The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From a soul struggling for knowledge of the world, Goethe spoke the sentence:

Mysterious in the clear light of day
Nature cannot be robbed of her veil.
And what she may not reveal to your spirit,
You cannot force from her with levers and screws.

And much of what has taken place in the field of science since his time would have prompted him to say:... you cannot force that from her with microscopes and telescopes. — The saying does not arise from a lack of knowledge, but from an attitude that does not want to accept only the material. From his youth to his old age, he held fast to what he says in Faust:

The spiritual world is not closed;
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Up! Bathe, disciple, undeterred
The earthly breast in the morning dawn!

And so he has here, as also expressed in the sentence mentioned earlier, not that man could not penetrate the mystery of existence, but to draw attention to the fact that the human spirit itself, in its development, can do what instruments cannot, that the human spirit is able to ascend from level to level.

What the human spirit can do can only be answered from an understanding of the secrets of our consciousness. Consciousness as it is experienced by people today relates to the other consciousnesses that exist and relate to today's normal consciousness in such a way that they, so to speak, plunge the human being into dark depths, and on the other hand lead him up to the summit of knowledge.

Let us ask ourselves today: Is there only the “normal” consciousness or are there other consciousnesses and thus the possibility of penetrating into the causes of our existence? Today, we will deal with the relationship between consciousnesses from a particular point of view. What the word “clairvoyance” encompasses is something that is unpopular and contested in our present time. People who only recognize normal consciousness will consider everything that has to be said as folly and fantasy.

It is based on nothing more than a lack of knowledge of the nature of human consciousness; it must be said that the common inner ignorance of facts speaks in this way. And it should not go unmentioned that one would wish that what is called 'clairvoyance' in the spiritual sense be known to those who speak of it and who know very little about it and crave it. They imagine something quite wrong under clairvoyance. Therefore, it must be spoken of that clairvoyance, which lies below our normal consciousness and also brings out the human being below normal consciousness. And in comparison, it must be spoken of what clairvoyance is in the spiritual-scientific sense and how it leads beyond normal consciousness. It can only be understood by placing oneself before the soul, which has often been said about the nature of man, about the visible and invisible man.

Spiritual science does not have it as easy as recognizing man as an external science that is tied to sensual matter. It regards only the outer physical part, and then speaks of the physical human body. Within this physical human body, the consciousness of which we will speak in a moment sees the invisible, the supersensible human bodies. Isn't it the case that the ordinary mind could form enough reasons for the existence of these bodies if it would only say the following to itself: I wake up every morning; during the night my normal consciousness is immersed in darkness and gloom. In the morning, entities from the most diverse realms of nature penetrate into the field of vision of consciousness; everything that was there yesterday penetrates back into consciousness.

Now everyone should continue by saying to themselves: If it were not too absurd, what fills the field of consciousness would have to disappear in the evening and arise again in the morning. They should say to themselves: Its existence would have to have disappeared during the night. Spiritual science tells us that the human being still has an astral body, which is the carrier of lust and joy, of urges and desires, etc. For clairvoyant consciousness, the astral body descends when we fall asleep. Why do we have no impressions during the night? Because it is in the spiritual world and because we have no organs for it. Imagine what would happen in the physical body. The eyes disappear; the ears stop hearing; you would have no sound, no color around you. Likewise, you could imagine that the other senses gradually fade away. This is what the astral body is like at night because it has not formed any organs in the course of human development; in the morning it uses the organs of the physical body. Thus we recognize in it one of the invisible links.

Between the astral body and the physical body lies a second link: the etheric body. During the time between birth and death, this is a fighter against the decay of the physical body. And then, when the human physical body is a corpse, it only follows the physical and chemical forces, because the etheric body moves out at death with the astral body. Sleep is separation from the astral body; physical body and etheric body remain in bed at night.

Then we distinguish a fourth element: the “I”, with which the human being can come to self-awareness. Thus, we see the human being as a composite of the physical body and three invisible elements: the etheric body, the astral body and the I.

Only when we consider the human being in its entirety can we form an idea of the stages of consciousness. There is only one thing we must be clear about: how do we look at the limbs? Once the physical body was of a spiritual nature; it has disintegrated, like ice separates from water. And the ether body is, as it were, a little denser spirit, and the astral body is still a little denser, and the I-bearing body is still a little denser spirit. Therefore, we also call the “I” that which is a “divine spark” or “drop”. It is only through the fact that man has gradually developed that he has become an “I-bearer” and awakened to his self-awareness.

If we go back, we find the first formation of the physical body. Then, as it were, as the physical body became denser, the etheric body was set apart. Even later, the astral body was added, and even later the I. Only through this did he - the human being - receive his normal consciousness, through which we perceive external objects.

This consciousness was not always there; it is a product of development. We could go back into the past and we would find that the human being was a being consisting of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. In this very distant past, man did not have today's consciousness; he had a completely different one, a consciousness that is one step lower. We can call this consciousness, in relation to today's, an “image consciousness”. The only way we can study this consciousness is to restore consciousness to a higher degree. In those days, people could not perceive objects in outer space. Imagine that there is some object lying nearby that has a certain taste. Today, a person has to become aware of it through the taste, through the tongue; he perceives from the outside what the object is. The image consciousness cannot perceive such an external object; an image arises, and this image is a symbol of what taste the external object has. Or one approaches an object that would shine for today's consciousness; the image consciousness does not see that; but through a mysterious bond between the soul and the body, an image arises again.

And so we may say that such a consciousness has images that surge up and down, images that are closely related to our present-day ideas, except that they are symbols; our present-day ideas are only photographic images. What the astral body experiences is an awareness of images. Indeed, if today's human being could erase his “self-awareness”, he would disappear into the sea of astral images. He would experience the surging images in the astral body. We can characterize our present-day consciousness by means of a comparison. Imagine a creature that lives in the sea for a certain period of time, so that it only stays at certain depths. It knows the animals and plants that are embedded in the sea, but it never looks at the sky. This is roughly how we have to imagine human consciousness. Man emerges from a sea of astral images, and self-awareness is ignited by the outside world. This could never have developed if he had remained in the sea of the astral; but only by having objects in the external world does self-consciousness ignite.

Thus we have pointed to a certain level of consciousness that lies below our present, ordinary sense of self, from which humanity has developed. If we go further, we would find a person who did not yet have the astral body. And so we could say that image consciousness has developed out of an “ether image consciousness”. If we were to descend further, we would perceive a consciousness that differs essentially from what the modern human being knows as consciousness. But you can get an idea from what has been said today: the ether consciousness is contained in what remains in bed during the night. And our astral consciousness has submerged in the sea of the astral.

Now we do not have to imagine extreme contrasts here, but differences in degree. We do not have to think that the consciousness during sleep is the opposite of our own today; imagine that you also know something similar in our daytime consciousness. When you walk down the street, it may happen that you say to yourself: Didn't I see something just now? — You did not pay attention to it. There you have a lower consciousness. There is only a duller consciousness in what remains in bed. The plant has the consciousness of sleep continually - they are sleeping beings.

And we can descend even further, we can enter the physical body and come to the mineral consciousness. This is the consciousness in which the whole mineral world lives. So we have listed four levels: mineral, plant, animal and human consciousness. Three levels of consciousness therefore lie below our everyday, normal consciousness. These three levels were completed by man in prehistoric times.

Today, people are occasionally able to revive the last remnants of ancient levels of consciousness within themselves. There are also such heirlooms in the physical world, such as the auricles, which are an atavistic remnant; likewise, certain states of consciousness, which are usually called clairvoyant states, are heirlooms from ancient developmental states. However, they are not the true ones in the sense of spiritual science; they are only old heirlooms that sometimes live into our present-day consciousness.

People have two very different types of such inherited traits, which express themselves in very different ways. One is what encompasses the dream world. What a person experiences in a dream are not perceptions that are made in the same way as those experienced by daytime consciousness. They are images of external events. You only need to imagine characteristic dreams. Let us take one as an example: a young man dreams that the vault of heaven has opened up in front of him and a number of shining beings have emerged. He wakes up and sees that the morning sun has shone on the wall through the window. The dream has symbolically expressed this shining of the morning sun in such a way that it allowed the experience to arise in the soul as an image. Here you have an image experience. That is why the dream is an heirloom from the time when man had inner soul experiences that were linked in their form to external objects. For example, if you see a symbol with an ugly color in your astral consciousness, you know that there is a harmful object nearby. The not yet awakened object consciousness does not see the object, but only an image, so that one could arrange one's actions accordingly.

The dream images are only a remnant, but since they have different degrees of approximation, the “dream can sometimes light up that it really corresponds to a real fact that appears symbolically. Let us take the case of a person who dreams of the colony of Kiau-tschau, how he sits in a meeting and is constantly confronted with the name Kiau-tschau. He wakes up and sees that a cat has crept into his room and is meowing. In fact, the dream is such an arbitrarily drawn conception.

If you study the dream in this way, you will see that it is lines of life that have been preserved, but that it mixes lines with the greatest arbitrariness, mixing in certain interests of the day. Such a mixing of interests is, for example, when an important philosopher dreams the following. In his soul lived the poem:

Do you want to roam into the distance,
when the good is so close,
just learn to grasp luck,
because luck is always there.

And he dreams:

Do you want to roam afar?
See, the money is so close.
Just learn to grasp the money,
Because the money is always there.

You see how the dream from the source of the inner imagination deals arbitrarily with what it has experienced – the structure of Goethe's poem, for example.

If we were to follow this, we would have an immersion in an earlier state of consciousness. All our ideas can be symbolized in this way. Imagine you are lying in bed, you press your feet against the lower edge of the bed and release them again. The dream symbolizes: the feet become free and a flight arises. What causes the dream? The fact that what happens does not happen completely when a person sinks into dreamless sleep.

It is now possible that the astral body has already left the physical body and not yet the etheric body; this is particularly the case when waking up and falling asleep. Then the astral experiences are reflected and the dream experiences arise. The dream stands on its own; it is really a last remnant of old, overcome states of consciousness.

It is different with other states of “abnormal consciousness”, which can develop in certain respects in humans. Because they submerge in the astral, so that they give up their full self-awareness in certain respects, completely different states of the subconscious arise than in a normal dream. What must be tuned down is what man calls his 'I', his healthy thinking, to distinguish it precisely from what is in the environment. Every time the actual 'I' of the human being is tuned down, when the human being does not feel: Here I stand —, then it is as if the human being were diving below the surface of the astral sea. Then what can be called the subconscious comes to him.

There are three forms of the subconscious: what is called presentiment, what is called vision and then second sight. These are three different forms of the subconscious. It is natural that when man muffles his ego, he enters into a closer relationship with all the threads that nature connects than he would otherwise. When we raise our usual ego consciousness, then man must be content to see only part of the space; there he is always in such a restricted area, and what effort it costs to pull the connecting threads of nature. In a limited consciousness – that is the work of our 'ego' itself, when we dampen it down, when we dampen down our abilities, when we let our reason fall silent, then we descend into our astral body and this is connected with many intimate threads to what lives in the astral. There the ordinary connections of space and time come to an end. There we dampen down all these concepts.

Because of the completely different concepts of space and time, it can happen, as it does in presentiment, that time is overcome. At the slightest immersion, what might be called “dark feeling” arises; this comes from the currents that run beneath the surface, which one senses gently when one descends into the astral world. If you dive deeper, then, just as it was with the astral consciousness, the experiences form into very specific images and the vision occurs. We are then in the world of causes, in the world of the primal reasons. Then those beings emerge that are invisible to the physical eye. We get to know such entities, and the visions are often the physical expression of beings that are behind the sense world.

Thus we can actually encounter those entities that are there and can also be human souls. This enters our consciousness when we descend. And the actions of these spiritual beings, what they undertake unbound by space and time, we experience in second sight. When we see things far away in second sight, it is a descent into the depths of consciousness.

Today's man cannot dive into the depths of consciousness without taking with him what he has experienced up here. Man has acquired the habit of seeing animals and plants, etcetera, in a very specific way. He takes the way with him and with it he covers, as it were, the beings that come to meet him. They are true beings that appear to him, but they are false images. The fact is that he submerges, that he sees a being that does not appear in its true form, and he covers that with the images he is accustomed to. For example, someone submerges and he thinks he sees the Christ himself. Nevertheless, it is a real being from the spiritual world, but he has endowed it with the image of the Christ himself. And so what he sees is an illusion of a real being. And because people who are not trained clairvoyants cannot know whether they are seeing what they are taking with them or what is the truth, such people can be very sure that they are indulging in the greatest deceptions. Descending is therefore always accompanied by deception after deception.

You can dive even deeper, into the sea of ether, and you also take with you the way of seeing things very definitely. You can perceive powers in this way, but they will be blurred. If you saw them clearly, you would see what could be described as an all-encompassing life. For example, you would see our earth as an all-encompassing living being. But in this world man perceives the images to which he has become accustomed, and sees all kinds of things that have indeed been caused by spiritual entities; but the forms that the lower clairvoyant perceives are in deceptive form. These clairvoyants are what are called the dream walker, for example, where the person in the dream performs actions with the physical body in the dullness of the etheric body.

Likewise, what is called “magnetic sleep consciousness” is to be sought in this sphere, because usually causes of illness underlie it; suppose you have an organ that is diseased, you do not need to know it, something is abnormal about the person, which steers the person towards becoming conscious in the etheric body, especially when another person strokes them, etc., accelerates this process. All kinds of events in the spiritual world appear to him in all kinds of illusions. So we see that one can descend into different states of consciousness. In occult science, they are called the “subconscious”.

All these states of consciousness are not relevant to what is said in esoteric science. Many people are eager to switch off their ordinary daily consciousness and descend. They only want to experience something strange, they want to experience spirits. That human beings are spirits is not proof enough for them; they want to have spirits without physical expression. This is not to say anything against the truth and reality of these spheres; but what would come from such states could never be decisive for spiritual science.

Just as there is a subconscious, there is also a superconscious. This can only be achieved through training in the occult sciences. This includes learning to manage one's ordinary consciousness in the most precise way. It is therefore always emphasized that what spiritual science hears from the spheres can only be grasped with ordinary human understanding. It cannot be expressed strongly enough that Theosophy can be grasped with ordinary human understanding. Only those who are trained clairvoyants can see the true shape of the spiritual world. But when it is related after he has seen it, those who absorb these facts, when they are presented in a sensible, comprehensive way, can understand everything and they can say to themselves: If I do this, I can then check whether all this can be applied to life. One must keep common sense as one's own possession. You have to keep telling people who come to you: Approach the physical world first, apply our minds to these facts and try to understand them.

But who has an unimpaired mind, unclouded by the suggestion of so-called scientific facts! You have to realize that this is no easy task! Never before has the human mind been so limited as it is today. Everyone is satisfied when they can construct a whole edifice of the world from a few pegged-out concepts, and when someone comes along who wants to build the edifice from the sum of spiritual truths, they say that this is folly, fantasy or something even worse.

This must be taken into account. Only unprejudiced thinking can approach the physical world, not judgment clouded by all sorts of suggestions. Today people talk a lot about the “independence of judgment”; they want to be free of authority. They do not accept what they have not examined themselves; but they do not ask themselves whether they are capable of examining everything. What matters is that they want to be independent of any authority and yet are dependent on a great authority: “They say.” This intangible authority has a tyrannical effect on people. Humanity languishes under it, believing itself to be free from all authority. It absorbs everything that is a matter of contemporary judgment; one believes everything that science has established, as if no one cared.

He who stands face to face with the facts of the spiritual world must free himself from this. There he has to use his usual healthy judgment to progress to superconsciousness. Many a person comes and says: I used to see all kinds of things, but now everything has disappeared. Those who understand will say: That is good. You should ascend to the superconscious; to do that, the best transition is to go through a sphere of spiritual darkness. You can expose yourself to danger if you don't want to. When [the person] descends into the subconscious and all the confusing impressions of the astral world come, then perhaps in a certain respect he will come to have premonitions, visions, etc.; he may still see so many black poodles that only pretend to be something. That is not the point of seeing this. He who is not yet mature enough not to have respect for these scraps of the spiritual world is also not mature enough to penetrate into the superconscious. To do this, he must undergo catharsis or purification. Man must be cleansed of all subconsciousness if he wants to ascend into the first sphere of the superconscious. There he also experiences a consciousness of images, but in the same way as he lives in everyday life. To do this, it is necessary to strengthen one's consciousness and throw out everything that is subconscious. And that is a lot! You can see this if you remember that in early childhood, a lot of things penetrate you; you have forgotten them in your sense of self, but they are inscribed in your etheric and astral bodies. Certain childhood impressions would come up and disturb a person every time he or she tries to penetrate into a higher consciousness. In a sense, diving into the spheres of the subconscious is a dressing up of the real facts with images from the real world. Try to register the images of such “clairvoyants”, follow them back to a time when there were no railways or telegraphs, wait and you will not be surprised that railways and telegraphs will play major roles in the “spirit realm”. This is only because the seer takes with him what has been imprinted in the etheric body. Therefore, if you want to penetrate unclouded, it is necessary to throw everything out of your subconscious. You can only acquire it by going through it with complete consciousness, which is provided by the spiritual scientific method. There is what the student has to practice, what he has to experience, absorbed in imagination, and that is pictorial representation, which proceeds according to the rule:

All that is transitory is but a parable.

Thus you will find that in every training session symbols are given such as the rose cross, the serpent staff of Hermes, etc. They have something tremendously significant when a person has to experience certain facts of the outer world inwardly. One forms a symbol that one does not use in the same way as a photographic image of the outer world.

Let me mention here once more, in the form of a dialogue between teacher and student – this dialogue did not take place, but the facts do take place –: Look at a plant; it takes root in the ground and lets stems, leaves and flowers emerge. And now compare the plant with the human being. You call him a higher being. You know that the red blood that makes man a higher being also enables him to develop passions, instincts and desires, but also the soul world, the higher consciousness. The plant has no desires and instincts; it stands there in pure, high chastity. But you see the human being with a higher consciousness; however, he pays for that which is connected with the red blood through passion and desire. And then imagine the high ideal that the human being will become like the plant; he has subdued the desires and purified his red blood.

For man the plant is a model; he forms a picture of how, in time, everything degrading will have died out in man, and his blood will be pure, like the sap in the red rose. Think of this as a symbol in the red rose and apply to it Goethe's saying:

Before you do not have this,
this: Die and become!
Are you only a gloomy guest
On the dark earth!

And when we feel the burgeoning and sprouting in the soul, like the reddened sap in the red rose, we feel that and let the image work on us in inner meditation! And the image has a certain effect: it pushes out everything that fills the subconscious, and we have taken the first step towards the superconscious.

There are countless symbols just as I have described the Rose Cross. The disciple must immerse himself in these and then put them together in the “occult writing”, and in this way he comes, purified and cleansed, to an ether consciousness. Through what we gain from the occult writing, we receive the so-called inspired consciousness in that which is not tied to space and time; but we do not see it clouded by the images of everyday life.

And then there is a higher link of the superconscious: intuition. — In all these spheres of the superconscious, man takes his full “self-awareness” with him. If someone says: You are describing a consciousness in vain, that does not reflect a true world, then let someone who understands it tell them: These things are there so that the forces develop in us that free the astral body, the etheric body, from the physical body, and by doing so, we learn to see into the spiritual world while being fully aware of our ego.

There is no danger associated with this path, nothing can happen to us on it, it is safe if we follow it with patience and perseverance. If you submerge yourself, if you dampen the I, there is a danger; we fall prey to the passions that reside in the astral, and eventually we can lose our minds, while we become more and more understanding as we ascend in superconsciousness. Hence the insistence that the road to superconsciousness lies through day-consciousness. Those who find it too dull and uncomfortable to go through the study of the physical often pay for it with the loss of their reason, which they have sought through their greed.

Thus we see that there are stages that lead up and stages that lead down. The former lead to true clairvoyant states, where the ego is among the actions of spiritual beings [in inspiration] and finally where it is spirit among spirits [in intuition]. Nothing less is achieved than the cleansing of the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body. There are some things you have to accept; for example, when a person frees his etheric body, he may experience a temporary loss of memory because it is attached to his etheric body. If a person partially draws it out so that he can use it, his memory fades. But it will be amply restored to him later, albeit in a different way. And the qualities and abilities of consciousness are lost for a time; even self-awareness takes on a different form. Like a wanderer who feels lonely, the person walks along. As he penetrates further, the common memory disappears and a certain insight into past things arises.

Those who undertake the right training must have composure and perseverance. They must enter the path with courage and boldness, but it will be rewarded with the great reward of insight into the spiritual world, where the powers lie to become master of the physical world. A time will come when only those who recognize the spiritual forces behind the physical and can make them fruitful will be considered practical people. This leads us into the spiritual world while fully maintaining self-awareness. Not instruments, telescopes and microscopes, which only explain the veil of nature, only the spirit leads into nature.

Mysterious in the bright day

Nature cannot be robbed of the veil.

And what it may not reveal to your mind,

You do not force it out with levers and with screws.

If we want nature to come to meet us, we must go to meet it by developing our consciousness into superconsciousness. Then man will live his way into what Goethe described with the words he put into the mouth of the wise man:

The spirit world is not closed; your mind is closed, your heart is dead! Arise, student, arise,

The earthly breast in the morning dawn!

Dear attendees! Not so long ago, only 300 years, not only laymen but also learned naturalists believed that lower animals, worms, even fish could arise from inanimate river mud. And it was a great advance in human thinking when the Italian naturalist Redi first stated that, under our present-day conditions, living things could only arise from a living germ. Today, anyone who still wanted to claim that earthworms or fish can simply form from ordinary sand or mud would be considered a fool or an ignorant person. Indeed, the vast majority of today's thinking people are hardly aware that these three hundred years ago, people still believed that such a thing was possible! What is taken for granted today by laypeople and by science, that under our present conditions, living things can only arise from living things, is something that humanity had to gain for its thinking only over the course of centuries, and so it is, honored attendees, for many achievements of human knowledge. Today, spiritual science or theosophy has a very similar truth to implement and introduce into human consciousness. That this truth will become part of human consciousness in the future depends solely on whether people will just as naturally accept what many people today consider to be folly, a reverie or a fantasy: that the spiritual and soul can only arise from the spiritual and soul. Basically, all that is needed to understand all the things that will form today's topic is a thorough living through of this simple sentence. Nevertheless, much, much water will flow into the Elbe before the advocates of this sentence will no longer be regarded as fools, dreamers or fantasists.

The sentence that living things can only arise from living germs was not easily accepted either, and Redi only narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. Today, those who bring something similar together are no longer condemned to death by fire, that has gone out of fashion. But they are condemned to the other death, which burns less, but which is therefore still equivalent to the way in which uncomfortable truth seekers were eliminated from the world in the past. Today they are condemned as dreamers, fantasists, fools or the like. But the time will come, and it is not so far away, when it will seem self-evident that the spiritual and the soul can only arise from the spiritual and the soul. And the whole question at issue today, the question of such immeasurable importance for people, the question of the supersensible worlds and the destiny of the human soul in the supersensible worlds, the question of the riddles of human death and life, the question that is not just a theoretical, but a practical question in the most eminent sense, because the one who is able to solve it for his own soul draws certainty and strength for life from the answer, hope and confidence for his work, in short, everything that allows people to stand upright in the most difficult struggles of fate, in all that life brings.

Today we will approach the question of the destiny of man in life and in death from two sides. One approach will bring this question before the court of facts, the other before the court of common sense. If we want to speak of facts, then we must first form an idea of what we actually have to understand as facts. We speak so easily of proving. We shall see that these things are taken very superficially in the wide circle of humanity. The fate of the human soul in the supersensible world will be the subject.

Now, dear audience, when I was still a little boy, I often listened to conversations of very simple people about that mysterious land where man comes after death. There were religious people who, out of their faith, gave certain answers about fate, but there were also free-spirited people among the simple folk, unbelievers. One sentence always worked to beat the others. That was the sentence: No one can know anything about that country from which no wanderer has yet returned. It was said more simply: Have you seen one who has told of the events after death?

