The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Good morning, gentlemen! I would like to say a few more words about the second part of the question that was asked the other day. The fact is that when great questions of life are posed, one always has to talk an extraordinary amount about these great questions of life; because actually one would always have to draw on the whole of science to answer these questions of life, because the whole of science is there to answer the great questions of life.

Now, I have told you: anyone who wants to understand the actual human spiritual-soul life must really study the human being. Last time we did this with memory. And I showed you how memory, or recollection, is already something purely spiritual in man. Today I want to look at man from a completely different angle and show you some things that we have already discussed. But we have to keep these things together.

Let us compare the development of the animal with the development of man. Although the animal learns many things in life, it can actually do the most important things by itself. The animal would be able to learn very little if it could not already do so much. Just imagine a chicken hatching from an egg, it immediately pecks out the right grains. That is already in him. Man must first learn all this. Now there are three things that man must learn in the course of his very first life on earth. The first is what is called walking. The animal has an easier time of it because it can walk more easily. It stands on four legs, and it is easier to walk on four legs than on two. When walking on two legs, one must first come into balance. The animal is already in its equilibrium because it has four legs.

Now you may say: But there are animals that use their front limbs in a way similar to humans, for example monkeys or other animals. Yes, but you must always bear in mind that a monkey is actually rather clumsy with its front limbs in relation to its entire organization. Even if it does not always grope on the ground with its front limbs, it still needs to hold on to something with them. And if it does not hold on, if it does not climb, then it is quite clumsy. He cannot use his front limbs in the right way. But most animals walk on all fours, and man also walks on all fours in the beginning. He must first learn to walk by means of balance. That is what man has to learn in life: first, he must learn to walk.

Secondly, however, you all know that humans learn something that animals do not achieve, at least not in the same way. Only fantasists could claim that animals achieve it in the same way: I am talking about human language. I am not saying that animals cannot communicate. I have presented enough things to show you that animals can communicate. But they do not communicate through language. They communicate through scent or something similar, but not through language. So the second thing that humans have to learn is language.

The third thing that man must learn, and that the animal does not receive to the same extent, is thinking. Thus man must learn three things: walking, speaking, thinking.

You may say: Yes, the thinking that man does cannot be so easily distinguished from that of animals. You cannot know whether animals do not think too. But the one who says: You cannot know whether animals think too, when you look at animals, speaks much as one who says: If my grandmother had four wheels and a drawbar at the front, she would be a bus! Of course you can say anything if you don't look at the facts. You can, of course, if you don't look at the facts, say: Why shouldn't a stone talk or think? But if you look at the facts, it is the case that animals do everything not because of a personal reason within them, but because of a cosmic reason. They do not do it personally; therefore, what they do is perhaps much more intelligent, but it is not personal. They think a lot, as we have heard, but their thinking is not personal.

You see, a person must first learn these three things: walking, speaking, thinking.

A child developing normally first learns to walk, then to speak, and only after that to think. It is quite wrong to believe that a person first thinks and then speaks. Rather, he first learns language by imitation. He imitates the words he hears, and only once he is familiar with the words does he learn to think. It is only through language that a person learns to think. That is why the whole of humanity learned to think so late. Even the ancient peoples spoke, but humans only learned to think later. It was through language that they learned to think.

Now consider what human life would be like if man did not learn these three things as a child: walking, speaking, thinking! But you will also realize that for these three things, for walking, for speaking, for thinking, man needs his body. When it comes to walking, this is obvious to you. The whole structure of the body shows you that man needs his body to walk. You cannot imagine walking without a body. So for walking, a person needs a body. For speaking – well, I have described to you how speech comes about – a person needs his larynx, his tongue and all sorts of other things. So for speaking, too, he needs his body. And for thinking, a person also needs his body. For thinking, he needs his brain and his nervous system. You can easily see for yourself: if someone cannot think well and you examine their brain, you will find that it has become mush. They cannot think because it has become mush. So the human being needs their body precisely for what they learn on earth.

But now we must realize what actually happens when we walk, for example, when we move at all. When we move at all, something of us always perishes. If I stand here and just walk to there and then examine my body, I would find more ashes in my body after I have walked than were inside before, because substances have meanwhile burned inside. I cannot move at all, I cannot even balance myself, cannot relate gravity to myself if I do not burn something inside me. So I have to set something on fire in me when I use what I acquire through life by walking and moving correctly. But if I were only constantly active and constantly burning within myself, yes, I would soon perish from it. I must constantly create again what I have burned.

But you see, the outside world does not do that for me. The outside world does not restore what I have burned within me. For you only have to see what a human corpse looks like. It is completely surrendered to the outside world. It burns it. The outside world, namely, burns the body. You will say: Well, not all people are burned, but some are also buried. But the process of decay in the grave is only a slow burning process. It is actually exactly the same process. When someone burns quickly, well, the body burns in a short time. Those who are buried in the grave, burn slowly. It is always a real burning, as I explained to you last time with the flame; only this time it is burned quickly, totally, the other time it burns slowly in the grave.

Now when we surrender to the earth as a corpse, we burn. When we walk, when we move, we also burn. Only we can no longer make the corpse alive, because we cannot carry out the other process with it, which makes up for the burning. We can make the corpse alive again at any time by undoing the burning. Yes, you see, we can undo the burning as long as we are alive. We can really undo the burning. Why? If we only had the body that we put in the grave, we could not undo the burning. Besides the body that we put in the grave, we also have the etheric body. That is a fine body. So that, if we want to draw the human being correctly, we first have his physical body and then his etheric body. Because we have this etheric body, we can quite correctly make up for the combustion process that we always carry out through our movement. So we not only have a physical body, we also have an etheric body. When we sleep, our etheric body is constantly repairing what the combustion processes have done during the day. That means: we also have our etheric body during sleep. So the physical body and the etheric body of the person lie in bed.

Now, how does the etheric body differ from the physical body? You can feel it: what the combustion causes when you abandon yourself to the external world is heaviness. And the etheric body has no heaviness. And if you now properly consider the thoughts that you remember, you have to say that they do not belong to the physical body, they belong to the etheric body. And that is why man is not subject to gravity in his memory either. You can work and think at the same time, although it is difficult, but that is due to something else. We can discuss this later. But you can work and think at the same time. Everyone knows this because only the physical body is worn out by working. The etheric body is not worn out by working. That is the important thing. The etheric body is now so active in man that man has something of this etheric body that enables him, first of all, to have his memory.

But now we come to the second thing that a person can learn: language. Learning to speak is not the same as learning to walk. When we walk, we move in the outer world. When we work, we also move in the outer world. We come into contact with something in the outer world that offers us perceptible resistance. We speak out the language, and even when we are in a thick atmosphere, we do not even notice that the language is becoming heavy for us. We notice by other means what the air does to us when it is too thick, how it is disturbing. We do not notice this by language. And yet, without the air, we could not speak, because we move the air with our language.

Now, of course, it is not just external combustion processes that are constantly taking place in us. If you eat something, it first has to go through the mouth into the stomach. There it must be processed. Then it must pass into the whole body. This is an internal process; it also burns the physical body. If the etheric body were not active for a moment, yes, then it would be over with the human being. Then he would continually kill himself through his own combustion processes. What man actually does in the earthly world is all geared to killing.

This is not the case when speaking. If one interrupts the activity of the heart, that is, if the combustion caused by the activity of the heart is not immediately compensated for by the etheric body, the heart would stop. But when speaking, we cannot say that; because someone who speaks continuously would soon become tiresome. And he would not be doing himself any particular good either. When speaking, it is not the case that a person must speak continuously. He can speak when he wants and can also refrain from speaking. Now, he cannot stop the etheric body from balancing the activity of the heart. He must do this from the beginning of his life on earth until the end of his life on earth.

So there is a big difference between what a person does inwardly when he speaks and when he simply lives. One lives by undergoing the combustion processes. One speaks when one wills. But when speaking, it is also the case that we destroy something in us. We really destroy something in us. You see, when we breathe, we constantly absorb oxygen, combine oxygen with blood, and release carbonic acid. We cannot use nitrogen in the same way. But when we speak, we always absorb too much nitrogen. The strange thing about speaking is that we absorb too much nitrogen. We poison ourselves to a certain extent. To take in too much nitrogen means to become more similar to cyan. This is because cyan is a compound of carbon with nitrogen, just as carbonic acid is a compound of carbon with oxygen. Man is constantly cyanizing when he talks. And that, in turn, he must also counterbalance. When man sets his speech organs in motion, he also kills himself in a certain respect, just as he kills himself through the combustion that takes place during movement. He must counterbalance that too. And that is done by the astral body. — You need not be offended by the word “astral”. I could also call it something else. That is not important. So that is what the astral body does. This astral body is also present in man, and it comes to life in breathing and speaking.

And now you can see the big difference between the astral body and the etheric body. If we did not continually make up for the combustion that takes place during the day while we sleep at night, we would not sleep but die. So we have to leave the etheric body with the physical body during our lifetime on earth. We cannot speak at night while we sleep; we have to wake up first. Speaking is connected to the astral body. So at night we simply take our astral body out of our physical and etheric bodies. That is why we also breathe a little differently at night. We exhale less carbon dioxide at night than during the day. In short, we have a third body within us, an astral body (drawing page 89). And the astral body lives in our speech.

When we look at an animal, it can also walk, move; it just does not need to learn it, it has it instinctively. But if you look at the animals, yes, they cannot speak. But they also have speech organs. One must actually be amazed why the dog does not speak, why the dog only barks. He cannot use his astral body to speak. He does not learn to speak. We human beings must learn to move, to walk, we must learn to speak. The animal learns nothing for its etheric body, learns nothing for its astral body. But we human beings learn something.

Now, you see that we can learn something, that comes from the fact that we have thoughts. All learning consists of the human being receiving thoughts. When he speaks, he merely imitates. When he thinks, he has to be active himself. So man learns through thoughts. He also learns to walk and to speak through thoughts; he just does not know it yet. He does not yet have thoughts when walking and when speaking. And the fact that we can learn what animals cannot is because, in addition to the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body, we also have an I that permeates us completely. So we still have an I (drawing page 89). Then we have the four true elements of the whole human being: physical body, etheric body, astral body and I.

What I have told you now is based on a correct observation of the whole human being, on a real science. Ordinary science is not really science. It does not concern itself with facts. There is no question that every person who learns anything should say: Man has a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and the I. But he does not say it because people do not concern themselves with facts.

And now let us visualize what actually happens at death. You see, you cannot really visualize this unless you continue your studies a little further than is usually the case today. It is true that today's cultural people, as they call themselves, are terribly lazy. What do today's cultural people do? They are not particularly concerned about the fact that man learns to walk, because this happens naturally through imitation of the adults. No special care is taken.

The fact that humans learn to speak does not particularly surprise people either. There was once a time on Earth when all humans could not yet speak. There was a kind of sign language. Then humans learned to speak. But that has long been forgotten by humanity. Today, history is simply viewed as looking at the people of the past who could already speak. And the fact that language is something that has to be actively learned is of no concern to people today. That is why there is dispute between nations. If only the nations would realize that they have learned the language, and that language is something that people have learned, then they would not be so proud of it and want to differentiate between groups of people. People have simply forgotten that language must be learned from within.

If you want to get into anthroposophy, then, I would say, you have to learn the language all over again. Because you will see that when any of today's scholars presents something to you, well, gosh, it comes out like a machine. Just watch it: it comes out like a machine. It is different from when something is presented to you from spiritual science, from anthroposophy. There you have to constantly search for the words, you have to inwardly take up the words anew. And afterwards, when you have formed the words, you are all the more afraid that they have not actually designated the right thing. With anthroposophy, the relationship to those who listen to you is quite different from that of today's scholars. Today's scholars no longer care about language. In anthroposophy, you always have to care about language.

You see, that is what comes to light in a special way when I write my books; then I am in a constant, I would say inner restlessness to shape the language correctly, so that people can also understand what is written. It is something new that one has to create with the language. Today's scholars simply say that I write in bad style, that I don't write proper German, because they are accustomed to putting words down only in the order in which the walking mechanism moves them. They do not speak from the soul. Therefore they are not accustomed to having their sentences formed somewhat differently than they do it. And so you see that people today no longer care much about language.

But now to the third, thinking. Yes, today's people are particularly proud of their thinking. But I say: people today do not think at all. Most of the time people today do not think at all. I will show you by an example that people today do not think at all. This can be learned from the example of religion. Religions are there. Yes, they were not always there. People have only developed into religions. And if you really study history, you will see how people struggled to develop their religious beliefs. That is why there used to be a struggle for religious beliefs. What are people doing today? Yes, they take on, by inheritance, what was once considered religious. But they do not want to take on new thoughts about the supernatural or anything like that. If people had always been like that, they would still be animals today – that is the truth – because they would never have thought about the supernatural. Today people are not capable of absorbing thoughts about the supernatural. They only absorb what has been preserved for them in the churches, what has been thought about this and that in earlier times. Of course, scientists will tell you: We are completely independent of the church. We have thoughts that we come up with ourselves. That is not true. Anyone who really knows the church will see that the thoughts of today's scholars are only the thoughts of the earlier church.

There was a great scholar in Berlin some time ago. His name was Du Bois-Reymond. He really was a great scholar. Above all, he spoke very elegantly because it was mechanically inherited - as the great-aunt also likes it, because the pastor in the pulpit only says what she already knows; if he were to say anything new, she would probably like it less and fall asleep. So Du Bois-Reymond, a great scholar, gave a great speech at the natural scientists' assembly in Leipzig in the 1870s. This speech has become very famous. He said something like: What we perceive with our senses, we can understand as human beings. We cannot understand the supernatural. We do not know it. - The speech has become famous as the Ignorabimus speech - ignorabimus, that is to say: we will never know anything. That was the conclusion: ignorabimus!

Yes, but why did Du Bois-Reymond give the speech? Would one of you have gone up to him and said: Du Bois-Reymond, you are a disciple – or for that matter, one of you could have said: Your Excellency, you are a disciple of the church father Thomas Aquinas! Du Bois-Reymond would have turned bright red and been terribly upset that he was supposed to be a disciple of Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic church father. He would not have wanted that. He did say once, in another speech, that the German scholars were a scientific protection force of the Hohenzollerns. — That is a saying that speaks of the same scholars to which he belongs. But even if he happily confessed to the Hohenzollerns, he would not have confessed to the Catholic church teacher Thomas Aquinas.

Yes, but you see, what did Thomas Aquinas teach? He also taught: Man can know the world of sense through himself; but to know the supersensible world, he needs the teaching of the Church; he cannot arrive at it by himself! Now, if you take away “ecclesiastical revelation” from this sentence and say that man can only know the world of the senses, that he cannot know the supersensible world through himself; but I do not accept church doctrine, you have the same thing that Du Bois-Reymond taught. He only crossed one thing out because it was a little inconvenient for him. He is really a disciple of Thomas Aquinas. It is not true that today's science has its own thoughts. It also takes the thoughts of the church. People just don't notice it. Only anthroposophy is developing its own thoughts. People don't realize that they have no thoughts of their own.

And so today no attention is paid to the fact that man learns to walk, to move, just as man learns to speak and how man learns to think. That is just it: if you pay attention to how language is formed from within, how one has to balance the burning again from within and how thinking is formed from within, then you come to the eternal, the immortal in man. But if you pay no attention to these things at all, it is quite understandable that you cannot come to the eternal, the immortal. It is precisely the thoughtlessness and inattention to language and the way a person walks that leads to the fact that a person does not pay attention to the fact that he has something within him that makes him more than the corpse that is put in the grave when he is dead. He must indeed fight this corpse every moment, otherwise he would die every minute. And he must fight it through his etheric body, his astral body and his ego. So man must constantly fight death within himself. Death is constantly there. We could die at any moment. But we do not die as long as we can combine our etheric body, astral body and our ego in the right way, asleep and awake.

So what remains for us in death? First of all, our etheric body remains. But this etheric body has a very strong attraction to the world. It has no weight, it has no gravity. But it immediately wants to expand when it is free, when we cease to live. What does that mean? It means that we pull out the etheric body. But we must die immediately if we pull out the ether body, because it is the ether body that allows us to live. Dying, then, means first of all to pull our ether body out of the physical body. The physical body now begins to burn properly because the ether body is no longer inside it. But this ether body immediately seeks to expand into the whole world. That is why a person still has memory after his death, because that is bound to the etheric body, as I have told you. But the etheric body expands rapidly throughout the whole world. That is why this memory has disappeared after a few days. So, for a few days, a person has a memory of his last life on earth, just as a drowning person also has that. I have already explained this to you the other day.

You see, this is claimed by someone who is an anthroposophist; he is not just making it up out of thin air, but what is he doing? Yes, he is learning something in addition to what one usually learns. In ordinary life today, man walks. He walks, that is, he watches how he is constantly burning. But he never watches how the combustion is compensated for again. If he were to watch how the combustion is balanced again, which happens when I just move my foot and have to pour into the etheric body to balance the combustion, he would begin to perceive the etheric body. But today people forget about it. He does not look at his ether body. And that is what anthroposophical learning consists of: learning to look at the ether body. One learns to see how a process that is directed against death is constantly developing in the human being. And now one does experiments in the same way as one does experiments in the physical and chemical laboratory. I will describe one such experiment to you. I have described the whole method of conducting such experiments in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” But I will show you once more how these things are done.

So, let us suppose that I have done something during the day, some kind of work, it can be more physical, it can be more mental. In the evening, before you fall asleep, you imagine very clearly: there, there you are, this guy. But you imagine him outside. And now you imagine how you moved your legs, moved your hands, how you thought, you imagine all that. And by imagining it again, a completely different idea gradually comes to you all by itself, namely the idea of how all this must be made good again. You get an idea of your etheric body, a piece of your etheric body. You can evoke that.

But people today say: Oh, if only people have learned to look at the external life, then it is enough! With the children in school, you just don't see to it that they get to know something else. That is, after all, the most convenient thing. Because the people who get to know more become rebellious. - You just need to develop this ability in the youngest age, then all people would be able to perceive the etheric body.

You see, you can have done the greatest exercises to perceive everything you do in terms of mobility, in terms of work, it can also be spiritual work; you can form very clear ideas, but history is reversed again, because after three days you have forgotten the ideas. If you learn something, something about the physical world, that remains in you if you have learned it correctly. The ideas you form about the supersensible world, even about the etheric body, have vanished in three days; if you don't first transform them into physical ideas, they are gone. Why? Because it is the same when you artificially create it as an experiment as it is after death. After death, the etheric ideas also go away. So they also go away when they are artificially evoked. Just as one, let's say, gets to know the compounds of oxygen in a laboratory through physical science, so one gets to know this through spiritual science when one then does the corresponding experiments on oneself. But that means not stopping at what is ordinary science. That is why my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” is the continuation of what people learn, but a kind of continuation like this fact that a person only has two to three days of experiences in their etheric body, which can be imitated, and then it becomes science.

Now, you see, you can experience the etheric body in this way. But you can also experience the astral body. When a person looks at water, he usually does not know that it contains hydrogen and oxygen. He must first separate the two substances from each other using a galvanic apparatus. Then he has the hydrogen and oxygen next to each other in two containers. So first one must be able to separate the astral body from the physical body in order to perceive it. One must therefore pursue real science with regard to these things. For example, one must pay attention: you have taken water at a certain time of the day, you have drunk water. Then you have not drunk for a long time. You have become thirsty. When you have become thirsty, you want to drink again. Just as when you want to speak, you first have to will that the speech should come. It is exactly the same. In speech, you have to will that you speak; when you are thirsty, you want to drink. Thirst means nothing more than that you want to drink. Thirst is the will to drink. And so you can say that you notice in yourself that you are getting desires, real desires. Note that at first we have memory. Memories sometimes come when we want them, but mostly all by themselves. They arise, the memories. They have to do with the etheric body. Desires, like thirst, hunger or the spiritual-mental desires, arise in man in such a way that they are like the will. This is where the human will expresses itself. The craving is there until it is satisfied, until the will has been realized.

Now consider what one actually wants when, let's say, one is thirsty. What does one want then? Yes, one has a condition in the body that one would like to remedy. What does one actually desire when one is thirsty? When one is thirsty, one desires that water circulates inside, in the way that water circulates in the body. Because it is not circulating, you are thirsty. What do you actually want? You want your body to function properly. When you are hungry, you also want your body to function in a certain way. You always want something in yourself. Now, you see, what you want in yourself, the body cannot achieve that. The will, the desire, the body cannot develop that. Right, if the body had to keep going out just to satisfy desire, then it would have to consume itself. The body cannot develop desire.

So where do desires come from? They come from the soul. And not from the etheric body. Something like memory comes from the etheric body. Desires come from the astral body. Desire is also not always there, while the life that comes from the etheric body is always there. Desire alternates with satisfaction because it is with the astral body. Thus we recognize the connection between desire and the astral body.

But what does desire actually want? It wants a certain state of the astral body. Now, if a person continues to learn in the same way as I have told you for learning about the etheric body, they can also continue to learn about their desires. Strangely enough, when a person continues to learn in this way, they go further and further back in their lives, and they come back to the point where they were in childhood. There he had nothing but desires. Because in that time, which one does not remember, he had nothing but desires. There one rages and fidgets, has nothing but desires. The child is only desire when it enters the world. And one goes back to that desire. And there one gets to know one's astral body.

You don't get to know your astral body if you don't apply what I described in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, because you only remember back to the point in childhood where the astral body has already merged with the physical body to such an extent that you can no longer distinguish it. But once you have developed this, you go back, you remember how, as a very young child, you wanted your entire physical body. And then you begin to understand what you do after death, when your memory is taken from you after a few days. You constantly desire your physical body from your last life. And that lasts longer. You can try it too.

If someone, let's say, has turned sixty and performs this inner experiment of remembering back to his childhood and there comes to the astral body, then he gets to know this astral body quite well. But he notices that now, when he is sixty years old, it is quite different for him than it would have been ten years ago. This changes with age. At the age of sixty, it is easier to go back than at the age of fifty. And at the age of twenty-five, it is almost impossible to go back. At the age of twenty, you cannot go back to the astral body. So this changes with life.

So you can get to know the astral body, and then you can say: the astral body changes as you get older. The older you get, the more desires it develops, and so it has more desires when you have passed through death, when you are older, than when you are still very young. Then it has fewer desires. And as long as a person has not yet come to no longer desire his physical body, he lives in his astral body after death. Next time I will show you why one has to say: After death, a person lives one-third of his lifetime in the astral body, only a few days in his etheric body. There is not enough time today to elaborate on this.

And then the human being completely breaks away from his desires. He no longer desires his physical body, and then something very peculiar occurs. He does not get the desire for the physical body he had, but he does get the opportunity to make provisions for the physical body he will receive in the future. And now he undergoes a process in the spiritual world that enables him to receive a physical body again in a future life on earth. That takes the longest of all. So he comes to life on earth again.

Next time I will explain to you that what is called eternity can be well substantiated. I will then answer the question in full next time. That is part of the question that has been put to me.

But, gentlemen, I explained the matter to you in such a way that I actually led you to the spiritual first. I told you: in addition to the physical body, we also have the etheric body, the astral body and the ego. That is already there before a person is not only born, but before he has taken on a germ life, conceived, conceived, conceived. That is there.

Yes, but you see, there is a certain ecclesiastical dogma that has a very strange content. That was very soon after Christianity had spread. The Roman Church forbids people to believe in a life before earthly life. Why? You see, people don't care much about life before earthly life. They say: Well, I'm here; what does life before life on earth matter to me. - On the other hand, people are very concerned about life after death, because they do not want to stop living. That interests people.

But you cannot get to know the life after death if you do not get to know the life before birth, that is, before conception. One is not possible without the other. So what happened when this dogma was established, that one should not look at life before life on earth, that one should not believe in life before life on earth? There the whole prospect of man for the supernatural has been cut off for him. Yes, does it make sense that exactly the church cuts off this prospect of the supernatural? Oh yes, it makes sense, because then the church can, because man still desires life after death, take all dying into their administration. Then man recognizes nothing of what is after death, and is dependent on the church to tell him. Then man gets the longing to believe the church above all. So it was very good for the church, namely, that this dogma was established: man lives after earthly life. Because through that, the church has taken on the administration of dying.

I once had a conversation with a famous astronomer. He didn't believe in anthroposophy. But astronomers are the ones who most easily understand that you can't stop at the physical. We talked about church and state. He was so well-positioned with both that he liked the state quite a bit, but liked the church less because it leads people only to mere belief, not to knowledge. And then this astronomer said very beautifully: Oh, the church has it good, much better than the state, because the state only has to administer life, but the church administers death. And because the church administers death, it has much more time for itself, it is much more successful.

Spiritual science, anthroposophy, wants to make people realize that they themselves manage their dying. That is the story. You see, gentlemen, that will be real progress. Then people will no longer want to feel dependent, but will want to take their lives into their own hands. And that is what matters.

Today, people are already realizing that things can't go on as they did in the past. In the past, they used to think: I will work for a while in life, it must be so, because if you don't work, life wouldn't work; but after that I will retire from the state. — That was the idea. And when I die, they said to themselves, then the church will retire my soul. Right, they are retired from that too, without their knowledge, without their contribution to eternal bliss.

That is precisely what real progress should be: that man takes his life into his own hands, not allowing it to be managed by the state or the church, but rather that he achieves something out of knowledge, out of will, out of himself. And to do that, he must also scientifically comprehend his own immortality.

Good morning, gentlemen! Now let us try to finish, at least for the time being, what we have begun to consider. You see, an understanding of life comes only from the fact that one begins to observe the sleep of man, as I have already mentioned to you several times. When one is immersed in life from morning to evening, one usually has the opinion that sleep gives one strength, removes fatigue and so on. But sleep actually does much more. You just need to think about it. Think back to your life, the dreams you have had in your sleep, you don't always remember them. Dreams are something you soon forget, as you all know. Only at most you may remember that you had a dream here or there that you often told. Then you remember it by telling it. But the dreams that you don't tell are quickly forgotten. If you remember your life back to your childhood, you will remember some memories from your childhood up to later in life. But these memories are always interrupted. When you think back today, there is the time during which you slept. That is a break, and you do not remember it. The memory starts again only yesterday evening and goes until yesterday morning. Then there is another break. So that actually, when you remember back, you do not have your whole life, but in this remembering back, what is in the night is actually always left out. If you draw a line of retrospection, a period of time flows from evening to morning without retrospection, then again from morning to evening, then again a pause from evening to morning, and so on. We actually only remember our lives in such a way that we do not remember a whole part of our lives at all. That is quite clear. That is the time that we have slept through.

Now let us consider a person who cannot sleep. You know, some people complain that they cannot sleep. But many of these complaints should not be taken so seriously, because some people tell you that they never sleep at all during the night. And when you ask them how long they have not slept at night, they say: Yes, not for ten years already. Well, anyone who couldn't sleep for so long would have been dead long ago. People do sleep, but because they have such vivid dreams while sleeping, it seems to them as if they had been awake. You should tell such a person: just lie down for once, you don't need to sleep; just lie down. He is already asleep, and even if he is not aware of it, he is asleep. I just wanted to tell you this so that you can see that a person really does need sleep for life. Sleep is more necessary for life than food. And those who cannot sleep cannot live.

Now, how much of our lives between birth and death do we oversleep? Yes, gentlemen, you see, this oversleeping lasts longest in very young children. When a child is born, it is almost always asleep. Then gradually the time spent awake decreases, and sleeping becomes less and less. And when you get a little older, if you count back, you have to say that you have actually slept a third of your life. That is also healthy. You have actually slept a third of your life.

This has been known for quite a long time. But today people don't like to remember such things that have been known for a long time. Even in the 19th century, at the very beginning, people who wrote about this said: Man should work for 8 hours, be alone for 8 hours and sleep for 8 hours. That leaves 16 hours of wakefulness and 8 hours of sleep, so 3 times 8 = 24 hours.

So that gives us a third of 24 hours for the time of sleeping. That was also a very correct observation. A person needs a third of his entire life to sleep. Now, people don't care about how important sleep is for life because today they don't care at all about what soul and spirit are. They only care about what the person experiences with his body when he is awake, but not what soul and spirit are. That is just how people often say in their daily lives today: God, yes, sleeping, that's all very well, but you don't need more than the necessary heaviness in bed. And so they drink so and so much beer in the evening so that they can sleep. But what matters is not having the necessary heaviness in bed, but realizing the great importance of sleep.

And now let us try to understand what sleep actually means. You see, gentlemen, basically people like themselves very much. This is particularly evident in the case of sick people. Sick people show how much they like themselves, because when something hurts them, they take terrible care of themselves and so on. That is all very well, but it shows that people like themselves very much. What does a person actually like when he likes himself? Yes, he likes his body. And that is the great secret of life, I would say, that a person likes his body. And the love that a person has for his body shows when that body is not quite right.

But there are also snags with this love of the body. The body moves all day long. The body works hard all day long. And the soul and spirit within it, without the person knowing it, grows less and less fond of the body as the day progresses. That is the strange thing, and one must know that. While the human being lives in the day and must constantly be active, the soul-spiritual aspect grows less and less fond of the body. That is why a child sleeps so much. It loves its body very much and always wants to enjoy its body. When you see a child, you can always see how it enjoys its body. Just think about what it is like when the child has drunk its milk and falls asleep. In this sleep, the child has the pleasant feeling of digestion. It enjoys what is going on in its body. And only when it gets hungry does it wake up. Because what happens when it is hungry, it likes less. Then it wakes up again. So you see, the child still wants to enjoy its body even during sleep. You can make the most beautiful observations. Only the scholars do not do that because they do not have the ability to do so.

Observe a herd of cows in a meadow, eating and then lying down comfortably, enjoying their digestion. They enjoy what is happening in their body.

That is what you need to know: that a person actually wants to enjoy his body. But in humans it is somewhat different than in cows, and in the adult human it is somewhat different than in the child. The little child does not work yet, so he enjoys his body while sleeping. The cows do everything out of instinct, so they also enjoy their digestion while sleeping. The human being does not even get to enjoy his digestion. A person actually becomes so that when he uses his body all day, by evening he is no longer sympathetic to his body. He no longer loves it. And you see, that's why he sleeps. He sleeps because he no longer likes his body. The antipathy that a person develops towards his body throughout the day makes him fall asleep at night, and he sleeps until he has overcome this antipathy in his soul, and he wakes up again when he feels sympathy for his body again. This must be understood first of all, that waking up depends on the person developing sympathy for his body again. And this sympathy exists for all the individual organs of the body. Therefore, when a person wakes up, he slips into his organs, so to speak.

