The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If a snail were to crawl through a hall in which Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was being played, the snail would probably hear nothing of all that from which the people who are in the same hall are moved into the most beautiful sensations. The tones of the symphony are expressed in the air waves of the hall, these air waves spread to all sides; they are the outer expression of the magnificent tonal coherence. This sound connection goes through the organism of the snail as well as through the organism of the human being. In the human being it evokes sensations of the highest kind, the snail remains untouched by it. It is in the same medium, in the same oscillating tonal vein as the human being, but it knows nothing of what is going on around it. A world is around it, and it is in this world, but it has no idea of this world. And nevertheless, this world of the sound-weight is not in another place, where the snail is not, but in the same place, where also everything is, what the snail needs. The space in which the snail is located is thus filled by the facts which the snail can perceive, but it is also filled by a sum of facts which the snail cannot perceive.

We have thus established that appearances can live around a being without the being having any idea of them, and we can raise the question whether we humans do not perhaps also live in a world which is filled with facts and appearances of which we initially perceive nothing, of such facts and appearances which relate to our world in the same way as the tonal texture of the Ninth Symphony to that which a snail is able to perceive. The question must therefore touch us, whether that, what we feel and perceive in a space, in which we are, is everything, what occurs in our environment. There could be facts in our environment which are not there for us simply because we have not developed the organs for the perception of these facts. There could be beings in our world or we humans ourselves could develop into beings who are able to perceive far more than what is in our world around us. There could be comparatively a similar relationship between more or less developed people, as between the snail and the people.

This is the question which must awaken in us conjecture upon conjecture about the unknown worlds surrounding us, and this is also the question which is to be answered by the theosophical movement. It is essentially the task of the theosophical movement to acquaint us with worlds that surround us daily and hourly, with worlds within which we live, but of which we know nothing under ordinary circumstances. Theosophy does not want to acquaint us with worlds that lie beyond ours, not with worlds that are to be found in places inaccessible to us, but with those worlds that continually project into our world, that always surround us, but that remain unknown to us because our organs are not open to them. At first we can only speak of these worlds. We can only point to them and invite you to take part in the work by which man's senses are opened to these higher worlds, so that he is able to perceive them as he is able today only to perceive the ordinary world. I would like to speak to you about such worlds in the next lectures.

First of all I would like to speak of the world which we call in Theosophy the astral world. It will show itself to us as a world which is not far from us, which is everywhere where we are. In the space where we are at present, it is just as real as the world you see. The astral world is a higher world, which with its appearances surges and waves through the world, in which you are, just as the symphonic tone-wave surges through the world of the snail, but is not perceived by it. So we are not talking about something that is to be found outside our world, but we are talking about something that permeates our world in every point of its existence. The theosophical view teaches us to recognize various such worlds; it teaches us first of all to recognize that world which is known to us from everyday life: the physical world - that world, therefore, which every human being is capable of feeling with his sense organs, the world which we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, the world in which we find the objects of nature, the minerals, the plants and the animals. This world is interspersed, interspersed, if I may so express myself, by a higher world, by the so-called astral world, which we now want to get to know. Just as one fluid mixes with another, finer fluid, so that one fluid interpenetrates the other in all parts, so the astral world interpenetrates our world of the physical; and this astral world is in turn interpenetrated by a still higher world, which we call the mental world, which is the spiritual world proper. Thus three worlds are interlocked, one always interspersing the other, but man with his present organs perceives only the physical world. Gradually to open the sense for the invisible and under ordinary circumstances inaudible worlds, that is the task of theosophy.

What is the astral world? When we speak of the astral world, the quickest way to understand it is to seek out, among all the world views that have recognized a spiritual world in addition to the physical, those that have spoken of the astral world and its relationship to man. The Christian worldview also knows this astral world. In the first centuries of Christianity, not only two natures were distinguished in man, as later and more superficially: body and soul, but three were distinguished: body, soul and spirit. Soul and spirit have always been regarded as the components of man in all deeper world views since ancient times. Go back to those peoples who lived in our regions long before the Germanic tribes. If you look at the temples of those ancient Celtic peoples, you will find that they had an altar in the center surrounded by three circles of columns. These three pillar circles signified nothing other than the threefold nature of man: Body, Soul, Spirit. The physical nature is known. By the soul nature was understood in all deeper religions and world views what we call in the theosophical world view the astral. Under the expression "spirit" one understood the actually eternal of the nature of the human being. Body, soul and spirit make up the threefold nature of man. Modern natural science has studied the body quite closely. Through it we are connected with everything that is around us. We are not single, self-contained beings. We could not live physically if our environment were different. If you think of the temperature of the physical world as being ten to twenty degrees higher than the temperature of our air circuit, man could not live in it. Not only does our life depend on what goes on within the confines of our skin, but also on the life of the phenomena in nature around us. In a certain respect, we are only a result of what is going on around us. If there were no plants in the world, we could not feed ourselves. Only by being able to maintain the physical metabolism, we are able to live physically. Man is completely dependent on his physical environment, that is, he is a physical being within the whole physical nature, he belongs to this physical nature. The materialists of the 19th century rightly saw it this way. Our body is the effect of the physical environment. We live in the physical world with the physical world.

Now you know that for this body a very definite moment occurs in which it no longer obeys those laws which it obeyed under the ordinary conditions of life, that is the moment of death. At the moment of death, the body that belongs to us no longer obeys the same laws that it has obeyed throughout life; and yet it is natural laws that it obeys. When we have died, our physical organism returns to the natural substances that acted in this body during our life. Chemical and physical forces work in our physical body during our life. Our digestion is a physical process, our breathing is a physical process. What goes on in our eye when we see is also a physical process; it is something very similar to the process on the photographic plate when you have your picture taken. We are physically a confluence of physical and chemical forces, but we cease to be a confluence of chemical and physical forces when we succumb to death. This body then no longer holds together; it flows over into the stream of general physical phenomena. But the human body as such cannot possibly be only a chemical and physical composition, because at the same moment when the chemical and physical forces are left to themselves, they go completely different ways, they join the stream of the general chemical and physical processes. They no longer generate the processes of seeing, hearing and thinking, but they enter into completely different processes. So something must have been there, which called them to build up an organism during our life. This organism is composed of no other substances one hour before death than one hour after death. The physical composition is exactly the same, but the life element is no longer there. That is no longer there which calls these physical substances to a powerful action, as they would never work if they were left to themselves.

This leads us to see that this physically and chemically constructed body, because it is an impossibility in only physical and chemical respect, must be lived through and flowed through by a higher principle, which organizes, sails through and lives through the lower one. The next principle that lives through our body is that which prevents its parts from falling apart while we are still alive; and that which causes this is what we call the astral element in man.

We can say exactly what the astral element in man is. It is that which causes all people who have such an element in them to let something happen in them, which we call pleasure and displeasure in the broadest sense. Pleasure and displeasure is something that occurs in our body and in the bodies that are similar to us in astral relation and that cannot be caused by the chemical and physical substances. Take a crystal or any other physical substance composed of chemical substances. Everything can happen to it that otherwise happens in the physical, but not desire and displeasure. This is to be found only in man himself and in those beings which are organized like man. These beings are interspersed with an element which can feel pleasure and displeasure. If you bump a stone, it will fly on or strike somewhere and make an impression. If you impress such a natural object in this or any other way, you can see it from the outside; you can even subject it to a process that destroys it, but it will never feel pleasure or displeasure. Pleasure and displeasure reach as far as the astral world reaches. And just as I belong to the external world through the processes of a chemical and physical nature which take place within me, so I really and really have all the various shades of pleasure and displeasure within me, and through these various shades and manifestations of pleasure and displeasure I belong to a world which permeates and sails through our physical world and which is as much outside me as within me. In space there is not only air that sustains physical bodily life, but space is also interspersed with an astral world in which we humans participate just as we participate in the outer physical world. And just as we could not live as physical beings without letting the physical force flow through our organism, so we could not live as pleasure and displeasure beings, as astral beings, without participating in what is going on in the astral world, what lives and weaves in it, and what continually pervades and spiritualizes us. Just as in the physical world we are separated by our skin and thereby individualized, so we are also closed in the general astral world. We are individualized within it as individual astral entities and participate in this astral world around us.

We have now pointed to a world which permeates and pervades and surges through our physical world, just as the sound world of the Ninth Symphony surges through the world in which the snail also lives. In ordinary life, man perceives the world through his senses, but he is not able to perceive that world which intersperses and weaves through him and constitutes his own astral organism. Now the fact that we do not perceive a world is no reason to say that this world is not there. Why do you perceive every other person sitting here as a physical being? Because your eyes are set up to perceive the physical light rays through your eyes. Your eyes can perceive the physical bodies of the other people around you. These physical bodies are real to you. They would not be there for you if your eyes were not there to see them. Likewise, in each of these other people, pleasure and displeasure are present in myriad shades. A world just as rich as the one you see with eyes is in each of you; it is a rich world of pleasure and displeasure. And just as real as your physical body, is a second body that permeates the physical body, by which this physical body is completely permeated. You must not

say that only what you see, what you can physically perceive, is real, because each of you knows that a world of desire and displeasure lives in it just as really as muscle flesh and nerve fibers live in it. Only because your spiritual eyes are not open, therefore you do not see these realities. If your eyes were open to it, then with every other human being, just as you perceive his skin color and his clothes, you would also be able to perceive him flowing through with forces and substantialities, with entities that are real, which we can call pleasure and displeasure beings. For the one whose sense is open to these realities, this world is as real as the physical world.

Thus, in every human being, apart from the physical body, there is also the astral body, which is so called because for the seer it shines in a bright light, which is an expression of his whole life of pleasure and displeasure, of everything that lives in him as feeling. Just as not only you yourself know that you consist of flesh and blood, but the other people can also perceive this, so the feelings of pleasure and displeasure are only there for you alone as long as not another person perceives them. Somewhat larger than your physical body is your astral organism, somewhat protruding above the same. Think of a hall in which a meeting is being held and in which the various speakers are speaking. When a clairvoyant looks through the hall with his seeing eyes, he not only perceives the words that are spoken, not only the sparkling eyes and the speaking physiognomies, he sees something else: he sees how the passions play over from the speaker to the other people, he sees how the sensations and feelings light up in the speaker, he sees whether a speaker speaks, for example, out of revenge or out of enthusiasm. In the case of the enthusiast he sees the fire of the astral body emanating, and in the case of the great multitude of people he sees an abundance of rays; these in turn call forth desire or dislike in the speaker. There is an interaction of the tempe raments which takes place openly and clearly before the seer. This is as real a world of which we are a part as the outer world in which we live.

Not in vain, not without purpose, has the theosophical movement pointed out to man these invisible worlds of which men are a part, into which we are continually sending our effects. They cannot speak a word, cannot grasp a thought, without feelings working out into space. As our actions work out into space, so do the feelings; they permeate space and influence people and the whole astral world. Under ordinary circumstances, man is not aware that a stream of effects emanates from him, that he is a cause whose effects can be perceived everywhere in the world. He is not aware that he can also cause harm by sending out into the world currents of desire and displeasure, of passions and urges, which can affect other people in the most harmful way. He is not aware of what he causes with his emotional life.

Our knowledge is not destined to a purposeless existence; it is not there merely to know, it is not there for its own sake. It has become a beautiful phrase of occidental scholarship that knowledge is there for its own sake. Whoever delves into Oriental wisdom finds something else than knowledge for its own sake. He knows that knowledge is about being active in the world in the sense of this knowledge. We get to know the physical world in order not to manage in the physical nature like in a chaos. And we get to know the higher nature in order to operate in this higher nature in a conscious way. He who knows and masters this higher nature learns to work in it consciously; he learns to control his thoughts and not to let them work haphazardly, not to let them go haphazardly either, but to keep them in check; he learns to control his inner life, to regulate his inner life so that it has a ennobling effect on the environment in the most ideal sense. Thus the higher worlds, which - let me emphasize this - are just as real as our physical world, indeed even more real, acquire an immense significance for the physical world. If you know that what is going on in the astral woe is much more important for the world process than what you are able to see and do in the physical world, you will also correctly estimate this world in its importance.

If you go up even further, you would find worlds that are even more important than the astral world. The Christian religion also speaks of this. What the latter calls the "soul" is the astral world, what it calls the "spirit" is what you know in Theosophy as the "mental plane". Why is the higher, the astral world so infinitely more important than the physical world? Because the physical world is nothing but the expression of this astral world, the effect of the astral world. I would like to give you, as an explanation, a phenomenon that will show you how infinitely more significant what goes on in the astral world is than what takes place in the physical world. What I have to say is called in the teachings of mysticism and in theosophy the mystery of birth and death. It is one of the greatest mysteries or mysteries of the world. We speak of seven world mysteries.

Those who think trivially - and today's world is only too inclined to think trivially - will easily accuse us of gushing and obscurity. But we Theosophists know what the three words mean, which were often mentioned in the first centuries of Christianity, when Christianity was still one of the deepest religions in the world: Perceive, Think, Assume. - These three words were mentioned next to each other. The fact that assuming was mentioned next to perceiving and thinking shows us that people were not as immodest in regard to knowledge as they are today. Yes, people today are immodest in regard to knowledge, immodest because they are dismissive of everything that their senses and intellect do not comprehend. Do you think that if the snail would dare to say that here in the hall there is nothing else than what it perceives, would we not have to say of this snail that it has a great immodesty with regard to knowledge? Make no mistake. In the worst sense of the word it is the same with the human being when he says: What my mind cannot perceive and cannot comprehend, that does not exist in this world. - Two things, perceiving and thinking, are what give us beauty, greatness and number in the world. But there is a third thing that makes us always humble, that makes us strive, that leads us deeper and deeper into the world: that is the supposition, the supposition that there could be something else than what we know.

The theosophical movement differs in this from all other cognitive movements. What does the ordinary scientist want, who is proud of his culture and immodest about his ordinary cognition? He wants to pursue all that he can perceive and recognize, and he wants to spread his knowledge on innumerable things. It is as if the snail crawls around in all directions and perceives what it can perceive - it would perceive nothing but what its snail organs can perceive. So it is also with the people. That is why the assumption has been added to the perception and the thinking, the assumption that - if we develop further - higher sense organs will open up to us, which will open up to us what is usually closed to us in the world. Thus, the attitude of the theosophist differs from that of the ordinary scientist in that he wants to develop himself, that he honestly and righteously believes in the development of his abilities, and that he makes an effort to work on himself. This, honored guests, is theosophical attitude: to work on oneself, so that higher organs open up to us, so that we are able to perceive something meaningful and important in what surrounds us. This must become more and more an occidental attitude, if occidental mankind does not want to be completely absorbed in the materialistic current. When this theosophical attitude becomes more and more widespread, then it will be understood that all those things which are external physical facts and phenomena are the consequences, the effects of deeper causes, which lie in the astral world or in still higher worlds. Usually the occidental science is satisfied with studying the body in all its components. But the theosophical mind asks: Did this body assemble itself? Where could be the reason for it? Can we believe that the forces outside in nature feel the need to assemble themselves into man? No. Whoever is able to see in the higher world knows that man, before he lives in the physical organism, lived in an astral existence before his birth. As true as we had an astral existence before our physical existence, before birth, so true we have an astral existence also after our birth, and this extends further than our physical body. All this is included in what we call the mystery of birth and death.

Theosophy understands the importance of the third word: supposing. What I suspect today may become knowledge tomorrow, and what I suspected yesterday became certainty today. Who trusts in the deeper of this supposition, does not believe in limits of knowledge; he says to himself: I do not believe that what I recognize at any time is the deepest. - And so we are clear that even in the most important phenomena of nature their laws, their essences are deeply veiled. "Mysterious in the light of day, nature cannot be deprived of the veil". Mysterious, mysterious, is nature, is the whole life, and to penetrate into it is the task of man. For to work with the mysteries is man's task.

