The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Emil Grosheintz opens the General Assembly:

Dear friends and members of the Goetheanum Association! I hereby open the eleventh ordinary General Assembly and ask Dr. Steiner, on behalf of the Executive Council, to take over the chairmanship for the day.

Rudolf Steiner: In response to the kind invitation of the chairman of the Goetheanum Association, I will take the chair of this meeting and will begin immediately with the agenda, since we must first complete the ordinary general assembly, and after a break the important extraordinary general assembly, at which we will decide on changes to the Goetheanum Association , its position in relation to the General Anthroposophical Society, its position in public life and so on, and this assembly is scheduled to begin at 11 a.m., we will now begin to go through the agenda of the ordinary general assembly without further ado, and I may perhaps ask Dr. Grosheintz to give us the chair's report at this point.

Emil Grosheintz: I have to report on the membership movement first. On January 1, 1923, at the beginning of the reporting year, we had 496 extraordinary and 563 contributing members, a total of 1059 members. During 1923, we gained 26 extraordinary and 90 contributing members, for a total of 116 members, so that on December 31, 1923, the number of members consisted of 522 extraordinary and 653 contributing members, for a total of 1175.

Dear friends!

There is actually little to report about the year 1923. For the association at the Goetheanum, 1923 was a year of mourning. On the first day of the year, we stood in front of the ruins of the beloved Goetheanum, deeply saddened by this irreplaceable loss. But our will to continue our work remained unbroken, and we longed to receive a new, second Goetheanum from Dr. Steiner as soon as possible.

Two conditions were necessary for this: one material and one spiritual. The material, financial condition was partially fulfilled by the fact that representatives of all countries in which Anthroposophical Societies exist came together here in July [of] last year and made resolutions, in which the willingness of all members of the Anthroposophical Society to make sacrifices for this new Goetheanum was expressed in a gratifying way. But today, from this place, a strong appeal must also be made to all members of the Anthroposophical Society in the world, in the various countries, to let these funds flow even more abundantly, because if we are to achieve what has been planned and what must come into being for the Anthroposophical Society here in Dornach, we still need a great deal of funds. So I am putting this particularly close to your hearts. May you, those who do not live here, who have come from far away, when you return to the circles in which you work, may you also work especially for the building of a real second Goetheanum in this place. The spiritual prerequisite came through the Christmas Conference.

At this Christmas Conference, a new General Anthroposophical Society was constituted with new statutes, with Dr. Steiner himself at its head, surrounded by an actively working board.

Now Dornach, previously the seat of the Goetheanum Association, had become the central seat of the Anthroposophical Society, and the Goetheanum to be built by Dr. Steiner has thus become a direct concern of the Anthroposophical Society. The reorganization of the Anthroposophical Society also requires, of necessity, a reorganization of the Association of the Goetheanum, and the Association of the Goetheanum may now continue to exist in its new form as a department of the Anthroposophical Society under the direct chairmanship of Dr. Steiner. We will hear more about this at the extraordinary general assembly that is to follow this extraordinary general assembly.

As you know, the plans for the new Goetheanum are already available. As soon as the official approval has been received and the rubble that is still there has been cleared away, the reconstruction will begin with the help of the willingness of the members of the Association of the Goetheanum and the members of the Anthroposophical Society to make sacrifices.

Rudolf Steiner: My dear friends! You have heard the report of the chairman on the past financial year. I ask those friends who have something to say to take the floor. However, I would like to say right away that we will have to discuss all questions related to the further development of the Association of the Goetheanum at the extraordinary general meeting that will follow, so I ask that you limit your comments to the report only.

Is there anyone who wishes to speak on this matter? If not, we will move on to the cash report, and I would like to ask Mr. Binder to present the cash report.

Emil Grosheintz: The third extraordinary General Assembly of the Association of the Goetheanum in Dornach is now in session. I request Dr. Steiner to take the chair for the day.

Rudolf Steiner: Dr. Grosheintz, as chairman of the Goetheanum Association, kindly asks me to take over the chairmanship of this extraordinary general assembly. I hereby accept it with thanks and warmly greet all the friends who have gathered and also the representative of the authorities.

The extraordinary General Assembly is hereby opened, and we will discuss the matters that have become necessary for the organization of the Association of the Goetheanum as a result of last year's Christmas Conference here at the Goetheanum in Dornach.

This Christmas Conference, my dear friends, was intended to bring a new direction into the whole anthroposophical movement, and above all, with this new direction, it should be avoided in the future that things in our movement drift apart, and it should be ensured that in the future they are actually led out of the anthroposophical movement.

As you know, a board of directors was appointed at the Goetheanum during this Christmas Conference, which now, as an initiative board, feels fully responsible for what happens in the Anthroposophical Society. And this intention can only be realized if the Anthroposophical Society in future stands before the whole of public life as the body that really does the work, that really feels fully responsible for everything that exists. This can only be achieved if we now also bring about a unified constitution in the mutual relationship of the individual activities. And so it was agreed between the previous chairman, Dr. Grosheintz, and myself for the Association of the Goetheanum Dornach that, firstly, because the organization of affairs has fallen to me, especially since the painful Goetheanum catastrophe, it must therefore also be possible for me in the future to take full responsibility for what happens here.

I had to lead the negotiations, which lasted almost half a year, about the accident in Dornach, insofar as it was related to the measures of the various insurance companies, with all that interested the authorities in this accident at the time. Then, after that was settled, we had to think about how to rebuild the Goetheanum. Of course, it couldn't be done in a day. It took some time to consider and develop possible plans for the reconstruction. We had to deliberate with ourselves in the most diverse ways.

We are dealing with a completely new material that is being used, because of course we do not want to create the possibility of such an easy fire again. It goes without saying that the building, since it is now to be constructed out of the completely fireproof material of reinforced concrete, must be thought of in a completely different way than it was thought of as a wooden structure. The style, the whole attitude of the building had to change as a result, and when the relevant negotiations with the authorities are concluded, we will indeed have a significantly different building in front of us in the new Goetheanum than the old wooden structure.

But work has continued, and we are now at the stage where, once we have cleared away the rubble on one side, and once we have received the official approval on the other, which will not be long now, and which we hope will be favorable when we have this official approval to build, we will also start building. And it would indeed be my wish to promote this construction as quickly as possible, so that – I am still thinking about it, even if perhaps our architect is overcome by a slight palpitation when I say these words, but despite all that – our architect is a very accommodating man, and he will have to consider how things will turn out, which will then be met by me in the course of the next activity – I am still thinking that meetings could be held in the new building as early as Christmas if the permit comes quickly and we can use the favorable construction period for this.

But please do not take this as a promise, just as a wish on my part, which of course may be opposed by many obstacles, of course. But as a rule, it is primarily the prejudices that are difficult for me in such matters. Then, of course, there may be external obstacles that are sometimes beyond one's control to overcome. But in any case, we will make every effort to overcome the matter.

So you see that there is no other way in the near future than for what has been agreed between Emil Grosheintz and me to actually be carried out, that I myself be entrusted with the presidency of the Goetheanum Association. Of course, I can only do this on condition that Emil Grosheintz, who has led the Goetheanum Association in such a beautiful and self-sacrificing way, is then the second chairperson, and that we can work together. That would be one thing.

But then it will be necessary, out of the whole spirit of the Anthroposophical Society as it now exists, for this Anthroposophical Society to function as the actual registered association, i.e. to be outwardly the institution that represents everything here in Dornach. It will therefore be necessary for the General Anthroposophical Society to exist as a registered association. Within this Anthroposophical Society, four subdivisions will have to be established. These four subdivisions are planned by me in such a way that I take into account only purely real things, and not programmatic matters. We have worked a lot with the programmatic since 1919, but from the moment I took over the chairmanship of the Anthroposophical Society at Christmas, I myself cannot work responsibly with the programmatic, for the simple reason that I am really quite opposed to everything programmatic, everything theoretical, everything that works with paragraphs, not for a personal reason, but for the whole reason of our anthroposophical movement. One can only work from the real.

We have four, I would say four, currents of real institutions that have been active in living, organic activity from the very beginning: firstly, the Anthroposophical Society itself, which, even when the programmatic things began, was was often challenged; so it will continue to exist as the Anthroposophical Society in the narrower sense – I will now proceed historically by listing the facts – as the first subdivision. It is, of course, completely independent of all the programmatic developments since 1919.

Secondly, within our movement, we have the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag, which has now moved to Dornach and cannot be treated differently [because] as an integral part of the Anthroposophical movement itself.

Again and again, efforts were made to thwart this view, which is actually the essence of the matter, from here or there. Again and again, the opinion arose that the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House was the institution that needed help most of all because it was not being properly managed, and the like. But when I wanted to substantiate one thing or another in the field of political economy with something that was actually working, and not something programmatic, I could only ever cite the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag, which did not develop from a grand program but from small beginnings, starting with two books and then working very slowly, so that it was always grounded in reality and never received any subsidy from any quarter other than that which arose from the matter at hand and which had absolutely real possibilities for covering costs. So that in terms of economic leadership, this Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House could even be cited as an example to follow if one wants to base economics on life. That would be the second subdivision.

The third subdivision – as I said, I am listing historically – would be the Association of the Goetheanum in Dornach itself, which emerged as the third institution and also worked only out of anthroposophical principles, untouched by any side currents. It would therefore also be able to form a subdivision of the General Anthroposophical Society.

And fourthly, the Clinical Therapeutic Institute, which was founded by Dr. Ita Wegman on the basis of anthroposophical principles, would then be integrated. And since I have to justify what it is all about - that it is really a real anthroposophical thing - if I want to explain it, I have to do it in the following way. I have to explain to you that there is an enormous difference between this Clinical Therapeutic Institute and other similar institutes. Many things have come into being since 1919 under the influence of the fact that at that time it was possible, more or less justifiably, to believe that certain things could be carried from some side into our movement, carried better than they could be carried from within the anthroposophical movement itself.

If we consider some institutions, we can say that they would not be there today if it were not for these movements, which emerged at the time in connection with the threefold social order movement, and if these movements had not emerged, the institutions would have been created by them. This is not the case with Dr. Wegman's Clinical Therapeutic Institute. One could say, and this is absolutely correct, that if none of the programmatic institutions had come into being – this Clinical Therapeutic Institute, which emerged from the intentions of anthroposophy, and of course from medical intentions – this Clinical Therapeutic Institute would then be there.

Let us imagine away everything that has been created since 1919. Not only has the Clinical Therapeutic Institute never had any need to take any of this into account, but on the contrary, it has even filled in for the other things to a very considerable extent at a crucial moment, so that here we have an institution that differs in its entire development and in its entire existence, also in the way it presents itself. It is a fruitful institution, one that is self-supporting, economically viable in itself, and promisingly economically viable.

So this institution definitely belongs to those that are now to be subdivisions of the General Anthroposophical Society. Therefore, the clinic is being acquired by the Anthroposophical Society through the Association of the Goetheanum in Dornach, and will form an integral part of the general Anthroposophical movement in the future.

These are the facts that arise purely from the matter itself. I would like to say that one cannot think differently about the further development of things here if one wants to put the matter on a healthy footing for the future. All other measures arise as necessary consequences.

We will have to negotiate the further composition of the Executive Council of the Goetheanum Association; we will have to negotiate the minor changes to the statutes that are necessary. All of this will arise as a consequence of the conditions just stated.

It is still the case that, if this reconstitution occurs, the board of the Anthroposophical Society will of course be on the board of the Goetheanum Association in the future: The President of the General Anthroposophical Society will also be President of the Association of the Goetheanum, the Secretary of the General Anthroposophical Society will also be Secretary of the Association of the Goetheanum, and the entire Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society will be part of the Executive Council of the Association of the Goetheanum. This is a rough outline of what should form the basis for the organization of this extraordinary General Assembly. Perhaps Mr. Emil Grosheintz would like to say something?

Emil Grosheintz: I would just like to add that the Executive Council of the Goetheanum Society had a meeting this morning and that at this meeting Dr. Steiner was asked to take over the chairmanship of the Goetheanum Society and the previous Executive Council resigned. This board, the previous board, is therefore resigning, and the new board will be constituted in such a way that the new members of the board of the Goetheanum Association will be chosen by cooption by the chair.

Rudolf Steiner: So the previous board has decided to resign as such, and the composition of the board would result from what will be laid down in the statutes immediately afterwards – should it be done beforehand? [Representative of the authority:] No. That the Executive Council of the General Anthroposophical Society, as I have stated, is on the Executive Council of the Goetheanum Association, and that then – Dr. Grosheintz will work by my side as the second chairperson – the remaining members of the Executive Council are appointed by this Executive Council. And it will be a matter of course that the previous members of the board of the Goetheanum Association will be re-admitted to the new board. I believe that all of you who are concerned will agree that the previous members of the board should be re-admitted to the board as such. Should it then become necessary to supplement the board in some other direction, this addition could be made over time.

We would then have a board consisting of the board of the General Anthroposophical Society, which includes the chair and the secretary, and then the other board members of this General Anthroposophical Society, as well as Dr. Grosheintz as second chair, [in addition to] the personalities Mr. Molt, Dr. Peipers, Count Lerchenfeld, Mr. Geering, Dr. Unger, Mrs. Schieb, Mrs. Hirter, and Professor Bürgi. These would then be the board members who should be there in the future.

I think that those personalities I have proposed will agree. I then ask to open their opinions.

If that is not the case, I would like to open the discussion about what I have set out. But I would like to proceed with the adoption of the new statutes, which, after all, show no changes other than those that have become necessary as a result of the proposals made. Perhaps Mr. Emil Grosheintz could read out the original paragraph, and I will then read the amended one.

So we have: “Association of the Goetheanum of the Free University for Spiritual Science in Dornach (Switzerland), registered in the commercial register of the Canton of Solothurn.”

[1. Typescript:]

This would be changed to read at the top: General Anthroposophical Society, sub-division Association of the Goetheanum of the Free University for Spiritual Science in Dornach (Switzerland).

[2. Handwritten entry by Rudolf Steiner:]

Strikethrough: That would... would be above... Sub-division of the Goetheanum of the School of Spiritual Science.

Added: Its name would be changed to

[3rd reconstruction of the altered text:] Its name would be changed to “General Anthroposophical Society in Dornach [schaft in] (Switzerland).”

The following would be omitted: “registered in the commercial register of the Canton of Solothurn”, because the Anthroposophical Society is [then already] registered. Then would come: “Articles of Incorporation of June 26, 1924”.

Emil Grosheintz: Now §1: “Under the name 'Verein des Goetheanum, der Freien Hochschule für Geisteswissenschafo, there exists an association in the sense of Art. 6Off. of the Swiss Civil Code; the seat of the association is Dornach (Canton Solothurn, Switzerland).”

[1st typescript:]

Rudolf Steiner: The amended paragraph would read: “Under the name Verein des Goetheanum, der Freien Hochschule für Geisteswissenschaft, there exists an association as a member of the General Anthroposophical Society with its seat in Dornach, Canton Solothurn, Switzerland.”

[2. handwritten entry by Rudolf Steiner:]

Strikethrough: the Goetheanum; the School of Spiritual Science

Added in the margin: the General Anthroposophical Society has an association in the sense of [with reference arrow]

3. Reconstruction of the handwritten amended paragraph:] “Under the name of the General Anthroposophical Society, there exists an association in the sense of Art. 60ff. of the Swiss Civil Code. The seat of the association is Dornach (Canton Solothurn, Switzerland).”

[4. Official Protocol:] An association exists under the name “Association of the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science” as a member of the General Anthroposophical Society. The registered office of the association is Dornach (Canton Solothurn, Switzerland).

Emil Grosheintz: [§2:] “The purpose of the association is to cultivate artistic and scientific endeavors.

Rudolf Steiner: Unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: “§3: The organs of the association are: a) the association assembly (general assembly of members), b) the board, c) the auditors”

Rudolf Steiner: To be changed to read: “The organs of the association are: a) the board of directors, which includes the entire board of directors of the General Anthroposophical Society.

[Official protocol] b) the board, which includes the entire board of the Anthroposophical Society.

Emil Grosheintz: “§4: The members of the association are: a) ordinary, b) extraordinary, c) contributing members”

Rudolf Steiner: Remains unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: “§ 5: Ordinary membership is acquired by appointment by the board. §6: The application for admission as an extraordinary or contributing member must be submitted in writing to one of the two chairpersons. Admission is granted by resolution of the board.

Rudolf Steiner: Remains unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: Ҥ7: A member's resignation must be submitted in writing to one of the two chairpersons. The resignation must be submitted at least three months before the end of the financial year. The board of directors may decide to expel a member from the association without giving reasons.

Rudolf Steiner: No changes.

[Official protocol:] Resignation can only be made to the [protocol incomplete]

Emil Grosheintz: §8: “Ordinary and extraordinary members shall pay an annual contribution of at least 100 Swiss francs at the beginning of the financial year, and contributing members shall pay at least 50 Swiss francs or, upon application and with the approval of the board, the same number of units of the corresponding national currency.”

Rudolf Steiner: Unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: Ҥ9: The Association Assembly is the supreme body of the Association. The ordinary Association Assembly (the General Assembly) is to be convened each time after the end of the financial year in the following first half of the year. Extraordinary Association Assemblies may be convened by decision of the Board.

The General Assembly is convened by written invitation from one of the two chairpersons to the members. The invitation must include the agenda for the General Assembly. The invitation must be posted at least five days before the scheduled date of the General Assembly.

Rudolf Steiner: Unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: Ҥ10: Only full and associate members are entitled to participate in the association meetings. The associate members have an advisory vote at these meetings. The resolutions are passed by the full members. One of the two chairpersons chairs the association meeting. He has the casting vote in the event of a tie.

Rudolf Steiner: Unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: “§11: Requests for items to be added to the agenda of the General Assembly must be submitted in writing to one of the chairpersons at least 14 days before the General Assembly.”

Rudolf Steiner: Unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: “§12: The Executive Council shall be elected by the General Assembly of full members from among the full members for a term of seven years. If a member of the Executive Council resigns during his term of office, the full members shall hold a by-election for the remainder of the term of office of the resigning member.”

Rudolf Steiner: §12 will be amended to include a sentence. It will read: “The Executive Council, with the exception of the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society – which is included by default – is elected by the Assembly of Full Members for a period of seven years. Should a member of the executive council resign during his term of office, the full members shall elect a replacement for the remainder of the term of office of the resigning member.

Emil Grosheintz: Ҥ13: The members' meeting shall elect two auditors to examine the accounts and cash management. These may not be taken from among the full members.

Rudolf Steiner: Unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: “§14: The Executive Council elects two of its members to serve as co-chairs, one to serve as secretary, and also hires the executive director.”

Rudolf Steiner: This §14 will be worded as follows: “The Executive Council constitutes the office in such a way that the chairperson and secretary of the General Anthroposophical Society are at the same time the chairperson and secretary of the Association of the Goetheanum. The second chairperson is elected by the first chairperson.

[Official Protocol] “The Executive Council constitutes the office in the sense that the chairperson and secretary of the General Anthroposophical Society also serve as chairperson and secretary of the Goetheanum Association. The second chairperson is designated by the first chairperson.”

Emil Grosheintz: “§15: The two chairmen are each individually authorized to represent the association independently.”

Rudolf Steiner: No change.

Emil Grosheintz: “§16: The management of the executive council is regulated by the council itself.”

Rudolf Steiner: Unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: “§17: At the regular association meeting, the board of directors must report on the past administrative period and present the accounts. The auditors' report must be enclosed with this report and the accounts. The association's administrative period is set at one year; it runs from January 1 to December 31.”

Rudolf Steiner: Unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: Ҥ18: The association's liabilities are covered by its assets. Personal liability of members is excluded.

Rudolf Steiner: Unchanged.

Emil Grosheintz: “§19: The association is to be entered in the commercial register in accordance with Art. 61 of the Swiss Civil Code.”

Rudolf Steiner: Deleted.

Official protocol: “§19: The association is to be entered in the commercial register in accordance with Art. 61 of the Z.G.B.”

Emil Grosheintz: Ҥ20: In the event of the dissolution of the association, the general meeting must decide on the use of the association's assets and the method of liquidation. The association's assets are to be used in line with the purpose of the association.

Rudolf Steiner: Remains unchanged.

These would be the amended statutes. I would like to make one further comment, to avoid any misunderstanding regarding the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag. When I said that it had never received a subsidy that was not derived from the matter itself, this means that it has never received any subsidy from outside at all, but that when work began on the two books, a small Schiller work and the Philosophy of Freedom, it was supported only by Dr. Steiner herself, and that everything that happened economically happened within the publishing house itself. So this publishing house has never received any external funding and has never been supported by capital from outside.

I would now like to open the discussion about what has been presented to you here.

Of course, it is also possible for friends who are not full members of the Goetheanum Association to take part in the discussion. Does anyone wish to speak?

Dr. Unger believes that we can be extremely grateful that the Executive Council of the Goetheanum Association and the new council have undertaken the regulation of the matter in this way, which is desirable and gratifying from all points of view, and would like to recommend that the amended statutes and everything connected with them be accepted en bloc.

Rudolf Steiner: A proposal has been made to accept the amended statutes and everything related to them en bloc. Does anyone wish to speak?

Since no one does, we will proceed to the vote. I would ask those members of the Goetheanum Association who are entitled to vote and who are in favor of this proposal to raise their hands.

It has been unanimously adopted.

It would then only be a matter of leaving the execution of the whole matter, which I believe is clear, to the future board of the Goetheanum Association. Is there anything to be said about this?

Then I also ask those members who are entitled to vote and who are in favor of leaving the execution of what has been decided to the future board to raise their hands.

This is also adopted.

Does anyone have anything to say about anything else?

In this case, we have reached the end of our extraordinary general assembly. I would like to thank the representative of the authority for attending our meeting.

Do you [the representative of the authority] have anything to add regarding the election of the board?

Representative of the authority: No.

Then we have come to the end of the proceedings, and I declare the third extraordinary general meeting closed.

For the correctness of the protocol
The 1st Chairman:
The 2nd Chairman:

Note on the Back of the Typescript with the Minutes of the Meetings of June 29, 1924

My address this evening represents a break in our current series; its subject is quite different from yesterday's.¹ This morning I received a letter, and I feel compelled, even obligated, to bring it to the attention of each individual member of the Anthroposophical Society. I will explain my reasons after I read you the letter.

Letter from Heinrich and Gertrud Goesch to Rudolf Steiner

19 August 1915, Dornach

Dear Dr. Steiner:

Alongside the work dedicated to the good within your activity in our spiritual movement, I have noticed certain behaviors that serve evil purposes. On the good side, I am grateful for the esoteric knowledge and teachings you have imparted to us, for the mystery dramas you have given us, for the introduction of eurythmy, and for the art of the Johannesbau. In these contexts, I continue to recognize you as an envoy of the great white lodge and am filled with profound gratitude to you and to anything you do that is devoted to the good.

However, I perceive the way you cultivate relationships between yourself and other members of our spiritual movement as serving evil purposes, and I see this behavior as gravely endangering our movement. The relationships you create between yourself and other members turn the others into merely parts of yourself rather than independent spiritual entities alongside you. You only appear to act as a human being among equals. In actuality, you scorn any truly human connection and presume to intervene in the lives of others in a way that belongs only to the gods and not to any modern human being.

In this way, you create an anti-Christian relationship between yourself and the other members of our spiritual movement. These people have readied themselves to meet great spiritual teachings in our time, but you are making them poorer than the poorest materialists out there, who in spite of their distorted Christianity that has turned into its exact opposite are still able to develop a strong I. If it goes on like this, however, your followers will eventually fall prey to black magic as a result of the constant weakening of their I through how you behave toward them.

There have already been instances of highly respected members substituting a reliance on your word for reliance on the truth; they cut off any criticism of any part of your work, objecting that your critics would be placing themselves above you. They feel that putting oneself above you is such an act of wanton temerity as to be out of the question, and that with their objection the issue is resolved once and for all. The members are not to blame for erroneous ideas like this—you are. In your concern to promulgate ever more of your teachings, you have neglected to cultivate the attitude among your pupils that as Christians, individuals must put themselves not only below any other person, but also above any other; not only are the least of our fellow human beings of irreplaceable value to us in their most profound depths of being, but also the least of us carry responsibility for the most advanced and must oppose their errors. Your own teachings have strengthened me in this conviction. In real life, however, you apply a number of means that work counter to this Christian ideal of human community.

I will now discuss two of these means in detail so that the thrust of my contentions becomes clearer.

It is a fact that you have developed the habit of making promises and not keeping them. No one will maintain that you do not have a sufficiently clear view of the future, or that you are too weak to carry out your original intentions, either of which would constitute a certain justification for failing to keep promises. No, this is a case of deliberately causing disappointment. Since the promises were unsolicited and made at your own initiative, it is also a case of deliberate intervention into someone else's life in order do something that is by rights reserved for destiny. A disappointment that comes to us through karma has a direct and beneficial effect on our development. In contrast, a disappointment deliberately arranged for us by another person is at the very least a heavy blow, and if our confidence in the person delivering the blow is not shaken, it also constitutes a weakening of our I. The difference is the same as the difference between meeting an accidental death in a burning building and death by burning at the stake, premeditated by others.

Because of their trust in you, recipients of such a promise who are waiting for it to be kept get into a state of tension and uncertainty; meanwhile you are able to calmly survey their gradually increasing disappointment. Once the people in question have realized that the promise is not going to be kept, they will not take your word seriously in the future and thus will distance themselves from you, at least to some extent. However, since on the whole they continue to put their trust in you, they will lose all standards for the sanctity of giving one's word, and may perhaps begin to act as you do. As a result, they are dependent on you in a humanly unworthy fashion and will try to affect others in the same way you do.

