The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Report in the Generalanzeiger of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, November 1906.

Theosophical lectures. Dr. Rudolf Steiner of Berlin gave three theosophical lectures at Café Luitpold. The first dealt with the topic: “How do we understand illness and death?” After a general introduction about the theosophical views of the human being, the relationship between the inner life and spiritual forces and the physical body, their gradual manifestation in the different age groups, the speaker explained how the saying is proved: nature has invented death in order to have much life. In further remarks about illness, the lecturer sought to suggest how, in the process of illness, the life force seeks to overcome the disturbing forces of the outside world, the pathogens, and how the process of illness can serve to make the person more and more immune, to strengthen them against the damaging influences of the environment. The speaker also discussed, from his point of view, the effect of poisons on the body and touched on the field of psychotherapy, pointing out how the developed mind can have a healing effect on the body.

In the second lecture, the speaker sought to clarify the principles of a Theosophical education for children, following on from his remarks on the development of the human being. The first seven years of life should naturally be devoted to the development of the physical body, and in particular, one should seek to influence the senses of the child in this age period. The educator should try to take into account the particularly strongly developed imitative instinct of the child. From the age of seven until the onset of puberty, on the other hand, the educator must act authoritatively in order to strengthen the child's character, to build up a solid foundation of good habits in him, to incorporate into his memory a sum of ideas that he will need in life. It is only after the development of the power of judgment in the subsequent period of life that one can dispense with authoritative guidance and work towards the young person's self-determination.

In the third lecture, the speaker discussed the topic: “Blood is a very special juice” (Faust). He believed that this passage should be interpreted as meaning that Goethe really wanted to point out the importance of blood for the human organism and its relationship to the surrounding forces of the outside world, to the old view that with influence over a person's blood, a certain power over the person himself and his inner life was bestowed. Furthermore, he tried to explain how cultural issues are related to blood issues in issues of blood mixing. The lecture, which was received with approval, was followed by a lengthy discussion.

We speak of the mysteries of the world. Fundamentally, man is surrounded by such mysteries [of existence everywhere]; [and] we can ask questions about every thing and every being that lead deep, deep into the depths of life and being. But there are certain individual, particularly towering pillars within this mysteriousness of existence, and among these are undoubtedly those that are designated by the two words that are to be the subject of our consideration today: illness and death.

If life is a mystery to many people – illness and death intrude into this life to make it quite mysterious to us, with death as that which confronts life as its opposite, and illness as a troublemaker. And not only in this respect are these two things mysteries of life, in that they encourage us to reflect, but they are mysterious because they cause us worry, and for many people fear and trepidation. Therefore, we should not be surprised that illness and death have always, since time immemorial, challenged the research instinct of all those who have wanted to reflect on existence, on the world. A long list of great thinkers would have to be cited here if I wanted to tell you everything that has been said about the two concepts of illness and, in particular, death. That cannot be my task. We want to penetrate into these two questions in the sense of spiritual science.

Just so that you can see what a beautiful task awaits us, let us look at a few things that have been taught by important people in order to approach these things more closely. Schopenhauer, the philosopher of pessimism, who reflected on the suffering of life and was touched by it, said that life is an unfortunate thing and that he first wanted to get to the bottom of it by thinking about it. He has put forward a variety of ideas about death. But if we look at them just a little, we see that even a deep thinker can easily fail on these questions. One thing seems grotesque to us: Schopenhauer tried to open up a kind of emotional understanding of humanity towards death. He said: Man is afraid of death. Truly, since life is such a bad thing, he does not need it, because death is a release. If one feels that life is a painful thing, then death is consoling. One can say to oneself, it puts an end to it. — Thus Schopenhauer saw in the bad sides of life a consolation in the face of death, and in death a consolation in the face of the bad thing of life.

In another part of his writings, he attempts to express himself on the necessity of death in a manner that is not so grotesque, but not much more fortunate. There he lets the earth spirit speak. [He says:] I need space for my many living creatures, so I have to clear them away, so I need death. Thus, for the guiding spirit of the earth, death is merely a matter of space.

Eduard von Hartmann says in his last book: It is in the nature of living beings, [and] especially of man.

I would like to point out that today we will only be talking about humans in the sense of spiritual science when it comes to death and illness. The world's mysteries are so diverse, and only those who want to put everything in the same category can apply what has been researched about one thing to something else. For the genuine spiritual researcher, things that appear to be the same, such as illness and death, are so very different for different beings. Hartmann says that man is so constituted that at a certain time in his life he loses his understanding of his environment, and a younger generation must follow that has this understanding. Man would be a stranger within the world if he were not taken away. — You see, again nothing substantial! What are we to make of this?

But one word shines through the ages, which for thousands and thousands of people has contained a kind of solution to the problem of death, albeit a word that is not even understood in its literal sense today; it comes from Paul and is:

Death is the wages of sin. (Rom 6:23)

It is understandable that a person with today's concepts and ideas, who has little knowledge of spiritual science, cannot become familiar with such a word. He has learned to see death and illness as natural processes, and it is completely foreign to him to see something [purely] natural that takes place within the world of purely natural processes as an effect of something moral, of something that depends on the arbitrariness and free will of man, of sin. That something moral can be the cause of something organic is far removed from the thinking of our time. If the apostle's word were correctly understood according to the wording, it would be quite futile to talk about it to our contemporaries. But it is not even understood correctly according to the wording. The Bible is a strange book of secrets, and those who think they understand it best usually penetrate its spirit the least.

We shall gain a better insight into our subject and a better understanding of it if we first try to understand it entirely from the mind of its author and from the thinking of the people from whose circle the Apostle Paul grew, the ancient Hebrew scholars.

In this context, “sin” means something quite different from what we call moral transgression today. And anyone who understands sin in the way that it is understood in today's church doctrine does not understand this word. We arrive at an understanding if we imagine what Paul called a doctrine of development. I would like to tell you about it not in a scholarly way, but only in outline. It is a superstition of modern science that the word “development” was only discovered in the last few centuries. People have always talked and thought about development, about the emergence of the perfect from the imperfect. It is just that the secret scientists of the time from which Paul grew up said: living beings represent a sequence of stages, from the most imperfect being up to the most perfect being. The human organism was literally thought of as a goal towards which all other living beings strive. They become more and more perfect in order to become like the human organism.

But what is the point of the human organism being structured in this way and the other living beings having it as their goal? For Paul, it makes sense that the human body should contain a soul with independence. He said: If a soul is to live, if it can find within itself the impulse to act, to make decisions out of itself, which is expressed in the word “freedom” or “arbitrariness” as a center of the being, then it must have just such a body. Therefore, the whole series of living beings would have to take this path under the influence of this freedom. The human organism is organized in such a way that a free soul can express itself independently within it.

What is an independent soul? Look at the universe, the cosmos. Look at the living beings! They are all connected to their environment; this connection becomes looser the higher we go in the evolutionary scale. The living beings become more independent, and humans are the most independent of all. He confronts the cosmos as a being that can act independently. But he, too, has outgrown this universe. Is it not the case that we can make the whole thing clear to ourselves through a very simple comparison? Take a glass of water; there are many drops in it. Each drop is contained in this mass of water without us being able to distinguish it from the mass. But if you single it out, if it becomes independent, then it presents itself as something independent of the whole, and if it were to develop forces within itself, then we could compare its position to the position of man in the cosmos. As long as the drop is in the whole of the water in it, it expresses those currents that come out of the mass. Having become independent, it has an effect back, like an opposing force on the mass.

It is the same with human beings, that is, to be “independent”. But if everything were to stand out as something special, it would destroy the whole harmony, and it must destroy it if harmony is not found again. Thus, from a certain point of view, the human being does go through the universe, opposing it. In other words, it is rooted in Paul's theory of development that the human being, in order to achieve independence, enters into a kind of hostile relationship with the universe. Paul says: independence and freedom must arise out of egoism. If man had never been led to egoism, he could not become free. A being that was always being led by the hand could never become an egoist and could never become free.

This liberation, which is built on the basis of egoism, this acceptance of selfishness by a being, is what Paul calls sin. For him, selfishness is the original sin. And so it was connected with the being of man, which developed into sin, that a body was organized through which the whole process of development led to this sin. But such a body could not help being mortal because of its detachment. So the essence of man requires a mortal body for its independence. Whoever penetrates into this will see that what has been said completely coincides with Paul's view. And that will give us the mood for what we have to consider.

Another person has also said a beautiful word about death: Goethe. In the essay: “Nature, we are surrounded and embraced by it” — there is also the word: Nature is alive everywhere, it has invented death in order to have much life. — These are to be introductory words to give you an indication of the direction from which we now want to penetrate our topic in the sense of spiritual science.

If we want to understand these two important events of human life, illness and death, we have to look at the essence and nature of the human being; and so, with your permission, I will repeat what this essence of the human being is. I can only do this very briefly. What the naturalistic [materialistic] thinker, the sensory perception, regards as the whole of the human being, his physical body, is for spiritual science only a part of the human being. Man has this physical body in common with all so-called inanimate beings that surround us. In this physical body, all substances and forces are found together, or precisely such forces as are at work out there in the so-called inanimate world. It is the same as the mineral.

At the end of the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was also scientifically accepted to say in a certain direction: That which lives is not merely a combination of substances and forces, but rather that which lives has a special power within itself, which brings the substances and forces of the inanimate world into very specific combinations, brings them into inner activity, kindles them into life; and this was called the vital force. Thus, it was said, humans, animals, and plants have vital force within them. And this makes it so that not only a chemical process takes place in the stomach and in the blood mixture, but that the whole thing is alive. The word “vital force” has become a term that could only be pronounced in the second half of the nineteenth century, and from a certain direction one was regarded as backward, as a fool.

But today, for a number of years, one is not such a great fool [before science] when one utters this word. For those who today consider the somewhat advanced state of the science of life phenomena cannot help but say to themselves: there is more to beings than a mere chemical-physical process. And many are of the opinion that they are speaking of a life force. They know that this is speculation. Spiritual science does not take this speculative point of view. It takes the view that there is a higher experience, that man is able to see more when certain powers slumbering in his soul are awakened. Comparison with the man born blind and the man who has received sight: the one who does not see can never decide whether something is there or not, but the one who sees it can. There is no possibility of speaking of limits to knowledge. For man makes the discovery that he has as many worlds around him as he has organs to perceive them. This is how spiritual science differs from what is called science today: it starts from discussing things that enter our existence as something new through the awakening of organs.

Imagine there is a piano here, a player is playing, and a deaf person is sitting next to it. They cannot hear anything that the player draws from the strings. But there is a method of making them perceptible to him, these things that are happening. You put paper tabs on the strings, they are thrown off by playing, and he can get a certain idea of what the others hear. The relationship between the world of sounds as perceived by the deaf man, who can only hear them indirectly through the little tags, and the world of the hearing, is the same as that between what is investigated within the material world and what can be experienced by those with higher organs. And the only thing that this claims as its assertion is the truth that there have always been people who had such higher organs and saw another world. Not through speculation, but through a higher perception, spiritual science comes upon what it now calls the life body or ether body, similar to the speculated life force. This is what brings the inanimate substances, the mere chemical-physical processes, to life and what man has in common with the plant and animal world.

The third link in the human being is the so-called astral body. It is the carrier of all that we call pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, affects, passions, drives and so on. Plants do not yet have this astral body, only animals and humans. The being that has it relates to the outside world differently. Today, even scholars often blur the difference between plants and animals by saying that plants also have certain sensations, and [they] refer to the fact that certain plants contract their leaves when a stimulus is applied. This is amateurish talk compared to spiritual science. If it only mattered that a being responds with a movement from within when it is stimulated, one could also claim that blotting paper, which absorbs ink, is a sentient being.

These are things that, because they occur, are highly dangerous because they confuse the senses of man when they are put forward by authorities, as they are today. What is true is only that what belongs to feeling is a reflection of the external stimulus, not what only moves and gives an answer. Not only must the being do something under the influence of a stimulus, but a reflection of the stimulus must take place in the innermost being. Not only must the tip of a needle touch us and we must defend ourselves against it, but the pricking must be linked to an inner process - pain or pleasure; that is part of it. A being that has such inner processes has an astral body. Man has this in common with the animal.

Man has become the pride of creation by being able to say “I” to himself. The “I”, that power that enables him to do so - let us say the “ego body” - is the fourth link in the human being, so that we initially recognize four links in the human being. We can disregard the higher links. We will understand the conditions that arise in the course of a human life, as well as illness and death, if we get to know the relationships between these four members a little better. Both today's lecture and tomorrow's are based on a correct presentation of the different members of the human being. We can do this by following human development. This can only be done sketchily here; it is intended as a suggestion.

We start from the physical birth of the human being and realize what this represents. Before this birth, the human germ is closed off from the outside world. It rests in the mother's body; the physical human body is surrounded on all sides by another physical matter, and birth means that this enveloping matter is pushed back and that which has developed as organs in the human body is directly exposed to the external physical world. Thus, physical birth is a pushing back of the physical shell and a free emergence of the human body into the physical environment.

Spiritual science does not just speak of this birth of man, but also of others; and this must be understood. Until this physical birth, the physical human body is surrounded by an outer physical shell that nourishes and protects it, sending its juices into it. What happens to the physical human body until physical birth happens to the etheric body until a certain point in human development. Even after the human being has been physically born, the etheric body is still enveloped by a protective motherly shell of etheric matter for the initiate. When the human being is physically born, he is not yet born eterally.

The birth of the etheric body does not take place as quickly as the physical birth; it happens gradually; little by little [the etheric body pushes the etheric covers away from itself, little by little] it emerges, at the time when the young person is undergoing the so-called change of teeth, towards the seventh year. Just as the physical body is surrounded by the physical sheath until physical birth, so the etheric body is surrounded by the protective etheric sheath until the birth of the etheric body. For spiritual science, the change of teeth is something very similar to the physical birth as seen from the outside.

And when the etheric body is born, the astral body has not yet lost its protective shell; and a third birth takes place. The third birth of the protective shell takes place in a similar way to the reining back of the etheric shell with the maturing of the human being in a sexual way, with sexual maturity. This is a third birth. Just as the physical body is exposed on all sides to physical impressions, so the etheric body in its nature and the astral body in its nature are exposed to their external world.

We have to take these facts of [spiritual science] as a basis if we want to understand human development. Therefore, we will recognize that the time from birth to the seventh year is a particularly important one for the development of the physical body. Not because the physical body does not develop afterwards. But the physical body develops in a very specific direction up to the seventh year, to a very specific point. [And] something happens in terms of physical human development that is characteristic: this is the hardening, [the] consolidation of the physical body. The human physical body is characterized by undergoing a process of hardening. The solid parts that serve as its support are bones. And from the softest parts to the solid bone system, there is a process of solidification, and this process of solidification goes through its main characteristics up to the seventh year; and the change of teeth, the acquisition of one's own teeth, is the conclusion of the solidification. There the power of solidification has reached its conclusion, has put out what it can work into the physical body in terms of solidification.

This is important. One must realize that this working into the solid structure happens more and more, and with the pushing out of one's own teeth, it reaches a kind of conclusion. The power that gives us teeth works within us. The previous teeth are inherited; what lies within us, in our own personality, in terms of creative power, is expressed [in the end] in our own teeth. When this point has been reached, the life force at work in the human being no longer has the constraint that it would have to have. Now the etheric body pushes back the protective etheric covering, becomes free and works differently. Now it mainly does the things in the body alone that are its task: growth, enlargement of the body and so on, whereas before it was busy creating forms. Now what is predisposed is increased. Now, in fact, until sexual maturity, the etheric body is the dominant factor in human development, the etheric body that has become free. It again puts a full stop, it pushes the power of forming, of growing, to the point where growth transcends itself.

Just as the power of solidification has been fulfilled in the teeth, so the power of the etheric body, in the maturing individual, reaches its potential in the moment of sexual reproduction. And at that moment the astral body is born. It is now free, no longer constrained. Human development is indeed so complicated when we look at the four elements that compose it.

We must now realize how these limbs, [whether they are more or less bound as] before the individual births; [or whether] they are free, [how they actually work in man]. First, let us look at the etheric body. We see that the etheric body is that which works in the human being, the power of growth, nutrition, reproduction; the etheric body is the carrier of this.

But that which brings the human being into a relationship with his surroundings, [which] enables him to enter into an interaction, that is his astral body.

While the etheric body of the human being works mainly within, enlarging the organs, working from [within] outwards in reproduction, the astral body is what is there to make the outside accessible to the inside and connect it to it. This happens all the time. Every ray of light, every piece of nourishment that a person takes in, is an interaction between the person's inner being and the outside world. The regulator is the astral body, and essentially the relationship is regulated by needs, by pleasure and pain, by desire. What a person desires, he appropriates, and the faculty of desire is the expression of the astral body. [This is what man demands of his environment.] You see, then, that man fulfills various tasks through his limbs. This now requires a significant distinction to be made with regard to the limbs in the whole of human life. This distinction will become clear to us when we consider the nature of sleep. When a person sleeps, all desire and suffering, all interaction with the outside world, everything that the astral body conveys, has sunk down. No sensible person will say that a person decays in the evening and is reborn in the morning. His astral body is there, but not as it is during the day. While during the day this astral body dwells in the physical body and allows the things of the outside world to flow out through the organs of the physical body and processes them, at night it is separated from the physical body, it does not touch the physical body. This is not the case with the etheric body. What it has to do continues during sleep.

When a person sleeps, the physical body and the etheric body lie in bed. The astral body with the ego has stepped out. What does this astral body do at night? If we look at this, it sheds light on the nature of the entire human activity in the world. The spiritual scientist knows that the astral body, if it remains within the physical body, could never remove that which finds its expression in fatigue. Call it an accumulation of fatigue substances or something else, it is there and must be removed. Where does the fatigue come from? How is it removed?

Fatigue is a by-product of what the astral body does in the physical body. As long as the astral body is in the physical body and uses the physical organs, the physical body will tire; and as long as the astral body is in the physical body, it cannot get rid of the fatigue. It must go out and work on the physical body from the outside, and this work takes place at night when the person is asleep. Then the seer sees the astral body working on the physical body and removing the fatigue. This is the source of the refreshing effect of healthy sleep. There is something healing about sleep. What is worn out in the physical body – the physical body is used by the astral body like a machine – all this is removed. An astral body that works on the physical body from the outside works to repair it; an astral body in the physical body consumes it; even destroys it within certain limits.

