The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Esteemed attendees! Eight days ago, I described the structure of the realm that everyone who enters the state between two embodiments has to pass through, the so-called mental realm or the world of Devachan. I have described to you that we have to distinguish three different areas, and I have also noted that the words we have at our disposal in our ordinary language are insufficient to convey our perceptions in the mental realm, so that we are often only able to express what can be perceived in this realm, which man passes through between two embodiments, only in hints and sometimes only allegorically. Those who, as initiates, know about this region describe it in words that are more suggestive than descriptive. Therefore, you must also accept the descriptions I gave last time more as a suggestion, because it is almost inexpressible for someone whose mind is open to the devachanic world.

I have described three regions of Devachan and remarked that these would correspond to three regions on our earth: the solid mountainous region of Devachan, which is the continental region of Devachan; the liquid ocean region of Devachan; and the region of the aerial sea.

One of the German poets who knew something about this country, as I mentioned last time, was Goethe. Goethe described this country more externally through his Mephistopheles. But even from this description, you can see that Goethe knew how difficult it is to speak of this country. He describes it by having Mephistopheles point out to Faust what he will find there. Mephistopheles says the following:

And even if you swam across the ocean
And saw the boundlessness there,
You would still see waves breaking on the shore,
even if you dread your own demise.
You would still see something! You would see, in the green expanse
of the calm seas, dolphins gliding by;
you would see clouds passing by, the sun, moon and stars.
You will see nothing in the eternal, empty distance,
not hear the step you take, find nothing solid where you rest!

We can see this – for those who look at it rationally – as an approximate description of this realm. In another passage, Mephistopheles says to Faust:

Take this key!
The key will sense the right place;
Follow it down: it will lead you to the mothers.

The realm of the mothers was also spoken of in the time of Plutarch; for Goethe it is the realm of the uncreated. That is why he has Mephisto say to Faust:

Then sink! I could also say: rise!

So Devachan is not above or below, but everywhere.

Escape from the originated
Into the realm of the formless!
Delight thyself in what has long ceased to be!

That is the description of a European. I will now give you the description of a Hindu sage; it is colored in an oriental way, but nevertheless the same content; it says: There are many thousands of world systems. A realm of bliss underlies this world. The realms are bounded by seven rows of fences, they are ruled by the Tathagata, and they belong to the Bodhisattvas. The waters flow through these realms and have seven properties.

I have described three realms of Devachan, which correspond to our solid land, our ocean and the air sea. I have said that in Devachan the land looks different from our present land, and I have said that we find forms there that we also see here, but embedded like a seal impression. This continent forms the foundation of Devachan. Within it moves the living ocean; pink-hued, it permeates all being and forms the source of life for all forms, all structures that are to arise as plants, human beings and animals. The etheric body is of a very special kind in Devachan. We see our physical etheric body as blue; the etheric body in Devachan is reddish and radiant. It is characterized by an extraordinary sentience that rests in each of its atoms, animating every single atom. Everything that asserts itself in the aura is sentient life. All the pain and pleasure I have experienced in the lower realms is expressed in the air circle of Devachan. He who perceives on this plane, he understands what an initiate of the Christian religion, Paul, says: All creatures groan in pain, awaiting adoption. The air is also permeated by a spherical sound, by music, which the ancient Pythagoreans called the harmony of the spheres. Those who have already heard this harmony, which is the expression of the harmony of the cosmos, hear it everywhere, although it is drowned out by the noise of everyday life. This is expressed in the description of the Hindu sage as fences.

Now we come to the fourth region of the spiritual realm. This is a very special realm; the creators and inspirers of all things are at work there. The so-called akasha substance is the substance, the clay from which everything is formed. This is an image that all magicians speak of. Goethe also speaks of it in the passage where he speaks of fire air. It is the substance that has the greatest plasticity, the substance into which one can impress material forms on one side and spirit on the other. It is the substance that was no longer known since the beginning of Christianity, no longer known until the Theosophical Society appeared. When the first request was made to Sinnett to make these things known to the Western world, we hear in his book “The Occult World” a description of this matter, which is said to contain magical powers. And we read there how the Master himself expresses it, that Western cultural people will only come to understand the meaning of the Akasha matter with difficulty and slowly.

As I described eight days ago, the devachan world can be divided into three lower realms and three higher realms. The three higher realms resonate and shine into the three lower realms. If we have designated the lower devachan realms – in theosophical language 'rupa realms' – as mainland, ocean, and airspace, then beyond the fourth realm – [akasha] – the three highest realms of devachan expand, which in theosophical language are called 'arupa realms'. In addition to everything that is on this side of Devachan – that is, the astral realm and the physical realm – the original states are present in the higher Devachan. These Arupa realms are inhabited by beings of the most exalted kind. The masters of the original Christian wisdom still described these realms; they were known in Christian wisdom until the 13th century; then knowledge of them was lost. No one understands the Christian wisdom of earlier centuries if they do not recognize that some of the writings speak of the three highest realms of Devachan. These three realms are, as I said, inhabited by exalted beings who guide and direct all the events in the lower realms.

In the fairy tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, Goethe also hints at the first level of the higher Devachan. You can read there: — This is one of the most profound words that Goethe spoke. From the kingdom of light in Devachan arises the so-called kingdom of conversation, that realm in which not only light, but also the stream of knowledge flows as light, and through this stream the higher beings in man express the eternal truths, through it the conversation of the cosmos resounds. This brings us to the higher realm in which the words for this conversation are, as it were, generated, in which the voice resounds in which lies the origin of the world, which men speak of as the “Word” from which the worlds have emerged. In the realm of conversation, of the light of knowledge, live a series of most exalted beings, which in Christian wisdom have been called the Exusiai. These are entities that are difficult to describe with an expression of the Occident. These entities become visible in the garment of the light of knowledge. I have already indicated that Moses appeared to such a being in the burning bush. This points to a being of the Exusiai. The garment of these entities is woven from the substance of this realm; they become visible and proclaim the truth to those who are ready to hear it.

We now ascend to even higher regions. There we meet beings who can no longer become visible, but who can speak to the person when he becomes ready to hear them. The first teachers of Christian wisdom called them Dynamis. These are beings who radiate widely as creative forces. In the next realm we find the rulers, the Kyriotetes. Thus we have the hierarchy of these exalted beings, sounding in the three highest realms of Devachan. In Christian esotericism, there are indications that these insights were still alive in the first centuries of Christianity, but that they have been lost because there have been fewer and fewer Christian initiates.

Also in the realm I have described earlier, in the air circle of Devachan, there are entities whose clothing is woven from the air circle of Devachan, but which have quite opposite qualities to those we humans possess. It is difficult to describe the qualities of these entities that live in the air circle of Devachan. If we ascribe sensations to men, we must ascribe to these beings that they do not receive or accept sensations, but that they carry sensations out through the air circle. They are therefore beings of a completely different nature. Wherever they go, they radiate forces of sensation, whereas sensations flow in to us humans. Only in this way can I describe what characterizes these beings. In Christian esotericism, this was expressed by calling these beings archangels. Today this expression is no longer understood. It must not be applied to physical powers, that would be superstition. It must be applied to the devachanic beings who carry the message of feeling through the sphere of Devachan and spread everywhere that which is purest feeling.

The ocean of Devachan is comparable to a rose-colored stream that pours over everything. It is animated by a series of entities called messengers, called Angeloi. These do not carry the sensation, they carry life through the realms of Devachan, they are life-bearers.

And the solid realm, the continental realm of Devachan is animated and ensouled by the beings that are called Archai in Christian esotericism – in English, primal forces. The lower realm of Devachan, the solid realm, the continental realm, is animated by these Archai. They are the ones who breathe life into everything.

These are the entities that are called the hierarchies of the archai, the archangeloi and the angeloi in Christian esotericism. These entities are encountered by people whose devachanic senses are open, but they are also encountered by every person who has died and goes through the conditions of the interim between two embodiments. I have already pointed out that when a person has laid down his body, he has to spend some time in the astral world. I will come back to this. I would now just like to say what takes place in this country, where a person is prepared to enter Devachan. Everything that a person has brought with him from the physical world is purified by the Kamakräfte in the astral world. Even the so-called sense of self slowly dissolves in the astral world; all chaotic forces dissolve when a person is to enter devachan.

I will now mention once more the four higher realms of the astral realm, which are also called the sympathy layers. They are filled with fine astral matter, with the matter of sympathy – in contrast to the matter of egoism of the lower three levels. In the fourth realm, egoism dissolves, and in the fifth realm, sensual pleasure dissolves. In this fifth part of the astral realm, man learns to admire the beauty of the world, not because it is pleasant, but because everything eternal and pure should be beautiful. And in the sixth astral realm, man comes to know the deeper forces of compassion, benevolence, and devotion to the world. In the seventh realm, all the life that man has taken with him from the lower realms melts away like snow in the sunlight. And then man has to pass through the four lower stages of Devachan, which I have described earlier. Life on these four stages has great significance.

I have said that the primal forces, the archai, are to be found in this first realm of Devachan. It is with these that man makes contact. We find the disembodied souls there, gathering new strength for their later life. Everything that has held people together in family ties, in tribal affiliations, in national associations, in state federations, in short, everything that more or less points to blood relationship in the human race, all that is spiritualized in this realm of the primal forces, so that the person is purified by what he has learned and can be endowed with higher abilities. The purpose of the realm of Devachan is to enable people to develop the higher abilities they have acquired during their life on Earth. People should gain experience in the physical world, and these experiences should be transformed into abilities. We should emerge from the school of life improved and strengthened.

Now the human being moves into the second region of Devachan. The ocean of Devachan is the realm that is all-uniting. Just as water connects the lands, so in Devachan the flowing, rose-colored water connects all that has boundaries in the lower realm. Boundaries are erected wherever there are family, tribal, national or state associations. These demarcations must be, but at the same time, the sense of belonging together, the harmony of all beings, must be established. The beings must come together in the stream that flows through everything. When man enters into this stream that flows through everything, he enjoys the fruits of what he has sown. There everyone will find that which elevates him above the limitations of existence; man is purified from that which must cling to man within the earthly realm. He is led to acquire new abilities. They are only germs, but the flowers that arise from them are the abilities that he develops and brings with him into the new life.

The third is what I have described as the air circle of Devachan. Man also enters this air circle between two embodiments. Where within the aura the deep sighing of nature can be heard, where every thunder roll means an evocation of pain, where the sunlight corresponds to what we call eternal bliss and beatitude, there the seed is sown that will later, at the time of re-embodiment, sprout into the sense of philanthropy, of noble humanity. Here active and understanding devotion arises, laboring love, and this is the plant that thrives here above all others, that man develops within himself. Here man will see in his fruits what he has experienced in the selfish world. Here he becomes a working human being, the human being who first knows the words humanity and philanthropy in the full sense of the word.

Then comes the fourth kingdom [Akasha], the kingdom of the sound of all world existence. Here man learns to recognize that which gives form and shape to beings and things in the whole of world existence. Here man learns to recognize how sound joins tone to form a symphony, how natural force joins natural force and transforms itself into “tools”. Here man gets to know the beings that discover and invent. Here he not only learns to recognize what the forces are as such, but he gets to know them as living entities. Here the human being permeates himself with the living, productive creative power. He learns to recognize not only the expressions of human existence that are created here, but also the human institutions that make the human sphere come alive and suitable for human life. In all of this, laws live that are experienced in the Akasha as living beings. By immersing himself in their splendor, man immerses himself in the fourth realm of Devachan in the way the weaving is done “at the whirling loom of time”. He learns to recognize this.

These are the four stages in which the human being lives out what he has prepared in his earthly existence and develops new abilities. This marks an important moment for the human being. When he has passed through this fourth realm, the moment has come when he is transferred to the other side of our world system, into the actual realm of the spiritual, into the realm where impressions are formed from the other side. A human being can only spend a short time there; only those who have already reached a higher level of development remain for a longer period. The as yet undeveloped human beings only have a momentary glimpse in this higher realm, and then descend again into the lower realms to gain experience there, so that when they return, they will stay there longer and longer. When man enters this kingdom again, then the abilities that were formerly limited by the material world develop. I call it an important moment because what was formerly held together by matter is completely discarded and removed. What was once narrow now becomes wide, what was once stuck together and inside each other now unfolds; it becomes fluid, man becomes free. The abilities are no longer restricted by the material world. This can only be compared to a plant, for example, which cannot grow freely, but has to grow between crevices and has to adapt to the shape of the crevices; it grows upwards, but is restricted by the crevice. It is the same for the human soul. Suppose the crevice softens and softens, allowing the plant to unfold a little more. Has the human soul entered the Akashic realm: there is absolute equality. For the one whose devachanic eye is open, it is wonderful to see how the soul unfolds during the transition from the Akashic realm to the higher realms of Devachan. We see it as a fine, ethereal substance in the middle of an egg-shaped or spherical, floating substance. It sheds layer after layer. The fine color of the Akasha is removed, and the pure being unfolds, radiant in the new light, in a light that cannot be described in earthly words. It takes on a completely free form. Every ability that was constrained in earthly life and that was not completely free even in the lower realms of Devachan is now released. The person becomes free in all directions. He can bring all his abilities to full growth. The more abilities a person develops, the more he “swells up” and the more he takes with him into the new embodiment. As long as he is allowed to linger there, he also makes the acquaintance of the Masters of Wisdom and Compassion. This is the realm where, by grace, he may receive from even more exalted beings the intentions that underlie the cosmos. From here they weave the garment of the world, which is woven from the fabrics of the lower devachan realms, from the astral realm and the realm of earthly substances. Up there, the intentions and basic lines of cosmic development are preordained, and there, too, those who have developed their abilities in the course of evolution can make acquaintance with the threefold sequence of entities I have enumerated.

In the first sphere of upper Devachan, he learns from the entities that have ascended to Exusiai about the miracle flower that springs from the seeds of the universe. He learns how it grows; he learns about the eternal forces of the universe. In this sphere, he meets the beings who have the power of thought; he sees how thought works through them.

The next higher sphere is the home of the entities of Dynamis. They not only have the power of thought, but also the power of the source; they are the beings who, as it were, have the seeds of thought. Compare the exusiai with the flower. Then go to the seed, which is now transparent, bright and clear, but which also has the power to become a flower. The spiritual power of the whole universe is in the hands of the Dynamis. That is why they are called power rays. Thus, through these entities, the seed of thought can be formed, and then, from the other side, the whole can be imagined into the Akasha, which is the sound of the whole world structure. This is how it is formed, as Goethe has it described by Faust, there where the mothers sit, enthroned in solitude and working at the glowing tripod. I already said that in Plutarch's time this realm was also called the realm of mothers. If you read about the realm of mothers in Plutarch, a completely new meaning will emerge from this story.

In the highest realm, the beings we call Kyriotetes resound. Only the most highly developed can gain a brief insight into this realm. There, everything is in harmony and unity; all peculiarity has disappeared.

The Exusiai, the Dynamis, the Kyriotetes, these are the three highest realms in which man's abilities are completely freed. We enter these realms in the meantime between two embodiments in order to draw strength from what lies on the other side for our work in the world of

What happens in this world, what we ourselves do and achieve, is the world of results, the world of effects. The world of causes lies beyond the earthly. When we

return to a new incarnation, new strength for our existence flows to us from the world of causes, and everything that a person accomplishes in this world, everything that shines within him as moral ideals, as abilities for creative work, as active human love, and compassion for all beings, and for the control of natural forces in technology, all this rests in the hidden depths of the human soul; it has been brought there from the realm of the higher Devachan, where the causes of the effects in this world are found.

In the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily, Goethe wonderfully suggests this when he speaks of the river – which we can compare with the Akashic current – and calls the opposite bank the garden of the flower, the garden of the beautiful lily. The messages of the Hindu sage also speak of such a flower. It is the power that permeates the entire Devachan. From this flower grow fruits, and the fruits are the archetypes for this world. If man wants to work, he must draw strength from these fruits by finding nourishment in them. Then man comes to development; he becomes effective and powerful.

As I said, Theosophy is not meant to draw man away from the world. It does not want to transfer him to a realm in which he becomes weak and feeble for earthly existence; it does not want that. It wants something quite different. It wants to point him to a realm in which he can draw strength and abilities to be strong and capable of his work in earthly existence. A man who does not know what lies behind and before him in evolution is like a blind man who gropes along, not knowing whither he gropes nor what he encounters. And a man who knows his way backwards and forwards resembles a seeing man.

The particular beings we will encounter later will be the subject of the next lectures. We will hear more about life in Devachan, about individual experiences and about the influence of the Devachanic world on our world. From these introductory lectures it should be clear that Theosophy is not a doctrine that is alien to reality, but one that is friendly to reality and full of creative power, because it does not lead man away from earthly existence, but rather equips him with powers that live in earthly existence but are not visible in earthly existence. Man must recognize this if he aspires to the realms that cannot be entered by one who is attached only to the sensual world. And to all natures hostile to the spiritual realm, to all those who say that there is nothing beyond the sensual world, we want to call out the Goethean saying:

Go on! We will fathom it:
In thy nothingness I hope to find the All.

If you, honored attendees, consider the ideas that Theosophy seeks to awaken about the actual spirit world, the so-called devachan world, to be somewhat improbable, then it may be retorted that it is certainly not new and certainly not strange when the theosophist points to this higher world that exists outside of our sensory world. Today, in order to delve a little deeper into the world of Devachan, I would like to begin my talk with the words of a German thinker who is well known to all of you, who had a great influence on his time, who knew how to speak of higher worlds not only in a dreamy way, but who, through the power and fire of his words, was able to intervene in the events of his present at the time: I am referring to Johann Gottlieb Fichte. We all know the power that he drew from the supersensible world, which made his words flow in rousing speeches with which he inspired the youth of his time to take part in the events that were necessary at that time. We know the “Speeches to the German Nation,” which are an act that does not belong to a dream-like world, but to immediate reality. When Johann Gottlieb Fichte gave the introductory lectures to the science of teaching in Berlin, he began this most mature fruit of his research and reflection before his students with the following sentence:

“This doctrine presupposes a completely new inner sense by which a new world is given that is not at all present for the ordinary person. This is not to be understood as some kind of exaggeration, rhetorical phrase that is only said to demand a lot, with the quiet hope that less may be granted – but it is to be understood literally, as it is said.”