Alternatively, people may respond in one of the three following ways: First, because of the confidence they have in you, they may assume that there must be a deep occult meaning behind the way you act. They will conclude that there can be profound occult reasons that permit or even obligate someone to make promises without intending to keep them. Occasionally we even meet people whose emotions are so confused that they admire that kind of behavior and take it as a sign of something superhuman. It is evident, however, that nothing in this world can authorize a modern human being to make promises without intending to keep them. Causing disappointment is something reserved for the gods who direct our karma.

This sort of conceptual confusion is all the more dangerous for a student of esotericism because modern spiritual science appeals to our healthy capacity for discernment, which is undermined by things like this. In a most unfortunate fashion, your word displaces the truth; the thought “I must not place myself above him” displaces the realization that you have done something evil. The human dignity of these people crumbles away bit by bit, and they turn into spiritually dependent tools in your hands.

The second possibility for those whose trust has been betrayed is that in order to be able to maintain their confidence in you, the people in question never let themselves become fully conscious of the fact that you never had any intention of keeping the promises you made to them. As a way out, they take your not keeping promises as a new revelation of a being they do not experience as really human and cannot hold responsible as they would a human being. This point of view is in fact already represented within the Society and is leading to your becoming ever more shadowlike as a human being.

The third and final possibility is that some people will choose the radical way out, forgetting the fact that a promise of some kind was ever made. This, too, robs people of a bit of their I. As a result, your coworkers in our spiritual movement will be shadows whose I is weakened, rather than independent individuals. You yourself, however, are the one to blame for all this.

A second example of the evil nature of your behavior is your refusal to accept any criticism of people working in our movement. On occasion, you have implied that any such criticism stems from negative emotions. This is a false assumption. I am not talking about malicious or destructive criticism. Many of our members, out of their sincere sense of responsibility, are capable of constructive criticism, and that is what I am talking about. The only possible reason for avoiding such criticism would be knowing that people in positions of responsibility are unfit for their jobs. In our modern age, people are meant to come together out of their own free will and freely create the kind of hierarchy and order necessary for us to accomplish what we have to do, and a certain amount of constructive mutual criticism is our only guarantee of success. In fact, the only way a true, natural, and appropriate hierarchical order can come about nowadays is if this kind of criticism is allowed to work.

If people who have been criticized do not choose to take action on justified accusations—and in fact they are morally obliged to actively seek criticism—they must give up their positions in the hierarchy so that the truth can triumph. Their superiors should not protect people like that by acting as if everything were going fine. This is what our modern age requires. However, if at any level in the hierarchical order mistakes are not criticized but tolerated and allowed to persist, we are only creating a false hierarchy that is based, not on real human capabilities and relationships, but on fiction—a fiction that is maintained only through further wrongdoing. Once again, the result is a lack of humanity and Christianity in our relationships in general, and once again you are to blame. In the organization of our Society as it has gradually developed under your guidance, the strengths of the members are usurped to the advantage of yourself and perhaps of certain other people prominent in this false hierarchy. Meanwhile, the Society's affairs are being mismanaged.

Personal oversensitivity on the part of those being criticized is something that needs to be eliminated; you might give a lecture about this sometime. As a general rule, especially if it comes at the right moment, criticism can take a stimulating and gratifying form and be free of any personal bitterness, so that its thorns are removed and the recipient can be glad to receive help in resolving the issue. The nervousness and animosity so prevalent among the critics spring in part from the justified feeling that even the most objective criticism will not be heeded, but will be looked at askance and disregarded. A truly superior person has no reason to fear criticism; true superiority can stand the test of even the most pointed criticism. In the event that people attempt to offer criticism out of a sense of responsibility but are not really able to grasp the facts of the case, those people can usually be made to see their misunderstanding sooner or later without any undue waste of time.

At the moment, I am not talking about a case like this one, where the criticism has already developed into a well-founded rejection of an entire self-contained system confronting me. In this case, no amount of postponement would make any difference. If in a specific instance, however, a person I myself recognize as superior—not simply someone who, for some unknown reason, is my superior in a false hierarchy—points out that I do not yet fully understand the case in question, I will gladly defer my criticism until the case can be considered closed. Under your influence, however, the principle at work in our spiritual movement is that any such criticism should be withheld indefinitely—until the facts of the case have been forgotten. And this principle applies not only to certain specific cases, but to all such instances. This is not only wrong and harmful to everyone, it also undermines our discernment, on which so much depends.

Once again, I have to point out the inherent contradiction between spiritual science's appeal to people's healthy power of judgment and the fact that in most instances in our movement, this power of judgment must be subordinated to incomprehensible reasons for measures being taken. You must admit, however, that at this point in time, two thousand years after Christ, people possess certain standards that all individuals can apply and must also allow to be applied to themselves, if they are not to be utterly lost. There are certainly a sufficient number of closed cases that really are subject to our judgment. The mere fact that a person feels compelled to think about a particular case usually suggests that he or she is capable of achieving some clarity in the matter, though not necessarily without help.

As things stand at the moment, our members are constantly expending a considerable portion of their spiritual energy on the useless task of seeking out hidden wisdom-filled motives for the evil behavior of yourself and your highest colleagues, while you stand by, calmly observing this waste of effort. Or, in order not to lose faith in you, these people have to decide to repress these truth-seeking forces in themselves and thus fall prey to partial stupefaction. What happens with these forces then? What a horrible thought to pursue! In any case, you represent a great focal point of forces of which individuals are merely the instruments, to be used as you choose for incomprehensible ends. There is no question in our movement of real interaction taking place between complete human beings, interaction in which each one is allowed to contribute his or her best. You are not a friend to all the members; your whole attitude rejects lively friendly relationships. In truth, for many people, you are the greatest enemy they have ever encountered.

All these things I have described are not only objectively evil, they also directly contradict the teachings you promulgate. It is from you that I learned the reasons that lead me to reject the way you act. As time goes on, you give an ever stronger impression of acting on your connection to the Christ impulse only in your lectures; outside the lectures, you embrace impulses that are quite the opposite. In parts, it already seems to me as if your teaching has been somewhat influenced by what you practice in real life—not the content of your teachings, but their formal structure. In their structure, certain sentences make promises that are then not kept and can only serve the purpose of subjecting the reader to fruitless thought and work. (See “Gedanken wahrend der Zeit des Krieges.”)² If people try to explain this by saying that you, like any other human being, may have changed your mind over the course of time, you reject this as irksome criticism (Preface to Riddles of Philosophy, last paragraph).³ Both these passages, by the way, clearly show a change in style verging on the incomprehensible.

The kind of interpersonal attitude you create not only contradicts your teachings; your behavior also contradicts what you yourself demand of spiritual teachers in the modern age. Such teachers should appeal only to people's consciousness. Their self-chosen obligation toward their students is to never exercise any magical influence on the students' subconscious that the latter have not consented to or cannot control. You, however, are doing this incessantly through the behavior I described and through other occult means. For you, every handshake, every friendly conversation becomes a means of cultivating these false relationships. The bliss that fills the members after meeting with you is not the bliss of the communion of saints, but a merely Luciferic-Ahrimanic one. You, not the members themselves, are to blame for this. You even try to use these handshakes and friendly conversations to pull members back into the fold against their will once they have recognized the falsity of the relationships you try to create. I have perceived with certainty that you exercise undue influence on your followers in this way.

In the modern age, when any uncontrollable influence on the subconscious of others must be avoided, it is not enough to simply give lectures or introduce new spirituality. In addition, the life you lead together with the other members of our movement must be governed by Christian impulses; your relationships with your followers must become like those of Benedictus, so beautifully portrayed in your fourth mystery drama. In fact, now that we have received so much in the way of teachings, developing such relationships is the much more urgent obligation.

When I ask myself how it can possibly be that you whose task it was to proclaim these teachings can act in ways directly counter to them, I can conceive of two possible answers. On the one hand, I can guess at the reasons why the great white lodge might have had to choose a person who is not yet completely Christianized for this task, and in your capacity as teacher I still accept you as the envoy of the lodge. On the other hand, it seems to me that your most profound motivation is by no means actively evil, although what I have had to say might be erroneously interpreted to imply that. No, it is simply a too one-sided interest in renewing these teachings in a way appropriate to our times, and above all a fear of real life. By avoiding and obstructing real life and by creating substitutes for it, however, you allow an evil force to develop. In this, I see the greatest danger to our spiritual movement and to yourself.

Fully Christian occultists can never rest content with simply passing on teachings; they must also enter into a life partnership with their students. True relationships from person to person in the Christian sense require each one of us to be an open book to all others to the extent their individual strength permits. All people should give themselves completely to their fellows to whatever extent the latter can receive them. This should be the basis of any modern hierarchy. Those higher up in the hierarchy must turn to those beneath them with whatever they have to give. What you practice, however, is anti-Christian and just the opposite. Whenever possible you arrange things so that intentions are kept in the dark and events are treated as if they had not happened. It is not enough to confess that like anyone else, you too can have a weak moment. Whenever we meet any other person (a person who in the Christian sense is just as necessary as ourselves), we do so as people who are imperfect in some way and still need to learn. This fact must not only be admitted, it must be constantly confirmed in our actions as human beings. It is truly necessary to seek out this interaction with our fellows, no matter how much an occultist of the old school may dread it. It is not enough to simply protest against blind admiration; we must also seek out objective criticism.

In communities of this sort, spiritual teachers must renounce all the help available to them in pre-Christian times for making students receptive to their teachings. Above all, they must renounce the unapproachable authority of the teacher filled with divine wisdom, who taught students in whom the I had not yet been born. They must also do without the complete isolation of teachers and pupils from all human relationships. The problem I am pointing out here did not exist for pre-Christian initiators. The individual I had not yet been born, and the divine being working through the teachers had the authority to intervene in the destiny of the students in ways otherwise reserved for karma. But as Christians, we must see modern initiates first and foremost as human beings, and our confidence in them depends on them not exercising any superhuman influence on our destiny.

For someone who is directing all his energies toward the renewal of occult teachings for our times, the temptation is great to reject the difficult tasks of Christian community and to artificially make his teaching easier by any of the means appropriate in earlier times. However, these things have become evil in our times, and it would be better nowadays for the teacher to remain invisible except when promulgating the doctrine than it would be for him to relate to his students as you are doing. Maintaining and strengthening the I of each student is much more important than passing on the teachings—after all, the teachings are directed to the individual I. Any restriction of the ego's rights must also result in the teachings taking root within the individual in the wrong way. Any dulling of individual discernment represents a grave danger to those striving for the spirit.

I will admit that in one sense, this kind of right living is infinitely more difficult for you than for others. Christian occultists must take up a challenge that other people will face only in times to come; that is, to both live and be a seer. They are in constant danger of falsely confusing these different planes and the laws that govern them. But they cannot escape this danger by refusing the challenge; for without being able to orient themselves according to the Christ impulse, they would still get these two planes mixed up in unjustified ways. When this happens in a meeting with a pupil, the pupil will be the first to experience the disastrous results, although they will soon revert to the teacher.

The community of the Grail is perhaps the only place where this challenge has been met satisfactorily to any extent. You yourself admit that you are not totally satisfied with what you have been able to tell us about the Grail, and you have clearly described your own difficulties in researching the Grail mysteries, although you call the new initiates “initiates of the Grail.” Perhaps the Grail will grant us salvation in this difficult hour.

Through the events I have described, my wife and I find ourselves in a situation with regard to yourself that makes it impossible for us to encounter you again in the way my wife did for the last time on Sunday, July 25, in the Schreinerei, and I on Thursday, August 5, on the steps leading to the eurythmy room. We were both in possession of this knowledge already at that time, as you were well aware. Nevertheless, you shook our hands and drew us into conversation as if nothing had happened. Healthy tact would have made that kind of thing impossible for any non-clairvoyant, so in your case I have to recognize it as an attempt at impermissible intervention into my inner being. I will refrain from explaining this statement in greater detail at this point because that would lead us too far afield.

It is still possible for me to greet you from a distance with all due respect as the bearer of great teachings, as I attempted to do on that evening. But I cannot submit to exchanging handshakes and friendly conversations with you as if nothing had happened, and especially not since I have clearly seen that these very handshakes and conversations are one of your chief means of exercising impermissible influences on your pupils and since I cannot share the opinion of a certain respected member that these things exist for the purpose of testing one's own strength in the face of outside influences.

To inform you of the need to avoid further personal contact is the purpose of this letter inasmuch as it concerns the two of us personally.

With regard to yourself, my purpose in writing to you about this very serious matter is to see accomplished the little I can do as your fellow human being, namely, to confront you with the fact that a person on the physical plane and using physical means has been able to point out to you the evil in your actions. You would be condemned to a shadowy existence if no one would turn to you like this. I hope that the fact that at least a few people nowadays are capable of recognizing your errors as such, remembering them and taking a stand against them, will be of help to you in the now necessary process of restructuring life in our spiritual movement. There are a few other members whom I can expect to understand the matters under discussion here, and I shall inform them of the contents of this letter.

It is imperative, however, that you begin to thoroughly transform the relationship between yourself and other members of the movement, as I have indicated. The objective purpose of my writing to you is to express this in the hopes that our movement will continue to work in accordance with the intentions of evolution. What would be the consequence if you were to reject this challenge? At least in certain instances, you have already forfeited an activity that must have been assigned to you by the masters of the white lodge—the personal instruction of individuals. For as I have already said, a profound mistrust in your treatment of individual human destinies is all too justified. I can also not imagine how an esoteric lesson could take place under the prevailing circumstances.

If you restricted yourself to disseminating ever more aspects of the teachings but let everything else continue as before, and if not enough members were able to work their way through to the necessary insights, the Society would degenerate into an exoteric association at best. There are already certain signs of this happening, alongside the tendencies to evil and to stupefaction. Either that or, if your followers become aware of their responsibility, they will have to bring about a complete separation between the teacher and what is taught, leaving you to discharge the duties of your holy office as a guilty and tormented Amfortas among hungry and sorrowful disciples.

I am now coming to the end of what I want to say at present. I have not been able to clothe these insights—which I achieved under the guidance of the Keeper of the Seal of the Society for Theosophical Art and Style, who is under the protection of Christian Rosenkreutz—in the ideal form I had envisioned. The obstacles were still too great for someone only recently released from your spell. But I have decided to send the letter anyway because the moment demands it.

When I wonder about the emotions with which you will receive this letter, the question of whether you will find your way to people with whom you can go through this experience and begin the necessary transformations weighs on me especially heavily. This is an area where, in this Christian age, the occultist as such is bound to fail and must be simply a human among humans, just as Christ Jesus had to experience things on Earth that he could not experience as a God. May you turn to this Spirit for help!

Heinrich Goesch
Gertrud Goesch

I have read you this letter, my friends, because it concerns each and every one of you just as much as it concerns me, and because it seems obvious to me that you must each decide for yourself to what extent you believe its claims correspond to actual practice within our Society. Otherwise people might think that I am afraid of this charge of contributing to the “stupefaction” of our members, and that I do not see you as sufficiently independent to leave it up to each one of you to judge the situation individually as you see fit.

However, you must realize that a letter like this cannot be seen in isolation; it is a symptom of what is going on in our Society. That is why I will take no part in discussing either this letter or anything that will need to be done as a result of it. It is clear that it must be left up to the members to decide what needs to be done and how to go about it, at least to begin with. In particular, I will refrain from saying anything about the passage claiming that promises have not been kept. If assessing this matter is left to individual discretion, each one of you will know how things stand, since each one of you must know what you have been promised and whether the promises were kept. However, I would expect and request the Society as such, or those members living in the neighborhood of the building in Dornach, to take a decided stand on this issue in the very near future.

I myself will not get involved in discussions on the matter at all. There are only a few things I want to tell you, and I ask you to take my remarks as what I have to say in connection with what I have just read, especially because it is obvious from other symptoms, not just from this letter, that many things I have said to members in lectures here in the course of the last few weeks and months have had no effect at all.

First of all, there is one thing I would like to emphasize. My friends, I cannot allow anyone to dictate how I conduct myself with members of the Society. It is up to me, and me alone, to decide how I find it necessary to relate to them. This is not to be taken as any kind of guideline for you; I am simply speaking for myself. I will not allow anyone to prescribe in any way how I should interact with members, inasmuch as this interaction has to do with the sins of omission I am supposed to have committed against them.

There is a very deep and weighty reason why this has to be the way it is. Not only this letter, but also many other things that have come up in the Society intermittently down through the years and with increasing frequency lately, show that many people simply do not make an effort to understand the kind of responsibility carried by someone communicating esoteric truths. It seems that many of our members don't want to try to understand what it sometimes takes to speak even a single sentence of that sort. With all the spiritual preparation it takes to give a lecture, it is simply not possible to sit with different little groups of members until two in the morning every night chatting about all kinds of useless and superfluous stuff. This fact is not sufficiently appreciated, nor are many other things that people seem to require of me and that then get counted as sins of omission. I need my time, and I need it in a totally different way than what people seem to want to understand. If I weren't using it the way I am, you would be hearing the same kind of stupid esoteric views from me that you can hear so much of in the rest of the world. So much for the sins of omission.

I also do not understand how the statement that my dealings with individual members and with groups of members are not Christian enough fits together with the complaint that I am exerting an undue influence over you by means of black magic whenever I take the liberty of shaking hands with one of you or involving you in conversation. I am certainly open to changing this practice if the Society will make its views on the subject known, because it is up to you, of course, whether you want to shake hands or get involved in a friendly conversation with me.

If this opinion becomes prevalent, it should be expressed, and then handshakes can, of course, be avoided in the future. For reasons I expressed earlier, I will not go into this any further, but there is still one thing I must mention because it is so very typical.

There is a passage in this letter that reads as follows: “Through the events I have described, my wife and I find ourselves in a situation with regard to yourself that makes it impossible for us to encounter you again in the way my wife did for the last time on Sunday, July 25, in the Schreinerei, and I on Thursday, August 5, on the steps leading to the eurythmy room. We were both in possession of this knowledge already at that time. Nevertheless, you shook our hands and drew us into conversation as if nothing had happened. Healthy tact would have made that kind of thing impossible for any non-clairvoyant, so in your case I have to recognize it as an attempt at impermissible intervention into my inner being.” Let me just mention that on the Friday before Sunday the 25th, a member of our Society approached me with an inquiry from Mrs. Goesch with regard to her child, who had fallen down and gotten hurt somehow. I responded by saying that if she wished, I could take a look at what was wrong with the child. Shortly thereafter that person returned, bringing Mrs. Goesch and the child to me. On the following Sunday, here in the Schreinerei, I intervened in the inner being of Mrs. Goesch by shaking her hand and asking her how the child was doing.

My encounter with Mr. Goesch on the stairs leading up to the eurythmy room on Thursday, August 5, consisted of my responding to Mr. Goesch, who had asked me whether it was all right for the child (whom I had just seen standing down by the door) to take part in eurythmy exercises again, by saying that of course that was entirely up to the parents, since what the parents wanted was the only thing to consider in whether or not the child should come to eurythmy again. At that point, I also made the mistake of extending my hand to Mr. Goesch. These are the two instances in which I intervened in someone else's inner being by means of black magic.

Let me still comment on one more passage from the end of this letter: “I am now coming to the end of what I want to say at present. I have not been able to clothe my insights—which I achieved through the guidance of the Keeper of the Seal of the Society for Theosophical Art and Style, who is under the protection of Christian Rosenkreutz—in the ideal form I had envisioned. The obstacles were still too great for someone only recently released from your spell.” I believe you all know who the so-called keeper of the seal is, and all I have to say about this is that the person in question has written a number of letters to both me and my wife in the past few months, including one Mrs. Steiner received only today.⁴ I will not discuss the matter of the “keeper of the seal” any further today; I just want to point out that her letters started coming around Christmas, mysteriously enough.

It may well be that I shall have to say something about this at some point, but I really do not want to do it today. I want you to come to a conclusion without being influenced by me. It is certainly almost impossible to be aware of the mysterious connection between this letter and the “keeper of the seal” and say nothing further about it, but today may not be the right time for that.

However, I do still want to mention that some years ago in fall I announced that due to certain embarrassing symptoms that had appeared within our Society, it seemed necessary to found a society of a more restricted sort.⁵ To begin with, I attempted to invest a number of long-term members close to me with certain offices, on the assumption that these people would become independently active in accordance with their new titles. At that time, I said that if anything came of it, the membership would hear about it by Epiphany. No one heard a thing, which means that the Society for Theosophical Art and Style does not exist. That is a perfectly justified assumption, since no one has heard anything to the contrary, and it is equally safe to assume that an announcement would have been made if my intentions had in fact been realized. The way my plans were received, however, made it impossible for this society to come about. It was simply an experiment.

My friends, I have often said that the Anthroposophical Society has to make sense as a society if it is to make sense at all. After all, other arrangements could be made for lecturing on esoteric teachings. I have also often pointed out that if certain signs and symptoms continue to appear in the Society, finding another form for it will become inevitable because the present form and present arrangements are not serving the purpose. I was trying to avoid certain things prevalent in the Theosophical Society when I founded the Anthroposophical Society, of which I do not want to be a member, since that is crucial to what I have to do for this spiritual movement.

Our Society also often comes under attack from outside, and of course these attacks are also directed at the Society's teacher and lecturer. This should lead our active members to take up the obligation to defend our cause, if they take the idea of our Society as seriously as they should. However, libelous pamphlets of the most despicable sort, containing the most unbelievable calumnies, have been appearing, and I leave it up to each one of you to judge whether everyone who could do something about them has taken the idea of the Society as seriously as would be necessary if the Society is to withstand these attacks from outside.

My friends, it is neither feasible nor possible for those who have an interest in the survival of the Anthroposophical Society to always first come to me to discuss what they ought to do in defense of me and our cause. That has to come to an end. If it does not, it would mean that it is actually true that people here are assigned their positions by me. I have to respect the independence of the members, even if that means, as it unfortunately does in many cases, that I have to deny them something. The fact of the matter is that the way things have been going, I could truly have done much more if I had not had to get involved in a lot of things that actually did not warrant my involvement. At least where the well-being of our Society is concerned, it is an absurdity to want to clear everything with me first. If what I want to do is to be accomplished on behalf of the Society, then please allow me the time to do it. The Society is wrongly conceived of if people are always turning to one individual; it must include taking personal initiative in what needs to be done on behalf of the Society.

For this reason, my friends, today's incident must be seen as an important and even crucial one. That is why I read you this letter, which is basically only an isolated symptom of something flaring up here, there, and everywhere. I will wait patiently to see what you, as members of the Society, will do about it. Meanwhile, I will continue to fulfill my obligations; the program will continue tomorrow as planned. But it goes without saying that how everything goes on after that will depend on the position the Society takes on what it has heard today. This is not something to be taken as an isolated case; it touches on many fundamental issues I have been pointing to for months in many discussions.⁶

When Rudolf Steiner had finished, a discussion took place; no stenographic record was kept. Some people must have spoken up in defense of the point of view expressed in Goesch's letter, because as one participant recollects, Rudolf Steiner left the room together with Marie Steiner, saying “I cannot have anything more to do with a society like this!”⁷ The great majority of those present must have been ashamed of this state of affairs, and on that same evening they composed this expression of confidence:

Dornach
August 21, 1915

Dear Dr. Steiner:

As members of the Anthroposophical Society, we wish to express our righteous indignation and our feeling of shame that someone of mendacious and immoral outlook, as evident in Mr. Heinrich Goesch's letter, has dared to address you in a fashion dictated by the most despicable delusions of grandeur.

We must painfully reproach ourselves for not having understood how to prevent what has happened and for having proved unable thus far to create a circle of people in which the thoughts and feelings expressed in this letter could not have arisen.

We ask your forgiveness as our loved and respected teacher. We also ask that you not retract your confidence in us, or rather, that you trust in us again, because we are firmly resolved to better realize the ideal of the Anthroposophical Society and to be more aware of our responsibility in future.

It is a matter of course that, given the point of view they represent, we no longer wish to consider Miss Alice Sprengel, Mr. Heinrich Goesch, and Mrs. Gertrud Goesch as having a place in our midst.

We ask you, dear Dr. Steiner, to take our signatures as an assurance of our unconditional and constant trust and our sincerest gratitude.

signed by Michael Bauer and over 300 others⁸

This vote of confidence was a spontaneous and purely human expression of the signers' relationship to Rudolf Steiner. The facts of the case are addressed in Rudolf Steiner's own contributions. The professional comments of one Dr. Amann (Basel, September 14, 1915) shed some light on the difficulties the members faced in judging the situation:

Among the members, the prevailing opinion is still that Mr. Goesch is not mentally ill, he is only under a bad influence.

When someone has a fever or is drowsy, that is easy enough for anyone to diagnose. On the other hand, mental illness is extremely difficult for even an expert professional to diagnose except in extreme cases.

From people's comments, it is clear that they cannot understand that Mr. Goesch is mentally ill and that they have misconceptions about this type of illness. They believe the mentally ill are necessarily idiots who cannot write intelligently.

Idiots are feeble-minded; the sluggishness of their brain does not allow them to think at all. Unless some organic illness causes feeble-mindedness as a secondary condition, they are born retarded. Exactly the opposite is true of someone who is mentally ill; here, we are dealing with a melancholy frame of mind and clouded logic. This condition, in turn, must be distinguished from insanity—insane people are dangerous!

People who are mentally ill forfeit none of the quality of their intellect. Their intellectual capacity actually increases, because they are inexhaustible when it comes to intellectual work; in fact, they are intellectually active all day and all night. Their illness lies in the fact that they become obsessed and hypnotized with their own fixed trains of thought and are not susceptible to any criticism from outside. These people suffer in secret under the thoughts that plague them until they have carried them to term and can present them to the public. The urge to be visibly productive and important is constantly present in them.

Rudolf Steiner continued in the same vein on the following evening, August 22, 1915, discussing the case further.

