The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Report, presumably by Rudolf Steiner in “Lucifer – Gnosis” no. 19/1904.

The German Section of the Theosophical Society (Adyar headquarters) held its annual meeting on October 29 and 30. The German branches were represented partly by personal delegates (Berlin, Charlottenburg, Cologne, Weimar, Leipzig, Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart), and partly (Düsseldorf, Dresden, Hannover, Nuremberg) by appointed proxies. Newly elected to the board were: Fräulein Stinde (Munich), Mr. Arenson (Cannstatt) and Mr. Seiler (Berlin). The number of members has increased from 130 to 261 since October 1, 1903. One particular point of discussion was the association's conduct towards the “theosophical” associations of Germany, which have not yet realized that it is impossible for divisions and antagonisms to prevail in a society based on the principle of brotherhood. Since these societies were all formed on the basis of the main society established in Adyar, they alone are responsible for the divisions, and not the main society. It was now decided to act objectively in accordance with the principle of brotherhood towards these societies, but not to participate in any way in their organizations, whatever their nature. The proposal adopted by the General Assembly reads: “The General Assembly of the German Section of the Theosophical Society of October 30, 1904, resolves not to participate in any undertaking originating from other so-called Theosophical Societies and considers it the duty of each branch to act in the same way. Any participation can therefore only be a private one by individual members.”

The following are currently members of the board of the German Section of the Theosophical Society: Dr. Rudolf Steiner (General Secretary), Marie von Sivers (Berlin Motzstr. 17, Secretary), Julius Engel (Charlottenburg), Richard Bresch (Leipzig), Bernhard Hubo (Hamburg), Helene Lübke (We , Sophie Stinde (Munich), Ludwig Deinhard (Munich), Adolf Arenson (Cannstatt-Stuttgart), Mathilde Scholl (Cologne), Franz Seiler (Berlin), Günther Wagner (Lugano), Adolf Kolbe (Hamburg).

On October 29th there was a free discussion among the members. On October 30th, from four o'clock on, lectures took place: I. Mr. Richard Bresch (Leipzig) spoke stimulatingly about: “Should we teach theosophy to young people?” II. Dr. Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture “On the Nature of Clairvoyance”.

Report by Richard Bresch in “Vâhan”, Volume VI, No. 5, November 1904

After the board meeting on Saturday at three o'clock, the actual general assembly was scheduled for Sunday morning at ten o'clock. All thirteen lodges were represented: Berlin with five votes, Leipzig with three, all the other lodges with two votes each, making a total of thirty votes. Düsseldorf, Hannover, Lugano and Nuremberg were not represented directly but by proxy, and Nuremberg, Dresden and Munich were represented for the first time as new lodges.

The General Secretary, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, welcomed those present and emphasized that we Germans are an advanced post for Central Europe for the spread of the great spiritual wave that poured over the Occident through the Theosophical movement in 1875. He then looked back over the past year and emphasized Mrs. Besant's visit as the most important event for the German Section, and he was convinced that it had a favorable influence. Dr. Steiner then spoke about his lecture at the Dresden Congress. As a Theosophist, he was not accountable for what had prompted him to do so, but as General Secretary he wanted to say a few words about it. He regarded the fact that the so-called Secessionist movement had adopted our title “Theosophical Society” as a mistake, regardless of whether it was moral or intellectual. Our relationship to others should therefore be understood to mean that we must help them. He would have given the lecture that was requested of him anywhere, regardless of what the society calls itself. Whether one should actively participate in the organizations is another question! He (Dr. Steiner) personally considers this a mistake, and that is why he did not participate in anything during the entire congress, even though he was in Dresden the whole time. Regarding voting, which had been a dubious point up to now, it was decided that the lodges should be free to decide whether they wanted to cast their votes in one hand or have them cast by several delegates. To avoid complications, all correspondence (including payments) intended for the German Section should be addressed to Miss Marie von Sivers, Berlin W., Motzstraße 17.

Dr. Noll (Kassel) was replaced on the board by Miss Stinde (Munich) and Mr. Oppel (Stuttgart) by Mr. Arenson (Cannstatt); Mrs. von Holten was replaced as treasurer by Mr. Seiler (Charlottenburg). Mr. Krojanker replaced Mr. Seiler as auditor.

As for the treasury, at the end of the financial year, the income amounted to 1795 marks, the expenditure to 795.04 marks. Of this, 427.51 marks were paid to the headquarters in Adyar, and the remaining expenses were distributed among the printing of the statutes, invitations to the congress, postage, and the German Section's contribution to the Amsterdam European Congress, so that the cash balance is currently 999.96 marks.

The number of members has increased from 130 on October 1, 1903 to 251, an increase of 121 members. 7 members have resigned or died.

Various reports have been provided about the activities of the representatives of the foreign branches. In particular, Lugano has expressed its thanks in writing and Dr. Steiner has expressed his thanks verbally through his representative in Stuttgart for their work over the past year.

Inspired by the editorial footnote on page 86 of the October “Vâhan”, Mr. Ffelix] L[öhnis] (for Dresden) had submitted two proposals. The first read, not in words but in spirit, as follows: The General Assembly should decide whether it considers it consistent with the spirit of the constitution and the decisions of the General Council and President of the Theosophical Society to allow Adyar members to participate in the convening of a general Theosophical Congress.

During the discussion of this proposal, however, the fear was expressed that the sharp tone sometimes adopted towards the secession at the “Vâhan” might do more harm than good, but in fact the view expressed in the footnote was generally agreed upon, with the exception of the proposer, as it also corresponded to the guideline set out by Dr. Steiner. Experience has shown that such congresses tend to form a new organization. Therefore, the co-convocation of such congresses by Adyar members cannot be approved, and such action can no longer be regarded as a mere private matter for members. Consequently, the following motion was adopted:

“The General Assembly of the German Section of the Theosophical Society of October 30, 1904, resolves not to participate in any undertaking originating from other so-called Theosophical Societies and considers it the duty of each individual branch to act in the same way. Any participation can only be a private one of the individual members.”

The second motion by Mr. Ffelix] L[öhnis] was to collect all the general resolutions and executive decrees scattered in “Theosophist” and (in German) in “Vâhan” and to attach them to the statutes, so that no one who, when joining the society, was only presented with the constitution and statutes, could not be ambushed by such a resolution, as happened to the applicant with the footnote in question, and also so that the police, to whom the constitution and statutes are to be submitted when a lodge is founded, are provided with everything and treated fairly. This motion was unanimously approved and adopted as a resolution. The only surprising thing is that it has not long since been recognized as a need throughout the entire society.

Now that this footnote has provided clarity in an important matter, thus protecting the members from missteps and also providing a truly not inconsiderable, lasting benefit, those readers who were offended by it will probably be reconciled to it. However, why all this could not be achieved without “taking refuge in the public sphere” must remain undiscussed here.

A proposal was made from Munich to move the headquarters to Munich because of the favorable prospects for theosophy there, but the general assembly merely took note of this proposal. Mr. B. Hubo then suggested calling for voluntary contributions to provide the society with a better financial foundation. After a short debate, it was decided that the board should be instructed to call for such contributions. At half past two, all the items on the agenda had been completed.

On the evening of October 30th, from half past four o'clock, lectures and discussions took place. First, our Mr. Bresch spoke on the topic: “Should we teach theosophy to young people?” Then Dr. Steiner spoke on “The Nature of Clairvoyance”. A report on the latter lecture can be found in this issue, and we will include the former in the next issue or two.

Before I set out on my journey to southern and western Germany, I would like to speak to you once again about the nature of the Theosophical movement and its relationship to the Theosophical Society, for the Theosophical movement is of such comprehensive significance that at the beginning of a new year - which may be a very fruitful one for our work - we may recall the task, goals and working methods of this Theosophical movement.

The theosophical movement is not one that can be compared to any other movement in the present day, not even remotely. The most diverse people face this movement – which has spread across all developed countries of our earth in its not yet thirty-year existence – they face it in different ways and have faced it from the very beginning.

Ever since the emissary of our great and exalted masters, Mrs. Blavatsky, founded this movement, it has undergone many changes. She has seen people in her midst who have left her and others who have remained loyal and zealous since they entered it, and have also persevered with her. There have been members who have come to the Theosophical Society out of curiosity, who have come to learn about the insights that humans can gain into higher, spiritual worlds, among many other interesting things that one can learn about in the present.

But because the path that the theosophical movement can offer people is a safe one, it is not the easiest, not the most comfortable, not the one that can be taken from one day to the next, so that the highest spiritual phenomena immediately present themselves as an absolute truth. Rather, a zealous endeavor, a truly intense devotion, is necessary. That is why those who enter the theosophical movement out of curiosity become apostates over time, because they believe that they cannot achieve what they want to achieve in a short period of time; or because they believe that the theosophical movement has nothing to offer them.

Of course, the Theosophical Society did not expect many such curious people from the outset, although curiosity is often a detour to the truth and to theosophical knowledge. For many, curiosity later developed into a real theosophical pursuit. Others come to the Theosophical Society to truly undergo an inner psychological development. They really want to arrive at the certainty of a soul and spiritual life and achieve mystical deepening in order to become an important link in human development. These are better members. To begin with, they strive to recognize and experience as much as possible within themselves. In the higher sense, this is still a selfish pursuit; but even the highest pursuit of knowledge is a selfish and not a selfless pursuit. They also know that this is not the highest goal. But there is a beautiful saying that characterizes this state of affairs: “When the rose adorns itself, it also adorns the garden.” The detour via this egoism is thus a serious and good one, and those who take it can be worthy and genuine members of the Theosophical movement. Perhaps they are right to strive for their own perfection, because a person will only become a useful and valuable member of society when he has perfected himself. What use is an imperfect person to his fellow human beings? What use is someone who has only a superficial understanding of life? Only when one is able to look into human hearts and souls, when one is able to solve the great riddles of the world to some extent for oneself, can one intervene in the human hustle and bustle; only then can one do something for one's fellow human beings and for the world in the right way. Therefore, self-perfection, the absorption of spiritual knowledge, is a right and good path. No one can be reproached for being selfish if he seeks the path of self-perfection. And he who remains [true] will find that he has not searched in vain in the theosophical movement, that the path leads quietly but surely to what he seeks. Some may say that there are other paths. These other paths are not to be fought or opposed in the slightest. I know how the other spiritual movements serve the world. Not a word of contradiction will come from a true Theosophist. There can be no question of that.

But the one who seeks the spirit in the highest sense must seek this spirit through self-knowledge. Everyone has the spirit within them, and it is basically not useful to seek spiritual knowledge in the world around us if we do not want to recognize the most accessible spirit, the spirit within ourselves, in the true sense of the word. There are many who seek to recognize the spirit through all kinds of artificial means, and in doing so completely forget what spirit is in such close proximity: it is our own soul, our own spirit. We can find it if we want to search in the right way. But it lies deep within the human heart. We must search for it deeper and deeper in the layers of our own inner being. For what dwells within us is the same that dwells in the world as spirit and soul. The God who creates in the world, who has been creating in the world for millions of years, can be found in the human heart. And just as the natural scientist studies the world outside, seeking to understand the physical forces of stones, plants, animals and human beings, so too can no one truly recognize the soul and spirit in the world without really studying the soul and spirit. And the spirit, which has always created in the world and will always create in the world, dwells in a reflection, in a mirror image in ourselves. We develop further and further towards this spirit, our soul becomes ever more extensive.

Thus, theosophical striving is nothing other than the striving to become aware of the creative soul and spiritual beings in the world. What we carry within us today, what we find when we descend into the layers of our soul life, we once created and developed. If we could go back – and the theosophist gradually learns to go back into the distant past – then we would find the same soul forces building the world structure before there was any physical substance out there. And we would find the spirit that lives as a spark within us, creating out there in the world before there were chemical and physical forces. Spiritual and divine forces were at work. And higher than all physical existence, than all corporeal existence, is this spiritual existence; and not only higher, but older is this spiritual existence than the corporeal.

So we descend within ourselves and bring up from our own heart and soul layers the primal riddle-question with its solution, through which the world itself came into being. Those who immerse themselves in theosophy and descend into the layers of their own soul and spiritual life will find the forces that were at work before an eye saw or an ear heard. Before fire, air and water were on our earth, soul and spirit were in the sky and brought all this into being. We find something lasting and superior to the physical when we descend into these layers of our heart and mind. And then we do not draw from ourselves, but from the formative forces of the world. The great teachers and all those you have met among the great souls and spirits have gone down into the human interior. They have not only recognized themselves, but have opened their view beyond the stars and infinities.

Through self-knowledge, we are also able to recognize how the worlds were created and where man had his origin; and also the goals of man, the distant and the near, and our world task we are able to get out of the layers of the spirit through self-knowledge. What we know about the origin of planets, rounds and races, what we know about solar bodies and solar systems, and what we know about the emergence of living beings from the solar system and the world bodies, has been gained through self-knowledge, through that self-knowledge which has struggled to recognize in one's own spirit what it is today, what has been drawn into it through eons. What is present in him today leads us to the realization of what has always been present in him – present in him and at the same time outside in the world.

When you look at a tree, it has annual rings. But you first have to cut through the trunk to be able to see the annual rings. In the same way, the soul has received its rings for the one who can observe it. Each year such rings are added. The soul has passed through the cycles, the rounds and the races, and everywhere it has formed such an annual ring. This view is not seen by man today. But when he has become seeing, he sees what has remained as a result of the development. That is the way of self-knowledge, of self-perfection. Thus, through self-knowledge, the world unlocks. Thus man gets to know his task through this self-knowledge. And then he comes to an understanding of [the task of] the theosophical movement.

And that is the realization that presents itself to us, that the theosophical movement is a necessity for present and future humanity. I can only hint at what I have often said. Other races preceded our race; other races that still had spiritual knowledge. The Lemurian race, although not so advanced in mind and imagination and then perished by fire, still had a direct connection with the spiritual beings of the world, a direct knowledge of people was present. Man has lost his spiritual knowledge because he was called to develop his mind, because he was called to develop his mind through the senses.

The Atlanteans were still able to connect spiritually with other superior beings. We know that the Lemurians were brought over to the Atlanteans in small colonies to form the new root race. And we also know that when the floods began to break in, through which the Atlantic continent perished, the Manu sent a small group to the center of Asia. And when the old Atlantis was drawing to a close, the Manu led his little band, which was to form the basis for our race, into the Gobi or Shamo desert. There they were protected from the decadent inhabitants who had remained from the Atlanteans and Lemurians. And so the first sub-race of our race formed. They moved to the west. The other races remained behind. We ourselves descend from this small group. Our fifth root race will not meet its downfall through fire or water, but in a different way our present race will experience its twilight, in order to be led to a new stage, to a new existence. The theosophist learns about this stage, and he does preparatory work for the future of humanity, for the coming race. The struggle for existence will be the form of our

It will be saved in a small group. This will be recruited from those who have recognized that they must lead, and who have sought soul and spirit again.

Unlike in the past, work must be done in the present time. In the past, people were separated into small cultural areas, and each culture could only work in a small area. Even during the ancient Indian culture, and also during the Persian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman cultures, people were limited to smaller territories. Now the whole earth has become our dwelling place. Our technology, which is the greatness of our race, spans the whole earth. There is no longer any separation. Goods produced far from us are distributed all over the earth. The earth has become a common dwelling place. People can no longer be distinguished by individual colors, races, climates; they now exchange not only goods but also opinions.

Nothing can exist anymore for a small group only. Today we have a new task through which we can all grow into a new future. It is the task of the Theosophical movement to grasp this.

The leaders of humanity at the beginning and during the [first sub-race] of the fifth root race were the Rishis in India, of whom the modern researcher knows almost nothing. Only those who have come to the vision of the higher worlds through mystical knowledge can tell of them. They created that wonderful culture of which the Vedic culture is only a faint reflection. All that we know of Vedic culture originated in much later times. For those who are able to observe the world spiritually, there is a time of which no document reports, a time when in ancient India, God-gifted spirits, the Rishis, taught directly. That was a land culture.

Then comes a culture that is again limited to one country: the ancient Persian, the Zarathustrian culture. There have been seven Zarathustras. The Zarathustra who is usually mentioned is the seventh. He is the incarnation of all previous Zarathustras. What is preserved in the books of the Persian religion was only recorded in much later times. Here we look back on a second inspired creed in our racial development.

We now move west. We encounter the wonderful Egyptian culture, a culture of which books give us knowledge. The Egyptian Book of the Dead is a result of the culture of Hermes. Then we come to Greece and Italy to the Orphic primeval culture, which arose on European soil and from which we still draw. Then we come up to the sublime religion of the founder of Christianity and finally into our time.

We have thus glimpsed a series of human religious beliefs that originated with individual great founders of religions. For us, these great, exalted founders are nothing more than members of a spiritual community of beings and individualities that stand highly exalted above our humanity, so highly exalted that today man can only look up with admiration and humility to the great ones who have brought the spiritual [impulses] of our development. But at the same time, as we look up to them, we know that we too are called to ascend to such clarity and spirituality. The holy men have emerged from what we call the lodge of exalted human leaders.

Those who brought Egyptian culture then moved west and, when they came as emissaries to the west, to Europe, they brought the peoples the knowledge that they used according to their circumstances. The White Lodge has worked so that every people could understand it. Every people needed something special over time. Each nation was confined to a narrower space. What did the ancient Indians know, for example, of what was happening in Europe? They lived in very special social conditions. The great initiates spoke to them as they needed to. And so they spoke to all nations.

Today, humanity is called upon to become one family, today people are called upon to engage in exchange, not only of goods, but also of what people recognize as truth. What the ancient Rishis taught is no longer closed to people. So it had become necessary for the Exalted Ones of the Great White Lodge to speak to humanity again. The same Beings who were once active in the founding of ancient Hinduism, the same Beings who were active in the founding of ancient Zoroastrianism and in the founding of the religion of the Egyptians, had to speak to humanity in a new form, in a new sense; the same Being who once offered the body of the Christ to the Deity in order to be able to work here on earth, Jesus of Nazareth. That is why these entities speak in such a way that in their language no distinction is made between race and language, no distinction between gender and class. There can no longer be any special alliances, but humanity must have something in common. And such a commonality is our theosophical teaching, through which we develop into the new race. That is the meaning, the spirit of the modern theosophical movement.

Those who understand the theosophical movement as the spoken word of those who have given [wisdom and] the harmony of feeling from the beginning of humanity, know that Theosophy is nothing other than the pioneering movement that can prepare the way for a new humanity that is to bring happiness to humanity. Those who believe that all the big questions that are knocking at the door must be solved by the theosophical central movement understand the theosophical movement correctly.

Some seek their salvation through a social movement, others through a spiritualist movement, others through a moral reform of food and drink, and still others through a reform of food and drink. All [such movements] are great, significant and useful. But they are only preliminary. They will only be able to bear fruit if they become branches of the great theosophical movement. Not through external improvements in food, industry, or work can anything be achieved, but only by helping souls to progress. Anyone who has carefully studied all these movements knows how they must merge into the theosophical movement.

