The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today we want to talk about the fundamental questions of the whole human being, about this question of all questions, which seeks the answer in the exploration of one's own being, the most intrinsic nature of the human being. It is intimately connected with everything that touches the human being, not only in theory, but with everything that encompasses his soul, evokes, with everything that is connected with the happiness and suffering of our existence, with everything in the world that gives strength and power of will.

If we want to find the answers to these questions, if we speak of the essence of man, then we must not only know about what is physically there in man.

In some respects, the animal is happier than man in this respect; it lives in its existence, within the forces instilled in it, and does not need to ask itself about the goal and purpose of its existence, but man must ask these questions; they are posed to him by life itself. All certainty, all hope in life must arise from how the human soul relates to this question of all questions. It contains within itself the secret of life and death. It encompasses the transitory and the eternal, the temporal and the eternal in the life of man.

If you look at the physical body – it fades away in death, it shatters into a thousand and a thousand components, which you see disappearing in the cycle of matter. The question arises quite naturally: Does the disappearance of the human being exhaust everything that he means in the world? And when we look at our cultural life, when we see how man creates and works in the world, when we see how great masters of art, such as Michelangelo and Raphael, create their masterpieces, how they transform spiritual forces into the physical, corporeal, earthly and know that these works of great genius, which people enjoy and are uplifted by, will also one day fade away and be scattered, so that no human eye will see them again and no human soul will enjoy them, then this question arises anew before our soul.

Everything that a person incorporates into the temporal, we see disappearing; what remains of the person and his creations? Does something of himself survive? Is there anything eternal in human life? The deep feeling that has always occupied people in these matters has always been satisfied in many ways. Those who were called have answered the same in the different religions of different nations when these questions about life and death arose. But in our time, we see a peculiar destiny in many people. A deep rift runs through their souls, through their whole lives.

If we look back in time, we see that in the days before the printing press, souls could more easily find a satisfactory answer from those who were called to do so. Today, however, we see that the most thoughtful and striving souls are at a loss when faced with this question. In their youth they have learned much, exercised their minds, trained their intelligence – then the questions of religion approach them. Through so-called modern science, through a thousand other channels, a wealth of knowledge has flowed to them, and it becomes difficult for the soul to hold on to what religion gives as soul food. It is those who thirst most longingly for the truth who then go astray. The information that religion gives him can no longer satisfy man. Science also gives him no world view that strengthens the heart in its endeavors.

And so we see the soul disintegrating within itself, often already in early youth, we see a deep conflict in those who strive most earnestly; and this is carried over into life. In many, a certain indifference to these questions then arises later; they try to keep them out in order not to be disturbed by them. A superficiality of life results from this, and that is perhaps even worse than in other people, in whom the longing to find answers to these questions is constantly giving rise to new doubts that can hardly be satisfied by anything. This is a deep tragedy in the inner life of man!

This is the mood of our time. Man needs something that nourishes his soul, that gives him certainty in the face of these questions. This must come for humanity. Those who know how to read the signs of the times also know that all this will become much sharper, and they also know how necessary spiritual science or the theosophical worldview is for humanity.

Some associate “Theosophy” with a strange view. It is not about something new, on the contrary: humanity has always had something similar to what Theosophy is in a certain form. In the same way that man theoretically investigates the facts of nature, Theosophy seeks to investigate the facts of eternal life.

The facts of eternal life did not arise from a child's imagination, nor from an outdated stage of human development. Rather, Theosophy contains the deepest spiritual wisdom, which, in the form of knowledge, passes on to people what religion answers these questions in the form of feelings. Therefore, we must not imagine that Theosophy is a new religion; it is not. It also does not oppose religions, but clarifies them, explaining the truths of religion themselves so that they can withstand the strictest demands of science. It is the instrument for bringing the truths of religion to the surface. It does not want to found a new religion, but to clarify the old ones. The same scientific thinking, exactly the same method as in science, prevails in theosophy.

