The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday we discussed the way the inner and outer human form is created out of the universe. We also found that this was something people knew instinctively in earlier times. It is important, however, to note the following. In one of my drawings I showed that the whole zodiac can be seen to lie in the human form, but this had to be the form of the human embryo. If we draw this we have literally recreated the zodiac within the human form.

During life on earth between birth and death, human beings tear themselves away from this embryonic form. They certainly have their form given by the universe during the embryonic period, but they “stretch” during their time on earth, lifting the head up and out of the circle that reflects the zodiac. They then have the form given to them as embryos, but no longer allow it to relate to the fixed stars, and this means that human beings become able to take into the form of the head what they have brought with them from their previous life on earth.

Animals keep their backbones horizontal, and essentially continue much more in the position given by the zodiac, with the head merely attached to the front part of the backbone. This means that animals are not able to use the head to take in anything from a previous life. The situation is such that if we consider the human form in one respect, we would have to say that the human form based entirely on the zodiac would be like this (embryo). And if human beings continued to have this form throughout life, the form of the human head would not be able to take in the essential nature of a person which comes from the previous incarnation. By lifting the head out of that position, it becomes possible for the form to hold and protect the element that comes from the previous life.

Human beings also lift the other side out of the embryonic form, which is the side that takes its orientation from the last four signs of the zodiac, from Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes. As we saw yesterday, this relates to life and conditions of life in the outside world—to hunting, animal breeding, agriculture and trade, or shipping. Human beings follow these pursuits out of will impulses, out of the system of limbs which they have lifted out of its orientation on the zodiac. The result is that everything people do holds the potential, or seed, for future lives on earth. Animals retain their orientation on the zodiac and are therefore unable to take in anything from a previous life on earth or to look towards any future life on earth.

Out of the profound wisdom people had as instinctive knowledge in the past they called the circle of constellations “the zodiac”.¹³ Today we use not instinct but clear thinking to discover the same truths, and we consider the original wisdom human beings once possessed with growing respect.

So much, then, about the human form. Into this form is poured life, and we find this life localized in the human ether body just as we find form localized in the human physical body. It is quite right to consider the human physical body with regard to its form, for that is the essence of it. The ether body essentially represents life, and this is what we want to consider today. Yesterday we saw that the human form is really made up of twelve different forms and we made the attempt to study those forms. The human form as a whole, in its inner and outer aspects, arises from twelve individual forms.

Human life also has a number of levels, and in the first place these may be considered as follows.

The first, and to our everyday thinking this is not yet a level of life, is the life of the senses. Although they are part of the whole human being, the senses are so much at the periphery that we tend to forget that the life of the senses is the outermost layer of our life.

Moving inwards from the periphery—now thinking only in terms of life—we come to the life of the nerves, which is an inward continuation of the life of the senses just as the nerves go inwards from the sense organs.

The life of the nerves in turn is in touch with another level that develops in the living human being. I have shown some aspects of it on earlier occasions, when I drew your attention to the way we draw breath. We take in air and the air we inhale creates a kind of inner rhythm which continues through the spinal canal and on into the brain. There the life of the nerves comes in contact with the life of our breathing, which is the next level as we move inwards.

The life of breathing in turn connects with another level of life. The breath, we may say, continually renews the blood. Thus the breathing rhythm is connected with the blood rhythm and we can move on from the life of our breathing to the life that exists in the rhythm of the circulation.

The circulation, however, is also connected with the whole of metabolism; it takes in metabolism, and we thus come to the next level, the life of metabolism.

Metabolism stimulates the movements we make in the world around us. It is thanks to our metabolism that we are actually able to move around. The nature of the human—and also the animal—metabolism is such that the soul is able to use the metabolic processes to produce movements. In the life of movement we are again becoming part of the outside world, for anything we achieve at that level of life connects us with the outside world.

There is one more level of life: the life of reproduction. In movement we continually use ourselves up, and internal “reproduction” has to take place for the very reason that we are in motion. Instead of “life of movement”, we may thus also put “internal reproduction, or regeneration”, providing we remain inside the human skin. And when this reproduction occurs independently, it becomes life of reproduction in the true sense.

1. Life of the senses
2. Life of the nerves
3. Life of breathing
4. Life of circulation
5. Life of metabolism
6. Life of movement
7. Life of reproduction

Yesterday we had twelve elements of form, today we have evolved seven levels of life, and it is true to say that in terms of the ether body, human beings live differently on each of these seven levels. If we are to take these things seriously, we cannot speak of a single kind of life that is all at the same level.

In the first place, then, our ether body may be said to live at the level of the senses, and this is a form of life that barely feels like life to us. Through it, we are involved in the outside world. If we take the eye, for example, we say the ether body is alive in the eye and in a manner of speaking enlivens it. It does however come in touch with a form of matter that is close to death in the eye, which is a living organ only in so far as the ether body enters into it. Apart from the ether body, the eye is really a physical apparatus.

Individual sense organs are always both a physical apparatus and penetrated by the ether body, each in its own particular way. Generally speaking, however, our sense organs are dead organs, except that the ether body enters into them. It would therefore be reasonable to say that the life of the senses is life in the process of dying.

The life of the nerves takes the experiences gained through the senses and makes them into something that can preserve the life of the senses. All lingering effects are due to the life of the nerves, therefore—lingering sounds, for example, and in the case of the eye, after-images. The life of the nerves, then, is a kind of resting life, or a life that holds and keeps.

The life of breathing gives image quality to the fleeting life of the senses that tends to preserve itself. We are able to have images of the outside world because the breathing rhythm is in touch with the currents that pass through the nerves. Ideas and abstract thoughts are still entirely bound to the life of the nerves, but anything to do with images is connected with the life of breathing. When we breathe we have creative life in us, a life we may call the image-creating life. This lives in the human form and therefore also takes part in the human form.

We have seen that the human form arises out of the zodiac, and because the creative life that comes with our breathing lives in the human form, it also has part in the whole outer form that has been created out of the starry heavens.

This form is therefore also part of the inner aspect of the human being. And it is thanks to our breathing that we have not only the contents of our conscious mind but also images of all our internal organs, images based on the outer form. Our internal organs therefore arise at first in a roundabout way—as images created in the breathing process. They do not yet have substance at this point. The breath creates an image of the internal human being. With our breathing we are in the outside world, moving within the zodiac with the earth, and we are continually inhaling the images of our internal organization.

These images are inhaled from life outside us. This, then is our creative life. The images we inhale are spread through the whole organism by the life of circulation. This and the life of breathing take human beings to the point where they are inwardly image of the world. Thus we may say:

The life of circulation is in touch with the life of metabolism, with the result that the images are given physical substance and physical organs develop on the fifth level of life. Matter infiltrates the images; it suffuses or tinges them. Thus the upper human being creates images in the life of breathing and these images are made tangible reality by the matter that infiltrates and tinges them.

Energy then enters into the physical organs from the life of movement. We may put it like this: We have physical organs and here we have life that generates power in the organs. The life of reproduction, finally, renews itself.

You can also see how the threefold human being arises: nerves and senses, circulation and rhythm, and metabolism and limbs, or metabolism and movement. Reproduction, finally, gives rise to a new human being.

The attributes I have added on the right (Fig. 14) give you an idea of the differences between the levels of life. Living in the senses, our ether body is in a kind of life that is dying. In the life of the nerves, the currents in the nerves, it is in a life that holds and keeps. The breathing life is where our ether body truly becomes a body of creative powers that designs images. The life of circulation ensures that those images become our whole internal organization. Physical substance is then brought in through the life of metabolism. The ether body enters into metabolism and suffuses the actual body of creative powers with matter. Subjective human energy is added through the life of the limbs, and so on.

The instinctive wisdom of old gave people understanding of this, too, and they knew, therefore, that human beings take in the life that is outside and develop it further inside them. That is more or less how the sages of old would see it. They would say: Let us take the outermost layer of the universe that is around the earth, then the next, and the next. The outermost layer is closest to the fixed stars in the sky, to the universe to which we owe the human form. Human life, they would say, does not come from the fixed stars, however, but from the planets in the sky. (Fig. 15).

They would first of all speak of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and the sun. If we consider the true nature of the sun—this is something I have said many times before—it differs from the other planets in so far as it presents itself as a source of light. This is also why in popular astronomy it is called a fixed star. The other planets do not appear as light sources but as images. This is why it is said in popular astronomy that their light is borrowed light, for they reflect the light of the sun. Just consider the difference between the sun, which lets its own essential nature emerge with the light, and the other heavenly bodies, the planets, which merely present an image of their outer nature, or of whatever they have on the surface, making this visible by reflecting the light of the sun. It is a major difference. And being the source of light, the sun is also the source of life.

It is also the source of something else. At all times, even when people had only instinctive knowledge, it was said that the sun was threefold, the source of light, life and love. This trinity is to be found in the sun.

No need to go against the Copernican system today, you can keep it and still understand what the ancients meant with their system, based on instinctive perception of the cosmos. Let us assume that, in Copernican terms, we have the sun at the centre—or at a focal point, if you like, but we can ignore that for the moment. Mercury, Venus, earth and Mars—we can ignore the minor planets for present purposes—Jupiter and Saturn are in orbit around the sun. But now we’ll look at it like this:

Let us say, and this is certainly also possible, that we have Saturn, Jupiter and Mars here, and then come sun, Mercury, Venus and earth, with the moon, however, which we’ll position here.

It is not essential, of course, to take this particular position, I am merely presenting it to show you that even with the Copernican system it is possible to get the sequence that was thought to be the right one in ancient times: moon, Venus, Mercury, sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. All we need is for the relative positions to be such that the earth is to one side of the sun and the outer planets are somewhere on the other side. It is not necessary to have this kind of opposition or conjunction—which may happen in alternation—but the sequence is certainly feasible. And it is the sequence that was in people’s minds out of the old instinctive wisdom. This sequence seemed important to them.

The ancients would say: Let us think of the human beings here on earth. They are exposed to the universe. They experience the rays of the sun as their source of light, life and love. These three enter into them from the sun. Yet human beings are also exposed to the image quality of Saturn. If they were only exposed to the life of the sun as they developed on earth they would not be able to develop the life of the senses. Thus the eyes would not become a distinct physical apparatus but would be just like any other part of the human body—muscular organs, or vessels, or the like. Continuously exposed to the sun, human beings would not be able to develop eyes, nor any other senses. They are able to do develop them because Saturn, the outermost planet, reduces the influence of the sun. Saturn dries the vessel out, as it were, and this, roughly speaking, produces the physical apparatus. The ancients had as instinctive knowledge what we are discovering again today: The life of the senses develops under the influence of Saturn.

Human beings also would not be able to develop the life of the nerves if they were continuously exposed to the sun. Thanks to the influence of Jupiter, the life of the nerves dries up and does not become as vital as the muscles and similar organs. The ancients would say: The life of the nerves is stimulated by Jupiter.

Saturn orbits the sun in about 30 years. During their life on earth, human beings have it happen about once that Saturn is blocked out by the sun, in a way. If someone has the good fortune to have Saturn blocked out very strongly by the sun, a powerful sun life dawns in their life of the senses. We might say that their eyes or other senses are stimulated—the eyes are in fact least affected, but they make the best example, being so obvious. So if once during life on earth a person is in the position where Saturn does not influence the senses, that person may discover that a specific cosmic influence comes in through the senses. The individual is given a stimulus and is strengthened in the sphere of the senses.

People try to explain these things in all kinds of ways. There is a considerable literature on the subject in America. William James, for instance, wrote of all kinds of “awakenings” that happened in people’s lives.¹⁴ If you read his books and those of his followers you’ll find that a particular phenomenon occurs when someone receives a special stimulus at some point in time. These people have no idea as to the cause; they do not know that this is due to the position relative to Saturn or Jupiter. When the life of Saturn is blocked out, the life of the senses receives a special stimulus; when the life of Jupiter is blocked out, which happens all the more easily because Jupiter takes only 12 years to orbit, the life of the nerves is stimulated.

All these things are said to be in the subconscious, which is an absolute sludge tank today for people like William James and all psychoanalysts. This subconscious of theirs is a negative term, a waste bin for all the things that cannot be explained. Everything has to go in there; there you’ll find the hidden “provinces” of the soul that will react occasionally, and so on. It would certainly be highly desirable to take a good look at those pragmatic and psychoanalytical ideas one of these days.

The third planet, Mars, reduces heaving life to the point where breathing becomes possible. Mars, too, may be blocked out by the sun, and the life of breathing then receives a special stimulus. Mars orbits quite rapidly, taking about two years, and everybody therefore gets certain stimuli in the breathing life, the life of images. These stimuli are not always of the first quality, but people become poets or composers, or something like that, through receiving this stimulus in their breathing life. It does not go deep enough to make people like William James want to investigate and speculate; it seems quite clear to them. People with the old, instinctive wisdom thus felt that Mars stimulated the breathing life.

The life of the sun arouses light in the outside world, love in our hearts, and life in our dealings with the outside world. The location for this is midway between the life of breathing and the life of circulation, as the ancients also knew. Between those two lives lies the heart, which does not act as a motor but reflects the interplay between circulation and breathing.

Next we come to metabolism. People who had the old wisdom looked at Mercury not to see how far the sun is able to block it out, the way it does with the other planets, but how far Mercury itself blocks out the sun for the earth. Its position between sun and earth was considered to be the most important aspect, just as in the case of Jupiter the position beyond the sun was considered most important. When Mercury blocks out the sun, the life of the sun is reduced. As the life of the sun is weakened, this weakened life stirs inside human beings. If it were not reduced, people would immediately spit out any food or drink they had taken; they would not tolerate anything that comes from the outside world. They would then get out of the habit of eating, finding it too much of a bore. That is how powerful the life of the sun is in us. If we had only the life of the heart, or the sun, we would not be able to digest anything and immediately spit, or indeed vomit, everything out again. We owe the development of our metabolism to the fact that the life of Mercury weakens the life of the sun a little in this respect. The ancients therefore thought that the Mercury principle came between the life of circulation and the life of metabolism. The Mercury principle thus pushes physical matter through the human organism and into its individual organs.

Energy comes in through the life of movement which depends on Venus life, just as the life of metabolism depends on Mercury life. The ancients therefore ascribed to Venus the power that streams through the human being, this inner self renewal, the feeling that there is another human being, an energy human being, inside one.

The life of the moon, which is close to the life of the earth, does more than reduce the life of the sun and thus enable human beings to digest physical matter and process energies. The background to reproduction is something I have spoken of before: a space is created, with matter pushed back at the organic level, as it were. The embryo is able to develop because matter is pushed aside and in energy terms the embryo is organized from the cosmos. In this respect the life of reproduction depends on the moon life.

Yesterday I spoke of the relationship of the human form in its twelve aspects relating to the fixed stars. Today I have tried to show you how the new science of anthroposophy is in agreement with the instinctive wisdom of old in saying that the different levels of human life are connected with the life of the planets in the cosmos. Depending on the position of the earth in relation to the different members of the planetary system and the sun at its centre, life is modified in many different ways. Life is made to die, it is preserved and made creative in the upper human being. It is reduced in the lower human being so that physical matter and energies can be taken up from the earth. Human beings simply take the earth’s power of repulsion, make it their own and in this way develop the power that is in their own organs, and so on.

We see, then, that human life, too, comes from the cosmos. Looking up to the fixed stars, we see the zodiac as representing the principles that give rise to the human form. Observing the movements of the planets, we find the explanation for the different levels of human life. We look to Saturn for the life of the senses, to Jupiter for the life of the nerves, to Mars for the life of breathing, which is active in images.

Let us take a special look at this life of breathing. I told you that the images are received from the cosmos: form. The movements experienced in the zodiac stream inwards as images of our internal organs. Between birth and death, human beings are on earth, however, and the lower acts into the upper, with the result that everything has its polar opposite. The images enter into us and become suffused with matter, otherwise we would have no internal organs. But there is also always a counter process. So we are able to say that when we breathe, the images are pushed inwards, the image of the kidney, for example.

Matter then fills this out (red); but the opposite also happens, this time in an upward direction, with the images thrown back, as it were, like an echo, but do not think of this as a once-only event. The organs are in existence, having been developed in the early stages of earth existence; but the counter action may go on all the time.—The role played by the soul element in this will be considered tomorrow.

Consider each on its own, therefore. You take in the images of your internal organs with the life process. Then comes the counter action, in which the echoes of those images rise up again, as does the zodiac, especially with the life of breathing in it. Well, just think of your ears, and there you have the counter process. These images are created and go out into the air—they are the vowels and consonants! The vowels come more from the planets, the consonants from the zodiac. The counter process to the images coming in is reflected in speech. Consonants and vowels are pushed into us, as it were, to be the foundation for our organs. Anything that is more by way of form inside us comes essentially from the zodiac, anything that is more by way of life comes essentially from the planets. If the counter action relates more to life, we produce vowels, if it relates more to form, we produce consonants. All this is to some extent connected with the life of breathing, and we can see that quite clearly in speech.

You see, it is not really a good idea to try and understand the human being by putting him on the dissecting table and investigating what lies inside the skin. The result of this is no better than if someone were to take a magnetic needle and ignore the fact that the earth itself is a large magnet, making one end point north and the other south. If anyone were to insist on producing a theory that the magnetic needle takes that position of its own accord, ignoring the fact that the forces of the earth give it that particular direction, it would be just like anatomists and physiologists trying to understand the human being on the basis of what is to be found inside the skin. You cannot understand the human being on the basis of what lies inside the skin. All the people who seek to explain speech and language on the basis of what lies inside the human being are also working at the level of that explanation for the function of a magnetic needle. The truth is that human beings take their form from the life of the fixed stars and reproduce this as an echo, which gives rise to the consonants. They take in the movements of planetary life which influence their own life. The life of breathing in particular creates images of all this. The counter action then produces the vowels. Human speech can only be understood if consonants are seen in relation to the constellations of fixed stars and the vowels in relation to planetary conjunctions and oppositions. Thus human speech and language is seen to derive from the whole cosmos.

The sun, here (horizontal line in Fig 14), marks the middle. Take the three upper principles and you have the upper human being. Take the three lower principles and you have the lower human being. The reproductive life then gives rise to a new human being.

Take the life of breathing and the life of circulation. The latter essentially reflects the planetary movements. Our blood circulation is basically no more than an image of planetary life. We may thus also say that the vowels come from the life of the circulation and the consonants from the life of breathing. And now we get another strange relationship. We can relate the life of metabolism to the life of the nerves and the life of movement to the life of the senses. The life of the senses, however, relates to the movements of Saturn, which may be said to be closest to the zodiac, just as human beings present themselves most clearly to the outside world in their life of movement. If we want to show how human beings reflect the secrets of the cosmos, we have on the one hand the life of the senses and on the other hand the life of movement and this gives us—eurythmy. Eurythmy is the direct image of the relationship human beings have to the cosmic periphery. I just wanted to mention this briefly.

My purpose today has been to show you how the human being relates to the cosmos in regard to life. Yesterday it was my purpose to show the relationship of the human being to the cosmos in regard to form. Tomorrow we’ll consider the third aspect of the relationship between human being and cosmos—the soul. After considering the human soul in relation to the life of the cosmos we will have the three aspects of form, life and soul.

• 13. Zodiac from the Greek and Latin zodiakus, derived from “circle of the figures”, being the Greek for the sculptured figure of an animal.
• 14. William James (1842–1910), American physiologist and pragmatic philosopher, in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), chapter 3: The Reality of the Unseen.

So far we have attempted to see the human being in relation to the universe as regards form and as regards life. We found that human beings relate in different ways to the universe at the head end and at the limb end. All these things essentially hold true for the period of human evolution in which we are today, i.e. the post-Atlantean period, and it has to be understood that anything we are able to say about the phenomena of this world always applies only for specific periods, for the world is in a process of evolution and changes radically from one stage of evolution to the next.

We saw that human beings tear themselves away, as it were, from the relationship to the zodiac. Unlike the animal head, which lies within the zodiac, the human head has been lifted out of it, going through an angle of about 90 degrees. The head end of the human being is fully in a way of life that inclines towards inorganic, lifeless nature. Here life is more or less in decline; it is dying. Both form and life tear themselves away from their connection with the cosmos, and because of this enter into a kind of frozen state, the beginning of lifelessness.

Essentially we are the outcome of previous development in this area. Think of the individual aspect of the human being and the fact that the human head is the metamorphosis of the other person who lived on earth before, and you will recall that the head points to the past, whilst the limbs point to the future.

The head part of the human being also points to the cosmic expanses of the past in another way. As you know, the head is the principal bearer of the sense organs and these had their origin on ancient Saturn. The most highly developed senses—other senses developed on ancient sun and moon—go back to the earliest stages of cosmic earth evolution. Everything connected with the human head therefore points to the past and in some respects it would be right to say: The mineral world evolved in the course of earth existence, and the human head, being the oldest part, is more than any other part involved in this process of mineralization.

Tearing themselves away from the cosmos, human beings keep the form that is no longer connected with the cosmos during their life between birth and death, and they also keep the life that is dying and becoming mineralized. We may also say that if human beings had kept the animal form, that is, if their heads had maintained the orientation given by the zodiac and therefore the weightier life that is to be found in the animal head, they would be entirely the outcome of earlier times in their heads. The head would have something that would immediately make it apparent that it has arisen out of the whole past cosmic evolution. By tearing the head away from this, human beings are in a way destroying their cosmic past.

It is tremendously important that we consider the things that were presented yesterday and the day before and realize that in the development of the head human beings essentially destroy their cosmic past. In fact, they go beyond the actual mineralization process, entering into a process in which matter is finely dispersed to an extraordinary degree. Organic forms are of course also to be found in the head, and embedded in the organic element is a process in which matter is reduced to dust to a degree that actually goes beyond the mineral level. Fig. 18.

If we look at the human head in the right way we have to say it is the focus of a process in which matter as such is reduced to nothing and it is this which makes it the bearer of a distinct inner life. The generally accepted materialistic view is entirely wrong when it comes to the form of the human head. Thanks to the head being part of the organism, human beings have a life of thoughts and ideas. This becomes possible because the material life is reduced to dust in a strange process which you may be able to picture as follows.

Imagine—as I said, it is a picture, but it will give you some idea of the extremely subtle process involved—imagine, then, a painting, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, for example. For the painting to exist in this world, it is necessary for it to have physical substance. Imagine that the physical substance falls to dust, but a fine etheric tissue would remain. So now the Sistine Madonna has turned into dust, but everything that was painted by using physical paints, including the nuances of colour, continues to exist in etheric form and someone with etheric perception would be able to perceive the etheric form that remains.

That is what the thinking process is like, the process of forming ideas. When we become conscious of a thought or an idea, this is due to the fact that because the head has been taken out of the wholeness of the cosmos, as we have seen yesterday and the day before, matter loses all significance and human beings face the constant need to let their heads come alive again because they are always disintegrating, and dying in every detail. The etheric aspect of their heads lifts out of it in the process (Fig. 18, red line on the outside) and thoughts evolve. Matter turns to dust and falls away, as it were, and the etheric remains and that is how people become aware of their ideas.

You’ll remember me saying that in the senses we already have something of a physical apparatus. The eye is a physical apparatus, except that the human ether body is active in it. There it already is the way I am now also going to describe for the rest of the head, for nerve tissue. Please take careful note of what I am going to say now. In the senses, and especially in the senses connected with the head, a separate etheric principle is active in the process of perception. In the sphere of the senses, therefore, we have a kind of independent etheric process.

Take the eye. It is a physical apparatus, but the etheric is active in it. Independent etheric life is to be found in an organ that is all the time tending to disintegrate and is really a mechanical, if not sub-mechanical, object. This is the situation in the sphere of the senses.

