The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It is of the greatest interest to delve into the way in which this remarkable document, the Bible, has been received by people of all times, and what reflection this book of books has evoked in the minds and souls of people. You can learn so much about the developmental history of human souls from the impressions that this book has evoked.

The impression that the writing makes on the human individualities of different periods of time is quite different. Of course, these different stages can only be touched on very briefly, because the material is too vast, and it is done because it is important to recall it to the soul. For example, how the Jewish people at that time had something of the Scriptures from which they learned about their own origin and ancestry, astronomy, the justification of the social order, the legislation, regulations for everyday life. The whole life of the soul and its wisdom were in it. The scholars of late Judaism applied all their ingenuity and all their mental power to understanding this book. And so it was in those times that the highest knowledge was applied to achieve understanding. And with the utmost respect, the Kabbalists can even be mentioned, who sought to interpret it down to the letter. And then later, the New Testament in connection with the Old Testament: In the first Christian century, we again find this deep, sacred earnestness in the search for understanding. In mystical and other communities, everything is geared towards understanding the Bible. The Gnostics and others of that time immersed themselves with the greatest effort in what is given in the Bible in the person of Christ Jesus. We find profound thought in this Bible study. Let's say the 9th century, John, the great Scot — Scotus Erigena. There is no doubt in this man's mind about the truth of the Bible, about the truth of the written word, that it is inspired; man has no choice but to seek to understand. From Thomas Aquinas and John Tauler to Jakob Böhme, a bold philosophy was applied to understanding what is written in the Bible.

Now, however, something very remarkable is happening with regard to the Bible. Whereas everything before – even in the eighteenth century – was explanation, a feeling of the deepest reverence for the Bible, in the nineteenth century what is called Bible criticism emerged. One could almost call the nineteenth century the century of Bible criticism. This sentiment would not have been understood at all in the past. In the past, it was always a case of looking up to the Bible and feeling down about oneself. It was only now that a feeling arose that man felt towards the Bible as he would towards any other book and that he could look down on the Bible. Critics dare to question the Bible, its individual documents and writings, doubt later appearances and so on, and finally even dare to question the person of Christ Jesus.

David Friedrich Strauß is one of those; he resolves everything in the Bible into legends and myths. He says that the facts of Jesus' life are not important; these feelings and ideas were simply in the people and so it was gradually put together. Other criticism and all that today's science has to say about it should be mentioned. Specifically, the seven-day work of creation is widely criticized, as is the narrative of the creation of man in it, how man emerged from the great cosmos. And then his creation is retold a second time. From this, it is concluded that there are two accounts of creation. All the many and incalculable things that have been achieved in it could be mentioned.

The Bible is the book of life for mankind, but all this has changed people's attitude towards it, and those in authority felt compelled to take their present position. And much, much more than one suspects and can know, people's attitude towards the Bible has changed. Only the soul researcher can gauge that. Even the most religious person of today has no idea of the deep fervor and inner bliss that one once had towards the Bible. Anyone who tries to observe the times and the psychology of the soul knows that since materialism has permeated all popular thinking, this is no longer possible. Since then, a change, a fundamental metamorphosis of intimate feelings can be observed. Many noble people among us look back on the days of their youth with a certain wistfulness, conflict or satisfaction, thinking of how they absorbed the stories from the Bible back then. The inner conflict between then and now is in many a soul.

But what violence, what significance this book of books has, emerges from the fact that scholars and scientists are constantly trying to bring the seven-day work into line with it. One must come to terms with the way the creation of the world is presented in the Bible. The power that the content of the Bible has repeatedly had over people is proven by the fact that, for example, in the early days of the Christian era, people turned to Plato for answers to such questions, and gave him the certainly strange name of the Attic-speaking Moses. So Plato's teachings are related to the Old Testament.

The same is said of Pythagoras and other great philosophers. Even Apollo has a very beautiful oracle that proves this: “Steep is the path to the / gap]” — “Steep is the path / gap]”

But there were mortals who did climb this path. The most significant of these were those who lived in Chaldea and those who were called Judean men.

Paracelsus, the great medieval physician, also made a very strange statement about the Bible: “All medicine, all healing can be learned from the Bible.” Of course, this must be thought of in the right way in Paracelsus' sense. He meant how he thought of the relationship of man and his position to the Bible. You must not just open it, read it and retell it, no, the words that are in the Bible are not only to be taken literally, but there are magical powers in them. If you let the words live in your soul, they will fertilize it; the soul will become wise and knowledgeable by letting not the content but the power of the Bible word live in you. No science can or should dissuade you from the Bible.

Take Darwinism, for example. Charles Darwin says: “So we would have fathomed” and so on, - “those whom the Creator once breathed life into.” And a second saying of his, that language is something higher than the animal inarticulate sound: “Language can never have come about through mere natural causes and could never develop in this way. One must assume an intelligent creator who has wisely ordered everything.”

Many sayings of great scholars who, in this respect, do recognize the Creator, could still be cited. Jean Baptiste Biot, who rendered outstanding services to the science of light, said: Moses either knew as much as we do or he was inspired! — All that has been said is not meant as any criticism on our part, but only as an explanation that it had to come in the materialistically thinking present. Even in our time, many great men have honestly endeavored to understand the Bible by interpreting it, but who knows about it? Example: Fabre d'Olivet: “The Mystery of the First Books of Moses”.

In the face of biblical criticism, spiritual research or theosophy yields a different point of view. Theosophy never criticizes, never tears down, but only seeks to understand. One thing is characteristic of theosophy: it is not a thought, not a concept, but an attitude. Everything in theosophy must be imbued with this attitude. We have this attitude towards all of nature. We see regularities and monstrosities in nature, we know that it would be nonsense to criticize nature, we do not do that, we seek to understand it. Understanding is the basic attitude we must have; we must pursue everything in the spiritual life with understanding, pursue everything with love, not with the yardstick of sympathy and antipathy. Understanding everything and everyone – you cannot define it intellectually, it has to be an attitude. If you have this attitude, you will have an experience: that the Bible is a book in the face of which criticism begins to fall silent. What you may have criticized in the past is now seen in a completely different light, it becomes clear.

One must rediscover the key to the Bible through spiritual research, and then biblical criticism will be replaced by an ever deeper interpretation of the Bible. The development of humanity is not considered if one considers only the external aspects of it. What science has brought, theosophy does not question; but it does not only pursue the external material phenomena, which are only the expression of a spiritual phenomenon of the underlying spiritual development. The task of theosophy is to explore the nature of today's man and his position in the universe. It must therefore say something about the creation report. Theosophy regards the whole human being, not just his physical body. Where natural science has to stop, theosophy begins. When it comes to the words “I smell the scent of roses, I hear the sound of an organ”, the natural scientist sees only the movement of atoms in the brain; but he cannot explain what must take place to produce the idea “I smell the scent of roses” and so on. The task of Theosophy is now a completely different one. Du Bois-Reymond ties in with Leibniz's saying: the idea of the soul, why it is that the scent of roses is smelled, you – [the] natural scientists – would not be able to explore.

Du Bois-Reymond ties in with the word: natural science is actually only capable of observing and fathoming the sleeping human being because the soul experience has been extinguished. Precisely that which the natural scientist cannot explain is there in waking. But can we then recognize what is not there in sleep and what is there in waking? Yes, I will give you a comparison that will make it clear to you how spiritual science relates to the other sciences. An example: Imagine a piano being played, with a deaf person sitting next to it. He cannot hear the notes, but there is a way to make them understandable to him if he is otherwise of sound mind. Open the piano and scatter so-called paper riders on the strings. By the jumping of the paper riders, the deaf person can see that something is going on; he can get an idea of the strings and their trembling. But there is a difference between his idea and the real objective, the sense is missing, the open ear.

This is how Theosophy relates to the so-called science of facts. The latter conducts research in the way we have described here the perception of the deaf. To perceive what is going on in the soul, one must have the sense for it. What Haeckel and others, in fact modern science in general, has brought is all true for Theosophy, but there is an awakening of the higher senses to follow the material processes, and to look back with one's higher spiritual organs and follow the spiritual facts of the higher spiritual organs that Theosophy teaches to develop. Thus Theosophy perceives what is present in the sleeping and waking human being. To do this, one must have spiritual eyes and spiritual ears.

What does the sleeping person do at night, what does he work on? He repairs the physical body to remove the fatigue substances from the outside. The other type of activity of the astral body is present in the so-called initiate or initiate.

What is an initiate? We must first realize that we can perceive as much as we have organs. There are as many worlds around man as he has organs, and each time he acquires new organs, he perceives a new world. And there are methods in the secret schools where this is taught, whereby such new organs are formed. An initiate is someone who has developed abilities within himself through which the higher worlds can be perceived.

We divide the human being into four parts: physical body, etheric body, astral body or soul, and I. Now, in the initiate, the astral body is equipped with organs of perception. The initiate sees into other worlds. He feels the need to express himself in a different way. For ordinary language is created only for our physical life, and even the words that have been used for the supersensible are taken from the world of sense perception. The initiates must therefore follow Goethe's dictum:

All that is transitory Is but a parable.

What the initiates see in the higher worlds, they can only express in images from the sensual world in order to be understood by people. Every student of the Rosicrucian school of thought, which has existed in Germany since the 14th century and is the most suitable for modern man, must therefore also learn to express himself in such images. What you find in books about the Rosicrucians is unclear and incorrect; for their secrets were not entrusted to books. He must acquire the so-called imaginative knowledge, that is, the knowledge of how to express in a parable what one beholds in the spiritual world. The initiate feels quite differently about a parable. He sees the immortality of the soul in the parable — doll and butterfly — the permanent in the transitory, which is always behind it. The initiate sees the great connection between all facts, the highest spiritual and the lowest physical facts, he sees the high in all this. And if he tells such a parable to a child, for example, he tries to make it clear to him, then he himself firmly believes in this parable, and feeling flows from him to the child. So he also looks at these little ones with the same fervor of heart.

It is the task of theosophy to make it clear that everything spiritual finds its expression in a material way. Not those who deny matter will penetrate to the spirit, but those who learn to grasp the truth that all matter is condensed spirit. If we recognize this, then we will also understand why the Bible gives instructions about the simplest things in life. With heartfelt love we must then enter into these simplest of processes, into something that goes with the phenomena of everyday life. Such knowledge should spiritualize life, not remove people from it. He is not a true theosophist who claims: Oh, what do I care about the brain molecules and their movements, the spirit is in him, that's enough for me! No, he must learn to understand that the brain is the expression of the spirit. Our goal is not to rise above the appearance to the so-called being, but to understand what lives in the appearance of being. This must be brought home to people again in images, in parables.

The spiritual was there earlier than the physical. The astral body has built up the physical body, structured it out of itself. All material substance has been structured out of the spiritual, and the spirit is the older, the earlier. Before the physical there was the astral; it formed, it created this body — in the likeness of water and ice. The naturalist sees only the time when the ice had already formed in the stream, the theosophist the time when there was no ice yet in the stream, and the one with the ice. The material — the ice — separates from the water, which still comes from something higher. The Bible expresses this process very beautifully: “The Spirit of God moved over the waters.” (Genesis 1:2) Water is the image of all secret schools.

The wisdom in the Bible is given in images and parables, in comparisons. The seven-day work is no different. We are not dealing with external facts here, but with long, long periods of time. There is no document in the world that contains theosophical truths in a more magnificent way than the Bible. Theosophy will offer an explanation of the Bible, an understanding of it again. Even something like the splitting of the creation account will bring it closer to human understanding again. The spiritual man is already contained in the stream of water, when the spirit of God still hovered over the waters. “Male and female” is the literal translation, not ‘a little man and a little woman’ (Gen. 1,27); this is the spiritual man. And then a condensation of the spiritual, asexual man to the physical man - to the egg - takes place, and thus a second creation, a sexual-physical.

“The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:6); we must understand this saying as Goethe means it when he says, “And as long as you do not have this dying and becoming, you are only a gloomy guest on the dark earth.” That is, the becoming of a higher soul that slumbers in man, but which can be awakened and developed through schooling. You must give birth to a higher human being out of the physical body, so that this physical body becomes a tool for the spiritual human being, but the physical body should not be the one that rules us. When man is free from the physical, the physical body becomes such a tool. Thus one should explore the spirit from the letter. Theosophy wants to build up from what is there; because even the smallest, the most material, is condensed spirit. Therefore, a theosophical attitude also understands that, as in the Bible, there may be rules that relate to simple daily life.

Those who fight the Bible do not understand it; they are fighting their own delusion, which they have created for themselves. It is only in the last four hundred years that this materialistic view of the seven-day cycle, an apparent reproduction of it, has developed. Even today, believers often interpret the Bible too materialistically. The Bible is to be taken literally; but one must learn to understand the letter and grasp the spirit through the letter. Theosophy does not want to found a confession, but to understand what is there; and that, what wisdom has poured into the souls through the millennia. The truths change; but a common original truth runs through all of them, for past, present and future. We find it in the Bible and its effect; it contains words that come from the divine wisdom of the world. Thus the readers found themselves imbued with the magical powers of the Bible, which live in the words. Religious documents and especially ones like the Bible, which in its two parts even points to our division of time, cannot be taken deeply enough. Only by delving deeply into them will people be led to spiritualization again.

Today, my task is to speak to you about the origin of evil in the sense of spiritual science. The fact of evil and its presence in the world is like a great mystery of life in the midst of our existence. And those who think that human development is permeated by divine power and divine providence are confronted with the question: How is it possible that the Divine allows evil? And for those who deny the Divine, the existence of evil is easily one of the reasons for such denial. They say: How can one imagine a world under divine guidance where evil reigns in the most diverse forms? In any case, this question of evil intrudes mysteriously and disconcertingly into our lives.

Since time immemorial, the question of the cause and origin of evil has been an important question. So today we want to deal with the fact of evil; and it should be said and attention should be drawn to individual points of resolution. In doing so, we must above all remember Jakob Böhme, who in his writings repeatedly raises the question: How does evil come into the world and what position does it occupy in the development of humanity?

Schelling draws on Böhme in his reflections on this in order to form a concept of evil and its existence in the world. For Böhme, evil is what darkness is to light. Böhme says: Beings owe their existence to the light of the sun; light is the sustainer, the creator of existence in the world. It is only through darkness that light is recognized, and light only exists when mixed with darkness. If we ask about the cause of darkness or even try to explain the light with darkness, we come to the correspondence of the ungrounded in relation to the primal ground.

If the light is to appear, then it must drive out and overcome that which is there for no reason and yet opposes the light; the divine primal ground of existence, the good, stands out by itself in the process. It is good; it is the pure good; but the light penetrates into the ground of evil in order to be able to fully unfold. This is an explanation of the concept that seems to shed light on our understanding.

In modern times, the question of good and evil seems to be playing a role again, for example in the work of someone who has impressed many, many people, Nietzsche. You all know the book “Beyond Good and Evil”. The modern philosopher Nietzsche juxtaposes good and bad, not good and evil. He says: We do not need to worry about the origin of evil, we distinguish between the weak and the strong, the strong-willed. They rule, the strong-willed; they want to assert themselves, their ideas, and that must naturally lead to a struggle with the weak, to their oppression. Those in power see themselves as the good guys. The oppressed think quite differently. They feel that what the powerful do is to their detriment. Since they are the weak, they come to the conclusion that there is still a good that has not been realized. They regard what the strong do as evil. Therein lies the origin of the contradiction in ideas between the weak and the strong. From this flows what is called slave morality.

Basically, those who have thought more deeply have always taken the position on good and evil relatively; we need only think of Goethe when he says: Oh, if men would only not always speak in the same way, this is good and that is evil, but would go into the motive power of their actions.

In his “Faust”, Goethe described the struggle between good and evil in humanity. In his youth, Goethe had not yet worked out these powerful contradictions in his Faust creation. In the present version, however, the characteristic features of good power and Mephistopheles emerge in Goethe and his Faust as early as the “Prologue in Heaven”. Goethe sensitively perceived the profound impact of good and evil in man; in Faust he seeks to fathom this supremacy of feelings.

Our task today is to fathom the fact of the origin of good and evil according to the new spiritual research or theosophy. We must indeed go back a long way in human development to do this. The Bible goes back very far indeed, almost to the origin of man. One of the most wonderful and greatest allegories on this subject is the “Fall of Man”, even for those who do not believe in the fact. The snake is the seducer of man, who in the beginning was created only for good. Only through an act of free will on the part of man is the difference between good and evil conceived. The animals do much more terrible things than what we call evil in humans; but who would think of speaking of an evil animal in this sense. The animal follows an implanted law in its actions, and there is no sense in speaking of good and evil; this is only the case with humans. In answering this question, spiritual science must go back to the point where man appears as the crown on our Earth planet. Why can we not speak of evil in animals? The animal also has a soul, but not an individual soul, but a group soul. What is a group soul? What a whole group is in the animal, man has for himself alone. To understand this, we need only consider the fact that a person has a biography, whereas an animal does not.

Every person, without exception, has a biographical interest for us and we know that there is no other person with exactly the same biography. With animals, it is only the whole species and type that interests us to the same extent. Like all lions together, we are interested in the individual person. The soul exists for an entire animal species together. Man has only just ascended from a group soul to an individual one. Man is in the midst of this development. We still meet people who appear to be members of the tribe.

But the richer the life of the soul becomes, the less this soul is a soul of the species, the more it takes on its own character in gestures and feelings. Thus man himself is mostly situated between group soul and individual soul; and as we go forward into the future, he becomes more and more individual, and in the past more and more group soul,

right back to the beginning of man's development. When we trace man back, we go back the periods that we call the historical ones. We conclude the historical times with the fifth main race and its five different sub-races.

If we look at the Indian Vedas, we sense a powerful culture that even Max Müller, a very sober researcher, recognizes. So far, then, are the historical times. From these, spiritual science goes back to prehistoric times. The methods of how to go back through the development of the inner senses can be found in more detail in my magazine “Luzifer - Gnosis”. Theosophy assumes that a huge continent once existed between America, Africa and Europe, Atlantis, which was destroyed by natural disasters and of which only small island peaks remain today. Today, modern science is beginning to confirm this. You can read about Atlantis in the magazine “Kosmos”. Spiritual science has always spoken of Atlantis. The living conditions there were completely different; the atmosphere was like billowing masses of fog, hence “Nibelheim”. This home of fog is preserved for us in the folk tales. At that time there was still an ancient human race; but we have to look even further back for the origin of earthly man, to Lemuria, a continent that was located in what is now the Indian Ocean. There we find the first humans of the kind that today's humans are.

So how does spiritual science view the origin of humanity? For spiritual science, humans do not originally descend from a material being; rather, the spiritual is the first. At that time, the physical body was still very imperfect. Spiritual science takes the view that the Lemurian man was very imperfect on the outside, but never descended from the ape, but the other way around; he left the apes behind at a lower level.

The organization of the physical man at that time was at the level of the reptilian organization, and his soul still dwelled outside his body. Today, the waking person has his soul in his body; in the sleeping person, who does not perceive through the doors of the senses, spiritual science knows that his soul is outside his body. The clairvoyant sees the astral body and its work on the physical body at night. The further back we go, the more we see the astral body at work on the physical. For in spiritual science, the spiritual body is the creator of the physical. In Lemuria, we see the physical human being still surrounded by the active astral body. The astral body or the soul has created the physical body; it is the creator of it, and the important point in time is when this soul was completely outside the body, where, after having made it perfect, this soul now passes from purely external activity to the inner being and becomes the I. An important moment, how in the Lemurian time the incarnation takes place. The Bible expresses this in a grand, powerful and meaningful way when it says: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7) This indicates the moment when the group soul becomes an individual soul in the human being, the moment of the astral body's entering into the physical body. As a group soul it remained in the spiritual world; the religious expression for this would be: As long as the soul rested in the bosom of the Godhead, it was a group soul. Example: the fingers of the hand; they are members, organs; they stand in exactly the same relation to the physical body as the soul was before it entered the physical body, that is, as a group soul. It was a limb in the great Being, which we may now call God or All-Spirit. In these souls it was the Godhead that acted. Example: water and sponges that fill with water. When these souls moved into the physical body, they became individual drops of water.

