The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The reversing of Egyptian remembrance into material forms by way of Arabism. The harmonizing of Egyptian remembrance. The Christian impulse of power in Rosicrucianism.

In the previous lectures wide reaches, both of human evolution and also of world evolution, were brought before our souls. We saw how mysterious connections in the evolution of the world are reflected in the civilizations of the different nations belonging to the post-Atlantean period. We saw how the first epoch of earthly development is reflected in the civilization of ancient India; the second, during which the separation of the sun from the earth took place, is reflected in the Persian civilization; and we have endeavoured, as far as time permitted, to sketch the various events of the Lemurian epoch—the third in the course of the earth's development—in which man received the foundations of his ego, which is reflected in the civilization of Egypt. It was pointed out that the initiation wisdom of ancient Egypt was a kind of remembrance of this, which was the first period of earthly evolution in which man participated. Then, coming to the fourth age, that in which the true union between body and spirit is so beautifully presented in the art of Greece, we showed it to be a reflection of what man experienced with the ancient gods, the beings we have described as Angels. Nothing remained that could be reflected in our age—the fifth—the age now running its course. Secret connections do, however, exist between the different periods of post Atlantean civilization; these we have already touched on in the first of these lectures.

You may recall how it was stated that the confinement of the people of the present day to their own immediate surroundings, that is, to the materialistic belief that reality is only to be found between life and death, can be traced to the circumstance of the Egyptians having bestowed so much care on the preservation of the bodies of the dead. They tried at that time to preserve the physical form of man, and this has not been without an effect on souls after death. When the bodily form is thus preserved the soul after death is still connected in a certain way with the form it bore during life. Thought-forms are called up in the soul, these cling to the sensible form, and when the person incarnates again and again and the soul enters into new bodies these thought-forms endure.

All that the human soul experienced when it looked down from spiritual heights upon its corpse is firmly rooted within it, hence it has not been able to unlearn this, nor to turn away from the vision which bound it to the flesh. The result has been that countless souls who were incorporated in ancient Egypt are born again with the fruits of this vision, and can only believe in the reality of the physical body. This was firmly implanted in souls at that time. Things that take place in one age of culture are by no means unconnected with the ages that follow.

Suppose that we represent here the seven consecutive cultural periods of post-Atlantean civilization by a line. The fourth age, which is exactly in the middle, occupies an exceptional position.

We have only to consider this age exoterically to see that in it the most wonderful physical things have been produced, things by which man has conquered the physical world in a unique and harmonious way. Looking back to the Egyptian pyramids we observe a type of geometric form which demonstrates certain things symbolically. The close union of spirit—the formative human spirit—and the physical form had not yet been completed. We see this with special clearness in the Sphinx, the origin of which is to be traced to a remembrance of the Atlantean etheric human form. In its physical form the Sphinx gives us no direct conviction of this union, although it is a great human conception; in it we see the thought embodied that man is still animal-like below and only attains to what is human in the etheric head.

What confronts us on the physical plane is ennobled in the fourth age in the forms of Greek plastic art; and the moral life, the destiny of man, we find depicted in the Greek tragedies. In them we see the inner life of the spirit played out upon the physical plane in a very wonderful way; we see the meaning of earthly evolution in so far as the gods are connected with it.

So long as the earth was a part of the sun, high Sun-Spirits were united with the human race. By the end of the Atlantean epoch these exalted Beings had gradually faded, step by step, along with the sun, from the consciousness of man. Human consciousness was no longer capable of reaching up after death to the high realms where vision of the Sun-Spirits was possible. Assuming that we are at the standpoint of these Beings (which we can be in spirit), we can picture them saying: We were once united with humanity but had to withdraw from them for a time. The divine world had to disappear from human consciousness so as to re-appear in a newer, higher form through the Christ-Impulse.

A man who belonged to Grecian civilization was incapable as yet of understanding what was to come to earth through the Christ; but an Initiate, one who, as we have seen, knew the Christ aforetime, could say: That spiritual form which was preserved in men's minds as Osiris had to disappear for a time from the sight of man, the horizon of the Gods had to be darkened, but within us dwells the sure consciousness that the glory of God will appear again on earth. This certainty was the result of the cosmic consciousness which men possessed and the consciousness of the withdrawal of the glory of God and of its return is reflected in Greek tragedy.

We see man here represented as the image of the Gods, we see how he lives, strives, and has a tragic end. At the same time the tragedy holds within it the idea that man will yet conquer through his spiritual power. The drama was intended as a presentation of living and dying humanity, and at the same time it reflected man's whole relationship to the universe. In every realm of Greek culture we see this union between things of the spirit and things of the senses. It was a unique age in post-Atlantean civilization.

It is remarkable how certain phenomena of the third age are connected as by underground channels with our own, the fifth age. Certain things which were sown as seed during the Egyptian age are re-appearing in our own; others which were sown as seed during the Persian age will appear in the sixth; and things belonging to the first epoch will return in the seventh. Everything has a deep and law-filled connection, the past pointing always to the future. This connection will best be realized if we explain it by referring to the two extremes, those things connecting the first and the seventh age. Let us turn back to the first age and consider, not what history tells us, but what really existed in ancient pre-Vedic times.

Everything that appeared later had been first prepared for; this was especially the case with the division of mankind into castes. Europeans may feel strong objections to the caste system, but it was justified in the civilization of that time, and is profoundly connected with human karma. The souls coming over from Atlantis were really of very different values, and in some respects it was suitable for these souls, of whom some were at a more advanced stage than others, to be divided in accordance with the karma they had previously stored up for themselves. In that far off age humanity was not left to itself as it is now, but was really led and guided in its development in a much higher way than is generally supposed. At that time highly advanced individuals, whom we call the Rishis, understood the value of souls, and the difference there is between the various categories of souls. At the bottom of the division into castes lies a well-founded cosmic law. Though to a later age this may seem harsh, in that far-off time, when the guidance of humanity was spiritual, the caste principle was entirely suited to human nature.

It is true that in the normal evolution of man those who lived over into a new age with a particular karma came also into a particular caste, and it is also true that a man could only rise above any special caste if he underwent a process of initiation. Only when he attained a stage where he was able to strip off that which was the cause of his karma, only when he lived in Yoga, could the difference in caste, under certain circumstances, be overcome. Let us keep in mind the Anthroposophical principle which lays down that we must put aside all criticism of the facts of evolution and strive only to understand them. However had the impression this division into castes makes on us at the present time, there was every justification for it, and it has to be taken in connection with a far-reaching and just arrangement regarding the human race.

When a person speaks of races today he speaks of something that is no longer quite correct; even in Theosophical handbooks great mistakes are made on this subject. In them it is said that our evolution runs its course in Rounds, that in each Round there are Globes, and in each Globe, Races which develop one after the other—so that we have races in each epoch of the earth's evolution.

But this is not the case. Even in regard to present humanity there is no justification for speaking of a mere development of races. In the true sense of the word we can only speak of race development during the Atlantean epoch. People were so different in external physiognomy throughout the seven periods that one might speak rather of different forms than races. While it is true that the races have arisen through this, it is [in]correct to speak of races in the far back Lemurian epoch; and in our own epoch the idea of race will gradually disappear along with all the differences that are a relic of earlier times. We still speak of races, but all that remains of these today are relics of differences that existed in Atlantean times, and the idea of race has now lost its original meaning. What new idea is to arise in place of the present idea of race?

Humanity will be differentiated in the future even more than in the past; it will be divided into categories, but not in an arbitrary way; from their own spiritual inner capacities men will come to know that they must work together for the whole body corporate.

There will be categories and classes however fiercely class-war may rage today, among those who do not develop egoism but accept the spiritual life and evolve toward what is good a time will come when men will organize themselves voluntarily. They will say: One must do this, the other must do that. Division of work even to the smallest detail will take place; work will be so organized that a holder of this or that position will not find it necessary to impose his authority on others. All authority will be voluntarily recognized, so that in a small portion of humanity we shall again have divisions in the seventh age, which will recall the principle of castes, but in such a way that no one will feel forced into any caste, but each will say: I must undertake a part of the work of humanity, and leave another part to another—both will be equally recognized.

Humanity will be divided according to differences in intellect and morals; on this basis a spiritualized caste system will again appear. Led, as it were, through a secret channel, the seventh age will repeat that which arose prophetically in the first. The third, the Egyptian age, is connected in the same way with our own. Little as it may appear to a superficial view, all that was laid down during the Egyptian age re-appears in the present one. Most of the people living on the earth today were incarnated formerly in Egyptian bodies and experienced an Egyptian environment; having lived through other intermediate incarnations, they are now again on earth, and, in accordance with the laws we have indicated, they unconsciously remember what they experienced in Egypt.

All this is re-appearing now in a mysterious way, and if you are willing to recognize such secret connection of the great laws of the universe working from one civilization to another, you must make yourselves acquainted with the truth, not with all those legendary and fantastic ideas which are given out concerning the facts of human evolution.

People think too superficially about the spiritual progress of humanity. For example, someone remarks about Copernicus that a man with such ideas as his was possible, because in the age in which he lived a change in thought had arisen regarding the solar system. Anyone holding such an opinion has never studied, even exoterically, how Copernicus arrived at his ideas concerning the relationship of the heavenly bodies. One who has done this, and who more especially has followed the grand ideas of Kepler, knows differently, and he will be strengthened even more in these ideas by what occultism has to say about it.

Let us consider this so that we may see the matter clearly, and try to enter into the soul of Copernicus. This soul had lived in the age of ancient Egypt, and had then occupied an important position in the cult of Osiris; it knew that Osiris was held to be the same as the high Sun-Being.

The sun, in a spiritual sense, was at the centre of Egyptian thought and feeling; I do not mean the outwardly visible sun; it was regarded only as the bodily expression of the spiritual sun. Just as the eye is the expression for the power of sight, so to the Egyptian the Sun was the eye of Osiris, the embodiment of the Spirit of the Sun. All this had been experienced at one time by the soul of Copernicus, and it was the unconscious memory of it that impelled him to renew, in a form possible to a materialistic age, this ancient idea of Osiris, which at that time had been entirely spiritual. When humanity had sunk more deeply within the physical plane, this idea confronts us again in its materialistic form, as the Copernican theory.

The Egyptians possessed the spiritual conception and it was the world-karma of Copernicus to retain a memory of such conceptions, and this conjured forth that “combination of bearings” that led to his theory of the solar system. The case was similar with Kepler, who, in his three laws, presented the movement of the planets round the sun in a much more comprehensive way; however abstract they may appear to us, they were the result of a most profound conception. A striking fact in connection with this highly gifted being is contained in a passage written by himself and which fills us with awe when we read it. Kepler writes: “I have thought deeply upon the Solar System. It has revealed to me its secrets; I will carry over the sacred ceremonial vessels of the Egyptians into the modern world.”

Thoughts implanted in the souls of the ancient Egyptians meet us again, and our modern truths are the re-born myths of Egypt. Were it desired, we could follow this up in many details; we could follow it up to the very beginnings of humanity. Let us think once more of the Sphinx, that wondrous, enigmatic form which later became the Sphinx of Oedipus, who put its well-known riddle to man. We have learnt already that the Sphinx is built up from that human form which on the physical plane still resembled that of animals, although the etheric part had already assumed human form. In the Egyptian age man could only see the Sphinx in an etheric form after he had passed through certain stages of initiation. Then it appeared to him. But the important thing is that when a man had true clairvoyant perception it did not appear to him merely as a lump of wood does, but certain feelings were necessarily associated with the vision.

Under certain circumstances a callous person may pass by a highly important work of art and remain unmoved by it; clairvoyant consciousness is not like this; when really developed the fitting emotion is already aroused. The Greek legend of the Sphinx expresses the right feeling, experienced by the clairvoyant during the ancient Egyptian period and also in the Grecian Mysteries, when he had progressed so far that the Sphinx appeared to him. What was it that then appeared before his eyes? He beheld something incomplete something that was in course of development. The form he saw was in a certain way related to that of animals, and in the etheric head we saw what was to work within the physical form in order to shape it more like man. What man was to become, what his task was in evolution, this was the question that rose vividly before him when he saw the Sphinx—a question full of longing, of expectation, and of future development.

The Greeks say that all investigation and philosophy have originated from longing; this is also a saying of clairvoyants. A form appears to man which he can only perceive with his astral consciousness; it worries him, it propounds a riddle, the riddle of man's future. Further, this etheric form, which was present in the Atlantean epoch and lived on as a memory into the Egyptian age, is embodied more and more in man, and re-appears on the other side in the nature of man. It reappears in all the religious doubts, in the impotence of our age of civilization when faced with the question: What is man? In all unanswered questions, in all statements that revolve round “Ignorabimus,” we have to see the Sphinx. In ages that were still spiritual man could rise to heights where the Sphinx was actually before him—today it dwells within him in countless unanswered questions.

It is therefore very difficult for man at the present time to arrive at conviction with regard to the spiritual world. The Sphinx, which formerly was outside him, is now in his inner being, for a Being has appeared in the central epoch of post-Atlantean evolution Who has cast the Sphinx into the abyss—into the individual inner being of every man.

When the Greco-Latin age, with its after-effects, had continued into the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries we come to the fifth post-Atlantean age. Up to the present new doubts have arisen more and more in place of the old certainty. We meet with such things more and more, and if desired we could discover many more instances of Egyptian ideas, transformed into their materialistic counterpart in the new evolution. We might ask what has really happened in the present age, for this is no ordinary passing over of ideas; things are not met with directly, but they are as if modified. Everything is presented in a more materialistic form; even man's connection with animal nature re-appears, but changed into a materialistic conception. The fact that man knew in earlier times that he could not shape his body otherwise than in the semblance of animals, and that on this account in his Egyptian remembrances he pictured even his gods in animal forms, confronts us today in the generally held materialistic opinion that man has descended from animals. Darwinism is nothing but an heirloom of ancient Egypt in a materialistic form.

From this we see that the path of evolution has by no means been a straightforward one, but that something like a division has taken place, one branch becoming more materialistic and one more spiritual. That which had formerly progressed in one line now split into two lines of development, namely, science and belief.

Going back into earlier times, to the Egyptian, Persian, and ancient Indian civilizations, one does not find a science apart from faith. What was known regarding the spiritual origin of the world passed in a direct line to knowledge of particular things; men were able to rise from knowledge of the material world to the most exalted heights; there was no contradiction between knowledge and faith. An ancient Indian sage or a Chaldean priest would not have understood this difference; even the Egyptians knew no difference between what was simply a matter of belief or a fact of knowledge. This difference became apparent when man had sunk more deeply into matter, and had gained more material culture; but in order to gain this another organization was necessary.

Let us suppose that this descent of man into matter had not taken place; what would have happened? We considered a like descent in the last lecture, but it was of a different nature; this is a new descent in another realm, by which something like an independent science entered alongside the comprehension of what was spiritual. This occurred first in Greece. Up till then opposition between science and religion did not exist; and would have had no meaning to a priest of Egypt. Take, for instance, what Pythagoras learnt from the Egyptians, the teaching regarding numbers. This was not merely abstract mathematics to him; it gave him the musical secrets of the world in the harmony of numbers. Mathematics, which is only something abstract to the man of the present day, was to him a sacred wisdom with a religious foundation.

Man had, however, to sink more and more within the material, physical plane, and it can be seen how the spiritual wisdom of Egypt reappears—but transformed into a materialistic, mythical conception of the universe. In the future, the theories of today will be held to have had only temporal value, just as ancient theories have only a temporal value to the man of today. Perhaps men will then be so sensible that they will not fall into the mistake of some of our contemporaries who say: “Until the nineteenth century man was absolutely stupid as regards science; it was only then he became sensible all that was taught previously about anatomy was nonsense, only the last century has produced what is true.” In the future men will be wiser, and will not give tit for tat; they will not reject our myths of anatomy, philosophy, and Darwinism so disdainfully as present-day man rejects ancient truths. For it is the case that things which today are regarded as firmly established are but transitory forms of truth.

The Copernican system is but a transitory form, it has been brought about through the plunge into materialism, and will be replaced by something different. The forms of truth continually change. In order that all connection with what is spiritual should not be lost, an even stronger spiritual impulse had to enter human evolution. This was described yesterday as the Christ-Impulse. For a time mankind had to be left to itself, as it were, as regards scientific progress, and the religious side had to develop separately; it had to be saved from the progressive onslaught of science.

Thus we see how science, which devoted itself to material things, was separated for a while from things spiritual, which now followed a special course and the two movements—belief in what was spiritual, and the knowledge of external things—proceeded side by side. We even see in one particular period of development in the Middle Ages, a period immediately preceding our own, that science and belief consciously oppose each other, but still seek union.

Consider the Scholastics. They said: Faith was given to man by Christ, this we may not deny; it was a direct gift; and all the science which has been produced since the division took place, can only serve to prove this gift. We see in scholasticism the tendency to employ all science to prove revealed truth. At its prime it said: Men can gaze upwards to the blessedness of faith and to a certain degree human science can enter into it, but to do this men must devote themselves to it.

In the course of time all relationship between science and belief was, however, lost, and there was no longer any hope that they could advance side by side. The extremity of this divergence is found in the philosophy of Kant, where science and belief are completely sundered. In it, on the one hand, the categorical imperative is put forward with its practical postulates of reason; on the other hand, purely theoretical reason which has lost all connection with spiritual truths and declares that from the standpoint of science these cannot be found.

Another powerful impulse was, however, already making itself felt, which also represented a memory of ancient Egyptian thought. Minds appeared that were seeking a union between science and belief, minds that were endeavouring, through entering profoundly into science, to recognize the things of God with such certainty and clarity that they would be accessible to scientific thought. Goethe is typical of such a thinker and of such a point of view. To him religion, art, and science were one; he felt the works of Greek art to be connected with religion, as he felt the great thoughts of Divinity to be reflected in the countless plant formations he investigated.

Taking the whole of modern culture, we have to see in it a memory of Egyptian culture; Egyptian thought is reflected in it from its beginning.

The division in modern culture between science and belief did not arise without long preparation,—and if we are to understand how this came about we must glance briefly at the way post-Atlantean culture was prepared for during the Atlantean epoch.

We have seen how a handful of people who dwelt in the neighbourhood of Ireland had progressed the furthest; they had acquired those qualities which had to appear gradually in the succeeding epochs of civilization. The rudiments of the ego had been developing as we know since the Lemurian epoch, but each stage of selfhood in this small group of people, by whom the stream of culture was carried from West to East, consisted in a tendency to logical thought and the power of judgment. Up to this time these did not exist; if a thought arose it was already substantiated. The beginning of thought that was capable of judgment was implanted in these people, and they bore the rudiments of this with them from West to East in their colonizing migrations, one of which went southwards towards India. Here the first foundations of constructive thinking were laid. Later, this constructive thinking passed into the Persian civilization. In the third cultural period, that of Chaldea, it grew stronger and with the Greeks it developed so far that they have left behind them the glorious monument of Aristotelian philosophy.

Constructive thought continued to develop more and more, but always returned to a central point, where it received reinforcement. We must picture it as follows: When civilization came from the West into Asia one group, that having the smallest amount of purely logical thinking capacity, went toward India; the second group, which traveled towards Persia, had a little more; and the group that went towards Egypt had still more. From within this group were separated off the people of the Old Testament, who had exactly that combination of faculties which had to be developed in order that another forward step might be taken in this purely logical form of human cognition.

With this is associated the other thing we have been considering, namely, the descent to the physical plane. The further we descend the more does thought become merely logical, and the more it tends to a merely external faculty of judgment. Pure logical thought, mere human logic, that which proceeds from one idea to another, requires the human brain as its instrument; the cultivated brain makes logical thought possible. Hence external thinking, even when it has reached an astonishing height, can never of itself comprehend reincarnation, because it is in the first place only applicable to the things of the external sense world that surrounds us.

Logic may indeed be applied to all worlds, but can only be applied directly to the physical world; hence when it appears as human logic it is bound unconditionally to its instrument, the physical brain. Abstract thought could never have entered the world without a further descent into the world of the senses. This development of logical thought is bound up with the loss of ancient clairvoyant vision, and was bought at the cost of this loss. The task of man is to re-conquer clairvoyant vision, adding logical thought to it. In time to come he will obtain imagination as well, but logical thinking will be retained.

The human head had in the first place to be created similar to the etheric head before man could have a brain. It was then first possible for man to descend to the physical plane. In order that all spirituality should not be lost a point of time had to be chosen for the saving of this, when the last impulse to purely mechanical thought had not yet been given. If the Christ had appeared a few centuries later He would have come, as it were, too late, for humanity would have descended too far, would have been too much entangled in thought, and would not have been able to understand Christ. Christ had to come before this last impulse had been received, when the spiritually religious tendency could still be saved as a tendency leading to belief. Then came the last impulse, which plunged human thought to the lowest point, where it was banished and completely chained to physical life. This arose through the Arabs and Mohammedans. Moslem thought is a peculiar episode in Arabian life and thought, which in its passage over to Europe gave the final impulse to logical thinking—to that which is incapable of rising to what is spiritual.

To begin with, man was so led by what may be called Providence or a spiritual guidance that spiritual life was saved in Christendom; later, Arabism approached Europe from the south and provided the field for external culture. It is only capable of comprehending what is external. Do we not see this in the Arabesque, which is incapable of rising to what is living, but has to remain formal? We can also see in the Mosque how the spirit is, as it were, sucked out.

Humanity had first to be led down into matter, then in a roundabout way by means of Arabism, and the invasion of the Arab, we are shown how modern science first arose in the sharp contact of Arabism with Europeanism which had already accepted Christianity. The ancient Egyptian memories had come to life again; but what made them materialistic? What made them into thought-forms of the dead? We can show this clearly. If the path of progress had been smooth the memory of what had taken place previously would have re-appeared in our age. That which is spiritual has been saved as a whole, but one wing of European culture has been gripped by materialism. We also see how the remembrance of those who recalled the ancient Egyptian age was so changed by its passage through Arabism that it reappeared in a materialistic form. The fact that Copernicus comprehended the modern way of regarding the solar system was the outcome of his Egyptian memory. The reason why he presented it in a materialistic form, making of it a dead mechanical rotation, is because the Arabian mentality, encountering this memory from the other side, forced it into materialism.

From all that has been said you can see how secret channels connect the third and the fifth age. This can be seen even in the principle of initiation, and as modern life is to receive a principle of initiation in Rosicrucianism let us ask what this is.

In modern science we have to see a union between Egyptian remembrances and Arabism, which tends towards that which is dead. On the other side we see another union consummated, that between what Egyptian initiates imparted to their pupils and things spiritual. We see a union between wisdom and that which had been rescued as the truths of belief. This wondrous harmony between the Egyptian remembrance in wisdom and the Christian impulse of power is found in Rosicrucian spiritual teaching. So the ancient seed laid down in the Egyptian period re-appears, not merely as a repetition, but differentiated and upon a higher level.

These are thoughts which should not only instruct with regard to the universe, earth, and man, but they should enter as well into our feeling and our impulses of will and give us wings; for they show us the path we have to travel. They point the path to that which is spiritual, and also show how we may carry over into the future what, in a good sense, we have gained here on the purely material plane.

We have seen how paths separate and again unite; the time will come when not the remembrances only of Egypt will unite with spiritual truths to produce a Rosicrucian science, but science and Rosicrucianism will also unite. Rosicrucianism is both a religion and at the same time a science that is firmly bound to what is material. When we turn to the Babylonian period we find this is shown in myth of the third period of civilization; here we are told of the God Maradu, who meets with the evil principle, the serpent of the Old Testament, and splits his head in two, so that in a certain sense the earlier adversary is divided into two parts. This was in fact what actually happened; a partition of that which arose in the primeval, watery earth-substance, as symbolized by the serpent. In the upper part we have to see the truths upheld by faith, in the lower the purely material acceptance of the world. These two must be united—science and that which is spiritual—and they will be united in the future. This will come to pass when, through Rosicrucian wisdom, spirituality is intensified, and itself becomes a science, when it once more coincides with the investigations made by science. Then a mighty harmonious unity will again arise; the various currents of civilization will unite and flow together through the channels of humanity. Do we not see in recent times how this unity is being striven for?

When we consider the ancient Egyptian mysteries we see that religion, science, and art were then one. The course of the world evolution is shown in the descent of the Gods into matter; this is presented to us in a grand dramatic symbolism. Anyone who can appreciate this symbolism has science before him, for he sees there vividly portrayed the descent of man and his entrance into the world. He is also confronted with something else, namely, art, for the picture presented to him is an artistic reflection of science. But he does not see only these two, science and art, in the mysteries of ancient Egypt; they are for him at the same time religion, for what is presented to him pictorially is filled with religious feeling.

These three were later divided; religion, science, and art went separate ways, but already in our age men feel that they must again come together.

What else was the great effort of Richard Wagner than a spiritual striving, a mighty longing towards a cultural impulse? The Egyptians saw visible pictures because the external eye had need of them. In our age what they saw will be repeated; once more the separate streams of culture will unite, a whole will be constructed, this time preferably in a work of art whose elements will be the sequence of sound. On every side we find connections between what appertained to Egypt and modern times; everywhere this reflection can be seen. As time goes on our souls will realize more and more that each age is not merely a repetition but an ascent; that a progressive development is taking place in humanity. Then the most intimate strivings of humanity—the striving for initiation—must find fulfillment.

The principle of initiation suited to the first age cannot be the principle of initiation for the changed humanity of today. It is of no value to us to be told that the Egyptians had already found primeval wisdom and truth in ancient times; that these are contained in the old Oriental religions and philosophies, and that everything that has appeared since exists only to enable us to experience the same over again if we are to rise to the highest initiation. No! This is useless talk. Each age has need of its own particular force within the depths of the human soul.

When it is asserted in certain Theosophical quarters that there is a western initiation for our stage of civilization, but that it is a late product, that true initiation comes only from the East, we must answer that this cannot be determined without knowing something further. The matter must be gone into more deeply than is usually done. There may be some who say that in Buddha the highest summit was reached, that Christ has brought nothing new since Buddha; but only in that which meets us positively can we recognize what really is the question here. If we ask those who stand on the ground of Western initiation whether they deny anything in Eastern initiation, whether they make any different statements regarding Buddha than those in the East, they answer, “No.” They value all; they agree with all; but they understand progressive development. They can be distinguished from those who deny the Western principle of initiation by the fact that they know how to accept what Orientalism has to give, and in addition they know the advanced forms which the course of time has made necessary. They deny nothing in the realm of Eastern initiation.

Take a description of Buddha by one who accepts the standpoint of Western esotericism. This will not differ from that of a follower of Eastern esotericism; but the man with the Western standpoint holds that in Christ there is something which goes beyond Buddha. The Eastern standpoint does not allow this. If it is said that Buddha is greater than Christ that does not decide anything, for this depends on something positive. Here the Western standpoint is the same as the Eastern. The West does not deny what the East says, but it asserts something further.

The life of Buddha is not rightly understood when we read that Buddha perished through the enjoyment of too much pork; this must not be taken literally. It is rightly objected from the standpoint of Christian esotericism that people who understand something trivial from this understand nothing about it at all; this is only an image, and shows the position in which Buddha stood to his contemporaries. He had imparted too many of' the sacred Brahmanical secrets to the outer world. He was ruined through having given out that which was hidden, as is everyone else who imparts what is hidden.

This is what is expressed in this peculiar symbol. Allow me to emphasize strongly that we disagree in no way with Oriental conceptions, but people must understand the esotericism of such things. If it is said that this is of little importance: it is not the case. They might as well think it of little importance when we are told that the writer of the Apocalypse wrote it amid thunder and lightning, and if anyone found occasion to mock at the Apocalypse because of this we should reply: “What a pity he does not know what it means when we are told that the Apocalypse was imparted to the earth 'mid lightning and thunder!”

We must keep in mind the fact that no negation has passed the lips of Western esotericists, and that much that was puzzling at the beginning of the Anthroposophical movement has been explained by them. The followers of Western esotericism never find in it anything out of harmony with the mighty truths given to the world by H. P. Blavatsky. When we are told, for example, that we have to distinguish in the Buddha the Dhyani-Buddha, the Adi-Buddha, and the human Buddha, this is first fully explained by the Western esotericist. For we know that what is regarded as the Dhyani-Buddha is nothing but the etheric body of the historic Buddha that had been taken possession of by a God; that this etheric body had been laid hold of by the being whom we call Wotan. This was already contained in Eastern esotericism, but was only first understood in the right way through Western esotericism.

The Anthroposophical movement should be especially careful that the feeling which rises in our souls from such thoughts as these should stimulate in us the desire for further development, that we should not stand still for a moment. The value of our movement does not consist in the ancient dogmas it contains (if these are but fifteen years old), but in comprehending its true purpose, which is the opening up of fresh springs of spiritual knowledge. It will then become a living movement and will help to bring about that future which, if only very briefly, has been presented to your mental sight today, by drawing upon what we are able to observe of the past.

We are not concerned with the imparting of theoretic truths, but that our feeling, our perception, and our actions may be full of power.

We have considered the evolution of Universe, Earth, and Man; we desire so to grasp what we have gathered from these studies that we may be ready at any time to enter upon development.

What we call “future” must always be rooted in the past; knowledge has no value if not changed into motive power for the future. The purpose for the future must be in accordance with the knowledge of the past, but this knowledge is of little value unless changed into propelling force for the future.

What we have heard has presented to us a picture of' such mighty motive powers that not only our will and our enthusiasm have been stimulated, but our feelings of joy and of security in life have also been deeply moved. When we note the interplay of so many currents we are constrained to say: Many are the seeds within the womb of Time. Through an ever deepening knowledge man must learn how better to foster all these seeds. Knowledge in order to work, in order to gain certainty in life, must be the feeling that pervades all Anthroposophical study.

In conclusion I would like to point out that the so-called theories of Spiritual Science only attain final truth when they are changed into something living—into impulses of feeling and of certainty as regards life; so that our studies may not merely be theoretical, but may play a real part in evolution.

Let us begin, my dear friends, with the words well known to us that effectively indicate the path into the spiritual, the words which are spoken by the Guardian, as the person comes upon him, that characterize what a person can perceive on the threshold to the spiritual world.

From the wide expanse of the beings of space
Who in the light experience existence,
From the onward tread of the course of time
Which in creating finds itself expressed,
From the depths of the feeling heart,
Where in one's self the world is born anew:

There sounds in speech filled with soul,
There shines in thoughts filled with spirit,
The from godly healing forces
In world shaping powers
Welling working word of existence-awareness:
O Man, know yourself!

At first it is a matter of a person bringing to light in his thoughts the paths to be taken if entrance into the spiritual world is sought. If someone or other brings his thoughts to bear upon what the initiate goes through in reality on entry into the spiritual world, no one can say that a person who meditates, if he lives in his thoughts in sincerity and in earnest, does not experience, even if only in idealistic reflections, that he does not experience the very thing that is ultimately revealed for the soul of a person on real entry into the spiritual world.

Now, one should not say, let us leave entry to the spiritual world to those seeking initiation, to those seeking the ability to stay with their souls in spiritual reality, as a normal person stays with the senses in physical reality. One should say something quite different. Note that a person engrossed in thought, living in thoughts, can actually approach what is denoted here as the way into, the entrance into the spiritual world, can approach the actuality of confronting the spiritual world, but of course not while mired in superficial thoughts, but while fully feeling it, and being engaged in it. So really one should say, that such a person has more than an intellectual understanding of it. Such a person can have some of what rules when he does emerge from the world of appearance, from the world of the senses, and actually enters the spiritual world.

So, what I will be speaking about with you today, my dear friends, is not something merely brought forth good-heartedly, to be used in seeking the personal transformation that leads into the spiritual world, but rather it is something that is brought forth that allows an initial experience of this transformation in one's thoughts. And you all basically desire this, or else you would not be sitting here.

And so, the following must be said. Whenever a person makes observations in the sensory world, and life is made of such observations, whenever a person takes whatever he bumps up against in the sensory world as the cause for engaging his will, whenever he moves on from observation to action, allowing it to work on his heart and mind, in feelings composed of action and observational thoughts together, then a person stands, simply due to his being presently planted as a physical being of earth, a person then stands on a safe and effective foundation. Whoever does not have such a safe foundation will certainly seek it. He seeks everywhere, finding himself believing something or other, for actual facts taught about his belief. He examines experiences that substantiate it somehow. He does not normally take up anything with a will if it has not been substantiated by external experience of some sort. So, a person stands firmly on a foundation, so he says to himself, on the things that are true, that he has seen, on the things that are real, that he has grasped hold of. It is certainly through the world itself, through the orderliness of the world, that certainty is gained in human life. And as these things are certain, so argues the person, as they are actually necessary for normal life between birth and death, they may be used to distinguish truth from illusion, truth from appearance, truth from dreams. In this manner of proofreading life, if such a person cannot verify something, then it is rated as illusion. And in normal life only that which he can rate as truth, as reality rather than illusion, will lead him with certainty through his life.

Now just imagine, my dear friends, going through sensory life in the normal way, making your rounds between birth and death, so that you nearly never can know with certainty whether something or other that you come upon is truth or illusion. You cannot check whether a person that you meet, who speaks to you, is actually a real person or whether he is some sort of semblance, some sort of simulacrum. You cannot distinguish whether any specific incident or happenstance is something you have simply dreamed up, or in interconnected detail is actually in the world. Now just think about what uncertainty, what terrible uncertainty, can come into life.

However, you may get a certain feeling that you are correct in evaluating life at every turn, correct about whether you are dreaming or whether you are actually confronting reality. It is just so when a student initially stands at the portal, at the threshold of the spiritual world; the most significant experience at the threshold of the spiritual world is noticing at once that this threshold is in actuality the spiritual world.

We have seen that at first merely darkness streams out from the spiritual world. But the very thing that wells up here and there, glowing and beaming out on first experiencing it, within which the guardian of the threshold allows his words to sound, as we heard at the last lesson, on first experiencing it can initially in no way be distinguished from all that has been experienced in the physical world of sensory knowledge, through intellectual insight. One cannot distinguish whether the present experience is that of a real spiritual being, a real spiritual actuality, or merely a simulacrum.

That is the very first experience that a person has in regarding the spiritual world, that appearance and reality are intermixed. Distinguishing between appearance and reality is at first quite problematic. Exactly this should most definitely be considered, not in the regular scholarly manner, but rather by means of elemental forces emerging in such things as convulsive events and sicknesses in various ways. Exactly by experiencing such elemental forces as an impression of one sort or another from the spiritual world, exactly this should be well considered, but not judged at the outset as being the actual spiritual world, for it might very well be something presenting as a flash out of the spiritual world that is really a mere illusion. Therefore, the first thing a person must learn, above all, in order to enter the spiritual world in the proper manner, is that what a person experiences in the physical world is quite removed from the real ability to distinguish truth from error, reality from illusion. A person must acquire a totally new way of distinguishing truth from illusion.

