The Rudolf Steiner Archive

There has hardly been a time in the development of humanity when it was as necessary as it is in the present to delve into the riddles of the supersensible life, although there has hardly been a time when there was as much rejection of this delving into supersensible problems as there is in the present. The questions that appear to be most remote must be of particular concern to the soul of the modern human being. And so today let us first consider what the materialistic attitude of the present day believes it must keep as far away as possible from human consciousness, but which is in fact infinitely close to human life. And to know that what is meant is infinitely close to human life is precisely one of the special tasks of our time. We want to start with a few remarks that are well known to us, in order to approach a subject that we have often considered from this or that point of view from a different point of view.

We all know that for spiritual scientific observation, it has a special significance to observe human life again and again according to its two great opposites, which play into everyday life, to observe it according to the special essence of the alternating states of sleeping and waking. It is precisely these polar opposites of sleeping and waking that we have had to consider again and again from the most diverse points of view in our spiritual scientific investigation.

Now you already know from the most diverse communications that this distinction, as it is usually made between sleeping and waking, according to which human life is divided up in such a way that one lives in an awake consciousness for about two-thirds or more of the day – or even less – and spends one-third in a sleeping consciousness, is at first only an external and superficial observation. Even if one continues to develop the matter as it is immediately given in this way, in order to get behind the character of sleeping and waking, it still remains somewhat superficial for spiritual-scientific views in relation to the depths that can be reached here. For we must be clear about the fact that the state of sleep is not only present in our soul life when we sleep in the superficial sense, not only in the time that passes between falling asleep and waking up, but that our soul also carries the state of sleep to a certain extent into the so-called waking state. In truth, even when we are awake for ordinary consciousness, we are only partially awake. We are never fully awake in this ordinary state of consciousness. And if we ask ourselves from a spiritual scientific point of view: to what extent are we fully awake? — then we have to give ourselves the answer: we are awake with regard to everything that we call perception of the external sense world, as well as the processing of these perceptions of the external sense world through the ideas. In our life of perception and imagination, in our thinking life, we are undoubtedly awake. We would not even think of speaking of our waking state if we did not want to describe as such a waking state a certain inner state of mind that is present when we perceive the external world in a fully conscious state and think about it, forming ideas about it.

But we cannot say that we are awake for our emotional life in the same sense as we are for our perceptual and imaginative life. It is only an illusion if one believes that one is as awake with regard to one's emotional life, one's affective life, one's emotional life from waking up to falling asleep as one is with regard to one's perception and thinking or imagining. Those who surrender themselves to this illusion do so because we always accompany our feelings with images. We not only imagine external things, we not only imagine chairs and tables and trees and clouds, but we also imagine our feelings; and by imagining our feelings, we wake up in the images of our feelings. But the feelings themselves surge up from the subconscious depths of the soul. For the one who can observe the inner soul processes, the feelings, the affects, the emotions, and the passions do not arise in a greater inner wakefulness than the impressions of the dream. The impressions of the dream are pictorial. We know how to distinguish them quite precisely for the ordinary consciousness of the external perceptions. Our consciousness is no more alert to the real feelings than it is to the dream. If we were to add an image to every dream as soon as we wake up, without being able to distinguish between the dream and the presentation of the dream, just as we always add a thought, an image, to our feelings, we would also consider our dreams to be the content of an awake experience. In themselves, our feelings are not experienced in a more awake state than our dreams.

And even less are our volitional impulses experienced in a waking state. With regard to the will, man sleeps continually. He imagines something when he wills something; he has an idea when he — let us take a simple volitional impulse — stretches out his hand to grasp something. But what actually happens in the life of soul and body when we stretch out a hand to draw something near remains in the unconscious, like dreamless sleep. While we dream our feelings, we oversleep our will impulses in reality. As a person of feeling we dream, as a person of will we also sleep in the so-called waking state, so that actually even when we are awake, that is, from waking to falling asleep, we are only awake with half of our being, while we continue to sleep with the other half of our being. We are awake in relation to our perceptions and our thoughts, but we continue to sleep and dream in relation to our will and our feelings. Such things can hardly be proved or corroborated more strongly than by what has just been said in the way of suggestion. For the recognition of such things depends on whether one can properly observe the life of the soul. He who can properly observe this life of the soul will unerringly discover the inner psychic equality of feelings, affects, passions and dreams. There is a very beautiful essay by Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the so-called V-Vischer, who is particularly well known in this city, about “Dream Fantasy”, in which he emphasizes this correct observation of the relationship between the emotional and passionate life and the dream world in a very beautiful way.

So we also go through life in a waking state, not only surrounded by the world we perceive through our senses, by the world we think, but also surrounded by a world that we can only dream of in our feelings, of which we, as with our will impulses standing in it, no longer experience more than we experience of our surroundings in our sleep, namely actually nothing. But a world that we do not experience when we are asleep is still just around us. Just as the tables and chairs and the other objects are in the room where there is a sleeper who, however, is unaware of them while he sleeps, so man is unaware of the world from which his emotional and volitional impulses come because he is constantly asleep with regard to this world. But this world, in relation to which we are constantly asleep, is the one that we have in common with human souls that are no longer embodied in the body.

We have tried from a variety of perspectives to build a spiritual bridge between the so-called living and the so-called dead. We can also build this bridge conceptually by becoming aware that we are connected to people in their physical bodies in our ordinary waking state because they are accessible to our perception and our thought life. We are not connected to the so-called dead in our ordinary waking state because we are constantly asleep to part of the world around us. If we were to penetrate into this world, which we so oversleep, we would no longer be separated from the world in which man lives between death and a new birth. Just as we are surrounded by the air, so we are surrounded by the world in which man finds himself between death and a new birth, only we know nothing of this world, precisely for the reason given: because we oversleep it. The clairvoyant consciousness, in the way we have often characterized it, leads to the recognition of this world, which is otherwise overslept, this world in which man finds himself between death and a new birth. To enter into this world in such a way that one can be certain that one's soul passes through the gate of death, enters another world and returns in a new earthly life, is not difficult in itself, if one carefully considers what is contained in the book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' or in similar books.

It is much more difficult to penetrate into this world, which man passes through between death and a new birth, in such a way that concrete, definite relationships can be established between the person here in the physical body and concrete dead people. These relationships are always there to a certain extent, at least between certain living people and certain dead people. But the reasons why a person is not aware that relationships always exist between him and certain so-called dead people can be seen in what I have already said today. And precisely that which the seeing consciousness experiences when it can relate to individual dead people can teach us why man in ordinary waking consciousness learns nothing of his relationships with the dead, which, as I said, are always present as real relationships. If such conscious relations are to be established between the seeing, awakening consciousness and certain dead, one must appropriate certain soul experiences that are quite different from the soul experiences to which we have become accustomed in waking consciousness. It is precisely in this area that it becomes apparent how one must discard all habits that one has developed for the purpose of knowing the physical environment and replace them with others if one wants to penetrate with a seeing consciousness into the concrete spiritual world. When the seer is confronted with a very specific individual so-called dead person, then he can indeed communicate with him properly, but he must just get beyond certain soul habits. The way one experiences the soul in such a case naturally causes bewilderment in someone who is not accustomed to such visions.

When we stand here in the physical world and converse with another person, we know that When we say something to the other person, it comes from our own vocal organs, so to speak, radiating out from us and going to the other person. And when he answers us or in turn communicates something to us, it radiates out from his vocal organs and over to us. —- It is quite different when one has concrete relationships between the seeing consciousness and a very specific dead person. In that case, one has to completely change one's habits. When we ourselves communicate something to the dead, when we ask the dead, when we tell him something, then we must — as strange as it may sound — have acquired the ability to perceive what we ourselves say as coming from him, as emanating from him and radiating to us. In order to be able to convey a message to a dead person, we have to be able to tune out ourselves and live in him in such a way that he actually speaks when we ask him, when we convey a message to him. And again, when he answers us, when he wants to convey a message to us, it comes from our own soul, it announces itself in such a way that we know: it radiates from us, so to speak. So we have to turn around completely, turn back, if we want to come into a real relationship with a specific dead person. This is, even if it can be characterized in a simple way, an extraordinarily difficult thing to do in our emotional experience. To behave in an almost opposite way to the world around us, as we are accustomed to in the physical world, is something that is extremely difficult to acquire. But genuine communication with the so-called dead is only possible under these conditions.

On the other hand, if you consider that you have to completely change your inner attitude, you will understand that relationships between the so-called living and the so-called dead are always possible, but that the so-called living will show little inclination to recognize these relationships. For the living are accustomed—and such an habit means more than one usually thinks—when they say something, to perceive it radiating from themselves; when the other says something, to perceive it radiating from the other. And anyone who is completely rusty in the prejudices of the physical world will, from the outset, have to find something like what I have just said quite foolish. But it is like this: you cannot penetrate into the spiritual world if you do not familiarize yourself with the fact that in the spiritual world, much - I say much, not everything - is exactly the opposite of the habits we have acquired here in the physical world. And what I have just discussed is one such thoroughly opposite experience. Only when one has familiarized oneself with such unusual things through very intimate practice can one form an opinion about the nature of the ordinary relationships that each person has with certain dead people, and how these relationships develop.

As I said, these relationships are constantly present. We just have to bear in mind, if we want to take a look at these relationships, that in addition to the polar opposites of the day's experiences, waking and sleeping, we have two others that are particularly important for the relationships between the so-called living and the so-called dead, but which, when consciously experienced, go against the usual habits of human beings. In addition to the usual waking and sleeping, there is also the process of falling asleep and waking up. These fleeting moments of falling asleep and waking up are just as important for the overall spiritual life of a person as the long periods of sleeping and waking, but they pass by in a flash. The reason a person does not experience the moment of waking up is because the full awakening follows immediately afterwards, and the person is not inclined to perceive as quickly as they would have to perceive if they wanted to grasp the fleeting moment of awakening; it is drowned out, deafened, by the waking life that follows. In more naive human conditions, where people knew a lot about such things, they also hinted at what it means for the human soul in this respect. But little by little, as materialism progresses, these things are being lost. Among naive, primitive people in the countryside, you still often hear it said that when you wake up, you shouldn't look straight into the bright window, you shouldn't open your eyes right away. Such talk arises from a very deep instinct, from the instinct not to immediately deafen the moment of waking through the waking day life, in order to be able to hold on to something that is there in the moment of waking.

But the moment of falling asleep is equally important, only that usually one falls asleep immediately afterwards. Then consciousness ceases. And so the moment of falling asleep is not properly observed by the ordinary consciousness.

What is important for the relationship between a person embodied in the physical world and the dead, however, is what can be experienced and is actually experienced in the moments of falling asleep and waking up. Such things can, of course, only be observed with the seeing consciousness. But when the seeing consciousness has brought about a state in which it can establish such relationships with certain dead people, relationships that can only be established through the complete transformation and readjustment of the soul's state that I have mentioned, then it can also judge what the real, but unconscious, relationships of the so-called living to the so-called dead are like. The most favorable moment to bring to the dead all kinds of relationships we ourselves have developed in our souls to certain dead people is when we fall asleep. And the most favorable moment to receive answers, messages from the dead into physical life on earth is when we wake up.

You do not have to be put off by the fact that what I have just said requires the person to address a question to the dead person when falling asleep, to send a message to the dead, and only to receive an answer or a return message at the moment of waking up. With regard to the supersensible world, the time conditions are quite different. What is separated by hours here for the physical world does not necessarily have to be separated in real supersensible life. One can definitely say: While here in physical life, when one asks someone, one expects an answer immediately, there one perceives the relationship in such a way that when one addresses questions to the dead while falling asleep, one receives the answer upon waking up. This relationship really always exists between the living and the dead. In fact, every person who has lost their loved ones to the physical plane by crossing the threshold of death has such relationships, which experience their most important development when falling asleep and waking up. They are not brought up into consciousness only because these favorable moments flit by quickly and man is not accustomed to taking into consciousness what approaches his soul in these quickly fleeting moments. To hold on to what approaches us in such fleeting moments, there is nothing more suitable than to occupy oneself with the finer, more subtle thoughts of spiritual science. If someone appropriates spiritual science in such a way that it is not mere head knowledge, but an inner substance of the soul itself, something that is grasped not only with cleverness but with love, so that it passes completely into the soul, if someone does not just cling to the thoughts of spiritual science with scientific curiosity or curiosity, but pursues them with love, to such a person this love sinks into the soul with such power that, with a little attention, he gradually becomes aware of the great significance of the moments of falling asleep and waking up. And the more spiritual science will sink into the souls of men, the more men will take up into real life not only what they experience when awake, but also what comes to them from a supersensible world when they fall asleep, but especially when they wake up. We must only be clear about the fact that we can only establish such real relationships, as I mean them now, with those dead with whom we are somehow connected karmically. But we are connected karmically with many more souls than we realize. For the conscious or unconscious communication between the living and the dead, however, the karmic connection is as necessary as it is necessary to direct the eye to a sense object in order to perceive it. Just as the sense relationship must be established, so it is a prerequisite for communication between the living and the dead that certain karmic relationships exist between them, or at least be established.

If we now consider the moment of falling asleep, it is the moment that is particularly favorable for us to bring up the relationships we have developed with someone who has passed away and who was dear and precious to us, who was otherwise karmically connected to us. The moment of falling asleep is particularly good for this. We naturally develop our relationships with the dead, with whom we are karmically connected, in the waking day life from waking up to falling asleep. We commemorate the dead. Everything we think in relation to the dead, that we would like to bring to them, that we would like to tell them, is then compressed in the moment of falling asleep and, even if it remains unconscious to us, reaches the dead for the ordinary consciousness. Only a certain state of mind is particularly favorable for these communications, another state of mind unfavorable.

You see, mere dry, cold thinking about the dead is not very suitable for really reaching the dead, for getting a message through to them. If we want the moment of falling asleep to become, as it were, a gateway through which our own experiences of soul that are related to the dead can reach the dead, then we must occupy ourselves with the dead in a different way while we are awake than by thinking cold, dry thoughts. We must try to stir up thoughts that connected us with the dead person while he was still living among the so-called living. But we must then put particular thought into what can establish a connection through the heart. Thinking of the dead person indifferently does not help much. But everything that keeps us connected to him through our hearts is good to call to mind: how one was with the dead person here or there, how one just talked with him, by developing an active interest in something that particularly interested him, out of one's own feelings; or to recall a situation in which one was once dead man here in life and something that touched him also touched you, or vice versa; how you were tempted to share something you had experienced with the other person because you liked him, to experience it together with him. Not dry thoughts, but thoughts permeated with love, with feeling! These thoughts then remain in our soul until the moment we fall asleep. And that is when we find the gate through which they can safely reach the dead person as a message.

We should not deceive ourselves about these things. We dream of the dead. When we dream of the dead, in a great many cases – not all, of course – it is because of a real relationship with the dead person. But what we dream, in so far as it follows the moment of falling asleep, is actually only a dream-like, pictorial transformation of what we want to communicate to the dead person. We do not experience the moment of falling asleep as the moment when thoughts, as just characterized, really go over to the dead, because this moment of falling asleep passes by so quickly. But this moment of falling asleep actually resonates in the following sleep, resonates in the dream. If we understand the matter correctly, we will not interpret dreams of the dead as messages from the dead. They could be, but usually are not. They are half-remembered impulses that tell us the following. If we dream of a dead person, it means that on a previous day we addressed such a thought to the dead person, either voluntarily or involuntarily, as I have characterized it. This thought has found its way to the dead person, and the dream indicates to us that we were actually speaking to the dead person. What the dead person then answers us, what the dead person communicates to us, these messages from the dead come in particularly easily at the moment of waking up. And they would come much more easily to the so-called living if they only had time in our present time, if they had the inclination to pay a little attention to what comes up between the lines of life from deep within their consciousness.

Yes, today's man is vain and selfish, and when something arises in his soul, he is usually clear about the fact that it is his genius that has caused it to arise. Being modest is an admonition put into life; being modest in the depths of one's being is not so easy for a person. Being modest also means that one really learns to distinguish between what arises from one's own soul and what arises from one's own soul from foreign, supersensible impulses. Just as the one who has the seeing consciousness feels and perceives the dead person's answer rising up from his or her own soul, so these answers from the dead, these messages from the dead in the waking period, from waking to falling asleep, come up from the depths of the soul. However, one can say: Just as a person does not see the stars during the day – although they are constantly in the sky – because sunlight drowns them out, a person is just as unaware of what is constantly coming up from the depths of his soul in his ordinary consciousness because the external life, which is caused by the impressions of the senses, drowns it out. When we become familiar, I would say, with our own soul, when we learn to distinguish between that which originates from ourselves and that which sounds from our own soul as something foreign, then, little by little, we also learn to recognize messages from the dead in our waking daily life. But then one connects something extraordinarily important with this knowledge. Then one says to oneself: We are actually not separated from the dead, the dead live among us. They do not announce themselves in the same way as other sensual beings, who send their impulses to us from outside, but they announce themselves from within, they speak to us through our own inner being, they carry us.

However, humanity in the present and near future will find it difficult to get used to the idea that the impulses under which they act come only from the sensual world around them, to recognize that in what we call our social, our other life, not only the so-called living lives, but also the so-called deceased, that the dead are always there and work in us and with us. In mythical form, the ancients knew this. When the ancients revered the deceased as tribal lords, as ancestral gods, it was because the ancients had atavistic knowledge that the dead are always there, that they are always at work through the living. This awareness had to be lost for good reasons for humanity, but it must come back! We must know again that the dead are in our midst, that the dead speak through our soul, that we have fellowship with the dead. We must recognize that spiritual science must be asked how life is actually constituted and that external science about life must be misleading because it does not know how to distinguish between what comes from the sensual world and what comes from the supersensible world. Our historiography has gradually become something grotesquely absurd. People speak of ideas that are supposed to live in history as if the ideas flew in like hummingbirds or other birds, whereas in truth the impulses that are often present as historical impulses are precisely the impulses of the dead.

This awareness of communal life with the dead must be developed. And as this awareness develops, and as human soul life becomes more refined through the concepts of spiritual science, which only then do not refine human life when they are conceived theoretically and not lovingly, all this will, so to speak, make the dead present for the consciousness of humanity as well. Then the great part of reality that today remains unconscious and unconsidered will also be considered. Only then will one live with the full reality and in the full reality. This is a task for humanity from this time on. For humanity is presently living in a great catastrophe. The deeper reasons why this catastrophe has arisen are that people have forgotten how to live in reality. Through their materialistic consciousness, people are far removed from reality. They believe that they are close to reality because they only accept one part of reality, the sensual reality, and consider the other to be mere fantasy. But it is precisely by not recognizing one half of reality that one separates oneself from reality. This does not lead to a deeper understanding of reality. If only people would realize that what I have just said is very, very practical for the present day!

Our children and young people are learning history today. In modern times, and for a long time already, people have become accustomed to learning history, that is, what they regard as history. But how much have people learned from history? Well, people today are very often called upon to ask themselves in the face of events that occur as elementary events every hour: What does history teach us about this? The phrase can be read again and again: one can learn this or that from history. People just don't learn anything from reality. Never before could one have learned so much from reality as in the last three and a half years. But countless people are oversleeping this infinitely meaningful reality. When these catastrophic events began, very clever people who believed that they had learned a great deal from history expressed their opinions about how long these war events, as they called them, could last. With the reasons they could have, they were also able to substantiate what they had expressed; they said: Four to six months; according to the knowledge one can have, this war catastrophe cannot last longer than that. They were experts who spoke in this way. Well, the facts turned out differently. And one truly does not need to be an insignificant person to judge in this way, seduced by what we call history in more recent times. In 1789, a truly significant person took up his professorship in history at the university and gave an inaugural address in which this truly significant person said at the time that history teaches that it is very likely that in the future the peoples of Europe will have all sorts of quarrels with each other, but that they will no longer be able to tear each other apart; after all, humanity is too advanced for that. In 1789, a not insignificant person, Friedrich Schiller, made this statement when he took up his professorship, based on his study of history, to which Schiller himself could devote himself. But what followed what Schiller said? The French Revolution; the great wars at the beginning of the 19th century. And if it were a lesson of history that the people of Europe, as members of one great family, could never again tear each other apart, then all the events of the present would be all the more impossible.

However strange it may sound, it is necessary to change our thinking about these things. What has been called history is not history at all. The forces that are supersensible are at work in the historical life of mankind. The dead have an influence on historical life, and a judgment based on history will only emerge when this judgment is made on a spiritual-scientific basis. Until this happens, history will never teach anything, history will never become a practical science, and it will never be suitable for providing maxims for what is to happen. This is why people today are so helpless in the face of events, because it is necessary in our time that spiritual maxims become the practical basis of life. As long as this does not happen, catastrophic events cannot truly be overcome.

I have said: thoughts that arise from an emotional relationship with the dead person and that are remembered in such a way that one also remembers this emotional relationship are particularly favorable for getting in touch with the dead. It is particularly favorable to get an answer from the dead, particularly favorable for the dead to influence our lives, if we really know the dead, if we have the opportunity to delve into his being. Spiritual science will also be able to provide the impetus to delve into the nature of other people. Because today, due to the materialistic state of mind, it is hardly possible for people to know each other in life. They think they know each other, but they just pass each other by, talk past each other. Today, you can be married to someone for thirty or more years and know very little about them. It requires a certain refinement of soul to know the nature of another. If one can know the nature of the other as one's own, then the prerequisite is to call one's nature before the soul. If we call the nature of a dead person to whom we want to ask questions before our soul by visualizing something that connects us emotionally with him, and if we imagine his nature quite vividly, then we are sure to get surely receive an answer; then it is only for us to develop the necessary attention for the interplay of what we address to the dead, with what is sure to come back from the dead when the emotional relationships mentioned are recalled. It is then possible that what we bring to the dead will find its answer from the dead if we can vividly imagine what we have truly understood of his nature.

The consciousness that sees can provide information about many other specific relationships with the dead. Today I will speak of one more. You see, those who pass through the gateway of death as our relatives or friends or otherwise karmically related to us, they either pass away as children or young people or as older people. If you observe with the seeing consciousness what the relationships are like with the various dead, then you can say the following with regard to this passing away at different ages. When children or young people pass through the gate of death, the relationship they maintain with those left behind can be described as follows: those who were their relatives here do not lose their children or younger people; they actually remain right there in the vicinity. And that, which we feel as pain, as grief, takes on its character through this. When a human being endowed with consciousness observes the pain of soul that a mother or father feels over a child who has passed away, this pain of soul is quite different from the pain felt as a young person when an older person dies. Of course, on a superficial, external level, these experiences of the soul are more or less the same, but if you look at them more intimately, they are fundamentally different. The people who have died younger do not go away, they actually remain – that is how you can describe the relationship – and they live on with our souls, live on in our souls. And actually the pain we feel, the grief we feel, is what the younger deceased experience in us. This is transferred into our pain, into our grief. They stay with us. It is a transference of their own pain, which does not have to be pain, but then becomes pain for us when it is transferred into our souls.

The grief we feel for an older person is actually a personal pain. I would say it is less a pain of sympathy and more of selfishness, our own selfish pain. For if we want to describe the relationship of the younger person left behind here to the older deceased from the point of view of the observing consciousness, we can say: the older deceased does not lose us. We do not lose the younger deceased; the older deceased does not lose us, those left behind, but to a certain extent takes the soul with him, carries it with him in its forces on his further path. He does not lose those who remain behind. And so our relationship to such an older deceased person is quite different from that to a younger deceased person. The older deceased does not tend to live in the soul of the person who remains behind, because he takes with him the inner being, the imprint of the inner being.

What I just said is not insignificant in life, because what we call the memory of the dead is given a very specific light through it. In younger people it is good to cultivate this memory – I would say the cult of the dead – in such a way, to develop it, that we remain more general, that we arrange the thoughts or the cultic actions or other things that are intended to cultivate the memory in such a way that we do not go into the individual, the personal side of the dead person, but have great world feelings and thoughts in view of the dead. In this way, the one who died young and remains with us feels at home. In the case of someone who died older, it is especially good if one can go into his individuality, if the thoughts one addresses to him are shaped in such a way that they have something to do with his personality, are shaped towards his personality. For someone who has died more recently, it is particularly good if the funeral service is arranged in such a way that a kind of cult, a generally established cult that has a symbolic meaning, is developed. For people who have died more recently, the Catholic funeral service is particularly suitable, which in most countries is less concerned with individual circumstances or not at all, but is a symbolic general funeral service for everyone. For souls who have died young, who of course remain there, it is best to develop general world symbols, general world feelings with regard to them, with rites that apply equally to everyone. For those who have died older, the Protestant funeral service, where more attention is paid to the individual course of life and more reference is made to the personal side of the deceased, is better. And also in the individual memory that one dedicates to such a deceased person, that which is personally connected with him, which is not applicable to every deceased person, but only to him, is to be preferred.

If one knows these things, then our emotional life with regard to the deceased will also be graded and differentiated. We know how to distinguish how the soul should behave towards a younger or older deceased. Life is enriched in its most intimate relationships when one absorbs the idea from spiritual science that not only the souls living in physical bodies belong to one another, but also the disembodied souls. Only then does man enter into full reality. It must be said again and again: to speak of the spirit in general does not lead very far. To speak of spiritual life in general, as certain philosophers do, or as people do who today also believe that they can overcome materialism by speaking in general of spirit and spirit and spirit: that does not lead very far. We muster the courage to penetrate into the concrete spiritual life. We muster the courage to unreservedly confess such conditions, as we have discussed them again today, before the world, no matter how great the mockery of materialistic thinkers may still be at present. Today one cannot see how much that is infinitely fatal for humanity, infinitely disastrous, is connected with the fact that people know nothing about these things in the most important parts of the world and therefore do not think about them, and are therefore so far removed from reality, which must then devastatingly befall them. The present earth catastrophe will be ascribed to all possible impulses, only not to those in which it really originates in the deepest sense.

This is the place to reflect on the full significance that an anthroposophically oriented spiritual-scientific worldview must have in European intellectual life, as we understand it here. How people relate to the spirit and to spiritual content will be of great importance in the not-too-distant future. For important and significant things are preparing themselves in the life of mankind on earth. One cannot help but, if one comes even a little out of the sleepy state in which, unfortunately, so many people are, think more deeply about certain things than has been thought in Europe for centuries. The times urge people to learn to rethink. Actually, you can see that people are rethinking; the only question is whether they are doing so in a truly profound way or whether they are refraining from doing so altogether, or whether they are doing so in the way that very many people are doing now. You can see that people are rethinking, it's just that sometimes it comes out in a very strange way. You could give not hundreds, but thousands of examples.

You see, one of those people who have changed their thinking terribly over the last three and a half years is the former French socialist and journalist Gustave Herve. He publishes a newspaper, he calls it 'Gloire', which has also been renamed from a less provocative name. This Herve is actually one of those who currently write in the spirit of the most furious French jingoism. One can say that even compared to a tigerish, bullish chauvinist like Clemenceau, Herve is actually even more French-chauvinist – and he has changed his views. Four years ago, he was still quite a cosmopolitan, who laughed at anyone who was somehow, I won't even say, French-chauvinist, but who was just somehow French-nationalist. He was a true cosmopolitan, this Herve. Now what he writes is so vitriolic that one can read between every line one reads of his: he would actually prefer that the French tricolour become an instrument to slay everything opposed to the French. Nevertheless, Herve did make a significant statement, though it was before this war. This saying is the following: The tricolor belongs on the dunghill! — So little was this man, who is now one of the most chauvinistic Frenchmen, nationally minded as a Frenchman, that he rose to say: the tricolor—he means the French tricolor—belongs on the dunghill. So he despised everything national. He has already relearned, rethought, only of course in a way that is not very profound. What should happen in a time happens – it is important to note this; the only question is how it turns out for one or the other, how one or the other really pays attention to their task for humanity. Above all, it is necessary in this re-education that the European man does not oversleep the significant things that are currently being prepared for all of humanity on earth. Over in Asia, especially in the Orient, a sum of judgments is being prepared about Europe, namely about Central Europe – we are particularly interested in Central Europe at the present time – judgments are being prepared that will gradually actually combine to form historical impulses. The Oriental, the Japanese, the Indian, the Chinese, are gradually feeling challenged to develop certain impulses within themselves. And to a high degree, such impulses have already been formed. To a certain degree, there are judgments, especially among leading Orientals, about Central European, about German nature, which should certainly be heeded, because what lives in these impulses will become history in the not too distant future. It may seem very strange, but today one should develop a fine sensitivity for such things; one should know that today it is necessary to foresee a little of what must come in order to keep pace with reality. The Orientals who are preparing to enter into a relationship with Europe, who are forming their judgments, which will become world politics in the future, these Orientals have their age-old views about spiritual life. They see what has been going on in Europe for centuries, but they see it only in a one-sided way, because this Europe, namely this Central Europe, shows them their own nature in a one-sided way. Yes, what do the leading Orientals believe, for example, about this Central European nature? They believe what they must believe from what they actually see. They believe that Central Europe is particularly skilled at organizing state, commercial and other relationships; that Central Europe is particularly skilled at submitting to the external science taught in schools in Europe and surrendering to the authority of this science. These Orientals cannot particularly appreciate what comes from this organization or from science, because they are aware that they have an ancient spirituality that is based on completely different impulses than we Europeans can have. The leading Oriental, in particular, will never be impressed by what European natural science, for example, has to offer; he will never be impressed by what European industry produces, even if he, like the Japanese, will accept it in an external way; he will never be impressed by what European organization is able to achieve. For he is aware that none of this establishes a relationship to the real essence of things. He feels that this relationship exists between his soul and the soul of the universe. He feels spiritually akin to the soul of the universe. Let us be quite clear about this. The Oriental would approach what corresponds to such a way of looking at things, as we have practiced here or elsewhere today, quite differently than he would approach the European machine, the European organization, the European external science of the mind. And however strange it may seem, we may well ask ourselves what the Orient would say if it could know that from the fruits of the spiritual life in Europe, as expressed by Herder, Schiller, Goethe, and the Romantics, , a true, concrete spiritual contemplation of the world, which adds something special to the oriental contemplation of the spirit that the Oriental cannot find through his disposition, but which he could appreciate and with which he could agree? Of course, you may say: Goethe is sufficiently known throughout the world, and the leaders of Oriental intellectual life can also get to know Goethe, and Goethe is a source, an infinite source for the intellectual life of Central Europe. All this is true, absolutely true. But has Central Europe already come to truly recognize Goethe as such a source? One could talk about this point at length. The Oriental looks at what Central Europe has been able to make of Goethe. Much could be said about this, but I will give just one example: Central Europe has known how to pass over the most important impulses of Goethe in silence, but it has a Goethe Society. This Goethe Society was founded at a truly propitious moment. The starting point was an excellent one. It may be said that few constellations were as favorable for such things as this one at the end of the 1880s. When the last descendant of Goethe handed over the estate to a princess, everything could have been well initiated, would have been well tackled, and would have given an initial impulse from which one could have believed: now the spiritual sources will be drawn from Goethe! Much has happened, and the Goethe Society was also founded at that time. But let us take the Oriental who asks: In the Orient we have a life that connects the soul directly to the world soul. Over there they have organizations of state and social conditions, over there they have machines and industry, they have a science that is taught in school and weighs on the soul with tremendous authority; but they have no relationship of the soul of the human being to the soul of the universe. If he knew what relationships were lying latent, if he knew what could be his after what could be experienced in Goethe, he would speak and think and feel differently. But what does he see? Well, he may ask himself: Yes, this Central Europe has managed to found a Goethe Society to honor one of its greatest minds. But it has also managed to have a former finance minister as the president of this Goethe Society today. - It is only symbolic of much more. One can say: there must live in our soul the impulse to make the world aware that from the source of the German spirit can emerge the impulses of spiritual science. They will not be overlooked in the Orient. If they were overlooked, then the judgment would have to form in the Orient as a historical impulse: This Central European culture is actually harmful to humanity. — And this judgment has become established to a high degree. It would certainly be corrected if it were known that this Central European spiritual life is capable of transforming even the most mechanical of mechanisms into beauty, into soul, through those impulses that it has within itself and that it can develop into real knowledge and real processing of the supersensible. So it could actually work in one direction.

And if we look at the other side: in the West, in America, not only the Central European way of life but the whole of Europe is seen in the same way as one can only get to know it from the outside, because of course not only the Goethe Society, with the former finance minister at its head, but also the other things are seen in a similar way, but not what can live in souls as what has passed through our souls today. While in the Orient they say: This Europe, this European life is harmful – in America they find it superfluous. Because the Americans can build machines, organize industry, and found Goethe Societies with people who understand Goethe scholarship as much as what is needed to put together financial budgets. But what flows from Goethe as the deepest source of spiritual life, the Americans cannot do that; they can only have it if they take it from the Central Europeans.

It is not just some mystical eccentricity, my dear friends, it is a question deeply connected with the practical necessities of life in the present, how we relate to the impulses to let the world know and feel, as much as is possible in us, what could live in European culture in terms of spirituality, which paths it could currently have to the supersensible. Today more than ever it is necessary to remember that spiritual science in our sense is not just something with which we want to do good to our own soul, but that spiritual science must become something through which we as human beings in the right sense, as human beings of Central Europe, can fulfill our task in the development of humanity.

