The Rudolf Steiner Archive

At the end of the last lecture, I mentioned that humans have the ability to influence their so-called astral body through such an intimate means as memory control. I will add a few more things today.

This astral body, which envelops us like a cloud and in which our desires, instincts and passions express themselves, is also the carrier of something that lives and works continuously in our mind: it is the carrier of our memory. Everything we call memory or recollection adheres to the astral body. The thought you had yesterday is still in you today. But it has no possibility of remaining in you if it is not embedded in the astral body, if it does not stimulate vibrations that remain and recall what you experienced yesterday to your existence today. Now it is impossible for a person to take even one step forward in the development of the astral body if he does not work on his memory, on his recall of experiences.

I have said how man should work on the strict control of thinking, on the control of the whole thought life; how he must be clear that his thoughts are real processes, that it is the greatest untruth when it is said that thoughts are “duty free” and that we have no spectators for thoughts. If you want to develop real insight within yourself, you must work on your memory. We can only do this by not allowing our memories to arise in a confused way above the horizon of our consciousness and then disappear again.

So how do our memories pass through our consciousness? They come and go. Man abandons himself to them. Man is haunted by memories that ebb and flow. As long as he is, he is also at the mercy of all the influences and coincidences that are constantly exerted on the astral body from the outside. This can only be remedied by devoting a short time each day, even if only a very short time, to taking care of our memory. However, this should not prevent us from faithfully attending to all our other life obligations. The first principle of Theosophy is that no one should be deterred from the occupation they have in life.

So just a few minutes a day spent cultivating our memory can truly work wonders in our astral body.

What we are supposed to achieve can be said in a few words: we must make our lives a school of learning. For very few people, life is a school of learning. Most people indulge in pleasure and pain. And as life passes them by, pain, joy and pleasure pass by; they learn nothing from their lives. The theosophist, on the other hand, says to himself: Every day must advance me; every day must be a step in my development.

Therefore, the theosophist lets no day pass without letting the important events of the day pass before his mind, before his spiritual gaze. The best moment is the last moment we spend in a waking state: that is, the moment immediately before falling asleep. If we are able to still fill two, three, four, five minutes with the experiences of the day, to let them pass by in an objective way, then we achieve a lot for the astral body.

During the day we feel pleasure and pain, joy and discomfort. The theosophist should not dull his senses, but should feel vivid compassion and vivid disgust throughout the whole of his ordinary daily life. No one should be able to distinguish him from other people. He should only differ from others during the selected four, five to twenty minutes. Then he does not let the sensations - pleasure and pain, joy and discomfort - pass by in the usual way, but he reflects on them: What has caused me pleasure and pain? What has caused me comfort and discomfort? Was this pleasure, was this pain justified? Could it not be different if I had approached the thought somewhat differently? Could I not arouse the pleasure and discomfort in a different way? Could I not influence the course of events? Have I acted as I would always like to act? Have I acted in such a way that I can bring it into harmony with the whole harmony of the world order? – In short, it is the elevation of everyday life to a higher point of view.

If we observe our feelings in these four or five to twenty minutes, reliving them, but not in such a way that we have the same impression, but rather confronting them objectively, so that we see our seeing, hear our hearing and become clear about our pain and our desire , and whether we have perhaps caused our pleasure or pain through our triviality. In short, we become clear about our entire position in the world. Then we have learned something from our experiences, then we are working on the development of our astral organs.

The one who can see on the astral plane, who can see, can see how a person's astral body changes when that person is alert and does these exercises for years. Then his astral body begins to be organized. Where it used to be chaotic, a real mess – you can see snaking lines in grotesque coils in people's astral bodies – certain forms now appear in it, regular forms, it begins to structure itself.

Today, people cannot yet see this, but cultivating the memory is precisely the way by which we are enabled to see this transformation in ourselves and in our fellow human beings. What we have experienced today becomes our experience tomorrow, and experience is the touchstone for our future experiences. This enhances our development and organizes our astral body. However insignificant this may appear, it works surely. It contributes to the opening of the spiritual eye, to looking into the feelings of others, to becoming truly enlightened in the spiritual world. And then you must help it by casting off everything from yourself that clings to your self, to your peculiarity, to your special nature. If you are able to suppress anything that belongs to your special nature, then you develop your astral body.

Those who have experience know that it has an enormous effect when you succeed in achieving the following. A person has hundreds and hundreds of opinions. But it is very unimportant whether A or B thinks something about a matter. The wise man has an opinion and so does the fool. Everyone considers his opinion to be of the utmost importance, and he wants to assert this opinion first. That is why you so often hear people say, “I believe this, I believe that.” Try to realize how unimportant it is to put forward your own opinion at every opportunity; it may be the most unimportant, the most incorrect, because what we believe usually depends on pleasure and pain. If we manage not to express our opinion, then we practice something important and store up a tremendous power.

Every such suppressed revelation of the special being, every silence is a new accumulation of power for our knowledge. The more we are able to listen and not express our opinion, the more quickly we ascend to direct knowledge and direct vision. To one who has no insight into the organization of the human soul, this is incredible. But just as surely as the forces accumulate in the accumulator, so can the soul forces accumulate if we suppress our opinions. This gives us power and strength. He who has opinions to express at every turn will advance slowly; he who can remain silent much, who can let things speak to him, will advance rapidly. This is a golden rule in relation to direct knowledge: if we do not thrust our opinions upon things, then things will speak to us.

A very significant saying in The Secret Doctrine is: “I have learned much from those above me; I have learned much from those around me; and I have learned most from those below me!” It is learning from those below us, learning by listening and by withholding our opinions, that lifts us up. And we learn most when we let nature speak to us and listen to it. Then we achieve what needs to be achieved, namely the strength to really expose our opinions. If we have allowed ourselves the four to five minutes to develop the astral body, then something else comes.

What do people do when they are faced with a question? It may mean something big or something small. What do people do then? They think about it, rack their brains and believe that they have to be the ones to extract the solution to the question from the depths of their thoughts. Those who follow the path of knowledge do not do it that way. Goethe characterized it, as he also hinted at many other things as an initiate. He once said: We are not called upon to solve the question, but first to pose it and then to wait for the question to solve itself.

Do not underestimate this way of solving questions! It is quite powerful. We try to ask ourselves the question very clearly, but we do not think about the answer, but about the means that are suitable for solving the question. Let us say, for example, that I am faced with the question of whether a person is guilty or innocent, whether he has acted out of evil will or out of an innocent heart. If I think about it, I will not come to a correct judgment. But I will come to an answer if I look at his life as far as it is accessible to me; if I ask myself: What has happened to me with him? How did he face me? What did he say to me? What did he say to other people? — These are not answers, but questions that I have created for myself. They need to be considered. If I do this actively and suppress the answer, the image that I create for myself provides the answer. I switch myself off, as it were.

If you do this with all your willpower, switching off so that your self is not present, that your thinking is suppressed, if you overcome yourself not to give yourself an answer, but to fall asleep with the prepared question, then you will experience that you will wake up in the morning with an answer that is much more correct and certain than the one that could have come to you in the evening. While your physical body was resting, your spirit was disembodied and obtained the means to answer the question from the higher worlds. It is advisable to have a pencil ready, because you have to write down the answer as soon as you wake up in the morning. If you fail to do so, you will forget it again because you will be under completely different influences.

The deafening noise of everyday life does not allow people to develop their higher mental abilities. Therefore, we must learn to let our daily lives disappear for a short time through these exercises, which are familiar to anyone who becomes acquainted with the more intimate life of the mind and soul. If we are able to do this, we can develop in these isolated moments what theosophists call “spirituality” or “spiritual vision”. A whole new world then unfolds around us.

Berlin, March 14, 1904

I would like to begin by saying that you should not underestimate the mood in which one has to place oneself in order to have the right relationship with the universe. For those who are not yet on the path of knowledge, this mood is perhaps something that seems to have no real significance. But it does. For this reason, all religions have tried to educate people to this mood through prayer, and the prayer that originated from esotericists also has no other meaning.

In order for you to fully appreciate the significance of such an attitude towards the universe, I would first like to show how not only those who want to progress in terms of their inner life, but also those who want to progress in their knowledge of the outside world, can pave their way by doing so.

In our materialistic age, many erroneous opinions are held about great explorers and pathfinders. In particular, many of those who are involved in the sciences believe from the outset that the sciences lead to disbelief, to the denial of the spiritual world. That is why I would like to tell you today about the spirit of a great mind, whose name I will not give you until I have read a few of his sayings to you. For these sayings show how he came to the great discoveries that have been a blessing for modern times, through his having a more intimate connection with the spirit that permeates the whole universe. He says:

Another sentence from the same man:

”What I sensed 25 years ago [...] I have finally [...] brought to light. To a higher degree than I could ever have hoped for, I have recognized as absolutely true and correct that the whole world of harmonics, however great it is, with all its parts discussed in the third book, is found in the heavenly motions, although not in the way I had imagined (and that is not the last part of my joy), but in a completely different, and at the same time highly distinguished and perfect way. In the meantime, while I was kept busy with the extremely laborious task of improving the theory of the movements of the heavenly bodies, my passionate desire for knowledge was greatly increased and my determination was spurred on by reading Ptolemy's Harmonical Writing [...] In it I found, contrary to my expectations and to my greatest astonishment, that almost the entire third book was already dealing with a similar study of celestial harmony 1500 years ago. But at that time much was still lacking in astronomy [...] However, in the emphatic pursuit of my plan, I was not only greatly encouraged by the low level of ancient astronomy, but also by the strikingly precise agreement between our observations, which were made fifteen centuries apart. For why are many words needed? Nature itself wanted to reveal itself to people through the mouths of men who set about interpreting it in very different centuries. There is a divine hint in it, to speak with the Hebrews, that in the minds of two men who had devoted themselves entirely to the contemplation of nature, the same thought about the harmonious design of the world emerged; for neither was the guide of the other in walking this path. Now, after eighteen months of gathering light, three months of bright days, and just a few days ago the full sun of a most marvelous vision, nothing holds me back..."

These words were written by the great astronomer Johannes Kepler, who first taught people how the planets move and which orbits they follow. From this you will see that, in the face of true science, it cannot be a matter of unbelief in the spirit and that anyone who today, on the basis of discoveries such as those made by Kepler, Copernicus, Galilei and so on, wanted to claim that the world is not permeated by the spirit, that a spiritual view of the world has been overcome, would find himself in a very strange position. For those who, out of this devotional mood, have made the discoveries of natural science, as Kepler did, have grasped the harmony of the world system.

What we must strive for first of all is to recognize that man's personality is not yet his true self, but that this true self is something to which we must aspire, something that must develop more and more in us through the incarnations. This is also what Goethe means when he says: “Whoever strives, we can redeem him. And if he has received love from above, the blessed host will give him a warm welcome!” And Christ meant nothing other by the term ‘grace’ than the ‘buddhi’ that bends down and draws our self up to itself.

Buddhi is grace. And this constant striving towards the realms that the theosophist calls the plane, the plan of buddhi, the plan of bliss, is what brings us knowledge. And every true knower, everyone who has come to knowledge, who has had knowledge, has realized that he has come from nature to grace and from there to glory. And that was Kepler's prayer. When he felt the full significance of his discovery within him, he was not the proud scholar who said, “I have now found it.” Rather, Kepler's mood was the mood from which his great discovery was born, and this mood was this:

"O thou who, through the light of nature, awakens in us a desire for the light of grace, in order to lead us through it to the light of glory, I thank you, Lord and Creator, that you have delighted me with your creation and that I have rejoiced in the works thy hands; behold, I have now finished the work of my calling, utilizing the measure of strength thou hast bestowed upon me; I have revealed to men the glory of thy works, as much as my limited mind could grasp of thy infinity. If anything has been presented by me that is unworthy of thee, or if I have sought my own honor, graciously forgive me.

The human soul is often called a reflection of the divine being. If one delves into this image, it becomes clear that one does not have one's being within oneself, but outside of oneself, that the higher self is outside and we can only reflect it. But then one also realizes that the human being is part of the higher self, is part of an eternal being. That the theosophists' images are not arbitrary may be proved to you again by a saying of Kepler's, a saying about the soul that coincides so completely with the theosophical truth about the soul: “I think about the soul somewhat like mirrors that the sun shines upon. If you stop perceiving them with your senses, they do not cease to be. They contain the expression of the Divine. Whatever is materialized in this dissolves.

What Kepler spoke, he overheard from the Spirit that spoke to him. This is mentioned here to show how the devotional mood comes into play in everything. No one can gain higher knowledge than the one who believes and allows himself to ascend to knowledge. He who knows that with every thought man lets a divine stream flow into him, he who is conscious of this, receives as a consequence the gift of higher knowledge. He who knows that knowledge is communion, also knows that it is nothing other than that which is symbolized in the Lord's Supper.

As holy and great as it can be grasped, it should be presented as the union with the world spirit. Those who feel unworthy must struggle to make themselves worthy and capable of the knowledge. Devotion is something that works wonders in this area. Those who do not know the mood of judgment are on the right path.

Young people usually make the mistake of judging too soon when they say, “I stand on such and such a point of view.” A young person must receive knowledge with reverence and respect. There is a difference between the person who criticizes from an early age and the person who receives knowledge devoutly. The Talmud lists seven qualities for those who want to become wise:

1. He does not speak first when a person of importance is present.
2. He does not interrupt anyone else's speech.
3. He does not answer hastily before thinking.
4. He asks and answers questions appropriately.
5. He discusses one topic after another in order.

This fifth rule is a golden rule for the present time. Go into a hundred modern meetings and see if you can find one in which things are handled properly and in order.

6. Of what he does not know, he admits: “I do not know.”
7. He confesses his error if he believes he has made one.

These are important sentences that look like very mundane rules of life, but they are infinitely important because they inspire reverence for knowledge, and that is what works more for spiritual knowledge than anything else. One must have experienced the difference in the auras of young people who have this reverent mood and those who do not. The clairvoyant can tell exactly whether someone is sitting, let us say, in a lecture hall and listening with real reverence, for then he has the blue and violet rays and currents in his aura. And then one can also tell exactly those listeners - especially among the student body they are frequent - who, even at the age of twenty, harbor the thought and also express it: I stand on this point of view; this seems right to me, this seems wrong to me. On the other hand, there are young people who, with a holy awe, only dare to open the door of some great man. And these come to the highest and furthest realization.

And then it is important that we keep order in our train of thought. The following words in «Light on the Way» seem to contain a contradiction. But anyone who wants to go higher must live with that. They must have two opposing sentences in front of them:

9. Strive only for that which dwells within you.
10. Strive only for that which lies beyond the self.

You may ask: Do I need both sentences and what for? Yes, we need both. And we want to be clear about both sentences, because that is where thought control lies. We must practice it so that we do not make one truth clear to us one-sidedly, but look at the world from all sides.

Let us first take the sentence: “Strive only for what dwells within you”, and then the second sentence, the second thought: “Strive only for what lies beyond the self.”

Life alternates between good and evil, between beauty and ugliness, and so on. These are things that always contradict each other. But we will only get to know the life of the mind if we do not get stuck in the details. We simply do not dwell on the contradictions, but understand that contradictions are what life is all about.