Just think of how dreams are when you wake up. When you wake up, you dream of snakes, for example. You slip into your intestines and dream of snakes. The snakes represent the intestines.

So when a person wakes up, they slip into their body out of sympathy with their body and their soul and spirit. People have to have this sympathy, otherwise they would always want to leave their body.

And now imagine: the person has died, he has laid down his body; the body is no longer with the person. The first thing that happens, I have told you, is that the person has his thoughts as a memory of his whole life. And these are then lost after a few days already. They are scattered all over the world. But then he is left with the sympathy for what his body has experienced. And this sympathy with what his body has experienced, he must now gradually lose. This is what we first go through after death, that we must lose our sympathy with our body.

How long does it take to restore this sympathy with the body if we live one day? It takes a third of the day. Therefore, the loss of sympathy after death also takes a third of a lifetime. If a person has, let's say, reached the age of thirty, it takes about ten years for him to get rid of the whole body, to have no more sympathies with the world and life at all - this is, of course, an approximation. So that after death a person first has a few days when he has a memory back, and then he has this breaking off, I would say, of memory back, which takes a third of the whole life he has spent on earth. Now, that is true on average for the individual person, but it is longer for one person and shorter for another because one person has more sympathy for his body, likes himself more, the other likes himself less and so on. So after death we go through something that could be called: the human being gets used to all the things that hold him together with his body.

But now you may say: What you are telling us is still somewhat theoretical. How can you know that a person still has something to him when he has discarded his physical body? How can you know that? — Yes, for that, gentlemen, you have to study how a person develops in life.

There is the first period of life in which the human being develops, the first period of life; this is until the human being gets the second teeth. First he has the milk teeth, then he gets the second teeth. Yes, you see, you can say that the human being has the milk teeth from heredity. But the second teeth, he no longer has them from heredity. The second teeth come from his ether body. The ether body is active in him and gives him the second teeth. So we have the physical body, as I already wrote to you the other day; it gives the first teeth. Then there is the ether body; it gives the human being the second teeth, the teeth that then remain.

Now one must just acquire the ability to see — today people only acquire the ability to think abstractly, to develop theories, but not to see what I have just described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. If you really look at the child as it gradually gets its second teeth, you can see this supersensible work of the etheric body. And this is the same body that a person retains when they die, retains for a few days, and then disperses throughout the world. So if you study what gives a person their second teeth, you find out that after death, a person still has their etheric body for a few days and then throws it away a few days later, that is, it disperses throughout the world.

Now he still has his astral body and his ego. This astral body is what always craves the physical body. With the ego inside, it always craves the physical body. So we can say: the human being develops - I have already told you this recently - the need in his astral body. The astral body develops all needs. The needs are not in the physical body. When the physical body is a corpse, it no longer has any needs.

So we can say: What gives the human being false teeth is also gone a few days after death. What remains now? Here one must again study what now begins to be particularly active in man from the moment he has his second teeth until the moment he becomes sexually mature. That is again an important period of human life. Our present-day science cannot study such things because it does not pay any attention to them at all.

You see, from the moment the child gets its second teeth until the moment it reaches sexual maturity, something supersensory is at work in the child. And what does this supersensory element want? This supersensory element wants to gradually take hold of the whole body. It is not yet inside when the child has its second teeth and begins to get this astral body into its whole body so that it permeates it. Then the child becomes more and more mature. And when the astral body is completely inside the body, then the child is sexually mature. That is the important thing to know: the astral body is the one that brings sexual maturity to the child.

Of course, these things cannot be studied in the way that today's scholars would like to study them. Today's scholars only want to study what is tangible. They do not observe human life. But anyone who has really learned to observe what it is that works its way into the body from the second teeth to sexual maturity knows that this is the astral body. It is the source of all needs. Of course, a child already has needs before the second teeth come in, because the astral body is present in the head; but later it spreads throughout the entire body. You can see this very clearly in boys, how the astral body spreads. The boy changes his voice, and with that he also becomes sexually mature. This is the penetration of the astral body into the whole physical body. In the case of a woman, you can observe it by the development of the secondary organs of sexual life, the breasts and so on. This is the penetration of the astral body. And this astral body the person retains after death if he has already discarded the etheric body.

You see, it is this astral body that wants to enter the physical body again every morning. Because while a person sleeps, he has no needs, neither sexual nor other needs. These arise when he is awake. They arise when the astral body wants to enter the physical body in the morning. And so, in life, this astral body is always striving to enter the physical body every morning. Of course, it wants to do the same after death, and it must first unlearn this habit.

If someone is thirty years old, how long has he been in his physical body? He has been in it for twenty years, he has not been in it for ten years. The ten years that he was not in his physical body, he slept through, and after death he wants to be in it again. And that is why he works in his astral body for a third of his life after his death, which he has gone through here on earth. After this time the astral body is satisfied. Then the human being only lives in his ego. So that after spending about a third of his lifetime after death, the human being only continues to live in his ego.

But this ego, this actual spiritual part of man, needs an enormous amount if it is to continue to live. You see, it is not without reason that I have been telling you that reason, the intellect, thoughts about the world are actually spread out. I have told you how everything in the world, when properly studied, is actually intelligently arranged. I have made it clear to you in the animal world. This whole world is such that we should not believe that our mind is the only one, but the mind that we have is only as if scooped out of the mind spread throughout the world. Mind is everywhere. And the one who believes that his mind is the only one is as foolish as the one who believes: “I have a glass of water here, this glass of water was empty at first, then it became full, that is, the water grew out of the glass.” - One must first draw the water from the well, from the whole body of water. And so one must also first bring the mind that one has out of the whole world mind.

We just don't realize any of this during our lifetime. Why not? Because our body does it. Gentlemen, if you should ever know – I have made this clear to you – what your body does with a very small piece of sugar that you have swallowed, how this small piece of sugar is not only dissolved in the body but also transformed into all kinds of other substances, if you knew what is going on there, then you would be amazed. You are amazed after I have told you only the very basics of what goes on in the human body. But no matter how much of what goes on in the human body is observed, it is always only a small part. You breathe in. The breath you inhale must be used throughout your entire body. Just think, you breathe in about eighteen times a minute. What you breathe in must be used throughout your whole body. This requires a tremendous amount of reason, a truly tremendous amount of reason.

Well, our body does all that. Our body, it really works for us with tremendous cleverness. It is quite admirable what one must feel when one realizes what the human body actually accomplishes in terms of cleverness. It is quite enormous. So it takes a lot out of us during our lifetime.

But now, after death, we no longer have it. Now we no longer even have the etheric body. We do not have the astral body, not even a longing for the physical body. So we only have the ego at all, and the ego now realizes that it does not have the body and now begins to familiarize itself with everything that is necessary for the body.

And that is where the mighty thing that must be understood begins. Today's science makes it particularly easy for itself. Today's science says: Where does man come from? Well, man comes from what has arisen as fertilization, as a fertilized germ in the mother. So science says: There is the fertilized germ, and in there, well, somehow man is already predisposed. If you don't know anything, you say: there is a predisposition; that's where the whole person comes from. Yes, you see, people have been aware of this for a long time, but in their own way, that is, they have been unclear about it.

Just imagine that this is the mother egg (it is drawn) from which you yourself emerged. So you would have been inside it, would have been inside it, so to speak, as a small human being. But this mother egg was in turn born of a mother egg. So the little human being must have been in the womb again, and the mother egg, that is, the mother, must have been in the grandmother again, and further up to the great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother, to Eve. And you come to the strangeness that in the great-mother Eve, the whole of humanity was inside, but so nested. Mr. Miller, he was inside the egg, which in turn was inside the egg with all the other human eggs, it was just nested that way. The whole human race was in the original mother Eve. This theory, which was also called the theory of evolution back then, later became known as the nesting theory.

So at the beginning of the 19th century, people came to the conclusion that the story of the egg containing the whole human race, with each individual contained within the next, and then so many of them, was not acceptable. And so they adopted another theory. They then said: No, in the egg there is actually nothing yet; but when this egg is fertilized, all the external conditions, wind and weather and sun and light and everything possible, can get to it. And from the influence of all of nature on this egg, man comes into being.

Yes, gentlemen, that is something that does materialism a great deal of good, if it can imagine something like that. But it does not stand up to closer scrutiny. Because just think what we become when the whole of nature is constantly working on us. We become what people today call nervous. Those who are sensitive to every breath of air and every ray of light do not become real people, but rather a bundle of nerves. We become just that from the surrounding nature. So that can't be it either.

A proper study shows us something completely different. A proper study shows that there is absolutely nothing inside this egg. Before it is fertilized, it is still, I would say, halfway so that you can see all kinds of things inside. It has a shape. So in the unfertilized egg, you can still see all kinds of threads and so on. But when the egg is fertilized, those threads are destroyed and the whole egg is nothing but a real 'mess', if I may express myself so. In more scientific terms, it is a chaos. It is a completely disordered substance.

You see, such a substance, which is completely disordered, is not found anywhere else in the world. All substances are in some way internally ordered, arranged. If you take the most arbitrary substance, if you just take a grain of dust and look at it through the microscope, you will see how finely and artfully it is constructed inside. The only thing that is completely chaotic inside is the fertilized egg. And the substance must first become completely chaotic; it must no longer be anything in itself if a human being is to develop from it. People are always thinking about the egg white, for example. They always want to study how the egg white is formed internally. Yes, the egg white is internally configured as long as it is not fertilized. When it is fertilized, it is just what I have called a “mess”, that is, a chaos, an absolutely disordered substance. And out of this comes the human being. Even in the Primordial Mother Eve, if she existed at all, the whole human race was not present, nor somehow in an egg germ that was later fertilized, but the egg germ is completely chaotic, disorderly, and was also disorderly in the Primordial Mother Eve. And if a human being is to arise out of this egg germ, then this must be brought about from outside, that is, the human being must enter into this egg germ. A proper scientific study shows, in turn, that the human being must enter this egg germ from the outside. That is to say, the human being comes from the spiritual world. He does not come from the material. The material must first be destroyed.

This is already the case with plants. In plants, you have the earth and in the earth the plant germ. Now, people are not properly studying what happens to the plant germ in the earth. It must first be destroyed, and then the new spring causes the new plant to arise from the destroyed material from outside in a spiritual way. This is how it is with animals, and especially with humans. It is only that it is easier for the plant. The whole universe forms its shape. In the case of the human being, the whole universe does not initially form his shape. He must actually form it himself. The human being must actually enter into this destroyed matter, otherwise no human being could arise from this destroyed matter. The human being must therefore first come from the spiritual world and enter into this destroyed matter. The whole process of fertilization is only there to ensure that the human being, who wants to enter the world, is confronted with a destroyed substance, that he has a destroyed substance. He could not do anything with an undestroyed substance. He cannot enter the world like a plant, because then he could only become a plant. He must really form the whole universe within himself. And he does form it. It is truly wonderful how man forms the universe within this destroyed substance.

I will show you an example of how the human being now forms the universe into this destroyed substance. If you have the earth's surface here (it is drawn), then we can just show it, because if you just look at a piece of earth, it looks even. The sun comes up in the morning, goes up to a certain height, then goes down again. That is a certain angle up to which the sun rises. It is very interesting that the sun always rises up to a certain angle and then goes down again. The angle is of course a little higher in summer than in winter, but up to a certain angle the sun rises. This angle is therefore an inclination of the sun to the earth.

We find this angle elsewhere, too. You see, when light enters our eye, where the optic nerve enters from the brain into the eye – I have drawn the eye for you – there is what is known as the blind spot. You cannot see there. You see most clearly only at points that are somewhat away from this blind spot, where the optic nerve enters. And that is where the interesting thing is: the same inclination that the sun has to the earth in its orbit, this point, where we perceive most brightly in our inner being, has the same inclination to the blind spot.

And something else. If you take the heart, it is also slightly tilted. It has the same inclination as the sun to the earth. I could show you countless such things, from which you would see: Everything that is out there in the universe, we somehow carry it within us. We carry the inclination of the sun in the inclination of our eye and in the inclination of our heart. We are formed entirely out of the reason of the universe.

Oh, gentlemen, that is where you start, when you gradually get some knowledge, to really tell yourself how actually man is a whole small world. Everything in the world outside is recreated in man. Center Just imagine if you were given this “mess”, this destroyed matter, and you were supposed to recreate it inside! You would not be able to do that. You see, when the ego is alone after death, it has to learn from the whole world how to recreate the whole world. So that after the person has shed the sympathy with the body during this third of the previous life, he now begins to learn from the whole universe how to become a human being again. And that takes longer than life on earth lasts, because on earth, things are such that one can learn a lot or a little. Actually, most people today learn very little. And however strange it may seem, scholars learn the least of all, because what they learn is all useless. It is only good for understanding what a corpse looks like, but not how a living body is affected. But the ego must learn this after death. It must learn the secrets of how a body is built from the whole world. And one can point to this time, which the ego now spends learning from the whole world how a person works and lives internally.

You see, when a person, through the exercises I have described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, brings themselves to remember the time when one would otherwise not remember, when one was a very small child, then one comes to understand what this actually consists of, this life of the infant, who as yet knows nothing of the world, who only uses his body, only wriggles, only lives in his eyes, lives in his ears, but does not yet understand anything of all this. In ordinary life, a person does not think of looking back. They say: Oh, what do I care about my childhood; I'm here now. But if you look back into this short time, which you otherwise do not remember, in terms of knowledge, you realize what you actually did there. Yes, you actually get a terribly uncomfortable feeling when you think about it. Because this fidgeting of the very young child consists of trying to forget all this knowledge of the universe. You give it to the body, and it knows it afterwards. Therefore, it can take it over during life.

The small child gives the body the whole wisdom of the world. It is so terribly painful, so terribly sad that today's science has no idea of what is going on in life, how the small child gives the body the wisdom of the world that it has acquired, how it gradually grows into the eyes, into the hands. Gradually it grows into it, giving all the wisdom of the ego to the body, while the ego actually used to possess all the wisdom of the world.

It may seem strange to you, but it is actually true: if you really have mastered anthroposophy, how can you tell people something about the universe? You can tell something about the universe simply because you remember back to the first days of childhood, when you still knew everything from the experiences you had before you entered the body. And anthroposophy actually consists of the fact that you gradually get all this world wisdom out of the body that you gave up to the body.

Yes, gentlemen, for that, ordinary science today gives no guidance. It gives no instruction at all on how to find the knowledge that one has put into the body oneself. It leads people to experiment, and they should only learn what they experience externally; whereas the right thing would be to guide people into the living body. Our students are guided to the dead body, which is already a corpse, and learn nothing about the living human being. That would admittedly be a more difficult study, because there the human being must practice self-knowledge, must look into himself, because there the human being is to become more perfect. But that is precisely what the modern person does not want: he does not want to become more perfect, he wants the school to train him a little, and then he wants to stop there, does not want to become more perfect. Man does not want this because, in the education he enjoys today, I would say he is already far too proud to somehow admit that he should perfect himself.

Well, with that I have, I would say, told you a little bit about the self. But we will talk about these things more in the coming hours, so you will hear much more and gradually find everything more understandable.

You see, I have told you a little about what the self has to do during the time until the human being comes down to earth again. But there are people who say: Oh, I'm not interested in what the self has to do afterwards! You can wait until after you die and then you'll see.

Yes, gentlemen, that would be just as if the germ, after it has emerged and been fertilized, and the human being has hatched, would say in the mother's body: Oh, I don't like living in the mother's body, I'll leave sooner. — Yes, but if he doesn't want to live his proper nine months in the mother's body, he cannot become a human being. He must go through with it first. Nor can the ego experience anything after death if it does not live here in such a way that it is stimulated to do so. Therefore it is quite wrong when someone says: I'll wait until death has occurred, then I'll see if I am something or nothing, and so on. People are not very logical. People today are actually as logical as the one who swore that he did not recognize any God, and he swore: “As surely as there is a God in heaven, I am an atheist!” That's more or less how people are today. They repeat the old sayings. Quite unconsciously they repeat the sayings, even when they contradict them. And so people believe: You can wait, then you will see whether I am still something or nothing. Isn't it true that people say to themselves: Do I believe in immortality, or do I not believe in immortality? Yes, if I don't believe in immortality and there is one after all, then I could be in a bad way. But if I believe in immortality and there is none, then it doesn't do any harm. So in any case it is better if I believe in immortality.

But, you are not supposed to play with the idea, instead it is important to really become clear about the facts. And so one must say: Here on earth, man must receive the stimulus that his ego can truly penetrate into the world after death. And today's science thoroughly dispels this stimulus, if at all, when people are no longer made aware of the facts. It is not admitted, but actually today it is in the interest of keeping people as stupid as possible, so that after death they sleep and have no idea how to penetrate the secrets of the whole universe in order to become truly human again.

You see, gentlemen, if humanity continues to live as it does today, merely concerning itself with outward things, then in the future people will be born who will no longer be able to lift a finger because they have not learned anything until the next life.

We will come back to how lives repeat themselves. Today I just wanted to give you some ideas so that you can see that it is not just a careless assertion about what the ego is like after death, but that one can point out from knowledge itself that the human being in turn descends and has to form his life from the confused material. This is really recognized on the basis of objective facts.

That is what this is about. It is just not going so fast, but I will answer the question in full when one takes together what is known about the end of human life, how man gradually loses his etheric body and his astral body, and how then the ego must descend to form its astral body and so on. Then one comes to understand how man repeatedly descends. And then, in the course of time, one also comes to understand when man will be liberated from his entire earthly life, when he will no longer have to descend. The question of when he once began will also be answered then. He must once have begun as a kind of plant. For that he does not need to be human. I have also described to you how the earth was once a large plant, and we will see how the earth will once again become a plant, and man will then be freed from his humanity.

I will then deal with the whole question again from a different angle. You will, of course, have to have the patience not to say after the first few lessons: I can't go along with this. You will see that the more detailed it becomes, the more it will seem plausible to you.

So what does the gentleman say? He says: What you can grasp with your hands is science. The rest is a figment of the imagination. Everyone can imagine things and have them imagined, because you can't know anything about all that. And if people take comfort in all kinds of supernatural things, well, you don't have to take that away from them.

It is absolutely terrible to see the confusion in which this matter has ended up. But now I would like to show you that these gentlemen have completely forgotten how to think when it comes to this science. I would like to show you this with another passage from this book. For what does the gentleman do, who pushes everything that cannot be grasped with his hands into the realm of belief? He says: To speak of an ego, which should actually dwell in man as an eternal ego, is actually scientific nonsense, because the ego is, after all, only the sum of all that is otherwise in us. We are accustomed to summarizing everything we imagine, everything we feel, from beginning to end, into a whole. And then, when we have summarized it into a whole, we say “I.” – So says the Lord.

Now, however, he wants to make this clear. He wants to make it clear that the word 'I' really only summarizes everything that one experiences. Because then the 'I' is just a mere word if one only summarizes in this way. So he makes a comparison. He compares everything that a person experiences with a mass of soldiers, with a company of soldiers. So what I experienced as a child, what I played as a child, what I felt in the game, that is one troop of soldiers; what I experienced a little later is the other troop of soldiers, and so on; to this day, I summarize all of this as the individual soldiers are combined into a company, and I say “I.” So he says. So he compares all the individual experiences of the soul with a company of soldiers, and he summarizes them as one summarizes, and does not say, Miller and Lehmann and so on, but says: The company 12 and so on. So he summarizes everything that one experiences in the soul as I, into a company of soldiers. Then he continues: “On the other hand, a word must be said here about the ego, insofar as one can also understand by it the circumstance that from the period of life when consciousness is somewhat developed, man always feels as the same personality, as the same ego.” He says, then: Man must finally be weaned of the idea that he feels as an ego, he must be accustomed to the idea that it is only as if one were a company of soldiers.

"This fact, viewed from our standpoint, should have nothing particularly surprising about it. First of all, if we want to get to the bottom of this matter, we must be clear about what we actually mean by the individual personality in relation to the external world.” So at first he gives a nice admonition that we have to form an idea. He answers: ”It is the result of all kinds of individual ideas, but especially of those that summarize the direct interactions of the organism with the external world into a more or less compact whole. In our view, the idea of the self is nothing more than an abstract idea, and indeed of the highest order, built on the sum of all the ideas, feelings and desires of an individual, but in particular of all the ideas of the interrelations between one's own body and the outside world. The concept encompasses all of this, just as the concept of the plant kingdom encompasses the infinite sum of all plants. The word 'I' – now this is where it gets interesting! “is the representative of all these ideas, much as the military leader is the representative of all the individual soldiers. Just as one can say of the deeds of a military leader that he always forms the more or less obscure unconscious background for the ideas of the individual soldiers and army detachments, in exactly the same way the mass of individual concrete ideas and feelings forms the background of the concept of the ego."

Now, gentlemen, look at how the man thinks. Now, the book is very learned, that must be assumed, it is at the cutting edge of science. The man says: You have a company of soldiers and the commander. But you only summarize the soldiers; the commander is merely their representative. It is the same with the ideas and feelings. You summarize all the ideas and feelings and the ego is merely their representative.

Yes, but if the ego is the representative, just the word, then with the company of soldiers you must also see the army commander only as a word. Have you ever discovered that the army commander leading a company of soldiers is just a word composed of all the individuals? Now, you could imagine that the army commander is not particularly clever. Sometimes the ego is not particularly clever either. But to imagine that the army commander is nothing but a mere word - and that is what he needs as a comparison for how the ego relates to ideas - proves that when the cleverest people start talking about the supernatural, they become very stupid. Because, right, you can prove to them that when they make a comparison, it is without any logic. There is not the slightest logic in it.

After Mr. Erbsmehl has made this fine comparison, he continues: “From this it follows that the respective concept of the self is entirely dependent on the underlying idea. This is most clearly evident in the way it gradually develops in a child. But every adult thinking person can also account for how they feel in every respect as a different self today than ten years ago.

Now I ask Mr. Erbsmehl or Mr. Burle whether they feel like a completely different person than ten years before! Surely you can distinguish whether you are now a completely different person than ten years ago! But you come across passages like that in books at every turn today. The most ordinary facts of life are turned upside down. Of course it is mere nonsense when someone says that he feels he is a completely different person today than he was ten years ago. But that is what these gentlemen say. But the moment you start thinking about the self, whether it is the same today as it was ten years ago, you no longer get the chance to say: the self dies when the corpse dies. — Why is that?

I have already explained to you, gentlemen, that you cut your nails, skin flakes off and so on; all this happens in seven to eight years. You no longer have any of the material that you had ten years ago. Just as your skin flakes off, your insides are constantly moving away from your body. You see, your body is like this: it sheds its upper layer; then the next layer moves forward, then that layer sheds itself; then the next layer moves forward, sheds itself again, and after seven to eight years everything has shed itself. Where is that? Where is the body you had ten years ago? Yes, it has undergone the same process, only in a somewhat more complicated way, that the corpse undergoes when it is placed in the grave. The corpse dissolves into the earth. If you were to break the body down into such small pieces as the scales that are constantly falling off you, or as the nails you cut off when you cut them into such small pieces, you would not even notice that the body is going anywhere. You could blow it away. And so, over a period of seven to eight years, the physical body dissolves into the external world.

But if you still feel like an ego today, and the physical body died two to three years ago, then the ego has nothing to do with the physical body as you have it there. So you could say. But you see, it has so much to do with it that if, for example, you take a piece of chalk, you will say: I took the chalk. Every person says that. I had a schoolmate – I think I have told you this before – who, when he was nineteen or twenty years old, was on the way to becoming a real materialist. We often went for walks together, and he always said: It is quite obvious to me that we have no self, we only have a brain; the brain thinks. I always told him: Yes, look, you say: I walk, you even say: I think; why are you lying? If you really tell the truth, you would have to say: My brain thinks! — You don't even have to say “my” because “my” already points to an ego; there must already be an ego if you say “my”. People never say: My brain thinks, my brain walks, my brain takes the chalk. It doesn't occur to them at all, because in life a person cannot be a materialist. He would immediately say nonsense if he were a materialist.

But in theory, people make materialism their own and do not consider that real science knows that we no longer have the body we had eight to ten years ago, that the ego has remained. And in the same way you can remember back to your early childhood, to the second, third, fourth, fifth year. It would never occur to you to say that it is not the same self that used to run around as a boy back then. But let us assume that you have now reached the age of forty; by the age of thirty-three you have lost one body, by the age of twenty-six you have lost the second body, by the age of nineteen you have lost the third body, by the age of twelve you have lost the fourth body, by the age of five you have lost the fifth body. You have lost five bodies and your self has always remained the same. So this self is preserved throughout your entire life on earth.

But this self can also do something with your body. The body it loses, the ego can direct continuously. You see, when I walk, my legs, although they are old, are in reality only six to seven years old at most. But I direct them with the old ego that was already there when I walked around as a boy. The ego is still walking around. The ego directs the body during life on earth.

Now I have told you that during the period of time that you no longer remember, the child learns to walk, to speak and to think. Of course, you can no longer remember the time when you could not yet think. So you learn to walk, to move in general, to use your body, to speak and to think. You learn that. And to do that, you have to direct your body as well. You cannot, as a child still crawling on all fours, straighten up the body without your will. When you move your hand, the I says: I move the hand - the I with its will. But in the same way, the will also causes the child to straighten up. The child learns to speak with the will. The child learns to think with the will. So we have to ask: where does it come from that the child learns all this? And here we come to the fact that through the “whole of earthly life, despite the fact that the body is continually being replaced, the I always remains the same, that this I is still the same in the time when we have learned to think, to speak and to walk. This I was already active in the body.

If you cut off the tip of your nose — it only needs to be a small piece, right, because a lot of it is not healthy, but you can cut off so much that it does you no harm — and look at it under the microscope, you will again see such a wonderful body with a structure that is very beautifully built. Yes, gentlemen, you have no idea how beautiful the tiniest part of your nose is! Admirably beautiful! And so it is with every part of the human body. It is beautifully constructed, beautifully arranged. The best sculptor could not do better.

There is only one structure in the human organism where everything must be destroyed and only mere matter must be present – I already drew your attention to this last time – and that is the egg from which a human being develops. And at fertilization, the last act takes place; everything of the matter that has been formed is removed.

So that one can say: the bone is beautiful; everything in the material is beautiful. The tip of the nose is no longer as beautiful as the bone, but it is still beautiful. But the egg, from which a person will later develop, contains only a completely disordered material, because everything is fragmented in it. There is no atom, there is no formation at all. Why?

A human soul cannot simply enter a bone. Superstitious people sometimes believe that there is a little devil sitting somewhere in their bones or limbs. Well, sometimes this is the case in a somewhat figurative sense, but a human being cannot enter such a bone. Nor can a person enter the tip of your nose.

I knew a lady who claimed to have a little ghost in her left index finger, and she would ask it anything she wanted to know. If she should go for a walk, she would ask it, and so on. But of course that is nonsense, a superstition. What we have to say to ourselves is: into such a well-formed bone, or even into the tip of our nose, no human being, no human soul, no human spirit can enter directly. The thing is this: The human soul-spiritual, the actual I, can only enter the egg germ because there the substance is only dust, world dust. There the soul now works the world dust with the powers it has brought with it from the spiritual world.

If people believe that what a person is comes simply through ordinary inheritance from father and mother, then one must assume that the human being is already a little human being. But that is contrary to science. Science says that the protein is completely pulverized. And it is from this pulverized protein that the soul, which comes from the spiritual, from the supersensible world, actually builds the human body.

Now you may ask: But why does the child resemble the mother or the father? Yes, gentlemen, the reason for this is that the child always imitates. The one who says: This child is the spitting image of his father – could actually say something else. You see, if we wait a little while with the child, we have a child that looks very much like, say, its father or mother, although this is not at all how it is expressed. But such things are not the concern of the learned gentlemen. But, you see, let's wait a little, let's not judge already when the child is eight or fourteen days or a month old, let's wait until the child is three or four years old. That's when the child started speaking. Then someone comes along and says: Gosh, the father is German, so the child has also started speaking German. It must have inherited it from the father, because the father is German. That is quite remarkable! Since the child came out of the egg, the language must have been in the egg. It is just wonderful that the child, when it came out of the egg, out of the mother's body, could not yet speak! But, of course, the child did not inherit the ability to speak; the child acquired it through imitation. The language is similar to that of the father and mother. But it would not occur to anyone to say that the child inherited the language.

Likewise, the face is similar. But why is the face similar? Yes, because the soul, when it allows itself to be born through a mother or to be begotten through a father who is Mr. Miller, makes the face similar to the father or mother, just as the child later makes the language similar to the language of the father and mother. You just have to consider that. In speech, the child works out the sounds and words by making itself similar to its parents or educators. But even earlier, the soul unconsciously works on the face or even the gait, like a sculptor. And because the child is born into the family and makes itself similar, when it has no consciousness yet, the similarity arises in the same way as the similarity of speech arises.

You see, gentlemen, in this way one comes to the conclusion that man actually comes from the spiritual, from the supersensible world, and builds his body with all its similarities himself. Now just take a look at the little child. The little child is born. When children are born, sometimes, despite the fact that all mothers find them very beautiful, one cannot easily distinguish them from little animals. Isn't it true that human beings are such little animals when they are born – in relation to later, of course. They really are quite unsightly, these little children. But gradually the soul works inside and makes everything more and more similar to a human being, until the moment comes when the child learns to walk; that is, as I told you last time, it finds itself in the equilibrium position of the earth. Then the child learns to speak. It learns to use the organs in its chest, because these organs are located in the chest. Then the child learns to think, that is, it learns to use the organs in its head.

Now, let us think about this. The child learns to walk, that is, to keep his balance and to move. What does he learn when he walks? Well, he learns to use his limbs while walking. But you cannot use your limbs without using your metabolism at the same time. When you use your limbs, something of us is always burned. Substances are burned. Even when you just move an arm, substances are being burned inside it. Metabolism is connected to the limbs. Walking, keeping one's balance, moving has to do with metabolism and with the limbs.

Then the child learns to speak. What has that got to do with? Speaking has to do with the chest organs, with breathing. The child can already breathe when it is very small. But connecting words with the expelled air is what the child learns with the chest organs. So: keeping balance is connected with the limbs, speaking with the chest, and thinking with the head, the nerves.

But now, we have three parts of the human being. Note that there are only three. First, we have the limbs and metabolism; second, we have the chest; third, we have thinking, the head. We have three parts of the human being.

