The Rudolf Steiner Archive

On a beautiful September day this year, I went on a trip to Zurich. Since the day was free, I decided to go to Maria-Einsiedeln, which was an important place of pilgrimage in the early Middle Ages and enjoys a wondrous location. There was also a so-called pilgrimage on this day, and since fine, sunny weather was in prospect, one could expect an extraordinarily lively atmosphere in Maria-Einsiedeln, as is well known.

I also wanted to make a pilgrimage, for which there was an opportunity here, so I took a carriage to the Devil's Bridge, which goes up and down hills, and after a while I found myself there in front of a house that had recently been built in place of an old, historically significant house. a plaque identifying it as the birthplace of the famous physician and naturalist Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim, who was born here in 1493 and died in 1541, at the age of forty-eight. If you linger there a little, you really feel the magic of nature, as you can only encounter it in the Alps. All the plants and animals there inspire you with a sense of intimacy, a language of the most intimate familiarity with the untouched essence of nature. And in the midst of such strong impressions of the interweaving with an outwardly charming nature, the image of the young Paracelsus arose in me, who had spent the first nine years of his life in this impressive environment. In him, we have a receptive personality who, even in his childhood years, was open to learning about nature. This boy had an individuality that seemed to prepare him to eavesdrop on many of nature's secrets in such a unique place, even if it was only at first by guesswork. We can imagine how the boy longingly awaited his absent father, a respected and busy doctor, with his questions, how he often accompanied his father on short trips, and how many a word about patients, their care, and the surrounding nature was exchanged in questions and meaningful explanations. When the boy turned nine, the family moved to Villach in Carinthia, where he was able to continue his interaction with nature and his father to an even greater extent.

Now follow me in your mind to a house in the eastern part of Salzburg, where a plaque announces that Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim died here on September 23, 1541. The legend associated with his death may come to mind, according to which the doctors, who were extremely hostile towards him, hired someone to throw him off the nearby hill. Between the years mentioned, a highly peculiar life is enclosed, and this remarkable personality at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries appears in the development of mankind as the dawn of a certain epoch, which can still show the spiritual sky of all that is beautiful and grandiose. Basically, everything that can be heard from the soul of Paracelsus is a testimony to the fact that he maintained a continuous and intimate connection with nature and understood the world around him. He maintained these strong relationships during his extensive travels throughout the world, in the areas of his homeland, throughout Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Turkey, everywhere quickly understanding and at home with what presented itself to him in the most diverse forms as the secret of existence. Thus, he gathered a rich treasure trove of knowledge and wisdom on his travels, and how he explored the world in his own way becomes even clearer to us when we imagine how he lived out the impressions he had brought with him from there and from his youth at the University of Basel, especially when we consider how university studies were conducted at the time, and how it was with scientific research and medical knowledge in particular. The old writings of Galen and Avicenna were used as a basis everywhere, and the learned men of the universities of that time delivered a kind of commentary on these ancient writers in Latin.

Paracelsus said to them: You speak about books, you are far removed from all that nature speaks to us in powerful revelations when we only open the gates of our soul to her, and he left this official teaching center of that time. Some called him a tramp then and still call him one today, but he was only a tramp on the outside, and only because he believed that if you wanted to learn the secrets of the world, you had to go to the spiritual beings that lived in that very world. He wanted to use his clairvoyant powers of the soul to learn how nature lives in its creation, to eavesdrop on the secrets of the world in all the countries he traveled through. Not from books, but from the great book of nature, he wanted to turn the individual pages of the same, as he said, while traveling from place to place. Paracelsus believed that behind the sensual lies the spiritual and that what is outwardly perceptible is only a manifestation of the spiritual. The great, all-embracing spiritual has different sensual forms in plants, animals and humans in different countries and climates, although the spiritual is unified. He sought the spiritual in its diversity, like a hidden aroma or a concealed light. It was also clear to him that the external form of the current life, including that of the types of humanity and the individual peoples, in their healthy and diseased states, also belong to these diversities. He imagined disease to be something mysterious, but with a different character in Germany, Hungary, Italy, and so on. He wanted to get to know what came to his mind when he was directly confronted with nature, in order to establish a salutary science of medicine. When we see Paracelsus placed in the multiform world, we recognize how he found special powers in the great book of nature and in his soul, and what he said, according to his studies and experiences, takes on an almost personal character. He developed a very unique state of mind as a result of his special relationship with nature. Without this leading to arrogance, he said that he felt forces speaking in and through him, which he felt as if not his own arbitrariness and logic, but as if nature were speaking directly in and through him. Only someone who is capable of grasping such a relationship, in which Paracelsus felt completely natural and at ease, will be able to understand how he could not relate to his colleagues and their books differently than actually occurred, since it did not appear to him that they were striving for genuine knowledge, when he said: “He who wants to learn and practice true pharmacology should not go to the old authors, not to Galen and Avicenna, not to Bologna, Paris and so on, not to those, not there, but follow me; for mine is the monarchy!” He was so grounded in himself, and his motto was: “No one should be a servant to another; he can remain alone for himself.” Thus, we see Paracelsus as an honest, defiant personality among his contemporaries, as a person in whom a clairvoyant power had emerged, who knew how nature lived in its creation, how it expressed itself in the healthy and diseased state of man.

But just as uncomfortable as he felt as a student, so he also felt as a professor and city physician in Basel. Although he was famous for his travels and his skills, and although he was able to help where all others failed, he was more or less considered by his colleagues to be a tramp who had roamed with dubious people, and although he should have behaved differently as a teacher in office and dignity, he had remained the same even in his university life. So he didn't get along with his colleagues either; even when we follow him on his travels, how he performs famous cures on the poor, on princes and respected people, and is cheated of his fee by them, as well as at the highest levels. He became famous, among other things, for healing a person whom we can regard as a forerunner of the age of printing, namely Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, who, as a credible scholar, expressed a judgment full of respect and reverence for Paracelsus. In Basel, a strange and momentous event took place: Paracelsus cured a canon of Lichtenfels of a severe and painful illness, and had stipulated a fee of one hundred talers for the cure. The sufferer took the remedies prescribed by Paracelsus three times, and then recovered. However, he did not want to pay the sum for such a simple service, as he saw it. Paracelsus then became quite angry and sent loose notes around the whole city. The city council, however, told him that if, after such insults to the highly esteemed canon, he had not left the city within half an hour, he would be put in prison. Paracelsus therefore fled from the city under the cover of darkness.

As he so often clashed with his environment, so it happened with his colleagues, since he cured according to other aspects. Besides, they took it very badly that he shared the connections that were self-evident to him, which he had overheard as secrets of nature and now applied to the healing and care of the sick, quite unashamedly, that he and connected, did not believe that he should express them better in the Latin language with its sharp, abstract contours, but instead used the living German language with its great flexibility and fine nuances. His colleagues did not understand how his knowledge, which was inaccessible to them, was interwoven with innumerable imponderables, how he was able to present this in German, contrary to the custom of learned schools, to his listeners, and thereby dare to reduce the dignity of the university according to their outdated view. During his wanderings, they tried to blacken his name everywhere. The scholars challenged him to Latin disputations, which he accepted, but in which, in the event of technical differences, he shouted at them in German, thus providing a vivid picture of the relationship between him and his contemporaries. It is understandable that almost everyone treated such a man in the most hostile way, and also that his life could only be short in such a grueling struggle. With his comprehensive and penetrating knowledge, he was unable to adapt to the externalized habits of his colleagues in his field and to wear the old-fashioned robe in which they appeared at the university at that time, so that they said of him: “Our colleague Paracelsus was seen walking around in the robe of a cart driver.” Those who felt they were no match for him in terms of knowledge and ability, and whom he openly despised because of their scientific masquerade, can be understood to have felt a deep hatred for him, and this is the source of the legend that formed at the end of his life: that he was deliberately annoyed to death or even thrown off the mountain near Salzburg. Thus we see his portrait, traversed by the deep traces of mental labor and the furrows of suffering that his opponents had caused.

In order to get closer to the spiritual life of this man, we have to try to answer the question of how Paracelsus actually imagined the surrounding nature, which he needed for his medical science, and human nature in his individual way; how peculiar his spiritual conception was. He initially established the following points of view: One must be able to comprehend the whole great world, the macrocosm, in its manifestation and understand how man, as microcosm, is situated in it as a particular detail, how air relates to the lungs, light to the eye, how the same works outside and inside in man. Everything that has effect outside we also find in man with its laws. Therefore, we have to look for what can make a person healthy or sick in the macrocosm, especially as a member of the Earth planet as a large organism in which the human being represents a link. He then said: Although the human being can be integrated into the chain of natural phenomena, he is still a self-contained being. The forces of the whole of nature are concentrated in man, but cannot easily lead him to cut himself off from the external forces and beings of nature. This is because, said Paracelsus, man has within him a living architect, an “archaeus”, who literally tears him away from the whole of nature and gives him his own unique configuration.

Paracelsus wanted to explore what a person absorbs from external influences in order to then process them within themselves, and he took such elementary insights to the highest expression. This is the most important thing to him, but not much is said about it. When man eats bread and fruit, for example, he said, the “archaeus” transforms it in man into flesh, into the various substances of the organs, as an inner alchemist, and depending on how this happens, the external substances become healthy, useful bodily substances or poison. He then examined this transformation, the unconscious art of this being, and viewed a certain type of disease from this perspective.

He established the third law: what has been integrated in this way is organized from many groups of individual organs and is independent. The human being is a whole small world, a microcosm in the image of the macrocosm.

He therefore came to the conclusion that out there in the cosmic conditions of the large planetary bodies there is something that corresponds to the microcosm of the human being. For example, the way the sun and moon relate to each other is how the heart relates to the brain internally; so you have to study both in their uniqueness and mutual interrelations and transfer them to the human being in their effectiveness, and likewise transform Saturn and Jupiter in their movements, sizes and light conditions to the liver and spleen of the human being, as their microcosmic image.

Thus, he constructed an internal heaven from the organs of the human being as an image of the external starry sky. He thought of the dynamically differentiated energies in the human being in this way, considering nothing to be separate, but everything in lively interaction. It is interesting to see how he defended what appeared to him to be the effect of an inner heavenly system, not as a rough interaction of the food we take in, but in rough language: “Oh, they don't understand anything, those who believe that the food we take in interior according to their chemical constitution, so to speak, only in continuation of their external chemical forces; because that would be about the same as regarding the plant as an effect of the dung, compared to the living configuration of the organs active in the human being. Thus, we see how the interacting organs appear to him like the dynamics of a complicated clockwork, and Paracelsus says: Man can therefore be “offended”, depending on the inner alchemist prepares the spiritual or unspiritual, with normal or anomalous interaction of the organs, even without external causes!

Fourthly, Paracelsus says as a basic principle: the soul falls ill through its own passions and emotional upheavals, with the organism also affected as an after-effect.

Finally, as a fifth point of view: the completeness of the science of medicine is given to him by the fact that the person in his illness must be seen as someone who suffers from his fate - karma - from something that towers above him spiritually, that intervenes in the spiritual microcosm from the spiritual macrocosm, so that the former is completely under the influence of the latter.

Thus, Paracelsus combined a wide-ranging knowledge with the greatest trust in the spiritual and mental powers of the human being, but also with the broadest trust in the spiritual forces of the great world that underlies the organization of the human being. He therefore said, through the mind we find God behind the natural event, through faith we find Christ and through imagination we find the Holy Spirit. He had a deep soul, his heart was imbued with the most intimate piety. We see the most essential part of his clairvoyant vision in his piety, from which everything that accompanied his deeds as a doctor emerged. It is therefore understandable that he described love and hope as his two most important remedies, and the nature of his medical treatment emerged for him without fail from this, when he did everything in full love and devotion that was possible according to his five points of view, and in the knowledge of these connections, he hoped that his remedy would have the healing effect that he had intuitively seen. He lived completely with the disease and the conditions of his patients in general. He looked clairvoyantly according to his five aspects, what had worked from the outside into the person, what the “inner alchemist” had done on it. What then penetrated from the great spirit of the whole of nature to the sick person, was not reflected back to him in abstract terms, but in such a way that it flowed down from the sick person to him again and concentrated in him to that which he had to prescribe as a remedy. Therefore, we can understand how Paracelsus was deeply convinced that his medical work was a continuous production as an artist. He guided the substances beyond nature to become effective remedies by forming and combining them for this purpose. Higher nature in nature was his art, his intention and his alchemy; he created art products in relation to nature. In Paracelsus, something reminds us of Goethe's saying:

When the healthy nature of man functions as a whole, when he feels himself to be a part of a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole in the world, when harmonious comfort grants him pure, free delight – then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as if it had reached its goal and would admire the summit of its own becoming and being.

There is no more precise way to describe this clairvoyant man than through these words!

And if we turn our gaze from Paracelsus to Goethe over the centuries, then, despite all the differences, Goethe's spirit has much in common with that of Paracelsus. We see that, as a young boy, Goethe placed himself in nature when, at the age of seven, he took a music stand, decorated it with all kinds of minerals from his father's collection, with plants and shells, crowned the whole thing with a small incense cone, and then waited for the sun to rise. He collected the rays in a burning glass, ignited the incense stick with it, and thus offered a sacrifice to the great, almighty God in front of his altar. If we consider the motives for which the young Goethe acted in this way, then we feel how he, like Paracelsus, felt most intimately connected with nature. Paracelsus said of himself, as a rough-and-ready country boy, that he was sent out of the house in all weathers, and that he did not grow up in soft beds on figs and wheat bread, but on sour milk and coarse oat bread.

In Goethe, we find a rarely disturbed harmony, always soon regained, also in his view of nature, which is evident in many ways in his work as a scientific researcher on his trip to Italy, where he, like Paracelsus, traveled the country observing keenly and wrote home about coltsfoot, for example, which, among other things, particularly caught his eye as it developed in different ways after changing the climate and sun, location, soil type and so on. He sees the emergence of diversity from unity, as he particularly wanted to demonstrate with the primal plant, from which he developed the diversity of plant natural phenomena. He also wrote that he would like to travel further to India, not to discover something new, but to follow nature in its ever-changing diversity.

In this way, something in Goethe was awakened that can be found in many ways in the figure of Paracelsus. And when Goethe embodied his main character in Faust, many traits are interwoven into this that evoke the thought that, when conceiving of “Faust”, Goethe was under the influence of the character of Paracelsus, despite the great difference between “Faust” and the historical Paracelsus, who died before the end of the forties of his life, but until then carried an inner harmonious seclusion as a treasure in his soul, which he had gained from his intimate intercourse with nature. It was only a short lifetime of this in itself rarely happy spirit, which his research results and his professional activity connected with the eternal reasons of nature.

Faust begins where Paracelsus ends, but with great doubt in all his extensive knowledge, Faust strives in the years of his life that Paracelsus no longer reached.

Goethe had developed Faust to the point where he had reached the stage of soul development that Paracelsus had when he penetrated into the essence of nature, when Faust breaks out into the words:

Exalted Spirit, thou gavest me, gavest me everything
I asked for. Thou didst not turn
Thy countenance to me in fire in vain.
Gavest me the glorious kingdom of nature
and the power to feel and enjoy it. Thou dost
allow only cold, wondering visitors,
granting me to look into her deep breast,
as into the bosom of a friend.
You drove the line of the living
before me, and taught me my brothers
in the silent bush, in air and water.

Thus he was related to the life and workings of nature, but nevertheless Faust's research was different from that of Paracelsus; for Goethe shows us that Faust's insights are not always gained in direct contact with nature, as they are with Paracelsus, but remain confined to the realm of the soul forces.

Therefore, in Mephistopheles, without such a confrontation with the phenomena of nature, Goethe brought a confrontation of the soul, so that the soul was not seen in nature, but only in the soul.

And yet, we can see a strong relationship between Faust and Paracelsus when the latter put the Bible aside for a long time and turned away from it, just as Paracelsus did from the learned works of Galen and Avicenna. Both trusted their own powers to find their own way. Thus we feel that Goethe often sees Paracelsus in the background and, to a certain extent, sees him through Faust. For example, in the scene where Faust goes out into the spring landscape with Wagner and recounts:

My father was a dark man of honor
Who, in his own way, thought long and hard
about nature and its sacred circles
with whimsical effort;
who, in the company of adepts,
locked himself in the black kitchen
and, according to endless recipes,
brewed up the adverse.
Then a red lion, a bold suitor,
was married in the lukewarm bath of the lily,
and then both tormented with open flames
from one bridal chamber into another.

One could almost see Paracelsus talking to his father. Or when we read how Faust struggles to “translate the New Testament into his beloved German”, into the language that flows from his soul, just as Paracelsus does not want to express the wisdom of nature that he has deciphered in the foreign Latin, but only in German. But nowhere in Faust does the struggle with the surrounding nature in the direction of its knowledge appear as it does in Paracelsus, but in the first part with moral, in the second part with spiritual, spiritual powers - Homunculus.

What Faust wanted to achieve was something natural for Paracelsus, who thought and acted completely selflessly. Only at the end, after a selfish life, when he had become blind in old age, did Faust achieve selflessness, when “a bright light shines within”, when he became a mystic, when he gained insight into the innermost being, which Paracelsus had discovered throughout his life as an elementary feeling spirit from external nature. Paracelsus was the dawn at the turn of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, clearly visible to all. In Faust, we can only seek it within, as a soul-acting power.

Why was Goethe able to describe Faust as he did? Because something special occurred in the development of humanity between the life of Paracelsus and the conception of Faust, which powerfully shifted the earlier conditions and steered them into new channels. What Copernicus and Kepler discovered, Paracelsus no longer experienced. He was only the dawn of a science that had then entered the morning dawn from the sensual into the supersensual. Paracelsus penetrated through the phenomenal side of nature to the spirit, but through Copernicus and the men working in his spirit, humanity has been led into the age of intellectuality, of thinking, which does not want to penetrate the veil to explain the world of the senses in the sense of earlier times, but seeks satisfaction in the knowledge of the soul. It was therefore inevitable that a spiritual approach would be chosen as the basis for the work of Goethe's Faust, just as Copernicus, Kepler, Giordano Bruno and Galileo worked in the same way. As a mystic, Paracelsus appropriated the same knowledge that Faust acquired through direct observation of nature. Goethe's Faust shows how modern man depends on the inner life of the soul. In the same way, spiritual science searches in the depths of the soul for that which can lead from the transitory to the infinite eternal.

After Paracelsus, a new era dawned, which said that if we turn to the non-sensuous, we will gain a correct understanding of our world system. And so Goethe presented his Faust as a representative of this view who had risen to a higher level. Spiritual science is advancing along this path, which leads from the realm of the soul into the secrets of nature. Just as Giordano Bruno broke through the blue firmament of the eighth sphere, so spiritual science is now breaking through the boundaries of birth and death by revealing the soul as an infinite being that reaches beyond space and time. Goethe thus seems like someone who shows us the beginning of the right path by presenting us with an image in Faust, to which the memory of Paracelsus leads us, in order to be able to understand him even more.

Thus, individual human beings are placed in the context of the further development of the world, and so today, too, man must again break new ground so that he can find the harmonization of his soul forces in his insights, beyond Paracelsus and Faust. Based on such relationships, one feels more and more deeply the inner affinity between Paracelsus and Goethe, especially in the latter's words:

When the healthy nature of man functions as a whole, when he feels himself to be a part of a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole in the world, when harmonious comfort grants him pure, free delight – then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as if it had reached its goal and would admire the summit of its own becoming and being.

In man as in a microcosm, Goethe, like Paracelsus, seeks and sees the entire workings of the great world, the macrocosm.

On the way back from the birthplace of Paracelsus in Maria-Einsiedeln, one is thoroughly shaken by the journey over the valley and hills, and in this way, one becomes quite aware of the gnarled character of Paracelsus, in addition to which, the memory of Goethe also resurfaced on approaching the pilgrimage church. Symbolically, the spirit of the great seemed to manifest itself to me in the outwardly small-looking church of Maria-Einsiedeln, as soon as one really lets the interior take effect on oneself and appreciates the tasteful interior in its kind accordingly. Goethe once stood in this atmospheric room, in this small yet great church, which, like a microcosm in the macrocosm, also presented the human being as an image of the great world to the contemplative observer. I sensed this in his words and could imagine how Goethe, in this place where Paracelsus often stood, felt the basic sensation of the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm in man becoming clearly expressed within himself. The path from Paracelsus to Goethe shows us this: the two boundary points of this path, the evening star and the rising sun of the new age, point to a profound similarity between the souls of the two men as a living protest against an external, unspiritual, non-spiritual understanding of things, which Goethe says in Faust, and which, significantly, Mephisto says:

Who wants to recognize and describe something alive,
First seeks to drive out the spirit,
Then he has the parts in his hand,
Unfortunately, only the spiritual bond is missing.
Encheiresin naturae is what chemistry calls it,
Mocks itself and does not know how.

This also belongs to the character of Paracelsus as a living protest against overlooking the whole when considering the parts. Instead of the final words, Goethe had written in the earlier version of “Faust”:

He makes himself an ass and does not know how.

Paracelsus and Goethe both condemned such a view of nature; both were inspired by the opposite tendency, which, in line with Mephisto's words, could be translated as:

Who wants to get to the bottom of something living
should seek to fathom the spirit in the depths!
And when he has the parts in his hand,
he sees the spirit's light
as the only salvation in the spiritual bond
that holds together what otherwise does not recognize itself
and the secrets of the universe.

Dear attendees!

The point of view from which I am to speak this evening at the request of some local friends of the theosophical or spiritual scientific world view is by no means a popular one in the world and recognized in wider circles. With the exception of a few, relatively few of our contemporaries, who, from a deep knowledge and long study of the subject, have gained an intensely effective conviction in the direction of the world view under consideration, with the exception of these, this point of view is everywhere met with opposition, doubt and misunderstanding. And anyone who speaks about such a subject for the first time in a particular place does not, of course, harbor any illusions that a mere suggestion of a few remarks that can be made in a short lecture can somehow lead to conviction. This evening, I find myself in the somewhat dubious position of having to cite a variety of things from the theosophical worldview, for which there is sufficient evidence for those who delve deeper into the subject, but which cannot be cited this evening with all the necessary proof.

In accordance with the wishes of our local friends of our world view, we will start with a figure in the spiritual development of humanity who must, to a certain extent, be of interest to this part of the world in which we find ourselves, because he lived here in this city for a long time. We will then move on to a personality who, as everyone must recognize, has had a profound impact on the intellectual life of our time – Goethe. Not that it is to be shown that one could only find confirmation in the world view of Paracelsus and Goethe of what can arise from spiritual science, but it is to be shown that figures are already given in them which, precisely in their struggle and striving, show that what spiritual science or Theosophy wants has been longed for and striven for by those who, with the approach of modern spiritual development and our present time, tried in their own way to interpret the signs of the times and the needs of the human soul.

But before we can tie in with the spiritual significance of Paracelsus and Goethe and the path that development has taken from Paracelsus to Goethe, we must first characterize the point of view of Theosophy as it presents itself to us in the world today. Theosophy or spiritual science is by no means to be confused with any religious It has no intention of interfering with outward religious observances, nor of forming a religion or sect of its own. Such a thing is far from its mind, for its sources are such that it cannot in any wise impair religious beliefs or convictions.

On the other hand, the subject characterized finds its opponents namely among those who believe that they stand firmly on the ground of natural science, which is also appreciated by spiritual researchers. The greatness of the spiritual-scientific view is that, in terms of its way of thinking, it stands entirely on the ground of scientific thinking; but, starting from this scientific thinking, it wants to lead up to the highest regions of existence, which the human soul longs to know. It longs for this because man needs views of higher worlds if he wants to be secure in his work within the outer visible world in which he has to work. It is into the world of the spiritual, into that world which can also be called the supersensible world, that theosophy or spiritual science should lead. At the same time, this indicates, my dear ladies and gentlemen, what must create an enormous number of opponents for you at the present time, because even today, quietly thinking first scientists admit that what is achieved by the means of ordinary science cannot provide any information at all about the highest powers and entities that permeate and permeate this world. So it is often admitted that a spiritual world underlies our sensual one. But even if such level-headed people of the present do not want to put themselves on the level of those people who, out of materialistic thinking, want to say: Man knows that nothing is real but what surrounds us, they still often stand on the ground that they say: May a supersensible world exist behind our sensual world — but the powers of human knowledge are so limited that one has to stop before this spiritual world.

That there is a spiritual world to which man belongs with his soul and with what lives spiritually in him, just as man belongs to the outer world with his physical powers, is something that is to be made known to the world again through spiritual science. The second is that one can penetrate into this world with the same means as in natural science. It will be good, since our time is limited, to now draw attention to how man, in the way of natural science and its thinking, can look up into the spiritual world. Natural science penetrates into what it wants to explore through observation, but it also penetrates through experiment. Exploration through observation, but also through experiment, are also the means of spiritual science. Here too, it must be emphasized that spiritual science must place itself quite honestly and sincerely on the ground of a Goethean saying that anticipated the method of our science:

Mysterious in the bright day
Nature cannot be robbed of the veil,
And what it may not reveal to your mind,
You cannot force it with levers and screws.

What does such a saying mean in essence? It means that we can penetrate into the outer world of things and into the forces on which they are based with all the tools that are made in the world. And if we disregard the new instruments of natural science, we already know that in the elementary realm, the world of the infinitely small has been explored through the microscope, and the infinitely large world, the macrocosm, through the telescope. In this way, one penetrates into the world of things, but one cannot penetrate into the world of the spirit. Only the spirit of man can penetrate into the world of the spirit, and there can only be one tool: the spirit of man himself.

Now it is the case that what this spirit is in man has certain limits, that only certain things can be grasped that are bound to the intellect. You can read about what can only be touched on here, and what means more than all power and all riches, that man can be led further, that he can penetrate into completely different worlds, in my writing: “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”.