In this way, we practice thought control, always being aware that when we have conceived a thought, we must immediately seek the corresponding other, which relates to the former as hunger relates to satiety. In this way, one side of the thought is complemented by the other, just as light and shadow, positive and negative, complement each other. So our thoughts must follow a strict order. Let us therefore remember the rule: add to every thought its opposite! Those who follow this rule will gradually be able to live in a living spirituality. They will live in a spiritual life that is higher than the sensual.

When we have reached one level, we must be aware that there is an even higher level above us. After all, everything we can achieve now is such low levels compared to what we still have to achieve. It is not for nothing that Christian wisdom has said: No eye has seen, no ear has heard what God will show those who approach him lovingly.

The tenth thought in “Light on the Path”: “Strive only for that which lies beyond the self” is controlled by the eleventh:

11. Strive only for that which is always unattainable.

The writer of “Light on the Path” wrote under the influence of a highly developed master. “Light on the Path” was inspired by an Occidental master who carefully dictated every single sentence to the pen, word for word. The person who wrote the book was merely the scribe, the writing medium.

In the sense of this sentence: “Strive only for what is always out of reach.” Goethe also says at the height of his knowledge: “I praise only those who desire the unattainable.”

It is not important to understand these sentences, to be able to make them clear to one's mind. It is much more important to start the day with three such sentences, no matter how you have understood them. Let us begin, for example, with the sentence: “Strive only for what is always out of reach.” For the one who lives with this sentence, it will become an inner strength; it will become his own. But then a change can also be found in the aura. In certain places in the aura, somewhat darker circles can be found. The more a person develops, the more these dark spots, which look like wheels, change. And when a person begins to assimilate such sentences in lonely mental work, then these wheels begin to turn. These are the “wheels” of which the writings of the Indians and the representatives of the old religions speak. These are the “chakrams”, and when they begin to turn, then the higher knowledge begins.

12. For in you dwells the light of the world, - the only one that illuminates your path. If you cannot recognize it within you, you will seek it in vain elsewhere. And yet it lies beyond yourself. If you penetrate to it, you have lost yourself. And it is unattainable, for it always recoils. You may enter its circle of light, but you will never touch its flame. Notes by Rudolf Steiner for the lecture Berlin, March 14, 1904, cf. p. 48

AUM
“Seek the way“
“Seek the way in inner contemplation”
“Seek the way by boldly stepping out of yourself."

The last two sentences only appear to contradict each other. In reality, they express two extremely correct facts.

Inner contemplation is the first half of a path. At first, at his present stage of development, man lives in the sense perceptions of the outer world. Even when he processes these sense impressions with his intellect and reason, he still remains “outside”.

When he frees himself from the impressions of the senses and withdraws into himself, the power of thinking remains. This thinking is then emptied of its outer content. This is the “inner contemplation”. But precisely because thinking is “emptied”, new content can now flow into it from within.

And this content is of a spiritual nature, just as the previous content was of a sensual nature. But it is precisely because of this that the human being now steps out of himself again. He steps out of the sphere of the lower self into the “spiritual outside world”. And this is indicated by the sentence: “Seek the way by boldly stepping out of yourself”.

Now the mystic connects all three sentences with the syllable AUM. The A is first of all the holding on to the state in which man always finds himself at the present stage of his evolution.

The U is the symbol of inner contemplation and meditation, and the M is the stepping out into the spiritual outer world.

The saying:

More radiant than the sun
One than the snow
Finer than the ether
Is the self,
The spirit in my heart
This self is me,
I am this self.

every morning to our higher self. Such sayings are not invented by the arbitrariness of a personality, but they are taken from the spiritual world. Therefore, they contain much more than one usually believes. And one thinks correctly about them when one assumes that one can never fully fathom their content, but can always find more in them the more one delves into them. Therefore, the Esoteric School can only give a few hints as to how to search for the content. Some such hints are given below.

Brighter than the sun

Man sees the objects around him only when they are illuminated by the sun. What makes them visible are the sunbeams reflected from them into the eye of the beholder. If there were no light, things would not be visible. But only the objects of the physical world become visible through this external light. A light that is “brighter than the sun” must shine for the human being if he is to see the soul and spiritual beings and things. This light does not come from an external sun. It comes from the source of light that we ignite within ourselves when we seek out the higher, eternal self within us. This higher self has a different origin from the lower self. The latter perceives the everyday environment. But what lives in this everyday environment has come into being once and will pass away. What we feel about it has only a fleeting value itself. And our fleeting self is also built up from such feelings and the thoughts about them. All things that become visible through the sun have not existed once and they will no longer be once. And the sun also came into being once and will pass away one day. But the soul is there precisely to recognize the eternal in things. When the whole earth will no longer be, the souls that inhabited it will still be. And what these souls have experienced on earth, they will carry elsewhere as a memory. It is as if a person has done me a kindness. The deed passes away. But what he has thereby planted in my soul remains. And the bond of love that has connected me with him does not pass away. What we experience is always the origin of something lasting in us. We ourselves extract the lasting from things and carry it over into eternity. And when people are transplanted to a completely different scene in the future, they will bring with them what they have gathered here. And their deeds in the new world will be woven from the memory of the old. For there is no seed that does not produce fruit. If we are connected to a person in love, then this love is a seed, and we experience the fruit in all of the future, in that we belong to such a person in all of the future. So there is something in us that is interwoven with the divine power that connects all things to the eternal fabric of the world. This “something” is our higher self. And this is “brighter than the sun”. The light of the sun only illuminates a person from the outside. My soul sun illuminates him from the inside. That is why it is more radiant than the sun.

Purer than the snow

Every thing is pure in itself. It can only become polluted when it combines with something that should not be combined with it. Water is pure in itself. But the dirt contained in the water would also be pure if it were in itself, if it had not combined with the water unlawfully. Coal is pure in itself. It only becomes dirty when it combines with water improperly. When water takes on its own form in the snow crystal, it then separates out everything that has combined with it unlawfully. In the same way, the human soul becomes pure when it separates out everything that is wrongly connected to it. And the divine, the immortal, belongs to it. Every ideal, every thought of something great and beautiful belongs to the soul's inner form. And when it reflects on such ideals, on such thoughts, then it purifies itself, as water purifies itself when it becomes snow crystal. And because the spiritual is purer than all matter, the “higher self”, that is, the soul that lives in the heights, is “purer than the snow”.

Finer than ether

Ether is the finest substance. But all substance is still dense in relation to the soul. It is not the dense that remains, but the “fine”. The stone, thought of as substance, perishes as substance. But the thought of the stone that lives in the soul remains. God has thought this thought. And from this he made the dense stone. Just as ice is only condensed water, so the stone is only a condensed thought of God. All things are such condensed thoughts of God. But the higher self dissolves all things, and in it the thoughts of God then live. And when the self is woven from such thoughts of God, then it is “finer than the ether”.

The spirit in my heart

A person has only truly grasped a concept when they have grasped it with their heart. Intellect and reason are merely mediators for the perception of the heart. Through intellect and reason, one penetrates to the thoughts of God. But when one has such a thought, one must learn to love it. Little by little, one learns to love all things. This does not mean that he should uncritically attach his heart to everything he encounters. For our experience is initially deceptive. But if one endeavors to investigate a being or thing for its divine essence, then one also begins to love it. If I have a depraved person before me, I should not love his depravity. By doing so I would only be in error, and I would not help him. But when I think about how this person has come to his depravity, and when I help him to discard the depravity, then I help him, and I myself struggle through to the truth. I must look everywhere for how I can love. God is in all things, but I must first seek this divine in a thing. I should not love the outer appearance of a being or thing without further ado, for this is deceptive, and I could easily love error. But behind every illusion lies the truth, and that can always be loved. And when the heart seeks to love the truth in all beings, then the “spirit lives in the heart”. Such love is the garment that the soul should always wear. Then she herself weaves the divine into things.

The members of the school should use some free minutes of the day to attach such thoughts to the divine sayings of wisdom given to us by the Masters from an immeasurably great world experience. Never should they believe that they have already fully understood such a saying, but always assume that there is more to it than they have already found. Through such an attitude one acquires the feeling that in all true wisdom lies the key to the infinite, and through such an attitude one connects with this infinite.

It is not important to meditate on many sentences, but to let a few live again and again in the soul that has become calm.

In meditation itself, one should speculate little, but calmly let the content of the meditation sentences take effect on oneself. But apart from meditation in the free moments of the day, one should come back to the content of the meditation sentences again and again and see what reflections one can draw from them. Then they become a living force that sinks into the soul and makes it strong and powerful. For when the soul unites with eternal truth, it itself lives in the eternal. And when the soul lives in the eternal, then the higher beings have access to it and can infuse their own power into it.

Sayings to the respective spirit of the day, so-called sayings of the day, with which the esoteric hours were begun from a certain point in time.

”... seven sayings that are distributed over the seven days of the week. You practice them by immersing yourself on Friday in the saying for Saturday, on Saturday in the saying for Sunday, and so on. You can do this several times a day and try to absorb the depth of each saying for 20 to 30 minutes. You will gain a great deal from it in terms of connecting with the mystery of the all-pervading seven."

Rudolf Steiner to Michael Bauer, August 4, 1907 (GA 264)

Friday evening for Saturday — Saturn

Great all-embracing Spirit,

You who filled endless space
when not one of my limbs was still present:
You were.
I lift up my soul to You.
I was in You.
I was a part of Your power.
You sent forth Your forces,
and in the earth's earliest beginning, my body's first archetype was reflected. I myself was in your sent out powers.You were. My archetype looked at you. It looked at myself, who was a part of you. You were.

Saturday evening for Sunday – Sun

Great all-embracing Spirit,
many archetypes sprang from Your life,
back then, when my life forces
did not yet exist.
You were.
I lift up my soul to You.
I was in You.
I was a part of Your powers.
You connected Yourself
with the earth's primeval beginning
to the sun of life
and gave me the power of life.
In Your radiant life forces
I was myself.
You were.
My life force radiated in Yours
into space.
My body began its becoming
in time.
You were.

Sunday evening to Monday — Moon

Great all-embracing Spirit,
in Your life forms, feeling shone,
when my feeling
did not yet exist.
You were.
I lift up my soul to You.
I was in You.
I was part of Your feelings.
You connected Yourself
with the earth's primordial beginning,
and in my body began
the radiance of my own feeling.
In Your feelings
I felt myself.
You were.
My feelings felt your essence within itself.
My soul began to be within itself,
because you were within me.
You were.

Monday to Tuesday – Mars

Great all-encompassing Spirit,
in your sensations lived realization,
when realization had not yet been given to me.
You were.
I lift up my soul to you.
I moved into my body.
In my sensations I lived myself.
You were in the sun of life.
In my feeling
lived your being as my being.
My soul's life
was outside of your life.
You were.
My soul felt its own being within itself.
Longing arose in it.
The longing for you,
from which it became.
You were.

Tuesday for Wednesday – Mercury

Great all-embracing spirit,
in the knowledge of your nature is knowledge of the world,
which shall become mine.
You are.
I want to unite my soul with you.
Your cognizant leader
illuminates my path.
Feeling your leader
I stride through the pathway of life.
Your guide is in the sun of life.
He lived in my yearning.
I want to absorb its essence
into mine.
You are.
My strength absorbs
the strength of the guide within itself.
Bliss draws into me.
The bliss in which the soul
finds the spirit.
You are.

Wednesday to Thursday – Jupiter

Great all-embracing spirit,
in Thy light the life of the earth shines,
my life is in Thine.
You are.
My soul works in Thine.
With Thy guide I go my way.
I live with Him.
His essence is an image
of my own essence.
You are.
The guide's essence in my soul
finds You, all-embracing Spirit.
Bliss is mine
from the breath of Thy being.
You are.

In another transcript, the third-last line reads: “Bliss becomes mine.

Thursday to Friday – Venus

Great all-embracing spirit,
in Thy life I live with the earth's life.
In Thee I am.
Thou art.
I am in Thee.
The leader has brought me to you.
I live in you.
Your spirit is
the image of my own being.
You are.
Spirit has found
the all-embracing spirit.
Divine bliss strides
towards new world-creation.
You are. I am. You are.

[Previous Every Day ¹]

Great all-embracing Spirit,
my I rises from below upwards,
may it intuit You in Your all-embracing.
The spirit of my being may be illumined
with the light of Your messengers,
the soul of my being may be kindled
by the fire-flames of Your servants
The will of my ego may grasp
the power of Your creative word.
You are.
Your light shine in my spirit,
Your life warm my soul,
Your essence permeate my will,
that my ego may grasp
Your light's radiance,
Your life's loving warmth,
Your essence's words of creation.
You are.

• 1. This information, missing in the original, was added by Marie Steiner for the first printing in “Aus den Inhalten der Esoterischen Schule”, Book III, Dornach 1951.

This is the second lecture in the series entitled: Art and the Experiencing of Art. This lecture is also known as: The Being of the Arts.

Let us imagine a great snow-clad plain spread out before us and upon it here and there rivers and lakes hard frozen. The neighboring sea is mostly frozen over close to shore; further out huge floes are drifting; occasional stunted trees and bushes lift heads heavy with snow and icicles. It is evening. The sun has already set, leaving behind the golden splendor of its afterglow.

Before our eyes are two female figures and out of the afterglow is born—we might say is sent forth—a messenger from the higher worlds, who stands before the women and listens with close attention to what they are telling of their inmost feelings and experiences.

One of the two standing there hugs her arms tightly to her body, cowers together, and exclaims: “I am freezing cold.” The eyes of the other woman wander over the snow-clad plain, out to the frozen waters and over the trees thick with hanging icicles, and from her lips burst forth the words “how glorious this whole landscape is.” She is utterly heedless of her own feelings, utterly oblivious to her physical suffering from the cold. We feel warmth streaming into her heart, for she has no attention to spare for her physical bodily discomfort, being inwardly overwhelmed by the wonderful beauty of this chill and frozen scene. Then the sun sinks further and further, the color fades out of the afterglow and the two friends fall into a deep slumber. One of them, the one who had been so acutely conscious of the cold in her bodily self, sinks into a sleep which might easily become fatal; the other sinks into a sleep in which we can recognize the influence of the emotion expressed in the words “How glorious,” which continues to warm her limbs and keep them full of life throughout her slumber. And she hears the youth who, born out of the glory of the afterglow, says to her these words, “Thou art Art”; and then she falls asleep.

With her she took into her slumbers all the results of the impressions made upon her by the landscape which has been described; and a sort of dream mingled with her sleep. And yet it was not a dream, but in a certain way a reality, although of a unique kind akin to dreaming in its form. It was the manifestation of a reality which this woman's soul had barely been able to conceive before. For the experience that befell her was not a dream; it merely resembled one. That which she experienced may be described as “astral imagination.” And if we are to describe her visions we cannot do it otherwise than by setting forth in words the picture by means of which “imaginative” perception speaks.

For the soul of this woman became aware at that moment what the event signalized. By the words of the youth, “Thou art Art,” can be described intimately only by clothing the experiences of the imaginative perceptions in words. Accordingly let us thus clothe the impressions received by the soul of that woman through the channel of this imaginative percept.

