The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! Spiritual science or theosophy is, through what it gives us as human beings for knowledge, at the same time a basis for life practice. The fact that we are able to see through the sensible, through what is merely comprehensible to the external mind, into the supersensible, makes this spiritual science a tool for us to feel that we are part of the supersensible world. In this way, Theosophy gives us the nourishment of knowledge that flows like spiritual blood into our entire spiritual organization, and we gain security and strength of life by absorbing knowledge of the supersensible world. But we are only in such a case when we seek to bring that which is supersensible into our knowledge. It is a different matter when we are confronted with the developing human being, as he enters into existence through birth, as he is compelled, through the normal course of life, to assert, step by step, through the material of the body, that which is rooted as a human spirit in indeterminate depths and comes more and more to the fore in the course of development. Here we are in a different situation from when we acquire knowledge, for we seek to bring the spirit out of its hiddenness into real existence, not only through our knowledge but also through our help and deeds. This prospect of passing from the external physical to the spiritual will have to arise in our soul when we consider the question that is the subject of our meditation today.

It must be emphasized at the outset that a prerequisite in the sense of spiritual science must be made for this question. Spiritual science goes beyond what presents itself to us in human life between birth or from the development before birth until death as an individual life. It penetrates to the essence of the human being, to the spiritual soul that exists before birth and that remains after death - to the core that can be traced from life to life through spiritual research, because we are indeed talking about repeated lives on earth. We make a strict distinction between these lives, which a person repeatedly spends on earth between birth and death, and the lives that lie in between in a purely spiritual world. When a human soul-spiritual comes into existence through birth, it is the case that it brings with it into this life all the effects of those causes that are to be found in previous lives. When we look at the developing human being, we see emerging like a sacred riddle what he has acquired in previous lives and brings into this life. The human being enters into the present life and lives spiritually, but he envelops himself with the qualities, characteristics and abilities that lie in the line of inheritance. Thus, the human being brings with him into his life the spiritual and soul essence, and he experiences in a certain way the strengths and abilities that the talents, characters and other qualities of his ancestors can give him. What a person brings with them from the spiritual world and what they inherit from their ancestors comes together in their development. To truly answer the question of education in a more intimate sense, we must be able to gain insight into the relationship between inherited traits and the spiritual-soul core of the person.

If we treat these repeated earthly lives and the effects of earlier lives on later ones as a spiritual scientific fact, this will provoke the opposition of many people who do not want to be informed in detail about the evidence that can be provided by spiritual science. It is not possible to convince oneself that this truth really exists in any other way than through practice. One can discuss at length whether a piece of iron, which is claimed to be a magnet, really is one. One can put forward many reasons against it; one could say that the person making the claim seems credible and so on, and so it can be argued about for an infinitely long time. But proof is there if one takes a small piece of iron and sees whether it is attracted. Through practice, evidence is provided. In a similar sense, one can be convinced of the truths of spiritual science.

The educator can now say: What I encounter in the child puzzles me; I must try to see whether what spiritual science claims is true, whether something really comes into the world as a spiritual-soul core of being. It will be shown that such a principle bears fruit for education by enabling us to enrich the child's life and to divine and coax out his or her gifts. We must focus on the way in which the gifts are formed if we want to distinguish the spiritual-soul core of the being from what the child has inherited. To do this, we must allow the human being's predisposition – everything that gradually comes to us in the way of qualities, abilities, talents and so on – to come to the fore, and we then find that it is characteristic of the human soul to allow the individual forces to interact so that they support and sustain each other in an overall organism. But still we see that the soul-forces of man, for example, thinking, feeling and willing, or other forces, appear independently of each other in their strength, yes, so independently that we find, for example, people in whom the power of thought is so highly developed that they can be good thinkers, while the power of will, on the other hand, recedes. Others are men of will and are equally ready to tackle an action, but are not always able to keep their thoughts together and follow them logically in a comprehensive way. They act, but do not think much. There are still other people who are pushed by their feelings to do this or that without thinking too long. So we see: the individual abilities can be developed to different degrees. For example, a person is very musical, and the other abilities recede. Some people, on the other hand, do not have the ability to do extensive calculations and so on.

The abilities are therefore independent of each other, but come together to form a complete organism. When we visualize the soul forces of a person, it becomes clear that he or she enters into existence with a very specific tendency and nature that brings soul forces into relationship and connection. If we turn our attention to what is inherited, that is, to the line of inheritance, and then to what enters into existence from a previous life, we can see what connects the forces and abilities. It is in fact the case that what the person brings with them as a result of previous lives has the ability to organize the abilities and shape them into a whole organism. The emotional tendencies, qualities, talents and so on point us in the direction of the line of inheritance. There is no more interesting observation to be made than to see how, on the one hand, the spiritual core of the being works to connect the soul forces and form an overall organism, and how, on the other hand, the individual forces are inherited from the ancestors.

Spiritual science is able to indicate very definite laws as to the relationship between these two elements. These can be understood in the same way as natural laws, but on a higher plane. When such laws are stated, one must not come and try to refute them with casual observation. That is child's play, even in the field of chemical physics. Let us suppose that a physicist establishes that the line traced by a stone thrown through the air is a parabola. If someone now follows the line externally, he will see that it is not exact. The line varies due to the resistance of the air and other external circumstances, but one can only arrive at the truth by going back to the law. One can only arrive at what underlies the spiritual life as a law by penetrating behind the scenes of existence.

Now, two types of forces present themselves in the soul life of man; we can describe one type more as the intellectual principle, and also as that of the imagination: everything that man has as a life of ideas, the way he conceives something, whether he goes slowly from one idea to another or can grasp rapid associations of thoughts, whether he can follow thoughts sharply and over a long distance, and the like. We have to take people who easily develop pictorial representations, who are able to clothe facts in images of the imagination, in short, who have the element of the intellectual and imaginative particularly active, who have inventiveness and the ability to think of many things, we have to take them as representatives of one side of the soul life. The other side, on the other hand, is the side of affects, passions and drives, the way someone is quickly captivated by this or that, whether they have many interests or are dull and so on. The latter is more connected with what we call the element of character, the former more with the reflective, the internalization. We must strictly distinguish these two sides, because if we are observers of life, the laws of development only reveal themselves to us when we can follow how the spiritual-soul essence of the human being, going from life to life, acquires one or the other element.

In general, we find that the child inherits the side that has to do with interest, passions, and attention more from the father; the spiritual-soul core of the human being borrows these elements from the father where it finds what passions are, what confronts events in life, what intervenes in the outer life. When a person wants to embody themselves, they are drawn to the father as if by magnet, who can transfer the qualities of interest, strength of character and so on, which are suitable for their individuality. They seek out the father who can give them this. The intellectual and imaginative qualities are more likely to come from the mother. Generally speaking, if we disregard more specific causes, we can say that the child's mental character comes about because the spiritual core of the being brings about something like a mixture of the intellectual and imaginative qualities of the mother with the temperament and drives of the father. How these qualities are mixed depends on the overall disposition of the spiritual core of the being. We can see what the elements are that belong to the nature of will and passion by looking at the father. We must look to the mother for what the core of the being has in the way of imagination and intellectuality. The children of the same parents are so different because the spiritual-soul core of their being mixes the paternal and maternal elements in different ways.

But we must go into this in more detail and distinguish between male and female offspring. Real observation of life will also confirm this law – that is, if the reservation is made in the same way as with physical laws and the secondary circumstances are not made the main thing. That which is in the soul character of the mother is more easily inherited by the sons, and in such a way that it is transformed in the son to a certain extent. If the mother is imaginative but only works in the narrowest circle, the soul of the mother works in such a way that it descends a step in the son, as it were, and gives him the outer organ predisposition so that he expresses this predisposition to a greater extent. The mother remains in the soul element in the narrow circle; the son shows what she has in her soul but imprinted in the brain as his tool. He has as a world ability what she experienced in the innermost circle. A talent for which the mother shows the disposition can come about in this way. And what descends more into the physical disposition through the mother is mixed and imbued with what is inherited from the father. This is how it is with sons.

It is different with daughters. Here it can be seen how what the father lives in his profession and so on is more expressed in the overall personality. What is the predisposition of the father's physical body is reflected in the soul of the daughter. What the father had as external qualities is realized in the soul. In the daughter, we encounter in spiritualized form what was more in the physical man in the father. It is particularly interesting, and one can almost express it as a law of nature, that the mother in the son descends in relation to her soul and appears in the physical, while the father ascends in the soul of the daughter with what he is in the physical man.

This can be demonstrated in hundreds and thousands of cases, and life will prove it right across the board. Here it will be explained only by means of one particularly characteristic example – in Goethe, in whom this general law shows itself especially clearly: What was admired in the mother's innermost circle as a spiritual quality was manifested in a “lowered” form in the son and was admired by the world. Frau Goethe had a desire to tell stories, which could have a stimulating effect in the innermost circle. In Goethe's case, it became a mental disposition, so that he became a world-affecting personality.

We also see the opposite in a wonderful way in his sister Cornelia. Councillor Goethe was extremely likeable due to his strong character and the serious way he led his life. He stood firm in the outer life as a thorough and earnest man. Let us take a look at how Goethe relates to his father. It is peculiar that the outer character traits, temperament, thoroughness and so on are inherited by the son. When people with the same disposition live next to each other, they sometimes repel each other. There was never any intimate relationship between father and son Goethe. But the sister had absorbed her father's thoroughness into her soul as depth of soul and seriousness, mixed with intimacy, as is often the case when external qualities are transformed into soul qualities and come to us. That is why the siblings were such loyal companions, because the qualities that Goethe did not like in his father had penetrated into the soul of his sister.

Can we not see this peculiar survival of maternal soul qualities in the external organ systems of the son everywhere? Throughout world history, we see the relationships of sons to mothers, for example in the poet Hebbel. He was the son of a bricklayer. If you knew him and were with him, you would know that the gnarled, pedantic character he had within was already apparent on the outside. His hands were much too long, his legs even longer, and his movements were angular. He got all that from his father, but he and his father did not get along. On the other hand, he got his mother's simple nature, which he relates so beautifully. We see how her soul, descended by one level, reappears in his poetic personality. This is how the two came to understand each other, and it was only through his mother that he escaped the fate of becoming a mason. Wherever we look, in everyday life and in history, we can see that this law applies universally.

But how should we proceed as educators when we see this complex interaction between inherited traits and the spiritual and psychological core? We must direct our attention as much as we can to the way in which certain traits that we see in children can be found in their parents at a different level. But we must not regard the child as a copy of [the parents], for then we would not consider the transformation, how the soul qualities of the mother descend into the body of the son, and how, conversely, the physical nature of the father is transformed in the soul of the daughter. Today, people are inclined to admit transformations of natural forces; natural science, for example, shows how natural substances transform into heat. But it is not admitted that these laws also apply to the spiritual. A real art of education can only come about when people become aware that spiritual science can flow into such areas of life as education.

We are always talking about individuality. But what is individuality? Today, we only refer to the word in a very abstract way. However, if we know how individuality arises, in that the spiritual-soul core of the child not only absorbs the qualities of the father and mother, but transforms them, we can grasp it in a concrete way. Then education comes from the abstract to the concrete, from materialistic abstraction to true reality. Now someone might object: You tell us that the soul-spiritual core of the being envelops itself in what is given to it in inherited powers. But we see the human being as a unified being, and how can we distinguish between what is inherited and the spiritual core of the being?

If we consider development only superficially and see only the individual, we will not make any progress. But life offers us proof, sufficient proof, to show how the spiritual-soul core of our being is enveloped and permeated by what comes from our parents and ancestors. Great minds such as Newton or Humboldt, who achieved great things, did not do particularly well at school and were considered to be poorly endowed. Many other people with great names could be named who also developed slowly, while child prodigies progressed rapidly. In the case of Newton or Humboldt or others, they brought a rich core of being into this life, with much sprouting and budding in the soul, and this working into what had been inherited from the parents had to happen slowly. The rich inner core needs more time, because it must first chisel out, transform, precisely gradate and so on, what it has inherited in powers. So rich natures, which are called to give much, must work longer on adapting the inherited material.

This will become increasingly clear, because today a person who brings strong soul forces with them has to fight against all the tough obstacles, because very rigid, sober, fixed hereditary traits are inherited that are not very flexible, so it takes a long time to adapt them precisely to the individual core of the being. Child prodigies are quickly finished, because they quickly process the abilities that lie in the line of inheritance and absorb them in a one-sided way. But it soon becomes apparent that their talents dry up and wither away. When we look at these most extreme cases, we see the slowly developing genius or the quickly developing prodigy and all the stages in between, as the spiritual and psychological core of the being works its way through the obstacles.

This slow process of working one's way through can also be found in Goethe. If, like me, you have spent three decades studying Goethe in detail and with humility, you can safely say, without running the risk of being misunderstood: If one surveys Goethe's life, one notices a slow progression in the development of his abilities and talents. We find the tendency towards what he became in him even as a child sacrificing to the great God, but what effort he had throughout his life to bring what was in him through the many obstacles of his physicality. We recognize him when he expresses his great thoughts, for example in the second part of Faust, as a mature human being, in contrast to young Goethe, who, compared to old Goethe, wrote many immature things. How does what is said here go against the judgment of our time, where the editions of the youthful works are particularly praised – there, it is thought, he achieved the greatest things. The young Goethe, it is said, brought forth great and powerful things. He is praised to the skies. And of the old Goethe, some say that he produced the second part of Faust in his old age. Few people understand that he developed and deepened slowly and gradually, that the Italian world fostered him inwardly, and that his essential core increasingly removed external obstacles. In short, they do not understand the old Goethe because he is too lofty for them. Even during his lifetime, he had to suffer from the fact that his later works were decried as products of old age. He expresses this in the following verse:

They praise Faust,
And what else
In my writings roars,
In their favor;
The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much;
The pack of rags and tags thinks,
It would no longer be!

In Goethe's case, it is particularly evident how the spiritual and mental core of his being rose to its height in the second half of his life, and no one who believes that the whole of Goethe was already present in his youthful writings understands him. People understand the young Goethe better, but they attribute this not to the fact that they do not understand the old Goethe, but to the fact that he has declined. Thus, we can also find it true in this great spirit how the spiritual-soul core of being works its way into the outer shells.

Someone might object that we are talking here about an essential core that must be there to group and organize abilities. But we need only point out that the most important qualities nevertheless lie in the line of inheritance and can be explained from it. For example, in the last few centuries there were 25 to 28 musicians in the Bach family. So how can you say that the essential core is the main thing? Similarly, there were a whole series of important mathematicians in the Bernoulli family in Basel. In their case, it is particularly clear how seemingly mere inheritance works, because some of them were destined for something completely different, but nevertheless, in later life, it drove them to mathematics.

To understand this correctly, one must consider the relationship between the spiritual-soul core of one's being and one's inherited disposition and talents. To be a musician, one needs a musical ear; but this belongs to the physical organization, that is, to the shell. Just as one inherits the shape of one's nose, hands and so on, one also inherits the finer inner organs that lie hidden beneath the surface of the physical body. A soul-spiritual core that strives to receive physical tools for musicality will be drawn to families that can pass on musical organs. What is musical talent based on? Not on the brain, which is the organ of logic, but on the shape of the ear canals. One must look at the individual relationships very carefully. Such auditory ossicles of a certain shape are inherited from generation to generation. It is similar with the Bernoullis. Those who need a predisposition for geometry can seek out such a family. Thus, what life shows us here again coincides with what spiritual science asserts. We can understand and illuminate life better if we bring before our soul the connection between heredity and predisposition and the harmony or disharmony that arises from it.

If we distinguish between the spiritual-soul core of our being and the environment in which it is embedded, then life means an interaction between these two elements. Let us look at a child in the very first weeks of its life. His features are still undefined, his organs not yet fully functional; he cannot yet walk and so on. But if we think properly, we know that where features and abilities are still undefined, the core of the being is still dormant and is only gradually working its way to the surface to become defined. What the person will become later works its way out of the vagueness of movements, gestures and so on. It works its way up from indeterminate depths to the surface, and more and more the outer shell becomes an expression of what lives inside the person. In later life, much more is expressed on the outside, as the person really is. In the youthful child, the forces that will one day express themselves in his features, in his gestures, in his hand movements, and so on, are still dormant. In later life, the human being shows the imprint of the soul's inner character in the physical. The outer, the envelope-like, becomes more and more [a mirror] of itself; in the physical, what he is as a spiritual human being shows.

During the first period of life, the human being works more into his physical being. There is something very interesting connected with this fact, and it is connected with the same lawfulness as a physical law. With regard to inheritance, a distinction must be made between what children inherit who are born in the first years of marriage and what those who are born in later years of marriage inherit. The first children show in a remarkable way the ability to shape the inherited traits in the freest way; they can do this more with an individual style independent of their parents. The later children are more constrained to yield to the strong element of heredity; they become more of an imprint of their parents. Children born in the early years of a marriage find it easier to mix the inherited traits with each other; inheritance is less tyrannical towards them. Those born in the later years of the marriage have to apply stronger forces, because the power of inheritance is stronger in their case. Thus we see how these children become more and more like their parents. Of course, this can be broken by the most diverse circumstances, but in the sense of today's scientific research, this is a law.

When we consider these laws of inheritance, the right relationship between a person's disposition, talents and upbringing becomes apparent. Such laws can only be made useful for the soul's life if they do not remain mere theories and insights, but if they are transformed into feelings and intuitions. It is a remarkable thing how feelings kindled by knowledge give us the gift of tactfully divining what qualities are striving for expression in a human being. If we have goodwill and a sense for it, we stand face to face with the developing human being as with a sacred riddle. The secret of education lies in our approaching the child with such a feeling, for then he will solve the riddle for us. He shows us what abilities can be drawn out of him. Then there is no need for much speculation; tact will guide us so that we do not burden the child with something that cannot be developed in him. This brings the educator into the right relationship with the child. Then we stand before the human being we have to educate as before a sacred riddle and not – as many an educator often does – as before a vessel, where one can discuss what is best to be poured into it. That is a very external point of view! We must not forget that life often forces us to bring the child to something that, in our opinion, is not within his or her individuality, so that he or she can get ahead in life. But generally speaking, all the talk about education is usually less about what the child is more or less suited for and more about family relationships and education befitting one's station in life. But we must grasp the demands of life and individuality in a concrete sense, harmonize the blending of the soul-spiritual essence and the inherited predispositions, and endeavor to solve the riddle according to the circumstances of life. A riddle can be solved in different ways, but one must recognize it, then one can let the child become different, otherwise one will often not hit the right thing despite all speculation.

It is precisely in such areas [as education] that the fruitfulness of spiritual science for life becomes apparent. Spiritual science is not just theory, but something that can and will prove itself in life every day and every hour - for the progress of all humanity and of each individual. It places us in life in such a way that we acquire the security, strength and confidence we need for life. This chapter on disposition, talent and education thus proves to us that, indeed, through having gone through many lives, the human being carries an enigma at the core of his being and that life, in the broadest sense, must be a solution to this enigma.

The better we can answer the riddle within us, the happier, more secure and more fruitful a person's life will be – we must take this as our motto.

The spiritual and soul essence that goes through many births and deaths is a riddle, and life is the solution.

Dear attendees! If we seek knowledge through spiritual science, then that means that we feel the urge within us to look out into the spiritual world that lies behind our sensual world and in which the solution to the riddle of existence can be better achieved than in our sensual surroundings. If we allow the results of spiritual science to take effect on our soul, then they are not just abstract, theoretical insights, but they are nourishment for our soul and powers that sustain us, that reveal our destiny to us, give us hope and certainty in life and make us realize that we human beings need these spiritual-scientific results in our lives. Through everything that man sees around him and more or less recognizes in his being, he comes to the spirit that is to live into his knowledge.

We stand in relation to the world in a quite different way when we have the task, not only of penetrating the spirit through knowledge, but of drawing the living, real, active spirit out of its hiddenness and onto the surface, or at least of smoothing the way out of its hiddenness and towards its manifestation. In this way we stand in relation to the world and to life when we have before us the spirit of evolution in the developing human being — that indeterminate spirituality with which the human being enters into existence through birth and which at first presents itself to us as indistinct, as if emerging from an impenetrable darkness, in the still indeterminate features of the human face at the beginning of its becoming on earth. We have before us the human spirit, which, as if hidden in the depths, asserts itself from week to week, from month to month, from year to year, permeating the material existence that confronts us from the beginning in the growing child, and which gradually transforms this material existence into an image of itself.

As educators striving for knowledge, we are called upon to seek the spirit that rests in the depths, not only to satisfy our own soul, but precisely as educators we are called upon to translate everything that is still more or less intellectual in the process of knowledge into reality, to lead the spirit itself into life as a real developing force. From this point of view, spiritual science becomes the basis for an immediate practice of life in a completely different sense than if it were only to help us to understand the secrets of existence.

Now, from the lectures that I was privileged to give here earlier, it has already become clear – and this should serve as a prerequisite for us today, since we are dealing with a very specific topic – that, on the basis of spiritual science, we are dealing with an inner spiritual-soul core of the human being, which we now not only follow in his journey between birth and death, but we see him entering physical-sensory existence through birth from another world, a supersensible world, and crossing over again into another world when he passes through the gate of death to live through new stages of development in this other world. Yes, we do not just speak of ascribing to this spiritual-soul core of our being an existence before birth and an existence after death, but we also ascribe to it repeated earthly lives, so that we look back from our present life on many earthly lives that we have gone through before, and look forward to many earthly lives that we will have to go through in the future. In the entire life of a human being, we must therefore distinguish between the times spent in the physical body between birth and death, and the intermediate times, the times between death and a new birth, in which the spiritual-soul essence of the human being has its abode and conditions of existence in purely spiritual-soul worlds. When we look at things in this way, we are also clear about the fact that we must take a different attitude in the physical world towards the developing human being than if we were to see the spiritual-mental in its developmental phases between birth and death as influenced only by the physical-material. When we look at repeated lives on earth and the intermediate stages of human spiritual development, we see something of a sacred enigma in the person who comes into existence through birth. We see how the spiritual element forces its way into existence through the indeterminate nature of the gesture and the physiognomy, through the indeterminate nature of abilities and inclinations, and how it increasingly and more powerfully expresses itself in gestures, physiognomy, talents, movements, and increasingly makes himself master of all the external means of expression and tools of this person, so that we spiritually see in the person — even if we ultimately recognize the unity of his nature — a duality.

We first have what he has inherited in terms of the qualities of his body and soul from his parents and ancestors, in short, from the earlier generations from which he descended. But then we look at the actual spiritual-soul center of the human being, at his spiritual-soul core, which initially has nothing to do with the characteristics and facts that we encounter in our ancestors, but comes from a previous life of the human being and now only acquires the characteristics that are inherited, so to speak envelops itself in them in order to express itself in them. We must therefore distinguish between what a person brings with him from previous lives at the deepest level of his being and what he acquires from the line of inheritance. And we can only gain the right attitude towards the developing human being if we seek this interplay between the forces that pass from one life to another and the forces that are inherited directly from parents and ancestors. If we want to understand this properly, we must first familiarize ourselves with two fundamental characteristics of our soul life, which must come before our spiritual eye in full clarity if we want to grasp the whole essence of the human being.

First of all, we have the important fact that when a person appears before us as a personality in the world, all the powers that he has - the soul abilities, the temperament, the character traits, the will impulses, the affects and so on - interact to form a whole. But alongside this, we must also recognize the other important fact, namely that these fully developed abilities and powers that we encounter in the personality of another person, even when they interact, are nevertheless independent of each other in certain respects in terms of their disposition, so that one is not necessarily the condition of the other.

This becomes immediately clear to us when we look at life and see, for example, how a person has a very special kind of aptitude, perhaps being musical, but not having the slightest talent for mathematics or for practical life. Another person has no musical aptitude at all, but instead a certain aptitude for practical life or for mathematics. This means that people's abilities and aptitudes can arise quite independently of one another, but they can also interact. Now, even to the superficial observer, it is clear that everything a person possesses in the way of abilities, talents, gifts, skills or physical characteristics points to his or her parents and ancestors. And we will soon see the precise way in which a child's characteristics point to their parents and ancestors.

But through birth, something also comes into existence that has nothing to do with inheritance, something that is brought over from previous lives as the human being's actual spiritual-soul core. This essential core, which eludes direct observation, comes to us when we, as true educators, observe the becoming of the human being and see him, as it were, growing out of the indefinite darkness, like a basic coloration, like a fundamental tone of the whole developing personality. We cannot trace back to parents and ancestors alone what comes into existence in such a way that it combines, groups, and plays with a person's abilities, his predispositions, his impulses, and makes a whole out of them. While individual human traits, let us say a predisposition for this or that science or skill, can usually be traced back to these or those traits in the ancestors, we admit right from the start that the way in which these abilities, these various powers of the ancestors are mixed together in the personality, depends on something other than heredity – it depends on the spiritual and soul core of the human being.

We can say, for example, that someone inherits this or that temperament from their father and this or that ability, perhaps the gift of imagination, from their mother. And now they come to us as a person with a particular temperament and the gift of imagination, mixed together in a certain way. We can trace the individual temperament that he has and the gift for imagination back to either the father or the mother. But the way in which these gifts are mixed up, how they are grouped, we have to trace that back to the spiritual and soul core of his being. And now it is evident to us that this spiritual-soul core of our being feels magnetized to a particular pair of parents before birth, so to speak, to take on these qualities from one parent and those from the other, which it needs to get just the right mixture that corresponds to what it brings with it from previous lives. We can indicate very definite laws as to how the spiritual and psychological essence of the human being mixes the inherited traits with each other, how it takes one from the paternal side and the other from the maternal side, and how the mixing ratio is the individual act of the person entering into life.

If we are to point out very definite laws in this direction, then it is necessary to agree that such laws are to be understood in the same way as physical laws. If, for example, a physicist teaches us that a stone thrown through the air falls along a parabola, we can understand this from the corresponding physical conditions. If someone then comes and does not take into account that this general line of throw can change, say, through the friction of the air or other conditions, he could tell us: You have established a false law, because the stone does not fly in a parabola. But it is not important for the physicist to include the external, modifying circumstances in the law, but to find the law from the essential conditions. We must apply the same principle to laws that apply to the spiritual life. We must say to ourselves: the laws that arise in our minds have the same significance as the laws of physics; therefore, they could be refuted just as easily as the laws of physics, but nothing special is achieved by such a refutation.

If now very definite laws of inheritance are developed, then of course a thousand and one circumstances could arise to influence these laws, just as the trajectory of a stone in flight is influenced by the resistance of the air. But these modifying conditions of an incidental nature do not change the validity of the law. And we can only understand the happenings of the world if we can express the essence of things - both in the physical and in the spiritual realm - in laws. Our observation of the spiritual world can be just as faithful as it is to the physical world. You can observe in hundreds and thousands of cases that in the immediate descendants, very specific strengths and talents go back to the paternal line of inheritance and very specific characteristics to the maternal line, that is, that the spiritual-soul essence of the human being takes very specific strengths and talents from the maternal line and very specific characteristics from the paternal line, which then appear mixed in the children.

We can therefore divide the realm of our soul life into two clearly distinguishable parts. In our soul, we first have what we can call the realm of our interest, our attention, our sympathy for this or that. People differ in terms of what their interest, the sympathy of their soul, leads them to. One person is like this, another like that, depending on the basic color of their interest, depending on the basic character traits of their soul. The area of the soul that we have just characterized is clearly distinguished from what we can call the intellectual area, to which we also want to count imagination, which gives us the ability to imagine our environment and human life itself in images. The gift of imagination, the intellectual gift, is the other part.

If we break down the entire soul life of a person in this way, it becomes clear that, in general, the area of interest, the overall character of the personality, goes back to the paternal line of inheritance. This means that the spiritual and mental core of a person's being mainly draws from the paternal line of inheritance what constitutes temperament, affects, and passions. What concerns our intellectuality, namely the mobility of our perceptions, the possibility of bringing the external world into certain images, of visualizing it through ideas, is generally taken from the maternal line of inheritance. The way in which these two areas are mixed up by the spiritual and psychological core of the human being depends on the nature and peculiarity of our personality. But we must not only consider this very general character of inheritance; we must go deeper and more precisely into it. And here it becomes apparent that human traits are not only inherited in a general sense, but that they are transformed in the process of inheritance, that they undergo very specific changes, and essential ones at that. It has been shown – and you can find this proven in hundreds and thousands of cases – that what lives in the mother as intellectuality, as mobility of soul, as the soul's inclination to process ideas, images, concepts and the like, has more of a tendency to pass to the son than to the daughter and usually, in passing to the son, descends, as it were, by one level [into the physical realm]. Thus it happens, for example, that a certain mobility of ideas, a special ability to think up this or that, perhaps to develop it artistically in the field of poetry, is present in the soul of the mother, but it only moves in the narrowest circle of the closest acquaintances and the closest surroundings and does not have or develop the right means to apply these abilities to the outside world. So we can say that the mother does have these qualities, but she does not have the tools tied to the outer body to make full use of what is there and to allow it to have an effect on humanity.

If this is the case with the mother, then these predispositions can be found in the son's personal organ systems, developed to a certain extent and transferred into physical tools. The mother can have this or that psychological predisposition, but not the organ predisposition, that is, the correspondingly developed brain or other organ complexes, in order to actually live out what she is predisposed to to a greater extent and make it visible to the world. In the son, the mother's predisposition moves into the organ system, into the brain and into other organ complexes, so that certain abilities can bear fruit for larger circles of humanity. On the other hand, paternal qualities, which lie more in the outer personality and are rooted in the organ systems, tend to rise to the soul level in the daughters and meet us there in a soul-transformed, soul-transformed way. And so we can express it as a beautiful law of the progression of human generational life: the soul of the mother tends to live on in the personal abilities and skills of the sons, but the predispositions of the father, the whole configuration of the father's personality, ascends and lives on in the soul of the daughters, or at least tends to do so. Thus the father will continue to live in the soul of his daughters, even to the formation of his physical personality in the outer life. The soul life of the mother, who remains in the narrower circle and has little opportunity to live out her soul abilities, will live on in the organ systems of the sons, which come into activity in the outer world.

This law, which is tremendously enlightening for the understanding of life, cannot, of course, be substantiated here in a short hour with hundreds of examples. It can only be explained, as is also done in physics. And I would like to begin by explaining it through the well-known case of Goethe. Who would not know that everything that was present in Goethe as an organ predisposition, that he was able to live out through his brain and other tools of the organism, was traced back by himself to his mother's “desire to tell stories.” In the close circle of the old woman's lively mind, with all her desire to tell stories, she had everything, except for the organ predispositions. But what was living in the soul of the old woman, advice, flowed down and formed the son's organ systems. We can refer not only to Goethe's mother, but also to his father, to the old Frankfurt councilor Caspar Goethe. When we get to know him as an able, ambitious man, we are particularly impressed by his thoroughness, and sometimes also by his quiet resignation. But on the other hand, we must be clear about how all the qualities he had made it possible for him to move up a few rungs on the social ladder, but that they were not nearly enough to give him the influence and scope he sought in Frankfurt, so that in a sense he was condemned to an idle life.

Something of strength and stubbornness lies in the old Goethe's nature, also something of sobriety, but thoroughness in sobriety, even of a certain harmony of these qualities. If we consider these qualities of Goethe's father alongside the qualities of the son, we can easily understand that the two repelled each other in certain respects. They did so, as is well known. But let us imagine this quality of the father “spiritualized” - if we may coin the word - elevated into the soul, let us imagine a certain thoroughness of soul, in turn, with that timidity that the old Goethe had, that did not allow him to achieve anything, coming to life in the soul of his daughter Cornelia: We can easily find in the soul of Cornelia, Goethe's daughter, a certain softness of character, soulfully mixed with a certain stubbornness, a sharp mind mixed with a certain indulgence in feelings, the need to give herself, to nestle up to the world, and yet the inability to really give herself to anyone. The whole situation in the life of old Goethe – who strove to occupy a significant position and yet could not – can arise in the soul of the daughter in such a way that she had the need to nestle to a spouse and yet could not find satisfaction in marriage. We only need to transpose the character traits, which go as far as the organ structure of the old Goethe, into the soul, and we have the soul of Goethe's sister Cornelia. And everything that repelled Goethe, that pushed him back to his father, so to speak, that was what deeply attracted him to his sister, who complemented him so beautifully during their short life together, and whom he loved so much. Everything paternal in this “ensoulment” by his sister had such a beneficial effect on the young Goethe.

Try to look into the same things in Hebbel. Read his diaries. Try to understand from them, which are also a treasure of German literature in themselves, how Hebbel inherited the whole externality of character, that is, the kind of interest in the world, from his father, but that which led him from his earliest youth to strive to be understood points back to the soul of his mother, even if she was only a simple bricklayer's wife. In historical observation we can see everywhere that everything we encounter in the organ-facilities of men can be traced back to their mothers. Look at the mother of Alexander the Great, at the mother of the Maccabees, at the mother of the Gracchi – wherever you want – you see it everywhere. Anyone who has an instinct for really getting to the bottom of human characters will find this confirmed everywhere, just as it is with physical laws.

