The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If we use a word for the predecessor of our Earth, we say: the predecessor of our Earth is called “Moon”, “Luna”. When one says “moon”, one must be aware that something quite different is meant than our present moon and also than those planets that astronomy can discover at all. For these planets are all seen through the organs that man has in his present state of consciousness. Now man sees all those bodies that have entered the mineral kingdom and have become visible.

When the occultist speaks of the mineral kingdom, he is not only speaking of stones, but of a very specific way of understanding that the human consciousness has today. The materialist claims that there is no such thing as life force, but that it is only a combination of molecules and so on. The occultist distinguishes a machine in which its parts are moved in a simple way from the organism that is animated in a complicated way. But man is now so organized that he can only perceive the mineral, the inanimate, which is why it is said in occultism today: “Man himself lives in the mineral kingdom.”

When you study the ear, you find that it is a complicated physical apparatus. Inside it is a keyboard, the organ of Corti. Certain vibrations excite a certain fiber in the organ of Corti, like the string on a piano.

The sum of all these complicated physical devices is the physical human body. When you now have a person in front of you, you do not just have the physical body in front of you, you also have the feelings of the person in front of you, only you do not see these feelings, but they change the physical body. You are never just dealing with the physical body, but, and this must be kept in mind, it is only in the physical body that consciousness has awakened. And this must be stated explicitly: consciousness must still awaken in the other bodies. Consciousness is only now being realized on the physical plane.

The second step is that consciousness will also be realized in the plant kingdom. And then it follows that it will be realized in the animal kingdom. Now man has only brought it to a mineral recognition of the world. But then he will also have brought it to a life-filled, plant-like recognition of the world, and then to an animal-like [recognition]. In the end, we will then bring it to human recognition.

Now man recognizes only the mineral kingdom. He cannot yet recognize instincts, desire and suffering in the animal, nor the growth force in the plant. Let us imagine the following: Imagine everything material in the plant is gone; then you could no longer perceive it, that is, you only recognize it in mineral terms. In the future, however, man will see through the essence of plants. But this seeing through is simultaneously linked with what these plants can create with. Now man can only build things out of mechanical-mineral forces; he works on the mineral structure of the earth. It is the “temple of the world” that man is now building out of the mineral substance.

Let us now do the following together: we will imagine a distant point in the past when no human hand had yet touched the earth, when the earth emerged from the hands of the gods, that is, before anything was made by man. This is the period when man had not yet touched any of the forces of the mineral kingdom.

Of course, back then everything was quite different than it is today. If we look now, so much on earth is shaped by human hands, by human forces. And now, after we have sufficiently imagined this [distant point in the past], let us imagine a certain final state of the earth. Think of it this way: everything that has been handed over to man has now been thoroughly worked through by him. In the beginning, the devas gave the things a form, but in the end, everything will be transformed by the hands of man. If we think this through, then the creative mineral power of the hands of the devas gradually shifts more and more into the hands of man. In the old tradition, there were three aspects to this transformation. These aspects were called: wisdom, beauty and virtue. The temple that will be built on earth by human beings will be built out of wisdom, beauty and virtue. When this temple built by human beings is erected, younger beings will look up to what human beings have created, just as we now look up to the mineral world created by the devas.

So let us always remember: the buildings and the machines are not built in vain. What we today dig out of the earth as a crystal, the devas once built in the same way that we now build a cathedral. If we go back to the past, we see how, in the distant past, the whole mineral kingdom emerged from a chaotic mass.

So it will also be in the distant future; there remains of today's cathedral, even of today's state, a seed state that will sprout again later. We must hold on to this, because in this way we have the transition through one form of life into the transformation. What we will perceive later is the transformation of the mineral kingdom. This transformation of the mineral kingdom is a skill that is now being gradually developed. In later stages of development, human beings also learn to transform the plant kingdom, which is a higher level of skill.

In the future, in a certain way, just as he builds churches today, man will be able to shape and build in the plant kingdom. These are aspects, perspectives that lead us into a real human future.

Man will have developed even further in an even more distant future, when he will not only shape growing but also conscious beings, that is, when he will also shape in the animal kingdom.

And when, in the end, man will be able to bring himself into being, then he will consciously carry out on a higher level what he only carries out today in the most sensual, in the mineral kingdom.

The seed from which man will become creative, without sensuality, is the word we speak today. Man began his present state of consciousness with his first breath. Man's state of consciousness will be complete when he can communicate the same substance that he gives to thought today through sound. Now he can only communicate his thoughts to the air, the innermost being of the soul. But when he has ascended to the consciousness of images, then he can already communicate the image to the air. In this later stage of development, the word will be present imagination. By incorporating these images into the word, he will then create the word imbued with the image. If we can incorporate not only the [thought content] of an object, such as a clock, but if we can incorporate imagination into a word, then the image will come to life. What we create today as a clock will be a plant. And if man then learns to incorporate the highest, he will permeate the image with life itself, with animal life. The development will continue and finally man will reproduce himself at an even higher level. At the end of earthly formation, the whole air will be permeated by the power of the words themselves. Thus man must grow until he is able to fully express himself in his environment. The initiate today already anticipates this state.

Of course, even in year one, the Earth cannot yet produce the human bodies that it will be capable of producing at the end of evolution. At the end of Earth evolution, the bodies are ready to express what is called the Logos. The missionary who had already expressed this in a body as we see it today was the Christ Jesus. What the final goal of our human-earthly development spiritually represents was presented by the spirit in the Christ Jesus at the beginning of our post-Christian development.

We ask: How was the human spirit, which lives in us today through breathing, there before? The earth is the reincarnation of a previous planet. This previous earth incarnation was “Luna”, the “moon”. The peculiar thing about the moon's existence is that at that time our present mineral kingdom did not yet exist. The moon itself, as it was then, did not consist of mineral rocks, hardened minerals. It was like a large living mass of plants, its whole being still between the mineral and plant kingdoms. We have to imagine that this plant sphere was like the wood of the trees in its densest parts. The rocks of the moon were also like that. What one walked on was not mineral soil. It could be compared to a peat bog, with a bit of coal at the bottom. Creatures grew out of this moon globe that were half animal and half plant, and a third kingdom existed that stood between the present-day animal and human kingdoms. These creatures that were there on the moon were precisely those that had such an awareness as dream consciousness. The matter of which these beings consisted can be imagined by visualizing the structure of today's nerve mass, the structure of the brain and also that of the crabs. Through the condensation of this matter, what is enclosed in humans today has been created: the brain, the spinal cord, the nerves. Everything that could live on the moon lived freely [with its environment], gelatinous. But on Earth, this had to be protected by a shell. The highest beings from the moon that came to Earth surrounded themselves with a bony armor: crabs, turtles, beetles, etc. In the case of humans, too, this [gelatinous] substance was surrounded by a bony armor. All of this was extracted from the macrocosm by the bony armor. When that was sufficiently prepared, the higher consciousness entered, and the descent of the Manasaputras took place.

Even higher beings can be characterized by me in the following way: that man was fertilized with his ego, that comes from the fact that he was able to breathe in the air around him. What did the beings on the moon breathe? The further we go back in the development of the earth, the higher and higher the temperature becomes. In Atlantis everything was still filled with fog, in Lemuria everything is still filled with hot, fiery vapors. So it is, as we go further back, always warmer and warmer.

Warmth appears as that to which we are increasingly being led back. When air changes into its earlier state, we call it “warmth” or “fire”; this is what dissolves air so that it is no longer air. Therefore, we distinguish between the solid or the earth, the liquid or the water, the warmth or the fire as we go back. Man today on earth breathes air, the gaseous. The Lemurian people were the beings who breathed fire, that is why we call those beings 'fire spirits'. Just as we have to call people today 'air spirits'. That is why it is also said in occult writings that people were first taught by fire spirits.

When man became human on earth, the air could become his life. Life on earth will consist of the fact that it will increasingly take place that man undergoes a descending development, that he exhales carbonic acid. The plant world balances this out again today. But it is certain, with regard to today's bodies, which necessarily have to absorb oxygen, that the carbonic acid will increase to such an extent that man will perish as a physical being. It is part of the process of development that the physical is destroyed by its own forces. When this state is reached, the earth will become 'astral'. There will be an eclipse, a pralaya, before the physical earth becomes astral. Before our Earth became physical, a similar process took place: the moon's atmosphere contained nitrogen, as we do [carbon], which played the same role on the moon as [carbon] does on Earth today. The predominance of nitrogen then marked the beginning of the pralaya, the eclipse of the moon at that time.