This is related to another phenomenon about which a man who is little known today said a great deal: Paracelsus. He knew the essence of sleep, but he knew something else as well. He realized that something special happens to this astral body when it emerges. It will become clear to us through a comparison. Imagine a vessel of water; there is water inside. Take a small sponge that can hold a drop and throw this sponge into the water, and it soaks up a drop. It used to be in all the water; now it is outside.

This is how it is in fact with the relationship between the astral body and the physical body. The astral body is not something that is original and separate from something greater. There is a mighty astral body, which is the astral body of our entire planet, and this astral body is like the mass of water in the vessel. The physical body is like the little sponge. When we are awake, the physical body has the astral body within it, and then it has separated a drop for itself from the astral sea, and this drop of the earth spirit works separately from the rest of the earth's astral body; and that is why it has an eroding effect during the day, it has to erode. Imagine a finger, separate it, and in a short time it will wither. Why? Because this finger must be connected to the whole life process, to the whole astral process, if it is to exist, and because the drop of astral mass that remains in the finger cannot lead its own life as a detached drop. The human being's astral body can do this to a certain extent, but it needs to return from time to time to draw strength from the entire astral body; this happens at night.

Thus, every human astral body connects with the entire astral body of the earth at night. This is why Paracelsus says: At night, man rests in the whole womb of spiritual nature and absorbs that harmony which has been destroyed during the day. — Thus we see that when a part is rejected from the spiritual world, it must return to gather strength there. In the state of separation, the astral body consumes the physical body.

Let us look at the ether body in relation to this. It is in the same position, it is also a piece of the general ether mass. But it does not return at night, and remains united with the physical body until death; it has a wearing effect on the physical body. The latter has drawn it out and made it independent, like the sponge and the drop of water. But now independent, the etheric body wears away the physical body, and this process of wear and tear is the life process of an individual being.

Now we can say: From the moment when this etheric body is born, when it emerges as an independent entity, it is completely independent and draws on the physical body. It draws in the way you can make clear by means of a comparison. Imagine a piece of wood that is burning; there is never a flame without a piece of wood. Just as the flame is released from the wood, so the etheric body is released from the physical body at the end of the seventh year; it shines like a flame. Just as the flame consumes the wood, just as it consumes its nourishment, so the etheric body consumes the physical body.

Until the etheric body has brought its own power to the final point at sexual maturity, until that time it replaces in some way what it has consumed. But at the end, it has nothing more to add, so it draws on the physical body. And a being that could not replace from any other side [what the ether body consumes, which in turn could not supply the ether body with new strength] would have to die when it reaches sexual maturity. In the animal world, there are such beings. How is it then that in the case of human beings the etheric body [after sexual maturity] receives further strength to grow? Because with sexual maturity the astral body is born, and this is now in a period of free growth.

What is this astral body? It is the forces accumulated by the person from a previous incarnation. The more capital a person has accumulated, the more they have to invest; and the more strength they have for their astral body, the longer their ascending line of life will last. The astral body rises; the time that expresses itself externally in the life of a person, morally, begins with sexual maturity. The human being is full of ideals, his longing goes beyond the measure of his reflection. All a sign that there is excess power in him. That is the excess power of his astral body.

Just as the physical body grows until the second dentition changes, and the etheric body until sexual maturity, so the astral body grows until mid-life. If you, as a clairvoyant, could measure the power that the astral body contains and distribute it over the years, you would be able to calculate mid-life. Because at that moment, when the astral body has given back everything that was put into it, has developed, then the middle of life has arrived. At that point, the astral body begins to consume. It consumes itself. Now the time comes when ideals fade, when man is no longer full of hope, when prudence sets in, when the astral body looks more to its surroundings, to experiences, whereas before it drew from within in the ascending current. The ideals of the young man, born from within, often do not correspond to the external. Then the time comes when harmony is established, and now he has the descending line. What the astral body has produced earlier is gradually used up, and then, when the astral body has used up itself, it begins to draw on the ether body, then it takes the strength from the ether body.

You may know that the etheric body is not only the seat of growth and so on, but also of memory, habits and temperaments. You see, just as the astral body begins to consume the forces of the etheric body from a certain point in life, so it later uses up the qualities we have just described. Memory begins to weaken and so on, and when the powers of the etheric body are consumed, what then? Then it goes to the physical body. This is then no longer able to work on itself, it ceases to stir up the life process within itself.

As long as the physical body can still enjoy the powers of the ether body, it processes what comes from outside to strengthen itself. When the ether body can no longer do this, substances are still absorbed from the outside, but are no longer integrated organically. Now the opposite of what happened earlier takes place. Whereas the substances that were taken in were integrated organically, now they are merely deposited like physical ballast substances in the tendons, in the soft parts of the human being, so that these harden; the bones become harder and harder. The physical body is actually consumed in the descending life. Just as the astral body can be born through the etheric body like a flame from wood, so the astral body first consumes itself like a flame from wood, then the etheric body, and then the physical body. What life has brought forth, what life has brought out, is at the same time what consumes this life. Just as the flame would not be without the wood, so the life of the astral body would not be, nor would consciousness, nor pleasure and pain, without the etheric and physical bodies. But just as the flame consumes the wood, so the independent life consumes its basis, the physical body. Therefore, death is not a process that takes place outside of life; rather, it is produced by life itself. This is the main thing we must realize: we could not have life at all if this life did not give birth to death.

Another thing is that the astral body is the mediator of everything that can come in from outside. If this is to happen, it must be appropriated by the physical body through the process of life. What does that mean? Light approaches us; if it were not for light, we would have no eyes. It is the same with everything that arises from the interaction of the physical body with the environment. The physical body appropriates the external environment and transforms it into organs. We transform the elements into organs when the life process is ascending.

We have to consider the following fact. A certain tribe in Africa that hunts needs certain dogs for hunting. Now there lives a poisonous fly there, the tsetse fly; it stings the hunting dogs, and they perish. Now, as so often, the “savages” have come up with something extraordinarily clever – spiritual science is familiar with the processes. This “savage” tribe now takes its hunting dog to the areas where the poisonous fly is found, just at the time when the dog can give birth to her puppies before she dies from the bite. The puppies are now immune; they can be stung and yet not die. This is an example of the adoption of an external aspect of the internal life process in the ascending line of life. Where life rekindles, where it passes through to the point of inner illumination, where the life process is re-established, it takes the poison within itself, integrates it and makes the organism strong against the poison.

This is basically how our organs came into being in the body. In ancient times, when there was no eye, a ray of sunlight fell on the skin; something like a small pain could be felt. The light had to integrate and the life process digested the light, appropriated it, transformed it into an eye, so that man had an eye to face the light.

This is how man interacts with his environment. This is to suggest that through external influences, which occur by means of the astral body, the physical body of man is organized as a receptive being that integrates the outside world; and the extent to which one can integrate the outside world gives pleasure, joy, desire. Where joy and desire are healthy, they are nothing more than the expression of a need, and that is the most reliable indicator of the life process. This can be seen in children. If their original instincts for nourishment are corrupted, they have no instinct for what is good for them. For example, if you overfeed a child with eggs from an early age, you will notice that this child loses the security of the food instinct. If not, the child is always ready to reject what is harmful to it and to want exactly what is beneficial to it. Such a child is much less exposed to damage to the organism. Too much protein is harmful.

So you see how desire is the measure for the life process itself. The life process is entirely under the influence of desire. But this also enables the human being to go beyond the measure of enjoyment and need. In order for life to be maintained, need must arise. Without hunger, life could not be maintained. Enjoyment is the concomitant of satiety. This is always the case where the external world is appropriated.

Because enjoyment is the concomitant of the life process, it can go beyond in terms of the appropriation of external substances. And so what it appropriates becomes a destroyer because it goes beyond measure; and there you have what predisposes the disease process through the activity of the astral body. Of course, we must not believe that this simply happens because it is expressed in the life between birth and death. Certainly, every excess has a destructive effect on this one life, and all moderation has a beneficial effect; but this happens to a greater extent beyond death. Here we must again consider the idea of reincarnation. The destructive forces, which are not yet harmful in life, are taken along into the next life, so that debauchery in one life means a disposition to illness in the next.

These are the most important foundations of illness. From this you can see how things are connected, but you can also see that what are actually internal causes of illness are necessarily linked to the life process, that they really arise from it. And now you will understand that we make our body stronger when we bring it into such interaction with the outside world in the ascending life process that it acquires something. This makes it strong against disease. We do not need to investigate other causes of disease. These are the ones that have less significance for life.

You know that today the bacillus plague does not only consist of being infected by it, but also of looking for the bacilli everywhere. This bacillus plague actually comes into consideration only in the second place in relation to spiritual science. Being invaded by bacilli is no different than being shot through with a bullet. In this case, the organism is so badly destroyed that the ether organism can no longer compensate for the destruction. As long as it is not destroyed, this ether organism also has the ability to compensate. The more it is connected with the ether, the more it has the power of compensation. You can cut up a polyp, and a new polyp will arise from each piece, because the etheric body of the polyp is still connected to the whole - [from which it can draw power, because in every drop of the etheric body there is the same power as in the whole] - and the connection still exists. Insofar as the etheric body becomes independent, it must lose this power. If, therefore, independence is at the same time a growth in relation to the impossibility of overcoming disturbances of the organism, then you have the Pauline sentence in a modern form: selfishness is the cause of destruction and death, and death is the wages of sin (Rom. 6:23). It is to be understood only in this sense. But someone may say: Yes, but is it compatible with the wise process of the world? Yes, if there were no possibility of illness, the great incentive for the etheric organism to become strong in order to grow by overcoming the illness would be missing. The etheric body emerges strengthened from every illness it has overcome. When germs attack us, it is important that we have a strong etheric body to overcome them. And does not the etheric body, precisely because it is forced to become an overcomer in the illness, give rise to higher forms of the etheric body? Yes, it develops itself upwards through this. Therefore, it can be said that illness is like the pearl oyster and the pearl; the noble pearl emerges from an illness of the oyster. Many things in the world have emerged as higher forms by building themselves on the basis of a process of destruction.

All this makes us understand, in a certain forceful way, illness and death. We can understand that we could not have life as we have it; if this life did not itself provoke death; as one could not have the flame if the fuel were not destroyed. Certain increases, intensifications are not possible without the possibility of illness. Sometimes strong health is the result of illness. Perhaps you will say: nature is healthy in all its parts, and even if it gives disease, it gives it to have much and strong life. In any case, it is clear that nature is everywhere, and it has, that is true, invented death in order to have much life, to have strong life, to have life. Because this can only exist if it creates death as its opposite pole.

Personalities such as Franz Brentano, whose life's work was touched upon in the last essay, give cause to turn our attention to the cultural forces of the entire age. For that which develops in the lives of such people emerges from the cultural currents of that age. In a sense, these people feel more intensely what is also happening more or less unconsciously in their fellow human beings. But in the end, the whole of social life is made up of these unconscious processes.

Now one of the most striking phenomena in Brentano's life is his contrast to Friedrich Nietzsche. This also comes to light quite clearly in Brentano's “The Teaching of Jesus.” There is a very short chapter in this book in which the question is asked as to how Nietzsche compares to the personality of Jesus. The fact that Brentano raises such a question is characteristic. Anyone who has the same relationship to Jesus the Christ as—according to the explanations in the last essay—Brentano could not have, but which arises from an anthroposophical understanding, will certainly not pose this question as Brentano does. That such a serious seeker of truth even comes to this question shows a deeply held antipathy towards Nietzsche's whole way of thinking. This is also betrayed by the fact that Brentano calls Nietzsche a belletristicly dazzling mayfly.

Here we shall not go into the relationship that Brentano, in his way, finds between Jesus and Nietzsche, but only into Brentano's absolute rejection of the whole of Nietzsche's way of thinking.

As understandable as this rejection may be for someone who knows the natures of both personalities, it is just as significant as an expression of a significant phenomenon of our time: the lack of understanding in general with which people today can face each other, who draw their education from the culture of the time.

Some will say that such a phenomenon is self-evident and has been so at all times. For man develops according to his individuality; and so what is the fashion of the times must appear in one person in one way and in another in another. That is true; and it is certainly not the philistine point of view that it would be best if people were the faceless imprints of a general cultural template. But anyone who looks at certain social facts of today's life with an open mind can see that an immense amount will depend on an understanding accommodation of the most diverse individual views for the progress of civilized humanity, especially in the near future. And such a man will have the gravest misgivings about this progress if he has to observe how a sharply defined individuality not only vigorously defends its own, but also fills itself with mere rejection of another sharply defined individuality, instead of the understanding that is so necessary today, even for the most opposing schools of thought.

One can see how Nietzsche's inner direction of life emerges from very similar foundations as Brentano's. The latter starts from Catholicism and turns his thinking in such a way that he ends up in a scientific attitude. From this he finds no way out into an understanding of the spiritual world-being. Nietzsche starts from Greek culture, whose artistic impulse he finds again in Richard Wagner. Philosophically, he organizes what he has formulated as a world view by drawing on Schopenhauer. It can be said that Nietzsche, who is only a few years younger than Brentano, stands at the beginning of the 1770s of the last century before the emerging scientific way of thinking, as Brentano did a few years earlier. The latter as a devoutly doubting Catholic, the former as a devoutly doubting advocate of an antique-style artistic wisdom. And Nietzsche falls for the scientific view that does not want to ascend to the spirit by embracing knowledge, just like Brentano.

In “Human-All-Too-Human,” in “Morgentöte,” Nietzsche descends from the soul to the physiological for the knowledge of the human being, which the natural scientific direction of the times allows. Only the personal orientation is different for the two. Brentano wants to scientifically establish all truth according to the model of contemporary natural knowledge. In doing so, he cannot reach the region of spiritual world-being, which he nevertheless strives for. This region, as it were, withdraws before what he can grasp scientifically. Nietzsche has before his soul the moral ideals of man. He learns to think scientifically. What had previously appeared as purely spiritual-soul ideal becomes the result of what arises out of the powers of the body. The human body works physiologically in the most comprehensive sense. It also forms the ideas and ideals as a result. For Nietzsche it becomes a life-lie if one regards the matter in this way, that the ideals are rooted in an independent spiritual world. This spiritual world is the fog that appears as independent to the blinded man, but to the knower it is a physiological striving for power that masquerades as an independent spiritual world.

Brentano forges his cognitive tool with the scientific methodology of his time. It becomes fine in the dissection of the soul, but it becomes dull in the face of the great world facts of mental life. Nietzsche forms his tool with the scientific way of thinking; it becomes robust to tap the soul everywhere in its bodily-physiological disguise; but it becomes a hammer that crushes the independent world of the spirit.

The effect of the scientific age was so personally different in Brentano and Nietzsche. But the cause for both was the submerging into the contemporary scientific way of thinking.

Two personalities, each of whom has made a significant impression on other people, show what is a general phenomenon of today: people do not live together, but apart. Only a conscious ascent into the spiritual worlds can have a healing effect. These are uniform for all people. They do not suppress individuality. People can, however, speak of them in the most diverse ways, according to their personal impressions. And prejudiced minds then say that because different people say different things about spiritual worlds, everything is uncertain. But the diversity stems only from the points of view from which they are seen. The spiritual reality that is recognized is a unity. And that is why the person who ascends to the spirit finds the other person in his soul. Brentano has only rejection for Nietzsche, although he is so close to him through the fate that befalls both of them through their immersion in the scientific way of thinking.

Recognition of the spiritual world will bring understanding of the human being; doubt in the paths of knowledge into the spiritual breaks the bridges from soul to soul.

The Bible, the New Testament and also the Old Testament are both written in figurative esoteric language and contain truths in allegories. The New Testament is written down later. The way of communication by writing is not an old one; still in the beginning of the Christian development one thought to profane the holiness of the teachings by writing them down. Earlier church fathers - an Origen, a Clement of Alexandria - considered what they wrote down to be only one tenth as important as the living word. Something living, immediate was sought in the Word, which is not to be found in the Scriptures. One writes for someone undefined and writes for those whom one does not know. Spoken was out of the needs of the congregation, which often had occult preliminary studies. In Ephesus one spoke differently than in Corinth; in Jewish churches differently than in Gentile churches. For earlier church teachers were filled with the occult principle of being tolerant. They knew that Christianity could be drawn out of the various religions. Now these speeches were rewritten, often later from memory, so the literal cannot always be taken strictly. But they have an occult power which acts on people, and with fidelity they reproduce sayings of a depth which can only be an expression of what is called the highest wisdom. [... ]

As long as occultism was at the bottom of religion, the stone kingdom was regarded as that which is most perfect; the plant has only a small part of Kama in itself, but it has it nevertheless; animal and man are filled with it; the chaste, desireless of the crystal was put up as an ideal to the disciple; the human intellect serves desire, concupiscence; it is therefore not perfect at its present stage, it serves the special being, while the mineral emerges from the general nature and dissolves into the general. As the emblem of man striving for understanding, one has considered the serpents - Naga - who brought understanding to men, [they were] therefore called seducers, since they brought with understanding the freedom to choose between good and evil.

It was wisdom of God that man possessed before middle of Lemurian race - symbol: sun. Human wisdom after the middle of the Lemurian race - symbol: snake. This passed to the uninitiated teachers: Ophites - worshippers of snakes, Christian Gnostic sect. Within the Jews, Pharisees and Sadducees were such teachers of worldly wisdom, Nagas.

Whoever was initiated in Judaism was called a prophet. This human wisdom had to be transformed again into divine wisdom. Therefore, Christ had to confront the Pharisees and Sadducees - the serpents; and John, his forerunner, had to reject the Pharisees and Sadducees accordingly.

The occult wisdom was taught to those who would become Christians; but in pictures, proverbs. This is clear from the Gospels themselves. The intellectual wisdom of the Pharisees was to be overcome by a new wisdom of God. The Christ incarnated in a man was to teach as occultism. The stones are perfected in their nature, not yet the astral and mental. Therefore, people should evolve upward and make their other bodies as perfect as the physicalmineral. <"To create children from stones", this means. [...]

All preceding life is a lesson for the following one; and indeed we must carry over into the future what is special in each realm; only by gathering the fruits of the physical world come over into the others. Therefore, if one should create a model, then in this also exemplarily the preservation of the essential - the bone structure - of the physical had to be indicated as preserved.

The luminous incarnation of the Christ forms the cosmic model. When he exemplified to men what they had to do, he could not point them to their astral body, to their mental. This had to be removed. Blood - etheric body - and water - astral - flow out by stabbing him in the side. The bone system corresponds to the physical. So, if what really corresponds to the human being in the physical should be taken over, the bone skeleton had to be taken over. The mineral is in man the already good, perfect; the best he must take over with all his strength into the other world. The initiate was told, "His bones must not be broken.