Fichte introduces this view of the supersensible world — that is, at a time when no one had yet thought of founding a theosophical society — with the words that one is dealing with the manifestations of a sensory organ that is not present in the ordinary human being. He then continues:

But quite new conditions would arise if a blind person were to receive sight through an operation. The comparison is correct with regard to higher vision. What is not expressed in Fichte's words is that every human being actually has this tool and only needs to develop it. Only good will is needed to receive the spiritual world revealed. Every spiritual blind person can be made to see. This must be emphasized so that it becomes clear that the spiritual world is accessible to anyone who wants to seek it out. The messages that are given about it are only intended to hint at what is to be given later.

The first step is to get a description of the spiritual world. As theosophists know, there is a way to gain insight into this world through description. We are not dealing with a world that lies in some other place in the cosmos, but with a world that surrounds us everywhere, that is present everywhere around us. This spiritual world is present at every point in our world. When we speak of the spiritual world or Devachan, we are not wandering into another world, but unlocking our organs, reaching a different state. One could object that such a state is something extraordinary in man, that one cannot imagine it and that nothing similar can be demonstrated in a person's life. That is not correct; the rest of life flows quietly by without such a radical change occurring. But in fact a transition such as that which transforms the man of sense perception into the seer takes place once in the life of every human being, only we are unaware of it. Everyone sitting here has already gone through a similar radical revolution of consciousness at some time in their life. We must only reckon life not from the moment of seeing the outer world, but from the first state of the germ in the mother's womb. If we look at the human being from the first state in the mother's body, then such a change has taken place for everyone. The state of consciousness of the human germ, its perceptive faculty, is quite different from that of the later human being. Anyone who is able to observe this knows what important things happen to a person in the first months of existence before birth, and knows that the human being's faculty of perception has already changed radically [at birth]. The germ has a perceptive faculty that is essentially different from the perceptive faculty of the human being who sees the light of day and has an awake consciousness. The human germ perceives in a way that we call astral perception. The human germ therefore has an astral perception. Only later does the outer, waking consciousness develop. From the astral life to the waking consciousness, the human being develops. A similar change, something like a new birth, is the opening of the so-called devachanic sense, which is granted to the seer so that he may perceive a new world. The human germ perceives the dark currents in the astral world. It perceives the feelings that prevail in its environment. You can see this in the influences of the existing conditions on the embryo in the mother's womb. This change, this transformation of the germ's astral consciousness into an awakened, sensory consciousness, occurs in every human being at some point.

Thus it is the world in which we live that is revealed to us in this new state of consciousness. What we perceive in this world is initially incomprehensible to us; we are led step by step to perception in this devachan or spiritual world. Our perception in devachan is the same as when a child's senses open in the first days of life. A world presents itself to us, which reveals itself in glittering colors that are at first incomprehensible to us, and in sequences of the most varied tones. At first, one does not know how to interpret these colors and tones, which do not belong to our physical world and which differ essentially from the colors and tones of our physical world, until one has become acquainted with their meaning and context in this spiritual world. The one who enters this world, left to himself, often does not know what to do. It sometimes happens that the devachanic sense is suddenly opened in a person; such a person then drifts helplessly in this world of spiritual existence. Only the one who is led into this world by a person who was already a seer in a former life and who can methodically introduce him to this spiritual world learns to understand the meaning of these phenomena. He then learns to structure the succession of sounds and colors and to combine them, just as we combine consonants and vowels to form a meaningful word. The sounds and colors of the spiritual world appear to us like vowels and consonants, and when we learn what the vowels and what the consonants mean, we have the opportunity to learn to spell and read. We learn that a certain type of being that lives here in the spiritual world communicates through this language of color and sound. This is the training offered to the chela, the disciple, who has to enter these higher worlds to become partakers of these higher truths. We then learn to know that it is not a random combination, a random arrangement of the appearance of colors, sounds and forms, but that what appears to us is the expression of spiritual entities whose language this is. When we have learned to know and read the letters, a whole new world opens up to us.

I have indicated that a lower world than the Devachan world is incorporated into our physical world, which becomes known to us first, that is the astral world. For the student, it sometimes merges with the Devachan world. In the beginning, one cannot distinguish exactly what belongs to the astral world and what belongs to the Devachan world. Only gradually does one learn to distinguish them. Today I would like to give an example of how one can learn to distinguish between what is astral and what belongs to the devachan world, the spiritual world, which is our true home.

The human being as he presents himself to us in the physical world is only part of the human being. In truth, for the one who can see, the human being is a being that has many other sides to his existence than those that appear to the physical eye. I am talking about what is known as the human aura. The human aura is something that essentially belongs to the whole person. I have described part of this human aura in the introduction to the eighth issue of Lucifer. It is something that appears to the seer just as the ordinary physical form appears to the human being's sensory eye. The physical form is only the middle part of the human being, which, so to speak, rests in an oval-shaped cloud of mist. This cloud of mist, the aura, belongs to the human spiritual body just as much as to the physical human being. It is much larger than the physical body, on average perhaps twice as long and three to four times as wide. What appears to the seer's eye as a continuation of the physical body are light formations and color formations of the most diverse kinds. This aura of the human being, this body of light, does not appear in indeterminate clouds, more or less structured in colors, but as a kind of mirror image, as an imprint of what is going on inside the person. A person's passions, instincts and drives are expressed in this aura; everything that we call inner life is expressed in it. Contemporary physics should actually find it most comprehensible that we speak of this, for what does the physicist say? There are oscillating movements of the ether; this oscillating movement transforms what is outside into color. It is the same with our inner world. Within us are urges, instincts, and passions that emanate from every person standing before us. Just as this appears before us as color, so too do perception, sensation, and feeling appear to us, transformed through the spiritual eye, as a colorful aura.

Just as the physical world appears to the physical eye as color, so the spiritual world appears to the spiritual eye in a wonderful blaze of color, only on a higher plane. This shows an immense mobility of color. We see the human being surrounded by an oval body of light in which he floats, and which does not appear to be at rest, but as if flowing, streaming, radiating and losing itself at a certain distance from the human being. In the devachan realm, which appears to be in constant motion, the person has a basic color within them. The person's lasting mood and lasting character traits are revealed in the aura by a lasting color tint, formed by clouds that flow through it in waves. We see how wavy currents run through the aura from bottom to top, flashing through it like lightning, and how the aura is suffused with beautiful blue-red, brown-red and blue colors. We see the most diverse and varied colors, which change according to the different occasions. Go to church and observe the auras of the devotees. You will find completely different color tones than in a gathering in which political passions or human selfishness prevail. You will see the moods of the soul that daily needs bring radiating in forms of brick-red and carmine color, sometimes having a darker color nuance. And if you go to a church and observe the worshippers, you will see the colors blue, indigo, violet and pink. And if you examine the aura of a person who lives in the world of thought, contemplatively pondering scientific problems, you will see the thought forms shining within his aura, reflecting the thought that is not touched by any passion.

When we learn what is shown in the aura, we read, on the one hand, what moods and temperaments live in a person and what takes place in their consciousness; on the other hand, we see all ideas, from the most mundane to the highest, most spiritual, to the feelings of divine worship and the most sublime compassion, reflected in the aura. At first we can probe nothing, but we gradually learn and notice that there are two distinctly different entities in the aura. First, there are cloud-like formations with indefinite outlines that stream in more from the periphery of the skin. We learn to distinguish these cloud-like formations from the appearances that emanate more from the heart, chest and head and have a radiant character. These radiations always emanate from an inner center. So we learn to distinguish the cloud-like formations from those that have a radiant character. The cloudy formations, ranging from brown to dark orange, come from the physical body, from the lower nature of the person, from the passions and drives. In this way, we distinguish the spiritual part of the aura from the lower, astral part. We learn to understand the most common colors. The aura of today's Europeans usually has green colors that often fade into yellow. This green represents the actual intellectual part, the conscious part; it thus expresses the basic mood of the soul life of today's Europeans. When a person is in a trance, you will notice that all green tones disappear from the aura. So anyone who understands how to perceive the aura will not have a difficult time distinguishing between a fraud and someone who is truly in a trance. Likewise, a doctor experimenting with hypnosis in a clinic – we consider this to be somewhat improper, but it does happen sometimes – could very precisely distinguish whether the test subject is deceiving him or whether they are truly in a state of trance or hypnosis, if he can observe the disappearance of the green color in the aura. The shades of green also disappear in the aura of a person who is fainting, and they always disappear in the aura of a sleeping person.

The ability to see the astral aura is the first to develop in the seer. The seer perceives this manifestation of the person relatively soon and learns to distinguish the astral aura from the mental aura. The radiant aura is from the world of Devachan; it is spirit and belongs to that which goes with the person beyond death. It is that which comes from the true spiritual home. What fades from brownish to greenish, to greenish tones, belongs to the transitory; man sheds it with the physical shell or in Kamaloka, in order to then enter the actual spiritual world. This is a higher kind of perception, a higher kind of spiritual sense, when the devachan sense opens up to us. The devachanic world differs quite significantly from the physical world. The physical world is immobile and dead, while the devachanic world is characterized by a complexity and ease of movement without parallel. It is a world that is always moving within itself, and is in a state of perpetual activity.

Now the disciple, who strives for higher development, must learn to find his way in this devachan world. When we perceive in the physical world, things remain as they are, and our perception is based on things. The table and the chair remain still; they do not conform to our perceptions, but our perceptions must conform to the table and the chair. This is not the case in the spiritual world. In Devachan there are no such still things; and therefore, there is an enormous responsibility on the one who consciously enters Devachan. We must be clear about the fact that every thought that flashes through our brain is a real, actual process in the Devachan world. The thought in the external physical world is only a shadow of reality compared to the thought in Devachan. The real thought does not live in our brain. It is not a shadow, a reflex image that appears in our consciousness, but it is an entity that lives in Devachan. In truth, our thoughts are entities that belong to the spiritual world. When you think a thought, you bring about a change in the devachan world. To make this clear, I would like to show you by way of example what happens in the devachan world when you think a thought. Those who have access to the devachanic sense do not just see silhouettes of thoughts, but see the essence of the thoughts as a real object. Imagine harboring some thought or other, a thought that relates to another person. The thought becomes visible to the seer; the thought radiates out like a wave of light emanating from a source of light; and just as the flame radiates light in all directions, so the thinking entity of the person radiates in all directions. And just as light spreads in the physical world, so do the rays of thought spread in the world of Devachan, so that we can indeed see how thoughts radiate from every human being. Therefore you will also understand that the Christ is depicted with a corona of rays. This is not some fantastic thing, but corresponds to a higher perception.

When thoughts radiate, they are first in space and spread out in space, just as light radiates and spreads out in space. Let us take a particular thought. If this thought is conceived in such a way that it is directed only at you, that it concerns only you, then it radiates in that way. But if it refers to another person, then in Devachan it takes on the appearance of light falling on an object and being reflected back from it; and just as an object appears illuminated by light, so the person concerned appears illuminated by the world of thought. When someone radiates a thought that relates to another person – let us assume, for example, the wish that the other person may become healthy – then we can see this thought radiating, just as we see light spreading in all directions. But this thought, which relates to a specific person, does not just flow through the devachan realm, but seeks to be realized in the person's immediate environment. This thought then flows to the person to whom it relates. These are processes that you can perceive in the devachan world. You can perceive how exalted thoughts of man are caught in the devachan space and form a kind of floral structure, beautiful geometric figures that do not exist in the earthly realm. Although it may seem fantastic, all this is true reality for those who can observe in Devachan. Those who learn to move in Devachan learn to consciously send out their thoughts and to become aware of the harvest they will reap through these thoughts. They learn that every thought in Devachan is a fact, and they strive to produce only favorable effects with their thoughts. The uninitiated person sends his thoughts blindly into Devachan, while the initiate learns to give form to his thoughts. This is what gradually becomes clear to the student.

I would like to draw your attention to something in particular. Last time I mentioned that there are two departments in Devachan, so to speak. First, there is the lower division, the Rupa-Devachan, which is the world of the devachanic continent, the devachanic sea and the devachanic atmosphere; these are basically permeated through and through with sensation. Then I described the Akasha fabric, the pure etheric fabric of Devachan. These are all the lower regions of Devachan. Then there are the three higher regions of Arupa-Devachan. In these higher regions, the highest spiritual beings reside: the Dhyani-Chohans, the planetary spirits, and so on. These high spiritual beings also include those we know as Mahatmas, as the spiritual leaders of humanity. These have reached such a high level of development that they can teach the rest of humanity and transmit to it the great truths of existence. For the person who has access to the devachanic sense and is able to observe in the devachan, communication with these advanced human brothers is also possible. He learns to understand the language in which they communicate with each other, and he also learns to speak to them. It is then up to him to translate the messages he has received into everyday language. Such teachings, translated into everyday language, are what we proclaim as theosophical truths. Originally coming from highly developed human brothers and sisters, flowing down from the highest spiritual worlds, these teachings were transmitted to us by a few suitable personalities. But since we have learned to “read”, we understand the eternal secrets of world existence. To be able to translate them into the ordinary language of everyday life, we must learn to look up to these high minds, to the masters, whom we call Mahatmas in Theosophy.

It is of particular interest to observe how the chela relates to these masters in the devachan world. I have already described how thought works in the devachan, how it radiates out to fulfill its destiny. This is not the case, or at least not in the same way, with the thoughts that the chela reverently sends up to the masters or mahatmas to ask them for insights into deeper truths. The thought that the chela sends up to the spiritual guides still takes a very special path that differs from that of the other thoughts. It is as if this thought did not fully flow up to the goal to which it is directed. This thought, this call for information about the higher worlds, first flows into the area that I have described as the Akashic field. Then the thought returns to the disciple, not as it ascended, but enriched, permeated and glowing with what emanates from the Master. This is the reason why it is always emphasized that the Master is the higher self of man. In a certain sense, our own thoughts speak to us again when we enter into contact with these highly developed human spirits. Nothing alien should be brought into us; the Masters do not want to make us into slaves, not even into slaves in spirit. The masters therefore send us not their thoughts, but our own, so that we may recognize that it is the substance that we ourselves have emanated. These are individual experiences of someone who is able to move as an embodiment between birth and death within Devachan, whose sense of Devachan is already here in the physicality, who can lift the spirit out of the shell of physicality.

In the realm of devachan, we also find a large number of lower beings who are regular inhabitants there: these are the temporarily disembodied, those who are between two embodiments. Between two embodiments, people spend a long time in devachan.

If today I have described the experiences that someone in the body can undergo in devachan, then next time I would like to describe what someone who is disincarnate in devachan goes through, that is, the course of the stay in devachan between two lives. This will complement the picture considerably; and if you then add this picture to today's, you will have the opportunity to grasp this world of Devachan more clearly. You will understand some of what initiates say without it being expressed in ordinary daily use or in our literature as what it actually is. Initiates only ever spoke in hints until well into the 19th century. The allusions were always comprehensible to those whose minds had been opened. For those who know the world of causes, the words of an initiate who is not usually taken as such – Goethe – will be understood correctly. Goethe himself said that he had included many secrets in the second part of his Faust that only the initiate can understand. And in mystically clear language, he pointed out what the earthly, the sensually perceptible, is for him: that it points to a higher world, of which it is an expression. If we understand this correctly, then we will know that Goethe, as an initiate, drew higher knowledge from the supersensible world, and then we will understand what he wanted to say with the words:

All that is
transient is but a parable;
The inadequate
here comes to pass;
The ineffable
here is done.

The Theosophical movement seeks to describe, little by little, what many have considered “ineffable”.

In the lectures about the astral world, I have tried to show what path the human soul has to travel after passing through the gate of death. This path through the world of the soul - or the astral world, as it is called in theosophical literature - is relatively short. The longest part of the time it takes for the human soul to travel from one incarnation to the next, it spends in the spiritual world, in what is called in Theosophy Devachan, the land of the gods. I will use the expression 'spirit land' or 'spirit world' for 'Devachan'. We must see to it that we gradually introduce German expressions. And if we know that by the so-called spirit realm we mean nothing other than what is “Devachan” in Theosophy, we will be able to communicate.

In the astral world, the soul has to purify itself of what chains it to the earthly, of the drives, passions and instincts that are necessary for earthly life but cannot possibly cling to the human soul on its further journey. After it has freed itself from all this, it passes through the actual spirit land. If one wants to understand what it means to pass through the spiritual realm, one must realize this. I have often emphasized that Theosophy does not turn away from earthly activity, does not point to some other world, on the contrary: it makes it clear that the main task of man during his embodiment here on earth lies in bringing this earthly existence to ever greater and greater perfection. Man has to bear the fruit of what he can experience in the higher world into the earthly sphere; he has to apply in the physical embodiment what he observes in the meantime between two embodiments. For this physical embodiment, the task of the earth and of man is to be perfected in such a way that what has been perfected can be carried up into higher realms. It is our task to work on earthly perfection, for this earth, according to the cosmic plan of the earth, is not to remain as it is, but is to become a higher world. And that which will enable it to be received into a higher world, that is what people are to bring about in it; that is why they must return to the spiritual realm from time to time. Man is to work on earth to lead it to its goal, which is spiritual. To do this, he must enable himself to work spiritually. He must return again and again to this state of living purely spiritually in the spiritual world, in order to occupy himself from there with the intentions and goals for earthly life. What we experience in the spiritual world, we carry into earthly life. Just as in building a house the first and most important thing does not happen on the building site, where the bricks are laid together, but in the architect's chamber, where the building plan is worked out, and just as the workers only only realize what the architect has worked out, so the first and most important thing that we bring from the transcendental world are the goals, the intentions, the plans to apply them within the physical world.

