The Rudolf Steiner Archive

At first it might seem as if the strict lawfulness in the The [...]M[...] is incompatible. You know that this problem [...]

Is man free or not free? Is he subject to ironclad necessity, or are his actions subject to his will? Initially, this question is not asked, and a lot depends on asking questions correctly. As man stands today, he is neither one nor the other, neither free nor bound, but both one and the other. In relation to certain actions, he is free; in relation to others, he is subject to ironclad necessity. Freedom is something we are always approaching; we become freer the more we develop. In the beginning, we are very constrained, dependent on everything our instinctive mat[...] has predisposed us to.

But the more we develop, the freer we become. How does this relate to the laws of karma? Theosophy deals with laws that operate in the future. If we specify laws so firmly, how can we speak of a development towards freedom? If we delve into certain investigations into the human soul in this field, we will make progress. Above all, we must ask ourselves: What is freedom? Can it be a creation out of nothing? Is it a specific nature? Is man predisposed to freedom at the stage of existence at which he now stands? - At the moment when man raises such a question, he is a being that has developed to a certain point.

The fact that my hand moves is a result of infinitely complicated laws. Now it is not a question of whether I can get rid of these laws, but whether I can make a free decision within these laws in which I have become; whether a being that is born according to certain [laws] and moves within these laws can ascribe freedom to itself or not. These laws belong to our becoming in the past and extend into the future. Imagine someone demands to be trained as an athlete. He must train himself in a very specific direction, follow laws, bring himself to a certain point of view; when he has done that, he can become an athlete. Freedom does not consist in our changing the laws by which we have become, but in acting within those laws.

You have heard that [the] human being walks either the left or right path. Yes, so it is not up to him; he must walk one or the other. If he has a guru, he must follow laws, strive for a goal – can there be any talk of freedom? In truth, there is no such goal that we should strive for. Occult development has no such purpose, but it does have the purpose and intention of developing abilities in people and using laws to bring them to a certain level. When they have reached this level, they are then able to set themselves a goal.

The animal cannot act out of freedom, only according to instincts; no act of instinct or passion is free, it is internally forced. To be free, one must above all have the ability to decide freely; not feel any compulsion within oneself to do this or that.

This is a step to be taken. And all occultism is about developing the abilities we need to make free decisions. Suppose a person acquires the ability to see into the supersensible world. At first, the person acts out of instinctive drives. What is the inner compulsion? The first task is to put the person in relation to the outside world. Instinctive drives initially guide his life, making him unfree. When a person begins to look into the supersensible world, the first step is to see the connection between the drives and the world's interconnections. He knows how an instinct works as a cause in the world. He moves on to the realization of the connection between himself and the external world. Occultism provides him with the guidance for this.

You have come to know this lawful mechanism of the world better and better and see how freedom develops from it. The fact that you bring oxygen and hydrogen together is an act of your freedom. If we know nothing of the law, we cannot foresee what will happen and must submit to a compulsion. The fact that we have recognized the lawful consequences makes us free. The more we understand the higher laws, the more we can adhere to them in order to reach our goals. What we learn to recognize are the means by which we achieve the specific goals we then set for ourselves. The master does not give the chela instructions about where to steer; he should learn to move in the direction of the goal. A goal presents itself to us when we truly look at the world without prejudice. The goal that a person sets for himself out of the abundance of world phenomena can only be a free goal. Then he is truly a liberated man.

The three most important elements of the soul's life are activity, wisdom, and will. Actions must be determined by our wisdom and our will, and are therefore not free. Wisdom is partly free and partly not.

In the idea for my house, I am free; my knowledge of the laws leads me to shape the house the way I want it. And the better I know them, the better I will be able to realize this idea.

Free is he who is able to shape out of thought in a self-creative way.

The will determined by free thought is what truly liberates man. Man thus ceases to be determined from behind by the past and is determined from in front by his goals.

Pearl in shell as an example.

A person is unfree as long as we find in him the reason for setting himself the goal; when the law lies in the goal, then he is free, then he can refrain from the action. He acts selflessly in devotion to the goal. The opposite of inner compulsion is determination by the object, love of the object.

Only a god is truly free; but man is on the path to becoming divine.

Through objectification, through transformation into knowledge, what was previously coercion is transformed into freedom.

Therefore, man is on the path to freedom because he is capable of setting aside what lives in him as a goal. Objectification is the path to freedom.

The Sermon on the Mount is usually not appreciated in its full depth because many people understand it to be a sermon that the Lord is said to have preached to the people. But in reality it is not addressed to the people, but “spoken on the mountain”. This means: in the intimate sanctuary, where the secrets of religion are shared.

With the people, Jesus speaks in parables, but when he is alone with his disciples, he explains many things to them. “On the mountain means in the mystery”. The most important teaching “on the mountain is that which is called the ‘transfiguration’. There Jesus talks to his disciples about reincarnation. He tells them: John the Baptist is Elijah, they just did not recognize him. There on the mount of transfiguration, time and space were overcome for the disciples James, Peter and John; they saw beings who were no longer incarnated: Moses and Elijah. “Eb means the goal, the path. ”Moses means the truth; in the middle is Christ - the life. So the disciples saw before them: the path, the truth and the life.

When reading this scene, we find that the disciples speak a significant word. In the path of discipleship, three stages are distinguished. The first stage is that of the homeless man, the second stage is that on which man builds “huts” in the spiritual world. The disciples were at this stage at that time, so they said: “Here let us build huts.

Jesus had taken the three disciples, who were on the second level of fellowship, with him into the mystery. Everything that is spoken “on the mountain” means that we are dealing with an intimate revelation to the disciples. It says:

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and his disciples came to him. [Matt. 5:1]

Even if we understand this sentence only literally, we can see that it is not a sermon to the people. He went away with his disciples. We are therefore dealing with an intimate teaching that is only to be spoken before the familiar disciples. These are then in turn to teach the others who are outside.

The Sermon on the Mount speaks of two worlds. From this we can learn how the sensual and the supersensual relate to each other. Man must first slowly and carefully get used to judging things when entering other worlds. In the astral world, everything appears as a mirror image, even with numbers. For example, 364 is 463 in the astral world. What happens in a certain direction here in the world appears in the astral world as a mirror image. People who develop clairvoyance through pathological conditions tell of terrible animals that pounce on them. These are the lower passions of man; they appear in the astral world in the mirror image. What comes from man comes back to him in the astral. The passions come towards him as figures from outside. This is an example of how the inner self appears in the mirror image when we perceive it in the higher world. Every thing, everything here in the sensual world, has a real mirror image in the supersensible world. The very first sentence of the Sermon on the Mount points this out. We must bear in mind that language is more spiritual than we think.

The word 'blessed' is related to the word 'soul'. This is also the case in Greek. 'To be blessed' means to bring the soul to full development. Just as 'holy' is related to the words 'whole', 'healthy' and 'pure'. The Holy Spirit is the healthy Spirit, who is completely pure. Blessed is he who has developed his soul, who has ascended to the supersensible. Bit by bit, the Lord explains to his disciples how they become blessed, how they ascend.

The first Beatitude says:

Blessed are they that mourn, and weep, and make themselves clean; they shall have joy of God. [Matthew 5, 3]

That means that the Kingdom of Heaven is within themselves. This is the profound connection between the material and supersensible worlds. Those who long for the spirit will find the reflection of their striving within themselves, the Kingdoms of Heaven. This is the natural connection between our striving and the reflection, the Kingdoms of Heaven. Nothing can happen in the sensual world that does not have its counterpart in the supersensible world. If we disdain the spirit, the spirit flees. If we strive for the spirit, the reflection flows towards us. Thus Christ always explains the connections to his disciples.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted [Matthew 5:4]

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth [Matthew 5:5]

Those who have not developed within themselves what is called meekness, who are irascible, cannot have the necessary counter-image, namely the kingdom of the earth, for themselves. One should not try to enter the kingdom of heaven without first having redeemed the kingdom of the earth and then bringing it with one into the kingdom of heaven. We are here on earth to redeem and deify everything that is on earth. Just as the bee flies over the fields, collecting honey from the flowers and carrying it into the beehive, so the soul flies over the world to gather experiences and bring them into the realm of heaven. We must learn to let the world come to us and let it work in us. If we absorb everything, if we show gentleness and full fertility to the earth, it will also bring us something.

Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness, for they will find satisfaction within themselves.

[Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. [Matt. 5:7]]

Just as the north and south poles necessarily belong together, so the one link of the sensual world and the other in the supersensible world necessarily belong together.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

God reveals Himself only to pure hearts. A person who is incapable of purifying his heart from all the impressions flowing to him from the sense world cannot experience the counter-image in his heart. When the heart is pure of sensual and memory material, then it can see God. But that which is full of sensual and memory material excludes the Godhead. There is the image and the counter-image: the pure heart – the Godhead.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be children of God by themselves.

When Jesus wanted to explain this to his disciples, he said: There are children of God and children of men. The children of God want to remain children of God; the children of men want to become children of God. The children of God are also called the descendants of Abel, the children of men the descendants of Cain. The descendants of Abel did not descend to the greatest human labor and toil; they accept what comes from God, even blood, and bring it to God as a sacrifice.

The children of men have descended lower. They must sacrifice from what they themselves have gained through their labor. Therein lies a profound contrast in the spiritual life of man. The children of Abel were generally priests who want to draw from the trancelike inspiration that takes what God gives and sacrifices it to him. God has ignited in us the trance-like, unconscious inspiration. On the other hand, there is a fully conscious wisdom that man acquires during his journey on this earth. Cain's children are the people who conquer this wisdom. If people had remained Abel's children, they would have been led by the hand of divine naturalness; but God wanted to let them be free. They have to become Cain's children. This initially led to a lack of peace. This led to Cain killing his brother. The children of Cain must develop peaceableness within themselves again, and then they will become children of God through themselves again. This is a sentence that, above all, refutes the basic view of those who believed that the old Abel principle should be revived. They say: People are not meant to be able to become children of Abel again once they have been children of Cain. That is why the Jesuit order wants to keep humanity in its dullness with the divinity. He wants to fight evil by not giving people the opportunity to become free. The Jesuit order almost contradicts this sentence that people can become children of God again through themselves, and believes, however, that they are acting in the spirit of Jesus. Ignatius of Loyola said: We do not want to let people descend so low. The good should be preserved at the expense of the light.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Here we see the opposite of what is said in the first sentence. Begging for the spirit comes from the person themselves. Here we find that which works from the outside; there the mirror image is formed within, which works against it. It becomes ever clearer to us that this basic tendency lies in the Sermon on the Mount. We thereby gain a deeper understanding of what Christ gives to his disciples “on the mountain, in the mystery.”

If we look at the seemingly radical sentences from this point of view, we can understand this. In the sensual world, we are separate from each other. In the moment when we feel ourselves in the supersensible world, we are one. Only in the sensual world are we many. We believe that our physical skin is a boundary. However, we are not separated from each other by it. That is an illusion. We go beyond that and are connected to each other. In truth, we are intertwined. When we intuitively grasp this on an emotional level, we will come to a different understanding of our fellow human beings. We will feel when our fellow human being directs his anger at us, when in truth it is we ourselves who are directing the anger at us. If we imagine a bond between soul and soul, we feel that the separation ceases to exist and we feel that we have no right to perceive the intention of another person as if it did not belong to us.

Jesus wanted to make it clear to his disciples that external justice is not what matters, but empathy for the soul of the other person. He says:

You have heard that it was said: “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. [Matt 5:38-39]

But I say unto you: Love your enemies, so that you may understand that you are one. [Matt. 5:44-45]

So it should not be “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”, but I must feel responsible for what the other person does. This is where thinking in the supersensible should come into play.

If anyone demands my coat and I feel at one with him, I will not hesitate to give him everything. If my coat is his coat, then my cloak is also his cloak. I will not go one mile with him, but two. That it is I who live completely in the other, that is what Christ expresses here. We must think supernaturally, completely free from sensuality.

But if your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. [Matthew 5:29]

Man has desires; he can satisfy them only through the physical organs. The possibility of satisfying these desires depends on the physical organs. Kamaloka arises from the fact that when a person dies, he still has desires for what only the physical organs can offer him. He must first get used to no longer using sensual organs. We should use our senses here in this world in such a way that we draw the spiritual out of things with the help of our senses. As we behold the sensual, we should continually lift ourselves up to the spiritual. To the same extent we prepare ourselves for devachan. This is what Christ means when He says:

And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is expedient for thee that one of thy members should perish, rather than that thy whole body be cast into hell. [Matt. 5:29-30]

If the right eye tempts you to remain in the sensual, then free yourself from what the eye clings to. Of course, this does not mean physically plucking it out.

Every sentence of the Sermon on the Mount implies a profound mystery wisdom about how the sensual and the supersensible are connected. Here Jesus explains the essence of Kamaloka to his disciples, and further teaches them: Man should never abuse the supersensible for sensual purposes. The Godhead should never be forced to do something that is not within the cosmic laws themselves. We should not bring down the supersensible sphere, but rise to the supersensible world. There is a great temptation, for example in spiritualism, to want to see the manifestations of the spiritual world. Man wants to bring down the spiritual world instead of developing upwards. The truth of spiritualism cannot be denied, but the method is attacked. We do not want to interfere with the transcendental sphere through our sensual sphere.

Christ emphasizes the perniciousness of the oath, because one should not interfere with the transcendental; one should not pull down heaven to confirm earthly matters.

Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is God's throne; or by the earth, for it is His footstool.

If you want to have the supernatural, you should rise to the supernatural. No one should touch the supernatural laws. Not my will, but yours be done.

We should not have the rights that the tax collectors have. We should know that the great unity reigns between “mine” and “yours”.

For if you love those who love you, what reward will you have? Do not even the tax collectors [...]? [Mt 5,46]

You shall be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.

You shall act consciously, out of the supersensible world.

The conclusion of the speech also contains profound occult aspects. Many believe that they have come to the truth through all kinds of arts. However, it is not only a matter of acquiring the higher powers, but also of putting them at the service of humanity. It is not so easy to preserve that which must be preserved when man rises to higher powers. One can make very definite observations in the case of people who develop their higher powers and do not at the same time also raise their character to higher levels. They then easily become more imperfect than before.

Let us suppose that one has a solution of two substances, for example a red and a blue liquid mixed together; it would be a mixed color. In the same way, in everyday life, man is a mixture of his lower and higher nature. As man usually is, the higher nature prevents his lower nature from coming to evil, radical excesses. By interweaving the higher and lower soul, we are protected from such radical excesses in ordinary life.

