The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees! With its scientific character, anthroposophy is not doing well with our contemporaries. The scientists find that this anthroposophy does not have the character of what they call science; and in turn, the people of faith, those who, from a religious point of view, advocate a way for people to find paths to the spiritual world, criticize precisely this scientific character of anthroposophy. Scientists are accustomed to taking what is accessible to sense observation , what can be investigated by experiment, to take it in, to combine it rationally, and then to ascend to certain laws that underlie the natural phenomena that are perceptible to the senses.

Anyone who has familiarized themselves with the investigations in this field with the kind of scientific conscientiousness and serious inner discipline that underlie our newer science has often absorbed the opinion that exact, real, scientific only possible when it relies on external sense perception and on what the intellect can fathom with the judgments it makes about sense perception and with the conclusions it draws from them. This kind of research has a certain certainty, I would even say a certain ground in that which cannot be denied in its existence, because it proves itself in this existence independently of the human being and announces itself to him out of this existence. One may, as is the case with many physiologically or even psychologically minded personalities of modern times, believe that what the senses directly perceive, what is the content of human perception, is conditioned by the peculiarity of the senses, and thus has a certain subjective character. But they are certain that even if what is perceived directly has a subjective character, for external observation there still underlies something objective for the human being, which presents itself to this observation and provides a firm foundation for research. Therefore, such personalities, who are, as it were, schooled in the exact investigation of external natural phenomena, feel insecure at the moment when this field of external sensory phenomena is left behind and they ascend to other fields. They believe that the inner certainty that is guaranteed by observation and experiment and by the mind that is bound to them, ceases the moment one leaves the soil of this sensory world. This is the source of such judgments as that made by du Bois-Reymond in his classic speech “On the Limits of Knowledge of Nature”, that science ends where the supersensible begins. Anyone approaching anthroposophy with this attitude will naturally have to deny its scientific character, and basically it is only this psychological background that rebels in the widest circles today when the scientific character of anthroposophy is mentioned.

On the other hand, there are people of faith. They often do not dispute that Anthroposophy presents what it has to say about the supersensible worlds in the form of ideas and concepts, and also in the form of connections between ideas and concepts that are thoroughly scientific in character, or at least endeavor to emulate the scientific character. But they dispute Anthroposophy's legitimacy precisely because it strives for this scientific character. For they say: Whatever can reveal itself to man from the supersensible worlds must reveal itself to him in the most intimate experiences of his soul; man must, above all things, tend towards what he feels from the supersensible with feeling and inclination of will, and this supersensible must bear a certain mysterious character. It is precisely when one stands before the mystery with one's soul fervently and religiously attuned, before that which does not yield to the transparent idea, to the clear concept, that one can develop within oneself that elevation, that selfless devotion, which is necessary for the human being in relation to the supersensible world.

And so it is that precisely such personalities are of the opinion that anthroposophy, because it wants to bring the supersensible into the comprehensible element of human consciousness, thereby distorts the religious feeling of the human being, their pious devotion. What relates to the religious must – so it is said – bear an irrational character. One even says that religion must have a kind of paradoxical character, that it must not be confined to what is scientifically called the comprehensible.

Anthroposophy is now confronted with these two views. It is quite understandable that, compared to the usual schools of thought of our time, all of which can be more or less categorized into one of the two categories described, the scientific character of anthroposophy is incomprehensible and difficult to understand. For anthroposophy seeks to arrive at the supersensible in a scientific way, by paths other than those usually recognized in science, and it seeks to follow this path into the supersensible with courage — until the goal is reached where this supersensible subtle world yields to human ideas in exactly the same way as external nature yields to human ideas for natural science, and it becomes difficult for anthroposophy to justify its scientific character in the face of the often rigid tendency of the spiritual currents of our time. Now, in order to characterize this scientific character in today's debate from certain points of view, it will be necessary to address the methodology of anthroposophy from a certain point of view.

This anthroposophy feels most at home at its starting point when it can fully stand where our time of scientific thinking and scientific research has led. Dilettantism and laymanship in relation to natural science may perhaps be touched on enthusiastically by anthroposophy; but they will not be able to find the deepest inner satisfaction in it, because anthroposophy will seem to them to work far too much in the sense of scientific thinking. But it must be said that anthroposophy begins where today's recognized science ends. Today's recognized science starts from the externally given, rises from this given to the ideas called natural laws of this given. If we then live within these ideas, so to speak connecting the ideas we have gained from nature with our soul life, then we have an inner view of nature, and this inner view satisfies us because we can clearly survey the transition from one idea to another, because inwardly, so to speak, in the whole field of our natural ideas, we have clearly before us what presents itself to us externally in the details of sensory observation and experiment. And when this natural science has arrived at this experience of natural ideas, then it feels at its end. Anthroposophy, however, seeks to begin precisely at this point. It takes up what has entered into the soul as natural ideas, and looks at the state of mind of the person who has united such natural ideas with his soul. It looks at the way in which the human being has applied his own activity, has brought his soul and spirit into action while exploring nature, how he has arrived at his ideas of nature; it looks at the activity that the human being has carried out during the research, and it then seeks to develop this activity further. In a sense, it seeks to make the beginning with an inner soul development, using what natural science has arrived at as its end. This now seems to lead entirely into the subjective.

Yes, by further developing the ideas gained, by seeking an inner soul life as a continuation of what has been applied in relation to external nature, one believes that one can get into the purely subjective, into the purely personal, for which only assertions of a subjective character may be made.

Now, dear readers, for the first steps in this direction, this is undoubtedly the case. But anyone who follows the details of these inner soul exercises for the further development of human soul abilities in my writings “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science: An Outline”, and so on, will find that this subjective approach is only a transitional stage and that in the end, beyond the subjective, one arrives at an objective, an objective that is indeed inwardly experienced subjectively – like the ideas of nature – but which, in its certainty, in its validity, is as independent of human subjectivity subjectivity, as are, after all, the mathematico-geometric judgments that are worked out subjectively, albeit only formally. These judgments, however, are independent of human subjectivity in their truth character, despite being worked out subjectively. Only through the path taken by anthroposophical research does one not enter into a merely formal realm, as in mathematics, but into a realm in which human spiritual content is created that relates to realities. When we draw a triangle in mathematics and examine its laws, it is initially only an inward subjective experience, and we must then apply it outwardly to something that can be perceived by the senses so that we can speak of objectivity. The anthroposophical method leads to certain insights, just as in mathematics, but at the same time they lead to insights that have their meaning and validity in the truly spiritually existing world. This becomes clear when one describes – from a certain point of view, I can do this today – the methods that the anthroposophical researcher applies to his or her own inner soul life in order to enter the supersensible world. I say: from a certain point of view, I can undertake this, because this anthroposophical path of research is a very complicated one, it has to involve many details of inner soul practice, and with regard to these details, I must refer you to the books mentioned.

But now, with regard to today's topic, which is supposed to deal with the scientific character of anthroposophy, I would like to start from a kind of historical perspective, because from this the scientific character of what is currently trying to incorporate anthroposophy into human civilization will perhaps be most apparent. When we speak today of the methods by which anthroposophy seeks to penetrate the supersensible worlds, many of our contemporaries are reminded of methods that are similar to them, or which they perhaps even consider to be the same as anthroposophy.

Just in the last few weeks, I have had to talk about anthroposophical methods in a wide variety of cities, and again and again I heard the judgment: Europe is not suitable for pointing people to the ancient Asian yoga cult, to the ancient yoga system, where one is to prepare the soul through inner soul exercises in order to see something other than what it is able to see without these exercises in ordinary life and in ordinary science. But people who judge in this way do not realize that there is a radical difference between what I describe as the anthroposophical methods and what was present — albeit going back to a distant gray antiquity — in oriental wisdom schools and oriental spiritual currents as soul exercises for arriving at another world in the manner of those spiritual currents, other than the one ordinary life presents. If we point out what these schools of thought wanted to give to man, we immediately notice that the ancient spiritual and soul character of man in the East was quite different from that of present-day Europeans.

If we are unprejudiced, we must take seriously the idea that we are seeking a progression in human development from one metamorphosis of the soul life to another. Anyone who believes that the human soul was essentially the same in all cultural periods, or at most different in certain primitive, wild tribes, is making a huge mistake. Anyone who is able to immerse themselves in the way in which, for example, the ancient Vedas or other ancient documents of earlier times sought to convey wisdom to the world will find that this way of imparting wisdom relied on a very different receptivity in the human being, in a very different state of mind, and perhaps only anthroposophical research is in a position to provide information about how the human being has changed in this respect in the course of his development. If we immerse ourselves in the ideas that have taken on poetic forms in the Vedas, for example, we find that there is an enormous difference between the way in which the Vedas were absorbed into the soul life and the way in which we feel today that they are appropriate to our soul state. We feel the need today to have strictly defined, sharply contoured ideas, ideas that have a recognizably logical character, that are transparent, that appeal not directly to the feelings but only indirectly. These are only isolated character traits that I can give. But anyone who compares the wisdom handed down to mankind in the Vedas, for example, with what we today call our pursuit of science and wisdom, will find a huge difference. What is the reason for this difference?

Now, what is usually called psychology today is not very capable of entering into the inner workings of the human soul, which is so mobile and carries so many individual, characteristic, essential traits. That is why today we find little that actually resembles the wisdom handed down to us in the Vedas. But some clarity can be gained if we do not compare the content of the Vedas with our sharply contoured, intellectualized concepts, but rather if we consider the following fact.

We imagine a human soul that is in the process of transitioning from a state of sleep to a state of wakefulness. We imagine it is imbued with the content of a dream. This dream content can take on wondrous and beautiful forms, can reveal an inner drama, can have a pictorial character that carries a thoroughly poetic mood. Certainly, this dream content cannot be directly compared with the wonderful wisdom of the Vedas. But there is something to it when Plato senses the poetic reliving of the world's secrets by the human soul as something dream-like. If we follow the soul as it emerges from the state of sleep and has these dream images before it during the transition to the waking state, we follow its path further: the dream images gradually paralyze, the person takes possession of his physical nature, especially of his will nature; because only when he has taken possession of his full will nature does everything dream-like disappear. Then he is able to make use of his senses through his corporeality; then he is aware of his connection with the physical world around him, then he is able to grasp the difference between the world of dreams and the world of reality.

What, then, is actually the essential thing in this transition from the state of sleep to the waking state? We can observe how, as it were, the dream fades more and more as the daytime perceptions emerge; the daytime perceptions dispel the dreamlike. But no one can be in any doubt that it is a real experience of the soul to which we surrender in our dreams, and that that part of us which later takes possession of our physical body lives in these dream images. The dream images escape it by submerging into physicality. With a more refined psychology than is available to our contemporaries, one can follow what I am hinting at here in great detail. Then one will find out how the soul actually emerges from a state that we will leave undefined for the time being, through the dream state, how it is in a state in the dream state of not quite having its body. At the same moment that it has its body, it is no longer dreaming. When anthroposophical research is applied to these facts, the following emerges. Anthroposophical research, as it must be understood today and as it takes account of contemporary civilization, initially aims to develop the human thought life so that thoughts become stronger and more intense than they are in ordinary science and ordinary life. This strengthening of thoughts is achieved through meditation and concentration. One devotes oneself to a particular content of thought, applying all the strength of the soul to it. In this way, the soul strengthens itself in the same way that a muscle strengthens itself when it is used in work. The whole mental life changes. One gradually feels that one no longer lives in abstract, pale thoughts, which can only be stimulated by the external world, but that one lives in thoughts themselves, as in an element that is as lively as otherwise only the experience of the external sense world; and by developing the power of thought further and further, one finally becomes free from one's physical organization in one's thinking. One develops an inner soul activity that, to a certain extent, takes place outside the body. Only now do you begin to realize what it means to have an inner soul activity. At first, through these exercises, they take place in mere thinking. But thinking is independent of all corporeality; one can bring it to such thinking independent of all corporeality. But then, when one has brought it to such inner vividness in thinking, one can distinguish between what occurs in waking life and what is present for the person from falling asleep to waking up in the state of sleep. For now we know through direct observation that when a person is awake and thinking, he must make use of the body for the activity of his thinking. For waking, ordinary thinking, the body is the foundation. The thinking that is peculiar to us in ordinary consciousness cannot, so to speak, illuminate itself to such an extent that it becomes truly conscious through its own power; the body must be its helper. Thought must be thought in the body, so that the thinking that we use in science and in our ordinary lives today is simply thinking with the help of the body. In this respect, anthroposophical research in particular makes people more materialistic than they would otherwise be with regard to ordinary thinking.

But you also learn to recognize something else, namely, the inner state of mind in which you are when you devote yourself to body-free thinking, which has arisen through meditation and concentration, when you have a thinking experience in the soul freed from the body, and you can now compare what you experience with what the state of sleep is like. One now learns to recognize that, with regard to one's body, one is just as independent during the strengthened independent life of thought as one is otherwise independent in sleep; only in sleep, in the independent soul that has left the body, the weakest prevails, which can only with the help of the body inwardly enlighten itself in such a way that it comes to consciousness. Therefore, thinking remains unconscious during sleep; we descend into unconsciousness during sleep. We enter into a very similar state of freedom from the body after meditation and concentration. But now the thinking has become so strong that unconsciousness does not occur, but rather a fullness of consciousness, so that one lives in a state that is radically different from the state of sleep, namely in a soul life independent of the body. Now one gets to know the character of human sleep. One now knows that the human soul leaves the body when it falls asleep, but that in the present state of human development it has only those thoughts that can be inwardly illuminated with the help of the body to the point of awareness; and by has consciously risen to such a state of soul, which is free of the body and is filled with content, one now learns to compare this state with that in which the authors of the Vedas were.

These authors of the Vedas could not make use of the kind of thinking that we have in our present-day civilization, and we are led back to a state of mind from older stages of human development, when man simply did not feel it to be his natural state to convey the secrets of the world through the body in sharply contoured thoughts, but where he could, through a certain instinct, externalize his thoughts, even if they could unfold outside the body. We look back to conditions, not as we have them today, but to dreamlike, dull, but still to conditions in which people developed the most important thing they developed in their soul life, namely the view of the world, outside of their body. One gets a picture of how the development of humanity in relation to the state of the soul was from older times to the present day. It can be said that the last remnants of an earlier state were still present until the middle of the Middle Ages, even until the dawn of modern times. It was only in the age of Galileo and Copernicus, which taught people to see the world in sharp, mathematically modeled terms, that this age progressed to an experience of the soul in thinking through the body ; whereas up to this age one still notices how the last remnants of a soul state free of the body are present in a form of knowledge free of the body, and the further back one goes in older times, the more one finds such knowledge free of the body. This could only express itself in soul formations similar to dreams. In a sense, people passed from the body-free state to the state where they use the body and develop what corresponds to their insight into the spiritual world.

We have to look back to such times if we want to understand what is communicated to us in older literature about the wisdom of the world. We must not criticize this wisdom of the world directly with our conceptual worlds; then we destroy it and cannot recognize it in its truth. But if we can transport ourselves back to these older times, and to that through which these older people wanted to go beyond their ordinary perception, then much will become understandable to us. For these people, it was not our science that was everyday, but rather what they saw in their images, in their instinctive imaginations. They did not need to achieve this through special exercises first. For them, the task of further development had to consist of something different than for us. If we now let ourselves in for this realization with what has been handed down to us, and especially look at the yoga exercises of the Orient, we must say: All these yoga exercises aimed at achieving a way of knowing that goes beyond the body in a body-free state, a way of knowing that uses the body as a tool.

This may sound strange, and yet, to an unbiased observer, it is how it presents itself! The goal of the older humanity was precisely to achieve something that is given to us in everyday life. They did not have the sharply contoured thinking that we apply with such triumph in science; they sought to achieve it through their exercises. Yes, even if you engage in the systematically well-performed yoga breathing exercises, where the personalities devoted to them do not perform the breathing process in the usual way, but in an abnormal but still lawful way, we see that they were designed to enable you to grasp the human body with what you were in a body-free state of mind. One might say: What is given to us as a gift is what these people strove for through their yoga exercises; we see everywhere how they endeavor to think in such a way that the body becomes the tool of thought. Thus, for anyone who fully understands the facts, the ancient yoga exercises that have been preserved to this day have the effect of making them see: These people strove for the state of mind that is, so to speak, partly innate and partly acquired through our upbringing since childhood.

Now, of course, the question may arise: But such a student of yoga has, through his yoga exercises, explored the secrets of the world for his own perception, has settled into wonderful worlds; but when one hears what they describe as the revelations they have heard, one soon gets the idea: what they have experienced is indeed very different from what we can strive for today with our abstract, blown-off thoughts. But here is an important psychological fact that must be considered. What can offer man the highest in a certain relationship in his relationship to the world arises precisely from practice, from striving, from inner work, not from the finished state. The yoga students had to conquer themselves with inner soul conquests to see what is given to us as a finished product, and only during this struggle and through this struggle do we become attuned to the deeper secrets of the world. If what is achieved is innate or acquired, it is taken for granted and presented as the self-evident in the environment; one no longer lives into the secrets of the world, one simply sees through the world according to one's organization in the environment. Therefore, for us, who are on the horizon that the yoga students first had to reach, the contemplation of the deeper secrets of the world, which the yoga students contemplated, has ceased. And today we feel the necessity to continue the practice, to continue it at a different level, to take the starting point where the yoga students left off.

The beginning of the yoga training is dreamlike, instinctively pictorial; but it is precisely to what we today feel is the actual spirit of science that the yoga student sought to develop. Today, because the spirit of science is now the natural state of civilization, we have to start from this state in our soul constitution and develop it further. We can therefore say: the yoga student has developed to our way of thinking, we have to develop further from our way of thinking. The yoga student designed all his exercises to incorporate thinking into his soul activity. Today, when I describe exercises to be practiced for the purpose of attaining higher knowledge, I do say that these exercises must be directed towards strengthening the thinking, elevating it – not just to unconscious imagination, which belongs to antiquity, but to conscious freedom from the body. We must become free from physicality again, whereas the yoga student strove to enter into it; so in a sense we are going in the opposite direction.

But then I must describe this path further, how these exercises must strive to develop a liveliness of soul such as we otherwise have in the experience of external sense perceptions. In our sensory perceptions, we are to a certain extent independent of our physicality. The senses are integrated into our physicality. However, we become relatively independent of our sensory perceptions; it is only in our thinking that we fully take in what is revealed to us from the outside world. Only when we develop further from this thinking, which the yoga student first strove for, does it now become important to suppress this thinking itself at a certain stage and to bring about a state that is similar to sensory perception, which does not merge into thought, but which, so to speak, leaves thought behind in the physical body. The essence of our exercises undertaken for the purpose of anthroposophical research is this: to overcome thinking in turn, to rise to a state that gives the person an experience, so to speak, in a second personality, but in such a way that this second personality now has the intense, the strengthened, the pictorialized thinking, and that the ordinary personality with common sense, with healthy thinking bound to the physical body, remains behind, fully aware.

Thus anyone who, in today's world, seeks to gain direct experience of supersensible knowledge must strive to achieve this twofold division of their personality. Anthroposophy is not to be confused with any kind of pathological condition. In hallucinations and visions, the personality is lost in the hallucinations and in the world of visions; in anthroposophical research, the personality remains and the ordinary, body-bound thinking continues to live. Those personalities who enter the higher worlds live in them with their developed, metamorphosed thinking. Thus the anthroposophical researcher is always in a position to follow up with his ordinary personality what he sees in the higher worlds, and to do so in a strictly critical way.

This training is now an absolute prerequisite for the anthroposophical path of research; and what is in the human personality by virtue of this training, the scientific character of the state of mind, is by no means abandoned. This scientific personality stands there, criticizes, controls - and even narrates - from its scientific concepts that which the other aspect of the personality, the one that has entered the supersensible world, beholds. But then we must say: on the one hand there is the outer sense perception; natural science turns to it, it seeks the laws of nature, it seeks to relive inwardly in the natural ideas, which have the laws of nature as their content, that which appears outwardly to the senses. The anthroposophical researcher finds himself in the state of soul that arises from this. By forming the ideas of nature in nature, we are scientifically satisfied by the character that this world of ideas bears. This scientific conviction is an inner experience! It is not the external world, nature, that tells us what is scientific, but our own methodology. When we give these ideas a content from sense perception with our ordinary thinking, we give them a supersensible content with the higher gaze of our strengthened thinking. There is no other content of thought, no other logic, no other scientific method that prevails in ordinary natural science and that prevails in what is seen supersensibly by the anthroposophical researcher and handed over to the scientific soul disposition for description.

That is the inner connection. The Yoga Training has sought the spirit of science as its ultimate goal. We have trained it in the age of Galileo and Copernicus in the outer world of nature, we are leading it further to conscious inner vision, but we do not deny it. We examine what is seen in the higher sense in the supersensible world, exactly in the same way, through the same ideas, as we examine what can be fathomed through the eyes, ears and other senses in outer experiment. In its development, humanity has striven for science. What science has become has become a human state of soul. This state of soul is cultivated by working one's way up into the supersensible world through anthroposophy.

But developing thoughts is only one part of what is striven for in anthroposophical schooling. In the previous lecture on “The Harmonization of Science, Art and Religion”, I already indicated that by strengthening our thoughts through meditation and concentration, we come to an intuitive perception of the soul and spirit of the human being as it was in a spiritual and soul world before birth or conception. One can rise to the eternal part of the human soul in its prenatal existence by developing the thoughts that are present in ordinary science. But if anthroposophical research is to be complete, exercises of the will must be added to this development of thought. Again, I cannot describe in detail what must be undertaken as exercises of the will for the purpose of anthroposophical research; I must refer to the books already mentioned, but I can again say something in principle.

To train the will, it is above all necessary that we raise the will, insofar as it extends into thinking, to a higher level than it is in ordinary life. A good exercise for this is what I call “reverse imagining”, for example when we look back on our daily life in the evening, preferably in images, so that a different force has to be developed than is contained in the thoughts. When we review our daily life backwards in such a way, allowing it to pass before our mind's eye in great detail, for example when we go down a staircase, we would imagine it in such a way that we start from the bottom step and work our way up to the top; not lose one's whole day to it, but it can be done in a short time if it is practiced correctly; if we get used to thinking about the course of ordinary events, then we have to exert the will to imagine events differently than they usually happen. We can also feel a melody backwards in this way or imagine a drama backwards. In doing so, we develop the will to a greater strength than is usual. We can now help ourselves in such exercises by doing other will exercises. In ordinary life, we proceed – if we consider longer periods of time, we can point out – from metamorphosis to metamorphosis; but it is the circumstances to which we surrender and which then make others out of us. But if you take your own development into your own hands, for example, if you try to break bad habits, if you try to unlearn something that may take years, and make this striving a characteristic of your nature by by taking it up into the will, one tries to take his development into his own hands according to a strictly outlined goal. The will is thereby strengthened, and one attains something in relation to supersensible seeing in a different direction than in the direction of thought. I want to express that through a comparison.

Take the human eye. Because it is transparent and does not bring its own materiality into play, we are able to see through the eye. The moment it brings its own materiality into play through a disease of the eyes, we can no longer see. The eye must be selflessly integrated into the human organism if it is to serve the purpose of seeing. Now I do not want to claim that the human organism is diseased in ordinary life; but for supersensible vision it is just as unsuitable as a strong-sighted eye is for ordinary vision. Through the exercises of the will our organism becomes, as it were, spiritually transparent. Normally the body is spiritually opaque; we carry it with us, we live with our will in its materiality. Through the exercises of the will, it becomes transparent in soul and spirit; it becomes, as it were, a sense organ. Through it, we learn to see spiritually and soulfully, as we see physically through the transparent eye. When we look through our body that has become transparent, we stand – as if through our physical, sensory eye in a physical outer world – in a spiritual world. We have progressed from imagination to inspiration and to the actual experience of being in a spiritual and soul world. We learn to be in the spiritual and soul world with our soul in the same way as we are in the physical world with our organization.

It turns out that we now experience something in the image that we would otherwise experience in death: in death, the body is shed, while the soul and spirit live on. That this is a truth is expressed in the image for this body-free will, that is, for the standing within the spiritual world, in the same way that what applies to our sensory environment is expressed only through a thought. We thus arrive at the other side of human immortality; we add to being unborn, being immortal. The anthroposophical researcher thus ascends to a real vision of immortality.

But when one comes to this vision, one also learns to evaluate other soul states of ordinary life in the right way in a more refined psychology. What is present in the waking state as facts of the soul's life can be recognized through strengthened thinking. That is why I gave the example of the soul waking up through the dream world into the waking state and linked it to the strengthening of strengthened thinking. But when we now do exercises of the will, thereby entering into the spiritual world and also being able to gain an image of our soul after death when we have left the body, then we also get to know the moment of falling asleep more precisely for our ordinary life. At first, we experience falling asleep in such a way that the sharply defined ideas that permeate our soul during waking hours gradually become darker and darker. But now we know that when we pass through the gate of sleep, our consciousness is not killed, but only paralyzed; and by experiencing that we now also live in a strengthened will, we can now also consider the states in which the soul is when it enters the spiritual world after falling asleep. There we experience how the soul becomes more and more immersed in an overall feeling for the world, and when falling asleep, what is seized in a very special way is what is opposed to the pictorial character of dreaming. When we wake up, the soul is more inclined to express in dream images what it has experienced during sleep; when we fall asleep, however, we also enter into a kind of dream, which dampens down our daytime perceptions, but we move towards a general experience of the magnitude of the world. When waking up, thoughts are more likely to be grasped in the form of images, whereas when falling asleep, feelings and especially the devotional will are more likely to be grasped. In short, one now learns to recognize, to recognize psychologically, the transition of the soul as it experiences it when falling asleep, from the experience of one's own self to being devoted to the world in feeling and will.

One learns to recognize what paralyzes thoughts, what dampens them, but on the other hand also what allows the other soul powers to merge into the world, which, when experienced in a kind of state of consciousness while awake – and it can be experienced – represents the state in which the pious soul is, that pious soul that does not want to have its inner soul state clothed in thoughts and ideas, that wants precisely the ideas and thoughts to be subdued in order to give feeling and emotion to the totality, to the majesty of the world, to the divine that permeates the world. In short, through anthroposophical research one gets to know both the state where the human being strives towards thoughts and the state where he strives away from thoughts, and one learns to see through both states at a higher level. One learns to recognize that the human being lives in such a way that he first moves out of the universe to use his body, and then moves back towards the universe when he leaves his body again. The states that are then taken over into consciousness are the states of everyday knowledge and everyday piety; but these states are raised to a higher level in supersensible contemplation, which is achieved through anthroposophical schooling.

Thus it can be said that the scientific character of the soul is not taken away by entering the supersensible worlds through anthroposophical schooling, for what one has gained as a scientific conviction, as the state of mind that goes with it, is carried up when one tries to fathom what the said second personality sees in the supersensible world. On the other hand, however, what the soul selflessly wants to submit to, what it wants to immerse itself in, is woven into the ideas. This does not lose its majesty at all, this does not lose the character of its holiness at all, by being brought out of the mystery and brought to intimate inner vision, by which it makes us look up to it with devotion, with reverence. The way in which anthroposophy brings the mystery into the soul, where it can be grasped, does not take away its sacred character. And so anthroposophy seeks to maintain a scientific approach to knowledge, not only in relation to the objects of ordinary experience, but also to maintain a scientific approach to knowledge of the supersensible. Just as nothing is taken from nature when we know it in the right way, through devotion to its beauty and to its majestic peculiarities, so nothing is taken from what is supersensible when it is brought down into direct human experience in its true form, not in an abstract form.

Thus it is that one cannot convince oneself of the scientific character of anthroposophy through a cursory definition or through cursory logical discussions of the criteria of scientificity, but rather by living oneself into into the course of anthroposophical research. The person who reflects on it must convince himself that here there is real scientificity, and one that certainly does not prevent the supersensible from taking on a religious character again. And so one would like to say: Anthroposophy has the courage to proceed with scientific exactness, with a scientific attitude and scientific method where the ground of the outer sensuality no longer exists. Anyone who objects, saying that there is no ground at all there, is like someone who would say the following: Just as a stone is attracted to the earth and falls until it can rest on it when we live on earth, so all things on earth are attracted to it and must ultimately rest on the earth's surface. This is true as long as we move within the orbit of the [earth] planet. But the moment we ascend from the conditions on our earth to those in our planetary system, we are dealing with something different; there the planets support each other, and they do not need any special ground as a base. Anyone who wanted to say that there must be a special world ground so that the planets do not fall into the depths would be saying something foolish. So it is here too. If we apply the same exactitude of the outer science to the anthroposophical field of research, we find that the two mutually support each other. The totality of supersensible science, the totality of anthroposophy, arises from the mutual support of the individual truths.

Thus, Anthroposophy has the courage to further develop science from the sensory to the supersensory, and it ensures that the scientific character is not lost. But it is not so timid that it believes that mystery must necessarily prevail over what the supersensible world is, so that man may retain his piety. No! Anthroposophy has the courage to affirm that the greatness of something does not only have its greatness for man because it is unknown to him, but it proves its greatness even when it is known; and through the familiarity with what religious content is, religion must not be thought of as diminished.

Thus anthroposophy seeks to justify itself in the face of the two accusations I characterized at the beginning of today's reflection. For it seeks to penetrate into the supersensible world with full respect for science, and it also seeks to develop the courage to bring down the supersensible into the human heart. And this supersensible is great enough to fill the human heart in such a way that this heart can still develop in true devotion even when the secret is revealed!

Dear attendees!

When speaking about the relationship between anthroposophy and human life, it must be pointed out again and again how, on the one hand, this school of thought arrives at its results and how, on the other hand, these results can be absorbed by the human being. Anthroposophy only arrives at its results, however, when the anthroposophical researcher has first undergone intimate inner soul exercises, soul exercises that enable him to move with his soul forces independently of the conditions of the physical body, so that he can truly enter into that state which must be described as 'experiencing the soul outside the human body'. But when, after such preparations by the anthroposophical researcher, the content of the higher worlds has been glimpsed to this or that degree and results are available, then every human being, even the simplest human mind, can grasp these results with common sense and also appropriate them. And today I would like to speak about what Anthroposophy can become for the individual through this appropriation of the meaning of life, which the individual can acquire for himself through the appropriation of anthroposophical insights with the help of common sense.

What the anthroposophical researcher himself has, by penetrating into the supersensible worlds, needs no mention from me. For those who have even just begun to tread the path that leads to these worlds need no further convincing of what they gain from beholding them. But we must go somewhat further than this meditation on the path to the supersensible worlds if we are to understand what a person who appropriates the results with common sense actually gains.

There are essentially three stages of inner soul-searching by which the anthroposophical researcher reaches his goals, and today I will only briefly mention what has already been discussed in the previous lectures I have given here in the last few days. The first stage of these soul exercises consists in strengthening the power of thinking through a certain practice, making it more intense than it is in ordinary life and in ordinary science. Through this strengthening of the power of thinking, the human being then arrives at what I call imaginative thinking, imaginative imagining. One goes beyond the pallor, the abstractness of ordinary thoughts; one arrives at thoughts that are transformed into images, but in which one is just as vividly immersed [with the soul] as one is otherwise immersed in the experience of an external sensory perception. Through such exercises one attains a certain inner mobility of thought and through all this one's thinking is liberated from the physical corporeality of the human being, to which otherwise ordinary thinking is thoroughly bound. When the spiritual researcher has completed these exercises to the degree necessary for his particular disposition, he comes to survey his past life since birth as in a comprehensive tableau.

But this overview is an entirely active inner activity; it is not mere remembering either. This overview is a remembering of that which has been working and strengthening in our organism since our birth. The thoughts have become more intense and more pictorial; in this way they have at the same time become something different from the ordinary abstract thoughts that we carry in our soul. We have connected with thoughts that are indeed forces, and the same forces that our brain, when we are still a very young child, shapes and permeates and empowers until we are a fully grown human being. Thus, we first experience the forces of life in this empowered thinking. Through this, we see ourselves in our inner becoming here as an earthly human being since our birth.

Once you have managed to have the inner image of your earthly life before you in this comprehensive imagination, you can move on to the second stage of the exercises for anthroposophical research, which brings you to what I call inspired knowledge. One must absolutely disregard what these expressions traditionally carry with them; one must not think of anything superstitious or the like when doing so, but only of what I myself characterize here.

This second stage of supersensible knowledge is not attained by strengthening the thinking, but by treating the already strengthened thinking in such a way that one removes from consciousness those ideas that are present in consciousness through the strengthened thinking, and thereby acquires what can be called empty consciousness. If you are able to find yourself in this empty consciousness in your state of mind, which now allows nothing to enter from the external sense world or from the memories that are usually in you, then it is precisely by having first strengthened your thinking and then , to the perception of a real spiritual world, both in our present surroundings and, in particular, to the perception of the spiritual world to which the human soul belonged in its eternal essence before it descended from the spiritual world through birth or conception to take on a physical body here. Within the empty consciousness, one arrives at a real vision of that which is not present in the ordinary consciousness and which may therefore be called the object of an inspired realization, because it flows into our soul from initially unknown worlds, which is thus truly inspired by that which is so accessible to us from the supersensible worlds.

Once we have come to know the immortality of the human soul in this way, we can also come to know the other side of this human immortality by continuing the exercises from the thinking exercises to the will exercises. Again, one would say: on the one hand, the eternity of the human soul expresses itself as unbornness, and on the other hand, in the beyond of death, as immortality. But the further continuation to the third stage of supersensible knowledge then arises from exercises of will.

One trains the will in such a way that it strengthens itself. I have already mentioned that this is achieved by detaching the will itself from the thread of external events, for example, by looking back at the end of the day at the course of one's daily life, by feeling a melody backwards, by imagining a drama backwards [going back from the last scene of the last act to the first scene of the first act] and so on, thus in the opposite direction to the external course. If one tries to control and develop the will in this way, as one sets out to do individually in the way I have described in my books “Occult Science: An Outline of Esoteric Science” or “How to Know Higher Worlds”, and if one succeeds in this way in tearing the will away from its usual course and physical conditions, then one, as a spiritual researcher, enters into a real spiritual world. One gets the picture of death, of the soul leaving the physical body when a person passes through the gate of death; one gets the cognitive picture of the eternal part of the human soul after death.