In spiritual science, we understand such a fact to mean that the spiritual and soul essence of the human being takes on paternal and maternal characteristics, not only mixing them but also transforming them, taking them to a deeper or higher level , that is to say, the qualities that are bound to the organ systems in the father are “soul-like” in the daughters, and the soul qualities that have not yet developed into organ systems in the mothers are transformed into organ systems in the sons. Thus, inheritance does not occur directly, but in such a way that we sometimes see it concealed, covered up, and we only have to discover how the spiritual and soul essence of the human being actually uses the qualities found in the paternal and maternal line in order to shape them plastically according to its individuality and assert them in the world.

Now it could easily be that if someone merely builds their conviction on a few observations of life or on prejudices, it would be very easy to refute individual statements of spiritual science. It must therefore be pointed out that only the full scope of a true observation of life can confirm what is given by spiritual science as a general law of the world for the spiritual life. And here we see in life how this spiritual-soul core of being envelops itself, as it were, with the inherited qualities, which it incorporates and blends. Someone might say: Yes, show us how this spiritual-soul core of being works, how it envelops itself with the inherited traits. The important thing is that we take the right path in such a demonstration. In the individual human being, whom we have before us as a self-contained personality from birth, we see abilities growing. We see a harmonious unity - of course, we do not need to be reminded of this - we see a unity in what gradually develops in this or that ability. And one cannot readily distinguish in the individual human being what and to what extent the spiritual-soul core of his being is at work and what he has acquired from outside as physically inherited tendencies.

But if you broaden the basis of your observations of life, if you look around at life, then you can see how differently people present themselves, depending on the spiritual and psychological core of their being, as it enters into existence through birth , is richer in content, more significant and deeper, or less deep and significant, whether it has a richer content from previous embodiments, through which it is called upon to achieve much for the world in the new embodiment. How will such a core of being fare?

He will have a long way to go before he works his way through all the obstacles that confront him from the outside in the line of inheritance; he will have to carve it out for longer, the external hereditary traits will not immediately fit the core of his being. This is wonderfully confirmed when we see how great minds of humanity, Newton or Humboldt or Leibniz, were actually poor students because their rich spiritual-soul core took a long time to work through, to develop that with which they enveloped themselves and what they incorporated. Therefore, someone who sees life only through prejudiced eyes may consider the greatest people to be dullards or incompetent individuals, because they may even appear stupid at first, for it takes them a long time to carve out the rich spiritual and soul essence. But how someone who does not know life judges it is not what matters; what matters is the truth. In his diaries, Hebbel made the beautiful observation about what it would be like if a teacher were to take on Plato with his students in a high school class, and the re-embodied Plato himself were among the students and could least understand what the high school teacher would present as his correct view and interpretation of Plato, so that the re-embodied Plato would constantly have to repeat it.

Thus we see the spiritual and psychological core of the human being moving into the externally inherited traits; and we see him, especially when he is rich, finding the greatest obstacles through which he has to work his way. Such people sometimes come quite late to properly integrate the externally inherited material. Child prodigies rarely have a rich spiritual-soul core and therefore have less difficulty integrating the externally inherited material. They develop quickly, but we also know that these abilities, which initially appear surprisingly, quickly fade and fade away. If we observe life on a broader basis, we see how what shows itself as a person's entire personality in one person is incorporated into the core of their being in a different way from the inherited traits in another. Yes, we can confirm and test this again with Goethe.

However, I must say something here that could perhaps be misunderstood. But anyone who, like me, has devoted themselves to Goethe intensively and lovingly for over thirty years is entitled to say such a heresy. Our understanding of Goethe and our devotion to Goethe's greatness need not be compromised if we admit to ourselves that Goethe's essential core only very slowly pushed its way into existence through the external physical obstacles. If we want to delve into what Goethe had to accomplish – if we are not afflicted with the prejudices of some Goethe researchers – we can see that his early works are by no means complete; and we can admit with regard to Goethe's first works: This is still the Goethe who is becoming, who has not yet overcome the external obstacles of his essential core; what Goethe was actually to become is still hidden. One does not question the greatness of the first part of the “Faust” work if one points out that this is still the Goethe who is becoming, that his rich essential core is still sitting in the depths and must first work its way out.

Indeed, today it is almost considered a hallmark of truly great minds that they have a certain tendency to favor the youthful works of poets in literature. One finds the tendency: Yes, we must go to the poets in their first period, there we have what gushes directly from the soul, there we have the essential that actually constitutes their greatness. And for Goethe, too, an audience has been found that says: Well, old Goethe has weakened a bit, he's no longer at the top of his game in the second part of Faust, you can't understand him; the first part of Faust, yes, that is of original power. Those who judge in this way certainly do not consider whether it is not perhaps due to themselves, whether they would not do better to endeavor to understand a work of this kind, such as the second part of Faust, which Goethe wrote at the height of his creative powers.

Goethe took a different view of this matter. He pointed to the first part of “Faust” as a youthful work in which his spiritual and intellectual essence had not yet come to the fore. Goethe left behind a few lines in which he expresses himself precisely on this matter, where he says - and he means the first part of “Faust”:

They praise Faust,
And what else
In my writings roars,
In their favor;
The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much;
The pack of ragamuffins thinks,
It would no longer be!

Goethe himself was of this opinion. We see in Goethe how, for almost his entire life, the rich soul core, which we cannot deduce from hereditary traits, fights against the opposing elements of heredity and against external resistance. We can follow year after year how his rich soul core comes out harmoniously, we see how he becomes more and more mature during his Italian journey and how he becomes completely one with the qualities of his spiritual and soul core.

The [character] traits of the human being are expressed in the course of the development of his being in his shells; the abilities, on the other hand, which are mainly bound to the inner being, can indeed emerge strongly in youth. Because there is not much shell yet, the existing talent for music, for mathematics or for poetry must already show itself. But when it comes to skills for practical life, we know that these and everything else needed to cope with the external world must first be acquired in the further course of life. And only at the end comes the real [spiritual] element, mysticism, looking into the spiritual world. It is then important not only to be inflamed for spiritual facts, but to have developed the abilities and trained the organs for spiritual vision, in order to achieve harmony between the knowledge of what is shown on the outside and what the world lives through and trembles through in its innermost being.

One can be a follower of a mystic in mature youth, one can interpret him, but to achieve something in this field is only possible when we have reached middle age. So if one wants to find within oneself the possibility of harmonizing with the universal spirit of the world, one must be about forty years old, since this is not possible earlier. One must give oneself time, one must occupy oneself differently beforehand, and that with the tendency of being a follower of a spiritual world current and thereby creating harmony between one's own inner core and the organs to be developed. He who does not transgress such laws, as they could only be hinted at here, will best find his way into life and increasingly separate himself from the forces that lie in the natural line of inheritance for him, hindering him, and overcome them. On further consideration of the natural conditions of inheritance, we can see that there must be a difference between the children of young spouses and the children from a union that has existed for a longer period of time or has only been entered into at an advanced age. Because a person is in a state of ascending development until a certain point in their life, the consequences of the work that has been done by the inner core of the being become more and more apparent in the gestures, the physiognomy, and thus in the outer personality, as one matures. Around the age of twenty, some of this work has already been done, but you can see that not all of the influence of the spiritual core of being is being exercised, but that part of it is still stuck in the depths. Only gradually does the actual person fully emerge and come to the surface. Only then does he have a stronger power to transfer his inherited traits to his offspring because he has now matured so much. A spiritual-soul core that wants to live as independently as possible out of its own inner strength will therefore feel magnetically attracted to a youthful father who offers less resistance; a weaker individuality, on the other hand, will be attracted to an older father with a fully developed character. Seen from this point of view, some of life's greatest riddles are illuminated. Such relationships can, of course, be most clearly demonstrated in the typical case, although the most diverse variations often occur.

Now we will see how the individual characteristics of the soul can be independent of each other and how they are inherited, but how all the qualities are brought together to form a basic tone and processed by the spiritual-soul core. Thus, for example, arrogance can be inherited from the mother and clumsiness from the father and grouped together by the soul. Soul qualities disregard much of what the parents are able to offer and favor something else. Many a complicated theory of external science is often very illogical. For example, it is claimed that genius can be traced back to its roots in the characteristics of previous generations; what remarkable qualities were already present in the individual ancestors can be seen in the genius that emerged from this line of ancestors, as if collected and intensified in a focal point. This is used to try to demonstrate that there is no such thing as a spiritual-soul core. But it is a mistake to assume that favorable traits can only be accumulated and enhanced through the natural process of inheritance. On the contrary, if there is to be any inheritance in this respect, the circumstances are such that genius stands at the beginning, but not at the end, of a line of inheritance. In its outward personal peculiarities, genius is only colored in its penetration through the physical line of inheritance – just as someone gets wet when they fall into the water.

We can apply all that has been said in practice if we make it the basis of an educational task that confronts us and allow it to become a kind of cognitive problem of life. We have already said that we have to solve a sacred mystery in the human being who strives towards existence, and we must seek to recognize what all that is working its way up holds within itself. We must try to acquire a fine sense of tact in order to observe correctly how the spiritual and soul essence struggles to free itself from dark undercurrents; we must pay careful attention to which qualities of the developing young person relate to the father and which to the mother – in the organ systems, in the soul qualities and in their interaction under the influence of the individuality on the outer shells.

Although individuality is often called for today, all this remains mere rhetoric as long as one cannot go into details and their origin. If one does not do this and, starting from this phrase, wants to judge and state that the child to be educated must now do this or that, one will remain very theoretical. Sometimes the educator will not be equal to the individual core of being that he is to help come into existence. He does not need to be equal to the pupil, but he must be equal to the education. It is necessary to educate the human being in such a way that he can enter life independently and is able to seize everything skillfully. It is not always possible, and depends on the educator, to introduce everything to the pupil bit by bit and always in good time, based on theoretical observations and considerations; often circumstances intervene that arise from within the family itself or from outside in a hindering way. Sometimes the maturing individuality is even better served when this or that is decreed by unavoidable external circumstances, because then – even under such circumstances – the individual riddle is not solved by theoretical education, but everything that comes from the dark depths of the past, from earlier life courses, is guided into harmonious interaction with present circumstances.

In spiritual science, we can find the spiritual not only for our own satisfaction; spiritual science can also be the guide to help the spiritual, which wants to reveal itself in the growing child, to come into existence, so that it can find its way into the living interaction of people. In this way, we can, in our modest way, become saviors of people, that is, of their spiritual essence, which is behind their outer appearance. Thus, spiritual science will become more and more deeply rooted in human life with this approach because it leads to the permeation of life with practical goals. We find this in Goethe, in his steadfastness in standing on a secure, inner foundation of life, in which we perceive a spirit that never remains on what has been achieved, but which also proves to us in the future to be continually effective and creative if we allow his word to have the right effect on us:

If yesterday is clear and open to you,
If you are vigorously free today,
You can also hope for a tomorrow
That may be no less happy.

And we can hope the same for ourselves, but also for the people whose mental content and spiritual health has been entrusted to us as educators.

Dear attendees! When I had the honor of speaking here a few weeks ago about the figure of Zarathustra, the intention was to show the significance that such a leading individuality has for the general spiritual life of humanity. We may say that we can feel this significance to an increased degree in a figure whose effects still extend so strongly into the immediate present, as is the case with the figure of Moses. For who would deny that a large part of our emotional and intellectual life, and a large part of what takes hold of the institutions and conditions of our environment through our thoughts, is still deeply influenced by the after-effects of those deeds in the development of humanity that are associated with the name of Moses. Although we go back almost one and a half millennia before the founding of Christianity, we can say that the after-effects of this act can be felt right to the innermost part of our soul tissue. Therefore, it must be of the greatest interest to us to understand what this mission, this teaching of Moses, means in the evolution of humanity as a whole.

Now it is not that easy to speak about the figure of Moses. On the one hand, it is not like the figure of Zarathustra or Zoroaster, whose historical outlines are blurred for us and of whom we can hardly specify even minor character traits from external documents; rather, the personality of Moses stands sharply outlined and vividly before modern man from the biblical record of the Old Testament. On the other hand, however, it cannot be denied that in the broadest sense, especially among those who deal with so-called critical Bible research, all sorts of doubts are attached to this description of the personality of Moses – doubts that not only challenge what the Bible tells us about the figure of Moses, but doubts that even go so far as to question the existence of Moses himself.

Now, as we have already shown on a number of occasions in other descriptions here, a genuine spiritual scientific approach to the religious documents provides the proof that we cannot so easily dismiss what is written in these documents, because more precise research in particular has often shown that the statements of the old religious documents are much, much more correct than one sometimes believes. But it is precisely when one adheres to the image that is given to us from the Bible of the figure of Moses that it is difficult to work this figure out spiritually – difficult for the reason that one must have insight into the way in which it is spoken in those parts of the Bible in which Moses is mentioned. These descriptions are very peculiar; they are so peculiar that we can characterize them in a few words in the following way.

In the Old Testament portions of the Bible, external physical events, external facts that once took place historically before the eyes of men, are continually interwoven with allegorical descriptions; without our being able to immediately and easily recognize the transition, the historical external facts merge into allegorical descriptions of inner soul processes. In the Bible, for example, a character may be presented as undertaking this or that journey, doing this or that, and then as the story unfolds, it may appear that what is being described are external events, whereas in fact the descriptions of these events are being used to depict inner soul conflicts, inner soul developments, soul stages. The description of external events then serves only to illustrate inner soul processes in certain parts. As I said, in the biblical description the transition from one to the other is not always readily recognizable. Only that measure of understanding that can be gained from spiritual scientific principles enables us to recognize: Here, in a biblical account, the will stops describing purely external, physical processes and a sequence of symbolic actions begins, which suggest to us that the personality, which until then did this or that externally, is now undergoing a soul development; it ascends from stage to stage and acquires this or that in its soul life. But it is not the soul life that is described, but symbols are given.

This has even led to the fact that a great theological-philosophical writer who lived around the time of the founding of Christianity, Philo of Alexandria, based on his opinion, regarded all the events described in the oldest parts of the Old Testament as symbols of soul processes [of the Hebrew people]. Such an opinion, however, goes much too far; it does not take into account that in the biblical account, external events are mixed up with internal soul processes. Today, we will endeavor to present the image of Moses that can be gained from the Bible in such a way that the two different descriptions can actually be distinguished.

To get to know the personality of Moses, one must consider the whole culture from which the deed of Moses has grown. And so it is incumbent upon me to first characterize the ancient Egyptian culture in spiritual scientific terms with a few strokes - that culture from which, after all, in terms of external events, what we can call the mission of Moses has grown. Now, however, one can only understand this ancient Egyptian culture in its development and the outgrowth of the deed of Moses [from this culture] if one knows two important spiritual scientific laws, and these two spiritual scientific laws must be the basis of our consideration. One law has been mentioned here several times. It is the fact that the entire nature and configuration of human consciousness and the human soul's makeup has not always been as it is now, but that it has changed significantly over the millennia of human development. We already know – and here it is only briefly hinted at – that the further back we go in human development, the more we encounter a different state of mind, a different kind of consciousness in people than what is considered normal consciousness today.

Where prehistory merges into history, that is, in those times from which we have historical documents, the old state of mind is already changing into the newer one. That is why people today find it so difficult to imagine that the word 'development', which today, in terms of its outward form, exerts such a magical power on people, must above all be applied to the process of the human soul in its becoming. And the further back we go, the more we find that the way we look at things today, which we perceive through our senses and link through the ordinary mind tied to the physical brain, that this way of viewing things by merely alternating our waking consciousness with our sleeping consciousness, which is interrupted at most only by irregular dreams, was not always present, but that this form of consciousness has only developed gradually.

The further back we go, the more we come to another form of human consciousness. Although what we call our present waking and sleeping consciousness has already been prepared in the millennia we are talking about today, in those ancient times, which still reach into the oldest times of Egyptian culture and of which external history does not know much to report, there was a kind of old clairvoyant consciousness, a kind of pictorial consciousness. It was this consciousness that asserted itself as a third state of consciousness, like an intermediate state between waking and sleeping. The waking consciousness, as it is today and on which our present-day view of the world is based, was preparing itself in its beginnings, and our “sleeping unconsciousness” was also essentially already present. But people still had a third form of consciousness that was not permeated by those thoughts, concepts and ideas through which we today enlighten ourselves about our environment. It was filled with images, of which the symbols of today's dream are an atavism. But in these images, which undulated up and down, nothing was arbitrary, but these images could be clearly related to supersensible facts and entities that stand behind our sensual world, so that in this state, man actually of an ancient clairvoyance, he reached into the spiritual, into the supersensible world and, from direct experience, from the ancient, dream-like consciousness of clairvoyance, had knowledge of what takes place in the spiritual world.

The further development of humanity consists in the fact that the power of one soul develops at the expense of another. Our present-day intellectuality, the way in which we connect the external objects given by our senses through our concepts and ideas, could only develop by darkening the clairvoyant consciousness, by descending into an indefinite subconscious of man and transforming itself into the present mental state. This will later combine again with a certain kind of clairvoyant consciousness, but this will then be interspersed with our intellectuality, whereas the intellectual element was precisely lacking in the old clairvoyant consciousness.

Now we have to familiarize ourselves with the fact that this ancient consciousness had to take on the most diverse forms. And for this to be possible, each of the ancient peoples - in accordance with their national character - was called upon to develop this ancient consciousness in a very specific way. One can literally speak of the fact that each nation had the mission to develop consciousness in a very specific way. The Egyptian people, for example, whose ancient, sacred wisdom, on which the ancient Egyptian script is based and which we can still admire today, was the one that received its wisdom in ancient times from its leaders through such clairvoyant awareness, that is, through direct insight into the spiritual worlds. And from the most ancient times the tradition went right down to the later times of the Egyptian people. What we find from these later times as historical accounts is essentially the echo of what the leaders of the Egyptian people saw clairvoyantly in the spiritual worlds in times gone by.

Now, however, we must be clear about the fact - and this is the other fact that is to be presented today from the basis of spiritual science - that for every human soul disposition, for every way of looking at things in the environment, there is a specific epoch for it, and when this has passed, another soul disposition must take the place of the old one. A nation that retains this old state of mind beyond the very specific point in time when an old state of mind should be replaced by a new one must face the decline of its spiritual powers, decadence. And we also see this, because why do nations face decadence? Because, so to speak, they have been inoculated with a certain soul-disposition from their national origin, and now, out of a certain conservative element, they want to keep it. But the world's development says: Up to here [with the old soul-disposition], and now a new one must come in! The nations can keep the old one, but then they will decay, because the time for a new soul-disposition has come.

Now, while the development of Egypt was taking place, a new era was dawning. The clock of the old, clairvoyant culture had run down, and within this culture of the ancient peoples an intellectual culture was to arise, one that was directed towards understanding, towards reason in the ordinary sense, towards the intellectual combination and comprehension of the things of the outer world. This intellectual culture, this kind of state of mind, extends far into our present time. We ourselves have the peculiarity of still bearing in our souls what had to be integrated into the course of Egyptian culture at that time, namely, what we have as our intellectuality, as our way of looking at things. What had to take the place of ancient Egyptian culture in Egypt at that time extends to us. The personality of Moses was destined to bring [man] to an intellectual understanding of the world around him - in contrast to the old, clairvoyant culture. It is therefore no wonder that the deed of Moses reaches to us, sending its offshoots into our souls. Because it has made fruitful precisely that kind of human soul-condition to which we ourselves still belong, we still feel in some way akin to the deed of Moses. Moses was placed in the midst of the Egyptian people, and out of Egyptian culture he was to found the modern culture of the intellect in its very first basis. He founded the New for which the cosmic clock was attuned, and the ancient Egyptian culture was outgrown and fell into decay. He brought what he had to give to the people to whom he had come of his own accord, and led them out of their Egyptian background, in whom the germ of the rational culture of humanity was to develop.

People who are called upon to recognize the course of the world's history are always described to us in such a way that something happens in connection with their birth that has a symbolic significance for the development of their soul. The biblical story describes how Moses was found by the daughter of Pharaoh in the well-known box in which he was placed. Whether or not this is an accurate account need not be discussed further here. We are simply meant to be shown by this description that there were originally predisposed forces in this Moses that were destined to bring something quite new, a completely new kind of soul-disposition into the world. Therefore, it had to be shown symbolically that this soul, in which the germ of something new was, had to remain completely unaffected by its surroundings for a while, closed in on itself, and then placed in that environment from which the new was to be carried out. And now we are presented with facts that belong to the area I have characterized, where biblical history tells us what really happened physically in the outer world - [that area] where one can see [the events] with one's own eyes and follow them historically.

There we are made aware of how Moses, through a certain act he has committed, is led to flee. He flees to Midian to a priest, to the priest Jetro. And in this transition from the purely external events that are presented to us - from the killing of the Egyptian and the escape of Moses - we are gently led to an event that looks like a physical continuation of the facts, but which is nothing other than a symbolic representation of the events that Moses is now experiencing [internally] and that he can only experience by coming into the presence of a priest, a bearer of the most comprehensive cosmic wisdom. This is hinted at and is clear enough for those who understand the images that are used again and again in the same way.

We are told that Moses, when he fled to the priest Jetro, first came upon a well. The well always indicates the source of wisdom - the source of human culture, of spiritual educational elements that someone finds. And then we are led further in a very strange way. We are shown how Moses finds the seven daughters of Jetro, who is also called Reguel by another name. That he was a priest of the deity that was placed above all other gods in those ancient times is indicated to us by the fact that we are told – told by his name – that he belongs to this supreme deity. This is always indicated by the suffix '-el', as in Gabriel, Michael, who 'belong to the highest God'. So Jetro-Reguel was a priest of the highest God. And we are told, by means of symbolic images of the soul processes, that Moses was to come into contact with a priest who could pour the most powerful wisdom into the soul of Moses. It was a wisdom such that his soul became full of light and strength, so that he could fulfill his mission of bringing a new soul state into humanity.

Now, in the old psychology of the soul, things were thought of somewhat differently than they are today, and so we have to realize how ancient psychology actually thought. Today we speak more or less of the human soul as something unified, and for our time we are quite right to do so. We speak of thinking, feeling and willing as forces that live in our soul, and we even know that if these three forces are not in the right harmony in our soul, the health of our soul is affected. And this is based on the fact that our soul has developed from what it used to be into what it is today. In ancient times, the wise said that different areas lived in the human soul, and they listed seven such areas. Just as we list the three areas of thinking, feeling and willing today, they listed seven different areas of the soul, but they did not imagine the soul as a single unit.

We can visualize the ideas of these ancient sages something like this. Let us assume that the human soul today does not feel as a unity, but rather says to itself: Thinking, feeling and willing live in me, but a special kind of spiritual current from the cosmos penetrates into thinking, which is only connected to the thinking of the human being; another current penetrates into feeling and yet another into willing. And these forces would not be held together by the power of the present ego, but by the intervention of divine spiritual beings from without, as it were, who shape our soul life into harmony. Thus it would not be we ourselves who harmoniously unite the members of our soul life with each other, but external powers that reach in from the cosmic expanses. The ancient sages assumed seven such powers, and these seven powers reached into the soul independently, as it were. What was grasped with this wisdom was the outpouring of seven forces that flowed through the world and poured into the seven soul regions of man. And what flowed in as soul forces was imagined in the image of the seven daughters of the bearer of the total wisdom.

This is something that still resonates in all the later mystical ideas, which imagined that which flowed into the soul as wisdom or as soul light or as impulses of will, as female: This also still resonates in Goethe's “Faust”, where it says, “The eternal feminine draws us up,” which must not be interpreted frivolously. And when we are told that Moses met with the seven daughters of Jethro at the well, it means that the seven rays of wisdom emanated from Jethro and poured into the soul of Moses — separate from each other, as was thought everywhere in ancient psychology. In those ancient times, wisdom, the spiritual forces of inspiration in the world, was thought of as personal and concrete, not abstract, as it is today.

In our study of Zarathustra, we saw how that which flows into man is conceived by Zarathustra as concrete world powers, as the Amshaspands and the Izeds or Izards. And here we see the progress in the thinking of mankind: what was presented in living spirituality as having a personal character and flowing into the human soul fades in the Platonic ideas, for example. The seven different powers of inspiration of the soul are presented to us figuratively in the seven daughters of the high priest whom Moses meets at the well. And the fact that he is called to develop one of these powers in order to begin his special mission in humanity is indicated by the fact that he is married to one of Jethro's seven daughters. And we will see which of the seven basic powers falls precisely within the mission of Moses. We can trace these seven soul forces throughout the Middle Ages, for what we encounter in the so-called seven liberal arts as the animators of the human soul are the faded abstractions of the seven ancient spiritual sources.

These seven spiritual sources, which were to flow into the soul of each individual, were conceived in such a way that one was more related to the wise understanding of the world – clairvoyant wisdom, of course – another spiritual power was more related to the loving embrace of facts and entities, a third more to the impulses of the will, a fourth to memory, and so on. It was now intended that Moses should incorporate one of these seven spiritual powers into his special mission and replace what had previously ruled humanity with the wisdom that permeates the world. This spiritual power is intellectuality; it is the kind of understanding and grasp of the world that no longer relies on clairvoyance but on the powers of the external mind.

Now a transition must be created everywhere. The old cannot easily be transformed into the new. Moses was called upon to replace the old clairvoyant wisdom, which was still native to Egypt and had already begun to decline in Moses' time, with the new intellectuality, the rational overview of things. He himself, however, still had to develop the new way out of a certain clairvoyance that he still had through grace. The fact that Moses still saw things in the old way of clairvoyance, but saw them as the new intellectuality should see them, created the bridge, as it were, between the old clairvoyance and the new intellectuality of humanity, free from clairvoyance.

What is this new intellectuality bound to? It is bound to that center of our soul that we designate with the simple word “I”. By consciously ascribing existence to the center of our soul, we enclose the realm of our consciousness as the realm of intellectuality - that realm in which reason and intellect, concept and idea are at work. If one wants to enclose this area, one must be aware that it only holds together because it is held together by the unified ego.

So what was given to Moses [as a task]? Well, an infinitely important deed lay before Moses - one can express it that way if one wants to put Moses' experience into words. Moses could say to himself: The gods have worked through their various powers into the human soul, and when people of ancient times, in their clairvoyance, looked over this or that, when they felt this or that in the outer world, they always spoke of the gods who lived outside in the cosmos. But for intellectuality – for that grasping of the outer world that is bound to the deepest human center – the God must enter into the innermost center of the human being, must connect with this I. And a God must be recognized who is not merely seen in the clouds, in the stars, but of whom it must be said: He works in the clouds, that is the power of the clouds; but when He streams into the soul, He brings about what this human soul experiences in itself.

Not only could this be said of the external gods, but also this: Now such a soul power must develop in humanity, which can only develop through the power of a god who has his being in the I of man. This God, who was to enter into the innermost being of man, into his I, appeared to the clairvoyant consciousness of Moses through the inspiration of the priest. And through clairvoyance, Moses beheld God, that is, through that which could still be kindled in him of clairvoyant power — which is indicated to us by the image of the burning bush. As this is described, everyone who understands these things recognizes that an astral-clairvoyant vision of a reality is present. The new God, who was to have his being in the ego, appeared in the burning bush. And Moses asked this God: If I am now to lead my people in your name, what must I say, who has sent me? You can read it in the Bible yourself – even if the translations of the Bible are otherwise very inadequate, here they are correct. To the question: Who has sent you?, Moses is given the answer: Tell your people that 'I am' has sent you. And that means: That divine power has sent you, which kindles in the innermost human center the possibility that man can speak in this innermost center “I am”, thus attaches his existence to himself, experiences his existence himself: “I am, who I am”!

That was what Moses clairvoyantly pre-experienced: the intellectuality of humanity. With this, he stood at a point where the old culture, in relation to the human soul, was to merge into a completely new culture. This was a transition over an abyss of human culture, as if the world powers had said: In the future, intellectuality must prevail, and those who want to continue the old ways are heading for decline. We must cross over this abyss. Moses might have said this to himself. And so the followers of Moses felt that the transition over a cosmic world abyss had been won. That is why the followers of Moses celebrated the Passover, the festival of the transition over a world abyss, in memory of this act of Moses. Oh, these ancient festivals, which today we are accustomed to celebrating in such a trivial way, relate to great mysteries of the existence of the world. Now when Moses, endowed with the power for thousands of years, came to the court of Pharaoh, it is no wonder that this Pharaoh, who had grown out of the old Hellschic culture of Egypt, could not understand the signs that Moses displayed before him.

We cannot go into the details of the misunderstandings that took place between Moses and Pharaoh. These are all images that are intended to show us that Pharaoh spoke out of an ancient clairvoyant culture and out of a state of mind that also came from this clairvoyant culture. The ancient pictographic script also originated from such a culture. Everything that Egyptians could understand about the course of natural events arose from this. But Moses developed such an understanding of world phenomena, such a combination of facts, as emerged from modern intellectuality. Of course, to those who were still steeped in the old clairvoyant consciousness, this appeared as a miracle, as miraculous events, for just as people today cannot imagine that things happen other than as they imagine them, the ancient cultural people could not imagine that things happen as modern people imagine them. Thus, the concept of miracle has only been reversed.

And we know, of course, as the Bible presents it to us, that Moses really did succeed, through his great strength, which arose from an inspiration of the soul, in leading this people, who were his descendants through blood, as it were, out of Egypt, but in such a way that afterwards, separated from Egyptian culture, they were able to develop an intellectual culture. Therefore, we see that from this mission of Moses everything that we can call thinking, which can be traced back to a unity - to the unity of Yahweh - and can permeate the world with reason, with concepts and ideas, arises from this mission of Moses. That was the mission of the ancient Hebrew people: to infuse human culture with reason, intellectualism, concepts and ideas. And anyone who wants to see things as they are will understand that to this day this peculiar mission of the ancient Hebrew people has been at work and that this peculiar intellectual culture could only emerge from such a source.

How did those for whom Moses was the inspirer relate to those who still came from the old clairvoyant culture? How did the followers of Moses, whom he led out of Egypt, relate to the Egyptians? Here we have to familiarize ourselves with some peculiarities of the state of mind of people who were influenced by the old clairvoyant culture and perhaps still are today. There are always stragglers, and these are the ones whose intellectual development is retarded. To make it clear to us how certain soul powers prevail there, I would like to remind you first of certain things in animals, although I do not want to compare the human with the animal. One speaks of instinctive activity in animals. We will not criticize the word instinct further; everyone knows what is meant by it, namely this elementary, direct action and doing, as we find it in the animal kingdom, which contrasts with [purposeful] human action. In humans, we have considered action; in animals, actions come from instincts. The more we go back to the old clairvoyant state, the more instinctive action becomes for people as well. They are led, driven to their actions; they do not first give account of themselves in concepts and ideas. We also find a certain instinctive action in every old soul condition.

Now I remind you of something that is truer than one might think. You will have heard descriptions that, for example, when eruptions from volcanoes are imminent, the animals move away beforehand and thus do not fall prey to the catastrophe. There is some truth behind these descriptions: just as I follow my instinct when flying, so do animals follow a mysterious urge when volcanoes erupt. Now, people, who have already risen to the level of thinking in terms of concepts and ideas, can no longer act so instinctively; they remain [and succumb] to the disaster. Even though such reports are often exaggerated, But there is some truth in them, because where there is an instinct, there is a more intimate connection between natural events and what is felt in the human soul than there is in such actions, which are based on concepts and ideas. Thus, the state of mind of the ancient peoples also changed; it became different in those who thought intellectually.

And so the followers of Moses now faced the ancient Egyptians: the Egyptians, an ancient people, the followers of Moses, the new people. And this was due to its entire blood composition, intellectually, rationally combining natural phenomena, thinking rationally. Yes, it now comes into consideration that the time for the old instinctive in the state of mind has expired. [And when this time has expired], then the [old] powers come into decline, then they are no longer useful. They were useful in ancient times; then people instinctively sensed the course of natural events and acted accordingly. But this came into decline around the time that Moses was called upon to bring a completely new culture, and there was no longer time for the old instinctive soul powers. And now let us imagine that on the one hand Moses and on the other the ancient Egyptians are confronted with natural events. The ancient Egyptians could not intellectually combine natural phenomena. In ancient times they had felt it instinctively in their souls when the sea level rose again; there was an intimate bond between the soul life and the external natural phenomena. Never would the soul have failed to feel when the sea level receded so that one could cross the dry land. But the ancient times were over. The Egyptians no longer had these ancient, instinctive powers, because the time had come when one should intellectually survey the context of things. Moses was called to do this. He now stood before the sea, and he knew from the course of natural events when to retreat so that he and his people could cross over. Through the newly developed intellectuality, it was possible for him to read this point in time from nature. In ancient times, the Egyptians would have sensed that they could no longer cross, but they were not yet ripe for the new kind of knowledge; they fell prey to the waves because their soul forces had come into decadence, into decay. Thus we see Moses leading his followers across the receding waters by intellectual deduction, and we see the Egyptians falling prey to the floods, because they could only have sensed from their ancient, instinctive strength that the sea was rising again, but they no longer had this instinctive strength.