Thus, in the process of development, the physical body, as it were, snatches the soul from the Divine. What are the consequences of this? Before, the soul does not feel and act independently, but as the Divine inspires it. This Divine is a part of the common Divine substance. All souls therefore knew something of each other; they had a common consciousness; this now ceased. Individual existence now begins. Before, Divine law was their conductor, now no longer. And with that, selfishness now begins to play a role. God's will was previously the will of one's own soul; now it had to come to its own will, to selfishness. Now it had to come to the birth of selfishness, with it at the same time the birth of self-awareness. The replacement of the world order of wisdom by the world order of love occurred now, that is what spiritual science of all time called it. Love and egoism were not there before.

Love demands that the independent comes to the independent, that free devotion is given. Example of the fact that love was impossible before: My right hand cannot love my left hand. — So now love entered the world, and in its most subordinate form, in sexual love. Spiritual science tells us that this was also the time of the separation of the sexes. With physical incarnation, they appear simultaneously as male and female with differentiation; and with that, the first impulse is given to utilize the first power for the body. So we have two epochs: one completely dominated by wisdom, the second completely dominated by the development of love, the higher and the lower human being. At that time the body was less developed, the soul more highly developed.

At today's stage, the soul is far from having the perfection that the physical body has as such. Later, the soul will develop to the same extent. Example of the wonderfully perfect nature of the physical body: the thigh bone, which, with the smallest amount of material, develops such a load-bearing capacity that even the most ingenious engineer could not have conceived. The spiritual researcher knows that this body is the expression of divine wisdom. Example: Contemplation of the heart. — The physical body of man is embodied wisdom. If, on the other hand, we look at the soul, which in the future will far surpass the physical body in perfection, it is now very imperfect. It is the soul that tempts man to do his deeds, not the physical body. The soul is flawed, sins, and goes astray in the body.

In its kind and perfection, the body is superior to the soul today. At that time, when the human body was occupied by the soul, it was already predisposed to this perfection. Today, this entry of the soul has not yet been fully completed. As much of it as is the group soul has been built up by the physical body. The part that has moved into the body still has to go through this. There is no other way for the human being to develop than to go through the physical body. In the Greek mystery teachings, the soul was therefore called a 'bee'. It absorbs light, it hears, it collects by using the body as an instrument. And what the soul gathers down here on this earth, she will take with her and one day lay on the altar of the deity.

In this way she will become perfect and ever more capable of immortalizing the temporal. The temporal passes away, but the fruits of it will be immortalized by the human soul. But all the marvels, the joys, are destined to remain sensations. So the life of the soul is an essence that brings it to spiritual existence.

By going through the physical existence, it has to establish something that is wisely integrated into the wise construction of the cosmos. This did not come about suddenly, but in a long, long process of becoming.

What is wisely constructed today was once not wisely constructed. Let us imagine the same process with love, for example; here the same development can be seen. Likewise, love rises to ever higher and purer aspects and forms, towards the love that will one day make all people brothers. Love will one day be that which glows and drives the whole cosmos. The whole world is permeated by a stream of love, which will then rule everything, as wisdom does now. Wisdom flows from the world to us, and love will flow from the world to them, to the later races. Our work is to impress the love of the world. But that could never be if the opposite were not also possible. Love must be brought independently, freely from person to person, that is why the era of love begins at the same time as that of egoism. Love will work itself out to overcome egoism, that is its goal. The starting point of the cosmos is love; out of it, egoism has also grown all by itself.

The family, the tribe, groups of people were permeated by love; what is related, what has common blood, loves each other. Although there may be raging conflict, humanity is gradually being driven towards love. It spreads from tribe to tribe, from generation to generation, from nation to nation. When the principle of Jehovah or Yahweh gradually spread among the Jewish people, it is recorded in the secret or spiritual science that existed before our era. And now we speak of a force, of a principle that is called evil, of a force in spiritual science that opposes the Jehovah principle.

I will explain this to you with an example. You know that in school there are students who do not move from one class to the next; they stay put; it is the same in the cosmos. The world was then ruled by entities like us; these beings had completed their development in the Age of Wisdom. But there were also forces in this epoch that had not completed their development in the Age of Wisdom; these now continue to work in the Age of Love. That is the retarded, the luciferic principle; this we see as the opposite pole of the Jahve principle. Therefore, so that love can be free, the principle of separation is at work in the world. It tries its effects on the person who loves other people, on the person who wants to be a free, independent personality. In the counter-effect we see the counter-force, evil, which actually, to speak with Goethe's Faust, creates good. This power, which is the egoistic principle, drives people apart; but love must therefore become ever greater and greater in order to unite people. The principle of Yahweh needed blood relationship to assert the principle of love, and then the principle of Lucifer worked alongside it, promoting selfishness and independence. Love and selfishness are constantly growing, and humanity swings back and forth between them; and that is why the presence of good and evil is so natural, the pendulum movement between love and selfishness. With selfishness, evil came into the world; selfishness must now be overcome. He has to accept it because good could not be achieved without evil. It provides the opportunity for the development of love. Spiritual science sees it in such a way that a point in time had to come when an act, the greatest of our earthly development, had to happen that was suitable for bringing people together; and the forerunner of this is John the Baptist, who prepares this, and in Christ Jesus this act is embodied. The words of Christ Jesus: “If anyone does not give up father and mother and brothers for my sake, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26; Matthew 19:29), are to be understood spiritually.

Christ, through whom one can receive the great love and the independent human being together, who is able to overcome all the impulses of evil, Christ is the embodiment of this great power, which, after overcoming all selfishness, is to become the bond of love from person to person. Through Christ, the bond of love shall link free man with free man.

Christianity is the power that is only at the beginning of its development; it will overcome the necessary evil and the world. Only the free man can become the true Christian; he can see in the Redeemer the power that leads to the fully liberated personality. Thus evil is the background into which the light of love shines; thus light is only recognizable through darkness. “And the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.”

Love will gradually permeate human development; the stronger the force it has to overcome, the more it will grow. It is this love that explains the meaning of evil, the position of evil in the world.

And so we may compare this with a word from Fabre d'Olivet. “Consider the pearl with its wondrous radiance and delicate beauty; how is it formed? From the disease of a shell."

In the same way, beauty arises from evil. This is how we must see evil and its mission. Love develops as a pearl of the world. Where does it come from? Let us think of the parable of the pearl!

Among the many spiritual currents that have emerged in recent times to satisfy the deepest questions and riddles of existence is also theosophy. It has been about thirty years since this movement has spread more and more in different countries. It originated in India, but it is also spreading to other countries and is having an effect through what is called the Theosophical Society. This Theosophical Society is divided into individual sections and these sections can be found everywhere in the developed countries of the world. We have an Indian, an American, British, Dutch, French, Italian, Scandinavian, German section, and so on.

From this we see that Theosophy is no longer something that only a few people explore, but that it satisfies the longing and the need of the widest circles. Nevertheless, it must be said that it is often misunderstood; just saying the word “Theosophy” makes many suspect dark superstition, fantastic fantasies; and when obscure movements arise somewhere in the world, one can still experience today that the word Theosophy is always mentioned. Others think that Theosophy is unscientific; no science could profess it. From another side, Theosophy is even treated with fear, it is said to be a sect that is directed against Christianity; anyone who wants to remain a good Christian must not become a Theosophist. And finally, it is referred to with the word that we can read over and over again in the newspapers: “New Buddhism”, and if someone today attaches the word “Buddhism” to Theosophy, a large proportion of all Westerners will be greatly alarmed.

All these thoughts are prejudices; Theosophy is neither a renewal of blind superstition nor is it unscientific. Those who have a thorough and logical understanding of modern science will not only be surprised when they take a look at Theosophy, but will also realize, when they draw certain conclusions from the natural sciences, that these lead them to Theosophy and can only be understood through it. And if one says that Theosophy is a sect, then we shall see later, after we have discussed the essence of Theosophy in more detail, how far removed it is from having anything sectarian about it, and how it does not in the least conflict with today's deeply understood, comprehensible Christianity, and how little it has to do with any Buddhism, least of all with the Buddhism that was founded by Buddha 600 years before Christ. A strange misunderstanding has prevailed, which has already been clarified by H. P. Blavatsky in the “Secret Doctrine”. There are many books that have been written about Theosophy. One of these books, which has contributed enormously to the spread of Theosophical science, is Sinnett's “Esoteric Buddhism”. Mrs. Blavatsky said that this book is neither esoteric nor Buddhism, because something is only esoteric if it is passed from person to person. It is only possible to transmit the most intimate thoughts in the most intimate communication between teacher and student. What flows from soul to soul and is called esoteric can never be published. A book can never be esoteric Buddhism, but the book is not about Buddhism at all.

Within the world view known as Theosophy, there are certain teachings about the structure of the human being. Let us briefly repeat this teaching, which is the common property of all those who stand on the ground of spiritual science, this teaching, which has been saying for millennia that what is known only through the external senses, through the material view of man, is only a small part of the human being. This physical human body, which we perceive through our external senses, is shared by humans with all beings on earth, and with everything that surrounds humans, because even stones and crystals are made up of the same substances that are contained in the human body.

Now spiritual science says: This physical body is only one part of the human being, the second part, which is actually much more real and actual, because it creates and forms the physical body, is called the etheric body or life body. This is what humans have in common with all living beings that surround them here on earth, including plants. The physical body is nothing more than a mixture of physical substances that would be impossible and would immediately disintegrate if it were not held together by the etheric or life body. The etheric body has the task of protecting the physical body from decay.

The third link of the human being is, in the sense of spiritual science, the astral body. This astral body is the carrier of all desires, instincts and passions, in short, of all affects, of all that is inwardly mirrored within the human being, and this astral body the human being has in common only with animals, but no longer with plants.

Spiritual science then distinguishes a fourth element of the human being, by which he is the crown of creation, by which he differs from all the creatures around him. This fourth element is called the “I” in the English language, which works from within the human being. There is only one name that can never sound from the outside when it refers to the human being itself. This is why all great religions say: Here we have the ineffable name of God, a drop from the ocean of divinity that has flowed into every human being. Just as the individual drop of the sea is not the whole sea, the human soul is not the whole of divinity. Only because the Godhead begins to speak in the soul, with the pronunciation of the Zch, does the soul begin to speak within itself, or, as religions say: the god speaks in man.

Today, this spiritual science is made exoteric through public lectures and writings; it is no longer passed on esoterically as it used to be, from person to person. One of these spiritual schools where teaching was only passed on from person to person was the old Pythagorean school in Greece.

Now let us see how the I works within the human being. Let us consider a savage at the most primitive level. On one of his journeys, Darwin came across a tribe of wild people who were still cannibals. He wanted to make it clear to one of them that this was not allowed, and he had the interpreter tell him that it was bad to eat people. The savage replied that he did not know whether it was good or bad before he had eaten the person. We see from this example that at this stage of existence, the uneducated savage knows nothing but how to satisfy the basest instincts and desires of his astral body. But when he undergoes a higher development, when he comes to the realization: You must not follow these lower instincts and desires, when he recognizes moral and ethical laws and commandments, then his ego works on the ennoblement of his astral body. The primitive man, at the lowest level of existence, whose ego has not yet worked on the astral body, has only the one astral body that the powers gave him at his birth. The more highly developed man has two parts in his astral body: the part that he has ennobled through his ego, and the other part, which is still as the powers gave it to him. The part of the astral body that is a product of the ego is called the manas or spirit self.

Now, a person can also work on their etheric or life body. To understand the difference, let us think about what each of us knew as an eight-year-old child and what we have acquired since then. We have absorbed a tremendous amount of ideas and concepts since then. Let us now compare this sum of ideas with what has slowly changed in our temperament, passions, habits and character. If we compare the changes in the human astral body with the minute hand of a clock, we can compare the advancement, the changes in the etheric body with the hour hand of the clock. The processing of the etheric body takes place much more slowly. A child's violent temper or melancholy, for example, will in most cases continue to resurface time and again, even at a later age.

There are now impulses in intellectual development that have a strong effect on the etheric body, and through which it can also be transformed. Art, for example, is one of these impulses. When a person learns to look through the mirror of matter at the divine that speaks to him through the work of art, he transforms the etheric body and forms a part of the etheric body in such a way that it too is a product of the ego. And the more and more perfect the human being becomes, the greater the part of the etheric body that is ennobled, transformed by the I. This ennobled part of the etheric body is called Budhi, so that Budhi is what transforms the human being's life body into life spirit. The impulses that are most capable of transforming the etheric body are religious impulses, whether they come from Hermes, Zarathustra, Buddha, Moses, or any of the other great initiates of humanity. They are the great, powerful impulses that are able to transform the life body into the life spirit.

Even more powerful are the impulses that affect the student in the secret schools who is undergoing spiritual training. It becomes completely clear to the person undergoing this spiritual training that there is what is called a spiritual core of being. When man in the secret training is made a seer, then he works even deeper into his etheric body, he develops an ever greater core of wisdom that lives in him and is able to conquer death. When the disciple then received this Budhi, when he developed the life body more and more into the life spirit, then he was called an initiate, and the greatest initiates are the founders of religions. This great wisdom was given by them in images, so that the people who were taught by them could absorb this original wisdom. Thus Hermes gave the Egyptian people an image of the original wisdom, and the Rishis taught in a way that the ancient Indians could understand. This original wisdom was made understandable by Zarathustra for the Persian people, and it was Pythagoras who did the same for the Greeks. So it was with the greatest religious teacher, who was no ordinary initiate but carried a divine spirit within him, with Christ Jesus, to whom it was reserved to found the greatest and purest religion, which, when it is understood by all, will be the universal religion of mankind. We also understand a word of Christ Jesus: “If you do not leave father and mother” (Luke 14:26; Matt. 19:29) and so on. This is not spoken in order to destroy the sacred bonds of the family, but to found a brotherhood of all mankind, where people shall live together fraternally, although they are not physically brothers and sisters and bound by family ties. Thus Christ has cast the original wisdom of the world into this form.

If we look at Buddhism, it is what is tailored for the Indian people, and the one who brought this religion to the Indian people is called Buddha because he said: “I give you the Budhi, which in me stimulates the life body to become a life spirit.” But what Sinnett described in his book is not what the Buddha taught, but those teachings that figure in the secret schools as the Budhi for transforming the life body into the life spirit. Sinnett's error is therefore nothing more than a spelling mistake; he wrongly writes Budhi with two d's. However, it is not about Buddha and Buddhism, but about the transformation of the life body into the life spirit. In the secret training, the disciple also learns to work into his physical body. The physical body of man is the densest and therefore it is the hardest to work into it. Because it is the lowest of the four limbs of the human being, the highest power is needed to work into it. What does man know about his physical body, about the process of digestion, the blood circulation, the work of the muscles? It is not meant what the anatomist can determine about the physical body, but that one can see how the nerve currents flow, how breathing and blood circulation proceed, that it becomes light in the physical body. When a person consciously works on transforming the physical body, it is said that he has developed Atman when he gains control over the physical body through his I. Now there is a communal teaching that underlies all religious beliefs. Everything that the human being has not yet worked through the ego of his physical, etheric and astral bodies falls away from the human being and remains behind as a corpse. But what the I has worked into these outer shells, which we call the physical body, ether body and astral body, becomes the eternal core of the human being. And now spiritual science explains that there is a core of being formed by the ego, which is eternal, which must often re-embody itself, and will become more and more perfect as the human being goes through his normal course until he has come to the point of view where he has transformed the lower bodies, deified them, so that he will be taken up again into the bosom of the Godhead, where the soul once came from in primeval times. Man consists of two parts, the eternal essence and the perishable part of man. It is clear that he cannot immediately reach the level of perfection, that he must go through many, many lives. What we have sown in previous lives, we will now reap; man is born again and again until he stands at the height of humanity. We can understand many things if we look not at just one, but at many lives on earth. It makes our need and misery, luck and misfortune, clear to us, because all of this is prepared in previous lives. These are not fates, but consequences of our own actions. So we must not only understand karma in relation to the past, but also see it in the future. Then karma becomes a great comfort to us, something that gives us work in life and strength and comfort for the future. Thus karma becomes a practical point of view for life, a moral foundation for our lives. This is how religions have spoken to people, about the eternal essence and its re-embodiment.

Now Gautama Buddha was the one who presented this teaching of reincarnation and karma, as we have now developed it, most purely. But if this teaching had always prevailed, humanity would never have reached today's level of culture. If we compare the time when this teaching was communicated to mankind with the present time, we see that the laborer at the Egyptian pyramid said to himself that this arduous life is one life among many, and he looked up to the eternal divinity, but in so doing he lost touch with the physical. People look to the spirit, but lose touch with the earthly, and it would never have been possible to achieve the level of civilization that surrounds us today. Man had to learn to love the one life between birth and death. Only because Christ Jesus appeared as such a powerful personality was it possible for man to develop his personality to such an extent that it brought him together with this world. This culture would never have come about without Christianity. The teaching of reincarnation was also taught by Christ Jesus, but esoterically, in parables. Only to his most intimate disciples did he say: “For a while, the teaching of karma and reincarnation must remain secret, but the time will come when it must be proclaimed again before all people. That time has come today. And this is the wisdom that Theosophy wants to bring to people today. That is why Theosophy is not a sect, but an instrument, a servant that leads to an understanding of the highest spiritual existence. That is why it is not unscientific, and precisely because Theosophy shows the common essence in Buddhism and Christianity and all other major religions, it is not a religious community at all, but an instrument for understanding every religion.

The study of parables and their interpretation is all too easily drawn into the current materialistic worldview, for materialism, even if it is not so strongly felt and admitted by individuals, has taken hold of our entire age, of the whole way of thinking. Not only natural science, but philosophy and even theology have been affected to some extent. One kind of materialism can be easily cured, so to speak, because it is only theoretical and can easily be shown to be absurd. It is much more difficult with the materialistic way of thinking, which, for example, sees in Jesus nothing more than a selfless, pure human being and then has drawn this figure so completely down into the materialistic.

There were times when the parables could not be interpreted highly enough; in the first centuries, the interpreters of the Gospels did everything they could to identify the Christ in Jesus; today, on the other hand, we see that newer theologians have no inclination to see in Jesus anything other than an idealized person who, while being somewhat higher than Goethe or Schiller, may in no case, in their judgment, rise so significantly above humanity. For these modern theologians, Jesus is simply the simple man from Nazareth, and such a belittling of Jesus' personality is much worse materialism than the theoretical kind.

Things like the parables must not be reduced to the generally human, otherwise only pure materialism will be spread in the field of religious thinking. Salvation can only come from the fact that these documents do not contain mere facts, but universal truths. One must delve deeply into these truths in order to recognize the right intentions from them, and not speculate about them.

How, for example, has the Lord's Prayer been viewed in the esoteric, which I have already been able to talk to you about! Only those who go back to the occult schools can find the right thing.

So let us also draw from these right sources with regard to today's parable: It reads:

He spoke But he spoke also to his disciples, saying, There was a certain rich man, which had a steward; and the same was accused unto him that he had wasted his goods. And he called him, and said unto him, How is it that I hear of thee? give an account of thy stewardship; for thou mayest be no longer steward. Then the steward said within himself, What shall I do, for my lord taketh away from me the stewardship: I cannot dig; to beg I am ashamed. I will know what I may do, that, when I am put out of the stewardship, they may receive me into their houses. So he called every one of his lord's debtors unto him, and said unto the first, How much owest thou unto my lord? And he said, An hundred measures of oil. And he said unto him, Take thine own bill, and sit down quickly, and write fifty. Then said he to the other, And how much owest thou? And he said, An hundred measures of wheat. And he said unto him, Take thine own bill, and write forty. And the lord commended the unrighteous steward, because he had done wisely: for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light. And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends with the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations. He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unrighteous in the least is unrighteous also in much. If therefore ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches? And if you are not faithful in what is another man's, who will give you what is yours? No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. When the Pharisees heard all this they were mocking him. And he said unto them, “Ye are they which justify yourselves before men, but God knoweth your hearts: for that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God.” The law and the prophets were preached until John. Since that time the kingdom of God has been preached, and everyone is forcing his way into it. But it is easier for heaven and earth to disappear than for the least stroke of a pen to drop out of the law. Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and he who marries a widow commits adultery. (Luke 16:1-18)

To understand this parable, it is first necessary to see where it is found; it is found in the Gospel of Luke. The apparent diversity of the four Gospels is due to the fact that their authors had not gone through the same mystery school. For example, the Gospel of John is based on the Greek mystery schools. Luke, on the other hand, drew from the deep mysteries of the therapists and Essenes, and that is why the Gospel of Luke has a completely different tone of explanation than that of John, for example. In this sense, everything cannot be lumped together.