Just as one does it in the laboratory, as in the clinic, so one cannot make the human soul suitable to penetrate into the supersensible world. Only through purely spiritual processes can one do that. One understands the whole meaning of this spiritual process when one realizes the following example, which shows that one can be very clever in thinking, in the way it is done in the methods of natural science.

If you have water, you know that this water can be understood if you break it down into its two parts: hydrogen and oxygen. You know that. But to examine what hydrogen is and what oxygen is, you have to separate it, the oxygen or the hydrogen, and then you can look at it on its own.

The mind and soul are now in the human being, as he stands in the world, connected with the whole body, like oxygen and hydrogen with water. Our soul and spirit perceive only the external world through the senses, through the mind, in colors, sounds, smells and tastes. One forms a picture by discovering the laws of nature. Everything that reaches the spiritual and soul reaches it in the same way as oxygen, when it is combined with hydrogen in water. But if we want to examine it, we have to separate it from the physical just as we have to separate the oxygen from the hydrogen when we want to examine it. Now there are means to secrete this spiritual-mental: meditation, concentration. All these are means by which something is achieved in the soul that is similar to what the chemist achieves when he breaks down water into oxygen and hydrogen.

To characterize this, we will see what fills people between waking and sleeping in terms of volitional impulses, hopes and worries. All that which fills us so, if we look more closely, we will find [and we will see] that it is not there without external cause. We know that when we see the red roses, we then hold on to the image, as one has not created the image itself in the soul. This is also how we find the laws of nature through our mind. When we look at our hopes, as well as our desires and passions, we find them stimulated by external factors. How can we say that we have acquired this through our own will? We know how it happens through external influences, through unknown depths of our soul life. Our pain, our joy, our suffering and our desire are prepared by the outer world without our intervention. We have not placed the experiences in the soul at the center of the soul. That is what the spiritual researcher must undertake. When the spiritual researcher brings such ideas, which he has made himself, into his soul through pure inner will, we say “symbols”. For example, let us imagine the light emanating from some cosmic body. But we imagine this light as the body of a spiritual being, which also has a body of light, just as we have a body of flesh. If you tell me that this is a mistake, I would like to point out that when we use such images as spiritual instruments, we do not in any way succumb to the illusion that we are thereby gaining an idea of the external world. When such images are given, they are not intended to be true in the sense that our usual images of the external world are true; they have the function of serving as facts of the soul. The person needs infinite patience and energy to arrive at such images, because he must reject all thoughts that relate to the external sense world. He must become as a person is in sleep. When all external impressions are silent and the mind is also silent, while the person is surrounded by darkness and unconscious, the person who devotes years and years to inner exercises – as soon as we have our own idea of the moral content – will come to be in relation to the outside world and the rest of the soul life as he is in sleep. Only that the unconsciousness is not there. Powers arise there. Now we know that the soul is a spiritual being that can give itself content. The soul does not arrive there in platitudes, as in mysticism. Through the same kind of efforts at contemplation as a person makes externally with the help of physical tools, the soul comes to experience itself inwardly. There it comes to an experience that is as free of corporeality, of materiality, as oxygen is free of hydrogen when they are chemically separated.

It is difficult to believe in it from the outset. But it is no more difficult than believing in a new scientific finding, to believe that a person comes to know that he has spiritual eyes and spiritual ears. An initial finding that can be gained through this path is that a person becomes aware of what actually happens when we fall asleep at night. Spiritual science tells us that what remains in bed is what man has in common with the plant world, an external corporeality, but that an inner spiritual-soul core of being emerges from this corporeality. This spiritual-soul core of being is not in the physical being of man from the time of falling asleep to the time of waking up, but in his own world. Man is just not able to perceive this. But it is perceived when the human being has acquired spiritual eyes and ears. Then the person knows that he is in a world in which spiritual facts take place just as they do in our sensual world. Every night, nature separates what the spiritual researcher has obtained as consciousness, only the person does not know it. Now an important result of spiritual science comes to light: that by means of spiritual science one can give proof of something that great minds have always suspected, which is, however, regarded as a dream in the widest circles, but which will make a way through world culture, like many other things that have lived through many a contradiction in the world. I would like to draw attention to something similar. Not so long ago, mankind believed that lower animals, small lower animals, can develop from mere inanimate matter, lifeless matter. It was even believed that worms could develop from river mud. And until a few centuries ago, it could be found in books that were considered scholarly how animals developed here.

It was a great deed of the Italian naturalist Francesco Redi to have pointed out to people that nothing can develop from non-living matter, but that only living things can develop from living things. In truth, there was a living germ in this river mud, originating from living beings. The man who recognized this and first expressed it barely escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno.

Modern spiritual science must apply this sentence: “Living things come only from living things” to man, but must then also come to proofs that stand just as high above the sentence “Living things come only from living things” as man stands above all living things, because with man we are dealing with an individual, while all other living things present themselves in groups and species. In our time, it is quite natural that we have to speak in terms of the spiritual and soul-related in the same way that Francesco Redi does in terms of the living; that we have to say: If a person is born with certain aptitudes and abilities, and even with a certain destiny, and people then think that this is based merely on heredity, this is based merely on inaccurate observation, just as it was based on inaccurate observation that people believed that worms can develop from river mud.

Spiritual research shows, as Lessing demonstrated, that as a human being grows up, the features become more and more distinct, the abilities become more and more distinct, and the soul and spiritual express themselves more and more. Then we may say that it is not only inherited from father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, but we must trace it back to the spiritual and soul, which is laughed at in the present, but which will become established in the same way as the sentence: 'Living things can only arise from living things'. What is born with us, what shapes us from birth or from conception, comes from a previous life on earth, and what we now carry within us as our spiritual and soul essence is something that will continue to live in the spiritual world when we pass through the gate of death, to form a body again in a later life on earth. In line with the natural sciences of our time, spiritual research comes to the view of different earth lives, to that doctrine of reincarnation decried as madness and to that doctrine of karma, which says that what we experience, what we are and how we face the world can be an effect of what we have done, experienced and felt in previous earth lives. That what we do, experience and feel now will be a cause for what we will do, experience and feel in a later life on earth.

Thus the spiritual researcher divides his life between what is between birth and death and a new birth, and in this he is a spiritual being. One only attains independence, the distinctiveness of the human being, through spiritual science, when one separates the spirit. Just as little as one can recognize oxygen as long as it is connected to hydrogen in water, so little can one recognize the spirit as long as it is connected to the body. When it is separated from the body, it can be recognized. Then one also recognizes that it cannot be destroyed by the body, that it characterizes it as something lasting, as something eternal.

When we see this spiritual science or theosophy emerging in modern times, it should not be something that ties in with the old, that can be picked up here or there. For example, some people say: Yes, this spiritual research with its doctrine of reincarnation and karma is only bringing something that we find in Buddhism. But we can find that it differs in its most important and essential aspects from the doctrine that Buddhism teaches as the doctrine of reincarnation, something that it recognizes from within through the spirit. It is a mistake to think that it is based on Buddhism; no, it stands on its own ground. It comes to what it wants to recognize through the investigations of those who make their own soul into an instrument that can penetrate the spiritual world.

We can see how the best of our minds, with all their yearning, have tended towards what spiritual science today wants to pick as a ripe fruit from the tree of knowledge. And so we come to direct our gaze to a mind that we understand when we have spent a long time in the area, as I was able to do near Maria-Einsiedeln, and we know that this spirit saw the light of day, that this is the birthplace of this spirit, that Paracelsus was born there in 1493 and lived there until the age of fourteen. We find a remarkable spirit in this Paracelsus. It is so very special in the soul when you are in this nature of Maria-Einsiedeln. What surrounds us in nature reminds us of how the boy grew up in wonderful surroundings into what later confronts us so greatly in his spirit. And this awakens the wish in us: May those who will be our successors be fairer to us than we were to our ancestors. We say so lightly: Yes, actually Paracelsus had a very commendable aspiration, but what he brought to light, no one can take seriously today, we have gone beyond that. In short, in a more or less veiled sense, one says nothing other than that such a person is a drip. If only posterity would be fairer to us, because what the botanist now knows will be able to be characterized in the same way after a few centuries, because only a short-sighted person will be able to say that this will last for all eternity.

But Paracelsus is an individuality who presents himself as strange to those who want to penetrate into the higher world because he was a wiser and more characteristic expression of his time, a time that seems strange precisely in a time when it presents itself as such. Paracelsus appears to us as if from his earliest youth he was intimately connected with everything that works and lives in nature. One cannot but apply the words spoken by Goethe to Paracelsus:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by you – unable to step out of it and unable to get deeper into it. Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and carries on with us until we are tired and fall out of her arms. She is forever creating new forms; what is there has never been, what was does not return – everything is new and yet always the same.

In a wonderful way, Goethe honors this interweaving of people with nature there. With Paracelsus, it was present only in the sense that he saw in his spirit, not just with his eyes and mind. And it was still the case that he did not need the kind of soul training that has been described today. Rather, it was his nature to perceive the spiritual forces of nature when he heard the trees rustling and felt the wind playing through the room; he never perceived in isolation what is found in nature. He said, “A soul is expressing itself, as in a human being who is not just made of papier-mâché.” Thus, Paracelsus saw in nature not only the outer appearance, but gestures for the spiritual entities that are present in a supersensible world and are active in nature. Therefore, wherever he encountered a natural fact or a natural being, he sought the spiritual and soul-like. He was predestined for this by the way he had grown up. He therefore always said later that he was proud of the way he had remained a primitive man: I did not grow up with wheat bread and figs like the Sugar Fairies, I grew up with rye porridge and coarse rye bread. From this close relationship with nature, an inner certainty arose in Paracelsus, a connection with the spiritual world. It is also a wonderful life, how the boy walked through nature at his father's hand in Maria-Einsiedeln, and how much he had already learned in the earliest days of childhood about the secrets of nature.

And how differently it touches us when we saw the man grow up, feeling so strongly this coexistence with nature that he dared to oppose what was around him. We just have to put ourselves in the shoes of the science of the time. The focus was not on the facts of nature, but rather on ancient traditions, traditions preserved in books, which were passed down. People listened to what people said, what Aristotle and Galen had taught. What I am telling you now is by no means a mere legend, to show how things were at that time. It was believed and taught by Aristotle that the nerves of the human being do not originate in the head but in the heart. Galileo had a friend who was a scholar. He pointed out to him that it could easily be demonstrated on a corpse, but his friend did not want to believe it. So Galilei took him there and showed him on the corpse that the nerves emanate from the brain, and then the learned gentleman said to him: “That may be right, you may be right, but when I see nature and ask Aristotle, I am more inclined to believe Aristotle.”

It is clear to see how enormous the efforts had to be to lead back to the source of nature. Paracelsus did not want to learn from books. Therefore, we see him traveling through all neighboring countries: England, France, Hungary, Poland, Turkey. Those who want to know about the world must not let it come to them, but go there. The world is like a large organism: it makes humanity healthy and sick. But health in France is one thing, health in Germany is another. Paracelsus wanted to read in the great book of nature. Therefore, he did not hesitate to hear what the farmers and the shepherds said, and even what the knackers said. He knew that with their elementary observation they could find something for true knowledge.

It was not surprising, therefore, that this Paracelsus, after he had, so to speak, put all the learned works behind him, according to which the others were taught, that he wanted to express what he had learned in word forms that were deeply related to what nature spoke to him. He expressed what nature allowed to shine into his soul from its spirit: he wanted to shape it, not in Latin, as was customary at the time, but in his mother tongue. That was what brought him into such stark contradiction with the scholarship of the time. When he was called to Basel, he not only taught what he had observed himself, but also dared to teach it in German. And when he went against other customs of the time, he was no longer tolerated. His wonderful teaching, so to speak, broke his neck. He had performed cures that were appreciated by the respected people of the time, esteemed by Erasmus and other great minds, but never had he confronted his patients in such a way that he would have seen a fee. It was the spiritual and mental state of the people that he was referring to. He never just saw what was on the outside. He said, “My main remedy is love. I immerse myself in my patients with love and feeling; and that which was in the body came to life in the soul of Paracelsus. When the image of the inner illness of a person met with the own soul of Paracelsus, then the image of the plant or mineral that he had to process arose in his soul as if by itself. This is why he had his great and significant successes. Even if, in a certain sense, he could be seen by people as a tramp, he was a great benefactor of humanity.

But that did not prevent something like the following from happening. A great gentleman went to Paracelsus to be cured by him. A fee of one hundred thalers had been agreed upon. Paracelsus prescribed a remedy. After taking it three times, the gentleman recovered. But then he said: “Yes, if I have recovered so quickly, it is not worth a hundred thalers.” And although Paracelsus did not usually attach particular importance to payment, Paracelsus flew into a rage and had “evil notes” printed, as it was said at the time, or as they say today: pamphlets. He had them passed around. A friend then advised him to flee, and he lost his job.

But that was how he usually felt about life. On the surface, the story of his death may be a legend, but the doctors had hated him so much that it does not seem incredible that an individual in Salzburg pushed him down a slope and killed him – in 1541. Since Paracelsus was a very temperamental person and represented with all his enthusiasm what he experienced, it can be said that this has an inner truth, especially when we look at the last picture of Paracelsus with his furrowed face, then we have the feeling: He met a tragic end because what lived in greatness in his soul was not compatible with the smallness of his time.

When we consider how he viewed the times, we can say: He has not yet been able to penetrate to the teaching of repeated earthly lives, but he knows that the human being standing before me is not a being that exhausts itself with its physical existence, but a being that has an inner nature, is connected to inner invisible forces of a supersensible world. Yes, he said: Man can only be recognized if he is seen as a threefold being. First of all, there is the human being who can be known with the physical mind. But above this physical world there is another world that can only be seen with the eyes of the spirit. This human being is taken from the astral or sidereal world, as Paracelsus also called it. He then further distinguishes the highest human being, who belongs to the purely spiritual world. There Paracelsus saw two others interwoven into our sensory world, and the human being interwoven with these two others, and knew that the human being belongs in the spiritual-soul world.

And then Paracelsus said again: When we look at this human being, the way he thinks and ponders must indeed present himself as a spiritual-soul being. When he saw how a choice was made within his organism regarding food, for Paracelsus this was a sign that between the person who thinks and researches and the one who presents himself in the body, there is still another one present. He speaks of a spiritual body that is taken along when a person passes through the gate of death.

Paracelsus calls this inner man the inner alchemist because he transforms the substances of nature so that they can become a builder of the human being. And Paracelsus is aware that he must not only use external means if he wants to heal people, but that the supernatural powers are at work when a person is healthy or sick. Therefore, he not only says: “The person must have passed a nature test, but he is also a pious man.” He knows that if he wants to heal people, he must penetrate to the deepest hidden causes of the illnesses. Therefore, when I am standing in front of a sick person, I know that I have a preparation, but more than anything else, if I can let something overflow in my soul, that is my hope. That in the spiritual course of events, what I have gained as a spiritual experience can also flow in, that the power of my hope, which completely permeates me, can flow out.

There is still much to be said, but one can divert one's gaze from Paracelsus in order to get to know him in yet another way, in a later, even more awakened spirit, in Goethe. And here, the figure of Paracelsus stands quite remarkably beside the contemplation of Goethe, as if Paracelsus were looking over Goethe's shoulder, and especially when one devotes oneself to the contemplation of Goethe's life's work, “Faust”. It is remarkable that in terms of external characteristics, Faust bears some similarity to Paracelsus. But this is understandable. Besides the sixteenth-century Faust, Goethe always had the figure of Paracelsus before his soul. And just as Paracelsus once placed the ancient Galen to one side, so we read of this Faust: He put the Bible behind the bench for a while and became a man who lives in the world. Paracelsus did not put the Bible behind the bench, but he turned away from the old medical books and wanted to gain independent knowledge. And when we follow Faust, in everything as Goethe describes him, how he goes out with the country people and how he is remembered by them, how his father taught him as a boy, the image of this boy Paracelsus, holding his father's hand, comes to mind. And one has the same image as Goethe gave in the walk before the gate.

But one thing is still very strange. Paracelsus lived to be 48 years old. He passed through the gate of death after a life of rich inwardness, and if he had had good health, not affected by the smallness of his time, he would also have had to say: There you stand alone; which is the ideal of “Faust.” Can we not imagine Faust as being as old as Paracelsus when he died? There is nothing to prevent us. But while Paracelsus would have stood there through his rich, precious, appreciative inner life, through the harmonious balance with all the longings of the world, Faust stands before us – at about the same age at which Paracelsus stands at the height of eminent satisfaction and knowledge, Faust stands before us in despair. Paracelsus could not have stood there with the words:

“I have now, alas! studied philosophy,
jurisprudence and medicine,
and unfortunately also theology
with great endeavor.

Paracelsus would have said: Thank God that I soon ran away when I was supposed to study all these things, and went to nature. Therefore, he had a different relationship to the great things of nature than Faust. No one would have said of him:

You resemble the spirit you comprehend, not me!

Rather, he was akin to the spirit that

In the floods of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
weaving back and forth!

and from which Faust turns away in horror:

terrible face.

And so Faust stands, despairing of what science can give us, yet unable to find what he seeks, having surrendered to magic. We can, of course, only touch on this, as time is of the essence.

Goethe lets his Faust go through everything that man can achieve through his aberration, he lets him go through all the aberrations that man goes through when he does not enter the spiritual world in the right way, and he presents this particularly in the witches' kitchen. The one depicted in Faust does not arrive in a harmonious way at what Goethe particularly desired in his “Faust”. Only Goethe penetrates more and more, especially through his Italian travels, more and more into what nature gives him.

Eminent Spirit, you gave me, gave me everything
I asked for. You did not turn
your face to me in the fire for nothing.
You gave me the magnificent nature for my kingdom,
the strength to feel and enjoy it. You do not
allow only cold, astonished visitors,
grant me to look into their deep chests,
as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
before me, and teach me my brothers
in the silent bush, in air and water.

This interweaving with the spirit of nature is something that Faust possesses: but he has not yet reached the point where he can recognize the spirit in a mature form. Therefore, Goethe must depict the recognition of the higher world in the characterized form of the witches' kitchen. But we move on and see how he — Faust — arrives at the imperial court and how he has to amuse the emperor in all sorts of ways, and finally has to bring him Helen from the underworld. We see how Goethe lets him descend into the realm of the mothers, that is, into the world of the soul and spirit. But at first he only brings up the image of Helen. But in the course of time he must bring up not only the image that resembles the spiritual Helen, but also what she really is in the spiritual world. What is needed for this? That he gets to know the right connection between body, soul and spirit, namely the physical body, the etheric and the astral body in the spiritual-scientific sense. Just as Faust initially fails to hold on to Helena, but first has to connect body, soul and spirit, so this soul must first be presented in such a way that the body can penetrate into it from one side and the spirit - homunculus - from the other. Goethe uses a strange image here, which people have studied a lot about:

He is not lacking in spiritual qualities,
but all too much in the tangible and practical.

And Thales advises him:

Give in to the praiseworthy desire
to start creation from the beginning!
Be ready for rapid action!
You move according to eternal norms,
through a thousand and one forms,
and you have time until the human being.

That he - the homunculus - is to become human is clearly stated. Furthermore:

Come with me spiritually into the moist expanse,
There you live equally in length and breadth,
You can move about here as you like;
Just do not strive for higher orders.

The comments come entirely from the text because the emphasis is on the word “order” as if he had been striving to receive an order. But it is a very simple matter. As so often, Goethe was speaking his Frankfurt German, and people also printed it that way, but it should simply be written Orten: “But do not strive for higher places”. When he arrives at the classical Walpurgis Night, the Homunculus, who is not lacking in spiritual qualities, is advised that he must pass through such realms of nature, through what natural science teaches, that man develops through the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms to human corporeality.

You have to start at the very bottom. The passage through the greenness of the plant world is depicted to characterize what a person experiences when they reach the plant stage, and Homunculus says:

It grunelt so.

And now to come to what is brought about in man through love, we experience the end of the second act, where Homunculus, who has progressed so far that he has the powers of the three kingdoms of nature within him – this is shown to us by the allusion to the elements – is dashed against the shell of Galathea. Then, when the spiritual has become so embodied through the three realms, this appears to us as the image of Helen.

Then Goethe shows further how Faust develops. It is wonderful how he demonstrates how Faust comes to ever deeper realization, which Goethe shows as complete only at the moment when the eyes go blind. Darkness outside, but inside the light shines. Through experiencing the spiritual world, he can become free from the external world. He shows us this by the fact that Faust only experiences inner vision when the outer light goes out. And yet, Goethe should not present Faust as Paracelsus. Faust falls into misfortune: He can only come to the realization of the spiritual light by dying to the external, by becoming a completely different person. Paracelsus was able to lead his enemies to their deaths.

Why did such a transformation of human research and forms of knowledge occur on the path from Paracelsus to Goethe? The answer is provided by an event that occurred a few years after Paracelsus passed through the gates of death, and which was experienced as a major event on the path from Paracelsus to Goethe. The world was introduced to the Copernican system of the world. It has not yet been realized what this means. Until then, the earth had been regarded as the center around which the firmament moves. Now, through Nicolaus Copernicus, the ground was taken from under people's feet, so to speak. There has been no greater upheaval in the world view. What was the fruit of such a change? That from now on such a path of the soul could lead to direct knowledge of the spiritual world. Until now, a supreme being had provided a worldview that recognizes that which is in physical space as the only thing, and presents it as if the senses recognize it. A sensual process was presented as the decisive one, and the solution to the riddles of the world was sought in external facts.

Paracelsus now faced the world unperturbed by such a materialistic solution to the world's riddles and acquired what he could recognize through direct observation of nature. But in his time, the solution of the world's riddles was otherwise sought in external facts and sensory processes. But this meant that the power to direct oneself to the spiritual in the innermost part of the soul was suppressed for a while in the innermost part of the soul.

Faust cannot gain any satisfaction from his yearning for the spiritual world. The human soul had been taught different ways of thinking. Faust faced spiritual science with despair, because the first thing that reveals itself as spirit to him is: “Don't talk to me like that!” – which is how Goethe made Faust a person of the eighteenth century. Goethe had to experience in Faust what he was to attain in the spiritual world. In this way, Goethe also characterized our immediate present, our time.

Goethe made his Faust character a tragic one, saying: In our time, man has not yet reached the point where he can penetrate into the spiritual world without losing the context of the world of sense. Faust had to lose his eye.

Spiritual science or theosophy, however, has a kind of fulfillment of what Goethe characterized as the task of modern times, because spiritual science wants to be a balance between what modern science has brought about as facts and what the spirit can be as a fact of the spiritual world. Man needs this, and we need nothing more as proof of this than the correctly understood Faust figure. Man needs not only his theory of the development of external facts, but he needs a knowledge of what is the bearer, the creator of the external world. And so, in addition to the law of Francesco Redi, that living things can only arise from living things, there is another: spiritual and soul forces in present earthly life arise out of spiritual and soul forces in earlier earthly lives.

Thus, spiritual-mental aspects will appear as the very legitimate continuation of natural science, as it were a re-embodiment of a Faust. A Faust who does not need to go blind, and yet has spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, so that it will be as we can read in Goethe:

Hark! Listen to the storm of the hours!
The new day is already born for the ears of the spirit.
Rock gates creak and rattle,
Phoebus' wheels roll and clatter.

What a roar brings the light!
It drums, it trumpets,
the eye blinks and the ear is amazed,
unheard-of things are not heard.

Thus Paracelsus appears as a personality that we still find in ancient times, where people still had an old heritage, where the spiritual powers of vision could draw from the spiritual world. But the time came when the spiritual powers of the soul were obscured by external materialism. Now we are at a time when they will develop again, and science will be warmed and enlightened by the assurance, hope and fulfillment of all that we strive for in our thoughts and meditations. Thus science will become much more useful, but spiritual science or theosophy will teach that man, with his innermost core of being, belongs to the spiritual world.

The social question, which is to occupy us today, did not, as will immediately become clear for everyone, arise out of a mere idea or out of the undoubted need of a few people, but is a question that confronts us with facts as strongly and clearly today as ever. One who looks around just a little in the surrounding world will know what a distinct language these facts speak. It could well be that someone who does not want to hear this language of the facts will find out in the not too distant future that he has closed his ears too long to what was necessarily going on. With regard to the social question, the human being of the present is standing within the battle that is at times still playing itself out under the surface of our social order. One who wants to say, more or less precisely, how the social battle has increased in extent and violence doesn't need to go any further into externals, he needs only to draw attention to the violent workers' movement on the occasion of the work stoppage at Crimmitschau, to the miners' strike on the occasion of the lockout of the electrical workers, and, in sum, to what is going on in Eastern Europe.¹ In all this we will have to discern the social question being lived out.

The reproach has often been addressed to Theosophy that it has a number of dreamers among its followers, that it seeks to work only in those areas to which one retreats from the great common questions of the time, where one wants to linger in leisurely contemplation of the human soul, and so they say: Theosophists are a few people who have nothing particular to do, who in an egoistical way want to retreat into the self and cultivate it in the manner of Theosophy. One easily makes the reproach to Theosophy that it wants to stand apart from the great battle of the day, from what touches humanity in the present time. The Theosophist should be setting this right again and again. He should ever and again point out that wherever there is something to investigate and think regarding warranted human affairs in the present, there the Theosophists must be, that he must have a clear heart and clear thinking, that he must not lose himself in some cloudy utopia, but rather must stand within the everyday, helping and caring.