That was something that was taken by many as something striking. Now, honored attendees, people would not attach so much importance to such words if they wanted to reflect more thoroughly on the ordinary events of the day that happen to every human being in 24 hours. In the ordinary course of daily life, a person clearly experiences different states. In 24 hours, you go through two states of consciousness: waking and sleeping. Of course, the most ordinary and everyday things are the least thought about; but the riddles of the world are present in the everyday. It should seem mysterious to man that what he experiences within himself from morning to evening, the whole world of surging and swaying sensations, perceptions and thoughts, lust and suffering, joy and pain, drives and desires and passions, that he sees this whole world of the evening sinking into an indeterminate darkness. Everything that a person perceives through his eyes from morning till evening, which awakens desires, lust and suffering in him, etc., descends into the darkness of consciousness like the setting sun. In the morning, the person wakes up again; what he left behind for his consciousness yesterday dawns again out of the darkness. All the familiar images, thoughts, impressions come to consciousness just as the sun rises over the horizon. All the pains and sufferings that had been forgotten come back up like the sun rising over the horizon.

Would it not be foolish to claim that every evening the sum of perceptions, sensations and perceptions, pleasure and pain, pain and joy, that they disappear and merge into an indeterminate nothing and are recreated tomorrow? Anyone who thinks thoroughly says: It would be the greatest folly to claim such a disappearance of mental life and a new creation. The soul is there, it is present, it is real, anything else is contrary to common sense. What distinguishes the sleeping soul from the waking soul? Only that the sleeping soul cannot perceive, it has no consciousness of what fills its field of vision during the day as its experiences. States of consciousness change in every person in 24 hours.

Now, honored attendees, when the world of facts is to be explored, that which can be called clairvoyant human consciousness comes into play. With this word, I have expressed what may seem like something fantastic or foolish to the very enlightened of the present, especially at first. What is this clairvoyant human consciousness? First, let us clarify this consciousness through a comparison. You imagine, honored attendees, you are leading a person born blind into this hall. For you, these lamps shine, these doors appear brown. For the man born blind, this hall does not appear in this way; the lights and colors are not there for him. If you were to succeed in operating on this man born blind here, what would enter his field of vision is what was there before, but what he did not see. What was there before has now become perceptible to him.

What this man born blind can experience through the operation can be experienced in relation to the spiritual abilities of the soul. Just as in this man, whom you operated on, the ability to see was dormant, so in every human soul there is something dormant of higher abilities that can likewise be brought out of the human soul through an operation. What Goethe, for example, referred to as spiritual eyes, slumbers in the soul of every human being. And then, when these spiritual eyes are awakened in the soul of a person, it is just as much on a higher level as it is for a person born blind on a lower level whose physical eye has been operated on. A new world invades him, the world that is always around us, the spiritual world. But man's soul is also in this world during the state of sleep, during the night.

Why can't the human soul see this spiritual world in its normal state? It is easy to see why. Imagine that you were standing here with your body alive, but you lost your sight and could see nothing. If you also lost your hearing and other senses, the world would be imperceptible to you. So how can we know that a world exists for us? Only on the fact that we have organs for this world. When a person is in the spiritual world at night while sleeping, then in his normal present state he has no organs for this world, he has no spiritual eyes. But when a person develops what are called these spiritual eyes, then it is not dark and gloomy around him, but then he lives in the sleeping state so that he perceives: There is a world, I have left the physical world; I have entered another world. Now another world has become visible, a fact, as the world of physical colors and lights for the blind man who has undergone an operation.

What is described here as opening the spiritual eyes is called awakening or initiation. Such initiated people, who had developed their spiritual abilities, have always existed. Because they had developed their spiritual abilities, they could see into the spiritual world, into the world of which they now had to say: When a person falls asleep, what we call his outer physical body remains in bed, and a spiritual-soul entity leaves this physical body. This being really does leave the physical body when we fall asleep. During sleep it is in another world. In the morning, the soul once again enters the physical body. It then uses the eyes and ears again and perceives the physical world. What is the difference between the unawakened person and the awakened person? The difference is that in that part of his being that goes out at night, there are no spiritual eyes; but in the awakened person, spiritual eyes have developed. Those who want to study these questions more deeply and thoroughly will see that what has been said is not something plucked out of the blue, but something definite and real. Of course you can ask the question: Yes, but how does one achieve this awakening? The answer to this question is also given. There are certain methods and certain practices that a person must apply to his soul, and then he draws out of his inner being the dormant spiritual eyes, the slumbering soul abilities. It can only be hinted at that by allowing very specific inner soul experiences, which have been established for thousands of years in what is called concentration, meditation, or inner contemplation, to take effect on his soul, man can change his soul and develop spiritual eyes as a result. Then man becomes clairvoyant in a world that is otherwise closed to him.

If you look through the little booklet on initiation and mysteries, you will see that there is a very specific way of making the soul clairvoyant, just as there are methods for making microscopes. Certain ideas have an effect on this soul, and then it transforms, and then abilities arise, which you can call hallucinations or visions if you like, but they change very quickly so that they become the mediators of the spiritual worlds that are around us. In this development, one very soon learns to distinguish from one another what a vision is and what corresponds to reality in the spiritual world. Just as in the physical world you can only come to distinguish between ideas and reality through experience and living, the same applies to the spiritual world.

Someone may say: I believe in Schopenhauer that the world is my idea. We say: Very well, just imagine a piece of burning iron or glowing steel. It does not burn you, but now, if you touch it, you will very soon realize the difference between your idea and reality; the imagined glowing steel does not burn, but the real one does. You will have the same experience as you develop your spiritual powers and abilities.

When I said this once in southern Germany, someone said: But you can evoke the ideas in your mind so vividly that they even have a physical effect; so someone could have hallucinations through contemplation and other exercises that they mistake for reality. You can also, he said, make your mouth water when you imagine lemon juice. “Then I said that he should try to quench his thirst with imagined lemon juice. You can only do that with real lemon juice, and you notice the difference. It is the same in the spiritual world. Those who are spiritually awakened and have developed their spiritual senses know from experience where the boundary is between imagination and spiritual reality.

These are the facts on which spiritual research is based. When someone comes and says: Yes, these people claim not only the physical body, but what they – oh, these fantasists and fools – call the astral body, these awakened ones claim that. They should just prove it and list all the facts. Well, ladies and gentlemen, firstly, the person who makes such a speech has not thoroughly informed himself about the nature of proof. I would like to advise him to think about the proof that the horse has its head in front and its tail behind. Just because people always see normal horses, that is why they take such a thing for granted. Proofs, which are to be based on facts, must be based on these facts. The spiritual researcher is on no different ground than the natural scientist. If someone comes and says, “There are natural scientists who say that plants consist of cells.” “I have never seen cells, only leaves and flowers.” What I have not seen, I do not believe. — Then the natural scientist will say to him: You must get a microscope and learn to work scientifically, then you will see the cells as facts. Only if you take the appropriate precautions will you see them.

But the methods by which the invisible, supersensible aspects of human nature can be seen are accessible to everyone. If he undergoes the methods that the initiate has to undergo, if he develops clairvoyance, then he undergoes something similar in the spiritual life to what the person working with the microscope undergoes in the physical life. The analogy of the facts is complete, at most the matter is more uncomfortable in the spiritual life. It is more uncomfortable in the spiritual life because a microscope can be fabricated. But what the spiritual microscope is, everyone must develop in their own soul; they must transform themselves if they want to see for themselves. But there have always been such initiates who knew what message to bring from these spiritual worlds.

And now let us present to our soul what these initiates have to say about the cycle of man through the different worlds. It is presented in much the same way as if someone were to tell you that he has seen this or that through the microscope. The spiritual researcher speaks from his research: What you call the human being is by no means as simple as you imagine. This human being consists of many, many parts; he has visible, tangible parts, but in addition he also has invisible, supersensible parts. The first part is the physical human body. This physical human body he has in common with all other inanimate beings, with crystals, rocks, with mineral beings. In addition, he has an invisible part that is a loyal fighter in the physical body. This second link, which only a clairvoyant can see, is the etheric or life body. This permeates the human being. If one did not have it, the human body would be in every moment what it becomes with death: a corpse. A crystal follows its own physical and chemical laws. The human body cannot follow its own chemical and physical laws during its lifetime. If it did follow them, then what it is as a corpse would show up, it would dissolve. But the etheric body is a faithful fighter against decay. The human being has the etheric or life body in common with all plants.

The third link of the human being is the astral body; it is the carrier of desire and suffering, joy and pain, of all the feelings and passions that arise and ebb away in the waking consciousness, etc. This astral body is just as real and true for the spiritual researcher as the physical body, indeed even more real. If someone objects: You are not going to imagine that such astral bodies can fly around in the air, then the spiritual researcher answers: I can imagine it very well; not only imagine it, but to the spiritual researcher the astral body shows itself as an independent part of the human being.

Today, such an awareness would be considered fantasy; but the real fantasy lies on the other side. A healthy understanding of human nature will say: Here I see the person, the tear rolls out of his eyes. Therefore, I assume that he is sad. The grief is an experience of the soul or the astral body. This experience has a physical effect, it presses tears out of the eyes. Here we see how physical effects arise from experiences of the soul. Some schools of philosophy say that this is a mistake. They say that when a person cries, a secret effect occurs that is mediated by material things, and this secret effect presses tears out of the eyes and when the person notices this, then he becomes sad. So the person does not cry because he is sad, but he is sad because he cries.

The third part of human nature, the astral body, is shared by humans and all animals. Then there is a fourth element, which is the carrier of self-awareness, the carrier of our ego. Through this element, humans rise above all the beings that surround them in the sensory world. He towers above his fellow creatures, he is the greatest of earthly creation. In spiritual research, we speak of the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body in animals. In the case of humans, we speak of four members: the physical body, etheric body, astral body and the I-vehicle.

What is sleep for spiritual research? When a person falls asleep, his physical body and ether body remain in bed, while the astral body and the I-bearing body separate out for the clairvoyant. In the sleeping person we have a separation of the four limbs. Because in today's normal consciousness the I and the astral body have no organs of their own, but only in clairvoyant consciousness, these organs are dark and there is darkness around the person. In the morning he plunges into his physical and etheric bodies. Throughout life between birth and death, except in states of emergency, the physical body is firmly connected to the etheric body. The astral body goes out at night.

After death, something very special happens. The mere physical body remains behind and the connection between these three invisible members, ether body, astral body and I, goes out. And from that time on, the physical body begins to be a mere physical body, that is, it follows its physical and chemical laws; it dissolves; it is a member of the mineral world.

But then, when spiritual research follows what emerges from the physical body, it shows that the person remains connected to their etheric body for a while. After death, there occurs for a time what could be called a review of the whole past life. You will already have heard that people who are close to death in abnormal conditions – for example, when drowning – review their whole life like a panorama. This gives the person a shock because the entire etheric body is detached from the physical body. The entire life is written in the etheric body, it is the carrier of memory, and only the physical body prevents it from showing this. But it immediately shows this memory of past life when it is freed from the physical body for a moment.

The same is also evident after death. Man then has a review of the past life. Then comes the second cadaverization. After a few days, the etheric body detaches itself from the actual inner core of the being, just as the physical body detached itself earlier. What remains is an extract of this etheric body, and the etheric body dissolves into the general etheric matter just as the physical body dissolves into the physical matter. After the human being has freed himself from his etheric body, he now consists of the ego, the astral body and an extract of the etheric body. This extract represents the fruit of the last life, what we have experienced in the last life. You can say to yourself: when you have grown older, you have experienced more than you did earlier. The whole of life consists of becoming more and more attuned to the spiritual; that is not lost, it is written into your etheric body, and you take it with you as a fruit.

After death, something very special happens. What I am about to say is a fact for clairvoyant research, but it can also be grasped by common sense. We have seen: the physical body has fallen away, we will leave the etheric body out of consideration for the time being, but what has lived in man, lust and suffering, joy and pain, that has not only existed as an effect in the physical body, but we must consider that as reality, and then we can say: what is the reason why the desires should immediately fall away when the physical body falls away? There is no reason for it. Spiritual research now shows that the astral body remains present after death with the desires.

An example: a person was a gourmet in life, he had desires for these or those delicious foods. This desire does not depend on the physical body - minerals have no desires - but it depends on the astral body. Now the physical body is dead, the craving has remained, and now the person is in a special situation: in life he satisfies it by eating the food in question, but for that he needs the palate and tongue, organs of the physical body. After death, he still has the craving, but he lacks the organs to satisfy it. The human being is in the same situation as someone who suffers from thirst in solitude and finds no water or beer far and wide. It is the same after death with everything that lives in the human being's astral body and that can only be satisfied through connection with the physical body. After death, spiritual research can confirm that the human being gradually weans from everything that can only be satisfied by the organs of the physical body. This state lasts until the person has given up all impulses in life that require physical organs. This period, which varies in length in different individuals, is called in spiritual science the time of man's passage through the world of souls or Kamaloka; what is meant is a state. After death, man has to go through this state. Certain religions call it purgatory, a time of trial, purification, cleansing. Then the parts of the astral body that contain only what can be satisfied by the physical body fall away from the person like scales. Then the soul is able to make something out of what it has taken with it as an extract, out of what it has taken with it as the fruit of life.

And now the time of the actual spiritual life begins, the time in which man lives in increasingly spiritual worlds, which first begins with man reversing his activity from the physical world. What does that mean? What man does first among many other things, we can understand, honored attendees, if we look at the light with common sense. It is true that if man had no eyes, he would not see the light. But for those who always claim that without eyes there would be no world of light, the other side, the other side, must also be asserted. Where do eyes come from? Goethe speaks from a deep knowledge of the world when he says, “The eye is formed by light for light.” That is to say, if there were no light, if the sun did not give off light, there would be no eye. Light has formed and shaped the eye out of indifferent organs.

The organs that we have as human beings have been formed gradually, after undergoing very imperfect states. So how could an eye come into being? Because there was light around the human being. If you look at certain animals that live outside in the world, they have eyes. When such animals change their way of life and come into dark caves, their eyes wither, they recede, they lose their sight because there is no light in their environment. As the missing light takes the eyes, so the light has also given them. But in the same way, what we encounter as a person's soul with these or those abilities can only be built up by the surrounding spiritual world. But in this world is the human being after Kamaloka, and in this spiritual world he has the fruit of his last life. From this spiritual world he begins to build up his spiritual organs with what he has learned in the last life, what he has experienced. Bit by bit, he now builds up his spiritual organism with the experiences he has had in the last life. It is true that the human being builds up this spiritual organism bit by bit. Just as he builds his destiny in the physical world according to the experiences he has in the physical world, so he directs his actions in the spiritual world according to the spiritual experiences around him. And he is busy, among many others in the spiritual world, creating a kind of archetype, spiritual model for his spiritual organs.

When this spiritual organism is now created out of the materials of the spiritual world, then the human being experiences the longing to realize in the physical world what he has built spiritually, to descend again into the physical world. So those bodies that he had previously discarded are built up again piece by piece around this spiritual organism according to the conditions of the physical world. For what the human being has taken from the physical world has been prepared for him in the physical world. That which is in the physical and etheric bodies must be given back to him from a world to which he had given it back; his parents give it to him. The physical and etheric bodies are brought up to him by his parents from a world from which he has only just departed, and what has taken shape as an archetype in the spiritual world is connected with him. And we can see how this archetype works on the formation of the physical body.

Physical science is not a counter-proof of this. Once the facts of natural science are properly examined, then natural science will correctly find the fact of spiritual life. Look at the child after it is born. The child has developed certain parts of its brain that can be said to be sensory centers, nerve pathways; these are already developed in the first week after birth. On the other hand, if you examine the brain at the end of the first month, you see that almost two-thirds of the brain is only formed during the last four weeks after birth. Bit by bit, the inner two-thirds of the cerebral cortex are permeated with nerve marrow, which transmits one sensory impression to another. The child sees colors and hears sounds, but cannot connect them. The nerve cords that transmit the impressions of the senses are built up bit by bit. Those who insist that these nerve cords build themselves can cling to their superstition; but they should also claim that some complicated apparatus also assembles itself.

We take on board what science says. We see the physical body and its mechanism, but we also make the comparison: No mechanism can be built without intelligence. No machine is made in the world by itself. That which is formed in the human brain does not do itself. What works on it? The archetype, which for the clairvoyant consciousness comes from that spiritual organism, works on this brain. And when this brain is worked through more and more, the fruits of life are woven into it. Man had, after all, taken the fruits of life into the spiritual world. He transforms his brain into this archetype. Depending on how he has used this life, his brain is now transformed by this archetype. For example, someone who has lived in dullness will think nothing of what happens when he sees a church lamp burning and swinging. But for the one who has used life in a different way, it works in such a way that he discovers the influential laws of the pendulum and gives them to humanity, like Galilei, who first saw the laws of the pendulum vibrations in the church lamp in the cathedral of Pisa. Indeed, with him the archetype worked differently than with the thousands upon thousands who also saw that lamp and who did not notice anything. Here we have a tangible example of how the spiritual works on the physical.

Those who do not admit this can be said to be beyond help, not admitting obvious facts. They cannot demand: prove your case, but rather it is a matter of the other person creating conditions to produce evidence. Those who look deeper will realize that the best evidence requires recognition.

Thus we see how man, passing through the gate of death, enters into other worlds: first into a preparatory world, then into the world of spiritual creation, where he prepares a new life. Then, through conception and birth, he enters into a new life. After birth, the human being still works on his brain. Either say: it all takes care of itself —, or there is no other possibility than that the human being is accepted with such a spiritual life.

Now one could say: Of course I will admit a soul that exists before conception; but I will not admit that the soul owes its working capacity and form to a previous life; rather, it descends from the spiritual world anew each time. — Under today's conditions, such a soul that descends anew would not fit well into the present world. That is another necessary assumption of common sense, that one turns one's attention to the harmony and fit between what descends and what is brought in the line of inheritance. Only such a soul can come into harmony with the conditions in the physical world that has acquired the prerequisites for a life in the present conditions in a previous life.

This is how we move from the present life to a previous one. When the soul descends again and develops in the body in this life, it is exactly the same as in the previous one, except that the person has woven in the fruits of the earlier existence. Thus enriched, the person lives again between birth and death, and so it goes on.

Thus man passed through the cycle from the sensual world through the world of the mere soul, the world of purification, to the spiritual world, and then again he descended into the sensual world, and so on. He goes through this cycle again and again, and therein lies, honored attendees, the guarantee of an ever-higher development of man. This teaching, which shows us the causes of our present life in previous lives, is not a bleak one. One can only say: if you build up this life in an inadequate way, then the cause lies in a previous life. But one can also point to the future and say: use your life well and you will carry the fruits of this life over into the following one; then confidence and energy follow from such a realization.

For those present, who approach this sentence with common sense, the facts of clairvoyant consciousness cannot, of course, be proven externally, but they can understand them. They can say to themselves: If I accept the facts, then life becomes understandable to me. Facts cannot be proven; I would like to see someone prove that there is a whale when no one has seen it. But by creating the appropriate organs, one can come to see the facts of spiritual life. Only connections can be proven, never facts.

Now, dear audience, common sense may want to object to some things and say: If you tell me that the human being descends from spiritual heights and connects with the physical, I don't believe it, because I don't see it.

Today, certain abilities are attributed to heredity. In the radical case of genius, people today try to present a genius and say: Now we go peddling and see if we can find the qualities that the genius has in the father or mother or up to aunt-like ancestors, and so the genius should be the last link in the line of inheritance. The fact that genius always appears at the end of the line of inheritance is cited as proof that genius arises through inheritance. For those who want to think in a thoroughly materialistic way, this sounds reasonable; but there is no logic behind it at all. For the doctrine would really be proven if the ancestor had the genius and this had inherited its properties to the descendants. But that is not the case. Those who take a closer look at human life will know that certain traits are inherited. We know that there are 29 musicians of varying ability in the Bach family. There is nothing miraculous about that. To become a proficient musician, one needs not only mental and spiritual qualities, but if the soul descends and meets no parents who can give it a developed ear, then it cannot become a musician. So just as the soul's qualities come from past lives, so the inner physiognomy of the ear depends on the ancestors. But when man becomes a closer observer of life, when he, as a thinking educator, sees this human soul developing in its manifold individualities, then he sees how the spiritual abilities by no means develop out of the physical human being, but he gets the feeling that something is working its way in that has lived in the spiritual world before. One then notices that the human being has often existed in this world, that he has adapted to this world in his various stages of existence.

Today we know that an earthworm can only develop from an earthworm germ, that it cannot grow from river mud, which all natural scientists believed 300 years ago. Today, people think that the wonderful human soul can arise without being transmitted from the spiritual and soul realm. Living things can only arise from living things, and spiritual and soul qualities only from spiritual and soul qualities. If one leads the spiritual-mental, which works in from a dark background, back to earlier spiritual-mental, and one is clear that the consequence of the spiritual-mental lies again in the spiritual-mental, that it goes beyond our present life, and that these different lives have nothing to do with what is called the line of inheritance.

A worldview like this will give courage and strength. The more materialistic people have become, the more they have become afraid of things. What is more widespread today than the fear of hereditary burden? The view has changed, and the result of this view, which is based on materialistic ideas, is fear of people, and this has an enormously paralyzing effect on life. If people live their soul unused and do not want to be filled with spiritual content, then what they inherit is indeed fatal for them. For they are weak in their soul.

The soul, like the body, wants to be nourished. It wants to be nourished with truths and insights. If a person trains himself in soul knowledge, he becomes strong and can control and overcome the laws of inheritance. Of course, today's materialists do not believe this. When the soul becomes desolate, then life remains unused, then what is called heredity carries a great deal of weight. It is therefore up to man to make his soul strong and powerful. A world view is not without practical consequences. He who has no idea that the soul really exists, lets his soul become desolate. The materialistic world view brings with it a desolation of the soul's feelings and emotional life. And it is true that such a soul has more to fear than a soul that strengthens itself with spiritual content. Here we see how the spiritual worldview provides enlightenment and security for life. At any time, so to speak, the two things interlock: the facts that arise in the clairvoyant consciousness about the fate of the soul, and the common sense that can say: I can understand life. And so the soul works its way through the individual lives to ever greater perfection. There is for the human soul, apart from the sensual life, a soul life and still another spiritual one. The soul passes through these lives, only to undergo a new one.

Even if life in the material world sometimes appears to be in decline, in general, life on earth and the intervening lives in the spiritual worlds are a continuous ascent. This worldview offers a wonderful perspective on the goal of life. This goal is becoming more and more spiritual in nature, both physically and spiritually. Indeed, we can say “spiritualization”, because the human being will increasingly recognize the foundations of physical life. More and more, he will work from the spiritual world. Ultimately, his own act will be his deliverance from the sensual world.

Thus man progresses towards his perfection in a way that is completely comprehensible to us. Those who extend the law of cause and effect, which is a scientific fact in the physical world, to the spiritual world, say to themselves: “Let people call you a dreamer and a fantasist – the time will come when the sentence: spiritual-mental can only come from spiritual-mental, will be recognized, where the realization will come of man's passage through all worlds, through many lives, and of man's perfection. When one comprehends the human development in this way, then one has certain concepts not only for the physical, sensual world, but also for the soul and spiritual world. These are not fantastic ideas, but concepts with which one connects something, just as man connects these or those concepts with ordinary sensual things.

And so today we can say: Yes, of course, the things that are facts for the initiate, such as the cycle of life through the different worlds, are still little recognized; but they will be recognized, and they will become a fact of the inner soul life for people. Humanity is moving from progress to progress, and it will also have to accept this progress. And those in particular who today still do not want to recognize these facts will have to recognize this progress, which solves the riddles of life, from the mystery of death.

Then people will understand that at first they can believe that what the initiates say is a reality, just as they believe when a microscopist says that a plant consists of cells. If we are willing to think through the analogy correctly, we will gain the courage to develop our own spiritual abilities, our spiritual eyes and ears, as Goethe says, and to learn to recognize what can give us a truly new religious religious consciousness, a religious consciousness that already lies in what we know as the truth of Christianity, which shows us that life in the world of the senses also has value for eternal, heavenly and spiritual life. With Christianity, a religious consciousness has entered into people that sees redemption not only in the spiritual world, but also in the taking over of the fruits of physical life, of what one has learned here.