The Gospel of Luke, as I said, was born out of the attitude of the therapists and Essenes, which consisted in pointing out to people in all their striving to the powers of their own soul. The keynote of this Gospel will only be grasped in the right way if one takes into account the saying of these Essenes: You shall bring to maturity the thoughts within you that take care of the poor, the afflicted, the laden. Luke's gospel is a gospel of poverty and is thus most intimately connected with the attitudes of the therapists and Essenes.

This noble brotherhood was the first to emphasize the equality of all people before God. They allowed their bodies only the most necessary nourishment, and of the greatest purity of morals. They were doctors of body and soul to their fellow human beings; no one was allowed to heal for the sake of reward. Their beneficial work extended to the huts of the poor as well as to the palaces of the rich. Those who are not familiar with the circumstances of this time do not realize what an eminent progress was associated with the appearance of this order, and only then do we understand why Luke's gospel has this particular tone. The confrontation between the rich and those who owe him money comes to the fore at first; it is not at all a matter of accusing the rich man in some way, but of putting the debtors, the poor, in the right light. Thus, it is not a good idea to want to recognize God, the infinitely rich, in the rich man; for it is simply said of the man that he is a rich man. But is his way of thinking also such that he wants to exploit people, or is it different, and would it not be possible that the steward's actions were based solely on the good intention of reducing the debts of the poor?

The steward had brought the economy into disarray; now he has to give account and fears that he will be dismissed and therefore he is trying to provide for himself. He cannot work, does not want to beg, but he wants to have a place to stay and he is now trying to find one with those whom he had wronged. It is his own fault that they were charged too much, so he says to the first one: You no longer owe me 100 tons of oil, but 50, and to the other: You no longer owe me 100 bushels of wheat, but 80, and with that the debtors are satisfied, he has eased the heavy burden on them as much as possible. So what did he do? He used his master's wealth to do justice to the poor, thereby doing them a favor.

That's what matters. Now let us remember that the rich man says to his steward, “You have acted wisely”; he does not want to be an exploiter, but thinks to himself, Now I like you.

Such an attitude was new to the scribes of the time; never before had anyone been induced to do good in this way. It achieved something that had previously been considered inadmissible, even impossible. The debtors, the poor, would have found no way out of their dire situation; here they are referred to as the children of light, that is, as those who accept the teaching of wisdom, in contrast to the children of the world. These, the Pharisees, are stingy and only act according to the rigid letter of the law; they do not want to help the poor, but the steward was always the one who did something for the poor.

And now we can also apply the parable to a higher truth and do not hesitate to describe God himself as the rich man who, although no one compares him to an exploiter, is always happy to give of his inexhaustible riches and praises the steward for using the divine riches to do good to the poor.

But the parable also becomes a universal truth through Jesus' subsequent words. Jesus says that the law and the prophets prophesied until John. (Luke 16:16) This is a reference to the higher spiritual truth; it refers to the great change that occurred through Christ Jesus. Before that, there was the rigid law, the wording of which people scrupulously adhered to, but which could not prevent the gap between the wealthy and the poor from growing ever wider, and the contradictions from developing into a harshness and acrimony that we can hardly imagine today. This state of affairs, carried to its extreme point, was finally resolved by the fact that Christ Jesus, although He rightly left the Law in full force, transferred its seat and its work into the souls of individual human beings.

As can be seen later, the Law not only does not lose any of its importance as a result, but it is intensified and refined in a way that was previously unimagined and unknown. In the serious and urgent admonishment that Jesus addresses to the Pharisees, who justify themselves before men, the parable of the prodigal son also passes before our soul. The son who always stayed at home is less favored by the father than the “prodigal” son who has undergone the test, who has returned to the fatherland, who has been resurrected. This is a perfect expression of what grace means, which paves the way from a loving heart to another loving heart. The law is the network that bound people together; grace flows into the inner being and becomes the living law in the soul. It is not for nothing that Jesus says, “I am the fulfillment of the law.” (Matthew 5:17-18) The Kingdom of Heaven cannot be forced; it does not come with external gestures; only those who try to reach it with the power of their soul will find it, and that is by Christ becoming alive in them.

In the successive periods, the most diverse impulses prevail in the soul. So what is the law in relation to grace? It is the one that did not come in through Christianity, but what was there through the steward. Before his appearance, Christianity was not yet the appropriate religion for people; they still needed the law, they still needed stewards.

This steward is replaced by the work of Christ on humanity and must give account. The law has become an unjust one over time, like all systems that are temporarily suitable for people. The oppression of the poor is mentioned again and again in the Gospel of Luke. Christ teaches a new way of thinking and acting in place of this way of thinking and acting. Now we understand when it says in this Gospel: “The law and the prophets were preached until John; and since that time the kingdom of God has been preached, and people are forcing their way into it.” (Lk 16:16)

When interpreting the parables, nothing should be left out; only in this way will we gain the context. Now let us go one step further:

The law had led to the oppression of the poor; these, the children of light, heard that something new was to come, that they were to give account. They can now cite nothing but the innermost feelings of their hearts if they want to make some excuse. The oppressors have not heard the voice of charity so far, but now they are trying to give back the unjust mammon, the vague call for a new era has also reached them, in which injustice should not continue, the children of the world cannot indulge in hypocrisy, the new external and internal conditions of the world force them to behave differently than before. All this justifies that Christ Jesus can claim this change in the spirit of the time for himself. And I also say to you: “Make friends with the unrighteous mammon, so that when you now suffer hunger, they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.” (Luke 16:9) He can say: “You see from this steward how one should behave in the face of poverty, and you can truly take an example from it, but you must be urged to do so by the innermost impulses of your soul; then you will find enough for your needs when you are in need yourselves.”

In the old dispensation, the children of the world were wiser than the children of light, but that will be reversed later. You must not believe that it can only be beneficial to adhere strictly to the rigid letter of the law; the children of the world have generally always spoken of righteousness, but have not in reality kept to it in the slightest. From the steward's actions, we can see how the law should have been applied in its deepest inner sense.

"If you have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches? And if you have not been faithful in what is another's, who will give you what is yours?” (Luke 16:11-12) These words point to the replacement of the old era by a new one, a new social order is being introduced in which each shall receive what is his. And now, once again, the point is summarized: ”Be serious.” There the old attitude with its harshness according to the letter of the law, here the new attitude, which knows nothing but responding to the needs of the other, recognizing in this an equal entity, while at the same time being carried by the consciousness of serving God.

“You cannot serve God and mammon” (Luke 16:13); mammon is the name given to the gods of obstacles, while Christ and wisdom bring forward. Mammon is the term used for everything that man wants to grab for the narrow circle of his “ego”; but this is only of secondary importance. This embodied selfishness is shown to us in the Gospel by Judas Iscariot, who contributes to Christ being led to his death.

“Old times - new times.” It is now understandable that the Pharisees mocked, of whom it says, “They were greedy.” (Luke 16:14) The translation is not quite correct; it would be better to say, “They had a mammonistic attitude.” Therefore, Christ Jesus says, “But God knows the hearts,” and that is what will matter, because what is high among men is an abomination before God; only true spiritual power determines the real order of rank. Charity is not against the law, but as an impulse for the fullest fulfillment of the law, of one's own free will. At the time of Christ, the moment had come when charity had to appear before the hearts of men hardened completely. But Christ Jesus continues: “It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one tittle of the law to fail” (Luke 16:17); “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and he who marries her when she is divorced from her husband commits adultery.” (Luke 16:18) – If we now turn to Matthew, chapter 5, we find that Jesus says that true marriage must neither be broken nor divorced (Matthew 5:30-31). We who are present know the concept of marriage only according to the law, and of course the completely new concept of Jesus, which places the focus of married life so completely within the soul, is the greatest possible contrast. Such words must have seemed incomprehensible to most people because their hearts were hardened, as Jesus often emphasized in his speeches. Instead of being bound by the form of the law, here the circumstances are based on the power of the innermost impulses. Therefore, through the realization of Jesus' teachings, the most glorious conditions must arise from the heart. In the analogous passage in Mark (Mk 10:2-10), there is also talk of marriage and the possibility of divorce and the consequences, but the whole marital relationship is so delicate in reality that it cannot be transferred to another. The teachings expressed in the parable point to the change brought about by Christ Jesus. — Having considered the gospel in this way, we may also compare the rich man with the world ruler, who is always happy to give from his inexhaustible abundance and praises those who make use of this wealth to do good to others. You see, the parable is written entirely in the spirit of the Gospel of Luke, and so it should be observed, otherwise it would not be understood. As already mentioned at the beginning, when studying individual parts of the Gospel, it is always necessary to consider which evangelist wrote them, each of whom came from a different school.

There is not much left to explain about this parable. Theosophy is always a clear guide for such considerations. We should not brood and fantasize, but draw wisdom from these words ourselves, then we will find what remains hidden from the keen minds of liberal theologians and at the same time we will not run the risk of being drawn into the teachings of material fantasists who, despite their new teachings about the vortices of atoms, they cannot in their own way get any closer to the essence of phenomena.

At present, however, it seems as if humanity is guided by purely material profanes who accept nothing other than what can be perceived with the bodily senses. Holding on to phrases about harmony and universal brotherhood does not benefit the progress of humanity either. If I say to the stove, “Be warm,” it does not spread warmth because of that; you have to heat it, and only then will it become warm and warm others. So admonitions of brotherhood are of no use either; you have to give people wisdom, then brotherhood develops by itself.

When the patriarchs are spoken of and their age is given in huge numbers, then we have to understand that these so-called patriarchs must be seen as representatives of tribes. The Bible students had been doing this for a long time, but they did not know what was actually behind it. If we now remember the lecture “Blood is a Special Juice”, we find a special application of the word “consciousness”. Those who firmly believe that there is development must also admit that everything is in development, including consciousness. The consciousness that we have today was not always there; it developed out of another consciousness that was dim and dream-like, that lived in images in people. This kind of consciousness, which was dull and clairvoyant at the same time, was dependent on a very specific fact. In those days, people lived in small communities. All nations, in whose distant origin we delve, show the same thing. The further back we go in the history of civilization, the smaller the communities of people become. It was considered immoral to marry outside of these small communities. It was only later that this principle of close marriage was interrupted by the principle of distant marriage, and it is with this interruption that the development of the dim consciousness to the present rational consciousness begins. In the members of those ancient tribes a very different memory lived; what the father and grandfather experienced lived in the son as if he himself had experienced it. The ancestral powers passed down through the blood of these tribes, which were united in close blood ties, to such an extent that the descendant remembered the events of his ancestors as if he had experienced them himself; that was in the blood, which rolled through generations. The son remembered and said: I have experienced this - what father and grandfather, etc., had experienced. As long as this I - this tribal I - was preserved, one spoke of the same entity with the same name. It is Adam, the continuous I of Adam, it refers to what is inherited through many generations from Adam, not the person of Adam.

Likewise, we must understand the passage where it says, “Enoch, the man of God, disappeared from the earth.” (Genesis 5:24) This does not mean that he dissolved into vapor and mist, but “Enoch” means one of those common “I”. This is dissolved by him becoming the man of God, that is, the one who devotes himself to the spirit, who gives up having offspring, who devotes himself in a kind of asceticism and therefore disappears, since he does not live on in the son and has given what runs in the blood.

Those who believe in the Bible today have no real idea of what the relationship to the Bible was in ancient times. For the ancients, the Bible was the “Word of God”; they knew that those who wrote it were initiates inspired by divine wisdom, and the more they believed that only truth could come from the divine spirit, the more each word of the Bible was sacred to them as the outpouring of that divine spirit, which revealed itself to them through these inspired men. For today's man, it is difficult to put oneself in this reverent frame of mind, which did not criticize this inspired wisdom at all.

It is only natural to see that the modern man must criticize, but we ask ourselves: How is it possible that through the centuries truly not stupid minds, who had these books in their hands, did not also criticize, why they did not also, for example, subject the differences that the four gospels show to this criticism? Are we to imagine that those few who had the Bible in their hands before the invention of printing did not see what today's critics see and from which they draw doubts about the authenticity of the Gospels? They saw these differences, but they knew how they came about. They knew that at this momentous historical moment, in the founding of Christianity, the sequence of initiation had been drawn down onto the physical plane and completed in the Mystery of Golgotha. From then on, the “Son of Man” could undergo this on the physical plane, that is, the one who had developed the consciousness of the general in himself. The Son of Man brought the secret of initiation into the physical world, and the life of these initiates had to be described in such a way that it was a reflection of the old canon of initiation in the old mystery schools, the old temple sites. This canon of initiation was fixed in this area in one way, in another area in another, but you can see the initiation mode of the old initiation schools shining through it.

The physical life of Christ Jesus, as described in the four Gospels, really did unfold as the life of a disciple in the ancient mystery schools; we see in the four Gospels only the various forms of the initiation canon as it was established by the different schools of initiation. There are small deviations, but one whole, one single stream runs through all four. The Jesus Christ, the only Son of Man, presents this mighty sentence in the physical life, living it in the physical body: that life conquers death! What the initiate experiences in his etheric body, Jesus Christ experiences on the physical plane. The symbol has become outer reality, has become an historical fact. In these three days, in which the Christ is dead, spiritual science sees carried out onto the physical plane that which the initiate experienced in the depths of the crypts. When he then awakened to life in his physical body again, when he, having returned from the spiritual worlds, was able to bear witness to their reality, when he had become a proclaimer of the spiritual worlds, then, in the exuberance of these high and holy feelings, the words that Christ Jesus also spoke on Golgotha broke free from his soul: “My God, my God, how have you glorified me!” — “Eli, eli, lama...” (Matthew 27:46, cf. Psalm 22:1; Mark 15:34) The word “forsaken” is not to be used; it is an incorrect translation. These words, “My God, My God, how have You glorified Me!” were the words of each one when he awoke from this three-day sleep, when he had experienced that life in the spirit conquers death.

The principle of initiation before Christ was different from today's. Only the chosen were admitted to the mysteries, from which the schools on the one hand and the churches on the other later developed. The teachings were oral, and in the mystery schools, once admitted, the student was subjected to a very special rhythm of life, which he had to integrate into his life. This rhythm, given in the ancient initiation canon, was fixed and unchangeable; as fixed and sure as the course of the sun, as surely as that, a disciple walked the path of life. These disciples were called solar heroes when they had reached a certain degree; and this life of a disciple, that is what the Christ Jesus carried out onto the physical plane, and that is described in the four Gospels.

There is a certain organ in man that contains the Christ potential; through this organ, man enters into direct relationship with the Christ. The Christ consciousness is created by the historical Christ. Just as the eye beholds light, so does this organ behold the Christ, but the historical Christ has created the Christ possibility, the possibility that man, through this organ, may come into direct touch with the Christ.

When the human body was not yet the carrier of a soul, as long as it was still inanimate, it was, like the earth it inhabited, still quite differently formed. It had an organ within itself that still exists today as the swim bladder of fish. Man did not walk upright at that time; he moved forward by floating and swimming. He carried this organ within him, which has remained with the fish that have not developed further; in man it was transformed into lungs. This gave him the ability to breathe in and process air. We still find gill breathing in the embryonic development of man. This point in time, when the lungs capture oxygen from the air, is also the moment of ensoulment. This, expressed in terms of feeling and perception, is illustrated in the monumental words: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7) That is to say, man inhaled the divine soul.

The ancients still felt every breath as a soul, hence the legends and myths that see in the air the body of the deity that has ensouled man. In all ancient forms of religion we find this clothed in images. It had to be clothed in images for humanity at that time, because if the great spiritual leaders of humanity had expressed these truths in the form in which they are expressed today, they would not have been understood; they had to speak in images. Everything, absolutely everything, is in a state of development, including consciousness! The form of imparting truths that was valid for the earlier dim consciousness of man was the pictorial one, so in the old religious documents the I also appears at the same time as the blowing, the one blowing in the air. This is the truth that individualizes itself in the breathing process. This is the same as Wotan, the one riding in the air stream, the one blowing.

Before its embodiment, the soul was sexless; here too, a development has taken place. Every spiritual researcher looks at this development. Before there were men and women, the God who unites both sexes within himself arose within the spiritual world order. This is the reason why the creation of man is told twice in the first chapters of Genesis. Once male-female (Gen 1:27), that is the divine spiritual man, who is neither male nor female, but unites the powers of both sexes in himself, and then the creation of man down on the physical plane; it says: Man came into being as a male-female being (Gen 1:27), not as Luther writes: “a little man and a little woman”.

The new instrument guides humanity towards a common bond that is more comprehensive than the bond of love. In the past there was a tribal ego, then, after long-distance marriage occurred, the same developed into a national consciousness, a national ego. Now, in humanity, there is a tendency to expand the national consciousness, which lies within this national ego, into that which holds all humanity together, into a brotherhood. To prepare this brotherhood, this blood brotherhood, which is independent of the blood that runs through the veins, that is the mission of Christianity. The old God, Jahve, the one who blows, who gave the ego, the one God who lives in the individual consciousness, will develop to recognize something common in all people, this human consciousness, that is the Christ consciousness! This encompasses an ego that will embrace all of humanity in one consciousness. There is a sentence that expresses this: “If anyone does not give up father, mother, son, or brother, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26; Matthew 19:29) Christianity prepares for an all-encompassing human brotherhood; we must not understand this in an everyday, trivial sense.

We may call Jehovah the people-god who splits up humanity into separate peoples; Jahve also means the blowing of the breath with which the I-spirit enters into man, but in Christ, the Son of Man, as whom he designates himself – that that is, not the son of a man or of a family, but of all mankind. In Christ we see him who prepares the universal world-alliance of love; and as Yahweh pours a part of his humanity into man, so the Christ pours a part of his being into humanity from now on. This essence lived in supreme glory in Jesus of Nazareth. He was the most highly initiated of all, and therefore He could say, “Before Abraham was, I am,” or rather, “I am to be.” (John 8:58) In such words lies the esoteric teaching of Christianity, which is meant to live as a power in outer Christianity.

How did it come about that the Son of Man was embodied in a personality? To explain this question, I will describe to you what prophecy means and how the Mystery of Golgotha emerged from it. In the beginning there were only a few initiates, prophets. To initiate means to develop those higher abilities in man that lead him up into the higher worlds and allow him to experience their truths for himself. All spiritual realities that they see and experience there will one day descend to the physical plane. A prophet can ascend to the spiritual plane, he can see what is there, and so he can say what will later descend to the physical plane. That is prophecy!

The old prophets proclaimed the coming of the Son of Man, that is, they foresaw in the spiritual worlds the preparation of that which later became a physical fact at the momentous time when the Christ appeared on the physical plane. The Son of Man brought down to the physical plane that which had previously been in the spiritual worlds, the brotherhood of man, which is to unite people in love, independently of the bonds of blood. And in the blood that flowed from the wounds at Golgotha, there flowed out that which was superfluous, overcome, selfish in human blood; this blood was sacrificed on the cross. That is the mystery of Golgotha. Human blood sacrificed itself to purify the blood of human egoism. This purification of the blood from the ego took place at Golgotha.

If we compare the meaning of the first three gospels, we find that a certain mood underlies them all. The Gospel of Luke points to the initiation school of the Essenes and therapists, which is why we find a certain social character in his parables.

The great German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte once said meaningful words about the interaction between two layers of the population in one of his inspiring “Speeches to the German Nation”. He said that the spiritual life of a nation can only be directly active if there is full understanding between the way in which the leaders at the forefront of this spiritual life express themselves and the way in which those who receive, who listen in their hearts and souls to what the leaders of the nation have to say, conceptualize and feel. And Fichte called those nations more or less dead nations in terms of their intellectual life, in which a stratum of learned education, a stratum of higher intellectual life, speaks a language and has a thought life that does not immediately find a living, full echo in those who are meant to listen to the voices of the leaders, to the voices of those who have something to proclaim about the highest questions of existence, about the riddles and the secrets of the world that are hidden in our existence.

What the philosopher and orator said at the time in relation to a nation, we can also apply to other forms of spiritual life, and indeed we see it confirmed more and more in what we experience in the field of religious coexistence between those who are supposed to listen, those who have a longing and a need to receive something, and the leaders in this field of spiritual life, in the field of religious life.