It is one of the deepest symbols, this not breaking the bones. He who does not want to fall into the eighth sphere must - like the bee the honey - carry the physical over into the other world.

[Let us now come to] Prometheus, that Greek mythical hero who fetches fire from heaven, while Zeus wanted to deprive mankind of freedom. Fire is the most important force in our present culture. With the Atlantians it was the life force. Only when people could no longer control the living, they tried to become masters of the inanimate through fire. Prometheus is the initiator, who at the important moment gave to the people what became their most important means of culture. The fifth root race was created from the fifth subrace of the fourth root race, the Ursemites, and a separated part was brought to the desert Gobi and Shamo. From this arose as the second subrace the Persians.

Zarathustra gave them the fire service, and the sacrificial fire was offered as thanksgiving to Manu, the leader. The Manu himself, who led over to the deserts of Gobi and Shamo, has held the Greek saga in Prometheus; and now Prometheus has to suffer his heavy punishment, because by the intellectuality the infinite sufferings are caused. The striving humanity can be redeemed by what? Again by an initiate, Heracles is an initiate - descends into the underworld. Everywhere we find similar Prometheus sagas, with the remarkable addition that through spiritual wisdom, through an initiate, comes redemption. On higher planes the truths take place. Reality is the expression of a higher fact. The physical lance is the expression for a higher truth, which takes place on other planes. Not mysticism is Christianity, but fact, but as fact mystic. For a long time nothing can happen in these lines, and thereby again the facts crowd together. Occult sentence: It is below everything like above. Above, a spiritual phase takes the place of the intellectual one: The Nagas, Pharisees are fought by spiritual teachers.

There are certain expressions that have been in use in all secret schools since ancient times to hide certain facts from the profane. For example, the expression 'on the mountain'. It means the 'interior of the temple', where the secret school is located and the secret disciple is initiated into certain things. “Jesus went up into the mountain,” that is to say, he led them into the interior of his mystery school and expounded what he had taught in parables before the multitude.

The Sermon on the Mount, with its tremendous and momentous significance, could only be expounded to the disciples, not to the people. It is secret because it contains tremendously significant demands. The very first sentence reads:

“Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” [Matt. 5,3]

Blessed means to be 'blessed'; those who will ascend from the physical to the spiritual, who long for the spirit; the Kingdom of Heaven springs from within them. There are 3 x 3 beatitudes, 9. The number nine, which through certain manipulations can be reduced to seven, is a holy number.

Three virtues that correspond to the lower nature are: longing, suffering and peace. Through longing we are drawn up; through suffering we overcome and come to peace.

The second group of virtues, those that lead upwards, are: justice, kindness and a benevolent heart. If we compare this second group with the first, we find that the first group relates to the individual, while the others relate to our fellow human beings.

Thirdly, there are the virtues that lead upwards to the higher beings. First, by being tolerant; only to be acquired through strict self-discipline – peaceableness. He who speaks to offend another, to say what pleases him, cannot find the way to higher entities. The second is to be strict against oneself and to suffer persecution for the sake of one's righteousness; to take upon oneself any persecution for the sake of righteousness. Third, to declare oneself a disciple of the Master.

These 3 x 3 virtues are now expounded in detail in the Beatitudes.

“Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” [Matt. 5,4]

Peace is found by the one who draws from the realm of the earth whatever can be had, but does not covet.

The Lord saw something rhythmic in the number nine and had to impress it on the disciples.

An even more magnificent example of being on the mountain is the transfiguration. It is said that the disciples came into a kind of special state, of heightened consciousness. 'A cloud overshadowed them.' This is the suggestion of devachanic clairvoyance, where the past and future disappear so that they see the three of them side by side. Jesus reveals to them the secret meaning of his basic saying: The Way is what is first revealed to man. It is also called 'Elias' – 'Elias', who shows the way. 'Moses' is also called 'truth' in the secret teaching. It is Moses insofar as he received the commandments; he sets the goal. Christ is the life-awakening example: life. The great religious founders – Zoroaster, Buddha, Hermes – gave teachings. What Christ taught was not the new thing that mattered, but that he lived it, that is what matters. – You are not to entrust it to anyone until the Christ comes to life in his own soul.

Another secret became clear, that of the returning Elijah in John the Baptist; he taught reincarnation here in its entirety. That he did not teach it outwardly has its good reason in the task of Christianity: to sanctify the personality. — In ancient times, people said to themselves: This life is one of many that I endure here, will benefit me later — Egypt, laborers. Now people should learn to appreciate the individual life, to recognize its full value; Christianity is 1900 years old; all people have gone through it once. Because about one reincarnation time has passed, the reincarnation doctrine is now being taught again. Once people felt the value of the individual life. Now they have to return to the higher self.

The most profound, mystical gospel is the Gospel of John. According to research by Protestant theologians, it is the latest, written 150 years later. This is based on the lack of writing in the beginning. Who is the writer of this gospel? We do not find the name John anywhere. Only the designation “the disciple whom the master loves”. In the secret language, this means: one who has been initiated by the master himself. Who was at the cross? Jesus' mother, Mary, her sister. Nowhere does it say that the mother's name was Mary. Let us read about the wedding at Cana. “Woman, what do I have to do with you?” Let us read further at the crucifixion: “Woman, behold your son.” All this can only be understood by the researcher of secrets: the people of an initiate are referred to as his mother. At the same time, he has outgrown his people, he arises from them but grows beyond them. Here we, as 'mother', must understand the Jewish people. Mary of Magdala represents the part of the people who believe in him because of his miracles; 'Cleophas' wife' represents the part of the people who feel Jewish. But he has outgrown the part of the Jewish people that forms a common basis, which had already absorbed Alexandrian wisdom, which was not limited to Palestine; this is the own mother from whom Jesus has grown out; the disciple is to take her to himself. Thus the Gospel of John spreads the truth on a Jewish-Alexandrian basis – Jews in the diaspora – in the learned form. This mother had become nameless, scattered throughout the world. Wedding = festivity. Symbol of transformation for the old religion, which was water, into the wine of the new covenant. He is founding something new, but his hour has not yet come. Therefore: 'Woman, what do I have to do with you?'

Who is the disciple whom Jesus loved?

The 'Wedding at Cana' is only found in the Gospel of John because it is one of the deepest secrets that Jesus entrusts to the disciple to whom he has initiated. Does he say at any point that he has been initiated? Yes. The story of the miracle of Lazarus is only found here. It is an initiation. Here the disciple whom Jesus loves presents himself. Until then, there is no mention of the disciple whom Jesus loves; only afterwards. The one who is awakened in this way is above the personal, needs no name. He also knows in the highest sense who Christ is: the Incarnate Logos. All Egyptian theosophy is here: the Word is what comes from an earlier development, arupic; life is the Rupic; the light is the astral; it shines in the darkness - the earthly. One comes to the literal interpretation of the Gospels indirectly, after receiving the key.

“Let us not rend the garment.” The garments are the various coverings; they can be divided except where the high priestly dignity is concerned. An initiate will distinguish himself from others by being absolutely tolerant, never pushing his opinion to the fore, but waiting until the facts speak. — [John in] “Chapter 20”.

Thus the Gospel of John contains not only words, but deeds that give life everywhere.

First we show how ancient are the findings - usually facts still reaching into ancient times - which surround us daily. Example of the days of the week written out of the "face" and on the other hand taken out of the cosmos.

Man consists of seven principles, four of which are already formed, three are in the process of becoming. When he is conscious of his temporal development, he must think of the number 7, of the ratio of 3 and 4. Man should keep this in mind every day, this is what the occultists wanted. From this ratio of 4 to 7 the days of the week are brought down from heaven. The ancients thought of the cosmos this way: earth, moon, Mercury, Venus, sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.

With the Copernican [system], however, it is not true. It behaves with it as follows: It depends on where you stand. Copernicus assumed: How do the celestial bodies move if you take the sun as the center? The ancients: How, if one assumes the earth as center? It depends only on the perspective.

The ancient occult astrologers have said: every day has four main times of the day. These are to remind man of his four lower principles. Now they have taken the ratio of 4 to 7 and written it down seven times. We start from the morning and go from the sun, consecrate the first day to the sun; [the ancients] went around and around the cycle until the 7 was over. Now they named each of these days after its morning: from the morning consecrated to each planet is taken the day of the week. This gives:

[Morning - Moon = Monday
Afternoon - Mercury
Morning night - Venus
Afternoon night - Sun

Morning - Mars = Tuesday - Tin
Afternoon - Jupiter
Morning night - Saturn
Afternoon night - Moon

Morning - Mercury = Wednesday, Mercury Day, Wednesday - Wotan
Afternoon - Venus
Morning night - Sun
Afternoon night - Mars

Morning - Jupiter = Thursday - Donar -, Jupiter day afternoon - Saturn mid-morning night - Moon mid-night - Mercury

Morning - Venus = Friday, Venus day
Afternoon - Sun
Morning night - Mars
Afternoon night - Jupiter

Morning - Saturn = Saturday, Saturn day, Saturday
Afternoon - Moon
Morning night - Mercury
Afternoon night - Venus

Morning - Sun = Sunday
Afternoon - Mars
Morning night - Jupiter
Afternoon night - Saturn]

The division of time should have a meaning, not erwas indefinite remain. He should not live an hour without inserting himself into the whole universe, because man is born of the universe and is connected with it through each of his organs.

When a shot is fired somewhere and the wave vibrations are created, they come to the generation of consciousness through the ear. It is set up to perceive vibrating air, and would have no purpose if there were no vibrating air. Therefore, the occultist said: It is clear that there were no such organs before there was air. Therefore, the element of air is related to the sensory tool of the ear. Therefore, he researched the connection between element and sense. To every element belongs a sense. The perception of sound belongs earlier than the ear - because man could perceive earlier with the ether-ear. In the ether-ear there has been a much infinitely finer sound; and another tool, another organ of perception existed in the first race, which transformed itself in the second race to the present ear. Likewise it has gone with other organs.

The first element that is present around us is the earth, the solid. The second element is water, which in physics is called the liquid. The third element is fire, the fourth is air, the fifth is ether. To these five elements the human sense tools stand in a quite certain relationship. To the earth the sense of the smell. Before there was a solid, there could be no sense of smell. The sons of fire mist and water did not have it. Only what evaporates as a solid can be smelled.

The water is mystically related to the sense of taste. Fire to the face. Air to feeling, the ether to hearing. As the first root race was, the ether passed into air, and there the finer sense of hearing, which the people had in the beginning, changed into the physical sense, and at the same time the sense of feeling, which was perceptible only as temperature - sense of warmth, arose. As the sense of warmth was then, there is no organ today, it has atrophied. Out of the opening in the skull stood a funnel-shaped organ - now pineal gland, which he stretched out. Gradually, the sense of warmth becomes more physical and - the fire mist time comes - transforms into an organ that can perceive not only warm and cold, but light and dark, and also color differences: an eye, sense of sight.

When the water time begins, this one sense of sight is still present - Cyclops. Then gradually a new one had joined the sense of sight: the sense of taste; and at the same time, how the water condenses, how it becomes . As long as man lived in the air, there was no possibility of seeing distances. Only with the solidification of the earth the necessity to perceive distances begins. You can perceive distances only if you have two eyes, they behave like a stereoscope, make things physical, round them. - With one eye you would see things as if painted on a wall. - This is caused by the intersection of the eye axes. Two eyes are formed instead of the one frontal eye. Approximately in the last Lemurian time.

Through this also the ability is formed to adapt the sense of feeling to what is perceived as distance. And last of all, the sense of smell is formed in the Atlantean period.

So we have an ever-increasing solidification in the development of the earth and with it a formation of the corresponding five senses.

Even earlier, before man had the sense of hearing of the ether, he had another. In truth, we have seven elements, two even higher and finer elements than ether: the divine fire - and still higher = Akasha.

In the future, the senses will change in the same way. And as now the sense of hearing is the highest, still higher ones will arise. The sense of hearing is already in development. During the Atlantean time language has developed; in the very last Lemurian subrace it began. The first speaking was only an expression of desire and displeasure. The sensation sound gradually connects itself with the being that evokes a feeling, and thus the designation language gradually emerges.

First feelings, objects, then mental images, and lastly only (so rightly with the Ursemites) abstract thoughts were designated.

Similarly, the sense of feeling will continue to change and acquire a new ability to perceive the astral, which will perceive the "divine flame". It will have a very definite relationship with the human heart. It will receive an immediate impression of the sensation of the fellow being.

Similarly, the spiritual sense - the pineal gland, which is in the process of regression - will develop and perceive in the Akasha in a completely different form. As a luminous crown of rays it will be seen; this organ is called: the Kundalini light. - The man moving in the ether could perceive the word moving in the clay, which later solidified to the earth; he heard the harmony of the spheres.

This consciousness that man is not a single special being was expressed by the ancient teachers in such a way that they continually reminded him of his connection with the whole starry world.

My dear friends,

Once again there comes to life in our hearts the verse that has resounded through the centuries, of the Divine Mysteries manifesting in the Heights and of the peace on Earth for men of good-will. And at this moment I imagine, especially in our time, the question will arise within our hearts: What then does mankind need, over the whole Earth's round, for the prospering of earthly evolution and of that peace of which the Gospel tells? Well, my dear friends, we have been speaking for weeks past of what is needful to mankind all the Earth over, especially in this our time—questionable as it is and so fraught with questions. And if we would gather up into a single sentence what has been passing through our souls in recent weeks—then we may say: It is necessary for men to strive ever more and more for a full mutual understanding.

This quest of a true mutual understanding among men coincides with what we explained yesterday as to the fundamental impulse underlying what we here call Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science strives for an insight into those things which can only be seen by spiritual vision in the world and in the evolution of the world. What is it that shall come to birth in human souls through this cosmic understanding? It is the true—not the apparent and illusory, but the true content of the social demands of the present time, and it consists in calling forth mutual understanding among men. We must strive for this understanding of humanity over the whole Earth—strive for it on the one hand with sincerity and on the other hand with strength. And this can only be done today with an active spiritual life, I mean a spiritual life which does not merely wish to devote itself to the world passively, but seeks to be inwardly active, partaking in the inner impulses of all existence and so arriving at an understanding of the world and man. Yesterday I told you, we are living in an age when new revelations of the Spirit are penetrating through the veil of outward phenomena. We cannot take this truth too earnestly. For he alone who takes it in full earnest will prove equal to the task which our age requires, of every single human being who claims to be awake in life.

If you will think back over many things which we have considered in the last few weeks, you will realize that this understanding of man over the whole Earth cannot be attained so easily as many people think. We have tried to throw light on the peculiarities of the groupings of peoples in the Western and Eastern regions of the Earth and in the Middle. Without letting sympathies or antipathies come into play in the very least, we have tried to understand what are the deepest characteristics of the peoples of the West, the Middle and the East respectively. Why did we do so? To take an example, we pointed out that our age is characterized especially by the development of intellectuality, and that in the Western—especially the English-speaking—peoples, this intellectuality comes to expression in such a way that it acts, as it were, instinctively. Whereas in the Middle peoples, intellect does not work instinctively—in fact, to begin with, it is not innate in them at all; they must acquire it by education. This, we showed, is a very significant difference between the peoples of the West and of the Middle. Thereafter we pointed to the peoples of the East and we said: There, the evolution of intellect comes to expression in such a way that, to begin with, the Eastern peoples actually recoil from it. They are loath to awaken this intellectuality to life within them; they want to preserve it for the knowledge of the Spirit-Self in the future. We pointed to other differentiations also, over the earth. Today let us ask ourselves: Why do we indicate these differentiations? Why do we seek from our point of view to characterize the different groups of people over the Earth? We do so, my dear friends, because in future the mere “Love one-another” will no longer suffice. In future, men will only attain mutual understanding as to their several tasks over the whole Earth if they know what is working in one or in another territory of the Earth. They must be able to look consciously at the several characteristics of the different groups of people. Once we can rise to the inner feeling, which is indeed essential to such understanding, this understanding will indeed be brought about. The feeling to which I refer, my dear friends, is this; the moment we begin to characterize human beings all the Earth over in this way, we must rid ourselves of the impulse to judge and value in the way we judge and value an individual human being as to his moral qualities. In seeking to characterize the nations it simply will not do to judge of their worth as we do in the case of a single human being. It is the very essence of the evolution of the individual human beings on Earth, that man develops the moral qualities as an individual being. Morality can only be evolved by the individual, not by groups of human beings. It would be the worst of illusions if we continued to believe that groups of human beings—or, as one likes to call them nowadays, nations—can enter into a like relationship to one another as man to man. One who can understand concretely what groups of human beings (nations, too, therefore) are in reality, will see the nations guided, as you know from our lecture cycle on the Folk Souls, by those Beings of the Hierarchies whom we call Archangels. He will never ascribe to the mutual relationship of nations that which he must see in the relation of one human being to another. What the nations are, they are in face of the Divine Beings. Here there arises a very different valuation from that which obtains as between man and man. It is for this very reason that man becomes an individual in the course of his evolution. He wrests himself free from the mere folk or nation, so that he may enter fully into what we call the moral order of the world. This moral order of the world is a concern of the individual man.

Such things must be understood by real spiritual knowledge. The true progress of Christianity itself in our time consists in this. I said the other day: We are living in a time when the Spirits of Personality rise in a sense to creative activity. They become Creators. This is exceedingly important, for inasmuch as they become Creator-Spirits there penetrates through the veil of phenomena what we described yesterday as a new revelation. The Spirits of Personality, therefore, are taking on the character of Creators. They become different in a sense from what they were before. They in their being take on a character like that which certain other Spirits (the Spirits of Form) possessed, for earthly evolution, since Lemurian times. This means that in a certain sense man will henceforth confront an altogether changed world-picture. We must become conscious of this, for this is the great thing in our time. Man is beginning to confront an altogether changed world picture, one that comes forth—to use a Goethean expression—out of the gray depths of the Spirit. If we look back with Spiritual Science into the historic evolution of mankind—we may look back into pre-Christian times—the farther we go back, the more we find that men possessed in an old instinctive way an extensive cosmic knowledge, which inspires us with all the greater reverence the more we learn to know it. For the seer it becomes a fact that at the outset of earthly evolution an immense Wisdom was poured out as it were over the earthly life of man. In course of time this Wisdom gradually filtered away. And strange as it may sound, my dear friends, yet it is true, it had reached a kind of zero level at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha came with a blessing to mankind. During that time all that humanity had known in former ages fell into a kind of chaos in the consciousness of man. Those who have understanding of these matters express themselves with perfect agreement on this fact. During that time, they say, the evolution into which man is woven had reached once more the point of utter ignorance. Yet into this gray ignorance which overlay mankind there fell the greatest earthly revelation—the Mystery of Golgotha—the starting point of new knowledge, new revelations for humanity.