[My dear audience], these are three stages through which man works his way up into the supersensible world. What he has to say about these supersensible worlds after going through these stages of knowledge can be followed with the ordinary human mind, provided one is unbiased enough. However, it is the case that this human mind must now, of course, take a certain different attitude, I would say, in that it must become somewhat flexible if it is to follow what anthroposophy has to say. So, for example, this common sense must behave in different ways depending on whether it is following what the spiritual researcher has to say from imaginative knowledge or what he has to say from inspired knowledge or from the third level of knowledge that I mentioned and that I call intuitive knowledge. It is really the case that someone who follows the results of spiritual science only through their common sense feels compelled to look differently at what is gained through imagination, differently at what is gained through inspiration, differently at what is gained through intuition.

If we get to know the supersensible world of human existence through imagination, we get to know through inspiration what the human being has gone through before birth or conception. By extending inspiration to intuition, we get to know what the human soul goes through after death. But once you have come to know these two worlds, what man comes to know in the physical world as supersensible and what he comes to know as the supersensible world before birth and after death, then you also have an overview of the relationship between these two worlds and you now come to know something even higher. What presents itself to intuitive knowledge is something still higher, in relation to both the sense and supersensible worlds. One comes to the realization of repeated earthly lives, which certainly once had a beginning and will have an end; but for the intermediate situation of the human soul, it is the case that the person once goes through a life between birth and death and then an existence in a supersensible world between death and a new birth, and that this is repeated by the individual human beings at the most diverse levels. By pursuing what is brought out of the supersensible world in this threefold way with the ordinary human mind, that which can be gained from anthroposophy as the purpose of life develops precisely in this pursuit.

Dear attendees, anthroposophy does not give trivial rules for life, it does not give trivial comfort for this or that situation in life or the like, but it points to what the human being accomplishes by struggling to understand it. And in what one goes through in coming to this understanding through one's own inner work lies what one can work out for oneself as the purpose in life that comes from anthroposophy. Anthroposophy does not impose a specific content on the human being, but rather points to an inner work and may promise only this inner work, that it is able to give the human being a purpose in life, an inner support and inner security through this work.

Let us take the first step: a person tries to use their common sense to work their way through everything that the spiritual researcher has to say from imaginative knowledge, for example about the forces that organize the human being as an organism and work within the human being. Anyone who tries to reflect on what the spiritual researcher has discovered will find that in the process of reworking the material, their thinking itself becomes more inwardly powerful and inwardly active than it is in ordinary life and in ordinary science. Ordinary life and ordinary science do not need this inner activity either, and that is precisely what holds back a great many people from anthroposophy, especially in our time. Today, people are accustomed to passively accepting everything that the outside world presents to them; they actually want to receive everything that comes to them, even in the form of knowledge, only passively, to enjoy it, so to speak. But anthroposophy, by its very nature, must make a different demand on the human being. Man cannot just passively surrender himself in thinking and imagining in order to understand; he must, by virtue of his inner nature, make his thoughts more powerful by setting about to gather the thinking power that reigns within him, to set it in motion and, in a moving thought, to follow what the spiritual researcher sees. But as a result, some people feel repelled by anthroposophy in the presence of it. They do not want to develop this inner strength in their soul; they want everything to be given to them, while they can remain passive. But it is precisely by demanding this kind of understanding that anthroposophy develops in the human soul that which leads to a certain independence of personality.

This, [my dear audience], is probably one of the first life experiences that a person has when he wants to get to know the world through anthroposophy. His personality becomes inwardly more independent, it is, as it were, inwardly condensed in such thinking - which he must practice - and thus he is given the opportunity to behave differently in life to many things than is often the case today.

[Dear attendees], one need only look a little impartially at life to see how passively people today are devoted to life, and especially to spiritual life. If you go to a party meeting today, for example, you can experience all kinds of interesting psychological phenomena. You can see how the audience does not counter the speaker with any inner independence of their own, but rather absorbs what is presented to them as if by suggestion. Catchwords would not have such power, phrases would not play such a role, if people could confront what is offered to them in this way with greater inner independence. And here it is precisely what one can get from anthroposophy: that one's own judgment is strengthened, made denser, that one's full personality is confronted with what comes from the outside world. That is an achievement for life in the first instance.

But what we get from this thinking, with which we pursue imaginative knowledge, goes much deeper into the destinies of human life. If we follow with common sense what the spiritual researcher says about the human being's inner organizing power, when he speaks of what a person thinks and what is more than thinking, what is a sum of inner living forces — we must then adapt this thinking to the inner work that the spiritual researcher himself develops. If he wants to bring his own ideas and thoughts, which are his means of expression, to people from the depths of his soul, he must speak in different thoughts from those borrowed from the external world of the senses. This stimulates the human being to unfold his active life forces; [by contemplating the spiritual researcher, the human being] appeals to his life forces, to his vitality. This causes the human being to bring his thinking down into his life, to bring life into it, so that a certain [freshness, an inner] confidence and strength comes into his thinking. The thinking undergoes a complete transformation, it becomes more powerful internally through the study of anthroposophy. If one continues this for a long time, this invigoration of thinking becomes apparent in what one achieves for one's organism.

[Dearly beloved attendees], there is a great difference in the way — this is just one example to characterize what a person gets from such a study of anthroposophy —, such as remedies that are absolutely correct remedies for certain diseases, acting on one or another human individuality. One can find remedies for these or those illnesses from the best medical methods and will still see that this or that organization remains dull in the face of a completely correct remedy. But by appealing to the deeper forces of his organization, by discerningly following what the spiritual researcher has to say, he calls upon healing powers in his organism. For what I recently called the body of formative forces, which we can see in a large tableau at a certain stage of higher knowledge, contains healing powers. It is not necessary that this strengthened thinking should work as a healing force from the outset; it can do so, but it will only really do so in the rarest of cases. However, anyone who has awakened their thinking through the inner freshness of their thinking power enables themselves to be affected by healing remedies in a more favorable way than someone who has not awakened their thinking power in this way. In this way we can bring about the possibility of being receptive to certain healing powers to which we would otherwise be insensitive. Many more examples could be cited of how directly such an understanding of the human being, which has been strengthened and refreshed in the way described, affects the human organism. We must say without reservation: precisely what is attained in relation to imaginative knowledge not only makes the human being stronger in relation to his thinking than he would otherwise be, but at the same time it invigorates him in relation to his physical being.

Anyone who has approached anthroposophy in this way will also soon notice that thinking becomes something that, like a current permeating it, fills their body more and more, so that they feel something going into their limbs; they become more skillful, actually simply in terms of the physical tasks they perform. People will discover how, by actually doing what I have described, they become much more skilled at the ordinary tasks of life, whatever their occupation. Anthroposophical work offers an extraordinary amount for our practical lives; in this respect, it already provides a purpose in life.

[Dear attendees], if we look at the second stage, which is reached in inspired knowledge, thinking feels stimulated again in a different way when we reflect on what the spiritual researcher in inspired knowledge from the supersensible world about the nature of this supersensible world, whether it underlies the nature that surrounds us or whether it is the supersensible world in which we ourselves are before birth or after death. Then thinking feels so stimulated [in a different way] that certain feelings are awakened in the person, feelings that are refreshed and become powerful. These feelings do not become so fresh and so powerful under any other influence than through the thinking pursuit of what has been explored through inspiration. Above all, you will see that [by training your mind in this way] you are able to penetrate nature with a completely different sense than you were able to before. I would like to say: Whereas before, when you looked at a plant, for example, you saw with your eyes its green leaves, its colorful petals and, to a certain extent, what the flower reflects of the sun, afterwards you penetrate, as it were, into the secrets of the plant itself. You feel, as it were, the sunlight absorbed by the plant pulsating within the plant. One gradually identifies with how the plant grows out of the germ, how leaf comes to leaf, how it drives out the flower; one's soul life goes hand in hand with the inner becoming of the plant itself and thus with every single [natural process]. It is something like a submerging into nature, like developing an elementary sense of nature. The peculiarity of the anthroposophical science that is meant here is that it does not produce a world-unrelated mysticism, but brings people closer to reality, gives them a sense of nature through which they can gradually deepen their understanding of the beauty and grandeur of nature, so that they can grow together again with nature and ultimately feel at one with it.

I am not saying, [dear attendees], that all these things cannot also be present to a certain extent through certain original, elementary, human predispositions. But what I am saying is that even for those who, through their innate abilities, have such qualities to a high degree, these can still be increased by pursuing the results of anthroposophical inspiration. Whether one has little or much of a sense of nature, one can still increase what one has in this way.

And another thing also comes about through the intellectual pursuit of inspired knowledge: one learns to empathize with one's fellow human beings in a different way. If, through the mental reliving of the imagination, one comes to possess one's own independent personality, then through the reliving of inspiration one comes into the inner life of nature, but also, to a certain extent, into the inner life of other people – again something that should be particularly considered in the present.

Let us look at how people today often pass each other by without understanding, or let us see how few people there are today who can really listen to others. Being able to listen to others is part of understanding people. How often do we see today that when someone speaks, if the other person has only a louder voice than the other, they interrupt and say what they want to say, what they know, even though social life could be very different if people were to approach each other with understanding. But [my dear audience], the person who follows the inspired insights with their thinking gradually realizes that what they experience with other people is basically something that belongs to the deepest part of their own soul. Here we have already reached a point where anthroposophy must go into its more precise results in order to be able to present certain things that are present in life in their correct relationships.

In our [sensory and] emotional life, we as human beings reveal what we experience in the outside world, which is the result of impressions from the outside world. But not all of these impressions directly form the content of our feelings, of our entire mind during our waking day-to-day life. Those who are able to study the nightly dream life with its inner drama more closely than is usually the case will already get an inkling of what anthroposophy can then raise to complete certainty: namely, that in the depths of our emotional life sits that which is the result of our intimate relationships [with the people] we come together with in life. Just as our dreams reveal in the most diverse ways what we might not even consider during the day, to which we are not attached with intense feeling, as it appears in the image, so the circumstances in which we find ourselves in our social interactions with people penetrate much deeper into our mental life than the things of which we are aware in our daily lives. There are relationships between people that penetrate deeply into the emotional life. We stand between people and talk to each other because we are involved in life, perhaps always only superficially, but there are many things that play between people at a deeper level. (Even for those who are not spiritual researchers, the dream life reveals many things.

Everything we experience [from person to person] forms the basis of our emotional life, our entire system of feelings. And some of the disharmony that arises from the depths of this emotional life, which arises in such a way that we feel permeated by an inner pain, an inner deprivation or disappointment, often stems from the fact that that relationships have been formed between people [that we have not brought to consciousness], which sit deep down in the mind, plague us and are just waiting for us to fully bring them into consciousness in order to place them in the right way in relation to our own soul life. Sometimes the solution to the mystery of our own mental life is that we know how to bring our experiences into consciousness in the right way.

If we now follow the results of inspired knowledge in our thinking, we acquire a sense of how to listen carefully to other people, for example, but in a broader sense, we also acquire an understanding of our fellow human beings, and it is precisely through this that we develop a social sense in the deeper sense. We develop that in us which makes us particularly suited to find our way into the social order of mankind for our own satisfaction and for the benefit of other people, insofar as this benefit can come from us. A person's life becomes most rich when he influences all good and evil in man by having trained his thinking in the comprehension of inspirational truths. World and human knowledge through this sense of nature and understanding of man is acquired by trying to penetrate the results of inspired knowledge. Again, it is the case here that anthroposophy does not make people unworldly, but rather brings them close to life and to people.

We experience many things in our time that are called social demands. But what is social feeling and perception is — [the unbiased can see it] — less developed in our time. But this is something that our time urgently needs to develop, and in this respect anthroposophy can and may fulfill a kind of task for the time by bringing people closer to each other in the way I have indicated. It is fair to say that it is precisely anthroposophy that can serve through understanding what I have described, through understanding the other person, through genuine, powerful love of neighbor. [And how is all this achieved, ladies and gentlemen? It is achieved by man acquiring a very specific internalized sense of truth by pursuing the inspired truths in the manner indicated.]

In our ordinary lives, we have – if I may call it that – a logical sense of truth. Through our conclusions [and judgments], we come to find one thing to be right and another to be wrong; this has a certain logical character. If we then apply this logical character to the inspired truths, our whole understanding of the world becomes internalized. Our sense of truth itself becomes different. We begin to feel that which proves to be right in the context of the world as something healthy. [This is a great achievement, my dear audience, when we no longer perceive a judgment, a conclusion, merely as logically correct, but truly perceive that which is right as something that heals, preserves and strengthens the soul so that we have a sympathy in looking at what is true]; when error presents itself to us in such a way that we perceive it as something that makes the soul sick, weakens it, and inwardly as an antipathy. As a result, something arises in the soul at a higher level that can be called a “psychic-instinctive life”, something that, precisely because it is instinctive, can guide us safely through life.

We know that animals have a certain security through instinct [in relation to physical life]; they avoid what is harmful to them as food and choose what is beneficial to them. Of course, we cannot compare the life of the soul with the life of physical instinct; but when we see something similar occurring in human life at a higher level [because it occurs at a higher level in the soul], we have to speak of a psychic-instinctive. [One comes to live in the world in such a way that one feels instinctively secure about truth and error, like a color, as an animal feels through its instinct about its food and poisons. It is precisely through this that this soul instinct enters our human organism through the contemplation of inspired truths. It is precisely through this that we enrich our purpose in life quite substantially.

Man gains something, [as inner support], such as life security, by being able to acquire this instinctiveness at a higher level. And precisely because we acquire the ability to perceive something as healthy conclusion or to perceive it as something pathological or destructive, precisely because of this, we are able to develop a sense of nature and understanding of people.

If I may mention another [dear audience], we come deeper into the results of anthroposophy. What is needed above all as preparation to receive the revelations of the supersensible worlds with one's developed knowledge is a certain quick apprehension, a certain presence of mind. I have described how to develop this in the writings “How to Know Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science: An Outline”. Why do you need presence of mind? Well, at the moment when the real spiritual world appears before you, you are no longer dealing with the same conditions of space and time as before; rather, it is necessary to grasp a spiritual reality at the same moment it appears. For if one is not sufficiently quick-witted to grasp it at the very moment it appears, it is already gone; one cannot grasp it at all. It is a basic requirement for the anthroposophical spiritual researcher to acquire a certain presence of mind for his research. What he gains through inspiration and grasps with presence of mind still has something of the way the thing was found clinging to it when he reflects on it. For when a person reflects on it, he stimulates in himself the qualities that led to the discovery of something like this. (It is therefore a training of presence of mind to follow the inspired truths, if they really are such, in thought.) But in doing so, we make ourselves more capable of dealing with life. For how much some people suffer today when they cannot come to a decision about this or that in life that requires them to make a decision! Becoming decisive is what can be gained particularly from thinking about the inspired truths. And this presence of mind is further enhanced when one becomes consciously aware of how one can now grasp in an instant many things that previously required long chains of thought to understand, because one perceives them directly as healthy truth or as a disease-causing, destructive error, as directly as one otherwise has a taste, smell or tactile experience. It is absolutely the case that one develops the same kind of aliveness in relation to truth and error within oneself as one otherwise has in relation to external sensory perception, but that one develops this aliveness as the experience of a higher, supersensible realm.

[Now, dear attendees], the spiritual researcher then goes on to explore what presents itself to him through intuitive knowledge by further developing and strengthening his will so that this will becomes independent of the physical body and the person is able to place himself in the external spiritual world. He is then able to be in the external spiritual world with his soul and spirit just as he is in the physical world with the help of his senses. But this standing within the external spiritual world is basically nothing other than an experience of one of the noblest human impulses on a higher level of life: it is an experience in love. It is also an experience in freedom, for man becomes unfree only by becoming dependent on his physical body, as I explained in detail in the early 1890s in The Philosophy of Freedom.

, as I explained in detail in the early 1890s in The Philosophy of Freedom. The moment a person rises to have impulses that he grasps through moral intuition, he becomes a free personality [in a moral sense]. But he can also become a free personality in relation to his whole position in relation to the environment, namely to the spiritual, supersensible basis of this environment, to the supersensible basis of his own human being, when this supersensible basis presents itself in the experience before birth and after death and also in the experience of repeated earth lives.

What is contained in an external spiritual world, and also in an external spiritual world of facts, is love on a higher level, the love that, even in the sense world, frees man in a certain sense from what would otherwise be imposed on him by his physicality through his urges and instincts. Karl Julius Schröer once gave a beautiful definition of love, which he explained in more detail in his book about Goethe, saying, “Love is the only passion of man that is free of selfishness.” It cannot be said that love is free of selfishness in its lower stages; but it must be said that as love develops to ever higher and higher stages, allowing itself to be more and more imbued with soul and permeated by spirit, it will make the essence of the human being, in which he merges with his own essence into the other being and submerges with his own essence into the other, more and more free of selfishness. And precisely by making this love a real power of knowledge in intuitive insight, it will also awaken love in this sense in man, in accordance with the intuitive truths that are contemplated.

Dear attendees, I know very well how the present shrinks from speaking of love as a power of knowledge; nor is it at all about ordinary love as a power of knowledge. But when love is elevated through such [serious soul-will exercises] into the experience and experience of the spiritual world, then love becomes a power of knowledge; then, precisely through this loving engagement with spiritual beings and spiritual facts, one attains real objectivity, the penetration of the object in its true form into human knowledge and thereby also into the human overall experience. It is precisely in this development of intuitive knowledge and also in the intellectual pursuit of the results of this intuitive knowledge that one notices how man comes to the experience of his self and also what hinders him from experiencing his self.

For, [my dear audience], anyone who looks into his own heart without prejudice will very well realize how little his own self actually stands before his soul. More or less, what we call our self in ordinary life is only a summary of what is reflected from the outside world as if in a single point. But what the real I, the real self is, is not at all vivid to ordinary consciousness; and if we were to live in such a way that our ordinary consciousness were not interrupted again and again by sleep, we would not experience the human I at all for ordinary consciousness. If we were able to go back to an experience of things in an uninterrupted, uninterrupted course of our consciousness since birth, we would still only find a sum of external images of experience in it, but not the human ego. We become aware of the ego precisely because we withdraw again and again from external experience into a state of sleep – even if we do not develop consciousness in the process. [It is exactly the same when we look back and remember our life.] We actually only ever see what we have experienced during the day, and we always have to see it interrupted [by sleep] during the night. What presents itself through this interruption is, in a person's life, a sum of dark spots in the brightly lit space of memory. If it were not for these dark spots, we would have no resistance to the light that arises from them. We would only experience the outside world, not ourselves!

But the one who ascends through intuitive knowledge to the contemplation of repeated earthly lives, only then gets a view of the true self of man, which goes through repeated earthly lives and can only be recognized in this going through repeated earthly lives. Anyone who has gone through this, as the spiritual researcher has to express himself about the nature of his research into repeated lives on earth, gets a vivid idea of the self of the human being. But he also gets a vivid idea of what knowledge in love is: merging with the external object of the spiritual world. And he gets an insight into the fact that we can only really experience our true self when we become selfless. And love in particular, when it is described in its higher stages as the “only passion that is free of selfishness,” it is at the same time that which allows us to experience the power of our own self in our experience of the external world, in our devotion to the external world.

This is a profound mystery of human nature: that one only experiences one's self when one experiences the outside world, embraces the outside world in love and is able to penetrate [into the secrets of the outside world with love] so that one can immerse oneself in it with one's entire being. This underlies many sayings, such as Goethe's: He first acquires his true self who first loses it in order to gain it. Only when we live ourselves into the world do we thereby live ourselves into our true self; whereas our ordinary self is only [thereby ours] in that it is based on physical corporeality and thereby diverts us from our true self. But by training himself in such a way of thinking about the results of intuitive knowledge, the human being comes to not only think, feel or sense his self, but to bring into a certain [context] that which is most important to him for the earth – that is the human will.

How do we actually stand in relation to the will for ordinary consciousness? When we are awake, we are really only fully awake in our mental life; our feelings are in a state towards our ordinary consciousness that is otherwise like dreams, except that they occur in our soul life differently than dreams; but what will is, has sunk so deeply into the subconscious that it is experienced like the states from falling asleep to waking up. Let us just realize what happens when we carry out the simplest volition, for example when we raise our arm and hand. First we have an idea: the intention to raise our hand and so on. Then what is mysteriously hidden in this intention penetrates down into the depths of the organism, and we know just as little about what is going on down there as we do about what is going on with us from falling asleep to waking up – until we then find ourselves waking up. We also find ourselves again when we look at the raised hand or arm from the outside after the executed volition. [Thus we find the volitional content of our thought.]

In a sense, every single act of the will is a falling asleep and a waking up and an intermediate state of being absorbed in sleep. By developing in oneself the strengthening of willpower and the liberation from the physical body, the whole will becomes like a transparent, holistic sensory organ. Just as we have physical organs, for example our eyes, and through them see the physical world, so at a different level the human being sees into the spiritual world through his or her entire spiritual organization, and thereby also into the essence of his or her will. When a spiritual researcher describes the nature of the will or the nature of the human ego, they must clothe this description in such thought forms that anyone who follows these thoughts with a healthy understanding of human nature will receive something of the reflection of how the will must be spoken of in this particular way, how the human ego is connected to the will [this deeper aspect of human nature]. This human ego is basically as deep down in human nature as the will itself; it must be brought up. But a reflection of this bringing up passes over to him who reflects on the intuitive knowledge of the ego. In this way he develops energy of action in himself, in this way he strengthens his will.

While the reflection of imaginative insights elevates the personality and can make it independent, while the reflection of inspired insights ignites the human mind in the most diverse ways, leading to an understanding of nature and of true human understanding and to an experience of the healthy and the sick in truth and error, the reliving of intuitive knowledge educates the human will. Those who educate themselves in this way will soon notice how their will becomes more active and how they truly begin to love what their destiny imposes on them in the outside world. We learn to fit into our destiny, we become strong in relation to our will in an active and passive way towards life; we become strong also in bearing suffering and pain as well as in experiencing joy. We become strong – not by passing by the suffering and pain of life; no, but through what is aroused [in our mind in the healthy and sick soul life], we become more receptive to the joys and pains of life. We do become more sensitive to things and experiences, but by reliving intuitive insights, the will is strengthened so that we can go through life more uprightly and endure our destiny more surely in both suffering and joy.

And by developing the reliving of intuitive knowledge, we feel connected to the world in a way that itself represents a religious sense of the world, which represents what the deepest divine impulses in the world - through immersion in love in this world - are capable of achieving. The religious and artistic sense is kindled by this immersion in love in the world, to whatever extent it may be present. Those who adhere to anthroposophy in this respect will benefit themselves in terms of the further development of their artistic, [religious] and moral being if they adhere to what has just been indicated in anthroposophy.

So, [my dear attendees], anthroposophy, by wanting to speak of what can become the purpose of life through it, does not approach people with some abstract sermons or admonitions, but in such a way that it tells them: When people experience what can be explored in the spiritual worlds through it, he acquires inner strength for his thinking, which he makes alive, and for his feeling, which he makes more inward and more accessible to world phenomena. He also acquires further development for his will, which he makes stronger and at the same time more capable of suffering, but also more suitable for responding to the joys of life in the right way.

This is what anthroposophy has to say about the purpose of life that a person acquires by immersing themselves in anthroposophy and delving into it [a certainty in life that cannot be gained in any other way]. Anthroposophy has nothing ready to give to a person in this regard as their purpose in life, but only what they can work for themselves, but will possess all the more surely for it.

Life is something that philosophers view in a variety of ways: one views it pessimistically, another optimistically, and yet another more neutrally, and so on. But however one may feel about these various nuances, anyone who looks back on what he himself has been through in life will agree with the maxim: “Only those who have to conquer it daily deserve freedom and life!”

In every sense, life wants to be conquered by people every day. And that is good; because those personalities who would only passively grow into life would also have nothing of life for their own being, because what a person really possesses is what he has to conquer in life. If we remember the truth that only those who must conquer it daily deserve freedom and life, then we may add: Anthroposophy, for its part, wants to bring the means to man through which this daily conquest can be carried out by man!

Berlin, March 12, 1922

Dear attendees! It is admitted from many sides that today, when it is said that there is an urge to find something for the heart, soul and spirit of man that could not come from the previous traditions and also from the present science, it is not just the ideal or the longing of a few that is being expressed. It is admitted that a need of the times is being expressed. Anthroposophy wants to serve this need of the times. That it can even come close to doing so, however, is disputed by many. It is admitted that the need for spiritual deepening and for an uplift of the soul is present today in the most eminent sense. But people behave very strangely when they judge the anthroposophical spiritual movement on the basis of ideas that they often believe were really born out of these needs of the time. Among many others, one judgment is typical, which goes something like this (I will not give the name of the person who had this judgment printed; names are not important, as they often only annoy, but this is a judgment that is asserted from many sides): Anthroposophy is the wrong path after a correctly recognized goal that is necessary for the needs of the time. There must be something extraordinarily remarkable at its basis if it could be said that Anthroposophy could indeed recognize with a certain certainty the right and even necessary goal for the needs of the time, but that it was also, in the fullest sense of the word, a mistake to pursue this goal.

Let us now, at the end of this week's course on anthroposophy, try to understand what might actually underlie such a judgment.

Anyone who makes such a judgment realizes that the scientific way of thinking has educated the souls of people in the civilized world for centuries, has given their search a certain character, and has left a certain imprint on what they call knowledge. He also realizes that what has been instilled into humanity in this way must be taken into account. This has found its way into all minds, even the simplest ones; it has also given these simplest minds the critical standard for everything that approaches them as a world view. Furthermore, the critic recognizes that it is the old traditional creeds and world views that profess to have a certain knowledge of the supernatural and the eternal in human nature, but that the way in which they present this knowledge to humanity is precisely what fails to satisfy the needs of today's humanity, which has been shaped in the way described by the development of recent centuries. And so a judging person sees: There is humanity thirsting for satisfaction in its world view; there are others who are, so to speak, natural leaders, who see this humanity before them, but who do not know how to speak to this humanity – neither from the perspective of modern natural science nor from that of the old traditional creeds and not even from what they knew how to make out of the two — to speak to this humanity in such a way that humanity is able to receive what is said as a proclamation of what it demands from its thus developed needs of the time. And then those who judge see that anthroposophy appears. One may think as one will about the details of what emerges from the anthroposophical method of research, but even they will admit that anthroposophy is trying to take account of these contemporary needs that have just been characterized.

And then the judges say: Yes, a certain intellectualism, a certain rationalism, has developed precisely in scientific thinking. But if one develops the human soul only in the sense of this rationalism and this intellectualism, and if one offers the seeking souls only what can be achieved in this way, then this human soul does not feel satisfied. For its yearning, its urge, arises from something other than mere intellect or than that which can be satisfied by mere rationalism. Therefore, those who sense the need of our time but are unable to enter into anthroposophy speak of the fact that we cannot approach our contemporaries with intellectualism or rationalism; that which is offered as a world view not be clothed in the forms of pale, abstract thoughts; it must not be won by a [rational] path; it must be brought forth from the irrational depths of the human heart, perhaps even from the subconscious depths of the soul. And then perhaps someone will also say: What man recognizes has already become an object; but what he is to revere as his eternal in the soul must not be an object of knowledge. One can also hear that what man thus turns to must be an Unconditional, which penetrates into the human soul somehow, not by the clear path of thought, but by an irrational path. And one can hear similar things.

Something actually presents itself in a remarkable way when one considers reviews of anthroposophical will today. People criticize anthroposophy for wanting to overcome mere intellectualism, mere systems of thought, but for being something rational itself, for working with thoughts. People shy away from mental work, and with some justification, and it is said – again with some justification – that anthroposophy does not fully want to get rid of thoughts; that is why people are somewhat wary of it. It is said that the newer world view has been burned by the thought life, despite it being so cold and pale. One would like to take from the unthought, from the seething of the soul faculties, which are not touched by the thought, that which is to become the content of a satisfying world view and world knowledge. It is then quite natural that, if one shuns the thought, one guards against wanting to express such a world view in thoughts. And so, when one wants to express the content of one's soul, one chooses the thinnest of thoughts. One must have thoughts after all, because mere feelings or impulses of the will or something merely irrational cannot be incorporated into a worldview, nor can they be incorporated into a life that is merely conceptual. One cannot even become aware of it. But if you want to bring what you are already striving for into consciousness as the content of your soul, then you make your thoughts as thin as possible. You make a very small, tiny thought: the irrational, the unconditional, and so on. But you have not escaped the thought, you just want to make the thought so small, so tiny, so easily manageable, so infinitely trivial that you do not realize that you have a thought at the end, in which you want to summarize something else. In contrast to this, anthroposophy seeks to recognize to the fullest extent, in the most comprehensive sense, what fate the life of thought has actually undergone within the human soul in recent times. Anthroposophy knows that with modern science, the life of thought has acquired a certain character, one that allows it to penetrate into the outer world, into the world of the senses, but not into that with which the soul can feel connected in its eternal essence. But Anthroposophy, taking into account all the tremendous spiritual values gained through the more recent development of thought, cannot simply exclude thought. Rather, it says to itself: Humanity has developed once up to thought, to the comprehension of thought in its purity, and in coming to this, thought has indeed become something that initially has only a very limited field. But Anthroposophy knows: this thought, as it was gained, must be regarded as something absolutely valuable, it must be the starting point. It does not shy away from accepting that as a gift of human development, which has brought great results in a certain area of humanity, but which, in order to achieve these great results, has made the sacrifice that the human soul must have in its eternal perspective.

Thus, Anthroposophy first turns to the realm of thought, regarding thought as a germ that, while it cannot be taken directly for the immediacy of worldviews in the way that natural science has carried it on the waves of its development, but can be developed, from which something can be extracted that is not yet revealed by itself – just as the fully grown and flowering plant that is about to bear fruit is not yet present in the germ, but is only hinted at for those who can judge the germ. And so anthroposophy seeks to strengthen thought through meditation and concentration, the means of inner soul development.

Then, when we strengthen it through meditation and concentration, it becomes something different in our inner experience. And I was able to show that by strengthening the thought inwardly, we first see the supersensible aspect of what lives here on earth as a human being: we see the physical body; we see the formative forces body, the time body, that which is thoroughly organized between birth and death as something spiritual, which underlying the physical body as the [creative] spiritual force and which is so constituted that, when the thought strengthens itself, it can condense so strongly that it itself is identical with the sum of those forces that are at the same time growth forces, formative forces of the physical organism. These formative forces, by being born with us into the physical world, become rarified in the human organism; they become powers of thought. Thus we take them up into abstract thought. But when we condense these abstract thoughts again through meditation and concentration, they become inwardly full of sap, vigorous in growth, and become real growing formative forces of the human organism. In this way, we move up in full, living knowledge to that which forms, permeates and supports the human organism between birth and death. And when we are then able to move from imaginative knowledge to inspired knowledge, that is, when we can remove from consciousness these thoughts, the formative forces, that we have attained through meditation and concentration, so that we can create empty consciousness, then we move we advance to the perception of the spiritual in the natural environment, advance above all [to the perception] of the spiritual soul in the environment, as we ourselves were before we descended into the physical world and connected with a physical body. The inspired knowledge thus shows us the spiritual soul according to the side of the unborn.

What do we do when we do such exercises and thereby gain certain insights that satisfy our need for knowledge? What are we seeking within the human power of thought by doing such exercises?

If I want to hint at what one is looking for, then I must say the following. The human soul is a unified whole; but it appears in three different external revelations: as a thinking soul, as a feeling soul, and as a willing soul. But in thinking, there is also willing; and in willing, there is also thinking. One would like to say that the life of thought is only the main thing in the life of thought; it has a hidden life of will in it. When we connect and disconnect thoughts, so that we enter more and more into reality through the disconnecting and connecting, the will works in this connecting and disconnecting of thoughts. But one does not see that; one overlooks this will, as it were, one hides this will. But when we meditate and concentrate, we disregard what the ordinary consciousness has as the content of thought; through meditation and concentration, through resting on a particular content of thought, we suppress, as it were, precisely that content. But what we bring up into consciousness is the will, as it is never otherwise taken into account, which lives in thinking itself. And it is this will that one grasps in order to then grasp with it the formative forces of the body and the eternal part of the soul, as it was before birth, as it was in the spiritual-soul world, in order to enter into a physical body. Thus, in the will, one grasps what can be grasped by the human being on the one side of eternity. The other exercises I have described are exercises of will; they lead to the will becoming independent of the physical body. And what is it that we are seeking when we practise this strengthening of the will? Just as we seek the will in the power of thought through meditation and concentration, so we seek the thought in the will through the exercises of the will. When we develop our will in our ordinary lives, we actually notice nothing of the power of thought in this will. We do start from the idea, as I have already explained these days, that when we bring about a simple development of will, for example, when we just raise an arm or a hand. But then the will penetrates down into the depths of our organization, and we see the result again only in the raised hand, in the raised arm. But anyone who does such exercises of will as I have described will find that, wherever he turns his will, it is permeated and glowing with the power of thought, with a power of thought that goes down into our limbs, a thought-power, the content of which we cannot even describe as human thoughts, but whose content we must describe as world-thoughts, because we stand in them through those thoughts that are not in our consciousness, but which are in our whole being and in our whole development of will. These thoughts, which are not in our consciousness, we discover as world-thoughts, as wisdom, but also when we lay down our body and go through the gate of death. Within our stream of will, we discover our eternal selves through thoughts that are otherwise deeply hidden in the human soul. This is how the picture of knowledge of dying emerges; this is how we come to know what we are when we have passed through the gate of death and moved back into the spiritual world.

Thus one sees that anthroposophy seeks the will in the power of thought and the thoughts in the power of the will. And by taking into account, in this way, I would say for itself, what a person otherwise leaves out of account in life, it comes precisely to that which otherwise remains hidden for the person, namely, to that which passes through birth and death as the eternal part of the human soul; and at the same time it comes to that which underlies all external nature as its spiritual-soul element. Anthroposophy values the thought. In thought-exercises it values thought as the germ from which other soul faculties are developed, and these are unfoldments of the will. But anthroposophy also appreciates thought when it lies hidden beforehand, like a flower in the bud. However, because one knows the thought beforehand from the ordinary consciousness, it is coaxed out as something well known when one experiences the will independently of the body.