What remained is what reminds us of the last processes on the moon; on Earth, these are the nitrogen compounds, the cyanic compounds. That is why these compounds are so destructive on Earth. They are remnants and therefore dangerous because they were the norm only on the moon. One of the most severe poisons is cyan, the combination of carbon with nitrogen. On the moon, this meant approximately the same as what the combination of carbon with oxygen means on Earth today. Everything that was there in one epoch must be utilized in a subsequent epoch. The physical body of man was formed by the animal-men of the moon, the spirit of man from the fire-spirits that lived on the moon. That is why man is a twofold being. What was incarnated in the fire on the moon is incarnated in the air on earth.

Where is the means of embodiment for the spirit that was once fiery matter? In the past, there was no warm blood. We can ask ourselves: what created the blood and thus the life of the passions? This was created by the same fire-air that the beings on the moon breathed; this fire-air of the moon is today in the blood of warm-blooded beings. The human spirit of today, the air spirit, has clothed itself with a sensual body. That which came over from the moon in those early days is today the brain, spinal cord, etc. But the organ that has absorbed the fire will be transformed in the future into a [cognitive organ].

This can only show us how deeply we have to delve into the transformation of matter in order to understand such a metamorphosis at all, as it occurred during the transition from the Earth's predecessor, the Moon, to the Earth itself. If we go further back, we would recognize that the being that was embodied in light was physicality. And if we go back even further, we would recognize that the being was embodied in clay, and was therefore physicality. But the human spirit was still completely unconscious. Man once emerged from clay. Then he progressed through the embodiment of light. It is only at this fourth stage that man becomes conscious. At first, the direction of the clay is given to him, then the word, the logos. Thus, his innermost being speaks out of himself and becomes his new creator. His original nature comes into existence in the “I”. The conscious appearance of the “I” is the Christ principle.

If a being lives only in sound, it is in the first elemental realm; if it lives in light, it is in the second elemental realm. If it lives in fire, it is in the third elemental realm, and if it lives in air, it is in the mineral realm.

If we were to ascend to the first elemental formation, we would enter a realm of flowing clay. Then, as we descended, we would come to a realm permeated with flowing light images; and then to a realm with flowing light images permeated with fire; then we would come to a realm where forms are formed, the present mineral kingdom.

Our time is characterized by reform. Reform movements and reform efforts are everywhere. Dissatisfied with the existing, the traditional and unsatisfied with the experiences they have made, people are seeking to shape and develop something new and to seek their salvation in something different. And that is how it should be; because everything in the universe, the big picture, all cultures, the individual human being, everything is in the process of becoming, of developing, there is no standstill.

How great and powerful the ideas of the individual reformers often are, but how distorted and taken to extremes they are by the masses. Let us take one of our most outstanding reform movements. There is a movement that has not yet been noticed in any cultural epoch, [which seems very strange to some:] it is the “women's movement”.

The urge to take part in the great tasks of culture and social life drives women to struggle for recognition and equality with men. The times also force women to do so. They no longer want to rule in a smaller circle, tied to unsatisfactory circumstances or standing alone in the world, without a supportive job, without a life's work. No, she wants to work in the cultural life, standing on her own two feet, with the same rights as men. The wonderful ideal of a housewife, which Schiller so beautifully shows us in his “Glocke”: “And within reigns the chaste housewife,” is no longer an ideal for the vast majority of our female world.

But how misunderstood and extreme this urge for independence and freedom is. Because women have not yet grasped that it is not only self-confidence in professional life that makes women free and independent, or that arbitrary action falls within the sphere of freedom, but that above all we must become independent and free within ourselves, that only the thorough working through of our entire psychological life, the ennoblement and purification of our character, makes women independent and free beings. Then external circumstances may be as they may, they will have little influence. The attainment of inner independence gives a woman the right to external freedom and independence; and only then can she become a man's equal, but not his rival. Only spiritual science can show us the way to this true inner independence; all other striving for freedom leads nowhere.

Let us turn to another area, that of naturopathy. It has been found that many of today's illnesses can be traced back to our current cultural life. The struggle for existence hardly allows people to rest, much less to recover. It is believed that because our ancestors lived so completely in nature, in the fresh air, unencumbered by clothing, [and with a simple diet], this was the decisive factor for their health. And because medical science can no longer find the right solution in some cases, people believe that a “back to nature”, a life with nature, would be the healthiest thing. They take earth, water, air and warmth and apply them wherever they can, in all conceivable cases.

But they do not consider that man is an individual being who no longer has a relationship with all elements. For some, sunbathing is not at all appropriate, while for others, water cures can be extremely harmful. If, from a secret scientific point of view, people are to become healthy, then an individual approach will have to be taken. Each person will receive the cure that is beneficial to their innermost nature, their temperament, their entire character, their spiritual makeup.

However, the human being is always in the closest connection with the eternal laws and only according to these can a complete healing of the same, a complete harmony of the human being with his physical and psychological organism be established. There is no “back to nature” for the human being in the sense that he believes he sees the highest in nature, but only a “through nature to the spirit”.

Vegetarianism usually goes hand in hand with natural healing methods. It is believed that animal food contains something that is not beneficial to health, and it is believed that it would be more beneficial for humans to enjoy plant-based food. This view goes so far as to consider that even milk, and the cheese and similar products made from it, are not suitable for nutrition. Everywhere, people are turning to plant products to get the right variety and a complete substitute for meat. This way of life is indeed very beneficial, but whether everyone can do it for a long time is another question. Because a vegetarian diet without spiritual pursuit inevitably leads to illness. It is said that [vegetarianism was known in Greece centuries before Christ, and] that the great sage of antiquity, Pythagoras, was the founder of vegetarianism. But this begs the question: Who was Pythagoras and why did he live as a vegetarian? And this brings us to the realm of secret schools, the mysteries.

From time immemorial, secret schools have existed all over the world, whose members endeavored to penetrate into the hidden being of the world, to see behind the veil of the ephemeral, through strict self-discipline, diligent study, and meditation. In Greece, it was especially Pythagoras, one of the great initiates, who worked in this sense. He had gathered students around him, whom he introduced to the mysteries through rigorous trials. At the same time, he also issued strict dietary regulations. Intoxicating drinks were completely frowned upon. Likewise, the consumption of meat and legumes was strictly forbidden. Even in later times, all secret schools gave instructions for the students' way of life. For the student should learn to choose food according to the principles of spiritual knowledge. He must know that in what he takes in as nourishment lies the power of certain entities. And if man wants to become the ruler of his organism, he must consciously choose his food.

When one first understands which entities are attracted by this or that food, one also recognizes the importance of nutrition. In the past, even in the great religious communities, for example in Judaism and Catholicism, the effects of food were known. Non-compliance with the regulations was punished with expulsion from the community.

In Brahmanism, too, the time between Christmas and Easter was dedicated to Vishnu. Those who called themselves his servants celebrated this time by abstaining from all legumes, oil, meat, salt and intoxicating drinks, for example. In those days, there still existed a living sense of the connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm, and every adult member of the community was required to make himself more receptive to certain spiritual forces at very specific times, so that he might celebrate a rebirth and resurrection with all of nature. These were the times before Christmas and before Easter.

Now let us consider what nourishment actually is. Almost no other area attracts as much interest as nutrition; because the demands that today's world places on the individual's ability to perform, necessitate good [and strong] nutrition. We see that we need nourishment to sustain our body. Through nourishment we supply our body with building and sustaining forces. From an external scientific point of view, food is a supply of energy. But esoteric science says: the trinity manifests itself in all of nature. Every thing consists of form, life and consciousness.

Everything in nature is animated and spiritualized. We take our nourishment from the animal and plant kingdoms. The animal has its physical body, its etheric body and its astral body in the physical world; the group ego of animals is on the astral plane. When the animal is dead, the effect of the animal nature is not yet eliminated, because the principle of the animal continues to work after the animal's death.

The same applies to plants. The plant has its physical and etheric body on the physical plane, its astral body in the astral world, and the plant's I is in Devachan. The principle at work in the plant will also be effective after the preparation of the plant. But the nutritional effect extends not only to the physical and life body, but also to the other parts of the human being.

And now let us speak about nutrition in connection with our spiritual striving. Meditation and concentration exercises will be the main thing, [but how the striving person nourishes himself will not be as unimportant] when the work on the astral body begins.

Above all, it is important to avoid alcohol in any form; even alcohol-filled sweets can be very harmful. Alcohol and spiritual exercises lead to the worst paths! From a scientific point of view, the bad influence on brain function has already been proven; how much more should a person who directs all his striving towards the spiritual abstain from a pleasure that completely excludes the recognition of the spiritual.

The consumption of meat and fish is not advisable. In meat, man enjoys all the animal passion, and in fish, he enjoys the entire world Kama [...] with.

Mushrooms are extremely harmful. They contain inhibiting lunar energy, and everything that originated on the moon signifies rigidity. Legumes are also not very advisable because of their high nitrogen content. Nitrogen pollutes the ether body.

