The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The chairman, Mr. Roser, opens the meeting.

Introductory words

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees! I will keep this short today as well and hope that you will make active use of the discussion, so that we might be able to discuss one or two details today. As events are increasingly pushing for a reorganization of the social order, it would not be good if the efforts that are intended to bring about such a reorganization, such as the establishment of works councils, were to be completely abandoned. Because, my dear attendees, there are people who would be quite happy if the works council movement were to die out. All the more reason for us to make an effort not to let it fall asleep. At the last meeting, I spoke about the threefold social order and its connection to the works council question. Today, I would like to say a few words about how an understanding of the works council system can be brought about with regard to the threefold social order.

You know that we initially want to create works councils simply from the individual companies. We want works councils to be elected from the individual companies that are simply there and then form a works council for an initially self-contained economic area, say Württemberg. In a general assembly of this council of works councils, everything would then be determined that concerns the tasks, competencies, etc. of the works councils. In this way, economic measures would arise for the first time independently of the other two institutions, i.e., intellectual life and state or legal life, from the personalities involved in economic life. These measures would first be decided upon in the general assembly of the council of works councils. Only then would the tasks arise. Then the individual works councils elected in the companies would return to their companies and take on their tasks there. At the same time, the demands that can only be made for general socialization would then also be on the table. If there were real unanimity - because power lies in that unanimity - any government, whatever it might be, would have to comply. I believe that some people already have a clear sense of what it would mean if these works councils were elected in all companies and formed a general assembly across a unified economic area, and if this general assembly in turn were to adopt resolutions that were then supported by the confidence of the entire workforce in this economic area. That would be real power, because no government, no legislative body, can in the long run contradict a power that is based on its own judgment and on unanimity and trust. In this way, one can think of a very concrete path. But at the same time, this would be the first step towards real socialization, a socialization that can only emerge from the provisions and measures of the people who are managing the economy themselves. Perhaps only when the decisions of such a works council are in place will we know what socialization actually means.

Now, however, it must also be clear that the election of the works councils must be handled very sensibly, because this works council will have to take completely new economic measures in many respects and set completely new impulses. I have often said, when speaking about these things in connection with the threefold social order, that what we need most of all at the present time is a real change of thinking. And I imagine that precisely at the moment when, for the first time within a closed economic area, the primary assembly, supported by the confidence of the entire working class, unanimously takes such an economic measure, a change of thinking, a re-learning, could come about. But we must realize how much of today's economic thinking needs to be revised. Therefore, in order for you to be able to orient yourselves regarding the difficult tasks of the works councils, I would like to describe an example of the old way of thinking.

You see, this old thinking is not just a collection of thoughts, but it is the expression of the economic order that has existed so far and that has come to an end as a result of the world war catastrophe. But what people thought still extends into more recent times, and that is what must be thoroughly removed from people's minds. I would now like to give a characteristic example of this. An essay has just been published by a very famous teacher of political economy of the old regime, that is, by a man whose ideas reflect much of what the old regime, what the so-called private capital regime that must be overcome, has produced. I would like to cite what is said by Professor Dr. Lujo Brentano as an example of what prevails in the old regime. These thoughts of Brentano's refer to the entrepreneur of the old regime, and he is making a sincere effort, as far as he is able, to form a concept of what the private entrepreneur actually is. You can see from Brentano's closing words that he does not at all regard this private entrepreneur as a superfluous element of the future economic order. He says:

"Many today believe that private enterprise is coming to an end. They see the absorption of all private enterprise into a single, large-scale enterprise by the banks, which control so many large-scale enterprises, as the beginning of the absorption of all private enterprise into a single, large-scale enterprise, and in this the transition of all enterprises into state-owned enterprises. We are only at the beginning of a development that opens up private enterprise to hitherto untouched parts of the world, and experience to date has shown that the various nations emerge as winners in the competition for this development, the less they leave to the state and the more they leave to private initiative. The more the national economy of the individual nations becomes a world economy, the greater the scope for private enterprise, and the greater its future. It will not only solve its task all the more successfully, but also all the more consistently and thus all the more advantageously for itself, the more unreservedly it recognizes one of the fundamental principles of today's economic order, personal freedom, also in the shaping of the employment relationship and the more she seeks to earn money by working, not by increasing the value of the means of production at the expense of the needs of the products they are intended to serve, but by satisfying those needs as fully as possible while using the means of production as economically as possible. As long as she is guided by this principle, there is no end in sight to her success.

So you see, a true representative of the old economic order says here that private enterprise is not only not at an end, but that it is only now really beginning to flourish, because without it the economic order that is to develop in the future would not be possible at all. We are therefore dealing with an opinion that still dominates many circles today, namely that the abolition of private enterprise is out of the question because it has a future. Therefore, if one approaches the question of the replacement of the old entrepreneurial system by the works councils seriously and not merely in an agitative way, one must deal a little with the thoughts that are haunting people's minds. You have to be prepared, so to speak, you have to know what people are thinking and what they will say when it comes to arguments between the representatives of the past and the representatives of the future, that is, those who want to stand up for the works councils.

Now you see, the concept of the entrepreneur is what this economics teacher wants to clarify for himself and present to people. He asks himself the question: What is an entrepreneur? Yes, he now gives three characteristics of the right entrepreneur. First, “that he combines in his hand the right of disposal over the production elements necessary for the manufacture of a product.” But first of all, it must be made clear what this gentleman actually means by “production elements”. What he understands by this is made perfectly clear in one of his sentences. He does not even make this sentence up himself, but borrows it from Emil Kirdorff, one of the most successful men in practice to date. He says: “We directors of joint-stock companies are also employees of the company and have duties and responsibilities towards it.” And now Mr. Brentano has discovered that directors like Privy Councillor Emil Kirdorff are also among the “production elements,” that is, the entrepreneur must have the right of disposal over the “production elements,” which also includes directors. The entire workforce, right up to the directors, are all “production elements.” First, then, an entrepreneur is the one who has the right of disposal over the “production elements”; these also include the directors. And a man like Kirdorff sees quite well that he is actually not a human being, but a “production element” in economic life. You have to realize what kind of ideas are in people's heads. That is why I have repeatedly emphasized that it is necessary to rethink and relearn. So that was the first quality of a real entrepreneur.

The second is that “he gives these production elements the purpose of serving a specific production purpose and disposes of them accordingly.” Here one has to bear in mind that all people in production are meant; so he must give them a purpose. That is the second quality.

The third is that “he does this at his own risk and expense.” So now we have all three characteristics of a true entrepreneur in the sense of the old regime, that is, the entrepreneur who, in the sense of the old regime, must continue to exist in order to maintain the future economic order and who should have an even greater significance there than he has had so far.

You see, if you are not wearing professors' or entrepreneurs' or other blinkers, then you have to admit that people with these three qualities will not tolerate the facts that are now to be created in Europe because after all, we have come so far in our consciousness that the future cannot depend on a small number of entrepreneurs who determine the 'productive elements' of the far greater number of people, that is, the masses. But that is exactly what is required. Now, however, let us follow the train of thought of this representative of the old regime a little further. It is actually extremely interesting. You will probably think I am making a joke, but the following is really in this essay; I am not joking. After initially presenting the vast majority of workers as “production elements,” Brentano strangely includes the workers, the proletarians, among the entrepreneurs! He says: “If the worker is not the producer of a consumer-ready product, he is nonetheless the producer of an independent good that he brings to market at his own risk and expense. He too is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of labor services.”

So you see, my dear audience, we now have the concept of the entrepreneur before us, as presented by a contemporary economic luminary. This concept of the entrepreneur is so confused, indeed it is just that you are all entrepreneurs as you sit here, namely entrepreneurs of your labor, which you bring to market at your own risk and expense. Yes, and now there is something else. Brentano says that the evil of which people are always talking does not exist at all, since everyone is an entrepreneur. Therefore, he had to find out what it actually is that makes the great masses of people not satisfied with being entrepreneurs at their own risk and expense through their labor. He says: “Once upon a time, the worker was not that, a time when he was absorbed in the business in which he was employed. He was not yet an independent economic unit, but nothing but a cog in the economic enterprise of his master. That was the time of the worker's personal bondage. The master's interest in the progress of his own economy then led him to awaken an interest in his performance in the worker he employed. This brought about the gradual emancipation of the worker, and finally his complete declaration of freedom.” That's nice, except that the damage lies in the following. There is another nice sentence, which reads: “But the capitalist entrepreneur has not yet found his way into this transformation from a gentleman into a mere labor buyer.” So the only harm is that the entrepreneur has not yet found his way into this role, that is, no longer being a gentleman in the old sense, but a buyer of labor. With that, Brentano is actually saying the following: If the worker sells his labor to the entrepreneur for his own account and risk, then everything is in order. It is only necessary for the entrepreneur to learn to understand what it means to be a buyer of labor. It is only because he does not yet understand that there is still damage. So it is only necessary to hammer it into the entrepreneur: you just have to learn to understand how to buy labor on the labor market that the worker sells to you as an entrepreneur of his labor.

Yes, it is of course a strange testimony that the gentleman gives to the entrepreneurs. The proletariat is now at the point of saying that it is above all important that labor should no longer be a commodity. But this gentleman gives the entrepreneurs the testimony that they have not even risen to the realization that they are buyers of labor. So this star of political economy thinks that today's entrepreneurship is very backward.

But what does all this actually mean? You see, you just have to face the full gravity of this fact. Lujo Brentano is one of the most famous economists of the present day, and one of those who have perhaps put the most ideas into the heads of those who speak as intellectuals about economic life. Yes, we have to look at things clearly today. Today, we often indulge in a belief in authority that is much, much worse than the Catholics' belief in authority towards the princes of the church ever was. People just don't want to admit that. That is why we have to be clear about things, and we have to learn from such things what a great task this works council will have. Above all, it will have to show what economic life really is, because what has emerged from the circles of the intelligentsia as a result of reflecting on economic life was, after all, just cabbage. But what is this cabbage? Let us just look at it in terms of its reality. Why is this cabbage there? People haven't even thought it up. If they had thought it up, they would have come up with something even bigger. They did not even think it up, but simply studied the conditions as they are now, and these conditions are confused, they are a chaos. Very gradually, this thoughtlessness of supply and demand in all areas of economic life has led to chaos. The first act of real socialization must be to start to shape it from scratch. We need, I would say, this sense of the seriousness of what the works council is supposed to be. And I would like to speak of this seriousness again and again and again, because in some circles of the proletariat, too, there is so little of this seriousness and awareness of the magnitude of the task.

You see, when one speaks of the threefold social order today, what is one speaking of? We are speaking of what must be done to satisfy the demands of the proletariat, which have been around for decades. But what do we get in return? Yes, there is another article in the Tribüne. It is entitled “Dr. Steiner and the Proletariat”. It says, for example, that the threefold social order is only concerned with ideas and that there are already enough ideas floating around in the air at present. That is what I would call a careless assertion. Then this gentleman should just point out the ideas that are now swarming through the air in such masses. He should just prove the existence of one fruitful idea! It is precisely the lack of ideas that plagues the present day. That is the case, and here it is carelessly asserted that ideas are just swarming around in the air. And then they say: “What helps the worker - I am speaking only of the physically laboring - to improve his life is not sophistry, but an energetic realization of socialism.” But what is the realization of socialism? You see, if you just keep saying socialism, socialism, then you have a phrase, a word! But you have to show the way! When someone says: What helps the worker to improve his life is socialism —– then it seems to me as if someone were to say: I want to go to Tübingen —– and I say to him: Well, you can take the train, there are trains at such and such times. — I tell him exactly how to get to Tübingen, just as the path to the threefold social organism indicates exactly how to achieve socialization. He says: It is sophistry that you give me the minutes of the trains; I say to you, if I want to come to Tübingen, then I only come by moving over to Tübingen. — So roughly one can say: I do not want a certain, concrete, individually characterized way, but I want socialism. — I want to come to Tübingen by moving over.

Now, the article continues: “Every individual who is concerned about public life will very often have to deal with political and economic issues together in one sentence.” Yes, but this happens because everything has been mixed up. But it must be separated. Then it says: “Therefore, no ‘threefold social order’, but the realization of socialism!” So again: I want to come to Tübingen by moving across.

Yes, we must face the fact that there are obstacles to such a real marking out of the way, as we are trying to do in relation to the now often discussed question of works councils, based on the ideas of the threefold social organism. What really hinders us from marking out the way is that people are always willing to be deceived. But you will achieve nothing by being deceived, however beautifully it may be spun, unless you take definite action, as in the case I mentioned at the beginning of my talk. Let us elect members to the factory councils who are there as human beings and not as ideas whizzing through the air! These people can then decide, on the basis of their economic experience, what is necessary for the recovery of our economic life. Today it is necessary for us to go beyond mere talk and gain insights into economic life and to penetrate from these insights to further development. That we cannot rely on the luminaries, on the authorities, I have shown you today. I have presented one of the most famous to you on the basis of his latest statements. I presented him in such a way that you could see the value of what the followers of tradition say: Yes, the famous Mr. So-and-so said that, you can't counter that with anything else. Of course, if you always point out what this or that person has said about current events, you still don't know what the facts are, even if this or that person is famous. But if you look at things where concepts are in confusion, where concepts are falling apart, then it becomes clear that we have to rethink and relearn in the present. And so I would like to say again and again: if not through something else, then surely the necessity will bring about this rethinking and relearning. Even those who still resist today will have to change their minds, because many things will still happen in this poor Central Europe in the coming years and decades, and many things will have to happen if, for example, one third of the population of Central Europe can no longer be fed, if the old conditions persist in the form they still have as a result of this terrible Treaty of Versailles, the so-called peace. A third of the population of Central Europe would have to die out or be killed if the old conditions were to be maintained.

The reason for the reorganization today is, of course, that the old conditions cannot continue at all. But the fact that the imminent prospect is the death or extermination of one-third of the population of Central Europe should convince people today that they can no longer remain in their old, complacent position and say: We are practical people, such ideas are just ideas, you can't get involved in them! — No, people are just too lazy to get involved in something really practical. Today, this practicality must be comprehensive, must not be limited to just one or two areas, but must embrace the whole economic sphere. And if we do not want to abandon this complacency of thought in the face of circumstances, we will not make any progress. Now, with these words I wanted to point out to you how we must move forward, and now we can enter into the discussion.

Discussion

Mr. Roser: From Dr. Steiner's comments on Brentano's article, one can clearly see where the course is headed. It is now up to us to show that the proletariat does not remain at the point of view, as the luminaries of the economy imagine, but that it takes its fate into its own hands. Our first duty is to promote socialization by setting up workers' councils in line with the threefold social order, otherwise we are heading for chaos on a scale that we cannot even imagine. We must make the economic sphere independent by its own efforts. This does not mean that it must be done by force; that is not necessary. Especially Dr. Steiner's proposals, especially the idea of making economic life independent in the sense of threefold social order, must be the way for us to work in practice in the first place. There can be no doubt about it: If the works councils are properly elected by popular vote, with perhaps a thousand members in Württemberg, do you think that the government would have the means or the courage to break up these works councils? — I find that hard to believe, because the workers who elected these works councils to do practical work will also provide the necessary support for the works council to be able to function. We must uphold the idea of setting up works councils at all costs, because that is the only way out of chaos that can lead us to the establishment of the works councils and the works councilors, and then actually to a legislative body riding together to carry out the socialization in the sense of the tripartite division. Only in this way can we be saved from destruction. The idea of threefolding is so great, so powerful, that every single person should grasp it, out of their own interest, because as a proletarian they must say to themselves: my future is at stake, I have a duty to do everything I can to push this idea through. With this in mind, I ask you to join the discussion. Speak up.

Emil Leinhas: Dr. Steiner has presented you with an article by a luminary of political economy today. As it happens, I also have something with me in which a luminary of practice expresses his views on socialization. It is the Privy Councillor Deutsch, the chairman of the board of directors of the General Electricity Company. The fact that this statement by this great practitioner on the socialization is considered desirable for the broader public is evidenced by the fact that the venerable Berlin Chamber of Commerce is publishing this memorandum, with the following introduction. The Chamber of Commerce writes:

“In connection with the investigations we are conducting into the probable effects of socialization under the law of March 23, 1919, we have received from our member, Privy Councillor Deutsch, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the General Electricity Company, and explanations of the ratio of the share of labor and capital in the profits of a larger number of industrial enterprises, which we hereby submit to the public as a contribution to the assessment of these issues."

The Chamber of Commerce is providing additional copies of the memorandum to those who wish to help by distributing it. And what does this luminary of practice say about socialization? I will read you a few passages; they speak for themselves:

"Why is it that the word ‘socialization’ has taken root in millions of brains with an ineradicable tenacity and why do workers in particular see it as a panacea that would put an end to all their ailments and dissatisfaction with their economic situation in one fell swoop? This dissatisfaction and the hostility of the workers towards the capitalist system of production are constantly fueled by the provocative idea that a small number of capitalists take up by far the largest share of the profits from industrial labor, while the working class has to be content with a small share. This idea is as false as it is provocative, and as long as we do not succeed in convincing the workers of this, a beneficial and peaceful collaboration between the two factors of economic production is impossible in the long run.

[E. Leinhas then continues to speak about Deutsch's remarks. Since he himself announced that more details would soon be published in print, his further remarks were no longer written down.] Mr. Stecher reports on the Haushahn company: We have often discussed the question of threefolding among our colleagues at work. I was able to ascertain that on this question the entire workforce, with the exception of those who only do propaganda for party purposes, are sympathetic to the matter. This morning, at the invitation of the “Bund”, I contacted our company regarding the works councils as chairman of the workers' committee with the employees' committee. The chairman of the employees' committee explained to me that he also sympathized with the matter, but then he said: “The good should come from the government after all.” A few days ago, Dr. Steiner gave a lecture in Weil that made a tremendous, deep and unforgettable impression. People flocked there from far and wide. I call upon the workers' and employees' committees present to join together and discuss the matter of threefolding everywhere they have influence. They can request speakers from the Federation for Threefolding to promote the cause. The speakers will find willing ears and willing hearts among the workers. Business circles are also taking an interest. A manager in our company told me that he is also looking into the matter, because it is known that if things continue as they are, we will face bankruptcy. Something new must come. Unfortunately, the employees are not yet interested in the burning issues. But if we do not gather and work together, we will not make any progress.

Mr. Conradt: The Federation for Threefolding is often accused of wanting to break up the parties, similar to the syndicalists. That cannot be the intention of the federation. I have heard the accusation dozens of times. Particularly when one professes the idea of threefolding, one can easily see what is fruitful in the parties and that something is alive in the parties that only intervenes in our national life in a supportive way when the impulses living in the parties are not carried out one-sidedly. There are, of course, currents in the parties that belong to an ascending culture and currents that belong to a descending culture. The good must be brought to life in the right way.

[The stenographer did not transcribe Mr. Conradt's further remarks word for word. A brief summary is given below: “Mr. Conradt then goes on to say that in the threefold social order, social measures can only be taken in the economic sphere, that democracy belongs only in the life of the state or of the law, but that in the sphere of spiritual and cultural life one can speak of anarchism if one divests the word of its evil meaning."

It is also reported that a new works council has been formed in the Faber company and that the following motion has been put forward by the workers' committee of the Julius Faber company:]

"Today's meeting of the employee and worker committees requests the previously elected works councils to form a works council in the near future, and instructs this provisional works council to take all preparatory measures it deems necessary to propagate the idea of a works council everywhere and to give the works councils the influence they deserve. Signed Glatz, Chairman of the Works Council and Chairman of the Workers' Committee at Julius Faber.

Mr. Glatz: The motion put forward by our workers' committee and which has just been presented to you speaks for itself. We have now been together in a number of meetings without actually achieving any practical result. As things stand now, we have every reason to work as quickly and intensively as possible to achieve what we are all striving for in practical terms for the working class and for humanity as a whole. We must not allow interest to wane instead of increasing. First and foremost, it will of course be necessary to encourage the establishment of works councils in companies where they do not yet exist. Furthermore, the agitation must also be taken to the countryside.

The principal of our company has himself drawn our attention to the lectures by Dr. Steiner. The gentleman has very liberal views and plays a role in business circles. After we had concerned ourselves with the matter of the threefold order and were striving for the works council election, he then took the opposite point of view and said: The employers had decided to wait with the works councils until the matter was regulated by law. He could not recognize us as a works council. Nevertheless, we went ahead with the election. The decision was unanimous; the employees also joined. The election was held with great enthusiasm in the factory itself. It is gratifying to note that almost all employees and workers exercised their right to vote, despite the company's resistance. Even if the company does not recognize the works councils, they have still been elected. And since the works councils also belong to the workers' committee for the most part, they must still be heard.

I would therefore ask you to support the motion so that the matter can be properly addressed.

Mr. Roser: I would like to announce that twelve works councils have been elected so far. I would also like to express the wish that the works council be formed during the course of this week or at the beginning of next week. Of course, we don't just need works councils in Stuttgart, but the idea must be spread throughout Württemberg. I would therefore like to make a special appeal to those present to show even more interest in the idea of works councils than they have done so far. Furthermore, I can report that new works councils are in the process of being formed. We will notify the individual works councils next week when they are to meet. Then they can make the necessary decisions among themselves.

Mr. Jansen: I would like to present you with a document that deserves to be made public. I won't mention the company's name; that has nothing to do with the matter at hand. I just want to characterize the overall train of thought:

“The undersigned officials have not officially declared, either in writing or orally, that they have been elected by the staff as works council members. As has already been said, our position on this matter is as follows: firstly, the election by the workers has been challenged and this challenge has been upheld by the management through a corresponding announcement. Accordingly, the validity of the election is in doubt. Secondly, according to a paper by Dr. Steiner, only those persons can be considered as works council members who are in a completely independent position, dependent neither on the boss nor on the business. Since this is not the case with us and we civil servants are in a distinctly dependent position, our election is also questionable. Thirdly, according to a gentleman, socialization at the... has already taken place, in that all surpluses after payment of the guaranteed interest of five percent are transferred in full to the municipality and thus to the general public. From this point of view, the supervisory board has rejected a works council. Efforts are being made to ensure that a joint meeting of all committees is held to discuss the works council issue. Fourthly, we take the view that works councils should be elected if the law requires it. We know that Dr. Steiner plans to socialize companies in such a way that the employer, the management and the supervisory boards and all shareholders are to be eliminated and that the so-called works council or all employees are to take their place. Since this amounts to an overthrow of the existing order and the existing laws, we hereby declare that we do not support such efforts and therefore cannot accept election as works council members.

This is truly a document of world-historical significance! Here are people who, thanks to the revolution, have finally escaped from dependency after half a year, and they declare: We are not allowed to participate because we don't want to get rid of capitalism, because we are, after all, in the service of capitalism. They have an interest in keeping the sacred capitalism alive and in being the employees who want to help support this idol so that the golden calf does not fall over. The logic in this document is a sign that there is still a huge amount of work to be done to hammer out the stupidity. To do this, the iron fist of the proletariat will be needed to carry out this work. However, I will seek a connection with these instances and try to find out to what extent the document corresponds to the facts and to what extent the gentlemen are revolting against any economic reconstruction.

Rudolf Steiner: Regarding this document, which is very interesting, I would like to make the comment that there are, after all, employees at present who are able to develop the following idea: the law on works councils is not yet a law, but only a draft. So there is no law on works councils yet. But, according to the four sentences, the gentlemen take the view that it is not just a matter of an overthrow – that could be discussed, but we do not need that – of the existing order and laws if one finds some existing law bad , but the gentlemen take the view that it is already an unlawful subversion if one violates any law that is not yet there, that they do not yet know, or a law that could come out, today. So, the gentlemen undertake to assure all laws that may be imposed on them of their obedience from the outset.

Mr. Nagel, Dresden: Anyone who has followed Dr. Steiner's comments on Brentano's essay no longer finds it incomprehensible that the government can approach us with a bill like the one on works councils. We cannot be concerned with getting works councils like that; instead, we have to get our hands on economic power. Unfortunately, the movement is still very small here in Dresden, but it is well known that Dresden has been fifty years behind the times. However, I hope that after studying the conditions here, I will be able to give enough impetus in my report back home to enable fruitful work to be done there as well. It was very encouraging for me to see that so many workers in Stuttgart already support the threefold social order.

Mr. Dorfner: As much as we have heard that is encouraging, I do miss one thing: I am often asked about this and that regarding the threefold social order and works councils. I always say: come to the discussion evenings, where you can ask questions that Dr. Steiner himself will answer. But hardly any questions are asked here. Those who do not like to do so orally can of course do so in writing. - I have also been asked the question: Won't the works councils make the workers' committees superfluous? - I would like to ask Dr. Steiner to answer this question.

Rudolf Steiner: The workers' committees have their tasks primarily in the individual companies. But the point of setting up works councils is to tackle real socialization. If the works councils are elected now and then come together as a works council, then this original assembly of the works council can take the first steps towards real socialization. Then the workers' committees, if they are to continue to exist, will presumably be able to receive a task for the individual companies, or, which is much more likely, the workers' committees will no longer be needed as such, but the works council will take their place. However, the works council may have to co-opt personalities from the current workers' committees for its further work, since it will not have enough people available to carry out the tasks currently performed by the workers' committees if it only has seven or eight members.

These specific questions will only be fully answered when we have a complete works council. The workers' committees were originally set up differently from the works councils. The works councils are intended to be the real leaders of the companies. A real works council would either have the current entrepreneur, if he agrees, as a works councilor, as well as people from the ranks of the employees, the intellectual workers, and the physical workers, or the entrepreneur would have to withdraw. It must be made perfectly clear that the works council is intended to be the real director of the factory, so that all entrepreneurship in the modern sense disappears alongside this works council. The workers' committee, however, is still intended to reflect the old form of entrepreneurship. I ask you to consider this difference carefully, that is, the difference between something that still exists from the old order, such as the workers' committee, and what should now form the first step towards a real reorganization. You must consider this difference, otherwise you will not be able to think about the tasks of the works councils in a truly comprehensive way.

Furthermore, it should be borne in mind that the question of the continued existence or reorganization of the workers' committees can only be answered when we have the founding assembly of the works council.

Then there is the question of how things should be organized with regard to the works council in a state-owned enterprise. In this regard, I must say – and this has already been mentioned – that there should be no difference in the election of works councils between a private or state-owned company. In a state-owned company, too, an attempt should be made to overcome all prejudices and to elect works councils, so that these works councils will then also have their place in the works council when the so-called statute of the works council is being drafted. Then it will follow that the state's usual absorption of such enterprises will naturally not continue. These enterprises will have to be transformed into independent economic organisms. But this demand will first have to be formulated.

You see, the things that underlie the impulse for threefolding are indeed intended as practical demands, but they must first be formulated. They have to be put forward by an individual in his book, and also by a “union” advocating them; but that is not enough. On the economic plane, these demands must be put forward by the economic actors themselves, and they must have the confidence of the entire working population behind them.

Furthermore, the question has been raised as to how the socialization of the state railways and the postal and telegraph systems can be carried out from the point of view of threefolding. Of course, people today still have great prejudices in this regard, and it can be readily admitted that the upheaval would be very great indeed if these economic enterprises were also to be transferred from the present state to the administration of an independent economic body. But this must be done, because postal and telegraph services, like the railways, are an integral part of economic life and can only develop properly in economic life if that economic life is independent of state or legal life. |

The fact that it is difficult to imagine these things today is due to the following. We have become accustomed to thinking of things as they have always been. We say, “These are facts.” But, my dear audience, facts are things that have been created, created by people, and they can just as easily be re-created, changed. That is what we must bear in mind. It is absolutely essential that everything that belongs to economic life is also really placed on its own free economic ground. The reason why these things are so difficult to imagine today is that today money, which in any case is no longer really money in a large number of European states, is actually based on a very false foundation. Naturally the transition will be difficult because through money humanity is dependent on England as the leading commercial state and because we cannot simply dissuade the English and Americans from the gold standard overnight. In foreign trade with these states, we must of course have the gold standard until, under the pressure of circumstances, the gold standard will also cease. But for the threefold social organism, the aim must be that the state no longer lends value to money, but that money acquires its value within the economic organism. But then money is no longer a commodity, as it is today. Even if it is hidden, today money is in fact a commodity, and only because the state attributes its value to it. But in the threefold social organism, money will only be present as a means of circulation in the sense that it is, so to speak, a flying bookkeeping. You know from what I said eight days ago: everything in the coming economic life will be based on real performance and counter-performance. For the performance, one gets, so to speak, the note, which means nothing other than: on the general credit side, what corresponds to my performance is available to me and I can exchange it for what corresponds to my needs. If I give the note, it means the same as if I were to enter in a small business today what is on the left side to balance what is on the right side. So monetary transactions will be the flying bookkeeping for the economic organism. Such things are actually already in existence today in their beginnings. You know that there is already a kind of credit entry, that is, credit balances that can be transferred without having monetary transactions in certain areas. In fact, most of what the threefold social organism demands is already there in germinal form and present here and there. Those people who today speak of the impracticality of the threefold social organism should see how, here and there – albeit on a small scale, so that it is sometimes not useful but harmful – how, here and there, what exists in combination and stylized on a large scale will give the threefold social organism. Today, the state railways are almost conceived as a state piece of furniture, and one thinks of the upheaval as something terrible. But one must only consider that what matters in the future, namely the administration of economic life by works councils, by transport and economic councils – they are added on top of that – that these changes are entirely related to a real socialization and that all the fears are superfluous. It is therefore important, for example, that the railways are managed in a sensible way and not in such a way that the bureaucratic state is behind them.