Thus, anthroposophy is able to respect the thought and to endure it quietly when it is said that it is rationalistic after all. It is not rationalistic, as the people who say this believe, but it is able to make something else out of the thought at the same time, by appreciating the level of the thought.

Anyone who now goes through these exercises, both intellectually and will-wise, will sense something before actually entering the spiritual world that should not be ignored if anthroposophical research is to be appreciated in the right way. A true rationalist who immerses himself in the world of thought, which is rejected by the needs of the time, does not actually realize how thin an element of soul thought is. But he who does become aware of this will speak something like Friedrich Nietzsche spoke — it is recorded in his posthumous writings — about the tragic philosophical age of the Greeks, where he shows how those pre-Socratic Greek philosophers came to the first reflections, which, although not yet as pale as ours, nevertheless already had enough of a pallor of thought in them. Nietzsche found these concepts of Heraclitus, Parmenides and the others chilling; the human soul literally feels permeated by the icy cold in these thoughts. Nietzsche describes this in a poignant way as a philosophical experience of the most intimate kind.

Anthroposophical research must come to this experience and must know with whom what lives in the soul can be compared. If one can approach this thinness, this paleness and abstractness of thought, and really experiences it, then one does not set oneself above it by simply returning to the full succulence of life, but one surrenders to these thoughts. If one wants to enter the spiritual world, then a certain fear comes over one, a fear of nothingness, the fear that always arises before the void. And this fear must be overcome in such a way that the person is well prepared beforehand by such things as I have also described in the book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” and in the second section of my “Secret Science.” The person must be prepared to go through this fear in the right way, so that when he arrives at the experience of the pale thought, he has the certainty: You have to go through this fearfulness, just as you have to go through the state of sleep for the time from falling asleep to waking up. But just as you may believe that you will awaken from sleep every morning, so you may believe that when you go through this fearfulness, a world will greet you that you will only be able to judge then. Before that, you have only earned the confidence that the spirit permeates the world and that you will find it when you leave this state of fear. The one who wants to prepare the soul to see the spiritual world must undergo many trials.

And when, on the other side, the human being is to arrive at the pictorial experience of death, he experiences something else. The spiritual world appears in the form of objective world thoughts from the currents of the will. But after it has emerged in this way, after we begin to imbibe these thoughts, which are greater than our subjective thoughts, in which we feel that the laws of the world, as living beings, draw themselves into our organism, we then become aware that something is also drawing into our will impulses, drawing into them like an alien feeling that takes hold of us as a certain anger at the merely finite. However paradoxical it may sound, one must experience a certain anger, one must expose oneself to it, at the experience of the eternal in the finite. This anger gives one something by which one can visualize the great distance between the infinite and the finite. For what is to be experienced by man must be cognitively experienced by the spiritual world. It must be grasped in clear thought, but if it were only that, it might be merely rationalized. But it penetrates into the human being as reality, entering into a relationship with human feeling and also with human will impulses, so that it is clearly announced that we are dealing with the unity of a reality, not mere thoughts, in the human being.

Dear attendees, what can now be clearly and distinctly present in the developed soul in this way is, however, present in all human souls, even in those belonging to the most naive minds, it is present in the subconscious state. It is present in the subconscious state when, from the newer spiritual development, man approaches the abstract thoughts, as they occur in natural science, for example, when he approaches them with the intention of creating a world view out of them. Then he experiences subconsciously what the anthroposophical spiritual researcher experiences consciously, he experiences this fear described. He does not bring it to consciousness, does not bring it up into his mind, but he devises logical reasons why what anthroposophy now wants, for example, by looking at thoughts, would be impossible. He reinterprets it to himself in order to avoid the necessity of transforming the thought in a living way and penetrating through the fear, as one penetrates through the night with the confidence that one will wake up again in the morning. And on the other side stands the shyness — that anger that overcomes one — to enter into the reality of the human soul as eternal.

In this final lecture, I will give you only a few characteristics of what the living knowledge of anthroposophy can do for the human being who, as I said in the previous lecture, can use his or her common sense to can relive with his healthy human understanding what is lived in this way by those who are really entering the path into the spiritual world to seek that which the deepest need of our time in this world is sighing and pushing for in the human soul. And in the face of this, people spend all kinds of energy, and certainly rationalistic developments, in order to avoid admitting to themselves that they shy away from that fear, from that patience in the face of anger, which I have described.

Then such people come along and say: Yes, it is right, people's need for time must be satisfied. But we don't want to know anything about anthroposophy, because it wants to take refuge in thought again – we have seen how it wants to do so not in a rationalistic form, but in a completely different form – but we want to seek out of the irrational what can satisfy the human soul. We want to try to analyze what can be in every human soul in order to find out how it can be expressed in the simplest non-rational way. Then such people believe – at least that is how they speak – that they can bypass anthroposophy by reinterpreting what they experience in their subconscious!

And then you can experience some very strange things in the opposition to anthroposophy. For example, it is said: This need of the time already exists, but anthroposophy is a wrong path to the correctly recognized and necessary goal; and those who correctly recognize this need of the time but do not want to go the wrong path of anthroposophy — oh, they would know how to wait for what Anthroposophy offers, but how the need of humanity for time could be satisfied from completely different, irrational human soul foundations.

Now it is very strange when you address such objections individually, in concrete terms. Today, I will avoid mentioning names for good reasons; but one can find out, for example, I am telling facts, that it is said: Oh, what does this anthroposophy want? There are other people today who are trying to gain a relationship in a very elementary way, firstly to the other human soul, which is also spiritual, and then to the spiritual soul of the world. When something like this is said, a name of a personality is mentioned who, with her writing, is held up in contrast to anthroposophy. I then found out these days that a name of a personality had been mentioned — I have to tell this so that the misunderstandings about anthroposophy are not repeated over and over again, and I am allowed to tell it because I am talking about a personality whom I hold in very high regard. This person, who is said to offer something for which there is no need to wait for anthroposophy, met with me about eighteen years ago to talk about anthroposophy. However, because she could not get to anthroposophy, but would not have been against it if she could muster the inner strength to approach it, she then tried the external methods, which were just appreciated by the opponents of anthroposophy in the manner just described. Then a few years passed and I met the same person again in a different place; she was trying again to get to anthroposophy, but she couldn't — perhaps also taking into account what is valued more in the outside world today than anthroposophical research. And during my last lecture tour a few weeks ago, this personality had come to me again, clearly expressing: There must be something that goes beyond what I can do myself, what I can give myself in my books. And this personality literally said: “There is something that seeks paths into the spiritual world not only from thought, from the rational, but from the will, from ethics; that is something that interests me, I would like to know more about it.” This is roughly what this personality said to me. A few days ago, I heard that the personality who would like to connect with anthroposophy in this way had achieved something that anthroposophy has no need of!

Dear attendees, behind the scenes of existence, things often look quite different than they are presented by those who often have very different goals — perhaps unconsciously — than those who are in the words. So, with our present life and its temporal demands standing before us, we need not be surprised if the position of those who would actually be called upon to understand anthroposophy in the light of the demands of the time is often still a grotesque one.

Listen to how I describe the methods of knowledge in anthroposophy: they are purely inward methods of knowledge, such methods by which the soul enters into the spiritual world through inward experience; what is experienced there is experienced as inwardly as only mathematical experience is; truth and certainty are experienced inwardly as only mathematical certainty is is experienced inwardly, only that mathematical certainty is formal and does not go to reality, whereas the knowledge gained by the soul through meditation, concentration and exercises of will and so on is quite real, and its standing in relation to this knowledge is then a standing in the real supersensible when it attains to it. And it is precisely in such books as “Occult Science”, “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Riddles of the Soul” and others that it is described how the anthroposophical researcher arrives at these results; it is described in such a way that anyone who wants to apply these methods to their own soul can come to verify these things at any time. It is only a matter of the one who wants to verify having to apply the methods to his soul. Those who merely want to understand anthroposophy and make it fruitful for their lives in this way, as I discussed in the last lecture here, do not need to apply the spiritual-scientific methods to themselves, but can certainly stop at taking them in through common sense and a healthy sense of soul.

But even if you are not a very important philosopher or scientist in the present day, you must still gain an idea from this description of anthroposophical methods and their results that a real examination of what anthroposophy says about its results can only be done by applying the same methods that he uses, by checking how he arrives at his results — in our soul — that is, in the spiritual world itself, by also checking it in our soul in the spiritual world itself. Instead of understanding things this way, people who call themselves scientists today come along and say: Somebody who comes to anthroposophical conclusions should come to some experimental laboratory and try to verify whether he can really come to such conclusions! But the nonsense inherent in such a demand is no less than that which would be spread in the following way. Someone says: I am a mathematician, I have solved these and those mathematical problems; see if they are correct by acquiring the appropriate mathematical skills and checking them out. But then people will reply: We don't like that; why should we first acquire these mathematical skills? Come to the laboratory, where we will examine your skull through experimental psychology and so on and determine whether your mathematical results are correct! Such absurd demands are trumpeted out into the world today and unfortunately find a believing audience.

This is what must be said first about the path of anthroposophy in relation to the needs of the present time. But what the soul penetrates into and from which it announces the results to humanity in such a way that these results can be grasped by the healthy human mind, if it really wants to, what is that actually?

To characterize what can be given to the world through it, or – if I may express myself more modestly – would like to be given to the world, we must recall how earlier times related to the content of spiritual life. Let us look back to earlier times, from which the traditional world-view beliefs have remained with us. There people spoke as if of spiritual beings. They naturally did so in terms of concepts and ideas. But even though the knowledge and perception of spiritual beings was instinctive in ancient times, people still had an inner certainty about this spiritual world, so that they knew: you do not just have concepts and ideas about the spiritual world, you have the spiritual world itself within you; you are not just speaking of gods and angels, these gods and angels – one could also choose other terms – do not just live in your ideas, but they live as living beings in that with which you are connected with your soul, they are spiritual realities.

This is what the more recent period has brought about, that this direct spiritual experience is no longer there. When the more recent period speaks of spirit, it means thoughts. No one in earlier times would have understood what it means when we say today: ideas are realized through history. But everyone would have understood what is meant: spiritual beings realize themselves through history. The ideas are only the means of expression for the spiritual world behind them, and this lives in every single activity that a person performs. Just as a person feels at home in the sensory world, so he also feels at home in a spiritual world. But people who come from this direct experience of the spiritual world used to have, for example, when they were faced with a bush – I am talking radically now, but perhaps this will help to adequately characterize it – an immediate relationship with it, so that the spiritual immediately confronted them and the natural object was also immediately seen through.

Recently, we have seen this coming to humanity: to look at the details of nature in such a way that we no longer experience them in an elementary spiritual and soulful way, but that the abstract thought that expresses the natural event is there first. We stand before the bush; in our thoughts, we first consider what we can experience about the bush. But this separates us from the spiritual, and so nature has been de-animated by us. Because we were able to penetrate nature with abstract thought in the newer epoch of human development, abstract thought separated us from the actual spiritual world. But what human beings did not have when they saw the elementary spiritual in each individual thing was human freedom. It could only develop in the age when man now experiences abstract thoughts in nature instead of direct spiritual images, so that nature is no longer compelling and no longer has a direct effect on human nature.

The fact that we have lost the spiritual reality in nature and only retained the image of spirituality in abstract thoughts has made our freedom possible. This is described in detail in my Philosophy of Freedom. But this has also brought about the necessity that if we want to come to the spiritual again, we cannot stop at the thoughts that we find today in bushes and trees, in stones and sun, rivers and mountains; there live the abstract thoughts that the human race had to experience in order to become free. Today we have to condense thoughts through meditation and concentration. Then we will look at nature again in such a way that the spirit looks back at us from all the beings of nature. And in the same way, we find the spirit in social human life in the way we as human beings face each other, by developing love for our neighbor and expressing this love through deeds.

Thus, anthroposophy relates to the experience of thought in modern times in such a way that it says: Thought has also become the thinnest in external natural phenomena, has become what one might say is a last memory of the spirit; it must be condensed again, must be strengthened, then it will lead us back to the spirit again. Anthroposophy is not rationalism; it does not stop at the pale thought, but struggles through to this thought — really to this inner coldness of thought, which Nietzsche also describes in such a poignant way; but by the soul coming to such thin thoughts, it is, as it were, thereby enabled to have windows everywhere. For anthroposophy, abstract thoughts are like windows; the environment reveals itself everywhere. And then, by condensing the power of thought, the soul penetrates through the windows that have been opened by the abstractness into the spiritual world. In this way we come to experience not only a world of abstract ideas and ideals, but again to that which humanity once experienced as a reality, but of which only the abstract copy remains in the present worldviews and religions, even if today one believes that one is looking into a spiritual world in the irrational. And then we come back to not just wanting to know about the spirit, not just to represent it in our thoughts, but to experience it.

Our living knowledge is only a detour to bring living spirituality into our lives, so that we live again from morning till night in such a way that we know: every one of our deeds, every one of our feelings, every one of our thoughts is such that the spiritual lives in it. That the human being does not become unfree as a result, but precisely free, is what I sought to show in the “Philosophy of Freedom”. I tried to show that if man can grasp thinking in such a way that he can also grasp it, that he can, for example, ascend through the moral intuitions into the spiritual world in the ethical and moral spheres – if he ascends to pure thinking in this way, then he is in a position to grasp world events at the root. But that is the second thing, quite apart from the path: it is a God-filled, a spirit-filled world that is coming into being. Anthroposophy is not meant to provide a mere world view, but should become the cause for man to have a real experience through which the divine-spiritual draws into the newer development of humanity, because man — for the sake of his freedom — can no longer go the old ways to the spirit and would remain spiritless if he did not seek the way from the thought and from the will, as I have characterized it.

Thus, anthroposophy does not merely strive for spiritual experience, but strives to prepare a field, a dwelling for the spirit that will permeate humanity, to offer this spirit a field and a dwelling so that it can be among us, so that we can think, feel and want everything not only out of a temporally ephemeral humanity, but out of an eternal divine spirituality! Anthroposophy does not want to be just a process of knowledge, it wants to be a real process. And in that it, I would say, prepares the Lord's dwelling here on earth, in that it wants to be a knowledge that is at the same time life and at the same time builds the dwelling for the Lord, the Spirit, it has a relationship of its own accord to the third aspect of our great contemporary needs: to the social aspect.

The social question, and that which it summarizes, has a deep impact on the soul and heart of today's man, insofar as this man has soul and heart at all in the true sense of the word. That is, of course, the fundamental question. But can it actually be understood in the way it is often understood today?

Of course, esteemed attendees, every well-intentioned human perception must be thoroughly appreciated and valued for the moment; but something else is still needed for the good of humanity. Today we hear how millions are starving; we ourselves may have the opportunity to experience the misery that has remained from the terrible war catastrophe in the civilized world. We learn how unemployment is spreading everywhere, how it has affected the victors even more than the defeated countries, and especially the neutral countries. We look at this world that has been so severely tested. Certainly, we have no objection to those people who now say, out of a good heart and also out of a certain knowledge of the world: “The next thing to do is to create bread, bread to satisfy hunger!” Yes, that is so; that must also be considered the next step. But we, as humanity, must move forward again in such a way that such times of hunger and need will no longer be possible, as they have become possible today. For what caused them?

Anyone who looks at the world with an open mind will say: Even if there is a natural disaster, if there is any kind of natural disaster or infertility, it must be compensated for in the world economy if it is managed properly. On the whole, nature gives people what they need from it. If entire groups of people do not have what they should have, it is not because nature is withholding it from them, but because people do not understand how to properly process and deliver what nature provides! Nature provides everything that could feed and clothe all people, everything that could provide the barest necessities for all people; it just needs to be worked in such a way that people can give and take it for people in the right way. Need is not caused by nature, at least not in the main, leaving out the details. Need is caused by the way people have treated nature, by the way people have behaved towards each other. Need has come and comes from the kind of spirituality that prevails among people, and only the kind of spirituality can remedy the need in the long term. We must not only find abstract concepts in human interaction, through which people envision themselves, for my sake also a spiritual one, but we must find a living spirituality through which we also approach work, through which we find the means and ways to work out what our fellow human beings can demand of us in terms of the results of our work. We must find that spirituality through which trust can be restored in those people who can lead the work, so that its results can flow into the human social organisms in the right way. And we must find the God who is able to permeate social life in the right way. But we will only find him for social action if we have first found him in living knowledge, if we have first found him in nature and introduced him into human life as a living spirit, as I have described. We first need a path to the spirit; but we need a striving for the spirit that leads not only to a theoretical knowledge, but to an experience of spirituality, which, in relation to social life, leads not to abstract ideas about the social order, but to concrete ideas, so that through the flow of these ideas, the divine-spiritual itself flows into the social order. As much Leninism, as much Trotskyism, that is, as much materialism as there is in the world, there are as many forces of destruction in the world! The only help is to draw a spirituality back into humanity. It is quite true that much can be criticized about the social life of older times, but that belongs in a different chapter from the one we are discussing today. What needs to be discussed today is that our time demands a spirituality that can only come from the highest development of thought, and only through this path.

But anthroposophy wants to go this way. There may well be individual aspects of anthroposophy that are capable of improvement and in need of it. But humanity, having to live out of the needs of the time, will not be able to avoid seeking its leaders where such paths into the spiritual world are taken as anthroposophy would like to take them. For it is important that we not only escape materialism, but that we escape the dead thoughts that are mere representatives of something real, and that we grasp the real in the thoughts themselves. This cannot be in abstract thoughts, but only in the condensed thoughts that have been further developed in the soul; this can only be by experiencing the world thoughts in the developed will. To many people today, who have settled into the old currents of science, this seems paradoxical to such an extent that they want to test the anthroposophist in the laboratory using laboratory methods, just as one would test a mathematician in the laboratory to see whether an integral is correct or not; one does not want to follow what he presents as his mathematics, but rather wants to examine his personal behavior. But it must be realized that the spirit can only be experienced in the spiritual realm, in that realm which, however, has the indicated windows everywhere for the spiritual soul. There the thoughts, the windows through which the spiritual can enter the human soul, are experienced, and in this way the reality of the spiritual world is experienced as something with which people grow together as spiritual and soul beings.

This, esteemed attendees, describes the way in which anthroposophy believes it can serve the needs of the times. I have endeavored to explain today what the real path of anthroposophical research is. For I do believe that once we take a close look at this real path, we will not be able to say that anthroposophy represents a wrong path after a correctly recognized goal that is even necessary for the times. No! If you examine what people who judge it call a mistake, you will ultimately discover again and again: it is not the anthroposophical path, it is the caricature that people themselves make of this anthroposophical path; it is the bugbear that they themselves make and then criticize, so that their words have absolutely no relation to the true anthroposophical path. This is what one experiences day after day: people criticizing their own spectres of anthroposophy because they do not want to get to know the true anthroposophy.

Those who, in the days of this college course, represented the anthroposophical method of research in the most diverse scientific fields, have honestly stood up against what is prevailing and for what is needed in our time. They wanted to show how this method of research can fertilize the most diverse fields of science, life, art, and social order. They wanted to advocate for the true nature of that which every honest critique wants to take up, but which today often only sees as it caricatures, turns into a bogeyman and then criticizes in the way I have indicated. Therefore, I would not want to fail, for my part, since I am connected with all my heart with this anthroposophical current, to thank you all here at the end, all those who in the last few days have entered from what they have gained through their science, through their life experience and so on, for anthroposophical research, for the anthroposophical worldview. It is to them that I would like to express my heartfelt thanks, in the name of anthroposophical thinking and the anthroposophical ethos. For whatever one's opinion of what anthroposophy has already achieved and produced, it is making a truly conscientious effort to adjust its intentions to the needs of the present day — not because it wishes to serve only the temporal, but Anthroposophy does not direct itself at all to these temporal needs. It speaks out of the eternal depths of the human soul, and actually of the eternal, but its striving coincides with the needs of the present time. For long enough, humanity has been concerned only with the transitory; today, in response to the demands of the times, it desires to get to know the eternal again, to reintroduce it into human feeling and human action. Anthroposophy can serve these demands of the time, this striving of the human soul, because its striving coincides with the needs of the time. It strives in such a way that I would now like to summarize in the following words what it has achieved today, but what it wants, which is perhaps still a long way off, and which is intended to express what the attitude and the will of the anthroposophical is.

This will knows full well how dark, how gloomy human paths of life are if they are not illuminated by a certain light; and today's humanity is coming to realize its contemporary needs, as I have characterized them, by being surrounded by much darkness in life and therefore must strive to attain that light that can illuminate the darkness, the darkness of life. How can this light be found? For this light, the human soul alone is the lamp. But this lamp can only be ignited by the spirit. The human soul becomes the shining light of life when the spirit ignites it! But when the human soul is ignited by the spirit as a light of life, then it also becomes the torch that can properly illuminate human life: the fruitful insights, the life-warming feelings, the active volitional impulses that are necessary for the human being.

When I last had the honor of speaking here a few weeks ago about spiritual science, I tried to explain the general character and the nature of the research of this spiritual science and also to point out the extent to which this spiritual science is not only in full agreement with scientific research and its discoveries, but also that it must necessarily fit into the aims of the time as a humanities today through the aspects that this natural scientific research has acquired for our general world view, that it must be taken up by the aims of our time.

This evening I will take the liberty of speaking about the mood that can evoke opposition and hostility in the soul towards this spiritual science. But so that we understand each other, so that those who were not present among today's esteemed audience at the last lecture can also follow the remarks, please allow me to say a few words in introduction to what was the subject of the last lecture and what is intended to characterize the general character of spiritual science.

Just as it is true that, on the one hand, spiritual science is a kind of continuation of scientific thinking, of the scientific world view for the spiritual realm, it is equally true, on the other hand, that this spiritual science, because it extends to the realm of spiritual life, of the spirit, of spiritual beings, needs different research methods, a different kind of world view, than the natural science directed towards the outer material existence. The natural scientist uses external instruments and external methods of observation for his research and to obtain his results. He has, so to speak, before him what the objects of his research give him and what the laws of his research allow him to gain. The spiritual researcher is different: he must find the connection to a world that, as the source, as the spiritual source of our existence, underlies all external reality, but which eludes the senses and also the mind, which relies on the statements of the senses, on external perception. The spiritual researcher must penetrate into a realm that is initially not accessible to external perception, to external observation. And the only instrument that is initially available to him, in the sense of true spiritual science, to penetrate into the spiritual world, is only his own soul.

But this own soul, as it is initially found in everyday life and also for external science, is not suitable for penetrating into the spiritual world. This human soul is so arranged for external life that it must make use of the organs, the instruments of the body. Through the sense organs, through the intellect, which is connected to the brain, the external world becomes accessible to it. The fact that the senses and also the intellect, which is connected to the brain, can only penetrate to the physical-sensory existence, was explained in more detail here last time, so it should not concern us today.

Let us first deal with the fact that this human soul, as it is in everyday life, must be transformed in order to penetrate into the spiritual world. It must first become that through which it can penetrate into the spiritual world, and it can only become this through the fact that the human being himself makes it so. And not external events, not experiences that are in the physical world, can advance the soul so that it can penetrate into the realm of the spirit, but only intimate, inner processes of the soul itself. These essentially consist of the soul practicing concentration of thought and meditation, as these things are called. You can find more details in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'.

When the soul, under certain conditions, erases and extinguishes the perceptions of the senses and the thoughts of the ordinary mind, and yet remains aware of itself as a soul, then it is in the state in which it gradually develops into the spiritual world. This state can be compared to the ordinary state of sleep in which a person finds themselves. When the ordinary senses gradually become silent as a person falls asleep, when ordinary thinking, the ordinary impulses of perception, feeling and will cease, then the human soul is indeed no longer using its body as an instrument. But at the same time it becomes unconscious. The darkness of unconsciousness spreads around it. Everything that is silent in sleep must also be silent in the spiritual researcher. But through inner strengthening of the soul life, through the spiritual researcher energetically and patiently over many years often concentrating a soul activity, even if only for a short time, just for minutes, on certain ideas — you can find more details in the book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'? — by means of which the soul is enabled to contract in inner power so that this soul can develop a life that is not mediated by the body, not by the sense organs.

One can indeed bring the soul into the same state in which it is otherwise only in normal sleep, but which differs from this state in that one is awake, although one does not think and perceive as in the ordinary waking state. One can detach this soul - the expression has already been used here - from the body as if by spiritual chemistry. If one strengthens one's thinking and feeling in the appropriate way, if one makes it increasingly stronger, one attains something in the instrument of one's own human being that can be compared to the separation of hydrogen from water in external chemistry. Just as water reveals nothing of the properties of hydrogen as such, so man, facing everyday life, reveals nothing of the actual properties of his soul.

But when this soul is strengthened by appropriate reinforcement of its inner powers, then it comes to experience itself not unconsciously, but fully aware outside of its body, so that its own body and its otherwise everyday destiny, its everyday experiences, face it like the outside world. Like the table or the chair as an object, the powerfully strengthened soul can face its own body. It expresses itself out of the body through the increased power that it acquires through meditation and concentration, as these exercises to strengthen the soul are called. In this way we can look inside when our soul has been strengthened; we see, as it were, ourselves in the world, but our soul is outside the body, which is very vivid through the method that really makes the soul go out of the body.

The possibility of penetrating into the spiritual world essentially rests on the human soul being able to become alive and perceptive outside the body. The strictest proof of the soul's independence also rests on the fact that the soul can experience and perceive outside the body through the spiritual-scientific method. One could deny that the soul is something outside the body, for example, when the person is asleep. One could say that the soul is nothing other than what is brought about by the machine of the body; when the machine of the body comes to a standstill, no expressions of life are shown. One could claim that when the machine of the body comes to a standstill in death, all soul activity ceases.

But when spiritual science shows that the soul can experience itself and perceive itself when it is outside the body, when it has the body before it, then at the same time proof of the independence of the soul is brought. This proof is possible. It is possible through the strengthening of the same inner powers that we otherwise also exercise in life, but only apply to all external events of life, and through the detachment of these powers from the external events of the day and the strengthening of these powers through meditation and concentration. These proofs — as far as they can be discussed, they were in the last lecture.

When the spiritual researcher has arrived at this kind of body-free perception, when he experiences himself in his soul, so that this soul is outside his body, then he is in fact in the spiritual world exactly as he is in the everyday life in the material world, when he has immersed himself with his soul in his body and makes use of the senses and the ordinary mind. In a spiritual world, the spiritual researcher then knows himself, and he knows himself in the spiritual world in such a way that he not only surveys the life between birth or, let us say, between conception and death, but he also surveys the life after he has passed through the gate of death to a new life. Because one of the most important criteria is the prospect of repeated lives on earth, in which the whole of life on earth is such that a person lives between death and rebirth and between birth and death.

What we experience in our present life is the consequence of previous lives on earth. But between two lives on earth, we spend time in the pure spiritual, in that spiritual in which the spiritual researcher immerses when he brings his soul to experience free of the body. Thus, the overview of human life is expanded through spiritual research. And the subject matter that has just been discussed, together with broader and broader aspects of these connections in the world and their creation, of the source of human life, of that which brings security, hope and purpose to human life, is precisely what spiritual research seeks to encompass and to add to what natural science has to give for the external world.

Now, in our time, there are opponents of spiritual research – but there have been opponents at all times – people who view spiritual research with outright hostility. Today, we will not go into the individual attacks of possible opponents of spiritual science. Something else should be shown. It should be shown where hostility against spiritual science can come from in human nature, what is present in human nature, normally, one would like to say, which, when it occurs particularly intensified and developed in this or that personality, must lead to a real hostility towards the research of spiritual life, towards the methods of the spirit. Spiritual science is, in the true sense, in the genuine sense, that which, where the words are understood, has been called Theosophy. That spiritual science has been called Theosophy does not mean that spiritual research, as represented here, wants to identify with all that is called Theosophy. For today, quite dubious teachings are summarized under the name of Theosophy. If one understands it honestly and righteously, the word theosophy means nothing more than that man can become aware that he carries within himself a soul-spiritual source through which he is connected to the divine-spiritual sources that spring and work through the world, that man can feel within himself what is present through the whole world as the divine-spiritual source. That he can experience it in himself, that he can not only suspect and believe in a divine within himself, but also bring it to realization. This gives the theosophical mood. An anti-theosophical mood would arise if man either completely denied that he can grasp something in the depths of his soul, or that what he grasps is connected with a divine spiritual life that surges through the world. Or an anti-Sophian mood would arise if he at least denied that he recognizes these connections with the divine-spiritual through the powers of human nature.

One can say: the human soul can develop a theosophical and an antisophical mood. And because spiritual science shows, as it were, through the soul's experiment, through soul chemistry: one can experience the soul if one first brings it to the point of view where it is free of the body —, spiritual science must stand on the theosophical point of view and surrender to it. That which can be made free of the body is, when it is free of the body, immersed in a world of spiritual facts and spiritual entities. The life with the spiritual worlds and the spiritual entities is theosophy, is spiritual science. But it will, precisely because it is able to go into the sources of existence, differ from other world views in that it can never become narrow-minded. We experience it in the other worldviews that their adherents simply want to understand and grasp what they themselves assert, and often blindly fight everything else, almost like a folly, and say that it should not be there. Spiritual science, because it tries to penetrate into the very sources of the human soul, can understand, fully understand, where other moods come from than its own, yes, it can even, as we want to show today, fully understand the anti-Socratic mood. Today's reflection is precisely about the fact that the anti-Sophian mood is not only forgivable, so to speak, when it occurs among the enemies and opponents of spiritual science, but that to a certain extent it even corresponds to human nature and its inclinations.

The spiritual researcher is not at all surprised that opponents and enemies of his line of research arise, because he recognizes that this antagonism is basically rooted in human nature. Let us cite a fact from the field of this spiritual research itself, which will also immediately show what is meant by the naturally given anti-philosophical mood.

How should spiritual science view human beings? It has already been stated in earlier lectures that for the spiritual researcher, the entry of human beings into the earthly world is a wonderful mystery. It is clear to the spiritual researcher that when a person enters earthly life through birth, they establish their earthly life on the basis of previous earthly lives that they have gone through. Before birth, he was a spiritual being in the spiritual world. In addition to what the person inherits from his father and mother, from his ancestors, and what he receives through the hereditary substance, the spiritual soul comes from the spiritual world. What comes from the father and mother combines with what comes from the spiritual world. We see first how that which comes from the spiritual world slowly works its way into that which comes through the hereditary tendency. We see first how even the child's facial features are indeterminate, but that they become more and more distinct as the child's soul-spiritual element comes to the fore. The spiritual researcher knows that the soul and spirit are only loosely connected to the physical body at first. So with each step towards a more definite facial appearance, with the emergence of abilities and talents, we see the soul and spirit becoming more deeply embedded in the physical body. If time allowed, I could cite evidence that the soul gradually disappears into the growing physical body, that the soul gives the physical body its three-dimensional shape, that it takes possession of the physical body's movements and skills.

Perhaps I may draw the attention of some of the honored listeners who have already taken a closer look at something like this, to the way children often look when they first enter the world through birth, so that one does not know who they resemble, that they only grow into the similarity over time. This is because two currents oppose each other: that which is predisposed in the physical body, which, so to speak, works its way up as physical strength, and that which comes from the soul and spirit, which permeates the physical body and gradually asserts itself. These currents determine the reasons why a person should be born into this or that family. One is not born into a family for no reason, but because what one brings with one from the spiritual and soul world feels a certain affinity to what is often in the family in question. Even if there is misfortune in the family in question, the soul needs precisely that for its further development, which can happen to it as misfortune. The attraction of the soul and spirit and the attraction of heredity interact. The soul and spirit only gradually grow into what the outside world brings them. Therefore, a balance with what is given in the line of inheritance only takes place gradually.

Spiritual science cannot participate in the discussion of these matters in the brutal way in which the physical experimental method does so. One must be able to look more closely and intimately at the living conditions if one wants to understand them from a spiritual scientific point of view. And so we see the soul and spiritual aspects of the human being descending and connecting with the physical and bodily aspects. We see that in the early stages of a child's development, the body is almost dream-like. Not only does the child have to sleep through a large part of its existence in order to stay healthy, but there is something dream-like about its life. Then comes the time – it is the point up to which one remembers – when self-awareness clearly emerges, when the child learns to feel itself as an ego, to express its self-awareness clearly.

What is this based on? In the early days, before this happens, the spiritual and soul forces are first at work to make the body a suitable tool for the mission, the sending forth. When a person is born, the brain and the finer organs, which are still quite undetermined at first, still have a long way to go. The spiritual soul must immerse itself, must increasingly take possession of the physical body, and grow into the physical body. The forces that descend from the spiritual world do this, they shape the brain plastically, they “organize” the individual members of the human body so that it has an instrument for acting and perceiving in the outside world. This inner work that the soul performs in the body is infinitely significant and important. As long as this inner work lasts, the child must live a kind of dream life, especially as long as this work is still focused on the physical development of the brain and the finer limbs of the nervous system. Then there comes a point, which we remember later. At this point, the inner work is completed to a certain extent. It is difficult to express such things precisely in the ordinary language of everyday life, because our speech is made for the outer world, not for the spiritual world. Therefore, one must try to coin the words in such a way that they point to what underlies them. When, I would like to say, that which the spiritual soul has to do with the physical body is so far worked out that the physical body is condensed and prepared as the human being needs it for his later life, then the forces that used to work within are released. They no longer sink into the physical body, they will be there for themselves. And what is the result of this? I would like to express what the result is by means of a comparison. The parable is not to be used as an analogy to explain anything, but it should only make it clear what is meant here: if we think we have a glass plate and a mass in front of us and we look through the glass, we see what is behind it. If we now take the mass and shape it so that we can place it on the glass plate as a covering, we gradually turn what was a transparent glass plate into a mirror. If we now look into the glass, we seem to be looking at ourselves. What is presented here as a parable, thought out accordingly, makes it clear to us what happens in the first years of a child in a human being.