Let us single out some of the coarsest lower qualities and relate them to the various nutrients. If a person is very independent and tends to be very selfish, they should eat little concentrated sugar; because sugar promotes independence. On the other hand, if someone has no inner or outer support and always believes they need to lean on and be supported, they should eat plenty of sugar to become more independent. If someone is very much dominated by [anger], they should eat a lot of spices, especially salt and pepper, in their food. If someone is very inclined towards laziness and indolence, they should especially avoid nitrogenous food and choose fruit and vegetables as their food.

If someone wants to tackle the difficult problem of mastering the sexual passion – the passion that, when acted out in a base manner, degrades man below the animal, but when transformed brings him closest to his divinity – he should consume as little protein-rich food as possible. Excessive consumption of proteins causes the reproductive substances to become overabundant, and this makes it very difficult to control one's sexual passion.

If someone tends towards envy, resentment and deceit, cucumbers, gourds and all the tendril plants are not beneficial for them. You also have to be a little careful when enjoying fruit. People who are very prone to emotional enthusiasm should not enjoy melons. The sweet, intoxicating scent [of this fruit] obscures clear consciousness. Even very abundant apple consumption is not beneficial for everyone. In certain people, it increases the desire for power and often leads to rudeness and brutality. Cherries and strawberries are not digestible for everyone because of their high iron content. Bananas, dates and figs are more beneficial.

You can also make a certain selection when it comes to nuts. If someone wants to undergo a course of intellectual training, then above all they need a well-built, healthy brain. Rarely do parents in this day and age give their children such a well-built brain, and so it needs a supplement to strengthen the brain, and it is above all the hazelnut that provides the substance to build the brain. All other types of nuts are less valuable. Peanuts should be avoided altogether.

As for fats, we should give preference to butter made from milk. Hazelnut butter would also be advisable.

Now we come to the luxury foods: coffee and tea. Drinking coffee aids logical thinking. But drinking coffee alone will not make us logical thinkers, for there is more to it than that. In people who do not have a thinking mind, as is often the case with women, drinking too much coffee can lead to hysteria. Drinking tea produces good ideas. But one can also get good ideas through special exercises.

During the time of spiritual striving, it is especially necessary for a person to live in moderation! “Temperance purifies the feelings, awakens the ability, cheers the mind and strengthens the memory. Through temperance, the soul is almost freed from its earthly burden and thus enjoys a higher freedom,” says an old sage.

If a person were to eat a lot and often, they would not be able to produce any fruitful thoughts. This is because if digestion takes up a lot of energy, there is no strength left for thinking. Precisely those people who filled the world with the products of their minds lived on a very meager diet. Schiller, Shakespeare and many other poets, to whom we owe magnificent works, worked their way through severe privation. The mind is never as clear as after a long fast. Also in the history of religious orders and in the biographies of the saints, one finds numerous examples of the effects of an abstemious life. The greatest saints lived only on fruits, bread and water, and no miracle-working saint would be known to have shown divine powers in action at an opulent meal. Also, all the great sages of antiquity were known for their temperance.

When the human being goes further in his spiritual striving, when the laws of truth and good flow more and more into the I, when the rays of the great spiritual sun flood and illuminate the I more and more, then the conscious working through of the life or etheric body begins.

The eternal essence of man, that which goes from embodiment to embodiment, lives itself out in each new embodiment in such a way that it causes a certain interaction of the four limbs (physical, etheric, astral body and I) of human nature, and from the way these [four] limbs interact, the temperament of the human being arises. Depending on which of these elements is particularly prominent, a person will approach us with this or that temperament. Whether the forces of one or the other prevail and predominate over the others, the peculiar coloring of human nature depends on this, which we call the peculiar coloring of temperament. There are four main temperaments: the choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, and melancholic temperaments. These are mixed in the most diverse ways in the individual human being, so that one can only speak of the fact that this or that predominates in a person. When a person works on himself, he brings harmony, order, and balance to these temperaments. Although spiritual exercises will be the main thing in working with the temperaments, how a person nourishes himself will also be important.

If the physical principle predominates in a person, this often becomes a kind of obstacle in development. But man must be master of his physical body if he wants to use it. Man is not able to use his instrument completely, so that the other principles experience an obstruction and disharmony arises between the physical body and the other limbs.

When the melancholic person works on himself, he should only eat food that grows very close to the sun. Food that grows far away from the earth, that has ripened under the full power of the sun, would be fruit food. Just as the spiritual sun glows and illuminates a person through spiritual exercises, so too should the solidifying and congealing tendencies in the melancholic be permeated and interwoven in the physical through the solar forces contained in fruit nutrition.

In the phlegmatic person, where the etheric body predominates, which keeps the individual functions in balance, where the inner life, which is limited in itself, generates inner comfort, and the person lives in this inner comfort preferentially, so that he feels so good when everything is in order in his organism, and is not at all inclined to turn his inner interest outward or even to develop a strong will: such a person should eat food that does not grow under the earth. Especially not foods that often take two years to flourish before they come to the surface; for example, a phlegmatic person should not eat black salsify. The seed of this plant takes so long to open up to external forces, and a phlegmatic person also needs a lot of work before they take an active interest in the outside world. The principle of this plant would only increase their inner complacency.

For sanguine persons, where the astral body predominates, where a person takes an interest in an object but soon lets it go, where a quick arousal and a rapid transition to another object is evident, even root vegetables should be chosen as food. One could almost say that a sanguine person must even be tied to the physical through food, otherwise his ease of movement could take him too far. So here, vegetables that thrive underground are even recommended.

When the ego is predominant, when the ego works with its powers in a particular way, and dominates the other elements of human nature, then the choleric temperament arises. The choleric person must above all beware of heating and exciting foods. Anything that is irritating and strongly spiced is extremely harmful to him.

One would assume that with higher development, temperament no longer plays a major role and that diet no longer has any influence. At the mastery level, this is indeed the case, because the master needs no solid food, nor will temperament influence or control him anymore. But he will use the temperaments to be effective in the physical world. He will use the choleric temperament to perform his magical acts; he will let the events and occurrences of the physical world pass by like a sanguine; he will behave like a phlegmatic in the enjoyment of life; and he will brood over his spiritual insights like a melancholic. But it will be a little while before we get there!

We should try to harmonize our whole life with our spiritual aspirations. Not just a small part of the day should be lived according to our ideals, but we should organize our occupations accordingly, choose our tasks with this in mind, and even regulate our nutrition in this way, striving to become a harmonious and established person, in order to then be able to engage in life to the best of our abilities. Life gives us nothing, everything must be achieved.

Goethe's beautiful saying belongs here:

“A serious will,
A persistent striving,
Is the only thing that leads you to your goal.
The purpose is no mere accident,
And life gives back only
What you gave to it.”

There is a beautiful saying of Hegel's: The deepest thought is connected with the figure of Christ, the historical and external one. And the great thing about the Christian religion is that it is there for every level of education. It can grasp the most naive consciousness and at the same time it is an invitation to the deepest wisdom.

That the Christian religion is comprehensible for every level of consciousness has already been taught by the history of its development. To show that it calls for penetration into the deepest wisdom teachings of humanity in general must be the task of the theosophical school of thought - or of spiritual science in general, if it understands its task. Theosophy is not a religion, but a tool for understanding religions. It relates to religious documents in the same way that mathematical teaching relates to documents that have appeared as mathematical textbooks.

You can understand mathematics through your own mental powers, you can see the laws of space without regard to that old book. But once you have seen them and absorbed the geometric teachings, you will appreciate all the more this old book, which was the first to present these laws to the human mind. This is the case with Theosophy. Its sources [are not in the records, are not based on tradition. Its sources] are in the real spiritual worlds; there one has to find them and grasp them by developing one's own spiritual powers, as one grasps mathematics by seeking to develop the powers of one's intellect.

Our intellect, which serves us to grasp the laws of the sensory world, is carried by an organ, the brain. To grasp the laws of spiritual worlds, we also need appropriate organs. How have our physical organs developed? Through the agency of external forces: the forces of the sun, the forces of sound. Thus the eye came into being, and so did the ear - from neutral dull organs that initially did not allow the penetration of the sensory world and only opened slowly. In the same way, our spiritual organs will open when the right forces work on them.

What, then, are the forces that are now assailing our still dull spiritual organs? During the day, such forces penetrate the astral body of modern man that work against his development, that even kill those organs that he had before the bright consciousness of day had not yet opened up to him. In the past, man perceived astral impressions directly. The world around him spoke to him through images, through the expression of the astral world. Vivid, structured images, colors floated freely in space as expressions of pleasure and displeasure, sympathy and antipathy. Then these colors enveloped the surface of things, as it were, and the objects took on firm contours. That was when man's physical body became more and more solid and structured.