Now let us take a look at the child. When a child is born, it is not only outwardly dissimilar to an adult human being. The cheeks are dissimilar, the whole shape; it is dissimilar at the forehead; isn't it, the child is dissimilar on the outside. But on the inside it is even more dissimilar. The brain matter of a child is more like a brain pulp. And by the age of seven, by the time the child gets its second teeth, this pulp, this brain pulp, is beautifully formed. From the age of seven, the human brain has a truly wonderful structure. The soul, the spirit within it, has made it, the soul-spiritual within it.

But you see, gentlemen, we as children could not develop this brain so wonderfully up to the age of seven if we were not constantly in contact with the world. If, for example, you have a child who is born blind, you can immediately see that the optic nerves and thus a whole piece of the brain remain a kind of pulp. It is not beautifully developed. If a person is born deaf, the auditory nerves, which go from the ear and cross here (it is drawn), and then go over there, remain a piece of brain mush along the way. So we can only properly develop our brain in the first seven years of life because we have the senses.

But the things you can grasp with your hands outside, the brain does not train that. You could, for all I care, stuff tangible substances through the nostrils into the brain – you would ruin the brain, but it would not be educated. So all tangible matter is of no use to you in building up the brain in the first seven years. Only the finest matter that lives in the light comes into consideration, for example. Only ether comes into consideration.

You see, that is very important. We absorb the ether through all our senses. So what works from our head? It is not the physical body that works from the head into the child, and into the rest of the organism. The physical body does not work in the child while the child is developing its brain so wonderfully, but the etheric body does. The etheric body, which, as I have already mentioned, we continue to possess for two or three days after death, is at work in the child, and it is this that causes the human brain to develop perfectly, thereby making the child a thinking human being. So we can say: the etheric body is at work in the thinking.

There we have found the first supersensible element of the human being: the etheric body. A child could not develop its brain, it could not have a human brain inside it, if it could not work with the ether all around. Later, by straining the muscles, you can make the muscles stronger through the physical. But, let's say, for example, the left parietal lobe in the brain, you can't make it stronger with something physically tangible. If you want to make the muscle stronger, you can do that by attaching a weight to it and lifting it again and again, thus overcoming the heaviness. But you have to make the muscle stronger through the tangible. Just as you have the muscle here, the biceps, and can make it stronger by lifting and lowering weights, so, if you look at your head from the front, you have a lobe of the brain here. It hangs over here like the arm hangs here. You can't attach any weight to it. And yet, what happens in the arm muscle during training cannot be compared to what happens in this lobe of the brain! At the beginning, when we are born, it is a pulp; when we are seven years old, it is wonderfully developed. Just as the arm muscle becomes stronger through lifting and lowering the weight, that is, from something tangible, from something visible, so the brain becomes stronger through what is in the ether. Just as the human being is connected to the environment through his physical body, so he is also connected to the environment through his etheric body. And from that he has the thinking. Through that he forms the inside of his head in the first seven years.

Once the human being has developed thinking, then, I would like to say, he returns to speech. Learning to speak is something completely different than learning to think. Learning to think is precisely what works on the formation of our body. This makes us, so to speak, sculptural, I would say, this thinking. It works in us so that we truly become a complete human being by the age of seven. During this time, we also learn to speak. But you see, it is not possible for us to learn to speak in the same way as we learn to think. For when we speak, what happens then? Yes, gentlemen, you see, when you lift a heavy weight or strike with your arm with terrible force, your arm hurts. To hurt means to have a feeling. We really have a feeling when we exert any limb too much and somehow hurt it. Whenever we feel pain, we have hurt something, even if only very slightly. We have a feeling. But, gentlemen, all language comes from feeling. If you listen to the child, you can hear how language comes from feeling. The child will learn: “Ei, ei” in its language. What does it want to express when it says “Ei, ei”? It nestles up. It likes the person to whom it says “Ei, ei”. It lays its little head down when it says “Ei, ei”. And so it is with all words; it is the same with everything that is spoken: a feeling underlies it. Yes, the feeling does not come from the brain, and the feeling does not come from what the brain develops from.

You see, if there were no sunlight shining through our eyes, the ether around us would not be able to work on us. We could not live properly for the first seven years. During the first seven years, the child also has more feeling. It learns language by imitation. But feeling is at work in this imitation. And we have to say: light cannot evoke feeling. When we learn language through feeling, something else is present in us. That which then works in language, whereby the human being can speak, is not just the etheric body, it is then the human being's astral body. So that we can say: secondly, to learn to speak, we have the astral body – that is just an expression, I could just as easily say differently – we have the astral body, which works primarily in the chest, in breathing, which then transforms into speaking.

You see, it is always the belief that man, with his physical body, has, let us say, hunger and thirst. But that is nonsense. Imagine a machine that is driven by water. You have to give the machine water. All right, then it will work, and if you don't give it water, it will stop working. What does that mean: the machine stops working? It means that you have to give it water again, you have to let it drink. But the machine is not thirsty beforehand. The machine is not thirsty; it may stop working, but it is not thirsty beforehand, otherwise it would cry out. It does not do that. It is not thirsty.

What is the connection in humans? When a child is thirsty, it does not behave like a machine. It does not just stop moving. On the contrary, a child starts screaming when it is thirsty. What is the connection between thirst and screaming? Screaming is not in the substance, but it is also not in the ether. The ether can form the structure; it can thus form that which is our form. But the ether does not cause us to scream. If the ether were to cause us to scream, there would be a terrible, perhaps not a roar, but a continuous hissing in the world. Because if we look, it is the ether that, together with our eye, causes us to see. The ether is constantly entering our eye. That is why we see. Yes, but when the ether enters our eye, it does not start in the eye: s-s-s-e-] —, no, that is not the etheric body of the human being; it does not lisp. Just imagine if, just because we are looking, there were a constant whispering in a room, that would be a nice story! So the etheric body does not scream or whisper. There is something else there. That is the astral body. And when a child is thirsty and cries out, there is a feeling of thirst in the astral body. And this crying out is what brings the child's feeling to our ears.

But all that I have described to you now could not yet lead to my walking. Because, you see, if I form my body from the head through the etheric body, I could remain like a statue my whole life. My body could be formed, I could roar like a lion; my roar could still be formed from the astral body. But when I want to come into balance as a child, when I want to apply the will to walk, to grasp, to come into balance, where I always say: I walk, I grasp, I come into balance - there it is still the I that comes into it, which is something other than the etheric body and the astral body. And this I lives in the limbs and in the metabolism. When you move your limbs, it is the I that moves them. So you have three parts of the human being in addition to the physical body: you have the etheric body, the astral body and the I (diagram on page 138).

And you see, these three parts of the body can also be perceived if one only trains to do so. But modern science does not want this training. And now I will tell you how modern science actually behaves when it does not want this.

You have all dreamt before. While dreaming, you believe that it is all real. Sometimes you wake up with a terrible fear, for example when you are standing at the edge of an abyss and feel dizzy and about to fall. Now you wake up, completely drenched in sweat. Why? Well, because you thought the abyss was real. You are lying quietly in bed, it is not dangerous at all, but you wake up from the danger that you saw in the image. Imagine if you slept your whole life – that would be a nice story for some. There are those who sleep their whole life.

Once upon a time, there was someone who had learned the Copernican theory and was a terribly lazy fellow. Now, he was lying in the ditch. Another one came by and said, “Why are you lying there?” “Because I have so much to do!” “Well, you guy, you're lying there, you're not doing anything.” So he said, “I have to go around the sun with the earth, and I want to stay behind! It's uncomfortable for me, it's too much work!"

Not true, some people would not even want to go around the sun with the earth! But we do our whole waking life with. You see, if we only dreamt our whole life, then we in Europe could lie in bed, someone could take our body, maybe even our bed, so as not to wake us, and take it on a ship to America – of course, angels would have to do it, because people couldn't do it so quietly – but we could be shipped to America. We continued to dream there, all that could be done to us, we don't know anything about ourselves. If we were dreaming, we would never know how the nose touches, how the left hand touches the right hand. And yet, gentlemen, we would have a whole life. If you dreamt your whole life through, it would be something else – we would be able to fly in our dreams, for example. You can't fly on earth; in your dreams you fly. We would think of ourselves as completely different beings, and so on.

But consider, a world would be around us if we were to dream the whole of life. And we wake up. Let us say: I wake up and dreamt that during the night – let me take a very telling example – I was hanged, or beheaded. Let us assume that one dreams that one has been beheaded. Well, gentlemen, if you dreamt your whole life, you would naturally always believe that you had been beheaded. It wouldn't bother you as much as it does here. You would perhaps experience it more often, dreaming that you were being beheaded, and you would believe that it wouldn't bother you. Now you wake up – and lo and behold, you've taken a book with you into bed. While tossing and turning, it came to rest at the back. Now you are lying on it with your head on the edge of the book, and the fact that you are lying uncomfortably seems to you in your dream as if you had been beheaded. When you have woken up, you realize what the dream means; after awakening, you can explain to yourself where the dream came from.

So you have to wake up first. It's waking up that matters. People who dream their whole lives would think that the dream world is their only reality. We only start to think of the dream world as a fantasy world when we wake up.

Now, gentlemen, in bed, a person wakes up of his own accord and through the surrounding world, which shakes him up. But we only wake up from the life in which we are immersed, which we believe is only the tangible, when we make an effort. And how one awakens from it, I have just described in the book: “How to Know Higher Worlds?” Just as one wakes from a dream and knows that the dream is a world brought about by waking, so one wakes from waking through higher knowledge and then knows that our ordinary world comes from what one now perceives of the higher waking. One knows this.

Therefore, the future science must not just dream away in the world, always just trying: How do you do it in the laboratory, in the physics cabinet? but it must guide people to wake up now. Then one will no longer say: Man is only a physical, material body, but then one will say: Man consists of physical matter, of the etheric body, astral body and I. And of these one can then say: One now knows what wakes up from the corpse when one dies. Because the etheric body had to approach the physical body first and shape the physical body through the head. The astral body had to approach first, had to dig itself into the chest a little, then the person learned to speak. And the I had to approach the physical body and had to bring it into balance in the outer world. Through this, he learned to move his limbs and to adapt his metabolism to the movements. So the human being brings his etheric body, his astral body and the ego from the spiritual world, and he shapes the chaotic substance, which is pulverized, into an etheric body, an astral body and an ego. And what he brings with him when he comes into the world, he carries out again through death. I have already indicated to you how that is. It is so that if one really considers this higher science of waking up, one can speak about life after death and before earthly life in the same way as one speaks about this earthly life. We will do that next time. Then the question of how a person looks without a body, namely before fertilization, will be fully answered.

The next lecture will be on Monday at nine o'clock. It is a bit difficult now, of course, but that doesn't matter. The fact that it is difficult is only because people are never prepared for these things in their youth. If they were prepared, it would not be difficult for them at all. Today, I might say, people have to struggle so that they can learn later what is not prepared for people in their youth. But when you see that people today only manage to say: the commander is only the summary of a company of soldiers, then you will also see that today's science already needs to be improved. And that is what really leads to an understanding of the supernatural.

Let us now continue to try to elaborate on the things we have discussed in recent times. I told you more or less in general terms how the spiritual and soul life of man actually relates to the sensory and physical life. Now today I will elaborate on this further. I have already pointed out to you that if you want to know something about these things, you cannot say: Yes, the intellect that I have once and for all must decide everything, and what it cannot decide does not exist. One must always bear in mind that one has also undergone a development in ordinary life. Just imagine what it would be like if we had remained at the level of a three-year-old child! We would look at the world quite differently. A three-year-old child sees the world quite differently than an adult. The three-year-old child can be taught all kinds of things. After all, in terms of life, he is still asleep. The three-year-old child cannot even speak properly; he can be taught language. In any case, the three-year-old child is modest and not snooty. It is willing to be taught. It would probably not be so modest if it were not half asleep and said: Why should one learn? We already know everything! But today's man says: We already know everything; and since we cannot understand the spiritual soul with our minds, there is no such thing as a spiritual soul.

Now, if I were to say as a three-year-old child: I don't want to learn anything more; if I say: Dad, Mom, and a few other things, like apples and so on, that's enough – that would be a child's point of view. But once you have acquired the common sense of an ordinary person, you can really develop something within yourself. And if you now further develop the ordinary powers of cognition that you have, then it comes about that you undergo just such a leap, I would say, as the one from a small child to an adult human being. All this depends, of course, on gaining insight and on incorporating it into the whole process of human development. Today, people cannot help but be snobbish in this regard and say: I already know everything, and what I don't know is none of my business. Today, people cannot help but say this because they have been educated from elementary school on to ascribe everything to reason, and to say of the other: Well, yes, one can believe in that, but one cannot recognize it.

You see, you just have to be very clear about the fact that there really is such an awakening from ordinary everyday life to real knowledge, just as there is an awakening from sleeping and dreaming to ordinary life. You just have to realize that you can only really know something about the world when you see through what is happening from a higher point of view, just as you have to see through the dream from a waking point of view. One only realizes that a dream is not reality, that a dream is something that depends on waking life, when one can wake up. I told you the other day that if one could never wake up, one would consider what one dreams to be the only reality.

But now let us see what a dream actually is. You see, gentlemen, people have thought an awful lot about dreams. But actually, everything that is said about dreams is basically just drivel. It really is drivel, because people can say: well, if the brain just vibrates a little, then the person is dreaming. Yes, but why does the brain only vibrate a little? — Well, what is said about dreams is actually a kind of proof. But if you are clear about the fact that the human being not only has this physical body, which you can see and touch in life, but that he also has the other aspects of his nature that I have drawn to your attention, that the human being also has an etheric body, an astral body and an ego, and if you then say to yourself: this very ego and this astral body are outside the physical body and the etheric body when you are asleep, then you can first of all explain to yourself why a person does not walk when they are asleep. They do not walk because the ego is not inside the physical body. You can also explain to yourself why a small child does not walk. Because the ego has not yet awakened in a small child. So you can explain to yourself why a person walks: he walks because the I slips into his physical body. You can also explain to yourself why a person does not think when asleep. He does not think because the astral body is not within his physical body.

Doesn't that show you that you have to distinguish, so to speak, between the physical body and the etheric body, which are in bed, and the I and the astral body, which are outside during sleep.

Now imagine what it is like when you wake up or fall asleep. When you fall asleep, it is the case that the I and the astral body are just going out. So there is also a state where they are half inside, half on their way out. Only later does the state come when the I and the astral body are completely outside. So there is also such a state where they are still half inside and already half outside. That is when you dream.

Otherwise, you only believe that you are dreaming during the night. Actually, you only dream when you are falling asleep and when you are waking up. And what do you dream about then? Yes, you see, gentlemen, people believe that you dream because you use your brain when you are awake – so today's scholars say – but when you are asleep you only use your spinal cord. That's what people think.

But these people are not able to observe at all! Take a real dream, for example. Take the dream of a fire. You dream of a whole fire; you dream of all kinds of things. And you wake up – someone yells outside: “Fire!” In reality, you perceived nothing else – you didn't know anything about fire and so on – so you heard this “Feurio!” half and half because your ear was open. Because you are accustomed to it, you associate this with fire, but it is half and half obscure. And what you dream about fire can be something completely different than what you see. For example, you may dream that the fire is coming from a volcanic eruption. You may dream something completely different. And when you dream about something that happened many years ago, you will know how confused the dream is. Perhaps as a small boy you had a small quarrel with someone. Now, years later, you dream about this quarrel. But you dream about it as if you had been beaten to death, or as if you had beaten the other person to death. The dream confuses everything. And you can perceive this confusion everywhere in the dream.

Now, when we dream while falling asleep, the story remains confused. When we dream while waking up, it corrects itself because we really see what is there. We dreamt that someone is murdering us. He puts a ball in our mouth; afterwards he comes and works on us with some instrument – we wake up and unfortunately have a corner of the bedspread in our mouth.

You see, the dream takes a small cause, adds a lot to it and confuses the story. For example, if the air is bad in the room where you sleep, you will experience what is known as the Alpdrücken. But you do not say to yourself in the dream: “The air is bad there, I can't get a good night's sleep there,” but you get the impression that an evil spirit is sitting on your chest and pressing down on you. You all know the legend of the Trut. This is based on the fact that one has got bad air into the lungs. The nightmare is based on this.

What, then, is dreaming based on?

Well, gentlemen, now let us take the waking dream. It is the case that the ego and the astral body are just slipping in and are not yet completely inside. These are the dreams of which we know the most. When you are completely inside your physical body, you look out of your eyes. But when you are not completely inside, you do not look out of your eyes. You have to imagine that when you enter your physical body, you turn around, as it were, and look out of your eyes. But if you are still half outside, you pass through your eyes, slipping through your eyes, and you see everything indistinctly. You then attach all kinds of confused fantasies to them. But when we enter our body during the night's sleep, we have nothing but these confused fantasies. And how do we sort them out? We can't sort them out. Only our body sorts them out for us. Otherwise, we would see the fire-breathing volcano Vesuvius every time we heard the word 'Feu' (fire) outside. Our eyes are so wonderfully constructed that we can only see the right thing through them. That is to say, we would only devote ourselves to all kinds of fantastic things throughout our lives if we were our body for the whole of life. It is the body that makes it possible for us to see life properly.

So you see, when we look at ourselves outside of our body, we are actually inside our ego and our soul; we are fantasists who have all kinds of confused ideas in our minds, and all we need to do is realign ourselves in our body every morning when we wake up. It is thanks to our body that we see things in order. Actually, we are fantasists in our earthly lives. The dream shows us how we really are in our earthly lives.

If you then come to really understand things, in the sense that you have awakened in a certain way with regard to your knowledge, you see even more clearly: in his life on earth, man is what he dreams. He is actually a fantasist, and he must always allow the body to correct him. And when he is completely asleep, he is actually quite unconscious. He cannot perceive anything of the world at all. Only when he has a piece of his body does he perceive the world fantastically.

But just when you know that, you say to yourself: What is the dream then actually? What does the dream actually show us? The dream shows us that we actually know nothing about our body; because if we knew something, we could also see properly what is outside. We could recreate the eyes in our thoughts and in our spirit. But we cannot do that; we are dependent on our body giving us the power of the eyes. So the dream shows us how little we know about our body.

But now you remember that I said the other day that we have to make this body ourselves. Inheritance is nothing. What is present when a person begins his existence on earth is, as I have explained to you, matter ground down to dust. First the soul-spiritual must enter into it. Man must first build up all his matter himself. When he understands the dream, he knows that he cannot do that. And when one comes to understand the dream, one learns something else.

Think about how difficult it is to put yourself back in the first years of your childhood. Suddenly you remember an event that you know your mother didn't tell you about, but that you saw for yourself. For one person it falls in the third year, for another in the fourth year, and so on. Yes, gentlemen, before that you were really asleep, really asleep. But when you look at a three-year-old child who can actually still sleep properly – because you don't remember it, just as you don't remember ordinary sleep – when you look at this three-year-old child in relation to life, you can do something that you can't do later.

I have already told you that the brain continues to develop until the permanent teeth have come through, until the seventh year. Look at the brain of a child who has just been born and the brain of a seven-year-old child. Something has happened to this seven-year-old child, something has worked on this brain. The brain itself cannot do anything. The brain is like a dynamo. A dynamo develops magnetism, and the whole factory movement depends on it. But the electric current must flow through it, otherwise the dynamo stands still. The brain stands still if the current of soul-life does not flow through it. In childhood the current of soul-life flows through the brain with much greater power, for the child works out the whole brain until the second change of teeth, and most of all in the very earliest years of life. That is why I told you that Jean Paul, who was a very clever man, said: A person learns much more in his first three years than in his three years at university. It is much more artful than what one ever has to work on externally later.

We say to ourselves: Yes, we had that; we have lost that. Just when we became conscious, we lost this inner soul work. We no longer have that. And the one who comes to this realization notices that he can do it less and less. When you later gain the gift of looking back on life, it makes you feel quite dizzy about what has happened. Because when you were a fourteen-year-old boy, you might still have been able to do some of the things you did in abundance when you were a three-year-old child or even just when you were born. You could do the most when you were a three-year-old child; at fourteen you could do a lot less of it. When you turn thirty, you can still digest enough, but you can no longer work out anything. When you turn fifty or sixty, you have become a real donkey when it comes to the work of working out the human body. You only realize how big an ass you become in the course of your life! It is necessary to realize that you lose some of your wisdom during the twenty to thirty years of your lifetime. If you go through the period of thirty to forty years, you lose a lot more. And afterwards, you are already a terrible donkey in relation to everything you have to process internally.

But when you start to realize this, when you acquire the ability to look back on your life, you are actually filled with respect for what a clever being you were as a very young child. You were once terribly ugly; but you can change everything if you were an ugly fellow. At fifteen, you can no longer make yourself beautiful. As a small child, you can do just that. All small children can do that.

So it is important to realize what kind of donkey you have become in the course of your life. That is an important side of life. You don't become immodest, but a terribly modest person. You realize when you see it correctly: when you were a little child, you actually sat on the donkey and drove the donkey yourself. Now that you have become an old man, you have turned into a donkey yourself. — You see, you have to put it so drastically, otherwise nothing comes of it.

In this way you also arrive at the meaning of the dream. You will have experienced it yourself; in a dream you can even think that you are the Emperor of China or something else. There are many other dreams. You can dream anything. But what does the dream show us? You just have to follow the dream to see how it changes in the course of your life.

Infant dreams are quite wonderful. Infant dreams still show you that the child still has the powers within itself to shape its body. They are truly cosmic. The child dreams of what it has experienced before descending to earth, because these powers are still within it. It needs them to develop its brain. When you have this wonderfully designed brain, which is located in the upper skull (see drawing on page 152), then it has the eye, but here are the nerves that are needed to see. All this must be worked out in detail. It must be worked out in detail. Yes, gentlemen, you cannot work that out with earthly knowledge. With earthly knowledge you can work out machines here and there; but with earthly knowledge you cannot work out the brain. In the dreams of small children you can still see exactly: in their dreams they work out how their brain functions. Later on, dreams also become very strange if a person does not lead an orderly life; they become increasingly disorderly. And the fact that the dream is confused actually stems from the fact that one knows so little about one's physical body because one is not inside it.

So that is the reason why we know so little about our physical body: because we have lost, transformed into foolishness, what we have received as wisdom when we descended into earthly life. When you wake up and say to yourself, “Well, if you believe everything you've dreamt now – that you're the emperor of China – then of course you're an ass.” But we ourselves can't do anything other than develop ass-like behavior because we don't have the body. Not being inside, we can't help but be confused by the dream. We have completely lost the ability that we had as small children to build up our body properly. It has to come to us from outside. When we wake up, it comes to us from outside. But when we come back down to earth, it doesn't come to us from outside. Then we encounter destroyed matter in the egg from outside. We have to build it up piece by piece.

Yes, gentlemen, we have to learn all this between two earth lives. Between two earth lives we have to learn what the dreaming human being cannot do. You see, there are enemies and opponents of anthroposophy who say: Oh, they are just people who want to dream; they make all kinds of fantastic things up about the world. Yes, but anthroposophy consists precisely in the fact that we no longer rely on dreams, because dreams show that we cannot do what we can do when we enter into earthly life, when we enter with this dark, unconscious knowledge that we have as a small child. There we are clear about the fact that we have acquired this in a world that is not the world on earth, because in the world on earth we can only educate ourselves to become fantasists with regard to our actual self. However beautiful this world is, we can only educate ourselves to become fantasists with regard to our actual selves. We have to acquire our relationship to our body, our whole relationship to our body, in another world.

Now I want to tell you that the one who sees through the whole thing and thus also sees how becoming an ass advances further and further knows: it is easy to lose this knowledge. Well, it is not much different than when someone takes an exam. When someone takes an exam, it often takes two years to pass it. But they forget it quickly, terribly quickly. This is also the case with the knowledge we need to build our body: we can forget it quickly. Only here the “quick” is somewhat different than with an exam or a test. The “quick” is our whole life on earth. When we have died, we have forgotten approximately what we brought down into physical life at our birth. Our lifetime is approximately the forgetting time.

Now imagine that one of you has an experience of which he is aware: you are growing up as a child; you first remember something that happened, let's say, when I was four years old. Suppose he has already turned sixty and he remembers an event from when he was just four years old. Now it took him fifty-six years after those four years to forget, to forget inwardly. For fifty-six years, the forgetting became stronger and stronger. For fifty-six years, he became more and more of an ass. So how much more time did he need to forget what he still had until the age of four? Well, it took him so much more time than 4 in 56 contains: he needed fourteen times his first childhood to forget. When he reaches the age of sixty, it takes him fourteen times as long again to regain in the spiritual world what he has forgotten there. So he needs 60 times 14 years, 840 years. Then, in the spiritual world, he has acquired the ability to have something similar to what the small child had in its first four years, in order to build up. That means that after 840 years he can come to earth again.

You can only calculate this with full responsibility, as I have written it on the board for you now, if you are really clear about it, if you can examine what lies in dreams, how dreams distance you more and more from the spiritual world.

And you see, if someone walks around and at a certain time cannot enter his physical body at all, then he is a medium. If someone enters his physical body at the right time and uses it again, well, then he is a normal person. But if a person goes around in this state all the time, without the ego having entered the physical body – you can even walk around as a sleepwalker; you can even speak as a sleepwalker, or when you are lying in bed – then you need not be surprised; because if you, let us say, throw a ball, and everything is flat, it will roll on by itself. So under certain circumstances, when a person is not quite healthy, when everything goes easily for him, when his body is not quite firm, the activity that is otherwise conscious can still have an effect. But then the person is an automaton. A sleepwalker is not a human being, but an automaton. And one who speaks from sleep does not speak humanly either. Just try it: when someone speaks from sleep, you can hear the most stupid things, because he becomes an automaton and his ego and soul are not in his body.

But if this is only half the case, if a person is only half an automaton – the inward movement happens from behind, so that the person moves in from the back of the brain to the front – if a person only moves in halfway, then he can close his eyes, and then, because the optic nerves are at the back (on the right), he perceives something, but it is fantastic. And then he can also talk you into all kinds of fantasies, because, right, he doesn't see, but he gets images there. The sense of hearing is located there (center). And the sense of language is located there (left). He can talk you into anything there. The mediums speak from there, but they are not in the world. Therefore, nothing that the mediums say can be trusted, because they are half inside their physical body. Nothing at all is to be given to it. What the media say is just what man in his - I must use the expression again and again - in his donkey-like behavior perceives.

Yes, gentlemen, but I have also heard of mediums who say really wonderful things. That is also true, the mediums also say wonderful things; but that is no wonder at all. Because, you see, when, for example, a strong earthquake strikes somewhere, the animals are the first to leave; the people stay and are destroyed by the earthquake. Animals are prophetic from the very beginning because the intellect is everywhere; they have not yet choked the intellect into themselves. So the medium is something that descends to the animal. It can do wonderful things, it can even say verses that are more beautiful than Goethe's verses — well, because it descends to the animal intellect.

For someone who is to attain knowledge in the anthroposophical way, the opposite is the case. He must not only enter halfway, as in his dreams, but he must know everything as the other person knows it, and in addition, what one can know when one wakes up a second time. When one wakes up a second time, one gets an idea of what it is like. You say to yourself: Yes, if you have spent a little time getting to know people during your life on earth, it will help you after death. Then it will be easier for you after death to get to know the human body again. But what you have to get to know between death and a new birth is the inside of the human body. And here you must be clear about one thing: getting to know the world is a lot of work. Students sweat profusely when they have to get to know the external world, when they have to learn to calculate how the stars revolve and so on; when they have to learn to calculate what the Earth looked like when there were no present-day crabs and so on. There is a lot to learn. But, gentlemen, what has to be learned on earth about what lies outside of man is nothing compared to what has to be learned within man.

Now you will say: Yes, but you do learn inwardly from the human being when the human being is dead; you learn everything from the human being. You cut up the human being and you learn from the corpse what the human being looks like internally. — But there is a big difference. With all the knowledge you gain from the corpse, you can never create a living human being. Of course, in order to create a living human being, conception is necessary. But at the moment of conception, the human being who has only just learned in the spiritual world between death and a new birth is also involved. One can only acquire knowledge on earth about that which is dead. One cannot acquire knowledge about that which is alive, or even about that which feels and thinks.

And I would not have dared to write these figures down for you if it had not been for the higher knowledge that one can see how man during his life on earth moves further and further away from the spiritual world. When he grows old, he has gone furthest away. When he is still a child – let us assume that he dies at the age of sixteen – yes, then it is different when he remembers back to the age of four. He may die at the age of sixteen, remembering back twelve years, that is three times four, and if he has reached the age of sixteen, he actually only needs forty-eight years to reappear. It is true that you can do that in the calculation!

But now we come across something very strange, gentlemen. This is this: you know, since ancient times, the patriarchal age has always been counted as about 72 years. When a person has reached the age of 72, the years beyond that are actually considered a gift. Isn't that right, that is the patriarchal age, 72 years. Now let us assume that such a patriarch was an excellent person, as there were some in ancient times. We, who are so inattentive today, remember very little from our childhood. But these people remembered things from the age of three or two. And then they had 70 years to forget their childhood wisdom, their extrasensory wisdom. That includes 35 times 2. So they go through a period in the spiritual world when they are 72 years old, remembering much further back than they can now, which is 35 times 72 years, or over 2000 years.

You see, gentlemen, if you observe the sun in spring, it rises in the constellation of Pisces. Once upon a time, it rose in the constellation of Aries. The calendar still shows Aries as the point of sunrise. But that is not correct. The sun rose in the constellation of Aries until the 15th century. Then it was correctly stated that the sun rises in the constellation of Aries. And since then, astronomers have become lazy and they continue to do so, even though the sun no longer rises in the constellation of Aries, but in the constellation of Pisces.

Let's assume that the constellation of Pisces has a certain size. There are twelve such constellations. When the sun rises next year, as I said, it will be somewhere in the constellation of Pisces on March 21. And when you observe it next year, it will have moved a little further, no longer coming up in the same place, and last year it was a little further back, also not coming up in the same place as this year. The sun takes a certain amount of time to pass through the constellation. At first it was at the very beginning of Pisces, and later, in the future, it will be at the end of Pisces. Then it will have advanced so far that it will no longer come out at Pisces, but at Aquarius. So now it passes through the constellation of Pisces, then later through the constellation of Aquarius, and even later through the constellation of Capricorn, and so on. For the sun to pass through such a constellation takes about as long as it takes a person, on average, when they have become very old, to come back.

