The Rudolf Steiner Archive

At the beginning of the earth's development, one of the light spirits or Elohim descended from the solar realm into the earthly realm and joined with Eve, the primal mother of the living. From this union was born Cain, the first of the earth humans. Then another of the Elohim, Yahweh or Jehovah, formed the Adam; and from the union of Adam with Eve arose Abel, Cain's stepbrother. The disparity of descent between Cain and Abel (sexual and asexual descent) caused a quarrel between Cain and Abel. And Cain slew Abel. Abel had lost his connection to the spiritual world through sexual descent; Cain had lost it through the moral fall. Jehovah gave the replacement son Seth to Abel's parents. Two types of people descend from Cain and Seth. The descendants of Seth were able to see into the spiritual world in special (dream-like) states of consciousness. The descendants of Cain had lost this ability altogether. They had to work their way up through the generations by gradually developing the human powers of the earth to regain their spiritual abilities.

One of the descendants of Abel-Seth was the wise Solomon. He had inherited the gift of dream-like clairvoyance; indeed, he had inherited it to a particular degree, so that his wisdom was so widely known that it is symbolically reported of him that he sat on a throne of gold and ivory (gold and ivory are symbols of wisdom).

From the Cain race came men who, in the course of time, became more and more concerned with the upward development of human powers on earth. One of these men was Lamech, the keeper of the T-books, in which, as far as was possible for earthly powers, the original wisdom was restored, so that these books are incomprehensible to uninitiated people. Another descendant of Cain's race was Tubal-Cain, who made great advances in the working of metals, and even understood how to fashion musical instruments from them. And as a contemporary of Solomon, Hiram Abiff or Adoniram, a descendant of Cain, had reached such a level of skill in his art that it bordered directly on the vision of the higher worlds, with only a thin wall still to be broken through for him to achieve initiation.

The wise Solomon conceived the plan of a temple, the formal parts of which were to symbolize the development of mankind. Through his wisdom of dreams he was able to conceive the thoughts of this temple in every detail; but he lacked the knowledge of the earth forces for the actual construction, which could only be gained through the training of the earth forces in the Cain race. Therefore Solomon connected himself with Hiram Abiff. He now built the Temple, which was a symbolic expression of the development of mankind.

Solomon's fame had reached as far as the Queen of Sheba, Balkis. One day she went to the court of Solomon to marry him. She was shown all the glories of Solomon's court, including the mighty temple. From the ideas she had gained so far, she could not understand how a master builder who had only human powers at his disposal could have achieved something like this. She had only learned that the leaders of workers, through the possession of atavistic magical powers, were able to gather sufficient crowds of workers to erect the old, mighty buildings. She demanded to see the master builder, who seemed strange and remarkable to her. When he met her, his eye immediately made a deeply significant impression on her. Then he should show her how he leads the workers by mere human agreement. He took his hammer, climbed a hill, and at a sign with the hammer, large crowds of workers rushed to his side. The Queen of Sheba realized that human powers on earth can develop to such significance.

Soon afterward, the queen and her nurse (the nurse is symbolic of a prophetic person) were walking outside the city gates. They encountered Hiram Abiff. At the moment the two women saw the master builder, the bird Had-Had flew out of the air onto the arm of the Queen of Sheba.

The prophetic nurse interpreted this to mean that the Queen of Sheba was not destined for Solomon, but for Hiram Abiff. From that moment on, the queen thought only of how she could break off her engagement to Solomon. It is further related that now, “in her intoxication,” the engagement “ring” was pulled from the king's finger, so that the queen could now consider herself the bride destined for Hiram Abiff. (The significance of this feature of the legend is based on the fact that the Queen of Sheba is seen as the “ancient wisdom of the stars”, which until that epoch was connected with the ancient atavistic powers of the soul, symbolized in Solomon. Occult legends express this in the symbolism of female figures representing wisdom, which can marry with the male part of the soul. The time of Solomon marks the beginning of the epoch in which this wisdom is to pass over from the atavistic old powers to the newly acquired ego powers on earth. The “ring” is always the symbol for the “ego”. Solomon is still thought of as having a not fully human ego, but one that is only a reflection of the “higher ego” of the angels in the atavistic dream-clairvoyant consciousness. The “intoxication” indicates that this ego is lost again within the semi-conscious soul forces through which it was acquired. Hiram is only in possession of a real human “I”).

From this point on, King Solomon is seized by a violent jealousy against his master builder. Therefore, three treacherous companions have no difficulty in finding the ear of the king for an act by which they want to destroy Hiram Abiff. They are his opponents because they had to be rejected by him when they demanded the master's degree and the master's word, for which they are not ready.

These three treacherous companions now decide to corrupt the work of Hiram Abiff, which he is to accomplish as the crowning achievement of his work at the court of Solomon. This is the casting of the “Brazen Sea”. This is an artificial casting made from the seven basic metals (lead, copper, tin, mercury, iron, silver, gold) in such proportions that it is completely transparent. The matter was finished, except for one very last impact, which was to be made before the assembled court – also before the Queen of Sheba – and by which [it] should transform the still cloudy substance to complete clarity. Now the three treacherous journeymen mixed something wrong into the casting, so that, instead of it clearing, sparks of fire sprayed out of it. Hiram Abiff tried to calm the fire with water. This did not succeed, but the flames leapt in all directions. The assembled people scattered in all directions. But Hiram Abiff heard a voice from the flames and the glowing mass: “Plunge into the sea of fire; you are invulnerable”. He plunged into the flames and soon realized that his path was leading him to the center of the earth. Halfway there, he met his ancestor Tubalkain. The latter led him to the center of the earth, where the great ancestor Cain was, in the state he was in before the sin. Here Hiram Abiff received from Cain the explanation that the vigorous development of human powers on earth would ultimately lead to the height of initiation, and that the initiation attained in this way would have to take the place of the vision of the Abel-Seth sons in the course of the earth, which would disappear. Symbolically, the power of bestowing the Mother, which Hiram Abiff receives from Cain, is expressed by the statement that Hiram received a new hammer from Cain, with which he returned to the earth's surface, touched the Sea of Bronze, and thereby was able to make it completely transparent. (This symbolism is given by that which, in proper meditation, elevates to imagination the inner essence of human development on earth. The Iron Age can be seen as a symbol of what man would have become if the three treacherous forces in the soul had not taken hold: doubt, superstition, and the illusion of the personal self. Through these forces, the development of humanity on Earth has come to a fiery unfolding in the Lemurian period, which cannot be dampened by the watery development of the Atlantean period. Rather, such a development of the human powers on earth must take place that the original state of the soul, as it was in Cain before the fratricide, is restored. The dream-like soul powers of the children of Abel-Seth cannot prevail against the powers of the earth, but only the descendants of Cain, who have come to full real ego development.

The flower that is cut from the stem withers. Had it been left on the stem, it would have turned the forces within it to seed formation; and the life of the plant to which it belongs would have been renewed in another. - What has the cut done to the stem? — Has it not transformed one way of being into a completely different one? Has it not robbed certain forces of the possibility of forming that to which they were called according to the order of nature? — Even after it has been cut off, forces still act on the flower. But these are different from those that previously called it into existence and that would have led it to fruit formation afterwards. They are forces under whose influence it gradually decays. The flower has passed into a different realm of forces. Into the realm that can produce no growth and no reproduction, but only chemical and physical effects. With the cut in the stem, a stream of life has been interrupted. And the flower has been taken up by another stream of existence. This current destroys what the flower is destined to become. The flower belongs to one realm of existence. And only in this realm can it become what it is meant to become. It becomes something else when it is snatched from this realm and transferred to another. And then a current that is only at home in its realm is destroyed. The flower must give up its plant character. The aims of the world into which it now enters do not lie in the formation of seeds and fruits. They have nothing to do with growth and reproduction. They impose a direction on the substances of the flower that is not in the nature of the flower.

In nature, therefore, a thing can be snatched from the ends towards which it tends, and its existence can be directed in another direction, one which is not in its nature.

What can happen to a plant can happen to every being, including humans. And it can happen with all the forces that are active in a person. Only with humans is everything less simple, less clear than with the other realms of nature. And everything becomes all the more complicated the more one ascends to the spiritual powers of man. But if we are able to see simplicity in complexity, we can see that the same thing can happen to the human spirit that happens to a blossom when it loses its connection to the stem.

What lives in the spirit of man can be compared to the current that, passing through the plant, constitutes its particular essence. And man experiences this current as the content of his soul. In this soul content he finds the direction and goal of his being. It is his inner life. If he lacked this inner life, he would be like the flower cut off from the stem. He would have to succumb to currents of power that are not his in the truest sense. But the essence of man is not as clearly defined as that of a flower. It has countless gradations. And it acquires its special character from the fact that man himself works on shaping this inner life. It becomes all the more meaningful the more man works on himself.

A person who does not work on themselves lacks inner life. They become entirely what their outer nature makes of them. The impressions of the outer world shape their soul. Yes, that is precisely the breaking away of man from his spiritual roots when he abandons himself to these impressions. The inner life only begins where man really adds something of his own to what he receives from the outside.

How many speak of their inner life and mean nothing but the reflection of the outside world within them. People live busy with what everyday life brings. They learn from the demands of everyday life what they themselves do. They suffer from the events of daily life, or rejoice in them. Depending on whether one or the other is the case, they act in their actions. Yes, their whole character is probably only a reflection of the outside world. One need only recall the differences between the inhabitants of the mountains and the plains, between those of the cities and the countryside, and one will admit that man bears the imprint of the outside world. And yet this imprint arises only when his inner self cooperates. A firm boundary between what the external nature imprints on man and what he forms from within cannot be drawn. But the character traits of the human being that are formed from the inner nature of his soul stand out clearly from those that are impressed on him from outside. Just as the essence of the flower consists in its progression towards the fruit and the seed in its growth, so the essence of the human being lies in the internalization of his life. This inwardness is the ideal towards which he strives to advance. There are many stages of development on the way to this ideal. From the savage to Goethe there are many such stages. The savage can set only a small inner strength against the influences of the outer world. He is torn this way and that by the forces that affect him. Goethe, on the other hand, forms a soul content from a few external impressions that creates a higher world. One need only seriously compare the lives of the two. One will find that the savage's inner life directly reflects the effects of the external world; while Goethe draws from the depths of his soul something that fills the reflection with a content that makes it richer and more exalted than the external object it reflects. Just as plants take substances from the chemical and physical world and imprint their own essence on them, so humans take in impressions from the external world and, through the power of their soul, channel them towards higher developmental goals. Thus, the relationship between the physical and chemical realms and the plant realm can be compared to a similar relationship in the human being: between the realm of external impressions and that in which the inner power of the soul unfolds its effects. And just as the plant part can lose itself in the chemical and physical realm, so the human being can lose himself in outer life.

What is brought about by an artificial intervention in the example of the plant exists in man as the essence of his character. At earlier stages of his development, he is cut off from his inner life; at later stages, he reaches it. In this way, he gradually moves upwards into higher realms. His nature strives for these higher realms. Through this striving, he must find the goal that is inherent in his soul. The lower the stages of his development, the more alien they are to the nature of his soul. The more the goals of the corresponding realms lie in different directions than his own. Man thus finds himself more and more by developing into the higher realms.

Two realms are most clearly distinguished from each other. The realm of external nature, which forms man according to itself; and the inner, spiritual realm, which gives the formation of external nature a character that could never come from it itself. — Nature and spirit: man belongs to both. If he were all nature, he would be only the outer imprint of a human being, not a human being himself. If he were entirely spirit, he would have to have already reached the goal of his development. He stands between the two.

The individual spirit of man, his soul, is rooted in the All-Spirit. It is, in a sense, an illusion when the individual spirit sees itself as an absolutely independent being. However, this delusion is part of the nature of man on the stages of his imperfection. For the delusion would be no less great if the individual spirit, in its isolation, simply wanted to explain its essence as the All-Spirit. It would be as incorrect as if one wanted to mistake the image of the sun reflected by a concave mirror for the sun itself. The All-Spirit lives in every soul; but He lives in it in a special way. It is present in each soul in accordance with its nature. Therefore, one cannot directly recognize the All-Spirit as such. One can only live it within oneself, allow it to flow unimpeded within oneself. “I am the All-Spirit” is just as correct as it is wrong. For “I am the All-Spirit in a special way.” Only this special way in which the All-Spirit comes into being in me can I recognize. I should open my gates as widely as possible to the All-Spirit; I should prepare the places in my journey so that he may find his dwelling place in them in the freest possible way. He flows into me as widely and as universally as I offer him a dwelling place. He does not hold back; only I myself can erect obstacles for him. Man's development consists in removing these obstacles. He lives in veils; and he gradually imbues these veils with the light that he receives from the Universal Spirit. How this is to happen is determined by man's original disposition. The veils in which his soul is clothed are not at his discretion. He finds himself in them. The All-Spirit is in them. But it is not in them as man is meant to place it. First of all, there is the outer physical covering. It is subject to the laws in which the chemical and physical forces operate. This covering, taken by itself, is, in its way, absolutely perfect. There is a harmony in it as in the realm of the stars and of physical nature in general. Security and calm progress are the hallmarks of this realm. And if these formations only exist for themselves, only isolated in their realm, they only strive for the goals that are peculiar to this realm, then they live a perfect life. When we gaze up at the starry sky, we perceive the mood of the soul that streams forth from this realm when it is left to its own devices, when it is not a shell but an entity in its own right. From this primal source of world existence, the realm of the living, the organic, stands out. Beings with growth and reproduction arise within it. The laws originally active in it take on a different direction and assume different forms. Thus the structures of this realm become a shell. Their nature is determined by what they now contain within them. Their laws, which are complete within themselves, become servants of a higher lawfulness. They must adapt to this lawfulness. And this lawfulness itself can only work in such a way that it takes into account the nature of the chemical and physical. The chemical and physical is a substance with which the living works. It must achieve what it is meant to achieve according to its nature; but it can only do so if it finds the way in which the chemical and physical forces can correspond to this nature. An interaction occurs between what is called upon to arise as life forms and the chemical and physical laws. This interaction provides the basis for imperfection in world development. Imperfection could not arise in a realm unto itself. It can arise where the laws of one realm interact with those of another. For it is a matter here of a continual finding of the right way for this interaction. The variety of life forms arises from the fact that this interaction can be effected in the most diverse ways. From mushrooms to oak trees, we have different types of this interaction. And in one case more, in the other less, the outer form is dominated by the inner life formation, and is its true imprint. Where there is no harmony between the form required from within and that which the external physical laws allow, imperfection arises. It is not due to the physical and chemical laws as such that a plant malformation arises, but to the fact that the demands of the inner life do not do justice to these laws in their specificity. What constitutes the “lower nature” of a being is never imperfect in itself; imperfection arises when the “higher nature” pushes the lower nature in the wrong direction. It is not the shell that is imperfect, but the way it is used.