We speak of seven great mysteries of life. There are seven great mysteries that reveal to us the seven great phases of life. The "unspeakable ones" they are called. The fourth of these great mysteries, into which we shall be gradually introduced through these lectures, is the mystery of birth and death. It is not that we need to lift a veil to understand the mystery of birth and death. The body that lives between birth and death is visited by another body that lives only in the astral world. Our astral body exists before our physical body. It is the basic note of our sentient life, the basic note of our temperament and passions. This is what the seer sees in the astral world. Before the human being is born, this basic note, which each of us carries within us, builds up the physical body. Our physical bodies do not build our passions, desires and temperaments, but these come from another world and choose the corresponding bodies. Therefore, every human being is endowed with a very specific soul entity. Whoever is able to really study man knows that men differ from each other, that there are not two men who are the same with regard to passions, desires and physical body nature. In terms of physical body nature, they may be only slightly different from each other, but tremendously different are people in terms of their astral nature.

Before a human being is born, the seer sees flowing towards the place of birth the astral body of the human being, the sum of his desires, urges and passions, which later develop in the physical body and interact with the outer world. And within this astral body, as the innermost being of the incarnating man, is the actual higher spirit being of man. From a still higher world this higher spirit being of man descends, and within the astral world this higher spirit being of man surrounds himself with what we call desire substance, astral substance. Thus it rushes through the astral world with lightning speed. The seer sees it in the astral world long before he is born. It is present in a luminous bell-shaped form and descends upon the human body to spirit it through. What we say about such an astral substance today easily attracts the reproach of rapture, and it is natural that if we speak in this way in today's world, we may receive this reproach. We must therefore be all the more careful. We must not allow ourselves to speak of it in this way, nor should we speak of it unless we are as firmly and securely at home in this world as we are in the physical world.

I consider it a requirement of a teacher of Theosophy that he should advocate only so much of the teaching as he can in his best conscience answer for; that is, I require of every Theosophical teacher that he should say only that of which he himself has a direct knowledge, an immediate knowledge. Not a word should the theosophical teacher speak about these higher worlds if he is not able to research them himself; exactly with the same right as no one can speak about chemistry who has not studied it. Therefore, in the lectures I will say only what I am able to say with absolute certainty. No one is able to describe the astral world in its entirety; it is richer and more extensive than our physical world. I admit that also the spiritual researcher can err in the individual, just as one can err in the physical world, for example, if one wants to determine the height of a mountain. But just as such an error in the individual can not be a reason to deny the physical world, so a man can not be tempted to deny the reality of the astral world because of an error in the individual.

Before man is born for the physical world, he lives as a driving being with his "body of desire" in the astra-l world. In the astral world, there is not birth and death in the same sense as in the physical world. In the astral world the mystery of the so-called elective attraction is valid. It is the same as in this physical world with our desires and wishes. As one desire develops from another, so it is in the astral world. One being develops from another through an eternal procreation, without birth and death. The beings are subject only to the elective attraction, not to the birth and the death. Where does it come from that the physical beings are subject to birth and death? This is the question I wanted to point out today. Where do birth and death come into the physical nature? I have said that before man lives in the physical world, he lives in the astral world and there he is subject to the elective attraction; birth and death would not exist there. But now there is birth and death, because the astral forms the middle point between two other worlds.

Man is a citizen of two worlds. He points down to the physical world and up to the highest, the spiritual world. Through his astral nature, man connects the spiritual world in its eternity with the physical world. For a long, long time, through several cosmic epochs, man was a merely astral being. Today we stand in the fifth "root race", the post-Atlantean time, preceded by the fourth and the third. Only in the third "root race", in the Lemuri period, man became a physical being; before that he was closer to the astral world. But at that time, when man was still an astral being, he did not yet have the power of the spirit. The higher, the spiritual soul only united with the astral being at the moment when the spiritual united with the physical. And this united spiritual-physical requires birth and death for the physical. Therefore, because man is the locus of the highest spiritual, he must be born and die within the physical. The astral being is neither born nor dies. The spiritual being will preserve its eternity by destroying the physical being again and again from time to time in order to ascend again into the spiritual and then to descend again into the physical world. Goethe indicated this in his prose hymn "Nature": life is its most beautiful invention, and death is its artifice to have much life.

This interaction of birth and death, the mystery of the whole life, shall occupy us further in these lectures, and also the beings of the astral world, of which we have mentioned little so far, we will get to know, in order to realize that there are more beings than man in his present materialistic attitude can dream of.

Today I would like to speak of certain phenomena that are connected with the state that occurs approximately in the middle of the third round, the third epoch of the development of the earth, and in which the previously ethereal, finer human races become denser, more material. The faculty of imagination develops. In the first root race, only the faculty of sensation was developed; human beings could sense, they could perceive the difference between cold and warm, between light and dark, between wet and dry, but they could not yet imagine things, they did not yet have the ability to repeat the objects that are outside in themselves, that is, to create within themselves spiritual counter-images to the objects outside. This only occurs in the third root race. On the one hand, we see the imagination emerging, and on the other hand, the coarse material, which expresses itself in the ability to reproduce and in the appearance of the opposites of male and female.

This development is linked to something else, namely to something that can give us a deeper understanding of the concept of God. In those days there was no concept of God; only from the third root race onwards could a concept of God begin to emerge, only then could a consciousness of God arise. We can only understand this if we grasp the process as a real one. If we try to understand how the concept of God began to take hold in humanity, we find that initially a form of religion can be observed everywhere that differs from polytheism and from the other forms of religion. That is why a special word was coined for it: henotheism. Henotheism was the original form of religion that we find everywhere at this time. Polytheism is something later. The original form of the conception of God is the worship and veneration of a primal deity. However, this conception differs from the later conception of a unified God, monotheism, because it is not so distinctly developed, because it is fluctuating and has a blurred form. It is an indefinite concept of God that occurs everywhere. To put it clearly, I would have to say: originally, peoples did not imagine one God, but a divine; they imagined that something indefinite underlies the universe and that this indefinite is divine. Where and how did people come up with this idea that the source of the world is divine? Various hypotheses have been put forward, but it has not been possible to find out where this idea comes from. Henotheism, as it is found today among the so-called primitive peoples, is not the original form of this concept of God, because we are not dealing with direct descendants of these ancient cultures.

When we turn to the Lemurians, we arrive at a point in time when the transition takes place from the general working of cosmic wisdom to the working of Kama-Manas in the individual human soul. Before that, wisdom is a universal being, a being that hovers over everything as a spirit. It is not yet very different from the universal spirit that was active during the lunar epoch. It is precisely in the Lemurian period that the instilling of the All-Spirit into human souls takes place. Imagine it this way: Before, the Lemurians saw the unified spirit, which they could not yet imagine, except for themselves; it hovered above them. And in their further development, they find the same thing within themselves that they used to perceive outside themselves; they find it reflected within themselves, in their own soul. Before their development into conceiving beings, the vision of the Lemurians was a semi-astral vision; they saw the Unity-Deity hovering above them. Now that they look within themselves, what they used to see outside of themselves is reflected in their own soul. What used to be outside is now the same content that now shines in one's own soul. The first conception of God is nothing more than a repetition of this process. You can find the remnants of such a religion in the most ancient Indian religion.

Now let us turn to the Atlantean race. The Lemurian could not only see, but could also create a mental counter-image of what he saw. It is one thing to create an image and quite another to carry that image around with you. Memory was only developed during the Atlantean race. In the first root race, the sense of feeling was developed, in the second the sense of looking, in the third the sense of imagination, and only the fourth root race could retain the images and thus developed memory. If you bear in mind that the Atlanteans were particularly good at remembering, you can imagine that religion also had to take on very specific forms for them.

The Lemurian race perished, it merged into the Atlantean race, which had developed memory. With their excellent memory, the Atlanteans remembered the images that their ancestors, the Lemurians, had created. This is roughly the same as when you see the sun reflected in a drop of water, for example, but do not see the sun itself. Therefore, the Atlanteans developed a twofold consciousness: the divine took hold in our ancestors; they were our ancestors, in whose souls the divine lived. That was the time when people began to worship their ancestors; the cult of ancestors emerged. The ancestors were worshiped because the divine was seen to flash in their souls. A variation of ancestor worship is the later hero worship: Theseus, Jason and so on; this also belongs to the worship of ancestors. But with this, the multiplicity of gods is also introduced. We find the inflow of real spirituality into the human soul — memory, the development of memory — within the fourth human race, within the time of the Atlanteans.

Now we come to the fifth human race. In it, the power of thought develops. The Atlanteans did not calculate in the same way as we do, because for that, the power of thought is necessary, the power of logic. You know that 2 x 2 = 4; you know that, you have acquired it through thinking. The Atlanteans did not yet have that. If he had two and then another two, he did not calculate: 2x2 = 4, but he said: How many were there in earlier cases when things were lying next to each other like that? The Atlantean's ideas were therefore tied to memory. Before the Atlantean's memory lay the whole of life and also that of his ancestors. This is not to be confused with the Akashic Records, but it was human memory. In the past, people felt with their whole nature; it was not like with us today, where you first have to touch something. Today we have rules of thought, for example 2 x 2 = 4, and we follow them.

The religious consciousness in the fifth root race must develop under the influence of thinking. The man of the fifth race not only seeks to perceive what is around him, he not only seeks to come to a feeling, but he seeks to grasp it. Thinking becomes an important means for him to penetrate to wisdom. In this way, he detaches himself more and more from the past because memory is drowned out. Veneration for the old disappears, and only that which lives deeply within the soul as Manas and announces itself as Manas becomes the object of veneration. Thus the fifth human race comes to recognize Manas as the divine.

The fifth human race therefore no longer practices polytheism, but strives to gain mastery of the inner self and to recognize the divine center of man. That is why we have the great masters in the fifth human race: Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, Moses, Zarathustra and so on. Thus humanity was freed from the past and from the worship of its ancestors, [and the worship of] divine wisdom realizing itself in time begins.

If you now grasp the deeper meaning of the mythological ideas of the Greeks, you will see how, in the sequence of the Greek deities, there is, strangely enough, a full awareness of the succession of these religious ideas. We have to imagine that the power that hovers over everything at the time of the Lemurians, the power that lives in space as unified wisdom, is called Uranus [by the Greeks]. Uranus is replaced by Cronus, the god of time, the god who lives in memory; he continually devours his children. He represents the entire ancestral divinity. Then follows Zeus, the humanized god, the god of heroism; he is a variation of the same principle. Then comes the cult of Dionysus. Dionysus is the striving, suffering, feeling, thinking human being himself. He is depicted as being originally killed, dismembered, then resurrected and now striving upwards again in the world. He is the representative of the mastery, the Mahatma, the representative of the fifth race's conception of God. Thus, in the Greek conception, these three stages have been preserved: Uranus – henotheism; Kronos and Zeus – polytheism; Dionysus – Mahatma. This will explain to you why the religion of Dionysus was a secret religion in Greece.

The Greeks hid this cult in the mysteries. Aeschylus was taken to court for revealing the secrets of the mysteries by bringing them to the stage. However, he was able to prove that he was not initiated into the mysteries at all. Socrates had to die because it was believed that his teachings were given out of the mysteries. The penalty for betrayal of the mysteries was always death. In the Greek myths, when there is mention of a descent into the underworld, this always signifies an initiation; it means that the persons concerned were mystics. Dionysus descends into the underworld. This means that he was a mystic, and so was Heracles. Every myth signifies something very definite, not something arbitrary. One did not have to believe, but one knew; one knew through initiation. Initiation enabled the person to truly recognize the meaning of the myth. The initiate of the fifth root race is fully imbued with the idea that the fifth principle of humanity is struggling for existence within him, that he is the bearer of the humanity of the fifth root race. In this way he also comes to recognize the Mahatmatum.

The deeper one looks at things, the more one comes to understand the inner progress of spiritual human development. Now it will no longer seem so incomprehensible if I have often spoken of secrets. You see, Theosophy is nothing more than a continuous unveiling of secret world connections. The secrets that Theosophy can reveal today are still quite elementary. But they are something that places man deep within a great context, which on the one hand makes existence seem small like a small pearl in a large shell, but on the other hand makes it great when he reflects on the higher self and imagines his incarnations as the totality of all the pearls. Theosophy does not make us small, as modern science wants to make us small, saying: in the whole universe there are millions of earths, all of which are inhabited, and of these, our earth is a speck of dust. Theosophy also says that man is one of these dust-corners, but that the divine also lives in man. This divine spark, which we find at the center of our consciousness, did not arise from within us, but was drawn into us from outside; it is the same as that which lives outside in the macrocosm.

It is not a particularly profound insight that Feuerbach arrived at when he said: the ancients were wrong when they said that the deity created man in its own image, for man creates God out of his own image. — Quite right, man creates the deity out of himself again. But: that is the deity that creates this. So we may say: Feuerbach is right, except that he does not admit it to himself. What I have been telling you again and again: mind control is what is needed. And mind control is not just that a thought is clear, but that every thought has a control thought. You should never think or say a thought without applying the corresponding control thought. Man works wonders when he does not allow himself to think only one-sided thoughts.

Thoughtful people might perhaps take an event which has occurred quite surprisingly in the last few days as a proof that many unknown things can be in the space in which we all find ourselves, of which we suddenly perceive effects without having had any idea of their existence before. You will already guess that I am referring to an event that took place last week: On a beautiful noon, it was last Saturday, all telegraph lines in France suddenly stopped working; one could not telegraph or telephone to any place in France, and no physicist could get an idea of what this was due to. In the evening, the power went on again as before. This disturbance was felt all over the world. One had no idea before that something like that could happen on our earth, that suddenly all telegraphic lines stand still. Science will find the cause. But one will have to be clear that a force can work continuously in the world, of which we can have no idea - connections of which we know nothing, whose mode of action we do not know in advance.

We human beings belong to the astral world just as we belong to the physical world. We also belong to other worlds, but we understand the existence of these worlds only when we see what forces from the higher existence play in. To the one whose eyes are opened to the astral world, a new existence opens up: the world in which we see all the drives and instincts, all the passions and temperaments before us in the same way as we see the things around us in the physical world. But this astral world is not the highest. It is the one which is one step higher than our physical world, it is a finer world which permeates our whole world. Then our world is also permeated by an even higher world, the actual spiritual world, which we call in Theosophy the devachanic or mental world, and which, when we have opened our eyes to it, makes it possible for us to see thoughts, which are not permeated by feelings and desires, that is, which are pure thoughts, like things. These are the three worlds to which man belongs, these are the three worlds which he passes through in his lives from embodiment to embodiment. So it is not the highest world that we are dealing with in the astral world. A special lecture shall be devoted to the spiritual world.

So we now consider this intermediate world, which, however, because it lies first of our physical world, is of quite special importance for us. To him whose eye is open to this sphere, we attribute a so-called psychic vision. Not only physical things appear to him, but also everything that lives in people as drives, desires and passions, appears to him as things. This astral world is graded. It is so great that our physical world cannot be compared with it. I can only give a sketchy description of it. Who has opened the eye for it, he sees things, which the ordinary man indeed perceives, but which he cannot unravel yet. That is psychic seeing.

But there is a still higher seeing, the spiritual seeing. This is like the view from the top of a mountain, i.e. from a lofty vantage point or from the slope of a mountain, to the places and objects lying in the valley. Think of a village, a city, its surroundings, but seen from below, from the ground on which you are standing, you can compare this with the physical seeing of the ordinary average man. Climb up the mountain and stop at about the middle of the mountain, then you can compare the overview you get there with psychic seeing. If you climb all the way up the mountain, you can compare the overview with spiritual seeing. Only a few people have this spiritual seeing in our age. Later, more people will have it. Those people have it who have acquired it through previous embodiments by leading a pure, mental life, those who have sought in the field of thought the ways of pure, crystal clear recognition of the world. That man for whom the pursuit of the pure moral deed was as natural as for the ordinary man the pursuit of his everyday occupations, pleasures, passions and urges, that man for whom the life of pure thought was natural, he then brings with him in the next life the ability to see around him these things to which he has given himself in the former lives as other men see physical things. He sees through the world, he looks, as it were, from above, not only into the physical world, but also into that which I have described as the astral world. He can describe it in broad outlines, as it appears from above, but he can describe it more clearly than he who has only psychic vision.

