The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The waking state is, of course, what we know most directly, but it is not within this familiar realm that the riddles of existence are actually revealed. If the solution to the riddles of life could be found in the waking state, as it serves us in our ordinary lives and in ordinary science, then these riddles would not actually exist, because they would be constantly being revealed. Man would never come to ask the question. That man asks: What are the deeper reasons for life? That he may not arrive at an exact formulation of this question of the riddle of life, but that from the depths of his soul he has the longing to know something that is not answered by ordinary consciousness , testifies to the fact that something comes up from the depths of the human soul, that is, in a more or less unconscious way, something that belongs to the human being but that must first be sought if it is to come to clear consciousness. And this leads those who observe life less to speculate and develop all kinds of philosophies. Such philosophies then ultimately remain unsatisfactory. But anyone who looks at the phenomena of life with a certain impartiality must realize that in the other state, the state opposite to waking, the state of sleep, something is veiled, and that an understanding of sleep could lead to an understanding of life. We have often discussed such things; but these things must be returned to again and again from the most diverse points of view, for anthroposophy can only be grasped if one tries to grasp it from the most diverse sides.

Now, out of sleep, the dream life surges up first. The dream life proceeds in images. One can very soon notice, when one begins to observe this dream life, that the images do indeed point to something in life, in ordinary conscious life. Even if one can often say that things are dreamed that one has not experienced in this way, I would like to say that the pieces from which the dream is composed, the pieces of images, are of course nevertheless taken from ordinary consciousness. But the drama of the dream, the way in which the dream builds up its tensions, how it can evoke inner feelings of fear, inner feelings of joy, feelings of momentum, is something else. What the course of the dream images means goes even deeper into human nature, and one can see this if one considers the following.

You dream that you are walking along a path and come to a mountain. You enter a mountain cave. At first it is still dark. It gets darker. But an unknown urge causes you to keep going. Anxiety sets in. This all increases until you are finally in a state of fear, let's say, of falling into an inner abyss. You can awaken from this state of fear by continuing to experience this state of fear during awakening.

You can also dream that you are standing somewhere and see a person coming from afar. He comes closer and closer, but he has a terrible expression. And as he gets closer, you realize that he intends to attack you. Your anxiety grows. He comes ever closer. He may transform the initially harmless instrument that he showed you from afar – after all, dreams are transformers – into a terrible murder weapon. Your anxiety increases again to fear, and you now wake up with this fear, which in turn continues into the waking life of the day.

These are two very different images. One time it is a series of images that takes you into the interior of a mountain, the other time it is a series of images that is associated with an approaching enemy. The soul can go through the same thing, even though the two series of images are quite different. What the soul goes through is something quite different from what consciousness experiences when waking up. One could say that it is not the images that are important at all, but rather how the soul undergoes a certain inner drama: how the soul initially has an urge, or how something comes to the soul instead of the urge, but how this then transitions into anxiety, into fear, and then, in a sense, causes the person to shake themselves out of sleep and into ordinary consciousness. What is important is the increasing forces behind the dream, which are not perceived themselves, but which clothe themselves in images. And the two series of images that I have characterized could be multiplied many times over; the same soul content could clothe itself in ten, twenty, a hundred different images. We must therefore say: there is something - if I draw schematically - that takes place in the soul (blue, green. See drawing on page 46). But what takes place in the soul, the human being does not notice; he does not know it. What he does know are images. I draw them schematically on it (yellow). These images are then experienced by the person in his consciousness of the dream. But what matters is the escalation: weak anxiety, stronger anxiety, greatest fear. The dream images are more or less taken from life, because both the mountain and the mountain cave, everything is basically borrowed from life. The enemy that approaches is borrowed from life, his weapon is borrowed from life. The images take their content from life. But that is only the clothing. If, through what I have often characterized as the imaginative consciousness, you have the opportunity to go beyond this clothing, not to form images at all, but to remain here in the soul forces, which are anxiety, fear, and extreme fear, to remain with the imaginative consciousness, if you are able to form images within, then something completely different comes about.

Because when you are asleep, you are initially outside of your etheric body and physical body, with only your ego and your astral body. When you wake up, if you are in a normal state, you enter your etheric body very quickly – you pass through it very quickly – and then immediately enter your physical body. But if you are in some abnormal state and do not enter the physical body immediately, but enter the etheric body before entering the physical body, that is, enter the etheric body first, then these images from life are formed. For in ordinary consciousness, the human being has no perception in sleep itself, and only at the moment when he either penetrates into his body and passes through the etheric body does he receive images, or when he goes out of the physical body while falling asleep but still remains in the etheric body, then he has dream images again. So only in these intermediate states do such dream images form, which are taken from life.

But imaginative consciousness leads to the fact that one can live completely outside of the body in that which stands there as the forces of the soul behind the dream. And then one lives in another reality. Then one lives in the world in which man is from falling asleep to waking up. Man lives from falling asleep to waking up in a world in which he becomes unconscious. You can imagine it as if a person were to submerge in water and lose consciousness, and only regain it when the water carries him out and releases him again. The same thing that happens physically also happens to the soul when a person falls asleep. He submerges into the spiritual world. There he loses consciousness. He leaves his body with his soul and loses consciousness. When he wakes up, he reappears and regains consciousness. But reappearing means entering the body. And if, as I said, one does not immediately enter one's body, but still notices the transition in the etheric body, then the dream images arise. But if one does not get involved in this and need not get involved in getting such dream images, but if one gets images entirely outside of the physical body in the spiritual world itself, then not just any images come out, but images come out that you can find as a description of the evolution of the world in my “Occult Science”. And everything that is presented as I have presented it in my “Occult Science” has this origin, which I am now characterizing for you.

If you ask yourself: What is actually written in this “Occult Science”?, then you will say to yourself: Well, thoughts are in it. You can also think about it. I always emphasize that again, with common sense you can think about all of this. Thoughts are in it, but they are not ordinary thoughts. They are the thoughts that are creatively active in the world outside. Man can live in these thoughts when he stands beyond the threshold that leads into the spiritual world. Man can live in these thoughts that work on the world. It is the first thing he finds when he enters the supersensible world.

These are not dream images, because, as I have explained to you, dream images come about in a completely different way. Instead, they are experiences in the spiritual world. I would like to say: Imagine a person who is asleep. During sleep, the most comprehensive and intense processes take place in the soul. The person is unconscious during sleep and is therefore unaware of them. In the morning he enters his physical body, and immediately he is immersed in it. He uses his eyes, sees colors and light, he uses his ears, hears sounds, and so on, and thus he becomes conscious. But there is this intermediate state: he does not immediately enter the physical body, he enters the etheric body. Then he has a dream or dreams. But imagine if a person became conscious before he even entered his etheric body. He would become conscious while still in the outer ether that fills the whole world. Then he becomes aware of what is described in my “Geheimwissenschaft.”

If, for example, you became conscious in the middle of the night without returning to your physical body, so that the physical body emerged next to you and you saw it – because you could see it then – then you perceived this cosmology, then you perceived what I described in my Secret Science. I may call what I have described: the formative forces of the world, or even world thoughts.

This presents itself in such a way that one can say how one otherwise has individual thoughts in daily life: the earth came into being in such and such a way, used to have a moon existence, a sun existence, a Saturn existence; in short, everything that I have described in my “Occult Science”.

But this way of perceiving in the spiritual world is only one of three. When a person looks at his state of daytime consciousness, he knows that in this state of daytime consciousness he can distinguish between thinking, feeling and willing. But just as the day-consciousness has these three states, thinking, feeling and willing, so also the night-consciousness, which in the case of the ordinary person is unconsciousness, has three states. One does not always sleep in the same state from falling asleep to waking up, just as one does not always wake in the same state. One wakes by thinking, or also by feeling, or also by willing. One can wake in three states, and likewise one can sleep in three states. For the fact that someone who has imaginative consciousness sees the world-forming forces, the formative forces of the world, comes only from the fact that he has acquired a consciousness of them, a knowledge of them. But every person falls asleep in these formative forces of the world, in the thoughts of the world. Just as you submerge when you jump into the water, so when you fall asleep you initially submerge in the formative forces of the world.

But in addition to this life in the formative forces of the world, there are two other states for the sleeping state, just as there are feeling and willing in addition to thinking for waking. When we consider thinking, having thoughts, in sleep this corresponds to life in the formative forces of the world. This means that when you become aware of the lightest state of sleep, then in this lightest state of sleep you live in the formative forces of the world. It is as if you were swimming through the universe from one end to the other, moving through thoughts, but these are forces. This is the lightest sleep, where you move in the thought-forces of the world. But there is a deeper sleep, a sleep from which, if one does not do special soul exercises, one cannot bring anything into one's daily life through dreams. One can only bring something into one's daily life from the lightest sleep through dreams. But then the dreams, as I have described to you, are not decisive as images, because the same dream can take on the most diverse images. But even the lightest sleep can lead to dreams, that is, one can bring something into consciousness, one can at least sense that one has experienced something during sleep. But one can only sense from this lightest sleep that one has experienced something.

Only those who attain an inspired consciousness can know anything of the deeper sleep. Such a one then perceives more than just what I have described in my “Occult Science”. In this “Occult Science” I have, to be sure, described some of what comes through from the inspired consciousness, but let us just realize what can only be described through anthroposophy – what the transition is like in experience from the quiet sleep to the deeper sleep, to the sleep from which the person in ordinary life can bring back no dreams.

When sleep is so quiet that one can bring back dreams in ordinary life, then the person who can look into these worlds sees the surging, weaving thought images, the imaginations of the world that reveal the secrets of the world to him, which reveal to him which world the human being belongs to, except for the one in which he is with his consciousness from the moment he wakes up until he falls asleep. For what I have described in my “Occult Science” is not something that is merely painted on a surface, but is in perpetual motion, in perpetual activity. But from a certain moment on, images begin to appear in this world, which every person experiences in a quiet sleep – they just do not know about it. These images become clear, they increase their splendor, they reveal certain underlying essences. They subside again, these images. Once again, one has nothing in consciousness but a kind of feeling that the images have been dulled. Then the images appear again. But while the images become more active and then fade away, something occurs that can be called the harmony of the spheres, a kind of cosmic music occurs, but a cosmic music that does not merely live in melody and harmony, but that represents the deeds and actions of those beings that inhabit the spiritual world, the deeds of the angels, the archangels, the elemental forces, and so on.

In a sense, you can see the beings moving on the surging sea of images, directing the world from the spirit. It is the world perceived through inspiration, the second world. I can call them the appearances of spiritual world beings. And this world, this world of manifestation of the spiritual beings of the spiritual world, is just as much the second element of sleeping as feeling is the second element of waking. So that during sleep man not only enters into the world which the thoughts of the world present, but within these surging world thoughts the deeds of the beings of the spiritual world are revealed.

But now, in addition to these two states of sleep, there is a third one. Most of the time, people have no idea about this third state of sleep. They usually know that they have a light sleep, and they also know that dreams reveal themselves from this light sleep. That he has a dreamless sleep, he notices. But that there is a third kind of sleep, that is something that people become aware of at most when they feel when waking up: there was something very heavy in them during sleep, it is something that they must first overcome in the first hours when they are awake again. I am quite sure that a number of you are familiar with this state in the morning, when you know that you have not slept in the usual way, but that there was something within you that leaves you with a certain heaviness that you first have to overcome over a longer period of time when you are conscious in the morning. This points to a third kind of sleep, the content of which can only be grasped by intuitive consciousness. And this third kind of sleep has a great significance for the human being.

When a person is in the lightest sleep, he actually experiences much of what he otherwise goes through when awake. He still participates, albeit in a different way, in his breathing. He still participates, if not from the inside, then from the outside, in his blood circulation and in the other bodily processes. When a person is in the second type of sleep, they no longer participate in physical life, but one could say that they participate in a world that is common to their body and soul. Something still passes over from the body into the soul. Something passes over, as light passes into the plant when the plant develops in the light during the day. But when a person is in the third phase of sleep, there is something in him that has become, if I may say so, like a mineral. The salts in his body are particularly strongly deposited. There are strong salt deposits in the physical body during this third phase of sleep. But in return, the human being is connected with his soul to the mineral world within.

Imagine you could do the following experiment: you go to bed, first fall into the light sleep, from which dreams can come out for the ordinary consciousness, then you fall into the deeper sleep, from which no dreams come, but which still leaves the soul of the person in a connection with the physical body. But now you are sleeping in a way that there are strong salt deposits in your body. You cannot have a relationship in your soul to what is going on in your body. But if you had placed a rock crystal on the nightstand next to you, you could be completely inside the rock crystal with your soul. You would slip into the rock crystal and perceive it from within. You cannot do that in the first or second kind of sleep. In the first kind of sleep, the content of which can enter into dreams, if you dream of the rock crystal, you would still experience it as a kind of rock crystal. You would experience something shadowy, but still something rock-crystal-like. If you sank down into the second kind of sleep, you would no longer experience the rock crystal in such a limited way. If you were still able to dream — you usually cannot, but let us assume that you could — then you would experience that the rock crystal becomes indistinct and forms into a kind of sphere or ellipsoid and then withdraws again. But if you could dream, that is, if you could access intuition from the deep sleep, from the third kind of sleep, then you would experience the rock crystal in such a way that you feel as if you are running along these lines inside, then running towards the tip, then running back again: you then experience the rock crystal within. You inhabit it. And so for other minerals. And not only do you experience the form, you also experience the inner forces. In short, the third type of sleep is something that brings the human being completely out of his body and completely into the spiritual world. During this third type of sleep, the human being stands in the third kind of world, in the essence of the spiritual world itself. That is to say, you are surrounded by the essence of the angels, the archangels, all those beings that one otherwise perceives only externally, that is, only in their revelations. You see, if you apply your sense consciousness from waking to sleeping, you see, so to speak, the external revelations of the gods in nature. During sleep, you enter either into the world of images in the lightest sleep, or in the second type of sleep into the world of appearances, into the world of revelations, or else, when you come to the third type of sleep, into the inner being of the divine spiritual entities themselves.

Thus, just as man lives himself out during the day through thinking, feeling and willing, so he lives himself out during sleep, either by flowing into the thoughts of the world, or by the deeds of the divine spiritual beings being revealed to him out of the thoughts of the world, or but these entities themselves take up the human being, so that he, as it were, rests with his soul in them. Just as thinking or imagining is the brightest, clearest, most distinct for the day-consciousness, just as feeling is somewhat duller - because feeling is actually always a kind of dreaming - and how willing, the most dull state of consciousness during the day, is, in a sense, a sleeping, so we have three states of sleep: the sleeping state in which ordinary consciousness experiences dreams and higher consciousness, the seeing, clear-sighted consciousness experiences the thoughts of the world. We have the second kind of sleep, which remains unconscious even for ordinary consciousness, but which appears to the inspired consciousness in such a way that the deeds of the divine-spiritual entities reveal themselves everywhere. We have the third kind of sleep, which presents itself to the intuitive consciousness, in which it lives in the divine-spiritual entities themselves. As I said, this announces itself by, for example, submerging into the interior of minerals. But this third kind of sleep has a special meaning for man.

If you take the second kind of sleep first, then you will find, as I said, the world beings of the angels, the archangels and so on, in the appearing, disappearing, surging images, but you will also find yourself. You find yourself in it as a soul, not as you are now, but as you were before your birth or before conception. You get to know yourself, how you have lived between death and a new birth. That belongs to this second world. And every time we sleep without dreaming, we live in the same world in which we lived before we descended and took on a physical body. But if you were to enter the third stage of sleep and were able to wake up there – the intuitive consciousness wakes up – so if you imagine entering the third stage of sleep and waking up there: then you experience your destiny, your karma. Then you know why you have special abilities in this life, from the nature of your previous lives. Then you will know why you are brought together with these or those personalities in this life. Then you will get to know karma, then you will get to know your destiny. This destiny can only be recognized if one - I am now approaching the matter from a different point of view - is able to penetrate into the interior of minerals. If you are able to see a rock crystal not only from the outside but also from the inside – of course you must not chop it up, because then what you see would always be on the outside, naturally – but you must, as I have described, be inside it; if you can do that, if you can see the crystal from the inside, then you can also understand why you are struck by this or that blow of fate in this life. Take any crystal, take an ordinary salt cube.

You see it from the outside: that is how you see it with ordinary consciousness. In this state, your life remains opaque to you. If you can penetrate into it - the spatial size does not matter - if you can see it from the inside out, then you are in the world in which you can also understand your destiny. But you are in this world every night when you enter the third stage of sleep.

But this third stage of sleep still has something very special. You see, people before the Mystery of Golgotha – and we were all there ourselves in our earlier lives on earth – people in the development of time before the appearance of Christ on earth, they very often came into this third kind of sleep. But even before they sank, I might say, into this third kind of sleep, their angel appeared and brought them back up again. For that is the peculiar thing: one can always get oneself out of the first and second kinds of sleep as a human being, but not out of the third. In the third kind of sleep, a person would have had to die before the appearance of Christ on earth if he had not been brought out by angels or other entities. Since the appearance of the Christ, the power of the Christ, as I have often emphasized, is connected with the earth, and every time a person must awaken from this third kind of sleep, then the power of the Christ, which through the Mystery of Golgotha has united with the earth, must come to his aid. Without the power of the Christ, a person could no longer awaken from this third kind of sleep. He can slip into the crystals, but he cannot get out again without the power of the Christ. For when one looks behind the scenes of existence, one already realizes what significance this Christ impulse has for life on earth. I therefore emphasize it strongly: man could enter the crystals, but he could not get out again.

These things were felt particularly strongly wherever, after the Mystery of Golgotha, after the appearance of Christ on Earth, a strong, ancient, pagan consciousness still existed and yet the Christ Revelation was already there, as for example in Central European regions. There were people known to have died as a result of falling into a deep sleep. They would not have needed to die if the Christ had come to their aid.

So, for example, people felt - I do not want to say anything other than what people felt - with Charlemagne or with Frederick Barbarossa. Despite the fact that Frederick Barbarossa drowned in the physical world, that was how it was felt. But it was felt particularly clearly with Charlemagne. Where did this medieval consciousness believe such a soul went? Into the interior of crystals. That is why it was placed in mountains, where it was supposed to wait until the Christ came and awakened it from its deep sleep. This kind of myth formation is connected with this consciousness. The strong connection with the Christ impulse since the Mystery of Golgotha on Earth, that is what now causes the world of the Angeloi, the Archangeloi and so on, to get man out again, because otherwise he would not be able to be brought out again when he sinks into the third kind of sleep. This, then, is connected with the power of Christ, not with belief in the power of Christ; for whether one belongs to this or that religious denomination, what Christ did on earth is done in the objective sense, and what I am describing here as objective takes place for man quite independently of belief. We will discuss the significance of faith in the next few days. But what I am talking about now is an objective fact that has nothing to do with faith.

But how did this happen? It happened because a different fate has entered the world of the gods than was previously in it, a fate that I would characterize by saying: People here in the physical world are born and die. It is the peculiarity of the divine spiritual beings that belong to the higher hierarchies that they do not die and are not born, but merely transform. The Christ, who lived with the other divine spiritual beings until the time of the Mystery of Calvary, decided to experience death, to descend to Earth, to become a human being, to go through death within human nature, and then to regain consciousness after death through the resurrection.

This is a very significant event in the divine spiritual world, that a God has gone through death in order to be able to do all that we already know or that I have now described again. We can therefore say: there is the significant event in the history of the development of the earth that the God became man and thereby floods his power into such significant phenomena as those that I have now characterized for you. The God who became man has such power in earthly life that He can bring human souls out of the depths of the soul if they have descended there. So that when we speak of Christ we speak of a World Being, of whom we must say: He is the God who became man. What would be His counter-image? His counter-image would be the man who became God. It does not have to be an absolutely good God; but just as Christ descended into the human world and accepted death, that is, first accepted the human body in order to share in the fate of human beings, so we are led to the opposite pole, to the human being who frees himself from death, frees himself from the conditions of the human body and becomes a god within the earthly conditions. He would then cease to be a mortal man, but would walk on the earth, though not under the same conditions as an ordinary mortal man, who goes from birth to death and from death to a new birth, but such a man, having become a god, would be found as a god who had come to earth unlawfully. Just as Christ is a legitimately incarnate god, so we would have to look for his counter-image in the illegitimately god-become human, the no-longer-mortal-but-wandering-about human who has assumed the nature of god in an unlawful manner. And you are aware that just as the Christian tradition points to the rightly incarnated God, to Christ Jesus, so it points to Ahasver, to the man who has become God unlawfully, who has laid aside the mortality of the human nature. Thus we have in Ahasver the polar opposite of Christ Jesus. That is the deeper reason, the deeper meaning of the saga of Ahasver, the saga that speaks of something that must be spoken of because it is a reality: of a being that wanders the earth. This figure of Ahasver is there. He wanders the earth, he wanders from people to people. Among other things, he does not allow the Hebrew faith to die out. This figure is present, this Ahasver figure, the god who has become unlawful.

Man has every reason, if he wants to get to know real history, to turn his attention to such ingredients of this history, to see how the forces and beings play down from the supersensible worlds into the sensual world, how Christ came out of the supersensible worlds into the sensible world, but also how the sensible world in turn plays a role in the supersensible world, and how we also have in Ahasver a real, actual world power, a world being. There has always been an awareness of this wandering of Ahasver, who of course cannot be seen with physical eyes, but only under the condition of a certain clairvoyance. And the legends that point to him have a good, objective basis. One does not understand human life if one looks at it only externally, as described in the history books, if one does not look at the special forms it takes.

For it is true that just as Christ lives in our inner being since the Mystery of Golgotha, and can be perceived in our inner being when we first awaken our inner gaze, so when we look around us at human life, and since the seeing glance arises in us for most people, for those to whom the seeing glance arises, it is the case, then, as it happens unexpectedly to the person who crosses the threshold of consciousness, Ahasverus, the eternal Jew, will appear to us. Man will perhaps not always recognize him, he will mistake him for something else. But it is just as possible that the eternal Jew will appear to man as it is possible that the Christ will shine forth when man looks into his inner being.

These things belong to the secrets of the world which must needs be revealed in our time, when many secrets should be revealed.

We have often turned our gaze back to the views of older times, and we want to do so again today, with the aim of gaining some insights into history and the development of humanity. If we go back thousands of years in human development, for example to the times that we, in our terminology, refer to as the ancient Indian cultural period, we find that people's way of looking at things was quite different then than it is in our time, even if we take a period that is very far removed from that time. If we go back to those older times, we know that people simply did not see nature as we see it today. They perceived spiritual beings directly in everything, in the individual elements of the earth's surface, in mountains and rivers, but also in everything that immediately surrounds the earth, in clouds, in light, and so on. It would have been inconceivable for a person of those ancient times to speak of nature as we do. For he would have felt as we would feel if we were to sit opposite a collection of corpses and then say that we were among human beings. What presents itself to man as nature today, millennia before our era, man would have felt only as the corpse of nature. For in everything that surrounded him, he perceived the spiritual and soul-like.

We know that when today's humanity hears from poetry or from the messages of myths and legends how it was once believed that spiritual-soul qualities can be found in the source, in the flowing river, in the interior of the mountains, and so on, it believes that the ancients let their imagination run wild and that they were inventing. Well, that is a naive point of view. The ancients did not make things up at all, but they perceived the spiritual and soul just as one perceives colors, as one perceives the movements of tree leaves, and so on. They perceived the spiritual and soul directly, and they would have thought of what we call nature today as merely the corpse of nature. But in a certain sense, some individuals among these ancients strove to gain a different way of looking at things than that which was the general one.

You know, today, when people strive to gain a different view from the usual one, and when they are at all capable of doing so, they become 'studied people', they receive concepts that go beyond what they otherwise see only externally. Then they absorb science, as it is called, into themselves. This science did not exist in the times of which we are now speaking. But there were individuals who aspired to go beyond the general observation, beyond what one knew in everyday life. They just did not study as it is done today. They did certain exercises. These exercises were not like those we speak of today in anthroposophy, but they were exercises that were more closely tied to the human organism in those older times. For example, there were exercises through which the breathing process was trained to do something other than what it is by nature. So they did not sit in laboratories and do experiments, but they did, so to speak, experiments on themselves. They regulated their breathing. For example, they inhaled, held back their breath and tried to experience what happened inside the organism when the breath was altered in this way. These breathing exercises should not be copied today. But they were once a means by which people believed they could come to higher knowledge than they could come to if they simply observed nature with their ordinary perceptions, if they saw external natural things as we see them, but also saw the spiritual and soul-like in all natural things.

When people devoted themselves to such exercises, the nature of which, although in a weakened form, has been preserved in what is described today as yoga exercises from the Orient, when they thus changed their breathing in relation to ordinary breathing, then the spiritual-soul aspect disappeared from the view of the surroundings, and it was precisely through such breathing that nature became for these people as we ourselves see it today. So, in order to see nature as we see it today, such people first had to do exercises in those ancient times. Otherwise, spiritual-soul entities would have leapt out of all the beings around them for them to see. They drove away these spiritual-soul entities by changing their breathing process.

Thus they — if I use the term that is current today for those who aspire so high above the general contemplation — as “learned men” no longer aspired to have nature around them as ensouled and spiritualized, but to have it around them in such a way that they perceived it as a kind of corpse. One could also say that these people felt, as they looked out into nature, as if they were in a surging, billowing, soul-spiritual universe, but they felt within it as a person of the present day would feel when dreaming in vivid images and could hardly wake up from these dreams. That is how they felt. But what did these individuals — let us call them the scholars of that ancient time — achieve when, through such special exercises, they distinguished themselves from this living surging and killed it in contemplation, so that they really felt that they now had a dead, corpse-like thing around them? What did they strive for as a result?