Just as life arises within the chemical and physical, so too does desire and repulsion arise within life, or the world of desire. And the living becomes the shell of desire just as the physical becomes the shell of the living. The laws of life become expressions of what a being finds desirable or what it wants to reject. The interaction that now comes to light will consist in pushing life in the direction of desire. The being in question will no longer merely live; rather, it will live in a way that befits its desires. A new source of imperfection arises.

The human soul is enclosed in three shells. It is in them that man is born as a thinking being. For it is only in his world of thoughts that his true inner being lies. These three shells are illuminated and permeated by this being. Each shell has its own laws; and each shell, in its own way, belongs to a particular realm.

The human being as a being of thought lives in the world of thought; this world of thought is first clothed in the shell of desire, which belongs to a special realm with its own laws; this shell of desire rests in the same way in the shell of life, and this in the physical shell. Man is not simple, but composed of a soul-core and three soul-covers: and his three soul-covers belong to three different worlds, into which he thus extends through his outer garments. And the core of the soul stands in the middle and gives meaning and character to the garments. The imperfection of man will consist in the fact that his soul cannot reconcile the demands of its essence with the laws of the shells, which are also the laws of the realms to which these shells belong. And the soul, what determines it, where do its laws come from? They are none other than the laws of the All-Spirit, only in a different form from that in which they find expression in the outer shells. The soul itself is a shell. Just as it is the core for the three outer shells, so it is itself a shell for the All-Spirit in other forms. And these forms correspond step by step to what has moved into the outer shells of the All-Spirit. Just as the master builder remains an independent person even after he has embodied his skill in the outer structure of the house, so the All-Spirit remains an independent spirit even after he has placed his essence in the three shells of the physical, the animate, and the desiring. Each of the three outer forms of the All-Spirit corresponds to an independent inner form of spirit: in order that the shell of the desiring nature might be laid around the beings, the Primordial Spirit had to develop within itself the form of the renouncing one. Desiring and renouncing belong together like warmth and cold. When warmth arises in one place, it must flow out at another, which thereby becomes colder. If beings arise that desire, their desire can only arise from a primal ground that forms renunciation in itself as its opposite. Likewise, life in the shell must correspond to its opposite in the spiritual primal ground. Life now consists of growth and reproduction, that is, in that which has life moves beyond itself. The opposite is complete inner stillness; beatitude. This is the second spiritual form of the primal ground corresponding to life. The third spiritual form corresponds to the cosmic, chemical and physical laws of the universe. These laws are spread out over space and time in an infinite variety of things. If we contrast this diversity with the unity that dominates it and finds expression in each of its forms, we are led to the unified spirit itself, which lives in the physical diversity. Spirit, bliss, and renunciation are the three forms of the primal source of things, which live externally in the three sheaths, the physical, the animate, and the desiring. The individual human soul is connected to these three basic forms of the primal spirit as if to its tribe. And just as the outer shells enclose them, so they in turn form the shell for renunciation, bliss and spirit. Thus, if the outer man extends into three outer realms, the soul extends into three spiritual realms. Man's own realm is in the middle between these six realms and together with them forms a seventh. Man's being is therefore sevenfold. And the seven realms give their laws to the fundamental parts that make up man: the physical, the living, the desiring, the thinking, the renouncing, the blissful, and the spiritual. Each of the seven realms has its own laws, through which it brings about what takes place in it. Take man's very own realm, that of thought. Thoughts combine within us according to laws that live within the world of thought. If that were not the case, the regularity of our [thought life] would have to be exactly the same as that of external things. But that is by no means the case. Otherwise, one could not speak of logical thinking. I understand a process or a thing only if I associate certain thoughts with them that make them understandable to me. If I left it to the thoughts that arise quite by chance in connection with the thing or the process, I could never arrive at a real understanding. It is an important proposition, originating in the Pythagorean school, that man differs from the animal in that he can count. By counting things, he arranges them according to aspects that are taken from the realm of thought. Things do not count themselves; and as they appear to us in mere perception, there is no immediate reason to count them. We count them because we want to summarize them according to the purposes of thought. And so it is with all the other forms in which thought deals with things. Man attributes the circular form to certain things. He cannot do so until he has explained to himself, by purely logical thinking, what a circle is. He could never gain a pure conception of the circle from the sense world. What one can learn about circles in the world of the senses are only approximate circles, imperfect circles. We recognize them as such because we have an idea of the circle from a purely ideal point of view. And so it is with all real thinking. Those who do real science always move on to ideas that are not present in their purity in the external world of the senses. They idealize. He develops something within himself that none of the senses can provide. He receives the laws for this from a world that is not the sensual one. The thoughts that we relate to external objects still point to another world. They are, to be sure, images of external things; but at the same time they are images of the laws of the spirit of these external things, which the senses cannot gain from them. In addition to the gates of the senses, we must also open the inner gates of the soul if we want to understand the essence of things. This could not be if what is called to us through the gates of the soul did not belong to the essence of things themselves. The thing that I perceive through the sense of sight is only one side of the thing; the other side is apparently absent when I merely open the eye; it hides itself from this organ. It becomes apparent when I open the inner organ of the soul. Then a thought-image enters through this. And this belongs to the external thing. It is the other side of the same thing. The thing is only complete when I familiarize myself with both sides of it. Thus, the essence of a thing is actually in the unknown source of things. And it reveals itself to me from two sides: externally through the senses, internally in the life of thought. A thing is only complete for those who, in addition to perceiving it with their senses, also reflect on it. People misunderstand the facts of the matter here if they believe that they already have the whole thing in what the senses provide and only want to allow themselves to repeat the external thing in thought. They do this because they consider everything that goes beyond external reality to be unreal, a mere figment of the imagination. They do not know that thought is an image that receives its content from two sides: from the external world, in which the external forms of things are, and from the higher spiritual world, in which the deeper meaning, the actual essence of things, lies. The world of thought lives in the middle between the three lower and the three upper realms. Things are both above and below. Everything that is below and tends more or less towards the physical, corresponds to something above that represents the actual spiritual essence of the lower. The two sides of things cast their rays; and these rays meet in the human soul, which thus gives images of things in its thoughts, which receive their luminosity and color from two sides.

Just as it is true that thought reflects the truth because the truth of things illuminates it from two sides, it is also true that, in order to be fruitful, in order to have content, thought must be truly illuminated from two sides. We cannot recognize a plant through mere thought: we need sensory perception for that. Likewise, mere thinking is of little help if one wants to get to the essence of things, which lies in the spiritual. Thought must be illuminated from within, as it is illuminated from without, through the sensory properties of things. People who are up to these things have called this inner illumination enlightenment, inspiration or intuition. It is spiritual perception and the exact opposite of sensory perception. It is only through this that the true inner life of the human being in the higher sense begins. Through it, the soul sees into the spiritual world. And the sensual then appears to it as an external form of this spiritual one, not much more than the figure of a human being recreated in papier-mâché as compared to the real human being. The nature of illumination only becomes noticeable, however, in people who have particularly essential perceptions from the higher spiritual world; and only in them does one hear talk of illumination or inspiration. But it is not only present in them. A certain degree of it can be found in every human being. Something from the spiritual world dawns in every brain. It is just so weak in many cases that, compared to the vivid impressions of the outer world, it appears to many as nothing, as an illusion that only serves to make man understand in thought what the senses perceive.

The realm of life flows directly from the spirit. It carries within itself the germ of becoming separate. Individual life can arise within the All-life. One does not comprehend life if one does not grasp it in its universality and all-livingness. All wishing and desiring is still far from life. The living thing only becomes a separate current in the system of forces of the All. It does not force the other living things into its service. It does not desire or abhor. It takes only to give. It forms itself to give existence to other forms. It lives in transformation (metamorphosis). And it retains nothing, accumulates nothing in the intermediate stages of metamorphosis. Whatever is to be accumulated must arise from desire. Desires must form themselves around a center. Life does not challenge other living things. Desire creates a form that must be dissolved again. The realm of desires is the realm where the forms that gather around centers in this way influence each other. Where they interact. - In the realm of life, we only deal with individuals in a suggestive way; in the realm of desire, the individuals are distinct. Through his desires, man gives the realm of desires a touch that bears the character of his separate existence. Through his life, he gives only life, that is, he forms beings that bear nothing of his separate being, but only correspond to the general nature of life. The living person says only: man is there; and he also only produces men. The desiring human being says: “I, this individual, am here.” The realm into which this sound penetrates thus acquires the special coloration of this individual being. The individual is now here forever. Something has come into being that continues to have an effect. Even if I myself could be completely absent, annihilated, for a moment: I will encounter this effect of mine when I am back again. My new effect belongs to my old one. Both must influence each other.

It is now nature itself that has brought man so far that he animates the three lower realms from that of the thinking soul. Within the thinking soul slumber the parts, the inner cores of the soul, which man awakens in himself by working on himself, going beyond mere nature. Through this awakening, he continues the work of nature. He develops; and with this development, the processes of the three lower realms are brought into the corresponding connections with the higher ones. Into those that are predisposed in them by the fact that the life forms of the higher realms have assumed an external existence in the lower ones. Immediately below the realm of thoughts lies that of desire. An interplay between these two realms first takes place in man. Thoughts first serve desires. Desire can work as a blind force. The sensation arises that something gives pleasure, something else gives displeasure. Desire works according to pleasure.

Thus man can never be in the world without his own being, as he has created it for himself, staring at him. The individual cannot begin at one point of development. He must tie in with what he has previously brought into the world, starting from himself. Here we are looking at the ledger of life. We not only live our personal life within ourselves, within our personality, but we also live it outside of our personality. We can do this consciously or unconsciously. And we can do it more or less consciously. The intellectual person can only come to the general awareness that it is so: the intuitive person recognizes the items of his life book in detail. And they recognize them, looking both forward and back. Intuitive people speak of their calling, of their special mission. This is the result of looking forward. It is the realization of the special task that the All-Soul has assigned to them. As such realization opens up to them, the realization of the past also follows. They get to know the items that they entered earlier in their life account book. For they must bring both into harmony with each other. In another sense, what is later in development relates to what is earlier like the spirit to the forms in which it first lived itself out, revealed itself. What was earlier is the result of a confrontation between forces in different realms. These results are stored as effects. And what happens again can only be a new confrontation with these effects. Now two things can happen. The forces of desire aroused by the personality can have their center of gravity in this world of desire itself, and by giving the personality its character, not the other way around: the personality to them, this center of gravity can remain in the realm of desire. Or the personality can place the forces of desire in the service of the soul's inner life. They lose their center of gravity in the realm of desire and gain another in the superordinate realm. But in doing so, they also lose the character of separateness that prevails in their realm. They no longer collide like strangers; they resonate together, because each individual, separate desire is given such a direction that it does not conflict with the others, but rather delivers a harmonious result with them. Diversity is generated in the realm of desire. Thus this realm acquires full content in itself. The next higher realm, the realm of thought, of the soul, would remain without content if it did not fill itself with the content that it draws from the lower realm. The desires are released from the bonds of their own realm by the forces of the higher realm. This is the course of evolution: the forces of a particular realm are given full expression. In doing so, they take on forms that are an external expression of the original forces. In this way, the first realm withdraws some of its forces. It releases them from itself, externalizes them. The remaining part becomes even more inward, even more spiritual than the original was. This inward part now spiritualizes, as a soul, the form that it previously separated from itself, as a center. Thus what was previously a unity becomes a duality, and the two members of the duality work together. They produce a third. The third is a repetition of the first, only the two members, which were still undivided in the first, are divided and their unity now consists in their harmonious interaction. There are two kinds of unity: one in which the members are not yet separated and therefore work from a common center, and the other in which the members are separated and the unity therefore consists in the harmonious interaction of the separated.

The external experience that man has through the application of his senses and his mind is a school for the higher development of man. He learns the regular use of thought from it. External events constantly correct our thoughts when they take the wrong direction. The upheavals in the world of thought are as much proof of this as everyday experiences. If I see a black object in the distance and mistake it for a cat, then coming closer can teach me that I am only dealing with a balled-up piece of cloth. This is a common example of how the outside world regulates thought. The correction that Copernicus made to the thinking of his predecessors regarding the course of the stars is an example of the same in the great historical life of thought. The things of the inner life do not seem so compelling on the thought. The thought must already be completely clear with itself if it is to absorb the spiritual content in the same way as it absorbs the content of external perception. He must not make any mistakes, because it depends on his self-established correctness whether he can see the spiritual in the right context. The spiritual content needs consciousness as its mature vehicle. Consciousness must therefore work correctly if the spiritual content is not to be distorted. Even though the sensual is transitory and changing, it teaches man the forms of thought. And with these thought-forms he can then comprehend the eternal. These same thoughts belong both to the temporal and the eternal. But as a personal being, man himself belongs to the temporal. He is related to the temporal. He can rise to the Eternal only by taking his starting-point from the temporal. He must learn to think in terms of the temporal. When he has thus acquired the laws of the temporal in the right way, they will be his guide on the soil from which the fruits of the Eternal grow. Man must first think surely, clearly and aright, then he can unlock his thoughts to higher illumination. If he tries to do so earlier, he is like a child who wants to climb a mountain before he has learned to walk. First one learns to read and to calculate, and then one applies reading and calculating in order to comprehend the truths of the sciences. Likewise, one first learns to think in the temporal; then one applies this thinking to the processes in the eternal. One will only make uncertain steps if one ventures into the field of the eternal before one has acquired the prerequisites for doing so. The most important of these prerequisites is to develop, through careful observation of reality, a thinking that flows in a proper way; and with this, an uninhibited, free opening up of oneself to the higher contents of the world with this thinking.