If we take a closer look at the last few decades, or perhaps the whole century, and survey these facts, we see how, in relation to those documents that have actually provided spiritual nourishment for thousands of years for broad sections of our population, how a scholarship is asserting itself in relation to these religious documents that is no longer directly understood by the broadest sections of the population, by those who are to be heard. We see how those who are scholars, leaders, and teachers in this regard have different things to say about the religious documents of Christianity and what is connected with them, and have different things to say about what has created a deep gulf between this scholarship and the immediate religious needs of wider and wider sections of the population: the two groups no longer understand each other properly. If you look at the matter with an unbiased eye, you will notice this very, very soon.

Theologians and other learned circles who deal with the Bible, whether scientifically or popularly, with that document that is the most important for our national life, have been led by their research to a way of understanding what these documents are , what value and origin they have, and of the content of the same, to a way of understanding them so that what they have to say no longer finds a living response, no longer can ignite the living life in the hearts of those who are supposed to listen.

When we take such popular writings on these matters into our hands, through which we are to educate ourselves, books that are distributed among the people in thousands and thousands of copies, when we look at them and ask ourselves: Is this scholarship such that what is spoken of it and distributed through thousands and thousands of channels into the people, is it such that it can satisfy the deepest religious needs of man, that the simple man, who seeks spiritual nourishment in religious documents above all things, seeks something that solves the highest questions of existence for him, the riddles of world life, is what is offered here such that this man can find what he seeks?

If we look at the facts at hand impartially, we have to say: little, very little, of real, truly deep religious feeling is to be found in our theological scholarship, and little, very little, of what comes out of this erudition, approaches us, little of it is suitable to penetrate the heart, to uplift and unfold the mind. We need only look around a little, and this will be confirmed.

Let us take a look at what has been developed in this direction over the last 100 years: The time is over when the Old and New Testaments were considered books in which truly inspired personalities once solved the riddles of existence under higher inspiration, as needed for the religious mind. For many, many centuries, there were times when the widest circles of the population listened so intently to the words of the Holy Scripture, as if the highest truths were proclaimed here, then, when they received it - not directly, but indirectly through the mouths of priests and sages, what the religious documents offer, that they then listened as if they were convinced that when the content was proclaimed to them, they were given the highest truths about the spiritual-divine realities underlying our everyday sensual life. There was a time when people were convinced that the Bible is no ordinary book, but that it originated from the very Being that has also brought forth all the phenomena that surround us. The Bible was spoken of as an inspired book, and it was felt to be a book whose words resounded from spiritual worlds themselves, whose words therefore proclaimed the eternal wisdoms that mankind needs on its path of development in the course of world evolution. In those ancient times, no one dared to think of criticizing this book in any way. That this book has been subjected to criticism is the result of 100 years of research by scholars. They no longer had the same reservations about accepting this book as it is, they asked themselves: Do the individual parts agree with each other, do they not contradict the scientific findings of other fields of research? Are they such that one could think it was an inspired book from beginning to end? The answer to these questions provides the basis for a critical work that has been done by the science of our time for 100 years. And what has come to light in the process? It is not necessary for our purpose – which is to consider the relationship of wisdom literature to the Bible – to talk about biblical criticism; we will say a few words about the spirit of this biblical criticism only in this introduction.

For example, it has been seen – I can only touch on what is important here briefly and summarily – that there is a peculiarity in the first parts of the Old Testament: two ways in which the divine presence in the world is named. It was noticed that in certain parts the divine presence is referred to as Yahweh, in other parts in a kind of plural: the Elohim.

And yet another observation has been made that seemed to point to something: that right at the beginning of the Old Testament, as is believed, a fact: the creation of man, is told twice. The creation is told in the seven-day work, and it is told how, finally, on the sixth day, man, as the crowning glory of creation, was created as it says, “male-female” (Genesis 1:27). Strangely enough, they say, this creation of man, and specifically of male-female man, is retold! Now the matter is presented as if man had already existed, as if no animals had yet been created around him. In short, critical research says that the same fact is being retold.

Furthermore, many passages were found in the writings named after Moses that could not be believed, and for which evidence was also believed to have been found, that they originated in the sense of the old opinion of the great inspired Moses himself, for example when it is said about the land of Canaan, so that it was seen: It could not be said in this old time, in which Moses lived, in this way about this land, but only in a later time. Then they examined the style in which it was written and found that the individual parts showed a great difference in expression; in one case they found it to be more popular, in the other more priestly and learned.

I would have to tell you much, much more in order to explain the spirit and meaning of this biblical research to you in detail. We do not need this, we just have to realize that under the impression of such critical research, scholars came to say: a unified meaning, a unified author cannot have written these so different, pieced-together parts that we call the individual books of the Bible. So they came to say to themselves: These most diverse parts originated at the most diverse times, formed in the most diverse manner among the people and were then collected. In particular, two parts were distinguished: a first part and a second, distinctly different part. Each of these parts was to have its special writer. The former was called the Jahwist. And to this Jahvist was attributed everything that seemed to be more original and imbued with popular force. Thus everything in the style of the Paradise Narrative, where Adam is led into paradise and Eve is created out of his own substance, was attributed to this source.

All of this was attributed to one source. On the other hand, everything that seemed more like speculation was attributed to another source. This source was called the so-called Priest Book, which alone was said to contain the more scholarly, priestly parts that were more speculative in character, like the six- or seven-day work. So, little by little, these stylistic and source investigations have been extended to the smallest individual parts, yes, one might say scraps, and traced back to their various origins.

Yes, today there are Bible translations, the so-called rainbow Bibles, in which the individual parts that are said to come from different sources are printed in different colors. Often you can even see the color changing in the middle of a line, in the middle of a sentence, for example, which means that this sentence is considered to come from different sources. The parts that are attributed primarily to the Yahwist are said to have originated in David's time, the others after the Babylonian exile. Thus the Old Testament gradually emerged as a collection, as something that had been compiled over a long period of time. In the way it was conceived, what was lost was necessarily that which, in its ancient greatness and significance as religious sentiment, was incorporated into what had been found in the Bible as revelation through centuries, even millennia.

Seen in this light, we have to say that the attitude of the broadest sections of society towards the Bible has changed more than people are usually willing to admit.

More than those who still have a deep religious fervor realize, this gap exists between those who are supposed to say what the Bible is actually about and those who are supposed to believe. And anyone who is able to look impartially into these circumstances, who has an unbiased view of the spiritual currents of our time, will see that the time is not far off when this gulf between theological scholarship and warm religious feeling among the people can no longer be bridged if things continue in this way, if nothing changes.

Religious life in the old way is no longer possible under these circumstances, and if you just don't want to close your eyes, you can see the time when Bible criticism – despite all the objections of those who want to cover up these facts , where this Bible criticism must have a killing effect on religious life, the gap will become unbridgeable if another spiritual current does not give the matter a completely different turn, a direction that brings about such a change. This spiritual current can only be one that has been referred to as theosophical wisdom for several decades.

Here in Munich, we have discussed the most diverse topics over the course of this winter; today and tomorrow, we want to consider the relationship between this theosophical school of thought and the view of this religious document, the Bible, which is so significant for our cultural life.

The theosophical approach to the world has to take a very peculiar attitude toward the Bible. Our conception of the Bible cannot and must not be something that is extraneous to the necessary historical course of our modern spiritual life, but something that is completely in line with the program of our modern spiritual life.

Theosophy seeks to renew and restore direct knowledge of the spiritual worlds. All those who have imbued their lives with this theosophical school of thought are firmly convinced that behind the world that our senses see there is a spiritual world, a world of spiritual beings. It is further the firm conviction of this same school of thought that this spiritual world is not something inaccessible and unsearchable for man, but something that man can search and recognize. Particularly under the influence of the materialistic school of thought in recent times, something like timidity, like hopelessness, has entered into our quest for knowledge: never in the development of the world has there been so much talk about the limits of knowledge as there is in our time, when people talk about the real why of existence, about the real creative and active entities that stand behind the world of the senses. Today, people easily say: Our powers of knowledge are not sufficient for this, we cannot explore this.

Our school of thought, however, spiritual science, says: We believe in development quite honestly and with all the consequences; not only everything else in the world, but also the human being develops, and the way he stands before us today, his development is not complete, he can continue this development at any moment, but especially the spiritual development. There are forces slumbering in him that can be drawn from his soul and then become active in higher knowledge.

To those who speak of the limits of knowledge, spiritual science says: Certainly, you are right, quite right, when you say that the source of existence cannot be explored with the powers of knowledge you are talking about. If you only speak of these powers you are quite right; but we, we do not speak of these powers in the field of spiritual science, but of powers which man does not have from the outset, but which everyone can have if he does not close himself to them by saying: I do not want to go further. Man lives in this world, which surrounds him with color and sound. Through his senses and with his mind limited to the world of the senses, he gains knowledge in it. In the same way, the higher worlds also surround him: but for them he has not yet brought any organs within himself into activity; he lives in these higher worlds like the blind man in the physical world of colors and light. But man can also live in this higher world as one who sees.

Just as the man born blind, when operated on, enters into a world that was previously unknown to him, while it has always been around him, so does the one to whom the spiritual eye is opened, to whom the spiritual senses are revealed, enter into a new world that has also surrounded him before, but which he could not perceive because he has not yet opened the organs for it. Only someone who does not want to think logically can dispute the possibility of such a higher world. Only someone who can see for himself is qualified to decide what it looks like in this world.

So what does this spiritual science have to say about religious documents? For anyone who really engages with the subject, it is a source of ever new and ever greater satisfaction and uplift. But before we discuss this in more detail, we would like to touch on something else.

In our time, there are four ways of relating to religious documents. These four types can be experienced by someone born into our time, who seeks out everything that seems capable of giving them satisfaction. Let us assume that a person is born and then introduced to a more or less naive religious life through school and family, so that he first receives the ideas of the Bible in a naive way, as the naive believer receives them. He believes in it for a while. Then, perhaps in our present time, the time comes for him when he becomes, as they say, as many people say, “enlightened,” when he becomes an “enlightened” person, and then he moves away from his old childlike faith!

What I am about to say is not meant as mockery, but as an expression of the truly tragic experience of many, many of our contemporaries. They come to the conclusion: When I look at modern science with its irrefutable results, which contradict so much of what I was taught and what I accepted with religious faith, I cannot help but have to give up my beautiful childhood faith. It is often tragic for such people to part with such beliefs; many cling to their old beliefs with all their hearts, but their sense of the truth of natural science separates them from them. They then become “enlightened people”; they try to be satisfied with what purely external natural science provides them with. These are the “clever people”, among whom many often look down with a certain arrogance and even some mockery on the naive believers.

Strangely enough, a group has now formed within these circles, within freethinking itself, which has come to the conclusion that these religious documents do not merely contain naive children's beliefs. They say to themselves: Admittedly, the things we are told here are not facts, but they are symbols for developmental processes - for inner development, if you like - and so now one person interprets these things in one way, the other in a different way, and so on. Recently a group has formed within the so-called freethinkers that has taken on the symbolic interpretation of the Bible. When you look at the work of this group, you have to say that you find many beautiful, spiritual things in it, they have thought about many myths and legends in an excellent way. But here the worst arbitrariness prevails. Everything depends on the interpreter's state of mind. One thinks more, the other less, into the things he wants to explain. What each one knows and is able to understand, that is just different. Some come to these points of view; but some can also shorten the way by leaving out one or the other of them.

Finally, after going through such preliminary stages, some people are able to truly penetrate the religious documents with the help of spiritual science, and there they notice something peculiar. They increasingly notice that what is written in the Bible can be taken literally, truly literally. It dawns on them like a new light, like a revelation, and on a higher level they come back to recognizing the value and significance of these religious documents. This is an experience that many have certainly gone through through theosophy. Starting out with a sincere striving for knowledge, they came to throw everything, absolutely everything, overboard. After a shorter or longer period of time, they came to Theosophy, guided by this striving for truth, and through it, the religious documents became valuable to them again, and what they once gave them, they have regained! The deeper one penetrates into the meaning of this wonderful book, the more one recognizes that everything, everything is as it is told to us there, and that precisely the passages that may have most provoked our disbelief, our criticism and our ridicule, can reveal the deepest spiritual truths to us.

The position of spiritual science in relation to the Bible and other religious documents will also be characterized from another perspective. You see, what Theosophy can be in relation to the Bible has long been established in another area of spiritual life, in the field of natural science, in order to determine its position in relation to another great document. What has taken place since Copernicus and Galileo in the field of external knowledge of nature is now taking place in our time in the field of religious knowledge and in relation to the religious scriptures through spiritual science, through Theosophy.

I would like to tell you a fact that will make this clearer: Throughout the Middle Ages, in all schools, what Aristotle had achieved was regarded as an incontrovertible fact with regard to the external knowledge of nature; for his time, he had been an important naturalist and collector of scientific knowledge. What he had compiled in his writings about nature is truly astounding. These were available as books, and at that time they were considered to be dogmatic documents about nature. Throughout the Middle Ages, teaching was based on these books; what he had to say about stars, plants, animals and human beings, and what they contained as a new revelation, was considered the ultimate authority. Then came Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler and their great leader Giordano Bruno; a completely new position with regard to knowledge of nature took hold. These people turned their gaze to nature itself; they no longer asked, “What did Aristotle say about this or that organ of the human body?” Instead, they examined everything themselves, they looked at the objects of nature themselves with their instruments and methods; they wanted to see with their own eyes, and for them only what they had found themselves was considered the authoritative thing, and no longer what Aristotle had said.

A short story may show how difficult it was for them to overcome their old faith in Aristotle and how deeply rooted it was. Through his detailed studies of the human body, Galileo had found various things that could not be reconciled with Aristotle. It is interesting to note what an old Aristotelian, a friend of Galileo, once said to him in this regard. He was invited by Galileo and shown by him to a human organism, and shown that one of Aristotle's assertions turned out to be incorrect when observed on the human body. Galileo wanted to make it clear to his friend that the true source of science about nature is the direct knowledge of nature itself. This friend, then, looked at what Galilei showed him, and had to admit, like it or not, that Galilei was apparently right, but he continued to swear by Aristotle's claim as only some orthodox theologian can swear by the Bible today: “It's true,” he said, “the facts are like this, but Aristotle said it differently, and I believe Aristotle more than my own eyes.” Tradition and prejudice have such a strong effect on people.

But today we see something different, and we have to say: Such are the changes of the times; another fact has taken the place of those prejudices. Today we are imbued with the attitude that we must approach nature itself directly if we want to come to a correct understanding. We are aware that it is not old traditions that can be decisive for us, but our judgments and insights gained through our own observations. At the same time, however, we are learning more and more through science to recognize that people in those days had not yet understood Aristotle at all, but had misunderstood him completely. Today we have come so far that we are making the amazing discovery that Aristotle meant the right thing after all, if only we understand him correctly. Thus, it is only through the fact that we have gained access through the direct knowledge of the facts of nature that we have been given the opportunity to recognize tradition in its true value, in its true meaning.

Where natural science stood at that time, today we stand in the presence of the spiritual science of the Bible. Through the stream of spiritual science that is brought to humanity today, the human being stands in relation to the spiritual world as the sensual human being of Galileo's time stood in relation to external, real nature. Just as there have been researchers since that time who approach the sensual facts of nature directly with their methods and instruments, so there will be more and more researchers who look directly into the spiritual worlds and directly recognize what is told in the Bible. This has been in preparation for a long time. It has been achieved for natural science; for spiritual science it must be achieved.

The Germans have a saga that points to this in its meaning: the Faust saga. Faust – it is said of him that he put the Bible behind the bench for a while. He no longer wanted to be a theologian, but a man of the world and a physician, because he put the Bible behind the bench for a while. He wanted to approach the secrets of nature directly and gain direct wisdom.

Thus, spiritual wisdom does not look to the Bible for the content and knowledge of the spiritual world, but independently of any tradition, it seeks to explore the factual content of the spiritual world and approaches the records with what it already has in order to test the records in its findings. If I am to characterize this position for you, I would like to do so with an example. What every schoolboy learns in geometry today was once discovered by ancient researchers. What schoolboys learn today is called Euclidean geometry, after that great Greek researcher to whom we owe the oldest work on these things. Is every schoolboy instructed to take the first work by Euclid and learn from it what he has to learn? The schoolboy knows nothing about these ancient documents; he learns from within himself, from his own ability to grasp the right thing, from the rightness, clarity and truth of the matter itself, and only much later, when he studies history, does it become apparent to him that the right thing is already contained in that work by Euclid and can therefore be found there.

Just as geometry is true in itself, so are the facts of the spiritual world true in themselves, and just as little as one needs the old documents to research the theorems of geometry today, so little does one need old documents to recognize the truths of the spiritual world. This is supposed to be the direct path, the immediate way into the spiritual world, which is shown by modern spiritual science. Here the Bible is the historical document that, like Euclid, is not necessary for understanding, but can confirm what has been found independently. So you see that spiritual science is as independent as possible of the Bible and is therefore also called upon to research it and recognize its real value. Let us ask ourselves: Who is actually called upon to recognize this? Our example can lead us to the answer: Only someone who is actually familiar with geometry can be called upon to recognize the value and significance of a work on geometry! Likewise, we must say: Only someone who is able to explore the content of the Bible from the spiritual world itself is called upon to judge and recognize its value and significance! As you can see, a completely new relationship to the Bible as a document has emerged through spiritual science.

Now, in the light of spiritual science, the things that “critical research” has brought to light about the Bible appear in a peculiar light! It seems relatively unimportant, quite unimportant and irrelevant when the individual pieces, parts of this document were written, created, we are only interested in this as a historical fact. But we gauge the value of the book itself as what we ourselves recognize as the content, by the correctness of the content.

Those who study this Bible from the point of view of spiritual science sometimes have the feeling when considering modern Bible criticism - I myself once had this feeling towards philological scholarship, sometimes towards this critical philology - because modern theology is, after all, only philology - a feeling that I will now describe to you.

It seems far-fetched, but there is a very beautiful prose hymn to nature by Goethe, which I have mentioned several times. In it, Goethe expresses his religious conviction in his enthusiastic way at the time:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by it, unable to step out of it and unable to get deeper into it. Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and carries on with us until we are tired and fall out of her arms. ... People are all in her, and she is in everyone. ... Even the most unnatural is nature, even the most crude philistinism has something of her genius. ... One obeys her laws even when one resists them; one works with her even when one wants to work against her. ... It is everything. It rewards itself [and punishes itself], delights itself and torments itself. ... It has brought me in, it will also lead me out. I trust it. It may do with me as it likes; it will not hate its work. I did not speak of it; no, what is true and what is false, it has spoken everything. All is its fault, all is its merit.

And then he concludes with the words:

Her crown is love, and she holds a few sips from the cup of love harmless for a lifetime of toil.

This is an essay full of many pearls of wisdom steeped in enthusiasm. Goethe was once asked in his later years when he had written this essay. In response to this question, you will then find a second essay in which Goethe says that he no longer remembers when he wrote this first essay, and that he no longer remembers that he wrote it, but that it is entirely an expression of his views at the time, and that it is quite possible that he wrote it. What Goethe said here has given learned Goethe researchers much to think about and occasion for incredible research; there was a time when Goethe researchers spent long, long hours investigating whether this essay was written by Goethe himself or not.

When I was appointed to the Goethe Archive in Weimar years ago to reissue Goethe's scientific writings, I was once asked to examine this question as well, and I was asked to pay particular attention to clarifying this controversial issue. I came to the conclusion that I was now able to determine that at the time when the aforementioned hymn was written, Goethe often went for walks with a younger person, and that one day, during a walk along the Ilm, he recited this essay to this young person in those beautiful words. This person was a certain Tobler, who had an excellent memory and was able to write down this essay word for word from memory. So in Tobler's transcript we have a genuine Goethe essay.

With a kind of pedantic philological precision, I myself proved at the time that every sentence was written by Goethe, although it was written down by someone else. Shortly thereafter, I met one of the most well-known Goethe researchers [whose name I understandably do not mention]. He approached me with the following words: [You have truly earned recognition for what you have brought to light, because] now we finally know who wrote the essay, that it was not Goethe who wrote it, but Tobler.

This is an experience that can show us how today's biblical criticism is to be taken. It was not important to this gentleman where the spiritual source was, but only to determine who dipped the pen in the ink and ran it over the paper.

