The Rudolf Steiner Archive

As soon as we go beyond the conditions of the earth, all knowledge becomes somewhat patchy and complicated, even for those in the know. If I say anything today about connections that are outside of the sun and the earth and go beyond them, then it is possible that it will be one-sided in some respects – if only because they are little known and sometimes too complicated. But some things will arise that are illuminating for the question that Franz Seiler has asked.

We must hold on to the fact that for the consideration of our solar system, the most important point of view is that, with the Copernican system, the sun is moved to the center of our solar system. And present-day astronomy regards the earlier world system, the Ptolemaic system, as an outdated and, as such, downright false system. However, it is only a difference in perspective. Astronomy presents all calculations with respect to the Earth, and Copernicus presents them with the Sun as the center, as if one were to describe a region with respect to one mountain and the same region from another mountain. Things are entirely relative. What we call rest and motion is more correctly represented in the Copernican system. But as far as rest and motion in the astral is concerned, this is more correctly represented in the Ptolemaic system.

The Middle Ages are not to be understood in exactly the same sense as our present-day conceptions. When you find the earth in the center in Dante, and then the spheres of the moon, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and then the sphere of the fixed stars, this does not mean the same physical sense of space as that understood by astronomy in the physical sense, but rather it means spiritual, mental connections. By the physical the medieval astronomer, who was not really an astronomer but a theosophist, understood only a sensualization of the spiritual connection. He did not understand the same, did not give the rough facts as the modern astronomer gives them, but he wanted to understand them as a sensualization of the spiritual connection of the world. Only another point of view was put in the place of the old point of view.

And now a few words about the connections themselves. We must be clear that the planets the ancients spoke of are not at the same stage of their development. While the Earth presents itself to us from the standpoint of Kama-Manas, the planet Mercury is today in a far more advanced state. It has already reached the point where earthly development will have arrived when we have developed the Budhi principle in all of humanity, when the Budhi principle will set the tone within earthly development.

Mercury is completely immersed in Budhi. On Venus we have Manas, pure Manas, which plays the same role as Kama-Manas on Earth. Venus and Mercury are planets that shine ahead of our Earth. They are therefore models for earthly development. [...] The Venusian and the Mercuryan are basically present throughout the solar system. They do not need to work, but they can work. So that on our Earth could occur what we call the appearance of the so-called Venus Sons. They could become teachers for the Earth as in the third Lemurian race this took place because the Earth needed this influence. It only requires the opportunity from outside for the Venus Sons. If the Earth does not need the influence, it is not there, if it needs it, it is there. That is the influence between Earth and Venus.

Then there is the planet Mars. In a certain respect, it represents a state that the Earth had already outgrown before it entered the lunar epoch. But that would not be today's Mars. It is no longer in the state that the present Moon is in. The Moon represents an externally overcome state of earthly development. Mars was already a moon and has entered a new line of development, so that it once represented the state and today is, so to speak, only at the place where our earth went through its pre-lunar epoch, the epoch in which it was in the state of pure prana. The lunarian epoch in Kama, the Mars epoch in the state of pure Kama. Plants and human beings, who have now developed the pranic principle as the highest principle. This took on the same role for them as Kama-Manas does for us. It would be a false idea if we believed that this was linked to pleasure and displeasure. That only came in the lunarian epoch.

These beings were purely engaged in reproduction. Even before that, the earth was in a state in which it developed the physical, purely elementary principle. So at that time, before the Mars epoch had come, the earth, or rather the forerunner of the earth, was purely physical. At that time, the forerunner of man was also already present. But he was only changeable in the physical life. He was an automaton, an automatic human being. All spiritual life was above man. He himself was only an automaton. The world body that man inhabited at that time was so elementary that it had no cohesive force, so it shattered. And that formed the ring of planetoids: the many planets that circle the sun like a ring.

How is it that Mars was able to develop further, although the body was shattered? Mars already had the life principle within it and therefore continued to live, while the other was only physical and had to disintegrate. So we have the four stages of development before us.

Our moon will later have completely disappeared, and in its place a new world body will shine, which will fertilize the kamic principle in a different way. In this way we have advanced to the planetoids and now come out of the circle of the planets, where we encounter Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus. There is no reason to speak of Neptune yet. It occupies a special position. It does not belong to our planetary system alone, but to another as well. It is a border planet. In contrast to this, we have to look at Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. You may say that Uranus was not yet known at that time. It was only discovered in the eighteenth century. But it was known in esoteric teaching. The three outer planets, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, counted. The planetoids, however, represented the fragmentation of the elemental realm.

Everything else is the reincarnation of what was there before. Our entire planetary chain was nothing more than the re-embodiment of states that had existed before. Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus represent the three higher cosmic principles, which simply reincarnated, first in the elemental, then in the pranic and so on, so that in Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus we have to recognize the three principles Atma, Budhi, Manas - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus.

Now I will characterize Saturn. He represents this upper triad in a very special way. I characterize him from the point of view of the spirit of our earth. He presents himself as the desire to reincarnate in the earthly chain of planets. You can imagine that the upper triad harbors the desire to become the earthly chain of planets. Saturn represents this aspiration. Imagine that it says to itself, “I want to form a planetary chain in which Kama-Manas becomes the middle principle: elemental-physical, pranic, kamic - Kama-Manas, Manas, Budhi.

The earth will become a kind of Venus-Jupiter-Sun when it is in the Sun. This wish is essentially expressed in the configuration of Saturn in that Saturn contains all the principles laid out next to each other. Actually, there are not seven, but nine principles. This also helps us to understand the configuration of Saturn. Man is three times threefold. He consists of body, soul and spirit. Each part consists of three parts again. Let us take the body first. It consists, firstly, of the physical body, secondly, the life body, and thirdly, the bodily form. First, think of the physical body. You have the stomach as a chemical laboratory, then the heart, a pumping station, and so on. The prana must work in this. These pranic parts must then be joined.

Secondly, the soul: it consists, firstly, of the sentient soul; secondly, of the mind soul – it can understand what it feels; thirdly, it is aware as the consciousness soul.

Thirdly, spirit: firstly, All-Spirit; secondly, human spirit; thirdly, human self-spirit-self. What the human spirit is is expressed by Christian esotericism as follows: the angels proclaim the glory of God. The human spirit is only aware of the glory of God, it is not itself.

[Stage] 3, 4, 6 and 7 combine and form only one. This gives us one. At the time when it was decided to form the chain of worlds, there were still nine. Saturn represents this plan. It represents the Kama-Manas, which stands in the middle. So we have four principles in front and four behind. Therefore Saturn has eight moons. That makes nine in total, and these nine together represent the preliminary plan for the creation of the world, while the ring signifies the process of becoming unified into a single entity. These unified principles are the archetypal human being. The ring is therefore also called “spiritus mund”. Thus Saturn would be the preliminary sketch of the planetary system. It looks like our solar system set apart. It is the archetype of our entire solar system. Within the upper triad, only one remains as Atma. This is Uranus.

And now Atma as unity, as upper triad with the Tetraktys. This presents itself as a common sphere for the upper principles, which are grouped around below as the four exemplary moons that Jupiter has. They are therefore not yet moons in our sense, but they are the principle of the moon before the moon is there. Our moon is a precipitated part. The four moons of Jupiter are driving, which can only be absorbed into Jupiter. Our principles apply only to our development. The deva development is already such that we cannot say that it has the same principles. Kama is already so different that we could not use it. The manasic principle of the devas is quite different, has quite different characteristics, although it is allied with us and we are able to understand it.

These indications are to be observed under certain conditions. But much has come to our knowledge only through tradition. Even Masters know about such things only because records are available from times when these things were still known. In the middle of the Lemurian race, the great teachers had come. We can know something about the Dhyani-Chohans. The Secret Doctrine is drawn from these records. Originally, it was only the Dzyan verses. These were only available in ancient records, accessible only under special conditions.

We understand the cosmos best if I say something about the human aura first, and this will enable us to better present the development of the rounds and races with regard to the influence of the so-called Pitris. You will see why I am including this.

What is called the physical human being is only part of the human being; the complete human being consists of a number of members that are actually visible to those whose sense organs are open to them. Although you know all of this in essence, I still have to link it to what I have to say in order to describe it accurately. The physical human being then has what I would call an etheric double body within him, which is visible to someone who has ether vision. It is a true double image of the ordinary physical body.

Then a so-called soul body or astral body penetrates both of these. This astral body extends beyond the physical body, is slightly larger and has the shape of an oval, of an egg, because it extends a little further beyond the body at the head and is a little narrower. It contains all the feelings, passions and desires that make up a person's inner life. All things that are caused by physical life are contained in it as dark clouds. The purer it is, the more it resembles the stars. It has a color that ranges from orange to yellow. If you imagine the physical body away, you have a kind of elongated circle that has an orange color as its basic tone. You can see the most diverse cloud formations flickering in it and the tiniest figures playing in it. In the human being, as he exists today as the average human being, this is visible to the seer.

You then find this astral body permeated with another form, with what we call the mental body. This mental body has only existed in human beings since the middle of the third race; the Lemurians, who were at the beginning of their development, did not yet have a mental body. If we go back to the area south of the front and rear India towards Australia, where the Lemurians lived, they had a physical body, something condensed in the middle, and then the astral body. Otherwise, nothing could be seen in them. The more the Lemurian race developed, the more a dark, black, spherical spot appeared inside these astral bodies, at a point - and if you want to describe this point, it is where our physical brain has its center. This black point, this spherical spot within the astral body, is what is actually referred to as the human ego, which has developed since the Lemurian period. This is the outer form of the ego!

Since the development of the Lemurian race, the beginning of what I have called the mental body has been located within this point. From this point begins an emanation that grows ever larger and larger and permeates the aura, so that the aura is animated from within. In the Lemurians, the point was still very small; it grew larger and larger, and now, in the average person, it protrudes above the astral body to the extent that it gains predominance over the passions and drives through thinking, through the mind, through moral feeling; that is what has developed since the Lemurian race.

We must now ask ourselves: why is this developing? The answer to the question of the “why” of this mental body lies in the fact that it is only now that what one is actually entitled to call spirit is emerging in humans. Since that time, since the spiritual impact on humans has taken place - that is, since the middle of the Lemuria - the emergence of the human mental body has been taking place.

Now I ask you to consider that the driving force behind what causes the mental body to emerge is the higher self: AtmaBudhi-Manas; this wells up. If we could see it alone in its swelling, it would be a blue mass, which, the further it comes outwards, becomes more and more violet. Because it is also mixed with the earlier formations of the astral body, it takes on various other nuances; it is mixed. That which is the I in man was only at that point during the time of the Lemurian race, because in reality this point then becomes the boundary of the mental aura, so you have to imagine - let us say - the astral body of the Lemurian Age in such a way that what was initially just a black dot formed a spiritual skin that became bigger and bigger [see sketch]; and in the spiritual skin is the I.

We have so far progressed in our development. Now let's go back to the point where, apart from the astral body, the Lemurian human being was completely in absolute darkness and only the astral body was luminous, in that the black dot appeared and the astral body began to radiate.

Before that, the astral body was surrounded by a bluish shell. They were in an astral body that was surrounded by a blue shell on the outside. However, this was not present on its own; it continued until it reached the blue shell of the next Lemurian. This blue atmosphere represents the collective human spirit, which holds together from the outside what was organized there. The development consists in this blue mass being drawn in and absorbed; the entire blue auric mass is finally drawn in and completely absorbed. Then the Lemurians are pure astral bodies. This also comes to the fore at the point I mentioned and wells up from within. Then the whole mental world is drawn in, and the astral body now glows in the dark.