In the sphere of the nerves, which is an inward continuation of the sphere of the senses, the situation is such that the ether body is more closely bound up with the physical substance, but the whole of our life of the nerves wants all the time to become life of the senses. Imagine, therefore, that you are seeing a coloured surface. The ether body moves independently in this process of sensory perception. If you now leave this process aside and give yourself up to the life of the nerves, the whole sphere of the nerves becomes sphere of the senses and you have a idea of the coloured surface in your mind. We may say that in so far as human beings are nerve human beings, they become entirely sphere of the senses in their mental images or ideas.

Now comes the reaction. The senses are geared towards the physical and are able to take things in continually. The organism of the nerves takes in what the senses present to it. It changes into sphere of the senses and in doing so it partly dies. It seeks to become all eye, or all ear, for instance. To prevent this happening, the vital principle, the principle of life, enters from the rest of the organism and pervades it and the human individual lets the idea go, as it were.

To sum up, we may say that towards the head end, human beings destroy their past. They thus become human beings with nerves and senses that hold images and they have a living experience of images that moves in the etheric realm. You see if we base ourselves on the spiritual science of anthroposophy it is perfectly possible to describe the life of ideas that arises in the conscious mind.

As human beings develop their head end with regard to form, they do so in a way that in the present age exposes them to the influence of forces that evolve in the cosmos when the sun is in the Fishes, the Ram, the Bull, and so on, but they lift their heads out of this, as far as the form is concerned. The result is that the head does not become an animal head but assumes what we may call the “human vertical”, whilst the animal remains within the zodiac.

With regard to life we are able to say that towards the head end, life evolves under the influence of the outer planets Saturn and Jupiter, as we saw yesterday. But human beings lift their life out of this, and thus the following happens: If those planets were never blocked out by the sun, the whole life of the nerves would increasingly become life of the senses. People would perceive with their eyes, or their ears, but this would continue on into the life of nerves. The life of the twelve senses would be in total, inorganic chaos in their life of nerves. Due to the fact that those outermost planets are blocked out, the life of nerves is torn out of the life of senses, and human beings are able to be conscious and act with deliberation in the life of ideas—entering into sensory function and leaving it again by deliberately suppressing ideas, and so on.

Thus an independent etheric principle is active in the senses during sensory perception and a reduced life of senses that is bound to the physical body is active in the nerve organism.

The whole has image quality because by going into the vertical human beings destroy the principle that would give them not image quality but the quality of physical substance. Animals remain within the zodiac and have only dream images and not the conscious images that human beings have. Dream images grow out of the vital principle of the organism; conscious images are lifted up into an etheric life that has become independent of the physical body. It is important to realize that human beings develop an independent etheric life towards the head end because they raise that part out of both the zodiac and the movements of the planets. Then the astral body and the I enter into the independent etheric life and are able to take part in the thought and idea activity of the ether body.

We thus see that the nature of the soul principle can be understood if we know that human thought life has soul quality, that is, it does not take part in material life.

We have seen how human beings develop with regard to both form and life at the other extreme. The day before yesterday we saw that human beings become active in the world through their limbs; going back to ancient Greek times we saw how they became hunters, animal breeders, tillers of the soil and traders who sailed the oceans. Human beings continue in these activities by withdrawing from the influence of the relevant images in the zodiac. Animals remain fully under the influence of Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes and therefore develop forms that relate to the earth. A study of the zodiac will show why animal limbs have developed in a particular way. Human beings develop their system of limbs in such a way that they relate it to the earth when those zodiacal images are beneath the earth, when the earth is at that point in the zodiac in the northern hemisphere for a time. This is also why the geography of the earth offers different living conditions. Human beings are however able to transfer something they have developed in one place to another. I am speaking of things that apply to earlier times; today the different human forms mingle on the globe and the study of geography will no longer give a real idea of the way human beings relate to the macrocosm.

Here, then, human beings tear themselves away from the line of the zodiac in a different way, entering into the “human vertical” in the opposite direction. They remain fully exposed to the constellations of the zodiac with regard to form and to the outer planets with regard to the head, but withdraw from both influences by standing on the earth and letting the earth cover up the other side. Saturn and Jupiter influence human beings by letting their light shine on the earth. Living in images in their heads, human beings also receive the images of those starry worlds, just as they receive images of the planetary movements by developing the principle of life towards the head end. Images from the cosmos, the macrocosm, are taken up into the life of images that human beings develop.

At the other end, images are taken up and thus the forms develop that I showed you the day before yesterday—the limbs, forms that are the opposite of those seen in the head. Human beings also develop activities that are beyond the influence of the macrocosm, that do not allow those influences to enter.

At the head end, therefore, human beings destroy their past. The opposite is the case at the limb end. If we stood on a transparent earth so that both zodiac and planetary movements could influence us from the other side as well, we would not be able to act freely and independently but only under the influence of the life of the planets and fixed stars. Freedom of action is only possible because the earth blocks out the life of the planets and fixed stars. Furthermore, if we were fully exposed to them, then in view of the special nature of the human life span, with repeated earth lives, the life of our limbs would grow wooden, it would harden in itself. We would be unable to let matter fall to dust, and our organic substance would become cornified (horn-like) before it matured. Human limbs would be cornified in a way that is utterly different from the hoofs of horses or cows—almost all the way up. We are protected from this horny development because as human beings we are lifted out of the zodiac.

The process which results from this is the opposite of the process of reducing to dust in the head, where the past is destroyed and matter turns to dust. Development of the limb end is such that matter is not allowed to reach full cosmic maturity. It is held back. We have fingers and toes because we do not allow our limbs to reach their full growth potential. If they did, we would not just have nails but our arms and legs would be completely stiffened and cornified. By holding our limbs back we are able to develop the will in them, and this provides the basis for future lives on earth. If we allowed the limb person to reach full maturity, life would consist of one life on earth only. We preserve the basis for our future by not letting the limb person grow to maturity.

Thus we have a complete contrast: When it goes in the direction of thought, our inner life becomes a life in images; when it goes in the direction of our limbs, life becomes material, it is flesh and organic matter—“young”, I’d say. It does not cornify and grow old and because of this it is possible for the flesh to fall away and the image of youth to go through death and into the next life on earth.

There (Fig. 19) the will is able to develop, and we may say that the “will-end” of the human being is organic development not taken to its conclusion. At the head end we were able to speak of image quality, and here we must speak of something else. Organic development not taken to its conclusion remains germinal, an embryo capable of further development. At the head end we have something like an oyster shell, pure matter that has been secreted out. At the limb end we have something that is embryonic.

Here (above) we can say we have living inner experience of a purely etheric principle—the image. Here (below) we live not in the image but in germinal life and we know ourselves to be bound up with matter, which is also why we are able to move our limbs. We do not have much physical movement in the head, except in so far as our senses are transformed into limbs, so that in the head, too, we are human beings with limbs. One thing is also always to be found in the other, that is a basic principle. In a sense our eyes are also hands, in so far as they are able to move. Nevertheless, the head is largely immobile, and the lobes of the brain and similar structures in particular are incapable of voluntary movement. Even the outside of the head does not show much mobility; it is quite rare even for people to be able to move certain ear muscles; if they can, it provides them with an excellent opportunity for showing off.

Life experienced in organic substance does not allow conscious awareness to arise and this makes it possible for us to develop the will. (Up) here, then, we destroy physical matter, and (down) here we retain, in embryo, the powers for our next life on earth when physical substance falls away from us at death.

Between the two lie the life of breathing and the life of circulation, as we called them yesterday. We also saw that with regard to form this area relates to the constellations of the zodiac that lie between the upper and the lower ones.

If we consider the present-day fixed stars to be Ram, Bull, Twins, Crab, Lion, Virgin, Scales, Scorpion, Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes, we need to relate these four (Fishes, Ram, Bull, Twins) to the head. Under their influence and in accord with the planetary movements that are above the earth, the head is given a dying life that offers experience of life in images, an inner life of ideas. The four opposite constellations—it would have been slightly different in ancient Greece—would be Virgin, Scales, Scorpion and Archer. The constellations that lie between the upper and lower ones would relate to the rhythmical aspect of the human being, just as in planetary life Mars and Mercury hold a middle position. Here, we may say, the human being swings to and fro between image and embryo. The life of breathing and of the blood illustrates this quite beautifully. We take in oxygen which gives life and is connected with the limb organism and with everything that is mobile in us. We combine the oxygen with carbon, a substance that initially has a stimulant effect on the life of the nerves and senses, bringing in an element of death, and is then cast out as a dying element. Here we have in physical, material terms the continuous contrast of extreme life in oxygen and extreme death in carbon: dying and enlivening, dying and enlivening. Life swings to and fro between these extremes.

At the level of soul life it is like this: we have inward experience of something that on the one hand is still purely etheric, like the life of thoughts; but the ether body takes hold of certain glandular structures and these glands secrete matter. At the physical level, therefore, the ether body acts on the glands. Glands do not make a connection with etheric life, the way muscles do—which are essentially part of the limb organism but secrete matter when etheric life takes hold of them. Etheric life and physical, material life therefore do not fuse completely, and we have a stage of transition. Matter is taken hold of but it also resists and is secreted out. If you study muscles and bones, the elements of the limb system, you find that matter is rigorously taken hold of by the human ether body, most of all in the bones. Nothing falls to dust and is dispersed, everything stays fresh and alive. In the head, none of the matter is taken hold of, but as the head develops, matter falls to dust. Unbound, etheric activity develops to become the life of thought. When the ether body takes hold of the glands, it unites with them but they resist. Muscle tolerates the ether body and take it into itself. Glands do not tolerate it; they immediately secrete matter and drive out the ether. At the soul level this is the life of feeling.

We can now get a real idea of the life of thought. Matter is not put to use, it only goes as far as the etheric, and conscious awareness lives in this etheric element. In the life of feeling, the ether body takes hold of glandular life, which does not tolerate it. Yet for the time that the ether body vanishes into glandular life, before secretion actually comes into effect, human beings are without their ether body, which has vanished into the glands. At that point they find themselves only in their I and astral body, and that is how it is when we feel.

idea—ether body, astral body, I
realm of feeling—astral body, I
life of will—I

If we take the ideas that come in the life of thought—the life of the physical body is cast off; human beings experience themselves in ether body, astral body and I. In the human head the I is active in the astral and the ether bodies and rejects the physical element; the I is thus able, with the aid of the astral body, to experience thoughts, thinking, in the ether body. In the realm of feeling human beings have the ether body taken away from them when it takes hold of glandular life; it is withdrawn from them until the gland has taken the secretory activity to its conclusion. The ether body is therefore in the physical body and human beings have only the astral body and I available for conscious inner life. Experience is at the level of feelings and dream-like in quality, because we enter into the physical body.

In their life of will, human beings enter completely into organic matter with the ether body. When we are awake, the ether body takes the astral body with it, and this enables us to move our limbs. The astral body is also taken into matter and is therefore withdrawn from us so that we have conscious awareness only of the I.

Thus we find that the inner life and the physical life are related at every level. Basing ourselves on the science of the spirit we merely need to have a clear picture of the way in which I, astral body and ether body are involved in the physical body and we perceive the difference between the inner life of thought, the inner life of feeling and the inner life of will. We find that the inner life of thought is in the dying part of the organism which has torn itself away from the upper part of the world of the fixed stars and the upper world of the planets, and become a life in images by reducing the past to dust. We find that in the middle, or rhythmical region we are able to share in life relating to the past and therefore also to the macrocosm, which has evolved out of the past; yet we also react to this because there is a continuous rhythmical element—on the one hand the rhythm of oxygen combining with carbon, and on the other that of glands being taken hold of and responding with secretion. When the macrocosmic life in us is taken hold of and takes hold, the microcosm, that is, the individual human being, reacts. We live in rhythm not only inside ourselves but with the world; we open up to the cosmos and take it back into ourselves. We are half-way individual beings and move rhythmically to and fro between macrocosm and microcosm, and this is where we are alive and active in our feelings. Here we can see exactly how the physical, material aspect of the organism interacts with the element of soul and spirit. In the life of the will, physical matter is most strongly taken hold of and this is where we are most of all mere microcosm, withdrawing entirely from macrocosmic activity in becoming active ourselves.

Living in the northern hemisphere, we withdraw from the other fixed stars and planets in our own way; people living in the southern hemisphere do the same in a similar way, and the whole does, of course, rotate. In our limbs we are therefore entirely microcosm between birth and death, in a world of our own which therefore is also able to take itself forward into a future. We are today developing the will as the youngest element in the inner life. This is still entirely dependent on the physical body for support; it allows only the I to find to itself, with the astral body and the ether body caught up in the physical body.

We shall never understand the inner life unless we are able to differentiate between I, astral body and ether body. Anyone who does not have a real, inner grasp of these will never be able to understand the life of thought, the life of feeling and the life of will. What happens when people refuse to grasp this reality today?

What happens is that people who carry some authority stand there and tell people that it is not really possible to know anything about the inner life, though certain phenomena suggest that something exists that has soul quality, which they call “psychoid”. Giving an explanation of the way Descartes¹⁵ and Spinoza¹⁶ endeavoured to discover the nature of this interaction, they are unable to be anything but abstract—the body on one side, the soul on the other. It will never be possible to get at the truth in this way, because the relationship between soul and body is different in the life of thought, the life of feeling and the life of will. People will not get to the truth if they insist on making one big muddle of the whole inner life and talk of a “psychoid” element rather than giving real consideration to the way the I, astral body and ether body are related in real life. It is as if someone were to refuse to look at the real human being and talk about an “anthropoid” in order to avoid speaking of the anthropos¹⁷ That kind of science is anthropoid-sophy rather than anthroposophy; it is psychoidology.

If we give real consideration to the life of soul and spirit, we can give full detail of the “interactions” and so on, as people call them. There will be no need to cut out bits of the liver, or the brain, and present them neatly as abstract tissues, the way anatomists do. Instead we must know that the relationship of the human being to the cosmos is different at the head end and the limb end. At the head end we reduce it to dust, destroying the past. At the limb end we do not allow growth to reach its full potential but remain embryonic.

The worst thing is when people leave truth aside and speculate on the nature of the physical body as well as of soul and spirit. Using worn-out old words and making them into -oids, they fail to grasp the real truth. There are people nowadays who have no notion of how to get from a word to a concept. Someone called Arthur Drews¹⁸ has been giving lectures to non-conformist religious and monist congregations in Germany today, both of which live on the dregs of the materialistic science that goes back to the 1860s and 70s. He has studied Hartmann’s philosophy¹⁹—as a young man he would always dance attendance on him—but he really only took in the words, which roll about in his head like the balls in a pin-ball machine, and he has no idea of how to get from word to concept. And he uses these words from Hartmann’s philosophy, words that whizz around in his head as if in a pinball machine, to criticize anthroposophy!

Those are the fruits of education in our modern civilization, where people refuse to give serious consideration to the methods available for gaining real insight into the relationship between human being and cosmos. These enable us to describe the human form and human life on the basis of the cosmos and to understand that because human beings are specifically torn away from the cosmos they have dying life at one end, which enables them to develop an inner life of ideas based on images, and a life that remains embryonic at the other extreme, which allows the will element to develop.

These things sound incomprehensible to the people involved in the official science of today, and as a rule—not always but as a rule—we cannot expect them to gain access to them, for essentially they have lost all real understanding with their kaleidoscope of words. For anyone who knows the real situation, those lectures about psychoids are essentially no more than word kaleidoscopes; the things said about Descartes, Spinoza and so on, right up to Fechner,²⁰ have no inner connection and are kaleidoscopes of words. The scraps of words that whirl around in confusion can only gain inner meaning through insight into I, astral body, ether body, and so on. It seems a pity that one has to talk about the present time like this; but when it comes to the “intellectual life”, as it is called, we have to speak about the present age like this. The philosophers have no longer been able to get their bearings because decades ago their words have lost all meaning.

The latest thing is to appoint modern scientists as professors of philosophy. They are asked to hand down philosophy. It started with Mach,²¹ and today Driesch²² is one of the main representatives of the species. Scientists are being appointed as professors of philosophy because the philosophers no longer have anything meaningful to say, whilst scientists at least still have the faculty of external observation. What they say about philosophy is, of course, even more empty of meaning than the things said by philosophers, who at least still had the words. This really has been a strange development. We have seen philosophy, which still had meaningful content in the first half of the 19th century, evaporate completely in the wordy works of someone like Kuno Fischer,²³ for instance. But in his day the chairs of philosophy were still held by philosophers, even if their philosophy no longer had inner meaning.

It is absolutely necessary that we realize this clearly and that there are at least a few people in the world who see through all the glitter of those “psychoids” and know that we are deeply in decadence, particularly in the field of academics. You can’t know this strongly enough, and I think it will be good for you to enter deeply into the things I have tried to put before you in these three lectures.

We have seen that on the one hand man appeared to be connected with the universe in outer form and in the way of life, but that he has renounced the universe at the head end and at the limb end, so that we are only wholly given up to the rhythm of the universe in so far as we are rhythmical human beings; renounced in order to develop the life of thoughts as life in images, that is, independent of physical matter, at one end, and at the other end to develop the life of will by keeping matter at an embryonic level, not letting it assume the rigid form that the macrocosm is able to impose. The limb end is thus kept mobile and has the potential to evolve and progress from earth to existence on Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan.

Hold on to these things and you can see that the insight gained in anthroposophy really wants to take hold first of all of our sense of truth, secondly of our sense of aesthetics—when you study the human form as it arises out of the macrocosm—and thirdly also in the direction of what is good and of religious life. These three lectures are particularly able to show the profound justification of the statement that has been made so many times here, in courses and also on other occasions, that we must look for a synthesis, bringing together in harmony religion, art and science. This cannot be achieved unless we come to a genuine cosmology which clearly shows the reality of the human form and of human life.

Something else we need is a theory of independent activity in the inner life, a theory that shows us the true nature of man, who has torn himself away from the cosmos at either end. And we also need to know the qualities which human beings develop independently, relating to future worlds which will take the place of the earth within the macrocosm. This will lead to deeply religious inner responses and feelings.

If human civilization is to show true progress we need a cosmology that includes the human being and does not leave humanity aside the way our present-day cosmology does. We also need a theory of independent activity and we need ethics that are able to show that the potential for good which they hold is the seed for worlds. We need ethics that have reality, their values not abstract but having the power in them to come to realization. Cosmology, a theory of independent activity and ethics—these are the things humanity will need to be able to rise to something higher.

• 15. René, Descartes (1596–1650), French philosopher and mathematician.
• 16. Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), Dutch-Jewish philosopher and theologian.
• 17. Anthropos, Greek for “human being”.
• 18. Arthur Drews (1865–1935), a professor of philosophy who gave a number of lectures against anthroposophy in the autumn of 1921. See his Metaphysik und Anthroposophie, Berlin 1922, esp. the chapter on perception of the supersensible.
• 19. Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), German philosopher
• 20. Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–87), German philosopher and psychologist.
• 21. Ernst Mach (1839–1916) Austrian physicist and philosopher.
• 22. Hans Driesch (1867–1914), German zoologist and philosopher.
• 23. Ernst Kuno Fischer (1824–1907), German philosopher who wrote a major history of modern philosophy, books on logic and metaphysics and on Kant, Descartes, Goethe, Lessing and Schiller.

Having considered the way human beings relate to the cosmos in the form of the human organization, in levels of life and with regard to the contents of their inner life, let us today consider the life of the mind and spirit This will be in preparation for our subject for the next two days.

Remember how we considered the form of the human organism, relating the human organization to the fixed stars out in the cosmos. To consider the levels of human life, we had to look at our own planetary system. For the phenomena of the inner life we had to change our line of approach and relate the inner nature of human beings to their physical organization, which they owe to the fixed stars and the planetary system. Looking at form and life, we perceived the differences between head organization, chest organization, and metabolism and limbs as a third organization. We found that the inner life of sensory perception and of ideas comes into its own through the head organization, through nerves and senses. We found that the life of feeling comes to expression through the breathing and circulatory organization, and the life of will through the system of metabolism and limbs. For our study of the inner life, account had to be taken of the way the I, astral body, ether body and physical body act together in the human being. We gained a general idea of the way soul and body interact, even at the level of glandular function, and of muscle function being made to serve the will, and found that account had to be taken of the way the soul principle comes to expression in the living body.

To study the life of mind and spirit, we have to consider the alternation between waking and sleeping. As you know, this consists in the first place in life swinging to and fro between day-time waking state and night-time sleep within the 24-hour day. We also know that human beings are awake and asleep in another way, for we are really only fully awake when we form ideas and perceive with the senses. The life of the will and of physical actions is really a life of sleep even when we are awake.

The life of feelings, we know, is a dream life even when we are awake. This, then, is another way in which human beings let life swing to and fro between waking and sleeping. Waking sleep, as we may call it, influences the life of ideas when we bring an act of will to expression and are awake in our doing by being able to form an idea of the action. We do, however remain unconscious of what actually happens when we perform the action, as unconscious as when we are asleep.

The fact that we feel ourselves to be individual beings we really owe to sleep. If we were always awake and given up to the life of ideas, our experience of the world would be limited to a sequence of images. We would have the feeling that we are at rest, as it were, in a fixed location in the universe, and the universe itself would be present in form of images. The I, too, would be no more than a kind of mirrored reflection. We are brought back to ourselves in our wide-awake life of ideas in two ways. Firstly, we pour into this life the continual memory of being in a condition of sleep between going to sleep and waking, a condition in which we do not experience anything. Secondly, we have indefinite recollections of our will intent, that is, of something that is sleep-like by nature, playing into conscious life. This gives us a feeling for the I and the I impulse. In ordinary life we do not have conscious awareness of the I impulse but experience it as a nudge coming from our organization. On the other hand we are aware of it because between going to sleep and waking up we go out into the cosmos with the I, which otherwise does not enter into ordinary consciousness, and astral body, which equally does not come to awareness. It is the dimming-down of consciousness between going to sleep and waking up that comes to conscious awareness.

What is it that puts us to sleep over and over again, pushing our will intent and much of our feeling life into the night-time darkness of the conscious mind? It is the need to develop organic activity in the exercise of the will. In the last lecture we noted that when human beings exercise the will they let their soul principle influence even the life of the muscles. The soul immerses itself in the life of the muscles, as it were, and we become unconscious of it, just as we become unconscious of the soul when it leaves the body and enters into a different state during going to sleep and waking up. We are therefore able to say that it is due to the needs and conditions of the living body that we are consciously aware of our I in ordinary life. It is due to the fact that we have a body which lays claim to the soul when will is to be exercised, and chases the soul down into the unconsciousness of sleep because it wants to balance the energies it develops in will activity. This enables it to mediate full awareness of the I at all times, even though the I exists at an unconscious level.

We are thus able to say that we enter into the living physical body by pouring our spirit, and that means in the first place the soul principle, into it. We shall see in a minute that with the soul principle we actually pour the spirit into the physical body. We feel physically strong when the soul has been poured into the body. We do not feel physically strong, but wide awake, when we have ideas and sensory perceptions.

To have ideas and sensory perceptions means not to live in the body. It is quite wrong to think that we must have imaginative, inspired and intuitive perception to enter into the world of the spirit. People are actually in the world of the spirit when they make sensory perceptions and have ideas. We have seen in these lectures that sensory perceptions depend on dead matter, purely physical apparatus, being embedded in the organism, with only the ether body present in them. In sensory perception we have experiences in the physical apparatus, which does not in itself come to experience . It is the spiritual process in the apparatus that we experience. The content of sensory perception is definitely spiritual by nature. It is merely that when we form ideas we extend the sensory activity to the nerve organization. Nerve activity actually is a process of dying. Organic activity has to be excluded when we want to form ideas. This is why we are definitely in the sphere of the spirit when we have sensory perceptions and ideas.

As we are human, and live between birth and death, our life in this sphere of the spirit is such, however, that we have only images of it. Characteristically, therefore, the things of the spirit first come to conscious awareness in sensory perceptions and ideas, but only in images. We are thus able to say: Sensory perceptions and ideas are experiences of life in the spirit, but only in images (written on the board, see table). When it comes to ideas we are in fact aware that they are abstract by nature and that the images they give are not rich and full. Things turn grey, we might say, when we move back from sensory perception to the life of ideas. That greyness exists only for our conscious life, however, for in reality all ideas developed by human beings contain Imaginations.

