The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum is seeking to establish not only the sections already mentioned but also a further section. This will be possible if the intentions of the Executive Council meet with a corresponding response. In every age, young people have been somewhat at odds with old. This gypsy truth is a consolation to many when it comes to the behavior of today's youth.

But this consolation could easily become a disaster.

One should understand the present youth from the “spirit of the present” both in their questionable aberrations and in their all too justified striving for something different from what the old give them.

First of all, there is the youth that is pushed into the academic career by the circumstances of life. They are offered “science”. Solid, secure, fruitful science for the outer life. It would be nonsense, in the manner of many laymen, to rant about this science. But the soul of youth still freezes to this science before it comes to recognize its solidity, its security, its fertility for the outer life.

Science owes its greatness to the strong opposition it has faced since the mid-19th century. At that time, people realized how easily man can sail into the uncertainty of knowledge when he rises from the lowlands of research to the heights of a world view. It was believed that chilling examples of such a rise had been experienced.

And so they wanted to free “science” from the world view. It should stick to the “facts” in the valleys of nature and avoid the high roads of the mind.

When they opposed the worldview, they derived a certain satisfaction from the act of opposing. The worldview fighters of the mid-19th century were happy in their fighting mood.

Today's youth can no longer share this happiness. They can no longer stir up satisfying feelings in their souls by experiencing the fight against the “uncertainty” and “crush” of the worldview.

For today there is simply nothing left to fight against. It is impossible to advocate freeing “science” from “worldview.” For the worldview is dead by now.

In contrast, however, the feelings of young people have made a discovery. Not at all a discovery of the intellect, but one that comes from the whole, undivided human nature.

The young have discovered that without a worldview, it is impossible to live a dignified human life. Many of the old have heard the “evidence” against the worldview. They have submitted to the power of the evidence. The youth no longer pays any intellectual attention to this power of evidence; but it instinctively senses the powerlessness of all intellectual proof where the human heart speaks from an invincible urge.

Science presents itself to young people in a dignified way; but it owes its dignity to the lack of a world view. Young people long for a world view. But science needs young people.

At the Goetheanum, we would like to understand young people in such a way that we can seek the paths to a worldview with them. And we hope that in the light of the worldview, a true love for science will be generated. We would like to not lose science in world view reverie, but to gain it in the awakening of spiritual experience.

The leadership of the Anthroposophical Society asks young people if they want to understand it too. If they find this understanding, then the “Section for the Spiritual Strivings of Youth” can become something vital.

Newsletter from the Youth Section of the School of Spiritual Science.

The announcement of the “Section for the Spiritual Strivings of Youth” at the Goetheanum has brought forth encouraging responses from the youth community. Representatives of the “Free Anthroposophical Society” and the younger members living at the Goetheanum have expressed to the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society their full and wholehearted readiness to take part in the undertaking.

I see in both expressions valuable starting points for a good part of the work of our Society. If it can build a bridge between older and younger people of our age, then it will accomplish an important task.

What can be read between the lines of the two letters can be put into words: our youth speaks in a tone whose timbre is new in the development of humanity. One feels that the soul's eye is not directed towards the continuation of what can be inherited from the preceding time and increased in the present. It is turned towards the irruption of a new life from the regions where not time is developed but the eternal is revealed.

If the older person wants to be understood by the youth today, he must let the eternal prevail as the driving force in his relationship to the temporal. And he must do this in a way that the youth understands.

It is said that young people do not want to engage with old age, do not want to accept anything from the insight gained from it, from the experience matured from it. — Today, the older person expresses this from his displeasure at the behavior of young people. It is true: young people separate themselves from old age; they want to be among themselves. They do not want to listen to what comes from old age.

One can become concerned about this fact. Because these young people will grow old one day. They will not be able to continue their behavior into old age. They want to be really young. They ask how one can be “really young”. They will no longer be able to do that when they themselves have entered old age.

Therefore, the older person says, youth should abandon its arrogance and look up to old age again, to see the goal towards which its mind's eye must be directed.

By saying this, one thinks that it is because of youth that it is not attracted to the older person.

But young people could not help but look up to older people and take them as role models if they were really “old”. For the human soul, and especially the young soul, is such that it turns to what is foreign to it in order to unite it with itself.

Now, however, today's youth do not see something in the older person that seems both alien and worthy of appropriation to them as human beings. For the older person today is not really “old”. He has absorbed the content of much, he can talk about much. But he has not brought this much to human maturity. He has grown older in years; but he has not grown in his soul with his years. He still speaks from the brain that has grown old, just as he spoke from the young one. Youth feels this. It does not feel “maturity” when it is with older people, but rather its own young state of mind in the aged bodies. And so it turns away, because this does not appear to it to be truth.

Through decades of knowledge in the field of knowledge, older people have developed the opinion that one cannot know anything about the spiritual in the things and processes of the world. When young people hear this, they must get the feeling that the older person has nothing to say to them, because they can get the “not knowing” themselves; they will only listen to the old person if the “knowledge” comes from him. Talking about “not knowing” is tolerable when it is done with freshness, with youthful freshness. But to hear about “not knowing” when it comes to the aging brain, that deserts the soul, especially the young soul.

Today, young people turn away from older people not because they have grown old, but because they have remained young, because they have not understood how to grow old in the right way. Older people today need this self-knowledge.

But one can only grow old in the right way if one allows the spirit in the soul to unfold. If this happens, then one has in an aged body that which is in harmony with it. Then one will be able to offer young people not only what time has developed in the body, but also what the eternal reveals from the spirit.

Wherever there is a sincere search for spiritual experience, there can be found the field in which youth and older people can come together again. It is an empty phrase to say: you have to be 'young' with young people. No, you have to understand the right way to be 'old' among young people as an older person.

Young people like to criticize what comes from older people. That is their right. For they must one day carry that to which the ancients have not yet brought in the progress of humanity. But one is not a true older person if one merely criticizes as well. Young people may put up with this for a while because they do not need to be annoyed by contradiction; but in the end they will tire of the “old young” because their voice is too harsh and criticism has more life in youthful voices.

In its search for the spirit, anthroposophy would like to find a field in which young and old people enjoy coming together. The Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society can be pleased that its announcement has been received by young people in the way it has been. But the active members of the Anthroposophical Society will not leave the Executive Council in the lurch either. Because at the same time as I am receiving approval from one side, I am also receiving a letter from the other side that contains words to which anyone who belongs to the Anthroposophical Society with their heart must listen. “The day may come when we young people will have to break away from the Anthroposophical Society, just as you once had to break away from the Theosophical Society.”

This day would come if we in the Anthroposophical Society are unable to realize in the near future what is meant by the announcement of a “Youth Section”. Hopefully the active members of the Anthroposophical Society will move in the direction of the Executive Council at the Goetheanum, so that the day may come when we can say of the young people: we must unite ever more closely with Anthroposophy.

This time I have spoken to the older members of the Anthroposophical Society about the “youth”; in the next issue I would like to tell the youth what is on my mind.

Newsletter from the Youth Section of the School of Spiritual Science.

In the letter which the committee of the General Anthroposophical Society sent to the members of the Society in response to my announcement of a youth section, there is a reference to the fact that I consider “being young to be so important that it can become the subject of a spiritual scientific discipline in its own right”. |

I really do consider this matter to be so important. Anyone who reads the description of my life in the weekly journal “Goetheanum” will understand why I think so. When I myself was as young as those who speak in this letter, I felt lonely with the state of soul that I now find alive in broad circles of young people. My contemporaries felt differently than I did. The life of civilization, of which this letter says that it no longer allows young people “to arrive at a worldview through any profession” and that young people “can no longer be led to any profession” through their “striving for a worldview,” was on the rise at that time. It was felt by young people as the latest stage in the development of humanity. They felt “liberated” from the extravagances of the ideological striving and secure in the prospect of professions that rose above the “safe” foundations of “science”.

I too saw the “bloom” of this civilization. But I could not help sensing that no genuine fruit of humanity would be able to arise from this bloom. My contemporaries did not feel this. They were carried away in the experience of “blooming”. They did not yet lack the fruit because they wasted their enthusiasm at the sight of the barren bloom.

Now everything has changed. The flower has withered. Instead of the fruit, an alien structure has appeared that freezes humanity in man. Youth feels the cold of civilization without a worldview.

In my contemporaries, there was an upper class of consciousness. They could rejoice in the fruitless blossom because its fruitlessness had not yet been revealed. And the blossom was radiant “as a blossom”. The joy of radiance covered the deeper layers of consciousness; the layers in which the yearning for true humanity lives inexorably in man. The youth of today can no longer find joy in the withered blossom. The upper layers of consciousness have become barren, and the deeper layers have been laid bare; the longing for a worldview is evident in the hearts, and it threatens to wound the soul life.

I would like to say to today's youth: do not scold the “old people” who were young with me forty years ago too much. Of course, there are superficial people among them who even today vainly flaunt their emptiness as superiority. But there are also those among them who, in resignation, bear the fate that has denied them the living experience of their true humanity.

This fate placed them in the last phase of the “dark” age, through which the grave of the spirit was dug in the experience of matter.

But youth is placed at the grave. And the grave is empty. The spirit does not die and cannot be buried.

Being young has become a mystery for those who experience it today. Because in being young, the longing for the spirit is laid bare. But the “light” age has dawned. It is just not felt yet because most people still carry the after-effects of the old darkness in their souls. But anyone who has a sense of the spiritual can know that it has become “light”.

And the light will only become perceptible when the riddles of existence are reborn in a new form.

Being young is one of the first of these riddles. How do you experience being young in a world that has become frozen in growing old? This is the question of feeling that lives in young people today.

Because being young has become such a human riddle, it can only find a living solution in “a spiritual scientific discipline of its own”.

In such a discipline, being young will not be spoken of in empty phrases, but the light that must fall on being young will be sought in it, so that one can perceive oneself in one's humanity.

Today, being young means wanting a world view that can fill one's life's work with warmth. It fears the professions that a civilization without a world view has created. It wants to see the profession grow out of humanity, not humanity crushed by the profession. To find one's way in the world without losing one's humanity in the search, requires a living relationship of the soul to the world. But this only awakens in the experience of the world view. The announcement of the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society was made in such an attitude. In such an attitude, the Council would like to unite young anthroposophists in a youth section to work towards a life of true humanity. But there is something else I would like to say to our younger members. If we succeed in giving the Youth Section the right content, those who have understood in their anthroposophical lives how to grow old in the right way will want to join forces with the youth. Let us hope that the young people will not then say: we will not sit at the same table with the “old”. For Anthroposophy should have no age; it lives in the eternal that brings all people together. Let the young find in the Anthroposophical Society a field in which they can be young. But the “old”, if they take up Anthroposophy in their whole being, will feel the pull of the young. They will find that what they have conquered through old age is best communicated to young people. After all, young people will struggle in vain for true humanity if they flee the humanity into which they must one day enter. In the course of the world, the old must rejuvenate itself again and again if it does not want to fall prey to the formless. And young people will find what they need with the genuine “old” anthroposophists, if they do not want to arrive one day at an age of their own, from which they would like to flee, but cannot.

Newsletter from the Youth Section of the School of Spiritual Science

Wherever the “youth movement” appears today, it reveals that it lives out of deprivation. What does the young person, who becomes aware of his or her youth, “lack”? After all, there is so much to “learn” in today's civilization. It contains not only a wealth of knowledge, but an overabundance.

It is tempting to think that young people are confused by this overabundance, that they cannot “understand” the content of it. But experience shows that this belief is false. Young people “understand” quite well what civilization offers them. One can understand what can be grasped in thought. And our present-day civilization, despite its overabundance, can almost be grasped entirely in thought.

The young person realizes when he begins to develop a relationship with civilization that he understands. And a right instinct tells him that this understanding, this thinking grasping should also be his further fate. But one cannot be young with “understanding” alone. One can only be young when one experiences with one's whole heart and soul what awaits understanding. And as a young person, one senses that one will grow old if one gradually leads the experienced into the understood.

Today's youth absorbs something from civilization that allows them to grow old, but not to be young. This civilization has almost nothing to give to the first years of life. One should enter the earth at the age of twenty today, then one could imbue oneself with the content of civilization.

This civilization has lost its spirit. It brings only matter into thought. These thoughts cannot be experienced; they can only be understood. And once they have been understood, they lie in the soul, incapable of transformation, as hard as stone. They are already fully ripe when they arise; that is why they cannot grow. But the young person must grow; and he wants what he takes up into his soul to be able to grow with him.

A genuine spiritual science can reveal itself only in thoughts. But these thoughts can be seen and experienced; they can be taken up by no one at a higher degree of maturity than he himself has. But they are akin to the human being's nature. They grow and mature with him. If someone gives me material thoughts when I am eighteen years old, I take them in the same way as I would if I were forty or fifty years old. If someone allows me to experience thoughts that arise from the spirit in their unfolding of humanity, then they may be seventy years old; if I myself am only eighteen years old, they will harmonize with my eighteen-year-old state of mind and grow as I myself grow.

The materialistic way of thinking and looking at things demands that young people fill themselves inwardly with “old things”. But young people want to experience their youth. Therefore, “experiencing old age” becomes a deprivation for young people. The Youth Section at the Goetheanum wants to give young people a living knowledge that can be used to grasp youth in a living way. Today's civilization has no thoughts with which one can experience “being young”. A real spiritual science will have such thoughts.

If you are an older person today and hear young people speak, you often have the feeling: oh, how old the speeches sound that come from the mouths of young people! But these are the speeches that young people find among the “old people” today. He absorbs them, but does not make them his own. In his desire to experience them, he feels false. He speaks words that cannot be true for him; and he carries his truth within him, without being able to reveal it to himself. It chokes him; it becomes a nightmare coming from within.

The young want freedom of breathing in a living spiritual life so that the nightmare will disappear. They want an awakening to a healthy spiritual outlook so that their consciousness can be filled with the experience of being young.

Young people want to be awake when they are young; but the thoughts of materialistic civilization only allow them to dream of it. But one can only dream when one has dulled one's consciousness. So the consciousness of youth must walk dulled through mechanical reality. Its hammer blows, its electric waves pierce into dreams. But they cannot bring about awakening. For they are not human; they are extra-human.

Spiritual science can be for souls that want to awaken. It does not just want to impart knowledge to people, but to bring them closer to life. Then it will be given to their freedom to transform life into knowledge.

People who believe themselves to be poets, but who are really just philistines, object: take away the dreams of youth, bring them to awakening, and you take away the best of their youth. Those who speak thus know not that dreams attain their full value only when illuminated by the light of waking. Mechanistic civilization does not bring the dreams of youth to joyful revelation, but rather crushes them as they arise, so that they become oppressive and burdensome.