This means a great deal that the sun advances once from one constellation to another. I have explained in my “Occult Science” that this is connected with the way the sun behaves when man returns. And we may therefore assume that knowledge shows us that when a person dies now, he receives what he has to learn to rebuild his body from the effects of Pisces. And then he comes again when he can no longer learn from Pisces, but must learn from Aquarius. And then he comes again when he must learn from Capricorn. Then again from Sagittarius. And then again he comes when he must learn from Scorpio. And then again, when he has to learn from Libra; then Virgo, then Leo, then Cancer, then Gemini, then Taurus, then Aries. Then he comes back to the beginning. But of course he has learned a lot by then. He has gone around once in 25,815 years and has gone through about twelve earth lives, eleven to twelve earth lives. Someone might say: Yes, you are telling us that a person always learns what he needs on earth from a different constellation, a constellation that looks quite different. If you look up at the constellation of Pisces, it looks quite different from Aquarius or Capricorn and so on.

Yes, but, gentlemen, imagine you were there, say, 800, 1000, 1500, 2000 years ago. It was quite different on Earth then. You would have led a completely different life. Perhaps you would have been some small, contented farmer, fattening up a paunch and becoming a very contented fellow. Now you are in the industrial labor movement. That is what you learned from the fish. Back then, when you would have fattened up your tummy and been a contented farmer, you would have learned that from the ram. So man learns what he goes through on earth precisely from the constellations.

You see, now we are getting to the point where we can say that people gradually come around. So if you had been there in 825 AD, for example, in the 9th century, you would have been that little farmer with the big belly; now you have returned under the influence of Pisces. But if you go around, you will arrive at Pisces again after 25,815 years. But now you have learned so much that you no longer need to become what you were before, but you are now at a much higher level as a human being. You have to realize that after 25,815 years, when we want to go back to Earth, we will no longer have to go down to Earth like that, because we have learned everything in a corresponding constellation.

And you see, this is where what I have already pointed out to you comes into consideration. Those who have learned geology in a very scholarly way today tell you: 25 million years ago, it was like this on Earth. Now, how do people come to the conclusion that 25 million years ago the Earth was a hot liquid body? I have also spoken to you about similar things, but not about such long periods of time. How do people come to this conclusion?

They examine Niagara Falls, for example. The waterfall rushes down. Now they take the stone over which it has rolled and calculate how much of it is washed away in a year, and then they calculate how much of the stone has been washed away in a year, when the water was not yet bottled but was still present as vapor. And from that they get these 25 million years.

It's just like when I examine a person's heart. Today is April 9. Let's examine the heart today, then again in a month, it will have changed a little bit; then again in a month, it will have changed a little bit again. And from these small changes, we calculate and come up with what the heart was like 300 years ago. But it hadn't existed yet. The calculation is correct. That is often the case with scientific calculations: the calculation is correct, but the things were not yet there. And so it is with what the earth looked like 25 million years ago. The calculation is exactly right, but the earth was not yet there. And so one then also calculates what the earth will be like after 25 million years. One just calculates in the other direction. But the earth will no longer exist then. Just as with the heart, which gets a little worse and worse every day, you can calculate what it will be like in 300 years, except that you will no longer be there as a physical person in 300 years. The calculations are quite correct. That is precisely the dazzling, the deceptive thing, that the calculations are terribly correct; but the human being does not last as long as the calculations indicate. When you reappear after 25,815 years, the Earth will have disintegrated in the meantime, and you will have had to find your way into the Earth in your successive lives anyway. The Earth is no longer there; you are freed from the Earth. You have ascended to a higher life.

And so, if you really get to the bottom of it, you can scientifically penetrate the time when old legends still tell that man goes through a series of earthly lives, but then no longer needs to return to earth. Then he must have learned so much that he can now endure it without a physical body. But then man must gradually have come to no longer have such crazy dreams as today, and must no longer have distanced himself so far from the spiritual world.

But you have come up with a very important result, gentlemen. You have to say to yourself: those people who resist becoming acquainted with the spiritual world do not want to let knowledge approach humanity. They want man to remain an ass on earth and not be able to return. Because he has already acquired something about man on earth, and something living at that, not just knowledge attached to dead matter, he is increasingly able to see through consciously after death what he has to go through.

Then, when a person, as certain dark forces want, because he must become a donkey on earth, should also remain a donkey, then these dark forces tempt him to lose his spiritual existence altogether. They persuade him to believe in eternal bliss. But just as they persuade him to believe in bliss, they take away from him what is allotted to him. That is how one has to talk; it is something terrible!

Therefore, anthroposophy must show man how he really is according to knowledge, so that he may gradually become able to enter the spiritual world again. You see, that is it, that anthroposophy is already a great human task and has a great social significance. Because all understanding will indeed go away. And because the intellect only wants to remain within, because human wisdom serves up what comes from the corpse, that is actually how it came about – not from something else – that humanity lives in such darkness and has no idea what to do. For example, in order to get out of the eternal congress image and so on, in order to get to something again, you have to really wake people up. But people hate to wake up. Because, when people sit down at meeting tables, it is not just about sitting down together, but about talking about something sensible; whereas people today are such that they do not even admit that they first have to wake up, have to make something of their minds flexible, so that they can also get a feeling for the social question again. Therefore, everything else is basically just a sticking plaster. But what is necessary is that people really come to an understanding of their inner being already on this earth, that they are prepared for what they have to do in the spiritual world. That is already so.

It does not occur to anthroposophy to convert individuals. Individuals cannot achieve anything, but many people can; and anthroposophy only wants to help many people acquire the right knowledge. Then it will be possible to bring about better times on this earth.

I wanted to tell you this too, gentlemen. Now I have to go to Zurich, St. Gallen and Winterthur. When I come back, I will continue with these lectures. Perhaps you can think of some questions you would like to ask.

Today, gentlemen, I would like to start by telling you a very interesting story that took place in front of witnesses, so it cannot be scientifically challenged. There was once a fisherman who held his fishing rod, was annoyed after a while that absolutely nothing wanted to bite, until suddenly there was a terrible jolt. Something very heavy bit. He held out the fishing rod and was very happy that he had now caught a big fish. But what did he pull out? A very large turtle.

Well, this big turtle stayed on the fishing rod, because it had swallowed the fishhook. It was inside her belly, and the fisherman couldn't get it out. The turtle pulled her head back a little. He tried to persuade the turtle, but she wouldn't let go of the fishhook. So he had no choice but to hang her from a tree branch, cut off her head with his sharp knife, and let her fall to the ground.

You will all agree: if this had happened to a human being – let's say, for example, during the French Revolution or some other beheading – well, he would have been a corpse. What did the turtle do? The turtle straightened up, calmly marched back into the water and disappeared into it. It didn't bother her at all that her head was cut off.

So, as you can see, gentlemen, this turtle did not need its head at all to continue living. How long it lived after that was, of course, not recorded at the time, but anyway, you can see from this: for everything that has to do with walking, for example, the turtle does not need its head at all. It can walk without its head.

I have told you many stories about animals doing all kinds of things, terribly clever things, and from this story about the tortoise you can conclude that the animals are not doing it with their heads, because you can cut off a tortoise's head and it will continue to move around and do everything else as usual. The turtle did not run away blindly, but straight into the water from which it had come. It could not have done it differently, or better, with its head.

Now you might say: That is a unique case. But it is not a unique case, because these experiments have been done and people are doing the same thing now. Those who can grasp the whole thing spiritually do not actually need these experiments. But these experiments are constantly being cited to contradict the matter. They do not contradict it, but they do confirm it. The experiments I am going to tell you about have been conducted countless times. You take a frog and cut its head off with a razor. Now the frog is there without a head. You put it back on the table. At first, it behaves extremely impertinently without a head. It sinks down a bit at the front, and at the back, quite impertinently with the back body, it lifts itself up and hops from the spot. But if you now take a caustic acid and touch the frog a little on the side (it will draw) – the headless frog is then there, has its legs there, only it has no head – so if you touch it a little with a caustic acid, which otherwise hurts, the frog first takes its hind leg and scratches itself there, without a head. You can repeat this over and over – the frog will use its hind leg and scratch itself, without a head. And if you add more acid, then he also uses his front leg to help. Then, of course, he tilts to the side. If you add even more, he also uses the leg from the other side to help. Then, of course, he falls over. So you see, the headless frog does everything he would otherwise do, regardless of whether he has a head or no head.

Not true, so you can see from this: When we go down from mammals to lower animals, these lower animals without heads do exactly the same as humans with their heads and higher mammals with their heads.

Now, however, we must be quite clear about what is actually going on here. So something has been proven. It has been proven that, when we ourselves have pain here, we raise our hand and rub ourselves, we do not need our head for that, because the frog can do that without a head. So that has been proven, that you can do it without a head. So we certainly don't have a head for scratching ourselves; we don't have a head for walking, running. Because the tortoise or the frog, they walk without a head. So we don't need the head at all for walking. We can't quite fulfill the story of the fable, the one about the lazy Hans, who you know, was too lazy to walk, but was very diligent when eating. So someone advised him to walk with his mouth and eat with his feet, in order to acquire a different habit. Of course that doesn't work, but the fact is that we don't need our head at all for walking. We don't need our head for moving our hands either. So why do humans and higher animals need their head? What is the difference – now with regard to the head – between humans and higher animals compared to lower animals? Yes, the difference is that the higher animals and humans die if they don't have their heads, but the frog, the turtle and all the lower animals stay alive. If you take even lower animals, for example worms – you can cut them in half – each half starts to move on its own. So you see, you absolutely don't need the head for what the body actually does. But the bad thing is that you need your head to live as a higher animal or as a human being. You need it to live. And since you need it to live, you die if you no longer have it. It is not because you have no head that you no longer wash off the acid when you are smeared with it as a human being, but because you die without a head. Man no longer washes off the acid when he no longer has a head. Man would have behaved differently if he had swallowed a fish hook and had his head cut off. In any case, something would have happened differently than with the turtle.

So we can say: In higher animals and in humans, everything that is connected with the head is not the cause of our body's movements, but we only have the head to thank for being alive. If we no longer have it, we simply no longer live. So in the higher animals, the life is in the head. In the lower animals, the life is in all the individual parts of the body.

But now I want to tell you something else that shows you that there is also a great difference between the higher animals and between man in regard to everything that belongs to this head and this whole organization.

You have probably already encountered this somewhat unpleasant disease in children, which is called whooping cough; in some areas it is called spasmodic cough. Actually, whooping cough is not so bad for a child at that age, because it usually goes away. The bad thing is what remains if you don't behave properly – that is, the doctors or whoever is responsible – while whooping cough is there. That's when the following can happen. What does whooping cough consist of? Whooping cough consists in the fact that the inhalation always remains proper – you can have a child with whooping cough as severe as you like: it breathes in properly; you can see that when you examine the matter – but when the air wants to come out again when you breathe out, it gets stuck, it doesn't come out properly again, and that's when the coughing fit comes. And because the air cannot come out properly, no fresh air can come in, and that is how whooping cough occurs; that is what it consists of.

But what is the underlying cause of whooping cough in children? You see, the underlying cause is that the inner mucous membrane of the respiratory system, of these tubes that go in and out of the lungs, becomes terribly sensitive. When the air goes in, it also goes out over the sensitive areas, because the chest is empty inside, and you can always pour air into the void. You only have to think of the air pump. The air pump consists of having a glass dome here (it is drawn); you pump the air out of it. Now it is empty of air. Then you can have an opening to support it. If you now take out the plug, the air rushes in with a whistle. There is no need for anything else under the glass cover but empty space. When we have exhaled, there is airless space in our lungs; so the air rushes in by itself. There is nothing special to be done to get the air in. So it is no wonder that air rushes in through the sensitive windpipe, because the air does not feel it. But if you want to get the air out of the air pump again, you have to do something, you have to pump it out. Likewise, you have to push out the air that is inside the lungs. Now, however, the child's respiratory tubes have become sensitive. They are just as sensitive as if they were scratched somewhere. So the inside of the respiratory tubes is a little scratched, they are sensitive. Instead of the act of the will, which drives the air out and expels the air, it scratches the windpipe, and instead of expelling the air, it is concerned with scratching the sensitive spot. You see, while the child wants to scratch, it forgets to expel the air, and then the air stops inside. Then come these fits of whooping cough. Then the body wants to forcefully expel the air, while in life what I recently called the astral body expels the air. You can tell exactly where the physical body is and where the astral body is by looking at a child with spasmodic coughing. When the child does not have spasmodic coughing, the astral body expels the air; the body is not bothered at all. If it is whooping cough, there is a sensitive spot. The astral body wants to scratch away; the physical body first has to come into action and has to expel the air spasmodically. This can even cause a spasm, and from that a secondary illness can arise.

So you see, it is not at all the case that one can say that the physical body does everything. Then one can never understand whooping cough. When someone has whooping cough, something strange is going on. One has to ask: what has actually happened to his astral body? His astral body has become headless, namely, like the other part of the astral body in the frog! As the frog wets its leg, so the astral body wets the air pipes internally, and the physical body then has to get rid of the air. So you can distinguish this quite precisely.

But now you can say: Give us some proof that the astral body, the soul, is really involved. I will tell you what can happen when a child has had whooping cough and therefore has sensitive spots in the windpipes and the astral body wants to clean them, which is when the child has these seizures. Suppose, while the child had whooping cough, the parents had bought a cat, or a cat had come to live with them – I am telling you something that happens quite often. While the child had whooping cough, the parents bought a cat or a dog. This made the child sensitive to the exhaled air of dogs or cats. It would not have happened if it had not had this particular sensitivity. Now it has become sensitive during whooping cough. Well, the whooping cough heals, but sometimes something strange remains. If the child is not used to cats, and a cat comes into the house during the whooping cough of the child, it remains that the child in question gets something – when it has just been cured, it does not occur immediately, but later on what is called asthma occurs, a recurring shortness of breath.

Now, when this shortness of breath occurs - asthma is something that comes and goes periodically - then you can examine and sometimes you will find something strange. For example, a man is having asthma and at first you don't know where it's coming from. If you pay attention, you discover that when a cat is near him or in the room, he is once again afflicted with asthma. If you move the cat, the asthma goes away. There, you see, he is reminded, and he does not need his head for that. He does not need to know that the cat is in the room. The cat can be in the room, he knows nothing about it, but he gets the asthma.

Yes, I can tell you an even more amazing case, a case that is quite strange. There was once a child who had whooping cough, and during the time he had whooping cough, a lot of buckwheat was eaten in the house. As a result, the child became particularly sensitive to buckwheat and developed a tendency, a talent, so to speak, for asthma every time buckwheat was in the room, or even just in the house. And then something very strange happened when he was already a grown boy, already a medical student. He lived upstairs on the top floor. Downstairs, two floors lower, was the kitchen. Once the boy upstairs got asthma, terrible asthma. He had only ever had it when there was buckwheat in the house. Now, of course, they were terribly unhappy. They had forbidden all the cooks to make any food with buckwheat. Buckwheat was not supposed to come into the house at all. What had happened? A new cook was there who didn't know any better. She had buckwheat downstairs, and the young student upstairs on the second floor got asthma! Such things look like fairy tales. But they are absolutely true.

And now you will also understand how human health and illness are related to the whole environment. It does matter for our health whether or not there are rats in our environment. You see, the story I told you about cats is so well known – because the human respiratory organs are particularly sensitive to cats – that there is even a name for it in medicine. You will find the name “cat asthma” in medical books. This is the asthma that people get when cats are around. There are, of course, many types of asthma.

The fact of the matter is that one must say: For the normal person, a dog or a cat or even buckwheat is often something that is taken for granted when they are around. This only makes an impression on his soul. But if the soul is not in order somewhere, then it makes an impression on his soul unconsciously. What actually happens to a person who gets either cat or buckwheat asthma?

Well, you see, whooping cough can be cured again in the following way. Let us assume that you are a child and have a sensitive windpipe; the windpipe and the bronchial tubes and bronchioles have somehow been cut open by coal dust. This can immediately lead to whooping cough. Such things arise from very tiny little things. So the child has a cut windpipe. What happens when a part of the body is injured in this way? You can see what happens when you cut yourself. If it were only a physical body, it would not hurt you. Imagine taking off a rather thick glove finger. You can form the glove just like the skin. You can cut into it and it won't hurt you. But why does your hand hurt when you cut into it? Yes, your hand hurts because, in addition to the physical body being there, the astral body is also inside. The astral body is used to being inside. If you now cut into the physical body – you can't cut into the astral body; now it suddenly realizes: Gosh, there is no physical body! It doesn't fit together! It hurts. Because only the astral body can hurt you. It hurts until it has healed again.

So the story is that where something is injured, the astral body is left to itself. It comes out of the physical body.

Now imagine you get this crack, this fissure in the inside of your windpipe; the astral body becomes somewhat free in the windpipe. Now healing can take place if you are very careful: let us say you have a child with whooping cough. First of all you put the child to bed and let it sweat properly – you can observe this step by step – so you put the child to bed, and it gets hot. The astral body unites easily with heat, with cold it is difficult. If you let it run around outside or just in a cold room, the astral body cannot attach to the physical body because the warmth is not there. But if you wrap the child up very warmly – people do this instinctively; they often tie a stocking around the neck to keep the warmth in – the astral body begins to be attracted to the warmth. The astral body is not attracted by anything else, by water or air, but it is attracted by warmth. So if you have left the child lying in this position for a while, and the astral body has been attracted by the warmth, then it has straightened itself out again towards the limb here. Then you have to take a cloth and put a few drops of lemon juice in some warm water, and put the cloth around it. This pulls together what is cut open, and then takes up the astral body again, and you can heal whooping cough well. You just have to do everything in the right order.

When healing, it is important to be able to see through the whole person and to do things in the right order. And then, during the whole procedure, you have to make sure that the child does not get a fright. Because when the child gets a fright, the astral body always comes out a little, and that makes you undo the whole healing procedure again.

Now, if you heal properly, then the whooping cough can run its course and the child will not get asthma later on. But if you heal wrongly, then these “fissures” in the trachea and in the bronchi and bronchioles heal together, and the child appears to be healthy, but the astral body has not completely entered, always remains a little outside. If the person is very weak, if the child is a weakling, then it will immediately get asthma because it is not breathing out properly. The astral body is not sufficiently present. The astral body, which is outside, cannot properly participate in the exhalation. But when the child is a little stronger, it just uses the other part of the astral body, and the result is that only when a new illness occurs in life, for example when the child gets the flu later or something like that, the rest of the astral body proves to be too weak, and then the child gets asthma.

This is a good way to get inside a person. You can tell when the soul is involved and when it is not.

But now look at a person with asthma. The astral body is at work here. It constantly scratches internally, just as the frog scratches externally when it is wetted with acid. You see, there you have the story, gentlemen, there you have the astral body, which behaves like a frog, like a tortoise. We can actually study the behavior of our astral body in lower animals. If the head could be involved in this activity of the astral body, it would be quite different. We just can't get at it with our head. The fact is that we are not yet human with our astral body. We are human on earth with our physical body, but we are not human on earth with our astral body.

What happens as a result? Yes, as a result, this astral body also behaves like an imperfect being. It behaves in an animalistic way. So don't think you can educate a person by, say, constantly beating him. It is actually quite remarkable how widespread this kind of education still is. There is a person today who is otherwise not pleasant to me, he is boring to me, but he is very interesting. He has also traveled around Europe, he was also in Basel, Rabindranath Tagore, who captivates people today. Isn't it true, an Asian is something else; they go there! A European could do much more; but an Asian, that interests them, that's a rare animal! You see, he has now given his life story. The life story is actually boring too; but it is very important to read the first chapters of this life story. There he tells how he was actually always beaten by everyone. One person in particular, who is now one of the learned Asians, the learned Indians, traveling all over Europe, says that the whole education was actually based on constantly beating the children. So this is not just a European peculiarity. It is precisely from this biography that one sees that the Asians have also been terribly beaten.

Well, Tagore then became a poet, did all kinds of things, so that's no longer so clear. But when someone is constantly beaten as a child, it doesn't just affect the physical body – precisely because the child's mind is not constantly active – but it affects the astral body. And the result is that the astral body becomes like a beaten dog. You can tell a battered dog from a lovingly raised dog. But it is the same with people. When a person is beaten as a child, later life may make him a little more courageous, but his astral body remains beaten throughout his life because it is still at the animal level.

Yes, you see, gentlemen, but you realize how not only physical beatings go into this astral body. At most, the physical beatings create welts. It is not the physical impression that makes the astral body beaten up, but the moral impression. In this astral body, we carry our moral impression from our entire life on earth. And it is true: One person was beaten as a child; later on, his astral body is like that of a beaten dog. Another person beat his teachers (there are such people, too). His astral body is like that of a lion. You look like that inside – you could also say, spiritually, let's say astral, because spiritual has already become a very abstract word and people don't think anything of it anymore – you become so astral inside that you take on one or the other form, depending on the moral impressions you have had in life.

But that is the way it is in life. If a person has a slave nature, he takes everything in a different way than if he has a free, independent nature. If a person has a slave nature, he puts up with everything. Then his astral body becomes stooped, and as a result becomes something dog-like. If a person has a free nature, he does not put up with everything. His astral body becomes somewhat human-like as a result. We can see inside and see what is actually going on with a person during their life on earth.

But now, gentlemen, we die. We have made it clear to ourselves; only the physical body descends from us. It goes away. But this form, which I have described here, remains. With it you go through death. And the one who has acquired a higher knowledge through the means I have described, and which are particularly described in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', can now distinguish exactly with what character a person passes through death. The moral impression of life is in it. Now you have to enter the world from which you form the next life on earth.

Yes, gentlemen, if you were to enter the world from which you form your next life with an astral body that has been created by the beatings of life, you could become a dog. But a human being cannot become a dog; that is the story. Through the moral impression of life, a human being comes out of death in such a way that he could become anything that comes from his moral impression. If someone has been brave, he could become a lion. Perhaps some people would like to be a lion in their next life. But a person cannot become a lion because he is not predisposed to it by the world, by the cosmos. Another person feels a bit like a cat; he would like to become a cat.

Don't the anthroposophists, after all, reproach the unintelligent people for thinking that the soul goes into the animals afterwards, and that the soul's migration should consist of the soul coming into the animals afterwards? That is nonsense, of course. What is true is that the soul retains an impression of it: one is lion-like, cat-like, tiger-like, crocodile-like, when one has died. And since one must become a human being again, one must first discard that. And one does just that during this one-third lifetime, which I told you about last time. If someone has reached the age of sixty, he needs twenty years for this. This is not plucked out of thin air; we know this because, curiously enough, a person becomes so when he falls asleep at night. He is only preparing for it then. And sleep lasts a total of one-third of life. He needs such a third of life, such a period of time, which thus takes up a third of his lifetime, to free himself from this moral impression.

But, gentlemen, when you are asleep, you are unaware of the whole story that you are going through between falling asleep and waking up. And that is good. Because as a result, the moral impression that you have only comes through a little as conscience. If you have to look at it all, it comes through much more strongly.

And why does it only come through a little as conscience after waking up from what you experienced during sleep? Because you submerge in the physical body, which obscures it. Otherwise, you would remember in the morning when you wake up what sleep has told you, what a horrible guy you are. During sleep you have experienced all of that. It sometimes haunts dreams. And such dreams are particularly interesting to study, in which something is haunted, which actually makes one a dreadful fellow. But in general one does not know that. But when one has no physical body after death, everything that is in the astral body enters into the ego, and in the ego one now has it inside. Now you have to go through the whole time. When you have discarded the astral body, then you have what you have discarded only in the ego. But now you can prepare yourself for the real physical body of the next life. That takes as long as I explained to you last time.

So you see, you just have to look at a person properly as they are now in their earthly life to get a very accurate idea of how these four parts of the human being – physical body, etheric body, astral body and I – are connected.

You see, gentlemen, I will tell you something else: Imagine there is a person's heart. It sits there. Two nerve cords go to the heart. They start from back there, go down there and go to the heart. One goes and then spreads out in the heart. Then another goes and also spreads out in the heart. Now imagine that I am passing an electric current through the nerve. I can observe something remarkable: the heart starts beating faster and faster. Why? Because the electric current excites the nerve, the heart starts beating faster and faster. The electric current excites the nerve.

Now imagine that I don't electrify this nerve, but I electrify the other nerve, the second one. Now you might think, a nerve is a nerve. I electrify it. And you might think, right, the heart starts beating faster and faster again. But it's not like that. When I electrify the nerve here (the first one), the heart beats faster and faster. But if I electrify this one (the second), the heart beats slower and slower. And if I electrify it very strongly, the heart stops beating altogether. I have to stop quickly, otherwise the person will die of a heart attack. It is the case that there is no difference in the construction between this one and that other nerve. They are both constructed in the same way. Yes, what is the matter here?

You see, it's like this: when this one is electrified, the astral body goes in, stimulates the heart to beat faster, because the electrical current takes over a task that the heart would otherwise have to do itself. So it can work faster in the heart. Now suppose, however, that the other nerve were to be electrified. Now the astral body wants to make the heart beat faster; but from the other side an obstacle is put in its way. As soon as it wants to start making the heart beat faster, it cannot through on the other side. This excitation (at the first nerve) is useful to it because it takes over a task from it. This excitement (the second) is harmful to him because it meets him halfway. If I could go into the heart and electrify it from there, it would also make the heart beat faster and faster. But if I electrify this nerve from the outside, the astral body cannot move the heart because there is more and more of an obstacle.

From this you can see that you can see very clearly how things actually work in the human body, how the astral body, on the one hand, intervenes just as it would if, let's say, I wanted to turn a wheel: I push it, turn it further; but if I turn it in the opposite direction, it doesn't work. It is the same with the heart, the same with the lungs, with every organ. Every organ is supplied from two sides with nerves; but what engages is the astral body.

Now you may say: But is it not perhaps the head that is at work in the astral body? No, gentlemen, if it were the head, you would have to electrify at the top of the head. But that would not help you at all; you have to start electrifying from there. If you cut off the head with the astral body, it still always hits the spot, as with the frog or the turtle. You have to electrify where the nerve is still located, which the frog also retains. This point is called the medulla oblongata, or extended marrow. You have to electrify there, and the head does not need to know anything about it.

Incidentally, it is also easy to see from other things that the head does not need to know anything. Yes, think, first of all, if you had to let your heart beat from your head, that would be a nice story. The heart would have to beat seventy-two times every minute, you would have to think about it seventy-two times every minute. So that wouldn't work. And when you sleep, your heart would have to stop. So with the head it is not yet done with these movements, which take place inside the person. They are carried out as they are in the frog or the turtle.

If we now have asthma, these internal movements are carried out in a pathological manner, while when we are healthy, they are carried out normally. You can see from this that everything that goes on inside a person in terms of movements and so on, goes on unconsciously, guided by the astral body.

And this astral body is the one that, after death, must first give up the moral impression that it has received from the world to the I, so to speak. Then the I can form a human life on earth again. These years after death, when the human being lives in such a way that he can discard this inner astral form that he has acquired during his life, are therefore such that he can prepare himself again for a new life on earth, where he can truly be human.

And how does one now bring what one had in the previous life into the new human life? Yes, you see, gentlemen, it is just that the child sleeps at the beginning of his life. If the child were conscious, it could not carry out what the ego has brought with it; after all, it has only unlearned from the astral body. In the astral body, the I is still inside; only the I does not need to work before conception, but the astral body has to work, the astral world has to work, as I told you the other day, from the stars. The child must come in asleep, learn to walk, learn to speak, learn to think. In this process, it pours into walking, speaking and thinking that which is the moral impulse from the previous life and seeks out. That is our destiny.

This does not affect our freedom. I think I already told you that. We carry our destiny within us, we prepare our destiny ourselves. But our freedom is not affected, just as little as our freedom is affected by the fact that we have black or blonde hair, brown or blue eyes, or cannot reach the moon. In the same way, our freedom is not affected by the fact that we bring something or other with us from our previous life on earth, being this or that as a human being. But people are different because they bring something or other with them from their previous life on earth.

Now you may say: But that leads us back to thinking that we will continue to return to further earthly lives forever. — No, gentlemen, there was once a time on earth when man did not progress at all, as a small child is today. In the beginning of the earth, in prehistoric times, he could not yet walk, could not yet speak, could not yet think. He was in such a state that, because the Earth – now remember what I have otherwise told you about the Earth – was still thick, he was not surrounded by air, but by a thick sauce, as I told you at the time, did not need to learn to walk. This thick sauce carried him. He was also more animal, more dependent on his astral body. In relation to the physical body, he has become human today. In relation to the astral body, he is still at the animal level at which he previously stood. He did not bring anything with him, but it gradually emerged. By learning to walk, speak and think, what is his destiny has also come into being. And when man now learns again to absorb something spiritual during his life, then he also gets out of the animal habit again, and then he gets used to a world in which he no longer lives in the way of walking, speaking and thinking, but again in a different way.

So there is a space between these two states, and in this space we come again and again in a certain life.

Now, you see, gentlemen, there is still a question. We will have to discuss that next time, next Wednesday at nine o'clock. That is this important question, which is raised again and again, that someone says: Well, it's easy for you to talk about your past life on earth, but I don't remember it. What I don't remember, I don't believe. Next time I will explain to you how it is with this remembering, and what the reason for it is. Then we will have come a little further again. Then we will have more or less dealt with the question for which we have prepared ourselves.

Good morning, gentlemen! Now we want to add to what we have looked at. I told you at the end of the last lesson that people mainly object: It may all be true about life before we enter an earthly body, and also about previous earthly lives, but why can't we remember it? And now I will first answer this question in detail today, why we cannot remember, and what this memory is like.

Now we must first consider something about the human body, because it is really a matter of expressing ourselves scientifically.

You see, in this respect, when it comes to the question of repeated lives on earth, people today are downright strange even when it comes to judging people who knew or know something about these repeated lives on earth. There was a very great spirit within German civilization, Lessing, who lived in the 18th century. This Lessing has achieved an extraordinary amount spiritually. He is still generally recognized today. And when the professors of German literary history lecture at the universities, they often lecture on Lessing for months. They also know that one of Lessing's researchers, as they say, a book can also be found in the Social Democratic literature, by Franz Mehring, “The Lessing Legend”. There Lessing is presented from a different point of view. You can't say that what is presented there is correct; but in any case, there is even a very thick book about Lessing within the Social Democratic literature by Franz Mehring. In short, Lessing is cited as a very great man. But this Lessing, whose plays are still performed everywhere in theaters today and are highly esteemed, wrote a shorter work when he was already very old: “The Education of the Human Race.” And at the end it says that one actually cannot come to terms with the contemplation of the soul at all, that one cannot really know anything correct about the soul life without the assumption of repeated earth lives, and that one comes there, when one continues to think, actually to those views which primitive people already had. They all believed in repeated earth lives. That is something that people only abandoned later, when they became “modern.” And Lessing said: Why should something be stupid just because the oldest, the earliest people believed it? — In short, Lessing himself said that he can only come to terms with the soul life of man if he adheres to this ancient belief in repeated lives on earth.