Thoughts take physical form in the human being. Its existence is conditioned by the physical laws that govern the brain and nervous system. But it also comes into its own in different ways in its own realm. Just as it can be applied to external things and also to the individual processes of the inner spiritual life, it is not original. Take the thought of a tree, for example, an oak tree. In the moment when we stand in front of the oak tree, it is a very specific thought image of this very oak tree. In the realm of thought itself, we rise from this particular image to a much more general one. We arrive at a mental image of an oak tree that does not really exist anywhere in detail, and yet it is a lawful thought form. This thought form is in turn connected with others. And when we survey our field of thought, we see that everything in it is connected in a lawful, inner way. This life of thought is the shadow image of the true higher life, in which everything is unity, inner harmony of being. Thought is the image of the super-thought. The super-thought is the creative essence. We merge with it when we transcend thought. From it comes our enlightenment, our inspiration. In it we live and move and have our being. When we rise to this region, we experience what we otherwise merely think. We move in entities that have life as in the human world the physical entities. Only then are these entities not governed by the limiting laws to which physical entities are subject. And the formless thoughts, the exalted images, which do not yet bear the reflection of the lower spheres, are the language that these entities speak to man. These entities themselves, and with them the human souls, are hidden as if behind a wall. We perceive the language - the exalted thoughts; the entities themselves and we with them move and we behind this wall. But it is their power that speaks to us, and it is our power that listens to the speaking. When this happens to us, then our ear listens to the divine message that tells us about the essence of things; then our heart clings to the heart of the world and, while the ear listens, perceives the pulse of the eternal. Space and time cease to have meaning in such moments: What the human being hears applies to many times and many spaces. These are the defining moments of life, in which the human being thus feels at the heart of the eternal; and it is a high stage of development of the human being when he makes such hearing and feeling his whole being. Then the impressions of the lower worlds cease to have any significance for him; they are only small nuances of color and tone in the eternal picture that unfolds before his mind's eye. The small lines of life intertwine as insignificant tendrils with the eternal lines that entwine across time and space and express the laws of the cosmos in eternal harmony.

Every event in the physical world is simultaneously an event in other spheres of the world. When I stretch out my hand, not only the physical process that I see with my eyes takes place, but at the same time a process takes place in the world of desires and another in the world of thoughts; not to mention the other worlds in which the corresponding processes also occur. The human soul dwelling in the physical body perceives only the physical process in its immediate form: of the other processes, it perceives only a kind of silhouette, a reflection that falls on this physical one from the other worlds. Only beings who spend their existence in the corresponding worlds can perceive the processes in these worlds as directly and in their original form as the physical person perceives physical existence. Our physical eyes see physical things; eyes that are made only of desire substance could perceive desires as physical eyes perceive flowers. And before a pure eye of thought, thoughts pass by as they do before human eyes, tables and cupboards. Those who cannot awaken a true feeling for these hidden worlds within themselves will not come to an understanding of what real human development means. Above the physical world lies the life world; and above that, the realm of desire: the place of wishes. Compared to physical matter, everything in this sphere is more subtle and fleeting. Of course, the laws of physics do not apply to this realm. Two beings of the same kind can be in one place, and distant things do not appear foreshortened as they do in the physical world. Colors are not opaque, as they are in the physical realm. They are opaque only because they appear on the opaque physical substance as its boundary. When this realm begins to reveal itself to man, he begins to realize how little he knows about the things of the world without knowledge of the same. How little he knows, above all, about himself and his fellow human beings. What man is otherwise able to keep locked in his bosom, his desires and feelings, his passions and temperament, in short, the whole world of his desires, reveals itself as a second organism in which the physical one is embedded, and which does not appear to the physical eye as color appears to the color-blind eye. The physical body alone can hide the world of feeling from the physical eye; it cannot do so from the eye that sees the organic cloud of desire in which the physical nature is embedded. Man's emotional life becomes an open book to this eye. Just as man spreads out his hands in the lower realm and thereby changes his form, so he sends out mobile rays when he has a desire. And just as his hand grasps a physical object, so the rays of his desires intertwine with the worlds that meet them in the realm of desires. Not hard as in physical space, desires collide in the space of desires; but they flow into each other, mix and mingle, and create complicated desire-forms, somewhat similar to how composite substances arise from simple ones in the physical world. Two people sit together. Their desire-rays flow into each other continuously. And when they leave the place, they have given existence to a being that now has an independent existence in the world of desire. No one can enter a place without leaving behind traces of their desires and feelings. And for our own being of desire, it matters who has entered the place before we do. We always, so to speak, lie down in the bed that our predecessor has prepared for us. People who have developed their sensitivity in this direction know this. And those who have not developed such sensitivity have no idea what others sometimes go through due to influences that are completely unknown to them. But such influences do not only emanate from people. In the world of desire, the receptive person encounters currents that were not previously at home in the physical world and that can only become so through him. He encounters the actual beings of desire that have no physical form. Almost all people are exposed to such encounters, but many are not aware of them. One must realize that much of what lives in the physical has its origin in the sphere of desire, and we just do not see the intrusion of their entities. For those who can perceive in this direction, much becomes evident in terms of its origins, of which the ordinary person sees only the effects. Man is almost always surrounded by extra-physical influences. The joker who tickles the funny bones of those around him is surrounded by a host of beings of desire and covetousness, who point his stories in the right direction. One sees the effect, but not the origin. Only pure intellectual beings lack this fleeting environment. A colorless cloud hovers around them, keeping out any influence from outside.

Man, realizing that he lives in such a world, cannot remain without an expansion of his outlook on life. His sense of duty and responsibility must undergo a significant broadening. Without such realization, he may believe that his “inner world” belongs to him alone, and that he is only responsible to physical realities. This will change when the third eye awakens. An ethic of desire will be added to his ethic of action. Just as he will deny himself actions that cause harm to the environment, so he will also deny himself desires and longings that must have an unfavorable effect on their realm. He will recognize duties in his heart just as he recognizes duties in the outside world and allows himself to be guided by the rules that can serve the prosperous coexistence of people.

The emotional life of a person who recognizes no higher duties is chaotic and disorderly. It is increasingly seized by noble harmony in those who grasp such a world of duties. Man then fits into the world quite differently. The chaotically surging feelings and passions are something fleeting and insubstantial, because they mutually cancel and destroy each other. Those who waste their feelings today in any direction, on any event, and tomorrow on something else, repeatedly destroy the results of their existence. Those who keep their feelings in strict harmony with each other shape their lives into a whole, which can therefore also be integrated as a whole into the world of desires. A chaotic life flows into the general world of desires like a dirty stream into the sea; one can still see the direction in which the dirt is moving, polluting the sea. A pure river flows into the sea and is absorbed into it without affecting its purity. And just as the sea must gradually overcome the dirt of the stream, so the world of desires must overcome the emotionally impure effects of life. A higher degree of human development brings consciousness to the way a person acts on the world of desires. What otherwise happens unconsciously and therefore completely randomly and arbitrarily, is then brought up into consciousness. Those who are able to do this will no longer desire unconsciously, just as the consciously aware human being acts consciously and not like an automaton in the physical world. Just as we commit harmful acts during our physical lives if we do not know the rules of action that lead to good, so too can we produce harmful effects in the realm of desire; and those who are completely unconscious of this realm become its playthings. The great religious founders of all times endeavored to give people rules for their inner life, so that their feelings and perceptions could become a harmonious link in the realm of desire: so that they would not work as troublemakers in this realm, but as members of its great whole. It is therefore only natural and understandable that such religious founders gave rules not only for external action, but also for the emotional life. How pleasure and pain should affect the heart, how renunciation and love are to be esteemed: these are the things that religious founders speak about, and those teachers of religion and wisdom who know something of the higher worlds. In the great, glorious song of human perfection, in the “Bhagavad-Gita,” one reads: “Respect pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory or defeat equally. Gird yourself for battle, and you will not fall into sin.” Or in another place: ‘It is the desire, the will, the strength that springs from passion. Get to know this all-consuming and devastating enemy.’ Such ethical principles do not refer to external action; they refer to the behavior of man in the world, where desires, longings, and cravings live. And the more a person delves into the depths of the soul, the more he is able to develop the ethics of the world of desires. The mystics of all times have worked on these ethics.

The human soul belongs to an even broader realm than that of desires. It is the realm of thoughts. It is through this that man can truly snatch himself from the temporal and attach himself to the eternal. Thought is the most comprehensive element in man's being. But it also depends on man himself what he makes of the thought with which he lives. He can make it a servant of his desires and cravings; or he can use it to rise to the eternal laws or essences of things. While the beings of the desire realm surround the human being as if arbitrarily, as if they were only loosely connected, forming a unified realm, the world of thought appears as a well-planned, strictly regulated whole. Each link serves the other in a precisely defined way. The desire beings therefore place us in a small circle, the thoughts in a large one. And what lives in us from the world of thoughts forms a far more enduring core of our being than our desire organism. Just as our physical organism is embedded in the desire organism, so are both, the physical and the desire organism, embedded in our thought organism. And when the eye of thought opens, the thought organism can be recognized. It presents itself differently from the desire organism. This is something fluid and flowing, and only becomes more stable at higher levels of human development. The thought organism has a characteristic basic structure. Although the thought rays emanating from a person are variable, usually changing from moment to moment, a certain skeletal structure is always re-established, and this retains certain basic features from birth to death. It is, as it were, the keynote of the personality. This keynote also forms the center from which thought-effects of a certain nature always go out into the thought-environment, and upon which they impinge from without. Through this world of his thoughts man is a participant in a realm in which the effects go far beyond what is possible in the physical world and also in the world of desire. Through his thoughts the beings of this kingdom speak to him. They speak to him more definitely, more gravely, more inwardly than the beings of the desires. The effects that extend from the thought part of man into the thought environment are also accordingly. Now man can let his thoughts be influenced by his desires. He can use his thoughts to best satisfy these desires. Instead of freeing himself from the fetters of desires and passions through the elevating power of thought, he can make thought the servant of those lower forces. The result is an enrichment and intensification of the world of desire through thought. The world of desires is peopled with beings from the Thought Kingdom, whereas, on the contrary, the beings living in him should be liberated. Thus the world of separate existence is fostered. The beings that arise in this way retard the true progress of cosmic evolution. Conversely, he furthers this evolution when the creatures of the world of desire are seized by the power of thought and led to higher goals. Wishes and desires do not cease to be what they are, But they acquire a character that strives towards the goals of the world of thought. People who ennoble their desires in this way, through an idealistic direction of their being, present themselves to the seer in such a way that their desire organism is in beautiful harmony with their own thoughts and these in turn are in harmony with the cosmic world thoughts. Such a person lives harmoniously in the universe of the cosmic system to which he belongs. His wishes advance this system and his thoughts become helpers for the beings of thought that govern this system. A person has reached a higher level of development when nothing more of subordinate wishes and desires disturbs this harmony. A personality in whom this is the case can be the carrier of a being of thought, whose work is in complete harmony with the cosmic powers of will. In this case it is no longer the world of thoughts of the individual personality that speaks, but an all-embracing, superior entity. It then bears the body, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the beings to whom it has to communicate. For in what it has to think and will, nothing flows in of what the personality as such has to desire, to long for and to will. Everything their will is directed towards remains within the sphere of thought. Such beings have reached a summit of humanity. They have ascended to a level that those of a lower standing can perhaps attain through special efforts for a few supreme moments of stability in life. And when they have such moments, they encounter the traces of those highly developed beings whose power comes to meet them for their own further development. It must be man's highest aspiration to meet such traces of beings who have completely withdrawn from the physical and also the desire spheres, and who only embody themselves in human bodies because they are to be teachers of others; and because these others can only understand them when they speak to them with human lips, with a human tongue. For themselves, these beings represent a higher state of incarnation, which hovers over man like an ideal to which he should aspire. But only those who have matured to hear the language of thought, which speaks not of temporal but of lasting processes, can hear the voice of such personalities. To such a person they then impart the higher teaching in wisdom and make him acquainted with the far-reaching purposes of the Cosmos, in which he then learns to cooperate. The higher mystical teaching takes place entirely in this region. And all lower teaching is a preparation for this higher teaching.

The human soul has its own definite place in this realm. Through this place, it is a citizen of its cosmos. And its task is to gather from the lower realms that which is to be carried up from them into this higher realm. But all this must first be purified before it can fulfill its task here. As the blacksmith works the raw iron from nature into the appropriate forms, so the soul takes the raw passions and desires and forms them, purifying them, so that they can be integrated into the element of the world of thought. The human soul has descended from this higher realm to gather the honey of the spirit from the lower realms and return laden with it to its original home. In a state of innocence it was when it began its descent. In a state of purification it will be when it returns. It is an egg before its descent, which carries the germ of its later being within itself. This egg reveals itself gradually, the being with all its organic limbs reveals itself. And these limbs are related to the realms into which the being will be placed on its journey of development. It uses these limbs where their corresponding realm is; and it leaves the characteristics of these realms where they have their element. But it takes with it the results, the experiences. The task of man consists in filling his thought-germ with the honey that can be gathered in the three lower realms. Every train of thought can be such a gathering of honey. Thus, in man, the upper world argues with the lower world. This argument is threefold. The first takes place in the realm of desire. The desire is ensouled. The passions and desires take on an upward tendency. One can observe this tendency in people who have a leaning towards ideals. Their passions turn from passing, changing goals to lasting ideals. What takes place in them is only a shadow of a process that takes place in the purely spiritual, mental realm. Every time an ideal passion develops in a human being, their cosmos has received a jolt forward; an innocent thought-being has taken shape and body, has become in the true sense of the word. It has now become a link in the progressive development in the cosmos, whose power cannot disappear again. It can be taken up again by even higher realms; but its power does not fade in them. When the human being has gained the ability to carry the honey of the realm of desire upwards, he can descend to the actual realm of life. He now purifies the growth forces of his nature. In doing so, he reaches beyond himself as a personality. In a much more general sense than before, he now becomes a co-worker with the cosmos. Just as the plant, unlike the animal, does not desire or abhor anything for itself, but absorbs the substances of its environment in calm serenity in order to pass them on selflessly in growth and reproduction, so at this stage the human being makes himself a transitional being and a helper of the spiritual-cosmic forces of growth. A high level of human development has thus been reached. Man gives more than his body to higher powers than his desire could give. If he previously only hewed the stones to build the cosmic building, he is now working on the building plan itself. He has become a disciple (chela) of cosmic beings. He not only knows what is to be carried from the lower realms into the higher ones: he also knows how the details are to be fitted together. At this stage of development everything becomes clear, transparent and plastic. Space and time have not yet entirely lost their significance, but they have become mobile and their limiting and inhibiting power has dissolved. Now there is only one step left to be taken in the realm of thought. This step leads the various lines of force of the cosmos back to their centers. Man no longer learns only the plan; he learns the intentions of the whole structure. The basis, the framework of his cosmos is revealed to him. He now knows what holds and carries this cosmos of his. The level of mastery has been reached. A master being wills and acts out of the intentions of the cosmic system to which he belongs. These intentions are a great mystery to beings at lower levels of evolution; they are even a great mystery to disciples: the cosmic mysteries. Until now, all those who know something of such a world have often hinted at such degrees of development in isolated passages of their writings. These indications are subtle, but comprehensible to him who has an inkling of higher worlds. Read in Goethe: “In nature, not only the events, but above all the intentions are worthy of attention.”