Of course, some of what will be said today will seem grotesque and fantastic to the materialistically minded, but we must not overlook the fact that when you hear such truths in their original form, you first have to find your way into them, you can't do it in an hour, because Theosophy encompasses the most important, the most profound questions of humanity! All things have occurred in time and were first regarded as fantasies. If they were truly based on life and truth, they became self-evident over time. Similarly, the theosophical teachings, which are still being fiercely opposed, will soon be taken for granted.

We now want to answer the questions about the nature of man from a spiritual-scientific point of view. It is not so easy to talk about it, because man is a very complicated being, and only if we subject ourselves to the discomfort of looking deeply into the reasons for our existence can we find answers.

A human being first appears to the external senses of human beings. We can touch them, see them, hear them, and understand what they say; they are perceptible to the external senses. The mind can combine all of this; the anatomist can explore the inside of a human being. From all this, we can form an idea of what a human being is. Basically, there is no great difference between what can be seen and felt in a person and what an anatomist or physiologist finds when they dissect a person. We understand all of this together as what we can know about a person. Some say: There is nothing else about a person but what the senses can perceive and what science can research. Others say: There is indeed much more, but we cannot explore it, we must limit ourselves to the sensual facts. But spiritual science does not say that; for her, all this is only a part of the human being. The physical human body is for her only a part of the very complicated human being.

Many people consider it a kind of immodesty to say that there is more to know about the human being and the world. They ask: How do you know these things? You cannot know them, because there are limits to our knowledge! — I quote here a saying of a great German thinker, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who in 1811 discussed before a large audience the same thing that Theosophy will have to discuss again and again: what underlies the human being as the invisible. Fichte says: If you imagine that you are the only one who can see in a world of blind people, and you talk to them about shapes and colors, about all the marvels that the eye transmits to us, then these blind people might say that this is all imaginary stuff. But the moment you are able to give all these blind people the ability to see, they see a new world, everything that the one spoke to them about is then standing before them. The blind man then realizes that he had no right to say that there are no forms, no colors. — In the same sense, Theosophy speaks of higher worlds. These are not new worlds, they are all around us, we are in the midst of them, only man lacks the organs, the abilities to perceive them. – Theosophy says: the world that our physical senses perceive is not the only one; we can expand our perceptions, can perceive other worlds. – They do not lie in an incomprehensible beyond, not in a cloud cuckoo land, but around us. Theosophy does not speak of these worlds in a magical sense, but in the same sense as Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

It is possible to acquire the senses to perceive other worlds through theosophy. Adepts and initiates have always been able to bear witness to what they themselves have seen and experienced in these worlds. These spiritual senses lie within every human being; they can be brought out and developed through the spiritual-scientific method. If a person has enough patience and energy to submit to these methods in training, then he can see into the other worlds as the blind see colors after an operation. (Of course, this operation does not help those born blind, but everyone can attain this spiritual operation through training.)

All religions in the world have emerged from what the initiates have seen in the spiritual worlds that surround us. They have given the world reports of them, and what the seers have seen is recorded in the sacred scriptures. We are now living in a time when humanity is once again drawing a stream of spiritual life from these spiritual worlds. That is why Theosophy is making this wisdom from the supersensible worlds available in popular lectures [to a large part of the world]. This is the reason why such teachings are now being publicly communicated that otherwise only a small circle of prepared people were allowed to receive.

But for a person who sees into the spiritual worlds, the higher limbs of human nature are just as true and real as the physical body. Today I can only give you a few hints and an overview of what Theosophy has to say about these things.

The physical body is the part of human nature that shares the same substances as the entire inanimate, mineral world. All substances in the environment, all metals in the earth contain the same substances as this body. Nevertheless, it differs from the so-called inanimate beings. It has the same substances in itself, but it would disintegrate into itself if it were not for a certain complication, another principle, another link that holds it together. A rock crystal exists in itself. The physical human body cannot do that.

The second link, which it has in common with plants and animals but not with the mineral kingdom, is the etheric body. [This is not the hypothetical ether assumed by physics.] Its task is to prevent the physical body from disintegrating at every moment of life. Only death separates this etheric body from the physical body, then the same is “corpse”, it decays when it is delivered to the substances that are in it. In every moment of life, the life body fights against the decay of the physical body.

