The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This lecture is known under the following titles: The Christmas Mystery, Novalis as Seer, The Christ Being, Past, Present, and Future. This lecture first appeared in English in The Anthroposophical Quarterly, Volume 12, 1980, No. 4.

Individuals appear in the world from time to time who are able to see in direct vision what has been realised through Feeling by thousands upon thousands of souls and hearts in the course of the centuries. But in the modern age only those who are familiar with the findings of spiritual ‘clear-seeing’ know that the effects of the event of Mystery of Golgotha on evolution are always perceptible to the true seer.

The entire spiritual sphere of the Earth was changed through what took place at Golgotha. And ever since then, if the eye of the soul has been opened through contemplation of this Event, the seer beholds the presence of the everlasting power of the Christ in the spiritual sphere of the Earth. Other men are impressed by the power of the impulse proceeding from the Mystery of Golgotha and the great truths connected with that Event; they realise, too, that since then the human heart has been able to experience something that could never previously have been experienced or felt on the Earth. But to a seer this is perceptible reality.

The young German poet Novalis became a seer—we might almost say ‘miraculously’—by the grace of divine-spiritual Powers. Through a deeply shattering event which made him aware, as if by a stroke of magic, of the connection between life and death, his eyes of spirit were opened and as well as a great vista of past ages of the Earth and Cosmos, the Christ Being Himself appeared before him. He was able to say of himself that he was one who with the eyes of spirit has actually seen what is revealed when ‘the stone is lifted’ and the Being who has furnished earthly existence with the proof that life in the spirit will forever overcome death, becomes visible.

In the case of Novalis we cannot really speak of a self-contained life in the ordinary sense, for his was like a remembrance of an earlier incarnation. The Initiation conferred upon him as it were through Grace, brought to life within him his achievements and experiences in earlier incarnations; there was a kind of consolidation of intuitions and insights that had been his in a previous life. And because he looked back through the ages with his own awakened eyes of spirit, he was able to affirm that nothing in his life was comparable in importance with the experience of having discovered Christ as a living reality. Such an experience is like a repetition of the happening at Damascus, when Paul, who had hitherto persecuted the followers of Christ Jesus and rejected their proclamation, received in higher vision the direct proof that Christ lives, that He is present, and that the Event of Golgotha is unique in the whole process of the evolution of humanity. Those whose eyes of spirit are open can themselves behold this Event, for in truth Christ was not only present in the Body that was once His dwelling-place. He has remained with the Earth; through Him the Sun-Power has united with the Earth.

Novalis speaks of the revelation that came to him as ‘unique’ and he maintains that only those who with their whole soul are willing to relate themselves with this Event are men in the true sense. He rightly says that the ancient Indian, with his sublime spirituality, would have allied himself with Christ had he but known Him. Not out of any dim inkling or blind faith, but out of actual knowledge, Novalis says that the Christ whom he has seen with eyes of spirit is a Power pervading all beings. This Power can be recognised by the eye in which it is working. The eye that beholds the Christ has itself been formed by the Christ-Power. The Christ-Power within the eye beholds the Christ outside the eye.

These are truly wonderful words! Novalis is also aware of the stupendous truth that since the Event of Golgotha the Being we call Christ has been the planetary Spirit of the Earth, the Spirit by whom the Earth's body will gradually be transformed. A wonderful vista of the future opens out before Novalis. He sees the Earth transfigured; he sees the present Earth in which the residue of ancient times is still contained, transformed into the Body of Christ; he sees the waters of the Earth permeated with Christ's Blood, and he sees the solid rocks as Christ's Flesh. He sees the body of the Earth gradually becoming the Body of Christ; he sees the Earth and Christ miraculously made one; he sees the Earth in future time as a great organism enshrining man, an organism whose soul is Christ.

In this sense, and out of his deep insight into occult truths, Novalis speaks of Christ as the Son of Man. Just as in a certain sense men are the ‘Sons of the Gods’, that is to say of the ancient Gods who through untold millions of years have moulded and shaped our planet, who have built the bodies in which we live and the ground upon which we move, so, by overcoming earthly things, man's task is to build, through his own powers, an Earth that will be the body of the new God, the God of the future. And whereas the men of old looked back to the primeval Gods, yearning to be united with them in death, Novalis recognises the God who in time to come will have as his body all that is best in us and that we can offer to Him. In Christ he sees the Being to whom humanity offers itself in order that this Being may have a body. He recognises Christ as the ‘Son of Man’ in this higher, cosmological sense. He speaks of Christ as the ‘God of the future’.

All these experiences and perceptions are so pregnant with meaning that they are well able to kindle the true mood of Christmas in our souls. And so we will let one who lived a brief life at the end of the eighteenth century, dying at the age of 29, describe the experiences associated with the greatest event in his life—the sublime vision of the Christ Being.

(Marie von Sivers (Marie Steiner) here recited a poem from the Spiritual Songs of Novalis.)

The Christmas Tree has not been the symbol of the Christmas Festival for any length of time. We shall find no poem on the Christmas Tree among, let us say, the works of a poet such as Schiller, although had such a custom existed in his day he would certainly have recognised its poetic possibilities and would not have found it difficult to write a poem on the subject. But in Schiller's time the Christmas Tree in its now familiar form was unknown. It is a young and quite recent institution. In earlier times men celebrated this festival in a different way. However far we look back into past ages, as long as one can speak of human beings in their present form or having the rudiments of that form, we shall everywhere find an institution that is akin to our Christmas Festival; we shall find it in constantly new forms among the widespread masses of the peoples and as an enactment in the highest Mysteries.

The very fact that the festival itself is so ancient and our present symbol of it so recent, is indicative of an element of eternity, of an eternal reality from which new forms ever and again spring forth. This Christ-Festival and all the feelings and experiences it symbolises, are as ancient as humanity on Earth. But man will always be able to find new symbols, symbols that are in keeping with the times, as outward forms of expression for this festival. Just as Nature herself is rejuvenated every year and her eternal forces bud forth in forms that are forever new, so it is with the symbols of Christmas piety; in their constant rejuvenation they betoken the eternal reality of this festival. And so in the solemnity of this Christmas hour we will bring a picture before our souls of what men on Earth have experienced at the time when we now celebrate Christmas.

As pupils of Spiritual Science we can send our thoughts back to ages in the far, far past, to begin with to the times when our souls were incarnated in Atlantean bodies, bodies very unlike those of today. In that epoch there were great Teachers who were also the Leaders of humanity. Men looked out upon a different world, where there was no bright sunlight to reveal to them in clear outlines the forms of objects in the kingdoms of Nature. Everything around them was as though swathed in mist—not only because much of Atlantis was actually covered with mist and fog through which the sunlight could not penetrate to the same extent as later on, but also because man's faculty of perception had not yet developed to the stage where external objects appeared in clear outline. When men woke in the morning they saw everything around them in divine Nature swathed in mist and surrounded by auric colours, and when they went to sleep at night they passed into a spiritual world without falling into the oblivion and unconsciousness of sleep today.

When men went to sleep in the days of Atlantis, they beheld the divine-spiritual Beings who were their companions; they beheld those divine Beings who were once experienced as realities and who in later times were preserved as memories in different regions of the Earth, bearing different names: Wotan, Thor, Baldur, in Middle Europe; the names of Zeus, Pallas Athene, Ares, and so forth, were given to those divine figures who had once been visible to man's eyes of soul in old Atlantis. But in Atlantean times the divine worlds were no longer the highest, creative worlds whence man had come forth in the age of Lemuria. Our souls were once born from the womb of divine Beings of whose sublimity and majesty there can be only a dim inkling today. These same divine Beings sent forth the cosmic orbs and all the forces surrounding us. Man was within the womb of divine Beings whose outward expressions we behold in the celestial bodies; they were the Beings who flash through the air in lightning and thunder, whose expressions are the plants and animals and whose sense-organs are the crystals. All the warmth that streams to us, all the forces in play around us—all this constitutes the body of divine-spiritual Beings from whom man has come forth.

The more deeply man descended to the Earth, the more closely he united with material substances, the more he membered into himself the substances of the Earth, the less capable he became of beholding the great Gods.

In primeval times man had as yet no faculty for cognising the material world; he could neither see with eyes nor hear with ears; pictures that were not pictures of minerals, animals or plants but of divine-spiritual Beings above him, surged through his soul. In later ages he lived more and more on the physical plane, learning through the outer sense-organs to know the physical world. In the days of Atlantis, sight on the physical plane alternated with a form of clairvoyance that had remained as a relic of the ancient state of sublime spirituality in which man once had lived. But the Gods he was still able to behold on the astral plane when by night he enjoyed the bliss of living as a spiritual being among other spiritual beings, were lower in rank than the highest Gods.

As the physical plane grew clearer, man's vision on the spiritual planes grew dim. But in ancient Atlantis there were Initiates who as well as imparting the deeper teachings concerning the Gods of old whence men had come forth, proclaimed a truth which they presented in somewhat the following way.

‘Look at the seed of a plant; see how this seed develops into a plant. It grows, sends forth leaves, sepals, blossom and fruit. One who observes the plant in this way can say to himself: I look back to the seed; the seed is the creator of the leaves and the blossom I see before me, and this blossom holds within it the seed of a new plant; the blossom forms itself into a new seed. And one can also look into the future.’—Thus did the great Atlantean Initiates speak to their pupils and through their pupils to the whole people. They said: ‘You can look back to the seeds of the Gods whence men have come forth. The spiritual and physical realities you see around you are all leaves that have sprung from the seeds of the primeval Gods. See in them the forces of those divine seeds even as the forces of the seed from which the plant has come forth can be seen in its leaves. But we are able to point to something more: in future times there will spread around man something that will be akin to the blossom of a plant, something that has, it is true, issued from the ancient Gods but—as the blossom ripens a seed—contains a seed in which the new God unfolds!’

The world is born of Gods—such was the ancient teaching. That the world will give birth to a God, to the great God of the future—such was the prophecy made by the Initiates of Atlantis to their pupils and through them to the people. For like all Initiates, those of Atlantis saw into the future, foresaw the great events of the future. Their vision reached beyond the time of the great Atlantean flood, beyond that stupendous happening whereby the face of the Earth was changed. They foresaw the civilisations that would arise in the future, in the land of the holy Rishis, in the land of Zarathustra; they foresaw the ancient Egyptian culture founded by Hermes, the conditions heralded and inaugurated by Moses, the happiness prevailing in Greece, the might and strength of Rome. All this the Atlantean Initiates saw in advance, and their vision extended to our own time and even beyond it. And to their intimate pupils they imparted hope, saying to them: ‘True, you must leave the spirit-lands where now you dwell, you must be ensnared in matter, you must clothe yourselves in sheaths woven from physical substances. There will come a time when you must labour on the physical plane, when it will seem as though the ancient Gods have vanished from your ken. But your eyes will be able to turn to where the new star can appear to you, to where the new seed comes to life, where there will spring forth the new God of the future, the God who has waited through the ages in order to appear in humanity at the right and proper time!’

When the Atlantean Initiates wanted to explain to their pupils and to all the people why man was destined to descend into the vale of Earth, they said to them that all souls would at some future time see and experience the One who was to come, who was still hidden from their sight, dwelling in a realm invisible to physical eyes as well as to the eyes of spirit which while man was still resting in the womb of the Gods, had gazed upon Him.

Then came the Atlantean flood. In a comparatively short time the face of the Earth was changed, and after the migrations of the peoples from West to East, the great post-Atlantean civilisations arose, beginning with that of ancient India.

The great Teachers in that epoch, the seven holy Rishis, taught their pupils, and indeed all the Indian people, of the reality of a spiritual world, for their life was now lived on the physical plane and they needed so to be taught. Their eyes could now see only the outer form of the physical world as the expression of the Spiritual, but the Spiritual itself they could not see. Yet there lived in the soul of every Indian something that can be called a dim remembrance of what the soul had once experienced among Gods in the age of old Atlantis. This remembrance aroused a yearning of such intensity for what had been lost, that the soul could establish no close relationship with the physical plane, could only regard it as maya, illusion, unreality. Nor could souls have endured such conditions on the physical plane had not the Rishis, filled with the fire of spiritual inspiration, been able to teach them of the glories of the ancient world that had departed from them. The teachings given by the Rishis concerning the Cosmos are still very little understood today; they were teachings based on a primeval wisdom, because the Rishis were initiated into what man had experienced when he was still within the womb of the Gods.

For man was present when the Gods separated the Sun from the Earth and ordained the paths of the celestial orbs—but during his later earthly pilgrimage he had forgotten it!

This wisdom was taught by the Rishis. And something else too was taught to those who were the most advanced and able to feel its significance. To them it was said: ‘From the world in which man is now placed, the world he now sees as maya, there will spring the Being who cannot yet be visible in this world because the human soul has not reached the stage where it can unfold the power to know this Being. But He who is still beyond your world will appear!’ Vicva karman was the name of the Being proclaimed by the ancient Teachers of India as the great Spirit of the future. To the Indian people it was said: ‘You cannot see Him yet, any more than you can see in the blossom the seed of the new plant. But as truly as the blossom contains the seed, as truly does maya unfold the germinating power that will make life in the physical world a worthy existence. The Being known in later times as the Christ was proclaimed in advance by the Teachers of ancient India; they, in true humility, were his prophets. Their spiritual gaze could turn in two directions—back to that primeval wisdom according to which the world was fashioned, and forward into the future. And to men engaged in the daily tasks of life they proclaimed the coming of One whose power would penetrate into the depths of human hearts and stir human hands to activity.

There was no age when He was not proclaimed, whenever one can speak of human culture and human understanding. If in later times men have forgotten the proclamations, this is not the fault of the great Teachers of an earlier humanity.

Then came the ancient Persian civilisation of which Zarathustra was the Leader. To his intimate pupils, and again to all the people, Zarathustra proclaimed that in everything by which man is surrounded, in the forces streaming from the Sun and from the other celestial bodies to the Earth, in all that fills the airy expanse, lives a Being now revealed to man in veiled form only.—And to his Initiates, Zarathustra was able to speak of the great Sun-Aura, of Ahura Mazdao, of the God of Good. What he said to his pupils may be rendered in somewhat the following way.—‘Look at the plant. It grows from the seed, develops leaves and blossom. But the plant is pervaded by a mysterious force which arises in the heart of the blossom as the new seed. What surrounds the seed will fall away; but the innermost force that can be perceived in the heart of the blossom enables you to feel that a new plant will arise from the old. If you ponder on the power and the force of the Sun's light, Feeling that in it you are beholding merely the physical expression of a spiritual reality and letting yourselves be inspired by the spiritual power of the Sun, then you will begin to understand the prophetic announcement of the Divine Fruit that is to be born from the Earth!’

When these intimate pupils had reached a very advanced stage, they were permitted, at certain times, to listen to teachings even more secret. And in consecrated hours Zarathustra spoke to them of One who would come when men were ready to receive Him into their midst with understanding. Mighty pictures of the One who would come were presented by Zarathustra to his pupils. To one pupil he could reveal the picture itself, to a second a kind of reflection only; to the others it was only possible to give a general picture of what would come to pass in the future.—Thus He who was called Christ was also proclaimed in the civilisation of Zarathustra in ancient Persia.

So also it was in Egyptian civilisation. Hermes too had his Egyptian Initiates and through them had proclaimed the Christ in a certain way to all the people of ancient Egypt. In the legend of Osiris may be seen a reflection of the proclamation of Christ.

What was it that the legend of Osiris conveyed to men? The legend is that in olden times the people were blessed in that Osiris ruled in the Land of Egypt in true union with Isis, his spouse. His evil brother, Set, or Typhon, resolved to destroy Osiris. To this end he built a chest in which Osiris was imprisoned, and cast it into the sea. Isis eventually found the chest but could not bring Osiris to life again on the Earth. He had been transported into higher realms and since then could be seen by men only after they had passed through the gate of death. To every Egyptian it was said: After death you can be united with Osiris as truly as your hand is united with you here on Earth. After death you can be part of Osiris and call him your own higher Self, but only provided you have merited this on the physical plane. After death you can be united with the God known to you as the Most High.

To one who was an Initiate, something more could be revealed. When he had undergone all the ordeals and testings, when he had received all the teachings that must precede vision of the higher worlds, then even during physical life between birth and death the picture of Osiris was revealed to him—the picture that came before other men only after death. The Being with whom the pupil of the Egyptian Initiates must feel himself united came before him when he was outside his body, when his ether-body, astral body and ego had been raised out of the physical body; and then, one who even in his lifetime had gazed upon Osiris could proclaim to the others:- Osiris lives! But never could it have been proclaimed in ancient Egypt: Osiris dwells among us! This was expressed in the legend by saying: Osiris is a king who has never been seen on the Earth! The ‘chest’ is nothing else than the physical body. The moment Osiris is laid in the physical body, the inimical forces of the physical world, forces that are not yet ready to receive the God, assert themselves with such strength that they bring the God to destruction. The physical world is not ready yet to receive the God with whom man must be united. ‘But’—so spake those who could bear personal witness that Osiris lives—‘although we say to you that the God lives in very truth, it is only the Initiate who can behold him, when he (the Initiate) is away from the physical world. The God with whom man must become one in his inmost being, lives, but he lives in the spiritual world. He alone who leaves the physical world can be united with the God!’

At the same time men were beginning more and more to love the physical world; for it was their task and mission to work in the physical world, to establish one culture after another in the physical world. To the same extent to which the eyes looked out with clearer vision, and intelligence was better able to fathom the happenings of the physical world, to the same extent to which man's knowledge increased, enabling him to make discoveries and inventions useful for the purposes of physical life—to that same extent it became constantly more difficult for him during life between birth and death to gaze into the spiritual world. He could hear from the Initiates that the God with whom he must be united, lives in very truth; but from the physical world he could bring little that would make definite communion with Osiris possible for him in yonder world. Greater and greater darkness spread over life in the world surmised by man to be the home of the God with whom he must become one.

Then came the age of Greece when with all their delight in the physical world, men achieved that marriage between spirit and matter which bore such glorious fruit on the physical plane. In the wonderful masterpieces of ancient Greece we have a picture of how, in the epoch when the Event of Golgotha was to take place, men were related to the spiritual world. It is difficult to conceive but it is true nevertheless, that the supreme achievement of architecture—the Greek temple—corresponds with the lowest point in man's relationship with the spiritual world.

Let us picture a Greek temple towering before us. In its forms, in its perfection and wholeness, it is the very purest, noblest expression of the Spiritual—so that it could once be said, and said with truth: the God himself dwells in the Greek temple. The God was present in the temple, for the lines woven by the material were everywhere in harmony with the spiritual order of the Cosmos and with the lines pervading the physical plane as the directions of space. There is no more beautiful, no nobler example of the interpenetration of the spirit of man and physical matter than a Greek temple. It is the unparalleled example of union between the higher worlds and physical matter.

Through their works of art and the principles expressed in their creation, the Greeks were able to make the ancient Gods come down among them. And even if the Greeks did not actually behold Zeus or Pallas Athene when they had so descended, nevertheless the Gods were there, drawn and enchanted into these works of art—the Gods who had once been visible to men and among whom they had lived in the times of Atlantis. Men were able to provide a glorious dwelling-place for the ancient Gods.

And now let us see what the Greek temple represents in another respect. Suppose clairvoyant consciousness has before it a Greek temple. What will now be said holds good even of the sparse remains still surviving of the Greek temple architecture.—Think of what happens when clairvoyant consciousness has before it a relic such as one of the temples at Paestum. The harmony of the lines presented by the columns and roof coverings can literally fill one with rapture. Such perfection is there that one can picture and feel the very presence of divinity in the physical structure itself. The same feeling can arise when Greek architecture is seen through the eyes of the physical body.

And now think of clairvoyant consciousness transported into the spiritual world. There it is as if a black screen were drawn across what is to be seen in the physical world; what is to be seen there is as though obliterated. Nothing of all these splendours of the physical plane can be carried over into the spiritual world. Supreme beauty—when such indeed it is—achieved on the physical plane, is obliterated in the spiritual world. And then we realise that it is no myth when, on meeting an Initiate, one who was a leading figure in Greece uttered the words: Better it is to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the Shades! (Homer: Odyssey, Song XI, verse 488-491)—In Greece, where man could find such bliss in the physical world, souls entered a shadowy existence when they passed into the world of the dead. Splendour in the physical world—equivalent barrenness in the spiritual world.

Let us now make two other comparisons with the experience aroused by a Greek temple.—Think of Raphael's Sistine Madonna, or Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper—works created after the Event of Golgotha and influenced by its mysteries. The sight of these pictures can fill the soul with rapture, and this is also true of clairvoyant consciousness.

When the eyes of clairvoyant consciousness rest upon these pictures on the physical plane and this consciousness then rises into the spiritual world, a man realises, although the physical is no longer seen: What I take into the spiritual world from the experience aroused by these pictures is not simply an echo of the physical; here there is not only the rapture I experienced at the sight of them, but now for the first time I realise all their glory; in the physical world I merely laid the seed of what I now experience in infinitely greater majesty and splendour!—When a man contemplates such pictures in which the mysteries connected with Golgotha are contained, he is laying the seed—but only the seed—for a greater knowledge in the spiritual world. What has made this possible? It has been made possible because the spiritual Power proclaimed so long in advance, actually appeared on the Earth. Mankind had succeeded in unfolding a blossom in which the seed of the God of the future could ripen. Through the Event of Golgotha something was communicated to Earth existence that man can not only take with him into the spiritual world but that in the spiritual worlds appears in higher glory and sublimity.

At the moment when the physical body of Christ Jesus died on Golgotha, Christ appeared among those who were living between death and a new birth. He could proclaim to them what none of the earlier Initiates, when they passed into the spiritual world, could have proclaimed. When the earlier Initiates—let us say of the Eleusinian Mysteries—passed from this physical world into the world of those living between death and a new birth, what would the Eleusinian Initiates have been able to say to those souls? They could have told them of happenings on the physical plane, but this would have caused them nothing but longing and grief. For their life had taken root entirely on the physical plane and in yonder world, where nothing physical could be found and darkness prevailed, souls could not share the Feeling which made a man of importance on the physical plane exclaim: Better it is to be a beggar on the physical plane than a king in the realm of the Shades! The Initiates who could bring such treasures to those living on the physical plane could have brought nothing to the souls then living in yonder world. Then came the Event of Golgotha. Christ appeared among the dead—and for the first time there could be proclaimed in the spiritual world an event of the physical world which forms the beginning of a bridge leading over from the physical into the spiritual world. When Christ appeared in the nether world it was as though light flashed through the spiritual worlds. For in the physical world itself incontrovertible proof had been furnished that the spiritual can forever conquer death! And thus it came to pass that man can also carry over with him into the spiritual world, experiences that come to him in the physical world.

This holds good of St. John's Gospel in an even higher degree and also of the other Gospels which tell of the Event of Golgotha. A man who studies the Gospel of St. John on the physical plane, experiences intellectual joy from the reading of this great record; but when he passes into the spiritual world he knows that what he was able to experience in the physical world was but a foretaste of what he can now perceive and behold. The fact of supreme importance is that man can now take his treasures with him from the physical plane into the spiritual world.

Since the Event of Golgotha the spiritual world has been illumined with an ever brighter, ever clearer light. Everything existing in the physical world has issued from the spiritual world. When he passed from the physical into the spiritual world, pre-Christian man could say: Here is the wellspring and origin of everything the physical world contains. What has come forth from the spiritual world are but the effects. But since the Event of Golgotha, man can say when he passes from the physical into the spiritual world: In the physical world too there is causality and what is experienced on the physical plane works over into the spiritual world.

And so it will continue—in ever-increasing measure. Everything proceeding from the work of the old Gods will die away and what will blossom forth will grow on into the future, as the workings of the God of the future. This is what will pass over into the spiritual world. It is just as when a man, looking at the seed of a new plant, says to himself: True, it has come forth from an old plant, from an earlier seed, but now the old has fallen away, has vanished, and now the new seed is there, the seed that will unfold into the new plant, the new blossom.—We too live in a world where leaves and blossom have issued from the seeds born of the ancient Gods. But more and more the new fruit, the Christ-fruit, is unfolding and everything else will fall away. What is wrought out here in the physical world will be of value for the future in so far as it is carried over into the spiritual world. Before the eyes of Spirit a world arises in the future, a world which has its roots in the physical as our world once had its roots in the spiritual. Just as men are the sons of the Gods, so, out of what men in the physical world experience by rising to an understanding of the Event of Golgotha, the body will be formed for those new Gods of the future, of whom Christ is the Leader. So do the old worlds live on into the new; the old dies utterly away, and the new springs into bud out of the old. But this could come about only because humanity was able to unfold a blossom for that spiritual Being Who was to become the God of the future.

This blossom that could unfold within it the seed of the God of the future could only be a threefold human sheath consisting of physical body, ether body and astral body, a sheath cleansed and purified by all that could be attained by man on Earth. And this sheath of Jesus of Nazareth who sacrificed himself in order that the Christ-Seed might be received, this blossom of manhood, represents the very purest essence that the spiritual endeavours of evolving mankind have been able to produce. Not until the earth was ready to bring forth her fairest blossom could the seed for the new God appear. And the birth of this blossom is commemorated in our Christmas Festival. In our Christmas Festival we celebrate the birth of the blossom which was to receive the Christ-Seed.