In our times, people certainly no longer care very much for the illumination flooding in from the spiritual world. This has been forsaken by people in the common civilization completely and emphatically, in favor of whatever can be grasped in one's hands and what can be seen with one's physical eyes. In these times, in which people wish to remain completely and emphatically within external certainty, as presented in the life between birth and death, in these times it is extremely wearying to attempt to distinguish truth from error, reality from appearance, as one becomes properly attuned to the spiritual world. So, in this undertaking, the very most serious effort is needed.

Now how has this come to be? Try to see what is happening. As a physical person bumping up against the external world, a person formulates thoughts about the external world. With such thoughts in hand, one simultaneously comes upon new impressions of the external world. These impressions of the external world run virtually under and through the thoughts and carry them. You don't need to do much at all in this regard, in order to live in reality. For reality carries you along, insofar as the reality is physical.

In the spiritual world it is very different. In the spiritual world you must first grow into it. In confronting the spiritual world, you first need to acquire a proper sense of true inherent reality. Then by and by you can come to the possibility of distinguishing truth from error, reality from appearance.

If you sit on a stool, exactly at the moment that you fail to fall to the floor, but rather sit solidly on the stool, then you know that the stool is in the physical world as a real stool, and not merely as an imaginary stool. The stool itself arranges that you come to this realization of its reality.

But that is not so in the spiritual world. Now just why is it this way in the physical world? In the physical world, basically, it is so because here in the physical world your thinking, your feeling, and your willing are carried by the physical material body as a unity. You are a three-limbed person in being a thinking person, a feeling person, and a willing person. All these, however, are joined together by the physical body.

In the blink of an eye as a person enters the spiritual world, he immediately becomes a three-parted being. His thinking goes its own way; his feeling goes its own way; his willing goes its own way. This division, this cleavage into three, he undergoes as soon as he gains entry into the spiritual world. And in the spiritual world you can think, can have thoughts, that simply have nothing to do with your will, but then these thoughts are illusions. You can have feelings having nothing to do with your will, but then these feelings are something that contributes to your destruction, not to your advancement.

Such is one's state of being at the instant of approaching the threshold of the spiritual world. It actually happens there, that as your thinking flies off into the depths of space, your feeling is directed back into its memories. Pay attention to what was just said. Try to understand that memory is actually something that presents rigorously on the threshold to the spiritual world. Just think about what you experienced ten years ago. It springs back in memory. The experience stands there. You are content, rightly content within the physical world, if you come upon a right lively memory. Whoever enters the spiritual world, however, for him it is really so, as though he were piercing through memory, as though he were going further than memory reaches. This is most important, that he goes beyond the limits of his memories in the physical world. He goes back beyond birth.

And when someone gains entry into the spiritual world, he feels at once that feeling simply does not stay with him. Thinking at least still goes out into the presented world. It takes off effectively into the world around. Feelings go out into the world, yet one must say to himself, if he wants to traverse with feeling, "Well, just where are you now?" When in life you have become 50 years old, in this manner you have certainly traveled back more than 50 years in time; you have traveled back 70 years, 90 years, 100 years, 150 years. Feeling carries you completely out of the time that you have witnessed from early childhood on.

And willing, if you fasten onto it in earnest, carries you still further back, into previous lives on earth. This is something that occurs, my friends, as soon as you really step in upon the threshold of the spiritual world. The cohesion of physical life ceases. In the abyss you no longer feel encased by your skin, but rather you feel split apart.

A person senses, when his thinking radiates out, thinking previously held together within awareness, when one’s thinking radiates out into the wide reaches and thoughts of the world, a person senses, immediately on entering the spiritual world, a person senses himself going back with his feelings to the time he had undergone between the last death and the present return to life on earth. And a person senses himself in previous earth-lives with his willing.

Directly this fissuring of the human being, which I have written about in my book, How to Know Higher Worlds, directly this fissuring of the human being creates difficulties on entry into the spiritual world, for thoughts spread themselves out. Thoughts that previously were held together now fly all over the world. But at the same time, they no longer can be taken at face value. And so one must acquire the ability to properly discern these thoughts that have so widely outrun themselves.

Feelings are now no longer intermingled with thoughts, since thoughts have departed from them to a certain extent. Your feelings must simply turn in a demeanor of reverence, devotion, and prayer to those beings accompanying a person during the life between death and birth. And if a person has marshaled such venerable feelings toward the spiritual world during his life, that is just what happens.

But in the blink of an eye when a person abandons himself to his willing, and so is carried back to previous earth-lives, then he settles into a great difficulty, for an immense force of attraction to all that is ignoble in his being develops. And working most strongly here, as I have previously said, is that it is difficult to distinguish between appearance and reality. A person develops a real inclination to abandon himself to appearance. I will clarify this.

If and when someone begins to meditate, when with inner devotion he really engages with and practices his meditation, he wants this meditation to proceed in the most care-free manner possible; he does not want to allow the meditation to tear him away from the comforts of life. Now such an effort, to be as quiescent as possible, as far as possible to remain within and not to be torn out of the comforts of life, this effort is a robust carrier of illusion, a robust carrier of mere appearance. For if someone devotes himself with complete honesty to the meditation, then out of the depths of the soul there inevitably emerges the conviction that there is some sort of evil complex within. One will simply not be able, during meditation, during immersion within oneself, a person will simply not be able to avoid really feeling, deeply feeling, that the potential is there to do anything and everything, to perpetrate in actuality whatever he or she is capable of doing. The stark intensity of the effort, just in admitting this to yourself, is such that instead you settle into the illusion, the illusion that in all certainty you are a good and righteous person in your inner complexities.

The correct experience coming out of meditation is quite different. It shows someone how he, as an individual, can be engulfed by all manner of conceit, how he can be engulfed by all manner of self-over-evaluation of his own intrinsic worth and under-evaluation of the intrinsic worth of others, how he can be thoroughly beset by this, by the conviction that people just don't have anything to offer, and that rather than experiencing them as having something to say, he really wants to just bask in other people's esteem. But that is the least of it. Whoever really and truly meditates, will see what sort of impulses are actually living in his soul, in regard to all that he certainly might be capable of. And so, the lower nature of man steps forth starkly before the inner gaze of the soul. And this honesty must be present in meditation. And when this honesty is present there, then reflected back is certainly what is in everyone’s impulses of will, just as it is also certainly reflected back in the words that have already come before our souls. Something is reflected back, chiseled into the words:

Behold the first beast, the crooked back,
The bone-locked head, the withered body,
Dull blunt blue is its skin.
Your fear of spirit-creator-being
Produced this monster in your willing.

And because this is so, because a person through an addiction, so to speak, in surrendering to this sort of illusion, gobbles down this inevitable striking impression in meditation, thence arises the inward impetus, the intention toward mockery of the spiritual world. But only by dealing with this as a counterforce can honest continuance in the spiritual world proceed. And so, the second beast now makes its appearance at the threshold:

Behold the second beast, it bares its teeth,
Contorts its face, and lies in scornful mockery,
Yellow with grayish cast is its body;
Your hatred of spirit-revelation
Produced this weakling in your feeling.

That is the way it is. That is the way it is, if we cannot emerge to pursue world-thoughts, if we remain powerless in rendering the thoughts that we held fast to otherwise in our heads during life on earth. That is the way it is for us, out of powerlessness in soaring with our human thoughts into world thoughts, that the third beast appears:

Behold the third beast, with long-split mouth,
Glazed eye, and slouching attitude,
Dirty red its form appears to you;
Your doubt in spirit-light-dominion
Produced this specter, this ghost in your thinking.

The less we withdraw into an illusion about this trinity, produced by our own being, the more we may enter the state of actually finding within us the nature of a true human being, a true human being who can receive the light coming from the spiritual world, who can henceforth perceive the enigma and comprehend as much as possible on earth of what is given to us in the words, "O Man, know yourself!" For from this self-awareness springs a true awareness of the world, through which you can direct your life in the proper manner. And so this disruption into three, which one experiences as thinking going its way, feeling going its way, and willing going its way, which were all held together through outer existence, is allowed to be referred to by the words which the Guardian of the Threshold speaks, to seekers drawing near:

The third beast’s glassy eye
Is the bad contrary-type
Of thinking, that denies itself
In you and chooses death,
Forsaking spirit powers
That held it before its earth-life
Living in spirit in spirit fields.

The second beast, the mocking face,
It is the bad contrary-force
Of feeling, that hollows-out suitable soul
And in it fashions living emptiness
Instead of spiritual worth, which was
Illuminating it before its earth-existence
By means of spirit’s sunny might.

The first beast, the bony mind,
It is the bad creative-might
Of willing, that estranges suitable body
From your soul's domain
And devotes it to adverse powers,
Who would rob world-existence
Of gods-existence in times to come.

These are the words, the words which will be spoken in admonition by the Guardian, so that we know just how entry into the spiritual world should not be gained. On entry into the spiritual world, we must choose quite another manner, feel in another manner, commit to becoming accustomed to another manner, other than what ruled us in the physical world. And for this it is required that we grapple with this trinity in us, that we turn our gaze strongly within, in order to take note of how thinking presently is, how feeling presently is, how willing presently is, and how they must become so that we can step over the threshold into the spiritual world, even if this happens only within our thoughts. It is so, that the gods in the serenity of absolute knowledge have established this obstacle and demand that it be surmounted.

We may immediately infer from having these daunting, perhaps chill-inducing words coming down from the Guardian, of which I have spoken to you today in recapitulation, that henceforth the Guardian will be adding others, which will tell us what we should do. Right now, the concern is that our first lessons in this class become simple practical means handed down to us, that can be applied in our thoughts and feelings and force of will, so that we may gain entry into the spiritual world in the right manner.

And the clarion call should in turn be three-membered, and as such should stream into us, so that we can live with it. For as we live with it, we launch ourselves along on the way into the spiritual world. So, as we eat and drink, so as we show and share, so should something in us gain dominion through all this, which the guardian of the threshold, who stands before the spiritual world, intones to us in his austere countenance. And he says at once in the first verse:

Look upon your web of thoughts:
World of semblance¹ you experience,
Self-awareness² hides from you;
Plunge beneath appearance:
Ether being whirls in you;
Self-awareness, it should honor³
Your own spirit’s guiding beings.

Let us elucidate this clarion call. A person, living in the sensory world, in the life between birth and death, feels himself to be in his physical body. He knows that his legs carry him through the world. He knows that his circulating blood gives him life. He knows that his breathing awakens him to life. He entrusts himself, in his breath, in his circulating blood, in the movement of the bulk of his limbs, to what carries him through the world. He entrusts and gives himself over to these things. By doing this, by giving himself over to these things, he is a physical being taking part in earth existence. Just so, just as a person entrusts himself to the physical stuff in the physical world that made life on the earth possible in limb movements, in blood circulation, and in breathing, just so a person must entrust himself to, must give himself over in soul to the guiding powers of the spiritual world, if the person would take part in the spiritual world, if he would gain entrance there with awareness.

Just as I had to say for one's health in physical existence, that one’s blood must circulate just so, one’s breath must come with regularity, just so must I advise someone who similarly seeks to remain in health in the spiritual world, that his soul must align with, must be infused with, must be led by his spirit's guiding beings. [The first stanza, "Look upon your web of thoughts" was now written on the blackboard backwards, beginning with the last word of the stanza.]

Your own spirit’s guiding beings

However, my dear friends, you are attached to your blood through the grip of nature, you are attached to the movements of your musculoskeletal system through the grip of nature, and just so for your breathing. You cannot be beholden in this way to your guiding essence in the spiritual world. You must approach it there with inner activity. You do not get hold of it in the way you get hold of breath through the movement of your lungs, you get hold of it insofar as you honor it in reverence, [Over “guiding beings” was now written, "honor", so that what now stood on the blackboard was:]

honor

Your own spirit’s guiding beings

honoring it in reverence with the most profound part that is rooted in you, with the core of your selfhood, your self-aware-presence, your self-awareness. [Before honor was written, "Self-awareness," so that what now stood on the blackboard was:]

Self-awareness honor

Your own spirit's guiding beings

Self-awareness, it should honor
Your own spirit’s guiding beings.

[With the speaking of these two lines the missing words "should" and "your" etc. were added, so that the last two lines now stood complete on the blackboard.] And so we have the facts of the case, the means by which you must stand within the spiritual world, as given in words, in the words spoken by the guardian.

And how do you stand within? You don't stand within in the same manner as when you stand with your legs on the physical surface of the earth. You don't stand within in the same manner as when you infuse the physical warmth of life in your blood. You don't stand within in the same manner as when you draw in your breath. You stand within by feeling the half spiritual ether being, the ether essence that whirls and wafts through you. [The third line from last was now written down.]

Ether being whirls in you;

That is the inner feeling, to stay within the spirit, as if one were oneself a small cloud, wind-blown all over and around by spiritual wind, as if one were taken around and about by this windy blowing back and forth, as when selfhood's core, namely your own true I, reveres, honors the guiding essence of your soul that approaches in this windy whirling wafting from all around. In submersion into this, we will be led. But what happens initially? So long as we simply remain within our meditation in all that I have just highlighted, we live in appearance; we must dive, dive beneath this semblance in full consciousness, diving into the whirling wafting wind with reverence, into the spirit's guiding being that appears as semblance. [The fourth line from last was now written down.]

Plunge beneath appearance:

Why should we do all this? Well, it is true, that in earthly life we initially have an unremarkable feeling in regard to our ego. Self-hood-existence, self-awareness, which we indicate with the word "I", is however an unremarkable, darkened presence, a feeling, that hides itself from us. [The fifth line from the last was written down.]

Self-awareness hides from you;

Of this one knows but little. And the little that one does know, that a person in thoughts, that a person becomes aware of and takes the measure of, is certainly not real world-existence, but is world-semblance. [The sixth line from the bottom was written.]

World of semblance you experience,

All this becomes for us, as we come upon the clarion call of the Guardian of the Threshold, [the seventh and accordingly first line was written down.]

Look upon your web of thoughts:

all this becomes for us our own moving thinking weaving, our thoughts weaving.

At this point we have the first mantric declamation, which should give us strength to approach the clarion call to self-awareness in our thoughts, which at first is spread out before our souls merely as words.

Look upon your web of thoughts:
World of semblance you experience,
Self-awareness hides from you;
Plunge beneath appearance:
Ether-being whirls in you;
Self-awareness, it should honor
Your own spirit’s guiding beings.

There it is, a challenging clarion call to us concerning the retrospection of our own thoughts. If you retire from the outer world and look back upon how thoughts are flowing within yourself, and then you meet the challenge that lies in these seven lines, then you have fulfilled the first of the requirements placed upon us by the Guardian of the Threshold. At this point, we have arrived at what the Guardian has to say about your feelings.

Embrace your stream of feelings:
Where semblance and substance mingle,
Aware-self leans toward semblance;
So plunge beneath appearance:
And world soul forces are in you;
Aware-self should consider well
Inherent in soul the powers of life.

And exactly as we arise in thinking through the first mantric declamation, so we arise through the second into the inner world of feelings. [Now the second stanza was written on the blackboard.]

Embrace your stream of feelings:

Refrain from thoughts and seek within, wending your way back into your own feelings. In thinking, all is mere appearance. If we get down into our feelings, just there is mixed, is mingled appearance and reality. We should realize this at once.

Where semblance and substance mingle,

By itself our "I", the true self, will not go willingly into the reality. It is used to the outward appearance of the senses; it will not go willingly into reality. It is drawn to what seems apparent in the brilliance, it yearns yet for the commotion of the sensory world,

Aware-self leans toward semblance;
So plunge beneath appearance:

into what is present in feelings, present fundamentally in one's life of feelings. It is the apparently real, a brilliant mixture of appearance and reality.

To plunge beneath appearance is the way, the way along which we will feel, if we really give ourselves over to the overall sense of these four lines, the way along which we will feel seriously and solemnly as we plunge into existence,

And world soul forces are in you;

Previously you yourself sought to honor in sinking into your thinking; now the aware-self seeks to consider well. The thought should be carried down under into feeling. We will come upon the following, affirmed for us by existence:

Aware-self should consider well
Inherent in soul the powers of life.

No longer semblance, now there are powers of life. The gods bestow upon us, even though our own essential nature, our "I" would like to lean toward semblance, the gods bestow upon us in the depths of feeling this rock of existence.

Now, if you really want the declamations to become mantras, it is good to keep in mind certain corresponding passages. [Words previously delineated and inscribed were now underlined on the blackboard.] First there is honor, and then consider, and we will see in the third stanza, how this is augmented. First you experience just semblance, then semblance and substance mingle. In the first there are guiding beings, and intrinsic powers of life in the second. In the first there are beings who lead us through the ether, and in the second that are powers of life leading us backward into pre-earthly existence-awareness. In this way we approach the meaning, the feeling. If we wish to make it into a real mantra, however, you must incorporate still something else.

So let us look at the first verse, "Look upon your web of thoughts.” I would like you to appreciate that it is clearly constructed in trochaic rhythm, in the trochaic voice. The emphasis is strong, then weak, and the feeling is emphatic, then retiring. When this proper etheric flow is present in your soul, in which to properly allow the enshrinement of higher beings, then you may be carried over into the spiritual world. [Macron and breve markings to indicate the trochaic rhythm were placed on the blackboard over the beginning of each of the seven lines.]

Lōok ŭpon your web of thoughts:
Wōrld ŏf semblance you experience,
Sēlf-ăwareness hides from you;
Plūnge bĕneath appearance:
Ēthĕr being whirls in you;
Sēlf-ăwareness, it should honor
Yōur ŏwn spirit’s guiding beings.

It is quite different in the second verse, "Embrace your stream of feelings." [Breve then macron markings indicating the iambic rhythm were placed on the blackboard at the beginning the seven next lines, along with the speaking of the corresponding emphasis.]

Ĕmbrāce your stream of feelings:
Whĕre sēmblance and substance mingle,
Ăwāre-self leans toward semblance;
Sŏ plūnge beneath appearance:
Ănd wōrld soul-forces are in you;
Ăwāre-self should consider well
Ĭnhērent in soul the powers of life.

The manner in which these words are taken in by your soul, whether trochaic or iambic, as here [first stanza], where there is a definite trochaic signature, and here [second stanza], where there is a definite iambic signature, the manner in which these words are taken in, gives the soul the proper stride.

Of course, the idea is not to simply achieve some sort of intellectual meaning in the soul, as if the soul could tread the path into the spiritual world merely in thought, but rather the idea is to approach universal existence with the right respiratory pattern and in the right rhythm. If you take up a rhythm that is iambic in your striving for admittance to universal thinking, you have misunderstood the Guardian of the Threshold. If you take up a ceremonious cadence that is trochaic and not iambic for entry into the wider world of feelings, you have again misunderstood the Guardian of the Threshold.

The third into which we must immerse, is the will. And for willing, the Guardian of the Threshold has again given us a ceremonial cadence. And after the first two have passed before our souls, we will be able to understand the last fairly well. [The third stanza was now written on the blackboard.]

Let reign in you the thrust of will:
It climbs from all apparent being,

It is not an article here, but relates to what emerges, to what climbs out when letting willing’s thrusting rule in you.

With autonomous existence⁴ well-equipped; ⁵

Out of the will it burgeons out, manifesting, presiding, fashioning, creating, rising to that, which to its autonomous inherent existence gives substance, meaning.

Turn to this throughout your life:
Filled it is with world-spirit-might;
Your autonomous existence, it should grasp
World-maker-might into spirit-I.

Again, feel the progression. [The appropriate words of the third stanza previously written down were now subsequently underlined.]

honor
consider well
grasp

First one is distant, one looks on, one reveres from outside. Then one comes near with thoughts, and is already walking in. Finally, one grasps. This is the climax; one walks in and takes it. One honors, then considers well, and then grasps:

first Guiding beings
then powers of life, and finally
World-maker-might,

which finally appears as such, in the line's beginning words, corresponding to the reality, the un-ambiguously effective manner of the force of will.

You will have a perception of the three as mantric speech, if you attend to the trochaic here [in the first stanza], the iambic here, [in the second stanza], although here [in the third stanza] you have two equally emphasized syllables. Here you have the spondaic. [Over the beginning of the lines on the blackboard the spondaic rhythmic markings of two macrons were inscribed along the with corresponding spoken intonation.]

Lēt reīgn in you the thrust of will:
Īt clīmbs from all apparent being
Wīth aūtonomous existence well-equipped;
Tūrn tō this throughout your life:
Fīlled īt īs with world-spirit-might;
Yoūr aūtonomous existence, it should grasp
Wōrld-māker-might into spirit-I.

All this is what one should attend to. You must tear yourself away from merely intelligible material, and attend to the trochaic, iambic, and spondaic cadences. In the blink of an eye, as we emerge from a sense of understanding into surrendering to the rhythm, in this blink of an eye we have the possibility of leaving the physical world and really entering the spiritual, for the spiritual does not open up if we turn to a mundane delineated sense of the words, but rather if we grasp the possibility of carrying the rhythm of these meaningfully delineated words out into the full warp and weft of universal life.

In this way the three-faceted rhythmic introspection of thinking, feeling, and willing will be enabled to work on the soul. This will certainly affect the soul in the right way, if the soul experiences this as it experiences eating and drinking in life, as it experiences the circulation of the blood, the breathing, as it experiences here just what can move you within, in the rhythm of the words.

Lōok ŭpon your thinking weaving:
Wōrld ŏf appearance you experience,
Sēlf-ăwareness hides from you;
Plūnge bĕneath appearance:
Ēthĕr being whirls in you;
Sēlf-ăwareness, it should honor
Yōur ŏwn spirit’s guiding beings.

Ĕmbrāce your feelings streaming:
Ĭt mīngles semblance and substance for you,
Ăwāre-self leans toward semblance;
Sŏ plūnge beneath appearance:
Ănd wōrld soul forces are in you;
Ăwāre-self, it should consider well
Ĭnhērent in soul the powers of life.

Lēt reīgn in you the thrust of will:
Īt clīmbs from all apparent being
Wīth aūtonomous existence well-equipped;
Tūrn tō this throughout your life:
Fīlled īt īs with world-spirit-might;
Yoūr aūtonomous existence, it should grasp
Wōrld-māker-might into spirit-I.

At first your blood is just passive in the words. Then as words appear in the corresponding rhythm, your blood is in motion. Seek the sense of the rhythms, let them dwell and live in your souls, and you will see, that you will then be able to approach ever more closely to the initial admonition the Guardian has brought to us, that I conveyed to your souls, my friends, at the first of these lessons.

Where on grounds of earth, color upon color,
Life developing reveals itself,
Where out of stuff of earth, form on form,
All without life takes shape,
Where feeling creatures, strong in will,
Delight in the warm glow of their existence,
Where you yourself, O Man, derive
Bodily life from earth and air and light:

There you enter your own being’s
Deep, night-bedecked, cold inner darkness;
You’d ask within the dark expanse
Never, who you are, and were, and will become.
For your true existence the day dims
To the night of the soul, to darkness of spirit.
And you turn yourself, soul-searching,
Unto the light, that from darknesses strengthens,

And if we will wend our way to the light, that from darknesses appears, we will find it, if we seek it by means of this three-faceted cadence, enthused with this holy blood of life in our souls, which will be present along the way to true knowledge of spirit and of God.

• 1. Schein is subtly different from the English word shine, for it is the sheen of superficial appearance, the semblance, the mere appearance.
• 2. Selbstheitsein is a derivative of Dasein, existence-awareness, and when applied to oneself, it is self-awareness, awareness of one’s intrinsic existence, awareness of one’s self. The word selfhood is archaic and must be used with caution.
• 3. Verehren in the sixth line of the first stanza should not be revere, which is to regard with respect tinged with awe and veneration, but rather to honor, which is to hold in high respect for worth, merit, or rank. Revere is to put at some distance, to still look upon, as in the first line, whereas we want to plunge, to connect, to be part of, to hold dear to us the guiding beings. Plunging beneath is not to revere, but to honor.
• 4. Eigensein (a derivative of Dasein, existence-awareness) is willing that exists in and of its own self, naturally inherent autonomous existence. This follows the usage of Kant in section 3 of his 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, “Clarity is gained, from most basic to most esoteric usage, by this principle: autonomous existence of willing is the nature of willing, a quality it is equipped with in and of itself, independent of the nature of the objects of willing.” (Es könnte sich um einen Satz aus der Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitte handeln: Autonomie des Willens ist die Beschaffenheit des Willens, dadurch derselbe ihm selbst (unabhängig von aller Beschaffenheit der Gegenstände des Wollens) ein Gesetz ist.)
• 5. Erschaffened auf: The will is well-equipped, constituted, fashioned with Eigensein, autonomous existence that is inherent.

We have tried to substantiate certain truths about the inner life of the fifth post-Atlantean period and about the development of the period from the sources that spiritual science opens up, using individual examples that simply result from the study of the physical world. Yesterday, in particular, we pointed out how important it is to note that a certain crisis can also be observed in the outer life during the 19th century. I have often pointed out how the mid-19th century in particular represents the crisis of materialism, and yesterday we were able to show, using a particular example from our own area, how certain indications — only indications, but still indications — of insights that could only come through anthroposophy were present, but how these insights are buried, I would say historically buried, just as a geological history of the earth is buried. that can only come through anthroposophy, but how these insights are buried, I would say, historically buried, just as one geological layer of the earth is buried and another lies above it. And so one would be able to prove in many cases in the spiritual life of modern times how the urge, the drive for a deeper insight, as it is opened up by anthroposophy, was present, especially present from certain conditions of earlier times in the course of the first half of the 19th century, and how then, brought about by the great advances in natural science, another layer, a completely opposite layer of human thinking, human thinking, has been superimposed on it, so that today what was already there is extremely difficult to reveal. And those people who today draw their concepts and ideas only from the uppermost layer covering the lower one, are strangely in darkness about what was already there. In this way, quite grotesque things arise.

Especially when you look at Troxler, who was also born in Switzerland and taught there for many years, and consider him in the context of European intellectual life, as I tried to do in my last book, The Riddle of Man), one can see in him how, although he did not yet have the things that can now come through spiritual science or anthroposophy, he worked towards them, I would like to say, in certain ideas, concrete ideas. In a straight line of development, if this existed in human development, but it is not given to the human race, a real spiritual deepening could have arisen, as it must be drawn today from the sources that spiritual science has. Then, in this country least of all, would spiritual science appear today as a foreign plant, but it would appear to those people who would only know the spiritual life of the 19th century in one of its most important representatives, as a continuation of the spiritual life. And if someone who was familiar with Swiss intellectual life were to speak at the Aarau conference in May 1916, he would say something like this: With this anthroposophy, we Swiss in particular do not have anything foreign coming into the country, but rather we greet an old acquaintance in this anthroposophy; after all, we have even been given a beautiful, wonderful definition of anthroposophy by our fellow countryman Troxler. In connection with the whole historical life, especially in this country, that would be the truth if it were told. But instead of that, in this Aarauer Aura in the writing, of which I already spoke to you yesterday, another thing was said. First of all, this spiritual science is lumped together with other things in order to be able to present it as a quantite negligeable, so to speak. It is said: “The overview may only use what is necessary for the characterization” — the overview that is to be given in this speech.

"Among these movements, all of which are immigrants in our country, the best known are the Christian Scientists, popularly known as faith healers, the Mazdaznan, the Theosophists and finally the Anthroposophists with their enormous temple in Dornach.

So we see that while it would be so nice to correspond to reality, that in Anthroposophy we would greet an old acquaintance here, Anthroposophy is declared to be an intruder. You see, that is just one symptomatic expression, but it could be multiplied not by thousands but by millions in our time, such a symptomatic expression of how our time is inclined to speak untruthfully. This is precisely what one should study in the impulses that underlie our contemporary culture: what the inclination towards untruthfulness is in our time. Of course, one soon realizes why the man in this case tells the untruth. He does not know the truth, of course, and has no idea of this truth, because he probably has not read much by Troxler. But that is precisely the characteristic of our time, that the most uncalled stand up and become teachers, enlighteners of the people, and that this must necessarily be connected with the spreading of untruth. Lack of thought is what underlies such things.

Now it is a matter of seeing these things in a deeper context. First of all, seeing that these things already arise from impulses, as we have discussed them in the course of this week, and that they must be seen through by our friends, so that our friends with spiritual science can place themselves in our present life in the right way. For it cannot be denied that it is quite difficult for many to assert themselves today as spiritual scientists, as confessors of spiritual science, in view of the situation in the world and what is happening in the outer world, and what, as can be seen more and more, naturally cannot find anything in this spiritual science that it understands. First of all, one must see the bigger picture. Some time ago, we characterized how completely inaccurate the theories of natural scientists are in the face of reality, given the great progress they have made in the world of facts. The facts that natural science has brought to the surface of existence can only be admired; it is truly a great achievement. But what has been said about the struggle for existence, about selection, about all the problems related to the problem of birth and kinship, all this is as inaccurate as possible, as is already recognized by scientists today. I even explained this in the public lecture in Basel.

But all of this is connected through the way in which certain old traditions have emerged in modern times with the present form of these old traditions. It is intimately connected with this. Modern times have indeed shown that they need the old times for their educational life. For the humanities scholar, this is not surprising, because the humanities scholar knows that certain impulses repeat themselves in every age. So it is only natural that impulses which intervene in a different form in the fifth post-Atlantic period in the development of humanity should also arise as repetitions of the fourth post-Atlantic period. This fourth post-Atlantic period began, as we know, in the eighth century BC and ends in the fifteenth century AD. Since the fifteenth century AD, we have entered a completely new era, as can be seen even on the surface, as we demonstrated yesterday with a few examples. But certain things that took place in the fourth post-Atlantic period are repeating themselves on a different level in our period. And I would like to say: “Outwardly, this fifth post-Atlantic period has indeed shown that it even has to consciously carry over certain things from the fourth post-Atlantic period. Did we not see how in the 15th century Greek scholars emigrated to Western Europe and brought ancient Greek scholarship in a new form first to Italy and then to the rest of Europe? What blossomed in European intellectual life through the impulses that arose from the traditions of an older time is called the Renaissance. And more than one might think, today's life still depends on the Renaissance.

But in other ways, too, one can show everywhere how, in relation to certain things, this fifth post-Atlantic period wanted to build on the fourth post-Atlantic period. Is it not a remarkable fact that Pico de Miranda, in the 15th century, when one could still speak more freely about Christianity than today, undertook to invite the most important scholars from all over Europe to Rome to discuss with them nine hundred theses that would essentially show how to arrive at a worldview suitable for the coming era. Of course, for obvious reasons, nothing much came of this. But this Pico de Mirandola, who was steeped in Greek culture, tried to substantiate Christianity in all its profound wisdom by drawing on Plato and Platonic philosophy. He believed that with the help of Plato, the Greek philosopher and greatest philosophical genius of the fourth post-Atlantic period, Christianity could be proven. So he wanted to create a connecting bridge between Plato and Christianity. One would like to say what a wonderful perspective would have resulted from this if such things could have been successful, if another geological layer had not been superimposed on top of it, if today in Europe we had a free, genuine Christianity permeated by Platonic philosophy!

But something else preceded that. Something preceded it that is connected in the deepest sense with many peculiarities of more recent spiritual life. If we take a look at the origin of Christianity, if we take a look at the time in which that exalted Being, whom we have come to know as the Christ, embodied Himself in a human body, and at the time in which that human life of feeling spread life, which was linked to this greatest event of the development of the earth, to the Mystery of Golgotha, which alone gives meaning to life on earth – if one takes a look at this time of the first spread of Christianity, then one notices that among those who, as a small group of people, brought this Christianity to Europe, there were some – they were then called Gnostics, especially by their opponents – who lived in the belief that the highest ideas, the highest wisdom, were necessary to make understandable the most significant event in the evolution of humanity on Earth.

We know that it is a misunderstanding of today's spiritual science to lump it together with Gnosticism. That is not the point. Gnosticism is something that was alive in the first Christian centuries, and was then buried like an old geological layer, and it cannot revive in the old form; it would then take on a Luciferic character. What is today spiritual science or anthroposophy must be born completely out of our time, and precisely this must be born completely out of our time, must fully reckon with all the great advances of the scientific world view. Thus spiritual science must not be confused with Gnosticism; but it must be recognized that the Gnostics, starting from the highest ideas, attempted to understand the Mystery of Golgotha by way of a spiritual evolution of the universe. And there is a deep striving for wisdom in the Gnostic systems. Everywhere we look, if we examine the matter from a spiritual-scientific point of view, we see how Christianity appears, I might say is borne by the Gnostic vehicle, as it appears to have been born out of a broad wisdom. It is one of the peculiarities of the development of Western civilization from the beginning of our era to the present day that this development was met with all the might of the wisdom in which Christianity was steeped. In a sense, the Gnostics were the ones most fiercely opposed. That is why only a few of their writings have come down to us, and most of what we know about the Gnostics comes from the writings of those who supposedly refuted them. But they did not refute them, they only eradicated them, they only pushed back the actual wisdom. That is the peculiar thing that was to be pushed back by the European impulses, the actual wisdom. And therein lies the origin of the fact that today even well-meaning people say: Well, these anthroposophists, if you look at their idealistic, ethical striving, that may still be acceptable; but what they want to research about world evolution, about the evolution of humanity, that goes - even well-meaning people say - into the regions of the worst fantasy. In order to make such a judgment possible, the sources of wisdom that also flowed in Gnosticism first had to be suppressed so that later European humanity could have the belief that the Lord gives His to His own in their sleep, and it is so beautifully preached that one says that the Most High must be simple. But what is really meant is that it must be comfortable, that it must not be necessary to expend any thought at all in order to find those regions, or to expend any spiritual effort at all in order to find those regions from which the deepest things in humanity have emerged.

And so we see that the West developed almost exclusively under this principle of suppressing the Gnostic. But this Gnostic element has not been completely suppressed. It has been suppressed in relation to the people, in relation to the broad masses, to whom, as we were able to discuss yesterday, it was even denied to get hold of the Bible until the invention of the printing press. But in a sense, the old wisdom that was already there was passed on. It was passed down and kept alive, as we have already indicated, in certain occult brotherhoods, which found their way into the education of Western Europe, occult brotherhoods that have developed up to modern times, some of which have been preserved in older forms, some of which have developed into what is today called modern Freemasonry. We know that such occult fraternizations, under this or that name, do indeed preserve a certain knowledge, a certain store of wisdom, but only through tradition, and that they do not endeavor to cultivate this store of wisdom in a truly living way. Until recent times, until the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period, it was indeed easy to preserve such wisdom in the circles of those occult brotherhoods that closed themselves off from the outside world and selected their people, those they wanted to admit, to whom they gave of this wisdom what they wanted to give them. Until recent times, it was relatively easy. Today, even that is more difficult, and there is a vast literature, as you know, in which the various degrees into which one is said to be initiated are communicated, along with their rituals and their so-called secrets. In particular, there is a vast English and French literature in this field.