• 1. Lecture of August 20, 1915, Dornach, entitled “Episodische Betrachtungen fiber Raum, Zeit, Bewegung” (“Some Observations on Space, Time, and Movement”), in Der Wert des Denkens far eine den Menschen befriedigende Weltanschauung. Das Verhältnis der Geisteswissenschaft zur Naturwissenschaft (“Thinking's Value for a Humanly Satisfying World View: The Relationship of Spiritual Science to Natural Science”), GA 164, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1984). [This lecture has not been published in English—Translator.]
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, “Gedanken wahrend der Zeit des Krieges” (“Thoughts during the Time of War”), essay of July 5, 1915, in Aufsätze über die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus und zur Zeitlage: Schriften und Aufsätze 1915–1921 (“On the Threefolding of the Social Organism and on the Current Situation: Essays and Articles 1915–1921”), GA 24, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1982). [Not available in English—Translator.]
• 3. Rudolf Steiner, The Riddles of Philosophy, GA 18, (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1973).
• 4. See p. 115 in this volume.
• 5. Address in Berlin, December 15, 1911, in Zur Geschichte und aus den Inhalten der ersten Abteilung der Esoterischen Schule 1904 bis 1919 (“On the History and Contents of the First Class of the Esoteric School, 1904–1919”), GA 264, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1984). [This volume has not been published in English—Translator.]
• 6. Rudolf Steiner may well have been referring to his description of different types of clairvoyance, and especially the difference between “head clairvoyance” and “gut clairvoyance.” Cf. the lecture series Wege der Geistigen Erkenntniss und der Erneuerung künstlerischer Weltanschauung (“Paths to Spiritual Knowledge and Renewal of Art Philosophy”), GA 161, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1980), and Kunst- und Lebensfragen im Lichte der Geisteswissenschaft (“Questions of Art and Life in the Light of Spiritual Science”), GA 162, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1985). [These volumes have not been published in English—Translator]
• 7. Hilde Boos-Hamburger in Mitteilungen aus der anthroposophischen Arbeit in Deutschland (“News about the Anthroposophical Work in Germany”), Vol 17, no. 1, Easter 1963.
• 8. Michael Bauer, 1871–1929, leader of the Albrecht Diirer Branch in Nurnberg. He was a member of the Vorstand of the Anthroposophical Society from 1913 until his retirement for health reasons in 1921.

Today I would have liked to be able to lecture on a theme going beyond the events of the moment, and I hope that will be fully the case with tomorrow's lecture, which will begin at seven o'clock. For today, however, I still feel the need to say a few things that relate not only to the letter I had to read yesterday, but also to the very gracious letter from the members that Mr. Bauer has just delivered to me and to still another letter I have received. This is especially necessary now that the things discussed in these letters have come to pass. What I have to say will relate to the matter at hand only to the extent that this particular case can show us all kinds of things we need to know about the relationship of the details of what is going on among and around us to our spiritual movement with its teachings, for in discussing specific occurrences, it is often possible to discover something of universal importance.

I will start from the fact—speaking more or less aphoristically—that I read you a letter yesterday that was signed by two members of the Society and mentioned a third member of long standing.

I believe I will not be committing an indiscretion in telling you about a letter that Mr. Bauer showed me just fifteen minutes ago, a letter written by a Society member who is a physician.¹ The writer is quite rightly of the opinion, as I myself was yesterday, not only after but during the reading of Mr. Goesch's letter, that we are not dealing with anything logical but with something that has to be considered from the point of view of pathology.

Obviously, this is one of the many assumptions we can make in this instance, but in my opinion—and this is simply my personal opinion and should not be considered binding on anyone else—this assumption would be incomplete if we do not also ask whether we are allowed to tolerate the fact that our Society and our entire movement are constantly being endangered by all kinds of pathological cases. Are we to tolerate psychopaths who are destroying our spiritual-scientific activity? Yes, to the extent that we can have compassion for them. However, if we tolerate them without fully taking their pathological nature into account, we allow them to constantly endanger everything that is most precious and most important to us. Of course, we need to be clear that we are dealing with psychopaths, but we must also be clear about what we have to do so that our cause is not jeopardized. Even things we recognize as being caused by illness have to be dealt with appropriately in real life. Of course, how this applies to the personalities in question is a totally separate issue.

As you have seen from many things we have had to discuss over the course of time, there is a certain recurrent experience that is unavoidable in a spiritual movement such as ours: Personal interests and personal vanity inevitably get mixed up with our purely objective aspirations. This need not even be taken as a reproach, strictly speaking; after all, we are all human. But it does need to be mentioned, and I am simply stating my personal opinion on the subject; of course, you are not bound by my opinion. When people are willing to admit that they are subject to vanity in certain areas and that for the time being (perhaps for reasons having to do with their upbringing and so on) they have no particular interest in getting rid of that vanity, that is a much lesser evil than wanting to be absolutely perfect at any given moment. The greatest evil, so it seems, is when people want to believe in their own perfection in every instance, when they want to believe that they are doing whatever they are doing for totally selfless reasons, and so forth.

The greatest temptation faced by any spiritual movement such as ours is the very pronounced vanity that comes into play simply because such movements must necessarily have great and noble aims that can be realized only gradually, and not all of us can immediately broaden our interests to include the objective requirements of our cause. It is understandable enough that when some people first hear about reincarnation, they take an immediate personal interest in finding out about their own previous incarnations for reasons of personal vanity. Looking into history for this reason is the worst possible way to investigate previous incarnations, but that is what most people do out of personal vanity. Thus, instead of being an inner path of meditation, historical events or the Old and New Testaments become a treasure trove for the gratification of personal vanity. Simply put, it is nothing more than that. And it is good to be aware that looking for one's own incarnations in history or in the Bible is basically nothing more than personal vanity.

It is understandable that this kind of vanity should come into play. The trouble starts, however, when vanity is not recognized as such, and when instead of examining their deep-seated ambitious motives calmly, people shroud them in a mantle of occultism or let them merge into some nebulous mysticism.

Concerning certain things that prevail with some justification outside the confines of a spiritual movement, the movement must make a point of approaching them from the perspective of a much more elevated morality than is the norm. However, we must never disregard the possibility that a lot of what we consider higher morality may be nothing of the sort, but simply an outlet for our own drives and instincts. From the kinds of discussions we have been through before, you can see how people can have perfectly legitimate human instincts and drives, but let them get mixed up with all sorts of occult embellishments. They may even console themselves for the existence of these drives and instincts with all sorts of deceptively rational explanations. It would be much better if they would simply admit these drives exist and apply their esoteric schooling to understanding them.

I read Mr. Goesch's letter to you; you all heard it and followed what was going on. What I am going to say about it today is simply my personal, non-binding opinion. Among other things, it was stated in this letter: "I am now coming to the end of what I want to say at present. I have not been able to clothe these insights—which I achieved under the guidance of the Keeper of the Seal of the Society for Theosophical Art and Style… in the ideal form I had envisioned.”

We all know that Miss Sprengel is the keeper of the seal and that Mr. Goesch is the one who wrote the letter. I think if any French-speaking people were to read this letter and apply the old French proverb “cherchez la femme,” they would be quite right, in spite of the fact that “keeper of the seal” is a masculine noun in German. In fact, if you apply the principle of “cherchez la femme,” much of what is talked about in this letter becomes more understandable.

I still need to express my own personal opinion about some of the details in this letter. For instance, in this letter it is suggested that it is impossible to imagine that so-called lessons of the esoteric school could be held within our Society after all that has happened. I read that passage yesterday. It suggests that because of all the “crimes” the letter describes, lessons of the esoteric school could no longer be held.

We must look at these things, too, in the right light and not hesitate to look at them closely. As you know, we temporarily discontinued these esoteric lessons when the war broke out, and anyone who bothers to look at these things carefully will realize that this is due to nothing other than the present circumstances of the war.² These lessons are not being given anymore so as not to do our Society a disservice.

There are only two possibilities these days. One is to act in the best interests of the Society, which means that regardless of whether we live in a nation at war or a neutral country, we must refrain from holding meetings that are not open to the public. Just imagine what could happen, and what a windfall it would be for people who go around making insinuations, if we were to hold secret meetings behind locked doors. Obviously, we must not do that, and Society members will have to resign themselves to doing without these lessons. It is as clear as day that we cannot have meetings between members from different countries going on behind locked doors, which is not to say that anything unacceptable would be happening there. As far as we are concerned, such meetings could happen on a daily basis as a matter of course. But you know how strong the opposition to our movement is. This must also be taken into account, and we must not endanger the whole movement by doing anything stupid or foolish. That's why we must give up holding closed meetings—they would simply open the door to that modern illness known as “spy-itis.”

The other possibility, which is totally out of the question, would be to separate the members according to nationality in order to speak to them. That is obviously not in line with the purpose of our Society.

I hope you have realized by now that this measure was taken because the war made it necessary; it will be rescinded as soon as the war is over, as you could all have worked out for yourselves.
I must still mention a few more thoughts in connection with this measure. We cannot simply assume that all the people out there are so decent and respectable that they will assume that we, too, are only capable of decent and respectable actions. We cannot expect them to be concerned about us and about finding out what we are doing. They have no way of knowing whether or not we are doing something they would consider unacceptable. That is what stands behind taking measures like this. It is impossible to count on the outside world making positive assumptions about us, but we really ought to be able to count on this within the Society itself.

In recent months, not only in this letter but in all the events leading up to it, we have repeatedly heard the opinion—coming from people whose aspirations are expressed in this letter—that the lessons of the esoteric school have been stopped not because of the war but because the Society has assumed a form that makes it necessary for such lessons to stop altogether. After all, given the “crimes” that have been committed, it can no longer be assumed that people will have the requisite trust in such lessons. This means nothing less than that we have to expect that certain measures we take within the Society will be judged in a way that can no longer be considered a decent or respectable interpretation. This interpretation is absolutely inadmissible; it is real slander and cannot be excused as a simple mistake.

Legally speaking, it is no different from libel, and it is even more worrisome when the rumors being spread are veiled in all kinds of mystical disguises. The way such things are passed around is often much more disastrous than people imagine, although I wouldn't go so far as to endorse the point of view of this letter-writer and claim that rumors whispered from one person to another must necessarily make use of black magic. That is not what I mean. Spreading rumors can be accomplished by quite natural means and does not necessarily imply any talent for black magic.

Let me emphasize once again before I continue that what I am saying is my own opinion, not to be taken as binding on anyone else.

In the letter in question, there was much talk of how people are supposed to have been unduly influenced through me. I will not comment on the contradiction inherent in this—on the one hand, my friendly conversations and handshakes are interpreted as techniques of black magic, and on the other hand I am blamed for not seeking closer relationships with members. On the one hand it is stated that I cut myself off from the members and don't do enough for them, but on the other hand I am supposed to have used each and every conversation and handshake to influence people against their will.

We need to understand how such a contradiction can come about. For instance, someone may desire something—let's take the case of a person who wants to have been the Virgin Mary in a previous incarnation. This is a real example, not a made-up one. Suppose the person in question comes and makes me aware of this. If I were to say, “Yes, yes, my occult research confirms that,” then that person would most likely not take this remark as an instance of undue influence. If what people are told corresponds to their desires, they are extremely unlikely to interpret it as an attempt to influence them unjustifiably. Now, self-deception and vanity are not usually taken to such an extreme that people imagine themselves having gone through this particular previous incarnation—they are more likely to choose something else, but the principle involved is what we need to consider at this point.

At this stage of human evolution, the autonomy of individual souls must be respected in the most painstaking way. Basically, people who think like the person who composed this letter do not have a viable idea of this painstaking kind of respect. After all, the writer of this letter would have found it pleasant to have been influenced in line with his own desires, and he wished for much more personal discussion. Suppose he and I had actually discussed all kinds of stuff, and also exchanged handshakes. On the one hand, that would have been exactly what he wanted, and on the other hand, the terrible crime he mentions would have been committed against him. As I said, most people have no idea of the painstaking regard for individual freedom that has to be the rule in a movement like ours. We must make an intense effort to preserve the autonomy of individual souls.

Let's imagine people coming to us with relatively mild cases of incarnational vanity. If we agreed with them, they would surely not go on complaining about being unduly influenced. But suppose we said to them, “Don't be silly; never in all your previous lives were you any such person!” If we are being very precise about it, that would have to be considered an unjustified intervention in these people's inner being, although perhaps not a very serious one.

Let's look at this instance with all possible clarity. If people come to us and tell us who they think they were in an earlier incarnation, regardless of whether they have come to this conclusion out of vanity or out of something else, they have arrived at it themselves, out of their own individual souls. This is where their own soul's paths have led them. And it belongs to the fundamental nature of our movement to lead people further, if possible, starting from whatever point they have arrived at inwardly when they come to us, but not to break their heart and will at some particular moment. If in such a moment we simply make an end of the matter by saying, “Don't be ridiculous; that's nonsense,” that is not an appropriate response. It actually would be an unjustified intervention if we permitted ourselves to speak like this, and these people would have no option but to extend us their confidence in a very personal way not appropriate to the situation, which, as we shall soon see, requires a totally different kind of confidence.

Instead, we should really say something along the lines of, “Well, as things stand now, this thought is something you have arrived at in your own soul. Try to make this thought carry over into real life; try to live as if it were true. See if you can actually do what you would be able to do, and if what happens is what would have to happen if it were true.” An answer like this helps them arrive quite logically at how things really are. It truly preserves their personal freedom without cutting anything off short, no matter how erroneous a path they may have been on until now. It is important to realize that refraining from influencing other souls is actually a very deep issue.

If they stick to the facts, people who share the opinions expressed in this letter will also not be able to maintain that any individuals in this Society have been particularly spoiled by me when it comes to having their previous incarnations made known. Please take what I have just said extremely seriously: It is not adequate to have some clumsy idea of what it means to influence or not influence others; in this day and age, if we always try to respect the freedom and dignity of others, the standards we must apply will be extremely difficult to live up to.

I have always consciously cultivated this sort of respect for the souls of others within our Society, to the extent that, in my attempt to preserve individual freedom, I have made a habit of speaking much less affirmatively or negatively than most people probably would. I have always tried to say only what would enable the person in question to come to independent conclusions on the matter, without acting on my authority. I have tried to eliminate personal authority as a factor by simply advising people to take certain things into account. This is something I have always made a conscious effort to foster.

I hope you will also realize that the misconceptions set down in this letter are not even among the strangest ones that can come about. It has happened more than once that people showed up at a lecture cycle somewhere or other, saying that it was Dr. Steiner's expressed wish that they attend. That has happened many times. If you look into it a bit, you will find that the people in question had told me of their plans to attend the series and, since I am always heartily pleased to meet members again in different places, I had told them I was very glad. In many cases, however, what I said was so changed in the minds of the people in question that by the next day they were saying that it was my particular wish that they attend this course. This is another instance of these strange misconceptions.

Many of our friends want nothing more than to be told what to do, but I have always tried to conduct myself so the members would notice that it would not occur to me to want to give people personal advice about how to manage their everyday life. I am far from wanting to influence them in things like whether or not they should attend a certain lecture cycle. From my perspective, the thing people most often want me to do and that I have to resist most strongly is to influence them personally in details like this. I never want to do that and always have to refuse. Within a society such as ours should be, it is necessary to refrain from that kind of thing.

All of this relates to something else that needs to be stated once just as a matter of principle. Anyone who observes how I try to work will realize that I always attempt to let the matter at hand speak for itself. And that brings me to the issue of confidence, as I would like to call it. I would really like to ask you members to duly consider whether I have ever done anything with regard to either an individual or the Society as a whole to encourage confidence of a personal nature in myself. Try to think about this and come to a conclusion on the basis of how I hold my lectures.

Let us consider an obvious case. You were all so kind as to show up for the lecture I held two days ago on various mathematical and geometrical ideas.³ In the course of this lecture, I told you that from a certain spiritual scientific perspective, matter is nothing; matter as we know it is a hole in space. There is nothing there where matter is. However, I do not want you to simply take this statement on faith; I am far from wanting anyone to take these teachings on faith simply because they come from me. Instead, I try to show how modern science, including its most advanced and respected representatives, can arrive at the same insight as spiritual science. I tried to demonstrate an objective basis in fact, a basis that is also revealed by the results of scientific research, regardless of my own personal way of arriving at this discovery and quite apart from the fact that I am the one telling you about it.

I make a point of doing this so you will not need personal faith in me, but will be able to do without it and see how I try to let the subject, no matter how difficult, speak for itself.

I am sorry to have to present the issue of confidence to you like this; I would have preferred for you to see for yourself that all my efforts are directed toward making confidence in a particular personality unnecessary. The only kind of confidence that comes into question here at all would be the kind enabling you to say, “He is really making an effort to not simply lecture us on some kind of inspired insights; he is really trying to get everything together in one place so that things can be assessed on their own merit, independent of his personality.” Of course, this is not to say that I always succeed in “getting everything together in one place”—first of all, there isn't enough time for that, and secondly it is the nature of things to remain incomplete. My method, however, does tend in the direction of eliminating rather than encouraging faith in me personally. That is how we have to look at this issue of confidence in a spiritual movement. That is what is important to me, but in this, too, I am only expressing my personal opinion.

Admittedly, we must also recognize a certain perspective that tends to make everything relative, since in general it is true that everything should be subject to legitimate criticism. And it is certainly true that everyone should have the right to criticize where criticism is justified. On the other hand, this business of criticizing must also be taken relatively. Just think, the amount of work we can do is limited by time and cannot be extended in just any direction according to the whims of others. In view of that, you will realize that some of Mr. Goesch's ideas have not been thought through in terms of real life.

As I have often pointed out and can state quite openly, I would not venture to speak about certain things if I had not lived and worked with them for decades and become familiar with them over the course of a long life. For example, I would never have spoken about Faust if I had not lived my way into it over decades of intense involvement with the subject.⁴ Having done so, however, it is a real waste of time for me, as you can imagine, if someone who has not put anywhere near that kind of effort into it comes and wants to argue certain points with me. You really cannot ask that of me or of anyone else. Someone once wrote a letter to the poet Hamerling on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, addressing him as “Dear old man”; Hamerling was somewhat taken aback, needless to say.⁵ Now, I am over fifty already, but I think you will admit that my task demands a certain amount of time and will understand that I do not need to spend time debating with people about things I was already concerned with when those people were still in diapers. In the abstract, getting involved in such discussions may be the right thing to do, but it is not usually very fruitful, especially when it has to do with things like the contents of this letter. I really have to say that. It is quite a different thing when someone speaks out of age and experience than when some young upstart talks about it. That is simply a fact of life.

And then, just think about the blatant contradictions in this letter. You don't have to think as I do, but I do want to tell you what I think about it. One sentence reads: “Alongside the work dedicated to the good within your activity in our spiritual movement, I have noticed certain behaviors…,” and so on. In conjunction with this sentence, the writer lists a large number of undertakings that I would not presume to mention myself if they weren't listed here, since I would have to admit that everything on this list has been done imperfectly at best. I have always emphasized, for instance, that the Johannesbau represents only the beginning of what ought to be done. Even so, people do not seem to be able to understand that I might have to limit what I take on, that I cannot, in addition to all these activities, take the time to cultivate all the relationships dreamed up by the writer of this letter. It is really taking things too lightly to imagine that I can possibly do both.

I am reluctant to put it like this, and I ask you to recognize my reluctance, but in order to do all that I would really have to ask the person who composed this letter to make each year twice as long. Barring that, I have to be permitted to organize my own activity as I see fit, which, however, in no way limits what other people want and can do. That, in fact, has been the goal of all my efforts—that each person should do what he or she wants without anyone asking them to do anything other than what they want to do. In that case, however, I must also be granted the right to limit what I recognize as my own task. In most cases, it is just those people who do not want to get involved in any concrete tasks and do not want to develop their will to serve concrete purposes who are most involved in criticizing what has already been accomplished.⁶

However, this is not a constructive attitude in real life. People who are not in agreement with an association as it already exists are welcome to stay out of it, and to do whatever they are in agreement with. It is much easier, though, to become part of some society and criticize it from within than to do something on your own initiative. Finding fault is easy, but it in no way determines or restricts what you yourself can accomplish. Knowing what ought to happen and that someone else is doing something badly is never the crucial factor, but what is crucial is the effort someone makes to actually carry out what one talks about and is able to do. It is also not crucial that other people carry out what I want to have happen—they can take it up or leave it; their freedom is limited, not by me, but only by what they believe themselves able to accomplish. They must simply develop the will to carry out what lies within their own capabilities.

When this Society of ours was in the beginning stages, I believed it could be a prime example of this last-stated principle. It is the greatest failing of this day and age that people always want a tremendous amount but do not actually manage to do anything. Well, that is understandable enough. You see, anyone who has acquired knowledge and capability in any particular field and works with what has been learned knows that what one can actually accomplish is really terribly little. People who have had to develop their abilities are the most aware of how little can actually be done, while those who can do very little or have not yet tested their abilities think they can accomplish the most. That is why programs are more visible nowadays than accomplished facts; programs are floating around all over the place. It is extremely easy to set down in abstract terms what we hope to achieve through socialism, theosophy, the women's movement, community with others, and so on. It's easy to develop ingenious and appropriate programs. But people who have done something positive, even within extremely limited circles, have actually accomplished much more than the ones who put out the greatest programs for all the world to see. My friends, we must realize that what counts is what actually gets done. It would be best if we would more or less keep our programs locked up in a secret chamber in our hearts and only use them as guidelines for our individual lives.

Of course, it is very easy to misunderstand a movement like ours. Yesterday, I pointed out that we have to accept misunderstanding as a matter of course and spoke about how we should relate to misunderstanding on the part of people outside the movement who are not only unsparing in their criticism—their criticism would actually be a good thing—but unsparing with slander and false accusations as well. A significant amount has been accomplished in this regard over the course of the years. Especially in the area of slander and disparagement much has been achieved; yet the steps necessary to fend them off have not been taken. It is really necessary that the most intimate attributes of a spiritual movement like ours spread within our Society.

Something I always advocate and repeatedly mention because it is obviously part of my task is the fact that what I can mean to another person must be determined only by the spiritual aspect of our movement. And it is crucial that this spiritual factor, this purely spiritual factor uniting us, not be misinterpreted. I really cannot discuss the issue of the case at hand without touching upon these things. I am very sorry about all this because I always try to protect people as long as possible. However, our cause has to be more important than individuals. There is no other way.

Anyone who can judge these things objectively will be readily able to see the connection between what I said earlier about respecting the freedom of each independent soul and how I relate to individual members. I am constantly trying to make a reality out of something that is a natural consequence of our spiritual movement and that seems necessary to me in order to handle all personal relationships in such a way that they are appropriately integrated into our spiritual movement. This means I must leave each and every member of our Society free to act in ways that may differ completely from mine.

Some of you may share Mr. Goesch's opinion, and welcome any efforts to cultivate our social and personal interaction and cohesiveness. I myself think it would be a good thing if someone would make this effort, so that our Society would be a society in more than name only. However, my own role in this Society is necessarily limited. Nevertheless, I realize that I am still the one who knows by far the greatest number of members personally. Many people here know fewer than I do. I am certainly not opposed to people doing a lot to cultivate the personal aspects that play such a great role in this letter, but as I said, I must limit what I myself take on for reasons I have already presented adequately.

In view of that, it seems a very strange misunderstanding of what is actually going on when we hear opinions like those expressed again in this letter, claiming that the best of what I have to offer is becoming a mere shadowy image because of all this. According to this point of view, it seems that this Society built on the basis of spiritual science, this Society as I have to understand it, is seen as something that is too abstract and ought to assume a much more personal character. I am putting it like this—“ought to assume a much more personal character”—in order to avoid using a different expression. I have often explained that this personal character is not possible; it simply cannot be. I have even said so to some members individually. I would prefer to see this personal element rooted out to such an extent that I could, for instance, lecture from behind a screen so as to avoid mixing up personal connections to members with the main point, which is to disseminate anthroposophical teachings and make them effective in actual practice. I am sorry to have to say things like this, but how are we supposed to understand each other if these things are not said?

I would like to relate a particular incident and then comment on it. There is a certain person to whom I have always related as I described above, trying to practice what is right in relation to our spiritual movement, fulfilling my obligations with regard to this movement and disregarding any personal factors.⁷ Some time ago, this person found it necessary to write me a letter that begins as follows. I will not read the whole letter, but only the part of it that seems to be at the root of this whole incident. This letter arrived on December 25, 1914—Christmas Day of last year. I will now read this very characteristic passage, which begins with a quotation from one of the mystery dramas: “ ’Seven years now have passed,’ Dr. Steiner, since you appeared to my inner vision and said to me, ‘I am the one you have spent your life waiting for; I am the one for whom the powers of destiny intended you.’ ” Further on in the letter, we read, “Neither the teaching nor the teacher was enough to revive my soul; that could only be done by a human being capable of greater love than any other and thus capable of compensating for a greater lack of love.”

This is asking for something that cannot and must not be given in a personal sense. The teacher and the teachings are of lesser importance; what is wanted is the human being, the person. We should not play hide-and-seek in cases like this. At the conclusion of Mr. Goesch's letter, he says that he arrived at his insights under the guidance of the keeper of the seal of the Society for Theosophical Art and Style. Now, this keeper of the seal is the same person who wrote the sentence I just read, a sentence that shows that the things she is writing about have been slowly coming to a head for a long time. I will refrain from using any adjectives to describe the particularly pronounced insinuations in the letter Mrs. Steiner received from her yesterday. (See p. 115.) Such insinuations should not be repeated because of course people should be protected as long as they actually allow themselves to be protected. However, I really must point out that it is possible for things like this to happen in our Society.

Please do not imagine that I have been blind to this development, which has split into two parts, so to speak. I will speak first about the part that has to do with our Society as it is seen from outside, since it may be best to talk about that aspect first. Among the many things, some of them highly slanderous, that have been written in defamatory articles about our movement in general and myself in particular, there have been ever-recurring insinuations about the number of man-chasing hysterical women in our Society. I am not saying that this is true, but simply that it is mentioned in the many diatribes that have appeared, slandering us and myself in particular.