Christmas is a festival wherein men can gaze into the past and also into the future. For from the past has issued the blossom out of which unfolds the seed for the future. The threefold sheath of Christ was a product of the old Earth—woven and born out of the highest that it was in men's power to achieve. And no outer presentation of a mystery can make a more powerful impression upon us than the presentation of the mystery of how the fairest flower of humankind could spring from the purest calyx.

That mankind once issued from the womb of the Godhead, that man was once a spiritual being and descended into material existence—how can this be more beautifully presented than by indicating how the Spiritual gradually densifies, how man himself has densified out of the formless haze of the Spiritual? As a prophetic foreshadowing, the ancient Egyptian depicted the lion-headed Goddess, still wholly spiritual, belonging to the age when man was still hardly material, still resting as an etheric-spiritual being in the womb of the Godhead. Then, anticipating the later ‘Sistine Madonna’, we have the Egyptian portrayal of another female form: Isis with the child Horus. There we see how what is born from the clouds, that is to say from the Spirit, has densified into the calyx, into that which represents the human being developing an into the future. This conception, already foreshadowed by men of ancient time, we see in the Christian Madonna with the Child Jesus.

With supreme purity and delicacy, Raphael has breathed this mystery into form in his portrayal of the Madonna. A human being crystallises out of angels' heads and in turn brings forth Jesus of Nazareth, the blossom into which the Christ-Seed is to be received. The whole story of the evolution of humanity is contained in a most wonderful way in this picture of the Madonna. No wonder that as he stood before the Madonna, there arose in the one to whose words we have listened today, the glorious remembrance from the incarnation of which his last incarnation was again a remembrance, and who brought to life within himself all the sublime insight which this pictured mystery of mankind could awaken; no wonder that these feelings streamed to the being from whom Christ was born, to the figure who brought forth the calyx from which sprang the blossom that could allow the seed of the new God to ripen!

And so we see how in the supremely gifted Novalis, feelings free of all denominational bias quicken to life at the portrayal of this holy Mystery which was enacted at the first Christmas and is repeated at every Christmastide. It is the Mystery of the ancient Initiates, represented by the Magi, bringing their offerings to the new Mystery. The Wise Men, who are bearers of the wisdom of times past, make their offerings to that which is to go forward into the future, that which, in a human being, will one day harbour the power by which all worlds connected with the Earth are pervaded.

Novalis experienced the Christ Mystery, the Mary Mystery, in relation to the Cosmic Mystery, the light of which shone before his eyes of soul as it had shone at the first Christmas, when Beings who had not descended to the physical plane proclaimed the union between a cosmic and an earthly Power, which can become a reality in human hearts and in the Cosmos itself when the human heart unites with Christ. The Egyptian proclamation: ‘The God with whom you must be united dwells in the world that can be reached only after death’, holds good no longer. For now the God with whom man must be united lives among us here, between birth and death; and men can find Him when they unite their hearts and souls with Him in this world. Thus in the first Holy Night of Christendom the strain resounded:

Offenbarung durch die Höhen dem Gotte,
Ruhe und Stille durch die Erdenräume,
Seligkeit in den Menschen.

Revelation in the Heights to God,
Quiet and peace through all the Earth,
Blessed joy in Men.¹

Poems by Novalis (‘Marienlieder’) were recited by Marie von Sivers (Marie Steiner) at the end of this lecture.

• 1. This should be regarded as an approximate translation of the rather unusual rendering of the Christmas message.

After the opening of the Pforzheim branch we are together again and will best fill our time by immediately entering into a spiritual theme, a theme which, through Anthroposophy, shows that we don't only absorb teaching and thoughts but that our life of feeling and of experience is enriched, calmed and protected. We do not dare imagine that teaching, imagining and thoughts are unimportant in our life of feeling. It's like this: in our time we will gradually come to say: Of thoughts and science there is enough in the world and we only need to take some or other book of instructions regarding the starry worlds or whatever else, to fill our minds with enough science. Theosophy however should be involved with mood or experience.—That is definitely correct because science, as encountered through popular lectures and publications, can offer little for the heart and soul. We don't dare conclude however that teaching, observation and knowledge are worthless.

Spiritual scientific knowledge is quite different to teachings of outer science. When we allow spiritual knowledge to really work into us, it becomes transformed in us as feelings, as soul impulses, as a way of thinking and in no other way can we acquire courage, certainty and power than through the deepening of this knowledge. It is quite different to merely recognise and know sense perceptible things and pioneering events, how things come about, than it is to penetrate behind the sensual things into the preceding spiritual events. When we allow spiritual events to work through the soul, we become warm, healthy and strong. We recognise the connections between us and that which weaves throughout the entire world as spirit and soul, the originators of all appearances. Consequently we want to come to grips with the relationship between the outer sensual world, outside, and our soul. On looking at our own souls, we find so to speak those things closest to us—suffering, joy, pain and pleasure—and now the question arises: When spiritual sciences says that everything in the world is spirit-penetrated, then we can argue that suffering, joy, pain and pleasure can also be found in those things which surrounds us, as well as in those things which we also meet as being callous, painless and insensitive.—We need to acquire the right way of thinking about things around us, through Anthroposophy.

We see for instance the various plants, animals and minerals around us. Not only do animals equally give us joy and suffering, pleasure and pain; that no one doubts. With plants and the apparently lifeless world of stones we can come to doubt that feelings, pleasure, joy and pain can be inherent in them. It is exactly this, which we acquire as experiences related to the entire surrounding world, that all beings are not only physically linked to us but that these beings link to us in such a way as to have soul content, just as we have soul content. Now we need to deepen within us, in the right way, what spiritual research and spiritual knowledge has to say about it. It is even understood in our time, from more sensory thoughts, that the plants could posses something spiritual, yes, one may be tempted to admit that an apparently lifeless stone could contain something spiritual.

When you consider you can still easily make mistakes if you don't take into account spiritual scientific research, you can easily say: If I cut the physical body of a person then I cause hurt, the same with animals; but when I cut a plant, will it also feel hurt?—Hence I can infer that if I crush a stone, I'm hurting it also. As a result, when people think about these things they come to believe that everything happening to other beings is experienced in the same way as to human beings, and because of this belief, they find it so difficult to enter with their thoughts into knowledge of spiritual knowledge. Occult science offers us quite a different way of recognising the soul nature of plants and stones, for instance. It appears, when we contemplate the plant, that certainly, when the plant is partly damaged where it grows out of earth towards the heights, no feeling of pain penetrates the plant, that it doesn't hurt but that the opposite is the case. That which comprises the actual soul of the plant feels pleasure, almost joy, when over the surface of the earth sensitive parts of plants are destroyed. Pain only starts for the plant soul when the plant is pulled out of the earth, uprooted; a similar pain is experienced when we or animals for instance have hair pulled out. This is something which a soul can gradually experience when on the so-called way or path of knowledge.

These things only allow us to experience them in our own souls when we transform our souls in such a way as to wake the slumbering, true powers of knowledge. Then the ability begins for the soul not only to feel compassion towards other people but to have compassion for the whole of the rest of nature, and the rest of nature becomes understandable in a wonderful way.

Now we could say: what do we get from spiritual scientific research if we ourselves can't feel such things?—It is an incorrect objection if we believe Anthroposophy has no meaning. It already has an account of spiritual-soul facts of great value. When such knowledge for example speaks about the relationship of plant suffering to plant joy then we really need to think about this knowledge and should allow such thoughts to work on us. Through our mere reflection regarding this knowledge we lure out contained forces and we will soon feel that it is indeed so, what is said by spiritual science. We learn however through knowing that when we look into the wisdom of nature, the plant soul experiences pleasure when we pick it. From this we can get the notion that we can think what is going to happen should the plant have been able to experience pain. Just think about it, what a large part of the earth's beings are nourished through plants, and how, through the nourishment of people and animals the pain could increasingly be spread over the earth. That isn't the case, but pleasure and joy spreads over the earth when an animal grazes in a pasture. Whoever has knowledge about this, feels entire streams of joy weave over the earth when in autumn the sickle cuts through the blades of grain. When the young animal sucks milk from its mother it does not mean there is pain, but a definite feeling of pleasure. Thus we see into the wisdom of nature when we go through life this way.

Against these things one should never turn your back: yes, it can appear gentler under the circumstances when a plant is dug out with its roots and replanted, instead of picking flowers.—Certainly, but this doesn't change the facts that uprooting causes actual pain to the plant soul. Deliberate ripping off blossoms can naturally from a certain point of view be rebuked, but even that changes nothing about the plant soul undergoing pleasure. From various points of view it looks different. A person may consider for example, from a standpoint of beauty, that pulling out the first grey hairs seems quite justified, even though it causes pain. Something else comes to our notice when we take this comparison of the uprooting of plants and the uprooting of human hair. We start to understand what it means when spiritual science considers not a single plant, but so to speak looks at the plant growth over the entire earth. Just as hair belongs to all human beings, so plants and earth create a unity, and we understand and can also think that, what we call the “I” (Ich) in spiritual science regarding a person, we can't find in a single plant but in the central point of the earth. The plant is absolutely not a single being, but becomes part of the great living being, existing out of many single living beings, but which has their “I” in the centre of the earth.

No one dares ask the question: Is there a place for this “I” everywhere?—Certainly, because it is spirit and can penetrate all. So our earth becomes a living being. So every single plant becomes something which grows out of a large supersensible being and, on the surface, becomes what nails or hair is to the human being. When we take such a fact seriously then we no longer argue about dry cerebral concepts regarding a physical planet on which we are living but then we feel that not only are we living beings but that we are linked to a great living being which is our planet. We learn to take cognisance of this spiritual being and we learn that it concerns more than just a comparison, when, in the sap flowing through the plant something happens similar to when blood courses through the human body. We learn to transform these things in our feelings by understanding them spiritually.

When we touch a plant we experience the soul-spiritual, we feel safe within the soul-spiritual. Gradually it becomes possible to add the thought given in spiritual science: The earth has gone through divers metamorphosis. We discover, when we go back in the most distant past, that the earth appeared quite different, that for example such solid rock masses as we have today, were not present then. There had been a time when the earth existed of only air and water and a certain condition of warmth. Only gradually solidity developed from the fluid and soft conditions. On contemplating this whole development, the activity within the entire development appears to us as one of growing and thriving. At one time the earth was young and in time it will become old and aged.

If we apply all imaginings which we relate to ourselves, to the earth, then we will understand that during our earth development certain extraordinary important stages were reached. We will bring such important stages in our earth development before our souls when we contemplate the following: Already from our earth's plant growth we realize, by considering the earth as a whole, that it is a living being. Similarly various other heavenly bodies are living beings which stand in a certain relationship to us. Let us look at our sun and moon. Consider the sun. You all know what we owe to the sun. You all know that when you have rested for the night, when you had been in a state of consciousness which had brought about the astral body and the ego (Ich) leaving the physical and ether bodies—you know, when the astral body and ego return, that it so to speak expects everything which the earth owes to the sun. What would the earth be without the sun? The sun surrounds our entire earthly mass with warmth and light. But we have to consider the activity of such a heavenly body on another not only as merely substantial and materialistic but we need to be clear that this sun does not only have a physical body floating in space but the sun is inhabited by spiritual beings and that in each ray of sunshine not only physical light but also spiritual activity streams to us.

A spiritual exchange between sun and earth was always there, but it has essentially changed in the course of earthly development. While no great difference in the physical exchange between sun and earth has come about during many, many millions of years, a spiritual and meaningful stages were reached. High beings these are, who live in the light and warmth of the sun and who work into the earth from there, flooding us with light and warmth.

A Sun Being, who had up to a specific moment in time his stage in the sun, which man could through long, long earthly cycles only observe clairvoyantly, this Being descended at a specific moment from the sun down to the earth. This is something which allows us to see in depth into spiritual development: through the event which we call the Mystery of Golgotha, or in other words, through the passage of Christ on earth, the spiritual Being who had been up to that point on the sun, united himself with the earth. He connected himself with the earth. Humanity's division of earthly time into pre-Christian and post-Christian has its origin in this: that this living being, which we call the earth, underwent through this deed an important development through the appearance of Christ on earth. What was previously only found in the sun, since then can be found in the astral body of the earth. The astral body of the earth changed through the Mystery of Golgotha: at the very same moment the blood flowed out of the wounds of the Redeemer, at that moment the Christ-Soul felt itself uniting with the body of the earth.

This has to be understood in order for us to consider the reported story of Christianity in the correct light. We can ask ourselves: what then was one of the most important events with reference to the spreading of Christianity? When one looks at the propagation of Christianity one can say: firstly more had been accomplished by Paul than those who were the physical companions of Christ Jesus in Palestine; Paul who was no physical companion of Christ Jesus, who had even persecuted the Christ. Paul didn't become a believer through sharing the life and suffering of the Christ, but he became a warrior for Christ through the Event of Damascus.

In theology much dust is raised over the Event of Damascus. Yet no one comes to an understanding of the Events of Damascus but through spiritual science. Let's try to bring this into harmony in only a few words—which will be uttered now. The moment Paul's reasoning consciousness changed into the higher consciousness, what did he see? He saw in that moment this spirit in the astral world, who had become the earth spirit; he saw the living Christ, who since the Event of Golgotha had united with the earth. One can well ask: what was this light which he saw, which people could not see before?—Paul first learnt to know the Christ from the time Christ united with the earth. Thus we may point out this important moment of the earth by saying: the earth prepared itself for this, to become a worthy body for the Christ-Spirit and while the earth was preparing for the uniting of itself and the Christ-Spirit, during this time the Christ-Spirit worked into it. Christ said according to the St John's Gospel: “Whoever eats my bread, treads me with their feet.” People who walk on earth step on the earth with their feet. “Whoever eats my bread, treads me with their feet,” is an expression for the mystery which lies in this important stage of earthly development.

How endlessly profound this becomes with the inauguration of Communion with this in mind, that the earth became from then on the body of Christ! How meaningful this becomes with reference to the words: “This is my body” and that which flows through the plants: “This is my blood.” We learn to take literally what we only dared pronounce in words. So we come, when we consider the earth as alive, as a living being which gradually matures, to the right moment, ready for the acceptance of the Christ-soul.

So from all sides it appears that we encounter the physical planet as spiritual; it appears penetrated by spirit. We then learn to understand connections between that which we meet daily and the super-sensible. When we turn our attention from the plant kingdom to the stone realm then it will not appear through clairvoyant consciousness that we inflict pain when we crush a stone to dust; by contrast, when a stone is turned into dust, what we could call the stone-soul, experiences pleasure and joy. Those who have the sight know that with crushing the stone world, joy streams out of the rock. When, for example, salt is dissolved in a glass of water, pleasure spreads through the water as the salt particles move apart. The opposite is the case when through cooling the solution of salt crystallizes; through the crowding together of the stone particles pain takes place. We look again deeply into the way in which the Initiates speak to us, when they want to tell humankind something like this.

These things are not simply said. We must go through them in a spiritual way to reach an understanding of the great religious documents. It has already been said that originally no hard rock kingdom existed, that the earth was fluid. Its solidity came into existence through the gathering of parts and by hardening. What does man and animal owe to the earth's condensing? Surely so man and animal can live in the present state? Without solid ground and land the earth couldn't offer a base for man and animal. Now bring this imagination into our souls as actual spiritual history. This is hardly understood when only considered with the mind of a physicist. Only when we, with our hearts and minds, explore the earth's coming into being, then we can become conscious of what lies in the stone kingdom, that soul processes are at play, while the was earth solidifying. Pain and suffering was involved—through this, man and animal owe the possibility to live on the earth.

These are the facts that lie at the basis of Paul's words after his Initiation and perception into these things: “All creatures suffer and sigh under the gradual solidification, all creatures sigh and wait for the spiritualisation.” He points with these deep words to the innermost, to the soul of the earthy beings. Now we may en-soul everything, by looking through the eyes of spiritual science, and only through glimpsing the soul and spirit in everything, will we gradually find the world around us becoming more and more comprehensible. We come to an understanding that the world which surrounds us, as in physiognomy, is an outer expression of an inner life. Then we will learn to grasp that the world looks exactly as it appears to people. Further we will learn to understand that behind all physicality is the soul-spiritual which has to be the origin of everything physical, and when the spiritual researchers take us back they show us how in the far, distant past, everything gradually developed out of the spiritual. The human being gradually descended from the spiritual world into the physical, and we must not imagine this descent as something as materialistic as is usually done these days, but rather ask: where does this actual material world which surrounds us, originate from, which is spreading ever more around us?

Mankind were for some time through and through spiritual, embedded in the soul-spiritual. Mankind developed only gradually out of this soul-spiritual. If we glance back to a relatively short time ago—when the realms of time were long, but for the spiritual researcher they are short to name—we find that our earth didn't appear as it does today, that her countenance has thoroughly changed, above all things through the event of the Flood, which in spiritual science goes under the name of the Atlantean Flood. Under this Atlantean flooding we may consider that through air and water activity the face of the earth was completely transformed. Previously the people lived in an area of the earth where the Atlantic Ocean is today. Land existed and there our souls actually lived in previous embodiments in Atlantean bodies. If we look spiritual scientifically at these people at the beginning of this Atlantean time, they appear quite differently to our souls from today. They appear in the early Atlantean times as if they perceived everything in a different way to later. Today, when one of us, during our waking hours glances around, we perceive objects in colour and light. When in the night, the physical and ether bodies are released from the ego and astral bodies, this world disappears. We call this unconsciousness.

During early Atlantean times it was not the case that unconsciousness surrounded people when they entered into another condition during night time. Everything emerged at that time that was soul and spirit in the physical world. People for instance saw flowers before they fell asleep. During sleep they perceived the soul-spiritual of the flower in the soul-spirit world. Therefore these things were, what we call physical outer objects today, not sharply defined as today, because the people saw these as if in a mist surrounded by edges of colour. So we see how the soul too has gradually changed its look. When we go back even further, we will find that the souls only perceived the spiritual, because the physical had not solidified out of the soul yet.

Now the people on our earth were subject to an important point in their development and this moment lay in the middle of their Atlantean development. At this midpoint the people would, if a certain achievement hadn't already been reached, not have ceased perceiving the spiritual world with their nocturnal consciousness. If a certain event hadn't intervened, the people of the middle Atlantean time would for instance not have seen some or other object, like a flower, as yellow, but as it were the spirit of the plant would have appeared to them. That this happened differently was due to people allowing Lucifer and his supporters to exert their influence earlier. The Atlantean was so to speak unaware of the outer physical world; it would have appeared transparent. He had perceived the spiritual world behind everything.

What now happened for the physical world to be not spread under a transparent crystal blanket but to become opaque? Through the spiritual world becoming concealed, yet another possibility, the influence of Ahriman, or as Goethe called him, Mephistopheles, could be expressed. As a result this spirit, which we call the ahrimanic, could penetrate, and after a certain time error and illusion stepped in. That which we call Maya, illusion, could mix into the conception of the world. So behind everything which we take as the physical world, stand the principals of this world, as we call them in the Bible. Their influence penetrates everywhere. Without these influences, matter would appear transparent and reveal the underlying spiritual. As a result an enormous change came about through these events within the souls of people. When we consider how human beings developed on the earth, we see how at a certain time the luciferic and at another time the ahrimanic influences made themselves effective.

When we look back at that time when the human being was still spiritual, when solidity hadn't crystallized, we see how the forces of nature and humanity were not as separate as they are today. They were in that time much closer while the earth was still penetrated by the watery element. The softer the earth was, the more spiritual were the people—human thoughts and human feelings influenced forces of nature. When we go even further back behind the Atlantean times, we find: As human will impulses turned to anger it had quite a definite influence on fire, and thus a large portion of the earth was destroyed in order for the human being to go through the luciferic influence and stimulate evil instincts, through which in an alternate hindsight mankind acquired his freedom and independence. Thus, what we call forces of nature, were linked to human thinking during the Atlantean time.

Now it happened, through humanity's so called luciferic influence granting them independence, that it was given the possibility to influence the forces of nature through the will. Gradually human beings withdrew from the influence of nature forces. This went hand in hand with the influence of Ahriman who wanted to mask the spiritual world from the human being. People who could still see the spiritual world were able to influence nature's forces. Single people were able to withdraw from these influences, the majority of mankind not. Even today actually very few individuals have a direct influence on the forces of nature, in comparison to humanity as a whole, and when we consider humanity in its entirety then we will see accordingly that besides individual karma there exists earth karma for the whole of humanity.

This is a result of what once were a luciferic and then an ahrimanic influence. This being we call Ahriman stands in a mysterious connection to the powers of earth fire which goes back to the direct influence of a few single people. These fire powers of the earth is a life element of ahrimanic spirits and through the ahrimanic influence the collective karma of the whole human race is bound in a certain extent to Ahriman. When specific soul attitudes of mind and events enter into human development, then again the relationship between people and Ahriman is valid, and that, which enabled people to influence forces of nature, still takes place today through Ahriman and his spiritual horde.

Every time Ahriman stirs, it indicates nothing other than that something had happened in human history which attracted Ahriman and brought him into turmoil and rage. In the soul of man something happens, something which for instance lets the largest part of mankind fall into materialism. This enables Ahriman to work in his own element—he then has a living element—because human materialism attracts him more than people who become spiritual. Ahriman awakens storms, volcanic outbursts and earthquakes. Here we really have something which shows how nature and spirit are connected. Nothing happens on earth without a spiritual connection. Our soul is connected to its good and evil deeds as a result of what is going on, on earth. When the earth rages during an earthquake, we will never say it is as a result of a single person's karma, but mankind's karma. Everyone can thump his heart and say his individual karma is included here, the single must perish, because right here the valve of the earth had to open up. He will be recompensed in future.—A materialistic point of view will say this is superstitious but whoever says this doesn't realise how childishly the argument is. How can a flower grow without a spiritual basis, how can it be an expression of spirit and soul, just so no earthquake, no volcanic eruption can be without a spiritual origin, without a spiritual cause. When we, as we said, stare karma in the face, then we make it valid for the entire life of humankind.

Only when we don't bring spiritual scientific teaching into movement, it appears cold and calculated by the mind. When we however allow our feelings, our attitude of mind and our experiences to be penetrated, then we will see the earth as a living being, through and through soul and spirit, and then you will see that this earthly body is bound to spiritual beings of the most various kinds and that a very important event has come to the fore, whose effectiveness is only beginning: the appearance of Christ on earth. Through Christ alone are the consequences of Ahriman's power driven out.

As a result of spiritual science's infusion into the human heart with this Christ-Spirit, that which spreads out on earth as the entire spirit of humanity, now enables the earth right into its nature elements to come to peace and harmony.

When all human hearts in the true sense experience the Christ-Spirit then the power which will stream from this will be so strong, it will calm fire and water. Then the Christ-Spirit would bring peace and harmony into the elements of nature, and the earth itself become an expression of the spirit. The earthly body, which is a living being, would become soft and mild and rise with the human spirit and human soul towards its spiritualisation. To a higher spiritual existence the earth will rise. We can place this as a higher, further ideal and can allow this to penetrate us each moment. No moment is lost in the development of humanity which is applied in such a way that knowledge and will impulses are inter-penetrated by spirit.

It may seem strange that an anthroposophist should feel called upon to speak about practical training in thought, for there is a widespread opinion that Anthroposophy is highly impractical and has no connection with life. This view can only arise among those who see things superficially, for in reality what we are concerned with here can guide us in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life. It is something that can be transformed at any moment into sensation and feeling, enabling us to meet life with assurance and to acquire a firm position in it.

Many people who call themselves practical imagine that their actions are guided by the most practical principles. But if we inquire more closely, it is found that their so-called “practical thought” is often not thought at all but only the continuing pursuit of traditional opinions and habits. An entirely objective observation of the “practical” man's thought and an examination of what is usually termed “practical thinking” will reveal the fact that it generally contains little that can be called practical. What to them is known as practical thought or thinking consists in following the example of some authority whose ideas are accepted as a standard in the construction of some object. Anyone who thinks differently is considered impractical because this thought does not coincide with traditional ideas.

Whenever anything really practical has been invented, it has been done by a person without practical knowledge of that particular subject. Take, for instance, the modern postage stamp. It would be most natural to assume that it was invented by some practical post office official. It was not. At the beginning of the last century it was a complicated affair to mail a letter. In order to dispatch a letter one had to go to the nearest receiving office where various books had to be referred to and many other formalities complied with. The uniform rate of postage known today is hardly sixty years old, and our present postage stamp that makes this possible was not invented by a practical postal employee at all but by someone completely outside the post office. This was the Englishman, Rowland Hill.

After the uniform system of postage stamps had been devised, the English minister who then had charge of the mails declared in Parliament that one could not assume any simplification of the system would increase the volume of mail as the impractical Hill anticipated. Even if it did, the London post office would be entirely inadequate to handle the increased volume. It never occurred to this highly “practical” individual that the post office must be fitted to the amount of business, not the business to the size of the post office. Indeed, in the shortest possible time this idea, which an “impractical” man had to defend against a “practical” authority, became a fact. Today, stamps are used everywhere as a matter of course for sending letters.

It was similar with the railroads. When in 1837 the first railroad in Germany was to be built, the members of the Bavarian College of Medicine were consulted on the advisability of the project and they voiced the opinion that it would be unwise to build railroads. They added that if this project were to be carried out, then at least a high board fence would have to be erected on both sides of the line to protect the public from possible brain and nervous shock.

When the railroad from Potsdam to Berlin was planned, Postmaster General Stengler said, “I am now dispatching two stage coaches daily to Potsdam and these are never full. If people are determined to throw their money out the window, they can do it much more simply without building a railroad!”