We are standing at the boundary between the old and the new times, we are standing at the point where the mission of Moses stands out clearly from the mission of the ancient Egyptian people. At such a point, we feel how profound and significant the descriptions of the religious documents are, but one needs spiritual science to understand the religious documents; this wants to be a servant to the understanding of these documents. Today I can only sketch out an outline, but try for yourself to compare everything you find in the Bible or in other documents with what has been said today, and you will see: the more closely you take what spiritual science has to say, the more you will find that what can only be sketched out today with a few lines of charcoal is true, because it corresponds to reality everywhere.

Let us now see further: We see how the special disposition that Moses has to convey to his people as his mission is particularly linked to protecting the purity of the blood. Especially with this people it should not mix, it should keep itself separate from the other peoples, so that the same blood runs down through generations and generations. Why is that so? We can understand that too, if we visualize the changes in the state of mind. Clairvoyance – whether it is the old, pictorial kind or the kind that is often described here, which the modern person can achieve by going through the appropriate exercises – clairvoyance is always tied to the person's spiritual part being able to become independent of their physical body, that they can, in a sense, draw their spiritual part out of their physical body. What the clairvoyant experiences, he experiences only through the tool of the soul, which frees itself, as it were, goes out of physical corporeality. The modern materialist will regard this as foolishness from the outset; he cannot believe that all the activity of his soul is bound to the physical brain. But clairvoyance is not bound to the brain, but takes place in the life of the soul without the brain. Only experience can confirm this, and anyone who does not have this experience can refute it with a thousand seemingly sufficient reasons, much like a blind person can refute the existence of colors. But that is not the point. According to the principles of today's research, one should admit that only experience can decide. So clairvoyance is dependent on the spiritual part of the human being freeing itself from the instruments of the physical body.

We have to look at all ancient cultures in such a way that they were based, in a certain way, on the paths of imagination, inspiration, and intuition, which flowed into the soul. These cultures therefore had something that was independent of the physical body and merely flowed down into the physical world. This is why the remains of ancient cultures are so difficult to interpret, because the moment you become independent of the physical body through consciousness, you can only live in more plastic forms than the physical body. In clairvoyance one does not have such sharply defined contours as in the physical; one has something pictorial that does not refer so directly to the physical world as is otherwise the case with intellectual comprehension; one has something that refers more symbolically to external things. We may say, then, that the clairvoyant cultures - and this includes the Egyptian in all its greatness - must be given to us in such a way in all their traditions that they use images instead of external, sharp conceptual contours. The myths, the old legends, in which the secrets of the world are immersed, are pictorial representations of the secrets of the world; they are echoes of the old pictorial clairvoyance. In a certain sense, the transmission of culture was still bound up with spiritual processes.

But now it was precisely the mission of Moses to give the souls such a constitution and to lay the foundation for culture that was bound to intellectuality, but thus also to the outer instrument of the body. For that is the peculiarity of [intellectual] thought: it conceptualizes things in the same way as our normal, waking consciousness, and this consciousness is entirely bound to the tools of the brain and the rest of the body. Intellectuality is bound to the tools of the physical body. It is no wonder that this special intellectual gift was bound to a special configuration, to special organ predispositions of a people, and had to be transmitted from generation to generation through the physical blood until the mission of the ancient Hebrew people was fulfilled. Thus, the physical instrument for intellectuality had to be bound to the physical peculiarity of this people through the blood flowing from generation to generation, and had to be refined more and more until it was so refined that the physical vehicle for that spiritual power, which then poured in to a much higher degree than the Divine power into the human 'I am' - to a much higher degree than had happened through the old power of Yahweh. And in this respect, the mission of Moses was indeed the preparation for the deed of Christ. But first the outer instruments had to be trained in the appropriate way. And so we also understand that this deed of Moses was bound to a very specific people, whose blood had to be kept pure because this special power, which is bound to the instrument of the outer body, was to flow into human cultural development.

Thus, the act of Moses fits entirely harmoniously and uniformly into the overall development of humanity. We perceive him as the great standard-bearer of intellectuality – in all its peculiarity, which is even expressed in mysticism, that is, in human spiritual activity, which is otherwise the most alien to understanding and reason. Even in mysticism, for example in Hebrew Kabbalah, it is clear to us that this culture has the mission of bringing understanding and reason, combinatory comprehension of external events into human culture.

And when we look back to the Hermes culture of ancient Egypt with its wonderful, old clairvoyant culture, we see how it is called upon to bear the no longer clairvoyant Moses culture in its bosom, but that it itself must perish because the clock of world development is now set to intellectuality. And that is the significance of the Christ event, that with Him and the Mystery of Golgotha, such a powerful spiritual thrust has come into intellectual development – such a powerful spiritual impulse – that little by little, as humanity, having become intellectual, more and more familiarizes itself with the Christ event, the intellectual can also be absorbed by this powerful spiritual impulse, and can be caught by that which in turn leads into the spiritual, into the clairvoyant realm, and carries intellectuality into this realm. We still feel so touched by the significance of the Moses event today because we ourselves are still immersed in the age of intellectual culture and only glimpse a new spirituality and a new mission in the distance.

So, with a few strokes, I was able to draw this picture of Moses for you, my dear audience, as it presents itself to spiritual research in the clairvoyant consciousness, which has an enlightening effect on the external, historical account. This is the only way to distinguish between what is historical and what is a symbolic representation of inner processes in Moses himself. And so Moses stands before our soul as a living being, and we feel how unjustified it is to say that such an impulse should have formed by itself. There are people today who do not understand that effects must also have causes and that effects that point back to the personal also presuppose a personality.

Nevertheless, there are people today who doubt the existence of such a personality as that of Moses. This is certainly a sign of our time. One may say that critical biblical research has a hard time with these things. Those who are familiar with it have a great deal of respect for it, above all because perhaps in no other field of science, not even in the natural sciences, has so much diligence and devotion been expended as in the field of critical biblical research. And yet, in many respects, we see that today it has reached a point where it no longer knows how to help itself in the face of the greatest figures and impulses of humanity, where it only knows how to deny them, just as the historical existence of Jesus is already being denied today. But nevertheless, one must have all respect for the tragedy of this research, which in our materialistic age, out of materialistic ideas, wants to find the inner value of the accounts in the Bible or in other documents. But if one approaches a figure like Moses from a spiritual scientific point of view and shows, based on the secrets of human development, what had to be sunk into the soul of Moses in order for humanity to reach the level we have today, then it seems the most absurd to assume an effect without a cause, that is, a personal creation without personality.

In contrast to this, we can say that it is only through the presentation of spiritual science that the details of the Bible are illuminated in a wonderful way and that the Bible takes on a new value. For now we approach the Bible as a person familiar with mathematical laws approaches a mathematical problem. Those who do not know the mathematical laws see nothing in them but incomprehensible signs, just as they see in problems. Those who do not know the language of the Bible also see only incomprehensible things in it today, perhaps childish images that prehistoric man conjured up. But anyone who gets to know the basics that spiritual science provides and, with its help, deciphers the religious documents, feels something of what has been going on so magnificently through the ages. They feel the language of the nations, of the people in whose souls the spiritual impulses for the progress of humanity are living, that choir of humanity's leading spirits that communicate across the millennia. It is a wonderful phenomenon when the spiritual researcher peers into the spiritual worlds and then looks at the Bible and realizes from the Bible that it tells us something that we can also find through spiritual research ourselves. So we cannot but say: Whoever wrote this must have known what is going on in the spiritual worlds and what is there if such human progress as we now have before us could happen at all.

And so, through spiritual research, we look to Moses as a great leader of humanity. These leaders of humanity become more and more precious to us as we penetrate into the depths of their spirit through spiritual research. And we feel more and more blessed when we look with such sharpened thinking and feeling at these leaders of humanity, of whom it can rightly be said: They illuminate our souls with their spiritual light in order to strengthen our souls with their mighty spiritual power.

Dear attendees! When spiritual science sets itself the task of penetrating into the spiritual world that lies behind our sensual world – the world that we perceive with our senses and can understand with the mind that is connected to our brain – then this spiritual science seeks to gain strength and confidence for human life from the spiritual world in which the origin of man itself lies. And in doing so, it seeks to benefit the individual through the knowledge of what lies in the very foundations of things.

We face the spiritual world in a completely different way when we do not seek the sources of spiritual life in general, not only for our knowledge, but when we are, so to speak, dealing with the redemption of the spirit, the real spirit behind material existence, and when it can become the task of this real spirit to help it, so to speak, to break through the physical-material. How often do we not stand before the developing human being, the human being whom we see as having to work the spirit out of the hidden depths of his being, so to speak, from early childhood, the spirit that takes more and more possession of the physical limbs and the spiritual-soul abilities that are bound to the outer instrument of the body. When we as educators are dealing with this real spirit, which rests in the mystery of the human being itself and which is to be brought out, we are dealing with a still higher sense of seeking the spirit than with mere knowledge, which we seek, so to speak, as a satisfaction for the longing of our soul.

Now today the spiritual researcher is in a special position when he wants to observe the developing human being – this developing human being who gradually reveals his talents and abilities and demands that we devote ourselves to him educationally. The spiritual researcher is in a special position when faced with the developing human being because he must immediately point out one of the great facts of spiritual science with regard to this real life of the spirit, which today by no means enjoys the special favor of the educated world. This fact should be apparent to the attentive observer of life when he sees how, from the first moment of human existence, the spiritual rests, as it were, in the deep layers of the human being, how it then, from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, that he must literally see this working out in the ever-more-detailed physiognomy, gestures, movements of the individual limbs and abilities that lie deeper within the human being. We see what is working its way from hidden depths to the surface in the growing human being, and we must ask ourselves: where do we find the origin of these predispositions, these abilities that are slowly emerging? And in regard to this search, the man of today is by no means inclined to approach the facts to which spiritual research must point. We have referred to this fact in various ways. Today it is to be used only as a basis for our actual consideration. On a higher level, this fact is a repetition of another fact that has not been known for very long in the development of mankind.

I have often pointed out – oh, human memory is generally very short in this regard – that in the 17th century not only laymen but also learned naturalists were convinced that matter, mud for example, could develop animals, fish and the like out of itself, without a germ of life having been placed in this mud – out of itself. It was a tremendous turning point for science when in the 17th century – just think, only in the 17th century! – the great naturalist Francesco Redi first put forward the proposition that opened up new, worldwide vistas for scientific knowledge: Living things can only come from living things. If you believe, he said, that living creatures can arise from river mud, then you have not examined it closely enough, otherwise you would have found that the source of life lies in the germ and that this germ only draws matter to itself in order to emerge. It is often the case with truths, as it was with Francesco Redi. He only narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno, because he too was considered a heretic. Today we can go from the most radical Haeckelians to Haeckel's opponents: within certain limits, the sentence “Living things can only come from living things” is recognized everywhere. It is taken for granted. That is the fate of great truths. First they are considered heresies, then, after some time, taken for granted. People then cannot understand how anyone could ever have believed otherwise.

The task of spiritual science today is to advocate this principle at a higher level. It is an inaccurate observation to say that what struggles into existence in the developing human being as something mysterious and expresses itself more and more distinctly in gestures and facial features comes merely from the inherited traits of the father and mother and so on. If one proceeds scientifically, this cannot be explained from these inherited traits any more than the emergence of the earthworm from the matter of the river mud can be assumed without an earthworm germ. Today, spiritual science shows that for human life, what comes into existence as the core of a human being through birth must be traced back to another, a completely soul-like existence, in which its spiritual and soul germ lies. And just as the earthworm germ draws upon external physical substance to increase in size, so too, in the human being, this spiritual-soul germ draws upon the qualities and powers of the parents and ancestors to develop with their help.

We must trace back the spiritual-soul to the spiritual-soul. We must trace the soul that exists in man back to a soul germ, just as we must trace the spiritual that develops in man back to a spiritual germ. And by accepting this, it leads us to the fact of repeated earthly lives, which today not only annoys so many people, but is felt by many people as a dream or a fantasy, as something quite abominable. The doctrine of repeated earthly lives tells us that the life we are now living, in which our abilities and qualities unfold, is a repetition of earlier earthly lives and the basis of later lives. The stages of life in which we are enveloped in the physical body are interchanged with other forms of existence, in order to bring into the spiritual life what we have taken in during the present life, what we have gone through in the school of life life, and then, after this has happened, to enter again into a new physical existence, in which a germ of life again draws from the substance what it needs in terms of qualities and abilities in order to live itself into a body.

We can therefore say: We look spiritually when we see the human being emerging from the mysterious foundations of his existence, to a spiritual-soul core of being that unfolds according to his previous life and develops in the present existence by drawing on the inherited characteristics of father and mother and their ancestors. This is another truth that will slowly become part of human education. Today, of course, they no longer burn heretics, but people still say that those who claim such things know nothing about exact science, whereas spiritual science is based on the most exact science of all. They are branded as heretics in the way that heretics are branded today. But the truth of reincarnation will become established and accepted, and will no longer be questioned by people capable of judgment, but will be taken for granted.

Thus, we must look back from what appears in a child as developing abilities to what a person has acquired in previous lives on earth and expresses in this life. If we consider present-day science, we must say that a certain lack of clarity prevails everywhere, in all fields. Science believes it need only point to what comes from the father and mother, from grandparents and so on, and is happy if it can show that the qualities that are expressed here or there were also present in this or that way in the father or grandfather.

Let us look at the whole situation of what crystallizes out of the center of the human being, brought over from a previous existence; let us look at the relationship of this core to the inherited traits. When we consider everything that the human being brings into existence in terms of qualities and talents, we can see two factually related facts in the human soul. The first is what occurs in a person in terms of both mental qualities and abilities – the majority of mental qualities and abilities are independent of each other in some respect, so that one does not depend on the other. This is shown by the simple fact that someone can be very musical and yet have no aptitude for mathematics or any other field of science. An ability can shine in our soul without our being able to say that other abilities are present with it. In this respect, the individual abilities are independent of each other. But the same is also the case with regard to the [mental] qualities. A person can have a certain pride alongside other quite pleasant qualities of the soul. And again, pride is not dependent on the other qualities. That is one thing when we want to take a look at the human soul.

The second fact is that the abilities and qualities that a person has in his soul are held together by a certain center that we call the ego and that they are either in harmony or disharmony with each other. All the abilities and qualities that work together through the ego are, to a certain extent, independent of each other and work together through the fact that each person has a special core of being. If we keep to these two facts, we can, with healthy observation of life, get a clear view of how the qualities and abilities of parents and ancestors are inherited by children and descendants. The individual qualities and abilities really do appear to come from the ancestors to the descendants. On the one hand, it shows us that if a boy is haughty, he has inherited this haughtiness from his mother; another is musical, we find the same disposition in his father or in his mother. But the way in which he processes the qualities, how he relates them, we see clearly depends on his own core of being. And the more closely we examine this human life, the more the nature of this dependence becomes apparent. We can best understand this if we say: the individual qualities – pride, humility, compassionate heart and so on – are inherited by the human being from his ancestors, including the talents, but the way in which he combines them in his soul leads back to his earlier existence, to his spiritual and soul essence with all that has been achieved by his soul in his earlier existence. We can then see much more clearly how the conditions are when we observe this peculiar way of working with the inherited traits. I should also mention that the laws of heredity are laws that cannot be investigated by spiritual science in the same way as physical and chemical laws can. Therefore, I ask you to bear in mind that it is not an objection to a law of spiritual science if it is said: Yes, if you look into life, it shows that heredity does not happen in the way it has been said here. But we must take the laws as physical laws are taken. For example, physics teaches that the path traversed by a thrown stone represents a parabola; the stone falls in a parabola. But the resistance of the air causes the path of the thrown stone not to be an exact parabola. If someone comes and says that the path of the thrown stone does not form a parabola, that is not correct. The physical law is valid, and we only have the possibility of arriving at an understanding of the stone's trajectory by accepting a general law. And if someone says, “Yes, but the stone flies to the side, a gust of wind has blown it away,” the presence of the wind does not contradict the physical law as such. In this sense, the laws of spiritual science are to be taken; they can be modified by the circumstances, but they still apply in such a way that we can only understand the processes through these laws if we know them. Let us now consider the human being in terms of his characteristics, by dividing the human soul itself into two areas, which can clearly be distinguished from one another in human life. Wherever you look in human life, you will find clear distinctions everywhere. One area can be described as the area of interests that a person has, where their attention, sympathy and antipathy, their affects, drives and passions are directed. This area of the nature of will and affect is one area. The other is the area that can be called the intellectual, the rational, that is, the way in which a person forms ideas, whether he is rich or poor in concepts and images, whether these are flexible, whether a person can form symbols or whether he is unimaginative, whether he has the intellectual elements for one area or the other. These two areas should initially be distinguished in the developing human being. With the same precision with which we gain physical laws through healthy observation of life, we can find laws for these two areas that reveal the connection between the ancestors and the descendants.

We see that everything concerning the sphere of interests, affections, sympathy and antipathy, passions, that is, the instinctive direction of man, can always be traced back only to paternal inheritance, whereas that which concerns the formation of the elements of intellect, of the rational, can be traced back to maternal inheritance. Such laws result from a faithful observation of life. Of course, it is not possible to go into the hundreds of cases that could easily be cited from a healthy observation of life. It can only be pointed out that life everywhere confirms that we get the intellectual and imaginative side from our mother's side, and the spirited element, the interest in whether we are lively or casual or apathetic, comes more from our father's side.

I cannot go into general confirmatory considerations at this point, but can only illustrate what has been said with examples. One great example needs to be mentioned: Goethe, who characterized himself so beautifully in the words:

From my father I have the stature,
the serious conduct of life,
from my mother the cheerful disposition
and the desire to tell stories.

We can find this in hundreds of cases when we observe world history or life. And because a faithful observation of life confirms these words everywhere, they make life appear so full of light.

But we still approach the subject far too abstractly when we look at life only in general terms. I said that in general the intellectual element can be traced back to inheritance from the mother's side. But it is not that simple. Instead, the qualities that are inherited undergo a transformation by metamorphosing. Spiritual science is still not fully recognized today, otherwise people would already be able to see how much it can benefit the natural sciences. It is instructive enough to observe how one natural force is transformed into another, for example heat into electricity, but spiritual science transfers this way of observing to other areas as well, and it will say that, for example, in the field of inheritance, one can only get to the bottom of it if one considers the transformation of characteristics.

And here it can be seen how maternal and paternal qualities enter into relationships when they are passed on to the children. We see how maternal qualities, when they are passed on, tend to pass over to the sons. If we look at the soul qualities in the mother, we can say: These soul qualities tend to pass over to the sons, but they tend to change in the process. What is basic [in soul terms] in the mother, she may not be able to develop into particular abilities because she lacks the organs. After all, you need the appropriate predispositions to do so. While the mother has to remain within the narrowest circle with her soul stirrings, we see how, in the sons, the mother's predispositions, as it were, shoot into the physical realm one step further, so that the same predispositions arise again in the son. And the son then shows us in his abilities, through which he can work in the world, what was predisposed in the soul of the mother. The mother has it as a soul disposition; the son has it in such a way that he can let it flow into the physical organs in order to carry it out into the world, in order to bring it to the world in the form of achievements. We see the soul qualities of the mother transformed in the sons right down to the physical level.

So we have the sentence: the soul qualities of the mother have the tendency to move into the physical organs of the sons and to confront us in turn in the soul forces bound to these organs. It only takes a healthy look at life and at the general development of humanity to find this confirmed. We can look to Goethe again, or to other personalities, for example, Hebbel. This peculiar natural dramatist Hebbel, who was never able to communicate with his father, had a great poetic gift; he shows us this gift in such a way that he had the simple primitive ability for it from his mother, who was just a simple bricklayer's wife. We can follow this in his diary entries. And this gift is manifested in him in such a way that the spiritual nature of the mother has been transformed into an organ system, descended into the physical system of the son, where it manifests itself in this way.

The remarkable thing, however, is that faithful observation of life reveals the opposite tendency in the paternal qualities, which have become more integrated into the physical, which rest more in the whole personality, including the physical predispositions. The qualities of the father tend to ascend by one degree in the daughter and to appear in the soul of the daughter as transformed into spiritual-soul qualities. Thus, something that is sober and pedantic in the father appears lovable in the daughter's soul.

I would like to give a brief example of how this relationship manifested itself in Goethe. One can point out that in fact the old Frau Rat Goethe had the art of storytelling in her soul; she had all the mobility, the imaginative gift, and we see how this particular type of gift was expressed in her circle of friends. We see how this type of gift was highly developed in the son, to the point of becoming a basic predisposition, so that it led to world-shaking facts. On the other hand, we see the father, the old Goethe. Anyone who, like me, has spent more than thirty years studying Goethe and everything related to him will not be misunderstood in a superficial way when he characterizes him as saying: “From my father I have the stature, the serious conduct of life.” The son takes over this character foundation from his father without transformation.

The old Goethe is a thoroughly sober, alert, honest man, even great within certain limits, but a man who, I might say, by the very way he comes across as a personality, cannot get along in life, cannot achieve anything worthwhile; he cannot get a proper position in the Frankfurt Council, he stops halfway. His character affects even his physical abilities. Let us now imagine this translated into the soul: how would it confront us in the soul - this stopping halfway, this never-ending? It would be possible for it to appear in the soul in such a way that it has the need on the one hand to join others, but never wants to make up its mind and repeatedly shies away from a decision. Here we have, as soul qualities, what we encounter as intellectual sobriety in the character of Goethe. But we can also have sobriety before us in its sentimental, soul-like transformation. It is easy to find where the outer qualities of the old Goethe live on in the soul: in Goethe's sister Cornelia, who, however, died young. In her, we see the entire soul qualities as a transformation of the qualities of the old Goethe. And now we also understand why Goethe, who received the external qualities from his father but what really mattered to him, what his greatness was based on, from his mother, could not really get along with his father, how the two repelled each other. In his sister, however, these qualities – transformed into kindness, passion and slight vanity – had such an effect that she became a dear companion for him, in whom the [qualities of the father], transformed into the soul, stood beside him. The whole way in which Goethe's life in his parents' house presents itself to us shows how precisely the abilities tied to active organ systems pass from father to daughter.

One could also point out that not only the father, but the entire paternal ancestry comes into consideration, and likewise on the other side the maternal. We see how Goethe repeats the sunny imagination and mystical character of his maternal ancestors – transformed into higher gifts. And in the nature of his sister, whom Goethe esteemed so highly and of whom he had to say that she lacked faith, hope and love, for she was a problematic nature who also withered away early, we see the paternal ancestry. But here we must think of these qualities, which were active in the sister, as having been transformed from the physical into the soul. We know, of course, that one of Goethe's uncles turned out to be a good-for-nothing. He was such a person that one must say of him that he had no head for anything and therefore could achieve nothing. We see the entire dilettantishness of this ancestry, which only in Goethe's father attained a certain greatness, transposed into the soul in the problematic nature of Goethe's sister.

If one wanted to, one could find mothers throughout history who transfer what they have in their souls into the physical traits of their sons. That is why mothers are so often depicted, so that we may understand the sons. Thus, in the fourth book of Maccabees, the mother of the seven sons who were killed is depicted precisely in her peculiar state of mind, which in the sons manifests itself as a stage-lowered, physical predisposition. In order to appreciate this fact, one must proceed according to laws, just as one would when investigating the dynamic force of a gust of wind. And here it can often be shown that the aptitude of a son, with all its intimacy, can be traced back to the nature of the soul struggles of the mother. Perhaps there are few cases as interesting as the relationship that the soul of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's mother had - through her character, through her sad fate - to the whole way of her son's poetry. And when we consider how closely Conrad Ferdinand Meyer was bound to his mother's personality, we see in the wonderfully noble, unassuming religiosity, in the delicate way of facing life, and in the full comprehension of tragic situations, what remained of the mother's soul.

In this way one could cite hundreds of great minds in history and intellectual life and of people we know in our ordinary daily lives and everywhere one would find this law confirmed. One can therefore say that what one is as a father tends to appear in the soul of the daughter and what one is as a mother in the disposition of the sons. A light spreads over numerous life circumstances when we survey this law; and much becomes understandable to us about the connection and the motives of different people.

What does spiritual research tell us about inheritance? It tells us that it would be a mistake to look only for inherited traits in a person. Rather, we have to go back, alongside all inherited characteristics, to the central spiritual-soul core of the human being, which comes from previous lives and integrates and incorporates the characteristics it finds, just as the earthworm germ integrates the external substance, absorbs this substance and enlarges itself according to its own nature. Thus we see in the human core of being that which is drawn in, as if by magnetic forces, into a family where the qualities in the father and other ancestors are suitable for this soul core, so that through the appropriate blending of these qualities and their transformation, the soul can express what its own inner being is. A soul that has acquired the ability in past lives, let us say, to achieve something poetic, for which it needs the gift of imagination, is attracted to a mother who has the gift of storytelling - the gift of thinking in images and, with a slight mobility of soul, transforming these images. But when this ability is passed down from mother to son, there is a tendency to carry these qualities down into the physical, and the spiritual and soul core must blend what it finds in the way of predispositions. The father's character traits are carried up into the soul, into the souls of the daughters, where they are transformed, but when they appear directly in the sons, they are not transformed.

We have to look at more complicated relationships if we want to explain the connection between how the actual human core being is attracted to the qualities of certain persons who then become its parents, and how this core being then mixes and harmonizes these qualities so that it can live out its own essence in them. Spiritual science, however, not only sees what is mixed and transformed from the qualities and dispositions of the ancestors, but it also directs our attention to the spiritual essence that we see coming into existence and must trace back to earlier forms of existence in which it has acquired what enables it to mix the qualities and dispositions that it can receive in the line of inheritance.

Now one could say that spiritual science is extremely easy to refute; one need only apply the most trivial concepts and it can be refuted with the greatest of ease. In an afterword to the small pamphlet “Theosophy and Christianity”, I myself pointed out how easy it is to refute certain presentations of Theosophy if one is determined to start from the prejudices of the present day. The examples given there could easily be multiplied. Regarding what are regarded as hereditary traits, Theosophy must point out the human individuality. It must say: The healthy human mind has the same interest in each individual human individuality, in each spiritual-soul essence of the human being, as it has in the animal in the species, in an animal species. We show the same interest in every single human being as we do, for example, in the lion species. We are as interested in human individuality as we are in animal species. You only have to misunderstand this sentence, or, if it is written, not read it properly, to refute it with tremendous ease.

Someone may object: But what do these spiritual researchers claim? They seem to be unaware that you can just as easily write the biography of a dog or a cat with all their individual characteristics as you can of a human being; you can also list all the differences between the individual animals. It is extremely easy to cite such a thing against spiritual science. But it has never been claimed that this is not possible with spiritual science. I myself was in a school class where a teacher tried to write the biography of a steel spring. You can transfer everything. But one thing can be said: the interest we show for an individual cat and so on is not the same interest as the one we show for a fellow human being. The interest we take in an individual of a species of animal can even be greater than the interest we have for an individual human being. But it is a different interest, not the same; it arises from different psychological roots. Spiritual science requires that the concepts be clearly defined. If someone does not do this, then they can put forward the kind of refutations that can be found on the street. We are dealing with a spiritual-soul core in the human being, and spiritual science does not merely trace this back to the parents and their ancestors, but says: He draws the qualities of these parents to himself, just as the earthworm germ draws the substance it needs for its growth. Now one can ask of spiritual science: Is there something that proves, and that from the human course of life, that such a spiritual-soul core of being actually exists? From the observation of the individual human life, it will be difficult to distinguish between what is nature of the cover and what is the core of the being. Regarding the individual human being, we take the view that the interaction of the covers and the core of the being unfolds gradually. We cannot easily distinguish this in the individual human being, but if we look at a larger, broader basis, at the human being in general, we see that people are very different from one another in terms of their development. Let us assume that this information from spiritual science is correct. Then, for example, there is a core of being in a person that goes back to a life in which this person acquired a strong individuality. Such an essential core will have a lot of trouble overcoming the resistance that the inherited traits present to it. It will have a lot of trouble developing these traits in such a way that they correspond to its spiritual abilities. It takes a long time for a strong essential core to integrate and develop the abilities that come from heredity. On the other hand, a spiritual core that has not yet acquired many abilities of its own will easily blend in with the characteristics of heredity.

This means that people who are stronger individuals, who have a strong inner core and who come from a previous life with a wealth of inner substance, are only slowly able to overcome the resistance that comes from heredity. And here we recall the fact that great minds are not so-called child prodigies, but that teachers often mistake them for the opposite. We only have to think of Alexander von Humboldt, who was considered stupid in his youth. His essential core simply took a long time to bring out the abilities resting within him. A rich core of being had come over to him, and it had a long time to do before it had reworked the characteristics of heredity according to the content of his soul. But through this soul content, which has long worked on the characteristics of heredity, something is also achieved that can achieve great things in humanity. On the other hand, we see souls that, so to speak, bring little with them from previous lives. They will quickly find their way into their new shells and will easily develop the characteristics of heredity. These are the prodigies who seem to be the most talented in the first years of life, but then very soon cease to be so.

Let us assume that the spiritual core of the being has to work its way through what is offered to it from the outside. It only takes a clear, correct observation of life to recognize that physical characteristics in particular are based on heredity. We can see the form of inheritance in the fingerprints. On the other hand, that which is seated as a germ in the soul will be all the less explainable by overcoming the inherited traits through external means, the more the qualities in question have their seat in the interior of the soul. This is why that which belongs to the subjective realm of the soul, the talents for music, mathematics, and so on, appear in the earliest years, as the numerous cases of child prodigies prove. On the other hand, talents that require more inheritance to be overcome will emerge later. In short, everything that comes to us in the course of a proper observation of life proves that a core essence of the human being emerges from all that seeks to envelop us as inherited traits. If we observe people carefully, we can see how the greatest individualities very slowly overcome the resistance of the outer human will. We do not want to focus on these facts today, but they can be seen among the greatest individuals.

I would like to remind you once again of Goethe. If we really understand his greatness, we can see in him how he stands before us as an old Goethe at the full height of life, at the height of art and wisdom; we can see that he has used his whole life to carve out his individuality against the opposing forces. And only the short-sighted could say [about Goethe's late works] that Goethe has grown old. Today, when judging great personalities, we can observe the tendency to exaggerate them in relation to their youth and to belittle them in relation to old age. We can even hear it said that the works of old age are old, dull things, and that those of youth are fresh. A book is being published today in which the true poets, the true individualities, are presented to readers from their youthful works.

People do not really consider that it is perhaps only through their own peculiarity that they are able to understand youth better. They would do better to go along with the individuality in question and not assume that the individuality has become duller in old age. This has already happened to Goethe during his lifetime. People have read the first part of his “Faust” and said: There is bubbling youthfulness in it; but what Goethe wrote in his old age is such that one must be lenient with the aging. But anyone who looks at what Goethe presents with this understanding will say: There, in the first part of “Faust,” Goethe's full individuality has not yet emerged; we see how he is still working his way through, and we see how this strong individuality, which educates itself throughout its entire life, works its way through the resistance of its covers. This is why Goethe says of the critics of his “Faust”:

There they praise Faust,
And what else
In my writings roars,
In their favor;
The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much;
The scum thinks,
One would no longer be!

Anyone who is familiar with the development of human nature knows that the stronger the individuality is, the longer it takes to work through.

We can already see a difference between what is the innermost core of our being, the origin of which we have to look for somewhere else, and what is the outer shell that joins this core of our being. We see this difference particularly when we look at the relationship between parents and children. Throughout life, the human being is in a kind of development. This development is an ascending and a descending one. The former includes the time up to the thirtieth, fortieth, fiftieth year, when the core of our being works from within, so that what we go through in pain and suffering becomes life experience and expresses itself in our physicality, in our expressions and gestures. In these stages of life we always see the inner core of the being working on the outer shells and finally shaping them plastically, so that we can speak of the fact that, in an ascending line, the human being becomes more and more similar to his inner core. If we look at a person in their fortieth year and consider the physiognomy that they have been working on for forty years, we can say that the outer appearance is more similar to the inner being than it was in the twentieth year, when it was still inside, still a mere ability, and striving out from the inside out. Thus, in the physical body, a person is more similar to himself in later life than in earlier life. He is more similar to himself in the fortieth year than in the twentieth. This explains an important fact of life, which in turn appears important for many external facts. What is this fact, and why is there such a difference [between the different ages]?

For the observer of life, there is a difference between children of younger parents and those born later in marriage. Only those who are not observers of life do not notice this difference. The core of a child's being, who has moved into a young couple, will find little resistance in its shells because the parents have not yet worked much into their physicality. The individuality will be able to work more into their shells; they do not yet find such a plastic expression of the qualities in them that reproduce themselves in the line of inheritance. Therefore, we can say that children conceived by young parents are better able to shape the whole person from their own individuality. Children born later in a marriage are those whose own core of being is weaker and are therefore drawn to very specific traits that father or mother have imprinted. Thus we see that children born later generally bear more of their father and mother than those born earlier, because the qualities that go into inheritance have already become pronounced in the parents' bodies. We see how the work of the parents on themselves shows in different ways in the children. Strong individualities, which are less similar to the parents, are the children born of the dawn of a young marriage. Less strong individualities, which are more similar to the parents, are those born to older couples.