The Dance

When her inner senses awoke and she began to take note of her surroundings, she became aware of a remarkable figure—very different in appearance from that which purely physical experience would lead one to anticipate in a spiritual figure, for it was poor in those characteristics which recall the world of the physical senses. The only manner in which it called to mind the world of the physical senses was by its outline, which resembled three interlacing circles. The circles stood one upon another, much as if one were horizontal, another vertical, the third running from right to left; and the currents which flowed through these circles and made their presence known were not reminiscent of any impression received by the physical senses; rather did they recall something purely psychic, something which can only be compared with the impressions and feelings of the soul. But a something streamed out from this figure which can best be described by saying that it was like a deep and repressed inner sorrow concerning some event. When the soul of the woman observed this she made up her mind to enquire “What is the cause of thy sorrow?” and this is the answer which came to her from that figure belonging to the spirit world: “Indeed, I have a real reason for manifesting this emotion, for I belong to a high spiritual race. I appear to thee now just as a human soul would appear, but thou must soar far into the realms of the hierarchies to discover the place whence I come. My sorrow is that mankind on the other side of my life, in the physical world where at present we are not dwelling, has robbed me of the last of my off-spring. I have descended to this level from the higher hierarchies, but men have torn the last of my descendants from me, taken him to live among them and chained him to a rock-like structure, after making him as little as possible.

Thereupon, this woman's soul felt drawn upon to ask, “Who exactly art thou? At this moment I can only describe things with the words which I remember as the result of life on the physical plane. How canst thou make me comprehend thy nature and the nature of thy offspring whom mankind has enchained?”

And the Spirit answered: “Over yonder in the physical world men describe me as one of the senses—as quite a minor sense—which they call equilibrium, which has become quite little, and is composed of three incomplete circles attached to one another in the ear. This is my last tiny offspring. They have torn him from me into the other world, and taken away that which belonged to him here, namely, the power to move freely in any direction. Similarly they have broken each of the circles, and attached him firmly on each side to a base. In this realm—as thou seest me now—I am not attached: I show perfect circles which ever way you look at me; I am complete in every direction. Now for the first time thou seest my real form.”

Thereupon the woman's soul felt compelled to ask, “In what way can I help thee?”

The figure from the spirit world replied, “Thou canst only help me by uniting thy soul with mine, and bringing into me over here all that men learn during physical life yonder through the sense of equilibrium. Thou wilt then grow to be a part of me; thou wilt become as great as I am myself; in this way thou wilt liberate thy sense of equilibrium and raise thyself—a spiritually free being—above thy attachment to the earth!”

And the soul of the woman did so. She became one with that figure of the spirit world. And in becoming one with it she became aware that she must carry out some purpose. So she put one foot in front of the other, changing repose into movement, and changing movement into dance, completed it as a form.

“Now thou hast transformed me!” cried the figure from the spirit world. Now I have become that which I can only become through thy agency if thou continuest to behave as thou hast just been behaving. Now I have become a part of thee, and become so in a manner that men can have only guessed at my real being. Now I have become the art of dance. Because thou hast will to remain a soul and hast not united thyself with physical matter, thou hast been enabled to set me free. And at the same time thou hast, by thine ordered steps, led me up to the spiritual hierarchies to which I belong, to the Spirits of Motion; and thou hast led me to the Spirits of Form by grouping thy steps into a rhythmic pattern. Thou hast brought me myself to Spirits of Form. But at present thou mayest go no further; for wert thou to advance but one step beyond what thou hast already done for me all that thou hast done would become useless. For it is the Spirits of Form who are charged with the bringing about of everything in the earth's evolution. Wert thou to intrude upon the mission of the Spirits of Form thou wouldst destroy everything thou hast accomplished; for thou couldst not help falling into the reign spoken of as the “Furnace of desire” by those who on earth describe the appearance of the spiritual worlds. Thy spiritual dance would be transformed into one arising out of mad passion. So long as men act on their very slightest knowledge of me as exhibited in their dances of today. But by doing only what thou hast just done and by grouping them into form thou makest in thy steps a copy of those mighty measures performed by planets and suns in the sky in order first to create the physical world of the senses!”

The Stage

The soul of the woman continued to live on in this condition of consciousness. And another spirit figure approached her—also very different in appearance from that which men, with their physical sense-perception, usually conceive when they think of a spirit form. The figure which confronted her was so to speak, bounded by a horizontal plane and consisted of only two dimensions, but it presented one unique characteristic. Although it was bounded by a horizontal plane, the soul of the woman, being in the condition of imaginative perception, could behold both sides of it at once, and this figure showed two totally different aspects—one on one side and one on the other.

Again the soul of the woman put a question to the figure, “Who art thou?”

And this figure replied, “My home is in the higher regions. I have come down to the region known to you as the region of the spirit, and which here is called the Region of the Archangels. I have descended to this level and was obliged to do so in order to come into touch with the physical realm of earth. But mankind tore the last of my offspring from me and took him away; and over yonder they have imprisoned him in their own physical form, where they call him one of their senses and describe him as the sense of individual movement—as that living part of themselves by which they move their limbs and other portions of their body.

And the soul of the woman asked, “What can I do for thee?” Thereupon also this figure said, “Make thine own being one with mine, so that thine own being becomes a part of mine!”

The soul of the woman did so. And she became one with this spirit figure and slipped entirely into it. Once more did this woman's soul expand, waxing great and beautiful. And the spirit figure said to her, Behold, by doing this thou has won the ability to endow the souls of men upon the physical plane with a special faculty which is exercised by a part of that nature which the youthful messenger assigned to thee; for by doing this thou hast become what is known as the “Art of pantomime, the art of expression by mimicry.”

And since the soul of this woman still kept a memory of her earthly form, for she had been asleep but a little while, she could pour into that form everything now contained in the figure before her. And she became the archetype of the art of acting.

“But thou must only go a certain distance,” said the figure from the spirit world. “Thou mayest only pour into the form just what thou expressest by movement. As soon as thou pourest in thine own desires, thou wilt distort the form into a grimace, and the destiny of thine art will be cut short. That is what mankind has been doing over there. They have been putting their desires and passions into their mimic pantomime in order to express themselves; But thou must let only selflessness come to expression; thus thou becomest merged with the archetype of the art of acting.”

Sculpture

The soul of the woman continued to live on in this state of consciousness, and another spirit figure drew near which veritably made itself manifest only on one plane, moving only along a line. The soul of the woman observed that this spirit figure also, moving on one plane was sorrowing, and when she enquired ““What can I do for thee?” the figure replied, “My home is in higher regions, in loftier spheres. But I have descended through the realms of the hierarchies to the one known to thee through the care of occult science as the Region of the Spirits of Personality, of which men possess only a copy,” For this figure too had to confess that on coming into touch with humanity it had lost the last of its offspring. And the figure continued, “Men call the last of my offspring their vitality, their sense of being alive, as long as they are on earth, meaning that which makes them aware of their own personalities; that which permeates them in the form of a momentary mood or pleasure, and that which lends energy and persistence to their individual forms. But they have fettered this sense in themselves.”

“What can I do for thee?” asked the soul of the woman. Once more the figure demanded, “Thou must make thyself a part of mine own being. Thou must abandon all human feeling of selfhood and dissolve thyself in my form—thou must merge thyself in me and become one with me!”

And the soul of the woman did so. And she became aware that although the figure had an extension on only one plane, she herself was filled with power radiating in every direction, and that she was now completely occupying the body that she wore on Earth, the body she remembered and which appeared to her here the more radiant and beautiful in consequence. Then the spirit figure said, “By this act of thine thou hast attained to something which endows thee with another individual talent in the great domain after which thou hast been named. At this moment thou hast become that which mankind over yonder possesses, though only as a possibility; thou hast become one with the archetype of the Art of Sculpture”

The soul of the woman became merged with the archetype of sculpture, and could now itself pour out a talent into the souls of men by reason of that which it had taken up into itself. By the aid of that Spirit of Personality she was able to pour this into the souls of men; she could do this in the form of talent. And by doing so she endowed mankind upon the earth with plastic fancy, with the ability to create in plastic outline.

“But thou must not go a step further than thou hast gone! Thou must abide entirely within the limits of thy form. For that which is in thee may only be taken up as far as the Spirits of Form and the regions where they dwell. For if thou goest beyond, thou wilt function as the realm which arouses human passions; if thou dost not stay within the limits of noble form nothing good can possibly be wrought within thy sphere. But if thou abidest within the noble confines of thy form, thou canst pour into that form that which can only be realized in the distant future. And then, although humanity is far from having attained the bodies by means of which they can enact with purity of life that which to-day is given over to quite other forces within them, Thou wilt be allowed to show them what humanity will at some time experience in a purified state, upon the future planet of Venus, when their bodies will have become quite different from what they are now. Thou canst contrast them with the human forms of to-day, and show how pure and chaste the human form of the future is to be.”

And out of the sea of changing figures in the imaginative perception there arose something resembling the archetype of the Venus of Milo.

“Thou mayst go only a certain length in the moulding of form. The instant thou passest the boundaries of form even a little, as soon as thou destroyest the powerful personality whose office it is to hold the human form together, thou standest at the boundary of that which can be beautiful and a work of art.”

And once more a form arose from the tossing waves of the changing sea of astral imaginative world. And it's aspect disclosed that its content had brought the human figure to the edge of the boundary where the form would break the coherence of the personality, where the personality would be lost is a step or two further were taken. And the form of the Laokoon arose out of the picture in the astral world.

Architecture

And the soul of the woman continued to enjoy new experiences in the world of imagination. A figure now drew near concerning which she knew, “This being is not to be found yonder on the physical plane; the physical plane contains nothing capable of manifesting it; I am becoming aware of it for the first time. There are so many things upon the physical plane which distantly recall this figure—but nothing so complete in outline as that which I see here.” It was a strangely austere figure which, in response to an inquiry of the woman's soul, announced that its home was in wide-flung regions, not merely in lofty ones, but that at present it was obliged to function in the realm of the hierarchies known as the Spirits of Form. “Mankind over yonder.” Said this figure to the soul of the woman, “has never been able to give an exact representation of me, or bring anything into being which exactly corresponds to me. For my form, as it appears here, does not exist on the physical plane. Therefore they had to break me into pieces, and only through my having been shattered by them I am able to lend thee certain faculties, if thou accomplishest that which thou canst accomplish by joining thyself to me and becoming one with me. By this means thou canst place a creative picture-making faculty in the souls of men. But because this faculty is torn to bits in the world of men the whole of it can only appear as scattered fragments which come up individually here and there. No part of me can be termed a human sense, and therefore mankind has been unable to bind me. They have only been able to tear me to pieces. From me too have they taken my last offspring; but they have torn him into pieces.”

Once again—not shrinking for the moment from the sacrifice of being torn to pieces—did the soul of this woman unite herself with this spirit being. Thereupon the spirit being said to her, “Now thou hast once more become, through this act of thine, another individual faculty of that which thou hast been called as a whole; thou hast become the archetype of architecture, and of the art of building. Thou canst bestow upon mankind the archetype of architectural fancy, by pouring into their souls that which thou hast just attained. But thou wilt be only able to bestow upon them an architectural fancy showing them single ideas if thou wilt follow up these ideas by which they will be able to build structures having the effect of something spreading downwards from the spiritual world, such as the Pyramids represent.”

“Thou wilt endow men with the ability to make what can only be a copy of what I am, by leading them to devote the science of building to the erection of a spiritual temple and not to the construction of something to be used for earthly purpose, and causing them to impress this character on its very exterior.” And now there appeared—as the pyramid had formerly arisen from the tossing astral sea—the Greek Temple.

And another figure arose out of this tossing astral sea—a figure that did not strive downwards from above, seeking to broaden out below, but one that strove upwards, becoming younger the higher it ascended; a third figure into which architectural fancy had to be born:—the Gothic Cathedral.

Painting

And the soul of this woman continued to live on within the world of the imagination, and another figure came up to her, even stranger and still more remarkable than the preceding. Something streamed out of it which felt like the warmth of love, and something again that produced quite a chilling effect

“Who art thou” said the soul of the woman.

“I have a name rightly applied over yonder among those only on the physical plane who bring men intelligence from the spiritual world. They understand how to apply only my name correctly, for I am called intuition, and I come hither from a wide-flung realm. And inasmuch as I have taken my way from a wide-flung realm to come down into the world I may say that I have come from the realm of Seraphim!”

This figure of intuition was of the nature of the Seraphim. And once more the soul of the woman said, “What dost thou desire me to do?”

“Thou must unite thyself with me! Thou must dare to unite thyself with me! Then wilt thou be able to kindle in the souls of mankind on earth a faculty which again is a part of their inventive activity, and whereby thou wilt become an individual faculty in that whole which the youth earlier described thee as being”

The soul of the woman resolutely undertook this deed, and by so doing she became something which was in actual fact very different and very remote from a human bodily figure, something which could have been appreciated only by one who has looked deep into the soul of man himself. For that into which the soul of the woman had been transformed could only be compared with something purely astral, something etheric within it.

“Because thou didst this,” said the seraphic spirit figure named Intuition, “thou art now capable of endowing men with the faculty which consist of representing ideas in color, and thus hast become the archetype of the art of painting. Thou wilt therefore be able to kindle faculty in men; to bestow it upon one of their senses, the eye, which contains a property that in its thought-activity is not affected by the individual human ego—namely comprehensive outlook upon the outer world—now that thou thyself possessest the painter's gift for visualizing ideas in color. And through this sense men will be able to see, shining through the surface of things which appear lifeless and soulless to ordinary vision, their soul being. Men will be able through this faculty of yours, to animate with soul all the qualities of color and of form. Which they ordinarily discern upon the surface of things. Moreover, they will so make use of their art that soul shall speak through form, and that color shall not convey merely an external sense-impression, but that the color which they spread with magical skill upon their canvas shall relate something about the inner nature of color, just as everything having its origin in me passes outwards from the inmost recesses. Thou wilt be able to give men a faculty by means of which they can, by their own soul-light, carry even into lifeless nature, otherwise regarded as a mere soulless mass of forms and colors, the quality known as soul-motion. And thou wilt be able to give them the means of transforming that motion into repose, and so fixing the changeable aspects of the outer physical world. The fleeting momentary tints down which the glory of the rising sun noiselessly speeds—the colors to be found in lifeless nature—these thou wilt teach them to preserve!”

And a picture rose out of the surging sea of imaginative world, a picture representing a landscape. And another picture rose up representing something else which the spirit figure explained by the following comment: “That which occurs in the experience of human life, whether the time be long or short, whether it takes place in a minute or an hour or in centuries, and which is concentrated into one short moment, that experience thou wilt teach men to record through this faculty which thou art bestowing upon them. Even when the past and the future cross each other with a mighty sweep, even when the two movements of the past and future collide, wilt thou instruct men how to record the instant of the collision as a point of undisturbed rest lying between them.” And out of the tossing world of imagination rose Leonardo da Vinci's picture The Last Supper.

“But thou wilt have difficulties as well. And thy greatest difficulties will occur when thou allowest men to exercise this faculty of thine upon objects already possessed of movement and soul, objects into which they have already sent movement and soul from the physical plane. There it will be the boundary where the copy of the original archetype which thou art, can still be called “Art.” “Yet danger is close at hand. And out of the tossing sea of the imaginative world rose the Portrait.

Music

And the soul of the woman continued to live on in the imaginative world. Another figure approached her—a strange figure once again, and one resembling nothing to be found in the physical world—also one that maybe termed a “heavenly figure” and not to be compared with anything upon the physical plane. The soul of the woman asked, “Who art thou?” and the figure replied, I have on earth a name that is rightly employed by those only who bring messages to men from the spirit world; these people call me Inspiration. I come hither from a wide-flung realm, but my immediate abode is in the region known—where the spiritual world is spoken of among men—as the region of the Cherubim.”