Nevertheless, through many centuries, as concerns man himself, the dark gray ignorance persisted in a sense. It does enlighten us, my dear friends, in the deepest sense, if, looking back on the last two thousand years, we ask ourselves with understanding: What, after all, did men produce out of themselves during these last two thousand years? All they possessed by way of Wisdom (independent of the Mystery of Golgotha) was old tradition—inheritance from old traditions. Let us understand one another aright. Needless to say, I will not say humanity has had no Wisdom at all during the last two thousand years, nor will I cast aspersions on the Wisdom which they had. The point is this: The Wisdom that was present in the old pre-Christian times—whose relics are still observable in the last centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha—this Wisdom was seen, albeit instinctively, seen in the Spirit of the olden times. Now however they had lost the power of relating themselves, with independent spiritual vision, to the content of the cosmic Wisdom. What had existed in olden times was preserved, as it were, in a historic memory. Even the Mystery of Golgotha, as I said yesterday, was clothed in the old Wisdom, expressed in the conceptions of the old-remembered Wisdom.

All this went on through many centuries. An advance-guard—albeit only an advance guard—for a renewed penetration of man into Cosmic Wisdom emerged in the mode of thought of modern Natural Science. True, to begin with it emerges in an apparently godless form; yet it is so. It is something which man seeks to acquire by his own activity of soul. Have I not often emphasized that for the future men must learn to regard the spiritual world anthroposophically, even [as], since Copernicus, they have regarded the purely mechanical, external order of Nature? To learn to behold the Divine just as men learned to behold the outer mechanical aspect of the universe since Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno—this is the task that must permeate us if we would come to a true understanding of our time.

Of course there are many things against this true understanding of our time. Towards such understanding, as you know, such things are necessary as are said for instance in my book on Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment where we have shown what ways the soul must take to penetrate into the spiritual world even as Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno sought to penetrate the outward mechanical order of Nature. Those who have no deeper understanding for human aspirations may well be astonished that the most vigorous opposition arises out of the spirit of the old religious faiths (if we may call them so) against this endeavor to show what ways the human soul must take to find the spiritual world. It is especially so when the old spirit appears in the form of Jesuitism.

Among the many stupid accusations which have appeared in three articles in the Stimmen der Zeit this year, the following also occurs: “The Church,” they say, “forbids this treatment of the human soul to find the paths into the spiritual world.” My dear friends, for many a modern believer in authority this may sound like something new; but they fail to remember that the very same Church also forbade the researches of Copernicus and Galileo! The Church dealt with external scientific research in exactly the same way. We need not therefore wonder if it metes out the same treatment to the inner researches of spiritual science. It is only remaining true to its old habits. Even as the Catholic Church rebelled until 1827 against the Copernican doctrine, so it rebels against the conscious penetration into the spiritual world. This penetration into the spiritual worlds is no mere talking in abstractions; it is something real and concrete. It means that we transcend in fact once more the state of dark, gray ignorance and penetrate with knowledge into the underlying spiritual content of the world. Was it not also part of this gray ignorance that man looked out upon the world and saw the nations—the groups of human beings—and spoke of them as of a formless chaos. They spoke of the peoples of the West, of the Middle and of the East, but they did not distinguish nor characterize them. At best they knew that the leaders of the nations were Archangeloi, but they did not strive really to know the specific characters of the several nations—of the Archangeloi themselves. This belongs to the new revelation:—we must now observe and understand how the several Archangeloi are working over the face of the Earth. And this will be a real enrichment of man's consciousness all the Earth over. Through the very inability to rise from the dead level of gray ignorance to real differentiation, the gulf has been brought about which I described yesterday, between the subject of the Sunday sermons and what is regarded as the business of everyday life in the outer world. Within the sphere of the religious faiths they talk about the Divine World and its relation to mankind, but all this talking proves too feeble to penetrate the life and business of men on Earth. It can say no more to them than “Love one another,” which is about as sensible as if I were to say to the stove: Warm the room, that is your duty as a stove. Such teaching has not power really to take hold of the hearts of man. They cannot unite their knowledge of everyday affairs with what is brought down to them in this way as abstract precepts, customs, dogmas about the spiritual world. This gulf is there, my dear friends, and the religious faiths would only like to hold it fast.

The strangest flowers spring from the presence of this gulf and from the conscious desire to maintain it. The Jesuits, for instance, object to anthroposophical Spiritual Science because it looks for something in the human being which is capable of inner evolution so as to lead man to the Divine. To do so, they say, is heretical, for the Church teaches us and forbids us to say anything different from this—that God in His Being has nothing to do with the world, nay more, that in substantial identity He has nothing to do with the soul of man. He who declares that the soul of man bears something of the Divine Being within it in any respect whatever, is for the Catholic Church—as conceived by the Jesuits—a heretic.

Into such statements is instilled the inmost tendency of that Church, which is not to let the human beings reach to the Divine but to shut them off from it. Dogma itself assumes a form such as to prevent man from reaching the Divine. No wonder, therefore, since they have not been permitted to reach to the Divine, if in the fifth Post-Atlantean age (which had to bring the Spiritual Soul, once and for all) World-knowledge has become not a Divine but a pure Ahrimanic knowledge. For that which is recognized as Natural Science today is a purely Ahrimanic achievement. We have often characterized it thus. Strange, that the Catholic Church should prefer the Ahrimanic Natural Science to the anthroposophical; for the Ahrimanic Natural Science is no longer considered heretical today, while the anthroposophical Natural Science is anathematized.

A truly enlightened man of today needs to be clear about these things. He must recognize that the same thing must now need to be undertaken on the path of the Spirit as has hitherto been undertaken on the path of Nature. Only so can the path of Nature be saved from its aberration into a purely Ahrimanic realm. It has already suffered this aberration, because in fact the path of the Spirit could only be added to it at a later stage. But from now onwards and for the future of mankind, the path of the Spirit must be added to it, so that Natural Science may be lifted again to its Divine Spiritual height; so that the life in which we live between birth and death be reunited with the life of which the science of the Spirit has to tell, namely that life in which we live in the time between death and a new birth. Yet this will only happen in our time if we have the will really to understand this life all the Earth over, to understand it as it works in man himself.

Moreover we can only understand the single human being if we understand the character of human groupings. Only so shall we be enabled to see into the true reality.

Not long ago I drew your attention to a strange fact which may well surprise many people. I will repeat it briefly. You know that here in Switzerland there lived a worthy philosopher, Avenarius, who undoubtedly regarded himself as a good, law-abiding bourgeois citizen; who did not think himself in the remotest degree a revolutionary. He founded a school of thought written in so difficult a language that very few people can read it. Moreover, writing a rather more popular language, but in a similar sense, there lived a philosopher in Vienna and in Prague—Ernst Mach, who equally regarded himself as a good law-abiding citizen. Truly, neither of them has a vein of revolution in them. Yet the fact is, these two philosophers have become the official philosophers of the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks have adopted them as their State Philosophers—so we may put it, if we do not misunderstand the expression. True, Avenarius and Mach would turn in their graves if they were to discover that they are now looked up to by the Bolsheviks as their State Philosophers. As I said on the former occasion, we only do not understand such a phenomenon because we confine ourselves to abstract logic instead of holding fast to the logic of realities, the logic of facts, the logic of things seen. Though you may think that this lies far afield from your point of view, I will nevertheless refer to it again from another aspect. In particular, I will mention one point in the philosophy of Avenarius which may help us to answer the interesting questions: How could it be that Avenarius and Mach became the State Philosophers of the Bolsheviks? The very fact is after all significant enough of the utter confusion of our time.

Avenarius, you see, raises various questions. If we spoke in his technical language—of “introjections” and the like, of all the purely epistemological concepts he evolved—we should be speaking a pretty unintelligible language for most people. Yet in this unintelligible language he raises a question which is after all very interesting from the point of view of Spiritual Science. Avenarius asks: If a man were all alone in the world, would he still speak of the distinction between that which is in his own soul and that which is outside in the world? Would he still distinguish the subjective and the objective? Richard Avenarius is clever enough to declare: We are only tempted to speak of the difference between “subjective” and “objective” through the fact that we are not alone in the world. When we stand face to face with another man, we assume that that which we carry in our brains—of a table or of any other object—is in him too. By projecting into his brain the same picture which we carry in ourselves, the whole thing acquires a picture-like character, and this leads us to distinguish the things in our soul from the things outside—the things that we confront. Avenarius opines that if there were not other people outside us in the world we should not speak of the differences between that which is in our own soul and that which is outside us. We should regard ourselves as one with the things, merged with the things of the world. We should not distinguish ourselves from the world.

We may truly say, my dear friends, from a certain point of view Avenarius is right in his assertion, but from another point of view appallingly mistaken. It is indeed of some importance that in the course of our earliest childhood (though in our conscious memory we know nothing of that time) we came into touch with human beings. Our whole ideation—our whole way of thinking—was influenced by this. It is quite true, things would be very different if we had not come into touch with others; but they would not be as Avenarius supposes. He who can apprehend the underlying facts by spiritual vision arrives at the real truth. Our whole world-picture would indeed be different if at the time in life when we cannot yet think consciously we did not meet with other human beings. But this is the curious thing, my dear friends. The different world-picture which we then should have would contain the spiritual Beings who underlie the world. It would not be as Avenarius supposes. Incidentally, what a dreadful abstraction! We should not fail to distinguish ourselves from the world if we were alone in the world and there were no other human beings. Behind the minerals and plants (for there would have to be no animals, they too would disturb the world-picture by their presence) we should perceive the Divine-Spiritual World. In other words, my dear friends, our living-together with other men is the reason why, in the ordinary way of life, we do not perceive the spiritual world behind the plants and minerals. Our fellow-men place themselves before this spiritual world and hide it from us. Think what this means! At the cost of not perceiving the Divine world of the Hierarchies, we acquire all that comes to us through our living together with other men on the physical Earth. Our fellow-men place themselves before the world of the Gods and hide it from us, as it were. Naturally, Avenarius was unaware of this, hence he carried the question in an entirely wrong direction. He imagined that if no human being were there we should see ourselves unseparated from the world—should not distinguish ourselves from the world. The truth is we should distinguish ourselves—not indeed from other men or from plants and minerals—but from the Gods whom we should then have all round us. That is the truth.

If you consider this you will realize what is very important to realize in our time. Strange to say, it is in many respects our destiny today! Precisely the most penetrating spirits of our time will often touch on the most vital questions—yet always so as to lead them in the most wrong direction, so as to lead away from the perception of the Spirit. It would indeed be difficult to lead away from the perception of the Spirit more radically than Avenarius does. His philosophy is extremely sharp-witted—written with all the refinement of professorial language—and it is therefore well-adapted to lead men away from the Spirit in a state of sleep. And when men are led asleep away from the Spirit they regard this leading away from the Spirit as a necessity—a kind of mathematical necessity. So long as they do not observe that they are being led away from the Spirit, they take it all as scientifically proven. That is the one thing, my dear friends.

Here we have a philosopher (and much the same could be said of Mach) the inmost nerve of whose thought is to found a system which shall lead man radically away from the Spirit. In Bolshevism, my dear friends, the intention is to found a social order to the exclusion of all things spiritual—to group mankind in their social life so that the Spiritual plays no part in it at all. That is the real inner connection of the two, and it makes itself connection of the two, and it makes itself felt in the logic of facts. Not for a mere external reason but by a deep inner kinship, Avenarius and Mach became the State Philosophers of the Bolsheviks.

You see, it is quite possible—with judgments that are prevalent today—to stand more or less fixedly before these things in blank astonishment. How do the Bolsheviks come to have Avenarius and Mach as State Philosophers? For us however it is possible even now to see the real inner connections. Only to do so, we must look for the underlying spiritual facts, as we have done in this instance, where we perceive how it would be in reality if man [were] alone on the physical Earth without any other men. There are many facts and phenomena entering into our life today—especially in the mutual relationships of men—which paralyze men's minds to contemplate, because they can gain no understanding of them without Spiritual Science. I have just given an instance from the spiritual life; quite everyday facts, however, might also be mentioned in this way.

Do not imagine that it was so in all ages. Such phenomena also existed in ancient times, but they were instinctively intelligible to men—intelligible by the old instinctive clairvoyance. Then, through the long gray period of ignorance, such phenomena were absent from the mutual intercourse of men. Now they are making their appearance once more. Not that the souls of men are evolving; the world is evolving. The world itself is changing, and it reveals its change to begin with in the mutual intercourse of men. In the next epoch it will also reveal the change in the relation of man to the other kingdoms of Nature. Life will remain unintelligible to men, in the present and in the immediate future, so long as they are unwilling to consider it through Spiritual Science. Illusion after illusion will take hold of the soul, if man will not have recourse to the spiritual-scientific concepts. There are some here present to whom at the outbreak of the present War-catastrophe I repeated one thing again and again. It is quite possible, I said, to write of the so-called world-historic facts of the last few centuries according to the records in the archives—by looking up the records and writing histories in the style of Ranks of the rest. But of the outbreak of this War-catastrophe it is impossible to write so. However much they delve into the archives, if they do not observe what was the mood of soul of those who were concerned in the outbreak of this War, and how this mood of soul gave entry for the Ahrimanic powers into the Earth's affairs, and how thereby the causes of this War-catastrophe came from an Ahrimanic side—if, in a word, they are willing to observe the starting-point of this catastrophe with Spiritual Science, it will remain forever dark. This War-catastrophe, my dear friends, is a real challenge to mankind, to learn from it. Much can be learned from what happened during the last four or five years as a consequence of the preceding events. Above all things, we should learn to put certain questions, not so one-sidedly as heretofore, but in keeping with the real needs of the time.

As I have often said, we have no reason to comfort ourselves too lightly about the misfortunes of our time, still less to shut our eyes to them. But we have also no reason to be pessimistic. Only consider the following. We can say to ourselves: immense and terrible events have taken place in the last four or five years over the Earth. And yet, what is the essential thing in all these terrors? It is what human souls have experienced through them. That is the essential thing—what human souls have experienced through these events, with respect to their soul's evolution, needless to say throughout all Earth-existence. Seen in this light, a question fraught with deep significance emerges. The question is strange and paradoxical, but so only because it is fraught with such deep meaning, unaccustomed to our everyday thought. Could we really desire that mankind should have lived on without any such catastrophe, in the way they had grown accustomed to live until the year 1914? Can we really say that that would have been desirable? In putting this question I may be permitted once again to point to what I said before the outbreak of this War, in my lecture cycle at Vienna (April 1914, Cycle XXXII). I said: If we really see what is living in the world of man today, the mutual relationship of men, their social life, appears to us like a social carcinoma—a cancerous growth—eating its way through mankind. Men had only shut their eyes to this carcinoma of the social commonweal. They were unwilling to look the real facts in the face. No one who sees things at their deepest could say that it would have been good for mankind to go on in that way. For on the lines which I have indicated they would have gone more and more downhill, farther and farther from the Spirit. And as to those to whom we look with souls full of pain—the millions who have been swept away from the physical plane by this dread catastrophe and who are now living on as souls—they it is who ponder most of all how different now their situation is, inasmuch as they are spending the rest of their life in the spiritual world; how different it would have been if their Karma had still kept them on the physical Earth.

Sub specie aeterni—from the aspect of eternity—things after all appear quite different, and this must not be left unsaid. Only on the other hand we must not take these things lightly or superficially. True as it is, it is infinitely sad that this catastrophe has taken place, yet it is no less true, my dear friends; by this very catastrophe man has been preserved from an appalling downfall into materialism and utilitarianism. And though it does not yet show itself today, yet it will show itself—above all in the Middle Countries and the East, where, in place of an order that had been imbued with materialism, a state of chaos is now developing. Truly we cannot refer to this chaos without an undertone of pain and suffering. I mean the social chaos which has overcome the Middle and Eastern countries, and that shows outwardly little prospect of transforming into any kind of harmony. And yet there is another aspect. Wherever this chaos exists, the world in the near future will give men very, very little through the purely physical plane. The blessings of the physical plane will truly not be great in the Middle and the Eastern countries. Of all that can be given to man so that he feels his life sustained by external powers—of this there will be precious little. Man will have to take hold of himself in his own soul in order to stand fast, and in the very act of doing so he will be able to set forth along the path into the spiritual world. He will resolve to go towards the Spirit, whence alone the salvation of the future can come. This, my dear friends, will be the essential thing for the future. Our outer bodily existence will, as it were, be slipping away from us. The outer bodily nature, as I said yesterday, will no longer be so sound and healthy as in times past; it has more death in it than it had in bygone ages. The content of the World-riddle is not to be found with that with which our bodily nature is connected; no, we must rise into the spiritual world to find the necessary impulse, and also the impulse which we need for the social order. This insight will arise when men are able to find as little as possible in the physical world. For the physical world itself will only be able to assume a form of harmony when it seeks for this form out of the spiritual life.

The Bible, my dear friends, in its first pages, does not tell us that is was Lucifer or Ahriman who drove man out of Paradise; it was the Jahve—God Himself who did so. And as we know, this very expulsion from paradise signifies man's becoming free—the conscious experience of freedom by mankind. The possibility, the seed of freedom, was given by the expulsion from Paradise. Is it then contrary to the Biblical wisdom if we say: Once more, it was Divine Wisdom which drove men out of the present age that was leading them down into materialism and utilitarianism, thus planting seeds, which, spiritually taken hold of, can really help the world. It sounds to us out of the painful depths of the last four-and-a-half years: “Spiritual life is wishing to reveal itself through the veil of the outward phenomena; men shall learn through misfortune to turn their eyes to these revelations of the Spirit, and it will be for their salvation.”

This too is a language which will seem paradoxical to many a modern man and yet, it is the language which Christ Himself is guiding us to speak. Today it lies inherent in the very progress of Christianity to grasp the Christian truths in a new way. This can only be done if they are taken hold of spiritually. The Mystery of Golgotha, my dear friends, is a spiritual event which has entered into the evolution of the Earth. It can only be fully understood by a spiritual way of knowledge. As in the last resort it was through misfortune that mankind found the Christ, we too shall have to seek through our misfortune for the Christ through the new way of comprehension.