We are now going back more and more. All the astral bodies were enclosed in the general aura that belonged to them. If we go back to the beginning of our development on earth, we would have what underlies development. When we look at these natures, these astral spheres, they are the descendants of what we call the Pitris. Everything in these astral auras comes from the Pitris, who came over from the Junarian epoch into our development. This total matter in the aura comes from the Lunarian epoch.

In the interval between the Lunar and Earthly epochs, these entire astral entities are present as seeds and slumbered over. So that you now have to imagine the total blue aura as a total mass that is drawn in, that appears as a total mass in a very dark violet, so that it could be seen even during the pralaya, so that it could be seen as it developed from the lunar to the earthly development; one would see how it exists in a dark violet.

When earthly development begins, the earth is red; it glows reddish; but it has the blue atmosphere around it. The reddish earth is what has formed from the Pitri seeds. The Pitri seeds form the reddish Arupa sphere, and that which is spirit surrounds this Arupa sphere as a blue atmosphere. This spirit, which was present, is differentiated as such; it is differentiated in itself, that is, it already carries the spiritual seed for every human being that will arise later. Just as our soul contains individual thoughts, so the spirit carries the individual human being as a thought. At the intersections there are dark spots (see sketch).

When the old moon was in its nirvana, the individual Pitris were completely separate from each other; they had the most perfect astral bodies imaginable. What I have just described comes from the lunar epoch. What comes across? The Pitri seeds and their entire auric atmosphere; they undergo the Pralaya there. However, they would not be able to develop further in earthly evolution if they did not now encounter something that is present everywhere in the universe, but which can only be suitable for them in a certain form, namely that which can later become physical matter and which is present everywhere in the universe as cosmic dust.

Worlds are constantly being created and destroyed, filling the entire universe with cosmic dust. Take, for example, the comet discovered by Biela. It split into two parts, then into several parts, and finally into many parts; it will eventually disintegrate into world atoms. Cosmic dust was discovered in the nineteenth century. It makes it so that when we calculate a planetary orbit, we get a number that is slightly too large because the planets have to overcome the dust masses.

Now you have to imagine that what comes across as the Pitri seeds and the auric atmosphere combine the world dust, but such world dust, which is attracted by them with a magnetic force, is what they need so that they can integrate it and become firm. This is how they get the physical body. So the Pitris organize the world dust; the Pitri is dependent on absorbing the world dust like the plant absorbs the earth dust from the soil. This process is expressed in the theosophical scriptures as follows: the Pitris form the seed forms and then build out the forms with matter so that the blue spiritual atmosphere can be absorbed.

The building is done from two sides: from the inside, from the Pitri seeds, the physical body is built; and the blue atmosphere, flowing in from the outside, forms the mental body.

The Pitris are present in various degrees of perfection; not all have reached the same high level. It is exactly the same as with Plato, Pythagoras and so on, who, when Nirvana of the Earth is reached, will be further along than the general human race; they were simply more advanced. The most advanced were the solar Pitris. There are two types of them. But then there are also two types of lunar-Pitris who had reached a fairly normal level of development, namely such that they were able to develop a kind of karma within themselves, a karma that was similar to the karma of our animals at the end of our earth development. Certain animals will have reached the point where one can speak of guilt and atonement in relation to them. Our animals do not yet have this, but at the end of their development they will. The karmic principle was already present in some species. In other species it was only in the process of development, and in still others it was only present in a rudimentary way. There are seven levels here, which are again related to the seven human rounds. In the very first stage the Solar-pitris were unable to intervene; they had no need to. They were there, but they hovered around the earth, as it were, waiting to be admitted. I will compare this with the following:

Imagine yourself back in the old days of the pile dwellings in Germany. Imagine that there would have been trained engineers there; they would not have been able to start anything, they would not have been able to do anything; there would have had to be more primitive natures: these were the still imperfect Pitris. When a later stage of development was reached, only the more perfect Pitris had the ability to take in. This continued until the Solar Pitris were able to intervene during the fourth round. It was only during the Lemurian race that the Solar Pitris were able to incarnate. The entire auric atmosphere was drawn in to make them swell from within. This was something that had nothing to do with Earth at all, but it gained influence. Then the more perfect beings, who already had the power to draw forth something from themselves, and whom we know as the Venus Sons - the Manasa-Putras, higher entities that were not intended within earthly development - had to intervene. They were there, and when they had incarnated, the first of the still lower human beings could receive the first teaching.

Today I would like to explain to you the formation of the aura and show you how it gradually develops. You will then easily understand the rest. I will show how the aura has developed since the middle of the Lemurian race. I will give you a kind of description of it so that it will be self-explanatory to you.

The middle of the Lemurian race development is an important point for the human race. Until then, the human body was built up from the outside, so that by the middle of the Lemurian race, the human body was already present as a physical body, etheric body and astral body. These three are present in the aura of the Lemurian ancestor. At the moment we arrive at the middle of the Lemurian race, a black dot becomes visible in the middle of the aura of the Lemurian ancestors.

If you imagine the physical body away, the etheric and astral body remains. This is the Lemurian man. He then receives a black point above the head; it is what we call the actual self of the human being. I will draw the Atlantic man in a moment, following on from this.

The Atlantean human would now look something like this, if this were the physical body /see sketch]. The Atlantean human, according to his aura, looks quite different from the Lemurian human and the present human; the Atlantean human has a black egg shape, and the astral human is the entire aura. Within the astral aura, the black dot expands and becomes a shell for the inner core. The remains of the Atlantean race still have this peculiar aura. The spirit shines within the black dot; it begins to shine. That which begins to shine is blue in itself, but appears, depending on the astral body,

in different shades of blue-red, indigo and so on. So, if you imagine everything away, something like an indigo egg will be visible. In a person who is particularly imaginative, it appears through various green thought forms. In a person who has very pure, abstract thoughts, it appears through the yellow form. Then it also appears in a beautiful coloration that tends more towards violet. This, which the Atlantean human has, becomes larger and larger, so that in an average person of our present race this black egg coincides with the outline of the astral body.

Our present-day human being more or less maintains a balance. He occupies his mind as far as he is interested, and he controls his desires and instincts with his mind. All our external culture is basically there to satisfy urges, instincts and passions. This is expressed by the fact that your astral aura coincides with the mental aura.

If you look at a more highly developed person in the present development, it is somewhat different. The mental aura extends beyond the astral aura; it protrudes somewhat. The I extends even further.

In the case of a chela or an adept, you have the astral body in the middle, then the mental body and only then the black egg, the I, so that the astral is surrounded by the mental and only then covered by the I, so that the astral is used for mental purposes.

The I is a point in the moment of becoming I in the middle of the Lemurian race. The I is now the outermost shell. The brain becomes more and more the center of the whole organism.

In the first race of our Aryan population, the actual center of movement in the mental aura was still located slightly above the physical brain and only gradually migrated into the physical brain. Those who were incarnated as adepts within the Atlantean race were endowed with a much higher intuition, an intuition that was still impersonal. Then this gradually migrated into the being, and only later does the spiritual come out of the personal.

The adepts of the fourth - that is, the Atlantean - race were still God-inspired seers; those of the sixth race will be self-inspired seers!

That is the difference between the beginnings of our own race [i.e., the fifth] and us! This is also a reason why, at the beginning of the theosophical development or movement, the adepts, who are our adepts, could hardly be understood; why they themselves felt that they could hardly be understood. This was because the adepts, who belonged to the earliest population, had a much more spiritual life that had not yet descended into mere rationality. The Westerner wants to understand. Therefore, if you read the “Secret Doctrine,” you will find the passage where the Master says, “You with your Western judgment understand it only with difficulty!

Everything in the aura can be seen by the seer, absolutely everything. The only thing he does not see, and in which no seer can see anything, is the essence of the dark, which signifies the ego, whether it is the black point or the black ring. What is visible is what has been formed from the outside and what has been formed from the inside. What actually constitutes a person's true self cannot be seen by any seer! One can follow exactly what nature has brought forth as I, but one can never see it in its self-uniqueness. For anyone, even for the highest seer, there is the dark point in man. Just as little as one can say “I” to another person, just as little can we see what is in the aura of the other I.

Something about consciousness: You consist of nothing but cells. Each cell has a cell consciousness. Your consciousness is the totality of the cell consciousnesses. The consciousness of which I speak here will never merge into another. Just as you incarnate in a cell body, so a higher consciousness will incarnate in what comes from the various egos. At each seance, the totality of the participants is the body for a higher entity. The actual ego is therefore not visible.

In the Lemurian, there is therefore a dark point; in the Atlantean, there is a circle or an egg-shaped form within the aura; for us, this blackness coincides approximately with the boundary of the aura; for the adept, the mental aura extends beyond the astral aura, and where it does so, it becomes resplendent in the most beautiful sense; it then plays into the blue or violet. The rose-red is the actual creative process, where the ego in the creative forces begins to reshape the world in a spiritual way, and where the adept begins to become a real planetary spirit.

And now something about what is really understood by so-called inanimate nature: the higher spirits also have an ego. If a spirit is so great that it builds a solar system, then it is not to be found in the sun, but at the outermost edge of the system. The solar system appears to be inanimate because the ego has already been externalized. If we could get to the edge of the solar system, we would find the ego there. That is the esoteric reason for the blueness of the sky! Space appears blue because it represents nothing other than the black shell on the outside! And outside this black shell, the spirit appears through the various shells in differently colored regions! So when you look at it, it must appear to you as if you were seeing a black surface through a glass that is illuminated, it appears blue to you. For example, the center of a flame also appears blue. Where the flame is blue, there is a dark space; nothing is burning there. This is easy to see in a candle flame; but in truth it is black. Every flame is bright. The blue of the sky can truly be called a firmament, as Genesis says; this is to be understood as literally as possible, just as the general spirit is outside of the ego. Nothing in the world is without spirit; there is only spirit that has not yet become ego; within is the spirit with which the ego has already been filled. The ego is the boundary between the spirit from outside and the spirit that lives in man. This boundary is the ego of the solar system concerned.

The Genesis is an inspired book; it is not something that has been thought up by people. As long as the mental had not yet been drawn into the human mind, inspiration came from outside. And we call the books inspired from outside the content of the original revelations. These all agree with each other if we look beyond the cover that people have drawn over them. We can go to the Indian books or to the traditions of the decadent tribes in America: they agree because they were received as revelations. This is not only known to occultists, but has obviously always been recognized. Herder also saw through this. The nineteenth century, which was mainly concerned with criticism, measured these things according to human opinions. The correct point of view regarding these books is the one from which it can be said: If we do not understand these books, it is not the book that is absurd, but we ourselves can be absurd.

I would now like to return to the aura of advanced people, for example to Plato in ancient Greece. The development that Plato has achieved will only be reached by the average people of the present race in the next round; that is why such people as Plato are called “artificial fifth-rounders”. Now, however, they also differ significantly from the other people. When the present people have reached the fifth round, their bodies will no longer be physical bodies as they are now, but astral bodies, so that the difference will still be there. Plato was in the physical body of the fourth round what the other people can only be in the astral body of the fifth round!