The most important thing is done during the earthly embodiment. From time to time, the spirit withdraws to get to know the actual basis of earthly existence. That is the purpose of the stay in Devachan or the spiritual realm. When a person dies, he first leaves his body, then goes through a state of unconsciousness; he passes through the astral world and finally awakens in the spiritual realm. There he has to develop everything he has practiced in the earthly world. To continue with the same image, we have to imagine that the human being works like an architect who designs the plan for a house. Once the architect has made a plan, he also becomes aware of the imperfections and mistakes in the plan during its material realization; he is a learner, and in the same way, the human being also learns during his embodiment. Just as the architect recognizes, uses and applies the experiences and observations he has made during a first construction to a later one, so too does the human being transform his experiences and observations into more perfect insights and then, enriched with these insights, enters into the new embodiment. That is the meaning.

From a kind of unconsciousness, the person wakes up in devachan [between death and a new birth]. He then has to go through the different stages. In each of these stages, a very specific set of abilities is formed. We have come to know seven stages. I will let them pass before our mind again and at the same time indicate what the mind has to accomplish at each stage. I have explained that the lowest region is the realm of archetypes. But this is to be understood figuratively; it is a state. Within this world we find the archetypes for everything that confronts us in the sensual world. I have said that in the spiritual world we live within the spiritual just as we live within the sensory world with our senses, and we feel the spiritual world as we feel the sensory world with our senses, as we hear and see this sensory world and so on. What is a thought in this earthly world is a living entity in the spiritual world. What passes through our minds as a thought is only the shadow of a spiritual being. This spiritual being appears to us as a thought because it has to penetrate the veil of physical corporeality. Man impresses his thoughts and ideas on the world, and through them he makes the earth more perfect. In the spiritual world, these thoughts are things between which man walks. And just as we walk among physical things here, as we push against them and touch them, so we walk among thoughts in the spiritual world. The archetypes of the sense world are to be found in the lowest region of the spiritual world. There we are in the “workshop” where the sense objects are “made”. We see there the archetypes of the physical forms of plants, animals and human beings. We have to think about what we see. These thoughts remain in the background like a shadowy outline, and man does not believe in the reality of thoughts because they have such a shadowy existence. Just as the clock is created in the way its inventor first wore it in his head, so every thing is created according to the thought, and the nature of thought appears to us in the spiritual realm.

Thus the whole material world that we see here appears to us in the spiritual realm in its archetypes. We see everything there as it is made, we see how the plant, the animal sprouts from the animal and plant-creating power. We learn to see what is here from a different perspective; we see, as it were, the spiritual negative opposite the physical positive. We enter the world, the description of which must appear fantastic to one who has no feeling for it, but which is infinitely more real than the physical world for one whose senses are awakened to this world. It is the world of archetypes, the world of causes. A spiritual transformation takes place in us, which becomes more and more intense the more we become at home in this world.

I would like to characterize the journey through this world for you. It is significant because it sheds light on this world, a light of unspeakable significance. Our own physicality, the body we call our own, appears to us as a thing among things; it appears to us as belonging to the external reality. We see how it arises and passes away. Thus the archetype of our body appears to us as a link within the external reality; we feel that we are facing it. We no longer say to the body, “This is me,” but we know that it belongs to objective reality. And one gets to know a sentence from the highest Indian Vedanta wisdom, the sentence: You must recognize that you yourself are a link in the whole great thing - “This is you.”

We see what builds our body as if we were stepping on a rock. It is something completely alien. We learn from experience to understand the sentence, “That is you.” And when we practise this sentence, it is nothing more than a memory of what we have experienced earlier in the spiritual realm. We bring this memory into consciousness and experience a faint reflection of the spiritual world in the physical world. But this removes us from the world of the senses and lifts us into higher spheres. We feel ourselves to be spiritual beings; we know that we are a member of the Primordial Spirit, a ray emanating from it, as it were. We know this from direct knowledge.

The second principle of Vedanta wisdom is also directly fulfilled in the first region of Devachan: “I am Brahman”. “Brahman” refers to the original spirit. When a person has come to feel that they are a part of this original spirit, they say: “The original spirit lives in me, I am the spirit”. “I am the original spirit” is an immediate experience that the soul has even in the lowest region of the spirit world. This is the meaning of life in the first region of Devachan.

I have described the second region as the one where the archetypes of all life on our earth are found. When we observe life in our earthly world, we find it built into individual beings, into plants, animals and humans. But the life of these plants, animals and humans is one great, living unity. It comes from the common source of life. The archetype of this life, which lives here on earth in its reflection, flows there like an ocean through all beings in the spirit realm. The occultist knows that this flowing life has a rosy color, like a rosy ocean; as a fluid element, it flows through all beings in the spirit realm. This streaming, rose-red, liquid life permeates and pulses through all life in the spirit world. When the person has passed through the first region of the spirit world, they then identify with this flowing life in the second stage. Then they get to know the flowing life as their own being.

To fully understand this, let us again consider what it means to live in these regions [in the time between death and rebirth]. One lives for an exceptionally long time in the first region of Devachan. In the physical world, we are born into very specific circumstances determined by the physical nature of the earth. We are born into a country, into a family, so that through physical ties we acquire this or that friend. We establish, through physical circumstances, something that makes up the content of everyday life: life in the family, life in the tribe, in the nation – that is karma. Everything that comes from physical circumstances, we get to know and judge in its archetypes in the first region of the spiritual realm. And the abilities that we acquire through practice in family life, in the lives of friends, and so on, these receive their full development in the first region of Devachan. They are increased and trained so that we can return to this earth for a new incarnation with these increased and trained abilities. Therefore, we experience that people who see their whole task in the circumstances of daily life, who do not get beyond their immediate surroundings, their business and so on, have a long life in this first region of devachan.

Those who already have a certain preparation stay in the second region of devachan. This is created through higher education within earthly life itself. Man learns to recognize that the things of earthly life are transitory and only expressions of eternal origins. He learns to recognize the unity in all life and to look up to unity in awe. When the simple savage sees divine qualities in objects and regards them as a symbol of the divine, this already goes beyond everyday circumstances. In this region, man learns to recognize the creation and activity of the deity. There we see the followers of the various religions developing devotional feelings as they approach their gods with humility and reverence. Having passed through this second region, the human being reaches his embodiment with a higher degree of devotion. We see people who have a sense of the underlying unity of all things dwelling in this second region for a long time. We see them becoming familiar with the unity of all existence, and we see how these spirits, when they return to earth, become leading religious figures. These people see that the interests of the individual can no longer be separated from the interests of the community. This sense of community life is developed in the second region of Devachan.

Let us ascend to the third region. Here we no longer find the archetypes for what lives in earthly existence, but we do find the archetypes of the soul's existence itself. Here are the archetypes of all desires and instincts, of all sensations and feelings and all passions, from the lowest passion to the highest pathos. For all this there are purely spiritual archetypes, and they are in the third region of Devachan. Just as all life in the second region, in the third region all feeling, all suffering and so on forms a great unity. The instincts of one being are not separate from the instincts of another being. There the “That's you” has already been carried out. We can no longer distinguish between my feeling and your feeling, as we do in the limited conditions of sense existence. The suffering of the other is just like our own. We perceive the “sighing of the creature”. We perceive every pleasure and every pain, whether it is ours or someone else's. We say to everything: That is you. — We sympathize with everything. I have described this region as the atmosphere, as the aerial sphere of the spiritual land. Just as our earth is enveloped by the physical atmosphere, so the spiritual continent is enveloped by this aerial sphere, by the spheres of sorrow and misfortune, by the archetypes of human passions, like storms and thundering thunderstorms that are discharging. When we live in the third region of Devachan, we learn to understand the words of an inspired person and recognize what it means to unite with the “sighing of creatures who await adoption as children”. This develops another side of our feelings, we get to know earthly feeling from a different side, not as a selfish individual feeling, but in such a way that we have developed meaning, compassion for all beings in this third region. What we develop in our embodiment in terms of selflessness and goodwill towards our fellow human beings is the memory of this third region of Devachan; that is what we bring with us from this third region. Philanthropists, the geniuses of human benevolence, develop their abilities there; they undergo a long life in the third region of Devachan.

How do these three regions of Devachan relate to our earthly world? In the first region we find the archetypes of physical things, in the second the archetypes of life, in the third the archetypes of the soul world, of drives, instincts and passions. We find what we need to work within our earthly lives in the spiritual realm.

The fourth region is a kind of pure spirit land, but not in the full sense of the word. If we want to understand the difference between the fourth region and the lower three regions, we must realize that, however much creative power we bring with us into the physical world, we are dependent on what is already present on earth. We are like a potter who imprints his thoughts on the clay. In our desire to realize messages from the spiritual realm here on earth, we are dependent on the clay of the earthly world. We must adapt to what already exists. We must study what already exists in the world as physical forces and as physical matter. We must take as our guide the suffering and the feelings of pleasure and displeasure that our fellow creatures experience. We must bring with us from the spiritual realm what we find here. We create only an image of what is in the spiritual realm.

The fourth region contains the archetypes for what man creates as a kind of original work within the world, what he creates beyond what already exists. Everything that art and science have produced, everything we know as technical inventions, everything that would never be there without the influence of the human spirit, that can be found as an archetype in the fourth region of Devachan. Those who take part in the cultural progress of their time, in scientific endeavor, in the expansion of state institutions, in the perfection of that which is born freely from the spirit, that which is not bound to the soul: all of these are fertilized by what they experience in the fourth region of Devachan. We imprint what we experience there on sensual reality and thereby transform it. If we ask ourselves whether this fourth region is independent of the earthly region, we have to say: in a way — because the person who comes from it brings something with them that is not yet there. But it is dependent again, because the human being can only ever stand at a certain level of perfection, and he can only develop what humanity is ripe for. The fourth region of Devachan is connected to earthly existence in such a way that, on the one hand, it is free, but on the other hand, it is dependent on a certain [level of earthly] existence.

When we ascend to the fifth region of the spirit land, we are completely free from the fetters of earthly existence. Then we are free and capable of development in all directions. Then we have the element in our environment in which our actual, true, real home is. In this higher region we experience the actual intentions that the world spirit has with earthly development. We partake in the intentions of the world spirit. All things become eloquent. We learn what the divine world spirit has in store for the plants, the animals and human beings; we become acquainted with the perfect form of that which the created world reflects only imperfectly. What we experience are the purposes, the intentions, the goals – the goals that flow from the eternal, we get to know them here. And when we return to the physical world, strengthened and invigorated by it, then we are messengers of the divine intentions, then we carry out that which, as truly spiritual, as independent spiritual, is to be added to this world.

Now you can easily imagine that what can be drawn from this region depends on how much the self has developed during its embodiment in the physical life. If a person shows no inclination to rise to higher intentions, if he clings to the everyday and cannot grasp what is eternal, then he will only have a brief flash in the fifth region of Devachan. And the one who, within earthly life, has little attachment to earthly things, who reflects in free thought about earthly existence, who practices works of compassion and charity without selfish interest, has acquired the right in this existence to dwell for a longer time in the higher regions of Devachan. This enables him to develop in a higher sense that which is free spiritual activity. Here he receives that which flows from the eternal, the divine. Here the self absorbs the world of thought, unlimited by earthly imperfection.

Every incarnation is only an imperfect reflection of what a person actually is. The spiritual self is in the spiritual realm, and by moving into the human body, into the human soul, it can only realize a weak image of what it actually is at heart. When the human being returns home to his true self, to his original nature, when he gets to know the fifth region, his view expands beyond his own incarnations, and he is able to see his past and his future. He experiences a flash of memory of his past incarnations and can put them into context with what he can accomplish in the future. He surveys the past and the future with a prophetic eye. Everything he accomplishes seems to flow from the eternal self. This is what the self acquires in the fifth region of the spirit land. That is why we call this self, insofar as it lives in the fifth region and becomes aware of its own being, the cause-bearer of the human being, which carries all the results of the past life into the future. That which reappears in the various embodiments is the body of causes, and that is the case until the human being moves on to higher states, where higher laws apply than those of re-embodiment. Since the beginning of planetary life, we have been subject to the law of reincarnation. The causal body is that which carries the result of a previous life over into future lives, which enjoys the fruits of what has been worked out in previous lives.

When, after a series of such earthly pilgrimages, the true spiritual self or causal agent has embodied itself in the physical body and now lives in the spiritual realm in such a way that it is able to move in the spiritual realm as freely as the sensual man moves among sensual things — because that is an experience we have: learning to move in a way that seems much more initiative and higher than within the sensual reality — then we move up to the sixth region of Devachan, then we acquire the right to spend certain periods between two lives in the sixth region. In the sixth region, the human self is already living out its deeper essence from within; there it lives out what we call life in the spiritual, in the eternal self. There it lives out what draws directly from the source of the divine self. There the human being learns to feel at home in the spiritual realm as the physical human being feels at home in the physical world. The laws of the spiritual world become so familiar to him that he regards himself as belonging to them. In this sixth region, the human being learns that he comes to this physical world as a messenger of the pure divine; he no longer takes the intentions for what he needs to work in the physical world from the physical world itself; he carries out the plans of the divine world order himself: he creates out of the spiritual, he works out of the spiritual. But that is not why he is a stranger on earth, nor does he act like a stranger; he has acquired a free and unbiased attitude in this sixth region. When he appears in the physical world as a messenger from the spiritual world, his work is all the more fruitful because he is not attached to the things of this world; and because he judges them with complete objectivity, he will do the right thing. His action will be an action of the divine order of the world itself, an expression, a revelation of the divine order of the world itself.

In this sixth region of the spirit land, the human being also enjoys the company of those exalted beings that I spoke of last time, who are involved in the plan of the divine order of the world. Their view of divine wisdom is open and unobscured. The human being who has developed to the sixth region can understand what they say to him about the divine plan of the world. When he returns to the earthly plan, he is able to determine the direction and goals of his life himself. Then he acts out of himself, he can consciously work in the future; then he is able to become an initiate here on this earth. The one who is capable of becoming an initiate has first, through deeds that are not connected with the earthly through selfishness, but that he has done in selfless sacrifice, gained the right to live in the intermediate state between two embodiments in the presence of the spirits and to become familiar with the powers and treasures of the spiritual country. When he returns to embodiment, his memory is open to his previous embodiments, he sees that he has already lived here and there, and he determines the future of his next embodiment – although not in every detail, because that cannot be determined. Those who have experienced such things in the intermediate state between their embodiments in the spiritual realm are the aspirants for initiation into the mysteries; they are those who are accepted into the secret schools and there learn the wisdoms that they have to proclaim to the world so that they may follow the path of progress.

These are the ones who can affirm from personal experience that the teachings of Theosophy are truths and facts. But they are also the ones who have the duty to proclaim to others, as often and as well as they can, what has become an incontrovertible truth to them, and to stir up in them the high feeling and strength that leads people further up the ladder of knowledge. He who is able to believe in re-embodiment, who knows that it is a possibility, has already reached the first step. He who believes, even if only vaguely, that re-embodiment is possible, can expect that this thought will develop within him into a realization of the truth, for faith, when it is a living power at work in the human soul, works wonders in the human soul. Those who do not know how that works which comes out of spiritual depths call such people visionaries and dreamers because they are not aware that they create out of a much deeper consciousness than their own. But the course of the world is a continuous embodiment of what dreamers and idealists have thought.

Only he can reach the seventh stage who has been an initiate in this life, who has grasped the meaning of the mysteries, who can contribute to the construction and the plan of the divine world order. After he has fulfilled his task in the lower regions, he enters directly into the highest region, from which the source of existence comes, where all life impulses and existential currents flow. Only the initiate has the right to claim the seventh stage of Devachan or the spiritual realm.

We have seen that man's task lies in this earthly world and that we must not withdraw from it. But what lies in this world must be fertilized by the experiences we have in the spiritual realm, which we recognize as messages that we have to carry out in our earthly lives. In order to be able to work all the more confidently, we must regard life as a school; we must make life a lesson for us. We must observe how, as it were, the rays of the higher life flow into the earthly world. We will continue our discussion on this next time.

Esteemed attendees! It is my responsibility today to conclude the lectures on the so-called Devachan plan or, as we have to call it in German, the spiritual realm. If you read about Devachan or the Land of the Spiritual Entities in theosophical books, you will find the description that this realm of the spiritual world is a realm of contentment, a realm of bliss. You are told that Devachan is the “land of delights,” the “land of happiness.” Well, honored attendees, it is very easy to misunderstand such a description and to imagine something quite wrong under these words. We must be clear about the fact that very many people do not know what the happiness of the spiritual realm is, that the vast majority of people seek happiness and satisfaction in things that are no longer found in Devachan. Even what people usually imagine in religious concepts as paradise, as a land of happiness and bliss, is still so closely tied to ideas of immediate sensual reality, to ideas taken from our physical environment, that we must not apply these ideas to the land of spiritual beings. What people hope for in terms of paradisiacal joys, what they call paradise, based on sensual perceptions, they already find before entering devachan, they find it in the fifth realm of Kamaloka, in the fifth realm of the fire of purification, and they find it precisely for the purpose of stripping away this tendency towards sensual pleasures and sensual desires. What the Indian, for example, imagines as paradisiacal hunting grounds, where he can indulge all his hunting desires, he finds already in the fifth realm of Kamaloka. But man must be cleansed of precisely that before he can enter the spiritual world. On the other hand, many people say that if they hear that none of what they experience here on earth as sensual reality remains in the spiritual realm, then the spiritual realm is nothing more than an illusion, a kind of dream that we dream between two incarnations. Both require a correction. The ideas that a person takes from their directly experienced reality need to be guided to completely different and higher ideas. One can gain a corresponding idea of what is actually meant by the land of delights, the land of bliss, what is meant by that deep intimacy and spiritual satisfaction that we experience between two incarnations, if one listens to what students of the great masters already know from their experience in this life.

