The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today we want to look at the question of the origin and meaning of human suffering. Why are there suffering, evil and pain in the world? That was the fundamental question for Gautama Buddha. This question is also important for every human being. Man has to deal with suffering and pain over and over again. Where do they come from, what do they mean? The answer we can give will not satisfy everyone in every moment. The answer is to be sought at great heights. I can give one thing as an assurance: for the more highly developed person, the answer to the question of the origin of pain and suffering is unsatisfactory. The chela gains insight into it. Pain and suffering pass the chela by like events that no longer concern him much. Even if we could see a larger world context than that which represents the world soul and its context, we still could not yet give an explanation of suffering. To some, my words today will sound strange, and yet they will be clear about what suffering is.

Do not believe that pain and suffering are to be found in the same degree throughout the world as in our stages of development. Nor do you believe that they have always been there. Only when man entered into our physical development, that is, since the third human race, has physical pain come into existence in the modern sense. Before the physical body was present, there was no physical pain. Pain is nothing more than a disharmony in the natural order. These disharmonies are necessary, however. Nature consists of a sum of special beings. Nature must allow a being to express itself in such a way that it may possibly harm another being.

If man did not also have an astral body and what we call the “desiring soul,” then man would never be able to perceive physical pain. If he only consisted of the “mental body” and the physical body, he could cut off a finger and then he would be able to look at it like at a glass of water standing next to him. But with the astral body switched on, the disharmony becomes pain. Only in the connection between the astral body and the physical body is the origin of pain to be sought. If we did not have an astral body, we would have no sense of the world. Our eye would not see the color red; our eye would be only a physical apparatus if the astral body were not present. The eye is therefore not a photographic plate. If a photographic plate could be permeated with astral matter, it would also feel the image as we do.

The effect of light at a certain intensity is pleasant. If the effect of light is too strong, it becomes painful. Every natural gift is accompanied by its opposite. But why do some people suffer particular pain? Pain is something that individuals suffer. But does the human being have the right to regard what they suffer as their own personal suffering? We have to look at the big picture in which the human being is placed. On the contrary, we must also ask: Why is the pain dumped on us? We can ask: Who causes pain to be inflicted on us? Materialism has no answer to this. The question cannot be answered even if soul and body have nothing to do with each other. If we think that the human condition does not go beyond birth and death, then we could ask: Why does one person suffer so much and why does another have so little suffering? I am not just talking about the concepts of 'karma' and 'reincarnation'. Does it not seem unjust that we do not know why we suffer? People cannot always relate the pain to past sins or see them as consequences.

If we want to find answers to these questions, then we have to take the theosophical point of view. Theosophy offers us the opportunity and shows us the way to overcome and free ourselves from suffering. It gives us the means to improve our lives. Theosophy therefore not only has an effect on the present and the past, but also has an effect on the future.

In ancient Atlantis and Lemuria, there were beings who did not suffer as we suffer on today's Earth. Suffering was also treated and healed differently back then. Even physical ailments were cured in a completely different way than they are today. We usually have very wrong ideas about earlier times. This is often not correct even for the most important and striking things. This does not only apply to times long past.

That is why hardly any doctor today can understand Paracelsus. Paracelsus healed in a completely different way than is done today. He did not heal with physical means, as is done today for the most part. Paracelsus was a soul doctor. He knew how to seek out the evil in the soul of man. Today's materialistic direction almost does not understand at all when one speaks in this way. The reason for this is that we descend with our astral body [...] into the physical nature. This is related to the answer to the question: Why are physical pains so severe? You just can't get the astral body out of the physical body. The astral body is the seat of evil. The pain can be reduced to a minimum if you know how to work on the soul of the person. The sensation of the sick person is then taken out of the sick limb. You leave the physical to the physical.

The true physician alleviates the pain in the soul. Then the soul can overcome the physical pain and heal it. We live in our age. This age has sunk the lowest into the physical. The example of the house that we used will make this clear to us. The closer we are connected to the house, the more detrimental are the damages of the house for the inhabitant.

So it can also happen that the human soul has to move into a body for which the inhabitant is not responsible, and for which the balance can only be achieved in a larger circle.

Theosophy can only ever hint at ways and means by which we can overcome this age again. Theosophy has a much greater task than some people imagine. Theosophy has the task of reawakening the language of the soul. In this respect, too, Theosophy has something to offer: the physician is once again able to heal from the soul. A martyr can walk to the stake with a smile on his lips. His smile is completely sincere and true, because he has detached himself from his physical body with his astral body. Giordano Bruno only suffered from not being able to take the works he was supposed to accomplish further.