Only in such images can we say here what the Youth Section wants to achieve. It will not publish a “programme”; it will not give an explanation of the “nature of youth”. It will try to bring to life what its founders themselves can experience of the deprivations of young people today. This will give rise to a “youth wisdom” that can unfold anew in life every day.

Immediately after the announcement of the Youth Section and ever since, young people living at the Goetheanum have expressed their desire to work within this section. Enthusiasm speaks from these expressions. In the first announcement, I said that the Youth Section will be able to work if it is understood for what it is meant. I truly believe that enthusiasm can bring about the right “understanding”. Not the “understanding” of which I have spoken here, and which is lacking in young people, but the kind that is called by the same word but is quite different. An understanding that comes not from the intellect but from the whole human being.

The longing of the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society “can only be to feel a receptive enthusiasm. Then it can hope that the life force of spiritual science is sufficient to give this enthusiasm what it would like to take. This board would like to live with the young in such a way that they can lead their youth towards old age in true humanity, because it believes that in doing so it will meet the needs of the young and give them what their yearning hearts desire.

I would like to address the younger friends in the Anthroposophical Society once more regarding the reasons for the founding of the Youth Section. It seems that two opinions are facing each other within the circles of our youth. One feels that being young is something that must be sought. They feel drawn to anthroposophy because they hope to find satisfaction for their search there. They have realized that this search must go to the depths of the soul, and that contemporary civilization cannot lead to these depths. There is a youth that searches for esotericism in this way because they have intuitively discovered that the true content of the human being can only be experienced in esotericism.

These young people will easily find the way to what the board of the Anthroposophical Society is striving for with the Youth Section. And this board will not interfere with anyone's independent striving. It will have a heart for this independence. But it will also be mindful of the fact that the cultivation of esoteric life has become its task. This concern will be his first. He will lead the Youth Section in such a way that esotericism is given its due, and he believes that he can also find true “youth wisdom” from true esotericism.

But there is another youth opinion. This is easily tempted to take being young in such an absolute sense that even the pursuit of esotericism seems to them like the absorption of a foreign body. They want above all, unperturbed by anything that comes from outside, to immerse themselves in their own youth and to understand it.

In the Anthroposophical Society, young people who hold this opinion also hope to find something. Otherwise they would not be there at all. But they believe that they must first bring Anthroposophy to life by activating their youth. The leadership of the Anthroposophical Society is far from criticizing this part of the youth in a philistine way. But it could easily happen that its intentions are seen in a false light by some young people. For it cannot deviate from its gained insight that the stream of eternity flows through the esotericism attempted by the Anthroposophical Society, towards which the youth aspires. He cannot fall into the error of believing that esotericism must first take on its true form through youth, since he knows that in esotericism youth will find the right paths to be able to be truly “young”.

I am saying this not because I want to point out a contradiction between part of the youth and the board. I do not see any antagonism; and in view of a practical world-conception such antagonism could not arise. The Executive Council is conscious of the fact that its tasks proceed from the spiritual world; and in all its activities it must follow the paths indicated to it from that source. There can be no antagonism in the field of its activity.

But it would be possible for youth itself to be drawn into contradictions if one part emphasized its striving one-sidedly in relation to the other. And that could do immeasurable harm to the anthroposophical youth movement. However, this will not happen if youth pays more attention to something it has learned from the “all-too-old” civilization than it often does. There is a certain tendency towards abstraction, towards speaking in mere concepts. I have already mentioned in the previous reflection how little good this abstraction does to youth. In truth, no one in the youth movement wants this either. But in talking about being young, about the ideals of youth, it is still there. There is even a considerable amount of “age” in today's youth. If, on the other hand, young people reflect on their true experiences, they will find that these are like questions, and that the esoteric side of the Anthroposophical Society at least offers them attempts at answers.

On the basis of such practical insight, an understanding will certainly arise between the various opinions in our youth movement. Through contact with esotericism, young people themselves can have an experience. If this happens, young people will realize that it is precisely through this contact that they can realize what they often have in mind in an indeterminate way. If this does not happen, it could easily be that some of the young people, not out of innate but externally absorbed “old talk”, will draw a theoretical curtain over the suggested experience.

If the young people understand each other, they will also understand the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society.

Newsletter from the Youth Section of the School of Spiritual Science

This institution cannot come about from abstract considerations “from above”. It must arise from the needs of our membership “from below”. The Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society has conceived the plan to form a Youth Section because it corresponds to what young people in our Society are seeking from the depths of their being. And it will shape it in such a way that these needs can be met as they arise.

The same must be true for the other sections. But for this to happen, the needs that arise within our membership must flow through the whole society and ultimately unite in what is expected of the Executive Council at the Goetheanum. We must therefore become more and more aware that the purpose of the Christmas Conference was not to form a mere “administrative board”. Of course, the “administration” must be there, and it should not be forgotten that it is necessary and that it has to develop care and accuracy. But the main thing will be that the attitude of the members of the Goetheanum Executive Council really places it at the center of the Society's spiritual interests. It should bring together all the spiritual interests that exist.

It is not the intention of this executive council to in any way restrict the initiative of the individual parts of the Society. But it should increasingly be seen as a necessity that everything that arises in the Society be brought to the attention of this executive council. It can then harmonize what is wanted in one place or by one group of people with what is intended by another. This board will not want to act in a one-sided way like an authority “from above”; it will make it its business to have an open heart and an understanding mind for everything that strives for realization from within the membership. In this regard, he would also like to be able to count on understanding in the sense that he will be met halfway, actively met halfway, when he wants to carry out something based on his initiative and the goals of the anthroposophical movement. In this sense, I said at the Christmas Conference: this board should be an initiative board.

If this board is increasingly seen in this light, then it will be able to serve as a true advisor in all matters concerning the Society. And it wants to be an “advisor”; because it knows that it would fundamentally contradict the spirit of the Anthroposophical Society if it wanted to be a “decider”. In his advice, he will appeal to nothing but the free insight of the members; but he will only be able to be a true “advisor” if the right attitude is brought to his position, which lies in the intentions and aspirations of the members.

The Executive Council at the Goetheanum would like to see as little as possible in the way of paragraphs and programs in the way of establishing a connection with the work in society; it would like to see the human element, which can also have an individual effect in every detail, come into general validity within society. And above all, it would like to achieve this in everything that is to be done for the School of Spiritual Science.

You can be sure of this: anyone who is free from prejudice takes the youth movement of today very seriously indeed. If you look around, not among your contemporaries, but among the older people of today, it may seem to you that the youth movement is not taken seriously, but it is quite certainly taken seriously by those who attempt real spiritual development.

Several years have passed since a small group of young people entered the Anthroposophical Society: they did not want simply to participate as hearers of what the Society gives, but brought to it those thoughts and feelings which young people today regard as characteristic of their age. This small group, which met in Stuttgart a few years ago, put before the anthroposophical movement the question: “How can you give us a place in this movement?” I believe that from my side this question was really understood at that time. It is not always easy to understand the question which a genuinely seeking human being puts to his time; and young people now have a number of questions, entirely justified, which cannot be expressed quite clearly.

At the time when the youth movement and the anthroposophical movement first came into contact, it really seemed to me as if they were being led together by a kind of destiny, a kind of Karma. I must still look on it in this way; the youth movement and the anthroposophical movement have by an inner destiny to take each other into account. When I call up all that I have experienced through many decades in the endeavour to bring about a community among human beings who wish to seek for the spirit, and relate this to what has developed as a youth movement since about the turn of the century, I have to say that what was felt by a very small number forty years ago, and was then hardly noticed, because so few were concerned, is felt today within a youth movement which is becoming more and more widespread. In your words of greeting it was well expressed—how difficult it really is becoming for a young human being to live.

Although at other times there has always been a kind of youth movement, it was different from what it is today. If one talks to older people about the youth movement, they often say, “Oh well, young people always felt different from the elderly, always wanted something different. That wears off, balances itself out. The youth movement of today need not be regarded differently from the opposition brought by the younger generation against older generations at all times in the past.”

From many sides I have heard this answer to the burning question of the youth movement of today. Nevertheless this answer is entirely wrong; and herein lies an immense difficulty. Always in the past there was something among younger people, however radical they appeared, which could be called a certain recognition for the institutions and methods of life founded by older people. The young could regard it as an ideal to grow into the things passed down from older times, step by step. It is no longer so today. It is not just a question of involvement in academic life, but of the fact that the young human being, if he intends to go on living, has to grow into the institutions brought about by the older people, and here the young feel themselves strangers; they are met by what they have to regard as a kind of death. They see the whole way in which older people behave within these institutions as something masked. The young feel their own inner human character as alive, and around they see nothing but masked faces. This is something that can bring the young to despair—that they do not find human beings among older people, but for the most part only masks. It is really so that men come to meet one like imprints, forms stamped in wax, representing classes, callings, or even ideals—but they do not meet one as full, living human beings.

Though it may sound rather abstract, it is a very real fact in human feeling that we are standing at a turning-point of time, as mankind has not stood through all history or indeed through most of pre-history. I do not like speaking about times of transition; there is always a transition from what went before to what is coming; all that matters is the specific change that is going on. But it is a fact that mankind stands today at a turning-point as never before, in historic or in prehistoric times. Significant things are going on in the depths of the human soul, not so much in consciousness as in the depths—and these are really processes of the spiritual world, not limited to the physical world.

We hear it said that at the turning-point from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the so-called Dark Age came to an end, and a new Age of Light has begun. Anyone who can look into the spiritual world knows quite certainly that this is so. The fact that not much light has yet appeared does not disprove it; men are accustomed to the old darkness, and—just as a ball which has been thrown goes on rolling—this too rolls on, through inertia. Our civilisation today goes rolling on through inertia, and when we look at the effects of this in the world around us, we feel it all has something in common. To describe these dead things in a living way is not easy, but for everything nowadays—one might say—documentary proof is required. Nothing is held to be justified in the eyes of our modern civilisation unless documentary evidence for it can be produced. For every scientific fact, for every assertion, and even for every human being, there must be documentary evidence. Before he can enter any profession or calling, he must have a certificate. In scientific life everything has to be proved. Anything not proved does not count, cannot even be understood.

I could say a lot about this certification, this having to be proved. It appears sometimes in grotesque forms. I will tell you of a little event connected with this. When I was young, though not very young, I edited a periodical, and was involved in a lawsuit over a small matter. There was not much in it: I went myself, and won my case in the first court. The plaintiff was not satisfied, so he appealed. I went again, and the opposing counsel said to me: “We do not need you at all, only your solicitor, where is he?” I said I had not brought one, I thought it was my own affair. That was no good. I had to use my ingenuity to get the case adjourned; and I was told that next time my presence would be useless; I had to send a solicitor. For in an appeal case it was not the custom for someone to represent himself.

I went away very much amused. And I forgot the whole thing until the day before the case was to continue. I went into the town and thought: I cannot let myself be told again tomorrow that I am unnecessary. As I went along the street I saw a solicitor's brass plate and went in. I did not know him, or anything about him. He said: “Who recommended me to you?” I said: “Nobody.” I had thought somebody else would not do it any better, and took the first I saw. He said: “Write out on a piece of paper what I should say tomorrow.” I wrote it for him and stayed away, according to custom. A few days later he wrote that I had won the case.

I could tell you a hundred things like this out of my own life. It is everywhere regarded as irrelevant to have an actual human being present; the important thing is that accepted procedures should be followed. Young people feel this. They do not want documentary proof for everything, but something different. Instead of proofs, they would put experience. Older people do not understand this word, “experience.” It is not in their dictionaries and can appear quite horrible to them; to speak of spiritual experience is horrible for many people. This is what we find at the transition from a dark age to an age of light; it signifies a radical turning-point.

It is quite natural that this transition should present itself in two streams, so to speak. The anthroposophical movement and the youth movement have by destiny a certain connection. The anthroposophical movement unites people of every class, occupation and age, who felt at the turning-point from the 19th to the 20th century that man has to place himself into the whole cosmos in a quite different way. For him it is no longer simply a question of something being confirmed by evidence or proved—he must be able to experience it. Hence it appeared to me quite in accordance with Karma that the two movements were led together. And so a kind of youth movement developed within the anthroposophical movement. And finally, when the anthroposophical movement was refounded at Christmas at the Goetheanum, this soon led to the institution of a youth section, which was to take care of the concerns that arise in the feelings of young people in a most sincere and genuine way.

An immensely encouraging beginning was made by our anthroposophical youth movement in the first months of this year. There are reasons for a certain stagnation at present; they lie in the difficulties of the youth movement. These difficulties arise because it is so hard to give something form out of the existing chaos, in particular the present spiritual chaos. To give something form is much more difficult than ever before. The strangest things happen to one today. Those who know me will know that I am not at all inclined to boast. But when I heard Rector Bartsch speak yesterday in such a warm and friendly way, saying that when I come to the anthroposophical society here I am welcomed like a father, I had to say, yes, there is something in it. So I am addressed as a father—and fathers are old; they can no longer be quite young. In Dornach, when we began the youth section, I suggested that the young people should speak out clearly and frankly. A number of young people spoke well and honestly. Then I spoke. Afterwards, when it was all over, somebody who knows me well said, after he had listened to everything: “All the same, you are the youngest among the young people.” This can happen today; in one place one is addressed as an old father, in another as the youngest among the young. Ideas no longer have to be quite fixed. But if you climb up and down the steps of the ladder, sometimes as the little old father, sometimes as the youngest of all, you have a good opportunity to catch a glimpse of what is living in people's feelings.

I said that the youth section was stagnating. This will pass. It has happened, because it is, to begin with, extremely difficult for a young mind to think its way into something which it feels quite clearly. Our civilisation, in losing the spirit, has lost the human being! If I now speak more from the background of existence, I see that young people who have come down recently from the spiritual world into physical existence have come with demands on life quite different from the demands brought by those who came down earlier. Why is this so? You do not need to believe me. But for me this is knowledge, not merely belief. Before one comes down to physical earthly existence one passes through much in the spiritual world which is fuller of meaning and mightier as an experience than anything passed through on earth. Earthly life should not be undervalued. Without earthly life, freedom could never be developed. But the life between death and rebirth is on a grander scale. The souls who came down are the souls which are in you, my dear friends. These souls were able to behold an immensely significant spiritual movement taking its course behind physical existence in regions above the earth—the movement which I call within our anthroposophical society the Michael movement.

This is so. Whether the materialistic man of today' is prepared to believe it or not, it is so! The leading power for our present time, who could be named in a different way, but whom I call the Michael power, is trying to achieve, within the spiritual leadership of the earth and of mankind, a transformation of all soul-life upon the earth. Men who became so very clever during the 19th century have no inkling of the fact that the attitude of soul which developed during the 19th century as the most enlightened attitude has been given up by the spiritual world. An end to it has been ordained, and a Michael community of beings, who never walk upon earth, but lead humanity, seeks to bring about among men a new attitude of soul. The death of the old civilisation has come.

