The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Report in the “Züricher Post”, November 24, 1905

Theosophy and the “world riddles”. We request the following lines to be included:

Th. S. On the evening of November 13, in front of a large audience of around 250 people, Dr. phil. Rud. Steiner from Berlin spoke about Theosophy and “The World Riddles” by E. Haeckel in the courtroom of the Schwurgericht (court of assizes). The speaker explained that the worldview called “Theosophy” (the wisdom of God) originated about thirty years ago. It is a spiritual movement that encompasses and unites religion, science, philosophy and ethics and answers questions about the origin, nature, purpose and goal of human beings. The world riddles are solvable; but only Theosophy is able to solve them, and in a way that satisfies all people, learned and unlearned. It is Theosophy that creates peace between the different worldviews, sciences and religions, all of which have a kernel of truth. But above all, Theosophy does not contradict the achievements of the natural sciences.

The lecturer now turns specifically to Haeckel's work “Die Welträtsel” (The Riddle of the World), whose widespread popularity is a testament to humanity's great interest in the most important questions. Many Theosophists speak out very sharply against Haeckel. I, the speaker continues, do not want that. Rather, I want to contribute to an understanding of Haeckel's world view. Haeckel's importance lies in the continuation of Darwinism, in the expansion of the evidence that all living things are based on a unified organization and that humans are also a link in the one great series of the animal world. But all this was recognized long before Darwin, for example by Goethe. However, his thoughts were in too lofty regions to be accessible and comprehensible to all people. Darwin's and his epigones' most significant work consists mainly in the fact that they drew the ideas of the unified context of all organisms (including humans) down to a level accessible to all of humanity, proved them to be true, and thus made them understandable to the mind. In this respect, Haeckel's “Welträtsel” (World Mysteries) is an astonishingly great achievement.

But great men also have great faults. From a theosophical point of view, there is nothing to be said against Darwin's theory of the origin of species. However, a distinction must be made

between Darwin's Darwinism and Haeckel's Darwinism, because in his writings, Darwin speaks of the “Creator” and the “Omniscient and Almighty, who foresees everything”. However, the original Darwinism occurred during a materialistic era and therefore received a thoroughly materialistic interpretation and explanation from its followers and developers. And it is only against this interpretation and explanation that Theosophy is directed.

The material and visible world is based on a transcendental and invisible one. If Darwinism had come into a spiritualistic-idealistic age instead of a materialistic one, it would undoubtedly have been interpreted and explained in a spiritualistic-idealistic way. But in an age when even the smallest living creature, the cell, can be seen by the armed bodily eye, the materialistic world view – and especially materialistic biology – is understandable. The “habits of thought”, whether religious, idealistic, materialistic and so on, play a major role. But thinking purely materialistically is a mistake; for there are perceptions (for example, the perception of the color red, the scent of roses, the sound of an organ) that cannot be conceived and explained in a materialistic way. They are based on material impulses, but these are not the deepest, ultimate cause. Materialism cannot solve the riddles of the world; this was also recognized, for example, by Du Bois-Reymond in his famous Ignorabimus speech. Haeckel's mistake, then, is that he brought his materialistic thinking habits into Darwinism, and that he also wants to explain mental and spiritual processes in material terms. But Theosophy does not want to criticize Haeckel's explanations of the physical or sensual, but to recognize them.

Steiner now turns specifically to Theosophy, which recognizes two entities in man, one soul or spiritual and one physical or material, and claims, for example, that these two entities are separate in the sleeping person. The fact that the soul or spirit does not express itself and does not feel in deep sleep is only because it lacks the organs to do so. Therefore, it is the task of every human being to recognize this and to decide to provide his soul with certain means corresponding to the sensory organs of the supersensible. The moment this happens is what the theosophist calls “rebirth”. Through the continued use of these means (which, however, were not mentioned), the soul or spirit develops into an organized supersensible, true or divine human being, to whom the dream world is also an entity and who can see the spirits with the “inner eye” just as the sensual human being can see the bodies with his outer eye. The body is transitory, the spirit or soul is eternal, an ineradicable unity. Therefore, theosophy is monism in the highest sense.

Will the newly formed “Theosophical Society Zurich” prosper and turn us all into Theosophists? The author of these lines does not think so. He believes it is a mistake to consider that what we call mind or spirit is not physical or natural, and finds it curious that we need to obtain organs for it. The theosophical identification of the terms soul and spirit is also unlikely to fall on fertile ground. Although today's state of science allows for certain differences, it no longer allows for sharp boundaries between what we call spiritual, mental and physical. Of course, theosophy has its merits in that it opposes crude materialism and seeks to give the spiritual side of man its due. But the theosophical degradation of the physical side of man, which, after all, also – to quote Darwin – originates from the “almighty and omniscient Creator” as his material and spiritual product, cannot stand up before the judgment seat of true science, such as natural science.

It might seem presumptuous to talk about the future of man. But if we consider that man is a self-conscious being, called upon to stride ever onward, we must realize that he cannot be called upon to live dulled into the future. If we realize the sacred meaning of the word “self-conscious,” we come closer to the possibility that a self-conscious being is destined to gain foresight into the future. But where do we find this foresight? We find it in the theosophical world and life view, which deals with the inner core of the human being. The word “theosophy” is often translated incorrectly. It is said that theosophy is the knowledge of the divine essence. This is not correct. No one would be so presumptuous as to believe that they could fathom the divine essence.

Last time we talked about the origin and the past of man; today we will deal with the development in the future. If we believe in the development of man, it is clear that man must acquire ever higher and higher abilities in order to learn to understand God and the universe better and better with these abilities. After millions of years, our concepts will be quite different from today, and so it will continue. Our knowledge of God can never be complete. Theosophy is not “knowledge of God”; but it does show us the perspective that leads to knowledge of God.

The question now is: How does man acquire knowledge at all? He acquires knowledge in everyday life through his senses. If man had no senses, he could not get to know the world around him. What man perceives with the eye through the effects of light, the sounds that his ear conveys to him, what he feels, senses, tastes and smells, he absorbs and combines with the intellect. Now, everything he perceives is transient, everything has an end. Even intellectual thinking is fleeting. Eye, ear, brain will fade away, scatter. What the senses have perceived will one day be a thing of the past. Everything that disperses will one day no longer be there; all knowledge that comes from the senses will have to perish; it will also prove to be transitory because it was based on the transitory. Man, animal and plant are transitory, everything is transitory.

But in addition to this transitory nature, human beings also have an immortal core. Within them lie dormant powers that are to be developed, organs of life; just as eyes, ears, brain, organs of the physical body exist, so too there are organs of the spiritual man of an imperishable nature. In short, Theosophy teaches us that we carry within us a higher being that directs its imperishable senses to everything that surrounds it and allows it to recognize the essence of all things.

Theosophy is based on this. Like natural scientists, it directs its research to plants, animals and minerals, but it does not just seek to recognize the transient, but rather that which is imperishable in things; it does not examine anything else, but it does examine things differently from the way science does. It is not only about the past and the present, but also about the future.

What do we know about the future of man? What is this essence that man carries over from the present into the future? What is the new link in the chain of development that establishes the connection between the temporal and the eternal?

Let us try to visualize this in our minds. When earthly life, with all that man has enjoyed, all that has given him joy and caused him sorrow, has vanished away, what remains? — To make this clear to ourselves, let us place ourselves at three points in the life of our Earth. Let us go back a million years, to the present and to the future after another million years. If we go back to the distant past, we see man in a very different form than he is now. He was still untouched by all human activity and activity. Through the forces of nature, he has become what he was; divine forces in the universe have worked together so that man could come into existence.

After man appeared on earth, he has the task of transforming and reworking the earth in turn. A glance at the pyramids, these magnificent giant structures, may serve to illustrate this to us as a small example. If we consider the transformation that Egypt underwent through the work and creation of the pyramids, in which the colossal masses of stone were moved from one place to another so that these structures could be built, and which withstood the floods and inundations, it can give us a small glimpse of the transformation that the whole earth has undergone and will yet undergo through the work of man.

Another image: Take Cologne Cathedral, for example; how much work was needed, human work, to create it! The transportation and cutting of the stones and so on, and so on; just imagine the forces needed to create such a work of art. In the distant future, man will have even more power at his disposal; he will force many more forces of nature into his service and achieve much more than he does today. Today he has learned to use natural forces such as electricity, magnetism and so on; with the gentle push of a button, he can conjure up light. In short, he can do things that were unheard of a hundred or two hundred years ago. Today's man can see that even without theosophy.

Later, the electrical forces of the great rivers will be exploited, as will the sun's rays. That sounds fantastic – but these are perspectives. Man will harness the power of fire and the forces of volcanoes. Man is increasingly forcing north and south magnetic forces to serve him. Just as the earth now looks very different from what it looked like millions of years ago, so after millions of years it will look very different from what it looks like now. Man is always working on the earth.

The creatures are created with the planet to then remodel it into an image of what man will become.

Now you ask, can we get a real picture from this fantasy?

Theosophy does not give a utopian picture; it shows us a very real picture of the future. It can speak of the future in a very real sense. Let us take a comparison: [two people are standing next to each other, one of them is a “savage”, the other is Goethe]. A third person standing in front of them would point to the “savage” and say: What you are now, Goethe was once too, and in the future you will be like Goethe. Thus we point to the individuality of the human being, which develops little by little to the highest perfection. Among us there are people who have already developed within themselves what the average person will only develop in the future. They are no different from us; it is all natural, it is not based on magic. All this will be explained to us if we believe in an ascent.

To show you that it is not necessary to imagine this as something completely incomprehensible, let us clarify the matter by means of a comparison. Two naturalists observed a clumsy Moluccan crab that had fallen on its back and was now trying in vain to turn itself over again. Two of the crab's brothers intervened violently to help him, but they did not succeed; he was too heavy for them. So they left the crab and fetched two more colleagues; now the four of them managed to turn their colleague over. Let us now assume that the two naturalists had turned the crab over while the companions went to get help, and [these] would have found the crab on its legs when they returned; they would certainly have believed that a miracle had occurred; but some of their fellow crab monists would have rebelled against this belief and would claim that everything had happened naturally.

Transferred to humanity, we realize that our knowledge and abilities cannot be concluded with what we have achieved today. As far as Goethe stands above the “Hottentot,” so far will the future race stand above the present one. The present race is gradually producing a race of the future.

Let us assume that we have people before us who have reached the level of development that the race will only reach in later ages. If we were to ask them, what would they show us? It would be about birth and death, about what it will be like in the hereafter, and so on. First of all, we would learn that the beyond is not something future at all. Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is in the midst of you” (Luke 17:21) - not “in you”.

How are we to understand this?

The things that surround us appear spiritual when the dormant forces within us are awakened. Two people love each other, live together; death comes, she leaves him, he leaves her. But what is above it, the result of life, the essence, remains from one embodiment to another; it will often come back to Earth.

What is the purpose and meaning of this? — The purpose is that life should teach people ever higher lessons.

Let us imagine ourselves in the time of the Odyssey. People at that time did not know how to read or write; they had not learned that. It was quite different from what people took out of the world at that time. It will not be useless for him to live on earth again now. From earliest childhood, he is surrounded by very different things than in Odysseus' time. He is always collecting new things, and the fruits of his experiences benefit him and the Earth.

What the soul has experienced remains with it. Not only has it become purer and stronger, but it has also learned.

In the time between death and a new birth, the human being processes what he has learned between birth and death. When he is then reborn, he brings with him new things that he can use to learn more. When we have learned everything, the earth will fall away. What has emerged from the human soul then remains; as new souls, they will live for a new stage of existence.

Now it will be clear that there are people who know more than the average person. They are people who have learned more and faster than their brothers.

What is the point of living in other worlds if we leave with death? We want to try to understand the whole of life. Here in this life, our senses are the tools through which we perceive the world around us. Without senses, we could not experience anything. We need eyes to see the beauty of the world, ears to hear sounds, tongue and palate to taste, the brain and tongue to think and speak.

What happens when the cover falls off us? The soul, the carrier of desires and instincts, is now free. Its life continues in the astral, uninfluenced and uninhibited by the earthly shells. If it was attached to a tasty food, it still feels the desire for such a tasty food; it would like to enjoy it, but it lacks the senses. It would like to enjoy it and cannot; this causes it agony. The soul has to unlearn desires and cravings. This happens on the plane or level of consciousness called Kamaloka; Kama - desire; Loka - place: the place of desires.

When the soul has stripped away all desires and cravings that can only be satisfied by the senses, what remains?

These are the experiences that we have absorbed through the senses, but they do not cling to the senses. The senses are the gates through which all experiences flow into us; but the senses tell us nothing about the essence of things themselves; nothing about the unity of all things, about numbers, about beauty, about all artistic activity, about good, about ideals. All this comes from the essence of man; this is how something arises that goes beyond the senses. The essence of man does not come to light brightly and clearly in Kamaloka if the soul still looks back at what it has left behind; but if it has broken the habit, the fruit of the whole life experience shines out of the soul. We live out what we have formed in blissful rapture. We lead a divine existence between our life on earth and our next birth. Devachan, or heaven, is the place where we will dwell when we have worked on earth beyond the call of earthly things. There we will feel kinship with the supermundane forces.

We will recognize the inner essence of plants and see the other, now invisible, side of nature. If your mind lives in the spiritual, you will be among those forces there that bring things into being, the forces that build the plants, that build the animals. If you look at a plant closely through the microscope, you will see a structure of wisdom with which the largest and most ingenious bridge construction of a master builder cannot compare. Or look at the marvel of the brain! Is it not condensed wisdom? We can only try to absorb it from the world around us by searching and intuiting; and we try to deduce the cause of things from what we intuit. In Devachan, we live among the creative powers and forces. The soul marries the spirit there. It rises higher and higher because it has lived among the creative spirits.

What we learn here can be compared to what the student learns on the map, for example, about Asia Minor. How completely different the country appears to him when he sees it with his own eyes than when he sees the names, points and lines on the map. The knowledge of the everyday person is also different from the knowledge of life in Devachan, the life among the things themselves. Here are the foundations of our being. A genius soul did not arise from swirling atoms. Those who have genius today have experienced it in many lives on earth. In one life we gain experience that we apply in the next. First we build the tools, then comes the application. What I can do today, I have acquired earlier.