If you look at things in detail, you will see that practical solutions can be found everywhere. If people keep coming to me and saying that they do not understand what is in my book, then I must say that I understand that today, because I would have to be very surprised if, for example, Professor Brentano, whom I have told you about, and his students, who are very numerous, would understand the “Key Points of the Social Question”. Because I do not think they can understand the book. But it is precisely these people, whose thoughts have not been corrupted by this education, that I believe can understand what is in the “Key Points” if they just overcome their habitual ways of thinking a little.

Mr. Roser: The individual points that came up this evening were mainly related to the economic field. It is understandable that this economic field is of the greatest importance in our discussion evenings. But in all this, we must not forget that economic life is only one part of that great problem, that great idea of the threefold social order. We must not lose sight of the fact that economic life alone is not viable and cannot function if we do not also look at the legal and spiritual life in an appropriate way. The reason for this is that our present circumstances are so chaotic because the three areas have been mixed up. This must always be our guiding star, that above all we strive to finally separate these three areas. These must then work together again in harmony, but not in the way it is now or has been the case, for example, that the constitutional state claims and abuses economic life or that economic life exploits intellectual life. Only when intellectual life also comes to full bloom, only then can a healthy economic life, indeed a healthy national life, come into being. Only through the threefold order can the whole life of the nation be seen in its true light.

Mr. Lange: He says that the doctor today is degraded to the level of a craftsman because he cannot prescribe medicines and the like freely, but must follow the instructions of the health insurance companies. Here, too, there is an all-round restriction through state laws and state authority. Furthermore, the mistake is made today that one always wants to press the new into the old. But in this way one does not move forward.

Mr. Kühn: The fact that the meeting today is not well attended is not due to a certain lack of interest, but to the fact that a large meeting is taking place at the same time in the Dinkelacker Hall. A lot of detailed work has to be done to establish the works councils. It's a long road. At the individual meetings in the factories, it becomes clear how difficult it is to convince individuals. It should not really depend so much on individuals, but more on the understanding of the masses. Then individual companies will simply be carried along. We have various speakers or lecturers who are constantly available to speak at meetings. From my experience in individual companies, it must be said that factual objections to the threefold social order are almost never heard. The workers almost all agree, only the employees are usually a little more hesitant, as can be seen from the interesting letter that was read out earlier. In many cases, people do not have the right feeling for the matter.

It would be desirable if the works councils elected to date could meet more often, including those from outside. Here, during these discussion evenings, would be such an opportunity to meet, but unfortunately not even all the works councils are here, apart from the fact that those from Esslingen and Heilbronn cannot travel here every time. The various sectors should be represented; an agreement should be reached on this, and I will now read out which sectors and industries are represented: a leather factory, several machine factories, trams, a cigarette factory, a cardboard box factory, a shoe factory, a measuring instrument factory, a state agency, a typesetting machine factory, and an optical instruments factory. I should also mention that the works council in the state-owned company is the only one that was set up with the approval of the superior. As you can see, we have a whole range of different industries. A works council is still being formed in a shoe factory in Kornwestheim, and in four or five engineering works; these are the most prevalent. But there are still some sectors missing, such as the textile, paper and printing industries, which is a shame. The food industry is not represented either. The current works councils are not yet sufficient to do real work. I would therefore like to make the suggestion that the works councils attend these meetings as often as possible or even regularly, and that the workers' and employees' committees, which come here anyway, are all converted into works councils. If you all go to the polls and not just listen to what is being said, you will all soon be works councils, so that we can soon fill this hall with works councils, although I do not mean, of course, that the workers' committees should disappear; they will probably often be part of the works council. If these question and discussion evenings are to be organized in such a way that the details are discussed, for example how this or that business can be transformed, then this is already a certain preparatory work for the later work of the works council. And so these evenings would be interesting.

Rudolf Steiner: There is not much more to say in today's closing remarks either. I will first answer a question that has been asked. This question is: The great mass of the proletariat, still thinking in materialistic terms, expects the activities of the works council to improve its material needs. What measures would have to be taken to quickly and fairly balance needs and wages during the transition period? You see, there are things that cannot be easily achieved from cloud-cuckoo-land. If it were not the case that works councils are absolutely necessary and are finally beginning to do real social work, the proposal to set them up would not be made at all. Therefore, such a view of improving the situation before the works councils start working cannot really be considered very significant. Today, there are many people who come up with strange questions when it comes to asserting the really practical points of view that will now lead humanity to more salutary conditions than we have today. In the last few weeks I have repeatedly experienced people asking: Yes, but now it should be socialized. What will happen to a small shopkeeper on the street after socialization? Or another question: How will the university custodian be socialized if threefolding is to be introduced?

Well, if you listen to these questions, they all actually boil down to one, namely, how do we actually bring about the great upheaval in such a way that not everything remains the same? That is what one type of person asks. The other type of people would like to see a great upheaval, but they do not want to do it that way; they do not want to intervene, they want easier measures. And this tendency underlies our question to some extent. One can only answer: With this other, easier form, even for the transition period, nothing can be achieved. Therefore, it is important that those who want improvement are prepared to take the measures that can bring about that improvement. You cannot ask: How do we bring about improvement in the run-up to the establishment of works councils? — But you have to say: In order to bring about improvement, we want to have works councils as soon as possible. I am even afraid that a miracle would not help here either. So don't rely on miracle cures, but take the practical route; the sooner the better.

Look, this “Tribune” has just come out, and it contains the essay about me and the proletariat that I mentioned earlier. In the same issue, there is another essay by a university professor who refutes the entire threefold social order point by point. It cannot even be said that what he presents this time is not true, but it is true for a very strange reason. You see, the man does not understand anything about the threefold social order. He is not at all in a position to really understand any of the ideas in my book about the key points of the social question. Because he does not understand this, but is still a university professor, he must understand everything. Because he does not understand, he makes up his own threefolding. That is a terrible mess. If you put together everything he describes as a threefolding, it makes a terrible mess, an unworkable, ridiculous, dreadful mess. And that is what he is now refuting. It is terribly easy to refute what he has concocted. But that is what the essay consists of. It contains nothing of what it is actually about. So the man cannot imagine why this independent economic entity should actually exist. I told you the other day: the independent economic entity must exist in the threefold social organism because everything in the field of economic life must arise out of expertise, out of being involved in economic life, out of the experiences of economic life, and because one cannot decide on economic life in the field of general law, where every mature person has to decide on what makes him equal to every other person. It can only be a blessing for economic life if it is decided by experts. Professor Heck cannot imagine this. He cannot imagine anything different from what he has already seen and experienced and in which his habits of thought are rooted. When it comes to such things, I always think of something I heard recently. Someone — I think it was a professor — said to me: I know the aspirations of the threefold social organism. — I asked him: Does any of it make sense to you? — Not so far, he said. You see, that “not so far” was all he could think of. What has not been so far does not seem to be open to discussion; he could not say anything more about it. You just experience things like that. You encounter objections that are not really objections. Not so long ago, someone even raised the objection: Yes, the idea of the threefold social order is, so to speak, based on a moral point of view, and taking a moral point of view is a big mistake. Yes, this objection has also been raised. The objections are all very strange. One of the most common is: Yes, it would be all very well with this threefold social order, but other people are needed for it. You cannot introduce the threefold social order with the present generation of people. Well, the person who says this does not understand that much of what is expressed in the present generation of people is precisely a consequence of our social conditions and that it will be different the moment our social conditions improve.

Well, people never look at things from a truly objective point of view. I will give you a drastic example, which I may have already given here. Was there not a terrible bureaucracy, especially within the civil service in Germany, before this world war? Now, the necessity of not only letting civil servants manage the economy, but also increasingly appointing merchants and industrialists to public offices, so that they could apply their practical wisdom to increasing the war economy, was recognized by the war economy. Then the strange fact arose, which is very interesting. The merchants and industrialists became much more bureaucratic than the bureaucracy had ever been before! So, they have adapted wonderfully to bureaucracy. Anyone who has observed this also knows what it would mean if people were no longer surrounded by unhealthy, i.e. bureaucratic, conditions, but by the kind of conditions that the impulse of the threefold social organism speaks of. In this way, just as industrialists and merchants have been transformed into dyed-in-the-wool bureaucrats within the existing bureaucracy, people would adapt to healthy conditions, and it would no longer be possible to say that one must first have better people in order to establish a better social order. It must be made clear that it is precisely by improving social conditions that people will be given the opportunity to become better people. But if you demand that people must first be better people, then we do not need to improve social conditions at all. If people had not become what they are at present because of social conditions, then social conditions must be good, then they must be all right. You can see from this the necessity of rethinking and relearning. This is what is fundamentally necessary above all else. And if people could only place themselves a little in reality and think from that basis, then we would already be one step further.

You see, a very well-meaning young man writes — one would like to help him so much — he writes: Yes, he cannot help but say that perhaps the threefold social order would be a solution if people were different from what they are now. And now I ask you: Don't you think that this man carries in the depths of his soul the view that the others are not better people, but he, who realizes this, is, at least in terms of his nature, this better person? — If you go to the next person who says the same thing, then he in turn sees himself as the better person and a third probably as well. So everyone should say to themselves: if everyone thought like him – and actually, you have to take into account what other people are like – so if everyone thought like him, then the better people would already be there! You see, it is not a matter of thinking in an abstract, logical way, but of being rooted in reality with one's thinking, so that one does not say something that, as a thought, is constantly doing somersaults. But this is precisely what has such a terrible effect in the present and strikes us, that people continually stumble over their own thoughts, which are actually non-thoughts. Therefore, it must be emphasized again and again that not only is a change in our economic life necessary, but also a change in the spiritual structure of our social life. We have been driven by what has happened so far into a crisis of intellectual life in particular.

If we look at the world today, what strikes us most? Yes, in the last four to five years, what strikes us most is that basically the truth has not been told about any world affairs, but all world affairs have been distorted, presented in a false light, from reports of battles to the goals of nations. From the motives for war to those for peace, everything has been presented in a distorted way. Everywhere, phrases prevail that do not correspond to the facts in the world. But this lives in everything that has developed from the previous cultural and social conditions. This lives on into the individual activities and institutions of human life. Therefore, we must say that all those who view the social question one-sidedly do not have humanity at heart. One is only honest about humanity when one says to oneself: economic life has led people into crisis, so it must be placed on a different footing. The legal sphere has shown that class privileges and class disadvantages prevail in the individual jurisdictions, so it must be placed on the basis of universal human rights. It has become clear that we call something law that which can only be supported by force, and this has continued to this day. And it has become clear that in the spiritual life, people's thoughts are warped. In the three fundamental spheres of life – economic, legal and spiritual – we see humanity in crisis. Those who are sincere about progress must realize that in each of these three areas, progress must be made independently, because the crises result precisely from the intermingling of these three areas. Therefore, I can only say: If you take decisive measures in any particular area, as you are now doing in connection with the works councils, in the sense of a comprehensive social reorganization, that is, in the sense of the threefold social order, then you are acting in the direction of progress for humanity towards a real social order. Consider this connection between an individual measure and the measures based on an overall view. Only then are you doing your duty today towards humanity and towards yourself. Individual measures have no significance today, only what is conceived in the great social context. The smallest must be thought together with the greatest. Be aware of this: if you succeed in really bringing about the works council, then you will have done something of historical significance for all of humanity that follows, because this is connected with the greatest problems that are posed to humanity today. Therefore, do not ask about small steps, but stand on such ground that really forms the basis for moving forward to action, because action is what matters. And if we add deed to deed to what we understand from the threefold social organism, then we will be able to create what gives us hope of emerging from the terrible situation into which the previous spiritual life, the previous so-called legal life and the previous economic life have led us.

Yesterday I tried to show how a more intimate study of man's dream-life can lead us towards the Science of Initiation. To a certain extent, the point of view was that of ordinary consciousness. Today it will be my task to enter more deeply into the same subject-matter from the point of view of ‘imaginative’ cognition—i.e. to present what we were studying yesterday as it appears to one who has learnt to see the world in ‘imaginations’.

For the moment we will neglect the difference between the two kinds of dreams discussed yesterday, and consider dreams as such. It will be a sound approach to describe ‘imaginative’ vision in relation to dreams which a man endowed with imagination may have. Let us compare such a dream with the self-perception attained by the imaginative seer when he looks back upon his own being—when he observes imaginatively his own or another's organs—or, perhaps, the whole human being as a complete organism. You see, the appearance of the dream-world to imaginative consciousness is quite different from its appearance to ordinary consciousness. The same is true of the physical and etheric organism. Now the imaginative seer can dream too; and under certain circumstances his dreams will be just as chaotic as those of other people. From his own experience he can quite well judge the world of dreams; for, side by side with the imaginative life that is inwardly co-ordinated, clear and luminous, the dream-world runs its ordinary course, just as it does side by side with waking life. I have often emphasised that one who attains really spiritual perception does not become a dreamer or enthusiast, living only in the higher worlds and not seeing external reality. People who are ever dreaming in higher worlds, or about them, and do not see external reality, are not initiates; they should be considered from a pathological point of view, at least in the psychological sense of the term. The real knowledge of initiation does not estrange one from ordinary, physical life and its various relationships. On the contrary, it makes one a more painstaking, conscientious observer than without the faculty of seership. Indeed we may say: if a man has no sense of ordinary realities, no interest in ordinary realities, no interest in the details of others' lives, if he is so ‘superior’ that he sails through life without troubling about its details, he shows he is not a genuine seer. A man with imaginative cognition—he may, of course, also have ‘inspired’ and ‘intuitive’ cognition, but at present I am only speaking of ‘imagination’—is quite well acquainted with dream-life from his own experience. Nevertheless, his conception of dreams is different. He feels the dream as something with which he is connected, with which he unites himself much more strongly than is possible through ordinary consciousness. He can take dreams more seriously. Indeed, only imagination justifies us taking our dreams seriously, for it enables us to look, as it were, behind dreaming and apprehend its dramatic course—its tensions, resolutions, catastrophes, and crises—rather than its detailed con-tent. The individual content interests us less, even before we acquire imagination; we are more interested in studying whether the dream leads to a crisis, or to inner joy, to something that we find easy or that proves difficult—and the like.

It is the course of the dream just that which does not interest ordinary consciousness and which I can only call the dramatic quality of the dream—that begins to interest us most. We see behind the scenes of dream-life and, in doing so, become aware that we have before us something related to man's spiritual being in quite a definite way. We see that, in a spiritual sense, the dream is the human being, as the seed is the plant. And in this ‘seed-like’ man we learn to grasp what is really foreign to his present life—just as the seed taken from the plant in the autumn of a given year is foreign to the plant's life of that year and will only be at home in the plant-growth of the following year. It is just this way of studying the dream that gives imaginative consciousness its strongest impressions; for, in our own dreaming being, we detect more and more that we bear within us something that passes over to our next life on earth, germinating between death and a new birth and growing on into our next earthly life. It is the seed of this next earthly life that we learn to feel in the dream.

This is extremely important and is further confirmed by comparing this special experience, which is an intense experience of feeling, with the perception we can have of a physical human being standing before us with his several organs. This perception, too, changes for imaginative consciousness, so that we feel like we do when a fresh, green, blossoming plant we have known begins to fade. When, in imaginative consciousness, we observe the lungs, liver, stomach, and, most of all, the brain as physical organs, we say to ourselves that these, in respect to the physical, are all withering.

Now you will say that it cannot be pleasant to confront, in imaginations, a physical man as a withering being. Well, no one who knows the Science of Initiation will tell you it is only there to offer pleasant truths to men. It has to tell the truth, not please. On the other hand, it must be remembered that, while we learn to know the physical man as a withering being, we perceive in him the spiritual man; in a sense, you cannot see the spiritual man shine forth without learning to know the physical as a decaying, withering being.

Thus man's appearance does not thereby become uglier but more beautiful—and truer, too. And when one is able to perceive the withering of man's organs, which is such a spiritual process, these organs with their etheric content appear as something that has come over from the past—from the last life on earth—and is now withering. In this way we really come to see that the seed of a future life is being formed within the withering process that proceeds from man's being of a former life on earth.

The human head is withering most; and the dream appears to imaginative perception as an emanation of the human head. On the other hand, the metabolic and limb organism appears to imaginative vision to be withering least of all. It appears very similar to the ordinary dream; it is least faded and most closely united, in form and content, with the future of man. The rhythmic organisation contained in the chest is the connecting link between them, holding the balance. It is just to spiritual perception that the human heart appears as a remarkable organ. It, too, is seen to be withering; nevertheless, seen imaginatively, it retains almost its physical form, only beautified and ennobled (I say ‘almost’, not ‘completely’).

There would be a certain amount of truth in painting man's spiritual appearance as follows: a countenance comparatively wise looking, perhaps even somewhat aged; hands and feet small and childlike; wings to indicate remoteness from the earth; and the heart indicated in some form or other reminiscent of the physical organ.

If we can perceive the human being imaginatively, such a picture which we might attempt to paint will not be symbolic in the bad sense that symbolism has today. It will not be empty and insipid, but will contain elements of physical existence while, at the same time, transcending the physical. One might also say, speaking paradoxically (one must begin to speak in paradoxes to some extent when one speaks of the spiritual world, for the spiritual world does really appear quite different from the physical): When we begin to perceive man with imagination we feel in regard to his head: How intensely I must think, if I am to hold my own against this head! Contemplating the human head with imaginative consciousness one gradually comes to feel quite feeble-minded, for with the acutest thoughts acquired in daily life one cannot easily approach this wonderful physical structure of the human head. It is now transformed into something spiritual and its form is still more wonderful as it withers, showing its form so clearly. For the convolutions of the brain actually seem to contain, in a withered form, deep secrets of the world's structure. When we begin to understand the human head we gaze deeply into these cosmic secrets, yet feel ourselves continually baffled in our attempts.

On the other hand, when we try to understand the metabolic and limb system with imaginative consciousness, we say to our-selves: Your keen intellect does not help you here; you ought properly to sleep and dream of man, for man only apprehends this part of his organisation by dreaming of it while awake.

So you see, we must proceed to a highly differentiated mode of perception when we begin to study man's physical organisation imaginatively. We must become clever, terribly clever, when we study his head. We must become dreamers when studying his system of limbs and metabolism. And we must really swing to and fro, as it were, between dreaming and waking if we want to grasp, in imaginative vision, the wonderful structure of man's rhythmic system. But all this appears as the relic of his last life on earth. What he experiences in the waking state is the relic of his last life; this plays into his present life, giving him as much as I ascribed to him yesterday when I said of his life of action, for example, that only as much of man's actions as he can dream of is really done by himself; the rest is done by the gods in and through him. The present is active to this extent; all the rest comes from his former earthly lives. We see that this is so when we have a man before us and perceive his withering physical organisation. And if we look at what man knows of himself while he dreams—dreams in his sleep—we have before us what man is preparing for the next life on earth. These things can be easily distinguished.

Thus imagination leads directly from a study of the waking and sleeping man to a perception of his development from earthly life to earthly life.

Now what is preserved in memory occupies a quite special place in the waking and in the sleeping man. Consider your ordinary memories. What you remember you draw forth from within you in the form of thoughts or mental presentations; you represent to yourself past experiences. These, as you know, lose in memory their vividness, impressiveness, colour, etc. Remembered experiences are pale. But, on the other hand, memory cannot but appear to be very closely connected with man's being; indeed it appears to be his very being. Man is not usually honest enough in his soul to make the necessary confession to himself; but I ask you to look into yourself to find out what you really are in respect to what you call your ego. Is there anything there beside your memories? If you try to get to your ego you will scarcely find anything else but your life's memories. True, you find these permeated by a kind of activity, but this remains very shadowy and dim. It is your memories that, for earthly life, appear as your living ego.

Now this world of memories which you need only call to mind in order to realise how entirely shadowy they are—what does it become in imaginative cognition? It ‘expands’ at once; it becomes a mighty tableau through which we survey, in pictures, all that we have experienced in our present life on earth. One might say: If this¹ be man, and this the memory within him, imagination at once extends this memory back to his birth. One feels oneself outside of space; here all consists of events. One gazes into a tableau and surveys one's whole life up to the present. Time becomes space. It is like looking down an avenue; one takes in one's whole past in a tableau, or panorama, and can speak of memory expanding. In ordinary consciousness memory is confined, as it were, to a single moment at a time. Indeed, it is really as follows: If, for example, we have reached the age of forty and are recalling, not in ‘imagination’, but in ordinary consciousness, something experienced twenty years ago, it is as if it were far off in space, yet still there. Now—in imaginative cognition—it has remained; it has no more disappeared than the distant trees of an avenue. It is there. This is how we gaze into the tableau and know that the memory we bear with us in ordinary consciousness is a serious illusion. To take it for a reality is like taking a cross-section of a tree trunk for the tree trunk itself. Such a section is really nothing at all; the trunk is above and below the mere picture thus obtained. Now it is really like that when we perceive memories in imaginative cognition. We detect the utter unreality of the individual items; the whole expands almost as far as birth—in certain circumstances even farther. All that is past becomes present; it is there, though at the periphery.

Once we have grasped this, once we have attained this perception, we can know—and re-observe at any moment—that man reviews this tableau when he leaves his physical body at death. This lasts some days and is his natural life-element. On passing through the gate of death man gazes, to begin with, at his life in mighty, luminous, impressive pictures. This constitutes his experience for some days.

But we must now advance farther in imaginative cognition. As we do so our life is enriched in a certain way and we accordingly understand many things in a different way from before. Consider, for example, our behaviour towards other people. In ordinary life we may, in individual cases, think about the intentions we have had, the actions we have performed—our whole attitude towards others. We think about all this, more or less. according as we are more or less reflective persons. But now all this stands before us. In our idea of our behaviour we only grasp a part of the full reality. Suppose we have done another a service or an injury. We learn to see the results of our good deed, the satisfaction to the other man, perhaps his furtherance in this or that respect—i.e. we see the results which may follow our deed in the physical world. If we have done an evil deed, we come to see we have injured him, we see that he remained unsatisfied or, perhaps, was even physically injured; and so on. All this can be observed in physical life if we do not run away from it, finding it unpleasant to observe the consequences of our deeds.

This, however, is only one side. Every action we do to human beings, or indeed to the other kingdoms of Nature, has another side. Let us assume that you do a good deed to another man. Such a deed has its existence and its significance in the spiritual world; it kindles warmth there; it is, in a sense, a source of spiritual rays of warmth. In the spiritual world ‘soul-warmth’ streams from a good deed, ‘soul-coldness’ from an evil deed done to other human beings. It is really as if one engendered warmth or coldness in the spiritual world according to one's behaviour to others. Other human actions act like bright, luminous rays in this or that direction in the spiritual world; others have a darkening effect. In short, one may say that we only really experience one half of what we accomplish in our life on earth.

Now, on attaining imaginative consciousness, what ordinary consciousness knows already, really vanishes. Whether a man is being helped or injured is for ordinary consciousness to recognise; but the effect of a deed, be it good or evil, wise or foolish, in the spiritual world—its warming or chilling, lightening or darkening action (there are manifold effects)—all this arises before imaginative consciousness and begins to be there for us. And we say to ourselves: Because you did not know all this when you let your ordinary consciousness function in your actions, it does not follow that it was not there. Do not imagine that what you did not know of in your actions—the sources of luminous and warming rays, etc.—was not there because you did not see or experience it. Do not imagine that. You have experienced it all in your sub-consciousness; you have been through it all. Just as the spiritual eyes of your higher consciousness see it now, so, while you were helping or harming another by your kind or evil deed, your sub-consciousness experienced its parallel significance for the spiritual world.

Further: when we have progressed and attained a sufficient intensification of imaginative consciousness we do not only gaze at the panorama of our experiences, but become perforce aware that we are not complete human beings until we have lived through this other aspect of our earthly actions, which had remained subconscious before. We begin to feel quite maimed in the face of this life-panorama that extends back to birth, or beyond it. It is as if something had been torn from us. We say to ourselves continually: You ought to have experienced that aspect too; you are really maimed, as if an eye or a leg had been removed. You have not really had one half of your experiences. This must arise in the course of imaginative consciousness; we must feel ourselves maimed in this way in respect to our experiences. Above all, we must feel that ordinary life is hiding something from us.

This feeling is especially intense in our present materialistic age. For men simply do not believe today that human actions have any value or significance beyond that for immediate life which takes its course in the physical world. It is regarded, more or less, as folly to declare that something else takes place in the spiritual world. Nevertheless, it is there. This feeling of being maimed comes before ‘inspired’ consciousness and one says to one's self: I must make it possible for myself to experience all I have failed to experience; yet this is almost impossible, except in a few details and to a very limited extent.

It is this tragic mood that weighs upon one who sees more deeply into life. There is so much in life that we cannot fulfil on earth. In a sense, we must incur a debt to the future, admitting that life sets tasks which we cannot absolve in this present earthly life. We must owe them to the universe, saying: I shall only be able to experience that when I have passed through death. The Science of Initiation brings us this great, though often tragical enrichment of life; we feel this unavoidable indebtedness to life and recognise the necessity of owing the gods what we can only experience after death. Only then can we enter into an experience such as we owe to the universe.

This consciousness that our inner life must, in part, run its course by incurring debts to the future after death, leads to an immense deepening of human life. Spiritual science is not only there that we may learn this or that theoretically. He who studies it as one studies other things, would be better employed with a cookery book. Then, at least, he would be impelled to study in a more than theoretical manner, for life, chiefly the life of the stomach and all connected therewith, takes care that we take a cookery book more seriously than a mere theory. It is necessary for spiritual science, on approaching man, to deepen his life in respect to feeling.

Our life is immensely deepened when we become aware of our growing indebtedness to the gods and say: One half of our life on earth cannot really be lived, for it is hidden under the surface of existence. If, through initiation, we learn to know what is otherwise hidden from ordinary consciousness, we can see a little into the debts we have incurred. We then say: With ordinary consciousness we see we are incurring debts, but cannot read the ‘promissory note’ we ought to write. With initiation-consciousness we can, indeed, read the note, but cannot meet it in ordinary life. We must wait till death comes. And, when we have attained this consciousness, when we have so deepened our human conscience that this indebtedness is quite alive in us, we are ready to follow human life farther, beyond the retrospective tableau of which I have spoken and in which we reach back to birth. We now see that, after a few days, we must begin to experience what we have left un-experienced; and this holds for every single deed we have done to other human beings in the world. The last deeds done before death are the first to come before us, and so backwards through life. We first become aware of what our last evil or good deeds signify for the world. Our experience of them while on earth is now eliminated; what we now experience is their significance for the world.

And then we go farther back, experiencing our life again, but backwards. We know that while doing this we are still connected with the earth, for it is only the other side of our deeds that we experience now.

We feel as if our life from now onwards were being borne in the womb of the universe. What we now experience is a kind of embryonic stage for our further life between death and a new birth; only, it is not borne by a mother but by the world, by all that we did not experience in physical life. We live through our physical life again, backwards and in its cosmic significance. We experience it now with a very divided consciousness. Living here in the physical world and observing the creatures around him, man feels himself pretty well as the lord of creation; and even though he calls the lion the king of beasts, he still feels himself, as a human being, superior. Man feels the creatures of the other kingdoms as inferior; he can judge them, but does not ascribe to them the power to judge him. He is above the other kingdoms of Nature.

He has a very different feeling, however, when after death the undergoes the experience I have just described. He no longer feels himself confronting the inferior kingdoms of Nature, but kingdoms of the spiritual world that are superior to him. He feels himself as the lowest kingdom, the others standing above him.

Thus, in undergoing all he has previously left unexperienced, man feels all around him beings far higher than himself. They unfold their sympathies and antipathies towards all he now lives through as a consequence of his earthly life. In this experience immediately after death we are within a kind of ‘spiritual rain’. We live through the spiritual counterpart of our deeds, and the lofty beings who stand above us rain down their sympathies and antipathies. We are flooded by these, and feel in our spiritual being that what is illuminated by the sympathies of these lofty beings of the higher hierarchies will be accepted by the universe as a good element for the future; whereas all that encounters their antipathies will be rejected, for we feel it would be an evil element in the universe if we did not keep it to ourselves. The antipathies of these lofty beings rain down on an evil deed done to another human being, and we feel that the result would be something exceedingly bad for the universe if we released it, if we did not retain it in ourselves. So we gather up all that encounters the antipathies of these lofty beings. In this way we lay the foundation of our destiny, of all that works on into our next earthly life in order that it may find compensation through other deeds.