Demand of your fellow human beings that they should not be so terrible to each other in the struggle for existence, but should behave as you would wish them to behave towards you, and it will be bearable. But if you write “struggle” on your banner, you will achieve nothing. Only through love, through union, through the harmony of all our souls can salvation be found. Only when we have realized once more that we are all spiritual beings, and that our soul and our spirit are sparks of the primal fire and our mission is to unite in this primal fire, will we work for the good of our future. Then we will live into the time in which we must live, but which we must also shape. And that will depend on the work we do on our own soul.

Many demand that people change: this class, that state should change, people are needed differently. They fight against them. But who can guarantee that such a fight will ever succeed? One thing must succeed, however: We can never go wrong if we improve our own inner being, if we each begin to reform our own inner being, that is, if each of us improves himself. In this endeavor, there can be no distinction of class, race, station, or sex. And that is the meaning of the Theosophical movement, which makes it a great movement of the future. The exalted beings who have spoken to us in tones that promise the future have taught us this. Many have come to the theosophical movement and ask: You tell us that so-called “masters” are at the head of the movement; but we do not see these masters. That is not surprising. Do not believe that it is in the will of the masters not to come and speak to you themselves. If they could, if they were allowed to, each of them would do so. But I would like to give you just a small idea of why the master must be separated from those he loves and why he must seek messengers who proclaim his word with their physical word.

The laws by which the world and humanity are governed are infinitely higher than what the average person of today can imagine. Only someone who works solely in the service of these exalted cosmic laws – after he has recognized them – can guide humanity in a spiritual and mental way. The master sees not only years, but centuries and millennia. He sees into the distant future. The teachings he gives are those that should serve as a goal for humanity to advance. The Master does not give idle teachings for curiosity, but teachings of great human love that will lead to the happiness of humanity in the future.

Look at people, how they live, how they depend on a thousand little things of the day. And I do not even want to point out the thousand little things of the day, but only how they depend on space and time, how they find it difficult to gain a free judgment, to admit to themselves what is necessary to help their fellow human beings. A thousand and a million considerations to which man is hourly bound make it impossible for him to gain a free, independent judgment. If one can only follow the innermost voice of the divine within, then one is called to lead, guide and direct people. That is the task of the Master.

Few can imagine the extent of the freedom of judgment that the Master has to express, unfettered by any consideration. Only in a weak ray, in a darkened reflection, can we express in the physical realm what the Masters express from their exalted seat.

Consideration must be given to country, culture and education. Only in a refracted ray can that which the divine leader can impart as the great law of the world come to humanity. Only the one who is able to listen to the master so that not the slightest contradiction stirs in the heart, who does not take time and space into consideration, but completely devotes his ear to the master in perfect devotion, only he is called to hear the master, who does not respond to everything with “yes and but,” but knows that the master speaks from the divine.

Everyone must fall silent in the face of divine truths. What is most prevalent today must cease: the insistence on one's own judgment. The Master does not impose his judgment on us, but he does want to inspire us. As long as we criticize, we are dependent on time and space, and until then, the voice of the Master cannot reach our ears. When we develop a ruthlessness towards everything that binds us to the personal, the temporary, the ephemeral, when we leave these considerations behind us, create moments of celebration for ourselves, tear ourselves away from what lives around us and only listen to the inner voice, then the moments are there in which the master can speak to us. Those who have gained that great freedom have also gained the opportunity to have a master themselves; they have managed to have the certainty that they exist in the glory of these high beings, surrounded by light.

They have given up the “test everything and keep the best”, because those who want to approach the master have to give that up. In doing so, they establish principles about things that one truly already knows. But if one wants to learn, then this principle ceases to exist. Who is to decide what is best? Those who have it, or those who have recognized it? We should not become judgmental or uncritical, but should be able to put ourselves in a truly independent frame of mind if we want to ascend to these lofty heights.

Above all, this is something that must flow through the theosophist as a feeling. And if he imbues himself more and more with this feeling, then he himself will be led up to the heights where the Master can speak to him.

Do not ask: Why are the masters in separate places? Because it is true that in St. Petersburg, Berlin and London and so on, the masters are staying and can be spoken to by those who want to speak to them and can do so; for those who have attained the necessary mood through inner self-conquest. When the theosophist imbues himself with this mood, he becomes a member of that part of humanity that is being led up to a new, elevated existence. And because that is the case, the Theosophical movement is also the most practical movement we can have in the present day. Many object that it is idealistic, fantastic, impractical.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, a little reflection can teach you that this movement does not have to be impractical just because many practical people – that is, people who call themselves such – consider it impractical. But just take a look at the people who consider themselves so practical. It is a strange thing about such people who have found themselves so practical. Some examples of what the practitioners did in the world of the 19th century may show this. For example, until the middle of the 19th century, the practitioners had a highly impractical postal system. With this postal system, the practitioners, just as today, insisted on their practice. But then a school teacher came along in England who invented the postage stamp. He was an “impractical” idealist named Hill. At the head of the English postal service was a “practitioner” named [Lord Lichfield]. He declared in Parliament that the introduction of the postage stamp could not be implemented. He said: The “practitioner” knows that it won't work. The traffic could increase, but then the post offices would no longer be sufficient, so the idea is bad. - That was roughly the response to an “unpractical” invention like the postage stamp.

Likewise, Gauss had invented an electromagnetic telegraph as early as the first third of the 19th century. It was not introduced. It was the idealists who made the inventions, and the practical people refused the funds.

The same applied to the railroad. What did the practitioners do when the railroad was to be set up? Postmaster Nagler said at the time: Why a railroad? I already have sixteen buses going to Potsdam every day and nobody is sitting in them. So what about the railroad? In addition, the Bavarian Medical Council issued a statement on the construction of the railways. The document can still be seen today. They said that no railways should be built because people would get concussions if they were to drive on them; at the very least, the railway line would have to be surrounded by wooden fences on both sides so that the people it passes by would not suffer from concussions or other damage.

All great achievements of mankind have never arisen from the minds of those who think they are practitioners. The practitioners have no judgment about true human progress. Only when man rises to the great culture-moving factors that come from the spirit and the soul, only when he is under spiritual guidance, can he give great impulses to humanity. Unconsciously, these inventors were influenced by the masters. Without the chemist knowing it in the laboratory or in the factory, he is influenced by the spiritual hierarchy of the masters, whom we shall get to know better through the theosophical movement. The theosophical movement will intervene in the immediate movement of the day, will not only live in the hearts and minds. Yes, it will live in the hearts, but it will inspire people to the tips of their fingers and transform their whole lives. Then it will be the most practical movement, directly influencing what surrounds us every hour, every minute.

This is not said by someone who wants to preach the movement fanatically, but by someone who is called to do so. We have gone through many errors; we have sought the factors that bring social progress in the world, but we have realized that progress must be sought in the soul, that progress must spring from the soul, and that it must also be implemented. Wherever this is in the background, we unite in the right way in the Theosophical Society.

The Theosophical Society is only the outer tool for those who believe that they must take part in the cultural movement prescribed by the theosophical movement. When the Masters are asked what must be done to come into contact with them, they answer: A person can make contact through the Theosophical Society; this gives the person a claim. What comes to life in us is what the Theosophical movement is about. The teachings we spread are the means to ignite the [inner] life in man. For the one who speaks to his fellow human beings, it is not the word that works, but rather what flows mysteriously through the word. It is not only the sound waves, but rather the spiritual power that is to flow through the word to us. Through this spiritual power, the word, the power of the masters, the great leaders, works on us so that we are united in spirit and our hearts beat together. That is what matters: that we feel in harmony with each other, that we feel within ourselves; when the current weaves from heart to heart, from soul to soul, the power that stands behind us goes through them.

It depends on the attitude. That is why we work in our branches in such an attitude, that is why the masters teach us that we should not acquire knowledge out of curiosity, just to constantly know more, but so that we can unite in the harmony of feelings. That is why we will never leave theosophical meetings as one would leave other meetings. Annie Besant once said that it is out of place to complain, “How little I got out of this meeting today!” That is not the point. The theosophist should not ask, “How boring was it?” but rather, “How boring was I?” We do not come together to learn, but we do work with our soul and spirit when we create thought forms that resonate with each other. Every theosophical gathering and every branch should be an accumulator of power. Each such branch has an effect on the surrounding area. The spiritual power does not need anyone to spread the word. The power of such a branch goes out into the world through mysterious waves. Anyone who believes that there is a spiritual reality will understand this, will know that a powerful movement emanates from such theosophical lodges. Every theosophical lodge is an invisible, sometimes incomprehensible force. A preacher teaches differently. No teacher teaches us, no connection was with a theosophical lodge and yet the spiritual word finds its way to his community. Chemists and physicists in the laboratory receive new ideas: it is an effect of the theosophical association. Only those who have the stated attitude, who cherish and cultivate what they possess of love and kindness and who also appear when there is no interesting speaker to be heard, know that effects are also present where they are not materially visible, and are true Theosophists. Because some things in the Theosophical movement have faltered, [the Masters] have given us the impulse to speak as I have now spoken to you. This is how it was recently spoken in England, America and India. This has been done on behalf of the masters, that we draw attention to the true spiritual attitude of a theosophical lodge. Leadbeater speaks in America, Annie Besant in London and in India, and so we must speak. It is not a question of whether we like one more or less according to our personal ideas, but that we come together unselfishly. Then we not only take, but we also give. We also give above all when we give our soul. And that is the best gift. In this sense, we want to unite in our branch as well. More and more, the theosophical branches must take on this form, so that all criticism and all knowing-better must fall silent, so that we work as positively as possible, so that we work in our soul, as has been indicated.

If we can be convinced that the effects are not outwardly visible, but invisible, then our theosophical attitude will be such that we make the theosophical movement what it should be.

All great spiritual movements have worked in silence. No contemporary messages have been handed down from Jesus Christ. Philo of Alexandria has brought us no message from the Master. Only later documents tell us about the master. The master of the Christian religion was also known in his true form only by the great and the faithful. Herein lies his strength and his tremendous impact, which is far from exhausted and will continue to have an effect in the distant future.

Do you believe in the spirituality of the words, which does not have to be manifested in external success, then you understand the earnest meaning of the theosophical movement. Let us truly take this to heart at the beginning of the new year, let us come together in this spirit, and may this New Year's greeting flow from every single soul, that we will do our theosophical work in the spirit of our exalted beings who stand above us.

First Dr. Steiner: “Today it is mainly about misunderstandings. I don't think much of discussing them and believe that they can be overcome through work. The divisions that usually arise are mostly based on misunderstandings. I have often found this on my lecture tours. Today I will try to dispel a real misunderstanding, because what should inspire us in society is a unity built on the heart and on feelings. Without this, it is hardly possible to move forward. I therefore propose forming an executive committee; this committee should make suggestions for the branch's events. I believe that this will help to avoid misunderstandings and also the differences that lead to divisions. As I have heard, members of the Theosophical Society meet at each other's homes; they unite in smaller groups. But that is not my concern. The assemblies that are of interest to me should be convened by the branch's board. If other assemblies are organized, it is tantamount to a vote of no confidence in the board. This is a matter that must be treated as a symptom. The question is whether the members of the Berlin branch believe that the current approach is not the right one and whether it is necessary to initiate a different way of doing business. We want to start with an opportunity to ask questions and discuss them."

Fräulein Schwiebs: “The meeting that took place at our house arose out of a completely harmless intention. It is not intended to confront the leadership or the management of the branch.”

Herr Quaas: “At the general meeting, Dr. Steiner pointed out that Fräulein von Sivers had so far provided her private rooms voluntarily. The Berlin branch, however, pays 300 marks for the library. But since there is a possibility that the library room may be needed by both Ms. von Sivers and the branch at the same time, the question arises as to what rights the Berlin branch has acquired for paying the 300 marks. Trust is not a patented thing, but something that one must make an effort to earn. I would therefore like to ask how this whole matter has been handled and whether there are no funds available to obtain premises that are completely neutral. It will not be possible to achieve agreement among individuals by listening to large crowds. I was sorry about the attitude that Dr. Steiner took towards my proposal. You can't say it's none of my business. Either the board has to deal with it or the board has to be bypassed. But now the question is: Do we have the means to bring about an improvement, or do we not have the means? I believe that the events organized by Schwiebs and Eberty are to be welcomed with thanks. It is true that they have not yet taken place in the time since the Berlin branch of the Theosophical Society has existed.

Mr. Fränkel: “I attended the meeting; it was not an official or semi-official gathering, it was purely private. Its only purpose was to bring members together. However, the members of the Theosophical Society should form the basis of the gatherings. I regret that thoughts have been expressed that do not correspond to the Theosophical guidelines. But one should not approach things with suspicions.

Dr. Steiner: “It is not about the cards, nor is there anything wrong with the meeting. But it is particularly important to get to a certain basis, because Mr. Quaas' speech has revealed that there are other things involved, other symptoms. Mr. Quaas has therefore also consulted with me. However, we must not mix up two things. We must not mix up the library issue and the issue of the Besant branch. I cannot get involved in private discussions. You have to have the right foundations for that.

And now for another matter. It is claimed that no insights into the financial situation of the Berlin branch are available. Then there were also remarks regarding the private rooms. In response to this, I must say that, in the beginning, my concern was to slowly take up the work of the branch and continue it in the same way. The work was done in the theosophical sense. Lectures were given on Christianity as a Mystical Fact and on Mysticism in the Rise of Modern Spiritual Life. The theosophical work is the main thing. But it can only be done if one has the fundamentals of the theosophical world-view. It is nice that members are approaching each other, but it must go hand in hand with becoming familiar with the theosophical world-view. This work could not be done if sacrifices were not made by private individuals. I have always felt that I was among Theosophists in this room. I did not have the impression of being in a private room. This year, members should divide into groups and work together. That is the second thing that will have to be done gradually. But it must be done in harmony with the central leadership.

The proposals must be within the framework of what currently exists. The continuity of the Theosophical Society must be maintained. I am called to maintain the continuity of the Theosophical movement. Until now, the only means of doing this was to hold meetings in this room. The library has been given to Miss von Sivers on condition that she has it in her home. It goes without saying that the library needs a room; and that something is paid for it is also self-evident. However, it is not a requirement that it should also be possible to hold meetings there. It is therefore advisable to leave the library issue out of it altogether. The Berlin branch has not yet had any reason to create a center. So we will stick with the old conditions as long as they are sufficient for the real work."

Krojanker: “I would like to say that a harmonious atmosphere no longer exists. The Berlin branch has no home at all, and now we are not even allowed to hold meetings in the library room. The situation of the Berlin branch is such that an executive committee is quite impossible under the current conditions. What has been on paper for years has now been summarized in a few proposals that have been discussed. We have the feeling that the lectures in the architects' house do not take place within the framework of the Berlin branch. These are separate events that we can or cannot attend, but with which we as the Berlin branch have nothing to do. They have statutes, but everything is dictated. We have every reason to accept your advice, Doctor, in every way. However, the administration of a branch does not quite coincide with this. Further misunderstandings should be avoided in the future. To convene a general assembly requires completely different preconditions. But then there are also other issues to be discussed: How are the general assemblies to be regulated? Where and how should they take place? What resources does the Berlin branch have for this? And how must the Berlin branch ensure that the external conditions are provided for regular meetings? These are the questions that the discussions came down to. The library question will hardly be able to be settled. There is a desire to feel at home among Theosophical members. For the Theosophical work that you describe, you have to choose the members yourself who can do such work."

Dr. Steiner: “We will then have to call an extraordinary general meeting. I don't see why an executive committee should be impossible given the circumstances of the Berlin branch. The lectures at the Architektenhaus are my events; the board must represent the Society. But the meetings at the Architektenhaus don't see why they can't be seen as branch events. I can't quite see how such a center should be created. The Berlin branch should consider the lectures as theirs."

Fräulein von Sivers: ”It's all very well to form groups, but it takes more than that. You need people, capital and staff. Before it was set up, there was no one at the library who could have taken care of it. It should have been sold or distributed. At that time, I was active in the Theosophical movement. It had adopted more fixed paths. The library was given to me because the branch could not spend the 300 marks. However, the continuity of the library and Dr. Steiner's lectures were to be maintained. The library was linked to my private rooms. Since they were not public, no one came.

The lectures that we have here were set up later, and the invitations from Miss Schwiebs and Mrs. Eberty to gatherings at their home have been quite successful.

Mr. Quaas: “The accounts should be duplicated and made available to the members. We do not need to completely dismiss the library question. We can also build and work on a solid foundation for the general meeting. The board has to make suggestions for convening the general meeting.

Dr. Steiner: ”I have heard something about a harmonious atmosphere that no longer exists.

Krojanker: “I believe that the assemblies at Schwiebs and Eberty will be able to bring the discord back into harmony.”

Dr. Steiner: “I would like to note: It is something different to work positively spiritually than to be active in administration. With attorney Quaas, [it] appears as disharmony, even a certain animosity comes to light. As long as animosity exists, I consider the positive work in society to be fruitless. This animosity was noticeable from the conversation.”

Fränkel: “I did not concern myself with the theosophical circumstances. Therefore, I did not know about the animosity either.”

Quaas: “The criticism is being forced upon the members.”

Fräulein Schwiebs: “I don't understand why heavy artillery is being brought up against us, although you were partly present at the first meeting. I didn't want to bring up this unfriendliness, but it hurt me. Fräulein von Sivers couldn't make the meeting because she had too much to do.”

Dr. Steiner: “Several errors seem to have occurred here. No one ever said anything about intending to hold meetings every fortnight. At the time, I asked that such meetings be officially recorded. It seems that invitations were sent out once. I knew nothing about the intention to hold permanent meetings. The fact that meetings are held on a regular basis has been presented to me as something new today. Personal discussions would not have satisfied the need. So it was probably not correct to speak of the members' meetings.” Miss Schwiebs: ‘We and Mrs. Eberty were together every first and third Sunday of the month.’

Mr. [Georgi] regards dissatisfaction as explosives. Working on oneself is the main thing. Then the walls that have been knocked down will disappear, and so will the dissatisfaction, so that we can devote ourselves entirely to the future.

Dr. B...: “Too many private relationships are discussed, but no one has really taken the actual study seriously. We want to approach everyone with love, we want to shake off what has made society disharmonious, so that in the future, instead of destroying, we will continue to work with a strong hand.

Quaas believes that the contact between the board and the members has been completely lost (objections are raised).

Krojanker: “This is a society that has certain forms. These must be adhered to and maintained. There can be no question of real animosity. Hold more general meetings.”

Ms. Motzkus: “The meetings were actually intended to facilitate closer contact with Dr. Steiner.”

Ms. von Holten: “I felt sorry for having let strangers write my letter. I missed a female touch here.”