On the whole, however, it can be said that what is written in these books of this literature will not be of much use to anyone in particular. Although there are enough people today who study this literature, even study it “with great zeal,” the students of such literature are still for the most part those who can say, “There I stand, I poor fool, and am as wise as before,” although these people often do not disdain to say what they do not know, though not often “with bitter sweat,” but still with great pomp. For this literature is so composed that he who has not special keys cannot penetrate it. This is due to the fact that in times when one no longer had direct access to the old Gnostic insights gained through clairvoyance, these things were also handed down in such inner occult brotherhoods in a purely external way. Of course, there have been individuals throughout the centuries, albeit only a limited number, who knew certain secrets associated with this ancient wisdom. But at the same time, these people chose to express themselves in such a way that they did not speak to the ordinary mind, which was increasingly emerging in humanity, but that they spoke through all kinds of signs and symbols. And so it has become more and more common in those occult brotherhoods to communicate what was preserved as ancient knowledge through signs and symbols, through very specific symbols. And to remain silent about these symbols and their meaning was strictly imposed on those who were truly initiated to a certain degree. So that there was actually always a fairly large group of people for such occult fraternization who knew the symbols but did not understand them. They then began to interpret the symbols. Nothing special comes of that, because something special only comes of it if you really learn to read the symbols. Then there was a small, limited number of people who really learned to read the symbols. These people did indeed arrive at a certain insight, at a certain wisdom, which was couched in the style of the old wisdom, which, as we know, still arose from atavistic human clairvoyance. We can best understand what this old wisdom was really like if we once again take a closer look at something that I have already touched on in recent weeks. On the one hand, let us consider the scientific research of modern times. I am referring less to the natural-scientific world view than to the way in which this natural-scientific research is carried out. Here we must say: in the relevant institutions, laboratories, cabinets, observatories, clinics and so on, the facts of nature are investigated. Certainly, in the course of time, the most magnificent things have come out of these things, and it must be emphasized again and again that spiritual science fully recognizes the progress of natural science. Great and momentous things have come out of it. But what has come out is, I might say, based only on the exploitation of a lucky groping in the dark. Anyone who takes an interest in the course of scientific research will notice this. The fact that this scientific research has produced the great technical advances that influence our whole lives today does not speak against it. These technical advances are also based on the fact that, to a certain extent, there is a wise guidance in the fact that certain things have been revealed in the last few centuries that could then be applied to our technical advances. But what all this scientific research has not led to is the revelation of certain secrets that can be expressed through what can be researched in laboratories, clinics and observatories. Of course, it was possible to find out how to make this or that powder by “scientific research” in the spirit of modern times; it was possible to find out how to make this or that machine, and then to bring this or that machine to a truly magnificent level of perfection. All that could be done. But the longed-for secrets of existence were not revealed. In modern times, we know how the chemical composition of a substance called phenacetin works on the human body. We know because we have tried it. And all that is attempted today in technical progress is an application of the tried and tested. Research is not aimed at revealing secrets. Sometimes this research does come up with hypotheses, but hypotheses never lead to the unveiling of secrets, but only to the transposition into nature of what has already been conceived. Thus, on the one hand, in modern times we have a natural science that, while it does diligent, conscientious research and from which we can learn a great deal, is unsuitable for pointing to the secrets of existence. One can achieve an extraordinary amount with this natural science, but know nothing at all about the connections of existence. That is on the one hand.

On the other hand, one has certain truths of faith, truths of religious creeds. In these religious creeds it is said - let us take something quite ordinary - that the human soul is immortal. Something is said about the nature of the Godhead and so on, but nothing is done to apply these truths to real objects, such as a soul that one wants to explore, that one wants to talk about in concrete terms. Concepts and ideas are sought that are, so to speak, beneficial to man, that he likes, and from which he can indeed be edified; these are sought. But these ideas are not applicable to anything that is actually there; rather, these ideas are supposed to refer to something that is not there. One avoids applying these ideas to something that is actually being explored in one's immediate life. So that today religious denominations talk about something with their beliefs that no one actually has a concrete idea of, something that they at most convince themselves that they have a concrete idea of. When someone wants to talk intelligently about such things, he speaks as I quoted an important contemporary theologian as saying the other day: “You natural scientist, you have the human being as nature reveals it; I retain the human being as a free being!” But when you then follow his words, he simply hands everything over to natural science, even saying that the human being is such that his freedom is taken from him by nature. I would like to know what he is talking about at all. He remains in what has been handed down to him through words. And such a person does not have more than what has been handed down to him in words.

Now, such things differ quite significantly from what the ancient Gnostic wisdom actually was; but they have transferred their way of thinking, their way of imagining, to what wants to open up in many ways, theoretically or otherwise, in modern times. Because everywhere in such occult societies or in non-occult societies that include occult circles, people talk about so-called esotericism. But what one often hears in this esotericism is also nothing more than what does not refer to anything specific that can be grasped, but what is modeled on religious truths as they are often taught today without object. An esoteric truth does not become esoteric by being spoken of with a certain very drawn-out story that marks a sentimentally exalted expression: Oh, that is abysmally esoteric, one dare not say it... because...! What one so often dare not say has no very abundant content. If you go back to older times, there were indeed things that were quite esoteric and were not shared by certain individuals who possessed them with those who were not considered mature. But these were truly not abstract truths, but very, very concrete truths. Today, the outer world can only gain an idea of the concreteness of such truths by looking at the last foothills of these older truths. And these foothills are just fading away, so to speak, at dusk, in the evening twilight of the fourth post-Atlantic period. In Paracelsus, however, we do find some indications, last foothills, weak foothills of the old deeper insights; but he does not speak abstractly when he speaks of such foothills of the old deeper insights; he speaks very concretely, so concretely that one sees how, in his work, spiritual life flows together with natural life in the imagination. For example, when he speaks of man, he speaks of salt, mercury, and sulfur. You can read about it in my writing: “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life.” He speaks, then, of external natural things, but he speaks of the deeper character of these external natural things. He speaks in a sense that it is not possible to speak of these things today, as one will speak again when this spiritual science or anthroposophy, which we practice, experiences a corresponding continuation. Then we shall again dig into that which should not hover in cloud-cuckoo-land, but which should really delve into the secrets of nature; we shall again speak in the most concrete way. These were also only offshoots of an ancient knowledge, of which Paracelsus still spoke.

You understand what is at stake when one wants to characterize this ancient knowledge. It is about not just looking into a void when you really want to develop spiritual concepts, but also to see the natural existence with your concepts, as it were, in a glass of water that you heat up and from which, when it cools down again, salt settles to the bottom, the spiritual process, that spiritual process that also takes place in our human organism itself. As you are all listening to me, something very similar is happening in you to what happens in this glass of water containing dissolved salt that is treated in such a way that the dissolved salt settles to the bottom. And only when one can follow this entire cycle of phenomena, but as they are spiritually, through the different spheres, then one speaks of real Gnostic knowledge. And again, Paracelsus saw something quite different from what a chemist or physicist sees today when sulfur burns. For what happens when sulfur burns will happen again in all of you when you go home, go to bed and sleep through what you have thought through here. And so it was for Paracelsus that he saw the spiritual in the processes everywhere in the outer nature – but as I said: only in the last foothills. That was the old esoteric, which was really strong-minded enough to imbue itself with ideas that had real value and that intervened in external existence. But that is why this old esoteric was connected with the highest human activity, which was developed for social life. There was a certain power in the old esoteric; because the one who understood something about the spiritual world could do something. Today many people can do something, because they learn from science to achieve a high level of skill; but they do not understand the subject, and those who understand it, that is, who repeat the words that come from understanding, they cannot do anything, they want the secrets to remain “secrets”, as I hinted to you yesterday. This time had to come, because humanity had to undergo a crisis in moral terms, and because certain secrets had to be reconquered from human freedom, which only took place in our fifth post-Atlantic period.

But the truth cannot be stopped. And in what I hinted to you the day before yesterday, that certain people now already see how smoke, which is developed, becomes sensitive and follows the sound, how even flames follow the sound, lies the beginning of a realization, to which the time must come, to a realization that will lead to what, for example, Goethe hints at in the evocation of the spirit. Because the beginning of this is, after all, this seeing of the smoke being transformed, which I hinted at the day before yesterday. But people today would only misuse certain things. Precisely the important things that still have to come out within our fifth post-Atlantic period, they just have to come out slowly, because today people would misuse them badly. I will have to refer to such things in the following period. In particular, I will have to point out the relationships that currently exist between spiritual science and various branches of knowledge, for example medicine. And then, in the following period, I would still like to speak about a very important topic, about the so-called karma of the human profession, because the concept of the various professions will have to change significantly for the following period, and indeed for a period that will follow very soon. If people continue to understand what is meant by a profession in the way that arises from our present way of thinking, it will truly lead to social chaos. But more about that in later lectures.

Today, however, I want to point out something else. In the fourth post-Atlantic period, more and more things have developed in such a way that people began to carefully guard what they knew about the spiritual connections between nature and human existence, and this practice has been passed on to the occult fraternizations of which I have spoken. These occult fraternizations were, as already indicated, as a rule quite incapable of finding anything out about spiritual connections by themselves; but they did pass on certain old secrets. And those human beings who today have no connection with such occult fraternization, who often have no idea that such occult fraternization even exists, would be amazed if they really understood what lives in many a formula and in many a practice that is found within occult fraternizations, and how some people in such occult fraternizations, who then use the masses at their disposal for their own purposes, know certain secrets handed down from time immemorial, even about physical existence. Certainly, most of this knowledge has been handed down to the series of unfortunate alchemists, those unfortunate other people who, under this or that name, existed precisely in the transition period from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantic period, who were so similar to the man of whom Faust said of his father said: “he was a dark honorable man... who, in the company of adepts, locked himself in the black kitchen, and, according to endless recipes, poured together the adverse,” and then did this or that with this adverse, poured together, as you know from this Faust scene. That was a time of much trial and error, but for the most part real wisdom had already been lost. This real wisdom, however, has found its way into many occult brotherhoods.

Now there is a law that must be observed if such things are to be considered at all. This law could be characterized in the following way: One could say that such things as the survival of wisdom among people are not bound to the laws of the dead, but to the laws of the living. Therefore, there must always be life in the further development of these things. These things cannot be simply handed down by tradition, for then they die, and then necessarily what is good in them must change into what is bad. And at first the impulse to let live was not present in the occult wisdom of these occult brotherhoods. All they did was to preserve a certain occult wisdom, to guard it from the world and to use it as they wished, and then at most to acquire a certain power through all sorts of atavistic mediumistic machinations or the like. It must be fully understood that these things will become worse and worse if they are not taken up by direct life. Therefore, occult truths must reproduce themselves in the worst possible way in those occult societies that preserve these occult truths, give them to their people in symbols, but do not work them in a living way. The good that lives has the same property as everything that is alive: after some time it must die if new life is not implanted in it. But there was also a certain temptation in the purely traditional preservation of occult wisdom in these occult fraternities. For those who are in living contact with the spiritual worlds, this temptation need not be present to the same extent. But for those in whom the living connection has already died to a certain extent, this temptation that I am referring to can very easily arise. And so certain occult fraternities were not at all free from the influence of such temptation. Such occult fraternities have enough graduates and adepts who put what they have seen of human wisdom at the service of human egoism, whether it be the egoism of individuals or that of groups.

In particular, it became more and more common among certain occult fraternities to combine what could be gained from occult wisdom with all kinds of political points of view and political impulses. And it must be said that such occult fraternities have thoroughly and closely combined what they have often practiced with clearly defined political tendencies. And in the case of occult fraternization, it is almost a characteristic of modern times that they have combined political tendencies with what they have been given from certain insights into interrelationships. — It is indeed extremely difficult to talk about these things in the present day because these things are immediately misunderstood, and it will really take a certain period of preparation before certain things can be spoken about at all. But it can be indicated that occult fraternization is definitely concerned with finding ways and means to bring the political affairs of modern times into their orbit, to shape them in their sense, or, in trivial terms, to gain political influence. And they have gained this in abundance and in a most satisfactory manner. And when the connections are once revealed between much of what has happened in modern times in political life and the sources in the occult fraternizations, from which it has happened through all sorts of channels that the public does not notice today, then strange discoveries will be made. For today more than ever, people talk about insisting on their freedom. But many a one who today presents himself to the world and talks about his freedom, who makes great declamations about his freedom, is anything but free. He just does not suspect how he is pulled by the various strings from this or that so-called occult side. And it would make an interesting chapter to describe how this or that so-called authoritative personality seemingly plays their great ideas out into the world from their own soul, how they are also celebrated by thousands and thousands, how entire groups of newspapers write for this personality write, it would be interesting to show how this machinery works, which pulls the strings from certain occult fraternizations, and how the relevant authoritative personality would appear to be quite unimportant in the process through her own individuality. For it must be emphasized that certain occult fraternities are aware of the sources of wisdom that were once so tapped, as I have indicated to you in recent weeks, but that these sources of wisdom are often misused. And they are always misused when they are applied in the way I have just indicated. Especially in an age in which, as in the fifth post-Atlantic period so far – you can see this from all the considerations we have been making in these weeks – occult knowledge has declined and people have been cut off, as it were, from the occult context for the outer life from the occult connections, those occultists who abused the old traditional occult knowledge had to work all the more strongly, but in a harmful sense. For the people were not at all armed against it. Hence it is that wherever honest occult knowledge appears, so many ways and means are sought to make it impossible. Honest occult knowledge, which simply represents the truth, is highly inconvenient for those who want to fish for occult knowledge in secret. We ourselves have had an example of this, which is not one of the most significant examples, but which can serve to illustrate a few points. When the Alcyone fraud was revealed by the Theosophical Society, it was linked to much more extensive intentions. They wanted a great deal from it. The fact that people believed in Alcyone was only a means to an end. The actual purpose was to be seen in something quite different. But that is why people found it so unpleasant when we vigorously rejected this Alcyone humbug, because they realized that the matter was being seen through, and that, you see, is the most unpleasant thing for occultists fishing in troubled waters for the occultists fishing in troubled waters, it is most unpleasant when they realize that someone has penetrated their plans, really penetrated the matter, and is not inclined to go along, but to go an honest, sincere way. If you study our entire movement, as it has developed for the last twenty-eight years, you will see that we have always tried to keep to the right path between public announcement and the practice of spiritual science, and we have even placed great emphasis on really going out to people and saying what people today will allow us to say. And further, particular emphasis is placed on our friends understanding how the demand to present a certain occult knowledge to humanity arises today, not out of arbitrariness, but out of the necessity of the time. And here it is necessary to take up the thread from such great minds as Troxler's, who expressed so beautifully the longing for spiritual knowledge such as is found in anthroposophy. But that this anthroposophy must rise up out of the upper geological layer that has settled over it is felt by many, many people.

Of course, one could easily believe that it is pessimistically described when, again and again, it is pointed out from this very place how the spiritual life of our time has come to a kind of dead end and that this coming to a dead end shows that rescue and help must come through spiritual science. But anyone who considers this to be an exaggeration, too radical or too pessimistic, has not studied the longings that have arisen in the last days of the best people of the 19th and 20th centuries. If you read any of Troxler's writings, you will see that such longings were particularly strong in him. At least he was still able to point to an anthroposophy, even if it did not take the form of today's spiritual science. Later times could no longer do so. I have often spoken to you about Herman Grimm, who is, so to speak, half Swiss, since his mother came from Switzerland; I have also recently pointed out how Herman Grimm from school as the Kant-Laplace hypothesis, in such a way that he says, scholars of the future will have a lot of trouble understanding how this fantasy could have been accepted by a certain age. This Herman Grimm, of course he could not come to spiritual science, the end of the 19th century was not suitable for that. But he saw the deadlock into which the newer spiritual life was moving. And it is interesting, endlessly interesting, to see how such people, such finely organized spirits, such spirits that have grown up with Goethe, how they constantly speak of something that they actually do not know, but that must come. They are constantly speaking of something that must come. The answer would be what spiritual science could give to humanity. But they know nothing about that. But they speak out of their longings in strong words, in words that surpass in radicalism much of what has been said here from this place, but which in turn show that the things have not been misunderstood.

Herman Grimm, the subtle observer of the intellectual life of humanity, especially from its artistic side, often turned his gaze to the question: Where should this lead, when one sees what has become of it in recent times? Certainly, he then consoled himself again and again: There will come a time when Goethe will be understood, when people will increasingly empathize with him. But on the other hand, other thoughts often occurred to him as well. He was able to appreciate the great advances that came about in the 19th century; but on the other hand, he also saw the dark side of this progress. In a volume of essays published in 1890, there is an interesting passage that, I would say, expresses precisely these sentiments. Herman Grimm says:

“The world is filled with the urge to achieve an unknown goal, for the love of which the tremendous efforts we are witnessing are being made.”

So it is an unknown goal; what he sees are multiple efforts towards an unknown goal. He says:

And now he states in abstract words what he alone knows about the goal:

“The goal is: to make all of humanity, in its final form, a kingdom of brothers who, yielding only to the noblest of motives, move forward together.”

But if there is such a longing to unite humanity in a realm of brotherhood, which, as we have also seen from lectures given recently, applies to the physical plane, then what is needed for this is the common bond of understanding for a general humanity. This general humanity is not present, however, if spiritual science cannot be spread; for the more recent development has been to fragment humanity. Then Herman Grimm continues:

“If you only follow history on the map of Europe, you might think that mutual general murder must fill our immediate future.”

We read these things today with a special feeling when a person looks at the fate of Europe in 1890 and comes to the conclusion:

“Those who follow history only on the map of Europe might believe that a mutual general murder must fulfill our immediate future; while those who study it on the globe” - that is, in the context of the earth with the whole world - “can be sure that the hour is approaching when the Germanic peoples, united in the same thoughts of the highest spiritual striving, will open the way to the true goods of human life for all the countless millions of Asia and Africa and what the world otherwise harbors.

And now comes the sentence that shows how people who saw what was happening in the 19th century in the destiny of humanity were able to speak about what they had seen with open eyes and not as sleepily as most of humanity. Herman Grimm continues:

“Allow these thoughts... .”

He is referring to the idea of the fraternization of peoples, as he has just expressed it, and of looking at the world through the lens of the globe.

“Permit this thought, which seems to be at odds with our enormous military armaments and those of our neighbors, but in which I believe and which must enlighten us, if it is not better to abolish human life by a communal decision and to set an official day of suicide.”

I think that such very serious sentences, which correspond to deep human feelings, could point to one thing: that seriousness is necessary for life in our time. Imagine what is going on in the soul of the person who expresses such feelings! But I know that many also read such a sentence and read it as one reads the newspaper today; they are incapable of looking into the seriousness of the times because it is more comfortable to sleep. But the lack of understanding of spiritual science arises from the complacency of oversleeping the demands of the time. The less one wants to sleep, the more one wants to understand how necessary it is not to sleep today, the more one will recognize that something like spiritual science is necessary for humanity. But for us, who are in spiritual science, it is necessary that we arm ourselves with this seriousness so that we can find the right relationship to the world that does not yet have this seriousness.

This congress has been announced as a Congress on the philosophy of life, and no doubt you will take it as such. Anyone who wishes to talk about philosophical questions today, however, cannot ignore natural science, and in particular the philosophical consequences that natural science has brought with it. Indeed, for centuries—since the fifteenth or sixteenth century, we may say—science has increasingly come to dominate human thinking in the civilized world.

Now it would take a great many words to survey the triumphs of science in the field of human knowledge, and the transformation of our whole life brought about by the achievements of scientific research. And it would be merely a repetition of what you all know already. Philosophically speaking, what is interesting about science is something quite different. I mean the function it long ago assumed of educating the civilized world. And it is precisely in discussing this educational rôle in the development of modern man that we come up against two paradoxes, as I should like to call them. Let me begin with these paradoxes.

The first thing that has followed from the scientific method of research is a transformation of human thinking. Any impartial observer of earlier philosophical trends must conclude that, because of the conditions which then determined man's development, thinking inevitably added something subjective to what was given by experiment and the observation of nature. We need only recall those now outmoded branches of knowledge, astrology and alchemy, to perceive how nature was approached in former times—how human thinking as a matter of course added to what was there something that it wished to express, or at any rate did not suppress.

In face of the scientific attitude of recent times, this has ceased. Today, we are virtually obliged simply to accept the data given us by observation and experiment, and to work them up into natural laws, as they are called. Admittedly, to do so we make use of thought; but we make use of it only as a means of arranging phenomena so that through their own existence they manifest to us their inner connection, their conformity to law. And we make it our duty not to add any of our own thought to our observation of the world. We see this, indeed, as an ideal of the scientific attitude—and rightly so.

Under these conditions, what has become of human thinking? It has actually become the servant, the mere tool of research. Thought as such has really nothing to contribute when it comes to investigating the conformity to law of external phenomena.

Here, then, is one of my paradoxes: that thought as a human experience is excluded from the relationship that man enters into with the world. It has become a purely formal aid for comprehending realities. Within science, it is no longer something self-manifesting.

The significance of this for man's inner life is extraordinarily great. It means that we must look upon thinking as something which must retire in wisdom and modesty when we are contemplating the outside world, and which represents a kind of private current within the life of the soul.

And it is precisely when we now ask ourselves: How, in turn, can science approach thinking? that we come up against the paradox, and find ourselves saying: If thinking has to confine itself to the working-up of natural processes and can intervene only formally, in clarification, combination and organization, it cannot also fall within the natural processes themselves. It thus becomes paradoxical to raise the question (which is certainly justified from the scientific point of view): How can we, from the standpoint of scientific law, understand thinking as a manifestation of the human organism? And to this, if we stand impartially and seriously within the life of science, we can only reply today: To the extent that thinking has had to withdraw from the natural processes, contemplation of them can go on trying to encompass thinking, but it cannot succeed. Since it is methodologically excluded, thinking is also really excluded from the natural processes. It is condemned to be a mere semblance, not a reality.

Not many people today, I believe, are fully conscious of the force of this paradox; yet in the depths of their subconscious there exists in countless numbers of people today an awareness of it. Only as thinking beings can we regard ourselves as human; it is in thinking that we find our human dignity—and yet this, which really makes us into human beings, accompanies us through the world as something whose reality we cannot at present acknowledge, as a semblance. In pointing to what is noblest in our human nature, we feel ourselves to be in an area of non-reality.

This is something that burdens the soul of anyone who has become seriously involved with the research methods both of the inorganic sciences and of biology, and who wishes to draw the consequences of these methods, rather than of any individual results, for a philosophy of life.

Here, we may say, is something that can lead to bitter doubts in the human soul. Doubts arise first in the intellect, it is true; but they flow down into the feelings. Anyone who is able to look at human nature more deeply and without prejudice—in the way I shall be demonstrating in detail in the lectures that follow—knows how the state of the spirit, if it endures long enough, exerts an influence right down to the physical state of the person, and how from this physical state, or disposition, the mood of life wells up in turn. Whether the doubt is driven down into our feelings or not determines whether we stride courageously through life, so that we can stand upright ourselves and have a healthy influence among our fellow-men, or whether we wander through life disgruntled and downcast—useless to ourselves and useless to our fellow-men. I do not say—and the lectures which follow will show that I do not need to say—that what I have just been discussing must always lead to doubt; but it can easily do so, unless science is extended in the directions I shall be describing.

The splendid achievements of science vis-ä-vis the outside world make extraordinary demands on man's soul if, as from the philosophical standpoint here expounded he certainly must do, he adopts a positive attitude to science. They demand that he should be capable of meeting doubt with something stronger and more powerful than would otherwise be needed.

Whilst in this respect science would appear to lead to something negative for the life of the soul, yet—and this brings me to my second paradox—on the other hand it has resulted in something extremely positive. Here, I express once more a paradox that struck me particularly when, more than twenty years ago now, I worked out my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and attempted, whilst maintaining a truly scientific outlook on life, to fathom the nature of human freedom.¹

For, with its conformity to law, science does easily lead, in theory, to a denial of human freedom. In this respect, however, science develops theories that are just the opposite of its practical effect. When we go further and further into the semblance nature of thinking and, by actually pursuing the scientific attitude—not scientific theories—arrive at a right inward experience of that nature, then we conclude: if it is only a semblance and not a reality, then the process of thought does not, like a natural force, have a compelling effect. I may thus compare it—and this is more than a mere comparison—to a combination of mirror-images. Images before me cannot compel me. Existent forces can compel me, whether they are thought of as existing outside me or inside me; images cannot compel me. If, therefore, I am able to conceive my moral impulses within that pure thinking which science itself fosters in us by its methods; if I can so shape moral impulses within me that my attitude to their shaping is that to which science educates me, then in these moral impulses conceived by pure thinking I have, not compelling forces, but forces and semblances that I myself am free to accept or not. That is to say: however much science, from its very premises, is bound, and with some justification, to deny freedom, yet in educating him to semblance thinking it educates the man of our culture to freedom.

These are the two poles, the one relating to the life of thought and the other to the life of the will, with which the human soul is confronted by present-day scientific opinions. In distinguishing them, however, we indicate at the same time how the scientific view of life points beyond itself. It must take up some attitude towards human thinlting; yet it excludes that thinking. By so doing, it suggests a method of research that can be fully justified in the eyes of science and yet lead to a comprehensible experience of thinking. It suggests, on the other hand, that because it cannot itself arrive theoretically at freedom, the scientific attitude must be extended into a different region, precisely in order to attain the sphere of freedom.

What I am presenting as a necessity deriving from science itself—an extension into a region that science, at least as understood today, cannot reach—is attempted by the philosophy of life I am here advocating. Today, of course, since it stands at the beginning of its development, it can achieve this extension only imperfectly. Yet the attempt must be made, because more and more people in the civilized world today are being affected by the problems of thinking and freedom that I have described. It is no longer possible for us today to believe that only those in some way involved with science are faced with demands and questions and riddles of this kind. Even the remotest villages, to which no scientific results of any consequence penetrate, are nevertheless brought by their education to the kind of thinking that science demands; and this brings with it, though quite unconsciously as yet, uncertainty about human freedom. It is therefore not only scientific questions that are involved here, but quite clearly general human ones.

What it comes to is this: taking our stand on the ground of scientific education, can we penetrate further along the path of knowledge than does present-day science?

The attempt to do so can be made, and made in such a way that the methods used can be justified to the strictest scientist, and made by paths that have been laid down in complete accordance with the scientific attitude and with scientific conscientiousness. I should like now, at the start of my lectures, to go on to speak of these paths.

Yet, although many souls already unconsciously long for it, the present-day path of knowledge is still not easy to explain conceptually. In order that we may be able to understand one another this evening, therefore, I should like to introduce, simply as aids to understanding, descriptions of older paths that mankind has followed in order to arrive at knowledge lying beyond the ordinary region science deals with today.

Much of what, it is believed today, should just remain an article of faith and is accepted as ancient and honourable tradition, leads the psychologically perceptive observer of history back into age-old epochs of humanity. There, it turns out that these matters of faith were sought after, as matters of knowledge suited to their time, by certain individuals through the cultivation of their own souls and the development of hidden spiritual powers, and that they thus genuinely constituted matters of knowledge. People today no longer realize how much of what has emerged historically in man's development was once actually discovered—but discovered by earlier paths of knowledge.

When I describe these paths, I do so, of course, with the aid of methods I shall outline later; so that in many cases those who form their picture of the earlier epochs of mankind only from outward historical documents, and not from spiritual documents, may take exception to my description. Anyone who examines impartially even the outward historical documents, and who then compares them with what I shall have to say, will nevertheless find no real contradiction. And secondly, I want to emphasize that I am not describing these older paths of knowledge in order to advocate them today. They suited earlier epochs, and nowadays can even be harmful to man if, under a misapprehension, he applies them to himself. It is simply so that we shall understand each other about present-day ways of knowledge that I shall choose two earlier ways, describe them, and thus make clear the paths man has to walk today, if he wishes to go beyond the sphere of scientific knowledge as it is now understood.

As I have said, I could select others from the wealth of earlier ways of knowledge; but I am selecting only two. First, then, we have a way which in its pure form was followed by individuals in ancient times in the East—the way of yoga.

Yoga has passed through many phases, and the aspect to which I shall attach the greatest value today is precisely one that has come down to later epochs in a thoroughly decadent and harmful state. What I shall be describing, the historian will thus be forced, when considering later epochs, to present as something actually harmful to mankind. But in successive epochs human nature has experienced the most varied developments. Something quite different suited human nature in ancient epochs and in later ones. What could, in earlier times, be a genuine means of cognition was later perhaps used only to titillate man's itch for power over his fellow-men. This was certainly not true of the earliest periods, the ones whose practice of yoga I am describing.

What did it comprise, the way of yoga, which was followed in very ancient times in the Orient by individuals who were scholars, to use the modern term, in the higher sphere? It comprised among other things a particular kind of breathing exercise. (I am singling out this one from the wealth of exercises that the yoga pupil or the yoga scholar, the yogi, had to undertake.) When nowadays we examine our breathing, we find that it is a process which for the most part operates unconsciously in the healthy human organism. There must be something abnormal about the man who is aware of his breathing. The more naturally the process of breathing functions, the better it is for ordinary consciousness and for ordinary life. For the duration of his exercises, however, when he wished to develop cognitive powers that are merely dormant in ordinary consciousness, the yogi transformed the process of respiration. He did so by employing a length of time for inhaling, for holding the breath and for exhaling, different from that used in ordinary, natural breathing. He did this so as to make conscious the process of respiration. Ordinary respiration does not become conscious. The transformed respiratory rhythm, with its timing determined by human volition, is entirely conscious. But what is the result? Well, we have only to express ourselves in physiological terms to realize what the yogi achieved by making conscious his respiration. When we breathe in, the respiratory impulse enters our organism; but it also goes via the spinal cord into the brain. There, the rhythm of the respiratory current combines with those processes that are the physical carriers of mental activity, the nerve and sense processes. Actually, in our ordinary life, we never have nerve and sense processes alone; they are always permeated by our respiratory rhythm. A connection, interaction, harmonization of the nerve and sense processes and of respiration always occurs when we allow our minds to function. By transmitting his altered respiratory rhythm into the nerve and sense process in a fully conscious way, the yogi also made a conscious connection between the respiratory rhythm and the thought rhythm, logical rhythm or rather logical combination and analysis of thoughts. In this way he altered his whole mental activity. In what direction did he alter it? Precisely because his breathing became fully conscious, his thoughts permeated his organism in the same way as did the respiratory current itself. We could say that the yogi set his thoughts moving on the respiratory currents and, in the inner rhythm of his being, experienced the union of thought and breath. In this way, the yoga scholar raised himself above the mass of his fellow-men and was able to proclaim to them knowledge they could not gain for themselves.

In order to understand what was really happening here, we must look for a moment at the particular way in which knowledge earlier affected the ordinary, popular consciousness of the masses.

Nowadays, when we look out at the world, we attach the greatest value to seeing pure colours; to hearing pure sounds, when we hear sounds; and similarly to obtaining a certain purity in the other perceptions—such purity, that is, as the sensory process can afford. This was not true for the consciousness of men in older civilizations. Not that, as a certain brand of scholarship often mistakenly believes, people in earlier times projected all sorts of imaginings on to nature: the imagination was not all that unusually active. Because of man's constitution at that time, however, it was quite natural for older civilizations not to see only pure colours, pure sounds, pure qualities in the other senses, but at the same time to perceive in them all something spiritual. Thus, in sun and moon, in stars, in wind and weather, in spring and stream, in the creatures of nature's various realms, they saw something spiritual where we today see pure colours and hear pure sounds, the connection between which we only later seek to understand with the aid of purified thinking. And there was a further consequence of this for earlier humanity: that no such strong and inwardly fortified self-consciousness as we have today existed then. Besides perceiving something spiritual in everything about him, man perceived himself as a part of this whole environment; he did not separate himself from it as an independent self. To draw an analogy, I might say: If my hand were conscious, what would it think about itself? It would conclude that it was not an independent entity, but made sense only within my organism. In some such way as this, earlier man was unable to regard himself as an independent entity, but felt himself rather a part of nature's whole, which in turn he had to see as permeated by the spiritual.

The yogi raised himself above this view, which implied the dependence of the human self. By uniting his thought-process with the process of respiration that fills all man's inner substance, he arrived at a comprehension of the human self, the human I. The awareness of personal individuality, implanted in us today by our inherited qualities and, if we are adults, by our education, had in those earlier times to be attained, indirectly, through exercises. The consequence was that the yogi obtained from the experience of self something quite different from what we do. It is one thing to accept something as a natural experience, as the sense of self is for us, and quite another to attain to it by the paths that were followed in early Eastern civilization. They lived with what moves and swells and acts in the universe; whereas today, when we experience all this from a certain elevation, we no longer know anything of the universe directly. The human self, therefore, the true nature of the human soul manifested itself to the yogi through his exercise. And we may say: since what could be discovered in this way passed over as revelation into the general cultural consciousness, it became the subject-matter of extremely important early products of the mind.

Once again, let me mention one of many. Here we have an illumination from the ancient Orient, the magnificent song Bhagavad-Gita. In the Gita we have the experience of self-awareness; it describes wonderfully, out of the deepest human lyricism, how, when by experiencing he recognizes it and by recognizing he experiences it, this self leads man to a sympathy with all things, and how it manifests to him his own humanity and his relationship with a higher world, with a spiritual and super-sensible world. In ever new and marvellous notes, the Gita depicts this awareness of the self in its devotion to the universal. To the impartial observer of history, who can immerse himself in these earlier times, it is clear that the splendid notes of the Gita have arisen from what could be experienced through these exercises in cognition.

This way of attaining knowledge was the appropriate one for an earlier epoch of civilization in the Orient. At that time, it was generally accepted that one had to retire into solitude and a hermit's life if one sought connection with super-sensible worlds. And anyone who carried out such exercises did condemn himself to solitude and the life of the hermit; for they bring a man into a certain state of sensibility and make him over-sensitive towards the robust external world. He must retire from life. In earlier times it was just such solitary figures who were trusted by their fellow-men. What they had to say was accepted as knowledge. Nowadays, this no longer suits our civilization. People today rightly demand that anyone they are to trust as a source of knowledge should stand in the midst of life, that he should be able to hold his own with the robustness of life, with human labour and human activity as the demands of the time shape them. The men of today just do not feel themselves linked, as the men of earlier epochs did, to anyone who has to withdraw from life.

If you reflect carefully on this, you will conclude: present-day ways of knowledge must be different. We shall be speaking of these in a little while. But before doing so, and again simply by way of explanation and not with any idea of recommending it, I want to describe the principles underlying a way that was also appropriate to earlier times—the way of asceticism.