Higher development means the withdrawal of the higher soul from the lower. Thus the higher soul is revealed; but the lower soul is then left to its own devices. In occult higher development, we have the higher nature, but also the lower nature – each on its own. That is why the lower nature comes out completely in people who develop occultly. Therefore, it is necessary to develop character, morality, and full self-control alongside occult development. The morality prevailing on earth is the solid rock floor on which we must rest. If we do not build on it, we build on sand. Jesus says:

Many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not acquire the higher ability of prophesying?' [Matthew 7:22]

It would be strange if Christ wanted to call all those who have acquired this ability “evildoers.” He is speaking here of those who, along with higher abilities, have not also acquired higher morals.

Whoever hears my words...

– by this he means his teachings, which he gave them; one should absorb them with the supersensible consciousness – at the end it says:

The people were horrified at his teaching.

When Jesus had finished his teaching, a commotion was heard in the innermost part of the temple, in the Holy of Holies, signaling that a revolt had broken out among the people outside. This took place outside the temple. The people had not heard the Sermon on the Mount; the last sentence has no relation to the others. Christ-Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount only for his disciples, in order to express the entire character of the supersensible world to his disciples. They were to become his apostles through his communicating his most intimate intentions to them in the holy of holies. Through this knowledge their words, which they spoke before the world, were inspired.

All the knowledge that is brought to people in theosophical literature naturally comes from one source. To the question “How do you get it?”, the answer must be: Yoga is the path to higher knowledge, and to participation in the higher worlds in general. “Yoga” means union with the divine source of existence, with the spiritual sources of the world. The one who practises yoga is called a yogi, that is a person who seeks to develop within himself the abilities and powers to penetrate into the spiritual worlds.

There is a great difference between the man who has grasped the idea of Yoga and he who seeks to acquire knowledge today. The latter seeks to bring as much of the outer world as possible into his own mind. The yogi, on the other hand, seeks out all the sources of knowledge that come from spiritual life itself. He starts from the fact that there is development, that man's development, as it is now, is a stage, and that there are forces and abilities slumbering within him that still have to come out, and that if we bring them out, we can truly enter into higher worlds. If you want to become a yogi, you must acquire an unconditional belief in the upward development of the human being, not a blind faith, but the active belief that you can move upwards, that you can develop forces that have not yet been expressed. But this cannot happen overnight. Yoga is a path that consists in many ways of renunciation, and it must be sought with patience and perseverance. It is very difficult for people in today's cultural life to achieve yoga. That is why the theosophical movement was necessary. When Subba Rao was asked how long it takes to achieve initiation, he said: “It can take seventy incarnations, sometimes only seven, for some it takes seventy years, for some seven years, and there may be people who achieve it in seven days, and some even in seven hours.

Of course, it depends on the level of maturity of a person. A person may be further along than he or she realizes. Internally, a person can already be empowered to exercise his or her will and mind in the spiritual world. It may be that someone in a previous incarnation was much further along than he has come today. Perhaps in this incarnation, due to the conditions of the physical body, what was already within him could not come out; now the previously attained powers must be brought out through the powers of the present life. For example, someone might have been a wise priest with magical abilities. This would now have to be brought out in the later incarnation through the powers of that incarnation. Perhaps the brain development in the later incarnation is not so far advanced as to make this possible. It could also be that other forces are missing, perhaps love and kindness; then the earlier forces cannot be brought out again. That is why it takes less time for one person and more time for another to reach initiation. It is a matter of exploring what is already within us by creating the most intimate inner life possible.

The concept of yoga must be removed more and more from everything external and tumultuous, and it must be realized that yoga will happen in the seclusion of the innermost life. Above all, it should be kept in mind that higher spiritual qualities should never be developed without strengthening the character at the same time. Imagine a yellow and a blue liquid mixed together, then a green liquid would result. Just as the yellow and blue liquids, when mixed, produce a green one, so the spiritual and physical powers of man are united. When the spiritual nature is extracted, the physical nature remains behind, so to speak, as a sediment. Much depends on the two natures being mixed [correctly]. It is because the higher nature is connected with the lower nature that man is a particular man. In yoga training, the higher nature is drawn out, and all those qualities that are bad in man come to the fore if absolute character development does not go hand in hand with it. If you aspire to yoga, you have to be prepared for the strangest things to happen in your life. These are the temptations of Saint Anthony. If you seriously begin with yoga exercises, then you have to be prepared for all sorts of things to come out of the lower nature. Some people who were truthful before start lying, cheating, becoming unreliable in character. This happens when the strictest sense of yoga training is not required of students to constantly strengthen their character. Opportunities for wrongdoing then arise as if by magic. That is why all genuine yoga schools first look at the development of morality. Annie Besant repeatedly says to Westerners: spiritual training without moral elevation of character can only lead to wrong paths.

Yoga consists of raising certain things that a person otherwise does unconsciously into consciousness. A person usually performs the breathing process unconsciously; the yogi raises it from the subconscious into consciousness. The yoga training that places the greatest emphasis on the breathing process from the outset, the Hatha Yoga training, only leads to a certain point of development; then it breaks off. It does not go further than the realization of the astral. From the very beginning, one should not follow the Hatha Yoga path, but the Raja Yoga path. This path regards a process such as the breathing process as part of a larger whole. It also involves bringing the things that we previously performed unconsciously into consciousness. We pay no attention to a large part of our thought processes. We have to learn to follow our inner thought process with attention. We can do this by bringing about complete calm within us in relation to the outside world. Then we have to bring thoughts into this calm ourselves and focus our attention on a particular

thought. It is best to devote ourselves to thoughts that contain a force. This conscious immersion in a thought is called meditation. What matters is to live intimately with a thought. You can meditate with a specific valuable thought content. You have to rest completely on it in all silence. You could also do it with an everyday thought, for example with the thought “table” and realize what that is. Most people do not realize what a table is, namely that a weight mass is distributed over several legs. You can search to understand the concept of the table in a contemplative way.

Look at certain pictures by great painters [...]. With some, you feel satisfied when you see floating figures, but with others you feel no satisfaction at all. With some pictures, you feel that the painter literally lived within the figures, while with others you feel that he only saw the figures from the outside.

A European man of culture will find it very difficult to immerse himself in such a concept for a long time. But the real yogi must immerse himself more and more in the concept. As we live inwards, forces develop in our soul that were not there before. When we rest in a concept with the soul, then these forces come out. You have to have the reins in your hand and look at your soul life in such a way that you always have the reins in your hand. A good preparation for this is this quiet resting in thought. The thoughts of life call the inner soul to the most diverse affects. You have to learn not to be led by the soul forces, but to lead them. You have to learn to strengthen your inner self more and more so that you can hold back an outburst of anger, so that you can hold back hatred. We have to get all our affects and passions under control so that nothing gets out of hand with us. We have to achieve complete mastery and restraint of our inner self. This is achieved through quiet devotion to the thought.

To meditate, it is necessary: first, to fix a thought in itself; second, to identify with the thought; third, to remain within it for a while. You have to enter into a thought, for example, the concept of the table, and identify the will with it. Then Samadhi occurs, which is immersion in the object.

The regulation of the breathing process is connected with such training of thought. If this alone is tackled from the beginning, it is Hatha Yoga. If it forms part of the other training, it is Raja Yoga. The yogi must observe certain times for breathing, and then he enters into a rhythmic life. The seven degrees of the Persian initiation are based on this: Ravens, Occult, Strugglers, Lions, Persians, Sun-runners, Fathers. Those who had come so far as to make their lives completely rhythmic were called Sun-runners. In this way, the human being integrates himself into the whole rhythm of nature. The sun returns to the same point every year. Everything happens rhythmically with it. Everything in life is based on rhythms. If a person wants to achieve something, he must bring rhythm into his life. The plants and animals are connected to the seasons in a very specific way. In the human being, everything is initially subject to the arbitrariness of the astral body, and this makes his life unrhythmic. This brings disorder into his life. He must now make it rhythmic again.

If I meditate every day at a certain hour, for example at seven o'clock in the morning, I bring rhythm into my life. But if I meditate at ten o'clock or at some other time instead of at seven o'clock, then the rhythm is disturbed. Even if a person decides to say a prayer every day at seven o'clock in the morning, again at noon and before going to bed, then these are three fixed points that bring rhythm into our lives. Part of the rhythmization of life is also the rhythmization of the breathing process. This is connected with very deep things that exist between man and the universe. Plants and humans belong together in a certain way. The human being inhales oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide; the plant does it the other way around. Throughout evolution, there is a connection between the nature of plants and that of human beings. The plant grows rhythmically according to natural laws. It is still completely chaste because it does not yet have the astral life within it. On the one hand, it is higher than the human being, but on the other hand, it is lower. As an ideal, it stands before man. Man must become similar to it by rhythmizing the breathing process. When one inhales and holds the breath longer, one develops carbonic acid in oneself, and thus approaches the nature of plants.

When the yogi gradually begins to consciously live in what he had previously done unconsciously, then new worlds open up around him. He then experiences new worlds. If we were asleep, we would not hear the most glorious music. So, at first, man is a sleeper in relation to the spiritual worlds. And just as waking up is like waking up to melodies, there is a waking up in the spiritual world through the breathing process. When you consciously enter into the breathing process, imaginative knowledge begins. Ordinary seeing is material knowledge. Imaginative knowledge consists in our ability to evoke images that are not mere visions, but that are grounded in the very basis of existence. Even when you look at the ordinary world, you basically only have images. Everything in the external world is an image. The images of the external world correspond to material knowledge. The images that arise through the yoga process are stimulated internally, stimulated in the right way.

What matters in this whole world, which then arises in us, is that it is inwardly true. That is the difficulty in the yoga training. As long as a person has personal desires, he cannot easily distinguish truth from untruth in this world. Hence the need to become selfless. In the Pythagorean schools, people were made to understand: You can only learn about life after death when you are completely indifferent to whether you live after death or not. All personal aspiration is eliminated in relation to this one question. When personal desire is eliminated, where imagination is needed, then truth is expressed in imagination.

The third stage is the stage of rational will. Here you also learn how the truth is made, the will by which something is willed. The fourth stage is the stage of intuition. The yoga training is about reining in everything that is in us: desire, urge, craving and passion. As long as we do not control this, truth makes us illusory. Above all, absolute inner calm, patience, endurance and steadfastness are required in the practice of yoga.

Certain character traits are essential. We must never lose our harmony with our surroundings, otherwise our progress will be at an end. If the smartest person fell asleep and then woke up on Mars, he would be unable to use his abilities on Mars. He would be considered insane there. All madness is a lack of harmony with the environment; then you can't get ahead if that happens. Not a drunken person should you become, as Plato says, but a sober person, and in no way neglect your everyday duties. This is absolutely necessary for the practice of yoga.

Then it is important to develop humility. Only under the influence of the highest humility can one speak correctly of the experiences in the higher worlds. A very high degree of humility must go hand in hand with the yoga training. The oriental disciple can easily gain a sense of respect and appreciation for the teacher. In this case, it is very important. The deepest trust in the teacher is necessary for the yoga training because one must have a fixed point. In a sense, the yoga student leaves the whole rest of the world. His relationship to the world changes. All things then take on a new meaning.

He becomes alien to his surroundings. He must transform all things. A certain spiritual alchemy takes place with him. He must now do everything out of an inner sense of duty. He treats everything from a new point of view. The way he relates to things changes completely. In a sense, the person becomes estranged from his surroundings. If he does not develop full strength of character, he can easily lose touch with his environment.

The fixed point for the yoga student was always the teacher, who was a point of reference for him, whom he calls his guru, whom he regards as the embodiment of the deity in man. In reality, divine beings do exist in higher human natures. It seems obvious to the Oriental that a higher being lives in the guru. This is not the case in the West. If someone seeks a yoga training in the West, then he will also find the opportunity to reach his goal in the West.

The greatest evil in yoga training would be impatience. But you overcome that when you recognize reincarnation and karma as realities. We must live with the feeling that we actually see this present life between birth and death as one among many.

In a transcript by Anna Rebmann, the following table is attached:

The legends of the gods and heroes of the Nordic peoples are based on profound occult facts. Even within Europe, there were occult lodges of the white brotherhood in ancient times. From Scotland up to northern Russia. They were called “Trotten Lodges” or “Druid Lodges.” The development of the spiritual life of the ancient peoples was entrusted to these lodges. Druid comes from Drus [...]. The legend that Boniface cut down the oak when he brought Christianity is a beautiful parable for the fact that the old highly religious Druid religion was overcome by Christianity. Six to seven hundred years before the birth of Christ, the old religion began to decline. The last part moved south. The ancient Truscans, from whom the Etruscans later emerged, settled in Italy; further east, another branch moved to ancient Greece. If we take the matter of the northern population as a whole, we find a deep connection in the spiritual realm, between the west and the east.

Let us take a look at Buddhism. This highly spiritual religion hardly found any lasting place in its native country India; it was soon absorbed by Brahmanism; on the other hand, it took root in the peoples descended from the Atlanteans, the Mongols.

The ancient Germans also descend from Atlantis. The similarity of the religions is evident from the names. The Nordic god “Wotan” is equivalent to “Buddha”. The ancient religion comes from Atlantis. It was well aware of the lost continent. The last echoes of the old Druid religion died out under the reign of Queen Elizabeth; the last Druid lodges were abolished.

The old teaching knew two traditions. In the south, the tradition of the Lemurian race that perished in the fire was alive, in the north, the memory of Atlantis that perished in the water. The former was symbolized in the saga by “Muspelheim”, the warm sunny land, and the second by “Nifelheim”, the land of fog. It is also very interesting to trace the relationship between the ancient Egyptians and the Nordic peoples. We can follow it in the religions. Osiris is dismembered by his brother and the pieces scattered, from which the earth then arises. In Egypt you find many Osiris graves, where the pieces of the Osiris body were buried, as it were. In the Book of the Dead, Osiris - the higher self - is addressed directly: “The Osiris and so forth. The task of the priesthood was to awaken the dead Osiris in man.

In the North, we have the giant Ymir. He is slain, and from his parts the earth is created. His hair makes the forests, his bones the rocks, his blood the rivers, and so on, all his limbs are divided. We recognize that this myth has been drawn from the same source as the worship of Osiris.