They strove for a stronger sense of self. They strove for something through which they experienced themselves, through which they felt themselves. Today's man says every moment: “I am”. “I” is a word that he uses very frequently from morning till night, because it is natural to him, it is self-evident to him. For these ancient people, it was not a matter of course in their ordinary daily experience to pronounce the “I” or even the “I am”. They had to acquire this. To do so, they first had to do such exercises. And by doing these exercises, they came to such an inner experience that they could say with a certain truth: “I am”. Only by doing this did they come to the awareness of their own being.

So what we take for granted only became an experience for these people when they made an effort in an inner breathing process. They first had to, so to speak, kill the environment for contemplation, to awaken themselves. This is how they came to the conviction that they themselves are, that they could say “I am” to themselves. But with this “I am” they were given something that we take for granted again today. They were given the inner development of the intellectual. Through this they developed the possibility of having an inner, secluded thinking.

If we go back to times when the old oriental views set the tone for civilization, it was the case that people felt a souled nature in their everyday lives, but had a very weak sense of self, almost no sense of self at all, did not at all summarize this sense of self in the conviction “I am,” but that individual people who were trained by the mystery schools were led to experience this “I am.” But then they did not experience this “I am” in the way we take it for granted today, but in the moment when they were brought to it through their breathing process, to be able to say “I am” at all out of inner conviction, out of inner experience, they experienced something that even today's man does not really experience at first.

Think back to your childhood: you can only think back to a certain point, then it stops. You were once a baby, but you have no memory of what you experienced as a baby. Your ability to remember ends at some point. You were certainly already there, crawling around on the ground, being caressed by your mother or father. You may have wriggled and moved your hands, but you do not know in your ordinary consciousness what you experienced inwardly at that time. Nevertheless, it was a more active, more intense soul life than later on. For this more intense soul life, for example, has shaped your brain plastically, has permeated your rest of the body and shaped it plastically. There was an intense soul life present, and the old Indian felt transported into this soul life at the same moment that he said to himself, “I am”.

Imagine very vividly what that was like. He did not feel in the present moment when he said to himself “I am”; he felt transported back to his babyhood, he felt the way he felt in his babyhood, and from there he spoke to his whole later life. He did not have the feeling that he now But this was only drawn into this inner being after it had previously lived in the spiritual-soul world. That is, by first transporting himself back to his babyhood through his breathing process, this old Indian yogi became aware of the time before his existence on earth. It seemed to him like a memory. Just as if a person today remembers something that he experienced ten years ago, it was like the occurrence of a memory in the moment when the “I am” shot through the soul, when in this ancient Indian time a person strengthened himself inwardly by breathing exercises and killed the outside world around him, but made it alive, which was not his outside world now, but what the outside world was before man descended into the physical world.

In those days, if I may use a modern expression, which of course sounds infinitely philistine when I use it for those ancient times, one was really lifted out of one's present earthly existence and into the spiritual-soul existence through the study of yoga. One owed one's elevation into the spiritual-soul worlds to one's studies at that time. One had a somewhat different consciousness than we have today. But precisely when one was a yogi in the former sense, one could think – the other people could not think, the other people could only dream – but one thought into the supersensible world, from which one had descended into earthly existence.

This is also a characteristic of the time of the earth's development, which, if we characterize it somewhat roughly, preceded, for example, the Greco-Roman conceptions in the fourth post-Atlantean period. There, the “I am” had already penetrated more into people in their ordinary everyday consciousness. Admittedly, the verb in language at that time still contained the I; it was not yet as separate as it is in our language, but nevertheless there was already a distinct I-experience. This distinct I-experience was now a natural, self-evident fact of the inner life. But in contrast to this, outer nature was already more or less dead. The Greeks, after all, still had the ability to experience the two aspects side by side, and without any special training. They still clearly experienced the spiritual and soul-like in the source, in the river, in the mountain, in the tree, albeit weaker than people of older times. But at the same time, they could also perceive the dead in nature and have a sense of self. This gives the Greeks their special character. The Greek did not yet have the same view of the world as we do. He could develop concepts and ideas about the world like ours, but at the same time he could take those views seriously that were still given in images. He lived differently than we do today. For example, we go to the theater to be entertained. In ancient Greece, people only went to the theater for entertainment in the time of Euripides, if I may put it this way – hardly in the time of Sophocles, and certainly not in the time of Aeschylus or in even older times. In those times, people went to dramatic performances for different reasons. They had a clear sense that spiritual and soulful beings live in everything, in trees and bushes, in springs and rivers. When you experience these spiritual and soulful beings, you have moments in life when you have no strong sense of self. But if you develop this strong sense of self, which the ancients still had to seek through yoga training, and which the Greeks no longer needed to seek through yoga training, then everything around you becomes dead, then you only see, so to speak, the corpse of nature. But in doing so, you consume yourself. They said to themselves: Life consumes the human being. The Greeks felt that merely looking at dead nature was a kind of mental and physical illness. In ancient Greek times, people felt very strongly that the life of the day made them ill, that they needed something to restore their health: and that was tragedy. In order to become healthy, because one felt that one was consuming oneself, that one was making oneself ill in a certain sense, one needed, if one wanted to remain fully human at all, a healing, therefore one went to tragedy. And tragedy was still performed in Askhylos' time in such a way that one perceived the person who created the tragedy, who shaped it, as the physician who, in a certain sense, made the consumed person healthy again. The feelings that were aroused – fear and compassion for the heroes who appeared on stage – had the effect of a medicine. They penetrated the human being, and by overcoming these feelings of fear and compassion, they created a crisis in him, just as a crisis is created in a pneunomia, for example. And by overcoming the crisis, one becomes healthy. So the plays were performed to make people who felt used up as people well again. That was the feeling that was attached to tragedy, to the play, in the older Greek era. And this was because people said to themselves: When you feel your ego, the world is divested of its gods. The play presents the god again, because it was essentially a presentation of the divine world and of fate, which even the gods must endure, thus a presentation of what asserts itself behind the world as spiritual. That was what was presented in the tragedy.

Thus, for the Greeks, art was still a kind of healing process. And in that the first Christians lived according to what was given in the embodiment of Christ in Jesus and what can be contemplated and felt in the Gospels – the death of Christ Jesus, to suffering and crucifixion, to resurrection, to ascension – they felt, to a certain extent, an inner tragedy. That is why they also called Christ, and he was increasingly called the physician, the savior, the great physician of the world. In ancient times, the Greeks sensed this healing quality in his tragedy. Humanity should gradually come to experience and feel the historical, the historically healing in the sight, in the emotional experience of the mystery of Golgotha, the great tragedy of Golgotha.

In ancient Greece, especially in the time before Aeschylus, when what had previously been celebrated only in the darkness of the mysteries had already become more public, people turned to tragedy. What did people see in this older tragedy? The god Dionysus appeared, it was the god Dionysus who worked his way out of the forces of the earth, out of the spiritual earth. The god Dionysus, because he worked his way out of the spiritual forces and up to the surface of the earth, shared in the suffering of the earth. He felt, as a god, in his soul, not in the way it was in the Mystery of Golgotha, also in his body, what it meant to live among beings that go through death. He did not experience death in himself, but he learned to look at it. One sensed that there is the god Dionysus, suffering deeply among human beings because he had to witness all that human beings suffer. There was only one being on the stage, the god Dionysus, the suffering Dionysus, and around him a chorus that spoke and recited so that people could hear what was going on in the mind of the god Dionysus. For that was the very first form of the drama, of the tragedy, that the only really acting person who appeared was the god Dionysus, and around him the choir, which recited what was going on in Dionysus' soul. Only gradually did several persons develop out of the one person who represented the god Dionysus in the older times, and then the later drama out of the one play. Thus the god Dionysus was experienced in the image. And later, as an historical fact in the evolution of humanity, the suffering and dying God, the Christ, was experienced in reality. Once as an historical fact, this was to take place before humanity so that all people could feel what had otherwise been experienced in Greece in the drama. But as humanity lived towards this great historical drama, the drama, which was so sacred in the old grienzeit that one felt in it the saviour, the miracle-working human medicine, was, more and more, I would say, thrown down from its pedestal and became entertainment, as it is already the case with Euripides.

Humanity lived contrary to the times in which it needed something other than being shown in pictures the spiritual and soul world, after nature had been de-animated for viewing. Humanity needed the historical mystery of Golgotha. The ancient yoga student of the Indian times had taken in the breath, held back the breath, so to speak, in his own body, in order to feel in this breathing: In you lives the divine I-impulse. - The human being experienced God in himself through the breathing process as a yoga student. Later times came. Man no longer experienced the divine impulse in himself through the breathing process. But he had learned to think, and he said: Through the breath the soul came into man. - The old yoga student went through that. The later human being said: #SE211-056 he became a soul. The older yoga student experienced it, the later human being said it. And by saying this in ancient Hebrew, one already experienced in a certain sense abstractly what one had previously experienced concretely. But one did not look in ancient Hebrew either, but in ancient Greek. One always takes place in one part of the earth, the other in another part of the earth. One no longer experienced the God within oneself as the old YOGA student did, but one experienced in the image the existence of God in man. And this experience in the image of the existence of God in man was certainly present in the older Greek drama. But this drama now became a world-historical event. This drama became the Mystery of Golgotha. But now the image was also abandoned. The image became a mere image, just as the breathing process was merely described in thoughts. The whole human soul became different.

Man saw the external world dead, and that was the elementary, the natural thing for him, that he saw the external world dead. He saw it without a god. He saw himself as an external world, as a physical external world, deified. But he had the consolation that once in this deified world the real God had come down, the Christ, and had lived in a human being, and through the resurrection as the Christ impulse had passed into the whole of earthly evolution. And so man could now develop a certain view in the following way. He could say to himself: I see the world, but it is a corpse. He did not say it to himself, of course, because it remained in the unconscious; man does not know that he sees the world as a corpse. But gradually the corpse formed in his view on the cross, the dead Christ Jesus. And if you look at the crucifix, at the dead Christ Jesus, then you have nature. You have the image of nature, of that nature in which man is crucified. And if you look at the one who rose from the grave, who was then experienced by the disciples and by Paul as the Christ living in the world, then you have what was seen in all of nature in older times. Of course, in a multitude, in many spiritual beings, in gnomes and nymphs, in sylphs and salamanders, in all possible other entities of the earth hierarchies, one saw the divine-spiritual; one saw nature spiritualized and ensouled. But now, through the burgeoning of intellectualism, there arose the urge to summarize what is scattered in nature. It was summarized in the dead Christ Jesus on the cross. But in Christ Jesus one sees everything that was lost in external nature. One sees all spirituality by looking at the fact that the Christ, the Spirit of God, rose from this body, having conquered death, and that every human soul can now partake of His essence. Man has lost the ability to see the Divine-Spiritual in the sphere of nature. Man has gained the ability to recognize this Divine-Spiritual in Christ in view of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Such is evolution. What mankind has lost, it has been given back to it in Christ. In what it has lost, it has gained selfishness, the possibility of feeling itself. If nature had not become dead to human contemplation, man would never have come to the experience of “I am”. He has come to the experience “I am”; he could feel himself, inwardly experience himself, but he needed a spiritual outer world. That became the Christ. But the “I am”, the egoity, is built on the corpse of nature.

Paul sensed this. Let us imagine Paul's perception for a moment. All around, the corpse of what people had once seen in ancient times. They saw nature as the body of the divine, the soul-spiritual. Just as we see our fingers, so did these people see mountains. It did not occur to them to think of the mountains as inanimate nature, any more than it occurs to us to think of the finger as an inanimate limb; rather, they said: There is a spiritual-soul element that is the earth; it has limbs, and the mountain is such a limb. — But nature became dead. Man experienced the “I am” within. But he would only stand there as a hermit on the de-spiritualized, de-souled earth if he could not look to the Christ. But this Christ, he must not look at him merely from the outside, so that he remains external; he must now take him up into the I. He must be able to say, by rising above the everyday “I am”: Not I, but the Christ in me. If we were to schematically depict what was there, we could say: Man once sensed nature (green) around him, but this nature everywhere ensouled and spiritualized (red). This was in an older period of human history.

In later times, man also felt nature, but he felt the possibility of perceiving his own “I am” (yellow) in the face of nature, which had now become soulless. But for this he needed the image of the God present in man, and he felt this in the God Dionysus, who was presented to him in Greek drama.

In even later times, human beings again felt the soulless nature (green) within themselves, the “I am” (yellow). But the drama becomes fact. On Golgotha, the cross rises. But at the same time, what man had originally lost arises within him and radiates (red) from his own inner being: “Not I, but the Christ in me.”

What did the man of ancient times say? He could not say it, but he experienced it: Not I, but the Divine-Spiritual around me, in me, everywhere. Man has lost this “Divine-Spiritual everywhere, around me, in me”; he has found it again in himself and in a conscious sense he now says the same thing that he originally experienced unconsciously: Not I, but the Christ in me.

The primal fact, unconsciously experienced in the time before man experienced his ego, becomes a conscious fact, an experience of Christ in the human heart, in the human soul.

Do you not see, when you draw such a trivial diagram, the form that the reality must take in ideas? Do you not see the whole world filled with the spirit of Christ, which arises from within the human being, and draws from the cosmos into the human being? And when you realize what significance sunlight has for human beings, how human beings cannot live physically without sunlight, how light surrounds us everywhere, then you will also be able to understand when I tell you that in those older times of which I have spoken today, human beings certainly felt themselves to be light in the light. They felt they belonged to the light. He did not say 'I am', he perceived the sunbeams that fell on the earth, and he did not distinguish himself from the sunbeams. Where he perceived the light, he also perceived himself, because that is where he felt himself. When the light arrived, he felt himself on the waves of light, on the waves of the sun, the sun.

With Christ, this became effective in his own inner being. It is the sun that enters one's own inner being and becomes effective in one's own inner being. Of course, this comparison of Christ with light is mentioned many times in the Bible, but when anthroposophy wants to draw attention to the fact that one is dealing with a reality, today most people rebel who have “divinity” listed as their faculty in the university directories. They actually reject knowledge of these things. And it is a deeply significant fact that there was once such a theologian in Basel who was also a friend of Nietzsche: Overbeck, who wrote the book on the Christianity of today's theology. With this book, he actually wanted to state as a theologian that one still has Christianity, that at that time, in the 1870s, there was still this Christianity, but that much had already become unchristian, and that in any case, theology was no longer Christian. This is what Professor Overbeck, of the Faculty of Theology at Basel, wanted to prove with his book on the Christianity of today's theology. He was highly successful. And anyone who takes the book seriously will come to the conclusion that there may still be some Christianity today, but modern theology has certainly become unchristian. And there may still be some Christianity today, but when theologians begin to talk about Christ, their words are no longer Christian. These things are just not usually taken seriously enough. But they should be taken seriously, because if they were taken seriously, then one would not only see the necessity of today's anthroposophical work, but one would also see the full significance of anthroposophy. And above all, people would be aware of their responsibility towards contemporary humanity with regard to something like anthroposophical knowledge. For this anthroposophical knowledge should actually underlie all knowledge today. All knowledge, especially social knowledge, should be derived from this anthroposophical knowledge. For by learning that the light of Christ lives in them - Christ in me - by fully experiencing this, they learn to see themselves as something other than what one gets when one sees man only as a corpse of nature. But it is from this view that man belongs to nature that has become a corpse that our antisocial, unsocial present has emerged. And a real view, which in turn can make people brothers and sisters and bring real moral impulses into humanity, can only come about if man penetrates to an understanding of the word: Not I, but the Christ in me — when the Christ is found as an effective force precisely in the dealings from person to person. Without this realization we make no progress. We need this realization, and this realization must be found. If we advance as far as it, then we will also advance beyond it, and our social life will be thoroughly imbued with the Christ.

Much is said today about the difference between belief and knowledge. In particular, it is often asserted that anthroposophy, in view of what it has to say, must be regarded not as a science but as a matter of faith, as a religious belief. But basically, all the differences that are made in this way stem from the fact that people have very little insight into what has emerged as belief in the course of human development, and that they actually do not have much insight into what knowledge is.

All belief, everything that is connected with the word belief, actually goes back to very early times in human development. It goes back to those times when the breathing process played a much greater role in the life of man himself than is the case now. Man, with his present state of soul, does not really pay attention to his breathing process. He breathes in and breathes out, but he does not perceive any special experience in doing so.

The beliefs of older times have always pointed to the importance of breathing. One need only remember – as I pointed out a few days ago – that in the Old Testament the creation of man is associated with the breathing of breath, and one need only recall what I said about the striving that existed in ancient India, for example, to gain higher knowledge by regulating the breathing process in a certain way. This striving had meaning in that time when man paid more attention to his breathing. I have said that this striving took place in the time when man perceived around him not only the dead nature that we perceive today, but when man saw spiritual and soul activity in all things and facts of nature, when he perceived spiritual and soul activity in every spring, in every cloud, in the river and in the wind. During this time, the aim was to become more and more aware of one's breathing: to regulate inhaling, holding one's breath, and exhaling. And through this regulation of the breathing process, what one might call self-awareness was generated, the experience of the ego, of “I am”. But this was a time when the perception, the experience of breathing in general played a certain role in human life. From his ordinary consciousness, the person of the present cannot imagine much of what it was like. I would like to give you such an idea.

The breathing process is divided into inhaling, holding the breath and exhaling. This breathing process is initially regulated by human nature. The yoga scholars I have spoken of regulated it differently. Just as today, when someone studies, they develop a way of thinking that is not the thinking of everyday life, so in the times when breathing played a special role in life, a different breathing was developed than in ordinary life. But let us now consider not yoga breathing, the developed breathing, but the ordinary. I can best show you this schematically.

Let us assume that this is the human chest organism, then we can say: we distinguish the inhalation process, the breath-holding process – I will not draw that separately – and the exhalation process. When people in ancient times inhaled, they experienced it as if, with the inhalation, that is, with the inhaled air from the outside world, what was spiritual in the beings and facts of the outside world came in. So in what I have here color-coded red as the inhalation current, the person, let's say gnomes, nymphs, experienced everything that was spiritual and soulful in the surrounding nature. And as he exhaled (blue), as he sent the inhaled air outwards, these beings became invisible again in the exhalation. They were lost, so to speak, in the surrounding nature. You inhaled and knew: there is something spiritual-soul in nature outside, because you felt the effect of this spiritual-soul in the inhalation. You felt connected to the spiritual-soul of the outer nature. That had a certain intoxicating effect on people in those ancient times - but it is only comparatively speaking - in a certain way. He intoxicated himself with the spiritual soul of his surroundings. And by breathing out again, he sobered up. So that he lived in a state of intoxication and a state of sobering up. And in this intoxication and sobering up there was an interaction with the spiritual soul of the outside world. But there was something else as well. Man felt, by breathing in, by intoxicating himself, as it were, with the spiritual-soul, how the spiritual-soul beings quietly drew up into his head from the breathing current, how they filled him inwardly, how they united with his own physical being. So that what man felt there can be expressed something like this: I breathe in the spiritual and soul life of the environment. It fills my head. I feel it, I perceive it. Then the breath is held. And as he breathes out, the person would say: I give back my perception of the spiritual and soul life.

But this had an intimate connection with life. Take just one very simple thing: here is chalk. If you take this chalk today, you look at it, you reach out, take it up. The people of the ancient epoch did not do that. We have the thought of looking at the chalk and then picking it up. This was not the case with ancient man, who looked at it and inhaled what was spiritually radiating from the chalk, exhaled, and only in the exhalation did he grasp the chalk, so that for him inhaling meant observing, exhaling meant being active. This was at a time when man actually always lived in a kind of rhythmic interaction with the environment. This rhythmic interaction has been preserved for later times, but without the living, observing consciousness of ancient times. Just imagine how, in our youth, threshing was still done by hand in the countryside: looking, beating, looking, beating, in rhythmic activity. This rhythmic activity corresponded to a certain breathing process.

Inhaling = observing

Exhaling = doing

As far as the later development of humanity is concerned, we can say that this experience of inhalation ceased to be perceived by the human being, and the human being perceived or perceives only that which goes up from breathing into his head. So in ancient times, the human being perceived how what was inhaled, which was intoxicating for him, continued into the head and connected there with the sense impressions. Later on, this was no longer the case. Later on, man loses consciousness of what is going on in his chest organism. He no longer perceives this upwelling of breathing because the sensory impressions become stronger. They extinguish what arises in the breath. When you see or hear today, the breathing process is included in the process of seeing and also in the process of hearing. In the ancient person breathing lived strongly in hearing and seeing, in the modern person seeing and hearing live so strongly that breathing is completely subdued. So that we can say, what was perceived by the ancient one in the breathing process in his inner being, no longer lives in the intoxicating, head-filling way that he said: Ah, the nymphs! Ah, the gnomes! Nymphs that whirl in the head, gnomes that hammer in the head, undines that surge in the head! Today, this hammering, surging, and whirling is drowned out by what comes from seeing and hearing and what fills the head today.

There was once a time when man perceived more strongly this upwelling of breathing into his head. This passed over into the time when man still perceived confusedly, when he still perceived something of the after-effects of the gnome-like hammering, the Undine-like surging, the nymph-like tumbling, when he still perceived something of the connection of these after-effects with the perceptions of sound, light and color. But then all that he still perceived of the breathing process was lost. And of those people who still had a trace of consciousness that breathing once introduced the spiritual-soul of the world into man, what now remained, what was established from sensory perception in connection with breathing, was called “Sophia”. But breathing was no longer perceived. So the spiritual content of breathing was killed, or rather, paralyzed by sensory perception.

This was particularly felt by the Greeks. The Greeks did not have the idea of such a science as we do today. If one had told the Greeks about a science as it is taught today at our universities, it would have seemed to them as if someone had continually pierced their brains with small pins. They would not have understood that it could give a person satisfaction. If they had had to take in science as we have it today, they would have said: That makes the brain sore, that wounds the brain, that stings. --- Because they still wanted to perceive something of that pleasant spreading of the intoxicating breath, into which, flowing in, the heard and the seen pours. So the Greeks did perceive an inner life in the head, an inner life such as I am describing to you now. And they called this inner life Sophia. And those who loved to develop this Sophia within themselves, who had a special inclination to devote themselves to this Sophia, called themselves philosophers. The word philosophy definitely points to an inner experience. The hideous, pedantic assimilation of philosophy, whereby one simply 'ochst' (as they say in student life) at philosophy, that familiarization with this science, was not known in Greece. But the inner experience of 'I love Sophia' is what is expressed in the word philosophy.

But just as the process of breathing that enters the body is taken up in the head by the sense perceptions, so what emanates as exhaled air is taken up by the rest of the body. In the limb-metabolism organism, just as sensory perceptions flow into the head through what is heard, just as what is seen flows into the head through what intoxicates the inhaled air, so too do physical feelings and experiences flow together with the exhaled air. The sobering effect of the exhaled air, the extinguishing of perception, flowed together with the physical feelings that were aroused while walking and working. Being active, doing, was linked to exhaling. And as man was active, as he was doing something, he felt, as it were, how the spiritual-soul left him. So that he felt when he did something, when he worked at something, as if he allowed the spiritual-soul to flow into the things. I take in the spiritual-soul: it intoxicates my head, it connects with what I have seen, with what I have heard. I do something, I breathe out. The spiritual-soul aspect goes away. It goes into what I hammer, it goes into what I grasp, it goes into everything I work. I release the spiritual-soul aspect from me. I transfer it, for example, by fizzling the milk, by doing something externally, I let the spiritual-soul aspect flow into things. That was the feeling, that was the sensation. So it was in the old days.

But this perception of the exhalation process, this perception of the sobering up, just stopped, and there was only a trace left in Greek times. In Greek times, people still felt something, as if, by being active, they were still giving something spiritual to things. But then everything that was there in the breathing process was dulled by the physical sensation, by the feeling of exertion, of fatigue in working. Just as the inhalation process was dulled in the head, so the exhalation process was dulled in the rest of the organism. This mental process of exhalation was paralyzed by the bodily sensation, that is, by the sensation of exertion, of becoming heated, and so on, by what lived in man so that he felt his own strength, which he applied by exerting himself, by doing something. He did not feel the breathing out process as fatigue in himself now, he felt a power effect in himself, he felt the body permeated with energy, with power.

This power that lived inside the human being was Pistis, faith, the feeling of the divine, the divine power that makes one work: Pistis, faith.

Sophia = the spiritual content of breathing, paralyzed by sensory perception

Pistis (faith) = the spiritual process of exhalation, paralyzed by the bodily sensation.

Thus wisdom and faith merged in man. Wisdom flowed to the head, faith lived in the whole of man. Wisdom was only the content of ideas. And faith was the power of this content of ideas. Both belonged together. Hence the only Gnostic writing that has survived from ancient times is the Pistis Sophia. So that in Sophia one had a rarefaction of inhalation, in faith a condensation of exhalation. Then wisdom became more rarefied still. And in the further rarefaction, wisdom became science. And then the inner power became more condensed. Man felt only his body: he lost consciousness of what faith, pistis, actually is. And so it came about that people, because they could no longer feel the connection, separated what was to arise subjectively from within as mere content of faith, so to speak, and what connects with external sense perception. First there was Sophia, then Scientia, which is a diluted Sophia. One could also say: originally Sophia was a real spiritual being that man felt as an inhabitant of his head. Today, all that is left of this spiritual being is the ghost. For science is the ghost of wisdom. This is something that should actually haunt the soul of today's human being like a kind of meditation, that science is the spectre of wisdom. And in the same way, on the other hand, faith — which is what it is usually called today; here one has not really grasped a particular difference in the words — faith as it is lived today is not the inwardly experienced faith of antiquity, pistis, but it is the subjective closely connected with egoism. It is the condensed faith of ancient times. In the faith that had not yet been condensed, people still sensed the objective divine within them. Today, faith only arises subjectively, as it were, rising like smoke from the body. So that one could say, just as science is the spectre of wisdom, so today's faith is the heavy residue of former faith, the lump of former faith.