So Plato was in the physical body of the fourth round, which other people will only be in the astral body of the fifth round! This requires a significant difference in the progress of development. As a result, when earthly development is complete, Plato will be in a very different state from the others. In the fifth round he will perhaps be a Buddha and in the sixth he will be even higher! Let's go back and look at Plato again. During the fourth round, he had already achieved with his physical brain what the average person will be able to achieve with their astral brain in the fifth round. This will enable him to have a corresponding effect in the next round; he has thus acquired an ability that others do not yet have: namely, to have an effect on the physical brain!

This is the same as if an engineer were suddenly transported to a primitive tribe; there he will be able to transform all things to a much greater extent with his artistic skills and knowledge; he will be able to teach this primitive tribe. While someone who grows out of the wild tribe can only take development a small step further, the one who comes into the tribe with a great development will be able to take the tribe much further. A highly developed person will naturally not intervene in the first stages of development, but only later, when development has progressed to a certain point. That is the task of advanced people! They will cross over into the next developmental epoch, but will wait until they can intervene!

[Presumably from the question and answer session:]

By retroactive, I meant that he has acquired abilities that others do not have. The others are bound to the physical brain, and then again bound to a single brain. He will act on the astral brain in the sixth round and on the mental brain in the seventh, so that he can retroactively act on the earlier brains, that he can direct them from outside.

The effectiveness of the Pitri is therefore to be understood as something similar, in which sense the earlier can participate in the construction of the new world body. Those who have completed their development in the normal way, who have become real people, will be able to contribute accordingly to this construction from the outside.

How far have we come at the end of the seventh round? So far that we can rebuild from the outside everything that the spirit has built up from the inside. So when we find new world dust, we will immediately build a body that will correspond to our level of development. We will build the “humans” of future stages of development! But those who have remained behind, who have not come so far, will have to build the lowest forms; they will accordingly be the ones who, as it were, build the walls of the new world system from below, and the developed ones will intervene where there is work for them.

The ego in us can never be lost; it only transforms. At present it thinks, and that is the highest faculty it possesses today. We will animate the next entities again, but not with manasic egos, but with higher egos. We leave the thoughts of the more developed ones to form a new sun; we lay them on the altar of community. A split of a nation into two parts is always preceded by a battle of the Dhyan-Chohans on higher levels.

Today I would like to talk about the formation of the cosmos according to Annie Besant's “Ancient Wisdom”. I would like to show how to try to read the relevant passage. It starts on page 325, where Annie Besant attempts to describe how the transition from the lunar epoch took place, in which our ancestors underwent their development and then came to our earth. During the lunar Manvantaras, evolution produced seven classes of beings, who were called Father because they produced the beings of terrestrial evolution.

Just as we have the task during our earthly epoch to bring the mind and so on to the highest development, these beings on the moon had to bring the sentient being to the highest refined form. That is the chemical principle, so that they had developed the sentient life in the idealized way. When the seventh round had been completed, these beings entered into a state of Nirvana. That was the full image of Yahweh, the being that was their ideal. As seeds overwinter, so they overwintered through a pralaya. They thus developed soul.

There were also two other races. Solar Pitris were those who had progressed further than the ordinary lunar development. They had reached the highest level of similarity with their deity. But even during the lunar epoch there were Moon Pitris, Moon Pithakas. The more developed beings were solar Pitris. Those who had already become masters on the moon were, in terms of the development of the human mind, higher than the moon gods. The moon gods did not develop the element of reason. It would be futile for the deity to only come as far as it was in the beginning. Something must be produced that goes further than the beginning. If the Masters are looked upon as the end of our life development, they are found to be of a much higher wisdom than that which has been incarnated as Earthly Wisdom. The wisdom that has been incarnated is only sufficient to guide the Earthly development to its end. Therefore, it must be realized that the Master is, under certain circumstances, much higher than the Deva.

Yahweh only became the first person of the Trinity through an error. He is the god of earthly forms, who therefore forms the Adam out of matter. Of course, the Jews have the Father-God. But they don't talk about him. That is namely the one who was never spoken of.

People are called such lunar-age beings who advance the Pitris - Dhyanis. No one had developed the causal body on the lunar epoch. Those who had causal bodies had progressed beyond the lunar epoch into the earthly, human epoch. Plato will bring the highest development of the causal body into the next round.

The lunar Pitris had a certain intelligence, similar to that of animals. The earth is the fourth incarnation. The first incarnation is the planetoids, the second is at the position of Mars, the third at the position of the moon. The fourth incarnation of the planetary chain is the earth. The elementary essence is what I have described as world dust. Just as seeds absorb substances from the earth, the Pitris absorbed earthly materiality. [...]

Sphere a) is the archetypal world. The red sphere emerging from the archetype, developing out of the darkness. The archetypal world. The archetype of all understanding. The mind must be shaped. It must be formed into the body. There was only a solar plexus, no nerve plexus that emanated from the head. The planetary spirits are above the corresponding development. The planetary spirits are at work from the outside; they have the highest task. They determine the succession; they have a task that stands above the individual. They never enter.

The mental world is limited to one kind of sphere. Instead of the stars and constellations, the Akasha Chronicle appears. The formers are not active in the mental sphere, they are active in the realm of Budhi, so the planetary formers can only be found in the sphere of Budhi. At first, the thought is only a point, then it takes shape. The archetype of the plant and the archetype of the minerals arise. On the sphere b) the forms of lower-level formers are reproduced until they have matured into a denser matter. There are small signs and colors in it. The color is the astral matter. The sphere, which was red, has turned orange, and now it is turning yellow. Now it is filled with astral matter.

And now sphere c). On sphere c) the form reaches its densest consistency. From this point on, the nature changes. Spheres e), f), g) follow. On spheres e) and f), consciousness first manifests itself on the ethereal plane. On the blue sphere f), the beings begin to will from within, they begin to move. So the first automatic mind manifests itself. The Lunarpitris are the soul forces of form; they bring it to maturity and later inhabit it. That which they have here in black is the soul. That they think is spirit.

The earthly epoch is destined to make the marriage between spirit and soul complete. Fire is the element of the first round. It is actually fire air, ether fire. In the second round, the first-class Pitris continue their involution. In the second round, the archetypal forms of the plants come into being, which then take on their completion in the fifth round. The mineral is at the stage of highest perfection. The human brain, as a mineral substance, is only a carrier. The mineral kingdom is already dissolving. In the next round, the plant kingdom dissolves, followed by the animal kingdom. And only in the seventh round will man reach his perfection. The mineral has developed seven principles. It is the most perfect of what we have. We have three spiritual realms: the first, second and third logos; then the first elemental realm, the arupic realm; secondly the rupic realm; thirdly the astral, fourthly the physical, the mineral. The mineral is perfect in the fourth round. The plant will have reached its perfection when it has become astral. Genesis, with its seven days, indicates the seven rounds. The first four days are the first four rounds, the seventh day is the resting. The fourth day is the present round. The fifth, sixth and seventh days are yet to come.

The more you get to know Genesis, the more you will have to understand it literally. When you are ready to take the meaning of Genesis literally, then you have really understood it. Air is the element of the second round. The Pitris reach the beginning of the human stage here. The Solarpitris make their first appearance here, on sphere d), to take the lead in human evolution. The beings are always ready four rounds later. The archetypes of human forms were already given in the fourth round.

[I am speaking to you today] to show how one can understand the difficult subject of the rounds according to [the book] “Ancient Wisdom” by Annie Besant.

First of all, I want to warn against speaking too abstractly about the Logos. It is so tempting to speak in general terms of first, second, third Logos. Especially beginners are very keen to talk about “Logos” right away and want to discuss the whole world with arguments about what the first, second, third Logos have for a task. That is not what we want to do.

We want to make clear to ourselves what task the individual beings have within the development of the world [as a whole], whereby they become a certain link in the Logos. For it is self-evident that we must be clear about the fact that when, for example, one evolutionary epoch develops into another - for example, the lunar one develops into the terrestrial one - [that] therefore [ for example, everything that took place during the lunar evolution goes through a pralaya and reappears, and that everything goes into an inverse pralaya. What happened earlier goes back into the Logos and becomes a void. It thus rests, as it were, in the Logos, not sleeping, but ready to receive a new task.

Now, the best way to clarify this is to ask ourselves: what will become of everything that is gradually forming during the various rounds and races of our present terrestrial development, for example? What will become of all this? When earthly evolution is over, the sum of all these beings, the sum of these entities, will be a coherent mass of new seeds, which will develop further in the next epoch. They return once more to the Logos. All that develops during our earthly epoch, what remains, what passes through a pralaya, will be a second logos for the next epoch. The result of a passing epoch is a second logos for the next epoch.

I ask you to consider that it is better to ask yourself: What will the second logos be like? Instead of simply saying: first, second, third logos. You stay with the concrete and realize that everything that comes from one epoch into the other is the second logos for the next epoch.

And now we divide the whole evolution during our earthly development into two parts. We are dealing with seven rounds. First, we take the first three and the first half of the fourth round. That is half. Just up to this point, when only half of the fourth round has elapsed, everything that has connected with the second Logos as the third Logos has developed and been expressed. The third logos is something that [gap in transcript]. Logos [is] not used in general yet, is something that has been added recently.

Take plant seeds, put into [the] earth. The seeds you sow are the second logos. The bed, the stuff from which the new forms arise, that is the third logos. The third Logos is used to swell up forms during the first half of the round development. This is what Annie Besant calls the development of form, the involution. [It is] what I would call world dust, if you would call it the substantial bed. [The second with the third Logos build the forms, from the outside in.]

The human being is built up from the outside. The Pitris - second Logos - have come over. They have fertilized the third Logos. From the fertilization of the third Logos by the second Logos arises the animal foundation of the human being. [That is] until the middle of the fourth round the Lemurian/Lunar race.

And now the second fertilization occurs from what has been created so far. From the second and third logos, the first logos now connects directly, creating the further second part. This is how the second half of the fourth round and the three following rounds come about.

So we have to imagine: [the] second logos is what comes from outside, [it] structures itself [with the help of the third logos] into form, swells. All the shells are built.

And now [the] fertilization comes from the first Logos. It radiates from within. That is the fertilization of the first Logos. That is what can be seen in the aura.

Up to the fourth round, the aura is cloud-like [from the outside], up to the Lemurian race. In the middle of the Lemurian race, the radiating image of the aura begins. And this is the inflow of the first Logos. And this is what Annie Besant calls the development of life or evolution. Life or evolution begins from within. [Third Logos: Evolution of Life.]

[The] man of the Lemurian race formed [a] physical shell, [an] astral shell [and a] Kama-Manas. All of this has built itself up. Now a black dot is emerging. In the middle, above the head, indicating, as it were, the place from which the inflow of the first Logos radiates.

Each evolutionary epoch has a very specific intention of the Logos to carry out. Our current round - terrestrial epoch - has intended man from the outset and has to bring man to completion. The present [round] has the specific task of predisposing man from the outset and bringing him to development.

For this purpose, there is always a twofold fertilization. The first consists in [that] the result of the previous epoch fertilizes itself. That which emerges from the fertilization are the facts of the first half of evolution. Then [the] second fertilization [by the] first logos occurs. These are the facts of the second half of evolution. One half goes from the outside in and forms the form. The other goes from the inside out and forms life.