The Edda is an echo of the immigration of Atlantis. “Edda” and “Veda” are the same word. Thus we recognize the connection between all ancient and old religions.

The entire history of Europe is preserved in the heroic sagas. All the sagas can be traced back to the great Nordic initiate “Sig”, who was initiated for Europe. Siegfried, Sieglinde, Sigurd are all names that point back to him. In terms of depth, the Nordic tradition surpasses even that which comes from India. What strikes us about all the sagas is the prophetic and tragic element that runs through everything. Everything points to what is to come. We see this in the Twilight of the Gods. It was known that the gods they worshipped would not find lasting worship. They said to them: “You are there for the north, but another will come after you who is higher than you.

The story of Siegfried clearly shows what is meant by initiation. He killed the lindworm, bathed in its blood, became invulnerable – all things that symbolize initiation. The initiate is invulnerable – only one spot between the shoulder blades was vulnerable, and that is the spot where Christ carried his cross and thus also made this spot invulnerable. Siegfried had to be replaced by Christ. This is depicted in the Nibelungen. We see the transition of the two currents in the Middle Ages, which finally merged: the old pagan current and the new Christian current. The old pagan current leads directly back to the downfall of Atlantis. It was replaced by the Franks and led over into the Christian current. The Nibelungs come from the Land of the Fogs, the land surrounded by water and fog. The hoard of the Nibelungs is sunk into the Rhine. For the peoples, the Rhine belonged to the great waters that had engulfed Atlantis with the golden city and all its treasures.

Then we see King Arthur's Round Table. It represents the 'White Lodge of ancient paganism'. The contrasts in the Middle Ages become more and more pronounced, in the form of the 'Ghibellines' = Nibelungs - the imperial party - and the 'Wibelungen' = Welfs, the party of the Pope, of Christianity.

What came to Europe from Christianity did not come only from Christian monks, but also from Oriental brotherhoods. The great spiritual brotherhood of the 'White Lodge', the 'Gral Lodge', brought the deepest part of Christianity. Barbarossa wants to get the Grail. He does not reach his goal, but drowns on the way. He was far ahead of his time and therefore could not yet fulfill his task. Now he waits in the Kyffhäuser until the spirit of his people has progressed so far that he can lead them further. Development had not yet reached its low point. There are those who cannot go down as deeply, they have to wait until the others have come through the depths to their point of view, then they can move on with them. So Barbarossa sits and waits. The ravens are to bring him word when the time has come. The ravens are the initiates of the first degree; they are scouts, they bring tidings from the world of the spirit.

The emperor – the warriors – have not found the initiation. Who is suited to seek it? This type is represented by a great, noble, inward-looking mind. The pure fool: Parzival. The Holy Grail did come to the land in the time of Barbarossa, but it was only sensed in dullness. Parzival sees it, but out of ignorance, out of misunderstanding the prohibition of questioning, he misses the question. Now he must go through all the degrees of initiation. He must prove himself as a child of his time, in the worldly knighthood. He goes through doubt: [“Is doubt the birth of hearts?”] Finally, after going through everything, he comes to the Grail. There the entire initiation is symbolically represented. His successor was Lohengrin.

In the history of the Middle Ages, we saw the flourishing of a great cultural movement. Thriving cities emerged, and in them the creative, industrious, but more self-contained bourgeoisie. From Scotland to Novgorod, a circle of flourishing cities emerged. This represents a great step forward in the development of the world. This development of the bourgeoisie corresponds to the female side of man. The masculine seeks its own in the outside world, represented by [gap in the transcript]

The inner being of man is feminine and must be fertilized by the great “White Lodge”. This is presented to us in the Lohengrin saga. The blossoming city-being is represented by Elsa of Brabant. She calls on Lohengrin, the knight of the Holy Grail, for her protection, marries him and loses him again because she asks about his origin.

There is a sacred law among the initiates that one must not ask about their physical origin.

Lohengrin's messenger is the swan. This is the third degree of chelaship, which is designated as follows: They know the name of all things.

Wolfram von Eschenbach, who died in 1225 and to whom we owe the Parzival saga, could neither read nor write. And Jacob Boehme, the poor cobbler, will not have occupied himself with reading books either; but that is no reason why he should not have left us such spiritual truth and wisdom. Walter von der Vogelweide boasted that he was something very special because he could read and write [...]; in the Middle Ages, that was a very rare skill.

All these northern sagas of gods and heroes contain the basis of occultism, which the great initiate Sig proclaimed. “Wotan” underwent four initiations to prepare the fifth sub-race of the fifth root race, which had the task of merging the Greek and Celtic races. The fourth sub-race found its greatness in the south. Here in the north, a corresponding countermeasure was taken. Four stages had to be gone through here first, while high culture was already developing down in the south. From the south came Christianity. In the north, four elementary classes of “Wotan” were gone through so that one would be able to receive Christianity.

“Wotan”, “Wille”, “We” – the trinity.

Creative power, will and we – the power of the mind was developed, the tragic trait that runs through everything.

What did the ancient Germans learn from the Druids? One example: imagine yourself on the moon. There, the lower three kingdoms were not what they are now on Earth. The mineral kingdom had not yet solidified, it was still alive, mobile, best compared to a spinach mass or rather to peat than to rock. There were no stones back then. Life had not yet escaped from it. The same applied to the plant kingdom. The plants of that time could only grow on living things. So living things grew on living things. Now some beings have not achieved the goal that was set on the moon. There are still plants that are unable to sustain their life from dead soil; they can only grow on living things; they are called parasite plants. These include, among others, mistletoe, which can only grow on trees; it is a moon plant. Mistletoe juice is antagonistic to the earth, which is why it is or was used as a poison in medicine.

From the above, we see that on the moon the three kingdoms were not yet completely separated from each other. The mineral kingdom was plant-like, and the plant kingdom was between the plant and animal kingdoms. When certain plants were touched, they produced sounds.

The earth sun is

All these things can only be recognized by those who are familiar with the conditions on earth. At the time of the ancient Druids, these things were told to us as fairy tales by the Druid priests. This is how we have been prepared to understand Theosophy today.

The initiates speak to the souls, not to the respective people.

Thus, today's theosophy prepares us again for the reality of later ages.

Various things, presumably from a question and answer [with comments by the transcriber]

Richard Wagner intuitively grasped the great realities and reflected them in his great operas. Various attempts have been made by the spiritual currents to bring these realities to the attention of mankind today. Just as Richard Wagner was inspired as an artist, so the attempt has been made to make the truth clear to the consciousness of the mind. Nietzsche was chosen as the tool for this. His brain did not hold up. He had to atone for the attempt with death. [...] The European race was too thick-skinned. None of it was of any use until Helena Petrovna Blavatsky got it through. - We were dealing with Kali Yuga, the dark age. We are in the middle of the fifth root race and have passed the low point. Jesus Christ: When Christianity emerged, Jesus of Nazareth was a highly developed chela, third degree, the swan. For him, the whole world is what the human ego is for the ordinary person, that is, he knows the true divine in every thing. He knows the whole world inwardly. Every thing tells him its true name.

[In response to a request for further clarification, Dr. Steiner tried to make it clear to us:] As I speak to you, I move the air, the sound waves reach your ear and you absorb the words in your soul. The air is in perpetual motion, the auditory nerves catch the sound. Now imagine the air with its different vibrations, because each word produces different vibrations [...]. Now imagine that from the beginning, when a thing was created, a word was spoken for every thing, and that the air waves that formed this word were made firm, made rigid. Imagine that my words were made rigid, then they would fall visibly on the floor here. That was indeed the case with creation.

Christ can be found in the astral world. Master Jesus teaches how to find Christ. Christ will come again as a spiritual man when he will incarnate again in the sixth root race.

He will have a forerunner, John the Baptist. The sun was in Aries in the spring at the time of Christ, hence Christ = the Lamb. But it is slowly moving forward. It used to be in the sign of Taurus, hence the service of Taurus; even earlier in Gemini, Perse - Ormuzd and Ahriman. A solar period lasts two thousand six hundred years. Now it is coming to Pisces. In the Middle Ages, reference was made to the Age of Pisces. An element, a sea of spiritual life was to come. Later comes Aquarius, after two thousand six hundred years. The Templars taught that John would return - John the Baptist

You have heard of the spirits that reveal themselves to man: “Will, Wisdom, Form”. I would like to say a few more things about these entities.

You must familiarize yourself with them. Those who only consider the physical part know only a little.

All teachings are based on observations with higher organs that do not belong to the physical body, that belong to the higher bodies and are not yet developed in the ordinary human being either. Familiarize yourself with the fact that higher insights are gained.

The names of the [four] stages of perception [are]:

1. Material recognition: It is the subordinate one, only used for everyday life [recognition].

2. Imaginative cognition – recognizing spiritual beings in images: the images of the dream world, surging up and down, are chaotic and disorderly, without meaning. However, the meaning can be developed in the soul. Imago image, with which man surrounds himself. There is the fabric from which knowledge is composed [...]

Through the reality that one recognizes imaginatively, one can grasp and pass through.

3. Voluntaristic - volitional - cognition: We are no longer dealing with images. All image-knowledge belongs to the astral worlds, all volitional knowledge belongs to the mental world.

Beings that are perceived have the same substance as our human will. Volitional expressions.

4. Intuition: Will particularly developed sensitively. The will stirs. When the will becomes sentient, that is the highest kind of knowledge that man can have on the third plan. The highest plan is intuition; the stages lead up to the three worlds, where we have arrived at the limit of what

concerns man.

Intuition is the world of knowledge of the disciple who has attained the third degree.

The third degree, or swan, is the degree that connects the intercourse of ordinary people with the masters - Lohengrin.

Intuition enables a person to perceive objects within. We must learn to understand the meaning of the name “I”. Through meditation, the distinction of the I from other names becomes clear. Then you distinguish the basics of the royal yoga school.

There is an unspeakable difference between the “I” and other names. There is no thing that would have a name that anyone could attach to it, but there is a name that everyone knows, that only one can say to himself, the meaningful I. The “I” must resound from within the person, then the person enters the realm that is supersensible and the path by which he comes only from within. There, man first enters the realm that has no [gap in the transcript]

That is why, in Jewish secret doctrine, the unspeakable name [Yahweh], which means “I am,” is God, who announces himself in the innermost part of the soul, the first of intuition. If you now learn to recognize all things in the same way, if you also elicit the names of things as you do for yourself, if you crawl into things through self-abandonment, through the dissolution of the self, then you will learn all secrets, then every object will say its own ego, then all things will become eloquent. All illusions of one's own self will then have vanished. All things will then proclaim the words within them. [...]

What I am saying to you now is a symbolization of what has been said in all schools. I speak to you, you hear me through the fact that I am able to make the air vibrate in very specific forms, which are a true reflection of my words and sounds. Now you know that all things in the form of air can be liquefied. Now you think that if someone could solidify the air at the moment I utter something, then my words would fall like snow crystals. That is how man, who looked deeper, rightly imagined the world in the first place. Thus the world soul once spoke the primal words into an infinitely fine substance, into the Akasha matter. Everything here on earth is Akasha matter that has fallen down. The crystal is the condensed word of the Primordial Soul. Everything around us is the word of the Primordial Soul that has become rigid. When man ascends to intuitive knowledge, he hears the words that the Primordial Soul once spoke.

The four steps of knowledge lead to the mental plane. These four steps are taught in all Rosicrucian schools and form the content of the first seven degrees of initiation. Freemasonry also had these seven steps before it descended to the three St. John's degrees.

One comes to an understanding of the higher worlds through feeling and through calm, clear research. Trust is necessary and faith, evoked by intuitive feeling. Man is inclined towards truth and clarity; when the occultist tells him something, he finds that there is something right about it.

First of all, I will give a skeleton of the higher world and will proceed quite logically and elementarily. If you consider human development, you will become aware of the four-fold nature of man as he stands before you.

Firstly: the physical body has something in common with the mineral kingdom. When a person stands before us, they are a mixture of the physical and the higher bodies. The eye is a physical apparatus without sensation, but it is animated, endowed with sensation. Outside in the world, the realm of the inanimate is spread out, and man has taken possession of it.

1. The realm of the inanimate: physical body
2. The realm of the plant-like: etheric body
3. The realm of the animal-like: astral body I Manas Budhi [Atma]

Secondly: the etheric body: You can cut a piece of the mineral kingdom and lay it down, and it will be just the same after a year. It is different with plants: if you cut off a leaf, it will wither after a short time.

Thirdly: the astral body or the sentient body.

These three kingdoms of nature are also in man. Then there is the fourth link, the I. The I holds together the essence of the whole world in the human body. Schiller expressed it quite theosophically in what he describes as Goethe's view of nature: “You seek to know nature, but on a difficult path, by combining all three kingdoms to understand the human being.”

Here we have arrived at the point where man is today. We have what the forces of nature have made of him. The physical body is what the deities have made, it is the cleverest. The physical body is constructed wisely, the other bodies are still imperfect. The astral body commits follies against the heart, it intervenes in the wise construction in an unrhythmic and chaotic way.

The ego is the real baby, it is at the very beginning. Through these imperfections, man must first develop upwards. The European knows how to distinguish between 'good' and 'bad', 'true' and 'false'. As much as the ego has of impeccable truth, so much manas is in the ego. There is no need to vote on anything that is manasic. However much a person achieves, together with everyone else, he must recognize the truth for himself.

Becoming dispassionate. The more dispassionate feeling there is in a person, the more Budhi there is in him. As the I develops, it also becomes as rhythmic as the physical body. Two worlds.

The human being lives in three realms, but a new world is opening up for the human being, into which he must learn to live. Just as the baby “I” has risen above the animal kingdom, so it rises into higher realms. All religions have striven to lead the “I” upwards. As we ascend, we gain an overview.

The old Christian secret doctrine calls the moon beings angels. The asuras are the origin of all kinds of selfishness, otherwise we would not have independence. Selfhood, but also selfishness. The gods of form are the constructive architectural ones. The spirits of form have worked on the physical body. Jehovah is the spirit of form. The moon gods have been particularly active in the etheric body, which is why Helena Petrovna Blavatsky calls Jehovah the moon god. The occultist approaches these beings and says that they did not develop out of nothing.

Supplement from the notes of Alfred Reebstein

The human being, the I, has taken possession of the other realms, formed an extract from them, which it now rules. The physical body is the most perfectly developed in its way; the higher limbs, etheric body and astral body, are much less developed in their way and the I only reach greater perfection in later stages.