Through his development, the human being increasingly shapes his will in the direction of the cosmic plan. As long as he only integrates the building blocks of the body of desire into this plan, it will not be able to depend on him for what he accomplishes. The plan of the whole hovers over him, and how he and his actions fit into this plan: he feels this as a commandment given from outside. He must submit to this law. This is how the idealistically minded person feels. To integrate his actions into the harmony of the whole is a sacred commandment for him: an ideal. What he accomplishes, he accomplishes out of duty. If he reaches the next higher level and thus becomes acquainted with the plan, then it becomes self-evident to him that he should proceed in a certain way in each individual case and not otherwise. He not only feels a commandment, a duty; he regards it as senseless to act differently. For it would awaken his disgust, which would arise if he did not act in the sense and direction of this plan. So with increasing knowledge, certainty grows in the behavior of the human being: He does what he is supposed to do out of inclination for the deed: He acts out of love. This is the way the disciple relates to his actions. However, this level must first be acquired. Anyone who believes that they are allowed to act out of love without the necessary level of knowledge will only act in the sense of their particular existence instead of in the sense and direction of their cosmos. And the interests of this particular existence do not necessarily have to coincide with the direction of the will of their cosmos. The right to act out of love must first be acquired through insight and wisdom. The Master reaches an even higher level in this respect as well. He fulfills the intentions of his Cosmos. He does not stand outside of these intentions, but within them. They are his. The idealist is driven by duty, the chela by love; he is driven by nothing, he only realizes his own nature in reality. The Master has arrived at acting out of freedom. It is quite erroneous to argue whether man is free or not. He is neither free nor unfree at any stage of development prior to the highest realm of thought; he is on the path of development toward freedom. Only the Master is completely free. Thus are the stages of man: that of the purification of the passions or that of the intuitive idealist, who forms the building blocks of the world of thought; that of recognizing the plan, working on this plan out of knowledge of it, or the stage of the disciple (Chelas); and finally, the realization of the intentions of the cosmos, the becoming one with the plan of this cosmos, or the stage of mastery. The idealist acts out of duty: he obeys a should. The disciple acts out of love, he realizes his will; the master acts in freedom, he lives out his essence.

Man rises to the Cosmos in insight and wisdom. This wisdom was originally in the Cosmos. Through knowledge, man comes to know the Cosmos, because the Cosmos is formed through knowledge. The knowledge laid in the Cosmos draws the human soul towards itself and becomes one with it. Therefore, everything the human soul does in this direction is a cosmic process. Man, at the lower and middle levels of his development, does not see it as cosmic because he does not see the process itself, but its shadow image, projection, as it can only be given by the brain consciousness. What appears to be taking place within the walls of the skull is not the real process. It is to this as the silhouettes on the wall are to the real people. In reality, the action that takes place there goes through the entire sphere of the world of thought and shakes the whole cosmos. When I move my hand, the eye sees a process of the physical realm in the hand movement. It appears directly in its true form. Even an emotion or passion no longer appears to a physical being in its true form, but in its effect, in its shadow image in the physical world. And this is even less the case with a process in which thought is involved. — Thus, what a person recognizes is limited by his or her respective stage of development, and accordingly, his or her will must also be determined in the same direction. In reality, the human being is always fully present. The original egg contains the whole human being, as formed within the sphere of thought. But this whole human being is only gradually revealed to himself. And he is basically only real to himself to the extent that he reveals himself. He acts out of the essence of his nature only to the extent that he has brought this essence into existence in the lower realms. This essence itself is as a force behind what is obvious to him. From the unknown, it shapes his activities. A being with senses for the higher forms of existence would be able to see what man can only recognize in his shadowy effects in the physical realm. Man thinks, but he does not see his thoughts; he feels, but he does not see his feelings. His consciousness encompasses only a part of his sphere of activity, which is the content of his being. Development proceeds in such a way that ever higher parts of this sphere of activity enter the field of consciousness. And with that, more and more is also done with consciousness; this changes the whole character of the activity. What a person accomplishes consciously is different from what goes on within him without him knowing how it is accomplished. His development thus consists in transforming the unconscious parts of his being into conscious ones. By attaining the higher degrees of consciousness, man also automatically attains the higher degrees in relation to his actions. Only those who unconsciously follow their desires are carried away by them to the wrong things: Those whose minds are awakened in the sphere of desire see what a feeling they harbor in this sphere can accomplish. It is only natural that they then shape their feelings accordingly. And to an even greater degree, this is the case with those who have become enlightened in the realm of thought. His cosmos becomes different for him than it is for the mere thinking person. Just as when someone steps out of a dark room, in which he constantly bumps into chairs and tables, into one brightly lit with intense light, so the life of the mere thinking person is transformed into that of the seeing-thinking person.

And with the awakening of the power of vision in the world of thought, all the essential influences that constantly surround man and of which he knows nothing without this power of vision, become manifest at the same time. To the uninitiated, the effects that flow to him from this sphere remain inexplicable because the causes are not apparent to him. The seer therefore speaks of the gods of the sphere of thought, of such entities that can only be perceived by him because they do not embody themselves down to the physical plane of existence; the outer shell they wear is a garment of thought, and this is related to them as man's physical body is related to man himself. Thus the seer understands the reason for what is often called the sudden appearance of a thought, an instantaneous enlightenment. At that moment a being from the sphere of thought whispers a truth to a person who is receptive to it. The person does not need to know more than that a certain thought has suddenly occurred: the seer sees behind the scenes of the cosmic stage and it is clear to him that a being floating in the sphere of thought is hovering around the person. The one who gains the ability to see into the world of thought enters a richly populated realm, a realm in which all physical experience is initially poor. However, it gains a new richness for the one who sees. For what he experiences in the higher sphere is woven into the physical one and infinitely elevates, beautifies and ennobles its existence. And contact with the beings of thought also reveals much about the physical and the world of desire, which must remain hidden within these themselves. Those who only know physical contact will naturally consider what is being spoken of here to be a figment of the imagination. From their point of view, they are right. He is only wrong in regarding his point of view as the only correct one and making no effort to reach a higher one. He will then also consider dealing with the thought beings to be a highly superfluous activity and talk about this contact to be something harmful that only distracts people from pursuing their real, practical goals.

Just as man's original egg derives its character from the realm of thought, so it also brings up the results of the three lower realms as their lasting legacy in the realm of thought. In this respect, everything that happens through man in the realm of thought is the cause of effects; and man has, so to speak, buried the fruits of his activity in the three realms in the realm of thought, his home. Only that which remains for the individual egg body as the fruit of its pilgrimage through the spheres of physical, life and desire can truly be the result of human development. This egg body is the permanent element in the changing phenomena that pass by the human being: but it is also the keeper of the lasting results: the carrier of all fruits. But only that which can really take on a lasting character is imprinted on this body. That which has only a temporary value dissipates as a wave in the physical or desire realm without leaving a trace in the lasting. For example, consider the development of a person at a fairly subordinate level. Such a person follows his desires and passions according to the strengths and characteristics they have. Only after a long period of time do thoughts arise from these desires and passions that are worth keeping. Thus, the thought core slowly forms within the various shells. When a person has reached the end of a lifetime, he will find himself in the following situation. The physical body is no longer able to maintain the cohesion of its parts through its own powers. It decays. This means nothing other than He steps out of the current in which he was absorbed by the human being and passes into the general physical realm. The parts of life and desire are equally temporary. They too must find the transition to the spheres to which they belong. Ultimately, however, something of the human being remains: the experiences, fruits, and results from the three realms during life, embedded in his original individual egg body. The cohesion of these results can no longer be destroyed. It is a link in the realm of thought of the cosmos to which the human being belonged. Is his task now exhausted and will he now have his entire continued existence in this realm of thought? One could believe this if the contemplation of the cosmos did not immediately reveal this further task. Within this cosmos, we see the permanent body continuing to evolve and descending again and again into the lower realms. The results of a previous life are increased, enriched and strengthened in subsequent lives. Human personalities with the most diverse degrees of development live on earth. This could not be the case if a single original, individual egg of a similar nature were embodied in each personality. But such would have to embody itself if the embodied one came directly from the pure realm of thought. The original thought-germ does not release from itself different perfections, but only equally perfect, i.e. innocent, original individuals. All diversity stems from the diversity of experiences during the passage through the three realms. If one wants to search for the reasons why a person has this or that disposition, one must not look for these reasons in the lofty realms of the realm of thought, but in life within the lower three realms. One personality becomes different from another because the individual bodies descending into the lower realms belong to different degrees of development, i.e., because they already have different life experiences. A life is therefore not explainable from itself. It only becomes comprehensible when it is understood as a repetition of other lives belonging to it. This law of repetition is found throughout nature. And just as it is found in the human kingdom, it is only a repetition of a law also present in the plant and animal kingdoms at a higher level.

Man advances further on his path of development by increasingly determining the goal and direction of his being himself. In the early stages, nature guides man according to its principles. The more the element of thought develops, the more man's self-activity also grows. For his original being is taken from the realm of thought. The more this moves in the realm from which it itself originates, the freer and more unveiled it becomes itself. Now, progress on this path to freedom involves working on certain qualities in the human being. The human being who reaches the stage where he develops his element of thinking more and more as a permanent element has certain qualities that must undergo a complete transformation if he is to achieve higher development. —

The first quality to be developed is determined by the very nature of higher development. This is a continuous ascent of life from the changing and the fleeting to the abiding and the lasting. The cognitive faculty must thereby acquire, to an ever-higher degree, the ability to recognize the lasting in the changing, to draw the fruits from the fleeting in order to carry them forward into the realm of the spirit. Every moment of life and every random thing can be used to develop this quality. For there are exactly two things to be distinguished in every thing: something fleeting and something lasting. We do not need to distinguish between the two as if there were a fixed boundary between them. That is not the case. Rather, they merge into one another without such a fixed boundary. The fleeting is more or less fleeting; the lasting is more or less lasting. Nor can one speak of the lasting as of something “eternal”. Eternal is the last thing to which one can arrive; what is below this “eternal” lasts longer than many a changing thing in the stream of time. But in the end, even the stream of time falls under such permanence and allows only its fruits to enter as links into a still higher, still more enduring realm. By developing this sense for the permanent, man's whole character is changed. And consequently, he seeks to overcome the changing, the temporary, everywhere. His striving takes the direction of the conceptual. What previously seemed particularly full of life and desirable becomes worthless to him, and what previously seemed empty and abstract gains meaningful life. If he previously only wanted the thought in order to get to know an external thing through it, now the external thing is nothing more than the cause of this or that thought. He seeks the thoughts for their own sake, and everything else for the sake of the thoughts. Whoever attains this perfection in his cognitive faculty will, as a result, change his emotional world all by himself. He can no longer attach his feelings to the transitory, since the lasting opens up to him everywhere. The change that takes place in a person as this second character trait develops in him can be seen in a transition of his entire being from small to large lines. He will give his actions a typical character, a certain lawful imprint. There will be constant currents of his will running through the small tasks of the day. More and more, a person who acquires these two basic traits, the ability to distinguish and character type, will distance himself from the passing interests that hold others captive. Something significant, weighty and fruitful takes possession of his thoughts and actions. Through the content of his thoughts and the motives of his actions, he himself becomes a significant link in the realm of thoughts. Once there, in order to develop further, man must cultivate certain further qualities. The realm of thoughts does not bear the one-sided, rigid, immovable basic trait that the physical and the realm of desires also have. Everything in the realm of thoughts is all-encompassing. A tree is by itself a single entity. In this sense, a thought is not by itself. It is connected with other thoughts and ultimately forms a link in the whole world of thoughts in such a way that it can only be fully understood if one understands the whole world of thoughts. The life in thoughts requires that one is aware that a thought must be illuminated by the other. “I am free” is a thought. In a certain sense, it applies to the ego. But the sentence “I am unfree” also applies. Only if one grasps both sentences and illuminates them with each other does one obtain the life that they determine in the world of thought. It should [manuscript breaks off]

The idea of development, which has become common in more recent times, does not truly consider the phenomena to which it is applied in terms of their main characteristics. Thus, when development is used to consider a connection between humanity and animality, the first question is not: How can the human being be imagined? It is taken too simply. It is not considered that the head, for example, must be grasped by completely different ideas than the rest of the organism. The head, if thought about correctly, represents so much of what is connected with the essence of the human being that the rest of the organism can be thought of as a limb attached to the head, into which the processes of transforming air and food are transferred. It is as if the head is to be relieved of these intraorganic processes. This idea, developed, would lead to seeing in the organization of the head the indication of an older form of human development that also included the organs for the transformation of air and food, and which then, through development towards the soul-spiritual side, separated these organs out as appendages. The same cannot be said of animals, not even of the more highly developed ones. In them, the head appears so much as a part of the whole organism that the latter must be spoken of as the whole animal. One can only say of man that he adds the animal to himself in order to relieve the head of what is essential to it. This leads to the idea that man is by nature older than animals; that he has added to his organization that of animality at a stage in his development, in order to ascend as a head being to a level of his essence that he could only reach by doing so.

Furthermore, this thought leads to the recognition that the living conditions in which the human being was when it had not yet added animal nature to itself were different from those that came later. For if they had been the same, the “human” head would have had to have degenerated into the animal form under their influence even then. These living conditions cannot have been the present earthly ones. For these bring man precisely in the animal direction of development. But his head shows another.