Spiritual science throws light on such facts in the same way that natural science throws light on natural facts. And if we have this law, we have the means to educate people in a way that is practical for life. Then we acquire a very specific attitude. Anyone who, as a teacher of children, acquires this attitude flowing from spiritual science always says to himself: You must look at what has come into existence through birth and is working its way out more and more like a sacred puzzle to be solved; it is something that comes from previous lives. To do this, you have to look at the ancestry, where the characteristics come from. From this there arises for the educational eye that harmony of will and ability, that sense of responsibility towards the developing human being as a sacred riddle to be solved. When we absorb such wisdom, which places us in this way with the pupil, then that seriousness is imprinted in us, which - without theorizing - finds the educational tact to really solve the riddle in each particular case. In each individual case, we have to act in accordance with this sense of tact in order to properly inspire the mind. We then take leave of the popular phrases of pedagogy.

Which phrase can be heard more often today than that: You have to educate the individuality of the human being. You must educate individually, not in a stereotyped way, and you must not do anything that would contradict the individuality. But anyone who truly observes life wonders: what exactly is individual education? This word remains a mere phrase as long as one does not know how the core of a being relates to what surrounds it. That is why what is said about individual education is just empty words. In most cases, we are unable to do much with them. We have to educate in the way that the demands of practical life arise. We have to realize that we cannot get by with these empty words, but that we have to say: we have to educate from what is assessed. Above all, we are called upon to give the human being what makes him a useful member of human society. He must be able to do what is demanded within certain circles of people, what his time and circumstances demand of him. The phrase of individuality must not shake this demand. Those who see how spiritual science understands the connection between the human being and the whole world are not at all powerless in the face of life's demands. It may be necessary, for example, that a son who has this or that quality takes this or that position in life; family circumstances demand it. Anyone who really looks into the laws of things knows that people are not so one-sided that it can be said that they are only useful for this or that. They can be made useful if not only one side is developed. People are more versatile than is usually assumed. And anyone who really looks through the combination of inherited traits to the spiritual and psychological core of the being is able to connect the various extraordinarily instructive processes with what presents itself as a real process to the spiritual researcher. If one seeks what the individuality of the pupil is, then the practical demands of life make it necessary to look at individuality differently than it is usually viewed in a stereotyped way. It must be said that anyone who allows themselves to be inspired by spiritual-scientific knowledge will, as if flowing into their entire attitude, acquire a fine sense of tact and not only a sense of responsibility, but also all the skills they need to do the right thing at the appropriate moment. It is quite remarkable that whenever you make such assumptions, you always know what to do at the right moment. To give an example: A child [was given to me to educate] who was denied all talents because he had developed in a strange way up to the age of eleven, so that one could say: “Nothing will come of this rascal; he has not even learned to read and write properly!” When this child was entrusted to me and I began to have a certain influence over him, I could say: “All this is only deceptive appearance.” The only difficulty was to break through the outer shell in order to reveal the inner core of the child's being. The core of the being had to be uncovered. Twenty years have passed since that time, and it has been shown that it was as I said. In a short time it was possible to help the spiritual core of the being to break through and to prove what has been said here.

Thus, the study of the developing human being shows how necessary it is not to remain with the outer, physical body alone, but to look through to the spiritual, which is everywhere behind the sensual and which we can see if we acquire the ability to do so. It is important for our knowledge in this direction as well if we can acquire concepts and ideas such as those found in spiritual science.

It is important for our practical lives that we believe in the spirit and seek it behind physical matter; this becomes clear to us when we stand before the developing human being and have to solve the real puzzle in education of how the spirit pours into physical matter. Spiritual science is there not only to talk about the three concepts of body, soul and spirit in a theoretical way, but to fertilize practical life in such a way that a direct result can be achieved through proper education.

When we look at the human being in this way, then, by participating in his development through education, the human soul is imbued with the high truth of the human being's mission in his earthly existence. Then we feel something of the fact that, although we human beings are fully immersed in the physical-sensual world, we are called upon to bring into this physical-sensual world that which we can draw from the spirit. From this realization, we can say: We are surrounded by physical and sensory phenomena; but behind them stands the active spirit. In the developing human being, we encounter the physical human being in indeterminate talents and indeterminate physiognomy, but at the same time we encounter the spirit, which has to struggle through physical matter and which we have to help to come into existence in the physical world from an enigmatic state. Wherever we look at our practical life's work, man is called upon to impress spirit on matter. The words in which we may summarize today's reflection are true everywhere. The spirit struggling for existence also shows us the truth that can be said with these words:

It presses to the human sense
From the depths of the world, full of mystery
The material abundance.
It flows into human souls
From the heights of the world, full of content
The spirit's clarifying light.
They meet in the human heart
To a wisdom-filled reality.

Dear attendees! This year, too, I would like to express my extreme regret that I am unable to make the remarks I have to make today in your language. However, that is not possible, and so I apologize to you for being forced to speak in a language foreign to you about the subject of today's lecture.

It is intended to speak about this subject from the point of view of spiritual science, of spiritual research. This already indicates that the whole way of treating, of presenting the reflection on the Christ in the twentieth century, belongs to a field that is still not very popular today, because spiritual science or theosophy is not only unpopular in the broadest circles of our present-day education, but also still quite unknown. Yet it is precisely spiritual science that contains the mission to speak about the most important matters, about the innermost facts of the human heart in our time and the time to come. A brief consideration of the following can make this clear to us – especially in relation to our topic today.

Since I had the honor of speaking here last year on a similar topic, a heated discussion has taken place in Germany. In recent months, the words “Did Jesus Live?” could be read on the notice boards in all of Germany's larger cities. Numerous lectures were held that referred to this question, for or against, as to whether Jesus had ever lived. It is significant that there is no [external] evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was really a historical figure – he to whom millions of people looked up as the bearer of the greatest hopes, as the source of comfort in the deepest suffering. It is a significant fact that science in our time must raise the question of whether this universally beloved and sacred figure ever lived at all, and that there is no historical evidence that he really did live.

Just as it is significant that science in the study of external facts has come to this point of view, so it is also significant that in our time, little recognized by our education, a spiritual direction is asserting itself that must say purely from the facts of spiritual research: These facts of spiritual research reveal the reality of Jesus with a certainty that no external document, no external tradition can give. Where external fact-finding loses the possibility of proving the historical Jesus, spiritual research steps in, which will be more and more able to prove with absolute certainty the reality of Christ Jesus as a historical fact.

Our time has achieved great and monumental things in terms of external, physical fact-finding, and it is justifiably proud of them. Spiritual research, however, is obliged to point out that it is possible to create other instruments, other tools, that cannot be realized with the outer hands and cannot be seen with the outer eyes, but that can be created by man if he develops the powers that already exist in his ordinary soul life - the powers of thinking, feeling and willing - beyond the normal level. Spiritual science must point out that the powers of thinking, feeling and willing, as they are initially present in the normal development of man, can be increased, and that even today, as they have always existed since primeval times, there are spiritual researchers who not only use external instruments and tools for their research, but also develop those inner powers that lie dormant in the human soul.

Those who make themselves researchers in this way acquire new organs of perception that open up something to them that would otherwise have remained closed. These organs bring about on a higher level what happens on a lower level to a person born blind when he undergoes an operation and thereby gains his sight. It is the same with the spiritual world: it is reality, but only when the human being is able to raise the forces slumbering in him to the level of clairvoyance – true, not pathological clairvoyance – does it become a fact that he can experience for himself.

The same applies to spiritual research as to any other research: just as a person in everyday life cannot always go into a laboratory and work with retorts and other tools to extract nature's secrets, so an everyday person cannot, of course, get involved in everything that a spiritual researcher does. You can find some information about this in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. But it must always be emphasized that it is the same as with what the chemist researches in his laboratory: one learns what he has researched with his tools, and what has been researched can then be grasped by the natural will to truth. It is the same in spiritual science or theosophy: individuals can become researchers and develop their powers of clairvoyance, then they can report on what can be seen in the spiritual world, and this can then be understood through reason, through natural [reason-based] thinking. Today we shall be presented with the results of spiritual research in a way that is comparable to a chemist telling you the results of his laboratory research.

Today we stand at an important and prominent epoch in the development of humanity with regard to our conception of Christ and our entire position on the Christ problem. Believe me, anyone who takes the standpoint of spiritual science is not quick with the word: “We are in a transitional epoch.” He knows that this word has already been used for every epoch. He uses it only when the spiritual-factual context demands it, when a particular epoch is something very special. We live in a time that spiritual research can only compare with the even more significant age of the last centuries before the initiation of Christianity, when people's expectations were at their highest, waiting for an event that had to come and found expression in the words of John the Baptist: “Change your soul's disposition, for the Kingdoms of Heaven - the spiritual world - have drawn near.” Today the spiritual researcher lives in a similar expectation, and in a similar way we may speak to present-day humanity: We are on the threshold of a new Christ-revelation. Admittedly, it will be of a completely different nature than the one 1900 years ago.

What does spiritual science understand by the Christ when it speaks of the new Christ-Revelation in the twentieth century? For spiritual science, the Christ is the highest impulse that has entered into the development of humanity. All those who have ever been able to see through the spiritual life of humanity with a clairvoyant eye have always spoken of the Christ, only they used different names. The great teachers in ancient India, who are usually referred to as the holy Rishis, also spoke of the Christ. But how did they speak of him? They spoke in such a way that all those who understood them could know: When they spoke of “Vishvakarman” - that was the name by which they designated Christ - then they spoke of the highest spiritual power to which man can rise when he immerses himself in his own soul forces - disregarding everything that gives external, sensual perception - and looks out at the great facts of the world or looks into his own inner being. When man looks out into the world and sees through what expands in space and takes place in time as Maya, as illusion, and when he sees behind this veil of Maya what underlies the sensory world, the Vedic teaching calls this “Brahman”. If man looks into his inner being, at his true self, as a part of that which lives and weaves in the world, it calls it “Atman”. Thus the ancient Vedic teaching of Vishvakarman speaks of that which weaves through space and time as “Brahman” and that which appears as an inner revelation as “Atman”. But there was one thing that the Vedic teachers impressed upon their listeners again and again: that only when man frees himself from all sense perception, when he frees himself from everything that is visible in outer space, can he gain insight into the essence of Vishvakarman, of Brahman and Atman.

Then came the time when another great leader of human development pointed to the Christ. Those who can see beyond names and labels know that the great Zoroaster or Zarathustra spoke of the Christ-revelation. What did Zarathustra speak from his clairvoyance, which he had acquired in the same way that clairvoyance is spoken of here today, when he pointed out the sun shining in outer space to his listeners? How did he speak of the sun? [He spoke thus:] When you look up at the sun and see the physical light of the sun, this physical light is only the garment of the spiritual being. This body of the spiritual being is related to that which truly lives in the sun, as the outer human body is related to that which, spiritually, as the soul, permeates, interweaves and lives through the human body. But that, he called - the word is not important here - “aura” or “Ahura Mazdao”. For the inner eye, it is perceptible as inner light, in contrast to the outer body. For the clairvoyant eye, an aura is what a person experiences spiritually. Thus Zarathustra pointed people up to the sun: the outer light of the sun is the physical body for the spirit of the sun, which he called the “great aura” in contrast to the small inner light in man. The great solar aura was for Zarathustra that which lives and works in all human development. For him, it was also that which man reaches when he seizes the inner power of the soul, when he immerses himself in himself. Thus Zoroaster or Zarathustra spoke of the great spirit of the sun, but he spoke of it as a real, actual spirituality that permeates and animates the world.

Natural science investigates the matter that makes up the human being and also works out in the universe. In relation to the body, it sees the human being as part of the macrocosm. But the longing has never been extinguished in man to recognize his belonging to the great universe not only in a material and sensual way, but also to find the connection between the spiritual that permeates and fills him with life and the spiritual in the world. Today, the longing lives in many people for what Zoroaster proclaimed as the solar aura, as the great aura. He spoke of the spirit that flows into the human heart as sunlight flows into the earth and awakens the plants to life. He expressed it particularly impressively in the following words:

I will speak, now come and listen to me, you who come from near and far and long for it. I will speak of the one who can be revealed to the spirit. And no longer shall the deceptive mind confuse those men who bind themselves to materiality and to the lower nature. I will speak of that which is the first and greatest in the world, which He has revealed to me, the great Spirit of the Sun, Ahura Mazda.

Thus Zarathustra wanted to imply that it is possible to recognize spiritual facts in the same way as one recognizes material facts, which fill space and develop in time.

Today, people feel the urge and the longing to recognize that, in terms of their soul and spirit, they have emerged from the world spirit. But there is no bridge that crosses the chasm [between the sensory world and the supersensible world]. However, spiritual science wants to build this bridge by developing the higher powers in the human soul. Spiritual science shows us how humanity develops over time. The goal of this development is revealed in what the spiritual researcher, the spiritual scientist, achieves by freeing himself from everything that is bound to external nature, to the external body. Humanity achieves this in a completely different form, slowly and gradually. Spiritual science in particular makes it very clear to us that there is real progress, real development in relation to inner human nature. Let us consider what the spiritual researcher can do: he can look into the spiritual world – not with the ordinary, everyday view, but only when he lifts his higher self out of the lower self through a powerful inner act of will, when he frees himself from the ordinary, everyday view; then he can see what is the subject of such a contemplation as today's. For the spiritual scientist, it is necessary to bring about very special conditions. The intuitive perception of sight and hearing that occurs of its own accord is quite different from what the spiritual researcher evokes through a powerful act of will, enabling him to see into the spiritual world independently of all corporeality. But what he achieves at a higher level of spiritual research will gradually become an ability of natural human powers. Man develops from epoch to epoch, from age to age. Ever higher powers of knowledge are acquired. This is why the spiritual researcher can speak of a new ability to perceive slowly developing in human progress. It must be said that the spiritual researcher can also, in a certain sense, see something prophetically in advance when he looks at the nature of souls in a particular epoch, at the forces that are striving towards a certain goal. And today these forces are striving towards a certain goal.

If we look back at the way people throughout the ages, throughout the centuries and millennia, have spoken of the Christ – albeit using different names – we find an enormous difference compared to the way it must be spoken today. In all ages before the beginning of our Christian era, the truly discerning spoke of the Christ as one who will come, as one who will reveal himself to people in the future in a completely different way. The spiritual researchers of that time said: Now only those who can rise to the higher worlds can see the Christ; they see the Christ in the supersensible, in the spiritual sphere. Thus the seers of India had beheld Vishvakarman, thus Zarathustra had beheld Ahura Mazdao.

Yet they always pointed out that the Christ would one day also reveal Himself to other human faculties of perception, not only to the heightened but also to the ordinary human faculties of perception, to the natural human powers of cognition. Thus, all spiritual research speaks of the Christ not only as a spiritual power, as a spiritual might that lives in humanity, but it speaks of the Christ in such a way that it is clear that the Christ - this being that has been spoken of at all times and will continue to be spoken of in the field of spiritual science in the future - actually once took on human form, that he really once lived as the historical Jesus.

For spiritual science, Jesus of Nazareth is something very special. We can compare it to what the great mechanic Archimedes once spoke of. He said: Give me a firm point for my lever, and I will move the earth. — He demanded a fixed point to which everything can be related. Only by having a fixed point can something in space be understood. Similarly, the course of time becomes understandable for spiritual science when there is a fixed point in historical development. And all initiates, all spiritual researchers before the beginning of our era, pointed to this fixed point as something that would come in the future. But we point to this fixed point as something that was there in the past, and we relate all events that will ever happen to this fixed point, to this hypomochlion. Therefore, within spiritual science, based on the facts and the results of this spiritual science, we speak of the historical Jesus as a reality. Spiritual science is also able to understand the Gospels in a new way by shining into their depths. If you delve deeper into spiritual science, you will see that spiritual science itself sheds new light on the understanding of the Gospels. But spiritual science does not base its knowledge of the Christ Jesus on these documents. It says everything it has to say independently of all historical tradition. And only by comparing its results with the Gospels does it shed deeper light on them.

What does it mean that the Christ walked among people in the physical body of Jesus, that he accomplished what we call the Mystery of Golgotha, which can teach us that the spiritual always conquers the physical, that life always conquers death? What does this impulse mean in the further development of humanity? From the time when the Christ dwelt in the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth, man, when he descends into his own soul, can now experience as spiritual power within himself that which was previously merely cosmic, which he could only attain when he dwelled outside his body. Those who, because of their world-view, cannot admit that a power from the cosmos has penetrated into the individual human soul, has entered into it in order to be a power that continues to work in these souls, will never be able to comprehend the Christ-impulse.

Not before, but only from the event in Palestine onwards, was there a new impulse in human souls themselves. Since that time, there is something in human souls that was not there before. People easily understand that when a new substance is added, something new arises in the outer chemical mixtures of substances. They grasp this more easily than that something happened to all of humanity when Jesus walked the Earth, in that something new entered human souls from the supersensible realms. Like a new substance that continues to work in a mixture of substances, a completely new power is at work in human souls from that time on – a power that now takes these human souls further and further. Spiritual science shows us that, in fact, in relation to his innermost being, man has been predisposed to something completely new since the appearance of Christ on earth - something he was not predisposed to before. One would think that spiritual science must emphasize this with all sharpness, with all idealism.

Now spiritual research shows us that this impulse, which was planted in the souls of men at that time, can only develop slowly, that it has shown itself hardly perceptibly in the first time and only gradually - until the most distant future - will lead mankind to ever higher and higher things. In order to understand what is happening in man, we must consider another fact that spiritual science investigates. However, speaking of it is somewhat dangerous in our time, because few people of the present are inclined to go along with what has to be said here from spiritual science. It shows us - and now we are moving away from our actual topic - the following: It shows us the deeper aspects of human nature, it shows us something that developing humanity will surely grasp in a relatively short time, but which is still regarded by many as fantasy, as the greatest nonsense. What spiritual science shows us can be compared, on a higher level, to something that humanity has only recently come to accept as true on a deeper level – this must be emphasized again and again.

In the seventeenth century, not only laymen but also learned researchers who were firmly grounded in natural science believed that worms, insects and even fish could develop from river mud without the addition of a corresponding germ. And it was the great naturalist Francesco Redi who, in the seventeenth century, uttered the significant sentence: Living things can only come from living things. In a text from the seventh century A.D., for example, you will find an explanation of how living things develop without a germ—with a self-confidence with which things were asserted in some scientific writings at the time. You will find it stated there: If you pound a horse carcass, bees will come into being, and if you pound a donkey carcass, wasps will come into being. All this was schematized in the same way as is customary in many respects in our time. And when in the seventeenth century Redi proclaimed what was only scientifically proved in the nineteenth century – that living things can only come from living things – he was a heretic and only with great difficulty escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. In those days people who asserted such a thing were burned at the stake; today that is no longer fashionable. But today people are considered to be terrible heretics who, in a higher realm, namely in the realm of the spiritual, spread the same truth and show that what is spiritual and soul-like can only come from something spiritual and soul-like.

Today it is claimed that the spiritual soul of a human individuality – that which grows from day to day as qualities and characteristics of the soul – arises only from the qualities of the father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, and so on. Now spiritual science shows that a spiritual-soul essence from a spiritual past penetrates into what is inherited from father and mother, grandfather and grandmother and so on - just as a germ must be placed in the river and then unfolds in it – and that in what is inherited, the independent, individual, which comes from a previous existence of a spiritual-soul nature, unfolds. She shows that the soul and spiritual cannot be traced back to what lies in the physical line of inheritance, but to a soul and spiritual that has nothing to do with the physical. Fashion has changed: today, those who teach such things are punished by being branded as fools. Today, the authority is he who says: Living things can only come from living things. In the not too distant future, the other truth, that spiritual and psychological things can only come from spiritual and psychological things, will become common knowledge for all humanity. But then people will not be able to understand how humanity could once have believed otherwise.

But this view, if followed to its logical conclusion, is nothing other than what is called the doctrine of reincarnation, the doctrine of repeated lives on earth: what lives as spiritual-soul in the present life on earth has already lived in an earlier life on earth, and the present life on earth is the starting point for a future one. The spiritual soul of the past seeks a mother soil into which it can move, the mother soil of father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, and so on. One is just as necessary as the other. For those who have acquired clairvoyance and clairaudience, the view of repeated earthly lives is a matter of course.

You all know that the doctrine of repeated earthly lives is an ancient teaching and that it was spread with particular force in the East by Buddha and the religious community founded by him, and found its way into millions and millions of souls. But modern spiritual research does not take its teaching from Buddhism – this must be expressly emphasized. It is a misunderstanding of the facts to say that modern theosophy or spiritual science borrowed the doctrine of repeated earthly lives from Buddhism. There is no need to resort to an old teaching. Just as one does not need to resort to the writings of Euclid to prove that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees, so one does not need to resort to Buddhism to prove reincarnation. Even today, the truth of repeated lives on earth can be investigated.

For him who really grasps the Christ Impulse, the truth of repeated earth-lives presents itself in a different way than for the follower of Buddha. Buddha emphasized the fact of repeated earth-lives over and over again. He set before humanity his so-called “Four Noble Truths”: Birth is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering, not being united with what one loves, and being united with what one does not love is suffering. To be freed from the karma of having to descend again and again from the spiritual into an earthly body, to be freed as soon as possible from the urge for existence, to be freed from the urge to embody oneself: that is the impulse of the Buddha teaching. In the Buddha-doctrine, the teaching of re-embodiment presents itself to us one-sidedly. The Buddha-doctrine does not have the impulse to place into the human soul that which continues to have an effect through successive re-embodiments and awakens ever new and new powers in the individual human being. Spiritual science, however, modern theosophy, sees in the Christ impulse that which strikes the human soul, which seizes the will, educates and develops it, which works in the soul in such a way that when it is touched by the Christ impulse in one embodiment, it comes to life in a new way in the next embodiment, that the Christ impulse works into the next embodiment. And because it has an effect, this soul can develop its powers, which, through the power of the Christ impulse, are increased and developed to even higher heights.

Thus, in the Christ impulse, we see what continues to have an effect in the human soul from embodiment to embodiment, giving the following embodiments new meaning and new content. Therefore, we are not talking about freeing ourselves from the wheel of reincarnation as soon as possible, but about permeating ourselves more and more with the living Christ impulse. Through Christ's descent onto the physical plane, it has become possible for us to permeate ourselves with the Christ impulse as with a spiritual substance. The Buddhist religion is rightly called a religion of redemption. The Christian religion is not a religion of redemption, but of resurrection. What the Christ exemplified for us in the Mystery of Golgotha, with the conquest of death through the spirit, is repeated again and again when we resurrect in a new embodiment, fertilized by the Christ impulse.

Must we not say to ourselves: There will come a time when the works of art that have enchanted thousands upon thousands of human souls will crumble to dust? This is the case with both the greatest and the smallest of human achievements in our physical world: they all dissolve into dust. But if we look at the matter in terms of rebirth, of repeated lives on earth, then we say to ourselves: the artist has incorporated something of his soul into the material; but as a result, his soul has also become something else, his work has had an effect on the material, but it has also had an effect on the soul. - It is the same with every human being, but with the artist it is only most evident. In a new embodiment, we continue to work with the powers we acquired in the previous embodiment. These powers are reborn, resurrected, awakened to new life. So it is no longer absurd to say: the whole earth will one day be crushed into dust. Just as the body of the individual human being decays into dust, so the whole earth, the body of our planetary existence, will decay. But then human souls will have achieved something that will lead to new stages of existence. The earthly body will fall away, and humanity will move on to new forms. And the impulse that lives in it is the Christ impulse.

Spiritual science, with the clairvoyant eye of the spiritual researcher, looks at an epoch that is very close to us in time, when certain earlier events will bear fruit. All souls that have processed the Christ impulse throughout the Middle Ages, that have experienced the deep Christian mysteries of the Middle Ages, will then experience the Christ impulse in the sense of Paul: It is not I who live, it is not I who work, it is Christ. They will see their own inner being illuminated by the Christ-light. This is the important fact that must be pointed out. This fact can be foreseen by spiritual science as surely as an eclipse of the sun or moon can be foreseen by astronomy. Those people who have taken up the Christ impulse in their souls, who have permeated their will, feeling and thinking with it in the Pauline sense, will come again. And the fruits of their rebirth will show up in that what they have gone through at the time will revive as strength in their soul. In what way will it revive?

Spiritual science shows us that in the relatively near future, and then more and more in the coming millennium, a new spiritual power will develop in people's inner being, which cannot be described other than by pointing to the fact that it first manifested itself in Paul as a natural ability. Paul could not be convinced by everything he had heard about the Christ Jesus on the physical plane in Palestine. But it became clear to him that the Christ had lived and had risen when, through his opened supersensible organs of perception, through natural clairvoyance, he saw what we call the Event of Damascus. There, through inner experience, the Christ became a fact for him – the Christ who had accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha.

Those who claim that the appearance of Damascus was a mere vision claim at the same time that the most important fact of Western culture, the religion of Christ, is based on an empty vision. Paul says that he has grasped the Christ within and can therefore see something completely new that underlies the world – something he could not have seen before. At first, only a few individuals will develop the ability to see as Paul did before Damascus. We are standing in the twentieth century before a new revelation of the Christ from the spiritual world. There will arise people, at first few, then more and more, who will see the spiritual, which is also in them, living and weaving out there in space, just as they see matter, which is also in their material body, living and weaving out there in space. And for them the truth of Zarathustra's teaching will become reality when the experience of the event of Damascus dawns on them, when they look out into space and see the origin of existence from which our soul and material being comes, when they see this in spiritual light.

We are standing before the entrance gate of a new historical development, a new revelation of the Christ. The Christ impulse continues to work in such a way that, in the end, the secrets of the existence of the Christ will be experienced by the souls as an experience. Physically, the Christ was only once in the world - this is shown to us by spiritual science - and it is a misunderstanding of the whole essence of the Christ to believe that a second time a physical being would appear that could be called a Christ. This is the problem: the Christ impulse allows ever new abilities to arise in the human soul, and the Christ will reveal Himself more and more to the newly awakened abilities. The Christ did not give the impulse for this, that He must come again and again in physical form and humanity must remain at the point where it has already stood. The ability to see Him spiritually has been awakened in it. He has come so that they may grasp Him spiritually and receive Him in ever higher and higher ways.

Thus we stand before a spiritual Christ-Revelation; this will send the spiritual light to men and will give them the power to understand the Christ more and more. In particular, the Christ impulse gives us the certainty that in the future our embodiments will no longer awaken in us the need to free ourselves from existence, but to penetrate it more and more. The Christ confession is a resurrection religion – in contrast to Buddhism, which is a religion of salvation. This is the message that spiritual science or theosophy can give to humanity in our time: that we are on the threshold of a new revelation of the Christ, that new cognitive abilities are gradually coming into existence in human souls and that people can look into the spiritual and will recognize and know: He is there! New cognitive abilities will develop through which the eternal, living Christ will reveal Himself, first to a few, then to more and more people, and finally to all who follow the appropriate paths.

This is the message that spiritual science wants to bring to the West. And basically, spiritual science is nothing more than what wants to draw attention to this great fact, which we must not overlook. People should understand what is going to happen. The aim of modern theosophy, of spiritual science, is to prepare the way for this new revelation, to prepare the way in Western culture for the Christ of the twentieth century. It wants to be a servant of developing humanity. Just as the forerunner of Christ had to say: Change your state of mind, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand – namely in the human mind – so spiritual science of the present must say: Change your attitude, pay attention to what announces itself in the human soul as a newly emerging power, as the power of a new vision. Pay attention to it, change your soul's disposition. It becomes possible for the human being who permeates himself with the Christ impulse to penetrate into the realms of the eternal and the imperishable. And so we summarize our meditation:

Being follows being in the expanse of space,
being follows being in the course of time.
If you remain in the expanse of space and the course of time, then you, O man, are in the realm of impermanence. But your soul rises mightily above it,when it sees, intuitively or knowingly, the immortalbeyond the expanse of space, beyond the course of time.

Within our European spiritual culture, one may already express the name of Buddha with very different feelings today than fifty years ago; yes, one must consider that the greatest mind of our culture, Goethe, knew nothing of Buddha. It is precisely here that we can recognize how feelings change. There is widespread interest in Buddha today. Where does this interest come from, which is present in broad sections of society, and why is the name of Buddha familiar not only in research? This is connected with the development of humanity, with the penetration of spiritual elements into this development, which will become common property in later times. I would like to draw attention to the fact that the interest shown in the Buddha promises to become a matter of the heart, a matter of the soul. At first, people do not always judge soul matters correctly when they arise. Now something is happening today that happened [in a similar way] a few centuries ago in a field more remote from the great interest, when the old scholars, misled by inaccurate observation, did not want to accept Francesco Redi's sentence “Living things come only from living things”. We see a parallel to our time, which also believes it must reject the sentence “Spiritual-soul-like comes only from spiritual-soul-like” - precisely because of inaccurate observation.

It is believed that a person's inner disposition is inherited only from their father and mother. Of course, anyone who does not believe in spiritual beings cannot go further, but anyone who recognizes the realities of the spiritual world will find it self-evident that a person's spiritual soul comes from a previous spiritual soul and that this spiritual soul draws on the predispositions of the ancestors, that there is therefore an essential core. And that is the teaching of reincarnation. Just as the animal is the repetition of its species, so the human being is the repetition of his individuality. What we see growing within us here in the way of inner gifts is nothing other than what we have acquired in previous lives on earth. Just as every plant can flourish only in soil that is suitable for it, such as the edelweiss that can take root only in the high mountains, so every human being seeks out his environment, which forms the basis for his destiny, because the environment that is beneficial and appropriate for him exerts an attraction on him. So this person is born in this country and this language area, in this family, that person in that country in that family - because his or her individual character determines this. That is the law of karma: we ourselves forge our destiny. To many, this seems fantastic, and it can easily be refuted from a scientific point of view. But just as Francesco Redi was pushed by scientific facts to express his assertion that “living things come only from living things”, so we are pushed to express the sentence: “spiritual things come only from spiritual things”. Just as Francesco Redi's sentence was misunderstood, so will our sentence be misunderstood. But every new truth evokes resistance - and from the experiences of the past we may draw courage.

Now the question arises: Why does man not remember his previous lives on earth? This ability to remember can be acquired, although it is difficult, but it must be possible to trace a thread back to previous earthly lives. Now, today's human being is mostly unable to see the bigger picture; today's European human being is not even able to remember back to birth, and the first years are dark for him. We have heard that remembering begins when the idea of self emerges in the soul. We also know that the concept of self places itself like a wall in front of the past and that we therefore cannot see into the spiritual world. If we understand this, then we can also understand the work that is involved in penetrating past earthly lives. Strict soul exercises are part of this: the self must be carried out, the self must become objective; everything that could come must meet us with complete composure. It is difficult to achieve and carry this out not only theoretically, but also in our inner life, but by doing so we gain an [independent position with respect to the ego]. We are in an important time. The human brain will think differently when it has to tell itself that everything is cause and effect [of a past life]. This is something that deeply affects everyone. Man must mature to this.

We will understand how people today can be interested in the Buddha's teachings: Buddhism, this religious confession, contains the teaching of reincarnation – albeit not quite as it is understood in Theosophy. So the interest in Buddhism is connected with something that is affecting humanity today. Now we need to ask ourselves: how does this truth fit into what European culture means? How does it relate to Christianity? For our culture is completely based on Christianity, and all opponents of Christianity have taken their concepts from the Christian arsenal. For those who think this way [in terms of the doctrine of reincarnation], the question arises: How can the Christian impulse be reconciled with this concept? Even without Buddhism, the doctrine of reincarnation would have to be crystallized out of European culture.

If you read a book about Buddhism today, you will find many [special] terms: “Nirvana” [for example] is presented as the great goal for the Buddhist; “Nirvana” is a place that is associated with the extinction, the annihilation of all existence - it cannot be put into words, since there is no word for non-existence. One could hold great discussions about what Buddha meant by it. But we just want to try to determine the mood content, to contrast Buddhism and Christianity, to place the Buddhist's perception next to that of the Christian. First, there is a story among Buddhists: the wise King Milinda comes to an initiate and wants to hear something about the secrets of life. The conversation goes as follows. The initiate asks: How did you get here? — The king answers: By carriage. — The sage looks at the carriage; he sees the wheels: Are these wheels the carriage? — No, they are not. — Is this seat the carriage? — No, it is not. These are only the parts of the carriage, but all the parts are not yet the carriage. So what else is there? — Name and form. All the individual parts are really there, but together they are only name and form. But name and form are something unreal, just like the mango fruit on the tree, which only has name and form in common with the fruit from which the tree grew. What does the wise man mean by this? The concept of reincarnation was self-evident to him. So he explains how in this life, a person only has name and form in common with the previous life. The Buddhist does not recognize the continuous self that passes through the embodiments – only name and form. He sees the individual parts of the carriage, connected by name and form to form a whole. This is not quite in line with the teachings of the Buddha, but it depends on the feelings of a follower of Buddhism.