I am therefore able to say that ideas contain Imaginations, but these do not come to conscious awareness. The ideas we have in everyday life are a kind of extract of those Imaginations. The imaging process extends back into the body, and a pale reflection of our ideas comes to conscious awareness. Every single time you have an idea you also have an Imagination, but whilst the idea remains in the conscious mind, the Imagination slips down and lives in the general vitality, or vital activity, of your organism.

To draw it (Fig. 21), I would have to put the head here, with the process of sensory perception (red), then comes the activity of forming an idea (blue, green) based on sensory perceptions, and this really shows a Janus²⁴ face. In front it is the pale idea which comes to conscious awareness; at the back it is the Imagination which does not become conscious. The Imagination goes down into the organism, where it becomes part of general vital activity. It enters into every organ—it lives in the brain, in the heart, in the lungs, in the kidneys, everywhere. It unites with our general vitality.

Remarkably, the result is this: here, where I have drawn in red and blue, we have the spirit in our picture. None of that which extends down into the physical body comes to conscious awareness, but we experience it as our inner life. The spirit, then, is spirit in the forward direction; it is soul at the back, where it faces the organism (green). In the sphere of the soul, however, it immediately begins to go down into half conscious and unconscious spheres, uniting with the living body.

Below this here (pointing to the drawing) lies unconscious soul activity, and the Imagination vanishes into it. Coming from the other side we have the living physical body, but this is immersed in the night of our consciousness, in sleep, and only comes to expression when it sends the will upwards into conscious awareness. The will is the counter thrust; it makes us physically strong and gives us experience of reality. That experience, however, will at most come up as a feeling. We dream of this reality but essentially do not have it in waking consciousness.

As human beings between birth and death the price we pay for existing in the sphere of the spirit is to experience the spirit in the images of our sensory perceptions and of our ideas. We have living experience of reality, but it enters our conscious mind unconsciously, just as the reality of the outside world comes in unconsciously.

We enter into outside reality, but essentially it enters into us at an unconscious level because we know nothing of the states of sleep when we are out there in the outside reality, which spins a web around us, as it were and enters into us all unconscious. There (pointing to the drawing) we live in the reality, but we live in a physical body, or in an outer, physical element. In so far as we live in the element of the spirit we know it only as image. The physical body is however created out of the spirit, and if we develop our faculty of Imagination, we can gain living insight into the imaginative life that lies at the back of it.

Going further back in the sphere of the soul, we can also gain experience of what in ordinary consciousness are our feelings. First of all, conscious experience of feeling is gained. But behind our feeling lies Inspiration. Every single time you have a feeling you also have an Inspiration. But just as your Imaginations slide down into general vitality when you have ideas, so the Inspiration slides down into the physical body when you feel. You need it down there for your breathing activity and rhythmical function. The Inspiration unites with general rhythmical activity.

I can now put it like this: Further back in us we experience our feelings, and by entering more deeply into these we have inner experience, which is at a dream level. In this, however, Inspiration lies hidden (see Fig. 21).

A hidden Inspiration slips into rhythmical movement and activity, into our breathing and the circulation of the blood. If we were to have a look at someone who was thinking and feeling we might say: You have ideas and you think; this is something you know. But from this activity Imaginations are continuously instilled into every part of your body to maintain your vitality. You feel—and Inspirations are continually going down into your breathing and circulation.

Below this lies will activity. Among the activities of life between birth and death, will activity in the first place belongs purely to the living physical body, and it is experienced as such, for muscle activity lays claim to the spirit. So we have experience of it in the body, but at the sleep level, for only the spirit can be experienced in full consciousness. Here, it sleeps. But there is Intuition in there. It is genuine Intuition when human beings do what I spoke of the last time and send their inner activity and therefore also the spiritual experience they have into their muscle activity in form of images and thus become doers, people with will intent. They are then truly intuiting. They go outside their I life, letting the I enter into something entirely different, which is the movement of muscles and bones. Thus we can say: Intuition slips into metabolic and movement activity. The spirit therefore has its life in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.

You see, we now have the spirit wholly inside the body. We have Intuition in metabolism and in the movement of the limbs, Inspiration in rhythmical activity, and Imagination in general vitality. Only the perception of objects exists at the level of images, activity of the spirit in images. Being mere images they are also able to combine with the images of the outside world.

The last time we tried to see soul and body together in our thoughts. We have seen that the soul principle is active in the head and in the nerves and senses, where a continual dying process occurs, which allows the soul principle to come into its own as the organic principle is destroyed.

We have seen that in glandular activity the soul principle lays claim to the physical, but only to a limited extent, so that the gland then secretes matter. When muscles and bones are actively used, the soul principle is completely laid hold of by the physical. I made it very clear that we do not waffle on about an abstract interrelationship between the living physical body, the soul and the spirit, nor of the physical relating in some way to a “psychoid” element. No, we consider the soul in real terms and perceive the way the physical body takes the soul principle into itself and everywhere makes it part of itself. Now we have also seen that the spiritual principle, which initially exists only in images in us, nevertheless also lives in the living physical body.

Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition are not something we grasp the way we do the wind and the clouds. They are something that is very much present in the activity of the living body, slipping across into it, whilst we are only able to hold on to images of the things of the spirit. We are thus also able to penetrate to the spiritual principle in the human being. We can consider the human being in terms of form, of levels of life, of soul content, and of the spirit coming to revelation.

The human form is of course dependent on the fixed stars, but it presents itself to us in visible form. The levels of life are dependent on the planetary sphere. In our ordinary consciousness we cannot see them in physical form. We perceive them in so far as they come to expression in aspects of form. Deep down in us rests the soul principle. We gain access to it by considering the mysterious relationships between the activity of nerves and senses and the soul principle, turning our attention to glandular activity in relation to the life of feeling and everything connected with rhythmical activity. We also saw how the soul principle is connected with the metabolism and limbs. At one extreme of life, however, the spiritual enters into the soul principle; it is only able to take hold of images and pushes Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition down into the physical body. And when the spirit thus pours into the soul, it lives in the soul as the most inward element that human beings possess.

The other extreme does not draw human beings into the particular way in which they have sensory activity from within, ideas and feelings, where human beings go down into the physical, into reality, with their spirit, and where the physical, with the spirit, is tinged with the Inspirations which in turn take in Imaginations that come down. This is something that comes to expression when we contemplate in an inward way a human being who is before us and who is fully at rest. When we study the physiognomy, which shines out when the spirit enters into the living body, sending Inspiration into it, the spirit comes to the surface again, coming out through the impulses given by life and giving the human being first of all the flesh colour of the skin, and whatever else there is by way of physiognomy, showing itself in the noble brow, in the shape of the mouth and chin, the form of the nose, and so on. This spirit, entering into the body as Inspiration, becomes active through the levels of life and thus shows itself in the human being who is at rest.

As soon as people start to walk, to be active, and even if they just blink an eye, we see the Intuition aspect of the spirit which is sent down into the living body. When we look at the way someone walks, and at their gestures, we see the working of that person’s spirit, which, however, enters into the body as Intuition, being present not as spirit but as processes that generate heat, processes of chemical decomposition that occur in the body when a person is active in the world.

When we looked at the form, we had something which the world gives to the human being. Now that we have seen the spirit enter completely into the living body, we find that in activity the human being is in turn giving things to the world. But the price we have to pay for having part in the spirit between birth and death is that we have the spirit not in its reality but in the form of images. We do have the spirit in us as something real when we are between birth and death, but the price we have to pay is that we know this reality only when asleep, albeit in waking sleep. We really should say that life between birth and death means that human beings experience the spirit in the reflected glory of images but have no conscious experience of its reality, which only presents itself through the medium of the living body.

Between birth and death we see the spirit in the living body it has created. It is not really matter which we see, for matter is the outer reflection and not the inner reality of the spirit. We may therefore say that when we see any kind of matter in the world around us or in human beings it always means the the reality is hidden from us and only the surface present itself. There the spirit reveals itself out of the reality of the body and of matter. Fig. 22.

It is different when human beings partake of the spirit. Then the physical aspects, for instance the inner parts of the head—and the outer part, too, if they are not just looking in a mirror, though even then all they have is an image—remain in the background, whilst the spirit is really experienced, though only in its image. In the conscious mind we inwardly see the spirit, but as an image. Sleeping, and also in waking sleep, we perceive the spirit in its activity, but the essential reality of the perception does not come to conscious awareness; it remains outside.

Everything is always completely the other way round.

You see, to consider the human form we have to go a long way, to the great world of the fixed stars. Out in that world lie the impulses responsible for giving the human head, chest and limbs their specific form. Coming closer to the human being we encounter the planetary system, the sphere of the planets, and we find that this creates the levels of life in human beings. Then we have to go right inside the human being to find the soul principle. And when we actually enter into this we find the alternation between waking and sleeping, image and reality. Coming to the human being of mind and spirit we discover the spiritual principle in man.

I am now going to present something to you that many of you may well find to be extraordinarily abstract and indeed most strange. Please take it and think of it as some nuts that you have to crack, for what I intend to develop during these last fifteen minutes may prove important for you when you come to consider the nature of the world one day.

If we really visualize the road we have to travel from the whole universe, the fixed stars, through the planetary system and all the way to inside the human being, something quite specific comes to mind for those who are in a position to have this happen. You see, mathematicians establish the location of a body, or of a point—this is very important for those who work with the theory of relativity today—by thinking of three lines at right angles to one another that intersect in one point.

If they then want to give the location of point A, let us say (Fig. 23), they measure the distance from the three planes defined by the three lines. So if you have those three lines, you can give the location of any point. All it needs is to assume these three axes at right angles to one another, which are called “co-ordinates”. They enable us to define the location of any other point, or line, which after all can only be defined by the points it contains, and so on. (Fig. 23)

Mathematicians are inordinately proud of being able to define any location in this way. They speak of the three coordinates as the x, y and z co-ordinates. Yet for someone who is not just a mathematician but is someone connected with reality, as well as having studied mathematics, a question arises at this point.

Such a person would say: During life between birth and death—our mathematicians today do not work with life between death and rebirth, and everything they work with lies between birth and death—we, as human beings, are really always also in the outer reality, and as human beings we see, or perceive with some other sense, what is in the world outside us. I think you’ll agree that the world looks quite different if I stand in one place or another. When I stand over there—well, there would be a considerable difference due to the fact that when I stand here I look you straight in the eye, and if I were over there I would see you all from the other side. Speaking in terms of reality, then, we can always assess reality only from one particular point of view, for human beings can never completely remove themselves from reality.

In a way modern thinkers are always longing, however, to remove themselves from reality. Physicists want to exclude anything that is subjective. A modern physicist recently asked the question: What exists, really? What has being?—Even in our (German) language, the verb for “to be” (sein) derives from the verb “to see” (sehen), so that if we do not exclude the human being we would have to say, in popular terms: Anything you see, exists.—However, physicists are unable to accept this, and a modern physicist therefore gave the following definition: “Anything that can be measured, exists”. This means the object is not seen in relation to the human being but to an objective measuring rod; the human being is excluded.

Another example of excluding the human being is one I have mentioned on a number of occasions. It is the explanation given for the nebular hypothesis of Laplace. You take a droplet of oil, a playing card on a pin—a sewing pin will also serve—and rotate it, and droplets separate out. But nothing would separate out, and the whole small planetary system would not arise if it were not for the schoolmaster who turned the pin! Yet when people want to explain the universe they leave out the schoolmaster. Otherwise the teacher would have to say: Look, children, there a planetary system is evolving, but I am the one who turns the pin; and out there the great planetary system is evolving, and there is the great God who turns the great pin. The world could not evolve if there were not a god out there, who relatively speaking would be much bigger, as I am the little god to you here.—You see, that is what the teacher should really be saying.

He does not, of course. In modern thinking we have got into the habit of declaring that the point of view does not exist, as it were. It is declared non-existent even in analytical geometry, as I have shown. But then it is difficult to answer the question: Who is it who is looking? Who is really seeing this object here without seeing the x, y and z co-ordinates in perspective? Where is the individual who sees it like this? (Fig. 23) Well, you know, he can’t be in that place, nor in that place, he can’t be in any of those place, for if he were, he’d always see in perspective. But if he were far enough away, over yonder in infinity, he would see the vertical z line in the right way. He’d have to be a devil of a fellow to see this axis of co-ordinates, as it is called, which is shown meeting in a point in Figure 23; for he’d have to be out there in infinity—in that place, that place, and that one, everywhere within infinity. That is the point of view, which has to be everywhere at once, from which to consider all three dimensions as they are at right angles to each other. When we speak of space, and indeed of analytical geometry, the point of view has to be from all points in infinity.

And now let us take the opposite. Let us consider how human beings truly experience themselves inwardly. They feel themselves to be a point at the centre of the universe, and they are really always taking sights. Before them, or rather around them, they have their horizon. Anything at, above or below the horizon is experienced in a way I might describe as follows: They experience along their line of vision—it could also be the line of touch—or somewhere above or below, it might also be over here; in short they increase or decrease the angle, or open it in an upward or downward direction.

Mathematicians do the same thing, but they do so from a specific point of view. In this case they are actually taking the human being into account, though they won’t admit it since it would be disgraceful for a modern thinker to include the human being in one’s approach. So they speak of a point and define a second point somewhere else by determining the deviation from the line of vision. Thus they say: this point here is so far away that there is a possibility—well, I won’t go as far as to introduce you to the cosine, as it is called—of defining it. The point will always be different, however, and so will be its cosine, if the sight is taken from higher up or lower down. And if you really think about it, this is where we find ourselves entirely in the real world. The mathematicians have it; they call it a polar co-ordinate system.

We now arrive at a rather peculiar statement. We are able to say: That’s not a devil of a fellow, for it is always I myself. Wherever I may be, the point at the centre of the co-ordinate system is my point of view. If we are looking at space, which is what we are in fact doing, we are everywhere out there in infinity. We ourselves are that devil of a fellow. But if you consider the centre we have here from everywhere out there in infinity, what lies in between? Between point and infinity lies the circle.

If you go out to infinity, passing through space, you will find something in there. But if you visualize the point of view that is everywhere in infinity, you are in the region where things are seen from the point of view of the fixed stars. If you move inwards to the centre, you are in the region of the human point of view. Between the two lies the circle, or at least an approximate circle: the movements of the planets. It cannot be any other way. When the human being is mediated to the world through the soul, this has to happen through a circular movement, through spheres. This is simply due to the inner constitution of the universe. We therefore have to find the stars that move in orbits between ourselves and infinity.

You see, in very early times, instinctive clairvoyance established mathematics on the basis of this very real situation: cosmic space with its three dimensions and a point of view everywhere at infinity; the sphere and the centre which is oneself. This was the starting point for the mathematics of old. Today the science has become abstract and deals only in formulae, not reality. But if we consider it in an inner way, as we have been doing, we can still get a feeling for the way in which the science which modern mathematicians are forced to put before their mind’s eye as a system of co-ordinates, or polar co-ordinates, originates in the inner structure of the universe.

You see, if Einstein, or one of his followers, began to talk today, you would almost always find that they base themselves on some form of co-ordinate system and then move on to the theory of relativity. It is not surprising that all things become relative in this case. For as soon as you start to consider reality you have to change, or ought to change, into the devil of a fellow who is everywhere at infinity. And it makes no difference if the distance is a mile, or more, or less, or the diameter of the earth or even the sun—for all things become relative. We have the theory of relativity because the point of view is at infinity and it makes no difference how far things are apart. If you consider all the arbitrary reasons that are given, you find everything becomes relative. That is the true, psychological reason. All you have to do is look into these things.

Tomorrow we shall build on the basis we have gained today.

• 24. Janus was an ancient Italian deity said to be the protector of doors and gates. He was shown with a face on the front and another on the back of his head. The month January is named after him.

We have been considering the human being in relation to the cosmos. To people who do not know anything beyond the present-day way of looking at things it must seem rather absurd to hear of a link being made between the essential nature of the human being and the essential nature of the cosmos, and I am certain that the majority of people will consider this to be quite unscientific. Yet when we think of the spiritual streams of today there is an urgent need to draw attention to exactly the kind of thing we have been considering and to do so quite energetically. For these things may fairly be said to be entirely in line with modern thinking. The problem is, modern thinkers are rejecting them with great vehemence, which is doing untold harm to the life of mind and spirit.

To begin with, we’ll sum up what I have been presenting in recent lectures. We have been considering the human form as the outcome of something the causes of which must be looked for among the fixed stars, and particularly the constellations of the zodiac as their representatives. We found that to understand the human form we must first of all look to the zodiac; its twelve constellations make it possible for us to understand the human form in every detail.

To understand the levels of human life we must look to the planetary system for the elements which will enable us to do so.

We then moved on from understanding the levels of life to understanding the soul principle. There we had to go to the human being himself, to the form he has been given and to that which lives in him. We also looked at the thinking, feeling and will aspects of the inner life in relation to the human form and the levels of life. Yesterday we attempted to look for the element of mind and spirit in the inner life. With the soul principle we move from the cosmic periphery to life on earth as such—that is, if we consider the soul principle during life between birth and death. We are able to approach it by considering its true relationship to the human form and to human life.

Yesterday we found that the spirit, which human beings only experience in images, has to be looked for in the sphere of the soul. If I may put it like this, we are coming down to earth from heaven. To consider the human form we have to go as far as the fixed stars; to consider human life, we need to go to the sphere of the planets; to consider the human soul in its relationships between birth and death, we must first of all descend to earth. Thus the human being becomes a whole for us in his relationship to the cosmos.

Now if we really appreciate all this, we shall be able on the basis of it to draw the borderline between animal and human nature. The way it may be done is as follows. If we consider the principle which can be understood in relation to the zodiac and how it is in humans and in animals, a difference emerges. But to see the whole of it we need to consider how the zodiac, the planetary sphere and the earth, with everything presented in yesterday’s lecture, act on human beings and on animals. Outside the human being the physical world does not take the form it does in the human body. We find it in the forms of the mineral world, a world very different from the human physical body. This is because in the human being the physical principle is clothed in an etheric and an astral principle and in I nature, all of which change the physical principle, adapting it to suit their needs. In the physical world outside the human being we see the physical principle as it presents itself when not imbued with etheric, astral and I nature.

The inherent form principle of the mineral is the crystal, a polyhedral form.

To grasp this form we must first of all consider the physical matter which has developed out of the forces which are active in the mineral sphere. We have to visualize that in an elongated mineral specific forces act in this direction to elongate the mineral (see crystal on the right). The forces acting in this direction (horizontal line in the centre) are perhaps less powerful, or we may say they act to make the mineral more slender in this direction, and so on. In short, in order to talk about minerals at all, we have to visualize these forces being at specific angles to each other, acting in specific directions, irrespective of whether they come from inside or outside. And above all we have to visualize these forces as existing in the universe, at least to the point where they take effect in the sphere of the earth.

Being effective, they must also have an effect on the human physical body, which means it, too, must have the inherent tendency to become polyhedral. It does not actually become polyhedral because it still has its ether body and astral body which do not allow the human being to turn into a cube, octahedron, tetrahedron, icosahedron, and so on. The tendency is there, however, and it would be fair to say: In so far as human beings are physical beings, they tend towards becoming polyhedral. So if you are glad that you do not have to walk around as a cube, a tetrahedron or octahedron, the reason is that the powers of the astral and ether bodies act against the forces—octahedral, cubic, or whatever—inside you.

Now we are not only a physical body but also have an ether body. Through it we are in essence at one with the plant world. Through the physical body we represent the mineral, or physical, world around us, through the ether body the plant world around us.

Plants are also part of the physical world and therefore have the tendency to be polyhedral, but they add to it a tendency to be spherical. Circumstances may occasionally cause minerals to occur in spherical form, but this is not their true form. There has to be scree, or something of that kind, if a mineral is to be spherical.

In plants, every single cell seeks to achieve spherical form; in humans only the head goes a little in that direction. We owe this spherical form essentially to plant nature. The fact that not all plants are spherical is in the first place due to their having to fight against polyhedral form, which has its own outcome, and secondly to the plant form having also to fight against a cosmic, astral principle. You will remember from earlier lectures that a cosmic, astral principle presses down on the plant from above. All this modifies the spherical form. You also get spheres imposed on spheres. But the essential plant form is a sphere.

Seeking to achieve spherical form the plant assumes the form of the earth itself. As you know, the earth is a sphere in the cosmos, and so is every drop of water. Only the mineral parts of the earth are polyhedral. As a whole, the earth is spherical. The plant, or the life principle, therefore seeks to attain to the spherical form and in doing so is really trying to recreate the form of the earth.

Let us now go higher and consider what the human being is because of the astral body. Here the human being is something representing the animal nature found in the animal world. In the physical, mineral nature of man we look for the polyhedral form, in human plant nature for the spherical form which reflects the planet earth (Fig. 28). Animal nature can be understood if we do not stop at the spherical form but add something to this form. We have to add pockets, or sacs, to the spherical form, like this:

It is in the nature of the animal form that a pocket element breaks up the sphere, with pocket-like inroads made everywhere. Consider your eye sockets—two pockets coming in from the outside. Consider your nostrils—two pockets. And finally consider the whole of your digestive tract from mouth to stomach. It is possible to arrive at this if you let a pocket develop, starting at the mouth, which goes all the way down.

You always get the pocket form added to the spherical form when the transition has to be made from plant to animal form.

We can come to understand the pocket form if we lift our eyes from the earth to the planetary system. You will find it easy to see that the earth seeks to give its own form to everything that lives on it. But a planet acting from outside counteracts the earth forces and makes pockets in the spherical form given by the earth. The different creatures of the animal kingdom are provided with such sacs, or pockets, in a wide variety of ways. Consider the planets and the different ways in which they act. Saturn makes a different kind of inroad than Jupiter or Mars. The lion is equipped with a different kind of inner sac-nature for the simple reason that the planetary influences on it are different from those on the camel, for instance. So in this case we have sacs being formed.

But in animals—and this means above all in higher animals, for the situation is different with the lower animals—and also in human beings something arises which does not merely come from the planetary realm, so that we are able to say: The essence of both animal and human nature is to have more than just the pocket form. This would be the case if there were only the planets and if the firmament of fixed stars had no influence. Something is added to the pocket form. In many situations people are satisfied when they have not just a pocket but something in it. And it is indeed the case that it is the essence of the animal aspect of human nature to have a pocket with something to fill it. So we have a spherical form with a pocket and the pocket is filled.

You only need to look at the sense organs, the eye. You have first of all a pocket, which is the eye socket, and then something to fill it. And this fulfilment,²⁵ which occurs particularly in the sense organs, relates to the zodiac just as the pocket form relates to the planetary sphere. Human beings have the most complete animal organization in this respect, which is also why they have twelve pockets with their fillings, though this is disguised in all kinds of ways. This is why I had to list twelve sense organs in my Anthroposophy.²⁶

We can now go back and ask: Which cosmic principle relates to the polyhedral quality? You see, if we consider the earth, it has the life form if seen as a whole, and if it consisted entirely of water it would only show this form. But all kinds of disruptions enter into the water. You can observe these disruptions in the tides, for instance. There the water is given configuration. Next, let us look back to earlier stages of configuration for the liquid earth, when it first began to develop solid elements. It is still possible to see today that the tides are connected with the moon, and everything polyhedral which becomes part of the configuration of the earth relates to the moon.

Thus we are able to say: The polyhedral or physical nature of human beings is connected with the moon, their vegetable or etheric nature with the earth, their astral nature, which would produce the pocket form, with the planetary sphere, and the filling of the pocket with the zodiac.