Dr. Steiner: “This is a letter that interferes in my private affairs without justification, a letter that arises out of ignorance. I have not given a reply to it. It should never have been written in this form, for I would have forgiven myself something if I had replied to it. The impression was as if you had seen someone at whose sight you were frightened.”

Mrs. B.: “It is actually only about the form of the meetings. I am not one of those who absorb gossip and pass it on. But I have to say that there is a tremendous dislike of Miss von Sivers, so members feel cold, catch a cold. This coldness is brought in and is contagious. People should look within themselves and approach the people with real devotion and love. The aversion must be removed; goodwill must be cultivated and what has happened must be forgotten. Only in inner harmony lies real work in the spirit of Theosophy. Otherwise we cannot help with the work. We must approach Fräulein von Sivers with different feelings."

Krojanker: “You can have reverence for a personality without extinguishing your own ego in the face of that personality. I think we need to have more general meetings and more board meetings.”

Dr. Steiner: “You can't have meetings that don't go harmoniously, that don't enable harmonious work. Those who have the best intentions are ultimately the sacrificial lambs. My work would be undone if what lies at the bottom of the soul were not openly and honestly expressed. There must be no wall between me and the members, for the following reasons: I myself am not dependent on anyone for my work and will never be dependent on anyone for my theosophical work. If someone says that a wall could be built between me and the members, then that would be the worst kind of mistrust. Anyone who has done that cannot receive anything from me. If such statements are made, then my work is stopped.

Krojanker: He complains that such personal matters are being made the subject of the General Assembly and asks: “Do you have any objections to the members' meetings at Fräulein Schwiebs's?”

Dr. Steiner: “It is not about the general meetings at Schwiebs and Eberty. My idea was to organize the sequence of the general meetings because it is desirable today that work continues within group meetings. These meetings should not serve to attack, but to recognize that dissatisfaction prevails and to ask how it can be organized away. The people in such groups must be selected. People who are completely sympathetic to each other must come together in such groups. That is why I asked for the establishment and regulation of general meetings. I wanted to gain a foothold because some members in society have so much against each other that it is impossible to bring them together in such group meetings. If my theosophical work had not been stopped, I would not have put it forward. When someone says that a wall is being erected between me and the members, it is not just a private matter; it is an accusation against a member who has led the events in my interest of thwarting relations. When they erect a wall, it is a criticism that is directed at our entire society. A wall against Miss von Sivers is a matter for the Society.

[Georgi]: Speaks against Mrs. Braun and says: “Criticism is unnecessary, it has a bad effect, you have to starve this force.”

Mrs. Braun: “I am against the attitude, I will not participate in it, I have renounced all forms.”

Krojanker: “As the head of the Berlin branch, you have to deal with matters that you don't have to touch on as a theosophist. You don't feel constrained at the branch's events, so you don't have to have anything to do with the administration of the Berlin branch. It's a two-way street.

Dr. Steiner: “It is indeed my opinion that the chairmanship is not tied to me and Fräulein von Sivers. This society has existed for years, but it has not developed any particular activity. We have tried to love the Theosophical Society and bring it to life in Berlin. Count and Countess Brockdorff have said that they were only stopgaps to keep it going. If a different activity is desired, I would cede the chair to whomever is able to procure better premises and more success.

Krojanker: “What is said is said in the interest of the Theosophical Society. Dr. Steiner is above all debate. However, business matters that arise when Dr. Steiner retains leadership and remains united with us through his work must be dealt with in an orderly manner.”

Dr. Steiner: “My activity as chairman is not tied to my other activities because the administrator and the spokesperson can be separated. This is how it has been kept, and that seems to me to be the desirable state of affairs. For a long time, the Society lay fallow. We tried to revive it. I proceeded according to my thoughts, I tried to get to know the Theosophical Societies around the world. You should not have the impression that you have been called together for trivial reasons. If, during the meetings, younger members speak out against their superiors, then I am prevented from being effective. I was not trying to assure sympathy. There seems to be no inclination and no desire for it.

Group work: A number of members who get along well and meet to discuss with each other is an especially important thing. They should then write down the questions that arise in order to ask me about them in the big meeting, so that a theosophical understanding among the members can take place in this way. I have found something similar in England, in India and especially in Holland. Exemplary work has been done in Düsseldorf. The group members meet twice. One member, Lauweriks, explains the secret doctrine to people in an extraordinary way. But this work can only be made fruitful if it is organically integrated into our lectures, so that people can enter into the theosophical worldview. I have thought of this in order to be able to make suggestions and so that people can see why they cannot be in a particular circle. Disharmonious currents are very fatal in smaller working groups. My wish has only been granted to a small extent. I do not know why it has not been used to a greater extent. This disharmonious mood is also likely to affect me in my work. It could prevent me from working for the Berlin branch. It is something that marks my work as unfree. What can be done? 'For example, when the administration decides on something that I cannot go along with. That is why it was necessary for me to ask you to express what is in the air here.

I ask those who wish to participate in groups to express their willingness to do so. This is the only way to get deeper into Theosophy. It is nice to socialize, but there are many opportunities for that. Theosophy does not have to be the reason for that. Theosophical work requires a certain foundation based on work. There is no limit to the size of the group. I will be here again tomorrow for eight days, and I will be back in Berlin on Thursday. Perhaps the suggestion of a center will take on a more concrete form, because there are probably still some who have an idea of how it could be done better, but you just have to stretch yourself to the limit. But this criticism is creating bad blood. I had hoped that whatever was to be said against me or Miss von Sivers would be said bluntly. Since this has not been the case, however, the time we have spent on it should not be considered wasted.

There is no reason to find fault with the work of Miss von Sivers. Take a more intimate approach to her work, not just business. But I cannot help it if the Berlin branch should be damaged. I know what the Berlin branch needs, and I also know what the duty of an occultist is. The great spiritual world stands above that. But it also requires that my freedom not be interfered with. To put up a wall between me and the members is an act of humiliation, and an occultist must not be humiliated. Anyone who has such conditions cannot receive anything more from me as an occultist."

Dr. Steiner: “Careful scrutiny of the lines along which we were moving showed me that it is necessary to contribute something to clarify the things that were suggested at the time. That is why I asked you to appear at this General Assembly. I would like to emphasize from the outset that it will not be a matter of somehow interpreting the steps that three members of the Executive Board felt compelled to take in such a way that they could be directed against anyone, even remotely. The aim is to clarify the situation by means of a full clarification that cannot be achieved in any other way. In order to make this completely clear, I must still refer to a few words on the essentials, to the history of the Theosophical movement since the founding of the German section, namely insofar as it concerns members of the board, who come into consideration above all.

When the German Section was to be founded, the leaders of the Theosophical movement, insofar as they belonged to the Adyar Society, were to be persuaded to hand over the leadership to others. The personalities involved in the continuation of the theosophical work were Fräulein von Sivers and I. I myself was not yet ready to join the Theosophical Society, even a few months before I was called upon to contribute not only to the Berlin group but also to the entire movement of the Theosophical Society in my capacity as General Secretary of the German Section. I had already given lectures for two winters, in the Berlin branch. Two courses that have been printed, so that I am connected with the Theosophical Society in Berlin in a certain respect, am connected only personally.

When Count and Countess von Brockdorff left Berlin, I had already been a member of the Theosophical Society for several months, and when other measures failed, I was designated as General Secretary. I did not oppose the request at the time. I had no merit in the Theosophical Society at the time.

Berlin was considered a kind of center in Germany. Berlin was to become a kind of parent company. The German Theosophical Society (DTG) was built on this. The aim was to run the society from Berlin. At that time, Count and Countess Brockdorff went to great lengths to recruit Fräulein von Sivers, who was in Bologna, for their Berlin lodge. Even after she had been asked, she was not at all inclined to accept. Only when the leaders of the Theosophical Society deemed it necessary did Miss von Sivers decide to go to Berlin and lead the Theosophical movement with me under the conditions that were possible at the time.

We adapted ourselves to the circumstances in an absolutely conservative way. The circumstances naturally required that we take the initiative of the German movement into our own hands and try to bring the intentions to fruition in the right way. The situation in Germany was such that it would not have been possible at that time without initiative in a material sense. In addition to this material theosophical work, there were many other things, such as, for example, the management of the library, which was in a loose connection with the German Theosophical Society, the later Berlin branch of the Theosophical Society. This management of the library naturally required a certain amount of work, which had to be done between classes. The actual Theosophical work could only be done in the free breaks. I myself could devote myself to these library matters only in an advisory capacity. I had more important things to do. Besides, for two years I had been able to study the way the branch had been run, and I had no intention of making any kind of change in the external administration. What was factually given should be preserved.

It was our endeavor to operate within the framework and to throw what we had to give into the framework of the Theosophical movement. That was our endeavor. The basic prerequisite for Fräulein von Sivers to take over the management of the various agencies of the Theosophical Society in Berlin was that complete trust prevailed. Without this trust, nothing can be done in the practical part of the Theosophical movement. Trust in the practical part of the movement itself is necessary. The administration is a kind of appendage. Since we could not engage in any particular pedantry, it was natural that we expected complete trust in what is the basic requirement for working together in the theosophical field. This trust does not appear to have been given to the extent that we would need it to conduct the business calmly and objectively. We will only make the final point by linking it to the meeting two weeks ago and contrasting it with it. This meeting was based on things that were even referred to as gossip; they were based on public appearances. Everything is to be discussed in public. The fact that there is dissatisfaction was admitted in the meeting, and the expression of a mood of discontent is in itself enough to bring about such a step as is to be taken today. I am - let this be accepted as an absolutely true interpretation - I am, not only because every occultist is, but on much more esoteric principles, opposed to all aggression. Every act of aggression hinders the activity that I would be able to unfold. Please regard this step as something that merely follows from the principle of not acting aggressively. Everyone must behave in such a way that the wishes of all can be fully expressed. Everyone must suppress their personal desires so that our work can be done. Otherwise, the Berlin branch cannot be managed as desired. That is what I would like to achieve. When opposing views are expressed, it is impossible to work together.

If we work in such a way, as desired from various sides, then in my opinion we would flatten the Theosophical movement, we would reduce it to the level of a club.

The words that were spoken at the last meeting must be heard, the words: that I am in diametrical opposition to those who want a club-like community. I do not intend to attack anyone. I just cannot be there. Anyone who considers this properly will have to say that this is the absence of any aggressiveness. I would like to set the tone for this matter. This is what I emphasized at the general assembly in October, where I emphasized that I do not conform to such a form, that I cannot conform to a club-like society. Those who wish that the Berlin branch be administered differently, that the members interact with each other in a different way, must act accordingly. It is necessary for them to take matters into their own hands and carry them out for themselves, so that it seems self-evident that no one can object if their wishes are fulfilled in the manner mentioned. I could not fulfill these wishes. I have always tried to satisfy wishes as best I could. In order for the Theosophical Society to continue to develop peacefully, I have to take this step. I have the task of maintaining the continuity of the movement in Germany. It is clear to me that only on an occult basis – given our confused circumstances in the world – can this movement be taken forward. A movement on a social basis does not need to be Theosophical; its people may already have ideal aspirations and become dear to one another, and that does not need to be Theosophical. But we need a theosophical movement, and that is why I cannot be a leader in a club-like organization. Please understand that I am obliged to bring the full depth of the theosophical movement, which is based on occultism, to it. Today, only those who live by the Aristotelian principle are truly called to actively participate within the Theosophical Society: Those who seek truth must respect no opinion.

Perhaps I would also like to work in a different way. But here it is a matter of duty, and therefore I will take this step because I have this obligation to build the Theosophical movement on a truly deeper foundation, and in the process of building, any attempt to run the society in a club-like manner will lead to a flattening out. No one can better understand that such things are necessary for some, and no one's relationship with me should change. Everyone will always be welcome with me. I will continue to conduct the business that relates to the material aspects of Theosophy in the same way, so that in the future everything can be found as it has been found. But precisely for this reason I must withdraw.

The consistency is, of course, in the lines that I have executed. I cannot and must not lose sight of the theosophical movement at any point. That is why I have asked those members of our Theosophical Society – all the other organizations are of a secondary nature – individual members of the Theosophical Society, to hold a meeting with me and asked them whether they would be willing to continue the Theosophical movement with me in the way I have led it, against which a discord has arisen and dissatisfaction has been expressed. This had to be so, because I must maintain continuity. I will only mention the case I have in Munich. There is a strictly closed lodge there that only accepts those who meet the requirements of the whole. But now we will have a second lodge in which all others can be admitted. I have endeavored to draw attention to the conditions of the work of the lodges, which is the daily bread of a lodge. I also want to found a Besant Lodge soon, for whose name I will ask Annie Besant for permission soon. In addition, there will be completely free activity from which no one can be excluded. That is the reason for my resignation.

(The names of a number of members are then listed.)

Krojanker: “After these explanations from Dr. Steiner, those who were unable to attend the last meeting will have gained an insight into the cause of the discord and also the background to the matter, which led three members of the board to take the above-mentioned step. There must have been trouble brewing long before those involved knew anything about it. Since I have known about these things, it has been impossible for me to get over them. At first it was impossible for me to realize that these things could drive the gentlemen to this conclusion. What was it actually? The starting point for me was simply the decision of City Councillor Eberty and Miss Schwiebs, who had set out to see the members in their home for free, informal discussions. It was not foreseeable that such conclusions could be drawn from this. The suggestion came from Miss von Sivers; members should be encouraged to approach each other, and the feeling should not arise that one does not quite feel at home, so that everything rushes home immediately after the lecture. But even with Miss von Sivers, this was noticeable to a certain extent. As long as we had no headquarters, she had to help herself in a different way, visiting friends and talking to them. These are things that were purely personal and private in nature, and in the previous session I had hoped that they would not affect us. I still have the same opinion of these things today, the opinion that they must not be touched. The polite couple who had invited us were not yet part of the branch. A distinction must be made between association work, associationism and theosophical work. But committees are not formed and elected, and members of the board are not elected, for nothing, so that they do not have to worry about running the association. They are elected and will then also have the authority to speak about business matters and to allow themselves to make judgments from time to time. If autocratic management [...] is desired, then statutes and so on would not be necessary either. If Dr. Steiner had said at the time: We must renounce such a form, had he shown or said, only under such and such conditions is it possible for me to work and participate, then things would have happened immediately and quite naturally. Those who would have liked it would have gone along with it, and the rest would have stayed out. I don't understand why a whole business apparatus has been set up and why it is resented if, as a member of one of its branches, I take an interest in it. I think it cannot be considered a crime to inquire about these things. I would recommend the introduction of wish lists. I must protest against the accusation that we are aggressive. We have heard Dr. Steiner speak for two years about what Theosophy is and what Theosophical life entails. Surely other ways could have been found to steer the discussions in a different direction. But now that it has come to this, the consequences must be drawn under all circumstances. I imagine them to be – I don't know if I have understood correctly – that this Berlin branch continues to exist as a continuation of the Berlin branch of the German Theosophical Society, and that the three board members and the other gentlemen whom Dr. Steiner has read out are now founding a new lodge.

Further negotiations and consultations will be needed before this step can be taken. The first task will be to elect a committee, because the Berlin branch currently has neither a committee nor a leadership. We will therefore have to form a provisional committee to discuss how this is to be done. I would like to leave it up to you to make proposals in this regard. In any case, we deeply regret the way in which the matter has been handled so far. When Dr. Steiner speaks of discord and soul currents, there is in fact nothing that I know and perhaps some personal matters that must never be made the business of the Berlin branch."

Dr. Steiner: “I myself had good reason to take the personal into account. At the general assembly, 300 marks were approved for my work last year. I had already raised concerns at the time, but soon after that I felt compelled to put these 300 marks back into the treasury because of the prevailing mood, because I did not want to work on the basis of ill will. You see that I have kept quiet for long enough. 'I also wanted to let this matter pass quietly, to bridge the gap with positive work. In the long run, this was not possible for good reason. Of course, we are not discussing private matters here, nor is a conversation about professional life appropriate. I have said that, as far as I am concerned, what was requested has been largely satisfied. The wish had arisen that we should have lectures elsewhere than here or in the architects' house, and I agreed to give lectures at Wilhelmstraße 118 as well. But now we have to make a few comments about such a matter. The things are not as crude as they might initially appear, but are more subtly connected. At the time, I readily agreed to fulfill this wish, and in the pursuit of this matter, I asked to form an executive committee. I did not dream what came of it. We still have no branch in the north, south, or east. It was my intention to work not only in the west, but in all parts of the city. When an executive committee was formed in the Berlin branch, it was intended that this committee should take charge of the actual agitation. No one here has ever been prevented from taking care of business matters, but the view is that anyone who wants to do something has to create the space for themselves. No one could demand anything from us. If someone had come to us with positive suggestions, we would have taken them up. But when it is said that our activities have not been attacked, I say that only this week I received a written accusation that we are managing the library in such a way that one can threaten to go to court about it. We cannot accept hidden accusations. We will also hand over the library. When I have presented these things, you can assume that they are based on the firmest possible foundation. The statutes and so on could have been adhered to if there had been goodwill. When one talks about business, it must be practical. What was done at the time was impractical. I spoke three times in relatively beautiful rooms, but then in a room that was referred to as a stable, and finally in a room where speaking was almost impossible. I had to speak with glasses knocking behind me and so on. That was no atmosphere for Theosophy. I had to think of doing things in a practical way. This was the reason for my decision to hold the lectures in the architect's house. Such measures were in favor of the Berlin branch. Nevertheless, I was told: These lectures are ones that we can attend or not attend. - So you see that this is a silent discourtesy. Nothing has been done precisely because the other view of business matters, of statutes and committees, gave the opportunity to try out how it works. A letter from a theosophist reads: “I would like to see the Berlin branch work well for once. Most of all, I would be pleased if it could work in a favorable way.“ But then a wish list has also been worked out, you think - on the wish list it said: ‘The chairman has to be there half an hour before the start’ - that's what made the step so special.” Ms. Eberty: “Don't you think this fragmentation is very sad?”

Dr. Steiner: “I have worked against these things. Whether a fragmentation will result from it remains to be seen. If the members of the Berlin branch will understand how to act in a theosophical way, there will be no need for fragmentation at all. There is no need to speak of fragmentation, I will do nothing to promote it.”

Mrs. Eberty: “If you had had something against the meetings, it would have been enough to say: There are reasons why the meetings cannot take place. We had the best intentions for this. We only did it to serve the cause of Theosophy. It did not even remotely occur to us that this was against your intentions, not even when it was on the agenda eight days ago, when there were indications that our afternoon could be meant by it."

Dr. Steiner: “If the form is dropped, there is no objection to the private meetings. What has happened at my request? That the teas at Fräulein von Sivers's have been abolished because I have not seen any benefit for Theosophy in such tea meetings. It was difficult for me that Countess Brockdorff took it badly. But nevertheless, I just said it. We ourselves would not be able to manage things differently.