Suffering that is not personally caused can also affect us. The present human being is far from understanding these things because he is unable to develop spiritual life. Those people who believe in re-embodiment and karma do not suffer so much from the same wounds as the modern human being. They have withdrawn their spirit.

Because an ancestor once contracted a disease, it was also inherited by his descendants. But even inheritance was never as prevalent as it is in our present age. Inherited diseases were not present in the same way, and especially not among spiritually developed tribes. Look at history. It takes the whole materialistic spirit of our time. Not because there were no newspapers in the past, not because we didn't hear anything, but because hereditary diseases didn't exist in the past.

The soul depends on what kind of spiritual stimulation it receives. The soul must absorb the spiritual environment within itself. Imagine a healthy animal being placed in an area where the air is polluted. It will become ill. In healthy, free air, where it can breathe, it will not only be able to live alone, but it will also be able to strengthen and invigorate the body.

What the external environment is for the animal, the spiritual environment is for us. In an age when there was still faith in the spirit, the spirit became stronger. In a spirit air that is materialistic, the soul can no longer develop the flight. Then the soul gasps under the burden of physical circumstances. A soul in our age is quite powerless against the physical composition of the body. A soul that lives only in the physical is subject to suffering. A soul that lives only in the spirit overcomes suffering.

But we also have a retroactive effect on the pain that has already been suffered. If you refrain from having a soothing effect on the future, then you also refrain from having a soothing effect on the past.

Theosophy must develop spiritual life again. The only reason why humanity suffers so much today is because the spiritual life within it has almost died. Perhaps someone else is personally to blame for what he has to suffer. But if we develop spiritual life again, we will overcome all this again.

Why do we suffer not only in the passive sense, but also in the active sense? If you work with the active sense, you promote the development of humanity and help in the redemption of pain and suffering. Theosophy does not give idle answers, but active answers, that is, to participate in the events of existence.

This occult lecture was inspired by the question: Do the souls of stillborn or deceased young children also reincarnate after 1500 to 1800 years? And does such a re-embodiment serve a purpose?

1500 to 1800 years is an average period. There are souls that only reincarnate after 4000 to 2000 years. However, the question asked is connected with much deeper questions. There are seven great mysteries of existence in the becoming of our earth. Of these seven great mysteries of existence, one of these secrets is handed over to people from time to time in the succession of human races. Our present race will receive the fourth. Our theosophical current is nothing more than the preparation for the communication of the fourth of the so-called unspeakable secrets. Only a small part of what the great masters learn from the fourth secret may we communicate in lectures. There are things that it is sinful to utter with words, says the Apostle Paul.

One of these things is the fourth secret. It is the secret of life and death. The theosophical current has the task of enabling us to learn about birth and death and how they are related in a lawful way. It is not yet time for the whole of the fourth secret to be revealed to us, but parts of it are being revealed little by little. We have spirits who have already anticipated the stages of development of future stages. Plato, for example, is a “fifth rounder”. Gautama Buddha anticipated what humanity will only achieve in the sixth round.

I will now try to say something about what reincarnation depends on. When a person dies, he does not discard a worthless garment. This physical incarnation really has a purpose. We bear the fruits of it into the other incarnation. Learning the art of writing may serve as an example here. You learn the steps, form letters and learn to put them together in a context. Just as you take one thing from the various individual activities, namely the ability to write, and you no longer remember your individual tasks at a later time, it is the same with rebirth. The ability to write has remained, the individual stages of learning have been forgotten.

It is the same with rebirth. The individual experiences have been forgotten, the abilities gained from them have remained. The voice of conscience, the ability to distinguish between good and evil, we have learned all this in previous incarnations. The savage who originally eats his fellow human beings gradually learns that he is not allowed to do so because it causes him to incur the hostility of his fellow human beings, because it causes enmity.

Our organs are the means of acquiring experience and skills. It is the organs that we receive in the new incarnation. If we are incarnated today and incarnate again in fifty years' time, or even immediately after our death, could we really learn something new that we could add to what we have already learned in the broader sense?

No, things on Earth don't change that quickly. What we learn up to the age of seventy is one lesson, and the following seventy years would not differ much from the previous ones. So we only incarnate again when the Earth has changed enough for us to learn something substantial again. This is related to the law that a person is reincarnated after an average of two thousand years. [...] Within two thousand four hundred or two thousand six hundred years, cosmic conditions change. So there is something new to learn again. Man must therefore wait until new constellations occur between the sun and the earth that can influence our being in a completely new way. But there are also deviations because what man has to do within the rounds is not the only thing.