Those who reach initiation in this life, experience something of this heavenly bliss, of this true spiritual satisfaction, through insight into the spiritual realm in this very life. You may ask: Is there or has there been something in our countries that is called initiation? Have there really been disciples in our Western culture who have been blessed with the highest vision that spiritual land has to offer? There has always been the possibility of receiving initiation in secret or occult schools. A current of occult wisdom came to Europe in the 14th century. This current, which is called the Rosicrucian current, was misunderstood by many; it must be misunderstood by all those who only get to know it from the outside. Only those who have been allowed to see through occult training should get to know it from the inside. When Christian Rosenkreutz brought the wisdom of the Orient to Europe, he founded schools in Europe where disciples were trained to reach the stages where vision in the Devachan, the vision of the higher secrets, became possible. Only those who have undergone training themselves know how to tell about it. All external research, everything that is written in books, cannot give you any information. Until 1875, the year of the founding of the Theosophical Society, these things were never spoken of at all, except in the most secret of teaching centers. It was only since 1875 that the Masters of Wisdom felt the duty to convey some of these deepest spiritual truths to mankind.

Initiations still take place today. However, they can only take place within the spiritual realm, the region I have described to you. Today, every person to be initiated must come to the Devachan plane to see these higher secrets for themselves. This forces me to give at least a small idea of how the person who receives the initiation on the Devachan plane feels and how he is transformed. What I have described to you of those highest entities that come from completely different worlds, first to enjoy their embodiment in Devachan and then to descend into the lower regions, into the three worlds, these entities can be seen by those who come for initiation in this field. When a person has attained initiation, he begins to gain a completely new faith, a completely new vision. He has truly become a different person. And what is not present at all for many people living around him, of which they never have an inkling, he sees with the spiritual eye.

Allow me to give you a brief summary of the creed that the initiate makes his own. You will recognize some of the phrases. All deeper truths have always come into the public domain and have been exoterically propagated in the public domain.

The person who is initiated gains a higher overview of what is happening here in our physical reality. He gains this higher overview by placing himself outside of this physical reality. While we live in the world of the senses, we are enclosed in the physical organization and can only see through our eyes, hear through our ears, and perceive through our other sense organs. We are dependent on what our senses convey to us. This is stopped by the higher training that the person to be initiated receives. Before the person to be initiated lies, I can only describe it, his own physical reality completely spread out. He sees himself objectively next to himself, and just as we look at any other object in the environment of our sensory reality, so we look at our own physical body when we are initiated. Our organism lies before us like our own corpse. But also our astral body, our desires, instincts, our whole sensual life of drives, lies before us, and we speak in the sense of the quoted Vedanta wisdom: “That is you”. We see ourselves completely objectively, with all our faults, with what we have achieved in life through the various incarnations. This is what is described to you as the passage through the gate of death, which every person to be initiated has to go through. He then no longer sees through the senses what he otherwise has around him in the sense world; he sees into the outer world from the spiritual plane, and not through the senses. But he also sees into the world of instincts, into the world of Kama, of passions, into the world where human drives are, into that which brings people into conflict and quarrel, what delights them and what gives them pleasure in this physical reality; there he sees into it as a pedestrian standing on a high mountain and looking into a mountain landscape.

And because he has risen above sensuality, because he has only a world of pure spirit around him, that is why he sees on the other side those entities that are spiritual in nature, and he perceives something of what is called divine wisdom. The divine essence itself is the Father-Spirit of all religions; no one can see him in his very own form. The Highest remains unrevealed, even to the opened spiritual eyes. But the initiate receives an idea of what creates and works in the world. He is led before the creating, divine powers. Then, for the first time, he utters the word out of conviction, out of direct contemplation, the word that was previously taught to him as a belief: [“I am Brahman”]. When the person to be initiated is now led through the narrow gate, where the physical and astral life is objectively shown to him, the word of the initiating priest is heard: To those who have, much will be given, and from those who have not yet, even that which they have will be taken away. — This is the initiation saying that is heard at the first gate of initiation. You will also find it in the Bible, like many a saying taken from Egyptian priestly wisdom. Those who have, are those who have already awakened to spiritual feeling and perception. But those who come to this gate without faith and without spiritual perception will also be deprived of their desire for spiritual knowledge. Woe to him who comes unworthily to this place, who has pushed his way in with curiosity; to him another voice is heard, which again has a symbolic meaning.

Man now experiences what universal spirit is, universal soul. We humans reflect on sensual things, but the spirit that lives in us, that we experience as thoughts within us, that forms the object of our reflection, is the same as the wisdom from which the world is built. We could not recognize the world with its laws if it were not built from these spiritual laws. Theosophy teaches that what lives in man as spirit, as manas, is essentially the same as what lives in the great universe, as Mahat. Man's manas draws wisdom from the manas of the universe, from Mahat. Or should a man believe that the laws we see operating in the heavens, by which the stars move, have meaning only in his mind? The Mahat of the starry sky is the element of intellect and reason out in the great world, and what you learn from it is manas, the element of intellect and reason of the small world.

Now the All-Spirit, the Universal Spirit, descends upon the initiate. The initiation priest speaks the words: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” The person concerned, now an initiate, knows what the spirit of the world is. Then he can express his belief in the creative spirit of the world out of his own conviction and say: “I believe in the divine Father-Spirit, which has made the spiritual, which is also called the heavenly, and the physical, the earthly.” In the Christian creed it says: I believe in God, the almighty Father, who created heaven and earth. — And then one thing has become clear to man: that in truth and reality he himself has taken his origin from the same universal world spirit that confronts him here in the spiritual realm. He knows that he has descended into the depths of sensual-physical matter; but he also knows that he has descended from divine worlds and comes from the spirit. He knows that the spiritual essence he bears within him he has received from the very source of the divine Father-Spirit, that he is a ray from the sun of the divine Father-Spirit. He becomes aware of this as a real divine power, as something he experiences and of which he has direct certainty. He begins to gain a new faith in humanity. Humanity becomes for him the only begotten Son of God, the Son of whom he speaks in his creed: “I believe in the divine origin of humanity — in the God in man himself, as the Egyptian priestly wisdom expressed it — or in the Christ in man, who has descended from heavenly worlds. And then it becomes clear to him that before these times in the evolution of the earth had arrived, these times in which we now live, these times in which people perceive through their senses, in which their sensual urges cause them to act — it becomes clear to him that before man descended into this sphere of the senses, he was in another, in a purely spiritual sphere.

The disciple has now come to know the spiritual land, and he knows that this land was the land where man was in his time as the only begotten Son of God, he knows that man is born of virgin spiritual matter – Mary or Maya – and he knows that the spiritual man Christ descended into sensual matter, he knows that this spiritual man is contained in each of us and develops little by little through the various incarnations, he knows that this spiritual man lives surrounded by sensual corporeality, lives in the physical body. The things of the outer world impinge sensually upon our body and build up our eyes, our ears and the other sense organs. Within this bodily sensuality we live and let the world penetrate into us. Through the sense organs we look as through windows upon the outer world; we are enclosed in sensual matter and therefore limited by it.

Pure and spiritual is the Christ who enters into people; he is virgin spirit-matter. Now he has descended into the contracted, sensual matter. Those who speak esoterically call this the water or the sea. Thus it says, for example, in Genesis: “The Spirit of God hovered over the waters.” This means that the spirit hovers over matter. In Greek, this matter is also called “Pöntos Pyletös”, literally contracted sea. Man has moved into this contracted matter, which has formed his organs. Thus, the active being in the spiritual realm has become a being that passively receives impressions from outside through the sense organs: Man has become passive, a Pöntos Pyletös. This is the difference between beholding in the spiritual world and beholding in the world of the senses. If we want to have an object before us in the spiritual world, we first have the thought, and the spirit forms this thought in the spiritual world, that is, man finds the images for all creation in the spiritual world. In the sensual world, man perceives passively, having become passive. We have all become passive, as it were suffering in the contracted matter. That was the original confession of the Egyptian priesthood. This is the symbol that the Christ has descended to mankind, that he has taken on matter and become passively suffering in the contracted sea, in the Pöntos Pyletös. In the course of time this was transformed into Christianity, and because the word Pöntos Pyletös was thoroughly misunderstood, the misleading passage in the Christian creed arose, which reads: “suffered under Pontius Pilate,” which is nothing other than the quoted passage from the creed of the Egyptian priests. Man has become suffering; he is no longer active, but passive. This is the article of faith which in the Occult Symbol signifies the so-called Incarnation.

When the person to be initiated has realized what is meant by these profound truths, he then searches in the objective, sensory reality until he has become clear within himself that he can now descend into this sensuality in order to work out of duty and in devoted self-sacrifice within the sensual reality. When he has reached the point where he no longer seeks to satisfy the sensual drives, but uses them only to work within the sensual world, then he is an initiate, then he is initiated, then he has the firm certainty that he can see through the general cosmic justice. He used to live locked in the sensual world, and the riddle of birth and death, the riddle of eternal becoming, was unclear to him. Now it is clear to him that he is eternal and above birth and death. He sees that which is changeable and at the same time the eternal cosmic justice, which in theosophical language we call karma. He has become a sage in the justice of the cosmos, he can judge between life and death, or, as it is said by the Egyptian initiates, between birth and death. And now he believes in the exalted community of spirits freed from the body. We are only separated in the sensual world; in Devachan we are a community of spirits freed from the body. The Christian creed expresses this when it says: “I believe in the communion of saints.” The Christian Creed grew out of the esoteric confession of the Egyptian adepts, which speaks a very esoteric language. It is partly translated from misunderstood symbols, partly from esoteric sayings, which the candidates for initiation received as direct knowledge in the land of Devachan.

From this discussion, you will now have a somewhat clearer idea of what is meant by the land of delight and bliss. It is the delight of infinity, of eternal activity, of eternal work. Why can none of the things that oppress us in the physical world oppress us in Devachan? Devachan is a land of bliss not because we experience delights there that man desires and craves in his sensual world, but because we are free from the material, free from what craves for sensual desires, but also free from what limits us, and because it makes it possible for us to react to what would otherwise affect us from the outside. What limits us in the sensual world is removed, what can cause us pain is no longer there. For what causes pain? Because impressions are made on our astral body or on our physical body. We have discarded these bodies when we are in Devachan; the reason for the pain and the feelings of discomfort that we experience in the physical world has ceased to exist. Because no one can be selfish anymore, no one can demand selfish pleasures; because no one has an astral body anymore, one is free from anything that can oppress one's own personality. That is why devachan is known as the “land of bliss,” the “land of happiness.”

I said that in the third region of Devachan, all pain and sighing of the creature is revealed to us, that we can perceive all the pain and suffering that takes place here on earth, all the passions and desires. But we perceive it as we perceive the objects here in the sensual world – a perception that is not so strong and not so glaring that it causes us pain. It is also not like touching an object that has a high temperature, so that we burn ourselves – in short, we perceive without feeling selfish pain or personal pleasure. We see the totality of all pain and suffering, and as spiritual beings we feel that we have to help alleviate or reduce this pain. It makes no difference to us whether this pain or pleasure belongs to us or to others. Our personality has been stripped away; the pains are no longer personal. The cause for personal suffering to arise for us has ceased to exist. Because we are disembodied and thus free from everything that could oppress us, devachan is called the land of bliss. The bliss in devachan must therefore be described as being incomparable to anything that happens here in the sensual reality. Only he knows what these “delights” of Devachan mean who, as an initiate, has already had experiences here in this physical-sensual embodiment and has received knowledge and wisdom of this Devachan.

Everything we are told about the realm of Devachan comes from the experiences and direct observations and insights of such initiates who have learned to be actively engaged in spiritual existence themselves. They have also learned that it would be the greatest illusion to speak of the life in Devachan between two embodiments as an illusion. It is precisely the illusion that we regard the life in Devachan as an illusion, as a dream. And in fact, all real life comes from Devachan. And only because the task of earthly existence is to lead people in their spiritual activity down to the earthly world, the Christ must appear in man, in sensual embodiment. That is why, according to the saying of Plato, the great Greek philosopher, the soul of the world is laid out in the shape of a cross through the universe and stretched over the earthly body of the world. That is what Plato said. It is a symbol that the initiate knows in its deepest meaning.

Just as the instrument needs the tool, the workman, so our physical existence needs the spiritual world, so that the spiritual world can be the architect of the physical body. Just as a hammer would never have been invented without the influence of spiritual reflection, nor could it ever have been used by a being that had only physical powers and was incapable of reflection, so too could man not fulfill his task if he did not repeatedly ascend into the spiritual realm and draw strength from there to work in the material world. He ascends to the land where he receives knowledge of pure spirituality, where he learns how spiritual forces work without them becoming passive within the senses, where he learns to freely unfold his wings and work. Then he can in turn become embodied again, suffering in the contracted matter of earthly existence, in the Pöntos Pyletös. From incarnation to incarnation, man wanders; again and again he moves into the Pöntos Pyletös; again and again the spirit is crucified in matter.

The theosophist can never be materialistic – not even to the slightest degree – and see the whole of existence in the physical world. And especially when he is able to make his own observations in the spiritual realm, he will come to the realization that asceticism would be hostile to reality. What kind of task man has as a spiritual being becomes clear to us in the spiritual realm. The earthly world in which we live is our assigned place of residence during our present evolution. And what we bring from the spiritual realm, we should use to benefit this earthly world. So that we can work on this earth, we are provided with new assignments from the spiritual realm again and again between two incarnations. Dear audience, we have now covered the three worlds. Man lives in three worlds: the material world, the world of soul or astral world and the spiritual world or Devachan. In this existence man lives in all three worlds. Every material human being also contains a soul and a spirit. However, man is only conscious within the sensual, but the astral and spiritual man also work in him; the soul and the spirit are also effective in every human being. Man's consciousness awakens between two incarnations in Kamaloka, in the soul's country; then man becomes enlightened, he is awakened between two incarnations – according to the level of development, according to what he brings with him from this earthly incarnation — in Devachan, in the spiritual realm, in order to return to the astral world, to clothe itself with astral matter and to be incarnated again in the physical reality. That is the path, the pilgrimage of the human spirit.

The human being comes from the spiritual realm. It was originally virgin matter from which man, when he still lived in the pure spiritual realm, formed a body for himself. Long ago, another life on our earth preceded this earthly state of ours. Then men were still pure spirits, then only spiritual reality existed. Then man descended first into the astral existence, not yet to the physical reality. He was then still the Adam Kadmon, that “pure” entity in which the physical world of instincts did not yet exist.

Then came that which is so wonderfully and symbolically expressed in Genesis: “Jehovah formed man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life.” The spirit met with sense-proof matter and with that, at the same time, the whole existence of physical and sense reality. Until then, man had been in a kind of subconscious state. The waking consciousness that we have today, this mind through which we consider things and with which we orient ourselves in the physical world, only came to man with the descent into the sensual world; at the same time as the lower sensual reality, man received reason. This is again symbolically represented in Genesis as the snake; it bestows the earthly mind on humanity.

The lowest point in human development is that where birth and death take place, where the immortal part of man must always pass through the gate of death. This will be replaced in the next epoch, when man, similar to the preceding epoch, will only be an astral being; and then the last epoch will come, when man will only have a spiritual existence.

Thus, the contemplation of Devachan teaches us, like everything in the world, on a large and small scale, that everything is in a state of development, that all existence comes from the spirit, passes through the sensual reality, and then ascends to the spiritual again. Contemplation of this higher, spiritual realm shows us that what we call death, what we call decay, is nothing more than a temporary, almost illusory state of an epoch of the world, that it is not something that can last. The conviction, the clarity, the knowledge that man has come from higher realms and that he will go to higher realms again, that is what gives us the strength to gradually, as we progress in theosophy, feel everything that an initiate of early Christianity – Paul – felt and expressed with the words: “Death, where is thy sting?”

On the other hand, we should never disdain our earthly existence. Just as the bee carries honey into the beehive, so we have to suck the honey out of the earthly world and carry it up into the spiritual world. But we can only find our way if we know what the basic forces of our existence are. For this reason I have given the lectures on the Devachan region. There was only one thing that could have induced me to give these lectures, and I know that they can easily be misunderstood. The author of the theosophical textbook “Light on the Path” wrote:

And once you have recognized the truth, you must not keep it to yourself. — Anyone who has recognized the truth must not keep it to themselves. And anyone who feels called to speak it must speak it, regardless of how it is received. Higher than everything else is the call from the spiritual world, once we have heard it. This call awakens in us a consciousness that is completely different from all consciousness that we know from our sensual existence. And then, from the perspective of the spiritual realm, we can make a saying of Solomon our motto:

Therefore I begged for insight, and it was given to me.
I called upon the Most High, and wisdom was given to my spirit.
I value truth more than anything that
lives in the sensual world around me.

The wise man values wisdom more than all the sensual realms around him. That is why he tries to proclaim this wisdom. This is to justify what has moved me to speak about this subtle area of existence, although I know how these things can be misunderstood and how difficult it is to talk about them in a reasonably understandable language. But if we have felt this call, then, in the spirit of Solomon's wisdom, let us express it in the words:

Propter hoc optavi et datus est mihi sensus
et invocavi et venit in me spiritus sapientiae
et praeposui illam regnis et sedibus et divitias nihil esse duxi
in comparatione illius.

We have seen that the Bible can be more and more deeply understood the more we penetrate into theosophical teaching. Today, however, you will see how theosophy, theosophical wisdom, existed for millennia, merely having different names, words and so on at different times. Today’s brief outline will be of something which was taught among the Jews of old. Today, the Cabbala¹⁰⁰ is something the profound wisdom of which is little understood even among Jews. It will sometimes emerge where you would least expect it. If you were to meet a learned Jew coming from furthest Galicia, who does not take much care with how he looks, so that he may look repulsive to civilized people, you may find that he still knows something of cabbalistic wisdom. In Austria these people are called ‘miracle rabbis’ for they have some knowledge of magical arts, being able to use suggestion much more effectively than our modern physicians do, for example. They are also initiated to a certain degree. Let me first of all say something about what is written in the Cabbala. You will find it said in my Theosophy that the occult teaching in the Cabbala agrees with the things taught in theosophy.