But the real facts of life often sweep aside the “practical,” that is to say, those who believe in their own ability to be practical. We must clearly distinguish between genuine thinking and so-called “practical thinking” that is merely reasoning in traditional ruts of thought.

As a starting point to our consideration I will tell you of an experience I had during my student days. A young colleague once came to me glowing with the joy of one who has just hit upon a really clever idea, and announced that he must go at once to see Professor X (who at the time taught machine construction at the University) for he had just made a great discovery. “I have discovered,” he said, “how, with a small amount of steam power and by simply rearranging the machinery, an enormous amount of work can be done by one machine.” He was in such a rush to see the Professor that that was all he could tell me. He failed to find him, however, so he returned and explained the whole matter to me. It all smacked of perpetual motion, but after all, why shouldn't even that be possible? After I had listened to his explanation I had to tell him that although his plan undoubtedly appeared to be cleverly thought out, it was a case that might be compared in practice with that of a person who, on boarding a railway car, pushes with all his might and then believes when it moves that he has actually started it. “That,” I said to him, “is the thought principle underlying your discovery.” Finally, he saw it himself and did not return to the Professor.

It is thus quite possible to shut ourselves up within a shell fashioned by our own thoughts. In rare cases this can be observed distinctly, but there are many similar examples in life that do not always reach such a striking extreme as the one just cited. He who is able to study human nature more intimately, however, knows that a large number of thought processes are of this kind. He often sees, we might say, people standing in the car pushing it from within and believing that they are making it move. Many of the events of life would take a different course if people did not so often try to solve their problems by thus deluding themselves.

True practice in thinking presupposes a right attitude and proper feeling for thinking. How can a right attitude toward thinking be attained? Anyone who believes that thought is merely an activity that takes place within his head or in his soul cannot have the right feeling for thought. Whoever harbors this idea will be constantly diverted by a false feeling from seeking right habits of thought and from making the necessary demands on his thinking. He who would acquire the right feeling for thought must say to himself, “If I can formulate thoughts about things, and learn to understand them through thinking, then these things themselves must first have contained these thoughts. The things must have been built up according to these thoughts, and only because this is so can I in turn extract these thoughts from the things.”

It can be imagined that this world outside and around us may be regarded in the same way as a watch. The comparison between the human organism and a watch is often used, but those who make it frequently forget the most important point. They forget the watchmaker. The fact must be kept clearly in mind that the wheels have not united and fitted themselves together of their own accord and thus made the watch “go,” but that first there was the watchmaker who put the different parts of the watch together. The watchmaker must never be forgotten. Through thoughts the watch has come into existence. Th thoughts have flowed, as it were, into the watch, into the thing.

The works and phenomena of nature must be viewed in a similar way. In the works of man it is easy to picture this to ourselves, but with the works of nature it is not so easily done. Yet these, too, are the result of spiritual activities and behind them are spiritual beings. Thus, when a man thinks about things he only re-thinks what is already in them. The belief that the world has been created by thought and is still ceaselessly being created in this manner is the belief that can alone fructify the actual inner practice of thought.

It is always the denial of the spiritual in the world that produces the worst kind of malpractice in thought, even in the field of science. Consider, for example, the theory that our planetary system arose from a primordial nebula that began to rotate and then densified into a central body from which rings and globes detached themselves, thus mechanically bringing into existence the entire solar system. He who propounds this theory is committing a grave error of thought.

A simple experiment used to be made in the schools to demonstrate this theory. A drop of oil was made to float in a glass of water. The drop was then pierced with a pin and made to rotate. As a result, tiny globules of oil were thrown off from the central drop creating a miniature planetary system, thus proving to the pupil—so the teacher thought—that this planetary system could come into existence through a purely mechanical process.

Only impractical thought can draw such conclusions from this little experiment, for he who would apply this theory to the cosmos has forgotten one thing that it ordinarily might be well to forget occasionally, and that is himself. He forgets that it is he who has brought this whole thing into rotation. If he had not been there and conducted the whole experiment, the separation of the little globules from the large drop would never have occurred. Had this fact been observed and applied logically to the cosmic system, he then would have been using complete healthy thinking. Similar errors of thought play a great part especially in science. Such things are far more important than one generally believes.

Considering the real practice of thought, it must be realized that thoughts can only be drawn from a world in which they already exist. Just as water can only be taken from a glass that actually contains water, so thoughts can only be extracted from things within which these thoughts are concealed. The world is built by thought, and only for this reason can thought be extracted from it. Were it otherwise, practical thought could not arise. When a person feels the full truth of these words, it will be easy for him to dispense with abstract thought. If he can confidently believe that thoughts are concealed behind the things around him, and that the actual facts of life take their course in obedience to thought if he feels this, he will easily be converted to a practical habit of thinking based on truth and reality.

Let us now look at that practice of thinking that is of special importance to those who stand upon an anthroposophical foundation. The one who is convinced that the world of facts is born of thought will grasp the importance of the development of right thinking.

Let us suppose that someone resolves to fructify his thinking to such a degree that it will always take the right course in life. If he would do this, he must be guided by the following rules and he must understand that these are actual, practical and fundamental principles. If he will try again and again to shape his thinking according to these rules, certain effects will result. His thinking will become practical even though at first it may not seem so. Other additional mental experiences of quite a different kind also will come to the one who applies these fundamental principles.

Let us suppose that somebody tries the following experiment. He begins today by observing, as accurately as possible, something in the outer world that is accessible to him—for instance, the weather. He watches the configuration of the clouds in the evening, the conditions at sunset, etc., and retains in his mind an exact picture of what he has thus observed. He tries to keep the picture before him in all its details for some time and endeavors to preserve as much of it as possible until the next day. At some time the next day he again makes a study of the weather conditions and again endeavors to gain an exact picture of them.

If in this manner he has pictured to himself exactly the sequential order of the weather conditions, he will become distinctly aware that his thinking gradually becomes richer and more intense. For what makes thought impractical is the tendency to ignore details when observing a sequence of events in the world and to retain but a vague, general impression of them. What is of value, what is essential and fructifies thinking, is just this ability to form exact pictures, especially of successive events, so that one can say, “Yesterday it was like that; today it is like this.” Thus, one calls up as graphically as possible an inner image of the two juxtaposed scenes that lie apart in the outer world.

This is, so to speak, nothing else but a certain expression of confidence in the thoughts that underlie reality. The person experimenting ought not to draw any conclusions immediately or to deduce from today's observation what kind of weather he shall have tomorrow. That would corrupt his thinking. Instead, he must confidently feel that the things of outer reality are definitely related to one another and that tomorrow's events are somehow connected with those of today. But he must not speculate on these things. He must first inwardly re-think the sequence of the outer events as exactly as possible in mental pictures, and then place these images side by side, allowing them to melt into one another. This is a definite rule of thought that must be followed by those who wish to develop factual thinking. It is particularly advisable that this principle be practiced on those very things that are not yet understood and the inner connection of which has not yet been penetrated.

Therefore, the experimenter must have the confidence that such events of which he has as yet no understanding—the weather, for instance—and which in the outer world are connected with one another, will bring about connections within him. This must be done in pictures only while abstaining from thinking. He must say to himself, “I do not yet know what the relation is, but I shall let these things grow within me and if I refrain from speculation they will bring something about in me.” It may be easily believed that if he forms exact inner images of succeeding events and at the same time abstains from all thinking something may take place in the invisible members of his nature.

The vehicle of man's thought life is his astral body.¹ As long as the human being is engaged in speculative thinking, this astral body is the slave of the ego. This conscious activity, however, does not occupy the astral body exclusively because the latter is also related in a certain manner to the whole cosmos.

Now, to the extent we abstain from arbitrary thinking and simply form mental pictures of successive events, to that extent do the inner thoughts of the world act within us and imprint themselves, without our being aware of it, on our astral body. To the extent we insert ourselves into the course of the world through observation of the events in the world and receive these images into our thoughts with the greatest possible clarity, allowing them to work within us, to that extent do those members of our organism that are withdrawn from our consciousness become ever more intelligent. If, in the case of inwardly connected events, we have once acquired the faculty of letting the new picture melt into the preceding one in the same way that the transition occurred in nature, it shall be found after a time that our thinking has gained considerable flexibility.

This is the procedure to be followed in matters not yet understood. Things, however, that are understood—events of everyday life, for example—should be treated in a somewhat different manner.

Let us presume that someone, perhaps our neighbor, had done this or that. We think about it and ask ourselves why he did it. We decide he has perhaps done it in preparation for something he intends to do the next day. We do not go any further but clearly picture his act and try to form an image of what he may do, imagining that the next day he will perform such and such an act. Then we wait to see what he really does since he may or may not do what we expected of him. We take note of what does happen and correct our thoughts accordingly. Thus, events of the present are chosen that are followed in thought into the future. Then we wait to see what actually happens.

This can be done either with actions involving people or something else. Whenever something is understood, we try to form a thought picture of what in our opinion will take place. If our opinion proves correct, our thinking is justified and all is well. If, however, something different from our expectation occurs, we review our thoughts and try to discover our mistake. In this way we try to correct our erroneous thinking by calm observation and examination of our errors. An attempt is made to find the reason for things occurring as they did. If we are right, however, we must be especially careful not to boast of our prediction and say, “Oh well, I knew yesterday that this would happen!”

This is again a rule based upon confidence that there is an inner necessity in things and events, that in the facts themselves there slumbers something that moves things. What is thus working within these things from one day to another are thought forces, and we gradually become conscious of them when meditating on things. By such exercises these thought forces are called up into our consciousness and if what has been thus foreseen is fulfilled, we are in tune with them. We have then established an inner relation with the real thought activity of the matter itself. So we train ourselves to think, not arbitrarily, but according to the inner necessity and the inner nature of the things themselves.

But our thinking can also be trained in other directions. An occurrence of today is also linked to what happened yesterday. We might consider a naughty child, for example, and ask ourselves what may have caused this behavior. The events are traced back to the previous day and the unknown cause hypothesized by saying to ourselves, “Since this occurred today, I must believe that it was prepared by this or that event that occurred yesterday or perhaps the day before.”

We then find out what had actually occurred and so discover whether or not our thought was correct. If the true cause has been found, very well. But if our conclusion was wrong, then we should try to correct the mistake, find out how our thought process developed, and how it ran its course in reality.

To practice these principles is the important point. Time must be taken to observe things as though we were inside the things themselves with our thinking. We should submerge ourselves in the things and enter into their inner thought activity. If this is done, we gradually become aware of the fact that we are growing together with things. We no longer feel that they are outside us and we are here inside our shell thinking about them. Instead we come to feel as if our own thinking occurred within the things themselves. When a man has succeeded to a high degree in doing this, many things will become clear to him.

Goethe was such a man. He was a thinker who always lived with his thought within the things themselves. The psychologist Heinroth's book in 1826, Anthropology, characterized Goethe's thought as “objective.” Goethe himself appreciated this characterization. What was meant is that such thinking does not separate itself from things, but remains within them. It moves within the necessity of things. Goethe's thinking was at the same time perception, and his perception was thinking. He had developed this way of thinking to a remarkable degree. More than once it occurred that, when he had planned to do something, he would go to the window and remark to the person who happened to be with him, “In three hours we shall have rain!” And so it would happen. From the little patch of sky he could see from the window he was able to foretell the weather conditions for the next few hours. His true thinking, remaining within the objects, thus enabled him to sense the coming event preparing itself in the preceding one.

Much more can actually be accomplished through practical thinking than is commonly supposed. When a man has made these principles of thinking his own, he will notice that his thinking really becomes practical, that his horizon widens, and that he can grasp the things of the world in quite a different way. Gradually his attitude towards things and people will change completely. An actual process will take place within him that will alter his whole conduct. It is of immense importance that he tries to grow into the things in this way with his thinking, for it is in the most eminent sense a practical undertaking to train one's thinking by such exercises.

There is another exercise that is to be practiced especially by those to whom the right idea usually does not occur at the right time.

Such people should try above all things to stop their thinking from being forever influenced and controlled by the ordinary course of worldly events and whatever else may come with them. As a rule, when a person lies down for half an hour's rest, his thoughts are allowed to play freely in a thousand different directions, or on the other hand he may become absorbed with some trouble in his life. Before he realizes it such things will have crept into his consciousness and claimed his entire attention. If this habit persists, such a person will never experience the occasion when the right idea occurs to him at the right moment.

If he really wants this to happen, he must say to himself whenever he can spare a half hour for rest, “Whenever I can spare the time, I will think about something I myself have chosen and I will bring it into my consciousness arbitrarily of my own free will. For example, I will think of something that occurred two years ago during a walk. I will deliberately recall what occurred then and I will think about it if only for five minutes. During these five minutes I will banish everything else from my mind and will myself choose the subject about which I wish to think.”

He need not even choose so difficult a subject as this one. The point is not at all to change one's mental process through difficult exercises, but to get away from the ordinary routine of life in one's thinking. He must think of something quite apart from what enmeshes him during the ordinary course of the day. If nothing occurs to him to think about, he might open a book at random and occupy his thoughts with whatever first catches his eye. Or he may choose to think of something he saw at a particular time that morning on his way to work and to which he would otherwise have paid no attention. The main point is that it should be something totally different from the ordinary run of daily events, something that otherwise would not have occupied his thoughts.

If such exercises are practiced systematically again and again, it will soon be noticed that ideas come at the right moments, and the right thoughts occur when needed. Through these exercises thinking will become activated and mobile—something of immense importance in practical life.

Let us consider another exercise that is especially helpful in improving one's memory.

One tries at first in the crude way people usually recall past events to remember something that occurred, let us say, yesterday. Such recollections are, as a rule, indistinct and colorless, and most people are satisfied if they can just remember a person's name. But if it is desired to develop one's memory, one can no longer be content with this. This must be clear. The following exercise must be systematically practiced, saying to oneself, “I shall recall exactly the person I saw yesterday, also the street corner where I met him, and what happened to be in his vicinity. I shall draw the whole picture as exactly as possible and shall even imagine the color and cut of his coat and vest.” Most people will find themselves utterly incapable of doing this and will quickly see how much is lacking in their recollections to produce a really lifelike, graphic picture of what they met and experienced only yesterday.

Since this is true in the majority of cases, we must begin with that condition in which many people are unable to recollect their most recent experiences. It is only too true that most people's observations of things and events are usually inaccurate and vague. The results of a test given by a professor in one of the universities demonstrated that out of thirty students who took the test, only two had observed an occurrence correctly; the remaining twenty-eight reported it inaccurately. But a good memory is the child of accurate observation. A reliable memory is attained, let me repeat, by accurate observation and it can also be said that in a certain roundabout way of the soul it is born as the child of exact observation.

But if somebody cannot at first accurately remember his experiences of yesterday, what should he do? First, he should try to remember as accurately as he can what actually occurred. Where recollections fail he should fill in the picture with something incorrect that was not really present. The essential point here is that the picture be complete. Suppose it was forgotten whether or not someone was wearing a brown or a black coat. Then he might be pictured in a brown coat and brown trousers with such and such buttons on his vest and a yellow necktie. One might further imagine a general situation in which there was a yellow wall, a tall man passing on the left, a short one on the right, etc.

All that can be remembered he puts into this picture, and what cannot be remembered is added imaginatively in order to have a completed mental picture. Of course, it is at first incorrect but through the effort to create a complete picture he is induced to observe more accurately. Such exercises must be continued, and although they might be tried and failed fifty times, perhaps the fifty-first time he shall be able to remember accurately what the person he has met looked like, what he wore, and even little details like the buttons on his vest. Then nothing will be overlooked and every detail will imprint itself on his memory. Thus he will have first sharpened his powers of observation by these exercises and in addition, as the fruit of this accurate observation, he will have improved his memory.

He should take special care to retain not only names and main features of what he wishes to remember, but also to retain vivid images covering all the details. If he cannot remember some detail, he must try for the time being to fill in the picture and thus make it a whole. He will then notice that his memory, as though in a roundabout way, slowly becomes reliable. Thus it can be seen how definite direction can be given for making thinking increasingly more practical.

There is still something else that is of particular importance. In thinking about some matters we feel it necessary to come to a conclusion. We consider how this or that should be done and then make up our minds in a certain way. This inclination, although natural, does not lead to practical thinking. All overly hasty thinking does not advance us but sets us back. Patience in these things is absolutely essential.

Suppose, for instance, we desire to carry out some particular plan. There are usually several ways that this might be done. Now we should have the patience first to imagine how things would work[s] out if we were to execute our plan in one way and then we should consider what the results would be of doing it in another. Surely there will always be reasons for preferring one method over another but we should refrain from forming an immediate decision. Instead, an attempt should be made to imagine the two possibilities and then we must say to ourselves, “That will do for the present; I shall now stop thinking about this matter.” No doubt there are people who will become fidgety at this point, and although it is difficult to overcome such a condition, it is extremely useful to do so. It then becomes possible to imagine how the matter might be handled in two ways, and to decide to stop thinking about it for awhile.

Whenever it is possible, action should be deferred until the next day, and the two possibilities considered again at that time. You will find that in the interim[,] conditions have changed and that the next day you will be able to form a different, or at least a more thorough decision than could have been reached the day before. An inner necessity is hidden in things and if we do not act with arbitrary impatience but allow this inner necessity to work in us—and it will—we shall find the next day that it has enriched our thinking, thus making possible a wiser decision. This is exceedingly valuable.

We might, for example, be asked to give our advice on a problem and to make a decision. But let us not thrust forward our decision immediately. We should have the patience to place the various possibilities before ourselves without forming any definite conclusions, and we then should quietly let these possibilities work themselves out within us. Even the popular proverb says that one should sleep over a matter before making a decision.

To sleep over it is not enough, however. It is necessary to consider two or, better still, several possibilities that will continue to work within us when our ego is not consciously occupied with them. Later on, when we return again to the matter in question, it will be found that certain thought forces have been stirred up within us in this manner, and that as a result our thinking has become more factual and practical.

It is certain that what a man seeks can always be found in the world, whether he stands at the carpenter's bench, or follows the plough, or belongs to one of the professions. If he will practice these exercises, he will become a practical thinker in the most ordinary matters of everyday life. If he thus trains himself, he will approach and look at the things of the world in a quite different manner from previously. Although at first these exercises may seem related only to his own innermost life, they are entirely applicable and of the greatest importance precisely for the outer world. They have powerful consequences.

An example will demonstrate how necessary it is to think about things in a really practical manner. Let us imagine that for some reason or other a man climbs a tree. He falls from the tree, strikes the ground, and is picked up dead. Now, the thought most likely to occur to us is that the fall killed him. We would be inclined to say that the fall was the cause and death the effect. In this instance cause and effect seem logically connected. But this assumption may completely confuse the true sequence of facts, for the man may have fallen as a consequence of heart failure. To the observer the external event is exactly the same in both cases. Only when the true causes are known can a correct judgment be formed. In this case it might have been that the man was already dead before he fell and the fall had nothing to do with his death. It is thus possible to invert completely cause and effect. In this instance the error is evident, but often they are not so easily discernible. The frequency with which such errors in thinking occur is amazing. Indeed, it must be said that in the field of science conclusions in which this confusion of cause and effect is permitted are being drawn every day. Most people do not grasp this fact, however, because they are not acquainted with the possibilities of thinking.

Still another example will show you clearly how such errors in thinking arise and how a person who has been practicing exercises like these can no longer make such mistakes. Suppose someone concludes that man as he is today is a descendent of the ape. This means that what he has come to know in the ape—the forces active in this animal have—attained higher perfection and man is the result. Now, to show the meaning of this theory in terms of thought, let us imagine that this person is the only man on earth, and that besides himself there are only those apes present that, according to his theory, can evolve into human beings. He now studies these apes with the utmost accuracy down to the most minute detail and then forms a concept of what lives in them. Excluding himself and without ever having seen another human being let him now try to develop the concept of a man solely from his concept of the ape. He will find this to be quite impossible. His concept “ape” will never transform itself into the concept “man.”

If he had cultivated correct habits of thinking, this man would have said to himself, “My concept of the ape does not change into the concept of man. What I perceive in the ape, therefore, can never become a human being, otherwise my concept would have to change likewise. There must be something else present that I am unable to perceive.” So he would have to imagine an invisible, super-sensible entity behind the physical ape that he would be unable to perceive but that alone would make the ape's transformation into man a possible conception.

We shall not enter into a discussion of the impossibility of this case, but simply point out the erroneous thinking underlying this theory. If this man had thought correctly he would have seen that he could not possibly conceive of such a theory without assuming the existence of something super-sensible. Upon further investigation you will discover that an overwhelmingly large number of people has committed this error of thinking. Errors like these, however, will no longer occur to the one who has trained his thinking as suggested here.

For anyone capable of thinking correctly a large part of modern literature (especially that of the sciences) becomes a source of unpleasant experience. The distorted and misguided thinking expressed in it can cause even physical pain in a man who has to work his way through it. It should be understood, however, that this is not said with any intent to slight the wealth of observation and discovery that has been accumulated by modern natural science and its objective methods of research.

Now let us consider “short-sighted” thinking. Most people are unconscious of the fact that their thinking is not factual, but that it is for the most part only the result of thought habits. The decisions and conclusions therefore of a man whose thought penetrates the world and life will differ greatly from those of one whose ability to think is limited or nil. Consider the case of a materialistic thinker. To convince such a man through reasoning, however logical, sound and good, is not an easy task. It is usually a useless effort to try to convince a person with little knowledge of life through reason. Such a person does not see the reasons that make this or that statement valid and possible if he has formed the habit of seeing nothing but matter in everything and simply adheres to this habit of thinking.

Today it can generally be said that people are not prompted by reasons when making statements but rather by the thinking habits behind these reasons. They have acquired habits of thought that influence all their feelings and sensations, and when reasons are put forth, they are simply the mask of the habitual thinking that screens these feelings and sensations. Not only is the wish often the father of the thought, but it can also be said that all our feelings and mental habits are the parents of our thoughts. He who knows life knows how difficult it is to convince another person by means of logical reasoning. What really decides and convinces lies much deeper in the human soul.

There are good reasons for the existence of the Anthroposophical Movement and for the activities in its various branches. Everyone who has participated in the work of the Movement for any length of time comes to notice that he has acquired a new way of thinking and feeling. For the work in the various branches is not merely confined to finding logical reasons for things. A new and more comprehensive quality of feeling and sensation is also developed.

How some people scoffed a few years ago when they heard their first lectures in spiritual science. Yet today how many things have become self-evident to these same people who previously looked upon these things as impossible absurdities. In working in the Anthroposophical Movement one not only learns to modify one's thinking, one also learns to unfold a wider perspective of soul life.

We must understand that our thoughts derive their coloring from far greater depths than are generally imagined. It is our feelings that frequently impel us to hold certain opinions. The logical reasons that are put forward are often a mere screen or mask for our deeper feelings and habits of thinking.

To bring ourselves to a point at which logical reasons themselves possess a real significance for us, we must have learned to love logic itself. Only when we have learned to love factuality and objectivity will logical reason be decisive for us. We should gradually learn to think objectively, not allowing ourselves to be swayed by our preference for this or that thought. Only then will our vision broaden in the sense that we do not merely follow the mental ruts of others but in such a way that the reality of the things themselves will teach us to think correctly.

True practicality is born of objective thinking, that is, thinking that flows into us from the things themselves. It is only by practicing such exercises as have just been described that we learn to take our thoughts from things. To do these exercises properly we should choose to work with sound and wholesome subjects that are least affected by our culture. These are the objects of nature.

To train our thinking using the things of nature as objects to think about will make really practical thinkers of us. Once we have trained ourselves in the practical use of this fundamental principle, our thinking, we shall be able to handle the most everyday occupations in a practical way. By training the human soul in this way a practical viewpoint is developed in our thinking.

The fruit of the Anthroposophical Movement must be to place really practical thinkers in life. What we have come to believe is not of as much importance as the fact that we should become capable of surveying with understanding the things around us. That spiritual science should penetrate our souls, thereby stimulating us to inner soul activity and expanding our vision, is of far more importance than merely theorizing about what extends beyond the things of the senses into the spiritual. In this, Anthroposophy is truly practical.

• 1. See Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man for a clarification of this, and other, anthroposophical terminology.

It may seem strange to some, if an anthroposophist, of all people, feels himself called upon to speak of practical training in thought. For people very often imagine Anthroposophy to be something highly unpractical, having nothing whatever to do with real life. That is because they look at the thing externally and superficially. In reality, what we are concerned with in the anthroposophical movement is intended as a guide for everyday life, for the most matter-of-fact affairs of life. We should be able to transform it at every moment into a sure sense and feeling, enabling us to meet life confidently and find our footing in the world.

People who call themselves practical imagine that their actions are guided by the most practical principles. When you look into the matter closely, you will, however, frequently discover that what they call their practical way of thinking is not thinking at all, but the mere “jogging along” with old opinions and acquired habits of thought. You will often find there is very little that is really practical behind it. What they call practical consists in this: they have learned how their teachers, or their predecessors in business, thought about the matter in hand, and then they simply take the same line. Anyone who thinks along different lines they regard as a very unpractical person. In effect, his thinking does not accord with the habits to which they have been brought up. In cases where something really practical has been invented, you will not generally find that it was done by any of the “practical” people.