At a certain stage of development, the human being will leave the earth. He will then continue to live on a new planet. However, he can only enter the scene of the new earth, or rather the new planet, when he has reached a certain level of development. The human being has to develop his ego to such an extent that he will be able to enter this new scene.

The thought that lives in you is not just what lives in your head. Every thought is a living force. Just as any air wave propagates and can still be perceived far away from its original location, so does my thought propagate. It continues to have an effect in the mental world. We have to see it as such a force. A thought is a force as strong as if you were splitting wood with an axe. You can cut and work with thoughts – and also with your drives – deep into the astral world. The changes you bring about there are much more significant than any physical events.

We have to become clear about these forces and we have to learn what changes we are causing. This is the first consecration, the experience and clarification of the inner drives, the terrible beings. We cannot think without affecting a whole host of beings. The adept is fundamentally different from other people because the adept does what others do unconsciously, consciously.

We affect the entire world around us. If it were only a matter of human development, we would regularly be reincarnated. However, a higher individuality may be needed for human development, in which case it must incarnate more quickly. The laws that cause an individual to reincarnate do not only apply to that person's development; the demands and laws for the entire environment also apply.

When such conditions arise, then such a personality may have died immediately beforehand or a few years before, and they incarnate again immediately. In the Theosophical Society, we have such personalities who were re-embodied almost immediately after death.

It depends on a great many circumstances after how many years an individuality has to reincarnate. A personality that has taken in a lot can take a long time to process the substances it has taken in. We know from a great personality in the development of German thought, Goethe, that he was previously incarnated in Greece at the time of Plato. And we know that he was reborn as Goethe in the eighteenth century. It was one of the most harmonious incarnations he experienced in Greece. He was a student of sculpture. The student of sculpture had absorbed so much that it took him so long to process it all. “Iphigenia in Tauris” could only be written with a great knowledge of Greek sculpture. Plato's lofty idealism flows towards us again in the profound passages of Goethe's “Faust”. The “fairytale” of the green snake and the beautiful lily contains the revelation of Goethe's harmonious development at the time of his Greek incarnation.

Bismarck could not work like Goethe.

Not all abilities need to be expressed in the embodiment. If someone who is in the devachan is able to carry out a necessary task on earth at a certain time, he will be re-embodied. He must then sacrifice himself for the sake of all humanity.

“Creare” is usually translated as “creating”. It has the same root as the Sanskrit word “kri”, which is the same as what we recognize in “karma”. It means “to will”. The body is willed by certain forces, by so-called “destiny directors”. The body is then brought into a suitable connection and mixture. Aristotle still used the word for human labor, but at that time it still meant “choosing,” “wanting.”

The physical body is an instrument for the soul, just as the piano is for a person who wants to make music. When we use the instrument, we take the fruits of our development with us. However, even the most highly developed individuals can still make mistakes when choosing a body. It may be that a person who would be capable of great achievements cannot find the body in which he can bring the forces within him to fruition. These are possibilities that must always be taken into account when doing research in this area. A student of Plato will be able to take quite different things with them into the next life.

But those who only have monotonous experiences in one incarnation will have few germinal forces to carry through. And therefore they will be able to reincarnate quickly. Savages who have little experience only spend a short time in Devachan. Chelas, on the other hand, those who have already acquired the right to the championship, can do without Devachan. They do not undergo Devachan. Therefore, they can re-incarnate immediately after death to continue serving humanity.

In childhood, the soul of the child has weak, soft powers that still need to be developed and refined. If you were unable to develop the astral body in one incarnation, it is possible that you will be reborn as a child for the sole purpose of developing the emotional body. A scholar who has a highly developed mind but no feelings will then only need a short period of tutoring as a child and will soon leave the body again.

An attempt to be born can also fail. Then a new attempt is made if the previous body was unable to express the forces. There are even examples in the Bible where re-embodiment occurs immediately after death. It is important to know that re-embodiment not only has a purpose, but that it is a necessity. (Here the example of the clock was given.) The [clock] is a product of development. It could only come into being when different sciences had reached the same level of development at the same time. It took the ability to work with metal and people who had mastered the laws of scientific mechanics. All these people combine at a certain level, and then you have the ability to make a clock in that age.

Those who look only in one direction make a mistake. Those who have developed in only one direction, like a Darwinist, for example, also make a mistake. Monism is not a unity because it has emerged from a unity, but the other way around: body and soul are one because they have connected at a certain level and thus form a unity. The wheel in the clock broke, and with it the unity. The clock is unusable. It is the same when an organism has a “bad wheel”.