What I have written on the board applies in a different way to humans than it does to animals. You see, with animals it is truly the case that the heavens only have significance as far as the sphere of the zodiac, meaning everything which lies within it. Anything which lies outside it holds no significance for the animal. Ancient wisdom was therefore quite right in calling it the “zodiac”,²⁷ for it was also able to say: Everything outside the zodiac in the universe might just as well not exist, for the animals on earth would still be exactly as they are. Only what lies below the zodiac, together with the earth and the moon, has significance for animals. What lies beyond the zodiac has, however, significance for human beings, for it influences the filling of the pockets.

For the animal we have to say: Everything which lies inside the zodiac influences the filling of the pockets. We therefore have to go into the zodiac itself and then we are able to explain how the filling of the pockets presents itself. With humans, we have to go beyond the zodiac (Fig. 34, brown) if we want to explain what goes on in the sphere of the senses, for example. In this respect, human beings go beyond the zodiac, animals do not.

It is also the case that in animals, the planetary sphere as such has a direct influence on the pockets. As the pockets continue inwards, to form the organs, animal organs are perfect reflections of the principles relating to the planetary sphere. Human beings again go a little further and we are able to say that in human beings, the region closer to the zodiac influences the pockets.

In animals, the earth has a direct effect on everything tending to assume spherical form. This is not possible in human beings, who otherwise would be animals, with a tendency to be spherical. In a sense, animals tend towards the spherical form. Here (Fig. 35) we have the backbone, then the legs. Animals are however prevented from becoming a complete sphere.

The back bone forms part of the sphere. Human beings tend to move away from the earth principle, just as they have moved away from the zodiac, and from the planetary sphere, towards the zodiac. We are able to say that the human spherical form is created by moving towards the planetary sphere. Human beings walk upright, however, and seek to go beyond mere adaptation to earthly principles.

With reference to the polyhedral element we have to say that the moon gives it directly to the animal. Human beings also seek to move out of the influences of the moon, “away from the moon”, as we might say, to receive their polyhedral element from a region between earth and moon. This means, however, that the moon still has an influence. In the fifth place, therefore, we must look to see what the moon, which in animals brings about the polyhedral element, is doing in human beings. It brings about a polyhedral element in humans, but as an image. Animals have the polyhedral element in their configuration; humans lift it out of the organism. Mathematical and geometrical ideas become image, taken out of the living physical body. Today, people primarily visualize and want to understand things in mathematical terms because they are able, under the moon’s influence, to lift their own polyhedral element out of the body, so that it enters into the conscious mind. We are thus able to say that thanks to the moon, we are able to understand the polyhedral element in images.

So you see how by considering the human being’s relationship to the cosmos we not only arrive at the outer form we have been considering in recent years but also understand how human beings gain inner form and structure. We see how they create their nasal cavities, or the stomach, as sacs or pockets. If we were to take this further we would understand the organs altogether and how they take internal form out of the whole cosmos. If we want to understand the human being we must always draw on the cosmos. We have to do so when we ask why we have an organ such as the lung, for instance. Essentially the lung can only be understood if we grasp that initially, in the embryo, a kind of sac forms, going inwards, with physical matter forming a lining. The sac-like form then tears itself free on the outside, and the organ closes itself off as an internal organ. We come to see why there is a lung, or any other organ, inside the human being if we perceive this organ to have originated from a sac, with the inner end of the sac thickening and due to other circumstances taking on a particular configuration. An organ such as the stomach can be seen as a sac extending inwards. An organ such as the lung, the heart or the kidney also starts as a sac, but it thickens here (Fig. 36), tears off here, and you have a closed-off internal organ.

Yet even with these closed-off organs—if we ask ourselves why they are in a particular place in the human organism, or why they have a particular shape or internal structure, we always have to consider the human being in relationship to the whole universe.

If a modern scientist were to hear of anthroposophists wanting to explain the lung, heart, liver, and so on out of the cosmos, he'd say we were quite mad. Members of the medical profession in particular would call this madness. They should not do so, however. It is up to them to realize that anthroposophy is actually trying to meet them half-way as they pursue their course clinging firmly to their accustomed blinkers. Let me give you a small example to prove this.

I have here before me a booklet written by the physician, medical scientist and biologist Moriz Benedikt in 1894.²⁸ I tend to quote this gentleman quite often, though I actually do not much like doing so, for apart from anything else, he shows himself to be terribly conceited, practically on every page he writes. He is also quite inflexible as a Kantian. There is, of course, the mitigating circumstance that he has made up his own Kantian ideas to suit himself, presenting them with some inflexibility. The man is extraordinarily gifted, however. He is not interested in anthroposophical ideas or anything of the kind, but it is fair to say that simply by being involved in medicine and science he has arrived at a reasonably unbiased view as to the value of his scientific outlook. He cannot get out of it; yet in a strange way he peers out. The others are also caught up in their science as if in a prison, but they do not even look at anything outside. He keeps looking at the outside world, and this allows him to arrive at extraordinarily interesting conclusions. His vanity has made him a great many enemies, and he will therefore sometimes say things about enemies who show themselves with their masks off—generally these people are “friends”, maintaining closed ranks. His colleagues have tended to put him down, and he therefore says things about them that are highly typical. He knows nothing about anthroposophy, of course, but still, if we consider anthroposophy in terms of its qualities it would be fair to say that, qualitatively speaking, he is an anti-anthroposophist. However, in the booklet I have before me he says:

The self-righteous ignore or deny anything that does not fit in with their point of view, persecuting not only the teaching, but even more bitterly the teachers. Self-righteousness is a peculiar kettle of fish. It smells sweet to the self-righteous but gives off a sharp, biting odour for others. Self-righteousness is by its very nature closely bound up with the scholars’ trade, so much so that although I hate the self-righteous I often ask myself: How often and in how many instances have you yourself been self-righteous? I’d be most grateful to anyone who would give me an exact answer to the question.

For my part, I am convinced that far from being grateful he would complain like anything if we were to make him aware of his own self-righteousness. Yet in his own peculiar way he has a particularly good eye for self-righteousness in others.

He goes on to speak of his own history, wanting to show that he has become a different kind of medical man from his colleagues. He writes:

Two severe strokes of destiny spelled disaster for my own development and also for the scientific position relative to the subject under discussion.

You’ll immediately be aware of a nice touch of vanity in what follows:

In the first place, I studied mathematics and mechanics before joining the medical profession. In those days we had an eminent mathematician at Vienna University, Professor von Ettingshausen,²⁹ who presented the most difficult problems in the mathematics of physics and caught our interest. I heard him develop the theories of Cauchy³⁰ and Poisson.³¹ Petzval³² taught us to express the problems of mechanics in mathematical formulas. It will be easy to show, however, how disastrous mathematical thinking is for a member of the medical profession, and above all a clinician.

Well, we shall see why it is disastrous, especially if such a person knows something about medicine. Professor Benedikt goes on with his story. You would have thought it to be a good stroke of destiny to be a mathematician, but he calls it a bad one, because it taught him to think. Other clinicians were apparently unable to think, and they hated him for having studied mathematics, for it meant he knew more than they did.

The second stroke of destiny to come in the days of my youth was that I became a student of Skoda.³³ I am still attached to his teachings today. He was the Kant of medical philosophy, and his mind rose to sublime heights not in books but in the discussion of diagnoses, indications for treatment, and particularly in postmortem reviews. Skoda had been a mathematician when young

—clearly another stroke of destiny!—

and had brought the most important and fundamental scientific thinking to medicine, though unfortunately only in isolated instances; the important insight I received from Skoda, having already been firmly convinced of it through my mathematical studies, is that in establishing scientific proof, we must be aware not only of what we know but also of what we do not know.

Benedikt had thus also studied under Skoda. The idea was that when using modern scientific methods—for this was the subject under discussion—we should be aware not only of what we know but also of what we do not yet know. Benedikt really did represent this principle with some degree of fanaticism in numerous treatises. He goes on to say:

This basic rule of medicine is not known to the majority of biologists, and indeed is incomprehensible to them. Some years ago, for example, I sent a manuscript in a foreign language to an anatomist, asking him to correct the language. When it came to the above statement, he wrote in the margin that he did not understand the meaning of it.

Benedikt says here that we should also consider what we do not know, and he wanted the other individual to translate the statement into proper French. The anatomist had written, however, to say he did not understand it.

When I showed the comment written in the margin to a professor at the technical university he smiled. The statement is perfectly clear to anyone involved in the exact sciences.

The man smiled because he understood mathematical thinking; it amused him that members of the medical profession thought they could ignore the things they did not know. An engineer must know what he does not know, for he has studied mathematics.

When I told a famous medical expert in Vienna of the odd reaction from my medical colleague, he said rather naively: Well, how are we to know the unknown?—This historical anecdote casts a sharp light on the method of thinking still prevalent in modern medicine and on the colossal errors made day by day and hour by hour in the medical literature.

These are the words of a medical man! But we now come to a most important point. Moriz Benedikt tells us what happens in medical science, where no account is taken of the unknown:

The problems generally arise with reference to the biology of an organ, its function, for instance. The conditions on which the function is based are partly unknown and still have to be found.

He goes on to give an example:

The liver, for instance, secretes bile. The reason for this secretory process lies mainly in the specific biochemical properties of the cells.

Let us ignore the fact that he is referring to the biochemical properties of cells, which does not really make sense. We are taking the point of view he takes in speaking of the liver.

The reason must be found as to how these differentiated properties evolve;...

He wants to find the reason why the liver is different from other organs; he intends to consider the unknown. It is known that the liver secretes bile. But now we come to the unknown, and mark you well, he produces a considerable list:

The reason must be found as to how these differential properties evolve; how the organ develops from its elements; how it comes to be in its particular place; why it relates to surrounding organs in a specific way; how with the aid of specific haemodynamic forces and haemostatic conditions it maintains the specificity of its cells; how with the aid of the central and centrifugal nervous system it is stimulated to function at the right time and with the necessary intensity; what the conditions are for nutrition in general, to maintain function and timing; which conditions impair function, causing short-term or permanent disorders, etc.

All this is not known and has to be considered. Moriz Benedikt then continues:

In science, these questions come up one after the other over long periods of time.

Just the questions come up, therefore!

The literature, on the other hand, considers only what is known at any time, without enquiring into the unknown, and behaves as if the basic problem had already been fully solved.

That is, makes no mention of the unknown. People like Moriz Benedikt are at least able to list all these unknown elements.

This is why only a small part of the theories which prevail at any given time is true, and they contain a colossal percentage of new and inherited errors which will continue on through generations as original sin.

What is this medical man really saying? He says: We have a medical literature but it only deals with the known. Yet the unknown keeps coming up after long intervals of time. What does Benedikt want? He wants people to be aware of what they do not know. What would happen in the case of the liver, for instance? A member of the medical profession taking the opposite view of Benedikt who gave a description of the liver would try to discover the biochemical properties of liver cells and present the fact that the liver secretes bile. He would be satisfied with this, for he does not talk about anything that is not known. Benedikt would say: Alright, the liver secretes bile; this is due to the biochemical constitution of the liver cells. But as a conscientious scientist I must also say everything I do not know about the liver and the bile. He would therefore write in his book:

This we know, but we do not know how the liver comes to be in that particular place; how the statics and dynamics of the blood, or rather the circulation, affect the liver; how the nervous system relates to the liver, both the system as a whole and the individual nerves; and how the liver contributes to nutrition. Benedikt’s books would therefore be different from those of other authors. As a scientist he would in this respect be extremely modest.

But he says this question as to the unknown comes up in the course of centuries; yet because of the way the questions are put, if we go down to fundamentals, then even taking Benedikt’s point of view, we could go on till Judgement Day, always putting down what is known and then what is unknown and the many questions that arise. Benedikt’s books would only differ from those of other authors in that they also list what is not known. Yet he would never accept that something we do not know has to be taken out into the cosmos, that it will continue to be unknown until we explain it out of the cosmos.

You see, a rational medical practitioner here says, speaking in the terms of his discipline, that we cannot explain the human being with the means at our disposal; all we can do is to list the things we do not know. Unfortunately he persists in his refusal to consider something which does provide answers to these questions, questions he says concern the unknown, and of course the answers can only be provided slowly and gradually.

Thus the questions are there in ordinary science. Anthroposophy offers the answers to these questions. This is the truth. It is something we should stress over and over again, quite emphatically.

Moriz Benedikt believes that the bad habits to be found in his particular science are due to the fact that people know nothing of the unknown, offering to humanity what they know on the basis of facts established in the sense-perceptible world only. He gets quite sarcastic as he goes on to say: This scientific ineptitude flourishes today ... not his ineptitude, but that of his colleagues! as much as it did a thousand years ago; indeed it is worse than ever, since production has become so much faster.

He means to say that in earlier times it was not possible to publish one’s misdemeanours so quickly.

Every short-lived notion or undertaking is published so quickly nowadays that medical journalism only needs a “Hot Wire column”, and perhaps we may see the day when telephone booths are set up just to make sure that scientific “ideas" do not lie fallow even for nine minutes.

Publication took more years in the past than it takes hours today.

Oh, and Moriz Benedikt also knows what he thinks of the public, who listen to the medical profession and swear by them! He puts it simply in the following rhyme:

Miller, Brown, Smith and Read join in every heinous deed.

He then starts to reproach his colleagues again—the heinous deeds are theirs, of course—saying:

These unsatisfactory conditions in biology will not improve until a major reform in education starts with the teachers. Anyone unable to show that he has made a serious study of mathematics and mechanics is not fit to be a thinker or a scientist, let alone a teacher. Individual genius has always achieved much; it limps, however, and will go on limping until it has learned to walk first in the school of mathematics.

Not everyone who wants to listen to something sensible will need mathematics, of course. But to work with genuine science one does need to be trained in mathematical thinking. This is why Plato—Moriz Benedikt is very rude about him, by the way—wrote on the doors to his academy: Admittance only for those trained in mathematics. This does not prevent present-day philosophers, who have not been trained in mathematics, to write about Plato, of course. And we may truly say: Most of the people who write about Plato today would not have gained admittance to his academy if it still existed. You will see, from what I have read to you from Moriz Benedikt’s booklet, how modern scientific minds view something they themselves really ought to desire, and how someone who, whilst not an anthroposophist but a rather vain individual who has got into some conflict with his colleagues, has nevertheless had some faint notion of the harm that is done—how such a person judges the situation. Let us be very clear about this: The situation we have today is exactly as an unbiased observer with insight gained in anthroposophy is compelled to describe it. The proofs are to be found everywhere in the world of modern exoteric science, you must merely want to look for them.

What we must do, however, is to learn how to consider the human being in a way which physicists would consider perfectly sensible. I have already given you the analogy: If you study a compass needle and insist on saying it assumes a particular direction out of its own inherent powers, you will never understand why there are north-and south-pointing forces in the compass needle. We must understand that the whole earth has two forces, that the poles of the two forces are determined from outside. In the same way it is utterly wrong to put a human being on the dissecting table and decide to explain the whole of the human being’s nature on the basis of what lies inside the skin. We need the whole world to understand the outer and inner aspects of the human being.

• 25. Steiner is using a slightly unusual term here, which usually translated as “fulfilment”. For the translation I have largely used terms like “filling”, “that which fills them” or “which are filled”, but I felt the note should be sounded just once in this passage.
• 26. Steiner R. Anthroposophy (A Fragment) (GA 45). Tr. C. E. Creeger. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1996.
• 27. From the Greek “ho ton [long “o”] zodion [long “o”s] kyklos” = the circle of the sculptured figures of animals.
• 28. Benedikt, Moriz (1835–1920), Hypnotismus und Suggestion, Leipzig & Wien 1894.
• 29. Ettingshausen, Andreas, Freiherr von (1796–1857), mathematician and physicist.
• 30. Cauchy, August Louis (1789–1857), French mathematician.
• 31. Poisson, Siméon Denis (1781–1840), French mathematician and physicist.
• 32. Petzval, Joseph (1807–1891), Austrian mathematician and physicist.
• 33. Skoda, Joseph (1805–1881), physician; together with Rokitansky established the high reputation of the Viennese School in its heyday.

We have been considering the human form, human life, the inner life and the human spirit in relation to the cosmos. Looking back on the different aspects considered, we are able to produce a kind of extractof it all and say: Deep down in the to produce a kind of extract of it all and say: Deep down in the depths of human nature lies the will (Fig. 37).

In a number of ways it is the most “mysterious” element in human nature, if I may put it like this. When we think of the moral sphere, it inevitably strikes us that our aberrations, tendencies in us which are often entirely hostile to the world, arise from the moral sphere as if from unfathomable depths, and that all pricks of conscience and self-reproaches we may feel stream up from the depths of the will.

We also know that this sphere of the will is mysterious by nature because in many respects there is something indefinite about it, something over which we have little control. It is an element which pushes us hither and thither on the billows of life, and we are not always able to say that we relate to it with our conscious impulses. In another respect, relating to our understanding, I have always stressed that the true nature of the will impulse lies outside our conscious awareness, being at the same level as experiences made in deep, dreamless sleep. In this respect, too, will intent is an indefinite, mysterious element which has been poured into human nature.

Considering the human mind and spirit, we are not able to say that human beings have it only when awake, say, or consciously forming ideas; we also have it in sleep and in the part of us into which will intent have been poured and where we are in the equivalent of deep sleep. We can imagine, therefore, that mind and spirit are also present when we sleep.

With reference to our will intent, two things can be distinguished. In the first place there is the will intent which induces us to be active from the time we wake up until we go to sleep—unless, of course, we are real lay-abouts. We are unable to perceive the nature of this will intent, but its effects come to awareness because we are able to form ideas of them. We do not know how our will impulse works when we take a step, but we can see that we have taken a step forward. We form an idea about the effects of our will intent and in our waking life we thus have an idea and awareness of those effects. This is one aspect of our will intent.

Another aspect is that the will is active in us even while we sleep. Internal processes occurring while we sleep are also effected by the will. We merely do not perceive them. Just as the sun also shines at night—on the other half of the earth, where we do not live—so will intent streams through our inner nature while we sleep, though we are not aware of this. It does, however, show itself afterwards, when we look back on the state of sleep.

We may thus distinguish between two kinds of will intent, an inner and an outer one.

Our will intent may be said to be down in the ocean depths of soul, rising up in waves. Since we had to agree that it is active also during sleep, when our living body is merely involved in organic activity, with no soul element streaming through it nor the light of mind and spirit illumining it, we also have to say: Our sleeping will intent has to do with organic activity, for organic, or vital, processes occur in us that are essentially connected with the will. They continue when we are awake and our will intent is in full flow. Will intent is revealed in internal metabolic processes, another area where we can speak of organic activity.

Out of the depth of this will ocean in human nature rise the waves of what comes to expression in our feelings. We know that in feeling, human nature works at a dimmed-down level (Fig. 37), with the intensity of conscious awareness reduced to the level of dreams. It is, however, less dim than our will intent. Something from the depths of human nature rises up into the light. Human beings bring light into their inner nature through feeling. In the process, the two aspects of will intent rise up into the more intensive level of conscious awareness; both inner and outer will extent can rise up and come to conscious awareness.

We therefore distinguish two kinds of feeling. One is the feeling which rises up from the sphere of the will and is related to the sleeping state in us. It comes to expression mainly in the antipathies of which we have so many. The kind of will intent which makes us active in the outside world when it rises up into our feeling, bringing us together with the world in sympathy, comes to expression in all the sympathies we feel for the world. In this region of the soul, therefore, we have dreamlike feeling experience coming to expression in sympathy and antipathy, sympathies and antipathies which go all the way up to our feeling for beauty, sympathies and antipathies relating to forms in life, both man-made and natural forms, and also the sympathies and antipathies which we have thanks to our organs of smell or taste, as we perceive odours and tastes, finding them good or repellent. All this rich and varied activity is the actual activity of the soul. Will intent is therefore revealed in organic activity, feeling in soul activity (Fig. 37).

If we study soul life from this point of view we can learn a great deal. We perceive that the waking state rouses us to be in sympathy with the world around us. Our antipathies essentially come from more unconscious levels. They rise from the sleep level of our will. It is as if our sympathies were more on the surface and as if our antipathies entered into them from unknown depths. Antipathies reject. With them, we put the world around us at a distance, isolating and shutting ourselves off. Egotism is mainly based on antipathies rising up inside us. The more egotistical a person, the more is the element of antipathy active inside. Egotists want to isolate themselves and be as far as possible by themselves.

In ordinary life we are not aware of the interplay of sympathies and antipathies in the inner life. We do become aware of it when our relationship to the outside world becomes abnormal and our defensive reactions, using our antipathies which come from the realm of sleep, also become abnormal. This happens, for instance, when our breathing is out of balance during sleep and we have nightmares. Inwardly we experience this as antipathy used to defend us against something that wants to invade us, reducing the experience of our egoity.

We get a glimpse of deep secrets in human life. When someone develops very powerful antipathies which then also enter into waking life, antipathy may enter into everything, even the astral body. The astral body then lets antipathetic nature stream out in front, rather like an abnormal aura. It may happen that the individual feels even people with whom he normally has a neutral relationship to be antipathetic and indeed people he normally loves. All the different kinds of persecution mania arise from this kind of situation. When we experience antipathetic feelings that cannot be explained by external circumstances, they come from overflowing antipathies in the soul. The pole arising from the realm of sleep in the life of the soul has undergone abnormal development in this case.

If this antipathetic element gains the upper hand, we get someone who hates all the world. And this can go to extremes. All education and all work done together in the social sphere should be designed to prevent people from developing this hatred. But just consider, if the element which rises up from the depths of human nature can make people into such egotists when it becomes too powerful, what must the inner will intent be like which is at the sleep level and which is mercifully hidden from us! We never come to realize the all-pervading presence of this sleeping will intent in the whole of our organism and our limbs. At most, highly unusual dreams may make some people a little aware of what lives in the will intent which restores the organism when we are sleeping. This element—I have shown it from another point of view in earlier lectures³⁴—is rightly beyond the threshold of ordinary consciousness. When you come to know it, you come to know everything in human beings which can take them to an extreme degree of badness. It is a profound mystery of life that our organic activity is balanced out by powers which would make a person a criminal, a bad character, if they were to gain the upper hand in conscious life.

Nothing in the world is in itself evil or good. Something which is thoroughly evil when it comes up into conscious life, also regulates our organic functions and restores our used up powers of vitality during sleep, which is the right place for it to be used. If you enquire into the nature of the powers which restore used-up vitality, you have to say: It is evil. Evil has its function. When human beings gain spiritual insight and see this element it is an element about which spiritual scientists of earlier times also said: Its true nature must not be described, for sinful are the lips which utter it, sinful the ears which hear it. People must know, however, that life is a dangerous process and that evil is very much present down in the depths, a much-needed power.

The waves also rise higher than this, into the forming of ideas. When the sleeping inner will intent which brings light in the sphere of feeling rises into the forming of ideas, light is shed, but at the same time the quality of our ideas is reduced through abstraction. Feelings of antipathy still have living intensity in human experience. When they rise up into the sphere of ideas, they live in all the negative, dismissive attitudes people have (Fig. 37). Everything we dismiss in this way, every “negative judgement”, as logicians call it, is due to antipathetic feeling, or sleeping will intent, rising up into the life of ideas.

When the sympathetic feelings which have their origin in wide awake, outside-related will intent, rise into the sphere of ideas we get positive attitudes. As you can see, we now have merely abstract images. In our feelings of sympathy and antipathy we still have something very much alive. In the opinion-based attitudes formed in the sphere of ideas we are standing still, as it were, and observing the world. We take a positive or negative stance. We are not as intensely involved as in antipathy, we merely say no. This is an abstract process. Instead of developing the heat of antipathy we simply say no. Instead of developing the warmth of sympathy we say yes. In contemplative calm we are above any relationship to the outside world to the point of forming an abstract judgement. Activity is merely at image level, therefore, and we are able to say, especially in the light of what was said yesterday: Here (Fig. 37) is the activity of mind and spirit, but will intent, feeling and judgement, or the forming of ideas, rise even further, into the sphere of the senses. What becomes of a negative opinion when it enters into the sphere of the senses? It becomes a situation where we perceive nothing. In terms of the most notable form of sensory perception, vision, we may call it a situation in which we see nothing and experience darkness: Experience of darkness. A positive judgement on the other hand means experience of light. We might of course just as well speak of experience of dumbness, experience of sound, etc. We could put this into words for every one of the twelve senses.