These things must be held together, then one will no longer judge as superficially as many people do today, who say that anthroposophy is only a matter of faith. Such people do not know what they are talking about because they have never brought themselves to consciously perceive the whole connection between faith and wisdom, this inner experience of faith and wisdom, from the real history of mankind. Where today do we speak of history as we have to here? Where do we talk today about what the breathing process once was for man, how it represented a completely different experience than it is today? Where do we realize how abstract on the one hand and robustly material on the other that has become what was once a real spiritual-soul-like on the one hand and a real soul-bodily on the other?

When the development of faith had reached a certain point, it became necessary for humanity to include something very specific in this belief. In ancient times, man had the divine within the belief. He experienced the divine in the process of exhalation. But the process of exhalation was lost to his consciousness. He no longer had the consciousness that the divine passes out into things. Man needed a revival of the divine for his consciousness, and he received this revival through the fact that he now received an idea within himself that has no external reality on earth. It has no external reality on earth that the dead rise from the graves. But the Mystery of Golgotha has no real content for a person if he describes the course of Jesus' life until Jesus dies. After all, that is nothing special. That is why Jesus is no longer anything special for modern theology either. Because a person goes through some experiences and then dies, as modern theology presents the life of Jesus, that is nothing special. The mystery only begins with the resurrection, with the living life of the Christ being after the physical body has gone through death. And - that is also according to Paul's words - whoever does not take up this idea of the resurrection into his consciousness has not taken up anything of Christianity at all, which is why modern theology is actually only a Jesusology, actually no Christianity at all. Christianity needs such a concept that refers to a reality that does not take place on this earth as a direct perception of the senses, but that as a concept already lifts man up into the supersensible.

Through an inner experience, the old human being was lifted up into the supersensible. I have shown you in these days how the yoga student was led to the inner experience of being a baby. They experienced the first impressions of being a baby, that which shapes the human being in a plastic way. What one otherwise knows nothing about became conscious through the yoga exercises I have spoken to you about, but with it, at the same time, the whole prenatal life, or the life that lies before conception, when the human being's soul was in the spiritual world above before descending and taking on a physical body. Only a notion of this remained. This notion is also contained in the Gospels: Unless you become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. This saying refers to it, but in those days it no longer had any direct effect on life. This saying was, so to speak, a reminder that one could once place oneself back into the time of childhood and experience the Kingdoms of Heaven from which one descended through birth into physical existence. It is hardly the case that a person today, when he hears about the Kingdoms of Heaven from the Gospels or from some other ancient language, imagines something significant by it. He may think: Well, I have seen that here on earth – France, England and so on, they are divided into kingdoms. Whatever there is of kingdoms on earth is also there above, the kingdoms of heaven are there too. – Otherwise, people cannot really get a concrete idea of the kingdoms of heaven if they cannot imagine what is down there as being up there. I believe that in English, if I am not mistaken, they even say: the kingdoms of heaven. Yes, you don't get the idea of what is meant by the term “the kingdoms of heaven”, which has been modernized today. The gospel even usually says it in such a way that you can't even see what it actually means, it even says: the kingdom of God. In doing so, people hardly think of anything, but simply let a word resound. But in ancient times the heavens were exactly that which, when the earth is here (center), spread out as the sphere of the world (white, blue). And “kingdom” — what was that? Let us disregard all philology and take the observation to help here, which can be given by anthroposophical method itself. “Reich” = that which reaches out, encompasses, surrounds, that is the reaching, the sounding, the speaking, so that one must soar to the imagination: Through these heavens, for the one who learns to perceive, the spiritual-soul sounds through. He perceives not only the heavens, but the world-word that resonates and reaches through the heavens.

Those who cannot become like little children cannot perceive the word of the heavens, the word that speaks from the heavens everywhere. If earthly realms are called “realms” and earthly rulers “rulers of these realms,” then one would have to have the secret idea that these rulers could speak or sing so loudly that their voice would resound throughout their entire realm. In older, legendary conceptions, there is also something like a resounding of the realm. And this was symbolically expressed by the fact that laws were given which were proclaimed with trumpets to the quarters of heaven, whereby the kingdom became a reality. The kingdom was not the plane on which men dwelt, but the kingdom was that which the trumpet-angels carried out into the wide spaces as the content of the laws.

But it was a memory. Another concept had to come that was more related to the will – what preceded related to the idea, to the thought – to that which accompanies a person when he passes through the gate of death. The will remains as his energy development. This goes with him through the gate of death with the world thought content. The human will, filled with world thoughts, enters with him into the spiritual worlds when the human being dies. And it was to this will that the new idea of the resurrected Christ turned, of the one who lives even if he has died in an earthly way. This was the strong, powerful idea that did not merely recall childhood, that pointed to death, and that appealed to what passes through the portal of death with man. Thus we find the irruption of the Christ idea, the whole Christ impulse, thoroughly grounded in the evolution of mankind itself.

Now, of course, one can say: Even today there are still many people on earth who know nothing of the Christ. Those people who know about him today usually know it badly, but they learn something about the Christ, even if, according to the sense of today's materialism, they do not have the correct idea of the Christ, the feeling for the Christ that they have within them. But there are many people on earth who live in other, older forms of religion. And that is where the big question arises, which I already hinted at yesterday. I said that the Mystery of Golgotha is a fact. The Christ died for all people. The Christ Impulse has become a power for the whole earth. In this objective sense, apart from consciousness, the Christ is there for Jews, pagans, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and so on. He is there. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, He has been alive in the forces of the evolution of humanity on Earth. But there is a difference between whether people live within a Christian sphere or a non-Christian one. The only way to study the difference that exists between the life that a person develops between death and a new birth and life on earth is to see the connection. If a person has passed through death and was a Buddhist or Hindu in life, say, if he has not absorbed any idea, any feeling of Christ, then he takes with him for the universe behind death what a person can experience here on earth from the external environment, from nature. One would know nothing of nature in the heavens if man did not take with him the knowledge of the earth when he enters the realms of the heavens through death. Man carries what he takes in here on earth over into the realm of the supersensible by passing through death, for it is only through this that the supersensible worlds have any knowledge at all of the mineral, the vegetable, and the animal on earth. But the one who knows something of Christ, who can have the idea that Christ lives in him, who experiences the Pauline word, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me,” now carries into the supersensible worlds not only the knowledge of the earth, but the knowledge of the earthly human being. Thus both are carried into them by the modern human being as well. Christians carry into the supersensible world the knowledge of the earthly human being, of the bodily earthly form of the human being. The Hindus, the Buddhists, and so on, carry into the heavens the knowledge of what is around the human being. Even today, human beings complement each other in what they contribute to the supersensible worlds by passing through death. Naturally it becomes more and more necessary that all secrets which man can experience in himself, through himself, are carried into the heavens, so that man is more and more permeated by Christianity. But above all it is important that what man experiences here on earth only as a human being with other human beings is carried through death by means of Christianity.

Consider that this is actually an extraordinarily important truth, a very essential truth. Take, for example, the Hindu or the Buddhist. What he experiences in looking at the world, in feeling the world, in sensing the world, what he experiences in thoughts about minerals, in feelings about plants, in feelings about animals, he carries all this through the gate of death and enriches the knowledge of the gods in the supersensible world with what he experiences. What the Christian experiences by entering into a social relationship with his fellow human beings, by developing social connections, that is, what one can only experience as a human being among other human beings, what is experienced in human brotherhood on earth, that is what the Christian carries with him through the gate of death. One would like to say: The Buddhist carries the beauty of the world through the gate of death, the Christian carries kindness through the gate of death. They complement each other. But the progress of Christianity consists in the fact that precisely the social earthly conditions acquire a significance for the heavenly worlds.

The Oriental tyrants might decapitate as many people as they liked, but it had little effect on the worlds beyond. It only affected them to the extent that the person received external impressions as a result: the external impressions of horror and so on were carried through the gate of death. The unkindness between people that is developing today as a result of miserable social conditions, and which is spreading across the earth as a false socialism due to a misunderstanding of social interrelationships, also has a great significance for the supersensible worlds that people enter through the gateway of death. And when today, under the flag of the realization of socialism in the east of Europe, a terrible, destructive force is being developed, then what is experienced there is also carried into the beyond as a terrible result. And when unloving conditions develop among people in the age of materialism, this is carried into the transcendental worlds through the portal of death, to the disgust of the divine spiritual worlds.

Through Christianity, man should come to bear the results of the evolution of the earth, which arise through him, into the supersensible worlds as well. What man himself develops on earth, he becomes capable of carrying into the spiritual worlds through the thought of the Risen Christ, of a living being who has gone through death and yet lives.

This is why even those people who do not want their social deeds to be carried by death today have such a horror of recognizing the Risen Christ.

The ancients were allowed to become intoxicated by the breath. The moderns are not allowed to become intoxicated by words. Words must not be intoxicating for them, but must be held in the sense of Sophia, penetrating man with wisdom.

These are the things through which anthroposophy also points to what is important in social relationships today. And it wants to express something of this in its name, this anthroposophy, anthroposophia, which is also a wisdom. During the Greek period, the human being was taken for granted. Sophia was already a human wisdom because the human being was still full of light and wisdom. Today, when one says Sophia, people only think of the ghost of Sophia, of science. Therefore, one must appeal to the human being one is calling upon, to the Anthropos: Anthroposophia. One must point out that this is something that comes from the human being, that shines out of the human being, that blossoms out of the best forces of the human being. One must point this out. But it also makes anthroposophy something that enlivens human existence on earth. For it is something that is experienced by man in a more spiritual, but no less concrete way than the ancient Sophia was experienced, and which at the same time is meant to bring about that which was then in the whole human being, the content of faith, pistis. Anthroposophy is not a belief, but a real body of knowledge, but one that gives people a strength that in earlier times was contained only in faith.

Let us visualize the forces that hold the human being together during life on earth, so that we can gain some insight into cosmology during these days. We know, of course, that the human being is structured when we look at the next thing that characterizes him in earthly life: the physical body, the body of formative forces (which can also be called the etheric body), the astral body, and the I.

Let us imagine how we might characterize these four aspects of the human being. The physical body is, after all, what comes to a person through the fact that the forces of the earth work for him, so to speak. In the time that a person goes through between death and a new birth, he does not deal with this physical body. From the remarks I made in the immediately preceding lectures, we have seen that the human being, when it descends from the spiritual and soul realms to a physical embodiment, is, so to speak, spiritually dead and must regain its strength in inwardness by immersing itself in the physical body. But this physical body itself is, as it were, born out of the forces of the earth and connects with that which descends from the spiritual-soul world. But a short time before the human being reaches physical embodiment on earth, he does not yet have the formative forces or etheric body either. This is also only connected to the human being for earthly existence in the same way as the physical body. Only this formative forces or etheric body has a different relationship to the cosmos than the physical body.

If we examine the physical body of man in relation to its forces, we find in it precisely the forces of the earth planet itself. But if we approach the etheric or formative body of man, we find in it more the forces of the cosmos, the forces of the entire universe. On the other hand, the human astral body and the human I contain such forces that are not actually found in the outer space of the universe, which, if we may use the expression, are not of the world to which the earth belongs.

It is actually the case that the earth is constantly striving to take possession of the physical body of the human being and incorporate it into its own being. In contrast, the universe constantly tends to disperse the human being's formative forces or etheric body throughout the world. When a person is in the state between falling asleep and waking up, the forces at work in what remains in bed, in the physical and formative forces, actually work in such a way that the physical body continually, if I may express it this way, wants to connect with the earth. It wants to become similar to the earth, it wants to become completely earthly. The formative forces or etheric body wants to disperse into the universe. And when we rediscover our physical body and our etheric body when we wake up in the morning, it is actually the case that, when we enter our physical body, it tells us: the earth has taken hold of me throughout the night, the earth wanted to shape me into dust. Only because you held me together through your ego and your astral body yesterday and the preceding days on earth have I remained a physical body; the forces of cohesion continued to work in me. Likewise, the formative forces or etheric body says: I have only kept the human form because I have adopted the habit of being like you. Actually, during the night, while you were sleeping, while you were away from me, the forces of the universe wanted to scatter me to the four winds.

Every time we wake up, we basically have to make an effort to properly take possession of our physical body again. It actually wants to lose us from falling asleep to waking up. We do this through the ego. The ego, when trained to do so, can really feel as if it wants to take possession of the physical body anew every morning. The astral body can feel when waking up that it must make the etheric body similar to itself. The etheric body already wanted to take on an inhuman form. The astral body must in turn push it back into the human form. One would like to say: During sleep, the physical body loses its tendency to be possessed by the ego, and the etheric body loses its tendency to have a human-like form. It flutters out. So that in fact the shape that our physical body has is only a result of the I-effect in our human being. In the present state of mind, people do not have much feeling for something that can be expressed in words: when I return to my physical body in the waking state, I first have to take possession of it again. It wanted to get lost, and the etheric body wanted to flutter apart.

But let us assume that there was once a time when people still had a clear sense of this struggle that takes place every time we wake up between the self and the astral body on the one hand, and the physical body and the etheric body on the other. Then, precisely because they would have had this clear perception, they would also have sensed that it would have to be something very special if a person were to suddenly have to leave his physical body and etheric body through some sudden event.

Under normal earthly conditions, when a person leaves his physical body and his etheric body, it is because the physical body, whether through illness or old age, has become very similar to the earth, so that it wants to unite with the earth. Or, through some kind of injury, the physical body has been brought to such a state that the ego can no longer possess it, and so on. But let us assume that the I and the astral body suddenly had to leave the fully healthy and uninjured physical and etheric bodies, so that they still have the tendency to be possessed by the I and to be similar to the astral body in the highest sense. What would have to happen then?

The thought might have dawned on the old person: Yes, then this physical body could not simply disintegrate. It can only disintegrate when it already has the tendencies to disintegrate within itself, as a result of illness or aging or the like. But when the astral body and the I suddenly have to emerge from the fully healthy human organism, in which the body of formative forces is present, then the human-like form would have to remain, because the tendency to be possessed by the I and the astral body is still fully present. The human form would have to remain fully intact. The human being would become like a statue. The physical body could not disintegrate, the etheric body could not become dissimilar because the separation would have been too rapid. The human being would become a statue.

There seems to have been a case of this kind of sensation in reality. You all know the Greek legend of Niobe, who had seven healthy sons and seven healthy daughters and who, out of a sense of abundance, once mocked the mother of Apollo and Artemis because, despite being a goddess, she only had two children: Apollo and Artemis. She refused to sacrifice, and the revenge of the god or the gods came upon her. She had to experience that her seven daughters and seven sons suddenly died, were killed, by the arrows of Apollo and Artemis. She saw the whole field of corpses of her fourteen offspring before her, and her ego and her astral body united in the pain of what she saw around her. You know the figures on the pediment of the statue of Niobe, who becomes a statue herself, surrounded by her seven sons and seven daughters as they meet their deaths. She herself becomes a statue. The physical body and the etheric body must separate from the ego and the astral body. But this physical body and the etheric body, because they were so full of life that Niobe herself could mock the goddess with her two offspring, could not lose their connection to the ego, and the etheric body could not become dissimilar to the astral body. Niobe became a statue.

Such a work of art is certainly the outcome of a deep feeling arising from a world view, of something that was felt to be a truth from the world view of the time. The feeling was simply this: if Niobe had not been so full of life that she could come to mock the goddess Latona, then she could have died with her physical body disintegrating. But she was so full of life that she rebelled against the gods, that she lived so fully in her physical body. And so we see that the Greek genius felt: because of the rapid departure of the ego and the astral body from the physical and etheric bodies, Niobe becomes a statue.

If we look back at the development of humanity, we see that art always follows the feelings associated with the world view of the time in question. But we can see this in many other ways as well. Let us turn our gaze once more to how the human being, upon waking, must take possession of his physical body again, because this physical body wants to become similar to the earth. If Niobe had been able to sleep even for one night after experiencing her pain, she could no longer have become a statue, for the physical body would then already have absorbed the forces to become similar to the earth, that is to disintegrate. Therefore, every morning the human being must again take possession of the physical body, and every morning the astral body must form the etheric body in a similar way, giving it a plastic form again, so that it takes on a human-like shape.

During the Greek development there was a time when it was felt quite vividly that every morning man must develop strength in order to take firm possession of his physical body. The Greeks derived a certain satisfaction from their physical body, and since they knew that they had to take possession of their physical body anew every morning, they felt the need to strengthen the forces that could take possession of the physical body, and also those that could make the astral body strong, in order to make the etheric body similar to it again every morning.

If man, while waking, would consciously follow the whole process that takes place when waking up, he would say to himself every morning: I must not lose my physical body, I must really get back into this physical body! Man would be afraid of not being able to get properly into the physical body. The ancient Greeks knew much about this fear, and they also knew that every night the etheric body has a tendency to split into four different forms: an angelic, a lion-like, an eagle-like, and an ox-like form. Every morning, starting from the astral body, one must endeavor to synthesize these four members of the etheric body, if I may use the expression, in such a way that a real human being is formed again. But the Greeks liked to have life in the physical and etheric bodies. I have often quoted the saying that comes to us from Greece: “Better a beggar on earth than a king in the realm of shadows,” in the underworld. The Greeks loved this physical existence. He also wanted to be strengthened in the possession of his physical body, in the becoming similar of the etheric body to man. And you see, tragedy arose out of this tendency. And Aristotle still gives a definition of tragedy that clearly indicates that basically the Greeks did not think of tragedy as modern man thinks of it. I don't know if anyone else has had different experiences, but I have mostly found that people today believe that tragedies exist because, after spending the whole day dealing with what the day brings, they like to sit down for a few hours in the evening to experience something more or less exciting, which is not a real experience but only an image.

This was not how the Greeks thought at the time when Greek culture was actually gradually emerging. For the Greeks, life was one, and everything they put into it was something that should truly belong to the totality of that life. And tragedy was the means by which man could properly possess his physical body and form his etheric body. And tragedy was so developed that by looking at it man should feel fear and pity. Why should man experience fear in tragedy? He should experience fear because by experiencing this fear his power is strengthened to take possession of the physical body in the right way every morning. And he should feel compassion, because through it his astral body is strengthened each morning to form the etheric body in the right way. “Put me before tragedy, said the Greek, then I am able to properly take possession of my physical body, to properly build up my etheric body, then I am able in the fullest sense of the word to be a right person.” The Greeks wanted to be true human beings in their earthly existence. In addition to the other means of immersing themselves in their culture, tragedy was also intended to help them achieve this. Of course, this presupposes that in those older times people knew how the soul and spirit, the I and the astral body of the human being, are connected with the physical and etheric aspects of the human being.

Aristotle gives a definition of tragedy. He says: “Tragedy is the imitation of an action through which fear and compassion are aroused, so that by arousing fear and compassion, man experiences the catharsis, the crisis of fear and compassion. Crisis, catharsis, is an expression borrowed from the older Greek medicine, the art of healing, and even when Aristotle was already developing Greek culture into pedantry, he still felt that tragedy, in particular, should have something healing, something strengthening for man.

Let us try to understand this term “catharsis”, which also comes from the mysteries – and we have often explained what it means in the mysteries – in our ordinary lives.

When a person becomes ill inside, what actually happens? Suffering and pain arise in the person that are not otherwise present. He begins to feel his organism, to sense it in some way, to sense it in a way that he does not sense it in normal, so-called healthy life. In healthy life, one believes, nothing hurts at first. When one becomes ill, something starts to hurt. But this means nothing other than that the I and the astral body are not properly — forgive the somewhat crude expression — integrated into the physical body and the etheric body. If the person is then led to healing and recovery, the I and the astral body are given the strength to integrate properly again. In the healing process, the I and the astral body gain greater power over the physical body than they had before the healing.

Let us assume that a person falls prey to a lung disease. His I and his astral body are not properly connected to the etheric part of the lungs and to the physical part of the lungs. What happens during the healing process is, again, the correct connection. And the crisis consists precisely in the fact that outside of the correct engagement, the I and the astral body are given the strength to engage themselves correctly again afterwards. What happens in an external way in the illness is what the Greek saw continually happening in an internal way in the human being.

The Greek felt this way: If a person does nothing for himself, then his I and his astral body become more and more alien to the physical and etheric bodies. They can take possession of the physical body less and less and shape the etheric body after themselves less and less. They have to be brought out so that they can then be properly brought back in again. The astral body has to be permeated by visualized suffering, by compassion. And the ego has to be permeated by fear. When the ego experiences fear, it strengthens itself. And the ego survives this fear because it is only presented through the image. So the ego does not perish under fear, it endures the fear, it undergoes the crisis, the catharsis, and as a result has a strengthened power to take possession of the physical body again every morning. Likewise, through compassion, through looking at suffering, the astral body is strengthened, making the etheric body more and more similar.

This shows how in Greece, art was seen as being fully connected to the human being, as the figure of Niobe shows, or as something that should have an effect on the process of becoming and educating a human being. The Greeks always looked at the concrete human being, and one can say that since the time of the Greeks, the essence of the human being has actually been lost by the human being himself.

This is particularly evident when we turn our gaze to young Goethe. Even in his youth, Goethe really does get to know a great deal about the world around him, the way people think and feel. And he even became familiar with the way extraordinarily significant, ingenious people try to imagine the world. But for Goethe — as I have already discussed here — it is a struggle to grow into his cultural environment. Because we know, of course, that over the last four to five centuries, the cultural world has become intellectualistic, and Goethe felt this intellectualism, which has poured over everything. He expressed this in Faust: philosophy has become intellectualized, jurisprudence has become intellectualized, medicine has become intellectualized, and even theology has become intellectualized. Faust has studied all of these. But the mere thought that lives in all of this is something that is alien to reality. He wants to relate the spiritual foundations of existence to himself. That is basically Goethe's feeling. Of course, Goethe had to admit that modern man was becoming increasingly intellectual, because that was the way the times were developing. The development of humanity had just reached this point. But for him it was a struggle, because thought does not fully embrace the human being. He felt alienated from the world by seeing the world around him develop as a mental one.

One of those people who, at the time when Goethe was young, strove energetically and with a certain matter-of-factness towards intellectualism, was Lessing. Goethe could have met Lessing in Leipzig. He avoided it because Lessing was too intellectual for him. Herder, later in Strasbourg, was not. Despite his intellectualism, Herder had arrived at a comprehensive worldview full of feeling and emotion. Goethe could relate to that. Lessing, on the other hand, seemed to him to be a little eerily intelligent. He avoided him.

In this context, it is easy to understand how, at a certain age, Goethe could no longer help but break out of this world in which one wants to think about everything. At a certain point in Weimar, Goethe would have liked to get out of his entire skin, even though he was doing extremely well; even though he was idolized at the Weimar court, he could not stand it. He could not stand the whole situation. He also could not bear this: Herder was studying Spinoza. Spinoza, however, is basically a whole thought machinery, a wonderful one, but one does get away from the world when one spins oneself into this thought machinery.

And so he had to go to Italy, because he wanted to discover man. He wanted to discover man in the feeling of Greek art, of ancient art, which had become alien to modern man. Goethe longed to discover, to experience the human being. And basically, the whole of anthroposophy is nothing more than a world view that arises from the longing to find the human being in his or her entirety, to answer the question: what exactly is this human being? How does he or she relate to life?

But as a result, more and more things gradually become vividly clear that have been placed in the development of civilization out of a full feeling for the human being, such as tragedy or a work of art like the Niobe Group. Take this Niobe Group. Niobe, in her soul, that is, in her ego, in her astral body, lives completely outside herself; they radiate completely out into the sphere from which her pain comes. The soul is torn out by the pain. The body is still permeated by the forces of the ego and the astral. The form remains, the form holds firmly together. She becomes a statue, Niobe.

Take the opposite case: there is no reason at all for the ego and the astral body to leave the physical and etheric bodies, and yet they are driven out because the physical and etheric bodies are destroyed from the outside, because they are taken from the ego and the astral body. So the ego and the astral body have to leave. But in that the physical body and ether body are destroyed from the outside, they take on a form which, on the one hand, follows the destructive force and, on the other hand, makes it literally visible how the ego and the astral body are pushed out. With Niobe, this does not have to be the case; there it is suddenly there. But suppose that Niobe, instead of gazing at the field of corpses of her offspring, did not rush out of her physical and etheric bodies, but that something happened to her physical and etheric bodies that forced the soul out. Then one would not see in the physical and etheric bodies how they become statues, how they freeze, as it were, in matter, in formed matter, but one would see how the I still works in there, how the astral body still endeavors to form the etheric body. You also formed that in Greece: this is Laocoon. You can understand Laocoon when you are imbued with the realization that it is the opposite of Niobe, that the physical body and the etheric body are being destroyed from the outside and how the whole thing fights with the I and with the astral body, which are being pushed out. So that in every form, in the shaping of the mouth, in the shaping of the face, in the holding of the arms, in the forms that the fingers take, you can see from Laocoon that the situation I am talking about is being depicted.

We must come to such realizations again, because otherwise the intellectualism that has been so deeply justified for the more recent period will remove man from a true view, from a true knowledge of nature, from reality.

Just think how Lessing tried to explain the Laocoön Group. He basically explained it only in purely external terms. Of course, I say this with all due respect for the great Lessing. But if you take his explanation, it says: When a poet talks about Laocoon, Laocoon is allowed to scream, because you don't see how he opens his mouth when he screams. But when the sculptor forms him, you see how he opens his mouth. You're not allowed to open your mouth. That is purely external: the poet should do it one way, the sculptor another! Of course, Lessing's achievement is something extraordinarily significant. One can say: with all due respect, one must treat these things, but one must be clear about the fact that in Lessing's treatment of the Laocoön Group there is nothing of what now explains the whole figure of Laocoön from the situation. For this it is necessary, as I said in the introduction to these considerations, to survey in the appropriate way the forces that hold man together in his four limbs.