The next question was whether the facts in the world are based on a plan or whether chance rules them. (The answer was:)

Development depends on temperature, on mountain air or sea air, on city or country. Let us assume that a brick fell on a person's head. Is that a coincidence or is it part of a plan? A person falls into the water, another jumps in after him, helps him, but he catches a cold and dies. Now let us take a counterpart to this: a person sees his enemy, pushes him into the water. But he also falls in and subsequently dies. These are two very different internal cases. But outwardly it seems as if they are the same cases. Both die as a result of falling into the water. The question of whether the world is governed by a plan full of wisdom or just by coincidence is something we will deal with in more detail in the near future.

Since God is perfect, it is virtually impossible for something imperfect to arise. The question of the origin of evil is as old as humanity itself and can only be answered on a theosophical basis. Christian theology has a very specific belief, a very specific view, of the origin of evil. It says that the world was created to glorify God. Evil must therefore have been admitted to a kind of glorification. But this formula only provides an inadequate solution to the problem – and it is also exoteric.

Paul says that before the law was, there was no sin; and when the law came, sin came into the world. Above all, it is important to bear in mind what I said last time. We are dealing with a linear development. The clock served as an example. Before you could make a clock, you had to be able to make the wheels, you also had to be so advanced in mathematics and physics that you knew the laws and could use them to make the whole thing. At first, mathematicians had nothing to do with physicists. But at some point the two came together so that the two insights could interact in one brain. Then the idea of the clock could also develop. So here there is a confluence of currents. Man is also a confluence of spiritual and material currents.

Actually, there are three currents that flow together in man. The Moon-pitris came over from the moon. These had only prana and kama. But what is in man today comes firstly from the moon: prana and kama; secondly from the elemental realms: the physical body; thirdly from what has been infused from the higher beings: spirit = manas, budhi, atma.

When the question of imperfection arises, I often use an example that science provides us with: there is a person who has been afflicted by a kind of mental illness. He lost his will and was sent by the doctor to the south to strengthen his nervous system. He was supposed to issue a document and sign his name to it. But it was impossible for him to write his name. He then came to Rome. There was a festival in Rome at the time, and he was completely healthy during that day. But after that day, his health was gone again. On the journey home, he also had to travel in a cab. Someone was run over next to his cab. He noticed it, jumped out and helped him. Afterwards, however, he was again unable to write his name. He could read, and could do everything else, but he could not write his name. And if he should make a decision to do something that was not quite right, so that his intelligence was not in harmony with his physical body, then the connection between the two was interrupted, as it were. We think of this process as extending to the whole world.

Jakob Böhme has already solved the problem from this point of view. He says: A person never has hands for feet or feet for hands. They match. And yet it is possible for the right hand to scratch the left.

Spirit, Kama, Manas, Prana originate from the same deity. But they flow into each other at different times, and so it happens that different states arise. Therefore, even in the great world, it is possible that although the individual is perfect, there is disharmony in the overall harmony.

One may ask: why does the Deity not take care to prevent the right hand from scratching the left? We must thoroughly grasp and comprehend that God created man in his own image, in the likeness of himself. Man is the image of the Deity; God formed the world out of free will. To create in freedom is to create according to inner motives and not according to outer reasons.

The allegory of the Fall of Man states that man gains knowledge, and through it he learns to distinguish good from evil. On the one hand, he is in the image of the deity, on the other hand, he is imperfect. He must have the reason for his actions within himself. The original, eternal being can only be perfect. This original being has poured itself out on many angelic beings. And through this, the ability to make one's own decisions also arises in man. Through the descent of the higher entities to the lunar beings, the two currents can interact. Man differs from other beings in that he has the three higher elements - manas, budhi, atma - within him. But why do they have to collide, why do they have to come into disharmony?

The animal is never evil. You cannot say that a lion is evil. Nevertheless, it wreaks great havoc, greater than the greatest criminal. And why can man be evil? Because in man, the same animal nature as in a lion is supposed to be in harmony with the higher. This discordance of the higher with the lower nature is what we call evil. When higher spirituality misuses the lower nature, evil arises. Now we understand Paul when he says: Before the law was, there was no sin.

Another rough example: can any sexual excess in animals be called evil? No, everything goes its regular course. Corruption only arises when the spirit comes into play. It is capable of misusing the physical. This is where evil arises. Mental abuse.

But where does the tendency to go astray in the spiritual nature come from? This is because the various currents were perfect at the beginning of the emanation. In the end they will be in tune again, but in the middle they do not have to be in tune. It is the same as in music, where a disharmony is also resolved again in a higher harmony at the end.

If you have developed your intellect very highly but neglected your moral side, you will have to overcome a great disharmony within you in your next incarnation.