The part of man that is completely flawless truth is called: Manas.

Budhi is what is completely independent of sensations and passions. The following are developing simultaneously with the human kingdom:

- Mineral kingdom
- Plant kingdom
- Animal kingdom
- Human kingdom – kingdom of the egos
- Angelic kingdom, lunar Pitris, moon beings, people of the moon
- Archangels, fire spirits, sun beings, people of the sun
- Archai, spirits of time, spirits of personality; Asuras, humans of Saturn
- Spirits of form, Exusiai
- Spirits of movement - activity - Dynamis
- Spirits of wisdom
- [Throne]
- Cherubim
- Seraphim

Today I would like to continue our examination of the things we began eight days ago. Not long ago, one of our Theosophical friends showed me a letter written in response to an invitation from a southern German pastor to the Theosophical friend. Our friend thought it might be a good idea to invite the gentleman in question to the lecture on the wisdom teachings of Christianity because he believed that the gentleman was actually preaching Theosophy and that a connection could be made between Theosophy and the pastor's understanding of Christianity. The answer given by the person concerned was interesting. He refused to come that evening. He was prevented by external circumstances. But he said that he had studied Theosophy and had also tried to read some issues of “Lucifer - Gnosis” and that he could see from them that the purpose of Theosophy is to renew certain old Gnostic ideas. He could not really see anything special in all these efforts, because he preferred to gain a direct relationship with his God and not to be satisfied with a relationship with divinity that was mediated by many intermediate beings. This is a very characteristic answer, which I mention because it is given by so many people today. A great many people say this, and I say this not as a criticism of our contemporaries, but simply as an observation, for the phenomenon is as justified as can be. It arises entirely from our sense of the times. I say that this answer is given frequently today. People think that one is actually doing something that does not quite correspond to today's consciousness and feelings if one assumes, in addition to the sensual world in which we live and the divinity that permeates the world, a whole series of intermediate beings, let us say gods or spiritual entities. For four centuries, humanity has been educated in this view. It is therefore not surprising that such a feeling has become general today, and that people believe that Theosophy has a little too much to do with all the different spirits and spiritual entities, with a whole hierarchy of spiritual entities between people, and of which one can have no consciousness, but only an inkling.

The doctrine of such a large number of spiritual beings is not new, but as old as humanity itself. The time in which one believes one can ignore this feeling of the spiritual is actually short in relation to the great time of development. Where there was an awareness of the real significance and depth of the spiritual world, there was never the widespread opinion that one can disregard spiritual beings and their knowledge. I have often mentioned here that Theosophy as such is nothing particularly new, that it only represents the popularization, the generally understandable proclamation of teachings, which have always been cultivated in the so-called brotherhoods. Only the way in which people came by these teachings was different in the past centuries than it is today. Fifty years ago, one could not have spoken of all the things we are talking about today. At that time, anyone who wanted to know something like that was definitely required to seek admission to a so-called occult school, and no one was introduced to such significant and far-reaching ideas as can be found today in every little manual of Theosophy. You had to acquire the ability to become acquainted with such things slowly and gradually, you had to complete and study degree after degree. Each new degree one acquired first entitled one to take in certain higher views. And the education within such a degree consisted in one getting the feeling that what one received in the ascending development of mankind from the teachers of occult schools was the true, correct and essential. This was not because it was forbidden - no criticism of the occult teacher - but because one gradually became convinced that it would be nonsense to criticize the occult teachers, just as it would be absurd for a child to criticize the multiplication table before he could do so, or for a student of geometry if he was not yet ready to understand it. In the same way, in the past one would never say, “I don't like that, it doesn't suit me,” and so on. One took it for granted because one was prepared for it.

Today we are obliged to introduce a further circle without such preparation and to speak of the elementary teachings of occultism. I have often explained the reasons why spiritual teaching is proclaimed before all people. Do not think that what we are allowed to proclaim of these occult teachings is the whole teaching of occultism. It is the very first. And the times will not come for a long time yet when the deeper teachings can be communicated. But these too will come, when it will also be possible to open up higher spiritual worlds. Today it is only necessary to proclaim and introduce people to as much as the course of time requires of us. Those who are sitting here have, for the most part, been here often, and for this reason assertions and communications can be made here all the time, which appear grotesque and paradoxical to those on the outside, to those who come to a public lecture, fantastic, if not crazy. But the deeper truths, especially those that constitute the very nerve of life, the deepest laws of world knowledge, these teachings appear at first to those who are only captivated by external sensuality and to what is otherwise said to them about the spiritual world as illusory, as paradoxical. For those who penetrate deeper and deeper into today's world, it is precisely what our senses teach us in our ordinary lives and what our minds can convey to us that appears as an illusion. Now, for centuries, humanity has lost the power to truly distinguish between spiritual things, and that, my esteemed audience, is something you consider to be essential in the introduction to today's lecture, that humanity's powers of discernment have somewhat diminished over the last four centuries.

This is why objections can be made as in the letter mentioned. Imagine what such an objection means. It is exactly the same as if you wanted to make someone a suggestion that they should come to a lecture on botany and they wrote back: I have read a little about botany, read that it distinguishes between different plants - orchids, oaks, palms and so on - but it does not interest me further. I don't want to distinguish between individual plants, I want to be content with a general, direct feeling of plant life as such. I know that the world has plants: oaks, lilies, tulips, poplars - these are plants; but it is an exaggerated gnosis for me to first have to distinguish between lilies, firs, tulips, poplars. I am content with the fact that in general there is something spiritual, something divine that permeates the world. What are people talking about with such entities? Such a person is in the same situation as the one who objects to the distinction in botany. Humanity has lost some of this discernment over the centuries. But this discernment must be awakened again today. That is precisely the purpose of the theosophical worldview. For one who knows the spiritual connections, it is really not an easy decision to go before the world and speak of the great connections between the great spiritual beings, because he knows how hard it is to achieve understanding in this time and how man can be misled by such discussions about the spiritual beings. But at the same time, one must look into the course of the spiritual world.

It is little known that the phenomena of the world occur in so-called cycles. Today, in materialistic times, the regular, rhythmic course of even fatal phenomena in the world is overlooked. But he who looks into the hustle and bustle of the great human spiritual life sees something approaching, something that is revealing itself more and more to humanity. What I am about to say is also paradoxical, but it will only be recognized all too clearly in some time, perhaps in the not too distant future. What is in store for humanity, must be in store simply because of the materialism that has been preparing itself for four centuries, that is a certain loss of spiritual life, a confusion in spiritual life, which would most certainly develop into a kind of spiritual disease, into a kind of epidemic, if the teachers of spiritual life did not work to counteract this spiritual epidemic through their teachings. We would be facing that today. It is slowly preparing itself. Those who do not have eyes do not see, and those who do not have ears do not hear, even if they are in psychiatry. But those who can observe spiritually know the danger that man is in. This danger need not come, but it would come if the human spirit is not strengthened again through life, that is, if it does not receive a true center. The purpose of Theosophy is to produce firm, strong character in the depths of the soul, and not to allow any spiritually vacillating nature to arise. He who scurries about with his knowledge, flitting like a will-o'-the-wisp through the outer material phenomena of existence, today inclined to this person and tomorrow to that, is exposed to the great danger of losing his spiritual center. And it does not help if we imbue this scurrying with general ideas of divinity and spirituality. Just as the only ruler and safe in the plant kingdom is he who has learned botany, so only he can be sure of the spiritual beings — which are there after all — who has knowledge of the spiritual world.

In the past, no one ever said anything about higher spiritual entities. Those who were mature enough sought and found it. They came to people who could initiate them by no mere coincidence. It was the great spiritual human magnetism that necessarily draws the student to the teacher. They may seemingly encounter an innocent person, in the waiting room or on the train, where they may have to sit for hours. Then you will enter into conversation with such a person. It seems to be by chance, but in reality it is a necessity for you. You may find in such a person the one who has the most significant influence on you, who may be your occult teacher. So it has come about that this inner psychic magnetism has diminished to such an extent that this power no longer plays. You no longer find it so easy to connect with the actual spiritual teachers.

Therefore, it has become necessary to develop the occult teachings in an elementary way through the spoken word to the larger masses of our contemporaries, so that everyone can say to themselves, there and there is a center; if I want, I can join. Actually, no one should be asked to join any secret science current. How far the individual goes must be his absolutely free decision. One should never act under the sign of occultism, as is the view today. Such agitation brings about what should not be in this field. Those who join without actually being seekers say, “I like this and I don't like that – and this is not the right thing.” Actually, the principle of social union is not the right one, as in Buddhism. It is only a surrogate today because people join together socially for everything. What is right in occultism is the grouping.

Nor is there any sense in joining a society for the purpose of occultism, just as there is no sense in joining in relation to geometry. You can learn geometry from someone who knows geometry, but you cannot discern the truth of geometry in a society. The occult is a small circle within our society. The Theosophical Society is an administrative matter. But the occult life cannot be cultivated in any other way than the one I have tried to explain. Those who have settled into the occult life know that the great security of the inner soul character can only be achieved if one has the power of discernment within the spiritual world.

I had to presuppose this because, with teachings such as we will now develop, we will encounter the same contradictions over and over again.

Now I would like to expand on what we discussed last time. I have already indicated that there are four levels of knowledge. These four steps have always been cultivated wherever there have been occultists. Not arbitrarily, my esteemed audience, through deliberation, through reasoning, through speculation, has humanity gained knowledge of the higher spiritual worlds and their beings, but by forming the spiritual organs through which one can gain experience in these higher worlds.

Now let us briefly bring these stages of higher life before our soul. The ordinary knowledge that is peculiar to all people in the world is called material knowledge. This material knowledge is almost the only thing that people today know. Almost no other form of knowledge is known today than this material knowledge. You seek it in everyday life, whether you are dancing, cooking or doing something else, and you recognize in this way. But even in the anatomical dissecting room, in the laboratory and in all of science, there is nothing but material knowledge. It is the first step of knowledge. It is not the case that the occultist wants to criticize material knowledge. Material knowledge has its full justification in life. It must be said, however, that there are higher levels of knowledge. You have to be aware of this material knowledge in its individual parts.

There are four elements involved in material cognition. Now, please follow me closely. What belongs to ordinary material cognition? Imagine that you are to look at this flower from the point of view of material cognition. Four things are necessary for this material cognition to come about. First, the flower, which is the object. Secondly, the image of the object. If you want to appreciate something like this at all, you have to engage in such subtle things. Thirdly, the concept. This is something different from the image. The concept is attained through inner spiritual work. The image remains as an impression of the object on your soul. But the concept is something else. I will make it even clearer.

Imagine: many people have looked at the starry sky. They either had the image without the concept or the concept and also the image. The astronomer has a concept of the starry sky and the image; the farmer has an image of it, but no concept. You can see here that the concept and the image are different. Let's take the concept of a circle. The circle is a line that extends equally from the center.

The fourth is the I, yourself. If you consider these four things, you have the components of ordinary material knowledge. That by which the image comes about in material cognition is called sensation.

The second level of knowledge, which also exists, differs from the first in that the external object is absent, and with it the sensation. That which gives you the stimulus for the image is gone. All that you recognize in this way, that an object has an effect on you, is precisely not the second level of knowledge. You have to imagine that the whole world is gone. Now, the materialistic person says that there is nothing left at all. But that is what matters, that you still have something. Indeed, the one who does not undergo development has nothing left when he closes his eyes. He has the empty, dark space around him. The second stage of realization is developed through so-called meditation. The external object has gone. What is still present is the image, the concept and the I. These three are still there. The fact that there is no external object, only the image, tempts many to say: this is fantasy.

It can be, and it will always be fantastic if it is not systematically developed. To regard it as fantastic just because one has only an image would be foolishness. If someone could invent the dirigible balloon in a dream and then realize it, it does not matter whether he made the discovery while dreaming or while awake. If you can become convinced that what appears to you in dreams is true, then it is right – and that is what it is about. The object that otherwise causes sensation must be replaced. What occurs is what in occultism is called illumination. And this whole cognition, which again has four parts – namely image, concept, I and illumination – is now called imaginative cognition. This imaginative cognition is trained through meditation. I have often described how this is done. One cannot meditate without the guidance of someone who has experience in this field. Meditation proceeds in such a way that the meditator really loses sight of the objects around him, that he makes himself blind and deaf and then also loses his memory, so that the soul is completely empty of external objects. You have to be able to fire a cannon without paying attention, then you have achieved the stillness of the soul.

Then, through practice, illumination must be stimulated. You can recognize that you have achieved something by noticing that your dreams no longer have a chaotic character. You have to pay attention to the fact that the dream world is calm and steady. In the case of ordinary people, their dream world is usually one in which they have reminiscences or in which they experience the moods of their external lives in their dreams. So when he meditates, the dream world begins to take on a regular character. He then gets to know things he does not know. Dreams speak in symbols first. This must be felt. But that is where people usually go too far. They try to interpret these dream images. But they should not be interpreted intellectually. The legend of digging for treasure also refers to this fact. It says that when you dig a treasure, you must not speak, otherwise it cannot come out. Even if you say something inwardly, that is, quibble, that is already a danger. You can only speak to someone who has precise experience of this matter. But if you quibble, then the intellect begins to act like a scorching, burning fire on the fine spiritual life.

One should experience dreams very intimately, treat them like very delicate things to which one surrenders with intuition, and not interpret things in sharp, rough lines of the mind. One must do this for the reason that the dream images, when they occur with a reality value, then have such a rich and comprehensive reality value that the ordinary powers of the mind are not sufficient to grasp them. They destroy their inner life when they approach the cobweb-like inner structures with the outer mind. This is how this wonderful life begins, how the inner illuminations begin, and soon you become aware that a new world is opening up in them. Through them you get to know something that is quite different from this ordinary, material world around you.

I would like to understand how it is structured in terms of a way of perceiving within the illumination. Take this flower, for example. It is yellow and has green leaves. Let's look at the colors first. These colors are spread over the surface of the object, so to speak. Think about the fact that you usually perceive color as appearing spread over the surface of the body. Try to consider how seldom it happens that you see colors separate from objects. At most, you have this with a rainbow. You can roughly imagine this when you see a sunbeam entering a dusty room. You have a rough sense of a color. Now imagine that the yellow is not attached to the object, but is free like flakes of color floating through space. Now imagine a room like this, filled in all directions with these color flakes and color formations, and you will have something approximating what you will see when you visualize the world of illumination in terms of colors.