Yesterday we tried to get to know more precisely the world that surrounds us in such a way that we share it with those who have passed through the gate of death and that we also share it with those spiritual and soul beings that we count among the beings of the higher hierarchies. In this way, we have devoted ourselves to a contemplation that is suitable for opening up to us a part of that reality that plays a part in human life, without man, with his sensory perception and also with his mind tied to sensory perception, being able to know anything about it in his ordinary waking consciousness. Since this world is a reality, a reality that plays a part in the shaping of human life, it is understandable that in the time in which we live, in which man is called more and more, take the general destiny of human development into his own hands, as we have often said, that in such a time a knowledge of these supersensible things also sinks into the human soul. Yesterday we ended our meditation, which, as a meditation on the life of the so-called dead, must be deeply penetrating for each individual human soul, with the suggestion that this is particularly necessary in our time. On the other hand, however, there must also be an urgent need to reflect more closely on such things, such as those we touched on in our meditation yesterday. For in our time even half-awake people, dreaming people, should suspect that extraordinarily important decisions are being formed.

In the course of our discussions, I have repeatedly given hints here and there about what can be said from the sources of spiritual research about the character of modern times, the character of our time itself and the near future. Such things could only be given to present-day humanity, and more or less to anthroposophically minded humanity, in a very cautious way. Just see how much of this can be found in the lectures given in Kristiania many years before these catastrophic events, for the understanding of precisely these difficult, catastrophic times. And perhaps it may also be recalled that at a time when it would have been necessary to point out, in one way or another, the seriousness of the impulses at hand, in the lecture cycle that was held in Vienna in the early spring of 1914 – that is, before the outbreak of our present world catastrophe -–, the way in which social life, the way in which human coexistence in our time is spoken of, I chose a sharp, a strong expression: I spoke at the time in these lectures, which were essentially also about the life of man between death and a new birth, of the fact that something is happening in the moral and social life of the present that can be described as a social carcinoma, as a terrible social cancer. Perhaps one or the other at that time found this to be a strong expression. But perhaps one or the other has since been able to convince himself that the facts speak for it, that such a strong expression was allowed to be chosen at the time.

However, what I already hinted at yesterday is correct and should give us much food for thought: despite all this, despite the fact that it can easily be surmised what serious impulses lie in the lap of our time, humanity today is little inclined to really grasp the seriousness of the phenomena. Today, humanity is far too comfortable for that, far too happy to indulge in those comfortable concepts that can be found in the scientific world view today, because these concepts can be gained from the handrails of external experience, because they do not require much inner effort of the mind and yet they flatter people's vanity so much. But what is necessary is that humanity should wake up, really wake up, to much of what the times demand of us today. This awakening will only be possible if certain underlying facts are no longer regarded as fantasies or dreams but as realities that play a part in our times. And so I have often hinted during our discussions that a significant change has occurred to humanity, particularly in the last third of the 19th century. I have also hinted at these things here in Stuttgart. Today, we want to once again call them to mind from a certain point of view.

I have indicated the fall of 1879 as the turning point in the development of humanity in modern times. If we want to understand this development of humanity in modern times more precisely, we must say that what happened in the last third of the 19th century is only the effect of something that happened in the spiritual world before. It began in the spiritual world in the 1840s. And the time from the forties to the end of the seventies of the 19th century is an important and essential, a significant time. What happened then did not happen on the physical plane; but in the year 1879 the repercussions descended on to the physical plane, and since that time these repercussions have been taking place on the physical plane. They are a kind of reflection of what happened before in the spiritual world. If one is to describe what underlies this, one can say that in a particular field in a particular sphere it is the manifestation of what otherwise happens more often in the development of humanity, and what has always been described by those who were still able to observe such things as a struggle between Michael and the dragon. In the most diverse fields, such struggles of normally progressing spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies against spirits of hindrance and obstruction have taken place. For the cultural development of humanity, such a struggle has taken place in spiritual realms, and in those spiritual realms that are directly adjacent to the earth, in the decades from the 1840s to the end of the 1870s. At that time, in 1879, this battle ended with a victory, if one may say so, of the good powers against certain spirits of obstruction, which at that time - one can put it that way - were thrown down from the spiritual worlds into earthly conditions, so that since then they have been working and weaving in earthly conditions. Within that which is developing in the spiritual evolution of humanity, there are spirits of hindrance that were only overthrown at the end of the 1970s and hurled down into the lower world for the upper world, and now rule in people.

If we look at these spirits of hindrance, these spirits of an Ahrimanic nature, with which the spirits that we can call Michaelic spirits have fought a fierce battle, we have to say that these Ahrimanic spirits had a good significance in past periods of human development, they had their tasks in past periods of spiritual development. These tasks were carried out in such a way that they were guided by good higher spirits. We must not imagine the so-called evil spirits in such a way that we think we just have to flee from them in order to get rid of them if possible. That is namely the best way to attach them to oneself if one wants to get rid of them in an egoistic way; rather, one has to imagine that these so-called evil spirits are also in the service of the wise world order. If they are only placed in their right position, they will perform services that are necessary for the wise world order. And so we can say that for centuries, even for millennia, these ahrimanic spirits have performed the task of dividing human beings into those community contexts that have to do with blood ties. People are connected in their earthly associations in such a way that the bonds of blood also trigger and bring about certain bonds of love. People organize themselves into family, tribal, ethnic and racial contexts. All these things are subject to certain laws of the times. These are directed by beings from the higher worlds. That which humanity has specialized, that which humanity has structured in such a way that this structure is based on blood, was guided by these Ahrimanic spirits, but under the guidance of good spirits.

But now a different era was to begin. As long as human beings were guided by blood, so to speak, they could not take their destiny into their own hands in the way that has been suggested several times. For this it was necessary that the service of these Ahrimanic spirits, as it was, be eliminated from the spiritual world. These spirits initially wanted to continue their activity of dividing people according to blood from the spiritual world; but humanity was to be driven to a more general conception of its entire spirit. What is often said in our field, that humanity is to be understood as a whole on earth, is truly not a cliché, but a modern necessity. And this is based on the fact that a strong, intense struggle has taken place between the Michaelic spirits and the spirits of Ahrimanic nature, which in the past differentiated people according to blood.

This battle has ended with the Ahrimanic entities being pushed down and now prevailing among people. They will cause confusion among people, because that is their intention after this defeat: to cause confusion with everything that can be drawn from all kinds of concepts and ideas related to blood ties and blood relationships. It is particularly important to realize that since the last third of the nineteenth century, these impulses have been active in everything that human beings can achieve here on the physical plane through their thoughts and feelings, and that reality cannot be understood without taking these impulses into account. The way in which certain international relationships and the like are discussed today has been confused by these Ahrimanic spirits, who have been defeated by the spirit of Michael.

I have often mentioned that we can say that we have been in the so-called Michaelic Age since the end of the 1970s. Michael can be seen as the Zeitgeist, which has replaced Gabriel as the Zeitgeist. This means a great deal: Michael as the spirit of the age! The spirits of the age that were present in earlier centuries worked differently than this spirit of the age. The other spirits of the age that influenced the development of humanity in earlier centuries did so more or less in the subconscious. The task of the Michaelic Zeitgeist, which has been working in human affairs since the last third of the nineteenth century, is this: to release more and more in human consciousness itself that which is to take place in the evolution of the earth. This Michaelic Zeitgeist has actually descended and is working on the physical plane of the earth.

There is something connected with all this for our time that is extremely easy to misunderstand. Ours is a very, very ambivalent time. If you describe it so superficially, you could easily call our time merely materialistic. But that is not all; the matter is much more complicated. On the whole, one can say that these more recent times are, in their fundamental character, extraordinarily spiritual, extraordinarily spiritual indeed. And there have never been more spiritual concepts and ideas than those that have been brought to the surface by modern science in the development of humanity. But these concepts, if I may express myself in this way, are abstract. In themselves, in their substance, they are thoroughly spiritual; but they are not suited, as they appear, if they are not properly treated, to express spiritual realities. These concepts of natural science, which are being instilled into all education today, are a very double-edged sword, if I may use this paradoxical simile. They can be used as they are applied by academic science today. In that case they are spiritual, but only in so far as they are applied to the external material world; their spirituality is denied. But these scientific concepts can also be applied in such a way that they serve as material for meditation, that one meditates on them. Then they will most surely lead into the spiritual world. If those who today have a scientific world-picture would not be too lazy to apply their concepts in meditation, then these people with a scientific world-picture would very soon enter into spiritual science. It is not the content of the scientific concepts that is at fault, but the way they are treated. The concepts are subtle and intimate, but people apply them in a materialistic sense. It is not so easy to make this clear in all its details, but we must communicate with each other; therefore we must let many such truths approach us only by reflection, as it were.

Thus people live in concepts, in ideas that are thin, that are, I might say, pure distilled spirit, so that one needs only to apply a strong force to arrive at spiritual science; and these concepts are the ones that are to enter the human development precisely through the Michaelic Age. But they are also the ones who are most confused by the indicated, one can already say, from heaven to earth pushed, in heaven overcome ahrimanic spirits of obstacles. They arise in so many areas where man today believes he is thinking and reasoning quite correctly, but where he is exposed to the confusion of these spirits to a high degree.

It is precisely when considering such a matter that it becomes clear how development actually takes place, let us first stay with humanity. We must bring before our soul a significant law of development, which we have also to consider from other points of view. It is, of course, an extremely superficial way of looking at things to think that events in historical life simply arise from one another in such a way that what happens in 1918 is a consequence of 1917, 1916 and so on. That is a superficial way of looking at it. Things happen quite differently; they happen in such a way that what has happened in the spiritual realm continues to have an effect in the following periods, but in a certain way. You can take any year, let us say for example 1879. Then something happens in 1880 that is determined by the fact that what happened in 1878 is repeated retrogressively. In 1881, in a certain respect, what happened in 1877 is repeated retrogressively, and so on. One can start from any point in the development of humanity, as contradictory as this may seem; one will always find that earlier annual cycles show up in later ones as important impulses. One can therefore expect that, especially in an important period of time, this law will also intervene in the development of humanity with particular clarity and importance.

I have often hinted at this, and have often spoken before these catastrophic events of the important period of 1879, and that it is only the effect of what has been taking place in the spiritual world since the forties. If we now apply this law, which I have just mentioned, we can say the following: 1879 is an important period of time; certain spirits were pushed down who had previously worked in the spiritual world as spirits of hindrance, and from then on worked here on the physical plane among people in a hindering and confusing way. What happened in 1879 is, so to speak, the conclusion of an earlier event that began between 1841 and 1844 and has been taking effect over the decades. If we now take the year 1841, we have the period of struggle in the spiritual world from 1841 to 1879. Those entities, which are under the rule of the spirit, who is called Michael – one could also describe him with another name – they prepared themselves in 1841 to take up the strong, intensive fight in the spiritual world, which then found its conclusion for the spiritual world in 1879. It lasted for thirty-eight years. Now I said: That which happens retrogressively has a retroactive effect in the following period. — Now continue calculating from 1879 for another thirty-eight years: 1917. Just as in 1880 what happened in 1878 repeats itself, and in 1881 what happened in 1877, so in a certain way what took place in the spiritual world in 1841 is repeated in the physical world in 1917 as one of the most important struggles. It is indeed the case that the year 1879 marks a turning point, which shows very energetic impulses forward and backward in the observation. And in a certain way, on the physical plane of 1917, 1918, those things are now repeating themselves that had to take place in the spiritual world in the forties, and which can be described as a struggle of normal, forward-driving spirits against certain spirits of obstruction. This is not a calculation that I have only just made today; rather, many of you know that these events have always been referred to, and that from the point of view of these events, the year 1917 must be seen as an important starting point for subsequent events.

Of course, things must not be viewed in such a way that one says: Well, we have experienced the year 1917. Certainly, one has experienced it; but what the events actually were that took place in that year, only a few people have experienced, since few people are inclined to evaluate them in their waking consciousness. That is what it is all about.

Now, through all these things I wanted to point out that we are indeed living in an important moment in the evolution of humanity, and that it is necessary to take some things more seriously at this point in time than they are taken by the present humanity in its masses. I have already pointed out how particularly necessary it is not to ignore the normal spiritual impulses in our time. As this newer time has developed, what has actually become predominant in it? What has really gained influence in this newer time? What is radiated, I might say, into the whole of general education? Basically, only that which has grown on the coarsest field of the scientific world view. But this coarsest field of the scientific world view has only the power to grasp the dead, the inanimate, never the living, which would be so infinitely necessary in this scientific age. Even today, people still do not want to see the connection between such things and general world events. They do not want to see that the more humanity endeavors to develop only concepts that relate to the dead, they are also destroying social and community life from within. It is necessary to bring scientific concepts into flux and to enliven them in such a way that they can actually be applied to human coexistence, that they are, so to speak, suitable for explaining human coexistence.

The course of development has been this way in these newer, in these most recent times: in what has been accepted as actual science, only those concepts have been formed with which one can comprehend external, dead nature. These concepts were quite unsuitable for grasping human life. But they wanted to use them to grasp human life. And so the official scientists applied these concepts to history, to social science, to social policy, and so on. But these concepts are not useful there, and so there is no useful concept for social life at all. As a result, the social life of the earth has become too much for people to handle, has become what it has become over the past four years. People will have to learn to condense their concepts and also to vitalize them.

What the natural scientists themselves develop is certainly ingenious, useful, and conscientiously methodical, but only for the external world. Today, everyone works in their own field and does not extend the concepts that are developed in any field to the totality of the human world view. Take just one example, and you will immediately understand what I actually mean. The ordinary school physicist who today looks at the magnet needle pointing with one end to the north and with the other to the south, explains to his boys that this constant pointing of the magnet needle to the north and to the south comes from the earth's magnetism, that the earth is also a great magnet; and it would be ridiculous if this school physicist were to seek in the magnet needle itself the forces that cause the needle to point in these directions. He tries to explain it in terms of the properties of the earth; he seeks the cause outside in the cosmos. In this purely dead area, the scientific concepts are still of some use, and one or other of them may still be discovered. Therefore, it does not occur to anyone to say of the magnetic needle that it has the inherent power to always point in one direction. One assumes directional forces from the magnetic north and south poles of the earth. The biologist no longer does this. It does not occur to him to develop a similar concept. The biologist sees the chicken in which the egg is formed. It does not occur to him to ask the same question as the physicist asks about the magnetic needle. The biologist simply says: When the egg is formed in the hen, the cause of the egg formation lies in the hen. If he were to proceed as the physicist does with the magnet needle, he would say: Although the hen is the place where the egg is formed, the cosmic forces are involved in the same way as the cosmos is involved in the magnet needle when the egg is formed. I must go beyond the narrow confines of nature and take what is outside to help. In the chicken there is the place where the egg develops, but the forces come from the cosmos, just as they give direction to the magnet needle from the cosmos.

It is urgently necessary to develop such a concept and to implement it methodically. But in the eyes of the official science of biology it is foolish, fantastic, it is ridiculous, because it has completely lost its way into a blind alley of the dead. This official science cannot even apply the comprehensive concepts to such things, much less can it say anything about how people could live together politically or socially in the right way. How can one hope that something so necessary for humanity could come out of this mere natural scientific world view, namely a revival, a refreshing of these concepts? Especially in the important area of human life, this cannot be. Let us make this clear by looking at a concept that we want to grasp spiritually.

Even the mere observation of the human skeleton shows something extraordinarily important, something, I would say, magnificent. When you look at the human skeleton, you see the head, which is actually only placed on the rest of the trunk skeleton; it is a world of its own. The other part of the skeleton is formed quite differently. If we apply Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, we do indeed get the transformation of the trunk into the main skeleton, but the main skeleton is formed spherically, the head is a reflection of the whole sphere of the world. The other is formed more like a moon. This is something extraordinarily significant and indicates to us that if we want to gain fruitful insights into the human being from his form alone, we must look at something that is already indicated in the form. Our natural science is indeed magnificent, but it is illiterate when it comes to knowledge of the world. It proceeds as someone who does not read the pages of a book but writes on them: A is like this, B is like that — that is, not reading but merely describing the letters. But one must proceed to reading, one must understand, describe the forms of nature not merely as science does, but interpret them in their relationships, in their transitions. Then one comes from reading the forms of nature and natural phenomena to unraveling the meaning of the world. Of course, people who hear something like this today and who, with their thick heads, are completely stuck in illiteracy, find such a thing, when it is said, quite dreadful. Good examples could be given of how something is found to be dreadful that is so far-fetched from the human skeleton, but which can be extended to the whole human organism. Man is a dual nature, and this dual nature is already expressed in the fundamental contrast between the head and the rest of the organism.

If one now, through spiritual science, engages with these two aspects of the dual nature – one could specify further aspects, but that is not the point today – then one can already read something tremendously significant from the mere shape of the human being, if one really engages with it. From a spiritual scientific point of view, it can be seen that this human head undergoes a development from birth through physical life on earth, which now differs from the development of the rest of the organism just as the head already differs in form from the rest of the organism. It is very interesting to observe that this head develops three to four times faster than the rest of the organism. If you look at the rest of the organism, you can call it by a common name, in that it is mainly organized by the heart, so that you then get an opposite between the head organism and the heart organism. This heart organism really develops three to four times slower than the head organism. If we were only heads, we would be old people by the age of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, getting ready to die because the head develops so quickly. The rest of the organism develops four times more slowly, and so we live well into our seventies and eighties. But that does not change the fact that we actually have a head development and a heart development, that we carry these two natures within us. Our head development is also usually fully completed by the age of twenty-eight; the head no longer develops. What then develops is the rest of the organism. It also sends the developmental rays into the head of its own accord. If you are able to observe the shape, the characteristic development of the shape, you could come across confirmation even from external things, even if you cannot come across the thing itself. However, you have to have spiritual knowledge to come across this. But look, who has not looked at a small child and said to themselves when they see it again later: This child only later became so similar to so and so. — This is connected with the fact that the forces of heredity are actually in the rest of the organism. The head is formed entirely out of the cosmos; and only when the forces of heredity work out of the rest of the organism, which happens more slowly, does the physiognomy of the head also resemble the rest of the organism. This is just one example of how external facts can confirm what spiritual science finds. It is important to note that the head develops much faster than the rest of the organism.

You see, knowing this was not so important in the early days when people were more unfree, more directed. In those days, the good spiritual powers took care of things. They effectively established harmony between the pace of head development and the pace of the rest of development. Now the time is coming when people themselves must ensure that such things are harmonized. Therefore, people must be able to understand such things correctly, must be able to deal with them, and they sin against development if they cannot do so. And we have an important area of human life where these things are terribly sinned against. This sin is sporadically expressed today because we have been in it since the last third of the 19th century. It will be expressed in a terrible way if people cannot understand the spiritual impulses. Today they initially express themselves in the following way: No consideration is given to the fact that if a person is to develop normally, something must be given to him that takes into account the fact that his brain development is three to four times faster than that of the rest of the organism. And one area in which this is particularly damaging is that of education and teaching, for the following reasons: Under the influence of the scientific world view, concepts have been developed that have gradually become mere concepts for the development of the head, that do not contribute to the rest of the development, concepts that are acquired at the same pace as the head develops, that cannot be absorbed at the same pace as the rest of the organism develops.

This means an extraordinary amount. Time has gradually developed louder ideas that occupy the head, leaving the heart cool and empty. They come sporadically today, as I said, but the things will increasingly take hold. You can do the test if you can observe life. Because of the dichotomy of the way the head and heart develop, the human being depends on not just developing intellectually in his youth. In youth, the head is the main focus because the other aspects develop more slowly. If we wanted to educate people for the rest of their lives as well as for the head, we would have to keep them in school their whole lives. We can only address the head in school education. But today the head is treated in such a way that it cannot give anything back to the rest of the organism in spiritual and soul terms. The rest of the organism does, of course, give its inherited impulses to the head throughout life, otherwise we would die at twenty-seven, because the head is predisposed to do so. But in return, the head should also give what is cultivated in it. You can see for yourself that today's education does not do this. To prove it, ask yourself: Is it not true that people who receive a school education today only remember what they feel in later life? — Most of the time they do not even do that, but are happy to be able to quickly forget everything. This only means that the rest of the organism observes the formation of the head. If the rest of the organism received from the head the life essence it needs, then one would not only remember in terms of memory, but one would look back on what one's teacher gave one, as on a paradise, to which one thinks back with heartfelt contentment and attachment every hour in later life, into which one plunges again and again and in which one has a source of rejuvenation. It would be a source of rejuvenation if it included education of the heart, not just of the head. Then, throughout his or her life, a person would have something from childhood teaching, from school, for the rest of the organism, which develops four times more slowly, and this would also have an effect on the organism. Today it is only just beginning, and it will get worse and worse. People will become prematurely aged because they will only remember what they have absorbed into their heads, and what has meaning only up to the age of twenty-seven. After that, it remains as useless, remembered memory; and the person ages. He ages inwardly, spiritually, early on, because the formation of the head is not suited to overflow into the four times slower development of the heart.

These things must be taken into account. But if they are to be taken into account, then our school education must become a totally different one, then it must have living concepts instead of the dead concepts that prevail everywhere today. When it comes to a Kant-Laplacean theory, people will always remember it in such a way that they grow old. What is real: the spiritual and soul starting point of our universe, from which the physical has only developed, will, if it is properly incorporated into the teaching material, be a lifelong source of rejuvenation. And it is possible to shape the subject matter, not just by using a methodical approach, but by completely reworking it in the anthroposophical sense, so that throughout one's entire life, there is something that one can recall not just in thought, but that is a lifelong source of continuous rejuvenation. We must consciously work to ensure that people are not old when they are barely fifty years old, but that they can still draw inwardly, spiritually, from what they have taken in during their youth; that they can have a source of refreshment, a refreshing drink from what they have taken in as a child. But then it must be given in such a way that it is not only suitable for the development of the head, but that it is suitable for the development of the whole human organism, which proceeds three to four times more slowly than the development of the head.

To understand such things means to bring to life what are dead concepts for the natural scientist and therefore also for our general education. Do not underestimate the great social significance of what is said here. You might think that this is only important where science in the narrower sense is effective. That is not true. Science has an effect on all of today's education, on the whole breadth of today's human development. These scientific concepts extend even into the Sunday newspapers; and even those who only absorb everything that constitutes their faith today, the real and true faith, from their Sunday newspaper, which they pretend to have towards their church or their office, are infected by science, which can only deliver dead matter, even if this dead matter may be considered in the most spiritual way. These things must be clearly seen through.

So you see: Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is truly not just something that can satisfy subjective curiosity, but something that has to deeply affect our entire development in time. And again, this intervention in our development in time depends, for our consciousness, which can be trained in anthroposophy, on the recognition of what took place in human development from 1841 to 1879 and to 1917, both supersensibly and sensibly, above and on the physical plane. These things cannot be taken seriously enough. For much, very much, has not been taken seriously in recent times. And the recovery of humanity will have to consist in people again being willing to accept perceptions, ideas, feelings about world development. Just reflect on these things!

If you look back over the past few decades, what has the world's ruling class, with the exception of a few individuals, actually done in terms of world views, major world views? At most, it has allowed natural scientific concepts to be popularized in some way, and has used these natural scientific concepts, which it has allowed to be popularized, to demonstrate all kinds of illustrative things using the means of modern times. If you could somehow announce that something from the natural sciences would be demonstrated with slides, you would attract a great deal of attention and popularity. What has the leading social class actually done with questions of world view in modern times? People were very interested if someone could tell what they experienced as a North Pole traveler or as a Brazilian explorer. It is not to be criticized that one is interested in this. When someone talks about the fact that he has somehow been able to unravel the secrets of the egg germ of the May beetle, one has felt the necessity of listening to such lectures as a well-educated bourgeois of modern times, even if one has dozed off after five minutes, unless a slide has awakened one. But where is the real will to elevate the human idea to a worldview? Where it was present, and it is very characteristic, and everyone is actually forced to reflect on it today, where have there been the most lively worldview debates, the most lively interests in worldview questions for decades? There, where the Social Democrats had their meetings. There, worldviews were formed. This is only unknown in other social classes because they guard against really getting to know human life as much as possible.

But what kind of worldview do the Social Democrats teach? One that only works with the same concepts that are enshrined in the machines; a worldview that only develops views of the world in the mechanical sense: historical materialism, materialist conception of history, materialist conception of human coexistence. You can read about these concepts in every socialist magazine. Most people don't do that, but it would be quite useful to get informed. Those people who have been pushed into the machines, who have nothing to do from morning till night but work, and who, when they come away from the machines in the evening, have to deal with a social institution that is actually a copy of the machine, they have a world view that sees the world as if it were a machine. They have developed a world view that takes no account of individuality and organizes everything around the balancing concept of the dead. There is a very good saying: Death makes everything equal; but one could also say: A worldview that only deals with the mechanical, the dead, also makes everything equal, extinguishes all individual existence, all life. — So all individual existence, all life would be extinguished by the worldview that takes its ideal from the machine. As long as the matter was not serious, one allowed these things to befall one while dreaming, while sleeping, and one behaved in such a way that one rejected all questions of world view and gradually lost touch with all the impulses that can permeate human community life, human educational life in an understanding way. And basically, in more recent times, work has only been done in matters of world view where mechanical concepts were used. Even science, after all, only produced mechanical concepts. If you take Theodor Ziehen's book, which is a model for modern science, and read the final chapters, you will see that he is also one of those who say that natural science cannot come up with concepts that ethics, morality and aesthetics provide; but afterwards concepts are developed which state that everything that is not natural science is only dreamed up. Between the lines, everything that is not natural science is defamed. At the end, Theodor Ziehen says graciously: Concepts such as freedom, ethics, morality and so on must come from other fields; only the concept of responsibility should actually be rejected by real science. Man cannot be responsible any more than a flower can be blamed for its ugliness. — From a scientific point of view, this is absolutely correct if you are one-sidedly grounded in natural science, if you apply mere concepts of the dead. But then you are applying concepts that do not even come to the living, and certainly not to the I.

It is interesting to see how Theodor Ziehen talks about the I. In these lectures, which were written down and then printed so that they capture the tone of the lecture, he says about the I: “Gentlemen, it is a complicated concept, the I; when you think about what you actually think when you hear the little word ‘I’, what do you come up with?

you come? First of all, you think of your corporeality. Then you think of your family relationships. Then you think of your property relationships. Then you think of your name and title - he leaves out the medals - then... well, you think of nothing but such things. And what some psychologists have developed, he says, is just a fiction. Yes, the natural scientist, when speaking about the ego, can also come to nothing but what no human being actually thinks about when they seriously consider the matter, when they consider the ego. But the matter is serious, in that the concepts that have been developed out of the dead must also lead to the killing, the destruction, and the devastation of life. A theory that has been made out of the dead machine as a social world-view theory has a destructive rather than a constructive effect when it is introduced into life. Humanity has not decided to grasp this; therefore, it must experience it in the most extreme way. For what has happened? In the area where sources of tremendous future impulses will once arise, in the East, the theory of the dead, the continuation of the mechanistic world view in social views, in Leninism and Trotskyism, is having a destructive effect.

Consider the matter only very seriously. He who recognizes only the dead, and in man also recognizes only the dead, may he be as great a scholar as Theodor Ziehen, when he speaks about the ego, about responsibility, as Theodor Ziehen does, then his true social interpreter is not he himself — who does not dare to do so — but Lenin and Trotsky are the ones who draw the right conclusion for human society. What Lenin and Trotsky carry out are the consequences of that which is already cultivated by the purely scientific world view. But because this scientific world view makes compromises with that which is not the consequence of this world view, only because of this does it, precisely because it does not draw the conclusion, become not Leninism and Trotskyism.

It is also important, however, that things be taken in the sense of reality. What is not true has an objective effect. Thoughts are realities, not mere concepts. You cannot just say: Even if no one knows about a lie, it still works as a power. That is true, but something else is also true: If a lie exists that is not recognized as a lie, that does not change its effect; it works in the real world as a lie. And no matter how well it is meant, it still works as a lie.

There are already works today - I may have mentioned them here already - which treat the question of Christ Jesus from the standpoint of the correct present-day natural science. Very interesting books, because they proceed uncompromisingly. Above all, a Danish book. There are also others who really express what the present-day psychologist, the present-day psychiatrist, who thinks scientifically, must think about Christ Jesus. What does Christ Jesus become? He becomes an epileptic, a pathological person, a person with a morbid disposition. And the Gospels are interpreted in such a way that one sees in every chapter: they are case histories. Of course, all this is nonsense; but to say that it is nonsense, today only the one has the right to do so who sees through the matter spiritually. The one who accepts today's scientific psychology and psychiatry, from his point of view, this Christ teaching is the right one, because it draws the right conclusion there. And a person who speaks as a modern psychiatrist is still a better person, a truer, a more honest person than the one who accepts today's psychiatry and yet thinks differently about Christ, in the sense of those pastors or priests who also accept science in its entirety and yet make compromises.

A lie has an effect, however piously it is dressed up, for it is a real power. Above all, what is needed today is not to cover up life with compromises, but to face squarely what needs to be faced from certain presuppositions. If today's psychiatrist does not want to see Christ as an epileptic, as a lunatic, which according to today's psychiatry he would be, then he must give up psychiatry as it is developed today; then he must place himself on the ground of spiritual science. If people today were able to place themselves squarely on the foundations of that which can be known, then we would, with what can be known, have the right impulses for what must continue to work.

Recently, a note was slipped into my hand about a book that I was already familiar with, which had, in any case, caused the horror of the lady – because it was probably a lady. The note tells me what Alexander Moszkowski has written. I don't have the book here, but you can see from the slip what the book is about: “Anyone who has ever sat on the benches of a grammar school will find the hours unforgettable when, in Plato, he ‘enjoyed’ the conversations between Socrates and his friends, unforgettable because of the incredible boredom that emanates from these conversations. And one might remember that one actually found the conversations of Socrates heartily stupid; but of course one did not dare to express this view, because after all the man in question was Socrates, the “Greek philosopher”. The book “Sokrates der Idiot” (Socrates the Idiot) by Alexander Moszkowski (Verlag Dr. Eysler & Co. Berlin) does away with this unjustified overestimation of the good Athenian. In this small, entertainingly written work, the polymath Moszkowski undertakes nothing less than to strip Socrates of his philosophical dignity almost completely. The title “Socrates – the Idiot” is meant literally. One would not be mistaken in assuming that the book will still be the subject of scholarly debate.

Of course, today's compromisers will say: Well, we have learned enough that Socrates is a great man, and not an idiot; now Moszkowski comes along and says such a thing! But today it is necessary to have a completely different idea about such a thing. Those who know Moszkowski are aware that he stands on the ground of the scientific world view in the fullest sense of the word, right up to the quantum theory, and that he is therefore on the outermost wing of today's scientific world view. And it must be said that this Moszkowski is a much more honest man than the others, who also believe that they stand on the standpoint of the natural-scientific world-view and yet do not think that they should regard Socrates as a fool who has nothing to say on the concepts important for the world-view; who nevertheless make compromises, depict Socrates as a great man.

The fact is that today things cannot be put right for the simple reason that people do not have the sense of truth to face up to the consequences uncompromisingly in every respect. And anyone who wants to accept Socrates today must not accept the conditions that Moszkowski sets.

But that is difficult today, has been difficult for three to four centuries. Therefore, the matter was left alone until it had developed into what it has become in the last three to four years. Things must be approached at their soul-spiritual core, where their truly deeper impulses lie. It must be faced, which is particularly necessary today, to face the fact that truth and the sense of truth must enter into the souls of human beings! Then the things that are brought into the light of this sense of truth, that are illuminated by the light of this sense of truth, will be able to show their true face. Then one will be compelled to come to spiritual science simply because one sees the true face of things. For the present speaks a lot and speaks urgently, and things can be learned, such as how educational issues and questions of teaching must be studied by spiritual science today. Just as the question of the different pace of head and heart education is important for teaching and education, so there are many questions that are fundamental, important and significant for social life, for historical life, for legal life. We just have to get out of what we have dug ourselves into, out of the terrible belief in authority regarding what the scientific world view alone provides. This is necessary for our time. What the scientific world view calls 'real' provides concepts that can never reach into the realm of human coexistence. Humanity lives under this error today. If you look at things more deeply, you can see this.

That is what I wanted to say to you today. Now, let each one of you draw the conclusion from this that it is important to open our eyes and to illuminate things with the light that we can find from the light of spiritual science itself.

Yesterday I spoke about how our development appears to the Oriental. In many respects, the Oriental sees precisely what is compromising and inconsistent with his naive, intuitive spiritual faculty. And right now there are critical views among outstanding Orientals that are significant and interesting to follow. More and more views are emerging in the Asian East that the Orient must take the further development of humanity into its own hands. These views could be undone if there were more sense for what is proclaimed here as spiritual science! But then this sense must also be a living one; one must not only want to have something interesting in spiritual science, from which one prepares an inner soul voluptuousness, but one must want to have something that permeates one's whole life. And one must be able to see that it is only through the insights of spiritual science that social, moral and legal concepts can truly be grasped. What humanity has conceived under the influence of the scientific world view over the decades has not grown with the spirit that reigns in reality. No, it is at best comparable to those views that today educate people who want to spiritually kill the whole world because they only take their concepts from the world of the dead. Future times, when people will think more objectively about these things again, when the passions that so often guide and direct judgments today will have died down, future times – I am fully convinced that it can be so — will say: One of the most important characteristics of the period around 1917 was that the Weltanschhauung, which is only intended for the head and actually drives people into old age, has become a school-like Weltanschhauung. In the future, perhaps in a distant future, it will be called Wilsonism, in reference to the great schoolmaster from whom a large part of humanity wants to have a socio-political worldview impressed upon them. It is no mere accident that mere school-knowledge, which has nothing to do with the spiritual, has now become one of the most important political factors in the form of Wilsonism. This is an important and tremendously significant symptom of our time. It is just not possible to talk about these things today in a really thorough and comprehensive way that takes everything into account. But from my present allusions you will have gathered how important it actually is to try to understand these things thoroughly, how infinitely important it is to face up to these things not only out of affect, out of emotion, but out of knowledge.