Krojanker: “It seems that the Executive Committee is being made the scapegoat. If you are on the Executive Committee, useful work is only possible if you are informed about the entire business situation. If you don't have insight and don't find opportunities to gain insight, what do you want to make suggestions for? The Executive Committee needs this knowledge because it has to report to the Board. I am increasingly lacking tangible documents that have given rise to these matters.

Now comes the library question. A library commission has been set up. It is not really understandable why the members of the branch should be held responsible for this.

Mr. Werner: “Dr. Steiner is a man called from a higher place. Now it is difficult to get what is needed to perfect us. If you approach him now with demands and questions, such as, ”Where did you leave the money you raised with your lectures? Give us information about what you got out of these lectures! Give us information about where the money has gone. If you say, 'We decide here, because we have a completely free hand to say what you have to do', then that is not the way to harmonious cooperation. I think that when you first accept teachings and instructions from someone, the demands and questions should not go so far that they are unbearable in detail. These would be thoughts that shun the light and lead to disharmony. But we can prevent disharmony if we want to. If that is not the case, then we have no right to come here and quibble about what has happened.

Krojanker: “A distinction must be made between the theosophical teaching and the leadership of the Berlin branch. This will make it possible to avoid any mistrust.”

Dr. Steiner: “The harmony may have to be bought at the expense of excluding some members. The arranged lectures were intended for the Berlin branch. It is true that we could not have done the work better. I am of the opinion that for the time being we have done the work as well as we could, since nothing better has been offered to us from the other side. At the moment something better would have been offered to us from the other side, we would not have ignored it. But what we have done, I consider to be the best so far.

Fränkel: “Two meetings have been convened that have caused the discord. On both occasions, accusations have been made, followed by disharmony, so that a club has been formed, as it were, and we consist of two classes of members, so to speak. There are two ways of proceeding. There is a civil case and a criminal case. This is a public matter, not a private one. The complaint should therefore be made. However, it is not clear what is actually at issue. The first point is the tea with the ladies, the second point is that only the business committee has taken the wrong measures. The error seems to lie in the fact that at the founding, there was no discussion about how the business of the committee should be handled. There is no real discord yet, only the complaint of a few gentlemen based on factual reasons.

Dr. Steiner: “If we had come to accuse anyone, then you could blame us for something. We are returning the management to those who have a wish list. The way of thinking expressed in the wish list is such that it cannot lead to anything in the Theosophical Society.”

Krojanker: “A desire for power emerges from those who perhaps believe they are superior. But I have heard from Dr. Steiner that Theosophy does not submit to any authority.”

Tessmar: “It is all much too materialistic. We are members of the Theosophical Society, but the whole Berlin branch can go home if Dr. Steiner says, ‘I will no longer give lectures here.’ Dr. Steiner gives Theosophical lectures, not lectures about speakers. I myself do not want to be held accountable; I want to hear Theosophical lectures in order to progress. And now the complaint about authority comes up. The theosophical lectures are authority for me. I show trust by not asking: What does the library do, what do the six Dreier do, who come in?"

Krojanker: “I now see where the debate is leading us today. We have to come to terms with the facts. From Dr. Steiner's reply, I see that he is not to be convinced in any way, and that perhaps only time can bring understanding of the individual things. We are faced with the fact that this separation is taking place. What must happen now? Perhaps we should devote another hour to this question.”

(A motion is made to end the debate, which is carried.)

(Dr. Steiner, Fräulein von Sivers and Mr. Kiem resign.)

Dr. Steiner: “My only remaining duty is to recommend that a managing director be elected for the time being. The process will be as follows: The managing director will have the task of informing the other members of the resignation. I myself will also inform the external members that I have resigned on my part.” Krojanker: ‘Can't a general statement be communicated to the members from both sides about what has happened here?’

(A number of members declare their resignation from the Berlin branch.

Krojanker: Asks what he has done wrong and is told that he disagrees with the management.

Dr. Steiner: “Why did I do it in general? It is done this way because it could not be done any other way. The Berlin branch can now experiment and so on, and do its own things.

Mrs. Eberty: “We all received invitations.”

Dr. Steiner: “I invited some with my name and with a personal greeting. But the list is not complete.”

Mrs. [Johannesson]: “We felt separated by the tone of your address. We felt as if you had carried out a separation.”

Ms. [Voigt]: “Could the ladies be asked which topic was discussed? And also about the question from which Mr. Fränkel started. It is perhaps of interest.”

Tessmar: “I belong to Dr. Steiner. I will not be influenced. Please make a note of that if necessary. I really feel offended. As a seasoned seaman, I would choose different words. I forbid personal tapping.”

Dr. Steiner: “It has therefore been decided that a manager must be appointed for the German Theosophical Society. It would have been impossible for me to continue my work without taking this step. I cannot give intimate lectures in this mood. I only had the choice of either leaving Berlin or taking this step. Maintaining continuity was the reason for this. Mrs. Annie Besant said, when she saw the current here, that I should go to Munich, where the work that Miss von Sivers has done can be continued. But I will not change my whole relationship into a mere point. It is precisely the outward appearance that is at issue here, not the inwardness.

Present were: about 30 members. The meeting ended at eight o'clock [in the evening].

Report by Rudolf Steiner in “Lucifer - Gnosis”, July-August, No. 26-27/1905

This year [1905], the Federation of European Sections held its congress in London at the beginning of July (6, 7, 8, 9, 10). In general, the nature and organization of the events of this second meeting of its kind were similar to those held in Amsterdam the previous year. The beautiful feeling of belonging together again flowed through those who were able to come from the most diverse areas of Theosophical work to exchange ideas about methods of action, to bear witness to the progress of Theosophical ideas in the individual countries, and to receive suggestions for achievements in their home countries. Just as our Dutch friends spared no efforts and sacrifices last year to make the course of the congress a worthy and fruitful one, so did our members in London this year. Those who can appreciate the time and dedication required for the preparatory work and the management of such a meeting will be filled with warm gratitude for our English friends.

Mrs. Besant took over the presidency of the congress. The day before the actual start of the meeting, the assembled guests were able to attend a meeting of the Blavatsky Lodge to hear a momentous lecture by Annie Besant on the “Requirements of Discipleship”. The speaker followed up on various remarks that had been published recently about various minor weaknesses and faults of the great founder of the “Theosophical Society”, H. P. Blavatsky. Out of a deep sense of gratitude, the speaker spoke about the personality of the bringer of light on the path to truth and peace of soul. It is not important to see the small spots and weaknesses, but the great impulses that emanate from such personalities. We should hold on to them and find our own way through them. When we hear much about the life of the “initiates” that we say we did not expect, perhaps our expectations are based on misunderstandings. Where there is sun, there may also be sunspots; but the beneficent power of the sun works despite these spots. On the same day (Thursday, July 6), Annie Besant opened the “Arts and Crafts” exhibition, which then remained open for all days of the congress. It is natural that such an exhibition, which has the purpose of bringing artistic achievements influenced by theosophical ideas or originating from theosophists to the attention of the members, cannot be perfect in terms of the composition and value of the individual pieces. But it is a highly valuable addition to the congress; and anyone who does not see the purpose of the society in merely spreading theosophical ideas, but in developing theosophical life in all its aspects, will certainly not dispute its legitimacy. It is impossible to go into the details here, given the abundance of exhibits. It should only be noted that in the pictures of G. Russell, the interesting attempt was noticeable to give something of the astral reality in the symbolic color drawings around the figures depicted in the pictures, and in the coloring of the landscapes in which they are placed. How much of this is achieved is another question and cannot be considered today. The works of our member Lauweriks, who used to belong to the Dutch section and now belongs to the German section because he has been working as a teacher at the School of Applied Arts in Düsseldorf for some time, deserve special mention. His arts and crafts show the subtle mind and excellent artist everywhere. German works on display included an interesting picture of the chairman of our Düsseldorf lodge, Otto Boyer, the “Alchymist”, and a portrait study of the same excellent artist, who had also taken the trouble to participate in the work of the art committee as a German representative.

Miss Stinde, our member active in Munich, has contributed from the rich treasure trove of her landscapes. Furthermore, a picture by our member Miss Schmidt from Stuttgart was exhibited.

On Friday evening, Annie Besant gave a lecture on “The Work of Theosophy in the World” in front of thousands of people in the large “Queens Hall”. In a few concise strokes, she characterized the task that the wisdom teachings of Theosophy have in modern life today. Not only as a confession, but through all areas of life, science, art and so on, they should come into their own if they are to fulfill their mission. What the Theosophical movement has achieved in terms of artistic and scientific circles, which are far removed from the Theosophical movement, has been admirably demonstrated.

On Saturday morning, the actual congress proceedings were opened by Annie Besant's forceful introductory words. Here she pointed out how nations must work together in brotherly cooperation for the great work, and she characterized the approaches to deepening spiritual life in the theosophical sense that are present here and there. For example, she pointed to the work of an Italian sculptor Ezekiel, a “Christ” in which the theosophist could see his image of Christ. For Germans it will be particularly interesting to hear that Annie Besant pointed to the art of Richard Wagner, in whose tones influences of the astral world can be felt. - What followed was a beautiful symbol of the fraternal international character of the Society. In accordance with a decision of the committee, the individual representatives of the various countries gave short welcoming speeches in their national languages. And one could now hear such speeches in the following languages one after the other: Dutch, Swedish, French, German, English (for America), Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, Finnish, Russian and an Indian idiom. Mr. Mead spoke last for England. The morning session closed with business announcements from J. van Manen, the secretary of the congress.

In the afternoon, the individual lectures and departmental meetings began. Papers were presented by the individual members who had registered to do so, covering a wide range of topics: philosophy, science, ethnology, theosophical working methods, art, occultism, and so on. It is quite impossible to even hint at the rich abundance of what is presented here. Lectures are given in various rooms on a wide variety of subjects, followed by discussions. Only a few of them will be mentioned here: Mr. Mead spoke on an interesting Gnostic topic, Pascal, the General Secretary of the French Section, presented a paper on the “Mechanism of Clairvoyance in Humans and Animals”. Mr. Percy Lund had contributed a paper on the “Physical Evidence for Atlantis and Lemuria”. In the Occult Section, Annie Besant gave a most illuminating talk about the requirements and difficulties of occult research methods. She showed what precautions and reservations the occult researcher must take despite the greatest caution, and how his results must be received with equal caution despite his utmost conscientiousness. Dr. Rudolf Steiner spoke in the “Science” section about the “Occult Foundations of Goethe's Life Work”. M. P. Bernard was able to make a contribution on “Instinct, Consciousness, Hygiene and Morality”. M. H. Choisy discussed the “Foundations of Theosophical Morality”. Mr. Leo provided extremely valuable insights into “Astrology”.

Mr. Mead spoke at a final meeting about Gnosticism in the past and present and from there shed light on the similarities in all mystery wisdom. On Saturday evening there was a theatrical performance, two symbolic dramatic works, the first attempt to cultivate this art at our congresses as well. On Sunday and Monday afternoons there were musical performances; vocal performances in the different national languages again symbolically and beautifully expressed the principle of brotherhood. Annie Besant ended the congress on Monday evening with a short closing speech. The following were present from Germany: Fräulein Scholl (Cologne), Frau Geheimrat Lübke (Weimar), Gräfin Kalckreuth, Fräulein Stinde, Herr und Frau v. Seydewitz (Munich), Gräfin Schack (Döringau), Dr. H. Vollrath (Leipzig), Herr Kiem, Fräulein v. Sivers and Dr. Rudolf Steiner from Berlin, Herr und Frau Dr. Peipers (Düsseldorf). Our members J. v. Manen and [Miss] Kate Spink, who did all the secretarial work for the congress, deserve special thanks. It has already been mentioned that Otto Boyer participated in the work of the committee for visual arts. Adolf Arenson (Stuttgart) represented Germany on the committee for musical performances.

The lectures and all the assembly reports from last year's congress of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society will soon be published in a handsome volume, the “Congress Yearbook”. It can be understood that publishing this book in its first year presented a great challenge to the collectors and editors (J. van Manen, Kate Spink), and that it is therefore only now that it can be published. This year's lectures and discussions will be completed in a shorter time. The Max Altmann publishing house in Leipzig has taken over the distribution of the “Yearbook” for Germany, and one should contact them for the purpose of purchase.

The Annual General Meeting of the British Section of the Theosophical Society took place on July 8. At the meeting, Mr. Keightley resigned from his post as General Secretary and Miss Kate Spink was elected in his place. Dr. Rudolf Steiner welcomed the meeting on behalf of the German Section.

As you can see from the announcement, we will have a weekly meeting every Monday. This is to be considered a meeting of the Besant branch. The notes on the invitation are to be taken into account. Last year's work has made the venue too small. It is not at all our intention to be exclusive and to hold these Mondays for the branch alone. We would like to expand the matter, but on the other hand it seems a bit harsh to the members if non-members without excuse have access throughout the year, especially this year, when perhaps even more intimate things could be discussed in these Monday meetings than last year. We are getting deeper and deeper into it. The other meetings are then in the architect's house. This year, particular attention will be paid to demonstrating the significance of Theosophy and its importance for the present. I will speak about important questions in their relation to current affairs. Next Thursday, I will speak about Haeckel's world riddle, then about our world situation, and then about the question of inner development. The cycle will then conclude with a reflection on Christmas.

I have just completed a major lecture tour. A tour such as this is not only educational for the one undertaking it, but it can also be educational for the widest circles of those who are interested in Theosophy. I was in St. Gallen, Freiburg, Stuttgart, Heidelberg, Frankfurt am Main, Kassel, Weimar. In most places I was able to give a public lecture, and then in the following days I had a discussion with those listeners who were more interested. We do not yet have branches in all these places. But that is not to say that we will not. We do not want to proceed in a stormy, agitating way. Those who come to the Theosophical Society should come because they have an inner urge to do so. Therefore, it will be good to cultivate Theosophy as much as possible and to tell the audience what it is all about. I am convinced that those who are predestined to participate will come. I was able to perceive that there is a great longing for what the Theosophical Society has to offer humanity. The Theosophists within it are deeply responsive to what people need and desire today. On the other hand, there is a certain despondency, a certain sum of prejudices with which people are afflicted, and which prevent them from immediately dealing with Theosophy. There is much to be overcome. This is shown by such a journey, on which one gets to know the most diverse moods. Despite all discouragement, such a journey has a certain satisfying impression. One sees in the hearts of men that which must live if we want to move towards the future, which the theosophical movement wants to strive for.

So let us touch on a few questions that may be of particular interest to us, without making any judgments. You only need to take a look at the current world situation to be able to recall at any moment how necessary Theosophy and Theosophical striving are today. You can look at all parts of the world, everywhere you see peoples and classes in a hard struggle for existence. Races are fighting each other, nations are at war with each other, individual classes in individual countries are sharply opposed to each other. Against this, we have nothing much other than our first principle: to establish the core of a universal brotherhood, without distinction of race, sex, class or creed. That is a powerful principle, people say. But many appeal to what Schopenhauer has already said: preaching morality is easy, but establishing morality is difficult. The theosophical movement is not a doctrine, not a foundation. It differs from the other movements of the new time in that it is real life. And the teachings we spread are not the main thing. It is not the teachings that matter to us. They are all only the means to life. And no matter what teachings are proclaimed in the various branches of the movement or at its public events, whether we believe these teachings or do not believe them, whether we can repeat them or cannot repeat them, that is not the point. The point is that the teachings are something quite different from other teachings of present-day science or from the teachings of even the traditional concepts of the Logos. As long as the theosophical teachings are not what they should be, as long as they are the same as other dogmas, as other doctrines and sciences. Only when they are great, when they live into the soul like a magnetic force and work in the soul, will they become what they should be. This is not a lodge where reincarnation and karma, the world view, the origin and purpose of man are merely taught and beautiful sentences are coined, but this is a lodge where these thoughts buzz through the room and touch the deepest part of the heart, so that man feels these teachings as intimately related to him, so that it is as if these teachings come from within him. When these things become so powerful that he not only becomes wiser but also better, then it is the right thing.

This difference will not be immediately understood by many. Many today present themselves as teachers of ethics, of morals, or as teachers of a creed or as educators. We hear people talking about monistic teachings, about a renewal of this or that teaching – all these teachings come across as being deeply different from what the theosophical teacher wants, what we want in general within the theosophical movement. All the others preach or proclaim their supposed truths, they stand there and say, this is our confession, this is our opinion, this is the truth, in my opinion. No Theosophical lecturer could approach an audience in this way. It is not about an opinion. We carry within us the awareness that truth is within ourselves, that it lives in every human breast, that we do not have to bring it in, but at most have to bring it out – that we stimulate our fellow human beings. Thus, what is necessary lies in what has been said, in the bond that unites the Theosophical members. What is discussed in the branches should be a kindling of the inner life in the souls. We bring thoughts from the spiritual world, the great laws from the supersensible existence, which have formed the world, brought forth man, the great laws according to which the wise teachers and masters taught our ancestors millennia ago and still teach us today. We draw on these great laws, and they are at the same time that which carries us forward, which gives us security, courage and hope for life. These laws should permeate the spaces in which we live. And by feeling them, these laws, we recognize the world and ourselves. Then we should let these laws influence our daily activities in the most mundane things we do. Then the members of the Theosophical Society will be like leaven; they will be everywhere on the outside like a new spirit - if that is the case, we will know that the spirit is something true and real.