There are beings that play a role in our development. They may have reached such a high level of development that they are beyond human development. You can't just throw yourself from a higher level of development to a lower one. But such high beings are thrown into our development. They are highly intelligent, but never satisfied with the current state of human development. Such a being will have the urge to reincarnate. They therefore want to seduce people, they want to bring people to a point of development that they are not yet ready for. There are constant insinuations. To someone who can see through this, the development of a person looks like this: caught between God and the devil. These people are the brothers of the shadow.

The questions are:

- Whether a planned connection can be seen in the external world phenomena?

— Whether one can assume a planned connection?

— Whether the events of the phenomena are in a planned context?

— Whether wisdom or chance rules in the world?

(The questions are) reminiscent of war, earthquakes, a brick falling on a passer-by's head, and so on.

Sometimes things in the world seem to be arranged quite wisely. Man will have to educate himself about the plan of the whole. The world order seems to be a mixture of harmony and disharmony. [Last time I chose an example:] On the bank of a river stands a man. He is full of compassion and benevolence, sees a drowning man in the river, jumps into the water and saves him, but [later] perishes due to a cold. A second case: out of a sense of revenge, a person pushes another into the water [and falls into the water himself]. He also catches a cold and dies [as a result]. We can reflect on the great and mighty plan, but the philosopher Baumann cannot bring himself to embrace the theosophical worldview.

Just think, could we find wisdom in the world if it were not [already] in it? The laws of mathematics can be studied [by a person] in a room, purely by himself, away from the world. We find there [in mathematical study] that the world bodies move according to the laws of the ellipse, which we have explored in the room.

From the world of animal and plant life, we move up to the world of man. But then it seems as if everyone has to go their own way, without any plan. So the world seems to be a mixture of wisdom-filled order and chaos. But even in chaos, we can find such wonderful wisdom that we stand amazed. Take a look at a beaver's lodge. It is designed with tremendous skill. An engineer could not do better. Above its dwelling, the beaver builds dams. They are not always the same, they always follow the course of the river. As a whole, it appears to be chaos, but in detail it is wisdom; the dams are built according to law.

What is a law? Statistics teaches us a very specific regularity in the external world: there are six hundred and fifty Frenchmen for every criminal, a specific number of people die after ten years. Life insurance bases its calculations on the lawfulness of deaths. Such order should seem oppressive. But although an order can be perceived as a whole, the individual is not subject to that law. Therefore, it is not a fatalistic view.

This is an important secret of existence. What I have indicated here also relates to the fifth world secret [of which I have already spoken in outline].

Is there perhaps wisdom in apparent unknowingness? It is perhaps only absent because we have not yet seen through it. Man should never assume that he has reached a conclusion. It is an eternal development. What we do not yet understand today, we may understand tomorrow.

Why do we easily find the law in the external inanimate nature? It is a nature that has not yet developed to the diversity in human life. The further the development has progressed, the deeper is the law and the more difficult it is to understand. I have shown you examples of planned laws. I showed you this at the beaver lodge. Beavers do not have human minds. But animals also have an effective reason. If you examine the animal body, you will not find a soul as in humans. You will not find such a single soul in animals. You have to look for the animal soul in the non-physical. The relationship is similar to that between the hand and the brain. There is no soul reason in the hand, but there is in the brain. It is the same with animals.

What lives in man in man, in the soul, is behind the same in the animal. A scholar said: If I found a nervous system in the worlds and stars, I would believe in a soul, but not otherwise. That is precisely the difference: in man, the soul can live in the nerves; otherwise, the soul lives above the physical world. Therefore, it is not possible for physical observation to perceive the connection everywhere.

It also includes the fact that vindictiveness and compassion have the same consequences in a certain respect. However, the causes lie in the higher spiritual spheres. If the causes from the higher worlds were to fall into the physical world, they would have to appear to us as a wise thing. Whoever works in the world must listen to the One who looks deeper into the world than he does. There are levels. (A genuine hierarchy is naturally established.)

We can only recognize and understand a law as far as we are developed. That world wisdom exists is clear from today's reflection. But if this is there, then we must strive to do everything that lies in the sense of this world wisdom. This is not intended to imply a specific approach, but rather free decision. What divine wisdom has reserved for itself with animals, namely to direct them, it has given up with regard to human beings. This is the descent of the tongues of fire, the descent of the spirit into every human being: The Feast of Pentecost. Each tongue directs an animal order. The animal need only surrender to the wisdom that guides it. Man must express his wisdom by consulting with the worldly powers.