When the Threefold Commonwealth movement, which failed through the death of the old civilisation, was going on, I often said: “We have today no threefold membering in public life according to the spirit, according to law and so on, and according to economic life—but we have a threefold membering in terms of phrases, conventions and routines. Instead of spiritual life, there are phrases; and routine dominates economic life, instead of goodwill towards men, love for men, which should be ruling there.”

This condition of soul, in which people are stuck fast, should be replaced by another, which arises from man himself and is experienced in man himself. That is the endeavour of spiritual beings who have taken over the leadership of our age and can be recognised in the signs of the times. The souls which have descended to the earth in your bodies saw this Michael movement and came down under this impression. And here they grew up in the midst of a humanity which really excludes man, which makes man into a mask. The youth movement is thus a wonderful memory of experience before birth, of most significant impressions gathered during this pre-earthly life. And if someone has these indefinite unconscious memories of pre-earthly life, of the endeavour to achieve a transformation of man's mood of soul—he will find nothing of it here on earth. That is what is going on today in the feelings of young people.

The anthroposophical movement springs from the revelation of the Michael movement; and has the purpose of bringing the intentions of the Michael movement into the midst of human life. The anthroposophical movement seeks to look up from the earth to the Michael movement. Young people bring with them a memory of pre-earthly existence. So the youth movement and the anthroposophical movement are brought together by destiny. And everything that has happened through the interplay between these two movements appeared to me to come about in a quite inward way, not through earthly circumstances, but through spiritual circumstances, inasmuch as these are connected with man. Thus I regard this youth movement as something which can awaken unlimited hopes for the future of all that can be felt rightly as anthroposophical.

Of course we encounter things which are bound to arise from the fact that the anthroposophical movement and the youth movement are both at their beginnings. We have seen the Free Anthroposophical Society founded side by side with the Anthroposophical Society in Germany. This Free Anthroposophical Society had—again inevitably—a governing committee that was chosen or elected. I think this committee had seven members—somebody says there were nine—very well, nine; there were nine, but one after the other was politely discharged from office, until three were left. All very comprehensible. The Free Anthroposophical Society had the essential intention of understanding the experience of youth. Now a discussion on this subject developed. One after another the committee members had their capacity to experience youth in the right way disputed. Three remained, and of course they discussed with one another whether all of them had the experience of youth. Something quite remarkable arose, pointing to a link of destiny between the youth movement and the anthroposophical movement. It seems ridiculous, but is very serious. For when one investigates the great questions of destiny, one finds very significant things, and the greatness of destiny is often indicated in symptoms. When we had founded the Anthroposophical Society, we also had committee members who quarrelled terribly, and it was evident to me that eventually very few would remain, after they had politely dismissed the others. But to prevent it from ending there, the left side of a person would start quarrelling with the right side over which side really had the experience of youth. That sounds like irony, but is not. For it indicates that what can be called the experience of youth today lies deep within the soul, and the significant thing is that this experience cannot necessarily be expressed in clear words. In the age of cleverness so many clear words have been spoken! What matters is that we should reach experiences. And then this inability to find clear forms of expression should be recognised as unavoidable. The right to continue in a state of vagueness is in fact claimed. But something else is needed: a refusal to separate from one another because an impression of unclarity is given, and a willingness to come together and talk.

Above all I would like to express to you, my young friends who are sitting here today, the wish that all of you, whatever you may feel and think, may hold together with an iron will, truly hold together. This is what we need most of all, if we want to achieve something in approaching the great questions of today. We cannot always be asking whether someone else has a rather different opinion from one's own. It is really a question of finding one another, even in the greatest differences of feeling. This will perhaps be the finest achievement, that those who are young understand how to keep together in spite of differences in feeling. It is a fact that what young people miss most of all today is the finding of other human beings. Wherever they go, they find, not human beings, for the human beings have died, but masks, everywhere masks! This has had a natural consequence: a search by human beings for one another. And that is very moving; for all the various “scout” movements, the Wandervogel movements and so on, are all a search for the human being. Young people want to join with others; they are looking in others for the human being. This is quite comprehensible. Because the human being was no longer there spiritually, each one said to himself: “But I feel, all the same, that the human being must be there.” And they looked for the human being, looked for him in community. But we should not forget that this has something immensely tragic about it.

Many young people have experienced this tragedy. They joined together and believed they were finding the human being. But nothing of what they were seeking came to fill their community; and they became even lonelier than before. These two phases of the youth movement are evident: the phase of community, the phase of great loneliness. How many young people there are today who go in loneliness through the world, conscious that nowhere have they been understood.

Now the truth is that one cannot find the human being in another person unless one knows how to look for him in a spiritual way—for man is in fact a spiritual being, and if one approached a man only externally, he cannot be found, even if he is there. It is indeed lamentable today, how people pass each other by. Certainly, earlier times can be rightly criticised. Much was barbaric then. But there was something: a man could find the human being in another man. He cannot do this now. Grown men all pass each other by. No one knows the other. He cannot even live with the other, because no one listens to the other. Everyone shouts in the other's ear his own opinion, and says: “That is my opinion, that is my point of view ”. You have merely points of view, nothing more. For what is asserted from one point of view or another makes no difference. These things murmur among young people, perceived by the heart, not by the mind.

You can be sure it must be right to feel a connection of destiny between the youth movement and the anthroposophical movement. Young people did not come to Anthroposophy just because they wanted to try out this as well, after they had tried out many other things—they came to it from destiny. And this gives me the certainty that we shall be able to work together. We shall find our way to one another, and, however things turn out, they must above all develop in such a way that those human qualities in the widest sense which live among young people are taken into account. Otherwise, if real spirit does not spring forth from youth, something utterly different will come about. For youthful life is certainly there, and one will be able to feel it; but this condition of youth, if it is not filled with spirit, ceases early in the twenties. We cannot preserve youth physiologically. We have to grow old, but we must be able to carry something from youth into old age. We must understand the condition of youth in such a way that we can rightly grow old with it. Unless spirit touches the soul, the deepest soul, the years between twenty and thirty cannot be lived through without coming into grey misery of soul. And this is my greatest anxiety. How can we work together in such a way that our young people will be able to cross the abyss between the twenties and the thirties without losing their vital spirit, without falling into grey misery of soul? I have known human beings who in their mid-twenties fell into this grey misery of soul. For, to speak fundamentally, that which lives in the depths of young souls after the end of the Kali Yuga is a cry for the spirit.

INTRODUCTION

Rudolf Steiner's report in the weekly journal of the Anthroposophical Society, No. 25, June 29, 1924: "A number of younger members of our Society also participated in the agricultural course. At the end of the conference they still felt the need to gather together as a group. This took place during the early morning hours of June 17. In this gathering the younger friends spoke out of the depths of their hearts about their longing to approach—in their creative life and in their work—the insights out of the spiritual realm that unite the human being with the active forces of nature. It was an exchange out of the innermost soul of youth, wishing to move beyond fruitless materialism that does not unite with nature but rather separates man from her and condemns his work to fruitlessness. In this gathering I was allowed to point to paths on which this longing needs to move in order to arrive at a goal."

I.

The youth movement today is again searching for nature; anthroposophical youth is also searching for nature, but it is searching for the spirit in nature. This searching lives as a kind of call to the spirit in the hearts of those in this youth movement. This call to the spirit, however, was very little met in the civilizations stemming from earlier centuries, for humanity since the fifteenth century, through its particular world karma, had gradually to lose the spirit.

The spirit in nature can be lost most easily when one is already on the way to losing the spirit generally, for you must remember that death is the fundamental condition of nature's becoming. You must not forget that what is living, in order to exist, always needs the dead. You have only to think that in all living substance must be imbedded, as a bony or other form of scaffolding, that which was received out of the universe as the dead.

During our whole earthly life, therefore, we carry death within ourselves, in that we have to contain unliving, dead substance. We must have dead substance. It was known in ancient times that it is precisely this death element through which the living can gain revelations of the spiritual. From ancient Roman times there still resounds a phrase like, In sale sit sapienta (Wisdom rests in the salt.).

It was felt in the times when traditions of an ancient, instinctive clairvoyant wisdom still existed that in the dead salt, out of which the bones and other scaffolding are built, must be seen what differentiates the human being from other beings—those who, through the lack of such a lifeless scaffolding within, are unable to take into themselves enough spiritual light, sapienta (wisdom). We live again in a time of transition, however, in which the young person feels that even in nature around him he would find the death of the spirit if he were to approach this nature in the style of the last century, with the traditions of the last century.

Nature builds itself a wisdom-bearing crystal. This wisdom-bearing crystal can delight us when we wander out into nature. At the same time, however, we must be clear that the gods had to die—not an earthly death but the death of transformation, which means the transition into the unconscious—in order to be reborn in the light-reflecting forms of the crystal. Today, when we look out into what is dead, we must bring into our feeling again the fact that there, shining through to us, is the life of the gods that for thousands of years has lain unconscious in nature. We must find within our souls the possibility of sensing and feeling this light that can approach us from the sun, and also everywhere in nature, as the light of the gods, quickening our hearts.

Today let us try to feel this divine soul world, resting for thousands of years in all of the heaven-reflecting nature around us. The soul has much to search for here. The youth of today is searching for an ancient knowledge of humanity, the ancient knowledge that already in the period of ancient Saturn was connected with humanity and that, when the periods of Sun and Moon came, entered a kind of world sleep, a kind of resting consciousness, in order to form out of its own spirit-substance the foundation for earthly nature. The soul can only sense but cannot really penetrate through this earthly nature to the spirit, and thus earthly nature, even in summer, appears to the heart that feels young today like a snow-mantle of sparkling bright spirit crystals; yet it carries within itself death—which means unconsciousness—and challenges the soul to feel deep beneath this icy soul-mantle the fiery, living workings of the word, stemming from ancient times, radiating from the center of the earth out to earthly nature.

This appears complicated when expressed in this way, but it is actually very simple when it is sought for by youth today. When the call to nature sounds forth from somewhere, it arises from the souls of the youth. They wish to have a memory, a uniting with the divine source of everything earthly and starry, and this is what can be sensed when today's youth again searches for nature. In the searching of today's youth for nature and spirit there resides something of the deepest world karma, which actually can be comprehended only with great solemnity of soul.

Just think how in an earlier time—today we call it the time of Rousseau (we have a parallel back-to-nature movement in Germany in the Sturm und Drang period¹ that preceded Goethe and Schiller, though much wider circles than merely literary ones were involved)—let us think back to how the call to nature in this time sounded in an abstract, literary sort of way through broad areas of civilization. Just think of those warm, intense calls to nature issuing from the soul of Rousseau. Yes, many today will still be gripped if they listen to these calls. What has followed these calls to nature, however? "Nature, we want nature again," these young people were calling.

Goethe himself ominously called out in the cautious manner of the aged, "Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her; unbidden and unwarned, she receives us into the circle of her dance." Goethe did not want to allow to enter consciousness what appeared as the call for nature among the Rousseauists. If we try to imagine ourselves as the Goethe of that time, how he felt in relation to nature and how he approached the calls of the others, we can still experience today something like a slight shiver running over us. We can feel the shudder he felt in encountering this call for nature. This call seemed to Goethe to be something that was itself unnatural, and he wanted to be received into the dancing circle of nature without being bidden; he felt that nature neither bids nor warns.

Then in the nineteenth century came the fulfillment of this call for nature. It was the knowledge, the so-called knowledge, of nature, the ever-resounding call for nature in the most rigid, materialistic sense, not only in relation to knowledge but in relation to all of life. A horrible fulfillment of Rousseauism thus emerged in the nineteenth century, as if a kingdom of demons began to snicker when the people around Rousseau and others were calling for nature, and then laughed with scorn when nature was allowed to approach humanity in an Ahrimanic form, in the most outward Ahrimanic form.

This is the background, and when we look into the middle ground the mood of tragic karma appears, a mood in which something lying deep in the souls of the youth today can be raised into full consciousness only with the greatest inner soul difficulties, something that since the end of Kali Yuga has been lying there dormant. This call to nature must be found again, the ancient working of the gods that is present in everything that in nature is earthly, watery, airy, and fiery and that above nature illumines and weaves and lives. This ancient spirit of nature must be found. But how can we avoid a rain of wild demons? How can we avoid what followed the call for nature in the nineteenth century like a shower of wild illusions? This must not happen. The twentieth century must not become a materialistic one! Thus the voice of karma calls in the souls of the young people today: if you allow the twentieth century to become as materialistic as the nineteenth century has been, you will have lost not only your own humanity but that which is human in the entire civilization. This is what one who is able to hear such voices can feel again and again in the most manifold ways, where circles of young people gather today. It is this that makes many members of these youth movements so certain in their vague feeling. You can experience these young souls as vague, uncertain, shifting from one path to the other—and at the same time there arises out of this uncertainty and vagueness a certainty, not yet completely light-filled but carrying a certain strength within itself.

This strength may not be broken, it must not be broken. Anthroposophy would like to contribute something toward this, because it believes that the concrete spirit can be perceived in all the particulars of life—in the roots of the plants, in the deeds of the light above the plants, and in the soul-blessing of warmth penetrating the plants—because it believes that what has been given to humanity as animality can be experienced as an admonishing call. It believes that there is much to be healed in this animality. The animals are on earth for the sake of the human being. In order to relate to the animals in the right way, as to all nature, it is necessary to sense and feel and finally even know in all nature the individual spiritual beings.

This can also be felt today if previously one has recognized the necessity not merely to speak in a general way about the spirit but to search for the working of the spirit right into the individual details of agricultural activities and other activities concerning nature. I therefore felt the deepest sympathy in my soul when you proposed that we exchange a few thoughts today.

(A discussion followed here.)

II.

You see, this is the situation. What is it that continually makes those who have already found their way into the anthroposophical spiritual movement feel somehow uncertain? What makes them believe that strong support must be sought in order to find the way to what they are seeking? The reason for this is actually that the young people, who feel with all their hearts that we must seek the path to the human being in a new way, different from what has come to us from the wisdom of past centuries, are again and again—mostly due to outer conditions—thrown back into the old tracks. It has not been possible for the soul to perceive clearly what, in our time since Kali Yuga, must be revealed only unclearly, to perceive the hidden seeking of humanity that is not openly revealed in our time: to find the way into nature out of "nature" itself, to find the way into the spirit out of the "spirit" itself.