The figure from the realm of the Cherubim freed itself from the embrace of the imaginative world. Again to a question asked by the soul of the woman, “What can I do for thee? What am I to do?” it answered, “Thou must transform thyself into myself. Thou must become one with me!”

Despite the danger attendant on such an action, the soul of the woman dissolved itself into the being of this Cherubim. And when she did this, she became still more unlike all physical forms which are to be found upon earth. While one could say of the former figure, “There is at least something having analogy with it to be found on earth,” one could only describe this figure by saying that it possessed a being utterly foreign to everything earthly and incapable of being compared with anything on earth. The very soul of the woman became quite unlike all earthly things; her appearance became such that one could see that she had herself passed over into a spirit realm, and belonged, with her whole being, to the spirit realm, which is not found in the world of the senses.

“Because thou hast done this, thou canst implant a faculty in the souls of men. And when this faculty is absorbed into the souls of men on earth, it will live in those souls in the form of musical fancy. Men will have nothing they can take from outside, so far has thy faculty estranged them from the earth—they will have nothing external upon which to record the impression received by the soul itself beneath thy inspiring influence. They must fan those impressions into flame in a new manner by means of a sense with which they are familiar in quite a different connection. They will have to give a new form to the sense of tone; they will have to find the musical tone in their own souls, as if they were creating from heavenly heights! And when men create in this fashion, something will flow out of their own individual souls which will be like a human reflection of all that can only grow and blossom imperfectly in external nature. From the human soul will flow reflected forth the murmuring of the brook, the power of the wind, the roll of the thunder. It will not be a copy of these things, but something that will step forth as self-evidently a sister of all these beauties of nature which flow, as it were, out of unknown spirit depths. This is what will surge forth from out of the souls of men. They will be enabled to create something that will enrich the earth, which is new to the earth, that would not have come into existence without this faculty of thine—something that is like a seed for the future of the earth. And thou wilt confer on them the ability to express certain living emotions in their souls which never could be uttered if mankind were confined to their present endowments of thought and conception. All the feelings which cause human language to shrivel up, or which would freeze to death if they were dependent upon verbal conception would be sheer poison, will attain through thee the possibility of breathing out the innermost being of the soul over the circumference of the earth, upon the wings of song and ballad, and the imprinting upon that circumference something that would otherwise not be there. All complicated and profound emotions, all emotions existing like a mighty world itself within the human soul—emotions which could otherwise never come to external expression in such shape and which could only be experienced by exploring, by means of the human soul, universal history and cosmic space and all other realms shut out from external experience (for all the opposing currents flowing through centuries and millennia would have to flow into the picture in order to show what mankind has learned at one time and another)—all this can be compressed by men, through thy faculty and poured into a form which they have made their own—the musical symphony.”

And the soul of the woman understood how one brings down what we call inspiration from the spirit heights of the world, and how this should be expressed by the normal human soul; she understood that this can only be expressed by musical sound. The soul of the woman now knew that if the occult investigator desires to describe the world of inspiration, and if this world is to be reproduced upon the physical plane by physical means so as to be more than a mere copy—if it is to be presented directly to human beings, this can only be accomplished through a musical work of art. And the soul of the woman understood how a musical composition could express such a stupendous event as Ouranos kindling his own emotion in the fire of Gaia's love, or how it could portray what happened when Kronos desired to illuminate his inner spirit nature with the light of Zeus!

Such were the deep experiences attained by the soul of that woman through contact from the Cherubim.

Poetry

And the soul of the woman continued to live on into that which is called the imaginative world. And another figure approached her: once again very different from anything to be found upon earth. To the question of the woman's soul, “Who art thou?” this spirit figure replied, “My name is only used correctly by those in the physical world who declare spiritual events to men. For I am Imagination! My home is in a distant country, but from that far country I have betaken myself to that region of the hierarchies known as the region of the Spirits of Will.”

“What can I to do for thee?” the soul of the woman once more enquired.

This figure also demanded that the soul of the woman should unite its own being with this figure from the Spirits of Will. And once more the soul of the woman became very unlike the ordinary soul figure; she was transformed entirely into a figure of soul.

“By doing this thou hast obtained the ability to breathe into the souls of men that faculty which men on earth know as poetic or lyric fancy. Thou hast become the archetype of poetic fancy. And through thee, men will be able to express in speech something they could never express if they were to cleave to the outer world with a desire to reproduce only what is found in the physical world. Thou wilt endow men with the ability to express through thy fancy all that comes into touch with their own will, and which could not be expressed in any other form or stream out of the human soul through earthly means. Thou wilt enable men to express this. On the wings of thy rhythm and thy meter and all the gifts thou wilt be able to offer to men, they will express things for which speech would otherwise be far too coarse an instrument. Thou wilt enable them to express that which otherwise could not be expressed at all.”

And in the vision of Poetry there appeared the events of the centuries in the history of nations, and its inspiring effect upon entire races.

“Moreover, thou wilt be able to compass something that could never be represented by any outward physical event. Thy messengers will be the skalds and the poets of all the ages. They will put into their epics the compact history of human epochs, and thou wilt be able to lend a magic life upon the stage to the forms assumed by the will when heated passions are arrayed against one another. Thou wilt now show, how men, fighting upon solid earth, would vie in vain, how the shock of conflicting passions brings death to one side and victory to the other. Thou wilt give men the possibility of dramatic art!”

And the soul of the woman became aware at this moment of an inner experience such had only to be described by the use of our earthly expression “an awakening.”

How did she come to awake? She woke up by becoming aware of what we may call reflected images of things not to be found upon the earth itself. She herself had become of one nature with imagination. That which lives on our earth as poetry is a reflection of imagination. The soul of the woman beheld the reflection of imagination in the art of poetry. And through beholding this she awoke. She had to forsake the dreamlike spiritual world, it is true, by reason of her awakening; yet she had come at any rate to a region that resembles—though it be but a lifeless reflection thereof—the spirit life of spiritual imagination. This is how she came to wake.

And when she awoke she observed that the night had passed. Once more the snow-clad landscape lay stretching around her; the drifting icebergs were floating off the shore and the icicles hanging on the trees. But as she awoke she noticed the other woman lying by her side, nearly rigid with the cold she had endured without being inwardly warmed by the impression “Oh! How glorious!” which her companion had received from this snowy scene. The soul of the woman who had encountered all these experiences during the night now became aware that the other woman, who had nearly frozen to death from inability to receive impressions in the spirit world, was Human Knowledge! And she took charge of her in order to be able to bestow upon her some of her own warmth. She comforted and tended her, and the other woman gradually grew warm under the influence of what the soul of her companion had brought back as the result of her night's experiences.

In the east the dawn heralding the sun's approach begins to spread over the landscape, and its glow grows rosier and rosier. And now that she is awake the soul of the woman who had met with these experiences during the night can behold and hear the things that human creatures all the world over speak about when they have had a dim inner intimation of realities that can be experienced in the world of the imagination. She hears amid the chorus of human voices the utterances sung by the noblest among them, representing their conjectures about matters upon which they are in no wise informed by imagination, but which they let pour out of the innermost depths of their soul as a beacon for mankind. She hears the voice of the poet who has apprehended the majesty of the experience that can come into the human soul out of the imaginative world. She understands now that she must act as the savior of what upon earth is half frozen knowledge; she understands that she must warm it and permeate it with her own nature, especially with her art nature, and that she must recount the memories of her dreams during the night to this half frozen knowledge. And she observes how that which was half congealed can thaw into life again with the speed of the wind, so soon as knowledge accepts in the form of perception that which is brought to it in the form of revelation.

Once again she gazes into the dawn which becomes a symbol to her of the state out of which she has awakened, and a symbol also of her own imaginings. And she understands the lines of the poet who has sung so wisely as the outcome of his premonitions. That which her new spiritual powers sang to her now comes ringing from the whole wide earth:—

Only through the dawn of Beauty
Shalt thou reach the realm of Truth!

Since Ms. Wandrey's illness has prevented her from giving her Faust lectures during our time together in Berlin, I would like to make some brief and rather random remarks about Goethe's “Faust” this morning. I have often lectured on Faust and I hope to one day put together a compilation of what I have said in various lectures in a smaller publication. The Faust theme is an extraordinarily comprehensive one on the one hand, and on the other hand it is extraordinarily difficult, difficult because there are probably not many works of world literature that are as inextricably linked to their author as Goethe's Faust is to Goethe. We need only consider the fact that Goethe brought with him to Weimar a kind of first form of the Faust legend, which he had developed as a Faust legend, and that in Weimar, in a relatively early period, he only had to add a little and work it out in detail, and then he could read it aloud. It is the figure that was published at the end of the 19th century, found in a copy that bears the rather distasteful name “Goethe's Urfaust”. So with this we actually have the Faust figure before us, which Goethe had very early on. Then we have a version of the Faust poem that Goethe published in 1790 out of certain feelings, a “Faust fragment”. I say out of certain feelings, of course, because the fact that Goethe published it was associated with the fact that Goethe actually despaired of finishing this Faust poem at the time. So it was a matter of repelling what he had thought up to that point because he no longer saw any possibility of continuing it. Then we have the form in which 'Faust' appeared in the early 19th century. That is roughly our first part today with the 'Dedication', the 'Prologue in Heaven' and so on. But that is not the end of it, because the “Helena Scene” was already finished at the time, and this now appears as the third act of the second part, so that at the time when Goethe had this figure of “Faust”, he already had in his feelings and thoughts a connection between this Faust figure and the figure of Helen. And then, in 1824, when Goethe was seventy-five years old, he energetically set about rounding off the second part and making it into a full-fledged poem, which he then left as a testament after his death.

We therefore have a piece of writing before us that not only accompanied Goethe throughout his entire life, on which he not only worked throughout his entire life, but which also continually changed its entire inner structure, content, form, conception, everything at all in the course of time. To this we must add that Goethe shows himself in this “Faust” as one of the most truthful poets that we find in world literature. For in writing Faust, his aim was never to present something outwardly beautiful or perfect, but always to give what he could give out of the deepest, innermost sincerity, to give unadorned what his soul had grasped as truth at the time. If we add to this the fact that this Goethean life was a striving through and through, that we can follow how this Goethean life developed and rose from decade to decade, how Goethe thought and recognized new things, formed relationships to new worlds, then we will recognize the importance that lies in the fact that Goethe always let what was in him flow into the Faustian poetry. So it could well be that here and there his “Faust” seemed rather questionable to him, when he undertook what he had written decades ago. In the meantime, he had progressed. Now, what he had created years ago is to be continued.

One thing will be considered here to take a look into Goethe's soul with the help of “Faust”. If you take what has now been published as “Urfaust”, you have something that you can call: It is approximately what brought Goethe to Weimar and rounded off the first Weimar years. It is something that could be called the poetry of a young, extraordinarily talented poet who, however, has not yet been able to bring much of what was actually in his soul out of his soul for himself. For this form of Faust poetry still lacks all the connections that Goethe would later in life call connections with the spiritual world. There are actually only the external, quite realistic human scenes that could be conceived in such youthfulness. It is self-evident that people who want to remain in such a relationship to the spiritual world all their lives, and who do not want to see the becoming, the development in Goethe, find contradictions. Of them, Goethe said:

They praise Faust,
And what else
In my writings roars
In their favor.

The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much;
It means the riffraff
One would no longer

But let us look at Goethe's situation, let us look at the matter with regard to Goethe's soul. We can stop at the time when Goethe was in Italy, when he was in Rome, that is, in the second half of the penultimate decade of the 18th century, 1787 to 1788. What happened in the time between when Goethe wrote what is now combined in the Urfaust, until the time in the Goethean soul when he was in Italy, when he regarded as most appropriate the form of art he had given in “Tasso” and in “Iphigenia”? Consider what it means that it is the same personality that had already written the strange, chaotic “Götz von Berlichingen” in its first form on the one hand and then gave the wonderfully rounded form in “Tasso” and “Iphigenie” on the other. It is the same person. For reasons that will become clear later, when we no longer know that these works are by the same poet, it will be possible to prove that the same poet could not possibly have written these things. We can say that there were already different people in Goethe himself in the truest sense of the word. In 1775, Goethe had overcome Goethe, and in 1788, it was the Goethe who wrote “Hexenküche” (Witch's Kitchen) in the Villa Borghese in Rome and the wonderful scene “Sublime Spirit, thou gavest me, gavest me everything, why I asked”. It is a fact of profound significance for our knowledge of Goethe's soul that the images of the original Faust, which he wrote in youthful titanic rebellion against the prevailing intellectual currents, arise before Goethe's spirit in the same mood in which “Götz von Berlichingen” was created. In Rome, the same Goethe felt the urge to bring measure and harmony into his conception and to take up the old figures again. He must again honestly and sincerely add something from his present to Faust, seek to continue Faust himself, as he himself has progressed. That was a very difficult situation. The earlier time is no longer there, but it confronted the poet Goethe. He would have had to rewrite everything that had been written so far, or he had something in front of him that was really as if he, at the age of forty, had his figure at seventeen, twenty-five, thirty, and so on, as if he had all that in front of him. And again, if he had completely reworked the whole of Faust, it would not have been true, because he would not have expressed the mood that was in him when he was interested in these scenes. All this makes the Faust legend so tremendously important and so unfit for the philistinism we find in life. But there is still something in Goethe when he wrote the “witch's cauldron” and the scene “sublime spirit”, there is still something there.

What had already occurred before Goethe? Goethe had approached everything that was in his soul, the fourth post-Atlantic cultural period, the Greek-Latin period. He is full of enthusiasm for this fourth post-Atlantic cultural period, for the Greek-Latin period. I have the suspicion, he wrote from Italy, that I am on the trail of the laws of Greek art. The artists proceeded according to the same laws that nature itself follows. After reading Spinoza deeply to find God in nature, when he stands before the works of art in Italy, what appears to him as art, stands before him, as he said: “Here is necessity, here is God.” Now, he felt himself confronted with what he had absorbed in the north from a culture in which what had emerged as the first dawn of the fifth post-Atlantic cultural period had essentially played a role. No matter how strange some of the beliefs, legends, and superstitions that emerged during the strange twilight of the Middle Ages may seem, they are connected to the cultural period that followed the Greco-Latin period. And now, in this period, the completion of the human being in the Greco-Latin period stands before Goethe's mind in a very remarkable way. It was a perfection that was brought about by the fact that this cultural period, which is the middle of the post-Atlantic period, is preceded by three periods that are repeated to a certain extent later, but that this fourth period is the middle, the center of gravity of the post-Atlantic period, that at that time man went out into the physical world to the utmost. Hence the sense of completion and calm perfection in this art. That was what made such an impression on Goethe. He felt: when you have such a work of art before you, you do not need to go out into space, into the external world, everything has been poured into the work of art. — It was this outpouring into form, into the “how”, that particularly gripped him.