Now let us transfer this parable into the Christian realm: let us imagine a Christian sage speaking to a Christian king. Let us imagine that the conversation is the same as the one above, but in the end, the sage would have to say, based on the spirit of Christianity: You cannot come here on a mere name, on a mere form. These are words that must be backed by something real, something spiritual. That mango fruit at the top of the tree has become the same as the fruit that was the origin of the whole tree, although nothing physical connects them. There must be something that has formed them as equals: there must be something spiritual. - In the same way, the Christian feeling must assume that there is a continuous self from embodiment to embodiment in reincarnation. The Buddhist, on the other hand, sees the path from embodiment to embodiment without knowing the bond of a common ego, and thus he gets the feeling of futility.

Buddha, the king's son, who had grown up without having known suffering, was deeply moved when he saw a sick person for the first time - then the idea of suffering poured into him. When he saw a dead body for the first time, he realized: Death is suffering. And now it became clear to him: Life is suffering, being born is suffering, being sick is suffering, being separated from what we love is suffering - everything is suffering. Why is everything destined for suffering?

Now imagine a person like Buddha, how he faced this riddle of life. Many lives before, many lives after – and always, always suffering, suffering! He felt the urge to explore this, and a long quest followed. When enlightenment came to him – which we refer to as “sitting under the bodhi tree” – he realized: the passion, the thirst for existence, comes from previous incarnations, and this is connected to life. Therefore, suffering is connected with the thirst for existence, and so, if suffering is to cease, the thirst for existence must be extinguished. This is what he said in the sermon of Benares. Man can, through his own work, become indifferent to existence and thereby extinguish all previous embodiments and free himself from suffering. There is nothing in the world that cannot cause us suffering. If we free ourselves from everything, we can enter into Nirvana. We cannot describe Nirvana, because we lack the concept for the absolute nothing. We simply have to leave out everything that is in our imagination. The ideal of Buddhism is the extinguishing of existence. Buddha stands before us and says: I look back on many embodiments. In my present body I know that I must become free from all thirst for existence. The previous embodiment pushed me towards this body, towards that which now pushes me to become free from corporeality. I know quite certainly that each time spirituality has built the body for me as a temple; but my goal is no longer to return to such a temple of the body - I feel this.

Now let us compare this feeling with the Christian one. In the Gospel of John, Christ Jesus says of the temple of his body: “Destroy it, and in three days I will raise it up.” Christ Jesus has the will within himself not to leave what is earthly life. This is not suffering, but something that should be developed. Even if there are still many embodiments to come, keep improving your temple, live each life on Earth in such a way that you continue to perfect yourself. When we let the warmth of the Gospel sink in, we ask: What did Christ bring? The answer is: In the Christ impulse we find the indication that life can be purified. Buddha descends to become free of the embodiments; Christ descends to make life perfect. Buddhism is a doctrine of salvation, but Christianity is a doctrine of resurrection! Christ says: When you acquire the higher, you will become ever higher, and a new life will arise. The Christian impulse is compatible with the concept of reincarnation – it is strong enough for that. Why is that so? Because Christ is not just a teacher. It is significant that Christ did not write anything down himself, because the essential thing is his deed – his deed at Golgotha has eternal significance.

The historical event at Golgotha is a seed for something other than the liberation from suffering. Is birth suffering? No. - Is death suffering? No. - Is being separated from those you love suffering? No. — Because death leads to new birth, and every birth brings powers that are exhausted through life. But illness is purification; by conquering illness, strength comes. Not being united with those we love is not suffering, because the Christian knows the realm of the spirit, where what belongs together is together. Nor is being united with those we do not love suffering, because the Christian seeks to live in love. To make everything Christian – that is Christianity. To learn through suffering, to learn through happiness, that is what we as Christians want.

And so we see the great difference in development that extends from Buddha to Christ. One religion is a religion of salvation, the other a religion of resurrection. But then we will also understand how the Buddhist confessor cannot even approach the self. The sensations, the feelings, the ideas, the consciousness – none of this is the self. The Christian, on the other hand, says: the self is everywhere. The spiritual self is behind everything, but we do not see it because we are not able to perceive it. We may strive for the resurrection of our self through Christ – so that the spirit may shine out to meet us from every stone, from every tree. And so, Western intellectual life has nothing to gain from Buddhism, but it has much, very much to gain from accepting the doctrine of reincarnation. And just as Buddha tied the doctrine of suffering to a corpse, so several centuries later we see people looking up to a corpse. A corpse became a source of comfort and strength for them: Christ on the cross.

Dear attendees,

When the topics of theosophy or spiritual science arise today, many of our contemporaries still believe that this school of thought has its roots or starting points in some oriental ideas or spiritual experiences that are foreign to our Western culture. And this prejudice is seized upon by those who believe they see in Theosophy or spiritual science something that is opposed to Christianity, or to a deeper understanding of Christianity, in so far as it permeates our entire Occidental spiritual culture. If such an opinion is entertained, it is based, in particular, on the fact that within the theosophical world view, what may be called the doctrine of repeated earthly lives or, as it is also called, the doctrine of reincarnation, is presented as a basic fact. And it is believed that such an idea, that man has to undergo repeated lives on earth, could only have been taken from Buddhism or some other oriental world view. Now, if we make such a presupposition, then the whole position of spiritual science or theosophy in the spiritual life of our time is misunderstood, because what is this idea of repeated earthly lives for modern man, or perhaps it is better to say what can this idea be for today's conditions?

Today there is a word that is indeed usually only used in connection with scientific facts, but which has a fascinating effect on the educated of the present - on those people of the present who believe they are at the height of our intellectual life - and that is the word 'development'. Admittedly, today this word is usually only used to refer to the development of external forms, that is, the forms of subordinate living beings up to and including humans. The elaboration of this idea of development for human life, encompassing the whole of human life, including the human soul and spirit, is still rarely thought of today; for if one were to engage with the elaboration of the idea of development for the whole of human , one would gradually have to realize that the same thing that we call the development of the species or genus in the animal kingdom must present itself in humans as the development of the individual individual, of the individual individuality.

But this means nothing other than that if we see how the individual species develop apart from one another in the animal world, then we must approach the individual with the same interest as we do the species in the animal kingdom, and we must speak of the development of the individual individuality in the human being. Let us commit this to memory: if we have a healthy mind, we show the same interest in the individual human being as we do in the animal species or genus. We have the same interest in the human being as we do in each individual lion – whether it is the lion's grandfather, father, son, and so on. Therefore, we must think of the same lawfulness that we think of as a law of development in animal species, we must think of it in terms of the individual individuality in the case of human beings.

So you can see that in the field of spiritual science we speak of the development of the individual human individuality. And we must come to say: What comes into existence in the human being at birth, what gradually and mysteriously unfolds from the still indeterminate facial features, expressions and gestures of the first childlike age, that is the soul-spiritual of the human being, which confronts us with each individual as something special, as an individual. We cannot attribute this to the inherited qualities of the immediate ancestors alone, but we must imagine this relationship of human life to its causes differently than the relationship of the animal to its ancestors. There we understand everything that lives in the individual animal – the form, the physiognomy – when we understand the species. But with humans it is different.

What lives in man, we find in each person in a special, particular way. What has developed in man as a generic characteristic, we attribute to physical inheritance; but what confronts us as his special being, we must attribute to what the person, as the cause of his present life, has gone through in earlier lives, in earlier stages of existence. And what we encounter in the present framework of his personality, that in turn forms the cause, the basis for his work in a later life. Thus we have a living chain of development that goes from life to life, from incarnation to incarnation. And we see everything that comes to us as characteristic of a person in such a way that we see the necessity of tracing it back to earlier soul and spiritual states.

Thus Theosophy or spiritual science is able to introduce a law in the higher realm of human life, just as it was incorporated relatively recently into the realm of the natural life of human development. Yes, today's humanity has a short memory. Otherwise it would not be necessary to point out that as late as the seventeenth century not only laymen but also scholars of natural science assumed that lower animals could develop out of decaying river mud without the introduction of germs of life. And it was the great Italian naturalist Francesco Redi who first caused this tremendous upheaval in natural science thinking by stating that living things can only come from living things.

Just as this sentence applies to natural life within certain limits, so the other sentence applies to human life within certain limits: spiritual and mental things can only have their origin in spiritual and mental things. And it is only an inaccurate observation if one wants to trace back what works its way out of the vague depths of an adolescent's consciousness from day to day, from week to week, from year to year as a spiritual-soul element to the mere physical line of inheritance of the ancestors – is just as inaccurate an observation as it is inaccurate to trace what lives in animals, even in earthworms, back to the mere laws of the substances that make up river mud just because one has not considered the living germ. It is an inaccurate observation when we speak today only of the inheritance of mental and moral abilities because we do not pay attention to the soul-spiritual core, which integrates that which it can appropriate from the inherited traits in the same way that the living germ of the living being appropriates the substance in which that germ is embedded.

Such truths always fare in much the same way in the course of human development. In those days, Francesco Redi only just escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. Today everyone, from the Haeckelianer to the most radical opponents of Haeckel, will recognize this sentence as self-evident, but only within the limits of external nature, insofar as it concerns the body. At that time, however, the sentence “Living things can only come from living things” was a tremendous heresy. Today, however, heretics are no longer burned. But if one stands on the firm ground of today's scientific facts - while in reality one only stands on the ground of one's preconceived ideas, of contemporary prejudices - one regards the law of repeated earth lives, which is the same for the higher areas of spiritual existence as Redi's sentence that living things can only come from living things, as heresy, as fantasy, as sheer madness. But the time is not far distant when it will be said of this law in the same way: It is really incomprehensible that any man could ever have thought differently.

Whence then comes this law of repeated earth-lives? Do we need to go back to some Eastern philosophy of life, must this law be borrowed from Buddhism? No. To understand the law of repeated earthly lives in the context of modern European culture, all that is needed is an unbiased, spirit-searching view that overlooks the facts. And what this view sees has nothing to do with any tradition. Like any other scientific law, it will be accepted by modern spiritual education because, based on the idea of development, it necessarily leads to this law.

But anyone who wanted to claim that this could add anything to our Western intellectual development that would run counter to Christianity is not aware of how this entire Western intellectual life is permeated by the living weaving and essence of Christian feeling, of Christian feeling. Indeed, if one is able to observe with an open mind, it can be seen that the way of thinking, the forms of imagination, even of those who today behave as the worst opponents of Christianity, have only been made possible by the education of Western humanity, which they have received through Christianity. Anyone who is willing and able to observe impartially will find that even the most radical opponents of Christianity fight it with arguments borrowed from Christianity itself.

But there is a radical difference between the Christian essence and what we can call the pre-Christian essence - a difference that is just not immediately apparent because everything in human development is slow and gradual and always encompasses the earlier in the later. There is something in the pre-Christian world view that is radically different from the Christian one, and this can be found and observed among the oriental world views, even in their most modern form, in Buddhism, for example. We can see this fundamental difference between the essence of Christianity and the oriental feeling and thinking that has found expression in Buddhism if we consider just a few of its aspects.

For this purpose, we need only recall a conversation that can be found in Buddhist literature and that is deeply rooted in Buddhist feeling and thinking. By studying such descriptions, we can gain a much more accurate insight into the essence of any world view than by considering its highest tenets and dogmas. After all, one can argue at length about whether this or that is to be understood in terms of Nirvana or Christian bliss. But how that which lives in the Buddhist and Christian way of thinking works its way into people's feelings, and how these feelings then relate to the whole world - the physical and the spiritual world - that is decisive for the value, the meaning and the essence of a world view and for its effect on human souls.

In Buddhist literature, we find preserved that remarkable conversation between the legendary King Milinda and the sage Nagasena. In this conversation, it is said that King Milinda came to the sage Nagasena by chariot and wanted to be instructed regarding the nature of the human soul. The sage then asked the king: “Tell me, did you come by chariot or on foot?” “By the chariot,” the king replied. ”Now tell me, when you have the chariot before you, what do you have there before you? You have the shafts, the body of the chariot, and the wheels before you. Is the shaft the chariot? Is the body the chariot? Are the wheels the chariot? No! Is that all you have in front of you? There is also the seat of the chariot! And what else do you have in front of you? Nothing! The chariot is therefore only a name or a form, because the realities that are in front of you are the box, the shaft, the wheels and the seat. What else is there is only name and form. Just as only a name or a form holds the individual parts together – wheels, shaft, body and seat – so too the individual abilities, feelings, thoughts and perceptions of the human soul are held together not by something that can be described as a particular reality, but only by a name or a form. So it can be said – felt in the right Buddhist sense: A central being in man, which holds together the individual human soul abilities, cannot be found, just as little as anything other than name and form can be found except for the drawbar, the wagon body, the seat and the wheels on the wagon.

And through yet another simile, the wise man made clear to [the king] the nature of the soul, saying: Consider the mango fruit – it comes from the mango tree. You know that the mango tree is only there because another mango fruit was there before, from which it was created. The mango plant comes from the mango fruit, which has rotted in the earth. What can you say about the mango fruit? It comes from the rotten seed. Now follow the path from the old fruit to the new mango plant. What does the new plant have in common with the old plant other than its name or shape? — But it is the same with the soul's existence, said the wise Nagasena to King Milinda. [It was also there only in name!] It was also a law of experience in Buddhism that a person undergoes repeated earthly lives. But this law did not prompt the actual central Buddhist feeling to seek and see something other than name and form in what passes from one life to another, just as with a mango fruit, where nothing passes from one to the other except name and form. Thus, according to the Buddhist view, we can see the effects of past lives in what we call our destiny in a life – our abilities, talents and so on. But no central soul-being passes over from the earlier life to the new one; only causes work out into effects, and what we have in common in one life with an earlier life – except for what we feel to be our destiny in the new life – is only name and form. You have to feel your way through what is actually at hand in Buddhism.

And now we could – in order to remain objective – translate that which appears to us in this story as the correct Buddhist feeling by transferring the whole thing into the Christian sense. What would the two stories sound like in a Christian sense? They don't exist, but let's try to translate them and thereby make the difference very clear.

A Christian sage would say something like this: Take a look at the chariot – when you look at it, you see the shafts, the body, the wheels and whatever else is on the outside. The chariot seems to you to be only name and form, but try to see if you can travel on a name or a form; you can't get anywhere in the world on that. Nevertheless, although only name and form are there for the visible, there is something else besides the body of the wagon, the shaft and the wheels and so on, which signifies a reality when a wagon stands before us and not just its parts. As I said, there is no such Christian legend, but a Christian-minded person felt this when he coined the phrase “parts”, which the scientifically minded person often has in his hand, but for which he lacks the context, when he said:

Then he has the parts in his hand,
Unfortunately, only the spiritual bond is missing.

Goethe, who coined the word, knew that the spiritual bond was a reality.

And now the second parable: Imagine the mango fruit hanging from the tree above and the one that has rotted below. Not only do they have the same name and form, but these also live in the same way in the old and new fruit. However, what makes this mango fruit the same as the other, rotten one is in the forces, in the elements, which are supersensible and which pass from the first mango fruit into the second.

Thus, in the psychological experiences that a person goes through from life to life, we see a central ego at work, a central soul being. And when we see a person in a later life, what he experiences as fate, what abilities and talents he possesses, and so on, is not only the effect of the causes of previous lives, but there is a central, cohesive being that passes from the previous embodiment into the new one.

Thus we see how the idea of repeated earthly lives - re-embodiment or reincarnation - must be brought to life through the fundamental Christian idea. Those who take Christianity seriously are not afraid that the foundations of Christianity could falter when new truths emerge in people's view. Christianity is so strong that it can give rise to feelings such as those just characterized, that it – like all other truths – can also tolerate the truth of repeated lives on earth, and even accept it willingly when human thinking has progressed to the point where this law can be impressed upon it. But then the fundamental impulse of Christianity will assert itself: the reality of the soul-spiritual, which passes through the various earthly lives as a central core.

Thus we have presented such a contrast that can make clear to us the fundamental difference between Buddhism and Christianity. We must grasp both worldviews in their basic sentiments [and not in their dogmas], because one could argue about dogma ideas and concepts not for days, but for months and years. Whether Nirvana is the same as Christian beatitude, for instance, is a question that could be argued about endlessly and which would lead to logical and dialectical quibbling. But the point is never to enter into discussions about the highest concepts, but rather to consider how religious or other ideological impulses fit into the soul, into the heart, into the hopes and certainties of life. In another, [even clearer] way, the same thing confronts us when we allow the basic impulse that inspired the great Buddha to take effect on us. I deliberately say “the great Buddha”, because to those who are able to penetrate what, like the last dawn of all pre-Christian thought, the Buddha produced as a worldview, this Buddha appears as a great, exalted figure.

The greatest influence on the great Buddha seems to us to be the legend that says: We are told - and the legend tells us more truly than any external history - that the Buddha initially spent his life in such a way, through the care of his parents, that he only got to know the joys of life, but not its suffering. But once he was led out of his parents' castle, and there he saw life in its reality. There he saw a sick person. Only now did he learn that life does not only reveal abundant health, now he learned that the same thing that calls illness into life also brings it into life. From this he learned the meaning of suffering for life. And he learned the meaning of suffering through further examples that came his way in life. He saw an old man and said to himself: old age is suffering - as he had first said to himself: illness is suffering. - And finally, when he was shown a corpse, he said to himself in the face of the end of life: death is suffering.

And in further developing this impulse, we see how Buddha recognized suffering in the act of coming into existence. He said: birth is suffering, illness is suffering, old age is suffering, death is suffering. Being separated from what one loves is suffering, being united with what one does not love is suffering, not being able to achieve what one desires is suffering. And from this, the great Buddha derived the essence of his doctrine of salvation.

Buddhism is a doctrine of salvation in that it says: It is the urge for existence, the thirst for existence, that leads that which is better than this world into the world. Only through the salvation of this world can man enter into real higher states of existence. But he can only achieve this by fighting the thirst for existence that leads him into earthly embodiment. Let us not grasp things only theoretically, but also emotionally; let us see the great Buddha with the great, wide heart full of love that he had. Let us grasp him as he stands opposite a corpse that represents the end of life for him, and he says to himself: “Death is suffering.” In the twilight of the old, pre-Christian world view, a corpse becomes the symbol of suffering for the great Buddha, the symbol that this thirst for earthly life must be fought. He teaches man to turn away from this earthly life; he teaches him to rise to what beckons him as Nirvana.

And now let us go back 600 years and then forward again 600 years and then take another look at humanity's view of life. 600 years before our era, we have the work of the great Buddha in India. Then, 600 years after our era, we no longer have to do with the Buddha, but with simple, naive minds. Like Buddha, they fix their eyes on a corpse – on the corpse of Christ Jesus, who died on the cross and who represents the Mystery of Golgotha for them. What is this corpse for these simple people 600 years after the founding of Christianity? The same as was once the symbol of a religion of redemption for the Buddha is now, for these simple people who received the Christian impulse 1200 years after Buddha, not the symbol of a religion of redemption that turns away from all earthly things, but the symbol of a religion of resurrection, for at the sight of this corpse, the certainty descends into human hearts and human souls that all suffering and all death is the gateway to the victory of the spirit over all that is physical, to liberation from death.

There was no greater, no more incisive impulse than the Christ impulse, which came into the development of mankind between the two epochs: between the epoch when even the great Buddha could look at a corpse and only find the idea of deliverance from the body, and that epoch when one could again look at a corpse, but now saw in this corpse a symbol that the highest and best, the most valuable that lives within man, will always be the victor over the physical, will always rise, will rise above the physical. This is how one must characterize the impulse, because only through it can one approach the impulse of Christianity in the right way, through feeling, as it should be, and not through theoretical ideas. And if we now want to grasp this impulse of Christianity in the right sense, we can still do so through something else.

Basically, the pre-Christian religions do not know something that only through Christianity has entered fully into the world view of humanity. Here again we can look to Buddhism. If we examine and understand it, we find that it has crystallized out of one of the highest concepts of the human being, the concept of the Bodhisattva. What is that, a bodhisattva? Well, if you want to grasp this concept of the bodhisattva, in which Buddhism sees one of the highest guides in the spiritual life of humanity, you have to look back a little at the developmental history of the human mind and soul. We must be clear about the fact that just as we live today in relation to our state of mind, this state that we carry within us is also subject to development. The way we see the things around us today and how we combine our senses with our minds – that is our present state of mind – this soul nature has developed slowly and gradually. And anyone who, without the means of spiritual science but only through thinking, looks back at the cultural development of humanity will become aware of how, in earlier times, the human soul was in a very different state.

Now, I would first like to characterize how spiritual research has to understand this earlier state. We look back into ancient times, into the times of prehistoric human development - into times to which no historical documents lead back. Man did not see the world in the same way as he does today, for example in science; in those times, a kind of clairvoyant state of mind still existed. People today are annoyed when clairvoyant states of mind are spoken of, and perhaps rightly so, because the word is so often misused today, and it is often understood to mean something highly superstitious. But what is really meant by it is quite different from the state of mind we have today from waking up to falling asleep, and the state of unconsciousness during sleep. In ancient times, there was a third state of consciousness between waking and sleeping. All that remains of this third state for today's humanity is what we must call a kind of atavism, namely the dream state. The only thing that ancient clairvoyance had in common with today's dream consciousness was the pictorial, the symbolic. But while today's dream images usually appear fragmented and chaotic, the content of what was perceived clairvoyantly could be related to spiritual realities that lie behind our sensual world, so that we can say: In an intermediate state between waking and sleeping, the spiritual world was an immediate experience for people of ancient times. Man looked into spiritual reality. And therein lies the meaning of human development: that man has descended from that state to our present consciousness, where we have bought the possibility, through the surrender of ancient clairvoyance, to grasp the world with our intellectual concepts, with our ideas.

But development continues, and in the future, this present consciousness will again unite with the old clairvoyant consciousness. Just as today some individuals undergo a development of soul through which they develop a clairvoyant consciousness in addition to the external object consciousness, so later all of humanity will attain an intellect that simultaneously functions as a clairvoyant consciousness. So we can say that people who lived in ancient, very ancient cultures could still look back to a time in the development of humanity when their forefathers had knowledge that came from direct observation of the divine spiritual world. And in those most ancient times, the leaders in regard to such knowledge were those people whom, in the sense of Buddhism, we call the first Bodhisattvas. Then the clairvoyant powers of people increasingly declined. And those peoples who particularly felt the decline of these abilities, as was the case with the inhabitants of ancient India, incorporated this looking back to the origin of man out of the spiritual into their feeling, and they said: In the way we now look at the world with our ordinary day-to-day consciousness, we basically do not live in a way that corresponds to the innermost core of our being.

People in earlier times could look back into the spiritual world to which we actually belong; but today this is only possible for those who undergo a special spiritual development. The ancient Indian people saw behind the physical world the old spiritual home of man, which could well have been seen in the past, but which can no longer be seen now. They felt this so strongly that they said: Everything that today's consciousness beholds is Maya, the great illusion, the great deception; behind it is what the ancestors beheld, what our souls themselves beheld in previous bodies. And what our fathers handed down to us in the teachings of ancient times contains the truth about the spiritual home of man. And so the old Indian strove out of Maya, the great deception, up to the spiritual home, to the spirit to which man felt connected when he said to himself in his soul: The spiritual that lives in me is one with the spiritual that lives and weaves through the world as Brahman.

That was the mood in ancient India, but humanity has always retained an echo of this ancient wisdom, and that is what we are considering here. If we look only at external evidence, we see that what people in pre-Christian times had as religions goes back to what people had as ancient wisdom, which comes from [ancient] clairvoyance. And one also sees that since those times, from age to age, great leaders of humanity must always arise who have within themselves, in their soul, the content of the ancient wisdom and truth that governs them. Thus the ancient wisdom lives on in the leaders and teachers of humanity, the bodhisattvas. And in the sense of Buddhism, one would have to regard Buddha himself, Zarathustra, Hermes, Orpheus and others as such bodhisattvas. They were initiated into the primal wisdom that they had within them as truth, and that meant that their souls were connected to the spiritual worlds. Thus, Buddhism looks up to the great leaders who, from epoch to epoch, have passed on the ancient wisdom, because “wisdom” and “truth” are roughly what the word “bodhisattva” means.

The Bodhisattva dignity is achieved by the fact that man gradually develops to such an extent that his soul can absorb the wisdom that characterizes the spiritual home of man. When a person has progressed from embodiment to embodiment to the point of becoming a bodhisattva, the next step – the highest rank he can achieve, so to speak – is the Buddha level; one goes from being a bodhisattva to being a Buddha. But the Buddha is no longer called upon to descend to earth again, but after becoming a Buddha, he has arrived where the thirst for life in the body is extinguished, where salvation occurs, where he no longer remains connected to the physical world, where he no longer lives in it. Thus the last development, so to speak, of the pre-Christian world view recognizes in the Bodhisattva the human being who stands at the boundary of that which still remains connected to earthly existence. In the moment when the human being rises one step higher, he no longer needs to remain connected to the earth. However, this world view does not yet truly know the concept of the Christ. What does the concept of the Christ consist of?

The Christ concept is higher than the bodhisattva and the Buddha concepts. We arrive at the Christ concept only when we turn our spiritual gaze to an inner experience of the human soul, an experience that is hinted at in the Christian Gospels and that we can call inner resurrection or rebirth. Usually, this inner rebirth is presented as something quite abstract. However, we need only consider a few aspects of the human soul in order to realize that this inner rebirth refers to something quite concrete. We need only consider the individual elements that form the basis of human soul life. In his outer life, man presents himself to us with his perceptions, feelings, emotions and volitional impulses. We see how he draws his ideas about the world around him from this soul, which lives in drives, passions and other impulses, and how he can ascend ever higher and higher to purer and truer concepts. Who would not admit that man feels within himself the urge and drive for ever-increasing perfection? One need only imagine the demands of all noble idealists of humanity, and one must say: These demands set high ideals, and people also live them out in methodical acts of noble human compassion and so on. Therefore, one must say: Man can, as it were, rise above himself.

We are dealing here with a fact of the human soul life that, when considered in the human sense, cannot always be called abstract. This is also admitted when one says: something lives in us like a second ego, a higher self, to which one can grow beyond the lower everyday self. Sometimes one admits in the abstract that Goethe's saying is right:

From the force that binds all beings,
the human being frees himself who overcomes himself.

But this higher self is usually imagined as something bloodless, colorless, something that for most people does not have the same immediacy and reality as those expressions of the human being that are tied to the person as he or she appears to us in life. He comes to us with all his feelings, impulses, with everything he does as a natural being, with his blood, with all the forces that pulsate through his body, with everything that nature has given him as a personality. If we want to summarize all this, we can say: Just as the human being comes to us as a natural being, so is he endowed with the forces that permeate the whole world. Just as he comes to us as a personality, so has he become through the forces of the world.

How colourless and abstract, in contrast, is what people often have as the content of their higher impulses. And how concrete it is when a person flies into a rage because of his blood. If, on the other hand, you set up an ideal of the higher self, then it usually remains quite abstract - so colourless and bloodless that it seems quite consumptive to us. For example, what Kant calls the “categorical imperative” could be described as a consumptive ideal. A bloodless idealism! Now, against what so often confronts us as bloodless abstractions, we need only hold up a word from the development of Christian impulses that is effective, Paul's word:

Not I, but the Christ in me.

With this, we have mentioned that which is able to describe the essence of Christianity in the deepest sense.

We have before us the human being as a natural personality; we see how he stands with his affects, his passions, as a confluence of all the forces that permeate and interweave the whole world. He stands there, composed into a small world, like a microcosm in the big world, in the macrocosm. And now we see how this human being is inspired by the pursuit of perfection, how he wants to experience something within himself, as it is expressed in the aforementioned saying by Goethe:

From the force that binds all beings,
man frees himself who overcomes himself.

What initially presents itself to us as a natural personality, composed like a microcosm from the forces of the world, now strives beyond itself in concepts and ideas, which may initially appear in abstract ideals as man's better self. But then we can imagine that these abstract ideals, these higher wisdoms, the highest ideals, which man can only have by rising above his natural existence, now permeate this higher self in the same way ing, and becoming an expression of that which the world experiences and interweaves spiritually, as spiritual, as world-moral, just as the physical-sensual of the personality is an expression of the whole macrocosm.

When, as if by lightning, a world being, a world essence, strikes into the highest ideals of man, which is conceived just as real in the spiritual-supersensible as the external world forces are conceived as real, which, acting in from the macrocosm, have put together the human natural personality as a microcosm Then we have the human being who frees himself – the human being who in this way rises above himself, who now lives in his higher self, which otherwise remains an abstraction, consisting of unfilled, bloodless concepts that do not have an immediate effect. Now the higher impulse that has taken hold of this person is at work; something spiritual lives in him that will become his higher personality. Now he not only has abstract ideals, the highest moral ideas within him, but he also carries a second, spiritual personality within him. Now that to which he can rise as to a highest is also permeated by spiritual personality, just as the natural man was formerly permeated by abstract ideals.

When we feel that this can happen in a person, then we understand the words of St. Paul: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” This Christ in me can permeate and penetrate everything that is and remains an abstraction of a higher self. Thus, through Christ, we ascend to a higher personality. While the Bodhisattvas are those teaching guides of man who lead him to impersonal higher wisdom, to abstract concepts and ideas, the Christ impulse does not merely lead man to an impersonal wisdom, but to a higher personality within himself. This concept, however, only came into the world through the establishment of Christianity. Everything that happens in the world has its causes. And when today, through a development such as that indicated in the writing “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”, man rises to spiritual insight, to spiritual clairvoyance, then he has this higher personality directly before him as a reality, like a new man in man - the Christ in ourselves.

But now there comes a moment for the real clairvoyant in which a word is spiritually fulfilled that Goethe used about the external, physical facts of nature and then also applied to the highest entity in man, namely the word:

If the eye were not sun-like,
How could we behold the light?

Goethe's point, with regard to the external, is: My eye is there, and sees the sun; if it did not possess the power of perceiving light, we could not see the light. But he also says:

The eye is formed by light for light.

We could not have eyes if light did not live and weave through the world: the eye is formed by light. – The Schopenhauerian truth “The world is my idea”, that is, that the world of light and color is the idea of the eye, is only half the truth. The whole truth is only found when we add: Through the world my idea is created, so that when we use the eye formed by the sun, we look into the world in which the sun is. - And in the same way we can say: As no eye without the sun, so no divine knowledge and feeling in us without God as objective God in the outside world.

In the same way, the Christ in us can be experienced objectively as a personality. And this event, where we experience our higher self in such a way that we can say: “Not we, but the Christ in us,” becomes a concrete experience for us. Then our inner soul existence is transformed, then we have become a different person, a reborn person, and through this experience a new, spiritual eye has been opened for us. And then we also see that the Christ in us needs the Christ outside of us, the subjective spiritual Christ in us needs the objective, historical Christ. To deny the Christ who went through the Mystery of Golgotha is logically the same as denying the sun that the eye has formed out of an otherwise indifferent organism, as Goethe said.

The fact that we can experience the Christ in us is formed in us as an inner experience from our soul organism, just as our physical eye is formed from sunlight. So what our inner spiritual eye is, is formed by the real, objective Christ, and those who truly experience this, not just in feeling but through clairvoyant consciousness, experience this as their most direct knowledge, which could be characterized as the clairvoyant looking up from the spiritual personality of Christ in us to the real, objective, historical Christ. We need no gospel, no historical document, we need only the true, genuine gaze of the clairvoyant, and we know that the embodiment of that being from whom the impulse for the “Christ in us” came has lived in the course of human development. That is the objective, not merely the subjective mystical experience of the Christ.

But we know something else. We know: When, under the compulsion of logical thinking, the doctrine of repeated lives on earth gradually becomes implanted in the process of human development and thus in all earthly life, then we have the Christ before us clairvoyantly as the historical Christ, who triggers the inner view in us so that we can look at future embodiments. And now we do not say, as in Buddhism: the fewer earthly embodiments, the better for the person, because the sooner he will be released from existence - but we say: as long as the Earth has a mission to educate, we, by being embodied on earth, we absorb more and more of the Christ impulse, and the Christ impulse in us becomes ever stronger and more comprehensive; higher and higher we carry it in us in every new embodiment. And so we look into a future in which more and more of us can fulfill the word, “Not I, but the Christ in me.” Therefore, we look upon future embodiments, upon our future earth-lives, as upon lives more and more permeated with the Christ, and we understand why in the pre-Christian world-picture, even in Buddhism, only an idea of redemption could arise - the Christ-impulse had not yet come, which brings ever new and new fruitfulness into every earth-life. On the contrary, the point had even been reached when it was no longer possible to perfect life on earth further. The Christ Impulse gives meaning to earthly embodiments and to the lives of human beings on earth, whereas Buddhism could no longer provide any meaning for this.

And if we now look at the history of the development of Christianity, the question is answered: How did Christianity come into the world, not the Christ, but Christianity? Anyone who wants to look at history objectively will have to say: Paul contributed the most to the development of Christianity. Let us take a look at him. Was he convinced by what had happened in the world as a physical fact or by what was described to him? As a contemporary of the events that took place in the physical world, he was able to hear everything that happened to him, but what he was able to absorb into his soul from these Christian ideas was unsuitable for making these external events appear to him in such a light that he could have changed his soul to Christianity. But then the event occurred that scientific theology has not yet been able to interpret. What was that event? Externally, what Paul could not have believed through any perception or observation in the physical world became an immediate certainty for him through what he saw supernaturally, in the spirit. No message from the physical world could be decisive for him - but it was a supernatural experience, a superphysical event. And this convinced him, not merely of the existence of some Christ, but that the Christ had experienced the event that, when translated into human life, means: In every human being, the spiritual core of the being will conquer the death of the outer covering of the lower human being, because “if Christ had not risen, our faith would be vain and vain our preaching”. Paul appealed to the risen Christ because it had become clear to him that in the Mystery of Golgotha that spiritual sun had appeared which makes the inner Christ in man possible in the first place. For Paul, the starting point of Christian development was a supersensible event that gave him the impulse to work for Christianity.