The child's soul and spirit work together to shape the body, to mold it plastically. We can say that they make it so dense that it no longer takes in spiritual and soul activity and works itself into the body. We can compare this to the fact that you can no longer see through a glass that has a mirror coating. The body will now reflect the spiritual-soul activity, will reflect it back; self-awareness begins. From the moment the spiritual-soul activity is complete, the body becomes a mirror, the nervous system becomes a mirror. And just as you see yourself in a finished mirror, so from that moment on, you experience yourself as an independent I, as a child, using the spiritual and soul forces to make your physical body a mirror. So, just as you perceive yourself in your mirror image, self-awareness begins to feel itself as an I. This is the point to which one later remembers going back. This is the awakening of self-awareness, this is the appearance of the ego in the child. And at the same time, we know from this that the forces that were previously used to organize the body, that brought the body to the density whereby it became a mirroring apparatus, that these are now used for everyday life, for feeling, imagining and thinking. What else comes into play here? This will be shown by the development that the spiritual researcher must undergo. When the spiritual researcher truly forms his soul free of the body, when he truly comes to a body-free experience and perception through the means mentioned in the last lecture and described in Occult Science, then he makes use, precisely in his soul, of the means that the child uses to shape the body plastically. He must reintroduce the means that ceased to be used when the relationship with the outside world began to become conscious. What the spiritual researcher needs for his spiritual method had to be stemmed by the bodily views and ideas.

One can use a precise way of expressing oneself that makes use of a word that is already frequently used today. One can say: That which the spiritual researcher must bring to consciousness is the same as what would be present in the ordinary person if consciousness were to suddenly arise in a state of sleep and the person would still be asleep. The spiritual and soul life in the ordinary person lies in the subconscious, it does not come to consciousness. For what comes to consciousness in everyday life? Not the soul-spiritual itself, but its reflection in the body, just as the person standing in front of the mirror does not see himself standing there, but his image, his reflection. So too, everyday consciousness is not one in which the soul-spiritual perceives itself, but rather what is reflected back from life as a mirror image from the moment self-awareness is awakened.

From this particular point in time onwards, what has ceased to be part of ordinary human experience, and been pushed down into the subconscious, so that the human being can focus his attention during physical life on the mirror image, must be retrieved by the spiritual researcher. This is done by the spiritual researcher in what is a fragment of the human organization itself, which is first worked out during the embryonic period and later during the time after the human being is born, up to the moment when self-awareness occurs. Two things are juxtaposed: everyday life, where man only has to do with the mirror image, while in the subconscious remains the truly real experience of the spiritual and soul. What the spiritual researcher has to do is to bring up that of which one otherwise has only a mirror image in daily experience.

Now we must bear in mind that it is in the nature of man that he is so placed in everyday life that he sends the forces into his body only in the first, most tender childhood, until the moment when the dream life transforms into the fully conscious ordinary day life, when man perceives the reflection of his soul life. Everything by which man is capable in the outer life, by which he stands firm in the social life, by which he accomplishes ordinary science, is based on the fact that he no longer uses the forces for the outer life from the characterized childhood standpoint, which can only be reflected, that he used before this point in time for the development of the physical body.

The forces that a person needs for their external physical body must therefore have the tendency to push back, to push down into the unconscious, everything that the spiritual researcher needs for their spiritual research, but that is there and that shapes the person from the spiritual world, that makes them in the image of the spiritual world. The mood must necessarily develop through this, especially in the person who is immersed in the outer physical life, who is aware of the fact that I have become capable of the outer world through what I have acquired as a human being – and who does not know that there are other forces, namely the forces that have so far worked on his inner being, for him the mood must arise to hold on to the forces that are opposed to the forces of spiritual research. This mood easily gets out of hand in ordinary life. It produces an aversion, an antipathy, to all spiritual research. One instinctively feels that one should apply those powers in the physical body that one needs for physical life. These powers have nothing to do with the powers that the spiritual researcher wants to talk about.

If one wants to state the matter forcefully, it can be characterized in the following way. One can say: Yes, the human being feels within himself the consciousness that he is capable in the physical sense of being through the powers of his body, when he forgets the other power, the spiritual-soul power, which, without his intervention, without him making an effort, has prepared the body in the first years of his childhood, on which the soul then reflects. Man pays no attention to the fact that the forces are alive that have made him what he is and that enable him to be capable. He takes for granted the instruments that he has prepared without effort. He does not think that they are formed out of the soul-spiritual world. He perceives this instrument when it is ready so that it makes him capable in the outer, physical world.

If a person is tuned in this way, if he says to himself, 'How they came into being is not my concern, I just want to use this tool', then he can enter into an anti-Sophian mood. He wants to know nothing of the forces that have formed this tool and that the spiritual researcher must bring forth and bring to consciousness. Do you realize that just at a time when material life makes so many demands on people, at a time when there are such rich and flourishing fields of knowledge, when people are so proud of material progress, that in such a time the anti-spiritual mood must get out of hand? Will you understand that there is antipathy towards Theosophy, towards the power that reigns in secret and must be brought forth by the spiritual researcher, that there is resentment? But these powers lie hidden in the depths of the soul and are brought out through spiritual research. And when they are brought up, these powers become the means by which we are introduced to the real facts and entities of the spiritual world.

Now the anti-sophical mood can be ignited a second time because the path of spiritual research is not particularly easy. What happens when a person comes to release the soul and spirit from the body, to slip out of the physical and bodily as it were? Then perceptions arise in his soul that are no longer the perceptions of the outer senses, thoughts that are no longer thoughts of his ordinary mind. Then, just as in falling asleep, the everyday world of the senses sinks away. So the outer world fades into the indefinite. But not the darkness of sleep emerges, but a new world, a world that must be understood in the right sense if it is not to be misunderstood.

When the spiritual researcher has practiced patience and energy long enough to free his soul, so to speak, to set it apart from the body, then the first thing that happens is not that he is immediately confronted with a multitude of spiritual facts and entities. But he does feel that he is in a different world. From a certain moment on, one knows what it means to be outside one's body in a spiritual-soul state. It occurs when one begins to have dream-like images with a kind of inner soul activity, just as dreams can interrupt the night's sleep, intermingling with it, and we know that they are not caused by external things in the usual way. Images arise that someone who does not understand them will consider to be fantasies, but that the spiritual researcher knows: if his spiritual-soul is developed in the right way, not as today's humanity understands evolution, but in such a way that the soul develops from the depth of its natural being, then he is in a new world. There are images that one has never seen, impressions that one has never had.

Lest I be misunderstood, I must now immediately point out something. Of course, when the soul has emerged from the body and sees a world around it, reminiscent of color images flitting back and forth, a world of sounds. But basically, not everything in this new world is the same as in the physical world. If everything were only a memory, a reminiscence of the sensory world, one could be under the impression that Plato's disciple made when he said, “Socrates knew nothing but what other people also know. Every schoolboy knows that too. Why should Socrates know more than a schoolboy? Certainly, the individual color pictures remind us of the outer purpose in life, but just as the letters of a book convey something completely new to us, even though we know all the individual letters, so the experiences of the soul introduce us to the spiritual world, even though they appear like reminiscences of the outer physical life.

There is only one point that must be overcome. What first appears, what fills our soul's field of perception, is something that the materialist can call images of the imagination, if he does not know that these images are not initially a real perception of something external, but the first manifestation of the spiritual organism. Just as we learn in the course of childhood to form our organs, to feel things in the right way, to see, and only through this do we become aware of our body, so we must, if I may use the expression, become aware of our spiritual body. What these people see as a spiritual world is only what we have to develop like a spiritual body. And in this spiritual body we have to feel, as it were, the real spiritual world. And indeed, what we perceive first is ourselves. In this sense, one can speak of visions, of hallucinations. The materialistic researcher gets to know nothing but this. And because he cannot get to know anything else, he cannot believe that the time will come when the real spiritual researcher needs them. Just as the material scientist needs his hands to perceive the physical, so the spiritual scientist needs what is produced by the senses free from the body, in order to grasp and perceive the spiritual world. First we train the mind's eye and mind's ear, and when we make use of them, we enter through them into the spiritual world.

There, on this threshold of the spiritual world, two things arise that, to a certain extent, make people shy away from really entering the spiritual world. What arises is as follows: First of all, the world of the spirit that we enter is quite different from the physical world. We cannot simply use our concepts, ideas and notions from the physical world to penetrate into this spiritual world. In our ordinary everyday life, we are accustomed to perceiving realities that we perceive with our bodies, that we perceive through our eyes and ears. We are accustomed to calling real that which we can touch with our hands, which we can understand in its laws through our mind, which is bound to the physical brain.

But we have shed this body when we enter the spiritual world as spiritual researchers. There is nothing in it that can be perceived through the body. At first, one experiences oneself in one's soul in such a way that one knows: the body is gone, one is only in the spiritual world with one's soul. What asserts itself is what one can call a complete unfamiliarity with the new situation. While you were used to being surrounded by the body in the world, you now stand there with only your soul and no inner experience. And the same strong feeling arises that can only be compared to what you experienced when you dreamed. You suddenly feel undressed in a place where many people are, full of shame because you feel you don't belong in this world. This dream gives a blurred image, somewhat like a premonition, of what happens with infinite amplification when you enter the spiritual world and feel out of place, so that you say: You stand opposed to that which you have called reality differently, you cannot see or feel what the real world has meant to you so far. What is the point of trying to enter a world that is stripped of what you have really perceived? As soon as you enter the spiritual world and are in a world that contains completely different entities, which are merely spiritual-soul, between which actions take place that lie only in the spiritual world, as soon as you enter, you must first preserve your ego with all your might. If you do not preserve your ego, you will be immersed in this entire spiritual world. Therefore, when you read the book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” you will see that all the exercises recommended there are aimed at carrying the ego into the spiritual world more strongly than it is experienced in the outer world. When I see a blue color in the sensory world, I say: I see it. I think it is outside of me. When one enters the spiritual world, one takes on its properties. When one submerges into the spiritual world, one must become one with the spiritual world. The entire inner being spreads out into the spiritual world, flows out into the spiritual world. And the thoughts – one does not feel as though one is thinking them, but rather they think themselves. You are really in this spiritual world so much so that you are like Erl King and his son at the same time: the father full of worries, the son with all kinds of visions surging through his soul. You are both at the same time. You perceive a new world, but you feel as if you are drawn to every thing, to every deed by some indeterminate forces. You feel as if you have been torn out of yourself. This creates a feeling in the soul that one must get to know well. A feeling of fear of being taken from what has so far guaranteed reality.

Both feelings, the feeling of being unaccustomed to the spiritual world and of being exposed in it, the feeling of fear of it, are found in the depths of the human soul. Both feelings would arise and suddenly seize the person if he were to awaken, as the spiritual researcher must awaken when he awakens from his everyday sleep; he would be seized by an infinite fear of being unfamiliar and exposed. But the ordinary sleep immediately corrects these feelings. They do not express themselves. Man numbs himself by the will arising in him to withdraw into his body and thereby wake up. That is why man feels as if he is being pushed by a will impulse towards his body when he wakes up, as long as the body can take him, that is, until death, because the body numbs the feeling of being exposed. Man numbs his feelings of fear by not allowing himself to penetrate into the spiritual world at all at first.

At the moment when man begins to penetrate into the spiritual world through exercises advised by the spiritual researcher, this fear quietly approaches his soul. Man tries to deaden it by keeping away from the spiritual world, by being materialistic, in other words, by developing to the highest degree that which is in him an anti-sophical mood, because man must deaden himself to what would fill him if he wanted to penetrate into the spiritual world. Through the feeling of fear, the soul is anti-sophically tuned. In order not to be anti-Sophian, man must do such exercises that enable him above all not to feel exposed, but to feel clothed by a spiritual body, as he is clothed here by a physical body. To overcome the feeling of fear, man must do exercises that enable him to approach the spiritual world fearlessly and boldly.

Therefore, many people are anti-philosophical. But this is basically not ill will, not something that can be strongly attributed to people, but rather it is the human desire to numb themselves to fear. This is what drives them to anti-philosophical sentiment. It is not a figure of speech when a building is erected for spiritual science somewhere and the opposition asserts itself in the whole environment and continues to do so everywhere. Therefore, the anti-sophistic mood arises from the fact that people want to numb themselves from their own abilities to enter the spiritual world. Because people cannot overcome this fear, they become anti-sophical. Just as people persuade themselves of something in order to avoid facing something else, not to let it enter their consciousness, so too, to put it frankly, they would have to say what is in their subconscious: we are afraid of the spiritual world, therefore the spiritual world must not exist for us. The consequence of this is that the person declares spiritual science to be nonsense, fantasy, dreaming, unnecessary, that he invents all kinds of things to denigrate it. These are means to numb the fear - the fear that one naturally does not understand when one speaks.

We can use the methods of spiritual science to draw particular attention to this fear in the present day and also to point out that it is not admitted, but something is invented to numb it. I would like to draw your attention to a characteristic phenomenon.

A very important physiologist who died some time ago pointed out something that only needs to be looked at in the right way to corroborate the fact just mentioned. However, I would like to point out that when I cite something that is anti-Sophistic, I am not willing to attack opponents whom I do not belittle, but whom I hold in the highest esteem in their own fields. I appreciate Du Bois-Reymond, who gave a famous, spirited speech at a famous natural science conference in the 1870s. The brilliant, outstanding explanations of a person grounded in current natural science find evidence for what he is explaining everywhere, he produces reasons everywhere. Then he approaches the conclusion.

What did he come to? He showed that natural science can only lead to an understanding of the world in which it understands motion of the smallest parts, and that it traces everything back to motion. But as much as all natural science is based on the investigation of the motion of atoms and so forth, it is also true that natural science can never grasp the soul. The naturalist can say that the red color arises from certain movements, but he cannot say how the consciousness of the red color arises in us. No natural science could ever comprehend anything of the soul from movement. If one wanted to comprehend the soul from what is solely justified in natural science, then what he calls supernaturalism would begin. And so Du Bois-Reymond concludes his speech: Natural science must stop at external movement; it can never grasp even the simplest part of the human soul. This soul could only be grasped where supernaturalism begins and natural science ends.

We can go through Du Bois-Reymond's speech and find the most beautiful reasons for what he says everywhere. Only the last assertion is like a shot from a pistol. He does not provide any evidence for it. We have the feeling – and we must have it, because it is justified – that Du Bois-Reymond, in moving from what is the justified field of his science to supernaturalism, no longer presents reasons, but antipathy. The feeling of dislike shoots out of his subconscious, making him look at supernaturalism with antipathy, but he has no reasons for his assertion. Du Bois-Reymond is not alone; I have only mentioned him as a typical representative of this tendency. Wherever there is antipathy towards the communication of spiritual science, i.e., wherever anti-Socratic sentiment arises, we see people everywhere, whether we call them materialists or monists, who give the most beautiful reasons for what they say in the way of positive arguments.

But you see, a hundred and a hundred proofs could be brought for this; where people express their antipathy towards spiritual science, the reasons stop. This antipathy comes from the subconscious, from what has nothing to do with what they know how to justify. To see what arises, we must shine a light into the human soul organization with the means of spiritual science, and here external natural science actually meets spiritual science halfway, as natural science always does when the latter understands itself and does not want to found a comprehensive world view on misunderstood knowledge.

One can examine how his organization works under the influence of thinking, which is directed only at the outer world of sense perceptions and the intellect, through the particular way in which the purely external, purely fact-based scholar, who otherwise only relies on what his thinking gives him about the outer world, investigates. You can see that the nerves are put in the same position as when a person is in a state of fear, only that in the case of a state of fear caused by a sudden shock, can be disturbed in its circulation; it can be drawn from the outer parts of the body and directed to the heart and brain, so that fainting can occur as a result of sudden fright. The scholar attributes what suddenly causes the fear to a long life. He dissolves the states of fear, as it were. When he encounters the world, he is overcome by fear in his entire soul, then he dissolves this fear into the anti-Sophian mood.

The Danish researcher Lange has written a book about the emotions, in which the states of fear are also characterized in psychological terms. But spiritual science can also do this with its means. The whole vascular system is put into a different mood when a person experiences fear or shock. When fear arises in the human soul, even the fluids are put into a different mood. This could be described in detail. It would take up too much of our time, but there is one thing you will all know: when a person is overcome by terror or fear, they suddenly feel insecure. They have the urge to hold on to something, and may even faint. Physically, they seek to hold on.

What one produces through an activity directed purely towards the external world of observation is a fear and terror spread over the years. Slowly and gradually fear is poured into the soul and into the organism that which is the state of fear when one only experiences that which relates to the external sense world. When people are in this state of fear, then that which expresses itself in them, in their field, is what expresses itself in a person who is in fear and terror and says: I am falling over, give me something to hold on to. This is what the person who is so inclined that he rejects the supernatural world says. I will reject the spiritual world, give me something to hold on to. Physical observation, the theory of atoms, is what those who are seized by a subconscious sense of fear hold on to.

This is the answer that science, which is directed towards the external, must produce, which wants to know nothing of this spiritual science, of the conditions that one is supposed to experience without being able to hold on to external knowledge, to physical laws. Just as the fearful want to hold on to the table or chair, so those who are afraid of the spiritual world want to hold on to matter, because they are afraid of sinking into a spiritual powerlessness if they cannot hold on to matter. He numbs himself with this fear by imagining: there is nothing supernatural.

From these remarks, we see how anti-Sophian sentiment must be generated in a natural way, we see how anti-Sophian sentiment must be generated precisely in the forms that this external science takes. You will find all the more anti-Sophian sentiment the more man lets himself be inwardly infected by the sentiment that this science generates, which is directed outwards. Thus, it can be said that something is given to man entirely in his natural disposition, which can be described as an antisophical mood. And the more man places himself in the outer life - be it in practice or in science - the more antisophical mood is stored.

But just as a pendulum, when it swings to one side, must also swing to the other side, so too, when external form swings to the anti-Socratic mood, man must also swing to the other side - theosophical. Man cannot stand there in spiritual peace, just as the pendulum cannot be at rest when it has swung to one side. Man could only then keep his soul at peace if he were to remain completely dull in a spiritual twilight. It can happen, precisely because of the mood of the present, that the soul is carried away by the antisophical mood. All the more reason to note, in the depths of the human soul, for those who can look at it more intimately, that the pendulum wants to swing to the other side, that the theosophical mood is also in numerous human souls. It is a matter of this theosophy being guided in the right direction for spiritual science in particular. It does not have the task of creating the theosophical mood; this mood will arise of its own accord, like the opposite swing of the pendulum. The more we approach the future, the more the theosophical mood will arise in all human souls that understand each other, in contrast to the anti-sophical mood. But the theosophical mood, however little it needs to be created, needs to be guided and directed by spiritual science. It must find the right path through spiritual science, just as the anti-theosophical mood must find its right path. Otherwise, what I want to suggest by way of a comparison could easily happen.

Tasso is known not only through his own poetry but also through the work of Goethe. Tasso spoke of a spirit with whom he converses. He did not speak as the spiritual researcher speaks. The spiritual researcher who brings himself to consciousness and knows what kind of being it is, who can maintain his consciousness, must speak differently than the poet who dresses what he feels in fantasy. The spiritual researcher of the present holds on to the ego and does not allow fear to arise. Tasso did not yet live in the age in which spiritual research began to educate about the spiritual world. Tasso spoke of a spirit with whom he conversed and to whom he owed his best thoughts. Manso, who had written a life of Tasso, always laughed at this strange spirit with whom Tasso conversed. He sees nothing, they say. So Tasso once said to him: “I will make you see and hear him for once.” And once, after they had been hunting together, Tasso suddenly looked towards the window where he was standing with Manso. Manso saw how Tasso began to speak as if to a foreign being. Tasso was holding a conversation with him. And Manso could not content himself with saying that Tasso might have invented it. He spoke in such a way that he gave answers that he could not have given of his own accord. When the conversation was over, Tasso said to him: 'Do you now have proof of the spirit to which I am speaking?' 'Yes,' said Manso, 'I heard you talking to a spirit, but I saw nothing.' Then Tasso said: 'You have seen and heard enough. If you had seen more, then – he broke off. You could not have borne it, we could complete his words in this way.

This is how it could be for souls if they did not, as is natural, have to develop the theosophical mood as a response, as a counterbalance, to the antisophical mood. They could necessarily perceive the spiritual, but one must doubt whether they could bear it. Spiritual science must guide these souls in the right direction. As long as people indulge in anti-sophical moods, it will be there that anti-sophists are, so to speak, the images of Mephisto, the original anti-sophist of modern times. He is the original anti-sophist. When he gives Faust the key to the realm of mothers, he explains that Faust will enter into nothingness. Faust, the theosophist, declares: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All.” He has overcome fear, he does not need to anesthetize himself in the face of fear.

If we develop this, which leads from the anti-theosophical to the theosophical mood, then again the case is that one can say: With spiritual science, one feels in harmony with all those people who, over time, even if they have not yet been able to embrace spiritual science – for spiritual science can only in our time grasp the soul and stand alongside natural science – with all those who, out of true, genuine spiritual research, represent the progress of humanity, with all those one feels in harmony.

When we consider the human soul with its anti- and theosophical moods, both of which must necessarily be present in the human soul, as we have done today, then we can say that we are fully understanding of all opponents and enemies of spiritual science. We have to defend ourselves against them, but we understand them. And this understanding can even lead to compassion, because in most cases, opposition is nothing more than an anaesthetic for the fear that overcomes a person when they first want to penetrate into the spiritual world and are not prepared. The anti-Sophist does not feel this fear, but it is present in his subconscious. And he places himself on the side of the person who, in the eighteenth century, responded as a philosopher to the antisophical trend. Haller, the great sage, who is also well known here in Switzerland. He is mentioned here, just as other people are mentioned, rather than lesser opponents, because he was one of the greatest in his field. Because in his soul, precisely in order to achieve that in which he had become great, namely as a natural scientist in the external fields, the anti-Sophian mood grew ever greater, he says:

Into the innermost nature
No created spirit penetrates.
Happy he to whom she only
The outer shell rejects.

This is the anti-Sophian sentiment, which cannot penetrate, recognize that man has an inner source of existence, and cannot approach this source scientifically. Goethe opposes this with his theosophical sentiment. He does not speak of theosophical or anti-Sophian sentiment. But he says, with regard to Haller's words:

I have heard this said for sixty years,
I curse it, but furtively;
Tell me a thousand, a thousand times:
She gives everything abundantly and willingly,
Nature has neither core
nor shell,
She is everything at once;
She only tests you most of all
Whether you are the core or the shell.

Man can develop an anti-Sophistic mood within himself. He can come to the frame of mind of saying: I want to get to the core, to that which guarantees my reality when I am only in my shell. What underlies what life hides from me, its core, may remain hidden. This is expressed in the sentence:

No created spirit
Can penetrate the innermost nature.
Happy the man to whom she
Only the outer shell shows.

The theosophist says: Man is, in the innermost part of his being, that which is spiritual and soul-like in him. The spiritual and soul-like triumphs over the body, [it is that] which conquers the body in death and passes through death into the spiritual world, in order to experience the spiritual world through death and to come back to the body again through a new birth for further development! A person can live in their core, and when they live in their core and only experience it, then they experience the spiritual and soul life that flows and surges through the world. Just as we are present in the entire physical world through our body as instruments and forces, so we are present in the spiritual and soul life of the world by experiencing the innermost part of our soul. And even if not everyone can become a spiritual researcher, the soul of man is predisposed to the knowledge of truth. Only a few people need become spiritual researchers. But even if one is not a spiritual researcher oneself, if one only examines one's own ordinary human thinking, one is able to understand everything that the spiritual researcher says, if one applies what has been indicated about soul development.

The spiritual researcher is not limited to speaking only to spiritual researchers. He knows that he speaks to the innermost core that is in every soul. And if external prejudices do not prevent it, every soul can feel the truth of what the spiritual researcher says. This theosophical mood will become more and more a part of life, will increasingly embrace the goals of spiritual life, especially as people come to ever more glorious and fruitful spiritual life. Then the human soul will defend itself against the anti-theosophical mood in its quiet hours, in the moments when it feels, when it becomes aware of how it is connected with the core of all existence. Then the soul will try to awaken such a theosophical mood, which expresses itself in saying more and more in the face of all anti-theosophical sentiment:

Nature has neither core
nor shell;
All at once it is everything;
— Nothing is inside, nothing is outside.
Because what is inside is also outside. —
You, most of all, test yourself
Whether you are core or shell.

Report in the “Hamburger Fremdenblatt”, 3rd supplement, November 10, 1904

Theosophical Society. At the public meeting held on Monday in the Patriotisches Haus, Dr. phil. Rudolf Steiner of Berlin spoke on the subject: “What can the modern human find in Theosophy?”

The lecturer assumed that Theosophy is based on the spiritual experience of the human being. This goes beyond mere external sensory appearance to an understanding of life, soul and spirit. In the realm of sensory appearance, there is emergence and decay, birth and death. Things, people, nations, even world systems arise and pass away. But life is constantly renewing itself in new forms. The individual plant form dies; its life is reborn in a new plant. In the realm of the soul, this life appears on a higher level. The outer appearance of a person is an expression of the constantly renewing soul life. An unbiased pursuit of this thought leads to the view of reincarnation or re-embodiment. The speaker then moved on to the consideration of the spirit, showing that the creations that arise from the activity of a being do indeed pass away, but that this activity itself continues to work as a cause. In its activity, the spirit is immortal. It becomes ever more perfect and more perfect, because its abilities arise from its work. From this arises the law of 'karma', of cause and effect in the spiritual world. And from this law, in connection with the idea of reincarnation, follows the moral teaching of the theosophical worldview. What drives the soul to action in the first place is desire. This expresses the soul's inclination towards the external world of phenomena. But the spirit transforms desire into love. An activity that arises from the spirit is a loving one. Since every activity lives on in its effect, a law of moral compensation is given with “karma”. The deed that a person accomplishes in a certain period of time, the experience that he has, are the consequences of earlier deeds and experiences and in turn become the causes of later ones. A continuous thread of moral concatenation must be spun from re-embodiment to re-embodiment in the life of the soul. The theosophical view of life builds its principles of the most general philanthropy, fraternity and tolerance on these great world laws. Its moral laws are the eternal laws of the general life that permeates the world.

The lecture, which was received with great applause by the numerous audience, was followed by a lengthy discussion and questions. The next lecture by Dr. Steiner, “World Law and Human Destiny,” will take place on December 12 at the Patriotisches Haus.

Dear attendees! Today I will speak about a very difficult, I would almost say, concerning topic: the evolution of a planet, especially in relation to the evolution of our own planet in the theosophical sense. And perhaps more than in any other of these lectures, it will be necessary today to appeal to the full impartiality of the audience. For such a way of looking at things, as one is currently almost solely accustomed to – that is, to deal with such a question as that of planetary development in a material, purely physical sense – what Theosophy has to say will, of course, have to appear quite fantastic.

Furthermore, the scope of what we have to discuss today is very broad. And the field of research involved is so remote that it is of course quite impossible for me to speak to you today in detail – in a short lecture – about the way in which such insights are gained. It is quite impossible for me to give you a derivation of what I have to say. I will only be able to relate and point out what would require many, many lectures, or even books, to be discussed in detail. I will not even be able to present the subject to you as it presents itself to the so-called occultist or secret researcher, but I will have to resort to comparisons and analogies.

I would ask you to bear in mind that the way in which I will treat the subject today is not the same way in which the secret researcher or occultist arrives at these results. Today, if any simile is used, it is only to make it possible to make oneself understood at all. The insights themselves are gained from quite different sources. And when we discuss inner development in detail in one of the next lectures, we will also learn something about the sources from which such insights as today's are drawn.

In the sense of the theosophical world view, man is – and I was able to mention this to you just now, also in connection with lectures from the last few weeks – an evolving being, a being in the process of development.

He sees a future perspective that entitles him to say that there is something spiritual, a spark of divinity, or better said, a resting place, a divine seed, in his breast. The human being of the future will be quite different from what he is today. Now the objection may be raised: How can man know what he will be in the future? He can know because he already carries the potential, the germ of the future within himself. The purpose of self-knowledge is none other than to study the potential and germs that still lie deeply hidden in the human breast today, in order to see what man can become in the future. In this way, man can see into his own future.

On the other hand, all higher beings – you know from earlier lectures that Theosophy speaks of higher beings than human beings – all divine beings are, for the theosophical worldview, entities that are similar to human beings, who have gone through their development at a similar level, albeit on different planes. One could say that the gods also served their time in humanity in earlier epochs. They were human and have already become what man will become in the future. Thus, in the theosophical world view, divine spiritual beings have advanced beyond the stage of humanity.

Man has not yet risen to the level of divinity. In this sense, we must place man in a whole sequence of entities. Then we will have created the conditions for being able to observe planetary development in the sense of spiritual research. It should be emphasized that this spiritual research, when understood in the right sense, in no way contradicts the sensual scientific research of our days, just as it does not contradict when an anatomist anatomically examines the corpse of a great artist and registers his anatomical results . Neither does it contradict what an art historian has to say about these artists, nor does what the materialist has to say about the moon, sun and earth contradict what Theosophy has to say about these heavenly bodies. The two things can coexist quite harmoniously. And even if the materially oriented researcher, from the standpoint of his conceit of infallibility, confronts the results of spiritual research with brusqueness, we must still say that such opposition is no less possible than the opposition of the anatomist who dissects a corpse and finds something to object to in what an art historian says about this person.

This said, if we look up at the heavenly bodies, where we see not only material things but also, in these things, the expression of spiritual beings, we will also find the expression for man in the thought that Goethe hinted at in “Faust” when he characterized the earth spirit:

In the flood of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down
Weaving back and forth!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life.
So I create at the whirling loom of time
and weave the living garment of the Godhead.

Those who cannot rise to the realization that it is a reality to speak of the spirit of Mercury and the spirit of the Sun, and that what the eye sees and what we can explore with our instruments to what is spoken in theosophy is exactly the same as the external bodies of man to his soul, for such people the theosophical results will be spoken in vain.

When there was more conscious spiritual research in scholarship than there is today, the names given to our celestial bodies, especially those belonging to our solar system, were meant in a completely different sense. The old names Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, etc. did not just refer to the material bodies; in these material bodies they saw the bodies of spiritual beings. And the names applied to the spiritual entities, so that originally Mercury was the name for the planetary spirit of Mercury. The same applies to the Moon, Sun, Mars, Venus, etc. This is a prerequisite that we must adhere to if we want to understand what I have just said.

First of all, let me describe the meaning of the earth's development in a comparison. Imagine going back to an earlier point in our Earth's development, to the point in time that our natural science must also assume: namely, to the point in time before man set foot on Earth. Our natural science certainly indicates such a point in time when the various other lower beings were present in manifold forms, and a point in time when man essentially entered this Earthly development in his present form, as a sensual-real being. Don't get worked up about the form. It should mean nothing other than that if we go back in scientific research, we will find a point in time when man was not yet there.

Let us look at the earth as it presents itself at this point in time. We have the point in time when man could not have changed anything about this earth in any way. Nothing at all had been worked on by man on this earth. Because he was not there at all yet. So we have to say: the point in time we are talking about now presents us with the earth as it was prepared by the forces of nature. But for man to be able to intervene with his own cultural work – spiritually and religiously speaking – it would be as if I had to say: the earth has been handed over to man out of the hand of the gods, without human intervention.

Now, human beings are beginning to work on the earth step by step. If we follow purely historical research, we learn that this teaches us how man first began to work the earth with primitive tools. We imagine how he carried stones to both sides of the Nile and how the pyramids were formed. We look back even further, to the time when people created the first cultural works using simple flint tools. As we move forward, we see how humans increasingly came to control the forces of nature. It is then clear to us that the things we see today would not be there if human minds and hands had not worked. Let us try to imagine a time when no human hand or mind had yet worked. Try to understand what the things around you are. They are the result of natural forces, but also the result of human labor. So we look back to the point in time when human labor began.

Now let us look up to our time, when human labor has changed this planet. Let us compare the surface of our earth with the surface of yore. We put ourselves in the place of an observer who is outside our earth and compares these two points in time and can then say: This is the earth without human intervention, and then on the other hand, this is what human labor has done. This human work can continue. It will increasingly transform the Earth planet. In your mind, you can at least imagine the later stage of Earth's development, where again an unbiased observer looks at this Earth planet, but now in such a way that, when he looks at it from the outside, it would seem to him as if you were looking at this room. There is nothing here that is merely a natural phenomenon. You will find nothing of the original forces, such as they are a flowing in the open. It is all artificially constructed. So you could imagine a point in the earth's development where everything that can be transformed by human hands has actually been transformed by human hands in such a way that the observer would see an earth transformed into a work of art. Of course, nature would have to be transformed even more by human labor and conquered by humans.

But there is no reason why we should not think that electricity and other forces of nature that have been put at the service of humans, and indeed much more significant forces of the earth, can be put at the service of human culture. In the present development, we see the earth as having arrived at a goal. We do our work in such a way that man does it with this goal in mind. If we could not intervene in the growth of plants, if it were not as it has happened, we could not become master of the forces of the origin of higher living beings, but only the inanimate, mineral nature could be completely transformed, so that the form of the planet would be the result of its work at the final goal of the earth planet.

Now let us look back again to the point in time when human work had not yet begun. The theosophical worldview does not view anything that already existed or was already developed in any other way. Everything that has come into being and developed has come about in a similar way to these processes, which I have been able to hint at comparatively. The beings, of whom I have said that they have ascended from men to gods, and whom men regard as the higher ones, they did their work at that time. Just as a younger being will receive the earth planet from the hands of men when the earth has reached its goal and will then be able to continue working on it, so man received this planet from the hands of the gods. What he found, the gods had brought into being, exactly in the same way and form as man brought the earth into being. Such was the mere development of nature before there was any culture on this earth, before a simple man, with simple tools or, let us say, with his hands, somehow touched the earth, the earth was the work of the gods. From that point on, man has taken over the work of the gods in his own way.