The way of asceticism involved subduing and damping down bodily processes and needs, so that the human body no longer functioned in its normal robust fashion. Bodily functions were also subdued by putting the external physical organism into painful situations. All this gave to those who followed this ascetic path certain human experiences which did indeed bring knowledge. I do not, of course, mean that it is right to inhibit the healthy human organism in which we are born into this life on earth, where our aim is to enable this organism to be effective in ordinary life. The healthy organism is unquestionably the appropriate one for external sensuous nature, which is after all the basis of human life between birth and death. Yet it remains true that the early ascetics, who had damped down this organism, did in fact gain pure experience of their spirituality, and knew their souls to inhabit a spiritual world. What makes our physical and sensuous organism suited for the life between birth and death is precisely the fact that, as the ascetics' experiences were able to show, it hides from us the spiritual world. It was, quite simply, the experience of the early ascetics that by damping down the bodily functions one could consciously enter the spiritual worlds. That again is no way for the present. Anyone who inhibits his body in this way makes himself unfit for life among his fellow-men, and makes himself unfit vis-à-vis himself as well. Life today demands men who do not withdraw, who maintain their health and indeed restore it if it is impaired, but not men who withdraw from life. Such men could inspire no confidence, in view of the attitude of our age. Although the path of asceticism certainly did lead to knowledge in earlier times, it cannot be a path for today.

Yet what both the way of yoga and the ascetic way yielded in knowledge of the sensible world is preserved in ancient and, I would say, sacred traditions, and is accepted by mankind today as satisfying certain needs of the soul. Only people are not interested to know that the articles of faith thus accepted were in fact discovered by a genuine way of knowledge, if one no longer suited to our age.

Today's way of knowledge must be entirely different. We have seen how the one way, yoga, tried to arrive at thinking indirectly, through breathing, in order to experience this thinking in a way in which it is not perceived in ordinary life. For the reason already given, we cannot make this detour via breathing. We must therefore try to achieve a transformation of thinking by other means, so that through this transformed thinking we can reach knowledge that will be a kind of extension of natural knowledge. If we understand ourselves correctly, therefore, we shall start today, not by manipulating thinking indirectly via breathing, but by manipulating it directly and by doing certain exercises through which we make thinking more forceful and energetic than it is in ordinary consciousness.

In ordinary consciousness, we indulge in rather passive thinking, which adheres to the course of external events. To follow a new super-sensible way of knowledge, we place certain readily comprehended concepts at the centre of our consciousness. We remain within the thought itself. I am aware that many people believe that what I am now going to describe is present already in the later way of yoga, for example in that of Patanjali. But as practised today, it certainly does not form a part of Eastern spirit-training—for, even if a man carried out the yoga exercises nowadays, they would have a different effect, because of the change in the human organism, from the effect they had on the people of earlier epochs.

Today, then, we go straight to thinking, by cultivating meditation, by concentrating on certain subjects of thought for longish periods. We perform, in the realm of the soul, something comparable to building up a muscle. If we use a muscle over and over again in continuous exertion, whatever the goal and purpose, the muscle must develop. We can do the same with thinking. Instead of always submitting, in our thinking, to the course of external events, we bring into the centre of our consciousness, with a great effort of will, clear-cut concepts which we have formed ourselves or have been given by someone expert in the field, and in which no associations can persist of which we are not conscious; we shut out all other consciousness, and concentrate only on this one subject. In the words Goethe uses in Faust, I might say: Yes, it is easy—that is, it appears so—yet the easy is difficult. One person takes weeks, another months, to achieve it. When consciousness does learn to rest and rest continually upon the same content, in such a way that the content itself becomes a matter of complete indifference, and we devote all our attention and all our inward experience to the building up and spiritual energization of mental activity, then at last we achieve the opposite process to what the yogi went through. That is, we tear our thinking away from the process of respiration.

Today, this still seems to people something absurd, something fantastic. Yet just as the yogi pushed his thinking into his body, to link it with the rhythm of his breath and in this way experience his own self, his inner spirituality, so too we release thinking from the remnant of respiration that survives unconsciously in all our ordinary thinking. You will find the systematic exercises described in greater detail in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, or in another one, Outline of Occult Science, or again in Riddles of the Soul and other books of mine. By these means, one gradually succeeds not only in separating the thought sequence from the respiration process, but also in making it quite free of corporeality. Only then does one see what a great service the so-called materialistic, or rather mechanistic, outlook on life has rendered to mankind. It has made us aware that ordinary thinking is founded on bodily processes. From this can stem the incentive to seek a kind of thinking no longer founded on bodily processes. But this can only be found by building up ordinary thinking in the way described. By doing so, we arrive at a thinking set free from the body, a thinking that consists of purely psychic processes. In this way, we come to know what once had a semblance nature in us—as images only to begin with, but images that show us life independent of our corporeality.

This is the first step towards a way of knowledge suited to modern man. It brings us, however, to an experience that is hidden from ordinary consciousness. Just as the Indian yogi linked himself in his thinking with the internal rhythm of respiration, and so also with his spiritual self which lives in the respiratory rhythm, just as he moved inwards, so we go outwards. By tearing our logical thinking away from the organism to which it is actually connected, we penetrate with it into the external rhythm of the world, and discover for the first time that such a rhythm exists. Just as the yogi made conscious the inner rhythm of his body, so we become conscious of an external world rhythm. If I may express myself metaphorically: in ordinary consciousness, what we do is to combine our thoughts logically and thus make use of thinking to know the external sensuous world. Now, however, we allow thinking to enter a kind of musical region, but one that is undoubtedly a region of knowledge; we perceive a spiritual rhythm underlying all things; we penetrate into the world by beginning to perceive it in the spirit. From abstract, dead thinking, from mere semblance thinking, our thinking becomes a vitalized thinking. This is the significant transition that can be made from abstract and merely logical thinking to a vital thinking which we clearly feel is capable of shaping a reality, just as we recognize our process of growth as a living reality.

With this vital thinking, however, we can now penetrate deeper into nature than with ordinary thinking. In what way? Let me illustrate this from present-day life, although the example is a much-disputed one. Nowadays, we may direct our abstract mental activity, by observation and experiment, on to a higher animal, for instance. With this thinking, we create for ourselves an internal image of how the organs of the animal are arranged: the skeleton, musculature, etc., and how the vital processes flow into one another. We make a mental image of the animal. Then, with the same thinking, we pass to man, and once again make a mental image of him—the configuration of his skeleton, his musculature, the interaction of his vital processes, etc., etc. We can then make an external comparison between the two images obtained. If we tend towards a Darwinian approach, we shall regard man as being descended from animals through an actual physical process; if we are more spiritually and idealistically inclined, we imagine the relationship differently. We will not go into that now. The important point is that there is something we cannot do: because our thinking is dead and abstract, we are not in a position—once we have formed a mental image of the animal—out of the inner life of thinking itself to pass over from that into the image of man. Instead, we have first to extract our ideas, or mental images, from the sensory realities, and then to compare these ideas with one another. When, on the other hand, we have advanced to vital thinking, we do indeed form a mental image still, but now it is a living mental image, of the skeleton, the musculature, and the interaction of vital processes in the animal. Because our thought has now become a vital one, we can pursue it inwardly as a living structure and pass over in the thought itself to the image of man. I might say: the thought of the animal grows into the thought of the man. How this works I can only suggest by means of an example.

Faced with the needle of a magnet, we know that there is only one position in which it remains at rest, and that is when its axis coincides with the North-South direction of the earth's magnetism. This direction is exceptional; to all other directions the needle is indifferent. Everything in this example becomes for vital thinking an experience about total space. For vital thinking, space is no longer an aimless juxtaposition, as it is for dead and abstract thinking. Space is internally differentiated, and we learn the significance of the fact that in animals the spine is essentially horizontal. Where this is not the case, we can demonstrate from a more profound conformity to law that the abnormality is particularly significant; but essentially an animal's spine lies in the horizontal plane—we may say, parallel to the surface of the earth. Now it is not immaterial whether the spinal cord runs in this direction or in the vertical direction to which man raises himself in the course of his life. In vital thinking, accordingly, we come to know that, if we wanted to set upright the line of the animal, that is to orientate it differently in the universe, we should have to transform all its other organs. Thought becomes vital simply through the rotation of ninety degrees from the vertical to the horizontal orientation. We pass over in this way, by an inward impulse, from the animal to the human shape.

Thereby, we enter into the rhythm of natural process and so reach the spiritual foundation of nature. We attain, in our vital thought, something with which we can penetrate into the growth and progress of the external world. We reach once more the secrets of existence, from which we departed in the course of human development with the unfolding of ego-consciousness, the feeling of self.

Now you can all raise a weighty objection here. You can say, for example: there have indeed been individuals with this kind of thinking, ostensibly vital; but the present time, with its insistence on serious research, has rightly turned away from “vital thinking” as it was expounded, for instance, by the philosopher Schelling or the natural philosopher Oken. I myself agree entirely with those who raise this kind of objection; there is something quite fantastic, something that leaves reality behind and breathes no actuality, about the way in which mental images gained from external processes and substances are inwardly vitalized by Oken and Schelling and then applied to other natural facts and creatures, in order to see “in the manner of nature.” So long as our vital thinking does not pass on to a mode of knowledge other than this we cannot, even with its aid, reach any assurance of reality. Only by adding exercises of will to the exercises of thought do we secure in vital thoughts a guarantee of spiritual reality.

Exercises of the will can be characterized as follows.

Let us be quite honest with ourselves. In ordinary life, if we think back ten or twenty years, we have to conclude: in the actual content of the life of our soul, we have in many ways become different people; but we have done so by submitting more or less passively, as children to heredity, environment and education, and in later life to life itself. Anyone who wishes to attain knowledge of spiritual reality must take in hand, if I may use this somewhat coarse expression, by an inner education and discipline of the will, what is usually experienced rather passively. Here again you will find the relevant exercises, which are intimate exercises of the soul, described in the books I have named. Today, I can only indicate briefly what is involved.

At present, we have certain habits that perhaps we did not have ten years ago, since life has only recently imposed them on us. Similarly, we can decide to adopt these or those qualities of character. The best thing is to assume qualities of character for whose shaping you have to work on yourself for years on end, so that you must direct attention over and over again to that strengthening and fortifying of the will which is connected with such self-discipline. If you take in hand the development of your will like this, so that you in part make of yourself what the world would otherwise make of you as a person, then the vital thoughts into which you have found your way by meditation and concentration take on a quite special aspect for your experience. That is, increasingly they become painful experiences, inward experiences through suffering, of the things of the spirit. And in the last analysis nobody can attain to higher knowledge who has not passed through these experiences of suffering and pain. We must pass through and conquer these experiences, so that we incorporate and go beyond them, gaining an attitude of indifference to them once more.

What is going on here can be represented as follows: take the human eye (what I am saying here could be expounded scientifically in every detail, but I have time only for a general outline): as light and colours affect it, changes occur in its physical interior. Earlier mankind undoubtedly perceived these as suffering and mild pain; and if we were not so robust and did not remain indifferent to them because of our make-up, we could not help also experiencing the changes in eye and ear as mild pain. All sensory perception is ultimately grounded on pain and suffering.

In thus permeating the entire life of our soul painfully and in suffering with vital thought, we do not permeate the body with pain and suffering as does the ascetic; we keep it healthy to suit the demands of ordinary life; but we inwardly and intimately experience pain and sorrow in the soul. Anyone who has gone some way towards higher knowledge will always tell you: The pleasure and joy that life has brought me I gratefully accept from fate; but I owe my knowledge to my pain and suffering.

In this way, life itself prepares the seeker after knowledge for the fact that part of the path he travels involves the conquest of suffering and pain. For if we overcome this suffering and pain, we make our entire psychic being into a “sense-organ,” or rather a spirit-organ, just as through our ordinary senses we look into and listen to the physical world. I do not need to discuss epistemological considerations today. I am naturally familiar with the objection that the external mode of knowledge must first also be investigated; but that does not concern us today. What I want to say is simply this: that, in the same sense in which in ordinary life we find the external physical world authenticated by our sensory perceptions, we find, after the soul's suffering has been conquered, the spiritual world authenticated by the soul-organ or spirit-organ which as a complete spiritual being we have become.

Let us call this way of looking “modern exact clairvoyance,” by contrast with all earlier nebulous clairvoyant arts, which belong to the past. With it, we can also penetrate into the eternal substance of man. We can penetrate with exactitude into the meaning of human immortality. But consideration of this must be reserved for tomorrow's lecture, where I shall be speaking about the special relationship of this philosophy of life to the problems of man's psyche. Today, I wished to show how, in contrast to earlier ways of knowledge, man can attain a modern super-sensible way of knowledge. The yogi sought to move into the human substance and reach the self; we seek to move out to the rhythm of the world. The ancient ascetic depressed the body in order to ex-press spiritual experience and allow it to exist independently. The modern way of knowledge does not incline to asceticism; it avoids all arts of castigation and addresses itself intimately to the very life of the soul. Both the modern ways, therefore, place man entirely inside life. Whereas the ways of asceticism and yoga drew men away from life.

I have tried today to describe to you a way that can be followed by developing powers of knowledge, now sleeping in the soul, in a more spiritual sense than they were formerly developed.

By doing this, however (I should like to suggest in conclusion), we also reach deeper into the essence of nature. The philosophy of life of which I speak stands in no sort of opposition to the science of today. On the contrary, it takes precisely the genuine mood of enquiry which is there in scientific research and, through its exercises, develops this as a separate human faculty. Science today seeks exactness and feels particularly satisfied if it can achieve it by the application of mathematics to natural processes. Why is this? It is because the perceptions with which external nature provides us, through the senses, for observation and experiment are wholly outside us. We permeate them with something we develop solely in our innermost human entity—with mathematical knowledge. And Kant's saying is often quoted and even more often practised by scientific thinkers: In all true knowledge there is only so much science as there is mathematics. This is exaggerated if we are thinking of ordinary mathematics. And yet, when we apply these to lifeless natural phenomena, and nowadays even regard it as an ideal, for instance, to be able to count the chromosomes in the blastoderm, we reveal how satisfied we are if we can permeate with mathematics what otherwise stands outside us. Why? Because mathematics is experienced inside us with immediate certainty: we often have to represent this experience to ourselves by means of diagrams, but the diagrams are not essential to the certainty, the truth. Things mathematical are seen and discovered within us, and what we find within us we connect with what we see outside. In this way we feel satisfied.

Anyone who perceives this process of cognition in its entirety must conclude: things can satisfy man as knowledge and lead to a science only if they rest on something he can really experience and observe through his inner powers. With the aid of mathematics, we can penetrate into the facts and structures of the inanimate world; but we cannot move more than a little way at most, and that somewhat primitively, into the organic world. We need a way of looking as exact as that of mathematics with which to penetrate into the higher processes of the outside world. Even one of the outstanding representatives of the school of Haeckel has expressly admitted that we must advance to an entirely different type of research and observation if we wish to move up from the inorganic into the organic realm of nature. For the inorganic, we have mathematics, geometry; for the organic, the living, we have nothing as yet that corresponds to a triangle, a circle, or an ellipse. By vital thinking we shall achieve them: not with the ordinary mathematics of numbers and figures, but with a higher mathesis, a qualitative approach working creatively, one which—and here I must say something which many people will find abominable—which touches the realm of the aesthetic.

By penetrating with mathematics of this kind into worlds that we cannot otherwise penetrate, we extend the scientific attitude upwards into the biological sphere. And we may be sure that eventually the epoch will come when people will say: earlier times rightly emphasized that the amount of science extracted from inorganic nature is proportional to the amount of quantitative mathematics, in the broadest sense, that can be applied to it; the amount of science extracted from the vital processes is proportional to the extent to which we can probe them with a living thought structure and an exact clairvoyance.

People will not believe how close this modern kind of clairvoyance is, in reality, to the mathematical outlook. Eventually, when it is realized how, from the spirit of modern knowledge of nature, knowledge of spirit can be gained, this spiritual science will be found to be justified precisely from the standpoint of our modern knowledge of nature. It has no wish to run counter to the important and imposing results of natural science. It seeks to attempt something different: we can look with our external senses at the physical form of someone standing before us—his gestures, his play of feature, the individual expression of his eyes—and yet perceive merely externals, unless we look through all this to something spiritual in him, by which alone the whole man stands before us. In the same way, unless we travel the ways of the spirit, we look with science only at the external physiognomy of the world, its gestures and its mask. Only when we penetrate beyond the outward physiognomy that natural phenomena present to us, beyond the mask and gestures, into the spiritual region of the world, do we recognize something to which we are ourselves related, something of the eternal in the world.

That is the aim of the spiritual science whose methods I have sought to describe to you today by way of introduction. It does not wish to oppose triumphant modern science, but to accept it fully in its importance and substance, just as we accept fully the external man. But just as we look through the external man at the soul, so it seeks to penetrate through natural laws, not in a lay and dilettante fashion, but with a serious approach, to the spiritual element underlying the world. And so this spiritual science seeks not to create any kind of opposition to natural science, but to be its soul and spirit.

• 1. The German title of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is Die Philosophie der Freiheit.

It has often been explained that it is not as easy to investigate and describe the realm of the occult as is commonly thought. If one wishes to proceed conscientiously in this domain, one will feel it necessary to make repeatedly fresh investigations into important chapters of spiritual research. In recent months it has been my task, among many other things, to make new investigations into a subject of which we have often spoken here. New aspects emerge as a result of such investigations.

Today we shall deal again with the life between death and rebirth, although it can only be done in outline. This does not mean that what has previously been said has to be changed in any way. Precisely in connection with this chapter this is not the case, but in the study of super-sensible facts we should always consider them from as many points of view as possible. So today we will consider from a universal standpoint much of what has been presented in my books Theosophy or Occult Science more from the aspect of immediate human experience. The facts are the same, but we should not imagine that we are fully conversant with them when they have been described from one point of view only. Occult facts are such that we must move around them, so to speak, and examine them from every point of view. In regard to spiritual science the mistake is all too common that judgments are passed by people who may have heard a few statements about a subject without having had the patience to allow what can be said from other aspects to work upon them. Yet the truths of spiritual research can be understood by sound common sense, as was pointed out in yesterday's public lecture.

Today we shall not pay so much attention to the stage after death where the life in kamaloca begins, but rather consider the point at the end of kamaloca when life in the spiritual proper begins. This period lasts until the soul descends into a new incarnation and re-enters earthly life.

Something can be communicated about these matters because, as you know, clairvoyant vision brings one into the same realm in which a human being dwells between death and rebirth. In initiation one experiences, although in a different way, what takes place between death and rebirth. This accounts for the fact that one can communicate something about this realm.

To being with, I wish to mention two fundamental points of clairvoyant perception that also will help in our understanding of life after death. Attention has often been drawn to the great difference between life in the super-sensible world and life in the physical, material world. For instance, the process of knowledge is totally different in the super-sensible world from what it is on earth. In the physical world objects present themselves to our senses by making impressions of color and light upon our eyes, audible impressions upon our ears and other impressions upon other sense organs. To perceive objects we must move about in the world. To perceive an object at a distance, we must go towards it. Briefly, in the sense world we must move about to perceive things. The opposite holds true for super-sensible perceptions. The quieter the soul, the more everything in the way of inner movement is excluded, the less we strive to draw a thing towards us, the longer we are capable of waiting, the more surely will the perception come and the truer will be the experience we gain from it. In the super-sensible world we must allow things to approach us. That is an essential point. We must develop inner silence. Then things will come to us.

The second point I wish to make is this. The way in which the super-sensible world confronts us depends on what we bring with us from the ordinary sense world. This is important. It may give rise to considerable soul difficulties in the super-sensible world. For instance, it may be exceedingly painful to realize in the super-sensible world that we loved a person less than we ought to have done, less then he deserved to be loved by us. This fact stands before the spiritual gaze of one who has entered the super-sensible world with far greater intensity than could ever be the case in the physical world. In addition, something else may cause great pain to one with clairvoyant consciousness. None of the forces that we are able to draw from the super-sensible world can in any way change or improve a relationship of soul in the physical that we recognize as not having been right. It cannot be made good by forces drawn from the spiritual world. This experience is infinitely more painful than anything we may experience in the physical world. It gives rise to a feeling of powerlessness towards the necessity of karma that can be lived out only in the physical world. These two factors confront the pupil of occult science after only a little progress. They appear immediately in the life between death and rebirth. Suppose that shortly after death we meet a person who died before us. We encounter him, and we feel the total relationships that we had with him here on earth. We are together with the one who died before, at the same time or after us, and we feel that that is how we stood with him in life. That was our relationship to him. But whereas in the physical world when we realize that we have done an injustice to someone in feeling or in deed, we are able to make the necessary adjustment, we are not able to do so, directly, in the life after death. Clear insight into the nature of the relationship is there, but in spite of the full awareness that it ought to be different, we are incapable of changing anything. To begin with, things must remain as they are. The depression caused by many a reproach is due to the fact that one is clearly aware of the way in which a relationship was not right but it must be left as it is. Yet one feels all the time that it ought to be different. This mood of soul should be transposed to the whole of life after death. After death we realize all the more strongly what we did wrongly during our life on earth but we are incapable of changing anything. Things must take their course, regardless. We look back on what we have done and we must experience wholly the consequences of our actions, knowing full well that nothing can be altered.

It is not only with relationships to other human beings, but with the whole of our soul configuration after death, which depends on a number of factors. To begin with, let me portray life after death in the form of Imaginations. If we take the words “Visions” or “Imaginations” in the sense in which I explained them yesterday, no misunderstanding will arise. Man perceives the physical world through his sense organs. After death he lives in a world of visions, but these visions are mirror-images of reality. Just as here in the physical world we do not immediately perceive the inner nature of the rose, but the external redness, so do we not have a direct perception of a departed friend or brother, but encounter a visionary image. We are enveloped in the cloud of our visions, so to speak, but we know quite clearly that we are together with the other being. It is a real relationship, in fact more real than a relationship between one person and another can be on earth.

In the first period after death we perceive a soul through the image. Also after the kamaloca period the visions that surround us, and that we experience, point back, for the most part, to what we experienced on earth. We know, for instance, that a dead friend is there outside us in the spiritual world. We perceive him through our visions. We feel entirely at one with him. We know exactly how we are related to him. What we chiefly perceive, however, is what happened between us on earth. This, to begin with, clothes itself in our vision. The chief thing is the aftermath of our earthly relationship, just as even after the kamaloca period we live in the consequences of our earthly existence. The cloud of visions that envelops us is entirely dependent on how we spent our earthly existence.

In the first period of kamaloca the soul is clothed, as in a cloud, by its Imaginations. At first the cloud is dark. When some time has elapsed after death, Imaginative vision gradually perceives that this cloud begins to light up as if irradiated by the rays of the morning sun. When Inspiration is added to Imaginative cognition we realize that we live, to begin with, in the cloud of our earthly experiences. We are enveloped by them. We are able to relate ourselves only to those who have died and with whom we were together on the earth, or to those still on earth capable of ascending with their consciousness into the spiritual world. What we have characterized for Imaginative cognition as the illumination of the cloud of our visions from one side by a glimmering light points to the approach of the hierarchies into our own being. We now begin to live into the realm of higher spirituality. Previously, we were only connected to the world we brought with us. Now the life of the higher hierarchies begin to shine towards us, to penetrate us. But in order to understand this process, we must gain some insight into the relationships of size perceived through imaginative cognition as the soul draws out of the physical body.

This actually happens as we pass through the gate of death. Our being expands and becomes larger and larger. This is not an easy concept but that is what actually happens. It is only on earth that we consider ourselves limited within the boundary of our skin. After death we expand into the infinite spaces, growing ever larger. When we have reached the end of the kamaloca period, we literally extend to the orbit of the moon around the earth. In the language of occultism we become Moon dwellers. Our being has expanded to such an extent that its outer boundary coincides with the circle described by the moon around the earth. Today I cannot go into the relative positions of the planets. An explanation of what does not apparently agree with orthodox astronomy can be found in the Düsseldorf lectures, Spiritual Hierarchies and Their Reflection in the Physical World: Zodiac, Planets, Cosmos.

Thus we grow farther out into cosmic space, into the whole planetary system, though first into what the occultist calls the Mercury sphere. That is to say, after the kamaloca period we become Mercury dwellers. We truly feel that we are inhabiting cosmic space. Just as during our physical existence we feel ourselves to be earth dwellers, so then we feel ourselves to be Mercury dwellers. I cannot describe the details now, but the following conscious experience is present. We are not now enclosed in such a small fraction of space as during our earthly existence but the wide sphere bounded by the orbit of Mercury is within our being. How we live through this period also depends upon how we have prepared ourselves on earth—on the forces we have imbibed on earth in order to grow into the right or wrong relationship to the Mercury sphere.

In order to understand these facts we can compare two or more people by means of occult research but we will take two. For instance, let us consider a man who passed through the gate of death with an immoral attitude and one who passed through the gate of death with a moral attitude of soul. A considerable difference is perceptible and it becomes apparent when we consider the relationship of one person to another after death. For the man with a moral attitude of soul, the pictures are present, enveloping the soul and he can have a certain degree of communion everywhere with other human beings. This is due to his moral attitude. A man with an immoral attitude of soul becomes a kind of hermit in the spiritual world. For example, he knows that another human being is also in the spiritual world. He knows that he is together with him but he is unable to emerge from the prison of his cloud of Imaginations and approach him. Morality makes us into social beings in the spiritual world, into beings who can have contact with others. Lack of morality makes us into hermits in the spiritual world and transports us into solitude. This is an important causal connection between death and rebirth.

This is true also of the further course of events. At a later period, after having passed through the Mercury sphere, which in the occult we call the Venus sphere, we feel ourselves as Venus dwellers. There between Mercury and Venus, where our cloud of visions is irradiated from without, the Beings of the higher hierarchies are able to approach the human being. Now again it depends on whether we have prepared ourselves in the right manner to be received as social spirits into the ranks of the hierarchies and to have communion with them, or whether we are compelled to pass them by as hermits. Whether we are social or lonely spirits depends upon still another factor. Whereas in the previous sphere was can be sociable only if this has been prepared on earth as a result of morality, in the Venus sphere the power that leads us into community, into a kind of social life, is due to our religious attitude on earth. We most certainly condemn ourselves to become hermits in the Venus sphere if we have failed to develop religious feelings during earthly life, feelings of union with the Infinite, with the Divine. Occult investigation observes that as a result of an atheistic tendency in the soul, of rejecting the connection of our finite with our infinite nature, the human being locks himself up within his own prison. It is a fact that the adherents of the Monistic Union, with its creed that does not promote a truly religious attitude, are preparing themselves for a condition in which they will no longer we able to form any Monistic Union, but will be relegated each to his own separate prison!

This is not meant to be a principle on which to base judgments. It is a fact that presents itself to occult observation as the consequence of a religious or irreligious attitude of soul during earthly life. Many different religions have been established on the earth in the course of evolution, all of them emanating essentially from a common source. Their founders have had to reckon with the temperament of the different peoples, with the climate and with other factors to which the religions had to be adjusted. It is therefore in the nature of things that souls did not come into this Venus sphere with a common religious consciousness, but with one born of their particular creed.

Definite feelings for the spiritual that are colored by this or that religious creed bring it about that in the Venus sphere a man has community only with those of like feelings who shared the same creed during earthly life. In the Venus sphere individuals are separated according to their particular creeds. On the earth they have hitherto been divided into races according to external characteristics. Although the configuration of groups in the Venus sphere corresponds in general to the groupings of people here on earth because racial connections are related to religious creeds, the groupings do not quite correspond because there they are brought together according to their understanding of a particular creed. As a result of experience connected with a particular creed, souls enclose themselves within certain boundaries. In the Mercury sphere a man has, above all, understanding for those with whom he was connected on earth. If he had a moral attitude of soul, he will have real intercourse in the Mercury sphere with those to whom he was related during his earthly life. In the Venus sphere he is taken up into one of the great religious communities to which he belonged during his earthly existence by virtue of his constitution of soul.

The next sphere is the Sun sphere in which we feel ourselves as Sun dwellers for a definite period between death and rebirth. During this period we learn to know the nature of the Sun, which is quite other than astronomy describes. Here again it is a question of living rightly into the Sun sphere. We now have the outstanding experience, and it arises in the soul like an elemental power, that all differentiations between human souls must cease. In the Mercury sphere we are more or less limited to the circle of those with whom we were related on earth. In the Venus sphere we feel at home with those who had similar religious experiences to ours on earth and we still find satisfaction only among these communities. But the soul is conscious of deep loneliness in the Sun sphere if it has no understanding for the souls entering this sphere, as is the case with Felix Balde, for instance. Now in ancient times conditions were such that in the Venus sphere souls were to be found in the provinces of the several religions, finding and giving understanding in them. Because all religions have sprung from a common source, when the human being entered the Sun sphere he had in him so much of the old common inheritance that he could come near to all the other souls in the Sun sphere and be together with them, to understand them, to be a social spirit among them.

In these more ancient periods of evolution souls could not do much of themselves to satisfy the longing that arose there. Because without human intervention a common human nucleus was present in mankind, it was possible for souls to have intercourse with others belonging to different creeds. In ancient Brahmanism, in the Chinese and other religions of the earth, there was so much of the common kernel of religion that souls in the Sun sphere found themselves in that primal home, the source of all religious life. This changed in the middle period of the earth. Connection with the primal source of the religions was lost and can only be found again through occult knowledge. So, in the present cycle of evolution man also must prepare himself for entering the Sun sphere while still on earth because community does not arise there of itself. This is also an aspect of the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha, of Christianity. Because of it human beings in the present cycle of evolution can so prepare themselves on earth that universal community is achieved in the Sun sphere. For this purpose the Sun Spirit, the Christ, had to come down to earth. Since His coming, it has been possible for souls on the earth to find the way to universal community in the Sun sphere between death and rebirth.

Much could be added in support of the universality that is born of the Christ Mystery when it is rightly understood. Much has been said in the course of years, but the Christ Mystery can ever and again be illuminated from new aspects. It is often said that special emphasis of the Christ Mystery creates prejudices against other creeds, and that is advanced because in our Anthroposophical Movement in Central Europe special emphasis has been laid on it. Such a reproach is quite unintelligible. The true meaning of the Christ Mystery has only been discovered from the occult aspect in modern times. If a Buddhist were to say, “You place Christianity above Buddhism because you attribute a special position to the Christ that is not indicated in my sacred books, and you are therefore prejudiced against Buddhism,” that would be as sensible as if the Buddhist were to claim that the Copernican view of the universe cannot be accepted because it, too, is not contained in his sacred writings. The fact that things are discovered at a later date has nothing to do with the equal justification of religious beliefs.

The Mystery of Golgotha is such that it cannot be regarded as a special privilege. It is a spiritual-scientific fact that can be acknowledged by every religious system just as the Copernican system can. It is not a question of justifying some creed that up until now has failed to understand the Mystery of Golgotha, but rather is it a question of grasping the spiritual-scientific fact of Golgotha. If this is unintelligible, it is even more so to speak about an abstract comparison of all creeds and to say that one ought to accept an abstract similarity among them. The different creeds should not be compared with what Christianity has become as a creed, but with the essence that is contained in Christianity itself.

Take the Hindu creed. Nobody is received into this creed who is not a Hindu. It is connected with a people, and this is true of most ancient creeds. Buddhism has broken through this restriction, yet if rightly understood, it too applies to a particular community. But now let us consider the external facts. If in Europe we were to have a creed similar, let us say, to the Hindu creed, we should be obliged to swear allegiance to the ancient god, Wotan. Wotan was a national god, a god connected with a definite racial stock. But what has in fact happened in the West? It is not a national god that has been accepted, but, inasmuch as his external lie is concerned, an alien personality. Jesus of Nazareth has been accepted from outside. Whereas the other creeds essentially have something egoistical about them in the religious sense and do not wish to break through their boundaries, the West has been singled out by the fact that it has suppressed its egoistical religious system—for example, the ancient Wotan religion—and for the sake of its inner substance has accepted an impulse that did not grow out of its own flesh and blood. Insofar as the West is concerned, Christianity is not the egoistical creed that the others were for the different peoples. This is a factor of considerable importance that is also borne out by external happenings. It makes for the universality of Christianity in yet another respect if Christianity truly places the Mystery of Golgotha at the center of the evolution of humanity.

Christianity has not yet made great progress in its development because even now two aspects have still not been clearly distinguished. They will only be distinguished slowly and by degrees. Who, in the true sense of the Mystery of Golgotha, is a Christian? He is one who knows that something real happened in the Mystery of Golgotha, that the Sun Spirit lived in the Christ, that Christ poured His Being over the earth, that Christ died for all men. Although Paul declared that Christ died not only for the Jews but also for the heathen, these words even today are still little understood. Not until it is realized that Christ fulfilled the Deed of Golgotha for all human beings will Christianity be understood. For the real power that flowed from Golgotha is one thing, and the understanding of it is another. Knowledge of who the Christ really is should be striven for, but since the Mystery of Golgotha our attitude to every man can only be expressed as follows. Whatever your creed may be, Christ also died for you, and his significance for you is the same as for every other human being.

A true understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha leads to the attitude that we ask ourselves about each person we meet, “How much has he in him of real Christianity, irrespective of his particular beliefs?” Because man must increasingly acquire consciousness of what is real in him to know something of the Mystery of Christ is naturally a lofty ideal. This will become more widespread as time goes on, and to it will belong the need to understand the Mystery of Golgotha. But this is different from the concept that one may have of the Mystery of Golgotha, of its universality that holds good for all human beings. Here the essential thing is for the soul to feel that this makes us into social beings in the Sun sphere. If we feel enclosed in some creed, we become hermits there. We are social beings in the Sun sphere if we understand the universality of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then we can find a relation to every being who draws near to us in the Sun sphere. As a result of the insight into the Mystery of Golgotha that we acquire during earthly life within our cycle of evolution, we become beings able to move freely in the Sun sphere.

Of what should we be capable during this period between death and rebirth?

We come now to a fact that is exceedingly important for modern occultism. Those human beings who lived on earth before the Mystery of Golgotha—what I am now saying is essentially correct, though not in detail—found the Throne of Christ in the Sun sphere with the Christ upon it. They were able to recognize Him because the old legacy of the common source of all religions was still living in them. But the Christ Spirit came down from the Sun, and in the Mystery of Golgotha He flowed into the life of the earth. He left the Sun, and only the Akashic picture of the Christ is found in the Sun sphere between death and rebirth. The throne is not occupied by the real Christ. We must bring up from the earth the concept of our living connection with Christ in order that through the Akashic picture we have a living relationship with Him. Then it is possible for us to have the Christ also from the Sun sphere and for Him to stimulate all the forces in us that are necessary if we are to pass through the Sun sphere in the right way.

Our journey between death and rebirth progresses still further. From the earthly realm we have derived the power, through a moral and religious attitude of soul, to live, as it were, into the human beings with whom we were together on the earth, and then into the higher hierarchies. But this power gradually vanishes, becomes dimmer and dimmer, and what remains is essentially the power that we derive on the earth from the Mystery of Golgotha. In order that we may find our way in the Sun sphere a new Light-bearer appears there, a Being whom we must learn to know in his primal power. We bring with us from the earth an understanding of the Christ, but in order to develop a stage further so that we may proceed out into the universe from the Sun sphere to Mars, we need to recognize the second Throne that stands beside the Throne of Christ in the Sun. This is possible simply by virtue of the fact that we are human souls. From this other Throne we now learn to know the other Being who, together with the Christ, leads us onward. This other Being is Lucifer. We learn to know Lucifer, and through the powers that he is able to impart to us we make the further journey through the spheres of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

We expand ever further into cosmic space, but as we move out beyond the Saturn sphere our state of consciousness is changed. We enter into a kind of cosmic twilight. We cannot call it cosmic sleep, but a cosmic twilight. Now for the first time the powers of the whole cosmos can work in upon us. They work from all sides, and we receive them into our being. So after we have expanded into the spheres, there is a period between death and rebirth when the forces of the whole cosmos stream into our being from all sides, from the whole of the starry realms, as it were. Then we begin to draw together again, pass through the different spheres down to the Venus sphere, contact and become ever smaller until the time comes when we can again unite with an earthly human germ.