I may have mentioned it here before, but I mention it again because it is important: now it is not difficult to speak out against Wilson within Central Europe; but I can point out how, in a cycle that was held long before these events, when the whole world, including Central Europe, still admired Wilson, I characterized him exactly the same way as I do now. The point is that one approaches the impulses that dominate the present time, which also dominate the present time as errors, from much deeper sources. In our anthroposophical field, our friends had the opportunity to see how, long before there was any external compulsion to see things in the right light, the right thing was pointed out again and again. May these things be better understood in the future than we have decided to understand them in the past! And I would especially urge you to bear this in mind: much of what is coming to light in the field of our anthroposophical science is infinitely better understood than we have so far chosen to understand it. It can penetrate even deeper into the hearts and souls of human beings and be awakened to a more intense life than has happened so far. May it happen! For what happens through it will already be connected with much that can truly be done, not to bring about disaster, but for the good of the future development of humanity, that can be done to make good much that has been neglected and that might perhaps be neglected further if one only listens to that which can be gained outside of spiritual science. Among our friends, too, many have a double bookkeeping of their lives. They have one in anthroposophical studies and books, for the private nourishment of their hearts and souls. The other bookkeeping is for their life outside, where they rely solely on the authority of the natural sciences. Often one does not realize that this is the case; but it is good to be a little conscientious in consulting with one's soul about these things, so that there may be harmony between these two accounts.

Man's life can only be administered in one sense. The spirit must also penetrate the scientific world view. And religious life must also be imbued with the light that can be gained from spiritual science. Take such things as were said and meant here today, and which seemingly lead the considerations of time up to supersensible heights, as they can be grasped in your presentations. Then you will see that anthroposophical education is not only education of the head, that it can also educate the heart for humanity. It is already education of the heart. It already serves all humanity, not just the humanity that might actually die at twenty-seven. It already serves to make people courageous and capable throughout their entire life. Education that fails to take into account the different pace of the development of head and heart will make him old, nervous, disharmonious and torn. Look at life, you will find this confirmed, because life can be a great teacher with regard to the confirmation of what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science brings down from the spiritual heights. Take everything that has been said, especially when it is spoken from such points of view as today, as spoken to your hearts, my dear friends, for the education of our hearts by the spirit of the world; and hold together that which should be the bond that links us together as members of our movement. Let us work together and plan to continue working, each in our own place and to the best of our ability.

I have already pointed out that one hears time and again an objection to the study of spiritual truths. This objection, incidentally, is immediately dismissed as arising from the extreme laziness of the human soul. It is the objection of those who say: I do not reject the idea that man, after passing through the gate of death, enters another, a spiritual world; but what this spiritual world is like, what the state of this spiritual world is, I will wait and see! Here on this earth one must attend to one's material duties, and then one will see what happens in another world when one is transported to that other world. It cannot be denied that this objection is very convenient. However, to examine it carefully is the duty of anyone who is interested in spiritual-scientific truths, because such examination can confirm their belief in the necessity of really dealing with spiritual-scientific truths. In order to lay this examination before you, I would like to say, let us today, from a certain point of view, once again visualize the relationships that exist between human life here and human life that flows between death and a new birth.

Let us be clear about the fact that man, while he walks through life here in the physical body, only really takes in part of what is connected with his life into ordinary consciousness, because things are constantly happening that are connected with our life, but which do not pass by our life so that we can bring them clearly and distinctly to our ordinary consciousness. Sometimes we become half aware of the facts, but not of their full significance for us in our everyday lives. Think about your day's work in the evening, and above all think about the places you have entered and the people you have encountered there. All of this has great significance for you, because your immediate surroundings are reflected in your soul. And of the many things that are reflected in the soul, very few come to our clear consciousness in everyday life. There is a great difference, after all, between, let us say, having been near the Stuttgart train station at nine o'clock this morning and having been out in the forest, because in both cases something quite different has been reflected in your soul; something quite different lives in your soul in both cases. We usually do not realize that this has a profound significance. Only from, I would say, quiet hints of life can we often deduce the meaning of such things. Take the following, for instance. You can see it – not in this case, of course, but in other cases – if you pay a little attention to life. Suppose you came here this evening. Someone in the first row would have reason to leave the room before I finish speaking; he gets up, moves down the aisle and leaves. Someone in the third row has seen him, but, at least I assume so, this person in the third row has listened carefully – which also happens, doesn't it – and he has only half let this personality, who has just left, pass by in his usual consciousness. He will be able to notice that he perhaps dreams very little of what I have spoken here. For if one could take a statistic on the subject, those of the honored listeners who dream a great deal about what has been said here would probably not be all that numerous. But you will easily be able to see – perhaps not from this example, but from a similar one – that you dream about the one who stood up and went out. That is to say, you will be able to observe in numerous cases in life that you draw on those things in your sleeping consciousness that fleetingly pass by your consciousness during the day.

This is why people know so little of what they have dreamt. For most of what is dreamt is of such a nature that it passes by fairly unnoticed during the day. Only the things that are clearly grasped by the consciousness are rarely dreamt of. Dreams only come when they are connected with certain sensations, certain feelings, which again are not clearly and distinctly brought to consciousness. And when one wakes up one remembers so little of the dreams, because in the previous life one paid little attention to what one dreamt. This is also connected with the limited ability to remember dreams. In short, what I want to say is this: countless things rush by in a person's life that only very fleetingly enter into consciousness, but that have a great significance for the human soul, even if they remain in the unconscious or subconscious. Everything that runs, as it were, between the lines of life has great significance at first, when the human being has passed through the gate of death.

We have often had to describe this time, which the human being first spends between death and a new birth, from the most diverse points of view. Thus one thing always blends into another, and only by choosing the most diverse points of view can one arrive at a certain completeness in this field. Everything that passes unnoticed by the ordinary consciousness is then revealed when the human being has passed through the gate of death. And I would call what the human being experiences first over a long period of time the unrolling of images. What the person goes through is essentially a reliving of experiences of the imaginative consciousness. A great, great number of images are unrolled over scenes from life that we have been very little aware of. And of that which we have become aware of here, that which has also been little touched by consciousness here is unrolled. The other, which was clear consciousness here, occurs more as memory after death, like memory images, like remembrance; but what has been little noticed here unrolls as in present images.

Today it is particularly important to me to point out that the first third of life between death and a new birth is essentially concerned with this unrolling of images, essentially with a life in imaginations. We can help these imaginations by establishing a connection between us, who have remained here, and those who, as karmically connected to us, have gone through the Gate of Death. Then comes the second third, in which this spiritual and soul life is more fully inspired. It is here that a person realizes the significance of the images he first experienced in the context of the whole world, and how these images connect him to the world. Everything a person experiences is significant in the context of the world. One must not believe that it is unimportant to have once met a person, whom one may have paid little attention to, to have been close to them. It is revealed in images, and what it means in the whole of world events comes to revelation in inspirations in the second third of life between death and a new birth.

In the last third, life is mainly one of intuitions. There the human being has to empathize with what is in his spiritual and mental environment. There the human being lives as if submerged with his consciousness in what is in his spiritual and mental environment. And it is precisely in this last third, through this submersion, that he prepares for the submersion in the physical body after birth or conception. The intuitions in the last third of life between death and a new birth are the introduction of that intuition, which is then of course subconscious or unconscious, which consists of the fact that the human being submerges into the body that is handed down to him in the hereditary stream of parents, grandparents and so on. And something remains for the person when he has now passed from the spiritual and soul world into the physical world. If you consider this, bear in mind that the human being actually lives through long periods in spiritual and soul intuitions, is accustomed to living in such, so he will still want to hold on to this habit when he has entered into the physical body. And indeed he does. For what then is the main endeavour of the soul during the first seven years of life until the change of teeth? You can look it up in the booklet 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science'. I have said: the desire to imitate. The child always tries to do what is being done in its surroundings; it does not start from its own intentions; it puts itself in the actions of those who live in its surroundings and imitates them. This is the echo of the intuitions in the last third of the life between death and a new birth. We are therefore born as imitative beings because we translate into physical life what we have done for a long time in a spiritual-soul way in the other world. And one understands how man grows into this physical life by turning one's gaze back to what man has become accustomed to doing in the spiritual world.

Here you see a thought from spiritual science presented to you that is of a kind that many will have to come in the coming centuries and millennia for human spiritual life. These thoughts will indeed have to change much, much from what has occupied people spiritually until now. Consider that it has become customary in recent centuries, when thinking about the question of immortality, to think mainly about what comes after death. One always thinks: Can man hold that which he develops in physical life beyond death? — This is important to people above all else. This question of immortality is certainly important, but it will take on a different complexion if we consider, I might say, the other half of the question of immortality, if we are not interested in what follows death and what emerges as a consequence of life here on earth but when one will ask: how does what we experience here in the physical body connect with what we have experienced before? For the life we have experienced before, our life here is the hereafter. It is mainly in this direction that thought will be received on this side. People will realize that they can only understand life on earth if they see it as a continuation of the spiritual life from which they have come. They will start to take an interest again in that life that preceded earthly life. It can be said that, with the exception of the last third of the 19th century, people were still somewhat interested in the question of immortality in spiritual life, but they were only interested in the question of immortality insofar as spiritual life in immortality is a continuation of earthly life. The philosophers did it that way, but these philosophers were basically, despite their claim to be doing unprejudiced science, in many respects miserable people who, while they believed they were doing unprejudiced science, did nothing more than continue the prejudices that arose from certain currents. Consider that at the time of Origen, the Church condemned the pre-existence of the soul, that it condemned Origen because he taught this pre-existence, so that the Church was in a certain dilemma: there was Origen, the greatest of the Church Fathers, and it could not be denied that Origen taught pre-existence. But that is forbidden in the church. So there was a great dilemma. Throughout the Middle Ages, people were accustomed not to teach about pre-existence. The professors of philosophy continued this well, and so did the writers of philosophy, but they believed that they were thinking without preconditions. They did the same in other questions, in questions for which I have already given examples here. Now it must be realized above all that the direction of thought, the direction of human contemplation, must undergo a serious change through spiritual science. This life on earth will only appear in its true value when one becomes conscious that it is a continuation of a spiritual life. And it can only be understood if it is grasped as such. Then, too, one will arrive at a more sound judgment on the other side of the question when one looks at it in this light. When one realizes more clearly that this life on earth has a significance for the life in the beyond, that man in the beyond strives to come here to earth to have this life on earth because he needs it, then one will ask about the value of this life on earth much more from just such a premise than one has done so far.

But one thing in particular will be able to point out to you how important it is to ask about the value of this earthly life. Two things are often not very clearly distinguished from each other, namely: Man thinks - and: Man has thoughts. But the two things are really very different from each other. Thinking is a power that man has, an activity; and this activity first leads to thoughts. Now, we bring the activity of thinking, this power that lives in thinking, into this earthly life from the time between death and a new birth. We apply this power of thinking to external perceptions through the senses and think about the surroundings that we have here. But these things in our surroundings have no significance for the time between death and a new birth, because there they are nothing. They are only here for the senses. Therefore, the thoughts we have here about the things that are spread out before our senses have no significance for life after death; but it does have a significance for life after death that we feed the power of thought at all, because this power of thought remains with us for the whole of life between death and a new birth. The thoughts that we accept from sensory perceptions are of no use to us after death. They only serve as clues to remember the self during the life between birth and death.

Imagine two people. One of them is not at all interested in what can be learned about life in the spiritual worlds through something like spiritual science. He only thinks about what the senses present and what ordinary science teaches; but that is nothing more than what the senses present. And he says: I will wait to see what the spiritual world is like before I penetrate it. From a certain point of view, they are, I might say, the less culpable in comparison with those who appeared in the 19th century and believed that they had to deny the existence of a spiritual world altogether, with all the power of science, according to the saying that the poet has such a person utter: “As surely as there is a God in heaven, I am an atheist!” — It was from such a frame of mind, after all, that 19th-century atheism was sometimes born, out of such “thoughtful soul-searching”. But let us take a person who simply does not engage in forming thoughts about the spiritual worlds. That would be one person. The other person engages in forming thoughts about the spiritual world. These are different thoughts from those that one takes in through the senses. It cannot be denied that they are different thoughts. This is already evident from the fact that the thoughts through which a spiritual world is not perceived are, in the opinion of most people living today, the clever thoughts, the real thoughts; the thoughts that spiritual science describes are the crazy, the fantastic, the crazy thoughts, and so on.

But let us take these two people. What situation are they in when they have passed through the gate of death? The person who has not absorbed any thoughts about the spiritual worlds here, who has not allowed thoughts about the spiritual worlds to pass through his soul, is, as a being of soul, in the same situation after death as someone who has a physical body but has nothing to eat and must starve. For the thoughts we think here about the spiritual worlds are the nourishment for one of the most important powers that remain with us after death: for the power of thought. We have the power of thought just as we have the power of hunger here, but this power of hunger cannot be nourished at all between death and a new birth. Between death and a new birth we can have imagination, inspiration and intuition, but we cannot have thoughts as such. We have to acquire them here. We have to enter into the life between birth and death in order to acquire thoughts here. We live on these thoughts, which we have acquired here, the whole time between death and a new birth, and we starve for these thoughts if we do not have them. That is the difference. He who does not want to occupy himself with the spiritual worlds here on earth is doomed to become a spiritual starving person. And such a person, who is able to satisfy himself and thus live between death and a new birth, is the one I mentioned as the second one who occupies himself with thoughts such as we do here. If materialism were to become the only view held by people, then in the future, between death and a new birth, people would fall more and more prey to a spiritual famine. The result of this would be that they would enter the physical world stunted through the following incarnation. The spiritual world would wither away, and with the spiritual world the physical world would wither away in the future that humanity still has to go through during this earthly world. They have succeeded in making the saying “After us, the deluge” a certain attitude for unsuspecting humanity that does not know what is at stake. This saying, 'After us, the deluge', even if it is not done, lies at the bottom of the soul in a materialistic time. This saying has no meaning at all for those who know reality. For what humanity is doing at the present time, whether it wants to immerse souls in the spiritual worlds or not, is what lays the foundation for the future of development. The welfare of the Earth itself depends on mankind not giving up its thoughts about the spiritual worlds in the present. Those who live in the present should realize this more and more. For an enormous amount depends on the fact that the course of human development is understood spiritually.

We have tried to develop important concepts about the spiritual worlds, because ultimately the spiritual worlds do indeed extend into our physical world, and one cannot understand the physical world either without understanding the spiritual worlds. And we have developed the most diverse concepts. Now, a truly thinking person will come to realize that this spiritual-scientific thinking is particularly important for reality. You simply cannot understand the whole of reality if you only want to think scientifically, just as you cannot understand material existence if you only think scientifically and not spiritually. I will give you a very paradoxical and strange example of this.

I believe I emphasized here some time ago that about a year and a half ago a very significant thick book was published by an excellent contemporary natural scientist, Oscar Hertwig, a Haeckel student, “The Becoming of Organisms; a refutation of Darwin's theory of chance”. This is an excellent book that is right at the cutting edge of contemporary scientific research. And I have taken many opportunities recently to emphasize the significance and the leading ideas in it. For it is also a remarkable book from a cultural-historical point of view. You know that in 1869 Eduard von Hartmann appeared on the scene with his 'Philosophy of the Unconscious', at that time in the heyday of Darwinism, which had then found its materialistic interpretation. Eduard von Hartmann opposed it. Then the natural scientists cried out: Well, it is an amateur philosopher who talks about spirit and understands nothing about natural science! — The matter turned out as I have already described it several times. One day a book appeared about which even Haeckel's student Oskar Schmidt wrote: “There is someone who understands something about natural science. He gave Hartmann what for! We ourselves could not say it better; let him come to us, and we will welcome him as one of our own! — They have done a terrible job of advertising. A second edition became necessary. Then the author named himself: it was Eduard von Hartmann! That's when they stopped advertising it. It was high time that someone took a stand and showed people that those who speak of the spirit are no less intelligent than those who deny it. Eduard von Hartmann wrote several other works in which he pointed out the one-sidedness of Darwinism. He did not find much favor with it. But one can say: After calm, well-trained research, a man like Oscar Hertwig has come to think the way Eduard von Hartmann spoke as early as 1869. He even quotes him frequently in his work. And everything is structured in an exemplary way in this book, 'The Becoming of Organisms'. Here one can actually study a prime example of a matter that could grow out of the scientific method of the present day, and has grown out of it.

Now, a few weeks ago, the same man published a kind of sequel to this book: “In Defense of Social, Ethical and Political Darwinism.” It is hard to imagine a more stupid book than this one, which Oscar Hertwig allowed to follow his first epoch-making work. It is hard to imagine anything more inadequate, anything more tinny than this book. As you can see, in the field of our spiritual science, it is necessary to acquire a certain lack of authority, because if our dear friends, after I have praised the truly epoch-making book to the skies and will always do so, now buy the second book on the basis of authority and say to themselves, “So we have to see this as something great,” they will be very much mistaken. The purpose of spiritual science is to enable us to form judgments freely and to be ready in every direction and at every moment to face the phenomena that come our way. Even in the most esoteric spiritual-scientific endeavors, no credence in authority can be tolerated, otherwise the result will not be spiritual science but a caricature of it. What is the cause of what I have described? It arises from the fact that today one can be a great epoch-making natural scientist, that is, one can be in a position to develop everything concerning material events and their manifestations according to the methods of the 19th and 20th centuries; but as soon as one begins to reflect on what lies in the human sphere, what lives in man, how people live together socially, when they live together ethically and morally, when they want to develop politically, want to develop political ideas, at that moment, when one begins to think about those things in which the spiritual element plays a role, one can, despite being a brilliant natural scientist, be an absolutely stupid person, because natural science is of no use at all. And just such a literary example has emerged in our time to really substantiate this, which can be seen from spiritual science; to really present it in reality. For anyone reading this second book by Oscar Hertwig will notice that there is not a single thought about what relates to social, ethical or political life, as would be quite appropriate in the present, for the present is really not exactly rich in fruitful social, ethical and especially political ideas. But that also stems from the fact that purely scientific thinking has been completely overestimated. And here Oscar Hertwig has the best of intentions; he wants to move this scientific thinking away from social, ethical and political thinking. But since he has nothing at all about the latter, it is of no use for him to reject the former. This book contains the most curious intellectual somersaults. I will only point out one thing, always assuming that the first book I mentioned is an excellent one.

People do not notice it: Oscar Hertwig is an authority; our time does not believe in authority, but it falls for any authority that is officially presented to it. People are willing to be taught; some things do not even strike them. But in the second book, Oscar Hertwig wants to make it clear to people what has to be done to think scientifically. He can do it, but he does not understand what it is. After all, you can do it instinctively. The methods are great; you just need to be educated for it, you don't have to develop in your thoughts what you are doing. This is where Oscar Hertwig comes to the following strange conclusion. He talks about how one should actually conduct scientific research in order to recognize things in one's environment. He says: The great model for physical, chemical and biological thinking has been provided by astronomers, and it is important that people learn to think about physical, chemical and actual life phenomena in the same way that astronomers think about celestial phenomena. It is very suggestive to say: imitate the greatness of thinking in Kepler, in Copernicus, in Newton, in order to understand the phenomena that are around you! But just think about what is behind it! The phenomena of life, the physical, the chemical phenomena, the phenomena of life are all around us; the facts are very close to us and we encounter them all the time. And now we are to obtain science by directing ourselves to the facts that are as far removed as possible from us; thus, because we are as far removed as possible from the facts of celestial phenomena, we are to develop from them the knowledge of that which actually surrounds us. One cannot form a more insane thought than such a thing. But thousands upon thousands of people read past such madness and suspect nothing of the fact that such follies corrupt the whole thinking of the present time, that if it takes hold, it must make people more and more alienated from reality. And then one cannot see one's way into any social, ethical or political structure if one starts from such thinking and such sentences. It is one of the tasks of our spiritual science to see clearly through what is in the so-called spiritual life of the present day.

I said that we had to deal with pointing out the spiritual forces that do indeed extend into the ordinary physical world. And we have spoken again and again about the fact that the human being, with his life, stands in three currents of force, in the luciferic, in the ahrimanic and in the one that is actually appropriate for the development of humanity. I have often pointed out that one must not say: I avoid the Luciferic, I avoid the Ahrimanic – if one avoids it, one will only plunge into it all the more, but one must be clear about it, one must really study, get to know the human being's standing in these three currents. One must take the knowledge of Lucifer and Ahriman into life.

Now, much of the social and historical structure of humanity in the last centuries or millennia has been very much under Luciferic impulses that came from within man. One could cite many, many things that were under Luciferic impulses, but I will cite only one, in which everyone will immediately see the Luciferic.

Ambition and vanity play a major role in the way people position themselves on the various poles of their lives, the various points of view in life. Many a person would never have aspired to this or that position if the social structure had not been the cause of this vanity being stirred up in one direction or another. All this business about titles, ranks and orders is ultimately based on the Luciferic element. And just try to consider impartially how much of what people achieve in life is purely due to the fact that they aspired to these fishing rods of ambition, to these baits. Try to consider how people are placed, one above the other, one under the other; how social institutions take this ambition into account. Try to realize how this has built the social structure. In this field, Lucifer has played an extraordinarily important role.

Let us consider another phenomenon that is now beginning to be practiced and admired. And here, in the field of spiritual scientific work, is the place to consider such things in a proper and realistic way. If you pay attention to some of the various things that are now becoming popular in the present, you will find among them what are now called the “gifted examinations”. The purpose of these examinations is to single out the gifted from among the children and young people. There is a danger that these aptitude tests will lead to true idolatry. How are they done? You have trained psychologists who, although they understand nothing of the soul, understand psychology all the better; psychologists who are trained in the methods of the present and who are thus able to select the gifted from a series of young people or children, so that the right man can later be in the right place, of course. One baits now less, one believes, in the future with the ambition, with the vanity, but one makes gifted examinations. These gifted examinations refer to the speed of comprehension, to the memory. Senseless words are written down, and the one who can remember them faster has a better memory than the one who can remember them less quickly. Intelligence tests are made. A word, a second, a third word that have no connection are given, and then the students are asked to find a connection. So, for example, one writes: “robber” and “mirror” and says: Now think of something between robber and mirror. — One person now thinks: The robber sees himself in the mirror. The other thinks: I have a mirror in my room, a robber sneaks in and I see it in the mirror. The latter has thought more complicatedly and is therefore more gifted. Then the matter is made statistical and those who are most intelligent are selected; they are then taken as the right people to be placed in the right place.

You see, anyone who objects to this great achievement of the present day on the basis of the conditions that now prevail here is considered a very stupid fool who knows nothing about what it is all about.

Now, let us take a look at this whole matter. What exactly are we examining when we test people in this way? We are not examining anything that really has to do with their soul. We only have to consider one thing: that probably the most important people of the past, those who have achieved the greatest things, would have been considered untalented after such tests. Consider even Helmholtz, who is regarded as a celebrity by modern man; if he had been subjected to such a test of talent, he would certainly not have reached the position he later held. These tests of talent have nothing to do with the development of the soul abilities of the human individuality, but everything to do with the sum of the Ahrimanic forces within man. It is not the person who is tested, but the Ahrimanic forces within him. And so, just as one has previously reckoned with Luciferic forces, one now begins to count on Ahrimanic forces and to establish a social structure that is built purely on Ahrimanic forces. However, only those who really engage with spiritual scientific content and who want to see through the world spiritually will be able to see through such things. Because what I have told you now about the aptitude tests is presented by a large number of people and their journalistic followers as one of the most significant achievements of the present day, presented in such a way that the social structure of the future can be built on the basis of this examination. And the public, which does not believe in authority, this poor public, has no opportunity to reflect on what such a matter is actually about. It does not have the opportunity to form clear concepts about such a matter. But that is what matters.

If, after taking in some of the things we have on our minds today, you begin to form ideas about what needs to happen first for humanity, what needs to happen in terms of the spiritual development process, then you are asking the right questions. But then you will endeavor to grasp the human individualities in order to teach them what they should be interested in. You will not come to test the Ahrimanic abilities, because these Ahrimanic abilities will lead to humanity being treated entirely as a sum of machines. You only test the mind in the outer body. One tests the human being only to the extent that he is a machine when he is subjected to this aptitude test. And a social selection is created that only makes the best types of physical machines the leaders of humanity. Nowhere is there any reflection on what basically rests in the soul, and what can never come to the surface in such tests. But I do not blame anyone if they run after such things in an almost idolatrous way today, because someone who has not studied spiritual science at all can only do as they do and surrender to the judgment that it is the smartest thing to do in the present. But this gradually leads away from real human liveliness, from human reality. It leads into abstract areas, into that which is dead in human life and is dominated only by the spirituality of Ahriman. One must see through the full seriousness of such things, how people are drawn away from the real. And that is something that confronts one with particular intensity in the present: the drawing away of people from reality. For anyone who has no sense of spiritual reality will gradually lose their sense of ordinary external reality as well, the reality that surrounds them every day, if they are not forced by their profession or other things to pay attention to reality.

I will give you an example of this: something very cute happened the other day. An article by Fritz Mauthner, the critic of language, appeared in a very popular newspaper. In this article, Fritz Mauthner, who is an extraordinarily clever man, complains about a booklet that has appeared in the collection “From Nature and the Spiritual World” and that develops the astrological ideas that have emerged in a way that is entirely in line with current materialistic science – and in fact in the way a modern university professor does – as it is. At the end, the person in question develops the horoscope of Goethe and explains that it can be used to show how things went in Goethe's life. But actually, the good professor only makes fun of those who believe in horoscopes. He wants to show them as something that can be interpreted in different ways. Fritz Mauthner rants and raves through three columns of the “Berliner Tageblatt”. One could not understand why he was actually ranting. There was not the slightest reason to rant. He actually has the same opinion as the one who wrote the little book, both look at astrology from the same point of view. And very soon the Tageblatt also published a correction by the author, in which he says that he does not understand Mauthner. He did not explicitly say on every third line: I scold astrology —, but he actually has no more interest in astrology than Fritz Mauthner does; he fully agrees with him. The Berliner Tageblatt – newspapers are very clever – adds that it has no reason to take the author to task and accuse Fritz Mauthner of misunderstandings. Fritz Mauthner was in fact the theater critic of the Berliner Tageblatt for many years and now writes a kind of theater column for this newspaper.

For his part, Fritz Mauthner says that he also has nothing to say about this anti-criticism by the author. One was faced with the strange fact that two people actually agree with each other, but one lashes out at the other. Fritz Mauthner gets angry when he hears something about astrology, or when someone writes something about horoscopes. Otherwise it would be inconceivable that he would have written this article. He writes as though the other were the most terrible astrologer, who wanted to throw the validity of Goethe's horoscope in people's faces. So there you have an example of how two people fight each other, one voluntarily, Fritz Mauthner, the other out of necessity, because Fritz Mauthner attacked him first, two people between whom there is not the slightest difference. How can that be? Such a thing can only happen when two people have nothing to do with reality, which is itself narrowly defined, when both live out of something other than reality. The most glorious example of this is that people talk and talk today, and talk very cleverly – Fritz Mauthner is a very clever man – but there is nothing behind the talk. There is not the slightest reason to talk like that.

There you have an example of a completely logical construction of thoughts that have absolutely nothing to do with reality. This is what happens to thoughts that get out of the habit of having anything to do with spiritual reality, because then the thought gradually loses all its connections to reality. It is important to realize this. And that is also the terrible seriousness of the matter. For in the end it does not matter whether Fritz Mauthner and the Heidelberg professor are attacking each other and their words have no meaning at all because there is no reality behind them, or whether they are two politicians, one of whom speaks in America and the other in Europe, and who perhaps even speak in agreement, despite being totally different. If all people who talk like this are absolutely alien to reality, have nothing to do with what really lives in things, then this estrangement from reality will spread. It has spread. For the example I gave, of Fritz Mauthner and Professor Boll, is only a grotesque example. But it is everywhere present. That is how it is done today. And what does it lead to? It leads to conflict. It is relatively easy to be united when you deal with reality; but when you stand by reality, it leads to conflict. Little by little, people will realize how much of our catastrophic events are connected with this prevailing mood of the present, and what a serious thing it is. For just go out and ask the numerous readers of this newspaper, which is one of the most widely read in Germany, whether they even notice the grotesque and paradoxical aspects that are coming to light! People are oblivious to all of this. But it does not pass unnoticed in the events themselves; there it has its bitterly evil effects. For what is being done here is nothing less than an abuse of human intellectual power. Do you think that if these mental powers, which are used for nothing because they are alien to reality, were applied in the right way, then reality would be promoted, then they would be in the normal current; but as it is, they benefit Ahriman. It is alien to reality for the middle current, but it happens, it slips into a sphere, and that is what matters. That is the seriousness of the matter. It does not pass unnoticed, but slips into another sphere and creates facts. It creates facts that do not correspond to the true situation. Because, even on the surface, purely rationally, purely intellectually, one can imagine how that creates facts.

Our time does not believe in authority. People test everything and keep what is best! Nevertheless, it does happen that people believe in authority. A person like Fritz Mauthner has countless followers who believe his every word. They are naturally impressed by such an article. Think how many thoughts are stimulated by such an article. They are all drawn into the Ahrimanic sphere in which the article flows. The matter is unreal, and things are pushed into an unreality by it. That is what matters.

What one would like to do with such things, my dear friends, is to point out again and again the tremendous seriousness behind such considerations. Because it is true: What I have characterized in individual cases, you will encounter at every turn today. We are in the time when we only do the right thing if we decide to see clearly, without prejudice, to face life impartially. That is our task. And that is precisely what spiritual science is meant to lead to, by building the bridge between the human inner life and reality in the right way. For in this respect, people live in the most terrible fogs. One cannot begin to describe what arises when one delves into this, how people live in this respect today, in dense fog. It must be so, for people must learn to rely on themselves. People must learn to create clarity through themselves, not to get clarity through authority. This must become one of the best, one of the most important achievements of spiritual studies for the individual human soul, to gain a free, clear, unbiased judgment about what life around them offers; to break the habit that basically dominates all of humanity today: to be asleep to events. People oversleep what is right in front of them. And to shroud them in a fog is precisely the endeavor of those who come with one-sided, all kinds of monistic or “scientifically based” — as they say — ideas, but who are nothing more than materialists. For they claim, indeed assert, that they are building the bridge to reality. They lead away from reality. Tell Oscar Hertwig that he is looking at things in an unrealistic way, he will laugh at you and cannot see that he is doing so. But as a spiritual scientist, you must be somewhat shocked when you read that the closest facts of life are to be considered according to the pattern of celestial phenomena, where the facts are as far away as possible. To go through life like this, paying attention to what we experience not in books but right under our noses from morning till night – not when we are among anthroposophists, of course – offers all kinds of things that we have to pay attention to without prejudice today. For humanity is at a significant turning point. And what I have said is not a criticism of the time, but only an emphasis of what is necessary by saying: This is how it is. It is good that it has come to this, because it calls on people to stand on their own two feet and become independent. The Deity did not set itself the task of leading people through evolution as spiritually and mentally dependent automatons, and so it had to let them come to the present situation. It is wise and good, but it must also be recognized in the right way and acted upon accordingly.

To let this attitude emerge from the deepest impulses of our being as the innermost stimulus of our strength for life, that must become one of the results of our spiritual-scientific occupation. Then we may not found a voluptuous, comfortable revelry in unworldly ideas, which is so good when one wants to oversleep life; but we found that genuine worship of life, which leads the divine-spiritual forces, which are the basis of all reality, through the most important instrument for this earth

instrument to the realization of this divine-spiritual in this earthly life.

More about this next time.

One of the fundamental characteristics of the spiritual scientific contemplation that we practice is not fully appreciated, even among us. Indeed, when this fundamental characteristic of our spiritual scientific endeavor is first pointed out in abstract terms, it is perhaps not so far from many of us, including those of us at the forefront, to think: That is self-evident, how could it not be! And yet it is not so. The basic characteristic I have in mind is that our spiritual science endeavors not only to point out in general terms that the spiritual world is a reality, that individual world beings live as realities within the spiritual world, but to show again and again in detail how what takes place around us and within us in our ordinary life between birth and death is a creation of the spiritual world. I say: It could be thought that if one seriously turns one's spiritual eye to the spiritual world, it is already given to see what is around us as a creation of the spiritual world. But it is a long way from these general, quite abstract, empty, meaningless thoughts to penetrating to the spiritual places where it is grasped in detail how the reality of the senses is a creation of the spirit. Today, we shall see this illustrated by a particular example, one that can also show how far present-day humanity is from even suspecting what it means that the creation of sense-perceptible reality around us, as we experience it between birth and death, is a creation of spiritual reality.