The Cabbala distinguishes twelve principles in the world, the first and last of which remain secret because they cannot be put into words at all.¹⁰¹ Only the other ten are put in words. They are divided into three groups. Firstly, the ‘spirit world’, the world of purely spiritual entities, secondly the world of the soul, and thirdly the world of bodily nature.

A Cabbalist will immediately say to each of his students: ‘You will never see one of these three worlds with your eyes, for at any time you can only see the “realm”.’ The ‘realm’ is our own world around us.¹⁰² I see a person, the Cabbala student will say, but what I am seeing is in the ‘realm’. In reality this human being is in the threefold world. He has body, soul and spirit. Through the body he breathes and feeds himself; through the soul he feels, and through the spirit he thinks. All this presents itself to us as a whole, as the ‘realm’. This is the tenth of the principles. This tenth principle is something in which the other nine come together in many different ways.

Firstly, the world of the bodily principle. This also has three parts. Every body is in itself. If it were not in itself, it would not exist at all. If you come up against it, you perceive its solid state. If it comes up to you, you perceive its appearance. Thus distinction is made between fundament, solidity, appearance. These are the three sephiroth¹⁰³ of bodily nature. We now have four sephiroth:

realm 10 solidity 9 fundament 8 appearance 7

Secondly: soul world. Again three sephiroth. The first is what we now call sympathy in theosophy; the Cabbala calls it love. Love is what the soul body gives off when it comes to another. Just as solidity comes to me from another body, so love is what I give out. 6 The second of these sephiroth is grace. This is not merely giving out, like love; it is more held in; it does not give itself the way love does, but gives something 5 to the outside from inside.

The third sephiroth is justice, which merely balances 4 things out.

Those are the three soul sephiroth.

Now for the sephiroth of the spirit world. They are the principle which is truly active.

The first is called ‘world mind’ in the Cabbala 3

The second the ‘world thought’, the mind which has 2 the thought

The third is the basic sephiroth, called the ‘height’ or ‘crown’ by Cabbalists (kether - the height). 1

These are the ten sephiroth. The Cabbalist then says to his student: you have part of each of these worlds in you. From the bodily world you have the vegetative soul (nephesh), plant soul, etheric double body. From the soul world you have the passion soul, the sentient soul (ruach), and from the spirit land you have the thinking soul (neshamah).

These are the bare bones of Jewish occult teaching.^*

• 100. From the Hebrew, means tradition; refers to the secret teaching of medieval rabbis derived from earlier occult doctrines.
• 101. In the 12th chapter of Agrippa von Nettesheim’s Kabbala, ‘The ten and its ladder’, it says: ‘God himself, the first monas, divides before he imparts himself to lower elements, first into the triad, then into the ten, which is like into the ten ideas and measures of all numbers and all that can be generated, which the Hebrews called the ten divine properties, designating them with ten special names for the godhead, which is also why there can be no more than ten.’ Generally reference is made only to one which cannot be known and which is above the ten sephiroth (ain soph, also spelled en soph; ain means ‘nothing’).
• 102. Concerning the concept ‘realm’ see also the discussion of the Lord’s Prayer in a lecture given in Berlin on 28 January 1907 in GA 96 Tr. A.R. Meuss, London, Completion Press 2001.
• 103. Sephiroth, plural of sephira (sef = number). The Hebrew plural tends to be generally used also in the singular. The ten sephiroth together symbolically are ‘Adam Kadmon”, the heavenly human being before the Fall. See the sketch Archive No. NZ 455 in this volume. In answer to questions following a lecture given in Leipzig on 12 January 1908, Rudolf Steiner said the following on the ten sephiroth, with reference to cosmology: ‘The ten sephiroth refer to periods of time, stages of evolution which the human being went through. The physical body went through four stages of evolution: Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth. The ether body three stages: Sun, Moon and Earth, the astral body two: Moon and Earth. The I is in its first stage. Together this makes ten.’ (The lecture notes available for this lecture are not adequate for publication of the whole lecture.)
• *. There followed notes referring to early Gnostic teachings. These have been omitted, being not only full of gaps but also distinctly faulty. Nor has it been possible to track the information down in the source works used by Rudolf Steiner. All the notes for the lecture have, however, been printed in their entirety [in German] in Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe Heft 29.

The course of lectures on the basic elements of theosophy which I announced some time ago will have to come later, at a time when numbers will perhaps be greater.¹⁵ I have put off the date for those lectures and decided to use the next few Thursdays to develop some aspects of cosmology, or world evolution, that is, the teaching in theosophical terms on the origins of the world and the creation of man within this world.

I am, of course, well aware that I am proposing to deal with one of the most difficult chapters in theosophical teaching, and it is probably right to tell you that in some lodges the decision has been made not to treat the subject for the time being, as it is too difficult. I have nevertheless decided to do it, for I believe that with the indications I am able to give, this will be useful to some of you. We may not be able to go into the whole of such a difficult subject immediately, but it should be possible to give encouragement, so that at a later time we may enter more deeply into the matter.

Those of you who have been in the theosophical movement for some time will know that questions as to how the world did actually come into existence, and how it has gradually evolved up to the present time when entities such as ourselves are able to inhabit it, have been the very first to be considered in the theosophical movement. Not only did one of the first books which drew the western world’s attention to ancient views of the world, H. P. Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled,¹⁶ deal with such questions of the origin and evolution of the world, but the book to which we are probably indebted for the greatest number of our adherents, Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism,¹⁷ has done the same. How does a solar system evolve, and the planets and constellations? How did the Earth evolve, what stages has it gone through and what would still lie before it? These questions are considered in full in Esoteric Buddhism. Then Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine appeared in the late ’80s, and in the first volume she, too, considered the question as to how the human race developed in Earth evolution.

Now I need just refer to a single point to show the whole problem. If you open volume 1 of Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine you will find that some of the statements made in Sinnett’s Buddhism are said to be erroneous and are in part corrected by her.¹⁸ The theosophical writers had partly misunderstood these things and partly presented them in a way that led to misunderstanding. Mrs Blavatsky therefore had to put them right. She said that a kind of Babylonian confusion of tongues had arisen with regard to theosophical cosmology,¹⁹ and that leading figures [in the Theosophical Society] certainly were not immediately well informed on these matters.

You all know that the contents of the Secret Doctrine were given by great, sublime masters who were far ahead of our average level of development. Before it was published, a book had appeared in which Sinnett, author of Esoteric Buddhism, published a number of letters by a mahatma.²⁰ We can thus see the problems which arise with understanding this secret doctrine, and we can understand that people who, like Sinnett and Blavatsky, were endeavouring to receive those doctrines were literally sighing, as it was so difficult to understand the doctrines that were given to them. ‘Oh,’ one teacher said, ‘being used to grasp things with a different set of mind, you cannot understand what we have to say, however much you endeavour to gain understanding of it.’ If we consider these words, the problems will be evident. Views that could be misunderstood arose wherever people spoke of cosmology.²¹ This is therefore well established, and I hope I may ask your forbearance as I try to say something on this doctrine.

Let me say something to begin with that will clarify the relationship of theosophical cosmology to modem science and its methods. Someone might come and say: ‘Consider the advances made by astronomers; we owe this to the telescopes, to the mathematical and photographic methods which have given us knowledge of distant stars.’ Modern science with its careful methods appears—in the opinion of scientists—to have the one and only right to establish anything about the evolution of the cosmic system. It appears that in modern science it is acceptable to disapprove of anything others say about the evolution and origin of the cosmic system. Many an astronomer will object: ‘What you theosophists are telling us about cosmology are ancient doctrines taught by the Chaldeans or Vedic priests and part of the oldest wisdom known to humanity; but what significance can anything said millennia ago have, since the teaching of astronomy has only gained reasonable certainty since Copernicus?’ It merely seems, therefore, that the contents of the first volume of Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine confounds the things astronomers armed with telescopes and so on explain to us. But a theosophist need not be in conflict with anything an astronomer says. There is no need for this, though there are theosophists who believe they must fight against modem astronomy in order to make room for their own doctrines. I know only too well that leading figures in the theosophical movement think themselves able to teach the astronomers. A simple example may serve to demonstrate the standpoint some theosophists take against astronomers.

Take a poet whose works give pleasure and edification. Perhaps someone else will be his biographer and will try to make the soul and spirit which lives in the poet understandable and explain it. There is also another way of looking at a person, and that is the physiological or scientific way. Let us assume a scientist studies the poet. He will of course only consider the physiological and physiognomic aspects which are of interest to him. He will tell us about anything he is able to see in the poet and combine with his scientific thinking. As theosophists we would say the scientist is describing and explaining the poet from the standpoint of the physical plane. The scientist won’t say a single word, however, about the poet’s biography, as we call it, or about his soul and spirit. We thus have two approaches that run side by side, though they need not collide. Why shouldn’t there be a scientific study and parallel to it one which considers soul and spirit, with each valid in its own way? Neither is interfering with the other.

The same applies to scientific cosmology, with the information astronomers give us on the cosmic edifice and the evolution of the cosmic system. They will tell us what can be accessible to the ordinary senses. At the same time, however, it is possible to consider the matter in terms of spirit and soul, and if we take the cosmic edifice in this way, we’ll never collide with astronomy; both ways of looking at things will sometimes substantiate one another, for they run side by side and are independent of one another.

For instance, when the scientific physiology of the brain was still far from where it is today, people were already providing biographies of great minds. An astronomer cannot object, therefore, that the occult approach is out of date and impossible since Copernicus put astronomy on a different basis. The occult sources are completely different from this; they existed long before the eye was trained to study the heavens through telescopes, and before photography had reached the point where it was possible to photograph stars. Copernican science offers something very different from occult research; and the one power in the human soul is not at all dependent on the other. The power which gives us insight into the element of spirit and soul goes back such a long way that no historian is able to tell us where this way of looking at the cosmic edifice did have its beginnings. It is not possible to establish how the great minds came to develop these occult insights.

Occult schools existed in Europe before the Theosophical Society was established in 1875. However, the knowledge we now present in popular form was then only shared within closed groups. The law not to let it go beyond these schools was strictly observed. People wanting to join such a school had to do serious work on themselves before the first truths were given to them. The view was that people had to make themselves ready before they could receive such truths. They had many degrees in those schools through which people would progress, degrees of trial; and when anyone was found to be unready they would have to continue to prepare themselves. If I were to describe the degrees to you, it would make you dizzy to think of the strictness that was applied. Matters concerning world evolution were considered to be among the most important and only taught at the highest levels. In the 17^th century, which has had a great influence on civilization, this knowledge was in the hands of the Rosicrucian movement.²² Originally this had come from knowledge held in the East, and European followers were given it at many different levels.

By the end of the 18th and above all the beginning of the 19^th century, those occult schools vanished from Europe’s culture. The last of the Rosicrucians withdrew to the Orient. This was the age when humanity had to organize conditions of life according to external knowledge; the invention of the steam engine came then, and the scientific study of cells and so on. Occult wisdom had nothing to say to this, and the individuals who had reached the highest peak of that wisdom, people of the highest degree, withdrew to the Orient. Occult schools existed also after this, but they are of little interest to us; I must mention them, however, for Mrs Blavatsky and Mr Sinnett went to the source springs when they received their cosmological knowledge from Buddhist Tibetan occult schools.

A long period of cultural development in Europe had brought the European brain, the European ability to think, so far that difficulties arose in grasping occult truths. These could only be grasped with difficulty. When this early knowledge of theosophical cosmology came to public awareness, partly through Esoteric Buddhism and partly through The Secret Doctrine, the followers of occult schools pricked up their ears,²³ and it seemed wrong to them that the strict rule of not letting anything go outside their schools had been broken. The followers of the theosophical school knew, however, that it was necessary to make some of it known.

Western science could not do anything with such knowledge, however, for no one was able to check the truth of what Mrs Blavatsky and Mr Sinnett had written. Above all people did not know what to do with the glorious cosmological song which consists of the Stanzas of Dzyan and was published at the beginning of Mrs Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine.²⁴ The verses tell the history of the universe. Their authenticity was put in doubt; no scientist could do anything with them; initially they appeared to go against anything European scholars knew. There was one man, Max Müller, the orientalist, whom I respect most highly; he spoke energetically in favour of Oriental wisdom.²⁵ Everything he could get hold of in this sphere was made accessible to Europeans by Max Mueller. But neither he nor other European academics knew what to do with the things Mrs Blavatsky made known. At the time people merely said anything said in Secret Doctrine was mere fantasy. The reason was that the academics had never found any of it in the Indian books.

Mrs Blavatsky said that great riches of ancient literature were still to be found in the place from which her secrets had come, but that the most important thing about that wisdom had been kept from the eyes of European scholars. European thinking was such that even the little which it had been possible to tell could not be understood; commentaries were lacking that held the key to understanding. The books which showed how individual statements should be taken were in the safekeeping of native Tibetans who had received the teaching; at least that is what Mrs Blavatsky said.

However, others who have reached advanced levels also said that this literature provides historical evidence that there was an original wisdom which in things of the spirit went far beyond anything people in the world know today. The Oriental sages say that this original wisdom exists in books which are in their safekeeping, and that it did not come to us from human beings like ourselves, but from divine sources. The Orientals speak of an original divine wisdom.

Max Mueller said in a lecture to his students that following certain investigations it was impossible to maintain that there had been such original wisdom. Having heard Max Mueller’s opinion through Mrs Blavatsky, a great Brahmin Sanskrit scholar said: ‘Oh, if Max Mueller were a Brahmin and I were able to take him to a particular temple, he would be able to see for himself that there is such ancient divine wisdom.’²⁶ The things Mrs Blavatsky presents in the Stanzas of Dzyan partly come from such hidden sources which she opened up. If she had invented those verses herself we would be looking at an even greater miracle.

We do not, however, have to depend on getting the occult knowledge of world evolution from the old writings. Powers exist in the human being which enable him to perceive and explore the truths himself, if he develops these powers in the right way. Anything we are able to learn in this way agrees with the knowledge Mrs Blavatsky brought with her from the Far East. It emerges that in Europe, too, occultists preserved knowledge that was passed from teacher to pupils and was never entrusted to books. The occultists were therefore able to test the knowledge Mrs Blavatsky presented in her Secret Doctrine against their own knowledge, and above all against things they had gained out of their own powers. Someone trained in the European way can also check the information given in Mrs Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine. And it has been checked and confirmed,²⁷ but it is nevertheless difficult for European occultists to cope with it. Let me say just one thing. European occult knowledge has been influenced in a quite specific way by Christian and cabbalistic elements which have given it a certain bias. If we ignore this, however, and go back to the basis of this knowledge, it is possible to have complete agreement with the knowledge which Mrs Blavatsky uncovered for us.

Although it has been possible in a way to check the cosmology Mrs Blavatsky had brought for us, it is difficult to explain to scholars what we mean when we speak of the origin of the world, doing so from occult knowledge. It is, of course, remarkable what they achieve in deciphering ancient records, making great efforts to decipher Babylonian cuneiform writing and Egyptian hieroglyphs; but Max Mueller himself has said that nothing they have discovered from those records does as yet give them a picture of the history of the world’s origin. We see the scholars labouring on the shell, as it were, without penetrating to the kernel. This is not to say anything against the careful work and fine bits of detail the scholars have been labouring over. I would merely draw attention to the books published relating to the Bible and Babel dispute.²⁸ All this is piecemeal; the scholars do not get beyond the shell. You feel they have no idea of the ways that take one to the key to these secrets. It is just like when someone begins to translate a book from another language into his own. Initially it is imperfect. That is how it is with the translation of ancient creation myths by today’s' scholars. They are shards of ancient wisdom taught from generation to generation in the mystery schools. Only people who had reached a certain degree of initiation could know something about it. I’ll come back to this again at the end of these lectures.

It is the initiates, therefore, who are able to come to these things in their own experience. You will ask: ‘What is an initiate, actually? People often speak of ‘initiates’ in theosophy and occult societies.’ An initiate is someone who has developed powers that lie dormant in every human being and are capable of development,²⁹ having done so to a high degree. The initiate has developed them to such a degree that he is able to understand the nature of those powers in the cosmos, in the cosmic edifice, which come into consideration for what I want to discuss with you. Well, you’ll say: ‘People always say that such powers lie dormant in the human being, but there’s no certainty of this.’ This is simply due to a misunderstanding. The mystic or occultist is not saying anything which any scholar may not also say in his field. Imagine someone tells you a mathematical truth. If you have never learned mathematics yourself, you will not have the knowledge to test this truth. No one would deny that one needs to have the necessary abilities before one can judge a mathematical truth. No authority can decide the issue, only the individual who has experienced it can judge it. In the same way only someone who has himself experienced, lived through an occult truth, can judge it. People of our time are, however, demanding that occultists should prove anything they have to say immediately and for any average level of understanding. They will quote the words: ‘Anything which is true must be capable of proof, and anyone should be able to understand it.’ Yet occultists say nothing else but what any other scholar would also say in his field, and they do not ask for more than any mathematician would also demand.

We may ask why occult truths are being presented today. Until now, occult schools have followed the principle that the knowledge should not go beyond a small number of people. Those on the ‘right’ still follow the principle today.³⁰ Yet anyone who has the experience and is able to read the signs of the times will know that this is no longer appropriate today. And this very fact, that it is no longer appropriate, has given rise to the theosophical world movement. Today, the rational mind is most highly developed. Associative thinking in conjunction with the senses has led to advances in industry and technology. This rational, intellectual thinking had its greatest triumphs in the 19th century. External intellectual thinking has never been as highly developed as it is today. 1 spoke of Oriental sages having original wisdom, and this was very different in form from our thinking today. Even the greatest masters among them did not have this acuity of logical thinking, this pure logicality; nor did they need it. Because of this it was also difficult to understand them. They had intuition, inner vision. True intuition does not come with logical or associative thinking; what happens is that a truth presents itself directly to the mind of the individual concerned. He will know it and there will be no need for proof.