Anyone who comes here just to hear teachings comes here in vain, because they don't have the right attitude. And this is what matters when faced with the spirit. It is important that the person who comes here knows that the spirit is a reality, a truth, that I do not just get well and ill from [a] medicine, not just from wind and weather, but that what our body and our reality actually is also emanates from what I think, feel and will, that health can only come from a spirit that works healthily. It is even more important that our thoughts are healthy than that our thoughts are true. You will not be able to notice tomorrow or the day after that a source of health emanates from what is done in the theosophical lodge. Think wrongly in the world and you will bring illness into the world, not tomorrow or the day after, but one day for sure. All evil stems from untruth, from an incorrect inner life. This connection will become clear to you in the next Monday lecture. To give humanity a new health, a new harmonious life, that is our main goal. Therefore, our thoughts are not just teachings, but forces. They do not just enlighten, but heal and harmonize, healing the body and healing the legal and social aspects of human coexistence. Those who grasp this so deeply have the core of the theosophical movement. Those who merely ask how this or that relates do not know about theosophy. But the theosophist knows that when he sits together with the others in the branch and the great thoughts of the world order pass through his soul for an hour, he makes himself the sounding board of a new, healthy and harmonious life. Well, ladies and gentlemen, the fact that such a life springs up and exists in the theosophical movement is evident in some phenomena. We started from the premise that we said: you cannot preach morality, you have to establish it. But it seems as if the Theosophical Society has already achieved something that corresponds to and serves the principle of the brotherhood of peoples. There was a beautiful moment at the opening of this year's congress. It was decided that each delegate would give a short speech in his or her mother tongue. There they were, people who, in the external political situation, are in a fierce struggle against each other. A prelude to what can become reality when the spiritual life takes hold of souls was played out at the opening of the London Congress. The following languages could be heard, as a symbol of our principle: Dutch, English, Swedish, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Finnish, Russian. There you have a symbol of the same will and the same feeling flowing in the different languages. This is the life that the Theosophical movement has achieved in the thirty years since its inception. There was one of the most beautiful and wonderful moments at this conference – not during the conference itself, but on one of the evenings before – for some members who gathered here during the summer. They were invited to attend a meeting of the Blavatsky Lodge. At that meeting, Annie Besant gave a lecture on the requirements of discipleship. As you know, discipleship is something very high. That evening, it was not so much a matter of discussing the requirements of discipleship in general, but rather of the greatest of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's disciples speaking out about critical minds. Allow me to say a few words about the actual subject. I need only mention here that everything that is the Theosophical Society is owed to the fundamental work of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. None of the disciples can claim to have fully grasped what lived in Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Those who delve into the works of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky see more and more that they are entering unfathomable depths, and that in her time the truth flowed through this unique personality as it has only flowed through the greatest religious founders and leaders of humanity. I can understand that in the beginning, when one approaches Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's achievements, one believes that one has understood many things. This can happen to anyone. But then there comes a time when one realizes that the content of the 'Secret Doctrine' contains writings of such spiritual depth that no one, without exception, has ever fully grasped it since Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. You could hear these words from Mrs. Annie Besant at any time.

There is the possibility, even for the greatest leading minds of humanity, to never stop. At least no one has yet found the end point. Deeper and deeper foundations of truth are found when you go deeper. That is what ultimately brings those who have the will to penetrate into a spiritual connection with Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky is still in contact with the Theosophical movement today. She is still one of the aids for the Theosophical Society today. If we have the right to turn to her, then she will help. One only has to look at what she has done historically. Take a look at her writings. You will find things in them that some scholars say: “This could be cobbled together from all the books in the world.” Yes, but no one has ever found what was available in different places around the world. Some things are in the most hidden places, in places that no other soul has had access to before; you will find exact quotes from writings that no human eye has rested on for centuries in Blavatsky's writings. She wrote so many of them in [Würzburg], while the books [in truth] were in the Vatican.

Of course she also made mistakes. But if you look into them, you will find that the mistakes are based on something specific, namely on a certain uncertainty of reading that always occurs when one has to grope in the astral light. We do not only live in the physical world, we also live in the higher worlds. We see not only the physical, but also the spiritual. We see not only physically, but also spiritually, and there you can also read books that are in the Vatican in Rome, but you can easily read wrong, you can easily read 136 instead of 631. Where mistakes have been made, it turns out that they have always been made in this way. Every objection that is raised against the truly valuable, the great and significant aspects of this personality can be easily refuted by anyone who really engages with it. But it seems that not many people are willing to get to the bottom of the matter, despite everything. Otherwise it would not have been possible for small mistakes by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky to have been ridiculed here and there in recent times – even in the English “Vâhan” – that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was sometimes passionately agitated, used a harsh, passionate word, smoked cigarettes. The question was raised as to whether someone who smokes cigarettes can really be a great person, can sometimes be agitated. This was the reason for Mrs. Besant's lecture on Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Now this greatest disciple of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky spoke from her innermost being. Everyone who was there will have found that something tremendous emerged from within, everyone had to feel that something deep was alive there. She discussed the fact that there may be people who have not gone astray – but [she also] asked whether they also have the great qualities of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Of course, there are also many who do not smoke cigarettes, but do they have the great qualities of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky? The sun also has sunspots, but these do not illuminate the earth. It is light that has a warming and fertilizing effect. Those who want to have it, who want to achieve what Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was able to give to humanity, must also be able to see it - and be satisfied with what is great and powerful about it. Then they will come closer and closer to the impersonal source of wisdom, truth and life.

The fact that this was spoken out of a deeply serious experience was what mattered, and it was spoken by a personality who herself admitted that evening that [Helena Petrovna Blavatsky] was the Bringer of Light for her. Then came the beautiful, profound words in which Annie Besant, as everyone could feel, was in complete harmony with all the students of the great teacher Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, at the head of whom she placed those who said that that one should bear in mind that the disciple, the beginner above all, before he can grasp the greatness of the great, harms himself if he blocks his path to these great ones by hasty, unintelligent criticism. To have such an attitude, to get into such a mood, to really feel what is right in the face of greatness, that is the gain of life, that is the beginning of the highest spiritual knowledge. No one needs to venerate anyone else, everyone may criticize as much as they want in the world, but by doing so, they harm themselves most of all when they want to gain knowledge. Then they put the greatest obstacles in their own way.

There is one thing that must not be misunderstood. It is often said in theosophical writings: Don't criticize, seek to understand first, before you judge. And this is taken as if it were a prescription for everyone. The Theosophical Society does not oblige anyone to follow such a prescription. But there is something else we need to know, and that is that we must be in this mood of unbiased acceptance if these truths are to flow into us. You can't have one without the other, and anyone who wants one without the other is like someone who has a glass rod and wants it to be electric. If he wants it to be electric, he has to rub it. If he does not want to rub it, it will not become electric. He who wants knowledge must have this mood. You cannot achieve one without the other. It is a contradiction in terms to want to achieve one without the other.

You just have to understand the theosophical view correctly. It is nothing more than a narrative. It never demands anything of any of its members. That is something we are very far from, especially those who know what is important in the theosophical movement. We are not asked to believe in any authority, to engage in any personality cult. The less the cult of personality is demanded, the higher the status of those to whom it is applied. All speaking against personality cult is speaking against things that are not there. The great moment I wanted to characterize was to see a personality looking up. And the whole lecture was looking up. That was the significant thing about it.

I wanted to emphasize these two moments for you because they symbolically show something of the gain in life that one can have today within the Theosophical Society. There are two things that will become more and more important: One is the realization of our first principle: to establish the core of a human brotherhood, to present the great core of humanity, and the second is to learn to worship without belief in authority, without worship of persons, to worship out of freedom, out of knowledge. To offer worship as a gift that is free, without compulsion. This can be achieved. This is what we have achieved in thirty years. When we do that, it is as if a different kind of spirit were to pass through the room and fill everyone. Little by little, the theosophist comes to realize that this is something much more real than what can be grasped with hands. The thought should occur to every member at the entrance gate to the Theosophical Society: Here you enter a society in which people believe in the truths and realities of the spirit, in which they believe that spirit lives in you. This is connected with the central phenomenon of our society.

We recognize the great progress of the outer life, we are not reactionaries, we know what it means to have achieved outer science, that in the eighteenth century in one of the big cities 77 out of 1000 people died, while now only 22 out of 1000 die. We know what it means that our industry has conquered the world. In the face of all these achievements, there is one thing within this modern science that claims authority, one thing that you will encounter again and again, and that is an uncertainty regarding the great questions of the divine, regarding the great questions of the immortal powers in man. And there you hear from those who are most learned, most scientific: We know nothing, we can know nothing. And that is only natural, for it lies in the present development. But what knowledge have we acquired? To understand this properly, we have to look back a little in history.

Anyone who studies culture from a historical perspective from the point of view of the school of thought will be told that there were originally primitive, uneducated, uncultivated peoples. They still live in some parts of the world. We are descended from them. We will not examine whether this is the case. But when we examine religious beliefs, legends and myths, these world scriptures, we are amazed when we look into the deep wisdoms for which these myths and legends are the expression. We can glimpse the deepest wisdom in the mythical images of the seemingly most primitive peoples. We do not import it. Those who study them will find that it takes much more skill to import it than to extract it. These peoples did not have our means of understanding and our instruments. It is a miracle that the secret of the material is presented in a similar way to that given to us by science today. But now read a lecture given at the naturalists' meeting on the brain conditions. Everything appears chaotic to you compared to the old wisdom. There is a difference in how our people think and how our ancestors thought. What does today's man say? I have invented the truth. - Your ancestors would have referred you to their teachers, to higher and higher teachers. A sense of profound humility permeated the whole thing, a humility that can listen, that says to itself, the human being is in a state of development, knowledge and wisdom are also in a state of development, and if I want to know that which I cannot know myself, I must look up to other teachers. We should not accept knowledge on authority, no, when we have heard the truth, the knowledge, we can also find it ourselves.

It is true that the personal cannot know anything about things that go beyond the tangible. If we want to know something about this, we have to turn to such teachers who have kindled the light within themselves, in order to be able to show us what it looks like in the worlds that extend beyond the physical world. They will bring the teacher principle home to us.

What has the man of today achieved with all his science? He has been able to build the outer house and to bring about the greatest conceivable progress in the outer world of the senses. But one thing must be borne in mind. Think of it: all of science and culture has made our Earth a veritable palace for the people living on it. But it also teaches us something else: namely, that this physical Earth will no longer be here, because all the greatness and infinity that material culture has achieved will disappear, will disperse into its atoms. What does this physical science teach us? What will happen to all that man has been here and has achieved? A “I don't know,” this science must say, which is limited only to this earth. Only those who have experienced more than what is connected with the earth can know something about this question – and they do not speak about it that way. We must turn to the great teachers. Therefore, theosophical teaching ultimately leads to the great masters and teachers of the human race. Then one comes to the point of saying that a certain human knowledge is vain. But there are human beings who are beyond this point of view and have achieved something that will still be there when the earth has long since been scattered. We must find the way to the higher individualities who speak to the people who want to hear them. The Master does not speak to those who are arrogant, only to those who are truly humble in the highest sense, who make themselves a vessel and tool of the Master.

The Master speaks to them in the highest sense. Did the founder of the Theosophical Society, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, also have this humility? How easily she could have said: What is in my books comes from my knowledge. But she always referred to those who stood behind her, to the enlightened guides and masters of wisdom. So Helena Petrovna Blavatsky had that great modesty.

There are many who do not want to hear about the so-called higher worlds, who want to avoid the Theosophical Society precisely because it talks about a devachan plan and an astral plan. But whether we are afraid and afraid of these things is not the point, but whether they are true. The masters have told us more about these things because we need them in life. Certainly, you can learn a lot by observing life, the mind can tell us a lot. Even the moral teachings can be grasped by the intellect. From the ordinary point of view, many a person can be moralized about envy, cowardice, lies and so on. But envy, cowardice and lies are things that are observed in truth in the higher world. In the physical world, lying is a relatively light offense. But it is nothing compared to what it is on the astral plane. The moment you tell a lie, you cause something that is like the destruction of a living being. You then carry this killing with you. It mixes with your own astral body. What we otherwise only know from the lie as an external world, we then get to know in its liveliness. What is sensual here becomes spiritual. Today we need to be reintroduced to the spirit, to sense it first and then be led to certain knowledge. This is the life that must pulsate through the theosophical movement. If this life does not pass through the theosophical movement, then it will not achieve what it is meant for. These guiding masters, all our beautiful teachings and theories are in vain if there are not a number of people in the world who come together in the mood we have described, in the mood that they already say to themselves at the entrance: Here we only live in the awareness that the spirit is a reality. - When every listener is filled with this mood, then our branch has meaning, then you yourself are the source of something living. When we are together in the consciousness of the truth of the spirit, then this consciousness is a force, and the people who are there and have this consciousness form an electrical receiver. And when thoughts are expressed, whether by anyone in particular, that are in harmony with the laws of the universe, and are grasped by all the souls in us and a center is formed, then they go out from there through the whole city and influence the whole city, when we have the consciousness of the spirit. My words have no meaning if there are no people who take them up and carry them out into the world. That is why we come together in the Society. When we have this consciousness, only then are we truly a Theosophical Society. That this consciousness becomes more and more intense, stronger and stronger with us, that we really show a power through faith and through the knowledge of the spirit and of the spirit, that is what our meetings should achieve. What really matters is not that we read books or listen to teachings, but that we accept and appropriate this consciousness of the spirit. And then, when there are as many branches as there are people who have this consciousness of the spirit, only then will there be a Theosophical Society. But not before. It is not the doctrine, not the dogma, but the consciousness of the spirit that is important.

The preceding considerations have essentially been concerned with showing how man in this day and age can gain an awareness of his present position in the evolution of mankind on earth. Even in circles that today do not want to know about the knowledge of spiritual worlds, some conception of this consciousness of the relationship of man to the universe is formed. And let us recall something that is much spoken of today in this connection, in this direction. Where all views of the universe are derived from the outer sensory events and the intellectual grasp of these sensory events, it is also said that the whole world consciousness of modern man has changed over the last few centuries. Attention is drawn to the great change that has taken place in this world consciousness of man through the Copernican world view.

We need only look back to the centuries that preceded the Copernican worldview; we need only look back, for example, to the scholastic worldview, which has been mentioned again here recently, and we find that for this worldview, spiritual forces and spiritual beings were present in the world of the stars. We hear how the scholastics spoke of the inhabitants of the stars, who belong to higher hierarchies in the development of their natures.

Thus, the people of this world view have directed their gaze out into the universe, have looked towards the planets of our planetary system, and towards the other stars in the night sky, and they have developed an awareness that not only etheric-material light from the starry worlds penetrates to them, but that, so to speak, when they look at the starry sky, the eyes of spiritual beings, whose outer embodiment can be seen in the stars, fall into their souls. Today, when man looks up at the planets and the other stars, he first of all forms an idea of how material bodies, permeated by ether, are floating freely in space, and how light emanates from these stars. But man does not think at all of the fact that from these stars the glances of spiritual beings of higher hierarchies meet him.

For modern man the Universe has become dead and unspiritual. And in the sphere of earthly existence, the man of ancient times found that which was intimately connected with the spiritual life of the universe. In the spiritual beings of the other stars were creative powers that had something to do with what develops spiritually and soul-wise here in man, spiritually, soul-wise and bodily, we might say. Men have looked up, let us say, to Saturn. They saw in the forces that come down from Saturn to Earth with the rays of light those forces that work within the human being and bring about the power of memory in this human being. They looked up to Jupiter, saw Jupiter connected with spiritual beings of higher hierarchies, who send their effects into man, so that the consequence of these effects in man is the development of the power of imagination. They looked up at Mars: they were of the view that the forces that work into man from the spiritual entities of Mars give man the power of reason.

Thus, a person belonging to an older stage of human development on Earth looked up at the starry sky and saw in the starry sky the origins of that which he perceived in himself spiritually, soulfully and physically. Man felt that he belonged together with beings of higher hierarchies, and man saw the outer revelations of these beings of higher hierarchies in the stars.

With the advent of the Copernican worldview, this world view also fell away. For it will be understood that an earth, which was seen as being under the influence of the immeasurable spiritual forces of the universe, was, one might say, also a gift of the whole universe for man, that man, by living on earth, saw in this earth the confluence of the effects of innumerable entities. Man felt, as it were, as a citizen of the earth, but, in feeling as such, at the same time as a citizen of the universe.

He looked up to the gods, worshiped his gods, but spoke of these gods in such a way that it was in their intentions to determine the course of human development on earth. The earth was explained in terms of its history, the earth as a dwelling place for man was explained from what was understood of the cosmos, what was understood of the universe. The earth was explained from heaven, and the gods were sought for the intentions for what was seen in the orbit of earthly events, and with which man was intimately connected.

What has emerged from the Copernican worldview gives modern man a completely different view of the world. Man increasingly felt that the earth is an insignificant world body flying around the sun. And when he reflected in a modern way on the relationship between this earth and the rest of the universe, he could not help but call this earth a speck of dust in the universe. All the other celestial bodies that his eye could see seemed more important to him than the earth, because external physical size became decisive for him. And in terms of this, the earth can hardly compete with a few celestial bodies.

Thus, for man, the earth became more and more a mere speck in the universe, as it were, and man felt insignificant in the cosmos on this insignificant earth, insignificant in the universe. With his spiritual powers, he was no longer connected to this universe. It must have seemed impossible for him to believe that what happens on this insignificant speck of dust in the universe, called Earth, is connected with the intentions of divine beings in the universe. One would like to say: All that man has seen on earth, because he recognized that heaven is populated by spirits and spiritual forces, all that has been lost to man in modern times. The universe has been desensualized and de-spirited. The earth has shrunk to an insignificant speck of dust in a world that has been de-spirited and de-spirited.

One must understand such a change in the world picture not only from the standpoint of a theoretical explanation of the world, but also from the standpoint of human consciousness itself. Man, who saw himself on an earth influenced by innumerable spiritual beings that had their realization, their intentions in man of the earth, otherwise knew himself, otherwise these views affected man, than the more spiritual space, in which glowing, spatially formed globes stand and move, of which one conceives no other activity than movement in space, than the revelation through light. How different must the human being, who now knew himself to be on one of the smallest of these world bodies, feel in the spiritless, soulless space, than within earlier world pictures. And yet, this conception of the world must have arisen in the course of the evolution of mankind. What an older mankind once knew about the heavens and their inhabitants, the divine spiritual beings, was indeed the inspiration, the imagination of an ancient dream-like clairvoyance, which was something that as such clairvoyance had descended from the universe into man. One must only imagine this correctly. When people in ancient times looked up at Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and saw divine spiritual forces at work in these heavenly bodies, it was because these revelations penetrated from the heavenly bodies themselves into their inner being and were reflected in them, so that through the influences of the universe, of the cosmos, they knew within themselves what was flowing from the cosmos into the earth. And so, through what heaven gave him, the earth became intelligible to him. Man looked up to his gods and knew what being he is on earth. In the modern conception of the world, he does not know any of this.

In the modern world view, the Earth has shrunk to a speck of dust in the universe, and now man stands as a small, insignificant creature on this speck of dust. Now the gods of the stars no longer tell him anything about plants, animals and the other kingdoms of the earth. Now he must direct his senses only to what lives in the mineral, plant, animal, and human kingdoms, what lives in wind and wave, what dwells in clouds, lightning and thunder. Now he can receive no revelations other than those that his senses give him about the things of the earth, and he can then only conclude from the revelations of the things of the earth about what is in the universe, according to the sensual and intellectual revelation.

Man has undergone this significant transformation in the fifth post-Atlantean period, which signifies the development, the unfolding of the consciousness soul. Everything that had previously come to him from the universe, and which then shone again within his soul, had to be squeezed out of him, so that he could stand there and say to himself: I know nothing but that I live on a speck of dust in the universe. This universe gives me nothing that enlightens me about the spiritual and soul life within me. If I want to experience such spiritual and soul life within me, I must extract it from my own being. I must renounce the idea that the revealing powers come to me from the vastness of the universe. I must fill my soul through my own efforts and activity, and perhaps hope that something in what wells up out of my soul is alive, which, conversely, gives me an insight into the universe from the human point of view.