I call [the] third logos cosmic dust because everything that is cast off from the other worlds is absorbed into it. In order for [plant] seeds to grow and flourish, matter must first be drawn to them. The [plant] seed must be sunk into [the] soil that has been prepared for it, so that it can draw out the strength it needs. It is the same with [the] third Logos. It consists of substance filled with [source] power. The kamic entities attract the substance and form a cosmos.

The eighth sphere releases the material and is absorbed into the new development when a new cosmos is created. [The eighth sphere, the corpse of each cosmos, provides the material for the future.] Each world body turns light purple at the end of its development and disappears. All seeds are contained in it and / gap in the transcript]

You have to free yourself from the idea of space. It does not reflect everything.

From the third round onwards, no new forms are formed. Externally, people have reached the most perfect form. The next thing people will achieve is to make the other covers more perfect from within.

Now the effect on the astral body has already begun. The fourth round will be complete, the fifth will come, and then more and more will be done to the astral body. And on the fifth sphere/round the astral body will be like this.

[From the middle of the fourth round, the forms are complete; now the influence on the astral body begins from within.] He will have wheels in his astral body. The chakras move, as they already do in those who can see spiritually. The chakras rotate.

During the sixth round, the mental body is formed. Not only the chakras move, but the mental body also shines more and more radiantly from within. Now it is the radiant mental body. This is complete on the sixth sphere.

In the seventh round, the causal body develops to its greatest perfection. [It transcends the boundary of the astral body until, at the end, there is nothing but the causal body.] Namely, the rays become more effective causal bodies.

the [gap in the transcript]

At the end of the seventh round, there is nothing but the causal body.

The uppermost layer is formed in the fourth round. In the uppermost brain, the tool is given for independent activity. Until then, the third logos works from the outside. From the brain, the forces can then flow out and set the chakras in motion again.

We call that which comes from the previous development Prakriti, that which comes from the second half, Mahat, and that which comes from the third, Purusha.

The body is Mahat, soul is Prakriti, spirit is Purusha. [In the seed, Mahat and Purusha have disappeared; Prakriti is carried forward.

The body is prepared by the spirit within it. The body would not make mistakes if it were not tempted by the spirit. There is no physical sin. All sin is of a spiritual nature. Only a person who has given up on controlling Kama can be cruel. Only from the middle of the Lemurian race onwards is there a “good and evil”, not before. Mind and body are two perfect parts. In the middle of the two lies Kama, the soul, it is the carrier of imperfection.

[The body is the mind from the outside, Mahat. The soul is Prakriti.]

There is nothing as perfect as your lungs, your stomach, your heart. If the mental faculties were as perfect [as the organs], you would have attained [the] mental perfection. The physical does not err, the mineral does not err at all. It cannot err.

Eight days ago, we followed man through the various stages of the so-called spirit land, the Devachan. We saw how man's destiny unfolds in the spirit realm, in the Devachan, between two embodiments. We have seen that, depending on the degree of their development, human beings are able to soar ever higher and higher or ever longer and longer into the realms of this land of causes, in order to bring abilities into this earthly world from this land of causes for ever higher and higher development. The actual causes lie in his work and creativity in this spiritual realm. For those whose minds are open and awakened, in order to observe the spiritual conditions that always surround us, which I have described to you, during their embodiment, the three parts of the human being whose destiny we have come to know, always lie open before the mind's eye. These three parts of the human being, of which I have spoken as gradually enveloping themselves, as it were, leaving the earthly, the carnal shell – the one in so-called Kamaloka, the place of desires, of wishes ; the second in Devachan or the spiritual realm; and the third in the uppermost region of Devachan, where the deepest self is able to develop and unfold, in order to then return with increased power. These three parts of man are his so-called astral body, the body that encompasses all his desires, wishes and passions, everything that man has in common with the animal, everything that forms the mediation, so to speak, between his own spiritual nature and the sensual nature, everything that he lays aside in the land of purification, of cleansing, in Kamaloka.

And then he ascends to the land of the actual spirit, to the land of the spirits or to the Devachan, in order to discard his second body there as well, the body of the world of ideas, of the higher human abilities, which still chains him to the human and inhibits him, in order to then, as it were, be freed of the body, depending on the state of development, to linger for a longer or shorter time in the actual disembodied state of mind. We call that body of man, who rises up to these uppermost regions of the spiritual realm, who spreads his wings to unfold, we call this body the cause-bearer or causal body. This causal body, which we preserve between two incarnations, which we bring with us again and again, this body, which forms the cause of what we have brought upon ourselves, which carries us from one incarnation to the next, that is the one that lives in the uppermost region of Devachan. The other is the one who is in the second region of Devachan, who then immerses himself in the realm of desires, and that is the astral body, in order to then move into the carnal body. Every human being has these three bodies within them.

I have already spoken about the so-called aura. I have already said that the human being visible to physical eyes is enveloped in a cloud of light, in an oval shape that presents the most diverse light phenomena to those who are receptive to it. The egg is smaller and larger depending on the degree of development. It is small in the one who is still at the lowest level of spiritual development. In this case the aura is only a faint glow of light that spreads around the body, but it grows larger and larger the more incarnations the person has undergone and the higher and later the person's stage of development. Then this aura shows the most diverse light and color phenomena. This aura is threefold, and the view for this aura can also be threefold.

There are people with so-called “psychic vision” who are only able to see what is happening in the astral realm. They see only that as a light phenomenon, which can also be perceived in animals. They see what lives in a person in terms of desires, cravings and passions in the form of light phenomena. A person can also rise above this realm. Then the body of representation becomes visible to him, the higher spiritual possibilities of development as a second, finer substance, as an aura that radiates through and permeates the first.

And finally, there is that which spreads out as an even more ethereal substance within this second aura. This is present in a very weakly developed state in people at the lowest levels, but it is developed more and more highly and appears in a wonderful way in the high spiritual beings of our culture. This is what carries over from incarnation to incarnation, the causal body. It is also present in undeveloped people, but only small, like a small halo above their heads. The more a person develops, the more it expands and becomes, as it were, a sun. And the more it illuminates and glows through the being, the better one can see these three bodies distinctly, when one's spiritual vision is opened.

One can direct one's eyes only to the astral world, one can subtract what belongs to the lower and higher spheres and direct one's gaze only to the astral aura. Then one sees only the instincts, desires and passions as color phenomena in front of oneself. If you then focus your attention on the body of representation, you see the mental body. And if you look at the eternal, at the body of causes, you see the most luminous aura of the human being. This bearer of causes is only visible to those whose spiritual eye is awakened in the highest regions of the spiritual world.

This cause carrier, seen externally in its light appearance, shows us the most diverse sights in the most diverse people. If you look at an undeveloped person, be it a negro in Africa, or even an undeveloped person in our areas, a person who has not yet formed many thoughts, is not able to live much in the imagination, knows nothing of higher ideas or spiritual interests, who only lives in his animal instincts, in satisfying his hunger and his physical well-being, then, if we disregard all other auras and only look at the causal aura, it appears to us as a more or less dark oval. This indicates that the causal body is still underdeveloped, that the real self still has a long way to go before it develops. These are the people who show nothing but a few greenish or dirty indigo stripes in their brown ovals. These few stripes are the only indication of the causal or cause body. This is the sight that fills those who can observe the aura with sorrow, because it shows those who can observe how much we still have to do with undeveloped people. We can see how rays of light emerge in them when we transmit spiritual culture to them.

But even the lower mental body, the body of imagination of the undeveloped person, still shows the brownish form and a few developed greenish areas, which alternate with reddish areas or with areas that play into the bluish. These greenish and bluish parts become more and more frequent the more ideas are formed in the person concerned. And then, when we examine such a person for his astral body, we are suddenly confronted with appearances of almost terrible effect in the glaringly bright colors; we are confronted with blood-red clouds that fill almost the entire astral body, billowing about in confusion. Only at the upper or lower layer of the oval we see a greenish or indigo base, and that alternates with the brownish colorings, but also alternates with all kinds of formations, which differ according to the different temperaments. In the angry people we see red flashes flash through the astral body, in others we see bluish-gray clouds.

This is the aura of an undeveloped person. Then we have to look at the aura of a person at a higher level, that is, a person who has received a good education here in our area. In such a person, the causal body appears as a form that is already more endowed with colors, as a form that is permeated by beautiful colors. In this case, it is the green colors, green-yellow and yellow color nuances. These are the nuances that the European has. Only when these colors expand a little further does the lower spiritual body appear. And when we look at the astral body of a person, it generally appears to be somewhat similar in design to the astral body of an undeveloped person. Only the colors have different nuances. The undeveloped person has blackish colors; the more developed the person is, the brighter the colors. They are illuminated from within, they attract the gaze and have a sympathetic effect on the gaze.

And if we go to the highly developed spiritual person, to the one who has developed higher spiritual abilities within himself, who has already devoted himself to a spiritual life through many incarnations, then the astral body also appears in completely different transformations. It no longer appears interspersed with cloud-like formations, but radiates from within on a blue background. The cause body has a more or less light or dark blue coloration, and the eternal man radiates into this. The purer and nobler he develops in the spiritual, the more he shows the coloration of the spiritual. We see a beautiful golden-yellow radiance from the inside out, merging into radiance verging on rose-red, and these merge into beautiful bluish-violet radiance. The causal body is permeated by radiance, expanding more and more, taking on larger and larger dimensions. The adept rests in the midst of this causal body, which fades from golden yellow rays within to violet rays without, so that he is surrounded by this flood of light, enclosed by it, so that he can become so great that he can often exceed his human form ten, twenty, thirty times in length from top to bottom.

These are the causes of great leaders and guides of people. And if you then look for the body of the imagination of lower people, you will still find forms there, but you will find that they have become luminous, sparkling, radiant from within. We may well conclude that this is because what such people want and feel is shaped by the spirit, by spiritual abilities. These are the faculties that reveal themselves to the spiritual eye when it observes its surroundings. It sees what is transient and what is permanent.

All the bodies that I have mentioned, especially the astral body, which appears flooded in reddish shades, are completely lost in Kamaloka and Devachan. In the lower parts of Devachan and the astral plane, the finer parts dissolve. Man loses what he contains of lower sensual values. The astral body can completely dissolve in Kamaloka and only passes with the causal body, the spiritual body, to Devachan.

In the fourth region of Kamaloka, what we call human selfishness and human egoism is completely absorbed by matter. Whatever still chains itself to the world is lost in the fourth region. Man feels the worthlessness of base selfishness and begins to realize that he must stretch his wings, that he must comprehend what does not concern him. And when he arrives in the spiritual realm, his feelings, emotions and perceptions, which can be summarized by the word selfishness, have disappeared. He has reached the stage where he can experience, “That is you!” and “I am Brahma”. He can hand over the lower spiritual bodies to dissolution and take his self over into the higher realms of the spiritual realm, where it can fully unfold. Here everything appears to a person in its true form. Here he appears as what he is, as what has embodied itself.

The bluish oval appears as the actual body of the person, and within the bluish oval shines that which we must call the actual essence of the person. A person cannot yet have this body. It is woven from the three finest substances of the spirit world, and these show up in their pure bluish color. I emphasize that this pure bluish color can only be observed if one completely disregards what else the person has and only looks at the spiritual. So he appears only in his bluish oval, permeated by his essence.

This is what the Platonic philosophy called the so-called luminous man, the sparkling, the shining one. This is the same thing that the initiate Paul called the so-called spiritual body. This means nothing other than what we find here in the highest regions of Devachan. This fine blue body is woven from the finest fabrics of the spirit land, of Devachan. That which radiates and sparkles in it does not come from any of the worlds we have mentioned so far. What sparkles in this body comes from even higher worlds.