One can describe the passage of the human being through the soul-region after death from what I might call its more external aspect. I did this in my book Theosophy, where I followed more the accustomed lines of thought of our age. Now in this recapitulation within the General Anthroposophical Society I want to present a systematic statement of what Anthroposophy is, describing these things more inwardly. I want you to feel how man, in his inner being—in his human individuality—actually lives through the state after death.

Now when we understand these things in this way, we can again turn our attention to the world of dreams, and see it in a new light. Perceiving man's experience, after death, of the spiritual aspects of his earthly life, his deeds and thoughts, we can again turn to the dreaming man, to all he experiences when asleep. We now see that he has already lived through the above when asleep; but it remained quite unconscious. The difference between the experience in sleep and the experience after death becomes clear.

Consider man's life on earth. There are waking states interrupted again and again by sleep. Now a man who is not a ‘sleepy-head’ will spend about a third of his life asleep. During this third he does, in fact, live through the spiritual counterpart of his deeds; only he knows nothing of it, his dreams merely casting up ripples to the surface. Much of the spiritual counterpart is perceived in dreams, but only in the form of weak surface-ripples. Nevertheless in deep sleep we do experience unconsciously the whole spiritual aspect of our daily life. So we might put it this way: In our conscious daily life we experience what others think and feel, how they are helped or hindered by us; in sleep we experience unconsciously what the gods think about the deeds and thoughts of our waking life, though we know nothing of this. It is for this reason that one who sees into the secrets of life seems to himself so burdened with debt, so maimed—as I have described. All this has remained in the subconscious. Now after death it is really lived through consciously. For this reason man lives through the part of life he has slept through, i.e. about one-third, in time, of his earthly life. Thus, when he has passed through death, he lives through his nights again, backwards; only, what he lived through unconsciously, night by night, now becomes conscious.

We could even say—though it might almost seem as if we wanted to make fun of these exceedingly earliest matters: If one sleeps away the greater part of one's life, this retrospective experience after death will last longer; if one sleeps little, it will be shorter. On an average it will last a third of one's life, for one spends that in sleep. So if a man lives till the age of sixty, such experience after death will last twenty years. During this time he passes through a kind of embryonic stage for the spiritual world. Only after that will he be really free of the earth; then the earth no longer envelopes him, and he is born into the spiritual world. He escapes from the wrappings of earthly existence which he had borne around him until then, though in a spiritual sense, and feels this as his birth into the spiritual world.

• 1. The drawing is not reproduced.

You have seen from the preceding lectures that a study of man's faculty of memory can give us valuable insight into the whole of human life and its cosmic connections. So today we will study this faculty of memory as such, in the various phases of its manifestation in human life, beginning with its manifestation in the ordinary consciousness that man has between birth and death.

What man experiences in concrete, everyday life, in thinking, feeling and willing, in unfolding his physical forces, too—all this he transforms into memories which he recalls from time to time.

But if you compare the shadowy character of these memory-pictures, whether spontaneous or deliberately sought, with the robust experiences to which they refer, you will say that they exist as mere thoughts or mental presentations; you are led to call memories just ‘pictures’. Nevertheless, it is these pictures that we retain in our ego from our experiences in the outer world; in a sense, we bear them with us as the treasure won from experience. If a part of these memories should be lost—as in certain pathological cases of which I have already spoken—our ego itself suffers injury. We feel that our immermost being, our ego, has been damaged if it must forfeit this or that from its treasury of memories, for it is this treasury that makes our life a complete whole. One could also point to the very serious conditions that sometimes result in cases of apoplectic stroke when certain portions of the patient's past life are obliterated from his memory.

Moreover, when we survey from a given moment our life since our last birth, we must feel our memories as a connected whole if we are to regard ourselves rightly as human souls.

These few features indicate the role of the faculty of memory in physical, earthly life. But its role is far greater still. What would the external world with all its impressions constantly renewed, with all it gives us, however vividly—what would it be to us if we could not link new impressions to the memories of past ones! Last, but not least, we may say that, after all, all learning consists in linking new impressions to the content borne in memory. A great part of educational method depends on finding the most rational way of linking the new things we have to teach the children to what we can draw from their store of memories.

In short, whenever we have to bring the external world to the soul, to evoke the soul's own life that it may feel and experience inwardly its own existence, we appeal to memory in the last resort. So we must say that, on earth, memory constitutes the most important and most comprehensive part of man's inner life.

Let us now study memory from yet another point of view. It is quite easy to see that the sums of memories we bear within us is really a fragment. We have forgotten so much in the course of life; but there are moments, frequently abnormal, when what has been long forgotten comes before us again. These are especially such moments in which a man comes near to death and many things emerge that have long been far from his conscious memory. Old people, when dying, suddenly remember things that had long disappeared from their conscious memory. Moreover, if we study dreams really intimately—and they, too, link on to memory—we find things arising which have quite certainly been experienced, but they passed us by unnoticed. Nevertheless, they are in our soul life, and arise in sleep when the hindrances of the physical and etheric organism are not acting and the astral body and ego are alone. We do not usually notice these things and so fail to observe that conscious memory is but a fragment of all we receive; in the course of life we take in much in the same form, only, it is received into the subconscious directly, where it is inwardly elaborated.

Now, as long as we are living on earth, we continue to regard the memories that arise from the depths of our soul in the form of thoughts as the essential part of memory. Thoughts of past experience come and go. We search for them. We regard that as the essence of memory.

However, when we go through the gate of death our life on earth is followed by a few days in which pictures of the life just ended come before us in a gigantic perspective. These pictures are suddenly there: the events of years long past and of the last few days are there simultaneously. As the spatial exists side by side and only possesses spatial perspective, so the temporal events of our earthly life are now seen side by side and possess ‘time-perspective’. This tableau appears suddenly, but, during the short time it is there, it becomes more and more shadowy, weaker and weaker. Whereas in earthly life we look into ourselves and feel that we have our memory-pictures ‘rolled up’ within us, these pictures now become greater and greater. We feel as if they were being received by the universe. What is at first comprised within the memory tableau as in a narrow space, becomes greater and greater, more and more shadowy, until we find it has expanded to a universe, becoming so faint that we can scarcely decipher what we first saw plainly. We can still divine it; then it vanishes in the far spaces and is no longer there.

That is the second form taken by memory—in a sense, its second metamorphosis—in the first few days after death. It is the phase which we can describe as the flight of our memories out into the cosmos. And all that, like memory, we have bound so closely to our life between birth and death, expands and becomes more and more shadowy, to be finally lost in the wide spaces of the cosmos.

It is really as if we saw what we have actually been calling our ego during earthly life, disappear into the wide spaces of the cosmos. This experience lasts a few days and, when these have passed, we feel that we ourselves are being expanded too. Between birth and death we feel ourselves within our memories; and now we actually feel ourselves within these rapidly retreating memories and being received into the wide spaces of the universe.

After we have suffered this super-sensible stupor, or faintness, which takes from us the sum-total of our memories and our inner consciousness of earthly life, we live in the third phase of memory. This third phase of memory teaches us that what we had called ourself during earthly life—in virtue of our memories—has spread itself through the wide spaces of the universe, thereby proving its insubstantiality for us. If we were only what can be preserved in our memories between birth and death, we would be nothing at all a few days after death.

But we now enter a totally different element. We have realised that we cannot retain our memories, for the world takes them from us after death. But there is something objective behind all the memories we have harboured during earthly life. The spiritual counterpart, of which I spoke yesterday, is engraved into the world; and it is this counterpart of our memories that we now enter. Between birth and death we have experienced this or that with this or that person or plant or mountain spring, with all we have approached during life. There is no single experience whose spiritual counterpart is not engraved into the spiritual world in which we are ever present, even while on earth. Every hand-shake we have exchanged has its spiritual counterpart; it is there, inscribed into the spiritual world. Only while we are surveying our life in the first days after death do we have these pictures of our life before us. These conceal, to a certain extent, what we have inscribed into the world through our deeds, thoughts and feelings.

The moment we pass through the gate of death to this other ‘life’, we are at once filled with the content of our life-tableau, i.e. with pictures which extend, in perspective, back to birth and even beyond. But all this vanishes into the wide cosmic spaces and we now see the spiritual counter-images of all the deeds we have done since birth. All the spiritual counter-images we have experienced (unconsciously, in sleep) become visible, and in such a way that we are immediately impelled to retrace our steps and go through all these experiences once more. In ordinary life, when we go from Dornach to Basle we know we can go from Basle to Dornach, for we have in the physical world an appropriate conception of space. But in ordinary consciousness we do not know, when we go from birth to death, that we can also go from death to birth. As in the physical world one can go from Dornach to Basle and return from Basle to Dornach, so we go from birth to death during earthly life, and, after death, can return from death to birth. This is what we do in the spiritual world when we experience backwards the spiritual counter-images of all we have undergone during earthly life. Suppose you have had an experience with something in the external realm of Nature—let us say, with a tree. You have observed the tree or, as a woodman, cut it down. Now all this has its spiritual counterpart; above all, whether you have merely observed the tree, or cut it down, or done something else to it, has its significance for the whole universe. What you can experience with the physical tree you experience in physical, earthly life; now, as you go backwards from death to birth, it is the spiritual counterpart of this experience that you live through.

If, however, our experience was with another human being—if, for example, we have caused him pain—there is already a spiritual counterpart in the physical world; only, it is not our experience: it is the pain experienced by the other man. Perhaps the fact that we were the cause of his pain gave us a certain feeling of satisfaction; we may have been moved by a feeling of revenge or the like. Now, on going backwards through our life, we do not undergo our experience, but his. We experience what he experienced through our deed. That, too, is a part of the spiritual counterpart and is inscribed into the spiritual world. In short, man lives through his experiences once more, but in a spiritual way, going backwards from death to birth.

As I said yesterday, it is a part of this experience to feel that beings whom, for the present, we may call ‘superhuman’, are participating in it. Pressing onwards through these spiritual counterparts of our experiences, we feel as if these spiritual beings were showering down their sympathies and antipathies upon our deeds and thoughts, as we experience them backwards. Thereby we feel what each deed done by us on earth, each thought, feeling, or impulse of will, is worth for purely spiritual existence. In bitter pain we experience the harmfulness of some deed we have done. In burning thirst we experience the passions we have harboured in our soul; and this continues until we have sufficiently realised the worthlessness, for the spiritual world, of harbouring passions and have outgrown these states which depend on our physical, earthly personality.

At this point of our studies we can see where the boundary between the psychical and the physical really is. You see, we can easily regard things like thirst or hunger as physical. But I ask you to imagine that the same physical changes that are in your organism when you are thirsty were in a body not ensouled. The same changes could be there, but the soulless body would not suffer thirst. As a chemist you might investigate the changes in your body when you are thirsty. But if, by some means, you could produce these same changes, in the same substances and in the same complex of forces, in a body without a soul, it would not suffer thirst. Thirst is not something in the body; it lives in the soul—in the astral—through changes in the physical body. It is the same with hunger. And if someone, in his soul, takes great pleasure in something that can only be satisfied by physical measures in physical life, it is as if he were experiencing thirst in physical life; the psychical part of him feels thirst, burning thirst, for those things which he was accustomed to satisfy by physical means. For one cannot carry out physical functions when the physical body has been laid aside. Man must first accustom himself to live in his psycho-spiritual being without his physical body; and a great part of the backward journey I have described is concerned with this. At first he experiences continually burning thirst for what can only be gratified through a physical body. Just as the child must accustom himself to use his organs—must learn to speak, for example—so man between death and a new birth must accustom himself to do without his physical body as the foundation of his psychical experiences. He must grow into the spiritual world.

There are descriptions of this experience which, as I said yesterday, lasts one-third of the time of physical life, which depict it as a veritable hell. For example, if you read descriptions like those given in the literature of the Theosophical Society where, following oriental custom, this life is called Kamaloka, they will certainly make your flesh creep. Well, these experiences are not like that. They can appear so if you compare them directly with earthly life, for they are something to which we are so utterly unaccustomed. We must suddenly adapt ourselves to the spiritual counter-images and counter-values of our earthly experience. What we felt on earth as pleasure, is there privation, bitter privation, and, strictly speaking, only our unsatisfying, painful or sorrowful experiences on earth are satisfying there. In many respects that is somewhat horrible when compared with earthly life; but we simply cannot compare it with earthly life directly, for it is not experienced here but in the life after death where we do not judge with earthly conceptions.

So when, for example, you experience after death the pain of another man through having caused him pain on earth, you say to yourself at once: ‘If I did not feel this pain, I would remain an imperfect human soul, for the pain I have caused in the universe would continually take something from me. I only become a whole human being by experiencing this compensation.’

It may cost us a struggle to see that pain experienced after death in return for pain caused to another, is really a blessing. It will depend on the inner constitution of our soul whether we find this difficult or not; but there is a certain state of soul in which this painful compensation for many things done on earth is even experienced as bliss. It is the state of soul that results from acquiring on earth some knowledge of the super-sensible life. We feel that, through this painful compensation, we are perfecting our human being, while, without it, we should fall short of full human stature. If you have caused another pain, you are of less value than before; so, if you judge reasonably, you will say: In face of the universe I am a worse human soul after causing pain to another than before. You will feel it a blessing that you are able, after death, to compensate for this pain by experiencing it yourself.

That, my dear friends, is the third phase of memory. At first what we have within us as memory is condensed to pictures, which last some days after death; then it is scattered through the universe, your whole inner life in the form of thoughts returning thereto. But while we lose the memories locked up within us during earthly life—while these seek the cosmic spaces—the world, from out of all we have spiritually engraved upon it, gives us back to ourselves in objective form.

There is scarcely a stronger proof of man's intimate connection with the world than this; that after death, in regard to our inner life, we have first to lose ourselves, in order to be given back to ourselves from out of the universe. And we experience this, even in the face of painful events, as something that belongs to our human being as a whole. We do, indeed, feel that the world takes to itself the inner life we possessed here, and gives back to us again what we have engraved upon it. It is just the part we did not notice, the part we passed by but inscribed upon spiritual existence with clear strokes, that gives us our own self again. Then, as we retrace our life backwards through birth and beyond, we reach out into the wide spaces of spiritual existence.

It is only now, after having undergone all this, that we enter the spiritual world and are really able to live there. Our faculty of memory now undergoes its fourth metamorphosis. We feel that everywhere behind the ordinary memory of earthly life something has been living in us, though we were not aware of it. It has engraved itself into the world and now we, ourselves, become it. We have received our earthly life in its spiritual significance; we now become this significance. After travelling back through birth to the spiritual world we find ourselves confronting it in a very peculiar way. In a sense, we ourselves in our spiritual counterpart—in our true spiritual worth—now confront the world. We have passed through the above experiences, have experienced the pain caused to another, have experienced the spiritual value corresponding to an experience with a tree, let us say; we have experienced all this, but it was not self-experience. We might compare this with the embryonic stage of human life; for then—and even throughout the first years of life—all we experience does not yet reach the level of self-consciousness, which only awakens gradually.

Thus, when we enter the spiritual world, all we have experienced backwards gradually becomes ourself, our spiritual self-consciousness. We are now what we have experienced; we are our own spiritual worth corresponding thereto. With this existence, that really represents the other side of our earthly existence, we enter the world that contains nothing of the ordinary kingdoms of external Nature—mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—for these belong to the earth. But in that world there immediately come before us, first, the souls of those who have died before us and to whom we stood in some kind of relationship, and then the individualities of higher spiritual beings. We live as spirit among human and non-human spirits, and this environment of spiritual individualities is now our world. The relationship of these spiritual individualities, human or non-human, to ourselves now constitutes our experience. As on earth we have our experience with the beings of the external kingdoms of Nature, so now, with spiritual beings of different ranks. And it is especially important that we have felt their sympathies and antipathies like spiritual rain—to use yesterday's metaphor—permeating these experiences during the retrospective part of the life between death and birth that I have described to you schematically. We now stand face to face with these beings of whom we previously perceived only their sympathies and antipathies while we were living through the spiritual counterpart of our earthly life: we live among these beings now that we have reached the spiritual world. We gradually feel as if inwardly permeated with force, with impulses proceeding from the spiritual beings around us. All that we have previously experienced now becomes more and more real to us, in a spiritual way. We gradually feel as if standing in the light or shadow of these beings in whom we are beginning to live. Before, through living through the spiritual worth corresponding to some earthly experience, we felt this or that about it, found it valuable or harmful to the cosmos. We now feel: There is something I have done on earth, in thought or deed; it has its corresponding spiritual worth, and this is engraved into the spiritual cosmos. The beings whom I now encounter can either do something with it, or not; it either lies in the direction of their evolution or of the evolution for which they are striving, or it does not. We feel ourselves placed before the beings of the spiritual world and realise that we have acted in accordance with their intentions or against them, have either added to, or subtracted from, what they willed for the evolution of the world.

Above all, it is no mere ideal judgment of ourselves that we feel, but a real evaluation; and this evaluation is itself the reality of our existence when we enter the spiritual world after death.

When you have done something wrong as a man in the physical world, you condemn it yourself if you have sufficient conscience and reason; or it is condemned by the law, or by the judge, or by other men who despise you for it. But you do not grow thin on this account—at least, not very thin, unless you are quite specially constituted. On entering the world of spiritual beings, however, we do not merely meet the ideal judgment that we are of little worth in respect of any fault or disgraceful deed we have committed; we feel the gaze of these beings resting upon us as if it would annihilate our very being. In respect of all we have done that is valuable, the gaze of these beings falls upon us as if we first attained thereby our full reality as psycho-spiritual beings. Our reality depends upon our value. Should we have hindered the evolution that was intended in the spiritual world, it is as if darkness were robbing us of our very existence. If we have done something in accordance with the evolution of the spiritual world, and its effects continue, it is as if light were calling us to fresh spiritual life. We experience all I have described and enter the realm of spiritual beings. This enhances our consciousness in the spiritual world and keeps us awake. Through all the demands made upon us there, we realise that we have won something in the universe in regard to our own reality.

Suppose we have done something that hinders the evolution of the world and can only arouse the antipathy of the spiritual beings whose realm we now enter. The after-effect takes its course as I have described and we feel our consciousness darken; stupefaction ensues, sometimes complete extinction of consciousness. We must now wake up again. On doing so, we feel in regard to our spiritual existence as if someone were cutting into our flesh in the physical world; only, this experience in the spiritual is much more real—though it is real enough in the physical world. In short, what we are in the spiritual world proves to be the result of what we ourselves have initiated. You see from this that man has sufficient inducement to return again to earthly life.

Why to return? Well, through what he has engraved into the spiritual world man has himself experienced all he has done for good or ill in earthly life; and it is only by returning to earth that he can actually compensate for what, after all, he has only learnt to know through earthly experience. In fact, when he reads his value for the world in the countenances of these spiritual beings—to put it metaphorically—he is sufficiently impelled to return, when able, to the physical world, in order to live his life in a different way from before. Many incapacities for this he will still retain, and only after many lives on earth will full compensation really be possible.

If we look into ourselves during earthly life, we find, at first, memories. It is of these that, to begin with, we build our soul-life when we shut out the external world; and it is upon these alone that the creative imagination of the artist draws. That is the first form of memory. Behind it are the mighty ‘pictures’ which become perceptible immediately after we have passed through the gate of death. These are taken from us: they expand to the wide spaces of the universe. When we survey our memory-pictures we can say that there lives behind them something that at once proceeds towards the cosmic spaces when our body is taken from us. Through our body we hold together what is really seeking to become ‘ideal’ in the universe. But while we go through life and retain memories of our experiences, we leave behind in the world something still further behind our memories. We leave it behind us in the course of time and must experience it again as we retrace our steps. This lies behind our memory as a third ‘structure’. First, we have the tapestry of memory; behind it, the mighty cosmic pictures we have ‘rolled up’ within us; behind this, again, lives what we have written into the world. Not until we have lived through this are we really ourselves, standing naked in spirit before the spiritual universe which clothes us in its garments when we enter it.

We must, indeed, look at our memories if we want to get gradually beyond the transient life of man. Our earthly memories are transient and become dispersed through the universe. But our Self lives behind them: the Self that is given us again from out of the spiritual world that we may find our way from time to eternity.

This book is the transcript of a shorthand report of nine lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in the early part of 1924, about a year before he died. Although his audience consisted very largely of people who had been studying for many years the spiritual science which is Steiner's legacy to the world (and which he also called Anthroposophie), he himself described the course as an ‘Introduction’. The German title of the book is Anthroposophie: eine Einführung in die Anthroposophische Weltanschauung. ‘We will begin again,’ he observed in Lecture IV, ‘where we began twenty years ago;’ and he may well have had in mind that the Movement itself had, in some sense, begun again only a month or two before with the solemn Foundation of the General Anthroposophical Society under himself as President at Christmas 1923. Though he proceeded ab initio, assuming no previous knowledge on the part of his hearers, this course is not an elementary exposition of Anthroposophy. We are gradually led deeply in, and the path is steep towards the end.

There are many very different approaches to the general corpus of revelations or teachings which constitutes Spiritual Science. As with Nature herself, it is often only as the student penetrates deeper and nearer to the centre that any connection between these different approaches become apparent. A reader of Christianity as Mystical Fact, for example, which dates from 1902 and of Steiner's lectures on the Gospels might well be surprised to find that it is possible to read Theosophy (1904) without ever discovering that the incarnation of Christ and the death on Golgotha are, according to him, the very core of the evolution of the universe and man. The truth is that the mastery of Anthroposophy involves, for our too stereotyped thinking, something like the learning of a new language. It would be possible to learn to read Greek and only afterwards to discover that the New Testament was written in that tongue.

From this point of view the present book is in the same category as Theosophy, yet even within this category the two approaches are made from such diverse directions that one might almost suppose the books to be the work of different men. Nevertheless it is best to look on the following lectures—as Steiner himself makes it clear that he does—as a supplement or complement to what is to be found in Theosophy.

The book Theosophy is the most systematic of all the writings that Steiner has bequeathed to us. Its whole basis is classification and definition and, taken by itself, it undoubtedly gives (quite apart from the dubious associations which the word ‘theosophy’ has for English ears) a false impression of the nature of Anthroposophy. It is as indispensable to the student as a good grammar is indispensable to a man engaged in mastering a new language, and it contains as much—and as little—as a grammar does of all that the language can do and say. Its method is that of description from outside. And this approach, essential as it is as one among others, is perhaps the one most likely to lead to misunderstanding and misrepresentation. Such terms as ‘soul world’, ‘spiritland’, ‘elemental beings’, ‘aura’, are liable to be taken literally in spite of the author's express warnings to the contrary. The descriptions are taken as reproductions of the reality that underlies them instead of as similes—attempts, that is, at making clear a purely spiritual reality in words which have received their stamp of significance from their relation to the physical world.

No one who studies the teachings of Rudolf Steiner seriously remains in any real danger of succumbing to this sort of literalness. But anyone reading hurriedly through the book Theosophy—or even through Theosophy and the Occult Science—and inclined to judge the value of Anthroposophy from that single adventure may well do so. That is why the present book seems to me to be an important one—not only for ‘advanced’ students of Anthroposophy, to whom it is perhaps primarily addressed, but also to the comparative beginner. It is condensed and difficult for most readers, and above all for those who have never dipped into the broad unbroken stream of books and lectures which flowed from Rudolf Steiner during the twenty years that elapsed between the publication of Theosophy and the delivery of this Course. But even if the content is far from fully understood, it cannot fail to give the reader some idea, let us say, of the sort of thing that is really signified by the spatial and other physical metaphors in which the systematic exposition of Theosophy is couched.

For here the approach is from within. It is no longer simply the objective facts and events, but the way in which the soul tentatively begins to experience these, which the lecturer makes such earnest efforts to convey. We have exchanged a guide book for a book of travel. The one who has been there recreates his experience for the benefit of those who have not, trying with every device at his disposal to reveal what it actually felt like. Of course the difficulty is still there; it can still only be done by metaphor and suggestion; but the difficulty is much less likely to be burked by the reader's surreptitiously substituting in his own imagination a physical or sense-experience for a purely super-sensible one.

Compare, for instance the description of the astral body given in Theosophy with the characterisation of it in No. V of these lectures:

One says to oneself: What I am observing as the astral body of this person is not really present today, i.e. on the 2nd February 1924. If the person is twenty years of age, you must go backwards in time—let us say, to January 1904. You perceive that this astral body is really back there, and extends still further back into the unlimited. It has remained there and has not accompanied him through life. Here we have only a kind of appearance—a beam. It is like looking down an avenue; there, in the distance, are the last trees, very close together. Behind them is a source of light. You can have the radiance of the light here, but the source is behind—it need not move forward that its light may shine here.

So, too, the astral body has remained behind, and only throws its beam into life. It has really remained in the spiritual world and has not come with us into the physical. In respect to our astral body we always remain before conception and birth, in the spiritual world. If we are twenty years old in 1924, it is as if we were still living spiritually before the year 1904 and, in respect to our astral body, had only stretched forth a feeler.

‘Thus,’ he adds a few pages later, ‘if you describe the astral body as I have done in my Theosophy you must realise, in order to complete your insight (my italics)’:

that what is active here is the ‘radiance’ of something far back in time. The human being is really like a comet stretching its tail far back into the past. It is not possible to obtain a true insight into man's being unless we acquire these new concepts. People who believe one can enter the spiritual world with the same concepts one has for the physical world should become spiritualists, not anthroposophists.

In the same way one could compare the description of the etheric body in the earlier book with its treatment here in Lecture IV. The etheric body is not a vehicle of any such ‘life-force’, as is understood by the creative evolutionists. It is totally incompatible with the assumptions of positivist science. If it can be described as a ‘formative forces’ body, it can equally well be described, from another approach, as a thought-body. This is the approach which is required for all the teachings which Steiner developed later concerning the descent of the Cosmic Intelligence and its progressive embodiment in the personal intelligence of man. And it is this approach which is chosen in the book which follows.

He begins by describing the practical steps needed to develop the ‘strengthened thinking’ which is the first stage of higher knowledge. And he continues:

If you strengthen your thinking the supra-terrestrial spatial world begins to concern you and the ‘second man’ you have discovered just as the earthly, physical world concerned you before. And, as you ascribe the origin of your physical body to the physical earth, you now ascribe your second existence to the cosmic ether through whose activity earthly things become visible. From your own experience you can now speak of having a physical body and an etheric body ... I stretch out my physical arm and my physical hand takes hold of an object. I feel in a sense the flowing forces in this action. Through strengthening my thought I come to feel that it is inwardly mobile and now induces a kind of ‘touching’ within me—a ‘touching’ that also takes place in an organism; this is the etheric organism; that finer, super-sensible organism which exists no less than the physical organism, though it is connected with the supra-terrestrial, not the terrestrial.

Equally important is the exposition in this lecture of the way in which astral and etheric find outward expression in the physical constitution of man, the etheric in his fluid organisation, which can only be understood with the help of the concept of the etheric body, and the astral in that ‘third man’—who is physically the ‘airy man’ and who can be experienced as ‘an inner musical element in the breathing’. The nervous system is shown to be the representation of this inner music.

The matter in this book is extremely condensed and one feels one is maiming it by arbitrary selections such as I am making for the purpose of this Introduction. I have, for instance, said nothing of the extensive and detailed discourse on dreams contained in Lecture VII, and VIII, which some readers may even find the most enlightening thing in the book. One final selection may however perhaps be made. In these lectures Steiner approaches the life after death by speaking of ‘four phases of memory’. The theme is first heard in Lecture VI, where, after speaking of the nature of memory he emphasises that it is not the concern of the remembering individual alone, but is there for the sake of the universe—‘in order that its content may pass through us and be received again in the forms into which we can transmute it’.

The universe needs us because, through us, it ‘fulfils’ itself—fills itself again and again with its own content. ... The universe gives its cosmic thoughts to our etheric body and receives them back again in a humanised condition.

It receives them back when we die. The moment we die, the world takes back what it has given. ‘But it is something new that it receives, for we have experienced it all in a particular way.’ Then, in the ninth and last lecture, the last three phases of memory lead into—indeed become—in a miracle of condensation—all that is presented so differently in Theosophy under such titles as ‘The Soul in the Soul-World after Death’.

Is this an esoteric or an exoteric work? Certainly it will be more readily appreciated by readers who have worked through other approaches to be found in the books and lecture-cycles and perhaps especially in the Leading Thoughts. Yet it is the whole aim and character of Spiritual Science, as Rudolf Steiner developed it, to endeavour to be esoteric in an exoteric way. For that was what he believed the crisis of the twentieth century demands. And I doubt if he ever struggled harder to combine the two qualities than in these nine lectures given at the end of his life. Thus, although he was addressing members of the Anthroposophical Society, I believe that he had his gaze fixed on Western man in general, and I hope that an increasing number of those who are as yet unacquainted with any of his teaching may find in this book (and it can only be done by intensive application) a convincing proof of the immense fund of wisdom, insight and knowledge from which these teachings spring.