Parts of psychic seeing are what we have through hypnotism and magnetism. Part of the psychic seeing is also the somnambulistic seeing. But still, if we stop on the psychic level, we do not stand on the summit. There will still be a possibility of error. Only the one who has spiritual vision can see the world from all sides. Only he who sees things from above has a free view over the things of the psychic world. The one who is able to see into this psychic world knows as a fact that man's origin, his beginning, does not lie within the physical world. He knows that what is found in man as a physical body has been chosen by a higher body, by something that was there earlier than the physical body.

Two views are possible, the materialistic and the spiritual. The materialistic view is the one which believes that man creates his physical existence consisting of physical substances and that then, so this view believes, these material substances produce the spiritual. This view then pursues some material phenomenon by asking, for example: What is going on in the organism, what is going on in the fine functions that take place in the brain, when a feeling, when a conception is in us? He who has psychic vision knows that this body has not built itself; he knows that the body has been chosen by its own higher man who dwells in it. "Creating" does not mean what we call creating today, but it means choosing. That is: the soul of man, the psyche, which comes from other regions, has chosen this body so that it can be an instrument for it in the pursuit of those goals which come from a higher world.

Having said this, let me show in brief how man prepares his earthly pilgrimage. Let me now show how man comes into being, and in another hour we will show his cosmic origin. Today only what leads to the existence of man in our epoch. I say facts, because I already said that the one who lectures about the astral world must weigh every word, that he must examine it not once but many times. Do not take my words as spoken at random, but in such a way that I feel completely responsible for what I say. What I put as facts, you can take just like what the natural scientist puts as facts which he can see with the telescope, with the telescope and so on.

Man is a being who does not live once, but who lives in many, many embodiments over and over again. Man often assumes the physical shell. This physical shell is the outermost of the shells in which the actual human being is wrapped. This actual human being who passes from incarnation to incarnation, who carries guilt and atonement from one incarnation to another, is called the higher self. At birth, this higher self enters our body. After death, this higher self leaves the body to appear again in the world in a new incarnation in one and a half to two millennia. In the meantime, this higher self dwells in the higher worlds, and, after this self has passed into a kind of state of maturity, it seeks to embody itself again. There lives in it, as it were, the desire to be active again within the material, earthly existence, to learn again a lesson within the earthly existence.

Now we have to consider a twofold, a double coming into being of man. This consideration provides us with two series of facts: the one which takes place within our physical world, the other which takes place in the higher world. I will outline only this higher world for the time being.

In the meantime, [between death and a new birth], man is in the purely spiritual world - in the mental world or devachan -, in a world which has two regions, a purely spiritual, higher world and a lower one. The higher spiritual world, which we also call the "Arupa sphere," man always enters between two embodiments. The undeveloped person stays in it for a shorter time, the developed person for a longer time. Every human being has to pass through this region. We will see later why. From this region he must go to the lower region, to the one in which for us is the subjective thought, the thought-matter. In this region the self takes on a thought body. It surrounds itself with thought matter, so that we can follow this self as it now enters the thought matter world from the higher region. These spheres are actually not one above the other, but pushed into each other. It is like a living organism, only this is more active than our physical organism. After the self has entered this thought region and has formed an organism of thought matter there, a desire drives it further down. It surrounds itself with substance from the astral or psychic world, so that before the higher self enters the physical organism, it is already a higher organism. Each of us was a higher organism in the higher regions. It was thought matter, and this in turn was woven into the astral matter. Such an organism we were before we entered the physical body. This astral world is as clear and transparent to the seer who can investigate in the psychic sphere as the physical world is to the eyes of the physical investigator.

In the physical world we distinguish three kinds of existence, three kinds of states of aggregation: solid, liquid and gaseous; moreover, the so-called ether, the etheric materiality, which is the reason why light passes through space, heat and so on. This is the finest state on the physical plane. Exactly the same in terms of division, but quite different in terms of quality, in terms of properties, it is in the astral world. In the astral world we are dealing with different astral materiality. Something penetrates into our world that we know, something penetrates all of us human beings, and we call it the astral world. In the astral world we see, without being able to grasp it properly, the astral substances. Even in the Middle Ages, the people who knew something about it spoke of substances through which the drawing in of the self [into the physical] takes place, and they called these substances "humores." What in our physical world these different states of matter are, solid, liquid, gaseous and ethereal, these are in the psychic world the four humores, but we can only name them according to their reflection, as they are in us, as they live in us. To the physical states of matter solid, liquid, gaseous, ethereal corresponds in the astral world what we call the four temperaments. That which causes in us that we have this or that temperament, corresponds to a quite certain state of matter. Whoever has a choleric temperament in the astral body will find that one of the humors particularly developed which corresponds to the state of matter of the choleric - cholae. Thus in the astral world we have the temperaments as correspondence for the four states of matter. As the ancients spoke of earth, water, air, fire, so they also spoke of four states of matter in the astral, and these consist of astral substances. Depending on the predominance of one or the other astral substance, man carries one or the other temperament.

Just as space with its three dimensions is inherent in our physical existence, so there is also an astral space, but it is of a different nature than our physical space. And because it is of a different nature, it will be difficult for the beginner to find his way around there. Something corresponding to the physical dimensions also exists in the astral. Just as our physical space has height, width and depth, there are also certain dimensions in the astral field. And now there is a strange connection between the dimensions on the astral field and what we call "time" in physical life. Past, present and future in the physical are only projections, shadowy images of those dimensions which are the dimensions in the astral world. There is also something like past, present and future as dimensions in the astral world. But this distinguishes the astral world from our physical world, that there is still a dimension unimaginable for our physical existence, which exists apart from present, past and future, which is often counted as the fourth dimension. This is a figurative, but not completely unsuitable expression. No one should speak of the fourth dimension who does not have a view of it.

The astral world is confusing for the one who takes a look into it for the first time. It also differs from the physical world in that things are not solid, but permeable. Therefore we call it the region of permeability. There are no boundaries of the body there for the astral eye as in the physical world; of every body its back side is just as visible as the front side. Basically, in the astral world we don't see from the outside at all as in the physical. You know, in the physical we see things as they place themselves before us, so to speak; for example, in an avenue departing from us we see the trees in perspective. The space offers us a perspective looking. The more distant trees seem to be closer to each other, the closer trees seem to be further away from each other. This way of looking stops completely in the astral. There we look at things from the inside. If you look at a cube from the outside, the sides of the cube appear to you in perspective. The astral looking is as if you would stand in the middle of the cube and could look at it on all sides from the inside. This is what Leadbeater said in his "Astral Plane". We can only give a kind of symbol, a kind of projection of it. Our words refer only to the physical plane; we must therefore first translate what we see astrally into physical language. When we say that in the astral we look at things from within, this is only a translation of what is present in the astral into the physical projection. For the beginner, this creates a kind of confusion, that he sees things from a different side [than the one he is used to]. His point of view changes completely. All beginners have this experience in common. For example, when you look at a number in the astral, for example 265, you see it according to old habit as you see it in the physical from the outside. In the astral, however, you have the point of view of seeing things from the inside. The number must be read 562 in the astral, because the point of view is from the inside, so it must be read symmetrically reversed from the other side. These are the reasons for the confusion that first appears in beginners to whom the eye is opened. However, it is a theosophical principle that no one's eye may be opened unless it is done at the hand of an adept, as we call the connoisseurs in this field. He who is guided by masters cannot possibly be exposed to such errors.

This is the world in which man finds himself before his physical embodiment, before his physical body has formed. Let us now consider that which rushes from the physical world towards the astral organism, man's physical corporeality, which is born through physical, through physiological forces. I call your attention to a fact which at the same time concerns the mystery of birth and death. By moving into the physical world, by taking possession of the physical world and weaving physical matter into it, man is subject to the laws of procreation, to the laws of birth and death as we know them in the physical world today. It is true that there is another birth and death; but the birth and death which we know exist only in our epoch of mankind within the Atlantean time and a part of the Lemurian time. These three epochs of mankind [root races] were preceded by two others in which men did not have such a dense body as we have. They had a fine, not yet coarse body, and with this body was not yet connected what we now know as the physical process of reproduction. This does not occur until within the third root race, [in the Lemurian period]. Before that, there was a kind of reproduction within living beings, which we are still reminded of today by the lowest natural beings, which reproduce simply by cell division. A cell constricts and divides; this is asexual reproduction. Humans reproduced during the first and second root races, [in the Polar and Hyperborean periods], by such division of the etheric body. These two races of men, which preceded the third, reproduced in such a way that one body let the other emerge from itself. This kind of reproduction is only a reminder of these oldest epochs.

You may know that the most ancient time had the worship of Adam Kadmon. You know this from the Indian secret teachings, and you also know from the Bible the double creation story. In the first creation story it is told: God created man, and - as it literally says there - He created man male-female. - Sexual reproduction was not the first. That, what one often feels as a contradiction with an external view of the Bible, the double creation history, is not a contradiction, because the first creation history tells about those human races, with which there was still no sexuality, which were still male-female. Only in the third root race, in the Lemurian time, the division of the sexes occurred and what we call in the physical sense today birth and death. But also something else occurred [in this time], which was not there before: The people did not have the capacity of imagination [in the today's sense] yet. That we can imagine an object today, that is something that only became so in the fifth epoch. I can create a mental image, for example, of a bottle. The [earlier people] could not do that yet. Simultaneously with the physical materiality the ability of imagining developed.

Now, strangely enough, we meet here one of those important historical facts which then led to the foundation of the theosophical movement in the present time. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century natural science came to form ideas about sexual reproduction and about birth and death which the Theosophists had already had centuries ago. The last period, which we have all witnessed, has brought light into the physical reproduction of man and thus also of the higher animals. Today, natural science no longer stands on the same standpoint as twenty years ago, that bisexuality is necessary. You can read this today in works of natural science. Sure and authoritative researches have shown that today's way of reproduction has a completely different meaning than the one that was given to it until now. Because the nature could have been sufficient also with the unisexuality. Today it is quite scientifically proven that two sexes are not necessary for reproduction, that something else was intended with the bisexuality, because one sex would have been sufficient for reproduction. What is the meaning of the bisexuality? There the natural science tells us: The bisexuality has occurred so that a mixture of qualities takes place. Otherwise there would be a much smaller variety in the physical body; the later descendants would always show the same type as the earliest ancestors. In order to mix as many substances as possible, in order to bring about the mixture of properties, nature has given rise to two sexes. A diversity should be brought forth in the third race of mankind. And there also the first animals came into being. The purpose of nature was to bring forth beings as manifold as possible, so that the beings coming down from the spiritual and the astral would find bodies as manifold as possible. Man should find a new body, which has passed through the most manifold mixture, in order not to remain the old type. You see, natural science has investigated here what theosophy has also taught since ancient times.

Now that we have seen both the descent of the spiritual and how the physical comes to meet the descending spiritual, let us again consider the process. What I say are facts, it is quite certain. I will show from both sides the elements that are present in the process of becoming human. First we have to do with the development of the germ, which looks like a small fish in the first days. I need only sketchily indicate this germ; it is something like this. (It was drawn on the blackboard; the drawing has not been preserved). To this comes the astral being about the seventeenth day; and this astral being the psychic investigator knows as well as the physical investigator knows the physical. The seer sees in the astral many funnel-shaped figures. These are the nascent human beings; these are the entities seeking their physical embodiment. Animated by the urgent desire to embody themselves, these entities rush through the astral space with great speed, seeking physical materiality. Who has read the second part of the "Faust" and remembers the scene with the Homunculus, will understand it only if he knows that Goethe wanted to represent this process. These astral formations have the most different colorations, of which we can hardly get an idea. Within this astral body there is a stripe, which loses itself into the indefinite. It is of light yellow color. This astral body connects with the physical body chosen by itself, when the embryo has approximately the shape of a little fish. Then a change occurs. The ray of light splits into two parts, into two brightly shining ray stripes. This is the case with the majority of human beings, and this is how it would appear to you if you could follow human beings as they come into being. Only a few people show a slightly different process. Only a few people show a permanent bright stripe, which, however, fades somewhat at the moment when it disappears completely in other people, but it still remains. These are the people who have spiritual vision.

First of all, we hold on to the usual process, where the light stripe divides. Now the astral entity unites with the physical human germ. From the one droplet everything is flowed through, as it were by a light-yellow liquid. This later grows into the so-called sympathetic nerve plexus, which supplies the physical nervous system of man. Apart from the brain and spinal cord system, we have another nervous system, the sympathetic one, which directs the lower functions. One drop flows through the sympathetic nervous system, the other through the brain and spinal cord system. This is how the human being is animated. Lawfully, the two cones of light pass into the physical and spiritualize it. In every human being, this light appears again, which passes through the brain in particular. When the moment has occurred, what man has brought with him from the former life and what he has from the physical world are actually united. In this way, the two entities that make up the full human being come together.

We have lived in previous incarnations; we have passed through the spiritual world; there we were spirit. The spirit goes down through the astral world and surrounds itself with the astral matter. This is what man brings with him from the former life and what he attracts from the astral sphere. These two things are what man brings with him, the spiritual and the astral. The luminous, these are the abilities that we brought with us from previous lives. These move in after the being has satisfied the burning desire to be connected with an astral organism. From now on, the human germ grows not only by the physical force, but also from within. What he has gained in previous lives, that now works from within to make the body. Not your organism builds your soul, but your soul builds your organism. The human germ is only a few days old when it is united with the soul. It is the only thing that is given to us from outside. It is given to us by very specific laws. We will discuss them in more detail.

In fact, we understand man's birth and death only when we know what two entities he consists of and how these two entities have flowed together, forming the whole man. So it is that we ourselves work on our external organs; they are not a product of the external world, they are a reflection of what we have brought with us.

Today we must take a look at the important questions of the origin and nature of man. When these important things are asked, it cannot be said that the answer to them is a particularly easy one. The following lectures will give us less difficulty.

From three components essentially, so I said in the beginning of these lectures, we have to think of man composed: from body, soul and spirit. How these parts of man are composed, we will see in the further course of the lectures. Theosophical insight shows us a threefold origin of our own nature, and in order to discuss this threefold origin, the physical, the soul and the spiritual, we must go to the most remote regions of the universe imaginable, we must take a look at those processes which we as Theosophists conceive as processes in the Divine-Spiritual itself and in its life. The esoteric philosophy of all times refers to the universe in its depths as a rhythmic life of the world spirit. The Indian philosophy, for example, speaks of the inhalation and exhalation of Brahma. Brahma goes through different stages of his divine life. These stages proceed in such a way that they can be compared to an inhalation and exhalation of the divine original spirit. The exhalation became a world existence, the inhalation is the transition from a world that has fulfilled its task into a kind of sleeping state, which then has to pass over into a new existence, into a new exhalation. Thus, the states of the revealed world and the states of rest continually alternate. Manvantara and Pralaya, these are the states of revelation and the states of the deity resting in himself. This is a picture. What process this picture is based on, human words would not suffice to describe in our time.

According to our human view, that is, according to the view of those whose spiritual gaze is open to these mysterious states of the universe, we have to distinguish three different breaths of the divine original spirit, and these three breaths represent at the same time the threefold origin of man. The fact that man consists of three parts, body, soul and spirit, owes its origin to three parts of the divine breath. Let us try to trace this threefold origin of the human being.

First of all, let us think of seven stages of development, from the first stage to how man confronts us in his present stage of development. On the first stage of development, which we call the first elementary kingdom of the universe, there is still nothing of what we now encounter in our world. There is still nothing at all of the diversity of the stones, the plant and animal world, as they appear to us today, also nothing of the diversity of our thought world, also nothing of the thought formation underlying our world formation, also nothing of natural laws. But in the first elementary kingdom there is the system of the predispositions to everything later.

Whoever has an eye for this system of all further wide germs, knows that these germs are of an infinite beauty and sublimity. Everything that comes to light later is only a faint reflection of that which is germ-like present in the first elementary kingdom. In this there are present the great intentions of the divine original spirit, the intentions he has with the individual worlds. And as the [developments] lag behind the intentions, so they lag behind also with regard to the being of the worlds, not as a whole, but in details. In the great manifoldness of infinity, the intentions are wonderfully fulfilled. That is why theosophy calls this first elementary realm the world of the formless, which only later gives birth to the form out of itself.