Occult students with a softer nature than Westerners do very special exercises. Westerners are much too compact for that. But because of their soft nature, the Orientals have the opportunity to do these exercises. The Oriental yogi sits down and looks at the color of such a flower, turns all his attention to that color, lives in that color so that he is able to withdraw his attention completely from the object and fix it only on the color, then he acquires the ability to hold the color even when the object is gone. Then it becomes possible for him to gradually bring this floating world of color into consciousness.

The same can be said for the world of sound and for other forms of the world. You see: Man conquers a whole new field of perception. This world and these color flakes are always and everywhere there. These color flakes are not irregular, they are not just clouds flying around, but just as objects on the physical earth plane are not just blocks, but also entities, so too do entities reveal themselves in this flaky world of colors. They have no bones and no flesh, they are incarnated in the substance that I have just described.

So these are the bodies of certain entities. The forms of the entities that you can get to know, once you have generated the illumination so that you can perceive them in this space, are mostly the bodies of the spirits of the twilight. So you can perceive them as the outstanding spirits of this sphere: the spirits of the twilight, the lunar or moon Pitris. Such beings people themselves once were on the planet preceding our Earth. They have only attained their present form through their condensation. Those beings who have not attained human condensation, who have remained at that level, stand today in that world as Lunar Pitris, as spirits of the twilight.

Just as one has to become familiar with each realm in turn, ascending from the mineral realm to the plant realm to the animal realm, and one must not lump all three realms together, so too can we now ascend further to the realm of the lunar Pitris, who can manifest themselves in this so-called elemental realm. This is the first elemental realm - actually the third.

We have not been talking in vague terms, but have indicated a path that leads to the perception of a type of being that you will get to know in planetary development. These twilight spirits play a very special role in this. These are the beings that are closest to man in the spiritual world. Next time I will share something about the relationship between man and these spiritual beings. These entities are present around you and influence you continuously.

At the next level of realization, the image also disappears. So only the concept and the ego remain. This state is achieved through concentration. This consists of the person associating certain parts with certain parts of the organism. That which prevents him from blindly fantasizing, from inventing concepts, is something similar to the illumination of the previous level and the sensation of the level before that. So we have sensation, illumination and now, at the third stage, inspiration. Here, the object and the image are absent, and the concept acquires content through the inspiration that occurs. So here you are dealing with the I, the concept and inspiration.

Illumination has something light-like about it, which is why it is also called illumination. Inspiration is completely free of all these pictorial representations. Here the human being floats in the purely spiritual world. That is why it is also said that his ideas take on a content without the need for them to be images first. It is the word 'imageless' that can be used to compare it to. That is why it is also said that at this stage, a person receives the inner word, that is, he is able to find truths through inspiration, in that the spiritual world works into his understanding in such a way that it is not the image that affects him, but that the spirit speaks directly to him. The language of the spiritual world itself flows into his concepts. That is inspiration. It is the conversation with the beings of a spiritual world. The person is quietly closed in on himself, rejects everything visionary, everything pictorial, keeps quiet and still, and the spirits tell him the truth. That is the level of inspiration, the inner word. This level of inspiration makes it possible for a person to not only see objects wherever he goes, but for them to tell him something everywhere, so that he can hear everywhere what is buzzing around in a new space. This level of knowledge is what Goethe means when he speaks the words at the beginning of the prologue in heaven: “The sun resounds in the old way in the brother spheres of value singing.” This is not a phrase, it is reality. He speaks of the spiritual sun that resounds. The whole world becomes a resounding world that teaches us significantly about the inner core of our being. In this world, we then make acquaintance with a higher group of spiritual beings, which we call the sun spirits or also the fire spirits. Just as we got to know the spirits of twilight there, we get to know the spirits of fire here.

So we have: mineral kingdom, plant kingdom, animal kingdom, spirits of twilight, spirits of fire. The realization at this level is a volitional realization, because the power that one must particularly develop is the will. A special training of the will through concentration, through inner willpower and will education. One then makes the acquaintance of the beings that are growth-producing power, power of reproduction and so on. We get to know this in this way. That which exists everywhere of these fire spirits lives in all growing entities. The one who rises to an inspired realization is one who 'hears the grass growing'. The proverbs are often tremendous words of wisdom. At this level, all growth is heard. That which makes the beings grow is the power that lives in the fire beings.

Finally, there is still the [fourth] stage. The concept is still missing. Then there is only the I. There is no more recognition in the concept, there is a recognition without concept, a pure life in the spiritual. You creep into the beings you want to recognize. The coarsest form of recognition is in the material. Think how little you are able to penetrate a flower. You have to stay outside. In imaginative cognition, you have the images around you. In inspired cognition, the sounds from the outside world come to you. But now you enter into the beings. You are every being you recognize. Space and time cease to exist. You are where you recognize the corresponding being. You are no longer different from that being. Your ego has submerged in that being. And that is the realization through intuition – intuitive realization.

These are the four stages of realization. Through this intuitive realization, you get to know not only the outer appearance of the beings, but the beings in their inner being. The I expands to include the whole environment. The person who has attained this higher realization is called the “swan”. Lohengrin is led from a spiritual world into the physical world by a swan. Through this gift, one attains a knowledge that is only accessible to those who have the gift of transformation into these beings. If you want to rise to the level at which intuitive recognition stands, you must present yourself in such a way that intuitive recognition can transform into you. That is why Zeus had to transform himself into a swan so that he could be grasped. The legends all have a great relationship to this world existence.

Through this intuitive knowledge, you rise to the level of entities called the spirits of personality or the spirits of selfishness. Everything that lives in us as a principle, as an essence of selfishness, comes from this spiritual realm, the realm of the spirits of selfishness or personality. The spirits of selfishness have always been at work. First, the physical body is worked on by the spirits of selfishness, then the etheric body, and then the astral body. Therefore, as a kama-manasic being, man is an egoist. What he thinks is what is independent and also what is selfish. What these beings are can only be recognized when one stands at the stage that one can crawl into the being, into the ego of the beings. There you get to know the spirits of the personality.

So you see that it is not just talk when you find something like this in my 'Lucifer' or in Mrs. Besant's books, even if perhaps not under the same names. The spirits are not invented, but gained through the stages of knowledge. Therefore, we distinguish: mineral kingdom, plant kingdom, animal kingdom, human, lunar Pitris or spirits of twilight, fire spirits or solar Pitris, spirits of egoism or spirits of personality - Suras and Asuras. Then the higher realms: spirits of form, spirits of movement and spirits of wisdom. We will talk about these four spiritual levels next time.

But you can already apply what I have said today in practice, namely that if you know something about this nature, even if you do not yet rise to the level of direct experience in this way, you will gain inner strength if you know even just a little. Man would completely lose his center in the coming decades if the knowledge of these things did not come. These entities do not exist in cloud-cuckoo-land, but surround us continually. The person standing in front of me is not just a human being, but interrelated with him is the Lunar-Pitri, the Solar-Pitri, the spirits of selfishness and so on. And they are constantly active in this person. I recognize something incompletely when I only have the outer person in front of me. Just imagine how insecure you would become if you were to go blind. Orientation in the new world is only made possible by new senses. In the same way, knowledge in the world is only made possible by knowing what is there. It makes us feel secure to know that such things exist, that such things are there. It is therefore necessary for humanity to know such things. In the fourth century, higher spiritual beings still led man, unconsciously. That is the higher development. The meaning of the materialistic time is that the spirits have fled to reappear in his consciousness. Man has descended into darkness to consciously ascend to the light again. That would be the greatest harm if man remained down here in darkness and did not find his way back to the light. The theosophical doctrine has not been brought out of mere caprice, but because it is a necessity for humanity. There have always been individuals in secret societies who had the realization. But it must become much more general. That is why the popular way in which these teachings are spread in theosophy.

I would like to briefly sketch again what we started last time, in order to build on it further. You will recall that I tried to explain the various degrees of higher vision to you, and to break them down into the activities that lead us up into the higher realms, into the realms of the higher beings, which we must consider if we really want to go through the entire human history of development through the various planets. I ask you to bear in mind that such a consideration must necessarily remain quite sketchy, that one has to discuss many things that are really quite difficult to express in ordinary everyday terms, because one is dealing with things for which ordinary language is not really created. Ordinary language is there to describe what is real to the senses, what surrounds us. It is therefore quite inadequate for all the things for which we want to evoke an idea today.

In schools in Europe where, for centuries – or more precisely, since the fourteenth century – ideas such as we are now allowed to discuss publicly in elementary terms have been developed in the same way, it was certainly not the case – especially in the higher grades – that the words of ordinary language were spoken, but rather in a so-called symbolic language. First, a certain language was acquired. First one acquired a certain way of expressing oneself, which then offered the possibility of characterizing in that peculiar way that is necessary if one wants to penetrate into such supersensible realms.

Now let me briefly repeat what I hinted at last time. I told you that at first our ordinary, everyday way of looking at things - and that is also the one that our science has - is the so-called material knowledge. This has its object outside of ourselves. It has its object in the sense world, and it then builds up knowledge with the help of the image, then goes from the image to the concept and from the concept to the I. So in our material knowledge we are dealing with: object, image, concept and I. These four things are to be considered.

When we now have to move on to the first stage of higher knowledge, the object must remain away, the external sensual object must fall away. So of what we have within our ordinary knowledge, only image, concept, I remain. The fact that external objects no longer stimulate us, that external objects no longer affect our sensuality, that the sensation is no longer there, is replaced by illumination, which forms images from within for our ordinary images, so that they are not visions, not illusions, but become what mystics of all times have called imaginations. If one wants to form a correct concept of what is meant here by imagination, then one must already be able to see, to see correctly, everything that still demands a connection to an external object. I think I mentioned last time that this often causes great disappointment to students who are to be trained in this kind of knowledge. Man expects that when a higher knowledge is to present itself, which appears to be the case in ordinary life, that it will approach him from the outside. That was also the mistake with spiritualism. I do not want to say anything against spiritualism. The mistake lay only in the method. The mistake is that the spiritualist has the things in front of him like an earthly object that stimulates his senses. That is why it is basically not a good preparation for a higher desire for knowledge if one goes through spiritualism, although I know very well that many of our best Theosophists have gone through spiritualism. But in the times before the Theosophical Society popularized these higher insights in their elementary stages, there were no schools. They did not build on the spiritualist method at all. They set out directly to reeducate people so that they would be able to truly rise into the supersensible world without external inducement. The spiritist tries to bring the supersensible world down to his ordinary capacity for perception. He says to himself: I can recognize that external objects stimulate me; if the higher world is to have reality, then the essence of a higher world must appear to me in the same way as ordinary things. They have to adapt to my capacity for perception. But the occultist says: No, the objects and beings of a higher world do not descend here, not where one sees with the eyes and reaches with the hands, but one must ascend to them, one must develop within oneself the organs necessary to see in the higher world. Therefore, for today's humanity, a much better training than any external event to come to the higher vision is the passage - as strange as it may seem to those who expect something different - the passage through the arts. What man should make use of, if he does not go directly through the school of clairvoyance, in order to come again to a deeper vision, to an imagination, that is the deepening in what art can give him, and that is art in all fields. We must be clear about the role that art has played for a long time in the development of our humanity. Through such things, many things also become clear to us that would otherwise be extremely difficult to understand.

Follow the advice for the purpose of getting a vivid idea of what I have to say. Follow me into what are called the Greek mysteries, the Greek mysteries, in the time before Homer wrote his poems. Those times when this Greek spirit and seer performed long primal dramas that the best minds sought. But because they were not able to look back clairvoyantly, did not find any positive science in it, what they achieved appears more like a hunch than real knowledge. But if we go back to these earlier times, into which Nietzsche, for example, wanted to look when he conceptually grasped the Dionysian in contrast to the Apollonian, if we go back to these times, we see how teachers led their students to hidden cultural sites and prepared them to see the primal drama there. What did they see there? They saw the secret of the existence and development of the world. What we endeavor to explain in many words, these pupils experienced in astral vision, in real vision: the descending deity that descended into the material, that has descended into the material before time began. And then the transformation of this original formation of matter into the forms that surround us today — into minerals, plants and animals. It was shown how the invisible, supersensible Deity was once creative in the universe, and how it formed and condensed those fruits from which our creation proceeded, how, as it were, the physical emerged from the spiritual as from cloud formations, and how the initial formations gradually developed into the complicated and ultimately into the microcosmic human being. The entire process of the evolution of the world was presented to the student. This was called “the great world tragedy.” First, the great living divinity that descended into matter, was buried in it, and then resurrected in man. And now it was made clear to the student: this process takes place within yourself, it has taken place within you and continues to take place within you. You were already involved in those formations that took place before time began. In those formations you were in the beginning of becoming, and they changed and changed until your present form was reached. Today you feel how that which lives in you as soul, as spirit, rises up again, how that which has sunk into matter, the divinity, rises again as if from a grave, from which the divinity rises, and that when you then say 'I', the divinity speaks within you. All this was explained in complete vividness. And in this way, things were united that have long since been lost to today's humanity. This was possible by placing these students in a completely different state of consciousness than the one in which people find themselves in everyday life, so that they were surrounded by the living images of the whole process of world-becoming. It is therefore a matter of the students, so to speak, feeling the consciousness shining within them, making the objects of everyday life visible to them. The external objects passed around them, but what they were trying to show them appeared in them in much more vivid colors than the objects of nature would ever be able to present themselves. The fire of the deity stood before their soul. And the fire that metamorphosed so that everything else emerged from it, that was there in a way similar to how the dreamer has a superficial knowledge of the dream.

If you translate this dream into something that has regularity and harmony and largely as what surrounds us in the outside world, then you have a weak idea of what was going on in the soul of such a student of the primal drama. It was said of such a student that he had seen the world in the twilight. The world event, this whole world becoming, then sounded into these images. The visible arts are an imprint of such imagination, of such images around us. They relate to this imagination, to this vision, as a silhouette relates to the real object. They are thus related to clairvoyant imagination, while our material vision has no relation to clairvoyant imagination.

The artistic imagination is a shadow of the true imagination. This is not to say that I consider artistic imagination to be of lesser value than clairvoyance. Back in the days when people could still awaken their clairvoyant abilities, when they could see into ancient times, there was no art. What was experienced was religion and art and science at the same time. Everything that led people to the higher worlds was offered in it. Later these three separated. Mankind had to go through this state. And since that time, art has been an external shadow image. External art is an internal imaginative vision. It is part of the process of development that humanity has lost this original vision for a while. What was awakened as a result is another state of consciousness. And in a later present, this introduces art in a tangible, visible form. That is why artistic vision is so beneficial for imaginative vision. That is the first stage: illumination.