This overview has been completely lost in the age of intellectualism. This age of intellectualism basically no longer knew what to do with what it means to be human. And so, in the age of intellectualism, all sense of proportion was lost. This is what Goethe felt so strongly and what led him to actually loathe it when intellectualism itself extended into art. The young Goethe could not stand the whole style of Corneille-Racine art because there intellectualism forms the dramatic in an intellectualistic way.

In contrast to this, Goethe turns to Shakespeare, who creates out of all the contradictions of nature. Therefore, Goethe finds that Shakespeare is something like the interpreter of the world spirit itself. Goethe feels this very deeply because he feels this incursion of intellectualism. I have often pointed out that Hamlet can be seen as a student of Faust. That Hamlet – Shakespeare's Hamlet, of course, not Saxo Grammaticus' – could have sat at the feet of Faust in Wittenberg during the ten years when Faust led his students around by the nose, that was immediately clear to Goethe. Of course, he did not spell out the details; but anyone who would now say, “Thank God I studied philosophy, law, medicine, and, for my own good, theology,” would naturally not be able to feel an intimate pleasure when he finds, say, the Dane Prince artistically shaped in front of him, speaking the monologue “To Be or Not to Be” and speaking of that land from which no traveler has returned from, despite the fact that the ghost of old Hamlet himself spoke shortly before, who must therefore have an awfully short memory if he cannot remember at the moment he speaks the monologue that he just spoke to his father, who returned from that unknown land!

An intellectual would not do that, of course. And I have met intellectuals like that. They said: Yes, “Hamlet” was not written by a single poet either, the monologue was written by someone else and then it was all mixed up. That's how it was done with Homer too!

It can be easily proved that a whole series of people could have written “Hamlet” because of the contradictions that are everywhere, for such contradictions do in fact exist. And Goethe felt that the reality was richer than the impoverished intellectualism. And so he is perfectly understandable.

If you want to have a good laugh at everything that is terrible in “Hamlet” and what just testifies that Shakespeare can be caught on a contradiction every moment, then you just need to read Professor Rümelin, the famous Heidelberg Rümelin, who pointed out all these things in detail in his essay on Shakespeare. But there is a difference between what Goethe felt about art, to the extent that he called the speaking artist the interpreter of the world spirit, and what is handed down as science, even in Heidelberg.

And if you compare what Lessing said about Laocoön and the beautiful comments on it by Goethe, you will not find in Goethe's remarks what leads to a real understanding, because Goethe did not yet have anthroposophy, but you will find significant progress compared to Lessing's discussions.

You will discover indications everywhere in Goethe of what I have just explained. So that you can say, for example, “Everything I have said about the Laocoon Group is evident from Goethe's comments on it.” And that is why it can be said that, in the right continuation, Goetheanism necessarily leads to anthroposophy, right down to the last detail.

Certain things can only be presented if one attempts to approach the corresponding reality through images. In the face of certain things, one must refrain from speaking in the abstract, intellectualized manner to which one is accustomed today. One would not be able to present the subject I wish to speak to you about today in this intellectualized manner. This, then, is the fundamental premise for the whole kind of presentation I want to give today.

Take, let us say, a certain interior space. I want to keep things as simple as possible. Let us take an interior space that perhaps has a window here (see drawings a, b). Through this window, let us assume, light would fall into this interior space, this light would spread in different ways inside. But let us assume that the interior is filled with all kinds of permeable walls, a kind of permeable vault. So we would have an interior that is filled in the most diverse ways with such vaults, whereby the light is partially transmitted and partially reflected in the most diverse ways, so that this interior would be filled with a light that is reflected and stopped in the most diverse ways.

Now imagine that I would let vapors flow through this inner space, and then let them flow up (red). But this vapor would be alive, it would be a living, sentient being. It would flow upwards and then, let us say, have an outlet, so that it could flow away again. It would flow through this light and into this inner space, into glittering light, into light that is variously modified by these vaults, light that falls through and is reflected. The vapor would feel what it perceived in the light and then flow away. In other words, the vapor would feel what was present in the inner space as a glimmer of light and in this way would get an inner image. It would get an image in its sensation of what is inside, glimmering in the light.

Now let us assume that after some time the steam, by flowing out again, would be able to reproduce what it has experienced inside (violet). We could have a kind of instrument through which the steam would somehow, say by striking musical tones or the like, express what it has experienced inside in the glittering, glowing light. Imagine this picture.

And now I will draw this picture for you in a different way. You see, instead of the vault, I have drawn the inside of the human head, and instead of the window, the eye through which one sees, through which the impressions of light come. What I have drawn as a vault are the convolutions of the brain, the spreading nerves. The light enters there and spreads out. Instead of the vapor that I have drawn there (see page 92), imagine the inhaled air that flows up and scans what can glimmer and glisten in the brain through the light, and what then forms into thoughts in the brain. The air flows back down through the spinal canal. Instead of there being an instrument, there is the human larynx and it can give expression to what has been experienced. There you have a picture of what actually goes on in the human head.

But now we say: Now we don't do it that way, but we close the window here, creating an inner, completely dark vault. So we close the window, now we have this inner vault, and again let steam flow upwards (red). Now, not the light is perceived, which falls in (see first drawing) and is attenuated in various ways, falls back, but now the forms that are there inside are perceived as such. And as the sentient vapor rises, it will be able to perceive the forms that someone once made in there, let's say that a builder once made. So this vapor will be able to feel the actions of this builder. When the vapor then flows out, it can in turn express (red) what has been perceived as the actions of the builder.

But let us assume that this master builder had built in a very special way. Let us assume that this master builder was an extraordinarily universal master builder, and he had made what he had built in there an image of the whole universe. Then, if you just close the window, the vapor inside would sense the secrets of the whole universe. Otherwise, it perceives what glitters in from the outside; but if you close it, it perceives what is inwardly an image of the whole universe.

Imagine, then, that we have here an image of the universe (see drawing). In the human head, in the wonderful convolutions of the brain, we really do have an image of the whole universe. And if we close our senses and then let the inhaled air, which goes through the spinal cord into the head, flow through, there is a way to sense the secrets of this brain interior. But you can't just let the inhaled air sense in a disorderly, chaotic way - then you won't find out anything - but it has to be done in an orderly way.

You know, if you want to detect, say, silk, you have to feel in a certain way. You have to accommodate what you want to feel. But if you can do that, if you can accommodate what you want to feel, then you can definitely find what is there to be felt.

In the time of which I have spoken to you in these days, when people wanted to come to higher knowledge by regulating their breathing process, in the time when the old yoga system of the Orient was really in its prime — because what is spoken of today as the yoga exercise is often a mere secondary thing — there was indeed the awareness: When you inhale, when you send the air you breathe into your head, you can grasp the secrets of the universe in the image of this universe, in the particular distribution of the nervous system in your head. You just have to behave in the appropriate way with the inhalation process.

I am not speaking now of what later occurred in a decadent way, but of the original. And the original was this. One said to oneself: When one inhales and shapes the breath so that one sends it up into this inner vault of the head, which is an imprint of the whole universe, but so that one puts a sound into the inhaled air that is between a and o or between a and u. So when you breathe in the sound a-u, you shape your breath so that, just as the hand is suited to sense something on the outside, the sound is suited to sense the secret of the world on the inside. And you get it into your consciousness if you then continue this breathing process in such a way that you let it run its course in an absolutely devotional mood towards what you have sensed. When you have what you attain by inhaling, by sending out the inhaled air and sensing with it in the a-u, when you then place yourself in a devotional mood, become devoted to the world, and pour out what you have sensed there into an absolute devotion, and then letting the breathing process run its course in “m”, then in such a breathing process, which forms inwardly into “aum”, one has caught - from the reproduction, from the nervous reproduction of the universe within - the secret of the universe. And you have brought it to life, which can become conscious in the air exhaled in the sound “m”. In what I have now discussed, you have a clue to what the original yoga training started from.

This yoga training said to itself: In my head is the secret of the whole universe. I can sense it by inhaling. In inhaling, the secret of the universe is revealed through myself. I grasp it, this secret of the universe. But I can only keep it — otherwise it remains in the unconscious — if I then live in absolute devotional surrender to the universe. And so it is recognized that by shaping the inhalation process, the world word is created, that which creatively pervades and interweaves the world, and by grasping this and breathing it out in absolute devotion to the universe: inhalation is the revelation of the world word, exhalation is the inward condensation of the world word, the confession to the world word. Thus is summarized man's exploration of the World Word and man's formulation of the World Word, in that it is realized: inhalation is revelation, exhalation is confession, and “aum” is the synthesis of revelation and confession, the invigoration of the world secret within, the confession of this world secret within.

For us today, in our present epoch, the tone has moved up further. The tone is lived out in real, concrete, not in intellectualized thoughts. So that we can say: inhalation becomes thought, and exhalation becomes the willful living out of the thought. That is to say, we break down what was once inhalation as revelation and exhalation as confession into exercises of thought and of the will, and thus we receive - likewise in thoughts, but in the thoughts practiced in meditation - the revelation, and in the exercises of the will, which after all are carried out on the other side, we receive the confession to what has been revealed.

For modern man it is as follows: what has been experienced in the mere breathing process, and what has been formed into vowel sound in the inhalation process and into consonant sound in the exhalation process, is lived out in a more soul-oriented way in the inwardly contemplated thought, which is, however, permeated by the will in devotional surrender to the universe. So the process is the same, only spiritualized and internalized. But here too, the process consists in perceiving the inner experience of the universe in its secrets and confessing to this universe, to the spiritual foundation of this universe.

We can also consider the following thoughts. We can say: Man is born out of the light, and his inner being, the inner being of his head, is the result of the light. The whole nervous system is, after all, the result of light. Light is not only transmitted through the eye, but also through the other senses. The eye is only the organ that conveys light in the most fundamental sense. We cannot say of blind people that they are completely cut off from light. Light works in them; it is only their conscious perception of light that is gone.

And sound, actually lives in the whole organism. Sound lives in us. Sound does not live only in the ear; the ear is only an organ of perception for sound. When we experience a sound, we experience it with our whole organism. We always experience a symphony with our whole organism. When we listen to a piece of music, the inner process is actually the following: We bring our breathing into a very definite rhythm, into very definite musical processes, which are prompted by the composition. These formations of our respiratory system strike the forms of the brain; the way they are reflected back gives us the musical impression. There is actually always a sensing of light through sound within us.

Please bear in mind that a sensing of the light through sound is constantly taking place in us. The world of sound in us, the sounding organism, is actually a sensing organ for the light. The light is actually always the external, the sound is actually always the internal.

Thoughts – inhalation: revelation

will – exhalation: confession

Sensing the light -> the outer through sound -> the inner

Sensing world thoughts through the human will.

The inner senses probe the outer. We grasp our own nature correctly only when we see ourselves as a special being, set apart from the harmony of the spheres of the world. This being gropes in the light, and in the configurations of light the sound recognizes the essence of the world. It is only in our epoch that we actually have a sensing of world-thoughts through human will (see diagram). We sense the world-thoughts with the will. The will stands here instead of the tone. The thought stands on the other side instead of the light. As I said, these things are very difficult to express in intellectualistic-abstract forms. But what I have tried to present to you figuratively will help you to understand these things if you reflect on them a little and realize that man's standing in the world is truly such that man has in his head an image of the whole cosmos. Man is indeed, in relation to his head, an image of the whole cosmos.

As the human embryo is formed in the mother's womb, it is also initially formed as an image of the cosmos. The first thing is that, yes, in the mother's body, the human being is formed as an image of the cosmos. At first, the human being is basically a brain, an image of the cosmos. You can study the cosmos by studying the human embryo in its earliest stages. Later, what is no longer an image of the cosmos comes over him, but what must be described as follows: if you have the earth here, on it the human being, then - by taking a piece from the embryo - what powers, parallel to the surface, circle the earth in rhythms, are added. The thoracic organism is formed, which is actually created from currents that circle around the earth. You have, if you will, reproduced these currents in the ribs. The effect of the earth organism itself comes last of all. The currents are sent up from below: you have the exact expression of how these currents run in the two legs. So that I can draw the human being as currents emanating from the earth, as currents orbiting the earth, connected to his chest organization, and at the top as a head, the image of the whole universe.

What takes place in the head is actually always a reflection of the whole universe, throughout life. Man, because he has the head organization, carries within himself a reflection of the whole universe. He only has to perceive it. He would not perceive it if he were not organized from the earth to do so. Actually, the earth perceives the universe through man: the chest organism is the mediator. The inhalation is effected from the cosmos, the exhalation from the earth. The cosmos gives us pure oxygen, the earth causes this oxygen to combine with carbon and thus form the deadening exhaled air. But as this dead air is formed, it is perceived.

Comprehension always has to do with the dying part of the human being. We actually die through our comprehension; we live through the cosmos. But we would live very quickly if we were only devoted to the cosmos. The cosmos provides us with the most life during our embryonic state, then the earth's circumference gradually takes us to work, and later on what flows up from the earth. In this way, the cosmos imparts to our organism the life it gives us until the quantum of life that the cosmos gives us is used up. The cosmos gives us life, the earth kills us as a physical organism and also as an etheric organism. It is just that the cosmos has its share in our etheric organism, while our earth has its share in our physical organism.

If you consider all this and say to yourself: once upon a time a regulated breathing process was carried out to cultivate higher knowledge, for the purpose of exploring the secrets of the universe within man, then you will realize how, in the times of original human endeavors, man inwardly felt inwardly, how he is connected with the whole universe, and how he wanted to experience the word of the universe through the inhalation process, wanted to sacrifice to the word of the universe through the exhalation process; how he wanted to place himself in the yoga breathing in the world process with his consciousness. Unconsciously, of course, he is always part of this world process. From the external description of this yogic breathing given today, one does not really gain any real knowledge of what was actually striven for with it. But one does gain such real knowledge by penetrating to such knowledge through today's anthroposophical spiritual science. People have no documents about the way it originally was. In the periods for which we have documents, these things no longer existed in their original form. We must arrive at the real secrets of the origin of man on earth without documents, otherwise we must abandon the attempt. So anyone who wants to find out about things only through external documents that have been preserved from older times will not find out about them, but only someone who can look back on much more original conditions than those that are attested by external documents. The secret of the oriental Aum prayer, if I may call it that – I might just as well say the Aum formula of knowledge, for both were contained in it – can only be grasped if one really knows the connection between man and the world in inhaling and exhaling. When one knows that the air, which otherwise gives no particular sounds, is formed into certain sounds as soon as one has differently tuned strings, that in the same way the inhaled air, which one sends with the Aum sound through the brain, inwardly expresses the whole secret of the world, when one knows this, then one knows the connection between man and the universe. One gropes for how one actually came into being. Before his conception, the human being lived in the spiritual-soul world, and in the spirit world. But now, as he descends, he passes through the entire configuration of the cosmos in the ether, gathering the ether. In this moment, he takes in all the secrets of the universe and gradually imprints them on his brain. And the very young child actually imprints what the soul has experienced of the total mystery of the universe, little by little, into the brain. And later on, this secret can be found again when one strives to experience this cosmic secret inwardly – in the breathing air in ancient times and now with the thought.

The power of thought, which is nothing other than a rarefied form of the power of breathing, also configures itself when it is truly channeled through the brain. Modern man does not do this. Modern man does not actually direct the power of thought through the brain, but he hears the words spoken in his language everywhere, and in them the thoughts also live, and then he passes through himself what he inwardly repeats from his national heritage. And in doing so, he acquires no inner knowledge at all, but at most writes books about the fact that one has only language, and cannot recognize anything through language. He then writes a critique of language because he has no idea what the power of thought encounters, because he only knows what is, so to speak, recorded in words. The modern human being is, after all, only a sounding board for words. And if he is then perceptive, like Fritz Mauthner, then he writes books about it, that words actually contain nothing of the essence of the world.

But with that you don't get close to the human being. And you don't get close to the world, especially not to the relationship between the human being and the world. You have to be clear about the fact that it is a profound truth that the human being is “human” through the divine breath, through the inhaled air. Because through that, through this inhaled air, he discovers the whole world within himself, he discovers how he is a microcosm.

If you reflect on what I have just explained today, you will see that you will gradually come across very significant connections. You just don't have to believe that it was a quirk that I initially just painted a picture. It is necessary not to characterize these things with our abstract words, but to try to approach them through images.

I believe I have given you a very important chapter of anthroposophical spiritual science, which I will develop further tomorrow.

Published in Anthroposophy Today, No. 4, Winter 1975 and/or 1987. It is the second of twelve lectures in the volume The Sun Mystery ... Death, Resurrection, and is also known as Mystery of Golgotha and its Relation to the Sleep of Man.

Spiritual Science cannot hand people something which, once assimilated, is enough for the rest of life. I have often pointed out that there exists no short summary of a world view which can be kept at hand in one's pocket. In place of ready formulas, science of the spirit provides something with which the human soul must repeatedly unite itself, which must be repeatedly inwardly assimilated and digested. External truths such as those provided by natural science we can, if we have a good memory, take in and then possess them once and for all. That is not possible with spiritual-scientific truths, the reason being that the truths of natural science are lifeless concepts. The laws of nature are dead once they have been formulated into concepts, whereas spiritual-scientific truths are living concepts; if we condemn them to lifelessness because we accept them as if they were external truths, then they provide no nourishment; then they are stones the soul cannot digest.
—Rudolf Steiner, Aspects of Human Evolution, Lecture VIII, Berlin 24 July 1917

Waking life is the state of consciousness that is most familiar to mankind, but within this sphere the problems of existence are not unveiled. If this waking consciousness, as it serves us for ordinary life and knowledge, could solve the problems of life without further ado, such problems would no longer exist. Their solution would be a matter of course. Human beings would never come to the point of questioning. The fact that someone asks about the deeper foundations of life and, while not perhaps coming to the point of definitely formulating questions as to the problems of life yet retains the longing to know something that ordinary consciousness cannot yield, proves that from the deepest foundations of the human soul, though in a more or less unconscious way, something arises which indeed belongs to the human being, but which must first be sought if it is to rise up into the light of consciousness.

This leads those who do not observe life sufficiently closely into speculation and into the forming of all kinds of philosophies which eventually prove to be unsatisfying. But anyone who observes the phenomena of life with a certain impartiality will soon realise that, in the sleeping condition, as opposed to the waking condition of consciousness, something is concealed, and that an understanding of life may result from an understanding of the sleeping condition.

We have often spoken of these things, but it is necessary to return to them again and again, for Anthroposophy can only be understood when the attempt is made to approach facts from the most varied points of view.

Out of the state of sleep there emerges first the life of dreams. This dream life consists of pictures, and if one pays attention to this life of dreams, it is easy to observe that its pictures are related to ordinary life and consciousness. Even if it can often be said that things are dreamed of in a way in which the dreamer has never experienced them, I would answer: the parts out of which the dream is made up, the details of the pictures, are all the same taken from ordinary consciousness.

It is different with regard to the dramatic element of the dream, to the way in which the dream, as it grows in intensity, evokes feelings of anxiety, of joy, of compulsion. The meaning of the course taken by these dream pictures lies more deeply within human nature, and we can understand this when we consider the following example. A man may dream, for instance, that he is walking along a road and comes to a mountain. He passes into a cave in the mountain. At first it is dusk, and then it gets darker. An unknown impulse urges him to go farther; he has a sense of uneasiness and this increases till he stands there in a state of terror, let us say, of falling into some inner chasm or the like. He may then wake up in this feeling of terror, for it has lasted until the time of waking.

Again, we may dream that we are standing somewhere and a man is approaching us from a distance. He comes nearer and nearer, and when he is quite close it appears that he is preparing to make an attack. There is an experience of increasing anxiety. The other man comes still nearer and the harmless instrument which he had shown us from afar changes into a murderous weapon. The dream transforms things in this way. Anxiety becomes terror, and once more we awake full of this terror which continues into waking life.

Here we have two entirely different pictures. In the first dream we have a series of pictures which led us into the mountain cavern, and in the second a series of pictures connected with an approaching enemy. The soul-experience has been the same although the picture sequence has been quite different. What the soul has lived through is something entirely different from what is consciously experienced on waking. The pictures in themselves are not the essential thing. The point is the inner drama through which the soul passes; how there was first an impulse—or something that approached the soul in the place of an impulse—how this passed over into feelings of anxiety and terror, and how at last the dreamer came to the point of rousing himself out of sleep and returning to ordinary consciousness. Forces that increase in intensity are there behind the dream and these forces clothe themselves in pictures. The forces are not perceptible but they are the essential factor.

I might multiply these two picture sequences many times, for the same soul content may be clothed in 10, 20 or a hundred different pictures. Thus we must say that here is something that takes place in the soul which the human being does not observe and of which the person knows nothing. Only the pictures are known. These pictures are experienced in dream consciousness, but the essential thing is the process of intensification: first anxiety, then greater anxiety, and lastly actual terror. The dream pictures are more or less taken from ordinary life—the mountain, the cavern, the approaching enemy, his weapon—all these are borrowed from life. The pictures derive their content from life, but this is only the clothing.

But now when, through what I have often described as Imaginative consciousness, we have the power to remain behind this clothing, building no pictures of this kind, but remaining with Imaginative consciousness within the forces of the soul which have given rise to the anxiety, fear and terror, then something quite different happens.

When a person sleeps, the astral body and Ego are outside the physical and etheric bodies. In normal circumstances when human beings awake, they re-enter the etheric and physical bodies very rapidly; but when, in somewhat abnormal circumstances, someone does not immediately penetrate into the physical body, but before entering it penetrates more intensely into the etheric body, then these pictures are formed out of life. For in ordinary consciousness there is no conceptual activity in actual sleep. The dream pictures arise only at the moment when someone is penetrating into the body and passing through the etheric body, or at the moment of falling asleep when, on leaving the physical body, the sleeper lingers in the etheric body. These dream pictures taken from ordinary life are formed only in the intermediate conditions. Imaginative consciousness, however, enables human beings to live in those forces of the soul which stand behind the dream while the person is wholly outside the body. The individual lives then in a different world of reality, a world which is passed through between falling asleep and awaking. Between falling asleep and awaking human beings live in this world without consciousness. You can picture this to yourselves as though a man sank under water, and there, losing all consciousness, can only regain it when the waters bear him to the surface and make him free again. The same thing that there takes place in a physical sense takes place in the soul when people sleep. They dive down into the spiritual world and there lose consciousness. They pass out of the body with their soul and lose consciousness. On waking they rise up again and regain consciousness, and this re ascent is the entrance into the body. When, as has been said, someone does not enter the body immediately, but becomes aware of the passage through the etheric body, there arise the pictures of the dream. But when we reach a stage where the appearance of such dream pictures is no longer allowed and, existing wholly outside the physical body in the spiritual world, we perceive pictures, these are no longer arbitrary pictures but are such as you will find in the description of world-evolution in my Occult Science. All such descriptions as those given in Occult Science originate in the way just characterised.

If it is asked what is to be found in Occult Science, the answer must be: ‘Thoughts are there’. These thoughts can be studied. I have emphasised again and again that the healthy human intellect can reflect upon these thoughts. Thoughts are there, but they are not ordinary thoughts: they are thoughts which are creatively active in the cosmos. Human beings can live in these thoughts when they stand on the other side of the threshold leading into the spiritual world. They can live in these thoughts which are active in the cosmos. This is the first thing that they will find when they enter the super-sensible world.

Picture to yourselves someone asleep. During sleep, processes of the greatest intensity and far-reaching effect take place in the soul. Nothing is known of all this because in sleep the person is without consciousness. In the morning the person re-enters the physical body, diving down instantaneously into it. The eyes are used to perceive light and colour, the ears to hear sounds, and so on. The person becomes conscious. But there is this intermediate state where, before entering directly into the physical body, the person enters the etheric body. Then the dream arises. But should that person become conscious before penetrating into the etheric body, he or she would then be conscious in the outer ether which fills the whole cosmos; there would be consciousness of what is described in Occult Science.

If, for example, you were to become conscious in the middle of the night without returning to your physical body, so that this physical body rose up before you and you were to look upon it—for it would then be visible—you would become conscious of this cosmology, of what I have described in Occult Science. What is there described may be called the formative forces of the cosmos, or cosmic thoughts. Just as people have their own thoughts in waking life, they can now say: ‘The Earth has originated in such and such a way; it has passed through a Moon condition, a Sun condition and a Saturn condition’—as I have described in Occult Science.

This kind of perception in the spiritual world is only one of three existing kinds. When human beings consider their waking condition of consciousness, they know that in this consciousness they can distinguish between thinking, feeling and willing. But just as the waking consciousness has these three states, so also the night consciousness, which in an ordinary way is an unconscious condition so far as the human being is concerned, has its three states. In the period between falling asleep and awaking people are not always in the same condition any more than they are during the period of waking consciousness. A person is awake when thinking or feeling or willing; consciousness can also function in three conditions during sleep. Imaginative consciousness is only able to behold the cosmic formative forces if we have first acquired consciousness and knowledge of them. In sleep we all live within these formative forces of the cosmos, within the cosmic thoughts; just as man is immersed when he jumps into water, so is everyone immersed, in sleep, in the formative forces of the cosmos.