Only in the later course this world of the original spirit takes form. This can only be compared with the forms which our thoughts have in us. Think that what you have outside of yourself would have disappeared and only what you can remember would be present to you. You would have around you a sea of thoughts. What you have seen and heard you have forgotten, also what you have seen of physical things. Such thought-forms - only large ones - are the content of the second elementary realm. The whole world-all has been a formed thought-all. As Plato once imagined the world of ideas, so we must imagine the realm of formed thoughts, the realm of the world of reason, as the mystics in the Middle Ages imagined it.

And further the development shows a denser stage. The world thoughts imprint themselves for the first time on a substance, which one can call substance only in truth. This is the astral realm. The light thoughts have become astral beings, which we can now perceive as urges and passions flooding the space. Only the seer perceives these currents, he perceives them in luminous forms. These currents are present in the third elemental kingdom. Ancient philosophers speak of these three elementary kingdoms, but the people who follow this today do not know what was once meant by it. We only need to go back to Empedocles, we find that he knew about it. He said: Everything is caused by love and hate. At this second and third stage the thoughts have condensed down. After the third stage was reached, then the astral matter consolidated. It became denser and denser and weaved into itself those substances and activities which the physical man now only knows. It wove into itself a web of natural laws and forces. Theosophy calls this kingdom the mineral kingdom. You must not imagine that the mineral kingdom at this stage contained already formed minerals, crystals and so on. No, all that which later, on much later stages, becomes mineral, which undergoes chemical compounds and decomposition, still runs through this realm like lightning and thunder, the fourth realm, which we call the cosmic mineral realm or the fourth elemental realm.

What lives in our physical body today, what governs all the laws in our physical body today, everything that is lawfully present in our body, was at that time dissolved in these forces, in these mineral forces, which are sweeping through the world space. Everything that constitutes the present body was present in that mineral kingdom. From there comes the origin of the forces and substances which are in our bodies and compose a part of our being. Out of these elementary processes the corporeal of man was formed. And at the moment of time when these elementary processes have progressed so far as I have described, at this moment of time something else enters into this mineral universe, and this something else of which I shall now speak is that which lives in us as our soul component. Originally, both the physical and the soul components were contained in the one divine primordial being. As it were, it was the first part of the divine breath that I have now described. The other part I will now describe.

The first part [of the development] we can summarize in such a way that we call man a generic being. In terms of genus, people are more or less the same. After all, we also speak of plant genus and animal genus. Thus, there is also a human genus that inhabits the whole earth. In each individual being of the genus the personality is present. Because I am a being of the human genus, I am physically formed in the same way as all other human beings, but in this human genus there is what I call my personality, and this makes up the soul. I am personality by the fact that I have personal interests, personal sympathies and antipathies and so on. Although people are alike as generic beings, they differ in personality in such a way that not one person is like another. This personal in man is not originated by the same part of the divine breath, that comes from another side to unite with the mineral substance. The generic character came into being through [the first part of the divine breath], the personality comes into being through the fact that up to the point where it unites [with the generic being] it has made a different path through the universe. On this other path, that which later constitutes the human personality has already passed through a series of stages, of lessons in the universe, that was already embodied on other stages, that was present in natures similar to our physical nature, similar to plant beings, similar to animal beings, only in a different, different way. The forces which are capable of making us personality have already passed through many stages, and this I would now like to describe.

The personality of man, therefore, comes over from another world; it has already passed through stages of development, in order then to unite with the other part, the generic. Cloudy desires are those which come over as if from a side stream to a main stream. Imagine that into this stream of universal mineral-elemental substance now flow innumerable such personality beings, who already once had physical corporeality, who as beings looked quite different from us human beings, but who were nevertheless our ancestors. Imagine that these beings had a physicality which was much denser and larger than our physicality. We can say they split off from the divine breath. A stream of force had arisen, which through the stages of development learned to become personality. All the souls inhabiting human bodies came over from this stream. Having graduated from a bad state, they let themselves sink as a germ, as it were, into the substance of the universe, as I described earlier, as turbid desires and passions, and constituted themselves as a personality. They connected themselves with that which is itself passion and desire. This current has evolved down until it has become the astral world.

This cosmic drive and passion nature is sunk into the physical human germ with the facility of development. At this moment the beginning of the development of our earthly being is given. At the moment of the union of these two, our earthly career begins. We also designate this double origin of man in such a way that we say: The universal Logos, on which the original spirit is based, has sent down a stream, the third Logos, and the third Logos has taken on different forms, which I have described as the first, second and third elementary kingdoms. You must not imagine that this third part of the Logos, this third part of the breath of the divine world soul, has been inactive until now. No, the whole series of elementary kingdoms which I have enumerated and the whole conduction of the impulse nature up to the personality, this spiritual entity, the third part of the divine breath, has directed from without. What was necessary to prepare these two sides until they reached the point of development to unite, all this has been effected by the third breath of the divine world soul. And the second Logos, too, has passed through various stages until it has become the germinal plant of the personality. The third and the second Logos flow together, and out of this flowing together of the third and the second Logos arise those formations which gradually build up our earthly sphere.

Now begins the human development as we see it with us. That which is capable of forming a mineral body out of desire, sensuality, instinct, and that which has learned to develop these qualities as a personality, these unite. And now man begins his earthly migration. Now begins the union between the human generic being and the human personality. They learn to send themselves into each other little by little. In us are these two. They are in us in such a way that the generic being works in us as the physical, and the personal, which has come over from the other world, works as our spiritual. Only gradually do they find in themselves the harmony to work together in such a way that the spiritual, which comes from the second Logos, harmonizes with the physical. The body is at first an unfeeling carrier of the psychic. The psychic cannot yet find the necessary organs and forces in the physical to express itself fully. Thus the psychic works its way through, as it were, imprinting itself on the material. In a series of cycles of development the spirit takes on material nature. The development proceeds in such a way that the body becomes more and more the expression, the tool of the psychic, of the inhabitant. Then the stage occurs when the actual spirit, what we call the spiritual of man, unites with these two other elements.

Now this divine breath itself flows into that which has been built up only after the two parts have adapted themselves to each other, so that one is the carrier and the other the force. Then the highest flows into this nature. That which until now was only the central conductor, the general universal world wisdom, now flows into the world beings. This is the moment we call the inflow of the first Logos. Everything has now become so mature that it can serve as a carrier of the first Logos. I will show you this moment of the inflow of the first Logos in this way: Imagine a room illuminated by a central light. On the sides of the room are reflecting spheres that reflect the light back in a thousand different ways. Every single sphere reflects back the image of the light. This is how we must imagine the man in the universe, guided by the spirit from outside. Let us assume that the spheres symbolically, symbolically represent the human beings as generic beings. The light, which gives light to all, comes from the outside, so that the spheres can give only an unsubstantial reflection from the inside. So it was with the human development up to the point of time of which we speak now. Until then man was like a mirror, which was illuminated by the first Logos, by the spirit soul of the world. Man threw back the light of the world soul, he reflected what the spirit light radiated.

But now think of the light transformed in such a way that the central light flows out and begins to penetrate the spheres, to awaken the individual spheres to shine with a part of its essence. The light flows out to bring to living self-lighting that which until now could only be a mirror image. From the spheres now shines their own light, which is separated from the central light. Thus we must imagine that at a certain moment of development the first Logos, the spirit soul, sacrificed a part of the light in order to pour it into man.

Now the human being is endowed with all three parts of his beingness. The first Logos has taken possession of the human being. Henceforth man consists of three parts. The part that has passed through the mineral kingdom has united with the development of the soul and has then continued to the state of maturity so that the spirit, the sun of the world, the spirit soul, could take possession of him.

In three successive stages of development these three parts have united with man. We can indicate the exact moment when this took place. We are now living in the fifth epoch of mankind. This influx of the spirit happened in the middle of the third human epoch, in the Lemurian period. The third human race, the Lemurians, inhabited a continent which has long since perished, but which existed south of the fore and hind Indies, the so-called Lemuria. At that time, what we call the imaginative life of man was formed first. After that came the fourth human race, the Atlantians, who lived on a continent between Africa and America, of which we are still told in Plato's writings. After this the fifth human race developed, to which we belong. In the third human race, in the Lemurian time, man began to have a three-part nature. At that time, the first beings developed into what we know today as human beings. But what were those beings like? That which we are in truth, that which is eternal in us, that was before purely spiritual nature. Our higher nature was previously decided in the bosom of the primordial world. It is eternal and imperishable, not in the form it has taken, but in the innermost essence. Before our spirit nature took possession of human nature, it was a purely spiritual being and formed a component of that which is present as the central sun, the spirit light of the world. That which descended to the physical man was not yet that which is in man today, that was only a reflection of his real nature; it inhabited only spiritual spheres of the world, the spheres of the first Logos. As spiritual beings we rested in the Logos, as the first sparks in the flame of the central light. Then our spirituality sank deeply into that which was prepared for us as a carrier, and that which descended, that which lives from eternity to eternity in the most diverse forms, that is the third element of human nature. This is what we call the actual individuality of man.

Thus, man consists of the generic being, which has the same form for all people living on earth. There, people do not differ from each other. This is the physical nature of man. The other nature, the spiritual -- joy and pain, desire and passion -- that is his personal nature. That arises and disappears and arises anew in the astral world. That such personalities can arise, for this the disposition is given in the stream, which I have described as the second stream. Besides this we have the individuality or also the causal body. Why do we call the individuality also causal body? The causal bodies were always present. They are imperishable. They have, before they inhabited these bodies, inhabited another body in the earlier races, all the way back to the Lemurian race of men who lived on the island of Lemuria. Always has this causal body embodied itself, but it moved into a human psychic body being for the first time in the Lemurian period. Before that he was not yet involved in matter and not yet involved in the psyche. He led a spiritual existence, which he will lead again when he will have gone through his various lessons which he has to make. That which we call causal body, that is what forms our eternal. What we carry within us as soul, what inhabits our body as soul, that has united with our physical body, so that we can say: The possibility that a personal arose in a physical body, has resulted from the fact that soul and physical body united in the beginning of our earth development. This did not emerge from primordial mists, as the physicists and astronomers imagine, but it emerged from what the ancients call the "waters" above which the spirit hovered. This means nothing else than the spirit of which I have spoken, the spirit which came from quite other universal worlds.

At that time the preparatory stage of man began. It took a long time until the physical and the astral body were prepared to become a carrier of the actual spirit soul. In the "Secret Doctrine" of Blavatsky this moment of the union of the psychic with the physical and also the moment of the union of the spiritual with the psychic-bodily are alluded to; and last of all the three parts of the breath of the world soul are alluded to with the words: The world soul had again slumbered through seven eternities. - That was a pralaya. Out of this vast slumber emerged that existence where the human being learned that it could soul a body subjected to mineral laws.

The human being flowed together from three currents. Three developments had to be gone through until they could come together in man. One origin has the generic being, another origin has the spiritual being and another origin has the mental, the spiritual being. That to which the whole being is chained, that is our causal body, the eternal. It comes from purely spiritual spheres and should return to purely spiritual spheres; but it should return in such a way that it has learned within the earthly existence it is going through, that it has collected results in order to carry them back into the realm of the spiritual. He is to come back, enriched in himself, again into the spiritual.

If we want to visualize these three origins of man, we can compare them to something like the building of a house. The house is built of building blocks; then we have the house furnishings, that which fills the inner rooms, that which constitutes the comfort of the house; this is to be compared with the human soul. Within the whole is the thought. It can be compared with the causal body, with the ideal spirit that inhabits the body. The sense organs are the windows through which the causal body looks out into the world. Before we moved into the body, we were gifted with spiritual sense organs and saw everything around us without hindrance. Having moved into a "house", man must look out through the windows, through the windows of the sense organs nature must penetrate to him. Just as man cannot always live in the open air, but must return to a house, so the spirit must again and again move into the building prepared for it, in order to look through the sense organs, the windows, at what it formerly saw from the outside. Why this is so and how the laws are, according to which it is formed, of it the next time.

An old writer, Olympiodoros, tells occasionally in a discussion of a work of Plato about the Hades journey of Odysseus. We know that in a great Homeric epic, the "Odyssey", we are told that Odysseus also descended into the underworld. Whoever understands the language of the Greek initiates who wrote such things, will know that the descent into the underworld always means the initiation into the mysteries, the crossing of the gate of death already during life. In our particular case it also means getting to know the astral world. So this descent of Odysseus into the underworld means nothing else than that Odysseus gets to know the world of the astral. Among other things, we are told that Odysseus saw three deceased persons in the underworld: Tityos, Sisyphus and Tantalus. He saw the first, Tityos, lying on the ground with two vultures eating at his liver. The Tantalos he saw standing by a lake suffering burning thirst; when he bent down to drink, the water dried up so that he could not reach it. He also suffered from hunger. Above him was a tree with apples; but when he tried to reach it, it slipped away. These are pictures to show us what forms man's desires take in the astral world after death, how man is attached to desires and how they are acted out. The first, Tityos, is lying on the earth and an evil force, a vulture, is gnawing at his liver. This indicates that he has been attached to the lower, sensual life and that this lower, sensual life cannot bring satisfaction in the long run. Sisyphus, the greedy one, is tormented by the fact that he can never satisfy his desires, which always arise anew. Tantalos hangs on the images of a fantastic imagination and must savor the eternally unsatisfactory of such an imagination.

There are given images for our astral life. To whom the eye is opened for the astral world, he can speak only in such pictures. The seer knows how little the words of our daily life are sufficient to describe what he sees in the astral world. Our language can only be a very meager means of expression to put into words what is to be told about. That is why I will hardly be able to give you anything else today than pictures, as a pictorial idea of the beings which become known to the one whose vision is opened. These are beings that populate our space, even if we do not perceive them in physical life. The astral world is full of colors, which the seer sees like an external reality. He who directs his gaze only to the outer appearance of man and sees only in it the whole essence of man, is like one who would say that a man has disappeared when he has entered the door of a house and is now no longer visible. We know that he still exists and is only covered by the wall of the house. And just as the wall of the house covers him, so the physicality of man covers what we are now talking about; it covers it because it is invisible to the ordinary senses. So also beings that have no physical corporeality are present in the astral space, although they do not become visible to the physical eye. And you all are present in the astral space as well as in the physical space.

The first thing that man comes to know when he enters the astral space, that is, what he sees when the astral eye is opened to him, is: he finds himself enveloped in the astral body. It is this astral body in which all the desires, passions, sensations and so on are surging. There we see clearly what otherwise lies closed in human nature. Everything hidden becomes visible when we look at this human aura. From it flows out in wave-like movements with a certain luminous power what I have called the astral, man's entire sentient nature.

I would like to mention some details which will show you how some things which we otherwise find incomprehensible become immediately understandable. One can often see that certain people, when they stand at an abyss, show an insurmountable eagerness to plunge into it, although they resist it with all their strength. Or one can see what thoughts run through a man's soul when he has a knife in his hand. All these things have their deep foundation in the human astral body. They are based on the fact that in the astral we have a completely different being than we encounter in the human exterior. But they are subject to fate, to karma. Whoever has certain desires in life, has gone through experiences in a previous life, which can be deeply pushed into the background by the present mind. However, they are dormant in the astral body. Suppose someone has participated in a cruel war in a previous life; there you will see in his aura how, through his karma, all these cruelties have been built into his astral body, with which he now has to fight hard battles in the present physical life. Just as threads are spun between a previous life and the present, so threads are spun from the present to later lives. All this the seer sees. He sees how a person's karma is formed, and he also sees, for example, how a person out of prudence tries to suppress an inclination or how he represses feelings. The seer sees down to the bottom of the soul. Those who have the gift of seeing do not consider it a desirable gift that brings joy in all cases, mainly when people have feelings that they had better not have. And for the beginner, the chela, it is often fatal, because easily he is attracted by all that he now sees.