In order to explain the special example we want to approach today in detail, I would like to remind you of what I was obliged to say in yesterday's public lecture. Today, we want to bring the matter more deeply and closely before our soul with reference to certain applications.

Yesterday and earlier, I spoke here in this branch about what I would like to call the growing discipleship of humanity in the course of development. If we go back in the evolution of humanity to the catastrophe in the becoming of the earth, which we call the Atlantic catastrophe, where the continent that once lay between present-day Europe and America sank and the western American and eastern European worlds arose in its place, we find, starting from our own epoch, five epochs of humanity. The first post-Atlantean epoch, which followed immediately as a cultural epoch upon the Atlantean catastrophe, is the culture of ancient India. It goes far beyond what can be explored through external historical documents. You will find it described, to the extent necessary, in my book, Occult Science. What is important for us today, however, is to be clear about the following: in that cultural epoch, people lived in such a way that they participated in their physical development with their spiritual and soul selves up to the age of fifty. This participation does not include what we experience today. When we feel tired or old, it is not the same kind of participation as the child experiences in its physical development in the first years of life. No, what we experience physically at a later age is not directly known by the soul and spirit. We do not participate in the descent of our development. If we could participate physically in the descent of this development, we would learn an enormous amount about the spiritual world by undergoing a reverse development - a collapse, a mineralization of the brain mass, a sclerotization of the body. We would experience through our body what we have to experience today through spiritual science if we want to approach it at all. In ancient Indian culture, this descending development continued until the fifties. People were children until their fifties, only an aging child.

Then came the second post-Atlantic culture, the ancient Persian culture, which was also prehistoric. In this culture, people continued to experience what they went through mentally and spiritually in relation to the body until the end of the 1940s. Then, in the third cultural period, humanity as a whole had become younger again. In the Egyptian-Chaldean period, the souls emancipated themselves from the body from about the age of thirty-five to forty-two. Then came the age of Greek-Latin culture, which included the Mystery of Golgotha. During that time, the body underwent a development similar to that which today only the child goes through, up to the age of thirty-five. And today we are in the fifth post-Atlantic cultural epoch – we have been advanced in this cultural epoch since the 15th century – we experience what the body experiences until the end of the twenties; we no longer experience the descending development at all. This is why man is so little inclined today, by his natural disposition, to take in the spiritual as such into his soul. In ancient times, the physical body itself gave the spirit; today, the physical body no longer gives the spirit. Therefore, the spirit must be taken up by the soul itself. The soul refuses to do this. In ancient times, it was nonsense for a person not to believe in the spirit. In order not to believe in the spirit, he would have had to die before the age of thirty-five. If he lived to see the time after the thirty-fifth year, he experienced something through what was happening in his body in a descending development, which immediately presented itself as spirit. It was inconceivable that people in ancient times did not believe in the spirit. But because things have developed in this way, a moral impulse, a magnificent moral impulse of humanity, has been lost in so far as its natural development is concerned. I ask you not to underestimate this magnificent moral impulse, which was lost in a natural way and which must be found again in a spiritual-ethical way. In those ancient times, children knew from their elders: Once you have passed the age of thirty-five, you experience something as a human being that you cannot experience at a younger age. — Imagine vividly the feeling that children and young people grew up with: I have something to expect when I enter the descending development; I then have something to experience that I cannot know now, that my physical body simply cannot give me now. Imagine the feeling, quite different from today's, when one expected to grow old under such conditions. There is something tremendously different in life today when one expects to grow old in such a way that one knows: something is coming that could not come earlier.

That has changed, but not as abruptly as one might imagine. Isn't it true that when one expresses such a truth as the one just hinted at, today's intellectual bad habit immediately demands an either-or. But in reality things are never an either-or, as a rule it is a matter of both-and. The spiritual does not come of itself when one ascends again in the development of age. But when the spark of spirituality is awakened in the soul in the way it is meant in spiritual science, then one benefits from growing old after all. Then something arises from the declining body that particularly immerses itself in what one has learned and come to know through the spiritual scientific path. If you remain without a scientific contact with the spirit today – this scientific contact is not meant in a specialized way, but so that it can be accessible to everyone, even to the simplest mind, because spiritual science can become popular if humanity wills – then you will not experience anything special when you grow old; you will not be able to appreciate growing old. They will also have no special expectation of growing old in childhood and youth. It is different when the spark of spiritual knowledge in the soul is not aroused through natural development, but through educational development, through a development that approaches the souls of the human community. If it is properly understood, what spiritual science can be for the soul in a living way, the mood will be generated again in a conscious way through this spiritual science: I have something to expect when I get old. Growing old means something. When I am thirty-five years old, what lives in me will be different than it is now that I am a young badger of twenty. This mood is something tremendous for the human soul, this mood, which I would describe as the mood of expectant life, of life that simply knows: the creation that you experience in yourself, you must seriously consider it to be a creation of the spirit.

Today, when people do not want to be touched by the knowledge of the spirit, do they seriously regard the creation of man – even when it is expressed in a phrase-like way – as the creation of the spirit? No, in practice people do not do this at all. For if they did, they would say to themselves: It makes sense that one grows old. The whole human life is a spiritual creation; one does not grow old in vain, the spiritual in us is constantly finding new expression. That which arises in us, that which reveals itself in us from within, will always show new aspects. To live expectantly, to expect something from growing older and older with each passing year, is a consequence that arises from taking seriously the sentence that what is around us and in us is a creation of the spirit. This is an attitude, this expectant life, which must become part of every educational system, which must flow into the whole constitution given to the educational system. So that from an early age, and when they become young men and maidens, and even later, the children get the feeling: While we are young, the spirit does not give us everything; but as one grows older, it reveals more and more new things that arise in the soul. One need only be stimulated by the knowledge of the spirit not to overlook, not to disregard, that which wants to emerge from the depths of our being, because it is not senseless, but because it makes sense that we grow old. Today, even the youngest people are annoyed when such a feeling is still expected of them; because the youngest people already feel ready to be elected to parliaments and state assemblies, as a matter of course, even though they do not belong there, because it is a matter of being able to pass judgment on social structures only from a mature perspective on life. If you have the mood of expectant life at all, then you know: you cannot know what you assume from external institutions in a living way, in a feeling way, until you have reached a certain age.

Do not say that spiritual science, when it is properly understood, is something abstract that does not intervene in practical life. Spiritual science, when it is more and more and more correctly understood, will intervene very much in practical life, because it will become familiar with concrete perceptions; it will cause man to grow up differently, to expect differently what each new year of his life can bring him again. Spiritual science contains the most powerful educational enzymes, the most powerful educational impulses. It contains moral impulses that affect the human mind quite differently from the moral impulses that people of the present day pride themselves on; for it contains impulses that flow to the human soul from the whole meaning of life, from the universal meaning of life. Of course, I do not mean by this that everyone who is familiar with spiritual science should immediately fulfill all ideals. But that is the case with morality in general: it initially hangs over man as an ideal, and he has to incorporate it into himself according to his free will. But spiritual science as such contains these significant moral impulses. It is not only a nurse of earthly morality, but it is a nurse of universal morality. One must only see through these things in the appropriate way. But it is extraordinarily necessary that an attitude of mind, which is connected with what I have now explained, should gain access to human minds through spiritual science. For what has led our time into such a fateful catastrophe is precisely that we live in that transition period that wants to pour something new into the human soul, and that people have not yet lost their attachment to the old, that they do not want to take in such new feelings, especially not want to take in such feelings in the principles of education. In the outer life, which has emerged from materialistic culture, one often finds the opposite of what the future so energetically demands of humanity. It is necessary that, above all, the young people assimilate this focus on the meaning of the emerging life. And today, in this respect, everyone is still a young person, because spiritual science has not yet been sufficiently assimilated, so that everyone must first become imbued with what spiritual science can give to the education of the human soul. For mankind must free itself from the belief that one is a finished human being at the age of twenty or twenty-five, that one has developed everything and only needs to live one's life, and for whom life has meaning only in so far as one applies what one has learned, or by enjoying life, and the like.

If you look more deeply into the context of life, what has been said comes to mind in a very, very deep way. It is something that developed in people by itself in ancient times, and that is to develop in more recent times through educational care in the human feeling: expectant life. Oh, it is something significant when a person says to himself at the age of thirty: in the future, simply by growing older by five or ten years, secrets will be revealed to me through this growing older; I have something to expect. —- Just consider what that is and what it means to introduce something like that into education! But it is also something real. It is a flowing being that comes into its own in man, that came into its own in ancient times by itself, that is to be cultivated in more recent times. For that is what comes to the fore in man; just because we do not pay attention to it, do not care about it, that does not make it not there. Do not think that you will escape becoming wiser, receiving secrets, as you grow older if you ignore these secrets. The spirit is at work in you. You will all become spirit-rich! The only difference is that one person absorbs it willingly, while another, once he has decided to become a clever man in his twenties (today this is particularly the case in the so-called world of the intelligentsia), rejects the idea of absorbing anything later in his development. The youngest people today write, compose poetry and do many other things. And how they feel about these things! How little they sense the meaning of life, which consists in the emergence of the human being as a creation from the spirit. But the spirit does not give up, even if the youngest people today write dramas or feature articles and the like. Nevertheless, it is possible that they still have spirit, they just know nothing about the spirit that develops in them.

What happens to this spirit, to the real spirit that developed by itself in ancient times? Yes, my dear friends, this spirit must disperse. Truly, it disperses. It spreads in the spiritual atmosphere, it spreads in the aura of humanity. And this is something that must be said again and again to our time, but which of course it does not believe for the simple reason that it naturally regards it as fantasy when one says to it: Now there is a young feature writer who thinks he is very clever. He knows nothing of the spirit, but the spirit passes into the aura of humanity, it atomizes. His spirit is nevertheless there. Today the aura of humanity is completely permeated with such atomized spirit. This spirit must be held together again by human beings, through the mood of which I have spoken. For we are already close to the point where a terrible evil would arise if this atomizing spirit were to be further and further developed. For it is an important law of spiritual life that a spirit becomes something quite different from what it originally was when it leaves its carrier. Just grasp this clearly: a spirit that leaves its carrier, that atomizes, becomes something quite different from what it would become if it remained held together by its carrier. It is essentially deteriorated, worsened, it is transformed in an ahrimanic way. And that which must come out, which does not yet come out clearly today because we are at the beginning of what can become terrible if it is not taken into account, that is a terrible spiritual wasteland. People will search for something to keep them busy because they have allowed the spirit to dissipate, which should actually keep them busy. A search for something without knowing what one is looking for is something that must become more and more widespread if the evil is not controlled. We can already see the beginnings of this in many of the things I have already mentioned.

What does a person do today if he has neglected to pay attention to his spirit? He will preferably search for something; only this search comes to fruition in a strange way in the most diverse fields. One very common area is: people found associations, associations with good programs. They confront people with all kinds of demands. These may be quite clever things, but they are mostly things that arise only from the fact that one has remained at the childhood point of view and then fossilized the childhood idea until one lets it loose on the world at a later age in the form of association programs. In this area, people today know an enormous amount to do. But they know little about working in the spirit, starting from small seeds of spiritual effectiveness, letting people join of their own accord and keeping them alive and active, something like a human community.

You see, that is why so many conflicts arise in our society, which, for certain reasons, remain latent and which I do not want to discuss here. Wherever I myself can exert an impulse in some way, I want all statutes, all rules, all laws to remain as far away as possible. After all, why do we need statutes when a number of people come together to cultivate spiritual life? We can draw up such statutes to show the authorities; that is another matter, it has nothing to do with the matter itself, but what matters is what such statutes mean to us ourselves. The point is that such a community should live, that each new person can bring something new into it. Such a community should live; it cannot be bound by any statutes. After five years of existence, it should be just as different as a child is different at twelve than it was at seven. But that is not the way of thinking in today's world. The way of thinking in today's world is to live as unalive as possible, to constrict everything into abstractions. That is one thing. Many examples could be given, all of which show that there is no awareness of the atomizing of spiritual life. One searches, one searches in every possible way. Just think how many women's and other associations there are already in a reasonably large city today! One searches and searches because one does not know that what one is supposed to hold is atomized. So one searches because one does not have what one does not pay attention to. This seeking means a barren life. This barrenness would increase terribly if humanity did not understand that the mood of life must arise, of which I have just spoken.

Isn't that what people today refuse to understand: the immediacy of life! The principle that what is there is a creation of the living spirit certainly demands mobility of experience. Never declaring yourself closed off or finished is inconvenient in some respects. But it is a necessity if the spiritual development of humanity is to progress. And to understand spiritual science in such a way that it is the inspiration for a living life, that it really finds its way into what the time demands at the present point of development of humanity, that is precisely the task of those who really devote themselves to spiritual science: to live with humanity and to recognize what it has to go through in the course of the development of time, what is set before it.

Try to gain an unbiased view of the events that surround you today. Actually, most people are oversleeping what is going on around us today. They just think that a state like the one before 1914 must come again, and they are waiting for such a state to come. They do not understand at all how radically the issue is involved, and how necessary it is that mankind should work its way through to quite new concepts, which were not there before. To comprehend life in its historical development, that is above all the task of the spiritual-scientific school of thought.

That is one thing: that the spirit is atomized by being ignored by people, as happens so often today. But only part of it is atomized, the other part remains behind, accumulating in the human organism, but not entering consciousness. It unconsciously impregnates the organism. It enters the blood and the flesh; it works in the unconscious. Part of what the human being should be aware of is atomized in the course of a lifetime, and part is driven down into the subconscious. What does it do in the subconscious?

Let us take a closer look at what causes the spirit to be partially driven down into the subconscious. The cause for this is mostly the wrong educational principles, which work towards children and young people becoming precocious, and towards children remaining childlike as little as possible. How much benefit is derived today from bringing the child to form its own judgment as early as possible, from educating the child in a different way as early as possible, as described in my booklet “The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science”. It is necessary that the child live above all in pictorial representations, that the intellectual approach comes to the child as late as possible. Today, there is very little sense of this. Even culture itself has little sense of it. But this culture should not be held back; spiritual science will never become reactionary. It will, of course, take into account external, material cultural progress; but this external, material cultural progress demands that a counterweight be created. It was different for people in the days when they did not learn to read and write in their youth. I do not want to speak in favor of illiteracy, do not misunderstand me, but today it is considered a misfortune when people are illiterate, because one sees the value of a person not in what is alive in the soul, but in what is brought up to the person, which ultimately has terribly little to do with the actual human soul. In those ancient times, when writing was still a pictographic script, when the letter reproduced a word secret, writing was something. But today: those little ghosts that appear on white paper before the eyes of the youngest children and have to be deciphered, those little ghosts that the children themselves conjure up on the paper, what kind of relationship do they have to the soul? They are only signs, arbitrary signs. One could imagine that the whole thing, as a piece of writing, would be arranged quite differently. Some people today already have a tendency to arrange it differently. They have even arranged shorthand. There is no necessity for what is there to approach people in this way; it could also be quite different. But that is a necessary requirement of earthly culture; it is against this that the reactionary turns, not the spiritual scientist. That had to come, of course. But a counterweight will come. Spiritual science will not consider it an ideal to abolish school; but a counterweight will be that children receive pictorial instruction, that instruction which contains reference after reference to the secrets of the world, instruction which, through everything that is learned, connects the mind with the secrets of the world. Every animal, every plant in its forms, they express something that is mysteriously connected with all creation. The right freshness of mind to feel such expression is only found at a certain age. One must grow together with creation at a certain age.

Let us take an example here too. I have already mentioned a saying that my old friend Vinzenz Knauer, the historian of philosophy, often used. He said, from his well-medieval scholastic consciousness, to those who claim that everything is in the same matter: Well, just look at the same matter as it is in a wolf and in a lamb; lock up a wolf so that it can't get any other food and only give it lambs. If the matter of the lamb is really the same as the matter of the wolf, then the wolf should gradually become a lamb, or at least become as meek as a lamb. This clearly shows that in that which forms the wolf – we call it the group soul – in that living thing that determines the structure of the wolf, there is something other than the structure of the lamb. To look at mere matter, not at formed matter, not at spiritualized matter, does not lead into creation, but out of it. The animals around us are built in the most diverse forms. Just look at how different man is from animals in this respect. Consider very carefully what is actually present. Human beings, apart from small differences that lie in the various racial characteristics, which can be great but do not come close to the differences between animal species, are equally formed across the earth. Why? Because the equilibrium conditions in them are different from those in animals. The animal is a result of the equilibrium conditions that develop in relation to the earth. You can see this in the ape, which is almost upright. The animal is designed in such a way that its backbone is actually designed to be parallel to the earth's surface, that its hindquarters are at the same height as its forearms. The most significant thing is that the human being is predisposed from the outset in such a way that what is next to the hindquarters in animals is built over the hindquarters, covering them. In humans, the line that goes through the head to the earth falls into the center of gravity line, but not in animals. The fact that man is called upon to give himself his own equilibrium to the earth, which becomes a caricature in the ape, but is the self-evident essence in man, is why he rises above the definite form that each animal genus has. Man does not have the same definite configuration as the animal species because he rises above it, because he can place the head above the abdomen. This is something tremendously significant. The Darwinists have not yet thought of this at all. But this is what matters.

Today I can only hint at it; if I wanted to explain it further, I would have to give many lectures, and it would illuminate the deeply significant question of the difference between animals and humans. But that interests us less today; what interests us today is that the human being overcomes the animal form within himself by adopting an upright position, by giving himself a different state of equilibrium on earth. In doing so, he makes himself independent of the earth. But he is only independent as a physical human being. If we go to the etheric body, it is different. This etheric body is mobile in itself; it is differently shaped every moment in every single person. If someone looks at a lion, you see the lion's shape in the person looking at it. If you look at a hyena, you become hyena-like in the supersensible. In the physical, the human being overcomes external formations, but in the etheric body, he adapts to what occurs in his environment. And this is precisely what so significantly distinguishes man from animals: the animal has its definite form; the lion that confronts the dog cannot imitate the shape of the dog in its etheric body, it always remains, even internally, the lion; in truth it only recognizes another lion. Observe how the similar animal faces the similar animal quite differently than the dissimilar one. Man, however, is versatile; he adapts himself to his surroundings with regard to his ether body. But the question is whether this adaptation is regular or irregular, whether this adaptation intervenes meaninglessly or meaningfully in life. The fact that animals are so diversely formed, that they hold fast in their physical form that which man, ever changing, can become, makes that the whole animal kingdom is not only what the modern zoologist sees, but that every animal form has a definite meaning, and the connections among the animals yield a definite meaning. In a certain way one can read this meaning of the whole animal kingdom. But it is by grasping the meaning of what is out there in solid form that we build a bridge between ourselves and the spiritual world, and then meaningfully relive it by becoming it ourselves.

In ancient times, people instinctively tried to sense the meaning of their environment. The various symbolic tales about animals are what stand out in historical times: the animal fairy tales, the animal sagas, the animal fables and the like. We cannot go back to that. But something else must be developed for this, so that people do not just learn what they are currently learning in a very abstract way about the animal form. How such animals are described in today's school books! The descriptions seem so boring to children because they are entirely external. Let the description be a meaningful one, let the lion become again something that is developing in Creation in a different way from the hyena or the kangaroo. Then the human being will also live meaningfully in Creation, will take in Creation in a living way. It will certainly have a certain effect, for the spirit will become mobile, the spirit will become full of content when it becomes absorbed in Creation. Then it will not be satisfied with what official science gives it today in many cases. You can experience all kinds of things in this respect today. If you follow the development of the animal series as presented by today's official science, even where it is somewhat unbiased, you can experience strange things. You don't even have to go as far as Darwinism; you can start with Zamarck, who is much wiser than what has been developed in a materialistic way from Darwinism. There you can also find a description of how the different animal forms have developed by adapting to their living conditions. Certain animals have developed webbed feet because their living conditions have developed for them to live in the water. Other animals have developed prehensile feet because they had to find their food up in the trees and the like. Yes, if the organs have developed through such habits, they must have been different before. Animals that have webbed feet must not have had any before, must have had different ones; they then developed them through their living conditions. One gradually comes to realize that those animals that have webbed feet have developed them from other feet, and those that do not have webbed feet have developed them from the earlier ones that were differently formed. That is how it is. You just don't notice it, you study hard, but you don't notice it. When the giraffe has a long neck, it is explained that it has become so from a short one because the giraffe had to reach the tree. If the giraffe had a short neck, it would have become so from a long neck through other habits of life. You don't even notice that you are turning things around and around. Today, no one has any idea of the confusion and confused thinking in which a world view lives that does not create a meaningful bridge to what is in the human environment.

But this is what must be incorporated into education, to mention just one thing: this meaningful experience of the environment; not just understanding the environment intellectually, but experiencing it meaningfully, so that one really absorbs the forms of the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms with one's whole soul. What a blessing it would be for a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boy or girl if you took them for a walk and said: Look at these cloud formations! Then again on a next walk, where the clouds are formed differently: Now look at these clouds. Memorize this so that you have an image of these forms! After letting the child observe the whole for a while, you go to your shelf and take out Goethe's “Natural Science Writings”, where he meaningfully describes the various cloud formations and how they merge and separate. The child will immediately understand this and immediately become immersed in this vivid, meaningful description of cloud formations, experiencing something wonderful.

Or let the child observe a plant in the garden in spring, summer and autumn, and then read to him Goethe's poem “Metamorphosis of Plants”. This is a meaningful way to introduce nature.

These are some of the things that help to create the mood of expectant life. These are some of the things that are needed if we are to avoid the spirit being repressed and entering the blood and the flesh, but instead being taken hold of by the soul in the appropriate way within. Certain things must not enter the flesh in the course of development, but must remain in the soul. What happens when they enter the flesh and blood? They create affects and passions in the subconscious, which are given names and masks, and which are sometimes quite different from the masks given them. Today, so much lives in human development that has come about because what should have remained in the soul has passed into the blood and flesh. And what is the result? It brings forth strife, discord, disharmony over the earth. This masks itself in all possible forms, this masks itself in the fact that the Italian cannot stand the German, that the Englishman cannot stand the German, that the German cannot stand the Roman; this masks itself in these passions that rage over the earth. We only have to know the deeper reasons for these things, and we have to realize what is incumbent on humanity, what is humanity's mission, in order to achieve what must be achieved at all costs.

What is happening at the present time should be seen as clear signs of what we must learn in order to lead humanity towards a prosperous future. We should not remain on the surface, as people do today, but look into the depths of human souls. The fact that the 19th century made an educational mistake because it was a transitional period, because it allowed things to be taught in the flesh and blood that should have been taught in the soul, is being fought out today on the battlefields. The blood that has absorbed what should have gone into the soul now rules in the wild passions that are raging across the earth. This makes it impossible for people to understand each other. It makes them talk at cross purposes. It makes them have so little sense of feeling and living together.

The signs of the times are serious, very serious, but they are an invitation to look into the depths of world evolution in order to recognize from these depths what our task is. I already said last time: This is not an objection to world wisdom, to divine wisdom. Divine wisdom must guide these signs through humanity, because humanity is not an automaton-like entity, but should become independent. The question is not: Why did humanity come into all this? — but: What must be done for the salvation of humanity? It is a matter of action and of great universal ethical impulses. This is what we are called upon to do from week to week, from hour to hour, from minute to minute: to engage with what is to happen. And the person who, in the way indicated today, has expected each new year of life to bring something that was previously a mystery to him, ignites in his soul that which humanity will also need in the future: the living, not the dead, sense of immortality. He who knows that every new year brings him new secrets also knows that life after death brings him new secrets; for him, doubt about the continuation of what brings something new to the development of the body makes no sense. But for him, this life after death is also real, very real: it is not only the egoistic principle, as it so often appears today, but it becomes the principle of humanity.

Today we step through the gateway of death and bring with us many observations of life that we have not processed here. But that still has a meaning for the earth. Our wisdom, which we have acquired here, will also benefit the earth after we have passed through the gate of death. But here on earth there must be people who want to use it. Those who have had experiences know how to report on them. In public, in order not to make a complete fool of oneself, one must still say these things as I did yesterday, for example: that Planck would think differently today than he thought in the 1880s. As a humanities scholar, one actually means something else by this. One knows that this person's soul has carried so much through the gateway of death that there is plenty that can still be useful to the earth. And those who know that their living feeling for the living soul is not diminished by the portal of death also know that the so-called dead are in constant contact with us, and that we only have to receive what they have worked. Those who have experience in this may perhaps speak of these things in a modest way from personal experience. I know that I have not only taken up Goethe's world view, but that I have written what I have written about Goethe's world view in the most diverse ways only because I knew that it comes from the inspiration of the soul of Goethe himself, at least as far as a weak descendant can absorb it.

But this requires a living relationship with the soul that has remained alive, not just the abstract veneration of the dead, but the absorption of the living essence of the dead into our souls, which are embodied here in the physical body. Oh, how much, how very much that is fruitful and of significant essence will flow into the evolution of the earth when the dead, through the attitude of the living, can be the advisers of mankind. I know how far our attitude still is from this. I know that people today ask: What does the twenty-two-year-old, the twenty-three-year-old say - or whatever the age limit may be for the various parliaments - what does the twenty-four-year-old say about something that is to become law? - But they do not ask: What does Goethe say today about what is to become law? But that will come too. The dead will be our fellow citizens. If you absorb into your soul the feeling that a new secret can be revealed to us every year, then you will go even further: then you will also know what it means to make the great transition through the gateway of death with the sum of the earth's evolution. Then the dead will be the co-advisers of the living. For it does not depend merely on belief in immortality, but on the fact that that which is immortal can bear fruit in all the fields where it is really to bear fruit. Man needs strength to push through the veil that still separates him from what the spiritual world still holds.

You see, today's way of thinking is actually more or less there for us to develop the strong power to penetrate to the spirit. But the time has already come when people must penetrate many things in a clear way, because they should understand it themselves. That is why the signs are placed before the human soul, because people must learn: This must not be there at all, that must be overcome completely. And because they are to overcome it themselves, that is why it had to occur among them.

Two extremes stand in the outer life - but there are many such extremes - opposite each other: Wilsonism and, opposite it, Trotskyism or Leninism, call it what you will. Both stand there, born out of an unspiritual world-view, the most unspiritual world-view imaginable. It is the task of mankind to see that everything that ultimately leads to Leninism or Wilsonism be eradicated. But there is a great deal of both Wilsonism and Leninism everywhere; they are very, very widespread, one just does not notice it. One must only look the things in the eye. But anyone who has studied spiritual science to some extent knows that this spiritual science gives him the soul's eye to look things squarely in the eye in this area as well. Today it is a vital necessity for people to look squarely at the world, to look at things, not to oversleep them. For people have all too much reason to spread masks over what is true in many cases. And people are all too gullible; that is why they believe in the masks and do not look at what is hidden behind them. One cannot develop the way of thinking that makes possible a certain agility of mind, which is necessary for spiritual science, without, in a certain time, when one really finds one's way into this agility, acquiring a clear, calm view of what is going on in the world. One must not oversleep things, one must awaken through spiritual science if one does not want to lull oneself out of a certain comfort in life. There is much need to let such a spirit flow into the soul, but the will, especially of many who feel themselves to be leaders of humanity, to take this need into account, is not there. The will to the spirit exists today in the simplest natures; they only do not yet understand themselves because they are misled by what is spread today in many cases as “public opinion” — Schopenhauer called it “private stupidity”. The leaders are often inclined to speak of the limitations of human nature where they do not want to lead people beyond those limitations. You find this today in all fields. How good it is for people – to mention just one example – when something like what is happening now to the French “theologian” Loisy, who has also taken up such a strangely vacillating position between modernism and non-modernism, although he had apparently stood on his own two feet for a while. But now, in the face of the catastrophic events, he has asked himself the question: Yes, what has actually become of Christianity in view of the catastrophic events that have taken place in the world today? Has not Christianity perhaps failed? Loisy does not mean Christ as such, but he wonders: Has not Christianity perhaps failed in some ways? Some have written about this question of conscience of Loisy. One said: Well, you just have to reckon with the imperfection of human beings. Christianity wants something different from what is happening on earth now, but what is happening must happen because people are imperfect. To think about it is not the point, but the point is to reflect and to consider and to feel how man can become more perfect, how man can ennoble himself, how man can come higher ethically by becoming more and more integrated into the universal world being. In many cases, the questions must be asked quite differently than one is inclined to ask them today.

These are the feelings that I wanted to place in your souls during our time together. Even more than before, it is important to me this time that my words are not only understood with the mind, but that they are taken as they are meant: that they inspire our minds, so that they become the seeds in our minds for an understanding penetration of what has to happen in the development of humanity, in the course of humanity. For each of us, in perhaps not too long a time, according to our nature and karma, will find ourselves surrounded by important questions in life at this or that point in our lives, questions that we cannot cope with if we only want to cling to the old, comfortable ideas. We must learn to acquire new ideas. Spiritual science can be our guide to such new ideas. My words were intended to awaken the souls to wakefulness. Even if they appear to have been based on facts, the facts were chosen so that they would touch on precisely what is most important for people at the present moment in terms of their emotional life, in terms of their entire mental life.

The fact that I am speaking today is a consequence of the question posed in the preceding history seminar. This question concerns the question of guilt for the last war catastrophe, and it is certainly such an important question, and one can already say today that it is also a thoroughly historically important question, that the answer to this question, as far as it is possible to answer it in such a narrow framework in a short time, must not be withheld from you.

I would just like to make a few preliminary remarks so that you are aware of the context in which I wish to speak about this question. I have never held back the views I have formed on the subject of today's discussions in lectures I have given at the Goetheanum in Dornach, and I have never made a secret of the fact that these views appear to me to be the ones that should be expressed to the whole world above all others. I do not believe that the situation today is such that we should keep saying that we must first leave the objective judgment to history, that we will only be able to form an objective judgment on this matter in the future. In the course of time, especially as a result of prejudices that continue to have an effect, just as much will be lost in terms of the possibility of forming a sound judgment on this question as might perhaps be gained from one or the other. I say “might” expressly, because I myself do not believe that in the future one will be able to form a better judgment on this question than one can already in the present.

That is the first thing I would like to say. I must say it for the following reason: As you well know, those attacks – I do not want to label them with any epithet now – that relate precisely to the cultural-political side of my work within the borders of Germany, come mainly from the side that one could call the “Pan-German” side, and I must of course be aware that on this side, everything I present in any way will be interpreted in the wildest way. On the other hand, I do not think I need to say any special words of defense in this direction, for the silly accusations that something is being done against Germanness are refuted by the fact that that the Goetheanum was already built during the war in the northwestern corner of Switzerland, a symbol of what is to be achieved not only within Germany, but also before the whole world through German spiritual life. If one has borne witness in this way to what it means to be German, then I think there is no need to say many more words to refute malicious accusations in any way.

What I have to say further is this: I have always endeavored not to influence in any way the judgments of those who hear what I say in this regard, and I would like to continue to do so today as far as possible – of course it is only possible to a limited extent if one has to be brief. In everything I have said, I have endeavored to provide everyone with the basis for forming their own judgment by listing these or those facts, these or those moments. And just as I never anticipate a judgment in the full scope of spiritual science, but only try to provide the material for forming a judgment, so I would also like to do so in these matters related to the historical external world.

Now, I would like to comment on the matter itself: it seems to me that the discussions taking place today on the question of guilt are, more or less everywhere in the world, based on impossible premises. I, for my part, believe that with these same premises, if only applied in one way or another, one can easily prove that the entire blame for the war lies with the somewhat strange Nikita, the King of Montenegro. I believe that with these arguments one can ultimately even prove that Helfferich is an extraordinarily wise man, or that the formerly fat Mr. Erzberger did not slither through all possible undergrounds and basements of European will in a remarkably lively manner during the war. In short, I believe that one can do very little with these arguments. On the other hand, I believe that the present German Foreign Minister Simons was quite right when he said in his recent speech in Stuttgart that it is necessary to seriously address the question of guilt. I just have the additional view that this should really be done. Because emphasizing that it is necessary to do this does not mean that we have done everything that needs to be done. It is necessary to address the question of guilt, and this is clear from the fact that the most cunning statesman of the present day, Lloyd George, put it at the forefront of those last ill-fated London negotiations. only call it, one is at a loss to find the right words for what is currently being said - the sentence: 'Everything we negotiate is based on the assumption that the Entente Allies have decided the question of guilt.

Now, if everything we can negotiate is done under the aspect that the question of guilt has been decided, then, if it has not been decided, it is all the more important to begin the negotiations by seriously raising the question of guilt and treating it in a serious manner. It must be emphasized that, so far, nothing has been done in relation to this question of guilt except for a very strange decision by the victorious powers. This decision is based, entirely in accordance with the rules of world affairs today, not on an objective assessment of the facts, but simply on a dictate from the victors. The victors need to exploit their victory in an appropriate way by dictating to the world that the other side was to blame for the war. You cannot exploit victory, as the Entente would like, as you even – it can be admitted – must exploit it from that point of view, if you do not blame the other side entirely. You will easily see that one could not act in this way if one were to say: Yes, people cannot actually be judged at all as they were, say, during the war catastrophe.

So it is a matter of the fact – because everything else has remained only literature or has not even become literature – that for the time being nothing more has been done for the question of guilt than for the dictation of a victor to flow. And the fact that this has happened in an incomprehensible way, which basically should never have happened, that this victor's dictation has been signed, has created a fact that cannot be regretted enough. For one cannot say: this signature had to be given in order not to make the disaster even greater. Those who look into the real events know that one can only get through the present world situation with the truth and with the will to the full truth. Even if what flows through the need may lead to tragic situations, today one cannot get by with anything else. The times are too serious, they call for great decisions, they cannot be resolved otherwise than with the full will to truth.