A person can also tell himself all this from his own mind. But there are people who recognize it from their own experience because they are able to consciously put themselves in these states while they are surrounded by the shell of the flesh. We call them “chela” or disciple. They have learned to see into spiritual development; the spiritual world lies open before them. The chela can develop to the point of becoming a master.

How does a person become a chela? The preparations necessary to become a disciple can be read about in many scriptures. To become a disciple, a certain degree of development is necessary. There have always been people who have crossed the threshold of death, from which, supposedly, no one returns. But the chela and the master really do return. They can consciously pass through the gate and come back. The preparation requires only that the person learn to truly live within themselves. We can achieve this if we are completely within ourselves at least once a day. The true Christian attains this state in prayer, others through meditation and contemplation. If we are able to meditate and work on ourselves in meditation, we can gradually be accepted into the spiritual world.

Disciples are required to be strict and earnest. First, they must be able to distinguish the essential from the inessential. It does not matter whether it is a mineral, a plant, an animal or a human being; whether it is a wild animal, a criminal or a noble person; they must be able to separate the essential from the inessential at a glance. This first quality, which leads to fellowship, does not, as some might believe, exist in some kind of cloud-cuckoo-land, so that those who possess it would have no sense of everyday things and would not recognize them as essential either; that would be a false view. The way you bring a spoonful of soup to your mouth can be more essential than the whole plate of soup you eat. What is essential is what reveals the essence of the thing or the person, not what the senses perceive externally. To achieve this quality, one must start from the right place. If, for example, one believes that enriching the world with printed paper is better than drawing wire, then one is mistaken.

The second virtue is – Vairagya – not to cling to the ephemeral, but to the fruit of the ephemeral. One must familiarize oneself with the eternal core of things.

Third: Shatsampat – six virtues or qualities that are necessary to prepare for the future.

First: control of thoughts – Shama. You should not let your thoughts stray. A person who wants to become a chela must achieve complete control of his thoughts. This is still an ideal, but you have to take time to strive for this ideal. I have to get to the point where my soul does not harbor any thoughts that I have not presented to it. The more mastery I gain over my thoughts, the closer I come to my core being.

The second thing that arises from the mastery of thoughts is the mastery of actions - Dama. You should not just let yourself be driven by circumstances. It is not the outside world that should drive us, but our own inner world. In a sense, we should take our own destiny into our own hands. We should seek to achieve what we want to achieve according to our own well-thought-out plan. This control over our actions gives us a previously unknown calmness of mind. There will be a transformation of our whole life. Not that you have to do something extraordinary now that you have set out and neglected your duty to your neighbor. But man becomes master of every destiny. He remains the master and rules over fate; fate no longer rules him. In every situation in life, he will see at a glance what is needed at that moment. This is the ideal to strive for.

Thirdly: The third quality – Uparati – is best translated as fruitfulness. To face everything that comes our way with a certain equanimity. Not to be sky-high and then sad to death, but to be fruitful. To greet happiness with joy, but without excitement, and to endure misfortune, albeit seriously, but calmly. Always keep the same temperature.

Fourth: General, loving understanding of people, understanding of all beings, tolerance – Titiksha. Do not condemn or detest the criminal, but try to ennoble him; do not say “I do not like him,” but try to bring him to a higher level, look for the essence everywhere. We say to ourselves: This criminal was no worse than I; circumstances may have made him a criminal. Can I help him? I do not want to judge him, but to try to understand him. And so the disciple must be tolerant towards all beings.

Fifth: Unbiasedness towards all events - Shraddha. When we are told or told something new, we are inclined to exclaim or think: Oh, I don't believe that. - If we do that, we take the unbiased view of something new. The chela never says: I cannot believe that. He believes that he can always experience something new and higher. Impartiality leads to faith and trust.

The sixth virtue, inner harmony – samadhana – arises from the five previous qualities.

From all this it follows: Fourth: The will to freedom - mumuksha. Man usually has more will to be unfree than to be free. He feels dependent on the outside world and inwardly unfree because his passions dominate him. But if he has realized the aforementioned virtues in himself, then the will to freedom is there, which enables him to become completely free, which is what makes it possible for him to become established in the life of the spirit. When this has been achieved to a certain degree, chelaship begins. This comprises four stages.

First stage: The homeless person. He no longer clings to the external world, does not look back longingly at the world of the senses. He is not unloving towards the world of the senses, but he does not allow himself to be captured by it. He himself gives equal love to all the world. He now begins to look consciously into the spiritual world, into those regions which are otherwise open to the average person only after death. Then all superstition and doubt disappear forever, because he sees how things are. But then all illusion of the self also disappears.

We can already realize this in the physical. Our existence depends entirely on the context we have with the globe. If we were to rise above it, we would perish, because the living conditions we need are not available up there. We can only live in the environment we were born into because it is in the right proportion to the temperature of our own blood. If the temperature were only 30 degrees higher or lower, our existence would be endangered.

The personal self will be overcome, the “Tat twam asi” - “That art thou”, fully awakened, that is, the human being feels at one with the universe.

[The] second stage of chelaship is referred to as “building huts”. He sees the kundalini light. This is presented to us in the account of the Transfiguration, where the Lord Jesus introduces his three disciples to chelaship. Then they want to build huts.

Third degree of chelaschaft: Then the light shines out of the disciple. “Every thing says its own name to him.” He sees things from the other side through the rays of the spirit,

Fourth degree of chelaschaft: cannot be described; it cannot be explained in ordinary words; it can only be spoken of in secret schools.

Only a hint can be given of the higher stages.

What only a few individuals attain now, the whole human race will possess in the future. New powers will be revealed, and people will consciously work from the realm of the spirit.

Theosophy is not utopian, not a figment of the imagination. What is now only realized in individual instances will be the future of the human race. It is not idle talk about interesting problems, but active work into the future. Whoever begins to immerse themselves in it is working for the future. Theosophy points out the seeds; it indicates means and ways in which we can work into the future. It is not an abstract teaching method. It shows what man will become if he lives in such and such a way.

Someone might ask: Is it certain that what is proclaimed here will come to pass? This cannot be answered simply with yes or no. The means have been given to man, but whether he will use them, no one can know. It depends on whether people will be willing to work together. The Theosophical Society has been founded for the purpose of educating people who want to work towards this goal. The deification of humanity depends on whether some of them will come together to tackle the work.

In this they must be completely free, they must make their own decision completely uninfluenced. From what we have heard here, we can see that

only Theosophy reveals the true meaning of life to us.

[Note from the stenographer] At Mr. Hubo's request, Dr. Steiner said a few more words about the Theosophical Society's position on Christianity:

Our second principle and goal is to cultivate knowledge of the core of truth in all religions and religious life. There is no intention of transplanting the Buddhist religion to our West. We have no need to do so. Christianity contains the purest form of theosophy. It is only just beginning. It is the religion of the future. The earlier religions contained the same essence, but their form was calculated for earlier times. However, we have lost the key to Christianity, the origin of all religions.

A small scene from North America should make this clear to us. The so-called culture had driven the Indians out of their hunting grounds. They were promised certain areas in which to settle. But the promises had not been kept. It was in 1847 when a great Indian chief faced a senior official and said something like the following: You white people promised us land, but you did not keep your word. You are one who gets the teachings of the great spirit from books, from leaves on which all kinds of signs are written. But the great spirit did not teach you the truth, otherwise you would not have betrayed us. Our ancestors taught us to seek the great spirit Tao in everything around us. We feel it in the wind, in the sunshine, in the rustling of the leaves, in the flowing water, everywhere it speaks to us, we are one with it. And Tao has taught us truth that you do not know. — 'Tao is the concept for God, who is thought of as half concrete and half spiritual. In Tao, man does not yet feel separate from God, inside and outside.

Religion seeks to reconnect what has been separated from Tao. One seeks now what one has felt before. The Brahmans say of Tao: It is what it is.

Orpheus has wisely developed this thought and described the laws by which man can regain this conscious feeling of unity with Tao: You are created and you will create. The son has given himself and thus brought back light and

life and communion with the Father.

Report in the “Mühlheimer Zeitung”, No. 667, December 5, 1905

a. Cologne, December 4. Last Friday and Saturday, the General Secretary of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, gave two fascinating and significant lectures in the Isabellensaal of the Gürzenich. On Friday, the speaker talked about “the origin of the world”, and, following on from that, on Saturday about “the creation of man”; both topics were illuminated from the point of view of the theosophist. In the first lecture, the great difference between the theosophical and materialistic views of the creation of the world was pointed out. Theosophy brings the old teachings of creation, which in our days have been dismissed as childish and naive, and which were tried in their creation, into mythical form to approach the understanding of contemporaries, to reintroduce them. A glance at these old teachings shows that they all have the same basic idea about the creation of the world, only expressed in different ways. The ancient Germans killed the giant [Ymir], the Egyptians killed Osiris, and created a world from their parts; even the later accounts of creation only appear to be different. The sacrifice of the god would be necessary everywhere in religions to develop a world or culture. In religions, therefore, the divine spirit is placed at the beginning of events, through it matter is animated, the inanimate is made alive. In our days, since Kant-Laplace, one imagines the creation of the earth from a primeval nebula that was in a rotating motion. From this, the world bodies formed. Similar to how smaller drops separate from a large rotating drop of oil in a glass of water due to the vibration, according to today's view, the gradually formed ball of matter hurls smaller ones, thus producing suns and planets. Even if Theosophy accepts this genesis as far as it takes place in matter, this view does not satisfy the Theosophist, because the modern theory does not answer the question of how spirit came to earth and how life entered this matter. The speaker continued by saying that the answer to this cannot be given scientifically or speculatively; it is only possible to gain clarity about this through one's own inner development. Goethe emphasized that every physical apparatus used as a research tool must be placed above the human being himself, whose organs represent instruments of a much higher order. Goethe also pointed out that the great world outside finds its true reflection in us and that there is no force in the environment that does not also apply to the inside of the human being; that is why he directly related the world around us as the macrocosm to the world within us, as the microcosm. Just as we are connected with a visible world, we are also connected with an invisible one. The human being as a physical organism forms the pinnacle of life, which is also expressed in the fact that he can say “I” to himself. This is not possible for any other being; nor can this “I” say “I” to another, rather each person can only say “I” to themselves. With the I, the human being presents himself as the crown, the perfection of physical life, but only at the beginning of the spiritual world. In the environment, as the mirror image of our inner world, we see at the beginning of the physical world the perfect spiritual world. The religions now place the sacrifice of God at the forefront of creation for the reason that God not only wanted to create a beautiful and wise world, but also a loving one. But true love can only exist in freedom, so he had to, as it were, immerse himself in the world, lose himself in it, so that we can recognize him around us and, of our own free will, engage with his spirit and develop in the direction of his spirit. When the ancient Egyptians conceived of their Osiris as resting in sleep in the world, they thereby demonstrated a fine understanding of the ancient wisdom teachings and the essence of all religions.

In the second lecture, Dr. Steiner began by noting that the question of human descent is connected to what we understand by human destiny. As a theosophist, one must have a different view of human descent than the materialists. Today, human beings only partially reveal the characteristic features of their entire nature; to obtain a complete picture of the human being, it would be necessary to consider what these have looked like in the various phases of development. In addition to the physical body, one must also speak of an etheric body in humans, which represents the actual body of life, and an astral body, which, as a sentient soul body, first created the physical body according to ancient theosophical wisdom. For, according to the theosophical view, we create our bodily form out of the spirit, through the soul, the speaker said. Depending on the external circumstances, the spirit and the soul have built up the outer appearance and adapted it to the given circumstances. At the time of the Atlantean civilization, the culture of

a lost continent situated between America and Europe, the conditions on Earth and in the atmosphere were quite different than they are today. The people of that time mastered their environment through their inherent spiritual powers and not through reason, as we do today. He could directly put the forces of nature, such as the life force, as it is present in plants, for example, into his service; it was only much later that man developed the ability to think. Theosophy must reject what modern researchers have claimed, that man descended from apes; even the latest research already contradicts this theory. No researcher has been able to prove that man is a further development of the ape species. If one wants to accept this, then there must necessarily have been a regression in the gibbon, the ape species whose skull is closest to that of modern humans, namely a regression of its colossal arms and hands. But this contradicts every reasonable theory of evolution. Theosophy presents the relationship between humans and animals – and especially between humans and apes – in such a way that humans and apes once shared a common stage of development, at a time long before the Atlantic one. From this common stage, the spiritually inclined man developed from his similarly designed companion, who was bound by lower instincts, to the heights of humanity, while the latter degenerated into bestiality. This view of theosophy corresponds to its fundamental conception of the relationship between man and his environment, which is most closely related to him. In stone, in plants, in animals, the theosophist recognizes soul-related beings that are subject to laws similar to his own, for, according to the theosophical view, in order to become a human being, he must first develop through all the kingdoms of nature. The speaker, whose captivating presentation we can only hint at here, was met with enthusiastic applause.

Esteemed attendees! Among the ideas that the theosophical movement is trying to bring to people's attention again, the two words “reincarnation” and “karma” are combined in the title of today's lecture as the solution to the human riddle. Our contemporaries have very different interpretations of these two words. Some are quick to declare Theosophy fantastic and nonsensical; they say, “How can anyone possibly know something like that?” For others, this knowledge is a kind of deliverance; the word to the riddle is the riddle's solution, which they have found; the nightmare under which they have been suffering has been lifted. The mystery of why some people are in deepest misery while others seem to walk in the highest happiness is solved when we consider that in times gone by the foundations were laid for both the abilities with which a person is born and his destiny in this life on earth.