I admit, my dear friends, this is no ordinary comfort. Yet if we are ready to put all trivialities aside in the deeper sense of the word it is after all no little comfort, nay perhaps, it is the only comfort in our time, worthy of the dignity of man. It is not the kind of comfort which says to man: Only wait, and without your cooperation all the divine things will be vouchsafed to you! Rather does it say: Make use of your own forces, and you will find that the God is speaking and abounding in your souls. Then, through this God, you will also find the God in the great Universe, and—which is the most important—you yourselves will be able to work in communion with Him. We must depart from the mere passive attitude to super-sensible knowledge. Man must bestir himself within to find himself, and as he does so, recognize himself as part of the World-Order. Let the religious faiths rebel, which want to make things nice and comfortable for lulling a man's spirit to sleep in clouds of incense (I speak figuratively) so that he may then find his way to the Divine passively and without active cooperation on his part. Let them rebel however much against the call that now springs forth out of the spiritual worlds!—“Man shall now look for his true worth in inner spiritual activity—in the active inner development of spiritual life!”

This, my dear friends, must be; and it must be so especially if we are to reckon with the social demands of our time. I have said so already in these weeks. We are living—at any rate, a great part of our educated humanity are living—from the achievements of Greek culture; but we do not always remember how these achievements, by which we live, were created. Greek civilization was unfolded on a basis of slavery. A great proportion of mankind had to live as slaves in order to bring about at all what we now feel as the blessings of Greek culture. Let us face the fact fully and clearly. All that Greek Art, Greek learning signifies—all this and many other things arose on the foundation of slavery. Then, my dear friends, we shall ask ourselves with renewed intensity: What is it that has brought about the inner change? We today no longer think as did the great philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, who took slavery as an absolute matter of course. At that time it went without saying, even for the wisest of men, that nine-tenths of mankind must live as slaves. For us today it no longer goes without saying. On the contrary, we regard it as an offence against the dignity of man that anyone should think so. What was it then that brought it about for Western humanity—this radical change in men's way of thought? It was Christianity which freed men from slavery and led them to recognize, at least in principle, that all men are equal before God, as to their soul. For this was the principle which uprooted slavery out of the social order of mankind. But as we know—for we must refer to it again and again from many points of view—one thing has been left behind until our day. It is that of which I told you that it is the salient point in the consciousness of the modern working man. One thing has been left behind, namely the possibility—in our social order—for a part of the human being to be bought as a commodity and sold by himself as a commodity. Moreover it is a part of man that takes its course in his very body. The salient point of the social question—the perpetual irritant, the thing that continually incites—is the fact that human labor-power can be paid for. This too creates at the very foundations of all our social order the character of Egoism. For egoism cannot but prevail in the social (I say once more, in the social order—please understand me aright) if to obtain what he requires for his own needs a man must get his labor paid for. He is obliged to earn for himself.

This is the next and necessary stage—after the overcoming of slavery—it must be made impossible for any man's labor to be a commodity. This is the true salient point of the social question, and it is this which the new Christianity will solve. In recent lectures I have told you something of the solving of the social question. For that three-folding of the social order, of which I told you there, sets free the commodity from the labor-power of man. In future, men will only buy and sell commodities—outer objects, things separate from man himself—which (as I wrote already in my essay on Theosophy and the Social Question which appeared in 1905) one man will work for another from motives of brotherly love.

It may be a long way to go to attain this end. Yet this and this alone will solve the social question. Whoever will not believe today that this must come about in the world-order is like a man who would have said, at the time of the origin of Christianity: “Slaves there must always be.” Even as he would have been wrong at that time, so likewise today the man is wrong who says: “Labor must always be paid for.” At that time it seems unimaginable that a certain number of men should not be slaves. Not even Plato or Aristotle could conceive it. Today the cleverest of men cannot conceive a social order wherein Labor would have quite another value—quite another meaning than of being paid for. Needless to say, even then the product will proceed from the labor, but the product alone will be able to be bought and sold. Socially, this very fact will be the salvation of men.

To realize these things it is indeed necessary to have the knowledge of spiritual vision, the logic of things seen. Without it humanity will not go forward. The logic of spiritual vision is the fuel to create what must arise among mankind in future, namely that human love which springs from the understanding between man and man. Strange as it sounds, my dear friends, today, when all manner of atavistic remnants are still there in men in one way or another—today everything is still regarded with sympathies and antipathies. So it is, for instance, when we explain such distinctions as I here did a little while ago. I said that of the three members of human nature the Western peoples are called especially to develop the abdominal nature, the Middle peoples the heart-nature and the Eastern peoples the head nature. Nowadays, such things are nearly always treated as judgments of relative value, in one way or another. At least, somewhere inside him every man still has a little pigeon-hole where he does so. Such valuation must absolutely cease, for this very vision of the differentiations of mankind over the whole Earth's sphere will become the basis of sympathetic, understanding love. From understanding, not from ignorance, true human love—reaching over the whole Earth—will spring, during this age of the Spiritual Soul. Then will men know, over the whole Earth, how to find themselves in Christ. Christ is no concern of one nation or another. He concerns all mankind; but to recognize this, many an illusion must first give way.

Men must be able to raise themselves, to look without illusions into the true nature of things. Today, in many spheres of life, they are unwilling to do so. And yet, I know I am speaking in the spirit of the true Christmas peace in placing the following paradox before you. My dear friends, you know well that I am not speaking of the individual human beings but of the nations as a whole when I refer to these differentiations. It is so easy to misunderstand these things unless one has good will. As I have pointed out so often, the single human individuality who grows out of the nation is not intended; only nations as such. I beg you to bear this in mind when I now say the following:—

You see, my dear friends, let us consider the one or other of the judgments which have been passed during the last four years on the countries, or States, of the Middle of Europe. I can thoroughly understand such feelings. I do not want to say anything in the least against those who are filled with enthusiasm for the Entente. Far be it from me—everyone has his opinion, and that is justified from a certain point of view. But, my dear friends, suppose we now look away from the opinion which prevailed in the past few years and consider its prolongation in the present time. Then after all, perhaps we may find something rather hard for understanding. For we may ask ourselves: Is it necessary for the judgments which were passed, while the potentates of the middle countries held the reins of power, to be continued now? Nay is it necessary to do all that one can—and by the most refined of methods—so as to be able to prolong these judgments? Is it necessary? Is it equally explicable? Superficially considered, it is certainly not so easy to explain as many such things were before. More deeply considered however, it is still explicable, my dear friends. More deeply considered we can understand it—albeit not out of the character of the individuals (for the individuals themselves in Western countries will want to bring about a healing of these matters). Those, however, whose judgments merely spring from their respective nationalities, or rather, national prejudices—they have in their subconsciousness something which we may characterize as follows:—

Some weeks ago I explained that in our conception of the world and notably our way of thinking at the present time much that belongs to the Old Testament is still alive, while the essential nerve of Christianity has only entered to a slight extent as yet. Now it is characteristic of Jahve-worship that it concerns all those things to which we do not bring ourselves up between our birth and death, but which are given to us as an inheritance—i.e., the things which lie inherent in our blood, which in the normal course only have influence on us while we sleep, while we ourselves are outside the body. This Jahve-conception still lives and throbs in our time to a very large extent, and it can only rise into the Christ-conception if we turn in this intellectualistic age with all our power to the conquest of the spiritual world, not through birth, not through what is inspired into us with our birth, but through our own self-education in this life. Now by nature the West is not predestined to pass from the service of Jahve to that of Christ. Such predestination only begins in the Middle of Europe and goes towards the East. This applies once more, needless to say, not to the individual but to the nation. Hence, my dear friends, the characteristic form of Wilsonian thought, steeped as it is entirely in Old Testament conceptions. However much it may deny the fact, the form of thought stands out as though it would fain exterminate what is trying spiritually to emerge in the Middle Countries and in the East. Hence it is outwardly so hard to understand. Under all manner of pretexts, these people still prolong the same hostile spirit, though they have swept away what they professed they wanted to sweep away, and only the peoples themselves are left, against whom—so they assured us—they had no ill intentions. They do so because in reality they are resisting what has arisen in spiritual evolution in the Middle Countries and in the East during the last few centuries, which, nonetheless, is necessary to mankind. Subconsciously, they want to expunge it. They do not want to enter into these things.

We are now living in a most important crisis of the world. I have often heard people ask; how is it that the men of the West especially the English and the French—have such a dreadful hatred of the Germans? There is a very simple answer, my dear friends, and yet it is an exhaustive answer. Man always sees himself differently (especially himself as member of a nationality) than he sees his fellow men. I can assure you, my dear friends, such thoughts as Mach had when he got into the bus or walked along the street are very often there in the subconscious lives of men. You know how Mach himself relates the story. Once, very tired, he got into a bus and did not notice that there was a mirror on the side opposite the door. Someone else, he thought, got in at the same time from the other side, and he said to himself: What a horrid old schoolmaster that is! He knew himself very little in his outward person and when he saw himself he did not like it at all.

Now, my dear friends, observe the spiritual history of Middle Europe—not in its more intimate features but as a whole. Down to Lessing, far down into the last third of the 18th century, the Germans took pains to be like the French. You could see it in everything. From a certain moment onward (approximately in the 12th century) till far beyond the middle of the 18th century, the Germans endeavored to be like the French—to behave in such a way that they also might become Frenchmen. What the French could not see in themselves—or, if they saw it, were inclined to rate it highly—all this they hated with a dreadful hatred when they saw it in the imitation. Unconsciously, man does indeed practice a strange form of self-knowledge. At bottom, in their deepest being, the Germans were never hated by the French. The French only hated themselves when they saw their mirrored image in the German soul.

Since then a very remarkable English influence has arisen, the extent of which is by no means adequately realized. The English naturally see themselves just as little as Mach did; but they notice themselves well enough when they see themselves in this mirrored image which has entered so strongly into the German soul since the 18th century. It is the Englishman whom they now judge in the German. There is the simple psychological solution, my dear friends. If the world-crisis had not arisen, this state of affairs would have gone on for a long time, and we should have a great mixture, as it were a broth, out of which single individualities would nevertheless have arisen, possessing the intimate qualities of the true German. Now, however, out of the world-crisis, chaos and misfortune will cause to arise what must arise: that which was always present, though under the power of the West it was unable to unfold. These are the real facts. There is no ground for pessimism, even in Middle Europe. We must only dive to the deeper foundations which underlie the process of evolution.

My dear friends, what the Entente Powers are doing today may appear thus, or thus. It matters very little how it appears, for at the bottom of their hearts they are wanting what is quite impossible. They are wanting to prevent the rise of something which absolutely must unfold in the Middle of Europe and in the East, for it is connected with the spiritual progress of mankind; it cannot be prevented. But it must also call forth this, my dear friends:—If man is to take the future of the Earth in earnest he must truly have faith in the Spirit; only out of the power of the Spirit will there come what must come, even for the solving of the burning social needs of our time. In the machine age it was necessary for these 50 million invisible human beings—that is to say, human beings visible as machines—to arise, so that men might gradually learn to feel that they must not be paid like machines are paid. And it was also necessary for this appalling catastrophe to arise, wherein the machine age has celebrated its greatest triumphs. Out of this catastrophe man will begin to unfold his real strength, and as he does so, he will gain a certain power once more to unite himself with the Divine and Spiritual. If we may now compare what many people have rightly called the most appalling event in the Earth's history with the beginning of Earth-evolution we may say: just as it was no mere misfortune for men to be driven out of Paradise, so too it is no mere misfortune that such a catastrophe has overtaken mankind.

In the end, my dear friends, the most valuable truths are paradoxes today, as I have often pointed out, we may well say: Men were so infamous as to nail to the Cross the greatest Being Who ever appeared on the Earth—Jesus Christ. They killed Him. We may well say that it was infamous of them. And yet this Death, my dear friends, is the very content of Christianity; for through this Death there took place what we call the Mystery of Golgotha. Without it there would be no Christianity. This Death is the good fortune of men; this Death is the abounding strength of earthly man. So paradoxical are things in their reality. For on the one hand we may say: how infamous it was of men to nail Christ to the Cross; and yet, with this Death—this nailing to the Cross—the greatest event on Earth is brought about. A misfortune is not always merely a misfortune; often it is the starting-point for the achievement of human greatness and of human strength.

You must remind yourselves that as well as living through his life here between birth and death, man passes again and again through the life between death and a new birth. Just as here on earth we have experiences through the instrumentality of our body, we also have experiences between death and a new birth, and these experiences are by no means without significance for what we do during our earthly existence in the physical body. But neither are they without significance for what happens on earth as a whole. For only part—and indeed the rather lesser part—of what happens on the earth originates from those who are living in the physical body. The dead are perpetually working into our physical world. The forces of which man is unwilling to speak to-day in the age of materialism are nevertheless at work in the physical world. Our physical environment is fashioned and permeated not only by the forces emanating from the spiritual world, from the Beings of the higher Hierarchies, but forces proceeding from the dead also penetrate into what surrounds and overtakes us here. So that a full and complete survey of man's life is possible only if we look beyond what can be told us by knowledge obtained through the senses and through history, here on earth.

The existence of such forces is in the end the one and only thing that can explain man in his whole being and the whole course of human evolution on the earth. A time will come in the physical evolution of the earth—it will be after the year 5,700—when, if he fulfils his rightful evolution, man will no longer tread the earth by incarnating in bodies derived from physical parents. In that epoch, women will be barren; children will no longer be born in the manner of to-day, if evolution on the earth takes its normal course.

There must be no misunderstanding about such a fact as this. Something else, for example, might come about. The Ahrimanic Powers, which under the influence of the impulses working in men to-day are becoming extremely strong, might succeed in preventing earth-evolution in a certain respect. It would then become possible for men—by no means for their good—to be held in the same form of physical life beyond this time in the sixth or seventh millennium. They would become much more like animals, while continuing to be held in the grip of physical incarnation. One of the endeavours of the Ahrimanic Powers is to keep humanity fettered too long to the earth in order to divert it from its normal evolution.

However, if men really take hold of the best possibilities for their evolution, then in the sixth millennium they will enter for a further 2,500 years into a connection with the earthly world of such a kind that they will, it is true, still have a relationship with the earth, but a relationship no longer coming to expression in the birth of physical children. In order to make the picture graphic, I will put it like this: In clouds, in rain, in lightning and thunder, man will be astir as a being of spirit-and-soul in the affairs of the earth. He will pulsate, as it were, through the manifestations of nature; and in a still later epoch his relationship to the earthly will become even more spiritual.

To speak of any such matters to-day is possible only when men have some conception of what happens between death and a new birth. Although there is not complete conformity between the way in which, between death and a new birth to-day, man is related to earthly conditions and the way in which he will be related to them when he no longer incarnates physically, there is nevertheless a similarity. If we understand how to imbue earth-evolution with its true meaning and purpose, we shall enter permanently into the same kind of relationship with earthly affairs that we now have only between death and a new birth. Only our life between death and a new birth in the present age is, shall I say, rather more essentially spiritual than it will be when this relationship is permanent.

Without the science of Initiation, understanding of these things lies leagues away. Most people to-day still persist in believing that the essential way to acquire knowledge of the science of Initiation is to amass all kinds of spiritual experiences, but not by the path that is proper for us in the physical body. Even the experiences gained by spiritualistic methods are apt to be valued more highly to-day than those which can be understood by the healthy human reason. Everything that is discovered by an Initiate, and can be communicated, is intelligible by the normal, rightly applied, human reason if only the necessary efforts are made. It is a primary task for the Initiate, also, to translate what he is able to proclaim out of the spiritual world into a language intelligible to human reason. Much more depends upon such translation being correct than upon the fact of having experiences in the spiritual world.

Naturally, if one has no such experiences, there is nothing to communicate. But crude experiences which arise without healthy reason being applied to their interpretation are really worthless, and have not the right significance for human life. Even if people were able to have many super-sensible experiences, but disdained to apply healthy reason to them, these experiences would be of no use whatever to humanity in the future. On the contrary, they would do serious harm, for a super-sensible experience is of use only when it is translated into the language that human reason can understand. The real evil of our time is not that men have no super-sensible experiences; they could have plenty if they so wished. Such experiences are accessible, but healthy reason is not applied in order to reach them. What is lacking to-day is the application of this healthy human reason.

It is of course unpleasant to have to say this to a generation that prides itself particularly on the exercise of this very reason. But at the present time it is not super-sensible experience that is in the worst plight; it is healthy logic, really sound thinking, and above all, too, the force of truthfulness that are worst off. The moment untruthfulness asserts itself, the super-sensible experiences fade away without being understood. People are never willing to believe this, but it is a fact.

The first requirement for understanding the super-sensible world is the most scrupulous veracity in regard to the experiences of the senses. Those who are not strictly accurate about these experiences can have no true understanding of the super-sensible world. However much may be heard about the super-sensible world, it remains so much empty verbiage if the strictest conscientiousness is not present in formulating what happens here in the physical world.

Anyone who observes how humanity is handling palpable truth today will have a sorrowful picture! For most people are not in the least concerned to formulate something they have experienced in such a way that the experience is presented faithfully; their concern is to formulate things as they want them to be, in the way that suits themselves. They know nothing about the impulses that are at work to beguile them in one direction or another away from a faithful presentation of the physical experience.

Leaving aside trifling matters, we need only observe the impulses which arise from ordinary human connections in life and prompt men to ‘varnish’ the truth in one respect or another. Further, we need only realise that the majority of people to-day are not speaking the truth at all about certain things, because of national interests or the like. Anyone who has national interests of some kind at heart can neither think nor say anything that is true in the sense in which truth must be conceived to-day. Hence the truth is virtually never uttered about the events of the last four or five years, because people everywhere speak out of one or other national interest.

What must be realised is that when a man desires to approach the super-sensible world, infinitely much depends upon such things. In times when procedures such as I characterised at the end of the lecture yesterday are possible—can you believe that many avenues to the truth lie open?¹ They certainly do not. For those who wallow in such swamps of untruthfulness as were disclosed yester-day, spread fog which completely shuts off what should be grasped as super-sensible truth by the healthy human reason. There is equal unwillingness to perceive that straightforward, candid relations between man and man must prevail if super-sensible truths are to penetrate in the right way into the social life. One cannot ‘varnish’ truth on the one hand and, on the other, wish to understand matters of a super-sensible nature.

When they are put into words, these things seem almost matters of course, but actually they are so little matters of course that everybody to-day ought constantly to repeat them to himself. Only so can there gradually be achieved what is necessary in this domain. As I said here recently, the essential principle of social community is that it must be founded upon confidence, in the sense indicated. This must be taken in all earnestness. In very many respects this confidence will also be necessary in the future with regard to paths of knowledge. The attitude adopted towards those who are in a position to say something about the science of Initiation should be to examine their utterances with the healthy reason only, not with sympathy, antipathy or the like, nor in the mirror of personal feeling. It must at all times be realised that the Anthroposophical Society should become in the real sense a bearer of super-sensible truths into the world. Thereby it could achieve something extraordinarily necessary and significant for the evolution of mankind.