It may seem almost grotesque, but today's biblical criticism is basically taking the same approach. It is not important to them where the spiritual sources for what is told come from, but rather to show with meticulous precision – in a figurative sense – who ultimately put the pen in the inkwell, and that is exactly what these people want to do: to distinguish with colors what flowed from one pen and what flowed from another. Not the slightest criticism is intended here. The scholar was right at the time: Tobler had dipped that pen into the ink and written the essay. Therefore, not the slightest doubt is to be cast on the value of this research. That is not the point. Full recognition is to be given to the true and infinite diligence that is displayed here, because anyone who is familiar with it knows what diligence, what amazing diligence is applied to answering these questions. Perhaps everything this science finds is true, but the only question is: is it fruitful for the inner life of human beings, is it of value for those who hope for an answer to the great questions of existence from the depths of their hearts? One more thing must be pointed out for a better understanding of these lectures. The word inspiration, which played a major role when the concept of the Bible was discussed earlier: it was said that what is in the Bible arose from inspiration. The wisdom from the same spiritual sources that are related to creation and production in the world itself flowed into it – the Bible. Gradually, the materialistic age came; it could not believe in such inspiration. The moment humanity ceased to believe in the spiritual worlds themselves, this concept had to fall. Spiritual science now knows this concept and traces it back to its true content and true meaning.

Spiritual science first recognizes a world, a physical world, the world of our senses, which we perceive with our eyes, can grasp with our hands, which we hear when we direct our ear to something that makes a sound. This whole world of the senses and of the mind that comprehends this world is the only real one for the materialistic mind. The spiritual world is a second world for those who, with unprejudiced senses, want to penetrate it through spiritual science. As already mentioned, spiritual wisdom shows that there are abilities that usually lie dormant in people today, but that can be awakened and that then really let people experience the spiritual worlds. In the human organism, the eye developed only gradually; with the development of the eye, the surrounding darkness, light and color first penetrated it. With the formation of the ear, the world of sounds resounded to it. With the development of the brain, man became able to develop and recreate the sensory world in his mind, to grasp it spiritually.

Just as the eye once lay dormant in the human organism, so other spiritual organs lie dormant in the human spirit, in the human soul. These organs can be awakened from the soul and spirit by certain methods that spiritual science offers to man, and then there is a second and a third world in the same world that surrounds us. I will first characterize the second world in a few words. When a person, whose physical senses are merely unlocked, looks at any object, he sees that thing with a certain color. The surface of that being is afflicted with a certain color. He can then hear what emerges as a sound from the soul of that being, and so on, but within the limits of that being's skin, there is something else, but it is just as true and just as real as what he can perceive with his senses: Within this being is a sum of pain and joy, urges, desires and passions. You cannot penetrate into this second world with your senses.

But there is a way to open up the spiritual eye, then this inner soul world of the other being does not remain hidden from you, then it appears before you as these external colors and sounds appear to the senses. You can perceive as much of the world as you have senses for perception. We only recognize a certain amount of realities when we have senses for them. What all there is that would confront a person if only they had more senses, more abilities to perceive. We can experience it through what is called initiation, that the sense is open to us, not only for what the outer senses tell us about the outer world, but also for what is going on in the soul of a being within. It is possible for us to perceive the joy and suffering of a being with the open mind of a seer. A certain color sensation arises before the spiritual eye of the seer when a person stands before him with some inner experience, and the same inner color appears to him every time he has the same experience.

In the case of sympathy, for example, we see with a seeing eye how this sympathy takes on a certain color and form; antipathy and pain appear to us in such a world of images, in different colors and forms. This world of second sight exists; this world can be developed, it has always been known in spiritual science. This world is called the imaginative world, and the ability to see in this way is called imagination. The person who has these abilities encounters a strange being within himself with the sensation of his joy and suffering. He perceives the soul life of the other being in the image; at the same time, he is surrounded by the imaginations of the inner being, the inner life of this entity. This world, to which all this belongs, is also called the astral world. Once the eye is opened to this world, one perceives not only the soul experiences that are actually present in sensual beings, but one also makes the discovery that there are also soul entities in our environment that have no sensual expression. Such beings exist. Everyone who knows spiritual science as the chemist knows chemistry, knows this world of imagination, because if he develops further, if he applies the methods that spiritual science provides in the right way, then he enters this world of flowing colors, and if he now continues to progress further on the path of inner development, then what could be called clairaudience - in contrast to clairvoyance - approaches him and now gives him knowledge of the truly so-called spiritual or even heavenly world.

This further world is also referred to by the term used in theosophical literature as the devachanic world; the old Pythagorean school called this world the world of the harmony of the spheres: one hears the tones of the harmony of the spheres when one develops up to this region.

Thus we are surrounded by three worlds; by the sensual world, which we perceive with our outer senses, by the astral world, in which we encounter - when we penetrate into it - the images of soul entities. These imaginations are the expression of a much truer and more real world than the sensual world is. Then, when we penetrate even further, to clairaudience, we enter the world of inspiration. Spiritual science has known about these worlds since the earliest times, and they are to be made accessible to today's humanity again through the theosophical movement of modern culture. The realization of this spiritual world of Devachan, in the form of clairaudience, has been called inspiration at all times.

Man can reach yet another level, where he can see into yet another world, the world of intuition. This occurs when man sees not only that which is recognizable on the surface as astral, when he not only hears what emerges from their soul as sound, only when he can become one with the whole world. This characterizes it in a technical sense: in ordinary life, we stand outside of a thing – you stand outside of a plant or a mineral that you want to explore. But when you have reached this level of knowledge, your own being flows into the foreign object and you speak with your soul from within the object itself. There is no thing in itself outside of you, there you are in all beings, there you have become one with the whole environment; there the things themselves speak to us.

Through inspiration, the things around us express their essence in the harmony of the spheres. In the images of the imagination, they reflect their soul-like outer sides to us in colors and shapes. The spiritual researcher knows that there are three such worlds outside our physical world, that there are beings in these worlds that elude our physical sense world, that the creative entities of our sense world are contained in these higher worlds.

What created minerals, animals and plants is contained in these worlds, and what is contained in man as a real higher being is also a citizen of this higher world, which can only be seen in imagination. Man is not only enclosed in the world of the senses, no, he is something that has its home in the imaginative world and can only be properly recognized through imagination. And in all of us lives an innermost being – in ourselves – but only when we are able to step out of ourselves so that it seems to come to us in others and can be recognized in its real form, that is, only intuitively, in intuition. And if humanity is to be informed of those entities, which as the creating original entities underlie our world of sense facts, then people must bring the message out of their higher developed perception, out of their imagination, intuition.

When today man penetrates spiritual truth himself, when the spiritual researcher penetrates into spiritual realms, then he can proclaim from his own experience what the leaders of mankind once put into the religious scriptures, what they gave to mankind as a guide to higher development. In primeval times there was a kind of dim clairvoyance. This gradually disappeared, and our present-day “scientific”, critical awareness of facts took its place. This will be overcome by the fact that higher spiritual-scientific knowledge must in turn be added to this day-awake object consciousness.

For certain intermediate stages, the sense of the spiritual-scientific foundations of knowledge from the higher worlds had to be lost. In older spiritual times, however, it was generally known that those people who had struggled to achieve inspiration were inspired, that they had truly laid down their own experiences in the religious documents.

There will be more and more people who can recognize more and more directly – independently of these documents – what is true in these documents. The concept of inspiration will be rediscovered; then the time will come when there will be a new relationship between wisdom and the Bible. Everything that can be known about divine spiritual things can be directly researched using the methods of spiritual science, everything that has ever been brought in a religious document. Then the human being recognizes the truth of these documents again; when he can look into these worlds himself, then he experiences again that these things are all true, that there was indeed good reason why people could naively believe in all that is reported in such holy books for a time. The fact that this awareness can be regained will indicate a time when people, precisely by knowing something of the spirit that underlies all matter, will come to recognize again that those records are true that criticism cannot begin to understand, those records that this criticism has devalued in the eyes of many people today. Recognizing the Bible in its value as a book that emerged from inspiration will be a success of the theosophical movement, because one will again recognize what inspiration is, what inspired knowledge is. One will again be able to find wisdom in the Bible if one can independently recognize what is described in it and is to be given to people.

There will again be wise men who, from their own spiritual experiences, will be able to give an account of what the origins of existence look like and how the riddles of existence can be solved. And when there are such wise men who, from their direct knowledge, can say what the riddle is, then the gulf between those who are to be guides in religious knowledge and those who want to look up, who want to have content for their existence, who want something more than the most empty everyday life, who want to live a dignified existence at all, can be bridged. A connection between the broadest layers of those who want to listen and those who are to teach will again become possible. Then the ground will be laid for a healthy national life and for a healthy religious development. These two are connected: this healthy religious development will mean healthy national development.

In this way we shall learn to see deeply into many a thing and then recognize how literally we can take again many a thing that was no longer understood because the sense for spiritual research had been lost. We shall see that it is true: there is a naive relationship to that great religious document of which Goethe said that it must be a land register for the religious development of mankind for an incalculable time.

There is a certain justification for this relationship of doubt and rejection in our time, but those who say that true wisdom and knowledge of facts must necessarily lead away from what is given in this document are wrong.

So you then find more and more that you understand, and you are surprised that you criticized some things earlier that you just did not understand, and that now it appears to you in a completely new light. Then comes the point where one becomes modest and humble in the face of such a book, which not only contains human wisdom but goes far beyond everything human. Then one is inclined to say: Through spiritual science I have come to understand some things, have learned to appreciate some things – there is much I do not yet understand, but now I no longer criticize, but wait quietly and patiently until I too will one day understand the rest. There is no more beautiful sensation than this: to look into the source of wisdom with modesty and humility, because this looking is connected with a feeling of an opening up infinity of existence into an ever-widening perspective of wisdom. We have recognized some things, and the little we have learned has taught us the idea that, with increasing development, we will be able to unlock more and more, that the stronger and brighter light will come to meet us from the great religious documents of the human race, the more we approach the sources of the divine being from which we once sprang, unknowingly, and to which we will approach again in the course of our development. We see this goal as a flourishing, satisfying fact before us, inviting us to never cease in our efforts to perfect and spiritualize humanity in its development.

Yesterday we tried to penetrate the relationship between what is called wisdom in the spiritual scientific sense, immediate, direct knowledge of the spiritual worlds, and that religious document that is the most important for our culture, the Bible. Today, let us take a look at some specific facts that can illustrate this relationship to us, that can show us how, if we understand this relationship in this way, we can indeed arrive at a new understanding of this religious document. You will understand that it is impossible to even touch on such a broad subject in summary, considering all the things that could be considered. It will therefore be best if we try to pick out individual things in particular to see how certain things that are also told in this biblical document can be understood through direct insight into the higher worlds and how one can then find that which one can grasp so immediately and directly in this religious document.

I would like to start with a very specific individual fact, a fact that has already been touched on here in a different context. I would like to show you how spiritual science introduces us to a certain law of human development. Today, this law is even already suspected by the more materialistically colored natural science. Spiritual science has known the law for long, long times and regards life from the point of view of this law. If we want to characterize this law in one word, we say: This law expresses the development of the spiritual life of humanity. You know that the idea of development is something that has had a truly fascinating effect on the external science of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. You know that external science has been completely moved into this perspective and that as a result the development of the simplest living beings up to the most complicated ones has become understandable.

Spiritual science has always had this idea of development, only much more comprehensive, much more universal than this natural science of the nineteenth century.

Spiritual science says: Everything is in the process of development. Everything develops from simple, very simple forms in the distant past to those forms that are so intricately interwoven that humans are still far from being able to comprehend them today. Spiritual science speaks above all of a development of human consciousness itself, and it is important that we follow the development of this human consciousness through its various stages. For this will cast a spotlight on certain chapters of the biblical records. What the vast majority of individuals today call consciousness is, for spiritual science, a state of consciousness that has developed from other forms of consciousness. We describe this present human state of consciousness as the so-called waking daytime consciousness, or also the object consciousness. Why? If we want to characterize this consciousness that a person has today from morning, when he wakes up, until evening, when he falls asleep, we have to say: This consciousness acquires its knowledge as follows: First, it acquires its perceptions of the objects through the external senses, of the objects in space and in the time around us, and our mind, which is limited to the sensory world, processes the perceptions that the human being receives through the external senses; and through such perceptions and such processing of perceptions in our conscious mind, we form the treasures of our knowledge, which are stored in our memory and guide and accompany us through life.

However, there are other forms of consciousness besides this state of consciousness; this state of consciousness is one that humanity has not always had in the past, and we have to look back to recognize the development of this state of consciousness, to times in the distant, distant past, to times that lie far, far behind our own.

In the past, people had a different form of consciousness, and at one point a different state of consciousness. How we perceive today, how we think today, has developed from other forms of consciousness, and the state of consciousness that once existed in humanity, but which today's state of consciousness has replaced, is called pictorial consciousness, the imaginative consciousness of the distant past.

The higher imaginative consciousness of which I spoke yesterday is not meant here. If we want to understand how this earlier pictorial consciousness relates to the consciousness that the initiate, who has undergone the inner spiritual development, already has today and that all of humanity will have at some future stage, if we want to recognize the two levels of consciousness If we want to recognize the two stages of imaginative consciousness, these two phases of the development of our consciousness in their relationship, we have to say: what we will speak of here precedes our own and is a dim, more dream-like clairvoyance. In that very distant past, people had a dream-like clairvoyance, and from this, today's object consciousness has only just developed; and a future state of consciousness stands before our soul, which the initiate already has today and which all of humanity will have in the distant future, in that man will have today's object consciousness and clairvoyance, both in bright, clear clarity. Early man, our ancient ancestor, had a consciousness that could not yet calculate in the same way that today's consciousness can. But instead he had a kind of dull, dream-like clairvoyance. He could see more into the spiritual and soul-life of his surroundings, either continually or in specially evoked states. He could receive images of what was spiritually and soul-wise in his environment. Today's object consciousness only sees spiritual entities when they are physically embodied externally.

I can best describe the former clairvoyance to you by means of an example. A person approaches another; the second harbors feelings of antipathy in his soul towards the approaching person. Modern man can only guess at what lives in the soul from external sensory perceptions. In the dim clairvoyance that man of ancient times had, however, a picture in color and form appeared freely floating before the clairvoyant gaze, indicating to him what the other felt towards him. The innermost attitude of a being was clothed in a color and form floating in space for the spiritual eye, just as certain ether vibrations express themselves today for the physical eye through color and form.

There are times in the distant past when this clairvoyance was developed to a certain extent. Today, however, we can only look back in history to a time when the last remnants of this somnambulistic clairvoyance, so to speak, were still present in people. These remnants were present in times not much more than a thousand years ago. We find such dim clairvoyance in every people in its initial stage, and it is from this dim clairvoyance that the myths and legends and fairy tales that originated among peoples in the early days were born. These myths and sagas did not come into being through that abstract thing we call the child's creative imagination, but out of the remnants of this former clairvoyance, as a reproduction of what an original, dim clairvoyance originally saw in all, all peoples from whom today's humans descended. This dim clairvoyance is connected with other conditions in the development of mankind, and if we want to characterize this development that has taken place in the transition to our present object consciousness, then we have to point to an external event that has taken place in our physical world and that is an expression of this transformation of that consciousness into our present one. This found expression in what we can call the transition from near-marriage to distant-marriage. In ancient times, among the most diverse peoples, there was an age in which what we call consanguineous marriage was common practice, a matter of course. People lived in small tribes and married within these small tribes, and it was considered somewhat immoral and incorrect to marry outside one's tribe; so in those times, related blood mixed with related blood, and those times these times of close marriage prevailed were also the times when the last remnants of a dim form of clairvoyance were present.

It is an extremely important moment in the development of all peoples: the transition from close marriage to distant marriage. One could point out how this is expressed in the most diverse myths and legends, how the whole cycle of the Siegfried saga is connected with that transition from close marriage to distant marriage, but that would be going too far today. What is important for us is the effect of foreign blood on foreign blood, which is that the original clairvoyance is killed; and this consciousness, which we know today, which is characterized by calculating, combining, logical thinking, this achievement emerged from that mixing of foreign blood with foreign blood!

Thus, we can trace in all ancient times how a different form of living together is linked to a different state of consciousness and vice versa. It has also been pointed out that even today, under certain circumstances, the last vestiges of this clairvoyance remain; I have already referred to the conversation between Rosegger and Anzengruber. I will take it up again here: Rosegger, the amiable and significant descriptor of what he sees around him in farm life and elsewhere, is a descriptor based on external sensory observation. Compare this with Anzengruber, and you will see that Anzengruber is able to present figures from folk life with wonderful plasticity, so that they stand on their own two feet with wonderful truth and naturalness. Now Anzengruber never saw the things he describes with his senses, he never lived among the farmers. Now Rosegger said to Anzengruber: You know, it seems to me that if you went out into the farming world and observed what happens there, you would be able to describe it even better. Anzengruber, on the other hand, replied: No, then I probably wouldn't be able to describe it at all. I have never seen farmers, but my ancestors were farmers, all my ancestors were farmers, and so the peasantry still lives and stirs in my blood, and I describe what my fathers saw, my ancestors, it runs down to me in my blood, and that is how I describe peasant life.

There you have the last remnants of what was once present in a much higher degree in all humanity. If you realize this, you will have to say: the way Anzengruber worked had the effect that a dark power of consciousness lives down in the blood through his ancestors to himself, and that lives itself out in him. Imagine this state of consciousness intensified, intensified to such an extent that the son can really remember what the father experienced, yes, what the grandfather experienced, then you have characterized that dim state of clairvoyance after a certain side, which once belonged to all our ancestors. There is a much higher, a real memory in the blood of what the ancestors had experienced, and as true as it is that today's man with his object consciousness can only store what he himself has experienced since childhood, it is just as true, incredible and grotesque as it may appear to today's materialistic way of thinking, it is true that there was a time when there was a dim awareness that the following generations remembered what their father, grandfather, ancestor and great-ancestor had experienced. Not just a vague feeling of it rumbled in the blood that had come from marriage between relatives, it was a real memory of it. Now let's see: what was the result of such a very different state of consciousness? The result of this was a very different naming than what takes place within humanity today. Today, man calls his ego that which holds together the experiences of his person since his youth. It was different then. Imagine those people who had a clear memory of what their ancestors had experienced; they also used the term “I” to describe what had been experienced in their ancestors over the generations. So someone was telling the experiences of his grandfather as those of his own “I” – if you want to express it radically. So he said: My “I” does not end with my birth, it extends up the generations, and that is why in such distant times, of which, however, no reports and documents report, what was remembered was given a uniform name, and so we must first learn to understand the meaning of the naming for those ancient times. Names were not only given to individual persons in those days; the whole context of all experiences in which one was present had a name in one's memory. When we know that there were names that designated many generations that went back centuries, then we understand an important chapter in which the patriarchs lived through the centuries.

Adam is not a person like those who live today as personal human beings on our physical earth. Adam was that which lived through generations and found expression in the collective memory. He did not denote a tribe or race, but that which passed through the generations as a common memory of consciousness in the old dim clairvoyance.

Thus it becomes clear that we need only understand the naming of ancient times, then it becomes bright within us in what the documents of the Bible tell us from this chapter of the history of creation. In those ancient times of dim clairvoyance, man did not attach much importance to his own personal experiences; they were only a small part of that great circle of experience to which he felt he belonged. He spoke of that which his consciousness overlooked as a unified entity. And so, just as when you talk to another person today, that person appears to you as something real, and the succession of generations as a whole appears more or less abstract, so to those people the individual person was insignificant, and what was important to him was what held his consciousness, reaching back over generations, together. Thus, in the patriarchal names, we do not have names for individual personalities, but rather a designation of a sum of beings. Thus, something in the Bible shines for us, which we recognize in its true sense when we face it equipped with higher spiritual-scientific knowledge. That is the way in which the person who recognizes it can look at the Bible. He first sees how it was in ancient times, and then, when he can understand correctly, he finds that the description of the Bible is just the same, wants to say the same thing. At that time, those who wrote down these records simply described what they were aware of.