Those, however, to whom this seems so fantastic, do not consider that their environment is not the only one on earth. There are many people who believe in repeated lives on earth, just as many as those for whom this idea has been pushed out of their field of vision. For the Asian peoples, re-embodiment is not a dry theory, but a truth of life from which they draw vitality. In earlier times, until the advent of Christianity, this view was widespread in Europe, even in the early days of Christianity. It was not just a view for visionaries; the best of the leaders professed this view. Plato, Giordano Bruno, who was executed for standing up for Copernicus, stood up for it. Their doctrine cannot be separated from the concept of repeated lives on earth. Lessing professes it in his “Education of the Human Race”. It is not just the fanciful spirits of some subordinate religious system that advocate this, but great minds such as Goethe and Jean Paul, because this is the only way they can explain life. One behaves remarkably against the great spiritual heroes such as Plato, Lessing and so on, whose names one mentions with more or less feigned reverence – there is even a tie named after Giordano Bruno – when one comes across their deepest conviction of repeated life on earth and then shrugs and says: That is one of the weaknesses of this great man. – Is there a greater immodesty than to judge like this? I ask anyone who speaks in this way where they learned the best things they know. It was probably from those whose names are associated with this teaching. Yet they claim to be their judges! They accept from them what suits them and discard what does not.

The theosophical movement seeks to bring the awareness of repeated earthly life to people in a modern way. Science still resists recognizing this teaching. If only they would accept it as a hypothesis, the time will soon come when they will see that without this teaching they cannot solve the mystery of man. Every human being carries within himself an imperishable core of being. What is born and dies with him is only the shell of this core of being. This was there before birth, will be there after death. This core of being has already repeatedly lived on earth and will be born again and again in the womb. The present life is only one among many.

This is not immediately apparent when considered superficially. On first glance, the teaching may seem improbable. The naturalistic way of thinking in the West makes it impossible for us to grasp the matter correctly. There is a certain higher spiritual teaching, as it was cultivated in the East. Many Westerners who have received this teaching have naturally come to separate their outer appearance from their inner core of being in their thoughts when they are alone or with those who have undergone the same schooling and know about this inner core of being.

They think or say: “It is not my actual core of being that is walking around the room, but my body. My body is hungry, my brain is thinking, and so on.

There are spiritual teachings that teach us that the physical body is only a tool for the spiritual essence, that all sense organs only serve to enable it to occupy itself on earth. The average person thinks of their body as “I”; the spiritually trained person has the sensation of a duality, a spiritual “I” that has nothing to do with the external one; more and more, they distinguish the imperishable core of their being from the physical body. What was there before birth has nothing to do with the physical body, but a lot to do with physical needs.

The idea that it is Mr. Smith or John Doe who returns is wrong. Only someone who can detach himself from the idea that he is his body can recognize what it is that reincarnates itself as Fritz Schulze or Johann Maier. Only when he is able to do this can he begin to understand what it is that reincarnates itself.

Now we must once again briefly consider what remains and returns to earthly existence and what passes away. Firstly, the physical body disintegrates at death because it consists of physical matter – it passes away.

Secondly, the etheric body, the life body: this is what enables the physical organs to perform their function; the moving, the invigorating in the body. The clock also moves, it consists of a wheel train; if I take out a wheel, it stops working; if I put the clock down and the wheel next to it, they can lie there for a long time, they do not change. But if I cut off a hand from the human body, it does not remain as it was; it withers away because it was connected with the body, of which I have separated it, in a living, organic way. This etheric body also disintegrates. It merges into the general ether.

The third body can be recognized when we consider what lives in the human being – not just the connection between skin and bones – but what he carries within him in terms of suffering and joy, desires and passions; these are things that live in him just as much as blood and heart; they are just as alive. This is the astral body.

Fourthly, there is the I, which distinguishes human beings from the creatures of the other realms. The physical body is shared with minerals, the etheric body with plants, and the astral body with animals.

The I works on the astral body. We must keep reminding ourselves of this. The example often given can make this clear to us. What Darwin experienced with a “savage” who eats his own kind: this “savage” also consists of the four basic parts of the human being mentioned; but his astral body still differs little from that of the animal. He still blindly follows his instincts. Darwin tried to make it clear to the “savage” how wrong it was for him to eat his brother. The “savage” said that Darwin could not possibly know whether it was bad or good before he had eaten it. — From this we can see that this “savage” had no concept of right and wrong at all; he could not yet make a distinction between good and evil. What he likes, what tastes good to him, is good for him; what tastes bad or displeases him is bad for him. His ego has not yet worked on his astral body; he has not yet ennobled it. Culture ennobles the instincts and makes them subservient to duty. The ideal of duty teaches man to distinguish between what attracts him and what he should avoid. In this way he recognizes right and wrong. When man has come so far that he is able to distinguish between what he may follow and what he may not follow, he has learned to control his astral body from the ego.

When we look at people today, we find that they have worked on one part of their astral body and not the other. We must make a strict distinction between these two parts of the astral body. One part is still like that of an animal, blindly following its inclinations and impulses. The other part is the part of the astral body that man has transformed from a purely natural state into something nobler. There is a sharp and important boundary between these two parts. The part that the human being has not yet worked on will be lost after a short time when he dies. The part of the astral body that we have not made our own is given back to nature. What we have purified and transformed from astral matter remains our imperishable property. The unrefined part of the instinct must fall away; what has been refined remains and is incorporated into the ego. Thus man works on the immortalization, on the making immortal of his astral body. It is obvious that this work cannot be completed in one life. Logically structured, the doctrine of repeated earth lives appears through this contemplation.

For anyone who, through personal insight, knows the inner life of man, re-embodiment is a fact as certain as the fact that there are so and so many people sitting here in this hall. He knows of this fact through higher vision; he has not arrived at it through logical speculation.

But this evening we want to make clear to ourselves the logic of the matter. — Let us compare the “savage” who has done very little work with, say, St. Francis of Assisi, who had almost nothing left in him that he had not ennobled. He had brought the remainder of the earth down to the smallest degree. To reach this level, he must have had completely different abilities and powers at his disposal than that “savage”. Would it not be just as nonsensical to assume that these abilities came out of nothing as it would be to assume that a lower animal could arise from the mud, or that a lion did not descend from a lion? If you wanted to claim that, you would consider it foolish in the physical realm. We are reluctant to assume miracles in the physical realm, but not such a much greater miracle in the higher realm! What is inherited in the animal, so that only lions descend from a lion, only tigers from a tiger, and so on, are generic characteristics. But in the individual human being, there can be no question of the genus. Every human being has individual characteristics; only someone who chooses to ignore them can fail to see this. For human beings, the individual is as important as the species is for animals. An animal repeats the species, a human being repeats the individual. The individual human being not only displays the characteristics of his parents, but is also something in itself.

This must be explained. In addition to what we have inherited from our parents, something spiritual lives in us; that is, something spiritual lives in each of us that can be traced back to a previous existence. Just as the physical person has acquired physical characteristics through heredity, so the spiritual person has acquired spiritual qualities. And he has acquired them in previous lives by learning to control his astral body. And he has brought this ability with him into this life. It is always only the core of his being that reappears on earth.

Some might well object: Yes, if that is so, then shouldn't a person remember their previous lives? The question is wrongly put. Imagine you have a four-year-old child in front of you and someone asks: Why can't people do arithmetic? Of course, the four-year-old child can't do arithmetic. Let him reach the age of ten and he will be able to do it. There comes a time for everyone when they will realize that the more they ascend, the more they will also come to understand their previous lives on earth. For the majority it is still quite impossible. One must first know what is embodied before one can recognize what happens to it. Man desires to remember, but that which he wants to remember has fallen away from him, that which has significance for him. Only when he can grasp himself as a spirit can there be any question of remembering.

Whoever needs external impressions to feel does not become aware of the immortal, cannot learn anything about it. It only shines forth in the one who conquers the spiritual core. Certain phenomena occur here and there where memory becomes clairvoyant; for example, in the face of mortal danger, the whole of life sometimes arises in memory.

We must be clear about this. If man, as he is now, is to remember, he must call upon the etheric body for help. Memory lies in the etheric body. The instincts are in the astral body. We could not have memories without the etheric body, but they are clouded and inadequate because they are hindered by the physical body and drowned out by the surging feelings of the astral body. During sleep, the etheric body remains connected to the physical body and causes dreams. Shortly after death, the astral and etheric bodies separate from the physical body; then the magnetic bond that tied them to the body is broken. In the short time between the lifting of the finer bodies and their separation from the physical body, the whole of life flashes before the soul as in a great painting. It is written in the etheric body; memories emerge of long, long times; there is a dead calm over the soul; it is blind and deaf to its surroundings; deep inside, it comes to life with a sublime content.

Thomas a Kempis, in his “Nachfolge Christi” (The Imitation of Christ), has much to say about this language of the soul. His book is almost on a par with the New Testament.

When this spiritual power arises deep within us, it gradually allows us to recognize our spiritual essence. It is a very specific experience, the inner realization of the self-generating thought. We can get some idea of the process if we become completely absorbed in a work of art, to the extent that we forget ourselves completely. If you want to know yourself, your innermost self, there must be perfect calm. Nothing, absolutely nothing of the personal ego must interfere. This requires a degree of living in the object that takes place in the chaste ether element. When a person has learned to let the divine thought live in him and is able to trace his life back to his birth, then an image appears before his soul. It is the image of what he saw at the hour of death in the previous life, the overview of the previous earthly life. He cannot remember the whole earthly life; that comes only later.

At first, this memory will be repeated until it becomes certain, before the memory goes back further and further. Anyone who knows what happens to a person will understand the context. Anyone who believes that a person receives everything from nature will find it strange. But to those who believe in the work that man has to do, it will be clear. What a person's character is, that person has created for himself: What you think today, you will be tomorrow. — Beautiful, pure thoughts, often, often cherished, duties faithfully fulfilled, will pass into character. Thought forms character.

On the other hand, it is obvious – and easy to notice – that a person's environment, their surroundings, their occupation, has a great influence on their character. On closer examination, we will find that the opportunities offered to people in life are related to their inclinations, desires and cravings. Compare a North American bank official with a botanist. The botanist draws very different things to himself than the bank official. This is quite natural and natural. They are the consequences of the innate dispositions that each person has acquired in their previous life. The actions are the counter-shock to the environment. An example: a carpenter has worked all day. The half-finished table that he finds in the morning causes him to continue working on this table. He does not work out of nothing. The half-finished table determines my fate for tomorrow, the carpenter can say. So the previous day is the karma for the next.

Those animals that crawled into a dark cave and could not find their way out again gradually lost their eyesight because they could not use it in the dark. Their offspring lacked the organs of sight altogether; in the dark they needed other organs. These animals prepared their own fate. Their migration into the dark cave was their karma. In the past they created their future. What I do changes the outside world. If I break off a twig, I have changed the course of the world. The tree does not continue to grow as it was in its nature to do. With every deed we change the course of events; it would have been different if I had not done that deed.

The same applies to the spiritual life. Through our feelings and thoughts, we change the world. Because all my actions have an influence on the world, my karma consists of the changes that I have brought about in the world through my actions. Thoughts form character; actions form counter-actions. They fall back on the doer in the next life.

Example: I have offended a person. By doing so, I have brought about a change; now I am obliged to restore the world to the state from which I disturbed it. I have made the world imperfect; it demands that I make it perfect again. I am bound by my obligation until I have restored the disturbed harmony. If the harmony is not restored in this life, the guilt remains until the next life on earth and must be compensated for.

This is how repeated lives on earth are connected. If I was born into hardship and misery in this life, it was because I had previously brought disharmony into the world. This is how world justice is administered. Man is answerable for his actions; there is no other forgiveness for these than the counter-action that is performed as atonement. This is the unpardonable sin against the spirit. What he does in the lower world must be made good by him in the lower world. Natural life brings about nature in him; if he errs there, it will be forgiven him. Man is answerable for what he has done himself. If he does evil, consciously goes against the cosmic order, it is a sin against the self, against the spirit. The self has been violated by the conscious act. Theosophy is not dogma, it does not form a sect. It is life, full life. Mere theory is of no use. Even if I knew everything perfectly and did not want to apply it in life, it would be of no use to me. You have to be convinced of the truth in a practical way.

How should we relate to this? We have to be thorough and look at the bottom of things. If we know the reason and the cause of the bad things in the world, it is depressing at first. Then I have to say to myself: I have prepared my destiny, my character myself. But on the other hand, consciousness also has an uplifting effect. We are the masters of the future. What I do now forms the basis for the future. If I work on improving my character today, I know that this work is not in vain. This gives a blessed consolation to those who are inwardly convinced of the matter. The deepest peace of mind sprouts from this teaching. Life becomes different, also in relation to our fellow human beings. We are only too easily inclined to judge when we see in others what we do not like. If we have gained an understanding of karma, how different it becomes. Then we say: 'You may be bad now, you may lie and cheat, but perhaps this is not the first time you have faced me, and who knows whether I am not perhaps to blame for the fact that you are so bad today.

If someone finds this ridiculous, it is a sign that they have not yet penetrated deeply into the law of karma. Once you have come to the realization of the higher self, you will no longer pass by your fellow human beings indifferently or criticize them; you will learn to understand the connection between person and person. He meets people on every street corner; he thinks, can I help you, maybe I can make you better if I did something wrong in a past life. This idea, which is possible today, applied to life, makes life clearer, more transparent. We learn to understand people better and to help them better.

It is nonsense to say: I should not help him, he has brought his evil karma upon himself. — The moment you are standing in front of him, his karma is that you help him. If you do not help him, he will be helped in some other way. But you have neglected your duty. If you help him, you can say to yourself: If I help him, his future life will be better. The doctrine of karma teaches us to help ourselves. Through my own practical life, the doctrine becomes ever clearer; those who live by it will find it to be true - and only in life. Through recurring experiences, it will be proven to you throughout your entire life.

Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity, summarized this teaching in a confession. He spoke of the whole world as of the body of his Father, as every body of man is a dwelling place of the Father. Man is unconscious of the Father; he needs a guide to the Father. Only through the Son do we come to the Father; he wants to be our guide. After every life on earth, the soul returns to the Father's body. In every life on earth, the soul passes through a dwelling that is taken from the divine Father Body. Jesus Christ says: “In my Father's house are many mansions.”