But it must be remembered that to have experiences in sensible spheres is obviously a matter to be taken in earnest. I told you some time ago how a friend of our Movement, shortly before he died from the effects of war-wounds, wrote lines in which, in the very face of death, he speaks of the air becoming hard, granite-like.

I said at the time that this is an absolutely true experience.² Think only of the most elementary experiences connected with crossing the Threshold of the spiritual world and you will be able to gauge the importances of these things. In our life by day—or also by night, for then there is electric light—the sun, the light of the sun, illumines the objects around us; the sunlight makes them visible. In a similar way the other senses become aware of surrounding objects. If I limit myself at the moment to the example of the sunlight, directly the Threshold is crossed man must become one with the light in his inmost being. The light cannot enable him to see objects because he has to pass into the very light itself. Objects can be seen with the help of the light only as long as the light is outside. When man is himself moving together with the light, the objects illumined by it can no longer be seen. But when, in his being of soul, he is moving in the light itself, then for the first time he becomes aware that thinking is, in reality, one with the light weaving in the world.

Thinking that is bound up with the body is proper to physical life only. Directly we leave this body, our thinking loses definition; it weaves into the light, lives in the light, is one with the light. But the moment our thinking is received into the light, it is no longer possible to have an ego as easily as man has one between birth and death, without doing anything towards it. His body is organised in such a way that his being reflects itself through the body, and he calls this mirror-image his ego. It is a faithful mirror-image of the real ego, but it is a mirror-image, a picture only, a picture-thought, a thought-picture. And the moment the Threshold is crossed, it streams out into the light.

If another anchorage were not now available, man would have no ego at all. For this ego, this ‘I’, that he has between birth and death, is furnished for him by his body. He loses it the moment he leaves the body, and then he can be conscious of an ego only by becoming one with what may be called the forces of the planet especially the variations of the planet's force of gravity. He must become so entirely one with the planet, with the earth, that he feels himself to be a part of the earth, as the finger feels itself to be a member of the human organism. Then, in union with the earth, it is possible for him again to have an ego. And he perceives that just as here in earthly life he makes use of thinking in the physical body, after earthly life he can make use of the light.

From the standpoint of Initiation, therefore, one would have to say: Man is united with the earth's force of gravity and through radiating light concerns himself with the things of the world. Applied to the experience beyond the Threshold, this would express the same fact as when one says here on earth: Man lives in his body and thinks about the things of the world. Of the life between birth and death we say: Man lives in the body and concerns himself with things through thinking.

As soon as he leaves the body, we must say: He is united with the earth's force of gravity or with its variations, with electricity or magnetism, and through radiating light, inasmuch as he is now living in the light, concerns himself with the things of the world.

When things that have been illumined in this way—instead of being merely thought about, as is generally the case—are put into words, they are entirely comprehensible to the healthy human reason. And even the Initiate, if he has not developed his reason in the right way, gains nothing whatever from his super-sensible experiences. When someone to-day—please take what I am now saying as a really serious matter—has learnt to think in a way perfectly adapted to meeting the demands of school examinations, when he acquires habits of thought that enable him to pass academic tests with flying colours—then his reasoning faculty will be so vitiated that even if millions of experiences of the super-sensible world were handed to him on a platter, he would see them as little as you could physically see the objects in a dark room; for that which makes men fit to cope with the demands of this materialistic age darkens the space in which the super-sensible worlds come towards them.

Men have become accustomed to think in the one and only way that is possible when thinking is based on the bodily functions. This kind of thinking is ingrained in them from their youth onwards. But healthy human reason does not unfold on bodily foundations; it unfolds in free spiritual activity. And even in our Elementary Schools to-day children are educated away from free spiritual activity. The very methods of teaching hinder the development of free spiritual activity. Dare one incur the responsibility of concealing from the world these vital truths of the age? People may not realise why it was thought necessary to set into active operation an institution such as the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. But through this Waldorf School some at least of the children of men will be given a real chance to discard the bigotry of the times and to learn how to move in the element of thinking that is truly free. As long as such things are not regarded in this serious light, we shall make no progress.

Now I would like to call your attention to another tendency which is still far too common. Because people are tired of the old in its ordinary form, they like to get hold of something new; but for all that they want the new to be somehow veiled, whenever possible, in all the old, habitual conceptions. I have known many people—and it is well to be under no delusion about these things—who have realised that anthroposophical Spiritual Science is endeavouring to promulgate something true and right about Christianity, about the Mystery of Golgotha. But among them were some for whom this was right only because it exposed them to less disapproval in Church circles; hence they found Anthroposophy more opportune than some other form of spiritual science holding a different view of Christianity. In anthroposophical Spiritual Science the one and only question is that of truth; but with some people it has not always been a question only of truth, but often only of opportunism. Naturally it is unpleasant nowadays to have to witness the attitude to truth adopted by the representatives of the religious confessions and ultimately by their congregations who are also influenced by it. This is a trend of the times that must be kept clearly in view.

If it is desired to approach the super-sensible world in the right way, we must have interest in all things—but never mere curiosity. People are so ready to confound curiosity with interest. They must learn not only to think differently but to feel differently about all things. If anthroposophical Spiritual Science were ever to be given a mantle suitable for the atmosphere of coffee-parties or what corresponds to them nowadays, this would by no means conduce to the fulfilment of its task—for this task is of grave moment.

The reason for the hostility that is asserting itself at the present time in such ugly forms is simply this: People realise that here it is not a matter of a sect, or of a happier “family circle” such as many desire, but that something is truly striving to activate the impulses needed by the times. But what interest have the majority of people to-day in these impulses? If only they can bask in happiness or have something in the nature of a new religion! This egoism of soul, which impels very many people to anthroposophical Spiritual Science, must be overcome. Interest in the great affairs of humanity is necessary for any true understanding of Anthroposophy.

These great concerns of the life of humanity are clearly to be discerned in the most seemingly trivial facts of life. But in one respect our whole life of perception and feeling must change if we want so to orientate healthy human reason that it functions in the right stream of Spiritual Science. Let me repeat: The whole of our life of soul must change in one particular respect if our healthy human reason is to function within the stream of spiritual life that is to be brought to mankind through Anthroposophy. What is the orientation given us here on earth by the culture that is smothered in materialism? Our orientation is such that we feel ourselves as bodily men—with bones, muscles, nerves. And our body acts as a mirror, reflecting the image of our ego to us—schematically, like this:

Your true being is somewhere in spiritual regions. Here, in the physical world, is your body. It becomes a mirror, reflecting back to you the image of the ego. The ego itself is here (= = =), but the image of the ego is reflected back to you by the body. You know of this ego-image when you look at the body with that centre of your being of which most people at present know nothing, but in which they nevertheless live. So the ego, together with the thoughts, feelings and impulses of will, is mirrored by the body. Behind this ego-image is the body, and man calls these mirrored images his soul; behind the soul he perceives the body and uses it as his support.

But this picture: There, down below, is the body; there the ego emerges ... this picture must be entirely changed. It is a picture perceived in complete passivity, and is indeed perceived only because the body is behind it. We must learn to perceive quite differently. We must learn to perceive: You are there in your spiritual world, a world in which there are no plants, minerals and animals, but Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, and the other Beings of the Hierarchies; in them you live. And because these Beings permeate us through and through, we ray forth the ego:

We ray forth this ego from the spiritual world. We must learn to feel this ego, to feel that we have within us the ego behind which stand the Hierarchies, just as the body, composed of elements of the three kingdoms of nature, is behind the ego that is an image only. We must pass out of the passive experience into activity in the fullest sense. We must learn to feel that our real ego is brought into being out of the spiritual world. And then we also learn to feel that the mirror-image of our ego is brought into being for us out of the body that belongs to physical existence.

This is a reversal of the usual feeling, and to this reversal we must habituate ourselves. That is the important thing—not the amassing of facts and data. They will be there in abundance once this reversal of feeling has been experienced. Then, when thinking is active in the real sense, those thoughts are born which can fertilise social thinking. When the ego is allowed to remain a mirror-image, thinking can take account only of those social matters which are (as I said yesterday) merely the outcome of changes in phraseology. Only when man is active in his ego can his thoughts be truly free.

In past centuries, not so very long ago, this freedom in thinking was still present in men, although springing, it is true, from atavistic qualities of soul. Instinctively, they regarded it as an ideal to achieve this freedom in their thinking, whereas we have to achieve it in the future by conscious effort. There is an outer illustration of this. Just look at the diplomas conferring the Doctor's degree at universities in Middle Europe. As a rule, people are made not only Doctors, but Doctors and Masters of the Seven Liberal Arts—Arithmetic, Dialectic, Rhetoric, and so on. This no longer means anything, for the Seven Liberal Arts are nowhere included in the curriculum of modern universities. It is a relic, a heritage from an earlier period when through university life men strove to liberate their thinking, to develop a life of soul able to rise to truly free thinking.

At the universities to-day the degrees of Master of the Liberal Arts and Doctor of Philosophy are still conferred. But this is no more than a relic, for nobody understands what the Liberal Arts really are. They are justly named ‘Arts’ because they were pursued in a sphere lying above that of sensory experience, just as the artist's imagination unfolds freely and independently of material existence. The degrees inscribed in university diplomas once represented a reality, just as many other things still surviving in the formula current at universities were once realities. The title, Magister Artium Liberalium, is a very characteristic example.

This living grasp of the self (Sicherfassen) must again be achieved. But it goes against the grain, because people to-day prefer to move about on crutches instead of using their legs. Their ideal is to have what they are to think conveyed to them by the outer, material facts. It is unpleasant for them to realise that thinking in the true sense must be experienced in free spiritual activity, because it means tearing themselves away from the convenient things of life, from all props, all crutches in the life of soul. Whenever things are said from the standpoint of a kind of thinking that has nothing whatever to do with the sense-world, but in complete freedom creates out of intuitions, people do not understand it. My Philosophy of Spiritual Activity was not understood because it can be grasped only by one who is intent upon unfolding really free thoughts, one who is truly and in a new sense a ‘Master of the Liberal Arts’.

These are the things that must be understood today with the right feeling and with the earnestness that is their due. Especially to the English friends who are here for a short time only, I want to say this: The Building we have erected on this hill must be regarded as an outer beacon for the signs of the times. This Building stands here in order that through it the world may be told: If you go on thinking in the old way, as for four centuries you have become accustomed to think in your sciences, you will condemn humanity to destruction. With the help of crutches you may seek in the easy way to establish principles of social life, but in so doing you will only be preserving what already has death within it.

For the life of soul to-day it is essential to unfold thinking that is as free as are those forms out of which, in architecture, sculpture or painting, the attempt has been made to create this Building. Its purpose is that at one spot on the earth these things shall be said not through words alone, but also through forms. Men should feel that here, through these forms, something different from what can be heard elsewhere in the world to-day is intended to be said, and also that what is said is urgently necessary for the further progress of mankind in respect of knowledge and social principles, in respect of all the sciences and of all branches of social life.

• 1. Steiner was quoting scurrilous statements based on deliberate falsification published in newspapers in Germany about the alleged political aims, methods and activities of the Threefold Commonwealth Movement at the time it was founded. He also referred to articles in a Roman Catholic periodical, and to a book by a Professor of Psychology containing false information about Anthroposophy.
• 2. See lecture given at Dornach, 15th November, 1919: “An impression of this nature must be understood. ... For in wrestling to acquire the wisdom needed for the future, one of the most frequent experiences is this: the surrounding world presses in upon one, as if the air had suddenly hardened to granite. The reason for these things can be known, for it need only be remembered that it is the striving of the Ahrimanic Powers to cause the earth to become completely rigidified.”

When you remember a dream, it will probably be quite obvious to you that during the dream you merely observed the images weaving before your soul without having a clear awareness of yourself. Self-awareness, then, is not as clear in dreaming as it is in waking consciousness. The images weaving before the soul present two types of scenes. There are either series of images familiar to the dreamer because they relate to recent or not-so-recent events, or scenes where such events are changed in all sorts of ways, their form altered to such an extent that specific occurrences are unrecognizable, and we think we are dreaming of something completely new. We can indeed have dreams that are not connected with any experiences we have had and are therefore completely new. But in each case, we will have had a feeling that a type of living, weaving image has been revealed to the soul. This is what we remember after waking up. Some dreams remain in our memory longer and others seem to vanish as soon as we have to deal with the events of the day.

So today let us examine what we perceive in such weaving dreams. We know what we perceive when we are awake in this world, which we call the physical. But what fills our perception when we dream, as events and material things fill our daytime experience? It is what we call the etheric world, the etheric substance permeating the world with its inner processes and with all that lives in it. That is the essence, as it were, of our perceptions when we dream. But we usually perceive only a very small part of the etheric world when dreaming. The etheric world is inaccessible to us when we are awake and perceive the physical realm; we cannot perceive the etheric substance around us with our physical senses. Likewise we cannot perceive all of it in our ordinary dreams, but only a part of it, namely, our own etheric body.

As you know, we leave our physical and our etheric bodies behind in sleep. In our usual dreams we look back, as it were, from within our astral body and I to what we have left behind in sleep. However, we are then not aware of our physical body and do not use our physical senses. Rather, we look back only at our etheric body. Fundamentally, therefore, processes in our etheric body reveal themselves in certain places, and we perceive them as dreams. In fact, most dreams are nothing else but looking at our etheric body in sleep and becoming aware of some of its exceedingly complex processes.

Our etheric body is very complex and contains all our memories, ready to present them to us when we recall them. Even those things that have sunk down into the depths of the soul, things we are not aware of in waking consciousness, are contained in the etheric body in some way. Our whole life in this incarnation is retained in the etheric body, is really present in it. Of course, this is very difficult to imagine, but it is true nevertheless. Imagine you were to talk all day long, as some people do, and everything you said was recorded on records. When the first record is full, you take a second one, then a third, and so on. The number of records would depend on how much you spoke. Now if someone collected all the records, everything you had said would be nicely preserved on records at the end of the day. Then, if someone played them, everything you said during the day would be heard again. In a similar way, all our memories are retained in the etheric body. Under the special conditions of sleep one part of the etheric body appears before us, as though—to stay with this metaphor—we took one record from the collection and played it; this is the most common kind of dream. Thus our consciousness weaves in our own etheric body.

The same applies to hallucinations affecting our soul. As a rule, such hallucinations arise because the person can see with the ego and the astral body, which are still in the physical body, a section of the etheric body that has become detached. This can happen when a part of your physical body is ill, the nervous system, for example. Your etheric body is then unable to penetrate the physical at the point where the nervous system is diseased; it is cast out there, so to speak. The etheric body itself is not sick, but it has been separated from the physical body in a specific place. If it could remain in the physical body, our normal state of consciousness would prevail, and we would be unaware that our physical body is sick. When the part our etheric body cannot penetrate shines out toward it, we experience this in our consciousness as a hallucination.

This etheric substance, from which dreams or hallucinations develop, surrounds us everywhere in the world. And our own etheric body is like a section that has been cut out of this etheric substance. After passing through the gate of death and discarding our physical body, we pass through this etheric substance and never really leave it on our path between death and a new birth. It is everywhere and we have to pass through it; we are in it. Sometime after death, we discard our etheric body, which dissolves into this surrounding etheric substance. Usually, we cannot perceive this outer etheric substance. That is why we have nothing in the etheric world that could be called perception, parallel to perception in the physical world. Our perceptions of the etheric in our dreams depend completely on us.

True perception of the etheric world after death or here on earth in clairvoyant Imaginations requires greater strength than we usually have between birth and death. We need greater inner strength of soul. We do not perceive the etheric world around us during earthly life because we lack sufficient strength of soul. To perceive the etheric world we must become much more active, work much harder than we do in ordinary life. After death, too, the soul must be filled with much more active strength than in ordinary life to relate to its environment. Otherwise we do not perceive the etheric world, just as we wouldn't perceive anything if we lacked all senses in the physical world. Thus, we need a more active strength of soul to find our way after death and not to be deaf and blind, figuratively speaking, to the world we enter then.

To get a clearer idea of how the soul perceives after death, or after it has developed the faculties to unfold its imagination, let us compare this soul faculty to writing. What you write down expresses something that stands behind your words; still, it is you who put down the letters. You have the power to make what you write true, to make it correspond to an objective state of affairs. If you want to inform a faraway friend about something and write it down for him, it is you who form the words that will tell the friend about the fact when he reads them. Someone may object that this fact does not exist in the world as an objective fact, but is only what someone has written down. This is nonsense, of course. It is possible to describe an objective fact with the letters you wrote. The same applies to imaginative perception in the super-sensible world. You have to be active. You have to set down the signs, the letters that express the objective processes in the spiritual world, and you must be aware that this is what you are doing. Whether you can do that or not depends on whether you have the strength necessary for a living relationship with spiritual reality, whether it inspires you to set down the truth and not falsehoods. But the fact remains: You have to know you are setting it down.

Now, let us return to dreams. When we dream, we usually feel the dream images “weave” and simply unravel on their own. We should think of these dreams as images that float past the soul. Now suppose you were thinking that you yourself place the dream images in space and time just as you set down letters on paper. This is not what we normally associate with dreams or hallucinations, but it is the type of consciousness required for imaginative thinking. You must be aware that you are the determining power in your dreams. You put down one thing after another just as you do when writing something on paper. You yourself are in control. The same power is behind you that makes what you write true. The great difference between dreams or hallucinations and true clairvoyance is that in the latter we are aware that we are the esoteric scribes, as it were. The things we see are noted down as an esoteric script. We inscribe onto the world what we perceive as expression, as revelation, of the world.

Here, people could object that we do not need to write these things down because they are known beforehand. But that is not valid, for in this case it is not we who do the writing but the being of the next higher hierarchy. We give ourselves up to that being, and it becomes the force ruling us. In an inner soul process, we record what holds sway through us. When you look at this esoteric script, you will read what is to be revealed.

That is why I have said so often in public lectures that the development of clairvoyance requires that all perception becomes active and does not remain the passive openness to the world that is appropriate for understanding our physical environment. Gradually, then, we comprehend what we have called “learning the esoteric script,” since the beginning of our anthroposophic work. I have described it in more detail in The Threshold of the Spiritual World.¹ To write the esoteric script into spiritual space and spiritual time our soul must be more active and powerful than it needs to be in everyday life. We need this greater strength when we have passed through the gate of death. If you seek imaginative clairvoyance, you will achieve it gradually through meditation. You will experience and perceive, knowing all the while you are in a world of which our dreams are but a weak reflection. You can live in that world in such a way that you can control your dreams, just as you are in control when you assemble a table or a shoe.