We may now ask ourselves what kind of activity we have in the sphere of the senses. We have considered organic activity, activity of the soul, and activity of mind and spirit. The last of these is entirely image-based, but still our own activity. The processes which occur between our senses and the outside world, on the other hand, really are no longer our own activity, for the world is influencing us. It is perfectly possible to draw the eye schematically, making it an independent entity, as it were. What happens in the eye is that the outside world penetrates into the organism as if through a bay. Here we are not engaged in our own activity in the world, but our position in the world is such that we may say: It is the activity of the gods. This is active throughout the whole world around us which in darkness inclines towards negative judgement and in light inclines towards positive judgement. Wise minds of the second post-Atlantean age had a particularly strong feeling for this activity of the gods influencing human beings in their relationship to the world. They had a powerful feeling for God in the light and God in the dark. God in the light is the divine principle with luciferic bias, God in the dark with ahrimanic bias. This is how people of the ancient Persian civilization experienced the world around them. To them, the sun represented that outside world—Sun as source of divine Light: second post-Atlantean age.

The sphere which lies between judgement and feeling was the main sphere of experience for the third post-Atlantean civilization, which is the Egyptian and Chaldean civilization. People then experienced the divine principle not so much in light and darkness outside but in the area where ideas come together with feelings. The influence of the gods on Egyptians and Chaldeans caused people to pour something of their antipathies into their negative judgements and something of their sympathies into their positive attitudes. We need to be able to read the images and other documents which have survived from that period to see how everything arose from positive sympathies and negative antipathies. Looking at figures from Egyptian tombs and elsewhere you can sense something in them that was artistically created out of positive sympathies and negative antipathies. You cannot create a sphinx without bringing in ideas alive with sympathy and antipathy. People then experienced not only light and darkness but the living quality inherent in feelings of sympathy and antipathy. The Sun was experienced as the source of divine Life.

During Greco-Latin times people had largely lost the direct connection with the outside world. In my Riddles of Philosophy³⁵ I have shown how people still experienced thoughts the way we experience sensory perceptions today but were gradually progressing to the state in which we are today. Due to I development, we essentially no longer have a real relationship to the outside world in which our I is in effect asleep in the body, and we tend towards the sleeping state. This was not so highly developed in ancient Greece, though it had already become quite powerful. The ancient Persians had not entered deeply into their physical nature. They did not really see themselves living fully in their bodies, particularly if they were sages. It was their belief that they moved and were active throughout the whole universe on the waves of light. The ancient Greeks had already reached a stage where they were asleep inside their bodies where this cosmic aspect was concerned. When we are actually asleep, our I and astral body are outside us; but compared to the wakefulness of the ancient Persians, even our waking state is one of sleep. The wakefulness, or let us say the “waking up”, of the ancient Persians which I have characterized in my Occult Science was like entering into the human senses, with light itself coming in at the same time.

We are no longer aware of the fact that on awakening we bring light into our eyes. Light is a shadowy element outside us. This meant that the Greeks were no longer able to perceive the sun as the true source of life but as something which penetrated them inwardly. To them, the element in which the sun lives inwardly in human beings was the element of Eros, love. Eros, the sun-element in man, was the true inner experience of the Greeks. Thus the sun was seen as the source of divine love.

Then, from about the 4th century onwards—I have spoken of various aspects of its specific nature on other occasions—came the age when the sun was experienced as no more than a physical body, a sphere of vapour, out there in space. The sun had, in fact, become obscured for humanity. Persians truly felt the sun to be the reflector of the light which billowed and lived in space with tremendous vigour. The Egyptians and Chaldeans saw it as life billowing and pulsing through the universe. The Greeks experienced it as something which instilled love into organic nature, as Eros guiding them through the waves of the emotions. Entering more and more into the human being, experience of the sun vanished into the deep down depths of soul. Today we carry the sun element down in those depths. We are not meant to reach it, because the Guardian of the Threshold stands before it, and because it is in the depths of which it was said in the ancient mysteries that no utterance should be given, for sinful were the lips which uttered it, and sinful the ear which heard it. Schools existed in the 4th century who essentially taught, to allow Christianity to spread: The Sun Mystery must not be revealed; a civilization has to come where the Sun Mystery is not known.

Behind everything which happens in the physical world are the inner powers which, I’d say, are teaching out of the universe. The Roman emperor Constantine (306–337) was one of the instruments of those powers. Under him, Christianity took the form in which the sun is denied.

Another emperor, Julian the Apostate,³⁶ took less account of developments in his day but let himself be guided by his enthusiasm for the last remnants of the old instinctive wisdom learned from his mystery teachers. He was murdered because he sought to restore the old tradition of the threefold Sun Mystery. The world did not want to take that road.

Today we have to realize that the old, instinctive wisdom needs to be revived in conscious wisdom. Wisdom which has gone down to subconscious levels, into mere organic, and even sub-organic, activity needs to be brought back to consciousness. The Sun Mystery must be found again.

When the Sun Mystery was in the process of being lost, Julian, who still wanted the world to be aware of it, made the most terrible enemies who finally killed him. Today we have enemies who are against the new Sun Mystery which anthroposophy must give to the world. Historical evolution now follows the opposite trend. The 4th century brought the decline; today we need the rise.

In this respect Constantine and Julian are symbols of historical evolution. Julian may be said to have stood on the shattered ruins of the past, wanting to rebuild the forms of the old wisdom out of those ruins. The old forms had been destroyed by Christianity, which initially, under Constantine, had taken materialistic form. Countless works of art, works of ancient wisdom and written works were destroyed, anything that might give people even a hint of the old Sun Mystery.

It is true that in order to achieve freedom, humanity had to come to believe that a sphere of gases moved through the universe out there, though physicists who would be able to go there would be really surprised, for instead of a sphere of gases they would find an empty space, indeed less than space. They would discover that the sun out there is not a sphere of luminous gases—which is a nonsense—but in the first place just a reflector (Fig. 39), unable to radiate light and at most merely reflecting it. In the spirit, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Venus and the moon radiate light. Physically the sun appears to be shining on them, but in reality they radiate light towards the sun, which acts as a reflector. This is the physical reality. The ancient Persians were still able to perceive the sun as the source of light for the earth, but not an actual source but a reflector. Later it became the reflector of life and the reflector of love.

Julian the Apostate wanted people to understand this and was got rid off because of this. To achieve freedom, humanity had to go through superstitious belief in a sphere of gases radiating light—something we see represented as the absolute truth in modern physics textbooks. Now we must penetrate to the truth of the matter again.

In this respect, therefore, Constantine and Julian are very much like two symbols. Julian wanted to preserve the old traditions so that the true Sun Mystery might still reach people. During the early centuries, the Christ was still an Apollo or Sun figure.

The Sun Mystery was seen as the most precious jewel humanity possessed. It was symbolized in the Palladium,³⁷ which was said to have been kept in Troy, where the mystery priests used it to reveal the true nature of the sun to people in ritual, sacramental form. It was then taken to Rome, and part of the secret knowledge held by Roman initiates was that the Palladium was in safe keeping in Rome. Essentially the initiate priests of ancient Rome, and also the early emperors of Rome, above all Augustus,³⁸ based their actions on the knowledge that the greatest jewel the world possessed, or at least its physical symbol, was in Rome. The Palladium had been placed beneath the foundations of the most highly esteemed temple in Rome, a fact only known to those who knew the deepest secrets of Roman life. Through the spirit, it had, however, also become known to those whose role it was to bring Christianity to the world. The early Christians went to Rome because of this. So there was a definite spiritual element.

When Christianity was secularized under Constantine, the Palladium was removed from Rome. Constantine founded Constantinople and had the Palladium put in the ground under the column he erected to himself. The further development of Roman Christianity was that the Sun mystery was taken away by the very emperor who established the rigid forms, rigid mechanisms, of Christianity in Rome. With this, Christendom has lost the wisdom of the world, the outward sign of this being the transfer of the Palladium from Rome to Constantinople.

In some parts of the Slavonic world—people always put their own interpretation on this—it was believed until the beginning of the 20th century that in the not too far distant future the Palladium would be taken from Constantinople to another city, in their belief a Slav city.

Whichever way this may be, the Palladium—you may take the whole as an outer symbol, but it is the inner aspect which matters—is waiting to go forth from Constantinople, which is casting darkness on it, to a place where it will be totally obscured. The Palladium is thus taken to the East, where the old wisdom lives in decadence and growing obscurity. Just as the Sun is a reflector of light given to it from the universe, everything depends on it in the further evolution of the world that the Palladium be illumined by a wisdom arising from the treasury of insight gained in the West. The Palladium, heirloom of the past taken from Troy to Rome and then to Constantinople, and to be taken even further into the darkness of the East, the Palladium, jewel of the Sun, must wait until in the West grows in mind and spirit and is able to release it from the dark, obscured treasury of insight limited to the natural world. Our mission for the future is thus linked to the most sacred tradition of European development.

To this day, then, legends are still alive for those initiated into these mysteries, some of them very plain, simple people who walk about on this earth. Legends are still alive of the Trojan Palladium being taken to Rome, of the Palladium jewel of wisdom, being taken to Constantinople when Roman Christianity became worldly and superficial, and that it shall be taken to the East one day when all the old wisdom will have been stripped away in the East, having fallen into utter decadence, and legends that speak of the need to bring new light from the West to this Sun jewel.

The Sun has vanished into the depths of human nature. We have to find it again by developing the science of the spirit. Humanity must find this Sun again, or the Palladium will vanish into the obscurity of the East. Today it is sinful to utter words that are wrong: “Ex oriente lux”. The light can no longer come from the East, which has fallen into decadence. Yet the East, which will have the Sun jewel, however obscured, is waiting for the light of the West. Today, people walk in the darkness, arrange to meet in the dark, their eyes turned to—Washington.³⁹ Salvation, however, will only come from Washingtons able to speak out of the mood of the spiritual world in such a way that they not only open economic gates for China, looking for the darkness which surrounds the Palladium. Salvation will only come when conferences held in the West decide to take light to the East, letting the Palladium shine out again. Like a fluorescent body, the Palladium in itself is dark; it shines out when light streams into it. The same holds true for the wisdom of the East. Dark in itself, it will be illumined and fluoresce when the wisdom of the West, the light of the spirit from the West, enters into it.

The people of the West are as yet unable to see this. The legend of the Palladium needs to be placed in the bright light of consciousness. We must feel the right kind of compassion for Julian the Apostate who wanted to close his eyes to the age when the light of freedom would be able to germinate in the darkness, who wanted to preserve the instinctive wisdom of old and therefore had to perish. We have to realize that Constantine took the light of wisdom from the Romans by giving them a worldly Christianity, sending Christianity into the darkness. We have to realize that the light which will let the Palladium shine out again must be sought in modern science. Only then will an important step in world history come to fulfilment. Only then will the Palladium, which became Western the moment the Greeks burned down Troy and which still holds the light that shone from Troy, become Western and Eastern. It is now in the dark and must be brought out of the dark. Light must be brought to the Palladium.

We can win enthusiasm from historical evolution if our hearts are in the right place. If they are, in the sense of what I have been presenting today, we shall also be able to find the right response to the impulses which are the true impulses of the science of the spirit.

I’ll continue with this on Friday.

• 34. See the lectures given on 23 and 24 September 1921—Cosmosophy Vol. 1. (GA 207)
• 35. Steiner R. Riddles of Philosophy (GA 18), tr. by F. C. A. Koelln. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1973.
• 36. Flavius Claudius Julianus (c. 331–363), half-brother of Constantine, Roman emperor (361–363).
• 37. In Greek mythology, the Palladium was an image of the goddess Pallas Athene which had come from heaven and was “the luck of Troy”. Stolen by Odysseus and Diomedes, it was thought to be in Argos, Athens or Sparta. According to the Romans, Anaeas had taken it to Rome.
• 38. Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus (63 BC–AD 14), first Roman emperor.
• 39. Washington Conference (21 November 1921 - 6 February 1922) to discuss naval disarmament and the Far East. Led among other things to American-British-French-Japanese agreement to guarantee each other’s territories and a collective guarantee of China’s independence.

In recent weeks we have been considering the human being from all kinds of different points of view, with the aim of getting a better idea of complex human nature and the relationship of the human being to the world.

Let us begin by recalling something very simple, something we know about the elemental aspects: the fact that in the present world cycle, the human being has four effective aspects—physical body, ether body, astral body and I. Let us also consider how these four essentially manifest. We have to say that the I mainly comes to revelation in all expressions of the human will. When we sleep, the will is essentially at rest. In other words: the will principle does not then come to expression through the physical organization. The I is outside the physical body when we sleep. The fact that the will principle does not come to expression reveals to us that the I is then not present in the physical body.

The activity of the astral body essentially can be observed in the whole sphere of feelings. The astral body is also outside the human being in sleep, when the sphere of feelings moves to the dim, dark part of the conscious mind. Consciousness is altogether silent in sleep, and we may thus be in some doubt as to what really comes to revelation through the physical body and the ether body. Let us leave this aside for the moment. The physical body is the most obvious part of the human being. Even someone not able to have imaginative vision can perceive the reality of the ether body in a number of ways. For the moment, however, let us leave aside the physical and the etheric from the point of view we have just taken of the I as the will aspect and the astral as the feeling aspect.

If we follow a person’s life from morning to evening, in the waking state, the I and astral body are at work in the physical and ether bodies with regard to will and feelings. Taking all the inner experiences arising in the waking state, we have first of all the world of sensory perceptions, which are bound to the physical body. We also have the world of thoughts and ideas as the consequence of sensory perception. We know very well that our world of ideas in the waking state has elements of will and feeling in it.

We have often stressed that in the sphere of the soul it is easy to make the abstract distinction between ideas, feelings and will elements. But in reality these three inner activities blend into each other. We can sense the will element in the linking or separating of ideas. We can also perceive that the idea is imbued with feeling. We can feel ourselves in sympathy with one idea and perhaps in antipathy with another. Let us now turn to the I and the astral body as they leave the living body on going to sleep. They leave something behind in the physical world which, while it does not appear at first sight to be the same as plant life, essentially is nevertheless like it, for it has a physical and an ether body just like a plant. In our astral principle we have something which comes to outward revelation in the animal world, and in our I we have something which emerges in the specifically human form, thus also coming to outward revelation. Since, however, I and astral body are outside the physical and ether bodies from when we go to sleep until we wake up again, we cannot say that this human form or animal nature is part of the inner nature of I and astral body. We have to realize that I and astral body do not come to revelation in that case; when I and astral body are on their own, during sleep, they cannot reveal themselves to the physical world in a way perceptible to the senses or to the rational mind.

I and astral body are therefore entirely beyond sensory perception. Now we also know that when we look at something in the plant world, we are not at all inclined to see it the way we see a human being. Looking at a human being we are interested in the moral element, for instance, whether the individual is good or bad. This means that there is no point in thinking in terms of good or evil with reference to the physical and ether body, the principles which remain in the physical world when we have gone to sleep. The whole human moral element is brought back when we wake up and I and astral body return to the physical and ether bodies.

Even people who do not have higher vision may take this as a sign that I and astral body have to do with what we call “the moral world order”. Our physical and ether bodies soak this up, as it were, as we wake up. And it is in no way absurd for those who do not have higher vision to say: Essentially, I and astral body belong to a completely different world, for the physical and ether bodies are neutral when it comes to being good or evil, just as plants are. I and astral body take moral responsibility into them.

Even those who do not achieve higher vision through the science of the spirit which takes its orientation from anthroposophy, but whose thinking relates to everyday life, will be able to realize that we are dealing with polar opposites here: physical body and ether body inclined to nature-given form, and I and astral body inclined to moral form. To take this further, however, we will need to draw on observations made through higher vision. When we use this to study the I and the astral body in the world to which they belong between going to sleep and waking up, they are seen to have the world of the spirit as their environment just as the natural world is the environment of the physical body. I and astral body bring the inner mortality to human beings from the world of the spirit. As the physical and ether bodies are morally neutral, they cannot possibly draw on them for moral impulses. They do in truth gain the moral impulses from the world in which they are between going to sleep and waking up.

In the science of the spirit, the following is said with regard to this: When human beings leave their physical and ether bodies on going to sleep, they meet, without being aware of it, the spiritual entities of the world, presenting to them all the inner morality they developed when conscious in their physical and ether bodies. They are compelled to let the world of soul and spirit work on the moral elements they have brought. This brings us to a different aspect of something we have often considered in our efforts to build a bridge between etheric and physical worlds on one hand and moral and spiritual worlds on the other.

The I has will quality. It develops its whole structure and constitution between waking up and falling asleep in the physical and ether bodies. When we go to sleep, the I meets the entities of the spiritual world. Here, as people walking around in the physical world, we perceive solid bodies with our organs of touch; we see colours, we use sensory perception. We relate to the physical forces of the world in a specific way The I also enters into a specific relationship to the powers of the world where it lives between going to sleep and waking up. Let me present this in graphic form It can only be schematic, of course. Let us say this is the physical man being in the process of going to sleep (Fig. 40, yellow).

This, which I am drawing here, is the ether body which fills the human being. If I were to draw the human being in the waking state, I’d have to draw in the astral body and the I. I am not going to do so, because I want to characterize the condition of going to sleep. The will element, that is, the I, meets the entities of the spiritual world.

It relates to them in the way we relate to physical entities with our physical body when awake. The relationship between the will-related I and the entities of the spiritual world is, however, much more real than the maya-like relationship which the physical body has with its environment. The relationship in sleep comes to expression above all in the following way, more or less, I can only put these things into images for you): When the I is in touch with the powers of the spiritual entities between going to sleep and waking up, everything evil in our state of soul makes the I waste away; everything good allows the will-related I to develop in freedom.

Showing this in graphic form we arrive at a specific form of the spiritual, will-related I form as it leaves the body (remember, these are only images). With regard to the human being of limbs, the I is quite intensely inside the human being even during sleep. Let me show it like this: These furrowed lines (light-coloured) have evolved from counter activities of the spiritual entities, their form depending entirely on the moral constitution. We may indeed say that the 1 assumes a spiritual form based on its moral constitution as it enters the world of the spirit.

When we go to sleep, the astral body also goes into the world outside us which is a world of soul quality. The will-related I meets the entities of the spiritual world, the feeling-related astral body enters into the soul sphere outside us.

The constitution of our will, with reference to good and evil, also has elements, or powers, of feeling in it. We merely have to recall the different feeling mood we have after doing a good deed compared to after doing something bad. 1 need only mention the whole sphere of self-reproach and inner satisfaction and you can see how our moral constitution is imbued with feeling. The feeling element as a whole enters the soul sphere when we fall asleep, and this enters into a relationship with the soul world outside. When we are awake we relate to the physical world around us through our ideas and in doing so develop the inner life of feelings—though the life of feeling merely connects with the life of ideas inside us. When we are asleep, our feeling-related astral principle makes direct contact with the astral world.

It is not given form, however. The will-related I is given form (I have shown this by drawing furrowed lines). Interaction between the astral body and the soul environment results in something I cannot draw as furrowing. I have to call it colouring, imbuing the astral body. To draw it I would, according to whether we are full of self-reproach or inner satisfaction, feelings of sympathy and antipathy, show the astral coloured by something with schematically may be shown as a particular colour (Fig. 41, reddish, blue).

Through the I, therefore, our higher nature is given form, and the astral is coloured through and through. This is of course a schematic way of putting it. It is perfectly justifiable to express these processes in colour images, but it has to be said that only part of the process can be expressed in this way. Instead of colouring the image I might just as well have all kinds of musical instruments at hand, for instance, and give expression to the above in combinations of sounds. One might even bring in qualities of taste. All this whirls and swirls together in the astral body when it is outside the physical body between going to sleep and waking up.

The situation is such, however, that the direction of the effective powers which bring about everything I have drawn, really derive, seen in schematic form, from the human being of limbs and metabolism. The spiritual entities and the soul world giving form and colour are working from below upwards, as it were.

If we try to discover the true nature of that which is given form and colour outside the human being between going to sleep and waking up, we finally arrive at the following. Between waking up and going to sleep the human form is complete, with I, astral body, ether body and physical body forming an interrelated whole. This goes hand in hand with a specific intensity of conscious awareness which is intellectual and has qualities of feeling and will. Compared to it, the element which is outside during sleep has an infantile quality. We think of a child’s dimmed-down state of consciousness, something we can only come close to when our consciousness is filled with dreams. Now imagine the child’s dimmed-down consciousness becoming even less developed—this would be closer to the nature of what is outside us during sleep. We might say: The element which is outside the human being during sleep is more infantile than the mind and spirit of a child.

What is the real nature of the element of human soul and spirit which lives outside during sleep? In the light of spiritual science, the determining factor is characteristically seen to come from the human being of limbs and metabolism. Studying what can be observed through higher vision one has the feeling—which gradually grows into the definite realization—that by taking this whole aspect here to be a photographic negative and visualizing the positive, we actually get the structure of the human brain. The scale is not the same, but if you see it as a negative and visualize the positive you get the human brain.

Think back to the various aspects I have presented. I have said that the structure of the human head in one particular life inwardly, in the structure of its powers, represents the individual from the previous life on earth, minus the head. What you are today contains the powers your head will have in your next life on earth. We see the same thing in what a human being puts into the outside world between going to sleep and waking up, except that it is infantile, childlike in form and, of course, converted into a negative.

Between going to sleep and waking up human beings in fact put an image into the world of what will incarnate into a physical form in their next life on earth. This is extraordinarily significant. If we now recall that it is the moral constitution of the soul which determines this form and coloration (Fig. 41), we must consider the powers inherent in the human head in the next life on earth to be the embodiment of the moral constitution of the soul in the present life. Since the powers of the human being come to expression in our ability to think and form ideas, this ability will therefore be the outcome of our moral constitution of soul in the present life. All of this exists as an image in what human beings put into the outside world on going to sleep.

In the light of the science of the spirit it would thus be fair to say: During the night, when we are asleep, we put a quite specific question to another world, the world of the spirit. We do not do this consciously but with a part of us that moves out of the physical and ether bodies at that time. The question we put is: How does my moral constitution of soul appear to the entities in the world of the spirit?

And we are given an answer which consists in the shaping of the furrows and the colouring we are given, both in accord with our moral constitution of soul. Every morning we enter into our physical and etheric bodies on waking up with an answer gained in the world of soul and spirit. Going to sleep, we always unconsciously ask a question; waking up, the answer is given at the unconscious level from the world of the spirit. At that level, we are all the time in dialogue with the world of the spirit, gathering there the answers which tell us the true state of our inner nature.

This allows you to see something which otherwise is always extraordinarily abstract. You see, when we speak of our conscience, this is something very real to us; yet when we are asked to speak of the specific nature of our conscience we immediately become rather vague. With reference to our moral impulses, conscience is something of which we have a real inner experience. Yet if we use the methods of ordinary science to reflect on conscience, we fall into chaos and are unable to arrive at anything definite. Here you are given something definite, which is, that your moral constitution of soul wins a continuous response from the world of the spirit. You bring the forms developed by the world of the spirit into your physical and etheric reality, and with this you bring the voice of conscience to it. In waking life, the answer given in form and colour is transformed into the voice of conscience. In fact we depend on the sleep state for everything we have by way of inner moral attitude.

Many examples have been given of the greater wisdom inherent in the instinctive perception of earlier times and the instinctive perception, which are not intellectual; it is greater than our modern science, though it takes the form of images. The moral principles of instinctive perception contain much of what comes back to us again through the true science of the spirit, though it is now clearer, more transparent and defined. One of the principles which is part of popular belief is that if someone has offended you, do not take your inner reaction to this through sleep but if at all possible settle the matter before you go to sleep. Do not take your anger through sleep, therefore, but try to calm it before you go to sleep.