Let us look at the matter from a different point of view, from the point of view of knowledge. Man seeks to explore what is around him, he seeks to think about what is in the world in terms of thought. I have often used the comparison: if there were no water in this glass, I could not scoop any out. All our thoughts, when we reflect on the world, have their meaning. If they are to have a meaning for the world, then they must be within the world. Of course, it would be quite ridiculous to want to think about a world in which no thoughts are embodied. When man reflects on the world and arrives at thoughts about the world, the world must have been built according to these thoughts. When man now investigates the laws and arrives at natural laws, what are these natural laws for him, which express themselves in thoughts? Nothing other than what man draws from them, similar to how he draws water from a glass. And just as the watchmaker has formed the watch according to his thoughts, and another, without knowing the watchmaker, can disassemble the watch better afterwards, so man comes and dissects the world afterwards. He does not need to know the one who put the thoughts into it. And it would be strange to say: No watchmaker put the thoughts into the watch mechanism.

More recent science has so often said: We do not need any spiritual authors of the world. Science has finally led us to understand this world in a purely mechanical way and to understand how the individual parts interlock. So we don't need a creator. — That's just as clever as claiming that because you understand how to take a watch apart, you don't need to assume a watchmaker. The fact that the world can be explained mechanically is no proof that it was not originally built according to thoughts. When we see nature in its natural forces and deduce the laws from them, for philosophy these natural forces are the expression of the original thoughts of the gods and the work of men in art, these are thoughts of a later work of the same kind as the work of the gods in nature outside. When the theosophist contemplates a rock, a crystal, or even a plant — although this is more difficult — he says to himself: All these have been created in the same way in spirit, like a machine, a work of art, like a work of art by a painter or musician. Only the latter are more recent products of the human spirit, which is a God in the making, while the former are the product of the mature spirit of God, which has long since surpassed the level of man. This is the spirit.

Now let us look at the matter in more detail. If we look at man as he is and lives today, and if we go back only a little in history, we learn that everything around us has been created relatively recently and that centuries ago man worked with very different, more primitive means of culture. And if we go further back, these means of culture become more and more primitive, and cultural history shows us that people living in the earliest times made knives and tools out of stone. So we come to a primitive man on earth who, in relation to everything that is the result of intellectual culture today, was still very far behind. The mind of the human being whom today's science likes to call prehistoric man was very primitive. We can see, then, that the ability to understand developed and took shape during this time. In this way, we ourselves trace the development of the mind. Further research into humanity in cultural history does not go any further.

But now spiritual research begins, theosophical research. It speaks in the most serious sense of the development, of the development of everything that exists in our environment. Just as the intellect has gradually developed, which at the beginning could only create very primitive means of culture such as flint knives and so on, grinding grain between two millstones, so the intellect was not only primitive, but it was not there at all. The intellect, this intellectuality has developed. Based on spiritual facts, just as our science is based on material facts, intellectuality begins to follow the things that cultural history speaks of. Cultural history extracts from the layers of the earth what it finds. Man evidently had a completely different facial expression. His brain was the tool of the spirit, which was not yet as developed as it later became. But from there we go back to even more distant primeval times. And what I have mentioned before, I have to bring up again here to make everything a whole. We come back to human ancestors who, however, cannot be shown in geology, who did not yet make tools, who did not yet have what we call intellectual power, but who had other mental abilities instead. From material natural science you know that the Earth has not always looked the same as it does today, that it has undergone continuous changes in its shape, that where there is land today there used to be sea, and where there is sea today there used to be land. The theosophical worldview speaks of facts that even the scientist at least hypothetically admits. The part of the earth's surface that is now occupied by the Atlantic Ocean, which lies between Europe, Africa and America, was once land. This is a fact for spiritual research. Arldt's treatise on Atlantis only provides information about the animal and plant world. Theosophical research, however, speaks of the human form. The intellect had not yet developed at that time; other spiritual abilities were decisive then.

You can get a rough idea of how this came about. When seeing animals migrate into dark caves, they lose their faces. Other powers develop. Strength declines. Thus, in general, in the course of development, we find that with the development of one faculty, the other must gradually recede. Thus, with the development of the mind, of intellectuality, other spiritual powers that man had in times gone by recede.

A certain kind of clairvoyance, a dim, dark clairvoyance, was an outstanding spiritual power among the population of ancient Atlantis. These were people whose forebrain was not yet developed. That was the case with the Atlantic people, whose forebrains were not developed; they were not intellectual, but they were endowed with a certain clairvoyance. They had not yet developed reflection. Therefore, [the Atlantic man] could not have any culture. He could not make knives and axes for himself, he simply lived in a completely different way, but he was clairvoyant in a certain respect. His consciousness was so developed that he could not only perceive in his surroundings that which the senses convey, that which enters the human soul through the gates of the senses, but his soul was able to perceive even more of the soul, albeit in a very shadowed way. When he came near another person, he not only perceived what the person looked like, not only perceived what the person saw, but he could vividly perceive what moral qualities the other person had. He could perceive the soul, the inner being, the instincts, the passions and desires with a completely different kind of mind. If he came near a person who had wild desires, he had something else; today we would call it hallucinations. Colorful images arose in him of what lived in that being. So a completely different perception was present in those times. This is roughly how we have characterized the Atlantean population.

Another practical activity was also linked to this cognitive activity. You can read more about these things in my magazine “Lucifer - Gnosis”, in the essays of “13”. There it is described how people worked in those days. They had no tools, but just as they were clairvoyant, they were also endowed with a certain magical power. They were able to do what people today can no longer do. They were able to promote the growth of a plant, to make it grow faster. I could tell you many other things, but I think that is enough, for it could be taken in the most serious way. You see, however, that we are looking back here to a point in our earth's development that had a very different human being. But you must bear in mind that a different being, at the center of such a development, also requires a very different environment.

If we explore the Earth itself in these ancient times, then this Earth is also quite different. The distribution of water, fog, clouds, and air that we have around the Earth today did not yet exist in ancient Atlantis. It was quite different. The air was, so to speak, almost saturated with water. We did not have to deal with such a distribution of water in the air as we do today, but with a perpetual misty air. When Germanic mythology speaks of a 'fog home', it is a memory of ancient Atlantis with its foggy air. It was only in the later process of our earth's formation that what we have in our environment today emerged. Only with this environment was the progression of sensory and intellectual development possible. Thus we look back on a different formation of man and the earth planet. In certain respects, we can regard man as divine in a spiritual sense, but he differs considerably from the spirituality of our time. The spirituality of that time has receded. But the recognition that built the mind has emerged in our time. It has pushed the other back.

There will indeed come a time when people will unite the two: self-aware intellectual knowledge with withdrawn clairvoyance. This is what is already emerging in clairvoyance as a prophecy of later epochs. The Atlanteans were not so significantly different from people today, but they were different in some ways. If I may express myself crudely and trivially, I would say that they were not yet embodied in such dense matter, they were not yet as hardened in their matter as they have been since that time. Just as you follow the animals and come up to the cartilaginous fish and bony fish, as you come to beings that are embodied in less dense matter, we also had people who had a finer organism that they then knew how to control more.

The naturalist [Lord Kelvin] takes us back to such times – albeit hypothetically. The naturalist has calculated when the earth must have been in a state that did not yet allow for life on earth. According to the amount of heat that it still loses today and that it must have possessed in the past, it must once have been so warm that creatures such as plants, animals and humans that live on it today could not have lived then. Whether this hypothesis is more or less well-founded, it is certainly ingenious and based on good foundations. It is calculated that 30 million years ago the Earth was in a state in which there was no plant kingdom, no animal kingdom and no human kingdom. These were in a completely different state from planetary beings.

Let us trace them back to a state that is more and more fluid and more and more finely material. So, what man carries as a physical body was not yet present at that time. If you hold on to the idea that I have put before you, then you will be able to visualize and imagine how the human spiritual part could have lived at that time, as well as how what is spiritual and soulful in the animal and plant world could have lived on this planet before it emerged in plants, animals and humans. We follow man from the stage when he was physically softer and then even softer, to states that appear gelatinous compared to our present flesh and further back ethereal and even earlier spiritual, so that we find him, by looking into the past, always spiritualized. This is how we have to look at all beings.

We come back to an Earth planet that in its form does not yet represent a solid skeleton for our Earth, but a soft mass of mist. If you now look further at the beings that we have traced back, we find the Earth planet by no means as material as science presents it. We find it still fluid where plant, animal and human forms have appeared. But we also find it already populated by beings in a spiritual state. Thus we see how the earth continues to develop.

I would like to make clear by means of a comparison what is of course somewhat difficult to grasp. Consider today's hard coal. You dig it out of the earth. Today it is lifeless. If you look back millions of years into the past, this coal was still within extensive forests. These forests with their undergrowth perished, were covered by the earth and transformed over millions of years into what we dig out as coal. This is the dead body of former plant formations. The plant has become stone.

So much for the external material point of view. For spiritual research, something else arises. The spiritual researcher sees how the living becomes dead, how a stone has become from the living. But spiritual research says: every stone - whether you take a rock crystal or any other rock - everything has come into being in a similar way to coal. Nothing living has come from something dead. Just as a plant would not grow out of coal, something living has never come from something dead. It is the other way around: the dead has come from the living. But what we have around us in the way of stones and rocks and crystals is nothing other than fossilized life. The inanimate emerged from the animate. Thus the earth was once a body that had nothing inanimate about it. The inanimate, the rock, is only a later phase, a precipitation from the animate. And the question is already wrongly posed if someone wants to explore how the animate arises from the inanimate, because only the inanimate arises from the animate.

When you look at a gelatinous lower animal, as we think of them in terms of materialistic science, when you imagine how their individual limbs are differentiated and how man, however, has developed out of an undifferentiated, uniform body, and how then from such a being, beings with cartilage and beings with bones arose, whose skeleton is a kind of petrification – so the whole skeleton of the earth is petrified, crystallized, it is what life has left behind. If we follow this in relation to another form of our earth, with ever thinner and thinner matter, we find: everything changes, the inanimate ceases. This thin matter is at the same time a living one. And finally – continue the same thought, I only need to hint at it – then you come back even further to times when you can find the even higher truth that just as the inanimate later arose from the animate, the material-animate arose from the spiritual in the first place. Just as the inanimate is not the origin of life, so too is mere life not the origin of spirit, but spirit is the origin of life.

However, in a remotely similar way, we have to imagine that our earth was once a spiritual being, and that life developed out of this spiritual being through a kind of hardening, just as the living later developed out of the lifeless. And so we trace the earth back to the state where it was a spiritual being. Man's soul was present in a completely different way. As we trace man further and further back, it becomes apparent that he had very different abilities, clairvoyant abilities. However, the further back we trace him, the more his independence disappears. We find him in absolute dependence as a part of the divine beings that form this earth in its original state. Thus we look back to an original state of the earth, in which man was a member of the gods, had not yet separated himself from the general divine existence, is a member of their organism, as your hand is a member of your organism.

Thus man forms a part of this spiritually conceived state of the earth; we have traced back the earth planet. Now go through again with me what is happening now in this planet Earth. We must now imagine that first the spiritual separates and leaves behind a living thing, hardens into a living thing and animates a spiritual, so that we now have an Earth that consists of spirit and matter. And the living thing is linked to a mineral and dead thing. Man is a true dual being; when we follow him, we must follow how, on the one hand, the physical organism has developed and, on the other hand, a spiritual element has developed. This spirit was originally contained in the spirit-earth. However, the spirit must be thought of in a completely different direction of development than the body. Compare: When you see the body, it appears, according to its external structure, as the perfect embodiment of this external sensual being. In terms of its spirit, it appears in such a way that we see a magnificent, powerful future. Our mental and spiritual qualities appear to us only as an inclination. This will make the idea plausible that we are dealing with two directions of development on our earth.

First of all, we have to observe the initial state of our earth. It develops in such a way that, up to a certain point in time, minerals, plants and animals and the human form, this being of sense, have separated out. This leads us to the point in time when they become the bearers of spirit. Then they are fertilized by a part that has not been absorbed into the matter that was formed earlier. Let us make a comparison. If someone comes to you and says: Here I have water. That is a certain substance, and I will cool this water in one part, so that ice floes arise. — If someone said: The ice is also water, only in a different form, so we would have to admit that. But if someone would come and wanted to say: It is ice and not water, that would be nonsense. So we can also say: Matter is nothing else but spirit. It is to spirit as ice is to water; it is spirit condensed, hardened, crystallized, if you will.

Let us follow the spiritual state of the earth up to a certain point in time. Then the spirit transforms itself into this material form. People, animals, plants and minerals arise. That is the point in time that I characterized earlier, the point in time when no human being has yet worked on this earth out of inner impulse. The being of feeling was there, just as the ice is in the water. Imagine the ice in the middle, but there is still water around it. As soon as man had reached the necessary perfection as a being of sense, he was given the opportunity to receive the spiritual spark and to be enlivened by it. He received the divine spark from the spiritual. Man had reached a certain level of development in terms of the senses. He is a real witness of the spirit and begins as a small god to continue the work of the earlier gods as his cultural work.

So you can imagine the development of a planet from the spirit to life and from there to the inanimate. The highest living being is fertilized by the spirit and the further work of the spiritual up to its peculiarity through matter. There we have a planet before us. Now you will ask: This Earth planet, where did it get the possibility to crystallize out of itself precisely this mineral kingdom with crystals formed in such a way, with plants, animals and human beings formed in such a way? — If something is to crystallize in the glass, then the forces that can accomplish the crystallization must prevail in this form.

Within the theosophical worldview, we know that every person has an eternal, imperishable core of being that did not come into being at the moment of birth. We know the doctrine of repeated lives on earth. We know that people have certain destinies for the simple reason that in past lives on earth, each person has prepared everything for himself. We have been given an account of the development of the soul in various earthly lives in various lectures, and we have seen that this life comes between two incarnations. Man is nothing other than the re-embodiment of a previous human being. We know this from the doctrine of re-embodiment and karma.

In a universal sense, we are dealing with an incarnation of the planets themselves. Just as the person who does not believe in spiritual miracles, but in spiritual natural facts, does not allow the soul of the person to arise out of nothing, just as little did the scholars of the 17th century allow earthworms to arise out of the river mud. So it is nothing more than the spiritual-soul developing only out of the spiritual-soul. This is certain from the experience of earlier developmental facts. Likewise, we have to consider the fact that the earth is now excavating such plants, animals and human forms out of itself. We have to look for the cause in earlier embodiments of our earth. Just as there is an interim period between two human incarnations, there is an interim period between two planetary incarnations. Just as we speak of people, of incarnations, so we speak of planets, of “Manvantars”. Thus we see that the earth is a re-incarnated planet from the past, and between two such planets there is an interval, a “Pralaya”. So we look back to a different state in which this earth was not yet such a planet as it is today, but we look back to an imperfect state of our earth. Just as a person in today's incarnation has abilities and powers that he has acquired from events and experiences in life, so the Earth as a whole has evolved from previous incarnations in order to get to know the regular formations of minerals, plants and animals. So we have our present planet and a predecessor. A few more words about this predecessor. What were the obvious characteristics of this predecessor? Spiritual research can trace them exactly, but I do not want to present them to you today because they seem to be plucked out of thin air. What abilities did it acquire to bring people so far that they could be fertilized by a spirit? Up to that point, man had been a kind of higher animal, he had come close to the point where development begins. I can only hint at the rest. To understand the progress that has taken place from an earlier planet to our present one, we have to realize the real meaning of the development of the earth. Occultism tells us that this meaning is as follows. The occultist knows that the spirit of the earth's development is love, and the spirit of the previous one is wisdom. In our stages of development, love is expressed, and in the earlier ones, wisdom. You can also understand this comparatively. If you understand it, you will find that our entire material earthly structure is embodied wisdom. Look at the rock crystal. You have to study, apply reason, to understand, you have to calculate. The spirit that you draw out must have been put in. Natural scientists have not yet come to understand these forms. The further we penetrate, the more we will understand that we are not dealing with unwisdom, but with wisdom. If you see a human thigh bone, look at it through a microscope. You will not find a compact mass. You will find fine beams, more beautiful than the best house. Because everything is stretched out there so that the greatest load can be carried with the least expenditure of energy. If a beam is placed at a certain angle, material can be saved. Here the miracle is performed.

The anatomist knows how the miracle of the human heart moves us, and that it is more perfect than what man develops in his soul today. These are passions, desires. No matter how he purifies them, they are not like the miracle of the heart. Man drinks coffee, tea, beer and thereby inhibits or stimulates the activity of the heart. You can trace a structure full of wisdom through the entire development of the earth. This is what has developed as a material framework. We look back on a framework that was nothing more than the basis for a new incarnation. Everything that was built as a framework was determined at that time. What is happening on earth now is the result of the passions, instincts and desires that were aroused and caused then. Look at an uncivilized 'Negro'; his soul blindly follows instincts, passions. There are no moral concepts. Man devours his fellow man. Gradually, the soul purifies itself. But wise is the basic structure, which is so imperfect in its passions. When the earth's development began again, it shaped the previously acquired basic structure again. What should happen on this earth is the purification of instincts, passions and instincts. Everything has been created, including the wise structure of how instincts and drives, moral concepts and so on, religious creativity and the sense of a soul arise from our earth. Thus, piece by piece, they originate from the earlier elementary states, like the wisdom of the structure of our basic framework.

Do not believe that out of nothing, this or that, the thigh or the heart, is formed out of nothing and thus becomes the bearer of passions and morals. To come from blind drives and instincts to the purity of moral wisdom, this wisdom of the basic structure had to grow out of long experience. This heart had to develop out of the experiences of the earlier planetary spirit. So the wisdom that underlies the basic structure of our earth is the experience of an earlier planetary incarnation of the earth spirit. On earth we have a different purpose. Here, wisdom is not experienced, here what has been wisely built up is instilled, instilled - the ennobling of drives, desires and passions. The beings ennoble themselves by living in an external relationship to each other. This external relationship of the earthly world is egoism, as it exists in all beings. It is love. This tendency of the development of love is just as much the meaning of the development of the earth as the development towards wisdom was the meaning of the predecessor of the development of the earth. When the development of the earth has reached its goal, then everything that is still egoism in man and in other beings today will have been transformed into love.

And the next incarnation will carry love within it, just as the earth carried wisdom within it. Thus an original planet that acquires wisdom passes into everything that people accomplish here in the development of the earth into an embodied love. When we look into the future, it means a perspective view, a view to the fact that man deifies himself and makes himself the bearer of love, in order to then give it back to his successor, and to whom he will belong again as a higher being, like the higher developed beings who presided over the development of the earth and still preside over it today.

Now I can only add what real occultism has to say about the outer presentation of this meaning of development. Just as something always has to be discarded when a higher development takes place, so it is with today's plants. Originally they did not exist in this form. They can only flourish on soil that is mineral; they can grow out of it. If we are talking about a life that was originally mere and about the fact that the mineral aspect has only gradually emerged, then our present-day plants were not present in the original life, but other plant forms were. These plant forms have, on the one hand, developed in relation to the mineral kingdom and, on the other hand, further developed into the present-day plant kingdom, which will not live without the mineral kingdom. That is the meaning of higher development: it is based on something. The plant has pressed down part of the mineral kingdom on which it stands. The animal kingdom has excreted the plant kingdom and feeds on it. The plant kingdom assimilates the carbon dioxide that humans exhale and exhale oxygen, which humans need. If you look into the human world itself, you can see that man, as master of the outer world, can only live on the basis of the 13th chapter of the Gospel of John, where Christ Jesus shows that he is aware that a higher being can only rise on the basis of a lower one, just as a plant can only rise on mineral soil, an animal on vegetable soil. Everything is helpful and healing on the soil of the apostles. Hence the great gratitude expressed in the parable of the washing of the feet. The spirit is at the same time the origin of this soil, but the substantiality of the soil must always be withdrawn so that something finer and younger can develop on it.

Thus the later form that spirituality took could only develop by excluding matter. Just as the original life expelled the mineral kingdom, so the moon was also expelled. Thus the matter of the moon is to be regarded as the rejected brother of the development of the earth, which was united with it in its earlier planetary existence. The moon has been cast off and still has a spiritual connection to the earth. It is necessary for this earth as the mineral kingdom is for the plant kingdom, as the plant kingdom is for the animal kingdom.

If we go further back, we will not only see the earth united with the moon, with what the secret researchers have called the moon, today's moon is only the cast-out corpse. It is similar with the sun. I have been able to show you a perspective of how the theosophical view looks at planetary development. The planets as they appear to us in the sky today present themselves in a certain relationship for the theosophical research. What is the sun today, what is the moon today, has emerged in the course of development. They represent other phases of development. If you look back to your own origin and source, you will be able to say to the child: This represents my own development. In a sense, the occultists see the planets in this way, so that they appear as childhood stages compared to the development of the earth. Other planets appear as those that have reached the stage in which the earth is today much earlier.

Thus, occultists present this development in such a way that they place the seven planets in a series that has a relationship in its individual links, as it is expressed in the successive stages of human development. Just as this represents that which can also stand side by side, so for the secret researcher this side by side is represented in that which each individual can also go through, namely: this development through forms that are preserved in the planets neighboring the earth. This is expressed by the science of secret in mnemonic signs. These are the names of the days of the week. “Cheap philosophy” — many will object. In the seven days of the week, the planets represent their own development on Earth. We have to start from Saturday. The development of Mars takes place on Earth. Secret research calls the development of Mercury the development in which man intervenes and which will persist until the end of the development. So this is how it corresponds:

Saturday: Saturn,
Sunday: the Sun
Monday: the Moon
Tuesday: Mars
Wednesday: Mercury
Thursday: Jupiter
Friday: Venus

Thus, in the names of the days of the week in the most diverse languages, you have a marker for planetary development everywhere.

I was only able to follow this development for a short distance, namely from the Earth to the Moon. So you can see that and how meaning and significance is added to this development through theosophical research. Those who not only have a feeling for our research, but also for the deeper forces, for the forces in development, have always understood that the earth comes from a development and progresses to a further development, that it is the planet that represents the stage of development of love, and that wisdom develops through love into a higher form. The next thing that surrounds us is the floods of the development of the earth planet, which present themselves as a tendency towards love.

One of the great minds sensed this in a poem when he wanted to express the meaning of the earth's development, when he looked up at the next goal of the earth's development, when he looked up at what man cannot look beyond. Then it appeared to him like a glance of the divine spirit, like a circle in which the infinity of the divine spirit can express itself. It seems as if the development of humanity, the whole meaning of planetary development, can express itself in the small spirit of the earth. But the spirit of the earth reveals to him what its essence is, what has become of earlier forces, and what will be transformed into later forces. And if I speak from the human point of view, the meaning of planetary development appears to us as development towards love. This is also expressed by Dante, the great thinker and poet, in the words:

The orbiting that was received in you
showed itself, like reflected light,
when I observed it for a while all around,
seemed to me in itself, in its own coloring
painted with our image,
which is why my gaze was completely absorbed in it.
Just as the geometrician becomes completely absorbed
in measuring out the compass and, pondering,
cannot find the principle he needs:
so it was with me at that new sight.
I wanted to see how the image related to the circle
and how it fitted into it;
but for this, not only my own wings were not enough,
my spirit was not struck by lightning,
which brought it what it longed for.
Here the power of the lofty imagination broke,
but already my desire and will moved,
like a wheel that drives the same revolution,
love that moves the sun and stars.

[What we are dealing with today has been called the question of all questions. What could touch man more deeply, if the question is only framed broadly enough – touch him more deeply, from a certain point of view – than reflecting on his origin, on his descent, because] everyone probably has an inkling that this question includes much of what alone can enlighten man about his true nature, about his destiny and about the nature of his life in general.

Now, however, from the point of view from which we are to speak to you today about human descent, it is difficult to make ourselves understood even to our contemporaries, if they are not already somehow prepared for it through spiritual science, because compared to what is being put forward from many sides today about the descent or origin of man, what we have to say in this our meditation will seem as if it were spoken in a completely, completely different language; and given the great interest that is shown in this question today, and given the public suggestion — we may perhaps call it that — which is not true science, but many of the catchwords that have been taken from this science and which today dominate many minds, with all this, much of what is presented today will perhaps seem to some even more than what was already said in the last three lectures [of this series] much more like a mere reverie, like a fantasy. When two such fundamentally different things confront each other as what a world view that is more materialistically colored — the word does not need to be pressed — has to say about the origin of man and what spiritual science, as we are considering it here, has to present, when two such different things confront each other, then, then, above all, one must first of all bring one thing to mind. Anyone who has familiarized themselves with the concepts and ideas that dominate our popular literature when the origin of man is discussed and it is claimed that this origin of man is spoken of in the way it must be according to scientific facts; [if you are confronted with this] when you have read your way into popular [or, for that matter, more or less scientific literature, one must still bear in mind that the concepts and ideas that someone adopts are not always based entirely on real contemplation, on real observation, but on authority, which is adopted in a, one might say, mysterious, mystical way – and this word is used in the worst sense – [by what is once popular], by what once has prestige.

And it must be realized that it is extremely difficult for those who have become accustomed to thinking in the direction that confronts them to bring the ideas they have once accepted into any kind of acceptable relationship with ideas of a different nature [that are put forward, for example, from the perspective of spiritual science]. Therefore, anyone who speaks about this question from the point of view of spiritual science today has no illusions about the fact that he could easily be understood by all those who have surrendered their habitual ways of thinking, by what is commonly accepted and seemingly based on the solid facts of science. That would certainly be an illusion. Nevertheless, from this spiritual-scientific point of view, what is to be said must be said, especially today, for little by little these ideas will find their way into the minds of all those who can free themselves from the [thought habits] just mentioned. This should be stated in advance so that it is not believed that the humanities scholar only indulges in such illusions, that he can conquer those who live in strict scientific ideas in flight, or that it cannot happen, [that one confronts such ideas], and say from their point of view, that what he has presented is pure nonsense, [pure folly]. As a rule, he is able to present the arguments put forward by the opponents of the former very easily himself. The deception then mostly lies with those who approach it from a spiritual scientific point of view and believe that its arguments could contain anything new for him.

Thus, we may well consider this subject [from the standpoint of spiritual science] without prejudice, given this assumption. Monistic thinking takes the easy way out by posing the question in materialistic terms, using a curious logic... Our natural science, which has been equipped with such admirable progress in the course of the 19th century – and no one but the humanities scholar can marvel at this progress in natural science – our natural science has, among many other things, also broadened the human view of the sum of living beings that live around us today and that lived on this earth in earlier epochs of the earth's development. We find their remains more or less preserved in the layers of our earth, where we once found creatures that were little like us. And a kind of religion, a kind of belief, that has been built on this scientific fact, has concluded from the contemplation, from the appropriate contemplation of what the world shows around us today, if we look at the layers of the earth to search for pre-worldly beings. This confession has turned it into a kind of theory of evolution that contains an extraordinary amount of interesting, important and also correct information.

But we can characterize the logical error that this theory of evolution makes with a few words – and we must characterize it [in this way] – and it is precisely when we start from this point that we will gather the material for thought in order to present that [being] to our minds, which can be said from the point of view of spiritual science. Science shows us [today] the perfect being alongside imperfect life. If we examine the layers of our earth, science shows us a series of [apparently] imperfect living creatures [to seemingly perfect beings], so that we can say: It is obvious to the human eye that one living creature is imperfect and the other is perfect.

Now, due to circumstances and facts [that we do not want to explain here], a remarkable logical conclusion has been drawn from this.

Let us consider this conclusion in its simplest, logical, sober form: the perfect has arisen from the imperfect. By making a comparison, we can make this conclusion clear to ourselves and then ask ourselves whether it is possible. Let us assume that we see two people next to each other, one with a genius for hard work, who has developed great diligence in life and has achieved something respectable. If we take another person next to him, we see a different person who has few abilities, who was also lazy and lethargic and has achieved nothing of note. Now we hear that these two are related. How they are related is something we should think about first, because that is the question in relation to the so-called developmental problem. When we look at the beings around us, we see that humans, with their various organs, are similar to lower forms of life, so-called imperfect ones. We see that humans have a slightly different structure, but basically the same bones as lower creatures. We could cite numerous other reasons that could lead us to the conclusion that we must assume a relationship. But what this relationship is like has not been established by facts, but inferred. No one should entertain the belief that the origin of the higher from the lower has been established; it has been inferred.

So if we know that they [the two people standing opposite each other] are related, [if we] can determine that from something, can we then conclude that [the one who has the genius and who was hardworking and achieved something decent comes] from [the other who was lazy and careless and did not improve]? Anyone who reflects a little will be able to realize how unnatural such a conclusion would be, and how easily he could be set right in his thinking if it were shown to him that the one as well as the other person descended from the same parents, that the one has only developed upward to his industriousness, but the other has declined, has developed downward. It is extremely trivial, [what I see], and it could seem as if an admirable theory that prevails in the world today should be refuted [by an /illegible/ triviality].

Unfortunately, however, [if we look closely] this logical blunder is [made] because it is known that the higher organism is related, [and it is] concluded that the higher one descends from the lower one – [by thinking that one could say that the more highly developed human descends from the lower, lazy human].

Now let us expand this little reflection to include, say, different peoples living side by side, a lower-developed people and a higher-developed people. Today, we have become accustomed to thinking that a higher-developed people with significant spiritual education [and cultural achievements] has developed from a state in which a lower-developed people finds itself today. Exactly the same conclusion as one would draw if one were to place these two people next to each other today. It is possible that one could be corrected if one were to research the facts, just as spiritual science is able to show that it is not the case that the spiritually higher educated people descend from the lower, but that] on the contrary, there is a common descent [of the two], that one that is spiritually more highly developed has developed in one direction and the other in the direction of decline. So that when we examine the ancestry, we are led up to a common primal people, not to the one that lives next to the other today, but to a common one. Since both live side by side, [they descend equally from the primal people]. Only one has developed upwards, the other downwards [in a certain respect].

Let us look at this in a little more detail, [so that our minds can form certain concrete ideas in the process]. You all know that when the European immigrants first moved to the American continent, they encountered an indigenous people [there], a people who are believed [in natural historical thinking] to represent earlier stages of the present peoples. From a European point of view, they were certainly at a low level of civilization back then, but if you take such an absolute point of view, you can go very wrong in your judgment. Let's imagine a scene to illustrate this. The Europeans have not always managed things so well. They have not always chosen the best means to exterminate the free man. One of the last chiefs [of the free people] who came from the areas from which [the Native Americans] were expelled in North America [was one of the last] to face a European conqueror, a leader of a European culture. The inhabitants of America had been deprived of their lands, including the tribe to which that Indian chief belonged. [The scene took place not so long ago.] The people had been promised land for what was taken from them, and it had not been kept.

The leader of the “redskins” stood opposite the leader of the Europeans. We have preserved a speech that the leader of the Native Americans addressed to the Europeans who had defeated his tribe and had not given them any land. I cannot even give you a literal translation of this speech, only the gist of it, what it contains. This is roughly what the chief said to the European: “Yes, you Europeans, you promised us other land for the land whose soil is covered by the corpses of our free brothers, you did not give us other land. That is because the pale man believes in different things than the free man. The pale man has strange magic tools, where little magic creatures are on them, he looks into them and sees what is right for him, he sees what is true and what is false. - The chief once saw the books and thought the letters were such magic creatures, [magic spirits that cause the Europeans to take such measures]. The free man does not believe in such spirits; the free man does not read what is written in such books of spells; the free man goes out and hears how the water rushes and how the trees rustle in the forest and he understands that. Because the Great Spirit speaks to him through the rushing of the water and the rustling of the trees. He always speaks the truth, and because you do not know the Great Spirit, who speaks the truth in the rushing of the water and the rustling of the trees, that is why you behave in this way. The pale man can never understand the free man, otherwise he would not trample with his weapons on the earth, which covers the bones of our brothers and which will one day take revenge on the pale ones!

What interests us about this strange speech by the free man, however, is the reference to the Great Spirit, whom he suspected everywhere. In the rustling of the trees, [in the trickling of the springs], even in thunder and lightning, [in all natural phenomena] the [divine] great spirit spoke to him. What is remarkable about this “savage” population is [this monotheistic religion], this remoteness from all superstition in their fundamental religious belief, which shines through the many superstitions that were present. You really don't need to go very far with your logic before you can see that those who were conquered by the Europeans, from whom the Europeans do not descend, but both [the European and the American population] descend from a common people, who must have had a wonderful natural religion. That will be a hypothesis if one stands on the standpoint of the sense-physical facts; that is a certainty if one [researches spiritually with the methods that we will talk about in the next lectures, especially in the second-next one, which is about initiation]. The American population, which had declined in certain respects, had lost its original purity and developed in another direction [towards a lower level]; the European, from his point of view, developed in the opposite direction. This gives us a concept of development that shows us very, very different perspectives than the simple concept of development that people are so keen to present to us as the only possible one. We see how this development is not at all simple, how we must assume earlier states of existence from which today's emerged, how that which today lives as imperfect in the imperfect appears to be a branch-off that develops towards imperfection. If we could go back in time to the distant past, we would find peoples who are the ancestors of the European [population] as well as those of the conquered American Indians. The path of development went so that a straight development [direction] led to the present-day developed population. But those who did not keep up, who did not absorb what could have led to perfection, came to a decline. The others are not descended from them, but descended from a common ancestor, others have progressed. [They are not merely /uncertain reading] lagging behind on a different point of view, but] because they lagged behind, they now show a state that was never present in ancient times. Because [they were] unable to develop further, [they] regressed.

We can now extend this concept to all living things. If we extend it in this way, we go back to the mammals that are closer to humans. Any simple theory of evolution would assume that the higher mammals were the ancestors of man. Today, this notion of man's very brutal descent from apes has been somewhat dropped, but the line of thought is still based on what appears to be different. If we imagine the relationship between humans and higher apes using this concept, we will say: Today's apes may descend from that original being that existed in the distant past and to which humans have evolved, but they have remained at [an older point of view], and therefore, in their present state, [in their present form] do not represent the ancestors of mankind, but the degenerate creation [that has wanted to hold on to an old form; that has corrupted itself]. Therefore, when today's man looks at this ape, he sees it with the mind, [then] it appears to him as a caricature of his own being, not at all as an ancestor, [and anyone with such feelings experiences it] as a kind of embarrassment... [illegible] when the original characteristics of man are corrupted.