Now, as you can imagine, this is a terrible embarrassment for our so-called researchers today. Because these researchers say: Lessing was one of the greatest men of all times. But the repeated lives on earth, that's nonsense. — Yes, how do you get around that? — Well, Lessing was already old then. He became weak-minded. We don't accept repeated lives on Earth! You see, that's how people are. As long as something suits them, they accept it and label the person in question a great man. But if he has just said something that does not suit them, then he has become weak-minded for the time.

But sometimes very strange things happen. For example, there is a great naturalist, William Crookes. Now, I don't agree with everything he says, but in any case he is considered one of the greatest naturalists. He lived in our time, at the end of the 19th century. Now, he always dealt with natural science in the morning. He had to go to his laboratory, and he made great discoveries there. We would not have had all of this, Röntgen and so on, if he, Crookes, had not done the preliminary work. But in the afternoons, he always occupied himself with soul-searching. As I said, I don't agree with everything, but at least he occupied himself with it. People had to say, didn't they: Yes, he must have been clever in the morning and stupid in the afternoon, stupid and clever at the same time! That's the way things are.

Now there is something else. You will hear everywhere – I have already dealt with this when I was talking about colors – that natural scientists consider Newton to be the greatest natural scientist of all time. He is not, but they consider him to be so. Now there is another embarrassment. This Newton, whom people consider the greatest naturalist, has now also written a book about what usually forms the end of the Bible, about the Apocalypse. So again an embarrassment!

In short, those people who reject any possibility of soul-searching are in for a terrible embarrassment when faced with the greatest naturalists and the greatest historians, because if someone really takes science seriously, they have no choice but to extend this science to the soul. And for that you find opportunity everywhere. I have told you: you just have to observe. Now you cannot always foresee everything in everyday life, especially if you have not learned it first. But nature and sometimes humanity also do experiments for us that you should not artificially induce, but once they are made, you can study them. You can follow them, at least be inspired by them. Now there is an experiment that is actually important, characteristic, if one wants to accept something about the soul life of man. Everyone accepts the physical body, because otherwise they would all have to deny the human being. One does not argue about that. Everyone has one. Today, natural science says: the physical body is the only one, we have to explain everything according to the physical body.

Now there is something that, when we observe it correctly, suddenly shows us that the human being also has the other three bodies: the invisible etheric body, the astral body and the ego. There is one thing that can be observed quite scientifically – there are many things, but one in particular, that can be observed quite scientifically and that then shows how a person can actually get into states where it shows us that an etheric body is present and an astral body and an ego.

You see, there are people in Europe who feel the need to numb themselves. Now, of course, many other means are used. I have told you that now, for example, cocaine is used to numb the senses; but in Europe, opium has always been used to numb the senses. There have always been people who, when they were not satisfied with life or when they had too many worries, didn't know what to do, and so they got high on opium. They took a little opium, always just a small amount of opium. What happened then? First of all, when someone takes a small amount of opium, they enter a state of inner experience; they no longer think, they begin to dream in wild images. They like this very much, it does them a lot of good. These dreams become more and more intoxicating. For some, it is the case that they get the gray misery, that they begin to behave like a sinner; another begins to rage, to race, that he even gets murderous. And then people fall asleep. So this consumption of opium actually consists of people being brought violently, by means of an external poison, into a state that consists of slowly drifting off to sleep.

When we look at everything that actually happens to a person, we can see that the person first has very excited dreams, then begins to fantasize, and then falls asleep. So something has gone from him. What has gone from him is what makes him a rational human being, what lives in him so that he is a rational human being. That is gone. But before it goes away, and even after it has gone, he lives in the most desolate, agitated dreams. After some time he wakes up and he is restored to a certain extent until he starts taking opium again. So he makes himself, only stormy, into a sleeping person.

Now we can see that when a person falls asleep from the effects of opium, it is not the faculty that makes him rational that is at work in him, but rather the faculty that gives him life; otherwise he would not be able to wake up again, otherwise he would have to die. It is the faculty that gives him momentary life that is at work in him. And one can see how there is also a certain struggle in the body during the night, so that one can wake up again. So there is something at work in man where reason is not present; that which in turn animates the body. Through the poison, the body surbs something. That drives out reason. But the vitalizing principle is still in him, otherwise he could not wake up again. So what has been affected by a small amount of opium? The vitalizing principle. With a small amount of opium, the etheric body is affected.

Now imagine someone takes too much or deliberately poisons themselves with opium. The same thing does not happen, but – and this is quite remarkable – what happens last with a small amount of opium happens first with a large amount. The person falls asleep immediately. So it does not slowly draw away the rational, but the rational comes out quickly, very quickly. But now something remains in him that was not in him at all when he took a small amount of opium. You can see that again.

Physical body Aetheric body: weak opium use Astral body: strong opium use I: habitual opium use

Let us assume that someone takes so much opium that he is actually poisoned. First of all, he falls asleep. But then the body begins to become restless and unruly, he snores, snorts; then cramps set in. And you notice something very peculiar: the face turns completely red and the lips turn completely blue.

Now remember everything I told you last time. I told you that all breathing disturbances occur during exhalation. Now, what does snoring, for example, consist of, first rattling, then snoring – what does it consist of? You see, snoring is something people do who cannot exhale properly. When a person breathes out properly, when it is out of the mouth, then the air goes in, then after a while it goes out again; then the uvula, which you can see when you look into the mouth, is inserted into the air passage. And then at the top there is something that rises and falls, the soft palate; it moves. The uvula and soft palate are constantly moving as a result of inhaling and exhaling when it is normal and correct. But if the inhalation is incorrect and the exhalation is incorrect, if there is belching, then the soft palate and uvula start to tremble, which causes the rattling and then the snoring.

So you can see that it has something to do with breathing, because someone who merely gets high on a little opium enters the other states that I have described to you: a kind of opium delirium, a frenzy. He falls asleep slowly. But if he now falls asleep quickly through the intense enjoyment of opium, he comes to snoring, to convulsions; the face turns red, the lips blue. If you remember all that I have told you, you will ascribe great significance to the fact that the face turns red and the lips blue. For I have told you: Man has red blood because oxygen is inhaled. When the blood mixes with oxygen, it turns red; when the blood mixes with carbon, it turns blue. When it is exhaled, it is blue. So when you see someone with a red face and blue lips, what does that mean? Yes, there is too much inhaled air in the face, too much red blood, which comes from the inhalation. And the lips are blue, what does that mean? There is too much of the blood that is supposed to come out. It stops there. This could continue to the point in the lungs where the carbon dioxide is released, where the carbon dioxide can be exhaled. — So you have a person poisoned by opium, and their breathing is labored throughout. And this is shown on the one hand by the red blood in the face, and on the other hand by the blue blood in the lips.

This is extremely interesting, gentlemen. What are the lips? You see, the lips are very peculiar organs on the face. If you have a face, you actually have to draw it like this, with the skin turned outwards all over. But on the lips, it is actually a piece of inner skin. The inside comes outwards. There is a piece of inner skin. A person opens up their insides by having lips. If your lips are blue instead of red, it means that all your insides are too full of blue blood. —So you see: when someone is poisoned with opium, the body works in such a way that it sends all unused blood outwards – it pushes to the surface – and sends all blue blood inwards.

These things were also known once by primitive people, the story of blue blood going inward. If someone has too much blue blood inside, they said: the person who has too much blue blood inside is first of all someone who has little of the soul, from whom the soul has gone out. That is why “blue-blooded” became a term of abuse. And when the people called the aristocrats “blue-blooded”, they meant: their soul has gone. —- It is very strange how in folk wisdom these things live in a wonderful way. It is very interesting. You can learn an enormous amount from language.

Now you can see: there is something that works in humans that does not work in plants, for example. Because if you introduce a toxin to a plant, the toxin stays somewhere at the top and does not spread. For example, you can find a very poisonous plant in the so-called belladonna, in the deadly nightshade. Yes, the deadly nightshade leaves its poison at the very top; it does not allow it to spread throughout the plant. When a person takes such a poison, it takes hold of the body in such a way that it drives the red blood outwards and the blue blood inwards. Yes, the plants are alive too. Those plants have their etheric body within them, have within them what is left blue, what comes from the weak consumption of opium, not the strong. That is only caused by the sensation in humans. If the plant had blood, it would also have such a sensation, like humans and animals. Humans and animals have it without the use of opium, when the etheric body fights with the physical one; the blood is immediately pushed outwards, and something remains in the body, and that causes this disorder in the body. And that is the astral body. So that one can say: the astral body is influenced by heavy opium use.

Now there is still a third kind of opium consumption. This opium consumption is even very widespread in the world, although not in Europe, more for example among a certain type of Turks and namely in Asia and Hinterindien, with the Malay peoples. There these people take only such strong quantities of opium that they can just still tolerate it, that they wake up properly again, and do not die from it. In this way they experience everything that the opium eater experiences in a strange and interesting way. Only they gradually get used to it, and so they experience the story more consciously. The Turks then say: Yes, when I enjoyed opium, I was in paradise. — That is already the case in these fantastic interpretations. And the Malays in the Far East also want to see all that. So they get used to taking opium because they want to see all that too. This can be done for a relatively long time, and then you end up saying to yourself, “Well, there is something else.”

But now one must say: if these people, who always habitually eat the opium – they eat it habitually – if these fantasists would only see that, then after a while they would get the story. But, you see, it is very strange. These people are descended from the first people on earth who still knew something about the eternal soul, about the soul that passes through the various earthly lives. They knew something about it. Now that has been lost to people. These people, who have not gone through European civilization, put themselves into a state through the consumption of opium in order to feel something of the eternity of the soul. It is indeed terrible, but they repeatedly introduce an illness into themselves. Because the healthy body in the present, if it does not exert itself spiritually, cannot know anything at all about the immortality of the soul, these people gradually ruin their body, so that gradually the soul is pushed out.

Now one can observe something very peculiar when looking at such people who habitually take opium in this way and can therefore endure it for a period of time: after some time they become quite pale. Even if they used to have a good skin color, now they become pale.

1 This means something quite different for the Malay than for the European. The Malay really does look like a ghost when he turns pale, because he is yellowish-brown. Then, after a while, the people become as if they were hollow around the eyes. Then they begin to lose weight, after they have already started to lose their ability to walk properly; they just limp along. Then they begin to lose their will to think, become very forgetful. And last of all, they get the stroke.

These are the symptoms. It is very interesting to observe them. Before the limbs become stiff, so that they can no longer walk properly, they develop severe constipation; in other words, the bowels no longer function. From the way I have described this, you can see that the whole body is gradually undermined.

Now there is something very peculiar. Not much experience has been gathered in this respect, because people do not pay attention to it; but this experience could be gained very easily. We know how these people become habitual opium eaters, it has been described many times. But now people should just try it out – they do this very often in another respect today: if they give the same dose of opium that a person has for habitual consumption to an animal, then the animal will either become somewhat lively, thus entering the first stage, where the etheric body is disturbed, or it will enter the second stage if it gets enough, and die. The animal does not have what the opium eater, the habitual opium eater has, as I described to you last. The animal does not have that.

What does this show, gentlemen? Yes, this shows that when the opium, as strong as it is there, enters the astral body and causes an improper relationship between blue and red blood, then in the animal blue and red blood shoots in a horizontal direction in a confused manner. In the upright man, in the one who has learned to walk, the blue and red blood does not shoot in quite that direction (it is shown), but more so, because he is erect, into each other; no longer horizontally, but from top to bottom, from bottom to top. This causes that man can also become a habitual opium eater.

But now I have told you: It is because man is upright that he has an ego. The animals have no ego because they have a horizontal back. So what is it that is influenced by this habitual opium eating? The ego. So we can say: I - habitual opium eating. And now, through opium, we have discovered all three bodies of man, which are supersensible: for weak opium consumption, the etheric body; for strong consumption, the astral body; and for habitual opium consumption, the I. You can, if you can only observe correctly, develop this wonderfully in a scientific way.

But now you can also see: a Malay with his habitual opium consumption comes to something huge. He comes to the I. And what does he get? What does this Malay or this Turk look forward to when he habitually consumes opium? What does he look forward to? Yes, he looks forward to it because then his memory awakens in a wonderful way. He quickly reviews his entire life on earth and much more. On the one hand, it is terrible because he achieves it by making his body sick; on the other hand, however, the desire to get to know the self is so strong in him that he cannot resist. He is already pleased when this vast memory is established.

But let me explain: if a person does something too much, it ruins him. If a person works too much, it ruins him; if a person thinks too much, it ruins him. And if a person continually evokes a memory that is too strong, it ruins his body. All the symptoms I have described to you are simply the result of the memory being too strong. That is there at first. And later on – as I have described to you – the person becomes careless about how he walks. He no longer remembers inwardly how to put one foot in front of the other. That is unconscious memory, of course. And then he becomes forgetful. So the very thing he achieves ruins him. But one can see, become aware, recognize that the ego is present when the habitual consumption of opium is there.

What does today's natural science do? Well, if you open a book, you will also find a description of what I have told you; you will find a description that with a small amount of opium the person goes into delirium and so on, that with a large amount of opium the person first falls asleep and then his body is immediately destroyed. He dies after his face has turned red and his lips blue. And with habitual opium consumption, all these things also occur. But what do these people describe? They only describe the physical body, what happens there; they describe that the opium eater rattles, has convulsions, snores. They describe how the habitual opium eater loses weight, can no longer walk, becomes forgetful, and finally suffers a stroke because the memory destroys his brain; we have to look at it that way. All this is described, but it is all attributed to the physical body.

But that is nonsense; otherwise, everything physical would have to be attributed only to the physical body. We also see all the phenomena that occur in plants. But we cannot say that a human being is merely a plant. For when opium is taken in large quantities, the effect is seen in the astral body, and only in the human being does that which is present in habitual opium use become apparent. If animals would benefit from habitual opium consumption, if they did not immediately perish from it, then you would see that there are many animals that would simply enjoy the opium found in plants. Why would they enjoy it? Yes, because the animals distinguish between what they want to eat and what they don't want to eat by habit. So if the animals would benefit from it, they would eat the opium that is found in the plants. If they don't do it, it's only because they don't benefit from it.

All this can be recognized through natural science. But now the question is: can all this, the memory that the Malay produces through illness, be achieved through healthy means? We must remember that the original inhabitants of the earth knew that people live on earth again and again. And Lessing, as I told you earlier, said: Why should it be stupid just because the original people believed in it? These original people, they didn't have abstract thoughts like we do. They didn't have any natural science. They looked at everything mythologically. When they looked at a plant, they didn't study: there are such and such forces in it, but they said: there is such and such spirituality in it. They saw everything in images. They lived more in the spiritual in general. ... (Gap in the shorthand.) The fact is that with progress, man can develop in such a way that he lives more in the physical. Only through this could he become a free man, otherwise he would always have been influenced. People in prehistoric times were not free; but they still saw spiritual things. Now we, gentlemen, as we are now, we really have the abstract thoughts that we are drilled in since school. You see, we can even say that the most important activities that humanity is so proud of today are actually something abstract.

Yesterday I said to the teachers here: Yes, when the child turns about seven years old, it should learn something. It should learn, after having learned all its life so far, that the person standing in front of it, whom it knows, is the father – it should now learn that this here (it is written) means “father”. The child should learn this all of a sudden. It has nothing at all to do with this “father.” These are very strange signs that have nothing to do with the father! The child is suddenly supposed to learn this. It resists it. Because the father is this and that man who has hair like this, a nose like this; it has always seen it. The child resists the fact that what is written should now mean “father.”

The child has learned to say “Ah!” when it is amazed. Now it is suddenly supposed to understand that this is an A. It is just very abstract, has no relation to what the child has known so far. You first have to create a bridge for the child to come up with something like this. I'll tell you how to create the bridge.

For example, you say to the child: Look, what is that? - (See drawing.) If you draw this for the child and ask him: What is this? - What will the child say? - A fish! That's a fish! He will not say: I don't recognize that. He cannot say: I recognize the father in that (in the written word “father”). But he recognizes the fish in it (in the drawn fish).

Now I say: Pronounce the “F” for me just once, now omit the i and the later one, just say the F with which the fish begins. Now, I will draw this for you: F. I have singled out the F from the fish. The child first draws the fish and then the F. It is important to avoid abstraction and to remain within the image. The child naturally enjoys learning in this way. This can be done with every letter. It is just a matter of gradually acquiring the skill.

At our Waldorf School, one of the teachers once explained very beautifully how the Roman numerals gradually came into being. Suddenly, it was not possible with V. How can a V be made? Now, see what is there here? (Dr. Steiner holds up his hand.) Of course, you say: a hand is still a hand. But is there not something in it? 1, II, III, III, V fingers. Now I draw this hand on the blackboard (see drawing) in such a way that I have stretched out the two things (the thumb and the four other fingers next to it). Now I have a hand in which the V is included; five is the pronounced number. Now I make it a little simpler, and you have recognized the Roman numeral V from the hand that has five fingers.

So you see, gentlemen, it is important that we are suddenly placed in a completely abstract world today. We learn to write, we learn to read; this has nothing to do with life. But as a result, we have forgotten what people had who could not yet read and write.

But now you must not say, as the other people outside of our opponents' kind do: Steiner told us in his hour that people were cleverer when they did not yet have writing and reading; then they immediately say: yes, he wants people to no longer learn to write and read! I do not want that. People should always keep pace with civilization, and certainly learn to write and read. But one should also not lose what one can necessarily lose by writing and reading. One must first come to understand through spiritual means what human life is.

And now I want to tell you something very simple about two people. One of them takes off his clothes in the evening and takes off his shirt collar, which has two little buttons, one in the front and one in the back. I use an example that is close to me because I wear a shirt collar like that. One person, he does it quite thoughtlessly, unfastens his first button, his second. Now he goes to bed. In the morning, yes, he walks around the room looking for and asking: Where are my shirt buttons? — He doesn't find them. He doesn't remember. Why? Because he did it thoughtlessly.

Now another. He has not exactly got into the habit of always putting his shirt buttons in the same place - you can do that, but that would mean making yourself lazy - but he says to himself: When I take off my shirt, I put one of the buttons next to my candlestick and the other one over there. So he turns his thoughts to it, doesn't just put them down thoughtlessly, but turns his thoughts to it. Yes, he gets up in the morning, goes straight to where he put them, doesn't need to search the whole room: where are my shirt buttons, where did I put my shirt buttons? What's the difference? The whole difference is that one person has thought about the matter and remembers it, while the other has not thought about it and does not remember it. Yes, but you can only remember it in the morning. It is of no use to lie down at night wanting to remember, you can only remember it in the morning if you thought about it in the evening.

Now it is said: Yes, but one cannot remember it; and if a person does not have a memory of previous earthly lives, then he cannot have had any previous earthly lives. — But in this way one can also say: A person cannot calculate, one can prove that a person cannot calculate – and now someone introduces a small child of four years as proof and shows that it cannot calculate at all. He is a human being and yet cannot calculate! One will say: He will certainly learn to calculate. If one knows human nature, one knows that he will learn to calculate. — If someone today points out a person who cannot remember his earlier lives on earth, one must say: Yes, but nothing has been done in the past to help people remember. On the contrary, there are still so many stragglers from earlier times today who want to keep people ignorant, so that they know nothing of the spiritual, so that they do not know at all what they are supposed to remember in the next life on earth, so that they become quite confused, like the man with the shirt button. First, man must learn to think in life, so that he can remember later.

So anthroposophy is there to make people aware of what they should remember later. And those who want to prevent anthroposophy want to keep people stupid so that they do not remember anything. And that is the important thing, gentlemen, to realize that man must first learn to apply thoughts correctly. Today people demand that thoughts be defined and that books contain correct definitions. Yes, gentlemen, even in ancient Greece people knew this. One man in particular wanted to teach people how to define. Today, in school, they say: You have to learn: What is light? I once had a classmate; we went to elementary school together, then I went to a different school and he trained as a teacher at the teacher's seminary. I met him again when I was seventeen; by then he was already a fully-fledged teacher. I asked him: What did you learn about light? He said: Light is the cause of the seeing of bodies. There is nothing to be said against that. You might just as well say: What is poverty? Poverty comes from pauvret@! That is about the same as someone defining it that way. But you have to learn a lot of such stuff.

Now, in ancient Greece, someone once ridiculed such clever learning. The children learned at school: What is a human being? A human being is a living creature that has two legs and no feathers. Now a particularly clever boy thought about it, took a rooster, plucked it and the next day he brought it to the teacher in its plucked state and said: “Teacher, is this a human being? It has no feathers and two legs!” That was the strength of the definition. So the things that are still in our books today are more or less in line with the definitions.

In all books, even in the social books that are written, the conditions of life are described in much the same way as the definition is given: A human being is a living creature that has two legs and no feathers. Then we draw further conclusions. Of course, if you start with a book that gives a definition, you can logically conclude all sorts of things from it; but it will never apply to humans, but may apply to a rooster that has just been plucked. Such are our definitions! The important thing is to see things as they really are.

In reality, the matter is such that one must say, as here for example (Schema page 183): physical body; etheric body, which is affected by weak opium consumption; astral body with strong opium consumption; I with habitual opium consumption. And when one now practices spiritual science, when one really learns to know the human being in such a way that one does not merely describe as in a dream: Such conditions arise —, but that one is familiar with them. The astral body is at work, the etheric body is at work, the I is at work - then one has right thoughts, not just definitions. And then, if one has absorbed right thoughts today, in the present life on earth, one remembers aright in the present life on earth. Just as one now only gradually remembers earlier earth lives with difficulty, as I have described it, so one will later remember them well if one does not make oneself ill, as through the consumption of opium, if one does not influence the body, but rather brings the soul through spiritual exercises to really get to know the spiritual.

So you see how truly a spiritual science arises in anthroposophy. You just have to bear in mind that anthroposophy is not about practising superstition. So, for example, when people find something extraordinary reported somewhere about spiritual things, they start saying: That's how it is when a spiritual world betrays itself. - But the spiritual world betrays itself in people! When people sit around a table and make it knock, they say: There must be a ghost in it. But when four people sit around, there are four ghosts! You just have to get to know them! But on the contrary, you'd rather knock people unconscious; there must be a medium among them. Look at the newspaper clipping you gave me a few weeks ago. For example, it describes how somewhere in England people were very much alarmed because during the night things fell off the racks, window panes were smashed, and so on. “Spiritual demons must be at work,” said the people. - What struck me most about the story - even though one can only say more precisely when one has seen it - but what struck me most about the story was that it was also mentioned that the people had a whole army of cats! Now, if you have a whole army of cats, and two or three of them get rabies, you should see how these “ghostly apparitions” all go! But as I said, you would have to know the details first; only then can you go into it.

You see, I was once very much urged to attend a spiritualistic seance. Well, I said I would do this because you can only judge such things when you have seen them. There was now a medium, he was actually terribly famous, a very famous medium, and after the people had sat down, had first been slightly numbed by some music that had been played – they all sat there numbed – the medium began, just as the people wanted, to make flowers fly down from the air all the time! Now every medium has a so-called impresario, if he is a real medium. Well, the people paid their mite after they had had their enjoyment. The main thing for those who had organized it was that the mite was left behind. And I said – people are terribly fanatical then, they start to scuffle with you when you want to enlighten them, they are the worst – but I said to some sensible people, they should investigate once, but not at the end, but at the beginning; there they will find the flowers in the impresario's hump inside! – So you will find things everywhere.

One must rise above superstition, gentlemen, if one wants to speak of the spiritual world. One must not fall for anything anywhere, neither for rabid cats nor for a hunchbacked impresario, but one can only access the spiritual world by no longer falling for anything superstitious and by proceeding with real science everywhere.

Good morning, gentlemen! Have you thought of a question?

Questioner: Doctor was kind enough to tell us what it is like when the spirit has left the body. The last lecture was very clear to me and my colleagues. But in “Theosophy” there is a sentence that says that when the spirit is separated from the body, the soul still retains desires. That is still a very hard nut for us to crack.

I have another question, something completely different.

Dr. Steiner: Very well, tell me the second question too.

Questioner: By chance I came across a brochure by a Dr. Heuer. I assume that Dr. Steiner has read the brochure, so that we already know that. This Mr. Hauer presents Dr. Steiner as if he were saying nothing new, as if we already know everything that he says about anthroposophy, that we already know all of this. And then, among other things, he says that the most incredible thing about anthroposophy for him is the story of the two Jesus children.

The questioner must also say, however, that this is also incomprehensible to him about the two Jesus children, how the one Jesus child comes from another world.

Dr. Steiner: I also have the brochure, I just haven't cut it open yet.

The questioner continues: If it is not immodest, he would like to ask the doctor to say something about the Jesus family.

Further question: I have been asked by my colleagues in the last few days about the Christ-being. It would be very dear to me if the doctor could say something about the Christ-being.

Dr. Steiner: Is there perhaps another question to be asked so that we can deal with it in context?

Now, I would first like to address the first question about desires. The fact of the matter is this: if you look at what a person experiences differently from how a plant or a stone experiences things, then you will find that a person experiences their world of thoughts. A plant does not show that it has a world of thoughts. Thoughts are there, living in the plant. But to look for conscious thoughts in a plant would be nonsense.

However, something remarkable has come about in the external way in which science partly proceeds today. Today there are all kinds of scholars, and since there are also those who cannot quite believe that there are only physical processes everywhere, that there are only mineral, inanimate processes, they at least assume that there is something spiritual. But since they know nothing about the spiritual itself, they say: the spiritual expresses itself in the fact that some being performs this or that.

There are plants that behave in the strangest ways. For example, there is a plant called the “Venus flytrap” because of the way it behaves. This Venus flytrap has rosette leaves that bear a leaf blade at their broadened stem. It consists of two parts. There are three bristle-shaped outgrowths on both sides of the blade. When an insect alights on the leaf and touches these outgrowths, the two wings of the leaf fold together so quickly that the small insect is trapped. So that is how it is.

Those who only talk about the soul in an external way and know nothing about it, they say: just as there is a soul in a human being, there is also a soul in a plant. I always have only one thing to say to these people: I know a little instrument into which you put a little bacon that has been browned a little: a mousetrap, and when the mouse sips the bacon, the mousetrap closes by itself. So anyone who draws conclusions from such things, as with the Venus flytrap, must assume that there is a soul, and should also say: the mousetrap has a soul because it also closes by itself. It always depends on the reasons for assuming the matter.

You see, that is precisely the characteristic of anthroposophy: it starts from reasons in everything, whereas the others, if they do assume a soul, know nothing about the soul and ascribe a soul to a plant like this, when something similar happens to it as to a mousetrap when an insect comes near it. But in anthroposophy there is nothing of outward appearances that lead to it, but there is the real realization of the soul. Part of this realization of the soul is that man develops desires. It is desire when, for example, he is thirsty. When I am thirsty, I have the desire to drink water or something else. Now, fine; the thirst is satisfied by the water. All of this is desire, where you wish for something from within your organism, want something; that is always desire.

You see, there is something people never think about. They do not think about the mental state that underlies when a person wakes up. Not true, when a person wakes up, now examine the people, how much more carbon dioxide in the blood and so on, that is, they examine only the physical conditions. But the truth is that man wakes up because he has desire for his physical body. When you fall asleep at night, you no longer have any desire for your physical body. It is completely filled with fatigue substances. There is no longer any good in there. The soul, that is, the ego and the astral body, want to recover outside of the physical body. In the morning, when the physical body has recovered, which the soul, which is outside the physical body, notices from the condition of the skin, because it is close to it, the soul goes back into the physical body because it desires to be inside the physical body as long as the physical body is able to live at all. So the soul has the desire throughout life to live inside the body.

Take something else: you cut your finger and it hurts you. There is the finger (drawing $. 202). Now you cut into it, and it hurts you. What has happened? Yes, the physical body is torn a little bit apart. You can cut into the physical body, but not into the astral body. I will now draw the astral body into the physical body. If I draw it large, there is a gap where the astral body is. But it wants to be able to enter the place where the physical body is torn apart as well. It has the desire to be inside the body and cannot do so because the body is torn open. That is what the pain is all about.

Now imagine that if the soul has this desire for the physical body throughout life, then something must happen after death.

If as a child you develop the craving to eat as much sugar as possible, then you develop the craving to get sugar. And if at a certain stage in your life someone finds it useful for you to eat less sugar, you still have the craving for sugar. Let's say you have developed diabetes, and you are therefore no longer supposed to do it – yes, it takes a long time to get rid of that habit! You always have the craving for sugar and have to slowly get rid of it. You know, if someone drinks a lot, he develops a craving for it; he has to slowly wean himself off it. If someone eats opium, as I told you the other day, and they are weaned off it, they will go crazy with desire for the opium.

Now, throughout life, there is a craving for the body in the ego and astral body. After death, the soul always wants to wake up back into the body. First it has to get out of this habit. This process takes about a third of the whole life. In fact, sleep takes a third of the whole life. On the first day after one has died, one wants to go back. You want to do what you did on the last day of your life; on the second day you want to do what you did on the day before that, and so it goes on. So you have to get rid of the desire for this third of your life. So after death you don't have any thirst or hunger cravings, but you do have a constant craving for everything you experienced through your physical body. After death, it is like this: you have grown fond of the area around your hometown all your life. You have always seen that. Yes, you have seen it through your physical body. Only a Turk believes that he has something much more beautiful in terms of meadows and flowers and so on after death than he has here on earth. So you have to get out of the habit of all that. And it is precisely this getting out of the habit that makes it necessary to say that the desires still remain. Is that not understandable? (Answer: Yes!)

So after death, the desires for the physical body and for life in general remain, but not hunger and thirst, because for that you need a stomach; you no longer have that, you put it in the coffin. But after death, you still have the desire to see everything that you saw during your life.

But now something else is added: after death, one can see just as little in the spiritual world, into which one has now entered, as a child here in the physical world can immediately see. One must first acquire this. One must first grow into the spiritual world. So that the first state after death, one third of life, consists of being still blind and deaf to the spiritual world, but still longing for the physical world. That occurs after two or three days, during which, as I have related, the dead person looks back. And only when he has given up that, does he grow into the spiritual world and can then perceive in a spiritual way. Then he no longer has any desire for the physical world. So anyone who can judge the soul's life can also judge what remains of the physical life. And of course it is not only pleasant things that remain. If someone had the desire to constantly beat people, the desire to beat people remains, and then he must slowly get out of the habit of doing so. These are the things that one can see.