Our dear friend, Dr. Ritter, spoke of how he had been a peasant's child and how he had grown out of this peasantry. This process of growing out of the peasantry could be experienced in its archetypal significance in a time that unfolded when people like you were not yet even lying in your cradles. This time of uncertainty had already begun. Basically, you see, the life of the peasant, as it has unfolded over the course of the centuries, is only a myth today. This life is actually quite different, regarding the soul, from natural science and the so-called civilization that has become so remote from all existence. The peasant was really more spiritual than today's scholars. In the 1860's and 70's it could already be sensed how a kind of living spirituality within the peasantry was slowly dying out.

It could often be seen how the peasants were seized by the impulse to send their sons to the university. This was already the first sign of such peasant abstractions, this idea that arose in the last third of the nineteenth century. This is already quite different from the way it was earlier with the peasantry, who truly lived in harmony with nature. Certainly the peasants' sons also studied then, but not in the same sense as later, not as they did in the last third of the nineteenth century. Looked at from the peasants' viewpoint, their sons did not study but became priests. To become a priest united one with the consciousness of the peasant. To become a priest united one with the consciousness through which the way to the spirit is sought. It was this search for the spirit that the peasant wanted when he put his son through educational institutions. In the last third of the nineteenth century, however, these educational institutions gradually became poor in spirit, empty of spirit. At the same time the consciousness of the peasant also changed: his son must attend the university—and in relation to this another experience arose. The son, who becomes a stranger to us, enters a totally different life; he no longer belongs to us.

One can only suggest these things, for they would be able to be understood correctly only in life. In the overall coarsening of life toward the end of the nineteenth century there arose within the peasantry a kind of aversion to, and sometimes even hatred for, everything spiritual. I still remember a charming picture from a peasant's calendar, which was surely conceived by a journalist but which arose out of the mood of the 1860's and 70's. In a certain region of Central Europe a peasants' union was founded. The peasants banded together, and the representative of such a peasant union, depicted in this picture with a tassel cap pulled far down over his ears, was saying, "No lawyer, no teacher, is allowed to enter this union of peasants." This was the consciousness, you see: it was no longer known what to do with learning in all areas, even the area of theology. It was felt to be very clever to exclude ordinary learning from this union.

This really expressed an outlook that, toward the end of the nineteenth century, produced human beings who actually were only "images." Human beings actually became mere images. There were no longer human beings walking on the earth; with a few exceptions there were only images. And when the turn of the century came, the civilized world was populated not by human beings but by images. The time came when what should have been truth was changed in a strange way into its opposite. At times it was painful to see the things that were presented as truths. The teaching arose that even encouraged over-population in individual regions. It was said that if many people were born it was a sign that all was going well—in this way the increase in population was encouraged. This increase in population was understood as expressing true progress. if you looked at the matter spiritually, however, you had to say that through the influence of such a world conception more and more souls came to the earth from the spiritual world really before their time—beings who actually were spiritually premature and basically did not find the earth. The human beings of the last third of the nineteenth century did not find the earth at all. They were on the earth without finding the content of their being, and they went about like appendages of their intellects. That was what was so horrible, that human beings walked about like appendages of their intellects, not like human beings!

The twentieth century thus began, in which numerous souls were born who in turn, as others previously had walked about as shadows, as images, estranged from nature, felt the deepest deprivation regarding these human images and had to seek again that which is truly human.

Every conceivable outer social institution has been retained, however, and young people experience this as a kind of soul-depressing influence. If we were already in a position, through anthroposophy, to form the outer life as we are able to awaken souls, many things would be quite different. It would not always be necessary to speak about anthroposophy needing now to become "concrete"; rather it would be experienced that anthroposophy would be able to become world-forming if outer powers were not trying to prevent it.

Just think how we develop today, especially how we develop in our youth. Yes, Dr. Ritter had the possibility in the course of his early development to experience such a great agricultural estate as Koefering, which still retained its spiritual nature, while all around it the world was wallowing in materialism. This is indeed a phenomenon. There will always be such phenomena, however, in which you will find an outer refuge for precisely what youth is seeking. Anthroposophy must be somewhat like this, standing in the background, because, in a different way, it is not the intellect that is striven for in anthroposophy; one does not study, but rather one becomes, in the best sense of the word, a "priest," if one wants to learn. And if one can look at this transition that has taken place so unusually rapidly—the transition from the old way of becoming a priest, which has become a lie, to this new way of becoming a priest—something quite special can be encountered. It is a very unusual path—what has taken place in Koefering, for example—which you will understand much better if I describe it to you so that you can comprehend it in your own way: it is the path from the anthroposophical formation of the estate owner's being to the anthroposophical formation of the whole estate.

We must learn to understand in our hearts what it is that transforms the merely intellectual conception of the spirit, which remains estranged from nature, into the spirit that has been truly worked for, which finds its path again into the world of facts concerning nature. Therefore I have tried in this course to find my words, as it were, out of actual experience. Today you can find the spirit in no other way than by finding the possibility of clothing it in words given by nature, and through this even the sensations will grow strong again. Just think, you transform what you are already able to know today—for the time of Michael is here—transform what apparently lives only iii ideas into real devotion. Then you will be on the best path. You are on the best path of all if you transform things into devotion. Just think what everything could become in that case! Meditating means to transform what one knows into devotion, to transform the single, concrete things. If you express such things, of course, as I have done many times, you lay yourself open to being called audacious.

Those who have become old in the twentieth century—not in a spiritual but in a conventional sense—will not experience the deep feeling man can have if he is compelled to look upon the human brain as something that has developed (though in a somewhat different direction) in the same way as dung. You must sense these penetrating forces in the human being, however: the brain forms itself like a dung heap. Feel how, in manuring, this dung substantiality is returned to the world-creating forces, so that the spirit can receive it there in a much higher sense than the human spirit can receive what is given to it as material substance from within.

Let us look now at this human being: he takes in outer material substance and has no inkling of what he is taking in with the plant, what he is taking in from outside with the cultivated plants. He is ignorant about what he takes in from outside. And now it begins to work within him through the power of the gods. It has already begun to work when he transforms what he takes in from outside into taste on the tongue. Of this process, by which things are transformed, he still retains something of mere sense experience. Then it leaves his consciousness, and a mighty, wisdom-filled process sets in. Everything is transformed within the human being, making it possible for us to be able to grasp the spirit. What we thus work over unconsciously finally ends up in the dung heap that fills our brain. Let us learn to think that as human beings we are urged to offer this dung to the world in the right way, that we do not use it in such a way as to want to transform compressed dung into little machines for children! It is mainly in this way that the human being of the present day uses his brain. He does not manure the fields of the spirit with his brain so that the spirit might work in them; he makes mechanisms out of everything. You see, you must know what the brain is intended for—to manure the fields of the spirit for the gods that come down to human beings—and you must thereby acquire the chaste reverence that can arise out of such an inward contemplation of these matters. If you thus learn to intimate what takes place in the unconscious and in the subconscious and then begin to take up nature, formed in accordance with the image of man, into your knowledge, thereby beholding nature really in connection with the dung, you can see how within nature—slowly, gradually—there rises into consciousness something that otherwise works unconsciously within the human being. Then you learn truly to renew out of yourself what has endured for a long time only as tradition, what was belief and, like so many things that had to be propagated out of the ancient clairvoyant age—still penetrated by nature—lives unintelligibly in Roman sayings such as, "Naturalia non turpia sunt" ("All things in nature are beautiful"). If they do not appear beautiful, it is only because man cannot see their beauty, cannot sense their fragrance.

Try once to bring together what has lived as the attitude in ancient times with what has lived as the attitude in recent times. Let us look at the whole realm of Western culture. A large part of how one imitates nature consists of the fact that one washes. Certainly it is very good to wash, but by the way in which washing is done in these European-American regions, everything that is nature is simply washed away. In this washing man anesthetizes himself. We may recall how in Egypt there was also a great deal of washing. The Egyptian process of washing was still something that later in Greece was forgotten and was recalled only when they spoke of catharsis.

All this gives us the consciousness that when we go out into nature, to the surface of the earth, we are deep in the belly of cosmic being. We may then also regain that feeling which I actually still experienced when, as a very small child, I associated with miners, not with coal-miners but with those mining for metals. There were still some among them who knew that if you descend into the earth you meet spiritual beings that you cannot find on the surface of the earth. You meet there the organs with which the earth dreams and thinks about the universe. With those people, thinking was still something that lived within the earth. They still knew that if you look up, you see abstract stars, but if you become acquainted with what lives beneath the earth, then you see in the universe something you could call pictures, but pictures that spring forth, that are truly living. Thus at the end of Kali Yuga a person lived in a hopelessly dead knowing, from which he began to grow into something more related to the realm of feeling. If we are able to do this, we will gradually free ourselves from the shackles with which our time has fettered the abstract human being.

Therefore I must indicate again and again what can unite you as young people in a very special, intense way. What unites you is that you say to yourselves the following. Anthroposophy appeared among people who developed out of the godless thinking in their surroundings. These people then met anthroposophy, but they abstracted anthroposophy also. So it happened that anthroposophy was well understood by the older people around the turn of the century, but in a somewhat abstract way. They actually understood anthroposophy, and it is not just chance but a karmically necessary phenomenon that in the history of our anthroposophical development there was a period in which people were coming to us who in some way or other had already retired, who had left the surrounding world and entered a retired existence. Now, what do you believe had to be experienced again and again if one were responsible for anthroposophy? As long as people were stuck in their professions they said, "I can probably be of more use to anthroposophy if I am not an anthroposophist. I feel quite connected to it, but I cannot be an anthroposophist." And so they came—and even then often in a strange, inward way—only when they had retired. We have seen many people come into these circles in this way, and we have lived through it as a kind of tragedy.

Then there came the time when these older members should have worked actively. The twentieth century began, then the very difficult time of the second decade of the twentieth century, when those in their late middle age should have been active. This failed to happen. Those in late middle age were somehow dangling between passing their doctoral examinations—and this could also happen with proletarians and peasants—and not yet having arrived at receiving their certificate of retirement. All of life just remained dangling; there was no sense of direction. Those within anthroposophy thought that deeds had to emanate out of anthroposophy.

Then the necessity arose to take up the question of the threefold social order, to create a threefold nature in the economic life, in life as such, where spirit-nature could have lived. And this also would have come about if the threefold social order had gripped people's hearts—but this failed to happen. One worked with people who were somehow dangling between their matriculation diplomas and retirement certificates. This is the tragedy of these people.

It was impossible to go further. And now there exists this abyss between those who have retired and those who no longer value such diplomas and retirement certificates, who no longer have much respect for the doctoral examinations but just take them as a matter of course and who no longer take pride in them as people did in the 1860's and 70's, when people thought that it was not possible to see an individual in his spirit- permeated blood but only hanging somewhere on the wall, framed as a diploma. Such an attitude is no longer present, and I am often led to think, when I meet the youth of today, of an old friend of mine. He was already in his late fifties when I met him, and he had attained a modicum of success in a small town. When he reached age sixty-four, he connected this old age in a strange way with his youth, for when he had been eighteen he had fallen in love with a girl and become engaged to her, and now in his old age he wanted to marry her. The church in which his birth had been registered, however, had burned down, and so he could not get the birth certificate anymore and had to forego his marriage; this was still the time when a person had to be recorded somewhere, and he had to show papers everywhere to prove that he existed. It did not matter then if one existed; it only mattered whether it was recorded somewhere that one existed! The youth today are no longer able to believe in the same way what a doctoral diploma stands for—what any kind of certificate stands for—because they no longer believe that the one who has written it really knows anything.

Then came the time when in the depths of these young souls, particularly among the proletarians, a warm, eager striving began to unfold. At the same time, however, this youth felt a tremendous abyss separating them from the older generation. This abyss truly exists in all those who at the beginning of the twentieth century were between age twenty-five and forty-eight. If at the turn of the century one was between twenty-five and forty-eight years of age, there was little chance of remaining human. One just appeared human outwardly, by virtue of one's clothes. Late middle age already formed a kind of abyss.

With the youth of today it does not amount to much when anthroposophy is transformed more and more into abstractions, when it is transformed into ideas, concepts, and even science. Now the young people who come want to experience, to live everything in deeds, in the true understanding of nature. One cannot remain with that, however. I would like to emphasize this especially strongly. It has been said that the sword of Michael has been forged, but this is connected with something else. It has to do with the fact that in the occult part of the world there remains what must be prepared of this sword of Michael, which is really to be carried, in the forging, to an altar that is not outwardly visible, that must lie beneath the earth, that really must lie beneath the earth.

To get to know the powers of nature beneath the earth leads to the understanding that the sword of Michael, as it is being forged, must be carried to an altar that lies beneath the earth. There it must be found by receptive souls. It depends on your help, on your contribution, for this sword of Michael to be found by more and more souls. And it is not enough for it to be forged; something is really achieved only when it is found. You must have the strong but at the same time the modest self-conviction as young people that you are karmically called upon to carry the sword of Michael out into the world, to search for it and find it. Then you will have received what you are searching for in gatherings such as the one today. Then you will also be able to recognize what I had to say to you about anthroposophy, about all the difficulties of those people who were dangling between their doctoral examinations and retirement certificates. And you will recognize it in a truly instinctive-pictorial way, so that the spirit of abstraction, that frightful Ahrimanic spirit, is not able to touch you too. Think in mighty pictures of the fact that two words have connected themselves with the striving of youth—words that in the nineteenth century were no longer understood. If one hears Wandervogel (Wander-bird) one wonders, does a well-traveled person today actually know what in ancient times this wandering was, what the wanderer was? We must return to a pictorial experience of the soul. Does the human being today still know what a person had to go through when meeting the birds, what Siegfried had to go through in order to understand the language of the birds? Wandervogel: Wotan, Siegfried—this is something that must be felt again, must be understood. One must first find the way from the abstract conception of Wandervogel to Wotan, who weaves in wind and clouds and waves of the earth-organism, to the hidden language of the birds, with which one must become acquainted by reviving in oneself the Siegfried-recollection and the Siegfried-sword, which was only the prophetic precursor of the sword of Michael.

The way must be found from the wanderer to Wotan, how with opened hearts one can believe again in the hidden language of the birds. You can feel this path from the Wandervogel to Wotan, to Siegfried, and if you can feel this deeply in your souls you will also find the possibility of experiencing nature and knowing about these things. And then if you are still able to dream a little, you will be able to live with the heavenly dreams in nature.

This is something that we should not reflect on a great deal at first but that we can sense and permeate with feeling. If you do this, you will form a community in accordance with your heart—a community in which step by step you will find what you are seeking. Let us keep this alive in our consciousness!

Let it fill our souls!

• 1. Sturm und Drang, (Storm and Stress), German literary movement of the late 18th century that exalted nature, feeling, and human individualism and sought to overthrow the Enlightenment cult of Rationalism. Goethe and Schiller began their careers as prominent members of the movement.