The teachers in the theosophical movement now have the right to present part of the occult wisdom. We have the right to express the wisdom which has been given to us in form of intuition, putting it in the thought forms of modern life. A thought is a power like electricity, a power like steam power, like heat energy; and the thoughts presented within the theosophical movement are power for anyone who takes them in, giving himself up to them and not meeting them with immediate distrust. Hearing them, one will not notice it immediately, for the seed will only germinate later. No theosophical teacher asks anything but that people should listen to him. He is not asking for blind faith, only that people should listen. Neither acceptance as a matter of belief nor unbelieving rejection are the right attitude. Listeners should merely think the thoughts through for themselves, leaving aside belief or doubt, yes or no. They need to be ‘neutral’ and let the teaching come alive in their minds just to ‘try it out’. If you let theosophical thoughts be alive in you in this way, you will not just have thoughts in you, but a spiritual energy will pour in, to be active in you and bear fruit.

Western European civilization has developed thinking to such a high degree that people find it easiest to come to anything through thinking. Even the most faithful church-going Christians cannot now imagine the kind of faith people had in the past. That source spring of conviction has dried up. We have to make our thoughts fruitful in a very different way today. In the past, thinking was not widespread and spiritual knowledge could therefore only be presented in occult schools. Today we must turn to the power of thought with the things of the spirit; we then fire the thoughts so that they come alive in us. A spiritual speaker speaks to his listeners in a way that is very different from that of other speakers. He speaks in a way that makes a kind of spiritual atmosphere, spiritual powers, flow from him. Listeners should receive a thought without accepting or rejecting it, as something wholly objective, live with that thought, meditate on it and let it come alive in them. The thought will then generate energy or power in us.

Today we must make the occult truths concerning the origin and evolution of the world known in form of European thoughts and the modern scientific approach. The lectures will thus concern the conditions that preceded the beginnings of our own world. We will go back to long-ago times when the entity evolved from the greyest twilit darkness which was later to become human. We will go back to the stage where this human being was received by earthly powers, surrounded with earthly matter, up to the point where we are today. We’ll get to know the pre-earthly and earthly evolution of our world edifice and see how theosophy opens up a prospect on the future. We will see the direction in which our world evolution is going to continue. All this will be shown without going against the ideas of modem astronomy. Awakening the powers that lie dormant in us we will ourselves perceive the great goal towards which we are moving—to gain cosmological wisdom. Let us consider this cosmological wisdom in the sessions that follow.

• 15. The following announcement appeared in the German journal Vahan No. 9, March 1904: ‘In April and May Dr Steiner will be giving lectures on the basic concepts of theosophy at Motzstr. 17 every Thursday at 8 p.m.’ The lectures were put off until the autumn, however; they have been published (in German) in Ursprung und Ziel des Menschen. Grundbegriffe der Esoterik (GA 53).
• 16. Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna (1831–91). Isis Unveiled, New York 1877; The Secret Doctrine, London 1888.
• 17. Sinnett, Alfred Percy (1840–1921). Esoteric Buddhism, 1883. See also Rudolf Steiner’s references to this work in a lecture given in Berlin on 12 December 1912 (in German, in GA 62), in the lecture course The Occult Movement in the 19th Century, tr. D. S. Osmond, London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1973 (in GA 254) and in Rudolf Steiner’s biography, chapter 7.
• 18. See introduction to the 1st volume of The Secret Doctrine.
• 19. In The Secret Doctrine, Mrs Blavatsky wrote that it had been difficult to find the right terminology. ‘In these early letters [of the mahatmas], in which terms had to be invented and words coined, the “Rings” very often became “Rounds” and the “Rounds”, “Life-Cycles”, and vice versa. To a correspondent who called a “Round” a “World-Ring”, the Teacher wrote: “I believe this will lead to a further confusion. A Round we are agree to call the passage of a Monad from Globe A to Globe G or Z. ... The ‘World-Ring’ is correct ... Advise Mr... strongly, to agree upon a nomenclature before going any further.’” [page 191] See also Note 4.
• 20. In The Occult World, London 1881.
• 21. In the series of essays ‘Aus der Akasha-Chronik’ (later Cosmic Memory. Atlantis and Lemuria, GA 11), we read: ‘... that the inspirations of the great teacher mentioned in Esoteric Buddhism [by Sinnett] do not contradict what I am presenting here, but that the misunderstanding only arose because the author of that work translated the wisdom of those inspirations, which is difficult to put in words, into the human language of today, doing so in his own way.’
• 22. See lecture given in Berlin on 4 November 1904 on the Rosicrucian Mystery in The Temple Legend, GA 93, tr. J. M. Wood; London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1997.
• 23. See lecture given in Domach on 10 October 1915 in The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century, GA 254, tr. D. S. Osmond; London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1973.
• 24. David Reigle, Tibetologist, has since identified the stanzas as coming from the books of the Kiu-Te, probably also as the fifth, esoteric part of the Kalachakra Tantra entitled Jnana. See Life and Work of Helena Blavatsky by Sylvia Cranston. See also what Rudolf Steiner said about Tibet in his talk with the workmen at the Goetheanum on 20 May 1924 in From Beetroot to Buddhism, GA 353, tr. A. R. Meuss; London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1999.
• 25. Max Müller (1823–1900), well-known expert on the Orient, language and religion in the 19lh century. Member and protagonist of the Theosophical Society for as long as it based itself on purely Indian philosophy.
• 26. See Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, vol. 1.
• 27. Clearly referring to C. G. Harrison’s The Transcendental Universe, lectures on occult science, theosophy and the catholic faith, London 1893/94.
• 28. Friedrich Delitzsch (1850–1922) professor of Assyriology and Semitic languages, had established a connection between certain Old Testament passages and Babylonian writings about the creation (Bibel und Babel, Leipzig 1902). Lectures he gave on the subject in 1902 and 1903 triggered serious disputes, and there were a number of published refutations. Rudolf Steiner wrote about this in an essay on the supersensible world which was published in Lucifer-Gnosis, GA 34, in May 1904.
• 29. Soon after this lecture Rudolf Steiner published the series of essays on how to gain knowledge of higher worlds in Lucifer- Gnosis.
• 30. See also lectures of 10-15 October 1915 in The Occult Movement in the Nineteenth Century (see Note 22), and on 1 and 7 November 1915 [in German] in Die okkulte Bewegung im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, GA 254.

Following last Thursday’s introduction, I would now like to begin by giving you an outline of world evolution such as we are able to give on the basis of theosophical insights. Please take note that time being short, I can only give a brief outline, with many things only mentioned in passing. Perhaps we will have opportunity to go more fully into them at a later date.

Before going through the evolution of the universe and above all the development of our planet Earth in theosophical terms, we need to establish some concepts which Western people no longer have since they have been devoting themselves exclusively to physical phenomena for such a long time. It says in every book on cosmology that we only need to look out into cosmic space to see thousands upon thousands of worlds spread before us that are like our own solar system, and that our Earth, the planet on which our life has been going on for millennia, is like a tiny grain of dust among those many worlds, with the human being just a tiny life form on this grain of dust in the universe. All this, it is said, scientists have discovered since the time of Copernicus. We are told by scientists how wrong people were in earlier times when they saw the Earth as the centre of the world, believing that cosmic evolution had only been a preparation for their own human existence. It has been made very clear to us how small the human being is compared to the universe. The authors write that it is sheer presumption to think that the world was created to be the way it is just for the sake of man. Schiller spoke out against this way of looking at things most beautifully:

Don’t chatter so much about nebulas and suns! Is nature great just for giving you things to count? Your object is, of course, the most sublime in space; But, my dear friends, the sublime does not dwell in space.³¹

And Goethe, whose knowledge of occult things is known to you from other lectures, said more or less the following on the subject: ‘What, after all, would be the purpose of the whole world with its solar systems and stars if it did not exist for the human being, so he may delight in it all and grow through it?’³² You see, people like these two, who took a truly spiritual view of the world, did not find the idea of the smallness of the human being and the dust-grain size of the world adequate.

Let us now consider cosmology and the human being in relation to the whole of evolution as we know it through theosophy. I need to say a few things first. Let us consider the position which present-day man holds in the world from the cosmological point of view. Everything we are able to perceive through the senses—be it the macroscopic senses we use every day or the more refined sensory perceptions available in science with its microscopes and dissection methods—everything we come across there in human beings is after all only the external physical human being. Those of you who have heard quite a few theosophical lectures before will know that this external human being is only the shell, an outer revelation of the actual, inner human being. What is the physical human being? If you study the anatomy you’ll find that he consists of a number of systems—the skeletal and muscular system, the nervous system, which has shaped itself into a brain, and so on. You also know that the brain is the organ of thought. As theosophists you also know that it is not the brain which does the thinking but that the brain is only a tool, so that the true essential human being only uses the brain as a tool for thinking. The spirit which thinks in the human being cannot be perceived with the tools provided by our physical senses; even someone whose astral senses have developed cannot see it. It therefore needs a well-developed sense of clairvoyance to really perceive what is truly doing the thinking in the human being. In theosophical terms we call this the true self. This inner core of essential human nature, the true self, is spiritual by nature. It does not occupy space, nor does it progress in time. It is beyond time and space, eternal. A description of this self was given in my lectures on the devachan,³³ and you will also be able to find an exact description in my book Theosophy, due to appear in a few days’ time?³⁴

The spiritual self needs a physical brain in order to live and think in the present period of human evolution. We would be able to perceive things without a physical brain through our spiritual self in the astral world and in the devachanic or mental world, but in this external, physical world we can only perceive things with a physical brain. If we truly want to understand the human being of today, we have to say that today’s human being is a Spirit Self embodied in a physical brain. This physical brain first had to develop, however, it is not eternal like the spiritual self. The Spirit Self can be traced back to infinitely distant times in the past and we can also follow it to infinitely far distant times in the future. From a certain point in time onwards, this Spirit Self enveloped itself in the brain, creating the brain for itself in accord with its own inherent nature. Such an organ is not so easily created. It would be quite impossible for someone to create a viable brain in physical space by means of some process in the world. It would be an artificial object, but not a viable brain which a spirit might use for its instrument. Other organs had to be developed before such a brain could arise. A brain can only develop in the kind of physical body we have in the human physical body. It was therefore necessary for the development of our brain tool to be preceded by the development of the rest of the human body. Looking back on the developmental stages which preceded our present one, we see how the tool which human beings have today, the means for communication with the world around us, only evolved slowly and gradually. It is the aim and purpose of our present evolution on Earth that the human being with his spiritual self should have organs that would make it possible for him to understand the world in this particular way. Everything which has happened on this Earth through millennia has happened for the purpose that evolution might reach the point where a Spirit Self would have a brain it could use.

Just go back with me to the beginning of our development on Earth for a moment. Someone who has developed mental vision will perceive the following. At the beginning of our planetary evolution, our Spirit Self had reached a particular level in its existence. At that time, when the Earth was in its seed stage, each of us was at a particular level of development. Imagine all the spiritual selves which were, are and will be incarnated on Earth taken back to the time when our evolution on Earth began. All of you did already exist at the time, though not the way you are today but in a completely different state. We have a specific mission in our Earth evolution; human beings are intended to be something as the result of this evolution.

Let me tell you in a few words, in narrative style, what the Spirit Self was when it entered into evolution on Earth. Standing at the gates of our earthly existence, the Spirit Self had quite a different kind of consciousness from today. We can get an idea of it by entering into the position of someone in a dim dream state who is unable to reflect on the images that flit past his conscious mind and use concepts; he merely sees them put before him and proceeding before his mind’s eye in a panorama. Each individual Spirit Self had this dream level of consciousness, and this had to go through earthly evolution and evolve from the dim awareness of perceiving images to the bright, clear conceptual conscious awareness we have in the daytime. The dreamy state of consciousness which the spiritual self had at the beginning of earthly evolution may be compared to that of the animals, though the level of conscious awareness is not the same. The mission our spiritual self has to accomplish in the course of this planetary period is to let conscious awareness grow clearer and clearer; when we are going to leave this earthly evolution in the far distant future, we will have taken this bright, clear conscious awareness to its highest point.

We call the spirits that entered into earthly evolution at that time the pitris, which means ‘fathers’. We were such pitris at the time; this was the nature we had made our own at that earlier state of evolution. We had gone through preliminary stages before we entered into earthly evolution and worked our way up to the dream-like pitri state. So now we know where we ourselves had got to when earthly evolution began. The pitris had to vest themselves step by step with all the organs they needed so that they might use a physical brain within the physical bodily constitution we know today to communicate with an environment which is also physical. The final thing the human being had to achieve—this is evident from what has gone before—was that he had to become a thinking physical entity, so that his self might be able to think in the physical realm. I now come to the second idea we have to consider in advance. If you examine the brain scientifically in all its aspects, using only the senses, you will find that it consists of the same kind of matter and is controlled by the same kind of forces as all other physical entities on earth. If you look at a rock crystal, a piece of calcite or rock salt, a plant or an animal and investigate it chemically and physically, you will find that the whole of our physical nature, in so far as it can be seen by eyes and taken hold of by hands, consists in a similar way of the same chemical and physical forces which are active in the mineral, plant and animal worlds. We therefore say in theosophy that to reach his present level of development, the human being had to vest his spiritual self in a mineral body. The spiritual self created a mineral body for itself. This took a long time, and the process has not yet come to an end. In future human beings will continue to evolve in this mineral vestment. Some organs are still in the seed stage in our bodies,³⁵ and they still need to develop. These are new senses, of which only vestiges exist at present. You see, the human being—his spiritual self—needed a long time to vest himself in the physical body which he has today.

Go back to the time when the spiritual self of man started the work of creating this mineral body for itself, a body able to walk and to stand, with all the mechanisms for growth and reproduction which are a necessity for man, with a nervous system and with the kind of brain the human being needs. Go back in your mind to the time when all this was in the early seed stage, and then move on to the time when the human being will have reached the highest point in his evolution, when an organ will have developed in the middle of his head that will enable him to have different perceptions from those we are able to have today. The whole mineral evolution of the present human being is taking place between these two points. In theosophical terminology we call such a period a ‘round’. The round I have just been describing for you, this period of evolution, is called the 'mineral round’. Yet before the human being developed this body in a way that allowed him to create the brain as a tool, he had to prepare other parts of his nature. The spiritual self, being a purely spiritual entity, could not have controlled such a mineral body just like that. Think of the spiritual self as a dot, if you like, and imagine this dot inside a mechanism such as our body; this dot would never have been able to move the mechanism, it would never be in a position to think by means of a physical brain.

We thus have two things. We know that our spiritual self had a dream-like state of consciousness in the beginning, when it would never have been able to control the mineral body. It needed to create a mediator if it was to control the body. What makes me move my hand? First of all I have the thought: I want to move my hand. If I had only the thought, this would be alive in me, but it would never be able to move a physical hand upwards, just as mere thought could not lift a bottle, for instance. If you want to move the bottle, a power would have to be added to the thought which mediates between the thought and my physical body. Such a power exists in the astral world. I would not be able to move my arm if there were not an astral power between my thought and my physical body, of which the arm is a part. This astral power acts as mediator between thought and physical body, physical arm. There has to be a mediator between my spiritual self and my physical body, and this mediator is astral by nature. If I move my leg or my hand, if I set my brain in motion to hatch ideas—my physical body must be connected with my thought by the astral body.

You know from previous lectures that the human being has such an astral body. A clairvoyant sees it in an astral cloud which we call the aura of a person, with his wishes, will impulses and desires living in it. When I have a thought, the thought is unable to do anything by itself. If wish or will impulse is added, this is a power, something shining out, which the clairvoyant is able to perceive. Before the human being developed the physical and mineral body he has today, he had to create an astral body for himself, a wish body, which can mediate between his thoughts and his physical and mineral nature. Another period of development had to precede the one which I have called the ‘mineral round’, and the astral body had to be developed in this. So you need to go back to a period when the human astral body was in preparation. It was only after this that the physical and mineral body could be embedded in the astral body. This period, which also had its beginning and end and which preceded the mineral round, is called the ‘astral round’.

So you see there are two ‘times’. We are living in one of them now, in the mineral round. It was preceded by another, the astral round. But the human astral body also needed to be prepared for. It could only be made part of human nature in a quite specific way. The astral body did not exist before we were born, and it will be gone some time after our death. It arises and disappears again, being subject to specific laws. Look at a child. The astral body of a child is correspondingly small; it grows as the child grows physically. Growth and reproduction are the basis of the mineral and physical and also the etheric nature of the human being. We have to develop according to the laws of growth and reproduction in our life on Earth. The basis for such origin and growth does not lie in the astral body. This only holds wishes, will impulses and desires. We are astral entities just as animals are, and we share a quality with plants and animals which is capable of reproducing itself out of the organism and let it grow from small to large size. If you want to put it in words, you may say that what I have been describing is the configuring principle, which configures the form. Our physical body and our ether body must have a specific configuration as they arise, and this must be able to grow and enlarge. You can get an idea of this if you consider a seed ... [gap in the notes].

The power of configuration does not belong to the astral sphere. The astral is able to live to the full within something that has been configured, but it first needs to be configured itself. The human astral body could not have arisen if it had not been preceded by a period of evolution during which the human form was prepared. Let me call this the configuring period, in theosophical terms the ‘rupa round’. This is the period during which the configuration of the human form was prepared for, so that his present form could then evolve.

Everything we are able to follow up in these three ‘rounds’ are the vestments enveloping the spiritual self of man. In the mineral round the human being put on the mineral vestment. In the astral round which went before this, the human being prepared the astral vestment, and in the rupa round, which came even earlier, the human being gained the ability to give himself the configuration which he needed if he was to perceive, think and act as a human being.

As theosophers we can say: When we were pitris, living in that dream-like state of consciousness at the beginning of our evolution on Earth, we were outcome, fruit, if I may put it like this. We did not come from nothing at the time, but had already gone through stages of development; we were the result of earlier periods which we will describe later. Very much as a plant sprouts from a seed when this is put into new soil in spring, so we, too, have to prepare for the arena which is the Earth, so that we might be able to evolve on it. We were the outcome of another world, and now had to be the beginning of a completely new world. Yet we first had to get our bearings in this new world. You may keep a seed obtained in autumn through the winter and then put it in new soil in the spring, and that is also how pitri nature does it, in a way. It must first be put into a new environment, into a form of matter in the earthly world which had not existed in earlier planetary periods. If you wanted to get an idea of the forces and forms of matter existing at the earlier planetary stage in which we evolved into pitris, you would find them very different. This means that yet another period of evolution must have preceded that one, a period when the human Spirit Self, having come across from an earlier period, first of all had to get used to the new environment. This, then, takes us to a period of evolution that goes very far back.