If you take the earthly world, the astral world and the spiritual world, the Devachan, you have the three worlds within which a person incarnates in the world. He always returns to develop new abilities there, which he then applies in the earthly world. These are the three worlds that Paul speaks of: the spiritual world, the soul world and the body world. Everything is woven into the physical body from these three. When we come into the physical world, we spread the physical covering around us. We take substances from physical matter, from the physical world. We live in some world with those substances taken from that world, so that when we descend from the spiritual realm, we first surround our real self with the body that is woven from the lower parts of the spiritual realm; this then descends into the astral world and forms the astral body. This finally attracts the physical materiality, and then the person is embodied again.

But what expands within the actual blue spiritual body, within this sparkling structure, is not from these three worlds. The real self does not come from these three worlds. What is wrapped around it as a blue oval is the uppermost, the finest, which is taken only from the spiritual realm. But that which is embodied, the self, comes from even higher realms. It comes from the actual divine home of man, from the regions which the theosophist calls the Budhi region and the Nirvana region. Man comes from these two regions.

The human being's essence rests in this spiritual body, which was present before man began to incarnate and which will again be present in other worlds when man ceases to incarnate. This is the actual, eternal, heavenly, divine essence of man. It is what Giordano Bruno called the eternal monad, which passes eternally through all embodiments, the heavenly self of man. This now participates in the manner indicated in what is gradually emerging. At first it radiates in a beautiful golden-yellow color, then it expands more and more, and in the outermost parts it takes on a violet-reddish color, depending on the various character traits that the person has acquired, because all of these exert their effects on the self. In a person who has developed the qualities of pride or ambition in his previous incarnations, we see how this golden, radiant part of the person takes on an orange-reddish coloration. This shows the effect that pride has had on the self. And in another way, other qualities show the influences that must be balanced. This is what has descended from even higher worlds to incarnate in our earthly world. This is what comes from Budhi and Nirvana; this is what we call Atma-Budhi, which is composed of the highest essence, which comes from the divine Being itself.

Last time I spoke about the fact that gradually, as a person passes through many incarnations, he ascends to the three higher regions of the spirit land, that is, each person will have to spend a more or less long time between two incarnations in the first higher region. Even the undeveloped savage experiences a glimpse of his Self in the spiritual realm, and his stay in this realm is getting longer and longer. And when the qualities of compassion, the higher spiritual qualities, are developed, then he ascends to the second region between two embodiments. And when he then returns to our earth, he has become what we call an emissary. Then he has become someone who can speak about the intentions of the world, then he is someone who, between two incarnations, has participated in the unveiling of the impulses of life, then he knows why the animal, the plant, and the human being develop. Then he can talk about the Earth, where it came from and what will happen to it in the future, then he can speak from experience about what theosophical wisdom reveals to us. When he has become a so-called initiate – that is, in the embodiment – then he knows from his own experience the nature of higher life and is able to recognize good. Then, in the next incarnation, he ascends to the highest region of the spiritual realm, where those who have the causes of world events clearly in view, even when embodied in the earthly world, reside.

And then the region is reached into which the structure of the higher worlds, the world of Budhi and the world of Nirvana, shines. Just as Budhi shines into our spiritual world, so the highest of things shines into it, the germs of the human self shine into it. These germs are there and enter the third world to envelop themselves in the substance of the third region. You may ask whether a seer, when he enters the third region of the spiritual world, can also see human beings in the state of germination. Yes, he can, because in this region that which belongs to prehistoric times has long since ceased to exist. The state of affairs is laid bare as if it were happening now, the state in which human souls have now begun to fulfill their development.

What Jacob Böhme expressed has come to pass with this man: if someone were to say to me, “Were you there when what you have told us about the beginning of earthly existence came about?” I could say, “Yes, I was there.” For in him the sense had long been opened that he could say that he had been there at the beginning, that he had really participated in the creation of the world.

What I have now related shows you that we are dealing with three worlds: the spiritual world, the astral world and the earthly or physical world. But this also shows that there are still higher worlds, which are the actual home of the human self. These three worlds are themselves created, formed, they have emerged from a spiritual essence. The sense world has a different origin in the spirit, and the astral world around us has its origin in the spirit. But as we develop more and more in the spiritual, we can investigate the causes of things. We can investigate what underlies the astral as spirit, and we can observe in the highest region of Devachan. But as long as what shines in the budhi does not shine in, we cannot speak of anything that belongs to what we call the deepest truths of world existence. We cannot speak, and we have no power to speak about the cause of evil, about the cause of imperfection, as long as we dwell in these three worlds. Within this world, we have evil alongside good, imperfection alongside perfection. It belongs to this world. It is grounded in this world that evil is added to good and imperfection to perfection. Answering this question requires that one recognize the meaning of existence. There is a meaning of existence, of life and of all becoming. One cannot recognize this if one remains only within the three worlds. And there is the question: Why is good mixed with evil and the perfect with the imperfect within the three worlds?

These three worlds are created from nirvana and budhi, and when we can see beyond that, in nirvana and budhi, then we see how evil, as it were, lies in the divine world order, from which good springs. Ultimately, all evil dissolves into good. According to the sayings of all great minds, good is the actual origin of the world. The world originates in the good. But how it does so, we cannot recognize in the three worlds. If we look beyond our three-worlds circle – I developed this in the first lessons – at the boundary of these three worlds, as it were from Budhi, some mysterious writing becomes perceptible. The Akasha writing appears. This is what is also communicated to us from the external world that does not belong to our three worlds. It contains the destiny of every single person and of all humanity. In this writing, the deeds of people are recorded, and the things that people themselves have entered in the book of guilt through their lives are recorded. Why man can become guilty in the succession of incarnations, that only becomes known at the sight of what has shone forth from the other spheres, when it is possible to read what is recorded in the akasha cloth. In it is written the law of karma.

This law can only be fully understood if one knows how all evil and imperfection dissolves into good, how even evil only contributes to the increase of good. When the highest self shines forth in man, then the great law of world justice is revealed, then the meaning of existence, the meaning of the world, is revealed to him. The world has its meaning from outside the three worlds, and man fathoms this meaning of the world when he rises above the three worlds of Devachan. It requires modesty. When man has found his innermost nature, when he has found in himself the living spirit that comes from the other worlds, when the shining spark has lit up in him, then the source of the shining spark is also revealed to him, and with it the reason for his existence. Then Budhi flows together with that which is above him, with that which is the meaning of the corporeal world. Then man begins to know what is one of the highest secrets of existence, why man is incarnated in this or that body.

With higher vision, we can easily see why a person forms a spiritual body around themselves and why they wrap themselves in an astral body. But now the mystery of earthly incarnation begins: why a person is born into this family, this country, this people. We know very specific human germs. That which is guided by entities of the highest order begins, by entities whose entity rests entirely in Budhi and Nirvana, by the entities we call Lipika, which govern the physical existence of the world, which determine the self to be born in this or that family. This is something that is connected to the deepest meaning of existence. Only when man has risen to the point of fathoming this meaning, do the scales that conceal the answer to the question “How is it that man is born in this body and carries this or that suffering, this or that imperfection through this or that body?” also disappear.

Man is equipped for a certain fate through his physical existence. This is one of the great questions of existence, which is connected to the whole meaning of existence, which is revealed when one knows the decrees of Lipika, the lords of fate. Christian esotericism has understood how to express this in a very beautiful way. Incidentally, you can find this secret in every religion. You just have to know how to read it. The Christian religion has also expressed the veiledness of this secret. You know the beings that live in the spiritual realm: angels or messengers. They have their task within Devachan, within their spiritual realm. The fact that they have their task here, not beyond Budhi or Nirvana, means that their views are bound to what is going on within the actual spiritual realm. But within the spiritual realm, the mystery of why this self dwells in this physical body and that in that is not revealed. That is why the Christian religion expresses it with the words: “The angels veil their faces from the mystery of the Incarnation and only say, ‘Holy, holy, holy’.”

This is just one example of how much can be found in the esotericism of the great religious beliefs if one only knows how to read them. Thus we have followed man through the three worlds and have reached the boundary where the destiny of these three worlds is written in monumental letters: that is the Akasha Chronicle. What shines from this Akasha Chronicle into these three worlds from the outside, as it were, appears to us when we are within these three worlds, in much the same way as when we look out into the starry sky and see, as it were, a heavenly writing in the constellations. Man comes to decipher this writing when he is able to work his way up to the highest regions of Devachan.

The initiates are able to read this Akashic writing and then, when man is able to read more or less of this Akashic writing, then he becomes a participant in the destiny of humanity, then he becomes one of the spiritual leaders of humanity, directing the forces for centuries to come, sending spiritual currents that do not come from the three worlds, but are sent into these three worlds from even higher worlds.

What a person experiences in the third spiritual world, what is known as the “bliss of Devachan”, what lives and flashes in us when we spend the interim between two embodiments in Devachan, that is the subject of the next few hours. I would like to explain why Devachan is called the “land of delights”, why it is called the heavenly region. This will be the subject of our next meditation.

I would like to add that from the boundary of this highest realm of Devachan, exalted masters of Budhi and Nirvana send great impulses to humanity, sending that which has an effect for centuries and making them the greatest guides in human history. They give the impulses, they create out of the mysterious, or according to Christian esotericism, out of that which causes the angels to veil their faces. They are the Messiahs, the greatest of all human leaders. They are named after the kingdom from which they come, from Budhi Buddha. Therefore, those who can teach what flows in from Budhi are called Christ. Buddha, Christ, they are the ones who send the truths from the higher regions into our three worlds. Such a one knows the world. He knows what lies beyond the three worlds. There lies that which we call the secret of evil. This is revealed at the boundary of devachan. There one comes to know the meaning of the world, what I have called the “Worv”. That is what gives the secret its sound. That is why Christ is called: the incarnate Word. That is why it is said: All things are made by the Word. That is why it is said in the Gospel: All things are made by the Word.

This is the sixth step, where the intentions and tendencies of humanity are determined. This is because the one who sends the great and high impulses into human history from this realm, because he knows and must know the secret that lies above the secret of good and evil, can be said to know more than the angels. This is also expressed by Christian esotericism: “Christ makes the angels his messengers.” Those who understand the depths of the Christian religion become theosophists, and true theosophists will not want to contribute to anything other than to the deepening of the core of truth in the great religions of humanity.

I have tried to reconcile the theosophical view of rounds and races, as stated in the “Ancient Wisdom”, with the Bible, and have suggested that the Genesis, the presentation of the Mosaic creation document, is to be taken in a truly literal sense, and that one then fully obtains the theosophical view. It should be noted that the true, great religious documents receive their original and real meaning through Theosophy.

To give an idea of what the Mosaic creation document means, I would like to repeat again: we have to distinguish seven rounds and in each round seven races. In the first round we have the archetypes of the mineral kingdom, in the second round the archetypes of the plant kingdom, in the third round the archetypes of the animal kingdom, in the fourth round the archetypes of man. When our present fourth round is over, the archetypes of man will have been formed. We have not even reached the archetypes yet. When our round is over, we will have expressed the human archetypes. The mineral kingdom will have already reached its completion in the round. It will dissolve again, regress. In the next round, the fifth, the plant kingdom will find its completion, in the sixth the animal kingdom, and in the seventh round the human kingdom.