In the past, man had the opportunity to gain insight into himself as a human being through what the universe revealed to him. He was able to see himself as the son of heaven because the heavens told him what he was as such a son of heaven. Now man had more or less become the earth's hermit, who in the solitude of his life on the dust-grain of the universe must gather strength in order, so to speak, to develop in solitude that which can be developed in him, and to wait to see whether that which reveals itself within is something that can shed light on the universe.

And for a long time, for centuries, what was revealed within was not about the universe. Man described the mineral kingdom according to spatial-temporal forces. He then described the workings of this mineral kingdom in geognosy, in geology. He described the outer sensory processes, how they take place, how plants sprout out of the mineral ground of the earth. He also described the sensory processes that take place in the inner being of the animal and the physical human being itself. He looked around everywhere on earth, inquiring what his senses told him about this earthly existence. Above all, they told him nothing about his own soul, about his own spirit. It was precisely out of this cosmic mood, if one grasped it properly, out of this mood, which can be expressed in the words: I, a human being, am an earth hermit on a speck of dust in the universe — it was precisely out of this mood that the impulse had to come to develop the truly human in free inner unfolding.

And a great, all-embracing question had to arise: Is it really true that in the whole range of what my senses can see, feel, hear, etc., here on earth, what can be combined by the intellect from them, is it really true that there is nothing in this range that gives me more than these senses can tell me? Man has developed a science. But this science, however interesting it may be, says nothing about man. It aims at abstract, dead concepts, which then culminate in natural laws. But all this leaves man indifferent. Man cannot possibly be merely the confluence of these abstract concepts, I would say, this receptacle for all natural laws! For these laws of nature have nothing spiritual, nothing of the soul about them, although they are conceived out of the human spirit.

You see, the person who felt this mood at a time of great significance for the development of world views was the young Goethe. And the expression of what he felt is what he wrote in the first form that he gave to his “Faust”.

Let us recall how Goethe, in the very first form he gave to his “Faust”, really presents this Faust, still remembering what it is that man should seek in the universe, how he would like to feel as a spirit and soul within spirits and souls, but how he feels rejected by the soulless and unspiritual world. How he then reaches for the old revelation of the mystical, the magical, opens an old book in which he finds descriptions of how the higher hierarchical beings live in the stars and their movements, a book that speaks of how heavenly forces ascend and descend and pass golden buckets to each other.

Such a view had existed, but in the times in which Goethe places Faust, such a view no longer captivates people. And Faust turns away, as Goethe himself turned away from the old explanation of the universe, which sought a spiritual and soul element in the whole universe, and he opens the book of the Earth Spirit. And then we read the remarkable words with which the Earth Spirit speaks:

In the flood of life, in the storm of action,
I surge up and down,
I weave to and fro!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So at the whirling loom of time I labor,
And work the living garment of the Godhead.

But that there is something not quite right in the encounter between this Earth Spirit and Faust is clearly shown by Goethe in that Faust falls under the effect of this Earth Spirit, and that he is then exposed to the influences of Mephistopheles.

If you look at the monumental, succinct words of the Earth Spirit from the point of view of a concrete world view and are unbiased enough to make an assessment that was actually close to Goethe's own feelings, in that he did not stop at the Earth Spirit scene when writing Faust , but continued, if one considers all this, then one must fall into a kind of heresy in the face of much of what has been said and printed about “Faust,” but which certainly does not reflect the real opinion, the real view of Goethe. After all, what has not been said in connection with “Faust”!

You keep looking back to the words that Faust speaks to Gretchen, who is around sixteen years old, later in the course of the Faust epic: “the all-embracing, all-sustaining... Feeling is everything, name is sound and smoke,” and one feels so tremendously philosophical when quoting all that the expression is supposed to mean for one's own soul concepts, and now also quoting what Faust gives as instruction to a teenage girl. It is a schoolgirl instruction. It is actually compromising that one can cite this schoolgirl instruction from people who want to be clever as the quintessence of what one puts into words as a world view. This does indeed result, even if it is heretical, in an unbiased consideration.

But something similar also applies to the lapidary, monumental words spoken by the Earth Spirit: “In the floods of life, in the storm of action” and so on. They are beautiful, these words, but very general; we find something of a mystical pantheism of a sensually nebulous kind in them. I would say that it does not feel cloudy to us when we have this before us:

In the flood of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
I weave to and fro!
Birth and death,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So at the whirling loom of time I labor,
And fashion the living robe of divinity.

Nothing happens that does not give us the ability to look concretely into the universe, into the cosmos.

Goethe certainly felt this, especially later, because he didn't stop there, he wrote the Prologue to Heaven. And if we take the prologue in heaven: “The sun resounds in the old way, in the spheres of the brothers' song” and so on, then it is much more reminiscent of the heavenly powers that float up and down and pass the golden buckets than of the somewhat nebulous tides and weaves of the earth spirit. Goethe returned from – well, one cannot say the 'divinization of the earth spirit', but something similar. Later, as a more mature person, Goethe no longer regarded this earth spirit as the one to which he wanted to turn solely and exclusively in the form of Faust, but he took up again the spirit of the great world, the spirit of the universe. And even if the words spoken by the Earth Spirit in the first version of Faust are beautiful, succinct and monumental, these words spoken by the Earth Spirit are also distantly related to the “All-embracing, All-sustaining One” and the teachings of the sixteen-year-old schoolgirl. only distant kinship – these words spoken by the Earth Spirit also have a distant kinship with the “All-embracing, All-sustaining One”, with the instruction of the sixteen-year-old schoolgirl. Why shouldn't they be beautiful for that reason? Of course, when instructing schoolgirls, one must take particular care to say things beautifully! Why shouldn't they be beautiful?

But of course we have to be clear about the fact that Goethe, as a mature man, did not see in nebulous pantheism that which gives man a real world-consciousness.

But there is something else at the root of it. Goethe, with his concrete way of looking at the things of the world – at least to a certain degree – would not have been able to draw his Faust in the way he did if he had portrayed him as a representative of humanity for the 12th century of Western civilization. He would have had to take on a different form, but he would never have been able to draw this form as he drew his Faust. Faust should not have put aside the book of Nostradamus and turned from the spirit of the great world to the earth spirit, because at that time there was an awareness that man, when he understands himself correctly, understands himself as a son of heaven, and the spirits of heaven have something to say to him about his own nature. But Faust is the representative of humanity who belongs to the 16th century, thus already to the fifth post-Atlantic period, the period that approaches the view: I live as the earth hermit on a speck of dust in the universe. It would no longer have been honest of the young Goethe to have Faust look up to the spirit of the great world. As a representative of humanity, this could not be the case with Faust, because in his consciousness, the human being no longer had any connection with the heavenly powers that rise and descend and pass the golden buckets to each other, that is, with the entities of the higher hierarchies. That was darkened, that was no longer there for human consciousness. So Faust could only turn to that with which he could be connected as an earthen hermit: He turned to the genius of the earth.

That Faust turns to the genius of the earth is something, I would say, radically grandiose, which occurs in Goethe: for this is the turn that human consciousness has taken in this age, away from the darkening powers of heaven to the genius of the earth, to whom the spirit itself has pointed, which has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha. For this genius, who has passed through the mystery of Golgotha, has connected himself with the earth. By connecting himself with the evolution of humanity on earth, he has now given man the power, in the time when he can no longer look up to the spirits of heaven, to look to the spirits of the earth, and the spirits of the earth now speak in man. Formerly it was the stars in their motion that revealed the words of heaven to the human soul that could interpret and recognize these words of heaven. Now man had to look at his connection with the earth, that is, ask himself whether the genius of the earth speaks in him.

But only nebulous words, mystically pantheistic words, can Goethe in his age wrest from the genius of the earth. It is right, it is magnificent that Faust turns to the genius of the earth, but I would like to say that it is quite magnificent that Goethe does not yet let this genius of the earth express anything that can already satisfy. That the Genius of the Earth first stammers and stutters, I might say, the secrets of the world into mystic pantheistic formulas, instead of pronouncing them in a sharply defined manner, shows that Goethe has placed his Faust in the age in which he saw his Faust and himself.

But one must feel one's way towards this relationship between Faust and the Earth Genius, so beautifully portrayed by Goethe, so that the Earth Genius will gradually become more and more understandable to man, so that he will reveal himself more and more clearly to man when man allows the activity of his own soul, the activity of his own spirit, to reveal what is in the heavens. Formerly the heavens revealed to man what he needed to know for the earth; now man turns to the earth, because the earth is, after all, a creature of the heavens. And if one gets to know the genius or genii that have taken up their residences on earth, then one nevertheless gets to know things about the heavens.

That was also the procedure adopted, for example, in my book 'Occult Science: An Outline of Its Methods'. There, everything within the human being was questioned and asked to speak. There, much was actually drawn from the spirit of the earth. But the spirit of the earth speaks about the Saturn age, the Sun age, the Moon age of the earth, the Jupiter age, the Venus age. The spirit of the earth speaks to us of what it has retained in its memory of the universe. Once upon a time, people turned their gaze out into the vastness of the heavens to gain insights about the earth. Now, they look down into the human soul, listen to what the spirit of the earth has to say about human nature from the memory of the world, and through their understanding of the genius of the earth, they gain macrocosmic knowledge. Today, of course, if one attaches the right importance to spiritual science, to spiritual knowledge, one would no longer present Faust's conversation with the Earth Spirit as Goethe did, although in his time it was ingenious to present it in this way.

Today, the earth spirit should not speak in those general, abstract words that can be said to express anything from a floating water wave to a spirit of the earth. Only that is mystically dark, because this floating wave of water is now sitting at a loom and weaving! I know, of course, that many people feel extraordinarily well when such vagueness stirs in them through the soul; but one does not thereby attain the inner human conscious stabilization that one needs as a modern person. There is always something of a reverie or even of intoxication about it: “All-embracing, All-sustaining,” “in the tides of life, in the storm of action,” one is always a little beside oneself, not quite in oneself. It certainly gives people a sense of well-being when they can be a little beside themselves; some people prefer to be completely beside themselves and let all kinds of ghosts give them insights into the world.

By this I would just like to suggest that we cannot do otherwise in modern times than to turn to the genius of the earth that lives in ourselves! The fact of the matter is this: if we simply take what the scientific ideas of modern times give us, as it is, as it is laid down in external civilization today, then it remains abstract, leaving human consciousness cold. But when one begins to wrestle with these concepts, to wrestle even with Haeckel's abstractions, then something very concrete, something that can be experienced directly, comes out of this wrestling: Then the great realization comes over us that although we initially receive the indifferent scientific ideas, this form is only a mask. We must first realize that the genius of the earth is telling us what we receive. We must first listen with the whole ear of the soul to what we initially hear with the abstract mind. And in this way we learn to understand the genius of the earth in a concrete way by listening.

In this way we approach the way in which man, in the age of consciousness soul development, must attain world consciousness. These things must be grasped by the human being in a way that is felt. Then, with feeling, I would say with his heart's blood, he approaches the anthroposophical world feeling. And this, not just individual ideas about the world, but this world feeling, must be acquired by the modern human being if he wants to feel and think in the right way, in accordance with the suggestions that I have made here recently.

Tomorrow, my dear friends, I will continue these reflections. Today, I would first like to say a few words to you about the state of the negotiations in Stuttgart. These negotiations are connected with what you have noticed as a kind of crisis within the Anthroposophical Society.

At this moment, the Anthroposophical Society must decide in its leading personalities whether it has viability or not. You have also heard various things here about the living conditions of the Anthroposophical Society. I would just like to say a few words about this today: this anthroposophical movement started in Central Europe. But it is of interest to the broadest international circles. And anthroposophy itself has gone through the three phases I spoke to you about last time. The Anthroposophical Society has not fully kept pace with the development of anthroposophy, and today there is an abyss between the work of the Anthroposophical Society and the reality of anthroposophy as it can be found today. This abyss must be bridged. And since the anthroposophical movement originated in Central Europe, it is a matter of fact that conditions must first be put in order in Central Europe. Then, when they are in order in Central Europe, we must immediately think about the order of the international anthroposophical societies, which will then have their center here or elsewhere. But the vagueness in which the Anthroposophical Society finds itself today must first be resolved. For this reason, the first step was to work on the consolidation of the Anthroposophical Society in Stuttgart.

Now the negotiations were extremely difficult. This crisis arose for the reasons I mentioned here on January 6, and the situation is as follows: on December 10, I gave a kind of mandate to one of the members of the Central Council, Mr. Uehli. I said at the time: It has been noticeable for a long time that the Anthroposophical Society needs consolidation, and I can only hope for success if the Central Board in Stuttgart, supplemented by leading personalities in Stuttgart, tells me the next time I am in Stuttgart how they would like to begin the consolidation; otherwise, if the Central Board does not come up with ideas about the consolidation, I would have to approach each individual member myself. Only this alternative is possible. —

You can see from this, my dear friends, that what was presented as a necessity for the consolidation of the Society was said on December 10; so it has nothing to do with the fire. After the fire, after this terrible catastrophe that has shattered our hearts, it must be said: if reconstruction is to happen, a strong Anthroposophical Society is needed; because without it, reconstruction would not be possible.

So it is imperative that a consolidation, an inner strengthening, a clear will of the Anthroposophical Society comes about.

This has involved very difficult negotiations in recent weeks, initially in Stuttgart. I said: They have to happen first, then they will be able to be on international ground. Well, I would have to tell you a book, a very thick book, if I wanted to tell you everything that has been negotiated in these weeks. But basically it was inconclusive until yesterday. And the day before yesterday I suggested that, now things have turned out this way, a kind of committee should deal with drafting a circular letter in which the great questions affecting the Anthroposophical Society and movement today be brought to the attention of the members; that such a circular letter call for the calling of a meeting of delegates in Stuttgart, initially for the German and Austrian branches, so that work can be done on this consolidation [see $. 268].

This committee, whose effectiveness is initially intended only until the delegates' meeting, which is to take place at the end of February, on February 25, 26 and 27, is a provisional one. Until this delegates' meeting, it is to have the leading position in the Central European Anthroposophical Society. The representatives on the committee are Dr. Unger, a member of the old Central Executive Council, and Mr. Leinhas, representing the “Kommenden Tages”; then, as a result of the circumstances, there are a number of prominent Stuttgart citizens: Dr. Rittelmeyer, Mr. von Grone, Mr. Wolfgang Wachsmuth, Dr. Palmer, Dr. Kolisko; from elsewhere, Mr. Werbeck from Hamburg and, representing the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press, Miss Mücke. This committee has been entrusted with the preparatory work for the consolidation. After all the other efforts failed, a draft of the appeal to the assembly of delegates was produced yesterday. It is to be finalized and sent out at the beginning of next week and is to include the real issues facing the Anthroposophical Society today. So that is what I have to announce for the time being.

The negotiations were indeed accompanied by widespread dissatisfaction. After we had finished the negotiations on the draft appeal yesterday morning, I was able to speak to the members of our academic youth movement who were particularly concerned; so I hope that during the days I am now here in Dornach, the young will negotiate with the old in an appropriate way. The day before yesterday I expressed it in this way: I said, “I hope that now, taking into account the new committee, the young will be accepted by the old among the young.”

Something like this had to take place, because everywhere people are demanding a new, fresh element of life. That must come. Youth is knocking at the gates. It has every right to do so; it must be understood. But age cannot be ignored; it must be allowed to work; the foundations of the Anthroposophical Society have come out of it. A modus operandi must be found as quickly as possible that will lead to a strong Anthroposophical Society, otherwise we will not be able to continue our work.

I wanted to share this with you today so that you are informed about these matters. The old Central Executive Council has ceased to exist, and this committee will now manage affairs until the end of February.

The great transformation that I have characterized here from a variety of angles and that has taken place in the spiritual development of humanity over the course of the last centuries, not only has the intellectual, the theoretical character of knowledge changed, but what has changed also has an influence on the whole human soul life, and thus on the whole human life in general. In order to understand this, one can imagine the following. Of course, what is shown in individual symptoms, which emerge more or less clearly when one wants to understand the actual foundations of life, must be shown in characteristic forms of expression of life.

We have often referred to what were places of knowledge in ancient times of human development. They were the mystery centres. These mystery sites were, to a large extent, shrouded in human veneration. When speaking of mysteries and mystery beings, it was said that through what was practiced in the mysteries, something most important for humanity on earth was present. Everything meaningful in human life was thought to radiate from the mysteries. It was said, in a sense, that If there were no mysteries among people, people on earth would not be able to be what the gods wanted them to be!

So people looked at the mysteries with a feeling of the highest reverence and the most intimate respect, and at the same time they looked at them with a feeling of gratitude, knowing that they gave them what makes it possible to be on earth what the gods want to make of people. One need only compare this with the way in which people look at educational institutions today, and one will find nowhere that tremendous warm devotion. In many cases, one even finds a feeling that, once one has necessarily settled for what comes from the educational institutions, one is glad to be free of them. But in any case, even if one does not look at this extreme, one still knows that one does not actually get from the educational institutions what seems necessary to one inwardly as a human being for one's actual humanity, what makes one a human being. No matter how much theoretical reverence one may have for what is gained in chemical laboratories, biological institutes, legal educational institutions, and even philosophical schools, one will not have the feeling: You are aware of your humanity because there are chemical laboratories, biological institutes, legal educational institutions, and even philosophical seminars.

You cannot say that – even if these educational institutions are perhaps shrouded in a certain theoretical atmosphere – all the warm feelings of reverence of people in the widest sense gravitate towards these educational institutions.

In any case, it will not be all that often that a student, for example, who is preparing a paper for a university seminar and who then, in this way, gives of himself intellectually, feels that he is doing so imbued with his whole elementary humanity as a mystery schoolboy once felt when he had passed one of the stages of practice.

But on the other hand, man needs something that brings him into contact with something worthy of worship here on earth, from which he feels the divine emanating. But if we compare this nuance, which I would call more cultural-historical, with what actually underlies it, let us go back, say, to the times when, in the Near East, two or three millennia before the Mystery of Golgotha, mystery-like educational institutions existed: In these mystery-like educational institutions, the natural science of the time was studied, if one can call it that. They studied the starry sky, the nature of the stars, the movements of the stars, the appearance of the stars at certain times, and so on. Today one imagines that this study of the starry sky in those days may have been somewhat fantastic. It was not. It was done with at least the same, if not much greater, methodical care as mineralogy, geology or biology are done today.

But what did they say to each other when they studied the nature of the starry sky? They said to each other: If you know the nature of the starry sky, then you know something about the nature and destiny of man on earth. The study of the starry sky culminated in the fact that knowledge about the fate of man and entire peoples on earth could be gained from the constellations of the stars.