OWEN BARFIELD

London,
August 1960.

I should like to begin by speaking to you about the conditions and laws underlying human destiny, destiny, which customarily is called karma. This karma, however, will be understood, be clearly seen into only when we begin by acquainting ourselves with the varieties of laws underlying the universe. So today, then, I should like—for it is necessary to speak to you in a rather abstract form about the various underlying universal laws, in order then to crystallize out of this the more special form which can be designated as human destiny—karma.

We speak of cause and effect not only when we wish to comprehend the phenomena of the world, but also when we wish to fix our attention on the phenomena of human life itself. And at present it is quite customary to speak in general terms about cause and effect. Especially is this so in scientific circles. However, directly from this there result the greatest difficulties concerning the actual truth. For the various ways in which cause and effect appear in the world are not at all considered.

We can begin by looking at the so-called lifeless nature which, indeed, confronts us most clearly in the mineral kingdom, in all that we see in the rocky and stony part of the earth, often in such wonderful formations, but also in all that is reduced to powder, and which is then reunited and repacked in the formless rocky strata of the earth. Let us look, my dear friends, first at what thus appears as the lifeless in the world.

When we consider the lifeless—everything lifeless, without exception—we discover that everywhere within this kingdom of the lifeless we can find the causes themselves. Wherever the lifeless exists as effect, we can also seek the causes within this very same kingdom. In fact, we proceed in accordance with the principles of knowledge only when we seek the causes of the processes of the lifeless within its own kingdom.

If you have a crystal before you, however beautifully formed it may be, you should seek the cause of its forms in the kingdom of the lifeless itself. And thus, this lifeless kingdom shows itself as something contained within itself. We are, at first, not able to say where we can find the limits of this lifeless. Under certain conditions they may lie far distant out in the reaches of the universe. But if we are concerned with the effects of something lifeless confronting us, and we wish to find the causes, we must then seek them also within the realm of the lifeless. Through what we have said, however, we have already placed the lifeless alongside something else, and therewith a certain perspective is immediately opened before us.

Consider the human being himself. Consider how he passes through the door of death. Everything which existed and acted in him before this event has left the visible, apprehensible form which remains after the human soul has passed through death's portal; nothing remains but this discarded, deserted form, of which we say that it is lifeless. And just as we speak of the lifeless when we gaze upon the stony structure of the mountains with its crystal forms, so must we speak of the lifeless when we behold this human corpse, bereft of soul and spirit. What from the beginning prevailed in the rest of lifeless nature only now comes into existence for the corpse of the human being.

We were unable to find in the lifeless itself the causes of what occurs in the human form as effects during life before the soul has passed through the door of death. It is true that, when an arm is raised, not only do we seek in vain in the lifeless, physical laws of the human form for the cause of this action, but we shall also seek in vain in the realm of the chemical, in the realm of the physical forces which are present in the human form, for the cause, let us say, of the heart-beat, of the blood circulation, of any of the processes which are not at all under the control of the will.

But, at the moment when the human form has become a corpse, when the soul has stepped through the gateway of death, we observe an effect in the human organism. We perceive, let us say, a change in the color of the skin, the limbs become limp; briefly, everything appears which we are accustomed to behold in a corpse. Where do we seek the cause? In the corpse itself, in the chemical, physical, lifeless forces of the corpse itself.

When now in all its aspects, in all directions, you think out to the end what I have here indicated—I need only indicate it—you will realize that, after the human soul has crossed the threshold of death, the human being has then become, regarding his corpse, like lifeless nature about him. That means that we must now seek the causes for the effects in the same region in which the effects themselves lie. This is very important.

As soon, however, as we behold this special nature of the human corpse, we find something else that is extraordinarily significant. The human being casts off his corpse, as it were, at death. And if then, with that faculty of perception which is capable of it, we observe what the real human being, the soul-spirit human being, has become after he has passed through the door of death, we are compelled to say: Indeed, it is quite true that the corpse is cast off, and that now it has no longer any significance for this actual soul-spirit human being, who has reached the other side of death's door. This corpse has no longer any significance; it is now something discarded.

With lifeless external nature this is quite a different matter. And, indeed, even if we consider the matter only superficially, this difference confronts us. Let us observe a human corpse. It can best be observed where it has had an air-burial. In subterranean caves, which formerly were chiefly used by certain communities as burial places, we find the corpses of men, for example, simply hung up. There they dry out. They go so far in this drying out process and become so completely brittle that it only requires a little tap to cause them to fall into dust.

What we thus find preserved as the lifeless is something quite different from what we find outside in our earthly surroundings as lifeless nature. This lifeless nature fashions itself, it forms itself into crystal shapes. It is in a remarkable state of change. When we disregard what is purely earthly and look at other phenomena which are also lifeless, at water, and air, we then find that an active transformation and metamorphosis takes place in these lifeless elements. Let us now place this before the soul. Let us bear in mind the similarity of the human body in its lifelessness, after the soul has laid it aside, to extra-human lifeless nature.

Let us now proceed further. Let us consider the plant kingdom. Here we enter the sphere of the living. If we study a plant intimately, we shall never find ourselves able to explain the effect appearing in the plant merely as a result of the causes which lie in the plant kingdom itself—that is, in the same kingdom in which the effects appear. Certainly, there is today a science which attempts to do this. However, this science is on the wrong track, for finally it comes to the point of saying: Yes, indeed, it is possible to investigate the physical forces and laws acting in the plant; the chemically active forces and laws can be investigated; but something remains over and above. At this point these people divide into two groups. One group maintains that what remains over is only a sort of aggregation, a sort of form, shape; that what is active are only the physical and chemical laws. The other group says: No! there is something else there besides, which science has not yet investigated; science will, however, eventually discover it. But this will be said for a long time to come. The fact of the matter, however, is something different. For, when we wish to investigate plant nature, we cannot comprehend it, if the entire universe is not called to our aid, if the plant is not beheld in such a way that we say that the forces of plant activity lie in the reaches of the cosmos. Everything that happens in the plant is the effect of the reaches of the universe. The sun must first advance to a certain position in the cosmos in order that some particular effects may appear in the plant kingdom. Different forces must be active from wide spaces of the universe in order that the plant may receive its form, in order that it may receive its inner driving forces.

My dear friends, the truth of the matter is as follows. If we were able to travel, not in the manner of Jules Verne, but actually to travel out to the moon, to the sun, etc., then, unless we should have already acquired other forces of cognition than those we now possess, we would not become any more clever in this search for the causes than we are upon the earth itself. We would not get very far were we to say the following: “Very well, the causes of the effects which appear in the plant kingdom are not in the plant kingdom of the earth itself; so we travel to the sun; we shall find there the causes.” But we do not find them there with ordinary means of cognition. We do find them, however, if we lift ourselves to imaginative knowledge, if we possess quite a different mode of knowledge. In that case we do not need to travel to the sun; we find them here in the earth region itself. Only we shall find it necessary to cross over from an ordinary physical world to an ether world, and we shall find that in the reaches of the world the cosmic ether works everywhere with its forces, and that out of these reaches it works inward. Out of cosmic reaches everywhere the ether forces work into our world.

Thus, we must actually cross over to a second kingdom of the world, if we intend to seek the causes of the effects in the plant kingdom.

Now, the human being participates in the same element as the plant. The same forces which send their influences from the reaches of the ether cosmos down into the plants work also in the human being. He carries within him the ether forces, and we designate the sum of the forces he thus carries the ether body. And I have already told you how this ether body a few days after death becomes larger and larger and finally loses itself, so that the human being remains only in his astral and ego being. Thus, what he has carried within him of an etheric nature becomes larger and larger and finally loses itself in the cosmic reaches.

Let us now compare again what we can see of the human being when he has crossed the threshold of death with what we see in the plant kingdom. We must say that the causative forces of the plant kingdom conn* down to earth out of the reaches of space. We must say in regard to the human ether body that the forces of this ether body go out into these reaches, that is to say, they go to that region whence come the growth forces of the plant when the human being has passed through death's door. Now the matter already becomes clearer. If we merely look at a physical corpse and say that it is lifeless, then a descent into the rest of lifeless nature becomes difficult for us. But, if we look at the living, at the plant kingdom, and become aware that the causative forces for this kingdom come out of the cosmic reaches, then by plunging ourselves imaginatively into the nature of man, we see that, when the human being has crossed the threshold of death, the human ether body goes out into the source whence come the etheric forces of the plant kingdom.

Something else, however, is characteristic. What acts upon the plants as causative forces, acts relatively quickly; for upon the plants which are springing from the ground, which are developing their blossoms and their fruit, the sun of the day before yesterday has but little influence today. The sun of the day before yesterday is not effecting very much as a causative force. The sun must shine today, really shine today. That is important. And you will notice in our subsequent considerations that it is important that we note this fact.

The plants with their ether-causative forces have, it is true, their actual fundamental forces within the realm of the earthly, but they have these in what exists simultaneously in the cosmos and the earth. And when the human ether body dissolves itself, after the human being as a soul-spirit being has passed through the portal of death, this process lasts only a brief time, a few days only. Again, a simultaneous relationship exists, for the days during which this dissolution takes place, measured in the time of cosmic events, are but an insignificant moment.

When the ether body returns to that region whence come the ether forces which manifest as plant growth forces, we have, again, to do with something which shows us that as soon as the human being lives in the ether, his ether activity is not limited to the earth, for it departs from the earth, yet it develops with simultaneousness.

I shall now tabulate the foregoing in the following manner. We can say:

Mineral Kingdom: Simultaneousness of cause and effect in the physical.

Thus, we have essentially to do with simultaneousness of the causes in the physical. You will say: “Yes, but the causes of much that occurs in the physical lie prior in time.” This is in reality not the fact. If effects are to arise in the physical, then the causes must last, must continue to act. If the causes cease, effects no longer occur. We are, therefore, justified in writing this down thus:

Mineral Kingdom: Simultaneousness of the causes in the physical.

When we come to the plant kingdom, however—and in doing so we come to what can be observed in the human being also as something plantlike—we then have to do with simultaneousness in the physical and the super-physical.

Plant Kingdom: Simultaneousness of the causes in the physical and super-physical.

Let us now approach the animal kingdom. In this kingdom we shall seek quite in vain in the animal itself for what appears as effects as long as the animal is living. Even if the animal only crawls in order to seek its food, we shall seek quite in vain for the causes in the chemical and physical processes taking place within the animal body. We shall also seek entirely in vain in the reaches of ether space, where we find the causes for the plant nature,—we shall also seek there in vain for the causes of animal movement and animal sensation. For all that takes place in the animal in regard to what is plantlike in the animal, we find the causes also in ether space. And when the animal dies, its ether body also passes out into the reaches of cosmic ether. But we shall never be able to find within the earthly, within the physical, or the super-physical etheric, the causes of sensation. It is impossible to find them there.

Here it can be said that something occurs wherein the modern view is very much on the wrong track. Indeed, in regard to many phenomena which appear in the animal—the phenomena of sensation, of movement the human being with this modern conception must say to himself: “If I investigate the inner processes of the animal's physical, chemical forces, I cannot find the causes there. But also, in the reaches of the cosmos, in the ether reaches of the universe the causes cannot be found. If I wish to explain the nature of a blossom, then I must go out into the ether universe. I shall be able to explain the blossom's nature from the nature of the ether universe. I shall also be able to explain much in the animal which is plantlike from the nature of the ether cosmos, but I shall never be able to explain what appears in the animal as movement or as sensation.”

If I observe an animal on the 20th of June and consider its sensations, then I shall not be able to find the causes of the sensations on the 20th of June in anything that is in earthly or extra-earthly space. If I go still farther back I shall not find them either. I shall not find them in May, nor in April, nor in any other month.

The modern view feels this. Therefore, this modern view explains what is thus not capable of explanation, or at least a great deal of it, by means of heredity. That is to say, it explains by means of a phrase. It is “inherited.” It originates with the forebears, it is “inherited” by the offspring. Naturally, not everything, because that would, indeed, be too grotesque; nevertheless, a great deal. It is inherited!

What is meant by “inherited?” The concept of heredity leads finally back to the idea that what appears as complicated animal was contained in its mother's ovum. And it has, indeed, been the endeavor of the modern view to observe an ox outwardly in its complicated form and then to say: “Well, the ox sprang from the ovum; in it were the forces which then resulted in the full-grown ox. Therefore, the ovum is an extraordinarily complicated body.”

It would have to be extremely complicated, this ovum of the cow, for, is it not true? everything is contained within it which presses toward all sides, and forms, and fashions, and works, in order that out of the little ovum the complicated ox may emerge!

And however much we may struggle to find a way out—there are, indeed, many theories of evolution, of epigenesis, etc.—whatever way out we try to find, we see that there is nothing else to do than to conclude that this ovum, this little egg, is something extremely complicated. Since everything is led back to the molecule, which is built up of atoms in a complicated way, there are many who represent the first inception of this ovum as a complicated molecule. But, my dear friends, this does not even agree with physical observations.

The question arises: Is this ovum really such a complicated molecule, already such a complicated organism? The peculiarity of the ovum does not at all consist in its complexity, but in the fact that it throws all its substance back into chaos—into a chaotic state. Precisely the ovum is, in the mother-animal, not a complicated structure, but a completely pulverized, disarranged substance. It is not organized at all. It is something that falls back into an absolutely unorganized, powder-like condition. And reproduction would never occur, did not the unorganized, the lifeless matter which tends toward the crystalline, toward the form—did not this matter in the ovum fall back into itself, into chaos. The albumen is not the most complicated body, but rather the simplest, which has nothing determinative in it. And out of this little chaos, which exists there at first as an ovum, no ox could ever come into existence, for this ovum is just a chaos. Why, then, does an ox come forth from it? Because, in the maternal organism, the entire cosmos acts upon this ovum. It is just because it is unconditioned, because it is chaotic, that the entire cosmos can act upon it. And fructification has no other purpose than to cast back the matter of the ovum into chaos, into the indeterminate, into the unconditioned. Thus, nothing else acts but the universe alone. But now, if we look into the mother, we do not find therein the causes. If we look outside into the ether world, there also in the simultaneous occurrences the causes are not to be found. We must go back until we come to the time before the animal was born, if we wish to find the causes for what germinates there as the potential capacities of a being, capable of sensation and movement. We must go back to a time before life has begun. That is, for the capacities of feeling and movement the causal world does not lie in simultaneousness but lies in a time prior to the conception of this being.

The following is the curious fact: If I behold a plant, I must go out into what is simultaneous, and I then find the cause; but I find it in the reaches of the universe. If, however, I wish to find the cause of what acts in the animal as sensation, then I cannot look for it in simultaneousness, but I must look for it in what preceded life; in other words, the stellar constellation must have changed, it must have become different. It is not the stellar constellation in the universe which exists simultaneously with the animal that has its influence upon the actual animal nature, but the constellation of the stars preceding its life.

And now let us look at the human being when he has passed the threshold of death. When this has occurred, he must go back—after he has laid aside his ether body, which spreads out into every part of the reaches of the universe from whence come the growth forces of the plants, the etheric forces—he must go back, as I have described it, to his moment of birth. Then he has experienced in his astral body all that he has gone through in life, but in reverse order. In other words, the human being must not pass into the state of simultaneousness with his astral body after death; he must go back to the state prior to birth. He must go to that region whence come the forces which give the animal the capacity for sensation and the ability of movement. These do not come out of simultaneously existing stellar constellations, they come from the constellations existing prior to birth.

Thus, if we speak of the animal kingdom, we cannot speak of the simultaneousness of the causes in the physical and super-physical, but we must then speak of past super-physical causes passing over to the present effects in the physical.

Animal Kingdom: Past super-physical causes to present effects.

And here, too, we enter again the concept of time. We must, if I may use a trivial expression, go for a walk in time. If we wish to seek the causes of something occurring in the physical world, we go for a walk in this world; we do not need to go outside the physical world. If we wish to seek the causes of something which is really in the living plant kingdom, then we must go quite far away. We must seek in the ether world. And only there where the ether world comes to an end, where—speaking in terms of a fairy tale—the world is fenced, is boarded in, there only do we find the causes of plant growth.

We may go about there as much as we wish, yet we shall not find the cause of the faculty of sensation or movement. We must begin to go for a walk in time, we must tread there the path of time in reverse order. We must leave space and go for a walk in time.

You will note that we can place the human physical body in its lifelessness alongside lifeless outer nature in respect of causation; we can place the human ether body in its life and its expansion after death into the ether spaces alongside the ether life of the plant, which also comes hither out of the reaches of the ether, but, indeed, out of the simultaneous constellations of the super-physical, of the super-earthly. And we are able to place the human astral organism alongside of that which exists outside in the animal nature.

And we then advance from the mineral, to the plant, to the animal kingdom, coming finally to the real human kingdom. You will say: “Well, we have already considered that from the beginning.” Yes, indeed, but not altogether. We have, in the first place, considered the human kingdom in so far as the human being has a physical body; then, in so far as he has an ether body, and then, in so far as he has an astral body. But just note that he would be a crystal—a complicated one, to be sure, but a crystal, nevertheless—if he had only his physical body. If he were to have merely his ether body in addition, he would then be a plant, a beautiful plant perhaps, nevertheless, just a plant. If, again, the human being had in addition an astral body, he would go about on all fours, perhaps have horns and other similar animal characteristics—in short, he would be just an animal. The human being is none of these. The form which he has as an erect walking being he has by virtue of his possessing an ego organism besides the physical, etheric, and astral organisms. And only this being, who also has an ego organism, can we designate as man, as belonging to the human kingdom.

Let us now once more consider what we have already observed. If we wish to seek the causes of plant nature, we must then go out into the reaches of the ether realm, but we are still able to remain in space; only, as has been remarked, space in that case becomes somewhat hypothetical, for we must even resort to the fairy-tale concept, we must go “where the world is boarded up.” It is, however, really a fact that even modern human beings who think in accord with purely natural scientific research are coming to the view that we can actually speak of something like that expressed in the fairy tale “where the world is boarded in.” It is, naturally, a trivial, clumsy expression. But we need only recall how childishly human beings think: There is the sun. It sends forth its rays, sends them farther and farther away. They become, it is true, weaker and weaker. The light goes on and on and on, it goes further and further away, into the endless.

I have explained long ago to those who have already for years heard my lectures that it is nonsense to imagine that the light goes out into the endless. I have always said that the outspreading of light is dependent on its elasticity. If we take a rubber ball and depress it, we can do this only up to a certain point, it then snaps back again. That is to say, the elasticity of the ball has its limits; then the depressed surface springs back into place. This I have said is also true of light. It does not go out into the limitless, but, when a certain limit is reached, it returns.

This fact, that light does not expand out into the boundless, but only to a certain limit and then comes back, has found an advocate, for example, in England in the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge. So it can be seen that today physical science has already come to advocate what is given through spiritual science, and physical science will eventually accept, in all particulars, what is stated by spiritual science.

And thus it is, indeed, possible to speak also of the fact that there outside, if we think sufficiently far out into space, we must allow our thoughts to return and not permit ourselves simply to postulate endless space, which is fantastic—indeed, a fantasy we cannot imagine. Perhaps there may be some among you who will remember that in the description of the course of my life I said how very deep an impression was made on me when, in my study of modern synthetic geometry, I was led to the concept that a straight line may not be considered as having a limitless extension, a never ending extension, but that such a line extending in one direction actually returns from the other. Geometry expresses it somewhat as follows: The point at infinity to the right of a fixed point is the same as the infinitely distant point to the left. It is possible to calculate this. This is not merely analogous to the fact that when we have a circle and start here by following the circumference we return to the same point again, or that, if a semicircle is infinite it is a straight line. That is not the case. That would be an analogy to which those who can think with exactness do not attribute any value. What made an impression on me was not this trivial analogy, but the actual proof in accordance with strict calculation, that the infinitely distant point on the left is the same as the infinitely distant point on the right, and that actually if someone begins to run from here along a straight line continually he will not run to a limitless infinity, but that, if he but continue to run for the proper length of time, he will eventually come toward us again from the opposite direction. This appears grotesque to all physical thought. The moment physical thinking is laid aside, this is actually a reality, because the universe is not endless, but is limited in as far as the physical universe is concerned. Thus, it may be said that we reach the limits of the etheric when we speak of the vegetative and of what is etheric in the human being. But we must go outside of everything that exists in space when we wish to explain the animal and the astral nature in man. There we must go walking in time; there we must go beyond simultaneousness; there we must advance in time.

When we enter time, we cross the boundary of the physical in a twofold way. In describing the animal, we must already proceed in time. We must, however, not continue this mode of thinking abstractly, but continue it in a concrete way. Pay attention for a moment and see how this can be continued concretely.

Human beings think, do they not? that when the sun sends forth its light, this continues on its path endlessly. Sir Oliver Lodge shows, however, that we have already forsaken this mode of thinking about the matter and, instead, that we know that light comes to a boundary and then returns again. The sun receives back its light from all sides, although in another form, in a transformed condition. The sun receives back the light. Let us now employ this mode of thinking on what we have just been considering. We stand, at the outset, in space. Earth-space remains within it. We stride out into the universe. That is not yet enough for us: we stride out into time. Now some one could say: “Very well, we now stride on ever further and further.” No, not at all! We now return again. We must continue this mode of thinking. We return again. We come back again in the same way as we do when we march forth into space, going ever further, reaching finally the boundary, and then return. So here also do we return. That is to say, if we have sought the past super-physical causes in the reaches of time, we must return again into the physical.

What does that mean? It means, we must again descend out of time, out of time descend again upon the earth. If we wish, thus, to seek the causes of the human being, then we must seek them again upon earth. Now we have marched back in time. If, by marching back in time, we come again upon the earth, then of course we come into a previous human life. With the animal, we stride further; it dissipates in regard to time just as our ether body dissipates right out to the boundary of the cosmos. The human being does not dissipate himself out there, for when we retract his path in time we come back to the earth into his previous life. Thus, we must say for the human being: From past physical causes to present effects in the physical.

Mineral Kingdom: Simultaneousness of causes in the physical.

Plant Kingdom: Simultaneousness of the causes in the physical and super-physical.

Animal Kingdom: Past super-physical causes of present effects.

Human Kingdom: Past physical causes of present effects in the physical.

You see, it has required effort today to familiarize ourselves with abstractions in a preparatory way. But that, my dear friends, was necessary. It was necessary, because I wished to show you that there is also a logic for those spheres which we must consider to be the spiritual. Only, this logic does not agree with the clumsy logic which is deduced merely from physical phenomena, and in which human beings are accustomed entirely and only to believe.

If we proceed in a purely logical way and investigate the series of causes, then, in the mere train of thought, we reach the past earth lives. And it is necessary to call attention to the fact that also the mode of thinking itself must become different from the usual mode, if we wish to comprehend the spiritual.

Human beings believe that what reveals itself from the spiritual world cannot be comprehended. It can be comprehended, but we must broaden our logic. It is, indeed, also necessary, if we wish to comprehend a musical or any other work of art, that we bear in ourselves the conditions which meet the matter halfway. If we do not possess these conditions, then we understand nothing concerning them. Then the music passes us by as a noise. Or we may see in some work of art nothing but an incomprehensible shape. Thus, we must also meet what is communicated from the spirit world with a mode of thought commensurate with this world. This, however, becomes evident in mere logical thinking. By investigating the various natures of the causes, we reach, indeed, the possibility of understanding the past earth lives also in logical sequence.

Now there remains the important question, which begins there where we observe the corpse. It has become lifeless. Lifeless nature exists outside in its crystal forms, in its varied shapes. The important question now confronts us: What is the relationship of lifeless nature to the corpse of the human being?

Perhaps you will see, my dear friends, that something is being contributed to a meaning which lies in the direction of the answer to this question, if you take hold of the matter in its second step, if you say: When I behold the plant world surrounding me, then I realize that it carries in itself the forces coming from the reaches of the ether cosmos to which my ether body returns. There outside in the ether reaches, there above are the causative sources of the plants. Thither goes my ether body when it has served its purpose during my life. I go thither where plant life gushes forth from the ether reaches. I go thither—that is, I am related to it. Indeed, I can say: Something exists there above me; my ether body ascends to it; the verduring, sprouting, up-springing plant world comes thither from it. But there is a difference. I give up my ether body; the plants receive the ether in order to grow. They receive the ether in order to live. I yield up the ether body after death. I yield it up as something remaining over. The plants, however, receive this ether body as something that gives them life. They have their beginning in that region which I reach at my end. The plant beginning unites with the human ether body's ending.

May it perhaps be that in relation to the mineral, to the crystals of the most manifold forms, I can ask the following question: Is that which I leave behind as physical corpse, as an end of myself, perhaps also a beginning of the mineral? Do beginning and end perhaps meet?

With this question in mind we intend to close today, my dear friends, and to begin tomorrow, in order to enter thoroughly into the question of human destiny, of so-called karma. Thus, in the next lecture, I shall continue to speak about karma. You will then no longer have to find your way through such a thicket of abstractions, but you will also understand that this was quite necessary for a certain development of thought.

When we advance from the study the aim of which was to prepare us for the explanation of human destiny, of karma, when we advance from abstractions, from the intellectual, to life itself, this advance then brings us, first of all, to the point of placing before our minds the various spheres of life into which the human being is inserted, in order to gain from these constituents of life a basis for a characterization of karma, of human destiny.

Indeed, the human being belongs to the whole cosmos in a much more comprehensive sense than is usually thought. He is, indeed, a member of the cosmos, and without the cosmos he is nothing. I have often employed the comparison of some human bodily member, for example, a finger: A finger is a finger by virtue of its being a part of the human organism. The moment it is severed from the human organism it is no longer a finger. Outwardly, physically, as finger it is the same as previously, but after it has been severed from the human organism it is, indeed, no longer a finger. In like manner is the human being no longer a human being when he is lifted out of the general cosmic existence. He belongs to the general cosmic existence, and without it he cannot at all be looked upon, not at all be comprehended as a human being.

As we have already seen from yesterday's lecture, the world surroundings of mankind consist of various domains. To begin with, we have the lifeless domain of the world which, in ordinary language, we call the domain of the mineral world. We become similar to this domain of the mineral world as the lifeless element only after we have laid aside our body, when we, as far as this body is concerned, have passed through the portal of death. In our real being we never become similar to this lifeless element. The discarded bodily form alone becomes similar to this element.

Thus, we have on the one hand what the human being leaves behind as a physical corpse in the realm of the lifeless, and, on the other, what exists as the widespread lifeless, crystalline and non-crystalline mineral nature and world. As human beings we are entirely dissimilar to this mineral world as long as we live upon the earth. To this I have already drawn attention. In regard to our form, we are immediately destroyed when we are consigned to the mineral world as a corpse. We disintegrate into the mineral; that is, the element which holds our form together has nothing in common with mineral nature. From this it follows that the human being as he lives in the physical world cannot be actually influenced at all by the mineral nature itself.

The chief and most comprehensive influences which act upon the human being from the mineral kingdom come in a roundabout way through the senses. We see the mineral kingdom, we hear it, we perceive its warmth, briefly, we perceive it by means of the senses. Our other relationships to the mineral nature are extremely slight. Just consider how very little of a mineral nature enters into relationship with us during earth life. The salt with which we flavor our food is mineral, and a few other things which we take in with our food are of a mineral nature, but by far the largest part of the food stuff which the human being consumes comes from the plant and animal kingdoms. And what we receive from the mineral kingdom relates itself in a very peculiar way to what we receive from the mineral world through our senses simply as soul impressions, as sense perceptions. And I beg you to consider seriously in this connection something very important. I have, indeed, frequently described this: The human brain weighs on the average about 1500 grams. This is quite a weight. The blood vessels at the base of this brain would be completely crushed by it if they were so heavily pressed upon by such a weight as this. But the brain does not press so heavily, for it is subject to a certain law. This law, which I have described here recently, says that an object immersed in a liquid loses some of its weight.

This can be shown by experiment, by taking a pair of scales—first disregarding the liquid-filled vessel—weighing this object and noting its weight. Then place the vessel containing the water underneath one of the scale pans so that the object in the scale pan sinks into the water. Immediately the scale pans are no longer in balance. The pan containing the weight drops lower, because the object in the other pan becomes lighter. If you then investigate how much lighter the object in question becomes, you will find that it is lighter by an amount equal to the weight of the fluid which the object displaces. If thus you take water as a fluid, then will the weight of the body immersed be reduced by an amount equal to the weight of the displaced water. This is the so-called principle of Archimedes. He discovered this—as I have told you on another occasion—when taking a bath. By simply sitting in the bath he found that his leg became lighter or heavier, according as he inserted it in the water or lifted it out again. And he then cried: I have found it! Eureka!