And this other reproach can also easily be made: that Theosophy is touted as a universal cure for all the evils and injuries of the present. That also is otherwise. To be sure, it is claimed that Theosophy, the Theosophical movement, has something to do with all that must prepare itself in the present for a salutary future, but not like a mastering, not as a universal cure do we extol Theosophy; rather we only want to show that with it something so comprehensive is given that without it today we cannot progress in the mosl essential things that we should be concerned about, and that all speculation and reforming must remain half- baked unless the human being approaches the matter with the Theosophical view. The doctrines of thinkers about grand encompassing cosmic connections, about the universal law of world destiny and world events occupy us, in the inner circles of our Theosophical movement, not merely so we can gaze at the starry vastness at leisure, but rather because we know that these laws we are studying and which are active in the great world-all are also active in the human heart, in the soul, and in fact give this soul the capacity really to see into the life of the immediate present. We are sort of like an engineer who absorbs himself for years in his technical studies, but not in order to engage in contemplations of the mysteries of the calculus and marvel at them; rather we seek the laws which we then apply to human life, as the engineer builds bridges and applies the laws to reality.

There is also something here that is universal and widespread and opens up a further horizon. Who would dare to present thinking as a universal remedy, even though this thinking is necessary for what can happen in the cosmos? Theosophy is no dead matter, no dead theory. No, it is something life-awakening. It is not a matter of the concepts, the ideas, that we take on. What is told here does not have the intention of dealing with the ideas as such, nor the intention of developing interesting notions about hidden facts, but rather, what is here passed before the human soul has a very special quality. Non-Theosophists may believe it or not, but one who has occupied himself with it knows that what I am about to say is correct in practice. One that has applied himself to how, in Theosophy, the world and life are considered will notice his life of the senses and of soul becoming something different from what they were before. He learns to think in another way and will observe human circumstances in a more unbiased way than previously.

We have a distant future in mind when we speak of awakening higher powers through inner development. But for the near future we also keep an eye on the life that we can bring about through Theosophical development: that is, the possibility of coming to a comprehensive, clear, and unbiased assessment of the human situations immediately surrounding us. Our culture, with all the scientific character which it has developed up to now, has come up with theories that are impotent regarding life. The Theosophical world-view will not produce such impotent theories. It will teach mankind thinking, awaken thinking forces in mankind that are not powerless regarding reality, but will empower us to take hold of human evolution itself, to take hold of the immediate conduct of life.

Let me bring in a little symptom that will further clarify what I mean to say. Recently a clear example in the political field was provided by a Prussian government councilor who went on leave to find work in America, to take part in and get to know conditions there.² A state councilman is normally called upon to be active in human evolution. Taken in a higher sense, it is his duty and obligation to let something live in his heart that corresponds to real conditions and not merely to theories. And if he has nothing that chimes with the conditions, then his theory is impotent. This man, who for years previously had been called upon to deal with the human element, got to know the human element himself. Of course what I am saying entails not the least reproach against the individual man. This deed is to the highest degree honorable and bold, and admirable. But what he has written is a symptom of what is urgent. It shows the discrepancy in his orientation toward the world and toward workers. Here are just a few words from his book As a Worker in America [4th edition, Berlin 1905, p.31] { Bracketed statements [ ] are insertions by the German editor.}: “How often, earlier on, when I saw a healthy man begging, did I ask, with moral indignation, why doesn't the lout go to work? Now I knew why. In theory things look different from practice; even the most unappetizing aspects of the national economy are easy enough to handle at your desk.”

There is no greater mark of poverty than when someone who is called upon to participate says that the theory which he had doesn't agree with the conditions. Here's the point at which one can take hold of the matter, just as logic enables people to think at all, and just as no one can become a mathematician without manipulating logic, just so no one can develop the power of practical thinking without Theosophy. Look at the national economy that is overwhelming our developmental [free] market. If you set about looking into things with healthy, comprehensive thinking, Theosophical thinking, you will find that things that are supposed to be guideposts, emanating perhaps from university professors or party leaders, are gray theory suitable for being dealt with at the desk, but are useless when one is facing reality. Such things reveal themselves, for instance, at congresses. One just has to look more closely. Congresses in general bear this character. If those who busy themselves would care to descend into practical life, they would soon find that they are capable of nothing. Merely gazing at life doesn't do it. Nor can someone who judges from the standpoint of today's customary culture pass judgment on the women's question or the social question, nor can someone judge who merely looks at things, for nothing is done by that either.

Now if you were to ask this gentleman who wrote these words, What can lead to an improvement?, then you would find that he has only learned how it looks; but how things should be done, that is a different question altogether. It is also not a question that can be answered in an hour or a day. It can't be answered at all by theoretical debate. No Theosophist worthy of the name will say to you: I have this program for the social question, for the women's question, for the vivisection question, or about the care of animals and so forth, rather he will say: Put people who are Theosophists into the institutions dealing with all these questions, set such people in professorial chairs of national economy; then they will have the ability to develop the thinking which will lead to making the single branches of their activity into guideposts in the realm of public life. As long as this is not the case, people in this realm will be charlatans and will have to witness the world collapsing around them, and how this idle circumlocution in congresses shows itself in its uselessness.

I say this not out of fanaticism, rather from what in every Theosophist is a real Theosophical attitude, real Theosophical thinking. Theosophical thinking develops clarity about the various realms of life, a clear, objective view of the forces and powers working in the world. To look at the matter rightly, that is what Theosophical life enables you to do. Therefore Theosophy is not a panacea in the ordinary sense, rather it is the foundation of contemporary life.

After these introductory words let us give a few indications about what has given our social question, as it arises from the facts, its special stamp. Whoever wants to see what will happen must know the laws of becoming, may not have gray theories, must know the laws of the becoming of humanity. We cannot find these laws through some sort of abstract science. Theosophy does not proceed abstractly. It proceeds from clear contemplative thinking. And so let me indicate with at least a few words how the life of today has shaped itself, how this life today has come to be. One who looks more closely at life will realize that some self-knowledge also belongs in these realms in order to see clearly. First I will picture the outer facts, then I will say a few things concerning what it is actually all about.

Every one of us knows what the human being needs in order to live. We all have an idea of what food and clothing we need. A few figures will tell us how much the majority has of all these. All we need to do in this regard is to examine the tax structure. It has been told over and over, but we can bring it to mind again and again. In Prussia, someone who has an income of less than 900 marks pays no taxes. One can very easily check how many people in Prussia have an income of less than 800 or 900 marks. That's 21 million people. Ninety five percent of the total population have less than 3,000 marks income. Take England. Only those who have an income over 150 pounds are taxed. [...] You see, we have most ample figures that speak of how many people have what one must have as absolute necessity.

Look at statistics. They speak a distinct language. But what has that to do with our self-knowledge? A lot. For it is a matter of gaining the right standpoint for ourselves regarding these facts. And in this connection people let themselves miss out a great deal on what is right. What are people around us doing? What is the cause of their receiving this low income? It is what we give them for what they do for us. We are now making no distinction between workers and non-workers, between proletariat and non- proletariat. For if one makes this distinction, then the matter is already entirely false. And that is the mistake of all our national economic considerations, that one does not proceed from self-knowledge, but rather from theory.

[The following sentences of the transcript reveal a few discrepancies, so that the original wording cannot be reconstructed. By the gist of it, Rudolf Steiner most likely described how every person lives from the products that another has produced. Even for someone out of work, whose means of livelihood are insufficient, products are produced. Even the seamstress working for starvation wages wears clothes that have been produced in turn for a starvation wage. Compare the paragraphs written in the same year in the essay “Spiritual Science and the Social Question,” in Lucifer Gnosis.]

And if in our emotions and perceptions we are able to feel a certain pain over the fact that the clothes we have on have been produced for a starvation wage, then we are looking deep into the heart of the question. When in all this you think over what you wear in the way of clothing, what you put in your mouth for nourishment, where it comes from, only then will you grasp the social question in all its depth. Not through speculation, but rather through a living contemplation does one get an insight into what it is all about.

It isn't right when they say that today's misery, even if we could portray it in its direst colors, is greater than it was in former centuries. That is not the case. We would decisively be committing a falsification of objective reality. Just try to study conditions objectively in the city of Cologne today and 120 years ago, and you will see that much has gotten better. And even so we have the social question. We have it because human beings have gone through yet another evolution, and this is because in large measure they have come to thinking, to self-consciousness, and because their needs have greatly changed. And there, if we study the question thus, we are indeed of necessity directed toward the broad contexts that arise for us in world history if we are not, like the modern researcher, too shortsighted. In order to judge these things it is necessary to get to know the great laws of life. What has brought it about that social affairs have taken this shape? It is the manner and method which the human spirit has taken on. Look back to the time of the French Revolution. At that time they demanded something else. It was a question tending more toward the juridical that brought out the ideal of Liberty - Equality - Fraternity. The French revolutionary heroes in Western Europe called for Liberty. Those now battling in Eastern Europe call for bread. It is simply two sides of the same coin, two different demands of human beings who have learned to put such questions because their souls have undergone a transformation.

This transformation of the soul we have to study more closely. We must study and understand why the souls of the great masses of human beings today—and this will spread over the centuries—have come to these demands. At this point the Theosophical world conception comes in with practical application, underpinning our comprehension. Only someone who understands the case is qualified to judge it. The only one who is able to look into the soul is one who, in the great world framework, sees what is going on in this soul. And only one who understands something of the laws of the soul is able to effect something in souls and lead into the future.

A small side remark: The sciences of today, biology, Darwinism, Haeckelianism, [The worldview of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), German naturalist and philosopher.] have brought us great ideas. So also the idea that each living entity, in the first stages of its existence, even in its germinal state, recapitulates the forms of life that have previously been gone through out in nature. This brief recapitulation of the various stages occurs also in that being which includes them all, climbing higher on the ladder of evolution than all others: the human being. Assume that a spirit had consciousness at a time before there were any human beings, then he would have had to know not only what had already happened, but he would also—by contrast—have had to form a picture of future evolution. He would have had to form a picture for the future out of the animal condition of that time. Only the human being, who in his germinal configuration recapitulates the preceding conditions, can show us what to do. It is the doing that must pass beyond all knowing. No knowing occupies itself with anything but what was. But if we want to work into the future, we have to do things that haven't been there yet. The great laws that are to be realized in the future show us this. In a certain way everything that is to come about in the future has already been there in the past, namely through intuition. A spirit who had intervened at that time would have had to have had intuition in order to be able to find out about the hidden laws of existence that apply to the past and the future. That is why Theosophy cultivates intuition. That is what reaches out beyond the mere physical experience of the world. Theosophy looks for the laws that are to be cognized by intuition and which lead us into the future of the human race. [For a characterization of intuition as used by Steiner, see, for example, his essays from 1905, The Stages of Higher Knowledge.]

One of these great world laws that can be a guide for us is the law of reincarnation. First, it renders understandable for us how, in higher spiritual realms, what obtains as law is nothing else but what Darwin and Haeckel have intimated. It renders comprehensible why this or that was felt as a need in any given age. One who steeps himself in this knows the last time in which there was life thirsting for universal freedom, when human beings took up impulses for which they should be calling today. The ones who today call for liberty and equality—I say this with the same objective certainty with which the natural scientist has spoken about the physical—all those souls who today cry for liberty and equality have learned it at another stage of their existence, in an earlier incarnation. The greatest needs of the human being of today were embodied in the early time of Christianity, in the first Christian centuries. All human beings have taken up this press for equality, before which the human being of today stands in spiritual life. Christianity brought the message of equality before God. In times prior to that, there had been no such equality.

I do not say what I have just said in a derogatory way, I say it with the same sober objectivity with which I would speak of any scientific problem. If one considers the actual soul and everything which creates outward inequalities, the same soul that once took to itself as an impulse “they are equal before God and before mankind”—when one considers the actual soul—finds that everything that determines outward inequality has no meaning for contemporary life. When the grave closes over us we will all be and become equal. What the soul has taken up lives on in the soul and emerges in a different form. If we consider cultural progress from the perspective of the macrocosm we come to tremendous implications regarding education. I have already drawn attention to what this pedagogy on earth was like in pre-Christian times. Let us look back into Egyptian times. A large number of people there were occupied with work, the difficulty of which a man of today can no longer estimate. They labored willingly. And why? Because they knew that this life is one among many. Each one said to himself: The one who is in charge of my work is like the person I will be sometime. This life must be compensated in different incarnations, for it directs itself out of this knowledge.

Linked with this is the law of karma. What I have experienced in one life is either deserved or will be compensated for in later times. If it had merely gone on like that, however, then the human being would have overlooked the kingdom of the earth. This one life would not have been important to him. In that regard Christianity took measures for education in order to have this life between birth and death be of importance to him. It is merely illusory when Christianity deviates from that, for it has pointed strongly to the beyond; it has even made eternal punishment and eternal bliss a function of one life. Whoever believes that the one life is of primary importance learns to take this life seriously. It pivots around the truths that are suitable for the human being, and it is suitable for the human being to be raised in the idea of this one earth life. Such were the two tasks: education for the importance of earthly life between birth and death, and, on the other hand, that outside this earthly life everyone is equal before God. This earthly life has been bearable only by being so considered that all are equal before God. Whoever looks at it that way will observe, in the development of mankind since the rise of Christianity, a descent into the physical world. More and more the human being feels committed to physical existence. Through this he transferred the importance of the rule of the equality before God more and more to equality in material existence itself.

That picture should not be misunderstood. The soul that 1800 years ago was accustomed to claiming equality for the beyond now brings the impulse for equality with it, but in connection with what is important today: “equality before Mammon.” Please do not see a criticism or anything pejorative in this, rather the objective confirmation of a cosmic law of the developing soul. One must study the course of time this way. Then one will understand that only one thing will again bring about in this soul a change in direction, an ascent, namely if we get the soul who is calling for equality back into the beyond. Toward the beyond we looked up, from the here-and-now we looked out. Today, due to this impulse, the soul is turned back upon itself. Today it seeks the same thing in the here-and-now. If it is to find an ascent again, it must find the spirit in the present, the inwardness, in the soul element itself. That is what the Theosophical world movement is striving for: to prepare the soul for the third stage, [The German “drei Stadien” translates to “three stages.” We suggest this represents a stenographic error and take the liberty of correcting it for the sake of clarity.] because it is filled with God, filled with divine wisdom, and will thereby again know how to place itself in the world, so that it will again find the harmony between itself and the surrounding world.

Such thoughts have value in giving direction. We can't bring this about from one day to the next. But we also cannot consider only our individual deeds. Every deed must stand under some influence. Then it becomes practical, then it is something, then it is no gray theory, rather immediate life, because we are looking into the workings of the soul.

Our national economists and our social theorists today so often say: the human being is only the product of outer circumstances. The human being has come to this because he has lived in these or those outer conditions. Thus speaks, for example, in earnest, social democracy, saying that the human being becomes what the environment makes of him, that because he has become a proletarian worker, due to the entire development of industry, he has also become one in his soul, the way he has evolved through just these conditions. The human being is a product of circumstances. We can often hear that. Let us study the conditions themselves, let us consider what is round about us, what we are most dependent on. Are we dependent merely on nature? No! We notice what we are dependent on only when we stand starving in front of the bakery and have nothing in our pockets to buy anything with.

All these conditions are made and put into effect in turn by human beings. The spirit that is evolving through history has brought these conditions about. People have thought up, out of concern for their own welfare, sometimes only shortly before, what obtains today; they simply insert it. Thus the one who thinks people are dependent on circumstances is reasoning in a circle, because the circumstances were brought about by people. If we picture this to ourselves we must say: it isn't a matter of the circumstances, rather we have to look at how the circumstances have come to be. It is idle to insist on saying: the human being is dependent on his circumstances. In fifty years the human being will also be dependent on the conditions that surround him. You can concede to every social democrat [Social Democracy is “a political theory advocating the use of democratic means to achieve a gradual transition from capitalism to socialism.” American Heritage Dictionary, 1992. Social Democrat (with capitals) refers to a member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in Germany, which was founded in the late 19th century.] that the human being is dependent on circumstances, but on those that we cause today, that emanate from our disposition, from our soul. We create the social conditions! And what will live then will be the crystallized perceptions and feelings that we put out into the world today.

This shows us what it is all about: that one must learn the laws under which the world is evolving. It cannot be a matter of science, rather it can only be an intuition of what we must contribute as law. This comes directly out of a perception that seems most fantastic to most people, but which is much clearer and more objective than much of the fantastic fantasy of our scientists. One that can tell what lives in the soul and then crystallizes outwardly, can also, out of the wisdom, out of the divine in the soul, tell what an individual can spread out into the world and what is proper for humanity.

If in the future you want to have such circumstances around you, if you want to have it set up that way, as an institution which will satisfy people, about which people will be able to say: “That's it—we want to live under these conditions,” then you must first pour humanity into these conditions, so that humanity will stream out of them again. The deepest humanity, the deepest soul-inwardness must first stream out of our own hearts into the world. Then the world will be an image of the soul, and in this soul there will be an image of the world. This will be able to satisfy people again. Therefore the human being cannot expect anything from all those quackeries in the social area that are perpetrated by looking at outer circumstances. These outer circumstances are made by human beings; they are nothing else but human souls which have streamed outwards. The first things that have to be worked over, what we have to take up first as the social question, are the souls of today, which produce the environment of tomorrow. You can see how better conditions stream into the environment if only you would study it. Again and again I have had to hear from social politicians: Make the conditions better and human beings will become better. Just let these people study what individual sects, developing themselves cut off from world evolution pursue as soul culture, just let them study what the latter contribute to the shaping of outer conditions. If human beings realize that the improvement of conditions depends on themselves, if they acquire Theosophical knowledge, and if they cognize the first fundamental principle to establish the kernel of a universal brotherhood [Refers to the first fundamental principle of the Theosophical Society: “To form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color.”] and develop it in themselves as a social feeling for the surrounding world, then the actual social is possible, and one is prepared for what will happen in the near future.

Our entire national economy today lives under false premises. Therefore our theories are mostly false because they proceed from assumptions entirely different from those that arise out of the human being and from humanity. One starts with production, or one believes one can achieve something with the development of compensation. All thinking moves in this direction. To be sure, an improvement will not occur immediately with a change in thinking. But it will occur when the direction is changed. Moreover, our proletariat has no inkling about what is here in question. What it demands is more pay and shorter hours. Take a look at the worker in any particular sector, say the electric sector, which has been unionized in order, through this collective, to get better pay and working conditions. What does he want with these better working conditions? He wants a different relation regarding compensation to take place between him and his employer. That's all he wants. The conditions of production don't change. All that happens is that the worker gets higher wages [...]. That's all that happens. If s just a shift in capital.

But that doesn't really change anything much at all, because if one gets more pay today, food will be more expensive tomorrow. It is not at all possible to bring about any kind of improvement for the future in this way. This ongoing endeavor is based on false thinking. There it's a matter of production and consumption. Here a great comprehensive worldwide law about work applies. One has to know this. Certain people who are used to thinking in today's national-economic terms will say perhaps that I am placing a foggy brain in front of them. One who has worked his way through to Theosophy has, as a rule, gone through today's thinking. Theosophy should be active in us as a life impulse. But as every thought will draw into us and stimulate every action in us, just so this also should stimulate us. We needn't think that we can realize it right away. Also, the government councilor who doesn't live in gray theories can look at life entirely differently. He doesn't need to travel to America in order to get the idea that someone who doesn't have any work has to be a lazy lout. In the course of time work has greatly changed its form.

Take a look at ancient Greece. What was work in those days? The worker stood in an entirely different relation to his master. At that time work was slavery. The worker could be compelled by force to work. What he received from his master was his living. But his master took the proceeds of the work; it had nothing whatever to do with the particular relation of the worker to his master. He had to work; moreover, he was maintained under precarious conditions; he was not compensated for the things he did. There we have labor under duress, without pay.

[A] commodity is the result of something other than directly compensated work. Thus its value also has nothing to do with what is to be paid in wages. Look at today's situation. Today we have jobs for which the worker is partly compensated—partly. What they bring in flows as profit into the pockets of the entrepreneur. Thus work is partly compensated. What, thereby, has the worker himself become? He invests his labor power into this work. In Greece, when one was confronting a unit of work, it was a product of slavery. Today's commodity involves something entirely different. Today the luxury that I receive is crystallized labor for which the worker is compensated. If we ponder this we will find that a half freedom has taken over from the old slavery. A contractual relation has taken its place. In that way labor has become a commodity in the figure of the laborer. So we have labor that is half compelled and half voluntary. And the course of evolution is in the direction of completely voluntary work. This path no one will change or reject. Just as the Greek laborer did his work under the compulsion of his master and a present laborer works under the compulsion of wages, just so in the future only freedom will obtain. Labor and compensation will in future be completely separated.

That will constitute the health of social conditions in the future. You can see it already today. Work will be a voluntary performance out of the recognition of necessity, out of the realization that it must be done. People perform it because they look at the person and see that he needs work done for him. What was labor in antiquity? It was tribute, it was performed because it had to be performed. And what is the labor of the present time? It is based on self-interest, on the compulsion that egoism exerts on us. Because we want to exist, we want labor to be paid for. We work for our own sake, for the sake of our pay. In the future we will work for our fellow human beings, because they need what we can provide. That's what we will work for. We will clothe our fellow men, we will give them what they need—in completely free activity. From this, compensation must be completely separated. Labor in the past was tribute, in the future it will be sacrifice. It has nothing to do with self-interest, nothing to do with compensation. If I base my labor on consumer demand, with regard to what humanity needs, I stand in a free relation to labor, and my work is a sacrifice for humanity. Then I will work with all my powers, because I love humanity and want to place my capacities at its disposal.

That has to be possible, and is possible only when one's living is separated from one's labor. And that is going to happen in the future. No one will be the owner of the products of labor. People must be educated for voluntary work, one for all and all for one. Everyone has to act accordingly. If you were to found a small community today in which everyone throws all one's income into a common bank account and everyone works at whatever he can do, then one's living is not dependent on what work one can do, but rather this living is effected out of the common consumption. This brings about a greater freedom than the coordination of pay with production does. If that happens, we will gain a direction which corresponds with needs. Already today this can flow into every law, every decree. Of course, not absolutely, but approximately. Already today one can organize factories in the right way. But that demands healthy, clear, sober thinking in the sense of Theosophy. If such things penetrate into human souls, then something will be able to live again in these human souls. And the way the one determines the other, just so this life of the human soul will also determine that the outer arrangements will be a mirror picture of it, so that our labor will be a sacrificial offering—and no longer self-interest—so that what controls the relations with the outer world is not compensation, but rather what is in us. What we have in our power to do, we offer to humanity. If we can't do much, then we can't offer much; if we have a lot, then we offer a lot.

We must know that every activity is a cause of endless effects and that we may allow nothing that is in our soul to go unused. We will be making every offering out of our soul if we completely renounce any pay that can accrue to us from external conditions. Not for our own sake, not for the sake of our welfare, but rather for the sake of necessity. We want to firm up the soul through the law of its own inner being, so that it learns to place its powers at the disposal of the whole from points of view other than the law of wages and self-interest. There have been thinkers who in some connection have already thought thus. In the first half of the 19th century there have been thinkers who have brought this feature of a grand soul-based contemplation of cosmic law. Is this feature not a sanctification of labor? Isn't it so that we can lay it on the altar of humanity?

Thus labor becomes anything but a burden. It becomes something into which we place what is most sacred for us, our compassion for humanity, and then we can say: Labor is sacred because it is a sacrifice for mankind.

Now there have been people who in the first half of the nineteenth century spoke of “sacred industry.” Saint Simon was one of those who had an inkling of the great ideas of the future.³ Whoever studies his writings will, if one deepens them in the theosophical sense, gain endlessly much for our time. Saint Simon spoke in a rudimentary way, but of a type of living together, as in an association. He has projected associations into which the single individuals deposited tribute, and thus existence became independent. He had great ideas about the development of humanity, and discovered several things. He said: The human races correspond to a planned development, and souls make their appearance one after the other and work their way upwards. That's the way to regard the development of humanity, for then one comes to the correct view. He also speaks of a planetary spirit that changes itself into other planets on which humanity will live. In short, here is a national economist whose works you can read and who lived in the first half of the nineteenth century. You read his work like a Theosophical book.

Today the palingenesis [continued rebirth, metempsychosis] of soul existence can be proved. Whoever acknowledges Haeckel will also have to acknowledge reincarnation if one carries Haeckel's ideas further. Fourier⁴ also thought in this way. You can find in him a primitive Theosophy. Thus for one who looks at things the way they are, Theosophy's first major principle for our social life—to establish the kernel of a universal brotherhood—is the only thing that can propagate healthy conditions in the environment. This view of the Theosophists is not impractical, rather it is more practical than the view of all those social theorists (you'll have to admit this if you apply these theories to life), and only someone like that will say, with good old Kolb: Studying theories of national economy is no burden. Only if Theosophy comes to be heard in debates on the social question can a healthy way of looking at it, a healthy thinking come into it. So it is necessary for someone who wants to see and hear in this area to come to terms with Theosophy.

For the Theosophists two things are clear, not out of fanaticism, but rather out of a knowledge that comes from looking at life: it is possible to stick with gray theory and relegate the matter to people who will later have to admit that at the desk it looks different from what it turns out to be in life out there. Then one will have to wait a long time, and what must come will come anyway. In the end, living theory will have to intervene in life—one can hear it already today—already today one can argue about what Theosophy has to say about the social question. Then one can't hear just one lecture, rather one has to deal with Theosophy in its entirety. From it one will derive the gift, the ability, in a healthy way to view life from top to bottom in its most secret and intimate forces, then healing and blessing can soon come into our social order.

Let us achieve in ourselves, as much as we can, what should happen. The reshaping of labor, working not for pay, is a sacrifice. Then we will have done our duty, then we will have regarded life in a healthy way. Or else we will keep looking at the world with gray theories, alien to life. Then it could turn out that future humanity could say: Questions were raised. When these questions were there to be raised, when recovery in a good way was possible, that was just when they did not want to study them. Goethe once said: “Revolutions are entirely impossible if the rulers do their duty.” He knew who was to blame for revolution.⁵ Let us try to consider what the history of the future can say about our present. You have seen what time has wrought, until the earth was drenched with blood, and how the time has raised the most burning questions in an even more frightful way.