The question arises: What causes this other direction of development of the head being “human”? An unbiased consideration of the main characteristics of the head also teaches us about this. One must find it more mineralized than the rest of the organism. The mineralization of the organism, which ultimately ends in the bone system, is most comprehensively expressed in the head. And it is nothing other than this mineralization that pushes the initial organs of respiration and metabolism out of the head. In the animal head, this mineralization is far less advanced. But this leads us to ask: what predominates in the animal head in terms of mineralization? Unbiased observation shows that this is the vegetable aspect. The human head acquires its essence by progressing from the vegetable to the mineral. This leads us to think of it at an earlier stage of development in the stage of stronger vegetable development. The later vegetabilization of the animal head corresponds to an animalization of its entire being. Thus, the earlier stage of humanity must also show the human being as a head being in a stronger animalization than it is today. Today's conditions cause the degree of mineralization that is now characteristic of the human being. These conditions could not have been present when he was a mere head being. One must think of the state of the earth with the present conditions as having been preceded by another, which did not yet have the impact of the mineral forces that are bringing about the present state of humanity. Neither the present human forms nor the present animal forms could have lived within this state. Beings lived that held the middle between the present human and the present animal. Beings that could become human if they were able to absorb mineralization and that sank deeper into animality if they could not do so. The latter, which are the ancestors of the present animals, only formed as a whole organization what man added as initial links.

Now, through mineralization, man's spiritual element approaches him. This lives in him as his independent spiritual being by mineralizing part of his physical being. The animal does not have this spiritual being because it cannot mineralize itself to the same extent as man. By absorbing it, man experiences an independent spiritual being within himself, which is itself the opposite of the spiritual [in its organization]. He must extract the spirit from its organization in order to experience it as an independent being. In an earlier stage of development, the spirit permeated the animal's organization to a greater extent; in the present stage, the spirit permeates the organization to a lesser extent, but the human being is its participant. The animal is not able to experience the spirit living in its organization as spirit through itself.

The older intermediate forms between humans and animals were, on the whole, those in which spirit only permeated their organization. The ancestors of the present-day animals continued this relationship in the present-day conditions; to the old developmental conditions, the human being added others that brought about his spiritualization. The external living conditions that correspond to this spiritualization are those that the human being has around him as his world of the senses. What the human being observes as such a sensory world around him, he experiences externally through perception; inwardly, it asserts itself in his mineralization process. Animal nature is excluded from both. It remains inwardly more plant-like than the human being; and it does not exclude its sensory organs to such an extent from this more plant-like organism that the external world can be experienced through them to the same degree as it can by the human being. Thus animal life is much more than human life organically closed in itself; it does not participate in the external world to the same degree as man. Animal life is soul-life; human life is soul-spiritual life. The animal shapes its organism in soul-life and lives with it in the world as soul; man shapes his organism in spiritual life and lives with it in the world as spirit.

Insightful knowledge guides us in all these matters. There is more spiritual in the head of a human being than in the rest of the organism. The head is permeated by the insight of the spiritual of the rest of the organism. It stands out from the spiritual of the rest of the organism. In the course of a human life, the head of a child is more spiritual than that of a mature person; and the head of an old person shows a spirituality that is quite different from that of the rest of the organism. For those who can see these conditions, the earlier stage of the whole development of humanity is just as much a part of them as the childhood of a person is part of the sensory view. For beings who still actualize this earlier human stage today are present for the observing consciousness. These beings do not participate in the mineral process of the earth. Nothing of the mineral substance penetrates into their organization. They cannot be perceived by the senses. But they are perceived when the rhythm, which is unconscious in human life, is raised into consciousness. Then they are recognized as souls that are on the way to becoming human spirits. Man was such a soul before he became the spirit-soul that he is at present. But he could only be it when the earth was not yet endowed with the mineral impulses of the present. When it developed vegetable impulses instead of these. Man was then not yet man, but an ancestral being of the earth. It worked as a whole in the same way as a vegetable formation works today. It did not yet show the mineral impulse. One can say that man was then just as much an animal as he was not an animal. For he developed the present form of his animality only later.

In that man fashions his animality under the influence of the organization of his head, the latter becomes different from what it could become through the conditions which in earthly life directly shape the animality in animals. Careful observation, attentive in the deeper sense, shows the following as the main characteristic of the human being in this respect: Man is placed in the world by different balances of power than the animal. The weight pressure of his head is in a different direction to the line that passes through his center of gravity than in the animal. Attention must be paid to the fact that in judging what is considered here, it is not the temporary position of the human being that is considered, but the expression of these balances of power in his lasting form. In this form, the relationship between the brain and spinal cord, which distinguishes humans from animals, is expressed. But the relationship of the hands and arms to the feet and legs also comes out of the same balance of power in the revelation. The human being experiences this balance of power with all its consequences in a dull consciousness as that which carries his 'I'. And by standing face to face with another person, he perceives their 'I' directly in this form. Both perceptions, that of one's own ego and that of the other person's ego, live at the bottom of ordinary consciousness like the experiences of sleep consciousness. Only that the latter alternates with ordinary consciousness, the dull consciousness of the “I” always accompanies this ordinary consciousness. A second thing is this: the thought prevailing in the animal organization finds expression in the animal form. In the human form, it is not the thought that is expressed, but the equilibrium just described. Because in the animal the thought flows completely into the organic form, the animal does not have the faculty of thinking as a special power of the soul. What is formed in the manifold forms of the animal world into a sensory revelation: the human being carries it within him in a formless way, as a living weaving of his thinking. And this living weaving becomes the bearer of his soul. The animal soul lives, as it were, solidified in the animal form; the human soul lives a life of its own, free of the body and formless. The third consideration is that the animal's emotional life only flares up in response to its inhibited or uninhibited will. The human being can separate the emotional life from the will. In the human being, feeling develops into a way of life connected with the continuous experience of his body, while in the animal it is a temporary inner revelation of the experience of inhibited or uninhibited will. It is in this interpenetration of the body with the independent element of feeling that the difference between human and animal corporeality lies. And it is in the sphere of the body, so to speak, impregnated with the life of feeling, that the origin of memory also lies. Because feeling separates from the will in this way in the human being, the will is again separated from the organization of one's own body to a much greater degree than in the animal. The animal is connected soulfully with the results of its will, the human being spiritually. The animal directly involves its body in its volition, while the human being only involves that which is separated from the body, so to speak, as a physical precipitation. In perceptive experiences, this is revealed in such a way that the human being is conscious of standing, with his volition transforming into action, as a spiritual being in the same world in which he stands through experiencing the equilibrium with his ego. As a spirit, man lives in the perception of the balance of the world and in his actions determined by his will. As a soul, he lives in his thinking, which reveals an existence separate from him in the forms of the animal world, and in his feeling; as a body, he experiences this feeling and as a body, he is part of his will. In willing, the spirit physically places itself in the world; in feeling, it lives in it as an organic process; in thinking, the soul frees itself from the body; in the “I”, the human being becomes aware of himself as spirit. In animals, thinking, which lives in meaningful forms, directly causes the form; not through its own thinking, but through the content of this form, it permeates feeling and thus the physical body, which in turn is directly connected to the external world, in that what is experienced in feeling is in truth only inhibited or uninhibited will.

In that the human being has developed the animalistic as an appendage, its outer form carries an ambiguity. As a head being, the human being is in fact only the confluence of all animal forms. He is, as such, the entire animal world as a unity. For him, the head is what the external world is for the animal. This remaining organism is actually only a reflection of the head, but one that is removed from what is determined by the characterized balance. In the head, the firmly shaping and contouring element of thinking is anchored; in the rest of the organism, that which sets this thinking in motion. Nothing of feeling is anchored in the head except the continuous dream of this feeling, while feeling itself has its carrier in the rest of the body. And as for the will, the organism of the head can only produce a dreamless, dull consciousness of sleep for it, for the will has as its vehicle the qualitative state of equilibrium between the rest of the organism and the outer world. Therefore, the will can only shine forth before the ordinary consciousness to the extent that the person perceives the way in which it brings him into ever-changing relationships with the outer world.

For the seeing consciousness, the result of the will is again felt directly, but as an experience outside of the body, not in the sense that the inhibition or furtherance of the will expresses itself in one's own body, but insofar as the will can be seen as hindering or furthering the world; feeling becomes the soul-sensual expression of thoughts; thoughts appear as a spirit full of content. Through the spirit, which is full of content, the beholder experiences the world as imagination; through the thoughts of the soul-bearing feeling, the world is experienced as inspiration; through the will, which is connected to feeling again, the world is experienced through intuition. The animal is an imagination fixed in the sensual through its form; its soul is inspired to it, and its body is a realized intuition. In man, the I penetrates into imagination, thinking into inspiration, feeling into intuition, and the objective spirit that lifts him out of animality into will.

An external comparison of man with the animal does not yield any knowledge. For what can still be perceived in the animal can only be seen supernaturally in the human being: the formative world of thought. What is still physical in the animal is soul-physical in the human being: the bearer of the emotional world; what is still experienced in the animal in the body is experienced by the human being in his relationship to the external world, his changing qualitative equilibrium with the external world.

For the external observer, there are basically only hints of what is going on. Compare the physiognomy of the animal with that of the human being. The animal is entirely physiognomy, and a specific one at that. In the human being, the physiognomic aspect stands out from the formation and becomes a reflection in the countenance of what the released thought is able to bring to the formation, which is expressed in the balanced relationship between the head and the rest of the organism. In the animal, the soul is bound to what the body experiences through its organization. And feeling is part of this experience. In the human being, the independent soul reveals itself in everything between laughing and speaking, between crying and the wide range of gestures expressing displeasure. In animals, the will is a direct result of the bodily organization and its determination by the external world. In the human being, the experience of the external world becomes decisive for the will. In the will, the human being disconnects his bodily organization. Through his volition, he accomplishes what has nothing to do with his bodily organization. The difference between humans and animals only becomes apparent when we are able to recognize what the forces at work in humans are outside of humans: the power of thought is the force that shapes the animal forms.

What is the power of feeling?

Self-observation shows that its seat is in the body. In the human being it lives as the soul within the body. In the human being, it takes the desiring element out of the animal will. In this way, feeling is experienced in the body, but not merely as inhibited or uninhibited desire (will). It is the bringing forth of that within the body which the animal's desire-nature does not have. It is a soul counter-image of the plant life that lives in human feeling. What is characterized in the above as vegetabilization in the animal, lives in the animal directly bound to the animal, but in the human being it separates soulfully from the animal and is experienced as liberated feeling. The will lives in the mineralized in the human being, while in the animal it is bound to the vegetabilized. The animal has a will organism; the human being separates a will mechanism from this will organism. The animal has a form organism; the human being separates the thought organism from this form organism. The thought organism interacts with the perception mechanism; the will mechanism is actually only the part of the external world found in the human being. In the mechanism of will, the human being does not belong to himself; he is in it as a spirit in the external world. In the emotional organism, the human being is present as a soul-inspired spirit; in the thought organism, he is present as a head-body, but this body is actually a knowing experience of the physical, so it is a spiritual body. In the consciousness of self, the spirit lives in the conditions of equilibrium determined by the human element. It lives in the physical, but only through the forces active in the physical. [Text aborts]

Note 1732-1735, undated, c. 1904

1.) Dreams are an influence of the spiritual on the human soul. The dreamer is the human being as a soul being. What the dreamer perceives, however, are the after-effects of his life in his formative forces body. In a dream, the human being is cut off from his physical surroundings and from his own physical body, just as he is in a real sleep. The dream shows the meaning of life in the physical world. This world provides the logical and the moral. Therefore, in a dream, man is neither logical nor moral. One should not describe a dream as a mental disorder. This disorder consists precisely in the fact that the supersensible aspect of dreaming takes hold of the body without the control of spiritual self-awareness. In a dream, the eternal is at work, but it is directed towards the temporal. It depends on the drama of the dream.

2.) In hallucination, unlike in dreams, there is not a spiritual-mental but a physical-mental appearance. The person is given over to the body. Instead of the whole body being used as a mediator to generate the perceptions, only part of the body is used. In the hallucination, the temporal is active, but this temporal dares to approach the eternal: that which should only be active in the creation of the human body itself.

3.) The somnambulist has infected his sensory life and sometimes - as a medium - his will life from the soul-bodily organs. He has become a physical and mental automaton. This results in an imitation of the spiritual. The temporal dares to approach the eternal; but in a way that should only be conveyed through sensory perception and through the willful misuse of will impulses that are only justified in interaction with beings of the physical world. Mediums sin against the common good; they act like someone who, for example, uses a substance that he has received as a gift for a crowd to adorn his own personality.

4) The artistic is related to the dream-like; but it differs from it in that the dreamer focuses on the temporal aspect of his own life, while the artist's soul is turned towards the spiritual, the eternal. The artist translates his spiritual experiences into the soul, but not into the activities that underlie the imagination and the will. He can do this because he only refers to that in the spirit which corresponds to his individual contemplation.

5.) The Contemplative Consciousness lifts the spiritual into the ordinary life that every human being has. One's own spirit stands in relation to the spiritual world. The experiences of the Contemplative Consciousness:

1.) cannot be remembered in the usual sense. Only when they are converted into representations;
2.) they do not become stronger in repetition like the habitually acquired representations and actions;
3.) they must be experienced with presence of mind.

Man is in relationship with a spiritual world. The beings of this world are not bodily-soul-spiritual like humans, but soul-spiritual. But within this world of the spiritual-soul there are levels, realms, as in the sensory world: the realm that has to do with the subconscious of the individual human being is active in his animal life; the realm that is active in his vegetative processes; the realm that is active in his mineral nature. This brings us to the unconscious of world-becoming. The original states were those that were more spiritual than the later ones.

1.) The dreamer has a reciprocal relationship with the being that serves him to guide his soul in the spiritual world.

2.) The somnambulist enters into a reciprocal relationship with an unjustified spirit world; the hallucinator with the 'human instinctual world'; the perceiving and acting somnambulist with the external world, which should legitimately only be experienced through sensory perception and influenced by the physical work of the will.

Goethe:

When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels himself [in the world] as a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole, when harmonious comfort gives him a pure, free delight – then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as having reached its goal and would admire the summit of its own becoming and being.