Until the nineteenth century, it was taken for granted, even by the external science, that there was something like this in living beings; it was called the life principle. It was only around the middle of the nineteenth century that people began to reject everything that could not be seen with the eyes; and one was considered a fool if one held on to it anyway. The materialistic scholars - such as [Vogt], Moleschott - created a world view that sought to explain life only in terms of a combination of atoms. Today, some are beginning to admit that there must be something beyond that.

For theosophy, this etheric or life body can be found in plants, animals and humans, and it is as real for those who can see into the spiritual worlds as the physical body; one can see it with what Goethe called the spiritual eyes.

This is the second link. We can visualize the third if we consider that the person standing before us is not made up solely of what we see of him, not of colors and forms, but that within the skin that encloses the physical there is something living that only the mindless cannot take into account. And that is something much, much more important than the physical body. Everything we cannot perceive, the drives, joy, pleasure, suffering, pain, desire, that live in a person from birth to death, all that is just as real as the color on his cheeks. All of this is not the result of processes in the tissues of the body. Theosophy says: This carrier of desires, passions, etc. in man is an entity that was there before, that is the origin of the physical body.

Let us make this clear to ourselves with water and ice. Ice is water, only in a different form. Just as surely as ice can become water again and is originally water, so spiritual science shows that all matter, all substance, is nothing other than solidified spirit. As true as ice is water, it is also true that everything that lives in man as instinct, desire, lust and pain has condensed, crystallized, as it were, into the physical body. This is a creature of the astral body, the third link in human nature. Man no longer has this in common with plants, but only with animals.

Thus we have the physical body in common with the mineral, plant and animal, the etheric body in common with plant and animal, and the astral body only with the animal. Some researchers claim, however, that some plants also show sensation because they respond to stimuli, but it is an amateurish view to say that a plant has sensation. Anyone who says that does not know what is meant by sensation. Only a being that reflects this external stimulus internally, only that is a being that can be said to have sensation, only such a being has an astral body. If one wanted to say that about plants, then one could just as easily say it about blue litmus paper, which under certain circumstances, when subjected to a certain stimulus, turns red.

We now have three parts of the human being and come to the fourth. Don't be alarmed at the number of parts! Man is simply a very complicated being. We come to this fourth part by a simple consideration. We understand it most easily if we follow this train of thought: in the entire German-speaking world there is one word that is different from all the others. Everything else around us can be called, but no one can say the little word “I” to you, you can only say it to yourself. This word must resound from the soul of each person; any other word is a you to you; only to yourself are you an I! One does not immediately realize the great significance of this fact. The I can never sound to our ear from the outside; it must sound in the soul itself; the soul must pronounce it as its innermost name. The ancient founders of religions, who built their religions on spiritual science, knew this very well. What begins to speak within man was called the spirit in man, it was called the ineffable name of God! The I, the God in man, announces itself in this word!

No one can say that Theosophy maintains that God is in man, as is often superficially asserted. Just as if you take a drop from the sea, you cannot say: “This drop is the sea,” when we know that the essence of the drop is the same as that of the ocean. In the same way, when you say ‘I’ to your soul, you do not mean the all-embracing spirit. It is not the spirit, just as the drop is not the ocean, and yet it is the same entity as the divine All-spirit. You must understand this in this sense. In this sense, the ancient Hebrews called Yahweh, Jehovah the unspeakable name of God, which means the entity, the I. Therefore, a deep, reverent shudder went through the ranks of the people when, once a year, the one who was called upon to do so, pronounced this holy name: Yahweh, that is, I am, who is, who was and who will be!

Therefore, deeper natures feel that this is a decisive event when, in the course of their lives, they come into inner contact with this eternal spirit of life, when they awaken to the realization: I am a self. Jean Paul, for example, when this became clear to him – he was only a child of seven – felt it to be a tremendous event, as if he were looking into the veiled sanctuary of his inner being. Even in his later years, he still fondly recalled the external circumstances in which this occurred.

