the bronze one and the mixed king? The golden king is manas, wisdom itself which could only develop higher in the mystery temple up to now. This is that soul-force which the human being can gain with purified thinking free of sensuousness. The silver king indicates an even higher element than wisdom: it is love, the creative word of the world buddhi, the god, being aglow with love. Its kingdom is called the kingdom of appearance; Christianity calls it glory (gloria in excelsis). It is pointed to a time which becomes later accessible only; then buddhi has the mastery over humanity. The bronze king whom the snake does not see at first and who is apparently little valuable is of huge seize. He looks rather like a rock than a human form. This is the king who expresses the willing-like soul-force which rests in the human being covertly.

He represents atma with which the striving human being is endowed last what he finds last.

Thus Goethe showed in a beautiful picture the endowment of the human being with the three highest virtues which are given to him one day. Without having attained this maturity, nobody was admitted to initiation in former times.

Then there is still the fourth king, of cumbersome figure; he consists of a mixture of gold, silver and bronze, but the metals seemed to have not correctly melted with the casting, nothing correlates with each other. This is the soul of the undeveloped human being who does not yet develop higher striving, in who thinking, feeling and willing are chaotically disorganised and which give “the picture a disagreeable appearance.” The fourth king shows the force of thinking which is still clouded with the sensory impressions, the fire of the soul which does not unfold love but lives in desires and impulses, the disordered will of the human being.

Remember the discussion of the kings with the man with the lamp. The golden king asks the old man: how many secrets do you know? Three, the old man replies. Which is the most important one? The silver king asked. The obvious one, the old man answers. Do you want to disclose it also to us? The bronze king asked. As soon as I know the fourth one, the old man said. I know the fourth one, the snake said, approached the old man and hissed something in his ear. The time has come! The old man shouted with penetrating voice.

There are three secrets the most important one is the obvious one. If this is disclosed, the fourth one can be known! This is the most important word of the whole fairy tale and at the same time the key of it as Goethe said in a discussion with Schiller. The old man knows three secrets; these are the secrets of the three realms of nature. The realms of nature have become steady in their development. However, the human being develops perpetually. He is able to do this, because the spirit, the self lives in him. The three secrets which the old man knows explain the principles of the mineral realm, the plant realm and the animal realm.

With its own forces the soul has to find the principle which must live in the human soul if it wants to obtain the maturity of initiation. The snake has found it. It hisses it in the ear of the old man. What did the snake say to the old man? That it wants to sacrifice itself! Sacrifice is the principle of the spiritual world. – Somebody can walk the path to the higher knowledge only who does not regard this knowledge as an end in itself, and seeks for it in the service of humanity. All true mystics know this soul path; they all have gone through this experience of sacrificing like the snake. As soon as the words sound in the temple: I want to sacrifice myself! The old man shouts: the time has come!

The words of the old man, the time has come, point to the distant future when the whole humanity has attained the maturity. Then the time has come that the temple rises up above the river, that the whole humanity takes part in wisdom, in the initiation which was otherwise given to few people only in the temples, in the abysses.

To somebody like me who concerned himself with this fairy tale for twenty years deeper and deeper profundities appear, time and again the lines point to an even more profound primary source. Here are treasures to be found; however, we have to find them. We must only take care not to permit ourselves something in view of Goethe that Goethe lets Mephisto characterise in his Faust in such a way:

To understand some living thing and to describe it,
the student starts by ridding it of its spirit;
he then holds all its parts within his hand
except, alas! for the spirit that bound them together!

(Faust's Study, verses 1936–1939)

Let us seek for this spiritual band in Goethe's creations.

Note:

The text of this and the following lectures are based on two incomplete transripts which were complemented with handwritten notes of two other participants.