What kind of a being are we when we unite with this germ? We are the being we have described, but we have received into us the forces from the whole cosmos. What we receive during the outward journey depends on the extent to which we have prepared ourselves for it, and our karma is formed according to the way we have lived together with the human beings we have met during life on earth. The forces by means of which an adjustment takes place in a new earth life are built up as a result of having been together with those human beings after death. That we appear as a human being, that we are inwardly able to have karma imbued with cosmic forces, depends on the fact that we received forces from the whole cosmos during a certain period between death and a new birth. At birth a being who has contracted to the minutest dimensions, but has drawn into itself the forces of the wide expanse of the whole cosmos unites itself with the physical human germ. We bear the whole cosmos within us when we incarnate again on earth. It may be said that we bear this cosmos within us in the way in which it can unite with the attitude that we, in accordance with our earlier earth existence, had brought with us in our souls on the outward journey when we were expanding into the spheres.

A twofold adaptation has to take place. We adapt to the whole cosmos and to our former karma. The fact that there is also an adaptation to former karma that must be harmonized in the cosmos came to me in an extraordinary way during the investigations of the last few months in connection with individual cases. I say, expressly, in individual cases because I do not wish to state thereby a general law. When a person passes through the gate of death he dies under a certain constellation of stars. This constellation is significant for his further life of soul because it remains there as an imprint. In his soul there remains the endeavor to enter into this same constellation at a new birth, to do justice once again to the forces received at the moment of death. It is an interesting point that if one works out the constellation at death and compares it with the constellation of the later birth, one finds that it coincides to a high degree with the constellation at the former death. It must be remembered that the person is born at another spot on the earth that corresponds with this constellation. In fact, he is adapted to the cosmos, members himself into the cosmos, and thus a balance is established in the soul between the individual and the cosmic life.

Kant once said very beautifully that there were two things that especially uplifted him—the starry heavens above him and the moral law within him. This is a beautiful expression in that it is confirmed by occultism. Both are the same—the starry heavens above us and what we bear as moral law within us. For as we grow out into cosmic space between death and a new birth, we take the starry heavens into ourselves, and then in the soul we bear as our moral attitude a mirror image of the starry heavens. Here we touch upon one of the points where anthroposophy can only develop into a feeling for the moral-universal. What appears to be theory is immediately transformed into moral impulses of the soul. Here the human being feels full responsibility towards his own being, for he realizes that between death and a new birth the whole cosmos worked into his being, and he gathered together what he derived from the cosmos. He is responsible to the whole cosmos, for he actually bears the whole of the cosmos within him.

An attempt has been made to express this feeling in a passage of The Soul's Probation, in the monologue of Capesius, where it is said, “In your thinking world-thoughts are weaving . . .” Attention is drawn to the significance for the soul when it feels that it is man's sacred duty to bring forth the forces that one has gathered out of the cosmos, and it is the greatest sin to allow these forces to lie fallow.

Concrete investigations showed that we take the whole cosmos into our being and bring it forth again in our earthly existence. Of the forces that man carries with him, only a few have their origin on the earth. We study man in connection with the forces that work in the physical, etheric and astral bodies, and in the ego. Of course, the forces that play into our physical body come to us from the earth, but we cannot draw directly out of the earth the forces we need for the etheric body. These forces can only approach us between death and rebirth during the period we are expanding into the planetary spheres. If one takes an immoral attitude of soul into these spheres, one will not be able to attract the right forces during the time between death and a new rebirth. A man who has not developed religious impulses cannot attract the right forces in the Venus sphere, and so the forces that are needed in the etheric may be stultified. Here we see the karmic connection that exists between later and earlier lives. This indicates how the knowledge that we obtain through occultism may become impulses in our life of soul and how the awareness of what we are can lead us to rise to an ever more spiritual life.

What was prepared for by the Mystery of Golgotha is necessary in our present cycle of evolution so that man may live in the right way into the Sun sphere between death and a new birth. Spiritual science has to achieve that the human being shall be in a position to grow out even beyond the Sun sphere with the universal-human, spiritually social consciousness that is needed there. Insofar as the Sun sphere itself is concerned, the connection that is experienced with the Mystery of Golgotha suffices. But in order to carry a feeling and understanding of the human-universal beyond the Sun sphere, we must be able to grasp, in the anthroposophical sense, the relation of the several religions to one another. We must grow beyond a narrowly circumscribed creed with its particular shades of feeling and understand every soul, irrespective of its belief. Above all, one thing connected with the Christ impulse is fulfilled between death and rebirth. It is contained in the words, “Where two or three are gathered together in my Name, there am I in the midst of them.” The gathering of two or three is not connected by Christ with this or that belief. The possibility of Him being among them is provided inasmuch as they are united in His Name.

What has been cultivated for years, through the performances of the Mystery Plays, and especially the last (The Guardian of the Threshold), should provide a spiritual-scientific understanding for what is essential in our epoch. On the one hand, we have to acquire a relationship to the Christ impulse, on the other, to the Powers that stand in opposition to Him—the impulses of Lucifer and Ahriman. We must realize that as soon as we emerge from Maya, we have to deal with Powers who unfold forces in the cosmos. The time is drawing ever nearer in the evolution of humanity when we must learn to discern the essential being rather than the teaching. This is nowhere so apparent as in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha. The Being is essential, not the mere content of the words.

I should like the following to be put quite exactly to the test. In fact, it is easiest to deal with people who put to the test what is said out of occult sources. There is nothing similar in any of the other creeds to the depths that are revealed through the Mystery of Golgotha.

A particular prejudice still prevails today. People speak as if things should happen in the world as they do in a school, as if everything depended on the World Teacher. But the Christ is not a World Teacher but a World Doer, One Who has fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha, and Whose Being should be recognized. That is the point. How little it is a question of the mere words, of the mere doctrinal content, we learn from the beautiful words uttered by the Christ, “Ye are Gods!” (John 10:34). We learn this also from the fact that He indicated repeatedly that man attains the highest when he realizes the divine in his own nature. These words of the Christ resound into the world, “Be conscious that you are like the Gods!” One can say that that is a great teaching!

The same teaching, however, resounds from other sources. In the Bible, where the beginning of Earth evolution is described, Lucifer says, “Ye shall be as Gods!” The same doctrinal content is uttered by Lucifer and by the Christ, “Ye shall be as Gods!” but the two utterances mean the opposite for man. Indeed, shattering calls sound forth in these words uttered at one time by the Tempter and at another by Him Who is the Redeemer, the Savior and the Restorer of the being of man.

Between death and rebirth everything depends upon knowledge of the Being. In the Sun sphere the greatest danger is to take Lucifer for the Christ because both use the same language, as it were, give the same teaching, and from them both the same words resound forth. Everything depends on the Being. The fact that this Being or that Being is speaking—that is the point, not the doctrinal content because it is the real forces pulsing through the world that matter. In the higher worlds, and above all in what plays into the earthly spheres, we only understand the words aright when we know from which Being they proceed. We can never recognize the rank of a Being merely by the word, but only by knowledge of the whole connection in which a Being stands. The example of the words that men are like the Gods is an absolute confirmation of this.

These are significant facts of evolution. They are voiced not on account of their content—and in this case, too, not so much on this account—but on account of the spirit they carry, so that there may arise in souls feelings that ought to be the outcome of such words. If the feelings remain with those who have absorbed such truths, even if the actual words are forgotten, not so much is lost, after all. Let us take the more radical case. Suppose that there were someone among us who would forget everything that had just been said, but would only retain the feeling that can flow from such words. Such a person would, nevertheless, in an anthroposophical sense, receive enough of what is meant by them.

After all, we have to make use of words, and words sometimes appear theoretical. We must learn to look through the words to the essence and receive this into the soul. If anthroposophy is grasped in its essence, the world will learn to understand many things, particularly in connection with the evolution of humanity. Here I want to quote two examples that are connected outwardly, rather than inwardly, with my recent occult investigations. They astonished me because they showed how a truth which was established occultly corresponds to what has come into the world as a result of inspired men and can be rediscovered in what exists already in the world.

I have occupied myself a great deal with Homer. Lately the fact that nothing can be changed after death, that relationships remain the same, came vividly before my soul. For example, if in life one was in some way related to a person and did not love him, this cannot be changed. If, bearing this in mind, one now reads the passages in Homer where he describes the world beyond as a place where life becomes unchangeable, one begins to understand the depth of these words about the region where things are no longer subject to change. It is a wonderful experience to compare one's own knowledge with what was expressed as significant occult truth by the “blind Homer,” the seer, in this epic!

Another fact astounded me, and though I strongly resisted it because it seemed incredible, I found it impossible to do so. Many of you will know the Medici Tombs by Michelangelo in Florence, with the statues of Giuliano and Lorenzo de Medici and four allegorical figures. The artistic element in these figures is usually overlooked. They are viewed as barren allegories. Now these figures with one exception, were not quite finished, and yet they do not give the impression of being merely allegorical. In the guide books we are told that the statue of Giuliano stands on one side and that of Lorenzo on the other. Actually, they have been reversed. The statue said to represent Lorenzo is that of Giuliano, and that of Giuliano is the statue of Lorenzo. This is correct, but in almost every history of art manual and in Baedecker, the facts are wrongly given. The descriptions would certainly not tally and apparently the statues were once reversed. They no longer stand where Michelangelo had placed them originally. But I want to speak mainly about the four allegorical figures. At the foot of one of the Medici statues we have the figures of “Night” and “Day;” at the foot of the other, “Dawn” and “Dusk.”

As I have said, to begin with I resisted what I am now going to say about them. Let us start with the figures of “Night.” Suppose one immerses oneself in everything one sees, in every gesture (books comment rather nonsensically that this is a gesture that a sleeping person cannot possibly adopt.) If, having studied every gesture, every movement of the limbs, one asks oneself how an artist would have to portray the human figure if he wished to convey the greatest possible activity of the etheric body in sleep, then he would have to do it out of his artistic instincts exactly as Michelangelo did it in his figure. The figure of “Night” corresponds with the posture of the etheric body. I am not suggesting that Michelangelo was conscious of this. He simply did it.

Now let us look at the figure of “Day.” This is no barren allegory. Picture the lower members of the human being more passive, and the ego predominantly active. We have this expressed in the figure of “Day.” If we were now to express in the posture the action of the astral body working freely when the other members are reduced to inactivity, then we should find this in the so-called allegory of “Dawn.” And if sought to express the conditions where the physical body is not altogether falling to pieces, but becomes limp as a result of the withdrawal of the ego and astral body, this is wonderfully portrayed in the figure of “Dusk.” In these figures we have living portrayals of the four sheaths of man. We can readily understand the once widespread legend about the figure “Night.” It was said that when Michelangelo was alone with this figure it became alive, rose up and walked about. This is understandable if one knows that it has the posture of the etheric or life body, and that in such a position the etheric body can be fully active. If this is perceived, then indeed the figure appears to rise up, and one knows that it could walk about were it not carved out of marble. If the etheric body only were really active there, then nothing would prevent it from moving about.

Many secrets are contained in the works of men and much will become intelligible for the first time when these things are studied with sharpened occult perception. Whether, however, we understand a work of art well or not so well, is not connected with the universal-human. What matters is something quite else. If our eyes are sharpened in this way we begin to understand the soul of another human being, not through occult perception, which, after all, cannot help seeing into the spiritual world, but through a perception quickened by spiritual science. Spiritual science grasped by sound human reason develops knowledge in us of what we meet in life, and, above all, of the souls of our fellow men. We shall attempt to understand every human soul.

This understanding, however, is meant in quite a different way from the usual. Unfortunately, in life love is all too often entirely egotistical. Usually a man loves what he is particularly attracted to because of some circumstance or other. For the rest, he contents himself with universal love, a general love for humanity. But what is this? We should be able to understand every human soul. We will not find excellence everywhere, but no harm is done for actually one can do no greater injury to some souls than by pouring blind love and adulation over them.

We shall speak further on this subject in the lecture the day after tomorrow.

To-day, the 8th May, the Theosophical Society celebrates the Day of the White Lotus, which to the outer world is known, in the usual terminology of the day, as the death-day of the instigator of that Spiritual stream in which we now stand. To us it would seem more appropriate to select a different designation for to-day's festival, one taken from our knowledge of the Spiritual world and which should run more like this: ‘The day of transition from an activity on the physical plane to one in the Spiritual worlds’. For to us it is not only an inner conviction in the ordinary sense of the words but an ever-increasing knowledge, that what the outer world calls death is but the passing from one form of work, from an activity stimulated by the impressions of the outer physical world, to one entirely stimulated by the Spiritual world. When to-day we remember the great instigator, H. P. Blavatsky, and the leading persons of her movement who have also now passed over into the Spiritual realm, let us in particular try to form a clear idea of what we ourselves must make of our Spiritual movement so that it may represent a continuation of that activity which she exercised on the physical plane as long as she remained on it; so that on the one hand it may be a continuation of that activity and at the same time be possible for the Foundress herself to continue her work from the Spiritual world, both now and in the future. On such a day as this it is seemly that we should in a sense break away from our usual study of theosophical matters, and theosophical life, and should instead go through a sort of conscientious retrospect, a retrospect concerning what the tasks and duties the theosophical movement sets before us, and which may also lead us to a sort of prevision of what this movement should become in the future, and what we should do, and avoid doing.

What we are carrying on as the Theosophical movement came into the world as the result of certain quite special circumstances and certain historical necessities. You know that there was here no question, as in other Spiritual movements or unions of any sort,—of one or more persons determining to follow certain ideals according as the quality of their hearts and minds leads them to feel enthusiasm for these ideals, trying to enthuse other people and to induce them to form societies or unions for carrying these into practice. Not in this way should we view the Theosophical movement if we understand it aright. We only do this if we look upon it as an historical necessity of our present life: something which, regardless of what people feel or would like to feel about it, was bound to come, for it already lay in the womb of time, so to speak, and had to be brought to birth. In what way then may we regard the Theosophical movement? It may be considered as a descent, a new descent of Spiritual life, of Spiritual wisdom and Spiritual forces, into the sensible physical world from the super-sensible ones. Such a descent had to take place for the further development of man, and must repeatedly take place in the future. It cannot of course be our task to-day to point out all the different great impulses through which Spiritual life has flowed down from the super-sensible worlds in order that the soul-life of man should be renewed when it had, so to speak, grown old; but in the course of time this has frequently occurred. One thing, however, must be borne in mind.

In the primeval past, not long after the great Atlantean catastrophe which the traditions of the various countries record as the story of the Flood, came that impulse that we may describe as the inflow of Spiritual life that poured into the development of mankind through the Holy Rishis. Then came that other stream of Spiritual life that flowed down into man's evolution through Zarathustra or Zoroaster, and we find another stream of like nature in that which came to the old Israelites through the revelations of Moses.

We have been speaking of what hinders modern man from coming to recognition of the spiritual world, as it must be understood through the spiritual knowledge of Anthroposophy, and two things have been indicated as having been the cause of this hindrance. These two things are leak of courage, lack of strength where recognition of the spirit is concerned, and lack of interest about the actual form of the spiritual life. Now today I should like to go into these things from a point of view from which I have touched on them still more lightly. When such things are spoken of it must always be borne in mind that man's ordinary sound intelligence, as I have often said, suffices for understanding and receiving open-mindedly all things concerning Spiritual Science. If I may say so, through the fact that sound human intelligence; when rightly directed, is sufficient for the understanding of the things of the spiritual world today, in a certain sense through merely understanding, through open-minded acceptance, everyone may have all that the investigating Anthroposophist receives from the spiritual world. And with the courage and interest to receive these things with sound human intelligence, man has himself the possibility of rising slowly and gradually, in accordance with what his own karma permits, into the spiritual world. Already today it is necessary, and will become increasingly so for all men, to learn to understand the spiritual world, to learn to understand it with sound human intelligence in the way the spiritual world is spoken of in Spiritual Science. How far man can become ripe to look into the spiritual world himself is quite another question, a question that can be settled only by each individual in his own inmost soul, a question to which each one will settle in the right way in his inmost soul when he seeks to understand the things of the spiritual world simply through his sound human intelligence, and not through intelligence prejudiced by natural science or any thing else.

Now the next question that arises above all about this is why so many people today avoid making their sound human intelligence active so that it may understand, or be prepared to accept, what is derived from Spiritual Science? And something can be learnt about this question by hearing what the things and beings of the spiritual world actually look like when this world is entered by the spiritual investigator. In former times the Initiates were allowed to speak of a great deal about the spiritual world that was different from what has to be given out today. But naturally in those olden days much also could be said of a similar nature to what can still be said now. Thus, for example, it was always given out in a way that today is still right, what actually happens when a man seeks to enter the spiritual world before his soul is ripe to do so. Today this can indeed so happen that the man says to himself: What! Sound human Intelligence?—that is the last thing to bother about if one wants to understand the spiritual world! People are not fond of the effort entailed; they would much rather accept some particular thing through belief in authority. There is really far less liking today for sound human understanding than people imagine, and they would like to get round this need for sound human understanding by penetrating directly to the spiritual world in a way that they imagine to be easier, even though this is an unconscious opinion, namely, through all manner of brooding and things of that kind, which they call meditation. This preference for actually penetrating into the spiritual world without the help of sound human intelligence is indeed very common. Those initiated into such things however were already saying what is right concerning this in past times, and it continues to be repeated by Initiates today. When an attempt is made to penetrate into the spiritual world by anyone who is insufficiently mature in his whole attitude of soul, it happens all too easily that after some time he ruins his whole endeavour, brings it so near complete disaster, that he is left with a feeling like someone who, grasping a red hot piece of coal, is undecided whether to burn himself or let the coal drop. This is an experience arising very often in those who meditate. They do not seek to let their sound human intelligence prevail in the same measure as their zeal for the so-called exercises, which indeed in themselves naturally have their justification. It is always emphasised, however, that sound human understanding may not be excluded, it must be actively, diligently, applied. If for sometime it is sought to make a practice of excluding sound human intelligence and also of excluding the accompanying moral self-discipline that up until then has actually not been acquired, this characteristic feature will appear—that all this will be experienced as if someone were to touch a piece of glowing coal with his fingers, not only touched it but jumped back, thus men would jump away from the spiritual world. As I have said this is always emphasised. It is emphasised because it is an experience made in earlier ages by countless teachers of Spiritual Science in the form this took in atavistic times; it is an experience that can also be very prevalent today. This is emphasised; but today we must find out the reason why there should arise this sensation of touching and recoiling as if from glowing coals.

Now if we seek to understand this fact, we may be able to recall a basic truth of our Spiritual Science perfectly well known to us, namely, how we as men behave when we bear in mind our entire life in its alternating states of sleeping and waking. With the help of the old mode of expression, we might say that while we sleep we leave the physical body and the etheric body lying in the bed whereas with the Ego and the astral body we fly out, if I can put it thus, into the world that otherwise surrounds us; we do not inhabit our body when asleep, we are poured out into the surrounding cosmos. In this way when we are sleeping our consciousness as a man is slight. When the sleeping condition is unbroken by dreams which implies a certain increase in the intensity of consciousness, but when we keep in mind dreamless sleep, then our consciousness is so inconsiderable that we do not become aware of the infinite and important number of experiences gone through in the state between going to sleep and re-awakening. This is just that we really should keep in mind, and not the abstract words: In sleep, with our ego and astral body we are outside the physical body—no, we should bear in mind that our body is tremendously rich between going to sleep and waking up again: (Compare Z-233) we do not know it, however, because our consciousness is then weakened, because our sleep-consciousness is not yet as strong as the consciousness that is able to be united with the instrument of the physical body. In actual fact a tremendously intense experience takes place in ego and astral body within the world where we also are the rest of the time—an intense experience. Man, however, during his ordinary state on earth is protected from the immediate perception of this life, this life developed when we as ego and astral body force ourselves—if I may express it thus—through the same things to begin with in which we are when making use of our physical body and its organs. The life during the state of sleep is one of tremendous richness. But this life does not cease when we wake and plunge down into our physical body and etheric body. We are still connected through our ego and astral body with the world surrounding us in a way that the ordinary consciousness has no inkling of; only this remains quite unnoticed. We can now look at this precise relation more closely. It may be asked what actually comes to expression in this relation of our soul and spirit to our physical and etheric?

You see, for our present state of experience it would be a very bad thing were we henceforth always to have to perceive what in sleep we experience with the things outside in space and in time. We do not indeed do this, but were we to do it we should always have to go on doing it and could not do otherwise. Our body, that is to say, has a certain characteristic where these experiences are concerned. It may be said to weaken these experiences. Our body weakens all that in actual truth we experience with the surrounding world; we perceive only what has been weakened by our body and not our real experiences. Our real experiences are related to what we perceive of our environment through our body—and this is a very pertinent picture indeed because not only is it actually a picture but it corresponds to an occult reality—our body or the experiences of our body are related to our real experiences in the same way as the sunlight, that shines on a stone and is reflected back so that we can see the stone, is related to the actual sunlight streaming towards us from the sun overhead. Look at the stone the sunlight falls upon; you are able to look at the stone, your eyes can bear the reflected, thrown back light. When you turn from the stone to the sun and gaze straight into the sun you are blinded. It is approximately the same with the relation between our real experiences in connection with the world around us, and What we experience through the organs of our body. What we experience in reality with our environment has the strength of the sunlight, and what we experience through the organs of our body has of this strength only the weakened form which the weakened light of an object reflected back to us has of the strength of the real sunlight. In our innermost man we are sun beings, but so far we cannot endure what it entails to be sun beings. Therefore as with our external physical eyes we have to look at the softened down light of the sun because direct sunlight blinds us, we must also perceive our environment through what results in a softened down form from our body and its organs, because we should be unable directly to face what in reality we experience of our environment. As men we are actually as if we were blinded by a sunbeam and what we know of the world and of ourselves has not our real being in it, not as things would be experienced in streaming sunlight but in light thrown back from objects, light that no longer blinds the eyes. You can gather from this that when you wake up in the world that ordinary consciousness cannot endure, you have the feeling you are in sunlight as if you really would live with the sunlight. And in the actual experience, in the actual practical experience there is indeed a very concentrated sunlight.

There you have the facts about what is often said—that people throw away the experience of Spiritual Science as if it were a red hot coal. You come to a region of experience where you have experiences like that of the soul when your finger is burnt. You jump back and do not want to burn it. Naturally you need not twist round what I say. Nobody can come to spiritual experience by having his finger burnt. On that account I say like the soul experience when one burns a finger, for in Spiritual Science things must always be expressed with exactitude.

The real state of affairs is that entrance into the spiritual world is certainly not at first anything providing man with an empty kind of happiness; entrance into the spiritual world is such that it has to be bought with that inner, one might say, unhappiness, experienced when one is burnt by fire. (Naturally there are many other experiences of the same kind). To begin with man experiences spiritually with the things, beings and events of the spiritual world, exactly the same as, for example, when he burns himself. The real experiences of the spiritual world have to be acquired through these painful experiences. What gives happiness from these experiences of the spiritual world, what gives satisfaction to life, is the afterglow in thought. Those who have these experiences imparted to them and grasp them through their sound human intelligence, can have this just as well as anyone who enters the spiritual world. Certain individuals, however, must naturally enter the spiritual world, otherwise it would not be possible for anything at all to be experienced of the spiritual world.

These feats to which I have referred must be borne in mind. Fundamentally it is not very difficult just from the external facts to gather what I have been speaking of. You will find everywhere the spiritual world is spoken of seriously—not in the way of charlatanism but seriously—that the passing over is spoken of not as being made through pleasant but through painful experiences. And you know how often I have said that whoever in life has acquired a little real knowledge of the spiritual world looks back, but not resentfully, on the sorrow, on the suffering of his life. For he says to himself: The joys, the exhilarating moments of life I accept thankfully as a divine gift and I rejoice over the destiny that has brought me these exhilarating moments of joy. But all that I know comes from my pain, my knowledge comes from my suffering. Everyone who has gained actual knowledge of the spiritual world will see this. Only in this way are we allowed to acquire knowledge of the spiritual world while here on the physical earth.

And now you will be able to realise why people Shrink from understanding the spiritual world in spite of the fact that this understanding is to be acquired simply with sound human intelligence. Usually the only thing they do not recoil from in their understanding is what they would not recoil from in external life. Now you would naturally be most stupid and unreasonable if you wilfully burnt your finger just to find out what it was like. Added to which, if you burn your finger you pay so little heed to what your soul is experiencing that you do not gain any real experience of what it is like to burn your finger. Us, there is indeed a psychological fact rightly grasped only when seen in the light flowing from this knowledge. Now in that I am going to say I am not speaking here to you individually, for naturally I am not expecting each of you to do this, I only believe, of Course, that each of you will have heard of such things, you will have heard of them from others and remarked them in others. You will perhaps have remarked that people cry out when they burn their fingers. Now, my dear friends, why do many people cry out on burning their fingers? They cry out for the simple reason that by thus crying out the soul experience may be drowned. People cry out and make a noise at any kind of pain to make things easier for themselves. Ay crying out you will not be able to experience in full consciousness the whole extent of the pain; it is really drowning the suffering, sending it outside. In short, in ordinary life man has not much experience of the things that will be experienced in the spiritual world; nevertheless it is clear that these things can be understood with sound human intelligence because everywhere in the external physical world they have analogies through which we gather our experiences. It is certainly not the case that things of the spiritual world are incomprehensible; we must, however, make up our minds to strengthen certain qualities of our soul, for example, courage. We must have the courage not usually possessed when we do something and then recoil because it is painful. We must have this courage, for penetrating to the spiritual world always means pain. Therefore we have to strengthen certain forces of the soul, this is necessary. But many people today do not,want to strengthen their qualities of soul in the systematic way that is recommended, for example, in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. They have no wish to do this; they have no wish to enhance certain attributes of their soul. Were they to enhance them then in their capacity for forming concepts , in their sound human intelligence, there would easily prevail what is needful for understanding through this human intelligence he experience of the fingers in the spiritual world that, in the sense in which I have described it, is a painful experience. We are actually living in an age in which this strengthening of the human attitude of soul is a necessity, for otherwise mankind cannot reach their goal, and because catastrophe on catastrophe will have to arise bringing us finally to chaos.

Now, however, while discussing these things just at a time when it is particularly necessary, I have placed strong emphasis on something else. This is, that with the weakening of the attitude of soul existing among men today, there can be excellent scientists in the modern sense of the word. For even with the intelligence, that is not sound human intelligence but human intelligence carried to a high pitch through the authority of science, the external part of our physical environment can be particularly well understood. It cannot be understood inwardly, spiritually, but directly understood in its external aspect. What is not possible for people with the concepts given by science, with just what people today are accustomed to when applying their thought, is however to bring order into the social structure of man's cooperative life which is gradually becoming chaotic. To put it differently: Present social demands, and social demands for the near future, will never find their solution through what may be referred to as the thinking about nature and natural phenomena. It is on this very point that our contemporaries have terribly much to learn; in this very point again our contemporaries do not fall in with what must be told them by Spiritual Science out of its most intimate understanding of the being of our universe. Indeed, in spite of all the opposition which today will be forthcoming more and more, Spiritual Science must say just on this point that even with any amount of bungling around and doctoring up in the sphere of social questions no bungling around or doctoring up will lead to anything better; it will lead on the contrary to still greater social confusion than is already present in individual spheres of world existence unless it is recognised that insight into social questions can come only from the spiritual understanding of world existence. Social questions must be solved with knowledge of Anthroposophy—anything else in this sphere is dilettantism.

Thus we must turn to something else if we are to speak about things from a certain point of view. What largely holds men back from pressing forward to Spiritual Science is lack of interest in the spiritual life. This lack of interest in spiritual life is prevalent among modern scientists. They are indifferent about the spiritual life. They deny it or give laws to everything they can observe through the physical senses, everything that allows of investigation by means of microscope or telescope; but they take no interest in what is revealed every time there is real deep observation of nature, namely. that the spiritual holds sway behind all-phenomena of nature, all facts of nature. This lack of interest in the spirit is particularly noticeable today in those who would meddle in social affairs. And again there is a particular reason for this.

Now, my dear friends, from all kinds of things that I have spoken about lately, you will have gathered that when confronting each other as man to man we are in a very special inner life of soul. I have gone quite deeply into what kind of mood of soul we are in when as man we are face to face with another man. I told you that actually standing face to face with another man always has a soporific effect on us. Where the innermost qualities of our human nature are concerned we actually go to sleep in the presence of another man. It is not to be wondered at that outward behaviour deceives us as to this falling asleep. For we certainly see the other man with our eyes, offer him indeed our hand and touch him, do all kinds of things; but still this does not alter the fact that the other man causes us to fall asleep in the depths of our human being. Just as we are asleep to nature at night, something is sent to sleep in us by the presence of another man. When this goes to sleep, however, it does not cease to be active. Thus in social life there are always taking place between men activities about which, just because they are together with their fellows, people are unable to have any clear consciousness. People fail to notice in ordinary consciousness exactly what is of most importance in the social life, because their actual capacity for conceiving the most important things in social life has fallen asleep and they act out of instinct. It is no wonder that as in the forming of conceptions the intellect is most easily lulled to sleep, the most chaotic instincts should be taken as perfectly justified in modern social life because clear thinking about these things is sent to sleep simply by men being together. The moment a man enters the spiritual world, however, what was sent to sleep wakes up, and it becomes clear what is holding sway between man and man. For this reason the solutions can also be found of the so-called social questions and social demands. Thus, as I have already said here, it is possible to find these solutions only beyond the threshold of physical consciousness.

And what mankind will want to have in future through the so-called solving of social problems, if it is to be a real solution, can be found only on the path of Spiritual Science, that is to say, the science of the superphysical, since all the most intimate foundations of human life in co-operation are of a superphysical nature. (cf. Z-234)

But then, if we wish to experience spiritually the things that have to do with man, mankind, and also with the human social structure, into our whole capacity for conception, into everything we experience, we must bring something which you will realise at once is hardly present today in ordinary consciousness. There is just one thing here in the physical world in the way of sensations, of feelings, that each of us must have if he does not want to investigate the social laws, the social impulses, in an unreal but in a fundamental way. This is only found in a limited form here in the physical world, only indeed when an absolutely healthy, absolutely right, relation exists between a father, mother and child, in the interest between father, mother and child. It is not to be found in anything that can be experienced between men anywhere else in the whole round world, Certainly not in ordinary consciousness.

Now while you are getting clear in your mind about, let us say, the mother's love (you can do it too in this fundamental way) about the love developed in the mother immediately she bears a child—this love of the mother for her child which obviously springs from the very sources of nature—try to become clear about this mother love, and then ask whether this mother love is dominant in any scientific investigations ordinarily carried out by the well-informed, even by those who are doing research work in social science. This mother love must be there in the thoughts developed about the social structure if these thoughts are to have reality in them and not unreality. The only form of thought in human life that could be right socially is what is thought out socially and with mother love.

And now take the various social reformers and social thinkers. Try for once to let work upon you such writings, for example, as those of Carl Marx, or people of his ilk, Schmoller or Reacher or anyone else you like, and ask yourself whether these, while thinking out their so-called social and political laws, in this devising of social and political laws, let themselves be influenced by what is there in the mother's love for her child when this love takes a healthy course. This must have attention drawn to it, my dear friends! A sound solution of the so-called social problem is possible only if this solution is forthcoming from thinkers able to develop mother love in solving their problems; you will understand what I mean by this. The solving of present-day social demands depends on this very human matter. It is not a matter of sagacity nor ordinary cleverness nor of belief in what is learned; it is a question of enhancing the capacity for love to the degree to which mother love can be developed, or we might also say the direct, intimate love in the common life of father, mother and child.

Here you will be right in making an objection. You will say: Yes, on earth matters are so arranged that the social structure has in a certain sense the family as its unit, and on earth the family as such is undoubtedly fully justified, yet the whole of mankind cannot be one family! This is an objection that naturally will be forthcoming at once. If we are to think out social laws with mother love, however, the consequence would actually have to be the whole of mankind becoming one family. Naturally that cannot be, Whoever knows what a real thought is, a real thought with nothing of the charlatan or abstract about it, will have to admit that of course nobody is immediately capable of behaving to every child as though it were his own, that every child cannot behave to all other women, all other men, as it would to its mother or father. Thus all mankind cannot become one family. That is perfectly right, my dear friends, but just because that is right another necessity arises for us. As we live here as physical men on the physical earth we should by no means be able to succeed in making all mankind into one family; whoever wanted this would naturally be wanting an absurdity. But we could arrive at it another way and in another way indeed it must happen. As physical men we should not be able to stand in the relation of father, mother and child. But when there takes root in mankind the knowledge that spirit and soul live in every human being, that a divine spiritual being shines forth from the eyes of everyone, and the message of a divine spiritual being rings in his words, when in other words man's immortal soul is no longer recognised simply in the abstract, then, my dear friends, the moment will have arrived, not indeed where physical man is concerned but with regard to what man hides intimately within him as his baling of soul and spirit, when we shall be able to behave to one another as if all mankind were one big family. But this will not happen until people meet each other with immediate feeling and it is recognised: When I look people in the eye the infinite shines towards me; when I hear them speak it is not only physical sound speaking but the divine spiritual being of their soul—if this becomes direct experience, just as we experience any blue or red surface, then we shall feel that man when expressing himself is of a divine spiritual nature, and shall learn not to recognise simply with blind faith that a man has an immortal soul, but we shall directly perceive this immortal soul in what he utters. For in this way we shall be able to enter into connection with the soul and spirit of each human being. This is something that will alone make the solution of the so-called social question possible, the one and only thing. Therefore we find this solution of the social question in the recognition of man's divine spiritual nature, in the recognition that what goes around on the earth as the human physical body, is only the outward expression of what lights up in every man out of the eternal. We can have the same relation to what lights up in every man out of the eternal, as we can have in the right relation of the smallest family unit. This is possible, possible in every sense. When recognising this we can capture that love for all men which is as great as the love of family.