In the north, he was confronted by what he himself loved so much with the other side of his nature in the early days. Take a Gothic cathedral or the art of Dürer, Holbein and so on. There we have what prepared the fifth period. The works of art are not closed. You have to look for what is inside the work of art. A Greek temple is complete, so complete that no one needs to be there. The Gothic cathedral is not; it is only complete when there are devoted people in it. Until the time of decline in Greece, we always have the spiritual in the outer form. But in Dürer's form, we have the endeavor everywhere to go deeper than what the outer form expresses. The forms are sometimes ugly in the Greek sense because a powerful will wants to express itself there. In his youth, Goethe was a follower of this art, of Shakespearean art, which is the opposite of Greek art. What is here like two opposing elements in Goethe's soul would hardly have caused such inner turmoil in another soul. For Goethe wanted nothing less than to have everything that confronted him in the external world, and at the same time the supersensible, the spiritual. He was not one of those people who were satisfied with the external form, but rather one of those who valued the external form that he saw in Greek-Latin art so much because the supersensible was present at the same time. Form itself was a super-sensible reality. For Goethe, what is given in nature, what otherwise confronts him in the world, is already Maya, great illusion; Maya or great illusion is everywhere present. But from art he demanded that it place the true in the midst of Maya, the Greek temple, the Greek god, which from the super-sensible point of view is the true. Thus Goethe was thirsty for the truth of the supersensible in the sensible, drunk with Greek-Latin art because he wanted to place a realm of truth in the realm of Maja through art. All that is untrue should be removed from art.

But on the other hand, he saw how dangerous such an artistic demand is. Through spiritual science, we know why it is dangerous. Because every form of art is tied to a particular epoch, because it cannot reappear later. That was something for the fourth period, but not for the fifth. There, people had to focus on the supersensible, which cannot express itself in form. That was the fate of humanity, to be judged by that. Hence the struggle in the Nordic cultures against all outward appearance, the grotesque appearance of the spiritual in everything. As long as one — Goethe said to himself — merely talks about these things — Goethe said this to himself when he was sitting in the Villa Borghese —, as long as one merely talks, as I also did in my youth, one is not really true. For in external speech, the phrase is unavoidable as long as it is not imbued with inner soul. Everything Goethe had created up to that point seemed to him to be untrue compared to the plan he now had to place truth in art in the Maja. Thus arose in him the urge to bring across into the new era that which, like an eternal, can live on in every epoch, to bring across from the Greek-Latin epoch that which can live on. Do you grasp that? No, it is unconsciously brought across, because every cultural epoch stands on the earlier one. Unconsciously, the fourth lived on in the fifth cultural epoch. All this lived in Goethe as an urge: how can one consciously bring this across, how can one let that which lived at that time and has eternal value flow over? How would it appear if people could consciously transfer what lived in Greco-Latin culture into their consciousness? — This was something that lived in Goethe's soul: What would a person who had lived entirely in the Greco-Latin period and who now consciously transferred his consciousness into later times be like? — This was the beginning of the whole problem of reincarnation in Goethe's soul. It could not have been more deeply felt at that time. He wondered how one could consciously transfer earlier cultural ideas into later cultural ideas. It lived in him so much that he did not know how to grasp it in his own soul. In the subconscious soul lay that which had transformed the soul in such a way that in the transition from the fourth to the fifth period a figure as remarkable as Faust could appear.

Faust really lived and is registered in the records of the University of Heidelberg. What kind of a person was he? In a certain sense he was a contemporary of Nostradamus. He was a man who felt, in a certain way, the longing to bring forth, more or less consciously, what must now be brought forth again from the hidden depths of the soul. The third cultural epoch is to be brought up again. It is Faust's destiny to bring up this third cultural epoch again. The justification of such a spirit, alongside the spirit that arose as an ideal in Goethe's soul, was always clear to Goethe. He could never doubt that this modern spirit had a right to exist alongside the ideal man in his soul from the Greco-Latin period. But now he said to himself: This spirit must dive down into the depths of its own soul, must become acquainted with all that divides man when he enters the higher worlds. No sooner has man approached the “Keeper of the Threshold” than Goethe felt that a multitude of figures immediately confront him. Thus, for Goethe, Faust became a highly questionable figure, but one that he could not ignore: “How is the spirit that I have carried over from the fourth cultural period legitimately contained in a spirit in transition to the fifth cultural period?” It is contained in such a way that all the dangers that confront man when he passes the “keeper of the threshold” and enters the supersensible worlds must play a part in the striving. That Faust enters the supersensible worlds emerges from his longing, from his intuitive contemplation. Goethe was aware of this from the outset, but only gradually became aware of the dangers that still existed at that time, but no longer do today, because they can be avoided by following the teachings in “How to Know Higher Worlds”. But Faust still faced these dangers. The way in which Faust enters the supersensible worlds is such that, simultaneously with the arising of a certain imaginative realization, an arousal, an inflammation and ignition of the lower passionate life must go along with it. Both things cannot be separated unless a regular spiritual path is taken. These things cannot be separated, you can also read that in Blavatsky. She says that one can only notice how the karma of someone who wants to penetrate into the spiritual worlds changes, how he can bring misfortune upon those around him if he does not enter the higher worlds in a regular way, how he spreads the circles that emanate from the impulses within him over his entire environment. In return, his own urges and passions also mingle in the higher worlds; worlds of forms surround the human being.

Goethe had to picture these real seekers of the spirit before his soul because he stood on the ground of having an inkling within himself of the absolute truth of Greek and Latin culture. He had to picture this seeker of the spirit of the fifth period with all its difficulties before his soul. What surrounds such a man, what dangers befall him? In the whole world of sense there is nothing that corresponds to what such a man experiences. He must enter into the spiritual world. But first one must know how what such a person experiences differs from the sense world. That is why there is the 'witch's kitchen': because Goethe wanted to show the whole supersensible environment into which Faust had to enter, because it had to be shown how the supersensible worlds present themselves in all the antecedents of which we have spoken. One must accept this 'witch's kitchen' as part of the spiritual world. It must be realized that Goethe knew certain secrets of the supersensible world, so that he was able to describe accurately how things are actually perceived by the clairvoyant consciousness. Thus the supersensible world is described with extraordinary accuracy, with all the seething human passions being described when the terrible process of entering the spiritual world takes place. All the seething passions that arise there are reflected in the monkeys, which have the names Meerkat and Meerkat, and are reflected in everything that is appropriately depicted in the “witch's kitchen”.

But Goethe has the urge to get Faust up to the truth, not to this world of untruth. It is a world that is absolutely true in fact, but a world that is even more illusion than the ordinary world of the senses is for the senses, Maja. Goethe must endeavor to approach the truth. He must depict how the external world, to which Mephistopheles belongs, the supersensible world, which is depicted in the “Witches' Kitchen”, is surrounded. Goethe wants to show that Faust can get out of the world from which Mephisto can receive his inspiration. Imagine a person placed in the supersensible world, as Faust is in the “witches' kitchen.” If one can no longer find one's way in this world, then not even the ordinary laws of the number system can be right. It does not depend on a witty interpretation of the witches' multiplication table; one must feel what it means to really stand in the presence of what is written in the witches' multiplication table:

You must understand!
From one, make ten,
And two let go,
And three make equal,
So you are rich.
Lose the four!
From five and six,
So says the witch,
Do seven and eight,
And it is done:
And nine is one,
And ten is none.
That is the witch's multiplication table.

It is about putting oneself in the shoes of a person who suddenly finds themselves in this world, where everything is different, after having known the ordinary number system. If you interpret these things more or less ingeniously, you do a disservice to the poetry, because it then seems as if the poet himself had symbolized it that way. No, the situation was vivid before the poet. Anyone who calls Goethe a symbolist or an abstract thinker shows that he is incapable of grasping the meaningful and real aspects of this situation. What had to happen to Faust if he did not want to destroy his own karma and that of those around him, such as Gretchen? It was a long way from this Faust to the one who speaks out of the contemplation of the fourth cultural epoch: Oh, from the human heart arise the imaginations that spin a web around the whole world of illusion:

Sublime Spirit, thou gavest me, gave me everything,
Why I asked. You did not give me
Your face in the fire in vain.
Gave me the glorious nature of the kingdom,
Strength to feel and enjoy it. Not
Coldly astonished visitors, you only allow,
Allow me to look into her deep chest
As into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
Before me and teach me my brothers
In the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm in the forest roars and creaks,
The giant spruce topples, crushing neighboring branches
And neighboring trunks, sweeping them down,
And the hill thunders hollowly with their fall,
Then you lead me to the safe cave, showing
Then to myself, and to my own breast
Deep, secret wonders open up.

That is Faust, who speaks with nature by connecting his imaginative world with what is present as Maja or illusion, who is different from the one to whom Mephistopheles may say so strangely:

How would you, poor son of the earth,
Have led your life without me?
From the creeping craw of the imagination
I have cured you for a time.

How did he cure him? By introducing him to the transcendental world. But Faust is not to be cured of imagination in this way, but rather in such a way that he recognizes imagination as the all-embracing Maja, the illusion. What is necessary for Faust to be able to say:

And when the storm in the forest roars and creaks,
The giant spruce toppling neighbor branches
And neighbor trunks squashing down,
And her fall dull hollow the hill thunders,
Then you lead me to the safe cave, show
Then show me myself, and to my own breast
Deep, secret wonders open up.

In order for this classical sense of calm to arise, what must Faust confront in the “witch's kitchen”, where he must lose himself if he does not develop something very specific? He must not proceed like a theosophical theorist; he must come to himself like a human being with a very specific experience; he must see himself objectively. He must encounter something in the “witch's kitchen” in which he sees himself. Something of higher truth must appear in the imagination, but something that has a higher reality than the “witch's kitchen”. The higher self is feminine for man. This is very realistically depicted in the appearance of “Helena” in the “witch's kitchen”, the appearance of the etheric body, which can only be seen from a certain distance. Faced with this figure, Mephistopheles says, because he does not understand her:

With this potion in your body,
Soon you will see Helens in every woman.

This is portrayed from a true poetic impulse that strives for what people of the outer world will not see as what is important. For the people of the fifth period, there will still be a question about what they need, a question that could easily be somewhat ambiguous, but when it is truly answered, it is easy to understand. How could one speak to the most important matter of the people of the fifth period?

What is cursed and always welcome?
What is longed for and always chased away?
What is constantly defended?
What is harshly scolded and accused?
Who should not be summoned?
Whom does everyone like to hear named?
What approaches your throne's steps?
What has banished itself away?

It is a remarkable enigmatic speech with which Goethe approaches us at the beginning of the second part. One could find enough words to solve this riddle, but for our humanity the best solution will be found if one word is applied to everything that is asked. The word: Spirit. But Goethe did not want it to be so easy to solve the riddle, he did not want to present it so bluntly. But the spirit is enchanted in the most diverse ways and yet always welcome. One need only observe the spiritual development of mankind to know: What is longed for and always chased away? One need only point to spiritual science, for example. In those days, the spirit was only allowed to show itself in the guise of the court jester, otherwise it was not very welcome.

The big question is how the fifth post-Atlantic culture should come to spirit, to spirit from what it has, how it can grasp the actual basic essence of the world. Now, in no cultural epoch has humanity been better suited to finding the spirit in the form of the ego than in our cultural epoch. But how could one find the true nature of man if one could grasp this I on the basis, on the background of the astral body? Let us assume that if a person in the 19th or even the 16th century wanted to find out what the astral body is. Imagination is not something that a person has in their external perception. Man should seek the astral body, that which lies at the basis of the moon-time of the outer development of the I. Of course, because all the powers can reach everywhere, even when man applies the intellect to things, he can arrive at something, but what will he bring out of the astral body? Let us assume what emerges from the astral body when we apply to it that which is well suited to the external world of maya. We cannot express this more aptly than by calling what emerges from the astral body the homunculus. The homunculus has something to do with the astral body, as it is structured around that which is the I. We are dealing with the supersensible, so that Goethe is allowed to coin a word here that from the outset refers to something that is created in the supersensible world. Then Wagner says – the philistine intellect does indeed produce the homunculus in the laboratory –:

It will! The mass stirs more clearly!
The conviction of the true, the true!
What was praised as mysterious in nature,
We dare to try intelligently,
And what otherwise allowed her to organize,
We let crystallize.

With these words of conviction, commentators have tried to explain the strangest thing, because they could not understand that it is not a matter of conviction here, but that Goethe, in the sense in which he speaks of the superhuman, is speaking here of a conviction. But the second part of Faust has been commented on in such a strange way that the spelling mistakes have been commented on. For example, when Goethe dictated and the writer wrote: “Only do not strive for higher orders” and so on — it is truly not meant here, but the one to whom Goethe dictated wrote “order” instead of “places”. These things that we have here show us that for Goethe, after he had envisioned Faust in all his spiritual striving, the question now becomes particularly urgent: How can one consciously bring across consciousness? — The consciousness that lived, for example, in Helena, who now came before his mind. That was the burning question. In this context, I must mention – you have to take the Goethe of 1797 – that the greatest change that has ever taken place in the entire soul of Goethe has occurred. At the same time that the Faust figure in him, as a result of the necessity to think it, not only as a result of processes of the inner soul, when he had to write the “Prologue in Heaven”, all things in his inner being changed, so to speak. Then necessity also approached him, to give ever more definite form to this conscious coming over of consciousness from the fourth to the fifth period. Hence also the endeavor to solve the question somehow.

I have often hinted at how Goethe attempts to solve the question of reincarnation in poetry by showing that the eternal part of Helena rests in the spiritual world of the “mothers”. But man cannot enter the spiritual world without further ado, otherwise what happened to Faust when he looked at the image of Helena would paralyze him. The spirit must first envelop itself with the soul, then with the natural body. Helena envelops herself with the soul when soul material is made available in the astral as a homunculus. In the homunculus we have the forces of the astral body of a human being entering into existence.

He does not lack spiritual qualities,
But he is sorely lacking in tangible substance.

Everything is described quite appropriately, and finally the enveloping with the outer nature, where we are shown how the external corporeality is taken up. There he must pass through all the elements of nature, beginning with the mineral world and passing through the plant world. Goethe finds the wonderful word “It grunelt so” (it grunts so) to indicate what can pass from the greening plant world into human nature. So it goes through everything. “... until you reach man.” But then you cannot go any further.

Because once you have become a human being,
Then you are completely finished.

This continues until the human being comes into existence through the mystery of love, which is so wonderfully portrayed, as the human being is called into existence through the mystery of love, through the mystery of the sexual opposition. After Goethe has portrayed everything that precedes the mystery, he has the sirens express the wonder:

What fiery wonder transfigures the waves
That crash against each other, sparkling?
So it shines and sways and brightens up,
The bodies glow on their nocturnal path,
And all around is enveloped in fire;
So let Eros, who started it all, reign!

And man comes into existence.

Hail to the mild-favored airs!
Hail to mysterious tombs!
Here be celebrated,
Element, all four of you!

And we turn the page. Act Three: Helena has arrived. These things must not be grasped with coarse hands, must not be entrusted to external interpretation. These things can only be described by running after and slipping into what is being expressed, by dissolving them in the metamorphosing water, as in Goethe. But that is all there is to it. In Goethe is the urge to consciously bring up what has unconsciously lived in man of the fourth cultural period and what must consciously come up.

And then Goethe still uses the moral-religious-mystical element of the north to show how what has shown itself unjustifiably in the “witch's kitchen” can indeed come out justified. He shows this so magnificently in the final scene, where spiritual science and mystery interact so wonderfully, where everything that lived in Goethe is so wonderfully compressed in the 'Chorus mysticus', that this Chorus mysticus can almost be used as a symbol of spiritual science, which is already expressed by the scattered roses, and when it is said:

All that is transitory
Is but a parable;
Here it becomes reality;
The ineffable
Here it is done;
The eternal feminine
draws us on

In just a few lines, everything that we recognize as spiritual scientific truth is expressed.