Another example: in spiritual science, we follow the human being in his development far, much further back than to the point in time we have just discussed. Since I have often spoken about the idea of development here, I hope I will not be misunderstood today. Spiritual science traces the human being far, far back, and when it traces the human being back, it always comes across such human beings through long, long periods of time, where the physical body of the human being is the expression of the soul living in the physical body of the human being. But then, going further and further back, we come to a point in human development when this is no longer the case, when we can see how, so to speak, the paths of physical development and of soul-spiritual development separate further backwards. The spirit and the soul of man are rooted in the spiritual world, and when I use the expression of descending from the spiritual world, those who have already penetrated deeper into theosophy know that this expression is only figurative, an expression for something spiritual in a language that is only suitable for the external material. We are coming to times in the development of humanity when we see how the human soul and spirit is still united with other spiritual and soul-like entities. Out of spiritual entities, man's soul and spirit are born. There is a point in our earthly development when these human soul and spirit have only just entered this physical body, but we must not believe that this physical body, as it has taken in the soul and spirit, has not also undergone a long, long development.

At this point, two developmental currents meet. One of these currents is that of the physical world: We see how physical entities – headed by the physical human body – develop up to a certain level of perfection. Then there comes a point in time when this physical human body has become so perfect that it is now able to accommodate this spiritual-soul entity, which has developed to such an extent that it could find expression in the physical human body. since that spirit, that soul, has moved within the human body from the imperfect form that that body had, up to the present human form, the soul and spirit itself has worked in the human body through long, long periods of time. And through the forces through which they worked, the soul and spirit within the human body developed this body ever higher and higher, to its present form. Soul and spirit are, so to speak, the transformers and redevelopers of the human body. From that time on, we can also characterize the form of the physical human body, as it existed at that time, suitable for receiving the soul-spiritual, today, without any religious document, but only from the developed abilities of the seer.

These two human body in such a way that the human body as yet without a human soul was certain — I know how I shock all those who have only a materialistic way of thinking; but that does not matter; but if we want to know the truth, we have to tackle this great difference . The reasons why materialistic science may find this strange and grotesque are already known to the spiritual researcher himself, he has already dealt with them, otherwise he would not dare to tell such things – they are formed quite differently than he later became. But the earth was also shaped quite differently in those ancient times.

I will speak only of a single thing in the human body and its transformation at that time. Before that time, it was necessary for the human body to have an organ that still exists today in a last rudiment and remnant, in the swim bladder of fish. Since the physical human ancestor had to move by floating and swimming on the earth, he needed such a organ. The physical human ancestor had this organ in ancient times. This organ has transformed itself in the course of human physical development into the lungs. This has enabled man to breathe in and process the air as he does today. Connected with this is what we know about other processes in the body that have some kind of relationship to this lung breathing. We see the transition from the old gill breathing, which is still present in human embryonic development, to lung breathing, which is the preparation for red blood, which plays such an important role in human beings as well as in the life of nations. This moment of capturing the oxygen in the air through the lungs is also the moment of the human being being endowed with a human soul. Only then was he a suitable vessel for what we call a human soul.

These things took place over long, long periods of time: the transformation of the swim bladder into lungs that are able to process the oxygen in the external air. Now, if an observer wanted to describe this important moment of development in emotional and sensory terms, he could have said: “With the inhalation of the air, we breathed in the divine soul.” That is indeed how our ancestors felt, they gratefully felt the breath as the inspirer. You see, that is why the legends and myths of all peoples saw the body of the deity in the air, which had given man his individual consciousness. In the drifting air, the one who sees out of dull clairvoyance or out of the developed consciousness of the seer, sees the body of the animating deity, that deity of which his individual soul is a part. Imagine that all this extended over long, long periods of time, what was expressed pictorially in such legends and myths.

This image for all that I have described to you can be found again in the biblical record: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became a living soul.

Yes, why then clothe such a powerful fact, which goes through millions of years of development, in such an image? Yes, it is not unimportant in which image such a fact is presented to the consciousness at a particular stage of development. In the form in which it was expressed just now, it would not have been understood by anyone at that time. At that time it was necessary to speak in images, in imaginations. Everything, absolutely everything is in development! You will only understand what that means when I tell you how it all affects you.

Those who have already delved deeper into the theosophical teachings know that the human soul is not embodied only once, but passes through human bodies over and over again, going through many, many lives. They know that That which is in you today as soul has developed over and over again through life and life; that which is able to understand and comprehend this great law of becoming human in you today would understand nothing, absolutely nothing, would not have the ability to grasp such concepts if you had not also listened before or more often to how others have described this same process of becoming world in images and imaginations. Only this enabled this soul to understand the concept of it in today's incarnation.

Everything that only later appears in concepts must first be brought to humanity in imaginations, in images. The wisest of humanity, the leaders of the people, have known all that we describe today. But for the majority it had to be brought in images, because they had a dim clairvoyance and could not yet absorb these things in concepts, but only in images, and that was to be given in this form: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and the man became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7)

Let us now ask ourselves: What does Jahve, Jehovah stand for? Jehovah is the expression for that which we perceive as the individual, the I-giving. At the same time, it has the secondary meaning “the blowing one,” “the one blowing in the air,” and there you have the Yahweh himself, that is, the deity who gave man the I: “I am who am” (Ex 3:14). And if you go from there up to the Central European old legends and myths, you will find that there you also have the Wotan, who rides in the air storm, the Wotan who blows. Thus, the blowing spirit, the spirit that blows in the air, was always felt to be the bringer of human consciousness.

This is only one of the concepts we can develop. Going further back into the distant past, we would arrive at the line of development of the spiritual core of the human being, and from there to spirit itself. Even in those ancient times, the old consciousness looked back to the time when the soul and spirit were still united with the original divine spirituality; our spiritual-soul human ancestor was within this. What you call your self today, your most intimate inner being, was at that time, when it had not yet united with your body, was at that time in that divine primordial being within it. Above all, it was in a state that we must describe as being without gender. Spirit and soul have no gender. They acquire gender when they take on a physically formed body, but their innermost being is not gender-related. This soul also underwent development, and every spiritual researcher looks back on this as well, and saw man and woman united in one before the two genders appeared to us in the outside world. The spirit of man, the spirit that was not yet sexual, united both sexes within itself.

Thus we have the one point of the incarnation of man in the sense of the soul, the spirit, entering the physical, appropriately prepared body, and an earlier, equally salient point: the incarnation of the soul, the spiritual man himself, and how from an even earlier spiritual state the asexual, spiritual-soul man emerged from the one original spirituality.

Thus we see the incarnation twice: once above in the spiritual world, once below on the physical plane. This twofold human becoming for our Earth appears to us in the mirror image in the description in the biblical document; we see it truly in that twofold human becoming in biblical history.

First, the human becoming in the spiritual-soul world: the biblical writer says of that time: man came into being as a male-female being. (Genesis 1:27) And then this male-female being, which was of a spiritual and soul nature, came down into the physical world, and there we are dealing with the physical body, which now simultaneously begins to breathe. Thus we see how a twofold form of human incarnation entered into the Bible. We now recognize that if one wanted to describe the truth, then this is how this twofold human incarnation would have to be described.

Now let us consider another case that comes closer to what touches us even more intimately, which introduces us introduces us to the New Testament and familiarizes us with the mystery of Golgotha, with Jesus Christ. You will easily be able to see that another element remains that is still present as a shared humanity that will not be destroyed if close marriage is destroyed. It is true that the love that attaches people to close marriage can only exist through shared blood, but there is a love that is more comprehensive and higher than that of blood. Thus there is something in humanity that is truly common, that exists as a common bond of humanity, even when that bond is severed, a bond that is more comprehensive than the love that is woven through blood relationship. When that human ancestor looked back at the time of the near marriage, it was a generational, tribal self that he designated as I. The boundaries of the tribes stretched further and further; tribes became nations, and the consciousness of the tribes was destroyed, and a common bond, which was no longer so strong, embraced the people, a national consciousness. It was most clearly and distinctly evident in that body of people who are called the Hebrew.

The tendency to expand the national consciousness to include that which holds all humanity together, the force that brings people together beyond the nation state, only came to Earth with the appearance of Christ Jesus. Even today man cannot clearly recognize what lives in all men as a common bond, but a future will come, still far distant from us, in which the consciousness will be so vividly present in a large number of people, the consciousness of brotherhood without blood. And to prepare this consciousness to act as a real power in preparation for this brotherhood, that is the mission of Christianity. If, therefore, the God who was felt in ancient times as the blowing one is also called the one who gave the I, then we must call the God who lives in that consciousness, which is not so dimly , but which will develop to feel and clearly recognize that which is common to all of humanity, we must describe this human consciousness and describe it, when we speak in the Christian sense, as the Christ consciousness. The Christ consciousness denotes, as it were, an I that embraces all of humanity in a common consciousness. There is a sentence: “If anyone does not leave wife and child and mother and brother, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26; Matthew 19:29) This must not be understood in a trivial, ascetic sense. It must be understood in such a way that Christianity paves the way for an all-encompassing human brotherhood, which is not based on blood ties, but on the fact that a person says brother to every human being, not in the everyday sense , but to gain an awareness that is not enclosed and limited within the blood ties, that gradually extends to more and more people in our later life, and is ultimately able to embrace all of humanity. Therefore, if one calls Jehovah the god of the people, then one comes to call Christ Jesus the god of humanity, the god of all humanity, the “Son of Man”. He, the Master, had to prepare the bond of love for all mankind.

If Jehovah is called a national god, then the Christ, who was embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, must be called the Son of Man, as He called Himself. Thus you see the truth of the word “Before Abraham was, I Am” or, better, “I AM” (John 8:58), who has brought the forces of humanity for the first time, which embrace all of humanity, who is able to bring about all of humanity's brotherhood.

How did this great event come about through external real facts, through real events? The Son of Man has been embodied in a human personality. Spiritual science points this out to us again. It points out to us, if we understand it correctly, what is called prophecy, that which underlies all of this. Only the initiate can and can clearly recognize this, but humanity can have a feeling for it, an awareness of it, since the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth.

What is prophecy? Do not believe that what the Christian can know since the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth has only just begun in those times. The one who is a true Christian and does not want to stop at what Christianity, for example, tells its believers today, knows that he is one with what Augustine said. That which is called Christianity today is the religion that has always been called the true religion in ancient times. But not all people have been able to understand this religion since ancient times; in ancient times there were always only a few who were chosen to be initiated into the great mysteries. They became the prophets of a certain time, able to see what must happen in the future. Initiation means: to develop those higher abilities in man that lie dormant in every human being!

And now a law that tells us: That which moves down into the physical world in the future is already present today in the spiritual world, and that which lives today in the spiritual world will one day descend into the physical regions. But because the one who becomes an initiate already ascends today into the spiritual regions, he can perceive in spirit today that which will descend into the physical world in the future. He can see it today from above and now say: This will happen in the future. Initiation is now attained in a certain sequence, only according to the methods prescribed in spiritual science and also in all great religions. There have been such methods of initiation in all times, just as there have been initiates in all times.

There is a tremendous difference in the initiation principle between those ancient pre-Christian times and the post-Christian times. In those pre-Christian times, much less of those methods was written down, but they were passed on through the tradition in those schools, which are called the mystery schools. Those who were recognized as being ready to be accepted into these schools were introduced to them in stages, undergoing severe tests, and were initiated into what what is called a mystery, a thing from which two things developed in the future: the school on the one hand and the church on the other – science and religion.

So you have a rough idea of those ancient wisdom schools where initiates were initiated, but it was prescribed step by step what the one who wanted to be initiated had to do first, and what he then had to go through as a second step, up to the highest step of the spiritual worlds.

You now have an idea of those wisdom schools, in which those entities work that underlie our physical world. There were ancient initiation rites, a canon of initiation in each school of initiation. Those who were deemed suitable to become students of the sacred mystery doctrine were accepted into this school of initiation and went through the stages that led them up into the spiritual worlds. The life of such a person was strictly prescribed. Imagine this life: Once he had been initiated into the mysteries, he had to lead a life in which everyday experiences were of no significance, while what he experienced in terms of the initiation methods was of great importance for the life of such a person.

Those who had reached a certain level of initiation was called a sun man, because his life had to be lived in such a regulated way that he could not stray from his path; just as the sun cannot deviate from its path, so the one who has made it to the level of a sun hero on his path of initiation is just as sure. He shares the truths of the spiritual world from his own experience; he is a leader of humanity.

The myths and legends contain this and tell us again and again about sun heroes, and when they speak of such people, when they agree with each other even among the most diverse peoples, what is described to us is what made him a sun hero. Then such a story seems to us like a repetition of the canon of initiation, and so in those ancient times a principle was formed in relation to the life of the initiate that is just the opposite of the principle of the biographers of today. For those who told something about the lives of the great leaders of humanity in ancient times, it was important to blur what made them appear as special beings, what made them become solar heroes, what they had to go through according to the initiation rite, and what all of them went through in the same way. The goal of this initiation was also to develop in those initiated a living vision of the all-human ego, of the unified consciousness, but the chosen ones only had it.

Only a few people could achieve this. Now, in the course of time, an event was to occur in development that what could be achieved individually in the old days, within the mysteries, could now be achieved by all of humanity in general. And this event was precisely the Mystery of Golgotha. How did that come about? We will understand this if we look into the mysteries: then, when he had experienced all these things at first hand, which one had to experience before that great final moment of initiation, then the time came when he was placed by the initiating priest-hierophant in such a state that he could experience in the clearest clarity of vision that which raised him above his tribe and people, and into what he has in common with all humanity.

You know from other lectures that the human being consists of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I and its higher members. During sleep, the physical and etheric bodies lie in bed, and during sleep the astral body with the higher limbs of human nature is out. Then, when the etheric body also separates from the physical body, death occurs. That is the spiritual difference between sleep and death. But then, when the person to be initiated had come so far that he could undergo the last stage of initiation, the hierophant, the initiating priest, led him to it, so that for a short time of three and a half days the etheric body could also leave, so that the physical body was in a kind of state of death. The result of this was that someone who had been prepared through the necessary stages could experience everything that was prepared for him in his own vision, and he could experience the higher worlds in real vision. Then, after three and a half days, the one to be initiated was called back to the ordinary physical, and now he was one who could proclaim, from his own experience, the secrets of the higher worlds to those who wanted to hear it. From his lips flowed the word of the spiritual world; he had become a witness that there is a spiritual world, that life in the spirit can conquer death. For he himself was in that world in which one gains the conviction that life will always conquer death. And again and again, the one who had thus traversed the spiritual worlds in three and a half days, again and again the initiate came back when he was awakened, with an exclamation that would be something like in German: “My God, my God, how You have glorified me.”

In ancient times, anyone who wanted to become such a proclaimer of spiritual wisdom from their own experiences had to enter into the mysteries and experience them outside of their physical body. Only in this way could it be done in the ancient, pre-Christian times. This is the world-historical moment of Christianity: that in the one event of Golgotha, everything that the one to be initiated experienced during the three and a half days was drawn into the physical world as a historical fact of physical reality. The Mystery of Initiation has become physically real in the Mystery of Golgotha. The sequence of initiations could be physically experienced in the physical world by the one who had the consciousness of the unity of humanity, the Son of Man. Physically, he could experience what was only possible for people to experience outside of their physical body before his appearance.

Thus, the mystery of initiation, having become physical, shines out to us from the event of Golgotha. So how will those who wanted to describe this mystery present the special events of the life of Christ Jesus? They knew that the one who, as the Son of Man, brought the secrets into the physical world, also had to experience these stages of initiation in the sense of the initiation canon here in the physical world, which the one to be initiated had always experienced outside of his physical body. Thus, the life of this unique being, who appeared only once in the development of humanity, had to be described in such a way that it was, of course, a reflection of the ancient initiation canon.

Now the various forms had been written down, fixed in different ways, in different forms of ritual, of rite, but all leading back to a unified mode of development. This mode of initiation, which also represents the life of Christ Jesus, was one that underlay all mystery schools, and it is only natural that it was applied to the external physical life of Christ Jesus, for this is truly how it happened. They describe to us something which they have taken from the old initiation canon, as they had received it in the mystery schools. Therefore, we find in the Gospels various outwardly seemingly divergent forms of the initiation canon, which appear as the biography of Christ Jesus.

Thus, we see in the Gospels the fixed initiation canon , and in Christ Jesus, whom they describe, we see the only Son of Man who presents that which others could only experience within the mysteries, outside of them in the physical life, in order to make their blessings accessible to all people. The sentence that life conquers death, which the initiate had experienced in the higher worlds, was outwardly manifested by Christ Jesus in the physical world, and is now accessible to all people in the same way.

Spiritual science knows that the gospel is history, extraordinary history, and at the same time a symbol. That is precisely the essential point, that here the symbol has become outer reality, that what had previously only taken place symbolically in the higher worlds, that it has become outer historical truth in the Mystery of Golgotha. Very few people want to understand that historical Christianity is so historical, and that it is also symbolic. Once this is understood, one can penetrate deeply into the spirit and meaning of the New Testament, and then one sees that the spirit and meaning of these documents is so infinitely deep that one can only gradually penetrate into its deepest depths. Let us look at a few more passages in this light. We recognize the three and a half days in the three and a half days, as it is reported (John 11), that Lazarus had already been dead when the Lord resurrected him, and we recognize again in another place those words – for that is how they should actually be translated – that Christ Jesus speaks on the cross at the moment when he arrives at the last act of his life in the physical body: “My God, my God, how hast thou glorified me”, for that is what these words should mean — and not “how hast Thou forsaken me” (Matt. 27,46, cf. Psalm 22,1; Mark 15,34), which is only an inaccurate rendering.

Thus we see that spiritual science, in its turn, becomes acquainted with initiation, experiences that life in the spirit conquers death, that this life, this wisdom, in its turn, makes understandable makes the deep meaning of the New Testament understandable, and so the wisdom-filled deepening of humanity within the theosophical movement will again lead to an appreciation, to a valuation of the biblical documents, of both parts of them.

Precisely because this wisdom will testify to the truth of this testament independently of it, it will have such a significant effect when you rediscover this truth in the Bible.

Thus will the man who penetrates it through theosophical study rediscover the value of this book, which could no longer be appreciated by someone who had lost touch with the spiritual world. And so no other biblical research, criticism, and so on, will be able to bridge the gap between scholars and believers than this spiritual science or and it will bridge this gulf and will bring a wisdom that will understand everything, everything that is expressed in the mighty words of the biblical documents. It will bring the solution to the great riddle of existence that is sought by the intellect and the mind in the Bible. And this will be recognized in the Bible, that it was and is the actual basis for the actual culture of humanity. Thus the Bible will again become a book that will be recognized in its full significance and value, and one will no longer be able to approach it indifferently, but with awe for the great, infinite sources of wisdom that bubble forth in it.

Thus, who is able to penetrate into the spiritual world independently will be filled with ever deeper and deeper awe in the face of this book, and it will become for him in turn a book of proclamation, which must be understood ever deeper and deeper, and a book in which the greatest riddles of man and of the development of humanity find their solution. Thus the Bible will rise higher and higher in value through wisdom, and if this movement succeeds in pointing people to the direct path to knowledge, then this reference will at the same time be something of immense value for the whole religious life of the broadest humanity.

The conquest of wisdom will at the same time be a reconquest of that charter which after all underlies our culture, that is to say, of that which lives as the spirit of our culture.

Then this penetration into wisdom, this conquest of the spiritual worlds through wisdom, will at the same time be the conquest of these valuable sources for wisdom, the conquest of the Biblical charters themselves.

Whether this applies to Romance and Germanic peoples is not necessary to discuss further here. It is a disaster for a people when those who are or are supposed to be leaders speak a different language and have different thoughts. Today there is one area where such a gap exists: it is the area of religious life. I will speak of the basis of this religious gap: the Bible.

Questions that occupy all people are: Where do people come from, what is the meaning, the goal of life, what is the essence and what is its form? Endless layers seek the solution to such questions in the Bible; but precisely what matters, the living feeling and attitude to the Bible, is lacking. There is a gulf between the theologians who study the Bible and the believers, and when someone says, “We want it to close,” for the time being it is only a wish. There are enough reasons, even without resorting to mysticism and occultism, to believe that the gulf is widening. There comes a time when teachers and believers no longer understand each other. People usually do not realize how great this gap is. Teachers of the past, who studied the Bible, based their teachings on the highest truths. There was a sense that what the Bible contains is something unspeakably high, that one is wise at the beginning, becomes wiser as one understands more and more. Teachers were formed through this wisdom-filled study of the Bible, and there were teachers. Those who listened, who listened intently, felt that this was where wisdom could be found. This is not to say that there are no such men today.