Then we find in the astral space the essence of man's waking and sleeping. What does it mean: waking and sleeping? This is something that the ordinary man accepts without having a precise and definite concept of it. What lives in us is something that man does not immediately recognize in our present epoch. The higher self rests in man. He thinks and acts out of the higher self. But man of the fifth root race [the present epoch] does not see this higher self. Everything that consciousness offers us is only a reflection of the higher self. Man sees himself only as a reflection, his brain is the mirror. What the brain throws back as a mirror image is not the real human being; this slumbers deep within us and cannot be seen directly. It is the physical body alone that can tire; it ceases its activity as a mirror during sleep. The higher self, whose reflection is the outer man, does not tire, it only withdraws more or less from the physical. While the body sleeps, freed from the outer physicality, it leaves the outer man and can perform its activity in the astral space. The seer sees this activity in the astral space.

The man of the present stage of development leaves his body in sleep. He wanders, sometimes at great distances from his physical body, in the astral world and there meets other beings of the astral world and exchanges with their thoughts. But when man wakes up, he does not remember this. This has to do with his present stage of development. However, the development can become one higher and higher. The student who learns under the guidance of a so-called master can gradually make his consciousness a continuous one, an ongoing one. Then he will be able to bring the experiences of the night to his consciousness as a memory in his waking state. When the disciple, the chela, has reached a continuous consciousness, then he remembers what he received in the astral world. These cognitions of the chela are not learned in the physical world, but they are experienced in the astral world and brought into his physical life. This is what Plato means when he speaks of recollection of higher states of soul.

The consciousness, which in the average man continually breaks off, the chela is able to make into a permanent one, when he has attained the gift of having his reflection arise, produce, not merely in the physical body, but in the higher elements of human nature. Out of the solid, physical body arises for the average man the mirror image of his self; one can also say: he becomes conscious of himself. He who has reached the higher stage becomes conscious of his self not merely in the physical, but in the astral; it shines out to him from the astral. Thus, on the astral plane, you will meet above all the chelas, the disciples, who are able to bring their consciousness up into the astral region. To bring up the consciousness into the astral region is that which also forms the content of the theosophical teaching and the content of the instruction which a highly evolved master gives to his disciples. This intercourse between master and chela takes place in the astral space. A translation of the teaching in the astral into physical words, into physical sentences is what theosophy is able to offer.

Thus, we have already met two kinds of entities that we meet in the astral space: Masters and disciples. In addition, there are those people who are also psychically developed but have not had regular lessons, the somnambulists, who have an ambiguous consciousness. They know that there are people for whom it is possible, without having received instruction from a master, to make very special perceptions at certain times, perceptions that are independent of their senses. But only for the one who enters the astral region through theosophical training, there is no error. The theosophist knows how to distinguish what comes from pathological states and what are deeper truths. If we follow the somnambulist in the awake and in the trance state, we see that the soul can step out of the body and become seeing. But we would not believe a word of the somnambulist if we did not have evidence that this undisciplined seeing can coincide with the seeing of the seer. The student who has developed continuous consciousness, who sees astral things as he sees tables and chairs, knows also that the somnambulists in their special states sometimes behold true things. They have the ability to temporarily lift their self out of corporeality and thereby see what cannot be seen with the ordinary senses. These temporarily body-liberated souls are the third that you can meet as inhabitants of the astral space. The fourth thing we encounter in the astral world is something not very pleasant, it is the destroyers and devastators in the astral.

I have often mentioned that our physical world was preceded by another, the fruits of which we enjoy. We can call our earth the cosmos of love, where man is trained in love until he will have reached the highest level in our round. When we survey this development and direct our gaze to what will be there in the future, we know that the earth is a school of love development. But we must also look at what has already existed in an earlier state. Our world body was born out of another one. The earth was preceded by another world body, the old moon, on which that was prepared which we need to go through our earthly course. From what man has gone through, his physical organs have been formed. On the former planetary state, the cosmos of wisdom, he has built up the human feeling, the feeling organs. The body of sensation was built up then.

At that time, when we humans began our development, the ability of sensation was woven into our physical organism. Consider what wisdom is added to the chemical constitution of the physical body by the weaving in of sensations and feelings. To purify these sensations and feelings, to refine them into moral sensations, into moral feelings - that is the task of our earthly life. Just as we on earth have the task to form moral sensations and feelings, so it was at that time on the cosmos of wisdom, which preceded ours, the highest task of the beings to create a wise structure of the sense organism. The beings had to devote themselves to the formation of sensuality. Through infinite wisdom the functions of the senses have come into being.

Now consider that in the different successive cosmic states the beings have different tasks. To make these different tasks understandable, think of a piano maker and a piano player. The piano builder must devote himself with love and devotion to the construction of the piano, so he has a different task from the one who is to play on your piano. Both the piano builder and the piano player have their specific task, and both bring about good in their place. But if the builder of the piano also wanted to saw and plane and hammer in the concert hall, he would only have a destructive effect there. Yes, he is no good there, however great he may be as a master of piano construction.

In the astral world, too, there are beings of this kind who have attained a high degree of skill in the construction of the sensual organism, but who have not discarded this tendency in the transition to another stage of development. They are masters in building up the sensual matter, but they are as little good in our present development as the piano maker in the concert hall. They have a destructive, devastating effect, they work in the wrong place as evil spirits, because they are attached to forces which man needs as "substructure", but they do not lead the development of man further. These beings can have a high development, but they have an inclination that no longer fits into our development, therefore they can become dangerous to the chela, the beginner who is only learning to look in the astral world, because he can be attracted by these beings and thereby go astray.

There are also other beings in the astral world, such that do not descend into a physical embodiment and come to manifestation only in the astral space. They cannot be perceived by the one who has only the view for the physical-bodily. These beings are noble, and their aspiration is directed only to the goal of human development. They do not have human desires, they are not attached to the earthly, they have worked out that stage of development through which they have become helpers of mankind. They are not epicureans, yet we find them in the astral space, for they are waiting here for their future destiny.

In order to understand how this happens and what significance it has, we must make clear in a few words what will then be the subject of the sixth lecture: the state in the Kamaloka. When the human being leaves the physical body, the same is given to the earth; also the life force is discarded. Then he enters the astral world, the realm of desires. Man goes through a period in this astral world, then passes into devachan, and then descends again to embodiment. This is the normal [post-mortal] development of man, that he passes through two worlds, the world of the astral and the world of the purely spiritual, in order to become mature again afterwards for the next embodiment. In this next embodiment he then enjoys the fruits of the former life. "God does not allow him to be mocked. For what a man sows, that shall he also reap."

Consider that the higher-evolved one could have a rich harvest in the spiritual world. But he is free to return to earth after a short time and help those who have fallen behind in their spiritual development. Thus he can renounce the spiritual stay in the Devachan and wait until a master instructs him a new embodiment. We meet these figures among the so-called disembodied ones.

Visible only to the most highly developed of our time are still higher beings, who rarely stay in the astral world, because they have their home in still higher regions, on still higher levels of the spiritual world. When the chela evolves, he acquires the ability to have consciousness not only in the astral, but to have consciousness also in the still higher world, in the spiritual or devachanic world, which is higher than the astral world. In this higher world the self is mirrored to him. Man experiences himself in the higher spiritual regions as the mirror image he sees in the physical world. The beings, which belong here, are visible only for highly developed ones. Also these beings can renounce what is to be understood as the highest task of our earthly existence, they can renounce the "Nirvana". Such a being can renounce nirvana, it can return to the earthly world, to which it itself did not need to return at all, in order to help people. Such beings are called nirmanakayas. They are able to descend from the spiritual world into the astral and into the physical world, and in order to have a "point of attack" there, they take on an astral body. They do this to help people. These are the Nirmanakayas, which we can meet in the astral world, although rarely. I am speaking here of such entities, which are not visible to physical eyes, but only to those eyes that can receive impressions from the astral space. If the eyes can perceive impressions in the astral world, then they can perceive there Nirmanakayas and also such human beings who are between death and the next embodiment. I will talk about this in the next lecture.

In the astral world we also meet beings which are incomprehensible especially to the beginner. These are entities which are of the highest inner mobility and assume different forms and shapes and show their connection with the world in a completely different way than the human astral body. The human astral body has a closed form within limits, it has certain contours. The astral body of animals does not have such definite outlines. The astral bodies of animals look quite different. They do not belong to a single being, but for whole groups of animals there are group souls. As it were, the individual physical animals hang on a common trunk, and from these individual animals then a kind of strands lead to the group souls, which move the animals. You can also discover certain animal forms, which cannot be encountered in the physical, in the astral. These astral bodies are nascent human beings who are forming and further developing their astral bodies in order to form a suitable vehicle for those who come down from the spiritual world.

However, these are not yet all entities of the astral world. We also meet in the astral world entities of a nature difficult to describe, entities whose size we cannot survey, entities of a size as if they extended over our whole planetary system. These entities, which span the whole earth, clearly show that they have something to do with our earthly development, but earthly man can only with difficulty form an idea of them. These entities, which exist in the most different variations, are connected with the whole of our development. They went through a development in the earlier rounds of the earth's development. Three rounds preceded our earth and three rounds will follow. These entities, which were called "Devas" in the oldest and even more spiritual religions, will have reached a higher development when our earth will have reached its goal. They are thought to be human-like, because people cannot form a proper idea of them. However, the people who know something about them will find it indicated how the cosmological development is going on.

When a "cosmos" begins to develop in the first, second and third round, then it is like a child develops in the first three years of life. It is indicated with it, as it were, the way which it will take in the life. Only then comes that which is the actual task of the cosmos; we call this the "truth" of the cosmos. On our present earth the truth has come to light; the three preceding rounds of the path of development represent the "way". The "truth" is the outer manifestation of this "way" in our present earth development. We will go through the third part of the development, the "life", when we will have penetrated our souls more and more by the truth. We will learn to recognize the truth, but the truth will become our life; then we will no longer need to gain the truth. Now this is still necessary to lead us to a moral and ethical life. But in the future, this truth will permeate us, it will be our life blood. Therefore, the one who is a representative of the truth flowing through the cosmos has taken this triple into his consciousness and has expressed it in the words: "I am the way, the truth and the life.

Today we will speak about the development of the causal body. We hold to the fact that on average, reincarnations happen in such a way that centuries pass between two incarnations. The causal body is initially at a lower level, then [after further incarnations] at a higher and ever higher level. The first incarnation of the human being, and thus the formation of the causal body, occurred in the third root race of our earth round. Before that, the immortal human spirits had not yet incarnated in the bodies we now wear, nor in similar bodies. We will talk about the previous conditions.

I would now like to show how development occurs. You can get an idea of the regular stages of development by looking at the Indian and European cultural epochs. The European sub-race is not at a higher or lower level than the Indian one – the Indian sub-race is more spiritual, the European one is more intellectual. We get the same content from spirituality that the Indian sub-race gets from intellectuality. We can grasp spiritual things today if we were previously incarnated in a spiritual race. What we saw spiritually at the time when the Genesis of the Old Testament was written can be more easily grasped intellectually today. That we are able to understand today what the causal body created in earlier centuries is because we were even more spiritual as human beings then; we were still able to see higher truths directly. If we look at the Indians and also the Jews of ancient times, we see that they grasped the truths spiritually; today the Jews have also lost the spiritual, and the Indians have become more materialistic. Earlier it was not the custom to give the truths in a rational form, as we do today, but everything was given figuratively; and that which was originally given in a pictorial way is the spiritual truth. Those who know the symbols can understand the spiritual.

Scholars argue about the biblical account of the seven days of creation and the myth of the Fall of Man. However, the myth of the Fall of Man describes nothing other than what happened in the third root race, during the Lemurian period: the transition from the asexual to the bisexual. Kama-Manas and the bisexuality of man belong together; Kama-Manas appears as the mind that is active, that is the one pole, the other pole is the bisexuality. The separation into two sexes and the appearance of the mind in Kama-Manas, that is what the Fall of Man myth of the Bible represents. Each and every one of the facts must have been alive in the minds of those who created this myth. The facts were told in high mythical language. In the Bible they are somewhat distorted; for the connoisseur it is clear where the content of this myth is distorted and how it must have originally been. |

We will see how the myth was given at a time when humanity was still more spiritual. Step by step, we can take on the myth of the Fall of Man and we will recognize the deep wisdom in this myth.

The serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman...

The serpent symbol stands everywhere for the initiate. The one who is initiated in a certain way and brings a content to humanity from his initiation was called “serpent”. The serpent is the symbol of the one who is able to guide humanity through Kama-Manas. All that was manasic within the dense Earth was less “cunning”, so the serpent said to the woman:

... Yes, should God have said:
you shall not eat from every tree in the garden? (Genesis 3, 1)

The trees represent what people should work with Kama-Manas, thereby advancing within the earth, within the physical matter. The mind culture is meant, which is to work on what grows and thrives within the earth.

And the woman said to the serpent: We may eat fruit of the trees of the garden. But of the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God said: You shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.

As long as the human spirit had not embodied itself, there was no death and also not the present-day reproduction. Reproduction in the earlier human races happened in a different way: one body released the other. It was a differentiation without fertilization. There was no birth and death; only an attracting and repelling in elective affinity took place. The serpent, the master of Kama-Manas, could say: “When you acquire Kama-Manas, you eat of the tree, then you undergo a development.” That planet spirit, who is called Jehovah and who formerly led humanity alone, knew what would happen if Manas mixed with Kama through the serpent. When that happened, then men must also die.

And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:<5> for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

You shall not surely die, but your eyes shall be opened –: that is, you will have to develop the Manas through Kama. You will have to see everything through the eyes and then acquire knowledge. – Before that, people did not know what good and evil was, because they were guided from above.

And the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise; and she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

Then the eyes of both of them were opened...

Then the humans moved into the bodies and were able to observe through the sensory organs.

... and they realized that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. (Genesis 3, 6-7)

Previously, they could not perceive this, only now did they become “naked”. Physical matter shows the nature associated with kama manas, and the physical matter of “clothing” is the result of kama manas. Previously, man had a higher, finer matter, so he had no need to be ashamed. He had to make the physical matter suitable for his higher nature first. God did not make Kama, but Manas. But man was ashamed and made clothes.

And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden when the day had become cool. (Genesis 3, 8)

Until then, the planet spirit had guided people. Jehovah is the God of physical nature, in the “Secret Doctrine” the God of procreation, a moon god. Mrs. Blavatsky was held against her will for correctly characterizing Jehovah. Man receives sexuality from the cosmos through Jehovah.

And the man hid himself and his wife from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

And the Lord God called to the man, saying, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” (Genesis 3, 8-10)

In the beginning, people could not hide at all because Jehovah was guiding them. The Kabbalah says this much more clearly. In the original times, the secret doctrine was only given figuratively. “Adam-Kadmon” means the sexless Adam. Now the intellectual nature is within man, whereas before it was outside. Now man hides it in his inner nature, he hides it from outer wisdom.

And he said: Who told you that you are naked? Did you not eat of the tree, of which I commanded you, you should not eat of it?

Then Adam said: The woman whom you have joined me gave me of the tree, and I ate. (Genesis 3, 11-12)

The single-sex being has become a two-sex being. This was what had enabled the snake to lead humans down the path of Kama-Manas.

Then the Lord God said to the woman, “Why have you done this?”

And the woman said, “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.” So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, be cursed more than all cattle and all wild beasts (Genesis 3, 13-14)

On thy belly shall ye creep: and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.

To creep on one's belly and eat dust means nothing other than: everything that can be achieved by Kama-Manas can be achieved by man within earthly development.

And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. (Genesis 3, 15)

From the middle of the second race until the middle of the sixth, the polarity between seed and mind is taken over by animal sexuality. The mind can never want what sexuality wants.

The man shall crush your head, and you shall strike his heel.

Hostile forces will come from here and there. One pole is the kama-manasic forces, the other pole is the kamic forces. A new kind of unhappiness entered that had not been there before, and that is kamic.

And to the woman he said: I will greatly multiply your pain and your conception; in pain you shall bring forth children; and your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you.