Thus, in relation to its first great teacher, Christianity emerged from a supersensible impulse, and only later were the Gospels able to provide what people needed to clearly visualize the Christ event in their minds. This event can be renewed forever, even today; if man observes the laws of inner human development, he provides himself with the opportunity to relive the event of Damascus within himself. Then he can experience the objective Christ spiritually as truth; then he can begin to believe the Gospels without needing to have historical proof, because what he beholds in spirit, what clairvoyant consciousness gives him, he then finds confirmed by the Gospel writings.

Thus, the essence of Christianity is to be sought within the human soul. And the strongest impulse for the spread of Christianity is to be found in a supersensible event of knowledge. Through this event, every human being, so to speak, immediately sees the necessity for the most important impulse in the historical development of humanity to have been the appearance of the Christ Himself. And then one truly understands that in the person of Jesus, the Christ lived as an entity that cannot be compared to any other. While the bodhisattvas progress from incarnation to incarnation like all other people until they have fulfilled their task and become a Buddha, we can only record one single life on earth for this entity that lived in the body of Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ. And [as in the successive generations the same blood passes from father to son], so from the one Christ who lived through the event of Golgotha - this is a fact that presents itself to the higher consciousness - a spiritual impulse goes out to all those who find the way to this Christ.

This idea that the Christ is connected by a spiritual bond to the one who finds the way to him – just as the descendant is connected to the ancestor by the bond of blood – this idea not only establishes a mysticism of Christianity, but a Christianity that can be described as a “mystical fact”. There is not only a Christian mysticism, an inner mystical experience in the sense of Christianity, but what happened in Palestine at the beginning of our era is a fact that can only be understood through mysticism. Just as the course of blood through the succession of generations can be understood by natural science, so that which happened through Christ can only be grasped through spiritual realization, through the wisdom of mysticism. Through spiritual realization one can comprehend that “spiritual blood” flows from Christ Jesus into the souls of those who find their way to him.

I am with you all days until the end of the earth cycles.

To recognize and see how the impulse of Christ flows within the development of the earth and thus he himself flows – this in turn can be converted into sensations, and one will feel how such contradictions as the following allow us to look into the depths of the development of worldviews.

We have a passage handed down from Buddha that can be compared with the saying just quoted: “I am with you always, to the end of the age”. Buddha said to his disciples: “When I look back on earlier earth lives, I know that my soul has gone through many earth lives and has undergone this or that experience. It has acquired abilities and now built my body, this outer, physical body. This has become my destiny because the soul built it and led it to such places where it could experience all this. So I see in my present physical body the results of the spiritual forces that I have gathered. And he called the body a temple built out of divine powers, by way of the human individuality. [And further said Buddha:] The temple of my body is the result of the previous lives I have gone through. But I know full well that since I became the Buddha, this temple has been standing, and it is the last time that my inner powers have built such a temple. I feel exactly how the beams are already breaking, the columns bursting; this is the last body that my soul will inhabit - the last body, because I have become a Buddha.

Deliverance from the body, that is what the Buddha teaches. Let us translate this into feeling and contrast it with another saying, namely the saying where Christ Jesus also spoke to his disciples about the temple of his body. But how did He speak? Did He also say, like Buddha, that this is the last existence and that everything that led to this body will dissolve? No, the Christ foresaw that what He had become in this body would give the impulse to continue working through all earthly existence: “Break down this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again.” That is the great contrast: on the one hand, the breaking of the Temple and the desire to break in order to bid farewell to the earth, and on the other hand, the contemplation of the structure of the Temple as the starting point for all subsequent human salvation. And for this stands the expression: Break down this Temple, the impulse is already there, which continues to work.

Thus we must not see the impulses that proceed from the Christ Jesus and that form the essence of Christianity in abstract terms, but we must transform the concepts so that they become sensations and feelings. Then, precisely in the realization of repeated earthly lives, we will feel the full significance of this Christ impulse. We will look at the human lives of the future and see in Christ the starting point for an ever higher and higher fulfillment of the destiny of humanity in the future.

And so we can say: We look back to ancient, pre-Christian times, to the wisdom that stands at the starting point of humanity, but which has gradually been lost until people had only the last remnants of it. Then came a time when the greatest impulse, the Christ impulse, struck humanity, which is a new starting point and leads people into the spiritual world, bringing the soul the possibility of ever higher and higher ascent, of ever higher and higher life, until man is so far advanced in terms of his earthly existence that he can ascend in spirit to the heights of all earthly existence. Nothing fulfills us as significantly, deeply and powerfully as this, which we can understand as a characteristic of the actual mission of humanity within our earthly existence. There stands the human being; he sees himself surrounded by the physical-sensual world, he strives for perfection, he sees ideals above him, he knows that through them he reaches up into a spiritual world. And he knows that from this spiritual world, spiritual forces and entities extend into his existence. But man cannot live his way up into the spiritual worlds with mere abstract concepts and ideals, because just as he is here in the physical world as a personality, so he must also educate himself as a personality into the spiritual world. Therefore, only a model personality can lead him there - that is the Christ-personality!

Thus man looks up to Christ as the Bringer of the spiritual world and says: By raising my own self to you, by ever more fully realizing St. Paul's saying, “Christ in me,” I draw down from the spiritual worlds the most intimate and potent impulses, clothe them in my human being and transmit them into our physical world, into our sense world. I am the mediator between the spiritual world and the world of the senses. I bring spiritual things into the physical world. I permeate and structure the physical with that which comes from the spiritual world. The Christ is my helper and model in this, the true Christ, who is just as necessary for the inner man as the outer sun is necessary for the physical eye, and who, as an historical being, walked on the outer physical plane at the beginning of our era.

We then feel as human beings in the world: we can hint at our mission on earth by saying that we should thoroughly imbue with a Christian spirit those words in which I would like to summarize what today's reflection has revealed about the relationship between man and the physical world on the one hand and the spiritual world on the other:

Man's sense is overwhelmed
From the depths of the world, full of mystery
The rich abundance of matter.
It flows into the depths of the soul
From the heights of the world, full of content
The spirit's clarifying light.
They find each other in the human heart
To a reality full of wisdom.

Dear attendees! Anyone who takes a look at our spiritual life will realize how deeply the mystery associated with the name of Christ Jesus is intertwined with our present education. And it may well be said that all questions touching the present time are the consequence of the Christ or Jesus problem, one of the most significant problems of all. We have even seen that even men of our time who believe they are above what they call the religious prejudices of Christianity are intensively occupied with this problem. For example, there is the fact that interest in this mystery has been shown from more or less monistic sides. The only question that arises is that it has been tried to solve this mystery in the most diverse, the most profound and sometimes also the most superficial way at all times since Christianity has existed.

Since we have to start from a very specific point of view, namely that of spiritual science, let us first visualize the underlying reasons for the particular coloration that our present age gives to this riddle. We must then see – and this is particularly indicative of our present time – that in souls, in hearts, an enormous contradiction is emerging: on the one hand, there is the need, the intense longing to know something about those questions that have occupied the human mind since time immemorial; on the other hand, there is the cleft, the chaos that emerges. While one feels too soft or too weak to really attack this problem in all its depths, there are again experts in this field who deal with it in the most detailed way, expecting some new revelation, some new event in relation to this problem.

The peculiarity of this question is already included in the two names that come to mind: “Christ” and “Jesus”. And if we just take a brief look at what has happened over the centuries, from the time of the evangelists, the first Christians, and across the centuries, we encounter the question: How can man form a conception that the divine essence of Christ can embody itself in a human being, in a human body? How is it possible that the divine nature has accomplished in a human body what is called redemption? In short, we can say that what has occupied humanity so powerfully at all times is the question: How could Christ appear on earth, how did that very union of the two natures, of the God Christ and the man Jesus, come about? But the closer we get to the present, the more and more the question takes on a different form. The question takes on a form - that is the remarkable thing - that is completely adapted to the respective cultural view that humanity has struggled to achieve. When we look at the present, we find the opposite pole, the complete opposite of what was recognized at the very beginning of Christianity in relation to the Christ-question.

One could point to hundreds and hundreds of cases similar to the one I am about to mention. In a Swiss journal of 1861, a man who was close to Christianity says the following: If I were compelled by anything to admit that Christ rose bodily, that the resurrection is at all possible in an evangelical sense, then I would have to admit everything that, not corresponding to my own worldview, would somehow confront me; then I would have to find that my whole worldview has a crack. How many people of the present day, including religious scholars and theologians, would have to make the same confession! If they thought about it, they would come to the conclusion that they would have to confess the same thing.

Let us contrast this confession with what Paul said when he said:

If Christ is not risen, then your works are in vain and so is your faith.

If you look at what Paul says, you have to admit that the most essential thing that permeates him is the fact that the Christ has risen. You have to admit that Christianity loses its meaning altogether if the mystery of the resurrection is removed, if what happened for the development of humanity is removed. Paul regarded the resurrection as the most essential thing, as the fundamental nerve of the Christian world view. And in our time it has come to this - this is deeply significant - that certain people say to themselves, if they had to acknowledge the resurrection, then their whole world view would be split.

It does not exactly touch someone sympathetically, to whom one has not yet plastered over these things, to find the fundamental question of Christianity – because that is what it is – presented to the soul in this form. But theosophy does not have the task of whitewashing things, so to speak, but rather of characterizing them according to their true names. In a sense, time cannot, out of itself, [out of its nature]; the general character of the formation of time is also expressed in the conception of the Christ-question. We see the Christ-question transformed into a Jesus-question in the nineteenth century; we see how, through the progress of science, it is becoming less and less possible for man to see in the man Jesus of Nazareth a divine-spiritual being, as it could be seen in ancient times. As the gospels became more and more accessible through the spread of education, people read deeply into them, and their souls were, as it were, drawn up to something divine. Then a gradual transition took place from the most paradoxical ideas about the Christ Jesus to what many theologians now profess, namely, that one has to assume that Jesus was only an exceptionally outstanding personality in world development, so that what man regards as the highest ideal was present in him to a great extent. One sees in him only a human being, albeit raised to a higher level.

Naturally, all possible shades of opinion are to be found in the conceptions of Christ Jesus. Thus, in the eighteenth century, we are confronted with the fact that people only put into the Christ Jesus problem what they could imagine, what they could think. Thus, to the Enlightenment thinker Reimarus, Christ Jesus appears hardly as anything more than an especially outstanding human being. [In contrast, Lessing had a substantially different spiritual image within himself.] He once said that he wished he could still live to see someone come along who would thoroughly refute what is being spread about Christ Jesus. Everything [at that time] was based on the criticism of the Gospels, especially on the contradictions, and specifically on those that come to light when comparing the different resurrection accounts. The obvious conclusion was that the reporters had passed on something that was not real – but this is by no means a fact.

If witnesses are heard in any matter who give different testimony, this is by no means proof against the fact itself. If we now imagine a world court case and ask: Are these witnesses credible? this is not correct. Rather, another question is the only decisive and important one: Who won the trial? Undoubtedly, Christianity, which was based on the fact of the resurrection, has carried the victory in world history. So the fact is that even if the witnesses testified differently, the trial itself is decided.

Then the time drew nearer and nearer when the matter was so arranged that every possibility of thinking of something superhuman in it disappeared, or, to speak with the spirit of that age: The time is drawing ever nearer when it will be impossible to think and speak of the resurrection in the same way as we originally did. Therefore, in the nineteenth century, the first concern of religious history was to get a picture of the man Jesus from the Gospels. We do not need to discuss here what has been done with the Gospels, how attempts have been made to compile the synoptic material in order to arrive at an approximately uniform overall picture, or how attempts have even been made to exclude altogether the Gospel that has the most supersensible content, the Gospel of John, on the grounds that it is a hymn to the individuality of Jesus of Nazareth. But there were also other researchers in the nineteenth century who said that if the Gospel of John were no longer recognized, then the whole of Christianity would have to be abandoned. One scholar, who is now considered outdated but who was once highly regarded, emphasized the facts of the Gospel of John. But all efforts were aimed at credibly presenting the man Jesus to the soul; however, from the outset, much had to be excluded that was indeed in the Gospels but that could no longer be believed in the nineteenth century. So a lot of facts, such as miracles and so on, were taken away and any possibility of admitting anything non-natural ceased.

It was therefore of particular significance when a theologian of the nineteenth century, Franz Overbeck, who lived in Basel, wrote a very remarkable book entitled “On the Christianity of Today's Theology”. This book is remarkable not only for its content, but it is significant for anyone interested in such things as an expression of the confession of a man who, as a theologian, had to struggle with the fact that he had to stand before his students with such feelings in his soul. Overbeck had to wrestle with this fact until it finally pushed him to express what lived in his soul. Anyone who understands such things will truly see a stormy destiny in following the strange life of the Basel native Overbeck, who basically answered the question, “Can theology today still be called Christian at all if it is also a science?” only with “no”. As a theologian, he sought to prove that theology as a science could not be Christian at all, because any science - according to Overbeck - must do away with and break with much of what is the basic meaning of any religion; the moment a pre-Christian religion came into contact with science, it underwent a process of decomposition, and so it happened with Christianity: science destroys Christianity under all circumstances and must always be an opponent of it.

When this is stated, it may not go deep to the heart, and in a certain respect it may be easily accepted by the layman. But when one is confronted with an era that urges such a significant theologian to make such a confession, one must feel how deeply the corresponding question [about the relationship of Christ to Jesus], the Christ-Jesus problem, actually goes to the root of our current development. And Overbeck says something else, namely, roughly the following: Whatever thoughts and scientific reasons we can muster about the Christian worldview must seem terribly small and inadequate to support the Christian creed. In the early days, Christians lived with the idea that a new world was coming, but soon a different time came, and it was no longer the doctrines of the Church Fathers that fertilized Christianity. At first there was hope for heaven to come to earth, but then finally the feeling that this world could never satisfy the human heart; an ascetic mood became apparent.

Today we see that people place some value on scientific truths – these are self-evident, they conquer the world of the outer senses, and so we see the driving force of religious belief slumbering in people. Who would not want to admit that this is deeply, deeply characteristic of our time? Is it not moving, distressing, that that which gave thousands upon thousands consolation and hope should increasingly lose its power? Let us face a fact: in 1873 an attempt was made in France to count those who were still touched by Christ, and it was found that one-third of the total population still believed in him. Today, it is estimated that only about one-fifth of London's total population is still imbued with Christianity. What does it matter that those who are quickly satisfied with themselves say, “What do we need a new foundation for? The old is enough for us.” Those who think only of themselves and are satisfied with that may speak thus; but those who think of humanity and see how the best truth-seekers can no longer find support will have to admit that the times are serious and that it is understandable when people long for a renewal of the old.

And so it gradually happened that on a theological basis a man named Jesus of Nazareth arose, from whom all the supernatural had been removed. In the nineteenth century, there was also a reaction of a strange kind. One could say: in order to deal with the Christ problem, which had been completely lost sight of in the Jesus problem, people sought to hold on to the Christ nevertheless, to recognize him. But in doing so, he was made into a being who basically lacks true reality. It has led to the Christ being made into a mystical being who does not need to be bound to what the evangelists tell – they tried to hold back the gospels [so to speak]. It would lead to chaos if one wanted to cover all the trends of the last few decades – at any rate, we are dealing with a crisis.

For those who have followed this development, there is something easy to grasp. The combination of mystical insight with all that has been brought to light by gospel research represents the last phase of this development. Something emerged that can be described as the connection between these two currents, and the result was that people even doubted whether a Jesus had lived at all. It is entirely in keeping with the style of our time that, once the mere external, historical yardstick was applied to Jesus, the question arose: Is there anything left at all in the Gospels that provides us with proof that a Jesus lived? — But one has no right to deny that a Jesus existed, because with a certain justification one is led to the conclusion that the existence of Jesus is clearly provable. However, for anyone familiar with today's historical research and aware of the current state of Jesus research, proof of the existence of Jesus cannot be provided because it is possible – if one wants – to challenge the documents of the Gospels. And one would have to be reckless not to admit that this challenge has quite significant reasons.

But what does all this show us? It shows us that we are in a state of crisis in the whole field [of Jesus research]. However, a new world view has also become part of the present education, which initially knows how to plausibly demonstrate that it has different sources of truth than those that have been available so far - I am referring to Theosophy or spiritual science. Even if Theosophy has something to say about Christianity and its origin, it could still be necessary for religion and religious research to deal with what Theosophy says about Jesus Christ. It is therefore important to know that both sides start from some elementary, fundamental events that have happened and cannot be denied.

The thing that our present education must undoubtedly take the greatest umbrage at is the story of the resurrection, that something has occurred that can no longer be understood today, namely that there was a victory of life over death. From a theosophical point of view, something can only be said about this if one considers the most obvious thing, namely the scene of one's own heart and soul. And what does this scene show us? It shows us something that cannot be admitted by the prevailing education; it shows us how the possibility exists for man that an inner miracle takes place at some time in his life. If we can call a miracle that which can be characterized as being in contrast to what is connected to the intellect, then it is a fact that such a miracle can take place in the human soul. And for every soul in which this miracle has taken place, it is inwardly clear that miracles exist.

It is a fact that there is an inner, mystical experience in which something enters the human soul that has no connection with the soul in the natural course of life. To understand this, one must follow the natural course of a person's life. It shows that, alongside all the external facts of life, we are constantly dealing with a deep inner life - we are dealing with the fact that the course of life shows itself in the human soul. Let us take a soul that belongs to the struggling souls in life - not a scientific one. Let us take a human soul that is dealing with the existential issues of life, that experiences inner tragedy, pain and suffering, but also bliss and salvation. Let us take such a human soul that has been living in such moods for years, and let us imagine that someone has not seen this person for ten years. He would make a remarkable discovery, namely that this struggle of the soul expresses itself in changes in the physiognomy, gestures and so on. The spiritual struggle expresses itself in the body. What takes place within a person also works on the transformation of the human exterior.

But what is much more interesting is the following: anyone who struggles in this way senses that when an answer or a solution to certain riddles has occurred, they are in a different state of mind. And the characteristic feature is that when the solution has occurred, the transformation of the physiognomy stops and the expression remains constant. As long as the struggle lasts, furrows form. But this too has an end; it is as if the human body reaches the limit of its elasticity. When the human being reaches this limit, the physical transformation finally ceases. The forces of consciousness transform, the soul forces. First they work on the body, and then, when this is no longer possible, they consciously work their way into themselves. It has been established that these human soul forces work inwardly throughout the whole of human life, and it has been shown that sometimes something of what is working in the depths of the soul also rises up into consciousness, and this shows itself in particularly strange dreams. This means that the dream images reveal something of what is going on in the soul.

Let us take a typical dream from the life of a friend close to me. When he was a young person attending secondary school, he had to do a drawing in the last grade, and because they knew he had talent, they gave him an especially difficult template, and that is precisely why the work progressed rather slowly. The end of school was approaching, and the student realized that it would be impossible for him to finish on time, since only a small part had been drawn. He felt anxious about this, but at the end of school his performance was still enough for the teachers, because they realized that he had only progressed slowly due to his great talent. The man grew older, became a draftsman, and strangely enough, this school experience came back to him in his dreams at certain intervals, and he experienced everything exactly as it had happened once, only the fear that he would not be able to finish was much, much greater in the dream. It happened that the dream came back regularly for days in a row, then it stopped for years and then came back.

The full significance of this dream experience can only be understood by comparing it with life. It turned out that every time this dream experience occurred, this person recognized an increase in his abilities. He could do more in terms of observing forms and expressing them through his hand; he experienced noticeable progress every time. Man works spiritually and mentally like this draftsman, and from time to time his soul work is revealed in 'dream' - in that strange state that exists between consciousness and unconsciousness, in that transition from the subconscious to the conscious. We see this throughout life.

We have an important point in human life, up to which one remembers in the course of life. Everyone must say: I remember up to a certain point in time, but what lies before that point in time is completely unconscious to me, and I only know something about it through the reports of others. This point in time is the one at which we have appropriated the word “I” for ourselves. But what happened before that moment? Let us look at the child, with its clumsy movements and actions. We know that the most important organ in the human being, the brain, is still completely undeveloped when the child comes into existence, and it is only during life on earth, until the child learns to say “I”, that it works on the organs of thought. We are therefore dealing with a spiritual-natural consciousness that is completely independent of the human being, with a supersensible-spiritual activity that represents the starting point of that cerebral activity. The following example characterizes that supersensible, spiritual element in man.

It is common knowledge that Nietzsche ended in madness. In the last period before the outbreak of madness, he wrote “captious” letters to acquaintances, including the Basel theologian Overbeck mentioned earlier. When Overbeck received one of these letters at the end of the 1880s, he knew that he could no longer delay in picking up his friend Nietzsche from Turin, where he was staying. The following now appears important as an example of what I have mentioned: When Nietzsche met Overbeck, he had no attention for what surrounded him; he let himself be done with whatever was wanted and showed absolutely no interest. Only when he heard the name of the personality standing before him, who was the same person who had been his colleague for years, did it flash through him: “That's the psychiatrist I was with back then.” And Nietzsche, to Overbeck's greatest astonishment, began to continue a conversation at the point where it had been interrupted seven years ago. A person who has no attention for the outside world continues a conversation at the point where it was interrupted seven years ago! Overbeck had forgotten that conversation in the meantime, but he remembered it immediately. And it is remarkable: when Nietzsche was brought to Jena and Overbeck visited him in the insane asylum, one could not talk with him about what was going on around him — only about what he had thought, devised, mentally struggled with and experienced years before; only about that could one talk with him.

But what does this show us? It shows us that there is a supersensible body within the physical body. If one builds on facts, then what is at issue here must be recognized as highly important. Man can only enter into connection with the objective external world through his physical organs. Nietzsche's organs were destroyed, and therefore he could no longer do this; only the central spiritual core within the physical body was unaffected. This one example could be multiplied a hundredfold. The existence of this central spiritual core in the physical body cannot be denied, and it is a fact that under certain circumstances man is able to see into the supersensible world. When we place thoughts that are symbolic through the strong will into the center of consciousness in such a way that all attention is focused on them and nothing is distracted, when we only look at them and repeat them over and over again - for a year, and if a year is not enough, then for ten years: a result will eventually emerge. The soul manages to bring everything up from the depths; she looks into everything.

This supersensible state cannot be reached with the help of ordinary tools, but only through intimate soul work. When a person has concentrated all thoughts and worked with them long enough in this way, he finally comes to a point where he says to himself: Yes, I am now experiencing something within me that I am quite sure is something supernatural. But strangely, I cannot think it in the way I usually think things. - Man then feels something that only comes to the consciousness of those who experience it, because in this moment of transcending the resistance of his physical body, the brain is no longer capable of expressing what has been experienced. Man recognizes: That which he was accustomed to feeling in the soul wants to transgress into consciousness. But he senses: the bodily tools were indeed suitable for the natural life up to now, but now I am experiencing something for which my brain is not yet sufficiently developed. Man then perceives the duality of the spiritual-soul being. He then experiences further how that which was initially weak finally begins to work perceptibly and tangibly on the brain, on consciousness, on the body.

I have now described this process of development to you. It is not a matter of something arbitrarily conceived, not a theory, but a fact that every true seeker of the spirit can experience. But what does the seeker of the spirit experience? He experiences what I have termed the “miraculous fact”. Something extra-worldly enters into the soul, to which man had no relationship before. One could describe what enters as a higher human being in the human being, as something that joins the spiritual that was already there before. Now a question might arise: Yes, but only a small circle of people experience something like that, only the spiritual seeker experiences something like that, who undertakes these exercises with the soul. — But what has just been described can be experienced by every soul, albeit in the most diverse shades, in the most diverse gradations, corresponding to the individuality of the person concerned. When we read the descriptions of those people whom we call the Christian mystics, we sense that these mystics did not experience what I have just described, but that something of a different nature has entered into these souls, something other than the existing spiritual - this transformation is called 'resurrection'.

Anyone who immerses themselves in the descriptions of the gospels with the necessary devotion will experience what I have described to a greater or lesser extent. But everyone can experience it - apart from studying the Gospels - feel that there is a feeling in the soul that cannot be found in the natural course of life in the soul. However, the Bible is the easiest way to bring a supersensible spiritual world into the horizon of consciousness. If one admits this miracle fact, then humanity provides a necessary supplement to it, and this arises from Theosophy itself. If we look back at what was said about the central core of spirit, we see that this central core of spirit cannot be traced back to the mere beginning, to the origin of the body, because this central core of spirit is completely independent of the beginning of life, of the brain activity of the human being. Rather, it must be traced back to an earlier human life, so that we must speak of repeated lives on earth. What we have come to know as the central core of the spirit, as supersensible life, asserts itself through death, and with this point of view we stand on the ground of spiritual science.

This view of repeated earthly lives has already been incorporated into our newer culture. Lessing was compelled to speak of the repetition of life out of an inner necessity. He said: “If one considers the entire human development, it appears to one as an all-embracing education of mankind.” It would have seemed senseless to Lessing if a soul that had ended completely [with death] had lived. Lessing thought that the soul takes with it what it possesses in the way of training, [then comes back to earth with it and so on. In this way a unified organism would be created: the soul, which is in a state of development, does not die], but lives on and on, lives forever. The nineteenth century, however, had little interest in elaborating on this fact. But this fact emerges with necessity. When a few decades ago a prize was offered for the best literary work on the subject of 'The Immortality of the Soul', the first prize was awarded to a work entitled 'The Immortality of the Soul on the Basis of Repeated Life on Earth'. This is proof that even then there were people who were drawn to this view of repeated lives on earth.

If we consider the development of humanity, it turns out that only from a certain point in time was it possible for the human soul to experience that inner miracle, that certainty, which [initially] comes to the soul as a question. We can distinguish two great epochs: the old, pre-Christian times, when man had not yet come to the consciousness of his ego, and the time after Christ, when man enters the world with the full maintenance of his self-conscious ego. Just as human descent can be traced back to a primal being, so too must that which can prove to be an inner resurrection for each individual in the soul be traced back to a progenitor for this inner miracle. Just as resurrection takes place for the individual, so it must also have taken place for humanity, and Theosophy shows us clearly: What makes the individual a different person also made the man Jesus of Nazareth a different person.

Just as we live with our central spiritual core, to which no boundary is drawn by death, so the world with its central spiritual core is subject to its own law. Therefore, according to theosophy, the resurrection for the whole of humanity is virtually the same miracle as the inner miracle for the individual. After [Jesus'] physical body was hung on the cross, the spirit [of the Christ] lived on. Let us consider Paul's words in the Gospel, that the Christ died for humanity and was resurrected on the third day, and that he then appeared first to Peter, then to more than five hundred people, and finally to himself. He did not appear to Paul in his original Jesus form, but in a spiritual form, which he had to recognize as the Christ form, which was such that the conviction asserted itself from within: the Christ lives! We cannot speak of the resurrected Christ in any other way than to say that that which lived in him spiritually, independently of the physical body, was not truly dead in death, but continued to be there, to live on.

It would take us too far afield today if I were also to explain to you what happened to the body. The important thing is that Scripture clearly and unambiguously points this out to us: from the moment of the resurrection onwards, we are dealing with the emergence of a new spiritual power that was not present before, with an outpouring of the spirit. And this inward miracle leads back to the resurrection from the dead, to the continuing life of the Christ, who was crucified as Jesus of Nazareth. Christ has made possible a new relationship with the spiritual world for humanity; thus the miracle of the cross is the progenitor of all miracles that take place in human life. In this way, spiritual science shows us a path to Christ; it shows us that the Christ is necessary for humanity. Only a timid mind could sense danger in such a path to Christ, because every path to Christ that is based on truth must and will be welcome (to those seeking the Christ).

Dear attendees! The riddles of [nature] first approach man insofar as he is a cognizant being and insofar as he has to implement his knowledge in practical life. The riddles of the soul are different. If knowledge is necessary above all for orientation in the world, if we find ourselves in a world that does not want to be illuminated for us through knowledge, so to speak spiritually as in a dark room, then it must be said: the riddles of the soul are those that are experienced directly, but in a way that very many people have no adequate conception of. Today, there is much talk about the unconscious and subconscious life of the soul. However, since we have hardly enough ways to gain more precise ideas about this subconscious life of the soul — as this very evening is intended to show — it is also the case that the profound influence of the soul's riddle on the human being cannot be sufficiently appreciated from the direct consciousness of the present and from what is recognized science in this present. Doubts about those things that are intimately and closely related to the longings and hopes of the human soul life not only bring the person a sense of instability of the soul, they not only rob him of the security of the soul life, they not only take away the strength to find and maintain his position in life in a moral and social sense, but they intervene in the entire inner constitution of the human organism's life as a whole. What is at issue here cannot be fully understood unless one knows that in the deeper layers of the soul there are forces that are initially unknown to the human being – and yet they work in the same way as the conscious forces, but – one might say – they dig deeper into the whole of human nature.

It seems at first to be a small thing when a person has to give in to doubt about one or other question, for there are indeed enough reasons for doubt regarding the great riddles of the world that can only be solved in the course of a long time. But doubt itself, when it takes root in the most intimate life of the soul, when, as it were, the soul must continually eke out its existence, not consciously, but unconsciously - if the expression may be permitted - tormented by doubt, then this doubt eats so deeply into the organism that it also gradually attacks physical health. For what emanates from the soul does not immediately interfere with physical life. But what gnaws at the soul in this way over a long period of time, little by little and again and again and again, and especially in such a way that it does not fully come to consciousness, ultimately undermines physical health and thus actually the whole existence of the person. For this reason, the whole area of these soul mysteries, especially in recent times, has once again entered the field of vision of even earnestly striving scientists.

Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, wants to work strictly on the basis of the most serious scientific conscientiousness and methodology that could only be developed in the course of the last four to five centuries, especially in the nineteenth century, in scientific research. However, since Anthroposophy wants to deal with what the deepest longings, the most earnest hopes and the strongest forces and sources of life of the human soul are, Anthroposophy concerns every human being – and one might say – it is therefore in its nature to address not only the individual field of science, but all people. One can also see how simple, healthy human understanding, if it is not occupied by one or the other prejudice, can certainly find the path to understanding anthroposophical research methods. I spoke about this in the two lectures that I recently gave here in the Philharmonie. Today, my presentation will focus on the riddles of the soul.

These soul mysteries have also recently been brought before the scientific forum with great intensity. This natural science, which, where it is justified, is fully recognized by anthroposophy, and which rightly points out again and again its great triumphs for knowledge and for life in the most recent times, this natural science has, especially in the present day, forced serious thinkers, I might say, to face the riddles of the soul. Scientific research is concerned, after all, primarily with that which is given to man sensually and which can be traced back to its laws through observation and experiment and through the combining mind. But what this scientific research has increasingly lost sight of in recent times is the human being himself. Natural science methods are and will always be applied to the outer human nature, the physical organization of the human being. In the extension of these methods to the great questions of the soul life, anthroposophy must find that these natural science methods do not remain true to themselves, even with great researchers. For this reason, I would like to begin by pointing out the way in which the present-day natural sciences in particular often approach the riddles of the soul, and how anthroposophical research must nevertheless take a negative view of this approach because, as I emphasized in the previous lectures, — must proceed more strictly and critically in the supersensible, in the realm of soul and spiritual life, out of scientific conscientiousness, than one proceeds on the natural science side when questions of soul and spiritual life are to be considered.

I would like to start with an example to show how natural science believes it can approach the riddles of the soul, and how anthroposophy has to approach these riddles in a completely different way. I would like to draw attention to a work that has recently made a great impression in certain circles because it deals with the soul riddle right up to the human question of immortality and breathes a thoroughly scientific spirit. It is the work in which Oliver Lodge wrote about what he was supposedly able to learn about his son Raymond's soul through mediumistic art after his son's death. One may cite this attempt by Oliver Lodge, which is considered a failure for anthroposophy, to penetrate into the soul life up to the question of immortality, because anyone who is familiar with the scientific conscientiousness of natural research will see on every page of I would like to say, can see in every page of this extensive book by Oliver Lodge how the strict methods of natural science are observed, how everything that the natural scientist is accustomed to using in the laboratory or in the physics cabinet is seemingly applied here to the study of the soul. I would like to mention only the experiment that was most striking, and that was almost a kind of “experimentum crucis” for many.