• 1. Crimmitschau strikes: Among the numerous work stoppages in the first years of the 20th century, the strike of the textile workers of Crimmitschau, from 7 August 1903 to 17 January 1904, stands out especially because the management reacted to the strike of 600 textile workers in five factories with an unprecedented mass lockout: they locked out the entire work force. Subsequently, in Crimmitschau, with a population of 23,000, around 8,000 textile workers and 1500 who worked at home stood in conflict with a management that was obviously intensifying its measures against the workers. For details on this strike see F. Deppe et al., Geschichte der deutschen Gewerkschaftsbewegung (History of the German Trade Union Movement), Cologne, 1978, p.77f.
  
  Miners' strike: A further high point in the strike movement was the miners' strike in the Ruhr from December 1904 to 9 February 1905, at the center of which stood the demands for am eight-hour day, higher pay, better worker protection, and recognition of the workers organizations. For this also see the portrayal of F. Deppe et al. op cit. p. 78f. what's going on in Eastern Europe: On 22 August 1905, “bloody Sunday,” in Petersburg, peaceful demonstrators were shot down by the military. The strike wave now turned into revolutionary unrest that soon spread over all of Russia. In the fall of 1905 the socialistically organized workers called for a general strike and, with the participation of Bolsheviks, Menscheviks, social revolutionaries and independents, formed the first Soviet (Council).
• 2. a Prussian government councillor, Alfred Kolb: Rudolf Steiner also deals with him in the essay “Spiritual Science and the Social Question” in Lucifer Gnosis, GA Bibl. No. 134, and in the Hamburg lecture of the same name of 2 March 1908 in Die Welträtsel und die Anthroposophie (Anthroposophy and the Riddle of the World), Bn/GA Bibl. No. 54.
• 3. Saint Simon (Claude Henri de Rouvroy), 1760-1825: social reformer. Lettres d'un habitant de Geneve a ses contemporains (1803) (Letters of an Inhabitant of Geneva to his Contemporaries), Réorganisations de la societi europtenne (1814) (The Reorganization of European Society); Le nouveau christianisme (1825) (The New Christianity). Also see A. Voigt, Die sozialen Utopien, Leipzig, 1906 (Social Utopias). This book is also to be found in Rudolf Steiner's private library (Archives of the Rudolf Steiner Estate Administration) and contains numerous underlinings by him concerning Saint Simon. See p,107ff.
• 4. Fourier, François Marie Charles, 1772–1837; Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales (1808) (Theory of Four Movements and General Destinies), Lenouveau monde industrielet sociétair (1829) (The New Industrial and Societal World). See A. Voigt op.cit. p. 95ff.
• 5. Goethe once said: Literally it says: “I was also completely convinced that any great revolution is never the fault of the people, rather of the government. Revolutions are altogether impossible as long as governments are continually just and continually vigilant, so that they anticipate them with timely reforms and don't hold back until what is necessary is compelled from the bottom up” (Eckermann, 4 January 1824).

Today, allow me to shed some light on a very current topic that touches the immediate present from the point of view of Theosophy. The fact that it is possible for such a question, such a movement that directly engages cultural life, to be placed in the light of our worldview is demonstrated by a small piece of evidence from the last few days that is extraordinarily significant in several respects. It shows that practical people in particular recognize the need to deepen our culture through the theosophical worldview, and that on the other hand, in the broadest circles, theosophy is still something that seems quite unknown.

Last Sunday, a very strange article appeared in the “Tag”, on whose political content I do not want to go into at all, about Russia, Japan and peace, by Carl Peters. You can think what you want about the name Carl Peters; no one will dispute that he is one of the great practitioners of our day. In this article, he talks about the differences in the perception of the peace between Japan and Russia within the two countries. He mentions the manifesto with which this peace was proclaimed to the people in Russia, which contains the words that God may give his great blessing to these people, and for the development of Russia in the future. He then mentions the proclamation of peace to Russia. [The Mikado says in his peace manifesto]: The result of the war is due to the kind souls of our ancestors. Now that peace and quiet have been secured, we call upon the great ancestors to enable us to pass the fruits on to our descendants. The Emperor of Japan visits the temple to bring the news of the conclusion of peace to the imperial ancestors. ... [space] I am quoting this because of the words the author of the article says about it. He says: “The two have this in common, that they appeal to a spiritual fate in the world process.” The difference is that, according to the East Asian view, it is not a victory of the material. The Japanese view is more pantheistic, the Christian view more [monotheistic]. Which one is right cannot be determined by rational arguments. I would like to add the following remark: The Japanese are a [sober, almost mathematical] nation, so I do not assume that what we can believe plays a major role for them. If they assume an influence on earthly fate, it is based not on faith but on knowledge. I would like to suspect that High and East Asia possess certain spiritual knowledge that the highly developed West can only dream of. If they are able and willing to introduce such knowledge into our more or less flattening culture, they would provide us with ideal values that go far beyond what we can offer them. ... [space]

It is not what is contained in these words that we want to examine. The fact that they have been spoken by a so-called [practitioner] is what we want to put at the top of our consideration. Two things strike us. One is that the necessity for a spiritual deepening of our culture is pointed out in such harsh words [about forces that do not live in the material world], and on the other hand, reference is made to East Asia and the hope is expressed that our flattening culture should receive a refreshment from the East, in that the hope is expressed that these knowers can offer us more than we can offer them with our culture. The fact that one can know something about the forces emanating from people who no longer live in earthly existence is taken very seriously here by a man of the world.

It is very strange that on the one hand the necessity is so emphasized, and on the other hand at the same time there is no awareness that for thirty years there has been a movement in Europe that is not working from the remnants of an older people whose spiritual consciousness cannot be at its full height today, but that, I say, there has been a spiritual movement in Europe itself for thirty years, as there is Theosophy. This is completely forgotten; and no consideration is given to the fact that we may be called upon here to establish this spiritual culture in a completely different way than those East Asian peoples. The whole thing is a throwing of light on the one hand, after the longing for spirituality, for knowledge of the spiritual world, and on the other hand, I would like to say, a superficial conception of our own European aspirations.

More than any other question, what has been touched on here may interest us when discussing the women's issue. The theosophical movement can in no way be suspected of treating this matter in any reactionary way. Simply the way it has developed would flatly contradict such an assertion. Women have been among the best founders and collaborators of the theosophical movement from the very beginning. Yes, the actual founder of the Theosophical Society – Helena Petrovna Blavatsky – was a woman. And in terms of the sum of knowledge contained in the works of this woman, nothing that has been given in the cultural works of the last few centuries can match it.

You don't have to believe it. If you seriously immerse yourself in what this woman has given, then the conviction grows that what has just been said is a truth. And Annie Besant, her successor – another woman – has understood in a quite extraordinary way how to combine modern science, modern thinking, and a progressive outlook on life with the theosophical ethos and the theosophical movement in general.

Within the Theosophical Society, men and women work together. Never, in any way, does one have the feeling within the Society that gender plays any role in this. Yes, from one side, which has not grasped the Theosophical movement in its deepest essence, this movement has been called a feminine one; partly because it was founded by a woman, partly because perhaps now in the majority women work in the movement. This fact protects us above all from the prejudice that we could understand this matter in some kind of retrogressive, hostile sense.

But the theosophist is called upon to consider all these things in the light of spirituality, in the light of the highest spiritual culture. He must also do this with regard to this matter. Above all, we will notice that this women's issue, as it now presents itself to us, is a product of our modern world view, our modern thinking and feeling. The way it presents itself to us today would not have been possible a hundred years ago. Insofar as Theosophy is always concerned with clearly and distinctly understanding the spirit of humanity in different epochs, we will also have to clearly understand how this women's issue in particular has emerged from our culture. Theosophy is less concerned with criticizing and more with understanding in all directions. Therefore, it will be less programmatic about this issue of women's rights, but will rather have to explore what the cause of this issue is.

We do not get to the bottom of this issue as easily as we do with others. This is because Theosophy leads us deep into human nature. And this is more diverse and complicated than one might think. While the modern man could easily ignore the distinction between man and woman, the theosophist must look at this difference from the depth of human nature and ask himself whether, despite this difference, the peculiar cooperation that has emerged within the Theosophical Society could also benefit larger cultural circles, perhaps even give rise to a general world view on this question in the present day.

If we look back over time, we find that the perception of women, both of themselves and of the perception they had of the opposite sex, has changed greatly over time. Likewise, the external institutions within which the two sexes have lived have changed significantly. If we look at this superficially, we will not arrive at the real cause and basis. It is known that in the beginning of the time into which not history, but prehistory leads us, the woman played a substantially different role. It is known that patriarchy, the “father family”, with its peculiarly constituted inheritance law and other social institutions, arose from an original “mother family” - matriarchy, that woman had a privileged position with regard to matters relating to the offspring, such as inheritance law and so on.

The theosophist must ask himself: how is such a thing connected with the original spiritual forces of the world? This brings us to the discussion of a fact that has been touched on here several times, but which we must apply to this particular case. The basis of all human life in its historical development on earth is a natural one, one that has developed from an [instinctive] disposition to conscious, clear thinking, to conscious, clear institutions created by the intellect and certain moral concepts.

The original bonds of humanity had arisen from nature. Blood relationship was the original one. Institutions that created moral concepts are later placed in the place of ancient blood relationship.

The materialist sees nothing but the raw force of nature in this blood relationship. But anyone who has a spiritual worldview knows that what is expressed as instinct, what comes to the fore as drive, what is expressed as blood relationship, can all be traced back to spiritual forces, to spiritual beings that stand behind the sensual existence. Just as man today, more or less consciously, directs the social order, so originally the devas [or dhyans], divine powers, directed the context of humanity, [they ordered human conditions].

This working out of a spiritual basis, which is still unconscious to man, appears as drive and instinct. The bearer of this original instinct, based on spiritual essence, was woman. The ancient myths and legends of the peoples bear witness to this fact. [From the theosophical point of view this is easily provable, but this view can also be proved purely intellectually.] Only one thing needs to be mentioned. If you look at the images that go back to the earliest stages of human existence, you will have found in these images the tradition of an original female basis for the entire human race. The Greeks depicted their Zeus with a female bust.

The theosophical worldview takes us back to the very beginning of time, as far back as we can trace time on Earth, to those times when there was no gender separation, to those times of which we cannot speak in detail today, to those times when the sexes were not divided between two different individuals, but were united. Those familiar with scientific research will know that even natural science points to a being from prehistoric times that was not single-sex but two-sex. In this regard, I draw attention to the Darwinian Oskar Schmidt. Theosophy speaks of that time in which the pictorially represented prehistoric man was a fact. He was more inclined towards the female sex.

A little thought can make this clear. Reproduction was tied to the female sex at all times. That which was there as a basis was also expressed in the external social context. In the early days, this natural basis was translated into a kind of moral worldview, in terms of social institutions, rights and institutions.

That the spiritual power of man was particularly concentrated in woman, is shown to us even by the view that we find in Tacitus, where woman is seen as a prophetess, [called to proclaim from the spiritual world what will happen in the future – Velleda, Alruna –] who has to proclaim whether right or wrong exists, whether something should be undertaken or not. We find such views among various peoples. The fact that the spiritual, too, where it appears at the beginning of our times, where it appears as something new, as something wise, is rooted in the same natural foundation, emerges from such facts.

And now something else: Go back to the earliest times of religious world view, and you will find a common trait in all peoples that is connected with this natural basis of the human race, and on the other hand with the consciousness from which the oldest institutions and the thoughts and aspirations of humanity have developed. In sexual symbols, in images that are connected to this natural basis, the culture and religion of different peoples is expressed in very specific times. These are naive but beautiful and magnificent times when people, in sweet simplicity and naivety, associated nothing low or frivolous with these sexual symbols, where procreation was a power of nature and was symbolized in the woman, who showed herself in various forms of expression like the divine creation for them. There have been attempts to revive these views from a so-called sexual religion. There is no right to do it the way it was done. For the current basis of feeling is not such that one can feel one's way back to that original and unblemished state that was associated with these symbols, so that the way these old things are discussed today has something offensive about it for the connoisseur.

Only slowly and gradually did those institutions, those states of consciousness that are linked to the female origin of the human race, change into a different order, an order that, to put it briefly, was made by man, by the man who has broken away from this natural foundation, by the man who has nothing to do with the visible progress in the human race.

It is only through the law, through legal regulation, that the right of the man is introduced into the original right based on blood relationship, taken from the female point of view. Thus we see that it is only on this original basis of a religious world view, which starts from the generative powers of nature, that what we encounter in the remnants of ancient peoples, [Mongolian ancient tribes] as ancestral culture, develops. A power that worked directly was revered in woman.

Then, in place of the wise and the soothsayers, and in place of the veneration of the directly present female, there arises what is called the cult of the ancestors, the veneration of deceased members of the people who have rendered outstanding services for the good of the whole — male ancestors. They venerated what had an effect beyond death. You can still see this in the fact that the Mikado brings the message of peace and war to the graves of his ancestors. So we see the transition from female culture to male culture.

The conquest of institutions that have been linked to women by nature since time immemorial through reason and the thinking of man is slow and gradual. But something else is connected with this, something that I cannot better describe than as the transition from a primeval conservatism to an idealism that is gradually emerging in the world.

You can follow this in those periods of world development in which those old religious cultures of which I have spoken developed. These go back either to times when the divine-creative could be seen in the power of creation, or to times when it had long since died but still continued to work as something present. These cultures build on something in the past. At first, we find in world development those that build on humanity's starting point, that point to the old, to what has come from before, to what has been sacred since time immemorial, to nature, to the ancestors. This is the starting point of the human race, and gradually this view changes into a completely different one. In all peoples who have provided the starting points for the culture to which we ourselves belong, you will find the veneration of the ancestors in the veneration of the prophets, the veneration of those who proclaim the future. In all the peoples who provided the starting points for the culture to which we ourselves belong, you find, instead of ancestor worship, the worship of the prophets, the worship of those who proclaim the future, those who hold up the high ideals to the people. Primitive conservatism gradually gives way to idealism. The focus turns from the past to the future, even among the people from whom Christianity itself emerged. The prophets were the real great personalities, and hand in hand with them goes a detachment from the natural, from mere blood relationship, from all that points to the foundations of our race.

We see the tremendous depth of human development when we look at this turnaround. That which is connected with the relationship between the sexes, which is the subject of much discussion among anthropologists and others today, the so-called sense of shame, was not present at the starting point of our culture. [What was connected with the creation of man was not hidden; it was something natural, self-evident.] It only emerged at the time when a characterized change took place as a necessity. Where the power of nature gave way to reason and ideals, people began to cover what was considered to be a remnant of the natural foundations of the human race.

Take a closer look at this point. What is man ashamed of? Consider this feeling of shame in other areas. Everywhere you will find that man is ashamed when something is done by him in such a way that he actually more or less recognizes the demand that he could have done it better, that it is actually not right the way he did it. We can say something quite similar about the feeling of shame in general. It is there and refers to something that comes from ancient times and can be overcome, and which is as it should not be if we look to the future.

Here human instinct, human perception, points to something that the theosophical world view presents as realized in the distant future. Today I must point out that the development of humanity through the sexes is only a transitional stage, that just as humanity has emerged from the union of the two sexes in one individual, humanity is again heading for a state in which there are again not two, but only one sex. Thus you see our present development through the theosophical world view placed in a distant past and a distant future that are similar, that resemble each other in certain ways.

We can perceive how this fact is reflected in the most intimate expressions of the human race. Take a look at ancient artistic or semi-artistic representations of the divine creative power, at the way the ancient Egyptians associated it with the service of Isis, and compare it with the peculiar trait that emanates from Raphael's Madonna. What is natural, what is connected with the power of creation, can be seen to have been expressed in a semi-artistic way in ancient times. This creative power is shyly veiled in a Raphael Madonna, and we encounter a completely different, higher moment: love, a spiritual relationship that takes the place of the old natural relationship. The mother with the child, bathed in the magic of love. And the spiritual is expressed, as for example in the Sistine Madonna, in the protruding angel heads. The creative power is hinted at as a spiritual echo. There you see a great universal truth sensed by the artist.

The religions themselves take this path. Ascetic religions, such religions that are escapist, are not at the starting point of humanity. They only emerge at the time when the indicated change has taken place. It is magnificent and powerful in the times when this change is being prepared. The saviors in human development are mythically depicted as immaculately conceived. You have this with Buddha and with the other saviors of humanity and finally in the Christian religion itself. In religion, the original natural foundation is developed into the most sacred.

[Again, compare the Egyptian Isis service with these spiritualized religions.] This is wonderfully indicated in the transformation of Egypt, with the ideal and the spiritualized perception at the starting point of our era. Then you will feel this transformation in all humanity. That is why the theosophical world view is clear about the fact that the natural basis from which the human race originated is the external physiognomic expression of a spiritual being. This spiritual essence is the same that man will approach again in a conscious way in the future.

If we bear in mind that we are progressing from the spirit in its natural form to the spirit in its immediate form, then we will understand many things better that have taken place in the course of sexual development. Above all, we will better understand what I mentioned earlier: the replacement of ancient female institutions and female foundations by a male culture, in which we still live today. The natural basis was to be suppressed. At first it could only be suppressed in the area of external institutions, but otherwise it remained in place, and so we are confronted by a strange hybrid in our present-day institutions. Half of them are still based on what remains of the old natural basis with blood relationship, and half of them are steeped in human understanding, in moral institutions that have been poured over them. In our current institutions, both elements peek out in a colorful mix. [Basically, man has only whitewashed what the original natural basis of women's culture has provided him with; it shows through everything.] However, we will turn to the future with its culture and efficiency. Then this spirit will show itself in its actual, appropriate form, and in the light of a completely different view than the one that originally existed. When man originally wanted to raise himself to the Divine, when he wanted to raise his eyes to Him to whom the highest honor and worship must be paid, then he turned to the Power that is germinating and sprouting through man himself, creating naturally.

More and more, this view is changing into a completely different one, and today we are only just at the dawn of this other view. But for a select few, it has long since emerged. Three words in the wonderful, ancient Indian Vedanta wisdom already express the germ of this world view: Tat twam asi – that art thou. – And what does this mean? It means a great deal. When the Vedanta sage immersed himself in this “That thou art”, he turned to the whole great universe, he turned to everything outside of himself, to that with which he felt at one. He then said to every stone: You are of the same nature and essence as I – that thou art. Just as my hand belongs to me, so the stone belongs to a being, to which I also belong.

Everything around us is an invitation to look outside, to seek the divine in the world itself, not just to worship the spirit in the creative and generative forces that work through human nature itself. Tat twam asi is the worship of the divine spirit in all of nature, and with that, at the same time, the call to carry this divine spirit into our entire environment, to transform this environment so that the original state around us from which the human being himself has sprung will arise again.

From asexuality comes sexuality. From the male-female comes the male and the female. This difference will again submerge in the common, objective spiritual world when man will find his self in the great universe, when he will feel brotherhood and connection with the whole great universe, which has no gender, which is all the more perfect the more exalted it is above all similar differences.

When this thought lives completely so that he can permeate culture with this thought of the higher human being exalted above all gender, then the sun has risen. This is what shines for you today as the dawn of a new culture. Then the future of our culture is self-evident, the culture into which we must enter when idealism is further developed, and this culture must not carry anything in the outer world that has anything to do with gender. So we enter institutions and facilities that show us a cultural environment, a moral environment, that applies equally to men and women, that is the same for men and women.

That is the theosophical thought, and the theosophical ideal is to reorganize our institutions according to this, which have emerged [from an originally female culture that has passed through a male culture, to bring them into a higher state in which these two epochs will only exist in the Hegelian sense as dissolved moments].

This can only be in a culture that is spiritual in the best sense of the word, a culture that starts from what has nothing to do with gender differentiation. The one that is emerging in the theosophical movement is such a culture. For what does the theosophical worldview cultivate? The higher self in man, that nature and essence which has nothing at all to do with man and woman. For that in man which the theosophist looks at, that which he makes the object of his special consideration and study, the higher man, the spiritual man, appears in one embodiment as man, in another as woman. The one who lives as a man today has, like the other who lives as a woman, passed through as many male and female incarnations. Man and woman were an outward expression of the inner higher individuality, which is neither male nor female.

Thus, something that is male-female at the same time already lives in today's man, something that unites both sides. And a worldview that shows this male-female as the basis of both through the embodiments, a worldview that cultivates this, only prepares the ground on which man and woman are completely equal, not only in our legal institutions, but also in their feelings. Through “Tat twam asi” we overcome gender differences, and the cooperation between men and women in the Theosophical Society is a kind of model, a small beginning for a great, powerful culture that must develop in this direction in the future, where the two sexes will not live side by side in abstract equality, because the diversity can be greater than it is today. But what is the same is what matters. That is the external world that is formed around us.

What matters is not what we carry within us, but what lives around us outside. As long as man is selfish, as long as the whole culture is based on domination and personality, man draws the impulses for institutions from his female or male personality. But as soon as he creates what is grounded in the higher self, the inner being can be shaped as it likes, the outer world, which is reflected in the inner being, is the same. To use an image, set up two concave mirrors, a convex one next to a concave one, and place the same image in front of both. The convex mirror, the one that curves outwards, will show a different image than the concave mirror, but it is the same image in both cases. As long as there is male and female in the physical body, there will of course still be a convex and a concave mirror, but the same external world will be reflected. It must not be shaped in a one-sided way by one sex or the other.

Those who have grasped the spirit will see something infinitely higher in it. Only a materialistic view sees the spiritual as an effect of matter. The theosophist, however, comes to the conviction that all matter originates only from the spirit, that everything that is material today was once spiritual, and that everything we could observe at the starting point originates from earlier, spiritual foundations. In the same way, a future natural super-sexuality will arise from the present super-sexuality, which man himself creates. We will create our outer institutions, which we will bring into the world, to an equal extent out of the spirit of woman and man. They themselves will be the cause of the later natural effects. What man creates as asexual culture will later create a super-sexual nature.

Therefore, it was quite natural that the original culture reverted to the worship of that which was conservatively held from ancient times, to the worship of creative natural forces, to the worship of ancestors. The spirit preceded nature. Through it, nature was created. If one wanted to look up to the spirit, one had to look at the dawn of the world. But if you want to see the future, you have to work with it as a human being – in both the conscious and unconscious state. Then the prophetic view of the future takes the place of the old cult of ancestors and the worship of the family. We ourselves must prepare today what is to be in the future, what kind of external culture is to exist.

Thus a great, all-embracing cosmic horizon leads us to a solution of the women's question that opens up great perspectives for us. If today, through the theosophical worldview, the higher human nature is sought in man or woman and gender remains a completely private matter, then what is really being covered is not considered. In a sense, this is the higher development of feeling, which emerges as a sense of shame in times of transition. What used to be a shy concealment is now a holy overcoming.

This kind of reaching out and looking forward is a great and powerful ideal for the future. By developing the higher human being in man and woman, the theosophical worldview awakens such feelings in man and woman that create culture. Noble, beautiful feelings that transcend everything base must arise from this cultivation of the higher human nature. Culture originated from a kind of female foundation. And when we look back to ancient times, we can find the female generative powers revered as divine nature everywhere. This then developed into a [male] culture. Initially, we have a true antithesis to this [male] culture in today's women's movement, which can also be explained from it, [today the women's movement is a revolt against this male culture, and it is entirely justified].

But every one-sidedness in the world shows us its complement. What confronts us in external history presents itself to us ideally in a kind of counter-image. The one-sided older culture seeks a counterpart. The old feminine culture, the Isis culture, finds its ideal antithesis in the Osiris cult, which was dismembered, perished, and for which Isis longs. This is the image through which the female wants to complement herself, where a new thinking takes the place of the old culture.

Then another ideal appears in Christianity. In the beginning, Christianity had to be a masculine level of culture. But it was complemented. Just as the culture of Isis was complemented by an ideal of man, so this culture of man was complemented by an ideal of woman: in the medieval cult of Mary.

Goethe also hinted at the contrast between female and male culture in his “Faust”. “The eternal feminine draws us up,” he says in connection with the preceding verses. This is what he envisioned: higher culture will be the one in which the female counterpart of the male no longer needs to be longed for in the female and the female ideal no longer longed for in the culture of men, where the feminine no longer needs to be drawn up, but where the higher divine, the higher self, appears as the drawing force in man. This higher self, the whole human being, is what the theosophical worldview strives for. How could it not be that women are the first to understand what is now, at dawn, to be the culture of the future.

For thousands of years we have had a culture of man. Our whole culture is a male culture. Our modern justice, theology, medicine and so on are almost exclusively products of the male culture. Those who approach these things more deeply will easily find a physiological expression of the male soul. But if it is to be different now, then it is self-evident that the inspirer must be the woman. If the theosophical movement is to be understood more quickly, then it must be understood in this direction. Those who do not see it this way can call it a feminine in a pejorative sense today. But those who are clear about the fact that the great progress of culture takes place from the feminine to the masculine and from there to the masculine-feminine will find it self-evident that women can best understand this theosophical world view.

It is more difficult for a man to [free himself from the prejudices of today's culture], because he has grown up from an early age with the results of a man's culture. He should literally transform himself inwardly. He will also have to do so if he wants to be up to date. But all that is to come also prescribes for us the free interaction, the completely free cooperation of man and woman, the absolute equality in the perception of the higher self, the actual spirit of the human being.

Thus the former ideal of the eternal in man, which we encounter in the Osiris cult, and the eternal in woman, which has found a mystical formal expression in the new age and has been lived by poets and mystics, will be transformed into the ideal of the harmoniously structured human being, who is not afflicted with any one-sidedness. We can foresee a culture all around us that will bear the outer physiognomy of supersexuality. That is the task of the theosophical world view. We do not work with phrases, with words and programs, not with demands, but we seek to awaken the living life in the soul from the contemplation of the spirit, to open up the source that is self-creating. We do not just speak as Theosophists, but we indicate what, according to the nature of the facts, must develop in these souls.