Many people object they have tried to meditate in all kinds of ways but are still not becoming clairvoyant. This lack of clairvoyance simply shows they do not really want the activity and strength I have just described. They consider themselves fortunate because they do not need them. They do not want to develop any active strength of soul, but want to become clairvoyant without having to acquire this strength first. They want the tableau that arises before them through clairvoyance to appear by itself. But that would be nothing but hallucinating or dreaming. To put it bluntly, a dream is a piece of the etheric world that we can take with our etheric feelers and move from one place to another. This has nothing to do with true clairvoyance. In experiencing true second sight we are as active as we are in the physical world in writing on paper. The only difference is that when we want to write in the physical world, we need first to know what it is we want to write down—at least it usually helps if we do. By contrast, in spiritual perception we allow the beings of the spiritual hierarchies to write, and only then, while we are writing, do the things appear that we are to perceive. Real clairvoyance cannot come about without our active involvement in every single aspect of our perception.

We also need the strength that enables us to write in the etheric world when we have passed through the gate of death. The kind of thinking that serves us well in the physical world is of no use for perception after death. A person may be exceedingly clever and smart about things of the physical world, but after death these capacities will be of no help. This kind of thinking is much too weak for writing anything into the etheric world. All ideas we have developed relating to physical things have their origin in this weak thinking, which is useless after death. We need a stronger kind of thinking, one that is inwardly active of its own accord. We need thinking that forms thoughts which do not merely mirror the outer sense world. We must develop this inner capacity to form thoughts independent of anything external that arise, as it were, from the depths of the soul, or we cannot have a corresponding capacity after death.

Now you might object that we could just think up all kinds of things, or create a lot of fantasies that do not reflect anything external, and then we would be well prepared for developing the strength of thinking necessary after death. It could be that someone wants to have a great deal of thinking ability after death and therefore imagines winged dragons, which do not exist, terrifying beasts, and so on. The person imagines all these things so as not to be tied to the apron strings of outer images, and to be able to develop inner strength of thinking in preparation for life after death.

It cannot be denied—people who do this will have greater faculties in the world after death than those who do not. However, they would perceive only false images, distortions, just as people with impaired vision see a distorted image of the physical world and those with damaged hearing have a false impression of its sounds. People who follow this course of action sentence themselves to perceiving nothing but grotesque things in the etheric world, instead of what is truly rooted there.

In past periods of human development, care was always taken to ensure that human beings were given mental images neither borrowed from the physical world nor created in the arbitrary and fantastical manner I have just described. According to the methods available to them, the great founders of our religions handed down images not based on the physical, but on the spiritual world. Thus, by following their religious teachers, people were able to develop mental images that were not tied to the sensory world but were true all the same because they originated in the spiritual world. This is the immensely great education of the human race undertaken by the founders of our religions. They had set themselves the task of giving human beings images that would help them to develop a kind of thinking that would keep them from arriving spiritually deaf and blind in the spiritual world after death. The founders of our religions wanted to be certain that human beings were fully alive, fully conscious, and that their consciousness would not vanish or fade in their hour of death or become a false consciousness then.

As I have often said, we are currently living at a stage of evolution when human beings are meant to come of age, as it were. Religious founders will no longer appear as they formerly did and appeal to our faith. Those times are past, although, of course, they still reach into our time. At present, only a few people are beginning to experience this new existence, so to speak. Most still yearn to cling to the traditional ideas of the ancient founders of religions. But humanity must come of age and what the founders of religions provided for our faith must be replaced by the contribution of modern spiritual science. For this science of the spirit is by nature completely different from those ancient teachings. In order to avoid misunderstandings, we must emphasize that when we speak of the old religious founders we are not including Christ among them. I have often said that Christ's significance does not lie in his teachings, but in what took place through him. The ancient religious founders were in a sense teachers, but Christ's main deed was to imbue humanity with His own power through the Mystery of Golgotha. To this day, this has been extremely difficult for many people to understand. That is why they speak of Christ as only a great cosmic teacher. For those who really understand the full significance of Christ, this is simply nonsense.

Humankind is coming of age through our modern spiritual science, through the concepts, ideas, and images that are linked with our life after death and thus with our entire soul life. For spiritual science can be understood by every person who wants to understand its findings. It strives to give people what each individual soul can truly achieve on its own, not by following the religious founders, as in earlier times. And although it must be individual researchers who make the results of this science of the spirit available today, they do so in a form that can be understood by everyone who wants to. I have often emphasized that it is a complete misunderstanding to say spiritual science must also be believed. When people say this, it is because they are so crammed full with materialistic prejudices that they do not look at what spiritual science really has to offer. As soon as it is examined, everything becomes understandable. One does not need clairvoyance for this; our ordinary understanding is enough to really grasp and comprehend all this gradually—of course, “gradually” will be inconvenient for some people.

In other words, spiritual science appeals to our understanding, making use of the opposite principle to the one used by the ancient religious founders. Their ideas gave something to human souls that awakened them spiritually and gave them strength to perceive in the etheric world, and that also means to lead a conscious life after death. Assimilating modern spiritual science will in turn give our soul the strength to develop the necessary power of thinking after death to consciously perceive its etheric environment. Both people of ancient times who followed their religious founders and modern people who are willing to understand spiritual science will be able to find their way after death.

Only one type of person will have difficulty in finding his or her way after death. In fact, this type will frequently not even experience a life after death, because it will have become so dulled and obscured. This sort of person is the dyed-in-the-wool materialist who clings to images of the physical world and does not want to develop any strength to perceive the world we enter after death. In terms of the soul-spiritual, to be a materialist really means the same as wanting to destroy one's eyes and ears in the physical world, gradually deadening one's senses. It is no different from someone saying, “These eyes—they can't be trusted, they provide only impressions of light. Away with them! These ears—they perceive only vibrations, not the one single truth. Get rid of them! Get rid of the senses, one by one!” To be a materialist in regard to the spiritual world makes as much sense as this attitude in regard to the sensory world. It is basically the same, as will be quite easy to see when we consider the reasoning presented by spiritual science.

Today I have attempted to explain from this perspective what it means to be in the spiritual world. I want to go on to explain a type of dream we will all recognize, because everyone has probably experienced a dream of this kind. I am speaking about dreams where we stand face to face with ourselves, so to speak. As I described earlier, usually the dream fabric unrolls itself before us, so to speak, and we have no clear awareness of ourselves at the time. It is only afterward that we reflect on the dream with self-consciousness.

There are also other dreams where we face ourselves objectively. And beyond simply seeing ourselves, as sometimes happens, we can also have the dream students often have, of sitting in school, trying to work out an arithmetic problem, but unable to solve the equation. Another person comes and easily finds the solution. The student really dreams that this happens. Well, you will understand that it was he himself who came and solved the problem. Thus, it is also possible that we face ourselves in this way without, however, recognizing ourselves. But that is not the important thing. In such a situation the I divides in two, as it were. It would be nice, wouldn't it, if in the physical world as well, the other ego appeared and immediately produced the right answer when we do not know something. Well, it does happen in dreams.

When we are dreaming, we are actually outside our physical and etheric bodies and only in the astral body and ego. While the type of dream described earlier gives us a glimpse of the etheric body, the ones where we face ourselves result from the astral body we took along revealing a part of itself to us and facing us with it. We perceive a portion of ourselves outside the physical body.

We do not perceive the astral body in ordinary life, but we can quite easily see part of it in sleep. It contains things we are not at all aware of when we are awake. I spoke earlier about the nature of the etheric body; it contains everything we have experienced. But now I have to tell you something quite strange—the astral body contains even those things we have not experienced. You see, our astral body is a rather complicated structure. It is in a certain sense built into us out of the spiritual world, and it contains not merely those things we already have in us now but also those we will learn in the future! They are already present there as a disposition. This astral body is much cleverer than we are. Therefore, when it reveals something of itself in our dreams, it can confront us with our self in a form that is much cleverer than we have become through physical life. If you bear this in mind—I say this now only as an aside and not as part of the lecture—it will throw some light on the “cleverness” of animals. They also have an astral body. It can bring out things that do not emerge in the ordinary lives of the animals. Many surprising things can reveal themselves there. For example, the astral body contains, believe it or not, all of mathematics, not only as far as we know it today, but also everything that still remains to be discovered. Nevertheless, if we wanted to read the mathematics contained there and read it consciously, we would have to do so actively by acquiring the necessary faculties.

Thus, it is a revelation of part of our astral body when we come face to face with ourselves in a dream. And many of the things that come to us as inner inspiration spring from these revelations of the astral body. In the same way hallucinations can occur under the circumstances I described earlier. The part of us that is cleverer than we usually are can, through a special disposition in our constitution, take on a voice of its own. Then we can be inspired, which would not happen if we used only our ordinary judgment in our physical body. But it is dangerous to give ourselves over to such things, because we cannot control them until we are able to penetrate them with our judgment. And since we cannot control them, Lucifer has easy access to all these developments, and we cannot keep him from directing them according to his intentions, rather than in accordance with the aims of the proper world order.

When we develop our inner forces, we learn to lead an inner life that makes us clairvoyant in the astral body. But you will see from what I have said that becoming clairvoyant in the astral body requires that we are always aware of facing ourselves, our own being. Just as we do not lead a healthy physical life if we are not fully conscious, so we do not lead a healthy soul life in the super-sensible world if we do not see ourselves at all times. In the physical world we are ourselves; in the higher, spiritual world we have the same relationship to ourselves as we have here to a thought representing a past event. We inwardly look at such a thought and treat it as a memory. As we deal with a thought in this world, so we know in the spirit realm that we are looking at and observing ourselves. Our self must always be present when we experience things in the spiritual world. Basically, this is the only principle applying also to those things over which we have no control. In fact, in the realm of the spirit this principle allows us to master things, to become the controlling power. Our own being is the center of everything. Our own being shows us how we act in the spiritual world, revealing to us who we really are in the spiritual world.

If we are in the spiritual world and perceive something is incorrect, that means we are using the esoteric script incorrectly. Well, if we use the esoteric script incorrectly but perceive ourselves as the center of everything going on, we experience in our own being: You look like this because you did something wrong; now you have to put it right! We can see how we have acted by what we have become. We can compare this to how you would feel here in the physical world if you were not inside but outside yourself. For example, if you said to someone, “It is now half past eleven”—something that is not true—and look at yourself, you see how you stick your tongue out at yourself. You say, “This isn't you!” And then you start to correct yourself and say what is true, “It is now twenty past nine.” At that moment your tongue goes back in. Similarly, you can tell whether you are acting correctly in the spiritual world by looking at yourself.

Such grotesque images may serve to characterize these things, which should be taken much more seriously than everything said about the physical world. The point is to gain an understanding of the super-sensible realm through the power of thinking we already possess in the physical world. That way we free our thinking, which otherwise remains bound to our physical environment.

In earlier times people had a basic, atavistic clairvoyance. It was possible for them to have Imaginations, even Inspirations. But in contrast to this earlier stage, we have now reached an advanced stage and can form ideas about the physical world. When people still possessed an atavistic clairvoyance, they could not think properly. For proper thinking to develop, the strength used earlier in clairvoyance had to be applied to thinking. Some people nowadays develop clairvoyant faculties at certain times in their life by methods other than those described by spiritual science. This is because they have inherited these faculties from earlier times and they have not yet achieved sound judgment in those areas of life where they are clairvoyant. But we are approaching the time when sound judgment must be present before clairvoyance can be developed on the basis of such mature and balanced judgment.

In other words, when people these days show certain psychic abilities, a certain clairvoyance, without having done serious exercises, without having studied spiritual science—which, if applied in the right way, can be the best exercise to bring out the old clairvoyance—this does not mean that they are more advanced than everyone else, but rather that they are lagging behind. Having atavistic abilities today does not mean one has reached the stage of clear thinking. The more advanced soul is clearly the one that comes to sound judgments out of its ordinary understanding—and this ordinary understanding is completely sufficient to grasp spiritual science if one is free of preconceived notions.

We are making a great mistake if we allow atavistic clairvoyant abilities to impress us. We are on the wrong track if we believe such a person's soul is particularly advanced. That this soul shows such abilities means that it has failed to go through certain things that had to be experienced in the age of clairvoyance. Therefore, that soul is now catching up on what was missed earlier. It is quite grotesque when people involved in spiritual science believe that someone who displays a certain clairvoyance without having studied spiritual science must have been someone important in a previous life. Such a person was quite certainly less important than someone displaying sound judgment about things.

Now it is very important that our movement should try to build a certain circle of people who see through these things, who truly and thoroughly understand them and can reach the following insight: We need spiritual science in our time because only by understanding it can we progress.

This is very important. There are, of course, childhood illnesses in all areas of life, and naturally also in spiritual streams entering the world. And one can understand easily enough why spiritual science has childhood illnesses because it tries to give human beings the results that were achieved by clairvoyant consciousness. But you can see how we have to describe this. We have to say that becoming clairvoyant in the way humanity needs it now and in the future does not appeal to people's love of comfort and convenience. It requires a great deal more than just waiting for things to happen. Participation at every moment, self-control and the capacity for self-observation are required to reach the spiritual world. This must be widely understood. It is much easier to wait for clairvoyance to approach us like a dream, streaming to and fro. People want to experience the spirit realm in the same way they experience the world of the senses. This is a remnant from past periods of our history. In ancient clairvoyance, things were experienced in such a way that people did not really “know” them. This is probably why even today people want to experience the spirit realm in such a way that they do not actually “know” it. We do not properly appreciate what we know for sure. When we do arithmetic, for example, we follow certain set methods, without being much involved in what we are doing. When we add up five and seven, we are not really participating in the sense referred to here; we are not fully present in what we do. That is why people do not like it if others have developed their own view of the world. As soon as you can show people something you have come to know without this inner participation, they are happy, exceedingly happy! But when someone demonstrates knowledge of the spiritual world and knows of it in such a way that he is involved, then people say, “Oh, he knows it! That is a completely conscious process and not objective.” But if someone comes along and has had a vision whose origin he cannot explain, people say, “That is objective, completely objective! We can believe this person.”

The most important aspect of our spiritual science is to develop clear ideas. Spiritual science is still relatively new; therefore, now that people's longing for the spiritual world and knowledge of it has awakened, they want to connect with everything still coming up from the old world of clairvoyance. They gather all these old things and believe they are doing something quite special in preserving them.

However, our task is to see clearly in this field! It must be clear to us that there is nothing inferior about giving advice in full consciousness on a matter of spiritual healing. But most people will appreciate indications given by someone “above” the situation, who yields himself to quite obscure feelings and does not “know” things, much more because his statements result in the dark, blissful feeling: This is the result of something unknown! Everywhere we hear people saying that things they can grasp are of no interest to them. They have come for the inexplicable—that is supreme, divine!

Believe me, the individual truths of spiritual science must gradually enter our souls, and at the same time we must have a clear and sure sense for the conditions I have just touched upon. I have spoken about these conditions to show, beginning with the nature of dreams, that true clairvoyance requires the kind of active work by the soul we can compare with writing. I wrote The Threshold of the Spiritual World with the aim of clarifying these matters more and more. Those who understand my book will grasp the vital nerve, the keynote of our movement. I have to emphasize again and again—in spite of having said it frequently over the years—because so much depends on this: Those who really want to gain access to spiritual science have to acquire a healthy sense for the things that truly belong to it. Then we will gradually develop into a Society that can set itself the task of having a genuinely healing effect on everything belonging to cultural life.

Next time, we will continue to talk about what we began today as a description of the world of dreams based on the spiritual world.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, A Road to Self-Knowledge & The Threshold of the Spiritual World, (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1975).

Out of his conviction that we live in and are always surrounded by the spiritual world, the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte said:¹ “I do not need to wait until I am removed from the things around me in the physical world to gain entry into the spirit realm. I already exist and live in the latter much more truly than in the former. It is my only firm basis, and the eternal life I took possession of long ago is the sole reason why I still wish to continue the earthly one. Heaven does not lie beyond the grave; it is here already, pervading all of nature and its light rises in every pure heart.”²

It is good to draw attention to such a statement, for in our time many people would have us believe that only stupid, superstitious characters or at least those inclined to fantasy speak of the spiritual world and have views on it. Interestingly enough, even those people who want to make us believe it is silly to talk of the spiritual world constantly speak of Fichte and others like him. So it is good if at least some people know that those with an anthroposophical outlook are of one mind with all the people who have carried throughout history a true knowledge and understanding of the spiritual world in their hearts, or at least a striving—in the highest and most noble sense of the word—for these things. And when materialists mention Fichte and pull this or that passage from his writings as it suits them, it is good when anthroposophically inclined souls know where Fichte's confidence in life, his courage for living, and his belief in life come from—they have their origin in his loyal adherence to the conviction that the human soul lives in the spiritual world and has a spiritual existence. When you hear a man such as Fichte quoted—as you know, he wrote the Addresses to the German Nation in difficult times—you should always be aware in your hearts that he had the strength to say what he said because he knew: The best part of me always lives in the spiritual world even while I am living in my physical body.³ The spiritual world surrounds me everywhere. This is true for others too; Fichte is only an example. People like Fichte were aware that their words were filled with a strength gained through a knowledge of the spiritual world that supported and worked on their souls.

There is another reason why it is good to recall such facts from time to time. After Fichte had delivered his lectures The Way toward the Blessed Life, which can be said to contain his life's teachings, to a small group of people, his audience asked him to have the lectures printed. The lectures had made a great impression on them, and they asked him to publish them because more people ought to have access to Fichte's encouragement for living, to his beautiful and noble striving for knowledge. And Fichte, strong, forceful, fired with the highest enthusiasm for his cause, made the following interesting remark in the foreword to these lectures:

I was, I might almost say, persuaded to publish these lectures by friends among the audience who had a favorable opinion of them. And because of the way I work, the most certain way never to complete them would have been to revise them once more for publication. Let it be my friends' responsibility, then, if they are not received as anticipated. I for my part have become so confused by the public at large when I see the endless bewilderment that greets every powerful idea, and also the thanks accorded to everyone who endeavors to do right, that I am unable to make a decision in matters of this kind and no longer know either how to speak to this public or whether it is even worth the effort to address it by means of the printing presses.⁴

I want to quote this remark particularly because it shows how very alone Fichte felt then—108 years ago now—with his tidings of the spiritual world in view of the general attitudes and spirit of the times. And yet, we cannot help but feel that anthroposophy is the fulfillment of what the great minds in human history longed and strove for in their endeavors. In view of the apathy and lack of judgment shown spiritual science today, we must evoke in our souls the harmony we can achieve with these great minds through our spiritual science to encourage and strengthen us. Nevertheless, it may take a long time even for those who are sympathetic with spiritual science to find the right inner energy to develop a feeling for the impulse it should give our culture. I mention this again only because I would like to see your hearts filled not only with the right kind of ideas about the spiritual world itself but also with the right kind of attitudes and feelings about our relationship to the spirit realm and our entire environment.