The second stage was the one where the image also disappears, where we are only dealing with concepts and the ego, and where inspiration occurs [in place of the image]. Inspiration is there for the person when the so-called continuity of consciousness occurs. Continuity of consciousness means: the person not only has consciousness during everyday life, but also continues this consciousness into sleep. As you know, one partial brightening of sleep is the dream consciousness. The ordinary person has this dream consciousness only in a chaotic way. In the one who develops to clairvoyance, to illumination, the dream images begin to become regular, lawful. He sees truths in dreams that he would not see without developing this dream life into regularity. In such undeveloped people, there is always the dreamless sleep as a state of consciousness. So there are clairvoyant individuals who have developed to the point where they have filled part of their sleep with regular dreams that reveal new worlds. This is the beginning of this stage of illuminative clairvoyance, of imagination. Then you also see how other people, in whom they do not have this, live in their dreams.

Now the person who guides such a person must bring them to the point where they, the student, can bring their dream visions into everyday reality; that is, that they can perceive in everyday life what they perceive in their dream vision. Let's be clear about this. The ordinary dreamer: what do they see? He has experienced something during the day. This appears to him in his dream as a reminiscence. It is an echo of the experiences of the day. Or, he perceives his surroundings in some way. He hears a train rushing by. He wakes up and realizes that he has symbolically perceived the ticking clock next to him as a train. Or the moods in which a person finds himself can also be expressed symbolically in a dream. For example: a person becomes feverish and dreams of a boiling stove. I am telling you facts here that really happened once. I ask you to bear in mind that I am only giving examples of events that really happened. Now let's assume that a person dreams of ugly animals. The chaotic then ceases under the guidance of the secret teacher, and the student perceives things that do not come from everyday life. Things are revealed to him that he does not know from our world. Only when the student is able to transfer this into everyday life, then we make what he experiences the subject of occult wisdom.

So how do we regularize what I have characterized as chaotic? We start at the very beginning. You dream, for example, under the guidance of the teacher. The exercises are done as meditations, and they have the effect that you actually see a person suffering in your dreams. The person is in front of you in a certain situation. You are very soon convinced that you were not dreaming, nor that it is not real, but you convince yourself that you were with a friend who is suffering or has suffered. You have not seen anything sensual, but you have experienced the soul, the real soul life. You then experience not only one such individual soul life, but soon soul life in abundance. You have to familiarize yourself with the diversity of stories. You have to learn to grasp them in an orderly fashion. This is a long and patient task, but we have to do it. Then we dream this into our everyday life.

You will then be able to see the same thing in everyday life with a fully alert consciousness. You will not see what is sensual, but what is spiritual. You must imagine that you will be surrounded by the soul. When you, as a clairvoyant, are confronted with a person, you will at first see nothing differently than any other person sees. But when you turn your attention to his soul, he becomes spiritually transparent to you. But the right dream state must have preceded this. Then the other will follow, because there are very definite stages.

The next stage is where consciousness no longer fades, or at least does not need to fade, where you are therefore aware during dreamless sleep, where you are able to wake up in the morning knowing that you have had experiences, have really lived, throughout the night. This experience of dreamless sleep is not in such images. It cannot be compared with the world of images that are around us in dream-filled sleep. What occurs first in dreamless sleep is a world of sounds and speech, a world of tones and words. Dreamless sleep is first filled with words. You see, in the first stages of this clairvoyant development, you experience this quite sporadically and individually. You simply know in the morning that something has been said to me. You remember what was said to you. You know quite well that something like this could not be said to you in your present life, in ordinary life. It is perhaps a great truth that you could not experience in ordinary life. This calling and hearing was something spiritual. This is spread more and more until finally the whole life of dreamless sleep is a continuous conversation with other entities.

However, a prerequisite for not indulging in illusions in this world is that one has already attained a certain higher degree of inner selflessness. Someone who criticizes a lot, who likes to say a lot of derogatory things about the world and its phenomena, may very often be exposed to the most terrible, deceptive ideas at this stage of development. Therefore, the teacher will, above all, impress upon the students again and again. He will tell the student: Try, over and over again, to ask only questions and to let the answers be given to you from this state. This is quite different from what one actually does in ordinary life. In life, one is quickly finished with an answer. Try to look at life from this point of view. Today, everyone says, “I think so,” or “That is my opinion.” That is what people say today. But the occultist who wants to rise to this level should never speak that way. But when he has prepared himself, he should be able to speak differently within. He should ask questions of the world and learn to refrain entirely from giving an answer himself. This is a mood that Goethe, who knew it, describes in simple words. He says: We are not made to answer the problem, but to pose the problem, to pose it quite clearly, and then to await the further development in reverence. Creating this mood is extremely important for the student at this stage of development. Therefore, it is very useful at this level if he has the self-control and selflessness to set himself a very important task and to refrain from forming any opinion. After all, what he can say is usually only what corresponds to his ordinary level of intelligence. He already has this point of view. But he wants to go beyond this, and so he should completely refrain from answering and wait to be given the answer. In this state of dreamless sleep, it will be whispered to him. From this state, an ever deeper and deeper world arises, which is a world of conversation.

I would like to draw attention to a passage of this kind, to the profound saying of one of our exquisite minds, Goethe. Those who have read or heard Goethe's fairy tales will remember a passage that goes:

“What is more glorious than gold?” asked the king. “Light,” replied the snake.

“What is more refreshing than light?” asked the king. “Conversation,” replied the snake.

At this point, Goethe points out that he knew everything we have discussed here. This conversation, which is about light, is what he is referring to. Then one brings what one has experienced in this way in a dreamless state into everyday life. Some will be tempted to believe that the clairvoyant no longer sleeps without dreams at all, but sees all the time. That is not necessarily so. It does not depend on how much of the night is filled with such experiences. There can be long periods of dreamless sleep in between.

It is true – I think I have already hinted at it: anyone who can experience something in dreamless sleep in this way hears all the objects around him. He hears the glass of water, he hears every little thing that whispers something to him. This is the third stage of knowing, inspiration.

In this way, the scriptures that are called inspired were created. Today, theologians and scholars dispute the method of inspiration in the writings of initiates. Imagine what has been written about whether or not the gospel is inspired – by teachers who have no idea that there is such a thing as revelation. Inspired writings are for those who one day will be made to disappear as painlessly as possible. The greatest parts of the three synoptic gospels and the gospel of John were written in a state of clairvoyance. They are inspired. We are not dealing with a miracle, not with a dictation from a god, but with this state. Therefore, only those who know something about how truths come in such states can understand them.

The next stage is intuition. It expresses itself clearly to you through feeling: you are now inside things, no longer outside them. You now crawl into every thing. This is the state of intuition. The ordinary person only has the state of intuition with his ego. When a person is developed enough, he is inside every thing.

The human being perceives the spirits of twilight at the first level, at the level of imagination. At the level of inspiration, the human being perceives the spirits of fire or of fire nebula. At the level of intuition, he perceives the spirits of personality, the spirits that lie hidden everywhere as the basis of the world-Iche. When he has reached that point, he can truly immerse himself in the depths.

But there is also a raising above this state. This consists in the fact that man no longer merely perceives, but that he participates with humanity. This is even something where understanding itself easily ends with those who still go along to the level of intuition. They will no longer go along so easily from there. It is only through comparison that one can get closer to what I am saying now.

It is also a passive state in intuition. The person submerges, but in a certain respect remains passive. They only begin to become inwardly active when they rise higher inwardly. They now participate in the world. The state that I am now describing can only be reached if one has already reached the state of intuition. When someone has reached the point where they can completely immerse themselves in the object, where they feel that it is themselves, and where they feel as if they have entered the body of a dog or a tulip, so that they not only hear it but also feel what it is inside themselves, then they can move on to something else. He can first rise to the animal kingdom. When he does this, he initially has the task of selflessly observing the animal world around him, and he has to focus his attention on the different animal species. Then, while he has been in individual animals through intuition, a stage will now arise for him where he steps out of the individual animal again, but remains within the animal being itself. Let us say, for example, he has been observing a dog. Through intuition, he is able to completely immerse himself in the dog, to experience all its sensations, and to empathize with all the pleasure and pain that it feels.

Now there is a higher level. Here the person goes beyond things without losing all of this. But the special existence is lost in the process. He rises above the individual being, but in the animal nature he remains in it. He loses interest in the individual being, the special characteristics of this individual being disappear. As he gradually rises above it, but the essence of this being remains present, forms appear in his mind that he has not seen before. He first grasps the ego of the individual being and then takes this ego out of the being like an extract. It takes shape and forms itself, and now he gets what Plato called “ideas”. These are Plato's ideas. You no longer have a single dog, but you have a spiritual, living form before you. This gives you more than the individual being. You have the model for all these beings. You have what is called the soul of the species, and not as an abstract concept, but as a living reality. You are surrounded by the souls of the animal species. You now live with these as you previously lived with the merely sensual animals. Space is not empty around you. But the beings you see there do not look like the beings that walk around us. They are completely new beings, and they do not fit the individual being, the individual dog, but they do fit all of the same species. It is something much more abstract and much more alive than the physical. What you see there are the spirits of form. They belong to a higher spiritual world. One of these form spirits was Jehovah. He was the form spirit that constituted the generic soul of humanity. The generic archetype of humanity was the god Jehovah. It is at this level of the spiritual world that one can reach him, that one can rise to that which in the Jewish mystery teaching is called Jehovah, to the spirit of the human form.

Another spirit had to join this spirit of the human form if a new, different one was to develop. This spirit of the human form had only made man such that he was like the soul of the species. Individual life would not have emerged. Individual life emerged when man struggled to recognize good and evil. This is powerfully and impressively depicted in the Fall of Man. Jehovah did not want to go further than the form. Until then, he guided man. In connection with other entities, man then took over his guidance through the Jehovah principle. So you see him sinking with man's arrogance over the animal world into what is called the world of forms.

When man has reached the point where he begins to sense this entity, then he can rise to the next level. This consists in the fact that he now learns to recognize in these beings that which he has learned to see and recognize at a lower level, in the natural beings, when he goes beyond the form to the life. The first thing you perceive, and why I have to call it that, is that you first see this generic soul in the form. But you have to rise to a higher level of insight if you want to see this world of forms in motion, in action. You cannot do that by merely immersing yourself in the animal world. This gift will only be granted to you when you immerse yourself in the plant world with devotion and do the same with it as I have described with the animal world. When you immerse yourself in the plant world with intuition, but do not lose the essence of the plant, so that the essence of the plant remains and you know how to merge with the whole nature of the plant, when you succeed in experiencing the suffering and rejoicing of the great natural world through the plant world.

When these things are spoken of to a modern man – and the more scientific he is, the more – he laughs at you. But it is nevertheless true that in the plant world, joy and suffering can be perceived by those who can live with the plant world, not as a mere comparison, not as a symbol, but in such a way that they know how to perceive the expression of the inner feeling, just as a person perceives a feeling when a tear comes out of the eye. There is therefore a real level of perception where the dew beading on a plant announces real life to you, a life like that in a tear welling up from an eye. When you are able to see in the sap flowing out of the tree when you cut it, a manifestation of life in nature, just as you cut yourself and know that it then hurts, then you are where you can ascend into the world of activity, into the world of movement. Then you can perceive that the beings, which you previously only saw in form, are alive inside. That's when the beings start to talk. The generic souls say something to you.

The next stage is reached when a person is able to feel the same way about the mineral kingdom as I said for plants, about inanimate nature. Kant said: two things fill him with a sense of awe, the starry sky above him and the moral law within him. But that remains abstract as long as the abstract sky fills us with awe, so that it is still enough for us that the inanimate starry sky speaks to us. But the materialistic view already shows us that the dead crystal is not just dead and mute, but that it also speaks to us the secrets of nature. These secrets can be reached by lovingly immersing ourselves in nature.

Anyone who has done what I have described, who has suffered and rejoiced with the plant world, will also find it easy to understand the dull language of inanimate nature – although there is also a gulf there. It is relatively easier to understand the language of plants than the language of stones. Even at these higher levels, it remains true that we understand best that which is akin to us. We are akin to human feeling, human pain and human joy. Even though the joy and pain that appear in the plant world are very different from human joy and

human pain, they still have something faintly related about them that we do not recognize in the mute world of stone. But the new thing that we recognize in the mute world of stone is precisely what would elevate us so highly [above] what makes us so weak. The mute stone world has no more desires. The world of desire is silent there, it ceases, before we pass from the plant world to the stone world. The plant and animal worlds end here. The plants still have something analogous to desire, which increases in animals and is strongly evident in humans. This is what makes them unchaste, while the stone is chaste. Those who understand stone come to know beings that are chaste and desireless. One comes to know a life without desire or longing in the stone kingdom. When we can feel and perceive something similar in the stone kingdom, as I have described in the plant world, we come to recognize what it means to be a being that is chaste by nature. The chaste, mute world of stone, of which we no longer say that, as with the dewdrop, as with the dripping pitch of the tree, it expresses joy and pain, but must say that it, in discreet, completely restrained silence, faithfully preserves itself within itself and does not, if I may express myself trivially, flaunt what it experiences internally. That is the tremendous thing that we recognize in the interior of the stone world. The stone world reached perfection so many years ago. In truth, the stone world is the greatest. What we see today as rock crystal once went through its time of unchastity when we look back billions of years. The greatest wisdom of nature appears to us when we examine it in the soundless world of the stars, the stones and crystals.

The stage of form leads us to the spirit of form. The second stage, which starts from the plant world, leads us to the spirits of movement and activity, and the same stage of observation leads us to the spirits of wisdom. We do not reach them until we bring to life within ourselves the mute, chaste, self-contained entity, the living entity of the stone kingdom.

If you would like a brief description of what happens in a person, the following may be said. The person must first let the outer light around him disappear; he must first stand before inanimate nature and disregard everything that his senses tell him. Then there is darkness at first. When he now rises to the contemplation that I have described, then all beings shine from within. An inner light shines through and radiates through all these beings and radiates from them. And this is the light of wisdom. These are the stages of contemplation that lead us up to what I have described as the spirits of wisdom.