Finally, let us visualize two images. The progress in our religious life goes from Buddha to Christ. We can only express our admiration for the great figure of Buddha to those who can understand the depth of the Buddha's soul. What Buddha expresses as the great truths of life is infinitely profound. It seems like a legend when Buddha, emerging from wealth and the king's environment, finds a corpse outside, a poor, miserable, sick man. He looks deep into the depths of life and speaks his great truths: life is suffering, death is suffering, illness is suffering, old age is suffering; being separated from what one loves is suffering; being connected to what one does not love is suffering. Desire for what cannot be obtained is suffering. The teaching of Buddha is that the thirst for existence, for re-embodiment and for new life must be quenched and mankind must be released from this sensual existence, which is called Nirvana. Buddha proclaims the fourfold suffering. Liberation from the suffering of this world, that is, ascending to the Buddha's teaching. And then Christ came into the world, that was a strange advance. Those who understand the essence of Christianity, who understood it in the first century, for example, had a different feeling about the name Christ. They had a feeling for how the spiritual life is clothed with the sensual existence, the material for which is supplied by the physical, sensual world. But we do not say with Buddha: We only want liberation and salvation from the sensual world. We say: This earth is worthy and dignified, because the body of Christ is also taken from the material of this earth. The earth over which Christ walked gives fruit for eternal life. And so, for those who recognized him, the existence of Christ became a certainty that from life to life, man takes the fruits of his existence into the spiritual world. And now the teaching of the Buddha changed. In the schools of spiritual science, it has always been expressed that the truth of life through Christ has changed. Birth, that is, entering life, is not just suffering, because we enter a life in which Christ has lived. Illness is not just suffering, because by connecting with Christ's powers we become master over illnesses. In the future, people will learn how to work externally on physical illnesses; the conqueror of illnesses is Christ in the human breast. And old age is not suffering, because as a person ages and the physical body declines, he will carry the fruits he receives in the physical body over into the spiritual world. And death is certainly not suffering, because it is a wonderful image of contrast: Buddha goes out of his royal castle and sees the corpse and there he comes to the great truth: death is suffering. And in the first centuries of Christianity, we gradually see people turning their eyes to the wood of the cross and seeing the corpse. And this is the guarantee of eternal life, of glorious eternal life, of the victory of eternal life. This corpse is not the proof that life is suffering, but that life is victory over all suffering.

The one who comprehends Christianity knows that he cannot be separated from what he loves, because the spiritual bond is woven from soul to soul. It is impossible not to be connected in a spiritual sense to what one loves, because one learns to embrace the whole universe and to purify one's desires.

The full meaning of Christianity will only be revealed by research, which we call spiritual science, not from any documents, but from the clairvoyant consciousness, independently of all records. Then Christianity will show itself as something that has not yet by a long way brought its deepest impulses to the surface. But not just a dead observation of the course of development of Christianity, but a deepening into the spiritual world and a bringing forth of these living germs from Christianity will mean the progress of Christianity. Spiritual science does not seek the Christ where he walked the earth, but is a faithful follower of the words:

I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

Therefore, we rediscover the Christ every day, and we find him, if we want to seek him today, through spiritual science, which, independently of all documents, looks into the spiritual world and sees the Christ as a guide to ever higher progress in it. This is how the cycle presents itself, and this is how it will always present itself to those who will understand spiritual people.

That everyone will experience this one day was the profound realization expressed by Goethe at an early age. He confirmed that he recognized a spiritual world to which the human being belongs just as he now belongs to the physical world. Yes, it was from the depths of his discerning soul that he spoke when he pointed out what can be renewed again and again in the human soul, what can constitute the happiness and blessing and blessedness of the human soul, which this spiritual world recognizes, which Goethe also recognized when he said:

The spiritual world is not closed;
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead.
Rise up, bathe, disciple, undaunted,

The earthly breast at dawn!

Those who reflect on such questions of human mental life as those on our winter program this year, on character, conscience, on the healthy and sick soul, on life and death, mysticism and so on, those who reflect on such questions will perhaps be able to be reminded again and again of a saying of an old sage from the fifth century BC, Heraclitus, whom is called the “Dark” because of the significantly deep nature of his thinking. He, Heraclitus, spoke the words:

You cannot fathom the depths of the soul, even if you wanted to travel all the roads. The soul has such deep reasons.

We are reminded of this depth of the soul in many ways when dealing with matters of the soul. But only slowly and gradually, over the course of this winter, can we, so to speak, engage with the deeper questions of the soul life.

Today and tomorrow, we will deal with phenomena of human inner life that are perhaps no less interesting precisely because they are closer to the most everyday and because one thinks about them less. It is in such phenomena that the noblest and highest core of human inner life, which we call self-consciousness, is obscured for certain periods of time in a certain relationship, obscured by all kinds of feelings, but mainly by affects.

Today we will deal with one of these affects, which plays a significantly profound role in the human soul. We will deal with the force within us that underlies anger and everything related to it. When speaking of the soul qualities and expressions of the human soul, one can ask: How is it that the human soul, which is supposed to lift itself ever higher and higher intellectually and morally through its self-awareness, is repeatedly thrown back by impulses of the kind that anger is? Is a quality of the soul like anger a mere hindrance on the path of human beings upwards to the great ideals of life? And in a practical sense, too, such questions are of the greatest importance in our immediate lives.

The educator, anyone who is entrusted with the care of another person, will readily admit and will recognize how important it is to know what role an emotion like anger plays in the soul's life. Once we recognize such a thing, we can treat everything connected with it in a correspondingly tactful and wise manner. However, our present consideration of the soul life will encounter the greatest difficulties in dealing with such a question as the meaning of anger. Only a deeper penetration into the undercurrents of existence, into the winding paths of the spiritual life, allows us to provide some insights into such a question. So today we will first have to allow something to enter our soul that those of our revered listeners who are present at these lecture cycles have heard from a certain quarter, who have been present more often at these lecture cycles.

But it will be necessary again and again to allow the unique nature of the human being to enter our soul if we want to understand human expressions and effects of force. From a spiritual point of view, the mission of anger is to be considered today. Here we must consider man, not only as he presents himself to our outer senses, to the intellect that is bound to the instrument of the brain, and which is limited to processing the impressions that direct sense observation provides. For such a spiritual-scientific consideration, that which the senses see and which the human intellect, conscious in this sense, can comprehend, is only a part of the human being. That part of the human being that we can perceive with our senses – external science is only concerned with the physical body insofar as it is a science of nature, and in a certain respect it is right with this limitation – spiritual science calls the physical human being. But beyond that, it distinguishes the higher nature of the human being. What we call the physical body has the same composition of substances and forces as everything we call the mineral kingdom, the seemingly dead nature around us. The same world of forces is in our physical body as it is out there in the world.

But there is also a question that the ordinary human mind can ask and to some extent answer, namely, whether these forces and substances that are at work in the human body and that are the same as those in the rest of mineral nature act in the same way as they do in the rest of mineral nature. The answer is no, they do not. When the human physical body – and the physical body of any living being, for that matter – is left to itself, it follows the laws of the mineral world. We see this when the physical body is left to itself at the point of death. We see the way in which the composition of the physical body works when it is left to its own physical and chemical forces. That which, from the beginning of physical life to the end, fights against the physical and chemical forces so that they cannot follow their own path, which they only follow in death, we call the first link of higher human nature – do not be put off by expressions, stick to the concepts – we call the etheric body or the life body. With this, we ascend to the first supersensible link of human nature.

Even for someone who merely employs logic and the instrument bound to the physical, such a life body can be reasonably inferred. For someone who stands on the ground of spiritual science, this life body is a fact of the same reality as the world of sounds and colors. And the spiritual researcher can say to those who reply: “This etheric or life body does not exist at all.” It is not perceptible to the ordinary senses, just as color is not perceptible to someone who is blind. But it exists for the person who has developed the corresponding powers in his soul so that he can really perceive this life body as a fact.

All these things can be discussed in the course of winter in a different context. Today it must be left at that. — Then we come to the third link of the human being, which is called the astral body. This astral body is the carrier of pleasure and suffering, of joy and pain, of urges, desires and passions. This astral body is what humans have in common with animals, just as they have the etheric or life body in common with plants and the physical body in common with minerals. For reason, this astral body, if it is to make use of logic in an unbiased way, can be something that can be logically deduced. For spiritual research, it is a fact, something that is just as present for the perception of the spiritual researcher as color is for the eye and sound is for the ear. Thus, in the astral body we have a second link in the supersensible human being.

And if we ascend further in the composition of human nature, we come to what he no longer has in common with the other realms of nature around him, what we call human self-consciousness or its expression, the ego. This ego is that which, so to speak, every sensible human nature is surprised by when it perceives it for the first time. I would like to quote again the beautiful saying of Jean Paul, when he was still a boy and stood in the courtyard of his parents' house and felt the 'I' for the first time [gap]. From now on, the question of God and immortality was understandable to him. It would be so easy to arrive at the human 'I', at an understanding of it, if one were to say to oneself: There is something expressed in the I that is distinguished from all other concepts or names by the very fact that it is spoken. Anyone can call a table a 'table' and a chair a 'chair'. But when you say the word 'I', it denotes something that only refers to itself, but that has no meaning and cannot be applied to your higher self-awareness when it is spoken by another. Your “I” can never sound sweet to your ear if it is not meant to signify your own soul. This is truly the expression for the “shrouded sanctuary” of the human soul. This is the expression that, as in a short monologue, describes the essence of the human being within, or what can also be described as the divine in human nature.

We have thus placed the four aspects of the human being: physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, before your soul. When we look at the person as he stands before us, these four elements are what constitute his interaction, his mutual interpenetration. What is significant is that the human being is not a closed being, that he is not a being who is finished at any given moment, but a being who is in the process of living development, a being who progresses from this or that stage of progress to another stage.

What then is the nature of this human development? What is the interplay between these aspects of the human being, which we can call the wonder of human development? They interact in the way that presents itself to our minds when we consider what an astral body might look like in a person at a low level of cultural development, and in a person at a higher level of cultural development, in that he does not live in his wild desires and instincts, that he does not desire and crave everything that comes to him in terms of the senses, but that he has purified his urges and desires through the ideals of moral life. You can place two people side by side: the one whose senses are still covetous, who still desires what his senses present to him; and the other, with fine tact and a sense of duty, who shows that he has undergone a refinement of his soul, has purified and cleansed it.

What is this purification based on? It is based on the fact that the human being works from his ego on the other members of his being. The ego has done this, which has become out of instincts, desires and passions. The ego has purified the astral body, transformed instincts, desires and passions, made them into something different from what they were before. In spiritual science, the part of the astral body that the ego has already transformed – insofar as the ego has worked with full consciousness on the transformation of drives and passions, on its moral perfection, on the transformation of the astral body – is called the “spirit self”, or, in an expression of oriental philosophy, the “manas” of the human being.

In general, we can say that in present human development, the human ego has only just reached the point of working on the manas or spirit self, consciously working. In the future, the high spiritual ideal for human beings will be to consciously work not only on the astral body, on the purification of passions, instincts and desires, but also on the transformation of the etheric or life body. Today, human beings can only work unconsciously on this etheric body. What he once transformed in his life body is called the spirit of life or Budhi in spiritual science.

And now an even higher ideal in the sense of spiritual science arises before the human soul; this is an ideal in which the human soul today, when it has a sense of it, can be overcome by a sense of vertigo at the height and grandeur and sublimity of the future of human development. When man is able to work consciously on the physical body, then he will also rework the physical body from his ego or self-awareness.

Today, a person can only do this unconsciously. But you can see it happening in everyday life. You just have to look at life impartially. Imagine a person who feels shame, that is, he feels something in his soul as if he wanted to hide something about himself; a blush of shame rises to his face. What does that mean? A purely inner experience has triggered a physical process, a redistribution of the blood. It is the same when a person turns pale. The blood then moves from the surface to the inner parts. This is a process in the physical body that takes place unconsciously. What a person consciously works on in his physical body is referred to in spiritual science as the Atma or spiritual man.

If we describe the course of human development in this way, we can say that the human being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an I. If the I transforms something of the astral body, the spirit self or manas arises. If something of the etheric body is transformed, the life spirit or budhi arises. And if the physical body is transformed, then the spiritual man or Atma arises.

But that is not the only thing that comes into consideration. When a person can also look at his ideal, in which he has completed the transformation of the astral body, then he has unconsciously already worked on this astral body from his I. He already has something within him that can be described by saying that the I lives in the astral body. That part of the astral body that is not consciously transformed by the I, but which - as we shall see is correct - is already an instrument of the I, is called the sentient soul by spiritual science.

But the etheric or life body has already been transformed to a certain extent by the I, and today it already serves the I as an instrument in a certain way. The I has already sent its power into the etheric or life body. Insofar as this body is merely an etheric body, it is connected with the forces of reproduction and growth. But insofar as the etheric body is transformed by the I, we call it the mind soul or emotional soul of the human being.

But the physical body of the human being is also transformed and becomes an instrument of the I. This physical body of the human being, insofar as it is an instrument of the I, serves precisely as a sensory organ; through the wonderful apparatus of the sensory organs, it serves the consciousness of the I. That is why we call that part of the physical body that is capable of being an instrument of the ego the consciousness soul, which thus dwells in the physical body.

Thus, in the sense of spiritual science, we first have three bodily members: the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body; then three soul members in which the ego lives to a certain extent: the sentient soul , the soul of feeling, and the soul of mind; and finally, by making use of these three members, the I works them over in a conscious way to become the spiritual self, the spirit of life and the spiritual human being.

This is a meaningful scheme. But it is not just a scheme, it is an active force. Only the one in whom it becomes so alive that he sees the forces of the individual human members interacting, comprehends human development. Yes, this human nature is deep, deep, as Heraclitus correctly said. Thus we see the human ego at its work, and within the human body we see the transformation of the inner soul-elements of the human being. If we want to understand this ego, we must ask ourselves, above all, what is the present stage of the human ego, what has it achieved, conquered by working, partly unconsciously, on its astral body? What it has conquered lies in what we can describe with the words: The I makes the human being a being capable of judgment, a being that judges from within, be it judgments of the intellect, feelings or will; this makes the human being a being capable of judgment.

This says a great deal when one says that it makes a human being a being capable of judgment, a being that can think, feel and want from reasonable judgments. It is said that one really learns to distinguish between what is the sensation of a physical being and what is the impulse of a human being. When we look at animals, we can find all the qualities of the human soul in animals to a certain extent. We find sympathies and antipathies in animals, even what is analogous to one of the highest feelings of the human soul, an analogy to love. We find analogies to what we call human intellectual activity. It is easy to observe in the animal kingdom how everything works similarly to that in humans; but who could fail to recognize the difference between what is present in humans and what is present as a quality in animals? We can say with certainty, based on the animal's organization and form, what it will be driven to do in this or that case. Necessity is quite different in the case of a human being who ponders the question: Should you do this or should you not do it? He weighs it up before coming to a decision. Only those who do not look closely at the matter can fail to see the enormous difference. In the course of his development, man has acquired the power of judgment through the interplay of his development, which has just been characterized.

If we want to place before our soul the highest ideal of this discerning human being in relation to an area, in relation to human coexistence, in relation to the way two people relate to each other, two things arise. If we look at the judgment that confronts people, it is the concept of justice and the concept of love. When the human being places the concept of justice before him, he will be able to say to himself: Justice is something that can be regarded as a higher ideal. This means harmony, balance in life's circumstances. One need only think of good and evil, right and wrong. But what is it that afflicts the human soul when it utters the word “justice,” when it surrenders to the concept of justice? It is something cold that the human soul experiences in its feeling when it surrenders to this concept. It feels justice as a necessity, as something that must be, as something that man must submit to based on his sound judgment.

The soul feels differently when it contemplates the concept related to justice, so to speak, the concept of love. Here the soul does not feel coldness, but inner warmth, something of what elevates human nature, because it must say to itself: That is only a truly human ideal when justice is no longer practiced because it is perceived as a necessity, but because one loves what is right, because one loves to do what should be done.

Thus, justice and love stand side by side as a cold ideal that is nevertheless recognized as necessary, and as a warm ideal that fills our soul with inner fire. And in them is contained what the human soul sees as the two ideals when it asks itself: In what direction must it develop its power of judgment first? That through her judgment, through her deliberations, through what lives in her, she experiences the coexistence of human beings in such a way that it is in the sense of justice and love. - In this sense, man looks up to justice and love as two lofty ideals of development, and he sees, enclosed in the interplay of his forces, that which leads to justice and love in coexistence.

That is how it is. But one cannot understand human development, or development in general, without another feeling, which provides insight into the actual nature of development. Development is something that, if it is to flourish, must include something else. And this other process can perhaps best be described by the word maturing. Maturation over time is something that cannot be separated from the concept of development. And we understand each other best when we apply the concept of maturation to the concept of the human ego itself.

Take the life of a single human being, take it in the sense that a serious observer of existence should take it. Is it possible to expect the same of a person in their third year as in their twelfth or sixteenth year? That is impossible. The same cannot possibly be expected of a developing being when the interplay of forces is such that it is developing. There is a time for every stage of development, and it is detrimental to the being's overall development to transgress this law of maturation. It is also detrimental to the individual's human development between birth and death to expect something of the ego at one stage of life that should only be expected at a different stage of life, according to the degree of maturity. But it is also unhealthy to expect a person at a lower stage of development, who has not yet sufficiently purified his passions and instincts, to do things that can only be expected of such an ego in a truly fruitful way after it has gone through the various stages of purification. This is how it is when the human ego sees such significant ideas as justice and love as ideals and says to itself: You must rise up — so that they work like two great guiding stars in the life of man. But the path must be traveled in the right way. If we now consider not the individual life, but the whole of human life over the course of centuries and millennia, how the human ego returns and works on the human being, then we will have a complicated fact before us, which is very compelling to draw attention to the maturing process. If – and this can only be stated today, but will be touched on from various points of view during the winter lectures – if the human being not only lives once between birth and death, but returns again and again, then what spiritual science recognizes as a necessary consequence of development, that the I does not live only once between birth and death, but returns again and again, then it is [conceivable] that spiritual science recognizes as a necessary consequence of development, that the I does not live only once in this life between birth and death, but undergoes successive embodiments.

During all these embodiments, the I works in such a way that it has worked in the distant past on the astral body, etheric body and physical body, so that the sentient soul, mind or mind soul and consciousness soul; let us continue to work so that spirit self, spirit of life and spiritual man will arise. The forces of this development permeate each other in interplay and unite in the ideals of justice and love. This work is done by the “I”. Thus, if we take the word experience in the right way, we must understand that at every moment of life – if we speak of different embodiments, in every single embodiment – the soul acts on the other members of the body in the right way, that the “I” works on every work on every single development, that it does not do too much in terms of acquiring justice and love; for the ego should never go further in relation to what is capable of judgment within it, and it cannot go further than its degree of maturity makes possible.

But what is the regulator in this relationship? What ensures that the ego does not go beyond the degree of maturity at certain stages? Do we understand what the regulator is, what ensures that the ego can at least do the right thing at each stage? What is said here can only be understood if we turn our attention to something that is becoming clearer and clearer to people through spiritual science: If we turn our attention to what man's knowledge, his insights, his ideas and concepts (to name briefly the means by which we know the world) give him, we see that these are not found in man alone, but are poured out over the whole world.

Man tries to understand the world by forming concepts and ideas about the world. Just as you cannot scoop water out of a glass that does not contain water, you cannot scoop wisdom out of a world that is not full of wisdom. Man draws wisdom out through his judgment, through his capacity for knowledge. He comprehends the plant because it is constructed in a way that is full of wisdom. He forms concepts. It is nonsense and foolish to believe that man could form a concept about the plant if the plant itself were not built according to this concept. What man draws out of the world is poured out into the world and underlies things. In the human soul, what is poured out in the rest of the world or in nature outside appears in a different form as wisdom.

If you want to visualize this, all you need to do is think about the following. It took a long time in the development of mankind for man to reach a certain stage of historical development, let us say, to produce paper. Try to imagine the sum of thoughts and work that were necessary to produce paper so that it could enter human development. One could say, if one wanted to speak grotesquely, that within the wasp world this paper was not invented thousands of years ago, but much longer before, because the wasp nest is built from the same material that we have as paper. We have real paper there. What man produces in his materials is worked out into the outer nature.

As such stages, you can realize how what man has acquired as wisdom is poured out into the world. The world is permeated by wisdom and built up of judgments. Wisdom is a rediscovery of judgments that are spread like a net over all existence in nature. Wisdom-filled furnishings are not only to be found in what human consciousness works out, what human beings shape in their souls; wisdom-filled furnishings can be found everywhere. They were already there when the human ego could not yet consciously work. And it was this wisdom-filled work that made it possible for the human ego to work on the physical body, the etheric and astral bodies, even before it was able to work consciously. But this wisdom must also be out there in life today. The human ego is not yet so far advanced that it can find the right thing all by itself, that which would correspond to a much higher power of judgment.

What I want to say becomes clear when you consider the following. Imagine a person standing before a child that he wants to educate. The child does something that it should not do. It becomes necessary for an action to take place; it can be punishment or something else. Such a thing is possible. One possibility is that the educator says that the pupil is doing something incorrectly. The educator dislikes this, and it is possible that he may become angry and that this anger may develop to a certain degree, in an impulse to a certain action. That is one possibility. The other possibility, however, is that the educator, although he has seen the injustice and felt displeasure, remains calm, feels composure and, based on mere judgment and a certain maturity of soul, does what is necessary as a punishment or otherwise in the case in question. Outwardly, the same can happen. The difference lies in the soul being filled with anger one time and with composure the other.

When we consider this difference, we will ask ourselves: Why is there anger in the one case and composure in the other? Would the person who looks at what the child is doing with anger be able to do the right thing in the case in question because of the maturity of his or her self? If you look at life, you will say to yourself that as a rule he will not be able to do the right thing. It takes a certain degree of maturity of the ego to do the right thing despite not feeling any emotion and remaining cold and calm, but still loving the matter at hand and loving what should be. A certain degree of maturity is required for this. And every person stands at a certain point in relation to this maturity. The human ego cannot always have the degree of composure that enables it to do the right thing despite not feeling any emotion. To do so, the human ego must develop to a certain level. What would the educator do if he were calm and did not feel anger? Then the educator would stand by with his composure, do nothing, and leave the matter be.

The wise order of the world ensures that the I is guided towards what is right, at least to some extent, by forces other than those to which it has not yet matured. Before the I is mature enough to act from serenity, it acts out of affect, out of anger. Here we see that in the course of development, the human ego does work on the human astral body, so that in the course of development the astral body develops in such a way that composure blossoms; but as long as the ego is not yet able to attain this maturity, it does not want to work on this composure, then the human being should be driven by something within him to do something. One such mechanism, and a very important one at that, which allows the ego to mature within the astral body and yet still drives it to enter into a certain relationship with its fellow human beings before it is mature, is anger. Just as, for example, the outer nature in its plant kingdom, in its animal kingdom, is wisely arranged, so is everything that we can call the astral nature of human beings wisely arranged. It is arranged in such a way that people enter into a relationship with each other before they can build themselves up completely on the basis of their ideals of justice and love, using their power of judgment. The forerunner of serenity is anger.

In development, it must be the case that what leads up to higher levels of development can also lead to error. If man did not now enter into error, he could not work his way to the truth. So even if anger gets out of hand, if we consider it in its full significance, we can see how it works. Take a young person in his youth, who is not yet able to develop certain ideals; but he sees this or that injustice in his environment; he comes to what one can call a noble anger. And what one can call noble anger at what he cannot approve of, that works in him to help the soul mature into working out in itself what the great ideals of life can become. Like a mother substance, the self, left to its own devices, is made mature through qualities such as anger. That the self is made mature can also be seen from other facts. Because the young man never sees his ideals realized in his environment in the case of things that he cannot yet have any concept of, he repeatedly feels the same noble anger at what displeases him. When people look into life, they can perceive that all the noble surges of anger in youth later come out as love and gentleness. He who views life in its entirety sees the transformation of youthful anger into the love and gentleness of old age.