Anthroposophy is concerned with recognizing what can actually be seen of the soul, that is, what is actually visible. That is what it is all about.

As for the other question, the question of Christ Jesus, we will deal with it today, so that nothing remains unsatisfied in you. However, I must first say something about history.

I have told you about various conditions on Earth in very ancient times. Now it is like this: we have conditions on earth that are actually no older than about six to eight or nine thousand years, according to scientific observations, so let's say six to nine thousand years. I have already drawn your attention to this. Before that time, you could not go very far from here, because you would enter the so-called glacial region. Switzerland was where you can walk around today, all the way down, covered by glaciers. The glaciers flowed in valleys where the rivers are now; the Aare, the Reuss and so on are only the thin, diluted glacier streams that remain from the distant, distant past.

But this period, in which a large part of Europe was covered by these glaciers, was preceded by a very different time. Because the earth is constantly – you just have to consider large periods of time – rising and falling, rising and falling. If, for example, there is sea here (he draws) and land up there, then this land is floating in the sea. All land floats in the sea. Can you imagine that? It is not that it goes down to the bottom, but that the land, all the lands, float in the sea. There is also sea under the lands.

Now you will say: Why doesn't it float back and forth like a ship? I will tell you something else first. In fact, the countries are floating in the sea, but suppose it were Great Britain, England (it is drawn). England is an island. It actually floats in the sea, but it floats near Europe, and the distance does not change. But even according to scientific views, it was not always the same as it is now, but there were also times when the water went up over it. Then England was under the sea. If you crossed this bit of sea, you naturally came to the ground. So the thing is that there were times when England was under the sea.

Yes, it's even like this: if you examine the soil of England, you will find certain fossilized animals in this soil. But they are not all the same. If you examine a piece of soil from England here and further up, you will find very different fossilized animals, and even further up there are yet again very different fossilized animals and even further up yet again very different fossilized animals. Four successive layers of fossilized animals can be found in the soil of England!

Where do these fossilized animals come from? When the sea floods a land, the animals die. Their shells sink, and the animals are fossilized. If I find four successive layers in a soil, the land in question must have been flooded by the sea four times. A layer was always deposited there. And so it is found that the land of England has been four times above water and four times below. Four times England was above water, it rose again and again.

Now you may ask: Why does such an island, which is actually floating in the water, not go back and forth like a ship? Yes, because it is not held by the earth. If it were only a matter of the earth, it is impossible to imagine how everything would be shaken up! England would soon be dashed against the coast of Norway, then it would be dashed against America and so on, and all the countries would be dashed against each other, if it only depended on the earth. But it does not depend only on the earth, but the constellation of stars in the sky sends out the forces that hold a country in a certain place. So it is not the fault of the earth. It is the star constellation. And you can always prove: when the situation has changed, the star constellation has changed – not the planets, of course, but the fixed stars. Those who do not want to know about this world do the same as people who say that the powers of thought come from the brain alone. If I have the soft ground and just make my footprints, and someone comes down from Mars for my sake and thinks that the footprints come from the earth, the earth sometimes throws up the sand, sometimes pulls it down – it is not at all the case, I pushed in from outside. And so the convolutions of my brain have also come from outside, from mental thinking. It is the same with countries that have come over the earth: they are held by the star constellations. So we must not only see spirit in people on earth, and on earth in general, but in the whole universe.

Such things, gentlemen, just imagine, older people knew them, but in a completely different way than we do today. I will give you a proof. There is a great Greek philosopher who lived several centuries before the birth of Christ, his name was Plato. He knew a great deal. He tells us that one of the wisest of his countrymen, Solon, the lawgiver of Greece, was once a guest at the home of an Egyptian. The Egyptians were the more advanced people at that time; only the Greeks behaved more cleverly than we do. The Greeks revered the Egyptians, as we shall see, but they did not learn Egyptian, the ancient language of the Egyptians. The Greeks did not learn Egyptian! Our scholars must all learn Greek! The Greeks were much cleverer. We do not imitate what they did with it; but we do imitate their language. Our scholars become narrow-minded precisely because they do not grow into what is original to them on earth, but are distracted from what is peculiar to human beings by having to find their way into a very old language. Now, in Switzerland they are fighting against this; but it took a long time. Our boys, if they wanted to become doctors, first had their heads turned by having to learn Greek. I'm not saying this because I also had to learn it, I love the Greek language very much. But that's what some people should learn who want to get something out of it, but not those who want to become doctors or lawyers, and forget it again later in life.

Plato recounts that Solon visited an Egyptian, who told him: “You Greeks may be an advanced people, but you are still children, for you know nothing of the fact that the lands are constantly being pulled out over the sea and submerging again, that upheavals are always taking place.

The ancient Egyptians still knew it; the Greeks no longer knew it. Only Plato still knew it. He knew that there was land out there in the Atlantic Ocean, where ships now sail from Europe to America, that the west coast of Europe was connected to the east coast of America by land. But the old truths have been forgotten. And that was because people had even more unconscious knowledge. We have acquired abstract knowledge. We need that for our freedom. For people in those days were not free; but they knew more. And Lessing, I told you, gave something to the fact that these ancient people knew more than the later.

So we come to say to ourselves: It is the case that there were ancient times when people, through their own nature, knew that there is a spiritual reality everywhere. People have known this for quite a long time.

There is, for example, a Roman emperor, Julian, in the 4th century AD. This Julian was taught by people who still had some knowledge of Asian wisdom. And this Julian said: There is not one, but there are three suns. The first sun is the physical sun, the second is a soul sun, and the third sun is a spiritual sun. The first is visible to us, the other two are invisible. That is what Julian said.

Now something very strange happened. Julianus was vilified throughout history because he did not believe in Christianity. But he believed in what people knew before Christianity. And when Julian once had to lead an Asian campaign, he was suddenly murdered. It was a kind of assassination attempt. But this assassination was carried out by those who hated him because he had appropriated the old knowledge.

You must remember that even in ancient times, things were handled quite differently than they are today. The Egyptians were terribly clever people, as I have already mentioned. But they did not have a writing system like ours, they had a pictographic writing system. The word was always similar to what it meant. And the people who were scribes in Egypt were taught: Writing is something sacred; you must imitate things very faithfully. And do you know what happened to anyone who made a mistake in copying pictographs out of negligence? They were sentenced to death! Well, today people would look on in amazement if someone who made a spelling mistake were sentenced to death because of it. But human history does not go as one dreams it would. Indeed, the ancient Egyptians were wise and cruel in some respects. Of course there is progress in humanity. But just because writing was something so sacred to them, we must not deny that they were wise in other respects and knew things that are only now gradually emerging in anthroposophy, in a completely different way. They dreamt it, and we know it; it was a completely different way.

Well, you see, Julianus was right. It is actually the case that just as you have soul and spirit in your body, so the sun has soul and spirit. That is precisely what the one who knows the soul says. He is not saying that the Venus flytrap has a soul, because it is nonsense to say that everything that moves in some purposeful way has a soul. But he knows that when the light shines, it has a soul, it moves soulfully; because he perceives that. And so it was known: the sun contains a living being.

Now you know that it is said: In Palestine, at a certain time, Jesus of Nazareth was born. You see, gentlemen, Jesus of Nazareth grew up - you can actually verify today what is in the Gospels, so it is true - as a fairly simple boy. He was the son of a carpenter, a joiner. That's right. He grew up as a fairly simple boy. Now he still had a great deal of ancient wisdom. Therefore, it is based on truth that at the age of twelve he was able to answer the scholars very cleverly. It still happens today that a twelve-year-old boy gives more sensible answers than a “disinstructed” scholar! But from this it was clear that he was a very gifted boy. Now he grew up, and when he was thirty years old, something suddenly changed in him. That is a fact; something changed in him all of a sudden.

What changed in him when Jesus was thirty years old? When Jesus was thirty years old, he suddenly realized, prepared by his earlier great knowledge, what was no longer known at the time, which only a few hidden scholars had from an ancient wisdom, of which Julian later found it. He realized through an older knowledge: The whole universe and the sun contain soul and spirit. He was imbued with what lived in the universe by knowing this. If you know it, you have it.

Now in those days, in those times, people had to be taught things in pictures. What I am telling you today can only be expressed in this way from the 15th century onwards. Before that, we did not have these concepts. So it was expressed in such a way that it was said: a dove descended, and he received the Holy Spirit within him. Of course, those who were able to perceive it knew that something had happened to him. That is how they expressed it, and in one gospel it says: “Then a voice from heaven was heard: ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased’.” Translated correctly: “This is my beloved Son, today I have given birth to him.” That means that what happened at the age of thirty was correctly understood as a second birth. With Jesus' birth, only Jesus was born, who was more talented than the others, but who did not yet have this feeling within him. This was felt to be something extraordinarily important. And that is the baptism of John in the Jordan.

There was something that caused me great concern at the time. In science, there are such concerns, gentlemen! You had, as you know, the four Gospels, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Don't you think everyone knows today that these four Gospels contradict each other? If you start reading in the Gospel of Matthew and read about the family tree of Jesus, and compare it with the family tree of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, they contradict each other. People say: they contradict each other. But they don't think any further about why it contradicts itself. At most, they say: one invented it, the other invented it; one just invented something different from the other, that's why things can contradict each other.

But that is not the case. It is like this: Goethe, for example, says of himself: “I have the stature of my father” — that is, he looked a lot like his father.

From my father I have the stature,
The serious way of life,
From my mother, a cheerful disposition
And the desire to tell stories.

Now, maybe at the age of three, Goethe was not yet able to tell stories; but maybe at the age of nine he could. Then he had to say: “Beautiful, from my mother I have the desire to tell stories, it has been passed on to me from my mother, it has come into me from my mother.

I tell you this because it will help you understand how my concern about the contradictions in the gospels has been resolved.

Now I have taken these two gospels, the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Unless someone carelessly says that it is invented, no one can understand why these two things contradict each other. And I have now examined the spiritual science behind it and found that not just one boy was born, but two Jesus boys were born. Both boys had the name Jesus. There is no need to be surprised about that; for example, if a boy in Austria is named Joseph, then there is no surprise if another boy born at the same time is also named Joseph. There is no need to be surprised if two boys are named Seppl or Franz. So there was no reason to be surprised if two boys were named Jesus at the time. And both lived together until they were twelve years old. And then something strange happened: because they lived together, the gifts that one of them had suddenly appeared in the other. Just as a son can inherit from his mother, so one of the Jesus boys inherited gifts from the other. And the one Jesus boy, from whom the other had inherited the gift, did not live on, he died at twelve years of age, he died soon after. So the one was left and, through the shock that the other perished, had the wisdom of the other shine within him. This is precisely how he was able to shine before the scholars.

His parents could say: Where did he get all that? — If you ascribe it to psychic influences, then that is also explainable. And such psychic influences simply exist. One of the Jesus boys did not have the wisdom until he was twelve; the other died, and the wisdom was transferred to the one Jesus boy, partly because of the shock of his death, partly because they were friendly with each other. And he went through the baptism in the Jordan. Two Jesus boys were born, not one. In the twelfth year, one of them died, and the other was suddenly awakened by this shocking event and gained the wisdom of the other.

And then you find out: the one evangelist, Matthew, described the one Jesus boy for the childhood of Jesus, and the other, Luke, described the other Jesus boy. And so the two agree with each other. I didn't make that up. It was the result of my research. And that's why I'm talking about the two Jesus boys, precisely because of a certain science that the others don't have.

And from this you can see that the same principles that are followed in natural science, that when the causes are there, the effects occur, are also followed in spiritual science. You don't just assume that you say: Well, yes, two people have invented something, the one Jesus child of Matthew is invented, the other Jesus child of Luke is invented. At the time when the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were written, there was no question of such an invention at all. People spoke figuratively; but they did not invent anything, because the things were taken so seriously that a few centuries earlier in Egypt, anyone who wrote down something that was not true was sentenced to death. We cannot be so reckless as to say that people in earlier times invented anything. They expressed things in pictures, but it would never have occurred to them to invent anything. He who says that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke could have been invented is speaking as one who knows nothing. But that is what today's scholars and theologians say. Since they cannot explain the contradictions otherwise, they have to admit that they are contradictory. But the fact that we know there are two Jesus children, one the Jesus child of the Gospel of Matthew and the other the Jesus child of the Gospel of Luke, clarifies the story in the best possible way.

Now Mr. Hauer, who is a private lecturer in Tübingen and also a traveling teacher, has come forward – speaking for anthroposophy does not bring in any money today, but speaking against anthroposophy does – and has come forward against anthroposophy, this Mr. Hauer now comes and finds: That is something strange. — Yes, gentlemen, it is of course something strange because no one has thought of it! It is of course something strange if I claim that there were not one but two Jesus children; one of whom died at the age of twelve. That is of course something strange, of course. There is no need to be surprised that it is something strange. But it is precisely because not everyone said it that it is strange. That is why Hauer finds it strange. This can be found on one page of Hauer's book.

On the other page, you will find: Yes, Steiner says nothing that was not already known. Yes, gentlemen, what Mr. Hauer did not know, he finds strange. He complains about that. On the basis of what he has gleaned from somewhere — because the old wisdom has been had, and today it is of course recorded everywhere — I do not glean it, but he does! — he comes to the conclusion: Yes, Steiner says nothing that others have not already said. So you are at the mercy of these people. Whenever something needs to be said, they say: He says nothing new. If I write a geometry book, I naturally have to include the Pythagorean theorem; it was discovered by Pythagoras 600 years before the birth of Christ. Of course, if I have a number of new things in it, I must also have the Pythagorean theorem in it; today I will prove it somewhat differently, but it is in it. One cannot be reproached for that, that what was already there is rediscovered after it has been forgotten! And so it is that many of the things that spiritual science claims today, in a different way, because it is not the case in the same way, can be found in a different way in the writings of the ancient Gnostics, who are the writers of an ancient time. At the time when Christ was around, there were still such Gnostics, and even later. They wrote down such ancient wisdom, but not out of science, but out of ancient knowledge, not like anthroposophy. Now people compare what anthroposophy says and what the Gnostics say. This is a little bit like what happens with the Gnostics again, because it is true. And then they say: Well, he is saying nothing different from what the others have said! But with the two Jesus children, Mr. Hauer cannot say: Steiner came upon something that the others already knew! Because he has no idea that anyone has ever known that.

I have not yet cut open the whole book, but what I have seen of it is full of such contradictions. It does not make sense at all when you compare one page with another. But that is how today's scholars do it. On the one hand they say: Others have said that many times before. - And on the other hand they say: He is not saying anything new, we already knew all that! Yes, but if they already knew all that, why are they grumbling about it? And on the other hand, when something comes that they didn't know, they find it incredible.

But you see, after I had found this, really found it through spiritual research, of the two Jesus children who lived side by side until the twelfth year, I knew nothing but this, that it is a fact. Then we once saw a picture in Turin. The picture is very strange. It shows the mother of Jesus and two boys, one of whom is not John, because John is known from all the pictures where Jesus and John are together, but there are two boys in it who look quite similar, but still cannot be brothers, because they look alike, and yet not alike. It is quite clear that they are two little friends. Whoever first found that there were two Jesus children would then have to consider what this picture means. This picture was created relatively late in the centuries; but when it was still known that there were two Jesus children, an Italian painter painted the two Jesus children in one picture.

If Hauer had known today that this was still the case from ancient knowledge, he would now say: Steiner simply saw the picture in Turin! He would say that he already knew that anyway. Then he would say at the same point: Steiner is not claiming anything new, he is only claiming the things that have been known anyway. - Such are people!

It is actually quite dreadful when you look into these apparently stupid contradictions with which people today fight anthroposophy. On the one hand, what I say is supposed to be pure invention, invented by me. Now, let us assume that it is invented by me; but then the same person cannot say in the same book: He is not saying anything new! — Because he himself claims that I invented the things I say, and reproaches me for it. And then he says that others have known this all along. It is, in fact, sheer madness what is being done. Whereas if one really approaches the Christ event and investigates it as one otherwise investigates facts, then it becomes clear: this tremendous gift, which the boy Jesus already had, came about through the interaction between the two boys.

I will prove to you that such an exchange can take place, unbeknownst to other people. Let me tell you about such a case. There was once a little girl who already had older siblings; these other siblings learned to speak quite well. This girl did not learn to speak properly at first; but a little later, when the other children learned to talk, she began to talk. But she spoke a language that none of the adults understood. She invented a language for herself. For example, she said “Papazzo,” and when she said “Papazzo,” she meant the dog. And in a similar way, she invented names for all the animals. These are scientific facts. These names are not found anywhere.

Now this girl had a little brother after some time. And the little brother learned this language very quickly from his sister. And they spoke to each other in this language. The little brother died when he was twelve or so, and the sister stopped using this language and also learned the language of the others. She then married later and became a completely ordinary woman who told people that this was the case. She went through it herself. It is so. The two children communicated with each other in this language, talked to each other in this language; no one else understood it. Gentlemen, that can be the greatest wisdom! Only the two of them understood and agreed with each other.

From this you can see how one is influenced by the other. Why should not the one Jesus boy, who died at the age of twelve, have known something that no one understood at all! You still experience that when you know the facts.

So, nothing else is being claimed than what, in the most eminent sense, can also be truly scientific. Now, people who do not accept this as scientific are simply unable to piece together the facts. The person who knows that something like this exists, that two children speak this language that no adult understands and share spiritual things with each other in which the adults do not participate, he who understands this, he understands everything I say about the two Jesus children up to the twelfth year. And that this was an extraordinary event is not surprising. It does not happen every day. And in the form in which it happened, it has only happened once in the history of the earth, that this tremendous enlightenment comes to this man at the age of thirty.

Now, you see, here the story of Christ is transformed into real science, into real knowledge. And you can't help it; it transforms itself through knowledge.

Now you can say: All right, so at the age of twelve, Jesus was already enlightened to a certain extent by the other one who died. But at the age of thirty, yes, he suddenly became a different person again, which the evangelist expresses by saying: A dove flew down and settled on him.

Yes, gentlemen, the fact is that he has become another. What has happened then? I have already explained to you: when a child is born, the germ is there. The spirit of the universe must act on the germ. It is no wonder that the spirit of the universe is at work there when it has even worked on the island of England, as we have seen. What happened to Jesus in his thirtieth year could not be explained from the earth. Just as a human being is created through fertilization, in that one thing influences the other, so at that time the whole universe had an influence on the thirty-year-old Jesus, fertilizing him with soul and spirit, and through this he became Jesus Christ or Christ Jesus, to put it better. For what does it mean? Christ means he who is enlightened. And Jesus is an ordinary name, as it was common in Palestine, just as today in Austria one is called Sepperl, Joseph, or in Switzerland so and so, where one also finds similar names in every house. So Jesus was the name of many, and he was called the Christ because this enlightenment occurred.

Yes, gentlemen, when you read my book “Christianity as Mystical Fact,” you will find it demonstrated there: This enlightenment has been artificially produced in certain people before, only to a lesser extent. These were then called mystery ways. The difference between those who were educated in the highest wisdom in ancient times and the difference between them and Jesus Christ was that these mystery wise men were taught by others in the schools that were called mysteries in those days. With Jesus, it happened by itself. Therefore, it was a different process.

In the ancient mysteries, those who ascended to the highest knowledge simply became “Christ”; just as today you need not be surprised if someone has studied until the age of twenty-five - before that he was the very ordinary Joseph Müller, but now he is suddenly a doctor. That is how one became a “Christ” in the old mysteries, although not in such an innocent, that is, simple way; because of course you can be the biggest idiot and still become a doctor at the age of twenty-five! That was not possible in the old mysteries; there it was a deep, deep wisdom. There you became the 'Christ'. It was a title given to the highest sages, as the title 'doctor' is given today after a certain course of study; only in those days, when it was done properly, it was real wisdom. And with the Christ it just came naturally. But that means that what was otherwise given by the earth, by people, was given from the farthest reaches of the universe. This only happened once. As a result, world history took a different turn. And no one can deny this secret, not even those who are not Christians, that world history has taken a different turn.

The Romans did not take this into account, they did not know it. Christianity was founded in Asia Minor by Jesus Christ. At the same time, the Romans advanced from the old republican state to the empire, and they persecuted the Christians. The Christians had to make themselves catacombs underground. There they reflected on what their Christianity was. What was done above ground? The circuses were built, and people, the slaves, were tied to the pillars and burned as a spectacle for those sitting in the circus. That was above ground. And down in the catacombs, the Christians practiced their religion, which at that time was just for enslaved people. Religion just means connection - religere = to connect -; down there, the Christians practiced their religion.

And what about a few centuries later? The Romans are no longer there in the old way. What they used to watch in the circuses for their own pleasure, the burning people, was gone, because the Christians had taken its place. That is how it is in the world.

And so it will come to pass: those people who today speak as Dr. Hauer, whom you mentioned earlier, will be swept away. And that which today, though not physically but spiritually, must work in the catacombs, will indeed work! But one must only realize how it is a matter of real science; and how those who do not study much today are annoyed that something like this comes out!

When I come back, I will be able to continue with that. But essentially, you will already have understood which path this is taking.

Good morning, gentlemen! Did you come up with anything that needs to be discussed today?

Question: Perhaps Dr. Steiner would say something about the essence of Christ, Ahriman and Lucifer in relation to man.

Dr. Steiner: To do that, we have to approach the nature of the human being from a completely different angle, otherwise it will naturally seem to you to be a kind of superstition. Based on what we have already discussed, I would like to say the following to you.

You see, gentlemen, today we have the notion that human beings are thoroughly homogeneous creatures. He is not; but man is actually constantly in a state in which he revives and dies again. One does not merely live at birth and does not merely die with death, but - as I have often explained to you - one dies continually and revives again.

Now, if we look at our head, for example, the head is actually entirely composed of what is called nervous substance. You know, nerves usually run through the organism only as threads, but the head is entirely made of nerves on the inside. If you draw it, it actually looks like this (drawing $. 220): the head, the forehead; the head is entirely made of nerves on the inside, a strong nerve mass; then some of this nerve mass goes through the spinal cord. But then the nerve threads go through the whole body. So what only goes through the whole body in threads is present in the head as a unified mass. That is the nerve mass.

If you now look at the inside of the human abdomen, for example, you will also see a great many nerves inside. There is the so-called solar plexus. There are a lot of nerves in there. But in the arms and hands and in the legs and feet, the nerves just run out in a thread-like manner.

If you now look again for something else, for the blood vessels, then you will find: in the head, the blood vessels are quite fine. In contrast, the blood vessels are particularly strong in the heart area; and then there are thick blood vessels in the limbs. So you can say: on the one hand we have the nervous system, on the other hand we have the blood system.

Now the thing is that we are born again and again from the blood, every day, every hour. Blood always signifies renewal. If we only had blood in us, we would be like beings that are constantly growing, getting bigger, fresh and so on. But, you see, gentlemen, if we were only nerves, if we were only made of nerves, we would be constantly exhausted, tired, we would actually be constantly dying. So we have two opposing principles in us, the nervous system, which makes us continually grow old, continually at the mercy of death, and the blood system, which is connected to the nutritional system, which makes us continually grow young and so forth.

The matter that I have explained to you now can also be further expanded. You know, in old age, some people become so that one has to say that they are calcified. Calcification occurs, sclerosis. It is very easy for people to no longer be able to move properly when their veins, as one says, calcify, that is, when the walls of their blood vessels calcify. And when the calcification is particularly severe, then the person is struck by a stroke, as they say. They get a stroke. The stroke that a person gets is only because their blood vessels have calcified and can no longer hold.

What actually happens to a person when their blood vessels calcify, when they become sclerotic? You see, it is as if the walls of their blood vessels want to become nerves. That is the strange thing. Nerves must constantly die off. Throughout our entire lives, nerves must be in the same state that blood vessels must not be in. Blood vessels must be fresh. The nerves must constantly tend to die off. If, on the other hand, a person develops nerves that are too soft, that are not sufficiently, if I may put it this way, calcified, that are too soft, then he goes crazy. So you see, the nerves must not be like the blood vessels and the blood vessels not like the nerves.

This is precisely what forces us to say that man has two principles within him. One is the nervous principle. This causes him to actually grow old all the time. From morning till evening, we actually get a little older each day. During the night, the blood renews itself. It goes like the pendulum of a clock: getting old, getting young, getting old, getting young. Of course, if we are awake from morning till night, we just get older, and if we sleep from night till morning, we get younger again; but a little something always remains. So the night makes up for it; but a little remains from each day of aging. And when that adds up to a sufficiently large sum in a person, then he really does die. That is the story. We therefore have two things in man that work against each other, growing old and growing young.

Now we can also look at it from a psychological point of view. I have explained it to you physically now. You see, when growing young takes hold too strongly in a person, then he gets pleurisy or pneumonia. It is namely the case that the things that are quite good, that are excellent when they remain within their limits, then, when they get out of hand, become illness. In a human being, illness is nothing more than an excess of something that he always needs. Fever comes from the fact that the process of growing young becomes much too strong in us. We can no longer tolerate it. We start to become too fresh with our whole body. Then we have a fever or pleurisy, which is a inflammation of the pleura, or pneumonia.

Now, the whole thing can also be looked at from a spiritual point of view. You see, a person can also dry up spiritually, or he can become as he otherwise becomes physically in a fever. There are certain qualities in a person - one does not like to hear them because so many people have them, especially today - and these are: one becomes pedantic, one becomes a Philistine. You know that there are Philistines today, after all. Philistines already exist. You become a philistine, you become a pedant. You become, while you should actually be a schoolmaster as a fresh guy, just dried up as a schoolmaster. Yes, that is again the same as when our blood vessels calcify, dry up. We can also dry up mentally. And then again we can also soften mentally. That is when you become a dreamer, a mystic or a theosophist. Yes, what do you want there? You don't want to think properly there. You want to reach out with your imagination into all the worlds without thinking properly. It's the same as when you get a physical fever. Becoming a mystic, becoming a theosophist, means becoming mentally feverish.

But we must always have both conditions within us. We cannot recognize anything if we cannot use our imagination, and we cannot work together in any way if we are not a little pedantic, if we do not register all sorts of things and so on. If you do it too much, you are a pedant, a philistine. If you do it just in the right measure, you are a real soul.

That is it, that one always has something that must be in the right measure in man, but which, if it gets out of hand, makes one physically or mentally ill.

The spiritual is the same, gentlemen. We cannot always sleep, we also have to wake up sometimes. Imagine what a jolt it is when you wake up! Just imagine what it is like when you are asleep: you lie there, you know nothing of your surroundings. If you have a good sleep, someone can even tickle you and you won't even wake up. Think what a difference that makes! Afterwards you wake up, you see everything around you, you hear everything around you. That is a big difference. Now when you wake up – yes, we must have this power to wake up in us; but if it is too strong, if one always wakes up, if one cannot sleep at all, for example, then the power to wake up is just too strong in us.

On the other hand, there are people who cannot wake up properly at all. There are people who doze and dream their whole lives, who might as well be asleep all the time. Yes, these people cannot wake up. We need to have the ability to fall asleep properly; but we must not have this ability to fall asleep properly too strongly. Otherwise we will sleep forever and never wake up again.

So we can say: we can distinguish certain conditions in people in three ways. Firstly, physically. On the one hand, we have the nervous system. This is constantly subject to hardening, to calcification. So we say:

You see, you are all already so old, with the exception of the only one sitting among you, that you must have calcified your nervous system a little. Because if you still had your nervous system today as you had it when you were six months old, you would all be crazy. You can no longer have such a soft nervous system. Those people who are crazy have a childlike nervous system. So we have to have the power of hardening, of calcification within us. And on the other hand, we have to have the power of softening, of rejuvenation. These two forces must maintain a balance.

If we look at the matter psychically, we can say that hardening corresponds to mental pedantry, philistinism, materialism, dry intellect.

We have to be able to see beyond all this. We have to be a little bit of a Philistine, otherwise we would be a Springing-ear. We have to be a little bit of a pedant, otherwise we would not even pick up our things properly. Instead of hanging our coat in the right closet, we would hang it in the stove or in the chimney. So being a little bit of a Philistine and a little bit of a pedant is all well and good, but it must not be too strong. Then we also have the strength in our souls for fantasy, for enthusiasm, for mysticism, for theosophy. If all these powers become too strong, then we become a fantasist, an enthusiast. We must not become that. But we must not lose all imagination either.

I once knew a person who hated all imagination, and he never went to the theater, for example, certainly not to the opera, because he said, “It's all not true.” He just had no imagination at all. Yes, but if you have no imagination at all, then you become a very dry subject, then you slink through life, not a real, true human being. So that must not degenerate again.

If we now look at it spiritually, we have the strength to harden when we wake up. When we wake up, we take our body firmly in hand and use our limbs. And the strength that is otherwise in the body in softening, in rejuvenation, we have in falling asleep. Then we sink into dreams. There we no longer have our body in hand.

You could say that people are actually constantly exposed to the danger of falling into one or the other, either into excessive softening or excessive hardening.

If you have a magnet, you know that the magnet attracts the iron. We say that we have two types of magnetism in the magnet. We also have positive magnetism and negative magnetism. One attracts the magnetic needle, the other repels it. They are opposite.

Not so in the physical, in the bodily, where we are not at all embarrassed about giving things names. We need names. I have now described something to you, physically, mentally and spiritually, that each of you can always perceive, always see, and be clear about. But we need names. When we have positive magnetism, we have to be clear that this is not the iron; this is inside the iron. Something invisible is inside the iron.

Anyone who does not admit that there is something invisible in the iron will say: “You are a foolish fellow! There should be magnetism in the iron inside? This is a horseshoe. I use it to shoe my horse. — Not true, such a person is an idiot who does not admit that there is something invisible in the iron inside, who shoes his horse with it. You can use this horseshoe for something completely different than for shoeing, if there is magnetism inside.

Now, in the same way, you see, there is something invisible, supersensory, in the hardening. And this invisible, supersensory, entity, which can be observed if one has the gift for it, is called ahrimanic. Ahrimanic are therefore the forces that would continually turn a person into a kind of corpse. If only ahrimanic forces were present, we would continually become corpses, and we would become pedants, completely petrified people. We would wake up all the time, we would not be able to sleep.

The forces that now soften us, rejuvenate us, bring us to fantasy, are the luciferic forces, these are the forces we need to avoid becoming a living corpse. But if only the luciferic forces were there, yes, we would remain children all our lives. So in the world we need the luciferic forces so that we are not already old at the age of three. In the world we need the ahrimanic forces so that we do not remain children all the time. These two opposing forces must be in man.