I would like to emphasize: Since I am unable, in the short time available to me, to present the matter in such a way that the content of my sentences fully substantiates what I am saying, I will at least try to give you a basis for forming an opinion in this area by the way I present the facts, the way I try to find the nuances in the way things are presented. Now, through many years of experience and careful observation of what is taking place in world-historical development, I have found out how, especially among the Anglo-Saxon people and in particular among certain groups of people within this Anglo-Saxon people, a political view exists that is, in a certain sense, quite historically generous. Certain backers, if I may call them that, of Anglo-Saxon politics have a political view that I would summarize in two main points: firstly, there is the view – and there are a large number of personalities behind the actual external politicians, who are sometimes straw men, are imbued with this view — that the Anglo-Saxon race, through certain world-developing forces, must fall to the mission of exercising a world domination, a real world domination, for the present and the future of many centuries. This conviction is deeply rooted in these personalities, even though it is rooted, I might say, in a materialistic way and in materialistic conceptions of the workings of the world. But it is so deeply rooted in those who are the true leaders of the Anglo-Saxon race that it can be compared with the inner impulses which the ancient Jewish people once had of their world mission. The ancient Jews, of course, conceived of it more in moral and theological terms, but the intensity of the conception is the same in the actual leaders of the Anglo-Saxon race as it was in the ancient Jews. So we are dealing primarily with this principle, which you can also observe externally, and with the particular way of looking at life that is present among the Anglo-Saxon people, among their representative men in particular. The prevailing view is that when something like this is at hand, everything must be done that lies in the spirit of such a world impulse, that one must not shrink from anything that lies in the spirit of such a world impulse. This impulse is brought into the minds of those who then lead political life in the more inferior positions — but this still includes those of the state secretaries — in an, it must be said, intellectually extraordinarily magnificent way. I believe that anyone who is not aware of the fact just mentioned cannot possibly understand the course of world development in modern times.

The second point on which this world policy, which has been so sad and so disastrous for Central Europe, is based, is the following. People are far-sighted. From the point of view of Anglo-Saxonism, this policy is generous, it is imbued with the belief that world impulses rule the world and not the small practical impulses by which this or that politician often allows himself to be guided with arrogance. This policy of Anglo-Saxonism is generous in this sense; it also counts on the world-historical impulse in individual practical measures. The second thing is this: It is well known that the social question is a world-historical impulse that must necessarily be realized. There is not one of the leading figures among the Anglo-Saxon personalities who does not look at it with an, I might say, extraordinarily cold and sober gaze and say to himself: The social question must be realized. But he also says to himself: It must not be realized in such a way that the Western, the Anglo-Saxon mission might suffer as a result. He says, almost literally, and these words have been spoken often: the Western world is not suited to being ruined by socialist experiments. The Eastern world is suited to this. And he is then inspired by the intention of making this Eastern world, namely the Russian world, the field of socialist experiments.

What I am about to tell you is a view that I was able to establish – perhaps it goes back even further, I don't know for the time being – to the 1880s. The Anglo-Saxon people were well aware that the social question would have to be resolved, that they would not let it ruin their Anglo-Saxon way of life, and that Russia would therefore have to become the experimental country for socialist attempts. And in this direction politics was tending, it was clearly tending towards this policy. And in particular all Balkan questions, including the one by which in the Berlin Treaty Bosnia and Herzegovina were snatched away from the unsuspecting Central Europeans, all these questions were already being treated from this point of view. The whole treatment of the Turkish problem by the Anglo-Saxon world is from this point of view, and it was hoped that the socialist experiments, by taking the course they must take when the erring proletarian world world follows Marxist or similar principles, that these socialist experiments will also be a clear lesson for the working world in their outcome, in their futility, in their destruction, that it cannot be done this way either. Thus the Western world will be protected by showing the East what socialism can achieve when it is allowed to spread as it would not be allowed to in the Western world.

You see, these things, which it will be possible to explain in full historical terms, are what has been lying at the bottom of the European situation, and the world situation in general, for decades. And from these things, I would say, emerges what shows a level of world-historical events that is now already too close to the physical world. We need only read very carefully what the fantasist Woodrow Wilson, who is, however, a good historian in the present sense, lets shine through his words in his various speeches. But we only need that to have a symptom of what I want to say. Throughout modern history, it has become apparent that the Orient, although this is usually not noticed, is a kind of discussion problem for all of European civilization. The objective observer has no choice but to say to himself: through the world-historical events of modern times, England has been favored in a certain inauguration of the mission characterized by you. This goes back a long way, back to the discovery of the possibility of reaching India by sea. From this privilege, basically, the whole configuration of modern English politics goes out, and there you have – if I may briefly indicate this schematically; what I am saying now would of course have to be discussed in many hours, but can only hint at the matter in this answer to a question. It goes from England through the ocean, around Africa to India. There is an enormous amount to be learned from this line. This line is the one for which the Anglo-Saxon world mission is really fighting and will fight to the finish, even if it is necessary to fight to the finish against America. The other line, which is just as important, is the one that represents the overland route, which played a major role in the Middle Ages but has become impossible for more recent economic developments due to the discovery of America and the incursions of the Turks into Europe. But between these two lines lies the Balkans, and Anglo-Saxon policy is directed towards dealing with the Balkan problem in such a way as to eliminate this line completely in relation to economic development, so that only the sea line can develop. Anyone who wants to see it can see what I have just indicated in everything that has happened from 1900 and even earlier, up to the Balkan Wars, which immediately preceded the so-called World War, and up to 1914.

Another thing is the relationship between England and Russia. This line is of course of no interest to Russia; but Russia is interested in its own behavior in relation to this line. As you have already seen, England has something special in mind with Russia, the socialist experiment, and therefore it must base its entire policy on the one hand on the realization of this economic line, and on the other hand on Russia being so restricted and contained that it can provide the ground for the socialist experiments. Nevertheless, that was basically the world situation. Everything that had been done in the field of world politics up to 1914 was influenced by this world tendency. As I said, it would take many hours to go into this in detail; but I wanted to at least touch on it here.

What I had to face and what I tried to throw light on when I wrote my appeal 'To the German People and the Cultural World' in 1919 is the other fact that unfortunately people in Central Europe have always refused to believe that they had to gain a political perspective from the point of view of such generous historical impulses. Unfortunately, it was not possible to get anyone within Europe, within the continent, to look at the measures that were taken from the point of view of dealing with such generous tendencies. You see, then people come and say: You have to do practical politics! A politician must be a practitioner! Now let me give you an example to make clear what such people actually mean by practice. There are numerous people who say: It is all nonsense, what the Stuttgart people are doing with their threefold social order, with their “Coming Day” and so on. It is all impractical, they are impractical idealists! Well, put these people in front of you now and think how it will hopefully be when the years come when we have been lucky, if I may put it this way, when we have achieved something, have accomplished something that stands in the world. Then you will see that the same people who now say: All this is impractical stuff – will then come and want to be hired to use their practical knowledge to spread what they previously shouted down as impractical stuff, using all their powers of speech and action. Then all at once the thing is regarded as practical. That is the only point of view these people have for their practice. Whatever the matter may be, this is what it is always about: one must realize that things must be considered at their origin and that what the “practical” impractitioners call “impractical” is something that is often sought precisely as the basis of their practice. They just don't want to put themselves in the other person's shoes, and that makes them unsuitable for dealing with real-life situations.

The practice followed by the politicians of Europe was more or less the same. There is no other way of putting it. And it is absolutely essential to realize that the nullity, the arrival at zero in relation to this policy, was a tragic relationship for Central Europe, when things were coming to a head. What is at issue here, then, is that we must also recognize that it is absolutely necessary for us in Central Europe to rise to the level of a generous, spirit-filled political point of view. Without that, we will not be able to escape from the turmoil of the present. If we do not resolve to do so, then only what we are now seeing will come about. I am of the opinion that the political problems which are still being treated today under the influence of the old maxims are so tangled and so confused that they cannot be solved at all, at least not from these old impulses. And let us assume that the Entente statesmen had sat down together – I am telling you this as something that I have formed as an honest opinion – and had, under the leadership of Lloyd George, if you like, concocted the peace demands that they put out into the world before the London Conference; but let us assume that they then lost the elaboration of these peace demands through some event and they had even forgotten what these peace demands were – of course this is an impossible hypothesis, but I want to make a point here – and now let us assume that Simons had received this document and had made these same demands, quite literally, I am convinced that they would have been rejected with the same indignation with which Simons' offers were rejected at the London Conference. For it is not a matter of solvable problems, but of beating about the bush with regard to problems that are initially insoluble from this point of view. That is what must be said for those who seek the truth in this field.

Now, I would like to go down another layer, to the purely physical events. You know that the external beginning was the catastrophe of the war with the Serbian ultimatum. I have spoken so often about the causes of this ultimatum, about everything that preceded it, and it will be possible for you to inform yourselves about these things, so that today I may speak more cursorily. The Austrian ultimatum to Serbia set in motion the whole series of complications. Now, anyone who is familiar with Austrian politics, especially the historical development of Austrian politics in the second half of the 19th century, knows that this Austro-Serbian ultimatum was indeed a warlike gamble, but that, having made the policy that was pursued, it was then an historical necessity. One cannot say anything other than this: Austrian politics took place in a territory in which it was simply impossible from the 1870s onwards to muddle along with the old principles of government. That they did muddle along is not a term I have invented; it was said by Count Taaffe, whose name was often misspelled as “Ta-affe” in Austria, in parliament itself. He said: We can do nothing else but muddle along.

Now, the necessity arose, precisely because of the complicated Austrian circumstances, to move on to a clear insight into the question: how does any association of nationalities study what are intellectual matters, and in an association state, such as the Austrian one was, did national issues really amount to something like the outpourings of intellectual life? Austrian politics has not even begun to look at this question properly, let alone study it in reality. And if I survey the situation with a certain will to weigh things, not to group them according to passions or to take them from external history, then other things appear to me in the prehistory of the Serbian ultimatum as more decisive than the murder of the Austrian heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand, around which the events then gathered. I see, for example, that from the fall of 1911 into 1912, economic debates took place in the Austrian parliament that had significant repercussions on the streets and that were always linked to the conditions existing in Austria at the time. On the one hand, a large number of companies were closed down at the time because Austrian politics as a whole was so cornered that it didn't know what to do and tried in vain to find new markets, but couldn't find them. This led to the closure of numerous businesses in 1912 and to a huge increase in prices. At that time, inflationary unrest, which reached revolutionary proportions, arose in Vienna and in other areas of Austria, and the debates on inflation, in which the late Member of Parliament Adler took such a great interest in the Austrian Parliament, led to the Minister of Justice being shot five times from the gallery. This was the signal; economic life cannot be maintained in this way in Austria, economic life cannot be sustained. What did Minister Gautsch find to be the main content of his speech back then? He said that all energy, that is, the old administrative measures of Austria, must be used to ensure that the agitation against the inflation disappears. That is how you see the mood on the other side.

Intellectual life was played out in the national struggles. Economic life was driven into a cul-de-sac – you can study this in detail – but no one had the heart or mind to study the necessity of the further development of intellectual and economic life separately from the old state views, which were shown to be null and void in Austria. In Austria, the necessity arose to approach the study of world-historical affairs in such a way that the matter worked towards a threefold structure of the social organism. This follows simply from the facts I have just described. Nobody wanted to think about it, and because nobody wanted to think about it, that is how things turned out. You see, what happened in Austria under the influence of the effects of the Congress of Berlin in the early 1880s, you just need to shed a little light on it and you will see what forces were at play. In Austria, conditions had already deteriorated to such an extent by the beginning of the 1880s, and even earlier, that the Polish member of parliament Otto Hausner publicly spoke the words in parliament: If things continue in Austrian politics at this rate, in three years' time we will no longer have a parliament at all, but something completely different. — He meant state chaos. Now, of course, people exaggerate in such arguments, they make hyperboles. What he had prophesied for the future of the next three years did not come in three years, but it did come in a few decades.

I could cite countless examples from the parliamentary debates in Austria at the turn of the seventies and eighties, from which it would be clear to you how people in Austria saw that the agricultural problem was also looming in a terrible way. I remember very well, for example, how it was said at the time, following the justification of the construction of the Arlberg railway, by individual politicians of the most diverse shades, that the construction of this railway had to be tackled because it was shown that it was simply no longer possible to continue working in the right agrarian way if the enormous influence of agricultural products from the West continued in the same way as before. Of course the problem had not been tackled in the right way, but a correct prophecy had been spoken. And all these things – one could cite hundreds – would show how Austria, in the end, in 1914, had reached the point where it had to say: either we can no longer go on, we must abdicate as a state, we must say we are helpless! or we must get out of this somehow by a desperate gamble, by doing something that will create prestige for the ruling class. Anyone who still held the view that Austria should continue to exist – and I would like to know how an Austrian statesman could have remained a statesman if he did not hold this view – even if he was as foolish as Count Berchtold, could say to himself no other words than: Something like this had to happen – there was no other way to play a game of chance. No matter how strange it may appear from certain points of view, one must understand this in its historical impulses.

Now, so to speak, we have the starting point in one place. Consider this starting point in another place, namely in Berlin. Now, I would like to begin by telling you some purely factual details in order to give you an idea of what was at work there: Please do not take it amiss if I also characterize it quite objectively: In 1905, the man who, in 1914 in Berlin, nevertheless had the decision on war and peace on his shoulders, the then General and later General-in-Chief before Moltke, was appointed Chief of Staff. At the time of his appointment, the following scene took place – I will describe it as briefly as possible: General von Moltke could not, in accordance with his convictions, take on the responsible office of Chief of Staff without first discussing with the supreme warlord, the Kaiser, the conditions of accepting this office. And this argument had approximately the following course. The point was that until then, due to the position of the generals in relation to the supreme commander, the matter was such that the latter – you may have already read about this here or there – often led the supreme command on one side or the other during maneuvers, and you know that this supreme commander also regularly won. Now the man who was to be appointed in 1905 said to himself, the responsible office of the Chief of General Staff: Of course, under such conditions, one cannot take it on; because it can also be serious, and then you should see how you can wage war under the conditions under which you have to put together maneuvers when you have the supreme commander in command, who must win. — Now General von Moltke decided to present this to the Kaiser in a very open and honest way. The Kaiser was extremely astonished when the person he had chosen to be his Chief of Staff told him that it would not do, because the Kaiser did not really understand how to lead a war in a real situation. Therefore, things had to be prepared in such a way that they could be used in a real situation, and he could only take on the role of Chief of Staff if the Kaiser renounced the leadership of any side. The Kaiser said, “Yes, but what is the situation? Have I not really won? Has it been done like that? He knew nothing about what his entourage had done, and only when his eyes were opened to it did he realize that this would not do, and it must even be said that he then accepted the conditions with considerable willingness; that should certainly not be kept secret.

So, ladies and gentlemen, having presented these facts to you for your own judgment, I ask you – and perhaps I may add in parenthesis that there is ample reason today not to color anything in such matters, because I can be checked at any moment by a personality present here – having presented these facts to you, I also ask you now to consider whether there have been any aberrations, whether it was not also a very peculiar thing that personalities were found around the supreme commander – who have also found their succession – who at least did not speak as the later General-in-Chief von Moltke did in 1905, but who also acted differently after taking office. Today there is no need to keep telling the world that one must wait until one can establish the objective facts; it is only a matter of having the sincere will to point out these objective facts.

And now there is really no need to speculate about a Kronrat of 1914, when it is certain that Generaloberst von Moltke had no idea that it had taken place, because he was absent in July 1914 until shortly before the outbreak of the war for a cure in Karlovy Vary. This is important to emphasize because when the talk comes to Germany's warmongers, one must then say the following: Of course there were such warmongers, and if one were to tackle the specific problem of warmongering, there would be a lack of such personalities, whom I have also mentioned earlier, if one wanted to whitewash them completely. And finally, what I said, that one can also ascribe a heavy burden of war guilt to Nikita of Montenegro – I don't know if he is white or black – may be inferred from the fact that as early as July 22, 1914, the two daughters, these – forgive the expression—demonic women in St. Petersburg, in the presence of Poincare, at a particularly magnificent court celebration, told the French ambassador, who did the strange thing of telling the story himself in his memoirs in old age, “We live in a historic time; a letter from our father just arrived, and it indicates that we will have war in the next few days. It will be magnificent. Germany and Austria will disappear, we will join hands in Berlin. Now, the daughters of King Nikita, Anastasia and Militza, said this to the French ambassador in St. Petersburg on July 22 – please note the date. This is also a fact that can be pointed out.

Well then, I would like to say that there is no need to worry about all the less important details. On the other hand, the fact that things in Berlin came to such a head by July 31, 1914, that all decisions about war and peace were actually placed on the shoulders of General von Moltke, and he naturally could not form an opinion about the situation based on anything other than purely military grounds. That is what must be taken into account; for in order to judge the situation in Berlin at that time, it is actually necessary to know exactly, I might almost say hour by hour, what took place in Berlin from about four o'clock in the afternoon until eleven o'clock at night on Saturday. Those were the decisive hours in Berlin, when an enormous tragedy in world history took place. This world-historical tragedy took place in such a way that the then Chief of Staff, from what had happened, or at least from all that could be known in Berlin about what had happened, could do nothing else but to have the General Staff plan carried out, which had been prepared for years in case something like this happened, which in the end could only be foreseen as the thing to happen.

The various alliances were such that one could not think about the European situation in any other way than this: if the Balkan turmoil extends to Austria, Russia will definitely take part. Russia has France and England as allies. They will have to take part in some way. But then things automatically go like this – there is no need to ask any further – that Germany and Austria must go together, and from Italy they had the most definite assurance, even stipulated in detail by an agreement reached shortly before, except for the number of divisions, how it would participate in a possible war. These were the facts known in Berlin, these were the facts available to a man who, in view of the world situation, really only had two points of departure. These were the two maxims of General von Moltke: firstly, if it comes to war, then this war will be terrible, something dreadful will happen. And anyone who knew the very fine soul of General von Moltke knew that such a soul would truly not be able to plunge into what it considered the most terrible thing with a light heart. But the other thing was an unbounded devotion to duty and responsibility, and that in turn could not help but work as it did.

If what happened should have been prevented, then it should have been prevented by German politics; what you yourself may judge should be prevented, if I draw your attention to the following facts: It was On Saturday afternoon, the event that was to lead to a decision approached, and after four o'clock the Chief of Staff, von Moltke, met the Kaiser, Bethmann-Hollweg and a number of other gentlemen in a state that actually seemed to be quite rosy. A report had just come from England – though I think it is hard to believe that it was properly read, otherwise it could not have been understood as it was – according to which German politicians believed that England could still be persuaded to change its mind. No one had any idea of the unshakable belief in the mission of Anglo-Saxons, on the other hand, one had always driven ostrich policy, that was tragic. Now one believed to be able to read with a light heart from such a telegram that the things could also play differently, and it happened that the emperor did not sign the mobilization document. So, I would like to explicitly note that on the evening of July 31st, the mobilization document was not signed by the Kaiser, although the Chief of Staff, based on his military judgment, was of the opinion that nothing should be given on such a telegram, but that the war plan must be carried out without fail. Instead of this, the officer was ordered on that day, in the presence of Moltke, to telephone that the troops in the west were to hold back from the enemy border, and the Kaiser said: Now we certainly do not need to invade Belgium.

Now what I am about to tell you is contained in notes that General von Moltke himself wrote down after his very strange dismissal. These notes were to be published with the consent of Mrs. von Moltke in May 1919, at that crucial moment when Germany was about to tell the world the truth, just before the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. And anyone who reads what was to be published at the time and what flowed from the pen of Herr von Moltke himself will not for a moment be able to gainsay the judgment, since these things so much bear the expression of inner honesty and sincerity that they would not have made a significant impression on the world before the Versailles Dictate. Well, the thing was printed, printed on a Tuesday afternoon, and was to appear on Wednesday. I will not go into further details. A German general appeared at my house who wanted to make it clear to me from a thick bundle of files that three points in these notes were incorrect. I had to tell the general: I have been doing philological work for a long time. I cannot be impressed by bundles of files until they have been assessed in a philological sense, because one must not only know what is contained in them, but also what is not contained in them, and anyone who undertakes a historical investigation does not only investigate what is contained in them, but also what is missing. — But I had to say the following: You have cooperated, the world naturally assumes that you know exactly what the facts are. If I publish the memoirs of Moltke, will you swear that these three points are incorrect? — and he said: Yes! — I am completely convinced that the three points are correct, because they can also be proven to be correct from a psychological point of view. But of course it would have been of no use at the time if the brochure had been published – all the other harassments were added to that – the brochure would simply have been confiscated, that was perfectly clear. I could not have a brochure published that had been sworn to before the whole world, that the three points in it were not correct. For we live in a world in which it is not a matter of right and wrong, but in which power decides.

I know that what I wrote in this brochure on page V was particularly resented, but I thought it necessary to shed the right kind of light on the situation. I wrote: The disastrous incursion into Belgium, which was a military necessity and a political impossibility, shows how everything in Germany was geared towards the peak of military judgment in the period leading up to the outbreak of war. In November 1914, the writer of these lines asked Mr. von Moltke, with whom he had been friends for many years: What did the Kaiser think about this incursion? and the answer was: He knew nothing about it before the days preceding the outbreak of war, because, given his character, one would have had to fear that he would have blabbed the matter to the whole world. That could not be allowed to happen, because the invasion could only have been successful if the opponents were unprepared. — And I asked: Did the Reich Chancellor know about it? — The answer was: Yes, he knew about it. So politics in Central Europe had to be conducted in such a way that one had to take account of garrulity, and I ask you: Is it not a terrible tragedy that politics must be conducted in this way? Therefore, the full proof can be provided from these underground sources that what the otherwise unpleasant Tirpitz says about Bethmann-Hollweg is correct, that the latter would have sunk to his knees and that the nullity of his policy would already have been expressed in his physiognomy. This nullity was also later expressed by the fact that he emphasized to the English ambassador that if England did strike after all, his entire policy would prove to be a house of cards. And it was a house of cards, and it collapsed, and the Chief of Staff had to write in his memoirs about the situation he was in at the time, on Saturday evening: “The mood became increasingly agitated, and I was left standing all alone.

Thus the military judgment was left standing all alone, while politics had lapsed into nullity. This was brought upon the Germans by their own refusal to rise to the great challenges to which they were particularly called, challenges that emerged in the great, significant epochs of German cultural development, challenges that they refused to face at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The fact that only disaster could follow from such a situation now weighed heavily on the mind of the Chief of Staff. When an officer came to him to sign the order to withdraw the troops from the Franco-Belgian border, which had been ordered by telephone border, the Chief of Staff slammed his pen down on the table, breaking it, and said that he would never sign such an order, and that the troops would become uncertain if such an order came from the Chief of Staff as well. And the Chief of Staff was then brought out of his most painful and despairing mood. It was now well past ten o'clock. Another telegram had arrived from England, and - I'd rather not go into the details - the words of the supreme commander were: Now you can do whatever you want!

You see, you have to go into the details, and I have only given a few main features of what was happening on the continent, so to speak. I would also like to mention the counter-move that occurred on the other side. It will become authentic one day – again, I can say that I am not telling you this carelessly – it will become authentic one day that the two people Asquith and Grey said at the same time as what I have just told you happened in Berlin: Yes, what is this actually? Have we been pursuing English policy with our eyes closed until now? They said that this English policy had been made by a completely different side; they had been blindfolded. And they said: Now the bandage has been removed from us – that was Saturday evening – now that we are seeing, we are standing at the abyss; now we can only go into the war. This is the reflection on the other side of the Channel, and I ask you to take all this as something that could be greatly amplified, because in the time allotted to me I can do nothing but give a kind of mood, present to you something that at least sheds some light on the things that have happened.

And then, if you take all this into consideration, I ask you to read what I have written in my “Thoughts During the Time of War”, which I deliberately titled “For Germans and Those Who Do Not Believe They Must Hate”. Every single thing in it has been carefully considered. I ask you to consider what I wrote there from these points of view, that it is not a matter of what is usually called moral guilt or moral innocence, but that things must be raised to the level of historical development , in which something extraordinarily tragic took place, something that can be called a historical necessity, and about which one should not pry with judgments such as those I have mentioned at the beginning. Matters are much more serious than the world on both sides still believes; nevertheless, they are such that they should absolutely be made known to the world, that they should actually be the starting point for the order of the confusion. But truly, at the present time, there is no possibility that what is undertaken in this direction will be presented to the world in any other way than by being distorted and slandered.

What I have told you today about General von Moltke gives us an opportunity to judge this man in this decisive hour; but, as you know, there are people who, as they themselves worked on the general staff, say the most defamatory things about General Moltke, including the absurd lie that anthroposophical events were held in Luxembourg before the Battle of the Marne and that the General Chief of Staff therefore failed to do his duty. If such things can be said from such a position, then it can be seen from this what moral condition we have entered into today, and it is difficult to pave a right path for the truth within this moral condition. For this we would actually need many, very many personalities, and only after I have given you the conditions I have spoken of, only now I would like to read from Moltke's memoirs a sentence that will show you what lived in this man's soul, firstly in relation to his opinion of the necessity of war and secondly in relation to his sense of responsibility. For it is absolutely essential that we do not construct a brutal concept of guilt, but that we delve into what lived in the souls of those times. It is a very simple sentence that Moltke wrote, a sentence that has often been spoken, but there is a difference between it being spoken by the next best person and by the one on whose soul the decision about the war lay at the time. He wrote: “Germany did not bring about the war, nor did she enter into it out of a desire for conquest or aggressive intentions against her neighbors. The war was forced upon her by her enemies, and we are fighting for our national existence, for the survival of our nation, our national life.”

When examining facts, you don't start somewhere; you have to start where the realities and facts play out, and if you can prove that an essential part of the facts plays out in a man's mind, then it is one of the facts that created the situation when such an awareness prevailed in that mind. In order to assess the situation, it is also essential to take a close look at what happened among the forty to fifty personalities who were actually involved in the outbreak of this horrific catastrophe. Anyone who does not form an opinion out of prejudice but from expertise about these things, knows that basically everyone was actually quite unsuspecting except for the forty to fifty personalities who brought about the outbreak of war, who were actually active under the constellation of European conditions.

During the war, I truly had the opportunity to talk about the situation with many people who were able to judge it, and I never minced my words. For example, I said to a personage who was close to the government of a neutral state: It can be regarded as notorious that in our time, which calls itself democratic, about forty to fifty personalities, among whom — and it is not only within the Anthroposophical Society that there are women — there were quite a few women, about forty to fifty personalities, were directly involved in this catastrophe in the international world. It would be necessary to first elevate oneself to a point of view from which one could fundamentally assess this situation. Instead, there is an enormous amount of talk about these serious, world-shaking events from the superficialities of the White Papers and the like, and it is extraordinarily difficult for someone who would not talk if he did not know things differently from many others, always to bring the necessary here or there to bear where the situation has been judged since 1914. For me, this began in Switzerland, when the “J'accuse” books were being thrown at me everywhere, and I could not tell people – you know how dangerous the situations sometimes were – anything other than the truth, even though it was often the least understood: “Don't read the legal technicalities in such a book,” I said, ”read the style, read the whole structure, the whole presentation of the book, and if you have taste, you must say: political underground literature! I have had to say it repeatedly to people who belonged to neutral and non-neutral fields. Of course, I am not saying that this “J'accuse” book does not contain some correct things; but it is least of all based on such a point of view, which is suitable for judging the world-historically tragic situation in which, one can already say, the world found itself in 1914. And one must point out the underlying causes, even if only in order to be able to discuss the question of guilt.

Yes, but this question of guilt should also teach us something. You see, immediately after Germany's ill-fated declaration of peace in the fall or winter of 1916 and the whole fantastic sequence of events that followed with Woodrow Wilson's fourteen points, I immediately – I was not intrusive, people came a long way to meet me, more than halfway – - approached those who were in positions of responsibility with the request, which admittedly seemed paradoxical to some, that the idea of the threefold social order could be put forward to the world in the face of these quixotic fourteen points of Wilson's, which, however, despite their quixotic nature, were able to bring ships, cannons and men into play. And I had to experience that yes, many people realized that something like this had to happen, but that no one actually had the courage to do anything in this direction, no one, absolutely no one. For the conversation I had with Kühlmann, I think the witness who was present is here again today. So I can't make up any stories about these things. But I still have to explain that, and here too I would certainly not tell you something that is not true, because it is well known how the matter was carried out.

Here too, I must say the following, for example: You see, as early as January 1918, I considered the spring offensive of 1918 to be an absolute impossibility, and I happened to be on a trip from Dornach to Berlin with a certain personage - it was known that when the decisive moments approached, this personality would be called upon to lead the business. I came to Berlin when I had actually found a certain understanding for the threefold social order. There I had the opportunity to talk to a personage. Those who were able to inform themselves at the time about the way things were going already knew about the offensive in January 1918; one could only not speak of it. And I had the opportunity to talk to a military personage who was extremely close to General Ludendorff. The conversation took a turn such that I said: I do not want to expose myself to the danger of being accused of wanting to interfere in military-strategic matters, but I want to speak from a certain starting point from which this military dilettantism, which I might have, would not come into consideration. I said that in a spring offensive Ludendorff might possibly achieve everything he could ever have dreamed of; but I still consider this offensive to be absurd – and I gave the three reasons I had for it. The man I was talking to got quite excited and said: What do you want? Kühlmann has your paper in his pocket. That's what he went to Brest-Litovsk with. That is how we are served by politics. Politics is nothing for us. We military can do nothing but fight, fight, fight. — In 1914, the Chief of Staff was in a situation that he had to write about in the evening hours: “The mood became more and more agitated and I was all alone.” For the mood between ten and eleven o'clock he had to write: The Kaiser said: “Now you can do whatever you want!” — And in 1918 one could be told: Politics is out of the question, it is null and void; we can do nothing but fight, fight. — My dear audience, it was no different then and it is no different today, and I would like to provide you with negative, albeit subjective, proof that it is no different.

Once again, the same unworldly, abstract language has been used, with which Woodrow Wilson spoke, as evidenced by the way Woodrow Wilson stood in Versailles. Then Harding spoke from the same place, and I see in his speech, which is as confused as possible and delivered with no sense of reality, which only repeats the old phrases, now that we are facing economic decisions just as much as political ones, I see in this speech nothing that suggests that people are somehow concerned about what is looming again. It is almost impossible to get people to make a judgment. Whether we have the first Wilson showing his confusion at Versailles, or whether we were speaking from the same area a little later, it does not matter. What would matter is that one would have a keen sense of reality.

Then one would also look at such things as the fact, which is almost unheard of for someone who has a sense of judgment in political situations, that this very statesman, Lloyd George, who is characteristic in today's sense, recently said: You cannot blame Germany for the war in the old sense; people have slipped into it in their stupidity. He spoke in this way a few weeks ago, and you know how he spoke in London to Simons. From this you can judge the truth in the speeches people make, and if people still have no impetus to look at these things – they must get it, they must get it by developing a sense for the big picture. These great aspects were present in this catastrophe, and our misfortune is that no one had any idea of these great aspects. It must be made possible for the great aspects, on which things depend, to be thrown into the decision-making process in Central Europe today.

But as long as those who believe that they have a peculiar monopoly on Germanness slander what is true, as long as such people call us traitors to Germanness , and they call us traitors to our Germanism, although if these people would only understand what we have to say, it would do nothing but help the true Germanic people to achieve the position they deserve. Until these people change, until people who are willing to recognize the truth come together.

Of course, there were warmongers in Germany as well; but everything that came from them was of no importance at the decisive moment. What was important, however, was what I explained in the last chapter of my “Key Points”: that by losing sight of the big picture, we had arrived at the zero point of political effectiveness. We shall only rise again as Germans when we rise to great heights; for anyone who stands in the German tradition with a warm heart, not just with words – forgive the somewhat crude expression – knows that true Germanness means being rooted in great principles. But we must find our way back to the great principles of the German people. And it is basically also from experience that I am speaking these things to you today. Despite the way the question was phrased, I might not have answered; but I wanted to answer this question, and something that leads to the answer of such questions will become clear to you when I present the final passage that the questioner gave me in a supplement. He writes: I consider it very valuable to publish the correct, clear view on the whole question of war guilt in a memorandum, for example, and to distribute it widely. Well, that should have happened in May 1919. The memorandum was also printed. The world within Germany prevented this memorandum from being published. Let us not just sit here forming our opinion; something like this should be done: support those who do not want to be satisfied with their opinion but have long since tried to do what is being proposed here at the decisive moment. Then we will make progress.

Dear attendees, because I do believe that there are personalities among the German youth who will find their way back to true Germanness, who have minds and hearts and open minds to receive the truth, therefore, because I might have been able to speak here with some prospect of reaching younger people in particular, the best part of our youth perhaps, I have decided to make these suggestions to you today.