In the seventh round, humanity will be the complete image of the deity in earthly development. What the deity was at the beginning, humanity will be at the end of the seventh round. The deity will have completed its task and will then rest. Nirvana will have been achieved. It will be able to hand over its task to the Masters and to the Master Lodges, to the Brotherhoods, which will then have developed into the complete image. This is described to us in the Biblical record.

The seven days of Creation signify in the esoteric sense seven rounds, so that the first chapter is to be understood in the following way.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: Then God divided the light from the darkness and called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. [Genesis 1:1-5]

I ask you to visualize exactly what I have described as the first round was. It was initially a reddish, brightly glowing sphere that then went through various stages of development to become a violet sphere, then disappeared into the pralaya, only to emerge again as a red sphere. The first day is thus complete. During this round, the archetypes of the mineral kingdom were formed.

Now the second round begins.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” Before the mineral kingdom came into being, there could be no firmament. The waters represent spiritual substances. These did not separate from each other until the archetypes of the mineral kingdom had been formed, so that chunks now appeared in them. Then God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. God called them heaven and earth. Only the mineral kingdom was pushed into the earthly, the other was still heavenly.

And God said: Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into separate places, so that the dry land may be seen. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of the waters he called the Sea. And God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, and herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit whose seed is in itself, and upon the earth:” And it was so. The earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth. And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven, to give light on the earth: and they did so. And God saw the light, that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Here it is emphasized that the completion of the mineral kingdom comes on the fourth day. In the fifth round, the plant kingdom will reach its completion. That is yet to come. Now the mineral kingdom will reach its completion. In the fifth round, the plant kingdom will reach its completion. This is expressed by saying: the plant idea will reach its completion. Everything that is now connected with the peculiar life that is in the mineral kingdom will be fully expressed in the fifth round. In the fifth round the mineral kingdom will gradually dissolve, and man will have a completely different relationship to the environment. The plant idea will have been realized. The relationship to the mineral kingdom will no longer be there, so that instead of being surrounded by a world of minerals, in the fifth round we will be surrounded by a world of plants. Everything that man leaves behind today will then be a plant product. There will be no more minerals; then human beings will live in the plant nature as they now live in the mineral nature. Man will be master over the plant kingdom; he will have dominion over the plant kingdom. This is how Genesis expresses it:

And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in all directions under the open heavens.” So God created the great whales and every living creature that moves with which the water swarms, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying: Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the water in the seas, and the birds shall multiply on the earth. And there was evening, and there was morning – the fifth day.

In the sixth round, we are dealing with the complete dissolution of the plant kingdom. A high, living animal thought has been realized, so that a difference between living and non-living will no longer exist. One will only live among the living. There will be no element at all as a medium; there will only be animal-like living entities. In the sixth round, everything related to sexual reproduction has long since disappeared; in the sixth round, we are only dealing with living things. Reincarnation ceases in the middle of the fifth round.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

And God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let us make man in our image, in the image of ourselves; let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle, and all the earth and all the creatures that creep on the earth.” So God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them: Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. God said: See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. These shall be for food for you and for all the beasts of the earth, for all the birds of the air and for all the creatures that move along the ground; I have given you every green plant for food. And it was so. God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day. [Genesis 1:24-31]

Everything culminated in animal existence. After the fourth round, the mineral; after the fifth round, the plant; after the sixth round, the animal. In the seventh round, everything had passed into the human. God created man as man and woman, no longer bisexual, but unisexual, and so God rested on the seventh day.

That is the story of the seven rounds. The first three days are over, the fourth day is the present round, and the last three are yet to come. The second chapter presents the story of the fourth round as such. Specifically, the fourth round shows how heaven and earth came into being, that they were created by God, who made heaven and earth and so on. Man was not yet there when the plant was made.

Then came the description of the fourth round. We had the red ball first, which then turns orange, yellow, and turns into a fog. Now the fog turns into the physical. God breathed a living soul into man after he had made him out of the clod of earth - the first two races. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, and put the man he had made there. This is the man who is still asexual. We are still very much in the first two races.

Previously, the plant and animal kingdoms were not so strictly separated. Man had a continuation that merged into the plant world. Then the plant world separated and then the animal kingdom. Even during our fourth round, there was a time - at the very beginning, when the first animals had split off - when humans were still connected to the center of the earth, similar to certain aquatic plants that hang from a long stem. Originally, men were plants, in the days when they had not yet descended into animality. They were still more plant-men, men who had not yet set the plant kingdom free from themselves.

Such a man was called Adam Kadmon. The man who still contains the plant and animal kingdoms within himself, and only later expels them, is Adam Kadmon. Then, in a new verse, on the one hand we have the Tree of Life and on the other hand an increase of consciousness, the Tree of Knowledge.

The Lord God formed man - Adam - out of dust from the earth and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils. So man was a living soul.

And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it was divided into four heads. [...] And the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may eat from every tree of the garden; but you shall not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die.” [Genesis 2:7-17]

Verse 16: Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Now the incarnation begins. The incarnation begins at the moment when Kama-Manas enters. That was in the middle of the third race, and it ends in the middle of the fourth race of the fifth round. Then the text also describes the individual races. But it describes the fourth race in particular.

Among the original Turanians, a kind of betrayal of the deeper secrets occurred. The priests allowed themselves to teach people what were priestly secrets. The soul of man is expressed as the feminine. The incarnated will is the masculine. The soul, the feminine. The initiated priests have now united with the human soul and handed over the secrets to it. This was in the fourth race of the Atlanteans. This betrayal is described in the sixth chapter of Genesis.

But when men began to multiply, the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which were fair [Genesis 6:1-2]...

... for they are flesh. Now God decides on the downfall, the flood, the downfall of Atlantis. That Noah took a pair of each animal into the ark is based on a real event. It shows how theosophy is becoming infinitely relevant to our culture. Not so long ago, Darwinism and the history of creation were still at a different point of view than they are today. In recent years, science has undergone important transformations. It was thought that animals develop through the struggle for existence and through selection; the imperfect perish, the perfect remain. Naturalists are already talking about the powerlessness of the struggle for existence. De Vries, the Dutch naturalist, has shown that the so-called mutation plays the greatest role in the descent of living beings. It has been found that living beings, when placed in different living conditions, quickly develop into completely different forms. You have to put them in completely different living conditions, that is the only real method of producing new species. It is mutation that causes new breeds to emerge. This does not happen gradually, but in leaps. The tomato, for example, emerged rapidly from a plant that did not have the red fruit. It originated in one place and then spread throughout the earth. All other forms of reproduction and development are secondary to mutation.

Now, science wonders: how could mutation once play such a major role? The Atlanteans knew the secrets of the germination power of seeds well enough to accumulate it, even to use it as a driving force. But they also understood how to cross the seeds of animals and bring forth new forms. What lives on Earth now has come about through conscious methods of crossbreeding, through actual cultivation, so that humans have actually created the animal species. From the few animal species, the Atlanteans created the entire living animal world. It is rooted in human nature that he who possesses greatness is inclined to abuse it.

A few specimens were selected from the animals and taken to the Gobi Desert - an ark. The rest perished. This is the basis of the story of the flood. The aberration of the Atlanteans, the segregation of the animals that arose from the mistakes of the Atlanteans, and the rescue of the same with the pure priests in the Gobi Desert. We must now ask: Who bred the races? Theosophy answers: the Atlanteans. But time is also pressing. The wheat, for example, came directly from a world body, from Venus. So we have to make a connection here between science and theosophy. [...]

After man had enjoyed knowledge, he had to die, he could no longer live, he could not at the same time also enjoy the side of life.

In connection with the ancient occult sentence, I would like to show how the entire doctrine of the round is still connected in a very specific way with the thoughts we expressed last time. First of all, I would like to emphasize the following: Every great religious teacher, even if he is not a religious teacher but has only participated in the work of humanity, starts from the guiding principles. And one of the guiding principles is: the human being corresponds to the processes in the great world, the macrocosm.

Now I ask you to consider that when we look at the development within the rounds, when we look at the seven rounds, we have a kind of descending development during the first three rounds, because the whole earth and also the human being move away from the deity, as it were. Man was close to the deity in the beginning, in a childlike, innocent state. During earthly development, he gains experience and reaches his lowest point during the fourth round, in order to ascend again in the following three rounds, in the fifth, sixth, and seventh round. The question is always asked whether there is a purpose to moving away from the deity and then approaching it again. I would like to talk about this in a later lecture, if there is a purpose.

Let us consider the first stage, then all the middle stages and then the last stages of the gap in the transcript]). During the first three stages, man is formed from the outside, so to speak. Man is built up in such a way that by the fourth round he is ready to have his entire physical body built. This physical body is built around the self. The self is inside, and the physical body is around it. It took the first three and a half of the fourth round to build the body around the self. Think about what man was before. He was a purely active being before. He was a being that was not designed to receive impressions from the outside, but a being that was completely dependent on itself, however strange that may sound. When man, in the course of his earthly development, wanted an object, he made it himself. He was active. This is still the case today at the higher levels of existence. Today, initiation happens in such a way that the person concerned first learns to form the so-called “Mayavi-Rupa body”. This is not a body that is formed around us, but when the self escapes from the body, it must be able to form the mayavi-rupa body. You have to be able to form it yourself, while the other body is formed around us, whereby we remain passive. This passivity comes into consideration for the human being when the body is not formed by us. This is what everyone first has to do in the descent. He did not do this himself, but they were formed for him.

The student must learn to do what has been done to him himself. We form the mayavi-rupa body ourselves. We put it around us. The student first learns to form this body. In the second half, the self works its way out again and gradually learns to form this body. The substance of the devachan provides the substance for the mayavi-rupa body. When a person sleeps, the self leaves the body. But the mayavi-rupa body is not formed. The substance is there. It is called the mental body when it occurs in the devachan. In the case where it is thoroughly organized, it is called the mayavi-rupa body.

The situation is as follows: we have built up the three bodies during the first three stages and during half of the fourth stage. Then the self feels trapped in these bodies. It is passive, but becomes more and more active. If you want to prepare yourself for this point of activity in a dignified way, you have to recognize that you are now passive and that you have to become more and more active.

Being trapped in your body means being passive. This is the meaning of the Buddhist teachings. For Buddha, suffering does not mean feeling pain, but being passive. Being born and dying is being passive. You can only be sick in the body. The mind cannot be sick. The astral body and the Mayavi-Rupa body can still be sick. Being separated from what is loved, being united with what is unloved, is being passive. You can only desire what you cannot attain if you are in the body.

So you can see that Buddhism is not a religion that understands suffering in its deepest sense, but rather that suffering is a vehicle. It does not recognize pain or suffering as the essence of the world. There is a prohibition in Buddhism that shows how far Buddhism is from regarding suffering and life as suffering. One commandment says: If a monk murders or incites murder, or if he publicly preaches that dying is better than living, he is unworthy to be a Buddhist monk. A murderer, or one who incites murder, who preaches that suffering is not worth living, is not worthy of being a Buddhist monk. Strive to be active, says Buddha. Buddha also took this out of esoteric Buddhism, to make man an image of the whole evolution.

The first stage is when the first wave of evolution is formed, when the thought is there before existence begins. In the first state lies the thought of how existence should be, which is about to realize the sentence: Man should put himself in the state in which the deity was when it says: It should become light.