Indeed, my dear friends, what has just been said is an extremely important fact; important facts, however, are often forgotten. Had the engineering art not forgotten this Archimedean principle, then in Italy perhaps one of the greatest disasters of recent times would not have occurred. These are just the things which occur also in outer life from inability to survey clearly present-day knowledge.

In any case, the body loses in weight an amount equal to the weight of the displaced water. Now, the brain is completely immersed in the cerebral fluid. It swims within this brain water. Once in a while, at the present time, the human being comes to realize that in so far as he is solid, he is actually a fish. In reality he is, indeed, a fish, for 90% of his body consists of water and the solid element swims within it like the fish in water.

Thus, the brain by swimming in the cerebral fluid becomes so much lighter than formerly that it weighs only 20 grams. The brain which out of its fluid weighs some 1500 grams, in its fluid presses upon its base with a weight of only 20 grams. Now just consider how strong in us is the tendency in such an important organ—on account of this swimming of our brain in the cerebral fluid—the tendency to become free from the earth. We do not at all think with an organ which is subject to the influence of gravity, but rather we think in opposition to this force of gravity. The brain organ has first been relieved of the force of gravity.

If you consider the wide significance of the impressions which you receive through the senses, and which you confront with your free will, and compare this with the minute influences which come from salt and similar substances absorbed as food or seasoning, then the following will result from your observation: So great is the predominance of our mere sense impressions, which render us independent of the stimuli from the mineral kingdom, that what we receive into ourselves as direct influence from the mineral world is related to our sense perceptions in the ratio of 20 to 1500 grams. What we take into ourselves through the sense perceptions does not tear us apart, and the elements in us which actually are subject to the earth's gravity—such as the mineral seasonings in our food are, for the most part, things that conserve us inwardly; for salt has at the same time a conserving, a maintaining, a refreshing force. The human being is thus, on the whole, independent of what exists in the surrounding mineral kingdom. He takes into himself from the mineral kingdom only that which has no direct influence on his inner nature. He moves about freely and independently in the mineral world.

My dear friends, if this freedom and independence of movement in the mineral world did not exist, what we call human freedom would not exist at all. And it is very important that we must acknowledge that the mineral kingdom actually exists as the necessary counterpart of human freedom. Indeed, were there no mineral kingdom, we would not be free beings. For the moment we ascend into the plant kingdom, we are no longer independent of that kingdom. It only seems as if we directed our eyes toward the plant kingdom in just the same way we direct them toward the crystal, toward the widespread mineral kingdom. That is, however, not the case. Here, on the earth, the plant kingdom lies outspread. And we human beings are born into the world as breathing, living beings, as beings having a certain metabolism. All this is, indeed, much more dependent on the environment than our eyes, our ears, than everything that is a transmitter of sense impressions. What exists as plant world, the outspread plant world, draws its life out of the strength-giving ether pouring from all sides downward into the earth. The human being also is subject to this ether.

When we are born as a little child and begin to grow, when the forces of growth are evident in us, these are the ether forces. The same forces which cause the plants to grow live in us as ether forces. We carry within us the ether body. The physical body harbors our eyes, harbors our ears. As I have just explained, this body has nothing in common with the rest of the physical world, and what shows this to be true is the fact that, as a corpse, it decays in the physical world.

In the case of the ether body we have at once a different condition. Through this ether body we are related to the plant kingdom. But by our growing—just consider this, my dear friends—by virtue of our growing, something forms itself within us which has a deep connection, in a certain sense, with our destiny. To employ some rather grotesque, radical illustrations, we may grow and yet remain small and fat, or become tall and slim; we may grow and have this or that shape of nose. In brief, the way we grow has most decidedly a certain influence upon our external appearance. This, again, is connected—although in the first place only loosely—with our destiny. Growth does not express itself, however, only in these coarser things. Were the instruments we possess for purposes of research fine enough, we should discover that actually every human being has a different liver composition, a different spleen composition, a different brain composition. Liver is not merely liver. In every individual—naturally, in a very delicate way—it is something different. All this is connected with the same forces which cause the plants to grow. And in beholding the plant cover of the earth we must become conscious of the fact that what pours in out of the reaches of the ether, causing the plants to grow, works and acts also in us; it produces in us the original human potentiality which has a great deal to do with our destiny. For whether a person has received this or that liver, lung, or brain composition from the etheric universe is a matter profoundly connected with his destiny.

We see only the outer side, to be sure, of all these things. Certainly, if we look upon the mineral kingdom, we see about all that exists in that world. Human beings are so fond, scientifically, of this mineral world—if it is at all possible to speak of a “scientific fondness” at the present time—because it contains everything that people wish to find.

This is certainly not the case with what sustains, as forces, the plant kingdom. For the moment we attain imaginative knowledge—I have already spoken of this on other occasions—we begin immediately to see that the minerals are of such a nature that they are enclosed in the mineral kingdom. What sustains the plant kingdom does not appear externally at all to ordinary consciousness. Here we must penetrate deeper into the world.

Suppose we ask the question: What is it really that acts in the plant kingdom? What acts there so that there can come from the distant ether reaches the forces which make the plants sprout and spring forth from the earth, which also cause our growth, however, and the finer composition of our whole body,—what acts there? This question then brings us to the beings of the so-called third Hierarchy, the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai. These beings are the realm of the invisible; but without them there would be no up and down surging of the ether forces which cause the plants to grow, and which act in us through our having within us the same forces that cause growth in plants. We can no longer stop at the mere visible—unless we wish to remain dull in regard to knowledge—if we approach the plant world and its forces. And we must, indeed, become conscious of the fact that in the body-free existence between death and a new birth we develop our relationships, our connections with these beings, the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai. And according to the way we develop these connections and relationships with these beings of the third

Hierarchy, does the karma of our inner nature—if I may designate it thus—fashion itself, that very karma which depends upon the way our ether body combines the bodily fluids, how it causes us to be tall or short, and so forth.

But here the beings of the third Hierarchy have only limited power. The ability of plants to grow does not originate from their power alone, for in this respect, these beings of the third Hierarchy—the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai—stand in the service of yet higher beings. What we live through, however, before we descend out of the spiritual world into our physical body, what is connected with our more delicate bodily structure, and all that I have just described, all this is caused by our conscious encounter with these beings of the third Hierarchy. And under this instruction which we can receive from them, in accordance with our preparation in our previous earth life, that is, as a result of the instruction we receive for fashioning our ether body out of the forces of the ether reaches, all this occurs during the last pre-birth period, just before we descend from the super-physical into physical existence.

From the foregoing it is evident that our glance must first fall upon what works into our destiny, into our karma out of our inner constitution. For this aspect of karma, I should like to employ the expressions “comfort and discomfort in life.” Well-being, comfort, and discomfort in life are connected with what is our inner quality by virtue of our ether body.

A second element which lives in our karma depends upon the fact that the earth is not only covered by the plant kingdom but is inhabited by the animal kingdom. Now just consider, my dear friends, that the different regions of the earth have the most varied animals. The animal atmosphere in the different regions of the earth varies greatly.

You will, however, admit that the human being also lives in this atmosphere in which the animals live. That sounds grotesque at the present time, because human beings are not accustomed to consider such matters. There are, for example, regions where the elephant lives. Indeed, in the regions where the elephant lives the cosmos affects the earth in such a way as to make it possible for the elephant to come into being. Indeed, do you believe, my dear friends, that, if there is a portion of the earth upon which the elephant lives, with the elephant-forming forces working down upon it from the cosmos, the same forces are not working, if right at this same spot a human being is present? Of course, these forces are there also when a human being is present. And this is likewise just as true for the whole animal kingdom. In exactly the same way that the plant-forming forces from the ether reaches are present right here where we live—the walls of wood, stone, and even concrete do not hold them back; here in Dornach, we live more or less in the midst of the very forces that fashion the plants in the Jura Alps—so likewise, if a human being lives on the very soil where the elephant can exist according to the earth's constitution, does he live under the elephant-forming forces.

I can, indeed, quite well imagine that you now have before your mind's eye many a large and small animal which inhabits the earth, and you now learn that the human being, indeed, lives in the same atmosphere as these animals. All this actually works upon the human being. Naturally, it acts upon the human being differently from the way it acts upon the animals, because the human being has yet other qualities, yet other members of his being than the animals. It acts differently upon the human being; otherwise he would also become an elephant in the elephant sphere. He does not, however, become an elephant. Moreover, the human being lifts himself continually out of what works upon him there. Yet he lives in this atmosphere.

You see, everything that exists in the astral body of the human being is dependent upon this atmosphere in which he lives. And, if we may say that his well-being or discomfort is dependent upon the plant nature of the earth, so may we again say that the sympathies and antipathies which we, as man, develop within our earth existence, and which we bring with us from pre-earthly existence, depend on what constitutes, so to speak, the animal atmosphere.

The elephant has a trunk and thick, column-shaped legs. The stag has antlers, and so on. In these members live the animal-forming, the animal-shaping forces. In the human being these forces are manifest only in their effect upon his astral body. And in this effect upon his astral body they produce the sympathies and antipathies which the human individuality brings with him out of the spiritual world.

Just observe, my dear friends, these sympathies and antipathies. Observe what a strong dominant power these sympathies and antipathies have throughout the whole of life. Certainly, we human beings are taught, with justification in a certain respect, to rise above these strong sympathies and antipathies. Nevertheless, to begin with they still exist—these sympathies and antipathies; we still go through our lives living in sympathies and antipathies. One has sympathy for this and another for that. One has sympathy for sculpture, another for music; one has sympathy for blondes, another for brunettes. These are strong, radical sympathies. But our entire life is interwoven by such sympathies and antipathies. We live in dependence upon those forces which produce the manifold animal configurations.

And now, just ask yourselves, my dear friends, what then do we as human beings bear within us which corresponds within our own innermost being to the manifold animal shapes existing in outer nature? A hundredfold, a thousandfold are the animal shapes. A hundredfold, a thousandfold are the configurations of our sympathies and antipathies; only, most of them remain in the unconscious or in the subconscious.

This is an additional, a third, world.

The first world was the world upon which we really feel no dependence—the mineral world. The second world is the one in which Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai live, the one which causes the plant kingdom to sprout forth, which gives us our inner quality by means of which we carry well-being and discomfort into life, by means of which we feel desperately unhappy through ourselves or feel happy through ourselves. That which signifies our destiny through our inner composition, through our entire etheric humanness, is taken out of this second world. We now come to what further profoundly conditions our destiny,—that is, our sympathies and antipathies. And these sympathies and antipathies bring us, finally, what belongs to our destiny in a far wider scope than do merely these sympathies and antipathies themselves.

The one human being is carried by his sympathies and antipathies into far distances. He lives here and there, because his sympathies have borne him thither, and in these distant reaches the details of his destiny develop. Deeply linked to our whole human destiny are these sympathies and antipathies. They live in the world in which lives not the third Hierarchy, but the second Hierarchy—the Exusiai, the Dynamis, the Kyriotetes. That which is an earthly reflection of the sublime, glorious forms of this second Hierarchy lives in the animal kingdom. That, however, which these beings transplant into us during our intercourse with them between death and a new birth we bring with us out of the spiritual into the physical world as our inborn sympathies and antipathies.

If we fathom these matters, then such concepts as those of ordinary heredity become childish, really childish. For in order that I may possess some inherited trait from my father or mother, I must first develop the sympathy or antipathy for this trait of my father or mother. Thus, it does not depend merely upon the fact that I have inherited these qualities through some sort of lifeless nature-cause, but it depends upon whether I have had any sympathy for these qualities. The reason why I have had such sympathies for these qualities will be discussed in the subsequent lectures. Our discussions about karma will, indeed, occupy us for many hours to come. It is, however, really childish to speak about heredity in the way this usually occurs today in those scientific circles which consider themselves especially clever.

It is even asserted today that specifically soul-spirit characteristics are inherited. Genius is said to be inherited from the forebears, and when a genius appears in the world, we seek out the individual traits in the forebears which, when united in some personality, are supposed to produce this genius. Indeed, that is a strange kind of demonstration of the truth. A reasonable proof would be that, if a genius exists he would then, through heredity, again produce another genius. But, if we were to look for these proofs—well, Goethe also had a son, and other geniuses have had sons we would come upon curious things. That would be a proof! But the fact that a genius exists and that certain characteristics of his forebears are found in this genius has no more significance than that I am wet if I fall into the water and am pulled out. Through this event, I have very little to do in my own nature with the water which then drips from me. Naturally, since I am born into a certain hereditary stream, because of my sympathies with the qualities in question, I am vested with these inherited qualities just as, when I have fallen into the water, I carry some of this water on my body after having been pulled out of it. Grotesquely childish, however, are the ideas which people have in this regard. For the sympathies and antipathies have already appeared in the pre-earthly existence of the human being, and these give him his innermost structure. With these he enters into earth existence: with these he frames his destiny for himself out of his pre-earthly existence.

And we can now easily imagine the following: In a previous earth life, we were associated with a human being. Much has resulted from this association, which continues on in the life between death and a new birth. Under the influence of the forces of the higher Hierarchies, there is fashioned within the living thoughts, within the living cosmic impulses, all that which is then to pass over into the next earth life out of the experience of the previous one, in order to be lived further. For that purpose, we employ sympathies and antipathies, cultivating the impulses through which we find each other in life.

And these sympathies and antipathies are shaped under the influence of the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes in the life between death and a new birth. These sympathies and antipathies enable us then to find the human beings in life with whom we must continue to live, in accordance with the previous earth lives. This is fashioned out of our inner human structure.

Naturally, in this acquiring of sympathies and antipathies the most manifold errors occur. These, however, are equalized again in the course of destiny throughout many earth lives. Thus, we have here a second constituent of karma: the sympathies and antipathies.

We may say: First constituent of karma—inner comfort, or discomfort; second constituent—sympathies and antipathies (see tabulation pages 26, 27). By virtue of our having reached the sympathies and antipathies in human destiny we have ascended into the sphere in which lie the forces for the formation of the animal kingdom.

Now we ascend into the real kingdom of man. We live not only in association with the plant kingdom, with the animal kingdom, but we live quite determinatively for our fate in association with other human beings in the world. That is quite a different association from the association with plants and animals. It is an association through which the chief element of our destiny is fashioned. The impulses which cause the peopling of the earth also with human beings act only upon mankind. And now the question arises: Which are the impulses that act only upon mankind? Here we can permit a purely external consideration to speak which I have already frequently presented.

Our life is, indeed, directed from its yonder side—if I may so express myself—with a much greater wisdom than we direct it here from this side.

We often meet in our later years someone who is extraordinarily important for our life. If we think back and see how we have lived up to the time when we met this human being, our whole life then appears to us to be the path we have taken in order to encounter him. It is as if we had ordered every step so as to find this individual exactly at the right point of time, or at least to find him at a certain point of time.

We need only, for once, ponder upon the following: Just think what, with full human awareness, it signifies, to find in some year of one's life a certain person and henceforward to experience something in common with him, to work and collaborate with him. Just consider what this means. Let us consider in full awareness what it is that offers itself as the impulse which has led us to meet this person. If we ponder upon the matter and ask ourselves how it is that we have found this person, perhaps it will then occur to us that an event had first to be experienced by us which was connected with many other people; otherwise there would not have* been the least possibility of finding this human being during life. And in order that this event might occur, another had in turn to be experienced. We arrive at complicated relationships all of which had to take place and into which we had to enter in order to have some decisive experience. And then we ponder, perhaps, upon the following: If at a certain age—I will not say at the age of one, but of fourteen—we had been put to the task of solving consciously the problem how we should, in the fiftieth year of our life, bring about a decisive meeting with some person, if we imagine that at a certain age we should have had to solve this problem consciously like a problem in arithmetic, I beg you just to consider what all of that would require! We human beings are, indeed, consciously extremely stupid, and what happens with us in the world is, if we consider such things, extremely clever and wise!

If we consider such a thing, our attention is directed to the extreme intricacy and significance of our destiny's working, of the action of our karma. And all this occurs in the realm of the human being.

Now, I beg you to consider that what takes place here with us is actually living in the unconscious. Right up to the moment when a critical event confronts us, it lies in the unconscious. Everything takes place as though subject to the laws of nature. But where would the laws of nature ever have the power to effect such a thing? What occurs in this region can, indeed, contradict all nature laws and everything that we construct in accordance with the outer laws of nature. I have repeatedly drawn your attention also to this fact.

The externalities of human life may even be stretched into the frame of calculated laws. Let us take, for example, the business of life insurance. It can only prosper through our being able to calculate the probable life duration of any—let us say—nineteen or twenty-year-old individual. When someone wishes to insure his life, the policy is based upon the probable length of life. That is, as a person, nineteen years old today, we are expected to live according to these calculations a certain number of years. That can be determined. But just suppose that this period has elapsed. You would not feel in duty bound to die because of this fact. According to this probable life duration, two human beings should have been dead for a long time. But, after they have long been “dead,” according to this probable duration of life, they meet each other for the first time in the way I have described! All this occurs beyond what we calculate for human life out of the external facts of nature. And nevertheless, it occurs with as much inner necessity as do the laws of nature. It is not possible to say anything but the following: With the same necessity with which any natural phenomenon takes place, an earthquake, or a volcanic eruption, or whatever it may be, a minor or a major event in nature, with the same necessity two human beings meet each other during earth life according to the rules of life which they have made for themselves. Thus, we see actually here within the physical realm a new realm established, and within this realm we live not only in comfort or discomfort, in sympathies and antipathies, but we live within it as in our own occurrences, our own experiences. We are entirely molded into the realm of events, of experiences which determine our life in accordance with destiny.

In this realm the beings of the first Hierarchy are active, the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. For, in order that every human step, every movement of the soul, everything in us may be guided in the world in such a way that the destiny of man may grow from it, a greater power is needed than that which acts in the plant kingdom, than that possessed by the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, than that possessed by the Hierarchy of the Exusiai, Kyriotetes, Dynamis. To achieve this a power is needed which is inherent in the first Hierarchy, Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones—the most exalted beings of the universe. Now, what comes to manifestation there lives in our real ego, in our ego organism, and extends its life from a previous earth existence into a later one.

Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi:

First Constituent of Karma—Comfort, Discomfort.

Dynamis, Exusiai, Kyriotetes:

Second Constituent of Karma—Sympathies, Antipathies.

Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones:

Third Constituent of Karma—Events, Experiences.

And now consider the following: You live a life on earth, causing this or that, out of instincts, passions, inclinations, let us say, or out of clever or foolish thoughts. All this is actually present within you as impulses. Consider that, when you live a life on earth, what you do through instincts leads to this or to that; it leads to the happiness or injury of another human being. Then you pass through the life between death and a new birth. In this life you have the strong consciousness: “If I have injured another human being, I am less perfect than I should have been had I not thus injured him. I must atone for it.” You feel in yourself the urge and the impulse to expiate this injury. If you have done something to a human being which advances him, then you behold what is advancing him in such a way that you say: “This must serve as the basis for general world advancement, this must lead to further results in the world.”

All this you are able to develop inwardly; all this may give well-being, ease, or discomfort, according to the way you fashion the inner nature of your body during life between death and a new birth. All this may lead you to sympathies and antipathies, in that you construct your astral body in the corresponding way with the help of the beings of the second Hierarchy, the Exusiai, Dynamis, and Kyriotetes. But all of this does not yet give you the power to cause what in a past life were mere human deeds to become a cosmic act. You advanced or injured a human being. The effect of this must be that this human being will encounter you in the next life and that you will find through this encounter the impulse to expiate the effect. What has a merely moral significance must become an outer fact, must become an outer world event.

For this purpose, the beings are needed who transform, metamorphose, moral acts into world deeds. These are the beings of the first Hierarchy, Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. These beings transform what proceeds from us in one earth life into our experiences of the next earth lives. They act in what constitutes event and experience in human life.

We have there the three basic elements in our karma; that which composes our inner constitution, our inner human existence, is under the control of the third Hierarchy; that which exists as our sympathies and antipathies, that which in a certain way becomes our environment, is the concern of the second Hierarchy; finally, that which confronts us as our outer life is the concern of the first, the most exalted Hierarchy of beings ranging above men.

Thus, we look into the relationship in which the human being stands to the universe, and come now to the important question: How do all the details of our destiny develop from these three elements of the human being?

The human being is born into a parental home. He is born on a certain spot of the earth. He is born within a folk. He is born into a certain complex of facts. Everything, however, that appears by virtue of his being born into a parental home, of his being entrusted to educators, of his being born into a folk, of his being placed upon a certain spot on the earth at his birth,—all of this which, in spite of all human freedom, intervenes so profoundly, so fatefully in the life of the human being, all of this is finally, in some way, dependent upon these three elements which compose human destiny.

All individual questions will disclose themselves to us in corresponding answers, if we focus our attention upon these fundamentals in the right way. If we ask why someone in his twenty-fifth year has small pox, thus passing through the most extreme danger of life, if we ask why some other sickness or event may intervene in his life, why his life may be benefited by this or that older person, by this or that nation, or why advancement occurs to him through this or that outer event,—in every case we shall have to return to that which, in a threefold manner, composes human destiny and places the human being in the totality of the cosmic Hierarchies. In the mineral kingdom alone does the human being move about freely. There lies the realm of his freedom.

By paying attention to this, the human being learns also to pose in the right way the question of freedom. Read in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity how much I have stressed the importance of not asking about the freedom of the will. The will resides deep down in the unconscious, and it is nonsense to ask about the freedom of the will; on the contrary, it is possible to speak only of the freedom of thinking, of thought. In my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I have clearly made this distinction. Free thoughts must activate the will, then is the human being free. But with his thoughts the human being lives in the mineral kingdom. With everything else, with his life in the world of the plant, of the animal, in the purely human world, he is subject to destiny. And freedom is something of which one may say the following: The human being steps out of the realms which are ruled by the higher Hierarchies into the realm which, in a certain way, is independent of the higher Hierarchies, into the mineral kingdom, in order to be free as far as he is concerned. This mineral kingdom is, indeed, the realm to which the human being becomes similar only as a corpse, when he has laid his body aside after having passed through the portal of death. The human being is independent in his earth life of that kingdom which can only act for his destruction. It is not to be wondered at that he is free in this kingdom, since this kingdom has no other part in him but to destroy him when it receives him. He must first die in order that he be, as a corpse, in the realm in which he is free also as a phenomenon of nature. Thus, things are related.

We grow older and older. If the other incidents do not occur which we shall also learn about in connection with karma, if the human being dies at an advanced age, he becomes similar, as a corpse, to the mineral kingdom. He enters the sphere of the lifeless by growing older. Then he detaches his corpse from himself. That is no longer human; naturally, it is no longer human. Let us contemplate the mineral kingdom: that is no longer God. Just as the corpse is no longer human, is the mineral kingdom no longer God. What is it, then? The Godhead is in the plant, animal, and human kingdoms; we have found it there in its three Hierarchies. The Godhead is in the mineral kingdom just as little as the human corpse is the human being. The mineral kingdom is the divine corpse. To be sure, we shall encounter in due course the peculiar fact, upon which today I desire only to touch, that the human being grows older in order to become a corpse and the Gods grow younger in order to become a corpse. That is to say, the Gods travel on that other path on which we travel after our death. The mineral kingdom is, therefore, the youngest kingdom. It is, nevertheless, the one that the Gods detach from themselves. And because it is detached from the Gods, the human being can live within it as in the realm of his freedom. Thus, are these things interrelated. And the human being learns actually to feel more and more at home in the world by his learning in this way to place his sensations, his thoughts, his feelings, his will impulses in the right relationship to the world. But only thus do we see also how, in accordance with the laws of destiny, we are placed in the world and in relationship to other human beings.

Karma is best understood by contrasting it with that other impulse in man—the impulse which we indicate by the word freedom. Let us first, in a very crude way, I should say, place the question of karma before us. What does it signify?

In human life we have to record the fact of successive earth lives. By feeling ourselves within a given earth life, we can look back—in thought at least, to begin with—and see how this present earth life is a repetition of a number of previous earth lives. It was preceded by another, and that in turn by yet another life on earth, and so on until we get back into the ages where it is impossible to speak of repeated earth lives as we do in the present epoch of the earth, for in going farther backward, we reach a time when the life between birth and death and the life between death and a new birth become so similar that the immense difference which exists be- l ween them today is no longer present. Today we live in our earthly body bet ween birth and death in such a way that in every-day consciousness we feel cut off from the spiritual world. Out of this every-day consciousness, men speak of the spiritual world as a “beyond.” They even speak of it as though they might doubt its existence, as though they might deny it altogether, and so forth.

This is because man's life within earthly existence restricts him to the outer world of the senses, and to the intellect; the latter does not look far enough to perceive what really is connected with this earthly existence. Out of this, countless arguments arise, all of which actually are rooted in something unknown. No doubt, you will have often stood among people and experienced how they argued about monism, dualism, and so forth. It is, of course, quite absurd to argue about these catch-words. When people argue in this way, we are reminded of some primitive man, let us say, who has never heard that there is such a substance as air. It will not occur to anyone who knows that air exists, and what its functions are, to speak of it as something belonging to the beyond. Nor will he think of declaring: “I am a monist; air, water, and earth arc one, and you arc a dualist, because you regard air as something that extends beyond the earthly and watery elements.”

All these things are pure nonsense, as, indeed, are mostly all arguments about concepts. There can, therefore, be no question of our entering into such matters, but it can only be a question of drawing attention to them. For just as the air is not present for the one who knows nothing about it, but for him is something belonging to the “beyond,” so for those who do not yet know the spiritual world, which also exists everywhere just as the air, this spiritual world is something belonging to the “beyond;” but for those who take the matter into consideration, the spiritual world is something that belongs very much to this side. Thus, it is simply a question of our acknowledging the fact that at the present earth period the human being between birth and death lives in his physical body, in his whole organism, in such a way that this organism gives him a consciousness whereby he is cut off from a certain world of causes which, none the less, affects this physical earth existence.

Then, between death and a new birth he lives in another world, which we may call a spiritual world in contrast to our physical world; in this spiritual world he does not have a physical body which can be made visible to human senses, but he lives in a spiritual nature. And in this life between death and a new birth the world through which he passes between birth and death is just as alien, in turn, as the spirit world is now alien to every-day consciousness.

The dead look down onto the physical world just as the living that is the physically living—look upward into the spiritual world, and only the feelings are, so to speak, reversed. While the human being here in the physical world between birth and death has a certain aspiration toward another world which grants him fulfilment of much of which there is too little in this world, or of which this world affords him no satisfaction, he must between death and a new birth on account of the multitude of events, and because too much happens in proportion to what a human being can bear, feel a constant longing to return to earth life, to what is then the life in the beyond; hence, during the second half of the life between death and a new birth, he awaits with great longing the passage through birth into a new earth existence. Just as in earth existence the human being is afraid of death, because an uncertainty prevails about what happens thereafter—for in earth life a great uncertainty prevails for ordinary consciousness about what happens after death—so in the life between death and a new birth the condition is just the reverse, there prevails an excessive certainty about earth life. It is a certainty that stuns the human being, that makes him literally faint, so that he is in a state resembling a fainting dream, a state which fills him with the longing to descend again to earth.

These are only a few indications of the great difference prevailing between the earthly life and the life between death and a new birth. If, however, we now go back, let us say, even only as far as the Egyptian period, from the third on up into the first millennium before the founding of Christianity—and, after all, if we go back into this epoch, we go back to those human beings who were none other than ourselves, in a former earth life—indeed, then, at that time during earth existence, life was quite different from our so brutally clear consciousness of the present day. At present human beings have, indeed, a brutally clear consciousness; they are all so clever—I do not at all intend to be ironical—the people of today are, indeed, all very clever. In contrast to this brutally clear consciousness of today, the consciousness of the human being of the ancient Egyptian period was much more dream-like, a consciousness that did not, like ours, strike against outer objects. It passed through the world, as it were, without striking against objects. Instead, it was filled with pictures which, at the same time, revealed something of the spiritual existing in our environment. The spiritual still penetrated into physical earth existence.

Do not ask: How could a man with this more dream-like consciousness, not the brutally clear consciousness of today, have performed the tremendous tasks which were actually achieved, for instance, in the ancient Egyptian or Chaldean epochs? You need merely call to mind the fact that mad people at times, in certain states of mania, possess an immense increase of their physical forces; they begin to carry things which they could not carry when in a completely clear state of consciousness. It was, indeed, a fact that the physical strength of the human beings of that time was correspondingly greater, although they were perhaps of slighter build than men of today. For, as you know, it does not always follow that a stout man is strong and a thin man weak. But they did not spend their earthly life in observing every detail of their physical actions; their physical deeds went parallel with experiences into which the spiritual world still extended.