When his eyes opened fully to physical light, when the veil of Maya lay over the spiritual world, the astral body of the human being received impressions of the environment through the physical and etheric bodies, and then transmitted them to the ego, from where they entered the consciousness of the person. He was thus constantly occupied, constantly active. But what worked on him in this way were not plastic, malleable forces, corresponding to his own nature. They were forces that consumed him, killed him, in order to awaken his sense of self.

Only at night, when he immersed himself in the homogeneous, rhythmic spiritual world, did he regain his strength and was he able to restore strength to his physical and etheric bodies. From the conflict of impressions, from the death of the astral organs that used to work unconsciously in man, the life of the individual ego, the ego consciousness, had emerged. From life to death, from death to life. The serpent's circle was closed. Now, out of this awakened self-awareness, the forces had to come that rekindled life in the dead remains of earlier astral organs, forming them plastically.

It is towards this goal that humanity is moving, and it is being guided towards it by its teachers, its leaders, the great initiates, whose symbol is also the serpent. It is an education towards freedom, therefore a slow and difficult one. The great initiates could, so to speak, make the task easier for themselves and for people if they worked on the astral body at night, when it is free, so that they could imprint the astral organs on it, working on it from the outside. But that would then be an influence within the dream consciousness of the person, an intervention in his sphere of freedom. The highest principle of man, the will, would never come to fruition.

Man is led step by step. There has been an initiation in wisdom, one in mind, one in will. Genuine Christianity is the sum of all stages of initiation. The initiation of antiquity was the prediction, the preparation. Slowly and gradually, the newer man emancipated himself from his initiator, his guru. The initiation took place first in full trance consciousness, but equipped with the means to imprint into the physical body the memory of what had happened outside the physical body. Therefore, there was the necessity to also release the etheric body, the carrier of memory, together with the astral. Both plunged into the sea of wisdom, into Mahadeva, into the light of Osiris. This initiation took place in the deepest secret, in complete seclusion. No breath of the outside world was allowed to intrude. The human being was as dead to the outer life, the delicate germs were cultivated away from the blinding light of day.

Then the initiation emerged from the darkness of the mysteries into the brightest light of day. In a great, powerful personality, the bearer of the highest unifying principle, the word that expresses the hidden Father, that is His manifestation, that, by taking human form, therefore became the Son of Man and could represent all humanity, [a] unifying bond of all “I”s: In Christ, the Spirit of Life, the Eternal Unifier, the initiation of all humanity took place historically - at the same time symbolically - at the level of feeling, of the mind. This event was so powerful that it was able to have an effect on each individual who experienced it, even physically, to the extent of the appearance of the stigmata, to the point of causing intense pain. And all the depths of feeling were shaken up. An intensity of feeling arose that has never before flooded the world in such mighty waves.

In the initiation on the cross of divine love, the sacrifice of the self for all had taken place. The physical expression of the self, the blood, had flowed in love for humanity and worked in such a way that thousands pushed themselves to this initiation, to this death and let their blood flow in love, in enthusiasm for humanity. How much blood has been poured out in this way has never been emphasized enough, and people no longer realize it, not even in theosophical circles. But the waves of enthusiasm that flowed down in this pouring out of blood and rose up have done their work. They have become powerful sources of inspiration. They have matured man for the initiation of the will.

And this is the legacy of the Christ.

The various effects of light rays on matter can be isolated. One can remove heat from luminosity by using an alum solution; and conversely, by using carbon disulfide, heat acts without the production of light. Certain rays of light separated from others can excite dormant faculties in a substance to activity or entirely annul them. For example, the rays that normally produce chemical effects, such as violet and ultraviolet ones, have the ability to make sulfur-calcium (a mixture of sulfur and the white metal calcium) luminous. However, if these rays are first allowed to pass through an aesculin solution, this effect will be cancelled, and the mixture will lose its ability of luminosity altogether. The ability to make sulfur-calcium luminous is possessed only by those types of rays that also produce chemical effects.

The red warmth rays have a slower vibration than the violet rays that produce chemical effects. The red ones have 400 trillion vibrations per second, the blue-violet ones 760 trillion, and even more so the ultraviolet ones; the light rays, bright in the middle, have an intermediate speed.

It is not that the vibration of the red warmth rays is slower, but rather the dark matter through which the bright rays shine and produce red makes the red rays more inert and passive. Thus the dark matter obscures the light and slows down the speed capability of the bright rays.

The violet rays cause the dark matter to take on a lighter coloring. That is, the dark matter itself undergoes a change, and therefore does not to disturb the vibrations of the light, but lets them pass. The dark matter changes the bright light rays by darkening them. On the contrary, the dark rays illuminate the dark matter and act on it, making it move and change.

When the light rays are caught by an object, darkness is created behind the illuminated object, and it will then cast its shadow on an opposite screen.

We can perceive an object's color due to the fact that, for example, a red flower vibrates the ether of light between itself and our eye 400 trillion times a second; that the light ether in our eye, set in the same vibrations, reaches the red cone in our retina; and through the optic nerve the image of the red flower which is reflected on the retina is telegraphed to the brain, whereby the reflection is then consciously perceived.

The astral can only perceive directly by empathizing with things. By being separated from things, man lost this ability of immediate perception; he places himself outside of things. He produces organs out of himself so that he may use them to produce images out of things; this enables him to perceive these images, and thereby perceive the things indirectly.

The light ether is now the medium, and the eye has developed as an organ of perception. The eye consists of the round eyeball, which is lined by the retina inside, which consists of rods and cones and is enclosed by an outer cornea. Facing externally is the open pupil and behind it the ciliary muscle, which holds a transparent lens. The ability to adjust causes the light aperture (the pupil) to widen in the dark and to shrink in the light so that not too much light enters, and to collect the light rays in a focal point; to let them fall into the "darkroom" of the retina, where the mirror image is produced and telegraphed to the brain by the nerve to which the eye is attached. Light and color are produced by vibrations in the ether. 400 trillion vibrations red, to 760 trillion and above in a second blue-violet.

The vibrations of air produce sound that are trillions of times slower than light waves.

The perception of air vibration as sound is between 16.5 and over 40000 vibrations per second. Below 16.5 and above 40000 vibrations are no longer perceived as sound.

Between 40 and 40000 vibrations per second musical tone is perceived.

For the measurement of the sound vibration of the air we make use of a rotating disc provided with holes—the siren. If the disk is rotated and vibrates under sixteen and a half times—that is, the air is driven through less than sixteen holes per second while rotating—we will hear only impact noise, not tone. The tone scale can be determined firmly by measuring the air vibrations in numbers. If we compare the prime C with the higher C, one C would relate to the other as 1 : 2, and within the octave we could determine the vibration ratios of the other notes.

Let's assume that the vibrations of the tone scale in the second were as follows:

so we get the following relationship:

The prime to the octave = 1 : 2 = 1st prime
The prime to the second = 8 : 9 = 9/8 second
The prime to the third = 4 : 5 = 5/4 third
The prime to the fourth = 3 : 4 = 4/3 fourth
The prime to the fifth = 2 : 3 = 3/2 fifth
The prime to the sixth = 3 : 5 = 5/3 sixth
The prime to the seventh = 8 : 15 = 15/8 seventh
The prime to the prime = 2 octave

The shades of color behave within the color scale as the pitches behave within the tone scale; the ratio is the same, only the light ether vibrates trillions of times faster.

400 trillion vibrations red
450 trillion vibrations orange
500 trillion vibrations yellow
532 trillion vibrations green
600 trillion vibrations blue-green
665 trillion vibrations blue indigo
750 trillion vibrations indigo
760 trillion vibrations violet
700 trillion vibrations ultraviolet

An ultraviolet would be about the octave of prime = red. Our violet, at 760 trillion vibrations, corresponds in the tone scale to a tone slightly above the seventh.

There is a certain amount of time required for light to propagate through space. The speed of light is approximately 300,000 kilometers per second. This has been calculated both astronomically and terrestrially, and the results of the calculation have given the same result. The cosmic calculation has been made by Olaf Romer, based on the following observation: One has calculated the time, which the four moons need, in order to orbit around Jupiter, and waited with the telescope, until the two moons, which stepped into the shadow behind the Jupiter, appear again. This has produced the irregularity that the moons have sometimes been delayed—and up to 996 seconds longer than they were expected to be. The cause of the delay has been sought, and in the process the discovery of the laws of the propagation of light has been made.

The circumference of the ellipse that the Earth circumscribes around the Sun is 299 million kilometers. A much larger circumference is drawn by the ellipse of Jupiter around the Sun. It has now been observed that the moons always emerge from the shadow at exactly the right time, when the Earth is in a straight line between the Sun and Jupiter.