Besides this life within the formative forces of the cosmos there are two other conditions of the life of sleep, just as in waking life the human being not only thinks, but feels and wills. Thinking, the possession of thoughts, corresponds in sleep to the life of the cosmic formative forces. This means that, when we become conscious in the lightest sleep, we are living in the formative forces of the cosmos. It is as though we were swimming through the cosmos from one end to the other, floating through thoughts—thoughts which are, however, forces. In this lightest sleep we float through the thought-forces of the cosmos. But there is also a deeper sleep—a sleep from which nothing can be brought into the waking life of the day unless we have practised special exercises of the soul. A person can bring back something into the waking life through the dream only from the lightest sleep, but, as I have already said, these dream-pictures are not authoritative, for the same dream can be clothed in the most varied pictures. In very light sleep we can always dream, that is, we can always bring something over into consciousness; we can feel that we have had at least some experiences in sleep. This is, however, only the case with the very lightest kind of sleep. Of deeper sleep nothing can be known until we can enter it with Inspirational consciousness, and then we become aware of more than is described in Occult Science. In that work I have, of course, described something of what sounds forth from Inspirational consciousness, but let us make it quite clear—and this is a matter which can only be explained through Anthroposophy—in what way the human being experiences this transition from light sleep to that sleep from which no dreams can be brought back into the ordinary conscious life.

When sleep is so light that dreams can be brought back into ordinary life, then one who is able to look into these worlds perceives the surging, weaving thought-pictures, the cosmic Imaginations which reveal cosmic mysteries showing that human beings indeed belong to a cosmic world just as they belong to the world in which they live consciously from awakening to falling asleep. For what I have described in Occult Science is not as though one merely painted something on a surface, but everything is in perpetual movement, in perpetual activity. At a definite moment, however, pictures begin to appear in this world through which human beings pass in light sleep, though they know nothing of it. The pictures become distinct; their light is enhanced; they reveal certain realities lying behind them. The pictures fade away again, and nothing remains in the consciousness but a kind of feeling that they have died down. Then they rise up again, and in this alternation of activity and withdrawal, something appears which can be called the harmony of the spheres, cosmic music. Thus cosmic music does not reveal itself only as melody and harmony but as the deeds and activities of those beings who dwell in the spiritual world, as the deeds of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, and so on.

The spiritual beings who guide and direct the world out of the spirit are seen, moving as it were through the surging sea of pictures. It is the world that is perceived through Inspiration, the second world. Let me call it the revelations of spiritual cosmic beings. And this world of the revelation of spiritual cosmic beings is the second element of sleep, as feeling is the second element of waking consciousness. Thus during sleep not only does the human being enter the realm of cosmic thoughts, but within these flowing cosmic thoughts there are revealed the deeds of cosmic beings who belong to the spiritual world.

In addition to these two conditions of sleep there is yet a third of which human beings have as a rule no sort of awareness. They usually know that they can sleep lightly, and they know also that dreams emerge from this light sleep. They know that there is a dreamless sleep. But the utmost that they can know of this third condition of sleep is that on awakening they may be conscious of the fact that, during sleep, they had been faced with some difficulty, with something which they must conquer in the first hours after awaking. I am sure that many of you are familiar with this feeling in the morning, where one knows that one has not slept quite in the ordinary way, but that something was there which has left a certain sense of difficulty, that will take some time to overcome when one regains consciousness in the morning. This is an indication of that third condition of sleep, the content of which can be apprehended only through Intuition. It is a condition which is of great significance to the human being.

When they are in the lightest sleep human beings are still actually concerned with a great deal that belongs to the experiences of waking consciousness. In a certain sense they still participate in their breathing processes; they also participate, although not from within but from without, in the blood circulation and the other processes of the body. In the second condition of sleep they do not actually participate in the processes of their bodily life; they are concerned with a world that is common both to the body and to the soul. Some element connected with the body plays over into the soul, just as something passes over from the light into the plant when it is developing in the light of day. But when they are in the third condition of sleep, there is something within them which—if I may so express it—has become mineral, for in this state the salts of the body are especially strongly deposited. During this third state of sleep a very strong storing up of salts takes place in the physical body—with their souls human beings live in the inner being of the mineral world.

Now let us imagine that the following experiment may be made. You lie down in bed and fall into a light sleep from which dreams may emerge into ordinary consciousness. You pass over into a deeper sleep from which no dreams proceed, but in which the soul is still connected with the physical body. You then enter into a sleep in which strong accumulations of salts take place in the physical body. The soul can have no relation to what is thus taking place in the body. However, if you had placed beside your bed a mountain crystal, it would be possible for you to enter with your soul right into the inner being of the crystal; you would perceive it from within outwards. This is not possible either in the first or in the second condition of sleep. In the first state of sleep, the content of which can enter into the dream, you would, had you dreamed of the crystal, still perceive it as some kind of crystal—it would certainly be a shadowy experience, but something of the nature of a crystal would be there. In the second state of sleep the crystal would be experienced in a less definite sense; and if you could then still dream—that is not possible in the ordinary way but we will imagine it to be so—then you would have the experience that the crystal becomes indefinite and forms itself into a kind of sphere or ellipsoid, and then recedes again. But if you could dream in the deepest sleep—that is, if you could bring into it the consciousness of Intuition—then out of this deepest sleep, this third condition of sleep, you would so experience the crystal that it would seem as though inwardly you followed these lines of form to the apex, and back again. You would experience the inner being of the crystal; you would be living within it. And so also in the case of other minerals. Not only would you experience the form, but also the inner forces. In short, the third condition of sleep is one which lifts human beings wholly out of their bodies and places them within the spiritual world. In this third stage of sleep we live with the essential being of the spiritual world itself. That is, we stand within the essence, within the being, of Angeloi, Archangeloi and of all those beings whom we otherwise perceive outwardly, in their manifestations. Between waking and sleeping we see with our sense consciousness, as it were, the external manifestations of the Gods in nature. During sleep we enter either the world of pictures, in the first condition, or into the world of manifestation, the revelation of spiritual beings, in the second condition. And when we reach the third condition we live within the divine spiritual beings themselves.

Thus, just as in our waking consciousness we live the life of thinking, feeling and willing, so during sleep we either flow with the cosmic thoughts, or out of these cosmic thoughts the deeds of divine spiritual beings are revealed, or these spiritual beings so take us up into themselves that we rest within them with our souls. Just as thoughts and ideas are for the waking consciousness the clearest and most definite things of all, while feeling is darker and really a kind of dreaming, and willing the condition of the greatest insensibility—as it were a kind of sleep—so we have these three degrees of the sleeping consciousness. We have the sleep in which ordinary consciousness experiences the dream and a higher clairvoyant consciousness the cosmic thoughts; we have the second state of sleep which for the ordinary consciousness remains hidden, but so appears to the consciousness of Inspiration that everywhere the deeds of divine, spiritual beings are revealed; and we have the third state of sleep, which to intuitional consciousness is life within the divine, spiritual beings themselves. This can be expressed by saying that we dive down, for instance, into the inner being of the minerals. This third state of sleep has, however, yet another element of great significance for the human being.

In the second stage of sleep, as I have said, we find in the surging pictures, alternately appearing and disappearing, the cosmic being of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and so on. But we find ourselves as well. We find ourselves as beings of soul; not, however, as we now are, but as we were before birth, before conception. We learn to know how we have lived between death and a new birth. This belongs to this second world. And every time we pass through dreamless sleep, we live in this same world in which we lived before we descended into our physical body. But when we pass over into the third condition of sleep and are able to awake there, when the consciousness of Intuition awakes, then we experience our destiny—our karma. We know then why certain capacities are ours in this life as the results of a previous one. We know why in this life we have been led into connection with this or that personality; we learn to know our destiny, our karma. We can learn to know this destiny—and I speak now from another point of view—only when we are able to penetrate into the inner being of the minerals. If we are able to see the crystal not only from without but from within—naturally we must not break it up, for that would still be to see it only outwardly, but we must feel fully within it, in the way I have described—when we thus see the crystal from within, we can understand why this or that blow of destiny has befallen us in life. Take any kind of crystal—take an ordinary salt-cube. We look at it from without. That is how it is perceived in ordinary consciousness. Life then remains impenetrable. But if we are able to penetrate within it—the size in space has nothing to do with it—when we look at it from within, looking around in every direction, we are in that world in which we can understand our destiny. We live in this world every night when we pass into the third condition of sleep.

Before the Mystery of Golgotha, in the period of evolution before the appearance of Christ on Earth, human beings—we ourselves in earlier incarnations—entered very often into this third condition of sleep. But before they sank down into this sleep their Angel appeared and raised them out of it again. This is the significant thing: we can always raise ourselves out of the first state, and out of the second state of sleep, but not out of the third. Before the appearance of Christ on Earth we must have died in this third condition of sleep if Angels, or some other beings, had not raised us out of it. Since the appearance of Christ, the Christ-force has been united with the Earth. Every time that we must awaken out of this third state of sleep, the Christ-force which came to be united with the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha must come to our aid. The human being can enter into the inner being of the crystal but cannot emerge again without the Christ-Force. When we gaze behind the veils of existence, we see the significance of the Christ Impulse for the earthly life. Once again, then, I emphasise that the human being could enter into the crystal, but could not emerge again.

After the appearance of Christ on Earth, after the Mystery of Golgotha, these things were strongly felt in certain regions, for example in Central Europe, where there was still a vivid, ancient, pagan consciousness but where, nevertheless, the Christ revelation was known. It was realised that many people had died because they had fallen into this deep sleep, and that they need not have died had Christ come to their aid. This was felt, for instance, with regard to Charlemagne and Frederick Barbarossa. In spite of the fact that so far as the outer physical world was concerned Frederick Barbarossa was drowned, this feeling was there, and it was very definitely there with regard to Charlemagne.

What happened to such a soul according to the consciousness of the Middle Ages? It passed into the interior of the crystal, thence into the mountain, and there it must wait until Christ should come to raise it out of its deep sleep. All such legends were connected with this consciousness. The deep connection of the Christ Impulse with the Earth since the Mystery of Golgotha has brought it about that the world of Angeloi, Archangeloi and other spiritual beings is still able to raise human beings from this deep sleep; otherwise, when they sank into this third condition of sleep, they could not be brought back out of it. This is connected with the Christ-force itself, not with belief in the Christ-force. No matter whether a man belongs to this or that religious confession, what Christ accomplished on Earth was an objective fact, and what I am here describing as an objective fact is wholly independent of belief. I will speak of the significance of belief on another occasion, but what I am now stating is an objective fact having nothing to do with belief.

How did these things come about? Into the spiritual world itself there entered a different destiny, a destiny which I will describe in the following way. Human beings here in the physical world are born and they die; the characteristic of the divine, spiritual beings who belong to the higher hierarchies is that they are not born, neither do they die, but only undergo a transformation. Christ, Who until the time of the Mystery of Golgotha lived with the other divine, spiritual beings, resolved to know death, to descend to Earth, to become man, and within the nature of man to pass through death, thereafter to return to consciousness through the Resurrection. In the divine-spiritual world it was an event of the deepest significance that a God should experience death. We can thus say that, in the history of the evolution of the Earth, there came about the mighty event that God became man, and that through this His power manifests as I have described. The God Who became man has such power in earthly life that He is able to raise our souls out of the interior of the crystal when they have passed into it. When we speak of Christ we are speaking of the cosmic Being, the God Who became man. What, then, would constitute the antitype? The antitype would be the man who has become god. This would not, however, be an absolutely good god but, just as Christ descended into the world of men and took death upon Himself, that is, assumed a human form in order to be able to participate in human destiny, so we are led to the opposite pole—to the man who, having freed himself from death, having liberated himself from human bodily conditions, within earthly conditions becomes a god. Such a man would then cease to be mortal. He would wander about the Earth—not, of course, under the same conditions as an ordinary mortal human being who must pass from birth to death, and from death to a new birth. A man who had thus become a god would exist on Earth as a man who had unlawfully become god-like. As the Christ is a God Who has lawfully become man, we must seek His antitype in the man who has become god, who, mortal no longer, has unlawfully assumed the god-nature. Just as in the Christian tradition we have in Christ Jesus the God Who has become man in righteousness, so are we also directed to Ahasueris, the man who has become god in unrighteousness, who has laid aside the mortality of human nature. We have the polar antithesis of Christ Jesus in Ahasueris. That is the deeper foundation, the deeper significance of the Ahasueris legend. This legend narrates something that is a reality, speaking of a man who wanders over the Earth. The figure of Ahasueris is actually there, wandering over the Earth from people to people. This Ahasueris figure exists—the man who has unlawfully become god.

If we wish to gain knowledge of historical truth we must turn our attention to such matters; we should observe how beings and forces from the super-sensible world work down into the physical world; how Christ came from the spiritual world into the physical world; and further how again the sensible world works back into the super-sensible. We must recognise in Ahasueris a real cosmic force, a real cosmic being. A consciousness of this wandering of Ahasueris has always existed, though of course he can be perceived only with clairvoyant vision and not with physical eyes. The legends of Ahasueris have a true objective foundation. We cannot understand human life if we only observe it externally, as it is described in history books.

Since the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ has dwelt in our inner being. Just as when we look inwards with quickened sight we can perceive Him there, so also when we look at human life and the eye of vision is opened there appears this figure of Ahasueris—and this is the case in most of those in whom clairvoyance arises, as it may happen unawares to the person who steps across the threshold of consciousness. People may not perhaps always recognise him; he may be taken for something different. It is nevertheless possible for Ahasueris to appear to us, as it is also possible when we look into our inner being for the Christ-figure to shine forth.

These things belong to World Mysteries which now, in this age when many Mysteries are destined to be revealed, must be made known.

Exoteric Christianity is to be found in the Gospels and as they have been interpreted through history; esoteric, inner Christianity is the living teaching of the Risen Christ: resurrection. Today it lies in the resurrection of thinking: how dead thoughts can be awakened to life in the form of moral impulses.

The evolution of mankind is recorded in documents that have been preserved as religious records, or as other documents relating to world-conceptions. But it must be emphasized over and over again that, in addition to these records that have influenced mankind throughout history (and there is, indeed, a deep justification for this exterior influence), there are other records, which we may term esoteric records.

When people spoke in a deeper sense of a knowledge of man and of man's conception of the world, they always made a distinction between an exoteric teaching, that gives a more exterior knowledge of things, and an esoteric teaching; only those who had trained their hearts and minds accordingly, were able to penetrate into this teaching. In Christianity, too, especially as far as its central point, the Mystery of Golgotha, is concerned, we must make a distinction between exoteric conceptions and esoteric knowledge. An exoteric contemplation of Christianity, accessible to all the world, is contained in the Gospels. Side by side with this exoteric contemplation, there has always been an esoteric Christianity for those who were willing—as I have said before—to prepare their hearts and minds in an adequate way for the reception of an esoteric Christianity.

All that could be gathered of the intercourse of the Christ who had passed through death and had risen from the dead, with those of his disciples who were able to understand him, was of the greatest importance in this esoteric Christianity. You know already that the Gospels contain very little about the intercourse of the risen Christ with his disciples. But what the Gospels tell us concerning this intercourse of the risen Christ with his disciples, can indeed give us an inkling and a foreboding of something very special, that entered the evolution of the earth through the Christ who rose from the dead. But we cannot go beyond such forebodings, without an esoteric knowledge.

These inklings of a truth acquire weight and significance if we add to them Paul's utterances. Paul's words acquire a particular meaning, for he assures us that he was able to believe in Christ only from the moment in which the Christ appeared to him through the event at Damascus. This gave him the sure knowledge that Christ had passed through death and that, after his death, he was connected with the evolution of the earth as the living Christ. The event at Damascus gave Paul a knowledge of the living Christ and we should bear in mind what this impiles, when it is said by a man like Paul. Why could Paul not be convinced of the true existence of the Christ-being before the event at Damascus? We must bear in mind what it implied for Paul, initiated to some extent in the Hebrew teachings—that the Being who lived on earth as Christ-Jesus, had been condemned to a shameful death on the cross in accordance with human laws and justice. Paul could not grasp that the old prophecies referred to a Being who had been condemned lawfully to the shameful death through crucifixion. Until the event at Damascus, Paul saw in the shameful crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth the proof that He could not be the Messiah. Only the experience at Damascus convinced Paul; the vision at Damascus convinced him of the truth of the Mystery of Golgotha. In spite of the fact that Jesus of Nazareth—or better, the Being who was incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth—had undergone the shameful death on the cross, something very deep and great is implied in this confession of Paul's conviction. The traditions that still existed in the first centuries after Christ, no longer exist. They may exist, at the most, in the form of outer historical records kept by some secret society that does not understand them. We must find again, through an anthroposophical spiritual science, that which surpasses the scanty communications concerning the Christ, after the Mystery of Golgotha. This is what we must find again: What did the risen Christ tell to the disciples that were around him, and that are not mentioned in the Gospels? For, what the Gospels say of the apostles who met Christ-Jesus on the way to Emmaeus, and other things recorded of the apostles, are steeped in tradition and refer to simple souls who were unable to advance to an esoteric knowledge. For this reason we must go beyond this and ask: What did the Christ say after his resurrection to the disciples who were really initiated?

If we want to understand this, we must begin by taking into consideration the frame of mind in which men of past ages took up the real Mystery of Golgotha and how the Mystery of Golgotha changed their disposition.

When we speak of the great truths of the past connected with man's earthly evolution, a modern man finds it very difficult to understand that the first men who lived on the earth did not possess a knowledge of the kind termed “knowledge” by us. The first men who lived on the earth were able to receive the wisdom of gods through atavistic, clairvoyant capacities. This means nothing less than this: Divine beings who descended to the earth from higher worlds could impart their teachings to human beings—in a spiritual way, of course—and these, in their turn, taught other souls. In the ancient past of human evolution on earth, it was a well-known fact that men were taught by the divine beings themselves, who descended to the earth from spiritual worlds. This condition, transcending the earthly one, could be attained especially by those men who had passed through the initiation in the Mysteries, where for the most part, they were outside their bodies with their souls and were able to reveive the communications of the gods in a spiritual way, because they were not dependent on the outer form of speech, or spoken words. They did not receive these communications in a state of mind resembling today's dreaming state, but in a living intercourse with divine beings which took place spiritually, and where they received what these beings considered to be their own particular wisdom. This wisdom at first consisted of communications (if I may call them thus) of the gods concerning the abode of human souls in the divine world before descending into an earthly body. During that state of consciousness which I have just described, the gods taught human beings what the souls experienced before their descent into an earthly body through conception. Then men felt as if they were being reminded of something, and they found that the communications of the gods reminded them of their experiences in the world of the spirit and soul, before birth, i.e. before conception.

An echo can still be found in Plato that this was indeed so in ancient times. Today we can look back on a divine spiritual wisdom received here on earth by men who were in the frame of mind just described, a wisdom received—we may indeed say it in the real sense of the word—from the gods themselves. This wisdom was of a special kind: namely, of such a kind, that people—strange as it may seem today—knew nothing of death. It may seem strange to you today, yet it is so: the oldest inhabitants of the earth knew nothing of death, just as the child knows nothing of death. The people who were instructed in the way indicated by me and passed on this instruction to others who still possessed an atavistic clairvoyance, became conscious at once of the fact that their soul-being had come down from divine-spiritual worlds into a body, and that it would leave this body. They considered this an advance in the life of the spirit and of the soul. Birth and death appeared to them as a metamorphosis, as something which is the beginning and end of something. Were we to draw this schematically we might say that people saw the human soul in its progressive evolution and considered life on earth as an interlude. But they did not see in the points “a” and “b” a beginning and an end, they only saw the uninterrupted stream of the life of spirit and soul. They did see, of course, that the people around them died. You will not think that I am comparing these ancient men with animals; for, although their outer aspect resembled that of animals, these oldest of men had a higher soul-spiritual nature. I have already explained this before. But just as an animal knows nothing of death when it sees another animal which is dead, so did these ancient men know nothing of death, for they received only the idea of an uninterrupted stream in the life of soul and spirit. Death was something pertaining to Maya, the great illusion, and it made no great impression on men, for they knew life, only. Although they saw death, they knew nothing of death. For, their spirit-soul life was not ensnared by death. They saw human life only from within. When they looked at birth, human life extended beyond birth, into the spiritual. When they looked at death, the life of spirit and soul again extended beyond death, into the spiritual; birth and death had no meaning for life. Life alone was known—not death.

Men gradually came out of this frame of spirit. On tracing the evolution of mankind from the oldest times to the Mystery of Golgotha, one may say: more and more, human beings learnt to know death. They learnt to know death more and more as something that made an impression on them. Their souls became entangled in death, and out of man's feelings arose the question: what happens to the soul when man goes through death?

You see, in far distant ages people never contemplated death as an end. Their problem was at the most one dealing with the special nature of metamorphosis involved. They asked whether the breath leaves man and continues streaming, and whether the soul enters thereby into eternity; or else, they had some other conception of the way in which the life of spirit and soul continues. They thought about the nature of this continuation, but they did not think of death as an end. Only with the approach of the Mystery of Golgotha people really felt that death has a meaning and that life on earth is something that ends.This, of course, did not assume the form of a problem formulated in a philosophical or scientific way, but it entered the soul as a feeling. Men on earth had to come to this feeling, for it was necessary for the evolution of mankind that the understanding, or the intellect, should enter life on earth. But the intellect depends on the fact that we are able to die. I have often mentioned this. Man had therefore to become entangled in death. He had to become acquainted with death. The old ages in which man knew nothing of death were all non-intellectualistic. Men received their ideas through inspirations from the spiritual world and did not think about them. There was no intellect. But the intellect had to come. If we express it in a soul-spiritual way, the understanding could come only because man is able to die and carries within him all the time the forces of death. In a physical way, we might say that death can enter because man deposits salts, i.e. solid mineral substances, dead substances, not only in the body, but also in his brain. The brain has the constant tendency to deposit salt—I might say, toward an incomplete ossification. So that the brain contains a constant tendency toward death. This inoculation of death had to enter in mankind. And I might say, that the result of this necessary development—that death began to have a real influence in man's life—was the outward acquaintance with death. If men had remained the same as in the past, where they did not really know death, they would never have been able to develop an intellect, for the intellect is only possible in a world where death holds sway.

This is how matters stand, seen from a human aspect. But they can also be contemplated from the aspect of the higher hierarchies, and then they will appear as follows: The higher hierarchies contain in their being the forces that have formed Saturn, the Sun, the Moon and finally the Earth. If the higher hierarchies had expressed their teachings amongst themselves, as it were, up to the Mystery of Golgotha, they would have said: We can form the Earth out of Saturn, Sun and Moon. But if the Earth were to contain only what we have placed into Saturn, Sun and Moon it would never have been able to develop beings who know something about death, and can therefore develop the intellect within them. We, the higher hierarchies, are able to let an Earth proceed out of the Moon, on which there are men who know nothing of death, and on which they cannot develop the intellect. It is not possible for us, higher hierarchies, to form the Earth in such a way that it is able to supply the forces which lead man towards the intellect. We must rely, for this, on an entirely different being, on a being who comes from another direction than our own—The Ahrimanic Being. Ahriman is a being who does not belong to our hierarchy. Ahriman comes into the stream of evolution from another direction. If we tolerate Ahriman in the evolution of the Earth, if we allow him a share in it, he brings us death, and with it, the intellect, and we can take up in the human being death and intellect. Ahriman knows death, because he is at one with the Earth and has trodden paths which have brought him into connection with the evolution of the Earth. He is an initiate, a sage of death, and for this reason he is the ruler of the intellect. The gods had to reckon with Ahriman—if I may express it in this way. They had to say: the evolution cannot proceed without Ahriman. It is only a question of admitting Ahriman into the evolution. But if Ahriman is admitted and becomes the lord of death and, consequently, of the intellect too, we forfeit the Earth, and Ahriman, whose sole interest lies in permeating the Earth with intellect, will claim the Earth for himself. The gods faced the great problem of losing to a certain extent their rule over the Earth in favour of Ahriman. There was only one possibility—that the gods themselves should learn to know something which they could not learn in their godly abodes which were not permeated by Ahriman—namely, that the gods should learn to know death itself, on the Earth, through one of their emissaries—the Christ. A god had to die on earth, and he had to die in such a way that this was not grounded in the wisdom of the gods, but in the human error which would hold sway if Ahriman alone were to rule. A god had to pass through death and he had to overcome death.

Thus the Mystery of Golgotha meant this for the gods: a greater wealth of knowledge through the wisdom of death. If a god had not passed through death, the whole Earth would have become entirely intellectual, without ever reaching the evolution which the gods had planned for it from the very beginning.

In past ages, people had no knowledge of death. But they learnt to know death. They had to face the feeling that through death, i.e. through the intellect, we enter a stream of evolution which is quite different from the one from which we come.

Now the Christ taught his initiates that he came from a world where death was unknown; he learnt to know death, here on earth, and conquered death. If one understands this connection between the earthly world and the divine world, it will be possible to lead the intellect back gain into spirituality. We might express approximately in this way the content of the esoteric teachings given by the Christ to his initiated disciples: it was the teaching of death, as seen from the scene of the divine world. If one wishes to penetrate into the real depths of this esoteric teaching, one must realize that he who understands the entire evolution of mankind knows that the gods have overcome Ahriman by using his forces for the benefit of the Earth, but his power has been broken because the gods themselves learnt to know death in the being of Christ. Indeed, the gods have placed Ahriman into the evolution of the earth, but, in making use of him, they have forced him to come down into the evolution of the earth without completing his own rulership. He who learns to know Ahriman since the Mystery of Golgotha and he who knew him before, knows that Ahriman has waited for the world-historic moment in which he will not only invade the unconscious and subconscious in man, as in the case since the days of Atlantis (you know this through myOccult Science), but will invade also man's consciousness. If we apply human expressions to the willing of gods, we might say that Ahriman has waited with longing for the moment in which to invade human consciousness with his power. His purpose was thwarted because he knew nothing of the divine plan whereby a being—the Christ—was to be sent to the Earth, a being who underwent death. Thus the intervention of Ahriman was possible, but the sharp edge was taken off his rule. Since then, Ahriman uses every opportunity to encourage men in the exclusive use of the intellect. Ahriman has not lost all hope today that he will succeed in inducing men to use only their intellect. What would this imply? If Ahriman would succeed in convincing men against all other convictions that man can live only in his body and that, as a spirit-soul being, he cannot be separated from his body, the idea of death would seize the souls so strongly that Ahriman would be able to realize his plans quite easily. Ahriman hopes for this always. One might say, for instance, that special joy fills the heart of Ahriman—if one can speak of a heart in Ahriman's case, but this is a comparison, for I must always use human expressions in cases where other expressions should really be found—that special joy lives in Ahriman's soul since the period stretching from the forties of the 19th century until about the end of the 19th century; in the predominant sway of materialism Ahriman could cherish new hopes for his rule over the earth. In this time even theology becomes materialistic. I have mentioned already that theology has become unchristian and that the theologian from Basle, Overbeck, wrote a book in which he tried to prove that modern theology is no longer Christian. This gave new hopes to Ahriman.