This means that a new Kamic current is emerging. Lust and displeasure is essentially the nature of the Kamic. Man and woman always mean in the esoteric language the two forces: the man means the outer force, the woman the inner soul. 'Man and woman therefore mean outer energy and inner, soully power of mind. As long as man is on this physical path, the soul man must submit to the physical man. Consciousness must submit to the laws of physical development, that is, “He shall be your master”.

And to Adam he said: Because you have hearkened to the voice of your wife and eaten of the tree of which I commanded you saying: Thou shalt not eat thereof, accursed be the ground on your account; with toil shalt thou eat its yield all the days of thy life.

With sorrow shalt thou eat thy bread —: Jehovah is the planetary spirit whose rule extends only as far as Kama-Manas. A new regime is emerging. Therefore, Jehovah cannot allow Kama-Manas to enter into development. He therefore says, “I must create a cosmic counterbalance, because you obeyed the voice of your wife, the consciousness that has been filled with Kama-Manas, and ate of the knowledge of Kama-Manas, of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat. So be the field cursed for your sake -: thus the physical earth. At that time it was given to man as a self-evident gift, and now he must conquer it bit by bit. In the past, what animated man was more dissolved. “Cursed” means: made independent, depressed. He could no longer see the finer matter. Sorrow: that is a new unhappiness.

Thorns and thistles shall it bring you, and you shall eat the herb of the field.

In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for from it you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you shall return.

But he must become spiritual. He must work in the physical world until he has spiritualized himself again.

And Adam called his wife's name Eve, because she is a mother of all living. (Genesis 3, 20)

And from that hour on, Adam called his consciousness Eve, the mother of everything that man creates on earth, the mother of everything that man has developed on this path of evolution. And that will be the Eve, the kama-manasic one.

And the Lord God made tunics of skins for the man and his wife, and clothed them. (Genesis 3, 21)

He gave the physical-spiritual people from the outside what they needed to get ahead.

And the Lord God said, “Behold, Adam has become one of us, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:22)

Remember the image I used, where the light source is in the center and the balls around it reflect the light. Now the balls themselves are glowing, and God says: Before you were only a reflection of me; you were only the thought I sent out, now you have become independent beings, living, detached, independent beings.

But now, lest he reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever! So the Lord God drove him out from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.

Adam was chased out of the Garden of Eden. He was no longer allowed to stay there; he was no longer allowed to eat from the tree of immortality as he could do before; he had to acquire another nourishment for himself. The Manasic does not pass through the gate of birth and death. Disembodied wisdom represents the tree of life. Now man became kamayanic, and now he must go through birth and death. There are two different trees in paradise, of which he was allowed to eat from one. Now after the fall he should no longer do so. With Kama-Manas he has lost the possibility of eating from this immortality.

So the Lord God drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

The Cherub is the planetary spirit, signifying Manas, or immortal life; not signifying knowledge through Kama-Manas. The Cherub standing by Jehovah was placed before the Garden of Eden, that man should not penetrate into that Garden wherein is to be attained Truth in its primeval form.

Now imagine the development of humanity before the time of the third root race. It was the Dzyan-Chohan who guided them. Through being guided by him, they had access to wisdom. Man was directly guided spiritually, not through eyes, ears or inner organs. But now, when he had become kama-mana, the cherub stood before man and would not let him approach the tree of life. Man must first have passed through all kinds of births. This will continue to be the case until he has acquired the original immortality again.

The people of the third, fourth and even the fifth race still had a certain spiritual life; today we are mainly kama-manasische people, who are only endowed with a small spiritual influence. But we have already reached the lowest point, and theosophy, the theosophical movement, is intended to bring back the influence of spirituality. In the past, truths could not be taught in a rational form, so everything was given in images; then people became aware of higher knowledge. Those who still have some of the earlier spirituality are difficult to understand today; they express many things in sentences that are difficult to understand. You have to guess what the leader wants to say, because everything is only expressed figuratively. But it is the same thing that is to be expressed in Theosophy today. We could not interpret the Fall of Man in such a spiritual way if we had not received the wisdom from elsewhere. In the past, it was acquired mythically; today it is revealed to us through the advanced development of our causal body. In later stages of development, it will be revealed to you as a manasic wisdom.

In the previous lecture I spoke of the beings that are to be found in the astral world. I characterized the inhabitants of this world by distinguishing them into those who are presently embodied and those who are not presently embodied. Today I would like to talk about the events in the astral space, and I would like to characterize in general how we should imagine the events there. Of course, we can only give a very general sketch, because the world we encounter here is so overwhelmingly large that everyone who enters this world once is overwhelmed by the abundance of phenomena, so that no one could possibly describe the whole astral world from his own experience. Just as no one has seen the whole physical earth, no one has seen the whole astral world. Since the diversity of the astral world is far greater than that of the physical earth, you will be able to imagine that there are many things in the astral of which the individual cannot give an account. However, the individual can describe a small piece.

I count to the processes in the astral space also the meetings with entities, which we cannot meet in the physical world or only quite exceptionally. The astral space is, so to speak, a place where beings of different worlds can meet. It is just as people can meet each other in the earthly career, as a person can once meet another who lives in a completely different place, perhaps travels a short distance together with him, loses him again and then no longer meets him. As this is on a small scale, so it can also occur on a large scale, and so we can explain many things from the astral world.

We as human beings have not been from the beginning in such a way that we have embodied ourselves in the world in a physical body between birth and death, but we have made it in a kind of cosmic development that we have to go through three stations: through the physical life between birth and death, through the life in the Kamaloka and through the life in the Devachan. Not all beings pass through these stages, and we human beings have also had a time preceding ours, in which we were much closer to the astral world with our beingness. Before we had acquired the ability to embody ourselves physically, we were beings who lived purely in the astral world and who had astral senses. Out of the astral senses only our eyes and ears developed in the course of millions of years to the physical form which they have today. We were astral beings, and we will be astral beings again in the course of our evolution.

We are now in the fifth root race of the fourth round, which is the fifth epoch of mankind of the fourth round of earth evolution. We have evolved through four previous epochs and will re-embody in three following ones. Then this form of our planet, which it has now, will be replaced by another form, and we humans will also have another form instead of our earthly form. We will then no longer reincarnate in the same way as we do today. We will again be astral beings, entities which do not use the senses we have now, but we will be entities which act astrally. Soul beings we were, soul beings we will be again when the physical globe will have fulfilled its task. Through seven so-called "races" we pass, often through bad states, and in the future we will again be in an astral state and lead a completely different existence. We used to be purely passive beings, devoted to the impressions of the outside world, before our physical body had condensed into the physical core, through which it became possible to set physical muscles in motion to perform earthly actions. We will transform ourselves again, from passive to active entities. Everything that we have absorbed earthly, that we have processed, will have ripened as fruit in us; we will be active beings, activity beings.

Because we still carry something of our former astral form around with us, because something of it belongs to our astral body, and because past and future interpenetrate in us, that is why we also live in the astral world today. And we can develop our spiritual eye in such a way that we become sighted in the astral world just as the average person is sighted in the physical world. People are not aware of this because their spiritual eye is not open. But the disciple's eye is gradually opened. Whoever has gone through the training can expect that the spiritual eye will be opened to him so that he can see what is described in the theosophical teaching.

We are citizens of the physical world and the astral world. In the astral world, the disciple also encounters beings who do not belong to our earth, never have belonged to it, and never will belong to it. These beings have undergone other developments, they come from a completely different side of the world, they cross our astral plane. They have to make only one way stretch through the astral space together with us. They are, as it were, like the comets that pass through our planetary system. Such entities are strangers to our human-terrestrial development; their development in the astral world will be quite different from ours. They will meet with us only for a short time and then continue their development in a way that has nothing to do with ours.

These are facts of which the mystical writings of all times speak. In these entities, to which the mystical writings have given different names, nothing else is represented than those inhabitants of the earth who go through their development apart from our development, so-called elemental beings, elemental spirits. For these entities, what they experience through human beings is as strange as what a human being experiences when entering the astral space is strange to him. They behave mostly rejecting what approaches them from the physical world. The chela will experience the most manifold temptations through these beings, he can be attracted by these elemental spirits and thereby easily be diverted from the path marked out for him. These entities show sympathies or antipathies with what they encounter from our human sphere. It was not always so. In an earlier epoch they were not so antipathetic to physical men. Now, however, these beings have a great antipathy to everything that comes from the physical world.

These phenomena of the astral world have often been described figuratively. Today, some of them are considered as folk superstitions and people do not know that the expressions in the ancient scriptures are based on truths. Gnomes, undines, sylphs and salamanders were called in the Middle Ages these beings which never have a physical existence. Of course, it is easy to say something about these things, but only he speaks about them with full sense of responsibility who knows to distinguish what is superstition and what is reality. Superstition occurs at different levels. There is not only superstition, which is attached to us when we believe in some phenomena that are not really there. No, superstition can also be present in the greatest scholars, even in those who believe they have explored nature in all directions. The belief in matter can also be a superstition. The second stage of seeing, spiritual seeing, must be reached by the student in order to be able to distinguish what is physical reality and what is delusion. Then he also learns to recognize what in the literature [about elemental beings] is due to reality and what is only fantastic stuff.

You need not imagine the elemental beings as particularly highly developed; they do not go through birth and death as man does. The fewest have gone through something which would be even similar to a human development. Such developments are also not in front of most of them. Some come - like comets - from other planets, disappear again and continue their existence somewhere else. What these entities accomplish is not without influence on the people. Some things are going on in the human astral body, which go back to effects of these beings. Only to him who can see in the astral space, such processes, which can take place in the human astral body, are explainable.

There are also such entities on the astral plan, which are higher than human beings. Religions that know something about esotericism speak of such higher entities; the Indian religion, for example, speaks of devas. Also in the Christian religion one spoke of such beings. Gradually, Christianity has lost this knowledge, but there are still circles that know these beings. The devas take on a certain "physicality". Just as man takes his physical body from the natural elements, and just as our physical body is the lowest element possible for us, so the lowest body of the kama devas is the astral; it is composed of astral matter -- according to their stage of development. Other devas we call rupa devas. They live in the devachan, through which we pass between death and and a new birth. The materiality of the rupa-devas is the mental body, that of the arupa-devas the causal body. The causal body has to do with what draws us from embodiment to embodiment. That which is physical materiality passes away, passes away; the corpse is returned to the earth, to the chemical and physical forces. The astral body and the lower mental body also dissolve after death. There remains only the one soul in us, which returns again and again in a new embodiment, when the one development has reached the goal, in order to enter then into a new development. This one soul is woven from the material of the causal body, in which we can have the recollection of former lives and recognize the whole development in it. Who knows these facts, knows that Buddha did not give a picture when he spoke: I remember past lives, I remember how I was born there and there, how I helped there and there, had children there and there, I remember world stands, world passes through which I passed, and so on. - That spoke this squat individuality, which has anticipated the development, to which the people will come only in the sixth round, in which the human being will have a purely spiritual existence. Buddha has already developed this; he attained the ability to see the higher states. Ordinary people will attain this only later. Everyone will one day see all his past states of development passing by. This is because something always remains, namely the finest materiality of the causal body. And from this materiality the higher kinds of devas, the arupa devas, are formed. These are the three kinds of devas we can meet in the astral: Kama devas, Rupa devas, Arupa devas. First we meet those who are made of astral matter; but the other devas also have the ability to entwine themselves with astral matter so that they can be seen by astral seers.

By the fact that such a person can move freely in the astral space, thereby he can get in touch with the devas; an exchange of thoughts takes place. The development to higher knowledge, the development to the adept, to the master, consists in reaching what is called in individual occult writings: "The adept makes the gods subservient to himself." The adept gradually comes to do deeds in these higher worlds, and among the helpers of his deeds are not only human beings, but also such beings who never enter our earthly spheres. The intelligence of some devas, however, is lower than the wisdom of the budhi, the self-sacrificing love and the wisdomful creative power. Man can come into possession of such a degree of this power that he rises above most of the devas we meet. Then he makes them serve him. Some of what happens is that the adepts have their helpers in these deva beings who never come into our physical spheres.

Until the 15th century people possessed knowledge of them; but in the 14th, in the beginning of the 15th century all traces of communications about the devas are lost; no more was talked about these things in the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries; nobody had any knowledge of these things, except in very intimate circles. It was the time when the power of the mind was being developed. Today it is possible, at least to some extent, to speak again of these truths concerning the devas, about which absolute silence has prevailed for centuries; it is possible because the development of humanity is currently heading towards events in the spiritual realm that are great and significant, and because people must face things in such a way that they are prepared. The next thing that will happen very soon can be characterized by saying that people will overlook the background of good and evil to a much greater extent than they do today. They will look deep into the threads that the powers spin, they will see the fabric of the world, which will appear to people of the present time as a network of good and evil. This truth will be a realization of infinite significance. And now there is already the possibility of acquiring this knowledge of good and evil.

These are great things that have been spoken of now; there are now other things that are taking place in the astral. I will tell you something about that now. Man must be aware that in every moment of his life he also lives in the astral realm. Just as physical facts can be seen with physical eyes, so it can be seen in the astral realm that, for example, a wish that arises in you emanates like a cloud. Every wishful thought emanates from you like a force and flows out into the astral realm. Such thoughts are like lightning-like formations, others like fine cloud-like formations. Whatever power is in the thoughts forms itself into arrows or into pleasant cloud formations; rays and star formations also form. Everything takes shape and form the further it goes away from us. Everything is protean in nature; everything changes its shape and color. By color and form, one can recognize exactly what thoughts a person is sending out into space. If you send a thought filled with anger, it goes out from you like a bolt of lightning through the air, to the astral body of another person; this can be observed. It depends on the intensity of the desire whether the thought shoots quickly through the astral space, and it depends on the character of the desires in which colors they appear. Thoughts of a violent nature appear brownish red to bloody red; thoughts of a calm, contemplative, benevolent nature appear in an intense bluish to violet color. You can see sharp, logical thoughts as yellow star formations that intertwine. The chela learns to consciously evoke such thought forms in the astral realm by getting to know the laws of the astral and mental worlds. The chela knows exactly how the thoughts he sends out work in the astral realm. This is chela development: becoming more and more aware of these facts and only sending out thoughts for the benefit of humanity. This is one of the profound truths that Theosophy leads people to.

The processes in the astral realm are processes that always surround us, that take place in our environment. They are higher facts than those of our physical world. In the time between death and a new birth, the human being passes through these higher worlds. The chela can consciously enter these regions even before he dies. The development of man in Kamaloka, that is, what awaits man when he crosses the threshold of death, will be the subject of a separate consideration. Today I only wanted to touch on those things that are not related to this particular chapter. I have left out everything that can be discussed in connection with Kamaloka and Devachan. Next time we will hear the sixth and final lecture in this series.

I have shown that man has descended from higher worlds and that he in turn goes to higher worlds. Some things happen here that have their causes in the higher worlds. The teaching of a chela also takes place in a higher world. The chela may receive teaching in the physical world, but this is not the most important thing. More important is the teaching that takes place in the higher spheres. Things happen to people in the higher spheres that people are not aware of in their ordinary lives. The rational person can only know about these worlds if they are first reported to him. Receiving reports about them is a way of looking into the higher worlds. It is not unnecessary to first hear something about these higher worlds. What is told sinks into the spiritual of man and will in any case come to life in the future life. What is sown today as seed will bear fruit in the future. That was a saying of Paul, the Christian initiate: God is not mocked. For whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.

In this astral world, which we have now become acquainted with, man also participates during his physical life. Daily and hourly we participate in the processes of the astral world. We have become acquainted with the processes and entities which can be encountered in the astral world by those whose eyes are open to this astral world. Today, again, a special object is to be singled out; we want to look more closely today at that which Theosophy calls "Kamaloka".

If we want to understand what Kamaloka is, we must first of all be clear about the fact that we have already passed through many incarnations within our development, that many others have preceded our present incarnation in the flesh and that many others will follow. The essential thing is that we have to fulfill our tasks in this incarnation, in this earthly life.