There is naturally no point in the objection, which would be superficial too, if we remarked about things in the following way: Yes, but there are also bad people. There are also bad children, my dear friends, whom we even have to punish, but there is love in our punishment. The moment we see the divine spiritual light up in human beings, when we see it is necessary we shall punish, but punish lovingly; above all we shall learn one thing which might be said to be practised only instinctively, that is, to meet other men as if we both belonged to the same family. When we meet another man in this way we punish but we do not hate the man; even when we punish him we do not hate the human being who is our son, but we hate his wrong doing. We love the man, we hate his misdeeds and his faulty training, and we know how to distinguish in him between the man and what has overcome him. When people have once understood the great, the infinite, difference existing between human love, and hatred of the misdeeds that assail mankind, a right relationship can be established among men. When we fellow our inmost human nature there is never any possibility for our hating anyone. Naturally we have much cause to hate human crimes, misdeeds, human weakness of character, human lack of character. Where we largely go wrong in our social behaviour is as a rule in bringing against the man what should be brought against the misdeed, the crime. We do this today instinctively, but must become conscious that the development of mankind today lies in the direction of distinguishing between hatred for the misdoing and the love that all the some can be felt for the man.

Oh, my dear friends, more would be done to solve the burning social demands of today by recognising truths of this kind than by much else going around the world as social quackery or social theory. In face of the materialism that everywhere employs what is grossly material, it is difficult to make any impression when speaking of such things as these, for the simple reason that people today are largely materialistic in their instincts, which is a more harmful matter than their holding materialist theories. Crime, lack of character, cannot be seen and do not exist materially. But because people want to hate what is material, they associate the material man with their hate and there arise countless misunderstandings.

What arises from this as a bad misunderstanding is that sometimes from some kind of misunderstood sensations and feelings, man is confused with what he does in another direction also. There is carelessness in judging what a man does when it is said: Oh, we do not want to hurt the man, now and then one has to overlook things for sheer love of one's fellows. If a verdict is given in the matter by turning ones's eyes towards the wrong doing and not confounding the man in his inmost life of soul with his misdeed, then indeed the right judgment will be arrived at. It is less trouble on the one hand, if you dislike someone, to mete out so-called justice to him; it is also easy because it suits us to excuse failings which may cause harm in the external world. In the common life of mankind a very great deal hangs on the way we are able to separate what ought to arouse our antipathy from the immediate being of man as man.

My dear friends, I have often emphasised that what is spoken here about these connections is not meant as a criticism of the culture and conditions of the times; it is simply a description of them. Therefore you will also understand when I say that mankind of so-called western civilisation, the people of Europe with their American cousins, for a time must go through the stage not only of taking things materialistically in accordance with science, but also of taking life itself materialistically confounding men with their deeds in the way referred to. This has to do with the education; for the right development of other qualities to be possible, men, must in this sphere, too, pass through the stage of materialism. Men, however, who have remained behind at earlier stages of culture have preserved a great deal of these former cultural stages in which there was still atavistic clairvoyance. And atavistic clairvoyance has since resulted in quite definite trends of feeling and attitudes of soul. We people of Europe can only be a match for what assails us from certain directions, if we reflect upon the arguments put forward today. For let us not forget this—that thinkers looked upon as very enlightened as, for example, Emmanuel Kant, speak—not indeed out of a certain basis of Christianity but of the church—a thinker of this ilk speaks of human nature being fundamentally evil. And how widespread is this error—for it may indeed be called so—that human nature in its actual depths is evil: In the civilised world of Europe and its American sister country it is said that if human nature is not under control it is evil. This is actually a European opinion, an opinion of the European Church.

There is a race of men who do not hold this view, who have preserved another view from former times, for example the Chinese people. In the Chinese world-conception, as such, there rules the proposition, there rules the principle, that man is by nature good. Here is a mighty difference which would play a much greater part than is thought in the conflict that will develop between men. To be sure, speaking of these things today, people believe one as little as they would have done had the war we are now engaged in been spoken of in 1900. Yet it is true all the same that a struggle is also being prepared between the Asiatic and European peoples. And then quite other things will play a part than have been played, are played even now or will be played later, in the catastrophic struggle we are in the midst of today.

There is really a great difference in the whole way of experiencing whether the Chinese have the conviction that man is by nature good, or the European holds that human nature is fundamentally weighed down by evil—from the standpoint of the world-conception of the people there is a great difference in which way a man thinks. How a man thinks is expressed in the whole of life's temperament, in the entire attitude of the life of soul. For the most part men have their attention riveted on the outer features of life's conflict and they generally pay little heed to what is lying in the depths of the inner nature.

There is just one thing I should like to mention. You see, the fact that the European, although he may not generally admit it, is always at heart convinced that man is actually bad and has to be made good only through education and restraint, restraint by the State or any other kind, this outlook, from historic necessity, is closely connected with something else. It is connected with—not with the fact itself but with the qualities of feeling underlying the fact—connected with European people having developed through this a certain life of soul in the form we call logic and science. From this you will find it comprehensible that those who really know the Chinese—I don't mean Europeans who know them but those who, Chinese themselves, (cf. The Karma of Vocation) have got to know Europe too, as for example, Ku Hung Ming, often mentioned by me here—that these Chinamen lay stress on there being no equivalent in the Chinese language for logic and science. Thus for what we Europeans call science, for what we call logic, the Chinese have no word at all, since they do not have the thing, because, what Europeans believe to be Chinese Science is something quite different from what we call science and what we call logic, something entirely different from what we Europeans think to be logic in the Chinese soul. So different are men on earth! Attention must be paid to this unless attention is focused on this no discussion of the social problem can bear any fruit. But when heed is paid to such a matter the spiritual horizon becomes wider. And this widening of the spiritual horizon is particularly necessary for the sound understanding of Spiritual Science.

And when many different questions are asked concerning all these things—we have already touched on two today and could still touch on a third—when it is asked why today people in accordance with custom still keep their distance from the truths of Spiritual Science this reason is found among others, that the horizon, the spiritual horizon, of modern man is a very narrow one. However much man may boast of his spiritual horizon today, however greatly, the fact remains that this spiritual horizon is very narrow. Its narrowness is shown in particular by the extraordinary difficulty modern man generally has in getting out of himself where certain things are concerned. And this not only has an effect on his understanding, it influences also his whole life of sympathy and antipathy.

I should like to refer to a fact, a fact well known to quite a number of you, that is to say, the effect of this fact is well known to a number of you; this fact I have already mentioned to you once and should like to mention it again. Now you know that a certain relation existed some years ago between the so-called Theosophical Society and those who today form the Anthroposophical Society. I experienced something remarkable in connection with just those members of the Theosophical Society who were prominent. Already by the beginning of this century, as you know, I had published communications from the so-called Akashic Record, information which I venture to say rested upon personal experience, as does all the rest of what I impart out of the spiritual world. (see Atlantis and Lemuria) When these communications were read by a prominent member of the Theosophical Society people could hardly understand how it arose. I was asked how these communications were received? And it was really impossible to come to any kind of understanding, for the actual methods of anthroposophical research suitable for the present age were totally unknown in that circle. There, more mediumistic methods were used for investigation. Really what was wanted was the name of the medium or medium-like person responsible for these Akashic Record communications. That they were actually the result of the direct observation of a certain human attitude of soul projected into the supersensible, was considered an impossibility! The narrowness of man's horizon speaks in things of this kind. Even in so momentous a sphere, people consider possible only what they are accustomed to, only what is easily understood.

Now I have quoted this instance just because if one is narrow-minded it is really quite im possible to press on to Spiritual Science. In everyday life, however, this narrow-mindedness is the common thing today, always to relate everything back to just the personal, accustomed standpoint. This is what must above all be considered by those very people who are attached to our Movement for Spiritual Science. My dear Friends, I am now going to say something that perhaps there would be no need to say in this way were the things to be said intimately, systematically, but which it is necessary to say when it comes to the external conditions of life. You see, those who take a more particular, active interest in our Movement know indeed how many attacks are made on the sources of this Movement, how bitterly it is persecuted, how many come to hate it who were formerly keen adherents, and so on. Last time indeed I spoke about these things from various points of view. Now it will not be superfluous, from certain aspects, to make clear the reasons for such hostility, such antagonism. I talked to you about the reasons for the antagonism seen here and there last time. Such hostility very frequently becomes particularly strong, however, when appearing among people who also belong, let us say, to some occult society. The hatred that develops in many adherents of one or another society against what is seen here as Spiritual Science, sometimes is really strikingly conspicuous, at times even taking grotesque forms. And it is not superfluous, my deer friends, to pay attention to these things, for we should pay attention to everything that makes us take our membership of this Movement very seriously. It is very true that nowhere is there more charlatanism in the world than where spiritual matters are represented in all kinds of societies. It is easy, therefore, because of so much charlatanism in the world to be suspicious of what arises as a Movement for Spiritual Science. Then those who want to, can easily find support if they say: Yes, once a Society appeared which maintained that it spread abroad all the wisdom of the world—then it was shown up as mere charlatanism! And now another has arisen, again it has proved to be charlatanism'! This must be admitted; there is infinitely much of this charlatanism in the world. Here the capacity for discrimination must come in to distinguish the true from the false.

But another case can arise; something, for example, in the nature of uncertainty may enter the soul. This uncertainty can consist in the following. A man of this kind may come to know what goes on here. Now if he has not an open mind, if he pursues what is personal, he may arrive at the following divided mood of soul. It is possible for him to foresee all manner of danger and to say: Dear me, how is this? I have so often heard of these societies, occult or whatever else they may be; I have never come across in them any knowledge, any real knowledge. It is true, every possible thing is talked of, it is in their books and given out in their ritual, but there is no stream of living knowledge. Now is this Anthroposophy of the same kind or is it something different? And he can find himself in a divided mood of soul. You see, in common parlance, when it is not possible for anyone to go deeply into what is actually living here, it may be said: Is this the kind of swindle that I really find more pleasant since it does not ask so much of one?

My dear friends, the things I give out here are not so unreal as that! Above all they are spoken because I want to point to the necessity for earnestness, dignity, and the capacity for discrimination. I have said this repeatedly, so that the unpleasantness should not arise which very often arises, namely, that the real life of spirit is all around, whereas because it is less trouble people actually prefer to hear it talked about. What calls forth so much antagonism is just the fact of what I have emphasised in my book Theosophy being true here—that only spiritual experiences are spoken of. The antagonism of the Theosophical Society also actually first arose when they noticed our claim to speak of real spiritual experiences. That could not be borne. People are preferred who repeat what has been given in their lectures and repeat it with a certain zeal, but independent spiritual investigation was, fundamentally, the great sin against the Holy Ghost of the Theosophical Society. And this independent spiritual investigation is not as yet to be so easily found in the world today. Once again I have wanted to intimate this at the end of what we have been considering. And it will indeed be necessary for you, my dear friends, really to my heed to these things with a sound mind but also with all earnestness. The times are grave and the remedy for the times that we wish to receive from the spiritual world must also be grave.

We should like to go on speaking of these things tomorrow.

Basically Spiritual Science aims at understanding humanity in its essence, tasks, and strivings in the course of evolution. We have often talked about how the outside world misunderstands our spiritual science. This is largely because people nowadays have a hard time getting used to certain fundamental truths—truths that simply must be perceived and acknowledged if we are to understand the life and nature of humanity at all.

Let us begin today by asking what modern scientific thinking, whose great and significant triumphs over the last four centuries we must fully acknowledge and appreciate, is based on. It is based on what it can perceive, on what is manifest, in physical existence. Now, of course, it goes without saying that first we trust in what we perceive as so-called reality in our environment, and then we try to explain this reality on the basis of all that we find within its domain. It is naturally difficult for us to be aware at the outset that this reality itself may well contain an element of semblance or illusion, that it may well be deceiving us. Those who truly want to understand spiritual science must first overcome this stumbling block. They must realize that the reality around us can indeed deceive us—it can mislead us into interpreting it falsely. Much of what we have learned in spiritual science over the years has convinced us that immediate reality, as it surrounds us, may indeed be deceptive.

Today we will start from a particular point that can only be reached through spiritual science. In spiritual science we must first understand things; then, when we have understood them, we can find them confirmed in reality. Some of the most important things in spiritual science must first be understood before they can be seen. It would be easy to show that this same method is frequently applied in the outer world, notably in the sciences, but we will not go into that today. It is not always possible to develop everything from the beginning.

Now one aspect of the outer appearance or physiognomy of reality that is most apt to deceive us about this reality is the differences, the diversities among human beings. When we look at the human beings inhabiting the earth, we realize that no two of them are alike on the physical plane. Here in the physical realm all human beings are different from one another. Once we have accepted this diversity of human beings as a fact—I mean the diversity of their physical bodies—it is quite natural that people then try to find out, on the basis of the facts of earthly life, why human beings are different, why they look so different.

However, from the point of view of spiritual science we see something very different. According to spiritual science, if we consider only the forms the physical body can take through the forces of the earth, we find that human beings could not be different but rather would all have to be alike and have the same outer form. Indeed, the forces that exist on earth to give us our physical shape are such that if only these formative forces were to work on us, we would all have the same outer, physical form. This is because the physical human body has undergone a long preparation. We know it was prepared through the epochs of Saturn, Sun, and Moon.¹ It was prepared by forces that worked during these three epochs in such a way that the forces of the earth itself could influence our physical body in no other way than to give it a uniform shape if they had indeed been the only forces at work. I might put it this way: Through all the forces that have been incorporated into our physical body during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon epochs, we human beings are so fortified against any diversities coming from earthly forces that if we were left to the earthly forces alone, we would be alike everywhere on earth. Spiritual science, therefore, must start from the fact that a single and uniform shape is predestined for humanity so far as the terrestrial forces are concerned.

Even if we consider just the difference between male and female what I have just said is true. This difference is not caused by the work of earthly forces; it is the result of quite other forces, which we will speak of presently. Thus, we can assume a certain totality of earth forces that works formatively upon human beings and wants to produce absolutely identical human forms everywhere on earth.

Of course, we must now ask why human beings are so different after all. We know we must consider not only our physical body, but also the etheric body that stands behind it. Spiritual science shows us that while we should all be alike in our physical body, in regard to our etheric body we must be different because earthly forces are not the only ones that work on our etheric body. Forces coming out of the cosmos work on our etheric body, forming and shaping it.

We must therefore distinguish between the uniform earthly forces working all over the earth that would make all human forms the same and the forces working out of the universe on the earth, making each etheric body different. We can see the differences between etheric bodies through spiritual scientific research. At the one extreme are those etheric bodies that have strong forces and are tough, retaining their form almost as much as we do our physical form. This is one kind of etheric body. There is a second kind that is mobile, like something that is fluttering and always in movement, flowing and moving. But these two kinds of etheric bodies still reveal themselves in such a way that we can describe their inner tone and shading as being more or less alike. There is another kind of etheric body that is inwardly tinted, inwardly shimmering, not uniform in color but having various tones and colors. There is a fourth kind of etheric body that has one primary color throughout its whole substance, but this color changes over time though we cannot pinpoint other than purely inward causes for this. These etheric bodies are not shimmering in different colors or shaded in many tones; they have only one color, but they change it in the course of time. We may call them chameleon-like etheric bodies.

Then there are those etheric bodies that have a strong tendency to light up inwardly, growing at times brighter and brighter. Other etheric bodies have a powerful faculty to reproduce the harmonies of the spheres. Finally, there are those etheric bodies that appear especially in inventive people and persons of genius—etheric bodies that, if I may say so, reveal forces within them that are rare and strange in this earthly world. Whereas the above-mentioned six kinds of etheric bodies are found among ordinary, even average, human beings, the last kind of etheric body produces the type of human being with powerfully developed faculties, those we often say are “not of this earth”—poets, artists, and the like.

It is not by arbitrarily picking the number seven that we distinguish these seven forms of etheric bodies. We simply have to count, and we find no others besides those I have just described as typical. For this simple reason, there are seven kinds of etheric bodies. There are seven different kinds of human etheric bodies, and in the etheric bodies we have forces that are not earthly, but come in from the cosmos.

Our etheric body forms and molds the physical body. If only earthly forces worked on us, we would all be alike in our physical body. However, the influence of the etheric body makes us different. The astral body brings about further differences, such as those between male and female bodies, through forces it develops between death and a new birth, during the time when we prepare ourselves for the gender that karma requires us to have in the next incarnation.

But for the moment, let us just look at the etheric body. If we take only earthly forces into account, we can say that our physical bodies would have to be alike. However, because our etheric bodies differ in their constitution, composition, and structure in the cosmos, there would have to be seven groups of human beings. This is the fact we gradually arrive at when we investigate the relationship between our etheric body and our physical body with the methods of spiritual science. Now this difference is connected with the racial diversities on the earth. Basically, because of this difference in etheric bodies, the several races can always be reduced to the number seven. Even though certain typical forms atrophy, and though natural science may distinguish fewer than seven basic races, there are really seven basic racial distinctions in the human species. These diversities are brought about by the etheric body; they do not result from the earthly forces that work during our evolution, but originate in cosmic forces.

Now, when we trace the evolution of the earth back into the Atlantean or even into the Lemurian epochs, we find that initially impulses and tendencies existed that would have prevented our physical body from developing the physiognomy it now has through the power of the etheric body—that is, the diversities. Instead, if everything had gone a certain way (we shall see directly in what way), the seven-colored etheric body would have brought about diversities in our physical form, but successively, one after the other. Thus, the etheric body would have created one form of human being in the fifth period of Atlantis, a second in the sixth period of Atlantis, a third in the seventh, a fourth in the first post-Atlantean period, a fifth in the second post-Atlantean period, a sixth in the third, and a seventh in the fourth post-Atlantean period, that is, in the Greco-Roman time.

That is what would have happened; various types of human beings would have appeared one after the other. Thus, in the fifth Atlantean period we would have had human beings in whose physical formation one type of etheric body would have predominated. In the sixth Atlantean period, the second of the etheric bodies just described would have been at work, and so on right until the fourth post-Atlantean period. That was the original conception. However, Lucifer and Ahriman opposed this; they did not want it to happen that way. They fought against this harmonious tendency of development in the evolution of humanity, and they managed to change the whole process so that various developments were shifted and displaced. While there should have been basically only one form of human being in the fifth Atlantean period that was to develop gradually into another type, Lucifer and Ahriman preserved the form of the fifth Atlantean period into the sixth, and again that of the sixth Atlantean period into the seventh, and even into the time after the Atlantean flood.

Thus, forms that should have disappeared remained. Instead of racial diversities developing consecutively, older racial forms remained unchanged and newer ones began to evolve at the same time. Instead of the intended consecutive development of races, there was a coexistence of races. That is how it came about that physically different races inhabited the earth and are still there in our time although evolution should really have proceeded as I have described it. Even when we consider only what resulted from the development of the etheric body, we see everywhere that Lucifer and Ahriman play their part in the earthly evolution of humanity.

Now we must ask what the intended consecutive development of humanity up until the Greco-Roman epoch meant in the larger cosmic context. As we know, around the Atlantean time, human souls gradually came down from the planets to which they had ascended. You may remember that I described in my An Outline of Occult Science that the souls had ascended and then came down again and that the life of earthly incarnations, properly speaking, begins with their descent.² Thus, the I of human beings, their individualities, would have gone through the various human forms mentioned above in consecutive periods. In the fifth Atlantean period, the I would have had one human form, in the sixth another, in the seventh again another; in the first post-Atlantean epoch it would have had yet another form, and so on. We would all have lived through these types of humanity, one after the other.

Indeed, it was planned that human beings would thus complete the necessary schooling of human individuality by passing through various etheric formations that had different effects on their physical body. In fact, according to the original plan, there could have been a type of human being on the earth who would have been the result, as it were, of seven successive periods of development, each of which would have contributed to the perfection of that human type. In the fifth post-Atlantean period, then, there would have been one united type of human being spread over the whole face of the earth.

However, Lucifer and Ahriman interfered and thwarted the original design. As a result, the ancient Greeks could only dream of an ideal, superhuman type, which they tried to represent in various ways, for example, in the form of Apollo, Zeus, or Athena. They could not fully encompass this type simply because it did not really exist. But if we have a sense for Greek sculpture, we can feel how the ancient Greeks dreamed of a uniform, perfect, beautiful type of human being that should have developed. This development did not occur because Lucifer and Ahriman preserved older racial forms that had developed, so that there was a coexistence of races rather than a succession.

In the fourth post-Atlantean period, in the Greco-Roman era, human evolution was faced with the fact that what the gods guiding the evolution of the earth had intended for the outer forms on this earth had not been realized because of the luciferic-ahrimanic influence. The spirits of the hierarchy of form had intended that the harmonious working of the various hierarchies of form should really lead to a human type with perfect physical development. As it turned out, the ancient Greeks could only dream of this perfect type and express it in their art.

It is a deeply moving experience to realize in the course of spiritual research why the Greeks created such perfection in their plastic art. They did it because through a soul-spiritual instrument they perceived that Lucifer and Ahriman had disappointed the good divine-spiritual beings, whose plans for humanity were different from the development that actually occurred. What should have developed through the work of these good divine-spiritual beings weighed on the ancient Greeks' minds, and so they wanted to at least represent it even though it did not exist in outer reality. It is great and wonderful and also deeply moving to behold these inner forces of human evolution that appear there in artistic forms, striving to express what could not be achieved in outer reality. Such insights shed new light on Greek art as it was developed so uniquely and unrepeatably at that time.

The Greek era was also the time when humanity faced a crisis because of the luciferic-ahrimanic influence. Lucifer and Ahriman had caused races to live side by side instead of one after the other. At the same time, however, all the forces the spirits of form were pouring into human evolution on the earth were immobilized. Now they could do no more than stimulate and inspire the creative imagination of the Greeks so that it developed as I have described it. The spirits of form had to decide whether the human race should continue to develop so that human beings would never again be united in earthly evolution. For this indeed is what would have happened. If earthly evolution had continued beyond the fourth, the Greco-Roman period, in the same way it was prior to that, then humanity would have become separated into seven groups due to luciferic and ahrimanic forces. These seven groups would have been as different from each other as the various species of animals. Animal species do not understand each other, but regard each other as foreign. Similarly, toward the end of the fourth post-Atlantean period and in the fifth one, in which we live, people would have had to develop more and more the view that there are seven groups of human beings on earth that see each other as completely different species. This view would still have prevailed in our time; in fact, the separation between the seven groups would not yet have reached its culmination or completion, but would still be developing and widening. The term “human being” for all people on earth would have seemed wrong; we would have had seven different terms, one for each of the seven groups.

Therefore, in the fourth post-Atlantean age, in the Greco-Roman period, something had to be done in the universe to forestall the development that threatened to result in the future, at the end of earth evolution, namely, the evolution of seven groups of human beings, each called by a different name, just as each animal species has a different name. These groups would not have regarded each other as belonging to the same species, and at most there would have been handed down to them some copy of the Greek forms, such as the statues of Zeus or Apollo. They would have regarded these statues as something alien to them—something that could never have existed on earth. Precautions had to be taken to prevent such a development. Physical evolution had already gone too far and could not be changed anymore. Therefore, precautions had to be taken for our etheric body; an impulse had to enter our etheric body that would counteract the separating of earthly humanity into seven groups. This impulse that was to counteract the growing fragmentation of humanity and that was to make it possible for the term “human being” to retain—and, in fact, increase—its true meaning over the whole face of the earth was the Mystery of Golgotha, which we can now see in a new light.

The first attempt that had been made with earthly humanity before the luciferic and ahrimanic impulses interfered in evolution was to create unity among human beings everywhere through the forming of the physical body. This attempt by the spirits of form failed because of luciferic-ahrimanic interference. But it could not be allowed to fail altogether; precautions had to be taken to prevent complete failure and to immobilize and offset the work of Lucifer and Ahriman. The physical body could no longer be worked on as was originally intended; therefore, the etheric body had to be worked on. This was done by the divine-spiritual being we have so often spoken of—the Christ Being—taking on human form at the time in human evolution when the possibility to express the archetype of humanity was the greatest.

At what period in human evolution was this? All the forces that counteract the original, identical design of our physical body are at work in us mostly in the first seven years of life, when the physical body is still soft and pliant. They do not allow our physical body to become the same everywhere, but from within the body they immobilize the forces for the original identical design.³ These opposing forces can still go on working in the second seven years until puberty; indeed, they can even continue to work in the third and fourth seven-year periods during the development of the astral body and the sentient soul. However, in the middle of the development of the intellectual or mind soul, which evolved above all in the fourth post-Atlantean or Greco-Roman time, the extra-earthly forces are less and less able to reach us. And in the very midst of this development, that is, in the period between our twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years, they have least access to us. If we add two years at the beginning of this period and subtract two years at the end, the time in question is that between the thirtieth and the thirty-third year. In the time following those years, extra-earthly forces once more have the greatest influence. The period from the thirtieth to the thirty-third year, however, is the time of the greatest influence of earthly forces on the human being. And if in this period of three years there remained only the degree of diversity that existed in younger years and only what is to appear in later years would be added—in short, if only what works on human beings between the thirtieth and the thirty-third year remained effective, then people would indeed be much more alike.

Christ had to use these three years—very special and unique years—to unite with those earthly forces in human beings that had retained most of the earthly element in the human being. To this end, as we have discussed, the body for Christ was prepared through the two Jesus bodies up to the thirtieth year. Then, from the thirtieth to the thirty-third year, Christ took possession of this body. Where the earth forces were most active and where deformations could have set in, there no further development was possible, and physical death occurred. Thus, the sun-being, Christ, really entered into the earth sphere and united with the whole etheric body of the earth, as I have often explained. He then entered into the earth aura and now continues to work there. This sun-being must work for us in such a way that we realize more and more that in Christ the divine spirit was sent to us who was to counterbalance and redeem from within the separation and diversification in humanity created by Lucifer and Ahriman's opposition to the original impulses.

In outer human nature, the good spiritual beings work together with Lucifer and Ahriman. But what human beings originally, at the beginning of earth evolution, were intended to have on the outside, namely, uniformity and the applicability of the term “human being” everywhere on earth, was now to be brought forth out of the innermost essence of the human being through the Christ-Spirit. It is one of the many meanings of the Mystery of Golgotha that with the Christ-Spirit something was given to the earth that, when rightly understood, makes the name “human being” again applicable to all earthly humanity. The real substance of Christianity, which has already been partially revealed through its teachings, will be explored by those who, in regard to Christ, seek in the spiritual world what Christ is continually revealing in accordance with his words: “I am with you always, to the close of the age.” When what can be conveyed to human beings in the name of Christ from within thus gradually becomes known, then, as a result, what Lucifer and Ahriman did in earthly humanity can more and more be made up for and redeemed.

We may, of course, ask now if there is any meaning in this detour. This is really a childish question, and it is often raised by people who think themselves cleverer than the cosmic wisdom—and indeed there are many who aspire to such superior cleverness. Such people say, “If there are mighty divine beings, could they not have eliminated the luciferic-ahrimanic influence at the beginning of earthly evolution in order to protect their work?” This may be human wisdom, but in St. Paul's sense it is “folly with God.” It is nothing more than mere human wisdom.

In our lectures, we must look at things as we are now doing, and then what has developed through the opposition of Lucifer and Ahriman does not seem absolutely evil to us, but only relatively evil. For let us now consider the other side of the matter. Let us assume the original, divine cosmic plan for the earth had been fulfilled. Imagine that in the regular course of evolution the Greco-Roman era would have arrived, as I have pointed out, and that beautiful, harmonious type of human being the Greeks dreamed of would not only have been created by their sculptors, but would have lived among them and would gradually have spread over the whole earth. All other human forms would gradually have disappeared, and only what lives in the Apollo type, the Zeus type, the Diana type, and the Athena type would have spread over the earth. Since such beings would have recognized each other as belonging to the same species, they would have given themselves the name “human being.” Then the term “human being” would indeed have been applicable, and at the same time there would have been a sense of the equality of all people.

In that case, a human race of Grecian beauty would have spread over the earth, and in our age we would already see humanity approaching more and more this beautiful Grecian type, which would reach its perfection when the earth arrives at its goal in the seventh post-Atlantean epoch, after which it will pass over into other stages of existence. However, human beings would have advanced to this common humanity in unfreedom—that is what we must bear in mind. We would have been compelled to see all human beings everywhere as the same beings. It is only because such an identical form did not develop that all the other things could happen that allow us to see others as different, so that each sees the other as unlike himself and does not love his neighbor as himself. You will probably understand that if human beings had really become outwardly as alike as the original divine-spiritual forces had intended if Lucifer and Ahriman had not interfered, the feeling that one must love one's neighbor as oneself would necessarily have developed. There would not have been any choice; for anything else would have seemed to be nonsense, both in terms of feeling and of perception.

However, this development was not supposed to come from the outside because then it would have made us into beings who love automatically—that is, we would have loved others because they are our own kind, but without knowing the force that urges us to this love. Thus, what would otherwise have come to us in unfreedom was prepared for freedom through Lucifer and Ahriman's opposition. This sanction of the opposition is therefore inherent in the original plan of divine wisdom. Indeed, we may say that in still earlier periods of earthly evolution, the opposition against the harmonious progressive divine-spiritual powers was created precisely so that it could later bring about freedom.

At this point, we must realize that our concepts must change when we leave the sphere of physical observation and ascend to a higher order of perception. Many of you probably know that philosophy speaks of antinomies, and that Kant has even gone so far as to claim that it can be proven with equal conclusiveness that the two statements “the world is infinite in terms of space” and “the world is finite in terms of space” are correct. Similarly, both “the world has had a beginning” and “the world has had no beginning” can be proven conclusively. Why is this? It is because logic does not apply when we come into a sphere that can no longer be comprehended by physical means. We finally have to realize that our physical logic works neither in the realm of philosophy nor anywhere else where we concern ourselves with other than physical forms of existence. We must not make the mistake of looking at the opposition of Lucifer and Ahriman as we would at the antagonism between a good and an evil person on earth. This kind of mistake occurs when we continue to carry over the earthly into the super-earthly realm.

Most people picture Ahriman and Lucifer as evil beings—albeit much more intensely evil than human beings. But this is not true; we must keep in mind that certain earthly feelings we associate with our concepts lose their meaning when we go beyond the earthly realm. Thus we cannot say that there are good gods on the one hand and the evil gods Ahriman and Lucifer on the other. We must not assume that a trial should be held in the universe where a highly qualified cosmic judge would sit on the cosmic judgment seat and sentence Lucifer and Ahriman to be locked up once and for all, so that only the good gods can get to work. True, locking somebody up can at times make sense in earthly life; in the cosmos it would not make any sense because there such ideas and concepts have no meaning. The opposing forces were created by the good gods themselves in an earlier period so that they would be able to bring to bear their full force for the development I have described.

For freedom to enter in so that human beings did not develop an unfree love through their outer shape or form, the luciferic and ahrimanic elements had to be part of our evolution. Only in this way can we arrive from within ourselves at the unity indicated by the term “humanity.” Thus, the gods allowed humanity to be fragmented by the opposing forces, so that later, after their bodily nature had been thus separated, human beings could again be brought into a unity in their spiritual nature through Christ.

This is one of the meanings of the Mystery of Golgotha: the attainment of the unity of humanity from within. Externally human beings are becoming more and more different. The result will be not sameness but difference over the earth, and human beings must exert all the more force from within to attain unity. There will always be setbacks in this process of achieving unity—we can see them coming if we look for them. What was actually intended only for an earlier epoch is preserved into a later epoch, and what was to create differences in consecutive periods coexists. Human beings form different groups, and while they are struggling for unity all over the world in the name of Christ, through the Christ impulse, differences remain as aftereffects and setbacks. Such differences will always exist because human beings will only gradually be able to attain unity. At the same time, different groups will fight each other tooth and nail about everything concerning their outer life. There are setbacks from earlier epochs that run counter to the Christ impulse, rather than in harmony with it.

Indeed, here we see a very profound meaning of this Christ impulse. Based on true knowledge, we can say Christ is our savior who keeps humankind from being fragmented into groups. This is not yet fully understood by all people because the old still exists alongside the new. Today, people hardly understand the community of life in the Christ impulse, and this is connected with the fact that this understanding must proceed from our innermost being. We must realize that the Christ impulse has worked in the earth aura for the last two thousand years, but has not been understood. As we have often emphasized, this Christ impulse can only be fully understood through what spiritual science gives us. It is only when a growing number of people can more and more grasp, think, and feel what actually entered our earthly evolution in the fourth post-Atlantean period that understanding for that event will increase. To expect modern humanity to understand the Christ impulse is really asking too much. After all, just think how unwilling people are to acknowledge that this fourth post-Atlantean period of evolution, the Greco-Roman epoch, is of such paramount, such mighty significance in human evolution. Just think how unwilling people are to recognize any such post-Atlantean age at all with the Greco-Latin epoch as its pivotal point. To accept such truths, people need to take in the ideas of spiritual science. Without them one cannot understand these things at all—that is, one cannot understand the evolution of humanity if one has not taken in these concepts.

We have to understand the significance of the spirits of form, who had intended to develop a homogeneous human race in seven successive stages. This homogeneous human race was fragmented by Lucifer and Ahriman, but the force that wants to spread the one name “human being” over all the earth and unto the end of time—in spite of the outer differences between people—was revived from within by the Christ impulse. One of the chief tasks of the immediate future is to understand that Christ stands between Lucifer and Ahriman and to grasp his significance in relation to them. Therefore, we must always call Lucifer and Ahriman by their true names—we must call a spade a spade, so to speak—and look to the Christ impulse as the one combating them and saving the earth from this one-sided luciferic-ahrimanic impulse. This is what must be presented more and more often.

In our Dornach building we have therefore placed the statue The Representative of Humanity in the most prominent place; it presents the archetype of humanity that is to be recreated by Christ from within, surrounded by the luciferic-ahrimanic elements.⁴ That is the meaning of this central statue in our building. Looking at this central figure, people will realize that this is indeed what the good gods had intended. The human race was fragmented, Lucifer and Ahriman made their appearance, but the Christ impulse triumphs and recreates from within, from within us, what was originally intended for the outside. In the process, our freedom is created. Our building and what will be in it are to place before humanity what must be accomplished in terms of understanding human evolution. What is most needed for humanity in the immediate future is to be revealed in our building; we want people to understand human evolution showing and telling them what is most important for the near future.

Of course, many objections can be raised, and some of them have already been brought to our attention. After seeing the paintings and sculptures in the Goetheanum, some people have said that a true work of art must be understandable immediately to everyone without requiring an explanation. Here, on the other hand, people need theoretical explanations to understand our art works. Well, if people would only think a little! Imagine a Turk, for example, understanding nothing at all except what is contained in the Koran, a Turk who has heard nothing about Christ except that he must fight against Christianity. Suppose you took this Turk to see the Sistine Madonna and showed it to him without any explanations. Naturally, a work of art can only be understood by those who live in the same spiritual stream out of which the work was created. Thus, our ideal figure surrounded by Lucifer and Ahriman will only be understood by those who live in our spiritual stream.

This is true for all works of art in all ages: they are comprehensible only to those who live in the same spiritual stream. Only within that stream are they true works of art. The spiritual orientation must be inherent in them. Those who understand Raphael's Sistine Madonna or, let us say, his Transfiguration must know something of the spiritual stream in which the pictures were created. Similarly, to understand what they have seen in our building, people must have some element belonging to our spiritual stream in their souls and hearts. If they have this element within them, then the work of art must speak for itself, and no labels, identifying names, or other comments will be needed to explain or interpret it.