The second state is that the whole will is born. First there was the thought, then the release of the thought, then the sinking into [space].

The third is what is called: the voice resounds. Not only is the thought let out, but the thought begins to sound. The fourth stage is where not only voice is there, but where real action begins, where action begins. [Fifth:] After action comes life; the middle state [sixth]. And when that is achieved, it goes up again. [Seventh: the upward striving.]

After the seventh round is the transition to nirvana, after the sixth [gap in the transcript]. [Looking back at the entire previous illusion.] You should strive for this cosmic development. This is your path, your eight-part path. So you should live like the cosmos. It is important that you cultivate right thinking; then, secondly, right resolve; and thirdly, right speech; fourthly, right action; fifthly, right livelihood; sixthly, right effort; seventhly, right mindfulness; eighthly, right concentration. There you have the whole cosmic evolution, which the disciple should endeavor to emulate in his path. The eightfold path is a repetition of cosmic development.

When the Buddha was about to found a religion, he said to himself: “I must make cosmic truths the goal of aspiration.” How does a person become a founder of a religion? By making cosmic truths into precepts. The founder reads in the cosmos what he sees. Therefore he says: “I and the Father are one.” What he gives is the same as what is written in the stars. This thought, this harmony gives Buddhism a deeper character. I doubt that the Sinhalese recognizes this. But it does not matter. The Buddhists recognize the legitimacy of the esoteric. The Buddhist strives for the eightfold path. He does everything to fulfill it.

The priest, the monk who leads the religious community knows it, and it is not customary to communicate everything to the outside world. It is the same as in Catholicism. Catholicism is a religion of sacrifice. The priest knows. He knows the esoteric. The believer only does the prescriptions. It can also be a high priest or an administrator without being an esoteric. This is more consciously a Dominican and Franciscan order, and therefore also structured in certain ways. What can you bring in?

A moral code is approved by a seemingly subordinate monk. He has written a book. The bishop has approved it and put his name to it. This book is now used in all schools. Who has the real spiritual influence? It depends on the right person writing the book, someone who feels called to do so. The bishop does not write a book himself. Why doesn't the monk become a bishop? He wants no distraction, no external position, he wants to devote himself to the inner life.

And the Pope, he knows esotericism. It may happen that there is no one. Leo was an esoteric, Pius IX was not. The present one is probably quite harmless.

The correspondence of the eightfold path with the cosmic law - when it is carried out, evolution is perceived. When man makes himself a microcosm, he also perceives the macrocosm. This is not just a penance, it is an expansion of the being of the whole person. The reproduction of the human being brings him together with the macrocosm.

Now something else: we have described the state where man is furthest removed from the divine. That is the state where one sees the other from the outside. When one sees the other from the outside, then the self is always closed off by a shell. This looking is called “looking in tamas, in darkness.” So one sees, in complete passivity around oneself, “in tamas.”

When we begin to feel with each other, then we perceive something of the self of the other through feeling. Also, through desire, we seek to spread our self beyond ourselves. By desiring a plate of broad beans, I am already reaching beyond myself. This reaching beyond oneself in mere feeling and desire, which concerns only the astral body, is called “life in rajas.

And the next higher state is when one goes out not only with feelings and perceptions, but with thoughts. There the barriers really fall even in life when one goes out in thought. We become calm through thoughts. It stops being deceived by desires. When I rise to the thought, I am no longer deceived by desires. I think according to the higher meaning. That is the “life in Sattva”. This is the state that can be achieved through thinking.

Then there is the state of intuition. These are the ones in which wisdom guides us through the world, in wisdom. This is the higher state. This is the Durga state. “Living in the Durga state” is the state of life that the chela strives for: to have a divine mission for all his actions. Man usually always asks himself: Is it good or evil? Various such logical impulses have been employed. But he who is to become a disciple must no longer act according to logical and moral impulses, but he must also ask himself whether there is a divine mission for him. Imagine a monk. There are many right actions. Suppose he is supposed to write a book, no one can blame him if he does not write a book. He writes the book because he is carrying out the divine order to write the book. That is acting in the Durga state. There is an inner urge to do so.

Only on a geometric and mathematical basis can humanity be raised to the Sattva state. That is why Plato demanded that every student have a mathematical preparation. Because only in mathematics is the Sattva state achieved. All other things are explored in a kind of selfishness.

Once people have come to terms with this, they will also face everything else as objectively as one faces mathematical truths today. Due to the way Western science relates to mathematics, the way it studies, it cannot arrive at deeper truths. Our science has only made it so far in mathematics to attain objective truths. That is why it is a kind of ideal state.

Do you remember the introduction I once gave when I talked about the immortality of the soul? I said that in the mysteries, only the students were prepared and that they wanted neither one nor the other. Today you can find people saying, “I don't want to be reincarnated!” or “I want to be reincarnated!” These were not allowed to enter the mysteries because they were deemed incapable of objectively grasping the higher truths. People first had to unlearn desiring. It is the same with Kamaloka. We must have no desires, for that makes objective observation impossible.

And now a few words about how Buddhism is to be understood in terms of its position in the world. When Buddhism was founded by Buddha, it was not a new religion, nor was it intended to be a new religion. The Buddha wanted the religion, which at that time was only priestly wisdom, to be made accessible to all people; he was to make it popular. He wanted even those who could not be initiated not to fall prey to mere image worship, but to be introduced to certain truths of salvation, so that by participating in the truths of salvation they would not be lost as they would be if it were mere image worship.

The Brahmans then possessed very high wisdoms that would have been quite impossible to proclaim to the people. Nobody would have understood them. Gradually, the people had taken the images for realities, just as in Catholicism. We can see this when we come to Tyrol, where the images of saints are worshipped like a kind of fetish. The Buddhist said to himself: There is too great a distance between the people's worship of images and the high wisdom of the Brahmins. Let us take only the two highest sentences of Brahmanic wisdom.

The first is: “That art thou!” That means: There is only one essence, and my body and this slate are exactly the same distance away from me. This slate is just as foreign to me as my own body. The whole sensual world is one. No part of it should be closer to us. The piece of flesh that I carry around is no closer to me than any other object.

The second sentence is: “I am Brahman!” I am the real divine being, a spark of the deity.

I must elevate myself so that I recognize everything as 'you' and the divine Brahman as 'I'. These are the two guiding principles. Everything else are explanations to them. The Brahman is completed by a shell, it becomes my Brahma or Atma - these are elaborations of the two sentences.

All the theosophical teachings that we know were essentially from the lower teachings. Karma and reincarnation were Brahman teachings. It is not surprising that this Brahman teaching, which goes back many millennia before the birth of Christ, has something peculiar about it. And what is it that is peculiar about the Brahman teaching? Imagine you learn Theosophy to a certain degree. If you then penetrate into the Brahmin teaching, you will find that everything that Theosophy has can already be found in the Brahmin teaching. What Jakob Böhme said is already a step higher. But if you go back to the Brahmin teaching, you will find that That was already there too. They go further, they become chelas, go back to the Brahman teaching and find that this is already in it. We finally come to the conclusion that we cannot determine how deep the Brahman wisdom is. And when we come across even deeper wisdoms, it is likely that we will find even deeper ones in them.

Now, however, Buddha said to himself: The teaching of the Brahmins must be made as popular as possible. But popularizing wisdom is only possible with individuals - through initiation. It is not possible to bring about wisdom through research. Rather, we should shape it through life. And now imagine that there were a method of telling people how to live, that would be a substitute for initiating them. I can accept anyone as a student and initiate them step by step. In doing so, I work on the intellect, on the intuition and, little by little, on the higher realms of spiritual life. But I can also do it differently. I can arrange their life in such a way that it gets better and better. Then he will naturally strive towards the treasure of wisdom. He will meet wisdom halfway. Just as two tunnels were bored from either end and met in the middle when the Gotthard tunnel was being dug, so does Buddha want it. Therefore, he gives no insights into the treasures of wisdom. He does not want to talk about the treasure of wisdom, he wants to teach the people. The people are to be taught about the best way to live. We do not want to concern ourselves with the wisdom treasure at all. Buddha differs only in method. He did not recognize a single sentence of the old teaching. But he says: It is useless at first to bother the people with teachings. We have to get the people to the point where they learn by living. He does not say: Teach the sentence “You are Brahma,” but he says, “Do not cling to matter!” If you experience the sentence “Do not cling to matter,” then it will be easy to understand the sentence, “I am Brahma.”

We also see this from the following: The Buddha once had a conversation in which he said, roughly translated, “Here is a cart. The chariot consists of the wheels, the seat, the shaft and so on. The wheels are not the chariot, the seat is not the chariot, the shaft is not the chariot. Each individual part is not the chariot, and yet the chariot consists of the individual parts. Just as the chariot is not in any single part, so the soul is not in any single part of a human being. Not your physical body, not your physical body's garment, not your desires, not your imagination are your soul!” So when Buddha said what is not the soul, he wanted to lead people to experience what the soul is. That is why he did not say, ‘I am Brahma,’ but rather, ‘Death, birth, desire, and so on, is passivity.’

Anyone who recognizes the sentence, “I am Brahma,” knows all of this. So Buddha says, “Free yourselves as much as possible from all that is subject to birth, death, old age, and disease!” The old Brahmin told people what is permanent. That is why he does not say, “Seek your higher self,” but rather, “Free yourselves from the lower self, cast off the fetters of the lower self!” And there are ten of them. Just as the Brahmin said, “I am Brahma,” so the Buddha says, “I will enumerate the ten fetters, and then the higher self will emerge from you.”

The first fetter is the deception of the lower self-awareness. Buddha does not say, “Recognize the higher self,” but rather, “The lower self is an illusion, a composition of temporary principles:

1. Physicality, 2. Perception, 3. Feeling, 4. Desire, 5. Consciousness.

These five things make up the lower self. The higher self is in there, but Buddha does not speak of the higher self. He only says that these five things are illusions; you must recognize that! And he is convinced that when he tells people, “This is the sheath of the sword,” they will also realize what is inside.

The second fetter is that one could believe that there is no moral world order, that is, disbelief in a moral world order. Buddha did not say, “Believe in divine beings!” He said to himself, “Man has nothing to gain from that. He should believe in a moral world order and free himself from the belief that something could be unjust that could affect us. It only seems unjust to us because we cannot see through it. For example, a brick may fall on my head. If I did not deserve this in the past, I will experience compensation in the future.

The third fetter is the belief that our rites and ceremonies can have a meaning, can be something other than parables. Those who take the symbol for reality suffer from the third fetter of existence. Symbolism is beautiful and sublime – but it must not be taken as reality.

The fourth fetter is the belief in sensuality, the opinion that the sensual is real. Imagine this book! The moment the temperature is a hundred degrees higher, we and this book will no longer be here. The moment our temperature is no longer here, the whole physical world is no longer possible.

The fifth fetter is that which imprisons us in our sensuality, which teaches us the belief that we may be special beings, that we encounter other beings with antipathy, may hate them. This fetter is antipathy towards other beings. Because we have antipathy towards other beings, we indulge in the illusion of separation. This is the fifth fetter.

The sixth fetter is love of sensual personality.

The seventh fetter is the longing for the preservation of personal existence. This is particularly pronounced in Christianity, the longing for the preservation of personal existence in the earthly personality. According to Buddha, this is the seventh fetter.

The eighth fetter is pride, the struggle for the elevation of personal existence.