The current case is not an isolated incident, and things that appear in this form should not be interpreted personally but taken as symptomatic. Still, I must say that someone trying to get close to our movement should not try to do so by writing “Seven years now have passed, Dr. Steiner…” and so on. I do not want to go into these things at great length, but you will understand what was meant. These things cannot be judged on the basis of a single case, however. Instead, each individual case has to be interpreted as a sign that the teachings have not been received as impersonally as they should have been, and as an indication that there were some among us ready to set less store by the teachings and the teacher than by the human personality.

This was one of the secondary reasons why I and my loyal colleague, who had stood by me for so many years, were married last Christmas. I admit that we were not at all inclined to conceal the matter behind any occult cloak. First of all, as far as we were concerned, these personal things were nobody else's business. Secondly, with regard to the relationship between us, it had become necessary not to let misunderstandings arise because of things being taken on a more personal human level than they were intended.⁸ An expression used frequently between the two of us in those days was that by marrying me, Mrs. Steiner had become the “cleaning lady” with regard to things that had been accumulating in some people's heads. I think you understand what I mean. Our intent was to have things taken less personally than they had been until then.

I hope you will not misunderstand me when I say that in general in a society such as this one, liberating ourselves as much as possible from the customs of the rest of the world is not the point. Instead, we should be helping the world progress with regard to customs and ways of looking at things. It can only be of help to us to arrange such matters so they are quite clear in the eyes of the outer world and so no one can get mistaken ideas about them.

This also led Mrs. Steiner, in responding to a letter from the person who actually instigated this whole business, to write that a civil wedding ceremony was actually not such a terribly important event, considering our years of working together on things that were of utmost importance to our lives. The response to that was, “However, your civil marriage unleashed a disaster for me, one that I had feared and seen coming for years—not in what actually happened, you understand, but in its nature and severity.” It should suffice for me to point out that a certain relationship exists between what we are experiencing now and the appointment of the “cleaning lady.” As far as I am concerned, no further proof of the need for the cleaning lady is needed!

There is no harm in taking things at face value and not reading more into them than is actually there, my friends, but it is always harmful to link a particular occult mission with some petty detail, or even something of major importance, from one's personal life. That's why we prefer the image of the “cleaning lady,” which corresponds to the facts much better than any pompous pronouncements we might have come up with, although we never imagined we would have to talk about it.

It is my personal opinion that if someone in our spiritual movement looks for something so personal in things that are perfectly self-explanatory, it is a disturbing reminder of the prevalence of certain instincts in our Society. The only acceptable way to deal with these instincts is to admit that they exist and face up to them truthfully without any occult disguises. That is also the best way to move beyond them. It only works if you confront them for what they really are. In our circles, however, an incredible amount has been done to surround these things with an occult aura.

Why should we let the purely objective interest we actually ought to have in our spiritual movement be clouded by dragging personal vanity into everything? Why should we let that happen? People who spend a lot of time thinking about their incarnations down through history are not really interested in this cause; they lack the particular kind of interest they ought to have. The only difference between them and ordinary egotists is that ordinary egotists are not so presumptuous as to identify themselves with all kinds of historical incarnations, but satisfy their personal vanity with other things.

It is really true that it is much better for people to flaunt their clothes or their money than their incarnations—that is much the lesser of the two evils. These are things we have to take seriously and inscribe into the depths of our soul. They have done too much harm over the years and are so intimately bound up with what I am forced to call “personal vanity,” to use a general term.

When personal vanity plays a large part, the most unbelievable misunderstandings can arise. As she recounts in her letter, this “keeper of the seal” once came to me and stated that she was obliged to apply standards already long since present within her to whatever came toward her from the outer world. My response was, “Why should that mean you can't be part of our spiritual movement? Of course you can apply your own standards,” by which I only meant that our teachings have nothing to fear from anyone's personal standards. That is what people are supposed to apply. In my opinion, there was nothing wrong with her wanting to apply her own standards. But the way she interpreted this showed that what she actually meant was that she was already in possession of everything spiritual that could be given her; she had already seen it in visions and thus was already in possession of it.

Then this woman went on to ask whether in that case she could or should become a student of mine. I do not know why she asked that; the question is a contradiction in itself. Well, all I can say is that it was an undeniable fact that she wanted to join us in spite of everything, and there was no way to prevent her from doing it. However, her claiming to be already in possession of it all and condescending to work with this movement while insisting on applying her own standards reveal a kind of vanity that is looking for something other than our teachings. After all, she did not need the teachings if she had them already. People are so unbelievably unaware of this kind of vanity, and it plays such a very great role in a movement like ours.

This person assumed that what was being taught actually stemmed from her, no less. That is somewhat difficult to understand. She must have found some reason to believe that in something in Mrs. Steiner's letter of response to her,9 something that led her to point more specifically to this mysterious source of our esoteric movement. That is how this strange state of affairs came about. My friends, it is no longer possible to play hide-and-seek for the sake of protecting individuals; it is time for us to go into these things. In the seal-keeper's answer to Mrs. Steiner, she says, "Three years ago, like a sick person seeking out a physician, I asked Dr. Steiner for a consultation. There was something very sad that I had to say during that interview, and I have had to say it frequently since then: Although I could follow his teachings, I could not understand anything of what affected me directly or of what happened to me. I must omit what brought me to the point of saying this, since I do not know how much you know about my background and biography." She says this because I once had to hear a conversation in which this was discussed. “I was not able to express my need, and Dr. Steiner made it clear that he did not want to hear about it.” It's true that I did not want to hear about it, but I did respond. You cannot just avoid things like that by indicating that you do not want to hear about them. “The following summer, however, we were graced with the opportunity to perform The Guardian of the Threshold; in it a conversation takes place between Strader and Theodora, a conversation that reflected in the most delicate way the very thing that was oppressing me. Perhaps Dr. Steiner did not ‘intend’ anything of the sort”—intend is in quotation marks—“nevertheless, it is a fact. Perhaps it was meant as an attempt at healing.” In the passage in question from the mystery drama, Strader says he owes everything to Theodora.

When people write things like this, especially in an attempt at a formal style, though its grandiloquence contributes nothing to its clarity, we really cannot assume that it deserves to be treated as a personal communication. There is a lot that could be seen as personal, and I have mentioned none of that; everything I have mentioned is intimately related to the whole character and nature of our movement. If people don't want these things to be mentioned in public, they should not write them down. When the kind of attitude expressed in this letter becomes predominant, it undermines everything I am trying to accomplish with every word I speak and with everything I have been doing for many years.

If we are to go on working together, you must not remain ignorant of what I think my position among you should be. If in fact we are to go on working together, it will have to be on the same basis as before. We must find a way to create a form for our spiritual movement that will be appropriate to the stage of evolution of people in our day and age. That cannot happen, however, if all kinds of personal things take the place of what should be achieved and understood on a spiritual level. It astounds me that in these difficult times, when our interest should be focused on the development of a major portion of humanity, someone should have so little interest in the events of the day as to drag such highly personal interests into our Society. A person who thinks it permissible to live in the illusion that something did not happen the way she dreamed it would, and has nothing better to do than cause a crisis on that account, is really cut off from the most profound aspect of our times.

This is how these highly personal matters start creeping into our Society. However, personal matters cannot be allowed to enter our movement, not in this form and not in any other. People whose chief interest is in their own person will only find a place in our Society to a very limited extent. Generally, people who wrap themselves in a mystical cloud also attempt to do the same to those around them. It would be inconsistent to imagine that you yourself are everything under the sun and not have the people around you be something special too, so the tendency is to broaden the circle. But when, as so frequently happens, this purely personal interest and personal feeling of vanity take the place of objective observation of and efforts toward what our spiritual movement is meant to be, they inflict the worst possible damage on our Society.

One might have thought that the Johannesbau going up here would have presented enough problems to keep our members busy and distract them from the vainer and more foolish things in life. One really might have believed that this building would turn their thoughts to better things. But as you see, that has not come about as we might have hoped, and yet we have to go on working. I thank you all for the expressions of confidence contained in the letter our friend Mr. Bauer brought to me, as well as those expressed by other members, and I hope ways and means can be found to deal with these obstacles to our movement's true progress and to give a little thought to what it will take to keep our movement from being too seriously constrained by outer hindrances in the future.

Criticism, my friends, cannot harm us. People can criticize us objectively as much as they like, and it will do no damage. First of all, it will always be possible to counter the criticism with whatever needs to be said, and secondly, time is on our side. Today, people may well still think we're fools because of our boiler house or the Johannesbau itself, or whatever, but they'll come around, and we can wait until they do. That's the way it is with anything new.

It is something totally different when slanderous and untrue statements are made. In that case, we are obliged to set these claims straight again and again if we don't choose to simply ignore them, and of course the slanderers can always answer back. It can even reach the point of taking legal action. Yet, we do need to defend ourselves against such statements, even if it feels like washing our hands in black and filthy water.

If we could really foster an active attitude and strengthen our forces on these two fronts, we would be able to do a lot that has been left undone so far.

Of course, this is not meant as a personal reproach to anyone in particular; some of what I said applies to some people, other things to others. It is intended quite generally. However, what I have pointed out has a solid basis in fact, and in order for you to see it, I have had to present something of the situation to show how things that were only intended to be taken spiritually have been taken very personally.

Please don't take it amiss if I say that if someone comes with complaints, even if she says she already knew everything she has gained or can still gain through the movement, the only thing to do is treat that person like a child and offer fatherly admonition or friendly consolation. I was naive enough to believe that it had helped, and then had to watch these delusions of grandeur appear afterward, so it… [gap in stenographic record] great damage within this Society of ours.

Considering the claims of the keeper of the seal, there was never any point in doing anything other than smilingly forgiving her for this rubbish, the way you excuse a child. Please don't hold it against me that I said what simply had to be said. But for the sake of our movement's dignity, we cannot permit pathological elements to destroy it. That is why we cannot always take the stand that we should simply accept these pathological elements for what they are. When this pathological element takes on all the appearances of delusions of grandeur, we have to call it by name; we have no other choice. This is by no means directed against the personality in question, but only against what is deserving of criticism in that person. After all, we must face the facts and not hide the issue behind the cloak of the occult. It requires a particular effort at self-education to do that, but if we succeed, we will see things as they truly are instead of through a glass darkly.

Perhaps you will say that I myself am speaking out of vanity at this point. That will make no difference to me, since I have already been condemned to call a spade a spade in this instance. I have known many students who thought they were smarter than their teachers and proceeded to tell them off, claiming that the latter had made all kinds of promises without keeping them. That this should also happen within our Society comes as no great surprise.

Now I have given you my own humble opinion, which you are not to take as binding. I am simply asking that you take it in the same way I want you to take everything I say, that is, I would like you to try to see if we are better able to get on with life in our movement once a common resolve is there to call the big things big and the little things little instead of drawing a mystical halo around any old arbitrary personal vanity.

If we are not aware of the full seriousness of our movement, the temptation is very great to fake it by decking out all sorts of life's little vanities in this same serious garb. That cannot be, and this simple statement means more than it seems to. This is what I had to say, although I did not want to. I cannot read these letters in their entirety in front of the whole movement, but it would not occur to anyone who could read them that I have overstepped my authority by quoting passages from private correspondence. In this case, it had to happen because these things are related to the very foundations of what we are doing together.

• 1. It has not been possible to ascertain which physician and which letter are referred to here.
• 2. See the volume Zur Geschichte und aus den Inhalten der ersten Abteilung der Esoterischen Schule 1904 bis 1919, note 5 to section II above.
• 3. See II, note 1 above.
• 4. See the two volumes Geisteswissenschaftliche Erlauterungen zu Goethes “Faust” (“Spiritual Scientific Commentaries on Goethe's Faust”), GA 272 and 273, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1981). [These volumes have not been published in English—Translator.]
• 5. Robert Hamerling, 1830–1889, Austrian poet.
• 6. This seems to be a reference to Heinrich Goesch, who was not involved in any kind of practical activity. It was reported by some members that he had refused to help with the construction of the first Goetheanum.
• 7. The person referred to is Alice Sprengel. See Part Two, p. 109ff in this volume and also note 1 under I above.
• 8. The second half of this sentence is somewhat unclear in the stenographic record and may have not have been taken down exactly or completely.

MY DEAR FRIENDS! Movements such as our spiritual scientific movement have always been fostered in such a way that something that was to be impressed upon the spiritual culture of the times, or on culture in general, was first cultivated on the level of some formal social organization or society. And since the conditions of human interaction are the same today as they have been throughout history, it is also necessary for us, to a certain extent, to cultivate our spiritual scientific strivings within the framework of a formal organization.

Now, it has been the experience of almost all such organizations that it is difficult, at least in actual practice, to understand the concept of the society needed to foster a particular spiritual current like this. Time and again we're presented with evidence that there are very many people who actually do not like having to join a society. They admit that they feel uncomfortable about joining such a society; they would prefer to absorb its spiritual wealth through reading or listening to lectures not bound to any organized society, or through still other means. Only this morning, for example, I received a letter to that effect.

The kinds of reasons people give for taking this position have to be taken seriously. But let me emphasize again that a spiritual movement like this one is of necessity very different in its impulses and its whole way of thinking, feeling, and doing from the thinking, feeling, and doing of the other people around it. Therefore, to introduce such a movement to humanity with no help from a formal organization would be much more difficult than to do this by means of a society whose members are preparing, through their interactions and their ongoing absorption of spiritual scientific thoughts and concepts, to be a kind of tool or instrument for disseminating our spiritual science. As a consequence, however, the concept of a society of this kind has to be taken extremely seriously, because in quite practical terms this society has to become a vehicle for the spiritual current in question.

You need only look at our own Society as an example and examine how different it is from other societies, associations, or organizations that people have called into existence. This difference will be particularly noticeable if you keep one thing in mind. Just suppose that recent events confronting us had made us entertain the thought of disbanding the Anthroposophical Society as such. Let's assume hypothetically that we wanted to dissolve the Society because of problems within it. Now, if the Anthroposophical Society were simply an organization like many others, of course it would be possible to simply dissolve it, set something else up in its place, and eliminate the disgraceful circumstances in the process.

However, our Anthroposophical Society is different in a very significant respect from other organizations or societies founded on the basis of some program with a certain number of points and statutes. That kind of society can be dissolved at any moment. If we were to dissolve the Anthroposophical Society, however, it would not be dissolved in actual fact. As the Anthroposophical Society, as a society existing on behalf of a spiritual scientific movement, we are different from other societies in that our Society is founded, not on a program of abstract and therefore unreal points, but on something very real. Our basis is a real one.

Just look at the fact that each member of the Anthroposophical Society is entitled to have access to our lecture cycles, while other people are not.¹ That's a very real basis, because dissolving the Anthroposophical Society would do so in name only; it would not do away with the fact that a certain number of people are in possession of these cycles. And it is an equally real fact that a certain number of people are carrying a specific wealth of wisdom in their heads. I cannot tell exactly how great the percentage is of people who have the things we talk about in their heads—in contrast to those who only have them in “visions”—but that's not the important thing as far as the Society is concerned. It remains a reality that a certain wealth of wisdom, a sum total of things that really exist, are present in the hearts and minds of people who have belonged to the Anthroposophical Society until now. That cannot be taken away from them even by dissolving the Society.

So the Anthroposophical Society is different from other societies in that it will not tolerate any figments of the imagination in its organization, but is constructed on the basis of reality. Thus, dissolving it would have absolutely no immediate effect on its continued existence as far as reality is concerned. Our Society compares to other societies and organizations as something real compares to things that are merely thought out. We must keep this weighty difference in mind in order to understand the concept of our Society in the right way. And it is only because a large number of members have counted, more or less consciously, on our Society's solid grounding in reality, on its basis in something more than programmatic points, that we see an institute of higher learning for spiritual science being built on this hill, a building that will further enhance our connection to something real.

It would be possible for some group of dreamers to get together and decide not to wear collars and ties, to wear only sandals on their feet, and perhaps to simplify life in other ways by disregarding certain other social conventions or “prejudices,” as they might call them. (I have chosen a hypothetical example so that no one present needs to feel put on the spot.) Disbanding a group like that would not change anything significant. But we are not simply a group of dreamers; we are different in that we are fully aware of the weight and importance of our grounding in reality.

Without getting into splitting hairs, we also need to distinguish between the concept of a society such as the one in which we develop a specific spiritual teaching, and that of a club or similar organization. We have to admit that the appropriate concept of a such a society eludes many of us when we think about the conditions of our life in this Society, and we are left contemplating the concept of a club or similar organization. In that kind of organization, statutes and conditions are set up that have to be met. In a Society like ours, however, that is not enough. It is different from a club in much more than name only.

In our Society, the important thing, as I have explained several times in the last few weeks, is that the concept of the society really be taken seriously.² This means that all members must be aware that belonging to the Society involves more than simply receiving membership cards and being entitled to call themselves members of the Society. In fact, they are all organs of the Society. Because of that, something subtle and yet very specific has to live among the members, something for which each member should feel a certain responsibility. As individuals, they must be aware of both the obvious and subtler needs and well-being of other members of the Society, and experienced members must be ready and willing to use their experience in supporting those who have joined more recently. These more experienced members do not necessarily have to reveal their experience; after all, what matters is how they apply their experience in daily life.

The word “trust” often comes up in this connection. In the course of a lecture I gave a few weeks ago, I explained that we do not need to have trust in our teachings, because these teachings will try to justify our confidence in them through every single practical measure they give rise to.³ However, we do need to try to have trust in each other and to make sure that trust is justified. We must try to bring about real connections between members. It goes a long way toward developing the kind of “ideal aura” necessary in a Society such as ours if each experienced member, without snooping around like a spy or a detective—that is, without violating anyone's privacy—can really keep an eye on the ups and downs of only ten other members, and do it without having to tell them they are considered less experienced. Of course, it's impossible to legislate trust; it has to be earned. Our more experienced members need to make a concerted effort to win the trust of those who have been in the Society for only a short time.

Such things have been mentioned often in the course of our Society's years of activity, but it has never been as necessary to speak about them as it is here and now. When members of the Anthroposophical Society were scattered among the rest of the population in various cities, that was a very different state of affairs from so many of us living here on top of each other, on display for everyone else, so to speak. This situation makes it imperative that we take a long and serious look at the basic premises of how we live together in the Society.

Of course, a society such as ours will never be able to please all the people living outside it. It will never be able to prevent some of these people from indulging in all kinds of slander, ridicule, unjustified attacks, and so on. But that's not the point; what I am going to say now is independent of all that. The important thing is that the members of the Society really do everything possible in each single instance to show up the attacks as unjustified and lacking any basis in fact. To do this, we have to look at details, my friends. It's not enough to just pay attention to the major issues in our outer life. We have to be equally aware of the little things.

For instance, if some of our members are sitting among other people on the trolley on the way back to Basel at night, and they talk loudly about every little twinge in their ether body, that is not exactly a crime. If someone criticizes them for it, we might well reply, “So what? Is it all that important?” In fact, however, it is really very important because it puts the dignity and seriousness of our movement in question. Thus, even though such incidents are only trifling matters, they ought to be avoided. We ought to start reforming ourselves wherever that change can have a real effect. Above all, we have to realize that when we talk in front of other people about things only we can understand, those people will not be able to avoid getting wrong impressions.

We can assume that we know what we are talking about when we speak about the ether body, but the people who may be listening do not. They may be in the same situation as a maid whom some of my closer acquaintances know well. This woman worked for anthroposophists, and because she was interested in finding out what anthroposophy was all about, she attended an introductory course given by one of our members, and came home saying, “Well, I learned that I have four bodies, not just one. But I have this tiny little room and a very narrow bed, and now I don't know how all those bodies are going to fit in!” This is a true story. It took place in the house of people I know quite well. So you see, people who hear you talking about all the little twinges of your ether body will naturally think that you're talking about the ether body as if it were a physical body; thus, you are actually leading them astray and keeping them from developing any closer connection to our movement.

That's why it is important for us to learn to take the things we talk about seriously and precisely. Even if they are only minor matters in themselves, they can raise a virtual wall of prejudices around us, and that can and should be avoided. In a society like this, it is important for us to learn to speak really precisely, or else it may gradually become impossible to foster what should be fostered within this Society.

Today I feel compelled to mention a number of things that will probably seem totally superfluous to most of you, simply because the natural response is, “Well, what is that supposed to mean—we need to be precise in our way of speaking? Of course we do.” But just keep your eyes and ears open next time something happens somewhere or other, when something has been said and one person passes it on to the next. If you really pay close attention to whether or not things are being presented accurately, in many instances you will easily notice the deviation from what is strictly accurate. When something someone has heard or seen gets passed on to the next person and then to the next, and so on, what comes out can be a monstrous caricature of what actually happened or was actually said. This experience is all too common in our Society.

We have to take into account that, in a spiritual scientific movement, we can work constructively only if we get used to being exact, to really understanding things precisely. Spiritual science forces us to focus spiritually on things that have nothing to do with the outer physical world, and in order to develop the right relationship to them, we need a counterbalance of some kind. The only suitable counterbalance is to approach things on the physical plane as realistically as possible. After all, accuracy belongs to reality.

Some time ago I gave a public lecture in Munich that really startled a number of people.⁴ Its subject was the nature of evil. In that lecture, I explained that the forces at work in evil on the physical plane are in a sense nothing else but forces that have been transferred from higher planes of existence to the physical plane. Certain forces that can lead us to recognize and master the spiritual if applied up there in the spiritual world can turn to evil down here in the physical world.

The force that enables us to understand the spiritual world belongs only in the spiritual world; this same force causes all kinds of harm if it is directly and thoughtlessly transferred to the physical plane. For what is the nature of this force? It consists in making one's thinking independent of the physical plane. When this capacity is applied to the physical plane itself, it turns into deceit and dishonesty. Thus, people who were called upon to disseminate spiritual science have always seen great danger in doing so, because what is needed for understanding higher planes of existence is harmful when applied directly to the physical world.

That is why a counterbalance is needed: in order to keep our ability to understand the spiritual world suitably pure and beautiful, we must develop our feeling for truth and exactitude in the physical world as thoroughly as possible. If we do not count on exactitude on the physical plane, then in a so-called occult society certain tendencies developed through spiritual scientific practices immediately mingle inappropriately with the very lowest aspects of the physical plane.

Let's look at ordinary materialistic society in a broader sense of the word. As you know—or you may have heard about it even if you have no firsthand knowledge of it—there are certain social circles where gossip prevails. At least from hearsay, you will be aware that this gossip or tittle-tattle is going on, that it prevails in ordinary materialistic bourgeois society. The quality of this gossip is usually not very high and much can be said against it, but at least for the most part no esoteric contents get mixed up with it. But when gossip is the general rule in an occult society, esoteric ideas are the first to get drawn into it.

I hope it is possible to really talk about things like this in our circle, because it should be possible to say something within our Society without having it immediately spread abroad in places where it is then misunderstood. Our experiences in this regard, however, are also not the best, and if they continue, we will indeed have to organize our Society differently. Things that are said within the Society have to remain in the Society in the strictest sense of the word, because it really must be possible from time to time to say things that could not simply be said casually outside our Society.

Of course, in our Society we often have to talk about the karmic relationships between people. It may well be that such relationships exist—in fact, of course they exist—but if we continually get our views on karma mixed up with our ordinary everyday relationships, we are not taking the concept of truthfulness literally enough, and the result is not only nonsensical but also harmful. Truthfulness is a concept that has to be applied extremely strictly.

I can think of any number of cases in esoteric circles, both inside and outside our Society, where subjective matters that take place as a matter of course on the physical plane have been studded and embellished with esoteric truths. Let me mention one extreme example that may not happen very frequently in our Society, but it is one of the things that can be experienced. Indeed, it has happened numerous times.

Many people have learned about reincarnation, and they have also learned that Christ was alive on Earth at a certain point in time. I have experienced more than once that women who have become aware of these two spiritual facts—reincarnation and Christ's incarnation—have in all seriousness imagined that they have been chosen to give birth to the Christ and have attempted to arrange their lives to make this possible. It is unpleasant to have to mention these things and call a spade a spade, but we must do it to protect the Society, which we can do only if we don't close our eyes to the harm people can cause by applying occult truths on the physical plane.

Granted, the case I just mentioned is extreme, but it has happened not only once, but over and over again. I have described it drastically because things like this happen very frequently on a smaller scale, and it is important to notice the minor instances as well as the more blatant ones. Of course, it is a major issue if someone thinks she is going to give birth to the Christ, because the consequences can be extremely unfortunate. On a smaller scale, however, things like this are happening again and again.

Now, in ordinary bourgeois life, it happens that people fall in love, that a man falls in love with a woman. People simply call it “falling in love,” and that's the plain and simple truth. In esoteric societies men and women also fall in love; the possibility cannot be ruled out, as some of you know from experience. But in that case, what you hear about it is not as simple as, “X has fallen in love with Y.” Ordinary people just say that they're going together, which is usually a very accurate description as outward observation goes. But in esoteric societies, what you hear about it often goes something like this: “Having thoroughly examined my karma, I find that another personality has entered it, and we have realized that karma has destined us to be with each other and to intervene in the destiny of the world in a particular way.”

People fail to notice how much deception has crept in between this assertion and the simple matter of falling in love. This deception has developed in the following way: In bourgeois materialistic society, it's considered quite normal for two people to fall in love. But in an esoteric society, this is often not considered normal; instead, it is something people feel slightly ashamed of. But people do not like to feel ashamed. We don't need to go into why that is the case; there can be any number of reasons. People simply do not like to feel ashamed, so instead, they say that karma has spoken and has to be obeyed. Of course they are not acting out of pure selfishness or pure emotion—far from it; karma has to be obeyed! But if they were truthful, they would just admit that they have fallen in love, and having admitted it, they would find their way through life much more readily than by getting the truth mixed up with all kinds of karmic nonsense. The basic mischief of embellishing personal matters with esoteric truths leads to ever greater harm because it makes people lose their inner sense of limits, the limits we have to accept when we adopt a spiritual scientific philosophy.