Take for instance our present postage stamp. Surely the most obvious thing would be to suppose that it was invented by a practical post-office official. But it was not. At the beginning of last century it was a very long and troublesome business to post a letter. You had to go to the office where letters were posted, and various books had to be referred to; in short, there were all manner of complicated proceedings. It is hardly more than sixty years since the uniform postal rate to which we are now accustomed was introduced. And our postage stamp, which makes this simple arrangement possible, was invented, not by a practical man in the postal service, but by a complete outsider. It was the Englishman, Rowland Hill. When the postage stamp had been invented, the Minister who had to do with the Postal Department said in the English Parliament: In the first place, we can by no means assume that as a result of this simplification postal communication will really increase so enormously as this unpractical man imagines; and secondly, even assuming that it did, the main Post Office in London would not be big enough to hold it.

It never dawned on this very practical man that the Post Office building ought to be adapted to the amount of correspondence, and not the amount of correspondence to the building. Yet in what was, comparatively speaking, the shortest imaginable time, the thing was carried out. One of the unpractical people had to fight for it against a practical man. To-day we take it as a matter of course that letters are sent with a postage stamp.

It was similar in the case of the railways. In the year 1887, when the first German railway was to be constructed between Nuremberg and Fürth, the Bavarian College of Medicine, being consulted, pronounced the following expert opinion. In the first place, they said, it was inadvisable to build railways at all; if, however, it were intended to do so, it would at any rate be necessary to erect a high wall of wooden planks to the left and right of the line, in order that passers-by might not suffer from nerve and brain shock.

When the line from Potsdam to Berlin had to be built, the Postmaster-General Stengler said: I send two mail coaches a day to Potsdam and they are not full up; if these people are bent on wasting their money, they might as well throw it out of the window without more ado.

In effect, the real facts of life leave the “practical” people behind, or rather they leave behind those who so fondly call themselves practical.

We have to distinguish true thinking from the so-called practical thinking, which merely consists in opinions based on the habits of thought in which people have been brought up.

I will tell you a little experience of my own, and make it a starting-point for our considerations to-day.

In my undergraduate days, a young colleague once came to me. He was bubbling over with that intense pleasure which you may observe in people who have just had 'a really brilliant idea. “I am on my way,” he said, “to see Professor X. (who at that time occupied the chair in Machine Construction), for I have made a wonderful discovery. I have discovered a machine whereby it will be possible by the use of a very little steam-power to exert an enormous amount of work.” That was all he could tell me, for he was in a tremendous hurry to go to see the Professor. However, he did not find him at home, so he came back and set to work to explain the matter to me. Of course, from the very start the whole thing had sounded to me suspiciously like perpetual motion; but, after all, why shouldn't such a thing be possible one fine day? So I listened; and after he had gone through the whole explanation, I had to answer: “Yes, it is certainly very cleverly thought out; but you see, in practice it surely comes to this. It's as though you were to get into a railway truck and push tremendously hard, and imagine that the truck would thereby begin to move. That is the principle of thought in your invention?” And then he saw that it was so, and he did not go to see the Professor again.

That is how it is possible to shut oneself up, as it were, in one's thought. People put themselves in a neat little box with their thought. In rare cases this is perfectly evident; but people are continually doing it in life, and it is not always so clear and striking as in the instance we have taken. One who is able to look into the matter a little more intimately knows that this is the way with a great many human processes of thought. He constantly sees people standing, as it were, in their truck, pushing from the inside, and imagining that it is they who are propelling it.

Much of what happens in life would happen altogether differently if people were not such pushers, standing in their trucks!

True practice of thought requires us in the first place to have the right attitude of mind, the right feeling about thought. How can we gain this? No one can come to a right feeling about thought who imagines that thought is something which merely takes place within man, inside his head, or in his mind or soul. Anyone who starts with this idea will have a wrong feeling, and will continually be diverted from the search for a truly practical way of thought. He will fail to make the necessary demands on his thinking activity. To acquire the right feeling towards thought, he must rather say to himself: “If I am able to make myself thoughts about the things, if I am able to get at the things through thoughts, then the things must already contain the thoughts within them. The thoughts must be there in the very plan and structure of the things. Only so can I draw the thoughts out of them.”

Man must say to himself that it is the same with the things in the world outside as with a watch. The comparison of the human organism to a watch is frequently used, but people often forget the most important thing. They forget the watchmaker. The cogs and wheels did not run together and join up of their own accord and set the watch in motion, but there was a watchmaker there first, to construct the watch. We must not forget the watchmaker. It is through thoughts that the watch has come into being. The thoughts have, as it were, flowed out into the watch, into the external object. And this is the way in which we must think of all the works of nature of all the natural creation, and of all natural processes. It can easily be illustrated in a thing that is human creation: in the things of nature it is not quite so easy to perceive. And yet they too are works of the spirit; behind them are spiritual beings.

When man thinks about things, he is only thinking after, he is only re-thinking, that which has first been laid into them. We must believe that the world has been created by thought and is still in continual process of creation by thought. This belief, and this alone, can give birth to a really fruitful inner practice of thought.

It is always unbelief in the spiritual content of the world that underlies the greatest impracticality of thought. This is true in the sphere of science itself. For example, some one will say, our planetary system came about as follows: “First there was a primeval nebula. It began to rotate, drew together into one central body from which rings and spheres split off, and by this mechanical process the whole planetary system came into being.” People who speak like that are making a grave error in thought. They have a pretty way of teaching it to the children nowadays. There is a neat little experiment which they show in many schools. They float a drop of oil in a glass of water, stick a pin through the middle of the drop and then set it in rotation. Thereupon little drops split off from the big drop in the middle, and you have a minute planetary system. A nice little object lesson, so they think, to show the pupil how such a thing can come about in a purely mechanical way.

Only an unpractical way of thinking can draw this conclusion from the experiment. For the man who transplants the idea to the great cosmic planetary system generally forgets just one thing—which at other times it is perhaps quite good to forget—he forgets himself. He forgets that he himself, after all, set the thing in rotation. If he had not been there and done the whole thing, the drop of oil would never have split off the little drops. If the man would observe that too, and transfer the idea to the planetary system, then, and then only, would his thought be complete.

Such errors in thought play a very great part to-day—and they do so especially in what is now called science. These things are far more important than people generally imagine.

If we would make our thinking practical, we must first know that thoughts can only be drawn from a world in which thoughts already are. Just as you can only draw water from a glass that does really contain water, so you can only draw thoughts from things that already contain thoughts. The world is built up by thoughts, and it is only for that reason that we can gain thoughts from the world. If it were not so, then there could be no such thing as a practice of thought at all. When a man really feels what has here been said, and feels it to the full, then he will easily transcend the stage of abstract thinking. When a man has full confidence and faith that behind things there are thoughts, that the real facts of life take place according to thoughts—when he has this confidence and feeling, then he will readily be converted to a practice of thought that is founded on reality.

We will now set forth some elements of practice in thought. If you are penetrated by the belief that the world of facts takes its course in thoughts, you will admit how important it is to develop true thinking.

Let us assume that someone says to himself: “I want to strengthen my thought, so that it may find its true bearings at every point in life.” He must then take guidance from what will now be said. The indications that will now be given are to be taken as real practical principles—principles such, that if you try again and again and again to guide your thought accordingly, definite results will follow. Your thinking will become practical, even though it may not appear so at first sight. Indeed, if you carry out these principles, you will have altogether fresh experiences in your life of thought.

Let us assume that someone makes the following experiment. On a certain day he carefully observes some process in the world which is accessible to him, which he can observe quite accurately—say, for example, the appearance of the sky. He observes the cloud formations in the evening, the way in which the sun went down. And now he makes a distinct and accurate mental image of what he has observed.

He tries to hold it fast for a time in all its details. He holds fast as much of it as he can, and tries to keep it till the following day. On the morrow, about the same time, or even at another time of day, he again observes the appearance of the sky and the weather, and he tries once more to form an exact mental image of it.

If in this way he forms clear mental images of successive conditions, he will soon perceive with extraordinary distinctness that he is enriching his thought and making it inwardly intense. For what makes a man's thought unpractical is the fact that in observing successive processes in the world he is generally too much inclined to leave out the actual details and to retain only a vague and confused picture in his mind. The essential, the valuable thing for strengthening our thought is to form exact pictures above all in the case of successive processes and then to say to ourselves: “Yesterday the thing was so; to-day it is so.” And in doing this we must bring before our minds the two pictures which are separated in the real world, as graphically, as vividly as possible.

To begin with, this exercise is simply a particular expression of our belief that the thoughts are there in reality. We are not immediately to draw some conclusion—to conclude from what we observe to-day what the weather and the sky will be like tomorrow. That would only corrupt our thinking. No, we must have faith that outside in the reality of things they have their connection, and that tomorrow's process is somehow connected with to-day's. We are not to speculate about it, but first of all to think, in mental images as clear as possible, the scenes which in the external world are separated in time. We place the two pictures side by side before our minds, and then let the one gradually change into the other.

This is a definite principle which must be followed if we would develop a truly objective way of thinking. It is especially valuable to take this line with things which we do not yet understand, where we have not yet penetrated the inner connection. Particularly with those processes—the sky and the weather, for example—which we do not understand at all, we must have the belief that, as they are connected in the outside world, so will they work their connections within us. And we must do it simply in mental pictures, refraining from thought. We must say to ourselves: “I do not yet know the connection, but I will let these things grow and evolve within me, and if I refrain from all speculation, I am sure they will be working something within me.”

You will not find it difficult to imagine that something may take place in the invisible vehicles of a human being who, refraining from thought in this way, strives to call forth clear mental images of processes and events that succeed one another in time in the outer world. Man has an astral body as the vehicle of his life of thought and ideation. So long as he speculates, this astral body of man is the slave of his Ego. But it is not completely involved in this conscious activity, for it also stands in relation to the whole Universe. Now as we refrain from giving play to our own arbitrary trains of thought, and simply form in ourselves mental images, clear pictures of successive events, in like measure will the inner thoughts of the universe work in us and impress themselves upon our astral body, without our knowing it. As, by observation of the processes in the world, we fit ourselves to enter into the world's course, and as we take its scenes and pictures into our thoughts clearly and faithfully in their reality and let them work in us, so do we become ever wiser and wiser in those vehicles and members of our being that are outside our consciousness.

So it is with processes in nature that are inwardly connected. When we are able to let the one picture change into the other just as the change took place in nature, we shall soon perceive, that our thought is gaining a certain flexibility and strength.

That is how we should proceed with things that we do not yet understand. For things that we do understand—events, for example, that take place around us in our daily life—our attitude should be slightly different.

For instance, someone—your neighbour, perhaps—has done something or other. You consider: Why did he do it? You come to the conclusion: Perhaps he did it in preparation for such and such a thing that he intends to do tomorrow. Very well; do not go on speculating, but try to sketch out a picture of what you think he will do tomorrow. You imagine to yourself: That is what he will do tomorrow; and now you wait and see what he really does. It may be on the following day you will observe that he really does what you imagined. Or it may be that he does something different. You observe what really happens and try to correct your thoughts accordingly.

Thus we select events in the present which we follow out in thought into the future, and we wait and see what actually happens. We can do this with the actions of men, and with many other things. Where we feel that we understand a thing, we try to form a picture of what, in our opinion, will take place. If it does take place as we expected, our thinking was correct; that is good. If what happens is different from what we expected, then we try to think where we made the mistake. Thus we try to correct our wrong thoughts by quiet observation, by examining where the mistake lay, and why it was that it happened as it did.

If, however, we were right, then we must be careful to avoid the danger of mere self-congratulation and boasting of our prophecy: “Oh yes, I knew that was going to happen, yesterday.”

Here again you have a method based on the belief that there is an inner necessity lying in the things and events themselves—that there is something in the facts themselves which drives them forward. The forces working in things, working on from one day to the next, are forces of thought. If we dive down into the things, then we become conscious of these thought-forces. By such exercises we make them present to our consciousness. When what we foresaw is fulfilled, we are in attunement with them. Then we are in an inner relationship to the real thought-activity of the thing itself.

Thus we accustom ourselves not to think arbitrarily, but to take our thought from the inner necessity, the inner nature of things.

There is yet another direction in which we can train our practice of thought.

An event that happens to-day is also related to things that happened yesterday. For example, a child has been naughty. What can have caused it? You follow the events back to the previous day, you construct the causes which you do not know. You say to yourself: “I fancy that this thing which has happened to-day was led up to by such and such things yesterday or the day before.”

You then make inquiries and find out what really happened, and so discover whether your thought was correct. If you have found the real cause, then it is well; but if you have formed a wrong idea of it, then you must try to see the mistake clearly. You consider how your thought-process developed, and how it took place in reality, and compare the one with the other.

It is very important to carry out such principles and methods. We must find time to observe things in this way—as though with our thinking we were in the things themselves. We must dive down into the things, into their inner thought-activity.

If we do so, we shall gradually perceive how we are entering into the very life of things. We no longer have the feeling that the things are outside, and we are here in our shell, thinking about them; but we begin to feel how our thought is living and moving in the things themselves. To a man who has attained this in a high degree, a new world opens up. Such a man was Goethe. He was a thinker who was always in the things with his thoughts. In 1826 the psychologist Heinroth said in his book, Anthropology, that Goethe's was an objective thinking. Goethe was delighted with this description. Heinroth meant that Goethe's thought did not separate itself off from the things or objects; it remained in the objects, it lived and moved in the necessity of things. Goethe's thought was at the same time contemplation; his contemplation, his looking at things, was at the same time thought.

Goethe developed this way of thinking to a high degree. More than once it happened, when he was intending to go out for some purpose or other, that he went to the window and said to whoever happened to be by: “In three hours it will rain”—and so it did. From the little segment of the sky which was visible from his window he could tell what would happen in the weather in the next few hours. His true thought, remaining in the things, enabled him to sense the later events that were already preparing in the preceding ones.

Far more can be achieved by practical thinking than is generally imagined. We have described certain principles of thought. A man who makes them his own will discover that his thought is really becoming practical. His vision widens, and he grasps the things of the world quite differently than before. Little by little his attitude to things, and also to other human beings, will become different. A real process takes place in him, one that alters his whole conduct of life. It can be of immense importance for a man to try to grow into the things with his thought in this way. In the fullest sense of the word it is a practical undertaking to train our thinking by such exercises.

There is another exercise which is particularly valuable for people who fail to get the right idea at the right moment.

Such people should try, above all, to think not merely in the way suggested by every passing moment. They should not merely give themselves up to what the ordinary course of things brings with it. When a man has half an hour to lie down and rest, it nearly always happens that he simply gives his thoughts free play. They spin out in a thousand different directions. Or perhaps his life is just occupied by some special worry. Suddenly it flies into his consciousness, and he is completely absorbed in it. If a man lets things happen in this way, he will never arrive at the point where the right thing occurs to him at the right moment. If he wants to succeed in this, he must do as follows. When he has half an hour to lie down and rest, he must say to himself: “Now that I have time, I will think about something which I myself will choose—something which I bring into my consciousness by my own will and choice. For example, I will think about something that I experienced at some earlier date—say on a walk two years ago. I will bring it into my thought and think about it for a certain time—say even only for five minutes. All other things—away with them for these five minutes! I myself will choose what I am going to think about.”

The choice need not even be as difficult as the one I have just suggested. The point is, not that you try to work upon your processes of thought by difficult exercises to begin with, but that you tear yourself away from all you are involved in by your ordinary life. You must choose something right outside the web of interests into which you are woven by your everyday existence. And if you suffer from lack of inspiration, if nothing else occurs to you at the moment, then you can have recourse, say, to a book. Open it, and think about whatever you happen to read on the first page which catches your eye. Or, you say to yourself: “Now I will think about what I saw at a certain time this morning just as I was going into the office.” Only it must be something to which in the ordinary course you would have paid no further attention. It must be something beside the ordinary run of things, something you would otherwise not have thought about at all.

If you carry on such exercises systematically and repeat them again and again, the result will soon be to cure you of your lack of inspiration. You will get the right idea at the right moment. Your thought will become mobile, which is immensely important for a man in practical life.

Another exercise is especially adapted to work on the memory.

First you try to remember some event—say, an event of yesterday—in the crude way in which one generally remembers things. For, as a rule, people have the greyest of grey recollections of things. As a rule you are satisfied if you only remember the name of someone you met yesterday. But if you want to develop your power of memory you must no longer be satisfied with that. You must set to work systematically and say to yourself: “I will now recall the person I saw yesterday, clearly and distinctly. I will recall the surroundings, the particular corner at which I saw him. I will sketch out the picture in detail; I will have an accurate mental image of what he was wearing—his coat, his waistcoat, and so on.” Most people, when they try this exercise, will discover that they are quite unable to do it. They will notice how very much is missing from the picture. They are unable to call up a graphic idea of what they actually experienced on the previous day.

In the vast majority of cases it is so; and this is the condition from which we must start. As a matter of fact, people's observation is generally most inaccurate. An experiment which a University Professor made with his class showed that, of thirty people who were present, only two had observed a thing correctly; the other twenty-eight had it wrong. But good memory is the child of faithful observation. To develop our memory, the important thing is that we should observe accurately. By dint of faithful observation we can acquire a good memory. Through certain inner paths of the soul a true memory is born of a good habit of observation.

Now suppose that, to begin with, you find you are unable to call to mind, exactly, something that you experienced on the previous day. What is the next thing to do? Begin by remembering the thing as accurately as possible; and where your memory fails you, try to fill in the gaps by imagining something which is, probably, incorrect. For instance, if you have absolutely forgotten whether a person you met had on a grey coat or a black one, then imagine him in a grey coat, and say to yourself that he had such and such buttons to his waistcoat, and a yellow tie; and then you fill in the surroundings—a yellow wall, a tall man passing on the left, a short man on the right, and so forth.

Whatever you remember, put it in the picture, and then fill it in arbitrarily with the things you do not remember. Only try to have a complete picture before your mind. The picture will, of course, be incorrect, but by the effort to gain a complete picture you will be stimulated to observe more accurately in the future. Continue doing such exercises—and when you have done them fifty times, then the fifty-first time you will know exactly what the person you met looked like and what he had on. You will remember exactly, to the very waistcoat-buttons. You will no longer overlook anything, but every detail will impress itself upon your mind. By this exercise you will first have sharpened your powers of observation, and in addition you will have gained a truer memory, which is the child of accurate observation.

It is especially valuable to pay attention to this. Do not merely content yourself with remembering the names and the main outlines of things, but try to get mental images as graphic as possible, including the real details; and where your memory fails you, fill in the picture and make it whole. You will soon see—though it seems to come in a roundabout way—that your memory is becoming more faithful.

Clear directions can thus be given, whereby a man can make his thought ever more and more practical.

There is another thing of great importance. Man has a certain craving to reach a definite result when he is considering some line of action. He turns it over in his mind, how should he do the thing, and comes to a definite conclusion. We can well understand this impulse; but it does not lead to a practical way of thinking. Every time we hurry our thought on, we are going backward and not forward. Patience is necessary in these things.

For example: there is something you have to do. It is possible to do it in one way or in another; there may be various possibilities. Now have patience; try to imagine exactly what would happen if you did it in this way, and then try to imagine what would happen if you did it in that way.

Of course, there will always be reasons for preferring the one course of action to the other. But now refrain from making up your mind at once. Try, instead, to sketch out the two possibilities, and then say to yourself: “Now that's done—now I will stop thinking about it.”

At this point many people will become fidgety, and that is a difficult thing to overcome. But it is no less valuable to overcome it. Say to yourself: “The thing is possible in this way and in that way, and now for a time I will think no more about it.” If the circumstances permit, defer your action to the next day, and then once more bring the two possibilities before your mind. You will find that in the meantime the things have changed, and that on the following day you are able to decide quite differently—far more thoroughly, at any rate, than you would have done the day before.

There is an inner necessity in the things themselves, and if we do not act impatiently and arbitrarily, but let this inner necessity work in us—and it will work in us—then it will enrich our thought. And our thought, being thus enriched, will appear again the next day and enable us to form a more correct decision. That is immensely valuable.

Or to take another example: someone asks your advice about some point that has to be decided. Do not burst in with your decision straight away, but have the patience to lay the various possibilities before your own mind quietly and to form no conclusion on your own account. Let the different possibilities hold sway. An old proverb says: “Sleep on it before deciding”—but sleeping on it is not enough. It is necessary to think over two or even more possibilities (if there are more than two, so much the better). These possibilities work on in us, when we ourselves, so to speak, are not there with our conscious Ego. Later on, we return to the thing. We shall see that by this means we are calling to life inner forces of thought, and that our thinking grows ever more practical and to the point.

Whatever it is that a man is seeking to find, it is there in the world. Whether he stands at the lathe or behind the plough, or whether he belongs to the so-called privileged classes and professions, if he does these exercises, he will become a practical thinker in the most everyday affairs of life. Practising his thought in this way, he begins to look at the things in the world with a new vision. And though these exercises may at first sight appear ever so inward and remote from external life, it is precisely for external life that they are so useful. They entail the greatest imaginable significance for the external world; they have important consequences.

I will give you an example to show how necessary it is to think about things practically. A man climbed a tree and was doing something or other up above; suddenly he fell down and was dead. The thought that lies nearest at hand is that he was killed by the fall. Most probably, people will say: “The fall was the cause, and his death the result.” Such is the apparent connection between cause and effect. But this conclusion may involve an utter inversion of the facts. For it may be that he had a fatal heart attack, and fell down as a consequence. Exactly the same thing happened as though he had fallen down alive. He went through the same external processes that might really have been the cause of his death. So it is possible to make a complete inversion of cause and effect.

In this example the fault is very evident, but often it is not so striking. Such mistakes in thought occur very frequently. Indeed, it must be said that in modern Science conclusions of this kind are drawn day by day, with a complete reversal of cause and effect. It is only not perceived because people fail to put before them the possibilities of thought.

One more example may be given, to show you as vividly as possible how such mistakes in thought come about, and how they will no longer happen to a man who has done the kind of exercises which have here been indicated.

A learned scientist says to himself that man, as he is to-day, is descended from an ape. That is to say, what I learn to know in the ape—the forces at work in the ape—evolve to greater perfection and so result in the human being. Now in order to indicate the significance of this as thought, let us make the following supposition. Suppose that by some circumstance the man who will propound this theory be placed on the earth alone. There are no other human beings around him; there are only those apes of which the said theory declares that human beings can originate from them. Let him now make an accurate study of them. Entering into the minutest detail, he forms a conception of what there is in the ape. Albeit he has never seen a man, let him now try to develop the concept of a man out of his concept of an ape. He will see that he cannot. His concept “ape” will never transform into the concept “man.”

If he had right habits of thought, he would say to himself: “I see that the concept of an ape will not transform itself within me into the concept of a man. Therefore what I perceive in the ape is also not capable of becoming man, for if it were, the same power of evolution would be latent in the concept. Something more must come in, something that I am unable to perceive.” Thus, behind the visible ape, he would have to imagine something invisible and super-sensible—something which he could not perceive, but which alone would make the transformation into man a possible conception.

The impossibility of the whole thing need not here concern us; we only wanted to reveal the faulty thinking which lies behind that theory. If the man's thinking were right, he would be led to the conclusion that he could not think the theory at all without postulating something super-sensible.

If you consider it, you will readily see that in this matter a whole succession of thinkers have committed a grave error. Such errors will no longer be committed by one who trains his thinking in the way here indicated.

A large proportion of modern literature (and particularly of the scientific literature) is positively painful to read, for a man who is able to think rightly. Its crooked, perverted ways of thought are distressing to have to follow. In saying this, we are by no means depreciating the wealth of observation and discovery that has been accumulated by modern Natural Science with its objective methods.

All this has to do with short-sightedness of thought. It is a fact that men seldom know how very little to the point their thinking is, and to what a large extent it is the result of mere habits of thought. And so, one who penetrates the world and life will judge differently from one who lacks this penetration, or who has it only to a very small degree—a materialistic thinker, for example. It is not easy to convince people by grounds and arguments, however good, however genuine. It is often a thankless task to try to convince by grounds and reasoned arguments a man who knows little of life. For he simply does not see the reasons which make this or that statement possible. If, for instance, he has grown used to see nothing but matter in things, he simply adheres to this habit of thought.

As a rule it is not the alleged reasons which lead people to their statements. Beneath and behind the reasons, it is the habits of thought which they have acquired, and which determine their whole way of feeling. While they put forward reasons, they are only masking feelings that are instinctive with thoughts that are habitual. Thus often, not only is the wish father to the thought, but all the feelings and habits and ways of thinking are parents of the thoughts. A man who knows life, knows how little possibility there is of convincing people by logical grounds and arguments. That which decides in the soul is far deeper than the logical reasons.

And so there is good reason for this anthroposophical movement, working on in its different groups and branches. Everyone who works in this movement will presently perceive that he has acquired a new way of thinking and feeling about things. For by our work in the groups we are not only finding the logical reasons for this and that; we are acquiring a wider mental outlook, a deeper and more far-reaching way of feeling.

How, for example, did a man scoff a few years ago, when he heard a lecture on Spiritual Science for the first time! And to-day, perhaps, how many things are clear and transparent to him, which a short time ago he would have considered highly absurd! By working in this anthroposophical movement we not only transform our thoughts; we learn to bring all our life of soul into a wider perspective.

We must understand that the colouring of our thoughts has its origin far deeper than is generally imagined. It is the feelings which frequently impel a man to hold certain opinions. The logical reasons he puts forward are often a mere screen, a mask for his deeper feelings and habits of thought.

To bring ourselves to the point where logical reasons really mean something to us, we must first learn to love the logic in things. Only when we have learned to love what is real and objective, only then will the logical reasons be the decisive thing for us. We gradually learn to think objectively—independently, as it were, of our affections for this thought or that. Then our vision widens and we become practical—not in the sense of those who can only think on along the accustomed lines, but practical in the sense that we learn to draw our thoughts from out of the things themselves.