If we consider human existence on Earth, the most significant element in life must appear to be our capacity to think or make mental images—the capacity to think for ourselves about the world, our own actions and so forth. Any other view would be a self-deception. Certainly there are temptations to consider other aspects of life as more valuable. We can feel, just below the threshold of consciousness, that our feelings about our own tasks, about our relationships and about the world, are more valuable than our thinking. And if we consider our moral existence, and the voice of conscience, we can tell ourselves that this conscience speaks to us from depths that thinking can never reach.

We may feel all the more inclined to such a view when we see that even the most highly trained thinking, schooled in accordance with normal life, cannot arrive at the moral impulses of a simple, unschooled conscience. Still, we would be fooling ourselves if we imagined that thoughts are not the essence of human life on Earth.

Certainly the voice of conscience, the feeling of compassion, come from inexpressibly deeper sources than our thoughts. Yet these impulses that well up from the depths only find their right place in the human sphere when they are permeated by thought. The voice of conscience, too, only finds its true value by living within our thoughts, so that we clothe in thoughts what the voice of conscience says. Without overestimating thought, we still have to acknowledge, if we want to proceed in describing human consciousness without illusion, that it is thinking that makes us human. So Hegel is right, in a sense, when he says that thinking distinguishes man from beast.

Let us consider the total compass of the thoughts that fill us from the moment we wake to the point of going to sleep. If we are honest about it, we will have to say that the majority of our thoughts in life are dependent on what comes from outside, on sense impressions and experiences that have to do with the material processes of earthly life. Our thoughts pass by in intimate connection with the Earth, so that whatever is most significant for us between birth and death seems to be connected to the Earth. But if we consider the totality of human life on Earth, we notice that a third of it goes by without any thoughts at all. If, with the means available to ordinary consciousness, we look back over a period of life, we naturally link one day's experience to the next and leave out the experiences of sleep that remain in the unconscious. But this leaves a third of life out of consideration.

From my earlier lectures you know that our activity during sleep, though unconscious, is not uneventful. The I and the astral body go through experiences at night that simply do not light up within our awareness. And if we look more closely, we notice that the unconscious forces that operate during sleep continue while we are awake—though we might say they live a life of sleep, for they operate in our whole activity of will, which is no clearer to us than the state of sleep. And they operate in a large portion of our feeling life, which is a kind of dreaming.

When we try to look at what comes from our deepest essence, from our fundamental nature, we have to look at something unconscious. Through spiritual scientific observation, we find that what operates in us while we sleep continues to operate while we are awake. It is present as the I and the astral body, though they do not enter ordinary awareness except in their effects—the expressions of our will and our feeling life—which give a special aspect to what does enter into clear, waking awareness: our life of thought. This becomes more comprehensible when we take into consideration the existence we participate in between death and rebirth.

When we pass through the gates of death, we undergo states I have described to you before, and that you already know in some of their aspects. If we examine very precisely what element of the human being is necessary for our thinking, our conceptual life, we arrive at the insight that for the formation of thoughts on Earth we need the physical body. The physical body must be set in action for us, as earthly human beings, to have thoughts. Beyond this, we also need to set our life body in action. But these are the two elements of human nature that seem to lie unconscious in bed while we sleep. Only when our consciousness has developed somewhat, through a certain training of our soul, and when we can even see physical things from a spiritual viewpoint, do we realize that actually we are thinking all the time, even when we are asleep. If we consider the whole human being, we can say that during earthly life we are never not thinking.

When we return in the morning to our physical and life bodies, normal consciousness forces itself very quickly back into them, and it is only then that normal consciousness becomes aware of external things—of sense perceptions that we then process conceptually, of objects that we perceive around us. But when we begin to enter much more consciously into our physical and life bodies, then as we awaken we meet the thinking that has gone on while we were asleep. We think; that is, the physical and life bodies are caught up in continual thought activity while we are asleep, only we are not present to it; we are outside this activity in our I and astral body, so we are not aware that it is going on. But this is a great self-deception. And just as we can better recognize any aspect of ourselves when it is torn away from its harmonious relationship to the whole of life—that is, when it appears in an abnormal state—so too we can realize based on external experiences of the world that while we are asleep we not only continue to think, but we think far more cleverly while asleep and absent than when awake and present. We arrive at the depressing fact that our life body thinks less well when we are within it, with the normal consciousness of our I and astral body. We spoil the thoughts that course through our life body by being present to them with our normal consciousness.

Someone who can see into these things can therefore confirm reports like the following. There were once two university students. One was a philologist and knew nothing of numbers. The other was a mathematics student. Now, we know that at certain moments in the study of mathematics, you do sweat through certain problems, whereas in philology it tends to go more easily. And that's how it was with these two students, who shared a room. One night, at the end of their preparations for their exams, the philology student was very pleased with himself, while the mathematics student was not, since he couldn't solve a problem he needed to solve for a written assignment. So he lay down to sleep very dissatisfied, and a strange event followed. At a certain hour the philology student woke up and saw the mathematics student get out of bed and walk to the desk. There, he thought some more, wrote for a long time and then went back to bed and slept. The next day, when they both got up, the mathematics student said, “We didn't drink anything last night, but this morning I have a terrible headache.” The other replied, “No wonder, if you get up at three and do calculations for hours, of course your head will swim the next day.” And his roommate said, “I was not up in the night!” He knew nothing about having been up. Then he looked and saw that he had solved the problem, though he had no memory of it.

These things are not fairy tales. I chose this example, which belongs to the literature, because you can check it. I could tell you many other such things. It is not a question of the individual example, but of the reality of all this. When consciousness is not present—and I emphasize that the person in question had no memory of his nocturnal activity—then the physical and life bodies are worked on by outside influences, and the life body works in the physical body to solve the assignment.

Now, I know that many will wish this kind of thing could happen more often. But we today do not have it so easy. In such a case as this the life body proves to be much more clever when it is left alone to work on the physical body than when the I and the astral body are present. This was merely an illustration of how we go on thinking all through the night. For our thoughts are stimulated directly by the outer world through the mediation of the life body, and then the physical body helps as well, to raise up thoughts for the physical human being on Earth.

So our thought life is definitely bound up with our physical and life bodies. Not so our feeling life and our will life. It is merely a superstition of modern science to imagine that our feeling and will are as bound up with our physical and life bodies as our thoughts are. I will only review a few points on this topic.

In contemporary earthly life, it is not true to say we can survey what happens with our I and our astral body when they separate from the physical and life bodies, taking with them from normal life only the will and a portion of the life of feeling. For this experience between going to sleep and waking up takes place in a completely different world. It takes place in a spiritual world, a world in which the environment is not the kingdoms of nature, the mineral kingdom and the plant kingdom, but the higher hierarchies, spiritual beings, spiritual events. But as long as we are beings of the Earth, we are not adequately developed to survey what we are experiencing in our I and astral body between falling asleep and waking up. The experience stays unconscious, but it is not less lively than what becomes conscious. We do go through it. And once we have done so, it is something that belongs to our inner content. Each morning we awaken changed; the night has changed us. We don't awaken in the same state we arrived at before going to sleep. Instead, we awaken in the state that our sleep life has put us into.

Now, when we pass through the gates of death, we lay down our physical and life bodies. And so, in the first days after death (since it takes about three days to let go of the life body), we feel that our thought life is being sucked up by the universe. First, we have a brief glance over our previous earthly life. It is as if our past life were the world around us; we see it in pictures before us. The whole of the past life stands before us at one stroke once the soul is free of the physical and life bodies, that is, once our passage through the gate of death has been accomplished. But it still takes days afterward for the life body to be completely dissolved in the general life processes of the universe.

During this time, our impression is, first, of a living and sharply contoured overview of the life. Then it grows weaker and weaker, but at the same time more “cosmic,” until after a few days it finally melts away. But in these few days, the most valuable aspect of the earthly life that is past departs from the person who has died. Everything we thought about the things of the world, about our whole earthly environment, what filled our normal consciousness—all this melts away from us in just a few days. And to the exact extent that the content of earthly life melts away, there emerges the content of what we all go through unconsciously every night during sleep. This content now begins to become conscious for us. If we really experienced nothing during our sleep life, then three or four days after death our conscious life would be at an end. For everything we thought of as most valuable during our life has melted away, and out of this darkening, dimming awareness there emerges what we lived through every time we slept, but which formerly remained outside awareness.

Now, the peculiar characteristic of our sleeping experiences is this: that in sleep the world takes place in reverse. Whether our sleep is long or short, once we fall asleep it is all the same, since other states of consciousness also have completely different time-senses. So the characteristic I am talking about holds true whether you sleep all night or only for a few minutes. From the time we go to sleep until the time we wake up again, we leave backwards through everything we just experienced between our last waking and the current moment of falling asleep. But we live through it in a different form than we did at first. When we are awake, we live through the day from start to finish, every event and every circumstance, in terms of physical, intellectual nuances. While asleep, however, we experience it all backwards and in terms of its moral nuances. Moral and religious impulses appear; we pass through everything evaluating how it has made us more or less valuable as moral human beings. We indulge in no illusions, nor can we, but we evaluate everything we did the previous day in terms of our fundamental humanity.

Natural science is wrong when it claims that human life relies on causality, on necessary consequences, though in waking life we may only see this linking of cause and effect. Reality contains another current, though it remains unconscious for us during the day, and every night as we sleep we experience this moral ordering of the world. There, we evaluate things morally, that is, in connection with our own human value. We do this every night, or every time we sleep, with regard to the last-experienced period of being awake. And when we pass through the gates of death, then we go backwards through the last night, the next-to-last night, the night before that, and so on, up to the first night after we were born when we became conscious for the first time—for about a third of the time we were alive, since we slept through about a third of our earthly life.

The physical, cause-and-effect course of the world passes away from us, and what rises up before us is the course of the world as the gods and spirits think about it, feel about it and will it. Still, it appears to us bearing the coloration that earthly life gave it, since we have to pass through it in the form in which we lived it during our life on Earth. We need about a third of our lifetime to live it over again backwards in this way, just as I described it in my book Theosophy. There, I described the land of the soul and the world of the soul.

For before we enter a world that is completely spiritual, we have to live through everything that we experienced on Earth unconsciously in our sleeping state. In this way, we are training our awareness for the actual spiritual experiences between death and rebirth. At the same time, this backward experience of earthly life frees us from earthly life. Until we have done this, our consciousness is not adequately free to move among the spirits of the higher worlds. And once we have come to this point, we are only at the beginning of our life in the higher worlds.

Our life in the higher worlds, until we come to Earth again, can become a purely spiritual experience. Just as here we live among physical beings and events, there we live in a spiritual world among spiritual beings and spiritual events. We live among the spiritual beings and deeds that never descend to Earth, and among the spiritual beings who as human beings came to Earth and passed through the gates of death before us, or even after us. We meet again with all the people we knew during earthly life. And this community of ours is very widespread. For through our sleep life we include in this community everything that we only touched on briefly with human beings during our life on Earth. In sleep, we already live within the spiritual world, but we are still experiencing earthly events in reverse as earthly human beings; just this distinguishes our nightly experience from what we go through once we have passed through the gates of death.

First, we have to acknowledge that in the first few days, the content of our earthly consciousness melts away from us. The unconscious experiences of sleep, which we ignored during life, now emerge and we really do experience them. For in those earthly states of sleep, we experience backwards, and in pictures, only the events of waking life. As we step through the gates of death, we submerge ourselves in spiritual substance, just as here we submerge ourselves in material substance. Just as we have the physical and life bodies on Earth, after death we receive a higher kind of external sheath, a spiritual sheath. Through this process, we can actually go through, in a real way, what we only pass through in pictures, in images, during our periods of sleep on Earth. It is a real, true experience, just as real as our experience of earthly life in a physical body. This real experience, a repetition in reality of the pictorial experience of our sleep states, is the basis of the further experiences we go through in the later course of our life between death and rebirth.

What follows between death and rebirth, after we have put aside our whole earthly existence, is a preparation for the next life on Earth. In conjunction with the beings of the spiritual world, we form the spiritual seed of our next earthly life, and above all our next physical body. Then comes another period in which we grow oriented toward life on Earth. After dwelling for a long time among spiritual beings and spiritual facts, something happens that can be compared to a feeling of tiredness, of wanting to go to sleep. We feel how the awareness we have in the spirit becomes weaker, how we can no longer work together with the beings of the spiritual world in the way we have done, and our consciousness shifts over to an interest in a new life on Earth.

Just as every day we sink into the unconsciousness of sleep, our purely spiritual consciousness that fills most of our time between death and rebirth sinks down, not to unconsciousness but toward being filled with interest for life on Earth—as seen from the other side, from the point of view of the spiritual world. This interest in earthly life emerges many years, even many centuries, before we descend again to an actual life on Earth. The interest we took for so long in the purely spiritual world transforms itself into an interest in the succession of generations, and at the end of this succession, we ourselves are to be born. From out of the spiritual world, we take note of our ancestors through many long years before our own parents are born. So from out of the spiritual world we grow together with our ancestry.

At some point all this will become common knowledge, and only then will we see how limited today's science really is, despite its partial correctness, with regard to the concept of inheritance. Physical inheritance can only become comprehensible to us when we understand the role of those forces by which we participated in our ancestry from out of the spiritual world. When we point out here, with our limited scientific means, that we possess this or that characteristic of our great-grandfathers, we shouldn't forget that while this great grandfather was alive, we took an interest in him from out of the spiritual world; we grew together with what played itself out as the characteristics of the succeeding generations. We grew into it from out of the spiritual world.

When anthroposophy makes itself felt in the general civilization of humanity, these things will gain practical significance. We hardly realize how much in the way of cowardice and lack of energy derives today unconsciously from our notions of inheritance, for our science can only speak of inherited characteristics in a completely inadequate way. It has even permeated our arts, the whole of human thought.

When we finally penetrate to a realization of how we have been connected to the physical formation of our own ancestors, and also to the development of our own soul, which from out of the spiritual world has followed and co-created the whole evolution of our ancestors, then this awareness will become an inward reality for us. Then energy and courage will come from the spirit into our souls, where today we derive only cowardice and lack of energy from our contemporary style of thought. For it is not of the slightest value if we think this or that theoretically about the spiritual world. For the most part, we even clothe whatever we think about the spiritual world in physical thought forms. It is not a question of our making theoretical thoughts for ourselves about the spiritual world. ... What matters is not that we have mere thoughts about the spiritual world—we have to have them initially, so that the content of the spiritual world enters our souls at all—but that these thoughts become living and creative forces within us. Normal physical thoughts on Earth are completely abstract. Most scientific thoughts are abstract; they accomplish nothing within our human nature—no more than mirror images. Such thoughts are only pictures. If you are standing with another person, looking in a mirror, and the other person smacks you on the ear, you won't ascribe the blow to what happens in the mirror, but to the real person standing next to you. Thoughts are like these mirror images: they don't do anything, they don't act as impulses on reality. It is moral intuitions that can act as impulses. So, even if we have to start from thoughts, our thoughts about the spiritual world have to be active, active as reality itself and not like other thoughts.

We only enter into the real Anthroposophic view when we sense and experience thoughts as realities. A common objection arises at this point. It can be stated superficially that the whole anthroposophical world view is based on auto-hypnosis, a kind of self-suggestion. People say for instance that some of us are so suggestive that the very thought of drinking lemonade can fill us with the feeling of drinking a real lemonade. It is true that there are people so sensitive that they can taste lemonade in their mouths when they think about lemonade. This seems to be a good objection, but just let someone tell us about quenching thirst by the mere thought of lemonade! Mere thoughts do not become realities. As long as anthroposophy remains mere thought, it is like an imaginary lemonade. But it need not remain so, for it derives from spiritual reality. It does not simply operate like a thought, but it operates the way outer reality operates on material substances. It permeates, it resonates through our human life of feeling and of will. It becomes a reality in us. This is what matters.

So we don't have much if we have anthroposophy as theory. It has to become life. It is life if it fills our souls with energy, perseverance, courage. It is life if, faced with the cares of physical life on Earth—in our deepest sorrow, our deepest suffering—we become filled with inner joy, inner consolation, inner energy by looking up toward the spiritual world. Then anthroposophy becomes like a living being; it becomes something that seems to move amongst us as a living being. Only then has it become amongst us what it should be, permeating all our activity. And then it helps us to permeate this world in which we have come for the sake of the spirit, not for the sake of physical matter. Above all, anthroposophy arrives at real knowledge of what we are as human beings.

For the subject of these lectures, I have chosen an account of man's development during a particular period of the past, of his situation today, and of the outlook for his future evolution on this Earth-planet. No world-conception which has had any influence upon Western civilization, or its American off-shoot, has been content to deal only with present-day man and to show how the individual fits into the pattern of world-population. The world-conceptions acceptable to Western civilization have always emphasized the place of man in the whole course of human history on Earth. They have always shown the relationship between man of the present and of the past, no matter whether they go back only to a certain point—as the Old Testament does in describing the history of the Earth—or whether they trace man right through the stages of cosmic evolution.

The philosophies of the East, and even the early philosophies of Europe, if they did not belong to our modern civilization, were less concerned with this outlook. They were content to envisage man in terms of space only. The feeling we all have as a result of living within Western evolution makes it quite impossible for us to be satisfied with this spatial picture. There is a sort of psychological instinct in us to see ourselves in a brotherly association not only with men living today but also with men of the past; and unless we include both past and present we do not feel that we have a real notion of mankind.

But we can never have any satisfying idea of the historical development of man, whether in a wider or in a narrower sense, if we are limited to the results of ordinary anthropology. Man is a being whose evolution we cannot comprehend with the aid of nothing but external documents, however brilliantly they may be interpreted. Man is a being of body, soul and spirit; he is a being who has been penetrated, to a lesser or greater extent, by the spirit, in such a way that consciousness has been alive within him. The whole nature and being of man can be seen in the development of his consciousness, just as the being of a plant is finally revealed to the senses in the flower.

Let us therefore go a little more deeply into this most vital aspect of human evolution—the evolution of consciousness. When we consider man's consciousness as it is today we can make certain distinctions. In our ordinary waking condition, as we know it from waking in the morning to the time of falling asleep, we develop a more or less clear and luminous life of ideas which grow out of our life of feeling as the flower grows out of the plant. Over against this clear and luminous life of ideas there is a further condition which never really becomes quite clear, but is more or less unconscious, dark, inwardly surging and weaving. Even deeper than the feelings, which do, after all, quite directly stimulate our life of thought and ideas—much deeper within our being there is our surging will. And I have often described to anthroposophists how in his willing man is strictly speaking, asleep, even during his waking state. We never experience, in the waking conditions of our present-day consciousness, what lives within our willing. We have an idea that we are going to do this or that, but in this there is as yet no willing—only the intention to will clothed in the idea. Then the intention plunges into the depths of the human being, of which his consciousness has no clearer idea than it has of dreamless sleep. It then emerges as the will seen in the action of our arms and hands, legs and feet; in the activity we exercise on objects in the external world.

Whenever we act thus through the will on our own body, or in order to effect some change in the external world, we become aware of it through our ideas—ideas which also have some quality of feeling. Our ordinary consciousness perceives only the beginning and the end of willing, the intention in the form of an idea, and then again, also in the form of an idea, the consciousness observes our own movements or those in the external world which arise out of these intentions. All that lies between—how our intentions transfer themselves, via the soul, into our organism, how the soul arouses the physical warmth, the movement of the blood and muscles which then produce an act of will—of all this we are as unaware as we are of the events in dreamless sleep.

If we really manage to observe what happens, we must say that we are actually awake only in our ideas (our conceptual life); we dream in our feelings and sleep in our willing. Our knowledge of this willing is just like the experience of waking in the morning and noticing that our organism has somehow recuperated and refreshed itself. We perceive the effects of sleep when we wake. Similarly, we have the intention to perform some act of will; we transmit it unconsciously into our organism where, as though in sleep, it passes over into activity and deed; and we wake up again only with our action and see the result of what has been going on within us, of which we have been quite unconscious.

Such in broad outline is man's experience of his own being in waking, dreaming and sleeping. After all, the dreams we have when we are sleeping have very little relation to our ideas. They obey quite other laws than the logical laws of our conceptual life. But if we observe things closely we shall see that the course of our dreaming, with its marvelous dramatic quality that is so often typical of dreams, bears an extra-ordinarily close resemblance to our life of feeling. If in our waking life, we were capable only of feeling, those feelings would not, it is true, be very like the pictures of our dreams. But the dramatic quality, tensions, impulsive wishes and crises of the inner life, with their turmoil of emotion, are displayed in our feelings just as vaguely—or if you like, just as indefinitely—as they are in our dreams.; with this difference, that the basis of a dream lies in its pictures, whereas our feelings live in those peculiar experiences which we describe in terms of our inner life. Thus in the present state of human consciousness we may include our feelings and actual dreaming as part of the dream-state, and in the same way include our willing and actual dreamless sleep as part of the sleeping state.

We must, however, realize that what we are now describing as the basic quality of our present-day consciousness has passed through a process of evolution in a comparatively recent period, though we do not like taking much notice of this in our materialistic age. But you will not understand the surviving documents of human thought, even of the early Christian centuries, unless you realize that the inner activity of men in those days was quite different from what lives within our souls today as the activity of thought. In particular it would be a complete psychological error to seek to understand Scotus Erigena's work, “On the Parts of Nature” (De Divisione Naturae) written in the ninth century, for example, or the older writings on alchemy, with the conceptual intellect which has become normal today. We simply cannot understand what they were driving at if our modern type of thinking is employed. We can read the words, but we shall not grasp the meaning.

Human thinking since the fifteenth century has acquired a particular character which may have developed only slowly but has more or less already reached is culminating point. Yet this way of thinking, which represents the actual waking condition for modern man, is not really capable of giving him any satisfaction. A man can think, and that is the only luminous experience of his waking life. He can think, and that is the only means by which he can draw on his inner powers and establish the marvelous results of the sciences. Yet basically this modern thinking can give man no satisfaction for his inner yearnings. The fact is that he loses his own self in this modern thought. He does of course experience this thinking as the one clear element in his consciousness—much clearer, for instance, than his breathing or blood circulation, which remain obscure in the deeper regions of his consciousness. He feels that these also may contain some reality, but he sleeps through this reality, and it is only in his ideas and thinking that he is awake. But then, especially if he is disposed to a certain amount of self-observation, he comes to feel that although it is only in his thinking that he fulfils his inner being, yet his true self is lost. And I can give you two examples which will enable you—spiritually of course—to lay hands on this loss of self in thought.

There is a famous philosopher of modern times, Descartes, who is the originator of the famous saying, cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. So this philosopher says. But today men do not and cannot say it. For when we merely think something or experience it in thinking, it does not follow that it “is,” nor that I “am” merely because I myself am thinking. For us these thoughts are at most pictures; they may be the most certain thing in us, but we do not grasp any “being” through our thinking. Again, we often say that if we think something, that is “nothing but thinking.” So also in Descartes' case: he wants to “be” and cannot find any other point at which to grasp this “being” of man, and so he seeks it where the common man certainly does not feel it to be—in thought. We do not think in sleep, but does it follow then that we are not? Do we die in the evening and are we reborn each morning? Or do we exist between falling asleep and waking? The simplest truths are in fact not taken into account by present-day views of the world. Descartes' “I think, therefore I am” is not based on something inwardly experienced, but is only a convulsive effort to attach oneself to reality. That is the first point.

The second point I want to make is this. Besides his thinking, of which modern man is very proud, we have the results of natural science, results of observation or experiment. In point of fact these do not help us to see the real being of things, but only the changes that occur in them—that which is transitory. And nowadays people consider a thought to be justified only if it derives from this external actuality, which after all reveals only a manifestation of itself. So we have ceased completely to grasp our real “being” in ourselves; our thought is too much in the air. We have no way of finding anything else in us except by methods that science applies to Nature; and then we seek our real being in that. In consequence, man today believes only in that part of himself which is part of Nature. Nature and the form of existence associated with it thus becomes a sort of Moloch which robs modern man of any real feeling of his own being.

Many people will perhaps retort that they don't notice anything of the sort, and will contradict what I have said. But that is only their opinion. The feelings which modern men have, at least if they have even the elements of self-awareness, are the outcome of the mood I have just described. They are encased, as it were, within this experience of their own being and their relation to the external world, and they then transfer the consequence of this condition to their consciousness of the world. For instance, they may observe the stars with their telescopes, spectroscopes and other instruments. They record what these instruments show and then build up a purely spatial astronomy and astrophysics. They do not notice that they are merely transferring to the heavens what they have observed and calculated about things on the Earth.

Thus, suppose that I have here some source of light. We all admit that if I move thousands of miles away from it, the light will become weaker and perhaps no longer visible. We all know that the strength of the light decreases with distance. Ordinary physics states the law that gravitation, too, decreases with the square of the distance. But people don't pursue this thought further. They can demonstrate that here on Earth, gravity has a particular magnitude and diminishes with the square of the distance, for they live on the Earth and establish laws of Nature and truths valid for the Earth, and build them into a system. Where gravity has a definite magnitude, these laws are true. The force of gravity decreases, but so does truth. What was true for the Earth ceases to be true if we pursue it further outwards into the Universe. We have no more right to regard the findings of physics and chemistry as applicable to the whole Universe than we have to assume that earthly gravity holds good throughout the Cosmos. The truths that rule in the heavenly spheres cannot be dealt with in the same way as those that hold on Earth. Of course to say this sort of thing nowadays is considered highly paradoxical—even crazy. But our general consciousness is so solidly encased nowadays that even the slightest remark which might pierce through the case immediately appears strange. Modern men are so wholly tied to the Earth that their knowledge, even sometimes their reflections, never pass beyond what they experience on Earth. And they deal with cosmic time exactly as they deal with cosmic space.

I was particularly impressed with all this recently. (I have often discussed this sort of truth among anthroposophists and what I am saying now is only a repetition based on a particular example.) This struck me with particular force when I was invited by our English anthroposophical friends to give a course of lectures at Penmaenmawr in the second half of August.¹ – 31^st August, 1923. (Revised edition in preparation, 1966.) The title of the German text in the Complete Centenary Edition is: Initiations-Erkenntnis. Die geistig und physische Welt- und Menschheitsentwicklung in der Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft vom Gesichtspunkte der Anthroposophie Penmaenmawr is in Wales, where the island of Anglesey lies over against the West coast of Britain. It is really an extraordinary region which shows that there are quite different geographies over the Earth's surface from those you will find discussed in textbooks, even for the most advanced students. Ordinarily we think it more than enough if a geographical description includes the character of the vegetation, flora and fauna, and I in addition we base it on the geological and palaeontological nature of the region. But the Earth displays differentiations of a much more inward nature than any you will ordinarily find in geographical works. Thus in Penmaenmawr, where these lectures were held, you have only to go a short distance, a mile or so into the mountains, and all over the place you can find the remains of the old Druid cults, fallen stone circles of a simple sort. For instance, stones are put together to enclose a small space and covered with another stone so as to form a little chamber, where the light of the sun could be cut off, leaving the chamber in darkness. I do not dispute that such cromlechs had also to serve as burial places, for at all times the most important centers of worship have been set up over the graves of fellow-men. But here, even with these simple cromlechs, we have something further, as indeed indicated by the so-called Druid circles.

It was a wonderful experience when I went with a friend one day to one of these mountains at Penmaenmawr, on which the scanty remains of two such circles are still to be seen lying very close to each other. Even today it can be seen from the position of the stones that there were once twelve of them, and if one wants to discover their purpose they must be observed closely. Now while the sun follows his course through the Cosmos, whether during a day or during a year, a quite specific shadow is cast beneath each stone; and the path of the sun could be traced by following the shadow as it changed in the course of a day or year. We are still sensitive to light today, especially if light is associated with warmth or warmth with light. Present-day consciousness can naturally also notice the difference between the light of the summer and winter sun, since we are warm in summer and cold in winter; and we may note finer differences too. But, you see the same differences we can notice in so obvious a fashion in the light, when we are either warm or freezing, can be perceived in the shadow as well. There is a difference between the October sun and the July or August sun, not only in the direction but in the quality of the shadow. One of the duties of the Druids was to develop a special faculty for perceiving the quality of the shadow—for perceiving, let us say, the peculiar intermingling of a red tone in the August shadow or a blue one in that of November or December. Thus the Druids were able, by the training they received, to read off the daily and yearly course of the sun in the shadows. We can still see from these remains that one of the tasks they undertook was something of this sort. There were many other things that belonged to this cult: a Sun ritual, which, however, was not a mere abstraction, not even the abstraction we see in devotion and reverence. Without undervaluing devotion and reverence, it would be a complete error to believe that. But devotion and reverence were not in this case the essentials, for the cult included something quite different.

Take the grain of wheat or rye. It must be planted within the Earth at a particular moment of the year, and it is a bad thing for it to be planted at an inappropriate moment. Anyone who has exact knowledge of these things is well aware that it makes a difference whether a seed is planted a few days earlier or later. There are other things of this sort in human life. The people who lived about three thousand years ago in the region where the Druid cult flourished led an extremely simple life. Agriculture and cattle-raising were the chief occupations. But we may ask how they were to know when to sow and harvest in the best way, or when they were to attend to the many other jobs which Nature requires in the course of a year. Nowadays of course we have farmers' calendars which tell the farmer that on such and such a day such and such a job needs to be done, and tell him very intelligently. In our day, with our type of consciousness, this information can be catalogued and read off from the printed page. We think nothing of it, but the fact remains that there was none of that, not even the most primitive form of reading and writing, in the days when the Druid religion was in its prime. On the other hand, the Druids could stand in one of these stone circles and by observing the shadow they could proclaim, for instance, that during the next week farmers must undertake this or that work, or the bulls be introduced to the herd since the moment was right for the mating of the cows. The druids were equipped to read in the Cosmos; they used the signs produced by those monuments of which we have today only such scanty remains, and could read from them the information the sun gave them of what was to be done on Earth.

The constitution of the soul was in fact quite different, and it would be a serious conceit on our part if, just because we are capable of this little bit of reading and writing, we were to undervalue the art which made it possible to lay down the work and activities required on Earth through these revelations of the heavens. In places like Penmaenmawr we are impelled to recollect many other things, too, which Spiritual Science is peculiarly qualified to investigate.

I have often pointed out in anthroposophical circles how ordinary thoughts are inadequate to grasp what Spiritual Science can investigate and how we have to conceive it in Imaginations. I assume you all know what I have said about Imaginations in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. It is these Imaginations and not our ordinary ideas which we must have in our souls when we are describing things on the basis of some immediate spiritual observation and not of external sense-perception. The genuinely spiritual-scientific accounts which are given you in our anthroposophical lectures have their origin in Imaginations of that kind.

Now these Imaginations are much more alive than ordinary abstract thoughts, which can give us no inkling of what reality is, but only pictures of it. Imaginations on the other hand, can be laid hold of by active thinking, in the same way that we can grasp tables and chairs. We are much more vigorously permeated by reality when our knowledge comes from Imaginations and not from abstract concepts. Anyone who speaks on the basis of Imaginations always has them before him as though he were writing something down—writing, however, not with those terribly abstract signs which constitute our writing, but with cosmic pictures.

Now what is the position with regard to these Imaginations in our district here? Anyone who knows them knows also that it is pretty easy to attain them, pretty easy to form them. If he has a sense of responsibility when describing anything through Spiritual Science, he will allow these Imaginations to take effect—that is, to inscribe them in the spirit—only when he has pondered them a good deal and tested them thoroughly. Nobody who speaks out of the spiritual world with a full sense of responsibility has a facile tongue. Nevertheless we can say that in districts like ours here it is relatively easy to inscribe these Imaginations, but they are obliterated equally easy. If in districts like this we create a spiritual content in Imaginations—I cannot put it any other way—we find it is like writing something down and immediately afterwards rubbing it out. But there in Wales, where land and sea meet and the tides ebb and flow each day, where the wind blows through and through you—for instance in the hotel where we were staying you could not only feel the wind blowing in the windows, but when one walked on the carpet it was like walking on a rough sea because of the wind blowing under the carpet—where moreover Nature is so full of life and so joyful in its life that you may get almost hourly alternations of rain and sunshine, then you do really come to see how Nature revealed herself to the Druid priests—or I might say the learned Druids, for it would be the same thing—when they gazed upon her from their mountain height. How then did the Earth appear to the Druid's spiritual eye when the heavens had the character I have just described?

This is very interesting to observe, though you will only realize it fully if you can grasp the particular geographical quality of the place. There you have to exert yourself much more vigorously if you want to construct Imaginations than you do, for instance, here. There, they are much more difficult to inscribe in the astral atmosphere. On the other hand they are more permanent and are not so easily extinguished. You come to realize how these old Druids chose for their most important cult-centers, just such places in which the spiritual as it approaches mankind, expresses itself to some extent in the quality of the place. Those Druid circles we visited—well, if we had gone up on a balloon and looked down from above on the larger and the smaller circles, for though they are some distance apart you would not notice that when you are a certain height above them—the circles would have appeared like the ground-plan of the Goetheanum which has been destroyed by fire. It is a wonderfully situated spot! As you climb the heights, you have wide views over land and sea. Then you reach the top and the Druid circles lie before you—there where the hill is hollowed out, so that you find yourself in a ring of hills, and within this ring of hills are the Druid circles. It was there that the Druid sought his science, his knowledge, his wisdom; there that he sought his Sun-wisdom but also his Nature-wisdom.