Now one waited for the time when the Earth arrived at the opposite point, crossed the whole width of its ellipse and puts the Sun between itself and Jupiter. Here the difference of 996 seconds has been observed; consequently the delay has been caused by the space which the earth has covered in the meantime. So the light needs 996 seconds to propagate through a space of 299 million kilometers. In one second it would need the 996th part of 299 million kilometers for it. 299,000,000 / 996 = 300,200. So roughly 300,000 kilometers per second.

The same calculation has been made by Fizeau with a gear. If one has a light behind oneself and a very distant mirror reflecting it back to the eye, and then brings a gear wheel between the eye and mirror and sets it in fast rotation by a crank, then one will see the light through the tooth gaps of the wheel until it has covered the distance back and forth; then the obstacle, the darkening occurs through the opaque gear-tooth. Now, if you measure the distance from the eye to the mirror twice and calculate the time, i.e. how long the wheel has to turn until the light gets from the gap to the tooth, you can also calculate how long it takes the light to propagate through space and return. This calculation agrees exactly with the astronomical one.

The speed of propagation is always the same, whether light or candlelight. Light is nothing other than ether vibrations which propagate in space.

With kerosene or a candle it is always the gas which burns; the liquid or the solid body is transformed by the heat ether into vapor or gas and then begins to shine.

If you make a solid or liquid body glow and deflect its rays with a prism through the opening of a darkroom, you get the continuous spectrum. If, instead of the glowing solid or liquid sphere, you pass a particular gas flame through a spectroscope, you get only a single-color line spectrum through the prism—a discontinuous spectrum—and exactly of the color of the gas in question.

Now if one tried to bring into the rays of the liquid body a glowing vapor, for example sodium vapor, there one found in the spectrum instead of yellow, a black line; the yellow was extinguished, absorbed. On this occasion, in 1859, Kirchhoff and Bunsen discovered the law of absorption: every glowing vapor extinguishes that kind of light which it itself produces, and allows all others to pass through it unimpeded.

Now that every substance has its own color which it emits as a gas and replaces it again by absorbing it from other rays of light, it is now possible to analyze every substance through the spectroscope and even discover unknown substances—for example, argon in the air.

This is also how one came to discover the dark lines found in the solar spectrum—the so-called Fraunhofer lines. One could thus analyze the material world of the Sun and state that it is of the same nature as ours. The glowing ball of fire is surrounded with an atmosphere produced by evaporation of the glowing masses of matter, and the rays of the liquid masses pass through the gas rays, which absorb their colors and give dark lines in the spectrum.

But these dark lines give a luminous band of colors as soon as a solar eclipse occurs and the moon covers the fiery ball of the Sun.

Through a spectroscope the state of evolution of the stars is also detected, and the character of the nebular patches, which may be doubtful through the inadequacy of the telescope, and which have often proved to be distant asterisms.

Only gaseous matter transmits any color and retains only its own color. Solids and liquids absorb all colors and reflect only the color which is their property, whether natural or artificially acquired.

What appears to us as color on a substance is only the reflection back of those rays of light which correspond to its color character, all others are absorbed.

Color is the property of a substance, the living expression of its acquired activity, its karma, and belongs to the karmic world, just as man is the product of his activity, his karma, for karma is life, is activity, is acquired.

Every substance or body is basically nothing but movement, it has its own mode of vibration and makes itself known only through the effects it exerts on other substances or suffers through them. Matter is always life and has a history; it changes through experiences, chooses and suffers. Any simple substance we perceive is in itself highly differentiated.

Light can be either primary—a self-luminous body—or polarized by reflection. In the former case, it has not yet lost its full vibratory capacity by contact with another body. If one puts two mirrors parallel to each other and brings them in contact with a candlelight, the light will be reflected twice in both mirrors. But if one places one mirror perpendicular to the other and brings it into relation with a candlelight, the reflection in the perpendicular one will be extinguished—it will not be present.

The cause is that the reflected light vibrates differently from the primary. It vibrates in all directions; now, as it is caught by a mirror image, this same light changes its mode of vibration, in that the mirror lets all other directions of vibration pass, absorbs, and lets only the parallel ones, which correspond to its mode of vibration, radiate back. This reflected light, which vibrates only in one direction, is reflected by the parallel mirror, but not by the perpendicular one. The first mirror is called the polarizer because it polarizes the light, and the perpendicular the analyzer because it shows the polarized light by extinguishing it. One can also use tourmaline tongs to investigate whether a luminous body emits its own light or only reflects light. Polarized light would be reflected only when the tourmaline is in a parallel position; when it is in a perpendicular position, there would be no reflected image; and when it is rotated obliquely, the light rays would partially vibrate with the tourmaline, and the different directions of the vibrations would form colored figures, similar to the Chladni-sound figures. In contrast, primary light would reflect at each position of the tourmaline tongs. In this way, planets and fixed stars can be recognized by their light.

If one brings a body between the two metal plates of the tongs, the darkened light will shine again, for the light vibrations are again regulated by the body's own movements.

If the rays of the Sun are caught unobstructed by a prism in a darkroom, a white disk with a darker perimeter will show up on the opposite wall, and this penumbra will contain the prismatic colors. The rays entering through the narrow aperture overlap and appear as colors at the boundary between light and dark; so, too, in mirror glass, colors are seen when the light is reflected.

Colors are the incarnation of light produced when the rays of light are stopped by matter and reflected back.

Meditation is like a system of nature forces, through which man does something not only for himself but for the whole world. Meditation differs from the forces of nature in that they do unconsciously what we do consciously. But in truth, this is only correct from a human perspective that these forces act unconsciously; actually it is conscious. It would be wrong, of course, if we said that in the clock there is a little soul that moves the wheels, the spring and the rest; but nevertheless this whole apparatus is put together by a guiding intelligence. It is the same with the forces of nature. There, too, it is the dhyanic intelligence of the higher beings who consciously decree everything in such a way that the nature forces in their combination result in the entities of the various realms. In man the dhyanic intelligence is inserted into his own being.

We remember the three elemental kingdoms. In nature the elemental beings act as creators; the work of the higher forces of nature are visible through them. Within the entities of the three elemental kingdoms, human beings also participate. For we would not be able to control our physical make-up if it were not so. There we work together in community with the beings of the first elemental kingdom. In that which belongs to the animal, the astral elemental beings co-operate; in the Rupic-Mental those of the third kingdom cooperate.

Only where man acts independently, do elemental beings not work with him. In his brain-life a fourth elemental kingdom arises; it is, as it were, the elemental kingdom drawn into him. Here he is master. He rightly extends nature's efficacy. He takes the lead as a thinking man. In the Kama-Manas no other elemental being participates; here man participates as a mineral man, as an elemental being himself.

Today man can only direct his physical body; he is able to change the physical through his actions. He is conscious on the physical plane but has experiences on the astral plane through his astral body, and on the mental plane through his mental body. Only what we call his physical body is properly developed. His astral body has not been developed as far. As far as the mineral body is concerned, man differs from all animals. Man is formed in the shape of a cross, while the animal has a horizontal spine. On the mineral plane this upright position is characteristic of man; he has developed the physical body, to the point that it must really be at, although his physical body will continue to be perfected until the end of this round. But he does not have the likeness of God in the astral or in the mental. The astral body is still on the level of the animal existence; the lower mental on the plant level; the Arupic-Mental body is three levels lower. It is the task of the future rounds to develop these bodies. In the seventh round the Arupic body is to become as perfect as it can be. This progress in his development, which man sees before him, is summed up in a certain formula: his physical nature is complete; the astral body, which surrounds the physical like something that is still to grow, is still in living development, is in a rudimentary stage.

"I am the jewel in the lotus flower."—Aum mani padme hum.

Aum, the innermost, the very life-force in man, which he strikes only with the sound;

Mani, the stone transformed, the jewel, manas;

Padme, the astral;

Hum, once again, I am.

This rhythmic Aum is yet only the imagined innermost essence of Man. And when it is placed before the soul with the right thought-content, Man does something cosmically; he resonates with the highest rhythmic world-vibrations; his single tone sounds harmoniously within the entire spherical world.

This is how Man prepares himself for that which he must absolutely attain if he is to undergo the proper Pitri development.

Man must now form his astral body. The elemental beings have built the three lower corporealities with him. To the extent that he can, he must take his astral body into his own hands. Out of an undifferentiated organism the sensory body has come into being. The astral body is still undifferentiated and must be organized by man himself. This is done by a review of the day which is done in the evening. By doing this, I must face myself as I would face a stranger. Because he is stuck in his lower astral man cannot work on himself. He is united with his astral and his "I" is not free. Only when he stands next to himself can he organize the astral.

The astral body can form senses just like the physical body. There will be seven senses, five of which can already be seen clearly in the astral aura. Directly in the center of the body is a six-petaled lotus flower. When man begins to meditate, these wheels begin to turn. This rotation means that the chakra is developing into the sense organ. The chakras are the developing astral sense organs.