[And so, step by step, we descend from higher to much lower creatures. In the remote past, we come to ancestors of man, whom we must not seek in creatures similar to present-day humans – the further back we go, the more dissimilar they become to the creatures that exist today. They are quite differently shaped]; from those ancestors of man, as a retarded and therefore declining entity, the lower mammals and other lower creatures descend. If we go back to the simplest creatures, [those that live today, consisting of one cell, from which one would also like to derive man,] then we would have to say that, yes, these creatures are undoubtedly related to man. But in the distant past, when man had an ancestor [from whom even these simple single-celled organisms descended, man looked quite different, his ancestor was a completely different being: The simplest organisms are the ones that are furthest behind and therefore the furthest from the original form of [the human being]. This is because they branched off earliest and, since humans have perfected themselves, have undergone a decline, [taken a direction of decline, and are the ones that are furthest from the original form].

Now let us look at this original form of man himself from the point of view of spiritual science. [There we have to take a look at the essence of man, as we have already frequently done.] We cannot look at [man] from the point of view of spiritual science in the simple way that we look at the physical body in material science.

[In what material science regards as the only thing, the human body, only one limb of the human being is based – this is only briefly hinted at – which has the same forces and materials as the seemingly inanimate matter – but science sees this body only be composed of these substances and forces in such an implicit way that these substances and forces could not maintain their form, as the material maintains its form], if the human physical body were not permeated and imbued with the second part of its being, the etheric or life body. This etheric or life body is for the spiritual scientist - [as already shown here last week] - a reality, a higher reality than the physical body, for it is the shaper and creator of the physical body. This etheric body or life body, which is a constant fighter against the dissolution of the physical body, because the moment the etheric body separates from the physical body, death occurs, and the physical body becomes a corpse. This etheric or life body is shared by humans and all other living beings, plants and animals. The third [link is called the astral body in spiritual science for good reasons]. The astral body is the carrier of lust and suffering, of joy and pain, of all instincts, drives, passions, ideas and feelings, of all that lives in the human being. This astral body is the third link of the human being. It has more in common only with the animal world, no longer with the plant world. [Then we already mentioned eight days ago] the fourth link of the human being, through which man is the crown of earthly creation, that which we could say is designated in the German language by the only name that differs from all other names, the name of our ego. The ego name, when you think about it, indicates the essence of the [ego]. [But first turn to] Fichte, [who said]:

Most people would much rather consider themselves a
piece of lava in the moon than an ego.

This ego can only be called from within itself. The name 'I' can never reach my ear if it denotes my own self; that can only be designated by the name 'I' from within. This has been discovered and recognized by those who study spiritual science: here is the actual sanctuary, the innermost link of human nature, to which nothing else of earthly things has access, but where human divine essence penetrates to one. [Man's divine essence announces itself in the ego.] By letting the little word “I” sound to itself, the soul speaks to itself what [religion] refers to as the God in man. This fourth link [of the human essence] is no longer shared by man with other beings, but is for himself and is thus the crown of earthly creation. ... /Illegible words]

[Thus, we initially have the human being as a tetrad before us, and anyone who speaks from a so-called monistic point of view would therefore not only want to accuse this spiritual-scientific view of dualism, which has been used to is done with it, but] then he should also reproach the dualism of the person who says that water consists of oxygen and hydrogen. If it is a mistake to look for light in its primary colors, only the one who does not think of dissecting the thing into its individual parts, or who claims of the individual that it is the comprehensive one, is a monist.]

Only he is a monist who does not think of dissecting the thing into its own members or of claiming that a single member is the whole. Then the word monism becomes a buzzword that does not take into account the facts. [But after all, people work with buzzwords today, not with facts.]

Now we can only understand the origin and descent of man if we consider the relationships between these elements of human beings in the present-day individual. We must distinguish between the two essentially different states in which we encounter man, waking and sleeping. These are two fundamentally different states. It was a remarkable fact when Du Bois-Reymond, [the naturalist], said [and it has already been pointed out in the first of these lectures] at the Leipzig Naturalists' Assembly: 'If one were to examine everything that goes on in the human physical body, all these [complicated movements and] processes, one could indeed investigate how hydrogen and oxygen and carbon and nitrogen [move in such a way, but one could examine all this], but one would never be able to explain the simplest fact of consciousness from these movements: “I feel red”, “I smell the scent of roses”. And likewise, even if someone were to see all the movements with the most wonderful instruments, he would only see movement, but not the soul processes, “I see red and feel the scent of roses”.

It is the worst materialistic superstition, and basically very interesting, that even on scientific ground it has been pointed out [although he has made significant blunders] that the fact of consciousness of the simplest sensation can never be explained from the facts of the physical body. We can understand the sleeping person, but never the waking one. Why? When a person sleeps, all these facts seem to sink into an indeterminate abyss, and because that is missing, we can understand what remains. Du Bois-Reymond, who is himself a materialist, rightly found the fact of life inexplicable.

To make this clear, let us consider the difference between the waking and the sleeping human being. In the waking body, we have the astral human being connected to the physical and etheric bodies. In the sleeping person, on the other hand, we have separated the astral body, detached it from the physical body [and from the etheric body. The difference between being awake and sleeping is that the astral body is separated from the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, but is connected to the physical and etheric bodies when we are awake.]

However, if you imagine purely in material and spatial terms that a kind of material cloud [as the astral body] emerges from the physical body, you still have a rather materialistic idea.

The human being, as he is today in his development, is just not able to perceive his physical organs [during sleep]; when the astral body reconnects with the physical body in the morning upon waking, [he can then perceive the physical surroundings through the eyes and ears]. What perceives is not your physical body, but the I with the astral body, which moves into its physical body in the morning. Physical organs are the instruments of this I equipped with a physical body. Therefore, no one would think of saying, “my brain feels a color, sees a friend,” but rather, everyone correctly says, “I see a friend,” “I perceive a color,” and so on.

When we consider the fact that today, when we are asleep, the human being, his I and his astral body are outside the physical and etheric body, then those who ask – [then we have to ask ourselves]: Where is the I [with the astral body] then? That is also somewhere in another world, in a world that belongs to the supersensible worlds. What does that mean? Where is this supersensible world? Those who oppose spiritual science imagine that spiritual science imagines this supersensible world to be in a beyond. Here it is, all around us!

And how does spiritual science imagine this supersensible world? Not any differently than [one has to imagine] colors and light for the blind. Imagine that you have a congenitally blind person below you. That which is around you, colors and light, is also around him, but he does not see it. For him, the world is what he can feel; for him, the world is [as for you, the world is the world of light and colors]. But if we could operate on this man born blind at this moment, so that he would see, out of the darkness that was around him, the lights and colors would light up, [and the world that was not there for him before. Why is it there now? We see that he has now formed it out of the physical.]

There are as many worlds in infinity as a being has organs to perceive them. [We will see in later lectures that] man, as he once had the disposition in primeval times to the eyes, which at that time could not yet see, but became seeing in the course of development, that all men have the disposition to what is called in spiritual science with Goethe, “the spiritual ears, the spiritual eyes”. Spiritual eyes and ears are present in man as a predisposition and can be developed. This is the purpose of spiritual science, that it gives people the methods to be able to enter the state that is related to the blind-born, [who can be] operated on, [to the world of colors and light, and] of course someone who knows nothing about it should not decide anything about such a world, [but] the only thing that can be said is that this is there, what can be perceived. And it is not only people of the future who can perceive these higher worlds that are around us, but these methods can be applied to people of the present.

People of the present know as a fact, as a primal form, that one can relate to the [higher] worlds as the blind are born [to the world of colors and light]. By awakening the spiritual ears and eyes, new worlds can arise that are around us. In this world and in no other is the human ego and the astral body when they are separated at night from the physical and etheric bodies. As long as a person's spiritual ears and eyes are not awakened, he cannot see [in this spiritual world], so consciousness fades away. But then, when spiritual eyes and ears are awakened, he can see.

But never can [may] perception decide on existence. [Otherwise a blind man could say to a seeing man who says he sees color and light: You are a fool, I see nothing at all]. Existence does not coincide with truth.

Now we ask ourselves the further question: What does this astral body do during the night and what is its business? [Is it unemployed?] This astral body is indeed busy during the night. When you work from morning till evening or let impressions of the outside world affect you through your senses, then something is going on [continually within you], and that is the fatigue, the wearing down of the forces of the physical body. Why is a healthy sleep so healthy? Because the astral body works [during the night on the removal of fatigue, of worn-out substances], on the restoration of the worn-out forces. What the astral body has done, you feel [in the morning as] a refreshment [even if you do not know how it works].

So this astral body works throughout the night, but how is it able to work in the physical body? It is able to do so because it is now not within but outside the physical body. An astral human body that is outside the physical body can work on that body. The one that is in the body has to make use of the organs of the physical body [to perceive the physical environment] and cannot restore [the worn physical body] from within it. Therefore, for all beings that have their astral body within them during wakefulness, it is necessary that the waking state alternates with the sleeping state.

When death occurs, what happens then? What does not happen during our entire life. Then not only the astral separates from the physical, but also the etheric body from the physical. [When you have the sleeping body in front of you, the physical and etheric bodies are in perfect connection in bed, the astral body is lifted out.] If you have the corpse in front of you, then the etheric body has been lifted out. Therefore, the physical and chemical substances now follow their own laws, [the body can no longer hold together] - and here we have set out the fact of death and the fact of sleeping and waking. Only when we know these are we able to understand the primitive conditions of man, then we can take a look at the origin of man.

Let us now take up our concept again. [I cannot talk about all the details today, but only give a sketch of human origin]. Let us go back to a distant past. We find a human ancestor.

But what did he look like? Quite different from today's man. Everything, absolutely everything in humanity has developed, including the conditions of sleeping and waking. They have only become what they are today, were quite different in times gone by. Spiritual science indicates that the distribution of sleep and waking as it is today only occurred relatively late [in the development of the earth]; the rule of sleep was quite different in the distant past. Man slept much longer, [was in an unconscious state, that is,] his astral body was much longer outside the physical body than it is today. And because it had the opportunity to be out longer and the waking state was shorter, this astral body had little to do with mending [the physical body]. The fatigue was not so great.

Today the night state is filled with mending [the physical body]. We only see something in our dreams, like fragments from the unconscious state. In ancient times of the distant past, not all of the work of the [astral body] had to be used to repair the physical body. Therefore, [even if it was dull and dim], this [astral] body [with the ego] was clairvoyant to a certain extent. In a way, this astral body, which was not so intimately connected to the physical and etheric bodies, could see into its surroundings. It saw what was around it in the spiritual world. However, what was it like, [looking into the world here? What is left behind?] There is dreaming. But dreaming is something that is only a very weak, [corrupted] echo of an [ancient], dim clairvoyance of all humanity, just as we have certain organs in us that used to have their function, [for example, certain] muscles near the ear. [Those beings in the animal kingdom that have remained at this level still have these muscles to move their ears.] Such organs, [which today have no function but which had a function in earlier stages of development], are called atavisms. One such atavism is dreaming. In the distant past, in the distant past of humanity, it was not what it is today, but something that brought man into real contact with his surroundings. As strange as it may seem to materialistic thinkers, I would like to give you an [unreadable] and describe a little [how it was] back then. In those ancient times, when man was in that half-asleep state, he could not perceive man in the way that he [could perceive the external natures, but he perceived] what lived in the soul of [other] people. When he – [the other] – was awake and thinking bad thoughts, then he [perceived this evil feeling, it] rose [like a kind of luminous body] for the consciousness at that time as a process of perception, a color image for the state of mind of the other.

In this way, people perceived the spiritual in their environment. [Of course, for materialistic thinkers this is something quite foolish. But the reasons that can be given against it are well known to the spiritual researchers themselves. So: Man was predisposed to be able to perceive in dreams. But it does not matter what one dreams; if a dream reflects reality, then it is real perception. [But if it is perceived in a dream, it is not yet bad. ... We have to imagine these ancient dreams as a much more vital state, showing a spiritual world around man that also exists today, but which he can no longer see because he has lost the ancient clairvoyance, but will learn to see again in the future.

Now we have described this person from the distant past. His astral body was essentially [more powerful], more substantial, more alive than it is now. Man has acquired this [external sensory] perception through his prolonged dwelling in the physical body. [But there is an original state of man in which the astral body was more outside the physical and etheric bodies than it is today.]

Let us realize what the astral body can still do in the physical body under certain circumstances, even today. It cannot do much today, but it can do something. When you feel a sense of shame in your soul and you blush, the blushing is a purely physical process, and what is it the result of? Of a process in the astral body.

The impression that caused the feeling of shame – [a reality of the imagination, an emotional reality] – has caused a feeling in the astral body [and] this feeling [has driven the blood to the surface, causing the blush of shame to appear here]. You can see how the blood could be set in motion by processes in the astral body through one process or another. [Today, there is very little that the astral body can do, but in the past it had great power.] In ancient times, the relationship between the astral body and the physical body was quite different. Not only could the astral body control the physical body in the minor way in which it [illegible] encountered the blood, but it had the ability to transform this physical body itself in terms of its form. At that time, when the astral body was still outside, [he had] not only the task of [removing the physical substances of] fatigue, but [illegible] that clairvoyant ability could [re-form the physical body].

Today [man] has a different forehead. [Certain animals still have that forehead formation and [illegible] formation corrupted. Man] has pushed it forward through forces that were in this astral body. [We can visualize what pushed this human forehead forward.] It was only when man learned to walk upright and move upright that he learned to imagine and feel the starry sky, that which is above, in a certain way. The animal, with its eyes directed downwards or straight ahead, does not have these impressions. When [humans] began to measure the space between the stars, namely at the time when humans had clairvoyant vision, [what was absorbed there] pushed the forehead forward, causing the brain to develop into the kind of convolutions that humans have today in terms of their abilities. This astral body is the creator of our forebrain and helped create [the anterior brain] [in adaptation to the external world]. Thus we can literally see how the astral body helped create the physical body.

Just as the astral body today transforms only a pale face into a red face [when shame is driven into the face], so in ancient times it shaped [the brain] out of this [primordial form] [into its present form]. Those beings in our line of ancestors who acquired this ability ascend to humans. Those who did not acquire this ability do not ascend to humanity, but condense. [Thus] an earlier stage of development ossified, corrupted, [and shows itself to us in a corrupted state]. Man must never be derived from today's ape, which has never been able to let these powers of the astral body take effect on it. But now we ask, if we go back even further, then we come to an even looser connection [to the physical and ether body]. There is less and less of it [the physical and etheric body], therefore the astral body [in the etheric body] is more and more powerful [and more and more powerful] and more and more able to transform the physical body. [At that time, man was gelatinous, like the animal, which is even more gelatinous today.] When man was in a soft state, the astral body could work on him in a powerful way.

[And] so we can go further and further back, to the state where the entire astral body was outside [the physical body], [where the physical body] related to the ether body as [ the body of the snail to the physical house [of the snail] relates, where the astral body /illegible] it, as it were, switches and reworks it, like the snail on the house - the snail does not live in the fabric of the house. [So it belongs to the physical and etheric bodies, but it does not yet live in them; it works on them from the outside; and we find] states, if we go back even further, [where even] the etheric body is not yet in this intimate connection with this physical body, the etheric body is still outside the physical body, and here we come to realize that the members of human nature, [which today in the waking human being are inwardly linked together], in ancient times have joined together. They certainly have a common origin, but despite the fact that they originate from the unified primal being and the unity they form in man is a remarkable one, [they are multi-faceted]. And if we ascribe to the astral body the ability to transform the physical body, what qualities can we ascribe to the [originally] free etheric body? ... /illegible]

[The further we go back in this respect to the original properties of this body, the better we get to know the mysterious workings in development]; if we can ascribe to the astral body the [shaping and reshaping, the] transformation [and reworking of the physical body], then we must ascribe to the ether body the material creation of the physical body. What is our physical body around us today, how did it come into being? We can visualize this with an image.

[The] humanities scholar [is not able to present everything with [illegible] through images. Today, what is tangible can be presented to everyone with the help of an image, which is something that arouses more associations from a physical-materialistic point of view.

By means of comparison, we can realize how the physical body of man came into being. Today, people believe so easily that what they know as physical contains the origin of the living, but this is again [such a] habit of thought, in truth it is not so. If you [once] deal with the prejudices that today [are said to come from science but do not come from it] ... /gap] If you examine how things are, [and we then only learn the method of how to examine], then you can make clear to yourself by the following comparison how the physical body comes into being.

Take coal, it is a mineral substance today. But long ago it was plants. What is now coal was once present as [graphite-containing] plants [in mighty forests]; the organic has transformed into the inorganic, the plant has become stone, the living has become physical. If you are able to do spiritual scientific research, you can see how all stones were originally living beings. We can investigate and prove that stones, rock crystal, were plants in primeval times, just like stone coal. Just as the mineral part of us originally came to life, so too was the human physical body once separated from the etheric body. As you see today] the many coral animals that build the coral reef, the physical, [you see how they grow out of it], see how the living creatures work this physical reef out of their own body. So in a time of man [ancestor] only this etheric body was present, [the astral body, and the] physical body is out of the etheric body [through a process] like ice from the water; the etheric body is a condensation, in condensed, other form, and there we come back to the original state of humanity.

Where only the etheric body existed, there was no physical human being at all. How did the physical human being begin? There was the astral and the etheric human being, who preceded the [physical] human being. The first physical human being was a small physical inclusion, like when chalk balls split off from [an animal, you see the animal and then a small chalk ball], or [you have] a container of water here: first [a small grain of ice forms], then it increases in size [little by little].

So man's entire physical nature was not there at all. It formed in the first place [as a small, tiny thing] within the spiritual, etheric [and astral], and] what now detached itself from the etheric and astral and back, was doomed, it began to develop in a descending direction, [and became the lowest living creatures]. But what was seized by the forces of the etheric and astral bodies developed higher. [Something detached itself from the animal], step by step, until [the stage was reached where] today's man was present; he left beings everywhere in his wake, as a result of the [developmental] steps he has taken. The simplest being that one sees today, which is said to be the progenitor [of humanity], is only a side branch [of human development].

But man [as a spiritual being], as an astral being, precedes all living beings. He is the firstborn as a spiritual being. [The other beings, the imperfect beings, descend] from him [as a spiritual being], who [from the very beginning] has all the potential for the highest perfection [within himself]. So man was there as a spiritual being before he was there as a physical [being]. [So where do we come from? From the world that man does not see]; man does not see the world in which the astral, etheric bodies are at home. In there is the world from which man really comes. Therefore, what is the highest link in man originally comes from him in a mysterious way, [the astral body, the etheric body and] as the last link, the physical body. Man descends from the Divine-Spiritual, [from the spiritual man descends. Only] then do we consider the appearance and descent of man in the right light, when [we] truly [elevate ourselves to spiritual-scientific contemplation. These spiritual-scientific insights can be explained in detail in the course of winter. What now appears as a program will become clear in its details. That will become clear... The physical is born out of the spiritual. The spiritual is something that permeates everything. This has always been felt above all by those who, through their good disposition and insight, had no materialistic mind and no materialistic habits of thought. From the laws that permeate and resound through the whole world as spiritual, from such laws, man appears to spiritual researchers as originating. Thus spiritual research is based on no other point of view than Goethe's, which we have recognized as a genuine spiritual researcher and which he has expressed in the most diverse forms, including in that wonderful series of poems entitled “God and the World” [is entitled], in which there is a beautiful poem, ‘Orphic Primal Words’, of which today we are particularly interested in the first stanza, because it shows us how Goethe was aware of the facts we have been talking about today. He wants to show us how that which is spiritual in man, which comes from higher laws [than from physical laws, which are explained by external sensory facts], cannot be fragmented by the powers of the temporal, cannot be fragmented by the forces of the sensual. [This is what he wants to express when he] connects an ancient, sacred idea to [his own dismemberment]: I and spiritual people are not bound to the physical laws of the body, which they themselves have produced, built, transformed, they are eternal and unchanging in their essence, in that they transform and remodel that which they themselves [as the ego and astral body] have produced.

As on the day when you were given to the world
the sun stood in greeting of the planets
You are as ever present and eternal
[according to the law by which you came into being].
You must be so, you cannot escape it,
So said the Sibyls and the seers of old.
And no power and no time dismember
The molded form that lives and develops.

From a soul struggling for knowledge of the world, Goethe spoke the sentence:

Mysterious in the clear light of day
Nature cannot be robbed of her veil.
And what she may not reveal to your spirit,
You cannot force from her with levers and screws.

And much of what has taken place in the field of science since his time would have prompted him to say:... you cannot force that from her with microscopes and telescopes. — The saying does not arise from a lack of knowledge, but from an attitude that does not want to accept only the material. From his youth to his old age, he held fast to what he says in Faust:

The spiritual world is not closed;
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Up! Bathe, disciple, undeterred
The earthly breast in the morning dawn!

And so he has here, as also expressed in the sentence mentioned earlier, not that man could not penetrate the mystery of existence, but to draw attention to the fact that the human spirit itself, in its development, can do what instruments cannot, that the human spirit is able to ascend from level to level.

What the human spirit can do can only be answered from an understanding of the secrets of our consciousness. Consciousness as it is experienced by people today relates to the other consciousnesses that exist and relate to today's normal consciousness in such a way that they, so to speak, plunge the human being into dark depths, and on the other hand lead him up to the summit of knowledge.

Let us ask ourselves today: Is there only the “normal” consciousness or are there other consciousnesses and thus the possibility of penetrating into the causes of our existence? Today, we will deal with the relationship between consciousnesses from a particular point of view. What the word “clairvoyance” encompasses is something that is unpopular and contested in our present time. People who only recognize normal consciousness will consider everything that has to be said as folly and fantasy.

It is based on nothing more than a lack of knowledge of the nature of human consciousness; it must be said that the common inner ignorance of facts speaks in this way. And it should not go unmentioned that one would wish that what is called 'clairvoyance' in the spiritual sense be known to those who speak of it and who know very little about it and crave it. They imagine something quite wrong under clairvoyance. Therefore, it must be spoken of that clairvoyance, which lies below our normal consciousness and also brings out the human being below normal consciousness. And in comparison, it must be spoken of what clairvoyance is in the spiritual-scientific sense and how it leads beyond normal consciousness. It can only be understood by placing oneself before the soul, which has often been said about the nature of man, about the visible and invisible man.

Spiritual science does not have it as easy as recognizing man as an external science that is tied to sensual matter. It regards only the outer physical part, and then speaks of the physical human body. Within this physical human body, the consciousness of which we will speak in a moment sees the invisible, the supersensible human bodies. Isn't it the case that the ordinary mind could form enough reasons for the existence of these bodies if it would only say the following to itself: I wake up every morning; during the night my normal consciousness is immersed in darkness and gloom. In the morning, entities from the most diverse realms of nature penetrate into the field of vision of consciousness; everything that was there yesterday penetrates back into consciousness.

Now everyone should continue by saying to themselves: If it were not too absurd, what fills the field of consciousness would have to disappear in the evening and arise again in the morning. They should say to themselves: Its existence would have to have disappeared during the night. Spiritual science tells us that the human being still has an astral body, which is the carrier of lust and joy, of urges and desires, etc. For clairvoyant consciousness, the astral body descends when we fall asleep. Why do we have no impressions during the night? Because it is in the spiritual world and because we have no organs for it. Imagine what would happen in the physical body. The eyes disappear; the ears stop hearing; you would have no sound, no color around you. Likewise, you could imagine that the other senses gradually fade away. This is what the astral body is like at night because it has not formed any organs in the course of human development; in the morning it uses the organs of the physical body. Thus we recognize in it one of the invisible links.

Between the astral body and the physical body lies a second link: the etheric body. During the time between birth and death, this is a fighter against the decay of the physical body. And then, when the human physical body is a corpse, it only follows the physical and chemical forces, because the etheric body moves out at death with the astral body. Sleep is separation from the astral body; physical body and etheric body remain in bed at night.

Then we distinguish a fourth element: the “I”, with which the human being can come to self-awareness. Thus, we see the human being as a composite of the physical body and three invisible elements: the etheric body, the astral body and the I.

Only when we consider the human being in its entirety can we form an idea of the stages of consciousness. There is only one thing we must be clear about: how do we look at the limbs? Once the physical body was of a spiritual nature; it has disintegrated, like ice separates from water. And the ether body is, as it were, a little denser spirit, and the astral body is still a little denser, and the I-bearing body is still a little denser spirit. Therefore, we also call the “I” that which is a “divine spark” or “drop”. It is only through the fact that man has gradually developed that he has become an “I-bearer” and awakened to his self-awareness.

If we go back, we find the first formation of the physical body. Then, as it were, as the physical body became denser, the etheric body was set apart. Even later, the astral body was added, and even later the I. Only through this did he - the human being - receive his normal consciousness, through which we perceive external objects.

This consciousness was not always there; it is a product of development. We could go back into the past and we would find that the human being was a being consisting of a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. In this very distant past, man did not have today's consciousness; he had a completely different one, a consciousness that is one step lower. We can call this consciousness, in relation to today's, an “image consciousness”. The only way we can study this consciousness is to restore consciousness to a higher degree. In those days, people could not perceive objects in outer space. Imagine that there is some object lying nearby that has a certain taste. Today, a person has to become aware of it through the taste, through the tongue; he perceives from the outside what the object is. The image consciousness cannot perceive such an external object; an image arises, and this image is a symbol of what taste the external object has. Or one approaches an object that would shine for today's consciousness; the image consciousness does not see that; but through a mysterious bond between the soul and the body, an image arises again.

And so we may say that such a consciousness has images that surge up and down, images that are closely related to our present-day ideas, except that they are symbols; our present-day ideas are only photographic images. What the astral body experiences is an awareness of images. Indeed, if today's human being could erase his “self-awareness”, he would disappear into the sea of astral images. He would experience the surging images in the astral body. We can characterize our present-day consciousness by means of a comparison. Imagine a creature that lives in the sea for a certain period of time, so that it only stays at certain depths. It knows the animals and plants that are embedded in the sea, but it never looks at the sky. This is roughly how we have to imagine human consciousness. Man emerges from a sea of astral images, and self-awareness is ignited by the outside world. This could never have developed if he had remained in the sea of the astral; but only by having objects in the external world does self-consciousness ignite.

Thus we have pointed to a certain level of consciousness that lies below our present, ordinary sense of self, from which humanity has developed. If we go further, we would find a person who did not yet have the astral body. And so we could say that image consciousness has developed out of an “ether image consciousness”. If we were to descend further, we would perceive a consciousness that differs essentially from what the modern human being knows as consciousness. But you can get an idea from what has been said today: the ether consciousness is contained in what remains in bed during the night. And our astral consciousness has submerged in the sea of the astral.

Now we do not have to imagine extreme contrasts here, but differences in degree. We do not have to think that the consciousness during sleep is the opposite of our own today; imagine that you also know something similar in our daytime consciousness. When you walk down the street, it may happen that you say to yourself: Didn't I see something just now? — You did not pay attention to it. There you have a lower consciousness. There is only a duller consciousness in what remains in bed. The plant has the consciousness of sleep continually - they are sleeping beings.

And we can descend even further, we can enter the physical body and come to the mineral consciousness. This is the consciousness in which the whole mineral world lives. So we have listed four levels: mineral, plant, animal and human consciousness. Three levels of consciousness therefore lie below our everyday, normal consciousness. These three levels were completed by man in prehistoric times.

Today, people are occasionally able to revive the last remnants of ancient levels of consciousness within themselves. There are also such heirlooms in the physical world, such as the auricles, which are an atavistic remnant; likewise, certain states of consciousness, which are usually called clairvoyant states, are heirlooms from ancient developmental states. However, they are not the true ones in the sense of spiritual science; they are only old heirlooms that sometimes live into our present-day consciousness.

People have two very different types of such inherited traits, which express themselves in very different ways. One is what encompasses the dream world. What a person experiences in a dream are not perceptions that are made in the same way as those experienced by daytime consciousness. They are images of external events. You only need to imagine characteristic dreams. Let us take one as an example: a young man dreams that the vault of heaven has opened up in front of him and a number of shining beings have emerged. He wakes up and sees that the morning sun has shone on the wall through the window. The dream has symbolically expressed this shining of the morning sun in such a way that it allowed the experience to arise in the soul as an image. Here you have an image experience. That is why the dream is an heirloom from the time when man had inner soul experiences that were linked in their form to external objects. For example, if you see a symbol with an ugly color in your astral consciousness, you know that there is a harmful object nearby. The not yet awakened object consciousness does not see the object, but only an image, so that one could arrange one's actions accordingly.

The dream images are only a remnant, but since they have different degrees of approximation, the “dream can sometimes light up that it really corresponds to a real fact that appears symbolically. Let us take the case of a person who dreams of the colony of Kiau-tschau, how he sits in a meeting and is constantly confronted with the name Kiau-tschau. He wakes up and sees that a cat has crept into his room and is meowing. In fact, the dream is such an arbitrarily drawn conception.

If you study the dream in this way, you will see that it is lines of life that have been preserved, but that it mixes lines with the greatest arbitrariness, mixing in certain interests of the day. Such a mixing of interests is, for example, when an important philosopher dreams the following. In his soul lived the poem:

Do you want to roam into the distance,
when the good is so close,
just learn to grasp luck,
because luck is always there.

And he dreams:

Do you want to roam afar?
See, the money is so close.
Just learn to grasp the money,
Because the money is always there.

You see how the dream from the source of the inner imagination deals arbitrarily with what it has experienced – the structure of Goethe's poem, for example.

If we were to follow this, we would have an immersion in an earlier state of consciousness. All our ideas can be symbolized in this way. Imagine you are lying in bed, you press your feet against the lower edge of the bed and release them again. The dream symbolizes: the feet become free and a flight arises. What causes the dream? The fact that what happens does not happen completely when a person sinks into dreamless sleep.

It is now possible that the astral body has already left the physical body and not yet the etheric body; this is particularly the case when waking up and falling asleep. Then the astral experiences are reflected and the dream experiences arise. The dream stands on its own; it is really a last remnant of old, overcome states of consciousness.

It is different with other states of “abnormal consciousness”, which can develop in certain respects in humans. Because they submerge in the astral, so that they give up their full self-awareness in certain respects, completely different states of the subconscious arise than in a normal dream. What must be tuned down is what man calls his 'I', his healthy thinking, to distinguish it precisely from what is in the environment. Every time the actual 'I' of the human being is tuned down, when the human being does not feel: Here I stand —, then it is as if the human being were diving below the surface of the astral sea. Then what can be called the subconscious comes to him.

There are three forms of the subconscious: what is called presentiment, what is called vision and then second sight. These are three different forms of the subconscious. It is natural that when man muffles his ego, he enters into a closer relationship with all the threads that nature connects than he would otherwise. When we raise our usual ego consciousness, then man must be content to see only part of the space; there he is always in such a restricted area, and what effort it costs to pull the connecting threads of nature. In a limited consciousness – that is the work of our 'ego' itself, when we dampen it down, when we dampen down our abilities, when we let our reason fall silent, then we descend into our astral body and this is connected with many intimate threads to what lives in the astral. There the ordinary connections of space and time come to an end. There we dampen down all these concepts.

Because of the completely different concepts of space and time, it can happen, as it does in presentiment, that time is overcome. At the slightest immersion, what might be called “dark feeling” arises; this comes from the currents that run beneath the surface, which one senses gently when one descends into the astral world. If you dive deeper, then, just as it was with the astral consciousness, the experiences form into very specific images and the vision occurs. We are then in the world of causes, in the world of the primal reasons. Then those beings emerge that are invisible to the physical eye. We get to know such entities, and the visions are often the physical expression of beings that are behind the sense world.

Thus we can actually encounter those entities that are there and can also be human souls. This enters our consciousness when we descend. And the actions of these spiritual beings, what they undertake unbound by space and time, we experience in second sight. When we see things far away in second sight, it is a descent into the depths of consciousness.

Today's man cannot dive into the depths of consciousness without taking with him what he has experienced up here. Man has acquired the habit of seeing animals and plants, etcetera, in a very specific way. He takes the way with him and with it he covers, as it were, the beings that come to meet him. They are true beings that appear to him, but they are false images. The fact is that he submerges, that he sees a being that does not appear in its true form, and he covers that with the images he is accustomed to. For example, someone submerges and he thinks he sees the Christ himself. Nevertheless, it is a real being from the spiritual world, but he has endowed it with the image of the Christ himself. And so what he sees is an illusion of a real being. And because people who are not trained clairvoyants cannot know whether they are seeing what they are taking with them or what is the truth, such people can be very sure that they are indulging in the greatest deceptions. Descending is therefore always accompanied by deception after deception.

You can dive even deeper, into the sea of ether, and you also take with you the way of seeing things very definitely. You can perceive powers in this way, but they will be blurred. If you saw them clearly, you would see what could be described as an all-encompassing life. For example, you would see our earth as an all-encompassing living being. But in this world man perceives the images to which he has become accustomed, and sees all kinds of things that have indeed been caused by spiritual entities; but the forms that the lower clairvoyant perceives are in deceptive form. These clairvoyants are what are called the dream walker, for example, where the person in the dream performs actions with the physical body in the dullness of the etheric body.

Likewise, what is called “magnetic sleep consciousness” is to be sought in this sphere, because usually causes of illness underlie it; suppose you have an organ that is diseased, you do not need to know it, something is abnormal about the person, which steers the person towards becoming conscious in the etheric body, especially when another person strokes them, etc., accelerates this process. All kinds of events in the spiritual world appear to him in all kinds of illusions. So we see that one can descend into different states of consciousness. In occult science, they are called the “subconscious”.

All these states of consciousness are not relevant to what is said in esoteric science. Many people are eager to switch off their ordinary daily consciousness and descend. They only want to experience something strange, they want to experience spirits. That human beings are spirits is not proof enough for them; they want to have spirits without physical expression. This is not to say anything against the truth and reality of these spheres; but what would come from such states could never be decisive for spiritual science.