An antagonism to Ahriman exists today only in the teachings like those that stream through Anthroposophy. If Anthroposophy can again make clear to men the independence of the spirit-soul being which is not dependent on the bodily being, Ahriman will have to give up his hopes for the time. The battle of the Christ against Ahriman is again possible. And we can have a foreboding of this in the Temptation described in the Gospel. But a full understanding can be gained only by penetrating into what I have often set forth, namely, that Lucifer plays a greater part in the older evolution of mankind, and that Ahriman began to have an influence on human consciousness since the Mystery of Golgotha. He had an influence also before that time, but not on the consciousness of man.

If we look at the human mind and soul we must say that the most important point in mankind's evolution lies where man learns to know that the Christ-impulse contains a living force which enables him to overcome death in himself, when he unites himself with it.

Seen from the spiritual world this implies that Ahriman was drawn into the evolution of the earth by the hierarchies belonging to Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, etc. But his claims of rulership were hedged in because they were placed at the service of the evolution of the earth. Ahriman has, as it were, been forced to enter the evolution of the earth. Without him, the gods could not have placed intellectualism into mankind and if they had not succeeded in taking off the sharp edge to Ahriman's rule through the Christ event, Ahriman would have rendered the whole earth intellectual from within and material from without. The Mystery of Golgotha is not only an inner mystical event; we must look upon it entirely as an outer event which cannot, however, be set forth according to an outer materialistic, historical investigation. It must be set forth in such a way as to show the entrance of Ahriman into the evolution of the earth, and, at the same time, the overcoming of Ahrimanism, to a certain extent. Thus we have a battle of the gods which was enacted through the Mystery of Golgotha. That a battle of the gods took place on that occasion, is contained also in the esoteric teachings imparted by the Christ to his initiated disciples, after his resurrection. If we are to designate that which existed in the form of an esoteric Christianity, we might say that in past ages of the evolution of the earth people knew of the existence of these worlds through the manifestations that I have characterized a short while ago. But these divine worlds could not tell them anything concerning death, for death did not exist in the worlds of the gods, and it did not exist for man, because he gained knowledge only of the steady uninterrupted progress of the spirit and soul through the spheres of the gods. Man came nearer and nearer to the understanding of death. By yielding himself up to the Christ, he could gain for himself a sure power which enabled him to overcome death. This is man's inner evolution.

But the esoteric element which Christ gave to his initiated disciples consisted therein, that He told them: What took place on Golgotha, is the reflection of superterrestial events and of the relationship between the worlds of the gods connected with Saturn, Sun, Moon and the present Earth, and Ahriman. The cross of Golgotha cannot be looked upon as something earthly, but as something having a meaning for the entire universe—this was the content of esoteric Christianity.

Perhaps we can awaken a particular feeling in connection with esoteric Christianity: Imagine two esoteric disciples of the Christ, who progress more and more in the acquisition of an esoteric Christianity, and imagine them speaking together while they are still battling with their doubts: One of them would say more or less the following words to the other one: The Christ who is teaching us, has descended from worlds which are known from the past. Gods were known in past ages, but they were gods who could not speak of death. If we had remained with these gods, we would never have learnt anything concerning the nature of death. The gods themselves had first to send down to the earth a divine being, in order to learn something concerning death though one of their own ranks. After His resurrection, Christ teaches us what the gods had to fulfill in order to guide the evolution of the earth to a right end. If we keep to him, we will learn something that men could not learn until then. We learn what the gods did behind the scenes of the worlds's existence in order to further the evolution of the earth in the right way. We learn how they brought in the forces of Ahriman, without allowing them to be of harm to man, but to be of use to him. What the initiated disciples received as the esoteric teaching of the risen Christ was something deeply moving. A disciple, such as the one described above, could only have continued by saying: Today we would know nothing at all concerning the gods, for we would be in the meshes of death had Christ not died and risen, and had He not taught us, after His resurrection, the experiences of the gods concerning death. As human beings, we must immerse ourselves into a period of time in which we can no longer know anything of the gods. The gods found a new way of speaking to us. This way went through the Mystery of Golgotha. The essential knowledge conveyed to the disciples through the Mystery of Golgotha, was that men could again approach the divine worlds which they had left. In the first period of the Christian evolution, the disciples were permeated by this stirring teaching. Many a one, whom history barely mentions, bore within him the knowledge which he could have gained only because in the early times he had enjoyed the teaching of the risen Christ himself, or else because he was connected in some way with the teachers who had been taught by the Christ.

Later on, all these things were exteriorized. They were exteriorized to such an extent that the first heralds of Christianity attached great value to the fact of being able to say that they were the disciples of one who had been taught by a disciple of the apostles. It was a continuous development, for he who imparted the teaching, had known one who had seen an apostle, i.e. one who had known the Lord himself, after his resurrection. In the past, some value was still attached to this living development, but the form in which it reached a later mankind was already exteriorized. It had assumed the aspect of an outer historical description. But, essentially, it goes back to what I have just set forth. The incorporation of the intellect, which began already, and particularly, during the fourth and fifth centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha, and underwent a special change in the fifteenth century—the beginning of the fifth post-atlantean epoch—this development of the intellect brought about the loss of the ancient wisdom which enabled man to grasp something of the spiritual truths, whereas the new wisdom was not there. To a certain extent, men forgot for a whole age everything that had an esoteric significance in Christianity.

As stated, some records dealing with this esoteric knowledge remained in the keeping of secret societies, the members of which no longer understood the content of these records—in our age, certainly not. These records really refer to the teachings that were imparted by the risen Christ to some of his initiated disciples.

Suppose that the ancient Hebrew teaching had not received new life through Christianity—then, Paul's conviction before the event at Damascus would have been justified. For, Paul more or less accepted the view that there is an old traditional teaching, which existed originally as a divine-spiritual revelation given to men in a distant past, in the spiritual form which I have described. Then, this was preserved in written records. Amongst the Hebrews, there were scribes who knew what was contained in the records from out of the ancient wisdom of the gods. The sentence that condemned Christ-Jesus to death came from such scribes. While he was still Saul, Paul looked up to this original divine wisdom of the past and thought that this ancient wisdom was the source of the knowledge which came streaming down even to the scribes of his time. The fact that prominent men took up the calling of a scribe, could, however, bring this divine wisdom only as far as the pronouncing of righteous sentences. Impossible—quite impossible—for an innocent man to be condemned to death through crucifixion! Especially if things took the course they did take during the trial of Christ Jesus. This was the course of Paul's thoughts. Only the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, was already entangled instinctively in quite another world-conception and could utter the pregnant sentence: What is Truth? Paul, as Saul, could not possibly imagine that what had taken place according to a righteous judgement, might not be truth. What a conviction had to be gained by Paul? The conviction that there can be error in the truth which used to come streaming down to men from the gods, for men have changed it into error—into an error so strong, that the most innocent of all had to pass through death. The original divine wisdom streams down as far as the wisdom of the scribes, who were the Hebrew contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha. This wisdom can only contain truth—thought Saul. But he had to think otherwise. When Paul was still Saul, he used to say: If he, who died on the cross, is indeed the Christ and the Messiah, this current of wisdom must contain error in its truth, and error brought Christ to the cross. That is, man must have turned the old divine wisdom into error. Naturally, only the actual fact that this is so, indeed, could convince Saul. Only Christ himself could convince him, by appearing to him in the event at Damascus. What did this mean for Saul? It meant that a divine wisdom no longer existed, for the Ahrimanic element had entered into it.

Thus Paul reached the point of seeing that mankind's evolution had been seized by an enemy and that this enemy is the source of error on earth. In bringing the intellect, he brings also the possibility of error, and, in its greatest aspect, this error is responsible for the death on the cross of the most innocent of all. First, this conviction must be gained—that He who has no stain upon him, died on the cross. This enabled men to see how Ahriman crept into the evolution of humanity and how a super-sensible, superterrestial event existed in the evolution of the Ego, through the enactment of the Mystery of Golgotha. An esoteric fact can never be merely mystical. It is always an enormous mistake to explain mere mysticism as esotericism. The esoteric knowledge is always a knowledge of facts which take place, as such, in the spiritual world, and remain hidden behind the veil of the physical world. For, behind this veil, the adjustment between the divine world and Ahriman takes place, as enacted in the death on the cross of Christ-Jesus. Paul felt that error, leading to the death on the cross, can only enter a world wherein man is seized by the Ahrimanic powers. And when he had understood this, he learnt the truth of esoteric Christianity.

Paul was undoubtedly one of those who belonged, in this sense, to the initiates. But initiation gradually died out, through the growing influence of intellectualism. Today we must return to a knowledge of esoteric Christianity: we must know again that Christianity does not only contain what is exoteric, but goes beyond the forebodings that can be awakened through the Gospels. Today very little is said concerning an esoteric Christianity, but humanity must return to this knowledge, which is not based on outer documents. We must learn to fathom what the Christ himself taught to his initiated disciples after his resurrection, and we must take for granted that he could impart such teachings only after having passed through an experience, here on earth, which he could not have had in the divine world—for until the Mystery of Golgotha death did not exist in the divine worlds. No being of the divine worlds had passed through death—Christ is the first-born who passed through death from the world of the hierarchies, connected with the evolution of the Earth that went through Saturn, Sun and Moon.

The secret of Golgotha is the inclusion of death into life. Before Golgotha, the knowledge of life did not include death. Now death became known as an essential part of life, as an experience which strengthens life. Humanity went through a weaker form of life when nothing was known of death; humanity must live more forcefully if it wants to pass through death and yet remain alive. Death, in this connection, is also the intellect. Men possessed a comparatively weaker sense of life when they had no need of the intellect. The older people who obtained their knowledge of the divine worlds in the form of images and inner manifestations, did not die inwardly. They always remained alive. They could laugh at death because they remained alive inwardly. The Greeks still relate how happy the ancients were because, when death approached them, they became so dazed within, that they hardly noticed it. This was the last remnant of a world-conception that knew nothing of death. Modern man experiences the intellect. Intellect renders us cold and dead within. It paralyses us. When our intellect is active, we do not really live. We must feel that when we are thinking, we are not really alive, that our life is poured into the empty pictures of our understanding. A strong life is needed in order to experience the living activity contained in the lifeless images formed by our intellect, a creative, living activity inspite of all. A strong life is needed to reach the sphere where moral impulses flow out of the force of pure thinking, and where we learn to understand the freedom in man, through the impulses of pure thinking.

This is what I tried to set forth in my Philosophy of Freedom, which is really an ethical conception, and tries to show how dead thoughts can be awakened into life in the form of moral impulses, and thus be led to resurrection. An inner Christianity is undoubtedly contained in this Philosophy of Freedom.

With these explanations I wished to place before your souls, from a particular aspect, something concerning an esoteric Christianity. This age, which is so full of disputes concerning the nature of Christianity in an exoteric, historical sense, needs an esoteric Christianity—it is necessary to point out the esoteric teachings of Christianity. I hope that they will not be taken lightly, but with the needed earnestness and responsibility. When speaking of such things, one feels how difficult it is to clothe these experiences in the words of modern speech, which has already become abstract. For this reason, I have tried to attune your souls by describing the inner processes of man in the form of images, in order to form a thread leading from the single human being to that which constitutes, in an esoteric sense, the historical evolution of humanity, which is contained, as something essential, in the Mystery of Golgotha.

Exoteric Christianity is to be found in the Gospels and as they have been interpreted through history; esoteric, inner Christianity is the living teaching of the Risen Christ: resurrection. Today it lies in the resurrection of thinking: how dead thoughts can be awakened to life in the form of moral impulses.

The story of the evolution of humanity is preserved in ancient records mostly either of a religious or philosophical character. But it must be emphasised that as well as these records which have had a deep and good influence upon mankind through the ages, there exists what we may call esoteric knowledge.

Wherever the deeper aspects of human knowledge and human thought have been studied, a distinction has always been made between exoteric teaching (concerned with the more external side of things) and esoteric teaching which is accessible only to those who have undergone the necessary inner preparation. And so in the case of Christianity itself, especially in respect of the spiritual kernel of Christianity—the Mystery of Golgotha—a distinction must also be made between exoteric and esoteric knowledge. The exoteric teaching is contained in the Gospels and is there for all the world; but side by side with this exoteric teaching there has always been an esoteric Christianity, available to those who have prepared their minds and hearts to receive it.

In this esoteric Christianity the teaching of greatest moment is that concerning the communion between the Risen Christ—the Christ Who has passed through death—and those of His disciples who were able to understand Him. The Gospels, as you know, make only brief references to this. What the Gospels say of this communion between Christ after His Resurrection and His disciples does indeed enable them to surmise that something of the deepest import to earthly evolution came to pass through the Resurrection; but unless the step is taken into the realm of esoteric teaching, the words can be little more than indications.

The avowal of Paul, of course, is of the greatest importance, for Paul testifies that he was only able to believe in Christ after He had appeared to him at Damascus. Paul knew then, with absolute conviction: Christ had passed through death and in His life now, after death, is united with earthly evolution. We must reflect upon the significance of the testimony which came from Paul when, through the event at Damascus, the reality of the Living Christ was revealed to him.

Why was it that before the vision at Damascus Paul or Saul as he then was—could not be convinced of the reality of the Christ?

We must understand what it meant to Paul—who to a certain extent had been initiated into the secret doctrines of the Hebrews—to learn that Christ Jesus had been condemned to a death of shame by crucifixion. It was, at first, impossible for Paul to conceive that the old prophecies could have been fulfilled by one who had been condemned by human law to this shameful death. Until the revelation came to him at Damascus, the fact that Jesus of Nazareth had suffered the shame of crucifixion was for Paul conclusive proof that He could not have been the Messiah. It was only after the revelation at Damascus that conviction came to Paul concerning the Mystery of Golgotha, notwithstanding the fact that Jesus of Nazareth, or rather, the Being indwelling the body of Jesus of Nazareth, had experienced a death of shame on the Cross.

It was of immeasurable significance that Paul should have proclaimed his conviction of the truth of the Mystery of Golgotha. Traditions that were still extant during the first centuries of Christendom are, of course, no longer available. At most they have survived in the form of fragments in the possession of a few isolated secret societies, where they are not understood. Anything that goes beyond the very sparse traditions concerning Christ after the Mystery of Golgotha must be rediscovered to-day through anthroposophical Spiritual Science. We have again to discover how Christ spoke after the Resurrection. What was the nature of the teaching given by Him to those disciples with whom He was in communion but of whom the Gospels make no mention? The Gospel story concerning the disciples who met Christ on the way to Emmaus, or concerning the host of disciples, has always been clothed in a form of tradition adapted for naive and simple minds incapable of understanding the esoteric truths. Going further, we must ask: What was the teaching given by Christ after the Resurrection to his initiated disciples? Before we can begin to understand this, we must think of the nature of the human soul as it was in very ancient times and of the change brought about by the Mystery of Golgotha.

A most important truth concerning the earliest periods in the evolution of earthly humanity and one which it is exceeding difficult for the modern mind to understand, is that the first human beings who lived on the Earth had no knowledge or science in the form familiar to us to-day. Because of their faculties of atavistic clairvoyance, these early men were able to receive the wisdom of the Gods. This means that it was actually possible for humanity to be taught by Divine Beings who descended spiritually to the Earth from the realm of the higher Hierarchies and who then imparted spiritual teaching to the souls of men. Those who received such teaching—for the most part they were men who had been initiated in the Mysteries—were able, through their Initiation, to live in a state of remoteness from earthly affairs; the soul lived to a great extent outside the body. In this state of consciousness men were not dependent upon oral conversation or instruction; they were able to receive communications from the Gods in a spiritual way. Nor did they receive these teachings in a condition of consciousness resembling dream-life as we know it to-day. They entered into living, spiritual communion with Divine Beings, receiving the wisdom imparted by these Beings. This wisdom consisted of teachings given by the Gods to man in regard to the sojourn of the human soul in the Divine-Spiritual world before the descent into an earthly body. The experiences of the soul before descent into a physical body through conception—such was the substance of the teaching imparted to human beings in the state of consciousness I have described. And the feeling arose in these men that they were only being reminded of something. As they received the teachings of the Gods they felt that they were being reminded of what they themselves had experienced before birth, or rather, before conception, the world of soul-and-spirit.

In Plato's writings there are still echoes of these things. And so to-day we can look back to a Divine-Spiritual wisdom once received by men on the Earth from the Gods themselves.

This wisdom was of a very special character. Strange as it will seem to you to-day, the earliest dwellers on the Earth knew nothing of death—just as a child knows nothing of death. Those men who received the teachings of the Gods and who then passed them on to others also possessing the faculty of atavistic clairvoyance—such men knew quite consciously that their souls had come down from Divine-Spiritual worlds, had entered into physical bodies and would in time pass out of these bodies. They regarded this as the onward flow of the life of soul-and-spirit. Birth and death seemed to them to be a metamorphoses, not a beginning and end.

Speaking figuratively, we should say: In those times man saw how the human soul can develop onwards and he felt that earthly life was only a section of the onflowing stream of the life of soul-and-spirit. Two given points within this stream were not regarded as any kind of beginning or end. It is, of course, true that man saw other human beings around him, die. You will not accuse me of comparing these early men with animals, for although their outward appearance was not entirely dissimilar from that of animals, the soul-and-spirit within them was on a very much loftier level.—I have spoken of this many times—As little as an animal to-day understands death when it sees another animal lying dead, as little did the men of those early times understand death, for they could only conceive of an onflowing stream of soul-and-spirit. Death belonged to Maya, to the great Illusion, and made no particular impression on them. They knew life and life only—not death, although it was there before their eyes. In their life of soul-and-spirit they were not involved in death. They saw human life only from within, stretching beyond death into the spiritual world. Birth and death were of no significance to life. They knew only life; they did not know death.

Little by little, men emerged from this state of consciousness. Following the evolution and progress of humanity from the earliest epochs to about the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, we may say: men were learning more and more to know the reality of death. Death was something that made an impression upon them. Their souls became entangled with death, and a question arose within them: What becomes of the soul when the human being passes though death?

In the very earliest times, men were not faced with the question of death as an ending. At most they enquired about the nature of the change that took place. They asked: Is it the breath that goes out of a man and then streams onwards, bearing the soul to Eternity? Or they formed some other picture of the life of soul-and-spirit in its onward flow. They pondered about this but never about death as an ending.

It was only when the epoch of the Mystery of Golgotha drew near that men began, for the first time, to feel that there is a significance in death, that earthly life has indeed an ending. Naturally, this question was not formulated in philosophical or scientific terms; it was more like a feeling, a perceptive experience—an experience necessary in earthly life because reason and intellect were to become an essential part of human evolution. Intellect, however, is dependent upon the fact that the human being can die.

It was necessary, then, for the human being to be involved in death, to know death. The ancient epochs, when men knew nothing of death, were all unintellectual. Ideas were inspired from the spiritual world, not ‘thought out.’ There was no intellect as we know it. But intellect had to take root and this is possible only because the human being can die, only because he has within him perpetually the forces of death. In a physical sense we may say: Death can only set in when certain salts, that is to say, certain dead, mineral substances deposit themselves in the brain as well as in the other parts of the human organism. In the brain there is a constant tendency towards the depositing of salts, towards a process of bone-formation that has been arrested before completion. So that all the time the brain has the tendency towards death.

Humanity had, however, to be impregnated with death. Outer acquaintance with death, realisation that death plays an important part in human existence, was simply a consequence of this necessity. If human beings had remained as they were in ancient times when they had no real knowledge of death, they would never have been able to develop intellect—for intellect is only possible in a world where death holds sway.

So it is when viewed from the standpoint of the human world. But the matter may also be viewed from the side of the higher Hierarchies, and presented in the following way.—

The Beings of the higher Hierarchies have within them the forces which fashioned Saturn, Sun and Moon¹ and finally the Earth. If the higher Hierarchies had, as it were, been holding council among themselves before the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place on Earth, they would have said: “We have been able to build up the Earth from Saturn, Sun and Moon. But if the Earth were to contain only what we have been able to incorporate from Saturn, Sun and Moon, no beings could develop who, knowing death, are able to unfold intellect. We, the higher Hierarchies, are unable to bring forth an Earth from the Moon embodiment—an Earth on which men know nothing of death and therefore cannot unfold the faculty of intellect. We, the Hierarchies, cannot so fashion the Earth that it will produce the forces necessary for the development of intellect in man. For this purpose we must allow another Being to enter, a Being whose path of development has been different from ours. Ahriman is a Being who does not belong to our hierarchy. He enters the stream of evolution by a different path. If we tolerate Ahriman, if we allow him to participate in the process of the Earth's evolution, he will bring death, and with death, intellect; the seeds of death and of intellect will then be implanted in the being of man ... Ahriman is acquainted with death; he is interwoven with the Earth, because his paths have connected him with earthly evolution. Ahriman is a knower of death; therefore he is also the Ruler of intellect.”

The Gods were obliged—if such a word is permissible—to enter into dealings with Ahriman, realising that without Ahriman there could be no progress in evolution. But—so said the Gods—if Ahriman is received into the stream of evolution to become the Ruler of death and therewith also of the intellect, the Earth will fall away from us; Ahriman, whose only interest is to intellectualise the whole Earth, will demand the Earth for himself.

The Gods were confronted with this dilemma that their dominion over the Earth might be usurped by Ahriman. There remained only one possibility, namely, that the Gods themselves should acquire knowledge of something inaccessible to them in their own worlds—worlds untouched by Ahriman; that they, the Gods, should learn of death as it takes place on Earth through One sent by them, through the Christ. It was necessary for a God to die upon the Earth, moreover for that death to be the result of the erring ways of men and not the decree of Divine wisdom. Human error would take root if Ahriman alone held sway. It was necessary for a God to pass though death and to be victorious over death.

The Mystery of Golgotha signified for the Gods an enrichment of wisdom, an enrichment gained from the experience of death. If no Divine Being had passed through death, the Earth would have been wholly intellectualised without ever entering into the evolution originally ordained for it by the Gods.

In very ancient times men had no knowledge of death. But at some point it was necessary for them to face the realisation: death, and intellect together with death, brings us into a stream of evolution quite other than that from which we have proceeded.

To His initiated disciples Christ taught that He had come from a world wherein there was no knowledge of death; that He had suffered death upon the Earth and had gained the victory over death.

When this connection of the earthly world with the Divine world is understood, intellect can be led back to spirituality. Such, approximately, was the substance of the esoteric teaching given by the Risen Christ to His initiated disciples: it was a teaching concerning death—death as seen from the arena of the Divine world.

To have insight into the depths of this esoteric teaching, we must realise that the following is known to one who understands the whole sweep of the evolution of mankind.—The Gods have gained the victory over Ahriman inasmuch as they have made his forces useful to the Earth but have also blunted his power in that they themselves acquired knowledge of death through the Christ. The Gods indeed allowed Ahriman to become part of earthly evolution but in that they have made use of him, they have prevented him from maintaining his dominion to the end.

Those who have knowledge of Ahriman as he has been since the Mystery of Golgotha and as he was before that Event, realise that he waits for the moment when he can invade, not only the unconscious, subconscious regions of man's life—which as you know from the book Occult Science, have been open to Ahriman's influence since the time of Atlantis—but also the spheres of man's consciousness. Using words of human language to describe the will of a God, it may be said: Ahriman has waited eagerly for the opportunity to carry his influence into the conscious life of man. It was an astonishment to him that he had not previously known of the resolution of the Gods to send the Christ down to the Earth—the Divine Being who passed through death. Ahriman was not thereby deprived of the possibility of intervention, but the edge of his power was broken.

Since then, Ahriman seizes every opportunity of confining man to the operations of the intellect alone. Nor has he yet relinquished the hope that he will succeed.

What would this mean? If Ahriman were to succeed in imbuing man with the conviction—to the exclusion of all others—that he can only exist in a physical body, that as a being of soul-and-spirit he is inseparable from his body, then the human soul would be so possessed by the idea of death that Ahriman could easily fulfil his aims. This is Ahriman's constant hope. And it may be said that from the forties to the end of the nineteenth century, his heart rejoiced—although to speak of a ‘heart’ in the case of Ahriman is merely a figure of speech—for in the rampant materialism of that period he might well hope for the establishment of his rulership on Earth. (Please remember that I am using expressions of ordinary language here, although for such themes others should really be found).—A measure of success in this direction was indeed indicated by the fact that during the nineteenth century, Theology itself became materialistic. I have already said that Theology has become ‘unchristian,’ mentioning that Overbeck, a theologian living in Basle, has written a book in which he has tried to prove that modern Theology can no longer truly be called Christian. In this domain, too, there was reason for Ahriman's hopes to rise.

Opposition to Ahriman really exists to-day only in such teachings as are contained in Anthroposophy. When, through Anthroposophy, man once again realises that the soul and the Spirit are independent of the bodily nature, then Ahriman must begin to abandon hope. Once again, the battle waged by Christ against Ahriman is possible. An indication is contained in the Gospel story of the Temptation, but these things can only fully be understood when it is realised that the more important rôle in ancient times was played by Lucifer and that Ahriman has only acquired the influence upon human consciousness since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. He had of course an influence upon humanity before then but not, properly speaking, upon human consciousness.