Now it is a matter of these two opposing forces having to be balanced. Where, then, does the balance lie? Neither of these forces should prevail.

You see, we are now writing, aren't we, 1923. The whole period from the turn of time until 1923 is actually such that humanity is in danger of falling prey to the forces of Ahriman. You only have to consider that today, wherever there is no spiritual science, people are educated in an Ahrimanic way. Just think, our children start school and have to learn things that seem very strange to them – I have already hinted at them – that they cannot possibly be interested in. I told you that they have always seen the father; yes, he looks like this, has hair, ears, eyes, and then they are supposed to learn that this (written): Father, is the father. It is completely foreign to them. They have no interest in it. And so it is with everything that children are supposed to learn in elementary school. They have no interest in it.

And this is the reason why we need to establish sensible schools where children can learn things that interest them. If teaching were to continue as it is today, then people would grow old very early, become old, because it is Ahrimanic. It makes people old. The way children are educated in school today is all Ahrimanic. It has been like this for nineteen hundred years, that the whole development of humanity is Ahrimanic. Before that it was different.

If you now go back, say, from the year 8000 to the turn of the century, it was different, people were exposed to the danger of not being able to grow old. There were no schools in the modern sense in those ancient times. There were only schools for those people who had already reached a respectable age and who were then to become real scholars. There were schools for them. In the old days there were no schools for children. They just learned by living. They learned from what they saw. So there were no schools, nor did anyone endeavor to teach children anything that was foreign to them. There was a danger that people would become completely Luciferian, that they would become fanatical, that is, Luciferian. And it was so. In those ancient times, there was much wisdom available, I have already told you that. But of course, this Luciferic had to be restrained, otherwise they would have wanted to tell ghost stories all day long! That was what people particularly loved.

So that one can say: from very ancient times, from about 8000 BC to the turn of time, was a Luciferic age, and then came an Ahrimanic age.

Let us now take a look at the Luciferian Age. You see, those who were scholars in those ancient times had certain concerns. Those who were scholars at that time lived in tower-shaped buildings. The Babylonian Tower, which is told to you in the Bible, is just one of these buildings. These scholars lived there. These scholars said: Well, we have it good here. We also want our imagination to run away with us. We always want to go into the ghostly, always into the Luciferian. But we have our instruments. We look out at the stars and see how the stars move. That reins in our imagination. Because if I look at a star and want it to go like that, it just doesn't go like that. So our own imagination is reined in.

So the scholars knew that they could let their imagination be tamed by the phenomena of the world. Or they had physical instruments. They knew: If I imagine that I have a very small piece of wood, heat it up a little, there will be a huge fire – I can say that in my imagination, but if I really do it, the small piece of wood will become a small fire.

So that was actually the purpose of these old educational institutions, to rein in the rampant imagination of these people. And the concern that these people had was that they said, “Yes, there are all the others now, but not all of them can become scholars!” And so they came up with the teachings, which were sometimes honest and sometimes dishonest. These are the old religious teachings, which are based entirely on science. Of course, the priests also went astray. And so the dishonest teachings - the honest ones have been partially, mostly lost - have come down to posterity. That was the restraint of the Luciferic.

And you know what the Ahrimanic element is. Today's science is moving more and more towards the Ahrimanic. In fact, all our science is something that makes us dry up today. Because this science, it only knows the physical, that is, the calcified, the material. And that is what is Ahrimanic in our whole civilization.

Between the two stands that which in the real sense we call the Christian. You see, gentlemen, the real Christian is too little known in the world. If one calls that Christian which is known in the world, then one would naturally have to fight the Christian, that is self-evident.

But the being of whom I also spoke to you last time, who was born at the turn of an era and lived for thirty-three years, this personality was not as people describe him, but he actually had the intention of giving such teachings to all people that would make possible a balance, an equilibrium between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. And being Christian means seeking this balance between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. You cannot really be a Christian in the way that people often call it today.

What does it mean, for example, to be Christian in the physical sense? To be Christian in the physical sense means that I acquire knowledge about the human being. The human being can also become ill. The human being gets pleurisy. What does it mean when he gets pleurisy? It means that there is too much of the Luciferic in him. If I know that there is too much of the Luciferic in him – if he gets pleurisy, then there is too much of the Luciferic in him – then I must say: if I have a balance (drawing $. 230) and it rises too sharply here, then I must take away the weights. If it sinks too low, I have to add weights. Now I say to myself: if a person has pleurisy, the Luciferic is too strong and the Ahrimanic too weak. I have to add something Ahrimanic, then it balances out again.

Let us assume, then, that I am saying to myself quite correctly: this person has pleurisy; how can I help him? I take, say, a piece of birch wood. Birch wood grows strongly in spring. Birch wood in particular is very good, especially when it is towards the bark; there are very good growth forces in the bark. I kill them, that is, I char the birch wood. Then I have birch charcoal. What have I made out of the fresh, ever-rejuvenating birch wood? I have made birch charcoal out of it; I have made Ahrimanic out of it. And now I make a powder out of this birch charcoal and give it to the person who has too much of the Luciferic in his pleurisy. Then I have added the Ahrimanic to what he has too much of the Luciferic.

You see, I have then created the balance. Just as I have to add something to the scales when they swing up too high on one side, so too have I added birch charcoal when there is too much of the Luciferic in the pleurisy. I have mineralized the birch wood by charring it. It has been made Ahrimanic.

Or suppose a person takes on such a tired, paralyzed appearance that I can say to myself: this person will be struck down soon. There is too much Ahrimanic in him. Now I have to give him something Luciferic to balance it out. What do I do in such a case?

You see, when I have a plant: there is the root. You know, the root is hard. It contains a lot of salts. That is not luciferic. The trunk and the leaves are not luciferic either. But I go further up, and there I have a smelling, a strong-smelling flower. It wants to get away, just as fantasy wants to get away, otherwise I would not be able to smell it at all. Now I take the juice from the flower. That is luciferic. Then I administer it in the right way, thus balancing out the ahrimanic, and I can heal him.

What does today's medicine do? Today's medicine, yes, it tries things out. A chemist comes up with the discovery of acetylphenetidine. I don't need to explain to you what that is; it is a complicated substance. Now one takes that into a hospital. There are thirty patients for my sake. You give all thirty patients acetylphenetidine, take the clinical thermometer, measure, note, and if something comes out, you consider it a cure.

But we have no conception of how things actually work in the human body. We cannot look inside the human body. Only when we know: in pleurisy there is too much of the Luciferic, so we must add the Ahrimanic; in apoplexy there is too much of the Ahrimanic, so we must add the Luciferic — then we have the right thing. That is what humanity lacks today. In this sense humanity is insufficiently Christian, because the Christian element is the element of balance. You see, I will show you what the Christian element consists of in the sphere of physical healing. The Christian element consists of seeking balance.

You see, that is what I wanted to show in this wooden figure, which is supposed to be under construction. At the top is Lucifer, the Luciferic, that is everything in man that is feverish, imaginative, asleep; and below is everything that wants to harden, the Ahrimanic. And in between is the Christ.

That is what brings one to what one should do in medicine, in natural science, in sociology, what one should do everywhere. And today it is just part of being human to understand how Luciferic and Ahrimanic is in human nature.

But what do people understand of these things? Once upon a time a very famous pastor in Basel, and even beyond, by the name of Frohnmeyer, a very famous pastor, presented a paper. He did not take the trouble to look at this figure, but he read in another paper, which perhaps had not been looked at either, but copied out, that there is a figure here, Luciferic at the top, Christ in the middle, and Ahrimanic at the bottom. There are three figures, one above the other, and, aren't there even more, Ahriman twice, Lucifer twice as well. But now this Frohnmeyer knew so well that he wrote: Steiner is doing something quite terrible out there in Dornach, a Christ figure that has Luciferian features at the top and animal characteristics at the bottom.

Now, the Christ-Figure has no Luciferic features at all, but a quite human head. But he has confused the two. He has believed, a Christ-Figure, which has Luciferic features above and animalistic ones below. — Now the Christ below is not finished at all, but is still a wooden block!

This is how this Christian pastor, who was striving for truth, described the matter, and now the whole world says that it must be true, because it is a pastor who wrote it! It is difficult to counter this when people do not want to understand. They always turn to the pastors because they believe what the pastors say. But here you have an example of slander that is so pathetic that you can't imagine anything worse than that.

And these people have strange views. Pastor Frohnmeyer wrote this. At the time he wrote this, Dr. Boos was still here at the Goetheanum. You know, Dr. Boos has a tendency to lash out. You may have your own opinion about whether you should lash out with a club or with a whisk. The whisk is softer, more luciferic, the mace is hard, more ahrimanic. So it depends on what you are supposed to hit. But now that he has told Frohnmeyer the truth, told the truth with the mace. Who gets a letter from Frohnmeyer? Me! I get a long letter from Dr. Frohnmeyer telling me to get Dr. Boos not to be so naughty to Dr. Frohnmeyer.

Just imagine what these people are capable of. It's unbelievable what they are capable of. They slander someone, as I told you, and then they turn to someone and say that action should be taken against the person who corrects the untruth!

That is precisely the difficulty, that the public, namely the bourgeois public, does not somehow make it convenient to see for themselves in these matters, but it is just accepted; because they are officially set up by the people concerned, it is right. That is why our civilization is so tremendously frivolous, so mean in many ways.

The point is that today's entire way of thinking must be brought into such a channel that one realizes again: with all this talk of Christianity, it is nothing, but one must take it factually. One must therefore know that medicine can become Christian if one knows, for example, the following. Let us say that someone shows very clearly that if a person has regularly eaten sugar, perhaps even as a child, they will develop liver cancer – this is the liver becoming Ahrimanic – and now one must know what to use against it: the corresponding Luciferic. Just as a person differentiates between warmth and cold, one must differentiate between becoming Luciferic and becoming Ahrimanic. If your limbs are numb, then you have become Ahrimanic. If you now apply warm compresses, warm cloths, then that is the Luciferic that counteracts it. And so, in all areas and under all circumstances, one must know what the human being is like. Then the medicine will become Christian.

In the same way, education and the school system must become Christian. This means that children must be educated in such a way that they do not become decrepit from an early age. So they must be introduced at school to things that are close to them, that they are interested in, and so on.

You see, if we look at it this way, then there is nothing superstitious about the use of the terms ahrimanic, luciferic, Christian. Rather than being something superstitious, it is something completely scientific. And that is what it is.

So how did this develop historically? Yes, it is true that from the earliest Christian times until the 12th, 13th century, even into the 14th century, Christians were forbidden to read the Bible. It was forbidden to read the New Testament. Only the priests were allowed to read it. The general believers were not allowed to read the Bible. Why? Yes, because the clergy knew that the Bible had to be read correctly. The Bible was written at a time when people did not think as they do today, but rather in images. So you have to read the Bible correctly. If people were to read the Bible without being properly prepared, they would notice that the Bible has four testaments: the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Luke, and the Gospel of John. Now, they contradict each other. Why do they contradict each other? Yes, gentlemen, you just have to understand it correctly. Even in the 4th or 5th century, a person who was not half-witted could see that they contradict each other.

But imagine that I have photographed Mr. Burle from the front and show you all the picture. Now, from the picture, you know Mr. Burle. Now someone comes along and takes a picture of him from the side, so that you see the profile, right? I show you this, and you would all say: “That's not Mr. Burle, he looks quite different; you have to look at him from the front, that's how he looks. But what you show me from the side, that's not Mr. Burle!” Yes, that is also Mr. Burle, but only from two different sides! And if I were to photograph him from behind, you would say, “But he also has a nose, not just hair!” But that is from different sides!

If you now “photograph” spiritual events from different sides, they will also look different. You just have to know that the Gospels describe from four different sides. Therefore, they must contradict each other, just as a picture of Mr. Burle from the front, from the side, from behind differs from each other.

But now the times have come when people have said: It is inconceivable that people should first have to prepare themselves in order to read the Gospels. Nowadays we prepare ourselves for nothing at all. We allow ourselves to be prepared at school, we allow ourselves to be trained; but once we have progressed beyond this training, after fourteen or fifteen years, there is nothing more to prepare, we must understand everything. Well, that is the normal view today.

Why should that not lead to people seeing that the Goetheanum is a place where not children are involved in preparation, but old, balding guys who still want to be prepared? Yes, a school that is not attended by children but only by old people must be a madhouse! — You see, that is what they say because they cannot imagine that people still want to learn something. And that is what we must realize: in order to read something like the Gospels, one must first be properly prepared for it, because it is meant to be pictorial. Just as if someone today wanted to read a Chinese document, he would first have to learn the letters. If you wanted to take the Gospels as they are written, it would of course be nonsense, just as Chinese writing is a scribble if you do not look at it properly. But if you understand things correctly, you realize that everything in Christianity is about learning to balance the Ahrimanic with the Luciferic in the right way, so that one does not dominate the other.

And that is why anthroposophy does not hesitate to speak of Christianity in this sense. It emphasizes that Christianity is not just about constantly mentioning the name of Christ and so on. That is what people criticize about anthroposophy: that it speaks so little of Christ. Well, I always say: Yes, you see, anthroposophy does not talk much about Christ because it knows the Ten Commandments. And you talk so much about Christ because you don't even know the commandment: You shall not speak the name of the Lord your God in vain.

If a Christian pastor preaches today, the name of Christ is uttered continually. One should only speak it when one really understands what it means! That is it, isn't it, that distinguishes anthroposophy from it, which really wants to be Christian in the right sense, but without superstition, without being sanctimonious, just really scientific, in this sense really only wants to be scientific. And in this way it also regards what took place between the old time, which was Luciferic, and the new time, which is Ahrimanic, it regards this event in Palestine as the decisive one for world history.

And when people will once again understand what actually happened on Earth, then I would venture to say that they will truly come to themselves. People are now beside themselves with their entirely external science. We will continue to talk about this next Wednesday at nine o'clock. That is what I wanted to say in response to the question. I believe that one can understand the whole thing.

Question: Is it possible to hear more about the personality of Jesus Christ?

Dr. Steiner: You see, gentlemen, that the question that is being asked is timely, and so we will discuss it today. I must say from the outset that what I am going to say will only be fully understandable to those who have been here for a long time, while those gentlemen who have only come today will slowly find their way into what we are discussing.

So the question that has been put to me and that we will discuss is about the personality of Christ, who was thirty-three years old when he died.

“On the third day he rose from the grave, resurrected. How did that happen, and where did this personality acquire the strength and power? And then you would be so kind as to talk about his ascension after forty days.”

Since time is just right, I will discuss this as it really happened, after we have already discussed the other thing; but, as I said, it can only be fully understood by those who have been here longer. The others will also understand it once we are together here more often.

Well, you see, at first the whole thing about Christ's personality and his destinies was actually quite unknown in the very early days after it happened. You don't have to look at it the way we look at it today, because today we have the feeling that the events in Palestine that are linked to the personality of Jesus became known throughout the world in one fell swoop. This is not the case. Rather, the situation is that in the time when the fate of Christ Jesus was unfolding, the so-called Roman Empire was widespread, a mighty world empire, and Palestine also belonged to this mighty Roman world empire.

You know that we still have a rather unfortunate legacy from this Roman Empire, the so-called Roman law. Perhaps you know that students at universities of so-called legal scholarship have to study for a very long time the so-called Roman law. Now, Roman law was conceived at a time when social conditions were quite different, so that Roman law has naturally become something highly unsuitable for today. But justice is still being done according to Roman law today.

So we have just this one inheritance from this Romanism. We have many other things as well; but this one inheritance, the so-called Roman law, is something that can be noticed by all of you.

Now, this Roman rule was extraordinarily widespread. I will just give you a small idea of how widespread Roman rule was. You just have to imagine the south of Europe: here we have Spain (it is being drawn), here we have Italy; then we have Greece, then we have the Black Sea. Then we have a lot of small islands. There Asia Minor comes over, and over there, in the area I want to mark, there was the small country of Palestine with Jerusalem, Nazareth and so on.

Roman rule now extended over all these lands. The Romans had occupied all these lands with their rule. So it was a very extensive Roman rule! Rome is located there. Of course, everything that was government-related and so on took place in Rome, so it was very far away from Palestine. And what happened in Palestine was very little known in Rome at that time. And those writers who wrote in Rome did not write about it for about a hundred years after the fact that had occurred with Christ Jesus in Palestine! It was only about a hundred years later that people in Rome understood the significance of what had happened in Palestine. And they did not treat it much differently in Rome at the time, except to say: Well, an unknown person has been crucified over there in Palestine. At that time, being crucified meant something like being hanged later. So it didn't cause any particular sensation. It was only after a hundred years had passed, and Roman rule had become more and more tyrannical and luxurious, that it became apparent that, while the people in Rome were enjoying their luxurious lives, Christianity had slowly spread here, and it was only then that they first noticed the Christians. And the Christians in Rome were initially not tolerated at all. Whoever was a Christian was something very much persecuted in Rome. And now I have to tell you why Christians were persecuted in Rome, because otherwise you would not be able to understand at all what the idea is behind the view that arose at the time: that a god died in Palestine, in Jerusalem. You have to realize what the views in the world actually were at that time.

You see, for a Roman in this first Christian century, that is, for a Roman at the time when it was written - they didn't write it back then, they calculated according to the Roman calendar, but if it had been our calendar, they would have written 1 or 10 or 50 for all I care - so if you had asked a Roman back then: Who is God? — he would have said: Emperor Augustus, or: Emperor Tiberius. — Just as today [1923] a Chinese, when you ask him: Who is God? — points to the Chinese emperor. So you must be clear about the fact that in those days for the Romans the ruler, the one in power, was at the same time their god. And that was the first thing the Romans noticed about the Christians: that they were not aware that a human being on earth could be a universal god. The Romans only knew that some human being sitting on the throne, who had powerful rule, was the god, was the highest thing, that had to be worshipped. And so the Romans did honor their emperor in a way that amounted to worship.

Yes, it was the same all over the world in those days. Over there in the Orient, where the great empires once were, the Persian Empire, the Assyrian, the Babylonian Empire and so on in the old days, it was also the case that the ruler was the god. “God” meant nothing more than the one to whom one turned when one needed something. He was the supreme one. He was seen as a helper. He was not always a helper, but he was seen as a helper.

I would like to point out that you are likely to know the word “God” in your language. When children are baptized, people have to be godparents. Now there are areas, I believe also here in Switzerland, where the man is called the Lord and the woman is called Gottel. This means that the godparents have to provide help. This is the same “God”. And the god was only the one who was the general god of the world. If you want to understand the things of the earlier times, you must always go back to the earlier times. So the god was the general god of the world. The name Goethe, the name of the German poet Goethe, also comes from the same word.

And that was the first thing one heard about the Christians: that the Christians did not believe that a human being on earth could be a universal god. For the Romans, this was something they could not grasp at all. Such terrible people, who do not accept the emperor as god, yes, they are very dangerous people. And the Christians, on the other hand, referred to the saying: Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's. — So, they referred to Jesus' saying, where the matter of Caesar and God is cut apart. God is the invisible. God is that which does not dwell in a visible man on earth. That is what the Christians claimed. And that was the big difference between the Romans and the Christians. And the consequence of that was that the Romans considered the Christians to be the most dangerous people of all, undermining the authority of the state because they did not offer sacrifice to the emperor in the temple. The sacrifices in the temples were offered to the emperor by the people. Now, the Christians sacrificed to a God who died in Palestine and who cannot be seen anywhere. That was something the Romans could not understand. And so the first Christians had to perform their sacrifices underground, under the earth. And these underground passages that they dug out there, in which they buried their dead and performed their sacrifices, are called catacombs. There are such extensive catacombs under the earth in Rome, in Italy in general, like small cities. The first Christians performed their sacrificial services there in the first centuries, while above, the Romans had large circuses, huge circuses. And there they had, for example, in such circuses, made a point of somehow tying a person they despised to a stake, to a pillar, and, after smearing him with pitch, setting him on fire and burning him alive. And they watched it in the circuses, just as people watch bullfights today. It was something that was quite common.

Just imagine this picture: above, the wild Romans in the circuses, who tied the pitch-coated man to the column and burned him alive. That amused them very much. And below, the Christians who performed their religious services in the catacombs. That was the difference, gentlemen, between below ground and above ground, which could not be more sharply defined. One must only consider that.

It is true that things were also quite terrible in the Middle Ages with the Inquisition. But as bad as the Romans behaved in the heyday of their imperial era, the Christians did not behave as badly as that later on. You just have to hold on to that. That is just true.

So the first thing one heard in Rome was that the Christians do not want to recognize a visible God. Now, of course, more and more has become known about what was actually meant by this Christ Jesus, and I have already told you some of it. For example, I have pointed out to you that there were actually two Jesus boys – the name Jesus was just as common a name in Palestine as Sepperl or Michel are today – one of whom died very young, and they were, one might say, playmates, extraordinarily capable, talented children.

Now, this story, which you all know from the Bible, about how the twelve-year-old Jesus taught the scribes in the temple, is something that is based on a truth. Of course, you don't have to tell yourselves: if a twelve-year-old boy goes to university today, the professorial council would not have much respect for him. Today's teachings cannot be compared with those of that time. You should not think that I am conservative or even reactionary, but I have to tell you the facts as they are. Nowadays we take it for granted that we have to send our children to school. Gifted children in particular learn an enormous amount of material that is not suited to them. We have to prepare things in such a way that they suit the children, as we do in the Waldorf school. But in general, children learn an extraordinary amount of material that does not suit them. Of course, adults are better at doing the things that do not suit them than children are. But what is driven out of children when they learn our present-day reading and writing, well, gentlemen, people today pay no attention to that. Children, if you know how to listen to them properly, will say extraordinarily clever things. They have brought this with them from the spiritual life before they descended to earth. And this one Jesus boy, he brought an extraordinary amount with him. And because the two Jesus boys were playmates, they actually always knew the same things. Now one of them has died. And so now the Gospels tell only of one Jesus boy, because people liked that better. But that doesn't help us understand the Gospels. If you read the Gospels of Matthew and Luke today, they contradict each other. The whole genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew is described differently than in the Gospel of Luke. Why? Yes, because the things really refer to two Jesus boys.

I have told you that I have really been dealing with this question from a spiritual-scientific point of view for years, and I have come to the conclusion that there are two Jesus boys, and that the Gospel of Matthew is about a different Jesus boy than the Gospel of Luke.

Now one of them died in his twelfth year, while the other remained. So when it says in the Gospel: “Jesus increased in wisdom, spirit and power,” this is only true of the one.

You see, I found that long before I told you that there were two such Jesus children. It was not known that somewhere in history it is reported that there are two Jesus children until we came across a picture in northern Italy. There this story is depicted of Jesus in the temple, where he teaches the scribes. And there, strangely enough, is this second Jesus child. He is leaving. The one who is teaching and the other who is leaving – that is not the usual Jesus child, we know him! So there are two Jesus children in it, so you can say that in certain centuries people still knew: a second Jesus child existed. He walks away. Only after I had found that out could I know that this second Jesus child is depicted. So you see, gentlemen, for centuries people have known this. But the church has never actually allowed such things, which correspond to the real truth, to come up.

Now, as I have already told you, there are simply certain things in the life of man where one says, there is an enlightenment. Of course, people don't accept that. But you see, there are such revelations, and I will give you an example that was given to me only yesterday by a member of this group. I could give you hundreds of examples, but I will give you this latest example. Mr. Pfeiffer, you don't mind if I do, do you?

There is a very important chemist, Kekulé, an impeccable scholar, simply a real chemist who has written many books on chemistry. Now there are two important scientific views that come from Kekulé. I don't need to explain these views to you in more detail; that would take us hours, it's not important now. These two

important chemical views relate to the structure of substances, such as benzene, in their smallest parts. And these views, which Kekulé established, play an extraordinarily important role in chemistry. Anyone who knows chemistry knows that today everyone is talking about Kekule's theories.

But what did Kekulé himself experience? Kekulé recounts that he was once in London, where he lived quite a distance out of town – before he had formulated any of his theories – and had to take one bus after another to get to the other end of the city at night. He had an acquaintance there whom he visited in the evening. He always had to take one bus after another because he spent the night there. Once he was driving home after spending a long time talking about chemistry with an acquaintance who was also a chemist. He was driving home and sitting on the top of the bus. He dozed off and began to fall asleep. And as he began to fall asleep on top of the omnibus, he dreamt: There is an atom, there is another, there is a third atom; and there are then small atoms that are held together by the large ones (it is drawn). He dreamt of the substance, the matter, how it is made. He dreamt all this on the top of the omnibus. As soon as he comes home, he writes it down carefully. That was the one theory. You see, it was a dream to him. It was given to him, a completely materialistic theory.

The second is the so-called benzene theory. He dreamt that at another time, though not in London, but when he had dozed off at another place.

Yes, gentlemen, you see, a completely materialistic chemist had to confess that he could not have come up with his ideas and inventions through thinking, but that he was enlightened about these two things through a dream. It was all a real inspiration.

Now I would like to know why people object when it is said that the Jesus who was left behind became something completely different in his thirtieth year. Of course, Kekule did not immediately become a completely different person because the inspiration was only a small one. But the knowledge of the whole world entered into Jesus when he was thirty years old. In those ancient times, this was something that was entirely possible, and similar things are still possible today. So you just have to imagine that the Jesus of Nazareth, who had been left behind, was enlightened in his thirtieth year with all that is called the Christ. It entered into him, just as Kekulé's benzene theory entered into him. As a result, he had become a completely different person. And those who now understood something of the matter said: the Romans have a god on the throne. The god on the throne, they said, came into being through the ordinary powers of the earth. Such gods on the throne do not usually have revelations; at least not usually, do they; they do not have such revelations at the age of thirty.

Now, the Christians said: Our God is not appointed by men, He is appointed by the world powers themselves.

But now they had to say something else. You see, what was said about Jesus in those days was not as vague as what I am telling you now. I have to tell you slowly and gradually, which is why the matter is only vague at first. But it was more specific in the following way. You see, today, in order for individual people to become wise according to the view of our time, we have universities. After being made clever for a long time in the so-called grammar school or in secondary school, one comes to the university. There one is now given the finishing touches of cleverness. But you will not always find that the people who come out of the university have become different people in the university, but rather they have learned something externally.

This was certainly not the case in older times. In older times there was no distinction between churches and theaters and schools, but it was all one, and that was called mysteries. That is where people were educated back then. And the most important thing that people were taught in the mysteries was the so-called knowledge of the sun.

You see, when we were talking about natural science, I always told you what influence the sun has on everything that happens on earth. Plants do not grow merely because they are driven out of the ground below, but because the sun drives them out. The power of the sun is in all of us, as is the power of the earth. And I have drawn your attention to the fact that this solar power is not just a dead force, but a wise, living force. I have given you many examples. You have seen that what happens among animals happens wisely, intelligently, judiciously. Yes, when you look up at the sun, the learned imagine it is a ball of gas. Yes, gentlemen, that is about as clever as if we could all get on a big airplane and fly to the moon, as Jules Verne described. We could sit on the moon and look for our work and I would say to you: There, gentlemen, down there, you see, there is the earth. The Earth is a single body, there is nothing else on it. — You would not believe me, gentlemen, because you came up with me. You would believe that there are people on it after all. People who have souls are on Earth.

But that is exactly what the scholars are doing with the sun today. You sit there on the earth, look up at the sun and say: There is nothing up there but burning gas. — But that is real nonsense. The sun is inhabited, even if not by such people as can be seen with the eyes, but it is inhabited.

And this knowledge of the sun was the main thing taught to students in the ancient mysteries. And that is why these students were called sun disciples. It was said: Up there on the sun, there are the forces, the spring forces, the sun forces, there is that which draws everything out of the earth. And so someone who had learned in ancient times the secrets of the sun was called a sun disciple, and later, when he was fully trained, a sun master. And what Jesus of Nazareth suddenly knew at the age of thirty was this solar wisdom. This solar wisdom had come over him. Now you may have already seen that when plants that are beautifully green and full of energy on the earth are below ground in the cellar, they turn completely whitish and appear paralyzed. This is because the solar power does not enter them. This solar power in the mystical, spiritual sense is drawn into Jesus. And those who understood this said: Now the Christ is drawn into Jesus.

You see, now this remarkable thing happened. The Jews, who mainly lived here in Palestine (please refer to the board), had long since heard from their prophets that something must happen so that the earth can be taught from outer space itself. But you can be quite sure that if someone were to write a “Wilhelm Tell” today, as Schiller wrote it, and it were to be performed in the theater, people would say: That's nonsense, it's something very bad. They would not recognize it. And 'Wilhelm Tell' was first recognized by the few people who knew Schiller; then it spread. It is always the case in our social order, it has always been the case, that the majority of people let themselves be led by the hair. So the Jews also let themselves be led by their hair and, when that happened, and they were no longer led by the mysteries, but when someone appeared who had this solar knowledge, they said: But there is someone who claims that everything he says is true! You know, of course, what is done to people who speak a truth that is not yet known among the people. It was a great truth and wisdom that Jesus of Nazareth, in whom the Christ now lived, had to proclaim. Well, and then they crucified him. And he actually went through death.

And now I come to the question as it was put to me directly. You see, gentlemen, today's enlightened theologians are often even worse than their unenlightened counterparts. The unenlightened theologians say: Well, they laid Christ in the grave, and after three days he rose again with flesh and blood, just as he was. Well, of course, the enlightened people said: We don't believe that because no one comes out of the grave. But, I would like to say, it is at least something to profess. It may be debatable, but it is something to profess.

But what do enlightened theologians say? You see, one of the most enlightened theologians, who is well known and named, is Harnack. What does he say about the resurrection? You see, Harnack says: What happened on the third day in the garden of Gethsemane – that is where the grave was – you can't know. So the enlightened theologian says: What happened there on the third day in the garden of Gethsemane, that cannot be known. But many people have gradually come to believe that Christ was resurrected there. So that is the Easter belief, and we assume that we should hold to this Easter belief.

You see, I once raised this question - it was a long time ago - in the Berlin Giordano Bruno Association. The chairman was an academic who thought he knew a great deal about these matters, and he said: Harnack could not have asserted that, because what would that mean if Harnack asserted that one should not believe what really happened, but only in what people believe about it! That would be just like the Holy Robe of Trier, where people also say: Well, whether the Holy Robe of Trier is really the one that Christ wore, nobody knows, but so and so many believed in it, so we believe in it too! — Thus said the Protestant about the Catholic belief in the Holy Shroud of Trier. Or another example is that of the bones of St. Anthony. When they were examined closely, they were found to be veal bones. So the people who believed in them did not make much of it either, but said that it did not matter whether it was reality or not, but whether people believed it.