Thus we see how love and justice, which stand before the human soul as lofty ideals, but which the ego must mature — for it takes an enormous effort to develop the system of human justice and the truth, the real of love, which is not burdened by clouded feelings, we see how justice and love, these high ideals, have set up wrath as a champion in the human social order. It is wrath's [mission] to prepare love.

This is understandable when you consider that what is supposed to become judgment in reality threatens to degenerate into extremism. If we consider the various embodiments, we can say that what a person brings with them in the way of justice and love goes back to a time when they were not yet able to recognize what the right balance should be, when they had no idea of the true feeling of love, but when what arises is anger. Like the dawn of the sun, so shines the nobility of anger, the noble anger that precedes love. In wisdom, the powers that rule the world have placed the nobility of anger in the astral body before a full consciousness of love can be developed, before love can become full justice in the soul.

In times when things were examined more closely than today, it was possible to determine what was in the soul members just by their names. If we go back to the great Greek philosopher Plato, we will find that Plato calls that which we call the consciousness soul, the reasonable soul. But what we call the intellectual or mind soul must be endowed with the ideals of justice and love, and Plato calls this the wrathful soul. What we call the sentient soul, Plato calls the desires soul.

If we turn to Aristotle, we find that he uses similar terms in a similar way; we can also see that they correspond exactly to the expressions of spiritual research. Why does Plato call the soul that precedes the consciousness soul, the wrathful soul? He calls it that because not only wrath but also all wisdom-filled institutions are written into this soul, because he found the wisdom that was poured out into the world also poured out in the human astral body, precisely as a wrathful soul.

In the case of those who have looked more deeply into the nature of the soul, we find that the essence is already indicated in the name. The person who, from the point of view of spiritual science, looks at what passes through the ages as legends and myths of the peoples, as a transmission of the peoples, makes a remarkable discovery in his soul. What might be called the “science of the green table” can answer when you ask where this or that myth comes from: “That is folk poetry.” Only someone who is unfamiliar with folk poetry can speak of folk poetry in this way. But anyone who delves deeper and shines a light into this or that saga or myth will make the remarkable discovery that it contains great wisdom. Before humanity was educated by logical judgment, by pondering and counting, as is right today, before this ability to judge led to the contemplation of truth, another, clairvoyant recognition led to it, to contemplate the truth. So the myths and legends are something quite different than they initially appear. They become an expression of profound truths.

A saga that leads us into the depths of the truth that interests us today was processed by the Greek tragedian Aeschylus in his “Prometheus Bound”. When we delve into the life of this poet, who lived two thousand years before us, we are seized by the world view that permeates his poetry, the world view that is poured out in the Greek myths, the world view of the Greek people.

I could fill the entire lectures over the winter if I wanted to tell you what there is to say about “Prometheus”. This poem ties in with the myths that the name Prometheus encompasses. You are all familiar with the Prometheus myth. Let us briefly recall it. When the Greeks looked back in time, they saw ancient generations of gods at work within our earthly nature, within our earthly and cosmic evolution. Today it is not intended to explain what is meant by this. Imagine that they are personifications of natural forces, or whatever and however you want; that is not the point today. The Greeks saw two ancient dynasties of gods: Uranus and Gaea; these ancient dynasties of heavenly gods, who brought about the first processes on our Earth, were replaced by the dynasty of Titans; the dynasty of Titans to which Cronus and Saturn belonged. Kronos was the son of Uranos. We are told that the Titans, with Kronos at their head, seized power and overthrew the old Uranos. We can assume from the outset – and this is pointed out, and it is true – that according to Greek belief, certain forms of life existed in ancient times that were subject to different rulers then than in later epochs of development. Anyone who is aware that the forms of events change over time will admire the ingenious view of Greek myth, which expresses the beginning of [earthly] development, that interplay of simple primal forces of the world, through the marriage between Uranus and Gäa, and then expresses a later epoch by saying that the Titans appear. The whole face of the earth changes, so that other forms of life, of happening and becoming are there. Thus, in the Titans, we have a second generation of gods, forces that work within the development of the earth. Why is the generation of Titans replaced by the generation whose leader is Zeus? He is, so to speak, a member of the youngest of the generations of gods. He therefore overthrew Kronos and his followers into an unknown world, a hidden world to which the Titans belong, and in which Zeus is the one who exercises world domination.

In Zeus's fight against the Titans, Prometheus, a descendant of the Titans, sided with Zeus. It was he who helped Zeus to achieve his goal. But Prometheus experiences a bitter disappointment, so to speak. He helped Zeus to achieve world domination. Within what the Greeks imagined as a succession of these three corporations of the gods: Uranus, Titans and Zeus's generation, human beings developed into various abilities, they developed into certain stages. When Zeus had taken over the rule, human beings had developed to the point where they could absorb the impressions of their surroundings into their consciousness.

If we understand this Greek myth in the right way, if we really engage with it in a spiritual-scientific way, then we find that the Greek genius, where it expresses itself mythically, takes the concept of development into account in a wonderful way. People who can see what is a few steps in front of their noses believe that as long as man and his consciousness have moved up from the animal to the human form in the sense of today's natural science, they have always been as they are today. So human consciousness is also in a state of development. It has only gradually taken on the forms it has today.

If we go back on the basis of research that is no longer accessible to external natural science, but [rather] to spiritual science, we would come to ancient stages of human consciousness where judgment and deliberation were not yet present. Instead, however, there was an image consciousness, an image consciousness that works differently, that works in such a way that when a person encounters an impression, an image arises within him. He knew directly through the images, through the impressions that the image made on his feelings, he knew in an old, dim consciousness that is preserved like an old relic, like a traditional heirloom in a dream. An old, dim, clairvoyant consciousness was there in those days. It was only into this consciousness that man first acquired the ability to conceptualize. Everything was in development; above all, human consciousness.

This is expressed in the fact that Zeus has taken power. Consciousness increasingly makes way for what is to develop into judgment and deliberation. The sure insight that was conveyed by images was lost. Man only began with the first facts of calculating and counting and considering. People were clumsy. They became dull in relation to their old consciousness. They could no longer grasp their environment. They lived in an almost inhuman way. But out of this dullness there developed more and more that which, as we have indicated, was present in the first beginnings and which worked in man in such a way that it gradually brought him to judge, brought him to posit out of his ego into the world something that was not there before. Call it power, call it essence. The Greek genius expresses it by saying: Prometheus works in human nature that sense which makes it possible for human nature to process the individual things of life into art productions by means of tools. Prometheus is the great benefactor of mankind who, in the name of love, has given humanity what it will continue to develop ever further. Zeus, that is the disappointment that Prometheus experiences, would only have developed in man what is independent of judgment, independent of calculation and deliberation, what has not led to the arts. Zeus had left man without fire.

Travelers will tell you that higher animals, for example monkeys, were spectators and saw travelers warming themselves by the fire. If the travelers leave the fire while it is still burning, they will also warm themselves; but what they do not do is to bring wood and make a fire themselves. This is closely related to the making of fire, to the foresight to bring about something that will serve one later. The foresight is interpreted in Prometheus, who is the forward thinker. The becoming is interpreted by the Greek genius in the form of Prometheus. In Zeus, we see that which is not active in the human ego, that which does not make the human being capable of judgment, but which only works in the human astral body. The Greeks focus on human nature, and they say to themselves: the threefold nature of man — whether they say it to themselves in this form or not is irrelevant — is made up of drives, desires and instincts. These must play against each other. What permeates the astral nature with wisdom was seen by the Greeks in Zeus. What penetrates the human I, what leads the I to a higher level, was seen in Prometheus.

Thus Zeus and Prometheus faced each other, like the I reflecting judgment and intellect and the astral body. Thus they fight against each other in the I, which purifies the astral body. When the Greek allows us to see the whole astral nature, he says to himself: When we look at the human being with his astral body and his I — he stands in the world, suffering pain and joy, doing good and evil; pain and joy, good and evil, are in need of balance. It causes displeasure in the human soul when good is unrewarded and without success, and evil goes unpunished or is successful in the wrong way. It is justice that brings about balance in suffering and joy, in good and evil.

But when we survey the world, says the Greek Genius, then we see that in the world, within human nature and the human astral body, justice is very limited. Man is powerless; that is how the Greek genius felt with regard to justice. Now he looks out into nature, sees and says: Development is what comes before our soul in the sunrise and sunset, in the rise and fall of the plant world; what comes before us is everything that does not comes up to the human astral body; that something is at work in it that is connected with human nature, that is connected with the whole world as something that is a far deeper justice than man in his powerlessness can realize. — He then looked up and said to himself: There must be hidden forces and powers after all, that are behind what we can see, and that have a balancing effect.

These powers are the ones that are powerful in the face of the human impotent being; they are the powers of justice, so that they prevail everywhere, that they can count on these powers that work with might and power to bring about balance and that do not succumb to human powerlessness. They are hidden, and there they must be. The Greek genius saw them and called them the Titans for the reason that they do not have human powerlessness; and Themis, the goddess of justice, belongs to the special female Titans.

Thus, before the eyes of the Greek genius, there is an all-pervasive justice in the realm of the Titans. But then it must transform itself into love. The warm feeling of love must absorb it. That is why it is not Themis who is worshiped as the figure who also penetrates into man, who leads him to the ideal of justice, to love, but the son of Themis, Prometheus. He is the one who takes hold of human beings in their very essence. While Zeus belongs to the realm that pours wisdom and balance into human knowledge on earth, insofar as the astral comes into consideration, Prometheus pours into the human I that which should bring this I ever further forward.

However, we can recognize a force in the individual human being that prevents the I from going too far in its development, a force that stands in its way. Just as anger precedes the still immature composure, the Greek genius saw the interplay of Prometheus' deed with Zeus' anger in the great cosmic context. Zeus is the one who has to watch over the human development of the self so that it does not advance too quickly. Therefore, he must create balances. Prometheus provides people with what is common to ordinary people: understanding, reason, feeling, that is, what comes from the ability to judge.

But this means that something else has emerged in human development. In the human being who has advanced from the earlier to this stage, his consciousness has narrowed. When man still had his old consciousness, the clairvoyant one, man saw through his image consciousness into his spiritual, at least into his soul world. This is connected with a conscious appearance of image forms, so that man can see into a soul world that is hidden from the mind and sense consciousness. Thus a world withdrew from human consciousness. The gaze was tied down on earth, while at the same time advancing to a higher level. What man had implanted as his ideals of justice and love had to pay the price of being banished to the outer sensual world, to earth.

This was the counteraction of the astral. As man developed his ego further, the astral worked like a counterblow. Whereas man could formerly see into the world of the soul, this counterblow obscured the view into the world of the soul, and the view remained limited to the outer physical world. He was chained to the world of the earth. What was in Prometheus chained him to the earth. And so Prometheus was chained to the earth in human nature through what works as a counterbalance in the astral nature in the realm of Zeus, through the wrath of Zeus, forged to the earth. He had developed a higher ability. But it was darkened by the wrath of Zeus.

There are all possible degrees between the brightness of consciousness that a person has during the day and the darkness during sleep. What occurs in affect is, to a certain degree, its darkness. And the cosmic degree of darkness was that human consciousness was chained to the physical world. The consciousness that should have looked into the spiritual world was paralyzed. This paralysis was the chaining of Prometheus to the rock.

The forward-looking in Greek human nature is precisely depicted in the myth in the Prometheus myth. And the Greek tragedian presents this in such a powerful way in the “Prometheus Bound”. If you let the nerve of this wonderful drama take effect on you, then you will see what confronts you in it; what you encounter is something of which one can say: it stands in the world like an old heirloom from earlier times. Certainly, man has developed in a certain way, but all development does not proceed in a straight line. There are always heirlooms from old developments; they do not fit into later times; they seem out of place. Imagine a being with the old image consciousness in our time – it is an impossible being; it cannot possibly find its way in today's world. It is not for nothing that the human soul's powers change. They change so that they are adapted to human conditions on earth.

The image consciousness is adapted to the earlier earth conditions. The mind consciousness corresponds to the present time. The artist presents this to us in the form of Io. She represents a being that has emerged from the level of consciousness of the ancients. What will become of this [image consciousness when it occurs in our time]? Madness! What is the image of the earlier time supposed to say? It may be that one also has the ability to say it, but these abilities are not good. They produce error and deception for the soul.

The Greek genius represents such an awareness, which has remained like an old heirloom, so that error and deception and illusion arise, by seeing the hundred-eyed Argus. Images confront her. But these are deceptions, illusions, that is illusion. Even if this consciousness, when it has seized the human soul abilities, when this consciousness would also fall into madness, one must not believe that it will not have a meaning. That which the developed consciousness has grasped has only grasped one part of the human being, the brain, and has made it its organ.

But the Io is still working on people today. This is human future development, that all the forces that can be there will appear in later times in new forms, like the Io with its consciousness in ancient times. So she is a madwoman. But how she will be when that in human nature which the subconscious works on connects with what is higher human nature, then human judgment will be conscious; the Prometheus in human nature will be redeemed. The Greek sets this whole thing in the past, and in a way it also refers to past events. Just as he was able to extract the meaning of each individual move of the drama from this train of Prometheus bound with Io, he could also extract it from the drama.

I could only hint at where the drama's nerve lies. I could show how the playwright's mind was filled with what is in human nature and how it interacts. That is why Aeschylus was able to show how anger arises from the astral body when the ego is bound in the cosmos, so that it can mature and develop the abilities that are appropriate to it, as it were, projected out of the cosmos into inner human nature. Through this powerful drama, we will see how anger has the mission of being a harbinger of love. In a certain respect, this is also what connects us with the noble word truth, which is related to human nature in a different way to anger.

We will see how Goethe has incorporated into his “Pandora” what he himself felt in his deepest soul about these riddles of life. But because humanity today is so far removed from spiritual science, from that which lives in the soul of a poet, the poems like “Pandora” were not understood. This was already the case in Goethe's time. That is why Goethe felt lonely at the height of his life. In this loneliness, he also felt many dangers – as people still say today: In his youth, Goethe still wrote understandably, but in his old age he came down and wrote [unintelligible]. – In contrast to this, Goethe once broke out in words that you will find spoken in his works: “There they praise my Faust and what else is in my works... and there the old rag-tag believes it is no longer.” That is how he felt about the misunderstood spiritual world. Especially when you are looking at the human soul and want to understand it practically, then you have to start from spiritual science. You have to be able to observe the interplay of forces and the meaning of the individual forces, as spiritual science presents them to us. Then we can look into the deep abysses of the soul in such a way that we can apply it practically. Only then do we understand as different fruits that which speaks to us spiritually from this point of view [through] Aeschylus in his drama [of] Zeus towards Prometheus, whom we will only understand when we understand what the mission of anger is in the astral body for the development of the I into the ability to love. The veil that we must lift if we want to penetrate to our satisfaction and to the right practical life is lifted so that we can say: Certainly, when we look at the soul in a spiritual scientific way, we feel how deep the fundamental tone is, and we also feel that we are on the way to penetrating into this ground. Spiritual science will first advise us to strive for the right thing little by little in order to penetrate the ideals and insights of the soul life that are to be attained; it will show us how to make the words of the ancient sage from the fifth and sixth century, whom we can remember when we explore the depths of the soul to find the boundaries of the soul, understandable in a new way, starting from these ideals. It will be difficult if we also travel a distance, because the soul's ground is infinitely deep.

The last lectures in this series were devoted to a consideration of the human soul. And it will have become clear to those members of the audience who have followed the last three lectures what inner justification there is for not regarding the human soul as an indeterminate being, with its qualities swimming around in confusion, but for actually pursuing it in the most careful way in its individual subdivisions. For those who are here today for the first time, it is enough to point out that, in the sense of spiritual science, this human soul is distinguished into what we call the sentient soul, which is, so to speak, the lowest of the members of the human soul, which is still close to what we call the bodily members of the human being. Then, in this soul, a distinction is to be made between the mind or emotional soul, which already stands out as an independent entity, making itself independent of the sentient soul and the bodily life, and finally, the consciousness soul can still be seen.

We have pointed out that what is generally regarded today in every science as development, in a higher sense as self-development of the human being, comes to us within this soul life. Man is in development and stands at the lowest level so that what we call the sentient soul comes into its own. With further development, the mind or feeling soul comes into its own. Then, to a certain extent, a person can find themselves and examine themselves with the light of thought, understanding and knowledge. We then speak of the consciousness soul. We have not just talked about these soul elements, but emphasized the qualities that take on very special forms when this self-development of the person is taken seriously.

In particular, we pointed out one of the qualities, anger, and showed how self-development lies in overcoming such an affect. Man's sense of truth [as educator of the mind or intellectual soul] was further found, and how then a special impulse for the development of the consciousness soul is what we described yesterday as devotion in the right sense of the word. As we were asking ourselves about that in the human inner being, which actually guides and leads the development, we came across that which we had to say could essentially reveal itself in two ways: We have come across the I that pulsates and interweaves through the whole soul. It is what works on the soul. It must reveal itself in two ways: on the one hand, strongly and powerfully and meaningfully, richer in thoughts, feelings and will impulses, which itself must expand more and more; in this way we have shown how selfhood grows more and more. Furthermore, that on the other hand this ego, by expressing selfhood in a special way, can degenerate into selfishness and egoism. ... Thus, in a certain respect, the ego became the center of the soul's life.

Today it is our task to eavesdrop even further on the work of this ego on the soul. We have seen what it does for the individual members when we look at each of them purely in itself. But it is also called upon to bring about order and harmony in the life of the soul... to work the individual members of the soul, sentient, intellectual and consciousness soul, in the appropriate way, to fertilize one through the other, to let the sentient soul play into the intellectual soul and this again into the consciousness soul, and so on.

If the human ego was unable to relate these individual soul elements to each other, to establish order, harmony, etc., then the individual soul elements fall apart. The ego must prove itself strongly through all the individual soul elements and allow each individual to play into the others in an appropriate way.

You can imagine that, by allowing the individual soul links to interact, the I plays in the same way as a musician plays an instrument – even if we can only see three strings of it at first. But the I plays very special harmonies and melodies on the three strings of the soul life: depending on whether it strikes one or the other string more, strikes it at the same time as the other, and so on, a very special music of the soul arises in the person. This is how the human soul life expresses itself, as this I plays on the three strings of the soul life.

What is this expression of the I playing on the three strings of the soul? —Nothing else emerges from it but the human character. Only someone who does not question how this I plays and works in the harmonious interaction of the various soul elements can understand what is meant by the [phenomenon of human character], which is so often enigmatic and yet confronts us at every turn in life. Yes, when the individual abilities of the human soul, the individual activities, fall apart, when the ego does not exercise joint control, then the human being appears to us as if he is striving in different directions. This is the most trivial thing in the life of the character, so that his soul activities work in one direction on the one hand and in another on the other. In life, the patriot and the private man can thus diverge. In such cases, we are not talking about a unified character, and by this we mean that the ego does not distribute its effect evenly among the various parts [of the soul].

This occasional inability to create harmony between the various activities of the human soul has always been a kind of material for artists to use in poetry or other artistic forms of expression. Consider Shakespeare's Hamlet; there is a spiritual activity that the ego cannot reconcile with action. Goethe has already expressed this dichotomy of the soul life in Hamlet by saying: A great task is placed on a soul that is not up to it.

Thus we see how the I can live fully in the consciousness soul. When it emphasizes this life in the consciousness soul, it is activated in the innermost link of the human soul life, which can hide its impulses from the outside world within itself. When it emphasizes its work in the consciousness soul, what arises is what we call the hidden, closed character. We cannot get at him because the consciousness soul withdraws from the outside world. We can therefore be separated from a person as if by a partition. His I is locked up in the consciousness soul.

The I can continue to be active and live in what we call the mind or feeling soul. This is how the malleable character is formed, which is somewhere between the other two. In this way, the I provides what could be called the balance of the soul forces. People who exercise their I within the mind soul are those who are willing to be stimulated by the outside world, but also willing to process these impressions in the service of their own self, to educate themselves more and more through the impressions of the outside world, through what is heard, seen and known of it.

If you want to educate, you have to know how the I works in the mind or soul. If such an inclination is present in a person, you have to make sure that you do the right thing in one direction or another. Such people are the most malleable, easily influenced by what is around them, and they use it for their own development.

But when the I lives it up in the sentient soul, it tends to turn outward what is in the sentient soul, its drives and so on. As soon as the I begins to be active in the sentient soul, the will arises to work outward. We have before us people who have a preference for an active character, who are always available to do this or that. When taken to an extreme, they become the busy people.

Thus we see how the human being expresses himself when the I strikes one or other chord. We can also say that the human being's I initially acts in such a way that it itself rests as if hidden in the sentient soul, namely in young people or at a low level of culture. There the I is closed in the sentient soul, it does not yet have the possibility to ascend into the mind soul and show its activities, as it expresses itself unconsciously in the sentient soul. In this case, we speak of a character that is at a low level and expresses base urges and desires.

This is different from the character where the I has already ascended into the consciousness soul, but which nevertheless then expresses itself in the sentient soul. Then the I carries what it has learned within the consciousness soul into the sentient soul; then it follows its instincts, desires, but with what it has learned through the consciousness soul. And because he follows them, such a person appears in life in such a way that we say: Oh, he only follows his instincts and desires, but in such a way that he pursues them in a clever, sophisticated way. At the same time, his character is imbued with low-mindedness [and clever reflection. It gives the] character a higher meaning when, with attitude, the person rises as high as with knowledge.

We must grasp this wonderful phenomenon of human character as a kind of inner soul music, a play of the I on the various strings of the human soul life. Now it plays not only in general with the soul members, but in all that is present in these individual soul parts of the human being. For example, we see one such soul quality as an affect of the sentient soul: anger. When the ego is little developed, has not ascended into the higher regions of the soul life, it gives itself over to anger; then we find an outburst of anger that shows us how an ego unconscious of itself storms out into the world. It is not in control of itself because it has remained undeveloped in a certain respect, ... not in control of itself when it is overcome by anger.

[Imagine a] teacher in front of a student [: [the] student [has] noticed something wrong with a fellow student and, in anger, hits the fellow student with a book. The teacher may be a person who has developed the mind soul and the consciousness soul, but in this moment, anger can overwhelm him so much that a young lad can get so angry. Then the teacher hits the boy a few lefts and rights. When the surge of anger comes, only a very controlled person can suppress it.

The stopping of the I in the sentient soul manifests itself as if in a rage. This is the extreme of anger, when the I almost sinks in anger and the soul becomes similar to a state of powerlessness. Then anger arises. The ego cannot conquer anger. If it conquers, then, by being conquered, anger becomes an educator in the right way, indirectly through the ego itself, if the ego does not let itself be overcome by the emotion but exercises self-control. In the sentient soul, the I has to accomplish its own education, which we call education in self-control. On the one hand, there is rage that breaks out blindly, and on the other, there is self-control, which is achieved through noble self-education.

Let us now take the I that is in the soul of reason or feeling. The mission of the sense of truth is revealed in it. It consists in the fact that the human being has something in the truth that he may cultivate – because when he devotes himself to the truth, he cultivates something – that he may cultivate in his own inner being. He can only assimilate truth within himself, in order to unfold the supreme power of the I in inwardness. At the same time, however, it unites us with the whole of humanity and with the world. In the cultivation of truth we see something by which the I can develop into selfhood and self-strength, and thereby at the same time into selflessness.

But one or other of these strings can be struck in the wrong way. It can happen that the I makes a mistake in a certain way, or where it should have a strong effect, it has a weak effect. If it makes a mistake within the soul of the intellect, then what arises is a demonstration of how even the noblest in human life can be distorted, can become a caricature, when the I loses itself in what it has recognized as truth.

When the I is immersed in the truth, the following can occur: Because man is not capable of mastering a comprehensive field of truth on all sides, and can only master part of the truth, when the ego loses itself in it, it can forget itself and blindly rage in its limited circle of truth. Then it becomes a fanatic, and what is called the fanatical character in life comes to meet us.

The opposite is true when the I not only devotes itself to the truth with the right strength, but also looks into itself in the right way and becomes aware that a person can also err. If the I does not lose itself in the truth, but always looks at itself in the intellect and in the mind, then the fanatic cannot arise.