Oliver Lodge, with the help of a medium, allegedly received messages from the soul of his son Raymond Lodge, who died in the war. Among these messages was one of particular significance. As Oliver Lodge believed, the soul of his son made the revelation to him through the medium that Raymond Lodge had had his photograph taken with other comrades a fortnight before his death, that a group picture had been taken, that the photographer had taken two pictures in succession and that the way Raymond Lodge was sitting was slightly different in the first and second pictures. Nobody knew anything about this picture when the medium brought the message that was supposedly coming from Raymond Lodge's soul. Oliver Lodge's family did not know anything. The picture had been taken in France and had not yet arrived in England when the corresponding seance took place. Nevertheless, the matter had been described in full detail by the medium. To the strict naturalist Oliver Lodge, it seemed as if this experiment undoubtedly established that the soul of his deceased son himself had spoken. For who could know anything about what was completely unknown at the place where the experiment was carried out. All sources of error, as we know them from physical research, for example, were carefully excluded. Therefore, the impression of this experiment, as it was described in the detailed book, was extraordinarily striking, even for unbiased readers. And yet, although a strict natural scientist speaks here with observation of all scientific certainty, anthroposophy must point out that its kind of research into the supersensible must be more critical than such a scientific method driven into the soul realm. For ultimately, what has been said here is nothing more than lay opinion regarding soul research.

There are simply abnormal powers and abilities in the human organism, and in certain borderline fields modern science has much to do with such abnormal abilities. Anthroposophy, however, has nothing to do with these abnormal abilities, but only with the further development of the normal human faculty of knowledge into the supersensible realm. It is possible to know how abnormal faculties can work, how it is actually possible that through special — and these are always actually morbid predispositions of the human being, which however mediumship presupposes —, how through such predispositions the conditions of sensory experience can be broken through in certain cases, how space can be overcome, but also how time can be overcome, and how it is a certainly established result that through such abnormal, pathological abilities, the person sees, for example, how he falls from a horse during a ride that is to take place in a fortnight. If the foresight is correct, the event occurs despite all the precautions taken to avert it. Such experiences are verified results; however, they are not based on the normal cognitive abilities of humans, but on abnormal abilities.

But if Oliver Lodge now thinks that some supersensible world has spoken to him, then it must be pointed out that in this case nothing more needs to be present than that the medium has had such foresight. The two photographs did indeed arrive in England later, and Oliver Lodge's eyes rested on them. The later seeing of the photographs can be seen and described through the medium's abnormal abilities based on such foresight. So in this case we are dealing with nothing more than the development of abnormal abilities that do not look into a supersensible realm, but only see what is happening in the ordinary physical world. These abilities can only do this: break through the conditions of space and time that are otherwise given to our sensory abilities.

I only mentioned this example in the introduction to point out how critical anthroposophy is, despite the fact that it points in the strictest sense to the path that really leads into the supersensible realm and shows us how the eternal core of the human being is connected to the eternal in the cosmos, and how the individual, everyday event in the life of the soul can be taken as a starting point for the great questions of birth and death, of immortality and the unborn. Although anthroposophy seeks such paths to the supersensible in the strictest sense, it must nevertheless critically reject that which, in imitation of abnormal human abilities, can only deal with that which after all only takes place in the sense realm. Anyone who understands the significance of such criticism for anthroposophy will not want to see anthroposophy in the light of those misunderstandings in which it is still seen today by many who only deal with it superficially. But the whole of anthroposophy's research methods is based on the need to apply scientific methodology to the most intimate inner soul life. It must awaken slumbering abilities in the soul, and it awakens them — not through any fantastic or mystical methods, but through systematic schooling, as I have described it — at least on a trial basis — in the two lectures already mentioned. But it would be easier for present-day humanity to form an unbiased judgment on such questions if people were willing to educate themselves about how differently people throughout the world want to ground their vision and also their faith from the intimate foundations of their soul life. I would like to point out just two polar opposites, so to speak, when it comes to characterizing the diverse abilities of people around the world.

In this way, the differences between the West and the East in terms of their understanding of the soul are particularly apparent. As a representative spirit of the West, I would like to cite Herbert Spencer, who has indeed gained such tremendous, if unjustified, influence on the way of thinking of the newer view of nature. Where Herbert Spencer talks about education, he also talks about the goal of educating the human being, and in doing so, he gives us the opportunity to really look into how he feels about the riddles of the soul.

I will only briefly present what he implies: Even if we educate people to be good citizens, to be efficient members of human society, to be efficient professionals, the most important thing in education is what enables people to educate others. The parental vocation is the highest in education. And on this occasion, it is particularly interesting to see the reasons Herbert Spencer gives for this view. He says that the highest goal in human life is to produce the next generation, the offspring. Therefore, the highest goal of education is to raise the next generation. No criticism of Herbert Spencer's assertion is intended here. One can make this claim if one is completely on the ground that wants to scientifically justify more or less everything that is valid in human life, only on the ground of external sensory perception, external natural science.

But the polar opposite of this view is presented to us by a thinker of the East who was particularly significant in his work in the second half of the nineteenth century: the Russian thinker Vladimir Solovyov. He turns his gaze to the riddle of the human soul from a completely different angle, so to speak. He says that human life has value only if, on the one hand, it sets itself the goal of perfecting itself in the truth; without this goal, human life would be worthless. But it would also be worthless if man did not partake of immortality, because, in Solowjow's opinion, a striving for perfection that could somehow be abandoned to destruction would be the greatest deception that the universe could perpetrate on a human being. Therefore, he demands that man strive for perfection in the truth and partake of immortality for the highest soul riddles, and on this occasion he speaks again in a very characteristic way – like the polar opposite of Herbert Spencer – by says: How dreary and desolate existence would be if it had to be exhausted only in the succession of generations that are produced one after the other, if the wheel of existence would run in such a uniform manner.

We see, then, that in the West and in the East, two representative human thinkers express themselves in opposite senses about the same area. It can be said that when Herbert Spencer deals with spiritual questions, he looks entirely at the external nature and only applies to the human soul what, in his opinion, can be accepted according to the pattern of recognized scientific conclusions and judgments. Solowjow demands the opposite, and that from the depths of the human soul. He demands something as the goal of human development that is also based on the succession of generations, but which goes far beyond what, in his opinion, would exist in a uniform course of the same wheel, which would only ever turn in history.

Now, one seems to me to be as imperfect as the other. In Herbert Spencer we see how a thinker cannot rise, I might say, from the depths of natural science to the heights of the riddle of the soul. In Solowjew we see how from mystical depths there emerges the indefinite, very mystical-sounding demand for immortality, but how here, too, there is absolutely no way to arrive at real knowledge in this field. And perhaps it may be said, especially in the present time, that if one looks impartially at these two sides and is sincerely and honestly devoted to what has emerged as the highest flowering of Central European, of German intellectual life, that the deepening that is necessary here in relation to the riddle of the soul must be found precisely in this German intellectual life.

This, ladies and gentlemen, I wanted to say first to show that one must indeed have ideas about the way in which people in the nineteenth century wanted to approach the riddles of the soul, how, so to speak, the soul are today's burning questions, and how the peculiarities of intellectual life in the most diverse regions of the earth present obstacles and hindrances to finding completely unimpeded paths into the regions in which the eternal of the human soul is rooted. At first, the human being appears to us as a unified being. And this is fully justified. But in this unified being, we must seek out the forms of reality that have entered into it. The way in which anthroposophy attempts to do this is often challenged by those who call themselves abstract monists or the like. Anthroposophy does not in any way offend against a justified monism. For no one denies that there is a unified activity in water when one shows how oxygen and hydrogen are effectively present in water. Nor does one deny what we encounter as a unified human nature when one conscientiously searches scientifically for the forms of reality that converge in human nature. But these forms of reality converge in a mysterious way. We see, when we devote ourselves to our external sensory observations and deepen these through recognized science, through physiology, biology and so on, the external physical corporeality of the human being. On the other hand, we see how the soul reveals itself out of this physical corporeality, how it permeates the physical corporeality, enlivens it and allows the spirit to flow into it.

But only when we realize, in an unbiased way, how these different forms of reality – the physical, the soul, and the spiritual – work together in the unified human being, can we hope to approach a solution to the riddle of the soul. Of course, I am not saying that the riddles of the soul can be definitively solved by anthroposophy today, but one can hope to point out the path to the solution. And again and again one is pointed to the two ends of physical earthly existence that approach man so mysteriously, when the great riddles of the soul come before one's eyes. One is pointed to birth and death. Let us first consider these physical ends of human life, and then ascend into the supersensible realm.

What the outer physical body of man is, we basically only see in its very own form in the corpse before us. Therefore, it is actually quite correct what many naturalists have said: that the characteristic of death is actually the presence of the corpse. This is also true for death. But if you look at what you are facing in the corpse without prejudice, it is characteristic enough for the whole human being.

Du Bois-Reymond believed – as he stated in his famous lecture “On the Limits of Natural Knowledge” – that the human being, as a conscious, waking being, is not transparent to his own knowledge, that this knowledge reaches certain limits when it comes to human consciousness. From the movements that the matter in our nervous system undergoes, we cannot understand — du Bois-Reymond said — how we feel: “I see red, I hear organ tones, I smell the scent of roses.” But du Bois-Reymond thought that ordinary natural science could be used to understand the sleeping person, in whom consciousness has dawned, and thus precisely that which, in his opinion, is unfathomable for ordinary natural knowledge. No! But through that in which natural science is great today, the sleeping person can be understood just as little as the plant. What pervades a being as life can only be seen in supersensible knowledge, in supersensible contemplation, as I have characterized it in my writings 'How to Know Higher Worlds' and 'Occult Science: An Outline' and in the two lectures already mentioned. What pervades man as a sleeping being, as invigoratingly as a plant, cannot be known through ordinary natural science. Here, man is only accessible as a physical being after he has died. And when he has died and lies before us as a corpse, we see how he begins to follow quite different laws from those he followed from birth or conception to death.

But as the human corpse approaches its dissolution, it follows the same laws that we see in the natural world and that we understand through ordinary science. So that in what happens to the human corpse, we have before us what man would be if he were not permeated, as a corporeal-physical being, by a spiritual-soul element that must snatch him from death, from dissolution, in every moment of life. For the laws of nature that we fathom with ordinary natural science dissolve the human organism, and what holds it together must therefore follow different principles.

Thus, we get to know the human being in his or her physical body, when it is detached from the soul and spirit. The laws that are effective there must be effective in the human being throughout his or her life on earth, because they are the laws of the physical, chemical existence of the substances and forces that the human physical body contains. They are now overcome in the opposite direction by what is in the human being besides these substances and physical forces. But if one wants to get to know the human physical body in its purest form, then one must seek it out in the corpse. There the human being is completely surrendered to external physical nature, and there one can see how he carries this physical organization within him in whatever way.

Now, in the books and lectures mentioned, I have pointed out that there are dormant forces in the human soul that can be awakened, just as forces are gradually awakened in the soul of a child as it lives in a dream-like soul life. If only human beings had the intellectual humility to say to themselves one day: You were once a very small child with a dream-like soul life that poured into your physical being; education and life have brought out of the depths of your thought, feeling and will, which you have today for orienting yourself in the world and for knowing yourself, and which, above all, has led to the triumphs of recognized science, especially natural science. But can we not assume that, when one has everything that life and education and inherited traits can give one, one nevertheless, at some point in one's mature life, presupposes soul abilities - if I want to express myself scientifically - as 'latent' in the soul?

Can we not say that at any given moment in our lives we can take our own soul life into our own hands and continue it from the point where we left off? Only practice can prove that this is possible. But the practice of anthroposophical research also shows this. I would like to mention only briefly that it is through inner soul exercises that such dormant abilities are awakened in people. These soul exercises, which relate primarily to the life of imagination and thought, consist of meditation, of systematically regulating concentration on very specific conceptual complexes. What do we achieve when we strengthen and energize our souls in the way described in the books mentioned?

Just as a muscle, when used, strengthens through use, so our soul abilities are also strengthened and invigorated in a very specific way when such soul exercises are done by a person with perseverance over a long period of time. And if I am to characterize how people come to such abilities in the normal way, I would like to say: When we, as honest people, look at our thoughts and how they develop from our outer perception and from the phenomena of life, then we can only say: It happens in us in such a way that we would have to confess: “It thinks in us.” For the fact that I think, it announces itself to an unbiased self-examination: we notice how “it” thinks in us. And we refer this thinking back to ourselves by seeing thinking revealed through our body and say, “I think,” while for ordinary consciousness and for ordinary science we should actually only express, “It thinks in us.” But when we strengthen the soul life through appropriate meditation and concentration exercises, then we really come to the inner consciousness that may express, “I think.”

For then thinking breaks away from what the physical organization is. I know how many paradoxes are expressed for today's consciousness with such a sentence. But here again, anthroposophy, with its research, which is a vivid one, proceeds with great caution and criticism. Anthroposophy is well aware of how ordinary thinking is bound to the physical organization of the human being. It does not present itself in an amateurish or dilettantic way. It agrees with those who study the central organ of the nervous system, the brain, and show us how this or that part of the human soul abilities turns out when this or that part of the brain is removed. Anthroposophy also examines how memory and the ability to remember are connected to the physical organism. And that is why it comes to the conclusion – which some may even misunderstand as a kind of materialism – that for the whole ordinary soul, the physical body is the absolute basis. But then, when appropriate meditation and concentration exercises are done and when the thinking is strengthened, the thinking as soul life breaks away from the physical organization, only then does the soul appear as an independent entity. Then the human being knows: “I think,” and in this “I think” he knows that thinking now proceeds as an independent process, purely soul-spiritual, no longer conditioned, no longer dependent on the bodily organization.

And in addition to the thought exercises, will exercises are added. Again, I would like to characterize only in principle how these will exercises lead to a very specific goal. One might say: Just as it is unjustified to say to ordinary thinking, “I think,” so it should be clear on the other hand that man, insofar as his own will flows into action, faces a real unknown. Take just the simplest volition, for example, raising an arm or a hand: First you have the thought of raising the arm or hand. This thought, however, is clearly in consciousness. But then something completely indeterminate comes, like what is experienced in consciousness as the goal of the action, flows down into the physical organism and asserts itself there as a volitional impulse. For in the end you see only the result of this volitional impulse: the raised hand, the raised arm. We see the beginning and the end of the whole process, the middle is shrouded in complete darkness.

As Anthroposophy develops its vision, it recognizes a similarity between what constantly comes about in the waking day life of the will and what thinking shows as peculiar between falling asleep and waking up. That which lies in between the thought of the goal and the thought that then states the achievement of the goal in the will, is something that stands before the soul just as the life of the soul that takes place between falling asleep and waking up. Anyone who, with the strengthened consciousness that can be achieved through meditation and concentration, observes how sleep approaches a person and how waking up happens again, knows that there is something positive in the process of inducing sleep. Not only does the physical body of the person enter into a different stage , but that in fact the soul and spirit carry out a positive action in falling asleep and waking up, that positive, only unconscious experiences take place in sleep, which are absolutely the same as those experiences that lie between the goal of an action and the thought that states the achievement of an action. So we are actually pursuing the achievement of an action into the waking life of the day when we pursue the will of consciousness in the ordinary life of the day. The exercises of the anthroposophical researcher are intended to penetrate into this darkness, where the will takes place in the ordinary life of the soul, if one does the exercises that I like to suggest on such occasions. There are many exercises, but I will now only mention those that are characteristic because they represent something fundamental.

Whereas otherwise, for example, the sequence of external facts is presented in the order in which they occur, the usual way to begin is to present this process in reverse, so that, for example, one feels a melody backwards or presents a five-act drama backwards in small sections, the fifth act first to the first or, as can be particularly fruitful for everyone, to imagine the course of one's daily life running backwards in pictures in the evening, so that if one has gone down a staircase, one goes up the stairs from bottom to top, from the lowest step to the highest. This causes the will, which lives in thought, to break away from the external world of facts and also from the human being's own physical interior.

So that, as on the one hand, through meditation and concentration, thinking becomes independent, free, and unfolds through these exercises of the will, now the will becomes something that is independent of the organism. While the ordinary will of man, in so far as it is dependent on instincts, drives, desires and emotions that have their basis in the body, while this will also has its basis in the body, it is made independent of physical body through such exercises of will.

And just as the human being, by making his thinking independent of his physical body, is able to look beyond birth and conception into his prenatal existence, and to see the soul and spiritual eternal in that existence as it was in a soul and spiritual world before descending into the physical existence in order to unite with a physical body, how, therefore, through the strengthening of the life of thought, the soul existence can be seen before birth or conception, so the image of what the human being will become after passing through the gate of death also arises through the will being trained. By creating certain aids for the will, which can thus be detached from the body, this will becomes more and more able to penetrate into the external objective existence free of the body.

A good training of the will, for example, is to walk alongside oneself critically, as it were, like a second personality, in relation to one's actions, deeds and moral motives, so that one can objectively view one's own actions as one would otherwise objectively view another person. In this way, one steel one's willpower inwardly so that it becomes independent of all corporeality.

This help is still very useful: I only need to describe how a person is always different after certain periods of time. We all know how we have changed after a decade in our overall state of mind and life. But what has made us different is life itself. Life has taken us into its great school, given us different or altered soul experiences, taken away certain habits, given us others, and so on. We are more or less passively surrendered to life when it is a matter of transformation, of metamorphosis of our own soul or bodily constitution. But if you take what is at work in your moral habits and motives into your own hands, for example by saying to yourself: You have a habit, you want to change it and make it completely different, or something similar, and if you practice it enough, especially if you set goals that run over time, then you will achieve more and more of what is the independence of the will from the physical body of the human being. But through this, something is developed into a power of cognition, of which one rightly says that it, as it is in ordinary life, should not become a power of cognition, and I know very well what speaks against the application of this power, as it is in ordinary life, as a power of cognition. But it should not be used in this way in anthroposophy either; it should be transformed. It should undergo a metamorphosis on a supersensible level.

It is love, the ability to love. In ordinary life, this ability to love is also bound to the physical organism. By doing such exercises of the will as I have indicated, and by inwardly freeing the will from the physical body, the human being becomes able to give himself completely to an external objective. But this is not a sensual objective, it is a spiritual objective. What has happened to man through such exercises, I can characterize as follows. But I ask you not to misunderstand what I give as a characteristic. It is meant in the very real sense, but meant for the further development of man's normal abilities, not for ordinary consciousness.

Take the human eye. It is relatively independent, integrated as a kind of independent organism into the human organism as a whole to a certain degree. We can use the eye appropriately in the service of our entire humanity by being fully transparent within ourselves. I would like to say in a figurative sense: the eye serves us because it is selflessly integrated into our organism. If the eye becomes cloudy, for example if its vitreous body becomes cloudy, if some kind of cataract occurs and it becomes filled with its own matter, then the possibility of looking out into the physical world of the senses through the eye also ceases. Now it is certainly not to be maintained that our physical organism, for example, can be compared to a diseased eye filled with its own substance in the ordinary course of life. But for higher knowledge it is. Precisely what makes it a healthy organism in ordinary physical life also makes it incapable of serving the human being to penetrate into higher, supersensible worlds in ordinary life. If, on the other hand, we do such exercises of the will as I have indicated, in order to penetrate what would otherwise remain dark in the will, then we also make the whole human organism transparent in a spiritual-soul way, so to speak, making it into a sense organ, an overall sense, a total sense. And by thus making the whole human organism as selfless in a certain respect as the eye is in the human organism for external seeing, we enable the human organism to look into the supersensible spiritual world in order to place itself in it. For these exercises, of which I have spoken, make the human organism transparent.

For ordinary consciousness, the ordinary human organism is indeed an obstacle to higher knowledge. It is the tool for ordinary life, for placing oneself in the ordinary world. But the human being can only place himself in the physical world by penetrating into this physical body with his spiritual soul. In a sense, this physical body is opaque. When it becomes transparent in the way indicated, we look out into the spiritual world. But by also tearing the will away from the physical body in this way, an image of death as it really is for the human being as a whole enters into our knowledge. By learning to recognize how we can remain in consciousness as human beings, independent of our physical bodies, and with our will power reaching into the future, we gain an insight into what happens to the soul and spirit of the human being when the corpse is taken up by the external forces and laws of nature. We gain a picture of the soul and spirit that frees itself from the body when the physical body of a person succumbs to death.

As you can see, dear attendees, anthroposophy cannot philosophically speculate or mystically fantasize about human immortality in some frivolous way. It must show step by step how the human being, in a systematic inner development, ascends to a state of insight that enables him, for example, to truly recognize what passes through birth and death as the spiritual-soul, eternal core of the human being, untouched by the physical body. And now we can say how that which, as a corpse after death, succumbs to the external laws of nature as physical corporeality relates to what can be attained as spiritual-soul in meditative or in will development. The path taken by anthroposophical knowledge and life is the opposite of that taken by the human being when, as a physical personality, he passes through death. Death unites the human being with physical-sensory reality, as we can see through it with our intellectual knowledge. What is experienced as an exercise in anthroposophical research methods unites the soul with the spiritual by tearing it away from the physical-bodily in terms of both thought and will. And by tearing the will and the thought away from the physical body, the mind, the sensation and the feeling, which is at the center of the soul's life and the most intimate of the soul's life, is also torn away from the physical body. One learns to recognize what can escape from death, and one learns to recognize it by simultaneously learning to understand what death actually means in human life under such conditions.

I have pointed out that the forces we find at work in the corpse are always present in the human being between birth and death, or between conception and death. The other forces I have spoken of, which are used in supersensible knowledge for the immediate spiritual-soul life that goes into eternity, are always present as the counterforces to those forces that become visible in the corpse at death, so that life is a continuous struggle between these two kinds of forces. And man, with his mind, which stands in the middle between thought and will, thereby takes part in this struggle and sees how the forces at work in the corpse are continually subject to a certain kind of decay. Why is that so? Well, the thinking of ordinary consciousness, being present between birth and death, turns to those forces that are at work in the corpse. You only need to remember the following – I could draw on much evidence from the depths of anthroposophy, but for today it may suffice if I merely point it out.

Whenever the sprouting and sprouted organic life that lives in nutrition takes over and develops particularly when the person remains asleep, whenever the constructive life that we develop particularly in childhood, where we have to shape our organism plastically, then the conscious thought life recedes. In the physical organism, the conscious thought life does not turn to the constructive forces, but to the destructive ones, to the dying forces, to those forces that only appear summarily, highly increased in a single moment, in human death. One would like to say: What appears in death in the highest degree, lives in us continually, and if it did not live in us, then ordinary human thinking would not be able to develop. This ordinary thinking turns to the forces that are always dying in us, to the destructive forces that age us in the second half of life by getting the upper hand against the forces that are also always present in us and rejuvenate us. These rejuvenating forces are active in our will and in the subconscious realm of thinking. But while ordinary cognition deals with the destructive forces, supersensible cognition, as striven for by anthroposophy, turns cognition precisely towards the opposite pole.

By making the human organism into a sense organ in a higher sense, as already indicated, man can make transparent what would otherwise be dormant, asleep, in the will, and can thus look into the spiritual world and get to know that which he cannot see in the state of sleep because of our own organism being opaque. This volition in the spiritual world becomes transparent, and we then look at the thinking of ordinary consciousness by learning to recognize the invigorating thinking that builds up the human being and works in from a spiritual world, by taking over what the human being receives through birth from the forces of heredity. What the human being receives in this way as growth forces can be applied as observing forces in observation and in experiment, while the physical experiment must turn to the dying forces. Thus we see birth and death continually at work in human nature. And by seeing death not only in that one moment of human life, but by seeing it spread in its individual [basic elements] over the whole of earthly existence, we confront it with what constantly fights this death and what, when we see through it, shows how the human being lives in an eternal existence that passes through birth and death unchanging, imperishable, one might say.

Anthroposophy seeks to follow the individual everyday events of the soul life — ordinary thinking, which it feels connected with the forces of dying, and ordinary willing, which it feels connected with the forces of building and growing — in such a way that, in their further pursuit, ways can be found to solve the great soul riddle of human immortality. I would like to say: The soul being is inwardly illuminated in terms of knowledge when we can add to what we have in ordinary soul life only as a reflection of sensory knowledge, in this way, supersensible knowledge. In ordinary life we carry the immortal soul within us, but this immortal soul is only filled with what it receives from external impressions. Even our memories are ultimately only reminiscences of external impressions, even when these external impressions have been taken up and transformed by the will and the mind. And even what ordinary mysticism often mistakes for a revelation proves to be only a reflection of the external physical-sensual existence for an unbiased knowledge. Man bears within himself the immortal, but he must first become conscious of the deeper reasons for this nature of his own in supersensible beholding, by transforming his whole cognitive faculty.

Then he penetrates through the gates that show the paths to the actual great riddles of the soul. In this respect, one can distinguish three levels of consciousness. And in these three levels of consciousness, all three of which can live in man, the path that man must take if he wants to solve the riddles of the soul is clearly shown. We shall disregard for the moment the very dull state of sleep, which is a kind of unconscious consciousness. But emerging from this unconscious state of sleep, as from the depths of a sea, are dreams, which are no less remarkable in their symbolism when they are considered quite impartially, as they sometimes appear to us, to mention just one example, as a visualization of conscience. One need only recall how, in a dream, when one has, for example, committed a sin of omission against a friend, this sin of omission emerges like a visualized conscience. One could point out many things in this regard.

But if one looks with an unbiased eye at what is present in this dream life, one must say: This dream life mocks everything that puts the human being into existence in an orienting way in the waking day life, through which alone he can fruitfully place himself into the world between birth and death. Where does this come from? Precisely those who see through the fact that man is present as a spiritual-soul being during sleep and that his consciousness is only subdued, will, when studying the dream life, be able to observe this sporadic flashing of consciousness in the dream in such a way that man then, with his spiritual soul, only comes to the periphery of the physical, that he does not yet fully enter the physical sphere when he wakes up or, when dreams accompany his falling asleep, step out of it.

When a person lives with their soul and spirit on the periphery of their physical body and this physical body faces them like a dark entity, then dreams burdened with arbitrariness arise. And when the human being's physical organization proves to be too weak to, I would say, fully absorb the soul and spirit into its own organization, to permeate itself with it and to permeate it with itself, then the spiritual-soul experience of dreams continues into the physical organism, where it becomes hallucinatory, visionary, mediumistic life, the kind of life that is easily suggestible, and so on. Yes, it is precisely those formations that arise when what should remain only on the periphery of the physical body as dream-like formations, as dream-like soul experiences, submerge too deeply into the physical organism that occur as pathological manifestations of the soul life. This leads those riddles of the soul life that are connected to the hallucinatory, visionary or medial life towards a solution. Anthroposophy must take a negative view of precisely these phenomena if they are to assert themselves in such a way that something of the spiritual world can really be recognized through them. But when the human being, with his soul and spirit, not only hovers on the periphery of the physical, but when he completely submerges himself in his physical body so that the two become one, when the arbitrary life of the dream the dream images are permeated by the forces of the orientation lines, which are formed from the laws of the full physical body with the outer physical nature, then the healthy, waking day life enters. Then what the physical human organization is has become one with the spiritual-soul in its dying and building powers; then they work together as one.

But the human being, who lives in his spiritual-soul, works through the instrument of the physical body, which gives him orientation in the physical-sensory world. When, through the exercises described, the human being not only becomes completely one with his physical body in his spiritual and mental being, but, beyond that, the whole physical organism of the human being becomes a sense organ, then the third state of consciousness occurs - supersensible consciousness. Then the ordinary waking consciousness of the day relates to supersensible consciousness in the same way that a dream relates to the waking life of the day. In approaching the riddles of the soul, we can distinguish between the darker consciousness of the dream, the lighter consciousness of the waking day, and the supersensible consciousness. It is the last that leads us into the eternal depths of the human soul, to the questions of our pre-birth and our immortality. Even those riddles that point to the morbid side of psychic life can be solved by comparing their phenomena in an appropriate way with what can develop in a healthy way as supersensible knowledge.

I have thus attempted to show what supersensible knowledge can achieve in relation to solving the riddles of the soul. The possibility of developing such supersensible knowledge, as I have described it, is only available today, after humanity has passed through the scientific age and has been able to obtain the corresponding knowledge through the conscientiously developed, serious, scientific methods. Therefore, the safest way to proceed in the field of supersensible knowledge is not to be a layman or a dilettante in the field of natural science, but to have learned how to really research in the field of natural science, and to leave to natural science what is its own, and then to leave to the spiritual what belongs to it.

But in earlier times, people always had some kind of idea of how to penetrate the hidden depths of the soul life, which today is achieved by strengthening the soul life. People spoke of a threshold that must be crossed if one wants to penetrate into the real soul life, and they spoke of how one can speak of crossing this threshold through an intuitive consciousness. But there were also very characteristic ways of speaking about how this knowledge of the supersensible is a healing process. The human striving for health in intimate community was found to be connected with this permeation with supersensible knowledge. Now, in relation to the soul life and its riddles, one will learn again that a process of healing is indeed taking place through the fulfillment with supersensible knowledge. To understand this, one does not need to be a psychologist oneself, just as one does not need to be a painter oneself to appreciate a picture. Just as one will be able to appreciate a picture if one has been raised healthily, so will the one who has been educated correctly in terms of common sense be able to understand what the anthroposophist says and judge whether it is healthy or unhealthy for a person. One can verify through common sense what the anthroposophist claims, and one will feel nothing in it, by taking it in, other than something that connects with the whole soul of man in a healing way, which above all supplies man with the forces that give him moral and social support and lead him to what can give moral impulses from the spiritual world.

For this reason, I was obliged to speak of supersensible forces as early as the beginning of the 1890s in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, where I presented as moral intuition those forces under whose influence man becomes a morally free being, so that what is to be gained through anthroposophical knowledge already exists in a presentiment in our moral life and in our ordinary consciousness. And by inwardly opening our cognitive powers to the forces that live in it, we equip ourselves with currents that have healing powers and give our lives support. In this way, anthroposophical knowledge does not give man theoretical views, but something that flows into his entire existence, connecting the reality of external nature with the inner moral world, so that these two no longer fall apart into two. And anyone who has ever stood before the full extent of the soul questions that arise here will also understand how one can strive for a knowledge of the soul, as spoken of here.

If someone today is honestly grounded in natural science, then he looks to an origin of the earth – even if the Kant-Laplace theory is modified today – from which physical existence emerges from a pure physical nebula gas ball, and from this later emerged what constitutes the higher natural kingdoms and also man. And today's physics shows how the end of the earth will one day be concluded in the heat of death, how through a great corpse that will be buried, which man perceives as the content of his human dignity, his human value and his moral value. Through these scientific ideas, man today gets an idea of the arbitrariness of the sensual-physical world, because the sensual powers necessarily give rise to forms of appearance, in contrast to which the moral world would have to be abandoned to decay if the powers assumed by science were to have exclusive validity.

But if we look at the world in such a way that we do not turn to the ordinary powers of thought, to the powers of dying, to which intellectual knowledge turns, because it is bound to the powers of dying and with these powers can only grasp the dead, inanimate nature, but if we point to the immortal, living nature of the world's existence, by rising from the ordinary knowledge of the soul to that knowledge of the soul that is given to supersensible vision, then our soul is anchored in an immortal world existence, and only then is a prospect of a true solution of the soul's riddles opened up. If someone now wanted to say: But this anthroposophy lacks the secure foundation of external knowledge of facts, because it only wants to build on what has been developed from the inner life of the soul. So anyone who sees through everything that I have only been able to hint at today will still say to themselves: Such an objection is like the one that someone would make who said: Everything must stand on firm ground so that it does not fall. That is of course true for things that stand on the earth. If, on the other hand, we look out into space, it would be foolish to ask: What does the earth rest on, what does the moon rest on, what do the other bodies of the universe rest on? They simply have their support in their mutually interacting forces; they support each other.

And one must recognize how what anthroposophy undertakes to achieve actually characterizes the world from the most diverse perspectives and thus supports each other. Until one has grasped the cosmic aspect of anthroposophical knowledge in this way, one will always think that it is unfounded, just as one could foolishly think that the earth is unfounded because it does not rest on a firm foundation in the universe, as every other body does rest on a foundation. Sensory knowledge and intellectual knowledge must rest on a foundation. But that which is developed out of the soul in the manner indicated bears itself, in that it seeks to penetrate from the most diverse sides into the supersensible realm of existence and thereby also prepares the way for the real, vital solution of the soul riddles.

Thus we can say: just as the soul riddles are connected with the processes of recovery and illness of the whole human being, so too must the processes of recovery lie in the penetration of the knowledge of the supersensible human nature, in the knowledge of the true immortality of the human being. In its own way, the most recent period would have to restore the instinctive knowledge of earlier times.

Words of truth do indeed come up from the depths of man's older striving, but modern times cannot strive for knowledge in the same way as earlier times. Natural science has taught us to strive for knowledge in a different way with regard to human existence and natural existence. And just as knowledge is sought in the natural realm, so too in the supersensible realm, not in the manner of nebulous mysticism, but with a clear development of the powers of knowledge into the eternal. But when this happens, then the modern man, who has found support in life in the face of the riddles of the soul's life, may speak again as the ancient Greek once did: “When you leave the body and ascend to the free ether, you will be an immortal god, having escaped death!”

Dear attendees,

In a sense, my lecture today will make a prerequisite, since I gave the scientific basis for the examination of anthroposophy with the science of the present in the last lectures that I gave here in Berlin, and it would only be a repetition for those of the honored audience who were present at the time if I were to repeat these foundations today. So today I will have a few things to say that can be understood quite independently, but which require those lectures for their scientific justification.