One did not look up at the starry sky with a merely theoretical intention, but rather one said to oneself: If you know the relationship of Saturn to the sun or the relationship of Saturn to a sign of the zodiac at the moment when a man is bidden or where he accomplishes an important deed in life, then you know how the heavens have placed man on earth, you know to what extent man is a creature, a son of the heavens. You study what you study about heaven in order to understand what guides you in your life on earth. Everything that was acquired as knowledge about the nature of heaven was aimed at man. All knowledge was actually permeated by something thoroughly human. And whatever man did on earth, he felt it in connection with what he could study in the heavens. We can take an example from, say, a human artistic activity. When people in ancient times took up poetry or music, they drew on the inspiration that came to them from the heavens.

I have mentioned it often: Homer does not say, to use a poetic phrase “Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of the Peleid Achilles,” but because he was aware that he was not speaking something that came to him from human arbitrariness, but he speaks something that the heavens whisper to him. And anyone who was in any way musically active on earth reproduced through the sound of earthly instruments what he believed he had heard in the spaces of heaven in the music of the spheres. Man felt quite distinctly in the way he was active on earth, in the way he cooperated with other people on earth, in the way he founded communities on earth, that he experienced the impulses of will that radiated from the vastness of the universe down to earth and which he explored according to his knowledge of the starry sky, that he acted as a human being here on earth according to these intentions of heaven.

One would like to say: everything that was science, art and religion in those ancient times flowed into human weaving and working. For religion, science and art were indeed a unity, a unity that ultimately radiated into man, so that man might feel himself on earth as the being the gods wanted him to be.

This mood lasted as long as man had a spiritual insight into the heavens, as long as he allowed a spiritual to be conveyed to him in the being, in the course of the stars and in the appearance of the stars, which, so to speak, flowed through the knowledge of the stars to him on earth so that he could realize it on earth.

Today, astrology is a word that does not have a good ring to it. However, if we imagine it in the old sense, it takes on a better sound. Man looked up at the stars, and from the stars the Logos revealed itself to him, which in turn worked through his thoughts, through his imagination, through his language here on earth. Man himself, when he set his speech organs in motion, practiced that which, in the formation of sounds, made the secrets of the heavens resound here on earth again. The Logos, which is the reason that prevails in the human race, appeared as the efflux of the starry world. Astrology: what happened here on earth appeared as an image of the archetype, which one experienced through astrology.

If we look at our insights today, we see how these insights are gained through sensory observation of the earthly. Even when studying astronomy today – I have already discussed this yesterday – it is only the reflection of earthly knowledge up into the heavens. Today's human being acquires sensory knowledge. He does indeed stand in the world differently than he used to. I have characterized this different standing in these lectures here recently. I said: Today's intellectual man, with his abstract concepts, but also with what his freedom is, which is only possible with the development of abstract-intellectual concepts that do not force man, that also give him moral imperatives that arise from his individuality, as I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom, as I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom, only comes into the evolution of mankind at the time when that consciousness, which originated in astrology and presented man as a being executing the intentions of the gods on earth, had ceased to exist. This human being, with his intellect and his sense of freedom, is a creature cut off from the heavens. He has truly become the earth's hermit and acquires his knowledge here on earth. And the way in which he acquires his knowledge also explains the interest with which he clings to these insights.

In ancient times, it would have been inconceivable to see a duality between religion and scientific knowledge. When scientific knowledge was acquired, it was such that it gave one an immediate religious feeling, that it showed one the way to the gods, that one could not help but be a religious person in the right sense if one had acquired knowledge.

Today one can acquire the whole wide range of popular knowledge: one does not become a religious person from it. I would like to know who becomes a religious person today by becoming a botanist, a zoologist, a chemist! If he wants to become a religious person, he seeks the religious in addition to knowledge. Therefore, we seek places of worship in addition to knowledge, and are often even convinced that knowledge leads us away from religious paths, that we must seek other paths that in turn lead us to the religious. And yet, here too, we have repeatedly had to emphasize the importance of newer insights. We had to point out that these newer insights are absolutely necessary for modern man and for the further development of humanity. But when man today places himself in the world with his intellectualism, with his sense of freedom, he is already developing here on earth that which the older man, who, if I may express it in this way, had a sense of heaven , only developed after death.

When we describe the moments after death for today's man, we describe how the person in the picture looks back at first on his life by separating his etheric body from himself. We then describe how he reviews his life in a subsequent period. For older times, life after death had to be described in such a way that people were told: That which you can only attain here through a higher revelation, an intellectualistic view of the world, will appear to you after death. That which you are to achieve here on earth can only exist as an ideal; you will be a free human being after death. — That is what they told older people. The true human being comes when one has passed from this physical world into the spiritual world. That is what they said in ancient times. But what people experienced only after death in ancient times, looking back on earthly life, intellectualism and a sense of freedom, for which all earthly life was preparation, has already been introduced into the life between birth and death by the modern human being. Here on earth, he becomes an intellectual being, here on earth he becomes a being with a sense of freedom.

But for this, he must acquire something on earth in sensory knowledge and in the combination of his sensory knowledge that is initially far removed from his interests. No matter how long we explore through the telescope that which we today explore of the starry worlds: humanly we do not feel inwardly warmed and inwardly enlightened by it. Expeditions are being organized by astronomers and naturalists to prove Einstein's ideas. But no one expects the observations that are being made to be as close to directly elementary human nature as one would have expected from the astronomers of the ancient Babylonian or Assyrian cultures. The modern insights give us a tremendous difference: the lack of interest in values. It may be extremely interesting when this or that biological discovery is made today, but one does not say: By making this or that biological discovery, man comes closer to the divine-spiritual being that he carries in his soul. It is to this divine spiritual being, which he bears within his soul, that man wants to come closer through a separate religious interest.

Nevertheless, today we do not have the right concept of the way in which an older humanity has come to knowledge, even in later times. One need only think of the momentous experience of fate when a man like Archimedes, while bathing, discovered the Archimedean principle and exclaimed, “I have found it!” Just such a single insight was something that one felt as if one had looked through a window into the secrets of the universe.

This warm-heartedness towards knowledge was certainly not present when the X-rays were discovered, for example. One could say that today's relationship to what knowledge provides is more that of gaping open one's mouth than of inward soul rejoicing. That makes a human difference! And this human difference must be borne in mind for the development of humanity.

Something very remarkable emerges from all this. For centuries now, modern people have been experiencing in their lives what they used to have only after death: intellectual comprehension of the world and the consciousness of freedom. But they have not even really noticed it. That is the remarkable thing, that modern humanity has not even really noticed something that it has received from heaven into earthly life. The emotional world has not grasped it at all, the elemental in the human world. One would almost say that it has a bitter aftertaste for humanity. Humanity does not look at the pure thought the way I have tried to look at it in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, where one would rather sing hymns to it than dissect it. And the consciousness of freedom has led people to all sorts of tumultuous things, but not to the realization that something has descended from heaven to earth. Not even the fundamental power of modern human development has been felt purely humanly. Where does that come from?

If you answer this question, then you also answer one of the most important questions of human existence in general. In ancient times, man acquired his knowledge by looking up at the sky, seeking the Logos there, that which the gods spoke to man through the starry sky and the nature of the stars. All that man did here on earth was illuminated by the content of the Logos, and this content was in turn fetched from the stars. Human life would have been meaningless if it could not be given a purpose through knowledge of the stars.

Now, in a very similar sense, everything we acquire internally as knowledge is actually nothing. We acquire it by allowing ourselves to be constrained to botany, zoology, biology, physiology, etc., and at most we allow ourselves to be moved by ambition, by an insight into the necessity of being able to eke out our lives on earth, to all of this. Again, this is a radical statement, but in a sense it borders on reality. For those who attach great ideals to things today, there is still a certain illusionary element through which they reinterpret the matter into an ideal. At least, people who could associate a meaning with the word: I pray a chemical formula. Yes, one must indeed express an important cultural-historical fact, even if it is negative, in such a form!

It takes a Novalis, with his deep and at the same time youthfully enthusiastic knowledge, to feel something like: I pray in the dissolution of a differential equation. Our ordinary mathematicians do not feel very prayerful when they reveal the secret of a differential equation. That which is self-evident, that with knowledge the whole person is engaged at the same time, the whole person feels their indebtedness to the divine, this self-evident fact is not at all self-evident to today's humanity. It is much more natural for those who are rising to the highest achievements of knowledge to be glad when they have the exams behind them so that they do not have to go through these things again. The joy of going through the stages of the mysteries: you don't notice much of that in modern people who go through the exams. At least it is extremely rare for someone today to speak with the full ancient mystery seriousness of that intimate divine deed that this or that professor has done by giving him a dissertation topic and putting him in the position to now pass through the waters of holiness while working on this dissertation topic! But this would be the normal, the obvious!

If you just think about it, you have to say: Yes, down there is the earth with its many things (see drawing page 70, white and green). These many things have been seen by the old cognizers. But they only believed they had grasped them in the right sense by looking up at the stars and bringing down the rays from the stars, which illuminated everything for them in the right way (red).

These ancient cognizers sought the reflection of the starry world in earthly life (lower red), otherwise all that I have indicated below would have seemed worthless to them. Today we pay no attention to what is above, but study what is below. We study it in countless details. When we have surrendered to some kind of knowledge oriented here or there, we have many details in our heads. But the evaluation of these details becomes somewhat indifferent to life, and with it also a certain lack of interest in the high, elementary human. Especially in the actual spiritual realm, this becomes conspicuously apparent.

Vöscher, the Swabian, has already ridiculed how indifferent to a universal human consciousness that becomes, which is to be overcome today, if one wants to struggle up to knowledge, by saying that one of the most “significant” treatises on the subject of modern literary history would be one on the connection between the chilblains of Frau Christiane von Goethe and the symbolic-allegorical figures in the second part of Faust! Why could a dissertation not be written about this connection, as is done about many other things? The methodology that is applied, the human interest that is involved, is, after all, no different in quality from when someone writes a treatise – and this does happen – about the thought lines in Homer's poetry! Yes, we really do acquire knowledge about what people only considered worthy of knowledge after they were able to illuminate it from the knowledge of heaven.

We do not have the knowledge of heaven. We do not look at the copper by looking up at Venus, we do not look at the lead by looking up at Saturn, we do not look at the primeval man by looking up at the constellation of Aquarius, and we do not look at that which passes over into certain inner impulses of human nature in the animal nature of the lion by looking up at the constellation of Leo, and the like. We bring down from the heavens nothing that can explain the earthly to us, but we turn our gaze to the wide-ranging, scattered details of the earth alone.

We need something that brings us valences into the individual, that leads us to see again what someone saw when he saw some earthly object illuminated from the heavens. We have knowledge of many things, but we need a unified knowledge that can radiate into all the individual fields of knowledge and give the individual fields of knowledge value. That is what anthroposophy wants to be.

Just as people once looked to the heavens in astrology to explain the earth, anthroposophy wants to see in people what they have to say about themselves, so that from there everything we about minerals, animals, plants, about man, about everything that can be known in addition to what is scattered, will be illuminated by anthroposophy.

And just as man once looked up at the heavens to understand his life on earth , so the intellectually liberated human being must learn to know himself, so that he can look beyond the moment of death, when he steps out into a spiritual world, and where the gods will look down on what he brings them, what radiates from him. For he should already have become human on earth, whereas before he only became human after death.

How he has become human will be shown through the power he has gained from pure human consciousness. And this pure human consciousness is to be given to him through that which radiates from anthroposophy to everything else, which man on earth can know, but also what man on earth can accomplish.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” thus in the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. Man has brought down the Logos from the revelation of the gods in the heavens.

But the Word was made flesh, and not only dwelt among us, but continues to dwell among us. The Logos has become flesh. What was once sought in the heavens must now be sought in man. For the Logos was once rightly sought in the Father-God; in our time the Logos must be sought in the Son-God.

But man finds this Son-God in his elementary meaning when he makes Paul's word true: “Not I, but Christ in me,” when he comes to know himself. All anthroposophy aims to delve deep into the human being. When ancient times delved deep into the human being, what did they find? At the bottom of human nature, the luciferic powers. If modern man delves deep enough into himself, he will find the Christ. This is the other side of the turnaround from older to newer times. With intellectualism and the consciousness of freedom having descended from heaven to earth, and with the Christ having united with humanity on earth, man finds the Christ in the depths of his own being, if he descends deep enough; while older people have found the Luciferian spirituality precisely by going deep enough.

This was also the message that an older student body in the mysteries was to understand particularly clearly: delve down into the human being as it is on earth, and at the bottom of your own soul you will ultimately find that which you must recoil from in terror: the powers of Lucifer. Therefore, look up at the moment of death; only when you have passed through the gate of death do you become a true human being. There you will be saved from what you find at the bottom of your soul here on earth: the luciferic powers.

That was the experience of death in the ancient mysteries. That was why they had to look to the realization, to the depiction of the moment of death in the mysteries, these ancient mystery students.

The modern human being should take on that which has become his: intellectualism and the consciousness of freedom. If he accepts them worthily, so that he permeates all other earthly knowledge and all other deeds with what wells up out of pure human consciousness, as anthroposophy wills, then he finds the Christ-powers at the bottom of his soul. Then he says to himself: Once I looked up at the constellation of the stars to fathom human destiny on earth; now I look at the human being and thereby learn to recognize how this human being, having already on earth become imbued with the humanity of the Christ-substance , shines out to the universe, and how it shines up to the heavens as the star of humanity after passing through the portal of death.

This is spiritual humanistics, which can take the place of the old astrology. This is what instructs people to look in the same way at what the human being can also reveal in himself as Sophia - Anthroposophia - as the stars once revealed themselves as Logia. But this is also the consciousness with which one must imbue oneself. And there one then learns the world significance of the human being. From there one learns to recognize that world significance of the human being that first allows us to study the physical body, which then allows us to study the formative forces or etheric body. But I will mention just one example: If you study the human physical body in the right way, by looking at it from the point of view of anthroposophy, you learn how the human physical body can follow its own forces. When it follows its own forces, it is constantly striving to become ill. Yes, what exists down there in the human being as the physical body is actually in a constant effort to become ill. And if we look up from the physical body to the etheric body, we have in the etheric body the totality of those forces of the human being that are constantly in the effort to restore the sick person to health. The pendulum swing between the physical body and the etheric body is aimed at constantly maintaining the center between the pathological and the therapeutic. The etheric body is the cosmic therapist, and the physical body is the cosmic pathogen.

And we could speak just as well for other areas of human knowledge. And in speaking thus, we say to ourselves: When we are confronted with an illness, what must we do? We must somehow, through certain healing constellations, call upon the etheric body to heal. Ultimately, all medicine does this: somehow call upon the etheric body of the person to heal, because it is the healer. If we approach the ether body in the right way in a person who can be made healthy, if we seek what can come to him from the ether body in terms of healing powers according to his general human destiny, then we are on the way to healing him.

But I will talk about that tomorrow. I will speak about this latter chapter, which has been discussed in connection with today's discussion, tomorrow.

In continuation of what I have said in the preceding reflections on the tasks of anthroposophical world view in the present and for the development of humanity, today I would like to add a few more things from a different perspective: those points of view that can arise when one sees how the world view of the nineteenth century led, as it were, to a kind of absurdity in Friedrich Nietzsche, and how it can be shown, precisely from the phenomenon of Nietzsche, that such a view of the world and of the human being as is presented in anthroposophy is an historical necessity for the development of humanity. I do not wish to repeat things that I have already said about Nietzsche here and elsewhere in the anthroposophical movement, but I would like to point out two implications of Nietzsche's world view today that I have touched on even less.

Throughout his life, Nietzsche was characterized by a tendency to arrive at a view of the value and essence of morality in man. Nietzsche was a moral philosopher in the proper sense of the word. He wanted to come to terms with himself regarding the origin of morality, the significance of morality for humanity, and the value of morality for the world order. In this quest for clarity, we see how two main themes run through his entire life, which, in relation to many other things, has undergone the most diverse transformations.

The first is that throughout his life – from the point in his life that he had already passed through in his second year at university until the end of his life, one might say – he had an essentially atheistic view. The atheistic element is what has remained constant throughout all the transformations of Nietzsche's world view.

And the second is that, in the face of what has come to him peculiarly in the moral impulses of the present, what has also come to him in the intellectual and practical impulses of human life in the present, he has asserted one virtue as the most fundamental, and that virtue is honesty towards himself, towards others, towards the whole world order. Integrity, honesty, that is what he considered to be the most important thing, what is most necessary for modern man, both inwardly, to his soul, and outwardly, to the world.

Nietzsche once listed four cardinal virtues that he considered to be the most important for human life. Among these four cardinal virtues, honesty, this honesty towards oneself and others, is the first. These four cardinal virtues are namely: firstly, honesty towards oneself and one's friends; secondly, bravery towards one's enemies; the third cardinal virtue is generosity towards those whom one has defeated, and the fourth cardinal virtue is courtesy towards all people.

These four cardinal virtues, which Nietzsche described as being particularly necessary for present-day humanity, all tend towards the one he described as the first, and which he regarded as a kind of necessary temporal virtue: they tend towards honesty, towards sincerity. And one can say: there is a relationship between this virtue of sincerity and his atheism.

Nietzsche first of all grew out of his age completely and utterly. He then outgrew this age in an even more comprehensive sense. Even a superficial examination shows how he initially took root in Schopenhauer's worldview, which is also an atheistic one, and how he initially saw this Schopenhauerian worldview artistically realized in Richard Wagner's musical drama in the first period of his life.

Nietzsche started out with Schopenhauer and Wagner. He then absorbed what can be called the positivism of the time in scientific life, that is, the world view that thinks the whole world is built solely on what is immediately perceptible, on what is perceptible to the senses, and which therefore sees the sensual as the only thing that matters for the world view.

And Nietzsche then attained a certain independence in the third period, by assimilating the modern idea of development, which he so elaborated that he applied it to man, by setting himself the ideal, as a kind of positivistic ideal, that man must develop into the superman.

Thus Nietzsche has outgrown various currents of thought and currents of culture of his time. But how has he outgrown them? The answer to this significant question also contains important information about the characteristics of the entire age that occupies the last third of the 19th century. One must ask oneself the question: Why did Nietzsche become an atheist? He became one out of a sense of integrity, out of inner honesty. He took with complete honesty what the 19th century was able to offer him in the way of knowledge, what he was able to absorb with holy zeal from this 19th-century knowledge. And he said to himself quite intuitively: If I take this particular kind of 19th-century knowledge honestly, then it does not lead me anywhere towards the divine; then I must exclude the divine from my world of thought.