It gives me great satisfaction to be able to speak to you once again, to be able to speak to you in the branch of our Anthroposophical Society in which I was able to develop the main part of my work for many years. Today I would like to speak to you about a number of things that I believe are important to consider in the present day. I would like to speak to you about the relationship between the human being and the supersensible world.

This is actually the constant theme of our discussions within the anthroposophical movement. But you will already have become accustomed to the fact that the truths about the supersensible worlds can only come into the full possession of the human mind when they are viewed from the most diverse points of view, so that, as I have often said, an overall impression can arise through the assimilation of images from the most diverse sides.

You know that spiritual scientific observation shows that human life on earth falls into two parts that are separated by time: the fully conscious waking state and the sleeping state. They also know that during sleep, those parts of the human being that we call the physical body, the etheric or formative body, the astral body and the ego are separated, so that the human being, so to speak, physical body and his etheric body, and that he initially leads an unconscious existence in his astral body and in his ego-being outside of the physical body and the etheric body. When one ascends to higher knowledge, it is not the case that one gains something for the human being through this ascent itself, through the knowledge, any more than we gain something for our digestion by having theoretical knowledge about this digestion, or at least we gain nothing for the immediate nature of digestion, as it takes place in our normally organized human being. It can be said that higher knowledge brings nothing new into the human being. Everything that higher knowledge provides is already in the human being. But it is the case that what can definitely be said to bring nothing new into the human being points to what remains unknown to the human being for ordinary consciousness and what, by not only is recognized but is experienced with the full content of the soul, with all the soul's powers, it does indeed bring something higher into the human being: not knowledge as such, but the experience of this knowledge.

In saying this, I have indicated what I would like to present as a threefold aspect of anthroposophical endeavour. First of all, there is the fact that there must be individuals who acquire spiritual-scientific methods in such a way that they can bring about knowledge of the supersensible worlds through higher vision in the supersensible worlds. What one calls the acquisition of these cognitions during one's existence on earth is not so important. If one does not associate the nebulous mystical ideas that are very often associated with the term clairvoyance, then one can speak of clairvoyant knowledge. Through this, then, what must increasingly become the purpose in life in our present age comes about.

The second thing is that through the ordinary, as one says, healthy human understanding, if it is only unbiased enough, that which is revealed through clairvoyant knowledge can be understood. I have often emphasized that one does not need to be a clairvoyant oneself to understand what is revealed through clairvoyant research. But it is also important for those who come to clairvoyant insight themselves to translate what they see into ordinary human terms. For that is precisely the significance that the clairvoyant has for man in the present time of his development: that it can be translated into those terms that we have in today's civilization as the terms of man in general. Therefore, whether one is clairvoyant or not, one must understand what is revealed through clairvoyant research.

And the third thing is this: what can be translated from clairvoyant research into concepts, what can be presented from clairvoyant research, must become an inner purpose in life, must become such that the human being thereby understands: I am a being that is not only bound to earthly existence between birth and death, but I am a being for whom earthly existence is only one phase, only one temporary metamorphosis. And everything that can appeal to the human soul will enter the soul if anthroposophy becomes the purpose in life in this sense. Firstly, the human being knows that he belongs to the spiritual worlds and he also knows that his earthly existence must receive its tasks from the spiritual worlds. Secondly, however, the human being knows that he is responsible to the spiritual worlds. All this elevates him above mere earthly existence, but not in such a way that he leaves it in a rapturously mystical way and holds it in low esteem, but rather by drawing his tasks for earthly existence from the supersensible world and thereby influencing the whole character, the whole status of his earthly existence.

This is especially important for our time, that we first learn to listen to what can be said through clairvoyant research; that we then endeavor to understand the content of this research through common sense, and that we make this content our life's work, to illuminate life with tasks, to increase our responsibility in life towards the spiritual worlds. In saying this, I would like to convey the color nuance that I would like to permeate my remarks today. I would like to give you some new information about man's relationship to the supersensible world.

The human being who lives here on earth opens his senses to the physical world. By looking into himself, he perceives his thinking, feeling and willing in a certain way. What he perceives through his senses and makes the content of his soul is what he calls his earthly surroundings. Note that, as earth people in this physical environment, we are actually quite familiar with what we call the outside world, the natural outside world, as far as it lies within our horizon, but that, basically, we are quite unfamiliar with what lies within our own being, even often physically. Man does indeed learn to know his inner organs through an external science, but only when he makes these inner organs external beings on the dissecting table or the like. Man cannot get to know his lungs, his heart and so on through looking inside himself with ordinary knowledge. At most, we learn to feel our inner organs, to perceive them when they are diseased. In a healthy state, man does not really perceive his inner self. He lives in his inner being, it is active in him. But precisely because he lives in it, is in it, is himself in it, he does not perceive it as he perceives the outer world, which is not himself.

This shows us that during our time on earth we focus on the outside world and have a world with content around us, and that when we look inward, we have a general, vague feeling of an ego, of which, if we are honest with ourselves, we have to say: it is very dark and very unclear. And that we can alternate between this looking into our inner selves, in which we experience something quite unclear and dark in our soul, and the experience of the external world, which is concrete in itself, determined and full of content everywhere. We can alternate between the two with our consciousness. This is essentially our experience between birth and death.

Between death and a new birth, the experience is essentially different. Especially in those times of existence between death and a new birth, which can be compared to the middle part of our life on earth, when we are at the height of our physical strength as thirty- or forty-year-olds, just in the time that is the middle part between death and a new birth, it is the opposite of life on earth. There we look into our inner being through a different consciousness that we then have, and by looking into our inner being, we have something so concrete and so full of content as when we look into the outer world here on earth. Only when we look at the external world here on earth do we have the beings of the three or four realms around us, the beings of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms and of the physical human kingdom. We have them around us in that they present themselves to us as sensory content. When we look into ourselves between death and a new birth in the marked time – that is already the case – then we do not have things of nature in us, but we have a world of entities in us, a world of those entities that we describe as the entities of the higher, of the spiritual hierarchies. Here we have world perception, external perception, perception of things; in the spiritual world we have inner perception, perception of beings. We look into ourselves, but we do not find such organs as we carry in us here on earth; rather, we find the whole world of entities when we can have the right awareness for it. And he who describes these entities of the higher hierarchies actually describes nothing other than the external experience of man between death and new birth. And just as we can turn our gaze back from the external world to ourselves, now, conversely, between death and new birth, we can turn our gaze from within, where we find the beings of the higher hierarchies within us, to the outside world, and there we find ourselves. The external world is actually the internal world there, the internal being is the external being, in the way I have just explained it.

But what we see there as an inner, fully-fledged world of spiritual beings within us is presented to us here, during our earthly existence, in its image, presented to us in such a way that we see the sensual images of those beings that we otherwise perceive within us between death and new birth. However, we do not see the same beings here, but, so to speak, the dwelling places of these beings, and that is - because there are always a number of these beings in common - the world of stars around us. So what do we describe when we speak of the stars, for example of the sun, full of knowledge - not with the knowledge between birth and death that is inherent in ordinary consciousness? The sun presents a certain image to our senses: but what presents itself here as the image of the sun, we experience between death and a new birth as a realm of spiritual beings. We do not see the sun as it is here now, but as a realm of spiritual beings. From our earthly existence, we have something like a memory, which tells us that this realm of spiritual entities corresponds to the sun, as seen from Earth. And it is the same for the other stars. That is, our spiritual consciousness between death and new birth becomes a cosmic consciousness. We are not just here within our own skin; we truly are the whole world. But you must not imagine it spatially. But we are the whole world, we carry the starry sky within us. And it is like this: just as we carry our lungs, our heart, our stomach and so on within us here on earth, so we carry the sun, the moon, Saturn, the other stars within us between death and new birth as our inner organs, but they are spiritual beings. It is their spiritual correlate, their spiritual archetype, that we then carry within us.

If we were always in this state, we would never come to ourselves in the spiritual world; we would always feel at one with the world of the higher hierarchies. But that cannot be. It would be just as if we only wanted to breathe in here on earth and never breathe out. Therefore, our life between death and new birth consists of a rhythmic change: in a life in these higher hierarchies and - in cosmic consciousness - in looking out; that is, there: coming to ourselves. Just as we have inhalation and exhalation here, I could also say waking and sleeping, so we alternate there between experiencing the hierarchical spiritual world and experiencing ourselves, where we are alone in our own soul, where we come to ourselves. This is how the rhythmic change in a person's experience arises between being spread out over the whole of world existence and coming to oneself: Being spread out over the whole of world existence – coming to oneself and so on.

This life between death and new birth within the spiritual world, of which the world of the stars is a physical reflection, is truly no less rich than life on earth. But in earthly life we can only recognize the result – and in a very unclear state – of what we experience between death and new birth. Let us imagine the following: we live here on earth, one of us makes shoes, the other skirts, the third cuts people's hair, the fourth builds locomotives and so on. By doing this here on earth in our physical existence, so-called human culture, civilization, comes about. Now, imagine that all of this civilization, in its manifestations, were to be summarized from time to time in a kind of result in a completely different area, for example on the sun. Let us assume that everything that comes into being here on earth, as I have indicated, would simply produce many copies on the sun. This is in fact the reality of what we do in the context described with the beings of the higher hierarchies between death and new birth: we work there with these beings on the spiritual form of our physical earthly body. And this work that is being done, where the human being between death and new birth works together with the beings of the higher hierarchies to bring about the spirit form of the physical earthly body, this work is truly a richer, a more diverse one than what we here as cultural work in physical existence, even if the physical human body that stands before us does not immediately reveal to us that it is the result of the work of divine beings in connection with man in the time of his existence between death and new birth. But older worldviews knew what they were talking about when they called the human body a “temple of the gods.” For this human body is actually, as little as we pay attention to it with our ordinary consciousness here on earth, the most complicated thing in the universe. And what a single human body is, that is precisely the combined work of innumerable beings, to which we ourselves also belong; for we work on the body with which we clothe ourselves in an earthly incarnation, only we cannot work on it individually for ourselves, but we must work on it in community with innumerable spiritual beings of the most diverse hierarchies.

If we speak from the point of view of earthly life, we are accustomed to calling a germ that which is small at first and then grows large in the physical sense. If we call that which man develops between death and a new birth the spirit germ of the physical body, we must say that this spirit germ is as great as the universe and then, as it passes through the embryonic life of man, becomes 'small' in the physical life. The small human germ contains an image of the great spirit germ, which has been worked out by the human being in connection with the higher beings. So that, by looking into the world that the human being passes through between death and rebirth, we actually see how the microcosm, the human body, is formed in ever new specimens from the tasks of the macrocosm. And that is a more sublime task than all the cultural work that a person does between birth and death. And the life that a human being undergoes by working on the human germ from the universe is a more varied and richer life than the one we spend here on earth, for example, by making shoes, making skirts, teaching children, governing states, and so on. Anyone who wants to understand the world must realize that there is something tremendously exalted in shaping the human body, as it exists here in its physical form, out of the tasks of the universe, and that the experience of this shaping is something tremendous, in terms of sublimity, not comparable to what man accomplishes here, even if he also helps to fabricate the most valuable cultural products of physical life on earth.

Thus man actually stands between death and a new birth in the spiritual world: he has an external world, which is himself; his gaze is directed towards his future life on earth, and in the prospect of this future life on earth lies the fact that he withdraws into himself, that he comes to himself. In the moment when his consciousness is filled with looking at his future life on earth and with looking back at his earlier life on earth, he is with himself. At the moment when he works together with the beings of the higher hierarchies on the task of bringing about the complicated physical body in the spirit-germ, he is, so to speak, outside of himself, but he has become one with the spiritual being, he lives in the spiritual being outside. It is at this highpoint of experience between death and a new birth, which I have called the midnight hour of human existence in one of my Mystery Dramas, that the human being experiences inwardly what he sees here in the image of the fixed starry sky. The firmament of the fixed stars or its representative – as the old worldviews also called it – the zodiac, seen from here, is the physical image of the spiritual world in which the human being lives between death and rebirth, and which he experiences as his inner world.

This continues for some time, and then, as it were, the human being leaves this living, this active, this, from an earthly point of view, sublime direct work with the spirits of the higher hierarchies. And the next thing that is then experienced is the point of view of co-experiencing with those higher beings who are revelations of higher beings. From a certain point in time, the human being knows: Yes, direct participation with the higher beings is no longer there, but the higher beings show themselves to me in an image. Seen from the earthly point of view, one can describe this as follows: the human being finds the transition from the world of the fixed stars to the world of the planets. As man passes through the planetary sphere, moving towards an earthly existence, he no longer feels the life of the higher worlds as his inner life; before, he felt it as his inner life. Here in the physical world, we feel our blood circulation, our breathing and so on, as our inner life; there, in the life between death and a new birth, we feel the life and essence of the higher hierarchies as our inner life. We are in a spiritual reality and we participate. Now, from a certain point in time on, we say to ourselves: Now we no longer participate, now what we used to participate in appears to us as in a picture; before we were in the actuality of the spiritual world, now we are in its revelations. But that means in reality: we have passed from the sphere of the fixed stars to the planetary sphere.

There we have to overcome a certain difficulty first: that is the entry into the sphere of Saturn. Certain spiritual forces radiate from Saturn. When we have passed through death, we first enter the planetary sphere and only then come to the sphere of the fixed stars; because then we take the path that I have just described, in reverse order. So when we leave our earthly life through death, Saturn is the dwelling place of those entities that do not want to leave us on earth, that want to lift us up from the earth, want to free us from our earthly powers and want to transport us into the world of pure spirituality. In my Theosophy, I have described this experience from a different point of view than the transition from the life in the soul's realm to the spirit world. These two descriptions are related to each other in the same way that you can always photograph a tree from different sides: it is always the same, but it always looks different. So, on our return journey, towards a new life on earth, we have the influence of the Saturn beings. And those people who, through their previous life on earth, have such karma that when they return to a new life on earth the forces of Saturn have a great influence on them, easily become alienated from the earth; people who either enthuse about how earthly things are actually worthless and how one should flee into a conceptual cloud-cuckoo-land, or people who, because they only looked at human conditions superficially, develop an inclination to organize spiritualistic séances and the like, in which the most diverse spiritual entities can cavort. All this is caused by the fact that in a previous life on earth a person had acquired such karma that, on returning to the terrestrial sphere, he comes into a stronger relationship with the forces of Saturn.

But when man enters the planetary sphere and approaches the solar sphere, he also comes under the influence of the counterpart of the Saturn forces, that is, those spiritual entities that have their dwelling place in the moon. These beings have above all the task of guiding the human being back into earthly existence, so that the person who absorbs the effects of the moon's forces is indeed firmly rooted in earthly existence , although on the other hand it may of course be the lunar forces that permeate the human being all too strongly with the purely physical existence, that is to say with the preference, with the inclination for this purely physical existence.