So you can see from this particular question that European spiritualism, European theosophy, has something quite different to say than to reproduce the remains of old worldviews that have retained the cult of the ancestors. They have spirituality, the reference to the spiritual, but they do not have what we have as those who have to work according to ideals, not according to old habits. Spiritualism is certainly a necessity for us and it must come into the world; but not a spiritualism that carries the achievements of our culture to the graves of our ancestors – although we can understand and respect such a thing – but a spiritualism that is prophetic, that carries the best that we can develop within us to be burned for a fire that will be the beacon of our future.

In our time, the result of the struggle is often seen as something that brings about progress. One often hears it said that forces must be steeled by meeting resistance. It is thought that only through struggle can one move forward. This is also believed to be the case in the spiritual life. It is believed that the best way to help young people to progress is to present life to them as a kind of battlefield. This view is far removed from another one, which has at least as many adherents as the other. This view is related to the world view that Buddha characterized with the words: hatred is not overcome by hatred, but by love. This contains the exact opposite of a fighting spirit. Genuine Christianity, too, is built on a different attitude than one that makes struggle the lever of progress. But in our time, precisely the deepest minds, in order to bring about what many long for, have believed that they are delivering the best for the progress of humanity in development in the fighting spirit.

The most radical expression of a militant attitude is found in Nietzsche. He says: “I love only the great war.” This view is that man develops through struggle towards greatness. In science, this view believes it finds its support. If that is so, we cannot easily dare to try to object to such an attitude. But we must try to see whether this science itself is based on solid ground. This is opposed to what the theosophical world view is supposed to solve.

Among the many questions that the theosophical world view addresses are those of brotherhood and the struggle for existence. The Theosophical Society and the theosophical current are there to bring about a new era in this area as well, to support in a different way many things that have so far been based on struggle, and to place them on solid ground.

The three principles of the Theosophical Society only appear to be unrelated. They are all connected. But especially the second and third are connected with the first, with the principle of bringing about a foundation for a general brotherhood of man. The theosophist, by thinking seemingly impractically, idealistically, has precisely the most practical thing in mind. We want to put ourselves in the shoes of our fellow human beings so that we can understand where the combative attitude can come from. We hear about the class struggle, the struggle for the liberation of women, for the liberation of the worker. Wherever we see the big issues of the day raised, we see them literally shrouded in the question of struggle. Because this is rooted in the soul of the times, it has led to the struggle being presented as the principle of progress, and especially since Darwin. How do Darwinian materialists think of progress? They think: perhaps there was once something imperfect and inappropriate in nature, alongside something perfect and more appropriate. The appropriate has overcome the inappropriate. Those who embrace this view believe that in the struggle for existence, the better will continually gain supremacy. The idea of the struggle for existence is linked to the idea of progress. This also continues in human life. The world of beings around us is like a gladiatorial fight, in which the strongest remains victorious and the weaker is overcome. Some Darwinians have justified the view that something similar is necessary in human life as well. In Haeckel's work, you can read that the strong triumph and that the weak must perish. Alexander Tille says that from our view that we must help our depressed brothers and sisters, draw them to us, warm them with our love, embrace them with our feelings, another view must emerge that replaces compassion with struggle; that the weak should not be protected precisely for the sake of general human progress. What Nietzsche said about the great struggle, about the great war, also stems from this opinion. It is significant that this struggle for existence has even been laid into nature.

We must assume something in the nature of time, the soul of time. If it is the case that those animals have the best chance of developing that oppress their weaker brothers, then we would have to draw a peculiar conclusion about the soul of time. If this is not the case, then man has been mistaken, then he has seen the struggle in nature, and he himself is now particularly predisposed for this struggle. Our public life is hardly based on anything other than the struggle for existence. Even people who are close to each other are in such a struggle for existence. Our minds often face each other quite differently than we face each other as persons in reality. Our lives have become alien to the way our institutions are. Suppose two people were involved in different business relationships. The two businesses are in fierce competition. But the minds of the two people love each other. In truth, however, they fight each other behind the scenes of personal life.

Our public life is in fact based on the war of individuals against others. We must realize that today our circumstances are so complicated that it takes a great deal of insight for people to face each other consciously in such a way that our whole life is built on brotherhood. For this we need a world view that permeates all areas of life, that can reach into everything, that is based on this brotherhood. One should get to know Theosophy by approaching it through individual practical questions in life and showing how the theosophical view can be applied to the individual questions. Here in Western Europe, we can learn a lot about the struggle for existence, and we do not know that for 25 years there has also been a trend in natural science that has almost proved to an obvious extent that the view of the struggle for existence in nature is wrong. In 1880, the Russian naturalist Kessler gave a lecture in which a highly plausible scientific view was clearly explained, namely that it is not the animals whose individuals fight with each other that progress best, but those that provide the most mutual help.

Of course, there is struggle in nature. But it is not what war causes that is progressive, but rather that which works against war and in favor of mutual assistance. Since that time, much work has been done in the field of natural science. If we familiarize ourselves with this, we become more and more convinced that it was in the soul of those who established the struggle for existence as a principle to see this struggle for existence as the principle of progress. — On the other hand, souls that have the spirit of brotherhood within them will also find brotherhood outside in nature. If we consider this, we will no longer be able to hold on to the idea that the human race is progressing through mutual conflict. The human race is a species. It will only progress as a species if its entire life is built on mutual assistance. This is where the theosophical worldview comes in, in that it regards mutual help not as based on an indefinite feeling, but on the deepest knowledge of the nature of man. The two great teachings that the theosophical worldview shows us appear absurd to those who approach them with prejudice. When a meteorite was once exhibited, a certain academy of sciences declared that it was impossible for this stone to have fallen from the sky. The teachings of reincarnation and karma, of human destiny and universal justice, are also still regarded by many as absurd.

Our life between birth and death is not the only one; we have an immortal core of existence within us. This was there before the physical body was there, and it will still be there when the physical body has disintegrated. We have often lived before, and we often return. Life becomes infinitely more understandable through these teachings. I see a person born into deepest misery, with little ability, condemned to live his whole life in poverty and misery; I see another endowed with great abilities, so that the whole of life is an easy matter for him. The theosophical world view tells us: That which we see here carries within itself an essential core, an imperishable soul that has prepared its destiny in previous lives. Everything we experience in this one lifetime is the consequence of our previous incarnations. When I do something that I consider justifiable now, I am building my future life. Through my work in previous times, I have built my present life.

Let us look back to a time when this world view was a general sentiment. The Egyptian slave could perform the hardest labor in building the pyramids without grumbling, because he knew that this incarnation was one among many, that he would one day stand where his master stood, that his fate was his karma, the consequence of previous embodiments, and that he himself would one day prepare his next embodiments. When this becomes the deepest consciousness, then a calm spreads in the soul, the peaceful resting in existence; and in the spiritual relationship, a life in bliss spreads in man. Then it is deeply written in the soul: My brother stands beside me. I see him. He is perhaps what is called a bad person. And I judge him, even though Christianity prescribes: Do not judge! As long as I only know the sensual existence, I may judge rightly. But if I know that this person may not be facing me for the first time in the world, then I may well think that I was with him in a past life – I myself may be to blame for the fact that he is not different. Perhaps as a father or as an educator, I neglected my duty towards him. If I have an inkling of a past life, the principle of brotherhood becomes even more profound. Even if someone does me wrong, I must realize that what he does to me I may have brought about myself in a previous life. If we think of life spiritually as permeated and entwined by a network, then the feeling of brotherhood arises from this.

Those who understand theosophical life will learn of other reasons why spiritual threads intertwine from person to person. We recognize how the deeper spiritual essence in all of us is one. You have to gradually feel the unity with all the powers of the soul. If I separate the hand from the body, it withers. It is only valuable on the communal organism. A few miles above the earth would be enough to kill us instantly. Only at this height above the earth can we live. Just as the hand is attached to the body, so man is attached to the earth. Our whole being continues outside as well, it is not only there within our skin. Anyone who recognizes this says to his entire physical environment: That's you. As human souls, we are all connected to each other by even stronger bonds. If we look at the spiritual, we will feel that no one could be there without their fellow human beings. If we wanted to peel the soul out of the rest of humanity, then our soul would wither. The task of the theosophical movement is to empathize with all of humanity and to recognize ourselves as a part of it; to know that if we take out one part, we will cause that part to wither. The individual human soul, taken out of the whole human community, no longer remains the soul, the living soul; it withers. It becomes more and more understandable to those who immerse themselves in the spiritual world view that just as the individual cells subordinate themselves to the body and fit into the whole, so must the individual souls fit into the whole. If the individual cells were to go their own way, we could not live. The soul lives on a higher level than the individual cells. The cells work together in a community. They create a new center. The soul works in it; so the souls also work together. The law of cooperation also applies in every other area of existence.

Imagine a community of people whose souls give up their own existence, think together with their thoughts, feel together with their feelings, want together with their will impulses, as cells join together. When we join together in this way, we create a new center for a higher being; we give an invisible being the opportunity to express itself here as often as people join together like cells. A true being of a higher kind can then work through the powers of human beings, as a soul works through the cells. For this, something more is needed than what is called the brotherly disposition, something that reaches deep into the soul of man. At the turn of the eighteenth century, the principle of liberty, equality and fraternity was established. We have indeed managed to respect personal liberty. At least in principle this is recognized, in theory. But there is a much deeper principle of fraternity, equality and freedom. Here something comes into consideration that is capable of conquering a world. It is not so easy for me to recognize that I am interfering with the freedom of the other person through my words, thoughts and feelings. When two people talk to each other, you often hear that one does not wait to hear what the other is saying. He contradicts outwardly or, if that is not possible, inwardly. There is an art of listening. There is an enormous amount of self-discipline involved in learning the art of listening, in fully tolerating even the opposite opinion, appreciating it in all its dignity. Our lives would take on a completely different shape if we learned to hold back with our words and thoughts. This is the second principle: we want to recognize the kernel of truth in all religions. If we make an effort to understand others, to embrace their opinions with love, even in religious matters, then we find that all opinions contain a kernel of truth. In all world views and religions, different religions, we seek the kernel of truth so that we can live together fraternally. If souls tolerate each other inwardly, then they will also outwardly create such conditions that serve the principle of brotherhood. This is where the full practice of life truly begins. The present way of life is fundamentally different from what has been characterized. All our institutions have arisen from what is not tolerance. The public institutions are images of what lived in the souls of our ancestors. If we start from the deep principle of brotherly love, then we also pour brotherly love into the institutions of social life. This clear brotherly love must be built on a clear view of the human soul.

Here followed the example of the government councilor Kolb, who went to America to work among the workers and gain experience – who came to the realization there of how little the gentlemen at the study table know of what matters.

We must test our present world view against the theosophical world view. The theosophical world view does not stop at the mask of life, but leads into the spirit. In every single personality lives the reflection of the one spirit. In earlier times, the idea of brotherhood was more present than one might think. In the time when the myriad small towns emerged into what we today call the bourgeoisie, we find everywhere that life, where it is formed in a new way, is based on the principle of brotherhood. Today, the bond between the lawyer and the one he has to judge is abstract and intellectual. In the Middle Ages, the judge knew the one he had to judge. Brotherhoods were founded at that time among those who were united by common interests. These old forms no longer fit our times. But Theosophy is to create new forms for the new conditions.

It is the same with religions. The founders established the individual religions for the abilities of the different peoples. Now the whole globe is connected by common thinking. Man must also understand man inwardly. The advent of the theosophical world view is linked to the cultural progress in the material realm through inner bonds. It is intended to achieve the same in the spiritual realm as culture has done in the material realm. The theosophical world view is suitable for deepening all areas of life again: medicine, education, law, and so on. The fact that there is little understanding of the spiritual means that all these areas of life suffer.

If we imbue each of these areas of life with theosophically trained thinking, then everything will be completely transformed. Anyone who has once passed through the thoughts that the theosophical worldview has provided will see into the innermost essence of things. He learns to train his thinking in a completely different way. All this shows how the theosophical world view understands the principle of brotherhood, which is based on a true knowledge of the world and life. Looking into the soul of the other and seeing oneself in the mirror image is the highest fruit of theosophy. The old teaching “know thyself” is given new validity here. A new life built on brotherly love, because this brotherly love is built on knowledge. Opening one's spiritual eyes and looking into the soul of another person, becoming tolerant of what lives in the soul of the other person, leads to truly loving them. Know thyself in the other, embrace with the feeling of community the common essence that is in all. Learn to say of the other as of yourself: That is you.

Dear attendees! That the theosophical worldview is not just a series of doctrines and dogmas and that professing them is not the main thing will be best shown when we practically consider the great cultural issues of our time. Today we want to look at educational issues from a theosophical point of view. What more beautiful fruit could arise from this world view than if it led us into the depths and into all corners of human nature, if it taught us to understand the human being and thus the art of influencing it. That would, of course, be different from if we came only out of curiosity or a desire for knowledge, to hear and learn unknown things about the mind, soul and body of man.

This path alone – the path of learning – cannot be called theosophical, because the theosophical path is only the one that passes through practical life. For those who do not delve deeper into the teachings in their daily lives, they remain incomprehensible. You only get to know the human being in terms of soul and spirit if you work with the undeveloped life of the same. This also gives you insight into the higher worlds. And we cannot deny that an intimate understanding of the soul is needed if we want to be leaders.

The human being consists of different parts, of which the physical body is only one. It is of great importance to know this, because the person who knows that the soul of this child has already led a rich life, that it has already taken many steps through many lives on earth, will relate to the growing child quite differently. What appears at birth in the way of aptitudes and abilities has been acquired in previous lives.

Anyone who knows that the soul gradually evolves out of its shells sees the child with completely different eyes. Not only with regard to the more intimate knowledge of human nature, but also to the whole process of human development in time, Theosophy sheds new rays of light.

We must distinguish between two aspects of the human being: firstly, an eternal core that gains new experiences in the most diverse embodiments, in that it takes something of an extract from each life on earth, so to speak, and secondly, the lower human nature, which only forms the shell of the actual self. Let us briefly repeat what this lower nature consists of.

We have, firstly, the tangible, visible physical body; secondly, the etheric body, which creates the shape of the human being; thirdly, the desires, instincts and passions – the astral body. The higher self is enclosed in these sheaths. We have the physical body in common with the mineral kingdom, the etheric body with the plant kingdom, and the astral body with the animal kingdom. Only the fourth, the I, is possessed by the human being alone. The sheaths that surround the I serve the human being as instruments, as tools, in which the actual I, that which already existed, lives out.

With each new birth, these three sheaths are formed anew. However, we do not have to imagine these sheaths as onion skins that seal off the core of our being from the outside world. Rather, the bodies penetrate each other, and the I penetrates the bodies.

Only those who know the growing human child not only in terms of their physical body, but also take into account their developing and growing etheric and astral bodies, can fully influence their education.

But there are other fundamental questions to be grasped. Great progress has been made in the art of education for over a hundred years. Pestalozzi on the one hand, Rousseau on the other, as well as Herder, have paved the way for the attempt to find the way to make a whole human being out of the child. Deep attempts have been made. Through theosophy, these attempts are becoming even more profound.

Since the subject is so vast, this evening we will limit ourselves to a few educational questions with regard to the finer limbs of the human being.

As long as one regards people as a real mess, one can only achieve results from observations. It is quite different for someone whose gaze is able to perceive the four limbs of the human being, or who at least has knowledge of the connections between these things. The child develops differently in the first years of life and differently in later years. We will now ignore the ego for the time being and deal with the physical, etheric and astral bodies.

Let us consider the child as it stands before us after its birth. There we have the physical body, which is most important. Then, from the seventh or eighth year onwards, it is particularly important to take the greatest care of the etheric body. At the time of the onset of sexual maturity, the astral body requires a very unique educational treatment.

What should happen in the first years of life? The etheric body is devoted entirely to the growth of the physical body during this year, so that the etheric body is not yet free for the astral body according to its natural disposition. Only later, when the physical body is formed, is the etheric body freed for independent growth; for the occult eye, this is connected with the will, which sits deepest.

The one thing in man that he most easily changes is his concepts and ideas. The concepts we form of things in earliest childhood differ significantly from what we think about them in later life. Our emotional world is also changeable, although it changes more difficult than the conceptual world. If, for example, a child has a grumpy disposition, it will be difficult for him to get rid of it. Temperament and character change more slowly.

The most difficult thing of all is the basic character of the will, because the will has its seat where the human being can do the least. He can create new understanding, acquire new feelings, but there is one thing he cannot do: he cannot work on the physical body; and it is the physical body that gives the basic shade to the character of the will. It is only possible to work on the physical body in the first years of life. The educator must always bear this in mind. It is now up to him to develop courage of will in the early years; he must devote himself entirely to its pure development; he must beware of interfering by wanting to teach the child concepts too early. So the will must be developed above all else. The human being has an instinct for imitation. The educator's attention must be focused mainly on this instinct for imitation. He must ensure that good role models are available for the child to imitate. The educator must have an effect on the child through his mere presence. The foundation for some good qualities, such as fearlessness and presence of mind, must be laid in the first year. Until the age of seven, the main focus must be on educating the physical body to become a useful organism.

Is it not possible to influence the etheric body at all during this period? The educator should not intervene much. He must work through his presence. He will then realize that feelings and thoughts are facts. He must not believe that only a slap in the face, a push or an upset stomach are real, but he must be aware that whether he has a good or an evil disposition is just as real, and that it matters who cares for the child. It is not what one does with the etheric and astral bodies of the child that matters, but rather with what thoughts, with what attitude, with what atmosphere one surrounds the child. Depending on the environment, the child's attitude will also be noble or ignoble. Thus it is possible to influence the child systematically, with full consciousness, by setting an example in ordinary, daily life. Everything the child absorbs, it absorbs through the senses, and what it absorbs, it imitates. In this way one is able to influence it harmoniously.

It would be very important if this idea were thoroughly worked on from a theosophical point of view, so that one would learn to recognize better and better the tremendous importance of the environment for a young child. Let us try to make this clear to ourselves in a few details. Some people believe that they are doing a child a great service by giving it a beautiful doll. This is the worst thing possible in the eyes of the occultist. With the beautiful doll, the child's instinct for imitation, which is to be stimulated, is forced into certain channels. The creative power is killed. If you observe a child closely, you will often see that it throws away the most beautiful toys and creates a new one for itself from the simplest material. You should not give the child a reflection of reality. Imitation must not be allowed to restrict the imagination. The child must live in an illusory world; the imagination must occupy the child. It must develop its own powers and create its own world of ideas. And this inner strength remains idle in the face of a beautiful doll. The child's games are reproductions of what they hear and see; they demand mental effort. This awakens two kinds of energy: skill and the ability to maintain balance in a wide range of circumstances. These are some of the aspects from which the education of a young child must be considered.

Around the seventh year, the etheric body becomes freer. The physical body has now acquired the vitality to develop further. Now it is important to influence the etheric body and develop its powers, which are memory and attention. Good habits should be instilled during this time. The educator must now develop these soul powers.

This has also been considered by today's educators. The astral body must not be influenced yet; that comes later; in these years, formal education is the main thing. It is not about acquiring a lot of specific knowledge at first, but about the human being itself. What the person does not learn in the way of geography and so on during these years can be made up later, but what cannot be made up is the acquisition of memory and attention. And these powers should be strengthened so that the person is later protected from flightiness, so that he learns to stand firm and not become fickle. So it is important to teach formal education at this age.

In this regard, big mistakes are made. As early as possible, one wants to develop the child's judgment, to answer the why and wherefore. This is not the right time for that. Rather, one should offer the child a sum of contemplation and thus strengthen his memory. Inner silence must be encouraged, one must try to limit the incessant questioning in order to promote a rich inner life. It is not a matter of saying no and yes, but of developing the possibility of one's own judgment; this would be restricted by saying: This you should do, that you should leave, but one should work more through examples and stories. The spiritual must be reflected in the symbols, fairy tales and mythologies that are communicated to the child; this awakens deeper soul forces. By saying yes and no, we restrict these forces; they should develop out of themselves. No ready-made morals should be given to the child; one should try to create great thoughts and feelings for great people. If possible, little doctrine. Stories of great personalities work better than moral rules. Describe the world, but don't teach rules and laws. It is not one's own judgment and views that should be cultivated at this time; the child is not yet mature enough for that. But what is missed in the development of memory between the ages of seven and fourteen cannot be made up for later. For example, in arithmetic: If the foundations have been laid through visual instruction, then memory must be used to learn the multiplication table. The same applies to languages and other things.

The educator has to gradually withdraw his personality and become a servant to the child. He must not only fill the child's soul with wisdom; he must approach the child's nature and slip out of his soul. He must be a puzzle solver. It is a great gain for the soul when the etheric sheath is given a fixed form in the seventh to fourteenth year. When the memory is practised, when the ability to dwell on one object in quiet concentration is developed, these are firm and solid habits that become constant in people, remaining with them for life.

Whatever we can do must be practised. During these years, everything must be repeated over and over again to become a habit. Formative, creative powers are developed in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth year. The task of the educator is now to lead from example to the ability to judge; the child should learn to use his finer powers. The soul must not be influenced alone, nor must it be guided only by precept and prohibition. Pythagoras struck a balance here and gave wise teachings clothed in a form that held the middle way between example and principle. Thou shalt not beat fire with thy sword, that is, a person in anger wastes strength. He now expresses this in a way that not only appeals to the abstract mind, but he also frames the teaching in a picture that stimulates the child's imagination, develops his fantasy, his imagination. The Pythagorean tenets are something between a picture and a principle. The aim should be to work towards the child learning to form his or her own opinion. The child's opinion should not be narrowed down by strict doctrines, but broadened. And this is done through images, through symbolic representations of the great truths. During the first years of school, the aim is to bring calm and work into the right relationship with the etheric body. As the time of maturity approaches, it is necessary to bring the right balance to maturity, so that the person can live out in the three worlds. The first task was to free the etheric body from the demands of the physical exertions of the body; this required careful observation in order to steel the body through gymnastic exercises and make it mobile, and then to give it the necessary rest, to get it used to rest while the etheric body works.

The tasks of the educator become increasingly difficult as the third period, the time of sexual maturation, approaches. Here, the astral body must be treated with care. Only now has the time come when the child must be taught to form their own judgment. Before that, it was necessary to encourage taciturnity. In the first period, the senses impel the child to imitate; the task is to create the right model for him. In the second period, the child should be influenced by authority; this is natural and has a beneficial effect, inspiring faith and trust. Happy the child who looks up with reverence to an authority that is everything to him. During the third period, the educator has to let his own wisdom take a back seat to the wisdom of the person he has before him in the growing child. Sexual maturity is connected with the independence of the human being. Preparation is necessary for this. What the astral body is to absorb must be prepared in the etheric body. This relates to the harmonious development of the emotional world. If we succeed in awakening graceful, aesthetic feelings in the child, this has an effect on the astral body and produces a normal, harmonious, aesthetic power of judgment.

It is not good when children of 16 or 17 approach us with ready-made judgments; this takes its toll bitterly. We should bring them noble figures from history, beautiful poems, the works of our great masters, but not a confession. Confessions evoke a yes or no, but not a rich inner life. And those who have not had the good fortune to see authorities before them will not come to their own judgment either.

Now is the time when we must strive to develop the relationship between people. In the past, it was important to awaken the spirit of worship; now he must learn to recognize the value of different people himself. Now he learns to distinguish his earlier relationship to people as man to man, recognizes what is worthy and what is unworthy. For what must now be awakened? The affects, the sensations, the feelings of pleasure and suffering. The astral body develops through our dealings with the world around us. Therefore, we must first cultivate the astral body in such a way that it works inwards. Now it is coming to the fore. If it is to make the right use of its freedom, the etheric body must be prepared for it. The astral body was otherwise called the body of instincts and desires. If it is not properly prepared, it will express itself in wild desires and the vices of academic life. If it is not prepared for freedom, the driving force that wants to live it up becomes wild and unrestrained; it must be strengthened in earlier years by educating the etheric body.

Through theosophical knowledge, the educator will be able to deepen and spiritualize his pedagogical skills. Thus, Theosophy becomes useful when it is used to influence young people. The usefulness of having these concepts will be recognized by those who try to apply them in practice in their lives. He will then gain knowledge from life itself, even if he renounces the theosophical worldview. And this practical knowledge is worth more than curiosity and a thirst for knowledge.

External material knowledge often does not depend on us. The state, the class, the circumstances are often decisive; but that is not the most important thing either. What is required by profession and station can take a good or a bad direction. Even with the most flawed curriculum and the most overcrowded classrooms, you can still be effective if you know the person. If it is true that the human being can develop all his powers harmoniously, then this can only happen if you recognize the person from the first year of life, even before birth.

Spiritual things are real. It matters not which thoughts surround a child, not unimportant who receives the human being. It depends very much on whether the person who receives a human being has good or evil thoughts and feelings; doctors and midwives should be priestly educated, ennobled personalities. If this is the case, then the human being enters a pure atmosphere at birth, and that is not insignificant. The spirit is a real thing. This is an area where an insightful education can do a lot of good, and conversely, ignorance can do a lot of harm. Imperfectly, the human being comes into existence. He comes into existence to acquire higher abilities; he must pay for the possibility of rising higher with his helplessness. He must be helped. In this we recognize the solidarity of all humanity, the necessity of mutual aid. Thus, all humanity is one great body, of which individuals are only members. This gives us an understanding of brotherhood, the first principle of the Theosophical Society.

When a human being comes into existence, it is not a matter of a finished life in the most eminent sense; the task of the educators lies in educating him for culture, and this can only happen if it is done out of a sense of brotherhood, out of a sense of community.