Practical life is born of objective thinking—that thinking which flows out of the things themselves. It is only by carrying out such exercises that we learn to take our thoughts from the things. And these exercises must be done with sound and healthy things—things that are least perverted by human civilisation—things of Nature.

Practising our thought as here described in connection with the things of Nature, will make us practical thinkers. This is a really practical thing to do. And we shall take hold of the most everyday occupations in a practical way, if once we train this fundamental element in life: our thinking. A practical frame of mind, a practical way of thinking, forms itself, when we exercise the human soul in the way here indicated.

The spiritual-scientific movement must bear fruit: it must place really practical men and women out into the world. It is less important for a man to feel able to accept the truth of this or that teaching. It is more important that he should develop the faculty for seeing things and penetrating things correctly. It is not a matter of theorising away beyond the things visible to the senses,—spinning theories into the spiritual realm. Far more important is the way in which Anthroposophy penetrates our soul, stimulates our activity of soul, widens our vision. It is in this that Anthroposophy is truly practical.

My task in these lectures will be to give you a picture of the theosophical conception of the world based upon the so-called Rosicrucian method. Please do not misunderstand this statement by expecting an historical account of Rosicrucianism. The expression “Rosicrucian method” is intended only to imply that theosophy will be presented in accordance with the method always adopted in the Mystery Schools of Europe since the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and called Rosicrucian training.

You know that theosophy is the truth that was imparted to mankind in ancient times in order that there might be formed in hearts everywhere a basic fount of human knowledge. But the further back we go into the past, the greater was the secrecy in which this knowledge was held. What was the reason for such secrecy? In the course of these lectures I shall return to the question why this universal wisdom was communicated in secret schools and centers to individuals who were destined not only to learn but to undertake training that transformed their souls to such an extent that they developed clairvoyance and insight into higher worlds. Such individuals were then sent out as emissaries, charged with guiding and leading others. But progress consists in the fact that more and more human beings become capable, through their power of judgment and intellect, of grasping this wisdom. Hence it has become necessary for what was formerly kept secret gradually to be made publicly known.

In the course of the nineteenth century, as the result of external conditions that we shall come to know, it became necessary to allow a great deal, indeed, a very considerable amount, of knowledge of occult science to make its way into the open for the sake of the well-being and progress of humanity. In the nineteenth century the Guardians of this knowledge said to themselves that in earlier times the communications of spiritual teaching made to human beings in the religions or by other means, were able to satisfy their needs in regard to eternal truths. But the needs of humanity change. So these Guardians of the primeval wisdom were obliged to realize that in the future there would be an increasing number of human beings whose souls could no longer be satisfied by the old forms of communicating spiritual truth.

Such people can find satisfaction in anthroposophy. This new form of communication springs from observation of a need of humanity in the modern age. The Guardians of the secret knowledge were naturally aware that such conditions were inevitable in the future, but not until a certain point of time was it necessary to make actual preparation for the influx of this wisdom into humanity and to emphasize that these secrets must also be grasped by the general intelligence prevailing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This was realized in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. There were few at that time who were aware of this starting point of preparation in Europe. The first Rosicrucians were those who gathered around a significant individuality known as Christian Rosenkreutz. It was he, Christian Rosenkreutz, who could affirm with the most convincing clarity, “From the Mysteries we have received a treasure-store of knowledge and wisdom of the super-sensible. If we adhere to this, we may hope in the future, too, to succeed in doing what was done in the past, namely, to send out individuals trained in our schools to instruct others when they have learnt and discerned the secrets of the primeval wisdom.”

This old method of promulgating the primeval wisdom was to continue, but preparation was to be made for something else as well. He, Christian Rosenkreutz, spoke as follows. He said, “A far greater number of human beings who long for the primeval wisdom will come to us and we could communicate it to them in the form in which we now possess it. But its acceptance demands belief in and recognition of our authority in a high degree—an attitude that will progressively disappear from mankind. The more men's power of judgment increases, the less will be their belief in those who teach them. Belief and trust were preconditions for the earlier form of communication.”

At the present time one would have to say, “People will come who wish to test for themselves what is communicated to them. They will insist that they wish to apply to what is told them the same logical intellect that is used for observation of the material world. They admit that something in addition to this intellect is necessary for investigation of the spiritual world, but for all that they insist upon testing things by means of this intellect.” Hence, at the beginning of our epoch it was necessary to clothe the primeval wisdom in new forms. The work of the Rosicrucians was to give expression to the primeval wisdom in a form enabling it to be acceptable to the modern mind and the modern soul.

What is theosophy when presented according to the Rosicrucian method? Theosophy in itself is always and everywhere the same. A Rosicrucian theosophist today is a theosophist of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the forms it takes, its wisdom is adapted exactly to what human beings desire and need to understand. What is the specific characteristic of our time? The course of the evolution of humanity was such that men were obliged to become ever more familiar with outer, physical reality. Look back into olden times, for example into the ancient Egyptian culture, and you will realize with what simple measures and forces men worked, erected their buildings, satisfied their personal needs. Then think of our modern life with all its ingenious gadgets for physical comfort. What tremendous spiritual force and mental activity are expended on the physical needs of daily life! This, of course, was necessary, because the specific task of the Western world was so to shape external culture and gain such control of outer nature that the physical plane came truly under the control of the human spirit. A world such as our own needs measures different from those current in antiquity to be capable of imbibing the wisdom guarded in the secret schools.

On the other hand, when we compare the knowledge possessed by the Chaldeans and their grasp of spiritual realities with our present knowledge, the Chaldeans admittedly tower heavens high above us. Today we admire a Copernicus, a Galileo and what is recorded by external science, but this is all child's play compared with the wisdom of the ancient Chaldeans. To the modern researcher the planet Mars, for example, is an objective body whose course and movement can be measured. But the Chaldeans knew as well what forces and entities are connected with Mars, what divine will governs all this, what connection there is between these forces and man. The mystery and sway wielded by these spiritual forces were known to the Chaldeans. That is why the modern researcher is so powerless in face of the inner character of this ancient Chaldean culture. External means for its investigation are at his disposal but there are no longer any inner means. Theosophists and Rosicrucians, however, have the spiritual, esoteric possibilities for penetrating into the spirit of that ancient culture.

The great scientific authorities, of whom we read that they excavate clay cylinders and fragments covered with inscriptions of the ancient Babylonian wisdom, stand before these objects like three-year-old children facing some electrical apparatus. The researcher does not know what to make of what he excavates from such ancient sites, so penetrating, so unbounded was the spiritual knowledge current in that era. But to produce by means of the intellect and the external devices of our civilization what we justifiably admire today as evidence of the great progress made during recent centuries—this was first possible for modern science. Such an era, however, needs a different kind of thinking and perception in order to understand the spiritual. At this point, perhaps, a warning may be given. People speak so much today about higher or lower degrees of evolution, arguing about whether Buddha or Christ is the greater. But that is not the essential. Whether the Assyrian wisdom or our own is the higher is not important. We are living in the present, materialistically-minded age and the inflow of spiritual knowledge into our culture is needed in order that mankind's longing for such knowledge may be satisfied. It is the Rosicrucian wisdom that gives this knowledge to modern man in the form suitable for him. What is being said here may possibly seem rather daring, but please accept it now for what it is and later on it will become clear. As a matter of fact, Rosicrucian wisdom has been more greatly misunderstood than anything else in the world.

As time went on, the great individuality who was Christian Rosenkreutz foresaw what demands of understanding would be made by rationalistic thought and he realized that already in that period it had become necessary to promulgate all spiritual knowledge in the form demanded by the modern age. We must realize that for the Rosicrucians it was much more difficult than for any similar movement of an earlier period, because their initial activity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries took place at the time when materialism was approaching apace. All modern achievements such as steam engines, telegraphy and so on were bound to place human beings firmly on the physical plane. The Rosicrucians were obliged to work for an era when men's thinking would be guided by mathematical principles. They were obliged to make their preparations with this in view and hence were entirely misunderstood. For this reason one cannot be informed truly about Rosicrucianism by what is said about it in public. Nothing of what was cultivated in true Rosicrucianism is to be found in literature. The deepest spiritual truths cultivated by the Rosicrucians were interpreted in such a mistaken way as to suggest that spiritual phenomena can be produced in alchemists' cellars with the help of retorts and so forth! This conception of alchemy gave rise to the materialistic caricature of Rosicrucianism that is presented in literature today. The task of the Rosicrucians was to formulate a science by means of which they would be able to let their wisdom flow gradually into the world.

From all this you will realize that when we present theosophy to people today it must be Rosicrucian theosophy. By using an older terminology we could win over a certain number of people, but they would necessarily be individuals who are connected with every fiber of their being with the modern world and its culture. There are egoists who withdraw from the tasks of the present age. We, however, wish to take modern life and its forms of expression seriously. We must accept our epoch as it actually is but endeavor to influence it spiritually. This is the conception that Rosicrucian theosophy must have of its task.

In the course of this Congress there will have been opportunity for you to realize what a fruitful effect theosophy can have, for example, in the sphere of medicine. Suppose medicine continues to develop along materialistic lines. If you could see forty years ahead you would be horrified by the brutality of the procedures to be adopted by medicine, by the forms of death with which medical science will set out to cure human beings. How does medical science today investigate the effects of its remedies? By means of the human material it finds in the hospitals and elsewhere; therefore, by outer observation. But spiritual wisdom, by its very nature, penetrates into the inner relationships of the spiritual, knows what in the physical world corresponds to the spiritual. A completely new creation of all medical science will proceed from what is called Rosicrucianism. But that is only one domain.

Compare the complicated conditions of our existence today with those of the ancient Chaldeans. Think what an amount of intellectual energy and what complicated cooperative measures are essential to enable a check issued in New York to be cashed in Tokyo. An era of this character, which has spread such culture over the globe, needs methods of spiritual activity different from those of earlier epochs. Occultists are aware of this. Modern thinking is simply unable to cope with and master the chaos of outer conditions and tasks in which man is becoming so deeply involved. Thinking itself will become rigid. Today we are living in an age of transition but thinking will soon no longer be sufficiently fluid and flexible to grapple with and transform the complicated conditions of life.

Why do we promulgate theosophy? In order to achieve practical effects. Theosophical thoughts make thinking more elastic, more flexible, enable a more rapid survey of far-reaching circumstances. Rosicrucianism has therefore to fertilize every domain of life. To realize the practical effect of theosophy you may turn to my essay, The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy. It is impossible for you to under-stand its content without Rosicrucian theosophy, which must not remain theory but become a helping hand in practical life. This element is simply not present in the earlier forms of theosophy. The role of Rosicrucian theosophy or occultism is to satisfy the spiritual longings of men and to enable spirit to flow into the daily round of their duties. Rosicrucian theosophy is not there for the salon or for the hermit, but for the whole of human culture.

Wisdom is always and forever one. But just as the individual man lives and evolves to further and further stages, so too does humanity as a whole. For this reason the forms of the wisdom revealed to men must change in order to be in keeping with the course of their evolution. The great teachers of humanity are working among us today, as always. We, too, who are present here as souls, were incarnated in earlier times, have lived through all the periods of evolution, the Greco-Latin, the Egypto-Chaldean and epochs still further back in time, in order to benefit from constantly new achievements and acquire constantly new knowledge. Think of a soul in an Egyptian incarnation, surrounded by the gigantic pyramids and mysterious sphinxes. What a different effect all this had upon the soul from what surrounds it today! For as long as the earth has something new to display—and the earth is forever making progress—for so long does the soul undergo constantly new experiences.

The soul does not incarnate on the earth in order to please the gods, but in order to learn! The face of the earth was quite different when the soul incarnated for the first time and will again be different when the final incarnation is reached. We return to this earth when, and not until, there is something new to be learned here. That is why the interval between two incarnations is lengthy. Only think how greatly Northern Europe, merely as landscape, differed from what it is today at the time when Christ was on the earth. We do not come to the earth twice without being able to learn something new. Everything in the world is in process of evolution, but evolution means the elaboration and later manifestation of the new.

Not only men but all beings evolve. We have to seek the way to beings who are at stages of evolution higher than that reached by man, although in this life he comes into relation with them in many ways. These beings are also subject to the law of evolution and just as our souls were different thousands of years ago, so, too, in earlier epochs, were the beings now revealing themselves. They also are perpetually learning. When we are speaking of one of the higher beings who has descended to our world in order to reveal to us with the resources of the spirit the mysteries of the higher worlds, we must affirm that that is a sublime art that must be mastered. Even a god has to master it.

Human beings of today must be addressed differently from those who were living ten thousand years ago. The higher beings, like men, undergo evolution, and what I have said during this Congress about the event of Damascus indicates how they evolve. A man with spiritual vision sees not only the outer environment but also everything that belongs to the spiritual aura of the earth. Just as human beings are surrounded by an aura, so, too, are the cosmic bodies. A clairvoyant is eventually able to perceive the aura of a cosmic body. What a clairvoyant would have seen in the earth's aura two thousand years ago would be quite different from what would have been seen a thousand years ago and different again from what would be seen by one who has developed clairvoyance today. Just as the picture of outer nature changes, so, too, does the picture of the spiritual world into which vision penetrates.

I shall now refer to an event of which I shall speak again later on, namely, the event of the burning thorn bush and the proclamation from Sinai. What happened to Moses at that time? His clairvoyant power had developed to a certain stage and he beheld the super-sensible reality in the physical phenomenon. An individual who was not clairvoyant would simple have seen a happening in nature. Moses, however, beheld in the burning thorn bush the Being who proclaimed Himself as “I AM the I AM.” He knew that this Being was there in very truth, that the fire was not only outer fire but harbored a spiritual reality. A Being belonging intimately to the whole further evolution of humanity, who announced His name as the “I AM the I AM,” had revealed Himself to Moses. What was it that was now known to all the pupils of Moses? In the Mystery Schools of that era they had learned that the same Being who had revealed Himself on Sinai would one day come down to the earth, live in a human body, and speak for three years in a man, Christ Jesus. This was known to the initiates. It was also known to Saul, who later became Paul. But he said to himself, “This Being exists in very truth and will come down to the earth. But I cannot conceive that the Being who revealed Himself in the burning thorn bush as Jehovah could suffer the shameful death on the Cross.” What was it that eventually convinced Saul? The event of Damascus! At the moment when he became clairvoyant and the earth's aura was visible to him, when in that aura he beheld the Christ, the living Christ, who revealed Himself as the same Being who had died on the Cross, at that moment Saul became Paul.

But that vision could not previously have been possible. Earlier than two thousand years ago Christ was not yet present in the earth's aura but He was still visibly present in the sun. Zarathustra beheld the sun surrounded by an aura he called Ahura Mazdao, the great Aura of Ormuzd. But this Being had descended, had first revealed Himself to Moses in the burning thorn bush and had then lived on earth as a man in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Hence Christ could say of Himself, “I am the Light of the World.” Before then, nobody could have spoken these words, because the Light of the World had not previously been present in any being.

We will study these themes until they are fully understood. Today, however, it will merely be indicated that it was not possible for the Christ Being always to reveal Himself as He did, for example, in the case of Paul. The Christ Being had first to muster the necessary power, to develop it to the point where this revelation was possible. Earlier than two thousand years ago this could not have taken place. Each soul, in each incarnation, makes progress. This is what has happened in the case of leading individualities. We must realize that Christ has not always been the same and in His distinctive ways of working we must recognize how He, too, advances from one evolutionary stage to another. It gives rise to an overwhelming feeling of exultation when a man is made aware that just as in the case of his own soul and its incarnations and progress, the spiritual beings also reach higher and higher stages and become more and more powerful. This realization gives one a living feeling of evolution. It is an essential part of Rosicrucian esotericism to show how a being such as Christ has worked both in the past and at the present time, in Moses and in Paul, and to see from this how even a Being of such sublime eminence makes progress. This gives a rise to an intimate concept of evolution.

Now let us think of a child. He is born, sees the light of the world—this is the usual expression—and in the very first years of life changes particularly quickly. Compared with the later epochs of life it is then that the course of evolution is the most rapid. Materialistic science itself could make many relevant discoveries here. When the brain is examined, which is possible by external means, it can be observed how on the top of a child's head at the place that remains soft for a considerable time, the skull bones do not close immediately and the brain itself takes shape only gradually. The function of articulation is to pro-duce an instrument for a power of which the child will only later be capable, namely, the power to think, to correlate his perceptions. A clairvoyant sees how during the very first weeks and months after birth the child is surrounded by intensely active, powerful forces belonging to the etheric body, the second member of man's constitution. We know that in an adult human being of today the dimension of this etheric body is practically the same as that of the physical body, but in a young child it still extends far beyond the physical body, especially around the head. The activity of the forces, which to a clairvoyant seems to be like a play of light, is particularly strong here. It is wonderful to see how certain forces surge up from the body below and then stream from the nape of the neck in all directions, wherever hair appears; the forces radiate in a living play of light to become an astral-etheric radiance in the child's etheric body, a radiance that fades away in the course of time. In this radiance lie the forces that create the connective tissues in the brain. The brain is formed out of spiritual substance after the child has been born. Forty to fifty streams of forces can be seen working together. The body of light is composed of these streams. A wonderful spectacle is presented by a child during the first weeks of life. This body of light gradually presses into and is then within the child's brain. To begin with, the etheric body was outside the child, surrounding the head, and was entirely primitive. This was surrounded by a body of light from which the etheric body gathered forces, and now it penetrates gradually into the child's head and remains there as the complicated etheric organism.

What is so wonderful about the process of evolution is that everything physical is produced from the spiritual, formed by the spiritual, which we then receive into ourselves. The psyche has itself fashioned the dwelling place in which it subsequently resides. So we see that what takes place in the microcosm, the little world, in the brain of a human child, also takes place in the macrocosm, the great world. Now think of an outstandingly advanced individuality, such as Jesus of Nazareth, in whose body Christ lived as soul for three years. Just as in a child the etheric body itself prepares the physical brain into which it subsequently passes, so, too, had Christ previously prepared the abode in which He was to dwell. He had to accomplish this by His own activity. To begin with He was only outwardly connected with the earth, which could not yet have received Him. The most highly evolved souls had, however, worked at the earth in such a way that the Christ was able to draw nearer and nearer, and He Himself had participated in this work. Who, then, had so transformed the body of Jesus of Nazareth and finally brought it to the stage where it was able to receive the Christ? The Christ Himself had done this! To begin with He had worked upon the body from outside and was subsequently able Himself to pass into the human being concerned.

What takes place in the microcosm also takes place in the macrocosm, and it is because the beings above us also develop that evolution is possible. It was only because Christ could reveal Himself supersensibly that He became the planetary Spirit of the Earth. The microcosmic invariably tallies with the macrocosmic.

I have not been able today to present even the first chapter of Rosicricianism to you. All I have done is to indicate how a man of the present age should learn to think and perceive. The true meaning of the mandate, “Know thyself!” lies in our following in this way the evolution of the cosmos. Where is our self? Certainly not in us alone! To think that would be egoistic. The self is formed out of, born out of the whole universe and our own ascent leads us finally to merge in the whole cosmos. The aim of self-knowledge is to give man his place in the great world in order to reveal to him there the true meaning of the word, self-knowledge.

As I said yesterday in the introductory lecture, the intention in this course is to give a picture, a kind of review of the theosophical world conception. It will be necessary to speak of a number of subjects with which many in the audience are already familiar. But only by learning of these truths from their very foundations will it be possible later on to consider higher regions.

Before beginning the actual theme, I want to speak of a matter of exceptional importance. Why is it that we must concern ourselves with theosophical ideas and theories before we can ourselves actually experience anything in the spiritual world? Many people will say, “The results of clairvoyant investigation are made known to us, but I myself cannot yet see into the spiritual world. Would it not be wiser if, instead of the results of investigation being communicated to us, I were told how I can myself develop clairvoyance? Each individual would then be able to undertake the further development himself.”

Those who are unacquainted with the principles of occult investigation may believe that it would be better if such facts had not previously been made known. But in the spiritual world there is a definite law, the significance of which we will make clear by an example. Suppose that in a certain year some properly trained clairvoyant had perceived this or that in the spiritual world. Now imagine that ten or twenty years later, another equally trained clairvoyant could see the same thing even if he had known nothing whatever about the result obtained by the first clairvoyant. If you were to believe that this could happen, you would be making a great mistake, for the truth is that a fact of the spiritual world that has once been discovered by a clairvoyant or by an occult school, cannot be investigated a second time if the would-be investigator has not first been informed that it has already been discovered. If, therefore, in the year 1900 a certain fact had been investigated and in the year 1950 another clairvoyant reaches the stage of being able to perceive the same thing, he can succeed only if he has realized that someone has already investigated and fathomed it. Therefore, already known facts in the spiritual world can be perceived only when their import has been consciously grasped as communications already made. This is the law that establishes for all epochs the foundation of universal brotherliness. It is impossible to penetrate into any domain of the spiritual world without a link having first been made with what has already been fathomed by the Elder Brothers of humanity. The spiritual world sees to it that nobody can become a law unto himself, saying, “I am not concerned with what is already there. I shall investigate only for myself.” None of the facts communicated in spiritual science today could be perceived by individuals, however highly developed and advanced, if they had not been previously known. Because a link must be there with what has already been discovered, the theosophical movement had also to be founded on this basis.

In a comparatively short time from now, many individuals will become clairvoyant, but they would be able to see only unreality, not truth, in the spiritual world if they had not heard of what had already been investigated. First one must have knowledge of these truths, such as is given by theosophy, or the science of the spirit, and only then can they be actually perceived. Even a clairvoyant must get to know what has already been discovered, and then, after conscientious training, he can perceive the facts himself. It may be said that the divine beings fertilize a faculty of seership only once in a human soul and if this single, virginal fertilization has been achieved, then other human beings must pay attention to what this first soul has discovered in order to have the right to see it themselves. This law lays the foundations of an inner, universal brotherliness, a true brotherhood of men. From epoch to epoch wisdom has passed through the occult schools and been faithfully harbored by the Masters, and we, too, must help to preserve this treasure and maintain brotherliness with those who have already achieved something if we wish to make our way into the higher regions of the spiritual world. What is striven for on the physical plane as moral law is natural law in the spiritual world.

Theosophy teaches us that everything physical or material is born out of the spiritual. But in our epoch it behooves us not to be satisfied with this bare realization of a spiritual world. That behind everything material, everything physical, there is the spiritual, is an essential, but abstract, consciousness of spirit. What is necessary is to develop definite concepts and ideas of how the spiritual becomes manifest in each domain. Today one can only guide some other individual by conscientiously ensuring that he takes all the steps leading from the external into the spiritual world.

The first kingdom to be observed among the physical kingdoms around us, is that of the minerals, the world of stones. The kingdom of the minerals is distinguished from the human kingdom, for example, by the fact that a man knows that if he has given someone else a hard blow, the latter feels pain. There is no outer evidence that a mineral feels pain from a blow. From this the conclusion is drawn that in man there is a soul that feels pleasure and suffering, but not in the mineral. We will not at the outset insist that the mineral also has a soul, because there we must already take note of the results of clairvoyant investigation. The stone as it lies before us has in it nothing of the nature of soul. But what is essential in a spiritual world conception is that observation shall be directed to the right place and not to a false one. Think of a tiny animal observing a human being but actually able to see only his fingernails. It would say that these fingernails are objects on their own, for the tiny animal cannot realize that the nails belong to and are part of an organism. When it is able to survey and see the whole, then its observation will be true. The same principle applies to the spiritual investigator and the mineral world. If you regard the stone as being something complete in itself, you are in the position of the tiny animal that takes the fingernails or the teeth to be the whole man, a complete being.

Think of the rocks on the earth. They can only be conceived as having grown out of the whole organism of the earth. But where is the being of which these rocks are parts, to which all these rocks belong? There are spiritual beings to whom the whole world of stones belongs. These beings feel happiness and pain, pleasure and suffering just as does the human soul, so that we can properly speak of a mineral soul. You must not, however, judge on the basis of mere analogies, because that might lead you to think that when a stone is smashed the mineral soul feels pain, but that is not the case. A man feels pain if one of his fingers is crushed, but in similar circumstances the mineral soul feels contentment and pleasure. The being belonging to the mineral experiences great happiness when stones are crushed, and pain when the fragments are put together again. Because in the external world, mineral fragments are constantly being separated off and put together again, pleasure and pain are continually being felt in the souls of the beings who belong to the mineral kingdom. Suppose we have salt here and a glass filled with warm water. What happens if we drop the salt into the water? To clairvoyant observation the grains of salt do not only dissolve in the water but feelings of well-being arise; actual pleasure becomes evident when the salt permeates the water in the glass. Then, when the water cools and a cube of salt crystallizes out, this causes suffering to the mineral soul. In mountain ranges where rocks have formed this is what has happened. When crystals form in the earth the process is accompanied by suffering and pain for the beings belonging basically to the mineral kingdom.

When a planet is born, collects into a coherent mass and condenses, this process causes pain and suffering to the spiritual beings involved in it. When a planet such as our earth comes into existence, the process is accompanied by pain and suffering. You may now ask me where then these beings are that the eye does not see, that feel pain and suffering, well-being and happiness, when, for example, stones are broken up by workmen in a quarry. Where are these beings? In a comparatively lofty spiritual world! The mineral substance seen by the eye is only a shadowy image of these beings. They live in a world we call the world of formlessness. Spiritual beings live in our whole mineral world-in the world of formlessness according to occult investigation. Why do we use this expression, “world of formlessness?” This will be understood at once when we turn to the world of plants.