And again, when the people of that time were in the life between death and a new birth, then far more of this earthly life extended upward into the life beyond—if I may be allowed to use the expression “upward.” Nowadays it is exceedingly difficult to communicate with those who are present in the life between death and a new birth, for languages have gradually assumed a form no longer understood by the dead. Our nouns, for instance, soon after death are absolute gaps in the dead's comprehension of the earthly world. They understand nothing but the verbs, i.e. the words of motion, of action. And while we here on earth have our attention constantly drawn by materialistically minded people to the fact that everything should be defined in an orderly manner, and every concept be limited and sharply defined, the dead no longer know anything of definitions; they only know what is in motion, not what has contours and is limited.

But in more ancient times that which lived on earth as speech, that which lived as usage and habit of thought, was still of such a nature that it extended up into the life between death and a new birth, and the dead still heard an echo of this long after their death, and also an echo of what occurred on earth even after their death.

And if we go still farther back into the time following the catastrophe of Atlantis—the eighth and ninth millennium before the Christian era t lit* difference between the life on earth and the life in the beyond, if I may so describe it, becomes even more insignificant. And then, as we go backward, we gradually reach the ages when the two lives are similar. We can then no longer speak of repeated earth lives.

Thus, repeated earth lives have their limit as we look backward, just as they will have their limit when we look forward into the future. For what begins quite consciously with Anthroposophy—the extension of the spiritual world into the ordinary consciousness of man—will have the consequence that this earth world will extend, in turn, into the world through which we live between death and a new birth; but, in spite of this, our consciousness will not grow dream-like, but clearer and ever clearer. The difference will once again grow less. So that this living in repeated earth lives is limited by outermost boundaries, which then lead into quite another sort of human existence, where it is meaningless to speak of repeated earth lives, because the difference between the earthly and the spiritual life is not so great as it is today.

If we now assume, however, for the long stretch of the present period of the earth age that behind this earth life there lie others—we must not say countless others, for they can even be counted by exact spiritual- scientific research—if we say: behind our present earth life there lie many others, then we have had certain experiences in these previous earth lives which represented certain relationships between human beings. And the effects of these relationships between human beings, which at that time lived themselves out in what we then underwent, extend into this present earth life in the same way as the effects of what we do in this present earth life extend into our next lives on earth. Thus, we have to seek in the former earth life the causes of much that now enters into our present life. Then it is easy for the human being to say: “Thus, what I experience now is conditioned, caused. How can I, then, be a free human being?”

Now, this question is, indeed, a rather significant one, if we consider it in this way. For all spiritual observation shows that in this way the subsequent earth life is conditioned by the earlier ones. On the other hand, the consciousness of freedom absolutely exists. And, when you read my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, you will see that we cannot understand the human being at all, if we are not clear about the fact that his whole soul life tends, is directed, is oriented toward freedom, but a freedom which we have to understand correctly.

Now, it is precisely in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity that you will find an idea of freedom which it is very important to grasp correctly. The point is that we have developed freedom, to begin with, in thought. The fountainhead of freedom is in thought. Man has an immediate consciousness of the fact that he is a free being in his thought. You may rejoin: “But there are many people today who doubt the fact of freedom.” Yes, but this only proves that the theoretical fanaticism of people today is often stronger than their direct experience in reality. Because he is so crammed full of theoretical concepts the human being no longer believes in his own experiences. Out of his observations of the processes of nature, he arrives at the idea that everything is conditioned by necessity, every effect has a cause, all that exists has its cause; thus, if I conceive a thought, this has also a cause. He does not at once think of repeated earth lives in this connection, but he imagines that what wells forth from human thinking is caused in the same way as that which comes out of a machine.

As a result of this theory of universal causation, as it is called, the human being blinds himself frequently to the fact that he bears very clearly within himself the consciousness of freedom. Freedom is a fact which we experience, as soon as we really reflect upon ourselves.

Now, there are also those who are of the opinion that the nervous system is just a nature system, conjuring thoughts out of itself. According to this, then, the thoughts would—let us say—be necessary results, just like the flame which burns under the influence of a fuel, and there could be no question of freedom.

These people, however, contradict themselves in talking at all. As I have often related here, I had a friend in my youth, who had a fanatical inclination, at a certain period, to think materialistically. Thus, he said: “When I walk, for example, then it is the nerves of the brain, infiltrated by certain causes, which bring my walking into effect.” This led, at times, to quite a long debate with him. I finally said to him on one occasion: “Now, look here, you always say: ‘I walk.’ Why do you not say: ‘My brain walks?’ If you really believe in your theory, you ought never to say: ‘I walk, I take hold of things,’ but: ‘My brain walks, my brain takes hold of things.’ Why do you tell a lie?”

These are the theorists, but there are also the practical men. If they observe any nonsense in themselves which they do not wish to stop, they say: “O, I cannot get rid of that; it is just a part of my nature. It is there of its own accord, and I am powerless against it.” There are many such people; they refer to the immutable causation of their own nature. But, as a rule, they do not remain consistent. If they happen to be showing off something they rather like about themselves for which they need no excuse, but on the contrary are glad to receive a little flattery, they then abandon the aforesaid view.

The fundamental fact of the free human being—a self-evident fact can be directly experienced. Now, even in the ordinary, everyday earth life it is a fact that we do many things in complete freedom which, nevertheless, are of such a kind that we cannot easily leave them undone. And yet we do not feel our freedom in the least impaired through this fact.

Let us suppose, for a moment, that you now resolve to build yourself a house. It will take about a year to build it. In a year you will live in it. Will you feel that your freedom has been curtailed through the fact that you then have to say to yourself: “The house is now there, and I must move in, I must live in it; it is a case of compulsion?” No, you will surely not feel your freedom impaired through the fact of your having built a house for yourself. You see, therefore, even in ordinary life these two things stand side by side: You have committed yourself to something. It has thereby become a fact in life, a fact with which you have to reckon.

Now think of all that stems from former lives on earth, with which you have to reckon, because it is due to your own deeds—just as the building of the house is caused by you. Seen in this light, you will not feel your freedom impaired through the fact that your present life on earth is determined by former ones.

Perhaps you will say: “Very well. I will build me a house, but I still wish to remain a free man. I will not let myself be compelled. If I do not like it, I shall, in a year, not move into the new house; I shall sell it.” All right! We might also have our opinion about such a procedure; we might, perhaps, have the opinion that, if you do this, you are a person who does not know his own mind. Indeed, we might well have this opinion; but let us disregard this. Let us disregard the fact that a man is such a fanatical upholder of freedom that he constantly makes up his mind to do things, and afterwards out of sheer “freedom” leaves them undone. We then might well say: “That man has not even the freedom to enter upon the things he himself resolves upon. He constantly feels the goad of the will to be free and is positively persecuted by his fanatical worship of freedom.”

It is really important that these things not be taken in a rigid, theoretical manner, but be grasped in fullness of life. Let us now pass over to a more complicated concept. If we ascribe freedom to man, surely we must also ascribe it to the higher beings who are not hampered in their freedom by the limitations of human nature. If we rise to the beings of the higher Hierarchies, who certainly are not hampered by the limitations of human nature, we must, indeed, seek a higher degree of freedom with them. Now someone might propose a rather strange theological theory to the effect that God must surely be free; He has arranged the world in a certain way;

He has, however, thereby committed Himself; He certainly cannot change the world-order every day; thus, after all, He would in that case be unfree.

You see, if in this way you place in antithesis inner karmic necessity and freedom, which is a fact of our consciousness, which is simply a result of self-observation, you cannot then escape a continuous circle. In this way you cannot escape from a circle. For the matter is as follows: Let us take once more the illustration of the building of a house. I do not wish to press this example too far, but at this point it can still help us along the way. Someone builds himself a house. I will not say: I build myself a house—I shall probably never build one for myself—but, let us say, someone builds himself a house. Well, by this resolve he does, in a certain respect, determine his future. Now, when the house is finished, and he takes his former resolve into account, no freedom apparently remains for him, so far as the living in the house is concerned. He himself has certainly set this limitation to his freedom; nevertheless, apparently no freedom remains for him.

But just think, how many things still remain for you to do in freedom within this house, Indeed, within it you are even free to be stupid or wise, you are free to be horrid or lovable to your fellow men. In the house you are free to get up early or late. Perhaps, you may be under other obligations in this respect; but so far as the house is concerned, you are free to get up early or late. You are free to be an anthroposophist or a materialist within this house. In short, there are innumerable things still at your free disposal.

Likewise, in an individual human life, in spite of the presence of karmic necessity, there are countless things at your free disposal, far more than in a house, countless things fully and really in the domain of freedom.

Here you may, perhaps, be able to rejoin: “Very well, we do then have a certain domain of freedom in our life.” Indeed, that is so: a certain enclosed domain of freedom surrounded by the karmic necessity (see Figure III). Now, looking at this, you may assert the following. You may say: “Well, I am free in a certain domain; but I now reach the limits of my freedom. I then feel the karmic necessity everywhere. I walk around in my room of freedom, but everywhere at the boundaries I come up against my karmic necessity and sense this necessity.”

Indeed, my dear friends, if a fish thought likewise, it would be extremely unhappy in the water, for as it swims in the water it reaches the water's boundary. Outside of the water it can no longer live. Hence it refrains from going outside of the water. It does not go at all outside of the water; it remains in the water, it swims around in the water, and it just lets alone the other element which lies beyond, be it air or something else. And because the fish does this, I can in assure you that it is not at all unhappy over the fact that it cannot breathe with lung«. It does not occur to it to be unhappy. But, if ever it did occur to the fish to be unhappy because it breathes only with gills and not with lungs, then it would have to have lungs in reserve, then it would have to compare the difference between living down below in it lie water, and up in the air. Then the fish's whole way of feeling itself inwardly would be different. It would all be quite different.

If we apply this comparison to human life with respect to freedom and karmic necessity, then it is a fact, in the first place, that the human being in the present earth period has the ordinary consciousness. With this ordinary consciousness he lives in the sphere of freedom, just as the fish lives in the water, and with this consciousness he does not enter at all the realm of karmic necessity. Only when he begins really to perceive the spiritual world—this would be similar to the fish having lungs in reserve—only when he really finds his way into the spiritual world, does he acquire a perception of the impulses living in him as karmic necessity.

He then looks back into his former lives on earth and does not feel, does not say, on finding the causes of his present experiences in a previous earth life: “I am now under the compulsion of an iron necessity, and my freedom is impaired,” but he looks back and sees how he himself has fashioned what now confronts him, just as someone who has built himself a house looks back on the resolve which led him to build it. And we generally find it more reasonable to ask: “Was it, at that time, a sensible or foolish resolve to build this house?” Well, naturally, we can come later on to all sorts of opinions on the matter, if the things turn out in a certain way; but, if we find that it was an enormous stupidity to build the house, we can, at best, say that we were foolish.

Now, in earth life it is an awkward matter in regard to anything which one has inaugurated to have to say that it was stupid. We do not like this. We do not like to suffer from our own follies. We wish we had not made the foolish decision. But this really applies only to the one earth life, because between the foolishness of the resolve and the punishment we suffer in having to experience its consequences there lies the same earth life. It always remains thus.

But this is not so between the individual earth lives. For between them always lie the lives between death and a new birth; and these lives between death and a new birth change many things which would not change if earth life were to continue uniformly. Just suppose that you look back into a former earth life. There you did something good or ill to another human being. The life between death and a new birth took place between this previous earth life and the present earth life. In this life, in this spiritual life, you cannot think otherwise than that you have become imperfect by having done something evil to another human being. This takes away from your value as a human being. It cripples you in soul. You must repair the crippling, and you resolve to achieve in a new earth life what will make good the fault. Thus, between death and a new birth you absorb by your own will that which will compensate for the fault. If you have done good to another human being, you then know that the whole of human life is there for the whole of mankind. You see this most clearly in the life between death and a new birth. You then realize that when you have helped another human being, he has thereby achieved certain things which, without you, he would not have achieved in a former earth life; but, as a result, you feel again united with him in the life between death and a new birth, in order now to live and to develop further what you have achieved together with him in regard to human perfection. You seek him out again in a new earth life in order, in this new earth life, to work further with him through the way you have already helped him perfect himself.

The fact is not at all that we might abhor such necessity, when we, through a real insight into the spirit world, now perceive the scope of this karmic necessity all around us, but the fact is that we look back upon this necessity and see how the things were which we ourselves had done, and then behold them in such a way that we say: “What occurs out of inner necessity has to happen—out of complete freedom also it would have, to happen.”

We shall never have the experience of possessing a real insight into karma without being in agreement with it. If things result in the course of karma which do not please us, then we ought to consider them from the point of view of the general laws and principles of the universe. And we shall then realize more and more that, after all, what is karmically conditioned is better than our having to begin anew, better than our being a book of blank pages with every new earth life. For, as a matter of fact, we are ourselves our karma. We are ourselves that which comes over from previous earth lives. And it has no sense at all to say that something in our karma—alongside of which there exists definitely the realm of freedom—that something in our karma ought to be different from what it is, because it is not at all possible to criticize the single detail in an organically connected totality. Someone may not like his nose; but it is senseless to criticize merely the nose, as such, for the nose a man has must actually be as it is, if the whole man is as he is. The one who says: “I should like to have a different nose,” actually says that he would like to be an utterly different man. But in so doing he really eliminates himself in thought. This we cannot do. Thus, we cannot wipe out our karma, for we are ourselves our karma. Nor does it at all confound us, for it runs its course alongside the deeds of our freedom, and in no wise interferes with the deeds of our freedom.

I should like to use still another comparison to make the point clear. As human beings, we walk; but the ground on which we walk is also there. No one feels interfered with in walking by having the ground underneath his feet. Indeed, he ought even to know that, were the ground not there, he could not walk at all; he would fall through everywhere. It is thus with our freedom; it needs the “ground” of necessity. It must rise out of a foundation. And this foundation—we ourselves are.

As soon as we grasp in the right way the concept of freedom and the concept of karma, we shall be able to find them compatible, and we then need no longer shrink from a detailed study of the karmic laws. Indeed, in some instances we may even come to the following conclusion:

I now assume that someone, by means of the insight of initiation, is able to look back into former earth lives. He knows quite well, when he looks back into former earth lives that this and that has happened to him which has come with him into his present earth life. Had he not attained to initiation science, objective necessity would impel him to do certain things. He would do them quite inevitably. He would not feel his freedom hampered by it; for his freedom lies in his ordinary consciousness with which he never penetrates into the realm where this necessity acts, just as the fish never penetrates into the outer air. But when he has initiation science within him, he then looks back and he sees how things were in a former earth life, and he regards what now confronts him as a task which is consciously allotted to him for this present earth life. This is, indeed, a fact.

What I shall now say may sound paradoxical to you, yet it is true. In reality, a man who possesses no initiation science practically always knows through a kind of inner urge, through an instinct, what he is to do. O, indeed, people always know what they ought to do, feel themselves always impelled to this thing or that. For the one who begins with initiation science, matters become somewhat different in the world. As he faces life, quite strange questions arise in regard to the individual experiences. If he feels impelled to do something, he immediately feels also impelled not to do it. The obscure urge which drives most human beings to this or that is eliminated. And, actually, at a certain stage of initiate-insight, if nothing else were to intervene, a man could really come to the point of saying to himself: “After having reached this insight, I now prefer to spend the entire remainder of my life—I am now 40 years old, which is a matter of indifference to me—sitting on a chair doing nothing. For such pronounced urges to do this or that are no longer present.”

Do not believe, my dear friends, that initiation does not have a reality. It is strange, in this connection, how people sometimes think. In regard to a roast chicken, everyone who eats it believes that it has reality. In regard to initiate science, most people believe that it has only theoretical effects. No, it has effects on life. And such a life effect is the one I have just indicated. Before a man has attained to initiation, under the influence of an obscure urge, one thing is always important to him and another unimportant. The initiate would prefer to sit in a chair and let the world run its course, for it really does not matter—so it might appear to him whether this is done and that is left undone, and so forth. It will, however, not remain so, for initiation science also offers something else besides. The only corrective for the initiate's sitting on a chair, letting the world run its course, and saying: “everything is a matter of indifference to me,” is to look back into former earth lives. He then reads there from his karma the tasks for his present earth life, and he does consciously what his former earth lives impose upon him. He does not abstain from doing it because he believes that thereby his freedom is encroached on, but he does it. He does it, because by his discovery of what he had experienced in previous earth lives he becomes aware, at the same time, of what his life between death and a new birth has been, how he then realized the performance of the corresponding consequential actions as something reasonable. He would feel himself unfree if he could not come into the position of fulfilling the task which is allotted to him by his former earth life.

Thus, neither before nor after the entry into initiation science is there a contradiction between karmic necessity and freedom. Before the entry into initiation science, there is none, because with every-day consciousness the human being remains within the realm of freedom, while karmic necessity takes place outside, like a process of nature. He has nothing that feels different from what his own nature inspires in him. Nor is there any contradiction after the entry into initiation science, because he is then quite in agreement with his karma and simply considers it reasonable to act in harmony with karma. Just as you do not say, if you have built yourself a house: “the fact that I must now move in is hampering my freedom,” but just as you will probably say: “well, on the whole it was quite sensible to build myself a house in this neighborhood and on this site; now, let me be free in this house!” so likewise the one who looks back with initiate knowledge into former earth lives knows that he becomes free by fulfilling his karmic task, by moving into the house which he built for himself in former earth lives.

Thus, my dear friends, I wanted to explain to you the true compatibility of freedom and karmic necessity in human life. Tomorrow we shall continue, going more into the details of karma.

Today I wish, primarily, to bring before you some of the more comprehensive aspects in the development of karma, in order to be able gradually to go more and more into matters of detail. If we wish to gain insight into the course of karma, we must be able to imagine how the human being gathers his whole organization together as he descends out of the spiritual world into the physical. You will understand, my dear friends, that in the language of today there are no suitable expressions for certain processes which are practically unknown to modern civilization, and that, therefore, the expressions employed here for what takes place under certain conditions can only be approximate.

When we descend out of the spiritual into the physical world for an earth life, we have, to begin with, prepared our physical body by means of the stream of heredity. We shall see how this physical body is, nevertheless, connected in a certain sense with what the human being experiences between death and a new birth. Today, however, it will suffice if we are clear about the fact that the physical body is given to us from the earth; on the other hand, those members which we may describe as the higher members of the human being—the ether body, astral body, and ego—come down from the spiritual world.

The human being attracts, so to speak, the ether body out of the whole universal ether before he unites himself with the physical body which is given to him by heredity. The union of the soul-spirit man—i.e. ego, astral body, and ether body—with the physical human embryo can ensue only through the gradual withdrawal of the ether body of the maternal organism from the physical human embryo.

The human being, thus, unites himself with the physical germ after having attracted his ether body out of the common universal ether. The more precise descriptions of these events will occupy us later. At present we are to interest ourselves mainly in asking: Whence come the individual members of human nature which the human being possesses during earth life between birth and death?

The physical organism comes, as we have seen, from the stream of heredity, the etheric organism out of the universal ether from which it is attracted. The astral organism—of which the human being remains, we might say, in all respects unconscious or only sub-consciously aware during his earth life—this astral body contains all the results of the life between death and a new birth. And it is a fact that between death and a new birth, according to what the human being has become through his preceding earth lives, he comes, in the most manifold way, into relationship with other human souls who are also in the life between death and a new birth, or with other spiritual beings of a higher cosmic order who do not descend to earth in a human body, but have their existence in the spiritual world.

All that a man brings over from his former lives on earth according to what he was, according to what he has done, all this is met by the sympathy or antipathy of the beings whom he learns to know while he passes through the world between death and a new birth. What sympathies and antipathies he meets among the higher beings according to what he has done in his preceding earth life is of great significance for karma during this period; but, above all, it is of deep significance that he comes into relationship with those human souls with whom he was in relationship on earth, and that a peculiar reflection takes place between his own nature and the nature of the souls with whom he had this relationship. Let us assume that someone has had a good relationship with a soul whom he now encounters again between death and a new birth. All that the good relationship implies had lived in him during former earth lives. Then this good relationship is reflected in the soul, when this soul is encountered between death and a new birth. And it is really true that the human being during this passage through the life between death and a new birth sees himself reflected everywhere in the souls with whom he is now associated because he was associated with them on earth. If he did good to a human being, something is mirrored to him from the other soul; if he did him an evil turn, something is likewise mirrored to him from the other soul. And he has the feeling—if I may use the word “feeling” with the reservation made at the beginning of these observations—he has the feeling: “You have advanced this human soul. What you have experienced through advancing him, what you then felt for this soul, that impulse in your feelings which led to your attitude toward him, your own inner experiences in performing the deed that advanced this soul, come back to you from him. They are reflected to you from this soul. In another case you have injured a soul; what has lived in you during this injury is reflected to you.”

And the human being has actually spread out before him, as though in a mighty and wide-extending reflector, his previous earth lives, but chiefly the last one, mirrored from the souls with whom he was associated. And we gain the impression, just in regard to our life of action, that all that is departing from us. We lose the ego-feeling which we had on earth in the body, or we really lost it a long time ago between death and a new birth. Now, however, the ego-feeling arises in us from this whole reflection. With the mirroring of our deeds, we come to life in all the souls with whom we were associated during our earth life.

On earth, our I, our ego, was like a point. Here between death and a new birth, it is reflected to us everywhere from the periphery. This is an intimate association with other souls, but an association in accordance with the relations into which we have entered with them.

And in the spiritual world all this is a reality. If we go through a room hung with many mirrors, we see ourselves reflected in each one. But we also know that the reflections—according to ordinary human parlance—are “not there;” when we depart they do not remain; we are no longer reflected. But that which is reflected there in human souls remains as something present. And there comes a time in the last third of the life between death and a new birth when we form our astral body out of these mirrored images. We draw all this together to form our astral body, so that, in truth, when we descend from the spiritual world into the physical, we carry in our astral body what we have taken up again into ourselves, in accordance with the reflection to which our actions of the former earth life have given rise in other souls between death and a new birth. This gives us the impulses which impel us toward or away from the human souls with whom we are born again at the same time in the physical body.

In this way, between death and a new birth, the impulse for the karma of the new earth life is fashioned. I shall, very soon, have to describe the process more in detail by taking the ego into consideration also.

And now we can trace how an impulse from one life works on into other lives. Let us take, for example, the impulse of love. We can perform our deeds in relation to other human beings out of that impulse which we call love. There is a difference whether we perform our acts out of a mere sense of duty, of convention, of decency, or the like, or whether we perform them out of a greater or lesser degree of love.

Let us assume that during an earth life a human being is able to perform actions warmed through and through by love. This, indeed, remains as a real force in his soul. What he now takes with him as result of his deeds, what is mirrored there in the other souls, comes back to him as a reflection. And from this he forms his astral body with which he descends to the earth. There the love of the former earth life, the love which has streamed out of him and which now returns to him from other human beings, transforms itself into joy. So that, when the human being does something for his fellow-men that is sustained by love, something in connection with which love streams out of him and accompanies the deeds which advance his fellow-men, then the metamorphosis in the passage through life between death and a new birth is of such a character that what is outpouring love in one life on earth is, in the next earth life, transmuted, metamorphosed, into joy streaming toward him.

If you experience joy, my dear friends, through a human being in one earth life, you may be sure it is the outcome of the love which you have shown for him in a former life. This joy now flows back again into your soul during earth life. You know this inwardly warming feeling of joy. You know what meaning joy has in life, especially the joy which conies from human beings. It warms life, it sustains life, we may say that it gives wings to life. It is karmically the result of love bestowed.

In our joy, however, we again experience a relation to the other human being who gives us joy. So that in our former earth lives we have had something within us that made the love flow out from us; in our subsequent earth lives we already have, as a result, the inward experience of the warmth of joy. And that is again something that streams from us. A human being who is allowed to experience joy in life, is of importance to his fellow-men, has warming significance. A human being who has cause for going joylessly through life behaves differently toward his fellow-men from the one who is permitted to go through life joyfully.

But what is experienced in joy in the life between birth and death is reflected again in the souls of the most various kinds with whom we were associated on earth and who are now also in the life between death and a new birth. And this reflection, which in manifold ways then comes back to us from the souls of the human beings known to us on earth, this reflection works back in turn. We carry it again in our astral body when we descend into the next earth life—we are now dealing with the third earth life. Once more it is instilled, imprinted, in our astral body. And it now becomes in its result the underlying basis, the impulse for a quick and ready understanding of human beings and the world. It becomes the basis for that soul condition which sustains us by virtue of our having the ability to understand the world. If we find the conduct of human beings interesting and can take joy in it, if we understand their conduct and take interest in it in a given incarnation on earth, then that directs us back to the joy of our previous incarnation, to the love of our still earlier incarnation. Human beings who are able to go through the world with a free and open mind, so that the free and open mind permits the world to flow into them, so that they have an understanding for the world, these are human beings who have gained this attitude to the world through love and joy.

What we perform in our deeds out of love is altogether different from what we do out of a rigid and dry sense of duty. You know, indeed, that I have always emphasized in my books that the deeds springing from love are to be understood as the truly ethical, as the truly moral deeds. I have often been compelled to indicate the great contrast, in this regard, between Kant and Schiller. Kant, both in life and in knowledge, “kantified” [Kante in German means a hard edge or angle. (Note by translator)] everything. Through Kant, everything in knowledge became sharp and angular; and thus, also human conduct. “Duty, thou great and exalted name, thou who containest nothing of pleasure, nothing that curries favors ...” this passage I quoted in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity to the pretended vexation—not the sincere, but the pretended, hypocritical vexation—of many opponents, and I opposed to it what I must acknowledge to be my view: “Love, thou impulse that speaketh warmly to the soul. ...”

Over against the dry and rigid Kantian concept of duty, Schiller coined the expression: “Gladly I serve my friends; yet alas, I do it with pleasure, wherefore it oftentimes vexes me that I am not virtuous,” For, according to the Kantian ethics, that which we do out of inclination is not virtuous, but only that which we do out of the rigid concept of duty.

Now, there are human beings who, in the first place, do not attain to love. But, because they cannot tell their fellow-man the truth out of love (for if we love a human being we tell him the truth, and not lies), because they are unable to love, they tell the truth out of a sense of duty; since they cannot love, they refrain, merely out of a sense of duty, from thrashing their fellow-man, or boxing his ears, striking him, or doing something similar, when he does anything they do not like. There is, indeed, a difference between the deeds of love and acting out of a rigid sense of duty—which, to be sure, is absolutely necessary in social life, necessary for many things.

Now, the deeds that are done out of a rigid concept of duty, or out of convention or propriety, because it is “the proper thing to do,” will not call forth joy in the next earth life, but in that they pass in the same way through the reflection by the souls, as I have described it, they call forth in the next earth life something which we might describe as follows: We sense that we are an object of indifference to other human beings. Many a person carries through life the sense that he is an object of indifference to other human beings and suffers from it. And rightly he suffers from it, if he is of no concern to other human beings, for human beings are there for one another, and the human being is dependent upon not being a matter of indifference to his fellow-men. What the human being thus suffers here is simply the result of the lack of love in a former earth life where he behaved as a decent human being because of the rigid duty which hung over him like the sword of Damocles—I will not say, a sword of steel, for that would be disquieting for most dutiful people, but just like a wooden sword of Damocles.

We have now reached the second earth life. That which comes as joy from love becomes in the third life, as we have seen, a free and open heart, bringing the world near to us, giving us open-minded insight into all things beautiful and true and good. That which streams to us as indifference from other human beings, and what we experience thereby in one earth life, fashions us for the third, that is to say for the next earth life, into a human being who does not know what to do with himself. When such a person enters school, he is at a loss what to do with that which the teachers impart to him. When he grows a little older, he does not know whether to become a locksmith or Privy Councilor. He does not know what to do with himself in life. He actually drifts aimlessly through life without direction. In regard to his observation of the outer world, he is not exactly dull. Music, for instance, he understands well enough, but it gives him no pleasure. It is, after all, a matter of indifference to him whether the music is more or less good or more or less bad. To be sure, he feels the beauty of a painting or other work of art, but there is always something in his soul that irritates him: “What is the good of it, anyhow? To what purpose is all this?” These, in turn, are the things that make their appearance in karmic connection in the third earth life.

Now let us assume, however, that out of hate or an inclination to antipathy a human being does certain injuries to his fellow-men. Here we may imagine every conceivable degree. One individual with criminal feelings of hatred may harm his fellow-men. Or—I am omitting the intermediate stages—he may be a critic. To be a critic, one must always hate a little—unless one is a praising critic, and such critics are few nowadays, for it is not interesting to show recognition of other people's work; it becomes interesting only when one can make fun of things. Now, there are all manner of intermediate stages. But we have here to think of human deeds which proceed from a cold antipathy—antipathy about which we are often not at all clear—or, at the other extreme, from hatred. All that is brought about in this way by human beings against their fellow-men or even against sub-human creatures, all this vents itself in soul conditions which in turn also mirror themselves in the life between death and a new birth. And then, in the next earth life, out of the hatred is born that which streams to us from the world as sorrow, as unhappiness caused from without, as the opposite of joy.