There lies the first great conflict between Nietzsche and his age, so that he had to become a fighter against his time. When Nietzsche looked around at the people who had also absorbed the knowledge of the 19th century, he saw that the vast majority of them still believed in a divine world order. He perceived this as dishonesty. It seemed dishonest to him to look at the world on the one hand as the knowledge of the 19th century looked at it, and then somehow to assume a divine order on the other. Because he was still speaking in the various thought formulas of the 19th century, he did not actually express what he instinctively felt about the 19th-century world view. He felt that the 19th century viewed world phenomena in the same way that one views the human organism when one has it as a corpse, when it has died. If one believes in this human organism in death, so to speak, if one believes that this dead organism has an inner truth, then one could not honestly believe that this organism only has a meaning when it is permeated by the living and ensouled and spiritualized human being. Anyone who studies a corpse should actually say to himself: What I can look at, what I can study, has no truth. It only has a truth if it is permeated by the spiritualized human being. It presupposes the spiritualized human being. But that is no longer there when I have the corpse before me.

Nietzsche felt this very clearly, although he did not express it so clearly: if you look at nature in the way that modern world knowledge looks at it, you look at it as a corpse. You should actually say to yourself: what you interpret as nature around you no longer has the divine in it. But if one accepts it in its absoluteness, if one speaks of this nature in such a way that one only follows its laws, then one must obviously deny that a divine underlies it. Because the way it stands before you, this nature, has no more of a divine basis than a human basis underlies a human corpse.

These were the feelings that lived in Nietzsche's soul. But the 19th-century world view had such a strong effect on him that he said to himself: Yes, we have nothing but this nature before us, and modern times have taught us to have nothing else before us. If we stick to this knowledge of nature, then we must reject God.

And so Nietzsche, as a student of Schopenhauer, rejected any divine, considering it dishonest to have modern knowledge and yet still speak of a divine. In this respect, his inner life was extraordinarily interesting because it strove for such intense honesty. He perceived it as a cultural lie of the 19th century that on the one hand there was a view of nature as it was, and on the other hand people still spoke of a divine. But he also took life seriously within this natural order in which one still believed. And he saw that the life of modern man had actually developed in such a way that it had become quite natural for him to assume such an order of nature. After all, nature had not forced modern man to accept this order, but life had become such that it could only endure such a view of nature. The view of nature actually came from life. And Nietzsche felt that this life was thoroughly dishonest. And he strove for honesty.

He had to say to himself: If we live in such an order as modern humanity recognizes as the true one, then we can never feel like human beings within this truth. That was actually the basic feeling in the first period of his life: How can I feel like a human being when I am surrounded by this natural order as it is now viewed? That which is truth does not allow me to come to my consciousness as a human being! Nietzsche felt and sensed this too, and so he said to himself in this first period of his life: “If one cannot live in truth, then one must live in appearance, in poetry, in art.

And when he turned his gaze to the Greeks, he believed he had recognized in them the people who, out of a certain naivety, had come to this dissatisfaction with the truth and who therefore consoled themselves with appearances, with beauty. This is what he expressed in his first, so beautifully written hymn, “The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music”. He wanted to say: Man, when you are in the realm of truth, you can never feel like a human being. So flee from the realm of truth into the realm where you create a world that does not correspond to truth. In this world of poetry you will be consoled by what truth can never give you.

The Greeks, he believed, had felt as the true naive pessimists that one could not be satisfied within the world of truth. That is why they created above all their wonderful tragedies, a world of beautiful appearance, in order to have in this world that which can satisfy man.

In Richard Wagner's musical drama, Nietzsche believed he saw a renewal of this beautiful appearance, with the express purpose of leading people away from the so-called real world into the world of appearances, in order to find satisfaction as human beings. So there was no possibility for Nietzsche to say to himself: Let us take the sensory world, deepen our contemplation of the sensory world, penetrate from the external manifestation to the inner divine, and thus feel connected to this divine as a human being and come to feel truly human in the world.

For Nietzsche, this consideration was not possible. He saw no possibility — because he wanted to be honest — of arriving at such a consideration from what the 19th century was. Hence the other: This whole reality gives us no satisfaction, so we satisfy ourselves with an unreal world. Just as if there were beings somewhere who came to a planet where they found only corpses, and in the face of these corpses would have to see not remnants of reality but true reality, because they had once permeated, and as if these beings, who thus encountered a planet of corpses, were beings who, in order to console themselves for these corpses, invented beings to animate them. That was Nietzsche's first sense of the world.

And basically, the writings that followed The Birth of Tragedy were: David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer, On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, Schopenhauer as Educator, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, confrontations of his honesty with the dishonesty of the time. This time spoke, although it had no way out of sensuality into the spirit, it still spoke of spirit; this time spoke of the divine, although basically it could not include a divine in its knowledge anywhere. This period spoke something like this: In the past, people surrendered to the delusion of a divine, but we know from the study of nature that there is no divine. But we have our concerts, of course, in which we make music. — There is a chapter in David Friedrich Strauß's “The Old and the New Faith” that particularly annoyed Nietzsche, where David Friedrich Strauß asserts this philistine point of view. That is why Nietzsche wrote this essay about Strauss as a philistine and writer, in spite of the fact that Strauss was a relatively excellent man, in order to show how one can either be dishonest by still assuming a divine quality that one should no longer assume, or how one must fall into the banal and philistine, as he saw it with David Friedrich Strauss.

But now the second period in Nietzsche's life began. He remained true to himself with regard to the demand for honesty, he remained true to himself with regard to his atheism. But in the first period, he adopted ideals, albeit aesthetically colored, ideals that would have a justification and with which people could console themselves about the reality of the external senses.

But now, I would like to say, in the second period of his life, his mind clings more strongly to what, according to the prevailing view of the time, the world reveals to people alone. And so he said to himself: No matter how much a person devotes himself to ideals, these ideals are born out of his very nature! People imagine many beautiful things, but this ideal beauty is only an all-too-human one.

And so the time came for him when he saw particularly the human weakness, the all-too-human, the devotion of man to his physique. And since he took the view of nature seriously, he said to himself: Man cannot help but devote himself to his physique! - Nietzsche once said: Long live physics, even longer live honesty in believing in physics. “Let us be honest,” he said to himself in the second period of his life. ”Let us be clear: no matter how beautiful an idealistic thought a person has, it is still an emanation of his physical nature. Therefore, when we approach human life, let us not describe the smoke it produces at the top, but let us describe the fuels from which this smoke is formed at the bottom: then we will not arrive at the idealistic-divine, but at the human-all-too-human.

And so, in the second period of his life, Nietzsche, because he wanted to be honest with himself and with others, virtually killed all idealism in life. So he said to himself: What people usually call soul is actually just a lie. This is based on the structure of the body, and something that comes from this structure of the body reveals itself in such a way that it is given the name soul.

And Nietzsche saw in this inclination of some modern people, for example, to Voltaire, the true enlightenment, that true enlightenment that consists in man no longer engaging in some illusory world in order to elevate himself above reality, but rather that he actually looks at reality in its physical nature and sees all morality emerging from the physical.

And if you then look at the third period in Nietzsche's life, you can't help but notice how he, one might say, out of a highly pathological nature, took this honesty to excess, as he said: If If you take seriously and honestly what you can know about nature and the laws of nature in the modern sense, then you have to say: Everything that is supposed to live as spirit in the human being is precisely the emanation of his physical being. Therefore, the human being can only be the perfect one who, in comparison to others, shows the physical being to be the most perfect; that is, the one who has such a physical nature that the strongest instincts live in him.

Nietzsche ultimately saw instinctual life as superior to all spiritual life, as that which, in its development, leads man beyond himself, in that instincts become ever stronger and stronger, remain instincts, but rise ever higher and higher above the animal: this is where man becomes superman.

What was it, then, that actually impelled Nietzsche in this way, that he first recognized the ideal in appearance as necessary for man, that he then, as he put it, led this ideal onto the ice, because he saw how it arises from the physical, and that he then wanted to lead man to the superman through a higher development of his physique, his instinctive life? It was impossible, if one stood within the world view of the 19th century, to grasp the physical in the sense of this world view, and then still get out of it if one wanted to remain honest. One simply had to stay inside.

And Nietzsche developed, if one may say so, an iron honesty in placing himself with all that he had in the physical. So that in fact his ideal for the future, if one may still speak of an ideal, for human civilization should have consisted in man's enlightenment about the great illusion of having a spirit. That these undercurrents are usually not seen in Nietzsche, who, however, worked his way out as honestly as possible, is only due to the fact that he denied the spirit with so much spirit that he glorified the spiritual poverty of humanity in such a brilliant, brilliant, witty way.

It becomes simply impossible to be a moral philosopher, as Nietzsche was by his very nature within the 19th-century world view, if one honestly wants to take this on board. For if one is no longer able to speak of the fact that man's task on earth is to bring a spiritual and supernatural element into this earthly world, if one feels compelled to remain within the mere earthly world, then, if one wants to establish morality, one wants to establish it without justification. Morality becomes outlawed if one accepts the world view of the 19th century in all honesty. And that is what Nietzsche really experienced deep inside: that morality became outlawed. He wanted to be a moral philosopher. But where did the moral impulses come from? That was the big question for him. If one finds the luminosity of the supersensible in man, then morality arises as the demand of the supersensible on the sensible. If one finds no supersensible element in man, as was the case with the world view of the 19th century, then there is no source from which one could draw moral impulses. If one wants to distinguish good from evil, then one needs the supersensible. But the supersensible had to be rejected by Nietzsche, who honestly took the world view of the 19th century. And so he groped around in human life to find something like the origin of the moral impulses.

So he looked at the cultural development of humanity, found how strong racial people acted as conquerors towards weaker people, how these stronger racial people imposed the direction of their actions on the weaker ones, how they, out of their instinctive nature, demanded of those whom they had acted as conquerors towards: This is how you should act! Nietzsche could not believe in any categorical imperative, in moral commandments. He could only believe in the instinctive racial supermen, who saw themselves as the good ones, the others as the bad ones, that is, as the inferior human beings, on whom they imposed the direction of action.

And then it happened that those who were the inferiors according to the conquerors joined forces and now, not with the more brutal older means, but with the finer means of the soul and spirit, with cunning and guile, made themselves conquerors over the others. And those who had previously considered themselves the superiors, the good ones, they called the bad ones, because they were conquerors, power-seekers, force-seekers, militarists; they called them the bad ones. And they called themselves the good, who had previously been called the inferior, the bad. Being poor, limited, oppressed, weak, overcome and yet holding on in weakness, in being overcome, that is the good, and being a conqueror, overcoming the other, that is the evil.

Thus good and evil arose from good and bad. But good and bad did not yet have the later moral connotation, but merely the connotation of the conquering, the powerful, the noble, in relation to the army of slave people, who were the inferior, the bad ones. And what was later distinguished between good and evil, that came only from the slave revolt of the previously bad, inferior, who now called the others criminals and evil, in revenge for what had happened to them. Thus, to Nietzsche, the later morality, clothed in the concepts of “good” and “evil,” appeared as the revenge taken by the oppressed on the oppressors. But he found no inner foundation for morality. He could only stand beyond good and evil, not in the midst of good and evil. For to find an inner foundation for good and evil, he would have had to resort to the supersensible. But that was a delusion to him, it was merely the expression of weak human nature, which did not want to admit to itself that its true essence is exhausted in the physical.

If one wants to characterize Nietzsche, one would like to say: Actually, all thinking people of his time should have spoken as he did, if they had been as honest as he was. And he made it his goal to be completely honest. That is why he became a fighter against his time, and that is why he had such sharp intellectual weapons, and why he strove for a revaluation of all values. He saw the values by which he lived as being the product of dishonesty. Centuries had already worked to bring about modern scientific concepts and also introduced them into all of history. But the same centuries had left that which was no longer compatible with them in human souls: divine and moral ideas. Values had emerged that now had to be reevaluated.

Nietzsche's life is a tremendous tragedy. And I don't think that anyone has really grasped the essence of human civilization in the last third of the 19th century and how it continued to have an effect in the 20th century, in the right way, who has not even seen into such a tragedy as it took place in a soul experiencing this civilization, as in Nietzsche. It is really the case that we have to see the collapse we are now experiencing as a consequence of what Nietzsche calls the dishonesty of modern civilization. One would like to say that Nietzsche became a fighter against his time because he had to tell himself: If this dishonesty continues, then only a destructive struggle can break out among the nations that belong to this modern civilization. And this tragedy in Nietzsche's life arose from the fact that Nietzsche wanted to find the foundations of morality, but could not find them in the education of his time. Nowhere could he find a source from which he could draw moral impulses. And so he groped his way through and wounded his fingers everywhere in the groping. And out of the pain he described his time, as he has just described it.

What was he looking for? He was looking for something that can only be found in the supersensible realm, something that cannot be found in the realm of the sensible. That is what he was looking for. No matter how beautiful, great, and noble the moral principles you come up with, they cannot heat a machine, turn a wheel, or set the electrical apparatus in motion. But if one applies only that to one's cognition which sets the machine in motion, sets the electrical apparatus in motion, turns the wheel, if one introduces only that into one's cognition, then one can never understand how that which lives in man as a moral impulse is to reach into one's own human organism. You can think up the most exalted ideals, but they can only be smoke and fog, because there is no possibility of them taking effect in a muscle, in some skill or the like. There is nowhere in the sensory world where you can see moral ideals taking effect in the organic. Imagine the most beautiful moral ideals – Nietzsche could only say to himself – if you harbor them in your head, then you are to your own organism as you are to a machine. You can make posters for the machine, write on them “Moral Ideals”: it will not heat with them, it will not turn. But should you revolve around your moral ideals if you are as nature intended you to be? You can think them up, they may be very beautiful, but they cannot intervene in the workings of the world! Therefore, they are a lie in the face of reality. It is not the person who devotes himself to ideals who is effective, but the one who fuels his machine so that the instincts become powerful: “the blond beast,” as Nietzsche paradigmatically expresses it.

And so Nietzsche stood with his problems before Man, who could only have been moral to him if the moral impulses in him had found a point of contact. They did not. Therefore, no good and evil, but - “Beyond Good and Evil”.

But now consider: we have always had to characterize this whole modern world-knowledge by saying that it does not approach man, it cannot gain any conception, any idea of man. So, if one experiences in the sense of the modern world-view, one does not have man in one's soul. Yet in Nietzsche everything tended towards man. Everything tended towards something he could not have! And now, in keeping with the modern idea of development, he wanted to transform man into the superman, only he did not have man. How could it be shown, from what was not available, how man develops into the superman! Man was not there for contemplation, for intuitive perception, for feeling, for the impulses of the will. Now the superman! It was as if one had formed these words only out of old habit: man and superman - and now choked, because these words have no content, just as one chokes in a vacuum.

Nietzsche was faced with the necessity of entering the supersensible world with moral problems, and could not enter. That was his inner tragedy. And with that, he is at the same time the representative soul of the end of the 19th century, that representative soul who points out the necessity: If you want to remain honest as human beings, you must enter the supersensible world in order not to declare the ideals of morality to be a lie.

Nietzsche goes mad because he is confronted with the necessity of entering the supersensible world and cannot do so. Many other people do not go mad; but I do not want to explain the reasons why they do not go mad, because one must indeed observe certain limits of politeness when describing the peculiarities of civilization. But one thing is clear from Nietzsche's life: modern man can only be honest and upright with himself and others when he enters the supersensible world. In other words, honesty and uprightness do not exist in a nonsensory world view. Nor can the path from man to superman be found if one cannot take the other path from the sensual to the supersensible. And if morality belongs in a certain sense to the superman, then it demands that this superman be sought not in the sensual but in the supersensible, otherwise it is a mere word, the word “superman,” that is called out but to which nothing resounds from the world.

Tomorrow I will approach the subject from the other side, from the side of how what Nietzsche encountered must now be further developed so that moral values in human life can be understood in the right way and harmonized with the knowledge of our time.

On the “tailoring problem” of the Anthroposophical Society

Tomorrow I will look at the topic from a different angle, from the angle of how what Nietzsche encountered must now be further developed so that morality can be properly understood in human life and reconciled with the knowledge of our time. These are the questions that the members of the Anthroposophical Society must ask themselves. Having an understanding of such questions is part of the Anthroposophical Society. And it is now in the process of coming to its senses.

At the end of February, I would like to add, a meeting of delegates will take place in Stuttgart – if traffic conditions still permit – at which the fate of the German Anthroposophical Society will be discussed first, so that the conditions of the Anthroposophical Society can then be discussed in more detail. These things must be taken very seriously today. For it was precisely during my presence in Stuttgart that I felt so keenly how, above all, those who want to do something within the Anthroposophical Society must bear in mind that anthroposophy, in the three stages that I described to you here recently, has become something that has outgrown what the Anthroposophical Society wants to remain in many ways.

In the first stages of the Anthroposophical Society's development, no thought was given to how, later on, under the influence of a Goetheanum and other things, people in the furthest reaches would relate to Anthroposophy, in the sense of opposing it or of adhering to it. The Society must grow with the growth of Anthroposophy. And so the next problem, which is to occupy the minds of the Anthroposophical Society at the end of February in Stuttgart – forgive me, my dear friends, if I express this in a figurative way – the next problem is a tailoring problem. It is the problem that has been raised by the fact that anthroposophy today is something in relation to which the Anthroposophical Society represents clothes that anthroposophy has outgrown. The sleeves of the skirt no longer reach the hands, not even the elbows, not to mention the trousers. Now the problem of tailoring must really be solved with the full application of the mind: how do you make the right clothes for Anthroposophy out of the Anthroposophical Society? That will be the big problem for Stuttgart at the end of February. And this is indeed pointed out in the call that has now been sent out.

What has struck me most is that there is not enough of what I hinted at at the end of my last lecture here last week. I said: Of course, not everyone can become a physician in the anthroposophical sense, but there can be understanding for what is happening in medicine that is inspired by anthroposophy to the greatest extent, there can be understanding, there can be interest. This interest must be present in the broadest sense among the members of the Anthroposophical Society for everything that happens within Anthroposophy. Then we will also succeed in solving the problem of the tailor. But it must be solved, otherwise other means must be considered; for the opponents are full of interest and are extremely attentive to everything, and their methods consist precisely in being good disseminators of the Anthroposophical worldview. Oh, if the members of the Anthroposophical Society were as good at spreading the Anthroposophical worldview as the opponents, then things would go excellently!

The opponents take everything they can from the writings, interpret it in the most absurd way and spread it with frantic interest. So that Anthroposophy is very well known – but as a caricature – on the part of the opponents. Until now, there has been no equal to this in terms of the true form of Anthroposophy. That is how it is. But this is what has now become critical and what must necessarily be led towards a solution. We need a strong and not a weak Anthroposophical Society in the near future.

I recently gave you the names of the provisional committee that will manage affairs within Germany for the time being until the assembly of delegates takes place. The last time we were in Stuttgart, a number of prominent figures declared their willingness to make their voices heard at the assembly of delegates, thereby awakening hope among those who care about the Anthroposophical Society that the support of anthroposophy in the most diverse directions will be presented to the world in a truly penetrating way. But the lecturers who have agreed to take on this task will really have to summon up all their strength and mobilize all their interest if they are to fulfill their duties. We will see.