Answering questions

One teacher, who was obviously deeply moved by this clear and convincing speech, asked a question about inheritance.

Answer: Above all, the educator must be an observer. He must observe human nature in the child. In doing so, it does not matter at first whether he has a materialistic view that the child's abilities and drives come from heredity, or a theosophical view that the child has acquired his abilities in previous lives on earth and is therefore born into certain circumstances with certain parents. The facts, the result of observation, will always be the same. The educator must be careful not to intervene forcibly in the child's development. Here is an example: an educator had to deal with an eleven-year-old boy in a family. He was retarded and his body was not normal either; he had a large head. He had never progressed beyond the lowest class. His arithmetic books, among other things, were in a sorry state. When he had calculated a task, it was never right, and he kept erasing until everything was full of holes.

The educator did not despair and said to himself: the soul would form the body. He carefully set about educating the child's soul, working according to the principle of the smallest measure of force. He started from very specific points of view and learned that one learns to solve puzzles. He succeeded in educating the boy into a normal child in a year and a half because he was able to recognize the causes of the characteristics. The large head gradually took on the right shape; the boy then developed normally and was later able to study.

It would be very desirable if the question of education were to be thoroughly elaborated in the light of Theosophy.

Dear attendees,

As we look around at our fellow human beings and consider the spiritual striving with which they seek to satisfy their inner yearning for something higher, we find that a major change has taken place over the past century. For a long time, the prevailing tendency was to seek only in the material, the obvious, that which has value for them. For them, the spirit was the emanation of the material, just as the hand of the clock is the expression of what is happening inside the clock, namely the wheelwork. They sought to explain all forces in terms of the material. Anyone who still talked about the divine spirit, about the soul, was, in the opinion of those setting the tone, stuck in outdated views. All life should arise from the material.

In recent years, a major change has taken place in this respect. There is a deep yearning in the world for a spiritual deepening, for solving the mystery of what lives within form. Even today's natural scientists no longer shy away from speaking of soul and spirit.

From three sides, today's humanity is trying to penetrate into the depths of existence. The most comprehensive research is the theosophical worldview. It emerged thirty years ago as an association of philosophy, science, religion and morality. Theosophists are spiritual researchers who strive to explore the spiritual life with the highest powers of man. But Theosophical research is just as certain as science. It aims to recognize the truth and only accepts what has been found through the strictest research into the truth. This is a difficult path, and our aim is to make this path popular.

The second area in which man tries to approach the spiritual and soul is the area of hypnotism and suggestion. For some time now, abnormal phenomena have been observed that cannot be explained by the mechanism of the brain. However, it is becoming apparent that there are many things in the world that our conventional wisdom did not dream of until thirty years ago. Scholars have been forced to take note of some inexplicable phenomena.

When Wilhelm Preyer, who wrote The Life of Darwin, pointed out that there were phenomena that could not be explained by conventional theories, his colleagues shrugged off his claim. Yet the phenomena increased. The appearance of the Danish mesmerist Hansen caused a great sensation among laymen, as many will still remember. He sat a person on a chair and could then do whatever he wanted with him. He gave him a drink of vinegar-sour liquid, telling him it was delicious wine, whereupon the person drank with pleasure; and only when he awoke from the state into which Hansen had put him did he shake himself and spit out what he had drunk. Or he would give him a potato and tell him it was a beautiful pear, which he would then bite into with relish. Yes, he would make him crawl on all fours and bark like a dog.

Some naturalists shrugged their shoulders and smiled, saying that these were just abnormal phenomena; but they did not engage in any attempt at explanation. However, there were individual researchers who wanted to try to see if something could be explored in this way about the hidden aspects of a person's mental life.

The third field in which his followers are so keen is spiritualism. Those who are not spiritualists or spiritualists cannot understand how otherwise reasonable people can come to believe that they can summon any deceased person to learn all kinds of secrets about the afterlife. The fact that some people make an effort to gain knowledge in other ways does not impress the spiritualists at all. What such a person says is considered fantastic by them. They think that to get to the source, you just have to die. They often turn to those who had no special higher wisdom in them while they were alive, and believe that now that they are dead, they can explain the most difficult areas of existence.

These are the three areas in which people seek enlightenment about the supernatural life.

The first, the theosophical area, is nothing more than the popular proclamation of a mystery wisdom that has always existed. The mysteries always showed the development of man, including that of the spiritual world.

There stands before me the perfect animal; was it really made out of a clod of earth? No! It has developed from imperfection to perfection. Honest theorists have also recognized this and traced this development from undeveloped sea animals to apes. The same development that the physical form has undergone has also been experienced by the soul. The human soul has also developed upwards. We become aware of this when we compare a “savage” who blindly follows his instincts and desires and devours his fellow human beings, with a European man of culture who submits to the commandment when it says: “You must not do that.” The latter has gradually learned to let duties take the place of desires. From an average person, we look up to Schiller. How much higher he stands above the average person! He has already cast off his desires. From there we come to the higher human being who has raised himself through piety, like Francis of Assisi; from there we look up to the initiates like Plato and Pythagoras. Between these and the ordinary person, the difference is just as great as between a cartilaginous fish and a lion.

The theosophically minded person says to himself that this soul of Schiller — or even the soul of Buddha — may well have developed itself to this height, that it has gone through the same primitive foundation from ancient times as today's savage. Thus, he sees ever higher stages of development before him. He sees the possibility for every soul to swing itself up to ever higher knowledge, to an eternal goal in life. What has lived in the soul before birth and what will live on after death also lives in us today. Why can't we see this soul? Because we lack the organs to perceive it. Living and perceiving are two different things; there is a great difference between them. The blind person also lives, but he does not perceive. If a person does not perceive the soul within him and the souls around him, it is because he lacks the organs to perceive it. But in man these organs can be awakened. Just as the blind man sees when the cataract is removed, so can the higher organs of perception be awakened in man, and then he can perceive from his own vision, and then he can enter into the higher worlds.

At first, this happens during sleep, when the body is resting from the work done. Gradually, the brain then transmits to the mind what the spirit has perceived during sleep, and the mind also learns to find its way in the higher worlds. The world of the senses envelops us in darkness. No man can say, if he is reasonable, that the inner nature of man is dead; but he does not perceive it. But there is the possibility to make it perceptible. Just as a whole new world of light and colors opens up for the blind-born after the operation, so it is for the person to whom the spiritual eye and ear is opened through practice; the deep night that surrounds him gradually brightens and begins to perceive the spiritual things that surround him. When man's inner life is thus awakened, the whole of nature comes to life for him. He finds the soul of the forest, the soul of the plant, the whole world is ensouled for him.

Some will say: I know nothing of this. That may be so; but he is a poor critic who wants to judge something he knows nothing about. Only he who has seen for himself can judge it.

What world is this that man enters in this way? It is the same world that the ordinary person enters at death. The clairvoyant consciously enters the world that one otherwise only enters after death. For him, death is only a change in life. For those who cannot see, survival after death is a matter of faith; some deny the fact. For the one who can see, all doubt disappears; for him, death is only the laying aside of the physical garment; for the one who has the organ of perception, the soul is there just as before.

What is important, therefore, is that we create organs for ourselves and develop our own soul upwards to the spiritual world, to the disembodied souls. All will struggle through, all will become companions, citizens of the spiritual world; but it is a slow process. Therefore, the call goes out to everyone: Develop your soul! Today, admittedly, there are only a few who have grown beyond the average human being and who, from their own experience, bear witness to the higher worlds. But today, through the theosophical world view, this knowledge is to be brought to all people.

Listening to the stories of the soul's development is the first step towards developing one's own spiritual life. Becoming familiar with the theosophical teachings is quite different from scientific learning. There is a big difference between reading an ordinary book – once I have taken note of its content, it has given me what it is supposed to give – but when I read a theosophical book, it gives me spiritual nourishment in a special way; by awakening thought powers in me, it ignites a fire in my soul. And these powers of thought are life-giving, awakening the slumbering powers in the soul. And so reading a theosophical book or listening to a theosophical lecture is the first step towards one's own independent realization. And just as the first step on this first path to the realization of higher worlds takes place in full day-consciousness, so every step forward is taken in bright day-consciousness.

Even if a person initially has his experiences at night while sleeping, he still takes the perceptions into clear day-consciousness and is awake from morning till night. As he develops further into the higher worlds, he will also be able to see the spiritual light that always surrounds us during the day. In true, correct clairvoyance, the person must be firmly and securely conscious at the center. Only a very reasonable person can enter this path, because only such a person can rationally grasp and logically think through each step forward. This is the clairvoyance to which Theosophy wants to lead people.

You can also achieve a certain clairvoyance by tuning down your consciousness. Souls are constantly around us; for the clairvoyant in the above sense, the spiritual light is not extinguished by the lamplight or daylight. For a different degree of clairvoyance, it is necessary to dim the lamplight so that the weaker light can be recognized. Let us be clear about this. If we want to recognize a small light that is outshone by bright lamplight, we can achieve our purpose in two ways. Either we can dim the lamplight so that the weaker light can shine in the darkness, or we can fan the small light or fire so that it outshines the flame of the lamplight. The theosophically trained clairvoyant does the latter. In full day-consciousness, he can make the light shine, whether daylight or lamplight or darkness surrounds him. The situation is different with mediums, in whom clairvoyance of a different kind occurs, not in full day-consciousness, but in a trance. Thus in a state where day-consciousness is extinguished; there the soul is given the opportunity to see the intermediate light because the waking mind consciousness is immersed in darkness. With the clairvoyant, the world, which is otherwise darkness, becomes light. With the medium, this world begins to shine when the visible has become invisible to the medium. The other two areas do not deal with the waking consciousness; they appeal to the trance consciousness.

We now come to hypnosis. Through some influence or other, a person's consciousness is so subdued that he can no longer control his actions; to varying degrees, the bright consciousness of day is subdued. Suggestion has such an influence on people. The man to whom you say, “Here is a pear,” while a potato is put into his hand, has not lost the ability to see; he can hear and see, but he has lost the ability to control the perceptions through the ear and the eye. Consciousness is dulled to the extent that he is only receptive to what you tell him. As long as he is awake, he can say and do whatever he wants; then he can control his actions. Now that the waking daytime consciousness has faded away, the mental consciousness is still there. Through various means, one can put a person into such a state, for example, by looking at a shiny object. When consciousness is tuned down to a certain degree, the person is a suitable subject for suggestion. He then does things that he would not do if he were awake, for example, he will crawl on all fours like a dog and bark. He hears what is being said but cannot make sense of it. But suggestion can also be carried out without such means. This is called verbal suggestion or suggestive hypnosis, and many contemporary researchers believe that everything comes from such verbal suggestions. What seemed miraculous to us — the barking of the hypnotized person — no longer seems miraculous to us now that we have seen that when the physical-sensory consciousness is extinguished or dulled, the soul-spiritual rapport from soul to soul has been established.

If you go through life with an open mind, you can observe this soul-to-soul rapport in many aspects of daily life. Not only what we hear and see has an effect on us; souls have a direct effect on each other; this also explains the otherwise inexplicable sympathy and antipathy. However, much of it is based on suggestion. Anyone who observes the workings of the soul will also be able to explain the powerful influence that some speakers exert on the masses, even though they give no logical reasons for their convictions. These are subtle effects of suggestion. Interesting observations can be made in this area. The well-known theater director Laube had a subtle suggestive effect on the audience. He brought the great actor Sonnenthal and the actress Wolter to the top. At first the audience did not want to know anything about them; but Laube was sure of his cause. He said: “Not today, but they will eat them!” The Viennese laughed at first, then mocked, but finally they also recognized the greatness of the excellent actors. Through continued listening, the audience's opposition was lulled and they became receptive to the impression that the great actors made on them.

How does science view these phenomena of suggestion? Wilhelm Wundt, who is almost worshipped like a god by some scientists, could not deny the facts, but he did not seek or find a satisfactory explanation for them either. He realized that a part of the brain was switched off during hypnosis, but he could not give a scientific explanation for it and shrugged his shoulders because he did not believe in the existence of the soul. His students tried to track down the existence of the soul and its effects.

The ancients were well aware of the suggestive effects. [Kircher] proved them to his contemporaries as early as 1646 by means of a simple experiment. He took a chicken, put it on the table, hit it a few times on the head with his fist, then drew a straight chalk line on the table, and the chicken obediently walked along this line without thinking of flying away. — It is also known that farmers would draw a thick circle of chalk around geese that were not supposed to fly away; no goose dared to leave the circle.

The knowledge of suggestive effects was buried under the rubble for a long time until the half-quack Hansen uncovered it again. The scholars mostly behaved dismissively towards the phenomena that were new to them. However, there were also unprejudiced men, especially doctors, who took a closer look at the matter and soon realized that a whole new avenue was opening up for them in particular. While it was previously believed that the soul has nothing to do with the body, it was gradually realized that the errors of the soul can even have a harmful effect on the body. The sick bodies are built by errors of the soul, the healthy bodies are built by healthy souls.

All of you gathered here will not be able or willing to dispute spiritualism, the third area we want to turn to. So we don't need to dwell on the evidence for its real existence. If we look at the spiritists, we will notice something. Most of them are quite gullible when it comes to the spirits they want to see, and incredulous when it comes to the spirit that lives in man.

You spiritists want to see the spirit! Why not enrich yourselves by recognizing your own spirit! You really often do much wiser things in your ordinary life than sit down at the table to converse with departed spirits!

When nine people sit around a table, there are nine spirits present, and it seems to me much more useful for these nine spirits to converse with each other than to summon foreign spirits to converse with them. Because spiritualism is known, it is known that a lot of fraud is done in the process; but it is also known that many interesting phenomena occur.

For the theosophist, the question arises as to whether it is appropriate to approach the spiritual world in this way. For the clairvoyant, the disembodied souls are of course companions, and he advises people to develop their own soul so that they too can see. The spiritist says: Why should I become different from what I am? I can save myself that; I don't like developing my mind. – The spiritualist seeks to make the spirit manifest itself to him. The theosophist wants to develop himself up to the spirit, to experience the spirit through his own soul.

The spiritualists are materialists. They say: What do I care about the spiritual worlds? I want to see! - Spiritism originated as a reaction against materialism. People believed in the material, they longed for the spiritual. And so they also wanted to make the spirit materially visible. This did not prove useful for human culture. What was needed was this: to descend even deeper in order to learn to understand the world from within itself. By trying to draw the spirit down to themselves, spiritists lose all control over the spiritual world. One thing is clear: only those who retain their rational minds can judge correctly.

Spiritualist séances whet our curiosity, and curiosity is selfishness. It should not be ignored that many are driven by noble motives and that they mean well. But on the whole, the matter cannot have a moralizing effect, since it leads to the most blatant materialism, in that one even wants to materialize spirits. Fortunately, a large number of spiritualists have saved themselves by joining the theosophical movement.

In this science, every step forward is controlled by the logical mind. So what might happen in a seance? When a person dies, he discards his physical body; the corpse decays; the soul leaves him, and this dissolves soon after death. The human being then still has the astral body; much, much later he also discards this when he enters devachan. Then he leaves an astral corpse in Kamaloka. This has no intelligence, but it can still respond to questions in an automated way. It is these shadows that manifest themselves very often. It is nonsense to turn to the astral corpses. The phenomenon may be correct, but man is not able to judge it. In other cases, one is not dealing with human beings at all. Confusion also occurs frequently. It can be compared to using the telephone; you hear a voice but do not see the person speaking. Confusion of voices can also occur. You speak to a different person than you think. It is like that and much worse in the spiritual world. Everything is uncertain; nothing gives us sufficient guarantee. Everything is withdrawn from clear day-consciousness.

This is how Theosophy stands in relation to the other two fields. The first materialists claimed that no stone could fall from the sky. And now we find meteorites in every natural history museum.

When we look at hypnosis, we see that the scientific world was quite dismissive, even mocking and hostile towards it. But gradually the scientists have been tamed by hypnosis to register the phenomena, and hypnotism has gained respect.

The spiritualists, who long so much for certainty, often become fanatics; but a little bit of materialistic spiritualism has served to reveal the mystery of the invisible world.

Mysterious in broad daylight
Nature cannot be robbed of the veil,

says Goethe, and Goethe was a theosophist.

The scholars only engage in what they can register; only series of numbers and percentages count for them. They achieve a little, and many of the researchers deviate from it nevertheless. They examine the phenomena for their authenticity with the greatest accuracy. Whether they come across the spirit in this way: In the meantime, their scientific endeavors may be quite good until they learn to take the only right path to knowledge.

The theosophical worldview truly leads people to higher things. It wants to guide people with bright, clear clarity and bring them proof that all their yearning for clarity can be satisfied, as Goethe said from his own spiritual insight:

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

The earthly breast at dawn!

It has often been emphasized here on other occasions that what is called spiritual science or, in more recent times, theosophy, that these are by no means mere theories floating in worlds far away, that theosophy does not merely seek to satisfy curiosity about higher worlds. Theosophy should not be something far-removed from the world, something unworldly. If it wants to fulfill its task, its mission, it must draw the forces and the impulses for its work from the higher worlds, and its work towards its goal and its mission must take place under the authority of these forces. Only then can it help in the further development and salvation of humanity. It would be a rather idle knowledge of the higher worlds if one did not want to apply it in practice, to life. For no one can understand life who does not know the deeper forces on which it is based. These forces do not lie on the surface; they lie hidden in the depths. Just as iron, when first seen as a substance, does not reveal that it contains electricity, which only becomes apparent when it is rubbed, so too these forces must lie dormant in iron and must first be drawn out of it. If we wanted to work on the service of progress for humanity without knowing these hidden realities, then our work could only be superficial. Beneficial work is only possible if we explore the deeper forces and entities.

Of course, we must also recognize the goals of our work. What does man work for? For the future! But nothing lies in the lap of the future that is not already present in the present. Let us look at the plant. It does not yet bear flowers or fruit. It will only produce these in the future. But the forces for these flowers and fruits already lie dormant in the plant. It already contains in an invisible form what will happen in the future. And only because people usually remember how similar plants have borne blossoms and fruits can they say that this plant will bloom in this way and not in another way, and bear fruit in this way and not in another way. But if man could see into the interior of the plant, then he could see the forces at work in the plant that will produce those flowers and those fruits.

There is something that lies in the future and that we cannot know, whose development we cannot foresee, and that is the body of the human being. What will one day be in the physical world already rests today in humanity, just as the flower and fruit already rest in the plant. If we are not able to delve into what lies dormant in the womb of humanity today, we cannot become rulers over the forces that will unfold in the future. Those who want to work on the development of humanity are thereby working on something that has not yet existed, and those who want to grasp that must descend below the surface. The theosophical worldview must take on this task and carry it out in practice.

Nowhere is the eminently practical nature of the theosophical world view more evident than in the field of child education. In the child, we have before us, so to speak, the riddle that lies hidden in the future. And every day we have to solve this riddle anew. For the child of seven is not the same child as he was at six, and he is not the same as the child of fourteen or sixteen. Only when we are in harmony with the deep forces that work in secret, only then can we approach the numerous questions in the field of education that are so burning for humanity today. Real orientation in all these questions will only be possible when the theosophical view dominates people's minds.

Today we want to take a closer look at the mission that Theosophy has in modern culture in relation to educational issues. To do this, it is necessary that we know the whole structure of human nature. We know that, in the sense of spiritual science, man is a complex being. For those who look more deeply, the material body is only part of the human being. This physical body combines the same substances that are present in the natural world. In the human body, they are combined in a highly complex interaction. Science tells us: When we look at a machine, we see the effect of the materials of which it is composed; but when we look at a living being, we see not a mere structure of dead materials, but a body that is permeated by life, which regulates the physical forces and brings them to life.

This life was described by an earlier science as “life force”. But today's materialistic science claims that there is no “life force”, that substances develop life within themselves. In recent times, however, people have been moving away from this point of view. It is seen that one does not get very far with this theory, that one must indeed reckon with some kind of life-force to explain the living. But even in this sense of the newer natural sciences, the theosophical view does not speak when it speaks of the second link in the human being, the etheric or life body. It is not concerned with mere theorizing, it does not speculate, but its way is to develop the higher vision in man himself. Just as other beings are only present in the world for man if he has the organs to perceive these beings, just as he perceives light and color only if he has the eye for it, just as he perceives sounds only perceives sounds only if he possesses the ear for them, so for man the higher beings are only present if he has developed organs within himself to perceive them through the training that has often been mentioned here.

If there were a man who had no eyes but organs to perceive electricity, for example, if such a man could see the forces at work that ignite the light here in the room, that play back and forth outside in the telegraphic lines, how very different the world would appear to such a person! With each new sense, new worlds arise for man, and slumbering within him lie the senses that make the higher worlds perceptible to him. They can be developed. No one can justifiably assert that such worlds cannot exist. It would be the same if he were to say that there are no higher worlds because he cannot see them. It would be the same as if a blind man were to say about color that it does not exist because he cannot perceive it.

But if a person has developed through schooling, then the etheric body is an experience for him; he can then see it. In its size, it is almost the same as the physical body. One often imagines the etheric body as consisting of a finer substance, a kind of mist, but that does not correspond to reality. Rather, it consists of forces and currents of a spiritual nature that interact.

The third link, the astral body, differs from the etheric body in that, while in the latter the forces of growth, reproduction and so on are at work, it is the essence of the astral body to feel and to be conscious. The astral body is the carrier of pleasure and suffering, of desires and passions.

Beyond these three members is what makes man the crown of earthly creation: the self-aware ego, the center of the human being, the innermost power in man. So when we have a fully developed human being before us, we have a structure of four members before us.

But you can only understand how to act as an educator if you understand this structure of the human being correctly, if you know that it does not play the same role in a newly born child as in a child of seven or fourteen years, if you know that the development of these links is different at each age level of the adolescent. Only when you know all this can you solve the puzzle that the child presents to us day after day. And we learn to understand all of this best when we start from the assumption that we see how the human being lives before birth.

Before the child is born, we have enclosed the child's physical body, enclosed in the mother's body. Nothing can reach the child without passing through the mother's body. No ray of light, no external influence reaches the child directly. It rests enclosed in another body; one physical body rests in another. Birth consists of the physical mother's shell being shed. But in this moment, from a spiritual point of view, not the whole human being is born, but only the physical body. The second birth takes place gradually, not in a single moment like the physical one. It essentially takes place when the child changes teeth. At this point, something similar happens in the spiritual realm to what happens in the physical birth.

Up to the age of seven, the child is surrounded by an etheric shell, just as it was surrounded by a physical shell before the physical birth, the womb. And so one could say: up to the age of seven, the child is surrounded by an etheric mother. Just as one cannot get to the child before the physical birth other than through the mother's body, one can no more get to the child's actual etheric body before the age of seven. And just as one must care for the mother before the physical birth if one wants to care for the child, so too, in order to care for and develop the child's etheric body, one must, until the seventh year, keep away everything that could harm it and give it everything that can promote its development. In the seventh year, the etheric covering is pushed back, the etheric body of the human being is born, very similar to the physical birth of the physical body.

And later on there is a third birth, the birth of the astral body. When the human being has shed his etheric cover in the seventh year, he has not yet fully developed his astral body; to the spiritual seer's eye he is still surrounded by an outer astral cover. He is wrapped in this until he reaches sexual maturity; then it is also shed: the actual astral body of the human being is born.

The educator must know all this. He must know about the physical, etheric and astral birth of the human being, because the individual educational epochs are based on this. He must know that just as it would be nonsensical to want to reach the physical child in the mother's body, it is also nonsensical to want to reach something that concerns the etheric body through education up to the age of seven, or something that concerns the astral body until sexual maturity. The limbs of the human being are the carriers of very special soul forces. The physical body is the carrier of the physical sense organs; the etheric body is initially the carrier of the growth and reproduction forces. But that is not all, because all these different bodies are worked on from within by the human ego. This works from the inside. And so the bodies of the human being are particularly related to the soul forces. The ether body is the carrier of memory, of all lasting habits and inclinations, of temperament.

We find concepts of the intellect, images of external objects and so on in the astral body. But when the image is also a symbol, a parable, when it rises to artistic imagination, when it becomes productive in the soul, then the etheric body is the carrier. What we call judgment, criticism, intellectual activity depends on the astral body.

If we know all this, then we will be able to apply it in relation to the emergence of these limbs in the course of the child's development. If we know that the etheric body is enclosed until the seventh year, we also know that until then we must not act on what the properties of this etheric body are. Only when it is released by the second birth may we educate it. There is a saying that can spread light and should be the basic principle for the education of a child up to the age of seven. Aristotle expresses this saying when he says: 'Man is the imitator of animals'. Imitation is what characterizes the child up to the age of seven. The child must see what it is supposed to learn, it must see and hear it. There must be something in its environment that is intended to have an effect on the child. It should not be taught overnight, but rather it should be shown and exemplified what it is supposed to imitate.

Exemplarity and imitation are the two magic words for a child up to seven years of age. What kind of teachings you give them, what principles you have, is not important, only what you do in the presence of the child. That alone is important. The example is what is actually effective. What the child is to acquire must be introduced into the physical world. One should avoid, as far as possible, allowing something into the child that the child should not imitate. A thousand good teachings are of no use to a child of this age; the child should imitate what it experiences with its physical body in the physical world. A little story will show you how far this imitation can go. A child of five years, who had been well-educated until then, suddenly took money from his parents' cash box. They were extremely upset. The child stole and gave the money to another child. The parents could not understand how their child came to steal. The explanation is simple. The child saw how the parents took money from the cash box and simply imitated them.

We can see from this how far we must go to avoid anything we do not want our children to imitate when it is also allowed to adults. Anyone who observes a little sees that children copy writing – like signs, without understanding the meaning. The meaning of what is written can only be conveyed to the child when the etheric body is born; but it can imitate the writing before that. Learning to write should begin by having the child first copy the shapes of the letters. Later, one can then explain to him what he can already do.