The plant, too, is the expression of certain beings of soul. Here again we will study the results of spiritual investigation. This tells us that when, for example, in the autumn, the corn is mown and the scythe cuts through the stalks, no suffering is felt by the soul-beings whose bodies are the plants. No indeed! We must not think of suffering here because whole streams of joy and contentment weave over the area. Equally, when the animal is turned out to graze, it means happiness for the plant souls, not pain. It can be compared with the feeling experienced by a mammal when its offspring sucks its milk; this gives a feeling of bliss. What our planet furnishes on its surface in the way of nourishment for the beings inhabiting it, is, so to speak, milk for the beings that belong to the planet and have their habitation in the center of the earth. You may ask if all of them are able to find a place there. Certainly they are, because of the prevailing law of permeability. Their self-surrender, when a certain degree of maturity has been reached, means bliss for the plant soul. Pain is caused when plants are torn out of the soil. Now you. may say: Yes, but when mischievous boys and girls uselessly tear off flowers how can that possibly cause happiness to the plant soul? Would it not be much better to root out the plant altogether? How can that cause it pain? From the point of view that is valid for the physical world you are certainly right in saying this. But it must not be forgotten that these points of view are by no means always authoritative for the spiritual worlds. A person may look more handsome when he has torn out the first grey hairs that have appeared on his head but pain is caused nevertheless. It is all a matter of the point of view concerned and we cannot struggle against the occult world with moral considerations. Beings, souls—they also belong to the plants—beings and souls for which the plant world supplies the bodies. We will now try to form an idea of how happiness and suffering take their course in the plant world.

The plant world is a shadow of the spiritual world. Where, then, are the beings that belong to it? In the world of form. They are also known by different names. The spiritual beings belonging to the mineral kingdom inhabit a spiritual realm, the realm of formlessness; the spiritual beings belonging to the plants live in the realm of form.

Realm of Formlessness, Arupa or Upper Devachan.

Realm of Form, Rupa or Lower Devachan.

The souls of the minerals belong to a definite region of the spiritual world, indeed, to its upper region. This must not surprise you, for the higher the realm in which the souls live, the more thoroughly they conceal themselves. Why is the one realm called the realm of formlessness and the other the realm of form?

When a crystal is smashed it is its form alone that is destroyed. This can, however, be reconstructed somewhere else, independently of the form that was destroyed. When a salt crystal comes into existence in nature it need not necessarily do so out of another crystal. It can only arise from the substance of salt and disappear again as form. That is the characteristic of formless substance. In the case of the plant, the form cannot come into existence in the same way, out of substance, out of the formless. The plant—this is its essential characteristic—must develop out of a parental plant. The form must pass over from progenitor to offspring in the case of the souls of the beings in the realm of form; procreation takes place as the result of transmission of the form. The form alone, nothing else, is contained in the seed.

It is a superficial belief of science that there is no great difference between plant seed and animal egg. In the animal egg, form and life are transmitted from progenitor to off-spring: Life is transmitted. In the seed of the lily nothing except the form is preserved and it is transmitted to the new lily. What happens in the mineral is that the forces that, so to speak, implant the form arise in the higher realm of Devachan. In the case of the crystal, the formlessness shoots as it were into the form confronting the eye. We must, therefore, say that the whole planet upon which plant life unfolds is surrounded by collective life containing the impulse that enables the life of the plant to arise from it, and from the plant seed only the form. From the life of the old lily nothing passes over to the flower bed or flower pot in which the seed is lying. That the new lily is imbued with life is due to the fact that the seed has been received into the. universal life of our earth.

Here we come to the transition to the animal kingdom. The form alone is passed on through the seed; life arises because the seed is received into the universal life of our earth. The quality of soul in the animal is visually perceptible and it is therefore self-evident to speak of happiness and suffering, joy and pain in this case. If we are to be clear about what happiness and suffering mean in the plant kingdom, we must turn to the study of other beings because happiness and suffering are felt outside single plants; the whole organism of the earth feels them, just as when you cut a finger the pain is not in the finger itself but is led over to the whole organism. If you want to understand what pain is in the plant, you must turn to the earth as a whole in order to contact the soul of the plant there. The essential difference lies in the fact that if an animal is wounded, the pain is situated inside its skin, as is also the case with the animal nature of the human being. Here we are coming ever nearer to individualization; the higher the evolution of the kingdoms of nature ascends, the nearer we come to beings whose center is within themselves. We study the plant rightly only when we study it in connection with the earth as a whole. The animal has a soul and admittedly feels happiness and suffering within the limits of its skin. We do not actually see this soul because it is in the realm we call the astral world. The animals are creatures that have a center in themselves and their souls live in the astral realm. Thus there is a certain systematic order in our idea of the world. The mineral conceals its soul deeply, the plant less deeply and the animal less deeply still; the animal has its center in itself, in the realm that is invisible. We must look for the souls of the animals in a world other than the physical.

Thus we distinguish four kingdoms. Firstly, the realm of the visible forms of minerals, plants and animals, the physical world. Secondly, the realm where the invisible nature of the animal is to be found, the astral world. Thirdly, the realm of the plants, the souls of which are hidden in lower Devachan. Fourthly, the realm of beings whose souls are hidden in upper Devachan. The differentiation is obvious even from observation of the external world. We will now, however, turn to the results of clairvoyant investigation.

In the space occupied by the mineral as such, nothing of the nature of soul is present. This space is void of soul, black, but round about and outside it luminosity begins; further away this luminosity increases in strength. What is it? It is the etheric body of the mineral that originates in the cosmos, drawn from a part of the ether where no actual mineral exists. The cosmic soul forces of the mineral experience joy and sorrow in the space where the etheric body of the mineral is present. There suffering begins, or happiness, perhaps, anticipates the severance of stone from a quarry like a spiritual ray of light. The etheric body of the mineral encircles its physical body. It could be said that where the mineral exists as such, the etheric body has densified to such a degree that it has become physical. The difference between mineral and plant arises through the fact that the etheric body of the plant is within it, permeating every single part. The green pervading the plant is the substance described previously as being the etheric body of the mineral outside it.

But if all that could be said about the plant were that it is permeated by an etheric body, it would not blossom but only produce green leaves. When the plant begins to blossom, clairvoyant consciousness sees something spreading over and playing around it. This is the astral life, which brings about the crowning of the growth. The green plant grows and finally something new, the astral element, spreads over and plays around it but never penetrates into it.

The animal has spiritually within it what hovers around the plant. When what hovers around the plant is inside the skin, the being is an animal. What hovers above the plant, the astral element, surrounds the whole earth. It is the collective astrality of the earth that hovers like smoke above the plant when it is about to flower. Happiness and suffering are not seated within the plant itself but are felt by the earth. The animal itself experiences happiness and suffering; the astral body within the animal weaves and is astir in the whole astrality of our earth. The mineral kingdom is as though embedded in an etheric world and has its etheric body around it. The plant is permeated by an etheric body and because the plant world is embedded in an astral body that is part of the collective astrality of the earth, pain and happiness are experienced outside the plant itself. The being that is not only swathed by the astral element but can actually take it into itself, is the animal.

Thus we have now surveyed the three kingdoms of the world surrounding us and their connection with the higher worlds.

Man is a little world in himself, the product of all that surrounds him. What we have discovered today we will use tomorrow in order to comprehend the structure of the human being.

In the lecture yesterday I endeavored to give a general survey of the different manifestations and functions of the life of soul in the world around us. Today we will study the nature and being of man himself in greater detail, referring as well to a great deal of what is already known. We will think, to begin with, of facts connected with the nature of man that form part of the picture I was able to give you yesterday.

To begin with, in respect of his lowest body, the human being seems as if he had grown out of the first kingdom that surrounds us, that of the minerals. What immediately catches our eye when a man is standing in front of us, is the most tangible part of all, namely, his physical body. But the occultist knows that this is only one member of his constitution. It is easy to form an erroneous idea of this physical body when it is taken for granted that the physical body is what can be seen with the eyes and touched with the hands. That would be as mistaken as it would be to take hydrogen for water. The higher members of man's constitution are intermingled with his physical body. As it confronts us, this physical body is already permeated by the other members of man's nature, so that the structure of flesh and bones before us cannot without further ado be called the physical body. This physical body of man consists of the same substances and forces that are to be found in the mineral world outside, interwoven with consummate art in the structure of the human body. That this body looks and feels as it does is due to the fact that the other members of man's nature and constitution are mingled with it. The body of man seen by the eye is not, properly speaking, the physical body. The physical body as such is present when the human being has gone through the gate of death. The remaining corpse is the real physical body, the body freed from all the higher members of man's nature. When it is left to itself this physical body follows laws quite other than those followed until the moment of death. Before then, it has, in truth, been consistently repudiating the laws of physical chemistry. In earthly existence the body of man would be a perpetual corpse if it were not permeated by the etheric body that throughout life fights against the decay of the physical body. The ether or life body is the second member of man's being.

We will now take it for granted that both the plant and the animal have etheric bodies. Nevertheless, in a certain respect the human being differs from the animal in his etheric body as well, and it is this difference that is of particular interest to us. In what respect does the etheric body of man differ from that of the animal? First let us ask how clairvoyant consciousness is able to acquire knowledge of man's etheric body. To answer this question we must describe what clairvoyance is.

An individual who has developed a certain faculty of clairvoyance has also acquired such mastery of his mental activity that he is able to focus his attention upon or divert it from something with far greater strength than before. If you were to expect an average human being to be able to control his attention to the extent of suggesting away a physical form in front of him, you would find that it would be possible in the rarest instances. A clairvoyant, however, is quite capable of doing this. The space otherwise occupied by the physical body is then, for the clairvoyant, filled through and through by this etheric body. It has approximately the human form in the head, torso and shoulders, but the lower the area in the body, the less similar it is to the human figure.

The etheric body of an animal is different from its physical body. The etheric body of the horse, for example, extends far beyond its physical form. If you could see the etheric body of an elephant clairvoyantly you would be amazed at its gigantic proportions. In the case of the human form, the lower the level the greater is the difference between the etheric body and the physical form. Otherwise, in a certain respect, left and right correspond in the physical body and in the etheric body. The physical heart lies slightly to the left; the corresponding organ in the etheric body is the etheric heart, which lies to the right. The greatest difference, however, between the physical and the etheric body is that the etheric body of a man is female and the etheric body of a woman, male. This is a fact of great significance and many riddles of human nature are explicable on the basis of this finding of occult investigation. Thus, in the case of the human being there is a kind of correspondence, and in the case of the animal a great difference, between this second member of man's nature and the first.

Of man's astral body it is possible to have a much clearer idea. It is the third member of his constitution. The etheric body of man is a reality to one who is clairvoyant; to a materialist it is simply an illusion. Anatomists and physiologists investigate man's physical body only. But in this physical body there is something—the blood and nerves—that is much more closely related to man's consciousness. This consciousness is aware of his happiness, suffering and joy, all of which take effect in the space filled by his physical body. The bearer of these experiences is invisible to the individual concerned but it is visible to clairvoyant consciousness as a luminous cloud. This is the astral body. It differs greatly from the etheric body.

Movement in the physical body cannot be compared with the extraordinary mobility of the etheric body. In a healthy human being the color of this etheric body is that of the blossom of a young peach tree. Everything in the etheric body gleams and glitters in shades of rosy red, dark and light, becoming a radiant white. The etheric body has a definite boundary, although this fluctuates. The astral body is quite different. It displays the greatest possible variety of colors and changing forms, like a cloud floating by with ever changing movement. The colors and forms that appear in the cloud are expressions of the feelings and experiences that play between one human being and another. If a clairvoyant sees a bluish-red color in the astral body, he perceives love streaming between human beings, but another time he will also see the feelings of animosity that pass between individuals. As a man's activity of soul is constantly changing, so, too, do the colors and forms change in the astral body, appearing and disappearing in a multicolored play.

The fourth member of man's constitution is the bearer of the ego. Thus we have his physical body, which in external nature is comparable with the mineral, then his etheric body, which is comparable with the plant, and then his astral body, which is common to both animal and man. The astral body in man, however, is far more mobile than it is in the animal.

The ego bearer, the fourth member of man's nature, is seen as a kind of oval form, the source of which can be traced to the anterior part of the head. It is visible there to the clairvoyant as a bluish, luminous orb. A kind of bluish sheen streams out from this orb and passes into the human being. When, but not until, the clairvoyant can also suggest away a man's astral body, he is able to perceive the ego bearer. Man has the other three bodies in common with the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms of nature. But the ego bearer distinguishes him from these kingdoms and he becomes thereby the crown of creation.

In studying the fourfold nature of man we have actually been envisaging the dowry he has received from the higher worlds, no matter what his stage of evolution may be. The fact that he has the fourfold constitution of which we have spoken makes him man. Not until the “I,” the ego, works on the three bodies does his own task begin in the real sense. Whether the development achieved by a human being has reached a higher or lower stage depends upon how effectively he has worked upon the lower members of his constitution. The ego begins first of all to work upon the astral body. The effect of this work differs depending upon whether the individual concerned has reached only a low stage of development or is a highly evolved personality such, for example, as Schiller. The one has achieved less than the other in the process of transforming his astral body. This inner work upon oneself is known in occultism as purification, cleansing or catharsis. In this way the ego works at the perfecting of the astral body. In every human being, therefore, it will be found that the astral body is twofold. One part has been worked upon and purified, not so the other. Let us now suppose that the ego continues to work unswervingly upon the astral body. If this is the case, the individual concerned will gradually reach the stage of no longer having to force himself to do what is good, because it will become habit. There is obviously a difference when an individual is obeying a command, or has so much love in him that willy-nilly he will do what is good, meaningful and beautiful. If an individual is simply obeying a command, his ego is indeed working upon his astral body, but if doing the good becomes a habit, then the ego is working upon the etheric body as well.

To understand how the ego works upon the etheric body we will think of an example. When something or other is explained to you and you have understood it, then the ego has worked into the astral body. But if day after day you repeat a prayer, perhaps the Lord's Prayer, you are working into the etheric body because of the repetition every day; the soul is exercising the same activity over and over again. Repetition is an entirely different matter from a momentary understanding. We will clarify our minds as to how, in the latter case, the ego works upon the astral body and, in the former, upon the etheric body through repetition.

Think of the growth of a plant. The living seed produces the stalk and leaf after leaf; constantly new green leaves are added. This is possible because the plant is endowed with an etheric body and the underlying, active principle of the etheric body is repetition. Wherever repetition occurs, an etheric body is at work. The culminating feature of the plant, the blossom, is the product of a different principle, namely, the overshadowing astral body. Culmination, therefore, is brought about by astrality. This can also be observed in the structure of man's physical body. The spine with its numerous vertebrae is an expression of the etheric body in the physical body. Now think of man's head, of the brain. There you have the culmination, the work of the astral body in the physical stature. Spiritually, this is the same process as the manifestation of understanding resulting from the effect made upon the astral body; activity generated through daily repetition of the same prayer or meditative exercise is the product of work upon the etheric body. The essence of meditation is that through repetition it has an effect not only upon the astral body but also upon the etheric body. The reason why the effect made by the great religious teachers has been so dynamic is because they have imparted to humanity principles embodying a power that works ever onward. The etheric body of man is also twofold; one part has been worked upon by the ego, although in the average individual still to a limited extent, while the other part has not yet been worked upon at all.

There is still a third possibility for man. He can work from his ego into the physical body. This is the hardest task of all. Man has already worked continuously upon his physical body unconsciously, but not from his ego. This is possible only for the most advanced individuals.

We have thus studied the four lower members of man's constitution and have been made aware that three higher members are products of the transformation of the lower members as the result of the work of the ego. In this work upon the three lower members there is considerable difference in that it proceeds either consciously or unconsciously—unconsciously, that is to say, without the individual concerned being aware of it. The transformation occurs perhaps through the study and contemplation of works of art, pictures, and so forth, or through pious devotion and prayer. But these individuals are not conscious that they are working upon their astral and etheric bodies; conscious work begins at a comparatively late state. We have therefore to distinguish between conscious and unconscious work upon the lower members of man's being. His astral body is twofold; one part is the product of unconscious activity, the other of conscious effort. The part of the astral body that was worked upon unconsciously by the ego is called the sentient soul, which today is finished and complete in man. What was worked upon the etheric body unconsciously from the ego is the intellectual or mind soul. What has been worked upon in the physical body, unconsciously for long ages, is the consciousness or spiritual soul. Thus in man we distinguish physical body, etheric body, astral body and the ego. The ego, working unconsciously upon the astral body produces the sentient soul, upon the etheric body, the intellectual or mind soul, upon the physical body, the consciousness or spiritual soul. We have, therefore, spoken of six, or rather seven members present in man's nature because he has worked unconsciously upon his own nature and constitution.

Now the conscious work begins. What comes into existence as a result of it? Spirit self, or manas, is the outcome of what a man consciously instils into his astral body; what he consciously instils into his etheric body, but this is dependent upon occult training, is known as buddhi or life spirit. What happens if the ego eventually becomes able to work consciously into the physical body, to inculcate forces into the physical body itself? Through occult training this can actually be brought about consciously through the breathing process but there must be great caution and sensitivity of procedure, for through false methods of training such as are often given in public literature, a European body can be seriously harmed; knowledge of what is suitable for the constitution of a modern human being is essential. Through a conscious method of breathing the physical body can be transformed by the ego into atman or spirit man.

Man was a fourfold being when he assumed earthly form. In his first incarnation on earth he had already begun to work upon his own being through the ego. In the course of the following incarnations he has developed, unconsciously, the three functional aspects of the soul: sentient soul, intellectual or mind soul, consciousness or spiritual soul. We shall subsequently learn how the conscious transformation is achieved of physical, etheric and astral bodies into the three higher members. Meanwhile, you have heard how the sevenfold being of man evolves through the incarnations. The four members, physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, form the so-called sacred quaternary that was revered in all occult schools and with which a sacred trinity was allied, consciously forming a sevenfoldness or tenfoldness. We have thus a picture before us of man who has within him everything that is out-spread around him but which he transcends by virtue of his ego bearer.

We will now study the human being in waking life and in sleep in order to learn how the bodies are connected. What is happening when joy and pain in a man are stilled, when his consciousness sinks into sleep? His astral body and ego are then outside his physical and etheric bodies. In the state of sleep something striking happens to man. In sleep at night he has descended as it were to the level of the plant by day. He has become a twofold being; his physical and etheric bodies remain in the bed and his astral body and ego are outside. You may now ask whether it can be said that man is a plant while he is asleep. No, but man and plant then consist of the same combination of bodies. On our earth a being with a physical body and an etheric body only is a plant. When an astral body and ego are present, the physical and etheric bodies change. In the plant there are no nerve strands, and it is only a physical body in which there is an ego, that has warm blood. The higher animals must be regarded as degenerate forms of the original man. In the physical body the ego comes to expression in the blood, the astral body in the nerves, the etheric body in the glandular system and the physical nature of man in his own body. If, therefore, the astral body is the creator of the system of nerves, which is actually the case, this system of nerves is in a doleful situation, for during sleep it is abandoned by its creator. Not so the glandular system, for the etheric body remains with it. But the blood system of the physical and etheric bodies is faithlessly forsaken by the ego during the night. The physical body can exist on its own, because the physical nature remains the same, as does the glandular system, since the etheric body remains in the physical body during sleep. The system of nerves, however, is forsaken by its master. We will now ask clairvoyant consciousness what is then happening in the physical body? To the extent to which man's astral body goes out of the physical and etheric bodies during the night, to that same extent a “divine-spiritual” astral body moves into the bodies lying in the bed. The same applies to the blood system; a divine-spiritual ego enters into it and provides for its maintenance. In the night, too, man is a fourfold being but beings of a higher order take possession of the two bodies remaining in the bed. When man's astral body and ego return in the morning to his etheric and physical bodies, his own astral body expels a being of greater power. The same happens in the case of the blood system. Man's ego drives out the divine-spiritual ego that has provided for the blood system during the night.

Divine-spiritual beings are present in our environment all the time. By day they must withdraw, just as we ourselves withdraw during the night. These divine-spiritual beings sleep by day, whilst human beings sleep by night. In the evening a divine-spiritual ego and a divine-spiritual astral body draw into the physical and etheric bodies of the man asleep in bed and leave these bodies in the morning. The process in man is exactly the reverse. In the evening he abandons his bodies and in the morning resumes possession of them. Even in religions a feeling has remained that the gods sleep by day. There are countries where the churches are shut at midday because the gods are then most deeply asleep.

We will now think about what is outside man's body at night, namely, the astral body and the ego. We know that desires, urges and passions are rooted in the astral body but during the night man is not aware of them. Why is this? It is because at the present stage of evolution man's astral body and ego have no organs that would make this awareness possible. Man as he is at present can perceive only by means of physical organs. There are around man as many worlds as he has organs to perceive them. If he has one organ more, a new world reveals itself to him. His astral body, if he has not yet become clairvoyant, has no organs, hence during the night he cannot be aware of anything. It is easy to imagine that during sleep he may be without senses. There are blind people and also people in whom other senses are lacking. No world is present for one who is unable to use his senses. Hence, in the morning, when a man can again make use of his physical senses, he becomes aware of the world around him. But at death it is different. Through the whole of life the etheric body and the physical body remain connected with each other; at death, the etheric body, for the first time as a rule, abandons the physical body. The moment of death is therefore described by those who have knowledge of the subject as the moment when a retrospect of the whole past life passes like a panorama before the human being. What is the explanation of this? It is because the etheric body is the bearer of memory and this memory now becomes free. As long as the etheric body is in the physical body it cannot unfold all its power but only as much as the physical instrument permits. Now, however, at death the etheric body becomes free of the physical body and can unfold what has been inscribed in it during life. This panorama can also arise as the result of a shock but in that case the man concerned must not lose consciousness as he does at death. The shock may be caused by danger of death. But this is an exceptional case.

Now you may ask how long this tableau lasts. The time varies a great deal in human beings. Speaking generally, it can be said that the tableau lasts for as long as the individual concerned could stay awake during life without being overcome by sleep—twenty hours, fifty, sixty to eighty hours. The extreme limit of time during which waking consciousness can be sustained is approximately that of the duration of this panorama. The retrospect persists for as long as this. Then it fades away and a clairvoyant sees how the etheric body detaches itself at the same time—not entirely, however, and that is the important point. The individual concerned takes with him an essence, an extract of his etheric body and with it the fruits of his last life. He ascends, retaining the essence of his etheric body, his astral body and his ego until he also lays aside his astral body. He has now laid aside two corpses, and then he passes into the spiritual world.

Tomorrow we shall study the life after death and the entry into the devachanic world.

Yesterday we heard about what takes place at the moment of death, how the etheric body, the astral body and ego bearer pass out of the physical body and the tableau of memory is arrayed before the soul. An intrinsic feature of this tableau is that the events present themselves simultaneously and provide a review in the form of a kind of panorama. The essential point, however, is that it is perceived as a picture. Events in physical life are connected with happiness or pain but there are no such experiences during the first few days after death. The tableau of memories is an entirely objective picture. Let us try to make this clear by means of an example. We see ourselves in a fatal, agonizing situation and follow the course it takes, but there is no experience of pain. It is like a picture at which we are looking, which, let us say, depicts martyrdom. We do not feel the pain that is involved, but merely see the event objectively. The same applies to the memory tableau after death. It appears directly the etheric body emerges, frees itself from the physical body and then dissolves in the universal cosmic ether. The extract, or essence containing the fruit of the past life, remains.

There now begins for the soul an essentially different period, the period of breaking its attachment to the physical world. The best way to think of this is to remind ourselves that for an occultist, urges and desires are realities. What is contained in the astral body is not nullified after death when the physical body has been laid aside, but all the urges and desires are present. An individual who was a bon vivant during his life does not, at death, lose his desire for tasty foods, for desire clings to the astral body and he has lost only the physical equipment of palate, tongue and so forth, by means of which his greed can be satisfied. His condition—the same applies in different circumstances—is comparable with that of someone suffering from terrible thirst without any possibility of quenching it. He suffers from these longings and from having to forego the prospect of satisfaction. The purpose of this suffering is to realize what it means to have desires that can be satisfied only through physical instruments. This condition is called kamaloka, the realm of desires, where habits are broken. It lasts for a third of the time spent by a human being between birth and death; perhaps it may be possible later on to go into the matter with greater exactitude. So if somebody dies at the age of sixty, it can be said that he spends twenty years, a third of his past life, in kamaloka. As a rule, therefore, kamaloka lasts until a man has rid himself of all the desires that still link him with the physical plane. This is one aspect of the period of kamaloka, but we will study it from still another.

What a human being experiences in the physical body is of value to him because he evolves to higher and higher stages as the result of what he achieves on earth. That is the essential point. On the other hand, between birth and death there are many inducements for individuals to create hindrances to their development, for example, everything that we do to injure our fellowmen. Every time when, at the cost of our fellowmen, we provide satisfaction for our own aims or embark for self-seeking reasons on a project that in some way affects the world, we create a hindrance to our development: Suppose we give someone a box on the ear. The physical and moral pain connected with it is a hindrance to our development. This hindrance would cling to us for all our subsequent lives in future epochs if we did not expunge it from the world. During the kamaloka period an impetus is given to a man to get rid of these hindrances to his development. During the period of kamaloka the individual concerned lives over his whole life in backward order, three times as quickly. The significant characteristic of the astral world, of kamaloka, is that things appear as mirror images; this is the confusing element for a pupil when he enters the astral world. For example, he must read the number 346 as 643; he must reverse everything when he is looking into the astral world. So it is, too, in the case of all passions.