This is not to say that we should introduce the worst principles of uncultured circles into our Society. In certain social circles, it is said that being human begins with being a baron. We must not establish our own version of this by saying that being human begins with being either a spiritual scientist or an anthroposophist—with being an “anthropop,” as others are starting to call it. We must not do that. We have to admit that even before we became spiritual scientists, we were people with certain ways of looking at things, people who would have done certain things and abstained from others.

In the very early days of our movement, I pointed out how important it is that we do not use our spiritual scientific views to sink down below our earlier level of moral standards, but that we must rise above it in all respects. That is why I said many years ago that when we entered the Society, each of us was equipped with a certain stock of moral standards and habitual ways of doing things, and that we should allow these habits to remain as they are until some clear and incontrovertible inner necessity compels us to change them. Generally, this happens only much later on. It can be extremely detrimental if, after having learned a little bit from spiritual science, we take what we have learned and use it to excuse or embellish what we do in life. You have to be perfectly clear on one point, my friends, namely that the outer circumstances of our life also come about through karma of a certain kind. And how people out in the world think and act is also a matter of karma.

Now, as you know, I prefer to talk about concrete cases because they are the most telling. For example, the following once happened to me: Not long ago, I was sitting in a barber shop—excuse me for talking about things like this, but what I'm going to tell you is not all that indiscreet or intimate. I was sitting in front of the mirror, so I could see the people as they came and went. The door opened, and in came a man who had on some kind of shoes that were nothing more than pieces of soft leather tied together; above that, he was wearing leggings and some kind of cape-like garment draped at a coquettish angle. In addition, his hair was swept back with some kind of a headband. Coincidentally, as it were, I knew the man very well.⁵

The barber let go of the razor he had just started to apply to my face and bought something from the man for five pennies. He showed it to me once the man had gone out—it was a poem he had composed himself. It was a simply terrible poem, but that man was going around the streets and stores in that get-up, selling the thing and imagining himself to be infinitely superior to all the people around him. He thought he was following some great ideal, but in reality he was only following an exaggerated and hysterical form of vanity. The basic impulse behind his conduct, his whole way of being, was nothing more than a gross exaggeration of the principle at work among the vainest and most superficial ladies.

But just consider how many among us might once have been tempted—for courtesy's sake, I will not suggest that they might still be tempted today—to say that in his own way, that man was only trying to do the right thing. True enough, but it was still absolute and total nonsense, and bound to make a mess of a person's life if he made it the principle of a lifetime. We have to realize to what extent vanity can be a motivating factor in what people do, and how difficult it is to notice it. If we take seriously what we can gain from spiritual science and accept it with respect, we have to admit that vanity is a very strong force in that man. If we do something or other out of vanity, not to mention other drives and impulses, other people are offended, though not necessarily for the reasons we might suspect. Nonetheless, there is a connection between ourselves and what other people say about us, a connection that is very easy to find if we look carefully. And we can only get beyond things like that if we develop a strict sense of exactitude as a counterbalance, an attitude we also need for understanding esoteric truths.

Although it's only a detail and no major issue, in esotericism it is extremely important to know and to observe, when people are recounting things, whether they are recounting their own observations and thus have a right to be talking about them as facts, or whether they are passing on things they heard from someone else. We must be able to tell the difference. But in hundreds of cases, people say things to others who in turn tell someone else, but in such a way that the person third in line gets the impression that they are not simply passing on something they've heard, but are talking about their own direct experience and have a right to be talking about it as if it were actual fact. This lack of precision is less important in ordinary materialistic society than it is among us. In materialistic circles, it may be pedantic to be so precise in how one speaks, but in our Society, more so than anywhere else, we need to observe such things strictly and exactly. And above all, we need to make a practice of being precise about ourselves.

If any of you need to be convinced of the implications of what I am saying, you are welcome to make the following experiment: Choose some topic—vegetarianism, for example—and observe how certain adherents of spiritual science talk about this topic in the outside world. Make a chart, and each time you hear spiritual scientists telling other people that they are vegetarians, jot down the reasons they give. It will soon become clear that on the subject of vegetarianism, adherents of spiritual science often say absolutely scandalous things to people in the outside world. When the outside world then comes to the conclusion that we are a society of fools, it should come as no great surprise.

In anthroposophical circles, I have frequently mentioned a very simple way of responding to the question of why you are a vegetarian without antagonizing people around you. If someone asks why you are a vegetarian, and you know that person would never eat horsemeat, you simply respond with the question, “Well, why don't you eat horsemeat?” Now the two of you are on the same footing, and the person who has to give a reason for not eating horsemeat will probably not come up with any highly theoretical reasons, but will say something like “The thought of it makes me sick.” Then you can say, “That's just how any meat makes me feel.” And as long as you say this in an appropriately conciliatory way, people will understand your point of view. The main thing is not to let the other person get the impression that you feel superior because of not eating meat. You might still want to add, although only if you can honestly admit it to yourself, that you are too weak to eat meat; you're handicapped when it comes to eating meat. When this question has come up, I myself have often said that a lot of things are simply easier to get through if you don't eat meat. Meat weighs people down, and if you need to use your brain in a precise way, it is simply easier to do if you don't eat meat. In the end, it all comes down to the question of what is easier and more convenient.

I have often emphasized that it is impossible to eat your way into the higher worlds, either through what you eat or through what you abstain from eating. Achieving access to spiritual worlds is a spiritual matter, and both eating and abstaining from food are physical matters. If this were not the case, people might get grotesque ideas about what would happen if they did or did not eat certain foods. It might occur to them to eat salt one week and no salt at all the next week in order to descend to the depths of the elemental world during the week when they were eating salt and come back up again in the course of the week when they were doing without. It's quite possible for people to get stupid ideas like that. In our Society, of course, people will not get ideas that are as stupid as that, but similar things might still occur to them.

But to get back to the subject of vegetarianism, if we are as modest as possible in how we discuss it in the presence of outsiders, we will find that eventually no one will hold the fact that we are vegetarians against us. On the other hand, if we consider vegetarianism to be something to our credit, the outside world will never forgive us for it. And in fact, being vegetarian is not a credit to anyone; it is simply an easy way out.

There are many other similar examples, and we really have to talk about things like this, not to preach morality, but to establish certain basic principles for our life in an esoteric society vis-à-vis the outside world. What it all comes down to is that we need to seriously consider how we relate to the outside world, and the result of our deliberations must be both a bridge and a protective wall between us and the outside, especially in the case of a society like ours. It happens again and again, for instance, that members say to people on the outside, “Dr. Steiner said this and such.” Just put yourself in the place of the person you're talking to, and imagine what it feels like!

For example, if someone says that Dr. Steiner is taking so-and-so's spiritual development in hand, how are outsiders supposed to understand that? What can they possibly imagine except a society of fools who all subordinate themselves to a single individual? That kind of thing really does happen. I cannot even pretend that it does not occur. And just imagine what it means to the outside world. We really must talk about these things from the point of view of how a society should be set up if a spiritual scientific movement like ours is to inhabit it. First and foremost, we must take this spiritual scientific movement seriously, and we must not do anything that could be detrimental to it in the eyes of the outside world.

I will go into this subject more deeply tomorrow, and you will see how intimately this all relates to certain specific impulses of spiritual science. I do not want to simply lecture you sternly; I want to explain how these things relate to the central impulses of spiritual science.

• 1. In Stuttgart on September 4, 1921, at the first Members' Assembly after World War I, Rudolf Steiner addressed the question of the lecture cycles as follows: “Actually, every member has taken on the responsibility of seeing that the cycles stay within the Society. I am not so concerned about the cycles being read outside the Society; what matters to me is that these cycles in the form in which they were printed stay among people who understand the circumstances, because lack of time kept me from correcting the proofs.” (Mitteilungen des Zentralvorstandes der Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft, Stuttgart, November 1921, No. 1, p. 27). And in The Course of My Life, GA 28, (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1986): “I would have preferred it if the spoken word could have been left in that form, the members wanted to have the lectures printed privately, and that is why the talks now exist in print. If I had had time to make corrections, there would have been no need for the 'for members only' restriction right from the beginning.” (Chapter XXXV, Anthroposophic Press, 1986).
  
  However, since the members did not feel bound by this responsibility and Steiner's opponents in their writings often showed themselves to be better informed about the lecture cycles than the members themselves, Rudolf Steiner was obliged to lift all restrictions and declare the printed lecture cycles available to the general public at the Christmas Foundation Meeting of the Anthroposophical Society in 1923.
• 2. See the explanations Steiner gave on August 21 and 22, 1915, printed in Part Two of this volume.
• 3. August 22, 1915, in Part Two of this volume, p. 144.
• 4. “The Origin of Evil in the Light of Spiritual Science,” Munich, March 29, 1914. Only incomplete notes of this lecture are extant.
• 5. Gustav Gräser, 1879–1958, who became well known as an apostle of nature in the 1920s. Cf. Ulrich Linse, Barfüssige Propheten. Erlöser der zwanziger Jahre, Berlin, 1983. (“Barefoot Prophets: Redeemers of the Twenties”) Rudolf Steiner mentioned Gräser in a letter to Marie von Sivers on January 6, 1906 (in Rudolf Steiner/Marie Steiner-von Sivers, Correspondence and Documents 1901–1925, GA 262, (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1988), saying that Gräser had attended a lecture of Rudolf Steiner's and taken part in the discussion afterward.

Yesterday, my dear friends, I explained the primary difference between a society like ours and other societies or associations. I said its statutes and the points on its program do not exhaustively describe the character of our Society—if we add or delete points and statutes, nothing significant will be added to or subtracted from what our Society is essentially meant to be. I also pointed out the most obvious way in which our Society differs from the usual kind of program-based society or association. That kind of association can be dissolved at any moment. But if it became necessary to dissolve our Society and we actually disbanded, that would in no way change the real state of affairs since our Society, unlike others, is based not on illusory human inventions such as programs and statutes, but on realities. We touched on one of these realities, namely that the lecture cycles are in the hands of all our members, a fact that would not change in the slightest if the Society were dissolved. And the same applies to many other realities on which our Society is based.

Consequently, we really must get to know the conditions necessary for the survival of our Society and not delude ourselves about them. I gave a rather superficial explanation of these conditions yesterday, and would like to go into them more deeply today.

You all know that in many materialistic discussions on the nature of life itself, we can find many definitions or explanations of what constitutes a living being. You have probably learned enough on that subject from spiritual science to realize that all these explanations and definitions are of necessity one-sided and incomplete. The greatest mistake or illusion of materialistically minded people is to think they can encompass the essence of a thing in a single definition or explanation. To illustrate how grotesque this idea is, I once told you the story of how a Greek school of philosophy was searching for a definition of the human being. What they finally came up with was that a human being was a living being with two legs and no feathers.¹ Well, this is undoubtedly correct; it is an absolutely correct definition. But the next day, someone who had understood this definition brought in a plucked chicken and said, “Here is a living thing that has two legs and no feathers, so it must be a human being!”

The usual attempts at defining life are no better than that. That's just the way it is with definitions, and we have to be aware of that fact. There is also a comparable materialistic definition of life given by a famous zoologist, a definition that is quite correct and useful within the limits of its applicability:² “A living thing is something that can leave a corpse behind under certain circumstances; what it leaves behind when it is destroyed is thus not a living thing.” Clearly, this definition applies only to the outer limits of the physical plane, where a living being does in fact leave a corpse behind at its demise; thus, this definition is valid there. When a machine is destroyed, it does not leave a corpse behind; we would be speaking metaphorically if we talked about the corpse of a watch, for instance. However, if our Society were dissolved, it would actually leave behind a real corpse, in the truest sense of the word.

What is the nature of a corpse? Once a corpse has been abandoned by its soul, it no longer obeys the same laws as it did when it was united with that soul. Instead, it begins to obey the physical laws of the earthly elements. The same thing would be true of the corpse of our Society as soon as the Society was dissolved. In addition, the Society's vehicle, namely all the lecture cycles now in the members' possession, would also be part of this corpse.

We can be quite precise and scientific in taking this comparison further. If a corpse is not to have a detrimental effect on its surroundings, it must be cremated or buried. This would also apply to the corpse our Society would undoubtedly leave behind at its dissolution. As a consequence, once we know what our Society really is, we become aware of our responsibility toward what it is based on. A society or association based on statutes and programs is like a machine that leaves behind only pieces if you destroy it, but our Society would leave an actual corpse behind if it were dissolved. It would leave behind something that would have to be thought of as a corpse and treated accordingly.

My friends, we really must think about what our Society requires to survive. For the time being, let's turn away from the superficial fact that the lecture cycles exist and look at their content, which, as I mentioned yesterday, is now present in a certain number of heads. It exists not only in the heads of people who took it in properly and harmoniously, but perhaps also of those—present company excepted, of course, for politeness' sake—who took it up in a distorted form and go on distorting it as they talk about it. All of this is really there and is alive in the Society. And just think of the effect it would have as the Society's corpse if the Society were to disband. That is why we must take responsibility for guarding what our Society requires for survival, and why I appealed to you yesterday in various ways to safeguard those needs.

Now, I just said that if the Society were dissolved, it would leave behind a corpse. This characteristic tells us that in the truest sense of the word, the Society is a real living being. But the Society also possesses another characteristic of living things, namely the fact that it can get sick. I told you that an association founded on the basis of a program and statutes is like a machine or a mechanism, and when members do something that does not fit in with the machine, they are expelled. Expelling members from an association founded on statutes is always just a matter of “lovingly” applying a rule.

However, in the case of a society like ours, which is a living organism rather than a mechanism, taking the action of expelling a member will very seldom have any significant effect on the actual problem. In our circumstances, expelling a member who has done something wrong is simply taking the easy way out. That is not to say that we cannot do it, but we do have to realize that it is much more important to keep the organism of our Society so healthy that it acts as a healer in its totality when confronted with individual unhealthy growths. In most cases, healing a sick organism is nothing more than calling up the healing forces of the entire organism when an individual member or organ is ill. It is important that we understand the process of potential illness within our Society and become aware of the need to call up the healing forces of its entire organism.

Now, I already explained yesterday that one important force for healing consists in getting used to being absolutely exact with regard to phenomena on the physical plane—truth in exactitude, and exactitude in truthfulness. In outer exoteric life, if some bit of information is altered through gossip or lack of precision in being passed on from one person to the next, that doesn't matter nearly as much as it would matter if we were to let this become habitual within our Society. One of the most urgent needs, then, is for us to take exactitude as our guiding principle in everything we say and do.

It is only natural for people to ask what they must do in order to help strengthen the Society. The answer is that the single most important thing is for each individual to really feel like a member of the Society in the right way. Members must experience the Society as an organism and themselves as its organs. That requires, however, that we all make the affairs of the Society our own and that we are able to follow the Society's train of thought. Knowing about the concerns of the Society and wanting to know about them is of fundamental, crucial importance. Of course, this presupposes a certain interest in the Society as such, and to develop this interest, we have to know that the Society is an organism and take this fact seriously. It is much more than just a metaphor.

For example, we need to understand the following. We have three points listed in our statutes.³ It follows from what I said before that statutes are only of secondary importance for us. Nonetheless, they are there. In fact, they have to be there. And if we consider these three statutory points, we can describe them best by saying that they represent our work, the work of our Society. But if you think about how it is with human beings and their relationship to their work, you will find that people's work is what makes them tired and wears them out. Describing a person's work, however, by no means definitively characterizes that person, and it makes just as little sense to say that the work within the confines of these three points on our program encompasses the whole nature and essence of our Society.

However, performing this work does wear the Society down. This means that our Society, just like a human being, needs to be taken care of. Just like a human organism, the organism of the Society also needs care. And it's not enough to think that being a member of the Society means nothing more than using the Society as a place for fostering what is expressed in these three points in our statutes. It also means taking an interest in the guidance and management of the Society as such. When someone lacks this interest, that really means that person is opposed to the Society's ongoing existence. Being interested only in the work the Society does is not the same thing as being interested in the Society as such. But in order for our Society to exist as a basis for this work, a certain interest in the Society as such, in the Society as an organism, must also be present. That is, a certain principle of togetherness, of living and working together, has to be cultivated within our Society.

I said yesterday that in certain cases it is necessary to become quite drastic in calling a spade a spade, and also that it belongs to the very nature of our Society to be able to count on not having these things spread abroad immediately. The grotesque example I used yesterday, the example of the man in the barbershop whose habits were at odds with those of his surroundings, was meant to show that the motive behind this kind of clash is often quite different from what people claim. As I showed, the man in question was motivated by hysterical vanity.

Karma has led us to set up our headquarters here in this area, and so we find ourselves living under conditions that are not exactly ideal in all respects, if I may put it like that. That was what I meant when I said that even if each of us behaved in an absolutely exemplary manner, we might be attacked with still more slander and so on, even if all our members were absolutely exemplary in how they behaved within the general population. So you see, I am not saying that we must take all possible prejudices into account, but only that we need to look at the living conditions our Society needs.

In terms of our own human nature, our own physical body, we know that we have to be physically adapted to the external conditions of life around us, on which we depend, and that our physical organism is in constant interaction with the outside world. The same thing applies to the outer organism of our Society. It has to develop within the social framework in which our karma has placed us, and this makes it imperative that our members respect our Society's needs with regard to living conditions. I have explained what these conditions are time and time again.

An important point I once expressly stated in a rebuttal⁴ of a local pastor's article attacking our Society⁵ was that our Society as such does not have anything directly to do with religion. After all, what matters is not only to always say the right thing, but also to say what needs to be said in each particular instance. That is what is important. And one of the things most crucially needed for our whole movement to flourish is for the outer world to finally realize something I've tried to explain again and again. I have said repeatedly that our movement has no more to do with religion than the Copernican view of the solar system at its inception had to do with any particular religious confession. That the religious denominations were opposed to the Copernican system was their problem, and no reflection on the Copernican view itself. And now we must stand firm on one point, namely, that we have no intention of founding a sect or a religious movement. At one point, I had to get downright unpleasant, because, with the best will in the world, people were writing articles about our building and calling it a “temple,” which was very detrimental to us. It made it seem, quite unnecessarily, as if we were competing with the religious denominations. That is why I always remind our members to try to popularize the term “School for Spiritual Science.”

It is really important for people to hear again and again that we have nothing to do with a religious sect or with founding a new religion or anything like that. Our members commit untold sins against the Society when they fail to point out, when providing information, that our Society has nothing to do with founding a religion. Not only that, but by omission they actually do a lot to make it seem as if we were trying to found a religion. It is important to take this into account even in trivial instances and to take every opportunity to beat it into people's hard heads that this is not a temple and not a church, but something that is dedicated to scientific purposes.

Sometimes, my friends, what is said is less important than how it is said. We have to realize that we will always give outsiders the impression that we are a sect or some kind of new religion if we invariably put on a long face in talking about anything happening in our movement—“so long a face that your chin hits your stomach,” as someone once put it to me.⁶ I know this is not a nice way of putting it, but it is certainly to the point. Of course, this is because many people imagine that this kind of exaggerated seriousness is the only way to talk about feelings related to religious life. But we must make every effort to free our movement from the preconceived idea that we are trying to found a church, a religion, or a sect, and to popularize the idea that this is a spiritual scientific movement taking its place in the world just as the Copernican system did, so that everyone can see that we are the ones being wronged. The Church made a mistake in opposing the teachings of Copernicus; it had to accept them eventually anyway.⁷ The same thing will happen with our movement as well—the Church will have to accept it.

This is an example of how we have to learn to speak very exactly, and precise speaking must be considered the lifeblood of our Society in its relations with the outside world. It is one way of doing something really constructive on behalf of the Society. People who are only interested in reading lecture cycles—which has its uses, of course, and we couldn't do without it—and take no interest in the governance of the Society, especially here, where you are all in such close contact—well, people who do not want to develop that interest are actually not in support of the Society as such, as I said before. You must develop an interest in the Society! The point is not simply to be there for the sake of participating somehow in the work the Society has to do, but to develop an interest in the Society as such. This means, however, that the affairs of the Society as a living entity have to enter our individual awareness. And the less we need statutes in order to do that, the better.

You see how necessary it is for us to become more and more able to stand firm when someone from the outside says something negative about our Society, and to be able to say that we can vouch for the fact that something like that could not possibly happen in our Society. We must be able to count on the fact that the kind of slander that gets circulated is false in almost all instances—although exceptions are always possible, of course. This, however, requires a really vital interest in the affairs of the Society.

Let's assume that some kind of indiscretion occurs. For example, let's take the hypothetical case of a man and a woman who, one fine afternoon in May, are so indiscreet as to do something they shouldn't do, outside and in full view of the people in the neighborhood. Let's assume that this kind of indiscretion takes place. What ought to happen as a matter of course if our Society were constituted as it should be? The natural thing would be for the people in question to realize in the course of the next few days that they ought to find an older member in whom they could confide, and ask what can be done about it. That would mean that they are making their own private matters the concern of the Society.

Please note the kind of example I have chosen. It is not simply the kind of thing we should regard as a strictly private matter that is none of our business. Rather, it is something that could be extremely damaging to the Society. We cannot function on the principle of the knee that says, “That's my private business”; the knee has to feel like a part of the whole organism. Of course, such things must also be received with real interest. They have to be seen as a concern of the Society; there must always be someone there who is aware of not only what is of immediate interest to him or her, but who also knows a lot about the Society and can contribute to the Society's ongoing well-being.

In other words, this means that we have to get beyond saying, “I have my own circle of friends, and it's to my credit that I brought them into the Society; this circle of friends is what interests me.” I certainly do not mean to criticize people for developing friendships and personal connections—that is none of the Society's business. However, it does have an immediate effect on the Society if people are only interested in the Society because of their own membership in it. We have to make the concerns of the Society our own. We must preclude the possibility of first hearing about some offensive incident from someone outside the Society rather than from within our own membership, and we will automatically take a step toward preventing this when the right kind of interest in our internal social relationships is present.

For instance, at present you can ask four or five people whether a particular person has been attending our lectures in the past few weeks, and discover that none of them knows. That can easily happen among us. Of course, it is understandable if one or the other person doesn't know anything about it, but if you cannot find out anything at all, even by asking around among people who can be presumed to be in the know, that demonstrates a lack of interest and shows that our Society is a mechanism, not an organism. It shows that people are not taking an interest in its life and vitality. That is what I want to emphasize again and again—the need for an interest in our Society's life and vitality.

You see, my friends, we are sometimes surprised by events in our Society that would not surprise us if the members were sensitive to their obligations—and I use that word deliberately—and were participating in the thinking, feeling, and doing of the Society as if they were part of a living organism. But two things are necessary for that to happen. First, each one of us must be willing not to deal with incidents touching on the Society's needs as if they were his or her strictly private concerns. And second, anyone willing to do that must seek out another member with a sympathetic ear.

In this present crisis involving the part of the Society around the building in Dornach, regardless of how many formal resolutions and new paragraphs you formulate, you will still not be able to cope with what is going on in the Society. In spite of all that, we will still not be able to prevent ending up with the above-mentioned corpse on our hands. You can only prevent it by beginning to take an active interest in the affairs of the Society. This means more than the one-time application of intelligence and good sense to formulating new paragraphs and setting up tribunals to deal with “transgressions”; it means making the Society an ongoing object of interest in a living context. But above all, it means we must not be afraid to think, regardless of how unsettling that may be.

I have already mentioned that we are now living in a highly abnormal phase of European history, which we hope will soon come to an end. In times like this, we have to realize that we should not feel free to send anything and everything we happen to think of over international borders, even if it is nothing incorrect or offensive. I am not talking about private matters, I'm talking about things that concern the Society. In fact, however, a large number of our members do not want to think at all about what might or might not be appropriate to the times. Of course, nothing wrong has been done and I do not mean to reprimand anyone, but only to encourage you all to give it some thought and consideration before you act.

We all know that applications for membership or notices of acceptance are totally innocuous documents that cannot possibly cause political repercussions. However, that is not how nations at war look at things. So why do our members insist on sending membership cards out of the country? Perhaps out of thoughtlessness, perhaps out of stubbornness, because they have a point to prove. But if such things continue to happen on a large scale, people will mistakenly read all kinds of things into them, and it will become impossible for the Society to continue to exist. Our members, of all people, ought to be distinguished by their ability to think! But we have to pay attention to these things, or we will not see the Society continue for very much longer.

Once in a while I need to refer back to things in the past. For example, our criterion for admitting members to the Society has never been that only exceptional human beings who were head and shoulders above the rest of humanity would be considered. That is what many people think, but it's not true, and there are others who think that people who are admitted to the Society are in no way exceptional. In fact, we also made a point of admitting people to help them become healthy. And then what happened? Other members began to regard one of these people, someone who was to be helped by being admitted, as a kind of apostle, as someone who was there to heal the Society.

Why is it possible, my friends, for something like that to happen? It is because we are not adequately aware of the ways and means we have at our disposal to prevent it. Just think back to some of the things that have happened—and think we must, if we are to sustain an esoteric movement! If you think back, you will find that whenever something like that happened, whatever you needed in order to be able to assess the situation was usually made available in a lecture; it was spoken out. You only had to be alert to it whenever some danger was present. This means, however, that you really have to consider in detail the lectures given during the time in question. There is no need for us to make the mistake of getting overly personal in our efforts to do the right thing; we can stick to objective facts. But we have to understand what is objectively true on a case-by-case basis.