There is no doubt that at the present time numbers of people are longing to know something of the spiritual worlds and even modern scientists have been at pains to discover paths leading to knowledge of the Supersensible. But in all these attempts to penetrate to the supersensible world, modern man finds stumbling-blocks created by the judgments issuing from modern scientific thinking with all the authority it commands; and in regard to the many sources from which people imagine that knowledge of the supersensible world can be derived, the prevailing opinion is that concerning the supersensible worlds there can be no exact knowledge in the sense of modern science, for none of the evidence put forward stands up to any valid test.

Now the anthroposophical Spiritual Science of which I am venturing to speak to you in these lectures, strives to reach exact, genuinely exact, knowledge of the supersensible world: “exact,” not in the sense that experiments are made as in domains of science concerned with the external world, but in the sense that inner faculties of soul otherwise slumbering in man during his everyday life and ordinary scientific pursuits are unfolded in such a way that the full clarity of consciousness implicit in really exact science is maintained throughout. Whereas, therefore, in exact scientific thinking, consciousness is maintained as it is in ordinary life and exactitude of method is strictly adhered to during investigation of the external world, in anthroposophical Spiritual Science we proceed by adopting an initial attitude of what I will call intellectual humility, saying to ourselves: “I was once a child and my faculties then fell far, far short of those I have acquired through education and through life and now possess as an adult human being.” It is quite evident that certain faculties which did not previously function have unfolded since childhood, and the question arises naturally: Is it not possible, then, that faculties are slumbering in the adult human being just as his present faculties were slumbering in his soul during childhood? Provided that certain methods are put into practice, these faculties can indeed be drawn forth from the soul.

In anthroposophical Spiritual Science these inner faculties must be drawn out in such a way that the methods whereby the actual approach to supersensible knowledge is made, are in line with our own development. The preparation for looking into the higher world presupposes exactitude of method. As I said in my last lectures here,¹ it is possible for “exact clairvoyance” to be acquired by methods as precise and systematic as those employed when the facts of ordinary knowledge are being used in the investigation of nature.

I shall speak less to-day of how this exact clairvoyance can actually be attained—I shall mention this merely in passing, for the two previous lectures dealt with the methods for the attainment of exact clairvoyance, and information about these methods is available from the book that has been translated into English under the title, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.

I want to-day to indicate why it is that in his ordinary life the human being is unable to pene­trate into the higher worlds. This is denied to him, primarily because he is only capable of per­ceiving the world in the actual present. Our eyes can perceive the world and its phenomena, our ears can hear sounds in the immediate present only. So it is with all our senses. We can only know the past of our earthly life in recollec­tion or remembrance, that is to say, in pale, shadowy thoughts. Just think how living and concretely real were experiences undergone ten years ago and how pale and shadowy are our thoughts and recollections of them to-day.

Everything that lies outside the present moment can only live in man's ordinary conscious­ness in the form of shadowy remembrance. But this shadowy remembrance can be kindled and fired into higher reality through the methods which, as I have said, I do not propose to discuss in detail to-day—through methods of mediation in thought, concentration upon thoughts, self-training and the like.

A man who applies such methods to himself, learning thereby to live in his thoughts with all the intensity with which he otherwise lives in his external sense-impressions only, acquires a certain faculty of observing the world not only in the immediate present. Depending upon the aptitude of the individual concerned, exercises leading to this result must of course be practiced for a long time, in conscientious, systematic meditation and concentration. Many a human being, especially in the present age, already brings with him at birth the faculty which can be developed by these methods. This does not mean that the faculty is immediately evident at birth, but at a certain moment in life it emerges from within the human being and he knows that had it not come with him at birth it would have been impossible for him to acquire it in the ordinary course of his existence. This faculty consists in being able to live within the thoughts themselves, just as through his body, man lives in the physical world.

Such a statement must not be taken lightly. Let it be remembered that man owes to his living participation in the physical world everything that enables him to claim an existence of his own. When he reaches the stage where without depend­ing upon impressions received through the eyes, ears and other senses he can unfold an inner life as active and intense as the life of these outer senses, an inner life consisting not merely of shadowy thoughts but of inwardly living thoughts experi­enced with all the intensity otherwise implicit only in sense-impressions ... then he knows the reality of a second kind of existence, a different form of self-consciousness. I will call it an awakening—an awakening to a life not outside the body but within the innermost core of being, while the physical body is as quiescent and as insensible to impressions from outside as is otherwise the case only during sleep.

If we think about our own inner life and being, we find that in ordinary existence we really only know what has been conveyed to us via the senses. But sense-perceptions tell us nothing whatever about our inner life and being. With ordinary consciousness we cannot look inwards in the real sense. But when the new kind of self-consciousness in the realm of pure thinking is unfolded, we learn to look inwards just as in ordinary existence we can look outwards, into the external world.

The experience then arising can be described somewhat as follows:—As we look into the external world, the sun or some source of light must be there to illumine the objects around us. Through the light that is outside us, we perceive these objects. When, in the process of pure thinking, consciousness of this second existence awakens—it is however a process of actual “beholding” as colourful and rich in content as sense-perception—then we can become aware of an inner light ... not in a figurative sense but as a spiritual reality ... a light which illumines our own inner life and being just as in the ordinary way objects are illumined for us by some external source of light.

This condition of human experience, there­fore, may be called “clairvoyance,” “clear seeing.” And this clairvoyance in the spiritual self-consciousness that has now been awakened, engenders, in the first place, the faculty whereby a man is able once again to be consciously present in every moment he has lived through during his earthly existence.

The following, for example, is possible—I say to myself: When I was 18 years old, I had certain experiences. But now, when the new conscious­ness has awakened, I no longer merely remember these experiences; I can actually live through them again with greater or less intensity. Once again I am the human being I was at the age of 18 or 15 or 10 ... A man can transfer himself in consciousness into every moment of his life and he thereby unfolds an inner, illumined perception of what, in contrast to the spatial body in which the senses are contained, may be called a “Time-body.”

But this Time-body is ever-present, ever in operation; it is not experienced in a succession of separate moments, but as one complete whole. It is present in all its inner mobility. A vista arises before the human being of the whole of his previous earthly life, whereas in ordinary circumstances he merely recollects this earthly life in shadowy thoughts. The whole course of his earthly exis­tence lights up for him, but in such a way that he lives consciously in each single moment.

When this inner illumination arises, a man knows that he is the bearer not only of a physical, spatial body. He knows that he is the bearer of a second: ethereal body, a body actually woven from the pictures of his past earthly life, but pictures which, with creative power, shape this earthly life itself, shape and mould the very organism and its activities. He thus learns to know the reality of a second man within himself. This second man is conscious of living within a delicate, ethereal world of light—just as the spatial body lives in a physical world. The world is revealed in its finer, more delicate formations; the delicate, ethereal formations perceived in this way underlie everything physical.

Strange to say, it is only possible to keep very brief hold of what is experienced in this finer body. A man who by the development of exact clairvoyance has filled his ether-body, or “body of formative forces,” with light, is able to perceive the etheric reality of the world and of his own being; but in most cases he will find that the impressions pass away very quickly; they cannot be retained. And he is aware of a kind of anxiety to return as quickly as may be to the perceptions of the physical body in order to be assured of an inner sense of consolidation as a human being, as a personality. He experiences his own self in his ether-body. In this ether-body he also perceives etheric realities of the higher world. But at the same time, he finds how fleeting all these impres­sions are; he cannot keep hold of them for any length of time, indeed he must always resort to some means of help.

By way of example, let me tell you what pro­cedure I myself adopt in order to prevent the impressions of this etheric vision from vanishing too rapidly. Whenever such impressions come, I try not only to perceive them but to write them down; in this way, the inner activity is carried out not only by abstract faculties of soul but is strengthened by the act of writing down the impressions. The point of importance is not the subsequent reading of what has been written but the strengthening of the activity which, to begin with, is purely etheric.

In this way a quality so fluid and evanescent that it quickly passes away pours as it were into the ordinary human faculties. This condition is not induced unconsciously as in the. case of a medium, but in full consciousness. An ethereal quality is poured into the ordinary human faculties. This enables us, too, to understand something of great importance, namely, how we can “keep hold” of a supersensible, etheric world (later on we shall be speaking of other supersensible worlds) ... a world which embraces the course of our life hitherto and also the etheric realities of outer nature extending to the sphere of the stars. This ether-world becomes a reality and consciousness of the self within this ether-world arises; moreover, we know that it is impossible, without returning again to the physical body, to keep a hold on this world for longer than at most two to three days—even when the faculties have been developed to a high degree. Certain powers of which I will speak presently enable one who is an Initiate in the modern sense to perceive all this with clear vision; such a man knows, too, what it is that he is able in this way to hold within his ether-body, or body of formative forces, without the support of the bodily faculties. It is the same as the vision that arises before the higher self-consciousness when, as the human being passes through the gate of death, the physical body is laid aside and >begins to decay. This vision, too, for the reasons given above, can remain only for some two or three days after death.

Through the development of exact clairvoy­ance, therefore, the first conditions of existence into which man passes after death, can be experi­enced; they are experienced in advance, with conscious knowledge. The conditions which the Initiate is able to experience consciously in advance, set in for every human being when the physical body is laid aside at death. But in the ordinary way a man can retain consciousness of these conditions for no longer than two or three days—that is to say, for as long as he is able, having developed higher knowledge, to hold fast his ether-body, or body of formative forces. (I shall explain presently why it is that the human being is, nevertheless, conscious during the existence after death.)

For two or three days after death the human being has, in his ether-body, consciousness of the etheric world. Then this consciousness fades away; he becomes aware that the ether-body is falling away from him just as the physical body fell away and that he must pass into a different state of consciousness in order to live on after death as a conscious individuality.

The reality of what I am now describing to you as the first moments after death (they are the first moments of the cosmic existence to follow) can be affirmed by one who has acquired the faculty of seeing into the higher world, because he experiences in advance the conditions which in the normal life of man set in only after death. Because he has developed the intensified consciousness of self that is no longer dependent upon the body, he experiences in advance, in his present con­sciousness, these moments which immediately follow death. He is able to shed light upon his own higher existence and to realise that he has within himself the light which during the first two or three days after death will reveal to him a world quite different from the world revealed to him by his senses during earthly life between birth and death.²

This inner illumination is necessary before it is possible to survey that supersensible picture of the course of earthly life which, as I have said, lasts for a few days after death. A man must kindle within himself a spiritual light which shines inwards. Instead of being aware only of the present moment in the way made possible by the senses, he will then reach a higher stage.

The attainment of further knowledge of the Supersensible depends not only upon a change in perceptive consciousness but also upon a change in the state of ordinary existence. Our ordinary existence as human beings is enclosed within the spatial, physical body; the boundaries of our skin also constitute the boundaries of our actual life. Our life extends as far as our body. Within this field of experience, we cannot reach what I have so far been describing as knowledge of the higher worlds. Knowledge of the higher worlds can only be attained when ordinary experience is trans­cended by consciousness that is not confined within the boundaries of the spatial body but partici­pates in the life of the whole world around. This extended consciousness leads to knowledge of the higher worlds. As I have said, on this occasion I propose merely to speak about the methods through which a modern Initiate acquires exact knowledge of the higher worlds. The rest is to be found in the book mentioned above.

When we have acquired the faculty not only of experiencing a second existence in the life of thought—an existence that still remains within the confines of the spatial body—but also the faculty of living outside the body, a further stage is reached. It is attained when we are capable not only of letting thoughts live with full intensity in our consciousness but of eliminating them at will as the result of systematic exercises and practice. By this means, consciousness arises of experiences outside the body. Let me give a simple example.

Suppose we are looking at a quartz crystal. It is there before our eyes. A person who is trying to make himself into a medium or to induce some kind of self-hypnosis stares fixedly at the crystal and the impression it makes puts him into a state of confused consciousness. Such procedure is altogether alien to anthroposophical Spiritual Science. The exercises it adopts are of an entirely different character and can be described as follows:—We look steadily at, say, a crystal, until we can entirely ignore it as an object physically perceived, and re-orientate our attention. A crystal is there before us and we learn gradually to see it not with physical eyes but with eyes of soul; the physical eyes are open but are not used for the purpose of looking at the physical crystal and in this act of inner cognition the crystal in front of us is eliminated, as a physical object, from our vision.—The same procedure may also be adopted with a colour; it is there before us but we no longer look at it as colour, we eliminate it from our physical vision.

Such an exercise can also be applied to thoughts engendered in the immediate present by circumstances of external life, or to those which arise in the form of remembrances or recollections of earlier moments of earthly life.—Such thoughts are eliminated, emptied from the consciousness, so that we are simply awake and in a state of consciousness from which the external world is altogether excluded.

If such exercises are conscientiously carried out, we discover that it is possible for our life to extend beyond the boundaries of our spatial body. Then, in the real sense, we share in the life of the whole surrounding world instead of perceiving its physical phenomena only.

Thereby, in complete clarity of consciousness, an experience arises which may be compared with recollection of the life passed through during sleep. Just as acts of ordinary perception are limited to the immediately present moment, so is our ordinary life limited to the experiences that have arisen in the hours of our waking consciousness.

Just think of it—When you think back over your life, the periods of sleep are always blanks sofar as ordinary consciousness is concerned. Nothing that has been experienced by the soul during these periods of sleep is remembered; remembrance, therefore, is a stream in which there are constant interruptions, but this fact is usually ignored.

The experiences of the soul during sleep arise like intensified remembrances in consciousness which has awakened to such a degree that with it the human being is able to live outside his body. This condition leads to the second stage of know­ledge in the supersensible world and we become aware, to begin with, of what we experience as beings of soul when the physical body is asleep and quiescent, when it has no perceptions, when the will is not functioning and when the soul has, so to speak, temporarily departed from the body. In ordinary waking life we can in this way recollect the experiences through which we have passed while outside the body during every period of sleep. But it is very important to understand what these experiences really are. The experiences of the soul from the moment of falling asleep to that of waking are, of course, experiences in a realm outside the body, and actual awareness of them is possible only when consciousness of life outside the body has awakened. At this stage, knowledge comes to us not only of something which, like the “time-body,” is illumined by an inner light, but with the faculty of waking remembrance that is now illumined by exact clairvoyance, we learn to know what really comes to pass in us during sleep. This experience will, at first, cause astonishment. Living in the physical body with our ordinary consciousness, we have within us, lungs, heart, and so forth; from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking we have, in very truth, not a personal, human consciousness but a cosmic consciousness. In this higher state of consciousness, it is as though the after-images of the planetary and starry worlds were within us. This may sound strange, but it is perceptible reality at this stage of higher knowledge. We feel ourselves within the all-pervading cosmic life and contemplate the world from this cosmic vantage-point.