Looking deeply into the human heart, we can only say: The most important point in the evolution of earthly humanity is that at which man learns to know that there is a power in the Christ Impulse through which, if he makes it his own, he can overcome the forces of death within him.

And so the Hierarchies belonging to Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth drew Ahriman into Earth-evolution but restricted his claims for domination in that his forces were used to serve the purposes of evolution. In a sense, Ahriman was forced into the stream of Earth-evolution. Without him the Gods would not have been able to introduce intellectuality into humanity, but if the edge of his dominion had not been broken by the Deed of Christ, Ahriman would have intellectualised the whole Earth inwardly and materialised it outwardly. The Mystery of Golgotha is to be regarded not merely as an inner, mystical experience, but as an external event which must not, however, be presented in the same light as other events recorded in history. The Ahrimanic impulse entered into earthly evolution and at the same time—in a certain sense—was overcome.

And so, as a result of the Mystery of Golgotha, we have to think of a war between Gods, and this also formed part of the esoteric teachings communicated by Christ to His initiated pupils after the Resurrection. In describing this early, esoteric Christianity it must be recalled that in ancient times human beings were aware of their connection with the Divine worlds, with the worlds of the Gods. They knew of these worlds through revelations. But concerning death they could receive no communication, because in the worlds of the Gods there was no death. Moreover for human beings themselves there was no death in the real sense, for they knew only of the onward-flowing life of soul-and-spirit as revealed to them in the sacred institutions of the Mysteries. Gradually, however, the significance of death began to dawn upon human consciousness. It was possible for men to acquire the strength to wait for Christ Who was the victor over death.—Such is the inner aspect of the process of evolution.

The substance of the esoteric teachings given by Christ to His initiated disciples was that in what came to pass on Golgotha, super-earthly happenings were reflected, namely, the relationships between the worlds of the Gods belonging to Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth as they had been hitherto, and Ahriman. The purport of this esoteric Christianity was that the Cross on Golgotha must not be regarded as an expression of earthly conditions but is of significance for the whole Cosmos.

A picture may help us to feel our way into the substance of this esoteric Christianity.—Suppose that two of Christ's disciples, absorbing more and more of the esoteric teaching and finding all doubt vanishing, were talking together. The one might have spoken to the other as follows.—Christ our Teacher has come down from those worlds of which the ancient wisdom tells. Men knew the Gods but those Gods could not speak of death. If we had remained at that stage, we could never have known anything of the nature of death. The Gods had perforce to send a Divine Being down to the Earth, in order that through one of themselves they might learn the nature of death. The deed which the Gods were obliged to perform in order to lead earthly evolution it its fulfilment—of this we are being taught by Christ after His resurrection. If we cleave to Him we learn of many things hitherto unknown to man. We are being taught of deeds performed by the Gods behind the scenes of world-existence in order truly to further evolution on the Earth. We are taught that the Gods have introduced the forces of Ahriman but by turning these forces to the service of man have averted his destruction. ...

The esoteric teaching given by the Risen Christ to His initiated pupils was deeply and profoundly moving. Such pupils might also have said: Interwoven as we now are with death, we should know nothing whatever of the Gods if Christ had not died, and now, since His Resurrection, is telling us how the Gods have come to experience death. We should have passed over into an age when all knowledge of the Gods would have vanished. The Gods have looked for a way by which means they could speak to us again. And this way was through the Mystery of Golgotha ...

The great realisation which came to the disciples from this esoteric Christianity was that men have again drawn near to the Divine worlds after having departed from them. In the early days of Christendom the disciples and pupils were permeated through and through with this teaching. And many a man of whom history gives only sparse and superficial particulars was the bearer of knowledge that could only be his because he had either received teaching himself from the Risen Christ or had been in contact with others who had received it.—So it was in the earliest days of the Christian era.

As time went on, all this became externalised—externalised in the sense that the earliest messengers of Christianity attached great importance to being able to say that their own teacher had himself been a pupil of a pupil of one of the Apostles. And so it went on. A teacher had meant one who had come into personal contact with an Apostle—with one, therefore, who had known the Lord Himself after the Resurrection.

In those earlier centuries, weight was still attached to this living continuity, but in the form in which the tradition came down to a later humanity, it was already externalised, presented as bald, historical data. In essence, however, the tradition leads back to what I have just described. The inculcation of intellectualism—a process which really began about the fourth or fifth century after the Mystery of Golgotha and received its great impulse in the fifteenth century, at the dawn of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch—this evolution of intellect entailed the loss of the old wisdom whereby these things could be understood, and the new form of wisdom was still undeveloped. For centuries the essence and substance of esoteric Christianity was, as it were, forgotten by mankind.

As I have said, fragments exist in certain secret societies whose members, at any rate in modern times, do not understand to what they refer. In reality, such fragments refer to teachings imparted by the Risen Christ to certain of His initiated pupils.

Assume for a moment that there had been no regeneration of the old Hebrew doctrine through Christianity. In that case the conviction held so firmly by Paul before his vision at Damascus would have become universal. Paul was acquainted with the ancient Hebraic doctrine. In its original form it had been Divine revelation, received spiritually by men in very ancient times, and it was then preserved as Holy Writ. Among the Hebrews there were learnéd scribes who knew from this Holy Writ what was still preserved of the old Divine wisdom. From these scribes came the judgment by which Christ Jesus was condemned to death. And so the mind of a man like Paul, while he was still Saul, turned to the ancient Divine wisdom preserved by the learnéd scribes of his day who well knew all that it signified to men. Paul said to himself: The scribes are men of eminence, of great learning; judgment derived on their authority from the Divine wisdom could only be lawful judgment. An innocent man condemned to be crucified ... it is impossible, utterly impossible in all the circumstances leading to the condemnation of Christ Jesus! Such was the attitude of Paul.

It was only the Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, influenced instinctively as he was by an altogether different mentality, who could speak the momentous word: ‘What is Truth?’ While Paul was Saul, it was impossible even to imagine that there might be no truth in the execution of a lawful judgment. The hard-won conviction which was to arise in Paul was that truth once proceeding from the Gods could become error among men, that truth had been turned by men into such flagrant error that One in Whom there was no guilt at all had been crucified.

Saul could have no other thought than that the primeval wisdom of the Gods was contained in the wisdom of the Hebrew scribes living at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. In such wisdom there could only be truth ... . While Paul was still Saul, he argued that if indeed it were Christ, the Messiah, Who suffered death by crucifixion, gross error must have entered into the flow of his primeval wisdom; for only error could have brought about the death of Christ on the Cross. Divine truth must therefore have become error among men.

Naturally, Saul could only be convinced by the fact itself. Christ Himself and He alone could convince him, when He appeared to him at Damascus. What did this signify for Saul? It signified that the judgment had not been derived from the wisdom of the Gods but that the forces of Ahriman had found entrance. And so there came to Paul the realisation that the evolution of humanity had fallen into the grip of a foe and that his foe is the source of error on the Earth.

In that his foe brings the intellect to man, he also brings the possibility of error which, in its most extreme form, becomes the error responsible for the crucifixion of One Who was without sin. The conviction that the guiltless One could be brought to the Cross had to arise before it was possible for men to understand the path by which Ahriman entered the stream of evolution and to realise that the Mystery of Golgotha is a super-sensible, super-earthly event in the process of the development of the ‘I,’ the Ego, within the human being.

Esotericism is by no means identical with simple forms of mysticism. To argue that mysticism and esotericism are one and the same denotes gross misunderstanding. Esotericism is always a recognition of facts in the spiritual world, facts which lie behind the veil of matter. And it is behind the veil of matter that the balance has been established between the Divine world and the realm of Ahriman—established by the death of Christ Jesus on the Cross.

Only into a world where the being of man is laid hold of by the Ahrimanic powers can error enter in such magnitude as to lead to the Crucifixion—such was the thought arising in the mind of Paul. And now, having been seized by this conviction, recognition of the truth of esoteric Christianity came to him for the first time.

In this sense, Paul was truly an Initiate. But under the influence of intellectualism this Initiation-knowledge gradually faded away and we need to-day to acquire again a knowledge of esoteric Christianity, to realise that there is more in Christianity than the exoteric truths of which the Gospels do indeed awaken perception. Esoteric Christianity is seldom spoken of in our times. But humanity must find its way back to that of which there is practically no documentary evidence and which must be reached through anthroposophical Spiritual Science, namely, the teachings given by Christ Himself after the Resurrection to His initiated disciples—teaching that He could only give after passing through an experience which he could not have undergone in the world of the Gods; for until the time of the Mystery of Golgotha there was no death in the Divine worlds. Until then, no Divine Being had passed through death. Christ is the First-Born, He Who passed through death, having come from the realm of the Hierarchies of Saturn, Sun and Moon who are interwoven with Earth-evolution.

The absorption of death into life—that is the secret of Golgotha. Previously, men had known life—life without death. Now they learned to know death as a constituent of life, as an experience which gives strength to life. The sense of life was feebler in times when humanity had no real knowledge of death; there must be inner strength and robustness in life if men are to pass through death and yet live. In this respect, too, death and intellect are related. Before men were obliged to wrestle with intellect, a comparatively feeble sense of life was sufficient. The men of olden times received their knowledge of the Divine world in pictures, in revelations; inwardly they did not die. And because the flow of life continued they could smile at death. Even among the Greeks it was said: The agéd are blessed because with the dulling of their senses they are unaware of the approach of death. This was the last vestige of a view of the world of which death formed no part.

We in modern times have the faculty of intellect; but intellect makes us inwardly cold, inwardly dead; it paralyses us. In the operations of the intellect we are not alive in the real sense. Try to feel what this means: when man is thinking he does not truly live; he pours out his life into empty, intellectual forms and he needs a strong, robust sense of life if these dead forms are to be quickened to creative life in that region where moral impulses spring from the force of pure thinking, and where in the operations of pure thinking we understand the reality of freedom, of free spiritual activity. In the book, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, I have tried to deal with this subject. The book really amounts to a moral philosophy, indicating how dead thoughts, when filled with life, may be led to their resurrection as moral impulses. To this extent, such a philosophy is essentially Christian.

I have tried in this lecture to place before you certain aspects of esoteric Christianity. In these days where there is so much controversy with regard to the exoteric, historical aspect of Christianity, it is more than ever necessary to point to the esoteric teachings. I hope that these things will not lightly be passed over, but studied with due realisation of their significance. In speaking of such matters one is always aware of the difficulty of clothing them in the abstract words of modern language. That is why I have tried rather to awaken a feeling for these things, by giving you pictures of inner processes in the life of human beings, leading on to the esoteric significance of the Mystery of Golgotha in the evolution of mankind as a whole.

• 1. The three earlier embodiments of the Earth. See An Outline of Occult Science.

The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution is the title given to this course of lectures. However, man's experience of his inner life does not at first induce him to ask about its connection with general world evolution—at least not consciously. Yet unconsciously he does continuously ask: How do I as man belong within the evolution of the universe as a whole? It is true to say that, particularly, man's religious life has always arisen as a direct result of this unconscious questioning in the depth of the human soul. The way man through religion feels himself more or less clearly related to something eternal prompts this questioning.

Man feels self-contained within his soul; he feels himself within his experiences of the external world; i.e., in what remains within him as memory from his impressions. This calls up in him thoughts and feelings concerning the world and its further destiny and so on. When he looks at his life of will and actions he has to admit that from the deepest regions of his inner being, regions of which he has at first no conscious knowledge, there well up impulses of thinking, feeling and willing.

Man's experience when he begins to observe his inner life, when he engages in what is usually termed introspection, is of his concepts derived from sense perception, of will impulses that come to expression in external action and of memories of past events. He experiences this as something isolated within himself. However, a more penetrating insight into his own being will soon make it clear that this kind of self-observation does not satisfy the deeper needs of man's soul. In the depths of his innermost being he is obliged to ask: What is that in me which belongs to something causative, perhaps to something eternal, and which lies at the heart of all the passing phenomena before me in Nature and in human life?

There is a tendency in man to seek, at first, the deeper reality of his being in feeling and sensation. This leads him to questions which arise out of his religious or scientific knowledge such as: Where are the roots of my innermost being? Do they stem from an objective reality, a cosmic reality? Is perhaps their origin something which though external is yet akin to my innermost self? Is their nature such that they will satisfy the deepest needs of my soul to have originated from them? A person's inner mood and attitude to life will depend upon whether he is able to find answers of one kind or another to these questions which are fraught with significance for his inner life.

These introductory remarks are meant to draw attention to the fact that man's soul life harbors a contradiction. This comes to expression, on the one hand, in his feeling of isolation within his thinking, feeling and willing, and, on the other, in that he feels dissatisfied with this situation. The feeling of dissatisfaction is enhanced through the fact that the body is seen to partake of the same destiny as other objects of nature in that it comes into being and again passes away. Furthermore, since to external observation the life of soul appears to dissolve when the life of the body is extinguished, it is not possible to ascertain to what extent, if at all, the soul partakes of something eternal.

The kind of self-observation possible in ordinary life is not, to begin with, in accord with the soul's deepest needs. When eventually this contradiction, connected as it is with man's whole destiny and with the experiences of his humanity, is felt deeply enough he discovers that the surging, weaving life of soul flows towards two poles. In one direction lies the conceptual life, in the other that of the will impulses. Between thinking and will lies the sphere of feeling. He becomes aware that concepts and ideas formed, let us say, in response to external perception, are accompanied by feelings which bestow on them warmth of soul. In the other direction he becomes aware that his impulses of will are also accompanied by feelings. We determine an action in response to certain feelings. And we accompany the result with feelings of either satisfaction or dissatisfaction. We see, as it were, at one pole the life of ideas, of concepts and mental pictures, at the other the life of will impulses and in between, linking itself to either, the life of feeling.

When we observe our mental life we have to admit, if we are honest, that in ordinary life it comes about simply in response to our experiences of the external world, that is to say, in answer to the totality of our sense impressions. Indeed in a certain sense we continue our sense experiences in our inner life; we give them a certain coloring so to speak. In fact, we often reproduce them in memory with a quite different coloring from what was originally experienced in direct perception. Nevertheless, provided we do not indulge in dreams but confront our fantasies without illusion, we shall always find our conceptual life prompted by external sense perception. When we withdraw to some extent from external perception and, without falling asleep or arousing will impulses, live in our conceptual life, then all kinds of memories of external observations—often altered perceptions—arise in consciousness. But when we close, so to speak, all our senses and live in concepts only, we are quite aware of the picture character of what we experience. We feel we are dealing with images of whatever the concepts convey. We experience their fleeting nature; they enter our consciousness and again vanish. We cannot directly ascertain if they contain any reality or if they are indeed pictures only. We may assume that they are based on reality, but a reality we cannot take hold of because concepts are experienced as pictures.

Our experience of will is radically different. Ordinary consciousness cannot penetrate the will. Our consciousness can take hold of a thought or an indefinite instinctive impulse to do something, say raise our arm. The arm movement follows immediately and we see it. Two mental pictures are involved in this process, first the picture of deciding to raise the arm, then the picture of the arm raised. Of that which takes place in the will between the two concepts we have at first no consciousness at all. We are as unconscious of what takes place in our will as we are of everything in the state of sleep. As regards the will we are asleep even when awake. Our will as such escapes our consciousness when we carry out an action, whereas in regard to our concepts, while we do not know how they are related to reality, we do grasp them in lucid clarity in our ordinary consciousness.

However, we do know something about the will. When will is real and not mere wish it becomes action. It expresses itself emphatically as reality. We have a concept—i.e., a picture: I will raise my arm. Ordinary consciousness knows nothing of what happens next, but the arm is raised. A concrete process is taking place in the external world. What lives in the will becomes external reality just as processes of nature are external reality.

Concepts and ideas have a picture quality. To begin with we do not know what the relationship is between the reality and that which mental pictures express. As regards will we know quite concretely that it is connected with reality. But unlike mental pictures we cannot survey it clearly.

In between the two, lie sensation and feeling which color the mental pictures, and color also the will impulses. Our feelings partake of the lucid clarity of mental pictures on the one hand and on the other of the darkness and unconsciousness of will impulses. We see, let us say, a rose; we form a mental picture of it and turn our gaze away. We retain the rose as a memory picture. Since we, as human beings, are not quite indifferent to things we feel delight in the rose; it gives us pleasure. We feel an inner satisfaction in the existence of the rose. However, to begin with we cannot say how these feelings of pleasure and satisfaction arise within us. Exactly how they come about remains obscure to ordinary consciousness. But that they are connected with the mental picture is completely clear. The feeling tinges, colors, as it were, the mental picture. When we have a clear mental picture of the rose we also have a clear mental picture of what pleases us. The clarity of our mental pictures communicates itself to our feeling.

By contrast, an impulse of will to some action wells up from the depth of our inner being. That this is so needs only to be tested. We often find ourselves impelled by instinct to an action. Our mental picture of a deed may tell us that it ought not to be done at all. We are dissatisfied with what we are doing. Yet when we look back at our inner life we find that a definite feeling was the cause of action, a feeling of which we may disapprove, but whose origin remains in the dark unconscious depth of our inner life. Thus, our feelings participate very differently in the bright clarity of our mental life from the way they participate in the dark dullness of the life of will.

Therefore, our soul life appears threefold: as thinking—i.e., forming concepts and mental pictures—as feeling and as will. The two opposite poles, thinking and will, are completely different in character. Our mental life refers us in the first instance to the sense world. However, we take in not merely simple perceptions such as, let us say, red, blue, C sharp, G major, warmth, cold, pleasant or unpleasant smells, sweet, sour and so on. These can be directly ascribed to the sense world and so can a continuous stream of such sensations. But we also take in more complex external events. Let us say we have before us a human being; countless sense impressions stream towards us—the expression on his face, his walk, his gestures and many others. We could name a host of individual sensations. However, they all combine to form a unity which we experience as the person we see. It can be said that through our sense perceptions we experience the world.

In the narrower sense it is only the actual sense perceptions themselves that are directly connected with us. Our soul life is in touch most of all with single perceptions like red, blue, C sharp, G major, warmth, cold, etc. Yet even our more complex experiences are in the last resort arrived at through sense perception. We mentioned the example of meeting another human being; we could also think of an occurrence, in which we are not directly involved, meeting us as an external objective event. In the case of the red of the rose we know we are directly involved since we expose our eye to it. We could take a more complex example. Let us say we saw a mother giving her little son a rose. Here the event takes place apart from us, we are not so closely connected with it. We are even less in direct contact when we remember some complex event, where perhaps sense perception had no direct contact with the external object. We remember perhaps what we know about the Rose of Schiras,¹ which we have not seen but learned about some other way. We may have read about it, in which case our sense perceptions were those of printers' ink in the form of letters on paper; or someone told us about it. All such sense impressions point to something completely separate from us. In this way we can discover the difference between sense perceptions that are more closely connected with our soul life and those we know of only indirectly.

Something similar applies to the pole of will. It is an expression of will when I move an arm. What takes place is connected solely with my organism. I am in close touch with what results from my will impulse. I am as closely connected with it as I am with direct sense perception. But now consider a situation where my will impulse results not only in a movement of an arm but in my chopping wood; then what happens through my will separates itself from me. It becomes an external event which is just as much a result of my will impulse as are the arm movements, but it detaches itself from me and becomes something objective in the external world. And just think of all the complicated events that can come about through will impulses! When you now examine the matter more closely you will be able to compare what on the one hand enters into us when direct sense perceptions lead us to external events existing apart from us, and what goes out from us in that the will impulses separate themselves from the results they produce solely out of our organism. These then become external processes separated from us. Thus, are we placed within the world through the two poles of our being.

Contemplation along these lines makes us realize that we are related to the world in two different ways. We have one kind of relationship to objects and processes which enter our consciousness through our senses. They are there apart from us and we become aware of them through sense perception. We are related differently to what comes about through our will impulses. Yet that, too, is something that then exists in the world. They are both external realities. If I imagine myself out of the picture and only look at what is there apart from me, then what is left in the case of sense perceptions is the external reality. In the case of will impulses, if I think myself away and look only at what came into existence through me, then again what is left is an external reality. In both cases I am related to something that exists outside and apart from me. In the outer world, the two merge with one another.

Let us say I chop wood. First, I see the block of wood before me. Perhaps I see not merely the wood but a complex external occurrence. I see someone bring the wood and place it before me to chop. I make ready to do so. All the time I am guided by sense perceptions. First, I have a piece of wood of a certain size. I then chop it and now it is different. The change has come about through me (see diagram). Sense perceptions merge into one another, so that what occurs through me and what occurs apart from me form a continuous stream of events.

One must be able to feel how the very riddle of the soul is contained in the simple fact that, on the one hand, we see around us objects and events that are given, complete in themselves, and, on the other, things whose existence is due solely to us. One can say that this simple fact characterizes our soul's relation to its surroundings. Nothing very special has been said by this characterization, but at least a certain aspect of the riddle has been presented.

Let us now consider the problem from another aspect. We are beings who possess sense organs, through which we gain a certain insight into our surroundings. We also possess limbs that enable us to move about. Basically, all that we accomplish in the world through our will comes about by means of our limbs. Thus, we have on the one hand the senses and on the other our limbs. On the basis of all the facts presented so far, we can say that the nature of our limbs and the nature of our sense organs are also polar opposites. In the case of our sense organs the external world approaches and stops at this boundary, so to speak. The external world as such does not actually enter into us, whereas an external world has its beginning through our limbs as it detaches itself from us and continues its existence apart from us. This suggests that there must be a connection between senses and limbs.

The essential nature of man's senses can perhaps best be recognized if we consider the eye. The eye is a comparatively independent organ, set into its bone cavity. Only at the back of the eye do blood veins and nerves continue into the rest of the organism. Apart from this connection the eye is relatively independent. A whole series of physical processes take place in the eye, at least processes that can be interpreted as being physical. Speaking symbolically, we could say that light approaches and penetrates the eye and becomes modified to some extent. At present I shall not describe the physical and chemical processes as I wish to speak about soul life, not about physiology. But I want to draw your attention to the fact that the eye has a sort of independent life.

This independent life can even be compared with what takes place in a purely physical instrument, in a kind of camera obscura, which is a copy of the eye and into which light falls in a similar way. Certain processes occur which are like those in the eye, though admittedly they are not living processes like those in the eye; they do not become sensation or perception. But we can reproduce certain processes which take place in the eye and bring them to manifestation in a physical instrument. So, we see that something akin to a physical process is unconsciously taking place in a comparatively independent organ. What does enter consciousness is the external illumined object, whereas what resembles a physical process takes its course unconsciously in man, independently of him. This is due to the relative independence of man's organ of sight from the rest of his organism. Something similar could be said about the other sense organs, though it is less obvious with them. The eye was chosen because it is the most characteristic.

Thus, we see that sense perception is a relatively independent process. And when we consider the processes taking place in the eye itself (see diagram) we can actually say that even what is transmitted by nerves and blood is like a continuation of processes taking place in the external world. So much are they alike that we can reproduce them physically

as I have indicated. It is as if the external world made inroads into the inner being of man. What takes place outside continues, so to speak, into our physical body; this is one aspect of sense perception. How we unite what thus pours in like a stream from outside with our inner life, we shall speak about in the course of these lectures.

There is, however, another side to sense perception. Let us continue with the example of the eye. I do not want now to speak about the blind, but to consider lack of sight from a general human viewpoint. We shall later consider all these things more especially from an anthroposophical, spiritual- scientific viewpoint. Let us imagine being robbed of the sense of sight. It is easy to recognize that there would then be a deficiency in our inner life. We should lack all that otherwise flows in through the sense of sight. Imagine what it must be like within the soul when it is so dark because light is unable to enter. Even in ordinary life we know that to be in darkness can cause fear, especially in persons of a certain temperament. People who become blind or are born blind are not really, at least not consciously, in this position, though they do experience something similar to someone who is temporarily in darkness. The fact that vague feelings of fear are connected with the experience of darkness shows that there is a relationship between our state of soul and what streams into us through our eyes. And it is easy to see that the state of soul would in turn affect the bodily constitution.

Someone who is condemned to a certain melancholy by having to live in darkness through being deprived of light, will transfer the effect of his melancholy to certain finer structures of the eye. We must realize that man would be different if he did not receive into his organism what he does receive through his soul's experience of light. This soul experience of brightness is diffused over our whole inner being. Light permeates us to such a degree that it affects certain vascular reactions and glandular secretions. These would function differently without the refreshing, quickening effect of light weaving through the organism. Darkness, too, affects secretion and circulation but in a different way. In short, we must realize that while we are indebted to the eye for being able to form mental pictures of a certain aspect of the objects and processes in our surrounding, we are also indebted to it for a certain inner condition even of the physical body. In a sense, we are what light makes of us.

We have seen that the eye is not only a sense organ through which we receive pictures of the external world; we also experience brightness or darkness through it. This causes all kinds of instinctive processes to refresh or oppress our soul life and even our body. How we are depends upon what we experience through the sense of sight.

Let us now leave the eye and turn our attention to the lungs. The lungs, too, are in connection with the external world. They take oxygen from the external air and modify it. Our life is maintained by the breathing of the lungs. Unless we are an Indian yogi, we do not in normal life notice the function of our lungs. But it affects us differently if the lung has a healthy perception of the air or whether through illness it does not perceive the air in the right way. How we are depends upon how we breathe through our lungs. In ordinary consciousness we are not aware that we perceive through the lungs. But organically we are the way we are through the way our lungs function.