Next is the ten-petaled lotus flower in the navel area. Near the heart, the twelve-petaled one. By the larynx, the sixteen-petaled one. Between the eyebrows the two-petaled one. The lotus flowers will develop very specific forms when the astral body becomes organized. Only then will man be conscious on the astral plane.

This organization is the task of this part of meditation. The main thing is to remove from consciousness everything that is external sense impressions and memories. Free we must be from all sense impressions; create absolute inner peace; control ourselves completely from the inner self—not be controlled by the outer world. All that composes our earthly-spatial personality has nothing to do with our higher self, unless we draw it out as a lesson, suck it out like a bee, [when we] form the eternal out of the temporal. One makes oneself completely free by getting hold of oneself outside of time and space. We can not imagine the overall human by thinking of our temporal personality, but rather when we think of our higher self which is pure like the Sun. We are human and nothing more than human when we utter this formula, which has been uttered by adepts for eighteen million years, ever since there have been human beings.

The second thing is to organize the lower mental body by concentrating on one particular thing. One chooses an inspired scripture; all these teachings are received from higher planes; there are spiritual forces of nature which lie in these teachings; their full truth and power lie on the mental plane. When we allow a completely empty, free field of consciousness to work upon us without speculation, we accomplish what we are meant to accomplish. What belongs to the mental work must be done outside of meditation. During meditation, the sentence must speak to us. If a person cannot yet let the sentence work on him completely, it is good to have it in front of him as if on a blackboard, even to write it down and hold it in front of him. We must look at foreign thoughts like waves of the sea, which we always chase away; we must purify ourselves from all waves, keep the field of consciousness pure. By having such writings created by inspiration, the masters of the different times have given us powers through which we work on our mental body to achieve what we must achieve in the sixth round. The Theosophical movement offers that which helps man to do this work. Not all will reach the goal; the undeveloped mental bodies will remain behind in the eighth sphere.

Up until the middle of the Lemurian period people practiced this concentration by themselves, which was as necessary for them as eating and drinking is for people today. In the second half of the Lemurian race, for example, people were still made of air, who did not need food and drink, but felt the longing to absorb the spirit. So this is concentration within meditation.

Developing the Arupic in the mental is achieved through the devotional part. Raising oneself up to a great role model teaches true humility, where man enters into the mood to what he should elevate to—the sensation that is exalted.

The purpose of the evening review is to turn the life of the past into lessons for the life of the future. Some say: yes, I do it every day. Self-examination is also a double-edged sword; it is fruitful only when it really detaches the higher self from [the lower]. People do not become strangers enough to themselves, worrying ...

This is not unjustified, theosophy does not say to become hard-hearted; but often we prevent something by worrying and worrying about past things, prevent doing better. The purpose of meditative work is to pull oneself out; during the day one can have sorrow and worry, during the review [one must reject them] as well as the everyday thoughts. It is good to make this day review from backward to forward. For man lives toward the future, and in truth the future is approaching, perfection is at the end. If we extend [the review] not to twelve hours, but to twenty-four hours, we will see that it is good. The dreams will be only confusedly conscious at first, but it is good that one extends one's memory, for thereby the sense of the astral is sharpened, and the consciousness becomes continuous. One learns to understand that the dream life has a higher reality. To man the astral appears in distorted images, because man is not able to see properly. Later comes the moment when during the dream man is fully conscious, and this leads to the continuity of consciousness, so that it becomes indifferent whether we are awake or dreaming. This is also the way in which the masters teach the occult disciples.

One should not care whether one is a valuable personality or not. As for the morning meditation, it is mainly a matter of having a completely sightless consciousness, so that this void is filled with spiritual content ... or scripture. Let's try to bring about this emptiness by imagining the absolute, dark and empty space that has no boundary. The state we have to invoke is just like when we are asleep. To exclude the senses and the memory is the art. Then we imagine the absolute empty and dark space, and then out of this blackest darkness we let rise: "aum mani padme hum" - then the formula and the elevation to the higher self. Again darkness - and then as on a wall the sentence.

Sitting down more often, when there is time and opportunity, and thinking of nothing at all is a good exercise. It is hard to resist the always angry thoughts. This even strengthens the physical organism. Very significant is to get free the brain with present astral body.

A strong reason why the astral body is egoistic is the thoughts; everyone surrounds himself with a shell that is astral. When the thoughts are taken away, this astral stuff dissolves again, and nothing is better than when an organism is left to itself. Man has such a harmonious heart, lungs and so on, because the higher formers have created on it and he could ruin little. One acquires also thereby a certain exercise to scare away thoughts.

With the concentration it is necessary that from it is sharply separated the thinking, the speculating about a [meditation] sentence. We must already be finished with it. Such a sentence comes from higher experience and always contains more than we know. Even the inspired one meditates on his own sentences. So firm is his belief that it is higher revelation.

Patience must be so long, even in failure, that the unconditional belief that things will get better one day does not waver. Not forcing things, not forcing, is necessary. Patience must be there in tremendous measure; it is it that comes over the occult student in the

Meditation must be poured out completely. It is through this that he becomes a disciple. As the plant does not skip a single one to get to the last, crowning one, so the disciple; never skip an intermediate link; detour where necessary; form is adapted to the cleft of the rock. Patience, constancy and steadfastness are the qualities of the divine nature that we have to develop. It is a matter of mind, not of success.

The devotional part then follows.

Phrases: Let us keep in mind the one that basically man is more perfect as a physical being than as astral and mental. Imperfection lies in the fact that man today is a tripartite being and still clumsy in the handling of what are the higher principles and in the free use of the lower principles. For he can never become happy if he abandons himself to the lower principles like the animal, which does not have its mental body on the same plan as its physical and astral. Animals can be trained, but man works through the animal again to the higher plan, which then works down. But only the one who moves freely on the mental plane, only an occultist, is allowed to do that.

Man must keep the balance between his mental and physical nature, oscillate back and forth between both. This is already expressed in the exterior. The animal is horizontal; the human being is imprinted with being torn out of the physical vitality. This uprightness of the head is conditioned by the balancing between the physical and the higher spiritual. Because it is so, the head of man as a sign of his intellectuality is the organ which is pushed in the middle ...

The animal head is only instinctive. In occult relation the human head is quite different from the animal one. With the animal completely ... With man a beginning; the stream is poured out into the animal and has found its end there - dead end. With man there is a new beginning; through all the openings of the head all the streams go on, so that man through his head is a bridge, a connecting link between the higher and lower nature.

The animal eye looks out only to the sensed object; the human eye connects the mental image with the object, and thereby opens to the spirit; while the animal eye forms a cul-de-sac.

The main human openings are related to space by the seven planets, to time by the seven days of the week. The sacred line in the world, the lemniscate, is to be traced here; we recognize in this way the occult placement of man in the world-entirety.

Through the right eye passes the second principle, Budhi; through the left the third principle, Manas; through the right ear the mind soul; through the left the sentient soul; through the right nostril the etheric body; through the left nostril the astral body, Linga sharira. And on the top of the head, in the future, there will be an opening for the outpouring of Atman. Through the mouth flows the Word, which must always be thought through. Through the seven planets these main openings are placed in relationship to space.

The top opening on the head has a connection with Jupiter, the right eye is connected with Mercury, the right ear with Saturn, the right nostril with the Sun, the left nostril with the Moon, the left ear with Mars, the left eye with Venus. Through the seven days of the week they are connected with time. Here it is necessary to notice the Sacred Line of the World. It points us to the occult construction of man in the universe.

Concentration is followed by a prayer part, which should consist of awe and reverence [toward] the great spirits who have penetrated deeply into the mysteries of nature and the universe and who are above ordinary human nature.

When the moon is waning, nothing new should enter into meditation.

Right Eye Second Principle, Budhi Mercury
Left eye Third principle, Manas Venus
Right ear mind soul Saturn
Left ear sentient soul Mars
Right nostril etheric body Sun
Left nostril astral body moon

We want to submit some more questions in relation to the three kingdoms of nature. We know that every being must pass through these three kingdoms. To each mineral belongs the form; from this formed being of nature the plant is to arise. If it were to evolve in the same direction, without new impetus, it would of course always remain mineral - at most it could become more perfect as a mineral.

If the mineral is to become a plant, this mineral must acquire the special power for plant existence - the abilities which form organs to draw this individual life into itself. Now, however, it remains mineral for the time being; it will still retain the property that when the forces of nature are overcome, it will decay. It cannot transfer the form it already has to a new individual. It must incorporate its form and the newly acquired organs and transfer them to a germinal state. Now, when it passes to life recently, it has acquired to its former property of having form a new one of breathing in life, and when it now passes into germinal state, it has to draw this life into its own. Now we have vegetable essence. The mineral has added to its own essence, which consists in having form, the new property of having life. This is the essence of a round or cycle.