It is quite wrong to claim that Theosophy distracts from life or wants to lead man into a kind of cloud-cuckoo-land, that it preaches an asceticism turning away from actual life. This would be a completely wrong conception of what the theosophical movement wants. Rather, theosophy regards this very life as the instrument, the tool, which we must use to fulfill our highest spiritual tasks in development. He who withdraws from life, who does not use the spiritual forces also in the physical, does not fulfill the tasks he has on earth. Therefore, it is one of the ideals of Theosophy that we derive the greatest possible benefit from our physical existence for the highest spiritual life.

We know, honored ones present - and we have to preface this today - that that which is the human spirit, which is the actual true self in us, that this is embodied not once but innumerable times within the earthly existence. We know that our present earthly existence has been connected to innumerable earlier ones and that this present life will be followed by further embodiments. We must now ask the question: What does the human self accomplish in the time between two embodiments? How does the human self participate in the other worlds which are not like our physical world? - Just by going on pilgrimage through the other worlds in the appropriate way, it is able to derive the greatest possible benefit from the physical existence for its development. The worlds through which the human self makes pilgrimage in the interim between two embodiments are first the Kamaloka and then the Devachan. When the physical shells have fallen off the human being [after death], he enters the world which we call in Theosophy "Kamaloka", the "place of desire". And when he has stayed there for a while, he goes on pilgrimage through the higher spiritual world, the Devachan, which we also call the "world of the spiritual". Through these worlds the human soul goes on pilgrimage after its earthly pilgrimage. If we want to understand what part these two other worlds, Kamaloka and Devachan, have in the whole pilgrimage of the human soul, then we must think first of all of the tasks that man has to accomplish in his earthly existence. These have always been taught in the secret sciences and are taught to us today also by Theosophy.

They are quite specific tasks which the human self has to undertake and perform within its earthly pilgrimage. Man has to train certain virtues which he cannot train outside the earth pilgrimage. There are seven such virtues. Man came to earth with the dispositions for these virtues, and at the end of his earthly pilgrimage he should have fully developed these seven virtues.

If I may use a comparison, I would like to say: Let us imagine a human being who is endowed with the greatest benevolence for his fellow human beings according to his disposition, a completely munificent human being, but who is completely poor and therefore is not able to make use of his charitable disposition. In this way, the human character is also, according to its disposition, a highly perfected one; however, the human being is not yet able to make real use of it. Now let us imagine that this man moves to a still uncultivated, distant country and tries to make it productive; he produces so much there by hard work that he now acquires the means which, when he comes back to his original country, he can now make available for the benefit of his fellow men. Now he can carry out what was contained in him as a disposition of generosity.

The dispositions for seven such virtues lie in man at his first embodiment. After millions of years he will go out again from his earth pilgrimage, and these dispositions will then be trained to virtues. He will then be able to use these abilities in a future planetary development. These seven virtues are:

1. Justice
2. Judgmentalism
3. Fortitude
4. Prudence

These are the four lower virtues. Prudence summarizes everything that enables us to pass judgment on our earthly circumstances and thus to intervene in the course of earthly circumstances ourselves. By acquiring these abilities, man gains the power through which he can intervene in the world in a powerful and leading way.

The three higher virtues are:

Faith
Hope
Love

Goethe expressed it with the words: "Everything transient is only a parable". If man sees in everything he can see and hear only a symbol of an eternal thing that expresses it, then he has "faith". This is the first of the three higher virtues. The second is to develop a feeling for the fact that man should never stop at the point on which he stands, a feeling for the fact that today we are people of the fifth race, but later we will evolve higher. That is the hope. So we have faith in the eternal, and then confidence, hope in the higher development. The last virtue is the one that is to be formed as the last goal of our cosmos, it is love. That is why we call our earth the "cosmos of love". What we have to develop in us by belonging to the earth is love, and when we will have completed our earth pilgrimage, then the earth will be a cosmos of love. Love will then be a natural force of all human beings. It will occur with such self-evidence as the magnetic force of attraction and repulsion is self-evident in the magnet.

Gradually, through various embodiments, man must develop these virtues. He has now reached about the middle of this path. What these virtues will be one day has been correctly described by Christian theology as follows: "What no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no man's heart has conceived"; this is to say that no one can have any idea in what perfect way these virtues will one day be present in the perfected one. We work our way from stage to stage in the various embodiments. We descend, as it were, from the spiritual world with the disposition to these seven virtues, and must train these virtues in life in order to then really have them. Thus, earthly life is nothing more than passing through a country in order to work on transforming the dispositions into true abilities. Whoever goes into this land must first devote himself to work, and while working he may not be able to look at that high goal. He develops the virtues by associating with other people in order to train fortitude, justice, hope, love, and so on. He comes together with other people, and he must use these encounters to train the virtues. In order to train the virtues, man must descend from the spiritual world into the physical world. He becomes entangled in that which the physical world contains, and it always contains the astral, the world of desires, of lusts: Kamaloka.

We cannot train our cleverness so [comprehensively] that it shakes the whole world. No, we must be satisfied that we can act in an appropriate way in the place and time into which we are born. Galilei, Giordano Bruno, in their people and in their time, developed their higher soul forces, their Kama-manas. Giordano Bruno's mind was suitable for his people and for his time. If he had been placed in another people and born at another time, he would have had other faculties. Man is entangled with the physical environment by his tasks, and so it is with our higher faculties; we are confined to a narrow field in every incarnation. Our mind and our higher soul powers are also confined to a certain narrow area, and even more so our desires, appetites, our passions and instincts.

We have to pour into the desires what we have brought with us from the spiritual. If I want the highest, I must surround the highest with desire. In order to fulfill his tasks in the physical world, man must grow together with the physical world, and he forms a kind of shell around himself, through which he is connected with the world of wishes and desires. As you are connected with the objects of the physical world in such a way that you bump into them, so you are connected with the world of the astral through your desires, cravings and passions. And as you detach yourself from the world of the physical immediately with death, so you must also gradually detach yourself from the astral world after death. Man has grown together with those people with whom he worked. He must first strip off this shell. This happens in the Kamaloka. If man has lost the earthly shell immediately with death, he is still connected with the world of his wishes, desires and passions. Through a passion by which he is still intimately connected with this earthly existence, he has to go through a time of confrontation with this earthly existence. This we call the stay in the Kamaloka.

As the earthly-physical world consists of different areas, so also the astral world consists of different areas, and these we can divide according to the seven virtues which I have mentioned. By training these virtues, we are entangled and chained with the astral world in a very specific way.

Man must learn to practice righteousness consciously. He can do that only by overcoming the astral forces. Justice can only exist in a world where individuals are special beings; only from individual to individual is justice possible. Consciously I have to behave [justly] towards other individual beings. I must therefore first feel myself as a special being in order to be able to practice justice towards my fellow human beings. The precondition for this is the separation of the one from the other. First man separates himself as an individual being, and this being special leads him to a struggle for existence. The struggle for existence is the opposite, the opposite pole to justice; it must be overcome by the virtue of justice. Man must strip off everything that opposes the other man, strip off all vices that arise from the struggle for existence. The region in which the forces of the struggle for existence prevail is the darkest region of the Kamaloka. In Egyptian documents we are told of this region, black as night, where beings wander helplessly. "Here is no air, no water, here no man is able to live with peace in his heart."

The abstinence of judgment, the abstinence of judgment towards the surroundings, this is the second virtue that must be practiced. Usually man judges according to the sympathy and antipathy with which he faces others. Gradually he learns that if one wants to understand a person, one must get beyond sympathy and antipathy, overcome them. And just as justice has as its opposite pole the struggle for existence, so abstinence of judgment has as its opposite vice the surrender to all the charms of the outside world. Antipathy and sympathy must be stripped away in the second region of Kamaloka.

The virtue of fortitude can be developed only by those who are not protected from temptation. We can develop this virtue only by the fact that the opposite poles to it are there and we are entangled in them. Day after day, hour after hour, we are exposed to temptations. We have to get rid of that in the third stage by developing the virtue of stout-heartedness in that region.

Prudence can only be formed by man passing through innumerable errors. Goethe says, "Man errs as long as he strives." - Just as the child learns by hurting himself when he falls, so all great men have learned from experiences made through error. This happens in the fourth region of the Kamaloka.

Now the higher virtues. The first one is faith; this is the recognition of the eternal in the temporal and earthly, the view that everything transient is only a likeness. The different world views are continuous attempts to lead the people here or there, of this or that nation, in the most different ways to the knowledge of the eternal. Man must advance through the letter to the spirit, from dogma to true, inner knowledge. Man will always be tempted to be entangled in a circumscribed field of letters. Because in life we are necessarily a member of a certain age, we must first discard what has become the dogma of our time in order to arrive at the truth which is expressed in all world views and religions. In the fifth region we meet the pious, the literalists of all religious confessions, of all world views: literalist Hindus, literalist Mohammedans, literalist Christians and also theosophists who believe in the letter.

The next virtue is the one that Christianity has called "hope." Man can form hope only if he believes in a further development. Little by little we can learn to understand this through the theosophical teachings, which lead us to the idea of further development. Human development before our time was already enormous. Even greater is the prospect of a future higher development for the chela. He develops a feeling for the fact that man must not stop at the finite, the limited ideals, at the ideals which belong only to his time. Look at Socrates or Robespierre or the idealists of our time. Try to see if their ideals would have suited any other people, any other age. Try to see if the ideals and hopes of a Columbus could have been translated into reality in some other time and among some other people. This limitation to one time or to one people, that is what man must cast off in this luminous sixth region of the Kamaloka.

In order for man to learn "love," he must begin in the finite. In order to learn a higher concept of love, he must begin with the small, with the transient and the finite, and evolve. Love must become a matter of course, a self-evident force. It must be the goal and the aspiration of man. When man develops love, he experiences himself in the seventh and highest region of the Kamaloka.

There are seven purification fires in the Kamaloka, through which the soul must pass. Then it ascends to Devachan, where again there are seven regions. Only that which is the fruit of a high ideal can be taken over into a new existence, into a new embodiment. That which is bound to place and time must fall away in the Kamaloka.

Thus, depending on whether a person has to undergo one or the other purification, he has to pass through the seven regions of the Kamaloka. For example, if a person needs to develop strong courage and therefore be strengthened against desires and cravings, he will awaken in the region where he can purify the negative. He will pass through the other regions more asleep. This is what theosophy calls the stay in the Karnaloka. What we have to go through in the pilgrimage of our earthly life enables us to go from stage of development to stage of development, and that in the intermediate states [between death and a new birth] we have to pass through places of soul purification and strip off the dross in Kamaloka.

Only to the seeing one do the various places in Kamaloka appear intelligible. For the chela, the stage comes when he learns to understand the brightness, the moment when our eye is opened to the astral world. What is in the physical world is then no longer there. He sees the sun shining at midnight. The other people cannot see the sun shining at midnight. This is not a symbol, it is to be understood as literally as possible: To the astral eye, the sun becomes visible at midnight. The chela can cross this threshold, it recognizes what man normally sees only when he crosses the gate of death. This is not theory, but it is real experience, which can be told about in the same way as, for example, someone can tell you his experiences who has made a trip to America. That there are such higher worlds, the materialistic world views and attitudes of the last centuries had little idea of. Theosophy has made it its task to reawaken the consciousness of the existence of such higher worlds. That such a message is necessary, especially in our present culture, is what gave the Theosophical Society its origin. It is necessary that again the voice of a higher world should sound into this world of ours. We must be led to what the seven virtues teach us and what can be learned through them. We must realize how these virtues can be trained.

The final task is "wisdom in love" and "love in wisdom. Love in wisdom is what man will attain after the training of the seven virtues and what he can carry out with him from this world development. You will find this already expressed in the Wisdom of Solomon in the words: "And because I prayed for wisdom, it was given to me, and because I pleaded for wisdom, the spirit of wisdom came to me. And I have learned to esteem this spirit of wisdom higher than principalities and kingdoms."

This is what matters: Not to withdraw ascetically from the physical existence, but to raise it to a higher one; to cherish the "kingdoms of the world" and to develop what the Middle Ages called "spiritus sapientiae" - spirit of wisdom. And with the spirit of wisdom people will go out to a new planetary existence.

We can experience all this in the astral world. To give a small glimpse into this astral world, which is closest to our physical world, that was the purpose of these lectures. Next time we will talk about the spiritual world, the world of Devachan.

The first two chapters of Genesis can be better understood if we are familiar with the various things we have already covered. The first chapter presents the development of our planet through the first three earth rounds into the fourth round, up to the moment when man is created. It thus concludes with the creation of man, with man of the fourth round in the third root race entering into the first incarnation. In a very similar way, the Mosaic Genesis is depicted in Greek mythology. It is only more clearly expressed in Greek mythology, which has three currents flowing from the three Logoi: Uranus, Cronus and Zeus. In the beginning of our earthly development, Uranus represents the first Logos, who brings about the split from the undifferentiated state that existed in the preceding Pralaya. The driving force was Uranus; his opposite was Gaia. The origin of the earthly planet is rooted in them. Thus, Uranus, in connection with Gaia, is the creative force. One could therefore also say: In the beginning were Uranus and Gaia. The second current is the soul current, Kronos, which represents the purely psychic moment of the soul. Then what is referred to as the pilgrimage of the soul occurs, the connection with Zeus, the god of Kama-Manas.

And what does it say in Genesis?

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void;
and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

That is the Arupa state; it has no form.

And God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light.
And God saw that the light was good.
Then God separated the light from the darkness
and called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.
And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

This is the first form, the beginning of the Rupa state. The second globe has arrived.

And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters,
and let it be a division between the waters.
So God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.
And it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven.
And the evening and the morning were the second day. (Genesis 1, 6-8)

When the Book of Genesis speaks of water, it always means astral matter.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear.
And it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters he called the Sea.
And God saw that it was good.
And God said, Let the Earth bring forth grass, and herb yielding seed, and fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the Earth: and it was so.
And the earth brought forth grass, and herbaceous plants, and the seed-bearing plant after its kind, and the tree bearing fruit, whose seed was in itself, after its kind: and God saw that it was good.
And there was evening, and there was morning, the third day. (Genesis 1:9-13)

This was the time when the plant kingdom came into being. In the beginning, the plant kingdom was a jumbled mass; individual plants had not yet emerged. Therefore, each shall now have its seed according to its kind. Only now are the individual plants emerging.

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them serve for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light on the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights;

And God set them in the firmament of the heaven, to give light on the earth: and they ruled the day and the night: and they divided the light and the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

This is the astral world, the third globe – the sea of stars, the symbol of the astral existence.

Now we come to the actual earth globe. Here matter formed little by little. First the etheric matter. During the first two epochs we are dealing with etheric matter. This condenses during the third root race, during the Lemurian period. At the same time, a condensation of materiality takes place, so that in the Lemurian period we have an ever-increasing density of physical materiality.

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, with which the waters bring forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind:
And God saw that it was good.
And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. (Genesis 1, 20-23)

This is not the animal kingdom that natural history tells us about, but what is found in the Dzyan stanzas in the second part of Blavatsky's “Secret Doctrine”.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

And God made the wild animals of the earth in variety, each according to its kind, and the livestock according to their kind, and all the creatures that move along the ground in their kind. God saw that it was good.

He made the animals separate, whereas they had previously swayed about in confusion.

And God said, “Let us make man in our image, in the likeness of ourselves; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; (Genesis 1, 26-27)

And God created him male and female, that is, asexual.

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

Multiply in a non-sexual way, not by reproduction, but simply by coming apart, as in the astral.

And God saw all that He had made; and behold, it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning, the sixth day. (Genesis 1:31)

We are now at the point in time when the third root race of the fourth round begins, the third main age of the Earth.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.

And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it,... (Genesis 2, 1-3)

"He rested means that he has now transferred the task to man. Before that, he had stimulated everything from within that needed stimulating. Now the cosmic Pentecost occurred: the spirits descended and continued the work.

... therefore by him were all things created, that were created God, visible and invisible,

Thus the heavens and the earth were created, when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it had sprung; for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground.

But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

(Genesis 2: 3-7)

Now man was there.