When you know that going to sleep means you are putting a question to the world of the spirit and that waking up is the answer to your question, you will be able to say to yourself: The answer you receive from the world of the spirit and take into your physical body as you wake up will be different if you moderated your anger the night before, or reduced the offence you felt, than if you take the feelings of offence into sleep and put your question out of injured feelings or in such anger that the fire of your anger fills the whole question. If you take an angry mood into the world of the spirit it is as if a stream of volcanic fire were to pour into that world. The soul world outside then has to colour this stream of volcanic fire (Fig. 41, reddish). This is very different from the situation where you have let your anger go down before going to sleep.

The effects of much of what I have said here can be seen not only in the human heart and mind but also in the way physical life and the life of the internal organs, is tuned. The causes of many diseases lie in the questions we receive to the answers we unconsciously put to the spiritual world as we go to sleep. In the waking state, our physical and etheric organs have to deal fully with everything the will-related I and the feeling-related astral body bring with them from the world of the spirit as we wake up.

It is quite wrong to think we have lots of experiences when awake but none in our sleep. When awake we experience processes that mostly take place between ourselves and the physical outside world. Satisfaction feit about these processes accompanies our clear perception of our relationship to the world rather like an inner dream in heart and mind—you will remember that the feeling element only has dream-level intensity of consciousness. When we are between going to sleep and waking up, however, considerable inner activity goes an in the I and astral body: The will-related I is given form, the feeling-imbued astral body is imbued with the powers of the outside world of soul and spirit. These real, factual processes penetrate and stream through the physical and ether bodies, and the way we behave in the physical world is determined by this. We do more for our inner life during sleep than we do in our waking hours. 011 the other hand, what we do when asleep depends an those waking hours. I'd say that the whole significance of sleep essentially lies not only in physical experience but in the moral structure of our inner nature.

I have shown on a number of occasions that superficial ideas about the way in which the human physical and ether bodies relate to the process of going to sleep are wrong. It is usually said that human beings grow tired because they use their limbs, because they work, and they need to sleep to make up for this. Merely to remember that we do not always go to sleep because we are tired will put us on the right track. Think of the well-rested retired gentleman who may go to a lecture, for instance, because it is the done thing; he’ll usually be fast asleep after the first five minutes, which is hardly due to his being tired.

Considering the superficial experiences to be gained in this field, we come to realize that people generally confuse cause and effect in this instance. We are in fact tired because we want to go to sleep. The impulse to go to sleep is a much more inward one than the physical tiredness which is its counterpart. When the outside world offers nothing of interest, the longing arises to withdraw from it. Soul and spirit then leave the living physical body, which grows tired. We grow tired because we want to go to sleep, not the other way round. Anyone can see this, if they have the will to do so. It is of course extraordinarily difficult to accept the truth of things that are so closely bound up with people’s self-satisfied life interest. But if we are prepared to accept truth, we will reach the point where we do not merely see going to sleep as a physical and physiological process, but consider it in relation to the whole cosmos which, as I have shown from many different points of view, also contains the moral impulses as real impulses, not just mere words. The alternation between sleeping and waking thus shows us how a bridge can be built between the physical and the moral elements in our world order.

Du Bois-Reymond,⁴⁰ the physiologist who gave that famous lecture on the limits of natural science, once said: “It is utterly beyond us to grasp the human being as he is in waking life.” Well, we know what to think of such a statement. Du Bois-Reymond believes, however, that it is possible for us to grasp the sleeping human being. According to him, the laws and relationship of the physical world outside, which we are able to grasp, also pertain to the sleeping human being, only in a more complex fashion. We know this to be incorrect, but let us merely consider the statement, which is, that we can have scientific understanding of the sleeping human being, but not of the waking human being.

So here a scientist is admitting that we cannot use the tools of science to discover what pervades the whole human being in the waking sate, and that the sleeping individual as a physical entity looks very different from an individual who is awake even in the eyes of scientists.

Scientists know nothing, of course, of the will-related I and feeling-related astral body which leave the human being for the non-physical world. But this “nothing”, what is it in the light of our present study? It is something which belongs to the moral world order. The activity of the moral principle is a real world which begins at the very point where people taking the scientific approach cease their observations. After waking up, the real effects of the moral principle show themselves only in the inner constitution of the human being. To enter into the sphere where moral reality is to be found we must therefore consider the world in which human beings live between waking up and going to sleep. It is not surprising, therefore, that people who take the scientific view and do not enter into this world only know a real world which does not contain the moral impulses and therefore relegate moral impulses to the realm of pure belief.

Such belief, however, becomes insight as real as that achieved by the followers of the scientific approach once we turn our attention to the other sphere. Our discussion will, of course, have to be based on completely different premises if we want to consider this sphere of spirit and soul imbued with moral principles.

If my drawing represented something from the physical world, I would have to base myself on the physical. My drawing would be an image of this, and we would progress from external reality to something which is merely image. We have to take the opposite route if we want to represent the non-physical. We have to experience it inwardly and then go outside and represent inward experience in an image. This kind of inward experience is extremely mobile and I should really show this colouring as glittering and gleaming, shifting and changing, growing luminous and fading away again, which is exactly what the spiritual scientist observes when considering the human being as a whole.

If one gains a vision of the astral body and I during sleep—I am trying to be extremely accurate here—the form given to the I and the colouring given to the astral body is bright and distinct. When I and astral body return to the physical and ether bodies, this bright, glittering and gleaming principle grows dark and dull. Outside the body the I aspect has definite contours; inside the body it grows indefinite. You get quite a specific feeling when you watch the I and astral body becoming submerged in the physical and ether bodies on waking. To use abstract words to describe this, means expressing oneself rather clumsily as a rule. It is however possible to define it relatively clearly. Observing the process you have a feeling which is rather like being aware of the coming of autumn and winter and letting this influence your soul. To consider the waking-up process in terms of the whole human being is to enter into a mood like that experienced with the coming of winter. Going to sleep, with the spirit and soul principles going outside the human being, you experience an inner mood similar to the one experienced with the coming of spring and summer. It is indeed the case that you enter into something very special here.

Dear friends, for several weeks I have tried to show how by taking the approach of spiritual science we come to see the human in relationship to the whole cosmos. I have shown you the human form in its relationship to the world of the fixed stars, and the levels of human life in relation to the world of the planets. Considering the human being in the light of spiritual science, we are always taken outside the human being. Today we have considered the alternating states of waking and sleeping; entering into them with inner feeling, we are again taken outside the human being, this time not into the world of the stars but into the world of time. So we said to ourselves: We understand the waking-up process if we understand the coming of autumn and winter; we understand the process of going to sleep if we understand the coming of spring and summer. From the progress of time in the human being we are taken into the progress of time in the cosmos, into the changing seasons. The human being is seen to be an image also of what happens in time. In the preceding weeks we endeavoured to see the human being as an image of the macrocosm more in terms of space.

We thus relate the human being to the world, and understand him in terms of the world. And then the moral world order also becomes reality for us and not a world of empty words. If we enter into everything we are able to feel in considering our relationship to the world, religious impulses enter into our ethical and moral world. The ethical will then comes to express the divine will which reigns in the human being, and the ethical and moral sphere is lifted up into the ethical and religious sphere. This is how anthroposophy as science of the spirit seeks to find the way to the ethical and religious. We shall continue with this tomorrow.

• 40. Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–96), German physiologist born in Berlin of French parentage, professor of physics at Berlin. The lecture referred to was published in Leipzig in 1916.

Yesterday we concentrated on the condition of the human astral body and I between going to sleep and waking up. Let us pick up the thread again. I said that if we consider the human physical and ether body during sleep and compare this to the I and astral body we have to say: The will-endowed or will-related I is given form out of the relationship it develops to the spirits of the other world during sleep. Using a diagram to show the I being given form, I said that if we see the furrowing given to the I (Fig. 42, light colour - white in diagram) as a kind of photographic negative—ignoring aspects of scale—the structure of the human brain would be like the Positive. The astral body would have to be envisaged as coloured by the soul element in its environment; I have shown this schematically by using a number of different colours (Fig. 43).

As I said yesterday, this does not cover the behaviour of the physical and ether bodies during sleep. Let us add this today. The human physical body is seemingly known in modern science, but it really and truly is only seemingly. Scientists take little account of the great difference between the human being in limbs and metabolism and the human being in the head. The constitution of the head person is a reflection of what the individual has been between death and rebirth. Again all aspects of scale are left aside.

Modern scientists take the structure of the physical brain to derive from the paternal and maternal organizations. Considering the matter from a number of different points of view, we have already realized that this is not the case. Put somewhat crudely and in radical terms, human beings develop in the physical world because initially substance is thrown into chaos in the maternal body. Into this chaotic matter, which is now outside the laws of both chemistry and physics, the powers to make the embryo what it will be are implanted out of the universe. The powers the individual has gained in the time between death and rebirth are inoculated, if I may put it like this, into these powers. The way I’d really like to put it is: With regard to form, the human being is implanted in the maternal body. Only the bed for the new human being is created in the maternal body, and the universe is constituted in such a way that if the opportunity is created for something specific to evolve, then this specific something will evolve.

The inner structure of the human head is such that in the first place it reflects what has been furrowed and coloured here during the previous life on earth, but in addition the whole universe may also be said to be re-created in this head. Modern science really does not have a very good grasp of the process by which insight and perception is gained. It is better to say: The complexity of the human brain really is a recreation of the universe. The form principles existing in the head cannot be penetrated by the 1 and astral body. They live an independent life in the human head, as I have shown before. Human beings know themselves to be I and astral body exactly because these two have an independent life. I and astral body can really only connect with the human being in limbs and metabolism. There they flourish, making us essentially into will-endowed creatures. This means that the human being of limbs and metabolism is essentially the dwelling place of the principle which on death returns to the world of the spirit. That world receives the individual human I and astral body and takes them onwards to new stages of existence. The human head, on the other hand, holds everything that comes from earlier lives, and from lives between death and rebirth, elements which have taken form in the head organization, as it were, and made themselves at home in it. The human head relates to the past, the human limbs and metabolism to the future. The rhythmical human being moves to and fro between past and future.

We need to see the physical human being in this light if we are to understand the form and structure of the limbs and their inner life. We then understand why the organization of the head is actually always breaking down, paralysing itself, whilst the organization of limbs and metabolism is always building itself up. We shall also understand why the organization of limbs and metabolism has to be connected with the chemical and physical nature of the earth, a connection which comes to expression in nutrition.

The human being of limbs and metabolism takes in elements which have a real need to develop further. In waking life, however, this human being needs to reckon with the forces that come from the earth itself. In this aspect we are subject to the earth’s gravity and to other earth forces. We are subject to the forces which enter into us with the food we eat. In this regard, therefore, we may be said to be entirely creatures of the earth. The evolution of form in limbs and metabolism had no part in what the individual lived through between death and rebirth, before entering into the present life on earth. This is the reason why the human being of limbs and metabolism also is not able to adapt to the spiritual universe outside when we are awake in life. In the waking state this aspect of the human being is given up to the physical earth.

This is not the case during sleep, however, for the human head contains the form principles of everything connected with the individual’s past, including life between death and rebirth. The forms of the organs in the human head contain subtle, fleeting images of the whole cosmos.

In waking life, the head, being all these images of the universe, is not able to influence the human being of limbs and metabolism. As the seat of the major sense organs, the head is continuously communicating with the earth world outside. In waking life, everything we see or hear influences us via the head. During sleep, the human head is not merely provided with physical nourishment. Physical nutrition, which essentially also happens in waking life, is not what matters most; something else is most essential for the human physical body during sleep.

The eye, for example, is not only the organization which provides for vision but at the same time it is also an image of the spiritual powers of the cosmos. Between death and rebirth the individual lives in the cosmos of soul and spirit. Like all organs in the head, the eye has a double function. The first is to enable communication with the outside world through vision, which happens during waking life. In the life of sleep, the eye and its surrounding parts, above all the surrounding nerves and blood, influence the physical organism in its metabolic and limb aspects. The powers of the eye closed in sleep influence the kidney system, for example, imbuing it with the cosmic image. Other organs in the head imprint other aspects of the cosmos on the human system of metabolism and limbs. For the physical body, therefore, the time we spend in sleep serves mainly to let the powers of the head structure the human being of metabolism and limbs (Fig. 42, reddish arrows). It is particularly during sleep that structuring powers radiate continually from the head to the lower human being, so that in sleep the soul and spirit aspect of the head is indeed the structurer of the human being of metabolism and limbs.

We have quite the wrong idea of creation if we see it as being limited to particular moments. We are in fact being created all the time. We are created out of the spirit every night; our system of metabolism and limbs is given structure and life out of the spirit night after night.

As you know, in modern materialistic science only the opposite of this is known, i.e. that the powers of the metabolism influence the used-up brain. That is only half the story, however, for as this effect is brought to bear from below upwards, the human being is enlivened out of soul and spirit in a process that takes the opposite direction. It is important to realize that these marvellous processes working from above downwards are governed by a high level of consciousness as we sleep, a level we human beings will not achieve until evolution on the planet Vulcan. It is the level of consciousness of the spirit human being. This level of consciousness is truly present in the human being today. It takes effect during sleep in the way I have just described. At our present level of consciousness we are not able to know our true nature well enough to be aware, under normal conditions, of the reality and activity of a level of consciousness which is infinitely higher than the conscious awareness we have of our daytime activities.

Real appreciation of such things is certainly dependent on human beings becoming more deeply religious through the science of the spirit. If people pursue activities in life that allow their true nature to be neglected so that it withers away, if they do not seek to implant in their physical bodies what can be implanted in them during life on earth, they bring destruction to something in themselves which, unknown to them in ordinary conscious awareness, is a much higher form of consciousness than they themselves are able to have.

Looking out into the universe we perceive a world which, if we gain real understanding, makes us go down on our knees in admiration. We must have the same attitude as we look, with real understanding, into the working of powers in our own inner nature that are greater than human powers. This, then, gives you an approximate indication of the situation in which the human physical body finds itself during sleep.

Apart from the physical body we also have an ether body (Fig. 42, hatched area). In the waking state this is continuously exposed to influences coming from the I, which is active in the world, and the astral body, which is connected with the I. In the waking state we always see the colours arising and fading away again and the other colouring effects which take place in the astral body and go across into the ether body. In fact, we see the ether body adapt itself to the astral body. We also see something enter into the ether body which is the I in its structuring. In short, in the waking state we see I and astral body play into the ether body. When asleep, the human being as I and astral body is outside the ether body, and the colouring of the astral body and structuring of the I do not enter into it. The ether body is then left to its own structuring principles. The way this comes to expression is that in sleep, the ether body assumes a structure that is an image of the universe and does so in a truly magnificent way.

The main substance of the etheric body is taken up by human beings as they move from pre-birth life to physical life on earth. Its composition depends on how the individual lived between death and rebirth. Everything the human being receives into himself from the universe—shown in symbolic form, as it were, in spiritual science as something the human being has taken in of the heavens from North, South, East, West—all this the etheric body bears within it. For the reasons given above, the ether body is unable to make this apparent in the waking state, but it does so in sleep. The human being is all memory then, to begin with memory of life on earth.

Occasionally people are aware that on entering into their etheric body they enter into a sea of images; they consider it part of their dreams. Anyone who has made the effort, however, to observe the sea of images which a person passes through, as it were, in the process of waking up, and observe the experiences made at that time, discovers that this ether body really contains the whole of our life on earth when we are asleep. In our sleep we are really alive and active in everything we have gone through in the ether body from the time we were born. It has however been structured for the ether body by cosmic powers. As astral body and I are not playing into it at this time, the ether body radiates what has been inculcated, inoculated into it at birth. The human ether body grows radiant (Fig. 43, yellow arrows).

This radiance of the human being in sleep is something truly significant. When the sun has gone down and the earth world is immersed in darkness of night, it represents the soul radiance of humanity, quite distinct from the physical radiance of the sun. Unfortunately, however, this soul radiance also contains everything the human being implants into the ether body via the astral body and I during life because he is bad, elements which are destructive and cause the ether body to wither. The evolution of the earth could not progress, however, without this radiance coming from human beings.

Someone equipped with the necessary organs who was out there in the cosmos, observing the earth from out there, would say: During the day you see the sunlight reflected from the part of the earth where the sun is shining; but when night covers part of the earth, the earth phosphoresces. The phosphorescence comes from the human ether bodies. The earth needs all this to progress in its evolution. If no human beings were asleep on earth, the vegetative powers of the earth would die down much more rapidly than they actually do. Human beings certainly do not exist on earth just for their own sake; they are not without significance for the way the earth as a whole is structured. For the whole of their life on earth, sleeping human beings radiate from their ether bodies into earth evolution what they have taken up in the world of the spirit between death and rebirth.

Thus we are able to say: For the physical body, radiation is from above downwards; for the ether body it is from the inside outwards. Human sleep definitely also has cosmic significance.

This is why I had to tell you yesterday that when an I and astral body return to the ether body it feels like autumn, and when they are free of the body in sleep it feels like spring or summer. It is indeed true that human beings become more sun-like or wintry in soul and spirit as the astral body goes in and out.

We may say, therefore, that during sleep the nature of the human ether body is such that the powers human beings gather between death and rebirth in the cosmos have a structuring effect on the earth. Again the level of consciousness is higher than that normally available for people’s waking activities. The consciousness of the life spirit is at work in the ether body’s activity during sleep. This is a level of consciousness human beings will only develop when our planet earth has reached its Venus metamorphosis.

We can see, therefore, that the relationship of I and astral body on the one hand, and physical body and ether body on the other, is such that they do not work together during sleep, but only from the time we wake up until we fall asleep. The relationship changes, with the swing of the pendulum moving between collaboration and non-collaboration. It is also the case that at the moment when I and astral body approach the physical and ether bodies on waking, and at the moment when they withdraw again on going to sleep, the interaction which occurs is governed by yet another level of consciousness which is above that used in human waking activity. We are able to influence our waking up and going to sleep in a certain, indirect way. But the subtle processes between I and astral body on the one hand and physical and ether bodies on the other as we go to sleep and wake up again are something our conscious human mind is not able to perceive.

I’d like to show this interaction with these arrows going in opposite directions (Fig. 43, blue). In this direction, in this interaction, as it comes to expression especially on waking up and going to sleep, though in a certain way it also continues in waking life and even during sleep, a principle comes into its own which we can say applies mainly to the astral body. We are able to say that the situation is such that the astral body is stimulated in a cosmic sense. Remember that from going to sleep to waking up the astral body is coloured in accord with its moral reactions, as I have shown yesterday. On waking up it enters into an ether body structured by the cosmos. It has to follow it and adapt to it. And we are able to say that cosmic astral powers influence human astral powers. This can be observed quite clearly in a specific case.

Imagine someone who has not gone through life between death and rebirth—which is true in the case of animals—and was newly created at birth, which is what Aristotelian philosophy postulates. This individual would not bring the effects of earlier lives on earth and between death and rebirth into the new life. His eyes, his senses would roam over experiences in the outside world, but he would have no concepts based on geometry and mathematics to make connections between them. This is just one instance, one of those where geometry, which holds true for the cosmos, enters into interaction with principles that apply only in the earth environment. Rational concepts of mathematics and geometry enter into empirical experience gained on earth. This interaction is continuous, and it takes place in such a way that the spirit self is the consciousness active in it. Observing the world from a mathematical point of view, people have no idea, of course, that as they do so, the spirit self has them by the scruff of the neck. They fail to take note of this because they limit themselves to the reflection of it which exists in ordinary human consciousness.

When the human being is finally neither sleeping nor in the process of waking up or going to sleep, when I and astral body have entered fully into ether body and physical body, we have the ordinary level of present-day conscious awareness, when we are given up to everything that is outside of spirit human being, life spirit and spirit self. When humanity will have reached the level of existence which it will have when the earth has gone through its metamorphosis into Jupiter existence, as described in my Occult Science, it will no longer be the case that people use geometry to create a cube in an external way, and then discover that this ideal cube form fits a salt crystal. Human beings will be given up to the outside world to such an extent that they will be in the salt themselves, as it were. There won’t be any salt of this kind on Jupiter, of course, but analogies like this help us to get a clearer picture of human life as it will be in the future.

Using the method we used yesterday to consider astral body and I, we can therefore also gain an idea of how physical and etheric body are during sleep. The physical body is actually self-structuring in limbs and metabolism during sleep, the ether body world-structuring.

Thinking back to what we were considering yesterday, we have to say: The human astral body moves out of the physical and ether bodies during sleep. The powers of soul in the universe stream into it, and the way they enter into it depends on the inner life of mind and soul. If someone is in sympathy with all that is good, the most beautiful powers of the universe will be able to enter. If people develop their inclinations towards evil, their astral bodies will wither away. During sleep, the astral body assumes different nuances of colour for different levels of feeling and inner responsiveness (Fig. 43, reddish, yellow, pink, mauve). We may say that individual people sparkle up in their astral bodies during sleep depending on the way they are. The astral body represents our inner state of heart and soul during waking hours. This, as it were, pours into the soul universe, and human beings experience themselves in this pouring-out process in so far as their inner state has changed, but in a situation where they encounter the world of the spirit in that inner state.

If human beings were able to enter into the consciousness of the life spirit when their astral bodies are active and alive out there, they would be able to speak to that which happens with their astral bodies. This actually happens, but at an unconscious level. Who would be speaking, if humans beings suddenly achieved the level of consciousness of the life spirit in their sleep? The only way of putting this is to say: The human astral body would be speaking, as judge over good and evil in the human being. So that we really have to say: In sleep, the astral body becomes the judge of the soul. Rightly understood, this statement is important for human life. It is a truth that shines out as if from beyond the threshold of the world of the spirit, a truth human beings should call to mind as often as possible.

Take the corresponding situation for the I. The I moves out of the physical and ether bodies, structuring itself in accord with the powers of the universal entities in the sphere of the spirit. It becomes what it can become in the light of how it lives in the physical body. If it were to come awake to the spirit human being level of consciousness, it would not merely speak to itself, as the astral body would if suddenly given the life spirit level of consciousness; the I would be given the level of consciousness which is active in the physical body it has left behind, sending powers from above downwards. If, then, human ‘I’s had this level of consciousness when out of the body during sleep, human beings would know not only the totality of judgements passed on them but they would see that which they are in the process of becoming, now as images, which will be the seed for future lives on earth.

I cannot think of any other way of putting this in a sentence than this: The I becomes its own sacrifice, a sacrifice brought by the spirit which is active in the body. A sacrifice may be such that it is accepted with pleasure, which may also be the case for the I when it is given structure out there. A sacrifice may also be such that it is rejected. These are the extremes. Mostly, of course, human beings experience something which lies more in the middle. But a sacrifice may be rejected, having been found unworthy. If human beings present themselves to the spirits of the universe in such a way that they have to wither away greatly because of experiences they had in their physical and etheric bodies during waking hours, they become rejects.

You see, therefore, that the idea of sacrifice is certainly applicable in this case. And it seems to me that these two statements: In sleep, the astral human being becomes the judge of the soul, and: The I becomes its own sacrifice, are extraordinarily important if we are to understand human nature fully.

If we consider what the instinctive judgements of humanity have achieved in the past, judgements made not with the clarity of mind we must use today to search for anthroposophical knowledge of the spirit, but from instinct, we become aware of images representing significant original wisdom possessed by humanity. I have spoken of this before. They come to expression in ancient myths and sayings and also in the rites which have survived in different religious systems.

This is why we feel profound reverence for traditional religious paintings and images of ancient rites if we understand them rightly. Essentially it is true to say that religious feeling can only come alive again in human hearts if insight into the world gained through the science of the spirit—insight that is more than mere words, but perceived in its deepest meaning—takes hold not only of the head, but of the whole human being. The science of the spirit must not only provide us with insight into the world but make us feel reverence for the spirit which is at work in the world. This has been particularly evident to us today.