As the Druid penetrated into the relationship between what he saw on Earth and what streamed down from the heavens, he saw the whole processes of plant-growth and vegetation quite differently from the way in which they appear to our abstract thought of later days. If we can properly grasp the true quality of the sun, on the one hand the physical rays which enter our eyes, on the other the shadow with its various gradations, we come to realize that the spiritual essence of the sun lives on in the various grades of shadow. The shadow prevents only the physical rays of the sun from reaching other bodies, whereas the spiritual penetrates further. In the cromlechs which I have described to you, a small dark place is separated off. But it is only the physical sunlight which cannot penetrate there; its activity penetrates, and the Druid, as gradually through this activity he came to be permeated by the secret forces of cosmic existence, entered into the secrets of the world. Thus, for instance, the actions of the sun on plants was revealed to him; he could see that a particular kind of plant-life flourishes at a particular time when the sun is active in a particular way. He could trace the spiritual activity of the sun and see how it pours and streams into flower, leaf and root; and it was the same with animals. And while he was thus able inwardly to recognize the activity of the sun he also began to see how other activities from the Cosmos, for example, those of the moon, pour into it. He could see that the effect of the sun was to promote sprouting growth, with an upward tendency, and so he knew that if a plant as it grows out from the soil were exposed only to the sun, it would grow unendingly. The sun brings forth burgeoning, luxuriant life. If this life is checked and reduced to form, if leaves, blossom, seed and fruit assume a specific shape, if what strives towards the infinite is variously limited—all this has its origin in the activities of the moon. And these are to be found not only in the reflected light of the sun, for the moon reflects all influences, and these in their turn can be seen in the growth of the plant out of its root and also in what lives in the propagation of animals, and so on.

Let us take a particular instance. The Druid observed the growing plant; he observed in a more living way what, later on, Goethe observed more abstractly in his idea of metamorphosis. The Druid saw the downward streaming sun-forces, but he saw also the reflected sun-forces in everything that gives the plant its form. In his natural science he saw the combined activity of sun and moon on the root, which is wholly within the Earth and has the function of absorbing the salts of the Earth in a particular way. He could see that the action of sun and moon was quite different on the leaf, which, wrests itself out of the Earth and presses forward into the air. Again, he saw a different action on the flower, which pushes onwards to the light of the sun. He could see as a unity the activity of the Earth; to him, plant-growth and the being of the animal were also a unity.

Of course his life there was just what we experienced, with the winds raging around, which can reveal so much about the structure of the region, with the peculiar weather conditions which manifest themselves so vividly in that district. Thus, for example, at the beginning of one of our Eurythmy performances, which took place in a wooden hall, the audience sat with their umbrellas up, because just before the performance there had been a heavy downpour which was still going on when the performance began. The curtains were quite wet! This intimate association with Nature which can still be experienced today was of course also experienced by the Druids. Nature there is not so hard; she almost embraces one. It really is a delightful experience. I might almost say that one is drawn on and accompanied by the activity of Nature; one seems to be part of it. I even met people who maintained that one need not really eat there, that one can be fed by this very activity of Nature.

The Druid, then, lived with his Sun-Initiation within this activity of Nature, and he saw as the unity I have described the sun and moon mediated through the activity of the Earth, the growth of the plant, the growth of root, leaf and flower; and all this not in the form of abstract laws as today, but of living elemental beings. Different elemental beings of sun and moon were active in the root, in the leaf and in the flower. He could also pursue in the wider realms of Nature what is so beneficially differentiated in root, leaf and flower. Through his imaginative gifts he could see the small elemental beings restricted to narrow limits in the root, and he knew that what lives in beneficial form in the root can free itself and expand to the gigantic. Thus he saw the large-scale activities of Nature as the small activities of the plant raise dot a gigantic power. Just as he had spoken of the elemental beings in the root of the plant, he could also speak of these root-beings as having expanded in a cosmically irregular way and manifesting in the formation of frost, dew and hail. On the one hand he spoke of the root-beings who were beneficially active, and of the giants of frost and ice which are these root-beings grown to gigantic size.

Again, he spoke of the elemental activities in the leaf of the plant, which permeate themselves with the forces of the air; he traced them into the distant spaces of Nature, and he then saw that, if what lives in the leaf frees itself and strives beyond its proper limits into the distances of Nature, it manifests in the surging of winds. The giants of wind and storm are the elemental beings of the plant grown beyond their size. And the element which is distilled in the flower the etheric oils with their phosphoric quality—if that is freed, it manifests itself as the giants of fire, among whom, for instance, Loki belongs. In this science of sun and moon, therefore, the Druid saw as a unity both that which lives in the narrowly restricted space of the plant and that which frees itself and lives in wind and weather.

But he went further. He said to himself: When that which lives in root, leaf and flower is contained within the desirable limits set by the good gods, normal plant-growth results. If it appears in hoar frost, that is the work of opposing beings: for the elemental beings growing into powers of opposition, create the harmful, devastating aspects of Nature. Now as a human being I can make use of the devastating activities of the beings who are the opponents of the gods; I can gather the hoar frost in appropriate ways, and the products of the storm and whatever is caught up in the surging of wind and rain. I can make use of the giant forces for my own purposes by burning the plant, for instance, and reducing it to ashes, to charcoal and so on. I can take these forces, and by using frost, hail and rain and other such things, or what the giants of fire control—things which are the expression of forces that have grown to harmful vastness—I can protect the normal growth of the plant. I can rob these giants of all this and can treat normal plants with it, and by applying these forces of the opposing powers I can make healing medicines out of the good elemental forces which have remained within their proper limits. And this was in fact one of the ways of making medicines out of plants, by employing frost and snow and ice and by the use of burning and calcinations. The Druid felt it to be his work to take whatever was harmful from the opposing giant powers and restore it to the service of the good gods. We can trace these things in many different ways.

Now why am I spending time on this? I want to use it as an example—and I quote this particular one because I do indeed think that the Penmaenmawr lecture-course was a very important event in the history for the Anthroposophical Movement—to show how man's consciousness and his whole constitution of soul were quite different at a time not so very far removed from the present. With his present-day consciousness man cannot realize what lived in the consciousness of this ancient humanity. And what I have said of that ancient humanity could also be said of other peoples. There we catch glimpses of a quite different constitution of soul. Men in those days had no idea of what we experience as abstract thoughts. All their thinking was more dreamlike, and they did not live within such sharply outlined ideas and concepts as we do today. They lived in dreams which were much more vivid and alive, more full of substance; and indeed their waking life was really a sort of continuation of their dreaming. Just as nowadays we live in an alternation of dreaming or dreamless sleep and the abstract ideas of our waking life, so they alternated between this dreamlike everyday life and a dreamless sleep which was not wholly like ours. When they woke they felt that there was still something remaining over from sleep—something which afforded a sort of nourishment for the soul, which they had absorbed during sleep and which could still be felt the after-taste of sleep in their whole organism. There was a third condition which no longer occurs in human consciousness, a feeling of being surrounded by the Earth, and when a man woke up he felt not only that he had been asleep—of which he retained an aftertaste—but that he had been received into a kind of grave by the forces of gravity, that gravity had closed him in, and he was, as it were, within the embrace of the Earth.

Now just as we can describe our present-day states of consciousness as waking, dreaming, and sleeping so we should have to say that at a certain stage of the past there were the three states of dreaming, sleeping and being surrounded by the Earth. Since everything which evolves in the course of history has some sort of relation to the present, we find human souls in whom, during a later earth-life something peculiar appears like a genuine memory of earlier times, something connected with their earlier earth-life. Men like this display what for their own age is abnormal, but which is a living memory of their souls. Examples of this were Jacob Boehme and Swedenborg, and in such spirits something connected with human evolution lights up into contemporary humanity from a very distant past.

Tomorrow I will say more about the special qualities of vision of Boehme and Swedenborg; this will help us to understand the past of humanity and also the three future states of consciousness.

• 1. The Evolution of the World and of Humanity. 13 lectures, 19^th 1

Yesterday I used the culture of the Druids—which at the moment is particularly relevant to the development of our Anthroposophical Movement—to illustrate the soul-quality of an earlier age in a particular region. If we go back three or four or five thousand years—it varies in different parts of the Earth—we can always penetrate into a quite different type of soul-quality, and we then find that the whole spiritual and social guidance of human life in a particular period follows the pattern laid down by such a quality. The development to which I am referring is connected with the gradual evolution of human consciousness. It would be true to say that in olden times men were quite different beings from what they are today, and in the future they will again be different. Ordinary history tells little of this and so as soon as we get a few centuries away from the present, ordinary history, as it is presented to us, is to a considerable extent quite illusory as an aid to a real understanding of man.

In the lecture yesterday I pointed out how we should have to study three main stages of human consciousness, though naturally with many different shadings. The states of consciousness with which we are familiar—waking, dreaming and sleeping—are valid only for the present. If we go back into older periods of human evolution we no longer find the sort of waking condition of today, with its logically interrelated concepts. The farther we go back, the more do we fail to find this logical consciousness, which appeared in full development only during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though it had begun in the later period of Greek culture. In earlier times, on the other hand, we discover a type of consciousness filled much more with living pictures than with abstract concepts; and we find this consciousness in man everywhere.

Natural forces in our sense were quite unknown to an older humanity. In the times I spoke of yesterday, people did not talk of meteorological laws controlling wind and weather, but, as I explained, of beings seen pictorially, of elemental spirits hovering around the plants, or of gigantic spiritual beings active in wind and weather, frost and hail, storm and thunder. All this was living in their observation of Nature without any logical deductions. Everything they saw, including the phenomena of Nature, was a living, weaving, surging of spiritual beings. The whole basis of their inner condition of soul was quite different from ours.

In a sense, men were more self-enclosed, but in a way very different from what we know today; this living in themselves was at the same time a consciousness full of living dream-pictures which led them out into the distant spaces of the Cosmos. Men saw pictures, though not in the way in which today we have thoughts, when the things are outside. While they had these experiences of the giants of frost, storm and fire, of the spirits of root, leaf and flower, they felt themselves united with plant, root, leaf and flower, with thunder and with lightning. Because they experienced the spiritual and spiritual pictures in their own being, they did not therefore feel their soul-life separated from external Nature.

If not in the very oldest periods described in my book Occult Science, at least in those that followed them, one can observe spiritually how this constitution of soul was accompanied by a general mood in the peoples who at the time were the most civilized. There was a time when men had an inner spiritual perception of the real being of man. In these pictures I have just spoken of they saw not only their present existence but their pre-earthly existence as well; just as we can see a perspective of space, they saw a perspective of time. It was not a recollection but an actual seeing; and they saw beyond their birth into a spiritual world from which they had descended into the life of man on Earth. It was quite natural for a member of this older humanity to see into his pre-earthly existence and to feel: I am a spiritual being, since before I assumed this earthly body I rested in the bosom of the spirit and spent my time within it, and there experienced my human destiny—not yet in a physical body but—if I may say so, however paradoxical it may sound—in a spiritual body.

To demand that one should believe in the spirit would have been absurd for this older humanity just as it is absurd to ask modern men to believe in mountains; you don't believe in them, you see them. In those days men saw their pre-natal spiritual life, though of course they saw it with the eyes of the soul. But there came a time when they indeed saw spiritually this inner being of man as the outcome of pre-earthly existence, while external Nature surrounding them became increasingly a sort of riddle. Pure sense-perception made its way gradually into human evolution. In very early times, such as those of ancient India, as I described them in Occult Science, men still saw everything, Nature included, spiritually. It marked a step forward when the vision of the spiritual remained inward, but Nature, if I may put is so, became gradually de-spiritualized. While man still felt inwardly that he was spirit born of spirit, when he looked outward to the blossoming of Nature, to the clouds from which the lightning flashes, to the wind and weather, to the delicate, wonderfully formed crystals, to hill and dale, a mood came over him which can be traced by Spiritual Science over long periods, especially over the times when men were civilized. They might have expressed it as follows: We men are spirit born of spirit; in our pre-earthly existence our being was knit together with the spiritual, but now we are transplanted into the environment of Nature. We behold the lovely flowers, the vast mountains, the mighty power of Nature in wind and weather, but the spirit is withdrawn.

Thus the notion of a purely material Nature in the environment increasingly arose. Men felt—I mean of course those who were the most developed, the men whom we should call civilized in our modern sense—they saw that their body was formed out of the substances of this Nature which for them had lost its divine-spiritual quality. If men nowadays felt anything like this, they would begin to think, to speculate and philosophize about it. It was not so with the men of that earlier time. Without reflection they experienced a great disharmony within themselves: “I come as spirit from a world of spirit, my essential being has descended from divine heights, but I am clothed with substance taken from a Nature which the spirit seems to have abandoned; my spiritual existence is interwoven with something that does not reveal the spirit. My body is made up out of the same substances as the flowers of the field and the water of the clouds and rain, but these substances have lost their divine quality.”

Those men felt as if they had been expelled from the spiritual world and thrust into a world to which in their essential being they did not really belong. It was of course possible to reject or to sleep through this mood, as happens nowadays with various aspects of our civilization. But those who were awake at this time felt it, and it is through moods and feelings like this and not in thoughts and concepts that mankind develops.

Even the way in which our thoughts evolve nowadays is only an episode—as indeed these lectures will show—and anyone who speaks merely in the form of thoughts is speaking in an unreal way. This is particularly true of the way we speak nowadays. The people who pride themselves most on being practical and are filled with conceit about it are basically the worst theorists. We have these theorists in offices, in schools—obviously in schools, but no less in offices and commercial houses—and everything there has a theoretical bias and thoughts run riot. But it is only an episode without any essential truth. These people will attain to some truth in their thinking about life only if they feel once more as men did when they found Nature de-spiritualized, when they feel that they are an outcast race, taken from a divine-spiritual world where they really belong, into one where their inmost human being is a stranger.

One of the ways in which this mood expressed itself was through the feeling that there had been a Fall of man. This idea arose from a change that had come about in human consciousness. Men felt that they had been thrust out of a spiritual world and that the reason for this must lie in some original sin. Thus at a particular epoch the conception of original sin, of the Fall of man, dawned in human consciousness.

If we understand the changes in human consciousness from the past through the present into the future, we shall also be able to understand how this conception of original sin, of a pre-historic Fall of man, arose. And at the same time when this mood came over man, his need was not for some grey theory, but for words through which souls needing comfort could find healing power. And what we have often described as the guidance of mankind in the old centers of ritual and religion, in the Mysteries, can be seen arising at a particular period of time coinciding approximately with ancient Persian and the earliest Chaldean culture in the Near East—it can be seen to coincide with what came from the priests, the great comforters of mankind. Consolation streamed from them and the Mysteries they celebrated; and indeed, human consciousness at that time was greatly in need of consolation. The words of the Mysteries had to contain some quality of soul that could speak to men's hearts with a power of healing and consolation. This is the epoch which exhibited such magnificent creative power (though in a somewhat different form from alter periods) in the spheres of art and religion, and a great deal in our art and in our religious ideas derives from that time, particularly the symbols, pictures and ritualistic ceremonies.

What was the source from which these teachers of the Mysteries drew in order to give this consolation? If the general waking consciousness consisted in the sort of living picture-consciousness I have described, yet at that time too there were three stages of consciousness. Nowadays we have sleeping, dreaming and waking. In those days, as opposed to the waking dream which, as I showed yesterday, was the normal form of waking consciousness, sleep was not as it is today, when it completely damps down our consciousness. Although with these men, too, consciousness was dimmed during sleep, there remained something of it on waking. Yesterday I described this by saying that when men woke after sleep, there remained something of it on waking. Yesterday I described this by saying that when men woke after sleep they had a sort of after-taste. Most people felt, not merely on the tongue or in the mouth, deeply permeated by a certain sweetness of experience which was the after-taste of their sleep. This sweetness they experienced in sleep spread over from their life of sleep into that of waking. This sweetness was to them a test of the healthiness of their life, whereas if other tastes were present it was evidence of illness.

It sounds strange to say that an older humanity experienced the sweet after-effects of sleep in their limbs, the arms, right down into the finger-tips and the other members. But spiritually-scientific investigation shows that it was so; and the genius of language has retained something of this, though in a crude and materialized form. A sleeping-draught was once something spiritual; that is, sleep itself, and it was only later that it became an actual liquid draught in material form. Sleep was then itself a draught of Nature, which extinguished the ordinary memories of day; it was a draught of forgetfulness. What ordinary men had from it was only a vague after-feeling, but Initiation gave the Mystery teachers, who were the leaders of humanity, a more exact consciousness of what really was experienced in sleep. In modern Initiation we ascend from our ordinary ideas to spirit-sight, but in those days, while ordinary men passed from their dream-waking life into sleep, for which they cultivated a consciousness and experienced this after-taste, the Mystery priests had means to feel their way consciously into sleep and so got to know what this after-taste implied. They learned of the water beyond physical existence, the water into which the human soul plunged during sleep each night—the waters of the weaving astrality of the world.

But that was only a second condition beyond the waking and reaming of ordinary life. The third condition was one of which modern humanity has no knowledge at all, a condition deeper than dreamless sleep today. I said yesterday that one might call it a state of being surrounded by the Earth, and this was the condition of man at night during deep sleep. Only the priest of the Mysteries by means of his Initiation could attain consciousness of it and impart the results of this experience, which constituted the knowledge of those days. Men felt themselves embraced by the Earth, but they felt something more; they felt that in the ordinary course of the day they had come into a condition very near death, a death, however, from which there was an awakening. They experienced this third condition of consciousness as if they had actually descended into the Earth and been laid in a grave, yet not one that could be called an earthy grave. I will try to make clear to you in the following way how this grave not only was, but how it had to be, conceived.

Now when the Sun's rays fall on to the Earth, they are not merely reflected from flowers and stars. Farmers know this better than the city dweller does, for during the winter they use the Sun's warmth which has penetrated into the Earth. At that time of the year we have within the Earth what has streamed into it during the summer. Not only the Sun's warmth but other forces stream into the Earth. Yet from the point of view of which I am speaking this was the less important fact; the more important was that the activities of the Moon could also penetrate below the surface of the Earth to a certain extent. It was a pleasant idea of those days, not just a poetical idea but, in a way, a super-poetical one—though of course not held in any logical conception as we should today, but as a picture—when men thought of the light of the Sun streaming down to Earth in the light of the full Moon and penetrating a certain distance into the Earth, then being reflected not just from the Earth's surface but from its interior, after the light had been absorbed by the Earth.

The silver ebb and flow of the moonlight were experienced by man as the rhythmic play of its rays. It was not only a beautiful picture; the priests of the Mysteries knew something definite about this flowing moonlight. They knew that man is subject to gravitation as he lives on the Earth; that gravity holds him to the surface of the Earth, and thus the Earth draws his being to itself, as it were. The forces of the Moon were known to work against this force of gravity. They are in general weaker than the vigorous forces of the Earth's gravity, but they work against those forces. It was known that man is not just a clod held fast by the Earth's gravity, but that he is rather in a sort of balance, drawn to the Earth by gravity and away from it by the forces of the Moon, and that for him as earthly man it is the Earth which holds the upper hand. But as regards his head-activity, the effective influence on it is the negative gravity that draws him away. Thus though man might not be able to fly, at least he could raise his spirit into the starry spaces. By means of this Initiation, through these Moon activities, humanity in those days learnt from their Mystery-priests the effect on earthly man of his starry environment.

This was the astrological Initiation, so much abused nowadays, which was specially prevalent among the people of ancient Chaldea. By its path men could learn not only of the activity of the Moon, but of that of the Sun, Mars, Saturn, and so forth. Nowadays man is—if you will pardon a pictorial way of putting it so, for it is hard to describe such things in strictly logical words—man, as far as his knowledge goes, has become a kind of worm, not even an earthworm but something worse, a worm for whom it never rains so that he never emerges from the soil! Worms do after all emerge periodically when it rains, and then they can enjoy whatever is happening on the Earth's surface: and that is healthy for them. Modern man, with regard to his soul and spirit, is a worm for whom it never rains, and then they can enjoy whatever is happening on the Earth's surface: and that is healthy for them. Modern man with regard to his soul and spirit, is a worm for whom it never rains, and he is entirely encased in the Earth. Thus he believes that the members of this body grow on Earth more or less as stones are formed. He has no idea that the hair on his head is the result of the Sun's activity, for he is a worm which never comes above ground, a creature, that is, which bears the Sun-forces within him but never comes to the surface to investigate them. As the old Mystery-priests well knew, man has not grown out of the Earth like a cabbage; he has been created by the joint activity of the whole cosmic environment. You can see, therefore, how men in those days felt towards their Initiates and Mystery-leaders who could tell them from their training what his cosmic environment signifies for man.

These priests of the Mysteries could thus proclaim something which I shall have to give in an unimaginative form, since we are not nowadays capable of speaking as they did; they clothed all they said in wonderful poetry. The genius of language made that possible then, but nowadays we can no longer speak in such a way, because language is inadequate. If we had to put into words the message of the priests of the Mysteries to their people who came to them for comfort, feeling themselves thrust into a Nature which had lost its spirit, we should have to put it somewhat as follows: As long as you remain in your ordinary waking consciousness, your environment will seem to have been robbed of spirit. But if you plunge consciously into the region embraced by the Earthy, where you can behold the power of the star-gods in the silvery light of the Moon flowing and surging through the Earth, you will come to learn—no longer with the earlier spontaneity but only by human effort—that external Nature is everywhere permeated by spirit-beings and bears the gifts of the gods within herself as spirit-beings and elemental spirits.

This was the consolation which the priests of the Mysteries could give their people in olden days; they made them see that plants are not just beautiful but are really permeated by the weaving of the spirit; that the clouds do not just sail majestically through the air but that divine-spiritual elemental beings are active in them—and so on. It was towards the spirit of Nature that these Initiates led the men who depended on them for guidance.

Thus at a certain point in man's evolution the task of the Mysteries was to make it clear that when Nature appeared to have lost the spirit, this was only an illusion of ordinary waking consciousness. Actually, spirit was to be found everywhere in Nature. You see, there was a time when man lived within the spirituality of existence, and through the Mysteries experienced this spirituality even in the sphere which at first sight seemed to have been robbed of spirit. Man was still dependent on the spirit in all that affected him, whether instinctively when he had inner spiritual perception, or by the Mystery-teachings which showed him that Nature also was permeated by spirit.

If human evolution had stopped there, our consciousness could never have experienced one of the greatest blessings of humanity, perhaps the very greatest—I mean the experience of free-will, of freedom. The old mood of soul, with its instinctively experienced spirituality, had to be damped down. Man had to be led to three other conditions of consciousness. The feeling of being embraced by the Earth, which had enabled the old Initiates to attain their star-wisdom and their knowledge of Nature's spirits, died away completely, and man's soul-condition came to include only dreamless sleep, dreaming and waking. To balance this, there were the beginnings of that sphere of consciousness in which freedom can dawn. What we call today our waking consciousness, which enables us to enjoy our ordinary life and knowledge, was quite unknown to early humanity. Yet through it came the possibility of pure thinking; we may profess doubts about its existence, but in it lies the only possible basis for the impulse of freedom. Had men never attained this pure-thinking—which is actually pure thinking and does not, as such, guarantee the actual reality—they would never have reached the consciousness of freedom.

We might say that as humanity developed, man's earlier association with the spirit was veiled in darkness; on the other hand, he acquired those three states of consciousness which led him from spiritual heights into the depths of the Earth. But out of these depths he was to find the original forces for the unfolding of freedom. This quality of soul, with its waking, dreaming and sleeping, had been developing for close on a thousand years, and men had gone far into that darkness where the light of the spirit does not shine but where the impulse of freedom is to be found. Try to realize what human evolution has really been like. There was a time when man looked up to the starry heavens and the knowledge he still had of the stars showed him that their forces lived within him and that he belonged essentially to the Cosmos. But now, man—as spirit—was thrust down to Earth and the Heavens became, so to speak, dark, for the light, though shining down physically from sun or stars, became impenetrable for him. It was as if a curtain had come down, so that he could no longer find any basis for his existence. He could no longer perceive what lay behind the curtain.

We shall see tomorrow how this curtain has existed for a thousand years, becoming thicker and thicker, and how this expressed itself in man's whole mood. Then a light appeared which did penetrate the curtain and to a certain extent the curtain fell away; it was the light that shone forth on Golgotha. In this way the Deed of Golgotha finds its place in human evolution. This Deed, accomplished on the Earth, was to reopen for man the vision of the spirituality of the world which he had once seen in the wide spaces of the Cosmos. Christ, by passing through the Mystery of Golgotha, was to bring into man's life on Earth what had in earlier times been seen in the Heavens. The divine-spiritual Being of Christ was to descend and live in a human body, so that He might bring this light in a new way to men who could no longer leave the Earth.

We are only just beginning to understand the Mystery of Golgotha, and the future evolution of the Earth must consist in this Mystery being ever more deeply understood, so that the radiance spreading from the Mystery of Golgotha will change more and more from an inward to a cosmic radiance and will gradually irradiate everything perceptible to man.

But we shall be able to talk of this in greater detail only if we lay some further foundations for it today. Now something which was once a living fact in human evolution is, in a sense, returning. The priests of the Mysteries possessed, as I have told you, the power of contemplating the influence of the Moon; the influence of the Moon bore them up to their astrological Initiation. They learnt how it was possible to be initiated into the secrets of the stars by this means. An important point for the candidate for Initiation was that he should feel as though gravity were of less importance to him than it normally was. He felt that he weighed less. But then he was instructed by the older teachers not to give way to this feeling; when he began to feel lighter he must restore his heaviness by a strong exercise of will. The technique of the old Initiation made it possible for the candidate to allow the weight which was lost by the influence of the Moon to be restored by an effort of will; and as a result the wisdom of the stars shone forth. Thus every tendency in man at that time to overcome gravity was used to develop the will to hold fast to the Earth by the power of his own soul. But since this exerting of the will acted as a kindling of an inner light, it shone forth into the Cosmos and he could attain knowledge of cosmic spaces. When Spiritual Science throws its light on these matters, it is possible accurately to describe how this old consciousness came into being.

Now there is always a tendency for what existed in such men to recur; there is a sort of atavism, an inheritance, of things long past. It recurs just because men themselves return; and when this relation to the Moon appears in men who live at a time when, because this deep sleep is a thing of the past, such a relation should not occur, it appears as somnambulism, especially as ordinary sleep-walking. Then they do not combat this increasing sense of lightness by exerting the forces of their soul, but they wander about on roofs or at least get up out of bed. They do with their whole being what only the astral body should properly do. Something which has now become an abnormality was in earlier times an asset which could be used to attain knowledge. It was quite appropriate that popular usage should call such men “moon-struck,” for this condition of man's being is connected with an atavistic relation to the Moon-forces which has survived from older times.

Again, just as man is related, in the way I have described, to Moon-forces, he is also related to Sun-forces. But they are active in a more hidden part of man's being and we find them only indirectly. The Druids of the finest period—not those when decadence had set in—certainly sought their Sun-Initiation in this relation to the Sun-forces. Now whereas astrological Initiation depends on Moon-forces and makes possible a knowledge of the secrets of the Cosmos, this Sun-Initiation makes possible a sort of conversation with the divine-spiritual Beings of the Universe, a kind of Inspiration, whereas the Moon-Initiation gave only Imagination. Sun-Initiation is like a listening to the counsel of the spiritual Beings of the Cosmos—certainly a much deeper vision of the secretes of the world's being than could be given by Moon-Initiation. This may also recur atavistically, for Sun-activity exists in every man. But the constitution of man's soul today is quite different from that of the past, and his eyes are now specially organized to see only the physical rays of the Sun. As I told you yesterday, in the physical rays of the Sun there is an element of soul and spirit. Modern man does not realize or perceive this. In his attitude to the Sun, present-day man behaves as if he met another man who claimed to possess some inner quality of soul, and said to him: “There is no such thing; if you move your arm, it is a mechanical process like that of a lever; the muscles act as cords and when they are drawn tight the lever comes into action. That is the mechanism of it.”

That is really how men behave nowadays in regard to the Sun; they see only the external-physical; that is, the physical light. But when the physical light of the Sun's working penetrates into us, the spirituality of the Sun's being penetrates also. By means of a sort of inner concentration—not acquired in the way described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds but possessed atavistically like some elemental force—a man can nowadays (and by nowadays I mean our present epoch of history which may of course extend for some thousands of years) cease through inner concentration to be strongly receptive to the physical working of the Sun but may, on the contrary, become receptive to its spiritual activity. Then his sight is changed. When this atavistic capacity appears, he sees differently from the ordinary way. When we look into a mirror, we see the reflection of what stands in front of the mirror. Just because the mirror is not transparent, it can reflect in this way. Now when a man's soul is constituted in such a way that, even when in full possession of all his senses, instead of looking into the Sun and seeing the physical sunlight he sees darkness, the darkness then becomes a sort of mirror which reflects his immediate surroundings. He does not say to himself: Here I have a plant which has a root which sends forth its leaves, flower, fruit and seed; rather, he says: When I look into the lower part of a plant, I see in it an elemental spiritual wisdom which makes it solid and permanent; if then I look further up the plant, I see how that quality is gradually overcome and how the plant strives to create alternatively a contraction and expansion in the formation of leaves, and finally strives upwards in the blossoms, as through transformed by fire. In this way the life of the plant is reflected in the darkness, which is however spiritual light.

Jacob Boehme possessed this atavistic power when he looked a the plant and saw the quality of salt below, the mercurial in the middle and the phosphoric above. Thus we can see in the spirit of a man such as Boehme, who was a natural Sun-Initiate, a capacity belonging to an earlier period of civilization, that primal civilization before there was any reading or writing. You completely misunderstand him if you read works such as the Mysterium Magnum, the De Signatura Rerum or the Aurora and do not see that in this stammering presentation there is something quite similar to what I described in relation to the Druids. Boehme was not initiated in an external sense, but his Sun-Initiation rises within him like a repetition of an earlier earthly existence. We can trace this into the very details of his biography.

There are still deeper forces which can be active in men, the forces of the outermost planet of our solar system. Modern astronomy does not regard it as the outermost since it has added two more—though even orthodox astronomers are worried because the movement of the moons does not properly fit, (The moons of Neptune and Uranus move in the opposite direction to the satellites of other planets,) but since it is the spatial arrangement with which they are concerned, they have added Uranus and Neptune. These, however, cause trouble because their moons are a little crazy compared with the ordered moons of Jupiter and other planets. In reality one must say that, for a living, concrete grasp of the planetary system, Saturn is the outer-most planet. Now just as a man can be under the influence of the Moon-forces which I described in detail, or of the Sun-forces, which I only outlined, he may also be under the influence of Saturn-forces. The activity of Saturn, as it rays into the planetary system and thus also into man, is like a cosmic historical memory. Saturn is, as it were, the memory, the recollection, of our planetary system, and if you want to know anything about the history of that system, you cannot really get it by astronomical speculation. Even external science is becoming rather desperate about all this because nothing fits. But the problem is not rightly tackled.

We have often spoken among ourselves about the so-called theory of relativity and the idea that it is never possible to talk of absolute motion; that there is nothing but relative motion. We can either say that the Sun moves and the Earth stands still, or that the Earth moves and the Sun stands still—as we have done in modern times. It makes no difference which one says, since everything is relative. And on one occasion here in Stuttgart, at a meeting of the Anthroposophical Society when we were talking about relativity, a supporter of the theory showed his audience clearly how it is all the same whether you take a match and strike it on the box, or take the box and move it past the match: in either case you light the match. This was meant as a serious scientific statement, and there is nothing to be said against it. Perhaps some simple soul might have thought of nailing the box to a wall—and then we should have had a little bit of “absolute.” We might somehow have moved the whole house and we should have had relativity again—but this might have been difficult! Yet it one takes the whole physical world, Einstein is quite right in saying that within the world there is nothing absolute, everything is relative. Unfortunately he stops at relativity, and it is just this relativity that ought to lead us on to look for something absolute, not in the physical world but in the spiritual. Everywhere nowadays, science—were it only rightly understood—offers us entry into the spiritual world. It is not a question of amateurish but of genuine exact science, and genuine science—except that it is not thought through to the end even by its experts—will lead to the spirit. Ordinary physical investigation cannot really tell us what this Saturn of our universe is. Saturn is in a sense the memory of our planetary system; everything that has occurred within that system is preserved in Saturn, and a Saturn-Initiate can learn of all those happenings.

Now just as our relation to the Moon can appear in a one-sided form in men as an inheritance of an older period of human evolution, with the result that they become sleep-walkers, or, again, as the spiritual forces of the Sun may emerge so that a man will not see the sunlight with open eyes but will see into the darkness in which Nature is mirrored, and then he will see as Boehme did—in the same way it is possible to experience our relation to the forces of Saturn, which work particularly on the head and implant in the human being a passing memory during his life on the Earth. These Saturn-forces can appear in a peculiar way, and just as we can talk of “Moon-men” who are the ordinary sleep-walkers, and of “Sun-men” such as Boehme, or in a lesser degree, Paracelsus, so we can also speak of a Saturn-man. This is what Swedenborg was. His is another case which should worry ordinary science—though it does not!

Swedenborg was master of the ordinary science of his time and was regarded as an authority. Up to his fortieth year he was thoroughly orthodox in his views and said nothing to which ordinary science might take exception. Then he suddenly became befogged. Actually we ought to say that the Saturn-forces became active in him, though people with an ordinary materialistic outlook say that he went mad. But it ought to make us pause to realize that there are so many surviving works of his which are recognized as scientific and are being published by a Swedish Society. The most distinguished scholars in Sweden are occupied just now in publishing his works—works, that is, written shall we say, before he attained spiritual vision. There is something unpleasant in having to deal with a man who up to his fortieth year was the most brilliant man of his age and after that must, to put it mildly, be called a fool!