And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

And out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; and the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

And out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; and the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

This describes the transition from the ethereal races to the physical races. These are brought together from the four sides, from east, west, south, north, and from the four elements, which correspond to the abilities of the spirit-soul. The tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the symbol for the higher self that has connected with man.

And a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from thence it was parted and became into four heads.
The name of the first is Pison, because all the land of Havilah, where there is gold, is a land of Pison.
And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. (Genesis 2, 10-12)

The other waters are called Gehon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates. The four waters are the symbols for the four astral forms of matter that flow together. Water always means the astral in the esoteric language. In the esoteric language, gold is the symbol of the spiritual; onyx is the symbol of matter that goes deepest down. Onyx is the symbol of how the living must transform before it can be absorbed into the higher principle. The living, the prana, must pass through a state of purification; this is called the onyx state. The transformation of the pug into an onyx can also be found in Goethe's “Fairytales”.

And the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it.

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You shall eat from every tree of the garden;

but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.

And the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.” (Genesis 2:15-18)

Now the fourth round begins; before that there was a small pralaya. When the fourth round begins, the ethereal human races only end. Man is the firstling of the fourth round. And what is now emerging is emerging through man; it is a product of decadence, it is falling away.

For when the Lord God had made every beast of the earth, and every fowl of the air, he brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that should be the name thereof.

And man gave names to every animal, and to the birds of the air, and to the beasts of the field; but for man no helper was found to be with him.

Then the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept. (Genesis 2, 19-21)

Sleep signifies that transition which must be understood very precisely. We imagine a light in the middle [of the room] that is reflected in the most diverse ways all around. Let us imagine that the light in the middle goes out, and the outer lights continue to shine. This is how the sinking of Manas into the bodies, which now begin to glow from within when Manas ceases to irradiate the human beings from without. Dream consciousness forms the transition between the inner radiance and the disappearance of the light in the outer. Sex is the counterpole for Kama-Manas, just as the south pole is the counterpole of the north pole.

So he took one of his ribs and closed up the place with flesh.

And the LORD God built the woman out of the rib he had taken from the man, and he brought her to him.

And Adam said: This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

Every man will leave his father and mother, which is to say, he will leave that which formerly constituted him.

The first two chapters of Genesis contain the Egyptian secret doctrine. Moses was initiated in Egypt; he then brought the secret doctrine with him and gave it to his people.

Christmas Lecture

Follow me for a few moments into the ancient Egyptian temples for a ceremony that was celebrated at midnight on the day that corresponds to our Christmas Day. On this day – or rather at midnight – one of the images that are only shown four times a year was unveiled in the temple and carried before a small crowd that had been prepared for this temple service. This image was locked in the innermost sanctuary of the temple throughout the year and was kept in strict secrecy. On this day, it was carried out by the oldest of the priests, and a ceremony was performed before him, which I will describe to you very briefly.

After the eldest of the priests had carried out the radiant image of Horus, son of Isis and Osiris, four priests in white robes approached the image. The first of the priestly sages spoke the following before the image: “Horus, you who are the sun in the spiritual realm and you who give us the light of your wisdom as the sun gives us the light of the world, lead us so that we may no longer be what we are today.” This temple priest had entered from the east. The second of the temple priests entered from the north and spoke roughly the following words: “Horus, you sun in the spiritual realm, you who are the giver of love, as the sun is the giver of the warming power that coaxes out the forces of plants and fruits throughout the year, lead us to a goal so that we may become what we are not yet today.” And the third of the temple priests came from the south and said: “Horus, thou sun in the spiritual realm, bestow thy power upon us, as the sun of the physical world bestows its power, by which it will part the darkest cloud and spread light everywhere.” After this third priest had spoken, a fourth stepped forward and said something like the following: “The three wisest of us have spoken. They are my brothers, but they are beyond the sphere in which I myself still am. I am the representative of you” - and he meant: the representative of the multitude. And he said: “I will lead your voice. I will speak for you who are still standing there as minors. I will tell my older brothers that they long for the great goal of the world, where human destiny and the eternal law of the world will be reconciled.” This should be understood in this hour by those who were sufficiently prepared for it, as once unchanging cosmic law and human destiny were one.

If we understand the ceremonies that took place on Christmas in Asia, India and even in China, then we understand what Christmas bells actually mean to us. A macrocosm has always been called the world and a microcosm the human being. This was meant to suggest that the human being contains within himself the forces that are present outside in the great. But not only the calculating mind has called the world a microcosm for man, but also the mind, which tells us that we must look up at the stars. Here a word of the philosopher Kant applies: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe...: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.”

How different macrocosm and microcosm are when we look at them from a different point of view. Especially when faced with the macrocosm with its immutable eternal laws, those who are the most knowledgeable are filled with the deepest admiration and reverence. There have been no knowledgeable people who have seen through the wisdom of the world and not at the same time stood in awe of the creative spirit of the world. And one of those people [in modern times] who for the first time had a confidential relationship with this immutable law, Kepler, spoke the words: Who could look into the wonderful structure of the whole world and not admire the Creator who implanted these laws of the world. - Those who know most admire the eternal laws of the starry sky.

It seems to be different when it comes to human destiny. Goethe says that he likes to take refuge from the changeability of man in the fixed rules of eternal nature, and the moral law [of Kant] with its categorical imperative seemed to him to be in error. We perceive the difference between the human heart and the world-spirit, the macrocosm, in yet another way. We perceive this difference when we consider the connection between human destiny and human character. Who would impose responsibility on a volcano? Probably no one. But we must indeed impose responsibility on the man who causes harm. Who would speak of justice and injustice in relation to nature? And how is it that the good suffer while the wicked prosper?

We see harmony within the macrocosm. What position do we have in relation to it? What is clearly and distinctly outlined in the ceremony I have described will be enacted in a few days in the festival that is so little understood today. The starry sky with its immutable laws was not always the cosmos that appears to us now. This cosmos emerged out of chaos. Out of the surging and swaying of forces, what we have today first developed. The Copernican-Keplerian laws, which make us marvel at the wisdom of the world spirit, have not always applied. Today it seems to be poured out, exalted above justice and injustice; we cannot ask about good and evil. But we can ask about good and evil in relation to the human being. Today we ask ourselves the deeper question: Why do we ask about good and evil, about justice and injustice in relation to the human being? Why can we not ask this question in relation to the macrocosm? In the beginning, when the world was still a surging sea, there was, in the midst of what the eyes see, the ears hear, the senses perceive, between what appears to us today in the laws of harmony, still a surging sea of surging feelings, of desires and passions out there in the universe. These world passions, which were in the midst of the laws and chaos, had to be overcome first. Today, anyone who tries to visualize this world of cosmic desires and passions from an ancient past can hardly perceive the body of passions. Shiny and transparent, bright as stars, barely perceptible with the seer's finest tools, it shines in every atom after chaos has been overcome.

What has brought the astral body of the cosmos to rest has not yet reached the same goal in man. In man, the astral body is still surging. What has already taken place in the cosmos over the course of millions of years, what has reached its goal, is still in the process of becoming in man. And if we follow man from return to return, from re-embodiment to re-embodiment, if we see him in his different bodies and then follow him in his astral bodies, then we see that from embodiment to embodiment the astral body becomes brighter and purer. In the beginning we see it permeated by dull passions. These remind us of the passions of that time when the world was still a chaos. But little by little that brightness and clarity developed, as it has now the astral body of the great universe.

Because the sages of ancient times knew about the connection between the development of the human being and the existence of the world, they called the world macrocosm and the human being microcosm. The human being must look at the goal that he can set for himself: to become like the macrocosm, to imbue himself with the same bliss and peace that flows through the cosmos as a universal law today. Just as we cannot ask whether the laws of the cosmos are just or unjust, so neither can man ask whether his destiny coincides with his law. Pure law is the law of the cosmos, and pure human law, pure human spirit, shall one day become man's destiny. This is the path of destiny that the human spirit undergoes in its various embodiments. We become ever more starry and ever more similar to the destiny of the cosmos.

Karma is a law by which we all suffer. What we have accomplished in one embodiment bears its fruits in later embodiments. What befalls us today we have caused in previous embodiments. But karma is a law that not only distributes guilt and atonement, disharmony and harmony in the right way, but is a law that leads us up to the highest summit of the human spirit. The great world book of karma will have found its balance on the left and on the right. We will have transformed everything we owe to life back into the bright glow of the astral body. Everything we have felt as deficiencies will be balanced out. Karma is burnt up. When the guilt points of our existence will no longer be there, when we ourselves go our way like the sun, which is not able to step even a little out of its orbit, then we will also follow the laws implanted in us like the sun in the starry sky. That is our way, that is our goal. That will one day be the harmony between the destiny of man and the laws of the world.

Not everyone's journey through life is the same. Just as in the natural world, the perfect exists alongside the imperfect, and the higher animal already exists alongside the worm, so too in the spiritual world, the imperfect human spirit exists alongside that which has already reached a higher level.

Those who honestly and sincerely believe in evolution must also have faith in spiritual science and its teachings of the first human beings. These are those who have already come further along the path that we all have to travel than we have today. Some have rushed ahead. They have overtaken us from the times of which history tells us; they have reached a higher stage of human development. Thus they have become leaders, guides of humanity. Just as the higher developed animal towers above the worm, so the Rishis, the masters, tower above humanity. They have achieved this in the earlier times because they have taken a different path of knowledge, a steeper, more dangerous path, which is associated with infinite danger. No one may enter it for its own sake. Whoever does so may stumble and fall into deep abysses, or lose his sense of existence for a time, or become a tormentor to people. In short, no one may seek out this path of faster knowledge out of selfishness. Only he who has taken this vow, who has sworn an oath that may never be broken, to powers of which the ordinary person has no inkling, only he who has taken this vow can enter upon the path to becoming a leader of humanity, a forerunner of humanity. Such leaders of men have never used their knowledge for themselves.

What is so highly esteemed in the West, the knowledge for the sake of knowing, is not what the adepts, the great masters of knowledge, strive for. They strive for knowledge in order to help humanity, to draw it up to where human destiny and world harmony are in harmony with each other. These human firstlings are those who live in our midst and have lived in all times, who have acquired an astral body cleansed of desires and passions. Buddha already had it, the starry astral body. When he once went out with his disciple Ananda, Buddha dissolved into a bright cloud, into a cloud of light, into radiant light. That was the astral body that had come to rest.

The corona of rays is nothing other than the symbol of the radiant astral body of the founder of Christianity. The Firstfruits of Men, as walking brothers of humanity, are an immediate reflection of the macrocosm. It should be shown that they have burnt their karma, that there is nothing more to be redeemed, that the eternal wisdom can no longer stray, that they guide humanity as surely as the sun follows its path across the vault of heaven and cannot stray from this path marked out in the firmament. This is the symbol for the firstfruits of mankind. It expresses that they cannot stray from the path that is laid out for people. As surely as the sun walks across the vault of heaven, they walk their path. And just as the sun sends its light and warmth over the earth, so they send the love of their hearts into the hearts of people, awakening love in the hearts of their fellow brothers. These firstfruits are strong in their powers to resist all temptations. You can show them, you can offer them all the riches of this world, they will not accept them, they only want to be one with the original spirit from which they came forth. These people want to be a macrocosm themselves in this life. That was their consciousness. This is also present in all religions. Those who know the sources of the religions are aware that in all these religions one looks up to the founders of the religions as one looks up to the stars of the macrocosm, as one looks up to the eternal cosmic law that rules the starry sky. These firstfathers of mankind were suns for the initiated and those who had progressed further.

If humanity was to be shown how karma works, then they were shown the image of the sun in the temple. This signifies to man his destiny, like the course of the sun in the course of the world. [A-mi-t'o] was the same for the Chinese when they worshipped the Buddha as the “son” among their heavenly gods. And it was the same for the Hindus when they showed Krishna resting in the arms of the Deva-Mother. Christmas permeates all religions. It is the festival that should make man aware that his destiny is once to be an image of the destiny of the macrocosm.

In Christianity, the spirit sun lives just as much as in the old religions. The life of Christ should also directly reflect the sun as it rushes across the firmament. His birth was therefore transferred to Christmas. Let us ask ourselves why. What happens to the sun at the time of the winter solstice, at the time of Christmas? The days become longer again after the shortest day has passed. The light struggles out of the darkness again. The sun, which has been in darkness for most of the day, is reborn, and as such a newly born sun it now sends its light. The birth of the light was celebrated at midnight because the light was born out of darkness. Thus, symbolically, the light of wisdom is to be born, which is represented by the firstlings of man. The sun appears again anew - she who moves across the firmament. With her birth, she is a symbol of the firstling of man who is born, who walks just as surely on his path as the universe carries harmony within itself.

In the beginning, there were various Christian sects, and they celebrated the Savior's feast at different times. In the early Christian times, there were 135 such days. It was only at the beginning of the 5th century that a uniform date was set, namely our present Christmas. It was deliberately set on this day in order to establish the same symbolism, which resounded throughout the ancient world, for this Christian festival as well. A church father himself, who had been canonized by the church, considered it justified and in the spirit of Christianity. He tells us that the Christians were right to celebrate the birth of Christ at a time when the Romans celebrated the birth of Mithras and the Greeks the birth of Dionysus. The same meaning should be attached to the festival as to the festivals of Mithras and Dionysus, because in them too the birth of the firstlings was celebrated. Thus, in the Christmas festival, Christianity has erected a symbol that is intended to remind people again and again that the karma must be burned so that harmony between the macrocosm and the microcosm, which is not yet present today, will one day be present, so that man will one day also follow the immutable laws from which he must not stray.

Just as Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris, the symbol of human existence and human destiny, was shown to the assembled crowd at midnight, and just as it was pointed out by the priests that he was the sun in the spiritual kingdom, that it is equal to the power of warmth and light of the sun, just as the three wise priests have joyfully bowed down, so the Christian legend also presents us with the three wise men bowing down before the Christ child. They follow the star, the light. There is a deep meaning in the visit of the three wise men from the Orient. They are the same three wise men who were active in the service of Horus and who now say: “A child has been born to us who will follow his path as unchangingly as the star that now guides us. The star is still far from us. But when this law will one day be our own, then we will be like the one who carries the unchanging law within himself. Just as the star is our ideal, so he who was born under it is our example. What the Egyptians celebrated became a world fact, a world event. Therefore, he who founded Christianity was allowed to call his disciples together for the Sermon on the Mount. It says: “He led them away from the people, up the mountain.” “Mountain” means the secret place where the inner circle were taught. The King James Version contains a tremendous error at this point: (“Blessed are they that are poor in spirit”). In truth it says: “Blessed are they that are beggars for spirit, for they find within themselves the Kingdoms of Heaven.” What did Jesus want to do for them? He wanted to make them blessed, the beggars for the spirit. Only those who were initiated into the temple mysteries had become partakers of wisdom. The founder of Christianity wanted to carry this wisdom out into the whole world; not only the rich in spirit were to receive the grace of wisdom – no, all those who stand outside and are also beggars for the spirit should find the Kingdoms of Heaven within themselves. In the past, people found this in the temple mysteries. They should not only find bliss within the temple precincts, but should also find the Kingdoms of Heaven within themselves, which were presented to them as the harmonious model of human destiny. They should ascend to the summit where a balance can be struck between the changeable, erring human heart and the unchanging law of the macrocosm. This is what the Christmas bells are meant to make people aware of, according to the original will of the initiates; they are a pointer to what shows us how karma leads to the goal, how the laws of the world and human destiny are connected.

And to hear this again is what theosophical deepening is meant to bring us. Many festivals that we celebrate today without thinking about it, without knowing their deeper meaning, have their origin in a deeper wisdom. Because the ancient man was connected to the macrocosmic world, the events of the festival were signs for him. The mystery of the heart and the immutable law resound to us from the sounds of Christmas bells. Theosophy will bring deeper wisdom and the core of religious beliefs into the most direct life; it will show the extent to which these truths are contained in them. And when we recognize this truth, then, in the highest sense, what is expressed in the beautiful word “peace be with all beings” will gradually come true in the harmony between the law of the universe and the destiny of man.