By increasingly practicing this self-examination according to the qualities of the intellect and the soul, the I attains what in characterology is called healthy self-esteem or healthy self-confidence, combined with proper self-criticism, [which] allows one to maintain balance with regard to recognized truth(s) and the possibility of error on the other hand.

Then... to that which contributes most to the soul's upward development into the consciousness soul, to devotion. Here too, the I can strike the right or the wrong chord. It can lose itself in devotion, give itself up in surrender to the Other and the Unknown. Then we are dealing with the self-losing ego, with the false holiness of man, which amounts to a kind of self-sacrifice. But when the I resonates with this quality of the consciousness soul in the right way, when it works strongly into devotion with its self, then we come to what can be called justified self-respect and self-knowledge.

Thus we see how the I expresses itself in the most diverse ways. It is the unifier of the individual members of the human soul. And it is the characterological activity of the I on the individual soul members, as just described, that prevents the human being from falling apart. But if the I does not maintain control over the individual soul-members, then the human being appears to us as fragmented, the I sinks down and can no longer be seen: lack of character, surrender to the demons of one's own soul, torn back and forth by instincts and feelings; thoughts that bring one to despair, surrender on the other hand, etc.

[I have] already pointed out in an example from art the loss of control over the individual parts, where the ego has sunk into self-loss. This work of art is the famous Laocoon: a priest with his two sons standing there and entwined by snakes. Many people have endeavored to understand this work of art. ... All this is expressed in a wonderful way, one must... in the right way understand. /Larger gaps; probably a description of “Laocoon”.] Even those who have devoted themselves to it with devotion have said many erroneous things in their understanding of this work of art. Winckelmann, who became Lessing's and Goethe's teacher in the study of art, looked at Laocoon in such a way that he said that it was particularly beautiful that here

the highest ennoblement of pain takes place. He sees the soul in its sublimity in Laocoon, who in the moment before death musters his full soul power; and in the face, namely in the eyes, one can see how the inner soul powers look up to a supreme being. The father shows in the eyes expressing mercy that compassion for his sons triumphs over pain.

This description fails when confronted with the overall view of the work of art. It can already be seen in a cast. If you want to judge the eye in this way, it fails because the eye is directed upwards and Laocoon does not see any of his sons. [The compassion for the sons is] not visible, because Winckelmann has invented it. But this group is illuminated by the light of understanding when one sees what is there and is clear about it: this Laocoon with the drawn-in abdomen, with the protruding chest, with the upward-looking, surrounding eyes, the hair standing on end – when we see all this, it is clear to us that here the effect of the human being is no longer overcome by the sense of self, but we are confronted with the moment when this sense of self has disappeared. The ego has just emerged, and at this moment it no longer follows the effect of the ego, which would hold the strong reins with regard to the expressions of the soul life. Individual limbs go their own ways. Nature... [the pain] draws in the abdomen, the upper body is protruding, other limbs go their own ways; everything is torn apart. Through the loss of soul that has just occurred, it shows what man is when the ego is truly suppressed and the individual strong limbs go their own ways in a final flurry.

When we have such a work of art before us, it is a negative symbol [for] what the I must be that brings about this interplay of the individual soul members. By looking at human character in this way, we can gain much for our understanding of life, but also many things that the educator needs if he wants to develop human character step by step. We will understand life if we ask ourselves: What is the peculiarity of human character itself?

If we look at animal character, we can say: the animal comes into the world with a ready-made character, which remains throughout the animal's lifetime. What is at the beginning is also at the end: a distinctly pronounced generic or species character. If you characterize a hyena, you have characterized them all. Why is that? It is because the animal, in a sense, has no history and does not incorporate the element of time into its life. The experiences of youth cannot be learned and carried into the later elements of development.

What we call time is incorporated into the human being's soul life. The I gradually develops out of the hidden germ, the peculiarities of the sentient soul and the mind soul, up into the consciousness soul. Thus, the child approaches us in a different way in terms of character than a young animal. From the earliest times, the latter practices the activities that are incumbent on it by virtue of its nature. In a sense, the human being enters the world without character. The individual forms, even those based on his nature, even what he acquires by being worked on by others, all that arises in later life, must be acquired over time.

Initially, a person can be determined in terms of their character. We can work into them, but we cannot use a word that describes a child in terms of character; the child does not yet have character. By showing itself differently from other children in its individual activities, it does not have character, but it does have individuality. The self has not yet taken self-development into its own hands. It is still pressed down under the sentient soul, still contained in the most hidden part. As long as it has not yet developed into activity, into an inner play on the strings of the soul instrument, it is only an individuality, not a character. Only then does the character begin to emerge when the I begins to become aware of itself, at first dimly. Then, in the course of life, this self-education by the I occurs more and more.

But one educates a person in the right way only when one pays attention to whether it is the I that is inclined to rummage around in the sentient soul or one that wants to express the qualities of the mind soul or consciousness soul in particular. Here one has to be careful not to limit one's view and to ensure that the various activities of the I are stimulated in the right way. If one sees that a child is inclined to lose itself in the individual activities, that it tends towards selflessness in the bad sense, then it is good to start teaching this child the concepts of human dignity and human significance as early as possible. You will educate badly if you encourage your selfishness here, appeal to the child's own selfishness. You will educate well if you teach him general concepts of what a human being is and means in the world.

When the sense of life is strongly developed in the soul of the mind, it can indeed bubble over and be lost on unworthy things. In this case, when it wants to lose itself on unworthy things, then one must ensure that such a growing person forms the right concepts of the world, of things and of beings, in order to assess them correctly in relation to each other. We have to ensure that he learns to appreciate things correctly.

Thus, as educators, we have to do the work of transferring the work of the ego to the neglected side. We have to do a balancing and harmonizing job with regard to character, but first we have to gain an understanding for the peculiar way in which the ego plays with the different parts of the soul.

Thus we see how justified it was to form the word character, that is to say, “imprinting”. The whole life of the soul receives a certain imprinting and shaping through this I. How the human being then affects life itself is best shown when we understand how the I is active in the individual members of the soul and how these interact.

Now there is something else to be borne in mind in particular. I have said that the I educates the soul up to the level of the consciousness soul. Is this education complete with this? It is not yet finished. Only then does what is important in terms of character development in human life occur. Only then is the consciousness soul accessible to what can reach into the human soul from a higher world. What can reach into the consciousness soul first of all?

What is most important in terms of character are moral concepts and ideas, which we do not find in our lives outside. There we find drives and instincts in which a self works that is blind. We cannot gain our [rational insights] and ideals and moral judgments from life. We must first carry these into life. The human soul must receive these as an inspiration from another world and try to bring them into life; but not just like that.

In the human soul, the moral imperative [lights up], the great ideals through which we can advance life, what life does not yet have and man must first bring into it. Then the I grasps this light from another world in the moral concepts and ideals. They first flow into the consciousness soul; the I grasps them. Previously, development took place from bottom to top; now, when the I has gained these moral judgments and ideals, it carries them back down into the mind soul, transforming the moral thought into moral feeling. The moral feeling in the soul of feeling is what was in the consciousness soul [moral concept]. When such a moral concept is brought down into the soul of feeling, we glow with a moral deed. Then we have sympathy for what is going on around us. More and more, moral judgments and thoughts push their way down and become feelings. We become inflamed with enthusiasm for what is done out of high moral ideals. Through the “I” bringing moral judgments and ideals down from the consciousness soul, we are moved to glow with enthusiasm for what is good and to feel sympathy for what is noble and great.

But the I must also carry these ideals down into the sentient soul. There the moral ideals also work on our drives, instincts and passions, transforming them into something completely different. Gradually, the moral ideal pours into this drive life, the drive now works as a force, and the moral ideal gains the power to be realized. The drive has abandoned its instinctive nature and what is in it as a force becomes the bearer of moral judgment and ideal. Thus, in life, we become people of action who not only live out drives and passions, but also carry the light of moral ideals, so that there is no contradiction in them between what they carry the passions in and what shines there as moral judgments and ideals. Thus the self carries down into the lower regions of the soul what it has gained above. In this way, it warms the soul with what it has gained in the consciousness soul.

By developing itself up into the consciousness soul, the I becomes a human being in terms of character. By carrying it down again into the lower members, the human being becomes a moral character. This carrying up and down of what has been gained... this is how we understand what character is, what moral character is.

This [the work of the ego on the soul members] gives the human being his character to such an extent that it expresses itself [in the body]. Just as the soul expresses itself in the outer body, so this work of the ego on the soul members expresses itself in the outer body. We can follow this down to the last detail and are amazed at how the I appears in the outer physical body of the human being. There we see how the I works in the consciousness soul. When this work expresses itself outwardly, it is in that which, in the outer world, belongs to the highest human activity. What elevates human beings above animals is the free mobility of their limbs and the subordination of their limbs to the sensations and concepts of their soul life.

One movement that expresses the inner soul life [in particular] is facial expression [and gesture]. We see how the activity of the soul in particular acquires an external expression in mimic [and gestural] expression. The one who is able to interpret the facial expressions and gestures of a person in the right way sees how the whole play of the I on the various soul members is revealed in the outer gestures. If, for example, the I in the consciousness soul is active, but has dragged up what it actually is in the sentient soul and allows it to play up into the consciousness soul, then it expresses itself as if one could say: The person lives in his feelings, brings this to consciousness and expresses it. Outwardly, this is expressed by the person tapping himself on the abdomen with great comfort, for example after a meal.

Suppose that what stirs particularly in the feeling soul and through which the I is stimulated by the feeling soul is particularly developed and expressed outwardly in the gesture: Man then reaches to his heart. Thus he rises up by his own body, by rising with his I and by playing in ever higher limbs. If the 'I' expresses itself in such a way that it only expresses the consciousness soul and is not touched by the other parts, only the consciousness soul, where thoughts and knowledge dominate, where human discernment is expressed – when a person reflects sharply on something and reflects in such a way that he wants to analyze something – then he puts his finger to his nose to, as it were, divide his face into two parts. What is worked in the consciousness soul is expressed. The character is reflected in the outward gesture by scratching behind the ear, or by grasping the head when something does not occur to one.

In the whole play of facial expressions, both the ascent in the soul life and the ascent in the soul life are expressed. When a person makes a judgment and wants to negate something, this can be expressed in the consciousness soul of this person by quietly judging. A negation expressed without emotion is then a movement of the head simply to the left and right. But if he negates with the will, he throws his head back.

It is particularly interesting to study the outward gestures of different nations. Here one could recognize the play of the I if one were to ask: How does one nation or another express negation? — and so on. Here we see how character is expressed and shaped in the play of facial expressions.

When the I allows the other soul members to play into the mind soul, this is expressed in the human physiognomy. What we read in a person's face is the expression of the work of the I on the mind or soul of mind, where the I allows the other soul members to work. Now, we have said that the human being, where the ego plays particularly in the soul of the mind, gets a malleable character; therefore, this malleability will also show externally. This malleability, which belongs to the time, to history, we can read from the physiognomy: a face furrowed with grief. The history of a person is imprinted here, the writing of what the person has experienced in his destiny.

In the animal physiognomy, one can wonderfully observe the animal species or generic character. What a [single] person has suffered, what has become of him, can be seen by observing the human physiognomy. His story is written there. In a deeper sense, the various dispositions of the character are also expressed in a special way in the facial expression. But one must not be pedantic about this, because everything can also be balanced out by other effects.

Thus, in the human being, we can distinguish the mental part in the face, the lower part around the mouth and chin, then the nasal part and the frontal part or forehead. Depending on whether the ego [has an effect] on the rational soul, the sentient soul or the consciousness soul, this is expressed in a variety of ways. A person who acts out his or her individuality only through the sentient soul is often characterized by a pointed chin.

Everything that happens in life is most pronounced in the middle part. When the ego particularly appeals to the emotional soul, allows the consciousness soul to play from above and the sentience soul from below, when there is a balance in the mind soul, then this is expressed in the physiognomic form in such a way that the middle part of the face has a special expression. Those who are able to observe life will find such harmony in the soul life of the Greeks. That is why the famous Greek nose is regarded as the model for the human body in all of sculpture. In the Greek way of life, the entire human countenance is reduced to the human nose.

The character that the I has shaped in the soul is impressed on the human body. When the consciousness soul in particular is pressed down into the mind soul, the forehead takes on a special shape. One must not exaggerate these things, but must be clear that the I works individually in each person. If pedantry intervenes here, such things are distorted. It must repel when approached by pedantic schoolcrafting. Here it is not abstract judgment that distinguishes, but scientific tact. This does not always proceed in the right way, and many a foolish thing comes about when these things are exaggerated.

When the I in the rational soul is active, then the I leaves its mark on the physiognomy, not only in the physical body, but also in the handwriting. The character and style of the handwriting are to a certain extent a reflection of the work of the I in the rational soul. Here, of course, the [urge to] interpret is quite dangerous. If a healthy comprehensiveness is not applied in the assessment, the result is either dilettantism or humbug in the interpretation of handwriting. This does not reject the idea that character can really flow into handwriting, but rather justifies it from a higher point of view.

Thus, one can also understand that because the soul of the mind is the malleable character, the changes in the handwriting can be observed over the course of several years and one can get an idea of the changes in one's character; [this makes more sense] than if one has made this from a single piece of writing. Without knowing the age, nothing proper can come out here either. If one is knowledgeable in these matters, one can even draw conclusions about earlier experiences from certain characteristics of the handwriting rather than being able to read the characteristic itself from the handwriting. But only with the right tact can the right thing come out.

What happens when the ego works primarily on the sentient soul, but as a strong ego that works inwardly on the human soul? Of particular importance is the case that shows us this ego at the stage where it is enlightened by moral judgments and ideals. But when the I has now carried moral ideals and judgments down into the sentient soul and the drives and passions have been purified and give strength to the moral ideals, how is this expressed in the external physical body?

When the I has worked in this way, it cannot be expressed externally at first. What is brought down from the heights of the consciousness soul must remain permeated by the consciousness soul and should express itself in the physical tool of the consciousness soul, the human brain. However, due to the firm cranial box, the skullcap does not offer the possibility of expressing this. The individual bones, which have hardened, can no longer be reshaped appropriately.

This is where we see that we are predisposed to certain dispositions with the most diverse formations of the skullcap. He has formed the skullcap with the most diverse elevations and depressions. As long as the skullcap is firm in life, what character has formed cannot play in it.

Here we are at the point where we receive a reasonable explanation [of] an appearance, if we refer to what is to be discussed later in its context, if we refer to the re-embodiment of the human soul. What the soul cannot do in a particular life comes to light when the soul is reborn. What the soul has taken in of moral judgments and ideals in the sentient soul is imprinted in the soft organism. This appears in the plastic formation of the human skull.

If we look at this human skull, a kind of craniology, we can look back at the person's previous incarnation. What we get is very unlike what has been practiced as phrenology throughout many ages. Here, all kinds of predispositions have been discovered. An overview of this shows us how powerless human knowledge is when it does not go into depth. What we see on the skullcap cannot be broken down into individual forms, but is the result of the work of the ego on the sentient soul in a previous life. This is entirely individual and cannot be explained by any classification. What a person has acquired in a lifetime, that he has not remained closed in himself, but has allowed the moral ideals within him to take effect, will reappear in a later incarnation.

Thus what the spirit and soul are becomes embodied in the outer physicality, and the body becomes a reflection of the spirit, becoming a character in itself. Phrenology, when it does not want to deal with things in this way, can become folly. But if we look at things this way, we see what Goethe calls the creative nature, in contrast to the created. Thus we grasp the spirit of the cosmos that permeates everything and is expressed in external phenomena.

Here we see how character is formed and how the I shapes the soul in character. Only when the I withdraws into the consciousness soul does a closed character arise that shuts itself off from the world. But when it takes hold of the other soul members, something arises that is developed into the formation of the body. It was a deep insight of the poet when he spoke the word: When man develops his abilities and talents, the I works within him; but when he develops his character, it works on the world and the outer life:

A talent develops in silence,
a character in the stream of the world.

When the poet approaches these phenomena, it can become deeply apparent to him that something has flowed through him in all his ways... Thus, he who observes life can see how life is formed from within. It is nature that stands firm in its foundations. But it is that which contains the spirit within itself and allows it to be born out of itself. But the spirit allows nature to emerge from itself again, in mimic play, [in] physiognomy, [in] the shaping of the skullcap. It imprints on matter, through the I, that which the I plays on that wonderful musical instrument in the hidden depths of the soul.

This can occur to someone who stands before such a miracle of such molding. Such a thought once flashed through a man's mind when, after many years, a friend's tomb was opened and the skull was removed. Contemplating this skull, the thought occurred to him how the form expresses what the soul has lived. Goethe wrote, as he looked at Schiller's skull:

What more can man desire in life
than to see how nature reveals the divine,
how it allows the solid to flow into the spiritual,
how it firmly preserves what has been created by the spirit.

Today we are to speak about the subject of asceticism. This subject is one that is judged differently from various sides. In asceticism, a spiritual current is usually already seen that, in what it represents in itself, already shows a kind of illness and that cannot at all proceed from healthy foundations of existence. But asceticism is an effective means of perfecting life, of reaching higher levels of existence. Sometimes asceticism is also seen as a withdrawal of human energies that could be used for existence; thus moderation and asceticism are considered to be more or less synonymous. The word is well suited to asceticism:

Confused by the hatred of the parties,
its image in history fluctuates.

Asceticism was something quite different in ancient Greece than it was in the Middle Ages. The nuance established by the Middle Ages for asceticism is indeed a questionable one. But spiritual science or theosophy has every interest in putting asceticism in its true light.

Asceticism in the sense in which it was meant in ancient Greece and wherever the word was understood in its general meaning has something to do with what underlies Theosophy. Asceticism is something that can lead to the highest heights of existence, but taken to an extreme, it can become idleness or even worse. “Asceticism” means ‘exercising one's powers’ so that one is able to develop and exercise one's highest abilities. ‘Askesis’, the Greek word, is related to ‘athlete’ and means ‘to make oneself strong’. In that the word indicates this in its original meaning, it has to do with the basis of spiritual research in Theosophy. And now we want to go into the distinguishing feature of asceticism in relation to many other scientific currents.

The theosophist has a different concept of knowledge than that which many other people have of knowing the world and what underlies it. With the senses one can know the external world, says the intellect; but one cannot explore everything about it, it exceeds the limits of its knowledge. Speaking in this sense means professing the opposite of what theosophy is; it says: reality is unlimited! It would even be able to give man a new sense, a physical sense, of reality if necessary. There are no limits to being, being is infinite. Man's soul is indeed limited in time to one stage of development, but it is up to man to expand this soul within it.

Man must not presume to want to exceed the limits of his knowledge, as science says against it. But spiritual science says: Try to expand your spiritual knowledge, your spiritual-scientific knowledge, as much as possible. The goal is the development of the soul, of the cognitive abilities of the human being. It must be admitted that there is something in the soul, something germinal in it. A person should not say, “This is how I am,” and be satisfied with it, but should say, “This is how I am now, and I will achieve new forms of existence to practice my powers.” This is asceticism.

Asceticism is something that enriches the human soul and makes a person stronger, opening up true and new realms of reality to them. Usually, asceticism is described as someone who practices it appearing gaunt and hollow-eyed, being idle, hating life and being disgusted by all the joys and demands of life. But an ascetic, properly understood, is akin to an athlete; true asceticism is elevation, expansion, enrichment of the true essence of man. Spiritual science or theosophy makes its knowledge and research accessible to a larger circle of people today. But you need not think that everyone must therefore also do the exercises - meditation and concentration and so on - and that the result will be the same for everyone as for the blind person who would have to be operated on, the opening of the eyes. Not everyone needs to do this, and not everyone will experience it; and not everyone can or needs to become a researcher in the spiritual world. But he, for his work in the spiritual world, needs the clairvoyant consciousness. To understand the messages of the researcher, none of this is necessary, one should just take them in impartially and examine them seriously. Everyone should test them against their own logic and sense of truth, which every person carries within them as a natural thing that they can rely on; this will then teach them to reject what a charlatan says and to agree with what a true spiritual researcher says; it will also teach them to distinguish one from the other.

It often happens that messages from the spiritual world arouse interest among listeners, especially those that deal with the subject of what kind of exercises and so on are necessary to enter the spiritual world. We will now begin with such a description today; how far one can follow it will be best seen from the subject itself.

The asceticism that is concerned with living in the spiritual world – and this is the only thing that matters for spiritual science – endeavors to develop abilities and perceptions in people that are silent in ordinary human life. Consider that you perceive from morning till evening through stimulation from the outside world; so you have a consciousness of yourself and of what is around you. In the evening, when you are tired, your soul can no longer perceive, your consciousness is silent, it falls silent. While you sleep, you are in the spiritual world, but you know nothing of it; why? Because today's man needs those external stimuli to see, which, as it were, entice perception. If he could give himself this push, which the objects give him as an external stimulus, this impetus from within, then man would have within him a stronger inner power than that which drives him from outside to perceive. But then he could also perceive in a world to which he drives himself from within, while he must perceive through external stimuli.

Let us assume that the former would be the case and that man would be blind and deaf to external stimuli, but would be able to receive the impulse to perceive within himself through invisible senses; then man would have awakened inner spiritual abilities in himself. But this can also happen in another way, namely in the sense in which we speak of asceticism in spiritual science. That is, a person commands himself through strong inner strength that he does not want to see or hear the external world; it sinks away for him, but not through fatigue, but through his arbitrariness. It is an inner world that then emerges, the outer one sinks.

Now let us turn to what man must do to achieve this. The preparation for this consists in his devoting himself to certain exercises. True asceticism has nothing to do with external means; what happens is an intimate, albeit energetic, process of the innermost of man's spiritual powers. The first thing he has to acquire is an especially heightened, intensified power of imagination! This occurs when a person stimulates his inner powers in such a way that he awakens within himself what had previously been dormant forces within him. ...

(As an example of this, Dr. Steiner cites the dialogue that one can imagine between the secret teacher and the mystery student when the student is being instructed in the contemplation of plants and humans.

Not to forget, however, that this dialogue never took place in this way.

(Description of the dialogue.)

This is to tell us: Man can stray, but the plant leads a pure chaste existence. The chaste red plant sap and the passionate human red blood. These thoughts must be transformed into an image and tried to visualize as a real ideal of man. Through this exercise, man will then gradually reach a stage of development through his own arbitrariness, as the plant has already reached a lower stage today. Goethe expresses this beautifully:

But if you do not have
this dying and becoming,
you are only a dull guest
on the dark earth.

In order to understand this ascent of man over himself, man must overcome something in himself, so as not to let it gain mastery over himself in self-aggrandizement. The disciple was told: Imagine that which should die as a withered piece of wood in the shape of a cross, and that which should come to life when man has conquered that which is expressed by his red blood, as a symbol of the purified plant-juice, think of it as the red rose. Imagine this vividly before your soul, surround the wood of the cross with living red roses, and you have before you the “Rose Cross”. Feel this mighty symbol deeply in your soul, do not just stare at it rigidly, but put into it all your perceptions and feelings, put them all into it as they fill you with devotion and devotion; when you compare the whole path of development through plants and humans up to the ideal of man in whom the red blood again flows pure and chastened, as in the red plant-juice in the petals of the red rose, feel and see this symbol, so that the Rosicrucian symbol becomes not merely an idea, a symbol, but a living power. Let all your feelings come to life in you as you contemplate and imagine, and let your heart warm as you do so, let this symbol come to life in you!

It is not an object that can be awakened by external perception and stimulation of the senses, nothing that can be seen in external reality, something that cannot awaken an external image in us. Hundreds and hundreds of such symbols could be cited from spiritual science or theosophy. But it is precisely such symbols, which do not come from external reality, that make man strong inwardly, that steel his will so that he can perceive a new world around him. The aim of such asceticism is the inner development of the human being's powers. We have characterized and shown what true asceticism is by the above example, and how through it man can become a citizen of the higher worlds. Asceticism is that which truly opens up a new, spiritual world to man and through which much can be communicated to him from it. At first, man should learn to hear the communications of the secret researcher and not immediately practice them himself. It is better if he first seeks to understand with his logic what the secret researcher says as a message from the spiritual world. So what we call asceticism leads us up into the spiritual worlds; and now let us see how humanity can relate to it. At first there will be those who say that these are fantasists, dreamers; and they will reject these explanations; but they will not always be wrong with us; because those who speak thus should say to themselves, one must first examine before one rejects. And we must say to ourselves that we must first know the reason why they reject, and we must have patience and consider that it is indeed a new world that is being shown to people. Wherever something like this is given, there is something that flows into us; we are to acquire new concepts, new ideas, which is not easy for everyone. For example, someone who initially only has a certain amount of abilities in his or her self cannot absorb this new, spiritual knowledge; for him, absorbing it would be like overeating in a spiritual sense. For him, to reject it is nothing more than his ego showing that he is incapable of absorbing it at first. It is instinct and self-preservation that tempt such people to reject spiritual science. These truths would extinguish their inner being; that is the one extreme where those poor egos of the present reject the truths of the spiritual researchers.