It is easy to see why spiritual science meets with incomprehension and misunderstanding in trying to establish itself in the world at large. Just try to understand how an ordinary citizen, a product of modern thinking, who has not really come into contact with anything spiritual, might relate to spiritual science. He has heard claims of one kind or another about the spiritual world. What must he do? Well, people have no choice but to try and make sense of these ideas on the basis of their own concepts. However, the ordinary person of our time does not possess any concepts that could help him grasp what true spiritual science says about the realm of the spirit. To begin with, he lacks the thoughts, concepts, and ideas to do this. He tries to penetrate what he is told with his ideas, which, of course, originated on quite a different level. How, then, is he supposed to avoid misunderstanding? How can we expect him to understand?

The central point in our relationship to spiritual science is to acquire new concepts, new ideas that we did not have before we encountered spiritual science and that we cannot bring with us from the outside, but have to learn gradually. This realization is fundamental for a right attitude of soul toward this spiritual stream. Consider the basic fact, namely, that spiritual science is to enable us to understand the spiritual world outside us. In the course of this year, we have heard many descriptions and all kinds of information about the spiritual world. We have always tried to enlarge our concepts and ideas so that we can really grasp properly what is going on in the realm of the spirit. For example, we speak about beings of the higher hierarchies, and you know what we say about them. We also speak of the souls of the dead as they exist between death and a new birth, and you know what we say about them. However, we must never forget that in speaking about these things we cannot use the concepts we learn in today's world or we will run into misunderstandings. Therefore I want to draw your attention to a concept you have already learned about, but I would like us to consider it in detail by examining how essential it has been to our various talks.

The physical world makes its impressions on our senses, and we try to understand this world with ideas and concepts tied to our nervous system, to our brain. When we look at this process, we find the central element is that we perceive the world. By looking at things, we perceive the human realm, human beings as physical beings, the animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms, clouds, mountains, rivers, oceans, stars, sun, and moon. We perceive these things to the extent that they are physical entities. We look at them, see their colors, hear their sounds, feel their warmth—in short, we perceive them. This is a perfectly correct description of our relationship to the physical world. But as soon as we look at the world of the spirit, we should feel the need for another expression than “I perceive,” because it is not quite correct to say “I perceive the beings of the spiritual world.” We need to understand that all so-called perception of the spiritual world is quite different from that on the physical plane. As we grow into the realm of the spirit and approach it, we have the impression that we are perceived. Here on earth we are, in a certain sense, the highest physical beings. A stone, a plant, or an animal might say they are perceived by human beings. And in terms of our physical body, we can say we are perceived by beings of our own kind. We are also perceived from the moment we grow into the spiritual world. The spiritual beings look down at us, and in a certain sense we become objects to them. It is indeed a first sign of having entered the spiritual world when we are perceived.

As I said in my last lecture, the way to rise toward the spiritual beings is to grow up to the level of their capabilities so that our being is perceived by them.⁵ That is how it is with regard to the higher hierarchies. We learn to see ourselves grow into a state of mind allowing us to feel we are perceived by the higher beings of the hierarchy of angels. Then as we develop further, we are perceived by those of the hierarchy of archangels, and so on. This feeling that we are looked at, that the will of spiritual beings is affecting us, is what I mean when I say “We are perceived.” We have to be quite clear about this and must not think that growing into the spiritual world is just a continuation of the panorama surrounding us in the physical world. Our whole soul mood changes because we become aware that we are living in the spiritual world, and that what we experience there is the feeling that the beings of the higher hierarchies perceive us. Their forces flow into us and are at work in us when we do something, when we act.

These things can best be explained with specific descriptions. So without any presumption—let me stress it again: without any presumption—and in all modesty, let me present the following example to show you what our relationship to the spiritual world is really like. When we undertake some work here on earth—whether it is spiritually inspired or not—we need forces coming to us from the physical realm. And these forces are outside our ordinary consciousness, of course. We cannot give them to ourselves; they are not really within our control. If you don't believe this, you can go to Dornach, to our building, and watch our friends there transforming large blocks of wood into capitals for the pillars and using their physical strength for this. Then you will have to admit that such forces come purely from the physical world. For my part, I admit quite openly that sometimes I wish I had more of this physical strength so I could help more with the work there. So, just as the strength of our hand muscles and other physical forces are involved in what we do physically, spiritual forces can also enter into our actions, flow into our souls from the spiritual world, and act from above downward, so to speak.

One of our tasks in past years was to express in our mystery plays what streams through our spiritual world view.⁶ Spiritually perceived facts had to be projected onto a physical stage; to use the common expression, they had to be “staged.” Such a production required new things compared with conventional stage productions. Over the years we have had to put on such plays with ever greater strength, one might say. But what I mean now refers not so much to external things, to what happens when everything is already there, but to the spiritual aspect of the matter.

In the early days of our work in spiritual science, a certain individual visited us.⁷ This person not only developed a profound and warm-hearted interest in our teachings as we had to present them then at the start of our work, but was also imbued with a wonderful artistic spirit, which was fused completely with her personality. One could say in the true sense of the word that she was an objectively kind person. She quickly assimilated everything we could say about the content of spiritual science at that time. Then, and this was in the early years of our work here, she left the physical world. In the years that followed, she worked in the subconscious depths that our souls reach after death and tried to integrate what she had learned about our spiritual science with her artistic sensibility. A spirit body was being built up in which these two forces were at work: the fruitful views of spiritual science and her kind, energetic and understanding artistic spirit. Many years passed, and then recently, when we were working in Munich, whenever I had to make decisions about inner matters of the Munich performances, I was always aware that this individual was looking down on everything that is happening. It is, of course, not true that such a being would tell us how to do things. We must have our own abilities for that. But through the blessing flowing to us from such an individual, we can feel strengthened for the task at hand. We can feel her radiant spiritual eye and her warm, sincere interest flowing into the things we have to do.

Things like this can show us that after death the soul gradually changes into a being involved and active here on the physical plane. Once we are conscious of this, we feel the presence of such beings as guardian spirits supporting us in the tasks we have to do here in connection with the spiritual world. Then we can set about our tasks knowing that there is a being in the spiritual world who protects our work.

Now you can see the concrete insight that should permeate our life in regard to the spiritual world. We gradually come to know that the dead do not really die, but merely move to another place. They still participate in what we do. This insight will be more than a vague feeling for us; we will gradually learn to point to the areas where they are active. We will learn to feel them with us when we need forces we cannot find on the physical plane, when we need support from higher regions. For the souls who have passed through death possess forces different from those on the physical plane, because they take the material for their development at that stage from another world. We can feel the true inner deepening we can gain by taking up spiritual science, not just in the form of abstract theories, but in lively understanding of concrete particulars. We can then realize the blessing our theories of spiritual science and also the whole spiritual stream connected with it bestow upon all human life.

Of course, I assume such explanations in a group like this are taken with the necessary reverence, for that is the only way we can proceed from the abstract to the concrete.

Let us look at the example of another person who left the physical world a short time ago. This man had been associated with us for five years and had gradually united the best of his being with the knowledge resulting from spiritual science.⁸ For many years, he was physically ill and had to fight against the attacks from his sick body. He truly demonstrated the triumph of mind over matter, particularly considering the strength he needed to create his last poems. From samples you have heard you already know the wonderfully poetic, intimate characterization of the spiritual world this man achieved. People will get many valuable insights when his last volume of poems appears in a few weeks.⁹ The author of this volume cannot witness its publication; yet it will show us how wonderfully his spiritual life triumphed over the physical body. When I spoke about his poetry in Leipzig late last year, I used an expression in a way similar to a person, or even a child, saying “the rose is red.”¹⁰ Such a statement can be quite correct without anyone needing to “know” the rose is red. In the same way, I knew then in Leipzig that I could use the expression I chose and that it was correct. Out of an inner necessity, I said his poetry not only reveals a wonderful expression of our world view, but one could almost say these poems have an aura! Something had entered this man's soul and taken hold of his personality so that words not only flowed from him but also contained something akin to an aura. In a nutshell, that is what I said and what I felt to be true. It is only now that I know why I said this. Of course, we can only know after death what the individual who wrote these poems intended to do in the spiritual world, what he was preparing for. He suffered much because his physical organism was deteriorating. But while his body was deteriorating, something developed in the soul far beyond the physical body, something that turned out to be quite different from what he initially thought it was. This new quality lived in the depths of his soul, and its light became ever brighter the closer his physical body came to destruction. And now we can see something shining in the spiritual world that prepared itself here on earth.

Let me use a picture to explain what I mean. Nature is everywhere around us in all its beauty and glory. Surely, anyone sensitive to the beauty of nature will think I was justified when I said here some time ago that a person may visit all the art galleries of Italy, finally go up to the Swiss mountains to see a sunrise, and then have the feeling that the spiritual beings who paint the sunrise are greater painters still than those who paint on canvas.¹¹ Even though this is true, we must also admit that while we may admire the beauty of nature with complete abandon, we find it infinitely precious when we see how a painting by Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, or another artist, presents the content of the artist's soul as well as nature's beauty.¹² In art, we see a physical expression of what the soul can give us, enriching what we take from nature. I want to use this analogy to prepare your heart to understand what I want to say next.

The individual I have just mentioned is now in the spiritual world, and the spiritual formations once trapped in his body are now free of it. Here on earth we have his wonderful poetry, but in the spiritual world we find lighting up what grew out of the Imaginations that were prepared here during his long illness, and that now form the basis of his spirit body. A splendid cosmic image! In these Imaginations lives a wonderful element from the cosmos that is to the direct perceptions of spiritual research what a wonderful painting is to a direct experience of the beauty of nature. When the spirit realm presents itself to the inner gaze in the Imaginations of a human soul, and we ourselves perceive it also, infinitely much will be revealed to us. In fact, it is almost as though the cosmos is perceived twice; once as it appears directly to our clairvoyant gaze, and then again as it is revealed to the clairvoyant gaze through what a human soul attained on earth through much suffering and vigorous striving for spiritual knowledge. I do not have to remind you that all these things must be understood as karma; no soul can acquire anything of this sort merely by force of will. Whether such things are granted us lies in the grace of the wise cosmic powers. During the time we spend on earth, we, and others as well, must take care to remain on earth as long as possible and in as healthy a condition as possible. This should go without saying, but these things are so easily misunderstood. No one should ever attempt to do anything to cause suffering. That must not happen, and, in any case, nothing could be achieved this way. Therefore, no worse and more false conclusion can be drawn from all this than to decide to make oneself suffer in some way just to achieve something.

With these specific examples I wanted to present two ideas. The first is that spiritual beings send their powers to us through the gaze of their spiritual eyes, as I tried to show with the example of the guardian soul of our artistic work. The other idea demonstrates the inner wisdom of the cosmic powers, which allows us to see in the spiritual world what an individuality has drawn from his earthly existence. This can then in turn enrich our perception of the spiritual world, just as artistic perception enriches our experience of the physical world.

I could say much more now about individualities who are blessed to carry what they absorbed from the anthroposophical world view into the spiritual world. However, the time for that has not yet come. I quoted these two cases because I believe such concrete and familiar examples can help us better understand the thoughts and ideas necessary for real access to the spiritual world. We must adhere to those concepts from the beginning, if we really do want such access. After all, we meet in smaller groups so that we can, in a sense, speak the language we have gradually developed for the description of spiritual life. Through spiritual science, we can progress to where we no longer talk in general terms about the spirit around us, just as we do not talk of nature around us in general terms, either. We speak not only of nature this and nature that, but of grass in the meadows, corn in a field, trees on a hillside, clouds, and so on. Gradually we have to learn to speak of the spiritual world in equally specific terms. Therefore, I like to talk of the spiritual world in concrete terms by discussing a guardian soul such as the one I mentioned today in connection with our artistic work, or by mentioning a soul whose form after death mirrors the forces emanating from the spiritual cosmos itself, forces this soul gathered while the body was overtaken by infirmity here on earth. This soul teaches us things we would not easily learn otherwise.

People like this friend, whom you knew, become the best helpers to aid spiritual science in fulfilling its task in the world. Since spiritual science is received in many quarters with misunderstanding, contempt, and hostility, we may feel that it will truly be very difficult to make any progress toward achieving its real purpose. However, the insights we discussed today evoke the encouraging thought that those who have passed through the gate of death become true witnesses for the true nature and purpose of spiritual science. I would like this thought to speak to our hearts and souls.

With this in mind, we cannot help believing that even if it takes longer than our lifetime, spiritual science will become part of the spiritual progress of humanity. This thought can give us courage to face what confronts us in certain quarters; it can give us courage in our conviction that more and more people will come to see the need to develop new concepts, new ideas, sentiments, and attitudes for a true understanding of the spiritual world.

I hope explanations like these also provide a proper context for our role in our spiritual movement. Let us accept examples such as those with reverence, and let us also draw from them what is relevant for our convictions so that we will be strong enough to bear the brunt of attacks from the outside. People outside our movement approach us only with the concepts they have learned in the world, and we should not be terribly surprised that they impose those concepts on what they find out about us. There are major problems in the relationship between spiritual science and the outer world's statements and judgments about it.

As you know—and as one of our dear members told you last time out of firsthand experience and an enthusiastic heart—we want to begin a real, true work of art in Dornach, near Basel; a work of art that is a result of our world view. Everything depends on there being a few people in the world who really understand what we intend to do. It is crucial that we do not let only those people judge this endeavor who want to describe it in terms derived from the outside world. No matter how good people's intentions are, if they approach our building with conventional concepts, they will only get a conventional description.

For instance, we can see now that newspapers in every language are saying things about the building in Dornach that can easily sweep away in a short time what we have struggled for many years to achieve—by not telling the public what it does not understand anyway. The newspapers have asked, What age are we living in? Is this still the age of materialism? An enormous temple is being built—and so on. And they have described the columns in this temple as supposedly linked by pentagrams and such. Seeing this, we can only wonder where such descriptions of the things that should develop out of our spiritual stream will lead. Such descriptions are now circulating through the media—it's terrible!

We do not need to go into detail, but the most painful thing is that the original article, which was the basis for all the others, was the work of a good-natured soul who wanted to understand us and do a great service to the movement by writing about it. We even showed him around to avoid the worst excesses of reporting. We showed him, for example, that there is really no pentagram to be seen, but that in one place the seeker's mind has to feel its way cautiously and subtly to a perception of a pentagram. Then we found that although we had asked this person not to write anything that smacks in any way of journalism, he could not do anything else, and did not use the concepts and ideas learned from us but instead only those that can be picked up on the streets of our modern culture! It is deeply painful to me to see how our original intentions and aims are now presented in the newspapers. The articles and clichés are passed on from one paper to the next and are translated into every language, and in each language another distortion and more stupidity are added. Of course, it is not hard to understand what happens when the aims of our serious and sincere spiritual science clash with what the outer world can understand. But I want to show you how solemnly and reverently we must approach our cause. It is important that we be aware how deep our understanding for the tasks of spiritual science in the world must be.

You may want to ask why we could not continue to work with our concepts modestly and anonymously even among those who cannot understand us, as we did before we started the building in Dornach. Well, people in the present age have their eyes focused on the physical level. Spiritual things go unnoticed, but that a building is being erected in Dornach cannot be ignored. Such questions are, of course, completely unproductive and also irrelevant. What matters is that we should have a proper appreciation for and understanding of our cause in our hearts. I do not say this to accuse or criticize anyone, but to remind you once again how earnestly we must try to understand the new that is to grow in us to counterbalance what comes from the world outside, particularly in the opinions of other people. What comes from outside is not part of what our souls really need and thirst for. They need spiritual science and yearn for it. Therefore, we must put the temptations and seduction of materialistic thinking, particularly that due to spiritual arrogance, in proper perspective. We must not be blinded when we encounter such views and attitudes everywhere in the external world, but must find the strength within ourselves to participate fully in this world and to seek in ourselves the impulse for a proper relationship to the world around us. Then spiritual science can really become something that warms and strengthens us inwardly. It can give us foundations for our judgment so that we are not blinded by external influences, which may approach us with authority and power and therefore can deceive us again and again about the ability of our age to understand spiritual science.

This is what I wanted to present again to your souls today. For now as summer approaches and our meetings will become less frequent, we want to be certain of one thing: The impulses of spiritual science should live in our souls independently of time and space. They should be alive in us regardless of whether we meet more often or less often. What is important is the character of our meetings that we really bring them to life in us. That is what I wanted to discuss with you today.

• 1. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762–1814, German philosopher.
• 2. In Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen (“The Vocation of Man”), vol. 3, section III, Berlin 1800.
• 3. Fichte gave these lectures in Berlin in the winter of 1807/08.
• 4Fichte, “On the Publication of Same,” from the foreword to Die Anweisungen zum seligen Leben, Berlin 1806.
• 5. Rudolf Steiner, “Understanding the Spiritual World (I),” lecture of April 18, 1914, Lecture One in this volume.
• 6. Rudolf Steiner, Four Mystery Plays, (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1982). The four Mystery Dramas were premiered m Munich between 1910 an 1913 under Steiner's direction.
• 7. Steiner here refers to the actress Maria von Strauch-Spettini, 1847–1904. See Hella Wiesberger's short biography of Maria von Strauch-Spettini and her letters to Marie von Sivers in Aus dem Leben von Marie Steiner-von Sivers, Dornach 1956, p. 15ff.
• 8. Steiner here refers to Christian Morgenstern, May 6, 1871 – March 31, 1914. German poet, wrote lyrical verse as well as grotesque and nonsense verse. Also translated works of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Hamsun.
• 9. Morgenstern, Wir fanden einen Pfad. (“We Found a Path”), first published by Piper Verlag, Munich, in autumn of 1914.
• 10. This lecture was given on December 31, 1913, as part of the lecture cycle Christ and the Spiritual World: The Search for the Holy Grail (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1963) at which Morgenstern was present. Rudolf Steiner's comments are in Die Kunst der Rezitation und Deklamation, volume 281 in the Collected Works, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1967), pp. 208–210.
• 11. See Steiner, Background to the Gospel of St. Mark, (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1968), Lecture Six, pp. 96–113.
• 12. Raphael, 1483–1520, Italian painter. Leonardo da Vinci, 1452–1519, Italian painter.