Just as there is a subconscious, there is also a superconscious. This can only be achieved through training in the occult sciences. This includes learning to manage one's ordinary consciousness in the most precise way. It is therefore always emphasized that what spiritual science hears from the spheres can only be grasped with ordinary human understanding. It cannot be expressed strongly enough that Theosophy can be grasped with ordinary human understanding. Only those who are trained clairvoyants can see the true shape of the spiritual world. But when it is related after he has seen it, those who absorb these facts, when they are presented in a sensible, comprehensive way, can understand everything and they can say to themselves: If I do this, I can then check whether all this can be applied to life. One must keep common sense as one's own possession. You have to keep telling people who come to you: Approach the physical world first, apply our minds to these facts and try to understand them.

But who has an unimpaired mind, unclouded by the suggestion of so-called scientific facts! You have to realize that this is no easy task! Never before has the human mind been so limited as it is today. Everyone is satisfied when they can construct a whole edifice of the world from a few pegged-out concepts, and when someone comes along who wants to build the edifice from the sum of spiritual truths, they say that this is folly, fantasy or something even worse.

This must be taken into account. Only unprejudiced thinking can approach the physical world, not judgment clouded by all sorts of suggestions. Today people talk a lot about the “independence of judgment”; they want to be free of authority. They do not accept what they have not examined themselves; but they do not ask themselves whether they are capable of examining everything. What matters is that they want to be independent of any authority and yet are dependent on a great authority: “They say.” This intangible authority has a tyrannical effect on people. Humanity languishes under it, believing itself to be free from all authority. It absorbs everything that is a matter of contemporary judgment; one believes everything that science has established, as if no one cared.

He who stands face to face with the facts of the spiritual world must free himself from this. There he has to use his usual healthy judgment to progress to superconsciousness. Many a person comes and says: I used to see all kinds of things, but now everything has disappeared. Those who understand will say: That is good. You should ascend to the superconscious; to do that, the best transition is to go through a sphere of spiritual darkness. You can expose yourself to danger if you don't want to. When [the person] descends into the subconscious and all the confusing impressions of the astral world come, then perhaps in a certain respect he will come to have premonitions, visions, etc.; he may still see so many black poodles that only pretend to be something. That is not the point of seeing this. He who is not yet mature enough not to have respect for these scraps of the spiritual world is also not mature enough to penetrate into the superconscious. To do this, he must undergo catharsis or purification. Man must be cleansed of all subconsciousness if he wants to ascend into the first sphere of the superconscious. There he also experiences a consciousness of images, but in the same way as he lives in everyday life. To do this, it is necessary to strengthen one's consciousness and throw out everything that is subconscious. And that is a lot! You can see this if you remember that in early childhood, a lot of things penetrate you; you have forgotten them in your sense of self, but they are inscribed in your etheric and astral bodies. Certain childhood impressions would come up and disturb a person every time he or she tries to penetrate into a higher consciousness. In a sense, diving into the spheres of the subconscious is a dressing up of the real facts with images from the real world. Try to register the images of such “clairvoyants”, follow them back to a time when there were no railways or telegraphs, wait and you will not be surprised that railways and telegraphs will play major roles in the “spirit realm”. This is only because the seer takes with him what has been imprinted in the etheric body. Therefore, if you want to penetrate unclouded, it is necessary to throw everything out of your subconscious. You can only acquire it by going through it with complete consciousness, which is provided by the spiritual scientific method. There is what the student has to practice, what he has to experience, absorbed in imagination, and that is pictorial representation, which proceeds according to the rule:

All that is transitory is but a parable.

Thus you will find that in every training session symbols are given such as the rose cross, the serpent staff of Hermes, etc. They have something tremendously significant when a person has to experience certain facts of the outer world inwardly. One forms a symbol that one does not use in the same way as a photographic image of the outer world.

Let me mention here once more, in the form of a dialogue between teacher and student – this dialogue did not take place, but the facts do take place –: Look at a plant; it takes root in the ground and lets stems, leaves and flowers emerge. And now compare the plant with the human being. You call him a higher being. You know that the red blood that makes man a higher being also enables him to develop passions, instincts and desires, but also the soul world, the higher consciousness. The plant has no desires and instincts; it stands there in pure, high chastity. But you see the human being with a higher consciousness; however, he pays for that which is connected with the red blood through passion and desire. And then imagine the high ideal that the human being will become like the plant; he has subdued the desires and purified his red blood.

For man the plant is a model; he forms a picture of how, in time, everything degrading will have died out in man, and his blood will be pure, like the sap in the red rose. Think of this as a symbol in the red rose and apply to it Goethe's saying:

Before you do not have this,
this: Die and become!
Are you only a gloomy guest
On the dark earth!

And when we feel the burgeoning and sprouting in the soul, like the reddened sap in the red rose, we feel that and let the image work on us in inner meditation! And the image has a certain effect: it pushes out everything that fills the subconscious, and we have taken the first step towards the superconscious.

There are countless symbols just as I have described the Rose Cross. The disciple must immerse himself in these and then put them together in the “occult writing”, and in this way he comes, purified and cleansed, to an ether consciousness. Through what we gain from the occult writing, we receive the so-called inspired consciousness in that which is not tied to space and time; but we do not see it clouded by the images of everyday life.

And then there is a higher link of the superconscious: intuition. — In all these spheres of the superconscious, man takes his full “self-awareness” with him. If someone says: You are describing a consciousness in vain, that does not reflect a true world, then let someone who understands it tell them: These things are there so that the forces develop in us that free the astral body, the etheric body, from the physical body, and by doing so, we learn to see into the spiritual world while being fully aware of our ego.

There is no danger associated with this path, nothing can happen to us on it, it is safe if we follow it with patience and perseverance. If you submerge yourself, if you dampen the I, there is a danger; we fall prey to the passions that reside in the astral, and eventually we can lose our minds, while we become more and more understanding as we ascend in superconsciousness. Hence the insistence that the road to superconsciousness lies through day-consciousness. Those who find it too dull and uncomfortable to go through the study of the physical often pay for it with the loss of their reason, which they have sought through their greed.

Thus we see that there are stages that lead up and stages that lead down. The former lead to true clairvoyant states, where the ego is among the actions of spiritual beings [in inspiration] and finally where it is spirit among spirits [in intuition]. Nothing less is achieved than the cleansing of the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body. There are some things you have to accept; for example, when a person frees his etheric body, he may experience a temporary loss of memory because it is attached to his etheric body. If a person partially draws it out so that he can use it, his memory fades. But it will be amply restored to him later, albeit in a different way. And the qualities and abilities of consciousness are lost for a time; even self-awareness takes on a different form. Like a wanderer who feels lonely, the person walks along. As he penetrates further, the common memory disappears and a certain insight into past things arises.

Those who undertake the right training must have composure and perseverance. They must enter the path with courage and boldness, but it will be rewarded with the great reward of insight into the spiritual world, where the powers lie to become master of the physical world. A time will come when only those who recognize the spiritual forces behind the physical and can make them fruitful will be considered practical people. This leads us into the spiritual world while fully maintaining self-awareness. Not instruments, telescopes and microscopes, which only explain the veil of nature, only the spirit leads into nature.

Mysterious in the bright day

Nature cannot be robbed of the veil.

And what it may not reveal to your mind,

You do not force it out with levers and with screws.

If we want nature to come to meet us, we must go to meet it by developing our consciousness into superconsciousness. Then man will live his way into what Goethe described with the words he put into the mouth of the wise man:

The spirit world is not closed; your mind is closed, your heart is dead! Arise, student, arise,

The earthly breast in the morning dawn!

Those who reflect on such questions of human mental life as those on our winter program this year, on character, conscience, on the healthy and sick soul, on life and death, mysticism and so on, those who reflect on such questions will perhaps be able to be reminded again and again of a saying of an old sage from the fifth century BC, Heraclitus, whom is called the “Dark” because of the significantly deep nature of his thinking. He, Heraclitus, spoke the words:

You cannot fathom the depths of the soul, even if you wanted to travel all the roads. The soul has such deep reasons.

We are reminded of this depth of the soul in many ways when dealing with matters of the soul. But only slowly and gradually, over the course of this winter, can we, so to speak, engage with the deeper questions of the soul life.

Today and tomorrow, we will deal with phenomena of human inner life that are perhaps no less interesting precisely because they are closer to the most everyday and because one thinks about them less. It is in such phenomena that the noblest and highest core of human inner life, which we call self-consciousness, is obscured for certain periods of time in a certain relationship, obscured by all kinds of feelings, but mainly by affects.

Today we will deal with one of these affects, which plays a significantly profound role in the human soul. We will deal with the force within us that underlies anger and everything related to it. When speaking of the soul qualities and expressions of the human soul, one can ask: How is it that the human soul, which is supposed to lift itself ever higher and higher intellectually and morally through its self-awareness, is repeatedly thrown back by impulses of the kind that anger is? Is a quality of the soul like anger a mere hindrance on the path of human beings upwards to the great ideals of life? And in a practical sense, too, such questions are of the greatest importance in our immediate lives.

The educator, anyone who is entrusted with the care of another person, will readily admit and will recognize how important it is to know what role an emotion like anger plays in the soul's life. Once we recognize such a thing, we can treat everything connected with it in a correspondingly tactful and wise manner. However, our present consideration of the soul life will encounter the greatest difficulties in dealing with such a question as the meaning of anger. Only a deeper penetration into the undercurrents of existence, into the winding paths of the spiritual life, allows us to provide some insights into such a question. So today we will first have to allow something to enter our soul that those of our revered listeners who are present at these lecture cycles have heard from a certain quarter, who have been present more often at these lecture cycles.

But it will be necessary again and again to allow the unique nature of the human being to enter our soul if we want to understand human expressions and effects of force. From a spiritual point of view, the mission of anger is to be considered today. Here we must consider man, not only as he presents himself to our outer senses, to the intellect that is bound to the instrument of the brain, and which is limited to processing the impressions that direct sense observation provides. For such a spiritual-scientific consideration, that which the senses see and which the human intellect, conscious in this sense, can comprehend, is only a part of the human being. That part of the human being that we can perceive with our senses – external science is only concerned with the physical body insofar as it is a science of nature, and in a certain respect it is right with this limitation – spiritual science calls the physical human being. But beyond that, it distinguishes the higher nature of the human being. What we call the physical body has the same composition of substances and forces as everything we call the mineral kingdom, the seemingly dead nature around us. The same world of forces is in our physical body as it is out there in the world.

But there is also a question that the ordinary human mind can ask and to some extent answer, namely, whether these forces and substances that are at work in the human body and that are the same as those in the rest of mineral nature act in the same way as they do in the rest of mineral nature. The answer is no, they do not. When the human physical body – and the physical body of any living being, for that matter – is left to itself, it follows the laws of the mineral world. We see this when the physical body is left to itself at the point of death. We see the way in which the composition of the physical body works when it is left to its own physical and chemical forces. That which, from the beginning of physical life to the end, fights against the physical and chemical forces so that they cannot follow their own path, which they only follow in death, we call the first link of higher human nature – do not be put off by expressions, stick to the concepts – we call the etheric body or the life body. With this, we ascend to the first supersensible link of human nature.

Even for someone who merely employs logic and the instrument bound to the physical, such a life body can be reasonably inferred. For someone who stands on the ground of spiritual science, this life body is a fact of the same reality as the world of sounds and colors. And the spiritual researcher can say to those who reply: “This etheric or life body does not exist at all.” It is not perceptible to the ordinary senses, just as color is not perceptible to someone who is blind. But it exists for the person who has developed the corresponding powers in his soul so that he can really perceive this life body as a fact.

All these things can be discussed in the course of winter in a different context. Today it must be left at that. — Then we come to the third link of the human being, which is called the astral body. This astral body is the carrier of pleasure and suffering, of joy and pain, of urges, desires and passions. This astral body is what humans have in common with animals, just as they have the etheric or life body in common with plants and the physical body in common with minerals. For reason, this astral body, if it is to make use of logic in an unbiased way, can be something that can be logically deduced. For spiritual research, it is a fact, something that is just as present for the perception of the spiritual researcher as color is for the eye and sound is for the ear. Thus, in the astral body we have a second link in the supersensible human being.

And if we ascend further in the composition of human nature, we come to what he no longer has in common with the other realms of nature around him, what we call human self-consciousness or its expression, the ego. This ego is that which, so to speak, every sensible human nature is surprised by when it perceives it for the first time. I would like to quote again the beautiful saying of Jean Paul, when he was still a boy and stood in the courtyard of his parents' house and felt the 'I' for the first time [gap]. From now on, the question of God and immortality was understandable to him. It would be so easy to arrive at the human 'I', at an understanding of it, if one were to say to oneself: There is something expressed in the I that is distinguished from all other concepts or names by the very fact that it is spoken. Anyone can call a table a 'table' and a chair a 'chair'. But when you say the word 'I', it denotes something that only refers to itself, but that has no meaning and cannot be applied to your higher self-awareness when it is spoken by another. Your “I” can never sound sweet to your ear if it is not meant to signify your own soul. This is truly the expression for the “shrouded sanctuary” of the human soul. This is the expression that, as in a short monologue, describes the essence of the human being within, or what can also be described as the divine in human nature.

We have thus placed the four aspects of the human being: physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, before your soul. When we look at the person as he stands before us, these four elements are what constitute his interaction, his mutual interpenetration. What is significant is that the human being is not a closed being, that he is not a being who is finished at any given moment, but a being who is in the process of living development, a being who progresses from this or that stage of progress to another stage.

What then is the nature of this human development? What is the interplay between these aspects of the human being, which we can call the wonder of human development? They interact in the way that presents itself to our minds when we consider what an astral body might look like in a person at a low level of cultural development, and in a person at a higher level of cultural development, in that he does not live in his wild desires and instincts, that he does not desire and crave everything that comes to him in terms of the senses, but that he has purified his urges and desires through the ideals of moral life. You can place two people side by side: the one whose senses are still covetous, who still desires what his senses present to him; and the other, with fine tact and a sense of duty, who shows that he has undergone a refinement of his soul, has purified and cleansed it.

What is this purification based on? It is based on the fact that the human being works from his ego on the other members of his being. The ego has done this, which has become out of instincts, desires and passions. The ego has purified the astral body, transformed instincts, desires and passions, made them into something different from what they were before. In spiritual science, the part of the astral body that the ego has already transformed – insofar as the ego has worked with full consciousness on the transformation of drives and passions, on its moral perfection, on the transformation of the astral body – is called the “spirit self”, or, in an expression of oriental philosophy, the “manas” of the human being.

In general, we can say that in present human development, the human ego has only just reached the point of working on the manas or spirit self, consciously working. In the future, the high spiritual ideal for human beings will be to consciously work not only on the astral body, on the purification of passions, instincts and desires, but also on the transformation of the etheric or life body. Today, human beings can only work unconsciously on this etheric body. What he once transformed in his life body is called the spirit of life or Budhi in spiritual science.

And now an even higher ideal in the sense of spiritual science arises before the human soul; this is an ideal in which the human soul today, when it has a sense of it, can be overcome by a sense of vertigo at the height and grandeur and sublimity of the future of human development. When man is able to work consciously on the physical body, then he will also rework the physical body from his ego or self-awareness.

Today, a person can only do this unconsciously. But you can see it happening in everyday life. You just have to look at life impartially. Imagine a person who feels shame, that is, he feels something in his soul as if he wanted to hide something about himself; a blush of shame rises to his face. What does that mean? A purely inner experience has triggered a physical process, a redistribution of the blood. It is the same when a person turns pale. The blood then moves from the surface to the inner parts. This is a process in the physical body that takes place unconsciously. What a person consciously works on in his physical body is referred to in spiritual science as the Atma or spiritual man.

If we describe the course of human development in this way, we can say that the human being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an I. If the I transforms something of the astral body, the spirit self or manas arises. If something of the etheric body is transformed, the life spirit or budhi arises. And if the physical body is transformed, then the spiritual man or Atma arises.

But that is not the only thing that comes into consideration. When a person can also look at his ideal, in which he has completed the transformation of the astral body, then he has unconsciously already worked on this astral body from his I. He already has something within him that can be described by saying that the I lives in the astral body. That part of the astral body that is not consciously transformed by the I, but which - as we shall see is correct - is already an instrument of the I, is called the sentient soul by spiritual science.

But the etheric or life body has already been transformed to a certain extent by the I, and today it already serves the I as an instrument in a certain way. The I has already sent its power into the etheric or life body. Insofar as this body is merely an etheric body, it is connected with the forces of reproduction and growth. But insofar as the etheric body is transformed by the I, we call it the mind soul or emotional soul of the human being.

But the physical body of the human being is also transformed and becomes an instrument of the I. This physical body of the human being, insofar as it is an instrument of the I, serves precisely as a sensory organ; through the wonderful apparatus of the sensory organs, it serves the consciousness of the I. That is why we call that part of the physical body that is capable of being an instrument of the ego the consciousness soul, which thus dwells in the physical body.

Thus, in the sense of spiritual science, we first have three bodily members: the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body; then three soul members in which the ego lives to a certain extent: the sentient soul , the soul of feeling, and the soul of mind; and finally, by making use of these three members, the I works them over in a conscious way to become the spiritual self, the spirit of life and the spiritual human being.

This is a meaningful scheme. But it is not just a scheme, it is an active force. Only the one in whom it becomes so alive that he sees the forces of the individual human members interacting, comprehends human development. Yes, this human nature is deep, deep, as Heraclitus correctly said. Thus we see the human ego at its work, and within the human body we see the transformation of the inner soul-elements of the human being. If we want to understand this ego, we must ask ourselves, above all, what is the present stage of the human ego, what has it achieved, conquered by working, partly unconsciously, on its astral body? What it has conquered lies in what we can describe with the words: The I makes the human being a being capable of judgment, a being that judges from within, be it judgments of the intellect, feelings or will; this makes the human being a being capable of judgment.

This says a great deal when one says that it makes a human being a being capable of judgment, a being that can think, feel and want from reasonable judgments. It is said that one really learns to distinguish between what is the sensation of a physical being and what is the impulse of a human being. When we look at animals, we can find all the qualities of the human soul in animals to a certain extent. We find sympathies and antipathies in animals, even what is analogous to one of the highest feelings of the human soul, an analogy to love. We find analogies to what we call human intellectual activity. It is easy to observe in the animal kingdom how everything works similarly to that in humans; but who could fail to recognize the difference between what is present in humans and what is present as a quality in animals? We can say with certainty, based on the animal's organization and form, what it will be driven to do in this or that case. Necessity is quite different in the case of a human being who ponders the question: Should you do this or should you not do it? He weighs it up before coming to a decision. Only those who do not look closely at the matter can fail to see the enormous difference. In the course of his development, man has acquired the power of judgment through the interplay of his development, which has just been characterized.

If we want to place before our soul the highest ideal of this discerning human being in relation to an area, in relation to human coexistence, in relation to the way two people relate to each other, two things arise. If we look at the judgment that confronts people, it is the concept of justice and the concept of love. When the human being places the concept of justice before him, he will be able to say to himself: Justice is something that can be regarded as a higher ideal. This means harmony, balance in life's circumstances. One need only think of good and evil, right and wrong. But what is it that afflicts the human soul when it utters the word “justice,” when it surrenders to the concept of justice? It is something cold that the human soul experiences in its feeling when it surrenders to this concept. It feels justice as a necessity, as something that must be, as something that man must submit to based on his sound judgment.

The soul feels differently when it contemplates the concept related to justice, so to speak, the concept of love. Here the soul does not feel coldness, but inner warmth, something of what elevates human nature, because it must say to itself: That is only a truly human ideal when justice is no longer practiced because it is perceived as a necessity, but because one loves what is right, because one loves to do what should be done.

Thus, justice and love stand side by side as a cold ideal that is nevertheless recognized as necessary, and as a warm ideal that fills our soul with inner fire. And in them is contained what the human soul sees as the two ideals when it asks itself: In what direction must it develop its power of judgment first? That through her judgment, through her deliberations, through what lives in her, she experiences the coexistence of human beings in such a way that it is in the sense of justice and love. - In this sense, man looks up to justice and love as two lofty ideals of development, and he sees, enclosed in the interplay of his forces, that which leads to justice and love in coexistence.

That is how it is. But one cannot understand human development, or development in general, without another feeling, which provides insight into the actual nature of development. Development is something that, if it is to flourish, must include something else. And this other process can perhaps best be described by the word maturing. Maturation over time is something that cannot be separated from the concept of development. And we understand each other best when we apply the concept of maturation to the concept of the human ego itself.

Take the life of a single human being, take it in the sense that a serious observer of existence should take it. Is it possible to expect the same of a person in their third year as in their twelfth or sixteenth year? That is impossible. The same cannot possibly be expected of a developing being when the interplay of forces is such that it is developing. There is a time for every stage of development, and it is detrimental to the being's overall development to transgress this law of maturation. It is also detrimental to the individual's human development between birth and death to expect something of the ego at one stage of life that should only be expected at a different stage of life, according to the degree of maturity. But it is also unhealthy to expect a person at a lower stage of development, who has not yet sufficiently purified his passions and instincts, to do things that can only be expected of such an ego in a truly fruitful way after it has gone through the various stages of purification. This is how it is when the human ego sees such significant ideas as justice and love as ideals and says to itself: You must rise up — so that they work like two great guiding stars in the life of man. But the path must be traveled in the right way. If we now consider not the individual life, but the whole of human life over the course of centuries and millennia, how the human ego returns and works on the human being, then we will have a complicated fact before us, which is very compelling to draw attention to the maturing process. If – and this can only be stated today, but will be touched on from various points of view during the winter lectures – if the human being not only lives once between birth and death, but returns again and again, then what spiritual science recognizes as a necessary consequence of development, that the I does not live only once between birth and death, but returns again and again, then it is [conceivable] that spiritual science recognizes as a necessary consequence of development, that the I does not live only once in this life between birth and death, but undergoes successive embodiments.

During all these embodiments, the I works in such a way that it has worked in the distant past on the astral body, etheric body and physical body, so that the sentient soul, mind or mind soul and consciousness soul; let us continue to work so that spirit self, spirit of life and spiritual man will arise. The forces of this development permeate each other in interplay and unite in the ideals of justice and love. This work is done by the “I”. Thus, if we take the word experience in the right way, we must understand that at every moment of life – if we speak of different embodiments, in every single embodiment – the soul acts on the other members of the body in the right way, that the “I” works on every work on every single development, that it does not do too much in terms of acquiring justice and love; for the ego should never go further in relation to what is capable of judgment within it, and it cannot go further than its degree of maturity makes possible.

But what is the regulator in this relationship? What ensures that the ego does not go beyond the degree of maturity at certain stages? Do we understand what the regulator is, what ensures that the ego can at least do the right thing at each stage? What is said here can only be understood if we turn our attention to something that is becoming clearer and clearer to people through spiritual science: If we turn our attention to what man's knowledge, his insights, his ideas and concepts (to name briefly the means by which we know the world) give him, we see that these are not found in man alone, but are poured out over the whole world.

Man tries to understand the world by forming concepts and ideas about the world. Just as you cannot scoop water out of a glass that does not contain water, you cannot scoop wisdom out of a world that is not full of wisdom. Man draws wisdom out through his judgment, through his capacity for knowledge. He comprehends the plant because it is constructed in a way that is full of wisdom. He forms concepts. It is nonsense and foolish to believe that man could form a concept about the plant if the plant itself were not built according to this concept. What man draws out of the world is poured out into the world and underlies things. In the human soul, what is poured out in the rest of the world or in nature outside appears in a different form as wisdom.

If you want to visualize this, all you need to do is think about the following. It took a long time in the development of mankind for man to reach a certain stage of historical development, let us say, to produce paper. Try to imagine the sum of thoughts and work that were necessary to produce paper so that it could enter human development. One could say, if one wanted to speak grotesquely, that within the wasp world this paper was not invented thousands of years ago, but much longer before, because the wasp nest is built from the same material that we have as paper. We have real paper there. What man produces in his materials is worked out into the outer nature.

As such stages, you can realize how what man has acquired as wisdom is poured out into the world. The world is permeated by wisdom and built up of judgments. Wisdom is a rediscovery of judgments that are spread like a net over all existence in nature. Wisdom-filled furnishings are not only to be found in what human consciousness works out, what human beings shape in their souls; wisdom-filled furnishings can be found everywhere. They were already there when the human ego could not yet consciously work. And it was this wisdom-filled work that made it possible for the human ego to work on the physical body, the etheric and astral bodies, even before it was able to work consciously. But this wisdom must also be out there in life today. The human ego is not yet so far advanced that it can find the right thing all by itself, that which would correspond to a much higher power of judgment.

What I want to say becomes clear when you consider the following. Imagine a person standing before a child that he wants to educate. The child does something that it should not do. It becomes necessary for an action to take place; it can be punishment or something else. Such a thing is possible. One possibility is that the educator says that the pupil is doing something incorrectly. The educator dislikes this, and it is possible that he may become angry and that this anger may develop to a certain degree, in an impulse to a certain action. That is one possibility. The other possibility, however, is that the educator, although he has seen the injustice and felt displeasure, remains calm, feels composure and, based on mere judgment and a certain maturity of soul, does what is necessary as a punishment or otherwise in the case in question. Outwardly, the same can happen. The difference lies in the soul being filled with anger one time and with composure the other.

When we consider this difference, we will ask ourselves: Why is there anger in the one case and composure in the other? Would the person who looks at what the child is doing with anger be able to do the right thing in the case in question because of the maturity of his or her self? If you look at life, you will say to yourself that as a rule he will not be able to do the right thing. It takes a certain degree of maturity of the ego to do the right thing despite not feeling any emotion and remaining cold and calm, but still loving the matter at hand and loving what should be. A certain degree of maturity is required for this. And every person stands at a certain point in relation to this maturity. The human ego cannot always have the degree of composure that enables it to do the right thing despite not feeling any emotion. To do so, the human ego must develop to a certain level. What would the educator do if he were calm and did not feel anger? Then the educator would stand by with his composure, do nothing, and leave the matter be.

The wise order of the world ensures that the I is guided towards what is right, at least to some extent, by forces other than those to which it has not yet matured. Before the I is mature enough to act from serenity, it acts out of affect, out of anger. Here we see that in the course of development, the human ego does work on the human astral body, so that in the course of development the astral body develops in such a way that composure blossoms; but as long as the ego is not yet able to attain this maturity, it does not want to work on this composure, then the human being should be driven by something within him to do something. One such mechanism, and a very important one at that, which allows the ego to mature within the astral body and yet still drives it to enter into a certain relationship with its fellow human beings before it is mature, is anger. Just as, for example, the outer nature in its plant kingdom, in its animal kingdom, is wisely arranged, so is everything that we can call the astral nature of human beings wisely arranged. It is arranged in such a way that people enter into a relationship with each other before they can build themselves up completely on the basis of their ideals of justice and love, using their power of judgment. The forerunner of serenity is anger.

In development, it must be the case that what leads up to higher levels of development can also lead to error. If man did not now enter into error, he could not work his way to the truth. So even if anger gets out of hand, if we consider it in its full significance, we can see how it works. Take a young person in his youth, who is not yet able to develop certain ideals; but he sees this or that injustice in his environment; he comes to what one can call a noble anger. And what one can call noble anger at what he cannot approve of, that works in him to help the soul mature into working out in itself what the great ideals of life can become. Like a mother substance, the self, left to its own devices, is made mature through qualities such as anger. That the self is made mature can also be seen from other facts. Because the young man never sees his ideals realized in his environment in the case of things that he cannot yet have any concept of, he repeatedly feels the same noble anger at what displeases him. When people look into life, they can perceive that all the noble surges of anger in youth later come out as love and gentleness. He who views life in its entirety sees the transformation of youthful anger into the love and gentleness of old age.

Thus we see how love and justice, which stand before the human soul as lofty ideals, but which the ego must mature — for it takes an enormous effort to develop the system of human justice and the truth, the real of love, which is not burdened by clouded feelings, we see how justice and love, these high ideals, have set up wrath as a champion in the human social order. It is wrath's [mission] to prepare love.

This is understandable when you consider that what is supposed to become judgment in reality threatens to degenerate into extremism. If we consider the various embodiments, we can say that what a person brings with them in the way of justice and love goes back to a time when they were not yet able to recognize what the right balance should be, when they had no idea of the true feeling of love, but when what arises is anger. Like the dawn of the sun, so shines the nobility of anger, the noble anger that precedes love. In wisdom, the powers that rule the world have placed the nobility of anger in the astral body before a full consciousness of love can be developed, before love can become full justice in the soul.

In times when things were examined more closely than today, it was possible to determine what was in the soul members just by their names. If we go back to the great Greek philosopher Plato, we will find that Plato calls that which we call the consciousness soul, the reasonable soul. But what we call the intellectual or mind soul must be endowed with the ideals of justice and love, and Plato calls this the wrathful soul. What we call the sentient soul, Plato calls the desires soul.

If we turn to Aristotle, we find that he uses similar terms in a similar way; we can also see that they correspond exactly to the expressions of spiritual research. Why does Plato call the soul that precedes the consciousness soul, the wrathful soul? He calls it that because not only wrath but also all wisdom-filled institutions are written into this soul, because he found the wisdom that was poured out into the world also poured out in the human astral body, precisely as a wrathful soul.

In the case of those who have looked more deeply into the nature of the soul, we find that the essence is already indicated in the name. The person who, from the point of view of spiritual science, looks at what passes through the ages as legends and myths of the peoples, as a transmission of the peoples, makes a remarkable discovery in his soul. What might be called the “science of the green table” can answer when you ask where this or that myth comes from: “That is folk poetry.” Only someone who is unfamiliar with folk poetry can speak of folk poetry in this way. But anyone who delves deeper and shines a light into this or that saga or myth will make the remarkable discovery that it contains great wisdom. Before humanity was educated by logical judgment, by pondering and counting, as is right today, before this ability to judge led to the contemplation of truth, another, clairvoyant recognition led to it, to contemplate the truth. So the myths and legends are something quite different than they initially appear. They become an expression of profound truths.

A saga that leads us into the depths of the truth that interests us today was processed by the Greek tragedian Aeschylus in his “Prometheus Bound”. When we delve into the life of this poet, who lived two thousand years before us, we are seized by the world view that permeates his poetry, the world view that is poured out in the Greek myths, the world view of the Greek people.

I could fill the entire lectures over the winter if I wanted to tell you what there is to say about “Prometheus”. This poem ties in with the myths that the name Prometheus encompasses. You are all familiar with the Prometheus myth. Let us briefly recall it. When the Greeks looked back in time, they saw ancient generations of gods at work within our earthly nature, within our earthly and cosmic evolution. Today it is not intended to explain what is meant by this. Imagine that they are personifications of natural forces, or whatever and however you want; that is not the point today. The Greeks saw two ancient dynasties of gods: Uranus and Gaea; these ancient dynasties of heavenly gods, who brought about the first processes on our Earth, were replaced by the dynasty of Titans; the dynasty of Titans to which Cronus and Saturn belonged. Kronos was the son of Uranos. We are told that the Titans, with Kronos at their head, seized power and overthrew the old Uranos. We can assume from the outset – and this is pointed out, and it is true – that according to Greek belief, certain forms of life existed in ancient times that were subject to different rulers then than in later epochs of development. Anyone who is aware that the forms of events change over time will admire the ingenious view of Greek myth, which expresses the beginning of [earthly] development, that interplay of simple primal forces of the world, through the marriage between Uranus and Gäa, and then expresses a later epoch by saying that the Titans appear. The whole face of the earth changes, so that other forms of life, of happening and becoming are there. Thus, in the Titans, we have a second generation of gods, forces that work within the development of the earth. Why is the generation of Titans replaced by the generation whose leader is Zeus? He is, so to speak, a member of the youngest of the generations of gods. He therefore overthrew Kronos and his followers into an unknown world, a hidden world to which the Titans belong, and in which Zeus is the one who exercises world domination.

In Zeus's fight against the Titans, Prometheus, a descendant of the Titans, sided with Zeus. It was he who helped Zeus to achieve his goal. But Prometheus experiences a bitter disappointment, so to speak. He helped Zeus to achieve world domination. Within what the Greeks imagined as a succession of these three corporations of the gods: Uranus, Titans and Zeus's generation, human beings developed into various abilities, they developed into certain stages. When Zeus had taken over the rule, human beings had developed to the point where they could absorb the impressions of their surroundings into their consciousness.

If we understand this Greek myth in the right way, if we really engage with it in a spiritual-scientific way, then we find that the Greek genius, where it expresses itself mythically, takes the concept of development into account in a wonderful way. People who can see what is a few steps in front of their noses believe that as long as man and his consciousness have moved up from the animal to the human form in the sense of today's natural science, they have always been as they are today. So human consciousness is also in a state of development. It has only gradually taken on the forms it has today.

If we go back on the basis of research that is no longer accessible to external natural science, but [rather] to spiritual science, we would come to ancient stages of human consciousness where judgment and deliberation were not yet present. Instead, however, there was an image consciousness, an image consciousness that works differently, that works in such a way that when a person encounters an impression, an image arises within him. He knew directly through the images, through the impressions that the image made on his feelings, he knew in an old, dim consciousness that is preserved like an old relic, like a traditional heirloom in a dream. An old, dim, clairvoyant consciousness was there in those days. It was only into this consciousness that man first acquired the ability to conceptualize. Everything was in development; above all, human consciousness.

This is expressed in the fact that Zeus has taken power. Consciousness increasingly makes way for what is to develop into judgment and deliberation. The sure insight that was conveyed by images was lost. Man only began with the first facts of calculating and counting and considering. People were clumsy. They became dull in relation to their old consciousness. They could no longer grasp their environment. They lived in an almost inhuman way. But out of this dullness there developed more and more that which, as we have indicated, was present in the first beginnings and which worked in man in such a way that it gradually brought him to judge, brought him to posit out of his ego into the world something that was not there before. Call it power, call it essence. The Greek genius expresses it by saying: Prometheus works in human nature that sense which makes it possible for human nature to process the individual things of life into art productions by means of tools. Prometheus is the great benefactor of mankind who, in the name of love, has given humanity what it will continue to develop ever further. Zeus, that is the disappointment that Prometheus experiences, would only have developed in man what is independent of judgment, independent of calculation and deliberation, what has not led to the arts. Zeus had left man without fire.