If we look back 150 years, there was still something of that feeling towards the Bible, a feeling of sacred awe, that such writing should be treated quite differently. Goethe was also familiar with this. Today, all this seems difficult to understand. We must realize that the spirit of materialism is not very intrusive where it appears as theoretical materialism. We see this in Haeckel's views. These are not the worst. The worst is the one that guides people to understand things materially and to see only what is tangible and to overlook the meaning behind it.

We want to touch on two things: biblical criticism and inspiration.

Tell a materialist about inspiration and he will laugh at you. Nevertheless, it is the current that we now call theosophical that is reawakening the dulled sense of the concept of inspiration. Inspiration, that is, inspiration from a higher world, would take a different position on what is in the Bible than on another book. The writer of those books was a point of passage, a conduit for the transmission of higher knowledge. This is a crude way of expressing the concept of inspiration, which is completely misunderstood, even in theology. Materialistic believers have suffered the greatest harm.

We will now only talk about what some Bible scholars say. Older and newer ones state that certain statements are made to us that prove that Moses could not have written the books in question, that passages must have been written centuries after Moses, that therefore the passages in question cannot be from him. I will mention one example that most likely makes people head shy. It is the twofold account of the creation of man. First it says: God created man male and female (Gen. 1:27). To make it quite clear: it does not say male and female. Then it says that God created man first and then the woman, his rib (Gen. 1:21-22). What is the basis for this? This is particularly characteristic. It was said that one and the same personality could not give rise to two different descriptions, so they must have been welded together.

So they searched the Bible for contradictions. Furthermore, they found certain differences in style and expression, so they concluded again that these are different sources and that some collector has combined both.

Let us take the six- or seven-day work. It presents in lofty thoughts the creation of the world from the first formation to the day on which God rested. It is a cosmic work that points out to us in vivid terms and intense images that we are dealing with an ancient document of inspiration. The creation of Adam, the leading to the animals, Eve's fall into sin, the snake as a symbol of sin (Genesis 3) led to the assumption that the six- or seven-day work came from a different source. Supercritical Bible researchers found the two designations: Elohists and Jahvehists; others found other discrepancies, so that finally it became clear what is now called the Rainbow Bible.

Thus the Bible work is fragmented. Now you may think that my word should be Bible criticism. That is not the case at all. I only know that in few areas so much diligence, ingenuity and intellect has been applied as to the fragmentation of the Bible. The original fervor, the devotion to this book, as inspiration from another world, has suffered. Now it is necessary to shine a light into this cleft in order to bring it back together again. It depends on the meaning behind it. I would like to use an example to illustrate the state of the art of this question. I will use a simple experience - I have experienced it - to explain. For many years I worked in the Goethe Archive in Weimar. In the records Goethe organized in the 1880s, there was a foreign transcript whose content he mistook for his own thoughts. However, he could not remember how he came to have this essay. When I came to Weimar in 1889, there were doubts that the essay was actually by Goethe. It was a scholarly question. I was able to prove that at that time Goethe had a man by the name of Tobler at his side, of whom Goethe said that he had an excellent memory. I thought that this settled the question; Goethe expressed the thoughts that Tobler wrote down, and so Goethe is the author. It is the passage that you find in the last Goethe volume: “Nature we are” and so on to the final sentence “Love is the crown”. A famous Goethe scholar – I won't mention any names, we owe him a great debt of gratitude – was keen to prove that the ink for these words had not flowed from Goethe's pen. It is not a sufficient comparison, but it is similar to biblical research. Efforts are made to prove when the content was created historically, factually, sensually, because thinking has a materialistic tendency. The sense of the spirit has been lost.

Now something else has to be added. Again, I can best make it clear with an example. Take geometry, this very ordinary school geometry. You can understand it from itself. You do not need to know how it came about. What does a schoolboy know about Euclid? What do we care who wrote it first? What matters is to explore it. When a learned house for all languages, which knows nothing about geometry, approaches Euclid, he is not yet explored by that. So something monstrous can come out at times. No philologist, no matter how famous, will understand Vedanta philosophy just because he is a philologist. If you know geometry, you know Euclid.

The question that now arises is: Is there any possibility at all of investigating the Bible? One must first know the worlds of which the Bible speaks, only then is one a qualified investigator. Is there access to the great riddles of existence? This is the path followed by the theosophical worldview. Just as there are ways to understand geometry, there are means and ways to penetrate into the spiritual world. A number of people are already walking these paths; they are seeking wisdom about the higher worlds. The result is that with each step one takes, the old religious documents arise before him in ever new forms. What does it matter from which sources, if we have the truth?

You know that for theosophical views, this world that we can see and touch is considered one world. This world would be different for us if we had other senses. Fichte once used the example: Imagine you are the only seeing person among blind people and enter the world of people who only grope around. You would be considered a fantasist if you still ascribed the quality of color to things. No one has the right to say that something is not. A person's perception depends on their organs, and how many of them they have.

Through the principle of initiation, an inner sense reveals itself to man, and with it the next world opens up to him, the imaginative or astral world, so called because it works in images. This pictorial consciousness can be tapped into. Those who apply the method described will enter this world. There is nothing, absolutely nothing of magic about it. The imaginative world presents itself as a flowing sea of light and color. These are not mere spots, but clearly defined forms, inwardly glowing and bright. So you rise to the world from which you come.

Develop these organs further and you will enter the world of inspiration. The School of Pythagoras called this world the harmony of the spheres. This is not an image, it is reality. It is not a sensual sound. Goethe and others point to this harmony of the spheres. Christianity calls it the Kingdom of Heaven or the Heavenly Kingdom. Goethe has his Faust say: “The sun resounds in the ancient way” and so on. That is not a poetic image. He knew that this was how to describe the characteristic. In the second part, Goethe says, “Sounds for spiritual ears” and so on, and by that he means the same thing.

This, then, is the world of inspiration, and beyond that is the world of intuition. There, there is an experience of the “thing in itself”, as our great philosopher Kant called it. There, love is something much higher, there is a merging with things.

Those who engage with the meaning of the concept of inspiration know what it means. In this way, a person can go through the world in his development. First, with the sensual eyes and the physical mind, the materialistic development of the human being begins. His astral development preceded this. Just as ice is related to water – water in another form – so your body is soul. Before it took on this form, it was merely soul. You lived in a world that can only be perceived by the imaginative senses. If you examine the world only with the outer senses, you can describe what Haeckel describes. It is all true, but only insofar as the ice remains only ice.

Go back even further, and the human soul was not yet condensed into the physical. The line does not end with imaginative knowledge. The soul has lived much earlier and comes to a point in its development that opens up the soul of man. Imagine this development in such a way that the soul lived separately because the physical world was not yet ready to offer it a suitable body. The world was a kind of stream in which the human being floated.

What enabled man to reclassify? A very specific organ, a kind of swim bladder was transformed into lungs. These were the times when the body became capable of being a condensed soul. In the Bible this is referred to as: “God breathed into the man the breath of life and he was a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7) There is an even higher world than that of inspiration. If we go even further, man was spirit. The body is a condensed soul; the soul is a condensed spirit.

As soon as one enters inspiration from imagination, male and female disappear. The Bible says: God created man male and female – undifferentiated. (Genesis 1:27) They all were in the spiritual body. Even without taking the Bible into consideration, we can establish this. Anyone who approaches the Bible quite freely today will feel it literally.

There are four possible attitudes towards the Bible:

1. The naive person takes it as it is offered to him.
2. the enlightened person sees it as a childish folk fantasy. These are the freethinkers. But some of them, and one of their most important representatives, Bruno Wille, has come to a symbolic interpretation.
3. Those who are beyond cleverness find a mystical-symbolic meaning for the Bible.
4. The theosophist adopts a literal interpretation.

Then comes the time when the person says to himself, “Now you are beginning to understand some of it.” One comes to assume that where one cannot keep up, one just does not yet understand. The Bible is conquered in such a way that the gap is filled again, and those who create the means to do so are inspired men. Those who grasped this initially did so under the influence of inspiration. We are heading towards a new conquest of the Bible and a new relationship between wisdom and the Bible.

Today, it is our turn to explain the relationship between the Bible and wisdom in more detail, but first we need to discuss the “Old Testament” some more. Yesterday, we only mentioned the creation of man and the important passage: God breathed into the man and so on. (Genesis 2:7) Today, we want to try to penetrate the content of the original source of the Bible. So let us first consider what may arouse wonderment in people. It is useful to pick out individual facts. The long lives of the patriarchs in the Bible can arouse amazement. The material scientist would of course say: that is not possible. A theosophy that indulges in generalizing a concept says: Adam, Seth and Enoch are not to be understood as individual people, but as tribes; thus, they are names of tribes. It is not that simple. We have to go deeper into the laws of life. We have to refrain once and for all from symbolizing and allegorizing, and not ask: What does it mean?

I have already spoken to you about the cause of this old age in another context. At the time, I cited a conversation between two poets, Anzengruber and Rosegger. You know Rosegger's charming description of the mountain people. Everything he presents to us has been carefully observed. When you see Anzengruber's plays, you see farmers who stand firmly on their feet. Now something very strange. Anzengruber never lived among farmers. He lived in the city and didn't like to go out. Rosegger said to him: If you would observe the farmers more closely, you would be able to describe them much better. Anzengruber replied: I have never seen farmers, but my father, mother, grandparents were farmers, and that has remained in my blood and rumbles in me.

Direct inheritance seems much more vivid than when the blood is mixed. This is still the case today when a son comes from unmixed blood. In the past, this was the case to a high degree; it was not only in the imagination. In the old days, people did not marry outside their tribe. It was considered a great sin to step outside the blood. In all ancient peoples you find sagas and structures where breaking this commandment had to be atoned for. No blood brotherhood existed among ancient peoples, and what was in the blood was a completely different power. In those days, consanguinity brought with it a kind of clairvoyance. Today that has passed, today it would even cause harm. This clairvoyance was expressed in such a way that one not only lived in the imagination, but one had real memories that went back a long way. Just as you remember your youth today, so one remembered events from the life of the father, grandfather and great-grandfather. Today's man does not believe that. At that time, what the father had done was felt as: I have done it. For today, this is a highly wonderful situation. Thus, what was the experiences of the fathers, as in Anzengruber, passed into the memory. You could have felt your father as your self at that time, so that you did not say “I” to yourself, but you took father, mother, grandfather and great-grandfather all together as “I”, you felt the whole generation as “I”. So Adam was everything that people felt for centuries as a common consciousness, patriarchs are a whole generation embracing self-awareness. You have to know that consciousness arose through blood-brotherly memory. This is how we understand those statements in the Bible, and a great wisdom is revealed to us. So I could explain from chapter to chapter how theosophy is based on our religious feeling.

And now from the “Old Testament” to the “New”, to the actual Gospel. We distinguish the time before Christ Jesus and the time after Christ Jesus. The coming of Christ Jesus into this world is the most significant, most powerful event in the development of humanity. Something completely new occurred there. Recent research has gradually unraveled the Gospels. Contradictions were sought and these have done little to further understanding. What confusion would such a dissection of the Apocalypse create, for example? I will mention only one fact here: the secret revelation of John was seen by Bible researchers as a prophecy of future events of humanity, or even of past ones. For example, some said that the presbyter John lived after Nero and only wrote what happened in terms of earthquakes, plagues and so on. Now I still want to point out a remarkable passage where great events and upheavals were brought about by a beast. The number of this beast is a human number, “666”. The researchers have heard something ringing here; they have heard that things have been expressed through numbers, certain names, forms. There was a possibility of using the alphabet as numbers. This was the practice in certain secret schools. Now researchers have found out, diligent, hard-working researchers, that Nero is supposed to mean the beast, just to avoid believing that there is something spiritual behind it. They simply did not know what it was. The true theosophist must first learn wisdom to understand the meaning of the Bible.

666 is composed of 400, 200, 60 and 6. This means or is called: Sorat. This also has a specific sign: a staff with two wings or ram horns. (Rev 13:11) That is the sign for this being. Spiritual science sees in everything not only a material but also a spiritual essence; for example, the sun is the body of the sun soul. For spiritual science, it is the spirit that moves people forward; its opponent is Sorat – 666. The Book of Revelation says: This beast has two horns, like a lamb or a ram. If you know these things, then you also know what the writer says. You see that you first have to know what it is about, and this requires wisdom.

Augustine, the recognized church teacher of various denominations, said an important sentence regarding the secular position of Christianity: “What is called Christianity has always been there, only that the true religion, which has always existed, has been understood in different ways.

But where did Christianity live before Christ Jesus appeared? In the mystery. What was mystery? That which is today called a church, school or art institution. The knowledge of things was used as a preparation to then serve as an introduction to understanding, just as the divine spirit bent down and ascended again. There one also learned to listen to the secrets of world existence expressed in sounds. Richard Wagner felt this again and tried to reproduce it. Such schools existed, and each person was first tested to see if they were capable of being gradually introduced to a tangible self-awareness through their comprehension, feeling, and understanding. This was the initiation or initiation. There were different levels, because people progressed to different degrees. One thing was necessary: that one went through a prescribed course of development, and this was passed on in the schools of the initiated. The different levels had different names:

1st stage: the Ravens.
2nd degree: the Occultists.
3rd degree: the fighters.
4th level: the lions.
5th stage: had a national name, for example, Persians. Christ says of Nathanael: true Israelite. (John 1: 47)
6th stage: the sun hero (son). 7th stage: one did not say (father).

Let us take one of the 6th stage, a sun hero. His life was as it has been for thousands of years. He could no more stray from his prescribed path than the sun can step out of its orbit, and so he follows the strictly harmonious world orbits. If he were to step out, an unimaginable disaster would occur, as if the sun were to step out. In ancient, ancient legends, there is talk of solar heroes: Hermes, Buddha, Zarathustra, Pythagoras; even in Germanic countries: Siegfried, with a few changes, a basic type. Why is that? Because in those days the process was exactly the opposite of what it is today. The old principle was: not to concern oneself with everyday matters, but to seek the essential. At that time, one described what one had to go through for initiation. The prescribed life of a thousand years was the description of life. Hermes had lived according to this prescription, and thus, when he described his life, he described what others had already experienced before him.

We will better understand the matter if we understand the meaning of the stages: one was used to form the character, another brought the phenomena of the astral world closer, and others brought explorations of even higher worlds. When one had grasped that at the time, then something special occurred. Then there was a final act of initiation. The initiate, through the initiated hierophant, was brought into a state in which the body was dead for three and a half days. The etheric and astral bodies were drawn out and wandered around in the spiritual worlds, guided by the high priest-hierophant. Then they were led back into the body and the person received a new name. Now he knew from his own experience what happens in the spiritual worlds, and was now reborn. He could bear witness that the spiritual life conquers death. Every time a person came back into the body, he woke up with the cry: “My God, my God, how you have glorified me.

Only those who achieved the victory of life over death could attain knowledge. This has happened over and over again in the secret schools of spirituality. This process has been veiled.

Compare this with the description of the life of Christ Jesus. In his case, what happened within in the mysteries took physical appearance. First came the test by the wise man, then came the baptism, and finally he was placed in a coffin similar to a cross. Outwardly, this took place historically in the Mystery of Golgotha. Some do not want to understand this and say, “You interpret it that way and take it as a historical event.”

The hanging on the cross is the outer representation of what previously applied prophetically to the initiated; a deep meaning that is mystically and historically true at the same time. It is as if you were entering a temple of art, where a drama depicts the year 1920 and what was seen would later come true. Before that, the mysteries depicted what later happened in the life of Christ Jesus. Those who described this life brought over ancient initiatory traditions from prophetic mysteries. Such a solar hero had to live according to the rules of initiation. They existed for thousands and thousands of years and therefore the same applied to the Gospels. Hence the great agreement, the exclamation: my God, my God, how hast thou glorified me, or: how hast thou forsaken me, looks very similar in writing and pronunciation. So Augustine could say: Christianity is the true religion.

The saying, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have come to believe” (John 20:29), referred to the vision of the initiates. Thus the Gospels are the same as the ancient books of initiation. They existed before Christ Jesus. But He lived through them in the physical world, because the mighty power of this unique personality made it possible. Thus Christianity appears to us as the fulfillment of ancient wisdom, and in the Bible we have what could be experienced in the initiations, the wisdom of the initiates.

The simple person who simply approaches the Bible builds his heart on it, and with fervor he feels the wisdom that underlies it all. No one would feel this wisdom if wisdom did not bring the Bible about.

Today, with a few exceptions, people are no longer able to approach it with faith. A new understanding of the Bible must now be opened up. I will give you a comparison here. In the Middle Ages, people swore by the books of Aristotle. Galileo could not do that. He was the first to perform an autopsy on a human body and to show that certain nerves originate in the brain and not, as Aristotle taught, in the heart. At that time, things really contradicted each other, and Galilei said: Get rid of the whole of Aristotle. — What about today? What Aristotle called a nerve was not a nerve at all, and so Aristotle was proved right again. First you have to go to the things themselves, then you come back to Aristotle.

The same thing must happen with regard to the Bible. What he himself sees, imagined inspiration – figuratively presenting inspiration, independent of any book, describes the spiritual researcher, and we can thus assume that what he himself sees is literally written correctly. When we understand this, great reverence for this book arises, and we feel that this Redeemer's life was truly written by inspiration.

Through such an achievement, our relationship to the spiritual worlds will change, and we will learn to look up to the inspired with great reverence. First, a bridge must be found to those who are exploring the wisdom of the Bible. The teacher will be wiser, the listener more fervent – the hearts of teachers and believers will resonate. That will be the success of Theosophy:

two things will come:

1. wisdom independent of the Bible,
2. How

Thus the book that used to be sacred will become sacred to us again, and so a true spiritual movement will be the reconquest of the ancient wisdom taught by the Bible. Through the Bible, the most free knowledge and true progress must be made fruitful again for religious life through theosophy. Questions

Question: [Not handed down].

Rudolf Steiner: Everything is in development, including the I. This I has emerged from a group I. Just as the finger of your hand does not feel itself as an I, so the human being at that time felt itself as a group I.

Question: [Not handed down].

Rudolf Steiner: There are personalities who were contemporaries of Christ Jesus. There are no historical sources about him. One passage in Josephus is a forgery; and so is one in Tacitus. Historians therefore say: There is no testimony of this Christ Jesus.

In our time there are deeply initiated people; but if someone wanted to prove historically whether there were initiates after 1900 years, they would find nothing about the initiates. But today there are personalities who were contemporaries who know and can testify that they stood eye to eye with Christ Jesus.

Question: Does keeping silent develop certain powers?

Rudolf Steiner: Through the suppression of certain words that are not said. Certain religious communities are led according to certain basic laws. The Trappists know full well that whoever is a good man of silence now will be a good speaker in the next incarnation.

[ 1 ] Sleep has often been called the younger brother of death. This simile illustrates the paths of the human spirit more exactly than a superficial observation might feel inclined to assume. For it gives us an idea of the way in which the most manifold incarnations passed through by this human spirit are interrelated. In the first chapter of this book, Reincarnation and Karma, Concepts Compelled by the Modern Scientific Point of View, it has been shown that the present natural-scientific mode of thought, if it but understands itself properly, leads to the ancient teaching of the evolution of the eternal human spirit through many lives. This knowledge is necessarily followed by the question: how are these manifold lives interrelated? In what sense is the life of a human being the effect of his former incarnations, and how does it become the cause of the later incarnations? The picture of sleep presents an image of the relation of cause and effect in this field.¹ I arise in the morning. My continuous activity was interrupted during the night. I cannot resume this activity arbitrarily if order and connection are to govern my life. What I have done yesterday constitutes the conditions for my actions of today. I must make a connection with the result of my activities of yesterday. It is true in the fullest sense of the word that my deeds of yesterday are my destiny of today. I myself have shaped the causes to which I must add the effects. And I encounter these causes after having withdrawn from them for a short time. They belong to me, although I was separated from them for some time.

[ 2 ] The effects of my experiences of yesterday belong to me in still another sense. I myself have been changed by them. Let us suppose that I have undertaken something in which I succeeded only partially. I have pondered on the reason for this partial failure. If I have again to carry out a similar task, I avoid the mistakes I have recognized. That is, I have acquired a new faculty. Thereby my experiences of yesterday have become the causes of my faculties of today. My past remains united with me; it lives on in my present; and it will follow me into my future. Through my past, I have created for myself the position in which I find myself at present. And the meaning of life demands that I remain united with this position. Would it not be senseless if, under normal conditions, I should not move into a house I had caused to be built for myself?