Now, as you know, at the very beginning of Saturn's development there are the spirits of will. If you want to learn to recognize these, you do not have to turn to animals, plants and minerals in general. Rather, to grasp the spirits of will, you must have something very special. No matter how fantastic you may consider what I am about to say, I hope that will not be the case. If you want to rise even higher - after you have more or less mastered the other levels - you have to approach something - it seems paradoxical - such as an anthill, in which not only animals of the same species are united, but also live in wise connection, and delve into the spirited interaction of these little creatures. The rational scientist does not do that. But the clairvoyant lives with the males and females and workers, all organized in their own way, and they interact in a wonderful way, so that he is inwardly identical with them.

This is the method for getting to know the will. Schopenhauer wrote a lot about the will. But he could have written this chapter if, as a clairvoyant, he had stuck his head into an anthill. There you learn to recognize what the will is by its very nature. There you learn to recognize what it means when you yourself pronounce the word 'I will'. This word lives deep within your own nature. Many things in your own nature come together there. But you only perceive the result. The natural scientist gives you a completely different view. What I am describing to you is taken from life. If, on the other hand, you choose a beehive instead of an anthill, you are doing something completely wrong. What lives in the beehive is quite different from what lives in the anthill.

We have spoken of the spirits of will, of wisdom, of form, of motion, of personality, of fire, of twilight, then of humans, animals, plants and minerals. These entities are not plucked out of thin air, they are not inventions, they are not speculations that are presented to you in elementary occultism, which passes itself off as theosophy, but they are things that are acquired through experience.

I could only make suggestions as to how something like this comes about, what is referred to as elementary theosophy or elementary occultism. In this way, one acquires the higher abilities that grant insight into the higher worlds.

This, you see, is something of what must be revived in the future. There is really a lot around us today that can cause concern, and I believe that what can really worry someone who is enthusiastic about real human progress is also the fact that many do not keep their eyes open. Man should be a pioneer in keeping his eyes open. What matters is not that individuals call themselves Theosophists, but that we find the means and ways in the great development of humanity to give a new foundation to what would otherwise really have to collapse.

Let me conclude the reflections of the old year with this reference, which I have made before. Much destruction is being wrought around us, much that might indicate to the attentive observer, even if he is not clairvoyant, that we are at the beginning of a great work of destruction in terms of external material things, which has developed over the past century, for material development only goes so far.

Supplement from notes of unknown authorship

But what is most worrying is that so many of our fellow human beings do not keep their eyes open for what is needed by humanity. The theosophist, however, should be a pioneer in this work of keeping their eyes open. It is not important that individuals sit down and develop, but to work together in the great development of humanity, to find ways and means to give new content to what would otherwise really have to collapse. Much destruction is being wrought around us today. Much that will alert the attentive observer to the fact that we are at the beginning of a work of destruction, of the material culture of the nineteenth century; for this has not been accompanied by a corresponding spiritual development. We are capable of wireless telegraphy; now imagine this ability of man developed just a little further, so that here in Berlin you could take a cab and drive through Friedrichstrasse with a wave generator, in order to destroy the entire Louvre in Paris by means of the corresponding wave excitations. No one would be able to prove the assassin in such a case. All our legal concepts will be completely powerless in a time that can easily be imagined; a time will come when purely material culture will, by and large, lead itself ad absurdum, where it has a destructive and devastating effect.

Only by the inner soul culture now moving up, so that people no longer depend on the external, and although the worst is done, but only the right thing happens, only by this can help. The path of development of today's humanity shows the first beginnings already. Only the path of inner, spiritual development can lead out again, and Theosophy is a necessary new beginning of a cultural direction, to which, so to speak, the necessary inner morality can be found to counteract the overwhelming external culture, which can only lead out, because man has the soul, the spirit, in addition to the material. That is why the renewed spiritual movements of today are so necessary, so that the forces that would otherwise wither away can be practised and cultivated again.

Our thoughts, feelings and desires move in two directions and lead us to two ideas of what is constantly around us, the transitory, and what man longs for, the eternal, about which he hopes for enlightenment, which he seeks to unravel because it appears to him as the riddle of life.

The truth that man seeks has been the same at all times; but people are not always the same; and so, at all times, depending on the development of humanity, the answers to the questions about truth have been given differently. The school of thought that wants to give us the answer to the question about the eternal in a way that is appropriate today is called the theosophical one. It has come to fruition in the last four decades.

What people usually understand by knowledge is connected with place and time; and the one who accepts this is the perishable human being. But the deeper core of human nature does not recognize through the senses. It recognizes that which has validity everywhere and at all times. Religions want to give people knowledge of that which is not bound to place and time. And the purpose of religion is to establish the connection between the human and the eternal. Theosophy is the realization of this inner man, of his essential core. Theosophy is not the realization of something other than what is around us, but only of another part of it. Suppose a blind man had been happily operated on in this room. The same objects are still there as before, but now with completely different revelations for him. In a similar way, through Theosophy, man learns about the same things as before – about people, plants, animals and minerals – but he learns different characteristics about them. Just as the operation is there to make the same object visible to the eye of the blind, so Theosophy is there to point out a different aspect of things, to show him new spiritual and psychological characteristics of things. They appear to him in other, more intimate relationships to people and to the whole of the rest of the world. In this way, the human being is uplifted, and the objects take on a new meaning for him. Theosophy is a knowledge of the immortal part in man. What the immortal essence of man is, what the essence of the God-man is, we can gauge from the words of Goethe:

If the eye were not sun-like,
How could the sun behold it.
If the power of God did not lie in us,
How could we be enraptured by the Divine.

The eye must meet the sunbeam; likewise, the inner strength of the soul must meet the flowing strength of the Godhead. The mystics have expressed this in their own way; for example, Angelus Silesius, with the words:

If Christ is born a thousand times in Bethlehem and not in you, you will still remain eternally lost.

The realization through the eternal core of our being is a different kind of knowledge than that gained through our senses and mind. We therefore distinguish different kinds of human nature, depending on whether the human being is eternal or perishable. Usually, man is perceived as a very unified being. You can see the human being with your eyes, he is perceptible to your senses like a mineral. But even if the anatomist cuts up the corpse, he only experiences what he can see with his eyes and touch with his hands. The human being he observes is no different from inanimate nature on the outside. Physical and chemical processes also take place in his body. This human being is the same as the minerals; somewhat more complicated, but the same as the rest of the physical world in itself.

But this is not the whole of man, but only the very first part of man. Thus there is a difference between the other physical bodies and the human body. If we copy a human being and cut off the hand of this imitation, it remains a hand; if we cut it off the real human being, it withers; my hand only has the possibility of existing with me. Without me, it is no longer a hand. A doctor will object: “That's quite natural, because there is no blood circulating in it anymore.” But the question is: Why does my hand need blood and the other doesn't?

And so we come to the second link of the human being; the whole body is a living thing, unlike the crystal. Such beings, from which a piece is taken and yet remains the same, are called “living beings”. We humans also have this life body, which holds the individual parts together; and we call this life body the ether body. For the theosophist, it is just as real as the physical body. And just as we have the physical body in common with all minerals, we have the etheric body in common with all plants. Man is a plant; he grows and reproduces, for these qualities are dependent on the etheric body.

Even more essential than this is the third link. In the same space as the physical body and the etheric body, there is a sum of pleasure and pain - a sum of instincts and drives, thoughts and perceptions that can be cut through just as easily as the physical and etheric bodies. For centuries, this third body has been called the astral body. We have it in common with all animals. Man is thus a being that unites all three kingdoms of nature - minerals, plants, animals - within himself. Goethe recognized this, and Schiller documented it with the most beautiful words in his first letter to Goethe:

For a long time now, although from a considerable distance, I have observed the course of your mind and noted the path you have mapped out with ever-renewed admiration. You seek what is necessary in nature, but you seek it in the most difficult way, from which every weaker force will guard itself. You take all of nature together to get light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations, you seek the explanatory ground for the individual. [Letter of August 23, 1794]

A naturalist from the beginning of the nineteenth century, Lorenz Oken, calls the human being an extract harmonized from all the properties of the animal kingdom. Paracelsus, the great physician of the Middle Ages, says: What is spread out in individual letters is united in the human being; one must spell out the whole of nature, then one can put oneself together like a human being.

Thus we have minerals, plants, animals in the physical body, etheric body and astral body in man according to his threefold nature.

Subtle natures recognize a fourth; so Jean Paul, who says of himself: As a young boy, I once stood in front of a barn. Then suddenly a completely new thought came to me: You are a self, and it felt like I had looked into the past of my being.

When we name things, we find that each thing has its own special name, as a table, chair, bench, a name with which everyone can identify the subject. Only humans have a name that they can pronounce only for themselves; can give themselves. The deep spirits of religion always develop this feeling. That is why the Jews called the unpronounceable name of God, Yahweh, I. I cannot grasp my I from the outside, only from the deepest inside. In my inner being, God announces himself in my soul. This I holds everything else together, and the work of the I on the other three bodies is world development. The I dominates all animal nature within itself and ennobles it.

When Darwin once came to an area where man-eaters lived, he told them that it was not good to eat people. He was told in reply how he could know that. Since he had never tasted human flesh, he could not judge whether it was good or bad. By “good” and “bad”, the savage understood only the pleasant and unpleasant. The knowledge that eating people is improper has developed through the work of the I on the astral body. In the beginning, the desires are raw, but the I refines them by plowing through the astral body - the body of desires - in such a way that it is made into the creature of its own I. I then no longer follow my instincts, but what my I - my duties - prescribe to me. We call such an astral body, which is completely transformed, the fifth link Manas. Today's man has partially reached this stage. When he has worked through the entire astral body, he becomes ripe to also work through his etheric body. If he succeeds in doing this, he has reached the sixth stage, Budhi, and can finally work on the physical body from the Budhi plan. When he has mastered the physical body, his whole being - Atma - is awakened in him.

Thus we have the human being in its sevenfold nature: four lower limbs and finally three higher ones, which the human being develops himself. The astral body is also partly the result of the work of the ego.

What happens when a person dies? Here we have the physical body before us. Death and sleep have been compared; but sleep is something else, a state in which a person is temporarily not at all what he actually is. What makes the sleeping person different from the ordinary one? The physical and chemical processes - digestion and the other life processes - take place just as they do when we are awake; pleasure and pain are forgotten. If we prick the sleeping person, they do not feel it until they wake up. In the sleeping person, the physical and etheric bodies - or life body - are in front of you. The astral body, the body of desire, is not present, otherwise the sleeper would also feel pleasure and suffering. The I with the astral body is gone. Sleep is therefore a release of the astral body - the body of desire. Sleep is initially interrupted by dreams. But dreams are not like waking experiences. We distinguish three types of dreams:

First: memories of everyday life, reminiscences. Second: perceptions from the environment, but in a special way. We may see the lamp, but not how it is placed. The ticking of a clock next to our bed may sound like the clatter of horses in the dream - expressed symbolically. Secondly, the dream is a creator of symbols. For example, a farmer's wife dreams that she is walking from the village to town, entering the church to listen to the sermon. The pastor in the pulpit raises his hands. His hands transform into wings. Suddenly, instead of speaking, he begins to crow, just as the rooster outside has crowed. This is the figurative way in which dreams work and create. The astral body is the great symbolizer, it transforms the crowing of the cock into a symbolic image.

Thirdly, the nature of dreams is characterized by remnants of the experiences of the astral body when it is released from the physical body and dwells in another world - the astral world. Dreams can be developed, instead of being chaotic, they can be induced with great regularity.

Death: When a person dies, something else happens; not only does the astral body detach itself, but it also takes the ether body with it. The sleeping person is alive, but the dead person is no longer alive because he has lost the ether body - the life body. After some time, the ether body is given to the rest of the ether world. Then only the astral body with the ego remains. It consists of two parts: what has not been worked through and what the person has already worked into it. Everything that is lent from the outside must be given up after death; and the animalistic is given up in the Kamaloka period - astral world. In this world the task is set to cast off the cover, which one has not cultivated; then one still possesses what one has purely worked out of one's ego.

Kamaloka is followed by Devachan, the place where all that is divine lives, namely the ego and what it has deified of its astral body. There the human being becomes mature to return to this earth again, and what he needs here, he must take on in the new life. He ennobles his astral body more and more in the new life. He can only do this if he gets a new ether body. This re-taking of the lower limbs leads to reincarnation. What a person has worked into his astral body is eternal; what he must discard is transitory, namely, what he has not yet plowed through. When he has worked through his entire astral body, he must also - at a higher level - work through his etheric body. We call such a person a chela.

The Wisdom Teaching differentiates between the mere cultural man and the chela. In ancient Greece, there were schools where not only the great culture was taught, but also chelas - initiates - were formed. One required of such a person that he had undergone a catharsis - purification, cleansing. Only then are the Budhi and the Christ awakened. The difference between the civilized man and the chela is as follows in death: When a chela dies, his etheric body no longer dissolves in the world ether, but as much of it remains as the I has worked into it. The chela will find his etheric body again afterwards to occupy it upon re-embodiment; while the civilized man gets a new one.

What religions prescribe, for example, has an effect on the etheric body: true piety. Letting inner wisdom take effect preserves the etheric body. Books that offer inner wisdom include: [“The Book of Divine Consolation”]; sentences from “The Imitation of Christ”; in the “New Testament”, the Gospel of John contains awakening sentences from the thirteenth chapter onwards that awaken the inner being, eternal power within man. In “Light on the Path” – written by Mabel Collins – every sentence is awakening. The following four sentences are particularly strengthening etheric power:

Before the eye can see, it must wean itself from tears.
Before the ear can hear, its sensitivity must fade.
Before the voice can speak before the masters, it must unlearn woundedness.
And before the soul can stand before them, the blood of its heart must moisten its feet.

Another means is the seeking of worldly truths. Knowledge and wisdom have an effect on the astral body. - Delving into the works of beauty - Raphael's Madonnas. Allowing beauty to flow into oneself has an effect on the astral body. The chela transforms this work into a conscious one. When the chela has worked through his etheric body, he then has to work on getting his physical body under his control.

By working on my astral body, I become a nobler person - wiser and better - and as such I can urge others to ennoble themselves. This is an effect from person to person; the good and wise person will exert a more beneficial influence than the opposite. The etheric body has its ability not only in the physical world, but also in the world of thought. Through imagination, through thoughts, one can influence others. I can send the thoughts of my soul to others. Speaking and admonishing are working in the physical world. Likewise, effects can be practiced in the supersensible world to the extent that the etheric body is worked through and dormant forces are awakened. By pursuing the thoughts into the tool, one makes the forces of the physical body supermundane. This ideal is Atma - or as the Christian says: communion with the Father.