And into this veiled sanctuary we also look when we consciously pronounce the little word “I” for the first time. It is this that makes man the crown of earthly creation: this I, glowing and flowing through the body, makes him the most sacred being on earth! This is the fourth link in his being. This is what is meant in the Pythagorean school by the holy tetrad. When this appears in a person, he has risen to a higher level of realization, which mysteriously expresses the deepest thing in human nature. But that is not all.

People do not differ from each other in terms of this tetrad, every person has it. There must be another difference between them. Let us clearly see the difference between a cannibal, an ordinary average person and a high idealist, such as Schiller, or a Francis of Assisi. We see a great difference between such people!

Darwin recounts how, on one of his journeys, he came to an area inhabited by a tribe of man-eaters. He had the interpreter make it clear to the chief how bad it was to eat a human being. The “savage” looked at the European in astonishment and replied naively that he could not possibly know whether it was good or bad before he had eaten a human himself! He was only thinking about whether something was good or bad for him, that is, whether it tasted good or bad.

But such a person also has the four limbs that I mentioned to you. How does the average European person differ from such a “savage”? He says to himself about some urges: you may follow them, but he forbids himself from following others. He has moral concepts that forbid him one thing and allow him another; he has purified and cleansed his urges and passions, and if he is a little higher, he has certain ideals that he strives for. How does he differ from the “savage”? He has worked on his astral body, the body that is the carrier of desires and passions. The savage has not yet done this; he has not yet put any work into it, he still lives in his urges and desires, and the part of his body, the ego, lives in him as it has been handed down to him by the gods. The higher a person is, the more this divine inheritance works in him and transforms the other bodies. The idealist has transformed even more in himself, he has brought even more under the rule of the ego; and the person who has his instincts and passions so well in hand that nothing happens that he does not recognize as right and good, who is never carried away by his instincts and desires, has completely purified and ennobled his astral body.

Thus we have five aspects to human nature: the four physical body, etheric body, astral body, in which the I is located, and then the part that the I has worked out for itself. This aspect we call the spirit self or manas, which is a product of transformation of the astral body. And the more a person has transformed in his astral body, the more of the spirit self or manas he has within him.

A person can now also work on his etheric body or life body. This is not only the carrier of nutrition, growth and the powers of reproduction, but also the carrier of lasting habits, character, conscience and temperament. Whether a person is good or bad in the normal sense depends on the astral body, but whether he is a melancholic or a choleric depends on the etheric body. Think about how little you knew as an eight-year-old child. You have learned a lot since then, but if you were a hot-tempered child, your temper will still flare up from time to time; if you were a melancholy child, you will still have to struggle with gloominess sometimes. Everything in the astral body changes quickly, everything anchored in the etheric body changes slowly, so that the reworking of the astral body could be compared to the minute hand of the clock, and that of the etheric body to the hour hand.

Therefore, the I also has much greater difficulties when it is to act on the etheric body. Strong impulses for its transformation are given by high, pure art, which allows one to sense and see the eternal; strong impulses are also given by the grandeur and glory of nature and of God's creations. But most powerfully, religious impulses work to transform the life body; not moral instructions with abstract concepts, but a deepening in the eternal content of being, a sinking into that which is given to us as wisdom in the great religions, triggers impulses that have a strongly ennobling effect on the human etheric body, and hence the great significance of [the same] for humanity.

This is where the training and education of the initiate begins. He has to learn and undergo different things than what is called learning in the school sense. Of course, he must also learn what lives in the astral body and can be grasped, what is called learning in the ordinary sense, but that is not the main thing. The student has done more in the direction of initiation when he fights an inclination, consciously abandons a habit. In the schools of initiation, therefore, special emphasis is placed on this; the student must undergo exercises that enable him to change his temperament, to overcome his character; and this work leads up to higher worlds. Everything that can be transformed in the etheric body so that the ego can control it is called the spirit of life or Budhi. Thus the sixth part of the human being is the transformed etheric body or life body.

If we go further, we come to the highest level, where the initiate begins to work on his physical body; this is the seventh link of the future. It may seem strange that the lowest part of man, the physical body, is worked on by the highest, but we must bear in mind that in this way man also becomes able to work out into the physical world, from which the human body itself has taken its substance. The initiate at this level can work out into the cosmos! This level is reached through a transformation of the breathing process; it is called Atma – Atma, that is, breathing, because it is connected with breathing – or spiritual man.