Others have a tendency to absorb everything that comes up and can be heard, but they also lack the will to penetrate it with understanding. Out of laziness, they don't want to make an effort, but they have an inclination to absorb, but they don't have the will to grasp what they hear with their will. But only then can harmony arise between the listener and what is heard; because only through receiving and processing does understanding arise. So one part is organized in such a way that it is unable to expand its spiritual abilities; it must reject the truths of Theosophy out of a sense of self-preservation. Others come from a sense of sensationalism, which is even less good; if one only wants to receive and not understand, that gives rise to blind faith in authority. One then hears them say: He said it, and so it must be true! But the one about whom this is said would rather be considered an authority less often, but in return be better understood.

(Example: What Lessing says about Klopstock).

The same applies to the secret researcher: he does not want to be praised at all and much rather not revered as a master personality, but to be understood and tested! For it is true, as has already been mentioned elsewhere, that if one wants to examine comfortably and not logically, it is then dangerous for the teacher to make the communications from the spiritual world to such people, for they can no longer distinguish truth from humbug and deception. There is only one way for the layman or the disciple to find the truth, and that is to examine everything with the strictest logic.

Now, we want to draw the attention of those who just want to absorb everything and who say, “the master said it,” to the danger of just blindly believing and not checking; you lose the strength and the educational result of the truth itself. For what truth is for man, its immense significance lies precisely in the fact that it is established in the innermost being of man. I know that three times three is nine; and if a million people come and claim that it is ten! This makes truth that great, that powerful educational tool, that the guiding principle for it lies within man, in his own inner being. This is why man makes something else the guiding principle of his inner being when it is not only about what comes from external sense perceptions.

But whoever only wants to hear new things abandons the educational means of truth, whereby truth is that strict means of education. Those who allow themselves to be overfed with truths allow the lack of judgment to take root in their habits; they allow someone else to be their judge of truth, thereby losing their sense of truth and falling into a habitual attachment to and love of untruthfulness. Out of laziness, true people can develop a tendency towards dishonesty, lying, dishonesty. Man must realize that truth research is a duty; but this realization must spur him on to examine logically and rationally everything he is taught from the spiritual world. What people who are too lazy to examine do to themselves can be compared, in a very good sense, to drowning. The person in question loses their self; this kind of reception of spiritual truths is drowning.

Now we want to discuss another thing that is even closer to what we call askesis or spiritual exercise. What does this askesis present itself as? We work on ourselves in order to become stronger for the world. Askesis is the practice of those powers that are not used at the present moment. Askesis can thus be compared to a healthy maneuver. The powers that are to be applied in an emergency are tested, tried and steeled there. Just as a military maneuver is related to war, so is asceticism related to the application of these forces themselves. The purpose of practicing the forces is for the sake of developing the forces; and the development of the forces must be done for the sake of growing the forces, so that they are there when you need them; therefore, you have to train them beforehand. You have to practice them before you need them, otherwise you won't have them when you need them. Example: If you train to be a singer, you have to practice a lot before you can perform and sing. Those who want to practice asceticism must practice and renounce the immediate use of their strength. You have to approach true asceticism as something that you only do to practice.

This kind of asceticism can be compared with something else: with children's play; they also practice their strengths now on objective things, which, so to speak, they are not yet touched by, but they practice them in preparation to have them and to be able to develop them in the time when the seriousness of life approaches them. To make one's powers pliable, flexible and mobile is the meaning of asceticism in relation to higher worlds and levels of knowledge; to develop these powers into abilities is the purpose of true asceticism.

In the development of spiritual abilities, something else comes into consideration. Through certain exercises, through meditation, through the presentation and contemplation of the Rosicrucian, man can strengthen his abilities and can also achieve certain visionary, clairvoyant abilities; powerful images and so on can be awakened in him, visionary clairvoyance is attained. Now the special thing occurs that the development of such powers can become dangerous if they are not directed towards something real, that is why study is such a necessary and important part of the student's task. One should not develop inner abilities without at the same time devoting oneself to an external, logical, rational understanding of the knowledge of the higher worlds. When a person becomes clairvoyant, a strong awareness must arise in him at the same time, and this is where the inner ability must be directed. Otherwise there is danger for the person. If a person has not previously acquired knowledge logically before entering the spiritual world, then the person does not know what to do with the inner ability. It is then a case of illusory images, of filling oneself with clairvoyant abilities; the process is then like an internal burning. For the awakening of such abilities is linked to the fact that the person feels the transition of abilities into passions, instincts, desires and so on. This is the other danger to which those who practice asceticism and who want to develop themselves in this way into the higher worlds, but without study, are exposed.

These are the two dangerous pitfalls – drowning, self-destruction, and burning to death – that await those who do not properly and thoroughly practice the ascent to the spiritual world and do not strictly follow the instructions.

Some will say, yes, meditation and all that stuff, that's fatal, I don't do that; but not eating meat, not drinking wine, I could dare to do that. But doing that is not so easy and not so simple and not successful either. Because only for the one who has already prepared his soul through spiritual work, for him the external measures and means are allowed as a relief for the journey. One must realize that they are only a relief, never anything else. Our body forms a resistance for our soul, and man would be able to do many things if he did not have this cumbersome body. Through external measures and aids, man can make this body more docile; he can prepare it as a better servant of the soul. A meat-free diet makes the body more docile in this respect and also more efficient.

In our time of true health fanaticism, where sunbathing and all kinds of other natural remedies are used, it happens that precisely those who are passionate about sunbathing, when they have to spend a quarter of an hour in the sun or stay in it, sigh and moan: “Oh, it's unbearable!” But anyone who practices true asceticism can also take a good walk in the sun, because it teaches people to endure life. Preparing oneself, making oneself capable of living, that is true asceticism!

Nothing can be achieved by external means alone. This only weakens the body – that is, if one only applies external means one-sidedly and does not regard them as adjuvants – because the body should be attuned to the soul. If the soul is lazy, so is the body. Otherwise the disharmony is too great. Those who apply and want to apply only external means to penetrate the spiritual world are preparing their body for a soul that they should first create. The soul must develop in parallel with the body.

Here we have reached the limits of our consideration, where asceticism can lead to the soul and body becoming unhealthy. You have to take care of your body and soul when you start practicing, because higher cognitive abilities are developed that then become realities in our soul; and every reality affects our body and soul. What can be achieved through true asceticism is a reality. A robust person must have a strong connection with the physical world; because there is a certain connection between the external world and the human being. — Example: What Fichte says about ideals, namely that those who have them know very well that they cannot be applied directly in the world, but are nevertheless their driving force.

A person who is whole within himself is also healthy when there is harmony between him, his inner self and the outer world. Based on this feeling, many people reject what they are not attuned to, for example, Theosophy. When a person takes in something and is not attuned to it and does not process it, then disharmony arises; this then takes hold of the physical body and what was previously only described as untruthfulness and so on, as the drowning of the soul, that is what then also makes the body sick. We must bear in mind that messages from the external world do not affect us so strongly that they cause such physical disharmony in the body; but messages from the spiritual world are realities, and therefore they affect the physical body; for everything physical is, after all, only an expression of the spiritual. This means that we make ourselves physically ill through the wrong reception and application of spiritual truths from the spirit.

This is even worse if the soul has been enriched by clairvoyant abilities without logical study; then the person burns inwardly, and this is transferred all the more as a consuming fire to the outer body, and the body becomes diseased. Therefore, man must strive to remain in balance with soul and body and their inner powers. Study and attainment of inner abilities must go hand in hand. If this is not the case, the consequence is otherwise the soul burning within and a morbid exterior. With correct asceticism, the organism becomes supple and flexible; but if a person digresses in either direction, then through asceticism, misunderstood or misapplied, the person will fall into and pass over into mental and physical illness. This is the great responsibility for those who make communications from spiritual science. And the leaders of the movement must always be aware of the existence of this responsibility in the most serious sense. The greatest caution and care is therefore required when accepting each disciple. But this responsibility must not deter anyone who is called to show the way, to give advice, nor deter anyone from coming. For the saying of Heraclitus applies to every soul, and with this I will conclude:

You cannot fathom the soul's limits,
even if you were to wander through all the streets and squares.

An important question of life will be treated from the point of view of Theosophy, a question that points to the highest heights of life and plays into our daily lives, which must occupy us always and forever.

We must first come to an understanding of Theosophy. It has only recently emerged in our spiritual life and is only now receiving a mission for humanity. And so we first want to discuss its nature and way of thinking. It wants to penetrate the spiritual world in a form that corresponds to today's longing, wants to teach that behind everything perceptible there are spiritual causes, wants to penetrate to these causes through real knowledge, which can be placed alongside the scientific knowledge of the present.

There are many prejudices among those who have only a superficial knowledge of it, and many misunderstandings. First of all, there is the misunderstanding that it could cause someone to doubt the beliefs they hold, as if Theosophy were a new religion. This is a mistake. It will never mislead anyone with regard to their religious creed. It will only lead people who are misled by materialistic science to religion. Thus, it will become clear to those who delve deeper that Theosophy makes one more deeply religious. Another misunderstanding is that Theosophy wants to transplant a Buddhist, Indian worldview into Europe. This is a mistake, something like that cannot be transplanted. Theosophy has the task of deepening European spiritual life, and to do that it must take into account the roots from which it has developed over the centuries.

And now the causes, the sources: where does Theosophy draw from what we want to discuss today? It is based on an honest recognition of what we call “development”. However, it does not say: we only recognize the external and its development – like materialistic science – but we admit that the human being is vividly involved in development. This development progresses, the human being will always develop further, indeed, the human being can not only observe this development, he can also promote it because he is a self-aware being. Just as a seed develops and a plant grows out of it, so too is a soul not only what it appears to be on the outside – you also cannot tell from a seed what forces lie dormant in it, what kind of plant can develop from it – so too does the human soul contain forces that can be developed, and Theosophy shows by the living example that something completely different can become out of the souls.

Today we ask about the hidden sources of life and death, and the answer of materialistic science is: We cannot know anything about it. But the theosophist says: Certainly, as man is now, his knowledge has these limits, and he cannot know about them, but these limits can be expanded through development, and then he can know about them.

If this limit is to be exceeded by development, then new organs must first develop. Theosophy now shows the way in which new forces and new organs can come to life in us; it shows the way in which the soul can become an instrument for higher development. Just as the microscope and telescope have assisted the sense organs in increasing our knowledge of the external world and have become the instruments for this kind of scientific knowledge, so the soul can also become an instrument of spiritual science. A scientist considers this to be fantasy and denies that something like this is possible. Fichte, the great philosopher, once said: Imagine a gathering of many blind people, among whom are a few sighted people who talk to the blind about color and light. Will the blind be able to understand and believe these words? But if one were given the gift of sight, light and color would shine for him where there was darkness before. Our perception of the world around us depends on the organs we possess. New organs can open up new worlds, just as the microscope and the telescope have shown people new worlds.

And so spiritual science speaks of the spiritual world. The fact that man develops the organs contained in him in a germinal form and becomes familiar with higher worlds, the fact that this is possible, is how one can judge the whole of spiritual science. Because only experience counts. The experience in spiritual worlds is there; spiritual research is being done and the results of this research become the content of theosophy.

Of course, only those who have experienced enlightenment can research, just as only those who have done the necessary studies can do microscopic research. But the spiritual researcher's research is comprehensible to people when it is communicated in the usual way. And these communications are valuable to [them], even if not every soul immediately reaches a higher level of development. Every person can listen to these messages and ask themselves whether life provides evidence for what the researcher says, whether it proves to be true in life.

So let us talk about life and death and hear what the researcher says and what life says. The researcher says: To understand this great mystery, we must first understand the nature of man. We are dealing with a four-part entity. The first link is the physical body. Theosophy is completely on scientific ground when considering this. The physical body is one with nature. But only after death does it appear to us on its own, and then it follows its physical laws and forces and dissolves. Now, theosophy says: something else must be sought in order to understand the whole person; this cannot be the whole person. This other thing, which prevents the physical body from disintegrating during our lifetime, is a force, a second body that we call the life body or etheric body. This life body permeates the physical body. The researcher now sees this life body; it is therefore an experience. Man has this life body in common with all of nature, with plants and animals.

Let us imagine a human being. A part of space is filled with the physical body, and within that is the life body. But something else lives in this filled space that is very close to the human being. There lives something that he knows as lust and suffering, as joy and pain and passion. That lives there, and he cannot grasp it, cannot see it, but it is there, and the seer sees it as the astral body. Man has this in common with the animal world.

Now the fourth part, which makes man the crown of creation: every thing has a name given to it from outside. We call these names of things, of persons; these names sound to our ears from the outside. Now there is a name that cannot be used in this way, that only a mouth can pronounce, the mouth of the one person whose essence is to be described: we only say “I” about ourselves - each one for himself. We say “I” about no one else. And this little word describes the very core that we have in common with no other being on earth. No animal has an ego. This ego, which can only be heard in every single soul, has been called the “divine substance” by all deep worldviews. This fourth part of the human being is therefore its divine core. But just as a drop of water is not a sea, such a divine core is not a god.

But in this fourth link there is something that is of the same substance as that which the world lives and weaves through, this fourth link, through which man stands out above everything - every sensible poet has spoken wonderfully about this fourth link, for example Jean Paul, when he recognized as a child: “I am a I.” - If we know this, we can understand much of the riddles of life.

Furthermore, the juxtaposition of waking and sleeping on the one hand and life and death on the other is significant and profound. What does waking and sleeping mean? The waking person stands before us in such a way that his four limbs are interwoven and work together. When a person falls asleep, the outer world, the soul world, sinks into an indeterminate darkness. The I and the astral body detach themselves from the lower limbs and live in a spiritual world during sleep.

Why does man know nothing of this life in the spiritual world? Because he has no organs in his astral body and all his perceptions can only be made through his physical organs. And these cannot be applied in the spiritual world. To acquire such organs of the astral body, intimate soul processes are needed. My writing 'How to Know Higher Worlds' talks about this. But once the astral body has formed organs, it also possesses them during sleep. The eye was created by the light; in the same way, the soul can also create organs for itself through exercises, and we call a person with such higher organs a seer.

During the night, the human being draws the strength to be able to live at all. While awake, the astral body, which is completely immersed in the physical and etheric, gives its own powers to these. Now it has to replenish what it has used up, and it can only do so in the spiritual and astral worlds. The etheric body, which is the creator of the physical body, also needs a replacement for its powers. But it cannot leave the physical body as long as the physical body lives in the physical world. Now there is a law that was formulated many years ago by an Italian, Francesco Redi: “Living things come only from living things.” This seems obvious to us. At that time, however, it was not obvious, because it was believed that earthworms came from mud. Francesco Redi was considered a scientific heretic. Today, Theosophy says: spiritual things only come from spiritual things. Now the same thing happens as when Francesco Redi contradicted the common belief based on his more precise observation. Today's scientists think we are fools and fantasists. But theosophical belief that the soul-spiritual comes only from soul-spiritual will one day be as self-evident as Francesco Redi's view has become today. But for us, strength, confidence and consolation may arise from it. More precise observation proved the superstition, and only inaccurate observation can say that man comes only from his parents. No, the soul-spiritual comes only from soul-spiritual. And with that, the realization of re-embodiment is connected. That which lives in us as soul-spiritual is the repetition of soul-spiritual that was there before, and at the same time is the cause of what is to come. The two higher members thus work their way into the human being, and that gives abilities. But this happens in a very special way because it is of soul and spiritual origin.

While the two higher members leave the etheric body and physical body when falling asleep, at death the separation is extended to the etheric body as well, and only the physical body remains behind. Now accept something with the same faith that you have in scientific researchers. When the physical body is released at death, the memory tableau of the human soul comes to the fore, because the etheric body is the carrier of memory, and this power now works intensely without influencing the coarse physical substance; a similar thing can happen when someone is about to drown or in the event of a nervous shock.

This memory tableau of the whole life lasts only a short time, then the etheric body leaves the astral body, and only a summary of the acquired abilities of the past life joins the astral body and remains for eternity. This is followed by the time of purification, during which the soul relives the life again and gets to know every suffering it has caused to other people as an obstacle to development and feels it as its own suffering, and thereby receives the impulse to make amends. After that, the ego, now connected to the life fruits of the ether body and the impulses for reparation of the astral body, enters devachan, the kingdom of heaven, and dwells there for a long time until the will to enter reality becomes so powerful that a new embodiment occurs. [Gap in the text basis]

The world is interwoven with spirit – only from spirit can we create spirit. Human wisdom can be found out there in nature. Just as wasps make paper, swallows build walls, and bees build – we absorb spirit from the outside, we are fertilized by this spirit, we are always absorbing. Just as the whole life of a plant is concentrated in its blossoms and comes to fruition in its fruit, and just as so many plants die while producing seeds, developing germs for new plants, the same happens throughout life in humans. The soul of the human being unites with the spirit of the world, what has been brought from the past is like a scaffolding. The eternal self begins to connect with the outside world and becomes new. Gradually the scaffolding will lose its significance, the soul-spiritual contracts more and more and now ascends to a higher level. But the new needs the new, the old must fall away. The body, which is the result of the earlier, must fall. Nature in its spirituality has invented death in order to have much life. A necessity for development is the death of man – animal and plant death are something else. And so death becomes something that guarantees us the opportunity for development.

Under this condition, much that was previously dark is understood, including the Old and New Testaments, these supreme books of humanity. — Eating from the tree of life is forbidden to man, because otherwise he would have to stop in his development.

Death is only a transformation of the human form; external science cannot comprehend death because it eludes the external organs as it destroys them. But working on the astral body can create psychic organs, and the experiences of the seer are then the same as those of death:

Tell it to no one, only to the wise,
Because the masses immediately mock,
I will praise the living,
That longs for death by flames.

And so long as you do not have that,
This dying and becoming!
If you are only a gloomy guest
On the dark earth.

Theosophical knowledge, however, transforms human hearts; love revives in them, that love that is not only preached but is lived. Generalized expressions are nothing. We must penetrate step by step, seeking the spirit and understanding what it reveals. Man ascends ever higher—his life is eternal and is subject to the law of karma. This is not exactly translated by the law of cause and effect, when all experience is conditioned by previous ones.

You might ask: if this conditionality exists, why do you help one another? — Because we foresee the effect for the future, that is why human help is so consoling, and because we know that it has an eternal effect, that is why we must provide it wherever we can. We will be able to help a small number of people if we are an ordinary person. But a higher being will be able to help many people, and His love, which was revealed at Calvary, shows us the way we should go to become helpers to the many.

But the secret of death becomes for us the key of life, because the perishable must fall, so that the eternal can grow and develop to ever greater heights.

Dear attendees,

When a person looks beyond the usual work of the day, which is his duty from morning to evening, then those great questions, those great questions with what we can call human destiny, which a person must face when he considers the highest goals, may well come to his soul.

One of these questions is undoubtedly that concerning the nature of knowledge. The question of what distinguishes man from the beings around him is connected with his dignity and his nature. And when man asks himself about the value and significance of knowledge for the knowledge gained from daily experiences, he does not need much reflection. Even where knowledge does not relate to daily life, it is of the utmost value to him. Am I just an idle spectator of these insights into the laws of the world and so on? Do insights then still have value?

These are questions that arise before our soul this evening and should be considered in context. Firstly, the question of the value, meaning and essence of the human being; secondly, the question of mortality or immortality. Will the human being preserve himself beyond mortality? It is not vanity that raises this question, but the urge for higher knowledge. We see life sprouting and budding all around us, everywhere. But we also see death everywhere. In spring we see fresh germs rising, which grow larger and larger in summer. And when we look at autumn, we see a dying that spreads more and more over the winter. Geological excavations are witnesses to the fact that life was there, that death was there, and if we look back to Greek or another culture; where once there was fresh, joyful Greek life, death has poured over this artistic life. On the pictures of Raphael and Michelangelo, which give us such pleasure today, death will spread. Bit by bit, it will disappear. And chemistry and physics speak of the death of entire plant systems; everywhere, death is poured out.

A question arises: Is what has passed away futile? Has it fallen into nothingness? Is everything completely gone? You can use the cheap excuses: There is always something new coming, spring and so on. — Of course, but then you have to think more deeply. According to this interpretation, you can say: the forms change, but not in such a way that the old ones send something over to the new ones. The real question, however, is whether something of what lives and moves in the old passes over to the new. Especially with humans, we are interested in that.

We can assert one thing in the face of death: that the ordinary means of science cannot suffice to comprehend what extends beyond death. We initially comprehend only through our sensory organs. All science is tied to the knowledge of these organs, and these organs are precisely what death puts an end to. It is not surprising that ordinary science comes to a standstill at death; if ordinary science is not sufficient to answer the questions about death, then one must approach what spiritual science is, which is usually called theosophy.

We can only communicate if we take a look at the difference between ordinary science and spiritual science. How far can human knowledge go?, ordinary science asks; man can only go up to a certain limit, and this limit is formed by the organs. Spiritual science says: human knowledge is unlimited, according to the law of development. Development is the magic word. Form has developed out of other forms, and will continue to develop into ever different forms. In the human soul slumber forces and abilities, of them spiritual science speaks.

But what must we do to cross the boundary that is drawn for people today by their organs? Is it contradictory to say that forces and abilities lie dormant in people and that these can be developed? Is it contradictory to say that a blind person could have an operation that would open up colors and light to them? In the same way, organs can be opened in a person that open up spiritual light and spiritual colors for him, which is precisely an awakening. This applies to the person as well as to the blind man who has undergone the operation. There are as many worlds as the person can open up through his organs. Once these organs have been opened up, then the person can understand the nature of death.

Wakefulness and sleep, life and death, are four important words. The human mind easily passes over the first two, because people are too accustomed to them to think about them. The spiritual researcher is aware of the relationship between sleep and death, as it is often felt and has often been felt. What actually happens when a person passes from consciousness to unconsciousness? To answer that, we have to imagine the essence of a human being: firstly, the physical body, which humans have in common with all of nature; the same laws and so on. However, the physical body only follows these physical and chemical laws at the point of death. So there must be something in the physical body, a fighter that prevents the physical body from following these laws during life. Secondly, there is the etheric body.

The etheric body is shared with all living things, for example, the plant world. Thirdly, the astral body is shared with the entire animal world. It is the carrier of desires and passions. Fourthly, there is a small name that can never be used to refer to another being. This little word can only come from within oneself. That little word is 'I'. What lives in the I in man is the same as what lives in the whole universe; it is a part of it; but of course not “God”. From waking up to falling asleep, these members permeate each other. But when falling asleep, the human being, who is endowed with spiritual organs, can observe how the ego and the astral body withdraw into a spiritual world.

Why do the astral body and the ego leave the etheric body and the physical body?

We perceive only what our astral body experiences when we experience it as a reflection in our etheric body. Therefore, the astral body must submerge into the etheric body in the morning so that we can experience the world in the mirror image. The entire life of the soul arises through the interaction of the astral body with the physical and etheric bodies. Why do we get tired in the evening? Because our astral body is well able to interact with the etheric body, but because it tires, because the astral body cannot gain the strength to present all this to us from the physical body, it therefore plunges into the spiritual world every evening to get strength to build up our entire soul life during the day. We truly dive into our true home from evening till morning.