Those who have a certain inclination towards spiritual life, “who must choose their heroes for themselves, the path to Olympus,” will encounter many things over time that they have absorbed from art and science, which seemed to them to be ideals. Then there is the world of practical people, who associate the concept of ideal and idealism with dreaminess and unworldliness.

One of those who grasped the concept of the ideal most beautifully is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He once said to a group of young people: “We others also know that ideals cannot be applied directly in real life, if not better than that. But those others who don't have this feeling should wait for the time being. Ideals cannot be applied like food and drink every day; but for the idealist, ideals are the great effective forces of human life, those forces that he draws down from the invisible realms to introduce into the visible world. The small, unimportant phenomena of external life can indeed be experienced without significant ideals, but the great advances of humanity have only been achieved by those who are able to rise from the realm of reality into the realm of ideals. Not those who think practically are the real progressives, but those whom the everyday person looks down on as idealists.

They say that idealists are unworldly people. But in truth, the future is always unworldly in the present. The idealist is, of course, quite different from the practitioner. The idealist's soul is tuned quite differently. He has quite different experiences of the soul. We have to develop a very specific way of feeling and we cannot do a child a greater service than to develop in him this state of mind, which does not constitute dreamy but practical ideality.

This is the devotional mood of the soul. One must not grasp certain ideals with the mind, but the one who develops a reverential, devotional mood in himself develops it to comprehend the ideals.

In our youth we had uncritical veneration, and we can do nothing better for ourselves than, for example, to make ourselves capable of venerating a person in such a way that when we are told about him and have not yet seen him, he appears to us as beautiful and worthy of veneration. Those who have had many such moods in their youth, who have learned to venerate, have truly developed something of such a mood of the soul that generates real power in life. The real is generated by the real. We gradually struggle to generate real strength by learning to venerate.

This is a real life teaching, and it aims to develop the devotional view of life. We can give young people nothing better than this power to worship, this devotion, this reverence. We owe an infinite debt to that which we are able to revere uncritically. This is an inner experience that one must have to appreciate its significance. Through this, one comes to what is called the impersonal.

Disinterested deployment of strength in the affairs that we have recognized as the right ones, without our having any personal interest in them, enables us to develop powerful ideals.

The great geniuses of the world have become great by making their own the affairs in which they had no personal interest. Furthermore, we achieve this devotional mood when we do what we have recognized as being right without looking for personal success. This does not contradict in terms of external effect; but we should decide in the most important matters of our external life in such a way that we are able to say: I almost certainly foresee that my first or second or third attempt will fail, but nevertheless I undertake it. – So not looking at the success. This is, of course, put radically, and in life many things will be different; but it is the attitude that matters.

Ideas continue to have an effect in life. This can be observed in Herder's “Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind”, the most beautiful primer of theosophy, whose ideas Goethe, Schiller, Novalis and Schlegel absorbed. Of this work, Goethe could say: This is the most beautiful way in which ideas continue to have an effect in life, although one so easily forgets their origin. And with the great ideals of the spiritual leaders of humanity, forms are also formed. The geniuses of humanity transform human beings in their most everyday activities. To rise to the ideals, we must absorb the spiritual creation within us; we must revere that which rises above the everyday. It is indiscreet to see the everyday in the lives of great geniuses, instead of seeing that which rises above the everyday.

Hegel says: You believe that some ideal is an abstraction? For me, an ideal is not an abstraction, but something very concrete. — Idealism is not only the knowledge of ideals, but it is a mood, a feeling that must come to life in us, that must become a life force. The ideals of humanity are therefore the deepest forces at work in humanity. The great geniuses of humanity, the poets, composers, painters, sculptors, all these guides of humanity are recorded in history, which some understand better and others less well. They stand at the top as the guides of humanity; but those from whom they draw their strength stand behind them. Those who are hardly more than a name to humanity – namely, the “great initiates” – stand overlooking and dominating the times.

The greatest of these, the founders of the great religions, have become known to humanity; but what they were like themselves, in their inner being, humanity does not know. This is to become popular again through the theosophical world view.

The one who imbued the whole of Egyptian culture with the great wisdom of Egyptianism, who spiritually dominated all of this, is actually the great Hermes, the Egyptian initiate!

The one to whom the culture of India goes back, Krishna, is actually quite unknown in terms of his soul life.

To see into the soul of Buddha is granted to only a few, and what took place in the soul of Zoroaster can be seen by only a very few; the same applies to Pythagoras, Plato; then the incarnation of the second Logos, Christ; and then the great initiate, the unknown from the highlands, whom history does not even know: Master Jesus. Behind the greatest we always find the very greatest. Just as people allow themselves to be inspired by their leaders, so the leaders allow themselves to be inspired by those who are even greater.

What then is an initiate? It is the one who knows something of the hidden forces in the world, of its deepest, most mysterious ones. It is usually a great secret that he has, and it is his mission to make this secret effective in the world.

The true initiates will not deny that they are initiates, but they will say that it is impossible to reveal the deepest laws of existence, the hidden forces, at first. An initiate may even tell his secret in words, but the world will not notice it. There are many people who are what is called ordinary in their outward occupation; they could be shoemakers like Jacob Boehme, but they are not recognizable as initiates by those around them. What he knows is a spiritual power, or a sum of powers, which in the present time must be put into humanity by some means, and these powers work through the centuries, even if they do not work immediately.

He is an initiate who knows what is to happen in the future, and he guides the course of human development in a great, definite direction.

Just as the chemist combines and controls certain substances, so the initiate controls spiritual forces.

Those who want to achieve higher development must overcome the illusion of personal self. While we may have the appearance of being personal, we are only a link in the organism. The hand that withers when it is sawn off is also only a link in the organism, nothing in itself. Just as man is ruled by the soul, so those who recognize the laws of nature [of] the earth speak of the earth spirit. That is the soul of the earth, and we all together with it are the body of the earth soul. Not only must we intellectually recognize that selfhood is illusion; our innermost feelings must also recognize that we are parts of a whole.

“My soul would be nothing without the others,” says Angelus Silesius. When this illusion fades and a person can let go of their personality and surrender in this way, they are ready to receive a certain teaching, which is a deeply inner experience of their soul. Initially, it is the greatest experience that a person can have here on our earthly journey.

Although we are part of a whole, we are still a very special being; we are a building block in the universe, but it would have to collapse if we were taken out.

The initiate learns to recognize which letter he is in the universe, in the book of the world; he gets to know his deepest, innermost being, which exists only once. He must recognize his letter, but each person has a different letter that he must recognize himself. All learning from the initiates consists in our being led, in our being shown the way, but what we are, that we must tell ourselves. No one can understand this, no one else understands this deep secret; only each person understands it for himself. To have come so far that we have the “inner word” — the letter — that enables us to develop spiritual powers.

And what is the value of all this? Even if it must be admitted that people quarrel over many, many things and are at war over them, there is still a certain area of truth where only the inner experience is decisive. People quarrel because of their passions, their desires, cravings and instincts – but wherever pure thought, dispassionate thought, prevails, there is no quarrel. But one must see the thought in the pure etheric height.

And only very few can do that! This unified realm, the purified thought floating in etheric height, harmonizes people.

That is Manas! The ideals of men are thoughts, but still interspersed with desires, longings and passions. People can still argue about their ideals because the passions, ideas and prejudices of one person are the same as the passions, ideas and prejudices of another.

But let us ascend to the ideals of the initiated! Through the innermost education of the human being, he has purified his passions, desires and wishes, just as the thinking person has also purified his thoughts. Christ therefore says: Sanctify your thoughts! If a number of people could be together who have purified their passions, desires and wishes in this way, they would be in harmony with each other, as are the thoughts of these people. When a person has undergone this purification, they find themselves in something similar that encompasses everyone, they are in harmony. That which develops in this way is the Budhi, which lies in all people in a germinal form.

Only manasic natures are united in their thoughts. But those who have developed Budhi are united in their feelings.

Thus we see at the bottom of human nature something spiritual, divine. The ideals of the initiates have become enthusiasm; that is: “in God”!

For when they have developed the Budhi, they can receive that which is their deepest self, their note, their word; then man can let his living ideals flow into humanity. A thought becomes powerful when it is inspired by desires. If it is imbued with divine power, then it can be placed in the germ of human development, then it can carry development through the centuries.

Thus the great initiates have brought the soul forces out of the hidden and invisible and placed them in humanity, creating in the invisible the phenomena that then unfold in history as events.

This is what Schiller calls “the gestalt”. Man then becomes aware of the essential, the hidden, the supersensible.

Schiller's beautiful words apply to him:

Only the body is subject to those powers
That weave the dark fate;
But free from every temporal power,
The companion of blessed natures
Walks above in the corridors of light
Divinely among gods the figure.

The great initiates do not contradict themselves; they express themselves differently because they speak for different ages of the human race, just as the same truth would be presented to an eight-year-old boy and a twenty-year-old youth in the same way.

The initiates know that they are initiates. Their goal is to plant the appropriate forces in humanity so that it continues to develop upwards.

Dearly beloved! Whoever gazes at a cloud, or at a cloudy sky, would never guess that in the next moment lightning will flash out of the cloud and thunder will rumble. Lightning and thunder are phenomena hidden in the cloud. This is an image for the things around us; there is also much hidden that can be awakened from its slumber.

I will now try to characterize this hidden world. In theosophy, it is called the three worlds. These three worlds are not separate from each other, but they rest within each other; they are present within this world of ours, but they only emerge under special circumstances. The physical world is visible, audible, tangible, and so on, for the ordinary person. The other two worlds rest hidden in the physical world; but they can be brought out.

An often-used image can help us to understand what is meant by this. Let us think of a person born blind, whose eyes are opened and who can now see. Until now, he has felt his way around; now he has had an operation and can see. The same objects, whose properties he could previously only explore by touching, take on shine and color now that his eye has been opened to the light. In this sense, one speaks of higher worlds. They are there, but the higher sense, the spiritual eyes, must first be opened in order for them to be revealed to the person.

Another comparison that has been made here before: two naturalists were observing three Moluccan crabs in an aquarium. One of them had fallen on its back and was so unhappily placed under an iron bar that it was unable to right itself. The other two crabs tried in vain to help their comrade back on his feet. After they had tried for a long time without success, they left. The naturalists waited to see what would happen. After some time, the crabs returned and brought two more brothers with them. These four then managed to get the crab back on its feet by working together.

I am not telling this story to give an example of mutual aid in the animal kingdom, although it is a fine testimony to it. It is intended to lead us to a different consideration. Suppose the naturalists had lost their patience and reached into the water and turned the cancer back over; and then imagine the crabs endowed with human intelligence, the following would arise: The cancer society would consider this strange case. First, there would be the orthodox, the conservatives; they would say: A miracle has occurred. Then there would be the monists, the materialists; they would say: There are only cancer forces, no other forces exist; a higher intervention is impossible. They would have to leave the case unexplained. Thirdly, the cancer theosophists would come; they would say: No, there are no miracles, everything is based on law; but there is also a higher law that goes beyond the ordinary comprehension of cancer. We theosophists extend the law into higher realms beyond the ordinary comprehension.

Let us now realize what it depends on to perceive these supersensible things. All our senses are active and serve us to perceive the things around us. But we also become aware that the senses decrease, die, and then the ability to perceive ceases; but life does not stop with that. So you can live in the world without perceiving. Whether or not we perceive things depends on whether we have the senses necessary to perceive them. Admittedly, it is not unacceptable that we live in countless worlds for which the senses have not yet been awakened.

The real purpose of the theosophical movement is to awaken man to these higher senses. Some people go wild when you talk to them about supernatural things. They cannot grasp that one can really gain an insight into these things, that not everything that is said about them is based on hypothesis. But they do not consider that there are many things around us that pass us by without a trace because we do not recognize them.

An example of this: a famous singer was invited to an elegant society event; she was late – as famous personalities sometimes are. She was seated between two gentlemen; one was Mendelsohn, whom she knew and with whom she had a lively conversation. The gentleman on her other side tried repeatedly, in his polite, modest way, to draw her into the conversation, but she didn't like him and asked Mendelsohn quietly, “Who is that stupid fellow?” The famous philosopher Hegel, was the reply. Had she known beforehand that she would meet Hegel there, she would have made every effort to engage him in conversation. Now she had sat with him – and had not recognized him.

Could it not be that many a person who is endowed with higher faculties is merely a “stupid fellow” in the eyes of many people? Let us think of Christ Jesus; now, after all that the Church and time have made of him, it is indeed easy to recognize him. But just imagine he were to enter this hall today. Who would recognize him then?

Therefore, we may admit the possibility that there may be people who are endowed with higher senses than the ordinary ones, without the ordinary man in the street perceiving anything. Such a person is called “one with a higher state of consciousness”.

Actually, every human being lives in these different states of consciousness. We must realize that the human being really lives in different states of consciousness. First, in the physical world during the day, in the normal state, he has the waking consciousness. Second, the dream-filled state of sleep. It is not uninteresting to study the experiences of dreams. If you pay just a little attention to them, you will find a certain regularity in the dream images. Dreams are symbolic. The dream experiences show that we are dealing with rudiments of our daytime consciousness.

I would like to make this clear with a few examples, which, like all the examples I give, are based on real experiences. Someone dreams that they have caught a tree frog, vividly reliving the entire chase until they hold it in their hand. With the feeling of the soft, slippery thing in their hand, they wake up and realize that they had a corner of their bedspread in their hand. There the dream consciousness had symbolized the soft mass of the bedspread and transformed it into a tree frog.

A dream is also a playwright. Example: A woman dreams that she is in church, the preacher is giving an uplifting sermon, gradually his raised hands turn into wings – she finds this quite natural in the dream – then his lofty speech turns into cawing and outside the cockerel crows. - How the dream is a symbolist and a playwright, Schubert described in “The Night Side of Nature” from the hidden side of man. Heinrich von Kleist received many suggestions from him about this matter.