The ninth fetter is the belief that one can achieve something in the world without karma, through self-righteousness. The Buddha refers to karma in everything. He says: “No one can achieve anything without karma.”

The tenth fetter is something that only Buddhism has developed, and by emphasizing the tenth fetter, Buddhism indicates that it is one of the most sublime religions that has ever been taught. The Buddha calls religious ignorance the tenth fetter.

Christianity has thoroughly misunderstood the first sentence of the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit”. “Blessed are the ignorant,” the Christian translates. But Buddha says: “There are many kinds of dirt. But the greatest dirt that can cling to you is ignorance!” Christianity regards those who want to know as being possessed by demons. The Protestant is content with being united with God by faith. But the wise man is united with God by wisdom.

This is what Buddha taught. The religion of the Brahmans remains in its entirety; it is the highest. But we cannot bring it to the people for the time being. Therefore, we teach the people how to free themselves from the bonds of the transitory existence. The Brahmans taught: “How can one recognize the eternal?” Buddha wanted to teach: “How can one overcome the transitory?” Buddha has only changed the method. We do not want to teach the eternal, but we want to teach how to live to overcome the transitory.

The second truth is: Recognize that in the impermanent is the cause of passivity! The third truth is: Kill attachment to the impermanent! This allows the eternal to break through by itself.

What I have said today refers to the four great truths and to the doctrine of the ten fetters and to the fact that the cause of all suffering lies only in ignorance. All of this is called 'the creation of a divine future'. Knowledge, realization, is called the creation of a divine future. The Buddhist lives for the sake of what a person becomes. And life and its application in this sense, he calls 'Dharma'.

And now he is convinced of the following:

Firstly: that Buddha is not a god, but that he is enlightened, that Budhi, the realization, has arisen in him, because Buddha is also a transient. To regard the Buddha as something eternal would be superstition in the Buddhist sense. So the Buddhist says: “I believe in the enlightenment of the Buddha!”

The second is: “I believe in Dharma”.

And the third is: “I believe in the brotherhood,” in “Sangha,” in the brotherhood of those who have gone so far as to overcome their separateness, that is, I believe in the possibility that they have overcome their separateness.

I believe in: first, a cause - karma; secondly, in life - dharma; thirdly, in what has been achieved - the Sangha brotherhood; the same: “I believe in the community of saints.

Today I would like to present to you a kind of lecture on the opening words of Genesis, as they were cultivated in the first times of Christianity in secret places. What I am going to say has been said many times, but always in secret places to a few people and has never really been popularized. It is not something that relates specifically to Genesis, but to the Lemurian Age. So I will not say anything different from what has been said over and over again in occult lodges. First of all, we have to realize that we have passed through two great catastrophes, one that led from the Atlantean era to our own time, and another that led from the Lemurians to the Atlanteans. We go back in time to before these catastrophes, to a time when humans already existed but did not yet have warm blood. They had cold, white blood. This cold, white blood was the reason that these beings could live in a watery element. At that time, the separation between air and water was not yet the same as it is today. All water was still a kind of fine mist or haze, so that everything that was earth was covered with this fine mist or haze. Air and sea were not yet there, only water and fog, which settled like steam over the earth, and this steam was also something that contained the life germs for everything that could live on earth at that time. The germs of life were themselves vaporous; they were not small grains, not small seeds, but vaporous, swirling forms in the general life of the world. Such a vaporous form, like a denser cloud, was at first still man himself. Man had a form that was composed of such condensed vapor. Within this vapor moved a thin liquid. And that which was most prominent about man was an organ on his head, which in its front part protruded far over his body, an organ that had a stalk and at the end of the stalk a kind of ball. This was an organ that could perceive not light but heat. What was particularly important at that time was the different degrees of warmth. One had to know that it was too hot here and too cold there; one had to be able to avoid that, and for that the warmth organ was necessary. One could perceive the degrees of warmth with the organ and could thus turn this way or that. The organ was later completely lost. But it was the organ that served man at that time for complete orientation.

The state at that time was called the “unfathomable depth.” It was so named because these beings could see nothing, hear nothing, speak nothing, understand nothing. They did not yet have all these abilities. The Secret Doctrine refers to this whole area with all the living beings in it as “the waters,” because in these waters the beings were not yet conceiving for themselves. They could not yet conceive. The entire earthly body was endowed with a single faculty of imagination. It was one great living being, which was regarded as the spirit. Individuals of the human race existed, but their imaginations were still common. Regarding this commonality of the world of imagination, the secret schools said:

“The Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the deep.” [Genesis 1:2]

That is, this area had a common idea, and this idea hovered over the waters, it had not yet entered into the people.

So we have two things side by side: first, the “unfathomable depth” and, second, the “idea that Genesis calls the ‘Spirit of God’.

The next thing is this: The outgrowth on the front of the beings that we have described has shrunk. And this organ that has shrunk today, which arose from this outgrowth, is the pineal gland. Back then, humans did not yet have bones. They were vapor humans, fish humans. If you look at the germinating human being in the first weeks of pregnancy, you will find this fish human hinted at in the human germ. The human being really repeats these conditions in the first period of pregnancy. The small fish body that the human being has there possesses the small organ that then shrivels up. It is one of those regressed organs, like the spleen, the function of which is unknown to today's doctors. The more this stalk-organ regressed, the more the pair of eyes developed inside the human organism. The eyes arose, two eyes formed in place of the original stalk organ. Just as the stalk organ was a warmth organ, so the eyes became a light organ. This unfathomable depth worked in all beings and, by withdrawing the warmth organ, singled out the pair of eyes. In The Secret Doctrine, this unfathomable depth is also called the “forefather.

In the beginning, human beings only felt warmth and cold. Now, however, they perceive objects through their eyes, that is, the forefather allowed the ability to perceive not only warmth but also light to arise from within them.

And God said, “Let there be light!” And there was light.

Now we have come so far that these beings could perceive the light around them and consequently also the limited objects. Now I ask you to consider the following. Before that, the unfathomable depth was there; everything was contained in it. There was the idea and then the light. The light was limited by the eye or the ability to see around it, what eyes could see: the visible. Everything else had not become visible. That was beyond the visible. [The boundary of the visible was the firmament.]

And God set a firmament where the visible ends and the invisible begins. [Genesis 1:6-7]

Furthermore, man began to perceive the visible, so that a completely new state of affairs arose for him. You have to imagine what it would mean for you if you could not see and could not hear. Hearing, however, was out of the question at that time. The people of that time were themselves a fluid in a liquid element. And by swimming around like that, you would not perceive the exact boundary between yourself and the other. You only perceive boundaries when there is something visible.

The individuals were held together by the idea. The individual was not so sharply defined. Each being felt that it belonged to the whole, to the general. It would be as if today your stomach were to feel independent; it must feel that it belongs in the body. Only at the moment when a sensation of light occurs does the possibility arise of perceiving the other as something different. An object is only something outside of us when we see its boundaries outside of us. Light was what distinguished the individual beings from one another. In the moment when humans were distinguished from one another, it became necessary for understanding of the environment to open up. The beings not only had to have the idea outside of themselves, but they also had to be able to have the idea within themselves. An object that I merely look at would be something quite mysterious for me if I could not imagine it myself. This understanding [of the environment] was imparted by entities that were of a higher nature than the beings living on earth. The light-sensitive entities were guided by entities that stimulated the intellect in them. Thus they became endowed with intellect. They became the “Sons of Manas.”

This brings with it the possibility of forming a false or a correct idea. Therefore, the Secret Doctrine says: “Mind and Truth” arose as the second pair. They arose through the influence of the Sons of Manas. [I cannot feel a false coldness or a false warmth, but the mind can form a false idea.] Only now, when the idea, the mind, was within the beings themselves, did the beings hold themselves together in a kind of sense of community. Earlier, the idea was outside; but now a spark of it was within the beings themselves. I have said: warmth and cold were differently outside in the world. The beings draw this warmth into themselves and distinguish themselves as warm and cold beings. A warm being is one that no longer perceives warmth, but generates warmth. Warm blood now originated in man.

So what had happened? Man was formerly born of water. Now that which the Secret Doctrine calls the “blur” had been generated in him. Man was therefore first born of “water”, then of “blood”. And if we could go back even further in time, to before the Lemurian period, we would find, before the water, the “spirit that had not yet become water.” So we have: spirit - water - blood. The warmth that was general then appeared as the warmth of the warmth-bearing beings. Man is born of blood - that is the moment when man becomes a warm-blooded being. This enables him to organize within himself everything that was previously organized outside of him. Warmth and cold were something different outside. Now he differentiates between warmth and cold within himself. Just as creation was outside before, man now became a creator within himself. And the first thing that makes man not only an inner being, but also an inner being that manifests itself outwardly, was the “speech. And with speech, ‘life’ arose. [Man was able to express himself outwardly; what was drawn in pushes outward – that is speech.] Only then is human life present when man is not only present as a being but also expresses himself as such – [an independent, self-contained, differentiated life, not coexistence. The being has become independent, can express itself, can reveal itself.)

The third pair is therefore 'speech and life'. Animals that are unable to produce sounds are cold-blooded. Only warm-blooded creatures are capable of expressing the soul outwardly through sound. A creature that is said to have a voice must differ from its surroundings in warmth. It must have a life that is differentiated from its surroundings. The third pair is therefore “speech - or voice - and independent life”. The fish has the same temperature as the water in which it lives.

Now we have come so far that the being has become independent, that the being can reveal itself and thus appear to its surroundings as an independent living being.

I ask you to take into account that today's concepts must not be transferred to that time. In later times, the cold-blooded creatures also changed in various ways. The fish were much larger at that time and more similar to humans.

The reproduction of the creatures at that time, however, was still such that they simply emerged from one another. You have to imagine that when a new offspring was to arise – copulation or fertilization did not yet exist at that time, nor did incarnation, incarnation has only existed since sexuality has existed, since there have been two sexes [we are not dealing with incarnations, but with materializations] – so when a new being was to arise, the one being allowed matter to emerge from itself into the new being. The determination for this process came from the general world spirit. Through elective affinity a new being was brought forth. A being was overshadowed by a spirit. It is exactly the same as when the medium [at a spiritualistic sitting] provides the material for a spirit that wants to embody itself in matter, to materialize, to manifest itself. Matter was always usable, always virginal, a nourishing process. The original being remained as it was. The process is there as it has been described in the description of its plant aspect. Matter was then depleted, it had become incapable of producing a new order from itself [without new inspiration], and differentiation into sexes occurred. In this way, the descent of the Lemurians essentially occurred; they had lost the ability to have virgin matter within themselves. If a new being was to manifest itself, there had to be a germ to stimulate life. With that [sexuality entered and with that] birth and death and also incarnation. And man became, as one adds, the beginning of “gathering, of ”fraternization.”

From the middle of the Lemurian period, the process of unification begins, the process of fraternization, which must lead to the point where the mystery sites unite, and then live on into a new world epoch. [Now comes the fourth pair: 'Man - the gathering that leads to fraternization'.

This explanation was also given repeatedly in the Pythagorean schools. It was said: Since the spirit has entered into every human being, birth and death came into the world. [And in Genesis it says:] In pain you shall give birth to children, it says now. In the past, they simply emerged through overshadowing.

This is the meaning of blood, water and spirit, as can also be seen from the words: Truly, truly, whoever is not born again of water and the Spirit will not see bliss.

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