We must listen [to the wise world powers]. We are not here to brood over the divine plan for the world [or to] simply believe, but we are here to work in a wise manner ourselves, to absorb the hidden wisdom within us and to penetrate it. Through human development, the hidden wisdom becomes apparent: through the actions of man, through his work.

Everything we call evil has a different form in another cosmos. We can only speak of evil in a particular cosmos. In the lunar epoch, evil would have had a completely different form than it does today. We can therefore only speak of our earthly evil.

The fact that evil is possible is connected with the position of the earth in the cosmos. Our earth has a very specific task. Our cosmos is called the cosmos of love. The preceding, the lunarian cosmos, is called the cosmos of wisdom. It is called the cosmos of wisdom because what we have before us as fruits in our cosmos has been prepared.

The task of earthly development is essentially this: [the human being] has to incorporate Kama-Manas into the nervous system in the form in which [he/she] has come over from the lunar epoch. (A description of the lunar epoch follows here.)

In those days, people had everything except our intellect. The people of the lunarian epoch did not have the intellect. But they thought and did not present as we do. They participated in a much more universal spirituality. This more universal spirituality surrounded them as a spiritual power. It can be compared to a swarm of bees, which has a common soul. In the lunatic era, not every human being had an intellect of his or her own. They were driven to their actions by a wisdom that lived in the lunatic cosmos. This is similar to the instinct of animals.

What I have in my nervous system and what I have in my Kama-Manas has been prepared by the lunar wisdom. The lunar wisdom sought to develop the organs with wisdom. It had to prepare the human physical personality. This wisdom aimed to make the body physiologically and physically perfect.

The human soul arises through the influence of Kama-Manas. Universal wisdom descends like a drop into the individual personality. It is as if the individual bee had brought down within itself the wisdom of bees and did out of itself, out of its own decision, what it [otherwise] does instinctively. The wisdom is absorbed into the form, presents itself in the form. Now this wisdom must be used as a means to achieve love.

All those who have undergone regular development in the Lemurian epoch enter the earthly epoch, sacrificing physical, pranic, and kamic life.

But there are also beings who are unable to make this sacrifice. These have not undergone a completely regular development. They have descended too deeply into the physical-pranic-camic of the Lemurian epoch. Their attention was too strongly attracted. An intimate brotherhood arose from this. These entities have undergone too extensive a development. They have delved too deeply into the physical sphere. Therefore, in the earthly epoch, they do not have the ability to start where they need to start in order to undergo regular earthly development. They have drawn down too much of the physical-pranic. Therefore, on the one hand, they have too much of the wisdom principle, but on the other hand, they have too much affinity with the physical-pranic.

So there were beings in the earthly epoch who had too much intelligence to go through earthly development. They have to choose a higher physicality. Such a being is incapable of incarnating in our bodies. In the human body, such a being would be constrained on all sides. Such a being seeks incarnation in a different way, not descending into humanity, but seeking material from the manas bodies to embody the entity. They attract, as it were, the intellectual matter of human beings in order to embody themselves. This is a constant danger for earthly humanity. Exoteric wisdom describes this danger as the evil principle.

Because hyperintelligences have come over from the lunar epoch and push people aside from the regular path, we have evil. That is the origin of evil. Evil arises from the fact that hyperintelligences are present that push people out of the ordinary path. In Christian esotericism, these hyperintelligences are summarized under the name of “Lucifer”. This is also the principle of wisdom, but on a level that is not right.

The principle of kamic in a criminal nature clearly shows that people are thereby guided in the wrong way by the intellectual principle. Evil is thus a straying from the actual task of our cosmos, a straying from love. Love consists in sacrificing the individual physical-pranic for the higher purpose. Every predominant selfish urge stems from the fact that the person concerned feels more related to the physical than is right. There has been too deep an affinity with the physical. The point of equilibrium between the physical and the physiological is love. Misguided, it is driven into hyper-egoism.

The piano as an example. It is made with hammer and saw. If you work on it any further after it is finished, it misses the point and the instrument perishes. Earthly selfishness is nothing more than a charitable principle in the lunar epoch. It is something bad in the earthly epoch. There is actually no evil. Evil is good - just in the wrong place. Evil arises from the fact that a cosmic principle of development appears in the wrong context. Evil only appears evil to us as long as we look at it in a limited way. But it brings about something good in another place, which balances it out. For every evil in the world, there is a corresponding good that restores balance. This is also the meaning of the saying: “Only the Father in heaven is perfect; why do you call me perfect?”