Experiencing as inner reality what was round about us in ordinary life, during every period of sleep we live through in backward sequence, all the experiences that came to us here, in the physical world, from the previous moment of waking to that of falling asleep. If, for example, after a normal day we go to sleep, we live backwards over the experiences of the day—first the experiences of the evening, then those of the afternoon, then those of the morning. Thus during sleep at night, we live backwards through all the experiences of the day.

The development of the exact clairvoyance of which I am speaking here, is connected with this power of conscious recollection of the experiences of sleep. Just as in the ordinary way we can remember things experienced years ago in full waking consciousness, by means of this exact clairvoyance we can call up remembrance of this backward sequence of the day's experiences. And so in actual fact, this exact clairvoyance is an extension of the ordinary faculty of recollection or remembrance. We look back upon our experiences during sleep, knowing that in sleep we have been living outside the boundaries of the physical body in a cosmic existence which is a reflection of the whole life of the universe; during this cosmic existence we live backwards through the happen­ings of the day. We find then, that the time taken by this backward review is shorter than that taken by the experiences themselves in physical life. When we are able in the real sense to investigate this realm of existence through systematic practice and increasingly exact knowledge, we discover that this backward review takes place three times more quickly than the physical experiences in our ordinary consciousness. Let us say that a man is awake for two thirds of his whole life and asleep for one third—During the one third spent in sleep, therefore, he lives through the experiences which, in the physical world, have occupied two thirds of his existence.

When exact clairvoyance enables us in waking consciousness to remember the life of sleep, we also realise that this backward review is significant, not so much in itself, but as a foreshadowing. Ask yourselves what you think about a recollection of something that happened to you 20 years ago—You say: “I experience it now in shadowy thoughts of remembrance; but the remembrance itself is the guarantee that it is not phantasy but a picture of an actual experience in my past earthly fife.”—Just as remembrance itself is the guarantee that it is related to a real experience in the past so the conscious recollection of the experiences of sleep is the guarantee that in itself it is only the foreshadowing of something belonging to the future.

Proof that a remembrance relates to something in the past is not needed. When exact clair­voyance has been acquired, it is equally unneces­sary to prove that the recollection of these night-experiences is not a phantastic picture of the present. It reveals in itself that it has to do with the future—indeed with that moment in the future when the physical body of a man will be actually laid aside at death, whereas now, in exact clair­voyance, it is only figuratively laid aside.

By this means, knowledge arises of what the human being experiences after death, when the three days of which I have spoken, have elapsed. This process also enables us to understand the significance of those two or three days after death when the human being is aware of living in a cosmic consciousness, when from the vantage-point, of the Cosmos he once again surveys the etheric picture of his life, looking back over the course of his earthly existence. We learn to know that these first days after death are followed by a life which runs its course three times more quickly than earthly existence. This same know­ledge, after all, resulted from conscious recollection of the experiences passed through during sleep. The etheric vision which persists for only a short time after death is followed by a life lasting some 20 or 30 years, or maybe less—according to the age reached in earthly existence. Approximately—for everything here is approximate—this life runs its course three times more quickly than earthly existence. If therefore a man dies at the age of 30, the life of which I am speaking now will last for about 10 years; if someone has reached the age of 60 and then dies, he lives through his life in the backward sequence of events, in 20 years ... but all these periods are approximate.

With exact clairvoyance these things become known, just as a past experience is known through an act of recollection or remembrance. Thus, we learn to know that death is followed by a life in the supersensible world during which we live through the whole of our past earthly life in back­ward sequence. Every night we live backwards through the events of the preceding day; after death we live back over the whole of our earthly life. We experience it all once again in its spiritual aspect and thereby unfold a true judg­ment of our own moral worth. During the period after death we unfold consciousness of our per­sonal, moral qualities, of our moral worth, just as here on Earth we are conscious of life in a body of flesh and blood. After death we live in a world that is conditioned by our own moral qualities and our deeds on Earth. By living through earthly life again in backward sequence and because we are not diverted from true moral judgment by instincts, natural urges and passions but survey our life from a purely spiritual stand­point, it is possible for us to form a true judgment of our own moral worth.

The forming of such a judgment requires the length of time of which I have just been speaking. When this period after death has come to an end, the backward-flowing remembrance of our moral life on Earth fades away and we must now pass onwards through the spiritual worlds with a different kind of consciousness. Knowledge of this different kind of consciousness can also be attained by exact clairvoyance.

The attainment of such knowledge depends upon the capacity not only to live outside the confines of the spatial body but to unfold a kind of consciousness entirely different from that belong­ing to the physical world. At this stage the human being discovers that a supersensible, purely spiritual state of existence follows the period during which judgment of the moral qualities is formed—this period lasts, as we have heard, for a third of the time spent in earthly life. This is followed by a different kind of existence, by a life that is purely spiritual. But before knowledge of it can be acquired, exact clairvoyance must have developed to a still higher stage.

If you think about the experiences undergone during sleep, you will realise that the human being does indeed lead a life outside his physical, spatial body. But he has no real freedom of movement in this life. He has to make his way through the experiences that have come to him during the hours of waking consciousness—only in reversed order. And a man who through exact clairvoyance has attained supersensible insight into these experiences—he too feels as though he is confined in a world which he is able to call up into his clairvoyant vision but in which he can­not move, in which he is fettered. Freedom of movement in the spiritual world—this is what must be acquired as the third stage of supersensible knowledge. Without such freedom of movement, it is not possible for spiritual consciousness in the real sense to arise.

In addition to exact clairvoyance, a power which I will call that of “ideal magic” must be acquired. I use this term in order to distinguish it from the unlawful form of magic which resorts to external means and is fraught with a great deal of charlatanism. A firm distinction must be made between such practices and what I now mean when I speak of “ideal magic.” I mean the following: —

When a man surveys his life with ordinary consciousness, he can perceive how in certain respects he changed with the passing of every year or decade. His habits have changed—slowly maybe, but definitely nevertheless. Certain faculties have developed, others seem to have disappeared. Anyone who honestly observes certain faculties of his earthly life can say to him­self that more than once he became a changed being. But this change has been wrought by life; he has surrendered himself to life and life educates him, trains him, moulds and shapes his soul.

A man who is intent upon finding his way into the supersensible world as a real knower, in other words one who strives to acquire the power of ideal magic, must not only be able to make his thoughts so inwardly forceful and intense that he becomes aware of a second existence as described above, but he must be capable of freeing his will, too, from bondage to the physical body. In ordinary life the will can only be brought into operation by making use of the physical body—be it through the legs, arms, or organs of speech. The physical body provides the basis for the life of will. But the following is possible and must, furthermore, be systematically carried out by anyone who as a spiritual investigator wishes to add to the power of exact clairvoyance that of ideal magic. He must develop such strength, of will that at a certain point in his life he can, at his own bidding, get rid of some habit and acquire an altogether different one. Even with the most resolute will, it may take a man several years to change certain forms of experience, but it is possible, nevertheless. Instead of allowing life in the physical body to be his educator, he can take this education and self-training into his own hands.

Exercises of will such as I have described in the book mentioned above, will lead one who is striving to be an Initiate in the modern sense to the stage where he is able not only to be conscious during sleep of what he has experienced by day. He will be able to induce a condition which is not that of sleep but is lived through in full, clear consciousness. At this stage he is capable of movement and action even during sleep; he is not, as in ordinary consciousness, a merely passive being while outside his body, but he can act and be active in the spiritual world. If he is incapable of this, he will make no progress during his sleep-life. One who becomes in the true sense a modern Initiate has acquired the faculties whereby he can also be active as a self-conscious human being in the life which runs its course between the onset of sleep and the moment of waking. And when the will becomes operative while he is actually living outside the body, he will be able gradually to unfold an altogether different kind of con­sciousness, namely, the consciousness that can actually perceive what the human being expe­riences during the period after death following the one described. With this more highly developed consciousness, vistas open out of the existence which follows earthly life and of the existence which precedes it. We behold a life which runs its course through a spiritual world just as physical life on Earth runs its course through a physical world. We learn to know ourselves as beings of pure Spirit in a spiritual world just as here, on Earth, we know ourselves as physical beings in the physical world. And it is now possible to ascertain the duration of this life—the period during which we assess our own moral worth.

By integrating will into the life of soul in this way through ideal magic, we learn to under­stand the nature of the consciousness that awakens in us as adult human beings, and to compare it with the dim consciousness of earliest childhood.

As you well know, ordinary consciousness has no remembrance of these first years of child­hood. The consciousness of the human being in this period of his life is dull and dim; his entry into the world is wrapped in sleep. The ordinary consciousness of an adult human being is clear and intense in comparison with the dim, dark consciousness of the first years of earthly life. But one who has acquired the power to put ideal magic into operation in the way described, understands the difference between his waking consciousness as an adult and this dim consciousness of early childhood; he knows that he rises to a higher level as he passes from the dim conscious­ness of childhood into the clearer consciousness of adult years. And with knowledge of how the dreamlike consciousness of childhood is related to that of adult life he is able to understand how his adult consciousness is related to that illumined consciousness which, imbued with the power not only of exact clairvoyance but also of ideal magic, makes him capable of moving freely in the spiritual world. He learns to move freely in the spiritual world just as after early childhood when he had no such freedom of movement, he learnt to move about freely in the physical body. In addition, therefore, to knowledge of how the consciousness of childhood is related to that of ordinary adult life, he learns to know how ordinary consciousness is related to a higher, purely spiritual consciousness.

Thereby a man is led to the realisation that in his life after death he is not only a spiritual being living among spiritual beings, but he can discover how long this life lasts. Here again I must quote as an example the recollection of an experience of earthly life. We realise that just as this recollection bears within it a reality belonging to the past, so this new experience bears within it the knowledge that the higher consciousness of the Initiate anticipates as it were this spiritual existence after death. And then we learn to know how this purely spiritual life is related to the earthly life that has stretched from birth to death.

When an Initiate looks back to his earliest childhood, he knows that as the years advance, the easier it is for him to look into the spiritual world. There are, of course, human beings who while still comparatively young have the power to see into the spiritual world. But this vision increases in clarity and exactitude with every year that passes. The faculty of entering into this other state of consciousness grows constantly stronger and with it comes clearer and clearer knowledge of the relation between the one state and the other. For example: a man has reached the age of forty and is only able, let us say, to remember back as far as his third or fourth year. By studying how the length of the period of the dreamlike consciousness of childhood is related to these forty years, we learn to recognise that the spiritual life after death will be longer than the span of an earthly life by as many times as this earthly life as a whole is longer than the dreamy life of earliest childhood; hence the life after death lasts for many centuries. The period during which the moral life is re-experienced and assessed after death is followed by a purely spiritual life during which man lives for many centuries as a spiritual being among other spiritual beings. During this period of existence, he has around him the tasks which belong to the spiritual world, just as here, in earthly existence, he has around him those which belong to the physical world.

When exact clairvoyance and the power to move freely in the spiritual world have been acquired, the nature of these tasks is revealed.—All the forces which finally lead over to a new life on the Earth are drawn from this spiritual world in which the human being lives after death. The future life on Earth stands there as a goal from the very beginning of the life after death. And this life on Earth as a human being ... it is in very truth a microcosm ... this micro­cosm is the outcome of great and mighty expe­riences in the spiritual world after death.

Now a seed in the physical world is minute—nevertheless it unfolds and later on will grow into a large plant or animal. It is also possible to speak of a spirit-seed which the human being unfolds and develops when his physical life on Earth is over. In communion with Spiritual Beings and out of the spiritual forces of the universe, he elaborates a spirit-seed for his new earthly life. This process is not a recapitulation of the past earthly life but embraces modes of activity and realities of being far greater and mightier than can ever exist on Earth. In his post-earthly existence, amid the experiences and realities of the spiritual world, the human being prepares his future earthly life.

I have spoken of the cosmic consciousness which arises in human beings after their death.—This cosmic consciousness is, after all, present every night during sleep, although in such dimness that, to use a contradictory expression, it is really an ‘unconscious consciousness.’—Because they have this cosmic consciousness in their post-mortem, spiritual existence, human beings live together not only with other spiritual beings who never come down to the Earth, having their abode in worlds of pure Spirit, but paramountly with all the souls who are either incarnate in human physical bodies or, having themselves passed through the gate of death, have also entered into the cosmic consciousness that is common to all.

The relationships woven on Earth between soul and soul, in the family, among individuals who have found one another inasmuch as they have met in physical bodies—all such ties in their earthly form are laid aside. What men experience as lovers, as friends, as associates of other human beings near to them in some way, in short, all experiences in the physical body—all are laid aside just as the physical body itself is laid aside. … But because these ties of family, of friend­ship, of love and affection have been unfolded here, on the Earth, they are transmuted after death into those spiritual experiences which help to build a later life.

Even during the period when the moral worth of the past life is assessed, the human being is working not for himself alone but for and in communion with souls who were esteemed and loved by him on Earth.

Through exact clairvoyance and through ideal magic these things become matters of actual knowledge, of direct vision, not of mere belief. Indeed, it may truly be said that in the physical world an abyss stretches between souls, however dear they may be to one another, for their meeting takes place in the body and the relationships between them can only be such as are determined by the conditions of bodily existence. But when a human being himself is in the spiritual world, the physical body belonging to one whom he loved and has now left behind does not constitute an obstacle to living communion with the soul. Just as the faculty for “seeing through” physical objects must be acquired before it is possible to gaze into the spiritual world, so the human being who has passed through the gate of death can penetrate through the bodies of those he has left behind, and enter into communion with their souls while they are still living on the Earth.

I wanted to speak to you in this first lecture of how perception of the supersensible life of man can be developed. I have tried to indicate that when we strive to unfold exact clairvoyance and the power of ideal magic, it is possible to speak with real knowledge of the higher worlds, just as exact natural science is able to speak about the physical world. As we learn to penetrate more and more deeply into these higher worlds—and undoubtedly there are human beings who by developing their faculties will be capable of this—we shall find that no branch of science, however highly developed, can deter us from accepting the knowledge which can be revealed through exact clairvoyance and ideal magic concerning man's existence not only on the Earth between birth and death but also between death and the return to earthly life through a new birth.

In the lecture tomorrow I shall speak of the impulse brought into the life of man on Earth by the Christ Event, the Event of Golgotha. It will then be my task to show that the knowledge of which I have been speaking, inasmuch as it is a concern of every single individual, sheds light upon the whole evolution of the human race on Earth and can therefore also reveal what the entry of Christ into earthly existence signified for man­kind.

The aim of these lectures is to show, on the one hand, that in speaking of supersensible know­ledge there is no need to be at variance with the exact scientific thinking of modern times. The theme of the lecture tomorrow will be that the Mightiest of all Events in the life of mankind on Earth—the Christ Event—is revealed in a new and even more radiant light to souls who are willing to receive knowledge of the supersensible world in the way set forth.