Actually Swedenborg did not become a fool, but, at a particular moment, just after he had reached the heights of ordinary science, he began to see into the spiritual world. When this power of vision reached his head—the organ he had developed to so high a level—and when it was influenced by the spirituality of Saturn, he had his own special power of vision, not the vision of Boehme who saw the inner secrets of Nature mirrored in the darkness, but direct vision into the etheric, where the patterns of a higher spirituality appear. And thus he was able to give his own descriptions of them—though he did not actually see what he imagined he had, for the spirit-beings to whom he was referring are different. Nor on the other hand was it a mere earthly reflection of these spirits; he saw etheric forms and the activities of spirits in the etheric. He saw in the ether of the Earth the deeds of the spirits, though not the spirits themselves. Whereas Boehme saw reflection of Nature, Swedenborg saw what was accomplished in the etheric by the spirits whose activity was all he could see. Thus when he describes Angels, it is not Angels whom he sees but etheric forms. Nevertheless, these forms were actually the work of Angels—a picture of the activity of Angels. We must always keep our eyes on the reality of such things. And whereas it would be an error to claim that Swedenborg saw the spiritual world as such (that was not his peculiar power,) yet it was a reality that he saw.

The ordinary sleep-walker does something real, does with his physical body what he ought to do only with his astral body. Boehme saw with his physical body, particularly with his eyes, which were organized in such a way that he could exclude the physical and see into the darkness, but in that darkness he saw the light, the mirroring of Nature-spirits. Swedenborg did not see mirror-pictures, but etheric pictures of a spiritual existence of a higher order. Here we have an upward process from the sleep-walker who, being permeated by spirit, does not see but acts automatically, through what I may perhaps call the natural second sight of Boehme who saw not the external side of Nature but the mirror of his inner side, up to Swedenborg who saw not mirror-pictures but reality in the etheric, the picture of activities which proceed in higher spiritual regions.

You see then in what way we can speak of man's past and present, and how in the so-called abnormal conditions there is a sort of inherited survival which we must try to understand. When we can see the past in this light and see also what survives from the past into the present, we shall be able to get some idea of mankind's future with the help of a deeper understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. This is what we shall attempt in the lecture tomorrow.

You will have been able to realize from the lecture yesterday that a certain state of consciousness, which was an actual experience to men of earlier times, has to some extent been lost. I told you that the special sort of waking consciousness we have today, which consists predominantly in more or less abstract ideas or at the best in shadowy pictures, did not then exist in the same form, and that in its place there was a kind of waking-dreaming, or dreaming-waking. This was not experienced as we experience dreams but as a living picture which corresponded pretty well with spiritual reality. There was a condition of sleep which, though it was dreamless, left an after-effect of the kind described, and there was a third state of consciousness beyond this which was experienced as a resting in the surging Moon-forces, forces which, reaching under the Earth, lift man out of earthly gravity and allow him to experience his cosmic existence. The essential point about these older conditions of soul was that they allowed man to experience his cosmic existence. In our ordinary everyday consciousness there is only a shadowy image left of that older state of consciousness—a shadowy image that is noticed by very few and is mostly entirely unheeded.

I will try to describe this survival of a primeval state of consciousness. When we observe our dreams—chaotic as they are—we find that all sorts of experiences drawn from earthly existence flow into them. Things long forgotten crop up altered in many ways, even things which passed unnoticed at the time. The times, too, at which events took place may be thoroughly confused. But if you look more closely into the details of a dream, you will discover the remarkable fact that in essence practically everything which crops up in it is related to the happenings of the last three days. You may perhaps have a dream about something that happened to you twenty-five years before; you may dream of it in all its vividness, though somewhat altered in detail. But if you study it closely you will always discover something of the following sort: in this dream about an event of twenty-five years before, a character appears whom we will call Edward, and you will find that you have somewhere heard the name casually in passing, or your eye has caught it as you were reading. In the details of a dream, even the remotest, there is always some relation, however insignificant, to something which has happened during the last three days. The reason is that we bear within ourselves the events of the last two, three or four days—the period is of course approximate—in a quite different way from those which occurred earlier.

Our perceptions are, as you know, taken up into our astral organism and our ego-organism, and the events thus perceived do at first live in direct connection with our consciousness. What we have experienced in the course of three days—that is, when at least three days have passed—goes more intensively into our feelings. Ordinarily we do not notice these things, but they are realities all the same. The reason is that all we perceive or think, which is taken up into the astral organism and the ego-organism, has also to be somehow imprinted upon the etheric body, the body of formative forces, and at least to some extent even upon the physical body. This process takes two to four days, so that we have to sleep two or three times on anything we experience before it is imprinted on the etheric and physical bodies. Only then is it firmly fixed in the etheric body so that it may be a permanent memory. Thus in man there is a perpetual inner reciprocity, a sort of struggle, between the astral and etheric bodies, and the result is always that what we have experienced consciously is imprinted into the denser, more material elements of our being. After three or four days, what was at first only a transitory sense-experience is transferred into the body of formative forces and into the physical body.

But how little of what I have been describing actually comes into men's consciousness nowadays! Yet it is something which is perpetually taking place in the life of the human body and soul. Every experience of which we have been aware has to wait three or four days before it is fully our own. It fluctuates between the astral and etheric bodies, and cannot decide—one might say—whether it has really been impressed into the etheric and into the physical body.

This is something of extraordinary significance. Remember that basically our true being is only our ego and astral body. We cannot really claim that the etheric body is our own property. In this materialistic age people talk as though the etheric and physical bodies were their, whereas actually they belong to the whole Cosmos. And so when in the course of three or four days, what our ego and astral body have experienced is passed on to the etheric and physical bodies, it is then part, not only of ourselves but of the Cosmos. It is only for three days that we can claim any action of ours in the world as significant for ourselves alone. After that we have, as it were, imprinted it on the Universe, and it rests within the whole Universe and belongs not only to us but also to the gods.

In very early periods of human evolution, as a result of that state of consciousness which is now lost and which has deeper than sleep, men had a definite impression of this remarkable fact, and the Initiates were able to give information about what lay behind it. Particularly in the epoch of which I spoke yesterday, the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, it was only a vague feeling that men had. But the priests were initiated into the real nature of the fact. Whereas nowadays Initiation must be a purely inner experience of soul and spirit, at the most with symbols and rites of a physical nature only, in those earlier days Initiation was an external process and the effects of that external process passed over into man's inner being. To take one example: when a man was to be initiated, for three or four days he was put by the Hierophant who was initiating him, into this state of consciousness which we have now lost. The purpose of this was to enable him to see for himself what happens during these three days in the world external to him, and how it finds entrance into the real being of man. The Initiate was enabled to see what happens to an idea, to an experience or a feeling, before it becomes a man's own property.

Our materialistic attitude to the world today affords us no conception at all of the extraordinary significance of the wisdom that lay within this condition that is so deeply concealed from us. I can perhaps best explain to you what was accomplished in the three days of this Initiation during that dim condition of consciousness if I remind you first of our ordinary dream-life with an attitude based purely on what we might call scientific method, there is still something extraordinarily profound involved.

How is this dream-life really revealed? There are of course many kinds of dreams, but let us keep for the moment to what consists largely in the recollection of past experiences. Pictures of these experiences arise in dreams. How do they arise? You are aware that they appear radically transformed. This transformation may go a very long way; for instance, we may take the case of a tailor who in his ordinary life has never had the occasion of making a Minister's state robes; he may have made a number of coats and been very proud of them, but for all that he has not the slightest chance of making such a robe as he now dreams he makes. In a dream like this there may be a number of different influences at work. For instance, the man may in a former life have been the attendant of a Roman magistrate and among his duties had to help him on with his toga. A dim feeling of all this survives and what a man experiences in this life may be colored by what streams over from a previous one.

This is just an example of how the content of dreams may be altered; the important fact is that they undergo the intense transformations we all know. One must really ask what is contained in these dreams, what is at work in them. It is external events which give the occasion for this type of dream, but the external events make their appearance in a wholly altered form.

The reason for this is quite beyond the conception of our ordinary scientific ideas. The sort of law which we should recognize as scientific, the laws we look for in the external world by our method of observation and experiment, cease to be valid as soon as we pass inside the skin of a human being. We should be very much mistaken were we to assume that the natural laws laid down in the laboratory were valid within the human being. Not only are the substances transformed within our organism when we consume them in the ordinary course of nourishment, but the laws of the substances are also changed, down to the smallest atoms. What appears in our dreams is not just the abstract reflection of some reality; in our dreams we see the weaving of the organic laws within which man has his being. Dreams are much closer to us than is our normal abstract thinking; they show the way in which external substances act within man. Our dreams are a protest against the part of reality that is shackled within the laws of Nature. From the time you go to sleep until the time you wake, you live in a world where according to the scientist everything is controlled by these laws. Actually the moment you enter, even to the slightest degree, into the spiritual world through your dreams, your dream-experience arises as a protest against the laws of Nature. Dreams cannot run their course in the way of external events, or they would be very much like actual waking life. Dreams which emerge from real sleep are in their make-up a protest against the laws of Nature, and they concern us much more intimately.

In this regard modern investigators of a materialistic turn of mind have made some interesting discoveries. Some of you will know a book by a man called Staudenmaier, entitled Experimental Magic, which appeared a good many years ago and is typical of the spiritual constitution of many modern scientific thinkers. Staudenmaier wanted to find out if there is any reality in the spiritual world. Of Anthroposophy he admitted that he knew only what its opponents had written. People don't like studying Anthroposophy; they find it difficult, particularly if they are typical scientific thinkers of today.

Staudenmaier attempted, by spiritualistic methods, to get into the spiritual world. He dulled his consciousness until he was in a sort of mediumistic state; then he began automatic writing and was surprised that he wrote a lot of nonsense which did not at all agree with what he knew about reality. In particular, the fact that spirits seemed to be speaking to him did not agree with it! He knew that was impossible and yet what he wrote assured him that spirits were speaking. He was appalled by the lies that these non-existent spirits told him. You should read in his book all the incredible lies which flowed into his writing. He became—to use no worse a word—a medium, and he did not know what to make of it all. A friend advised him to give the whole thing up and to lead a normal, sensible life and go out shooting. So he did, and he went out after magpies; but even there he found that whatever it was he had stirred up inside himself continued its activity, and he could not rid himself of it. If he looked up at a tree, he saw, not a magpie but a fearful dragon with terrible fangs, which looked at him with horrifying eyes. The same things happened everywhere, and he lived in an inner struggle to get himself back into a normal condition.

I mention all this because here we have experimental evidence that there is an immediate protest against the external order of Nature as soon as we are not merely dreaming while awake but are using this device to contact and arouse the inner being of man. Obviously we regard it all as lies. When we have thought of a man as a friend and as a decent fellow, and if after he has got into this mediumistic condition we see him putting out his tongue at us or making long noses, then inevitably we say that the spiritual world is lying and that this experience is simply that of a dream. Now there is something in this. Whenever man approaches the spiritual world inside himself, within which everything inside his skin is enclosed, there is an immediate protest from this sphere against the natural order. It is not surprising that when a man enters it with underdeveloped faculties of judgment, all kinds of elemental beings appear and create delusion. But there is always this protest against the natural order when we approach the spiritual; and ordinary dreams make this clear.

We ought to realize that we then enter a quite different order of being, and, even though it appears only in the fleeting form of the dream, it is all the same a protest against those admirable laws of Nature which we establish by laboratory experiments. This is the first step into the spiritual world where we immediately find the protest against natural laws, which are, as it were, robbed of their dignity as soon as we penetrate a little into man's inner being.

The old Initiates knew very well through their three days' Initiation that there is not only a natural order, but that within and behind that natural order there is a spiritual one. It is moreover still possible for anyone who has acquired some knowledge of Initiation to penetrate with modern methods into these things and to pass through the experiences a really fearful torment of the soul. When dreams begin to weave their forms we actually enter a world where the laws of Nature collapse, and just because the ordinary laws no longer hold good, their interrelations change, however many recollections of ordinary life may still be effective. If we have come to regard natural laws as the last word, we find ourselves face to face with nothingness. It is painful, almost tragic, for a modern man, as he passes through Initiation, to experience entry into a sphere of being where this protest against the laws of Nature is encountered; he feels that everything he had got from his intellect, and which was determined by the laws of Nature is swamped. His soul can no longer breathe because he has been too much accustomed to the natural order. He finally realizes that an altogether different world is pressing in from a quite different direction. This is no longer a natural but a spiritual order, which is throughout permeated with what in the depths of our present-day human conscience we experience as a moral world-order. He gradually learns that on the one hand there is the order of Nature perceived by the senses, for which the laws have been established by natural science; on the other hand, if he moves out of this natural order, he moves into a world that protests against the natural order. As he experiences this protest, a sort of luminous water of life pours round him and he can once again breathe—this is the moral order which ultimately expands into the spiritual.

The highest knowledge gained by the ancient Initiates was when they discovered the protest against the physical world-order and saw the true moral world-order extend into the physical. It is indeed experienced in a much weaker degree during the three days described: whatever we experience in the external world, whether actions or feelings, takes three or four days to be imprinted on our organism. But when the process is completed, the imprinted form is not like that which we experienced externally; it becomes an impulse demanding a moral expression very different from the natural order. If we could see how our experiences have changed in our inner being during those three of our days, we should see that what we experienced in its natural form during our earthly existence has been imprinted in our external being and is no less real than it was in the external world. But now it lives within us as the impulse of a moral world-order by means of which we may move further over the ocean of life. Thus we carry the results of what we have experienced naturally as the moral foundation for our later life.

In recent periods of human evolution, however, when men plunged into that “lower sleep,” if I may call it so, that Earth-embraced sphere, he plunged into the outer ether. There his experiences find their compensation. He is not merely set within the moral world-order as regards the direction of his inner life; in that lower sleep he is set within the moral order of the Cosmos. Since this deep sleep has been lost to our forms of consciousness and we now have only a very faint echo of it in the three-days' experience described, this contact with the Cosmos has been lost also. Indeed, we should have been gradually thrust out of the self-subsisting moral world-order if a particular event had not occurred in the course of Earth-evolution. The experience undergone by the older Initiates so as to be able to tell men what happens during those three days, was undergone as a unique world-event, as an event in world-history, by the Christ Being who descended from spiritual worlds into the body of Jesus of Nazareth and, though a God, lived a truly human life. That experience of the three days now became available for all mankind. What could previously be discovered in the sleep of deep consciousness, taking place in man not consciously but at least subconsciously, in a natural way, had to be gone through in order that man might find his connection with what was brought about for earthly humanity by Christ in the Mystery of Golgotha. This was the vicarious deed of a God. Man was to take a step upwards in his evolution and to experience in moral form through Christianity what had previously come to him naturally. The Mystery of Golgotha is therefore closely related to the whole meaning of earthly evolution, because of its relation to the evolution of man's consciousness. We can understand what was to be accomplished by the Mystery of Golgotha only if we can look back on what had once occurred naturally and was now to occur morally.

In this respect, however, our modern consciousness, which runs its course between waking, sleeping and dreaming, has not yet attained inner harmony. Since the fifteenth century, when this modern consciousness first received its imprint, it has looked on Nature one-sidedly and has claimed to understand the order of Nature, considering that what is found there constitutes reality. Beyond this reality men will not look; they will not press forward to that strengthened form of human knowledge to which the spiritual reveals itself just as the natural order does. Thus it has become customary to speak of the moral order as of unknown origin. To do this was not strictly honest, since the common view of Nature cannot admit any reality in the moral order. One could, even if a little dishonestly, get over this difficulty by saying that on the one side we have knowledge, on the other, faith; and that the moral order belongs to the realm of faith; that knowledge cannot become faith nor faith, knowledge; and that the moral order belongs to the realm of faith. Such is the convenient formula which has become customary. The distinction has even come to be regarded as something specifically Christian, though even five or six hundred years ago no genuine Christianity, and certainly not original Christianity, would have admitted the distinction. Even today it is not yet Catholic dogma, however much it may be Catholic custom, to distinguish in this way between faith and knowledge.

We cannot get a proper notion of the relation between the natural and the moral-spiritual order because we are not aware of the transition between them; because the dream is not understood which leads out of the natural order and protests against it, thus preparing the way. If we have gone through this preparatory stage, we can make contact with the moral order of the world.

Only an honest view of the past of mankind, and of something which modern man does not yet possess, can lead to a satisfying picture of all this. Failing that, even historical documents of ancient times remain just things which can be studied but convey no real meaning. Now we spoke this morning a good deal about the opponents of Anthroposophy. I could say much that would be for their good, though certainly not in their favor. The comments of our opponents ... I often have to recall an anecdote supposed to be based on truth which the famous Professor Kuno Fischer was fond of telling. He used to relate how he had had two schoolfellows—they may have been brothers—with an uncle who was a thorough simpleton. The boys got to the stage of learning logarithms and having to buy log tables. The uncle caught sight of these tables and when he saw the mass of figures he asked his nephews what they were. The boys were completely at a loss to explain, but at last the young rascals conceived the idea of telling him they were the house-numbers of all Europe. The uncle believed them and finally thought it an excellent idea to be able to know at a glance all the house-numbers of London, Paris, and so on. Now people who are unable to see with insight into the meaning of the ancient documents are like the old uncle with his log tables. Our modern historians who edit these ancient documents do not tell us much more about them than the uncle did about logarithms when he took them to be the house-numbers of Europe. We must make it clear to ourselves how far their interpretation, based on present-day abstract thought, is removed from the real spiritual facts. We must have the determination to do that, or we shall never be able to see how man has developed into the present out of a past when he was very different.

We are living at a time when all sorts of inner conflicts must arise from our present-day experience of sleeping, waking and dreaming, if we are in the least capable of real self-observation. Just as men lost the real knowledge of that deep sleep which was so significant for them that the Initiates had to explain its nature to them, so in modern times our ordinary sleep tends to crumble to pieces. I do not mean that in the future men will dream the whole night through, but rather that their dreams will be dulled. Just as man has passed since olden times from that “waking dreaming” to our modern abstract thinking, our present-day chaotic dreams will be dulled, and that duller kind of sleep will become normal. Dreams will no longer extend into our consciousness, which will be overlaid entirely by our present-day form of abstract logical thinking. But then a super-consciousness will emerge, already apparent to anyone who can understand these things. This super-consciousness is concerned with the human will and with the effects of the will when it acts on the nervous system. If with the help of Initiation-knowledge you observe the unrestrained way in which human will is developing, you will be able to see how various psychological manifestations, sometimes going as far as actual physical illness, are really the herald of a form of consciousness higher than our present waking consciousness.

But there is something beyond this which men will not yet be able to experience unless they can actually acquire spiritual science: a science, that is, which needs a quite different sort of thinking from the normal and is in reality far more practical than the theoretical attitude to life, which is in fact completely unpractical. This spiritual science adds an inner living power of thinking to ordinary abstract thinking. Yet this is not something we can arbitrarily add or neglect; it occurs because an organism is coming into being within man which did not exist in earlier times and of which only the first foundations have so far emerged. The way in which the blood circulates through man's limbs, his arms, legs, hands and feet, is continually changing. What we often call “nervousness” (a nervous state) nowadays is an expression of the fact that a higher condition is striving to make its way into man, but that he is unwilling to accept it because of its strangeness, and this produces a restlessness which will cease only when he makes the new consciousness his own.

Thus we can visualize three further states of consciousness towards which man is making his way: a dulled dream life, waking, and a heightened state of waking. All the turmoil and upheaval which show themselves even in external conditions today are due to the fact that men are trying, for the most part quite unconsciously, to fight against something that is approaching humanity from the spiritual worlds. It is struggling to make its way especially into the human will. We shall have to understand—as nowadays we do not—that as soon as the spiritual comes into action, we pass at once into a sphere where a protest is uttered against natural laws. We shall also not properly understand the Mystery of Golgotha unless we can rise to the realization that the full import of that Mystery cannot be attained by our ordinary knowledge. To grasp its full meaning we have to develop a new faculty; we have to pass with right understanding beyond mere dreaming, which indicates a natural process, and penetrate to an understanding of the other side of being. It is from the side of the spirit that we have to acquire the elements of understanding adequate for future comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. What we must do is to set our experience of the present in this way between the past and the future, and so feel ourselves as a sort of bridge between them. Thus we shall increasingly achieve the understanding required for the use of spiritual truths alongside the natural.

It is easy to understand our ordinary illusions, just because the things that are false are so uncommonly logical. We do not suspect that falsehood can be so logical. What could be more logical than to argue as follows: first observe how long it takes some particular geological stratum to reach a particular thickness, then, if we are dealing with another stratum, divide the smaller into the greater thickness and multiply it by the time taken by that stratum to form, and so reach the conclusion that some epoch, the Silurian or Devonian for instance, was twenty or 200 million years ago. The arithmetical calculation is quite correct and there is nothing to be said against it. It is only ordinary logic that is here deceiving us.

This sort of logic always reminds me of the logic one of the greatest mathematicians of all times applied to his own life. When he had already reached a considerable age he suddenly became ill with some kind of lung trouble; and seeing that he had had a good deal to do with doctors, he had the idea of calculating how many tiny abscesses would have to be got rid of in order to shake off the lung trouble. His calculations about the further development of the illness showed him that it would take fifteen years, and then he would be cured. But ... he died two years later. That was the reality; the other was only logic.

The same sort of thing applies to the relationship between reality in the Cosmos and our ordinary logic. Things are very easily proved by logic, and the logic is perfectly sound. It is just as sound as if we calculated as follows: Our heart goes through certain phases of development; in a definite period it will have reached a definite condition; then we calculate how long it would take to reach that condition and the answer is 300 years. Then we can calculate backwards 300 years and see what our heart looked like 300 years ago. Unfortunately we were not alive, at least as physical beings, 300 years ago, and we shall not be alive 300 years hence. Equally the Earth did not exist in those past ages that are worked out by the geologists. The destinies undergone by the Earth can be known only in spiritual terms. That is the distressing thing about modern science: it can prove so logically what is really an illusion, and its proofs tell us nothing about reality.

Human beings today, though people do not realize it consciously because they refuse to be aware of it, are living with the unconscious fear that they are on the way to losing touch with truth. We can see this fear manifesting itself in various forms. Fundamentally, the people who base their philosophy of life on materialism are very ill at ease. They are always harassed by anxiety about the limits they have set themselves, for their cherished limits create appalling obstacles to living a fully human life. People already feel intuitively that if they have nothing more than the natural order to rely on, they cannot draw life from it; above all, that the ideas derived from this natural order cannot lead them to any genuine artistic and religious experience or ideas.

We must always remember that our existing religious systems originated in the times when men were dependent on that deep sleep I have described for their understanding of the Cosmos. All our religious institutions derive from those times: the religious institutions, yes, but not the Mystery of Golgotha. That is independent of any religious view; it stands grasped by those conditions of consciousness that are still in course of preparation. For centuries now, even millennia, the religiously creative side of man has lain barren and the same is true of real artistic capacity. With rare exceptions we have to live on what we can get from various cultural revivals. We do not possess any original power of creation. But that is what is seeking to make its way into this age, and the general unrest typical of our civilization today is something like the birthpangs of a new age, a new age in the scientific and artistic spheres but also in the social, religious, and moral spheres. The future of mankind—that is what we must strive to take to heart. There has never been a time when humanity has been less disposed to listen to Initiation-knowledge and yet never a time when humanity has been in greater need of it.

That is why I wished particularly to speak to you about the past, present and future of humanity from the point of view of the evolution of consciousness. Of course, in three lectures I could do it only in outline, but you can work out within your own hearts what I have told you. Because our consciousness lies closest to our own being, it is there that men can become most easily fruitful and be stirred towards spiritual experience. In order that present-day man may develop into a man of the future, what we need is not any materialistic experience but spiritual experience. Ever since we have been victims of abstract thinking and ideas, our inner habit is really such that anyone participating in our present culture must have the same sort of impression from any talk of the spirit as the simple old uncle in the story about the log. tables, and will interpret all the powerful evidence for the entry of the spiritual as if it were like the house-numbers of Europe. The analogy is a little far-fetched but if you remember what I have told you, you will understand what it means. Our normal attitude to life, or rather our ordinary judgments about life, penetrate into all our scientific thinking and produce there a philistinism and banality raised to the nth degree, even a moral hypocrisy claiming scientific validity. If there is any, even the slightest, sign of the entry of the spiritual, it is assumed to be something which intelligent human reason, according to this materialistic view, can only call “mad.”

There is a good story, founded on fact, which also illustrates this attitude. At the beginning of the forties of the nineteenth century the old philosopher Schelling was called from Munich to Berlin. He had held his peace for several years, but a high reputation had preceded him. People looked forward to lectures on philosophy of a more positive kind, as opposed to those he himself called negative. Anyway, in these lectures at Berlin University he was to deal with the spiritual development of man, the essence of religion and the Mysteries, in a much deeper fashion than anyone had done hitherto.

When Schelling began his lectures, the front rows were occupied by the most brilliant intelligences, the professors of various subjects, the heads of the teaching departments and the most distinguished representatives of spiritual life—certainly not mere callow students, who had to sit at the back. They were all waiting—as far as they were able to wait—to see what Schelling's great reputation would accomplish. As the lecture proceeded, the faces of the audience grew longer and longer. Schelling did in fact speak in a remarkable way about the spirit; just at the moment when materialism was reaching its climax and coming to its fullest flower, he spoke of the spirit. As he spoke, the faces grew appreciably longer because the audience had no idea what he was after. Trendelenburg, well-known later on as a philosopher, who was sitting in one of the front rows, said he thought he had understood a little, though most of it was beyond him; but he was not even sure he had understood that little!

Then, some days later, two of the people who had been present at the lecture happened to meet. There had been a good deal of discussion among Schelling's hearers, and these two had taken part in it, wondering why on earth he had been called to Berlin, since not a word of what he had said was intelligible. But one of them now had the answer: Schelling's daughter had got engaged to the son of the Minister of Education! So everyone could understand why Schelling had been willing to come to Berlin. The whole thing was explained!

It may seem strange to tell you these things, but I am obliged to talk to you in this way. For the form of thinking characteristic of the present day is so far removed from the sort of thinking proper to Anthroposophy, which is moreover not just a whim of ours but an absolute necessity for man's future unless he is to fall into decadence. Only this new form of spirituality will be able to experience fully the three stages of consciousness which will emerge in the future: namely, a damped-down dream-sleep, ordinary waking, and a heightened consciousness. Otherwise man will never be able to experience his humanity properly in future lives on Earth. For the gods wish out of present threefold man to form the threefold man of the future, as they have formed the present threefold man, the dreaming, sleeping and waking man, out of the former threefold man who dreamt in pictures, slept, and on waking experienced the after-effects of his sleep, and also slept deeply. In this present age of freedom, as I have so often explained to anthroposophists, we must resolve by our own free knowledge to live towards the goal laid down for us by the divine Powers of the world. If we do that we shall not only think, we shall above all feel, in the right way about the past, present and future. Then we shall also have the right will with regard to this life on Earth, in accordance with the divine-spiritual ordering of the world—from the past, through the present, into the future.

This is what I wished to talk about, and with these words I will bring our studies to a close, not however without expressing a wish that tomorrow a discussion may begin here which will show that in the Anthroposophical Society some desire exists to promote a fully living consciousness in this Society of what man in his fullness is to be—the whole man who must be comprehended as including man of the past, man of the present, and man of the future. For these three are also one. What man has been in the past, what he is in the present, and what he is to be in the future, will embrace in face of the divine World-Order the whole being—anthropos. But in order to strive for this there must be an enthusiastic, heart-felt grasping of Anthroposophy to lead us to the true anthropos, the whole man, man in his fullness.

Why is it that an esoteric still hasn't arrived at vision in higher worlds even though he's done his concentration and meditation exercises for years? To answer this question clearly we'll now imagine what meditating really is. When we want to meditate we want to turn away from outer things, we don't want them to have any influence on our thoughts any more, they're not supposed to disturb us in our devotion to spiritual things. But, outer events and thoughts about them constantly push in front of our meditating soul; they want to divert us from our meditation, they defend themselves against our devotion, so that we have to fight this with all of our willpower. Now if we want to find out who is defending himself against our better will the following example can perhaps clarify things. Let's imagine that a stranger approaches us and says: You are a fickle person. In 99 out of 100 cases we would be very disturbed about this, because until now we thought that we were a very good esoteric, who had seriously examined his inner life as far as his defects are concerned, and now a stranger comes and says the opposite.

Just as the stranger steps before us, so in all the thoughts that push in between our meditation something is placing itself before us which we think that we don't know, and yet it's our own self that reveals itself in all these thoughts and shows us how fickle we really are and how little we can free ourselves from our daily worries and desires. For what always presses into us during our meditation, when we have the wish to separate ourselves from outer things and to unite ourselves with spiritual things, is our streaming desire life. It constantly streams into our thinking in pictures of our daily life and it defends itself when we want to connect ourselves with the spiritual realm.

It can be good for us that this is so, since we get to know ourselves in our continually inflowing desire life, in all of these pictures and thoughts; it must bring us to self-knowledge—that we've exercised very cursorily till now. But mostly we'll still look for all kinds of excuses, because we don't want to accuse ourselves, and that's why we still can't look into the spiritual world. Our desire-ego pulls a veil in front of it. If we would turn our attention away from the events and experiences of our desire life, if we would turn our ego towards the spiritual and direct our whole devotion towards it, we would then have been successful a long time ago. If we would only direct as much attention to our meditation as one uses for all kinds of conversations that one has in social life or for news about one's dear fellow men, we would then make rapid progress in our knowledge of higher worlds, we would then push back our ego that's defending itself.

Our thoughts are nothing but memories of previous events, and these events are nothing but the desires that we've felt. If they hadn't become pleasure for us we wouldn't have preserved them in our memory. If one examines one's memory one will find that everything that gave one the most pleasure is engraved in it. Everything that we remained indifferent to, that we didn't enjoy has disappeared from our memory, just as a child no longer remembers the little details of what he learned in school later on, because he wasn't interested in them, and so they don't become very deeply imprinted in his memory.

What we must also apply in our esoteric development is devotion. The method that we use in meditation isn't that important, and we shouldn't want to meditate a lot so that we can have a lot of experiences in the spiritual world, for thereby we would only see our own wishes, and Lucifer would gain control over us. It's not easy to get away from this world of Lucifer and Ahriman. If we think that we've exercised thorough self-knowledge, but are still looking for excuses, then it's Ahriman who's standing beside us. When we look for excuses if someone tells us: You did this or that badly,—then that's Ahriman just as much. We love Lucifer and Ahriman too much, they accompany us our whole life long just because we love them so. And why do we like them so much? An example may clarify this. With what does a mother quiet her crying child? She caresses him and produces a pleasant awareness of his body in him. Likewise Ahriman and Lucifer bring us in contact with the world's things around us that give us so much pleasure. We feel a pleasant stimulation through the light rays that they let fall on objects and that then radiate back from the things and touch us, just as the crying child feels his mother's caresses. Lucifer and Ahriman caress us by magically weaving light rays over the world's things, and our eyes become aware of things by touching the rays.

These powers also assert themselves in modern science and philosophy, as for instance in a conversation of one of Schopenhauer's pupils with Nietzsche. Deussen says that denial of the will conditions life, whereas Nietzsche said that ennoblement of the will leads to life. Now if one would look at the first statement exactly and think about it one would have to say that denial of the will doesn't lead to life but to death, for a drinker or tramp who lives out denial of the will in his desires and doesn't keep them under control, who affirms every pleasure that's offered to him in life—he will not attain life, but will come to an early death, whereas one who strives for ennoblement of the will, who rays out the forces of a healing germ with which his rays unite,—he'll be healthy and in tune with life. Scholars thought that they were looking through good glasses in Deussen's statement, whereas they were really looking through wooden glasses. Here again we see how Ahriman places himself before men, for they love him so much that they don't let go of him. Men go to church and pray to the beings they love. We often have Christ's name on our lips when we mean Ahriman. We have to make all of this clear to ourselves, for we must see Lucifer and Ahriman in all of our deeds and omissions and namely there where these two powers want to place themselves before our meditation to keep us from looking into the spiritual world. For the moment has come when we must try to form spiritual organs of clairvoyance in us and develop ourselves for spiritual knowledge, so that these organs don't dry up and waste away. We must slowly and gradually grow into the spirit out of which we're born: Ex Deo nascimur.

At life's beginning that originates in the Godhead we were still permeated by divine-spiritual forces that work up to the change of teeth at age seven. That's the way everything is renewed in man, the old is pushed out by the new, new hairs push out the old ones, the nails are cut and they grow again. The spiritual forces that worked at the up-building and growth of the child have come to an end with the milk teeth, and now other forces or beings begin to work at an up-building for the present incarnation, but with this the deterioration and dying of organs begins immediately. They gradually die, and also every thought that a man thinks causes destruction in brain cells, so that matter is dedicated to slow dying: In Christo morimur. We grow towards the spirit slowly. Our hair becomes white, all our organs pass over into the spirit slowly, our whole body strives towards spiritualization and it'll arise again in the spirit: Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.