While the function of the eye—and this can be said about each of the external senses—is perception, it also has another more subtle function. This other function must be brought to consciousness before we can know that through the experience of brightness or darkness something takes place in us which is not so obvious, or radical and pronounced, as the lungs' intake of oxygen. Man is aware of what he owes to the lungs' intake of oxygen because it is a robust and strongly vitalizing process, whereas what he receives through the eye, in addition to actual sight, is a more intimate, more subtle vitalizing process. So we can say: What is strongly pronounced in an organ like the lung is only indicated in a subtle way in the case of a sense organ like the eye.

In my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment and the second part of Occult Science—An Outline you will find descriptions of exercises that will develop faculties of knowledge which otherwise lie fallow. Such exercises completely transform man's inner being. In the case of the lung the result of this transformation is that it attains a function which is similar to that of the eye, with the result that to higher vision the lung's vitalizing function retreats. Higher insight is less concerned with the effect of the breath on our organism. The lung becomes transformed into an organ of perception, not the physical lung but a finer part, the etheric part of the lung. Through the exercises we transform the finer structure of the lung into something akin to what the eye is without our doing. Nature made our eye into an organ of sight as well as an organ that sustains us. To ordinary consciousness the lung is primarily an organ that sustains. When we attain knowledge of higher worlds we transform the lung into an organ of perception. Its finer, etheric part becomes a higher sense organ. When we experience the lung's etheric nature we must describe it as a higher sense organ, for its etheric body perceives; however, inasmuch as it contains the physical lung it is also an organ that sustains and vitalizes. So you see, when we attain knowledge of higher worlds the lung, from being an ordinary non-perceiving bodily organ dedicated to growth and life processes, becomes an organ of perception in a higher sense.

The same applies to the heart and other organs, the kidneys, the stomach and so on. All man's organs can, through higher development, become organs of perception. This means that they become sense organs in their higher, etheric nature or even in their more spiritual astral nature.

When we consider our environment in relation to our sense organs we have to say: On the one hand our senses mediate perceptions, on the other they mediate vitality. When we consider our inner organs: lung, heart and so on, we find that these organs primarily sustain and vitalize us. We can, however, develop them through methods described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment', then they become sense organs. Just as we see through the eyes a certain aspect of the external physical world, its light and color, so do we become aware of certain aspects of the external spiritual world through the etheric organ of the lungs, and another aspect through the etheric organ of the heart. We can transform our whole organism into a sense organism.

To ordinary consciousness the external world presses in on man only as far as the surface of his senses, where it becomes image. To higher consciousness it presses deeper, only what presses deeper is an external spiritual world. As he attains knowledge of higher worlds, and transforms his inner organs into sense organs, man gradually becomes inwardly as transparent as the eye. The external world permeates him.

It must be realized that as long as we remain in ordinary consciousness we can only know our senses from their external aspect. But ask yourself if it is possible to acquire insight into the ethnology of all the races on earth if one knows or has heard of only three? It is not possible, for one must be able to compare. Imagine the opportunity we shall have for making comparison—also in regard to the external senses—when we are in a position to examine the nature of the inner organs as sense organs.

This leads to a quite special kind of knowledge of man. We learn of the possibilities that lie within us, of what we are destined to become. It also poses significant questions: If our lungs can become a sense organ when we take our higher development in hand, then what is the situation, for example, in regard to the eye or some other sense organ? We saw the lung develop from being a vital organ to become a sense organ. Was the eye, perhaps in an earlier evolution of the world, not yet sense organ but only vital organ? Did it at that time sustain the organism in a way similar to that of the lung today? Has the eye in the course of evolution become an organ of perception through a different process from our conscious cultivation of higher cognition?

We have seen that the possibility to become higher senses lies in our vital organs. We have seen how a sense organ comes into being. We must at least ask the question, if, during evolution, the opening of our present senses came about in a similar way. Should we perhaps trace mankind's evolution back to a time when man had not as yet turned his present senses outwards, to a time when perhaps these senses were inner vital organs and man, as regards his present senses, was blind and deaf? Man's eyes and also his ears must of course have been quite different in form and served different purposes.

We see how knowledge of man, possible through external means, is supplemented when knowledge of higher worlds is attained. Most of you will have heard me describe man's being from many different points of view. Today, by way of introduction, I have indicated certain things from yet another aspect. You will be able to see from this how spiritual science may start investigation from the most varied viewpoints and, by combining the results, arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the being of man.

It is often imagined that anthroposophical research is a straight continuation of one or two definitions of higher worlds to be found in non-anthroposophical writings. This is not the case; what is gained from one aspect can be illumined and enlarged from other aspects. These will fit together into the totality of a spiritual-scientific truth that carries within it its own proof. This approach is often severely censured because people believe that reality can be investigated from one standpoint only.

In our materialistic age someone who is accustomed to physical proof may say that Anthroposophy is not built on a firm foundation, whereas science is based on direct observation. That assertion is the equivalent to someone saying that the earth cannot possibly float freely in space—all bodies must rest on something if they are not to fall. Therefore the earth must rest on a mighty cosmic block if it is not to fall down. But the proposition that everything must be supported by the ground holds good only for objects on earth. It no longer holds good for cosmic bodies. It is folly to transfer laws that apply on earth to cosmic bodies and their interrelationships. They mutually support each other and so do anthroposophical truths. They lead us out of our habitual world into other worlds where truths mutually support each other. And, more to the point, truth supports itself.

This is what I wished to say today as introduction to these lectures. I wanted to show that it is possible, in speaking of the soul, for a spiritual-scientific method of research to take as its starting point considerations that are open to sensible interpretation by ordinary consciousness.

I could only make a beginning today in describing how higher consciousness sees the lung, for example, on the way to becoming a sense organ. However, we shall continue this line of investigation so that in the coming days we may learn more about the nature of man's life of soul and its relation to world evolution.

• 1. Shiraz: Town in southern Iran known for its roses.

I spoke yesterday about the sense organs and drew attention to the way they appear when, to our ordinary knowledge, we add what is gained through knowledge of supersensible worlds. Taking the lungs as an example I showed that the moment we rise with spiritual sight into supersensible worlds, then other organs become just as much sense organs as our present ones. We come to the conclusion that our organs are in process of evolution and transformation. This is not apparent to ordinary consciousness because we are always observing a process arrested, a process which, because we cannot survey either its earlier or its later stages, reveals only a momentary stage of its evolution.

If our advance into the imaginative world—as I termed it in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment—reveals the lung in a state of transition, from being a vital organ to becoming a sense organ, we can no longer regard it in the way we do in ordinary life. We realize that what we ordinarily observe is a momentarily arrested stage in the lungs' evolution. If we compare this with the arrested stage of the evolution of the eyes, we come to the conclusion that the lung reveals itself to be at a younger stage than the eye.

I said yesterday that we could at least put forward as a question whether the eye, in the course of evolution, had once been a vital organ as the lung is now. Let us remain cautious and merely say that there is at least a possibility that the relationship between lung and eye is like that of a child to a grown-up. One shows itself to be a younger entity, the other an older one. In other words, the eye in its youth could at some stage of world evolution have been a vital organ which has now become a sense organ, while the lung, which is now a vital organ, could later become a sense organ. Yet we shall only come to know the truth by advancing further in supersensible knowledge. To do so let us today consider the other extreme of the soul's life, the pole of the will. Yesterday it was described purely externally.

Concerning the pole of the will we can ask: How does it appear when we have attained imaginative cognition? We find that the organs belonging to the will sphere become paler. They fade away before spiritual sight. Our limbs are organs that belong more immediately to the will sphere; they grow paler. In fact, the characteristic feature, when we rise to imaginative consciousness and observe the external organism, is that the limbs become lost. And so does the metabolic system with which the limbs are connected. This aspect of man is simply no longer there in the intensity it was to physical sight. When we compare all that, which to higher vision fades from view, with something in the physical world, we arrive at a quite astonishing result.

Let me draw some sketches of what comes about. Imagine that this is man as he appears to physical sight (drawing on the left). Now we observe him with imaginative cognition: the limbs grow paler (drawing in the center). Suppose this next sketch is of all that which becomes ever paler and fades away. What we get becomes more and more like an image of a human corpse (drawing on the right). In other words, we get an image of what man leaves behind at death, of that which is either buried or cremated. When a corpse is cremated it ceases to be visible to physical sight, just as that part of man ceases to be visible to supersensible consciousness.

But something else becomes visible: At the place where the arms fade away something becomes visible which a former instinctive clairvoyance saw more or less correctly. It was said that where physical man has arms spiritual beings have wings; and that after death so did spiritual man. However, to replace spiritual beings with a kind of symbol in the form of a winged creature, a superior bird, is a crude ghostlike image. When cognition of higher worlds is further developed, that is when one ascends, in the way I have described, from imaginative knowledge to inspired knowledge, then one recognizes what one is really seeing. And to depict this as wings is a distortion, but then it is not so easy to recognize the reality. However, the moment the ascent is made from imagination to inspiration then, by careful observation, one gradually realizes what takes the place of say the right arm and hand. Let me put it this way: You will agree that we make a lot of movements with our arms. According to materialistic critics a dreadful lot of movement is carried out in eurythmy. People who do not understand eurythmy cannot bear it. But when you observe, with inspired cognition, what is done by the movements in eurythmy, you no longer see the arms and hands, all you see are their movements. All the individual movements are all there, and because they all merge into one another they look like wings.

Well, people who are not eurythmists also move their arms. In fact, most of the movements done by human beings are done with the arms. All the movements, their curves and forms become visible (see drawing, orange). Everything physical—muscles, flesh, bones—ceases to be visible, whereas all movements become visible. And it is the same with the legs. I said yesterday that the movements man makes are not confined within the body. In order to point to something useful I spoke of chopping wood rather than of sport. When someone chops wood, he makes continuous movements. All these are also visible when one ascends from imagination to inspiration. However, man causes things to happen not only through his body, he does so also by means of thoughts, perhaps through other people. All the events that he causes to take place gradually become visible, particularly as one ascends from inspiration to intuition. In short, when we contemplate the pole of will, all that at death is placed in the grave ceases to be visible; whereas all man's deeds gradually become visible. After a person's death what is still in existence are all the deeds he has carried out. That has further life and continues to exist. What passes through the gate of death can be said to be a birth of will. So you see as regards the limbs we must choose a different approach in order to find the transition from the physical aspect of man to the soul. And the same applies to the metabolic system.

We have now considered from a certain aspect the nature of man's senses and also what so to speak constitutes his will nature—that is, the source of his actions. To enable us to proceed further let us return to the pole of the senses. Let us look back with imaginative and inspired consciousness and see what becomes of a sense organ, let us say the eye, and then consider it at the stage where the lung let us say has become an organ of perception.

When the lung has become an organ of perception we begin to see a completely different world. Even in public lectures I have often spoken about the fact that another world becomes perceptible to the higher man who gradually develops and frees himself from ordinary man, though the latter is still present and in control. We also begin to experience the world more rhythmically, more musically as soon as the lung becomes sense organ. In fact, we begin to experience all that which in my book Theosophy I described partly as Soul World, partly as Spirit Land. When the lung becomes sense organ we experience a different environment. I mentioned yesterday that the lungs become sense organ in their etheric part. But what happens to our ordinary sense organs?

Unlike the organs of the metabolic-limb system which disappear to higher vision, the sense organs do not disappear, they reveal themselves as they are at present but in their spiritual nature. They reveal themselves as objective entities; they become, as it were, spiritual beings. They are—if I may so express it—what peoples our spirit world. One gets the strong impression that the sense organs expand into worlds. We witness, as it were, a world being built up out of our sense organs. Our soul has the experience that the world which we now witness coming into being unites itself with something else. It unites with what in ordinary life we look upon as our memories; that is, our mental pictures of past events.

Here I must point to an important experience which occurs as one ascends from imaginative to inspired knowledge. The sense organs become, as it were, independent beings which take into themselves our memories. As we turn our attention to this fact we become clearly aware of a certain aspect of our soul's nature.

Take the example of the human eye. To ordinary consciousness this organ is as I described it yesterday. When we begin to develop imaginative cognition and then ascend to inspired cognition, the physical aspect of the eye disappears but not the eye itself. It becomes ever more spiritual and expands to cosmic proportions. It becomes a world, a world that unites itself with our memories; it unites with the thoughts that live in our memory (yellow in diagram). Along this path we gradually attain a specific insight into a certain area.

A trivial concept of popular psychology is the idea that man perceives with his physical organs and develops his mental pictures—i.e., his thoughts—from the physical percepts. And then the thoughts he has formed go—well, they go somewhere. The philosophy of Herbart,¹ in particular, attained eminence by letting thoughts disappear beneath some sort of threshold. Then when they were remembered they wandered up again and appeared in consciousness.

This idea always reminds me of a children's game I often watched as a small boy: One runs both hands up a child's arm, tickling him while chanting, “Up comes a little mouse who wants to hide in Joey's house.” This suggests to the child that a mouse is running up his arm to hide in a box somewhere inside his head. Psychology is just about as clever; it also lets thoughts emerge from sense perceptions and then walk into a sort of savings-box within the soul from where they arise again when remembered. It is a trivial concept but one that is much bandied about in psychology. The true facts become clear only when one comes to know the whole process through imaginative and inspired knowledge. What then becomes clear is the following: Things we see through our eyes are there, they are not created by the eyes. So, too, what we see through imagination and inspiration is also there, it is not created by the higher faculties.

In other words, while ordinary consciousness is functioning the higher reality is also present. It all goes on but becomes visible only to supersensible sight. It goes on through every moment of our waking life. This reveals that whenever we perceive in ordinary consciousness, another process takes place beyond that consciousness. Another process goes on which runs parallel to that of perception, only we do not become aware of it until we have attained higher consciousness. Let me put it this way: In ordinary life whatever we perceive in everyday consciousness is already there. But all that which only becomes visible to imagination and inspiration is also there. A process takes place of which we know nothing in ordinary consciousness. When we learn to know it through higher cognition we become aware that the memory pictures we have in ordinary consciousness are indeed only pictures. Their true reality becomes apparent to higher consciousness. There is no question of memory pictures wandering up again after having first gone down somewhere.

When I form a mental picture of a physical object and then withdraw from it, the mental picture remains. After a while the mental picture disappears and because it is mere picture it disappears completely. But our senses do something else: they carry out a process we do not see. They vitalize in our inner being a process that is living, which endows the thoughts contained in our memory with reality. This means that when we have a physical perception and form a mental picture (red) then another process (blue) takes place through which something real comes about—i.e., a reality, not just a picture. The picture vanishes, but when we remember then this, real memory takes the place of the former physical percept and what we now perceive is the reality that was brought to life in us, without our knowledge, at the time of the physical perception. And this reality is the soul.

If today you have physically before you a human being and you see him again after eight or ten years then nothing of what you see today will be present. You cut your nails, your skin flakes off, externally the physical body continually falls away; it becomes dust. After seven to ten years that which today is the physical substance most deeply embedded in you will have come so far to the surface that it flakes off or is cut off as long nails. You can be certain that what is today at the center of your physical body gradually comes to the surface and falls away. But then what remains? What remains of man's whole being is solely the reality developed inwardly through the process taking place parallel to that of forming mental pictures.

In ten years' time nothing of what you are today will exist except the memories of your experiences. Today nothing exists of what you were ten years ago except what your memories have made of you. You are woven out of your memories, all that is physical flakes off and disappears. Anyone with sound common sense, who thinks through and correlates what he can observe in ordinary consciousness, will acknowledge the truth of what I have brought before you with the help of imagination and inspiration.

If we would picture to ourselves how a human being develops, taking into account his soul nature, then from one aspect—and I beg you to keep in mind that we are considering everything from one pole, the pole of thought—we would depict it thus (see drawing). When we are born, a body is provided for us (white lines). This body is gradually filled with all that results from the process taking place parallel to sense perception (yellow lines). All that which is body (white lines) gradually flakes off. We eat, we take in a variety of substances from the air. All this reaches into the process taking place when memories are formed and builds up the bodily nature ever anew, whereas that which impregnates the soul from the metabolic system is what is buried after death. The soul itself weaves its own essential being. It develops its being from those processes which to begin with are experienced merely as mental pictures. One can say in truth: I live in thoughts, but what I experience as thought in ordinary consciousness is only image. It is, so to speak, an attendant phenomenon to the reality which I bring into existence.

Something of extraordinary significance emerges from this: it shows that what takes place within us, unknown to ordinary consciousness, is by far the most important for man's development. We look at the world, what we perceive through our various senses brings us experiences; we rejoice in what meets our eyes or ears. And all the time while we see, hear and feel there slips into our inner being all that which later can be called up in memory. In other words, all that constitutes my soul slips into me. That is an activity that goes on perpetually. One can never say that it is because it is forever surging and weaving.

Whoever earnestly endeavors to ascend to spiritual knowledge will have vivid experiences of all I have indicated. Whatever one has accumulated in life by way of written notes can, like any possession, be comfortably taken home. And because in present day life comfort is much preferred to inner experiences of disquiet, all knowledge tends to be given a form that allows it to be written down and comfortably taken home. It is said, however, that anthroposophical lectures do not transcribe well, so one actually does not get much from what is written down about them and comfortably taken home.

But, you see, that is only a reflection of the experience of higher knowledge. When a university student today prepares for an examination he is really happy when he manages to store up some facts in his head. And when after three or four weeks the time comes for the examination he hopes to be able to pour it all out unchanged just as he crammed it in. One cannot set about acquiring higher knowledge in that way. Those who really develop higher knowledge are faced with spiritual perceptions that have a life of their own. Higher knowledge is perpetually alive. It will not permit itself to be so conveniently stored in notebooks as do the rigid concepts which today are kept as scientific records of the external world. These, though radically expressed, are real inner facts.

Take the case of someone who has attained supersensible cognition to a fairly high degree. Let us say he has at present certain spiritual perceptions; he can attain those experiences again later by means I have often described. He may experience them after three or four years; they have meanwhile gone through a life of their own. If he once more builds them up they burden his soul with uncertainty. One gradually learns that this is nothing exceptional. Supersensible knowledge in general, fills one with uncertainty when it develops further—when, as it were, it grows old. One has to attain certainty about it all over again. One experiences uncertainty already the following day even about the loftiest spiritual perceptions and must struggle to attain the knowledge once more. Only lower kinds of perceptions cease to be alive, and they become specters which reappear unchanged. The one who has them feels satisfied that he has attained some insight into a higher world. He grabs a notebook to make sure the experience is preserved. He would in fact like to have a kind of soul-notebook for the purpose.

Genuine spiritual perceptions act differently—they are living entities and must continually be created anew. One must go through the process repeatedly for already the following day uncertainty arises, especially about the loftiest experiences, and one must win certainty all over again. One must relate to spiritual knowledge as one relates in the physical world to what is reality and not image. A real process in the physical world is the need to eat: not many of you would refrain from eating today because you had a good meal a week ago. You would not say that the meal of a week ago is still in you nourishing you, so that there is no need to eat today. By contrast a soul content arrived at via the body remains and can be recalled unchanged in many respects. That is not the case with a spiritual soul content; this does not just fade; its very certainty is repeatedly shaken and must be regained ever again.

One effect of this aspect of attaining supersensible cognition is that the world is, as it were, illumined by it. It is like coming into a brightly lit cosmic hall. After eight days one has the following experience: A certain residue of memory lingers due to the fact that in attaining this higher knowledge one drew near its reality and this had an effect even on one's physical being. But concerning the supersensible perceptions as such, one has the experience that one continuously meets them in a dark room where one must rekindle the light ever again. This is an indication of how supersensible knowledge is experienced in the human soul.

When supersensible perceptions are attained then, unlike the instinctive clairvoyant, one cannot claim that they remain like specters. The spiritual realm that is attained must be conquered anew. Yet, though the experiences do not stay in ordinary memory, the effect naturally does. The effect is felt after a time particularly if the supersensible knowledge has to be faced again in the form of a written manuscript or even—dreadful thought—in print. The spiritual investigator may have before him a new edition of a book he has written. He is faced with the external effect of his earlier experiences.

I can imagine there are lecturers who experience deep inner satisfaction when they have before them the result of the golden words they have spun together, especially if, again and again, new editions are produced based on those same golden words. It is a very pleasurable feeling. But the written results originating from spiritual perceptions do not provide pleasurable feelings; they cause pain. What has become preserved and poured out into the physical world is a source of pain. That is the other side of the coin. This pain is not only like going with one's spiritual perceptions into a dark room where one must kindle the light ever anew. It is like going into a room where arrows are hurled at one from all sides. An armor must be created against what one meets as a residue, as an embodied remnant of supersensible worlds.

This is an indication of how soul life is experienced when one has reached higher knowledge. In ordinary consciousness one does not experience the soul's life directly; it is adjusted to the physical body and experienced through it. To experience the soul directly is different. The soul is continuously becoming; it is in a state of transformation and metamorphosis. This fact escapes one unless, during supersensible experience, one enters into the process and identifies with it. Yet, to do so is felt to be unbearable; it causes pain because it is bound up with the past. Whenever a spiritual experience is not of the present it causes pain and one must be armed against this pain. So you see, if the living content of higher knowledge has really been absorbed it is not so easy to live with as that to which our students listen in the universities. That knowledge only hurts when it has been forgotten and the students do badly in examinations, although that kind of knowledge does not in itself cause pain, but pleasure, for when the students possess it they rejoice. The knowledge may pain them later if they come to see that there is something better than their own knowledge which has become like fixed ideas in them.

When the supersensible is entered into deeply one experiences it as, through and through, alive. One learns how to attain and how to endure it. In the knowledge itself one finds joy and satisfaction and also pain. One also learns at last to know the soul directly in its reality. In ordinary daily life the soul has fallen so deeply into materialism that its life appears to consist merely of pale concepts. Into these pale concepts warmth of feeling must be poured to rescue the soul life from the painful, pale, cold thoughts which are but images without life, whereas what is attained as supersensible knowledge is alive; it is in fact the living soul. And this living soul content gives us the first real concept of what we are; for our memory pictures are but faint reflections of the reality. If we manage to penetrate the curtain of memories, we arrive at that which I have just described as joyful, satisfying, light-filled and also painful experiences of the world. In its participation in this, our soul is united with a knowledge which itself contains soul-life. The past we experience as pain, but we become aware that what we experience as happiness and delight goes with us through the portal of death; it is the future.

There must flow into ordinary powers of comprehension a reflection, but a living one, of what I have been saying. If mankind's past evolution is contemplated merely in the light of the frigid ideas of history it remains just image, an image which has significance only as long as it remains in our head. Just as the mental pictures we form of sense perceptions have significance only as long as we have them in our heads, so, too, the mental pictures of history formed purely intellectually have significance only for the head. What in popular terms is called “the spirit of the times” is in fact the historian's own spirit held up to reflect the times.

One only learns real history when one participates with living knowledge in the reality of world evolution and mankind's evolution, when one feels the greatest intensity of pleasure and pain in the events taking place in the world. This means, for example, to turn the eye of the soul backwards in time to, let us say, ancient Persia, India or Greece; or any other past age. When, for instance, one feels how differently the Greeks experienced their tragedies from the way modern man experiences a theater performance. Goethe pointed to the fundamental difference between Greek tragedies and modern dramas when he said that a modern drama is a shadowy affair, whereas a Greek tragedy was a world-shaking event. And certainly those who experienced a Greek tragedy were affected by it very differently from the way modern man is affected. The latter goes to the theater to be amused and lets the play flow over him indifferently. When a Greek watched a tragedy, he felt shaken through and through; he felt shattered right down into his bodily nature. The basic issues he saw portrayed sent a chill down his spine. The Greeks also experienced life as full of sin and guilt and therefore full of sickness. They felt the tragedy as a healing force. They felt that a remedy was needed and that the public performances repeatedly raised life out of its state of guilt and sickness to what it truly ought to be. Thus, the

Greek tragedy was not something that merely provided amusement, it constituted a power that acted as healing for what, in social life, continuously fell into sickness.

What effect has modern drama on present-day society? Its effect might be compared with that of having one's hair shampooed by the hairdresser, whereas the effect of a Greek tragedy must be compared with one's soul and body being healed by a truly competent physician who with genuine health-giving medicine dynamically vitalizes the organism through and through. When one approaches history, identifying oneself completely with every situation such as the one of a Greek watching a tragedy, then history is indeed experienced very differently from the usual way where there is no participation.

In the present-day world there is also social sickness, but no remedy is sought as was done in ancient Greece. If one really transfers one's soul into the Greek age in the anthroposophical sense then—if I may express myself somewhat trivially—one at last catches hold of the soul element which nowadays is otherwise suppressed in ordinary consciousness. In contemplating the world, one discovers the soul.

This is what I wanted to describe to you in order to demonstrate that if the soul is to be known in its reality one must first find where it is hidden. The images produced in ordinary consciousness tell one nothing of the soul. However, these images are what psychologists describe as soul. If one opens a book on modern psychology one finds the first chapter dealing with mental pictures but described in the way they appear in ordinary consciousness. What psychologists describe is that which at every moment dissolves (see drawing, red, page 24). Nothing is said about the parallel process taking place beneath it. This approach of modern psychology could be compared with a conference in which instead of the chief speakers being present only their portraits were there. The portraits would have the same relation to the living reality they depict as man's mental life has to reality in ordinary consciousness. Psychologists are dealing with nothing but pictures; what matters is the reality behind them.

I have been at pains to show you the reality that lies behind mental pictures. One cannot reach the soul through ordinary consciousness. It must first be drawn up from hidden depths. That must be kept in mind; to do so is very important when one speaks about the human soul in relation to world evolution. As the soul's true being is attained, so one gradually enters into world evolution.

In these first two lectures I have attempted to show how, through spiritual knowledge, one can reach the soul. Now that a foundation has been laid we shall consider, in the further lectures, human soul life and its connection with world evolution in a more accessible form.

• 1. Johan Friedrich Herbart, 1776-1841. Philosopher and Educator.