Today, far too much emphasis is placed on the fact that meaning should be involved in everything that is taught to the child. But it is far more important to ensure that the child's entire environment is set up in such a way that the external forces surrounding the child have an awakening and life-promoting effect on its etheric body. — In doing so, we recall Goethe's words: The eye is formed by light for light. The animal that is forced to live in dark caves gradually loses its eyesight and becomes blind. Light has a creative and formative effect on the eye. The forces of nature create organs and develop them. A human being is not yet complete when he is born. Every ray of light continues to have a formative effect on the eye. And so everything in the child's environment can have the effect of awakening life or stunting it.

Here spiritual science shines through to the smallest details. For example, it is not unimportant whether the child's surroundings are red or blue. The same color is by no means suitable for a lively, perhaps even nervous, child as for one that is quiet or even apathetic. Blue is the right color for the latter, red for the former. Thus, even clothing can have a beneficial or debilitating effect on the child. In this way, it is influenced right down to the brain and heart, these instruments of the soul. It depends on the child's environment whether these organs dry up or mature into liveliness, whether they develop slowly and sluggishly or whether they are awakened to active life.

Education has to ensure that what is an indicator of inner prosperity is taken into account: pleasure and joy. These are not there for nothing; they should not be suppressed, especially not in childhood. They should not be suppressed, but ennobled. Thus, for example, the body's need for a particular kind of nourishment is indicated by the fact that one has a desire for it. In this way the body indicates that it needs it in order to thrive. Everything that gives pleasure, that arouses interest, has the effect of creating organs. The organs are brought to life by this, and regulated.

But if a child becomes bored, then you kill something, you have a weakening effect on your organs; and that is very bad. Because what has not been developed by the age of seven is lost forever. The whole direction, the growth tendency is indeed given by then. One might try – or rather, one had better not try – to test the truth of these assertions of spiritual science by, for instance, giving one child a lot of eggs to eat and another very few. The latter child will show remarkably healthy instincts for what his body needs as nourishment; the former, on the other hand, will not. This is because an excessive amount of egg white extinguishes healthy nourishment instincts.

So it is in the seventh year that the child's etheric body is born. The body that is the carrier of habits, temperament, memory, is freed. All these qualities must be cultivated in the period up to sexual maturity. This is the epoch in which one approaches the child with the subject matter of learning. For this time, not only what is present in the physical world applies. Imitation is the magic word up to the age of seven; there is now also a guiding principle for the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity: imitation and authority. Just as the child imitated before, so now, to use a saying of Goethe's, it must choose its hero and follow him on his path up to Mount Olympus. If you expound the most beautiful moral principles or pass harsh judgments in front of the child, you will find that such teachings are of no use to the child. However, if you place a personality in the child's environment as an authority, then it has an effect. Not moral principles, but embodied morality should be given to the child. The soul and conscience of the child are not developed by mere teaching, but by the child saying to itself when it sees such a personality: What he does is right. And it learns to look up with reverence to such a personality.

Nothing is more beneficial for later life than reverence cultivated in childhood, nothing more fruitful for the whole of life. When a child hears about someone who is a person to whom everyone looks up with reverence, and then sees this person for the first time and feels a shiver of awe run through his heart, too, then that is a wonderful basis for education. Respect and authority, these words must gain resonance if one wants to have a firm basis for education.

The child can only properly follow principles if it has previously seen them embodied in a person. Only then do the principles become second nature, or rather part of the etheric body. They remain in the memory. Anything missed during this time remains missed for life. To exercise the memory, the child must also absorb a great deal of material; he can then later permeate it with his own judgment; now he must first practice the memory. Later he must have material in order to be able to judge it. It is bad for the developing human being to be called upon to criticize too early. First it must get to know the world, must learn from great historical examples, must feel reverence. One must paint for the child in words and pictures what great personalities have achieved. The pictorial imagination must be cultivated in this period.

In this respect, the current materialistic way of thinking is in a sorry state. One must compare two things. Up to the age of seven, only the physical organs are developed, then the character and temperament; and we have seen how education can have the effect of awakening or stifling life. A child that is healthy in body and soul will always prefer a toy that it has created itself to a finished, beautiful and complicated thing. His rag doll, which has been given eyes, nose and mouth by ink blots, will be a dearer toy to him than the most beautiful doll bought. Why? Because when the child looks at his beloved rag doll, he has to do something, because he has to complement what he has in front of him through his imagination and power of imagination. The imagination must work, otherwise it withers away.

There is a great difference between letting a child develop by putting together artificial structures from individual parts and having something alive in front of you. There will come a time when people will no longer worship the construction kit. Truly, the occultist should not become sentimental, but here is a point where he is tempted to become so. He sees the materialistic way of thinking developing in the tender, childlike growing human being and knows that it comes from having put together dead individual things into a dead whole in the nursery. Just as the building blocks produce a lifeless thing, so the materialistic point of view achieves a lifeless world development. The materialist's brain has atrophied; it cannot be led to the living, cannot be pointed to it.

Therefore, give the child something alive, so that his brain may be awakened to life. Give him the simple toys of the country fair, where, for example, two figures set the blacksmith's hammer in motion, or a picture book in which figures pulled on strings can move. That is much better, that is alive. That is much more beneficial for the child than if he puts together dead things from dead things. There the child sees life, there it seeks the reason for the movement. This is how the child's soul develops. — All the pain in the world is deposited on the soul of the spiritual researcher when he has to see how the wrong things are brought into the child's environment. The spiritual researcher sees the forces in the organs of the developing human being wither and know: they are permanently withered.

In the period after the child's second dentition, what the etheric body is the carrier of begins to develop: a lasting stock of habits. If you want to cultivate calmness, security, simplicity and straightforwardness in the child, a personality with these character traits must walk before him as a living human being until the age of fourteen to sixteen. He must learn to develop these qualities by observing them in others. But the etheric body is also the carrier of all artistic powers. We must realize what should be given to the child artistically during this period. If the child's taste is spoiled during this time by bad pictures and so on, then it remains spoiled. From the age of seven, the child is also receptive to comparison. In this respect, there is the greatest lack of understanding in our time. For example, research is being done into the meaning of children's songs. Meaning should underlie everything. But children's songs, such as “Fly, little beetle, fly!... Your mother is in Pommerland” — that is, in Kinderland — they don't want to have any meaning at all; they are partly symbols, partly they should just give euphony.

The point is that from the age of seven, sound and color are transformed from the sensual into the meaningful. Our materialistic age is not exactly suited to this. It is not inclined to make itself understood allegorically. If, for example, you want to show the emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis as a symbol for the emergence of the soul from the body, you yourself must also believe in such a parable as reality. Who really does that today? You may say to yourself half pityingly, the child with his still undeveloped mind cannot yet grasp what I mean, so I will make it clear to him in a symbolic way. But if you delve into the spirit of things, then such a parable is a profound mysterious process; then what the doll and the butterfly show us in a subordinate sphere is the same process that is repeated at a higher level when the soul emerges from the body.

If we realize this, if we feel it vividly, if we take this process not just as a comparison but as a pictorial expression of a higher truth, then the power of this idea flows into the child's soul. Everywhere, in everything, the educator should see a parable for the eternal and pour the power of this parable into the child's soul. Only then will he be able to work fruitfully. And this is not just the affair of some specially gifted or chosen person, but every educator can work in this way, every educator can impart these things from soul to soul and thus awaken productive life in the etheric body of the child.

With the time of sexual maturity, the last cover is then removed. Only now has the time come for the child to awaken to criticism and discernment, only now can abstract teachings be given, not before. And it is wrong to lead a person to their own judgment earlier than this. It is essential for the period between the ages of seven and fourteen that religious ideas also be brought to life. Religious education is just as essential for this period as the right physical environment was for the previous period. The child should not just hear about what is in the worlds beyond, but faith should be implanted in him as a matter of course.

But nothing is worse than calling a person to judgment before the astral body has awakened. First he should learn to worship, then to judge. First he should possess a great deal of memory knowledge before penetrating it with his mind. But to call him to judgment and confession before he can distinguish is the greatest corruption. First he should be imbued with a sense of authority, only then can one appeal to his judgment. It is not there before; it has not yet developed. It only develops in the years before and after sexual maturity. It is therefore grotesque when young people of eighteen appear and give their judgments, and even write thick books in which they want to overturn what has been created over thousands of years. In this respect, much will be able to change through spiritual science. Through right education, judgment can be formed and guided in the right way.

On the whole and in particular, it should be shown how one can become the right educator through a deeper knowledge of the development of the individual members of the human being. If someone says that one cannot know about this, then it must be answered: Just try educating people in this way, in the sense of these three births, and you will find the proofs of the theosophical truths in life and in practice. It is not a matter of formulating theories or principles, but of putting them into practice. The principles are good that prove beneficial in life, that, when applied in life, bear witness to their influence on culture in a beneficial way. What promotes culture, what awakens life, that is true. When the teachings that relate to the supernatural are applied, one will receive the proof of their truth. It will be recognized that Theosophy is something eminently practical, that it is not foreign and far removed from life, but that it is full of life and awakens life, that it gives strength and security to the human being. And what is more important than this in the education of a child? Education should bring down into the visible, into the sensory, what lies hidden in the supersensible. Therein lies the key to what happens in the childhood of the human being. The full significance of the question of education arises when we realize that every human being is a mystery that we as educators must solve by truly delving into their inner being.

Answer to question

Question: A spirit of contradiction in children?

Answer: The best way to counteract and eradicate this is to let the child achieve what it wants to achieve through this spirit of contradiction, so that the child experiences that what has been achieved is wrong and that it is harming itself by doing so. By forbidding, instructing and so on, little is achieved, and in most cases even more contradiction is provoked. The child learns best through its own experience.

Question: How can we explain the influence of colors on children?

Answer: Take the following example: If you look at a white surface with red squares on it, and then after a while look at an empty white surface, you will find that the squares that you previously saw as red now appear green to your eye on the empty white surface. The red that one was looking at has turned into green in the person. Green is now a soothing, calming color. Even the overly lively, nervous child, who has a lot of red in his environment, transforms this red into soothing, calming green.

Question: A spirit of contradiction in children?

Answer: It is so harmful to young people because it leads to impoverishment in later years. People then have no understanding for certain things. One can only judge about what one has experienced oneself. The power of judgment, summoned up too early, puts a stop to the whole broad reality of life. Life becomes impoverished; because only those who know can judge. Hence the rapidly impoverishing writers of our time.

Question: The sexual question: Should we educate children?

Answer: The question that is now so often asked in discussions about whether to explain sexual processes to children is often answered: I do not want to and must not tell the child any untruths. Well, one should not tell the child an untruth, one should tell him the whole truth, but a truth that lies in a completely different area than in the banal description of the physical processes of conception and birth. Our ancestors did not tell their children untruths when they said to them: “Your mother is in Pommerland, fly, little beetle, fly!” Pommerland is the land of children, the land of the soul's home. There is also a spiritual aspect to “flying”. People knew more than people today, they knew about the spiritual processes that take place at the physical birth of a child, they knew that these processes are more important, that birth is not just a physical act. And in this sense, we should also speak to children today when the question of the origin of man arises for them. We should tell them in the most beautiful poetic images about the soul that descends to give birth, we should fill their soul with images full of spiritual beauty and purity, holiness and reverence. We cannot reach high enough, we cannot be poetic enough when we place these images in their souls. And when the time comes when, with sexual maturity, the physical processes of conception and birth also become clear to them, these will appear to children only as what they are, as the inessential. Their soul, filled with high, sacred, awe-inspiring images and ideas, will regard the birth of the body as a more trivial matter.

You all know the Greek temple motto “Know Thyself”. It contains the deepest wisdom of life and is brought home to people again and again. Although it can be a beneficial guide through life, it can also be misunderstood. “Know Thyself” is a truth. It should not be understood as meaning that a person should brood and think within themselves, thinking that they are already a finished person. Rather, it is an invitation to develop the inner slumbering powers of the soul, to increase and expand them, to develop the talents and seeds. Striving and searching are much better tools for self-knowledge than believing that everything is already finished within us.

Let us consider how a person develops from birth to death, as it truly is.

For anyone who hears about the nature of man from a spiritual-scientific point of view, these things appear to be associated with manifold doubts and challenges. I can only give you a brief sketch here. That which the materialistic mind regards as only one link in the human being for the spiritual researcher. We call this the physical body. It is composed of the same substances and forces as minerals and stones. But a stone, a mineral, these inanimate bodies have the ability and power to maintain themselves through themselves. The physical body of man does not have that. It is precisely because of its physical and chemical powers that it is impossible for him to do so; as a corpse, he decays. We can understand the actual principle of life as an entity that fights every moment to prevent the disintegration of the physical body. We call this entity the etheric body; it is, as it were, the architect of the physical body, ordering the chemical and physical substances. In the past, it was common in natural science to speak of this principle of life as life force. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, it became fashionable to speak of living matter as if it were assembling itself, just as if a house were putting itself together out of wood and bricks. Just as a house is built according to the architect's plan, so the forces of the etheric body are used to build the physical body. The etheric body is thus the second link in the human being.

The third is the astral body. It is the bearer of all desires, passions, pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow. But what makes man the crown of creation is the power to say “I”, which is the fourth link in the human being. These four parts of the human entity have been observed for thousands of years and universally recognized as the expression of the forces that make up the divine human being. These four parts are explained in all schools of initiates. Pythagoras first made it clear to his students that the human being consists of these four parts, only then were they allowed to learn about the higher levels. With that, they had to take an oath: to receive the higher secrets with seriousness, dignity and fervor. This oath-like formula reads: “I swear by the one who has imprinted in our hearts the holy wisdom, the sublime pure symbol, the primal source of nature and all creation of the gods.

The human being at the lowest level, the “savage”, already has these four entities, as does the average European, an idealist like Schiller and also a spiritual person like Francis of Assisi. They differ in that the “savage” initially follows his instincts and passions and surrenders to them. The person who has progressed further in their development, in whom the I, the center of their being, has already worked on developing the three limbs and thus already had a refining effect on their desires and passions, has already realized that they can follow certain things and not others. He has developed a second limb of his astral body, and thus a fifth, his spiritual self, the manas.

But man can also work in the etheric or life body through all the impulses of art, and there he also develops a second limb, and that is the sixth limb of man: the Budhi, that is the spirit of life, are the religious impulses that transform the etheric body unconsciously. This transformation has been taking place since the human race came into being. The etheric body is the carrier of memory, of habits and of what is called conscience. This transformation takes place more slowly than that in the astral body; and these activities can be compared with the minute hand on a clock in the latter and with the hour hand in the former.

Imagine yourself back at the age of eight and compare what you have learned in terms of concepts and life experience since then. It is an enormous amount. That is the change in your astral body. But if I had a violent temper as a child, it has not changed that much. Our ego can only slowly work on the life body. This happens unconsciously. The higher disciple, however, consciously works at transformation. He receives guidance to change his habits and temper. Once the disciple has learned to consciously transform certain basic traits, for example, to change a domineering nature into a humble one, he can hope to ascend higher and higher, and higher gates will open for him. This is relatively difficult, but it is even more difficult to work within his physical body. What power does he have over his pulse, his breathing, over the functions of his physical body? What the disciple learns to develop towards higher development is the seventh limb, the spiritual man, Atma. Thus man then consists of seven limbs.

We will now consider how these seven members develop in the period from birth to death. Man begins his existence with physical birth; actually, he only continues life in the womb, but even this is only a continuation of previous life. Before physical birth, man was surrounded on all sides by the mother's body, which also supplied him with forces and juices. When the physical body emerges, it pushes back the maternal covering; while it was protected before, it now enters the physical world. The eye and ear had formed, but man could not perceive light and sound; he only learns this in the physical world. He has changed his scene through birth.

But with this birth, only the one link, the physical body, is born. Now there is a second and a third birth for man. When man is born, he is still surrounded by an invisible etheric and astral covering. Just as this covering is pushed back in the womb and at birth, so too is the etheric covering pushed back when the teeth change and the etheric body is fully born. This is the second birth. It takes place slowly and accompanies the time when the milk teeth are replaced by other teeth. When a person has left his etheric body, he is still surrounded by the astral body. The third birth occurs at puberty. Then the astral cover is pushed back and the person becomes receptive to astral influences. These are important moments that must be taken into account. The first seven years: the first epoch. The second epoch – from seven to fourteen years – is essentially different, and so is the third, from fourteen to twenty-one years. Then the human being develops his astral body in a free way through the I that lies behind it.

In the first epoch, physical organs have to be formed up to a certain point. Although the human being continues to grow even then, the growth up to the seventh year and after is very different. The change of teeth is a kind of final year. By then, the human being has been given the direction that he retains, the basis of his form remains. What a person has not developed by the age of seven can no longer be made up for. Only one aspect is to be considered. Up to the age of twenty-one, development will be more educational in nature, then it will take on a different character. What makes it so that the organs of the human being receive the right imprint? The surrounding world does it. Goethe says that the eye is formed by light itself. Light is the creator, the shaper. The ear forms sound and so on. What light and air can create in a human being is most intensively formed in the first epoch until the teeth change. A suitable environment is creative for the physical body of the human being.

For example, it is not irrelevant whether a child is surrounded by invigorating or dulling colors. A nervous, excited child should therefore be surrounded by lively colors, reddish, reddish-yellow colors. It depends on what has a creative effect on the child. Here is an example. If you look sharply at a white cloth with red spots and then look away from it, you perceive the opposite color and see green spots. This green has a beneficial effect. Therefore, an excited child should wear a red dress, while a calm child should be dressed in dull colors. It depends on the stimulation of the inner forces. A perfect doll does the child a disservice, because the imagination is no longer active. And the child has a sense of well-being in shaping the internal organs, and that is what is taken away from him. The child must take pleasure in its surroundings. You cannot do enough to bring joy and happiness into the first epoch of life. Not asceticism.

Another thing is love. The love that surrounds the child blends into its etheric and astral sheaths. It even brings favorable instincts.

Here I would like to mention food. Do not think that children should be overfed with eggs. This food spoils the favorable instincts for nourishment. The less a child is overfed with eggs, the healthier its instincts for nourishment will be. Spiritual science is considered a practical thing that gives you practical guidance here in life.

In the second epoch – from the change of teeth to sexual maturity – the astral body is actually born. Until now, the life body – ether body – has been shrouded; now everything that is memory and habit must emerge so that the child can become a useful member of human society. If you want to influence the child with something similar before then, it would be like trying to supply light and sound to the child in the womb from the outside. You cannot do it. But it is the time until the seventh year when joy and pleasure, desire and instinct are guided in the right direction. You have to write two magic words in his heart: imitation and example. These are the two forces at work. A role model must be given, not a command.

Here is an example. The parents discovered that their well-behaved child had taken their money. The parents called it stolen. But the child had bought gifts for poor children. He had done what he saw his parents doing. In the physical environment, nothing should be done that the child should not imitate. Teaching is of no use at this age; it only takes effect when the etheric body is uncovered. Jean Paul calls the example the greatest slogan of education. You may ask a world traveler, and he will say that he has learned more from his mother or wet nurse in his early years than from all his travels. Under the protection of the outer physical environment, which love works into the outer shell, infinite powers develop. Jean Paul also says here: Look at the child, it learns the language and also the spirit of the language in inner education. What would man have achieved for later language formation if such power were preserved for him. The child has language-forming power; for example, it calls the person who makes the bottles, the flascher - and other things. The worst thing is if you don't keep the right order in education. Jean Paul says: “Consider the words the child uses” and then ask whether his father can explain it philosophically. This is how the talent for imitating letters comes about, but the child only learns to understand the meaning of the letters after the seventh year.

During the time between the seventh year and sexual maturity, memory, inclination and character are transformed. There are three aspects to consider: thinking, willing and feeling. These are fed by different teachers. The thinking that he has instinctively developed through the etheric body must be transformed. He has learned language, but now the meaning of what is spoken must be taught to him, the meaning of what he has imitated in forms. Therefore, didactic instruction should not be started too early, only when it is imaged in the child. Then the feeling and mind should be worked on with things that are called history. Try to let the child look up to the great personalities of world history. Religion is to be made the indispensable basis of education. The human being undergoes a process of will formation that appears to him as the primal being of the divine essence. The absorption of pictorial representations must form concepts, not the abstract form. Today it is not easy for the teacher to find the comparison for death, like from chrysalis to butterfly: the chrysalis opens and out flies the moth. In this way, the soul separates from the body at death. What one believes oneself has an effect on the child. Goethe says: “Everything that is transient is only a parable.” This is the image of the butterfly. There is a point of view where the spiritual person really believes it. Then the child is shown the supersensible image through a sensory image.

From this point of view, I would like to talk about a matter that is being presented very strangely today. What concern does the “stork's nest” pose? Our highly enlightened contemporaries say today that we must not teach children such lies. That is not the case. In five hundred years, our descendants will say of us: What strange people they are, who have crudely depicted the physical event. That is much more of a lie. The stork's nest image comes from a time when it was known that the process found spiritual expression in it. From the spiritual realm, the soul comes down, and that is the most important thing in this process. All going down and all going up is associated with flying beings. So it was also the flying being, the stork. The little song “Fly, beetle, fly” and so on - “Pommerland” means children's land – tells us about the flying scele that the mother brings out of the children's land. All fairy tales bring spiritual truth in a form that the child can understand. What is important is that the powers be developed. If in the first epoch the two magic words imitation and example must work, then in the second epoch it is succession and authority. The question of schooling will become a question of the teacher. Each person must choose the teacher who allows him to follow in the footsteps to Mount Olympus. What the child believes is what matters. The truth must be expressed in person, must have become flesh. Authority is the magic word in which the child's conscience, character and temperament are vividly recreated in the teacher.

With sexual maturity, the astral body is born. What confronts the human being in the world is laid bare within him. The time of the birth of the astral body is when the sexes become aware of what separates them; the child himself becomes acquainted with the relationship between male and female and learns to distinguish between them. Therefore, at that time, as little as possible of all this should be dealt with in theory. It is a mistake to think that a person only needs a period of exposure to the world from the age of fourteen onwards in order to become mature enough to judge for themselves. The astral body must mature, mature under the authority of the world, which has to add what it has to give. And then comes into consideration what the maturation brings about, the forces. From the fifteenth to the sixteenth year, ideal forces must be developed, life forces and desires. Whatever his ideal is, that is his strength. As the astral body matures, the muscular system strengthens. And just as school ends with sexual maturity, so the apprenticeship ends with the twenty-first year. After the apprenticeship, the birth of the free ego actually follows. It is there that the human being enters the world as an independent worker, where the wandering time begins. He must learn to work independently before he has matured, to influence life as a master.

During all this time, the human being is in a state of growth, and just as the human being continues to grow in his external organs until the age of twenty-eight, or even thirty, he also has an inner growth, because the body is the expression of the soul. This is how a person develops a foundation. First, the child develops by imitating a role model, then by following authority in their apprenticeship, and in their travels in free association. Then comes a time when everything in the person is exposed; this is the actual time of manhood and womanhood. From then on, the influence from outside ceases to a certain extent. At the age of thirty, fat begins to accumulate in the body and the person begins to broaden. This is a sign that the forces to be active within have diminished.

In the thirty-fifth year, the person begins to process the forces within him or herself beneficially. Until then, he works on the temporal part of his soul, which he brought with him from previous embodiments. From the age of thirty-five onwards, he begins to work on the eternal part of his soul. That is why everything we have learned only bears fruit from the age of thirty-five onwards, and we have something to give to the world. It is the time when we become firm within ourselves and gain weight within ourselves. If up to that time man must learn through the world and through life, then only from the thirty-fifth year onwards can the world learn from him. The youth should be advised, but only he who has risen above the sun's height can advise. Then he can give more than he takes from it. This is because the astral body comes out with sexual maturity, then it can work inwardly in its etheric body. As long as the muscles are still growing, this is not possible. When the muscles are no longer left to the body itself, the life body – ether body – becomes more and more solid, and it gives what is worked in it to the environment. Particularly gifted people can do this before the age of thirty-five, but it only has weight from the age of thirty-five. The ancient Greeks would never have allowed a person to guess before that time. Doing well, but not guessing. In all secret schools, all students before the age of thirty-five only entered the preparatory program.

Only when the powers had been released could they rise higher. When man grows old in this world, he only becomes young for the immortal one. It is a great fortune – a healthy developed person, he will have something modest around him and will choose his hero until then, whom he will emulate to reach Olympus. In particular, this must be a cause for great caution when young people with the highest knowledge of the world want to work in the world. This requires maturity and standing in the spiritual world. More and more, people internalize themselves, and there are no specific periods for this. Those who undergo a certain training – even if their hair has already turned white and their skin is wrinkled and withered – may still be the youngest. Those who have the youth of the soul will acquire the greatest powers even in old age. Even when memory declines, the formative power begins to weaken, the power of ideals dies, then one saves one's strength for all that, and they serve the cultivation of the immortal. Old age withers outwardly and brings forth the eternal in man.

This is also proof of human continuity. What grows and develops is the indestructible, incorruptible core of the human being. The more the environment loses interest in it, the more important what the person says and thinks at this age is for the world. That is why the ancients took the elders as their guides, also for the social order. They had the say, the thinking, that should remain, the imperishable in the perishable.

That is why spiritual science allows us to see this life in the right light. It gives us not only theories, but something that gives us strength and security in life, confidence in the great future of the world. Then the course of a person's life, with its ascents and deaths, has something very meaningful about it when we know how to live with this wisdom, according to the sublime saying: know thyself. It shows him how the world creates him and how he works out of himself. It shows us how we owe our existence to the world, but also that we can give. The bliss of taking and giving shows us this path.