You will reply: “But really, we experience so much sorrow; is that all due to hatred, greater or lesser hatred, in our preceding life? I cannot possibly imagine”—a man will be apt to say—“that I have been such a bad lot, so that I must experience so much sorrow, because I have hated so much.” Well, if we wish to think without prejudice on these things, we must become aware of how great is the illusion which gives us satisfaction and to which, therefore, we easily surrender if it is a question of our suggesting away from our conscious mind any feeling of antipathy against other human beings. People really go through the world with far more hatred than they think—at least, with far more antipathy. And it is a matter of fact that hatred, because it gives satisfaction to the soul, is not as a rule consciously experienced. It is eclipsed by the satisfaction it gives. But, when it returns as sorrow which streams to us from without, then we notice it, as sorrow.

But just consider for a moment, my dear friends—in order to represent in a quite trivial fashion what is present there as a possibility—think of an afternoon-tea chatter, a real, a genuine gossiping tea party where half a dozen (half a dozen is quite enough) “aunts” or “uncles”—it can be uncles, too—or “cousins,” if you will, are sitting together discussing their fellows. Just think how many antipathies are unloaded on human beings, say, in the course of an hour and a half—often it is longer. While this antipathy pours out, people do not notice it; but when it returns in the next earth life, then it will, indeed, be noticed. And it returns, inexorably.

Thus, in actual fact, a portion—not all; we shall still become acquainted with other karmic connections—a portion of what we experience in one earth life as sorrow caused from outside may very well be due to our feelings of antipathy in a former earth life.

In connection with all this we must, naturally, always realize that karma, that some sort of karmic stream, must begin at some time, somewhere. So that, if you have here, for example, a succession of earth lives:

a b c (d)

and this (d) is the present life; not all pain, naturally, that falls to our lot from without need be due to our former earth lives. It may also be an original sorrow, which will work itself out karmically only in the next earth life. I say, therefore, that a large part of that sorrow which streams to us from outside is a result of hate which was brought into being in former earth lives.

If we now proceed again to the third earth life, the result of what streams to us there as sorrow—but only the result of that sorrow which comes to us, so to speak, out of stored-up hate—the result of this sorrow which then unloads in our soul is, in the first place, a kind of mental dullness, a sort of dullness in the capacity of insight into the world. If you have a human being who confronts the world phlegmatically and with indifference, who does not confront the things of the world, or other human beings, with an open heart, the fact is, very often, that he has acquired this obtuseness of mind through the sorrow of a previous earth life, caused in his own karma. This sorrow, however, when it expresses itself in this way in obtuseness of soul must be retraced to the feelings of hatred which occurred at least in the second earth life prior to this one. We can be absolutely sure that stupidity in any one earth life is always the consequence of hatred in a certain former earth life.

Yet, my dear friends, the understanding of karma shall not rest only on the fact that we comprehend karma for the purpose of understanding life, but that we are also able to comprehend it as an impulse of life, that we are conscious that with life there is not merely an “a, b, c, d,” but also an “e, f, g, h,”

a, b, c, (d), e, f, g, h

that there are also earth lives still to come, and that what we develop as the content of our soul in a present earth life will have its effects, its results, in the next earth life. If any one wishes to be especially stupid in his second earth life after this one, he need, really, only hate a great deal in this present earth life. But, if someone wishes to have a free and open insight in the second earth life after this one, he need only love with special intensity in this earth life. And insight into karma, knowledge of karma, gains real value only through the fact that it flows into our will for the future, that it plays a role in this will for the future. And it is true in every respect that the moment is now at hand in the evolution of mankind when the unconscious can no longer continue to be effective in the same way it was effective previously, while our souls were passing through previous earth lives, for human beings are becoming constantly freer and more conscious.

Since the first third of the fifteenth century we have been in the age in which human beings are continually becoming freer and more conscious. Hence, those individuals who are human beings of the present time will have in a subsequent earth life a dim feeling of previous earth lives. And just as the modern man, if he notices that he is not very bright, does not ascribe this to himself, but to his natural lack of ability—the cause of which he usually seeks in his physical nature in accordance with the theories of modern materialism—so will the human beings who will be the re-incarnated human beings of the present time, have at least an obscure feeling which will worry them. If they are not very bright, they will feel that something must have taken place which was connected with feelings of hate and antipathy.

And, if we speak today of a Waldorf School pedagogy, we must naturally take into account the present earth civilization. We cannot yet educate in complete frankness in such a way that we consciously employ repeated earth lives in education, for modern human beings have not yet even a dim feeling for repeated earth lives. The beginnings, however, that have been made just in the Waldorf School pedagogy, if they are taken up, will continue to develop in the coming centuries with the result that the following will be included in ethical, moral education: If a child has little talent, it is due to former earth lives in which it has hated intensely, and we shall then, with the help of spiritual science, seek out whom it might have hated. For the human beings who were hated, and against whom deeds were committed out of hate, must be rediscovered somewhere in the child's environment. Gradually, in coming centuries, the education of a child will have to be related far more definitely to human life. We shall have to see, in regard to this dull child, whence that is reflected or has been reflected in the life between death and a new birth, which goes through a metamorphosis resulting in unintelligence in this earth life. We shall then be able to do something to the end that in childhood a special love is developed for those human beings for whom the child felt specific hatred in former earth lives. And we shall see that through such a specifically aroused and directed love, the child's intellect, nay, the child's whole soul state, will brighten.

It is not in general theories about karma that we shall find what can aid education, but in looking concretely into life in order to see what the karmic connections are. We shall soon notice that the fact that children are brought together in a school class by fate is, indeed, not something to be regarded with complete indifference. And when we shall have risen beyond the hideous carelessness that prevails in these things nowadays, when the “human material”—for so it is often called—which is thrown together in a school class is actually conceived as though it were thrown together by mere chance, not as though destiny had brought these human beings together,—if we shall have risen beyond this appalling indifference, we shall then gain a new outlook as educators, we shall then be able to perceive what strange karmic threads are spun from one child to the other as a result of former lives. And we shall then bring into the children's development that which can effect equalization.

In a certain respect, karma is under the domination of an inexorable necessity. Out of an inexorable necessity we are able definitely to establish the sequence:

These are unconditional connections. Although it is true that we are confronted by an absolute necessity when a river follows its course, yet we have frequently regulated rivers, have given them a different course. So in like manner is it also possible to regulate, if I may say so, the karmic stream, to affect its course. Indeed, this is possible.

Thus, if you notice that in childhood there is a tendency to idiocy, and if you then realize the necessity of guiding the child, especially of developing love in his heart, if you discover—and this should be possible even today for people with a fine observation of life,—if you discover to which other children the child is karmically related, and if you are able

to bring the child to the point of loving just these children, to perforin deeds of love for them, you will then see that you are able with love to give a counterweight to antipathy, and that you are able by means of it to correct this idiocy in the next incarnation, in the next earth life.

There are educators, trained, as it were, by their own instinct, who often do some such thing out of their instinct, who bring dull-witted children to the point where they are able to love, and thus educate them by degrees to become more intelligent human beings.

It is such things that make our insight into karmic connections of service to life.

Before we go further in considering the details of karma, yet another question will have to confront our souls. Just ask yourself: What is a human being really with whom—in general, at least—we may know ourselves to be karmically related? I must use an expression which is often used today rather ironically: such a man is a “contemporary”; he is on the earth at the same time that we are.

If you bear this in mind, you will say to yourself that, if you are associated with certain human beings in one earth life, you were associated with them in a previous earth life also (generally speaking, at least; matters may, of course, be somewhat shifted). And you were, likewise, associated with them in a still earlier life. (See Figure V)

Now, those individuals, who live fifty years later than you, were associated in turn with human beings in former earth lives. Generally speaking, the human beings of, let us say, the B series do not, in accordance with the thought we have developed here, come in contact with the human beings of the A series. This is an oppressive thought, but a true one.

I shall later speak about other debatable questions, such as arise, for instance, through the fact that people often say that humanity multiplies on the earth. Today, however, I should like to place the following thought before you; it is, perhaps, an oppressive thought, but it is none the less a true one. It is an actual fact that the continued life of men on earth takes place in rhythms. One shift of human beings—if I may put it so—proceeds, as a general rule, from one earth life to another; another shift of human beings does the same, and they are in a certain sense separated from one another; they do not come together during earth life. To be sure, in the long intervening life between death and a new birth they do come together; but for earth life it is, indeed, a fact that we descend to the earth with a limited circle of people. To be “contemporaries” has an inner meaning, an inner importance just for repeated earth lives.

Why is it so? I can assure you, this question which, in the first place, may occupy us intellectually, has caused me the greatest imaginable pain in the field of spiritual science, because it is necessary to discover the truth regarding this question, the inner nature of the facts. And thus, we may ask ourself—forgive my using an example which really concerns me only as a matter of research—we may ask ourself the question: “Why were you not a contemporary of Goethe's? By your not a contemporary of Goethe's you can, according to this truth, conclude on general principles that you have never lived with Goethe on the earth. Goethe belongs to another shift of human beings.”

What really lies behind this? Here we must reverse the question. But to do so we must have an open, liberal mind for human social relationships. We must be able to ask ourself a question—and I shall have very much to say in the near future about this question—we must be able to ask ourself the question: What is it really to be another man's contemporary? What is it, on the other hand, to be able to know of him only from history, so far as the earth life is concerned? What does this mean?

Well, my dear friends, we must have an open, liberal mind in order to answer the intimate question: “How do matters stand with regard to all the inner accompanying phenomena of the soul when a contemporary of yours speaks to you, performs actions which come near you? How do matters stand?” And, after having acquired the necessary knowledge, you must then be able to compare this with what the situation would be were you to come into contact with a personality who is not your contemporary, perhaps has never been such in any life on earth, and whom you may, nevertheless, revere to the highest degree, much more, perhaps, than any of your contemporaries—what would be the situation were you to encounter this personality as a contemporary? In a word—pardon the personal note—what would the situation be, had I been a contemporary of Goethe? If you are not an indifferent kind of person—naturally, if you are an indifferent person and have no comprehension of what a contemporary can be, you cannot very well answer such a question—then you can ask the question: “How would it be if I, walking down the Schillergasse in Weimar toward the Frauenplan, had seen the fat Privy Councilor approaching me, say in the year 1826, 1827?” Now, we know quite well, we could not have stood it. Our contemporary we can stand. If the one with whom we cannot be contemporary were, nevertheless, our contemporary, we should not be able to endure him; he would, in a certain sense, act like a poison on our soul life. We endure him as a historical character, because he is not our contemporary, but our successor or predecessor.

Of course, if we have no feeling for such things, they remain in the unconscious. We can well imagine that a certain man has a fine feeling for the spiritual and knows that, had he walked down the Schillergasse in Weimar toward the Frauenplan, and had he, as a contemporary, encountered the fat Privy Councilor Goethe with the double chin, he would then have felt himself in an inwardly impossible state. The one, however, who has no feeling for such things—well, he would, perhaps, have taken off his hat!

These things, my dear friends, do not derive from the earth life, be- cause the reasons why we cannot be the contemporary of some particular man are not to be found within earth life, because here we must penetrate with our preception into the spiritual relationships. This is why, for earth life, such things appear at times paradoxical. Nevertheless, they are facts, most certainly facts.

I can assure you that I wrote with genuine love an Introduction to Jean Paul's works, published in the Cotta'sche Bibliothek der Weltliteratur. Yet, if I had ever had to sit side by side with Jean Paul at Bayreuth—without doubt, I should have had a stomach ache. That does not hinder us from having the highest reverence. But such an experience comes to every human being, only, with most people it remains in the subconscious, in the astral or in the ether body; it does not take hold of the physical body. For the soul experience which must seize upon the physical body must, indeed, become conscious. But the following must also be clear to you, my dear friends: If you wish to gain knowledge of the spiritual world, you cannot escape hearing things which seem grotesque and paradoxical, because the spiritual world is different from the physical.

It is, of course, easy enough for anyone to ridicule the statement that if I had been a contemporary of Jean Paul's, it would have given me a stomach ache to sit in his company. It goes without saying that for the everyday, banal, philistine world of earthly life ridicule is to be expected. But the laws of the banal, philistine world do not hold good for spiritual relationships. If we wish to understand the spiritual world we must accustom ourselves to think with other thought forms; we must be prepared to experience many quite surprising things. When, in our everyday consciousness, we read about Goethe, we may naturally feel impelled to say: “How I should like to have known him personally, to have shaken hands with him!” and so on. That is thoughtlessness, for there are laws according to which we are predestined for a certain epoch of the earth in which we can live. Just as we are preconditioned to stand a certain pressure of the air in our physical body, and therefore cannot rise above the earth beyond a certain height where the pressure is not agreeable, so is a man who is predestined for the twentieth century unable to live at the time of Goethe.

These were the things which, at the outset, I wished to bring forward about karma.

If we speak in detail about karma, we naturally must distinguish, in the first place, between those karmic events of life which come to a human being from outside and those which arise, as it were, within his inner being. A human being's destiny is composed of many and diverse factors. His destiny is dependent on his physical and etheric constitution. It is dependent on what the human being, according to his astral and ego constitution, can bring of sympathy and antipathy toward the outer world, what others, again, according to his constitution can bring to him as sympathy and antipathy. Moreover, the destiny of the human being depends on the most manifold complications and entanglements in which he finds himself involved on the path of life. All of this determines the human being's karmic situation for any given moment of time or as a totality for his whole life.

I shall now try to put together the total destiny of man out of these various factors. For that purpose we intend today to take our point of departure from certain inner factors in the human being; we intend to look at that factor which, in many respects, is really of cardinal and decisive importance,—that is to say, his inherent tendency toward health and illness, and that which then becomes effective as the basis for this tendency in his strength of body and soul with which he is able to fulfill his tasks.

If we wish, however, to judge these factors correctly, we must be able to see beyond many a prejudice that is contained in modern civilization. We must be able to enter more into the original nature of the human being; we must gain real insight into what it signifies that the human being, as far as his deeper nature is concerned, descends from spiritual worlds into physical earth existence.

Now, you know that what is summed up in the concept of heredity has today found its way, for example, even into the realm of art, of poetry. If anyone appears in the world with certain qualities, people inquire first about heredity. Or if, for example, someone appears with a pre-disposition to illness, they ask: “What about the hereditary relationships?”

This question is, indeed, at the outset quite justifiable, but in their whole attitude toward these things, people today ignore the real human being; they completely ignore him. They do not observe what his true being is, how his true being unfolds. Naturally, they say in the first place that he is the child of his parents, the descendant of his forebears. Certainly, this can be seen. Even in his outer physiognomy; and still more, perhaps, in his gestures do we see the likeness to his ancestors emerging. But not only this; we see also how the human being has his whole physical organism as a product of what is given to him by his forebears. He carries this physical organism about with him, a fact which is pointed out very forcefully today.

People fail, however, to observe the following: When he is born, the human being has most assuredly, at the outset, his physical organism from his parents. But what is this physical organism which he receives from his parents? In that regard the man of modern civilization thinks fundamentally quite falsely.

When the human being has reached the time of change of teeth, he not only exchanges his first teeth for others, but this is also the moment in life when the entire human being—as an organization—is renewed for the first time. There is a thorough-going difference between what the human being becomes in his eighth and ninth year of life, and what he was in his third or fourth year. It is a decisive difference. What he was—as an organism—in his third or fourth year, he received through heredity. His parents gave him that. What comes into being in his eighth or ninth year is the result, in the highest degree, of what he himself has brought down from the spiritual world.

If we wish to indicate in outline the really fundamental facts, we must do it in the following way—shocking though it may be to modern mankind. We must say, the human being receives as he is being born something like a model of his human form. He receives this model from his forbears; they bestow upon him a model. Then, aided by this model, he develops what he becomes later. What he then develops, however, is the result of what he brings down with him from the spiritual worlds.

Shocking as it may be to human beings of today, if they are completely immersed in modern culture, we must, nevertheless, make the following assertion: The first teeth which the human being receives are entirely inherited; they are the products of heredity. They serve him as a model according to which he fashions his second teeth in conformity to the forces he brings with him from the spiritual world. These he elaborates.

And as it is with the teeth, so is it with the body as a whole. Only, this question might arise: Why do we human beings need a model? Why can we not do just what we did in earlier phases of earth evolution? Why is it not possible as we descend and draw toward ourselves our ether body—which we do, as you know, with our own forces brought with us from the spiritual world,—why is it not possible likewise simply to gather to ourselves physical matter, and without the help of physical forbears form our own physical body?

To the modern human being's way of thinking, this question is obviously an example of monumental stupidity, an example of insanity. But then, we must indeed say that with respect to the insanity of the above statement, the Theory of Relativity holds good, although it is applied today only to movement, postulating, as it does, that we cannot tell from observation whether we are moving together with the body on which we find ourselves or whether it is the nearby body which is moving. (This fact became clearly evident in the exchange of the ancient cosmic theory for the Copernican.) But, although at present the Theory of Relativity is applied only to movement, it holds good—for it has a certain sphere of validity—it holds good also in regard to the aforesaid insanity: namely, here are two people who differ greatly; each one thinks the other crazy; the only question is,—which of the two is actually crazy.

Well, in relation to the facts of the spiritual world this question must, nevertheless, be raised: Why does the human being need a model? Older world conceptions have given the answer in their own way. Only in modern times, when morality is no longer included in the cosmic order, but is admitted solely as a human convention, are such questions no longer asked. More ancient world conceptions have not only asked these questions; they have even answered them. Originally, they said, the human being was so constituted that he was able to establish himself on the earth in the following manner: Just as he now draws to himself his ether body out of the general cosmic ether substance, so did he draw to himself the substances of the earth to form his physical body. But he fell a prey to the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences, and as a result, he lost the faculty of building his physical body out of his own essential being. He must now receive it through heredity.

This way of obtaining the physical body is, for the human being, the result of “original sin,” hereditary sin. This is what ancient world conceptions said. This is the fundamental meaning of “original sin,” hereditary in the necessity of inserting oneself into the relationships of heredity.

In our age, the concepts must be provided again in order, first, to take such questions seriously, and secondly, in order to find the answers. It is a fact that the human being in his earthly evolution has not remained is strong as was his predisposition before the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences were present. Therefore, he cannot form his physical body through his own capacities as soon as he enters the earthly conditions, but he needs a model, that model which grows during the first seven years of human life. Since he conforms to this model, it is but natural that something of the model, more or less, remains with him in his later life. The human being who, working on himself, is completely dependent on the model will forget—if I may put it so—what he actually brought down with him and will entirely conform to the model. Another human being who has acquired stronger inner force through his former earth lives will conform less to the model, and it will be possible to see how significantly he changes in the second phase of life, between the change of teeth and puberty.

The school will even have the task, if it is a true school, to bring about in the human being the unfoldment of what he has brought into physical earth existence out of the spiritual worlds. Hence, what the human being carries further with him in life contains the inherited characteristics in greater or lesser degree, according as he is able or is not able to overcome them.

Now, just remember, my dear friends, that all things have their spiritual aspect. What the human being possesses as his body in the first seven years of life is simply a model to which he conforms. Either his spiritual forces are to some extent submerged in what is forced upon him by the model and he remains quite dependent on the model, or he works into the model during the first seven years of life that which will transform the model. This work, this elaboration, finds expression outwardly. For it is not merely a question that work is done and that this here (see Figure VI) is the original model; but the original model gradually detaches itself, peels off, so to speak, falls away, just as the first teeth fall out. Everything falls away. The matter is as follows: From one side, the forms and forces press upon the model; on the other, the human being wills to express what he has brought down to the earth. That causes a battle during the first seven years of life. Seen from the spiritual standpoint, this battle signifies what comes to outward symptomatic expression in the illnesses of childhood. The diseases of childhood arc the expression of this inward struggle.

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Figure VI

Needless to say, similar forms of illness occur in human beings later in life. That is the case if, for example, someone did not succeed very well in overcoming the model during the first seven years of life. Then the impulse may emerge later in life to get rid of what has thus karmically remained in him. Thus, in his twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth year of life, the human being may suddenly feel inwardly aroused against the model; he will only then collide with it and, as a result, fall prey to some illness of childhood.

If one has an eye for it, one can observe how strongly the following appears in many children: they change essentially in physiognomy and gesture after the seventh or eighth year of life. No one knows whence certain things come. Today, when the prevailing view of civilization adheres so strongly to heredity, this has even passed over into our way of speaking. If, in the eighth or ninth year, some feature suddenly emerges in a child which is deeply rooted in the organism, the father may say: “Anyhow, he did not get that from me,” while the mother may say: “Well, most certainly not from me.” All this is due to the common belief which has found its way into the parental consciousness that the children must have inherited everything from their parents.

On the other hand, it may often be observed how children grow even more like their parents in this second phase of life than they were previously. Here we must take in full seriousness the way the human being descends into the physical world.

Please note that Psycho-Analysis has, indeed, produced many really horrible swamp flowers; among them, for example, is the following—this may be read today everywhere—namely, that in the hidden, subconscious mind, every son is in love with his mother and every daughter with her father, and that this condition causes life conflicts in the subconscious provinces of the soul. [Cf. Rudolf Steiner: Psycho-Analysis in the Light of Anthroposophy (in preparation). {It's prepared! - e.Ed}]

All these are amateurish interpretations of life. The truth, however, is that the human being is in love with his parents already before he descends into earthly existence, that he descends because they please him. Only, we must naturally distinguish the judgment which people have here on earth about life from the judgment they have about it outside the earthly life between death and a new birth.

On one occasion, in the early stages of our anthroposophical activity, a lady appeared among us who had heard of reincarnation. She liked other things in Anthroposophy very much indeed, but in repeated earth lives she would not participate; one earth life was quite enough for her—with others she would have nothing to do. Now, at that time there were already very well-meaning adherents among us who tried in every possible way to convince the good lady that the idea was, after all, a correct one, and that every human being must participate in repeated earth lives. One friend belabored her from the left, and another from the right. She then departed, but two days later she wrote me a post card to the effect that, after all, she did not intend to be born again on earth!

In such a case, the one who wishes simply to tell the truth out of spiritual knowledge must say to people: “Certainly, it may be that, while you are here on earth, it is not at all to your liking that you should come down again to earth in some future life. But that is by no means decisive. Here on earth, you go through the gate of death into the spiritual world. You are willing to do this. Whether or not you wish to descend again depends on the judgment which will be yours when you no longer carry your body about with you. Then you will form quite a different judgment.” The judgments a human being has in physical life on earth are different in every way from those he has between death and a new birth. For there every point of view changes.

These are the facts. If you tell a human being here on earth—a young human being, perhaps—that he has chosen his father, he might object under certain circumstances and say: “Do you mean that I chose the father who has beaten me so badly?” Yes, certainly, he chose him; for the youth had quite another point of view before he came down to earth. He then had the point of view that the thrashings would do him much good ... This is, indeed, no laughing matter, it is meant in the deepest earnestness. In the same way a man also chooses his parents according to their form and figure. He has a picture of himself before him—the picture that he will resemble his parents. He does not become like them through heredity, but through his own inner soul and spirit forces, the forces he brings down with him from the spirit world. The moment, therefore, that we come to an all-inclusive opinion out of spiritual science as well as physical science, such wholesale statements are without exception no longer valid, for instance, the assertion: “I have seen children who became more like their parents only in the second phase of their life.” Certainly, that is then just the other case, where these children intended to take on for this earth life the form of their parents.

Now it is a fact that the human being, during the whole time between death and a new birth, works in union with other departed souls and with the beings of the higher worlds upon that which makes it possible for him to build his body.

You see, we generally underestimate greatly the importance of what a man carries in his subconscious nature. As earth men, we are far wiser in the subconscious than in the conscious nature. It is, indeed, out of a far-reaching, universal, cosmic wisdom that we elaborate that which becomes within the model during the second phase of life the form that we then bear as our own human nature, the one that belongs to us. If, at some future time, we become aware of how little we really absorb, as far as the substance of the body is concerned, from the food we eat, how we take in far more from all that we absorb in a very finely diluted condition from the air and light, then we shall more readily be able to believe that the human being builds up his second body for the second life period quite independently of all hereditary conditions; he builds it entirely out of his environment. The first body is, actually, only a model. That which comes from the parents—as substance as well as the outer bodily forces—is no longer there in the second phase of life.

In the second life period the child's relationship to his parents becomes an ethical, a soul relationship. Only in the first period of life, that is, up to the seventh year, is it a physical, hereditary relationship.

Now, there are human beings in this earthly life who take a keen interest in all that surrounds them in the visible cosmos. There are men who observe the plants, observe the animal world; they enter with interest into this or that thing in the visible world around them. They take an interest in the majesty of the star-studded heavens. They take part, so to speak, with their souls in the entire physical cosmos. The inner life of a human being who has this warm interest in the physical cosmos differs from the inner life of one who passes the world by with a certain indifference, with a phlegmatic attitude of soul.

In this respect, we have a whole scale of human characters. On the one side, for example, there is a man who has taken a very short journey. When we talk to him afterwards, he describes with infinite love the city in which he has been, down to the minutest detail. Through his keen interest we may thus gain a complete picture of the city he had visited. Prom this extreme we can pass to the opposite,—to such as the instance, when I encountered two elderly ladies who had just travelled from Vienna to Pressburg. Pressburg is a beautiful city. They had returned, and I asked them what it was like in Pressburg, how they had liked it. They could tell me nothing except that they had seen two pretty little dachshunds down by the riverside. These they could have seen just as well in Vienna, they need not have gone to Pressburg for that purpose. But they had seen nothing else. Thus do many people go through the world.

Between these two extremes of the scale, there lies, indeed, every kind and degree of interest which the human being can have for what is in the physically visible world. Let us suppose someone has little interest for the surrounding physical world. It may be that he just manages to interest himself in the things that immediately concern his bodily life—whether, for instance, one can eat more or less well in this or that district. Beyond that his interests do not go. His soul remains poor. He does not imprint the world on himself. And he carries in his inner life very little of what has radiated toward him from the phenomena of the world through the gate of death over into the spiritual realms. Because of this he finds the work with the spiritual beings, with whom he now comes into contact, very difficult. And, in consequence, he brings back in his soul not strength, not energy, but feebleness, a kind of powerlessness for the upbuilding of his physical body. The model, to be sure, works strongly upon him. The fight with the model finds expression in the manifold illnesses of childhood; but the weakness persists. He forms, so to speak, a frail or sickly body, subject to all manner of illnesses. Thus, our soul-spirit interest from one earth life is transformed karmically into the state of health in the next life. Human beings who are “bursting with health” had a keen interest in the visible world in a former incarnation. And in this regard, the details of life act very powerfully.

It is certainly more or less risky nowadays to speak of these things. But we shall understand the relationships of karma only if we are ready to occupy ourselves with the details about it. The art of painting, for example, already existed at a time when human souls, now living, were living in a former earth life; and there were human beings who had no interest at all in painting. Even today there are people who are quite indifferent whether they have some atrocity hanging on the walls of their room, or a well-painted picture. And there were also such people at the time when the souls who are living today were present in former earth lives. Indeed, my dear friends, I have never found a human being with a pleasing face, a sympathetic expression, who did not take delight in the art of painting in a former earth life. The people with an unpleasing expression (which, after all, also plays its part in karma and has its significance for destiny) were always those who had passed by the works of the art of painting with obtuse and phlegmatic indifference.

But these things go much farther. There are human beings (and there were also such in former epochs of the earth) who never look up at the stars, who do not know where Leo is, or Aries, or Taurus, who have no interest in anything in this connection. Such people will be born, in a subsequent earth life, with a body that is somehow indolent; or, if through the vigor of their parents they receive a model which carries them beyond this, they become flabby, lacking in energy and vigor in the body which they then build for themselves.

And thus, it is possible to trace back the state of health which the human being bears with him in a given earth life to the interest he had taken in the visible world to the widest extent during his former earth life.

People, for instance, who in our time take absolutely no interest in music—people to whom music is a matter of indifference—will certainly be born again in a next earth life with asthmatic trouble, or with some disease of the lungs; or, they will be born with a susceptibility to asthma or lung disease. It is an actual fact that the quality of soul which develops in one earth life through the interest we take in the visible world comes to expression in our next earth life in our general bodily disposition in regard to health or illness.