Thirdly: the state of consciousness of dreamless, unconscious sleep. Everyone will admit that a person is present, even when he is unconscious in his sleep, that he does not cease to exist in the evening and come into being again in the morning. And yet his consciousness perceives nothing of what is going on around him. These three states of consciousness change significantly when a person undergoes a spiritual, mental development. Then the divine man is awakened in him. He learns to perceive the mental processes. With the help of higher, more perfect people, mental organs develop in him that change the first two states of consciousness, so that the person not only perceives fleeting images, but a new world opens up to him that speaks to him in symbols. It is not enough for a person to be conscious only in dreams; he now also learns to bring dream consciousness into daytime consciousness, and in this way all irregularities will be regulated. Gradually, the confused dreams become clear symbols. If one receives guidance, one also learns to understand these symbols. Something real may then well occur. For example, it may occur that the student dreams of something ugly that is connected with a particular friend, who moves him; he learns that the friend has fallen seriously ill. A real condition has been expressed in the ugly dream.

In this way, a new world gradually opens up for the dreamer, and he learns to take this spiritual world into the ordinary world. He also perceives the soul in his fellow human beings. He also perceives soul-spiritual beings that he has not usually seen before.

The world that opens up to the human being is the “astral” world. Just as lightning and thunder issue forth from the cloud, so things emerge when the astral senses are awakened. Why is this world called the astral world? Those who understand only one sixteenth of it have quibbled a lot about the name. The people who have always been theosophists, the ancient mystics, used this name for good reason. What is the astral world? It is an expression of the soul world.

What is physical about me, my bones, muscles, and skin, forms the physical body. What is mental about me, my instincts, passions, and desires, is just as real as my hand and my head. These [mental qualities] form the astral body.

A person stands before me. I see his form, his hair, his face, his skin; but just as real as this visible person are his desires and cravings, instincts and passions before me, they are just as real for the astral world as the visible body is for the physical world. It has been suggested that it should be called the “drives-body”, but that is no better; it could lead to the erroneous opinion of the materialists, who believe that the drives emanate from the physical body. Before man was born, the soul of man was there, which has embodied itself in the body. The drives, instincts, passions and so on were there, and they are what shaped the physical body. So we can give a very definite answer to the question of where the physical body comes from.

Imagine a glass of water with a piece of ice floating in it. Ice is water. It is formed from water through cooling. This is roughly how we can imagine the process. The astral is to the physical as water is to ice. Ice is condensed water. The physical is the condensed astral substance. This is the relationship between the desire body and the physical body. Just as water crystallizes into snowflakes, all worlds have been created through crystallization processes. Our visible world has also emerged from the astral one. Goethe knew this process and tells us about it in the words of the world spirit:

In the floods of life, in the storm of action
I surge and surge again,
Weaving to and fro,
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life.
Thus I create at the whirling loom of time
And work the living garment of the Godhead!

Just as our earth was created from the astral matter that surrounds it and consists of it, so the astral matter and the other matter consist of the same matter as the whole world of stars. The physical matter of the earth is related to the physical matter of the stellar world, the astral matter to the astral matter of the same and so on. The astral matter permeates everything. The mineral contains forces and substances. The plant also has substances and forces and life. The animal feels and senses, but more unconsciously. Man, finally, who still has the animal in him, consciously gains control over it and thereby rises above the animal. He is, as it were, a summary of all physical realms and has the essence of all of them within him.

The materialists claim that instincts arise from the physical. Theosophy claims the opposite. Our desire body is related to the world of desire around us.

Thirdly, dreamless consciousness: human consciousness develops ever higher and higher. Then not only dream consciousness emerges from the dark night, but something new emerges that cannot be compared to light images. It speaks to the human being in sounds, as it were. This sound of the higher spiritual world was well known to the Pythagoreans; they called it “the harmony of the spheres” or “music of the spheres”. Goethe also tells us about it in his “Faust”. The “Prologue in Heaven” introduces us to this third world. What Goethe presents to us here is not just a poetic image, but reality. — The archangel Raphael sings:

The sun resounds in the ancient way
In brotherly spheres of song,
And its prescribed journey
It completes with a thunderclap.

What resounds is not the physical sun. This physical sun is only the body for the sun spirit. This “resonance” is perceived by the more highly developed people. From the dark deep sleep, it “resonates” up to him. This is what Goethe means when he says “the sun resounds”. He sticks with this image. In the second part of “Faust” it says:

Tönend wird für Geistesohren
Schön der neue Tag gebören:;

This third world is the mental world, the spiritual world. It can be perceived in its true state with proper concentration. Once man has reached this level, he knows that the mere thought is something real. Heaven – Devachan – can be conjured up.

This state is called the continuity of consciousness. When the ear is opened to this sound, the actual spiritual world, the world of the spirit, opens up to man. Just as man is plant, animal and mineral, he is also astral and mental; it is possible for him to live entirely within himself, in the spirit.

Man lives in the three worlds. During the day he lives in physical consciousness. At night, during sleep, he initially perceives nothing that is perceptible to his senses. How is it that man is unconscious during sleep? There is a very specific reason for this. Man divides his being. During the day, the human being uses the powers of the physical and etheric bodies. The powers for the waking consciousness are taken from these two bodies. These powers must be renewed; this is done during sleep; the actual human being uses his astral and mental bodies and their powers to work on the physical body.

The person who wants to develop himself higher must acquire special moral qualities, whereby he can make the work of the astral and mental bodies superfluous.

How can a person make this possible? When he enters the “Chela path”, which has been discussed in detail here. The qualities that are necessary as preparation for this path have been mentioned here many times. The first main condition is the control of thoughts; one must not let them stray; then comes the control of passions and desires, great composure, and so on. When all this has been achieved, after years of practice, what happens then?

A calmness comes over the physical and astral life, a feeling of well-being, an inner health, and thus the astral and mental forces are released from their work during sleep; they no longer have as much work to do on it. These unused forces are now used to draw out hidden abilities in man and to develop clairvoyant organs, to form the “eyes of the soul”. These organs are called “lotus flowers” or “chakras”; they are described in detail in “Lucifer - Gnosis”. With these organs, the astral world can be perceived.

In this way, a person develops through virtues, especially through calmness and composure. Once he has achieved these, he may use the freed-up energies to develop the higher organs. Those who want to develop these higher organs without these virtues are drawing on physical forces that the physical nature still needs. The result is that the person becomes nervous, even mentally and spiritually ill. In this way, the human being can open up the two higher worlds. The astral matter is thin, thinner than air. It appears in the astral light as a human aura. It is a radiation that extends one and a half times the length of the head. This aura expresses the character of the human being's innermost being in different color tones. The newcomer to the astral plane is struck by the fact that everything is read there as in a mirror image, in a most strange and shocking way. Above all, he sees the mirror image of himself there, which seems to be coming towards him, while in reality it emanates from him. If, for example, one sees the number 164, one must read 461.

What takes place in relation to time also runs in the opposite direction. You first have to learn how to orient yourself in the other world. It is very important to know that the passions show themselves there in an ugly, demonic form; one's own passions pounce on the clairvoyant as demonic figures – in the mirror image.

That is how you get to know yourself. Those who have had experience in this and have previously learned the context know how to judge and deal with this phenomenon correctly. Many a person who has attained abnormal vision without having received proper training, but has broken into the astral unprepared, describes it that way. That comes from materialism. Theosophy is quite serious. It can only confuse those who approach it without understanding. But for those who look deeper into it, theosophy brings spiritual health. Materialism, on the other hand, makes people ill. If the religious element slumbering in every human being is not satisfied, it will eventually break through the brain; the brain does not understand it and becomes ill. The higher worlds break in on man, and he does not understand them. That is the essence of mental illness.

The “sounding” is then the third world.

The human being lives in these three worlds one after the other. After he has ended his life here in the physical, he discards his physical body, then also his etheric body; then the astral body remains, in which he now lives. He really lives in the astral. When we say we live in this or that, we mean that we have something in common with the world around us. Now, one thing in particular is no longer the case. Even during sleep, the astral body is separated from the physical and etheric bodies, but they are still connected by a magnetic bond. This now falls away. The human being now becomes aware of this. It is a very peculiar awareness that confronts him. He is accustomed to perceiving and doing everything through the senses; for example, he is accustomed to enjoying food and delighting in the taste through the palate; the longing for enjoyment has remained with him; he must first get used to doing without these pleasures.

This happens for all the senses. This happens through this deprivation of the senses. Through this deprivation of the senses, two conditions arise violently. First, a burning thirst that arises from the inability to satisfy desire. This acts as a kind of fire — the purgatory of Catholics. He must first get rid of his desires. The other concerns action. He is accustomed to acting; but he lacks the hand to act, the foot to walk, and so on. This feeling of inability causes a state of coldness. This state is called Kamaloka, the place of desires. This state is caused by the desires in man, which are still active and find no satisfaction. It is the state of disaccustoming.

If a person has already become accustomed to living in the spirit during his lifetime, this disaccustomment will not be difficult for him. Christ Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is within you” (Luke 17:21), so that a person can already live here in the spirit, in the third, the mental world, in Devachan. If he has then passed through Kamaloka after death, he comes to Devachan. That is the state in which the divine man truly lives in his element. When he is no longer attached to the lower, his own divine self comes to life in his inner being.

I have now shown how man, by opening up the higher senses, becomes familiar with the two hidden worlds, which are hidden only to the extent that colors and light are hidden things for those born blind.

The time has not yet come for everyone to follow this hidden path of knowledge. But people must hear about the higher worlds, become familiar with them, try to grasp them intellectually, and let them tell them about themselves. That is the first step towards finally entering them. Man should create concepts for himself, he is a self-creating being.

We live in an important time, when great movements of a spiritual and intellectual nature are taking place. Much is being told publicly about supersensible facts that used to be kept secret. Then some people come and say: Yes, you are telling us all kinds of things; and we are to believe in you. — Once a personality in Berlin was literally enraged. To this personality I said: You don't need to believe me at all. I don't care what you think about me. If I draw you a map of Asia Minor, indicating the outlines, the rivers with lines and the cities with dots, you can say: 'What are you making up, Asia Minor doesn't look like that. No, it does not look like that, but if you go there, you will see that the drawing was correct. That is how it is with the drawing I have sketched for you of the transcendental worlds. For the time being, you are welcome to think of me as a fraud who is telling you something, but – listen! – after death everyone is in a position to apply what they are now learning.

But culture will soon produce blossoms that will only be understandable to those who understand the occult. Therefore, it is advisable to listen quietly and to process what you hear. If you can do this without inner contradiction, life will open up for you in a completely new way; you will learn to understand it in an unimagined way.

In this way, one struggles upwards to knowledge, to that which never fades, to the realm of heaven. We develop ever higher and higher, through the three worlds first. The first stage is the physical, the second the astral, the third the mental, the spiritual. The first step consists of man's turning from the transitory to the eternal. The astral life of mind and desire turns either downwards to the transitory or upwards to the eternal; it has two sides. The third world, the spiritual world, encompasses what man recognizes as his own spiritual being.

Report in the “Mühlheimer Zeitung”, No. 86, February 16, 1906

Cologne, February 15. On Monday and Wednesday, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, the General Secretary of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, spoke in the Isabellensaal of the Gürzenich about two topics that may be of the greatest interest to us, since they deal with the inner development and the future of humanity. In his first lecture on 'the inner development of man', the speaker pointed out the aspirations and tasks of the Theosophical Society, which aim to form the core of a general brotherhood of humanity without distinction of faith, nation, class, or sex, and to cultivate the knowledge of the core of truth of all religious life, as well as to explore the deeper spiritual powers that lie dormant in human nature and in the rest of the world. One of the tasks of Theosophy is to promote and develop the abilities and powers lying dormant in man in a school-oriented way. Although this must be regarded as one of the tasks of Theosophy, it is not mandatory for every member of the Theosophical Society to undergo such inner schooling with the help of knowledgeable teachers; rather, it is entirely left to the discretion of the individual. Such schooling is only desirable when it is something that the person is drawn to from the bottom of their hearts. The development of inner abilities in esoteric circles was practiced in ancient times, as it has always been. In ancient times, this took place in secret schools, and later in more intimate circles of societies and orders. In the esoteric schools, the aim is to systematically explore the physical, mental and spiritual forces that are now working in confusion within the human being, in such a way that the soul and spirit become master over him and master the physical instincts. Theosophy teaches that man belongs to three realms: the physical, the soul and the spiritual, and that his being is subject to the laws of these realms. Knowledge of these laws promotes a person's inner development. First of all, it is necessary to listen to the teachings of the knowledgeable in the spiritual realm without prejudice and to let them take effect, because one does not initially have the spiritual tools to penetrate into the higher worlds. Therefore, the first thing that must be demanded of the disciple is unreserved, unbiased devotion. He must be able to make himself, as it were, an empty vessel into which the foreign world flows; he must become completely selfless and master of his pleasure and displeasure. He must accept pleasure and pain with composure; furthermore, he must strictly regulate his thinking, and this should take on the inner character of the spiritual world. Plato demanded that those accepted into his school first undergo a mathematical course of study so that their thinking would be a reflection of undisturbed mathematical thinking and reasoning; then the laws of the spiritual world would flow into the student. From his thinking, he must then allow his actions to be influenced. Thus, arbitrariness is nowhere to be seen, only conformity to law. Then the human being becomes free of all sense perception; his spiritual self is released from the sense-perceptible coverings. Thus he becomes a disciple of wisdom, a homeless human being who lives only in the spirit; he no longer lives only with the things that are formed by the spirit, but with the forming spirit itself. All doubt and superstition soon fade away, for he knows that the true form of the spirit is freedom from personality, doubt and superstition. To attain higher knowledge, man must acquire four qualities. First, he must learn to distinguish the eternal from the temporal, truth from mere inclination; second, he must learn to appreciate the eternal and real in relation to the transitory and unreal; third, he must develop six qualities: control of thought and action, persistence, tolerance, faith and equanimity; and fourth, he must develop the desire for liberation. These are the stages on the path to higher inner knowledge.