For example, when people look at one of our glass windows, they see in the bottom part a kind of coffin with a dead man in it; above that, they see an old man, a youth, a young woman, and a child standing on a winding path. If people have taken in our spiritual stream, they will realize that this is the review of life. Immediately after we have passed through the gate of death, we will see the course of our earthly life in reverse. Of course, you have to know this fact to make sense of the picture in the window. But if you know this, then the picture works by virtue of what it contains, just as the Sistine Madonna works upon those who know the Christian history behind it, but it has no such effect on the Turk. By the same token, what is presented in our building cannot work upon those who have not taken in our spiritual stream. These things just have to be seen in the right way.

Today, I wanted above all to explain that Christ was that spirit from the cosmos who, in the course of earthly evolution, brought spiritually what was originally intended for our outer form but could not develop externally, because we would then have become automatons of love and equality. On the physical plane there prevails the fundamental law that everything must operate through antitheses, through polarities. The gods could not simply have sent down Christ at the very beginning of earth evolution, as our naive wisdom might suggest they should have done. For then the antithesis of external fragmentation and inner concentration could never have developed. Humanity, however, must live in this antithesis and polarity. We have the right feelings for Christ only when we see in him the savior, rescuing humanity from dispersion and separateness; only then can Christ fill our own innermost I. Christianity lives wherever people are able to understand this union of all humanity through Christ. In the future, it will not matter much whether what Christ is will still be called by that name. However, a lot will depend on our finding in Christ the spiritual uniter of humanity and accepting that external diversity will increase more and more.

We will also have to accept that there will still be many setbacks for this spiritual understanding of the Christ impulse. What developed at the same time instead of consecutively will for a long time continue to evoke forces that fight against a spiritual understanding of global human equality. There will be many and terrible onslaughts, and, for the most part, their purpose will be to continue the luciferic-ahrimanic war against the Christ impulse. And it will be one of the greatest, most beautiful and significant achievements of our age if we can be among the few who understand this thought of the unifying of all human beings, who understand how remnants of the luciferic-ahrimanic elements strive to bring to the fore what is unique in various groups of human beings so as to exclude all others. It is very difficult to say anything at this time about the final outcome of these matters. As human hearts are now, to speak about that outcome would only be upsetting and bewildering; it may lead to opposition, perhaps even to hatred and abuse rather than to working in accordance with the Christ impulse. However, what can be said about this principle in the Christ impulse, namely, the salvation of humanity out of bodily fragmentation into spiritual unity, must be told, for it must become more and more effective in human evolution.

We have to be able to face calmly and courageously the increasing diversity in human nature because we know that we can carry a word into all these diversities that is not merely a word of speech but one of power. Though there may be groups that fight against each other and though we may even belong to one of them, we know that we can bring something that will express: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” into every group. We know that this “Christ who lives in me” will not lead to the forming of groups; rather, it will bring about the spreading of the glory of the name “human being” over the whole earth.

The understanding of spiritual science brings to life the realization that we can carry the power that comes from the words “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” into the groups that are fighting each other—no matter into which group we bring our I. This is one of the practical and moral-ethical aspects of our strivings in spiritual science. With the force of these words we bring something into the group that does not belong exclusively to one or the other group but to all humanity. It is only through this that we can arrive at a true spiritual understanding of Christianity.

It is the hallmark of mighty spiritual paths that they are finally expressed in simple words. Think of the simple words that can express the whole of Christianity, which has permeated the world for nearly two thousand years. But these simple words can only be found on the basis of big, long-term developments. These simple words that express Christianity were not just there all at once; they had to be worked for. We must be aware that we are among those people working to make it possible that someday simple words may be found to express, in a basic, elementary way, the truths we have to spread and develop today. Without such development the simple could never come about. We may not yet be able to put our spiritual science into simple words in any language—words that would condense it on a quarter of a page—so that all striving people would understand it, as was done for Christianity when it originated two thousand years ago. Yet, we can be sure that those simple words will contain something of what I said today, something that will direct our attention to the Greco-Roman age, especially to the Mystery of Golgotha during that time, as well as to the contrast or polarity between Christ and Lucifer-Ahriman.

What can be seen everywhere will be concentrated in a few simple words that can then be handed down to future humanity in the same way as the commandment, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Just as this commandment expresses something that had to be attained as a result of a long development, so, in the future, the findings of spiritual science will be put into simple words, and then all people will understand them.

This requires our spiritual work, for the simple can only arise in the spiritual evolution of humanity when people have been willing to spend long periods of time learning about the details. You are called upon to help in this development, which will lead to something appearing to people in bright clarity, something we cannot yet express because we do not have the words for it in our languages, yet something spiritual science works toward. When you feel you belong to such a spiritual stream, and feel at home in it, because you see that it is necessary for human evolution, then you have the right understanding of our spiritual movement—you belong to it in such a way that you rightly understand the greatest of its goals based on your increasing understanding of the contrast between Christ and Lucifer-Ahriman. You understand that this contrast is vital and had to exist.

This is what I wanted to bring before your souls today. It is all connected with the question of the meaning of our whole earthly evolution. For when spirits from other planets look down upon the earth and ask what the meaning of this earthly evolution is, they will understand it when they learn about the Mystery of Golgotha. Everything that happens in the course of earthly evolution has its meaning only through the Mystery of Golgotha. The Mystery of Golgotha radiates out into the cosmos and imparts to everything else that radiates out from the earth its meaning, its central meaning.

• 1. These names do not refer to present-day planets but to ancient evolutionary stages and are therefore capitalized.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, vol. 13 in the Collected Works, repr. (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1989).
• 3. Editor's note: The transcript seems to be faulty here. The original reads: “They [the opposing forces] let it [the physical body] become the same; they make it identical from within.” This obviously contradicts not only the statements directly preceding this passage, but also the lecture as a whole.
• 4. The statue is Rudolf Steiner's wood sculpture The Representative of Humanity. It survived the burning of the first Goetheanum and stands now in the second Goetheanum.

The friends of our spiritual movement who are here in Ulm got together some time ago to cultivate the thoughts, aspirations and impulses of our spiritual movement here as well. We are here, friends from out of town, united with our Ulm friends today to commemorate this event together, which consists in the fact that friends of our movement have also come together in this city of Ulm. They have joined together in a serious time, in difficult times, in a time that speaks to the human soul through significant signs. And so it is appropriate on this occasion today to remember larger contexts, spiritual connections in the development of humanity, into which our spiritual movement will place itself for our time and for the near future. I would like to say: First we want to turn our gaze from what is connected with the very nearest human interests, including those in the spiritual, to the all-encompassing, that all-encompassing with which our movement is connected.

We know, of course, that those personalities of the present day who join together under the sign of our spiritual impulses must feel deeply in their souls and hearts that they want to seek something that another spiritual movement, another spiritual endeavor in the present time, and which is connected with what the soul of man must seek in our time and in the near future if he is to become truly conscious of his humanity. In this seeking, precisely as it is expressed in our movement, we find many opponents. And our opponents are precisely those who believe that they must protect the true interests of the development of humanity from this or that point of view, and protect it from what they consider to be such an aberration of the human spirit as is found in our movement. Thus many people of the present day who are religiously minded or apparently religiously minded believe that our movement is likely to lead away from what they need for real religious deepening.

Now, one could indeed reply to some of those who speak in this way, with a somewhat superficial but no less apt judgment: Has the Christian idea, for example, in the course of the last few centuries, managed to bring humanity to a height that could have mitigated, or I will not even say eliminated, the present terrible catastrophe? But those people who never want to learn from events, who learn nothing even from them, that religious life has been developing in their sense for centuries, even millennia, and now, despite this religious life, this catastrophe has been able to break out over the whole earth. But even if it is obvious to ask, we do not want to move our thoughts in this direction. Today, by way of introduction, we would like to raise another question that is perhaps given very little consideration, but which is in fact connected with very, very profound matters of the present.

Do you know which word is most unknown to contemporary scholars, to philological scholars, in terms of its origin and development? Do you know which word is most often found in even the most learned works when you seek advice, a word for which you cannot determine its origin, what it actually means, or what it means? The word for which you will most often search in vain in the scholarly resources, both in terms of its linguistic and spiritual origin, is the word “God.” No science today can give you any information about the linguistic and spiritual origin of the word God. That is a peculiar fact. For this fact does not merely point to externals, to something that is in this or that series of facts, but it points to something that is deeply, deeply connected with the human mind. People all believe they are saying something when they speak of the divine, when they speak of their turning to God. And with all the means of present-day learning, they do not even know how to somehow indicate the origin of the word God. This indicates that by far the greatest number of people in the present day who speak on religious or other spiritual subjects really do not know what they are talking about. If one would only go deeply enough into what is actually meant by people not knowing what they are talking about when they believe they are talking about what is most intimately connected with the human soul's striving! This is felt, if not clearly conscious, then instinctively by those who feel compelled to come to our spiritual impulses from the various spiritual confusions of the present. That these spiritual impulses, which come precisely from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, are connected with the most urgent needs of our time, has been emphasized by me again and again in the times when the present severe thunderstorm has actually gathered for a long time.

I would like to remind you of a sentence that I have often spoken, as those friends who have been following our movement for years now know. I have often said that over the last three to four centuries, the earth and its various peoples have become one in commercial, industrial, banking and so on. I have pointed out how modern means of transportation and what, through modern means of transportation, has rolled across the whole earth until recently, has poured out over the whole earth a unity of economic, of external economic life, a unity, if we may say so, of physical life on earth. We had a unity of physical life on earth. A check written in New York could be cashed in Tokyo, Berlin, or wherever. In the years leading up to the war, I always added the following demand to this fact: Not only does the human body need a soul, but every body needs a soul and cannot live without one. What has spread across the earth as a physical body in commercial, industrial, or other ways, needs a soul, a soul that offers the possibility that people on earth understand each other spiritually as they understand each other commercially and monetarily. To give the earthly body an earthly soul is something I have often spoken of as desirable.

Now, something like this certainly does not develop in a day; it takes time. And what I am expressing here is not meant as a criticism of the time, but only as a description; it is intended to stir in human souls what the impulses of action, of thinking, of feeling, and of will should be. It is not meant to accuse, but to express what should happen. Therefore it is not meant in the form of a reproach, [when it was said] that people have neglected to form a common earth soul for this earth body in the last decades, in which the common earth body has developed particularly intensively. This earth soul can only be found if people are made to understand what is as common to people in a spiritual sense as the sun is in a physical sense, and what is to be spread among mankind through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

But this has been neglected until now. And in this present catastrophic time, we are experiencing it in the most terrible way, as has never happened before in the history of the development of humanity, which can be traced with documents, that humanity finds itself in a dead end, in a real dead end. And it will only escape from this deadlock if it decides to add to the physical culture of which humanity is so proud, the spiritual culture of the earth soul for our time and for the near future, which belongs to this physical culture.

One may resist these efforts to give the earth a new spirituality as much as one wants, but the truth will have to prevail under all circumstances. Humanity is now living in the midst of a terrible catastrophe. If humanity does not decide to truly adapt to the new spirituality meant here, then these catastrophes will keep recurring in ever new periods, perhaps in very short periods. This catastrophe and all its consequences will never be healed by the means that humanity already knew before this catastrophe broke out. Anyone who still believes this is not thinking in terms of the earthly development of humanity. And this catastrophic time will last as long as it can be bridged, apparently, for a few years in between, until humanity interprets it in the only correct way, namely, that it is a sign that people are turning to the spirit that must permeate purely physical life. Today this may still be a bitter truth for many because it is inconvenient, but it is a truth.

Let us ask ourselves what it is that has actually maintained some connection with the spiritual world to this day, despite the increasingly intense purely materialistic culture of the earth that has been occurring for three to four centuries. Anyone who has experience in this field knows that it is actually only a single fact that is still maintaining the connection with the spiritual world, and that this is a fact of great importance for humanity. A man who had been one of the most important leaders of the barren “Society for Ethical Culture” in recent years once told me one day that he had thought for a long time about how it could be that in our enlightened times, when humanity knows that salvation can only lie in understanding the material world, how it is possible that in these enlightened times there are still churches, churches alongside the various states. And he said he had come up with the reason why there are still churches. He clothed this solution, with which he meant to express a deep secret, in the following words: “The states administer life, the churches administer death; and since people have not yet ceased to think of death as something terrible, the power of the church lies in the fact that it administers death.” It is a truly materialistic way of thinking, because the man wanted to express that when people would finally have given up thinking of death as something terrible in people's lives, when they would have gotten used to letting death come over them like an animal, then the churches would have lost their power.

Now, of course, this saying is complete nonsense, absolutely brilliant nonsense; but looking at the intellectual life of the present day, it is not entirely unfounded. Sometimes, in order to understand itself, to express what it is in intellectual terms, the present day has to say nonsense. In the future, this will be cited as a special characteristic of our time: that the most ingenious people of the present were compelled, when they sought to express the character of the present, that is, the time around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, that they then had to say nonsense. But now, there is something true in this nonsense, namely the truth that for many people of the present time, it is almost the only connecting bridge to the spiritual world, that in a certain respect they either have a fear of death or cannot bear the thought that their loved ones have gone and cannot imagine them as being in a nothingness. Certainly, it should not be denied that these thoughts are still significant enough, that they are still connected with the deepest interests of the human soul. However, neither fear nor any other feeling about death can lead to a real connection with the spiritual world. For this, there must be real, true knowledge of the spiritual world, there must be understanding of the reality of the spiritual world. And this understanding of the reality of the spiritual world is not possible today other than by adding a spiritual-scientific attitude to the natural-scientific attitude.

If people do not know where the word of God actually comes from, what the divine actually is, what do people who speak of the divine today actually do out of need of this or that religious worship? Those people who often believe themselves to be deeply religious, pretending to worship the highest divine, what are they actually doing? It is not unimportant to ask yourself this question in a moment of seriousness. What does this question imply? This question implies: What is the God that most people of the present time speak of, who pretend to be of a religious nature?

Now, people reject it when we speak from the standpoint of spiritual science that there are other beings above us, the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai and so on, so that we see a hierarchy of spiritual beings, and that the way up to what is the highest divine is long. People of the present day do not want this epistemological modesty. They often express it by saying that they want no mediation between themselves and God; they always want to turn directly and immediately to the Most High God. But it is not a matter of what one believes about such a turning, but of what one really does in one's soul, what one really experiences in one's soul.

Take everything that a preacher of any recognized religious community tells you about the divine today, everything he talks about the divine. What does it refer to if you do not go by his words, but by reality? It refers to two things. Either what he talks about refers not to a higher being than to his angel, who stands as a guiding entity over each and every one of us. He worships this angel; he calls him the highest God. He who knows what words can really mean, he knows that everything that is said about God in modern sermons never refers to any higher God than an angel, or if not to an angel, then to something else. If one investigates the question of where such people get what they feel when they speak of their God, when they preach of their God in their churches, when they often even claim to have an experience of God in their souls, as some people of the present time do – they then call themselves with a certain pride “evangelized people” and the like – where one comes from, one arrives at the following: In their souls, such people feel the impulse of their own being, how this being has developed in a purely spiritual environment between the last death and birth. This spiritual being that has developed in us between the last death and our birth is now in our body, has taken up residence in our body. Much of what we now experience in life comes only from this being, from this prenatal being. Man feels this prenatal being as a spiritual one; it is this prenatal being with which he feels united. Yes, even so-called theosophists of the most varied schools of thought have repeatedly told people, in order to make something spiritually honeyed sound, that it is a matter of man uniting with his God within himself. But what man feels when he supposedly unites with his God is he himself, it is only his spiritual-soul being in the time between the last death and the last birth. And what numerous pastors and priests speak of when they speak of the God they feel in their soul is nothing more than that they sense their own ego, not as it develops here in the physical body, in the physical environment, but as it developed in the spiritual world between death and birth. They sense this, and then they begin to pray. And what do they pray to? To themselves.

This is the one that comes from many spiritual currents of the present so heartbreakingly. If you look at these things in reality, so you have to confess that people have gradually come to worship themselves unconsciously, without them knowing it. And once someone finds out, he expresses it in strange forms, as Friedrich Nietzsche has done. This must be made perfectly clear: either the person who does not want to recognize the hierarchies, the wonderful breadth and greatness of the spiritual world, merely worships his angel - which is also a form of selfish worship - or he worships himself. This is the spiritual form of egoism to which humanity has gradually come under the influence of the materialistic development of modern times. Now you will say: What is he telling us? That is not true! People do not say that they worship themselves, that they only worship their angel! - Of course they do not say it, but they do it; and what they say only happens in order to numb themselves to the fact that it is no less real. What is spoken today is often an anesthetic for humanity, because, of course, people do not want to admit to themselves what it is actually about. Today, people often find it too inconvenient to rise to the spiritual worlds through inner work. They do not want that. They want to penetrate to the spiritual worlds in a much easier way, as simply as one can. Therefore they deceive themselves, therefore they anesthetize themselves. But one cannot deaden one's senses with impunity. The world goes its course. The Divine-Spiritual is at work in the world, even if one does not want to acknowledge it. It is at work and weaving therein. And that is the most profound task of our time: to rediscover the connection with the real spiritual, to bring out of ourselves the spiritualized egoism that we have just described, to overcome it. That is what speaks so powerfully to the heart when one has grasped the actual deeper impulse of spiritual science for the present time. The world – as I pointed out earlier – will, through its mighty signs, force people to seek the spirit again. But there must be a certain core of striving humanity that can find its way into this spiritual striving, which alone can be the right and true and real thing for the present.

You see, the earth has gone through various tasks. It is not only the individual human being who has a task; the whole earth is constantly having its various tasks. In the period immediately following the great Atlantic catastrophe, the people of Indian culture had a different task; a little later, the people of Persian culture had a different task; the people had a different task when the Egyptians and Chaldeans were in charge, and a different task when the Greco-Roman peoples set the tone. This continued until the 15th century. Another task has been assigned to us from the 15th century until today. And this task, which is now assigned to us, is quite different from any other task on Earth. One can characterize this task, which is presently allotted to mankind, which began with the 15th century and which will last into the 4th millennium, by pointing out the most essential thing that is happening on earth during this period.

If we look back to the time before the 15th century from a spiritual scientific point of view, we see that until the 15th century everything that people did was imbued with a certain spirituality. External history tells us nothing about this, because it is a fable convenue that we learn in schools and universities. But if you really study what people have created in their daily lives, you will see that it is imbued with a certain spirituality. The characteristic feature of our epoch is that this spirituality has declined and must gradually be lost altogether if man does not add a new spirituality to the purely external, material culture. Through purely external conditions, the development of the earth is doomed to become purely materialistic. The spirit, which more or less came of itself in earlier epochs of earth evolution, must be added by mankind of its own free inner deed to what presents itself.

If we disregard what people can bring to earthly culture out of their inner freedom, out of their consciousness, and only look at what has arisen by itself in our fifth period, which has lasted since the middle of the 15th century, then it turns out that this is the period in which the Earth is gradually beginning to die for the whole cosmos, for the whole universe. The fifth period is the beginning of the death of the Earth. While all the earlier periods could contribute to the spirit of the universe through what arose from the Earth itself, all the brilliant culture that developed in this fifth period - the telegraph, the telephone, the railroad - has its great significance for the Earth, but no significance outside the Earth. Nothing of what arose in Egyptian or Greek civilization perishes with the earth; but what arises in our time on the soil of purely materialistic culture perishes with the earth when the earth itself becomes a corpse of the cosmos. That which the present material culture creates perishes with the earth. This time had to come. For people must become free. They did not have to be forced to find the spirit; they had to find the spiritual through a free act of consciousness. That is why this present period came, in which everything that we can find externally, of which we can be so proud, is only there for the earth, but is not there for the spiritual world. But that is why it is also the time that leaves it up to man to rise to the spirit, that refers man to his inner being, to his soul, to his heart, to his mind, when they want to become more spiritual, that does not force man to be more spiritual, but that leaves it up to man whether they want to decline with the outer declining culture, or whether they do not want to decline with this culture.

We can either understand a truth such as the one that has just been expressed, that is, what is absolutely necessary for humanity, from spiritual science – and everything that you find in spiritual science literature gives you the building blocks for understanding what I have now summarized. But people are still not very inclined to read the signs of the time.

Consider the following. Anyone who has looked around a little in the fields of human development in recent decades has been able to make very strange observations. If he has asked himself: How are people striving for ideals for the future, for spiritual renewal? - and when he went to really get to know these things, he found active striving, he found spiritual striving, spiritual activity, a sense that things must change on earth in the area that used to be called socialism in the working-class world, in the labor movement. Purely material, but correct ideals for the future, always asking how the world must be transformed, how something new must come, that was one thing.

If you ask in other areas than the field of socialism, our intellectual movement is still a very small group of a few, as people say, quirky, half-crazy people – if you ask among the clever people, among those who have really understood the ideas of the time, you will find the most outrageous intellectual barrenness everywhere in recent decades. Within church theology, the strangest discussions arose: Whether Jesus Christ ever lived at all or not, but in any case that he could not have been some extraterrestrial being; after all, the “simple man from Nazareth” was the only thing that people cared about. And otherwise? Yes, what did they find? In this time, when people have “gotten rid of all belief in authority,” when people only follow the principle: test everything and keep the best, they found the most blind belief in authority in what, as they say, science demands. Blind belief in authority in all fields! Blind faith in authority from the historical branch right into the medical branch. Nobody found it very convenient to somehow know a lot about what health depends on; you let the one who is an authority in this field take care of that. Simply the most terrible belief in authority! Clinging to the remnants and scraps of what had been saved from the past, what had been held on to out of convenience. No striving that would have emerged from the awareness that a renewal of humanity in spiritual terms is necessary!

At the same time, it became apparent to those who were able to observe spiritually that in the east of Europe, I would say under the sign of fire, something of a new spirit was announced through pure natural processes, so that under the most disgraceful external yoke in the east of Europe, a future time developed in the minds of even the dull inhabitants of this part of Europe. It is remarkable how, since the 9th century, the rest of Europe has been pushed back to the east by that which was to remain, which was not to be eaten away by the west, as it then appeared in the outer form of the so-called Russian Empire in the various centuries, inwardly preserving the old and, in the shell of the old, as in a chrysalis, preparing a new one for a later culture! One is tempted to say that mystery cults have been preserved within this Russian people, that this Russian people, which has little understanding of the abstract religious concepts of the West, but which has a deep, profound inner feeling for cultic forms, lives with these, and that these cultic forms bring the human soul to the Divine in a pictorial form. In the East, people feel in their own souls that which the Western religious leader bears the name of: “pontiff”, that is, bridge-maker, bridge-maker to the spiritual. But in the East, as much of the old as was necessary to keep the bridge to the spiritual at least open, untouched by the new, the new materialistic.

And now take today's signs of the times together with this! One would like to say: the most bitter irony of human evolution has been poured out precisely over Eastern Europe, the bitterest irony! The caricature of every higher human aspiration, which has asserted itself in Leninism, in Trotskyism, as the final caricature consequence of purely materialistic socialist ideas, is like a dress that does not fit the body, put on the people of the East. Never before have greater contradictions collided than the soul of the European East and the inhuman Trotskyism or Leninism. This is not said out of any sympathy or antipathy, it is said out of the realization that the greatest contradictions that have ever come together are brewing in the European East through the combination of the greatest contradictions that have ever come together. This should also remind us that the signs of the times speak meaningfully. This should show us that, above all, we must begin to take spiritual science so seriously that we want to enter into reality through it; because with it we can penetrate into the reality of the present.

Rabindranath Tagore gave a remarkable lecture to the Japanese on the spirit of Japan. He speaks as an Oriental, Tagore; but the Oriental is already speaking today in such a way that the European, if he wants to, can understand him a little. But just when one delves into what Tagore said about the spirit of Japan, what he wanted to say to the whole world, then one finds that this Tagore knows with all insightful people of the East: The East preserves an ancient spiritual culture, a spiritual culture that the sages of the East have carefully kept secret, which they have not allowed to come out among ordinary people. But it is a spiritual culture that they have incorporated into the social institutions until very recently. A culture that is spiritual through and through, but whose time is up. Hence the peculiar unnaturalness that confronts us, I might say, throughout the Asian Orient. People are adapting the Western forms of thought and culture to their old spiritual way of feeling. This is basically a terrible thing, because spiritual thinking, especially as developed by the Japanese, is flexible and penetrates reality. If it fraternizes with European-American materialism, then, if European materialism does not want to spiritualize, it will certainly outstrip it. For the European does not have the flexibility of mind that the Japanese have. They have this as a legacy of their ancient spirituality.

Now, as if by some wonderful wisdom, I would like to say, the Russian folk soul had been preserved from everything that leads to abysmal development, to decadence. But now it is to be poisoned by Leninism and Trotskyism. It is to be infected by that which would extinguish the spirit from all earthly culture if it came to power. Of course, that must not be allowed to happen. But if it is not to be allowed to happen, then success, spiritual success, depends on our deciding to regard spiritual science not merely as an abstract theory, not merely as a convenient means of developing a certain inner voluptuousness, a certain mystical ic dreaming in the soul, in which one feels comfortable, through which one pretends that one has nothing to do with the world - one despises this vile world, one feels one is in a spiritual beyond. But this is only selfishness, a higher selfishness, but still only selfishness. One should want nothing to do with such mysticism, such theosophy, but only with that spiritual comprehension of existence that really grasps the spirit, experiences the spirit, but wants to comprehend reality through the spirit.

Now we must recognize the subject as a task, as a serious task for the present time. But these things are sometimes inconvenient. And precisely because they are inconvenient, certain brotherhoods have kept them secret from the masses and guarded them. That time is past. It is time that people strive out of their conscious inner being in free spirituality. The things that have been kept secret for thousands of years must now be communicated to people. One must realize that in the East in old, bygone epochs, a spiritual wisdom already existed, but the time for this spiritual wisdom is past. Another spiritual wisdom must come. In this, people often want to be mistaken. How many people have appeared in our present time of searching and wanted to make things comfortable for the Europeans, because something like our spiritual science is much too difficult for them, because there you have to think; thinking is something so uncomfortable! You have to be spiritually awake; being spiritually awake is something so uncomfortable! So many people were found who wanted to spare the Europeans the trouble of seeking their own path to the spirit and taught them all kinds of oriental wisdom, Zarathustrian wisdom and all sorts of other things. The Europeans felt so comfortable when they did not have to seek the spirit themselves, but when the spirit was brought to them ready-made from ancient India. This was a narcotic, for they did not want to search the universe through the spirit. They wanted to anesthetize themselves by taking hold of an old means of knowledge. That was the mistake made in many fields after the East.

And another mistake has been made. This other mistake is connected with the fact that this more recent time, which is leading the earth to die off in its culture, so to speak, brings with it the unconscious necessity in people to seek their own inner being. The urge to seek and find this inner being is already there. Oh, there are more and more people who are out to search for their own inner being! The search for the inner being even disguises itself, masks itself, in the worship of God, which is either a worship of the angel or of one's own self. The search for the inner being will become ever more lively and lively in modern humanity. The more science and technology people in modern times embrace, the more vividly the counter-thrust of the search for the inner self will come. Today, people often search in the wrong ways, but they search for it. Those who search the least are those who are employed as official organs to search for the spirit; they search for the “limits of knowledge”. They seek to determine what man cannot know of the spiritual world. And so today we have spiritual leaders who, above all, endeavor to tell people how not to penetrate into the spiritual world, and a humanity that seeks but has no real awareness of its seeking.

This is the most striking phenomenon. If you really want to unravel the souls on earth, you will find that people who are laymen, who are in the midst of the trials and struggles of life, are searching for the soul everywhere. Ask about the leaders who should speak down to the people from the pulpits and lecterns in such a way that the search is satisfied. They will tell you that science does not allow you to cross the boundaries of knowledge, that man cannot penetrate into the spiritual world. Kant established the limits of human knowledge for all time, and anyone who does not accept this is a fool. This is the most striking phenomenon of the present time. But the urge is there in the widest circles, even if they are not aware of this urge to search within. Where such an urge exists, in the long run one will not be satisfied with mere limitations, but one will seek for something else.

Just as the East has sent the narcotic of an old culture, a culture that has passed away, the Far West is sending people another narcotic. This is what people will gradually come to realize: Anglo-Americanism is culturally the narcotic of modern times for the spiritual search within the human heart. On the one hand, Anglo-American culture has the task of organizing and spreading material things across the earth, but it combines this task, by virtue of an inner characteristic of the Anglo-American nature, with the task of numbing people through Americanisms in their search for the spiritual in the soul. The more Europe becomes orientalized, the more it will become numbed to spiritual knowledge of the world; the more Europe becomes Anglo-Americanized, the more it will become numbed to the search for the true spirit, the true self within the human soul.

These things are not said here to develop chauvinism, not to talk all sorts of tirades about this or that world mission, but because - in the most modest way - this must be seen through in order to understand the responsible situation of the Central European human being. For since the times of the spiritual deepening through Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, through everything that I have tried to describe in the book “Vom Menschenrätseb as the forgotten sound of German intellectual life, the Central European spirit has been called upon to lead humanity away from these two narcotics: from the narcotic of Orientalism, from the narcotic of Americanism.

To understand how the spiritual tableau is spread across the earth, to understand what is placed on our souls, for this spiritual science is intended to be a guide. Can people out there in the world know today what spiritual impulses can come from Central Europe into the world? Can they know that? Let us ask the question in a different way: Have we proved ourselves worthy of such spiritual seeking as was inspired by Herder and Goethe? My dear friends, meditation is rightly recommended to us in spiritual science. Do you know what a wonderful meditation would be that you could start with even the youngest children? Read Herder and see how he presents every sunrise in the morning as a new creation in a grandiose world picture. And read the countless images that Herder presents in his “Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind”. Forgotten, faded away! Just recently, a gentleman who is serious about Central European intellectual life said to me: I have never heard of any of this at Herder's!

Yes, we have a task; we must recognize this task. Listen today to a Chinese like Ku Hung-Ming. Listen to an Indian like Tagore. Do you think that these people have the opportunity to really understand what is going on in Central European intellectual life and what intellectual impulses are at work there? They look and say to themselves: Well, Goethe lived; even a Goethe Society has been founded to cultivate Goetheanism. But what has happened? In recent years, they have been looking for someone to lead this Goethe Society, to stand at the helm of this Goethe Society; the question has not even been raised: should it be a man who works in the spirit of Goetheanism, who could work for spirituality in the sense in which it is to be thought now, a hundred years after Goethe? No, a man who was a former finance minister has been placed at the head of the Goethe Society. The world sees him as the administrator of Goethe's spirituality. No one other than a former finance minister is seen as the administrator of Goethe's spirituality!

It is not enough to call out: Spirit, Spirit, Spirit! We must permeate reality with what we have gained from spiritual insight, but we must also lead this spiritual insight into reality. A task has been assigned to the Central European, and this task has begun. For spiritual science, as it is conceived here, is nothing other than the continuation of that which has emerged around the great turning point of the newer spiritual life, to which I have just pointed. It should have found a counterpart, the purely material socialist striving, which for decades was the only impulsive movement in a spiritual movement! It is never too late, but it must be understood at last, so that it does not decay, that which is precisely our task. It must finally be understood that one cannot get ahead with all the buzzwords, that a new spirit must take hold of humanity. But people today walk past the spirit. Life gives us countless examples of this.

One example among thousands upon thousands could be cited. Recently a remarkable essay by a very clever man appeared in a widely read German newspaper. This witty man gave a book a roasting in the collection “From Nature and the Spiritual World” that had unfortunately been published; he was horribly scathing about this little volume. And when one read this essay, one could not understand why the man was actually scolding. Because in this book, the development of astrology and the horoscope is discussed as a normal, well-behaved, upstanding university professor today, who does not participate in the “superstition” of astrology, would discuss it. And at the end he develops his view by describing Goethe's horoscope, and he actually makes fun of the fact that you can find all sorts of things in this horoscope. So a very good university professor wrote from today's point of view. You couldn't be a more decent university professor than the one who wrote the little book. But Fritz Mauthner rants like a pipe about this book, that someone is spreading superstition. He rants and rants and doesn't know why! A few days later, the author published a correction in which he pointed out: “I am quite in agreement with Fritz Mauthner, he makes fun of astrology and horoscopes, so do I! I only quoted the horoscope to show that you can read anything you want into it. So we are in complete agreement. The “Berliner Tageblatt”, of which Fritz Mauthner was once the theater critic, had nothing to add, because it did not think that Mauthner had misunderstood. Mauthner does not offer a word of clarification either. In short, two people who were absolutely in agreement came into the most furious conflict, and no one knew why. There was not the slightest reason for it.

That is the way it is in general in the present time, that is the characteristic of the present time! People no longer listen to what they have to say to each other; they also usually have very little to say to each other. But what they develop, what they have against each other, arises from something quite different from what they confess. One lives in a completely inexplicable way, in a completely irrational way, because one has become estranged from what reality is and can no longer enter into it.

If you think and feel your way through such things, you will feel the importance, the significance of what spiritual science is, in your soul. Anyone who believes today that spiritual science is something impractical is on the wrong track. In fifty years' time it will no longer be possible to found factories or establish any kind of working community without permeating things with spiritual science, because it alone will find the way to reality. When people understand, really understand, that all the old catchwords lead to dead ends, that we need insight into the spirit that rules the world for the very most material life, then one will understand spiritual science, then one will not want to get into the spiritual world in an egoistic way through the “only bridge of death”, but then one will also draw life from death.

Perhaps someone who has seriously studied spiritual research is allowed to speak of such things in such an intimate circle. I, who have been writing about Goethe for more than thirty years now, have not wanted to write about Goethe in an outwardly philological or philosophical or other scholarly way, but rather, my aim has always been to offer, through my relationship with Goethe, a possibility to express in my books what Goethe now wants to say to humanity in a particular field that is close to me. I did not want to go to the dead Goethe to study him, but through what Goethe left behind, I wanted to find the way to the living Goethe. To the Goethe who speaks to our souls when we know that the dead are alive like us, that they live in the world in which we ourselves live, only that we walk around in the body, but the dead are among us in the spirit.

Do religious communities really believe that they live together with the dead? There is, admittedly, a selfish belief in immortality, and this should not be criticized. But only spiritual science can make fruitful the life of the dead. For it is through spiritual science that men will find the way to those with whom they were karmically connected and who have passed over into the other world and still cling to the world with a thousand and one threads. For in what happens here on earth, not only the impulses of the living work. Man does not cease to work for the world when he has passed through the gate of death.