At this point, there can be no doubt that something radical and fundamental has to happen, especially for that part of our Society gathered around this building. But it is high time to make sure that we do not look for this fundamental and radical action in the wrong direction, that we do not believe it can be accomplished through a few simple things, a few principles and resolutions. That will not bring about any fundamental change or any fundamental healing.

My friends, I must confess that it is not at all easy for me to discuss these things as I have been doing yesterday and today, simply because I would prefer to be talking about other things, of course, and because I also know that many of you have no desire to hear such things, since, after all, your reason for being here is to hear various esoteric truths. However, my friends, if the Society continues to be of as little use as the recent actions of some individuals suggest, we may have to concede that it is no longer possible to use it as a vehicle for introducing spiritual science into the world. Just think of the discrepancy between what I have just said and something else I have had to say here many times in the last few weeks, namely, that spiritual science as we know it must be the greatest influence of our times in counteracting the presumptuous, superficial, and deceptive knowledge existing in the name of science and research. Indeed, spiritual science must make itself felt as a fundamentally progressive element within humankind. And yet we still have to talk about things that should really be self-explanatory, and all this at the risk of being constantly misunderstood. We all tend to see the sins of the other and not make the effort to see our Society as a real living organism, that is, to experience ourselves as organs within this organism.

Of course, members who have joined us only recently can easily make mistakes, but I wonder what some of the long-term members are doing here if they are not doing anything to prevent the mistakes of the newcomers. It should be a principle of ours that longtime members pay attention to the new members as individuals and offer help, in word and deed, to protect them against mistaking foolishness for cosmic wisdom.

It is inherent in the very nature of an esoteric society, however, that foolishness occurs every now and then. Thus, there have to be as many members as possible who can see through the foolishness and prevent it from being implemented. That includes what is in Mr. Goesch's letter.⁸ He claims that promises have been made and not kept, and has tried to confirm this through a member who he believes or assumes has been promised something. When this member told him that this was not the case, Mr. Goesch, instead of admitting he was wrong, said that this was one more proof that magic is at work—when I shake hands with somebody on something, the handshake wipes out the promise in that person's memory. This is one of the main accusations in Goesch's letter.

It is obvious, my friends, that Mr. Goesch has not only written about these things, but has talked to a number of individuals about them. A vital interest in the affairs of the Society would really have required these people to go in all due haste to a more experienced member and make him or her aware of this situation. It is absolutely incomprehensible how anyone can allow Goesch to say something as impossible as, “When people tell me no promise has been made to them, the conclusion I come to is not that they really were not promised anything, but that their memory of the promise has been wiped out by the power of suggestion,” and let it stand uncontested. When things like this are allowed to happen unhindered, then clearly the Society is not viable and cannot be used as a vehicle for esoteric truths.

There are two things, my friends, that are very much on my mind. One is the fact that everything I know compels me to consider bringing spiritual science to human beings as both necessary and urgent. But I am equally aware of another fact, namely, that the instrument established for this purpose is in the midst of a crisis. That is why I cannot help “tormenting” you with what I had to say yesterday and today. After all, meetings to take remedial action have been announced. But if these meetings run their course the way they did in earlier, similar cases, we will get nowhere.

Please be aware that the simple measure of expelling some one will never accomplish anything. Expulsion cannot resolve any concern of the Society. As you recall, we expelled Dr. Hugo Vollrath many years ago, and he managed to do everything he did later on in spite of having been expelled.⁹ The same thing will happen in similar cases. It is possible to expel a member, but that is not enough; we cannot rest content with that.

If you will get out Theosophy, which is the first book I wrote in the theosophical movement on the subject of theosophy, and read the chapter entitled “The Path of Knowledge,” you will find certain things that, if you think them through, will make it easy for you to come up on your own with what I said yesterday and today.¹⁰ It is all there in that chapter. However, I must assume that not even this very first book of mine has been understood, for if it had been, many recent events could not have taken place.

When the special members' meeting takes place tomorrow, we must be sure that we are looking at these things with all due seriousness and dignity.¹¹ We need to ask ourselves whether we really want to let things get to the point where we have to admit that spiritual science cannot be disseminated by means of a society like this one. If that is the case, if it becomes impossible to do this through the Society, then we will need to find other ways of dealing with what is left behind as its corpse, and that will be much more difficult.¹²

I am not responsible for making the agenda for tomorrow, but how that agenda is dealt with will play a part in deciding whether the Anthroposophical Society will continue to exist in the future. Therefore, I will content myself with making an urgent appeal to you to deal with this situation with the greatest possible responsibility and to not gloss over things that are of the utmost significance for human civilization as a whole.

Tomorrow there will be a eurythmy performance at half past ten, followed by a lecture.

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MY FRIENDS, today I would like to talk about difficulties encountered in attempting to enter the spiritual worlds, and I will begin with a specific example. All of you will have heard of the seer Swedenborg. [ Note 1 ] I have often talked about him and have always emphasized that a personality like Swedenborg is not to be dismissed lightly. On the other hand, for those who really want to know what it takes to gain access to the spiritual worlds, visionaries like Swedenborg can serve as an example of how people can still be subject to all kinds of illusions in spite of having entered the spiritual world. The spiritual world is open to them, but that does not mean they are able to break free from the world of illusion.

I said that Swedenborg is not to be taken lightly. He was not one of those seers who lightheartedly give in to their visionary gifts without knowing much about life or about the world. Swedenborg was a profound thinker and an important scholar, certainly one of the greatest of his time, if not the very greatest. His scholarly knowledge encompassed everything the science of his day had to offer. A whole committee of experts has recently been formed to prepare for publication, not what Swedenborg left behind as a seer, but his purely scientific writings—substantial proof indeed of his well-founded scientific approach and striving for the truth. [ Note 2 ]

Swedenborg, then, in his pre-clairvoyant days, before being granted access to the spiritual world, had already accomplished so much that a whole committee of scholars is now needed to edit the great number of manuscripts documenting the sum total of his knowledge. (And in fact, these manuscripts may represent only a portion of what he knew.) This task is beyond the scope of any single expert of today. And we are talking only about his writings that have nothing to do with seership. Swedenborg was already at the peak of a career in academic science when he became clairvoyant—only then did the spiritual worlds become accessible to him. Swedenborg, then, was not simply some ordinary man who one fine day decided to call himself a visionary. On the contrary, he ascended to the level of seership on the basis of an eminently serious and conscientious scientific approach.

However, when we look closely at Swedenborg's clairvoyance, we can see how it is possible for a seer to stop short at a stage that does not yet lead on to the ultimate in knowledge.

This outstanding scholarly and clairvoyant personality clearly illustrates how necessary it is to be extremely conscientious when we talk about entering the spiritual worlds and about what can be brought back from them. I cannot emphasize strongly enough that before his clairvoyance developed, Swedenborg was already an outstanding scholar who had not only absorbed all the knowledge his age had to offer, but also added to it through many scientific discoveries of his own. This fact is already well established, and will undoubtedly become even more apparent once his unpublished works appear in print. He had made some first-class scientific discoveries before becoming a seer.

Swedenborg reported a great variety of information gained through clairvoyant perception. [ Note 3 ] It is interesting to note that when his soul ascended to the heights and he could look into the spiritual worlds, he always felt he was surrounded not only by his own aura, but also by numerous spiritual beings embedded in it. This is very characteristic and quite significant. Whenever Swedenborg's gift of clairvoyance became active, he immediately experienced that he was not alone—he felt his soul expand to embrace his aura and saw in it spiritual elemental beings proceeding from his own organs, as it were. As Swedenborg watched, these beings held counsel among themselves and also with Swedenborg himself, with his own soul.

From the very beginning, then, he was advised by these spiritual beings that are present in each human being. These inner beings were joined by others Swedenborg was able to recognize on the basis of their consultation with the beings that proceeded from within himself. He recognized some of these beings coming toward him as beings of the outer elemental world, and others as beings who have their home on other planets of our solar system.

It so happened that once, after having consulted with his own elemental beings, he recognized certain beings in his surroundings who demonstrated a certain peculiarity. So far, Swedenborg's clairvoyant perception had always allowed him to understand to a certain extent the language of both the elemental beings coming from within himself and the beings coming from Venus, Mercury, the Sun, and so on. He was accustomed to thinking that spirits have an understandable common language—the language of ideas, of the inner weaving of ideas come alive. I have told you about these ideas come alive in several recent lectures. [ Note 4]

Swedenborg was accustomed to understanding this language, which is also our basis for cultivating the art of eurythmy. When someone uses sounds in order to speak, the whole complex of forces that exists in order for speech to be able to resound is concentrated in the larynx and adjacent organs. Thus the human being as a totality is freed from having to “act out” speech. This means that the inner structure of speech becomes unconscious, subconscious—it becomes something totally earthly. Eurythmy is meant to enable us once again to participate with our whole being in speech.

But more on the deeper meaning of eurythmy some other time, my friends. For now I only want to point out that Swedenborg had always been able to understand the language of spiritual beings, until a certain moment when he noticed spirits approaching him who, like the others, spoke to him through all kinds of gestures and movements of their limbs or of their actual form, which is how all spirits speak. As I said, Swedenborg was used to understanding the spirits' gesture-language. This time, however, he could see the spirits making certain movements, but was unable to understand them; their movements conveyed no sense or meaning to his soul. He was surprised by that, as surprised as we would be if we were approached by somebody whose lips were moving in speech, but we could hear nothing.

Swedenborg learned a very significant lesson from this after realizing that these beings he could not understand were inhabitants of Mars—that there were in fact beings from Mars whose speech could not be understood even by someone who usually understood the language of spiritual beings. I am talking here only about Swedenborg's experiences. Because he made a point of studying these things rather than simply interpreting them arbitrarily, he gradually realized why he could not understand these souls from Mars. It was because they belonged to a group of cosmic beings who had developed the ability to conceal all their feelings and intentions, to not let anything of what they were feeling flow into their words. The fact that they were able to conceal their emotions and keep them to themselves made Swedenborg realize that hearing words and seeing gestures is not all there is to understanding language—something of the speaker's emotional state flows over to us as well. Understanding speech is actually based on this flow of emotional content. He realized that because these Mars beings had developed the ability to conceal their feelings, the meaning of their speech was not revealed in spite of the fact that they actually were speaking.

A short time later Swedenborg had another experience that led to an additional insight. He came to the realization that the beings from the hierarchy of the Angeloi did understand these Mars beings. He could not understand them, nor could the spirits proceeding from his own body, but the beings belonging to the class of the Angeloi could understand them. This realization was a very deep and meaningful experience for him. Not being able to understand something that was quite clearly understandable to the hierarchy of the Angeloi made him aware of the limits of his own visionary potential for perceiving the spiritual world.

We must avoid simply glossing over an account like Swedenborg's, because it can actually lead us deep into certain mysteries of the spiritual worlds. In order to understand the connection, let us recall several things I have described before. I explained how authentic seership begins, how good seers have to acquire a totally different relationship to the spiritual world than they have to the physical world. I told you that we perceive external beings and objects out there on the physical plane as existing outside us. We face these objects and take something of them into ourselves in the process of perception. Our I knows about the objects and creates mental images of them. This is the experiential basis of any kind of knowing and perceiving on the physical plane—we make mental images of the objects on the physical plane and recognize them.

I have also told you that this basic experience changes as soon as we ascend to spiritual worlds. There it is replaced with a different fundamental experience, the experience of oneself as object. Our I relates to the beings of higher worlds in the same way that objects formerly related to the I. We no longer perceive, but experience that we are being perceived, that the spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies are observing us. This experience of being perceived and observed by the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and other spiritual beings is a total reversal of our former relationship to the physical world. We achieve the awareness that our being has expanded to encompass the sphere of the hierarchies, and that the hierarchies are at work in us and are looking at us just as we used to look at objects on the physical plane.

Without this fundamental experience our whole relationship to the spiritual world is wrong, just as our whole relationship to the physical world would be wrong if we lacked the basic experience of perception and developing mental images. “I am observing” is true of the physical world; ultimately, “I am being observed” is true of the spiritual world.

However, right at the threshold into the spiritual world, we come to a region or current where we still retain the whole structure and essential characteristics of our relationship to the physical world. There, we have not yet rid ourselves of the attitude of “I am observing” and are not yet able to proceed to “I am being observed.” Out of deeply embedded habits, we expect the spiritual world to be essentially a copy of the physical world—a subtler or more refined copy, but a copy nonetheless. And so there are more than a few people who imagine that being at a gathering of spirits would be just like standing here in this room among physical human beings—the spirits would be assembled just like people on the physical plane, but they would be a bit less dense, so you could stick your hand right through them. Because we bring our habits of perception from the physical plane into the spiritual world and retain our underlying mode of experiencing things, we are left with the illusion of being able to “observe the cosmic beings,” and cannot ascend to that other fundamental experience of being observed by them.

As a seer, Swedenborg never freed himself from this illusion, at least not during the incarnation we're talking about. He was never able to ascend to the experience of being observed. If you read everything Swedenborg wrote as a visionary, you will find that he really does describe the higher worlds as if they were nothing more than a misty emanation of the physical world—figures that are very fine and vapor-like but otherwise very similar to those in the physical world.

It's true that Swedenborg describes the world of Imagination very aptly, but he is in no position to assess it because he veils the whole spiritual world in his habits derived from the physical world. That is why all the beings of the spiritual world only reveal to him what they are able and willing to clothe in the form of Imaginations derived from the physical world. In other words, Swedenborg sees only as much of the spiritual world as can be clothed in Imaginations contaminated with habits retained from experience on the physical plane. He sees mighty and important spiritual beings, no doubt, but always in a guise that is not their own, a guise that he himself imposes on them. And when he enters a region where the spirits make every effort to conceal what is within them—like the Mars beings who have learned to conceal their inner life and not reveal it in how they speak—he can no longer understand them; they remain a mystery to him. This lies at the root of all of Swedenborg's very conscientious descriptions, and to understand what Swedenborg's visionary world was like, we need to be aware of it.

Thus, if we really want to enter the spiritual world, we must try to identify our own self with the things around us in such a way that we become accustomed to breaking free of ourselves as we look at higher worlds. I have described this in the last chapter of Theosophy; basically, all the indications are already given there. [ Note 5 ] If we become accustomed to doing this, we will gradually begin to experience things in the other way I described. This is not something we can accomplish purely through our own efforts; all we can do is set out on the right path. The experience of being perceived by spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies comes to us as an act of grace on the part of the spiritual world itself. And it is not simply that higher beings look at us; we become perceptions, concepts, and thoughts for the beings of higher worlds in the same way that objects on the physical plane are for us.

If Swedenborg had been able to get used to being perceived and thought about by the beings of the higher hierarchies, then he would not have experienced the inability to understand the Mars beings while the Angeloi could understand them. He was only capable of applying his own perspective and could not make use of the angelic mode of perception. But that is precisely what we have to be able to do. It is not enough to have concepts; we must become concepts. It is not enough to think; we must become thoughts, thoughts of the beings of the higher hierarchies.

We must learn to stand in the same relationship to the beings of the higher hierarchies as our own thoughts stand in relationship to us. Swedenborg could not do that. If he had been able to do it, he would have known that as long as he remained within himself he would not be able to understand those Mars beings. However, if he had stepped outside of himself and become an object, a thought, an idea for the Angeloi, then, as expanded self, he would have been able to understand both the Angeloi and that category of Mars beings. He would then have had the same understanding of the essential nature of these Mars beings as the Angeloi had. He was unable to reach this stage because he always remained within the limits of his own consciousness and was never able to let the Angeloi observe and experience him, so that he himself would simply be their field of perception. If he had been able to do that, he would have known what the Angeloi know, for our knowledge of higher worlds comes through higher spirits, spirits of the higher hierarchies, knowing in us.

The important thing for us to keep in mind is that at this stage of evolution, the human constitution is such that we can know only about those worlds that are accessible to our organs of perception. If we want to transcend this limitation, we must open ourselves up to the consciousness of spiritual beings above us so that what these beings experience becomes the content of our own consciousness. It is important for us to experience ourselves as being included in the choirs of the spiritual beings. If you read everything I have written on the subject of initiation, you will find that all this has already been described there. [ Note 6 ]

The example of an important personality like Swedenborg shows us that it leads to illusions if we ascend to spiritual worlds without being steeped in the ability to step out of the kind of consciousness we apply on the physical plane. We are met by an illusory world. My friends, if you go through all the available visionary literature and read its descriptions of the spiritual world, what you will find for the most part will be illusions of this sort. It is important not to let yourself be deceived by these illusions, because being deceived by illusions at the threshold to the spiritual world is much worse than it would be to fall prey to illusions in the physical world.

We need to use our anthroposophical literature to gradually and rationally discover how we as human beings are meant to relate to the spiritual world. We are presented with a double opportunity to do so, first of all through the fact that this material is available, and secondly because of the fact that it cannot be read without considerable mental effort. I have always made sure of that, even though it has often been suggested that I make my writing more accessible to the general public. I have always resisted such suggestions because these things are just not meant to be popularized.

If we presented what we have to offer in our spiritual-scientific literature in all kinds of watered-down versions for the sake of popularizing it, we would simply be pandering to people's unwillingness to exert themselves, and asking for trouble at the same time. Attempts at loading up on spirituality in easy and thoughtless ways always lead to trouble. The effort we make in learning to understand something difficult to read is a kind of inner training and contributes to shaping our relationship to the spiritual world in the right way. It is an essential part of our literature, or at least it should be, that you really have to think in the most comprehensive way possible while taking in the information; your thinking has to become active. Everything you have at your disposal as a result of prior reading and experience must be brought into connection with the content of our anthroposophical writings.

At this juncture, I would like to demonstrate a particular train of thought as an example of how anthroposophical material can be studied actively and thoughtfully. I once gave a lecture cycle in Munich on the subject of the history of creation with reference to the Bible, in which the working of the Elohim was discussed. [ Note 7 ] This cycle is read frequently, and many people think that when they have read it and gotten it into their heads after their usual fashion, they have really accomplished something special. But that is not all there is to it. First of all, of course, it is important to accompany the reading of a cycle like this with a certain amount of inner effort. The train of thought could be as follows:

The Elohim, led by the being who later became the Christ, are a category of beings who had a particular task during the stage of planetary existence we call the Sun stage, when the main thrust of their development was taking place. Because of their particular connection to the Sun stage of existence, we must address the Christ, too, as a Sun being. We can give a lot of thought to how truly Sun-related the Elohim are. The whole tone of the lecture cycle shows that the Elohim's relationship to the Sun underlies the whole thing and can be felt throughout.

After thoroughgoing meditation—not in deep sleep!—we realize how we need to conceive of the character of the Elohim. Then, having immersed ourselves patiently in the character of the Elohim, we will experience after some time that a thought occurs to us, coming toward us from nowhere in particular. For example, it might occur to us—and this is just an example—that Jehovah, one of the Elohim, forbade eating from the Tree of Knowledge, and that after the Luciferic temptation, once human beings had in fact eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, they were barred from also eating from the Tree of Life. How strange that the Elohim should speak of trees!

I have often said that the language of a document such as the Bible should not be taken lightly. If trees are spoken of in the Bible, if the Elohim speak of trees, you can be sure it's significant. Something essential is meant by this expression. It has been said of Homer that he declared that each thing has two names, one in the language of the gods and one in the language of ordinary mortals. With this in mind, we might imagine that the gods' referring to trees may have something to do with this divine language. Considering the subject more deeply, we may wonder what the Elohim are actually talking about when they speak of the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. What do they mean?

If you consider our teachings in their entirety, my friends, you will realize that the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge must have something to do with the essence of the human being. Being forbidden to eat from the Tree of Knowledge means, as you will eventually discover, that the human soul is not to strive for the kind of knowledge bound to the physical body. This has led to the kind of sense-bound perception we know today. “Eating from the Tree of Knowledge” means becoming bound up with the physical body to the extent that the kind of knowledge brought about by Lucifer now prevails, as I described in a recent lecture. [ Note 8 ] Thus, the Elohim were referring to something inherent in human beings when they spoke of the Tree of Knowledge. And they must also have meant something intrinsic to the human being when they spoke of the Tree of Life.

We may wonder why we see as we do today, how it came about that we perceive as we do. It came about because our soul and spirit, permeated with the being of Lucifer, have become embedded in our physical body and are consuming it, although this is not what was originally intended. This physical body is the Tree of Knowledge, and the ether body is the Tree of Life. After having let themselves be seduced by Lucifer into using their physical body for purposes of perception as we know it now, human beings were prevented from also acquiring knowledge through the ether body. That has been denied us. If you are really thinking, my friends, you will arrive at trains of thought like this one.

The next question to be asked, then, is why the physical body is called the Tree of Knowledge in the language of the gods.

Why do they call it a tree, and why do they also call the ether body the Tree of Life? Why are they talking about trees? It is easy to understand what is meant by this if you recall that the gods in question evolved during the Sun period for the most part and thus assumed some essentially Sun-like qualities. For a moment, just reflect on the fact that during the ancient Saturn period, everything was at the mineral level, while during the ancient Sun period, everything was at the evolutionary stage of plants. Since the gods we call the Elohim developed their characteristic way of speaking during the Sun period, it is natural for them not to speak of things that could only be experienced later, during the Moon and Earth stages of evolution, but about what evolved in the universe during the Sun stage, namely plant life. When using their own language, which is the language of the Sun, it is only natural for them to speak of trees.

You see, my friends, this is the kind of thing you can come to simply by taking what is in my books and lecture cycles and thinking it through in the right way. It is not enough to go on reading and reading and reading and putting together things you have read; you need to go further in your own thinking and use the means suggested by the very nature of things themselves to draw connections between them. But in doing that, you are also doing something else: You're making a real effort, and the result of this effort is that your soul becomes independent. However, this takes work, real work. I have to emphasize again and again that it is not through passively giving ourselves up to something, but through using our own soul forces to grapple with it actively, that we begin to separate the spiritual world from the physical world.

Active effort is what counts in attempts to gain access to the spiritual world. If you really want to enter the spiritual world, you cannot shy away from working through what confronts you and bringing it into connection with everything life has given you. Without this effort, all kinds of crazy things can happen—like someone believing he is the reincarnation of Homer but feeling no need to do anything to prove that something of Homer's genius is welling up in him. Since Homer already put in all the effort, the person in question can spend this incarnation comfortably lying on the couch in mystical slumber! If you make an effort to actively work through whatever confronts you, you will not be diverted into all kinds of mystical monkey business. Instead, you will eventually reach the point where you can develop an appropriate sense for the deeper meaning the spiritual world's truths hold for human beings. Then you will realize that you have to make every effort not to allow your habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and perceiving on the physical plane to get mixed up with qualities belonging solely to the spiritual world.

This attitude is crucial, my friends, and once we have really acquired it, it will prevent us from doing anything foolish in our efforts to enter the spiritual world. It doesn't require any particular effort to eat salt for a week in an attempt to descend to subearthly realms, and then eat no salt for a week in an attempt to ascend into higher elemental realms. That takes no effort at all, but there is also nothing to be gained from it except the worst kinds of illusions. Inner work is the only way to really accomplish something in the spiritual world. And inner work, if it is really taking place, will by its very nature lead you to the right thoughts and keep you from getting into trouble with regard to the spiritual world. Without it, however, we are subject to perversions of mystical thinking, and people have every right to laugh at us then.

For example, I once received a letter from a man of sound common sense who said that he had visited a member of an anthroposophical branch and found that people kept all the windows closed although it was terribly hot. I have nothing against closing windows, especially when everything said indoors can be heard outside—that would be a sensible reason for closing them, wouldn't it? But instead of telling him that, people said, “Dr. Steiner has expressly told us to close the windows when lectures are given in our branch, so that the demons can't get in.” This man, who was quite unspoiled by mysticism, wrote to me asking why spirits couldn't get in through closed windows. What kind of an esoteric teacher is that, he wondered, who tells his pupils to close the windows so the demons do not get in? You can see how the physical plane is confused with higher worlds in this kind of careless talk. It is quite true that beings on the physical plane cannot get in through closed windows, unless they break them, but we will hardly be able to keep the spirits out by shutting the windows! We really must develop appropriate and serious concepts to apply to the spiritual and physical worlds.

If we give it some thought, the example of Swedenborg, who was conscientious and energetic and a splendid seer in his own way, can help us correct some fundamental errors in our own way of thinking. More on this subject tomorrow.

CONSIDERING the kind of deliberations you are engaged in at the moment, my friends, I must assume that your minds would be less than ready to take in a continuation of yesterday's lecture. For those of you who want to hear it, that lecture will be given tomorrow, but today I would like to speak about something that will relate in some way to things you all must necessarily have in mind at the moment.

First of all, and from a very specific point of view, I would like to address the question of what is really confronting us in the Goesch-Sprengel case. In recent lectures I have often said that it is important to arrive at the appropriate perspective from which to try to resolve any given issue. How, then, can we arrive at the right perspective on this particular matter through objective study of the case?

In order to deal with a case like this objectively, we must first of all remove it from its personal context and insert it into a larger one. If, as I believe, this larger context turns out to be what is most important for our anthroposophical movement, we will find ourselves obliged to study this case for our own edification and for the sake of spiritual science itself. And in fact there is a larger context to the case, as will become apparent if we look at Mr. Goesch's letter of August 19 with an eye for his main motives and arguments.

Since you have important deliberations ahead of you, I will not detain you too long, but will only select a few essential points for your consideration. The first is Goesch's claim that promises have not been kept. If you listened to the letter carefully, you will have noticed that the emphasis in his reproach is not on the alleged making and not keeping of promises. His primary accusation is that I looked for and systematically applied a means of making promises to members and not keeping them, and that once the members noticed that these promises were not being kept, they were put into a state of mind that forced them into a particular relationship to the one who had made and not kept the promises. As a result, forces accumulated in their souls that eventually made them lose their sound judgment.