What can the astral body do with the powers it draws from the spiritual world? It can build up our soul life with them. Let us see how it builds up our soul life. What is necessary for the art of writing? We had to make many attempts to achieve this ability. We do not remember all the unsuccessful attempts we may have made, all the love we may have received in the process, with every writing. Abilities develop from such attempts; these are abilities of our own soul life. When the astral body submerges into the etheric body, our organs, both physical and etheric, are uninvolved. Think of the miracle of the heart, the larynx and so on. We could still have such subtle soul abilities as a musical sense, for example; we could not use them if we did not have the corresponding organ.

The work a person does on their astral body is complicated. It happens when a person receives impressions from outside. These are experiences of the soul that take place within the astral body, affects and so on. At a lower level, the ego is like the slave of the astral body, but this ego can work its way out. Let us compare a lower and a developed person. The latter rules over his astral body. The ego rules over, governs him, wresting him from the urges, desires and passions. We call this inner processing of external impressions. The ordinary person sees, tastes, smells what comes to him from outside, whether it is pleasant or unpleasant. But another person who processes such impressions in moments of stillness, only such a person can become richer and richer.

But one should not always work inward, for that would be to creep into one's inner being. That would not be the only right thing to do. Now one must go out of oneself again. What we feel inwardly becomes a store of wisdom that can be applied to the outer world, so that concepts and ideas arise within the human being, that is knowledge. First, these impressions must be collected, then processed within, and then applied to the outside world. Only then is a person in a position to let something new flow into them. Something opens up in our knowledge; sensory impressions tell us what is pleasant and what is unpleasant. But the I finds moral values by way of knowledge.

There it is, what martyrs died for. These concepts, these valuable contents, which man thus receives, were more valuable to him, more important than his life. These contents can be found by the ego if it makes itself independent of the organs, of the outside world. If this content is to permeate us completely, then we must be able to express what we have gained in this way. We cannot conjure it into our organs. It could not be absorbed into our flesh and blood. Only through a specific law could this happen.

In the seventeenth century, people still believed that lower animals were created from substances that surrounded these animals. This was scientifically assumed. For example, how bees arise: from rotten oxen, when you beat them, the bees grow out of them; from horses, hornets; from donkeys, wasps. This was written in the seventeenth century. In the seventeenth century, Francesco Redi said: Only from the living can the living arise. Today this is a matter of course, like all views that first have to be accepted. Only from the spiritual-mental can the spiritual-mental arise. “The earthworm arises from river mud.” This sentence represents the same ‘spiritual’ point of view as if one wanted to say: a person has all character traits, talents and so on from their father, mother, grandfather and grandmother.

You have to go back to the spiritual and mental seeds. But that is the past life. We have to look back at the life before the present one, and look forward to the life after the present one. That is the law of re-incarnation or reincarnation. This law will spread just like the one of Francesco Redi, who was almost burned at the stake in those days. Today it is no longer fashionable, at least not everywhere; today such creative minds are called fantasists or dreamers, perhaps even fools. Maybe so, but in a short time it will be accepted that spiritual-soul things can only arise from spiritual-soul things, just as living things can only arise from living things.

We are dealing with souls that have already gone through death once. It is different from sleeping at night. Now, after death, there is a transition through the spiritual world. Experiences that could not be utilized during life are now utilized, they are built up into a spiritual body. Now we build new organs for ourselves, we do not return to the old organs, as we do the morning after sleep. Now we build into the organs what we have conquered through knowledge.

The abilities of a young child become more and more apparent. Every human being is an individual puzzle to us. The result of the knowledge of the previous life is the human being. It comes out bit by bit; what the person has worked on is sent down from one life to the next.

You grow with what you create. This goes with you into the next life. With the insights gained in one life, man builds himself a scaffolding, so to speak. But nothing new would be built if what had been built once did not disintegrate. Thus we see in death a piece of life that life can always show us at a higher level. Passing through death, we can always build something new. And at the center is the self.

Why no memory? The I is the first supersensory faculty in us. Once we have recognized and understood the I, we can look back. This realization of the self brings consciousness of past lives on earth. From the life when the I is not just a word, from then on, one remembers the I. Immortality is of no use if you have no knowledge of immortality; the more you know about your self, about the inner core of your soul, the more, the higher knowledge you have of immortality. Thus, knowledge becomes the source of immortality. This doctrine of reincarnation gives us strength and security in our daily lives.

If yesterday was clear and open to you,
If today you feel free and strong,
You may hope for a tomorrow
That will be no less happy.

Orphic Primal Words: («Demon»)

As on the day you were born into the world,
The sun stood in greeting to the planets,
You have thrived and prospered ever since,
According to the law by which you came into being,
That is how you must be, you cannot escape it,
So said the Sibyls, so said the seers,
And no time and no might dismember the form that is shaped, which develops itself alive. (Goethe)

To the discerning eye, everyday things are the greatest mysteries. The deepest science is needed to solve the most mundane things. Natural science provides the basic key to solving many questions. Other questions can only be solved by spiritual science, to which is given the much-abused and much-misunderstood name of Theosophy. The great, gigantic fate that elevates man by crushing him is often called a sum of coincidences. Some grow up without care at their cradle, can only prove little services to their fellow human beings. Others are watched over by a caring love, their abilities are developed, they can lead a satisfying existence and become a useful member of the world. Why? The law of the interlinking of facts, causes and effects, is to be investigated for this.

Let us take a few cases. A person at the age of eighteen chooses a different profession than at the age of twelve. But after eight years, a disharmony arises. He is like an elastic ball that has been compressed and then expands again. This occurs as many years before as after the nodal point. Roughly in the middle of life, at 35 to 37 years of age, there is a kind of turning point. In this way, causes from youth have an effect in old age. In the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth year, one had youthful ideals that sank into life. This is not the reason for later dallying. Even if they are not fulfilled – for our soul they are not – they become strong forces in our soul. Thus a person grows up who is secure within himself. After mid-life, the fruit of such ideals can be a calm composure.

From seven to fourteen, authority is a vital need. What is true is then not through its reasons, but through a revered authority. There is also a certain emotional life: one takes joy in every flower, for there are divine spiritual beings behind them. From the mid-forties onwards, the opportunity arose to absorb what at that time became a firm character in the freshness of life. These things emerge so deeply as effects because they went so deeply into our soul. Experiences in the seventh year have effects in the evening of a person's life. But if we say: this is beautiful, this is ugly, then practically nothing results for the good of people. We should awaken the soul's need to do this or that. To do this, we delve a little deeper. We draw on this in our old age. We give the child provisions for old age. A great poet says: “What we have recognized with our intellect, we look up to with devotion.” We encounter devotion as an effect at a later age; we later spread an atmosphere of love and bliss.

Such connections are found in spiritual science. They are subject to the law of karma. It is possible to modify the above, for example, by getting married at twenty-three; but that does not overturn the law that governs the change of career at the age of eighteen.

In the seventeenth century, a law applied that has only now been refuted. It was thought that worms, insects and so on grew out of river mud. Today it is taken for granted that an earthworm germ is necessary for this. In the seventeenth century, it was believed that if you beat oxen bodies until they were tender, bees would come out; hornets would come out of horse corpses, and wasps would come out of donkeys. Francesco Redi, who died in Pisa in 1697, said: “Living things can only grow out of living things.” He was considered a formidable heretic.

This is how it is in the spiritual world: spiritual and soul-like qualities are passed on, drawing on the characteristics of the father and mother, thus fulfilling themselves. Now the law of karma is still outlawed; in later times people will not believe that it was ever not believed.

Development takes place between birth and death. Experiences are condensed into an ability, for example the ability to write. The individual experiences are forgotten. Experiences lead to a state of what happens without compulsion.

All sensory impressions, pleasure and pain, sink into unconsciousness during sleep. The soul life is ignited by external stimuli. During sleep there is unconsciousness because external impressions are silent. The spiritual researcher must consciously command silence with his will to the external impressions; but inwardly the soul must be filled with that which is stronger than external impressions. The first act is the emptying of the soul, the second is complete calm, otherwise there is a storm. Then comes the awakening of initiation. At a lower level, it is like someone born blind undergoing an operation. Then come spiritual facts, spiritual beings, then comes hearing and seeing with spiritual ears and eyes. Then comes knowledge of the other members of the human being.

During waking hours, we use up our soul forces; during sleep, we replace them and draw from our home world what replaces the used-up forces. During sleep, experiences are transformed and converted into essence as abilities, for example, of writing. We would never be able to develop if we did not sleep. When we fall asleep, the ego descends into the depths of consciousness. The astral body has its subconscious, the ego rests, the astral body submerges into its own world to transform our experiences. The astral body works in a way that we cannot work, transforming experiences into abilities. The ego cannot take care of its own development, cannot provide relationships with the environment. The ego peels itself out of the entire sphere of the environment. An accident that we do not understand is how the ego, which must renounce, relates to the environment. Accident is everything that can be spatially called sleep.

We step through the gateway of death with the extract.

Human life alternates between waking and sleeping. At night, people sink into a state of unconsciousness or subconsciousness. If they want to consciously experience this, they must first be able to suppress the external sensory impressions. To do this, the soul must be artificially emptied of all external impressions. Then, through the will, powerful, strong thoughts must be evoked in the soul. They must flash through the soul. Without a third element, something like an earthquake would be experienced, a shock. Through the will, a state of complete calm, a state of complete stillness, must now be created in the soul. Then the spiritual researcher experiences something similar to what happens at a lower level to a person born blind, who undergoes an operation and gains sight. Color and light flow in. This is what the spiritual researcher experiences. This is the awakening or initiation for him. Now he can judge about what lies behind the sense impressions. These are not dreams of feverish souls. Thus the spiritual eye is opened, the spiritual ear. This is easily judged wrongly, somewhat like a shell when it is first seen in the limestone. It has not grown out of the rock, but has been created by a water shell animal.

What is sleep and dying for the spiritual researcher? He first considers the nature of man, which consists of four limbs. The lowest limb is the physical body. The etheric or life body continuously prevents the body from falling prey to physical and chemical forces as in death. It paralyzes decay; it is a faithful friend between birth and death. No science prevents the assumption of higher limbs of man. Even if positive research were to show that carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen could be combined to form living protein substance, this result could not refute the higher limbs; it would not be a reason to deny the etheric body. In the space that a person fills with his or her being, not only the physical body and the etheric body are present, but also pleasure and pain, perceptions, ideas, instincts, and so on. They also fill this space. And as a fourth link, the ego, that name that cannot be called from the outside, to whom he belongs, who is also the unspeakable name of God: Jehovah-Yahweh.

We feel tired as soon as the astral body withdraws. Who lifts the hand up? The astral body at the behest of the ego. We see with the astral eye through the instrument of the body. Tiredness sets in where we want to apply the astral body, but where the physical body cannot go with us.

The first organ to fail when we fall asleep is the organ of speech. The inner self can no longer move the outer organ of the tongue. Then the senses of sight, taste and smell fail; finally, hearing, the most spiritual sense, is the last to go. The astral body, which governs everything, gradually slips out. As a person falls asleep, he can feel how external impressions cease. Then a total feeling of one's own being sets in. Mistakes, shortcomings and so on, the spiritual world holds the exterior up to him like a mirror. Then a feeling of bliss; then a twitch as a sign of entering into the spiritual world. Then unconsciousness. Then something can be perceived as a fine rain out of the spiritual world into the physical and etheric body. This is the regeneration, the restoration of that which showed itself as fatigue.

There are certain hypotheses that attribute fatigue to so-called fatigue substances. But this is like two people seeing one person slap another. One says, “I saw how he was boiling inside”; the other describes it like this: “I saw how he raised his hand and slapped him.” The legitimacy of external natural science is admitted, but behind everything external there is nevertheless that which directs and guides it.

In order to rebuild our entire soul life, the astral body draws its strength from the spiritual world at night. Again and again it returns to the spiritual world and carries into it from our daytime consciousness that which can enrich us.

Between 1770 and 1815, events took place that left some people indifferent, but which others processed. However, experiences cannot be processed if they are only simply experienced. They must be sunk into the ground, as it were, as seeds, and then grow like plants. The function of sleep must intervene, as it does between learning something by heart and really knowing it. The experiences must be sunk into the ground in sleep and then picked as experiences in waking, otherwise they remain chaotic like erratic blocks as experiences without wisdom. If you sleep too long, too many of the invisible forces are poured in. Such long sleepers become mentally obese. In spiritual and mental terms, this means that one wants to process too much without having anything. This results in dullness and sluggishness of thought.

Dreams arise when the astral body and the I have connected with the etheric body and not yet with the physical body. This is not to be imagined spatially. The second face also arises as a kind of reflection, as a vision, when the physical and etheric bodies do not merge. The etheric and astral bodies work together. The ego loosens and the astral body submerges into its own world. It is an abnormal intermediate state. If the immersion of the astral body into the visual field is imperfect, then deceptive intuitions arise. If the astral body does not submerge, the connection between the astral body and the etheric body is not in order, then visions arise.

Thus there is an unschooled, disorderly connection of the limbs. In the development between birth and death, almost everything relates to the inner soul abilities. Similar to Francesco Redi's sentence “Living things can only come from living things”, the sentence “Spiritual-soul things can only come from spiritual-soul things” can be formulated. Thus the spiritual soul of man between birth and death comes from a spiritual soul that was already working before birth. Before birth, man worked on the still plastic and malleable physical and etheric body, as he did on the soul body between birth and death. At death, the human being takes an extract of the etheric body with them into the spiritual world as malleable material. There, freed from the physical being, they can accomplish what they were unable to do between birth and death. They can incorporate everything into the spiritual archetype of a new physical body, into spiritual material. The fruit of the previous life can be woven into the etheric body and physical body of the new earthly life.

We must want death to happen. We must be grateful to death. It destroys the scaffolding that would only be a hindrance to our ascent. Goethe said:

Nature invented death in order to have much life.

The spiritual essence has invented death to make a perfection of human life possible. A great poet said:

Man is initially a shadow of a dream.

He has only the shadow of the dream, only the dream of the shadow. That is man of the outer sense world. But if he has a ray of knowledge and light, it becomes as bright as day for him, and joy radiates through all life.

Dear attendees! When I last had the honor of speaking to you here about the “mission of wrath” and “the mission of truth” for the human soul, I was able to refer to the saying of the great Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “You will never find the limits of the soul, and even if you walk through all the streets, so far are its territories.” And even in those days, the validity of this saying about the vastness of the human soul was proved by the fact that we can only penetrate to some extent into the complicated structure of our own soul if we first bring a little order, so to speak, into our consideration of the soul; that is, if we do not simply look at the soul as it presents itself to us — as a sum of surging sensations, feelings, urges, desires, of perceptions, of ideas, of ideals, and so on, but that we realize how this soul into three separate areas: what can be called the sentient soul within the human being, what can be called the mind or emotional soul, and finally the third, highest soul element, which can be called the consciousness soul. For these three different soul members have three completely different types of developmental conditions. And that which can teach us, so to speak, how one of these soul members develops is not at the same time suited to give us insight into the developmental laws and developmental conditions of the other of the soul members mentioned.

Our sentient soul initially presents itself to us as that which responds within us to external stimuli that confront us from both nature and human life, which first receives impressions from the outside world and then, on the basis of these impressions, develops what we can call the passions for something, the urges to do or want this or that. Everything that confronts us in the way of drives, desires, passions, in the form of an unordered soul life, however it unfolds even in the lowest human soul, we describe as the realm of the sentient soul.

When a person progresses in their development, when they become more inwardly focused, as it were, then what might be called the emergence of the intellectual or mind soul in relation to the sentient soul occurs. As long as a person gives way to anger in response to some external stimulus, as long as he is seized by the affect of fear in response to some external impression, we can only speak of the sentient soul.

But when a person independently processes the feelings and impressions of the external world within themselves, when, in addition to being devoted to the external world, they can also immerse themselves in themselves, combining the impressions of the external world, then they gradually rise above the mere surge of the sentient soul and comes to what can be called the rational control of instincts, desires and passions with ideas, which on the other hand can be described as a soothing, purifying of unbridled instincts and passions by the mind. In short, the mind or soul, which actually form a unity, are what elevates man above the mere sentient soul.

That such an elevation takes place, that man can, as it were, turn away from the outside and process the impressions within himself to a certain perfection, is taught us by the outer life when we consider an example such as the following. There were certainly many people who were contemporaries of the events from 1750 to 1815. Enormous upheavals of life occurred during that time. Let us take a closer look at those who experienced these events. They had an effect on their sentient soul. All those who were able to see them were carried away by the sensations and impressions. But only those who processed these impressions within themselves became wiser and richer in worldly wisdom and experience. They then faced the world in 1815 with a different inner soul life, with a clearer inner soul life than in about 1770. That is the elevation of the intellectual or mind soul out of the sentient soul.

If we only had this intellectual or emotional soul at work within us, then we would, so to speak, become more and more introspective. We would become richer in worldly wisdom and experience, but we would not come to know the world, as we call it, to recognize the great laws that lie behind things. We can only approach this by going out of ourselves again, , that we again permeate the impressions with what we have acquired in the way of life experience and worldly wisdom; and that occurs through the soul of consciousness, which leads the human being out of himself and into the world again. He allows the consciousness soul to prevail at the moment when he, so to speak, not only becomes richer and richer within himself in ideas, but also applies these ideas to into order and to penetrate it in such a way that the laws of existence, the laws of the world, gradually appear to him, so that he, as it were, connects with his consciousness soul to the outside world.

And if we ask ourselves – this too has already been mentioned – what is going on within us to bring these three soul elements into corresponding activity, to work one out of the other, to let one have an effect on the other? That which is at work within us is the actual human I, the actual bearer of human self-awareness.

But it is also this human I that is in a state of perpetual development. As it were, it still rests submerged in the sentient soul. As long as only the sentient soul rules, the I appears as a slave to this sentient soul, devoted to all impressions of the external world, overwhelmed by all the impressions of color, light and warmth, tyrannized by its passions, instincts and desires.

But then this I continues to work, even working to make the person more and more mature. By purifying the intellectual soul from the sentient soul, the I becomes more and more independent, it becomes more and more the master of the drives, desires and passions, and it is increasingly led to determine the direction and goal of life itself. Then the I works its way up to the consciousness soul, so to speak, to penetrate through the skin of the soul, as it were, and to reunite with the things, to live in the things and events of the world.

Thus we see that it is the I that reigns in these three soul members, and we emphasized in the last lectures - this is only briefly repeated today - that something like an affect, like anger, works through its own nature within the sentient soul in order to allow the I to develop in the right way. If a person initially surrenders to external impressions in such a way that he directly follows such an impression in the sense of the sentient soul, so that he erupts in anger, then this anger itself has an effect on his soul. We can experience that anger, because it obscures the I, because it takes away the full, clear, bright consciousness of the I, because it does not allow the I to emerge into completely selfish existence, thereby beneficially moderating this still undeveloped I. It is still entirely a slave to the sentient soul; it would abandon itself entirely to the ruling drives, and it dampens it down to a certain powerlessness, not letting it live itself out completely. By damping it, it actually does a good thing. If anger only led to the expression of the ego, then every time the ego was expressed, it would reinforce the ego in its selfishness, in its self-will.

In this sense, we could see the mission of anger as educating the ego. Anger poisons selfishness, as it were, by pushing the ego down. And we can find this in all affects, that they signify a kind of self-regulation of the soul or the ego.

And then we were able to point out how truth works in the human soul to educate the ego. Since truth is something that a person must fully understand within himself if he really wants to experience it in his own ego, he can only experience it by recognizing it within himself. Thus the I must live entirely within itself if it wants to arrive at a real truth. A million people can vote against the truth 3 x 3 = 9; if the I has grasped this truth within itself, then the I knows that 3 x 3 = 9, that it is true. In this way the I is completely within itself when it penetrates the truth.

But at the same time, truth is something that does not allow any selfishness or egoism to arise, but something that leads this ego out of itself at the same time. Truth is the only thing that must be experienced in the ego completely and that at the same time can make the ego completely unselfish. For once we have arrived with our ego at a truth that must be experienced in itself, then this truth does not belong only to the individual ego, but is a common property for each and every ego.

Thus truth is a powerful educator for the intellectual soul, because it leads the I out of selfishness and at the same time highly encourages the powers of selfhood. For truth can only be experienced in an I that wants to seek this truth in itself. Thus, in a certain sense, affects such as anger, when they are overcome and purified, can be seen as educators of the sentient soul, and truth as a powerful educator of the mind or mind soul.

Likewise, there is now an educator for the consciousness soul, for that in us which leads our I and thus our soul in turn completely out of us and allows us to grow together with the outer world, with that which does not rest in us but is outside of us, and with which we must grow together if we do not want to become desolate within ourselves. And today's meditation is to be devoted to the education of this third soul element.

Just as anger has the mission of dampening selfishness in the sentient soul in a certain respect, and as truth has the mission of guiding the I in the rational soul, both to be within itself and to instinct to express itself, then what we call devotion becomes the educator for the consciousness soul, showing the right way to reconnect with the outer world, with that which lies outside of our ego. Only when we recognize its purpose for this third of the human soul's members can devotion truly reveal itself to us. In order to be able to present the whole mission of devotion for the human soul, we must look a little deeper into the workings of our soul.

Devotion is, after all - already according to the use of the word - what allows man to go out of himself and penetrate into the other, which, above all, is first of all an unknown behind the visible, behind the perceptible. But we can only understand this devotion if we first ask ourselves: how must spiritual science, from whose point of view we are speaking here, understand this whole relationship of man or the human ego to the unknown?

It has been emphasized time and again from this point that spiritual science is called precisely to penetrate through the external world of physical reality to that which is initially unknown and hidden for this external physical reality. And it has been pointed out again and again that man can only penetrate into the unknown spiritual world behind the physical world by awakening the spiritual organs, the spiritual faculties of perception, in his soul itself, which lead beyond the sensual-physical.

And so that we can understand each other, I will only hint at a few words of what you will now find in great detail as a description of the path that the human soul can take into the spiritual world, both in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second section of the recently published “Occult Science”. What you will find there in detail is briefly hinted at here.

It will be hinted how man can become a spiritual researcher and make communications from the spiritual world when he cultivates his soul in such a way that the forces and abilities slumbering in it come to external activity. There man must, with his will and consciousness, evoke something that otherwise always occurs in everyday life without his will. The everyday event that takes place with a person without their will is that the surging perceptions, drives, passions, that pleasure and pain, cease to be conscious in the soul when the person finds themselves tired in the evening, and sink into an indeterminate darkness. At this time of falling asleep, external impressions cease. But instead, the human being sinks into the state of unconsciousness, or rather, the subconscious. His soul is empty of external impressions; but he also knows nothing, so to speak, of any world or inner experiences.

The spiritual researcher, the one who wants to live in the spiritual world, must be able to consciously and deliberately evoke that which takes place so spontaneously. He must consciously silence external impressions. He must also command all interests, all sympathies and antipathies with external impressions to stand still and be silent. The spiritual cognizer must voluntarily evoke in himself the same silence and cessation of external stimuli and impressions that occur when he falls asleep at night due to fatigue. But he must be present throughout all of this; he must be able to prevent, through his will and consciousness, that his consciousness passes into unconsciousness when he empties his soul of all external stimuli and impressions. He must, so to speak, be able to be conscious with an empty soul as he is otherwise conscious with a full soul that receives external impressions. So then, the spiritual researcher must have the strength to reject all external impressions, but still be able to consciously remain in the state of the empty soul. That is the first act that the spiritual researcher has to perform.

The second step is to allow a series of images and sensations and volitional impulses, which are described to him, to take effect on his soul. These images and sensations and volitional impulses, which he must now bring to life in his soul through his inner strength, are not there to reflect external impressions, to give an external truth. Anyone who were to look at them from this point of view would be very much mistaken. What must constitute the inner life of spiritual knowledge is an ascent of very definite, or, as I see it, symbolic concepts and ideas, etc., which have such a strong effect in the soul that they might indeed mightily shake up this soul life from within, shake it up more powerfully than all outer impressions and stimuli can shake up the soul life. That is the second act of spiritual knowledge, when the spiritual researcher can stimulate such experiences in himself that powerfully shake up his soul.