This science of the spirit will be able to quicken religious feeling in human hearts. Humanity has however also gone through a time when people lived only for intellectualism, rationalism and the materialism connected with this—we know this had to be, for the sake of achieving independence. Today the greater part of humanity is still caught up in these things. There has to be a return, however, to perception of the spiritual in the world, to living beyond mere intellectual understanding of the world, beyond experience limited to the purely head aspect of the human being.

If we go back beyond the age of the intellect to the days when the religious images of old were still alive—also serving as images to convey insight well into the Medieval period of modern humanity—if we consider the images created in the performance of religious rites, we find something in all of these which is enormously similar, except that it was gained through instinct, to the insights we are now able to gain in the worlds of the spirit, though now in the light of clear conscious awareness.

I really have to say that if the idea expressed in the words: “In sleep, the astral body becomes the judge of the soul” comes from Inspiration, we find this well represented in Michelangelo’s fresco The Last Judgement on the altar of the Sistine Chapel. Here we have something that comes from time immemorial. It has merely assumed Christian form and with this become more traditional. Pictures like these were painted out of tradition. There were times in human evolution, however, when they were seen in a living way, when instinct made people see the inspired Imagination of human souls pass judgement on themselves in sleep.

Again, if we consider the image of the Lamb of God, which touches us so deeply, the image of the Christ uniting himself with the human I, entering into it, the thought of the I becoming the sacrifice as it enters into sleep arises in heart and mind—particularly when we contemplate the Lamb sacrificing itself—we discover how fittingly the image of the Lamb expresses the sacrificial nature of the human being in sleep. We discover that an instinctive, wisdom-filled consciousness gave rise to this image, which the I needs in its life on earth, because during sleep it becomes the sacrifice of its own selfhood.

We can do no other but again and again point out that the anthroposophical science of the spirit, as it evolves, seeks to develop completely clear concepts, the kind of clear concepts which otherwise exist only in mathematics, or geometry. But because the concepts gained in the science of the spirit have their roots in the living life of the cosmic spirits they are always such that they do not leave us cold, the way mathematical concepts do, but also fill us with the warmth of inner feeling and with will impulses to fire us. Here we see the close relationship between clear thinking, warmth of feeling and energy-laden will impulses. This, then, is a point of view which allows us to perceive human nature in its fullness.

Many aspects of history, too, only find their explanation if we are able to base ourselves on such a perception of the human being. Well into the Middle Ages, as I said, many people still understood the ancient images, in which the world is seen sub specie aeternitatis, in the light of eternity, a kind of understanding that still existed in the old instinctive life of wisdom and which has to be regained in clarity of mind, seeking to achieve it through the anthroposophical science of the spirit.

We sometimes see strange individuals come up in history, people who seem rather out of place in the present-day situation. Travelling in Italy, I once talked to a priest belonging to the Benedictine order in Monte Cassino. He told me that the list of saints in his breviary included the Saxon German emperor Henry II,⁴¹ also called “the Saint”—I do not know how far this is still mentioned in the history books. What Henry II was after was an Ecclesia catholica non Romana, that was his true aim, though he is called a saint. In his day, that is, in the 10th, 11th century, it was certainly still possible to speak out of real experience of old traditional wisdom and say that what had come into the world through Christianity should be an Ecclesia catholica, meaning a church for the whole of humanity in which the spirit reigns which was intended to come into the world through Christianity. But he wanted an Ecclesia catholica non Romana, for the Roman Catholic Church had become a worldly kingdom. Truth is that everywhere where kingdoms of the spirit become worldly kingdoms the ahrimanic principle takes hold of what lives as a holy of holies and has lived as such in the ancient wisdom possessed by humanity. In the days of Henry II, people were still strongly aware that it was possible to separate Ecclesia catholica and Ecclesia catholica Romana and that the desirable aim was an Ecclesia catholica non Romana.

As I said, Henry II is out of place as a saint in the breviary. The Ecclesia catholica Romana has not the least cause to include him among the saints, for he was one of the people who in a fiery, holy enthusiasm for a catholic church actually wanted to vanquish the Roman Catholic Church.

Historical facts like these ought to be brought to mind especially when reference is made to the tremendously important truths which can be brought back again to the surface of human awareness through anthroposophical science of the spirit. It is very necessary to point this out today, for individual instances which may disgust us as they come up from the Ecclesia catholica Romana right here on our doorstep⁴² allow us to see how the ahrimanic spirit was able to enter into it. On the one hand we must not let this ahrimanic spirit deceive us into thinking that the Ecclesia catholica Romana does not hold the light-filled wisdom of eternity. When I was able to give a course here for theologians, it was evident that with the longing felt by Protestants to deepen Protestantism in its spiritual aspects, to get out of rationalism, out of intellectualism, it came as a real liberation for some of those present to hear the words: Ecclesia catholica non Romana. For today we have definitely reached a point where rationalism must be overcome just as much as the worldly nature of the Catholic Church has to be overcome; humanity must come together again in a life of the spirit that is for all, a life of the spirit to which none may lay claim who have any kind of desire to rule the world.

The ahrimanic spirit is a lying spirit. It may happen that lying minds fall so low in this lying spirit as to declare falsehood to be truth. It is necessary, therefore, that out of the depths of what is happening in the world we come to abhor lies utterly. We truly come to abhor lies if we are able to say, in full awareness: In sleep, the astral body becomes the judge of the soul. The I in sleep becomes the sacrifice of its selfhood.

Darkness is thrown on these profound truths by the ahrimanic spirit, which has also entered into the religious creeds of recent times. It will be up to people who in all honesty, and with some energy, profess themselves to be followers of anthroposophy not just to develop a superficial, intellectual liking for the wisdom anthroposophy is able to offer, but to develop real inner energy of feelings and will, and to let this energy unite with what mind and spirit are able to perceive of the world of the spirit through the science of the spirit which takes its orientation from anthroposophy.

This, my friends, is also intended to teach you how important it is to distinguish between the element to be found even in the traditional continuation of religious images and images created in religious rites and the way in which these are sometimes used today.

Surely all of us must feel the deepest reverence for something which is contained in the ritual of the Russian Orthodox Church, something which as it were shines out to us from the spiritually grey-haired ancient Orient. Our approach to these ritual acts can always be such that we penetrate through what is happening there to the tremendous depth which comes to revelation. Millennia and millennia of wisdom evolved from instinct come to expression in these ritual acts.

Years ago I attended such a ritual in Helsingfors.⁴³ It was at Easter and it is fair to say this was one of the saddest events in my life to remember, to see how the popes, the most terrible inner liars, acted out their comedy based on eternal truth. That is how it is in the world today. Under the influence of ahrimanic materialism, lies are presented on the outside, and the deepest truth lies within, and the two are brought together in a truly dreadful way. You have to have a real feeling for this, or you will not develop the right energy in your understanding of the nature of the human being.

That was an extreme case, but the same happens everywhere today, with differing degrees of intensity. Anthroposophical awareness should be such that we see these things, and are able to distinguish clearly between truth and falsehood, a falsehood which under the pressures of external circumstances is very much hidden. We must always gain something from entering deeply into anthroposophy—for the human being as a whole and above all for the conscious awareness belonging to our age. This is what I wanted to say to you in connection with what we have been considering here.

• 41. Henry the Saint (973–1024).
• 42. Diatribe entitled “The Secrets of the Dornach Temple” published by M. Kully in Basle, 1920-21.
• 43. Helsingfors, Easter 1912. See letter Marie Steiner wrote on 13 April 1912 to Mieta Waller: “There was an Easter celebration in the church ...”. Nachrichten der Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung Easter 1967, No. 7, p. 12.

Let us consider a few facts connected with man and his relation to the universe in respect of body, soul and spirit. We have seen that in a certain way man’s experiences between death and a new birth, which were connected with the whole universe, enter his inner life during his earthly existence. We have seen that what we experience before birth or conception in the form of outer experiences, is afterwards contained within us, in our inner life. Let us now consider man’s relation to the universe from another aspect, namely that his experiences between birth and death go with him through the portal of death and become experiences of the new existence through which he passes between death and a new birth. In man we must distinguish what he has (I mean, during his earthly life), to begin with, as his inner life, and what separates from this as a kind of external life.

Inner Life: We may first indicate man’s feelings, the inner content of his feelings between birth and death. This constitutes his real inner life. What he feels in regard to the impressions left upon him by the external world, or in regard to his own inner experiences, his feelings of approval or reproach towards his actions, which are the expressions of his will, all this is something which man more or less settles with his own self during his earthly life. He may allow others to look into it, but the essential thing is the way in which man settles all this with his own self. His experiences in connection with perception are, as we already know from our preceding lectures, not real experiences, but they form a world of semblance which surrounds him. In reality, this world is neither inside nor outside; man participates in it and it becomes his inner world only because he develops thoughts and feelings connected with it and because it stimulates him to this or that action. His attitude towards it is essentially the result of capacities he brings along with him through birth. This attitude towards the external world, also his place in the world, the nation he belongs to by birth, etc., all this depends on his preceding earthly and spiritual life. Consequently it points backwards rather than forwards. But something else must be considered that connects us with the external world. What is rooted in our will and passes over into our actions becomes part of the external world. Everything taking place through our actions brings about a change in the external world. The least thing we do transforms the external world.

We may now say: The external world which we ourselves prepare through our actions is rooted in our will. It is related to us in the same way in which the events during sleep are related to us. With our consciousness, with our ordinary consciousness, we are just as unable to look into the depths of our volitional world, as into the conditions which exist during sleep.

All that really takes place in the sphere of the will thus remains inaccessible to our consciousness. I have often explained this as follows: The whole volitional process which takes place when we move an arm or a hand, the forces which develop in these movements, are not accessible to our consciousness. Yet we see the movement of the hand. We see the changes which we bring about; when we simply move something to another place we see this change through our forces of perception. We may therefore say: Our perceptions enable us to know something about the expressions of our will. The human will and the effects which it produces flow, as it were, into man’s sphere of perceptions.

Let us bear in mind our recent lectures. In these we explained that we have, to begin with, man’s physical body, (see drawing) and then his etheric body. In between lies the weaving world of thought, in so far as it is incorporated in the human organism. Between the etheric and the astral bodies lies the world of feeling, and between the astral body and the sheath of the Ego lies the world of the human will.

Our ordinary consciousness is really unable to distinguish the volitional world from the Ego. For the will is united with the Ego. Everything that takes place in the Ego when it wills or does something, does not enter our ordinary consciousness in a direct way. This lives below the surface of our ordinary consciousness, like the events which take place during sleep.

In our physical body we have sense-organs and these are endowed with perception. This also enables us to perceive the manifestations of our will. The physical body has eyes and ears and through these sense-organs we perceive what comes from the Ego and from the sphere of the will. Man’s perceptions, which constitute his most external part, thus become united with what he experiences through his will and his Ego. (See arrow in drawing.)

Consider the following: The will-processes in the depths of the human organism, which arise whenever we walk a few steps, the forces which induce us to move our legs—all this is not accessible to our ordinary consciousness. After a few steps we see a different environment, or at least we see it from a different standpoint. In this changed aspect, sense-perception gives us something which thought transmits during our ordinary state of consciousness; it gives us a picture of what ordinarily lives in the depths of a waking state of sleep. So that whenever our Ego is filled by will-impulses and these become actions, no matter whether brought about by walking or by taking hold of something, or by any kind of activity, this is experienced through perception. Through our will, we really belong to the external world of our perception. By developing what may thus be observed in connection with the manifestations of our will, we do not reach our real inner being. Although our will streams out of the innermost depths of our being, we grow conscious of it by passing through an external process, or rather a sum of external processes connected with the body. But let us now consider man’s inner life. There is, to begin with, his weaving world of thoughts. The way in which thoughts are active outside in the work does not touch the present subject.

Outwardly, the world of thoughts exists in such a way that it brings certain logical, lawful connections into our perceptions. We classify Nature. We see plants which resemble each other and classify them; we see animals which resemble each other and classify them. We also try to discover the laws of Nature. What we thus unfold, does not really belong to our inner life. All this is science, which we share with every other person. It does not form part of our inner life. Yet we cannot simply assert that everything connected with thought does not form part of our inner life. It suffices to bear in mind that when we see a beautiful landscape (through external perception) and develop thoughts about it, we may recall this picture at any time, even if this memory grows pale. The things connected with the external world therefore become part of our inner world. The same may be said of other experiences connected with the external world, which become thoughts forming part of our inner world. To begin with, these thoughts pervade our etheric body, yet they also unite with feeling, which reaches as far as the astral body.

All this takes place inwardly. The inner side of thought-life, and the life of feeling, really constitute man’s inner world. What we experience in connection with the inner aspect of our thoughts and with our feelings cannot really be sought in an outer world. Whenever we want to know something about the outer world, we must look into us, into our inner life. I have already told you that we may speak with other people and indirectly allow them to look into us, but our inner life is the essential thing. It is possible to distinguish clearly what constitutes external life, through the fact that we constantly bring our inner world into the outer world.

When a train brings us at night from the West to the East of Switzerland, we are in an entirely different environment in the morning and it is our perception which makes us aware of this change. We have brought our inner life with us. It was the same in one place and in the other, perhaps modified by what induced us to turn towards our inner being, by the thoughts which induced us to do so; in fact, by what has become our inner life.

If we want to, we may therefore distinguish quite clearly between that which constitutes man’s real inner life, psychically woven out of thought and feeling and based on reciprocal, rhythmical processes of the etheric and astral bodies, and that which constitutes in a certain sense our external world, psychically woven out of the content of our will and the content of our perception, and bodily woven out of the Ego and the physical body. For we take along with us our physical body, we observe it and see that it enters into different relations with the world. As explained just now, we may distinguish inner and outer life.

This distinction is very important if we want to observe the life which man carries through the portal of death. In a compendious way we may describe how the inner and outer life characterised just now, will behave after death, for we may say that the outside becomes inside, and the inside becomes outside.

In fact, this is the great change which takes place when we die. Outer life becomes inner life. Even as we are now able to feel our soul’s inner being—for we can see that our inner soul-life is woven out of thoughts and feelings and we address this inner being with "I"—so after death all our perceptions connected with our actions become our inner life. But what we now experience as our inner being, the contemplation of everything we did here on earth, is concentrated, as it were, in a point, or rather in a sphere. Everything we did, we carry through death as an inner memory, as pictures of our whole earthly existence. Here we therefore have a complete reversal. For what was outside, what could only be perceived by looking upon our actions, becomes our inner life. Even as now we live in our feelings, in the impressions gained from outside, so after death we live in our actions. Our actions then become our inner life.

After death, we ourselves become what we have done to a person, in the form of good or evil deeds. Such things should not be imagined abstractly, we should not think that a vague kind of Ego slips through death and then changes, or undergoes a slight change, but we ourselves become what we have done, right into the very details. After death, we are each one of our actions. We are each one of our experiences and we address them all with "I".

On the other hand, our inner life becomes an outer life. All our thoughts, the whole life of our feelings, become an external world. Even as we are now surrounded either by the shining sun and the clouds, or at night by the starry sky and its movements, so after death we are surrounded by the external world of our thoughts and feelings; that is, everything that now constitutes our innermost being, becomes part of the external world after death, and we see it outside in mighty pictures. The sky which shines down upon us after death, is our present inner life, our inner human essence. If I were to describe this in detail I would have to say: I have explained to you just now that our actions become a sphere, that we experience them as our inner being. We experience again and again all our activities here on earth; we again walk as we have walked. After death we change, as it were, into something that experiences its own actions in an ever growing sphere. We always look back upon the earth. Even as now we look out into the world’s spaces and behold the sun and the stars, so then we look back upon the earth. And we see the earth surrounded by the pictures of our preceding inner world.

We do not only experience the semblance of our inner world, but from the site we abandoned, and sending a reflexion after our own self, we experience all that once constituted our inner world; we experience it in the form of clouds, stars, and so forth, streaming out of this site. We feel ourselves within the former peripheric world, and we experience the earth upon which we once stood, as a centre, but outside. And we always look towards it. We ourselves live in what surrounds it; the earth at the centre is then the object towards which we look, and mighty pictures are unrolled before us, as our whole inner life unrolls. Outer life becomes inner life. Inner life becomes outer life. This takes place right into the very details.

And when we look down towards the earth, from this sphere spreading out more and more, we then behold, streaming back to us from the earth, all the feelings and sensations we had for other people. And all the other feelings we had, besides those in connection with human beings, appear more in form of clouds. But our feelings for others appear like stars. The human beings themselves, whose forms we see during our life between birth and death, these human beings with whom we now come into contact through experiences caused by our deeds, now constitute a world. All the people with whom we were connected, become part of our inner world.

This is of course reciprocal. Even as every person now bears within him his feelings, or his heart and stomach, so between death and a new birth everyone bears within him all that took place outside in space, and also all that occurred between himself and other people. Of two men who were closely connected, A bears within him the picture of B as his inner content, and B the picture of A. What was outside is now inside; our inner life, our feelings, become an external world, they become the content of a cosmos; what we felt for others, what we obtained from others, all this rays out towards us from the earth.

Man thus really becomes almost the creator of the world which surrounds him after death. During our earthly life, matters stand as follows: We always live in a certain place, and by this I do not only mean trivially that we live in Basle, or Dornach, etc., but any point, any standpoint we have in the world, physically as well as morally. We view the world from this standpoint. We may therefore say that we stand at a certain point and see the world perspectively from this point. But this is a subjective view, for every other person has another standpoint.

Things change after death. There, all men already have something in common. This common element is the sphere. Yet each person has had a different inner life, consequently the earth appears to each surrounded by different clouds, by different stars. It is as if we were all standing upon the same point of the earth, yet each one sees another picture. When we die, we discard the physical body. In the lectures I gave during the past weeks, I have already explained that the physical body is dissolved by the earthly kingdom as such. What remains, is the web spun out of our deeds, by what we see when we follow up our deeds, or the manifestations of our will, through perception. Think of all the ways you have gone on earth: As an infant you first crept about, then you began to walk, you made a long journey, and so forth. All this becomes your inner life. Yet this is only its outermost structure.

Every single thing you did is spun together and forms a web. This stretches out and becomes a sphere. This is your inner life and the fact that it becomes inner life is a guarantee for your Ego during your earthly existence. For man obtains his Ego from the earth, or through the earth. Because after death everything is spun together in this picture of perception and memory, we may take our Ego with us through death. But our real inner experiences are lived through again immediately after death, when the etheric body dissolves shortly after we have died.

The etheric body dissolves into the cosmic spaces and this brings about the fact that all the thoughts and feelings woven out of the etheric body, but with an astral influence as well, change into forms of clouds, or—as I have pointed out—into forms of stars which surround the earth. What falls away from us in two directions—towards the earth, and out into the cosmic spaces, into the air, as it were,—constitutes our inner and our outer world, when we pass through the life between death and a new birth.

Imagine quite vividly the world which surrounds you between death and a new birth. There are your actions, in so far as they come from the will, and these constitute your inner life. There is your feeling and thinking life in the form of a cosmos, as an external world. You do not look out into the world’s spaces, but from the cosmic spaces you look towards the earth, and the earth rays back to you your inner thought-aspects.

When we live here on earth, between birth and death, we have on the one hand, the life of the sun. The sun is outside and we stand upon the earth and see the sun. When we die, the sun immediately vanishes. For then we ourselves are the sun and we cannot see what we are. We simply pass over into the life of the sun. And what I have described to you above, is our passage through the life of the sun.

That we ourselves become our actions, is connected with the fact that we pass over into the life of the sun. When we have left the earth, our earthly experiences become something we behold. Here we stand upon the earth and look at the sun and we see the earth below our feet. This is due to the peculiar material structure of the earth. But the sun has no material structure. What physicists say in regard to this, is pure invention. I have often spoken of this. When we ourselves exist, as it were, within the sun and look back, we have the whole spiritual world behind us, the world of the Hierarchies. Even as here on earth we see solid matter when we look down, so between death and a new birth we have behind us the world of the Hierarchies. Thus we ourselves are sun and we behold the real sun, which is spiritual. We may say that the earth is then the sky. But it is a sky which we ourselves prepare through our inner experiences.

This will be the ease in future, this is how the future existence of Jupiter will arise. I have already explained this in detail. Everything we weave around the earth through our feelings and thoughts, will remain. The now existing material earth will vanish, for it will decay. Between death and a new birth, we are able to behold our inner experiences. This will change into reality, when the earth decays, and it will form the new earth, for the old earth will dissolve and all our inner experiences will constitute the future earth.

This is the real process of metamorphosis. When we simply say, the earth will become Jupiter, this is an abstract statement. We can only understand this process by knowing that all earthly, external substance will melt away into the cosmic spaces, it will become dust, whereas the web spun out of our feelings will form the future earth; it will condense more and more and become the planet of Jupiter.

Geologists now dig into the sub-soil of the earth and sometimes discover strata which have arisen in very remote ages; similarly, during the Jupiter existence, it will be possible to investigate the different strata which have thus formed themselves. All kinds of strata formed out of human feelings and thoughts will be discovered, lying one on top of the other. A Jupiter geologist may, for example, discover various strata, and in the same way in which a geologist upon the earth may say, here are the lower strata, the tertiary strata, so a geologist upon Jupiter will one day ascertain: Here is a stratum pointing back to an age which was called upon the earth the 20th century, the early 20th century; this is a stratum formed by the materialists and profiteers, who spread their thoughts and feelings over nearly the whole world. Even as we now speak of a Silurian stratum, so it will in future be possible to speak of a "Profiteer-stratum". Of course, one will also speak of other strata. But these things are realities.

It is not allowed to man to let his inner experiences vanish. They are a developing world; they will one day be a real world. And between death and a new birth, human consciousness may already look upon that which will in future become a world; indeed, this is the only thing man beholds after death.

Among the many different things in our environment, we also observe the Moon when we stand here upon the Earth. But the Moon is there in a very special way. It sends back to us the reflected sunlight. We can only see its surface, as it were, in so far as its garment is woven by the sunlight. So that when the Moon is shining, it is really the Sun that is shining for us; the sun’s rays come to us indirectly. The Moon, the earth’s satellite, is connected with us in a special way.

During the life between death and a new birth we thus have, to begin with, our inner world, the effect of all our actions in so far as these are rooted in the will, and this inner world, this sphere or central kernel, is surrounded by our feelings and thoughts, which ray out into the cosmic spaces. Yet after death there also exists something resembling the Moon. I might say: After death we see the Moon from the other side. Our existence within a sphere is subjected to laws of perspective which differ from those which exist here on Earth and it is, of course, difficult to explain certain things connected with the laws of perspective which exist after death. This is very difficult, because between death and a new birth we are, in a certain sense, inside, not outside the Moon. In a certain way, we are always connected with the Moon’s inner being. We live, as it were, within the Moon. Even as here upon the earth we continually see the reflected sunlight, so between death and a new birth we always see the inside of the Moon.

But as stated, there the perspective changes. Let us assume that here we have the Earth with the Moon circling round it. We must take into consideration the whole sphere, the whole orbit of the Moon if we take the after-death aspect and the conditions which apply to it. We must consider the whole sphere in which the Moon revolves, and this sphere is really perceived from within. To begin with, we go further and further away from the Earth by moving within this sphere. There, we cannot look at the Sun from within. But at the same time we do not see it from outside, because it becomes invisible; we cannot perceive it. The Sun remains as a memory. What we first behold as we move away from the Earth, what becomes, as it were, visible upon the inner wall of the Moon, or the Moon’s sphere, and is retained as a memory, are the effects of a former earthly life in a subsequent one. It is, in fact, the Moon that preserves the events of one earthly life, and these appear in a subsequent earthly life as effects of the former life. For the whole mystery of the Moon in the cosmos is connected with the fact that the content of one earthly life continues and is taken along into the next earthly life.