So the first hypothesis Goesch presents is that systematic attempts were made to stifle the members' good sense, that deliberately making and breaking promises was a means of dulling their normal state of consciousness, resulting in a kind of stupefaction that turned them into zombies. That is the first point his letter addresses.

His second point has to do with one of the means of carrying this out. To put it briefly, through handshakes and friendly conversations and the like, I am supposed to have initiated a kind of contact with members that was suited, because of its very nature and the influence it allowed me to exert, to bringing about the above-mentioned effect on their souls.

A third thing we must keep in mind as a red thread running through Goesch's whole letter is the nature of his relationship to Miss Sprengel. We could add to these three points, but let us deal with them first.

To begin with, how does Goesch manage to construct such a systematic theory, based on his first two points, about how steps were taken to undermine the members' state of consciousness? We need to go into this thoroughly and try to find out where it comes from. In Goesch's case, we are led to his long involvement with Dr. Freud's so-called theory of psychoanalysis. [ Note 1 ] If you study this theory, you will begin to see that it is intimately related to how the pathological picture presented in the letter develops. Certain connections can be drawn between this pathological picture, as it relates to Goesch's first two points, and his involvement with the Freudian psychoanalytic point of view.

Of course, I am not in a position to give you a comprehensive picture of Freudian psychoanalytic theory in brief—my intent is only to present a few points that will help clarify the Goesch-Sprengel case. However, in a certain sense I do feel qualified to talk about psychoanalysis, because in my earlier years I was friends with one of the medical experts involved in its very beginnings. [ Note 2 ] This person eventually abandoned the theory of psychoanalysis after it degenerated later on in Freud's life. In any case, please do not take what I am going to say now as a comprehensive characterization of Freudian theory; I only want to highlight a few points.

Freudian psychoanalysts start from the assumption that an unconscious inner life exists alongside our conscious soul-activity—that is, in addition to the soul-activity we are conscious of, there is also an unconscious inner life we are usually not aware of. An important component of psychoanalysis is the doctrine that certain experiences people have in the course of their life can make impressions on them, but these impressions disappear from their conscious awareness and work on in their subconscious. According to the psychoanalysts, we do not necessarily become fully conscious of these experiences before they sink down into the unconscious—for example, something can make an impression on a person during childhood without ever coming to full consciousness, and still have such an effect on that person's psyche that it sinks down into the unconscious and goes on working there. Its effects are lasting, and in some cases lead to psychological disturbances later on. I am skipping a lot of links in the chain of reasoning and jumping right to the outcome of the whole process. In other words, we are to imagine in the soul's subconscious depths a kind of island of childhood and youthful experiences gone rampant. Through questioning during psychoanalysis, these subconscious proliferating islands in the soul can be lifted up into consciousness and incorporated into the structure of conscious awareness. In the process, the person in question can be cured of psychological defects in that particular area.

During the early years of the psychoanalytic movement, it was the practice of Dr. Breuer in particular to carry out this questioning with the patient under hypnosis. [ Note 3 ] Later on, this practice was discontinued, and now the Freudian school conducts this analysis with the patient in a normal waking state of consciousness. In any case, the underlying assumption is that there are unhealthy, proliferating islands present in the psyche below the level of consciousness.

This psychoanalytic outlook has gradually spread to incorporate and try to explain all kinds of phenomena of ordinary life, particularly with regard to how they appear in people's dreams. As I already explained once in a lecture to our friends in another city, it is at this point that the Freudian school really goes out on a limb in saying that unfulfilled desires play a primary role in dreams. [ Note 4 ] Freudians say that it is typical for people to experience unfulfilled desires in their dreams, desires that cannot be satisfied in real life. It can sometimes happen—and from the point of view of psychoanalytic theorists, it is significant when it does—that one of these desires present on an unconscious island in the psyche is lifted up in a dream and reveals in disguised form an impulse that had an effect on the person in question during his or her childhood.

Please note the peculiarity of this train of thought. It is assumed that as young boys or girls, people have experiences that sink down into subconsciousness and work on as fantasy experiences, clouding their consciousness. The pattern, then, is this: experiences of waking life are repressed and continue to work on the subconscious, leading to a weakened state of consciousness. This is exactly the same pattern Goesch constructs with regard to promises being given and broken and working on in the subconscious—all with the intention to create the same effect in the subconscious as the “islands” in Freudian psychoanalytic theory. According to Goesch, this was done cunningly and deliberately and resulted in a state of stupefaction analogous to what occurs when experiences of waking life have sunk into subconsciousness and are brought up again in a dream.

Psychoanalytic theory is a very tricky business, and if you dwell on it long enough, it gives rise to certain forms of thought that spread and affect all your thinking. As you can see, this has something to do with why Goesch came up with such a crazy idea.

In addition, as I have said before, the concept of physical contact plays an important part. I am now going to read certain passages from one of Dr. Freud's books, a collection of essays from the Freudian magazine Imago, and I ask you to pay close attention to them. [ Note 5 ] But I must precede that with something else concerning the Goesch-Sprengel case. Those of you who have known Miss Sprengel for some time will recall that she was always very concerned about protecting herself from other people's influence on her aura—she lived in horror of having to shake hands and things like that. Even before Goesch arrived on the scene, she had already gotten the idea that shaking hands is a criminal act in our esoteric circles. The following incident is absolutely typical: I had business to do in Dr. Schmiedel's laboratory and happened to meet Miss Sprengel there. [ Note 6 ] I extended my hand to her, which gave her grounds for saying, “That's how he always does it—he does whatever he wants to you and then shakes hands, and then you forget all about it.” There you have the origin of that theory about handshaking. Yesterday you all heard what this theory became in Miss Sprengel's confused mind with the help of Goesch. He contributed his understanding of Freud's theories and combined things systematically with Freudian ideas.

The following passage is from page 29 of the above-mentioned book by Freud:

The principal characteristic of the psychological constellation which becomes fixed in this way is what might be described as the subject's ambivalent attitude (to borrow the apt term coined by Bleuler) towards a single object, or rather towards one act in connection with that object. He is constantly wishing to perform this act (the touching), [and looks on it as his supreme enjoyment, but he must not perform it] and detests it as well. The conflict between these two currents cannot be promptly settled because—there is no other way of putting it—they are localized in the subject's mind in such a manner that they cannot come up against each other. The prohibition is noisily conscious, while the persistent desire to touch is unconscious and the subject knows nothing of it. If it were not for this psychological factor, an ambivalence like this could neither last so long nor lead to such consequences. [ Note 7 ]

This is followed by a long discussion of the role fear of physical contact plays in cases of neurosis:

In our clinical history of a case we have insisted that the imposition of the prohibition in very early childhood is the determining point; a similar importance attaches in the subsequent developments to the mechanism of repression at the same early age. As a result of the repression which has been enforced and which involves a loss of memory—an amnesia—the motives for the prohibition (which is conscious) remain unknown; and all attempts at disposing of it by intellectual processes must fail, since they cannot find any base of attack. The prohibition owes its strength and its obsessive character precisely to its unconscious opponent, the concealed and undiminished desire—that is to say, to an internal necessity inaccessible to conscious inspection. The ease with which the prohibition can be transferred and extended reflects a process which falls in with the unconscious desire and is greatly facilitated by the psychological conditions that prevail in the unconscious. The instinctual desire is constantly shifting in order to escape from the impasse and endeavours to find substitutes—substitute objects and substitute acts—in place of the prohibited ones. In consequence of this, the prohibition itself shifts about as well, and extends to any new aims which the forbidden impulse may adopt. Any fresh advance made by the repressed libido is answered by a fresh sharpening of the prohibition. The mutual inhibition of the two conflicting forces produces a need for discharge, for reducing the prevailing tension; and to this may be attributed the reason for the performance of obsessive acts. In the case of a neurosis these are clearly compromise actions: from one point of view they are evidences of remorse, efforts at expiation, and so on, while on the other hand they are at the same time substitutive acts to compensate the instinct for what has been prohibited. It is a law of neurotic illness that these obsessive acts fall more and more under the sway of the instinct and approach nearer and nearer to the activity which was originally prohibited. [ Note 8 ]

Considering the obsessions involved in fear of physical contact, you can well imagine how it would have been if Miss Sprengel, as a person suffering from this fear, had ever been seen by a psychoanalyst who, in line with usual psychoanalytic practice, would have questioned her about her fear of contact and tried to discover what caused it.

A third factor I want to emphasize is the relationship of Miss Sprengel to Mr. Goesch. According to psychoanalytic theory, this relationship would of course be characterized by the presence of repressed erotic thoughts. I mean that quite objectively… [ Note 9 ]

At this point, my friends, we must look a bit more closely at the whole system of psychoanalysis. As I have just outlined for you, psychoanalysis lifts up into consciousness certain “islands” in the unconscious psyche, and it assumes that the majority of these islands are sexual in nature. The psychoanalyst's task, then, is to reach down to the level of these early experiences that have sunk into subconsciousness and lift them up again for purposes of healing. According to Freudian theory, healing is brought about by lifting hidden sexual complexes up from the depths of the subconscious and making the person aware of them again. Whether this method is very successful is a matter of much discussion in books on the subject.

As you can see, psychoanalysts' thinking is often colored by an underlying pervasive sexuality, and this is taken to extremes when psychoanalysis is applied to any and all possible phenomena of human life. For example, Freud and his disciples go so far as to interpret myths and legends psychoanalytically, tracing them to repressed sexuality. Consider, for example, how they interpret the story of Oedipus. [ Note 10 ] In brief, the content of this legend is that Oedipus is led to kill his father and marry his mother. When psychoanalysts ask what this story is based on, they conclude that such things always rest on unconscious, repressed sexual complexes usually involving sexual experiences in earliest childhood. The Freudians are firmly convinced that a child's relationship to his or her father and mother is a sexual one right from birth, so if the child is a boy, he must be unconsciously in love with his mother and thus unconsciously or subconsciously jealous of his father.

At this point, my friends, we might be tempted to say that these psychoanalysts, if they actually believe in their own theory, should apply it to themselves first and foremost, and admit that their own destiny and outlook stem from an excess of repressed sexual processes experienced in childhood. Freud and his disciples should apply this theory to themselves first. They derive the Oedipus legend, for instance, from their assumption that most little boys have an illicit emotional relationship to their mother right from birth, and are thus jealous of their father. Thus, the boys' father becomes their enemy and works on as such in their troubled imagination. Later, however, they realize rationally that this relationship to their mother is not permissible, and so it is repressed and becomes subconscious. The boys then live out their lives without becoming aware of their forbidden relationship to their mother and their adversarial relationship to their father, whom they experience as a rival.

According to psychoanalytic theory, then, what we need to do in cases of defective psyches is to look for psychological complexes, and we will find that if these are lifted up into consciousness, a cure can be effected. It's too bad that I can't present these things in greater detail, but I will try to give you as exact an outline of them as possible. On page 16 of the above-mentioned book, for instance, you can read the following:

There has been little opportunity in the preceding pages for showing how new light can be thrown upon the facts of social psychology by the adoption of a psycho-analytic method of approach: for the horror of incest displayed by savages has long been recognized as such and stands in need of no further interpretation. [ Note 11 ]

This essay explains why primitive peoples so strictly enforce the ban on marrying one's mother or sister and why relationships of this type are punished. “Incest” is love for a blood-relative, and one of the first essays in this book is entitled “The Horror of Incest.” This fear is explained by assuming the existence of a tendency to incest on the part of each male individual in the form of a forbidden relationship to his mother.

All that I have been able to add to our understanding of it is to emphasize the fact that it is essentially an infantile feature [that is, primitive people retain this for a lifetime, while in civilized children it is repressed into the subconscious] and that it reveals a striking agreement with the mental life of neurotic patients. Psycho-analysis has taught us that a boy's earliest choice of objects for his love is incestuous and that those objects are forbidden ones—his mother and his sister. We have learnt, too, the manner in which, as he grows up, he liberates himself from this incestuous attraction. A neurotic, on the other hand, invariably exhibits some degree of psychical infantilism. He has either failed to get free from the psycho-sexual conditions that prevailed in his childhood or he has returned to them—two possibilities which may be summed up as developmental inhibition and regression. Thus incestuous fixations of libido continue to play (or begin once more to play) the principal part in his unconscious mental life. We have arrived at the point of regarding a child's relation to his parents, dominated as it is by incestuous longings, as the nuclear complex of neurosis.

Thus, according to psychoanalytic theory, the central complex involved in neurosis is a boy's forbidden sexual attraction for his mother and sister.

This revelation of the importance of incest in neurosis is naturally received with universal skepticism by adults and normal people. Similar expressions of disbelief, for instance, inevitably greet the writings of Otto Rank, which have brought more and more evidence to show the extent to which the interest of creative writers centres round the theme of incest and how the same theme, in countless variations and distortions, provides the subject-matter of poetry. We are driven to believe that this rejection is principally a product of the distaste which human beings feel for their early incestuous wishes, now overtaken by repression. It is therefore of no small importance that we are able to show that these same incestuous wishes, which are later destined to become unconscious, are still regarded by savage peoples as immediate perils against which the most severe measures of defence must be enforced. [ Note 12 ]

From this point of departure, an atmosphere of sexuality spreads until it pervades the psychoanalysts' whole field of activity. Their whole life is spent working with ideas about sexuality. That is why psychoanalysis has been the biggest contributing factor in making an unbelievable mockery of something quite natural in human life. This has crept into our life gradually, without people noticing it. I can sympathize deeply with an old gentleman by the name of Moritz Benedikt (who spent his life trying to bring morality into medicine) when he says that if you look around, you'll find that the physicians of thirty years ago knew less about certain sexual abnormalities than eighteen-year-old girls in boarding school do today. [ Note 13 ] This is the truth, and you can really empathize with this man. I mention it in particular because it is really extremely important to regard certain processes in children's lives as simply natural, without having to see them in terms of sexuality right away.

Nowadays, these complicated psychoanalytic theories lead us to label a lot of what children do as sexually deviant, although most of it is totally innocent. In most cases, it would be enough to regard these things as nothing more than childish mischievousness that could be quite adequately treated with a couple of smacks on a certain part of the anatomy. The worst possible way of dealing with it, however, is to talk a lot about these things, especially with the children themselves, and to put all kinds of theoretical ideas in their heads. It is hard enough to talk about these things with grownups with any degree of clarity. Unfortunately for people who are often called upon to provide counseling, parents frequently come with all kinds of complaints, including some really dumb ones, about how their children suffer from sexual deviance. Their only basis for these complaints is that the children scratch themselves. Now, there is no more sexuality involved in scratching yourself anywhere else than there is in scratching your arm. Dr. Freud, however, upholds the idea that any scratching or touching, or even a baby's sucking a pacifier, is a sexual activity. He spreads a mantle of sexuality over all aspects of human life.

It would be good for us to look more closely at Freudian psychoanalysis in order to become aware of the excesses of materialistic science; specifically, of those of psychoanalysis in seeing everything in terms of sexuality. In a book introduced by Dr. Freud, the Hungarian psychoanalyst Ferenczi writes about the case of a five-year-old boy named Arpad. [ Note 14 ] There is no doubt in his mind as to the sources of Arpad's interest in the goings-on in the chicken run:

The continual sexual activity between the cock and hens, the laying of eggs and the hatching out of the young brood gratified his sexual curiosity, the real object of which was human family life. He showed that he had formed his own choice of sexual objects on the model of life in the hen-run, for he said one day to the neighbour's wife: “I'll marry you and your sister and my three cousins and the cook; no, not the cook, I'll marry my mother instead.” [ Note 15 ]

We could wish for a return of the days when it was possible to hear children say things like this without immediately having to resort to such awkward sexual explanations. I can only touch on this subject today, but I will discuss it at greater length sometime in the near future in order to reassure all you fathers and mothers. [ Note 16 ] But of course, Freud's theory, which is spreading widely without people noticing it, is only a symptom of a worldwide tendency. And when parents come with the complaint that their four- or five-year-old sons or daughters are suffering from sexual deviance, in most cases the appropriate response is, “The only deviant thing in this case is your way of thinking about it!” In most instances, that is really what's wrong.

My intention in telling you all this has been to point out the kind of atmosphere Freudian psychoanalysis is swimming in. I am well aware that the Freudians would take issue with this brief characterization. But we are fully justified in saying that psychoanalysis as a whole is positively dripping with this psychosexual stuff, as its professional literature reveals.

Suppose the assumption that psychosexual islands exist in the human subconscious actually proves to be true in the case of a certain individual. A Freudian theorist might subject that person to questioning and be able to add a new case history to the annals of Freudian psychoanalytic theory. In the case concerning us, Goesch might have undertaken this line of questioning and made some discoveries among those psychosexual islands that would have served to verify Freud's theories. But to do that, Goesch would have needed to be stronger in his own soul. As it was, however, he succumbed to a certain type of relationship to his new lady friend. The material in our possession supplies ample evidence of this relationship and will allow anyone who applies it in the right way to describe their relationship with clinical, objective precision.

Since what can be learned from a specific case is often of greater significance than the actual case itself, let me point out that this case can lead us to the same conclusions I presented in my essay, published in the Vienna Clinical Review in 1900, entitled “The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as a Psychopathological Problem.” [ Note 17 ] Notwithstanding all the contributions Nietzsche's genius made to the world, it was necessary to point out that Nietzsche would be misunderstood if the psychopathological factor in him were not taken into account. It is important for our Society that psychopathological elements not gain the upper hand, that they be eradicated from our minds and seen in the right light so that psychopaths are not looked upon as some kind of higher beings. That is why it is also important to see the current case in the right light and assess what is actually involved from the right standpoint.

It is already too late for me to describe now at length how the storm developed. When I was in Vienna in May of this year, one of our members wrote me a letter I had to tear up on returning here, since taking letters across the border is no longer allowed. This letter contained accusations very similar to those raised by Goesch under the influence of Miss Sprengel and showing a similar involvement in Freudian psychoanalysis. They came from the same quarter; the same wind was blowing in both sets of accusations. In fact, if I could have read you some sentences from that letter, they would have sounded remarkably like what Miss Sprengel inspired in Goesch.

What, then, was actually going on in the Goesch-Sprengel case? Goesch could not really function as a psychoanalyst, because to do that his relationship to Miss Sprengel would have had to be an objective one like that of a doctor to a patient. Her influence on him was too overwhelming, however, and thus his involvement in the examination was not fully conscious and objective. In Freudian terms, everything at work in the psyche of his friend, the “keeper of the seal,” came out, but since it sank down into Goesch's unconscious, it was masked by the whole theory that came to light in his letter.

The Goesch-Sprengel case grew out of one of the greatest mistakes and worst materialistic theories of our time, and we can only deal with it by realizing that both people involved threw a mantle of secrecy over their human, all-too-human relationships. In essence, this consisted of shrouding their relationship in Freudian psychoanalytic theories, as the documents very clearly reveal.

When we attempt to help people who come to us in such a confused psychological state, they are often fawning, enthusiastic supporters to begin with, but later on their adulation changes into enmity. That, too, can be explained in psychoanalytic terms. However, our most urgent concern at the moment is our relationship to the rest of the world. Just as we are now experiencing hostility coming from the direction of psychoanalysis, steeped as it is in sexuality, we can expect to encounter at any moment new opposition from all kinds of aberrations resulting from other all-too-human impulses.

This shows us that we must study such cases; they should be of great interest to us precisely because our Society represents a spiritual movement. I could speak at much greater length on this subject, but I must stop for today because you need to get on with your deliberations. I simply wanted to point out the first tentative steps we must take in seeing where the dangers for our movement lie and how urgent it is that we all do as much as we can to help the world out there learn that we are not chicken-livered. We know how to stand up for ourselves. When things come up in disguise as they did in this letter, we must rip off the mask and expose where they come from. Their origins lie much deeper than we usually think; they originate in the materialistic outlook of our times, which has not only become the dominant view in science but has contaminated our life as a whole. Combating it is our movement's very reason for existence, but we must keep our eyes wide open and see what is going on in the world. We must recognize what the people coming to us have learned out in the world and what they bring with them when they come to us.

YESTERDAY I inserted a talk on psychoanalysis into this lecture series, since that subject is of concern to all of us at the moment because of the case at hand. You will have noticed that I first characterized the psychoanalytic view as distinguishing between consciousness and the unconscious in our inner life. I then went on to describe, if only briefly, how the psychoanalytic point of view as a whole is swimming in sexuality, and you could see that with this second aspect, an extremely unfortunate (you might even say “terrible”) element has entered our culture. This points to something characteristic of current intellectual trends in general.

There can be no doubt that in distinguishing an unconscious that exists alongside the conscious mind, psychoanalysis has made a legitimate contribution to our culture. We can look at it like this: These people are on the right track in thinking that the human soul goes beyond what our ordinary consciousness encompasses. However, these same people have also taken their materialism to extremes. It has done more than engulf their thinking, which is what happened in the case of what is now erroneously known as monism. The materialism of the psychoanalysts, however, also pulls the lower human drives into their theory and incorporates them into it. As a result, sexual drives, the most subjective element possible, become the motivating impulse in scientific activity.

We must look particularly closely at such modern cultural phenomena, because they show us that something independent of human individuals is compelling even the crassest materialists among us to recognize a higher spiritual element than the one we are immediately aware of. After all, the followers of Freud are deeply rooted in materialism, in their intellect as well as their instincts; yet the objective world compels even them to investigate something beyond the scope of ordinary consciousness. That is the objective side of the matter.

On the other hand, the subjective aspect is that these people are so tangled up in materialism that their lowest and most subjective drives are immediately drawn into the business of formulating their outlook on life. That is part and parcel of materialism just as much as the left hand belongs to the right hand or the left eye to the right eye. And tumbling right down into the very lowest human drives is the inevitable consequence of getting stuck in materialism if people really let themselves go.

However, my friends, we can really understand this way of looking at the world only if we can get to the bottom of many a riddle of the world order. The dangerous thing about philosophies like psychoanalysis is that people are on the right track, but drag their impure instincts into what is true. It is much less harmful when impure instincts are incorporated into something completely erroneous than it is when they are incorporated into a partial truth. And the truth in the psychoanalytic view lies in its recognition of the fact that so much of what is at work in human life is unconscious, truly unconscious. That is where psychoanalysts are on the right track and have come upon many things that are true and correct.

Let us follow up how psychoanalysts stumble onto the right track. In the book I told you about yesterday, the head of the psychoanalytic school of thought attempts to explain certain customs among primitive people on the basis of certain psychoanalytic theories. He does so in accordance with connections he assumes to exist between early childhood and neurotic conditions later in life.

We saw yesterday how the element of sexuality plays into these theories. In his book Totem and Taboo, in the essay “Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence,” Freud compares some of the views and ideas of primitive people with certain infantile characteristics of civilized human beings that manifest in neuroses, in certain types of nervous or psychological disorders. [ Note 1 ] From what we discussed yesterday, you will recall that psychoanalysts explain many things as the result of impulses that affect people in the early years of their life and then retreat to islands in these people's psyche where they work on in the unconscious. This means that infantile psychological activity is still going on in civilized adults. According to this view, neurotics, or at least a certain type of neurotics, are walking around at age forty with psyches in which earliest childhood experiences, infantile experiences, are still especially influential.

Freud then compares certain primitive beliefs with the experience of neurosis. For example, he says:

A Maori chief would not blow on a fire with his mouth; for his sacred breath would communicate its sanctity to the fire, which would pass it on to the pot on the fire, which would pass it on to the meat in the pot, which would pass it on to the man who ate the meat, which was in the pot, which stood on the fire, which was breathed on by the chief; so that the eater, infected by the chief's breath conveyed through these intermediaries, would surely die. [ Note 2 ]

My patient's husband purchased a household article of some kind and brought it home with him. She insisted that it should be removed or it would make the room she lived in “impossible”. [ Note 3 ]

That is what the patient tells the psychoanalyst. A spiritual scientist using healthy understanding to contemplate a patient like this would have to consider the problem from many different angles. Psychoanalysts, too, might or might not be able to follow the clues in a case like this. And a false mystic might come up with all kinds of profound ideas about magical influences at work on this person or proceeding from this very refined personality who has reached such an advanced stage of evolution that she cannot tolerate having certain objects in the same room with her!

The psychoanalyst says of his patient:

She had heard that the article had been bought in a shop situated in, let us say, “Smith” Street.

He finds out that she has heard that the item in question was bought in a store on Smith Street—increasing mystification! He continues:

“Smith,” however, was the married name of a woman friend of hers who lived in a distant town and whom she had known in her youth under her maiden name. This friend of hers was at the moment “impossible” or taboo.

Consequently the article that had been purchased here in Vienna was as taboo as the friend herself with whom she must not come into contact.

As the psychoanalyst in question has found out, the patient had had a friend with whom she had once gotten into trouble. The friend's name was Smith. This fact survives on an island in her psyche. Nothing of it is present in her ordinary waking consciousness, but although she is unaware of the connection, it remains in her unconscious. Only the name provides the connecting link inasmuch as the friend whom she hated in her youth—a hatred the patient was not conscious of—is called Smith and the article in question was bought on Smith Street. The similarity of the names provides the connection; that is how the subconscious works up into the realm of consciousness.

People with a strong mystical bent make much of names that sound alike. They make such associations very readily and are led to all kinds of mystical conclusions without ever becoming fully aware of the connection. For example, it could happen that a person who once played the role of Persephone might come to believe that she was an actual reincarnation of Persephone because she thinks she once heard someone she didn't know call out the name Persephone as she went past. It could well be, however, that she simply overheard someone saying he saw a woman telephoning, and that she understood “Persephone” from that sequence of sounds. The person in question misheard “Persephone” when what was actually said was “telephoning,” and that is enough for her to go on spinning her mystical threads. This is all strictly hypothetical, of course, but it does correspond to how such things can actually happen.