The further we go away from the present, the harder is it to form ideas. A theosopher does not think he can go back to the beginning of the world with his questions. When people hear something about theosophy for the first time they’ll often ask: ‘How did the world come into existence?’³⁶ As theosophers we are no longer able to ask quite a number of those questions, for we do not get back to a beginning. You saw the time when we came across from pitri nature. A clairvoyant is able to study this time by using specific methods. But the human being did not come into existence then, for he had already reached a particular level of development by that time. A theosopher does not speculate or think about these things in abstract terms. He pursues the things to be learned, his experiences, intuitions in the supersensible sphere, and he will tell of anything learned and experienced. Just as an explorer would only describe the regions he has visited, let us say in Africa, and not anything which he has not seen, so a theosopher would not say anything about the beginning of the world which is far, far away. A theosopher can only follow our evolution for some distance, and we do this through what we learn and not through speculation.

A seed entered into our evolution from an earlier time. The human being was a formless seed on Earth. We call this time the ‘arupa round’ or ‘formless round’. Thus we have four periods of time up to the point where we are now. We call them ‘rounds’. The first, second and third rounds have passed. We are now in the fourth round, and three more will follow. We will speak of these later. We call the human being of the fourth round the human being of the mineral world, because he has configured himself in the mineral forces. We call someone of the preceding round, the astral round, when he was able to shape his astral body, a human being of the third elemental world. We distinguish human beings of the third, second and first elementals worlds. During the first elemental world, or the first round, human thoughts moved in formless thought matter. During the second elemental world, or the second round, human thoughts moved in configured thought matter. And in the third elemental world, human thoughts could be configured to wish level; they were able to assume the configuration we are able to perceive as astral rays in the astral world. It was only in the fourth round that the human being reached the point where he could control the mineral world. Just as a human astral brain developed from astral matter in the third round, so the human being was able to create a physical brain for himself in the fourth round that allows him to think.

We thus have three elemental worlds and the mineral world. The three elemental worlds are where the human being of the past lived. What follows can only be touched on lightly. But you’ll be able to grasp it if we use analogy. Our present round will be followed by another, when the human being will reach an even higher level of evolution. He will then be able to think not only in his physical brain, but in the power which we call the astral power. He will be able to control not only physical matter but also the astral power. To make this clearer, let me give you an example. If I want to move this glass from here to here, I need physical mediation—my hand. The human being of the fourth round has reached the point where he can act with conscious deliberation in the physical, the mineral world. He is not yet, however, capable of conscious control of the astral power and has not yet developed an astral organ for the will. He will be able to do this in the fifth round. The human being of the fifth round will be able to control the astral world just as he is today able to control the physical world. In the sixth round the human being will have progressed even further. He will then be able to control the configuring world, just as today he controls the physical world and in the fifth round will be able to control the astral world. In the fifth round the human being will be able to fulfil a wish not just in the place where he has it. He will be able to send his wishes to distant places. In the sixth round the human being will have the power to configure. He will then be able to control rupa power himself. After the sixth round our earthly evolution will have been completed. The human being will then have taken in everything he is able to learn on Earth. Only then will he have gained a real, clear self-awareness. He will then no longer need mediation, having reaching his goal. In the seventh round the human being, having reached his goal, will again be formless. He will, however, have taken in all the things which he had to learn.

The human being has to go through seven rounds. I have only been able to give an approximate description of these. One thing we must remember is that the human being and the Earth have not been physical for the whole of our mineral round. They had to reach this state first, assuming it in order to become physically perceptible. We look back from our mineral round to the other stages of development. We are able to perceive that we are looking at a seven-stage evolution of our Earth, and that the Spirit Self had to go through seven levels or rounds. During each of these rounds the Spirit Self was in one of the natural worlds. Let us look at the human being. He has gone through the first, second and third elemental worlds and is now in the fourth round, which is our present world.

The next time we meet I will show that only the human being reaches the mineral stage during this fourth round. Today’s mineral matter, unenlivened natural matter such as rock crystal, calcite and so on, reached the peak of its evolution in the first round. The plants of today reached their peak in the second round, and today’s animals did so in the third round. The human being achieved physical and mineral evolution in the fourth round.

We thus see that millennia ago another Earth preceded our own. The mineral world then arose. The human being was then only in his first elemental world. In the second round, plant nature evolved; both mineral and plant nature then existed, with the human being in his second elemental world. Then came the third round, when animal nature became part of earthly evolution. The human being as such was still astral then and not yet able to descend into mineral embodiment. In the fourth round, finally, with mineral, plant and animal already extant, the human being was able to achieve embodiment in the mineral principle. We thus have four worlds side by side in the four rounds: the mineral world in the first, the plant world in the second, the animal world in the third and the human world in the fourth round. The human world sent the other three worlds ahead as preparatory stages. Goethe was right, therefore, to ask: ‘What would the whole of nature be if it did not have the human being for its goal?’ This great cosmic process had to be instituted; the human being had to evolve through three rounds so that he might assume mineral form in the fourth. The human being has been the creator, the co-creator, though his form was not visible. As pitri, he came across from another period of evolution. We worked on those first rounds in a dream-like state of consciousness. We worked to prepare for the creation of our Earth, so that a world would arise that could be the basis for our evolution.

This is the process of Earth evolution from a beginning (which I have been able to show you today) to the point in time where we are now. We will add to this the next time we meet.

• 31. Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), An die Astronomen.
• 32. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). The actual words in Goethe’s work entitled Winckehmann und sein Jahrhundert, Kapitel ‘Antikes’ are: ‘For why all the suns and planets and moons, stars and milky ways, comets and nebulae, worlds in existence and others evolving, unless ultimately there is a happy human being who innocent of all this takes delight in his existence?’
• 33. In German in Über die astrale Welt und das Devachan, GA 88.
• 34. Chapter 9, on body, soul and spirit.
• 35. See Foundations of Esotericism (note 13).
• 36. See part 2 of this volume.

A week ago I attempted to explain a way of thinking which is very alien to people in the West and which gives the theosopher insights into the cosmos. The lectures must of necessity be sketchy in character, and this prevents me from presenting the theosophical cosmology in full detail. I will, however, attempt to give you a picture of the genesis of the world which is the basis of theosophy, doing so in narrative form. I would ask those who demand something scientific to remember that it simply is not possible for me to give any kind of scientific foundation for what I have to say in three short lectures. Anyone who wants such a scientific foundation will find it in a later course, when I will be speaking on the subject in more detail.³⁷ A second volume of my Theosophy, which is due to appear soon, will also be on cosmology.³⁸

Above all let me give you an important initial idea which essentially is very simple, but must be considered by anyone who seeks to understand evolution in theosophical terms. Speaking of evolution on the large scale, we mean not only animal or plant life arising from another life, but also the great transformations in our universe, and this includes the origin of matter, matter in the actual sense, as we are able to perceive it with our physical senses today.

The last time we spoke of the seven successive levels to be distinguished in the evolution of our planet, and I described them to you at least briefly. You need to envisage our earthly planet going through seven stages in rhythmical sequence, as it were, stages we call rounds. Everything that exists and lives on our Earth today did also exist before our present-day Earth came into existence; it existed, however, in a kind of seed stage, just as the whole plant exists already in a seed, lying dormant in it, as it were, before it unfolds in the outside world. In theosophy we also call such a dormant stage of all human beings ‘pralaya’. The state in which everything awakens to life, gradually emerging and progressing from beginnings to perfection, to a peak, is called a ‘manvantara’. When perfection has been reached, pralaya again follows, to be followed in turn by a state of being awake and growing. The planet is going through this sequence seven times, awakening to a new round seven times. The period between one manvantara and another thus passes in a state where everything that is alive and active on our Earth goes to sleep, as it were. This sleep cannot be compared with ordinary human sleep. With the latter, only the activities of the rational mind and the human senses are suspended, whilst human physical life continues. You have to see the Earth’s sleep state as something very different. This state of the Earth would only be perceptible to the opened eye of the most highly developed seer, a dangma.

Such a state cannot be described in our words, for our words are not made for this form of existence. I cannot find words for this state in any language. The developed seer would therefore say something quite different to give an idea of this state. He would say: Imagine a plant. You see it. Now think of a kind of plaster cast of this plant, with the plant in all its parts now a hollow space surrounded by plaster of Paris. Now imagine that everything which is plaster of Paris is spiritual and only perceptible to certain sensory perceptions. Someone who is able to see the plant cannot see the plaster cast at the same time, it being the negative of the plant.³⁹ This would be more or less what a developed seer would be able to perceive of the Earth in its pralaya sleep. The Earth would not be there. It would be the cavity, the hollow form. It is as if it were in an great, tremendous sea of most sublime spirits which is gradually thinning out in all directions, with the existence of Earth itself pouring forth from this, as it were.

Then something began to develop in this hollow space, but it was not yet perceptible to physical eyes, only to a highly developed seer who is able to move freely in the sphere of the devachanic plane. Someone who has this vision would see an orb in space at the beginning of earthly existence, a purely spiritual orb, with anything on it also spiritual, only perceptible to the devachanic seer’s eye. Before a new round began, our Earth was in such a spiritual state. Awaking from pralaya sleep it awakened to such an orb. The devachanic seer perceives it to have a marvellous reddish shimmer. The orb is not visible to someone with astral vision only. It still holds everything in it which will later be Earth. Even the densest bodies are already there.

How can we get a picture of this? We may consider a simple process. Imagine a vessel containing water. The water is liquid. As you reduce the temperature the water will freeze and turn to ice. You have the same thing as before—ice being nothing but water, only in a different form. When you increase the temperature the ice will turn to water again, and if you heat it further even to steam. You can imagine that all materiality arises through condensation from the spiritual. The spiritual orb—only visible to a highly developed seer’s eye—condenses more and more, having first gone through a minor pralaya. It will then also be apparent to a less highly developed seer’s eye. A kind of short sleep state follows, and then the whole sphere presents in a more condensed state. It is then visible to the astral eye, that is, to someone whose senses have been opened on the astral plane. Then comes another pralaya state, and the orb emerges again, now in form of condensed physical matter. It is only now that physical eyes can see it, physical ears hear it, physical hands take hold of it. This is the fourth state. After another short pralaya the state dissolves again, and we have an astral orb again, but the spirits in it are much more highly developed now. An analogous state develops in the sixth round, which again is only visible to a devachanic seer. After a further pralaya the state is such that only the most highly developed seer’s eye can see it. Then the orb vanishes even for a dangma. A major pralaya follows, after which the whole process begins to repeat itself. This happens seven times over. The Earth is thus transformed from its lowest to its highest level.

Let us now look at the first round. The best way of studying it is to look at what was then densest on our Earth. Mineral forms did not exist in the first round, nor did physical forces of nature or chemical forces. The Earth had by then only developed far enough to provide a basis for physical existence; it created this basis in order to prepare for physical existence in the fourth round. The Earth then presented as a fiery mass, at such a tremendously high temperature that none of the forms of matter we have today could have the form which they have today. All substances were primeval mass—a kind of mush if I may use such a common term—uniform and undifferentiated. In theosophy the Earth is said to have been in the fire state at that time. This is no ordinary fire, however, but a fire of a higher, spiritual kind. No chemical elements existed. Yet there was activity inside this matter. Two kinds of spirits were active in it—those we call ‘dhyan-chohans’ and others which had not yet descended into the state of physical materiality, partly having a spirit body and partly being enveloped in astral matter; these flooded the fire matter with tremendous speed. We see irregular forms continually arising and disappearing, including forms which are already reminiscent of what will later exist on Earth. It seems like a kind of template, always coming and going. Something bubbles up which reminds us of the forms of later crystals and later plants, and indeed even something which is already assuming human forms, only to blow away again. The human beings who would incarnate at a later time lived in that fire, developing and modelling the bodies, preparing them. That is how this state in the first round on Earth presents itself to us. This fiery, flowing Earth then went into a sleep state.

The second round started in the same way. Let us again look at the earth where it was at its densest. This state now took a completely different form compared to before. It was a form which modem physicists also know, calling it ‘ether’. Ether is subtler than present-day gases, but denser than the Earth had been in the earlier round. In this extremely subtle matter, something evolved which we call chemical elements. You will find this second stage referred to in a truly marvellous way, saying that the gods arranged everything according to measure, number and weight.⁴⁰ Something which until then had been irregular became organized into chemical elements, and these assumed order by numbers. Chemists will understand this, for they know the regular periodic system of the elements. Matter thus developed specific proportions of measure and number once it had gained a degree of density, an etheric form. Individual substances still did not relate at this stage. They were alien to one another. Now, with matter differentiating, we see the most marvellous forms develop which are reminiscent of those that would come later, but are not yet stable—star-like forms, angular forms, tetrahedrons, polyhedrons, rounded forms, and so on. A hint is given of the forms that will later appear in the natural world. In the first round, crystalline forms had their precursors; now in the second round preparation is made for the plant world. Then the whole passed away again; the astral and the devachanic went through pralaya again before appearing in the third round.

If we consider the physical state of the third round we find that matter had changed considerably. It was not yet differentiated into air and water but was a kind of vapour or mist. No longer in ether form but like a kind of water vapour, mist, or like our clouds today—that is how we would have to envisage the Earth at this third stage. With those mists—we find them in ancient legends like those of Niflheim (land of mist)—matter was now no longer organized according to number but endowed with energies. Occult scientists speak of the law of elective affinities here. Chemical substances regulate themselves according to this law. Now, in the third round, energy appeared, making it possible for small things to grow larger and expand. Substances were able to organize themselves fully from inside, filling themselves with energy. Not only did the beginnings of plant nature appear, which we already saw in the second round, but growth had become possible. The first animal forms appeared, though we would consider them utterly grotesque today. Gigantic, colossal forms arose from the mist. There is some truth in it for an occultist when he looks up at the clouds and sees that one looks like a camel, another like a horse. In this third round entities were nebulous forms, with reproduction consisting in one changing into the other, one arising from another, like today’s lower cell organisms, which remind us of that time. The animal-like bodies arising from the mist were able to provide a first basis so that individual entities that had come across from earlier worlds would find a body. The human being was then able to incarnate, finding a housing that allowed him to come to expression, though initially in an imperfect, primitive and awkward way. Incarnations may also misfire. We may say that entities were on Earth in the third round that were intermediate between human and animal, with the human being not entirely at ease in them but still able to incarnate.

Then came another pralaya, followed by the fourth round. This is the round of which we ourselves are part. The Earth had thus first gone through the devachanic state, then down through the astral and etheric state, finally coming to the physical state which we have now reached. In the first round, the basis for the mineral world developed, in the second, the basis for the plant world; in the third round the potential arose for the development of animal forms. Now, in the fourth round, the human being has been given the ability to assume the form which he now has.

Let us take a closer look at the state of our physical Earth, our present round. The state of the Earth at this fourth level must be said to be very much denser than the states of the earlier rounds. Initially there was a fiery state, then a misty one, and then one that was between air and water. Now, however, at the beginning of the fourth round, we have a kind of swelling matter, rather like protein. The whole Earth was in that state at the beginning of the fourth round. Then everything gradually condensed, and matter as we know it on Earth today is nothing but the condensed matter which had originally been swelling—just as ice is condensed water matter. At the beginning of this fourth round, all entities were such that they could live in this swelling matter. The form of the human being did resemble that of today, but man was still in an utterly dim state of consciousness which would be comparable to a dreaming person today. He dreamt his way through life in a kind of sleep level of consciousness; he did not yet have a mind and spirit.

Let us take a closer look at this. The human being was possible in the swelling material. We would call the human being of that first race a human being in a dream. It is difficult to describe the human being of that first race. This state was followed by another, when matter condensed more and differentiated into a materiality that was more spiritual and another that was more physical—north pole and south pole, as it were. I would ask you to take note of the difference between the occult view of this and the generally accepted Darwinian view. When the Earth was in that state, the human being was present, and so was the plant world; the animal world was also extant, but in forms where there was as yet no sexual reproduction and no warm blood. These life forms were not yet able to produce sounds from inside themselves. The human being himself was still silent. Nor was he able to think, being unable to have even the dimmest ideas. The mind and spirit had not yet come to the living body. In the next race, the second one, matter differentiated to create two poles. The human being was, as it were, withdrawing the matter which was useful to him, setting anything less useful aside; this led to the higher animals developing as a kind of lateral branches. The lower animals already looked similar to today’s molluscs, and even fish-like forms were evolving.

The human being continued to develop. At the third level of race evolution he again set aside matter which he was unable to make the vehicle for a higher form of conscious awareness. He again let this go to provide material for creatures which then looked more or less like amphibians, in giant forms. Myth and fable refer to them as flying dragons, and so on. So far none of the life forms which had evolved had sexual reproduction. Only in the middle of the third race, the middle of the Lemurian age, did the beginnings of this appear. The arena for these events was in Lemuria, in the region of today’s Indochina in the Indian Ocean.

In the middle of the Lemurian age came the great event which made the human being human. Not all the humans which had come across from earlier planetary states were at the same level of evolution. Those who had achieved normal evolution during the earlier cycle on the misty Earth, were able to embody themselves during the third race. A number of them had, however, already reached a higher level, and they were completely unable to embody themselves in the third round. In every round, some human beings evolved to a normal level and others to a stage that went beyond this. Those who went beyond the normal level were masters, more highly developed individuals. In theosophical terminology they are called ‘solar pitris’. They had gained a higher level of spirituality but could not embody themselves in the body which the human being had at that time, just as today’s human being cannot incarnate in a plant body. They waited for evolution to continue until the right moment had come and their first true incarnation became possible in the fourth race. Then those more highly developed individuals, the solar pitris, were able to take possession of the existing forms. A humanity arose that had reached a high level of spiritual development. Legend and myths tell that there were people in those times who stood high above other human beings—individuals like Prometheus,⁴¹ the rishis of the Indians, fire rishis who then became the actual leaders of the human race, and also the manus which gave later humanity their laws. Only those solar pitris were able to incarnate as adepts.