As the plant being progresses, it takes the kama from the environment, forms organs. We have plant being with the ability to take in desire, but this being, while able to take in desire, cannot keep it inside. It flows desire in and out. This goes back to the germinal state, and after revitalization, animal being is formed. This is the process of a cycle.

Now a mineral would always remain mineral if there was no driving force to take care of the same, There has to be something taking care of the mineral for all this to come into being, and that is the monadic essence. It is the driving element. If it had only the drive to be plant, it would stop here. As high as the being is to develop, so high the drive must already be. No mineral can move up to a higher level than it already has in itself according to the plant. The mineral, which later becomes a plant, is already a plant according to its disposition, a latent plant. The mineral, which later becomes animal, is already latent animal. We can also say: The mineral, which later becomes plant, is already plant according to the spirit; the mineral, which later becomes animal, has always been animal according to the spirit; it was only not according to the physical reality animal, but mineral. Every being, from which something becomes, must have an invisible spirit nucleus in itself. What we now call a mineral is not like minerals of yore: each had an astral body. Now it has none, is in a dead end. When we speak of man having once passed through the mineral kingdom, it is not to be understood that he was mineral like the minerals of today; we must never say that man was mineral, plant, animal as he is today. It follows: Man has never been anything but man, he has only in previous periods of evolution always developed parts of his full reality, the physical parts, and the spiritual he has retained.

He has always been present in a higher spiritual way; only he [evolves] in the first round visibly in the mineral, [in the] second round visibly in the vegetable kingdom, [in the] third round visibly in the animal kingdom, and [is] only in the fourth round also visible as man.

Common Darwinism says: before was mineral, then plant, then animal. And he explains that man has emerged from these three. So it looks from an external point of view, for the one who does not see the invisible. Darwinism is a half-measure; but when it is recognized in its right meaning, it has its good sense. In descending, that which is acquired as a faculty is absorbed into the being. Now we are in the ascending line and have to acquire new abilities. Memory, as we know, develops in the Atlanteans. There man begins to absorb what he receives through the mental images. The abilities acquired during the ascending arc are new parts of the entity during the descending arc. And since since the middle of the Atlantean time the ascending arc has been begun, and on this ascending arc thinking as a faculty is more and more developed, so in the next round during the descending arc thinking will be absorbed in the beingness of man.

The Upanishads reckon one round as the day of Brahma. "What you think today, you will be tomorrow." This is true of man in his present round. Thus we can imagine the rhythmic course of the world, that a being sucks in an element from the environment or universal world and then gives it to the outside world. Man sucks in thought - he will send out the thought from himself in the next round. During one half of the round, a being sucks in what it gives out during the next. That is why esoteric philosophy calls a whole round an inhalation and exhalation of the Supreme Being. "Brahma breathes a world in and out."

It is not a mere comparison; what was originally taught is the world process. The first teachers taught these great truths - man later added his lesser realizations. The macrocosm came first, the great nature - then the microcosm, the small nature.

The knowledge of the earlier time referred to the higher world (Brahma breathes in and out). According to this revealed cosmic truth, people later named the process noticed in humans as inhaling and exhaling. Then people forgot the cosmic process and considered the naming more a figurative one.

Even the Greeks did not attribute their knowledge to experience, but to the revelation of higher beings.

If we keep evolution in mind, we find that man has been quite ascendant since the Atlantean period. The Ursemites have passed from memory to combining thought. The Aryan, the fifth root race, had to train thinking - working from manas to kama. Right thoughts have an effect on the astral body like higher natural forces. At the end of the round, the astral body must be formed. At the end of the fifth race, the astral body must be formed regularly. In the sixth root race, social love will have been formed and the astral body must be ennobled; the pull upward, toward the spiritual, will be the achievement. And at the end of the seventh, he will be completely purified.

Sixth race: purification, refinement of kama-manas,

Seventh race: purified kama-manas.

By advancing in this way, man is able to gradually acquire abilities for higher worlds. These worlds, to which man acquires a kind of ideal relation, are called:

Bhurloka fourth race
Bhuvarloka fifth race
Svarloka sixth race
Maharloka seventh race

These four worlds really exist, the heavenly worlds to which we form the earthly one. During the ascending evolutionary epoch they are developed as an annex in human beings

You have to acquire a few terms to understand how self-knowledge becomes world-knowledge. First, a simple concept. Let us consider a lily seed and then the whole lily. The power of the whole lily is inside the seed. If we sink the seed into the earth, the power inside it is able to group earth, water, air in such a way that the lily becomes. The material comes from the environment, but the organizing force from the lily.

Similarly, we must imagine the Pitri nature according to a Pralaya. In the form of a seed we have it after a great pralaya. He is perceptible only in the beginning and at the end of his development on the Budhi plan and in the middle on the Nirvana plan. Nevertheless, when he comes into matter, he has the power within him to organize it as the lily seed does.

Let us note: Pitri whole force without matter; in contrast to this we have man in his material arrangement. In a sense, similar. After the seventh round, when man will have reached nirvana, he will again have seed nature, but a different one. Everything he has experienced here, he will take over into the seed. We have the state where everything is rolled up into one point: Involution; and the one where unfolded is: Evolution.

Seed of the lily - involution unfolded lily - evolution

They are states relative to each other, [they are] mutually dependent. If man, as he is, went to Nirvana, he would not be able to unfold all that he is capable of. One side of the being is always in evolution, the other in involution.

Let us go through the Middle Ages, the time of Augustine to Luther and Calvin. Little of external science was then, but more mystical-internal life. This was therefore in evolution; mind in involution. - Later time: intellectual life [emerges] and mystical recedes. Mind life: Evolution; mystical: involution. What was then in germ, now came up. - In life the activity of our senses is in evolution - after death we have no senses, but all that we have experienced through them is properly spread out. Involution and evolution.

We have no time at all to process everything we see, only a small part we process. From this it can be seen how much we involve, absorb, how much must spread, evolve in the Devachan. From this we can see why the time in Devachan has to be so long. And again, what is prepared in Devachan by this propagation, becomes investment at birth and evolves in the next life. So, it is a continuous equilibration between involution and evolution. And to penetrate this completely is the task of theosophical immersion. It corresponds to a world process. Man usually jumps from one impression to another, taking in impression after impression; that he spreads them out in devachan will depend on the fact that he already holds them in life. Ordinary life is a kind of spiritual involution; meditation-life is a kind of spiritual evolution.

Just as evolution and involution play an essential role in understanding the world order, so does triplicity.

Let us think of a sphere, a glass sphere, compact, it is a unit, holds together. Let us think it divided into innumerable parts, all the same: The glass ball will fall apart, be a heap. If it doesn't, it must be held by forces that make it float in space. [unreadable word] Sphere made of many parts; forces that hold it - shape.

This applied to the whole universe: originally one, then divided into millions of parts; and then the forms, the arranging spirit. - The first, infinitely times divided is:

a) I. Logos, original power, on which everything [unreadable word]: Father, b) II. the powers that hold together: Word, Son, c) IIL. the ordering, the Holy Spirit.

Namely this was in use by the greatest Christian esotericist: Dionysius Areopagita, disciple and initiate of the Apostle Paul. - He is called Pseudo-Dionysius because [the teachings] were not written down until the sixth century.

There was a watchword among Christians, "From mouth to ear." Written things can be abused; the truly initiated did not write down. Dionysius was the head of a school of mystics. It happens with such developed people that they do not remain in devachan as long as other people. They can soon return to new incarnation. The heads of initiatory schools usually do; these schools often have the good fortune to keep the same head through many centuries. So it was here. And it was not until the sixth century, when people thought more of writing down teachings, that they were written down here.

From this Dionysus are the original teachings of Christian esotericism; one can learn Christianity in its original form from him, and to this belongs this interpretation of the supreme entities.

The Father reveals himself first in the higher being, then in the mirror image:

Atma - Father
Budhi - Word
Manas - spirit and in physicality:
Etheric body - Father
Astral body - word
Kama-Manas - spirit, the lower.

In [John]: Three are they that beget on earth: the blood - life principle -, the water - astral - and the spirit - KamaManas; and three are they that beget in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the heavenly spirit: Atma - Budhi - Manas.

This is how gnosis, esotericism, was taught even then in Athens. Pulpit speech was exoteric, priestly teaching: esoteric.

Seven states of consciousness develop one after the other. What develops and rises to higher degrees is the ego. What we study is what the I experiences. So that theosophy is: self-knowledge. We were there and participated in the life on all planets. On the first one was a peculiar state of consciousness, not spatially we have to think of the planets. They are states that emerge from each other, like the girl from the child - in between only pralaya states. Metamorphoses they are.