When man speaks of spirit and spiritual knowledge, it must be said that he is actually pointing to something that is constantly present to him, at least insofar as he is awake. Man cannot doubt that both his cognitive and volitional activity with the external world is carried out by him in such a way that he is spiritually active with his whole being. And so man actually speaks of spiritual activity as if it were something independent. The difficulties actually only begin where it is a matter of penetrating deeper into the nature of the human spirit and the spiritual foundations of the world. When this is said, the most diverse things can be pointed out. For from many sides these inner soul difficulties arise in relation to the spiritual life in man. And I will, so to speak, pick out just one example that illustrates how these difficulties arise and ultimately take hold of the whole human soul. I will give an example that is perhaps not always felt as strongly as others. But much of what the human being has to deal with because of the inner destiny he has to live through lies in semi- or wholly subconscious mental processes. People do not always realize the origins of their inner suffering and their inner mood. But with unbiased self-observation, which is based on a certain, also scientific self-education, one can discover the origins of these moods, these feelings of happiness and suffering in the soul life, which mean a great deal, very much, for the way in which a person can engage with life, the way in which he can be active in life, and the way in which he can work for the good or ill of his fellow human beings in the world. And so I would like to point out how, when he summarizes what he calls his spiritual life, man can, as it were, feel the powerlessness of this spiritual life anew every day; as I said, even if he does not feel it, the result of these unconscious emotional connections in his soul life points to it. Man feels the powerlessness of spiritual life every time he sees this spiritual life paralyzing, when he sees it sinking into a state of sleep, and between falling asleep and waking up, this spiritual life completely sinks into a kind of unknown world for him. Then he feels, as it were, the powerlessness of that spiritual life, which he is able to hold within his earthly existence through his own soul power. The course of the world takes away this soul life from him, takes away this inner spiritual activity from him every day.

But then, when a person observes with a certain impartiality how he awakens from sleep again, how he perhaps, with the transition through the dream life, which he can only see as unreal compared to the external physical reality of the world, re-enters his physical earthly existence in such a way that he, as it were, strengthens his soul nature with all that permeates his bodily organization, with all that is active in his will, then the human being feels, or can at least feel, a difference. He feels how spiritual life becomes dependent on physical corporeality. But at the same time he feels that he cannot look down into this physical corporeality. He feels that, in a sense, this spiritual life sinks into his own being, so to speak, sinks into a kind of darkness into which he cannot look. He feels how that which he calls his spiritual life is seized by the processes of bodily life, by nervous processes or by others. He cannot see through it, it eludes him as if in a kind of inner darkness.

What one can feel when one is able to go so deeply into one's powerlessness in the face of the spiritual being of the human being, one might compare it to a kind of emotional breathlessness. And this emotional breathlessness, with all the uncertainties of life that it contains, can spread over the entire state of mind like an inner, spiritual cloud and give rise to the great question of life: What am I? What am I here for in this world?

And again, when a person sees how their spiritual life is submerged in the physical, as it were in darkness, they feel just as if, if I am to compare it with something physical, the air they breathe were being spoiled by the metabolism. He feels as if he is in some kind of mental suffocation, or at least he can feel it. But it is precisely these two poles of insecurity and uncertainty that lie at the heart of the human being. And that is what has led to humanity always searching for the essence of what the spiritual actually is.

Anthroposophy, in the sense in which it is meant here in my lectures, seeks to approach this spiritual world from the point of view of modern human consciousness. However, it must be well aware of what is easily placed before the door of the spiritual world, so that man is either unable to pass through it in the right way or is unable to pass through it at all. For two powerful enemies of the inner human life lie in wait at the gates of the spiritual world: superstition on the one hand, with all its delusions, and doubt on the other. Those who suffer from superstition, despite feeling so happy in it, are those who do not want to come to terms with what modern science has to offer. They then conjure up all kinds of images from the arbitrariness of their inner soul life, through which they try to understand what the spiritual world is for them. Yes, one can, in a certain respect, I would say, with a certain superficiality of mind, be satisfied with the delusions of superstition. But if you want to be or have to be an active person, if you want to intervene in life, when you encounter phenomena in nature or in human life, then you feel how everywhere that what the human soul produces in terms of superstitious delusions is shattered, and you end up with a certain lack of orientation in life. You can't find your way in life because you bump into everything, life becomes full of corners and edges, because what is revealed in things is something different from what superstition conjures up from the soul.

Those, on the other hand, who have become more immersed in modern science educate their thinking by the phenomena of the external world, by what observation and experiment can yield to modern man. But they often find that this thinking sticks to what the external basis of knowledge is, what the senses alone provide. This leads them to say to themselves: I can only apply this thinking to what the senses tell me. And they find this thinking, so to speak, too thin to somehow penetrate from the world of the senses into a world of the supersensible, into a world of the spiritual. Then doubt creeps in. This doubt can be thought up, can perhaps even be logically justified. But doubt cannot be lived in the long run if one does not want to help oneself over it through all kinds of superficiality and illusion. And if you do the latter, then doubt settles deep down in the mind and takes hold of the physical shell through the pathways that lead from the mind to the body. Gradually, through the influence of doubt, a person feels like a weakling, and it may then be that the more he entangles himself in doubt with his logic and science, the more the effects of doubt take hold of him in life and he comes, so to speak, if the expression seems exaggerated, it still has a certain justification, into a kind of mental “consumption” that makes him unsuitable to fully engage in the tasks of life. And if he does not notice how doubt consumes him, then others notice it, and what doubt has made of him comes back to him in the way he is valued in life.

In this way, one can look more deeply into the way in which man places and must place himself in relation to what he calls the spiritual world. In our time, people who have just come to doubt an immediate insight, an immediate realization of the healthy judgment of man into the spiritual world, either find a certain reassurance by turning back or not stepping out at all from what has become of them, to and into all kinds of old traditional worldviews and creeds. Many have a certain fear, a certain shyness, to step out of what they were born or raised into as old creeds, because they fear losing that foothold in life by losing a view into the spiritual world as a result.

Others, who cannot hold on to what has been passed down to us through the immeasurable forces of human civilization and the various revelations of the spiritual world, are going through strange developments today. They despair of the possibility that a healthy person can see into the spiritual world, and so they turn to what anthroposophy, in harmony with true natural science, must also understand, but in a certain respect to the sick person. They turn to what can be delivered to them through all kinds of mediumistic arts. They cling to what certain natures can see in visions and the like. What is the basis for this? In every case, if one really approaches the subject impartially, one can say that a medium can only arise from the fact that the physical organization is such that certain external impressions can be penetrated and suppressed, that the deeper physical nature can stir more than it can when a person is devoted to his healthy sensory impressions. From what can reveal itself in a certain way, it is believed that one can learn a great deal about what does not reveal itself in the normal state of life, and this is then seen as the intervention of another world in this, our world. It is easy to prove that in all cases where something visionary becomes present in the human soul, it is based on some kind of detuning of the human organization. Without delving into the pathological, it is impossible to explain what arises in a visionary way in the human soul as spiritual content. And so we see how those today who despair of the normal, active human being being able to penetrate into the spiritual world turn to the abnormally active person.

In the face of these things, anthroposophy behaves in such a way that it starts from the healthy person, both in soul and body. And when I had to deal here with how man can awaken slumbering powers of knowledge through certain soul exercises in life and in science in order to penetrate into the spiritual world, the prerequisite was made that such exercises are only undertaken when there is absolute mental and physical health. Anthroposophy must, to a certain extent, deal with the directions just characterized, which are taken to enter the spiritual world, if it wants to discuss its relationship to the spiritual world. In this respect, it can be seen that certain spiritual contents, which people today more or less accept as contents of revelation, are effective above all through their venerable age. Today, we also see what impression this venerable age of such revelation makes on people seeking the spiritual. We see people doubting the paths that the human spirit of science can take into the spiritual world.

And so they turn back to the ancient times of human development or turn to what still extends from such ancient times into our time, in order to see, as it were, how people once came to what is available in traditional religious beliefs as a world view through their own powers of knowledge. With supersensible vision, as I have developed it in my last lectures, one comes to an extraordinarily significant spiritual discovery about the development of human spiritual striving. If we look impartially at what is actually present in the traditional beliefs that exist today, to which thousands and thousands of people turn with the deepest needs of their souls, we find that, ultimately, they are based on paths of knowledge that people once walked, perhaps by very different means than we consider right today. It may be said that everything we take in as a worldview from historical development or tradition, or that we take in through faith, has once been regarded as knowledge. All the supersensible assertions and dogmas that can be found in our creeds, in our world views, in our philosophies are based on what people once sought out of themselves, on paths that are similar in some respects to the paths that I will speak of again today as the anthroposophical ones, but which were fundamentally different in earlier times. But even today we can gain some understanding of the path to the spiritual world by turning our gaze back to the paths that were once taken into these spiritual worlds.

Now I would like to pick out two paths that people have taken, both of which are completely impassable for us Westerners today. But if we look at them with an open mind, we will see that ultimately these paths also arose from the same attitude that we act on today when we seek the spiritual world through anthroposophy. These two examples are the ancient Indian yoga practice, through which serious seekers of the spirit once sought to enter the supersensible world, and, further, that which can be called asceticism in the times when it was not in a state of decadence, both paths which, as I said, are not suitable for our Western humanity, but by which one can ascend to an understanding of the path that is necessary today.

What did the ancient practice of yoga consist of? Among other things, it included a kind of regulation of the human being's breathing, such that the person, for the purpose of knowledge, did not give himself over to the natural breathing that is his in ordinary life, but rather breathed differently according to certain laws. What is the actual goal of such yogic breathing? What is the significance of the fact that one imposes on oneself the inner obligation to breathe differently, to draw in the breath differently, to hold it differently than one does in ordinary life, and also to shape the exhalation in a peculiar way, for a while and again and again, and again? The purpose of this is to direct one's consciousness to an inner human process, namely breathing, which otherwise takes place unconsciously, either entirely or at least for the most part. I would like to say that we take breathing for granted in our ordinary lives. We do not pay attention to breathing. But the moment the Indian yoga student begins to breathe differently from the way he takes breathing for granted, the whole attention of his soul life is directed to this breathing process. The breathing process becomes something he can experience strongly within. And what does he experience in the end? He experiences the connection between the breathing process and human thinking. What is presented here can be characterized in the following way in abstract logical terms. As we draw in the breath, we simultaneously push it rhythmically up into the organ of our thinking, the brain and nervous system. The breath interweaves and undulates through what takes place in the brain. As modern people, when we breathe, we do not pay attention to how the breath flows through the thinking process. But it is precisely this flowing that the Indian yogi wants to make clear. He permeates what is abstract thinking for us with the denser current of the breath, which he becomes aware of. In this way, he strengthens his thinking in ways that take place entirely internally in the human organism. He invigorates his thinking, but he also enlivens it. What now comes inwardly to his consciousness is a different thinking from what goes on in everyday life.

To one who has practiced yoga, this thinking of everyday life appears as a corpse appears to a living person. Ordinary abstract thinking, or thinking connected with sense perceptions, appears dead in comparison to the inwardly living thinking that is gained through such strengthening for the consciousness. But then, through his strengthened thinking, he who has done such exercises over and over again for a certain time looks deeper into the world. And because his thinking has now become so strong through this strengthening, as otherwise only our sensory perceptions are when, for example, we direct our eyes outwards, perceive the world of colors and it makes an intense impression on us, or when we perceive sounds through our ears, he sees because his thinking has now gained the same power as his perception. Although he does not see the external world with his thinking, he does experience the world. What has been seen in this way from the spiritual worlds by individuals who have undergone such a yoga practice has then been incorporated into the development of civilization of mankind. And some of those who today accept this or that, which has been handed down to them traditionally and historically as a world view, accept it without knowing that it is incorporated into human spiritual development from the results of this yoga practice. It can be said that in all worldviews, even in those that ascribe philosophical certainty to themselves – if one can only look at them correctly from an inner soul-historical perspective – much of what today's human being accepts comes precisely from that which once flowed into human consciousness in the way described.

Through the fact that thinking has been made alive in this way, the human being comes to know something about the eternal nature of his being, and comes to know something about the fact that he existed as a spiritual-soul being before he descended from spiritual-soul worlds into what had been developed for him in his mother's body out of the physical world: his physical-bodily organism. With our own thinking, without having undergone any training that strengthens thinking and enlivens it, we perceive only that part of the human being that passes between birth or conception and death. With invigorated and enlivened thinking, one perceives in the person what his own eternal being is, what can live even without being in a physical body, and what also immediately announces itself to the enlivened thinking as what lived in a spiritual world as a spiritual being before the beginning of our physical life. One vividly gains knowledge of the spiritual nature and the spiritual past life of the person.

This is the one path. Initially, it led its followers to look primarily at what is called the pre-existence of man in relation to his life on earth. And they devoted themselves to the practice of yoga with a certain one-sidedness. Through this, they gained an insight into the existence in which the human being was present in spirit and soul before birth or conception. They spoke of this part of human existence as if it were something self-evident. And in so doing, they overcame the powerlessness that humans feel in the face of the spiritual when they see it descend into a state of sleep every day. What becomes unconscious in sleep does not escape from animated thinking. For what becomes invisible to the sleeper is, so to speak, permeated with inner spiritual life, but in such a way that it extends beyond birth and death and announces itself as that which has a formative effect on the human organism – and it is already present from the moment of conception — so that it cannot be understood as a product of the human organism, but must be understood as that which submerges and immerses in this organism as its eternal, spiritual-soul nature.

Another direction is the one that has now led certain people of different cultural ages to see through the essence of a spiritual world, but which, on the other hand, spread light in life. As I said, the matter has often taken a harmful turn. But with anthroposophical science, one can look back to times when asceticism — I mean now — had not yet degenerated into its harmful currents, when it was not yet a certain spiritual coquetry, but when it was supposed to represent the most honest path of knowledge of certain soul seekers. Asceticism consists in the fact that man, in a sense, tunes down, paralyzes – one could even say – his ordinary life functions, that he suppresses what would otherwise well up and surge into his conscious life from his instincts, drives and passions in ordinary life, that he, out of full inner strength of soul, , to command certain inner stirrings, which are connected with the organism and the activity of the organs, to stand still for a while, that he even educates his body to keep a calmer pace for a while in relation to the bodily-physical functions and that which is connected with them: the urges, desires and passions. What was the reason for this? It was based on an insight gained through experience. For these ascetics came to certain insights, and in coming to them, they knew what asceticism is for them. They came to the realization that our physical body is indeed the rightful vehicle for everything we are meant to experience between birth and death, but that it is an obstacle to the perception of the spiritual world, and that everything that allows the essence of the spiritual world to arise in consciousness has the effect of descending in the manner indicated, on the expressions of this physicality. Those who in this way have, as it were, removed the physical obstacle to looking into the spiritual world, looked more to the other side of human eternity. They looked towards the gate of life that man has to pass through when he lays aside his physical body by dying, when he re-enters the spiritual world with his eternal being. They did not so much look at the pre-existence of human existence, but rather at the life that man enters when he has passed through the gate of death.

I have given you these two examples to show how, in other times, people have come to experiences and views about the spiritual world from certain backgrounds. But today we are faced with a world development, a cultural development, a life of civilization that must, above all, come into the right relationship with the outside world. Those who had acquired insights into the spiritual world either through the practice of Indian yoga or through asceticism had, in a sense, made themselves unsuitable for the outer life. By going through the yoga breathing practice described, the person tunes himself to become extraordinarily sensitive and to feel everything that is going on around him with extraordinary ease. He develops a tendency to withdraw from the outer life, just as when the horns of a snail are touched, it withdraws from the outer world into its shell. Thus we see that those who have come to real insights into the spiritual world have withdrawn and lived in hermitages, paying little attention to living with the outer world. We find the same with those who come into contact with the spiritual world through asceticism. They undergo exercises that aim to tune down the processes and powers of their physical bodies, thereby making them unsuitable for intervening in the more robust life of the outside world. Again, these people are also led to a certain inability to intervene in the external life. But again it was necessary for these people - for reasons that do not belong here - that they devoted themselves to a knowledge of the higher worlds, so that then the others, who more through authority accepted what such knowledgeable people could reveal to them, then accepted this in good faith and performed in the outer life what the reclusive hermits could not perform. But such behavior contradicts both our current knowledge and the demands of modern life.

We humans, who do not live like the original yogi scholars or like the former ascetics before the Copernican or Galilean era, but who live in the era in which a richly developed natural science has changed our entire external life and demands of us , if we want to be cognizant, we must also know how to intervene energetically in life. Today we must realize that it is no longer possible for us as people of the present to penetrate into the spiritual worlds in the ways described. But that does not prevent the modern man from finding his way into the supersensible world, if he undertakes certain things, as I have already indicated earlier, that have nothing to do with breathing practice, but that consist of meditation and concentration, through which the human being can enliven his thinking. In this way, it is similar to the inner experience of the yoga practitioner. Or when I describe the exercises of the will that a person can undergo, which aim to educate the self, to take one's own development into one's own hands, to discard certain habits with all one's strength, and to attain in terms of disposition or even attitude towards life, then what the human being experiences in this way through a strengthening of his will can bear a certain similarity to what the ancient ascetics experienced. But the aim is not to weaken the physical body, but rather to maintain it in its full efficiency and suitability for the outer life.

But what do we gain when we, on the one hand, invigorate our thinking through meditation and concentration in a way that is appropriate to the present time? We achieve something that, even in knowledge, does not need to withdraw from the outer world, but rather attains a very definite relationship to the outer world, a relationship that is entirely in harmony with what we are accustomed to applying as our methods of observation to the outer world at a lower scientific level. I will give an example in this direction, an example of what can become of our thinking through purely mental animation, through inner soul-strengthening of this thinking, precisely in relation to the outer world.

A large part of our present-day views about living beings, about the connection between animals and humans, for example, have been gained by comparing the individual organs, for example of higher animals or of animals in general, with the corresponding organs of humans. We also compare other things, for example blood composition and the like. From this we form an idea of how the human organization could be related to, how it could be related to what we encounter, for example, in the organization of higher animals. But there is a peculiarity. What I am going to say now is perhaps a little subtle, but the whole modern path of knowledge into the supersensible worlds is indeed a subtle one and must be considered in its details and peculiarities. Let us assume that an unprejudiced observer of the higher animal world forms a mental picture, not merely an external view through the senses, of a higher animal, and that he then also forms a mental picture of the structure and organization of the human being. He can visualize the relationship between the two. But if such an observer were now to be required to do the following, he would immediately notice how dead, how inanimate, how abstract his thought life actually is. It is just that man does not do this in ordinary life and in conventional science, and so he does not realize how inanimate his observation and his thinking are. Let us assume that he has formed an idea about their external organization and so on with regard to the higher animals. If he makes these thoughts alive, he cannot progress and draw the thought of the human organization from the living thought of the organization of the higher animals. He can only find a relationship between the two by first forming the thought of the higher animal, then that of the human being, and then bringing both into connection. But he cannot vividly bring forth the thought of the human being from that of the higher animal. His thinking does not have this inner vitality. We know this vitality from observing how we grow, carry out our daily metabolism and so on. But our thoughts stand side by side. We cannot let the thought of the human organization grow out of the thought of the animal organization, as the individual organs grow out of the more undifferentiated human organism in the human germ during the embryonic period. We have no living thinking in ordinary life, and all our thinking bears this imprint for common science as well as for ordinary life. But in the moment when one does soul-exercises that inwardly strengthen the thinking, the thinking comes to life, and one arrives at inwardly experiencing the form of a higher animal with these living thoughts, by going into how the higher animal bears the main direction of its organization horizontally, while man bears it vertically, how man frees his arms from the tasks they have in animals. To be able to do this, the human being must develop an inner relationship to that to which he has no relationship in ordinary thinking.

Because, dear honored attendees, in relation to external nature, we often think differently because we get by with dead thinking when we think about human nature, about living nature in general. For example, we look at a magnetized needle that can be rotated around its axis and find that it has a particularly distinct direction that points to the magnetic north pole on the one hand and to the magnetic south pole on the other. This leads us to the idea that the magnetic north-south direction in space has something distinctive about it compared to the other directions. We differentiate space, which would otherwise appear to us without distinction. When one has developed living thinking, the vertical direction can be similarly enlivened, which man acquires by bringing the animal organization, which is oriented in a completely different direction, into the vertical direction. One learns in this way to experience the world, and the whole space comes to life. But this enables one to move from the living thought of the animal organization to the living thought of the human organization. The thought of the human organization itself grows out of the living thought of the animal organization. One sees: by observing the phenomena of the outer world, thinking becomes alive. In the case of the Indian yogi, it only became alive through his coming into a relationship with the spiritual world; he did not enter into such a relationship with the outer world as we need in our process of knowledge.

Developing the ability to bring the world to consciousness as a living thing in this way still does not guarantee that we are dealing with reality. What we develop as living thinking could still be mere fantasy. One must have a criterion for knowing that one is not dealing with mere fantasy, but with something that, by living in our living thinking, also lives outside in the things themselves, so that the thought that I experience as living represents that which lives outside in the beings of nature itself. This characteristic arises for the one who, in the way I have presented it in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in my “Occult Science” or in other books, walks the path of knowledge to the living thought. The reality of the living thought presents itself to him simply by the fact that, when he has it, he experiences a mental pain, a suffering, in cherishing and experiencing this living thought with every step he takes inwardly in life. Yes, real higher knowledge cannot be attained without mental pain, without mental suffering. And what does this suffering, this pain, indicate?

Well, this pain and suffering is nothing other than what arises from the fact that our whole organism, our whole human being, becomes inwardly sensitive through and through, as otherwise only the senses are sensitive. We are accustomed to the sensitivity of the senses; they no longer cause us pain, even though processes also take place in the senses – for example in the eyes – which, if we had any sensation of pain at all for such processes, would appear to us as processes of pain. We do not have the sensation of pain for these processes. But when our whole organism becomes a total sensory organ through the exercises indicated, then we initially feel this as pain, as inner mental suffering. Therefore, one must say again and again: He who experiences joy, experiences pleasure, can indeed be grateful to life for this joy and this pleasure. Insights in a deeper sense will not come to him through this. Anyone who has acquired a little knowledge knows how much he owes to the suffering and pain that ordinary life has already given him; so that these sufferings and pains have prepared him to now, in inner self-education to living thinking, also to experience the sufferings and pains that precisely this living thinking prepares for man, because he is precisely placed in the outer world. By experiencing reality in suffering, we experience the spiritual world, which we now grasp with living thought, with the same degree of reality with which we experience the sensual world through our senses. In this way we become entirely spiritual sensory organs, if I may use this paradoxical, self-contradictory, but very real expression, and only as a whole human being can we become that. Then we perceive the spiritual world in its reality. Then we know how the living thought is just as much a reality as we know how to distinguish in ordinary life between a piece of hot iron that we really grasp with our fingers and one that we merely imagine in our minds.

Thus, in order to grasp the higher, supersensible world, these two things belong together: that the living thought is experienced in man, and that through inner, soul pain, his whole being is permeated with inner sensitivity. The thought must become alive – the whole human being must become sensitive to those moments in his life when he wants to seek a connection to the spiritual world. We see that as modern people, we remain entirely in the soul realm. We do not turn to the process of strengthening consciousness through regular or irregular breathing. Nor do we turn to the process of paralyzing our bodily functions. We remain entirely in the soul with our exercises, but on another level we develop the same thing that was developed through yoga practice and through asceticism for the vision of the higher world. We develop these higher insights and yet remain human beings who can fully face robust life, who, as neither men of insight nor men of action, do not have to retreat into hermitage. Why is that? We only perform inner soul exercises, but as a result we arrive at the invigorated thought, which the Indian yogi only achieved by letting the stronger current flow into the other of breathing. And on the other hand, purely inwardly, we arrive at the soul, which in a certain way becomes a kind of downgrading of physical processes. But we now have both in hand. We can, for example, keep suffering to the soul alone and we can return to our healthy soul and body state whenever we wake up from sleep. For it must be emphasized again and again that what is important in anthroposophical methods is that we can return from that state, which leads us into the spiritual world, to that state where we stand with both feet on the earth.

But when one has succeeded in enlivening thinking in this way, then one knows that one has something quite different from what the much-mocked natural philosophy once had. Oken and Schelling also came to a living thinking. And anyone who reads Schelling's works today will notice that there is something in them that is not a dead thought, that is a living thought. But what Schelling does not express is what makes his living thinking different from the mere image of such thinking. It is different because of what I have added, which testifies that we have become a sense organ with our whole being: the pains, the sufferings that one recognizes as a necessity when higher knowledge is to arise in man. Therefore, one can say, such knowledge as seems to be present in Schelling gives only a kind of inner soul voluptuousness, while the knowledge I mean is quite serious when the question arises: how can one bear it?

And yet another difference arises between anthroposophical knowledge and Schelling's. When we acquire knowledge through ordinary science or speculative philosophy, we are accustomed to the fact that once we have it, it remains with us, becoming memory images. I would like to say: it is not as easy as that with anthroposophical knowledge of the spirit, because it is a living thing. Once one has gained access to a certain area of the world in the manner indicated, in order to look into the spiritual, No matter how strong the experience and how powerful the vision at a given moment, after a short time it has faded away, like a dream that has gone cold. And if one wants to revive it, one must awaken it again within oneself, for one has just entered the sphere of the living. And just as no one in the sphere of the living can say that what has gone before makes what comes after unnecessary – for example, that if you have eaten once eight days ago, you do not need to eat again after eight days – so it is here too: that the knowledge you have acquired in the spiritual life must be gained again and again. This gives the soul life a certain disposition in relation to the supersensible world: the disposition that the spiritual shows itself to be alive by having to be grasped again and again by the living forces in order to be there for the consciousness. In short, one lives one's way into the supersensible world by experiencing the reality of this spiritual world at the same time, just as one lives one's way into a reality through the senses.

But then, when one has developed this living thinking within oneself, permeated by inner sensitivity and inner capacity for feeling, then one no longer faces the person one is dealing with in the same way as with dead thinking. In dead thinking, the peculiarity is that we have this person before us, we form certain ideas about him, which we then carry within us. But all these ideas do not extend beyond the space enclosed by the person's skin. If, on the other hand, we look at the person with living thinking, then a spiritual person is added to the physical-sensory view of the person, which in turn is structured within itself. We look at the person in their physical form. But this appears to us as enclosed in a spiritual shell, and this spiritual shell points us back to earlier earthly lives. We see how the present life on earth, in which the present form is being lived out, is a repetition of a previous life on earth. And we come to see the person in such a way that we recognize what he experienced in the spiritual world during the time between his previous death and the beginning of his present earthly existence. We look at the spiritual and soul nature of man as it was before descending into the physical world, and see how the activity of the spiritual and soul nature, which does not yet have a body, developed, how it is directed towards penetrating with a full, and now spiritual consciousness, the secrets of the human body. We now realize the profound meaning of the saying, 'Man is a small world'. For this small world is small only in space compared to the great world of the cosmos. It contains not only the secrets of the cosmos. It contains far more than can be seen with ordinary eyes in the cosmos, as we survey the external cosmos with the intellect and direct our gaze into it so that we can recognize it or act in it. Thus the human being, as a spiritual-soul being, lives in a spiritual world before conception, and his gaze is directed to the human organization, to the human being as he is enclosed here with his spiritual-soul being in his skin. That is the world one lives through between death and a new birth, and we look at this world through what - if one may use this expression - we see like a spiritual aura on and through the human being, and what points us to the world he lived through before his earthly existence.

And we look at the other structure through which it is expressed to us how the person acts in front of us. If we observe with our ordinary intellect how one person meets another in life, then we may attribute it to so-called coincidence if we notice that this encounter has a deeper meaning for the person. If we notice that this encounter, perhaps by bringing these two people together, is decisive for their whole life on earth, we may still attribute it only to chance that these two found each other. But if we look at it with strengthened thinking that guarantees reality, then we recognize how the whole life of these two people moved with a certain magic, and that one of them finally came into the other's field of vision because the other was sympathetic to him. It becomes a certainty, as sensitive people say to themselves when they reach a certain age, as Goethe's friend Knebel put it, for example: When I look back on my life, it seems to me as if I had wanted it out of unconscious, inner desires. It turns out that what wants to come out in a person's destiny binds us together in our inner being with the being of the other.

This is where we come to what the ancient ascetics, the yoga people, called karma, how destiny develops in connection with successive earthly lives. Today, this still seems paradoxical to many people. But anyone who takes seriously the question of how the reality of living thinking can be substantiated will, after all, form a conception of the connection between human destiny and that which one develops as higher, supersensible powers of knowledge. Just as one can say that what lives in the world of colors is unknown to the blindborn, but that the world of colors must not be denied because of this, so for higher knowledge the connection between human destiny and repeated earthly lives does not appear to contradict human freedom. When one considers human freedom, it might appear that it has nothing to do with such a view of karma and repeated earthly lives. But it is not so. For example, I am not unfree because I build a house this year and move into it the next year. But I am no more unfree because I develop certain powers in me and that these then seek their ways in earthly life. It remains, as with the construction of a house, still the freedom of the human being. But through such an insight, one sees how what human action is is the second link in the human aura. And through this one gains an insight into that part of us that works incessantly as the human being is active in the physical world. Not only the ordinary powers of perception live in it, but also that which the human being can otherwise feel in relation to his digestion, for example. In this way, man now sees what he experiences from day to day, what enriches his life, through which he becomes greater and greater – in the spiritual sense this is now meant, of course – and what then goes into the spiritual world through death: He sees the mystery of death.

This is the anthroposophical path to the spiritual world. And this path also explains why those who do not want to go it now condemn it, as we see today. They have an unconscious fear of what must one day be overcome in a higher realization, of suffering, of what brings human functions to a certain calm, but a calm that is under an inner domination. They therefore prefer to see visions and so forth arising from a down-tuned corporeality, as in the medium, but which have no cognitive value. While a cognitive value arises from not experiencing what is worked through the outer corporeality, but what is experienced from the inner soul, but as a certain suffering, which guarantees the certainty of the supersensible world.

And since the path to the supersensible world is sought in this way, its results must also be communicated in such a way that the whole presentation is an expression of the seriousness that must be shown by those who want to go up the path into the spiritual world and from there want to bring knowledge about this spiritual world to other people. The idea must take hold among people today that the messages about the spiritual world can be proclaimed by those who walk this path, and that the secret of birth and death can be revealed through it. People must be able to arise who seek knowledge of the spiritual world, not only of the natural world in natural science. And just as one does not have to be a painter to feel the beauty of a natural phenomenon, one does not have to be a spiritual researcher to feel the value of what the spiritual researcher has to say about the supersensible world. Only when a relationship has developed in which the spiritual world can be understood in a similar way to how one can understand works of art, even if one is not an artist, only then will the right relationship exist between the spiritual researcher and the non-spiritual researcher, just as the right relationship already exists today between astronomer and non-astronomer.

And spiritual science will establish the right relationship between the spiritual researcher and those who want to take up spiritual research. And since this relationship is directed towards truth, truth must also be felt if people allow their sense of truth and common sense to prevail, which is also the aim of the spiritual researcher's messages. But then, when such a relationship exists between spiritual research and this life, as I have just described, then that which can bring the spiritual impulses of this spiritual science into a real life practice will stand up for life. What do we have from the spiritual world today? We have thoughts from the spiritual world, we live in thoughts and ideas, but as I have characterized them, they are actually dead. But if one is able to infuse anthroposophical spiritual science into these ideas, then it gives life to these thoughts and ideas. As a result, the people who are able to understand these anthroposophical thoughts are themselves inwardly spiritually enlivened.

Do we have spirit in our present culture? We may say: we have spirit in the sense that we have developed beautiful, great thoughts from the spirit. But in these thoughts the living spirit is not present. Anthroposophy does not want to develop thoughts about the spirit, but to pour the living thought itself into people as spiritual blood, so that they are permeated with spiritual blood in their spiritual nature just as they are permeated with physical blood in their physical nature. Then, however, we will succeed in permeating our whole life with spirit again, but not just with thoughts and abstractions from spirit, but with living ideas of this spirit. Then, however, the great questions of life, especially the social questions, will be solved in a completely different way when we can say: We not only have thoughts of the spiritual, but the spiritual world itself walks among us. It is there where we ourselves are as physical human beings. But because we — each of us in our physical body — carry a spiritual being within us, we are companions of spiritual beings that walk among us. We will relate to the world quite differently, and the great riddles of the present and the near future will present themselves to us in a completely different way when we stop having only dead spirit in our thoughts, but when we can say again: We humans are not alone on earth, we do not just harbor thoughts of a spirit in us, which, as thoughts, are unproven and lead on the one hand to superstition and on the other to doubt. For out of certainty we can say: We are not alone on earth, spiritual beings are among us, are connected with us, spiritual beings take care of the course of the world with us, and we take care of the course of the world when we enter into a relationship with them!

Thus, anthroposophy does not seek the spirit, which often proves to be a dead thing in life and can only give us a gloomy picture of the future. Rather, anthroposophy turns to the living spirit, so that people may not only have ideas about the spirit, but may have the living spirit walking among them!