Suppose that as the result of genuine training or of pathological conditions, someone becomes clairvoyant. To begin with he sees his own urges and passions streaming out of him; they appear to him in the form of varied shapes and figures and approach him in rays from all sides. Whoever becomes clairvoyant in the astral realm, either in a well-regulated or irregular way, immediately sees these figures, which in the form of goblins or demonic beings, rush upon him. This is a distressing experience, especially for individuals who become clairvoyant but know nothing of it. It will become less and less infrequent because we are living today in a stage of evolution when in a number of people the eyes for sight of the spiritual world are opening. This must also be said in order that those who have the experience shall not be alarmed. Spiritual science is there in order to lead human beings into the spiritual world. For many who become clairvoyant this process is fraught with much unhappiness of soul because they are ignorant of the facts and conditions. They see things in the astral world as mirror images and they see other things too in the spiritual world. In the physical world, when a hen lays an egg, you see the hen first and then the egg; astrally you see the process of the egg going back into the hen. Everything is experienced in reverse order.

Think of a man who dies at the age of sixty and then, in kamaloka, comes to the point when, at the age of forty he gave someone a box on the ear. Now, in kamaloka, he experiences everything that the other person experienced; he is literally within the body of the other. Thus, a man lives his life in backward order to his birth. But he does not experience pain only, he also experiences the happiness, the joy he has given to others. Little by little the soul discards the hindrances to its development and evolution and must be thankful to the wise guidance that makes compensation possible. Together with the will to make compensation, the soul receives something like a token, an impulse of will, to make reparation for what hinders its development, and in the coming life it is able to do this. We realize, therefore, that the objective tableau is something altogether different from the retrospective experiences in kamaloka. In kamaloka a man experiences exactly what the other person felt as the result of his behavior; he experiences the other side of his own deeds. But not only has this cross to be experienced. What has been experienced here (in physical life) as pain, is experienced in yonder world as happiness and joy—happiness and joy, therefore, as the opposite of what they were in the physical world. The purpose of kamaloka is to impart to the soul what the tableau of memory cannot impart, namely, the experiences of pain and joy in retrospect.

When kamaloka has been lived through, a kind of third corpse is discarded. The physical corpse was the first to be discarded, then the etheric corpse, which dissolves in the cosmic ether, and now the astral corpse is laid aside. This astral corpse comprises whatever from a man's astral body has not yet been purified and regulated by his ego. What was once his as the bearer of his urges and passions and has not been transformed and spiritualized by his ego, frees itself after the period of kamaloka. On his further path the human being takes with him an extract of his astral body: firstly, the sum total of all the good will impulses, and secondly, what he has transformed through his ego. Whatever urges he has ennobled into beauty, goodness and morality form the extract of his astral body. At the end of the kamaloka period the human being consists of the ego and around it he has laid, as it were, the extracts of the astral body and of the etheric body, the good impulses of will.

There now begins for a man a new condition, namely a life free from sorrow, the spiritual life of Devachan. It is encouraging when the occultist experiences these truths as realities and then finds them again in the sacred records and scripts. An example is this sentence in the New Testament: “Except ye become as little children ye cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” This is an indication of the experience of living the course of life in backward order; it is an example of a sublime moment when studying the sacred records of religion. You must understand me correctly here. An occultist does not swear by any original record or authority. The facts of the spiritual world alone are conclusive as far as he is concerned, but the value of the original records dawns upon him anew. Spiritual science is not based upon any original record or religion but upon the investigation of spiritual facts. The foundation of all spiritual science is objective investigation. Then, if the content of the original records proves to be identical, the occultist will be in a position to value them truly.

Life now begins in Devachan, in the Spiritland, the “World of the Spirit.” This spiritual world can at all times be seen; although it is actually entered for the first time at death, it is always present. Later on we shall hear about the methods by means of which it can be observed. It is difficult to describe this spiritual world because our words are coined for the physical world. Hence, it can be described only by using analogies. Here, in our terrestrial world, we have the solid earth upon which we move about, fluidity, a sphere of air and the whole permeated by warmth. You can form an idea of the Spiritland by means of analogy. A solid land can be found there, formed in a remarkable way. It is the “continental” region of Devachan, containing the archetypal forms of everything mineral. You know that where a mineral appears, a clairvoyant sees nothing in the space concerned; the space is hollowed out and round-about the mineral are the spiritual forces that appear to clairvoyant sight rather like etheric figures of light. Try to visualize a crystal. When consciousness is raised into the spiritual world, the physical substance is not the important thing; what is important are the spiritual forces visible round about it. The crystal cube presents itself to the clairvoyant in negative. The forms in our physical world form a solid soil in Devachan. There is, of course, a great deal else in Devachan. All life on earth and its distribution among the different plants, animals and humans appears to the seer as the fluid element of the spiritual world, like the sea and water systems of our earth. This flowing life in Devachan cannot, however, be satisfactorily compared with our rivers and seas but far rather with the blood that flows through the human body. This is the “oceanic” and the “fluid” region of Devachan. The solid and fluidic regions do not appear in stages but in a relationship similar to that between land and sea here on earth.

The third region is comparable with our air. This region of Devachan is formed of that of which our feelings and those of animals consist. It is the sum total of whatever is present in the astral realm. Flowing pain, flowing joy is the substantiality in Devachan that can be compared to the air on earth. Picture to yourselves a clairvoyant looking from Devachan at a battle. Watching it physically you would see soldiers, guns and so forth, but the clairvoyant would see more than the physical figures of human beings and physical weapons. He would see the passions of the fighters arrayed in opposition. From Devachan you would see what is present in the souls of those involved in the battle, how passion is hurled against passion. Like a terrible tempest raging among high mountains—that, approximately, is how such a battle would appear to a clairvoyant looking from Devachan. But loving feelings are also seen from there; they pervade the airy sphere of Devachan like a sound of wonderful sweetness. Thus we have named three regions—solid, flowing and airy—and have compared them with those of our earth.

Just as warmth pervades the three lower regions in our physical world, so does one common element pervade the three regions of Devachan that have been named. What pervades everything is the substance of our thoughts, which live there as forms and beings. What the human being experiences here in the way of thoughts is only a shadow image of the thoughts in their reality. Think of an outstretched canvas with living beings and figures behind it; on the canvas, however, you would be able to see only their images. This is exactly how the thoughts familiar to man in the physical world are related to what thoughts are in Spiritland. There they are beings with which one can associate and which pervade the whole sphere of Devachan as states of warmth. It is into this world that a man passes. During this life after death he has a definite feeling of the moment when he enters Devachan.

It must also be stated that to the extent to which the human being in kamaloka has broken away from physical connections, to that extent his consciousness lights up again. After the clear tableau of his life, a darkening of consciousness begins during postmortem existence, its intensity depending upon the strength of desire for physical life. But the more the human being breaks his attachment to physical things, the clearer does his darkened consciousness become. In Devachan a man's experiences are conscious, not dreamlike; all events are experiences in Devachan. We will speak later of how the relevant organs are formed.

A human being knows with exactitude when he enters the spiritual world. The first impression he has of Devachan is that he is seeing the form of the physical body of the previous life outside his ego, his “I.” This body is, of course, incorporated into the “continental” region of the spiritual world and belongs to the solid land of Devachan. When in physical life, you say, “I do this,” you affirm that you are living in your physical body and hence say “I” to it; not so in Devachan. You are then outside the physical body but in its form you become conscious of it when you enter Devachan and you say to it, “That art thou!” You no longer say “I” of your physical body. This is an incisive, significant event for the soul, which now realizes, “I am now no longer in the physical but in the spiritual world.” Hence you no longer speak of your physical body as “I,” but you say, “That art thou!” These words from the Vedanta philosophy, Tat twam asi, are based upon this experience. Utterances of this kind in Eastern philosophy represent facts of the spiritual world. When the Vedanta teaches the pupil to meditate on the “That art thou,” it means that already in this life, he should awaken in himself those ideas and conceptions that will arise in him when he enters Devachan. Genuine meditative formulae are actually “photographs” of facts of the spiritual world, and the Tat twam asi is the boundary sign or signal that one is about to enter the spiritual world. We learn gradually to contemplate objectively, without sympathy or antipathy, what is connected with our own physical lives, like pictures at which we gaze.

The soul's experiences in connection with the flowing life of Devachan are again different. In the physical world, life is distributed among the many individual beings. In Devachan, life manifests as a single whole. We encounter there the one all-embracing life, and perception of it is of great intensity, for in this uniform life experiences are not contained as abstractions. Just think of how everything introduced into life by the great founders of religion is in turn received by man into his astral and etheric bodies; such truths are experienced again in Devachan as a source of exaltation. What had flowed from the founders of religion into the individual incarnations—and the most valuable knowledge is seated in the etheric body—is an experience facing you in Spiritland. Everything that had streamed into the physical life is present before you in great, impressive pictures. You experience in Devachan what unites human beings and promotes harmony among them; what divides us, what is alien to us here, we bring into unison in yonder realm. The pleasures and sufferings in which we are so strongly involved here are made manifest to us there as wind and weather. We experience in pictures or images around us what we formerly experienced inwardly; it is now the airy sphere around us. What we feel personally in physical life is experienced in yonder world in connection with the totality. We only feel joy in connection with the totality of joy, pain in connection with the totality of suffering. Thus, the importance of our personal joy and suffering for the totality is made manifest. Such is the knowledge concerning joy and suffering that we acquire in the life after death. We live there with thoughts that are realities.

Now we ask how man's being is affected by this life within the whole in Devachan. Let us clarify this by means of a comparison. What enables man to have sight in the physical world? The fact that light comes to him and forms the organ for its reception. Goethe said with deliberate purpose, “The eye is formed by the light for the light.” The truth of this is confirmed by the fact that if animals go to live in dark caves, their eyes may degenerate, and other organs, for instance, the organs of touch that are essential there, develop greater sensitivity. The organ of perception is created by the relevant external element. If there were no sun there would be no eye; the light has produced the eye. Our organism is a product of the elements surrounding it; everything physical in us has been created by the surrounding world. Similarly, in Devachan the spiritual organs in man are built by the spiritual environment. During the time in Devachan, a man takes in something from the life of his environment, and from the elements around him builds for himself a kind of spirit organism. In Devachan he feels always as if he were a being in process of becoming, in whom member after member of his spirit organism is coming to birth. Now think of this. All awareness of productivity is accompanied by a feeling of blessedness, as indeed is the case in physical life, too! Think of an artist, or an inventor. This growing and becoming give rise to a feeling of blessedness in a human being as he passes through Devachan, and there he creates for himself the spiritual archetype of a man. He has already often done this whenever he sojourned in Devachan after death, but every time there is built into this archetype, as something new, what the man has taken with him into Devachan as the fruit of his last life, as an extract in his etheric body.

When man entered Devachan for the first time, he had already created spiritually an archetype that then densified to become physical man. Now, when he has lived through many incarnations, he takes with him every time into Devachan the extract of the past life, and then, in accordance with it, he creates the archetype of a new man. This operation takes a long time; today we will speak of it only in general terms.

Thus, it is by no means fortuitous that the human being appears on the earth in successive incarnations and passes through Devachan ever and again. The earth reveals a different countenance to him each time and new experiences are available in external culture and through relationships of every kind. The soul does not return to the physical plane until new experiences can be offered there. I will give you in figures later on the length of time between two incarnations; it is the time needed by the human being for the creation of his new archetype. Once it is created, this archetype has the impulse every time to appear on the earth again. This archetype is, after all, the human being himself. It is not easy to describe this impulse so we will take an example. Someone has a particular thought and also the urge to give expression to it. The impulse has led the thought to take on physical form.

The power to shape and elaborate the archetype that has been created by himself in Devachan does not yet lie within the power of human will. In the present cycle of life, man cannot yet direct his reincarnations himself; he needs lofty spiritual beings to guide him to the parents who are able to provide the physical body that is suitable for the archetype. These beings direct him to the people and the race best suited to the archetype. If the time for the reincarnation has come, man surrounds himself first of all, in keeping with the archetype created in Devachan, with astral substance. This actually forms itself and shoots in, as it were. The process of being directed by higher beings to the parental pair now begins. Because the physical body to be provided by the parents can be only approximately suitable for the astral body and ego, these higher beings meanwhile incorporate into the individual concerned the etheric body through which the best possible adjustment is achieved between the earthly and what comes from the spiritual world. Of this incorporation of the etheric body and of the physical birth we will speak tomorrow, but we now realize today that at birth, when the human being appears again on the earth, the course of the process is the exact opposite of what takes place after death. At birth the astral body is incorporated, then the etheric body and finally the physical body, whereas at death the human being first lays aside the physical body, then the etheric body and lastly the astral body.

When a human being receives the etheric body, something happens to him analogous to what takes place when he goes through the gate of death. Then he had a backward view of his past life, now he has a preview, a prophetic view of the life he is about to begin. This is of great importance for him. It takes place at the moment when the etheric body is being incorporated. The moment then vanishes from his memory. He does not see particular details but a picture of the life's possibilities. This preview can be disastrous for him only to the extent to which he is shocked by it, which means that he struggles against entering into the physical body. If the entry is as it should be, the etheric body and the physical body harmonize; in cases where there is a shock they do not. The etheric body then does not pass in its entirety into the physical body, but especially around the head projects outwards. It cannot then mould the organs of intelligence properly. Some cases of idiocy are due to this, but by no means all, emphatically not all.

Physical life becomes intelligible through the spiritual life behind it. This recognition will help us to dedicate our knowledge to the service of altruistic life.

Some explanation must now be given of how the conditions prevailing in our physical world are related to the spiritual world through which man passes between death and a new birth. For anyone who concerns himself with the truths of spiritual science it is self-evident that every happening in the physical world is an expression of spiritual influences, facts and beings. The foundations of all physical happenings are therefore to be sought in the spiritual world, in Devachan. You may now ask if, inversely, our physical world produces effects in the spiritual world. Yes, that is the case, and the best way to understand these relationships will be to study the life of a human being. Threads from soul to soul are woven here in the physical world as the result of the manifold circumstances of existence. Bonds of friendship, of love, and so on, are firmly knit, and every contact made between one human being and another has significance and reality not only for this physical world but also for the spiritual world. Indeed, it may be said that the more spiritual the relationships here have been, the more significant they are for the world of Devachan. When the individual dies, everything that is physical in these relationships of love and friendship falls away from them and only what was of the nature of soul and spirit remains. The relationship between mother and child is an example. To begin with, this relationship is founded upon nature; it becomes more spiritual as time goes on, until finally the original, natural circumstances simply provide an opportunity for a bond to be woven between soul and soul. When the human being dies, the factors provided by nature are eliminated but the bond that has been woven remains. If you try to picture the whole human race on the earth and all the bonds of friendship and of love that have been woven, you must picture these relationships as a great network or web, which is, moreover, actually present in Devachan. When a clairvoyant gazes at the earth from the standpoint of Devachan, he perceives this web of spiritual relationships that a human being finds again when he passes into Devachan after death. He is involved in all the spiritual relationships he himself has woven.

This is also the answer to the question: In Devachan do we see again those who were dear to us? Yes, we see them again, freed moreover from all the obstacles of space and time that here on earth lie like veils over these relationships of the soul. In Devachan, souls confront each other directly. The relationship of soul to soul is far more intimate and inward than it is in the physical world. There can never be any doubt in Devachan about one soul recognizing the other again, even when one of them passes into Devachan before the other. Recognition of loved ones is not particularly difficult there, for each soul bears his inner, spiritual reality inscribed as it were upon his spiritual countenence. He himself proclaims his name, indeed, in a much truer form than is possible here, as the basic tone, which, as it is said in occultism, he represents in the spiritual world. An absolutely undisturbed communion is actually possible only when both souls are in Devachan. Nevertheless, the disembodied soul does not lose all consciousness of the one who is still on earth; he can actually follow the latter's actions. The soul who is first in Devachan is naturally unable to see physical colors and forms belonging to the earth because in that spiritual realm he has no physical organs. But everything in the physical world has its spiritual counterpart in Devachan and that is what is perceived by the soul already there. Every movement of the hand in the physical world, because it is preceded by an impulse of will that is either conscious or unconscious, every change in the physical human being, has a spiritual counterpart that can be perceived in Devachan by the soul whose death preceded that of the other human being concerned. Existence in Devachan is not a kind of dreaming or sleeping but in all respects a conscious life. It is in Devachan that a human being develops the predispositions and impulses that enable the bond with those whom he loved to remain closer, in order that in a later incarnation he will find them again on earth. In many respects the purpose of incarnation on earth is to forge bonds of ever greater intimacy. Companionship in Devachan is, to say the least, as intimate as any life here on earth. Fellow feeling in Devachan is much more alert, much more intimate than it is on earth; one experiences another's pain there as one's own. On earth, greater or less personal prosperity is possible at the cost of others but in Devachan that is out of the question. There, the misfortune caused by someone to another human being in order to better himself, would reverberate upon him; nobody could prosper at the expense of another. Adjustment starts from Devachan. It is from there that the impulse is brought to make brotherliness a reality on the earth. A law that is a matter of course in Devachan is a task that has to be fulfilled on earth.

A great deal more could be said about the connection between the spiritual world and the earth. You can now think exhaustively about this and be able to answer many questions yourselves about meeting and being together in Devachan with those we love.

It was said yesterday that when the human being in Devachan has developed his spiritual archetype, the impulse comes to him to descend again to the physical plane. To express it more or less abstractly, it is rather as if a thought matures and you feel an urge to turn it into deed. What is it that actually induces the soul to descend again into the physical world, that gives it the definite impulse to do this? During the kamaloka period, when the soul gradually rids itself of the urge to cling to physical life, it is continually receiving, in the experience it undergoes, impulses that kindle the will to sweep away hindrances to evolution. The soul itself experiences the pain and harm it has caused to others. In thus experiencing the pain of the other being, there arises in the soul the temporarily ineradicable impulse that reparation must he made for this. Thus, step by step the soul takes with it from kamaloka into Devachan the impulse to rectify its faults. In the higher worlds there is even more possibility of everything remaining preserved in the suitable way. When, after the period of kamaloka, the human being lays aside his astral body as a third corpse, everything upon which the ego has not yet worked separates from him. But in the astral world there remains behind something like a web, consisting of whatever hindrances to evolution he has himself brought into the world. The human being himself paves his path through the world with all the forms that are evidence that he has caused injury of some kind to others. If the human being concerned has completed the development of his archetype in Devachan and has woven into it everything that came with him from the last incarnation as the extract of his etheric body, a kind of fecundation now takes place. The archetype is permeated by the web of its own unrequited deeds. Thus, the first thing that happens to the soul after it has reached maturity in Devachan is that it is permeated with what we call karma, and this gives it the impulse to descend again to the earth in order to make compensation for as much as possible of the harm previously caused. At the end of the period in Devachan the soul is permeated with the consequences of its own deeds. Not until then is there complete readiness for the descent into a new existence on earth.

Everywhere in the astral world a clairvoyant sees souls who want to incarnate. Conditions of space and time in the astral world are of course different from those in the physical world. Such a soul can move with tremendous rapidity in the astral world and is impelled by certain forces to the locality where a physical and an etheric body befitting this soul are produced. Distance such as that between Budapest and New York plays no part whatever. Time factors come into consideration only insofar as the earthly possibilities of the most favorable conditions for incarnation can be achieved. From the earth there comes to this soul, which has the form of a bell, widening from above downwards as it flies through astral space, the physical element produced by the line of heredity.

We must now speak briefly of what draws the soul down to the earth and what it is that will incarnate. You know that procreation is connected with certain impulses of feeling, impulses of love, sympathy born of love. The process of procreation is preceded by “sympathy born of love,” which is perceived by a clairvoyant as a play, a surging hither and thither of astral forces, of astral streams, between the man and the woman. Something is alive there that is not present if the human being is alone; the companionship between the souls themselves is expressed in the play of the astral streams. But of course every process of love is individual and issues from a specific individuality. Now, before earthly fertilization, before the physical act of love, there is reflected in this play of astral forces, the individuality, the being who is coming down again to the earth. That is the essential reality in the procreative act. So one can say that before physical fertilization, what is descending from the spiritual world is already beginning to be active. The spiritual world is also instrumental in bringing about the meeting of the man and woman. A wonderfully intimate play of forces from the spiritual world is taking place here. The being who is descending is, generally speaking, connected from the beginning with the product of fertilization. It is emphatically not the case that an individuality connects with it only after a certain time. From the moment of conception this individuality is in touch with the outcome of physical procreation. There are exceptions, of course, there, too. During the first days after conception, this spiritual individuality who is descending does not yet actually affect the development of the physical human being, but it is close by, as it were, is already in contact with the developing embryo. The actual attachment takes place from about the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first days after conception; what is descending from a higher world is then already working together with the being who is in process of coming into existence. Thus the delicate, organic texture that is necessary if the human individuality is to use the physical body as an instrument, is prepared from the beginning in accordance with the earlier faculties. That the human being is an integrated unity originates from the fact that the smallest organ is in keeping with the organism as a whole, that is to say, even the smallest unit must be such that the whole structure is able to ensure that from the eighteenth to the twenty-first day after conception, the ego can participate in the development of the physical and etheric bodies.

Now to what extent have the female and male elements influence upon the development of the being who is coming into existence? If you study what occultly and spiritually underlies the physical creation, a great deal will become intelligible to you; naturally only the essentials can be touched upon here. We shall hear presently that in earlier times, before the separation of the sexes, procreation took place without participation by the male. If it were still the same today, what would happen? If the female element alone were to participate in the process of human procreation, to what extent would it be involved? If the female element alone were to operate, the further evolution would result in the child resembling the forefathers to the highest possible extent. Beings coming into existence would all be completely homogeneous. The principle of generality, homogeneity, originates from the female element. Only through the separation of the sexes has it become possible for human individuality to develop, for it is due to the influence of the male that there are differences between the successor and his forefathers. The male element provides individuality.

Hence, not until bi-sexuality had been established on the earth were successive embodiments or reincarnations possible. Not until then was man able to embody on the earth the product of earlier existence. That there is harmony between what is executed below on the earth and the individual entity who must evolve and be enriched from incarnation to incarnation, is due to the fact that the male element and the female element work together. The human ego would no longer find a suitable body today if the principle of the “universal human” were not modified by the activity of the male element, that is to say, if the universal type were not individualized. It is essentially the etheric body that is worked upon by the female element. In the etheric body, where the permanent tendencies are rooted, the driving force of the female element is at work. The principle of generality, of the generic., is anchored in the etheric body. In the etheric body of the woman there is still present today the counterpart of what exists outwardly as the folk soul, the race spirit. Folk soul and race spirit are identical.

If we now bear in mind the spiritual reality underlying conception, we must say that conception in itself is nothing else than a kind of deadening of the living forces of the etheric body. Death, at conception, is already woven into the human body. It is a happening that hardens, as it were, and deadens the etheric body, which otherwise would multiply ad infinitum. The etheric body, which originates from the female principle and would otherwise produce copies only, is densified as a result of the male influence and thereby becomes the producer of the new human individuality. Propagation consists in the production of a copy of the etheric body of the woman; through being hardened, in a certain respect killed, it is at the same time individualized. In the deadened etheric body there lies hidden the formative force that brings forth the new human being. Thus do conception and propagation amalgamate. Thus we see that two conceptions take place: below, the physical, human conception, and above, the conception of the archetype as the result of its own karma. We said that from the eighteenth to the twenty-first day after conception onwards the ego is already working on the embryo; but not until much later, after six months, do other forces also work on the embryo, forces that determine the karma of the human being. This can be expressed by saying that the web woven out of karma there takes hold; gradually these forces come into play. Now exceptions occur here, too, so that later on an exchange of the ego may take place. We will speak of that later. The ego is the first factor to intervene for the purpose of development.

If we want to have an approximate picture of what exists in the spiritual world and is about to descend, we must say that it is the individual who is in the process of incarnating who brings together those who love one another. The archetype wishing to incarnate has drawn to itself the astral substance that now has an effect upon the passion, the feeling of love. The astral passion surging hither and thither on the earth below, mirrors the astral substances of the descending entity. So the astral substance coming from above is encountered by the astral feeling of those who love each other, which is itself influenced by the substance of the entity descending to incarnation. When we think through this thought to its conclusion, we must say that the reincarnating individual definitely participates in the choice of his parents. According to who and what he is, he is impelled to the parental pair concerned. It is often glibly stated that if the choosing of parents were accepted as a fact, the feeling of finding a new life in one's children would be lost and that the love based upon having transmitted one's own nature to them would thereby be lessened. This is a groundless fear, for maternal and paternal love assume a higher and more beautiful meaning when we realize that in a certain sense the child loves the parents even before conception and is thereby impelled to them. The parents' love is therefore the answer to the child's love, it is the responsive love. We have thus an explanation of parental love as the reproduction of the child's love that precedes the physical birth.