As I told you, sexuality did not yet exist at the beginning of the fourth round. The division into sexes only came in the Lemurian age. And it was only with this that incarnation became possible, taking possession of a body, something which had not existed before. Previously, one entity had arisen from another. With the division into sexes in the middle of the Lemurian age, birth and death came on Earth, and this also meant the possibility for karma to be active. People could burden themselves with guilt. Everything we know to be ‘human’ arose at that time.

The continent of Lemuria perished in fire-like catastrophes, and the continent of Atlantis then arose from what today is the Atlantic Ocean. Another important event came in Atlantean times. I drew your attention to it when I spoke about Pentecost.⁴² I said then that except for the solar pitris, all existing entities were at a low level of mind and spirit. Only selected bodies were able to receive the solar pitris. The others would merely have made it possible for those spirits to live in a state of dim conscious awareness. People without heart and mind would have arisen if the bodies of that time had been used. The pitris therefore waited until specific animal forms had developed further. These had gone down more deeply into the life of drives on the one hand, but on the other hand this had created the preconditions for brain development at a later time. Matter had differentiated into ‘nerve matter’ and ‘gender matter’. The pitris who had waited for this later stage then became embodied in this poorer form of matter. This is called ‘the Fall’ in religious terminology—the descent into matter of a poorer kind. If this had not been done, they would all have remained at a much less consciously aware level. They could not have been used for the clear life of thought which we have today, but would have remained in a much dimmer, duller state. The price they paid for this was that they let the body get worse on the one hand, so that on the other hand they could enhance it and develop brain matter, achieving a higher level of conscious awareness. A special outcome of the Atlantean race’s evolution was a phenomenal memory.

When Atlantis had perished—through water—our present fifth race became a later continuation. Its special achievement has been the associative mind which enables the fifth race to take art and science to their highest levels, something which had not been possible before. In the fifth sub-race of the fourth round the human being reached a high point—control through the spirit, a spirit which had descended into matter so that it might now be taken upwards again to higher and higher levels. We have seen the cosmos evolve in rhythmic sequence of stages to the point where we are today. Earlier rounds led to the development of

1. mineral world,
2. plant world,
3. animal world,
4. [and then] human being.

Theosophical cosmology is an edifice complete in itself which has arisen from the wisdom of the most highly developed seers. If only I had a bit more time, I would be able to show you how particular natural scientific facts go powerfully in the direction of substantiating this image of the world. Consider Haeckel’s famous genealogies, for instance, with all evolution interpreted in a purely material sense.⁴³ But if you take the spiritual states as they are described in theosophy, rather than matter, or crystal, you can produce genealogies, just as Haeckel has done, though the explanation would be a different one.

Let me draw your attention to the following to prevent you from confusing the different astral or physical states described in some theosophical works with what I have been saying here. Evolution is often described as though different states ran side by side; you see orbs put side by side, so that it seems as if life moved from one to the other. In reality there is, however, only a single orb, and it is only its condition or state which changes. It is always the same orb going through the different metamorphoses—spiritual, astral, physical, and so on.

We have seen, therefore, that the starting point, which we took from Goethe’s words, has its full justification, the words being that ultimately it is the human being who shows himself to be the goal, as it were, a mission of the earthly planet.⁴⁴ The occultist knows that every planet has a particular mission. Nothing in the cosmos is random chance. The mission of physical evolution is to let the principle which is arising for us luman beings reach its goal. You would not find a human being like the present-day human being on any other planet. Spirits—yes, humans—no. The Earth exists so that the human being could evolve as an entity aware of being an I. The natural worlds evolved in the first four rounds in order that in the fourth the human being would have self-awareness, able to mirror himself consciously in the body. He will continue to ascend to higher states, and only very few people can form a real idea of these.⁴⁵ In the next, the fifth round, the mineral world will disappear completely. All mineral matter will be transformed into plant matter. Everything will live in the plant idea—speaking in occult terms. Then the plant world, too, will reach perfection, and in the following round the animal principle will be the lowest world. In the seventh round the human being will have reached the height of his evolution. He will then be what he is meant to become in his planetary evolution.

Someone who understands this may also gain profound insight into religious source documents. There was a time when people believed in them like children. There followed a period of enlightenment, when nothing was believed. Now a time will come when people will learn to understand the images again which have been preserved for us in religious writings, tales and fables. Thus we have the seven rounds shown as the seven days of creation in the Bible. The first three days of creation have passed, we are now in the fourth. The last three are still to come. The first three days of creation represent the rounds that lie in the past; in the last three we have an indication of what will come in future. Properly understood, what Moses wanted to say in describing the fourth day of creation was that we are in the fourth round; he also described this day specifically. This is also why you have two creations in the Book of Genesis.⁴⁶ People who merely apply the rational mind to the Bible will never understand this. The human being of the seventh day has not yet been created. Creating man out of clay is a simile for our fourth round. The double creation story speaks in image form of what has been created, of the state in which we are now, and of the state which will exist at the end of the seventh round. When we look at the Bible texts in this way, these documents suddenly gain a meaning of which we could not have the least idea before. Now humanity will finally realize that the meaning of it all is so profound that we almost have to become different human beings in order to understand. It will be necessary for the sublime spiritual meaning of this, the oldest document to be made plain again,⁴⁷ which is the mission of the theosophical movement. This does not find fault with the materialistic aspects of our time, realising that they are necessary. But it works towards the goal of letting humanity recognize the spiritual meaning of those documents again. This is also what we want to work on in the winter which lies ahead. Today’s lecture is the last in the course. But our Mondays will continue. We’ll meet here every Monday night at eight.

• 37. It appears this was never given. Elements may be found in public lectures, e.g. Berlin, 9 March 1905 on the origin of the Earth [in German, in GA 53].
• 38. See in ‘About this volume’.
• 39. See for instance the lecture given in Berlin on 30 October 1905, in Foundations of Esotericism (note 13).
• 40. See notes on the Logoi (2 July 1904) in this volume.
• 41. See lecture given in Berlin on 7 October 1904, in The Temple Legend (note 22).
• 42. On 23 May 1904. In German in GA 93.
• 43. See Ernst Haeckel, The Natural History of Creation vol. 2.
• 44. See Note 32.
• 45. E.g. essays in Cosmic Memory (note 11, chapter on the Earth and its future); lecture given in Oslo on 12 June 1912, in Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy, GA 137, London & New York: Rudolf Steiner Publ. Co. & Anthroposophic Press 1945.
• 46. See lectures given in Berlin on 4 Nov. & 8 Dec. 1903 [in German] in GA 88, and lecture course Genesis, GA 122, tr. D. Lenn, O. Barfield; London: Anthroposophical Publ. Co. 1959.
• 47. See lecture course Genesis (note 46).

We have to realize that the microcosm does to some degree relate to the macrocosm. Human beings have dual nature the way they present themselves today—body and soul from the outside, and the spirit which they have been developing from the inside, beginning in the middle of the Lemurian age. Soul and body are vestments for the evolving spirit. Human beings will gradually be more and more spiritual. The soul is the mediator between the physical aspect and the spirit. Today’s spirit human being had no part in the process in which hosts of sublime spirits worked to develop this organism with its body and soul. This has been created out of great wisdom. The most perfect photographic apparatus would be child’s play compared to the structure of the eye, which shows such wisdom, and this also holds true if we compare a piano with the structure of the ear, which also shows wisdom. The human skeleton is configured in a way showing the greatest wisdom. Every bone is made up of countless numbers of small struts that support one another. This is a much more profound wisdom than any wisdom human beings have ever gained through their activities in the outside world. How does the human being show his dual nature? Where the vestments are concerned, in a perfect structure; where the spirit is concerned, as the beginning of a gradual evolution.

The development of the human being is the work of two hosts of sublime cosmic builders.⁴⁸ They are gradually handing their work over to others. Wisdom is the essential quality of these cosmic builders. At the time when human beings began to develop the spirit, in the middle of the Lemurian age, one of these hosts really handed over to others who are now helping human beings to take mind and spirit onward through their incarnations. The wise cosmic builders who created the human being as a microcosm have also evolved further themselves, for everything is in evolution. They learned their task on the [old] Moon where they went through the highest level of evolution that was possible on the Moon. This enabled them to undertake the construction of the human body on Earth. In the middle of the Lemurian age the next higher quality developed in them. This was love. Their manas had been perfected on the Moon; now they rose to the level of budhi. Love is the outer macrocosmic form taken by budhi. On the Moon, they had learned everything that could be learned there, and they were therefore able to construct the wonderful edifices of the microcosm.

They developed their budhi in the middle of the Lemurian age, as they had developed their manas earlier, on the Moon. From then onwards the human race was no longer constructed out of wisdom coming from outside but guided out of love. The new task the macrocosmic spirits had taken on was to achieve ennoblement through love.

Higher development of any kind can, however, only be achieved by letting others lag behind. On the Moon, a group of spirits had lagged behind in their development. They entered into the phase of Earth evolution in a latent state and were only then able to develop further in their individual manas. They were only able to emerge very gradually. These are the spirits full of wisdom which in esoteric terms are called the luciferic principle. Lucifer, leader of the human intellect, was now intervening, whilst the other spirits were the leaders of love.

Let us consider the next level of planetary evolution, which is Jupiter. Everything mineral will then have vanished, been absorbed. Wisdom will have been transformed wholly into love. The result will be that because the macrocosm is love, the astral body will then be able to reach its highest level of development. The plant world will be the lowest then, and the human being will have such a soft astral body that the astral will be formcreator, law of nature. Karma will be a thing of the past and love will have become a reality. The consequence will be that everything people feel will also come to immediate expression in the world of form. The human being will reflect his karmic balance sheet. One will then be able to see what kind of karma he has brought with him. Love will be an immediate reality, as the law of nature is now. Budhi will thus come to expression at this fifth level.

At the sixth level, the macrocosmic atman will come to expression. The divine self will be present at first hand, coming to expression in manasic matter... [text missing]. Today the word can only exist physically in the spoken word. At the sixth level the word will flow through the world as an immediate presence, resounding. The human being will then have become sound. This is what the author of John's gospel referred to as the Logos. Just as with everything that is to come, one individual always develops in advance in order to assume leadership, and so the word has become flesh now in the Christ. At the sixth level, however, humanity will be word become sound.

To understand the position of the principle of spiritual evolution we have to consider a significant development in the Atlantean race. Spirits that had initially been [full of wisdom] now became rebels, agitators wanting to gain their independence. Suras became asuras. Until then they had been latent on Earth. They are the powers which now, at the present time, represent the intellectual and mental side of humanity. This aspect of Lucifer is also the one which represented Christianity in the early centuries.

Two documents relating to this exist—one in the Vatican, and a copy of it in the possession of the most initiated Christian in the West, the Count of St Germain.

This Lucifer-nature had also represented Christianity in the early centuries. Then Lucifer had gradually changed into a kind of adversary in the Christian tradition. Originally his position had been that of the human being’s friend.

Evolution thus means that the different streams in the universe do not develop at the same rate. Part has to go ahead, something else needs to catch up later. This lagging behind of evolutionary streams leads to opposing interests in the world. This is an important occult law. Certain evolutions have been shown as ascending and descending in theosophical books. We have 7 planets with 7 rounds each and always 7 form states, a total of 343 states. These were at about their halfway point by the middle of the Atlantean age. The ascent thus began with an intervention from the luciferic principle. In the descent, evolution became delayed, and in its ascent it came to be faster and faster. This accelerated development did not, however, address itself to the whole of the physical plane but only to individual spirits. The lords of wisdom had initially been in ascending evolution. They had reached a peak by the middle of Atlantean evolution. Where love is concerned they are at a beginning; they carved love into the macrocosm, but they are in the descending line and in delay. The lords of the luciferic principle, on the other hand, are in the ascending line of development. Because of this, intellectuality is increasing rapidly, whilst ennoblement through love is very slow. Example: piano maker working with loving care would be out of place in a concert hall; there you have to have the perfect virtuoso pianist. Disharmony would result if the former wanted to go on to do his hammering with the same loving devotion in the concert hall.⁴⁹

Two streams must therefore always come together. Relative evil arises when two streams, perfect in themselves, interact. Jesus said to his disciples: 'Why do you call me good? No one is good except God only.'⁵⁰ Nothing in the world is good, only the principle of the beginning, which is the Father. So this is how the godlike atman and budhi qualities develop macrocosmically in the hosts of the world's disposers.

• 48. See also Cosmic Memory (note 12, chapter on gender division), and lecture given in Berlin on 25 October 1905, in The Temple Legend (note 22).
• 49. See also lecture of 2 November 1904 in this volume, and the lecture of 23 May 1904 in GA 93 [in German].
• 50. See lecture of 18 November 1903 [in German] in GA 88.

We left human evolution at the point where the human being entered into what we would call the mineral realm. He had now become mineral. A brain had been developing from the middle of the Lemurian age. The mineral world achieved its highest quality when the brain developed, with intellectuality establishing itself within it. This descent of humanity to the mineral world was only possible because earlier stages of evolution had taken the human being through the first, second and third elemental worlds.⁵¹ Before going through the three elemental worlds the human being was pure monad, pure spirit (atman, budhi, manas). He then descended through the three elemental worlds into the fourth. The mineral world is the fourth world. Who was actively involved in this development?

Spirits called 'dhyani of wisdom' were active, putting the body together in its mineral form from the outside. And it was only when the brain was finished that the stream of evolution could continue from inside. If the dhyanic spirits of wisdom had continued to work from outside for themselves at this time, the human being would have grown harder even than the mineral world; he would have had no inwardness, no spirituality to counter the hardening tendencies of matter, and he would have been lost to cosmic life. He would have dropped away like a cinder in the course of evolution, cast out from the successive natural worlds. If a life in mind and spirit had not intervened from inside, a world of completely petrified human concretions would have arisen that would have been incapable of evolving further. Such a petrified world must drop out from the succession of worlds. Occultists call this hypothetical world the 'eighth sphere'.

As they were lagging behind at the time, the dhyani of wisdom would have taken humanity to a dead end. At this point the dhyani that had lagged behind before and were now ascending took hold of humanity. This spiritual principle took humanity, then moving towards hardening, to bring spirituality into human evolution. The dhyani working from inside sought to spiritualize the human being more and more, and in that case there would have been wisdom only. The human being then had two avenues open to him—to fall to the eighth sphere,⁵² or to be wholly spiritualized. Either would inevitably have led to something other than humanity is today—humanity would either have vanished into the eighth sphere, or it would have been steadily getting more spiritual. These two streams worked against each other from the middle of the Lemurian age. The situation would have remained like this if the dhyani that had built up the human being from outside and would have taken him onward into the eighth sphere had not taken in budhi or love. (In Marie Steiner-von Sivers’ notes, this sentence reads: ‘It would have remained like this if the dhyanic spirits of love had not incarnated in order to bring love also into matter.’) They thus saved the material aspect of the human being from perdition. They joined the others as a third stream; these were working from the outside.

With the three streams acting together, part of the material, mineral world became this tripartite human being made up of matter, or body, of soul and spirit. Anything that could not be taken along because the streams were not equal did indeed turn into cinders. That is [today’s] moon. It is a piece of the eighth sphere; cinder. In the moon we have a symbol, for the time being, of what the first dhyani might have achieved. The activity of the dhyanic spirits, which had given the human being his form until then is thus symbolized in the moon. In Jewish esoteric language they are collectively called Yahveh or Jehovah, the god of macrocosmic wisdom, of form. H. P. Blavatsky therefore calls him a moon god, the god of form. In [A. P. Sinnet’s] Esoteric Buddhism, the moon is seen as part of the eighth sphere. It is only a part of it, however, a symbol of what the human being would have been in the eighth sphere. Yahveh is the elohim of the fourth round, the lord of wisdom-filled form (the fourth elohim).

From the middle of the fourth round, the lord of love was active—the Christ, the world's love, the second Logos. The lord of form, the fourth elohim, was wisdom, the third Logos. Jehovah is the spirit of the third Logos. In the spirit, the Christ principle, the principle of love, began in the middle of the Lemurian age. Lucifer intervened at the same time. We must get to know the difference between things perishable and imperishable. Greek sculptors, for example, created magnificent, glorious works, but a time will come when they will all have perished. If those works were all, we would have to say that they are perishable. Everything on the physical plane is mortal in this way. But the fact that artists work on the physical plane means something that will remain for the artist's spirit, something that would not exist if he had not been working on the physical plane. Taking in something done on a lower plane is the faculty of the spirit on a higher plane—that is evolution. It is only by incarnating that human beings gain riches in their spirit which they would not otherwise have. That is what the perishable means for the imperishable.

The skeletal system is the most mineral aspect of the human being. It also gives physical human beings at the present time their most perfect form. In future Earth evolution, the digestion, the heart, and so on will be more and more perfect, but not the skeletal system. This will gradually vanish. Standing firm in the physical world with one’s skeletal system is important. Human beings will be able to take with them what they have become through their skeletal system.

The fact that the bones of the Christ must not be broken means that the part of him which belonged to the mineral world must not be destroyed, had to be left intact. The symbols from the mysteries were then for the first time lived out in the world. The Christ becoming a human being was one of the most important cosmic events in the fourth sub-race of the fifth root race. The founders of earlier religions had taught wisdom; the Christ teaches love.

The sub-races of the fifth root-race

• 51. Luke 18:19, Matthew 19:17.
• 52. See Note 6.
• 53. See the 6th and 12th lectures in this series. Also lectures given in Berlin on 9 and 16 October 1915, in Foundations of Esotericism, note 13, and the lecture given on 18 October in The Occult Movement, note 23.