Today we want to start from the question: Do only the beings of the physical plane that are close to human beings have consciousness? Or how does the consciousness of human beings relate to the other beings on the physical plane, to the consciousness of animals, of plants, and of so-called dead stone? Can we also speak of a consciousness of the other kingdoms of nature?

Imagine a small creature that could only see something of a person, for example, a finger moving. [That is all this little creature would see; but it cannot] form a concept of what underlies this movement. This little creature would also have no idea of the human soul and would only see and describe the expressions of his strength. But it could also be the same for a person in relation to other entities. The materialist sees the things, but does not speak of the actual soul of the earth. Could it not be the same for him as for the little creature, which walks around the human being and only sees and describes the details? The little creature itself has no soul consciousness and therefore cannot speak of the soul of the human being. Just like that little creature, the materialist also lacks the soul, therefore he does not recognize the soul of the earth.

The soul of the earth is higher than the human soul. All beings of the physical plane have consciousness. But the consciousness of man differs from that of the other beings in that he lives here on the physical plane with his consciousness.

But during sleep, the human consciousness is also on other planes. In so-called dreamless sleep, the human consciousness lives on the devachan plane, where plant consciousness is always at home. The animal's consciousness lies somewhere between humans and plants on the astral plane. The human being is the being that has its consciousness on the physical plane.

The animal has its consciousness on the astral plane. The plant has its consciousness on the devachan plane. Consciousness on the astral and devachan planes differs significantly from consciousness on the physical plane. For consciousness on the physical plane can only receive ideas and thoughts through the physical organs. Consciousness on the devachan and astral planes only perceives through images and imagination, as was the case with people in prehistoric times.

The conscious astral being has yet another peculiarity: It is not separate from other beings in the same way as the being that has consciousness on the physical plane is separate, but it lives much more behind and within other beings. For the being that has consciousness on the physical plane, it is necessary that everything be conveyed to it through the senses. If its consciousness of an object were astral, the eye would not convey the things; one would perceive nothing at all of an object. On the other hand, an image would arise from which one could deduce from its colors and configuration whether the object is pleasant or unpleasant. The images that previously arose from the objects and hovered in the soul are now completely obscured in today's people, because the physical consciousness is drawn over the objects directly. This is how sense consciousness arises.

Consciousness on the physical plane is a strictly defined circle, something solid that the other beings cannot enter. Consciousness on the astral plane is a cloudy, spiritual thing. Just as liquid, like water, differs from solid, so on the astral plane there is a flowing together of the different contents of consciousness.

Man has formed his physical body himself. Before that, an ancient animal kingdom existed. If one were to see these creatures, they would appear to today's humans like caricatures. The original astral body was able to transform those animals, to refine and develop them into humans. This earlier human being first had an astral consciousness. This first formed and shaped the physical body.

What was the purpose of this next evolution in the physical? Without passing through the physical, that earth creature with the dull consciousness would never have learned to say “I” to itself. The God who dwells in man today, the divine germ, could not enter the astral body other than by condensing it into the physical human body. Before that, the spirit of God was still completely outside the astral body; the “I” was the spirit of the deity. The astral consciousness was similar to water: “The spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters”. The “I” spirit hovered over the original waters of consciousness, over the astral bodies.

The nature kingdoms differ in the occult sense in the way the outer physical body relates to consciousness. Man has brought down consciousness to the physical plane, the animal to the astral plane and the plant to the devachan plane.

The plant becomes an animal when it has brought down consciousness to the astral plane, the animal becomes a human being when it carries consciousness down to the physical plane. The consciousness of the rock is on the higher parts of the devachan plan, namely on the fourth level. The Akashic Records are also located there on the border. The beyond is the plane of silence, a completely different form of existence than the Arupa region of devachan. In this realm lies the consciousness of the entire mineral world. In order to engage with the occult truths in a way that is not only constructive, it is necessary to get a sense of what the mineral actually is. The mineral is essentially different from all other creatures around man. And with mere manasic knowledge, one cannot come to a deeper understanding of the mineral world.

One must gain a moral relationship to the mineral world. To this end, the Rosicrucian schools drew people's attention to the chastity of the mineral world. Through its chastity, the mineral world is a model for man. Man is still flooded with desires and passions.

But imagine a human being so purified that his inner nature is as chaste, as unassuming and as self-contained as the mineral. One cannot say that the mineral kingdom is on a lower level than man. Man here on the physical plane only knows the skin of the mineral kingdom, which is related to the real mineral as the skin of man is to man himself. The mineral is a human being who lives only on the higher parts of the devachanic plane.