We are only partially awake. When we perceive and form ideas, we are awake. When we feel, we are dreaming. Our feelings do not live more strongly in our consciousness than our dreams. And our will impulses, we oversleep them. We know how to remember dreams in our imagination, but in our ordinary consciousness we do not even know how our will works when we move our arm. We dream in feeling, we sleep in willing. Because we are sentient beings who feel and will, there is a world of spirit around us that we cannot see into in our ordinary consciousness. We are torn out of this world by perception and thinking. Because we are perceivers and thinkers and enjoy the physical world, we do not know that the dead walk among us. The dead walk among us. Man, when he has developed throughout his life, goes through the gate of death. He remains connected with earthly existence, the threads go down from him into earthly existence. We cannot feel and will without the dead who were karmically connected with us working in our feelings and wills. Spiritual science gives recognition of what looks in as a life not lost to the earth, which one otherwise believes in nothing, in a living way. The spiritual inclinations of the people of the East are also based on this. The peoples of the European center have the task, out of the freedom of the soul, to draw everything that the human being can consciously create out of the freedom of his soul into the fourth millennium. To do this, however, the outer material reality must be spiritually permeated. But it must not be immersed in Wilsonism, which is the opposite of all spirituality. In the East, what is preparing itself as the next culture must be released from those terrible contradictions, from that which does not belong together, which has developed from the grafting of Trotskyism and Leninism onto burgeoning spirituality. This next culture will be called upon each time something happens on earth to ask: What do the dead say about this?

Yes, it is a much more important thing today to know that this is something we are approaching in our development on earth. Today people are clever, they are so clever at twenty! They let themselves be elected to parliament at twenty because today everyone has their own point of view by the time they are twenty, they are fully formed human beings. That life from the age of twenty until we die is not given to us in vain, but that we are constantly growing, that new things are revealed to us, that when we have passed through the gate of death, wisdom continues, life continues, we become wiser, that is something that people must imbibe. And in the future, people will realize that the wisest people to ask about what is happening on earth are the dead.

The consciousness soul - if you read about what that is in my book 'Theosophy' - develops the present, the spirit self develops the nearest culture. The spirit self develops in that the dead will be the advisers of the living on earth. Today this is still considered a fantastic reverie, half madness. It will become a reality. There will come a time when people united on earth to do something worthwhile and meaningful for the evolution of the earth will not only consult the living but also the dead. It is not possible at present to go into detail about how this will take shape politically in the future and how it must be prepared. This can only remain a mystery. But one can already penetrate with the fact that this living consciousness must arise in humanity, that we are with the dead; that man should not only develop egoistic striving for immortality, but that living striving that lives in work, in action.

To become aware that spiritual knowledge would like to place the individual human striving into the all-embracing striving of the earth, I thought was particularly suitable to be considered on this occasion, when our friends have come together here to find the spiritual-scientific answers to certain questions of life. That it is not just about narrow-minded human soul needs, but that today, if we are serious about what spiritual science is, it is about the fate of earthly culture, to This realization is not arrogance, not megalomania; it can be done in all humility, but it must be done because there must be people today who truly understand the seriousness of human endeavor on earth. Immerse yourself in spiritual science, and you will find that however small a branch it may still be, it can make its contribution to what should come about in the development of humanity, what must come about if the earth is to reach its goal!

Two years ago, as the catastrophic events of recent times were approaching their decision, the circumstances revealed that the friends of our School of Spiritual Science in Dornach wanted to change the name of this School of Spiritual Science. The intention was to express how, out of an awareness of German intellectual life, they wanted to courageously oppose everything that might arise against this intellectual life in the present or in the future. In those days — and you will feel the significance of this naming — that building, which is also intended to reflect in its artistic design what lives in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, was called the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum. And so this Goetheanum stands on one of the most north-westerly hills in Switzerland as a symbol of a truly international spirit, but of a spirit that wants to have that significant element in itself that can be linked to the name Goethe. And so it will be allowed, in spiritual scientific considerations, as they are practiced here, to occasionally recall Goethe's.

Today I will apparently take something far-fetched as a starting point, but this apparent far-fetchedness may be suitable to point out a characteristic of the spiritual science meant here.

It may be known how Goethe, after taking up his duties in Weimar, devoted himself intensively to scientific observations out of certain contexts of his life there. And when, after having conducted the most diverse experiments and studies on plants and animals in Weimar and in the neighboring town of Jena, he had traveled to Italy in the mid-1880s and had occupied himself with all the natural sciences as he wandered from region to region, he once wrote about the ideas that he now had to form about the connection between plants and the earth. He wrote to his friends in Weimar that he had now fully grasped the idea of the primal plant, the plant that he was convinced was a concept that could only be grasped in the mind, that was something that all individual plant forms were based on, but that was only a spiritually grasped unified form. And he wrote a remarkable sentence to his friends in Weimar at the time: With this image in the soul, one must be able to recognize the plant world in such a way that, if one modifies this image - Goethe called it a sensual-supersensory image - in the appropriate way, by giving it a concrete form, one must inwardly create something in the spirit that has the possibility of becoming external reality. With this primal plant in one's soul, one must have grasped plant life so deeply that one could invent a fantasy plant that would have just as much justification for being an external reality as the plants that grow outside in the meadows and in the forests and on the mountains.

What did Goethe mean and how did he feel when he uttered such a thing at the moment when he believed himself to be at the pinnacle of his insight in a certain field of knowledge? Do we not see from this saying, especially when we consider everything that lived in Goethe's nature, that Goethe strove for a knowledge of nature that, as he puts it, is spiritual, that is, a knowledge in which not only the senses, not only the intelligence, are involved, but a knowledge in which the whole of the human being's spiritual nature is involved? But don't we also see how Goethe strives for such knowledge, which can delve into the essence of things, which knows itself so intimately with things that, by creating the idea of things within itself, it can be clear to itself that in this creative power, which lives and is productive in the soul, the same lives and moves as in the growth force of the plant outside? Goethe was clear about this: when the plant grows out there, when it develops leaf by leaf, node by node, blossom by blossom, growth force lives in it. But Goethe wanted to connect with this growth force that lives out there; he wanted to let it live in his own soul. Something should live in what he created as cognitive ideas about things, something that is the same as what lies out there in the things.

Such knowledge strives for an incredible intimacy of shared experience with external things. Today, we still underestimate the impact that Goethe's ascent to such ideas had on the quest for knowledge in humanity; for, basically, we live in a completely different era of knowledge. However, the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science referred to here wants to be Goetheanism, that is, not Goethe science in the way that this or that Goethe collection does with what Goethe said or wrote, but in the sense that that it seizes what lived in Goethe in an initial, elementary way, but which has an inner vitality to bear fruit again and again, which today is something quite different than it could be in 1832, when Goethe died. A spirit lived in Goethe that continued to develop, even after Goethe was dead to this earth. Today we can speak of a Goetheanism of 1919. It does not need to reheat what Goethe himself said word for word, but it must work in his spirit. And one can best work in his spirit if one takes what he tried to do for his time almost a century and a half ago in a small area, that of plants and a little of animals, and only in terms of outer forms, and makes it the impulse for a comprehensive world view, and above all, includes the human being in this comprehensive world view. But in doing so, one professes a Goetheanism that must have a transforming effect on everything that today wants to grow from the most respected parts of our quest for knowledge, from the natural sciences, into a world view.

Perhaps I may, with some reference to what I have already said in previous lectures, once more characterize the spiritual development of civilized humanity over the last four centuries. What have we seen as the main force in human development and in the quest for knowledge? We have seen the rise of intellectual and rational life, and even if we have experienced great triumphs in the field of natural science, we must still say: Although natural science describes external facts to us in abundance , the way in which we, as human beings, approach the external world, namely how we form ideas in our souls about external nature and about life, is steeped in intellectualism through and through.

If one takes the intellectualistic moment in human nature as one's guiding principle, one arrives at something very spiritual. Our abstract ideas and concepts are, of course, very spiritual within. As they have asserted themselves over the last four centuries, they are spiritual in themselves, but they are not capable of becoming anything other than mirror images of external sensual facts. That is the characteristic feature of our intellectual and spiritual life: we have gradually developed abstract, very fine ideas and concepts that have filtered into the spiritual, but they are ideas and concepts that only dare to approach the external sensual reality, that do not have the strength within themselves to grasp anything in life other than the external sensual reality. Those who today strain their soul in this intellectualistic direction often believe that they are pursuing the paths of their research and thinking quite unconditionally and impartially. But this thinking and research, which moves along such intellectualistic paths, is by no means independent of historical development. And it is interesting to see how many people who call themselves philosophers or scientists today believe that they can somehow justify their research in this or that way on the basis of human nature or the essence of the world, whereas the way they research is only the result of thousands of years of human education.

If we go back first – and today I can only give a general characterization – through the centuries after Christ to ancient Greece, we find in the last centuries of pre-Christian Greece the first echoes of that intellectualistic thinking to which we have completely surrendered in the Western civilized world since the 15th century. In ancient Greece, we find the emergence of what was long called dialectics. This dialectics is the inner mobilization of a thought element that increasingly tends towards abstraction. But anyone who looks at Greek life impartially will see that this life of the intellect, which in Plato is still very spiritualized and in Aristotle is already purely logical, goes back to a fully substantial soul-filled life. And if one goes back to the earliest times of Greek thought and cultural development, as Nietzsche did – grandiosely, even if somewhat pathologically – then one finds that in what Nietzsche called the tragic age of the Greeks, the intellectual life does not yet include the abstract dialectical, logical element, nor is there a turning to the merely external world. Instead, this spiritual life still contains something that can only arise from the innermost nature of man itself, which, as if from within itself, bears the essence of the world in the most diverse forms. And if we trace the origin of what arose in Greece further back, what was later filtered down to mere logic, then in the Orient we find what I recently pointed out, what could be called a mysterious knowledge of the mysteries that is accessible to today's humanity — but only to today's humanity. It is a kind of knowledge that is gained in a way that modern humanity can no longer even imagine in its normal life. In those schools of the ancient Orient, which were simultaneously schools and art institutions and religious sites, the individual did not merely have something to learn or to explore intellectually. Rather, before he was even introduced to the secrets of existence, he had to undergo a transformation of his entire being. In these mysteries of the Orient, it was taken for granted that man, in the way he lives his outer life, could not penetrate to the secrets of existence. Therefore, one had to lead man, through strict discipline of his entire being, to that state in which he became a different being, and to this other being one then imparted what was called the content of knowledge. Once upon a time, in the East, knowledge was built up out of a rich, historically no longer existing, but intellectually verifiable, soul-spiritually concretely shaped life. This knowledge then spread to Greece, where it was filtered into dialectics , to logic, to mere intelligence, and which then was filtered further and further until it became the mere intellectualism in which we have been immersed in modern civilization since the middle of the 15th century.

Without directing the eye of the soul unreservedly to such things as I have characterized them, one cannot look into the various cultural currents and balances of culture in today's existence, one cannot come to fruitful views on what is necessary for humanity today. Today it is a matter of looking unreservedly at what has become, and from that recognizing in which spiritual worlds we actually stand in it. If we follow the way in which a spiritual life from the Orient that was more or less foreign to us was transplanted to Greece and filtered into our intellectualism, then we come to the question: How did this spiritual life actually develop?

This spiritual life could not have developed in any other way than by being bound in a certain way to something natural in the human being. If we examine what has actually been working and weaving in human nature so that this spiritual life could develop through the transformation of the human being described, we must say that the fact of heredity, the fact of blood inheritance, plays a major role in this. And we can only study how the development of knowledge has taken place in humanity if we extract it from the knowledge of the fact of blood development. Therefore, the knowledge in the times to which I have referred, in order to explain the origin of our present knowledge, is bound to individual peoples, to individual races, to blood connections, to hereditary conditions. Knowledge arises differentiated according to the individual peoples. What had to be taken into account when the pupil was brought in from the outer life into the mystery school of which I have spoken, and what had to be taken into account in his education, was: What blood, what temperament in the blood, what gift based on the blood lived in him? And this natural element was developed until everything that could arise from it emerged in the knowledge of the person concerned.

Anyone who really knows the developmental history of humanity, who does not cling to — I may use this word again — the fable conveniale-like, what is called history today, but to the real developmental history of humanity, will find that this bondage of the human soul and spiritual life to blood ties and blood facts radically ceases around the middle of the 15th century for the Western civilized world. Something begins to set the tone that can never be bound to blood in the development of man. It is very interesting to see how everything that has been artistically developed since the 15th century in modern humanity emerges from the sources of the human soul, which have nothing to do with the natural and elemental aspects of even the greatest intellectual achievements of earlier times. This may be misunderstood in many circles. But anyone who really wants to understand what lives in Aeschylus, what lives in an ancient Greek philosopher like Heraclitus or Anaxagoras, anyone who wants to comprehend what lived in those ancient civilizations must realize that something lives in them that is bound to the blood of certain races. The Greeks were still aware that all their spiritual being was bound to what their blood produced as a spiritual blossom. This can be seen by studying Greek works of art with any sense, for example, the typical sculpted figures. If you try to understand the nature of these figures, you will find that three types live in the realm of Greek sculpture: first the satyr type, then the Mercury type, which appears particularly in all Mercury heads, but then the type that we find in Zeus, in Hera, in Athena, in Apollo. If we carefully compare the shape of the nose, the shape of the ears, everything about these three types, it will be obvious how the Greeks wanted to represent in the satyr type and in the Mercury type the subordinate humanity within which, as the blood-related superior humanity, that Aryanism had spread, which the Greeks gave their image to in the head of Zeus. One would like to say: It expresses the consciousness of how the Greek felt his spirituality bound to the blood-related, elementary in the development of mankind. This gradually petered out and ceased to have any significance for humanity by the middle of the 15th century. Since that time, the intellectual element, the element of imagination, has been alive in what is produced in the normal life of the spirit, so that everything that arises in the soul, the artist of the soul, has nothing more to do with what surges in the blood, what the blood produces. Today even trivial philosophers have to admit that what lives in intellectualized ideas is not bound to the body, least of all to the blood, and in any case has nothing to do with what played such a great role in the old spirituality: with heredity, with the fact of blood relationship within heredity.

Since the middle of the 15th century, something has emerged in human development that is, so to speak, a very thin spiritual, just merely intellectual, but it educates this modern humanity to independence from everything merely natural, which, however, also removes this humanity from everything that was previously felt to be human. And a strange, I might say tragic, thing occurred in this development of modern humanity. It had to rise to an experience that is independent of the natural, elemental, but it could no longer understand itself with what it received in the soul. In that ancient spirituality, in that spiritual knowledge which was still based on blood, one had, together with the inner knowledge, a knowledge of human nature and essence itself; now one had risen to an abstract spirituality, which can experience great triumphs in natural science, but which cannot possibly go into the essence of man himself, which remains far removed from the essence of man.

But that had another consequence. If we look back at this development, which I have characterized as being bound to the natural, elementary, and turn our gaze not to the nature of knowledge, but to what happens in history in terms of good or evil, sympathetic or antipathetic deeds, we find that these deeds are connected to natural cognition, to the natural experience of the spirit, and are the expression of the natural experience of the spirit: Man experiences himself through his blood, rises through his blood to spirituality, experiences what his blood gives him in powerful images, in imaginations that are representations of the spiritual experienced, and what he experiences in his soul passes over into his whole being. And the outflow of what pulses from his perceptions, from his sensed perceptions, sensed ideas, becomes his deeds.

And today? We have arrived at a point of culmination. We have three to four centuries of intellectual life behind us. We look around us in the modern civilized world and find everywhere an intensive development of intellectual research, the most diverse ideas, but all these ideas are so abstract and so far removed from life that they cannot be transformed into impulses for action. When we see the general spiritual slumber in which people find themselves today, from which they are always and forever unwilling to admit how much we are on a slippery slope and how much we need to draw to draw from our soul life the strength to find the impulses that can lead to action. This reminds one of a saying that was used in earlier centuries to call to the Germans, who were already found to be sleepy at the time: “Sleep, Michel, sleep, in the garden a sheep is walking, in the garden a little Pfäflelin is walking, it will take you to heaven. Sleep, Michel, sleep!” Yes, that is the attitude of many today: listening to some abstract religious teaching that has no connection with the immediate external reality and life in this reality. We have lost the connection between the external knowledge of nature, which we grasp only intellectually, and what lives in our soul and what was included in the old, blood-based knowledge of nature, the view of the essence of man.

I know how reluctant people are today to listen to such characterizations, which they regard as something outlandish, as fantasies that seek to exaggerate things. Nevertheless, it must be said: unless we listen to what comes from this quarter, we will not arrive at fruitful ideas about a reorganization or a new structure, which seems so necessary today if we observe things impartially. The spiritual and the soul — well, our school philosophers still talk about something soul-like in relation to the external world; but that clear grasp of the human being as body, soul and spirit is no longer part of our Western way of looking at things. There we can perceive a very remarkable fact. As I have already explained in other lectures, we can only come to terms with the essence of the human being if we are able to divide the human being into body, soul and spirit. For the body is what provides the tool for the spiritual powers between birth and death, the spirit is what makes use of this tool, and the soul is what is neither body nor spirit, but what connects the two. Without understanding this trinity, one cannot penetrate the essence of man. But even outstanding philosophers speak of it: man consists of body and soul. They believe they are pursuing unprejudiced science. Yes, unprejudiced science! They only do not know: In intellectual life we are dependent on the entire oriental development. Thus, in our looking at body and soul, we are dependent on the 8th General Council of Constantinople in 869, where the dogma was established that as a Christian one should not believe in body, soul and spirit, but only in body and soul, and one should believe that the soul has some spiritual properties. This has since become a dogma of the Catholic Church, it has become a commandment for those who have searched externally. And today people believe that they are pursuing an unbiased search that they are spinning out of themselves, while they are only following the old education that was inaugurated by the general council at Constantinople in 869, where the spirit was abolished.

All this has contributed to our spiritual life becoming so abstract, so intellectualistic, that there is no longer anything in it - but humanity is subject to a development, and there can no longer be anything in it - that lived in the old spiritual life and gave impulses to the will. And a time would have to come in which man would appear completely paralyzed in relation to his deeds if we retained only materialism within our Western intellectual life. From the course of Western intellectual development, it must be felt that a new fertilization of this intellectual development is necessary; that we must regain what we have lost as old blood from another side. It was right for humanity to undergo an intellectual development independent of blood for three to four centuries. In this way it educated itself to freedom, to a certain emancipation from the merely natural. But what we have developed in terms of intellectualism must in turn be impregnated, it must in turn be filled in our being with a kind of knowledge that can flow into human action, that can soul and spiritualize the human being at will. Such spiritual knowledge, a modern spiritual knowledge that wants nothing to do with a revival of the old oriental spiritual knowledge, is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science strives for. And in this sense, it now seeks to achieve that intimacy with everything that lives in the universe, not only for plant and animal forms, but especially for humans, whereby one can say: the forces that live outside enter into our being, they awaken in our being itself, and by recognizing them, the growth forces of nature and the spiritual world live in us, above all our own human growth forces. So when we impregnate our intellectual life with spiritual experiences, we stand in modern civilization in such a way that not only something blood-related, but also something seen in the free spiritual lives in us, which in turn can have an inspiring and invigorating effect on our life of action.

It is true that the human life of will and deed would have to weaken if it did not receive the impact of what can be seen in the spirit. It is fair to say today, for example: Yes, but the insights of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science are gained in the inner, contemplative life! Of course they are won in the inwardly contemplative life, just as, after all, chemical knowledge is also won, closed off from the application of chemical achievements in the practical world, in secluded laboratories and study rooms. What we need to do is to gain knowledge that can shed light on the human being, that can form the content of a true spiritual knowledge today, in which, again, but in a very different way than in the ancient mysteries, the human being transforms himself and comes to gain a spiritual view, as he has a sensory view here in the sensory world through his sensory organs and an intellectual view through his mind. This intellectual modesty, of which I spoke in the penultimate lecture here, must be developed so that one says to oneself: just as a five-year-old child must first be educated to learn to read, so too must a person who is involved in external life first transform himself in order to approach the real secrets of the natural and spiritual world. And it is only through renunciation, through voluntarily borne suffering, that real knowledge of the human being can be gained. You can see this from the fact that it is necessary for the truly cognizant person, the person penetrating into the spiritual world, no longer to look at the world as if with different eyes, to hear as if with different ears, to think as if with different thoughts, but to look at the world in an independent spiritual organism. But between birth and death one is not adapted to this world, into which one enters; one enters into a world, to which one stands as a stranger. This non-adaptation, this being placed into a world, to which one, insofar as one makes use of one's body, does not belong, is something that must be characterized by a spiritual-soul pain, which of course can only be recognized through experience. Through such and similar things, which certainly lie far removed from the outer storms and floods of life, one must penetrate into the spiritual world. But what is gained through the spiritual science meant here is slandered when one says: This is a mysticism that is unworldly; when one says: This is something that is alien to life or hostile to life. No, what is gained in spiritual research, albeit apart from life, is something that, when presented to humanity, is knowledge, a realization that can be grasped by common sense, but then impels the human being in such a way that it can become the bearer of his life of will and action.

What knowledge does spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy strive for in its desire to develop a comprehensive Goetheanism? It strives for a knowledge of the spirit that can be the foundation for a strong life of will and deed. Our world can only be helped if that which can be seen out of the spirit enters into our life of will and deed. Intellectual knowledge and its application, knowledge of nature, is something contemplative, it is something that can at most be transferred into technology, into the extra-human. But what is seen out of the spirit will become an impulse to steer social life, this social life that is becoming so difficult, in truly salutary ways.

One could reflect a little and consider whether such characteristically spiritual scientific demands should not be taken into account after all, when one sees the immense suffering caused to humanity by the fact that so much is going wrong in social life today, that Leninism and Trotskyism and the like are introduced into social life. These are nothing but the intellectual poison which, during the four centuries, was admittedly needed for the liberation of humanity, but could only be used as long as the old social form was not yet affected by it. The moment it is affected, the poisonous effect of mere intellectualism in social life must show itself. It will begin to show itself in terrible manifestations, and it will show itself more and more. It is a terrible illusion when people believe that they are not just at the beginning in this area, but at a point where one can watch calmly. No, we are at the beginning, and healing can only come if it comes from the spirit. Spiritual knowledge must become the foundation. Instead of letting off all kinds of sometimes well-meant declamations, for example about the way in which this spiritual science has nothing to do with religion, it would be better to look the phenomena of life in the eye without bias.

So I was told that here in Stuttgart a lecture was given on anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in which it was said: All kinds of things may be brought to light by clairvoyant powers, of which spiritual science speaks; but this has nothing to do with the simple childlikeness that is said to be effective in religion, in the religious understanding of Christianity as well. This is how one can declaim, how one can believe one is allowed to speak when one is abandoned of all spirits of historical observation, of all spirits that explain the development of humanity. If one is not abandoned by them, then the spirit of human development proclaims loudly and clearly that this abstract talk of an abstract unifying of something in man, which one cannot define either, with an undefinable word, or Christ, that this enthusiasm for a childlike element has led us into the social misery in which we find ourselves. At first the spiritual and intellectual element was monopolized by the confessions. This gave rise to a natural science in which there is no spirit, which presents the image of nature in a spiritless way. And by admitting that all kinds of spiritual realities can be revealed to humanity through spiritual science, it is now demanded that it should be confessed that in this spiritual reality nothing is alive of what man should seek as his divine. Yes, the materialism of natural science has successfully managed to de-spiritualize nature. This religiosity will increasingly lead to the de-divinization of the spirit. And then we will have a de-spiritualized nature, a de-divinized spirit and a religion without content. This religion without content will not inspire any deeds. Spiritual knowledge must bring about deeds, otherwise our moral impulses for our Western intellectual life are in the air. Our moral impulses strive from within us in a completely different way than intellectual knowledge. Anyone who is able to look at themselves impartially knows that the intellectually conceived, for example, scientific knowledge in the life of the soul is something quite different from those impulses that arise within us as moral drives, as moral intuitions, and demand that we introduce them into life. But this modern intellectualism, through its intellectualism, has no bridge between its knowledge of nature and its moral life. What has become of the moral worldview? If we disregard a religious worldview that has now become more or less meaningless, if we look at those honest people who build a worldview out of science, which is certainly highly one-sided but still honest , we have to say: they imagine that some kind of connection between vortex phenomena arose from a Kant-Laplacean cosmic fog, and that little by little what we now call our world with natural beings and human beings arose from it. But moral ideals and moral intuitions arise in the human being. If we believe only in the natural context, then these moral ideals, these moral intuitions, are merely what emerges, what is valid only as long as people say so. Many old instincts from that human development are still alive, which actually came to an end in the 15th century. If these instincts were not to live on, if they were to be eradicated and nothing else were to enter into human spiritual life, then one would have to limit oneself to the external documentation of what we call moral ideals. And instead of feeling inwardly bound to our moral ideals, instead of feeling bound to the spiritual life that rises above all physical life, instead of this, at most, one might find it honorable to be thought a moral person by other people, one might find it opportune not to violate what is established by law in the state. In short, if our intellectuality remains, that glowing of a spiritualized soul should also disappear from the human moral life. For reality can only be given to our moral life when spirit-perception again impregnates and permeates all that we have acquired for ourselves through three to four centuries. By no means should this be criticized in a reactionary way, but only the necessities should be emphasized. But what does this spiritual insight show us, what is the moral of our spiritual insight? This spiritual insight recognizes external nature, it sees in it, in an initial sense, what reasonable geologists - I want to speak comparatively - assume for the geological formation of the earth. Such geologists say: a large part of our geological development is already in a state of decline. In many regions of the earth, we are walking over dead matter when we walk across the ground. But such dead matter is much more universally present than merely in the geological; it also permeates our cultural life, and in more recent times we have acquired a natural science that is directed only towards the dead, the inanimate, because we are gradually surrounded by the dying in our culture. We get to know what is dying out, what comes from ancient times of development and what is reaching its last phase in the development of the earth. But then we can compare what is reaching its last phase there with what blossoms in us as our moral ideals and intuitions. What are these moral ideals and intuitions? These moral ideals and intuitions, when they arise in us, reveal themselves to what is here called anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in such a way that one sees in them something that could be compared to the germ for the next plant contained in a plant blossom, while what dies off in the blossom is the inheritance from the previous plant. We see our moral life sprouting up within us. By experiencing the natural, we experience what has developed from ancient times to the earth; by feeling the moral ideals flourish, we experience what, when the earth is once thrown off like a slag corpse, will go out with the human souls into a cosmic, immortal life, just as the individual human being, when he discards his corpse, enters into spiritual-soul existence. Thus we see the germs of future earth metamorphoses sprouting within us as we unfold our moral life.

If you are able to take such an idea, which may certainly still seem fantastic to today's humanity, in its full seriousness and in its entire depth, then think what will become of a concept such as moral responsibility! You say to yourself: What are you, human? You are a result of the past and of the whole development of the earth. As such you are going downhill. Your moral sense is awakening within you; it is the germ of the future, which now seems unreal, so much so that we consider it to be merely abstract. But it is the first beginning of a future rich reality. And one should still say to oneself: If you do not practise this morality, if you do not connect with it, then you sin not only against your fellow man, but also against the spiritual worlds. For they have placed in you the seed through your morality to grow into the future of the world. If you are immoral, you exclude yourself from the future of humanity. In addition to the strength that comes from the knowledge of the spirit for the will and the life of deeds, such seriousness, I would even say cosmic, universally oriented human responsibility, can still be added to the life of morals. We can feel: In ancient Greece, the horizon of the educated was limited. One was a citizen of the country. Then came the newer times. America was discovered, and the globular shape of the earth was rediscovered through direct travel around the earth, through experience. Man became a citizen of the world. Once again, we have progressed. Mankind has passed through the stage of being a citizen of the country and of the earth. Today, it is called upon to become a citizen of the world in the truest sense of the word, that is, to feel itself as a citizen of those worlds that are outside our earth, but which belong to it as part of a whole, and to be a citizen of those future worlds to which I have alluded.

In this way, an ethical view can be rooted in spiritual knowledge in a new way. Only when such strength permeates our moral life will we be able to transform the moral doctrine into a socially effective view of life.

Approaches such as those outlined here have been attempted in something like the threefold social organism and in something like my book The Core Issues of the Social Question. Many people consider these to be abstractions, utopias, and yet they are the most real, because they are based on that new understanding of reality that cannot be achieved by any natural science, since it is too much affected by intellectualistic life. This intellectual life has gradually led man to turn in on himself. Today we can see remarkable examples of how man, no longer comprehending the human being from his external knowledge of nature, has become egotistical. At the same time as intellectualism has entered into all outer and inner human life during the last three or four centuries, this intellectualism, this egoism has also seized religious life. Today, unfortunately, human education over the centuries has prepared the way for speaking about the immortality of the human soul only from a certain egoistic point of view. People today recoil from the thought that — as it is not a matter of course, but as it would be possible — the cessation of their spiritual and soul-life could occur if the corpse were returned to the earth. This contradicts what is left of the natural as a clear last thing; it contradicts a clear egoistic urge. One indulges in this egoistic impulse when one speaks, as one does under the compulsion of dogmas, only of the continuation of the human soul-life after death, which, of course, is fully substantiated by spiritual science; but one does not speak of the fact that our spiritual soul was in a spiritual world before our birth or conception. Before we descend into physical corporeality and take on the covering given to us by the inheritance of father and mother, we undergo a development in a spiritual-soul world just as we do here on earth. And just as our life after death is a continuation of our life here on earth, a development of the experiences we have had here, so the life we undergo between birth and death is a continuation of the life we had before birth.

This, for example, imposes great duties on the educator when he is fully aware of the responsibility that weighs on his soul, in that he has to develop that which has descended from eternal spiritual heights into a human body and, through the outer form and shell, expresses itself more and more from year to year. This is the other thing that can be added to the knowledge that accommodates egoism, which only takes into account the fact of the immortality of the human soul in the face of death, which is of course an established fact. This is the other side that spiritual science in particular must emphasize for the modern human being: life before birth or before conception and the continuation of that same life here. It is easy to become world-weary when one speaks only of the afterlife. Anyone who seriously considers the prenatal period will feel obliged - since the order of the world is such that the human being has to descend into physical existence - to make this an active one. For only in this way can we shape what we are seeking to shape if we know that we descend into physical existence through birth. While the mere prospect of what comes after death leads to the deadening of the soul and spirit in physical existence, the consciousness that we have descended into this physical-sensual existence as spirits must lead to the strengthening of our will, to the working through of our whole life. Human hopes for the future can only arise with certainty from spiritual insight if we are rooted in spirit with our insight, if we permeate and impregnate our intellectual nature with what spiritual science gives us. Then, in turn, the impulse of deed and the impulse of will can enter into our lives. And our life will need these spiritual impulses, for this life is a descending one. Former generations could still rely on their instincts. We can see that in the ancient Greeks, those who matured for public life only needed to develop their blood instincts. This will no longer be possible; education would have to disappear if we were to rely only on what the earth could still bring us from human instincts. Present-day Eastern European socialism relies on these instincts; it relies on a zero. One reality will be relied upon if the hope is raised that socialism should be built on a spiritual-scientific basis. However, such views as have been put forward here are not yet taken seriously in their full import, at least not by a large number of people. Some people do take them seriously, but only from a very particular point of view. For example, in our journal 'Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus' (Threefolding of the Social Organism), when I was still working in Dornach, I read how something that comes from a certain quarter is taken very seriously; and I read that a remarkable lecture was given there, I believe even accompanied by music which was based on something that appears like a program from a certain quarter, for example, in the “Stimmen der Zeit” [Voices of the Times] by the Jesuit Father Zimmermann, in almost every issue, and which produces just such reactions as the one that is said to have occurred here. It was said, and by a member of the cathedral chapter at that, that one could indeed inform oneself about what Steiner says from the writings of his opponents, because the writings that he himself writes and those of his followers are not allowed to be read by Catholics because the Pope has forbidden them. In fact, the Sacred Congregation of the Roman Church of July 18, 1919, issued a general edict prohibiting the reading of theosophical and anthroposophical writings, at least according to the interpretation of this general edict by Father Zimmermann, a Jesuit priest. And yet one cannot believe that this Jesuit Father Zimmermann always lies. He lied: he claimed that I had been a former priest, that I had escaped from a monastery. I was never in a monastery. Then he said: 'The claim that Steiner was a runaway priest can no longer be maintained today'. A strange way to make up for telling a lie! Now I do not believe that what has found this strange expression is also a lie. It goes that one can educate oneself from the writings of my opponents because the anthroposophical writings were banned by the Holy Congregation of July 18, 1919. Yes, on this side one senses that something in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which has very real powers, wants to be placed in the present.

This anthroposophically oriented spiritual science – let me say this in conclusion, I would like to say, as an objective and at the same time personal comment – this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will continue to represent what it has to represent as the basis of knowledge for the life of action, as the basis of knowledge for the moral and social life, as the basis of knowledge for the most beautiful human hopes, against all resistance, as well as it can. As far as I am concerned, it can be gagged; but as soon as it can stir even a little, it will again assert what it believes it can recognize as the truth necessary for humanity. And just as, at the moment when the prospect of victory began to turn against us, a testimony to international spiritual life was created in the Goetheanum for the whole international world, without shying away from the fact that what is now developed Goetheanism comes from the roots of German spiritual life, then this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will also fight for the recognition that everything else that wants to stand in the way as an obstacle, for the knowledge that has become part of their conviction, as a world content.

Thirty-five years ago, in one of my first essays, I wrote the words as a call to arms to the German people, to characterize how the German essence must necessarily return to the best spiritual sources of its strength. an appeal to the German people: “Despite all the progress we have made in the most diverse fields of culture, we cannot escape the fact that the signature of our age leaves much, very much, to be desired. Most of our progress has been only in breadth and not in depth. But only progress in depth is decisive for the content of an age. It may be that the abundance of facts that have come upon us from all sides makes it understandable that we have momentarily lost sight of the broader view in favor of the deeper one. We only wish that the severed thread of progressive development would soon be re-established and that the new facts would be grasped from the spiritual height that has been attained.

In the feeling that if the spiritual low of that time did not meet with a counterpoise in a real spiritual upliftment, something catastrophic must happen, in this feeling, with a heart-wrenching pain, I wrote these words down and had them printed 35 years ago. I believe that today, from the same point of view as I have stated, I may refer to these words in a factual and personal way. For the course of events in these three and a half decades is proof that it is justified to let the call for spirituality resound again. May it, since it was not heard at the time, be heard today and in the near future by the Germans, so that they can build from within, out of a grasped spirituality, what has been so terribly way in recent years, indeed, what has only just begun to be destroyed, and what will certainly continue on the paths of destruction if one does not take spirituality with them for the new building.

That is what one would like to appeal to today: the will to spirituality in the German people in particular. And one may appeal to this will to spirituality; for it is certain: if the German people develop this will to spirituality, then they must find it. As I said recently, there seems to be no talent for materialism – the events of the last few decades prove this; but there is talent for spirituality, as proven by the spirit of our development over the centuries. Therefore, one may appeal to the will for spirituality: the German people, if they only develop the will, will find spirituality, they have the talent for it. But because it has this gift, it also has a great responsibility before the call for spirituality. May the awareness of this responsibility awaken, awaken in such a way that the German people may once more intervene energetically in the development of humanity on a spiritual basis and from spiritual impulses, may continue what it has done for the benefit of humanity through its greatest spirits for many centuries.