So we can say: Here on earth we walk among trees, flowers, grasses, animals and so on, between death and a new birth we walk under stars. And it is not so unreal if you simply imagine in a comprehensive picture that you are here on earth during your life on earth, that after death you pass through the spheres of the planets, leaving the lunar sphere, losing your inclination for earthly life, being transported out through Saturn, spheres, and then return again, enter the planetary sphere, and in particular, by coming under the influence of the moon, you will be prompted to return to earthly life in the supersensible world by what the lunar forces are. It urges you to return to earthly life. Just as we are connected here on earth with what we call our sensory environment, so we are also connected with this life through the world of the stars. And all this has great significance for our work with the beings of the higher hierarchies on the spirit germ of the physical human body. For until we descend to the planetary sphere for a new life on earth, it even remains undecided in our being, which we are building for our future life on earth, whether we will become man or woman. Yes, it even remains undecided for a certain time when we are already in the planetary sphere as soul-spiritual beings. In the sphere of the fixed stars, to speak of anything similar to what we have here as man and woman would be pure nonsense. But in the picture I have now begun to paint, you can well imagine that as you move away from the earth, you first see the moon from the front, then from behind. You also see Venus, Mercury and the Sun from behind, then you see the zodiac sphere and so on. But as you pass through these spheres, what is otherwise a physical image for us here is transformed into a sum of spiritual entities that you look at. When you look at the moon from behind, you see spiritual beings, for example those spiritual beings that were of particular interest to the initiates of the Old Testament: the presence of Yahweh and the beings that belong to it. But if you now return to Earth, you can, through your past karma, approach the lunar sphere by choosing the point in time when, as seen from Earth, there is a full moon in the sky; that is, you see, as seen from Earth, a full moon, the illuminated disc of the moon, but as seen from behind, when approaching Earth, the moon looks black. Choose the time for your approach to Earth so that you are influenced by the black sphere of the moon, unaffected by the sun, when there is a full moon on Earth. If, on the other hand, you choose a time when we do not see the moon here on earth, when there is a new moon and the effects of the sun go out freely into space in all directions, then you will establish a male earthly existence. So you see, we have to derive what we are here on earth in the physical body from the experiences that we have in the stellar sphere, that is, in the spiritual sphere, as it were, from the other side, between death and new birth. These things can be traced in great detail. Just as we on earth can say what a person experiences by eating cabbage or eggs or ox meat, for example, because his physical existence on earth depends on it, so too are there corresponding relationships in the spiritual worlds, the result of which then appears in the formation and inner experience of the person on earth. Here on earth we eat ox meat or eggs; in the spiritual world, between death and a new birth, we choose, according to our karma, the new moon or full moon for the time of our transition and thus become man or woman. But the full human existence in connection with the existence of the world can only be grasped if we do not merely consider what happens here between birth and death, but if we can understand what happens in earthly life in connection with what happens between death and a new birth for man.

This is something that man today does not yet understand in its full, real significance for earthly life either. But man today actually only knows the world as a mole knows museums. The mole that digs through the soil under the museums can perhaps list its experiences about it; but there will not be much of what is above him. This is more or less the position of the world as far as the earth sciences can reveal it. The only difference is that the mole could live without a museum above it. It has little connection with the museum, but man is intimately connected with the supersensible world, with that by which he is connected. Humanity must regain an awareness of this. Once there was a dim, muffled awareness of these things, which was illuminated in the ancient mysteries, but also with the old methods. These ancient mysteries were not merely one-sided cultic places. It is only in recent times that humanity has had a need for one-sided cultic places. Modern humanity must practise separate cults because it has become egotistical and wants to have an assurance of immortality for its own self. This can be given, it is a fact. But today man is inclined to practise all this separately from one another. In Paracelsus' time it was not yet so, there healing was still divine service. We must - although we must have transitions - come again to see all earthly work as a completion of spiritual work. It is only incumbent upon man today, as it were, to go through earthly events cut off from the spiritual world during his earthly existence; otherwise he would not be able to gain his consciousness of freedom. But the time is fulfilled in which man may keep himself cut off from spiritual existence. He must again permeate his consciousness with inner enlightenment from spiritual existence, and for this he cannot use the old methods today. He must go through what can be revealed to him in this direction in the present.

For suppose that some ancient mystery center provided for the affairs of the surrounding area. The care of this mystery center extended to all the affairs of the people who lived around it, to all those affairs that could only be fulfilled and ordered through the connection of earthly life with the spiritual world. Suppose a person fell ill. In those ancient times, people did not ask: What substances have we tried that have had an effect on humans in this or that direction? — They least of all asked themselves about the effect of substances that they had tried out on animals and so on. Today, people have to go through all of this. This is not meant as a derogatory criticism of medicine, but only as a way of putting it in its proper place in the development of the earth and of humanity. But in ancient times, a sick person who was afflicted with something sought refuge in the mystery temples, for the priests were also artists and doctors. Art, religion and science were one; this was cultivated in the mysteries. In those ancient times, there was still an overall view of man. It was known that when a person is afflicted by something at a certain age, it is not only related to the chemical mixture or separation of his substances, but from a higher point of view, it is related to the experiences and adventures he has undergone when he was in the world of the stars and sought his earthly existence from there.

Let us assume, then, that such a sick person came, between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, seeking help at a mystery center that was also a medical center. In ancient times, when only instinctive, half-dreamlike knowledge was at work in the mystery centers, when such a sick person came for treatment, the examination that was carried out with him was often nevertheless clearer than today's examinations. I have actually met physicians who, when you entered into conversation with them about the most important thing about the patient and asked, “How old is the patient?” did not know. As if one could possibly contribute to any person's health if one does not have an exact idea of his age! Because in each year of life, man must, so to speak, be cured differently, because human life is constantly changing. No one would think of taking a flower petal, for example, and planting it in the ground, and believing that a new plant would grow from it. Instead, he would take the seed from the fruit and plant it in the ground, because he knows that the development of the plant is something. And so human life must also be considered. If a sick person seeking help came to a mystery doctor between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one – these are approximate figures – the doctor knew that there are a number of illnesses that are simply related to the human being's passage through the solar sphere as he descends from the planetary world into the physical world. If the patient was between the ages of thirty-five and forty-two, the mystery priest knew which diseases had something to do with the passage of man through the sphere of Saturn in his descent. So he asked himself above all about the connection of earthly life with the experiences and adventures of man in existence between death and new birth: then he knew what is here on earth again related to the beings of the higher hierarchies, or rather their physical images, the stars. Now, certain plants on Earth have a more intimate relationship with the Sun than others, and others in turn have a more intimate relationship with Saturn and so on. You will be able to tell by healthy instinct that the sprouting flowering plants, for example, have a different relationship to the Sun than a fungus or lichen on a tree. And someone who, for example, suffers from a stomach or heart condition between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one will certainly not be cured with buckthorn tea, as the ancient mystery doctor would not have treated him with buckthorn tea, but with a sun-related plant juice; but this is based on the knowledge of the connection between human life and the universe.

These things are, so to speak, “buried” knowledge; they must be rediscovered at a higher level, illuminated by our modern intelligence, after humanity has passed through darkness for a period of time. They must be rediscovered and they can be rediscovered, and the anthroposophical world view is the beginning of this rediscovery of spiritual enlightenment for humanity in all areas of life.

I have now described this descent of the human being until he enters the planetary sphere. Then there comes a time, after the influence of the moon has already begun, when the human being loses the spirit germ of his physical body, which has already shrunk very much. The expressions are of course rough, but you will not misunderstand them. This spirit-germ of the physical body descends earlier than the human being himself. It is handed over to a pair of fallopian tubes, sinks into a fertilized human germ, and forms the element of growth there before the human being himself has descended. So there comes a time when the human being has already handed over this physical germ to earthly life, when he looks down on the earth, as it were: This is what he will become, the person to whom I will belong. But for a short time the human being still lives freely in the cosmos. Then the human being draws the forces for his etheric body from the ethereal world of the cosmos, so that he then consists of I-being, astral body and etheric body. And after he has acquired his etheric body in this way, he now unites with what has become his physical germ, which he himself first sent down.

There is an enormous amount of wisdom in this sending forward of the physical human germ and in the subsequent agglomeration, if I may call it that, of the etheric body. For suppose we kept our physical body while we collect the etheric body, and the physical body would not be permeated with physical matter, but rather the forces that could be permeated with physical matter in the womb, but suppose we did not send it ahead, but still permeate it with the etheric body before we arrived in the substance of the physical embryo and in what is offered to us there. What would happen then? Precisely because we can know what might happen, we begin to marvel at the wisdom-filled guidance of the universe. For if it were otherwise, every thought we conceive and every inclination we have for evil would constantly stand before us. There would be, as it were, a living memory of what we had done, even as the slightest evil, only in thought or in feeling on earth. We would be overrun by the contents of conscience, especially from its evil side, and we would not be able to form a neutral thought, we would not be able to come to any knowledge of nature, for example. If we were to look at plants neutrally, according to natural laws, then such thoughts would easily mix into our observation of nature: “Oh, what a bad guy you were at seventeen, what you did then!” This would become ingrained in our observation of nature, and we would never arrive at a neutral view. We are able to distinguish our simple, neutral reflection from our own moral or immoral instincts because we first send down our physical spirit germ and only then, after we have gathered the etheric body, do we connect with the physical body. In this way we keep these two so far apart that the memory can be stored in the physical body, so that it is not always there, and also leaves us free, so that not our whole, namely moral life, is always before us.

I have now described man's descent from the spiritual world to the moment when he unites with the physical substance of the earth in order to continue living on earth. What do we find out now that we have arrived here? I already said that it turns out that we have to say: When I realize that man first sends down the forces that shape his physical body and then follows, I am led to unreservedly admire the wise guidance of world affairs. If I grasp this with all my being, I cannot stand there like a blockhead who makes a machine and does not need to admire it, because I would have to be a very dry person who is revealed such tremendous wisdom of world leadership and does not have admiration for this wisdom welling up within him! And so it is with all anthroposophical insights.

In other words, the ordinary earthly knowledge that we acquire in our waking hours appeals to our intellect, but less so to our feelings. This is not the case with the knowledge that we receive from the spiritual world in our inner experience. They engage our whole being; indeed, our whole nature is organized differently when we acquire these insights. Spiritual knowledge does not want to leave us cold in our minds, as physical knowledge does, but it is no less objective knowledge. If someone were to say, for example, that knowledge that touches the mind is not objective, that it is subjective, then one need only imagine the following: If someone stands before Raphael's Sistine Madonna, then he would have to be a strange fellow if he did not feel admiration for this painting; but no one would be able to say: That is merely subjective, Raphael's Madonna is not objective. For it is not a matter of our not actively feeling forces of sympathy or antipathy in our minds when we look at something objective, but rather of not disturbing the objective through our subjectivity. Of course, if we recognize something because it suits us to take something objectively, then we are not objective, since in this case we assume something because we like it. But if something were to appear before us as objectively as such insights, and we were then to burst into admiration at it, then this admiration would certainly not impair the objectivity of the insight. That is the essential thing about anthroposophical spiritual-scientific insights: they engage not only our intellect, our head, but our whole being. And the more and more we learn about such truths that relate to the life of man between death and new birth, the more our emotional life sprouts and later our life of will. That is, the human being permeates the impulses for his deeds with what he recognizes from the spiritual worlds. He feels here on earth as a fulfiller of what he was in the spiritual life between death and new birth.

Thus, everything that comes from experienced anthroposophy has the power to fulfill the whole person of its own accord, just as the instinctive clairvoyance, that is, the instinctive connection with the spiritual world, was once present in ancient humanity through the whole person. How did we become such intellectual guys today, and why were the ancient people not? Because the ancient people also knew what the instructions from the whole human being were. Today, for example, people learn geometry; they are taught what a perpendicular is. But what a perpendicular is hovers only in the realm of ideas. You can't even say it hovers in the air; it hovers in the realm of ideas, and the connection is simply not known. Man would never have developed a feeling for the vertical if in the course of his life he had not himself become upright and thus felt in his movements what the vertical is. And what the human being experiences in this way is also experienced by his head and made into the vertical. In the same way, what a person experiences when spreading out his arms becomes an experience of the horizontal. Man, who originally was active in his soul life as a whole human being, has gradually limited himself to the head, which can only depict everything figuratively. And how does the head do it in man? Yes, when I walk, I live differently than when I drive in a car: the car goes, and I am quiet. And so it is with the head in man: it is lazy, it has its vehicle in the rest of my organism and lets itself be driven, everything comes to rest, just as when I sit in a train. Therefore everything becomes pictorial, abstract. In the course of our earthly existence, we have come to this abstractness. But we must come again to that which allows us to grasp the spiritual in existence. And this then takes hold of the whole human being. It is the reverse process of what happened with the old man, but through this reverse process we can come again to the study of the whole human being. In this way we then also come again to a culture that fulfills the whole human being.

There are people today who hear what spiritual science has to offer and then say: There are some strange people who are proclaiming a spiritual truth today and think it is necessary for humanity. We do not want to doubt that it may be true that these worlds all exist, as the spiritual scientists talk about them; but what do they have to do with us? We can just wait until we die, then we will see what it is all about. Why should we strain here to understand what it is like in the spiritual world? But it is not like that. It is actually like this: if you want to understand what spiritual knowledge means – that is, the kind of knowledge that can be acquired through common sense after a spiritual researcher has communicated with a person – then the best way to learn about it is to have a spiritual researcher explain how the first step of extrasensory knowledge, imaginative knowledge, is acquired. I will give a few examples of this.

As man usually lives, he has only a consciousness of the present. He has this consciousness through his physical body. It is in space. Space represents the present with its three dimensions. Man therefore always has only a consciousness of the present. And when he has a memory, it is a memory of the present; he does not live himself into what he experienced ten years ago, for instance, but only into the image of what he experienced at that time. This is therefore sufficiently shadowy and abstract. If one seriously practices the exercises I have described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” for the purpose of attaining imaginative knowledge, one comes to not only live in the present, but gradually to overcome the shadowy of memory and to live in one's own past experiences. In this way, in 1922, one can still relive one's experiences from 1911 as one experienced them in 1911. And anyone who makes a special effort to live in thoughts, not in abstractions but in a fully concrete way, will be able to grasp how the life of thoughts brings turns of fate and all sorts of , deep sympathy and antipathy, as otherwise only the rough material earth-squeezing - that also comes to experience his time body, as he experiences his space body at all through the ordinary consciousness. If, for example, I cut my big toe, it hurts, and I have not only a memory of this pain in my head, because the head is far removed from the big toe, but I have an immediately experienced sensation of pain. Of course, the head is spatially connected to the big toe, but one does not experience time in this way. When a thirty-year-old person thinks back to what they experienced as a seventeen-year-old, and has now distanced themselves from in terms of time, it seems faded. If you lost a loved one thirteen years ago, how powerful the experience of pain was at the time compared to the present memory. But anyone who, through the exercises described in “How to Know Higher Worlds,” has attained this imaginative knowledge, so that he understands how to live in thought, namely, to live in pure thoughts free of sensuality, as I have described in “Philosophy of Freedom,” lives then, as he lives here in the space body in every part, so there in every part of his time body simultaneously and in every strength. When you place yourself back in time as a fifty- or sixty-year-old person, or even as an eighty-year-old, you see not only five years back — for the present existence extends over the entire course of life —: you are immediately present in every single point. However, this presence is bought at the price of fleetingness. If you are able to have an experience in the most vivid way in your eighteenth year, it does not fade from your mind as quickly as a “dream, but you cannot hold on to it, you have to forget it. And as a spiritual researcher, for example, if there were no other aids, you could get into a very bad situation. You could establish the connections through which you can see something in the etheric world, but you immediately forget it. Therefore, you also have to resort to all kinds of aids - I have given details about this in 'How to Obtain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds' - so that what you acquire in this way as a spiritual-etheric vision does not immediately disappear again. It disappears with great certainty after a few days, and what the person still carries with him as his etheric body after death disappears just as quickly.