One cannot deny consciousness to the series of physical beings, but one must ascribe different forms of consciousness to them: there is a consciousness

— which manifests itself in form three levels lower down: today mineral,

— a consciousness that manifests itself in its forms two levels lower: today plants,

— a consciousness that manifests itself in its forms one level lower: today animals,

— a consciousness that manifests itself at the same level as the being [: today man].

This is the descending line of evolution. In ancient times, man once stood at the level where he is at the level of today's mineral. At that time, he had to be guided by other beings. The purpose of man's development is to emancipate himself from all such entities on the higher planes and to become such an entity on the higher planes himself.

The first stage of consciousness that man has undergone can be called “deepest trance consciousness”. The second stage of consciousness that man has undergone is still found in plants, the “deep sleep consciousness”. The third stage of consciousness that man has undergone is the “dream-filled sleep consciousness”. This “dream-filled sleep consciousness” is still found today in the animal kingdom, but actually only in those animals that have not developed warm blood. The animals that came into being later already have a slightly different consciousness; for example, the apes have a consciousness similar to that of humans. From the consciousness of dream-filled sleep, from the images of this consciousness, a higher animal kingdom develops. The fourth stage of consciousness, which man has reached today, is “object or subject consciousness”.

Today, man has hardly any connection with the first stage of consciousness. But he experiences the second stage, the deep sleep consciousness, during the night; it is an atavistic remnant from the time when he was completely in the sleep consciousness. The third consciousness has remained atavistically present in the chaotic world of dreams. The fourth stage, the normal consciousness, is today's everyday consciousness. The further course of human development consists in the fact that he develops himself up to an even higher consciousness. The fifth stage, which every human being will reach in the future, is where the astral consciousness joins the object consciousness again, where the human being will move fully consciously between the images.

A being with only astral consciousness cannot see the human form, but it can see what is going on inside the human being, every pain, every suffering and so on, it perceives all this, expressed in colors and forms. If object consciousness were to develop in this being, the images would gradually take on fixed boundaries and be superimposed over an object; this would emerge and everything that previously appeared as pleasure and pain would disappear.

Then [in addition to mere astral consciousness] there would come an even higher stage, [something would be added that goes beyond everything that happens in pleasure and pain in the human being]. The medium must extinguish the consciousness of the day and thereby loses the certainty of control. The clairvoyant, however, does not extinguish the physical consciousness, he retains the physical mind and all his physical abilities and in addition develops the consciousness of images. Thus the fifth stage is the conscious consciousness, which in reality encompasses approximately that part of the world that extends to the boundary of the devachan world.

The sixth stage is the state where sleep consciousness becomes a conscious state and delivers not images but sounds. This consciousness occurs in the higher degree of clairvoyance; it is the “otherworldly sound consciousness”. The reality of this is the Pythagorean music of the spheres. This otherworldly sound consciousness arises when sleep becomes not only dreamless but consciously aware in sounds. The awakening of the inner word corresponds to this. This is not a symbol, but true inner reality, the moment when things express themselves as they are. Man lives on the physical plane because he has the power to express his being himself in the I. But at this level of clairvoyance, all beings tell him their name. The whole world takes on the character of flowing sound, and each being in the world of flowing sound is a note that is different from all other beings.

About the even higher seventh state of consciousness, one can only say that it is there. To understand this, a region of the soul must be separable from the physical consciousness.

A human being goes through these seven states of consciousness in his evolution and is now in the middle of the development, at the fourth state. If we were at the fifth, we would also be in the middle again, if we were at a previous level of consciousness, one of the later ones would have disappeared and on the other hand another one would have appeared. So there are always seven levels that can be observed.

In the past, people went through a completely different state of life. Every state of consciousness must pass through seven states of life and every state of life through seven states of form. Seven states of form thus always form a state of life, and seven states of life make up an entire planetary development.

In the first life state, consciousness is three levels higher. In the second life state, consciousness is two levels higher. In the third life state, consciousness is one level higher.

The seven life states are called the “seven realms”. These are the three elemental realms: the mineral, animal and plant kingdoms. The three elemental realms precede the present state of life; human beings had to pass through them before they could emerge from the mineral realm into the fourth state of life, in which they now find themselves.

The process of passing through such a state of life has been called a “round” so far, and this includes seven form metamorphoses. So, in each state of consciousness, one passes through seven states of life and in each state of life, seven states of form. A total of seven times seven times seven metamorphoses of form. In occultism, it is written: 343. A great deal depends on the ability to read this number 7x 7x7 =343. All form states are what is understood by the third logos. The forty-nine life states are the second logos. The seven states of consciousness are the first logos.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goethe's beautiful saying belongs here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this is the legacy of the Christ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

so we get the following relationship:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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