In the second lecture, Dr. Steiner used the theosophical worldview to sketch out an image of the future of humanity. He explained that human destiny is not limited to what happens between birth and death. Otherwise, it would have to be seen as an unjustifiable phenomenon that one person enters the world with all the prerequisites for a happy existence, while another, spiritually and physically backward, has no prospect of a good life. These phenomena can only be explained if one does not see the life between birth and death as the only one that man experiences. Man, said the speaker, must be considered from the point of view of development. Just as there are individual highly developed or lowly developed people, there are also entire nations that are more or less developed. These facts suggest that man acquires abilities in his previous life and what he acquires in this life he will gain in later lives. Nothing in the world is without cause, everything is in the closest relationship. All the spiritual knowledge we possess today we have acquired through our work in previous lives. Theosophists call the law that determines our destiny the law of karma. It states that everything we have acquired in the way of work and virtues, and everything we have committed in the way of mistakes and transgressions, must become recognizable in this or another life and regulates and determines our existence in a lawful manner. This view is what makes our existence understandable in the first place and allows us to recognize our relationships with the world around us. After death, the physical body, as an organism living on the mineral plane, falls back to the mineral plane, to the earth matter; it dissolves into it. But the soul remains in the soul world to which it belongs until the physical-sensory influences that the body has worked into it have been eliminated. This first period of the soul in the soul world is a painful one for it, because it cannot live out the desires, instincts and passions inherited from the physical body, since it lacks the physical organs for this. The soul must overcome the physical-sensual side of its nature, but then the soul also dissolves in the soul world and the human spirit now has the way free to enter the spiritual realm. There it brings with it the experiences it has gathered in life, there it refines them by subjecting them to spiritual laws, and thus enriched the spirit returns to new life and to further tasks. As it happens with the individual life, it happens with that of the nations, all for the ultimate purpose of inspiring matter more and more. Man's work is nothing more than a work on matter; it strives to bring about the spiritualization of one's own body and the entire environment, to produce one culture after another, one culture around oneself after another until all the material of the planet has dissolved and the overall result gained by the human spirit, the world spirit, freed from the earth's material, creates new planets for itself and ascends to new, higher realms of activity.

Theosophy is a mediator of peace, and its second principle, to find the seeds of truth in all worldviews, should not only apply to the past, but especially to the present.

Haeckel's “Welträtsel” (World Riddle) now wants to deal with the great question of existence. The sensation caused by this book shows the interest in this question. But the book is entirely rooted in materialism. If theosophy wants to be life, it has to deal with such facts.

What is the position of the author in modern intellectual life? A bold spirit has shown itself in this work. Ernst Haeckel has had a great influence on modern intellectual life for a decade. He was one of the first to take up Darwinism, boldly and courageously to its ultimate consequences.

Let us first deal with Haeckelianism and Darwinism. Everything that comes from Haeckel has been worked through and is acquired. But how are the conclusions to be drawn from his scientific views? Man is trapped between birth and death, is only a higher animal. After his death, there is no existence. Scientific materialism is a way of thinking from the last century, but not a consequence of Darwinism. Haeckel saw in Goethe his predecessor. Goethe discovered the intermaxillary bone that he had inferred and sought in humans. For him, this was proof of the truth of the relationship between humans and higher animals. Even as a privy councillor in Jena, he was still in the midst of students for this purpose.

Haeckel saw his materialism in his Darwinism. Haeckel's view has been very much shaken in the last decade. Haeckel established the ape relationship. Now he concludes: one must have descended from the other. For example, let's assume two brothers. One is a tramp, the other a moral person. They both have the same ancestors. One descends, the other ascends. Once there was only one nature with the possibility of development in both directions. That was Haeckel's hasty conclusion.

There is nothing more useful today than studying the secret writing of nature. Disregarding individual one-sidedness, the first 30 pages of Haeckel's book are of importance.

Riddle questions:

1. What provided the impetus for matter and force?
2. How did motion come about?
3. Where did life come from?
4. Where did the idea of fitness come from?
5. How could consciousness arise?
6. How did language come about? (Laws must underlie it).

Theosophy makes it clear to us in a different way. Let us look at sleep with her. What lies within a person during sleep? Life is present, but there is no ability to perceive. The soul has two directions, one towards the lower, one towards the higher, the Devachanic. Now the soul in us is still a baby, but it will develop and become more and more richly structured and grow up into the divine. Occultism promotes this development. There the higher world is experienced. That which lives as spirit shines in the darkness of night.

What Haeckel lacks is that he only pursues the idea of development in the past, instead of also pursuing it in the future. In this way, Theosophy will make Haeckel's thoughts fruitful.

We should learn from him, but not criticize him. Force and matter are nothing but crystallized spirit; figuratively speaking, they are like ice to water. Matter is nothing real, it is only spirit in another form. Take coal. What is it? Stone - and was a growing Farrenbaum millions of years ago. The living has become the lifeless. All of the earth's crust originated from the living.

The origin of all things lies in the All-consciousness. The question should not be: how did spirit arise from movement, but rather the other way around: how did movement arise from spirit? The religion of the materialists is nothing more than fetishism. The atom is a fetish. The worst superstition is the belief in the atom, which is real fetishism. Haeckel says: “For us, God is in every atom. That is moving matter.” There is a grain of truth in this, because the Spirit of God lives in every atom. It is just that the materialist regards matter as the first. For the theosophist, God is spread throughout the world: theosophy strives to draw all beings up to God. In doing so, it deifies and spiritualizes the world.

Dear attendees! Today I will speak about a very difficult, I would almost say, concerning topic: the evolution of a planet, especially in relation to the evolution of our own planet in the theosophical sense. And perhaps more than in any other of these lectures, it will be necessary today to appeal to the full impartiality of the audience. For such a way of looking at things, as one is currently almost solely accustomed to – that is, to deal with such a question as that of planetary development in a material, purely physical sense – what Theosophy has to say will, of course, have to appear quite fantastic.

Furthermore, the scope of what we have to discuss today is very broad. And the field of research involved is so remote that it is of course quite impossible for me to speak to you today in detail – in a short lecture – about the way in which such insights are gained. It is quite impossible for me to give you a derivation of what I have to say. I will only be able to relate and point out what would require many, many lectures, or even books, to be discussed in detail. I will not even be able to present the subject to you as it presents itself to the so-called occultist or secret researcher, but I will have to resort to comparisons and analogies.

I would ask you to bear in mind that the way in which I will treat the subject today is not the same way in which the secret researcher or occultist arrives at these results. Today, if any simile is used, it is only to make it possible to make oneself understood at all. The insights themselves are gained from quite different sources. And when we discuss inner development in detail in one of the next lectures, we will also learn something about the sources from which such insights as today's are drawn.

In the sense of the theosophical world view, man is – and I was able to mention this to you just now, also in connection with lectures from the last few weeks – an evolving being, a being in the process of development.

He sees a future perspective that entitles him to say that there is something spiritual, a spark of divinity, or better said, a resting place, a divine seed, in his breast. The human being of the future will be quite different from what he is today. Now the objection may be raised: How can man know what he will be in the future? He can know because he already carries the potential, the germ of the future within himself. The purpose of self-knowledge is none other than to study the potential and germs that still lie deeply hidden in the human breast today, in order to see what man can become in the future. In this way, man can see into his own future.

On the other hand, all higher beings – you know from earlier lectures that Theosophy speaks of higher beings than human beings – all divine beings are, for the theosophical worldview, entities that are similar to human beings, who have gone through their development at a similar level, albeit on different planes. One could say that the gods also served their time in humanity in earlier epochs. They were human and have already become what man will become in the future. Thus, in the theosophical world view, divine spiritual beings have advanced beyond the stage of humanity.

Man has not yet risen to the level of divinity. In this sense, we must place man in a whole sequence of entities. Then we will have created the conditions for being able to observe planetary development in the sense of spiritual research. It should be emphasized that this spiritual research, when understood in the right sense, in no way contradicts the sensual scientific research of our days, just as it does not contradict when an anatomist anatomically examines the corpse of a great artist and registers his anatomical results . Neither does it contradict what an art historian has to say about these artists, nor does what the materialist has to say about the moon, sun and earth contradict what Theosophy has to say about these heavenly bodies. The two things can coexist quite harmoniously. And even if the materially oriented researcher, from the standpoint of his conceit of infallibility, confronts the results of spiritual research with brusqueness, we must still say that such opposition is no less possible than the opposition of the anatomist who dissects a corpse and finds something to object to in what an art historian says about this person.

This said, if we look up at the heavenly bodies, where we see not only material things but also, in these things, the expression of spiritual beings, we will also find the expression for man in the thought that Goethe hinted at in “Faust” when he characterized the earth spirit:

In the flood of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down
Weaving back and forth!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life.
So I create at the whirling loom of time
and weave the living garment of the Godhead.

Those who cannot rise to the realization that it is a reality to speak of the spirit of Mercury and the spirit of the Sun, and that what the eye sees and what we can explore with our instruments to what is spoken in theosophy is exactly the same as the external bodies of man to his soul, for such people the theosophical results will be spoken in vain.

When there was more conscious spiritual research in scholarship than there is today, the names given to our celestial bodies, especially those belonging to our solar system, were meant in a completely different sense. The old names Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, etc. did not just refer to the material bodies; in these material bodies they saw the bodies of spiritual beings. And the names applied to the spiritual entities, so that originally Mercury was the name for the planetary spirit of Mercury. The same applies to the Moon, Sun, Mars, Venus, etc. This is a prerequisite that we must adhere to if we want to understand what I have just said.

First of all, let me describe the meaning of the earth's development in a comparison. Imagine going back to an earlier point in our Earth's development, to the point in time that our natural science must also assume: namely, to the point in time before man set foot on Earth. Our natural science certainly indicates such a point in time when the various other lower beings were present in manifold forms, and a point in time when man essentially entered this Earthly development in his present form, as a sensual-real being. Don't get worked up about the form. It should mean nothing other than that if we go back in scientific research, we will find a point in time when man was not yet there.

Let us look at the earth as it presents itself at this point in time. We have the point in time when man could not have changed anything about this earth in any way. Nothing at all had been worked on by man on this earth. Because he was not there at all yet. So we have to say: the point in time we are talking about now presents us with the earth as it was prepared by the forces of nature. But for man to be able to intervene with his own cultural work – spiritually and religiously speaking – it would be as if I had to say: the earth has been handed over to man out of the hand of the gods, without human intervention.

Now, human beings are beginning to work on the earth step by step. If we follow purely historical research, we learn that this teaches us how man first began to work the earth with primitive tools. We imagine how he carried stones to both sides of the Nile and how the pyramids were formed. We look back even further, to the time when people created the first cultural works using simple flint tools. As we move forward, we see how humans increasingly came to control the forces of nature. It is then clear to us that the things we see today would not be there if human minds and hands had not worked. Let us try to imagine a time when no human hand or mind had yet worked. Try to understand what the things around you are. They are the result of natural forces, but also the result of human labor. So we look back to the point in time when human labor began.

Now let us look up to our time, when human labor has changed this planet. Let us compare the surface of our earth with the surface of yore. We put ourselves in the place of an observer who is outside our earth and compares these two points in time and can then say: This is the earth without human intervention, and then on the other hand, this is what human labor has done. This human work can continue. It will increasingly transform the Earth planet. In your mind, you can at least imagine the later stage of Earth's development, where again an unbiased observer looks at this Earth planet, but now in such a way that, when he looks at it from the outside, it would seem to him as if you were looking at this room. There is nothing here that is merely a natural phenomenon. You will find nothing of the original forces, such as they are a flowing in the open. It is all artificially constructed. So you could imagine a point in the earth's development where everything that can be transformed by human hands has actually been transformed by human hands in such a way that the observer would see an earth transformed into a work of art. Of course, nature would have to be transformed even more by human labor and conquered by humans.

But there is no reason why we should not think that electricity and other forces of nature that have been put at the service of humans, and indeed much more significant forces of the earth, can be put at the service of human culture. In the present development, we see the earth as having arrived at a goal. We do our work in such a way that man does it with this goal in mind. If we could not intervene in the growth of plants, if it were not as it has happened, we could not become master of the forces of the origin of higher living beings, but only the inanimate, mineral nature could be completely transformed, so that the form of the planet would be the result of its work at the final goal of the earth planet.

Now let us look back again to the point in time when human work had not yet begun. The theosophical worldview does not view anything that already existed or was already developed in any other way. Everything that has come into being and developed has come about in a similar way to these processes, which I have been able to hint at comparatively. The beings, of whom I have said that they have ascended from men to gods, and whom men regard as the higher ones, they did their work at that time. Just as a younger being will receive the earth planet from the hands of men when the earth has reached its goal and will then be able to continue working on it, so man received this planet from the hands of the gods. What he found, the gods had brought into being, exactly in the same way and form as man brought the earth into being. Such was the mere development of nature before there was any culture on this earth, before a simple man, with simple tools or, let us say, with his hands, somehow touched the earth, the earth was the work of the gods. From that point on, man has taken over the work of the gods in his own way.

Let us look at the matter from a different point of view, from the point of view of knowledge. Man seeks to explore what is around him, he seeks to think about what is in the world in terms of thought. I have often used the comparison: if there were no water in this glass, I could not scoop any out. All our thoughts, when we reflect on the world, have their meaning. If they are to have a meaning for the world, then they must be within the world. Of course, it would be quite ridiculous to want to think about a world in which no thoughts are embodied. When man reflects on the world and arrives at thoughts about the world, the world must have been built according to these thoughts. When man now investigates the laws and arrives at natural laws, what are these natural laws for him, which express themselves in thoughts? Nothing other than what man draws from them, similar to how he draws water from a glass. And just as the watchmaker has formed the watch according to his thoughts, and another, without knowing the watchmaker, can disassemble the watch better afterwards, so man comes and dissects the world afterwards. He does not need to know the one who put the thoughts into it. And it would be strange to say: No watchmaker put the thoughts into the watch mechanism.

More recent science has so often said: We do not need any spiritual authors of the world. Science has finally led us to understand this world in a purely mechanical way and to understand how the individual parts interlock. So we don't need a creator. — That's just as clever as claiming that because you understand how to take a watch apart, you don't need to assume a watchmaker. The fact that the world can be explained mechanically is no proof that it was not originally built according to thoughts. When we see nature in its natural forces and deduce the laws from them, for philosophy these natural forces are the expression of the original thoughts of the gods and the work of men in art, these are thoughts of a later work of the same kind as the work of the gods in nature outside. When the theosophist contemplates a rock, a crystal, or even a plant — although this is more difficult — he says to himself: All these have been created in the same way in spirit, like a machine, a work of art, like a work of art by a painter or musician. Only the latter are more recent products of the human spirit, which is a God in the making, while the former are the product of the mature spirit of God, which has long since surpassed the level of man. This is the spirit.