Dream recognition:

1.) The spiritual researcher can compare what he experiences with imaginative knowledge.

2.) The spiritual researcher has a different experience with him. He becomes aware of this.

In dreams, anesthesia of the higher senses and of touch. —

In the dream, self-observation is practiced. The thinking activity, which otherwise disturbs self-observation, stands still; so does the sensory activity.

Imagination and inspiration are present.

The will rests on intuition; the presentation on sensory activity; both are absent.

The dream takes place outside the senses and outside the metabolism.

It takes place in the rhythm of breathing and blood circulation.

Memory weak because sensory activity is absent. False memory – hyperesthesia.

The dream proceeds like a mental disorder, but is quite unlike it, because it takes place in the soul. In a mental disorder, the physical intrudes into the soul without justification; in a dream, the spirit intrudes into the soul without understanding.

In a dream, a person is neither moral nor logical.

Dreaming continues in waking life.

Hallucination: the unwarranted conscious perception of a part of the body instead of the whole body. The dream image: one knows only through a part of the soul instead of through the whole soul.

Imagination must not become hallucination; inspiration must not become autosuggestion.

It depends on the drama of the dream. He clothes his tensions, solutions, his rhythms in the images of personal experience.

The somnambulist is in relationship with the outside world; but not through his normal physical body, but through that part of his being that is associated with the imaginative and inspired world. In dream consciousness, it is the soul that is active; in somnambulism, it is the body. A person is somnambulant if, instead of extinguishing prenatal experiences in the body (and merely seeing them in the spiritual) and instead imprinting them in the body (which enables the person to perceive in the sensory world). —

In post-hypnosis, the organ remains imprinted until the command is carried out. Instead of being a soul-spiritual being that reveals itself through the body, the person has become a physical-soul automaton that apes the true human being.

The human being carries his childhood within him; but in the normal state he does not relate it to the outside world, to which he relates only his present human being. In the morbid state, however, he relates his childhood to the outside world. This is when a lack of direction in life occurs. It is easy for a person in a civilized society to get into this situation if they cannot keep up with life and are therefore unable to place their present human being in a fulfilled relationship with the outside world. Hypersthesia: aping artistic activity.

Hyperesthesia: aping of artistic activity.

If sensory activity is heightened and combines with healthy mental life, then artistry arises. But if the activity of perception, which lies behind the senses, is heightened, then it fabricates unauthorized sensory activity and apes artistry.

Diagnosis for increased sensitivity. -!?

Healing instincts.

The etheric body is the creator of the physical body, while it itself is created by the astral body. The physical body can be seen as the manifestation and condensation of the creative part of the etheric body; whereas the receptive parts of it remain open to the influence of the astral body. The etheric body of a man is female, that of a woman is male. Originally, however, the etheric body is of both sexes. And this bisexuality is nothing other than the condensation of a part of the completely sexless astral body. The external physical sex arises only from the fact that one side of the bisexual etheric body condenses physically. The man arises through the condensation of the male side; the woman through the condensation of the female side. In the former, an ethereal-female remains, in the latter an ethereal-male.

These remaining parts of the etheric body are again divided into two parts, one of which retains its sexual characteristics, while the other takes on an asexual nature. That which remains sexual permeates itself with desire and becomes the basis for human physical reproduction. While the physical organs of reproduction are the expression of the lowest part of the etheric body, the organs of affection, the heart, are the creatures of the second part of the etheric body. The woman has a male heart, the man a female heart. The male heart expresses itself in active love, in compassionate devotion; the female heart of the man finds expression in courage and bravery. At this stage, one should no longer interpret the expressions male and female here as having exactly the same meanings as they have for physical corporeality. Although love and courage first reveal themselves to the opposite sex, they nevertheless take on a more general character that relates to more general life circumstances.

The third part of the etheric body contains the forces that produce the sense organs. The entire sensory apparatus is produced by this etheric body. But these sense organs would be without effect if the etheric body did not imbibe with the astral body. The eye and the etheric forces that produce it would bring forth something that is also present in the photographic apparatus, if these emanations were not transformed by the astral body into sensations of color.

What the astral body produces in connection with this third highest link of the etheric body and the physical organs it generates forms the basis of the soul's life. These are the perceptions.

When observing the eye, for example, one has to consider three things: firstly, the ether eye, which is the creator of the eye. Secondly, the creature, namely the physical eye itself. And thirdly, the astral limb that extends into this eye and in which, for example, the color “red” is formed.

The astral body also breaks down into three parts. The lowest is the one that fills the sense organs in the manner indicated. It is of a creative nature, for it has given the uppermost part of the etheric body the ability to form sense organs. The second, middle link of the astral body, on the other hand, is less creative. It has a character that finds expression in the preservation of what it has received, in pleasure and pain. It is connected to the heart in the same way that the first link is connected to the objects of the external world through the sense organs. It experiences the impressions that are conveyed through the heart.

The third limb of the astral body is essentially independent of the external world of the senses as well as of the internal world of the heart. It finds its expression in the “I”. But this limb can let etheric forces flow into it. These etheric forces at play in the I are initially thoughts. With these thoughts, the I enters into contact with the universal ether. The thoughts of things embodied in the ether flow into the ego, and so the ego first forms the third, uppermost limb of its astral body. With the help of this “ego work”, the astral body becomes an organized entity, whereas before it was a chaotic, virgin being. This astral body now in turn has an effect on the lower limbs of the astral body. First of all, on the second limb. The forms of the consciousness soul are imprinted on the desire soul. The heart undergoes a process of ennoblement and spiritualization. It is directed towards the spirit. Initially, this can only happen when the externally stimulated experiences are silent. In the quiet hours of life. Above all, during sleep, when the soul is disconnected from the body, the spiritualized astral part imprints its character on the intellectual and sensual part. Therefore, time must be given to the person to consolidate what the malleable astral soul absorbs. Forces must develop in the middle part of the soul that can then act on the heart. Then the heart will release its powers again, so that the physical parts for the spirit can also be formed. These are then clairvoyant organs.

When the uppermost part of the astral soul can no longer evoke mere thoughts but actual images, the next step can begin on the lowest part of the astral body. Before, it was only able to build sensory organs that reflected external things. Now it becomes capable of making these sensory organs the realization of internal things. The human perceptions are then no longer mere images of the external, but they radiate the things of the inner world outwards. Man becomes the bearer of causes, whereas before he could only receive effects.

In the waking state, the astral body works through the third part of the ether body in the senses.

In the dream state, the astral body withdraws into itself; the astral body transforms into images what the ether body has received from the senses. In the actual state of sleep, the astral body frees itself even from these perceptions of the senses. It lives only in the ether, which is not changed by the human being himself. He lives the general life of the world.

This latter state is connected with the waking life only through the ego-concept. It is pure will, creating out of nothing.

The dream state is connected to waking life through the desires and feelings. They only have an existence in the soul. You experience them, but you do not look at them. Clairvoyance consists of looking at this world. It then becomes images, just as the external world is represented by the sense organs in images. This is astral vision.

But when the will itself becomes pictorial, then mental seeing occurs. Man then sees thoughts as he sees trees.

If this state increases to such an extent that the thoughts of his seeing prove to be independent beings, spirit beings, then will perceives the will. And through the will perceived [a part of the manuscript is missing here]

In this state, the human being transforms the third and uppermost part of his etheric body himself. This becomes more and more his own creation.

Finally, this transformed highest part of the etheric body then influences the second. It makes it creative too. This has previously been stimulated to its productive achievements by the outside world. The most prominent stimulus came from the perception of sexual desire. Now the stimulus comes from within. The one-sidedness of the masculine or feminine disappears completely. A non-sexual generative power of this etheric body begins: Budhi. It again affects the physical organism, which now develops the organ of will in the highest sense.

The first sentence of “The Voice of Silence” speaks of the lower soul powers (Iddhi or Siddhis). And it points to the “dangers of these soul powers”. First of all, I would like to point out that the little book, “The Voice of Silence”, is intended to serve as material for meditation. It is written entirely from an occult knowledge. And occult knowledge is living knowledge, i.e., it has an effect as a force on the whole person when he or she penetrates it through meditation. But, as I have already said, it is not a matter of rationally absorbing and dissecting this knowledge, but of completely surrendering to it. Only those who succeed in clearing their field of consciousness for a short time of all impressions of everyday life and in filling themselves completely with the meditation thought for that time will receive the fruit of meditation.

I would now like to point out some of the occult knowledge that underlies the “Voice of Silence”. But I must explicitly state that it is not a matter of speculating such knowledge into the sentences of the “Voice of Silence” in moments of meditation, but of appropriating this knowledge in times that lie outside of meditation. Then the same becomes a component of our soul and it works in us, even if we do not analyze it in detailed thoughts during meditation.

All truly occult sentences are based on the knowledge of world development and are written out of the knowledge that sees man in harmony with the One All-Life, which lives out in ever new forms. But man should recognize himself as one of these forms. He should learn to understand that the developmental processes of a long past have flowed into his being, and that he himself forms the transitional form to higher states.

As man is today, he consists of a series of bodies: the physical, the astral, the lower spiritual body, and the higher spiritual body. And even higher bodies are for the time being only hinted at in him. Man understands himself even less if he knows that the bodies mentioned are not all developed to the same degree. For although, for example, the astral body as such is higher than the physical body, man's present astral body is nevertheless lower than his physical body. One must distinguish between perfection in its kind and perfection in itself. Man's physical body has today reached a certain level of perfection in its kind, and it will be complete when the present so-called [4th] “round” of our earth has come to an end. The astral body, however, still stands today at a lower degree of perfection, and it will only be in the 5th round that it will have progressed as far as the physical body has today in its kind. The higher bodies are even further behind in their development. Therefore, one can say: Man still has a lot of work to do on himself so that his higher bodies are organized and developed to the same extent as his physical body is. Today, man cannot essentially sin as much against his physical organization as he can against his higher bodies. Of course, one can also damage one's physical organization; but damaging the higher bodies means something quite different. For these higher bodies are still in a kind of embryonic state, and by acting on them, we act on predispositions, not on organs that have reached their finished form to a certain extent in the realm of nature. We organize our higher bodies in the same way that we think, feel, sense, and desire. We do this in the same way that natural forces did long ago, when they formed our physical organs, our lungs, heart, eyes, ears, etc., from lower structures. We see ourselves as the continuation of nature on higher planes. That we direct our thoughts, desires, sensations, feelings in such a way that we organize our higher bodies in the way nature has organized our physical body: such instructions as the “Voice of Silence” are for this purpose. And we bring ourselves into the right direction of development when we let such sentences take effect on us in meditation. For these sentences are precisely spiritual natural forces that guide us, and through which we guide ourselves. If we let them guide us, then our higher bodies will organize themselves and we will receive sensory organs for the higher planes. We will see, hear and act on these higher planes, just as we have come to see, hear and act on the physical plane through the natural forces. It is easy to see that there are “dangers” in such a development. The so-called lower soul powers present these dangers if the spiritual power is not directed in the appropriate direction. The Voice of the Soul was written to achieve this direction.

It is also a danger for a person if they acquire a false sense of the idea that the “outer world” is a mere illusory world. This is certainly true in one sense. But man is not called upon to withdraw from this “outer world” and flee to higher worlds. We should gain insight into the higher worlds, but we should be clear about the fact that we should seek the causes for effects in our physical world in these higher worlds. We should always bear in mind that we have to delve into our own spirit. Through such deepening, we learn to understand the spirit that speaks to us through every leaf, through every animal, through every human being. But it would be wrong if we sought the spirit and disregarded its organs, and the organs of the spirit are the phenomena and processes of this world. We are to draw the impulses, the motives for our activity in this world from higher planes; the activity itself must lie between birth and death in this world. We are not to disdain the world, but to love it; but we are not to love it as it appears to the mere physical senses, but we are to learn daily, hourly how it is an expression of the spirit. Everywhere, in the sense of the third sentence of “The Voice of Silence”, one seeks the “Creator” on a higher plane. Certainly, in this way the world of the senses becomes an illusory world. But only to the extent that man usually regards it. For example, we see a criminal. As most people look at such a person, they see only appearance. We get to know the truth about the criminal when we confront him with a gaze that is sharpened by the higher worlds. When we look deeply into the workings of the world, then all our feelings, all our perceptions of the reality around us change. And through such knowledge we become capable for the real world in which we live. We must realize more and more that we are much less called to correct the world than to correct our illusory views of the world. Only then can we intervene in the world in a bettering way, if we have improved ourselves by struggling through from false to true views. That is why it says in “The Voice of Silence”: “Only then, only when the human being no longer perceives the many entities of appearance as such, but directs his gaze to the One True, will the feeling close to the realm of falsehood and open to the realm of truth.”

The “creative spirit” works around us, but the “creative spirit” also works within us. The outer world will always reveal this creative spirit to us if we maintain the “silver thread” that binds us to the creative spirit itself. We should therefore listen to everything that reaches our ears and look at everything that presents itself to our eyes. However, we should never allow ourselves to be directed by external influences, but we should be clear that within us is the interpreter, the conductor, who places everything external in the right light. By tearing the “silver thread” within, we ourselves make the outer world an illusory one, which then deceives us at every turn; by maintaining the inner connection with the source of the spirit, all the light of truth also pours out for us over the outer world.

We must search in our own spirit: then the spirit of the world opens up to us. It is not usually assumed that this is the way to see in higher worlds. Yet it is. —

The “halls” in “The Voice of Silence” are real experiences of self-knowledge in the human being.

It is important that we clearly bring the stages described here to our minds. It is not a matter of grasping intellectually what is meant by these “halls”. We must experience this meaning. Understanding is the least; and this understanding also does not open up higher powers. But even if we believe that we have long since understood, we must live in this sense again and again: that opens up [higher powers]. Experienced occultists know that understanding occult tenets is nothing. That is why every occultist will live and let live again and again what has long been understood. And no true occultist should fail to meditate daily on the most important and simplest truths. This does not give him knowledge in the worldly sense, but it gives him strength and life in the occult sense. Just as you love a child that you see and know every day, so the occultist loves the truths and must be with them and live with them every day. Occult knowledge is therefore different from the external knowledge gained from mere civilization. You have it once, and you are, so to speak, done with the understanding. Not so with occult knowledge. You have it again and again in your living environment, even if you know it, like lovingly embracing a child, even if you have known it for a long time.