Those who work on themselves in this way reach into the eternal. The stone disintegrates and is absorbed by the earth; the plant also gives its physical body to the earth and its etheric body to the cosmic ether. Like the mineral, man gives his physical body to physical matter, and like the plant, he gives his etheric body to the cosmic ether.

The astral body gradually dissolves in the Kamaloka, but not what has been worked through. Something remains. Man makes himself immortal through what he has worked into his body; he creates a core of his being.

The physical body is broader than the astral body; it does not have such a part that is bad. Take, for example, a thigh bone. It is not a compact mass, but - when viewed under a microscope - a wonderful framework that no engineer could construct. No beam is stronger than it needs to be. No architect could build something like this - it is constructed out in the cosmos. The human heart, with all its fibers, the entire physical body, is such a product of divine order.

The astral body is constantly attacking the physical body. The heart is good. Now the astral body – the body of desire – comes along with wine, tea and other stimulants and disturbs its normal beat. It takes a long time for the astral body to become as wise as the physical body. But then it can work on its etheric body. When the etheric body is also wise, the physical body is worked on; in the future it will strengthen the physical body. But who is working in the physical body today? The Godhead; it is working on the limbs of human nature, on which man does not yet work himself. Let us go back to the example of the cut-off hand. The hand can only exist on the body; removed from it, it withers. Likewise, if I were to be lifted just a few miles above the earth, I would wither away like the severed hand. From this it follows that as a physical human being I am bound to the place where I am placed. Just as I cannot consider the hand by itself, I cannot consider the human being without the earth. Man is not a body in itself, but a part of the whole earth organism. He can only exist with the properties that the earth offers. For example, he could not exist at a temperature of two hundred degrees Celsius. Just as our organism is enlivened by the soul, so is the whole earth organism enlivened by the earth soul.

The 'spirit of the earth' in Goethe's 'Faust' is not a phrase, but truth. Those who awaken the etheric body within themselves can associate with higher spirits, like Goethe, to whom the earth spirit reveals itself:

In the floods of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
Waving to and fro!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life
Thus I create at the whirling loom of time
And work the living garment of divinity.

The physical body is a link in the planetary organism. The etheric body is a link in the planetary ether. In the etheric spirit lives the spirit, which is called Budhi or, in Christian terms, 'son'; in the physical body lives the 'father spirit'. Through the astral body, through the etheric body and the physical body we come to God. The 'spirit' is astral, which, when it is well purified, we call the 'Holy Spirit'. In the etheric body we have union with the Son. In the physical body we find the Father-Spirit, the Spirit of planetary life.

All religions are based on such truths. Theosophy wants to awaken these truths. The theosophical worldview wants to give the seeking souls points of reference. Man has arisen from the eternal. If he can do nothing about brain molecules, he can do a lot about his thoughts; and we conquer the lower natures by bringing them closer to the divine.

Man must develop various abilities in the succession of the ages. In ancient India, that to which only the chela can look back is enclosed in the poetry of the “Veda”. In European regions, similar to the Veda, sacred knowledge was laid down by the Druids - holy men, great teachers. The “Edda” is the same as Veda.

In Buddha, the same wisdom teachings appear in a different way. Buddha becomes Wotan in the Germanic: 'Boda' becomes 'Wota', 'Wota' becomes 'Wotan'. Thus we have the same key to German mythology. In the Hebrew secret doctrine we have the 'I' - the 'Jao' - 'Jehovah'. In Christianity, the Christ.

Eternity is taught by the Spirits of Wisdom.

Later there came a time when the physical world was conquered [...]. This conquest of the physical world has caused the spiritual world to recede. This is why Theosophy is now stepping in to replace the rampant materialism with something spiritual. In the past, the various religions taught according to the needs of the individual peoples. Today, materialism has enveloped the entire globe; therefore, the spiritual must also embrace the whole world. Mankind on earth must become a spiritual whole. This is the goal of Theosophy. Just as people understand each other everywhere in the material world, just as a check passes through the whole globe as a common currency, truth and wisdom should become common currencies everywhere. That people everywhere learn to understand each other and exchange their thoughts as a cheque is exchanged for money, that is our goal – and that is why the call for brotherhood among people is the first that the Theosophical Society makes. The last few centuries have conquered temporal goods. Culture has added layers to the earth's crust that bear witness to its evolutionary process. Only in the uppermost layers do we find human remains. Millions of years further on, and everything we are working on now will also form a layer around the globe and provide a uniform cultural history. Theosophy works for the future, in which not only the material, but also the eternal, the immortal, will embrace the whole universe. That is why it places such great value on the core of brotherhood.

In the same way that people understand each other in material terms, they will also understand each other in spiritual terms in the future, when they awaken the eternal, because the eternal is revealed in the soul. Through the eternal that is within us, the eternal is first revealed – and from the transient to the eternal, that is the path prescribed for us by theosophy.

I must first explain something that is important for understanding evolution and re-embodiment. Every personality, every individuality must live out its life in the devachan, in the arupa sphere, in order to maintain the unified thread. A personality as exalted as Nicholas of Cusa descends even in ordinary life from the arupa sphere. Every person acts from the arupa sphere, but only a few know about it. The higher a person has risen in the arupa sphere in the time between two lives on earth, the more the divine breaks through in him.

Cusanus wrote a work about not-knowing out of higher knowledge: De docta ignorantia. “Ignorantia” means “not-knowing”, and not-knowing here is equivalent to higher beholding. In his books he also expressed the following: There is a kernel of truth in all religions; we need only look deeply enough into them. He also stated that the Earth revolves around the Sun. He stated this as an intuition.

Copernicus did not live until the sixteenth century, Cusanus already in the fifteenth century. Such an incarnation as that of Cusanus is to be considered in context. It is possible that the recollection of previous incarnations is lost in an incarnation, only to awaken later, perhaps after one or even after many incarnations. The means of the causal body can only be used when one awakens in the plane above the causal sphere. Every being must be drawn back down to the physical sphere by a force from the devachan, and by forces that he has not yet encountered. In the highest Arupa level, the person gets to know these forces and thus gains influence over his later incarnation. He also had his life in his hands to a certain extent.

Cusanus points to both theosophy and modern science. Cusanus also had influence on his following incarnation. It was Nicholas Cusanus who experienced re-embodiment in such a way that he reappeared as Copernicus.

An incarnation does not depend solely on one's own development, but also on the usefulness and significance for the whole evolution. An example of regular development. The succession of personalities of higher individualities is no longer irregular. There is no regular development in the less developed. In highly developed individualities, however, outstanding qualities will emerge. These include

firstly, a sincere looking up to the Higher,
secondly, a calm love for God,
thirdly, becoming in God.

As a regular development of an individuality, we can consider

firstly: a contemporary of Jesus, Philo;
secondly: Spinoza;
thirdly: Fichte.

Three personalities – one individuality. If you read Fichte without knowing about these processes, you will understand very little. But with this knowledge, you will find that the words of these personalities are written in fire. These great minds have undergone a regular evolution themselves.

In oriental esotericism, there is something that is difficult to understand: the being does not need to be exhausted in its determinations. A personality can work on one level without lowering its whole being into that level. The being does not need to coincide with the upadhis. The desire to help is the thread of strength that establishes the connection with the sphere in question.

An initiate is one who is able to communicate from self to self with other individualities. The fourth step on the path of knowledge is initiation. One cannot speak about the nature of the initiate.

To understand Western spiritual culture, we need to note a few things. The starting point of our reflection today is the event that Tauler experienced in the Middle Ages. He preached passionately as a Christian. One day, a personality came to him who apparently wanted to listen to him. But he soon turned out to be greater than Tauler. He said that this sermon is only conceptual, it is only intellectual knowledge, a matter of memory. But through practice, Tauler soon brought him to the point where he preached differently, that he spoke through the Spirit. This layman walked with the Master Jesus of Nazareth.

Christianity originated from a circle that came from oriental sources. The Knights Templar had a home where Solomon's Temple used to stand. This is only an external accessory. One can distinguish between an exoteric side, an esoteric side and a secret doctrine. The aim of the Knights Templar was to give Christian life a completely new direction. The cults were hidden in a completely secret service. They differed significantly from what was then the Christian cult of the West. They were based on an oath that had been taken by a Christian patriarch. It was a current that can even be seen as anti-Christian. The worship of the divinity of Christ was to be done away with. It is an emphasis of the faith of the Knights Templar in John the Baptist. It was a revival of what had existed in Christianity within the Gnostic school.

In what way was the Templars a new influence in Christianity, a revival of the old teachings? Jesus accompanied the cultural development to the present day. - “I remain with you until the end of the world.”

One could learn as little about the true nature of Christianity through study as one can today. The most diverse studies on Christianity have been made. One is amazed at this. Just take Pfleiderer, for example. But this cannot give satisfaction to anyone who stands on the ground of Christianity. Historical facts cannot help us. It is about an eye-to-eye vision with Jesus, about an immediate vital influence. There must be a small circle that knows the truth not only through the knowledge of the letter, but through direct life. The Knights Templar said to themselves: We can only be initiated into the secrets by the chela who has been left to us.

No one can skip any of these stages. There are four stages. “I baptize you with water, but one is coming who will baptize with fire and the Holy Spirit.” The baptism with water is associated with the personality of John the Baptist.

A large part of Goethe's initiatory knowledge can be traced back to Rosicrucianism. Not only the outer part of it, but the stream of mystical facts has existed. With Swedenborg, there is a danger of being easily taken for a charlatan. But before he came to his mysticism, he was at the height of the science of his time. The Academy of Sciences collected the learned writings of Swedenborg. This current also had a great influence on Goethe. Swedenborg was influenced by a current of Atlantic culture. This influence can only be a very peculiar one, and one can see how difficult these mystical things are for those who try to understand them. The influence of this Atlantic school of thought can be as follows.

The Atlanteans inhabited a country that stretched between Africa, Europe and America. It perished many thousands of years before our era. Plato still speaks of a last remnant, of the island of Poseidonis, which is said to have perished about ten thousand years before our era. For the mystical researcher, the fact of the Atlanteans' existence is certain. This fourth race had particularly developed one spiritual power, which has taken a back seat in our society in favor of another power. Their memory was their main strength. It is less important for us to know what they looked like on the outside. Our fifth race has developed the intellect. The Atlanteans did not calculate and think like us. Our calculating and thinking is a product of the fifth human race. Another power of mind will replace the intellect in the future. The Atlanteans never formed the judgment 2 x 2 = 4. There was no such judgment at that time. Man remembered that 2 x 2 = 4 was taken earlier. He also knew general sentences, but he could not summarize certain types of animals. The general judgments were only formed in the fifth race.

This shows how one faculty can be overshadowed by another. The strong sense of smell in certain animals is later overshadowed by the intellect of humans. This Atlantean culture has been preserved in today's spiritual development. Certain influences flow into our cultural life. Examples of this are Leadbeater and Swedenborg. However, this influence is always somewhat chaotic. Since the eighteenth century, there has been a very intense influence of this Atlantic Lodge within our Western development. Many are under this influence without knowing it. The influence goes to the subconscious. This can always be influenced by certain currents. This can be observed in somnambulists. Many people who advocate something today do not know that they are under this influence.

What did the Knights Templar bring to Western thought? They broke away from Christianity. Then astrology comes to them. Within the Knights Templar we have a complete system of astrology. They now turn their gaze up to the starry world, to the great connections of the universe, away from Jesus. Thomas Aquinas predicted Copernicus [in the thirteenth century], as did Cardinal Nicolaus Cusanus [in the fifteenth century].

Two things can be seen:
1. A great plan has been designed, under the influence of which we stand in the Theosophical Society.
2. Religions have a common core of truth.

This is expressed in the second program of the Theosophical Society. One also finds the teaching that the earth revolves around the sun in Cusanus and later in Copernicus. The last point has emerged in a long series of developments. Western culture had emerged from the same source from which Gnostic knowledge had originally emerged.

A comparison: I have a child to educate until adolescence. I don't want him to absorb knowledge too soon that makes the mind strong but does not sufficiently ennoble the heart. Certain truths are left untouched. When the heart has been purified and ennobled in the right way, then one approaches it with the truths of nature. It is the same in the greater world of nature. First comes the development of the emotional side and then that of the intellectual powers. The development of literature is subject to the same influences.

We have a mystical direction and a scientific direction. The first includes the well-known great mystics, the second the naturalists such as: Lamarck, Darwin, Copernicus and so on. These two currents still run side by side today. The union has not yet been found.

Reincarnation and karma are contained in the Bible as self-evident truths. The higher soul of man was the content of all wisdom religions. The mysteries had to cultivate this higher soul above all else. This higher soul should now recede, so that the lower soul can experience development. This too should receive a higher religious culture. This ennobling of the individual personality was achieved all the more surely the more one disregarded the development of the higher soul. It is necessary to give humanity a new impetus from this theosophical side.

The materialistic attitude has gained a great influence, and has also gained a deep influence on the moral life. This can be seen from statements such as the following: Hamlet's tragedy is nothing more than a product of the transformation of what Shakespeare ate. - In the long run, there is no morality in the materialistic view. Hence the necessity for the Theosophical movement. In the past, world views were still possible on a materialistic basis. Today, after the research of natural science, no longer.

As long as Christianity was only concerned with the sanctification of the personality, it was not necessary to consider the greater truths and the higher life of the soul. There is a great connection with what I have said about the mysteries. You will see on closer examination that Christianity wanted to make the mysteries popular. This is evident from many sayings: “Blessed are they that have believed without seeing,” “Blessed are they that have begged for the Spirit,” and so on. What was in the mysteries was to be handed down to humanity piece by piece.

The mystery process was carried out in different stages:

— The first stage was the purification of the personality, the purification of the astral body. Pythagoras also subjected his disciples to a preparatory and purification process.
— Then he taught them about the nature of the external world.
— Then he gave them the teaching about re-embodiment and karma, the law of the moral world order.

This process then also became external, historical; it became a mystical fact within the historical development itself:

— Up to the twelfth century, Christianity is the process of purification of the fifth race of mankind.
— Then comes the teaching about the nature of external nature. In the case of humanity, this takes centuries.
— Then comes the teaching about reincarnation and karma. The development of the individual is repeated in the development of humanity.

The repetition of the mystery process can be found in the theosophical current.