Travelers will tell you that higher animals, for example monkeys, were spectators and saw travelers warming themselves by the fire. If the travelers leave the fire while it is still burning, they will also warm themselves; but what they do not do is to bring wood and make a fire themselves. This is closely related to the making of fire, to the foresight to bring about something that will serve one later. The foresight is interpreted in Prometheus, who is the forward thinker. The becoming is interpreted by the Greek genius in the form of Prometheus. In Zeus, we see that which is not active in the human ego, that which does not make the human being capable of judgment, but which only works in the human astral body. The Greeks focus on human nature, and they say to themselves: the threefold nature of man — whether they say it to themselves in this form or not is irrelevant — is made up of drives, desires and instincts. These must play against each other. What permeates the astral nature with wisdom was seen by the Greeks in Zeus. What penetrates the human I, what leads the I to a higher level, was seen in Prometheus.

Thus Zeus and Prometheus faced each other, like the I reflecting judgment and intellect and the astral body. Thus they fight against each other in the I, which purifies the astral body. When the Greek allows us to see the whole astral nature, he says to himself: When we look at the human being with his astral body and his I — he stands in the world, suffering pain and joy, doing good and evil; pain and joy, good and evil, are in need of balance. It causes displeasure in the human soul when good is unrewarded and without success, and evil goes unpunished or is successful in the wrong way. It is justice that brings about balance in suffering and joy, in good and evil.

But when we survey the world, says the Greek Genius, then we see that in the world, within human nature and the human astral body, justice is very limited. Man is powerless; that is how the Greek genius felt with regard to justice. Now he looks out into nature, sees and says: Development is what comes before our soul in the sunrise and sunset, in the rise and fall of the plant world; what comes before us is everything that does not comes up to the human astral body; that something is at work in it that is connected with human nature, that is connected with the whole world as something that is a far deeper justice than man in his powerlessness can realize. — He then looked up and said to himself: There must be hidden forces and powers after all, that are behind what we can see, and that have a balancing effect.

These powers are the ones that are powerful in the face of the human impotent being; they are the powers of justice, so that they prevail everywhere, that they can count on these powers that work with might and power to bring about balance and that do not succumb to human powerlessness. They are hidden, and there they must be. The Greek genius saw them and called them the Titans for the reason that they do not have human powerlessness; and Themis, the goddess of justice, belongs to the special female Titans.

Thus, before the eyes of the Greek genius, there is an all-pervasive justice in the realm of the Titans. But then it must transform itself into love. The warm feeling of love must absorb it. That is why it is not Themis who is worshiped as the figure who also penetrates into man, who leads him to the ideal of justice, to love, but the son of Themis, Prometheus. He is the one who takes hold of human beings in their very essence. While Zeus belongs to the realm that pours wisdom and balance into human knowledge on earth, insofar as the astral comes into consideration, Prometheus pours into the human I that which should bring this I ever further forward.

However, we can recognize a force in the individual human being that prevents the I from going too far in its development, a force that stands in its way. Just as anger precedes the still immature composure, the Greek genius saw the interplay of Prometheus' deed with Zeus' anger in the great cosmic context. Zeus is the one who has to watch over the human development of the self so that it does not advance too quickly. Therefore, he must create balances. Prometheus provides people with what is common to ordinary people: understanding, reason, feeling, that is, what comes from the ability to judge.

But this means that something else has emerged in human development. In the human being who has advanced from the earlier to this stage, his consciousness has narrowed. When man still had his old consciousness, the clairvoyant one, man saw through his image consciousness into his spiritual, at least into his soul world. This is connected with a conscious appearance of image forms, so that man can see into a soul world that is hidden from the mind and sense consciousness. Thus a world withdrew from human consciousness. The gaze was tied down on earth, while at the same time advancing to a higher level. What man had implanted as his ideals of justice and love had to pay the price of being banished to the outer sensual world, to earth.

This was the counteraction of the astral. As man developed his ego further, the astral worked like a counterblow. Whereas man could formerly see into the world of the soul, this counterblow obscured the view into the world of the soul, and the view remained limited to the outer physical world. He was chained to the world of the earth. What was in Prometheus chained him to the earth. And so Prometheus was chained to the earth in human nature through what works as a counterbalance in the astral nature in the realm of Zeus, through the wrath of Zeus, forged to the earth. He had developed a higher ability. But it was darkened by the wrath of Zeus.

There are all possible degrees between the brightness of consciousness that a person has during the day and the darkness during sleep. What occurs in affect is, to a certain degree, its darkness. And the cosmic degree of darkness was that human consciousness was chained to the physical world. The consciousness that should have looked into the spiritual world was paralyzed. This paralysis was the chaining of Prometheus to the rock.

The forward-looking in Greek human nature is precisely depicted in the myth in the Prometheus myth. And the Greek tragedian presents this in such a powerful way in the “Prometheus Bound”. If you let the nerve of this wonderful drama take effect on you, then you will see what confronts you in it; what you encounter is something of which one can say: it stands in the world like an old heirloom from earlier times. Certainly, man has developed in a certain way, but all development does not proceed in a straight line. There are always heirlooms from old developments; they do not fit into later times; they seem out of place. Imagine a being with the old image consciousness in our time – it is an impossible being; it cannot possibly find its way in today's world. It is not for nothing that the human soul's powers change. They change so that they are adapted to human conditions on earth.

The image consciousness is adapted to the earlier earth conditions. The mind consciousness corresponds to the present time. The artist presents this to us in the form of Io. She represents a being that has emerged from the level of consciousness of the ancients. What will become of this [image consciousness when it occurs in our time]? Madness! What is the image of the earlier time supposed to say? It may be that one also has the ability to say it, but these abilities are not good. They produce error and deception for the soul.

The Greek genius represents such an awareness, which has remained like an old heirloom, so that error and deception and illusion arise, by seeing the hundred-eyed Argus. Images confront her. But these are deceptions, illusions, that is illusion. Even if this consciousness, when it has seized the human soul abilities, when this consciousness would also fall into madness, one must not believe that it will not have a meaning. That which the developed consciousness has grasped has only grasped one part of the human being, the brain, and has made it its organ.

But the Io is still working on people today. This is human future development, that all the forces that can be there will appear in later times in new forms, like the Io with its consciousness in ancient times. So she is a madwoman. But how she will be when that in human nature which the subconscious works on connects with what is higher human nature, then human judgment will be conscious; the Prometheus in human nature will be redeemed. The Greek sets this whole thing in the past, and in a way it also refers to past events. Just as he was able to extract the meaning of each individual move of the drama from this train of Prometheus bound with Io, he could also extract it from the drama.

I could only hint at where the drama's nerve lies. I could show how the playwright's mind was filled with what is in human nature and how it interacts. That is why Aeschylus was able to show how anger arises from the astral body when the ego is bound in the cosmos, so that it can mature and develop the abilities that are appropriate to it, as it were, projected out of the cosmos into inner human nature. Through this powerful drama, we will see how anger has the mission of being a harbinger of love. In a certain respect, this is also what connects us with the noble word truth, which is related to human nature in a different way to anger.

We will see how Goethe has incorporated into his “Pandora” what he himself felt in his deepest soul about these riddles of life. But because humanity today is so far removed from spiritual science, from that which lives in the soul of a poet, the poems like “Pandora” were not understood. This was already the case in Goethe's time. That is why Goethe felt lonely at the height of his life. In this loneliness, he also felt many dangers – as people still say today: In his youth, Goethe still wrote understandably, but in his old age he came down and wrote [unintelligible]. – In contrast to this, Goethe once broke out in words that you will find spoken in his works: “There they praise my Faust and what else is in my works... and there the old rag-tag believes it is no longer.” That is how he felt about the misunderstood spiritual world. Especially when you are looking at the human soul and want to understand it practically, then you have to start from spiritual science. You have to be able to observe the interplay of forces and the meaning of the individual forces, as spiritual science presents them to us. Then we can look into the deep abysses of the soul in such a way that we can apply it practically. Only then do we understand as different fruits that which speaks to us spiritually from this point of view [through] Aeschylus in his drama [of] Zeus towards Prometheus, whom we will only understand when we understand what the mission of anger is in the astral body for the development of the I into the ability to love. The veil that we must lift if we want to penetrate to our satisfaction and to the right practical life is lifted so that we can say: Certainly, when we look at the soul in a spiritual scientific way, we feel how deep the fundamental tone is, and we also feel that we are on the way to penetrating into this ground. Spiritual science will first advise us to strive for the right thing little by little in order to penetrate the ideals and insights of the soul life that are to be attained; it will show us how to make the words of the ancient sage from the fifth and sixth century, whom we can remember when we explore the depths of the soul to find the boundaries of the soul, understandable in a new way, starting from these ideals. It will be difficult if we also travel a distance, because the soul's ground is infinitely deep.

The last lectures in this series were devoted to a consideration of the human soul. And it will have become clear to those members of the audience who have followed the last three lectures what inner justification there is for not regarding the human soul as an indeterminate being, with its qualities swimming around in confusion, but for actually pursuing it in the most careful way in its individual subdivisions. For those who are here today for the first time, it is enough to point out that, in the sense of spiritual science, this human soul is distinguished into what we call the sentient soul, which is, so to speak, the lowest of the members of the human soul, which is still close to what we call the bodily members of the human being. Then, in this soul, a distinction is to be made between the mind or emotional soul, which already stands out as an independent entity, making itself independent of the sentient soul and the bodily life, and finally, the consciousness soul can still be seen.

We have pointed out that what is generally regarded today in every science as development, in a higher sense as self-development of the human being, comes to us within this soul life. Man is in development and stands at the lowest level so that what we call the sentient soul comes into its own. With further development, the mind or feeling soul comes into its own. Then, to a certain extent, a person can find themselves and examine themselves with the light of thought, understanding and knowledge. We then speak of the consciousness soul. We have not just talked about these soul elements, but emphasized the qualities that take on very special forms when this self-development of the person is taken seriously.

In particular, we pointed out one of the qualities, anger, and showed how self-development lies in overcoming such an affect. Man's sense of truth [as educator of the mind or intellectual soul] was further found, and how then a special impulse for the development of the consciousness soul is what we described yesterday as devotion in the right sense of the word. As we were asking ourselves about that in the human inner being, which actually guides and leads the development, we came across that which we had to say could essentially reveal itself in two ways: We have come across the I that pulsates and interweaves through the whole soul. It is what works on the soul. It must reveal itself in two ways: on the one hand, strongly and powerfully and meaningfully, richer in thoughts, feelings and will impulses, which itself must expand more and more; in this way we have shown how selfhood grows more and more. Furthermore, that on the other hand this ego, by expressing selfhood in a special way, can degenerate into selfishness and egoism. ... Thus, in a certain respect, the ego became the center of the soul's life.

Today it is our task to eavesdrop even further on the work of this ego on the soul. We have seen what it does for the individual members when we look at each of them purely in itself. But it is also called upon to bring about order and harmony in the life of the soul... to work the individual members of the soul, sentient, intellectual and consciousness soul, in the appropriate way, to fertilize one through the other, to let the sentient soul play into the intellectual soul and this again into the consciousness soul, and so on.

If the human ego was unable to relate these individual soul elements to each other, to establish order, harmony, etc., then the individual soul elements fall apart. The ego must prove itself strongly through all the individual soul elements and allow each individual to play into the others in an appropriate way.

You can imagine that, by allowing the individual soul links to interact, the I plays in the same way as a musician plays an instrument – even if we can only see three strings of it at first. But the I plays very special harmonies and melodies on the three strings of the soul life: depending on whether it strikes one or the other string more, strikes it at the same time as the other, and so on, a very special music of the soul arises in the person. This is how the human soul life expresses itself, as this I plays on the three strings of the soul life.

What is this expression of the I playing on the three strings of the soul? —Nothing else emerges from it but the human character. Only someone who does not question how this I plays and works in the harmonious interaction of the various soul elements can understand what is meant by the [phenomenon of human character], which is so often enigmatic and yet confronts us at every turn in life. Yes, when the individual abilities of the human soul, the individual activities, fall apart, when the ego does not exercise joint control, then the human being appears to us as if he is striving in different directions. This is the most trivial thing in the life of the character, so that his soul activities work in one direction on the one hand and in another on the other. In life, the patriot and the private man can thus diverge. In such cases, we are not talking about a unified character, and by this we mean that the ego does not distribute its effect evenly among the various parts [of the soul].

This occasional inability to create harmony between the various activities of the human soul has always been a kind of material for artists to use in poetry or other artistic forms of expression. Consider Shakespeare's Hamlet; there is a spiritual activity that the ego cannot reconcile with action. Goethe has already expressed this dichotomy of the soul life in Hamlet by saying: A great task is placed on a soul that is not up to it.

Thus we see how the I can live fully in the consciousness soul. When it emphasizes this life in the consciousness soul, it is activated in the innermost link of the human soul life, which can hide its impulses from the outside world within itself. When it emphasizes its work in the consciousness soul, what arises is what we call the hidden, closed character. We cannot get at him because the consciousness soul withdraws from the outside world. We can therefore be separated from a person as if by a partition. His I is locked up in the consciousness soul.

The I can continue to be active and live in what we call the mind or feeling soul. This is how the malleable character is formed, which is somewhere between the other two. In this way, the I provides what could be called the balance of the soul forces. People who exercise their I within the mind soul are those who are willing to be stimulated by the outside world, but also willing to process these impressions in the service of their own self, to educate themselves more and more through the impressions of the outside world, through what is heard, seen and known of it.

If you want to educate, you have to know how the I works in the mind or soul. If such an inclination is present in a person, you have to make sure that you do the right thing in one direction or another. Such people are the most malleable, easily influenced by what is around them, and they use it for their own development.

But when the I lives it up in the sentient soul, it tends to turn outward what is in the sentient soul, its drives and so on. As soon as the I begins to be active in the sentient soul, the will arises to work outward. We have before us people who have a preference for an active character, who are always available to do this or that. When taken to an extreme, they become the busy people.

Thus we see how the human being expresses himself when the I strikes one or other chord. We can also say that the human being's I initially acts in such a way that it itself rests as if hidden in the sentient soul, namely in young people or at a low level of culture. There the I is closed in the sentient soul, it does not yet have the possibility to ascend into the mind soul and show its activities, as it expresses itself unconsciously in the sentient soul. In this case, we speak of a character that is at a low level and expresses base urges and desires.

This is different from the character where the I has already ascended into the consciousness soul, but which nevertheless then expresses itself in the sentient soul. Then the I carries what it has learned within the consciousness soul into the sentient soul; then it follows its instincts, desires, but with what it has learned through the consciousness soul. And because he follows them, such a person appears in life in such a way that we say: Oh, he only follows his instincts and desires, but in such a way that he pursues them in a clever, sophisticated way. At the same time, his character is imbued with low-mindedness [and clever reflection. It gives the] character a higher meaning when, with attitude, the person rises as high as with knowledge.

We must grasp this wonderful phenomenon of human character as a kind of inner soul music, a play of the I on the various strings of the human soul life. Now it plays not only in general with the soul members, but in all that is present in these individual soul parts of the human being. For example, we see one such soul quality as an affect of the sentient soul: anger. When the ego is little developed, has not ascended into the higher regions of the soul life, it gives itself over to anger; then we find an outburst of anger that shows us how an ego unconscious of itself storms out into the world. It is not in control of itself because it has remained undeveloped in a certain respect, ... not in control of itself when it is overcome by anger.

[Imagine a] teacher in front of a student [: [the] student [has] noticed something wrong with a fellow student and, in anger, hits the fellow student with a book. The teacher may be a person who has developed the mind soul and the consciousness soul, but in this moment, anger can overwhelm him so much that a young lad can get so angry. Then the teacher hits the boy a few lefts and rights. When the surge of anger comes, only a very controlled person can suppress it.

The stopping of the I in the sentient soul manifests itself as if in a rage. This is the extreme of anger, when the I almost sinks in anger and the soul becomes similar to a state of powerlessness. Then anger arises. The ego cannot conquer anger. If it conquers, then, by being conquered, anger becomes an educator in the right way, indirectly through the ego itself, if the ego does not let itself be overcome by the emotion but exercises self-control. In the sentient soul, the I has to accomplish its own education, which we call education in self-control. On the one hand, there is rage that breaks out blindly, and on the other, there is self-control, which is achieved through noble self-education.

Let us now take the I that is in the soul of reason or feeling. The mission of the sense of truth is revealed in it. It consists in the fact that the human being has something in the truth that he may cultivate – because when he devotes himself to the truth, he cultivates something – that he may cultivate in his own inner being. He can only assimilate truth within himself, in order to unfold the supreme power of the I in inwardness. At the same time, however, it unites us with the whole of humanity and with the world. In the cultivation of truth we see something by which the I can develop into selfhood and self-strength, and thereby at the same time into selflessness.

But one or other of these strings can be struck in the wrong way. It can happen that the I makes a mistake in a certain way, or where it should have a strong effect, it has a weak effect. If it makes a mistake within the soul of the intellect, then what arises is a demonstration of how even the noblest in human life can be distorted, can become a caricature, when the I loses itself in what it has recognized as truth.

When the I is immersed in the truth, the following can occur: Because man is not capable of mastering a comprehensive field of truth on all sides, and can only master part of the truth, when the ego loses itself in it, it can forget itself and blindly rage in its limited circle of truth. Then it becomes a fanatic, and what is called the fanatical character in life comes to meet us.

The opposite is true when the I not only devotes itself to the truth with the right strength, but also looks into itself in the right way and becomes aware that a person can also err. If the I does not lose itself in the truth, but always looks at itself in the intellect and in the mind, then the fanatic cannot arise.

By increasingly practicing this self-examination according to the qualities of the intellect and the soul, the I attains what in characterology is called healthy self-esteem or healthy self-confidence, combined with proper self-criticism, [which] allows one to maintain balance with regard to recognized truth(s) and the possibility of error on the other hand.

Then... to that which contributes most to the soul's upward development into the consciousness soul, to devotion. Here too, the I can strike the right or the wrong chord. It can lose itself in devotion, give itself up in surrender to the Other and the Unknown. Then we are dealing with the self-losing ego, with the false holiness of man, which amounts to a kind of self-sacrifice. But when the I resonates with this quality of the consciousness soul in the right way, when it works strongly into devotion with its self, then we come to what can be called justified self-respect and self-knowledge.

Thus we see how the I expresses itself in the most diverse ways. It is the unifier of the individual members of the human soul. And it is the characterological activity of the I on the individual soul members, as just described, that prevents the human being from falling apart. But if the I does not maintain control over the individual soul-members, then the human being appears to us as fragmented, the I sinks down and can no longer be seen: lack of character, surrender to the demons of one's own soul, torn back and forth by instincts and feelings; thoughts that bring one to despair, surrender on the other hand, etc.

[I have] already pointed out in an example from art the loss of control over the individual parts, where the ego has sunk into self-loss. This work of art is the famous Laocoon: a priest with his two sons standing there and entwined by snakes. Many people have endeavored to understand this work of art. ... All this is expressed in a wonderful way, one must... in the right way understand. /Larger gaps; probably a description of “Laocoon”.] Even those who have devoted themselves to it with devotion have said many erroneous things in their understanding of this work of art. Winckelmann, who became Lessing's and Goethe's teacher in the study of art, looked at Laocoon in such a way that he said that it was particularly beautiful that here

the highest ennoblement of pain takes place. He sees the soul in its sublimity in Laocoon, who in the moment before death musters his full soul power; and in the face, namely in the eyes, one can see how the inner soul powers look up to a supreme being. The father shows in the eyes expressing mercy that compassion for his sons triumphs over pain.

This description fails when confronted with the overall view of the work of art. It can already be seen in a cast. If you want to judge the eye in this way, it fails because the eye is directed upwards and Laocoon does not see any of his sons. [The compassion for the sons is] not visible, because Winckelmann has invented it. But this group is illuminated by the light of understanding when one sees what is there and is clear about it: this Laocoon with the drawn-in abdomen, with the protruding chest, with the upward-looking, surrounding eyes, the hair standing on end – when we see all this, it is clear to us that here the effect of the human being is no longer overcome by the sense of self, but we are confronted with the moment when this sense of self has disappeared. The ego has just emerged, and at this moment it no longer follows the effect of the ego, which would hold the strong reins with regard to the expressions of the soul life. Individual limbs go their own ways. Nature... [the pain] draws in the abdomen, the upper body is protruding, other limbs go their own ways; everything is torn apart. Through the loss of soul that has just occurred, it shows what man is when the ego is truly suppressed and the individual strong limbs go their own ways in a final flurry.

When we have such a work of art before us, it is a negative symbol [for] what the I must be that brings about this interplay of the individual soul members. By looking at human character in this way, we can gain much for our understanding of life, but also many things that the educator needs if he wants to develop human character step by step. We will understand life if we ask ourselves: What is the peculiarity of human character itself?

If we look at animal character, we can say: the animal comes into the world with a ready-made character, which remains throughout the animal's lifetime. What is at the beginning is also at the end: a distinctly pronounced generic or species character. If you characterize a hyena, you have characterized them all. Why is that? It is because the animal, in a sense, has no history and does not incorporate the element of time into its life. The experiences of youth cannot be learned and carried into the later elements of development.

What we call time is incorporated into the human being's soul life. The I gradually develops out of the hidden germ, the peculiarities of the sentient soul and the mind soul, up into the consciousness soul. Thus, the child approaches us in a different way in terms of character than a young animal. From the earliest times, the latter practices the activities that are incumbent on it by virtue of its nature. In a sense, the human being enters the world without character. The individual forms, even those based on his nature, even what he acquires by being worked on by others, all that arises in later life, must be acquired over time.

Initially, a person can be determined in terms of their character. We can work into them, but we cannot use a word that describes a child in terms of character; the child does not yet have character. By showing itself differently from other children in its individual activities, it does not have character, but it does have individuality. The self has not yet taken self-development into its own hands. It is still pressed down under the sentient soul, still contained in the most hidden part. As long as it has not yet developed into activity, into an inner play on the strings of the soul instrument, it is only an individuality, not a character. Only then does the character begin to emerge when the I begins to become aware of itself, at first dimly. Then, in the course of life, this self-education by the I occurs more and more.

But one educates a person in the right way only when one pays attention to whether it is the I that is inclined to rummage around in the sentient soul or one that wants to express the qualities of the mind soul or consciousness soul in particular. Here one has to be careful not to limit one's view and to ensure that the various activities of the I are stimulated in the right way. If one sees that a child is inclined to lose itself in the individual activities, that it tends towards selflessness in the bad sense, then it is good to start teaching this child the concepts of human dignity and human significance as early as possible. You will educate badly if you encourage your selfishness here, appeal to the child's own selfishness. You will educate well if you teach him general concepts of what a human being is and means in the world.

When the sense of life is strongly developed in the soul of the mind, it can indeed bubble over and be lost on unworthy things. In this case, when it wants to lose itself on unworthy things, then one must ensure that such a growing person forms the right concepts of the world, of things and of beings, in order to assess them correctly in relation to each other. We have to ensure that he learns to appreciate things correctly.

Thus, as educators, we have to do the work of transferring the work of the ego to the neglected side. We have to do a balancing and harmonizing job with regard to character, but first we have to gain an understanding for the peculiar way in which the ego plays with the different parts of the soul.

Thus we see how justified it was to form the word character, that is to say, “imprinting”. The whole life of the soul receives a certain imprinting and shaping through this I. How the human being then affects life itself is best shown when we understand how the I is active in the individual members of the soul and how these interact.

Now there is something else to be borne in mind in particular. I have said that the I educates the soul up to the level of the consciousness soul. Is this education complete with this? It is not yet finished. Only then does what is important in terms of character development in human life occur. Only then is the consciousness soul accessible to what can reach into the human soul from a higher world. What can reach into the consciousness soul first of all?

What is most important in terms of character are moral concepts and ideas, which we do not find in our lives outside. There we find drives and instincts in which a self works that is blind. We cannot gain our [rational insights] and ideals and moral judgments from life. We must first carry these into life. The human soul must receive these as an inspiration from another world and try to bring them into life; but not just like that.

In the human soul, the moral imperative [lights up], the great ideals through which we can advance life, what life does not yet have and man must first bring into it. Then the I grasps this light from another world in the moral concepts and ideals. They first flow into the consciousness soul; the I grasps them. Previously, development took place from bottom to top; now, when the I has gained these moral judgments and ideals, it carries them back down into the mind soul, transforming the moral thought into moral feeling. The moral feeling in the soul of feeling is what was in the consciousness soul [moral concept]. When such a moral concept is brought down into the soul of feeling, we glow with a moral deed. Then we have sympathy for what is going on around us. More and more, moral judgments and thoughts push their way down and become feelings. We become inflamed with enthusiasm for what is done out of high moral ideals. Through the “I” bringing moral judgments and ideals down from the consciousness soul, we are moved to glow with enthusiasm for what is good and to feel sympathy for what is noble and great.

But the I must also carry these ideals down into the sentient soul. There the moral ideals also work on our drives, instincts and passions, transforming them into something completely different. Gradually, the moral ideal pours into this drive life, the drive now works as a force, and the moral ideal gains the power to be realized. The drive has abandoned its instinctive nature and what is in it as a force becomes the bearer of moral judgment and ideal. Thus, in life, we become people of action who not only live out drives and passions, but also carry the light of moral ideals, so that there is no contradiction in them between what they carry the passions in and what shines there as moral judgments and ideals. Thus the self carries down into the lower regions of the soul what it has gained above. In this way, it warms the soul with what it has gained in the consciousness soul.

By developing itself up into the consciousness soul, the I becomes a human being in terms of character. By carrying it down again into the lower members, the human being becomes a moral character. This carrying up and down of what has been gained... this is how we understand what character is, what moral character is.

This [the work of the ego on the soul members] gives the human being his character to such an extent that it expresses itself [in the body]. Just as the soul expresses itself in the outer body, so this work of the ego on the soul members expresses itself in the outer body. We can follow this down to the last detail and are amazed at how the I appears in the outer physical body of the human being. There we see how the I works in the consciousness soul. When this work expresses itself outwardly, it is in that which, in the outer world, belongs to the highest human activity. What elevates human beings above animals is the free mobility of their limbs and the subordination of their limbs to the sensations and concepts of their soul life.

One movement that expresses the inner soul life [in particular] is facial expression [and gesture]. We see how the activity of the soul in particular acquires an external expression in mimic [and gestural] expression. The one who is able to interpret the facial expressions and gestures of a person in the right way sees how the whole play of the I on the various soul members is revealed in the outer gestures. If, for example, the I in the consciousness soul is active, but has dragged up what it actually is in the sentient soul and allows it to play up into the consciousness soul, then it expresses itself as if one could say: The person lives in his feelings, brings this to consciousness and expresses it. Outwardly, this is expressed by the person tapping himself on the abdomen with great comfort, for example after a meal.

Suppose that what stirs particularly in the feeling soul and through which the I is stimulated by the feeling soul is particularly developed and expressed outwardly in the gesture: Man then reaches to his heart. Thus he rises up by his own body, by rising with his I and by playing in ever higher limbs. If the 'I' expresses itself in such a way that it only expresses the consciousness soul and is not touched by the other parts, only the consciousness soul, where thoughts and knowledge dominate, where human discernment is expressed – when a person reflects sharply on something and reflects in such a way that he wants to analyze something – then he puts his finger to his nose to, as it were, divide his face into two parts. What is worked in the consciousness soul is expressed. The character is reflected in the outward gesture by scratching behind the ear, or by grasping the head when something does not occur to one.

In the whole play of facial expressions, both the ascent in the soul life and the ascent in the soul life are expressed. When a person makes a judgment and wants to negate something, this can be expressed in the consciousness soul of this person by quietly judging. A negation expressed without emotion is then a movement of the head simply to the left and right. But if he negates with the will, he throws his head back.

It is particularly interesting to study the outward gestures of different nations. Here one could recognize the play of the I if one were to ask: How does one nation or another express negation? — and so on. Here we see how character is expressed and shaped in the play of facial expressions.

When the I allows the other soul members to play into the mind soul, this is expressed in the human physiognomy. What we read in a person's face is the expression of the work of the I on the mind or soul of mind, where the I allows the other soul members to work. Now, we have said that the human being, where the ego plays particularly in the soul of the mind, gets a malleable character; therefore, this malleability will also show externally. This malleability, which belongs to the time, to history, we can read from the physiognomy: a face furrowed with grief. The history of a person is imprinted here, the writing of what the person has experienced in his destiny.

In the animal physiognomy, one can wonderfully observe the animal species or generic character. What a [single] person has suffered, what has become of him, can be seen by observing the human physiognomy. His story is written there. In a deeper sense, the various dispositions of the character are also expressed in a special way in the facial expression. But one must not be pedantic about this, because everything can also be balanced out by other effects.

Thus, in the human being, we can distinguish the mental part in the face, the lower part around the mouth and chin, then the nasal part and the frontal part or forehead. Depending on whether the ego [has an effect] on the rational soul, the sentient soul or the consciousness soul, this is expressed in a variety of ways. A person who acts out his or her individuality only through the sentient soul is often characterized by a pointed chin.

Everything that happens in life is most pronounced in the middle part. When the ego particularly appeals to the emotional soul, allows the consciousness soul to play from above and the sentience soul from below, when there is a balance in the mind soul, then this is expressed in the physiognomic form in such a way that the middle part of the face has a special expression. Those who are able to observe life will find such harmony in the soul life of the Greeks. That is why the famous Greek nose is regarded as the model for the human body in all of sculpture. In the Greek way of life, the entire human countenance is reduced to the human nose.

The character that the I has shaped in the soul is impressed on the human body. When the consciousness soul in particular is pressed down into the mind soul, the forehead takes on a special shape. One must not exaggerate these things, but must be clear that the I works individually in each person. If pedantry intervenes here, such things are distorted. It must repel when approached by pedantic schoolcrafting. Here it is not abstract judgment that distinguishes, but scientific tact. This does not always proceed in the right way, and many a foolish thing comes about when these things are exaggerated.

When the I in the rational soul is active, then the I leaves its mark on the physiognomy, not only in the physical body, but also in the handwriting. The character and style of the handwriting are to a certain extent a reflection of the work of the I in the rational soul. Here, of course, the [urge to] interpret is quite dangerous. If a healthy comprehensiveness is not applied in the assessment, the result is either dilettantism or humbug in the interpretation of handwriting. This does not reject the idea that character can really flow into handwriting, but rather justifies it from a higher point of view.

Thus, one can also understand that because the soul of the mind is the malleable character, the changes in the handwriting can be observed over the course of several years and one can get an idea of the changes in one's character; [this makes more sense] than if one has made this from a single piece of writing. Without knowing the age, nothing proper can come out here either. If one is knowledgeable in these matters, one can even draw conclusions about earlier experiences from certain characteristics of the handwriting rather than being able to read the characteristic itself from the handwriting. But only with the right tact can the right thing come out.

What happens when the ego works primarily on the sentient soul, but as a strong ego that works inwardly on the human soul? Of particular importance is the case that shows us this ego at the stage where it is enlightened by moral judgments and ideals. But when the I has now carried moral ideals and judgments down into the sentient soul and the drives and passions have been purified and give strength to the moral ideals, how is this expressed in the external physical body?

When the I has worked in this way, it cannot be expressed externally at first. What is brought down from the heights of the consciousness soul must remain permeated by the consciousness soul and should express itself in the physical tool of the consciousness soul, the human brain. However, due to the firm cranial box, the skullcap does not offer the possibility of expressing this. The individual bones, which have hardened, can no longer be reshaped appropriately.

This is where we see that we are predisposed to certain dispositions with the most diverse formations of the skullcap. He has formed the skullcap with the most diverse elevations and depressions. As long as the skullcap is firm in life, what character has formed cannot play in it.

Here we are at the point where we receive a reasonable explanation [of] an appearance, if we refer to what is to be discussed later in its context, if we refer to the re-embodiment of the human soul. What the soul cannot do in a particular life comes to light when the soul is reborn. What the soul has taken in of moral judgments and ideals in the sentient soul is imprinted in the soft organism. This appears in the plastic formation of the human skull.

If we look at this human skull, a kind of craniology, we can look back at the person's previous incarnation. What we get is very unlike what has been practiced as phrenology throughout many ages. Here, all kinds of predispositions have been discovered. An overview of this shows us how powerless human knowledge is when it does not go into depth. What we see on the skullcap cannot be broken down into individual forms, but is the result of the work of the ego on the sentient soul in a previous life. This is entirely individual and cannot be explained by any classification. What a person has acquired in a lifetime, that he has not remained closed in himself, but has allowed the moral ideals within him to take effect, will reappear in a later incarnation.

Thus what the spirit and soul are becomes embodied in the outer physicality, and the body becomes a reflection of the spirit, becoming a character in itself. Phrenology, when it does not want to deal with things in this way, can become folly. But if we look at things this way, we see what Goethe calls the creative nature, in contrast to the created. Thus we grasp the spirit of the cosmos that permeates everything and is expressed in external phenomena.

Here we see how character is formed and how the I shapes the soul in character. Only when the I withdraws into the consciousness soul does a closed character arise that shuts itself off from the world. But when it takes hold of the other soul members, something arises that is developed into the formation of the body. It was a deep insight of the poet when he spoke the word: When man develops his abilities and talents, the I works within him; but when he develops his character, it works on the world and the outer life:

A talent develops in silence,
a character in the stream of the world.

When the poet approaches these phenomena, it can become deeply apparent to him that something has flowed through him in all his ways... Thus, he who observes life can see how life is formed from within. It is nature that stands firm in its foundations. But it is that which contains the spirit within itself and allows it to be born out of itself. But the spirit allows nature to emerge from itself again, in mimic play, [in] physiognomy, [in] the shaping of the skullcap. It imprints on matter, through the I, that which the I plays on that wonderful musical instrument in the hidden depths of the soul.

This can occur to someone who stands before such a miracle of such molding. Such a thought once flashed through a man's mind when, after many years, a friend's tomb was opened and the skull was removed. Contemplating this skull, the thought occurred to him how the form expresses what the soul has lived. Goethe wrote, as he looked at Schiller's skull:

What more can man desire in life
than to see how nature reveals the divine,
how it allows the solid to flow into the spiritual,
how it firmly preserves what has been created by the spirit.