Perhaps, someone might now say: “To know of such things may well take away one's taste for the next earth life.” That, again, is a judgment pronounced from the earthly standpoint, my dear friends, which is certainly not the only one; for the life between death and a new birth lasts longer than the earth life. If a man is obtuse to something visible in his environment, he remains incapable of working in certain realms between death and a new birth, and he has passed, let us say, through the gate of death with the consequences of this lack of interest. After death, he proceeds on his way. He cannot get near certain beings; certain beings hold themselves apart from him, for he cannot approach them. Other human souls with whom he was associated on earth remain strangers to him. This would go on forever; there would be something like a punishment in Hell for eternity, if this could not be modified. The only cure, the only compensation, lies in his resolving—between death and a new birth—to come down again into earthly life and feel in a sick body that which is an incapacity in the spiritual world. Between death and new birth he desires this cure, for he lives with awareness of but one thing, namely, that there is something he cannot do; but he feels this in such a way that in the further course of events, when he dies again, and again passes through the time between death and a new birth, that which was earthly pain becomes the impulse to enter into what he missed the last time. Thus, we may say that in all essentials, we carry with our karma health and disease out of the spiritual world down into the physical.

And if we bear in mind in this connection that it is not always a karma in course of fulfillment, but also a karma in process of becoming, so that certain things may also appear for the first time, then we shall naturally not relate to the former earth lives of a human being everything he experiences in his physical life as regards health and illness. That which, with its roots in the inner nature, appears in regard to the conditions of health and illness, is, we shall know, karmically determined in the roundabout way I have just characterized. The world becomes explicable only when we are able to look beyond this earthly life. Without this the world is inexplicable; it cannot be explained by means of the earth life.

If from the inner conditions of karma, which ensue from the organism, we now pass on to what is external, toward the outer, we may once more—only in order, at the outset, to come in contact with karma, as it were—we may once more proceed from a realm of facts which touches the human being closely. Let us take, for example, that which can be very strongly connected with the general mood of soul health and illness in our relationship with other human beings.

I should like to offer the following case: Some one finds a friend in his youth. An intimate friendship of youth is formed; the two friends are very devoted to one another. Life separates them, so that both of them, perhaps—or, perhaps, one especially—look back with a certain sadness to this youthful friendship. But it does not permit of renewal. However often they meet in life, their friendship of youth is not again renewed. If you consider how much in destiny can sometimes depend on such a broken friendship of youth, then you will admit that this sort of thing can profoundly affect a person's karma.

We should speak as little as possible about such things out of mere theory. To speak out of theory has very little value. In truth, we should speak of such things only from direct perception or else on the basis of that which we have heard or read in the communications of those who are able to have direct perception, and which appears plausible to us and is comprehensible. There is no value in theorizing about these things. Therefore I say, when you endeavor with spiritual perception to get behind such an event as a broken friendship of youth, the following results: If we go back into a former earth life, we usually find that both individuals who in one life had a friendship in their youth which was afterwards broken, were in an earlier incarnation friends in the later part of their life.

Let us assume, for instance, two young people—boys or girls—are friends until their twentieth year. Then the friendship of their youth breaks. If we go back with spiritual cognition into a former earth life, we find there that a friendship also existed, but it had begun around the twentieth year and continued on into later life. That is a very interesting case, which we often find when we follow up things with spiritual science.

In the first place, when we examine the case more exactly, it appears that the urge to know a person also as he was in youth with whom we had a friendship in our mature years leads us in the next life to a youthful friendship with him. In a former life we knew him as a mature human being. That brought into our soul the urge to become acquainted with him also in youth. This we could no longer do in that life, so we carry it out in the next life.

But that has a great influence if in one or both of these individuals this urge arises, passes through death, and then lives itself out in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. For there is then something present in the spiritual world like a fixed staring at the period of youth. We have this quite special longing to fix our gaze on the time of youth, and we do not develop the urge to become acquainted with our friend once more in his maturity. Thus, the youthful friendship is broken which was predetermined between us by the life we had lived through before we came down to earth.

This is decidedly a case which I recount to you out of real life, for what I am now relating is absolutely real. The question, however, arises here: What was the mature friendship really like in the former life, so that it caused this urge to arise to have the human being as a friend again in youth in a new earth life?

Now, in order that the impulse to experience this youthful friendship does not, however, increase into a wish to have the friend also in later life, something else must occur. In all the instances of which I am aware, the following has invariably been the case: If these two human beings had remained united in their later life, if their youthful friendship had not been broken, they would have grown tired of each other, bored with one another, because their friendship which occurred in maturity in a former life developed too egotistically. The egotism of friendships in one earth life avenges itself karmically by the loss of these friendships in other earth lives.

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Figure VII

Thus, things are complicated; but we can always find a guiding line if we see the following: It is a fact in many cases that two human beings in one earth life—let us say—go each his own way until their twentieth year, and thenceforward continue on together in friendship (see Figure VII, No. I). In a subsequent earth life, this picture (I) corresponds to another (Figure VII, No. II), the picture of the youthful friendship after which their lives separate. This is very frequently the case. Indeed, it will generally be found that the various earth lives—seen, as it were, according to their configuration—mutually supplement each other. Especially is the following frequently found to be true. If we encounter a human being who has a strong effect upon our destiny—this applies, naturally, only as a general rule; it is not applicable in all cases—but if we meet an individual in the middle period of life in one incarnation, we have had him beside us perhaps at the beginning and at the end of life in a prior incarnation in accordance with destiny. The picture is then as follows: We live through the beginning and the end of one incarnation together with the other human being, and in another incarnation, we live with him neither at the beginning nor at the end, but we only encounter him in the middle period of life.

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Figure VIII

Or again, it may be that as a child we are bound by destiny to another human being; in a former life we were linked to the same individual just before we experienced death. Such reflections occur with extreme frequency in karmic relationships.

In continuing our studies on karma, we are under the necessity, at the outset, of casting a glance at the manner in which karma intervenes in the evolution of man, how destiny, which intervenes with the free deeds of man, is really fashioned in its physical reflection out of the spiritual world.

To begin with, I shall have to tell you today a few things about that which is connected with the human being in as far as he lives on earth. This earthly man—during these lectures we have been studying him in regard to the various members of his being. We have distinguished in him the physical body, the ether body, the astral body, the ego organism. We can, however, by directing our gaze upon him, just as he stands before us in the physical world, perceive the membering of the human being in yet another way.

Today we intend—quite independently of what we have already been discussing—to consider a certain membering of the human being, and we shall try to build a bridge between what we discuss today and that which we already know.

If we consider the human being as he stands before us on the earth, simply according to his physical form, then this physical form has three clearly differentiated members. This differentiation is, however, not usually observed, because that which asserts itself as science nowadays really looks at things and facts in a merely superficial way. It has no sensibility for what reveals itself when things and facts are considered with a perception inwardly illumined.

We have, to begin with, the human head. Even outwardly considered, this human head shows itself as something quite different from the remainder of the human form. We need but turn our attention to the formation of the human being out of the human embryo. The first thing we can see developing in the body of the mother as human embryo is the head organization.

The whole human organization takes its start from the head, and everything else in the human being which afterwards flows into his configuration is, actually, an appendage-organ of the human embryo. As physical form, the human being is a head in the beginning. The rest are appendage-organs. And the functions which these appendage-organs assume in later life—such as breathing, circulation, nutrition—are, in the first period of the embryonic existence, activities proceeding not from within the embryo, but from without inward, out of the body of the mother, through organs which afterwards fall off, organs which are no longer present later in the human being.

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Figure IX

The human being is, at the outset, entirely head. The rest is appendage-organ. We do not exaggerate in the following sentence: The human being is in the beginning head; the rest is, so to speak, appendage-organ. Since that which at first was appendage-organ later on grows and gains in importance for the human being, his head finally loses its sharp distinction from the rest of the organs.

But this gives only a superficial characterization of the human being. For in reality he is, also as physical form, a threefold being. All that which actually constitutes his first form—the head—remains throughout his earthly life a more or less individual member. We fail merely to recognize this; nevertheless, it is a fact.

You will say: Indeed, one ought not to divide the human being in such a way that we behead him, as it were, chop off his head. That this happens in Anthroposophy was only the belief of Professor “Blank” who reproached Anthroposophy for dividing men into head, chest organs, and limb organs. But this charge is not true; it is not at all a fact; for in what is outwardly head configuration, lies only the main outer expression of the head configuration. Man remains completely “head” throughout his whole life. The most important sense organs—the eyes, ears, the organs of smell, the organs of taste—are, to be sure, in the head, but the sense of warmth, for example, the sense of pressure, the sense of touch, are spread out over the whole human being. That is precisely because the three members of the human organism are not to be differentiated spatially, but only in such a way that the head formation mainly appears in the outwardly formed head, while in reality it permeates the entire human being. And this is true also for the rest of the members. The head is, throughout man's earthly life, in the big toe, in so far as the big toe possesses a sense of touch or a sense of warmth.

Thus we have characterized, to begin with, the one member of the human being's essential nature, that human nature which confronts us as something sensuous. In my books I have designated this organization also as the nerve-sense organism in order to characterize it more inwardly. This, then, is one member of the human being, the nerve-sense organism.

The second member of the essential nature of the human being is all that manifests in rhythmical activity. You cannot say of the nerve-sense system that it finds expression in rhythmic activity, for example, in the perception of the eye; for in that case you would have to perceive one thing at a certain moment, then another, then a third, then a fourth, and then return again to the first, and so on. In other words, there would have to be a rhythm in your sense perception. But that is not the case. Observe on the other hand the main characteristic of your breast organism. There you will find the rhythm of breathing, the rhythm of circulation, the rhythm of digestion, and so forth. There, everything is rhythm.

Rhythm, with its organs of rhythm, is the second thing to develop in the human being; and it also extends over the whole human being, though its chief external manifestation is in the organs of the breast. The whole human being, again, is a lung; yet lung and heart are localized, so to speak, in the organs so named. The whole human being, indeed, breathes; you breathe in every spot of your organism. People speak of skin respiration. Only, in the activity of the lung is respiration mainly concentrated.

The third human organism is that of the limbs—the limb organism. The limbs terminate in the breast organism. In the embryonic stage of existence, they appear as appendages. They are the latest to develop. They are, however, the organs which are chiefly connected with metabolism. The metabolic process finds its chief stimulus through the fact that these organs are put into motion, perform most of the work in the human being. We have thus characterized the three members that appear to us in the human form.

But these three members are intimately connected with the soul life of the human being. His soul life can be divided into thinking, feeling, and willing. Thinking finds its physical expression chiefly in the head. But it has its physical organism also in the entire human being, because the head exists, in the way I have just described, throughout the entire human being.

Feeling is connected with the rhythmic organism. It is a prejudice, indeed even a superstition on the part of modern science to assume that the nervous system has directly to do with feeling. The nervous system has nothing directly to do with feeling. The respiration and circulation rhythms are the organs of feeling, and the nerves only transmit the fact that we cognize our feelings, that we experience them. The feelings have their organism in the rhythmic system, but we should know nothing of our feelings if the nerves did not procure for us percepts of them. And because the nerves procure for us these percepts of our feelings, modern intellectualism creates the superstition that the nerves themselves are tin* organs of feeling. This is not the case.

But, when we consciously observe our feelings, as they arise out of our rhythmic organism, and compare them with the thoughts which an* bound to our head, to our nerve-sense organism, then—if we are able to observe at all—we shall perceive the same difference between our thoughts and our feelings that exists between our daytime thoughts which we have in waking life and our dreams. Our feelings have no greater intensity in consciousness than dreams. They only have a different form; they only make their appearance in a different way. When you dream in pictures, your consciousness lives in pictures. But these pictures, in their picture character, have the same significance—although in another form—as our feelings. Thus, we may say that we have the clearest consciousness, the most illumined consciousness in our visualizations, in our thoughts. We have a kind of dream consciousness in regard to our feelings. We only believe that we have a clear consciousness of our feelings; we have no clearer consciousness of our feelings than we have of our dreams. If on awaking from sleep we recollect our dreams and form of them wide-awake visualizations, we do not seize hold of the dream. The dream is far richer than our visualization of it afterwards. In like manner is the world of feeling infinitely richer than our mental pictures of it, which we make present to our consciousness.

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Figure X

And completely immersed in sleep is our willing. This willing is bound to the limb-metabolic organism, to the motor organism. All that we really know of our willing are the thoughts. I form the visualization: I shall take hold of this watch. Just try to think quite sincerely that you form the visualization: I shall take hold of this watch. Then you do take hold of it. What proceeds from your visualization, your thought, right down into the muscles and finally leads to something which again appears as a visualization—your taking hold of the watch, which is a continuation of the first visualization—what lies between the thought of the intention to act, and the thought of its fulfilment, what occurs in your organism, all these activities remain just as unconscious as your life in the deepest dreamless sleep.

We do at least dream of our feelings, but from our impulses of will we have nothing but what we have from our sleep. You may say: I have nothing at all from sleep. Well, I do not speak now from the physical standpoint; even from the physical standpoint it is, indeed, entirely senseless to say that you have nothing at all from sleep. But psychically, too, you have a great deal from your sleep. If you were never to sleep, you would never reach your ego consciousness.

You need only realize the following: When you remember the experiences you have had, then you say that you are going back in time, that from the present you go further back in time. Indeed, you imagine that it is a fact that you go further back in time. But it is not so at all. In reality you only go back to the moment when you awoke from sleep the last time. (See Figure X.) Then you have fallen asleep. What lies there between is eliminated. And then in the interval from the last time you fell asleep back to the time before the last when you woke up, memory appears again. So the matter continues on, back in time. And by looking back, you must really always insert the periods of unconsciousness. In doing so we must insert unconsciousness for one third of our life. We do not pay attention to this. But it is just as if you had a white plane with a black hole in the center. (See Figure XI.) You see the black hole, in spite of the fact that there are no forces present. Thus, in looking back in memory, in spite of the fact that it contains nothing from life's reminiscences, you see, nevertheless, the blackness—the nights, through which you have slept. There your consciousness strikes against this blackness continually, and that impels you to call yourself an I, an ego.

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Figure XI

If this really continued on and you were to knock against nothing, you would never gain an ego consciousness. Thus we can, indeed, say that we benefit from sleep. And just as we benefit from our sleep in the ordinary earth life, do we benefit from the sleep which rules in our willing. We sleep through that which really takes place in us with every act of will. But in it there lies the true ego. Just as we receive our ego consciousness through the black void (see Figure XI), so does our ego lie in that which sleeps in us during the act of will—the ego, however, which passed through our former earth lives.

That is where karma holds sway. Karma rules in our willing. In our willing all the impulses from our preceding earth life hold sway; only, even in the waking human being, they are sunk in sleep.

Thus, when we visualize the human being as he confronts us in earth life, a threefold membering of his organism is observable: the head organism, the rhythmic organism, and the motor organism. That is a schematic division. Each member belongs in turn to the whole man. Visualizing is bound to the head organism, feeling is bound to the rhythmic organism, and willing to the motor organism. Our state while visualizing is wakefulness, while feeling is dreaming. Our state in which willing, in which the will impulses take place is sleep, even during our waking life.

Now, in the head—that is, in our visualizing—we must distinguish two things; we must discover, as it were, a more subtle membering of the head. This more subtle membering leads us to distinguish what we have as momentary visualization by virtue of our having intercourse with the world, from what we have as memory.

You go through the world, constantly forming visualizations, mental images, according to the impressions you receive from the world. But it remains possible for you to call up these impressions again out of your memory. The visualizations you form in your intercourse with the world at present are not differentiated inwardly from the visualizations aroused to life when memory becomes active. In one case they come from without, and in the other from within. It is, indeed, a naive thought to imagine that memory works in the following way: I now confront a thing or event, form a visualization, a mental picture of it; this visualization sinks down into me somewhere, into some sort of pigeon-hole, and, when later I remember, I take it again out of the pigeon-hole. There are, indeed, whole philosophies which are able to describe how the visualizations sink down beneath the threshold of consciousness, then are fished out again in the act of recollecting. These are naive concepts.

There is, of course, no such pigeon-hole in which our visualizations lie when we remember them. Nor is there any such place in us where they are moving about and whence, when we remember them, they walk up again into our head. All these things are utterly non-existent, nor is there any explanation in their favor.

The facts are rather as follows, you need only to reflect on the following: When you wish to exercise your memory, you often do not work merely with your powers of visualizing, but you bring to your aid very different means. I have seen people memorizing who exercised their power to visualize just as little as possible, but carried on vehement outer movements accompanying their speech (arm movements) again and again:

And it undulates, surges, and roars and hisses

[Und es wallet und woget und brauset und zischt.
A well-known line of German poetry. (Tr.)]

Thus, people memorize in this way, and in so doing the least possible thinking occurs. And in order to add a further stimulus—And it undulates, surges, and roars and hisses—they beat their forehead with their fists. Even this happens. It is definitely a fact that the visualizations we form as we occupy ourselves with the world are as evanescent as dreams. On the other hand, what emerges out of memory are not visualizations which have sunk below into us, but something quite different. Were I to give you some notion of it, I should have to draw it thus (see Figure XII). This is, naturally, only a kind of symbolic figure. Imagine the human being as a seeing being. He sees something. I shall not describe the process more exactly; that could be done, but for the moment we do not need it. The human being sees something. It passes through his eye (see Figure XII), through the optic nerve into the organs into which the optic nerve then merges.

We have two clearly distinct members of our brain: the more external brain, the gray matter; and, beneath it, the white matter. The white matter terminates in the sense organs, the gray matter lies within it; it is far less developed than the white mass. “Gray” and “white” are, of course, only approximate terms. But even thus crudely anatomically considered, the matter is as follows: The objects make an impression on us, pass through our eyes, and on into the processes that take place in the white matter of the brain.

On the other hand, our visualizations have their organs in the gray matter (see Figure XII) which, incidentally, has quite a different cell structure. Therein our visualizations glimmer and vanish like dreams. They glimmer, because the impressions are occurring underneath.

If you were dependent upon having the mental images sink down into you, and you then had to call them up again in memory, you would remember nothing at all, you would have no memory. The fact is like this: At the present moment, let us say, I see something. The impression of it—whatever it may be—sinks into me, the white matter of the brain acting as the medium. The gray matter functions by dreaming in its turn of the impressions, making pictures of them. These are only transitory pictures; they come and go. That which remains we do not visualize at all at this moment, but that goes down into our organism. And when we remember, we look within; down there below, the impression remains.

Thus, when you see something blue, then an impression of blue sinks down into you (below, in Figure XII), here (above, in Figure XII) you form the visualization of blue. It is transitory. Then, after three days, you

observe in your brain the impression which has remained. Now, by looking inward, you visualize the blue. The first time, when you saw the blue from without, you were stimulated from outside by the blue object. The second time, when you remember, you are stimulated from within, because the blueness portrayed itself within you. In both cases, the process is the same. It is always a perception. Memory, too, is a perception. So that our day-waking consciousness is actually to be found, as it were, in the visualizing process; but, beneath the visualizing, certain processes are going on which also rise into consciousness through visualizing, namely, through the memory visualizations. Below this visualizing lies perceiving,

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Figure XII

the actual perception, and only below this lies feeling. Thus, we can distinguish more intimately between the processes of visualizing and perceiving in our head organism, our thought organism. That which we have perceived we can then remember. But it remains, indeed, very unconscious; only in memory does it rise into consciousness. What really takes place in the human being is actually no longer experienced by him. When he perceives, he experiences the visualization. The effect of the perception penetrates him. Out of this effect he is able to awaken the memory. But then the unconscious has already begun.

In reality it is only here, in this region—where in waking-day consciousness we visualize—there only do we ourselves exist as human beings. There only are we really aware of ourselves as human beings (see Figure XIII). Where we do not reach down with our consciousness (we do not even reach the causes of our memories) there we are not aware of ourselves as human beings but are incorporated into the world. It is just as it is in the physical life. You inhale, the air you now have within yourself was a short while ago outside, it was the air of the outer atmosphere; it is now your air. After a short time, you give it back again to the world; you are one with the world. The air is now outside you, now inside you, now without, now within. You would not be a human being were you not united with the world in such a way that you possess not only that which is

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Figure XIII

present within your skin, but that by means of which you yourself are connected with the whole surrounding atmosphere. And just as you are thus connected on your physical side, so are you connected on your spiritual side—the moment you descend into the nearest sub-conscious region, the region out of which memory arises—so are you connected with that which we call the third Hierarchy, Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. Just as you are connected through your breathing with the air, so are you connected through your head organism, the lower head organism, with the third Hierarchy. The outer lobes of the brain, consisting of gray matter, only and solely belong to the earth. What is beneath (the white matter) is connected with the third Hierarchy, Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai.

Now let us descend into the region, psychologically speaking, of feeling; corporeally speaking, of the rhythmic organism, out of which the dreams of our feeling life arise. There we do not at all possess ourselves as human beings; there we are connected with what constitutes the second Hierarchy—the spiritual beings who do not incarnate in any kind of earthly body, but who remain in the spiritual world. They, however, send unceasingly their currents, their impulses, that which streams from them as forces, into the rhythmic organism of the human being. Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes—these are the beings whom we bear within our breast.

Just as we bear our human ego only in the outer lobes of our brain, so do we bear the Angeloi and Archangeloi, directly beneath this region, but still within the head organism. That is the scene of their earthly activities; there the starting-points of their activity are to be found.

In our breast we bear the second Hierarchy—Exusiai, and so forth; there in our breast are the starting-points of their activity. And if we now descend into the sphere of our motor organism, if we enter our movement organism, then in this sphere the beings of the first Hierarchy are active—Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones.

The transmuted food-stuffs, the food-stuffs we have eaten, circulate in our limbs, undergo there a process which is a living combustion process. For, if we take just a single step, there arises in us a living process of combustion, a burning up of that which was outside us. We are connected with it. Through our limb and metabolic organism, we are connected as human beings with the lowest, and yet it is precisely through the limb organism that we are connected with the highest. With the first Hierarchy, with the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, we are connected by that which permeates us with spirit. Now the great question arises—it may sound trivial in that I clothe it in earthly words, but there is nothing else I can do—the question arises: With what are they occupied—these beings of the three successive Hierarchies, while they are among us—with what do they occupy themselves?

The third Hierarchy—Angeloi, Archangeloi, and so forth—concerns itself with that which has its physical organism in the head; this Hierarchy occupies itself with our thinking. Were it not concerned with our thinking, with that which takes place in our head, we would have no memory in ordinary earth life. The beings of this Hierarchy retain in us the impulses which we receive with our perceptions. They underlie the activity which manifests itself in our recollection, manifests itself in memory. They lead us through our earth life within this, our first unconscious region.

Now let us proceed to the beings of the second Hierarchy—Exusiai, and so forth. They are the beings we encounter when we have passed through the gate of death, in the life between death and a new birth. There we encounter the souls of the departed human beings who lived with us on earth; but we encounter there, above all, the spiritual beings of this second Hierarchy also, it is true, those of the third Hierarchy, but the second Hierarchy is more important. We work with them during the time between death and a new birth upon all that we have felt in our earth life, all that we have transplanted into our organism. In union with these beings of the second Hierarchy, we elaborate our next earth life.

When we stand here on the earth, we have the feeling that the spiritual beings of the divine world are in us. When we are there beyond in the sphere between death and a new birth, we have the reverse thought. The Angeloi, Archangeloi and so forth, who guide us through our earth life in the manner indicated, live on the same plane with us, so to speak, after our death. Directly underneath are the beings of the second Hierarchy. With them we work on the forming, the shaping, of our inner karma. And all that I told you yesterday about the karma of health and disease we elaborate with these beings, the beings of the second Hierarchy.

And if we look still deeper in the time between death and a new birth, that is, if we, as it were, look through the beings of the second Hierarchy, then below we discover the beings of the first Hierarchy, Cherubim, Seraphim, and Thrones. As earthly human beings, we seek the highest Gods above us. We seek as human beings between death and a new birth in the profoundest depths below us for the highest Divinity attainable by us. And while we are working with the beings of the second Hierarchy, dab- orating our inner karma between death and a new birth, that inner karma which afterwards appears reflected in the healthy or diseased constitution of our next earth life, while we are engaged in this work, while we work with ourselves and with other human beings upon the bodies which will then appear in our next earth life, the beings of the first Hierarchy are occupied below in a peculiar way. We behold that. They stand within a certain necessity in regard to their activity, in regard to a part, a small part, of their activity. They must imitate—for they are the creators of the earthly—that which the human being has molded during his earth life but imitate it in a quite definite way.

Think of the following: In his will, the human being performs certain deeds on earth. The will belongs to the first Hierarchy. Be these deeds good or bad, wise or foolish, the beings of the first Hierarchy—Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones—have to mold the counterparts of these deeds in their own sphere.

You know, my dear friends, we live together. No matter, whether the things we do together are good or evil, for all that is good, for all that is evil, the beings of the first Hierarchy must shape the corresponding counterparts. Among the first Hierarchy all things are judged, but also shaped and fashioned. While we work on our inner karma with the second Hierarchy and with the departed human souls, we behold between death and a new birth what Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones have experienced through our earthly deeds.

Indeed, my dear friends, here upon earth the blue sky with its cloud formations and sunshine arches overhead, and at night, as the starry heavens, it vaults above us. Between death and a new birth, the activity of the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones vaults beneath us. And we gaze down upon these Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones just as we here look up to the clouds, to the blue heaven, to the star-strewn heaven. Beneath us we behold the heavens formed of the activity of Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. But what kind of activity is it? While we live between death and a new birth, we behold the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones performing the activity which results as the just and compensating activity from our own deeds on earth—our own and the earthly deeds lived through with other human beings. The Gods are obliged to exercise the compensating activity, and we behold it as our heavens which are now beneath us. In the deeds of the Gods we behold the consequences of our earthly deeds, whether good or bad, wise or foolish. And by looking downward we relate ourselves, between death and a new birth, to the reflection of our deeds in the same way as in earthly life we relate ourselves to the vaulting heaven above us.

We carry our inner karma into our inner organism. We bring it back with us onto the earth as our faculties and talents, our genius and our stupidity. What the Gods fashion there beneath us, what they must experience in consequence of our earth lives, confronts us in our next earth life as the facts of destiny which come to meet us from without. We may say that what we pass through to which we are asleep carries us into our destiny in our earth life. But in this lives what the Gods in question, those of the first Hierarchy, had to experience as the consequences of our deeds in their domain during the time between our death and a new birth.

One always feels the need of expressing such things in pictures. Let us imagine ourselves standing somewhere in the physical world. The sky is overcast; we behold the clouded sky. Soon thereafter, a rain begins to trickle down; the rain is falling. What previously hovered above us we now see on the dripping fields, on the dripping trees. If we look back, with the eye of the initiate, from human life into the time we passed through between our last death and our last birth, we then see therein, first of all, the forming of divine deeds, the consequences of our own deeds in our last earth life. We then see how this spiritually rains down and becomes our destiny.

If I meet a human being who has significance for me in earth life, who has a determining influence upon my destiny, what occurs with (his meeting of the other human being has been previously experienced by the Gods as a result of what I have had in common with him in a former earl h life. If I am transferred during my earth life to some locality important to me or placed in some important calling, all that comes to me thus as outer destiny is a likeness of what the Gods have experienced—Gods of the first Hierarchy—as a consequence of my former earth life, during the time when I was myself between death and a new birth.

Indeed, if you think abstractly, then you think: “There we have the former earth lives; the deeds of the former earth lives work across into the present. Previously they were causes; now they are effects.” With this we cannot think very far; we have actually little more than words when we make this statement. But behind what we thus describe as the law of karma lie the deeds of the Gods, experiences of the Gods; and behind all that lie the other facts.

If we human beings approach our destiny only through feeling, then we look up, according to our faith, either to the Gods or to some Providence, upon which we feel the course of our earth life depending. But the Gods—those whom we know as the beings of the first Hierarchy, Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones—have, as it were, a reverse religious confession. They feel their necessity lies with men on earth whose creators they arc. The aberrations human beings suffer, and the progress they enjoy, must be equalized by the Gods. And what the Gods prepare for us as our destiny in a subsequent life they have already lived through before us.

These truths must be found again through Anthroposophy. Out of a consciousness not fully developed, they were perceived by mankind in an erstwhile instinctive clairvoyance. The ancient wisdom contained such truths. Then only a dim feeling about them remained. In much that meets us in the spiritual life of mankind, there is still a dim feeling for these things. You need only remember the verse by Angelus Silesius which you will also find quoted elsewhere in my writings. To a narrow religious understanding it sounds like an impertinence:

Without me, God could not a moment live at most.
Came I to naught, must He from need give up the ghost.

Ohn' mich könnt' Gott ein Nu nicht leben.
Würd' ich zunicht, müsst' er vor Not den Geist aufgeben.

Angelus Silesius went over to Roman Catholicism and as a Catholic wrote such verses. To him it was still clear that the Gods are dependent on the world, just as the world is dependent on the Gods, that this dependence is something mutual, and that the Gods must direct their life according to the life of human beings. But the divine life acts creatively and has its effect in turn in the destiny of human beings. Angelus Silesius, dimly feeling, but not knowing the exact truth, said:

Without me, God could not a moment live at most.
Came I to naught, must He from need give up the ghost.

World and Godhead depend on one another and work into one another. Today we have seen this interactivity in the example of human destiny, of karma.