But this must not be the end. If the spiritual investigator were to stop at this act, he would not be able to ascend in truth to an insight into the spiritual world; he must add the third act, which consists in his power to would otherwise have an earthquake-like effect on his soul through mere inner contemplation, so that he transforms his entire soul life as if to an inner sea calm, to a complete [inner] calm. Then, when he is able to control and work on his soul inwardly, he will experience that something rises from his inner being, which can only be compared at a higher level to the outer senses at a lower level. Then – this has already been said several times – the spiritual world, which is always around him like color and light around the blind, will flood in as light and color flood into the eye of the blind who has undergone an operation.

In this way, then, can man penetrate into the spiritual world. Then the spiritual unknown, the spiritual facts and spiritual entities that prevail and are active behind the sensual-physical world, open up to him, which are not there for the merely sensual and intellectual perception of reality.

Now the human being is standing in the middle of a world of spiritual life. But at first this spiritual world is closed to the physical gaze and mind. We have to ask ourselves: What are the reasons for this spiritual world being closed to the physical gaze and mind of the human being? There are reasons for this, and these reasons will become clear to us when we ask ourselves: Well, where in ordinary life do we encounter that which stands like a boundary between the physical and the spiritual world?

We encounter it at precisely the moment we described earlier. What does the spiritual researcher actually do when he activates his inner soul powers? He makes the moment that otherwise occurs involuntarily for a person, the moment of falling asleep, into a conscious one, and what otherwise occurs through falling asleep is shaped by the spiritual researcher into a supreme experience. In ordinary consciousness, everything that a person could possibly experience sinks into unconscious darkness when falling asleep. In the world into which the human being plunges every night, and in which he dwells during sleep, he could perceive the spiritual world. For it has been shown here many times that precisely that which we call the 'soul being' lifts itself out of the physical body and out of what is connected with it, out of the etheric or life body, but at the moment when what we call the soul being lifts itself out with sleep, for the person in normal consciousness, consciousness itself ceases, that is to say, the world into which he enters is shrouded in a veil so that he cannot see it. But the person who becomes a spiritual researcher sees into this world!

And how does a person attain consciousness of the external world? He attains consciousness of the external world when he submerges himself in his physical body in the morning and makes use of his physical organs and the physical mind that is connected to the brain. But in doing so, he is bound to the limits of the physical organs. The spiritual researcher, on the other hand, once he has achieved what has just been outlined, when he has acquired these inner abilities, he in turn returns to his physical body, so that he no longer needs to perceive only through the physical senses, but can perceive his environment directly with the inner organs of the soul. In this way he sees behind that which extends in the outer world like a boundary and obscures the actual spiritual world. The spiritual researcher learns to see behind every color into that which the color presents to us; the spiritual researcher hears behind every sound that which stands behind it as a spiritual being. He sees behind every perceptible impression. The world becomes crystal clear to him. And when he sees through the carpet of the external world, spiritual beings and realities are revealed to him.

When the spiritual researcher penetrates into the spiritual world, there is no way for him to avoid – without running the risk of being shipwrecked – but to undergo two important experiences in the course of his initiation or development in spiritual research. These two important experiences are also described in more detail in the two books mentioned earlier. These are the ones who are called the guardians of the threshold.

It is the case that before a person's inner soul abilities awaken in the right way, before he is able to dive down into that darkness in sleep, before he perceives the reality behind it, he must meet with what is called the little guardian of the threshold. This is the perception through which the human being's own being clearly and distinctly comes before the soul in real self-knowledge. Through this, the human being learns to understand what he actually is. Above all, he comes to know what can be called real individual knowledge of karma and reincarnation. The human being learns to recognize how he has gone from life to life before entering this life, and learns to recognize how he has inscribed this or that in his soul in past lives as his karma by living in one way or another, true or laden with error, surrendering to beautiful or ugly impressions, performing good or evil deeds in past lives. Depending on how he has lived, he learns to recognize what his soul has inscribed in itself and what it still has to go through in order to eliminate all error, all that which would prevent the soul from reaching a certain level of perfection. Everything that the soul has of imperfections within itself, the person gets to know there as a kind of second self, as something that he has to overcome, as a kind of doppelganger, of which he knows exactly: you have to overcome that, otherwise you will never reach the goal of the human life path.

This encounter with one's own double would be a harrowing, terrible event for a person if they were not sufficiently prepared. Spiritual science ensures that a person only comes to see this Guardian of the Threshold in his true form when they are sufficiently prepared. And one should not enter into one's own human soul life before one has made this experience, how imperfect one must be through one's whole past life. Through this, that is developed in us which enables us to enter into the own powers of the soul without danger.

What would happen if we were to enter the underworld of the soul without this encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold? Something would happen that would be very destructive for the human being. Let us assume that, through some event, a person enters into the supersensible spiritual abilities of his soul without having met the little guardian of the threshold. In that case, however, this entering would not be able to undergo all that attenuation, all that purification, which is only possible if we have a double of ourselves in our entire imperfection. Then the good qualities of our soul would not emerge to mitigate, so to speak, all that which rules in our ego and is woven from selfish impulses and drives that only take our ego into account. If a person were to descend into his ego without first becoming acquainted with the Guardian of the Threshold, it would mean that all the evil aspects of his nature would be stirred up in him. All the evil impulses of his nature that he is capable of would be awakened in him. All the arrogance, vanity and mendacity rooted in his soul would assert themselves with a mighty force. And man would become, to the highest degree, a being that consumes and burns itself through its own selfishness; man would perish in his own selfishness; he would bring himself into such a conflict with the world that he would first consume himself in his own selfishness. This is what can characterize us, as if man enjoys a certain benefit in his life in that his consciousness is darkened when he falls asleep. If he did not dwell unconsciously in sleep, he would draw from the world, in which he would then be conscious, a continuous increase of his egoism and his untruthfulness.

Now, for all the things that have to occur, so to speak, at a higher level of human development, there are weak imprints in ordinary life, something like preparations. We can say that even if a person in this embodiment has no inclination to go beyond the ordinary life to a higher level of consciousness, he can still always prepare for it, even in this life. And a preparation for this descent into one's own soul, a preparation that works in such a way that it protects the normal outer soul, so to speak, from sinking into complete selfishness and untruthfulness, is everything that we take into our sentient soul in the way of feelings and emotions of humility.

Humility is an effective means of self-education in that, when we let it prevail in our conscious daily life, when we let humility permeate our soul, it imbues our soul life with a soul substance that prevents the soul from drawing all the forces of selfishness out of the ego when it descends into the spiritual world. That is why humility is so highly recommended as a preparatory quality for all those who want to prepare themselves in their ordinary waking lives to gradually enable their soul to become selfless even in places where it might otherwise become selfish.

Through everything that we pour into our soul as humility, we also make our encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold easier for ourselves. We make it easier for ourselves by becoming aware of our imperfection while we are still awake, and so we do not find the Guardian standing before us in such a terribly repulsive form. We, so to speak, strip away his horror.

Thus humility is a good educational tool for descending into our own soul, into its depths, which otherwise remain closed to us for our own good. As long as we are immature, they must remain closed if we do not want to suffer shipwreck in life. This is, as it were, a kind of boundary downwards, towards that 'below' which we have to describe as that which lies in the depths of our soul life, which is hidden from ourselves when we are asleep.

But there is another boundary; and this comes to our mind when we once again familiarize ourselves with what has just been outlined. It was said that the spiritual researcher is not dependent on mere physical perception, on mere thinking with the mind, when he returns to the physical body, but that he is able to bring out soul abilities, inner abilities, through which he can see through to the spiritual foundations, to the spiritual entities and facts of the world. These now also close themselves to the outer gaze of people in the normal state of consciousness. Why is this so? They close themselves for the reason that if man were to stand unprepared before that which exists behind the sense world as its primal foundations, he would be blinded, as if destroyed.

The path that shows us, so to speak, in the mildest form, how man steps out of his ordinary physical abilities, as it were, and faces the outside world spiritually, is the path of what is called ecstasy. This is not really good. It does, however, lead a person to rise in a certain way above his physical seeing and hearing and grasping and understanding to a kind of spiritual vision of the external world, but this ecstasy, as it is so often described, obscures the direct consciousness of the self. The person is then out of himself; he does not carry his self into the world of spiritual experiences. Just as sleep spreads a veil over what we would experience to our detriment, because we would have to become selfish as a result, so the veil of external reality spreads over the spiritual world behind it, and this also occurs as a beneficial effect for the person who wanted to approach this spiritual world unprepared.

But anyone who wants to enter into this spiritual realm as a true spiritual researcher will have a different encounter. It is the encounter with the so-called great or greater guardian of the threshold. This is what shows us, at the moment when we break through, so to speak, the ordinary looking and ordinary understanding, how far we are from a complete understanding of the world. Then we encounter the great guardian of the threshold. And he clearly instructs us that we should no longer ask all those questions about the ultimate reasons so easily, that we should no longer curiously enter behind the veil of existence without first carefully and slowly weaving and working from step to step on the abilities that lead us up, in order to slowly gain insights from world to world. Then we learn through this Great Guardian of the Threshold — he shall be characterized here only from this point of view — what abilities we still lack to penetrate into the spiritual world. At the same time we receive instructions on how to develop what we do not yet have. The self-perfection to which we must submit presents itself to us with all clarity through what is called the greater guardian of the threshold.

Now, however, man can also prepare himself for this degree of higher experience, for this degree of penetration into all the spiritual undercurrents, into the great unknown beings, in his ordinary, so-to-speak normal consciousness. And because everything in humanity is geared towards development, our ordinary life also contains that through which we may approach the secrets of existence, the unknown worlds that lie behind the realities of the senses. This is contained within us like a teacher who can gradually lead us to soften the impression of the greater Dweller of the Threshold. Just as we, when we are led as a humble one to the lesser guardian of the threshold, can soften this encounter, who then does not appear to us in his gruesome form, in which he would otherwise crudely present us with the doppelganger of our imperfections, so we can soften that other encounter with the greater guardian of the threshold, whom every human being must meet in the course of his development. We can also soften the impression of that great, powerful figure, which shows us through its glory, through the way it confronts us when it tells us: “This is how you must become” — which shows us precisely through its majesty what we still have to develop. We will not be repelled with fear and terror as before a cherubim with a fiery sword if we are properly prepared. And unconsciously, people who are on the right path in life, on the path of true inner morality, are always preparing for this great moment.

And what prepares us in our consciousness soul to emerge in the right way in this consciousness soul with the I, not only into physical reality, but into spiritual reality, in order to be allowed to acquire spiritual knowledge, that is what is meant by the word 'devotion'. Devotion is the stirring of inner impulses in the soul for the unknown, for us insofar as we cannot yet understand it. If we had nothing within us that pointed us to what we cannot yet understand, then the urge and the longing could not awaken to come to the unknown. Everything that we want to understand one day and can only understand when we have entered into it must first work in us in a dark way, like a yearning. That which draws us to that which we are not yet equal to, beneath which we still stand, outside of which we find ourselves, that is devotion. We can be truly devoted precisely to that which we know: we do not yet penetrate it with our soul powers, with our knowledge. But then this devotion is something that brings us precisely in the right way to the subject, so that we enter it in a dignified way, so that we can gain true, non-trivial knowledge from it.

It is understandable from the outset that all knowledge must be preceded by something like such a feeling. A person need only consider that, while man must understand everything through logic, that is, one must approach everything through logical thinking, that logic is what can prove everything in existence to us. But what does logic itself prove to us? If we are not to arrive at the self-contradiction that logic proves itself, then we must assume that there is something in the human soul other than mere logic, which in turn is proved by logic. Logic can only be proved by something that itself has nothing to do with logic. And that is in man that which can be called his original, healthy sense of truth. Thus, the logical ultimately leads us back to feeling. All understanding leads us back to feeling.

If we are sincere, we cannot get beyond this. Therefore, it should not surprise us if the first thing that occurs to us when we have the highest knowledge of an unknown behind things is that devotional feeling that we call devotion. And when this devotion, which rules and works in us and moves our soul, before we have recognized something that we reverently worship, when this feeling itself is what leads us up, so to speak, up the mountain to what then yields to our recognition – that is devotion in the highest sense of the word.

But everything that confronts us in the highest style also confronts us in the first outward form. And so devotion in its highest perfection is indeed that which lives in us as a yearning devotion to an unknown, so that it may one day reveal itself to us when we are ready for it, but it is present to a lesser degree in relation to everything that we have not yet recognized, even in the ordinary external world.

When, for example, a younger person looks up to an older, more experienced one, he cannot, of course, see beyond him; for it is vanity, if we believe, sometimes even very much out of today's consciousness of time, to be able to judge everything at any level of existence. For anyone who has a concept of knowledge, it seems strange when someone, for example, believes that they can describe a comprehensive personality like Goethe biographically, because the point is that we can basically only understand someone to whom we have already made ourselves equal. If we were unable to develop a relationship with someone to whom we have not yet made ourselves equal, then we would not be able to understand them at all.

But the human soul is so constituted: if it retains its healthy feelings, then it can long revere a thing, devote itself to it devoutly, before it recognizes the same. And so it is with all maturing of the human soul. And those who look at life in its even most external depths will find this confirmed, which has been emphasized here many times: that in later life one always remembers again and again with such gratitude the hours and moments of childhood in which one could so reverently worship this or that human being, this or that personality.

It will always be a great moment when a person is able to experience in the circle of his family the veneration of this or that personality with whom one is acquainted. The child may not yet have seen this personality, so has not even enjoyed the external impression; it looks up, so to speak, from the stories about what one can see, as if to a complete stranger. Then it experiences the day in such a way that it first gains an impression of the previously revered personality in the external experience. Then it may stand with shy reverence at the door handle that is to give it access to the personality it has learned to revere. When the child has had these feelings, it also approaches the external impression in a completely different way, then something of the wonderful radiance that our soul can radiate is present where it first develops devotion and worship before approaching the object.

Devotion and reverence are something wonderfully luminous that can cast a wonderful radiance [on that] which we encounter only later. One remembers – as I just said – back to the greatest moments of one's childhood, to just such moments when one has truly learned to revere even in the face of what one may encounter in the outside world. And so, in these seeds of devotion, we have a small reflection of what that all-encompassing devotion can give, which builds up to that which must remain more or less unknown to us. Even if it has already opened up to us to a certain extent as knowledge of the spiritual world, something still remains unknown to us; for behind every known thing there is again an unknown. Even the ordinary devotions are a reflection of this comprehensive devotion, with which our soul strives towards the unknown before it can fully penetrate into this unknown.

Thus, in devotion, we have a power that enables us to take the path to the unknown. And since it is true that the spiritual and the unknown give rise to powers and abilities that are known and evident in the outer human senses, it is also the case that our own powers, which flow to us from the spiritual world, can only flow to us if we seek the right path to this spiritual world ourselves, the path through devotion. Even in the ordinary life, as it presents itself to us between birth and death, we can find the healing power of devotion.

If we look at life in this way, we have to say that, alongside all the other moods that can be developed for the world, alongside the moods of joy and pleasure, alongside the moods of exultation and enthusiasm, it is also possible to develop the mood of devotion in the face of the phenomena of existence, whether familiar or unfamiliar. We encounter this, for example, in poetry, in the fact that alongside the song of jubilation, alongside joy and delight, there are also hymns and odes. It confronts us in all the arts, and we may say: just as there are works of art that affirm us, as it were, in how we are the same and akin to the things of existence, so there are also works of art that evoke in us an inkling of how we can strive for the highest, that draw us, as it were, towards a highest.

Thus, we encounter sufficient occasions for devotion throughout life; and we should observe this in life; above all, we should not ignore it in a true life pedagogy, because it is important that we absorb into our life destiny in our childhood that which devotion can give us.

If we observe life between birth and death, we can find what is called karma, the great law of fate, which presents itself to us as a chain of spiritual causes and effects; but it presents itself in a very peculiar way. For example, certain things that are laid down as causes in early youth present themselves in later life as effects. What we may absorb in childhood through this or that only emerges as an effect in old age. And the effects are not the same, but such that we must first understand the connection between cause and effect.

The young person who grows up, educated in the right way and without what is distorted into some dark side of devotion, who grows up in the right devotion, will notice that this is transformed into something else in his soul. We can see this in a more intimate knowledge of life, here or there, that this or that person enters into a group of other people – perhaps he says little or nothing – but his presence already pours out what can be called a beneficent element. The presence of such a person blesses and delights those around him. What radiates from him spiritually has come into him.

But this power of blessing does not come into a person's later life if it is not rooted in what we have developed in our youth as the mood of devotion. Devotion in youth transforms itself throughout life into the power to bless in old age. This is a karmic connection that we encounter between birth and death. We do not need to know this only from spiritual science; anyone who knows life can see it everywhere. We could put it in symbolic words: Those who have not been able to worship devoutly with bowed knees and clasped hands in their youth will never be able to stretch out their hands to bless. The bowed knees and clasped hands of youth are the cause that, in old age, transform into blessing hands. This is one of our wisdoms of life. There we see one of those forces that come to us from the spiritual world, even if we are not yet able to see into it. Devotion first leads us up into the spiritual world, which is still closed to our vision because the greater guardian of the threshold is not allowed to show himself to us. It closes itself to us, but sends us out of itself the forces that, in their all-pervasive effects, emerge from our actions themselves.

In this way we can develop within us a mood of devotion towards an unknown world. Perhaps we will not yet be able to penetrate to an understanding of it, but it pours out forces from itself, which are transformed in our soul and become impulses for our outer life. Just as when we fall asleep tired in the evening and wake up refreshed in the morning, just as the night brings us refreshment, just as what comes out of us makes our tired arms able to work again, so it is in our outer life when we know how to relate to the unknown worlds — which we are not yet able to see into, which stand behind the reality of the senses — when we approach them devoutly. Thus they may, like a gentle sleep, veil their powers from our consciousness; but they give us their powers. And it is through devotion that we can make our way to unknown worlds and that opens up the powers of these unknown worlds to us, thereby bringing us out of ourselves with our ego and making us capable of being effective in the outer world. Thus we approach the unknown worlds with our devout ego. Our I is enriched by them with that which can bring us together with the world again. We become more powerful, stronger, more vigorous through what devotion gives us.

This is the mission of devotion for the soul element that we call the consciousness soul and through which we in turn step out of ourselves and pour our ego into the outside world, as it were. We owe everything that makes us fruitful for the outside world to our devotional moods towards that which is worthy of worship. And the person who cannot be devout will not be able to intervene [in life]. There will be people who will come and say: Yes, I don't succeed at anything, people don't believe in me, people don't want to understand me. Then one falls back on appearances, which prove themselves, but not on the reasons. The reasons lie in the fact that such people, who feel compelled to feel misunderstood, have never been able to find the mood of devotion within themselves. This is the mission of devotion for the education of our ego to grow together with the world.

Thus we first grow unconsciously into the world through the forces that devotion gives us, in order to gradually approach the spiritual world itself, when we have matured through what devotion produces in us. But we must also be clear about the fact that devotion in a certain sense leads the ego out of itself, and that a person who wants to follow the right paths in the world must never divest himself of his ego in the present period of development, because the ego gives him the ability to judge, the right power of deduction, and the possibility to place himself in the world without confusion. Therefore, anyone who has an inclination to indulge in devotional moods must bear in mind that, while they may go as far as possible in the devotional mood, they must never lose themselves in devotion.

We can describe the two elements of devotion that are revealed to us in it as devotion, on the one hand, and love, on the other. When our soul is permeated and warmed by love for a being, that love is the one element that leads us to devotion; the devotion of the will is the other element that leads to devotion. And wherever love and devotion arise, they must also arise [as love and devotion] to the unknown; for there is an intimate connection between all beings, even between the lower beings and ourselves. What is in our soul consists of love and devotion, which can then be lived out as devotion. But we must not lose ourselves in devotion; we must enter into the mood of devotion while preserving our ego. If we do not do this, then we paralyze our will, then a weakening occurs instead of a strengthening of our will. If we approach things with a blind love that is not permeated with the soul, then this love becomes blind, then instead of knowledge we will come to a form of superstition, blind faith. And above all, if our love is not permeated and purified by intellect and mind, we will end up with what we can call unguided, unadvised love. But that is enthusiasm. It is the kind of thing that can ultimately escalate into delusion in the face of the unknown. Just as we are gradually condemned to spiritual powerlessness through a devotion or surrender in which we lose our ego, so we are seduced into erring in the world through our love, which is not illuminated by the deeds of the guide who is there for all our orientation: the soul of mind or soul of feeling.

We must not lose our will or our feelings, advised by reason, if the favorable effects of devotion are to occur, as described.

At the same time, it will be readily apparent that education in devotion, like devotion itself, necessitates something that is far removed from mere intellectualism. When a correct middle course must be found between good and evil, then what one might call the tact and sense of life always comes into play. Therefore, one will not be able to lead someone into devotion in the right way through abstract ideas, but only by pouring out one's whole soul, which in turn comes from a properly guided devotion. That is why, especially in the education of devotion, looking at the other devout person can have such a powerful effect, and why example must play such a great role here.

This is why devotion, where it should be cultivated, relies so heavily on being cultivated in community; this is also why a person walking alone through the world can find little opportunity for devotion. And just as devotion can easily develop in the contemplation of others, so it is also that which leads us out of ourselves and brings us together with other people, for nothing ignites our devotion more powerfully than when we can share it with others who are looking up to the same thing. In this way, devotion also leads our soul upwards to the heights, where it steps out of itself as the consciousness soul, where it enters into communion with the environment. In devotion, man has something that leads man out of himself, that frees him from mere selfish feeling, willing and thinking, that instructs him to have something in common with others in his ego, to which he can look up. This is the mission of devotion in human society. It leads from I to I, and, when it is fostered and cultivated in the right way, it pours a wonderful mood and atmosphere over a community.

Thus devotion plays the greatest conceivable role for man in both his ordinary and elevated life. And devotion also leads him up to the heights of life. This is what all those strive for who want to break through the outer sensual cover and enter the spiritual world. That is what they strive for through the longing and urge of devotion: to penetrate to that which they thus devoutly venerate, to be able to live with that which they first devoutly venerate; to be able to unite with that which one first devoutly venerates, to be able to stand in that which one first strives for from below. This has always been called mystica, spiritual union with the spiritual world, from which man comes, but with which he can consciously unite when he has gradually matured to do so. Mystical union was the lofty ideal of all spiritual aspirants. To all spiritual aspirants, that which lives and works in the human soul appeared as a feminine force that draws up in a devout mood to that which permeates and interweaves the world and can fertilize the soul as a masculine force. This is also what Goethe felt, based on his good knowledge of the mystical mood of human development, when he wrote the “Chorus mysticus” at the end of his life's work. There he wrote the words that, as if from unknown spiritual depths, resonate in our soul and present the riddle of our soul's striving and development to our mind's eye, telling us that everything we encounter in the external world is a parable for something eternal, that what is insufficient for sensual striving can be achieved through spiritual striving. What we cannot describe with words of the physical world is done when we come together with that which inspires us from the spiritual world. And then they fade away, these words, into that wonderful dictum that tells us: The soul is like an eternal feminine that allows itself to be fertilized by what lives as a masculine in the secrets of the world, behind sensual existence. Thus, Goethe's “Chorus mysticus” sounds to our ears like the great riddle of human development:

All that is
transient is but a parable,
the inadequate
here becomes an event,
the indescribable
here is done,
the eternal feminine
draws us on.

But when we learn from the understanding of the mission of devotion to grasp our own soul as it draws us as the eternal feminine towards the eternal masculine, which is to flow into us as world wisdom, then we also gain from this understanding of the mission of devotion this higher understanding of the real union with the eternal masculine in the world. And we feel certain, in the face of what unfolds as a world secret, that we can achieve this unio mystica through our spiritual striving and that we are approaching this unio mystica more and more through the mood of devotion, in order to experience it in the end.

And so, on the one hand, we hear Goethe's words when we contemplate the human soul:

The eternal feminine
Draws us up!

And so another saying rings true to us as the expression of the truth that flows from the unio mystica, which must impose itself on us when we receive the certainty that we can unite with the eternal masculine. As if in amplification of Goethe's saying, “The Eternal Feminine draws us upward,” he who is certain of the former attainment of the unio mystica will say, looking up to the mysteries of existence: The Eternal Masculine leads us upward!