Now let us look at the matter in more detail. If we look at man as he is and lives today, and if we go back only a little in history, we learn that everything around us has been created relatively recently and that centuries ago man worked with very different, more primitive means of culture. And if we go further back, these means of culture become more and more primitive, and cultural history shows us that people living in the earliest times made knives and tools out of stone. So we come to a primitive man on earth who, in relation to everything that is the result of intellectual culture today, was still very far behind. The mind of the human being whom today's science likes to call prehistoric man was very primitive. We can see, then, that the ability to understand developed and took shape during this time. In this way, we ourselves trace the development of the mind. Further research into humanity in cultural history does not go any further.

But now spiritual research begins, theosophical research. It speaks in the most serious sense of the development, of the development of everything that exists in our environment. Just as the intellect has gradually developed, which at the beginning could only create very primitive means of culture such as flint knives and so on, grinding grain between two millstones, so the intellect was not only primitive, but it was not there at all. The intellect, this intellectuality has developed. Based on spiritual facts, just as our science is based on material facts, intellectuality begins to follow the things that cultural history speaks of. Cultural history extracts from the layers of the earth what it finds. Man evidently had a completely different facial expression. His brain was the tool of the spirit, which was not yet as developed as it later became. But from there we go back to even more distant primeval times. And what I have mentioned before, I have to bring up again here to make everything a whole. We come back to human ancestors who, however, cannot be shown in geology, who did not yet make tools, who did not yet have what we call intellectual power, but who had other mental abilities instead. From material natural science you know that the Earth has not always looked the same as it does today, that it has undergone continuous changes in its shape, that where there is land today there used to be sea, and where there is sea today there used to be land. The theosophical worldview speaks of facts that even the scientist at least hypothetically admits. The part of the earth's surface that is now occupied by the Atlantic Ocean, which lies between Europe, Africa and America, was once land. This is a fact for spiritual research. Arldt's treatise on Atlantis only provides information about the animal and plant world. Theosophical research, however, speaks of the human form. The intellect had not yet developed at that time; other spiritual abilities were decisive then.

You can get a rough idea of how this came about. When seeing animals migrate into dark caves, they lose their faces. Other powers develop. Strength declines. Thus, in general, in the course of development, we find that with the development of one faculty, the other must gradually recede. Thus, with the development of the mind, of intellectuality, other spiritual powers that man had in times gone by recede.

A certain kind of clairvoyance, a dim, dark clairvoyance, was an outstanding spiritual power among the population of ancient Atlantis. These were people whose forebrain was not yet developed. That was the case with the Atlantic people, whose forebrains were not developed; they were not intellectual, but they were endowed with a certain clairvoyance. They had not yet developed reflection. Therefore, [the Atlantic man] could not have any culture. He could not make knives and axes for himself, he simply lived in a completely different way, but he was clairvoyant in a certain respect. His consciousness was so developed that he could not only perceive in his surroundings that which the senses convey, that which enters the human soul through the gates of the senses, but his soul was able to perceive even more of the soul, albeit in a very shadowed way. When he came near another person, he not only perceived what the person looked like, not only perceived what the person saw, but he could vividly perceive what moral qualities the other person had. He could perceive the soul, the inner being, the instincts, the passions and desires with a completely different kind of mind. If he came near a person who had wild desires, he had something else; today we would call it hallucinations. Colorful images arose in him of what lived in that being. So a completely different perception was present in those times. This is roughly how we have characterized the Atlantean population.

Another practical activity was also linked to this cognitive activity. You can read more about these things in my magazine “Lucifer - Gnosis”, in the essays of “13”. There it is described how people worked in those days. They had no tools, but just as they were clairvoyant, they were also endowed with a certain magical power. They were able to do what people today can no longer do. They were able to promote the growth of a plant, to make it grow faster. I could tell you many other things, but I think that is enough, for it could be taken in the most serious way. You see, however, that we are looking back here to a point in our earth's development that had a very different human being. But you must bear in mind that a different being, at the center of such a development, also requires a very different environment.

If we explore the Earth itself in these ancient times, then this Earth is also quite different. The distribution of water, fog, clouds, and air that we have around the Earth today did not yet exist in ancient Atlantis. It was quite different. The air was, so to speak, almost saturated with water. We did not have to deal with such a distribution of water in the air as we do today, but with a perpetual misty air. When Germanic mythology speaks of a 'fog home', it is a memory of ancient Atlantis with its foggy air. It was only in the later process of our earth's formation that what we have in our environment today emerged. Only with this environment was the progression of sensory and intellectual development possible. Thus we look back on a different formation of man and the earth planet. In certain respects, we can regard man as divine in a spiritual sense, but he differs considerably from the spirituality of our time. The spirituality of that time has receded. But the recognition that built the mind has emerged in our time. It has pushed the other back.

There will indeed come a time when people will unite the two: self-aware intellectual knowledge with withdrawn clairvoyance. This is what is already emerging in clairvoyance as a prophecy of later epochs. The Atlanteans were not so significantly different from people today, but they were different in some ways. If I may express myself crudely and trivially, I would say that they were not yet embodied in such dense matter, they were not yet as hardened in their matter as they have been since that time. Just as you follow the animals and come up to the cartilaginous fish and bony fish, as you come to beings that are embodied in less dense matter, we also had people who had a finer organism that they then knew how to control more.

The naturalist [Lord Kelvin] takes us back to such times – albeit hypothetically. The naturalist has calculated when the earth must have been in a state that did not yet allow for life on earth. According to the amount of heat that it still loses today and that it must have possessed in the past, it must once have been so warm that creatures such as plants, animals and humans that live on it today could not have lived then. Whether this hypothesis is more or less well-founded, it is certainly ingenious and based on good foundations. It is calculated that 30 million years ago the Earth was in a state in which there was no plant kingdom, no animal kingdom and no human kingdom. These were in a completely different state from planetary beings.

Let us trace them back to a state that is more and more fluid and more and more finely material. So, what man carries as a physical body was not yet present at that time. If you hold on to the idea that I have put before you, then you will be able to visualize and imagine how the human spiritual part could have lived at that time, as well as how what is spiritual and soulful in the animal and plant world could have lived on this planet before it emerged in plants, animals and humans. We follow man from the stage when he was physically softer and then even softer, to states that appear gelatinous compared to our present flesh and further back ethereal and even earlier spiritual, so that we find him, by looking into the past, always spiritualized. This is how we have to look at all beings.

We come back to an Earth planet that in its form does not yet represent a solid skeleton for our Earth, but a soft mass of mist. If you now look further at the beings that we have traced back, we find the Earth planet by no means as material as science presents it. We find it still fluid where plant, animal and human forms have appeared. But we also find it already populated by beings in a spiritual state. Thus we see how the earth continues to develop.

I would like to make clear by means of a comparison what is of course somewhat difficult to grasp. Consider today's hard coal. You dig it out of the earth. Today it is lifeless. If you look back millions of years into the past, this coal was still within extensive forests. These forests with their undergrowth perished, were covered by the earth and transformed over millions of years into what we dig out as coal. This is the dead body of former plant formations. The plant has become stone.

So much for the external material point of view. For spiritual research, something else arises. The spiritual researcher sees how the living becomes dead, how a stone has become from the living. But spiritual research says: every stone - whether you take a rock crystal or any other rock - everything has come into being in a similar way to coal. Nothing living has come from something dead. Just as a plant would not grow out of coal, something living has never come from something dead. It is the other way around: the dead has come from the living. But what we have around us in the way of stones and rocks and crystals is nothing other than fossilized life. The inanimate emerged from the animate. Thus the earth was once a body that had nothing inanimate about it. The inanimate, the rock, is only a later phase, a precipitation from the animate. And the question is already wrongly posed if someone wants to explore how the animate arises from the inanimate, because only the inanimate arises from the animate.

When you look at a gelatinous lower animal, as we think of them in terms of materialistic science, when you imagine how their individual limbs are differentiated and how man, however, has developed out of an undifferentiated, uniform body, and how then from such a being, beings with cartilage and beings with bones arose, whose skeleton is a kind of petrification – so the whole skeleton of the earth is petrified, crystallized, it is what life has left behind. If we follow this in relation to another form of our earth, with ever thinner and thinner matter, we find: everything changes, the inanimate ceases. This thin matter is at the same time a living one. And finally – continue the same thought, I only need to hint at it – then you come back even further to times when you can find the even higher truth that just as the inanimate later arose from the animate, the material-animate arose from the spiritual in the first place. Just as the inanimate is not the origin of life, so too is mere life not the origin of spirit, but spirit is the origin of life.

However, in a remotely similar way, we have to imagine that our earth was once a spiritual being, and that life developed out of this spiritual being through a kind of hardening, just as the living later developed out of the lifeless. And so we trace the earth back to the state where it was a spiritual being. Man's soul was present in a completely different way. As we trace man further and further back, it becomes apparent that he had very different abilities, clairvoyant abilities. However, the further back we trace him, the more his independence disappears. We find him in absolute dependence as a part of the divine beings that form this earth in its original state. Thus we look back to an original state of the earth, in which man was a member of the gods, had not yet separated himself from the general divine existence, is a member of their organism, as your hand is a member of your organism.

Thus man forms a part of this spiritually conceived state of the earth; we have traced back the earth planet. Now go through again with me what is happening now in this planet Earth. We must now imagine that first the spiritual separates and leaves behind a living thing, hardens into a living thing and animates a spiritual, so that we now have an Earth that consists of spirit and matter. And the living thing is linked to a mineral and dead thing. Man is a true dual being; when we follow him, we must follow how, on the one hand, the physical organism has developed and, on the other hand, a spiritual element has developed. This spirit was originally contained in the spirit-earth. However, the spirit must be thought of in a completely different direction of development than the body. Compare: When you see the body, it appears, according to its external structure, as the perfect embodiment of this external sensual being. In terms of its spirit, it appears in such a way that we see a magnificent, powerful future. Our mental and spiritual qualities appear to us only as an inclination. This will make the idea plausible that we are dealing with two directions of development on our earth.

First of all, we have to observe the initial state of our earth. It develops in such a way that, up to a certain point in time, minerals, plants and animals and the human form, this being of sense, have separated out. This leads us to the point in time when they become the bearers of spirit. Then they are fertilized by a part that has not been absorbed into the matter that was formed earlier. Let us make a comparison. If someone comes to you and says: Here I have water. That is a certain substance, and I will cool this water in one part, so that ice floes arise. — If someone said: The ice is also water, only in a different form, so we would have to admit that. But if someone would come and wanted to say: It is ice and not water, that would be nonsense. So we can also say: Matter is nothing else but spirit. It is to spirit as ice is to water; it is spirit condensed, hardened, crystallized, if you will.

Let us follow the spiritual state of the earth up to a certain point in time. Then the spirit transforms itself into this material form. People, animals, plants and minerals arise. That is the point in time that I characterized earlier, the point in time when no human being has yet worked on this earth out of inner impulse. The being of feeling was there, just as the ice is in the water. Imagine the ice in the middle, but there is still water around it. As soon as man had reached the necessary perfection as a being of sense, he was given the opportunity to receive the spiritual spark and to be enlivened by it. He received the divine spark from the spiritual. Man had reached a certain level of development in terms of the senses. He is a real witness of the spirit and begins as a small god to continue the work of the earlier gods as his cultural work.

So you can imagine the development of a planet from the spirit to life and from there to the inanimate. The highest living being is fertilized by the spirit and the further work of the spiritual up to its peculiarity through matter. There we have a planet before us. Now you will ask: This Earth planet, where did it get the possibility to crystallize out of itself precisely this mineral kingdom with crystals formed in such a way, with plants, animals and human beings formed in such a way? — If something is to crystallize in the glass, then the forces that can accomplish the crystallization must prevail in this form.

Within the theosophical worldview, we know that every person has an eternal, imperishable core of being that did not come into being at the moment of birth. We know the doctrine of repeated lives on earth. We know that people have certain destinies for the simple reason that in past lives on earth, each person has prepared everything for himself. We have been given an account of the development of the soul in various earthly lives in various lectures, and we have seen that this life comes between two incarnations. Man is nothing other than the re-embodiment of a previous human being. We know this from the doctrine of re-embodiment and karma.

In a universal sense, we are dealing with an incarnation of the planets themselves. Just as the person who does not believe in spiritual miracles, but in spiritual natural facts, does not allow the soul of the person to arise out of nothing, just as little did the scholars of the 17th century allow earthworms to arise out of the river mud. So it is nothing more than the spiritual-soul developing only out of the spiritual-soul. This is certain from the experience of earlier developmental facts. Likewise, we have to consider the fact that the earth is now excavating such plants, animals and human forms out of itself. We have to look for the cause in earlier embodiments of our earth. Just as there is an interim period between two human incarnations, there is an interim period between two planetary incarnations. Just as we speak of people, of incarnations, so we speak of planets, of “Manvantars”. Thus we see that the earth is a re-incarnated planet from the past, and between two such planets there is an interval, a “Pralaya”. So we look back to a different state in which this earth was not yet such a planet as it is today, but we look back to an imperfect state of our earth. Just as a person in today's incarnation has abilities and powers that he has acquired from events and experiences in life, so the Earth as a whole has evolved from previous incarnations in order to get to know the regular formations of minerals, plants and animals. So we have our present planet and a predecessor. A few more words about this predecessor. What were the obvious characteristics of this predecessor? Spiritual research can trace them exactly, but I do not want to present them to you today because they seem to be plucked out of thin air. What abilities did it acquire to bring people so far that they could be fertilized by a spirit? Up to that point, man had been a kind of higher animal, he had come close to the point where development begins. I can only hint at the rest. To understand the progress that has taken place from an earlier planet to our present one, we have to realize the real meaning of the development of the earth. Occultism tells us that this meaning is as follows. The occultist knows that the spirit of the earth's development is love, and the spirit of the previous one is wisdom. In our stages of development, love is expressed, and in the earlier ones, wisdom. You can also understand this comparatively. If you understand it, you will find that our entire material earthly structure is embodied wisdom. Look at the rock crystal. You have to study, apply reason, to understand, you have to calculate. The spirit that you draw out must have been put in. Natural scientists have not yet come to understand these forms. The further we penetrate, the more we will understand that we are not dealing with unwisdom, but with wisdom. If you see a human thigh bone, look at it through a microscope. You will not find a compact mass. You will find fine beams, more beautiful than the best house. Because everything is stretched out there so that the greatest load can be carried with the least expenditure of energy. If a beam is placed at a certain angle, material can be saved. Here the miracle is performed.