[ 3 ] If the effects of my deeds of yesterday were not to be my destiny of today, I should not have to wake up today, but I should have to be created anew, out of the nothing. And the human spirit would have to be newly created, out of the nothing, if the results of its former lives were not to remain linked to its later lives. Indeed, the human being cannot live in any other position but the one which has been created through his previous life. He can do this no more than can certain animals, which have lost their power of sight as a result of their migration to the caves of Kentucky, live anywhere else but in these caves. They have, through their deed, through migration, created for themselves the conditions for their later existence. A being which has once been active is henceforth no longer isolated in the world; it has inserted itself into its deeds. And its future development is connected with what arises from the deeds. This connection of a being with the results of its deeds is the law of karma which rules the whole world. Activity that has become destiny is karma.

[ 4 ] And sleep is a good picture of death for the reason that the human being, during sleep, is actually withdrawn from the field of action upon which destiny awaits him. While we sleep, the events on this field of action run their course. For a time, we have no influence upon this course. Nevertheless, we find again the effects of our actions, and we must link up with them. In reality, our personality every morning incarnates anew in our world of deeds. What was separated from us during the night, envelops us, as it were, during the day.

[ 5 ] It is the same with the deeds of our former incarnations. Their results are embodied in the world in which we were incarnated. Yet they belong to us just as the life in the caves belongs to the animals which, through this life, have lost the power of sight. Just as these animals can only live if they find again the surroundings to which they have adapted themselves, so the human spirit is only able to live in those surroundings which, through his deeds, he has created for himself and are suited to him.

[ 6 ] Every new morning the human body is ensouled anew, as it were. Natural science admits that this involves a process which it cannot grasp if it employs merely the laws it has gained in the physical world. Consider what the natural scientist Du Bois-Reymond says about this in his address, Die Grenze des Naturerkennens (The Limits of the Cognition of Nature): “If a brain, for some reason unconscious, as for instance in dreamless sleep, were to be viewed scientifically”—(Du Bois-Reymond says “astronomically”)—“it would hold no longer any secrets, and if we were to add to this the natural-scientific knowledge of the rest of the body, there would be a complete deciphering of the entire human machine with its breathing, its heartbeat, its metabolism, its warmth, and so forth, right up to the nature of matter and force. The dreamless sleeper is comprehensible to the same degree that the world is comprehensible before consciousness appeared. But just as the world became doubly incomprehensible with the first stirring of consciousness, so the sleeper becomes incomprehensible with the first dream picture that arises in him.” This cannot be otherwise. For, what the scientist describes here as the dreamless sleeper is that part of the human being which alone is subject to physical laws. The moment, however, it appears again permeated by the soul, it obeys the laws of the soul-life. During sleep, the human body obeys the physical laws: the moment the human being wakes up, the light of intelligent action flashes forth, like a spark, into purely physical existence. We speak entirely in the sense of the scientist Du Bois-Reymond when we state: the sleeping body may be investigated in all its aspects, yet we shall not be able to find the soul in it. But this soul continues the course of its rational deeds at the point where this was interrupted by sleep.—Thus the human being, also in this regard, belongs to two worlds. In one world he lives his bodily life which may be observed by means of physical laws;in the other he lives as a spiritual-rational being, and about this life we are able to learn nothing by means of physical laws. If we wish to study the bodily life, we have to hold to the physical laws of natural science; but if we wish to grasp the spiritual life, we have to acquaint ourselves with the laws of rational action, such, for instance, as logic, jurisprudence, economics, aesthetics, and so forth.

[ 7 ] The sleeping human body, subject only to physical laws, can never accomplish anything in the realm of the laws of reason. But the human spirit carries these laws of reason into the physical world. And just as much as he has carried into it will he find again when, after an interruption, he resumes the thread of his activity.

[ 8 ] Let us hold on to the picture of sleep. If life is not to be meaningless, the personality has to link up today with its deeds of yesterday. It could not do so did it not feel itself joined to these deeds. I should be unable to pick up today the result of my activity of yesterday, had there not remained within myself something of this activity. If I had today forgotten everything that I have experienced yesterday, I should be a new human being, unable to link up with anything. It is my memory which enables me to link up with my deeds of yesterday.—This memory binds me to the effects of my action. That which, in the real sense, belongs to my life of reason,—logic, for instance,—is today the same it was yesterday. This is applicable also to that which did not enter my field of vision yesterday, indeed, which never entered it. My memory connects my logical action of today with my logical action of yesterday. If matters depended merely upon logic, we certainly might start a new life every morning. But memory retains what binds us to our destiny.

[ 9 ] Thus I really find myself in the morning as a threefold being. I find my body again which during my sleep has obeyed its merely physical laws. I find again my own self, my human spirit, which is today the same it was yesterday, and which is today endowed with the gift of rational action with which it was endowed yesterday. And I find—preserved by memory—everything that my yesterday, that my entire past has made of me.—

[ 10 ] And this affords us at the same time a picture of the threefold being of man. In every new incarnation the human being finds himself in a physical organism which is subject to the laws of external nature. And in every incarnation he is the same human spirit. As such he is the Eternal within the manifold incarnations. Body and Spirit confront one another. Between these two there must lie something just as memory lies between my deeds of yesterday and those of today. And this something is the soul. It preserves the effects of my deeds from former lives and brings it about that the spirit, in a new incarnation, appears in the form which previous earth lives have given it. In this way, body, soul, and spirit are interrelated. The spirit is eternal; birth and death rule in the body according to the laws of the physical world; both are brought together again and again by the soul as it fashions our destiny out of our deeds. (Each of the above-mentioned principles: body, soul, and spirit, in turn consists of three members. Thus the human being appears to be formed of nine members. The body consists of: (1) the actual body, (2) the life-body, (3) the sentient-body. The soul consists of: (4) the sentient-soul, (5) the intellectual-soul, (6) the consciousness-soul. The spirit consists of: (7) spirit-self, (8) life-spirit, (9) spirit-man. In the incarnated human being, 3 and 4, and 6 and 7 unite, flowing into one another. Through this fact the nine members appear to have contracted into seven members.)

[ 11 ] In regard to the comparison of the soul with memory we are also in a position to refer to modern natural science. The scientist Ewald Hering published a treatise in 1870 which bears the title: Ueber das Gedaechtnis als eine allgemeine Funktion der organisierten Materie (Memory as a General Function of Organized Matter). Ernst Haeckel agrees with Hering's point of view. He states the following in his treatise: Ueber die Wellenzeugung der Lebensteilchen (The Wave Generation of Living Particles): “Profound reflection must bring the conviction that without the assumption of an unconscious memory of living matter the most important life functions are utterly inexplicable. The faculty of forming ideas and concepts, of thinking and consciousness, of practice and habit, of nutrition and reproduction rests upon the function of the unconscious memory, the activity of which is much more significant than that of conscious memory. Hering is right in stating that it is memory to which we owe nearly everything that we are and have.” And now Haeckel tries to trace back the processes of heredity within living creatures to this unconscious memory. The fact that the daughter-being resembles the mother-being, that the former inherits the qualities of the latter, is thus supposed to be due to the unconscious memory of the living, which in the course of reproduction retains the memory of the preceding forms.—It is not a question here of investigating how much of the presentations of Hering and Haeckel are scientifically tenable; for our purposes it suffices to draw attention to the fact that the natural scientist is compelled to assume an entity which he considers similar to memory; he is compelled to do so if he goes beyond birth and death, and presumes something that endures beyond death. He quite naturally seizes upon a supersensible force in the realm where the laws of physical nature do not suffice.

[ 2 ] We must, however, realize that we are dealing here merely with a comparison, with a picture, when we speak of memory. We must not believe that by soul we understand something that is equivalent to conscious memory. Even in ordinary life it is not always conscious memory that is active when we make use of the experiences of the past. We bear within us the fruits of these experiences even if we do not always consciously remember what we have experienced. Who can remember all the details of his learning to read and write? Moreover, who was ever conscious of all those details? Habit, for instance, is a kind of unconscious memory.—By means of this comparison with memory we merely wish to point to the soul which inserts itself between body and spirit and constitutes the mediator between the Eternal and that which, as the Physical, is inwoven into the course of birth and death.

[ 13 ] The spirit that reincarnates thus finds within the physical world the results of its deeds as its destiny; and the soul that is bound to it, mediates the spirit's linking up with this destiny. Now we may ask: how can the spirit find the results of its deeds, since, on reincarnating, it is certainly placed in a world completely different from the one in which it existed previously? This question is based upon a very externalized conception of the web of destiny. If I transfer my residence from Europe to America, I, too, find myself in completely new surroundings. Yet my life in America is completely dependent upon my previous life in Europe. If I have been a mechanic in Europe, my life in America will take on a form quite different from the one it would take on had I been a bank clerk. In the one case I shall probably be surrounded in America by machines, in the other by banking papers. In every case my previous life determines my surroundings, it attracts, as it were, out of the whole environment those things which are related to it. This is also the case with my spirit-soul. It surrounds itself quite necessarily with what it is related to out of its previous life. This cannot constitute a contradiction of the simile of sleep and death if we realize that we are dealing only with a simile, although a most striking one. That I find in the morning the situation which I myself have created on the previous day is brought about by the direct course of events. That I find on reincarnating an environment that corresponds to the result of my deeds of the previous life is brought about through the affinity of my reborn spirit-soul with the things of this environment.

[ 14 ] What leads me into this environment? Directly the qualities of my spirit-soul on reincarnating. But I possess these qualities merely through the fact that the deeds of my previous lives have implanted them into the spirit-soul. These deeds, therefore, are the real cause of my being born into certain circumstances. And what I do today will be one of the causes of my finding myself in a later life within certain definite circumstances.—Thus man indeed creates his destiny for himself. This remains incomprehensible only as long as one considers the separate life as such and does not regard it as a link in the chain of successive lives.

[ 15 ] Thus we may say that nothing can happen to the human being in life for which he has not himself created the conditions. Only through insight into the law of destiny—karma—does it become comprehensible why “the good man has often to suffer, while the evil one may experience happiness.” This seeming disharmony of the one life disappears when the view is extended upon many lives.—To be sure, the law of karma must not be conceived of as being so simple that we might compare it to an ordinary judge or to civil justice. This would be the same as if we were to imagine God as an old man with a white beard. Many people fall into this error. Especially the opponents of the idea of karma proceed from such erroneous premises. They fight against the conception which they impute to the believers in karma and not against the conception held by the true knowers.

[ 16 ] What is the relation of the human being to his physical surroundings when he enters a new incarnation? This relation is composed of two factors: first, in the time between two consecutive incarnations he has had no part in the physical world; second, he passed through a certain development during that period. It is self-evident that no influence from the physical world can affect this development, for the spirit-soul then exists outside this physical world. Everything that takes place in the spirit-soul, it can, therefore, only draw out of itself, that is to say, out of the super-physical world. During its incarnation it was interwoven with the physical world of facts; after its discarnation through death, it is deprived of the direct influence of this factual world. It has merely retained from the latter that which we have compared to memory.—This “memory remnant” consists of two parts. These parts become evident if we consider what has contributed to its formation.—The spirit has lived in the body and through the body, therefore, it entered into relation with the bodily surroundings. This relation has found its expression through the fact that, by means of the body, impulses, desires, and passions have developed and that, through them, outer actions have been performed. Because he has a corporeal existence, the human being acts under the influence of impulses, desires, and passions. And these have a significance in two directions. On the one hand, they impress themselves upon the outer actions which the human being performs. And on the other, they form his personal character. The action I perform is the result of my desire; and I myself, as a personality, am what is expressed by this desire. The action passes over into the outer world;the desire remains within my soul just as the thought remains within my memory. And just as the thought image in my memory is strengthened through every new impression of like nature, so is the desire strengthened through every new action which I perform under its influence. Thus within my soul, because of corporeal existence, there lives a certain sum of impulses, desires, and passions. The sum total of these is designated by the expression “body of desire.”—This body of desire is intimately connected with physical existence, for it comes into being under the influence of the physical corporeality. The moment the spirit is no longer incarnated it cannot continue the formation of this body of desire. The spirit must free itself from this desire-body in so far as it was connected, through it, with the single physical life. The physical life is followed by another in which this liberation occurs. We may ask: Does not death signify the destruction also of this body of desire? The answer is: No; for to the degree in which, at every moment of physical life, desire surpasses satisfaction, desire persists even when the possibility of satisfaction has ceased. Only a human being who does not desire anything of the physical world has no surplus of desire over satisfaction. Only a man of no desires dies without retaining in his spirit a certain amount of desire. And this amount must gradually diminish and fade away after death. The state of this fading away is called “the sojourn in the region of desire.” It can easily be seen that the more the human being has felt bound to the sense life, the longer must this state persist.

[ 17 ] The second part of the “memory remnant” is formed in a different way. Just as desire draws the spirit toward the past life, so this second part directs it toward the future. The spirit, through its activity in the body, has become acquainted with the world to which this body belongs. Each new exertion, each new experience enhances this acquaintance. As a rule the human being does a thing better the second time than he does it the first. Experience impresses itself upon the spirit, enhancing its capacities. Thus our experience acts upon our future, and if we have no longer the opportunity to have experiences, then the result of these experiences remains as memory remnant.—But no experience could affect us if we did not have the capacity to make use of it. The way in which we are able to absorb the experience, the use we are able to make of it, determines its significance for our future. For Goethe, an experience had a significance quite different from the significance it had for his valet; and it produced results for Goethe quite different from those it produced for his valet. What faculties we acquire through an experience depends, therefore, upon the spiritual work we perform in connection with the experience.—I always have within me, at any given moment of my life, a sum total of the results of my experience. And this sum total forms the potential of capacities which may appear in due course.—Such a sum total of experiences the human spirit possesses when it discarnates. This the human spirit takes with it into supersensible life. Now, when it is no longer bound to physical existence by bodily ties and when it has divested itself also of the desires which chain it to this physical existence, then the fruit of its experience has remained with the spirit. And this fruit is completely freed from the direct influence of the past life. The spirit can now devote itself entirely to what it is capable of fashioning out of this fruit for the future. Thus the spirit, after having left the region of desire, is in a state in which its experiences of former lives transform themselves into potentials—that is to say, talents, capacities—for the future. The life of the spirit in this state is designated as the sojourn in the “region of bliss.” (“Bliss” may, indeed, designate a state in which all worry about the past is relegated to oblivion and which permits the heart to beat solely for the concerns of the future.) It is self-evident that the greater the potentiality exists at death for the acquirement of new capacities, the longer will this state in general last.

Naturally, it cannot be a question here of developing the complete scope of knowledge relating to the human spirit. We merely intend to show how the law of karma operates in physical life. For this purpose it is sufficient to know what the spirit takes out of this physical life into supersensible states and what it brings back again for a new incarnation. It brings with it the results of the experiences undergone in previous lives, transformed into the capacities of its being.—In order to realize the far-reaching character of this fact we need only elucidate the process by a single example. The philosopher, Kant, says: “Two things fill the soul with ever increasing wonder: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” Every thinking human being must admit that the starry heavens have not sprung out of nothingness but have come gradually into existence. And it is Kant himself who in 1755, in a basic treatise, tried to explain the gradual formation of a cosmos. Likewise, however, we must not accept the fact of moral law without an explanation. This moral law, too, has not sprung from nothingness. In the first incarnations through which man passed the moral law did not speak in him in the way it spoke in Kant. Primitive man acts in accordance with his desires. And he carries the experiences which he has undergone through such action into the supersensible states. Here they become higher faculties. And in a subsequent incarnation, mere desire no longer acts in him, but it is now guided by the effect of the previous experiences. And many incarnations are needed before the human being, originally completely given over to desires, confronts the surrounding world with the purified moral law which Kant designates as something demanding the same admiration as is demanded by the starry heavens.

[ 18 ] The surrounding world into which the human being is born through a new incarnation confronts him with the results of his deeds, as his destiny. He himself enters this surrounding world with the capacities which he has fashioned for himself in the supersensible state out of his former experiences. Therefore his experiences in the physical world will, in general, be at a higher level the more often he has incarnated, or the greater his efforts were during his previous incarnations. Thus his pilgrimage through the incarnations will be an upward development. The treasure which his experiences accumulate in his spirit will become richer and richer. And he thereby confronts his surrounding world, his destiny, with greater and greater maturity. This makes him increasingly the master of his destiny. For what he gains through his experiences is the fact that he learns to grasp the laws of the world in which these experiences occur. At first the spirit does not find its way about in the surrounding world. It gropes in the dark. But with every new incarnation the world grows brighter. The spirit acquires a knowledge of the laws of its surrounding world; in other words, it accomplishes ever more consciously what it previously did in dullness of mind. The compulsion of the surrounding world decreases; the spirit becomes increasingly self-determinative. The spirit, however, which is self-determinative, is the free spirit. Action in the full clear light of consciousness is free action. (I have tried to present the nature of the free human spirit in my book, Philosophie der Freiheit, (Philosophy of Freedom—Spiritual Activity.) The full freedom of the human spirit is the ideal of its development. We cannot ask the question: is man free or unfree? The philosophers who put the question of freedom in this fashion can never acquire a clear thought about it. For the human being in his present state is neither free nor unfree; but he is on the way to freedom. He is partially free, partially unfree. He is free to the degree he has acquired knowledge and consciousness of world relations.—The fact that our destiny, our karma, meets us in the form of absolute necessity is no obstacle to our freedom. For when we act we approach this destiny with the measure of independence we have achieved. It is not destiny that acts, but it is we who act in accordance with the laws of this destiny.

[ 19 ] If I light a match, fire arises according to necessary laws; but it was I who put these necessary laws into effect. Likewise, I can perform an action only in the sense of the necessary laws of my karma, but it is I who puts these necessary laws into effect. And new karma is created through the deed proceeding from me, just as the fire, according to necessary laws of nature, continues to be effective after I have kindled it.

[ 20 ] This also throws light upon another doubt which may assail a person in regard to the effectiveness of the law of karma. Somebody might say: “If karma is an unalterable law, then it is wrong to help a person. For what befalls him is the consequence of his karma, and it is absolutely necessary that it should befall him.” Certainly, I cannot eliminate the effects of the destiny which a human spirit has created for himself in former incarnations. But the matter of importance here is how he finds his way into this destiny, and what new destiny he may create for himself under the influence of the old one. If I help him, I may bring about the possibility of his giving his destiny a favorable turn through his deeds; if I refrain from helping him, the opposite may perhaps occur. Naturally, everything will depend upon whether my help is a wise or unwise one. [The fact that I am present to help may be a part of both his Karma and mine, or my presence and deed may be a free act. (Editor.)]

[ 21 ] His advance through ever new incarnations signifies a higher development of the human spirit. This higher development comes to expression in the fact that the world in which the incarnations of the spirit take place is comprehended in increasing measure by this spirit. This world, however, comprises the incarnations themselves. In regard to the latter, too, the spirit gradually passes from a state of unconsciousness to one of consciousness. On the path of evolution there lies the point from which the human being is able to look back upon his successive incarnations with full consciousness.—This is a thought at which it is easy to mock; and it is easy to criticise it negatively. But whoever does this has no idea of the nature of such truths. And derision as well as criticism place themselves like a dragon in front of the portal of the sanctuary within which we may attain knowledge of these truths. For it is self-evident that truths, the realization of which lies for the human being in the future, cannot be found as facts in the present. There is only one way of convincing oneself of their reality: namely, to make every effort possible to attain this reality.

• 1. I can imagine that there are many people who consider themselves standing at the pinnacle of knowledge and who consider the present exposition “completely unscientific.” I can understand these people, for I know that this objection forces itself upon anyone who has no experience in the domain of the supersensible and who, at the same time, lacks the necessary restraint and modesty to admit that he still might learn something. Such people, however, should at least refrain from stating that the processes described here “contradict the intellect” and “cannot be proved by the intellect.” The intellect cannot do anything but combine and systematize facts. Facts can be experienced, but not be “proved by the intellect.” With the intellect, you cannot prove a whale. Either you must have seen it yourself, or you must let somebody describe it who has seen one. It is the same with the supersensible facts. If we have not yet attained to the point where we can see them ourselves, then we must permit them to be described to us. I can assure everyone that the supersensible facts which I describe in the subsequent pages are just as “factual” for the one whose higher senses are opened, as is the whale.