But it does not depend on that at all; what matters is what happened! Now the Bible actually tells the story in a wonderful way, only people do not pay attention to how it is told. The Bible does not say that such and such happened, but everywhere it says: such and such people have seen, really seen. That is what is told.

So it is related that the women came out, and what they saw at the grave – take that as sophistry if you want! It is related that the Christ met the disciples at Emmaus, and so on; that the Christ was seen, that is related.

Now, remember that I told you that a person does not consist only of this material body that is laid in the grave, but that a person also consists of the etheric body, the astral body, and the I. I have described this to you in detail. Now the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth has indeed been laid in the grave. I have studied this question a great deal, and it is extraordinarily significant that it is stated in the Gospel itself that an earthquake occurred. There was such an earthquake. It made a split and the body was taken up by the earth, so it was really no longer there. And the disciples did not see this physical body, but the etheric body, the supersensible body. The women and the disciples saw Christ in the etheric body, no longer Jesus of Nazareth, but Christ, that which was now the transformed inner man.

Of course, you have to imagine that what happened there was something extraordinarily magnificent for the disciples. You just have to consider that if there is someone among you with whom you have grown so close as friends, who is snatched from you by crucifixion, or as we would say today, by the gallows, you are intimately connected with him – that must have created a state of mind. This state of mind made the disciples almost clairvoyant for these things. And they really saw Christ again and again in the early days, more often than is mentioned in the Gospels. But it was the supersensible Christ.

And you see, when you read the letters of Paul, you read about the famous event of Damascus that Paul experienced. Near Damascus he came into a kind of sleeping state, and there the Christ appeared to him in the clouds. And pay attention to how Paul tells it. He once said: You can't take away my faith in the Christ, because I, like the other apostles, have seen the Christ.

So Paul is not saying that the other apostles saw Christ in the physical body; otherwise he would have to claim that he too saw Christ in the physical body. He explicitly claims that he saw the Christ in the clouds, thus the supersensible Christ, and by saying that he and the other apostles saw the Christ, he is already indicating that the other apostles, like him, saw the Christ in his supersensible body. And isn't it true that people believe that the unbelieving Thomas had to place his hands in the wounds as an objection to this? That just wants to say: the presence of the Christ, that he was there, this experience was so strong that Thomas himself could have the strong faith to touch him. So everything was related to the supersensible Christ.

The wounds were something that touched the hearts of the disciples, especially the apostles. It would be much less vivid if it were not mentioned that the wounds could be touched. Why the wounds in particular? Why not lay his hands on the face or something like that? He would have sensed that something was there. He laid his finger on the wounds because the wounds made a special impression, and what the disciple really became aware of in the Christ actually depended on the higher vision.

So that one can say: For forty days in a row, the disciples were clear about one thing: the Christ is still there.

And from this the Christian teaching arose – which is the original Christian teaching, and which ties in with what I told you last Monday. The Christian teaching arose from this: When Christ is buried, there is only the body in the grave, which of course disappears; Christ showed us the immortal in Himself; He walked around in His immortality for forty days. We have seen him. And he appeared to Paul even much later. So he is always there.

And so we can say today: He is always there. Only the disciples, because this power of vision has disappeared in them, have not seen him after forty days. That's when they said, “Now he has left us: Ascension.” This is an event that naturally filled the disciples with great sadness. They said: Even though he died, even though his enemies crucified him, he was still with us for forty days. Now he is no longer with us. Now he has returned to the vastness of the world.

And then they became truly sad. Not in an ordinary sadness, but in a very deep sadness. And the ten days that are now being talked about, these ten days were for the disciples and apostles something where they went very deeply into their hearts, where they reflected with inner strength on everything the Christ had ever said to them. These ten days were enough for them to say to themselves afterward: Yes, we can know all of this ourselves; this wisdom – they said to themselves, impressed by the strong impression – this wisdom itself resides in us. And now, after ten days, they felt the strength to teach this wisdom as well. The fiery tongues – that is the image of it – came upon their heads. That is Pentecost, the Pentecostal idea, the fiery tongues. Through their great sorrow, when they had lost sight of everything except the Christ, they had reflected so deeply that they were able to teach themselves.

And it is beautifully told that they now began to “speak in all languages”. But here we must realize something about the way people spoke in those ancient times. Of course we must not suppose that it is claimed that the apostles began to speak Chinese or Japanese or even German, but rather that it is meant that, through the way they spoke in those ancient times, they had now become tolerant through all that they had thought in the ten days between Ascension Day and Pentecost. Now, for them, there was no longer any difference between religions, but they proclaimed one religion for all people. That is what is meant by being able to speak in all languages; they proclaimed one religion for all people.

And that is the most beautiful thought of Pentecost; one religion for all people. You see, the thing that has done the most harm to people is always fanaticism in religion, the exclusiveness in religion, that you have Christianity and Buddhism and Judaism and all sorts of things. Why is it that you have so many religions? That you have so many religions comes from the fact that these religions are earth religions, real earth religions.

What do I mean by that when I say: earth religions? Now, you see, there is a time when we go back, let's say – it's 1923 today – to the time when I told you that Christ Jesus lived in Palestine, so at the turn of the age. Now we go further back, let's say, to the year 3500 before Christ Jesus, so back to ancient times, there are people down there in Egypt who also spoke of their God about 3000 or 3500 years before Christ, only in old words. They called him Ra, for example. They spoke of their god, but they said: the god is in the city of Thebes, for example, and in the city of Thebes there was a kind of building with a special artistic, tomb-like structure. The god lived in there. That was the oldest form of worship, that he was in a certain place.

Yes, gentlemen, if someone lived where we live today, he probably did not say: the god is in Thebes; because that was something that not only could not be reached in ancient times, but of which nothing was known at all. They knew nothing of Thebes. So those who were down here, in Egypt, where the Nile flows, said: the god who lives in Thebes. And those who were here, in our area, they also had such local deities. For example, there was a local deity in what is now Alsace, or in Münster. So people worshiped God in a particular place. Yes, that is the reason why there are different religions: the Theban religion, the religion of Münster, the religion of Alsace. There the religions split.

And later, when people wandered more on earth, they could no longer accept any place for God, because then they would have contradicted themselves. They had migrated, and there they no longer accepted the place as God, but the man who led them. And so, gradually, the dignity of God passed to the emperor and the princes. For the people, the prince was emperor. Many princes arose.

You see, in Rome there was still something of this religion, in that the Romans still worshiped their emperor as a god.

But what was Christianity? Christianity said nothing of the sort. What is to be worshipped is not bound to a place on earth, not to a person on earth, but to the power of the sun, the sun's vitality, which the Christ has taken up in himself. And the sun is precisely universal. For no one in Europe can say that when the sun shines on his head it is a different sun from that of the Egyptians, the Chinese or the Australians. Those who truly recognize that the power of Christ comes from the sun must recognize the universal religion for all people.

It was the universal religion for all people, even if people did not always understand it. And it dawned on the disciples that the religion of the sun is there. This is expressed by the fact that they were able to speak in all languages. They were able to bring a religion of reconciliation and tolerance for all people. That is the idea of Pentecost. But as you know, the idea of Pentecost has not yet been fulfilled today. And it must be fulfilled. It must still become quite clear that what the Christ brought to Earth does not depend on a doctrine at all, but on a fact.

When today European missionaries come to an Indian or a Chinese, they demand of them that they believe in what is said about the Christ in Rome. The Indians or Chinese cannot bring themselves to do that, because it has been developed from European conditions. You cannot get people to do that. But if it were said as I have told you today, it could be understood all over the world. Because what applies to all people is the idea of Pentecost.

I have now tried to explain to you the idea of Ascension Day and the idea of Pentecost, which is what the Lord, who recorded the question, wanted to know. I also find it very fitting because today is the day before Ascension Day and in ten days the Pentecost follows. I was very happy to be able to tell you this.

Now I have to go to Norway. I will let you know when the next lecture will be. Goodbye.

In order, gentlemen that the last question may be thoroughly answered. I will, as far as possible, say something about colors. One cannot really understand colors if one does not understand the human eye, for man perceives colors entirely through the eye.

Picture to yourselves, for instance, a blind person. A blind person feels differently in a room that is lighted and in a room that is dark. Though it is so weak a matter that he does not perceive it, yet it has a great significance for him. Even a blind person could not live perpetually in a cellar, he would need the light. And there is a difference if one brings a blind man into a bright room with yellow windows, or into a dark room, or into a fairly light room which has blue windows. That acts quite differently on his life. Yellow color and blue color influence life quite differently. But these are things which one learns to understand only when one has grasped how the eye is affected by color.

Now from what I have hitherto put before you, you will perhaps have realized that two things are most important in man. The first is the blood, for if man were not to have blood he would have to die at once. He would not be able to renew his life every moment and life must be every moment renewed. So if you think away the blood from the body, man is a dead object.

Now think away the nerves too: man would no doubt look just the same, but he would have no consciousness; he could form no ideas, could will nothing, would not be able to move.

We must therefore say to ourselves: For man to be a conscious human being he needs nerves. For man to be able to live at all he needs blood. Thus blood is the organ of life, the nerves are the organ of consciousness.

But every organ has nerves and has blood. The human eye is in fact really like a complete human being and has nerves and blood. Imagine that here [a drawing was made] the eye protrudes, and in the eye little blood-arteries, many blood-arteries spread out. And many nerves too spread out. You see, what you have in the hand, that is, nerves and blood, you have also in the head.

Now think: the external world which is illumined works upon the eye. By day at any rate the world in which you go about is illumined, but it is difficult to form an idea of this wholly-lighted outer world. You get a true idea when you imagine the half-lighted world in the morning and evening, when you see the red of dawn and evening. Dawn and the sunset glow are particularly instructive.

For what is actually there in the glow of dawn and evening? Picture to yourselves the sunrise. The sun comes up, but it cannot shine on you direct as yet. The sun comes when the earth is like this—I am now drawing the apparent path, but that does not matter (in reality the earth moves and the sun stands still, but how we see this makes no difference). The sun sends its rays here [drawing] and then here. So if first you stand there, you do not see the sun at dawn, you see the litÖ¾up clouds. These are the clouds and the light falls actually on them. What is that actually? This is very instructive. Because the sun has not quite risen, it is still dark around you and there in the distance are the clouds lit up by the sun. Can one understand that?

If you stand there you are seeing the illumined clouds through the darkness that is around you. You see light through darkness. So that we can say it is the same thing at dawn and sunset—one sees light through darkness. And light seen through darkness—as you can see in the morning and evening glow—looks red. Light seen through darkness looks red.

Now I will say something different. Imagine that dawn has gone by and it is daytime. You see freely up into the air, as it is today. What do you see? You see the so-called blue sky. To be sure, it is not there, but you see it all the same. That certainly does not continue into all infinity, but you see the blue sky as if it were surrounding the earth like a blue shell.

Why is that? Now you have only to think of how it is out there in distant universal space. It is in fact dark. For universal space is dark. The sun shines only on the earth and because there is air round the earth the sunbeams are caught and make it light here, especially when they shine through watery air. But out there in universal space it is absolutely black darkness. So that if one stands here by day one looks into darkness, and one should actually see darkness. But one does not see it black, but blue, because all round there is light from the sun. The air and the moisture in the air are illumined.

So you see quite clearly darkness through the light. You look through the light, through the illumined air into darkness. And therefore we can say: Darkness through light is blue.

There you have the two principles of the color-theory which you can simply get from observation of the surroundings. If you thoroughly understand the red of dawn and evening glow you say to yourself: Light seen through darkness or obscurity is red. When by day you look out into the black heavens, you say to yourself: Darkness or obscurity seen through light—since it is light around you—is blue.

You see, men have always had this quite natural view until they became “clever.” This perception of light seen through darkness being red, and darkness through light being blue, was possessed by ancient peoples over in Asia when they still had the knowledge which I have lately described to you. The ancient Greeks still had this concept, and it lasted through the whole Middle Ages until the 14th. 15th, 16th, 17th centuries when people became clever. And as they became clever, they began not to look at nature but to think out all sorts of artificial sciences.

One of those who devised a particularly artificial science about color was the Englishman Newton. Out of cleverness—you know how I am now using the word, namely quite in earnest—out of special cleverness Newton said something like this: Let us look at the rainbow—for when one is clever one does not look at something happening naturally every day: dawn, sunset, one looks at the specially unusual and rare, something to be understood only when one has gone further. However. Newton said: Let us look at the rainbow. In the rainbow one sees seven colors, namely, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. One sees them next to each other in the rainbow:

When you look at a rainbow you can distinguish these seven colors quite plainly.

Now Newton made an artificial rainbow by darkening the room, covering the window with black paper, and in the paper he made a tiny hole. That gave him a very small streak of light.

Then he put in this streak of light something that one calls a prism. It is a glass that looks like this [drawing], a sort of three-cornered glass, and behind this he set up a screen. So he then had the window with the hole, this tiny beam of light, the prism and behind it the screen. Then the rainbow appeared with the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet colors. What did Newton then say?

Newton said to himself: The white light comes in; with the prism I get the seven colors of the rainbow. Therefore they are already contained in the white light and I only need to draw them out.

You see, that is a very simple explanation. One explains something by saying: It is already there and I draw it out.

In reality he ought to have said: Since I set up a prism—that is. a glass with a cornered surface, not a regular glass plate—when I look through it like this, there is light made red through darkness, and on the other side darkness made blue through light—the blue color appears. And in between lie in fact gradations. That is what he ought to have told himself.

But at that time the aim in the world was to explain everything by seeking to find everything already inside that from which one was really to explain it. That is the simplest method, is it not? If, for example, one is to describe how the human being arises, then one says: Oh well, he is already in the ovum of the mother, he only develops out of it. That is a fine explanation!

We don't find things as easy as that, as you have seen. We have to take the whole universe to our aid, which first forms the egg in the mother. But natural science is concerned with throwing everything inside, which is the simplest possible way. Newton said that the sun already contained all the colors and we had only to draw them out.

But that is not it at all. If the sun is to produce red at dawn, it must first shine on the clouds and we must see the red through darkness; and if the sky is to appear blue, that is not at all through the sun. The sun does not shine into the heavens: it is all black there, dark, and we see the blue through the illumined air of the earth. We see darkness through light, and that is blue.

The point is to make a proper physics where it could then be seen how in the prism on the one side light is seen through darkness and on the other darkness through light. But that is too tiresome for people. They find it best to say that everything is within light and one only draws it out. Then one can say too that once there was a giant egg in the world, the whole world was inside, and we draw everything out of it.

That is what Newton did with the colors. But in reality one can always see the secret of the colors if one understands in the right way the morning and evening glow and the blue of the heavens.

Now we must consider further the whole matter in relation to our eye and to the whole of human life altogether. You see, you all know that there is a being which is especially excited through red—that is, where light works through darkness—and that is the bull. The bull is well known to be frightfully enraged by red. That you know.

And so man too has a little of the bull-nature. He is not of course directly excited through red, but if man lived continually in a red light, you would at once perceive that he gets a little stimulation from it. He gets a little bull-like. I have even known poets who could not write poetry if they were in their ordinary frame of mind, so then they always went to a room where they put a red lampshade over the light. They were then stimulated and were able to write poetry. The bull becomes savage: man by exposing himself to the red becomes poetic! The stimulation to poetry is only a matter of whether it comes from inside or from outside. This is one side of the case.

On the other hand you will also be aware that when people who understand such things want to be thoroughly meek and humble, they use blue, or black—deep black. That is so beautiful to see in Catholicism: when Advent comes and people are supposed to become humble, the Church is made blue; above all the vestments are blue. People get quietened, humble; they feel themselves inwardly connected with the subdued mood—especially if a man has previously exhausted his fury, like a bull, as for instance at Shrove Tuesday's carnival. Then one has the proper time of fasting afterwards, not only dark raiment, black raiment. Then men become tamed down after their violence is over. Only, where one has two carnivals, two carnival Sundays, one should let the time of fasting be twice as long! I do not know if that is done.

But you see from this that it has quite a different effect on man whether he sees light through dark that is red, or darkness through light, that is blue.

Now consider the eye. Within it you have nerves and blood. When the eye looks at red, let us say at the dawn or at something red, what does it experience? You see, when the eye looks at red then these quite fine little blood-arteries become permeated by the red light, and this light has the peculiarity of always destroying the blood a little. It therefore destroys the nerve at the same time, for the nerve can live only when it is permeated by blood. So that when the eye confronts red, when red comes into the eye, then the blood in the eye is always somewhat destroyed and the nerve with it.

When the bull is faced with red it simply feels: Good gracious—all the blood in my head is destroyed! I must defend myself!—Then it becomes savage because it will not let its blood be destroyed.

Well, but this is very good—not only in the bull, but in man and in other animals. For if we look at red and our blood becomes somewhat destroyed, then on the other hand our whole body works to bring oxygen into the eye so that the blood can be re-established.

Just think what a wonderful process takes place there. When light is seen through darkness—that is, red—then the blood is destroyed, oxygen is absorbed from the body and the eye vitalized through the oxygen. And now we know through the renewal of life in our eye: There is red outside. But in order that we may perceive this red, the blood and the nerve in the eye must be a little destroyed. We must send life, that is, oxygen, into the eye. And by our own vitalizing of the eye, by this waking up of the eye we notice: there is red outside.

Now you see, man's health too actually depends on his perceiving rightly the reddened light, on his always being able to take in reddened light properly. For the oxygen which is drawn out of the body vitalizes then the whole body and man gets a healthy color in the face. He can really reanimate himself.

This refers not only to a person who is healthy and able to see, it applies as well to one whose eyes are not healthy and who does not see: When the light works through the bright color then he is vitalized in the head, and this vitalizing acts again on the whole body and gives him a healthy color. So when we live in the light and can take in the light properly we get a healthy color.

It is very important tor people not to be brought up in dark places where they can become lifeless and submissive. People should be brought up in light, bright places with yellowish-reddish light, where they also properly assimilate the oxygen in them through the light.

But you see from this that everything connected with the element of red is actually connected with the development of man's blood. When we look at red the nerve is actually destroyed.

Now just think: We see darkness through light, that is, blue. Darkness does not destroy our blood, it leaves our blood unharmed. The nerve too is undestroyed since our blood is in order. The result is for man to feel himself thoroughly well inwardly. Since blood and nerve are not attacked by blue, man feels thoroughly well inside.

And there is really something subtly refined in creating submissive meekness. When, let us say, the priests there above at the altar are in their blue or their black vestments, and the people sit below and gaze at them, the blood-arteries and nerves in the eye are not destroyed and naturally the people feel very well. It is actually directed to the feeling of well-being of the people.

Do not imagine that that is not known! For they still have their ancient science. The more modern science has only arisen with the men of the Enlightenment, in such men as, for instance. Newton.

Thus we can say: Blue is what sends through man a feeling of well-being, when he says to himself (it is all unconscious, but he says it inwardly): There alone I can live—in the blue. There man feels inwardly himself; in red, on the other hand, he feels as if something were to penetrate into him. One can say that with blue the nerve remains undestroyed and the body sends the feeling of well-being into the eye and hence into the whole body.

That is the difference between the color blue and the color red. And yellow is only a gradation of red, and green is a gradation of blue. So that one can say: according to whether nerve or blood is active, the more sensitive is man to red or to blue.

Now you see, one can apply that to substances. If I want to look for a red for painting, to produce a red color which contains the substances that stimulate man to develop oxygen inwardly, then I gradually arrive at the fact that to get red color for painting I must test the substances of the outer world to find how much carbon they contain. If I combine carbon in the right way with other substances, I discover the secret of making a red for my painting.

If I use plants for getting colors for paints then above all it is a matter of so organizing my processes, diminishing, consuming, and so on, that I obtain the carbon in the paint in the right way. If I have the carbon in it in the right way, then I get the bright, the reddish color.

If on the other hand I have substances which contain much oxygen—not carbon but oxygen—then I obtain the darker colors, such as blue. When I know the living element in the plant then I can really create my colors. Imagine that I take a sunflower: that is quite yellow, a bright color. Yellow is near to red, that is, light seen through darkness. If I now treat the sunflower in such a way as somehow to gel into my paint-color the right process that lies in the flower, then I have a good yellow. Even the outer light cannot have much against it, because the blossom of the sunflower has already taken from the sun the secret of creating yellow. If I therefore get the same process into my artist's color as there is in the blossom, then if I get it thick enough, I can use it normally as paint.

But let me take another plant, the chicory, for instance, the blue flower that grows on the wayside—it grows here too. If I have this blue plant and want to prepare a paint from the flower, I cannot do it, I get nothing from it. On the other hand, if I treat the root in the right way, there is a process in it which actually makes the blossom blue.

When the blossom is yellow then something goes on in the blossom itself which makes yellow; when the blossom is blue, however, the process lies in the root and it only presses upwards towards the flower. So if I want to produce a blue paint from the indigo-plant, where I get a darker blue, or from the chicory, this blue flower, I must use the root. I must treat it chemically till it yields me the blue color.

In this way, through real study, I can find out how to obtain paints from the plant. I cannot do so in Newton's way; he simply says that everything is in the sunlight and one has only to draw it out. (One can apply that at most to one's purse; what I spend for a day I must have in the purse in the morning.) That is how the quite clever people picture it, like a sack in which everything is lying. That, however, is not the case.

We must know, for instance, how the yellow is in the sunflower or in the dandelion. We must know how the blue is in chicory. The processes which make the chicory or the indigo׳ plant blue lie in the root, whereas the processes that make the sunflower or the dandelion yellow lie in the flower.

And so I must imitate chemically, in a chemistry become living, the flower-process of the plant and get the bright, light color. I must imitate the root process of the plant and there obtain the dark color.

You see, what I have related here is plain to the real human understanding; whereas as a matter of fact this business (in the rainbow) with the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, is a rarity.

Now when Goethe lived the affair had got to the point where people generally believed in what Newton had taught, namely, the sun is the great sack in which lie the so-called seven colors. One need only tempt them out, then they come to light. Everyone believed that; it was taught and in fact is still taught today.

Goethe's nature was not one to believe everything immediately. He wanted to convince himself a little about things that were taught everywhere. People generally say that they do not believe anything on authority. But when it comes to the point of crediting what is taught from the professorial chair, then people are today frightfully credulous, they believe everything that is taught. Goethe did not want to believe everything straightaway, so he borrowed from the university in Jena the apparatus, the prisms and so on which provide the proof. He thought: Now I will do exactly what the professors do in order to see how it actually is.

Well, Goethe did not get down to it immediately and had the apparatus rather a long time without doing anything. He just did something else. So the time became too long for the Hofrat Büttner who needed the apparatus and wanted to have it fetched back. Goethe said: Now I must do the thing quickly—and at least, as he was already packing up, looked through a prism. He said to himself: The rainbow must look beautiful on the white wall if I look through there; instead of white, red, yellow, green and so on must appear. He therefore peered through, anticipating with delight that he would now see the white wall in these beautiful colors,—but he saw nothing: white as before, simply white. Naturally he was extremely surprised and asked himself what was behind it. And his whole theory of color arose out of this.

Goethe said: One must now control the whole affair again. The ancients have said light seen through darkness = red, darkness through light = blue. If I gradate the red somewhat it becomes yellow. If I make the blue go up to red, then it becomes green on the one side and violet on the other. These are gradations. And he then worked out his color theory and in fact better than it existed in the Middle Ages.

Now today we have a physicist's color-theory with the sack from which the seven colors come, which is taught everywhere. And we have a Goethean color-theory which understands the blue of the heavens rightly, understands rightly the morning and evening glow as I have been explaining to you.

But there is a certain difference between the Newtonian and the Goethean theory. For the most part other people do not notice it, for other people look on the one hand to the physicists: there the Newtonian theory of color is taught which stands in the books everywhere. One can very clearly picture to oneself what appears there in the rainbow as red, orange, yellow, green and so on. Well, but there is no prism there! However, one does not reflect further. The Newtonians certainly know, but they do not admit, that when one looks through the rainbow on the one side, then one sees darkness through the sun-illumined rainbow; sees on the other side the blue. But then one also sees in front the surface where one sees light through darkness, and on the other side the red. One must explain everything therefore by the simple principle: light through darkness is red; darkness through light is blue.

But as I have said, people on the one hand see everything as the logicians explain it to them: on the other hand they look at pictures where the colors are used. Well, they do not ask further about the red and the yellow and so on; they do not bring the two things together.

But the painter must bring them together: one who wants to paint must connect them. He must not merely know: There is a sack and the colors are within it—for he has not got the sack anywhere. He must obtain the right thing from the living plant, or living substances, so that he can mix his colors in the right way.

So this is the position today: painters really reflect (—there even are painters who reflect, who do not simply buy their colors): but those painters who reflect upon how they are to obtain these colors and how they should use them, they say: Yes, with the Goethean color-theory one can do something; that tells us something. With the Newtonian color-theory, the theory of the physicists, we painters can do nothing.

The public does not bring painting and the physicists' theory of color together, but the painter does! He therefore likes the Goethean color-theory. He says to himself: Goodness! We don't bother about the physicists: they say something in their own field. They may do what they like; we keep to the Goethean color-theory. The painters look on themselves as artists and not as having to encroach on the teaching of the physicists. That is in fact uncomfortable, enmities arise, and so on.

But that is how things stand today between what is in the books about color and what is true. With Goethe it was simply the defense of truth which impelled him to oppose the Newtonians and the whole modern physics. And we cannot really understand nature without coming to Goethe's color-theory.

Hence it is quite natural that in a Goetheanum Goethe's theory of color should also be vindicated. But then if one does not remain in some religious or moral sphere but also intervenes in the smallest single part of Physics, then one has the physicists' whole pack of hounds upon one.

So, you see, the defense of truth is extraordinarily difficult in modern times. But you should just know in what a complicated way the physicists explain the blue of the sky. Naturally, if I start from a false principle and want to explain the simple thing that the blackness of universal space appears blue through light, then I must make a frightfully complicated explanation of it. And then the red of dawn and sunset! These chapters mostly begin like this; the blue sky—one cannot actually explain that properly today, one could imagine this or that.—Yes, with all that the physicists have, their little hole which so much amused Goethe—the little hole through which they let the light come into the room, in order with the darkness to investigate the light—with all this they cannot explain the simplest facts. And so it comes to the point that color is no longer understood at all.

If one understands, however, that the destruction of the blood calls forth the vitalizing process—for when I have destroyed my blood then I call up all the oxygen in me and renew myself, bring about health—then one also understands the healthy rosy color in man.

If I have darkness round me or continual blueness, well, then I shall not continually reanimate myself, or else I should create too much life in me. And so on the one hand one can understand the healthy rosy countenance from the intake of' oxygen, when one is thoroughly exposed to the light, and one can understand paleness from the perpetual intake of carbonic acid. Carbonic acid, the counterpart of oxygen, wants to go into my head. That makes me quite pale.

Today, for instance in Germany, the children are almost all pale. But one must understand that that comes from too much carbonic acid. And if man develops too much carbonic acid—carbonic acid consists of a combination of carbon and oxygen—then he uses the carbon which he has in him too much for forming carbonic acid. Thus in such a pale child you have all the carbon in him continuously changed into carbonic acid. So he becomes pale. What must I do? I must administer something to him through which this eternal development of carbonic acid inside him is hindered, through which the carbon is held back. I can do that if I give him some carbonate of lime.

In this way the functions are again stimulated, as I have told you from quite a different standpoint, and man keeps the carbon that he needs, does not continually change it into carbonic acid. And since carbonic acid consists of carbon and oxygen, the oxygen comes up into the head and animates the head processes, the life processes. But when the oxygen is given up to the carbonic acid, the life processes are suppressed.

If I therefore bring a pale person into a region where he has a good deal of light, he becomes stimulated not to give up his carbon continually to carbonic acid, because the light sucks the oxygen up into the head. Then he will get a healthy color again. In the same way I can stimulate that through the carbonate of lime, inasmuch as I keep back the oxygen and the person has it at his disposal.

So everything must be interconnected. One must be able to understand health and illness from the theory of color. One can do that only from Goethe's theory, for that rests simply on nature in a natural manner. It can never be done from Newton's color-theory which is merely devised, does not rest on nature at all, and actually cannot explain the simplest phenomena, the red at dawn and sunset and the blue sky.

Now, gentlemen, may I still say something else to you. Think of the old pastoral peoples who drove out their flocks and herds and slept in the open air. During their sleep they were not exposed to the blue sky but to the dark sky. And up there upon it [drawing] are the unnumbered shining stars. Now picture the dark sky with these countless shining stars and there below the sleeping men. From the heavens there streams out a calming force, the inner feeling of well-being in sleep. The whole human being is permeated by the darkness, so that he becomes inwardly quiet. Sleep proceeds from the darkness, but nevertheless these stars shine down. And wherever a star-beam shines the human being becomes inwardly a little stirred up. An oxygen ray goes out from the body. Pure oxygen rays go to meet the rays from the stars and the man becomes entirely permeated inwardly by the oxygen rays: he becomes inwardly an oxygen reflection of the whole starry heavens.

Thus the ancient shepherd folk took into their quietened bodies the whole star heavens in pictures, pictures which the course of the oxygen engraved into them. Then they woke up and they had the dream of these pictures. From this they had their star knowledge, their wonderful knowledge of the stars.

Their dream was not merely that Aries, the Ram, had so-and-so-many stars, but they really saw the animal, the Ram, the Bull, and so on, and felt the whole starry heavens in themselves in pictures. That is what has remained to us from the ancient shepherd folk as a poetic wisdom which sometimes has extraordinarily much that can still be instructive today.

One can understand it when one knows that the human being lets an oxygen ray radiate to each beam of light from the stars, that he becomes wholly sky, an inner oxygen sky.

Man's inner life is as we know an astral body, for during sleep he experiences the whole heavens. It would go badly with us if we were not descended from these ancient pastoral peoples. All men in fact are descended from ancient shepherd folk. We still have, purely through heredity, the knowledge of an inner star-heaven. We still unfold that, although not so well as the ancients. In sleep, when we lie in bed, we have still a sort of recollection of how once the shepherd of old lay in the fields and drew the oxygen into him. We are no longer shepherds and herdsmen but something is still given to us, we still receive something, only we cannot express it so beautifully as it has already become pale and dim. But the whole of mankind today is indeed interconnected, all belong to each other,—and if one would know what man still bears in him today, one must go back to ancient times. Everywhere, all men on earth have proceeded from this shepherd-stage and have actually inherited in their bodies what could descend from these pastoral peoples.