One gets to know the whole nature of the etheric from this experience, as I have described it. The things that are told about life after death are not constructed, but gained from a living realization. But if you want to apply such aids, mere mental activity is never enough. I am not afraid to talk about my own experiences when I noticed how fleeting such experiences are in the etheric cosmos. If you see so much, you take recourse to something else to tell your experiences to other people a week later. But these aids are not taken from the mind remedies. One remedy that was very effective was to write down the experience while it was still fresh in my mind, so that the activity was not carried out through the mind but through the writing hand. In this case it is not a matter of mediumistic writing, nor of the purpose of having written it down. Writing things down, even rewriting lectures, is something that is extremely unappealing to someone who works in the spiritual field anyway. But it helps to fix what would otherwise be fleeting by allowing the whole organism to participate, as one would when executing a drawing or a painting. It then remains in one's own organism, one does not need to appropriate it again afterwards. It is only a matter of fixing the things. But for this you cannot use head-aids. If you are a spiritual researcher, you cannot fix it by means of any head-aids; you have to fix it by something that takes up your whole being. One such means would be to write down what you have experienced. But do not take into account that you are incorporating an intellectual activity, but only the characteristic style of the writing; or you can even make a symbolic drawing, a painting, or the like.

From this you can see how intimately connected with the whole human being it is, what must be there, so that one can lead over into the ordinary conceptions, what one sees in the spiritual world. But when one leads it over, then one can communicate it to other people who cannot see spiritually themselves and who then, with their ordinary, healthy human understanding, grasp it through the same conceptions in which one transmits it to them. They then have the same ideas about what the clairvoyant presents to them. To discover spiritual truths, one needs the art of clairvoyance; to live with these truths, one does not need this art of clairvoyance, but only a healthy understanding of what is presented.

But you can see something else from what is presented here. What man is spiritually in his etheric body does not live in space, it lives in time. Now look at the physical organism, for example the eye: with it you see visible things. If you were to tear out your eye, you would no longer be able to see visible things. If you look at the spiritual human being, he is, so to speak, the whole stream that passes from life to life, living once in existence between death and a new birth, then in physical life on earth, then again in life between death and a new birth, and so on. That is a unity. People in ancient times were endowed with instinctive clairvoyance at birth, that is, a connection with the spiritual world through the forces of nature themselves, and this developed in them in such a way that they could take it with them again through death; but the knowledge of the spiritual was not allowed to cease. Nor must it disappear in the newer man. Man must acquire this knowledge of the spiritual here on earth, for he is a continuous stream on earth. If you have had an earthly life that knew nothing at all about the spiritual, then for your spiritual life it is as if you were to pluck out the eye of your physical body. For what you acquire here on earth as knowledge of the spiritual life belongs to you, it is your eye with which you later “see” between death and a new birth. And if you remain “dark” here on earth with regard to knowledge of the spiritual life, then after death you have no eye; then you walk in life between death and a new birth as if through a dark valley. For this eye you must have through what you have acquired here. You tear out the eye of the spirit by excluding knowledge of the spiritual world.

This is a realization that humanity must come to terms with. Now that the old instinctive vision of the spiritual has completely faded away, humanity must realize that organs for the spiritual life must be acquired again along the lines of the path pursued by the anthroposophical movement. It is not a matter of saying: We will wait until after death, we do not need to make an effort now to understand the spiritual worlds, because after death we will see what it is like in the spiritual worlds. Certainly, we will see it after death. But for the soul it will be like a dark dungeon if we have not opened our eyes to life in the spiritual worlds here during our life between birth and death. Therefore you can see how impossible it is when a person virtually sets up a dogma that he need not concern himself with the transcendental existence here in earthly life. For we live rather in a time when, in the true sense of the word, the one who says to himself: Here, in life between birth and death, you must acquire the eye so that it is not dark for you in the spiritual world after death, and so that you can also experience the light that is around you, is also fulfilling his supersensible duty towards the world.

When I was able to speak here in this circle some time ago, I presented man in his relationship to the spiritual world from a certain point of view and concluded by saying: It can be seen from all this how we have arrived at the point in the present age where a core of people must form who recognize the necessity of spiritual-scientific knowledge. From what I have said again today, one can see this necessity even more clearly. We live today in an age in which the spiritual world wants to show itself to us during our earthly lives. We must not close the doors and windows through which it can enter. We must let the light of the spiritual world come in, we must let it come in for the sake of life on earth, we must let it come in for the sake of the life we live between death and a new birth. Man must hear the voices that speak to man from the spiritual world in a spiritual way, and he must say to himself: It is time that man perceived the light of the spirit, that he heard the voice of the spirit. And when we have familiarized ourselves with what can be understood in this way from a spiritual-scientific point of view as the necessities of the time, then the right attitude prevails in such a working space, when one regards oneself as obliged to lead humanity to recognize that now is the time to see the light of the spirit, to hear and understand the voice of the spirit.

It is in this thought, in particular in this feeling and primarily in this attitude that we want to be together and stick together in the times when we are spatially separated again. That is what I would like to say to you as a greeting, a greeting to the effect: Let what we can say to each other when fate brings us together be the occasion for it to prevail as a thought among us, as a sense of belonging together that is there in the spiritual, even when we cannot be together in space! Nevertheless, I hope that it will soon be possible for me to speak to you in person about the continuation of what I have presented today.

There's a nice remark by Hegel: The deepest thought is united with the figure of Christ, with the historical and outer one, and that's the great thing about the Christian religion, that for all of its profundity it's easy to understand in an outer way, and yet also challenges one to get into it more deeply. Thus it's for every stage of development and also satisfies the highest demands.

The fact that the Christian religion is understandable to every stage of consciousness is clear through the history of its development. It must be the task of spiritual science in general to show that this religion invites one to penetrate the deepest teachings of wisdom that mankind has. Theosophy is not a religion but an instrument for understanding religions. It's related to religion in about the same way that our mathematical theory is related to ancient math books. One can understand mathematics out of one's own intellectual forces and the laws of space without referring to Euclid's geometry book. But when one has taken in geometric teachings one will treasure that old book all the more, that first placed these laws before the human spirit. That's the way it is with theosophy. Its sources are not in documents and aren't based on tradition. Its sources are in the real spiritual worlds; that's where one must find them and grasp them in that one develops one's spiritual forces, whereas one grasps mathematics as one tries to develop one's intellectual forces. The intellect that enables us to grasp the laws of the sense world is carried by an organ, the grain. We also need corresponding organs to grasp the laws of spiritual worlds. How did our physical organs develop? When outer forces worked on them, sun forces, sound forces. That's how the eyes and ears developed out of neutral, dull organs that did not permit a penetration of the sense world at first and only opened slowly. Our spiritual organs will also open when the right forces work on them.

Now which forces storm in our spiritual organs that are still dull? During the day forces press into a modern's astral body that work against his development, and that even kill organs he had before he got his bright day consciousness. A man used to perceive astral impressions indirectly. The surrounding world spoke to him through pictures, through the astral world's form of expression. Living, differentiated pictures, colors float around free in space as an expression of pleasure and displeasure, sympathy and antipathy. Then thee colors laid themselves around the surface of things and objects received firm contours. This happened when man's physical body became even firmer and more differentiated. When his eyes opened completely to physical light, when maya's veil placed itself before the spiritual world, man's astral body received impressions from the surroundings via the physical and etheric bodies and transmitted them to the ego, from where they entered men's consciousness. Thereby he became continuously active. But what worked on him in this way wasn't plastic, formative forces that corresponded to his own nature; it was forces that consumed and killed him to awaken his ego-consciousness. Only at night when he dived down into the rhythmic spiritual world that was homogeneous to him did he strengthen himself anew so that he could send forces to the etheric and physical bodies again. The life of the single ego, ego-consciousness arose from the conflict of impressions, from the killing of the astral organs that worked unconsciously in man before. Death out of life, life out of death. The snake's circle was closed. Now the forces that rekindled life in the dead remnants of previous astral organs and molded them plastically had to come out of this awakened ego-consciousness.

Mankind moves toward this goal, it's guided towards it by its teachers, leaders and great initiates, whose symbol is the snake. It's an education towards spiritual activity, and therefore it's a long and difficult one. Great initiates could make the task easier for themselves and men if they would elaborate the astral body when it's free at night, so that they imprinted astral organs into them, worked on them from outside. But that would be a working within the dream consciousness of a man, an intervention into his sphere of freedom. Man's highest principle, the will, would never develop. Man is led step by step. There was an initiation in wisdom, one in feeling, and one in willing. Real Christianity is the integration of all initiation stages. The initiation of antiquity was the annunciation, the preparation. Man slowly and gradually emancipated himself from gurus. Initiation at first took place in a complete trance consciousness, but there was a way to imprint a memory of what had happened outside the physical body, into the latter. That's why it was necessary to separate the etheric body, the carrier of memory, and also the astral body. Both of them dived down into the sea of wisdom, into mahadeva, into the light of Osiris. This initiation took place in the deepest secrecy and seclusion. No breath of the outer world was permitted to push in between. The man was as if dead to the outer world, the delicate seeds were cultivated away from blinding daylight.

Then initiation stepped out of the darkness of the mysteries into the brightest daylight. The initiation of all mankind took place historically—symbolically to begin with—at the stage of feeling in a great, mighty personality, the carrier of the highest unifying principle, of the Word, that expresses the hidden Father, that is his manifestation, that since it took on human form it became the son of man and could be the representative for all mankind, the unifying band for all I's: In Christ, the spirit of life, the eternal unifying one. This event was so powerful that it could go on working in every human being who lived by it, right into the appearance of stigmata, right into the most excruciating pains. Feeling was shaken to its depths. An intensity of feeling arose that had never flooded the world in such mighty waves before. The sacrifice of the I had taken place for all in the initiation on the cross of divine love. The physical expression of the I, the blood, had flowed in love for mankind and it worked in such a way that thousands pressed to this initiation, to this death and let their blood stream out in love, in enthusiasm for mankind. How much blood flowed out in this way was never sufficiently emphasized, people are no longer aware of it, not even in theosophical circles. But the waves of enthusiasm that flowed down in this blood and ascended have fulfilled their task. They've become mighty impulse givers. They have made men ripe for an initiation of will.

And this is Christ's legacy.

There's a nice remark by Hegel: The deepest thought is united with the figure of Christ, with the historical and outer one, and that's the great thing about the Christian religion, that for all of its profundity it's easy to understand in an outer way, and yet also challenges one to get into it more deeply. Thus it's for every stage of development and also satisfies the highest demands.

The fact that the Christian religion is understandable to every stage of consciousness is clear through the history of its development. It must be the task of spiritual science in general to show that this religion invites one to penetrate the deepest teachings of wisdom that mankind has. Theosophy is not a religion but an instrument for understanding religions. It's related to religion in about the same way that our mathematical theory is related to ancient math books. One can understand mathematics out of one's own intellectual forces and the laws of space without referring to Euclid's geometry book. But when one has taken in geometric teachings one will treasure that old book all the more, that first placed these laws before the human spirit. That's the way it is with theosophy. Its sources are not in documents and aren't based on tradition. Its sources are in the real spiritual worlds; that's where one must find them and grasp them in that one develops one's spiritual forces, whereas one grasps mathematics as one tries to develop one's intellectual forces. The intellect that enables us to grasp the laws of the sense world is carried by an organ, the brain. We also need corresponding organs to grasp the laws of spiritual worlds. How did our physical organs develop? When outer forces worked on them, sun forces, sound forces. That's how the eyes and ears developed out of neutral, dull organs that did not permit a penetration of the sense world at first and only opened slowly. Our spiritual organs will also open when the right forces work on them.

Now which forces storm in our spiritual organs that are still dull? During the day forces press into a modern's astral body that work against his development, and that even kill organs he had before he got his bright day consciousness. A man used to perceive astral impressions indirectly. The surrounding world spoke to him through pictures, through the astral world's form of expression. Living, differentiated pictures, colors float around free in space as an expression of pleasure and displeasure, sympathy and antipathy. Then these colors laid themselves around the surface of things and objects received firm contours. This happened when man's physical body became even firmer and more differentiated. When his eyes opened completely to physical light, when maya's veil placed itself before the spiritual world, man's astral body received impressions from the surroundings via the physical and etheric bodies and transmitted them to the ego, from where they entered men's consciousness. Thereby he became continuously active. But what worked on him in this way wasn't plastic, formative forces that corresponded to his own nature; it was forces that consumed and killed him to awaken his ego-consciousness. Only at night when he dived down into the rhythmic spiritual world that was homogeneous to him did he strengthen himself anew so that he could send forces to the etheric and physical bodies again. The life of the single ego, ego-consciousness arose from the conflict of impressions, from the killing of the astral organs that worked unconsciously in man before. Death out of life, life out of death. The snake's circle was closed. Now the forces that rekindled life in the dead remnants of previous astral organs and molded them plastically had to come out of this awakened ego-consciousness.

Mankind moves toward this goal, it's guided towards it by its teachers, leaders and great initiates, whose symbol is the snake. It's an education towards spiritual activity, and therefore it's a long and difficult one. Great initiates could make the task easier for themselves and men if they would elaborate the astral body when it's free at night, so that they imprinted astral organs into them, worked on them from outside. But that would be a working within the dream consciousness of a man, an intervention into his sphere of freedom. Man's highest principle, the will, would never develop. Man is led step by step. There was an initiation in wisdom, one in feeling, and one in willing. Real Christianity is the integration of all initiation stages. The initiation of antiquity was the annunciation, the preparation. Man slowly and gradually emancipated himself from gurus. Initiation at first took place in a complete trance consciousness, but there was a way to imprint a memory of what had happened outside the physical body, into the latter. That's why it was necessary to separate the etheric body, the carrier of memory, and also the astral body. Both of them dived down into the sea of wisdom, into mahadeva, into the light of Osiris. This initiation took place in the deepest secrecy and seclusion. No breath of the outer world was permitted to push in between. The man was as if dead to the outer world, the delicate seeds were cultivated away from blinding daylight.

Then initiation stepped out of the darkness of the mysteries into the brightest daylight. The initiation of all mankind took place historically—symbolically to begin with—at the stage of feeling in a great, mighty personality, the carrier of the highest unifying principle, of the Word, that expresses the hidden Father, that is his manifestation, that since it took on human form it became the son of man and could be the representative for all mankind, the unifying band for all I's: In Christ, the spirit of life, the eternal unifying one. This event was so powerful that it could go on working in every human being who lived by it, right into the appearance of stigmata, right into the most excruciating pains. Feeling was shaken to its depths. An intensity of feeling arose that had never flooded the world in such mighty waves before. The sacrifice of the I had taken place for all in the initiation on the cross of divine love. The physical expression of the I, the blood, had flowed in love for mankind and it worked in such a way that thousands pressed to this initiation, to this death and let their blood stream out in love, in enthusiasm for mankind. How much blood flowed out in this way was never sufficiently emphasized, people are no longer aware of it, not even in theosophical circles. But the waves of enthusiasm that flowed down in this blood and ascended have fulfilled their task. They've become mighty impulse givers. They have made men ripe for an initiation of will.

And this is Christ's legacy.