I could give you many other examples from the essays of Dr. Freud and his followers that would show you that the philosophy of psychoanalysis is in fact seeking the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious. However, as I described yesterday, as a result of certain tendencies of our times, all it finds down there in the unconscious is sexuality. This is an extremely important point, and we must take a very close look at it.

The day before yesterday, I told you about Swedenborg and his clairvoyance, for in his own way, Swedenborg was an extremely distinguished and advanced clairvoyant. I explained that he was characteristically unable to cross the threshold into a different state of consciousness, to say “I am being observed” instead of “I am observing.” Swedenborg always wanted to observe everything himself. He observed his Imaginations. He himself was not being observed from the sphere of the Angeloi, but was observing that sphere with the same kind of consciousness he used on the physical plane. Let's take a good look at this once more so as to be clear about the right way to ascend from the physical plane to a higher plane of existence. We must be very clear that on the physical plane, we perceive various objects which are mirrored by means of our physical body and thus become our concepts. That's how we arrive at the important insight that we are looking at objects, and this is the basis of our consciousness.

As soon as we ascend to a higher state of consciousness, however, all this changes fundamentally. There we are received with our I by beings of a higher order, and then we become aware of being perceived, of being looked at by them.

Swedenborg presents a third state of consciousness in which a whole world of objects not present on the physical plane is perceived by him exactly as he perceived objects on the physical plane, although in a more refined state. Thus Swedenborg perceives spiritual objects presented to him in the form of Imaginations just as if the spiritual world were nothing more than a finer version of the physical world. He looks at the spiritual world in the same way we look at the physical world in everyday life. What is the cause of this?

We have already traced the process Swedenborg went through. He discovered certain spiritual beings who made it clear to him that they came from Mars. These beings were incomprehensible to him because they repressed all expressions of emotion and expressed themselves only in thought-gestures. As I told you on Sunday, he realized that he could not understand these beings because they had acquired the ability to conceal their soul life. If Swedenborg had been able to see with the kind of consciousness available to the Angeloi (which is what would have happened if he had really ascended to the spiritual world—that is, if he had also carried his consciousness up into the spiritual world), he would have been able to understand the nature of these Mars beings even though they concealed all their emotions. As it was, however, the content of the Mars beings' soul appeared to Swedenborg as a cold world of thoughts. This is all very strange.

Just think how terribly afraid most people here on the physical plane are of the cold and abstract world of reason. You hear all kinds of derogatory comments about this cold and abstract world of thoughts, and people do everything possible to try to avoid it, to avoid thinking in pure thoughts. Someone who expects people to ascend to pure thought is held to be out of touch with and hostile to real life. That's how people on the physical plane feel about the abstract world of thoughts.

This point of view is very widespread. I will give you an example; present company is always excepted, of course, so I am sure there will be no hurt feelings. For a number years now, a great many people have been reading my The Philosophy of Freedom, which is a work of pure thought. [ Note 4 ] It first appeared in the 1890s. It would be interesting to find out how many of the people in our movement who are now reading The Philosophy of Freedom would have read it on its own merits, without knowing anything about me and our movement, if it had fallen into their hands back in the early 1890s. How many people would have read it back then and how many would have said, “I can't get through this tangled web of thoughts; it just doesn't make any sense!”? You can just imagine, then, how many people are reading this work of pure thought for strictly personal reasons. (Present company excepted, of course.) The only ones who are reading it for other than personal reasons are the ones who would have read it even if they had never met me in person. We have to admit to this quite soberly; it shows how horrified we on the physical plane are of so-called abstraction.

In spite of being such a great scholar, when Swedenborg encountered the beings I described, this particular class of Mars beings, on the astral plane, he was incapable of understanding the pure thoughts, free of any emotion, that were active in their souls. Transferred to the physical plane, this is the same as if someone would say about The Philosophy of Freedom, “It's all Greek to me; no sensible person can read that kind of language,” meaning that it seems totally incomprehensible. In the same way, Swedenborg found these Mars beings incomprehensible on the astral plane.

It is important, however, that we at least have the good will and make the effort to advance to the kind of thinking that is free of emotion—to begin with, free of the emotions we know so well in ordinary life. If the content of The Philosophy of Freedom appeals to people because their feelings incline them to a more spiritual way of looking at things, they have not yet achieved pure thinking. Only those people who take it in because of the thoughts' logical sequence and the way they support each other are relating to the book in the right way.

Swedenborg, on the other hand, in spite of being such a great scholar, could not conceive of being drawn to a world of pure thoughts free of emotional motives. We must try to understand, my friends—and the means of doing so are available in our anthroposophical literature—to what extent in everyday life our choice of truths is dictated by emotional impulses, by impulses provided for us on the physical plane through our karma or upbringing. We are only free of subjectivity when we have really moved on to a realm of thinking in which thoughts sustain each other and no longer have any subjective content.

After that, however, there is still one more thing we must accomplish. When we have really reached the stage of thinking in pure thoughts, when a sequence of pure thoughts is present in our soul, then our personal mind or subjective I is no longer involved. This accounts for the severity we experience when we reach this stage of pure thinking. It is no longer possible to bend things to fit into the mold of how we subjectively would like to have them. Take a train of thought like that of The Philosophy of Freedom. It is impossible to construct it in any other way. It cannot be arbitrarily tampered with; you have to let it grow inside you like a living organism. Then your I is really uninvolved; it is thinking itself that is doing the thinking.

However, your thinking only becomes mature if what it has been emptied of—your own I—is replaced with something else. In place of the contents of your personal mind, the mind-content of spirits belonging to higher hierarchies must fill this emotion-free thinking. When you have come so far as to be able to gradually rid your emotion-filled thinking of its subjective content so that it contains only pure concepts, then divine content, the content that comes from above, can flow in.

Swedenborg never reached this stage. In spite of being a great scholar, he could not extricate what he was thinking from his personal emotions. When he ascended to the astral plane, beings such as the Mars dwellers who could think in pure thought were completely alien to his thinking, confined as it still was to his own personality, and they were therefore incomprehensible to him. As far as he was concerned, their gestures could not be understood at all. But why was Swedenborg barred from entering the world of higher consciousness? Why did he carry a mode of perception appropriate to the physical plane up into the spiritual world, to which he really did gain access? We need not investigate why certain spirits were able to keep their thoughts free of subjective emotional content, but why was Swedenborg unable to understand their words and gestures?

The answers to all these questions will become apparent if we first ask what was actually going on in Swedenborg's case and what he took with him onto the astral plane. It seems he was not completely able to extricate his spiritual nature from his physical person, for if he had been able to do so, he would have seen his I as an object in the realm of higher consciousness. His I would have become like a remembered object, something like the broken pots in a comparison I used some time ago. He was unable to wrest himself sufficiently free of himself. However, as you know from what I have already said about him, it was characteristic of Swedenborg's clairvoyance that he did not just see illusions. He did not just see maya—he could actually recognize objective facts; for instance, he knew he was dealing with beings from Mars and could see what they were like. That was all correct, but he was seeing the spiritual world in its maya aspect, through a veil of illusion, so to speak. He was in fact looking at real beings from Mars, but could not understand that they were actual spiritual beings.

Now, my friends, let me ask you to be really, really clever for a moment, and clever in a way that people who want to develop their clairvoyance usually are not. Obviously, Swedenborg did not perceive these beings from Mars with his ordinary senses, with his ordinary sense of sight. After all, he was seeing them in the spiritual world. In other words, he could not see them with his sense of sight or hear them with his sense of hearing or even understand them with his ordinary capacity for thought. As I have explained to you, this capacity for thought was actually a gift of the ancient Moon stage, that is, something that developed before the Mars forces came into play… [ Note 5 ] [gap in the stenographic record]. Among all the powers of cognition known to human beings, there was nothing that could have enabled him to understand these beings.

Thus we are confronted with the strange fact that Swedenborg undoubtedly recognized the beings he saw, but did not recognize them by means of any higher forces. He recognized them by means of some ability he should not have had because he was lacking the necessary consciousness—ordinary powers of consciousness on the physical plane are inadequate to explain what he was seeing. But in that case, how was he actually seeing? Now, Swedenborg had spent his life not only as a great scholar but also as a very pure person, and so a certain energy was transformed within him. All people on the physical plane have this energy, which is somewhat similar to clairvoyant ability. On the physical plane, however, it is used for a different purpose. What was this energy that enabled Swedenborg to see as he did?

Swedenborg was seeing by means of a force that perceives outer appearances without touching them in any way and without making use of the eyes. What kind of a force is that? On earth, on the physical plane, it is the force that comes to expression in sexual activity, the mysterious force that pulls people together in earthly love, a force different from all other powers of perception. Swedenborg had stored up this force, and when he reached a certain age it was transformed in him, although it remained sexual energy in some respects. He used this sexual energy to see spiritual worlds. That is, transformed sexual energy is actually the basis of Swedenborg's clairvoyance.

You can conclude from all this that human beings during their evolution on earth are provided with a force that expresses itself as sexuality during earthly life, but that will be transformed once it is no longer bound to the physical body. On the other hand, you can also come to the conclusion that the forces leading to clairvoyant vision are very intimately related to forces involved in what are now the lowest drives in human nature, and that one of these realms can be attracted by the other, so to speak.

My friends, it follows that clairvoyance is not something to be toyed with. Of course, what I have just said does not apply to spiritual science as such, but it does apply to all kinds of clairvoyance people grab for in passing without working to acquire it legitimately. We cannot take seriously enough the fact that clairvoyance is not to be developed by simply applying a transformation of our usual mode of perception on the physical plane to higher planes of existence. These higher planes require that we work toward a new mode of perception applicable to the spiritual world, a mode of perception that has nothing to do with sexual energy, since that is physical and exists only for the physical plane. Applying the same mode of perception to higher worlds as is applied on the physical plane, that is, the assumption that people can still perceive in the same way as they do on the physical plane, is what makes people relate clairvoyance and sexual energies.

There are several ways of avoiding this, and we are now at a crucial point in human evolution where these things must be understood. What I have just told you is ancient knowledge, and in olden times people knew how to protect themselves. They knew that people approaching the spiritual world had to recognize both their own weakness and the fact that strength of character, inner discipline, and doing away with any unrestrained emotional impulses are necessary for ascending into the spiritual worlds in the right way. Ancient initiates were aware of human weakness and took steps to prevent any possibility of mixing the two spheres.

How did they do it? Simply by keeping people away from the opposite sex whenever truly spiritual matters were being spoken of. That is, the female sex was not allowed to participate in gatherings in which spiritual scientific matters were discussed. That is why in the past women were excluded from all spiritual-scientific gatherings. This measure prevented the men from mixing the two spheres in any way, because they were bound by strictest oath not to discuss what went on in the lodge outside the lodge itself. Women, then, could have no connection to spiritual science other than the white gloves, which were a significant symbol of this whole state of affairs. [ Note 6 ]

Now these times are long gone, and spiritual scientific movements such as ours should attempt to do away with such constraints. However, the spiritual realm must still be kept totally free of the other sphere I mentioned; these two realms are not to be mixed.

What we have seen recently is a case of the worst possible mingling of spheres, a case in which sexual drives were at work but were interpreted as something quite different. They were interpreted as all kinds of mystical things, but in reality they were sexual drives. It is important to face this fact squarely and to understand it from the inside, out of the inner nature of the cosmic order. Only our recognition of the very great dignity and solemnity of spiritual life can guard us against egotism in spiritual activity. Once egotistical mysticism enters, nothing can save us from mixing the two above-mentioned spheres in the worst possible way.

Thus we saw how in Swedenborg's case, repressed sexuality filled his Imaginations that would otherwise have remained empty, but only to a certain extent. When he came into contact with beings who were able to eliminate all emotions from their gestures, he was no longer able to fill that sphere, which was a strictly human one and came about because his sexuality extended to include his Imaginations. Swedenborg, then, is a good example of what to avoid in approaching the spiritual world in modern times. Aspirations that resemble Swedenborg's in any way put people striving for clairvoyance in danger of arousing the sphere of sexuality and having the two spheres mingle.

My friends, we must be able to speak of these things as a matter of course in spiritual scientific contexts. It would be very unfortunate if we were unable to mention them objectively and scientifically, because serious seekers also need to know the dangers they face in their search. That is also why it is so easy for an impure fantasy to misinterpret pure spiritual striving.

We stand at an extremely significant point in our spiritual scientific communications, and what I wanted to do today was sketch the lines converging in this point. Because I want to be very thorough in speaking to you about these things, I will continue to present my reflections on this question tomorrow. We will meet again at the same time, or at whatever time seems best—we can decide that before we leave here today.

LET US continue with the theme we have been considering for the past few days and begin by asking the question, “How old is love?” There is no doubt in my mind that the great majority of people with their rather superficial way of looking at things would immediately respond that love is as old as the human race, of course. However, anyone who recognizes cultural history as being imbued with spiritual impulses, and who therefore tries to deal with such issues concretely instead of in vague generalities, would answer quite differently. Love, my friends, is seven hundred years old at the most!

Nowhere in ancient Greek and Roman prose or poetry will you find anything resembling our modern idea of love. And if you read Plutarch, for instance, you will find the two concepts of Venus and Amor very clearly differentiated. [ Note 1 ] Love as the subject of so much lyrical eloquence in literature, and especially in poetry, is no more than six or seven hundred years old. Our modern notion of love—what love means to us today and how that is instilled in people—has played a part in the human heart and mind only for the past six or seven centuries. Before that, people did not have the same idea of love; they did not speak about it in any even remotely similar way.

This should not come as a surprise to you, not even on a theoretical or epistemological level. The objection that human beings have always made a practice of loving does not hold good; that would be like saying that if the Earth revolves around the Sun as the Copernican view claims, then it must have been doing so even during Roman, Greek, and Egyptian time—in fact, as long as it has been in existence. Of course that's true, but the people of those times didn't talk about the Copernican system.

Similarly, it is also not valid to object that what is expressed in the idea of love must have existed before the concept itself was there. Of course, the facts and phenomena of loving have always been an identifiable facet of human life, but people have not always talked about them. We have come a long way in the past six or seven hundred years in that respect; in fact, we have come so far that love occupies a central position in many people's view of life. And not only that, we now have a scientific theory, the theory of psychoanalysis, which is positively swimming in the most vulgar concepts of love, as I have shown. This is an evolutionary tendency that anthroposophists in particular are called upon to resist and to transform by fostering a spiritual-scientific philosophy of life.

Many of you may be aware that I described these same things quite precisely from a historical perspective in some earlier lectures, so I would be surprised if you were all taken aback by my statement that our idea of love is only six or seven hundred years old. [ Note 2 ] In any case, the idea of love has gradually crept into all kinds of philosophical concepts during the past few hundred years, as is revoltingly evident in psychoanalysis. It would take a long time to get to the bottom of all this, but I hope these more or less aphoristic remarks will give you some clues.

As an example, let's consider a contemporary thinker who is totally immersed in modern cultural concepts—in other words, someone who cannot overcome his supposed insight that outer sensory-physical reality is all we can reasonably talk about. I have already introduced Fritz Mauthner to you as a very sincere representative of this type of person. [ Note 3 ] Mauthner is a linguistic critic and the author of a philosophical dictionary. This puts him in a very strange position in that it makes him aware of the fact that the word “mysticism” has existed down through the ages—as a linguistic critic, he naturally wants to know what stands behind both the word itself and actual mystical aspirations.

My friends, just consider how much reading material we have to struggle through to understand that particular relationship of the human soul to super-earthly worlds that deserves the name “mysticism.” Consider, too, how very seriously we have to take any explanations, such as those in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, if we want to understand the inner attitude needed in order to face the spiritual world as a mystic—that is, as a soul at one with the spiritual pulse and flow of higher worlds. [ Note 4 ] We can only really say what mysticism is in the modern sense of the word when we have engaged in serious reflection such as that in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. In other words, we have to at least study that book thoroughly and attentively a couple of times.

When someone like Fritz Mauthner gets his hands on a book like Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, it is patent nonsense to him—just so many words. Mauthner is an honest man, after all. He would be telling the truth if, having read Swedenborg, he were to say that he doesn't understand a thing when Swedenborg talks about inhabitants of Mars who can conceal their innermost impulses. He might also say that he finds nothing to relate to in a book like Knowledge of the Higher Worlds; perhaps angels might be able to understand it, but he cannot.

This is an utterly plausible opinion, and I am convinced it is what Fritz Mauthner would come to as an honest person. And in fact, if he is honest and sticks to the truth, coming to this conclusion is inevitable because the concept of mysticism eludes him entirely; there's nothing to it as far as he is concerned. For him, everything in Theosophy or Knowledge of the Higher Worlds is all just words, words, words. [ Note 5 ] If he himself experiences a kind of Faustian striving, he might express it by saying, “[I will] contemplate all seminal forces in the outer physical world and be done with peddling empty words.” [ Note 6 ] And in his own way, he is quite right.

However, Mauthner is not only honest, he is also thorough, and so he wonders if it is actually true that human souls have never experienced anything like mysticism. After all, people have always talked about it. What was it, then, that induced them to speak about mysticism?

When I was a very young man, I knew an outstanding theologian, now dead, who was also very well educated in philosophy. [ Note 7 ] He always said, and rightly so, that behind every error there is something true and real we must look for. No idea is so crazy that we need not look for the reality behind it. This is also Mauthner's rationale in conceding that there must be something to mysticism after all. Obviously, there are still strange characters around who write books like Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and talk about our mystical relationship to spiritual worlds, but to him it is all nonsense. However, there has to be something in human nature that produces the emotions these crazy, mixed-up people call mysticism. There must be something behind it.

If you try to find how Mauthner discovers what underlies mysticism, the most you can say after having read the entry on mysticism in his dictionary is that he keeps going around in circles. [ Note 8 ] Everything in this article revolves around words and definitions of words. But since I was interested in finding out how Mauthner, in his own way, attempts to get at what is behind mysticism, I looked it up in his dictionary to see what could be found there ... [gap in the stenographic record]

So I looked up not only his entry on mysticism but also the one on love. I found the article on love to be one of his best, and very well written. It's actually very nice. Mauthner first mentions Spinoza's definition of love and Schopenhauer's brief and heavy-handed definition, and then he explains that it is necessary to distinguish between mere eroticism, which is strictly physical and confined to sexuality, and real love on a soul level. Mauthner admits all that, and even goes on to say something as elevated as this: [ Note 9 ]

I believe that people who are one-sided geniuses in thinking have seldom, if ever, had any understanding of love in its highest degree, of feelings of love taken to pathological extremes. They have not experienced it personally and have only tried to categorize the descriptions of poets.

That is, the philosophers did not know much about love except what they looked up in books of poetry.

I believe that love in its ultimate degree has been experienced and described only by artists (approximately since the time of Petrarch), and that it entered common parlance through the power of imitation or fashion and captured the imagination of readers for six hundred years, and is now in the process of being replaced by another fashion. Although the ultimate degree of love is as rare as a great artistic creation or the kind of religious union with God that St. Francis may have experienced, still the whole world babbles on about religion, art, and love. What they mean by all this are mere substitutes for emotions that perhaps one person in a million has actually experienced.

So there!

The ultimate degree of love, whose existence I do not deny, is really something of a miracle—and people have also tried to explain miracles as pathological phenomena. In the most unlikely event that both sexual partners experience the highest degree of love, a miracle takes place in defiance of all the laws of nature: each one lifts the other and both float above the earth. Archimedes' principle is, or appears to be, superseded. Whether in happiness or in death, the longing of mysticism is fulfilled.

There you have it. For someone like Mauthner, steeped in modern materialistic philosophy, the emotion of love is the only way human beings can experience the feelings “deranged” mystics experience in their relationship to spiritual things. “Whether in happiness or in death, the longing of mysticism is fulfilled” is a remarkably honest sentence coming from someone who has lost all connection to the spiritual world. Mauthner continues:

For the purposes of this little investigation, I have deliberately overlooked many other meanings of the word “love.” At this juncture, however, I must still point out that union with God is experienced by mysticism as the pleasure of love at its most passionate and most spiritual, and that Spinoza made use of his first definition of love (in Book III and Book V of his Ethics) to proclaim the love for God, the amor erga Deum, as the highest bliss known to human beings. The longing to give expression to the inexpressible is intrinsic to mysticism, and this has led to considerable misuse of the concept of love. There is something of this vivid mysticism not only in Spinoza's pantheistic extravagance, but also in Schopenhauer's metaphysical cynicism. It is also what Cousin meant when he said that we love the infinite and imagine we love finite things.

The well-known feeling that leads us to call our sexual partners “lovers” runs through so-called love in all its various degrees. And we describe our very subjective experience through the unwarranted use of the corresponding verb “to love.” The attempt to find an objective noun, namely, the word “love” to describe this experience met with such success that people have persuaded themselves that the experience itself is as common as the word “love” has become.

As you can see, when the modern materialistic world tries to formulate a concept of mysticism out of its own fundamental impulses, it is forced to conclude that what mystics dream of can only be found in the emotion of love in the real world; that is, everything spiritual is dragged down into a refined version of eroticism.

It is typical, for instance, that Mauthner brings up the particular way in which a woman friend of Nietzsche's, the author Lou Andreas-Salomé, [ Note 10 ] describes Nietzsche's intellect as a type of refined eroticism. [ Note 11 ] It is interesting, too, how Mauthner reacts to her portrayal of Nietzsche. He says:

Recently, after so many attempts by men, a woman, Friedrich Nietzsche's friend Lou Andreas-Salome, has also tried to formulate a philosophy of love in her excellent book on Nietzsche, which won her the hatred of the entire Nietzsche clan. She is very subtle in her expositions, but bold enough to refuse to accept fidelity as an attribute of love, and she forges a link between the artist's fantasy and that of lovers (“Eroticism,” p. 25). She too, however, intellectualizes the act to such an extent that there seems to be no conceptual distinction between sensuality and the intellectual phenomena accompanying it.

In other words, then, from the way men and women express themselves, we see that nowadays, even in our thinking, we have to replace our relationship to the spiritual world with the eroticism throbbing in our souls—a more or less refined eroticism, depending on the character of the individual in question.

This all has to do with the fundamental materialistic tendency of our times, which also leads to untruthfulness when people are not honest enough to admit that all they know about mysticism is the aspect that is identical to eroticism. Untruthfulness emerges when these people talk about eroticism but conceal it behind a veil of mystical concepts. Materialists who freely admit that they see nothing but eroticism in all of mysticism are actually much more honest than people who take eroticism as their starting point but hide it behind mystical formulas as they clamber up to the very highest worlds. Sometimes you can almost see the ladders they are using to scramble up to the very highest planes of existence in order to have a mystical cover-up for something that is actually nothing more than eroticism. On the one hand, then, we have the theoretical linking of mysticism to eroticism, and on the other hand the tendency of our modern times to sink down into eroticism and drag all kinds of murky, misunderstood mysticism into it.

Some time ago I challenged you to work on eradicating the mystical eccentricities that come about through the kind of mingling of spheres I described, so that people who are well able to recognize the noble character of spirituality will once again be able to rise to the perspective needed to speak about spirituality where spirituality is actually present, without clothing subjective emotions in spiritual forms. In making this appeal, I hoped to create some degree of clarity in these matters within the Anthroposophical Society, so that clear thinking might prevail. [ Note 12 ] Time alone will tell whether we will actually be able to accomplish this.

In former times (and in fact until quite recently, as I pointed out yesterday), a much more radical means was used to safeguard the basic requirements of any kind of spiritual scientific society. It was a simple matter of excluding one entire sex, half of humanity, so that the other half would be spared the dangers inherent in mixing elevated spiritual concepts with thoughts of natural human activity on the physical plane. Thinking about spiritual matters belongs to the spiritual world. We must come to the healthy realization that it is much worse to talk about certain aspects of natural human interaction in mystical formulas that do not belong to this natural level than it is to call these things honestly by name and admit that this aspect belongs to the physical plane and must remain there.

Schopenhauer, in his singularly heavy-handed fashion, characterized love as follows: “The sum total of the current generation's love affairs are thus the human race's ‘earnest meditatio composition is generationis fu fume, e qua iterum pendent innumerae generationes’ ”—the earnest meditation of the human race as a whole on the composition of generations to come, on which in turn countless generations depend. [ Note 13 ] Well, that's Schopenhauer's opinion, not mine! It is a terrible thing to see people deny the rightful place of such urges and disguise them by saying, for example, that they are obliged to do what they do so that an extremely important individuality can incarnate. That is really an abomination in the eyes of someone trying to practice mysticism in all earnestness and dignity.

We must also take into account the fact that mysticism is not intended as an excuse for laziness on our part. That is what it becomes, however, when healthy concepts are replaced by unhealthy ones in the name of mysticism. Here on the physical plane, people are supposed to make their mark through good will and work—real hard work. If they prefer to gain recognition under false pretenses rather than on the merits of their work, and demand special treatment by virtue of being the reincarnation of somebody or other, then they are using mysticism as an excuse. They want to be recognized as someone special without doing a thing. This is a very trivial and vulgarized way of looking at the matter.

If we are making every effort, as indeed we must nowadays, to foster spiritual science openly in the presence of both sexes, the old compulsory bans must be replaced by a serious and dignified attitude on the part of both men and women as they seek to acquire knowledge of the higher worlds. We must succeed in eliminating from this search all the fantasies bound up with our lower human drives. Only then will we be able to prevent the proliferation of errors originating in the illusions of individuals prone to mystical laziness. Mysticism, my friends, does not ask us to become lazier than the people out there who care nothing about it. If anything, it requires us to be more diligent than they are. And mystical morality cannot mean sinking below the moral level of other human beings; rather we must advance beyond it. If we do not make a serious effort to eradicate anything resembling “Sprengelism,” as I would like to call it, from our Society, we will make no progress.

How I will continue with this series of lectures depends on the course of your meeting today. [ Note 14 ] Let us first see how far you get in this meeting, and then I will announce when we will continue.