The “first hall” makes it clear to us that our usual point of view is that of ignorance. And ignorance must remain our part if we remain with what, so to speak, has fallen to us through nature itself. All external knowledge, too, is only a collection of what ignorance yields. As long as we are not clear about the fact that we can remain in ignorance despite having much knowledge, true wisdom is impossible for us, as is any kind of progress. It is essential that we imbibe this attitude with a sense of being alive, that we are “learners”. With every step we take, life must be a school for us. Then we experience life in the second hall. Our whole relationship to the world changes under the influence of such an attitude. We then have the faith that we can learn from everything that comes our way. We become students of the All-One Life, which continually reveals itself to us. And only then do we learn to love; to love the All. Thus the isolation banished into the narrow self melts away, and we learn not to remain with pain and joy, but to let pain and joy teach us. We come to understand that our own organism is an organ for the whole world. We realize that our real self is not at all identical with this organism; we learn to regard ourselves as a tool through which the world acts on our higher self, and this higher self on the world. But then we will also soon find that this higher self is a member in the spirit-all-organism, entrusted to us as a pledge, so that we can regard ourselves as emissaries of the divine all-will. We feel more and more like missionaries of the great world spirit. And when we feel like this, we sense something of the atmosphere of the “Hall of Learning”. But then we can also ascend to the feeling of what the 3rd hall, that of “Wisdom”, is. We experience the connection with the All-Spirit and become aware that the highest knowledge flows to us from within. We begin to allow ourselves to be carried along by this stream. The gates of inspiration open for us. We will guide ourselves in the true sense, not be guided by the impulses of the outside world. We are reborn in this way. For, as we were previously a child of the world, so now we become a child of the spirit. The spirit within shows us the way. An infinite sense of security and calm comes over us; all success does not decide anything about our actions, but only the view of what is right. And this feeling of inner security opens our eyes to the hall of bliss. And then the seven voices resound. These seven voices, like all occult truths, have a sevenfold interpretation. And more and more we ascend to the highest interpretation, which is actually no longer an interpretation but a spiritual reality. But one must meditate within oneself to open up the following interpretations, then higher interpretations and ultimately realities will reveal themselves.

First, the first (symbolic-allegorical) interpretation.

1.) Feeling alive and immersing oneself in this living feeling, one must always renew the feeling that the world, as one initially sees it, is an outer work, an illusory world. One must immerse oneself in the living belief that this world will reveal the truth to us more and more as we immerse ourselves in ourselves. It cannot be easy for us to completely imbue ourselves with such a mood. For we must not forget that this world is ours after all, that we are indeed called to love this world. If it were very easy for us to say goodbye to the way we live in the world, then this farewell would not be a sacrifice. Then we would seek a new way of life only as we rush from distraction to distraction in ordinary life. Therefore, the voice that speaks to us in this moment of farewell must be the sweet song of the nightingale; there must be a real farewell to the illusory feelings of life. If we can often imbue ourselves with such a mood for a few moments, then we ascend the ladder of mystical perfection.

And we can discern the second voice in the things of this world. For as long as we live in illusory feelings, the world sounds disharmonious to us. We judge and criticize because we perceive the discords on the surface of things. But when we dampen our perception of the discords, we dampen judgment and criticism; and we immerse ourselves in the harmony at the basis of things. We learn to understand evil ourselves. We learn to recognize that evil is a force that asserts itself in the wrong place. If it were in the right place, it would be good. And so, at the bottom of things, what previously appeared to be discord is transformed into harmony. Not judging, not criticizing, but hearing and understanding makes the second sound resonate out of the silence. Every occultist knows that it has helped him infinitely to understand and seek everywhere, to understand uncritically, compassionately; and then the silver cymbal resounded to him, which is only drowned out by what an external hearing perceives from the surface of things.

“Listen within,” the occultist urges us. If you compare one thing with another, you may well find one thing perfect and the other imperfect. But it is not such a comparison that will tell you what is in the thing, but the third sound that is hidden in every thing like the sound in the sea shell. You will not understand the ugliness in nature, the wrong in life, the corruption in man by comparing one with the other, but by listening to the hidden inner self of each thing and being. Go into the silence, where nothing intrudes on you that prompts you to compare, and be spiritually alone with each being, then the “silence” reveals to you the muffled sound in each thing and being.

And after such an exercise, seriousness and dignity pervade our entire being. We learn to understand the world in its seriousness and dignity. Something must stir in us that allows us to feel fully serious about all things. This is the moment when it is revealed to us how everything is an expression of the most dignified whole. We get used to looking up from the smallest to the infinite, because even when we are confronted with the smallest thing, we are not left with the thought that it is an expression of the language of the universe, which speaks to us with the calmest dignity. This feeling, vividly grasped in our meditation, gives the fourth tone.

But then, when we have prepared ourselves, the spirit beings in the world begin to resound for us; then it sounds like the trumpet call, for we will no longer hear the secret of a single thing, but the sound of the universe itself. If we let the spirit of the world speak to us, it will resound to us from all things; but no longer as the individual sound of these things, but as the harmony of the universe. This is the fifth sound.

And this sound can intensify. It penetrates from being to being for us. It reveals to us the secrets of the world. Once we have grasped that everything is the manifestation of the One Spirit, we can surrender ourselves completely to this manifestation. We then see the world as a spiritual sound, permeating everything and finding an echo everywhere. This is the sixth voice.

We should bring ourselves to experience the ideas thus suggested in a spiritual, meditative way. We should be still within, very still, and vividly recall the images with which the tones are characterized in the “St. d. St.”, so that we listen imaginatively to them with the spiritual ear. And in doing so, we should fill ourselves with thoughts such as those given here for the exegesis of the tones. Not speculatively, but in a living feeling. Then we meditate correctly and fruitfully.

And finally, we let all the revelations of the six tones resound together in one. For we should not remain in one relationship to the world, but be all-embracing. And whoever has already heard the sixth voice must return to the first, to the second, etc. Only when we love the individual as well as the harmony in the whole do we approach perfection.

(continued next time). —

[Part 1: Enclosure to a letter to Marie von Sivers, early January 1906]

The development of the Earth

The earth is the fourth of the seven planets on which the human being successively develops his seven states of consciousness. It has been shown that the moon is the arena for the development of image consciousness. An “image” is only similar to, but not the same as, its object. But the consciousness that is developed on earth produces images that are “equal” to the object to which they belong in a certain respect. That is why earthly consciousness is also called “object consciousness”. However, this object consciousness only develops during the fourth, smaller cycle of the earth (round). During the first three, the conditions previously experienced on Saturn, the Sun and the Moon are briefly repeated. But it must be said again that it is not a mere repetition, but that during this repetition the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body are transformed in such a way that they can become the carriers of the “I”, on whose development in the fourth round the object consciousness depends.

So when, after the third round of repetition on earth, a kind of state of sleep is again experienced - between the so-called archetypal and the arupic globe - then, at the beginning of the fourth round, everything that can be considered the result of the development of Saturn, the sun and the moon emerges, initially in an arupic form. So we are dealing here with the descendants of the three lunar realms: the mineral realm, which is still in some sense plant-like, the plant realm, which has something of animal life, and an animal realm that is higher than the present animal kingdom. These three realms together form the planet that is emerging from the twilight: the Earth. It should be noted, however, that the former Sun and Moon are still contained in this Earth. When the Moon Manvantara came to an end, the Sun and Moon reunited and passed into Pralaya as one body. They will also emerge again as one body, although the tendency to split has already become apparent in the third round of the earth. Now the earth is going through the rupa and astral state during the fourth round, and is then preparing to become physical again.

The development of this physical state in the three kingdoms mentioned is the responsibility of the “spirits of form”. They transform the earlier “sense-germs” into truly formed sense organs, especially in the case of the highest kingdom, the animal-human kingdom. In all the earlier physical states through which man has passed, the sense organs had not yet taken on a fixed form.

Now, by acquiring a fixed form, these organs cease to be active; they lose their productivity, they become purely passive, suitable for merely perceiving what is offered from outside as objects. The productive power thus withdraws from the sense organs; it goes more inward; it forms the organ of reason. But this organ cannot be formed without a certain part of the human comrades being pushed down to a lower level. But now man himself pushes part of his being down into a subordinate region. He separates off a part of his being as his own lower nature. And this lower nature retains the productive power that the sense organs have had to give up. This productive power, pushed down into a lower sphere, becomes the power of sexual procreation as it occurs on earth. The “spirits of form” would cause all generative power and thus all life to solidify, to harden into mere form, if they did not concentrate this power on one part of the human being. Therefore, the spirits of form bring about sexual development. Without this, statues would have to be created instead of living human beings.

Now the whole process is linked to a complete transformation of the earth. Conditions arise that allow the beings described to live. This is made possible by the fact that the earth – still united with the moon – splits off from what remains as the sun. As a result, the sun emerges as an independent body opposite the earth. This is the external physical condition for the emergence of external perception, of object consciousness, and for the development of sexual predispositions. But at this time we are still dealing with a dual sexuality. This is because all the moon forces are still contained in the earth. During this time, however, although the organ of intellect is present, it is still completely inactive. It will only be able to develop its activity when the power of sex production has diminished by half, so that each being has only half of the former power of production. This then gives the two sexes. Outwardly, this is brought about by the emergence of those forces from the earth, which then orbit the earth as the present moon. If this separation had not taken place, the whole earth would have had to become a rigid mass, a mere form. But in this way only that which absolutely had to become firm has been removed from it, and this has become the moon, on which human life could not develop. Thus, out of the common planetary matter, the earth has saved what could be productive, even if only in the lower realm of sexual life. The representative of the “spirits of form” is Jehovah. He thus brings about the formation of the sense organs; but he also brought about, if he were now more alone in his activity, the complete solidification into mere form.

Now two events are significant for the further development. The one is the origin of the two sexes for the reason given above. The form of the sexual stems from the form-spirits. But this does not yet give the attraction of the two sexes for each other, their inclination towards each other. This is due to the fact that special beings embody themselves in the life of the two sexes, which descend from a foreign place: from Venus. Through them, love in its most subordinate form, as an inclination of the sexes, is now incorporated into the earth. This love is called upon to ennoble itself more and more and later to take on the highest forms.

Just as the Venus beings now release the element [of inclination] of the separate sexes [to each other], they also enable the intellect to become fruitful. It receives half of the productive capacity saved from the sexual power. For this reason, the monads – initially their manas part – which, as shown, formed during the Saturn, Sun and Moon cycles, can now descend into the organ of mind. But the activity of the monads would have remained cold and dry if the astral body had not received such an impact that the human being would have pursued the activity of his mind with a certain higher passion. This influence came to man from Mars. And those who conveyed it are the luciferic beings, who on the moon have indeed gone beyond the stage of the later existence of man on earth, but have not yet reached the point where, like the Lunar Pitris, they could have concluded their lunar development with the Lunar Manvantara. They, as initiates, now bring the astral forces of Mars into the astral body of man and thus fan the passion for the activity of the intellect in him. In this way they quicken man's realization; they stir him up to independence. This is the help in man's further development, which is provided by the luciferic principle. Admittedly, they also combined self-interest with knowledge. For they do indeed kindle thinking through passion, and this brings about self-interest. But only through this has it become possible for man to make the earth subservient to his purposes, to use it for his own benefit. Jehovah would have given only the form of the organ of understanding, and the spirits from Venus would have awakened only in this one dispassionate sense; for what could be given by them in this direction has indeed been delivered to the power of reproduction.

[Part 2: From the letter of January 7, 1906 to Marie von Sivers]

Yesterday it seemed to me that the thoughts I wrote down for you to read tomorrow still need to be expanded. Perhaps you will receive these lines soon enough. Therefore, I still want to add a few things to the chapter “Earth Education”.

You know that the Lunar Pitris, the beings who precede man by one stage, have to bring their existence on the moon to a stage that is analogous to the stage of human existence on earth. Let us now consider the middle of the earth's development. You know that man absorbs the impacts of Mars and Mercury and thus strives towards his “Jovian existence” as one strives towards an ideal. Of the three parts of the astral body – the sentient soul, the mind soul and the consciousness soul – man brings only the first, the sentient soul, from the moon; the mind soul comes from the impact of Mars, the consciousness soul from that of Mercury. The consciousness soul can only unfold because the forces that will later come to full development on Jupiter are already casting their shadows, so to speak. The consequence of this casting of shadows is the unfolding of the consciousness soul, which, as described in my Theosophy, can only then become the bearer of the spirit self. Insofar as the human being develops 'Manas' today, he is already living into the Jupiter stage. The Jupiter stage is now followed by the development of Venus for all beings that belong to the seven-part human evolution. Just as the human being lives towards Jupiter, so the Lunar Pitris of the moon (the 'twilight spirits'), when they have undergone their normal development, live towards the Venus existence. And the “fire spirits” are already there. They live there towards their existence on Vulcan.

If we want to describe the present situation correctly, we have to say: the human being lives on Earth towards Jupiter; the Zunar Pitris live on Jupiter towards Venus, and the fire spirits live on Venus towards Vulcan. When a being has reached the level of Vulcan itself, it has become a creator. During the development of the earth, the “spirits of form” are now in this situation. They are therefore the creators of the earthly human being. And to the extent that they are this, “Jehovah” is their representative. Since the middle of the earth's development, man has been dealing with: 1) With his creators, the spirits of form, who gave him his earthly form; 2.) with the fire spirits, which gave his astral body the sensual affects; 3.) with the Lunar Pitris, who gave this astral body earthly knowledge; and finally 4.) with himself, who lives as “I” in the consciousness soul.

The intervention of the fire spirits occurs in the Lemurian period, then the work of the lunar Pitris is added, and in the fifth sub-race of the Atlantean period, man begins to develop into an independent “I”. The incomplete lunar Pitris now work differently in this order than the complete ones. The latter impress the astral body from the outside in perfection with the Mercury impact; the former, however, must first complete themselves with what is developing in man. So they are stuck in man with their own essence. This makes them the luciferic principle.