To-morrow, then, I shall be speaking of the relation of anthroposophical Spiritual Science to Christianity.

• 1. Knowledge and Initiation, 14th April 1922; Knowledge of Christ Through Anthroposophy, 15th April 1922.
• 2. The lectures were delivered by Dr. Steiner in three sections as indicated in the text, translations being given after each.

At the present time, opposition to what I will call anthroposophical knowledge of the Spirit comes mainly from two sides. I alluded briefly in the lecture yesterday to the antagonism of natural scientific thinking which maintains that supersensible knowledge is beyond the reach of human faculties. From this side, therefore, Anthroposophy is regarded as unworthy of any serious consideration.

We shall be more concerned to-day with opposition of a different character. It comes from people who feel that Anthroposophy deprives them and their fellow-believers of their inward connection with Christ. In their own way, such people are usually very devout Christians and it is from their very piety that the antagonism is born. They feel that man's relation to Christ should be the outcome of simple, naive devotion of the heart and soul and that this is disturbed and confused when intellectual knowledge is brought to bear upon the Christ Being. The one desire of such people is that the strivings of simple human hearts shall be left undisturbed by any attempt to speak of Christ in terms of intellectual understanding.

Due-respect must, of course, be paid to such feelings. Nevertheless, in their attitude to Anthroposophy these people are entirely in error. If they realised the truth, they would find that Anthroposophy helps them to tread the Path to Christ; they would find that all the longings which draw them to Christ in simplicity and devoutness of heart are inwardly strengthened by what Anthroposophy has to say concerning Him.

I should like to illustrate this from different points of view.—We will think; to begin with, of the character of the religions life, of the religious consciousness of men in different epochs of human evolution on the Earth.

Let us go back to ancient times.—You will see later that this historical survey is not superfluous but will actually clear away many misunderstandings prevail and at the present time. Evidence and knowledge concerning these very ancient epochs cannot be obtained from historical documents but only through the methods of Spiritual Science of which I spoke yesterday through the development of those faculties of inner perception described yesterday as the means whereby the supersensible nature of man and his supersensible destiny are revealed. We find that in these olden tithes, men were instructed by these who were disciples of the Mysteries. External documents have practically no information to give about the ancient Mysteries, far such indications as still exist are of very much later date and tell us nothing of what the Mysteries really were.

The Mysteries were centres of spiritual life and culture in which religion and science were a unity. Sheer veneration, superhuman in its intensity, went out from the pupils to their great Teachers, or Gurus in these Mysteries. And when other men desired to satisfy their inner longings for religion, they turned to those who were the pupils of these Teachers, receiving from them the knowledge of the universe and its laws which the disciples of the Mysteries had acquired through deep devotion. In order to throw light upon what, in the present age too, can be true piety and true veneration of Christ, I should like to speak briefly about the attitude and relation of a pupil in olden times to his Guru or Teacher in the Mysteries.

We find, first of all, that these Teachers were regarded by their pupils as being divinely inspired. When they spoke with the fire of inspiration that had been kindled in them in the Mysteries and through the sacred rites, their pupils felt that the words were not uttered by men but that the Divine Powers of the universe were speaking out of human lips.

This was not a symbolic conception but an actual experience in the pupils of the ancient Mysteries. And you can imagine the depth and intensity of veneration in such a pupil when he knew that a Divine Being, a God—not a human being—was speaking to him through the lips of his Teacher. Strange as it seems to us to-day, the following was the typical attitude of the pupils of the ancient Mystery-teachings.—They held the view: In still earlier epochs of the evolution of mankind, in the initial stages of this evolution, Divine-Spiritual Beings themselves descended—in the spiritual sense, of course—to the Earth. These Divine-Spiritual Beings did not incarnate in bodies of flesh but by way of spiritual knowledge entered into communion with those who were the first Gurus, the first Teachers in the Mysteries; and the primary instruction concerning what must be taught to men in order that they may enter into real connection with the spiritual world, came from these Divine-Spiritual Beings themselves. Thus, it was held that the teachings once transmitted to men by the Gods themselves had - passed down the generations to the disciples of the Mysteries in every epoch.

You will say this amounts to an assertion that the origin of human wisdom lies in supersensible worlds. But here we come to a domain that is still wrapped in complete obscurity. Think, for example, of the explanation usually given of the origin of speech. There are people who believe, in accordance with the Darwinian theory, that human speech has evolved from the sounds uttered by animals. But there are and have been men—above all it was so up to a comparatively recent past—who attribute a divine origin to human speech.

I shall not enlarge upon this particular point for it would lead too far to-day. It is enough to say that what gave rise to these feelings of deep reverence in the disciples of the Gurus was the conviction that the teachings received from their lips had once been imparted to mankind by the Gods themselves.

What was the aim and goal of this kind of discipleship? Discipleship itself consisted in this: the pupil gave himself up to his Guru in utter veneration and devotion; the Guru was the link connecting him with the spiritual worlds; this Teacher was regarded as the one and only channel for the Divine. The pupil felt that whatever qualities he himself possessed, whatever powers he unfolded were due to his Teacher; he felt that he owed everything to his Teacher. From the Teacher he received instruction—primarily concerning the direction of his thoughts. His thoughts must not be concerned with the material world of sense but through the power implanted in his soul by the Guru, using what were then legitimate methods of suggestion, the heart and soul, of the pupil were directed entirely to the Supersensible. In acts of ordinary sense-observation, thoughts strike as it were against the external objects ... when we think about a table or a tree, our thought strikes against the table or the tree ... But under the influence of the Guru the pupil's thoughts became translucent, so that he saw nothing that is in the physical world but with the vision of thought he gazed into those supersensible worlds I described to you yesterday in terms of ,modern Initiation-science, It was essential, too, for the pupil to experience the reality of these supersensible worlds, and to this end instruction was given him concerning speech. When we speak in ordinary life, we share with others, thoughts that are either of our own shaping or have been conveyed to us in some way; in short what flows into our speech has its origin in the physical world. The Guru imparted to his pupil certain mantric utterances, words half-declaimed, half-spoken, the purpose of which was to educate him to pay attention not so much to the meaning of the words but rather to experience the currents of the Divine Cosmos itself in the flowing sentences. The mantram itself was uttered in such a way that the divine realities in the world and in the human being might pour through the words; the actual meaning of the words of the mantram was of no importance. Thus, by making his thoughts translucent, the pupil was to become capable of beholding the Divine. When declaiming the mantrams, he was not to heed! the meaning of the words, but the divine power streaming through them was to flow over into the acts performed in the sacred rites. The pupil's will was to be directed to the Divine through the rites and ceremonial. Even to-day you can find an indication of this in the Buddha posture. The position in which the limbs are held is quite unsuitable for earthly activities; indeed, the human being is lifted away from the earthly world and, I together with the acts he is performing inwardly is led upwards to the Divine.

What was the aim of such procedure? The soul of the pupil, directed in this threefold way to the Divine, was to become capable of turning evil, sin and human transgression in the direction of .those supersensible worlds described to you yesterday, I told you that with modern Initiation-science, too, man can penetrate into the worlds in which he lives as a being of soul-and-spirit before entering earthly-existence; he descends from these worlds in order to unite with a body provided by the father and mother, and when he has passed through the gate of death, returns thither to prepare for another life on Earth. The aim of these godlike Teachers in the ancient Mysteries was not only to turn the gaze of the pupil towards the supersensible worlds but to kindle in him a force of thinking akin to prayer, a force born of the divine power flowing in the mantric utterances, a force of deepest veneration while performing the sacred rites. Imbued with this power the pupil was then able to turn the tide of sinfulness on the Earth towards the supersensible worlds. These pupils in turn imparted to other human beings what they themselves had been taught in the Mysteries and thus the content of civilisation in those ancient times took shape.

Now upon what basic assumption did these teachings rest? The basic assumption was that the world in which man lives here on Earth does not, like the Divine world, encompass his whole being. In those olden times the Guru taught his pupil: This world in which you are living between birth and death comprises the other kingdoms of nature, but not the deeper being of man. And apart altogether from the conception that human activities between birth and death were fraught with sin, the pupil was taught to realise None of my experiences here in the world between birth and death, none of the deeds I perform are an expression of my full manhood, for that belongs to supersensible worlds.

Every pupil in those ancient times knew with complete certainty in certain moments of life that before descending to the Earth he had lived in a supersensible world and would return thither after death. This clarity of insight was due to a primitive, dreamlike clairvoyance which he need not acquire by effort since it was a natural faculty in all human beings. Thus, the pupil knew: When my actions and life are concerned only with what exists here, on the physical Earth, my full manhood is not in operation. I must guide the forces within me to those spiritual worlds where they truly belong.

The aim of the ancient Mysteries was that by the ceremonial rites and the divine power flowing through the sounds of the mantrams, the forces which man on the Earth cannot turn to good account in his actions should be led upwards and away from the earthly world to the super-earthly, supersensible worlds—for it is there and there alone that man lives in the fullness of his being.

The Gurus brought home to their pupils that when the human being has passed through the gate of death he knows that his actions and achievements on Earth fall short of what his full manhood demands; he knows that compensation must be made in the spiritual world for actions which on the Earth are full of imperfection and fraught with unwisdom.

Knowledge of the supersensible worlds includes the realisation that what remains imperfect on the Earth can be raised nearer to perfection in the supersensible worlds.

But as we shall see, conditions in the days of the ancient Mysteries were quite different and this difference must be recognised and understood to-day. The pupils in those olden days learned from their Teachers that when man has passed through the gate of death and has lived for a certain time in the supersensible world, a sublime. Spiritual Being comes before him, a sublime Being Whose outer expression is the Sun and its forms of manifestation. Hence the sages of the ancient Mysteries spoke of the Divine Sun Being. Just as we say that the soul of a man expresses itself in his physiognomy and play of countenance, so did the men of old conceive the Sun with its movement and forms of manifestation to be the physiognomic expression, the revelation of the sublime Sun Being Who was hidden from their sight on Earth but Who came before them after their death, helping to make more perfect their shortcomings and imperfect achievements in earthly life. “In deepest piety of heart, put your trust in the sublime Sun Being Whom you cannot find on the Earth, Who will be found only in the spiritual worlds ... put your trust in the mighty Sun Being in order that after your death He may help you to take the right path through the spiritual world.” ... In such manner did the Gurus of ancient times speak of the Being by Whom all the imperfections of men are made good.

When the time of the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching, this ancient wisdom had already fallen into decay; little of it remained, save traditions and vestiges here and there. But Initiates-in the old sense of the word still existed—men who clung with the same devotion and pious faith to the Divine Father God by whom in days of yore the Divine Messengers, the Teachers of the first Gurus, had been sent down to Earth. These Initiates were well aware of the deep consolation that had been given to the pupils of the ancient Mysteries when they were told: After death you will find the sublime Sun Being—He Who helps you to transmute and make perfect all shortcoming of earthly life, Who takes away from you the bitter realisation that you have fallen away from the Divine World-Order. Those who were Initiates at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, however, knew that this same sublime Sun Being had come down to the Earth, had taken Manhood upon Himself in Jesus of Nazareth and since the death on Golgotha must be sought no longer in the supersensible worlds but among men on the Earth. This was how the Initiates spoke at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and on in to the third century of our era. To those who were willing to listen, they were able to say The Being from Whom true healing comes and for Whom you are longing, was within the reach of men in days of yore. Through a Divine Deed this Being came down to the Earth, into a human body and has lived since then as a supersensible reality within the evolution of mankind. And whereas the pupils in olden times had been obliged to go to the Mysteries and there be stimulated by the sacred rites to lift their gaze to the supersensible world, men of later time must learn on the Earth itself to make direct connection with the Christ Being Who descended to the Earth and became Man as other men.

Such was the mood and attitude kindled among men by those who were contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha and also by many who were Initiates in the first three centuries of Christendom. Historical records have little help to offer because all real evidence of the teaching was exterminated. But supersensible perception as it was described to you yesterday leads to the knowledge that in the first three Christian centuries, this was the attitude and feeling prevailing in men who were willing to listen to the Initiates still living in those times ... And then this truly Christian feeling died away and must in our time be called to life again.

The veneration of the pupil for his Guru in olden days had been a means whereby men had learned to look upwards to the Divine. The Teacher or Guru was regarded as the channel by which the Divine streamed down to the Earth and as the one who, in turn, guided into the spiritual world the feelings of devotion and reverence in the human heart. These feelings and experiences passed along the stream of heredity from generation to generation and were guided by those who became the first Teachers of Christianity no longer to a Guru in the old sense but to the Christ Who had descended from spiritual worlds and in Jesus of Nazareth had taken Manhood upon Himself. Few people to-day realise the deep inwardness and intensity of devotion which characterised these early Teachers of Christianity.

This feeling of reverence and devotion continued through the centuries, directed now to the Being of Whom Christianity proclaimed that He had passed through the Death on Golgotha in order that henceforward mankind might find Him on Earth.

The goal and aim of the modern Initiation-science of which I spoke to you yesterday is to approach this Christ Mystery, this Mystery of Golgotha, with true understanding.

Medieval Christianity was, it is true pervaded by piety and religious devotion that were really like a continuation of the veneration paid to the Gurus of old, but the dreamlike clairvoyance once possessed by human beings had faded away. Apart altogether from historical records, anthroposophical Spiritual Science is able to investigate the life of man as it was in those far distant ages of the past. At certain moments in their lives it was possible for human beings to pass into a state of dreamlike clairvoyance in which they became aware of the world from which they themselves had descended to their earthly existence. But this knowledge that the soul belongs to Eternity had gradually been lost. Under the influence of this knowledge men would never have been able to unfold consciousness of human freedom. Consciousness of freedom—which is an integral part of full manhood—was destined to arise in man when the time was ripe. The epoch when this feeling of freedom dawned was that of the Middle Ages; but by that time the old consciousness which could never have experienced the reality of freedom, was fading away. For when man looked upwards to his existence as a being of soul among other beings of soul in pre-earthly life, he was aware only of dependence, he had no feeling of freedom. The ancient clairvoyant vision of the spiritual world grew dim and in this twilight condition of consciousness humanity unfolded that feeling of freedom which in our modern civilisation has reached a certain climax. But in this condition the gaze of mankind could not penetrate into those supersensible worlds whence Christ had descended into Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore, true Christian worship rested, to begin with, upon tradition; men relied upon historical tradition and upon the power that had come down through the generations from the veneration once paid to the Gurus. The deep reverence for the Divine that had once lived in men could be directed, now, to the Being Who had passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. But in this twilight condition of consciousness, men were gradually evolving a science of physical nature such as ancient times had never possessed and in consequence of this, even the faintest inkling that a spiritual world is accessible to human cognition, even that faded away.