This is the aspect presenting itself when we stand upon the Earth and look out into the cosmic spaces—the aspect between birth and death. But there is another aspect, the one between death and a new birth, when we live within a sphere and look back upon the central kernel. We then exist in a world which is, in a certain sense, opposed to the one we now live in. Yet we carry through both these worlds that part of our being which has been concentrated, etc. upon the Moon, preserved by the Moon. The Moon is, in a certain sense, highly important to us as a celestial body. The Moon connects our different earthly lives; it is not, of course, that slag shining down upon the Earth; in its whole mysterious cosmic essence it forms a connecting link.

You see, the individual life of men is thus connected with the life of the whole universe. Here, between birth and death, we can see what has been left to us by former worlds, what has remained from the Saturn, Sun and Moon existences and from the past existence of the Earth. We perceive all this when we live here upon the Earth, surrounded by the radiant phenomena above us. This more or less points back to the past.

Everything we bear within us and what we ourselves do upon this Earth points to the future. And we already behold this future during our life between death and a new birth, sending, as it were, a reflexion into the present—we see it, when our inner life becomes outer life and our outer life inner life. If you consider the whole meaning of the descriptions which have just been given to you, if you consider that man carries his after-death life into his earthly life, you will find that this resembles his experiences in connection with the outer world, reaching as far as the stars, the planets; this reappears in his organisation, it rises up again in his inner being. And man’s inner being becomes his outer world. After death, something similar takes place. The external world which man formed for himself, all the actions that went out from him, become his inner world. All his inner experiences, derived either from his surroundings or from his actions, giving rise to feelings of satisfaction or of self-reproach, all this inner world becomes his outer world and it looks towards him like a firmament, but this firmament is now at the centre and it looks towards him, i.e. out into the cosmic spaces.

If we do not misunderstand this, we might also say: Man’s outer life becomes his inner life, his Sun-life, for he becomes an inhabitant of the Sun. Man’s inner being, in so far as he experienced it upon the Earth, becomes his firmament. But he now inhabits the firmament. The Earth becomes sky, the Sun becomes Earth, during the life between death and a new birth.

When true vision adds this other aspect of the world to the intellectual world-conception which modern man gains here on Earth, the only conception which he accepts, only then will a complete picture of the world stand before us. We shall then have entirely different feelings in regard to the world. This other picture of the world is, in reality, the one described in Anthroposophy, it is the picture I have always described to you, in contrast to the world-conception formed through external observation; the picture I have always described to you is the active picture, for we must participate in it actively. Your thoughts must become mobile when you read anthroposophical books. And your thoughts must become mobile whenever you listen to an anthroposophical lecture. But people who are only accustomed to the things offered to them by modern life do not want to be active in their thought, they prefer to obtain everything passively, so that also their thoughts are merely passive pictures of what they obtain, and in doing this they always sleep a little, as it were.

These things arise in this form because during his life between birth and death man has a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body, and an Ego. In regard to earthly life, the Ego is man’s highest part. After death, when he passes over into the Sun-existence, his Ego is the lowest member, and the next one from below is the Spirit-Self, then the Life-Spirit, and then Spirit-Man. Physically, they will exist only in future epochs of evolution, but between death and a new birth they develop spiritually.

The Spirit-Self, in fact, rays out into the cosmic spaces as the image of the Earth. The Ego lives in the Sun, in the life of the Sun, and the Spirit-Self rays back from the earth, as described above. The other members are higher forms, which afterwards come to man from the cosmos, but at first they have nothing to do with his inner being. What rays out towards him appears to him in a new life; through this it becomes "Life Spirit". And man’s deeds are pervaded by a high spiritual substantiality throbbing through them. This will be given to him by the cosmos, he receives it, as it were, outside, in the cosmos. When he comes down to birth, he obtains a physical body and an etheric body, and similarly when he has passed through the portal of death, he obtains a Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man, which are his garments. From man himself comes what constitutes his Ego. And between death and a new birth, all that rays out from the Earth becomes a finely woven planetary existence, something which can only be felt as a trans-formed earth; we look back upon it and we go on weaving it from life to life.

When the Earth will have reached the end of its evolution, man will therefore proceed with the Earth to the Jupiter-stage of existence, and what he has thus woven, will enable him to unfold his Spirit-Self physically upon Jupiter. The foundation for this has been laid during his earthly life, through his inner being.

These are the real processes. This is the true course of development. You see, it is not necessary to combine outer words—Earth-existence, Jupiter-existence, etc.—nor to describe things abstractly from outside, for when we grasp man in his totality it is quite possible to describe the transition from one stage to the other. Our thoughts must only be formed in such a way as to take hold of concepts such as the following: The thoughts and feelings extending within us, ray out from the Earth into the cosmic spaces like planets, like stars, and we ourselves then live with the cosmos; we bear within us the other human beings with whom we were associated.

Human life is complicated. But people who wish to build up a world-conception by setting up a few concepts do not have any real feeling for what is right. We can only build up a world-conception by viewing the totality of life. Life is very complicated even in the smallest bug, and we should not imagine that in the whole universe—and man is connected with it, as a microcosm—life is formed in such a way that we may grasp it by setting up a few thoughts.

We did not accuse Mrs. von Tschirschky. Mrs. von Tschirschky accused herself by taking things personally. She grasped the matter in a peculiar way, did not bring forward anything to refute the charge but declared outright that society is a gossiping society because things that have been said are said again here.

Now, let's leave aside the fact that one can have different views on whether things should have been said or not. They have been said once; and after all, it is not a principle in the world that the one who tells something about another person's actions is the guilty one, but the guilty one is the one about whom one has something guilty to tell. But what Mrs. von Tschirschky presented was only that it was an improper procedure, that the things she could not refute were presented. She did not lack expressions that are legally incriminating in her speech. I just recall: “I thought I was dealing with a friend, and now I see I'm dealing with a spy.” In short, the speech was full of insults. You will recall that the whole speech was full of insults, also in tendency. During this speech, Mr. Bauer made a comment. Ms. von Tschirschky immediately responded to this, coining the term herself: “mystical eccentricity.” She herself labeled what she wanted to describe as “mystical eccentricity.” Then she announced her resignation and explained why she could no longer be a member of the Society. The Society listened. Let us hold on to this fact.

Mrs. von Strauss, whose name was also not mentioned, said in her letter: “This is an exaggeration.” She could be quoted exactly: She came in again, but did not say a word to explain that the things were not true, only that they were grossly exaggerated, and that the matter played no role in her spiritual life, and then she left the room.

Fräulein Wernicke also left the room with some comment. In the next few days, it came to the well-known dialogue. Then Fräulein Wernicke appeared and gave us a lecture, which in turn, was truly not free from legally actionable expressions. I recall only that at that time the expression “dirt” was used. There are many here who heard that. I also recall that a comparison I used a few days earlier, when the ladies were still there, was taken as a starting point to hurl a legally contestable insult at the whole society. A few days earlier, I had spoken, in a positive sense, about society being a living organism, and I didn't just say it for superficial ears, just to hear it, but I defined it further. I said: other societies are formed on the basis of all kinds of program points; they can fall apart again. Our society differs from the others in that it was founded on a reality. I mentioned that you have our cycles in your hands, and I mentioned that our society, by forming an organism, leaves a corpse behind when it disintegrates, and that from this external, materialistic point of view alone, it must be true of our society that it is not an association, like another association, which can disintegrate, but that it leaves something behind. We cannot get rid of it. Really, this was a serious discussion about the nature of our society. Friends have abused this serious discussion. They have now thrown the insult in our face that society is already in decay, that it is already a corpse. When you throw the words corpse and decay in someone's face, it is of course an insult, and in all this, society has listened.

Ms. Blasberg was given the choice of whether she wanted to stay here or not, and to say whether she believed the dirt was here, with us, or not. And that led her to leave by saying that those ladies – who, as demonstrably true assertions, have said so many things that they cannot assert – and in particular Mrs. von Tschirschky, could not have said anything incorrect.

After a short time, a flood of express letters from Mrs. von Strauss began to pour in on me. I wanted to spare you these at first because I believed that there was no reason for the society, which had remained passive until then and had not really said anything substantial about it, to continue the proceedings in this matter. Because everything that had happened had happened on the part of the ladies. There was no expulsion or anything of the sort. No official explanation was sent to the ladies. Some members of this House felt obliged to write to the ladies for certain reasons, reasons that, even if some words were out of place, were nonetheless entirely commendable; for the writers of the letters actually tried to appeal to the ladies' consciences. If you follow the letters, you will see that the writers may have made mistakes in some of their statements, but basically they just wanted to appeal to the ladies' consciences.

Mrs. von Strauss wrote in her letter that she has many regrets and should have done many things she did not do, which would probably be because she did not do the ancillary exercises. She sends these letters, I don't know why – I couldn't find any reason why – to my house. In Mrs. von Strauss's letters there were things in them that one would have thought referred to other letters, that Mrs. von Strauss would have mixed up the letters, because she characterizes them in a way that is highly offensive. It was further insulting in these letters the term “lie”. It is an insult if there is no mention of a lie in a letter that Mrs. von Strauss claims says “lie”. She says that she is being accused of a lie. But you are calling someone a liar if you say that they are lying when the word “lie” has not been said. Similarly, the word “immorality” does not appear in any of the letters. Mrs. von Strauss accuses us of accusing her of immorality. There are many things in these letters that are objectively untrue. To allege such things about someone is an insult and can be prosecuted. I am not allowed to say that someone has made an insulting comment if it is not true that they have said it, so from this point of view, the letters are full of insults.

We have to look at the matter very soberly. The way these ladies deal with insults is quite peculiar. One of these ladies, for example, has said a real insult. She used the term “gossip” or “blabbermouth” about someone, and the strange thing is, she said it about herself.

So you can't really get out of things by looking at them in the sober light of day. In a sense, it was a dilemma for me to read the letters to you because Mrs. von Strauss simply forced you to read the letters. Therefore, they had to be read. That's actually how it looks. No matter how meticulously you search, there is no way to find the slightest reason for the ladies to complain about anything; because absolutely nothing happened to them. Nevertheless, they are even threatening to hire a lawyer, and they keep talking about injuries and about the board of directors staging a Haberfeldtreiben against them.

So, my dear friends, the sober fact is that someone compares another person who is a member of society to Judas; that someone says this about another person who is also a member of society. These are things that have been amply characterized. These things come out unfortunately, and the gentleman now demands not merely that he shall not be sued, though he could be sued ten times, twenty times—for these are all actionable things that the ladies have said, really actionable things. We have no intention of filing a lawsuit, but these are all actionable things. Rather, he threatens us with a lawsuit. We are really dealing with a serious perversion of the facts; it is an outrageous thing. We must realize this situation in all seriousness and sobriety. It is necessary that we realize this. Our society must be one built on true love. But if it should happen again and again that, when it is necessary to achieve this or that here, this or that person comes and takes the side of those who attack the others in the sharpest way, how are we to really get along? In our society, it is certainly justified to show a lot of love; but it is important to do so with reason, with reason. This is extremely necessary. And we will need to emphasize correctness and accuracy, especially in this time, when we are surrounded by a bunch of the real opposite. We have to be clear about what is actually going on.

You see, that is the situation and from this situation the board will have to find the necessity to prove, really file by file, piece by piece, that the matter is really as it has now been characterized, namely that someone who has behaved in the most incredible way, after running away from the company against its every wish, is now demanding that those from whom he has run away apologize to him. The matter is actually so absurd that one could even imagine that if one were to take the matter to court, the judge would say: Yes, if the matter were like that, then it would be quite absurd. It would have to be quite different, because it is not possible that reasonable people demand such a thing in the world.

We have now been forced by Mrs. von Strauss to talk about the matter again, which was absolutely unnecessary. But we are in a real society. If the absurd is real, then we must also deal with the absurd. That is also part of the concept of a living organism. But if we negotiate here, and it can then be made the sad discovery that our negotiations, which we conduct among ourselves, are even carried out - yes, where do we end up if we are exposed to this danger for all our affairs?

Just think, my dear friends, that there is the possibility – because more important things than this basically highly unimportant thing are also being negotiated here – that the most intimate, even esoteric things that are said here, can be easily communicated to the outside world. This is how we take what is always emphasized: that certain things have to remain among us.

I would like to know, my dear friends, if any society of the kind that our is, which only approximately takes into account the principles with which we have to deal, could do such things; it would be considered quite impossible. If such possibilities arise again and again, that things are carried out, then it is of course of no use to us to set up inquisition courts and ask who visited this or that person. The fact that this or that person can visit this or that person is beyond our control, it is not our business. But the fact that the things that are discussed here are told outside and that no attention is paid is what is so bad. And that's why we have to say one day: we're closing up, we're not talking about what should be talked about here at all, because if we don't have the opportunity to do our thing seriously and with dignity, then we shouldn't do it at all. Then we are in the sad position, my dear friends, that we have done everything for years that has led to the construction of this building here and everything else, and that we are now, simply because of these things, faced with the impossibility of continuing the matter. That is also part of the nature of a living organism. Basically, we are being led by sheer impossibility. We are not in a position, basically we are not at all in a position to continue talking about the matter, because we do not know how the matters were carried out. So we actually have to stop talking. I therefore believe that in this case, which we must come to an end at some point, the members of the board present here can be commissioned to carry out the case, to examine it in a smaller circle. It was necessary for us to get an overview of the whole matter. It was necessary for us to visualize what is actually at hand and what is possible among us, and to really set out to consider society as a society.

It is truly not an easy fate to be compelled to engage in further debates in society when one cannot even be sure that one is free from the things that are said on the condition that they are not carried out, assuming that they can be carried out at any time to anyone. It really must be said: It is a sad fate to have to work in society.

I will just say this one word: I read the lecture that I gave in Berlin, the lecture on the foundation of the Theosophical Society for Type and Art. I ask you to note that this lecture was actually read with the intention of ensuring that this matter is accurate. You will have noticed that the word “esoteric” does not appear in this lecture. So when someone speaks of an esoteric foundation, this is an objective untruth. It is not a matter of something esoteric, it is a matter of what has been expressed in these words, and since this very matter has been used for attack, I ask you, especially on this point, as soon as you speak about it, to speak very carefully and not to fall for the idea that because esoteric things have been practiced in this or that case, this or that must also be understood in that way. This is not an esoteric matter. I had to make these comments so that they all know what is necessary to know about this.

You see, nothing is given to what I say. This is evident from the fact that someone leaves the company, that someone can be said to run away. A society in which that is possible cannot deal with its problems. It won't do any good what we do – that's possible; but we have to do our duty, even in a case like this, where we know full well that we won't achieve anything by doing it, we have to do our duty.

And now, in conclusion, I have a few remarks to make, since our time is up. It is with an extremely heavy heart that I do so. But, you see, my dear friends, so much has happened in relation to our society, so much has occurred that is truly not for the benefit of society, that society does not particularly promote. We only need to think of one or the other thing that someone could really raise the question: Yes, why is it that things that could have a harmful effect are not pointed out at the right time? Why must everything proceed, as it were, in secret? Why are certain things not pointed out at the right time, certain dangers, certain harmful things that are harmful to the life of society? It is only for the reason, my dear friends, that in view of the sorrowful and painful events that have taken place in recent years and up to the present day, such a question could be asked and could be justified, that I would like, quite à contrecoeur, I would like to say, against everything that is pleasant and agreeable to me, I would like to say a few words about something that can already imply significant dangers, significant things, and in the face of which one will have to say: It should be pointed out in a society at the right time to such things, which really has different conditions of existence than some other societies, which must work out of different impulses of the heart and soul. I would like to say: Fortunately, what I have to come to you with today has nothing to do with anything that initially belonged to our circles here today, insofar as these circles are concentrated around the building site. There is no one who comes into question who would have anything to do with our building here. So, as I said, we who are here are not directly affected by what I have to talk about. But it is something that could very well have something to do with our building and with everything connected with our building later on, something that must arise as a development, as a natural and correct development, and that the building must be placed in. This could really become a matter of life or death one day.

In the days since I have been here again, I have had to learn something truly distressing! Now, I do not want to burden you with all the distressing things, because the proclamation of truth has always been associated with obstacles in human life, with a certain necessity to suffer and bear pain, and in some respects I consider it foolish to talk about this pain. You accept it, you bear it, but you don't put yourself forward as a bearer of pain. So it's not in that style that I want to discuss it: to put myself or someone else forward as a martyr. That is, so to speak, a matter of course in the proclamation of truth in the development of the world, that one doesn't really talk about. But you see, from a different point of view, I have to talk.

I was obliged to read two letters in the last few days, among many other distressing things. I will say nothing about these letters for the time being, about their origin, their authorship, because they are letters. But they are, after all, letters that seem to me to have been read not only by the addressees but also by others. Two letters – yes, about the content of these two letters – that affect not only me alone, but one of these letters also affects, for example, Dr. Steiner, while the other letter concerns me and some indefinable others who are around me, whom one does not even really know are there, much less who they are supposed to be. But as I said, I had to read two letters. I do not want to go into the origin and authorship of these letters any further, but the things mean a beginning – and that is why one must speak from the point of view that I meant. The things mean a beginning, and I do not say 'the end', because much can develop from what is in these letters, very much can develop. Do not misunderstand me. What I am going to say – that something can develop out of what has been expressed in these letters – is not said as if one or the other of these letter writers had the intention of developing it. That is not the case. But it does not depend on

human intentions, when a person does this or that, what develops from it, but it depends on the objective course of events. Sometimes people can have, well, who knows what intentions in what they write or say: something quite different from what they intended can develop from it. So it is not about someone's intentions or someone's opinions – that or the other should develop – that is being discussed here, but rather what can and must be discussed is what can actually arise from such things, so that it does not again appear as if we are going into everything completely blindly, when in fact a great deal can be clearly seen in the future. Unfortunately, for one reason or another, one must always remain silent about certain things. Now, these reasons for remaining silent about this or that can be discussed in general terms.

Both letters have a certain peculiarity; and since I am talking about “cases”, what I say can be accepted with a certain generality. Both letters have a certain peculiarity: they contain from beginning to end – in a certain sense this is spoken – not a true word, but only inventions, not a single true word, but only inventions! In one letter, to characterize only that, for example, Dr. Steiner is accused of being a particular political agent, of wanting to develop particular political currents, of secretly engaging in particular political agitation. Well, I have known Dr. Steiner for a long time, and I can assure you: I know her very well and I know very well that these allegations of political aspirations, as they are characterized there – and in a way that must be called downright unscrupulous – that to assert such political aspirations about her is simply ridiculous, in an objective sense it only seems strange, only really strange! So that one could only think of a pathological imagination when considering someone who makes such an assertion. Because nothing could be further from her mind than to deal with politics at all – just as nothing could be further from our minds in our endeavors than to connect any political endeavors with the theosophical-anthroposophical endeavors. When the word “policy” came up – it was in particular the late Misses Oakley who took this word “policy” into her pen in her writing [and] of course also into her mouth, and then Misses Besant – I emphasized: If only this word “policy” would never be heard within this movement, because anything that can remind one of what can be designated by this word, that is impossible within our movement. But truly, to be so deeply involved – without wanting to say anything bad about Dr. Steiner, or to say anything disparaging – to be so deeply involved in any political cause, in any political current with the interest to be so deeply involved in order to do anything politically, that was never the case with her! She has always been highly politically passive! So if it weren't so damaging to make such an insinuation, it would actually be just funny, or could only be attributed to a morbid imagination. But it is not only said that she has such political aspirations, but that she has had the intention of getting someone else directly into her hands to make them her political tool. - Something more ridiculous is impossible to imagine! - Well, it would only be ridiculous if the matter were not so sad.

Another letter talks about how we – yes, I don't know how many years – have had any political intentions, in particular by using a personality, and it is impossible for us to even locate the personality that is quite accurately characterized in this letter! One cannot even imagine who could be meant! There is no one who even remotely resembles such a personality. So it is another completely ridiculous, downright idiotic claim. This is then linked to the fact that Jesuitism is interfering, linked to the fact that “super-Jesuitism” is interfering, which is now supposed to assert itself as a new current.

It is not easy to see how we are connected to all this. But all this is being linked to the brochure I wrote, “Thoughts During the Time of War,” in a very serious way, but it is explicitly emphasized that the person in question has not read this brochure, has not received it, and is actually making all these claims because she has not been given it - I don't know why she has not been given it, she could just as easily have been given it. She is not making all these claims because of what is in it!

Yes, in addition, the very nice thing is that they want to turn to the secret police or to another secret political body in the country concerned to get hold of this brochure so that they can see what secret political machinations are actually taking place.

The other letter also mentions this brochure, well, it is mentioned in such a way that it has been read, but the way it is talked about is that – well, that is subjective, I don't particularly want to touch on that – because of the particular way it is talked about, every word is actually a gross and irresponsible insult. And since the letter was sent to someone close to me, who I knew would pass it on to me, the way in which the “Thoughts During the Time of War” are discussed, which, as anyone without prejudice can see, are meant to be completely apolitical, is a direct and irresponsible insult. Furthermore, the whole way of speaking shows that the person who wrote this letter only regards phrases as something real, because on the title page of this brochure it is stated to whom it is addressed, so that what is stated on the title page of me - who, I think I may say that, that I have never said a phrase in my life - that of me this may not be taken as a phrase! So anyone who, in such an insulting way, in a deliberately hurtful way – and if it is not pathological, it is deliberately hurtful – responds to this brochure in such a way, and responds in such a way that he cites a German sentence, translates it into his language, shows through the translation that he makes something completely different out of the sentence. The translation is something completely different from what is stated in this sentence - it is the opposite of it. When speaking of falsifications, one of the main sentences in this translation is one of the most unscrupulous falsifications, in that the opposite is translated into the translation.

And so in the rest of it too.

The whole thing is written, my dear friends, in such a way that there is life and a remarkable life in the spirit, which can only be characterized as I want to characterize it.

Furthermore, there is a connection between the content of one letter and the content of the other! They emerged from the same machinations, as is clear from the first letter. They emerged from the same machinations, so the two letters are intimately connected.

If we can be so suspected in the world, as is the case with this letter, if that can be said about us, can be spread, if that becomes opinion – so here I ask you to observe carefully that I said, “I do not attribute it to the letter writers as an intention” – they may have meant something quite different by it, but that is not the point. What matters is reality, what can arise from these things. If this is spread, if this is thought and said, and only the wrong thing, or what has been incorrectly heard, is said and thought, then it certainly has dire consequences under the current circumstances, that we, yes, we here are to be expected, at least Dr. Steiner and I, to be exiled from this building, that it will be made impossible for us to ever participate in what happens in this building. It leads to wrest this building out of our hands. It will be for that. - If others want to wrest from us what has been achieved here from the depths of the soul, from pain and suffering, if they want to wrest it from us, then they will be able to wrest it from us in this way, then they will be able to make it so that we can no longer set foot on the ground on which this building stands. Despite all the “admiration”, that will be the effect.

This is what I would like to entrust to you, so that you can see how what truth wants to represent has been hanging in the clouds. May the people who do such things think whatever they want, but you see what enmities arise where nothing else should happen but to advocate the truth, and how people try to cloak the enmities - because of course the two letters were written “out of the purest enthusiasm” for the just cause. Of course, so may be the plan!

I would not have bothered you with what is in such letters – which, as I said, are only available to a very limited public. But these things go further. These things draw their circles. And the beginning is made to that, whose end will be that

it will truly not be through our own free will, not through anything we do, that we will be made unable to come here. Because if these things are said, as they are presented there, if these things are written across the border, if these things are discussed as they are already being discussed through the very similar insinuations of Misses Besant, whose job it is not to tell the truth, if these things continue in the appropriate manner, then the consequence of this is that we will be exiled from this building. Not that this is the intention – I repeat – but that is the natural consequence that must arise from such things. I, my dear friends, will do my duty to the building as long as it is possible. I will certainly never let myself be separated from the building by my will, but the forces are at work that could bring this about.