Very early on, I was drawn to Kant. At the age of fifteen or sixteen, I studied Kant very intensively, and before I went to the University of Vienna, I occupied myself intensively with the orthodox followers of Kant from the beginning of the nineteenth century, who have been completely forgotten by the official history of science in Germany and are hardly ever mentioned anymore. Then I immersed myself in Fichte and Schelling. During this time — and this belongs already to the external occult influences — the conception of time became completely clear. This realization had no connection with the studies and was directed entirely from occult life. It was the realization that there is a backward-going evolution interfering with the forward-going evolution — the occult-astral one. This realization is the condition for spiritual vision.

Then came the acquaintance with the agent of the Master.

Then an intensive study of Hegel.

Then the study of the newer philosophy as it had been developing in Germany since the 1850s, namely the so-called theory of knowledge in all its ramifications.

My childhood passed without anyone outwardly intending to do so, so that I never encountered anyone with a superstition; and when someone around me spoke of superstitions, it was always with a strongly emphasized rejection. I did get to know the church cultus, as I was called upon to assist at cultic services as an altar boy, but nowhere, not even among the priests I met, was there any real piety or religiosity. Instead, certain dark sides of the Catholic clergy kept coming to my attention.

I did not meet the master immediately, but first one of his disciples, who was completely initiated into the secrets of the effectiveness of all plants and their connection with the cosmos and with human nature. For him, dealing with the spirits of nature was something that was taken for granted, and it was presented without enthusiasm, but it aroused all the more enthusiasm.

The official studies were directed towards mathematics, chemistry, physics, zoology, botany, mineralogy and geology. These studies offered a much more secure foundation for a spiritual world view than, for example, history or literature, which, in the absence of a specific method and also without significant prospects in the German scientific community at the time, stood there.

During his first years at university in Vienna, he met Karl Julius Schröer. At first, I attended his lectures on the history of German poetry since Goethe's first appearance, on Goethe and Schiller, on the history of German poetry in the 19th century, on Goethe's “Faust”. I also took part in his “exercises in oral and written presentation”. It was a kind of college college based on Uhland's institution at the University of Tübingen. Schröer came from German language research, had done significant studies on German dialects in Austria, he was a researcher in the style of the Brothers Grimm and in literary research an admirer of Gervinus. He was previously director of the Viennese Protestant schools. He is the son of the poet and extraordinarily meritorious pedagogue Christian] Oeser. At the time I got to know him, he was turning entirely to Goethe. He has written a widely read commentary on Goethe's “Faust” and also on Goethe's other dramas. He completed his studies at the German universities of Leipzig, Halle and Berlin before the decline of German idealism. He was a living embodiment of the noble German education. In him, the human being attracted. I soon became friends with him and was then often in his house. With him it was like an idealistic oasis in the dry materialistic German educational desert. In the external life, this time was filled with the nationality struggles in Austria. Schröer himself was far from science.

But I myself had been working since early 1880 on Goethe's scientific studies.

Then Joseph Kürschner founded the comprehensive work “Deutsche National-Literatur” (German National Literature), for which Schröer edited Goethe's dramas with introductions and commentaries. Kürschner, on Schröer's recommendation, entrusted me with the edition of Goethe's scientific writings.

Schröer wrote a preface for it, through which he introduced me to the literary public.

Within this collection, I wrote introductions to Goethe's botany, zoology, geology and color theory.

Anyone reading these introductions will be able to find the theosophical ideas in the guise of a philosophical idealism.

It also includes an examination of Haeckel.

My 1886 work, Erkenntnistheorie, is a philosophical supplement to this.

Then, through my acquaintance with the Austrian poet M. E. delle Grazie, who had a fatherly friend in Professor Laurenz Müllner, I was introduced to the circles of Viennese theological professors. Marie Eugenie delle Grazie has written a great epic “Robespierre” and a drama “Shadow”.

At the end of the 1880s, I became an editor of the “Deutsche Wochenschrift” in Vienna for a short time. This gave me the opportunity to study the national psyche of the various Austrian nationalities in depth. The guiding thread for an intellectual cultural policy had to be found.

In all this there was no question of publicly emphasizing occult ideas. And the occult powers behind me gave me only one piece of advice: “All in the guise of idealistic philosophy”.

All this went hand in hand with my more than fifteen years of work as an educator and private teacher. My first contact with Viennese theosophical circles at the end of the 1880s had no lasting external effect.

During my last months in Vienna, I wrote my small paper: “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”.

Then I was called to the then newly established “Goethe and Schiller Archives” in Weimar to edit Goethe's scientific writings. I did not have an official position at this archive; I was merely a contributor to the great “Sophien Edition” of Goethe's works.

My next goal was to lay the purely philosophical foundations of my world view. This was done in the two works: “Truth and Science” and “Philosophy of Freedom”.

The Goethe and Schiller Archives were visited by a large number of scholars and literary figures, as well as other personalities from Germany and abroad. I got to know some of these personalities better because I soon became friends with the director of the Goethe and Schiller Archives, Prof. Bernhard Suphan, and visited his house a lot. Suphan invited me to many private visits that he had from visitors to the archives. It was on one of these occasions that I met Treitschke.

But the friendship I formed soon after with the German mythologist Ludwig Laistner, the author of “Riddle of the Sphynx,” was much deeper. I had repeated conversations with Herman Grimm, who spoke to me a great deal about his uncompleted work, a “History of German Imagination.”

Then came the Nietzsche episode. Shortly before, I had even written about Nietzsche in an opposing sense.

My occult powers pointed out to me the need to let my interest in the true spiritual flow unnoticed into the currents of the times. One does not arrive at knowledge by wanting to assert one's own point of view absolutely, but by immersing oneself in foreign currents of thought.

Thus I wrote my book on Nietzsche by placing myself entirely in Nietzsche's point of view. It is perhaps for this very reason the most objective book on Nietzsche in Germany. Nietzsche as an anti-Wagnerian and an anti-Christian is also fully represented.

For some time I was considered the most uncompromising “Nietzschean.”

At that time the “Society for Ethical Culture” was founded in Germany. This society wanted a morality with complete indifference to all worldviews. A complete construct and a danger to education. I wrote a sharp article against this foundation in the weekly “Die Zukunft”.

The result was sharp replies. And my previous study of Nietzsche led to the publication of a pamphlet against me: “Nietzsche-Narren” (Nietzsche Fools).

The occult standpoint demands: “No unnecessary polemic” and “Avoid defending yourself wherever you can”.

I calmly wrote my book, “Goethe's World View,” which marked the end of my Weimar period.

Immediately after my article in “Zukunft,” Haeckel approached me. Two weeks later, he wrote an article in “Zukunft” in which he publicly acknowledged my point of view that ethics can only arise on the basis of a worldview.

Not long after that was Haeckel's 60th birthday, which was celebrated as a great festivity in Jena. Haeckel's friends invited me. That was the first time I saw Haeckel. His personality is enchanting. In person, he is the complete opposite of the tone of his writings. If Haeckel had ever studied philosophy, in which he is not just a dilettante but a child, he would certainly have drawn the highest spiritualistic conclusions from his epoch-making phylogenetic studies.

Now, despite all of German philosophy, despite all of Haeckel's other German education, Haeckel's phylogenetic thought is the most significant achievement of German intellectual life in the second half of the nineteenth century. And there is no better scientific foundation of occultism than Haeckel's teaching. Haeckel's teaching is great and Haeckel is the worst commentator on this teaching. It is not by showing Haeckel's contemporaries his weaknesses that one benefits culture, but by presenting to them the greatness of Haeckel's phylogenetic ideas. I did this in the two volumes of my:

“Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im 19. Jahrhundert” (World and Life Views in the 19th Century), which are also dedicated to Haeckel, and in my small work: “Haeckel and his opponents”.

In Haeckel's phylogeny, only the time of the German intellectual life actually lives; philosophy is in a state of the most desolate infertility, theology is a hypocritical fabric that is not remotely aware of its untruthfulness, and the sciences, despite the great empirical upsurge, have fallen into the most barren philosophical ignorance.

From 1890 to 1897 I was in Weimar.

In 1897 I went to Berlin as editor of the “Magazine for Literature”. The writings “Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im 19. Jahrhundert” (World and Life Views in the 19th Century) and “Haeckel und seine Gegner” (Haeckel and his Opponents) already belong to the Berlin period.

My next task was to bring an intellectual current to bear in literature. I placed the Magazin für Literatur at the service of this task. It was a long-established organ that had existed since 1832 and had gone through various phases.

I gently and slowly led it in the direction of esotericism. Carefully but distinctly, by writing an essay for the 150th anniversary of Goethe's birth, “Goethe's Secret Revelation,” which only reflected what I had already hinted at in a public lecture in Vienna about Goethe's fairy tale of the “green snake and the beautiful lily”.

It was only natural that a circle of readers should gradually gather around the direction I had inaugurated in the Magazin. They did gather, but not quickly enough for the publisher to consider the venture financially promising. I wanted to give the young literary movement an intellectual foundation and was actually in the most lively contact with the most promising representatives of this movement. But on the one hand I was abandoned; on the other hand, this direction soon either sank into insignificance or into naturalism.

Meanwhile, contact with the working class had already been established. I had become a teacher at the Berlin Workers' Education School. I taught history and natural science. My thoroughly idealistic history method and my way of teaching soon became both appealing and understandable to the workers. My audience grew. I was invited to give a lecture almost every evening.

Then the time came when I, in agreement with the occult forces behind me, could say: You have given the philosophical foundation of the world view, you have shown an understanding of the currents of the time by treating them as only a complete believer could treat them; no one will be able to say: This occultist speaks of the spiritual world because he is ignorant of the philosophical and scientific achievements of the time.

I had now also reached the fortieth year, before the onset of which, in the sense of the masters, no one may publicly appear as a teacher of occultism. (Wherever someone teaches earlier, there is an error).

Now I could devote myself to Theosophy publicly.

The next consequence was that, at the urging of certain leaders of German socialism, a general assembly of the Workers' Educational School was convened to decide between Marxism and me. But the ostracism did not decide against me. In the general assembly, it was decided with all against only four votes to keep me on as a teacher.

But the terrorism of the leaders meant that I had to resign after three months. In order not to compromise themselves, they wrapped the matter up in the pretext that I was too busy with the Theosophical movement to have enough time for the labor school in.

Miss v. Sivers was at my side almost from the beginning of the theosophical work. She also personally witnessed the last phases of my relationship with the Berlin laborers.

For information; it cannot yet be said in this form.

The Theosophical Society was founded in New York in 1875 by H. P. Blavatsky and H. $. Olcott. This first foundation had a distinctly Western character. And also the writing “Isis Unveiled”, in which Blavatsky published a great deal of occult truths, has such a Western character. However, it must be said of this writing that it presents the great truths that are communicated in it in a distorted, often caricatured way. It is as though a harmonious countenance were seen entirely distorted in a convex mirror. The things said in Isis are true, but the way they are said is an irregular reflection of the truth. This is due to the fact that the truths themselves are inspired by the great initiates of the West, who are also the initiators of the Rose Cross wisdom. The distortion stems from the inappropriate way in which these truths were absorbed by the soul of H. P. Blavatsky. For the educated world, this fact should have been proof of the higher source of inspiration for these truths. After all, no one who expressed them in such a distorted way could have received them through themselves. Because the initiators of the West saw how little chance they had of continuing the flow of spiritual wisdom into humanity in this way, they decided to abandon the matter in this form for the time being. But once the gate was open, Blavatsky's soul was prepared so that spiritual wisdom could flow into it. Eastern initiators were able to take possession of it. These Eastern initiators initially had the very best of intentions. They saw how humanity was heading towards the terrible danger of a complete materialization of the way of thinking through Anglo-Americanism. They, the Eastern Initiators, wanted to instill their form of anciently preserved spiritual knowledge into the Western world. Under the influence of this current, the Theosophical Society took on an Eastern character, and under the same influence, Sinnett's “Esoteric Buddhism” and Blavatsky's “Secret Doctrine” were inspired. But both became distortions of the truth. Sinnett's work distorts the lofty pronouncements of the initiators through an inadequate philosophical intellectualism carried into it, and Blavatsky's “Secret Doctrine” through their own chaotic soul.

The result of this was that the initiators, including the Eastern ones, increasingly withdrew their influence from the official Theosophical Society, and that this became a playground for all kinds of occult powers that distorted the high cause. There was a brief episode in which Annie Besant, through her pure, lofty way of thinking and living, came into the initiators' current. But this little episode came to an end when Annie Besant surrendered to the influence of certain Indians who, under the influence of German philosophers, who they misinterpreted, developed a grotesque intellectualism. That was the situation when I myself was faced with the necessity of joining the Theosophical Society. It had been founded by true initiates, and thus it is, even if subsequent events have given it a certain imperfection, for the time being an instrument for the spiritual life of the present. Its beneficial further development in Western countries depends entirely on the extent to which it proves capable of incorporating the principle of Western initiation among its influences. For the Eastern initiations must necessarily leave untouched the Christ principle as the central cosmic factor of evolution. Without this principle, however, the theosophical movement would have to remain without a decisive influence on Western cultures, which have the Christ life at their starting point. The revelations of Oriental initiation would have to present themselves in the West as a sect alongside living culture. They could only hope to succeed in evolution if they eradicated the Christ principle from Western culture. But this would be identical with extinguishing the actual purpose of the earth, which lies in the realization and realization of the intentions of the living Christ. To reveal this in its full wisdom, beauty and form is the deepest goal of Rosicrucianism. Regarding the value of Eastern wisdom as a subject of study, there can only be the opinion that this study is of the highest value because Western peoples have lost their sense of esotericism, while the Eastern peoples have retained it. But only the opinion should exist about the introduction of the right esotericism in the West that this can only be the Rosicrucian-Christian one, because it also gave birth to Western life, and because by losing it, humanity would deny the meaning and purpose of the earth. Only in this esoteric can the harmony of science and religion flourish, while any fusion of Western knowledge with Eastern esotericism can only produce such barren bastards as Sinnett's “Esoteric Buddhism” is. One can schematically represent the correct:

[Transcription:] Primordial Revelation Evolution Indian esotericism Christ / Esoteric Rosicrucianism Modern Western materialistic science Synthesis: fruitful modern Theosophy

the incorrect, of which Sinnett's “Esoteric Buddhism” and Blavatsky's “Secret Doctrine” are examples:

[Transcription:] Primordial Revelation Evolution Indian esotericism / Development not shared by the Eastern world / Modern materialistic science / Synthesis: Sinnett, Blavatzki.