Today we want to talk about the fundamental questions of the whole human being, about this question of all questions, which seeks the answer in the exploration of one's own being, the most intrinsic nature of the human being. It is intimately connected with everything that touches the human being, not only in theory, but with everything that encompasses his soul, evokes, with everything that is connected with the happiness and suffering of our existence, with everything in the world that gives strength and power of will.

If we want to find the answers to these questions, if we speak of the essence of man, then we must not only know about what is physically there in man.

In some respects, the animal is happier than man in this respect; it lives in its existence, within the forces instilled in it, and does not need to ask itself about the goal and purpose of its existence, but man must ask these questions; they are posed to him by life itself. All certainty, all hope in life must arise from how the human soul relates to this question of all questions. It contains within itself the secret of life and death. It encompasses the transitory and the eternal, the temporal and the eternal in the life of man.

If you look at the physical body – it fades away in death, it shatters into a thousand and a thousand components, which you see disappearing in the cycle of matter. The question arises quite naturally: Does the disappearance of the human being exhaust everything that he means in the world? And when we look at our cultural life, when we see how man creates and works in the world, when we see how great masters of art, such as Michelangelo and Raphael, create their masterpieces, how they transform spiritual forces into the physical, corporeal, earthly and know that these works of great genius, which people enjoy and are uplifted by, will also one day fade away and be scattered, so that no human eye will see them again and no human soul will enjoy them, then this question arises anew before our soul.

Everything that a person incorporates into the temporal, we see disappearing; what remains of the person and his creations? Does something of himself survive? Is there anything eternal in human life? The deep feeling that has always occupied people in these matters has always been satisfied in many ways. Those who were called have answered the same in the different religions of different nations when these questions about life and death arose. But in our time, we see a peculiar destiny in many people. A deep rift runs through their souls, through their whole lives.

If we look back in time, we see that in the days before the printing press, souls could more easily find a satisfactory answer from those who were called to do so. Today, however, we see that the most thoughtful and striving souls are at a loss when faced with this question. In their youth they have learned much, exercised their minds, trained their intelligence – then the questions of religion approach them. Through so-called modern science, through a thousand other channels, a wealth of knowledge has flowed to them, and it becomes difficult for the soul to hold on to what religion gives as soul food. It is those who thirst most longingly for the truth who then go astray. The information that religion gives him can no longer satisfy man. Science also gives him no world view that strengthens the heart in its endeavors.

And so we see the soul disintegrating within itself, often already in early youth, we see a deep conflict in those who strive most earnestly; and this is carried over into life. In many, a certain indifference to these questions then arises later; they try to keep them out in order not to be disturbed by them. A superficiality of life results from this, and that is perhaps even worse than in other people, in whom the longing to find answers to these questions is constantly giving rise to new doubts that can hardly be satisfied by anything. This is a deep tragedy in the inner life of man!

This is the mood of our time. Man needs something that nourishes his soul, that gives him certainty in the face of these questions. This must come for humanity. Those who know how to read the signs of the times also know that all this will become much sharper, and they also know how necessary spiritual science or the theosophical worldview is for humanity.

Some associate “Theosophy” with a strange view. It is not about something new, on the contrary: humanity has always had something similar to what Theosophy is in a certain form. In the same way that man theoretically investigates the facts of nature, Theosophy seeks to investigate the facts of eternal life.

The facts of eternal life did not arise from a child's imagination, nor from an outdated stage of human development. Rather, Theosophy contains the deepest spiritual wisdom, which, in the form of knowledge, passes on to people what religion answers these questions in the form of feelings. Therefore, we must not imagine that Theosophy is a new religion; it is not. It also does not oppose religions, but clarifies them, explaining the truths of religion themselves so that they can withstand the strictest demands of science. It is the instrument for bringing the truths of religion to the surface. It does not want to found a new religion, but to clarify the old ones. The same scientific thinking, exactly the same method as in science, prevails in theosophy.

Of course, some of what will be said today will seem grotesque and fantastic to the materialistically minded, but we must not overlook the fact that when you hear such truths in their original form, you first have to find your way into them, you can't do it in an hour, because Theosophy encompasses the most important, the most profound questions of humanity! All things have occurred in time and were first regarded as fantasies. If they were truly based on life and truth, they became self-evident over time. Similarly, the theosophical teachings, which are still being fiercely opposed, will soon be taken for granted.

We now want to answer the questions about the nature of man from a spiritual-scientific point of view. It is not so easy to talk about it, because man is a very complicated being, and only if we subject ourselves to the discomfort of looking deeply into the reasons for our existence can we find answers.

A human being first appears to the external senses of human beings. We can touch them, see them, hear them, and understand what they say; they are perceptible to the external senses. The mind can combine all of this; the anatomist can explore the inside of a human being. From all this, we can form an idea of what a human being is. Basically, there is no great difference between what can be seen and felt in a person and what an anatomist or physiologist finds when they dissect a person. We understand all of this together as what we can know about a person. Some say: There is nothing else about a person but what the senses can perceive and what science can research. Others say: There is indeed much more, but we cannot explore it, we must limit ourselves to the sensual facts. But spiritual science does not say that; for her, all this is only a part of the human being. The physical human body is for her only a part of the very complicated human being.

Many people consider it a kind of immodesty to say that there is more to know about the human being and the world. They ask: How do you know these things? You cannot know them, because there are limits to our knowledge! — I quote here a saying of a great German thinker, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who in 1811 discussed before a large audience the same thing that Theosophy will have to discuss again and again: what underlies the human being as the invisible. Fichte says: If you imagine that you are the only one who can see in a world of blind people, and you talk to them about shapes and colors, about all the marvels that the eye transmits to us, then these blind people might say that this is all imaginary stuff. But the moment you are able to give all these blind people the ability to see, they see a new world, everything that the one spoke to them about is then standing before them. The blind man then realizes that he had no right to say that there are no forms, no colors. — In the same sense, Theosophy speaks of higher worlds. These are not new worlds, they are all around us, we are in the midst of them, only man lacks the organs, the abilities to perceive them. – Theosophy says: the world that our physical senses perceive is not the only one; we can expand our perceptions, can perceive other worlds. – They do not lie in an incomprehensible beyond, not in a cloud cuckoo land, but around us. Theosophy does not speak of these worlds in a magical sense, but in the same sense as Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

It is possible to acquire the senses to perceive other worlds through theosophy. Adepts and initiates have always been able to bear witness to what they themselves have seen and experienced in these worlds. These spiritual senses lie within every human being; they can be brought out and developed through the spiritual-scientific method. If a person has enough patience and energy to submit to these methods in training, then he can see into the other worlds as the blind see colors after an operation. (Of course, this operation does not help those born blind, but everyone can attain this spiritual operation through training.)

All religions in the world have emerged from what the initiates have seen in the spiritual worlds that surround us. They have given the world reports of them, and what the seers have seen is recorded in the sacred scriptures. We are now living in a time when humanity is once again drawing a stream of spiritual life from these spiritual worlds. That is why Theosophy is making this wisdom from the supersensible worlds available in popular lectures [to a large part of the world]. This is the reason why such teachings are now being publicly communicated that otherwise only a small circle of prepared people were allowed to receive.

But for a person who sees into the spiritual worlds, the higher limbs of human nature are just as true and real as the physical body. Today I can only give you a few hints and an overview of what Theosophy has to say about these things.

The physical body is the part of human nature that shares the same substances as the entire inanimate, mineral world. All substances in the environment, all metals in the earth contain the same substances as this body. Nevertheless, it differs from the so-called inanimate beings. It has the same substances in itself, but it would disintegrate into itself if it were not for a certain complication, another principle, another link that holds it together. A rock crystal exists in itself. The physical human body cannot do that.

The second link, which it has in common with plants and animals but not with the mineral kingdom, is the etheric body. [This is not the hypothetical ether assumed by physics.] Its task is to prevent the physical body from disintegrating at every moment of life. Only death separates this etheric body from the physical body, then the same is “corpse”, it decays when it is delivered to the substances that are in it. In every moment of life, the life body fights against the decay of the physical body.

Until the nineteenth century, it was taken for granted, even by the external science, that there was something like this in living beings; it was called the life principle. It was only around the middle of the nineteenth century that people began to reject everything that could not be seen with the eyes; and one was considered a fool if one held on to it anyway. The materialistic scholars - such as [Vogt], Moleschott - created a world view that sought to explain life only in terms of a combination of atoms. Today, some are beginning to admit that there must be something beyond that.

For theosophy, this etheric or life body can be found in plants, animals and humans, and it is as real for those who can see into the spiritual worlds as the physical body; one can see it with what Goethe called the spiritual eyes.

This is the second link. We can visualize the third if we consider that the person standing before us is not made up solely of what we see of him, not of colors and forms, but that within the skin that encloses the physical there is something living that only the mindless cannot take into account. And that is something much, much more important than the physical body. Everything we cannot perceive, the drives, joy, pleasure, suffering, pain, desire, that live in a person from birth to death, all that is just as real as the color on his cheeks. All of this is not the result of processes in the tissues of the body. Theosophy says: This carrier of desires, passions, etc. in man is an entity that was there before, that is the origin of the physical body.

Let us make this clear to ourselves with water and ice. Ice is water, only in a different form. Just as surely as ice can become water again and is originally water, so spiritual science shows that all matter, all substance, is nothing other than solidified spirit. As true as ice is water, it is also true that everything that lives in man as instinct, desire, lust and pain has condensed, crystallized, as it were, into the physical body. This is a creature of the astral body, the third link in human nature. Man no longer has this in common with plants, but only with animals.

Thus we have the physical body in common with the mineral, plant and animal, the etheric body in common with plant and animal, and the astral body only with the animal. Some researchers claim, however, that some plants also show sensation because they respond to stimuli, but it is an amateurish view to say that a plant has sensation. Anyone who says that does not know what is meant by sensation. Only a being that reflects this external stimulus internally, only that is a being that can be said to have sensation, only such a being has an astral body. If one wanted to say that about plants, then one could just as easily say it about blue litmus paper, which under certain circumstances, when subjected to a certain stimulus, turns red.

We now have three parts of the human being and come to the fourth. Don't be alarmed at the number of parts! Man is simply a very complicated being. We come to this fourth part by a simple consideration. We understand it most easily if we follow this train of thought: in the entire German-speaking world there is one word that is different from all the others. Everything else around us can be called, but no one can say the little word “I” to you, you can only say it to yourself. This word must resound from the soul of each person; any other word is a you to you; only to yourself are you an I! One does not immediately realize the great significance of this fact. The I can never sound to our ear from the outside; it must sound in the soul itself; the soul must pronounce it as its innermost name. The ancient founders of religions, who built their religions on spiritual science, knew this very well. What begins to speak within man was called the spirit in man, it was called the ineffable name of God! The I, the God in man, announces itself in this word!

No one can say that Theosophy maintains that God is in man, as is often superficially asserted. Just as if you take a drop from the sea, you cannot say: “This drop is the sea,” when we know that the essence of the drop is the same as that of the ocean. In the same way, when you say ‘I’ to your soul, you do not mean the all-embracing spirit. It is not the spirit, just as the drop is not the ocean, and yet it is the same entity as the divine All-spirit. You must understand this in this sense. In this sense, the ancient Hebrews called Yahweh, Jehovah the unspeakable name of God, which means the entity, the I. Therefore, a deep, reverent shudder went through the ranks of the people when, once a year, the one who was called upon to do so, pronounced this holy name: Yahweh, that is, I am, who is, who was and who will be!

Therefore, deeper natures feel that this is a decisive event when, in the course of their lives, they come into inner contact with this eternal spirit of life, when they awaken to the realization: I am a self. Jean Paul, for example, when this became clear to him – he was only a child of seven – felt it to be a tremendous event, as if he were looking into the veiled sanctuary of his inner being. Even in his later years, he still fondly recalled the external circumstances in which this occurred.

And into this veiled sanctuary we also look when we consciously pronounce the little word “I” for the first time. It is this that makes man the crown of earthly creation: this I, glowing and flowing through the body, makes him the most sacred being on earth! This is the fourth link in his being. This is what is meant in the Pythagorean school by the holy tetrad. When this appears in a person, he has risen to a higher level of realization, which mysteriously expresses the deepest thing in human nature. But that is not all.

People do not differ from each other in terms of this tetrad, every person has it. There must be another difference between them. Let us clearly see the difference between a cannibal, an ordinary average person and a high idealist, such as Schiller, or a Francis of Assisi. We see a great difference between such people!

Darwin recounts how, on one of his journeys, he came to an area inhabited by a tribe of man-eaters. He had the interpreter make it clear to the chief how bad it was to eat a human being. The “savage” looked at the European in astonishment and replied naively that he could not possibly know whether it was good or bad before he had eaten a human himself! He was only thinking about whether something was good or bad for him, that is, whether it tasted good or bad.

But such a person also has the four limbs that I mentioned to you. How does the average European person differ from such a “savage”? He says to himself about some urges: you may follow them, but he forbids himself from following others. He has moral concepts that forbid him one thing and allow him another; he has purified and cleansed his urges and passions, and if he is a little higher, he has certain ideals that he strives for. How does he differ from the “savage”? He has worked on his astral body, the body that is the carrier of desires and passions. The savage has not yet done this; he has not yet put any work into it, he still lives in his urges and desires, and the part of his body, the ego, lives in him as it has been handed down to him by the gods. The higher a person is, the more this divine inheritance works in him and transforms the other bodies. The idealist has transformed even more in himself, he has brought even more under the rule of the ego; and the person who has his instincts and passions so well in hand that nothing happens that he does not recognize as right and good, who is never carried away by his instincts and desires, has completely purified and ennobled his astral body.

Thus we have five aspects to human nature: the four physical body, etheric body, astral body, in which the I is located, and then the part that the I has worked out for itself. This aspect we call the spirit self or manas, which is a product of transformation of the astral body. And the more a person has transformed in his astral body, the more of the spirit self or manas he has within him.

A person can now also work on his etheric body or life body. This is not only the carrier of nutrition, growth and the powers of reproduction, but also the carrier of lasting habits, character, conscience and temperament. Whether a person is good or bad in the normal sense depends on the astral body, but whether he is a melancholic or a choleric depends on the etheric body. Think about how little you knew as an eight-year-old child. You have learned a lot since then, but if you were a hot-tempered child, your temper will still flare up from time to time; if you were a melancholy child, you will still have to struggle with gloominess sometimes. Everything in the astral body changes quickly, everything anchored in the etheric body changes slowly, so that the reworking of the astral body could be compared to the minute hand of the clock, and that of the etheric body to the hour hand.

Therefore, the I also has much greater difficulties when it is to act on the etheric body. Strong impulses for its transformation are given by high, pure art, which allows one to sense and see the eternal; strong impulses are also given by the grandeur and glory of nature and of God's creations. But most powerfully, religious impulses work to transform the life body; not moral instructions with abstract concepts, but a deepening in the eternal content of being, a sinking into that which is given to us as wisdom in the great religions, triggers impulses that have a strongly ennobling effect on the human etheric body, and hence the great significance of [the same] for humanity.

This is where the training and education of the initiate begins. He has to learn and undergo different things than what is called learning in the school sense. Of course, he must also learn what lives in the astral body and can be grasped, what is called learning in the ordinary sense, but that is not the main thing. The student has done more in the direction of initiation when he fights an inclination, consciously abandons a habit. In the schools of initiation, therefore, special emphasis is placed on this; the student must undergo exercises that enable him to change his temperament, to overcome his character; and this work leads up to higher worlds. Everything that can be transformed in the etheric body so that the ego can control it is called the spirit of life or Budhi. Thus the sixth part of the human being is the transformed etheric body or life body.

If we go further, we come to the highest level, where the initiate begins to work on his physical body; this is the seventh link of the future. It may seem strange that the lowest part of man, the physical body, is worked on by the highest, but we must bear in mind that in this way man also becomes able to work out into the physical world, from which the human body itself has taken its substance. The initiate at this level can work out into the cosmos! This level is reached through a transformation of the breathing process; it is called Atma – Atma, that is, breathing, because it is connected with breathing – or spiritual man.

Thus we have the tetrad of man and the so-called higher trinity, which arises from the tetrad and is a process of transformation of the tetrad. We now want to take a look at how these elements work in man, we want to consider man in life as well as in death.

What is sleep? It brings about a change in the context of the elements of human nature just described. As long as a person is awake, from morning till evening, they are intertwined and form a living system of interacting forces. It is different when a person is asleep. Desire and suffering, joy and pain, have sunk away when man lies in a deep, dreamless sleep. That all this is not present for man is because his astral body, which is the carrier of desire and suffering, has left him during sleep. Only the physical body of man, connected with the ether body, lies in bed. The astral body is outside of man as soon as he sinks into sleep. What does this astral body do during the night? Does it rest somewhere in the insubstantial? No! Precisely when we know what the astral body does at night, then we can take a deep look into the nature of the human being.

As long as the astral body is in the physical body during the day, it perceives through the physical organs. Through the eye it receives light and colors, through the ear sounds, and so on. The astral body senses these things because the sensation is in it. But because it is inside the physical body, it also senses the disharmony of the environment; there is no harmony around it, and that wears it out continuously. This wear and tear of the astral body is expressed in the fact that the person tires. As long as the astral body is inside, it is occupied with the outside world, but as soon as it is outside, it works to repair the physical body, it is busy at night getting rid of the fatigue substances. That is its business at night. Man would die much sooner if the astral body did not do this every night and did not send its forces down into the physical body to bring it into the state in which it needs to be to continue life.

We have to imagine it like this: we are enclosed in a sea of astrality, as if in a large vessel of water. During the day, each person absorbs a drop of this, like a sponge, and releases it again at night. And so, at night, the astral body submerges into its source, and at night it is back in its home. Only a clairvoyant can tell you what it looks like. The ordinary person has no insight into it, but it is different for the clairvoyant. During his conscious sleep at night, a world of light and colors opens up for him. He consciously lives in the world of the harmony of the spheres, in which the astral body of every human being also lives unconsciously. And this world is not a fantasy. This harmony of the spheres is a reality! It is the source of all things, it is the same as what is called in the Christian religion the Kingdoms of Heaven. The initiates have always known this. — It may sound outrageous to many when I say: Goethe knew that too! When a person is transported up into heaven, he hears the harmonies of the spheres from which the whole world was created, and Goethe expresses this when he says:

The sun sounds in the ancient way
In the singing contest of the spheres,

and so on. If we look at this passage superficially, we cannot explain it. The physical sun does not sound! But the sun has its spirit, and it is this spiritual essence that sounds in the singing contest of the spheres! And this spirit is meant by Goethe, which can be perceived by those who can perceive in the spiritual worlds. And further, the end of the Faust drama, [the Ariel scene, what does it say]:

Resounding for spiritual ears
Now the new day is born;
It trumpets, it trombone,

and so on. Because the soul lives in this sounding astral sea, in this harmony of the spheres at night, Paracelsus rightly calls it the astral body, because every night it is transported to its original home, to the world of the stars.

As long as this astral body has not yet completely left the etheric and physical bodies, it is the time when dreams emerge from the unconscious nocturnal darkness. As long as the astral body has not yet completely severed its connection with the human being, the person dreams. When the astral body is completely within the person, he lives in the waking consciousness of the day.

When a person dies, other changes occur. After death, only the physical body remains of the person; the astral body has left with the etheric body. [It is only in the rarest of cases that the astral body takes the etheric body with it.] Usually, something special happens to the person after death.

The entire past life then appears before the soul of the person like a large tableau, like a panorama, but in a very peculiar way, because everything that has given the person joy or caused him suffering in his life is missing from this painting. The person looks at his life quite objectively. This is as long as the etheric body is connected to the astral body and the ego. Then the astral body separates and the second corpse of the human being remains behind, the etheric corpse. It dissolves into the general cosmic ether just as the physical corpse dissolves, only much faster. But an essence, a center of power remains behind from this life tableau, so to speak, a sum of the experiences. Just as you add a new page to a book, you add the content of your last life each time you look back at your life after death with clairvoyance. This can take hours or even days, depending on the person's individuality.

There are moments in human life that are similar to this. When a person experiences a strong fright, for example, when they suffer a fall during a mountain climb or are in danger of drowning, their whole life probably passes before them like a tableau, and even materialistically thinking people have experienced this and stated it, such as the criminal anthropologist Benedikt in Vienna. What is the cause of this experience? You all know the feeling we have when a limb has fallen asleep, this tingling sensation, children might say: It's like seltzer water in my fingers. As a clairvoyant, you can see that in such a numb limb, the etheric body has loosened so that the etheric hand hangs sideways when the hand is numb, and the same is true of the head when a person is under hypnosis. If a person is then given such a fright, the entire etheric body loosens for a brief moment. Because the etheric body is the carrier of memory and is otherwise constantly embedded in the physical body, in ordinary life it can only remember as much as the physical body allows. But in such moments, when the etheric body is free, that is, when the physical body is no longer an obstacle, then the memory comes fully to the fore.

Recently someone told me that he had been close to drowning, but did not have the memory tableau because he was unconscious. This is precisely the proof of this, because when a person is unconscious, the astral body is also out, which is the carrier of consciousness, so of course this memory cannot occur.

Now, after death, when the astral body is freed from the physical body and the etheric body, which remain as two corpses and release their substances back into the environment, a certain epoch begins: the so-called Kamaloka time. Kamaloka is not a place that is far from us. People who have died are always around us. The clairvoyant eye can always see them.

We can make this clear to ourselves by means of simple logic. What situation are we in after death? Let us think, for example, of a gourmet who, in life, had a passion, say, for beefsteaks. The physical body does not enjoy it, but the astral body, which is the carrier of desires, passions, sensations and so on, does need the physical body to obtain this pleasure; it is, so to speak, its instrument. Now, after death, he has discarded the physical body, so he no longer has an instrument, but still has exactly the same longing for the satisfaction of his desires.

It is the same situation as that of a person who, in a beautiful area, cannot find water far and wide and has to suffer from burning thirst. In the same way, the unquenched longing for physical pleasures burns in the astral body. As long as a person has not yet given up this, as long as his greed for this satisfaction exists, so long will his Kamaloka time last. Only when nothing draws him back into this world can he ascend into the actual spiritual world, the heavenly world.

One could well ask: Is the person conscious in this state of Kamaloka? Certainly, because the same forces that the person has in his astral body and that go out into cosmic space every night, live there in the harmony of infinity and thereby renew the used-up forces of the physical body again and again – it is precisely these forces that he now uses within himself in this state. So man must be conscious after death.

Now man ascends into the spiritual worlds and takes this essence, of which I have spoken to you, from his etheric body and a similar essence from his astral body with him.

The essence that he has acquired in his etheric body during his lifetime influences his emotional life in a moral sense, and what he has acquired in his astral body influences his desires and instincts. He now lives in the spiritual worlds for a certain number of years, then he descends again into the world, equipped with what he has worked for in this way, with a more or less purified etheric and astral body, and each new life he leads is, as it were, a new page in the book of his life. The more embodiments he has experienced and the better he has used them to refine himself and strive higher, the richer the new life is, and so the human being rises from life to life, and it perfects itself more and more. He is not separated in one life, nothing is a mere game of chance, but his lives are connected. Just as in daily life the work of one day prepares and influences that of the next, so our past is connected with the future, and so we create our own future through our behavior in the present. This is a law that runs through all nature, through the inanimate as well as the animate.

And this connection between events that happen later and those that happen earlier is called [“krama” — not “karma”]. A certain [krama] emerges from every course of life for every person. There is something deeply reconciling about this when viewed in the right way; because when we often see a hardworking, good person condemned to poverty and misery in life, and another, seemingly without any merit, living in happiness and joy, then we may well ask in vain how this can be, which seems so unjust! But if we know the law of [Krma], if we know that everyone prepares their own destiny, that [Krma] is a law of life, if we know that everything I do bears its fruit, if I do something foolish, evil, then the fruits will be the same, if I do good, then happiness and joy will be the result - then this law will be something deeply reconciling for everyone, and when it not only theoretically but truly illuminates a person's life, then it will unfold new powers in him, it will give him confidence, orientation and security in life.

Even with the redemption of Christ, the law can be perfectly reconciled as soon as it is properly understood. The theologians say: We speak of the redemption through Christ Jesus, but you speak of the fact that one must redeem oneself. You do not believe in the idea of redemption! — That is not true. Just as a merchant can draw up his balance sheet at any moment and still be able to enter new items every moment, so too can we enter new items in our book of life every moment. [Krma] is completely compatible with the freedom of will; we can enter bad or good items. Now, if we are strong enough, we can help a fellow human being. If we are even more powerful, we can help two, and so on. But an all-powerful being, such as Christ Jesus, who appeared in humanity, can help countless people through a single act that transcends time. Properly understood, the law of karma is completely in line with the Christian idea of salvation; it is also compatible with the whole of Christian teaching.

When the teaching about the nature and essence of man gradually penetrates humanity, when it is imbued and spiritualized by it, then new life and new development will flow through it. For humanity needs these teachings now. The souls of men would dry up under the conditions that were indicated at the beginning. Theosophy had to come, it was a necessity for the life of humanity. Even if it is still treated with hostility, what harm is done? Everything that is new and incomprehensible is treated with hostility at first and only later becomes taken for granted. Think of the postage stamp – no postal administrator came up with this simple idea, and when it first came up it was called 'brain-damaged'. That was only 70 years ago! And it was the same with the first railways. It was said that anyone who traveled on them would inevitably suffer severe nervous shocks.

Theosophy points to things, and it is important that they prove themselves in life when applied; and if Theosophy has proven its truth, then it will naturally find its way through the souls of men. [For it is the spiritual remedy for humanity!] Not through words, not through discussions – the recovery of spiritual life can only be found through action. And this proof is awaited by those who know what Theosophy should mean for humanity in the times to come. Knowledge that is put into practice is what we need. This knowledge cannot be found by the weak powers of our intellect alone, but must flow in from higher worlds in order to revitalize our culture, to give us strength and security in life, and to make us strong, creative human beings.