From distant states we come to the esoteric plan. Mars. - On it we lived and had a consciousness that was quite dull -, not yet dream consciousness - as it is today in the stones, mineral. - But it went into the vastness, an all-consciousness it was. Such a person knew /gap in transcript]

Now only to be artificially evoked in pathological states. There they begin to draw /unreadable] great world systems [...]. A dull trance consciousness, but extending over the earth with surrounding world bodies.

In each round it becomes brighter. Seven rounds, each in seven states. So that 7x7=49 states the consciousness has already gone through. - Materially, the planet dies, but all the plants pass over, like the lily from the seed.

On the second planet - Sun - a consciousness is formed which extends not so far, not over the dead, but over all living things, the consciousness which man has in dreams, where all vegetative functions continue to work; plant consciousness in 49 states. The planet is esoterically called the sun. Solarpitris, which here complete themselves high.

The third planet - Moon - develops a higher state of consciousness, dream trance, like the consciousness of the higher animals. Moon - again seven states: arupa, rupa, astral, physical, [illegible]

Fourth planet: earth. Now it comes over and becomes earth-development, which has to develop the bright day-consciousness.

Then passes over into the fifth state of consciousness - fifth planet: Mercury: psychic consciousness. To be distinguished by the fact that man will be brightly conscious not only in the physical but also in the astral. The desire nature of the other becomes transparent, his own he can direct like a force. Psychic consciousness.

On the sixth planet - Venus - more-than-psychic, super-psychic. Thought is conducted.

Seventh planet: On Jupiter spiritual consciousness; man will be all spirit.

343 states man thus undergoes. 7 x 7 on each planet. Thus we understand the seven principles that are in eternal formation. Four are formed in man, three in the plant. The earth is for man to be formed as he is now; because man is in the fourth round, he has also formed his fourth principle.

Important theosophical proposition that basically everything is one and we are connected with all beings - let us study.

In the great seed that arose as earth, as loud seeds were pitris that surrounded themselves with matter of various kinds, took bodies and lived out in seven principles. What happens on the earth is the means for man to reach his goal, to climb up the ladder. Man is the center and goal of the earthly development. There would be no /unreadable] if /gap in transcript]

The Pitris enter, find the earth quite undeveloped, must prepare the ground; form the mineral world. The human being has it in itself - bone structure is mineral -, even we have predisposed it, together with the formers. Not like today it was, a radiating system and germ of what should become. However, one had not been able to use everything, but had to separate out. From the rest dead bodies became, the nobler materials were taken away to living ones. So the human being came into being at the expense of the mineral kingdom. So that we can stand and develop further, we had to form it. Everything can be distributed only polar. If we climb up, we push the others down.

Now man got out of what he had already drawn to himself the vegetable and repels that which is useless for him.

During the third round, he does the same with the animal kingdom, but only as far as the fish-like creatures.

During the fourth round, the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms are there, and man first segregates what becomes amphibians, and also the birds. Within the animal kingdom he segregates the higher, so that he eliminates at their expense the very noblest parts to form himself. - Thus within the warm-blooded animals man arises.

Elohistic days - the rounds.

So the mineral kingdom arises in the first round, becomes properly finished in the fourth. The plant kingdom begins in the second, becomes finished in the fifth. The animal kingdom comes into being in the third, is completed in the sixth. Man comes into being in the fourth, and in the seventh becomes the image of God.

Fifth day: teeming [Mostly illegible and very fragmentary notes follow]

That man rules means that he has already sucked into himself.

Let us once again visualize the sequence of stages of the three kingdoms of nature. The mineral kingdom merely takes the form for the particularity. The plant takes the life from the general nature and transfers it to a single being. Thus it seeks in universal nature a perpetual source of life. This is the difference between plant and animal, where life depends on the ancestor. Hence this intimate being of the plant interwoven with universal nature, more chaste life.

Man has already passed through these three realms on three previous spheres. He was realized in the mineral, plant and animal kingdom. The shape was admittedly different. It resembled an automaton in the mineral; human plants looked radiate; human animal forms were egg-shaped. The human being reaches a kind of completion on the three first plans, so to speak. In the order of the kingdoms he could not have perfected himself further - only as an animal. Perfection of animality there can be much greater.

We only have to be clear that as long as an animal remains animal, manas in animality does not work on the physical plan, but on a higher one. Think of an animal: it will differ from man under the condition that its manas does not remain in the animal, but on a higher plan, so that if one wanted to imagine it sensually, one would have to think of the animal as pulled on strings.

The mind lies on the higher plan and acts into the lower. So with lower organs of the human being. A thigh, for example, is so artfully constructed that the thing could not be made more ingenious by the sharpest engineering.

To train the animal means: manas cannot do anything if the animal has no organ to do it; if the brain cannot be used to count, manas cannot count. If you prepare the brain of the animal, you give Manas opportunity to work from the higher plan down to an animal. Therefore, only occultists and mystics should do it. Otherwise, you can do something that is harmful in the universe.

In the Atlantean race, animals were artificially formed and trained into new species by crossbreeding; to this our animals now owe their higher qualities. Thus we must not be surprised that certain animals rival man in the skill of their ability. A bone can do even more than man. The Moeris lake was created with perfect art. The ancient Egyptians still knew how to drain the Nile waters into an artificial lake that irrigated the land through canals. It was still a kind of higher instinct, manas worked into it from the higher plan.

Man differs from the animal in that Manas works within him, not from above. Manas has descended to the physical plan. That is why an animal can progress further than a man, yet it is qualitatively below man. - What shows me the time is spirit of the clock inventor; he works from another sphere. Thus manas in the higher sense. That can also be called highest at the same time, what man achieves in the three former spheres: Being into which Manas works from outside. The task of earthly development is to transform the body so that Manas can work from within. And now you will also become clear about the difference of the human being standing on the fourth stage of development from the one standing on the third: that that which formerly acted upon him from the outside, bursts forth from within.

Now everything must be properly prepared. Let us think the lunar period completed. Now everything had to be repeated briefly, and for this purpose previous stages were necessary. Only the Lemurian period was so far that Manas could make the transformations. Also the Lemurian race has seven sub-stages. In the fourth, Manas bursts forth from within the human being. Let us imagine the great contrast: the certainty with which Manas works from outside in the animal; fallibility is unthinkable. Therefore, free will is also unthinkable. Only when Manas moves into the inside, fallibility is conceivable.

Now that the spheres are closed and Manas is within, he is, as it were, locked in prison and dependent on meeting his fellow Manases. Fallibility occurs only when Manas shines forth from within. Throughout the evolution of mankind, the possibility of freedom occurred, the ability to choose between good and evil. In the whole early macrocosmic nature there can be no question of freedom. Until that time, animals lived with absolute security. All animals with warm blood and fighting instincts arose only after the middle of the Lemurian period, with sexuality at the same time.

Before there were single beings, directed by Manas; now single beings with freedom of choice arose. Now something new must arise, which harmonizes the beings. The drive cannot now come from Manas, for it has lost its security. A new element appears. This is the element of love. Love has not been necessary before, because before the security of instinct has worked. From the lowest to the highest, what is called love has now arisen. Even the most subordinate form, sexual love, appeared only now, up to the forms of the most spiritual love. As in an atmosphere our whole earthly macrocosm was wrapped up in love at that time. This love in the organic was connected with the development of the warm blood. It is the physical vehicle for love.

Those entities that were powerful, great entities before could not remain; these were the fishes, they withered away. Cold-blooded beings of today are the last remains of great, mighty fishes of the Lemurian time. Only warm-blooded animals feel well now.

And now we see what the earthly development has become since that time. The animal spreads its beingness like a cover over something, which reveals itself from the outside in: "The animal is gone.

Man reveals himself. Higher development is that he reverses the matter, that he sends the threads of his mana outside. He gives the threads of his being as love. So on the one hand revelation - to the animal, then intermediate realm of egoism, then realm of love.

Exusiai - coming forth of a higher entity into a lower one. Revelation. Light is the physical expression for this shining in; this revelation. Occult light is the revelation of a higher element by a lower being. Love is the surrender of one's higher element through a lower appearing being. In this struggle humanity still stands. Earthly development is the struggle between light and love.

What resides in man himself? A drop of manas, the inner glow itself. Love is the inducement for Manas to push outward. - Two principles.

The manasic entity that works in infinite facets as human souls is called Lucifer. Occult name for that which acts as light on man. The power that lets it flow out, that pushes outward, is Jehovah. The love entity that pushes the manasic entity outward is Jehovah. "God is love." It came in to the world in the middle of the Lemurian period.

What will fully express itself as love when the human way of life is at its goal, will express itself as divine wrath while it is still in an imperfect state.