It has already been said that higher beings participate in the embodiment of the new human being. You will grasp what this means if you realize that there is never a perfect correspondence between what is coming down from above to embodiment and the sheaths that this entity acquires down below. A perfect correspondence between the higher and the lower cannot take place until man has reached the goal of his evolution, when he has attained spirit man. When he has transformed the physical body into spirit man, the etheric body into life spirit, and the astral body into spirit self, man stands at the point in evolution where, with a will that is completely free, he himself chooses his final incarnation. Before this point, full accordance is not possible. As he is today, man has transformed only part of his astral, etheric and physical bodies, and of this part alone is he master. But what he has not yet transformed must be integrated into him from outside by other beings. Two different categories of beings participate in this process, those who integrate the etheric body into him and those who lead him to the parents. At the present stage of his evolution, man could not himself make the etheric body an integral member of his constitution. It is through the forces contained in the etheric body that the human being has the pre-vision spoken of in the lecture yesterday.

When the human being already has the etheric body and the astral body, and the physical body is added, the moment comes when the pre-vision must disappear; the etheric body must blend with the physical body. The etheric body is, of course, not only the bearer of memory but of everything to do with time, that is, remembrance and foresight. But when the etheric body passes into the physical body it becomes subject to the laws of physical existence and these laws extinguish its power in a certain respect. Just as through the influence of the physical body a man can unfold his memory only to a certain degree, whereas after death, when the etheric body is again free, it presents the whole tableau of memories, so it is with the pre-vision; in the physical world, vision of the future is limited by the physical body. That is the normal course of incarnation. The shock mentioned previously is experienced by the soul as the result of an abnormal pre-vision of difficult circumstances in the future life.

We have now come to the point when the ego itself, the real man, begins to work upon what has been given him and with which he has been connected in the physical world. The forces of the various spiritual members of man that are at work in the period before birth, are first active through the corresponding members of the maternal organism. During the period just before birth, the human being is able to live only because he is enveloped on all sides by the maternal sheath. At birth the human being thrusts away this physical maternal sheath. At first, it is only the physical body that becomes free; the etheric body—the clairvoyant sees this—is still enveloped by a maternal etheric sheath and remains protected and guarded by this sheath until the time of the second dentition. It is an important point in the evolution of humanity when the maternal etheric sheath is cast off and a second birth takes place. Then, when the etheric body has cast off its maternal sheath, the etheric body as such is born, it becomes free. This is an event of great significance for the evolution of a human being. Until the change of teeth there is still the possibility of the bodily structures remaining elastic in one direction or another, of changing in certain respects. From this time onwards they will only be subject to growth. When the change of teeth takes place, the development of the bodily forms has, in essentials, been completed. It is important that this should be known. Hence, everything that from outside is to become a formative influence on the physical body, to be a permanent quality of it, must be thoroughly taken into consideration and carefully formulated until the time of the change of teeth. But now, every external factor—light and color, for example—that has an effect upon the human being, has a formative effect upon his finer members and organs. All external factors have an essentially formative effect until the seventh year of life. Hence, it is not a matter of indifference what color, what environment the child has around it, and what he is allowed to do. If you were never to use your hands, they would atrophy. The same applies to all organs; the more delicate ones also develop through activity. The effect of red, for example, upon the finer organs in the hurnan being, is different from the effect of blue. Thus the effect differs according to the color that is around the child. While there is activity, the organs develop. The eye sees by habit, certainly, but what it sees has an effect upon the whole of man's nature. For the child's development it is not a matter of indifference whether the eye is looking at red or blue. It is here that spiritual science, in a time by no means far distant, will prove to be eminently practical. Why do we put spiritual science into practice? We do this out of love for man, because it equips us even in this sphere of activity to play a useful part in such subtle matters.

At the seventh year of life, then, the etheric body becomes free. It is the bearer of memories. In regard to a child's memory, the most important thing of all is that before the seventh year of life it shall not be developed by current pedagogical methods. Only from the seventh year onwards has the time come when a true art of education should influence the training of the memory. It is often argued that nature sees to it that the child uses memory long before the age of seven. That is true, but it is the preliminary work that is accompanied by nature. The eyes of a child have been made ready by nature before birth in the mother's body, but what would happen if you were to allow the sunlight to work upon the eye of the embryo? Precisely in order that later on the sunlight can have the right effect upon the eye, the preliminary work upon it must be done by nature, before birth. The same applies to the other organs before physical birth. Nature produces them in advance but they are protected by the outer covering of the maternal sheath. So up to the seventh year of life, the child's memory should be worked upon by nature in order that then, from the seventh year onwards, it can be further developed in the right way. How, from then onwards, ought one to work on the child's memory? Just in the way that nature works until the child's physical birth.

The human being bears a maternal astral sheath around him until puberty in his fourteenth or fifteenth year. Then this sheath is cast aside and the astral body becomes free; a third birth, so to speak, takes place. The astral body is the bearer of the faculty of human judgment, of discrimination. The opinion that the child ought to develop the faculty of independent judgment at as early an age as possible, should be abandoned. From the seventh to the fourteenth year it is essential to amass a rich store of memories for the purposes of life, in order that when the astral body is born, as ripe and rich a content of soul as possible shall be produced. Only then should the power of judgment begin to be exercised. The earlier method used in schools which let the “one times one” be learned by heart, that is, 1 x 1 = 1, and so on, being a matter of actual memorizing, is decidedly preferable to the abstract method at present in vogue of demonstrating the “one times one” with red and white beads on the abacus. This method is decidedly harmful. The same principle applies here as in the case of the young child; he understands speech a long time before he is able to speak himself. He should therefore not be encouraged to excercise judgment until he has gathered a good store of memories for the etheric body, until he has developed certain lasting inclinations and habits.

It is important to develop the life of feeling. Gratitude, reverence and holy awe are feelings that in later life come to expression as the power of blessing, as outstreaming human love. The strongest impulses are given to the etheric body through religious experiences, through the feeling of being attached to the divine-spiritual, to the cosmic All. The faculty of abstract judgment should first be developed about the time when what flows from the etheric body has been made by the human being so pliable and flexible that the danger of forming the habit of abstract thinking lacking in piety is averted. The more the knowledge conveyed to the child is illustrated with imagery and symbols, the better. The world of feeling develops through being made acquainted with allegories and symbols, especially through the narration of the history of representative men and through intense absorption in the mysteries and beauties of nature.

How a child's questions are answered is of great importance; for example, as explanation of the birth of a human being, of death and birth, the butterfly coming into existence out of the chrysalis. This is a picture of man's soul nature emerging from the physical body. But naturally, when we tell this to the child, we must believe it ourselves, for otherwise the child will not believe it either. Facts that confirm the truth of this imagery are to be found in nature everywhere. The occultist knows that the imagery of the butterfly and the chrysalis can serve as a symbol of a process at a much higher level. We must learn to believe again in what only an abstract philosophy will stigmatize as saga and fairy tale. The fairy tale of the stork, also songs such as, “Fly, beetle, fly,” can be ingeniously interpreted. The fairy tale of the stork was not invented in days of yore in order to tell children an untruth, but it was devised by one who knew that at birth something comes down from the spiritual world. In future time it may well be declared that it is a lie that in the past there were people who were expected to believe that at the birth of a new human being the only process that takes place is the physical connection of man and woman. This is a fairy tale, the fairy tale of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “We ourselves know better,” that is what will be said in the future. It is to be hoped that those who come after us will understand and be more lenient with our weaknesses than we are with those of our predecessors!

The symbol is the best means for working on the astral body. Ideation, mental pictures, should he cultivated until the time comes for the training of the liberated astral body, and only then should the power of judgment be developed. Why is it that so many human beings of the present age are, sad to say, crippled in their life of soul? Why is this? Because they have to say “Yes” and “No” to things at much too early an age. In the period until puberty they should learn to revere the great prototypes, the great processes in nature; only between the fourteenth and twenty-first years should the power of judgment come to maturity. Fewer voluble authors would then be let loose upon humanity. The outcome of premature forming of judgment in immature, though literary-minded men, is the shallow materialism of our present age. This veiled materialism is far more sinister than the scientific kind. An opinion has weight only when it is supported by what the soul has genuinely experienced. Human beings must learn how to form judgments; opinions are so deeply at variance because they have been formed at far too early an age. It is not until the twenty-first year that the ego is born and only from then onwards can there be any question of the individual being able to judge the world correctly, because it is only now that he confronts the world as a truly independent being.

Further, from about the twenty-first to the twenty-eighth year the development of what is called sentient soul takes place, then the mind soul and the consciousness (or spiritual) soul in periods each of seven years duration. Hence it is an occult law that no individual before his thirty-fifth year is in the position of being capable of imparting or attaining anything in the field of occultism. The thirty-fifth year is particularly important. Let me remind you of Dante, of his vision of the spiritual world; if you can calculate it you will find that he had the vision in his thirty-fifth year.

Where occult tradition survived it was known that such cycles also occur in the lives of individuals. It was known how the spiritual forces of the human being who is descending, work, where they take hold and how long they need for their proper development. It was known that all life is one great whole and that community in human society must be formed on the basis of this insight. Theosophy should teach us that wisdom must pass into deed, into social deed and into the daily round of life. The value of theosophy is that the greater it is, the less it remains abstract wisdom and the more forcibly it streams through the soul into the dexterity of the hands. Manual skill is then a kind of physical expression of the spirit of the world, a material expression of the spiritual.

In continuation of the lecture yesterday concerning man's evolution, we will go back in thought today to epochs in the remote past and consider matters relating to them. Before speaking of the fact of reincarnation and discussing questions of human destiny, however, we will pass in review lengthy periods in ancient epochs of the evolution of humanity.

Man of the present age confronts us as an assemblage of physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego—the bearer of the ego, which means complete independence. Neither the ego nor the astral body are the most perfect members of man's being by reason of being more spiritual; the physical body, a structure consisting of the most wonderful components, is the most perfect member. What a truly magnificent structure it is, this physical body of man! The astral body is admittedly more inherently spiritual but it is less perfect; it is the bearer of joy and pain of urges, desires and passions. Why is the physical body the more perfect? Think of man's physical heart. It is a marvellous structure, holding its ground all through life against attacks! The same applies to all the other organs of the physical body. Wisdom itself is articulate in them. How does the astral body behave toward the heart? Certainly not always wisely! Because of its longings, the astral body needs to have the means for enjoyment and it continually maltreats the physical body, continually launches attacks upon the physical heart, which offers resistance. Why? Because the process of building the physical body has occupied a far longer period in the past than have the other bodies. The physical body is the oldest member of man's being, hence also the most perfect. A host of more advanced beings have already worked on it. Everything physical and material has evolved from spirit, has developed into its present form. The very first beginning of the human being in the physical world was the establishment of his physical body. At that time there were still no rudiments in the physical world of the etheric body, none of the astral body nor of the ego-bearer.

Everything in the universe is subject to the process of evolution, not only man but also a planet such as our earth. Our earth, like man, has already existed in other planetary embodiments, the first of which we call Saturn, the second, Old Sun, and the third, Old Moon. We must not think here of the present moon, which is only residue, dross or slag of the Old Moon.

We will now hear why our moon has since olden time been called “moon.” Here it must be remembered that the giving of names by the old occultists was by no means fortuitous but of deep significance. The name given to a thing or a being was always organically linked with what each was to express. The preceding planetary embodiment of our earth was the Old Moon; the still earlier embodiment was the Old Sun, not the present sun, which is like a remembrance of that ancient Sun. Then we come to that cosmic body to which it is now possible to look back with occult sight; this cosmic body is Saturn, Old Saturn, of which we have already spoken.

I will now speak briefly of the evolution of this ancient Saturn. To begin with, we must be clear in our minds about the character of the basic elements of our outer world, according to occultists. Ancient occultism distinguished the four elements of earth, water, air, fire or warmth. For a modern physicist this no longer has meaning; what modern science calls an element does not coincide with what the occultist means by the word. The modern expression “aggregate condition” means roughly the same as “element.” Everything that is solid in present temperatures on the earth is called by the occultist, “earthy” or “solid”; a quartz crystal, for example, in conditions of present-day temperatures, is “earth” for the occultist. Everything fluid, also fluid metals and so on, is “water” for him; everything aeriform is “air.” What the modern physicists regards as a state of the three “aggressive assemblages,” namely, fire, is for the occultist, the fourth element. I well know that modern science considers it a veritable abomination when fire is regarded not merely as a condition but as something on a par with earth, water or air. On Old Saturn you would have found no earth, water or air; warmth or fire alone was in existence. If at that time—perhaps by putting a chair in cosmic space—you had been able to observe the Saturn evolution with clairvoyant sight, perception of it could only have been through the sense of warmth; at first, this was purely warmth of soul, inner warmth. With the exception of man, no single one of the beings on the earth today was present. There was no mineral, plant or animal kingdom. Under the conditions prevailing today, man needs the three kingdoms for his organic structure; in that period of ancient Saturn it was not so. The whole human being was a formation consisting only of warmth. Otherwise, nothing whatever of man was in existence. Try to think away from man as he is today everything physically perceptible, even the in-haled air, and imagine that he consists only and entirely of the warmth of the blood circulating in him, thus forming a picture of the blood system as it is today. Such was the constitution of all human beings on Saturn. For the occultist, a celestial body is only an assemblage of spiritual beings. The earth, too, is an assemblage of beings belonging to the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms.

The consciousness of the men of ancient Saturn was also evolving. It was dull but comprehensive. Only on the earth has the clear day consciousness of the present time become possible. The consciousness of human beings on Saturn was dull and in a curious state. Man, as you know, is today unconscious during sleep. Now think of the plant, simply the physical plant without the beings concealed behind it. There you have a demonstration of a still deeper state, namely, dreamless sleep. The plant is a being in a condition of deep sleep. Now think of a state of sleep that is still deeper, still dimmer. this is the state of deep trance—the Saturn consciousness. I will describe it to you by means of an example of conditions that are abnormal in the modern age, occurring in a human being whose consciousness remained backward. A girl who up to her eighteenth year was totally unaccustomed to any form of alcoholic beverage was tempted by certain circumstances to drink rapidly a number of glassfuls of red wine. On account of certain organic conditions this made such an impression that she fell into a moribund state. A pencil was put in her hand and she began to make all kinds of drawings to which she added names. She had no consciousness whatever of what she was doing. She was like a machine, without life or consciousness. If you were to compare what this girl wrote down with what is said in theosophical books about planets, the structure of the universe today, and so on, you would find that what she wrote is, it is true, a strange cosmology but, for all that, one that in certain respects tallies with occult cosmology. The girl was in a state of consciousness deeper than that of ordinary sleep. In such a state the individual concerned is able in his dull consciousness to move far, far over the earth and to give expression to cosmic facts. The occultist knows that such a consciousness, dull and comprehensive, without the pertinent ego, is present in a physical stone, and that if the stone could be articulate it would be able to do what the girl did. This consciousness, although dull, embraces vast regions. Such was the consciousness of men on ancient Saturn.

Saturn itself was an entity unconscious of its own identity, or better said, was possessed of a low form of consciousness to be described by saying that it bore within it a mirror-image of the whole cosmos and would have been capable of delineating it. To understand what this implies we must consider other matters. While man was finding on Saturn the sphere where the first rudiments for his physical body could take shape, Saturn was at the same time the stage at which other beings also were able to evolve, beings whose rank today is much higher than that of man. We will clarify this by quoting an utterance once made by an Egyptian sage to a Greek. He said, “You Greeks remain forever big children. You know nothing about the greatest secret of the Mysteries, namely, that gods were once men.” It is no longer necessary for these beings to enter into physical existence.

On ancient Saturn, then, man was a kind of mineral; his consciousness was also on a par with that of the mineral. But beings who today are at a stage far higher than that of men once lived in human bodies. These are the Archai, First Beginnings, or Spirits of Personality. They passed through their “human” epoch on Old Saturn.¹ They were not men as we are today but merely made use of the then “physical” body in order to experience their human epoch, to acquire ego consciousness. These sublime beings therefore acquired ego consciousness on Saturn and used the human body as a vehicle deputizing as their bodily dwelling place. Certain beings permeated the human physical body together with their distinctive characteristics and for these, man today owes twofold thanks. First, the faculty that alone enables an ego-bearer to find a footing in him; it was these Spirits of Personality who endowed the human body at that time with the form proceeding from their own nature. But second, they also made it possible for man to develop selfishness. Through the influence of the Spirits of Personality, man's body was endowed with the germinal capacity to develop as a free personality but at the same time to cultivate selfishness, egoism. If I wanted to describe all the pertinent details of this process I should need not one lecture or one lecture course but years. Hence, we can study steps or stages only and we will consider seven such stages in the Saturn evolution, each differing from the others.

At the first stage you must picture to yourselves that as yet no physical warmth was present but that this was only in preparation. All that was present was purely of the nature of soul; soul warmth was present, and not until the midpoint of Saturn evolution was the physical human body in existence, composed of physical warmth substance. At the end of the Saturn evolution this human body of warmth dissolves. There are seven stages: three preliminary stages, a stage of physical warmth and three descending stages; each of these seven stages has again seven sub-divisions of which it is better not to speak at this point and to which we will return in the course of studying the evolution of the earth. In modern theosophical literature these stages are called rounds and globes.

But now we will ask, “Whence came the substance out of which the human body was formed?” Sublime spiritual beings poured forth their own being and let it flow down as substance for the physical body of man. These beings were the Spirits of Will or the Thrones. They made the sacrifice of allowing the outpouring of their own being to take place. On Saturn, then, we find the Spirits of Will or the Thrones who give the substance for the human body, then the Spirits of Personality who inhabit Saturn during their human epoch and man himself as a physical germinating entity. The Saturn evolution takes its course in such a way that we must picture the beginning, the zenith and the ebb. Thereafter, the whole planet passes through a pralaya. We can think of the process in connection with the plant. The seed is laid in the earth, decays and carries over the form into a new existence. Just as between the first and the second plant there is an intermediate condition, a hidden condition, so is it in the case of the planet. This condition is called the “sleep of worlds.”

After this sleep of worlds, when Saturn appeared again but metamorphosed, it was the Old Sun that now came into existence. The difference between Saturn and Sun is that the warmth substance of Saturn had densified to a gaseous state. Old Sun retained the warmth but evolved something as well, namely, air, so that on the Old Sun there was now warmth and air, and moreover light. Saturn consisted of dark warmth; the second planet, Old Sun, consisted of light—burning gas—warmth ether and air. Through Saturn there came into existence once and forever the foundation for the existence of the seed of the physical body of man. Now, on Old Sun, something new is added. The etheric body is poured into this substance by spiritual beings. This is the second planetary condition in which man has achieved the status of a plant. There is life in him. Through the integration of the etheric body, however, the physical body of man has also changed. It does not retain the egg-form of the Saturn period but is membered in itself. It is now a vibrant warmth egg in which forms of light gleam and fade away and in which there are indentures. The etheric body now works upon and elaborates the physical body.

Whereas on Saturn the Thrones poured out from them-selves the substance of the physical body, it is now other beings who pour out substance as their great sacrifice. These beings are the Spirits of Wisdom, Dominions or Kyriotetes. The more difficult sacrifice had been made by the Thrones. Had they not created the foundation, the Spirits of Wisdom could not have begun their work.

Again there were beings who passed through their “human” epoch on the Sun, namely, the Archangels or Fire Spirits—Archangeloi in Christian esotericism. Acting as substitutes they indwelt the body of man and in this way developed their ego consciousness.

Something must here be mentioned that it is important to remember. If, after pralaya, Saturn had emerged directly as Sun, the bodies of men could not have received the etheric body into themselves. On the new planet, Old Sun, there had first to be a brief recapitulation of Saturn, during which the beings concerned were obliged to assume their old form once again.

What other kind of beings were to be found on Old Sun? Certain Spirits of Personality had not reached their human stage on Saturn, had not succeeded in acquiring their ego consciousness on Saturn. They were obliged to make up for this on Old Sun and were therefore still at the same stage as their companions on Saturn. Hence, on Old Sun they were obliged to live as it were in a husk, in a mineral body that was not permeated by an etheric body. On Old Sun, therefore, a structure consisting only of physical body came into existence. Thus, structures of a lower grade existed side by side with those that consisted of physical body and etheric body, and these were the predecessors of our present animals. On Old Sun, therefore, there were two kingdoms: a human kingdom and the kingdom of the beings who, on Old Sun, were at the stage of the Saturn evolution. They constitute our present animal kingdom. On Old Sun there were thus two preliminary kingdoms, a human kingdom and an animal kingdom. The successors of the latter are the present higher animals.

Old Sun now passes again into a kind of “cosmic night” and is born again in a third metamorphosis as Old Moon, which is able, at the beginning, to recapitulate the earlier stages to which fluid or watery substance is now added. When the separation of the Sun takes place, warmth and light go with it; sublime beings also go forth together with the finer essences. What has become fluid or “watery” goes forth as Moon, condenses further and becomes a kind of secondary planet. At that time on Old Moon, therefore, there were warmth, light and water. Man has his etheric or light body as on Old Sun; the new element that is added on Old Moon is what may be called tone or sound. In order to realize more clearly what this means I will give an illustration. Think of a metal plate covered with powder, across the edge of which a violin bow is drawn. The powder shapes itself into definite forms—the sound figures of the physicist. What we today recognize as sound or tone is the physical configuration of the sound. The “water” on the Old Moon was permeated with sound and thereby stirred into regular movement. Inner experience is thereby made possible in the physical bodies of beings on Old Moon; organs take shape, for example, the liver, but it passes away again. The process is one of the forming and disappearance of organs, an experience of figures and rhythms. The bodies present are thus made ready to receive astral substance into themselves. The impact of the primeval tone in the watery substance is expressed in the Bible as follows: God arranged everything according to measure, number and weight. The essentially new feature of Old Moon evolution is therefore the process of inner oscillation that is forced, as it were, into the physical substance. You must think of Old Moon as being permeated by this inner oscillation, which is diversified into regular, numerical rhythms. Earlier, on Saturn, it had been warmth formations that built the human body; later, on Old Sun, it had been aeriform formations, appearing like an aerial mirage, like a Fata Morgana. On Old Moon, substance was now water, stirred into movement by inner oscillation. Organic members involved in a process of inner metamorphosis were brought into existence by this oscillation and shimmered through the human body. You must conceive of this as a transient process of coming into being and passing away again; thus, a liver or lung was formed in the human body and then dissolved. Such were the conditions on Old Moon. The Bible expresses it as follows: God once ordered everything according to number, measure and weight. The inner oscillation is here meant.

Within Old Moon there now, firstly, come into existence again the earlier structures of the human body; the physical and etheric bodies are formed again. Why? Because what first takes place on Old Moon is a repitition of the Saturn and Old Sun embodiments. Only then does the real Old Mood come into existence. Into the physical human body, which now contained the watery substance on the one hand, and on the other, as a result of the inner oscillation, was permeated by the primal tone and the etheric body, the Spirits of Movement, Powers or Dynameis pour the astral body of man. They, as the Spirits of Will on Saturn and the Spirits of Wisdom on the Sun had done, now offer up, out of their own substance, the human astral body. Thus, the development of the earth is continually progressing, and also that of man himself who is to inhabit it.

The human physical body, as you have heard, developed on Saturn. Through the three metamorphoses—Saturn, Sun, Moon—it has now reached the third stage of perfection. On Old Moon this physical body of man had come still nearer to resemble its present form. But the further development that was necessary for man's astral body would not have been possible on the earth if a severance had not taken place at a certain point of time. A basic mass of substance of the planet—the Old Moon—remained; part of it went out and surrounded the basic mass. Firstly, there was Saturn; secondly, Sun; thirdly, Moon. The best substances and beings have now separated into a basic body which, during the earth period, again separates and becomes a fixed star, higher in rank than a planet. Still another body separates and remains a planet. The sun of today was once a planet. If you were to take the present sun, the present moon and the substance of our earth with its beings, and combine them in a huge vessel, you would have Old Sun. If you were to combine earth and moon you would have Old Moon.

In the course of the evolution of humanity, our sun separated from the planet earth. With it the best substances and the best beings went out of the earth. The watery element, becoming denser and denser, accompanied the sun. The dense figures and forms are the bearers of the beings who inhabited Old Moon. Human beings now chose a separate scene of action. A fixed star, a sun, always comes into existence as the result of a planet having advanced. During this process of evolution, men were not the only beings who were present and had evolved to the stage of having as members the three bodies, physical body, etheric body and astral body. There were also other beings who had remained behind in their development.

The beings who had passed through their “human” epoch. on Old Moon were the Angels, called Angeloi in Christian esotericism and in India, Lunar Pitris. The consciousness of these beings was different from that of men today. But on Old Moon there were other beings as well. There were certain Archangeloi who had remained backward on Old Sun and were now obliged to repeat their “human” stage on Old Moon. There were also beings who had reached the stage of Spirits of Personality, (i.e., the Saturn stage of humanity) on Old Moon for the first time.

The Archangeloi who had become backward on Old Sun, produced as human bodies structures that had physical and etheric bodies only. This was a kingdom below that of man, a kingdom that continued on the earth as the animal kingdom; the beings belonging to it were the precursors of the physical bodies of the present animal world, and beings who on Old Moon had only a physical body were the precursors of the present plant kingdom, Thus, on Old Moon there was a human kingdom, an animal kingdom and a plant kingdom, on Saturn there was a human kingdom only, and on Old Sun a human kingdom and and animal kingdom. The mineral kingdom is the last of the kingdoms that have come into existence in the process of cosmic evolution. Man, the human kingdom, is the oldest kingdom in the evolutionary process; he was already there before the earth was in existence. On the earth he then receives, in addition to this three bodies, the fourth member of his being, the bearer of the ego.

• 1. For an explanation of “human” epoch, see An Outline of Occult Science, Anthroposophic Press, 1972, pp. 125–6.