The supersensible knowledge of which I. spoke yesterday is an actual extension of knowledge of the world of nature. And all the faculties developed by a man through meditation and concentration in such a way. that he penetrates into the spiritual world as a knower—all these faculties are immeasurably strengthened when, as one belonging to the modern age, he does not content himself with what natural science has to say about the external world but wrestles inwardly with it, assimilating these exact, scientific thoughts but endeavouring, then, to unite them with the innermost forces of his own being. A certain attunement or attitude of soul then arises—to begin with, it is not easy to define. But if this attitude becomes the keynote of meditation and concentration in the sphere of thought and in the sphere of will, then the soul is led upwards into the spiritual worlds and understanding of supersensible reality is attained. We learn to look away from the Earth of which natural science teaches us, into a supersensible world which belongs to the Earth and must be recognised as an integral part of the Earth—above all when it is a matter of understanding man and man's life on Earth.

Questions of far-reaching import then arise in one who is struggling to acquire anthroposophical knowledge. And as he seeks to find answers, he is led towards an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Having raised his consciousness away from the Earth, having unfolded a faculty of perception outside the physical body and of action through the power of ideal magic, such a man is able to behold the Spiritual. With consciousness that has become independent of the body, he is able to penetrate into a spiritual world with knowledge and with power of will.

If a man who is equipped with this inner understanding of the spiritual world turns his attention again to Christ and to the Mystery of Golgotha as an Event on the Earth, his thought—unlike that of many modern theologians—will not be concerned only with the man Jesus of Nazareth. His conception of what came to pass in the Mystery of Golgotha is no longer materialistic because he has acquired the power of supersensible vision and sees the man Jesus of Nazareth as the bearer of the Divine Christ—the Divine-Spiritual Christ Being. Because the Divine-Spiritual is a direct reality to this modern “Theosophia,” it can recognise in the man Jesus of Nazareth the Christ Who is a Spiritual Being and must always be conceived as such. With the knowledge and understanding of the Super-Earthly he has acquired, a man is then led to Christ, beholding in Him the super-earthly, Divine Principle, the God-Man.

Through an understanding of the realities of the spiritual world, modern Anthroposophy leads the way to Christ—leads to Him after due preparation. In order to make this quite clear I want to speak of erroneous and true ways by which a man of the present age may approach the spiritual world ... There were men in days long since gone by whose inspiration proceeded directly from the Mysteries; then the spiritual consciousness of humanity grew dim but even with this darkened consciousness men still gazed into certain spheres of pre-earthly existence and strove to let a spiritual power stream from their sacred rites. But the successors of those godly, pious men of old have become, in the modern age, people who endeavour by extremely questionable means to contact the spiritual world. The godly men of earlier times confined themselves to the realm of the soul, turning their eyes of soul to the supersensible worlds; this mood of holiness and of piety persisted in the feelings of those devotees of Christianity of whom I spoke at the beginning of the lecture and who desire to cling to their naive, simple piety. Such an attitude is naive to-day because in his natural consciousness the human being no longer has any vision of supersensible existence. This naive piety no longer leads men upwards into the supersensible worlds, for their consciousness remains in the earthly, physical body. It is characteristic of this naive piety that it clings to the feelings, to the sentient experiences, coming to the soul when it sinks into itself, into its own human nature. This will, it is true, lead a man to the realisation that the physical body consists not only of flesh and blood, but that the Spiritual too, is present—the Spiritual which truly pious men would fain send upwards to the Divine. But those who are misguided successors of the pupils of the old Gurus endeavour through mediumistic practises to kindle this spiritual force.

What kind of person is a medium? A medium is one who lets the Spiritual speak out of the physical body, write by means of the physical hands or manifest in some other way. The very fact that mediums speak or write while their ordinary consciousness is dimmed, indicates that the human body is not wholly physical, that a spiritual force issues from it, but of a mechanical, inferior kind. A medium desires not only to experience the Spiritual in the body but strives to bring the Spiritual to physical manifestation. And the spiritual force that is present. in the body does indeed become articulate when the medium speaks or writes. The peculiarity about mediumistic people is that they become extremely talkative, they love to talk and to write at tremendous length ... but all these manifestations of the Spiritual through the body contain a great deal that ordinary logic will regard as highly questionable. These mediums are themselves the proof that it is not right for modern man to fall back upon ancient methods of establishing connection with the Divine-Spiritual but that he must seek in an altogether different way.

This different way of approach to the spiritual world is that of anthroposophical Spiritual Science and I will speak of one particular aspect. If a man takes natural science in earnest, regarding its results as truly great achievements of modern civilisation, then in his efforts to draw near to the spiritual worlds he will, to begin with, find it extraordinarily difficult to speak of the Spiritual at all, to entertain thoughts concerning it, let alone to indulge in any kind of automatic writing. When through meditation and concentration a man becomes aware of the Spirit within him, he will prefer to keep silent—to begin with, at any rate. Whereas a medium becomes talkative and lets the Spiritual become articulate through his own organs of speech, when supersensible knowledge of the Spirit begins to dawn in one who is a conscientious, scientifically trained thinker, he would rather keep silent about the subtle and delicate experiences of which his soul becomes aware. He even prefers to forbid thoughts from intruding because thoughts have been associated with earthly, physical things. He prefers not to let thoughts stream into his soul because he has an inner fear lest half-consciously he may apply to spiritual realities, thoughts that are connected with outer, physical things; he is afraid that when thoughts are applied to spiritual reality, this spiritual reality will not merely slip away but that it will be profaned, distorted. Least of all will he take to writing—for he knows that in days of yore, when worship of the God became potent, spiritual deed in the sacred rites, men did not resort to writing—which is a bodily act. Writing first became a custom when the human intellect and reasoning faculty were directed to the material world of sense and to one who has any knowledge of the Divine-Spiritual it is an activity which goes very much against the grain. And so when a man begins to become aware of the reality of the Divine-Spiritual, of the supersensible world, he stills his thoughts; he is literally silent as far as speaking is concerned; and he abstains from writing about matters pertaining to the Divine.

I said before, my dear friends, that it is permissible for me to speak of these things because they are the results of my own experience along a path of development which had led on from natural science to a comprehension and actual perception of the spiritual worlds and of the Mystery of Golgotha as spiritual reality. But you will realise that the Mystery of Golgotha presents difficulties to everyone who tries to approach it in the light of anthroposophical Spiritual Science. The Mystery of Golgotha as it reveals itself in the course of human history must be conceived in all its stupendous majesty and glory as an historical fact. Within the man Jesus of Nazareth, a God passed through death on Golgotha and we must learn to contemplate in a picture from which every element of sense-life is absent, this, the greatest of all Events in history. But it is exceedingly difficult to wrestle through in thought to this sense-free comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha, to present it in words or write of it.

What comes to us along this path is inner reverence and awe as we contemplate the great Mystery enacted on Golgotha. This reverence pours through the soul of one who in the way I have described, has silenced his thoughts and words, who feels the deepest awe when the power of the Spirit within him draws him to the Mystery of Golgotha. Feelings of profound reverence and awe pour through the soul of such a man ... it is as though he dares not approach so stupendous a Mystery. Thus the path of anthroposophical Spiritual Science leads not only to knowledge ... although to begin with it is knowledge which directs our gaze into yonder supersensible worlds. But this knowledge streams into the life of feeling, becomes holy awe; it becomes a power that lays hold of the human soul far more deeply than any other power, more deeply even than the veneration paid to the Guru by his pupils in olden times. And this feeling grows, first and foremost, into a longing and a yearning to understand Christ Jesus on Golgotha. What, to begin with, was supersensible vision in the life of soul is transformed through inner metamorphosis into feeling. This feeling seeks the God-Man on Golgotha and can find Him through the vision of the Spiritual already acquired. Man also learns to understand Jesus of Nazareth, realising that, in him, Christ may be seen as a reality within earthly existence. And so anthroposophical Spiritual Science brings knowledge of the Spiritual Christ Being but at the same time the deep and true reverence for the Divine which arises from this knowledge of the Supersensible.

When a man first becomes aware of the power of supersensible knowledge he prefers to be silent in his thoughts and words, not in any way to use his bodily faculties as an instrument for voicing his experiences. Nevertheless, having reached a transitional stage, when he resolves to speak of his inner life, he experiences something which justifies him in speaking of the spiritual nature of Christ Jesus. At this transitional stage he makes the resolve to give the Spiritual definite form in his thoughts, to speak and to write about the Spiritual. And the experience that now comes to him is that he feels as it were lifted out of his physical body whenever he is speaking or thinking about the Spiritual. The physical body is an essential instrument in ordinary thinking and speaking, but now, at this higher stage, a man is aware of being removed in a certain way from his physical body. Whereas a medium feels himself entirely within the physical body and even deadens his consciousness in order to remain within the physical while allowing the Spiritual to manifest through the body, a man who has attained real knowledge of the Supersensible lifts himself out of his physical body in an enhanced and more delicate state of consciousness. Because he is experiencing the reality of the spiritual world, he finds it exceedingly difficult to take hold of the physical world; his faculty of speech and the natural flow of his thinking elude him; he cannot find the way to his limbs or his physical body. He must now undergo the experience of trying to find his bearings in this physical world once again and therewith the thoughts and the language in which to express the realities of the supersensible world of which he has become aware. But having had this experience, a man feels as though he must enter life anew, as though he must pass through a second, self-engendered birth. He learns to know the inner depths of human nature for he has entered into these depths a second time in order to create an instrument for thinking and speaking of spiritual reality. Penetrating thus into his organism with supersensible knowledge, a man realises that there too he will find Christ inasmuch as Christ passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. He now has some understanding not only of the Christ Who once came down to the Earth and passed through death, but if he has really fathomed the depths of his own being, there too, he experiences Christ Who died in order that His Power might flow into all mankind.

This is the experience that comes, with far greater assurance now, to a man possessed of supersensible knowledge. And he can clothe the knowledge of Christ thus acquired in words which contain profound truth: “Not I but Christ in me.” For he knows: On Golgotha, Christ died; through His death Christ entered into the human forces of birth and has lived since His death in the very being of man. The modern Initiate therefore knows the truth of these words of St. Paul, knows that he will find Christ within himself if he does but succeed in fathoming the depths of his own manhood.

In order to make men Christians in the real sense, the Initiate need not demand that they should all have reached his own level. Equipped with this understanding and knowledge of Christ, he can also discover new paths for simple-hearted piety. Men of simple piety can indeed find Christ, only their path to-day cannot be quite the same as that which led in days of yore to the adoration outpoured at the feet of the Guru. The piety that befits the modern age must be an inward piety, for man is no longer called upon to send up into a supersensible world, his feelings of reverence for the Divine; he must penetrate within his own being in order there to find Christ Who since the Mystery of Golgotha has been on the Earth as the Living Christ.

Anthroposophical Spiritual Science can say to a man of simple piety: “If you do but penetrate deeply enough into your own being, you will find Christ; this is no illusion because by his Death on Golgotha Christ did indeed descend into these depths of your innermost self.” One who is schooled in Spiritual Science knows that in speaking thus to a man of simple piety, he is saying what is true; he knows that he is not playing upon the emotions of the other but pointing to a goal within his reach. It is perfectly possible for simple, godly men to tread the path which leads, in the modern age too, to supersensible knowledge.

Whereas in earlier times, reverence and veneration for the Guru made the thoughts of the pupil translucent, enabled divine power to resound in the mantrams and the rites to become potent deed, a man who desires to find the true path to Christ in our modern age must, above all else, inwardly deepen his soul. He must learn to look within himself in order that he may find and become aware of inner reality when he turns his gaze away from the world of sense. And within him too, he will find the power that carries him through the gate of death, inasmuch as here, on the Earth, knowledge of this power has come to him through devotion to Christ and to the Mystery of Golgotha.

The Guru of olden times said to his pupils and through them to all human beings: When you pass through the gate of death you will find the sublime Sun Being Who makes good the imperfections of Earth-existence. The teacher of modern times says: If here on the Earth, with inner reverence and deep devotion of heart you establish connection with Christ Who has descended, and with the Mystery of Golgotha, you will be inwardly filled with a power that does not die with you, but bears you through death and will work together with you towards the fulfilment of what cannot be wholly fulfilled on Earth while you are living in a physical body. What in olden times was wrought by the sublime Sun Being will be wrought, now, by Christ's power within your own being from which the body has been cast off at death. Christ's power will work in human imperfections on Earth and men will be drawn together in the social life through their recognition of Him. For the power that streams from Christ, the power upon which anthroposophical Spiritual Science is able to shed the light of understanding, can enter into the actions and the will of men and thereby flow into their social life.

There is much talk to-day of social reform and social progress. Who will be the great Reformer of the social life when men's actions are performed in the name of Christ Jesus and the world becomes truly Christian? Who will be the mighty Reformer, having the power to establish peace amid social strife on Earth? The Christ—He and He alone can bring peace, when men lead a social life hallowed by acts of consecration, when as they look up to Christ they do not say “I,” but rather: When two or three, or many, are gathered together in the name of Christ, then He is in the midst of us Activity in the sphere of social life then becomes a veritable hallowing, a continuation of the sacred acts of cult and rite in olden times. Christ Himself in very truth will be the great social Reformer, since He works to-day as a living reality within the being of man.

The social life must be permeated with the Christ Impulse ... Men of simple piety long to find Christ's power within the soul so that what they do in the social life may be done in Christ's name. These men of simple piety can still be sure of their ground when a modern Initiate says to them: The power you can find through your simple piety of soul when you meditate upon your own being and upon the Christ Who lives within you—this power streamed from the Death on Golgotha, from Christ Himself. It works as the Christ Impulse in the deeds you perform in social life, because Christ is present among men as a Living Reality when they find the way to Him. They are led to Him through that deep inner love which links human hearts together and brings a supersensible element into feeling, just as the light that is kindled within a man's being brings a supersensible element into knowledge.

And so men of simple piety need say no longer that their path is disturbed by the knowledge imparted by anthroposophical Spiritual Science. If natural science were to continue along purely external paths, this simple piety would in the course of time die out altogether; but if natural science itself can lead on to knowledge of the Supersensible and thereby to knowledge of the Christ as a supersensible Being, then all truly pious men will be able to find that for which they long: assurance in their life of soul, certainty that their deeds and actions are in harmony with the Christ Impulse. That for which pious and godly men yearn can be imbued through anthroposophical Spiritual Science with all the certainty of knowledge. This Spiritual Science has therefore the right to insist that it does not disturb the path of simple godliness or lead men away from Christ. Seeking as it does to lead the way to the spiritual world by working with and not against modern science, Anthroposophy has this message to give: Mankind must not go forward into the future without Christ but with him—with Christ as a Being Who is known and recognised, Whose reality is felt and Whose Impulse men resolve to make effective in the world.