The anatomist knows how the miracle of the human heart moves us, and that it is more perfect than what man develops in his soul today. These are passions, desires. No matter how he purifies them, they are not like the miracle of the heart. Man drinks coffee, tea, beer and thereby inhibits or stimulates the activity of the heart. You can trace a structure full of wisdom through the entire development of the earth. This is what has developed as a material framework. We look back on a framework that was nothing more than the basis for a new incarnation. Everything that was built as a framework was determined at that time. What is happening on earth now is the result of the passions, instincts and desires that were aroused and caused then. Look at an uncivilized 'Negro'; his soul blindly follows instincts, passions. There are no moral concepts. Man devours his fellow man. Gradually, the soul purifies itself. But wise is the basic structure, which is so imperfect in its passions. When the earth's development began again, it shaped the previously acquired basic structure again. What should happen on this earth is the purification of instincts, passions and instincts. Everything has been created, including the wise structure of how instincts and drives, moral concepts and so on, religious creativity and the sense of a soul arise from our earth. Thus, piece by piece, they originate from the earlier elementary states, like the wisdom of the structure of our basic framework.

Do not believe that out of nothing, this or that, the thigh or the heart, is formed out of nothing and thus becomes the bearer of passions and morals. To come from blind drives and instincts to the purity of moral wisdom, this wisdom of the basic structure had to grow out of long experience. This heart had to develop out of the experiences of the earlier planetary spirit. So the wisdom that underlies the basic structure of our earth is the experience of an earlier planetary incarnation of the earth spirit. On earth we have a different purpose. Here, wisdom is not experienced, here what has been wisely built up is instilled, instilled - the ennobling of drives, desires and passions. The beings ennoble themselves by living in an external relationship to each other. This external relationship of the earthly world is egoism, as it exists in all beings. It is love. This tendency of the development of love is just as much the meaning of the development of the earth as the development towards wisdom was the meaning of the predecessor of the development of the earth. When the development of the earth has reached its goal, then everything that is still egoism in man and in other beings today will have been transformed into love.

And the next incarnation will carry love within it, just as the earth carried wisdom within it. Thus an original planet that acquires wisdom passes into everything that people accomplish here in the development of the earth into an embodied love. When we look into the future, it means a perspective view, a view to the fact that man deifies himself and makes himself the bearer of love, in order to then give it back to his successor, and to whom he will belong again as a higher being, like the higher developed beings who presided over the development of the earth and still preside over it today.

Now I can only add what real occultism has to say about the outer presentation of this meaning of development. Just as something always has to be discarded when a higher development takes place, so it is with today's plants. Originally they did not exist in this form. They can only flourish on soil that is mineral; they can grow out of it. If we are talking about a life that was originally mere and about the fact that the mineral aspect has only gradually emerged, then our present-day plants were not present in the original life, but other plant forms were. These plant forms have, on the one hand, developed in relation to the mineral kingdom and, on the other hand, further developed into the present-day plant kingdom, which will not live without the mineral kingdom. That is the meaning of higher development: it is based on something. The plant has pressed down part of the mineral kingdom on which it stands. The animal kingdom has excreted the plant kingdom and feeds on it. The plant kingdom assimilates the carbon dioxide that humans exhale and exhale oxygen, which humans need. If you look into the human world itself, you can see that man, as master of the outer world, can only live on the basis of the 13th chapter of the Gospel of John, where Christ Jesus shows that he is aware that a higher being can only rise on the basis of a lower one, just as a plant can only rise on mineral soil, an animal on vegetable soil. Everything is helpful and healing on the soil of the apostles. Hence the great gratitude expressed in the parable of the washing of the feet. The spirit is at the same time the origin of this soil, but the substantiality of the soil must always be withdrawn so that something finer and younger can develop on it.

Thus the later form that spirituality took could only develop by excluding matter. Just as the original life expelled the mineral kingdom, so the moon was also expelled. Thus the matter of the moon is to be regarded as the rejected brother of the development of the earth, which was united with it in its earlier planetary existence. The moon has been cast off and still has a spiritual connection to the earth. It is necessary for this earth as the mineral kingdom is for the plant kingdom, as the plant kingdom is for the animal kingdom.

If we go further back, we will not only see the earth united with the moon, with what the secret researchers have called the moon, today's moon is only the cast-out corpse. It is similar with the sun. I have been able to show you a perspective of how the theosophical view looks at planetary development. The planets as they appear to us in the sky today present themselves in a certain relationship for the theosophical research. What is the sun today, what is the moon today, has emerged in the course of development. They represent other phases of development. If you look back to your own origin and source, you will be able to say to the child: This represents my own development. In a sense, the occultists see the planets in this way, so that they appear as childhood stages compared to the development of the earth. Other planets appear as those that have reached the stage in which the earth is today much earlier.

Thus, occultists present this development in such a way that they place the seven planets in a series that has a relationship in its individual links, as it is expressed in the successive stages of human development. Just as this represents that which can also stand side by side, so for the secret researcher this side by side is represented in that which each individual can also go through, namely: this development through forms that are preserved in the planets neighboring the earth. This is expressed by the science of secret in mnemonic signs. These are the names of the days of the week. “Cheap philosophy” — many will object. In the seven days of the week, the planets represent their own development on Earth. We have to start from Saturday. The development of Mars takes place on Earth. Secret research calls the development of Mercury the development in which man intervenes and which will persist until the end of the development. So this is how it corresponds:

Saturday: Saturn,
Sunday: the Sun
Monday: the Moon
Tuesday: Mars
Wednesday: Mercury
Thursday: Jupiter
Friday: Venus

Thus, in the names of the days of the week in the most diverse languages, you have a marker for planetary development everywhere.

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I was only able to follow this development for a short distance, namely from the Earth to the Moon. So you can see that and how meaning and significance is added to this development through theosophical research. Those who not only have a feeling for our research, but also for the deeper forces, for the forces in development, have always understood that the earth comes from a development and progresses to a further development, that it is the planet that represents the stage of development of love, and that wisdom develops through love into a higher form. The next thing that surrounds us is the floods of the development of the earth planet, which present themselves as a tendency towards love.

One of the great minds sensed this in a poem when he wanted to express the meaning of the earth's development, when he looked up at the next goal of the earth's development, when he looked up at what man cannot look beyond. Then it appeared to him like a glance of the divine spirit, like a circle in which the infinity of the divine spirit can express itself. It seems as if the development of humanity, the whole meaning of planetary development, can express itself in the small spirit of the earth. But the spirit of the earth reveals to him what its essence is, what has become of earlier forces, and what will be transformed into later forces. And if I speak from the human point of view, the meaning of planetary development appears to us as development towards love. This is also expressed by Dante, the great thinker and poet, in the words:

The orbiting that was received in you
showed itself, like reflected light,
when I observed it for a while all around,
seemed to me in itself, in its own coloring
painted with our image,
which is why my gaze was completely absorbed in it.
Just as the geometrician becomes completely absorbed
in measuring out the compass and, pondering,
cannot find the principle he needs:
so it was with me at that new sight.
I wanted to see how the image related to the circle
and how it fitted into it;
but for this, not only my own wings were not enough,
my spirit was not struck by lightning,
which brought it what it longed for.
Here the power of the lofty imagination broke,
but already my desire and will moved,
like a wheel that drives the same revolution,
love that moves the sun and stars.

There have always been great searching minds. There have always been epochs in which the human mind sought to penetrate into the deepest questions; at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was particularly astonishing. In the German thinkers, we find the highest level of training. But precisely these important ones have become the least known. One man stands at the top: Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Who knows and still reads his “Addresses to the German Nation” today?

Fichte's world view is a difficult one, so let us first take a look at Immanuel Kant. Kant, so to speak, set firm limits to human knowledge. He sought the thing in itself. He did not penetrate into its depths. Fichte went beyond him in a way. The Age of Enlightenment began with Kant. He said: “Man, you shall dare to use your own reason.” This caused the old belief in authority to falter. Stirring memories of the spirit of enlightenment came from France. Rousseau's spirit had a powerful effect on Kant. Materialism appeared there first, and the spirit of enlightenment also made itself felt in Germany; but something else was added there.

Lessing, in his “Education of the Human Race”, showed how he had been seized by this spirit of enlightenment; but with him, for the first time, we encounter a new idea, the idea of re-embodiment. He said: “Is not all eternity mine?” Through many lives, man walks the path to perfection. We see how Goethe showed us the great idea of re-embodiment in great images. That was Fichte's “deed”: Fichte showed in his teaching of science that man has to find the “I” within himself, and it was precisely this that was difficult for man to grasp. Fichte said: The great thing is that man himself says “I” to himself. No one can call out “I” to us from the outside. It is the only name that only we can give ourselves; it is the designation of our unique nature in relation to nature. It is there that the God in man begins to speak. With this, man has begun to ascend to ever higher levels. In 1800, Fichte wrote “On the Destiny of Man”. One should not read it, but live it, let it take effect on oneself. He suggests observing our inner life, immersing ourselves in the inner power of our nature in order to come to the certainty of our eternal essence. In his booklet “Instructions for a Blessed Life” he shows that the I has always lived in us and will always live in us. In such German writings you receive the best theosophical training.

Novalis was an eminently theosophical spirit; he died at the age of 29 as a mining engineer. He himself felt that his mathematics was a great poem. In this he recalls Pythagoras' saying that there is music of the spheres in it. Novalis sensed the movement in the universe as harmonious tones. For him, the starry world was a world built according to mathematical principles — just as the harmonies that one perceives in music can also be calculated. He also sensed and thought the layers of the earth. It was clear to Novalis that man must develop his inner senses. In “The Apprentices of Sais” he clearly stated that man is related to God and the whole world – Pictures: Hyacinth, a beautiful boy, loves the beautiful Rose Child. He owes the realization of the human ego to Fichte.

Another thinker: Schelling. In his 1809 publication “On Human Freedom”, he seeks to bring out Jakob Böhme's ideas. He is concerned with the interesting research into the origin of evil. I can only hint at a comparison today: everyone will see harmony at the bottom of everything. But how does disharmony come about? How can man come to freedom? By also having the possibility of doing evil. Schelling says: the divine good is like sunlight. When light throws light into darkness, it awakens shadows. The light would not be able to develop its power if there were nothing to cast the shadows. — Jakob Böhme calls it the counter-throw. Darkness is precisely the nothing. The something, the good, can only be understood by the fact that evil is a nothing, only a shadow. Schelling also called human beings, as a physical body, a perfection. Hands, for example, are perfect and independent, but can scratch themselves if they turn against each other. — Conversation: Clara and Benno. He had been silent for a long time, then Frederick William IV appointed him to the University of Berlin. Then he wrote “Philosophy of Mythology” and “Philosophy of Revelation”. He speaks there of ancient mysteries. What is a mystery? If we go far back behind Homer to the culture of the Greek secret schools, temple cults, we see that the disciples first had to observe the external drama, the God who descends into nature, who is hidden in all four realms, who only awakens in man. In the human breast is the place of the resurrection of God. This was not art, religion, science, it was all three at once: beauty, religion and piety. It was only later that truth, beauty and piety, science, art and religion separated. The mysteries illustrated this. In Schelling you can find the most beautiful in his “Mystical Revelations”.

Heinrich Kleist: “Käthchen von Heilbronn”, “Prinz von Homburg”. The former cannot be understood if one denies hypnosis and does not look deeper into the soul life. Kleist delved deeply into Schubert's philosophical lectures, which he heard in Dresden at the time, about dreams and the interior of the soul, and through this he gained those thoughts.

Justinus Kerner found a way to study the abnormal soul life with the seer of Prevorst. She came into a spiritual and mental environment in that state. This has many concerns. While the physical body rested during sleep, the soul perceived conditions in its environment. Kerner said: “For her, the state of constant illness is a constant dying.” Eckartshausen presents everything in an idealized way up to a certain point.

Ennemoser was somewhat superficial.

This chain of theosophical thinkers provided deep insights into the further development of humanity, showed the eternal core of being in individuality, and demonstrated re-embodiment.

What significance does the personality have for the being? It gains experience in thinking, feeling and willing. It does not discard this experience when it dies like a garment; no, life was a school for it, and what it took in during its lifetime, it takes with it as treasure into its new existence. A human being would have lived in vain if that were not the case. Thus, with each life, the individuality becomes richer. Everything that the personality has collected is the pearls of a pearl necklace. The personality is the tool for developing out of life. Earth life is what makes us more perfect. The personality lays the foundation for development.

Certain Western views underestimate the personality and believe that we simply shed our personality at death. No, we take its fruits with us. It is valuable to learn what the personality means. And all those spirits are masters at describing the personal. The mission of the German spirit at that time was to emphasize what is pure and beautiful and noble in the personality. And this is precisely what Theosophy shows: beautiful, pure and lofty thinking. Each age has its task and mission. That was the mission of German philosophy. The great minds have been almost completely forgotten, and it is our duty to learn from them. The most wonderful fruits can be gained there. Then one will truly understand the energy that emanated from those minds. “Man can do what he should, and when he says, 'I cannot,' he will not.” There were two great eras: the first when the Vedanta philosophy emerged in Asia in the post-Vedic period, the second at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany. On both occasions, the human mind experienced its greatest depth. During this time, will and strength were directed towards the ideal.

Nature is a great living thing,
And everything is fruit, and everything is seed.