Thus we have the tetrad of man and the so-called higher trinity, which arises from the tetrad and is a process of transformation of the tetrad. We now want to take a look at how these elements work in man, we want to consider man in life as well as in death.

What is sleep? It brings about a change in the context of the elements of human nature just described. As long as a person is awake, from morning till evening, they are intertwined and form a living system of interacting forces. It is different when a person is asleep. Desire and suffering, joy and pain, have sunk away when man lies in a deep, dreamless sleep. That all this is not present for man is because his astral body, which is the carrier of desire and suffering, has left him during sleep. Only the physical body of man, connected with the ether body, lies in bed. The astral body is outside of man as soon as he sinks into sleep. What does this astral body do during the night? Does it rest somewhere in the insubstantial? No! Precisely when we know what the astral body does at night, then we can take a deep look into the nature of the human being.

As long as the astral body is in the physical body during the day, it perceives through the physical organs. Through the eye it receives light and colors, through the ear sounds, and so on. The astral body senses these things because the sensation is in it. But because it is inside the physical body, it also senses the disharmony of the environment; there is no harmony around it, and that wears it out continuously. This wear and tear of the astral body is expressed in the fact that the person tires. As long as the astral body is inside, it is occupied with the outside world, but as soon as it is outside, it works to repair the physical body, it is busy at night getting rid of the fatigue substances. That is its business at night. Man would die much sooner if the astral body did not do this every night and did not send its forces down into the physical body to bring it into the state in which it needs to be to continue life.

We have to imagine it like this: we are enclosed in a sea of astrality, as if in a large vessel of water. During the day, each person absorbs a drop of this, like a sponge, and releases it again at night. And so, at night, the astral body submerges into its source, and at night it is back in its home. Only a clairvoyant can tell you what it looks like. The ordinary person has no insight into it, but it is different for the clairvoyant. During his conscious sleep at night, a world of light and colors opens up for him. He consciously lives in the world of the harmony of the spheres, in which the astral body of every human being also lives unconsciously. And this world is not a fantasy. This harmony of the spheres is a reality! It is the source of all things, it is the same as what is called in the Christian religion the Kingdoms of Heaven. The initiates have always known this. — It may sound outrageous to many when I say: Goethe knew that too! When a person is transported up into heaven, he hears the harmonies of the spheres from which the whole world was created, and Goethe expresses this when he says:

The sun sounds in the ancient way
In the singing contest of the spheres,

and so on. If we look at this passage superficially, we cannot explain it. The physical sun does not sound! But the sun has its spirit, and it is this spiritual essence that sounds in the singing contest of the spheres! And this spirit is meant by Goethe, which can be perceived by those who can perceive in the spiritual worlds. And further, the end of the Faust drama, [the Ariel scene, what does it say]:

Resounding for spiritual ears
Now the new day is born;
It trumpets, it trombone,

and so on. Because the soul lives in this sounding astral sea, in this harmony of the spheres at night, Paracelsus rightly calls it the astral body, because every night it is transported to its original home, to the world of the stars.

As long as this astral body has not yet completely left the etheric and physical bodies, it is the time when dreams emerge from the unconscious nocturnal darkness. As long as the astral body has not yet completely severed its connection with the human being, the person dreams. When the astral body is completely within the person, he lives in the waking consciousness of the day.

When a person dies, other changes occur. After death, only the physical body remains of the person; the astral body has left with the etheric body. [It is only in the rarest of cases that the astral body takes the etheric body with it.] Usually, something special happens to the person after death.

The entire past life then appears before the soul of the person like a large tableau, like a panorama, but in a very peculiar way, because everything that has given the person joy or caused him suffering in his life is missing from this painting. The person looks at his life quite objectively. This is as long as the etheric body is connected to the astral body and the ego. Then the astral body separates and the second corpse of the human being remains behind, the etheric corpse. It dissolves into the general cosmic ether just as the physical corpse dissolves, only much faster. But an essence, a center of power remains behind from this life tableau, so to speak, a sum of the experiences. Just as you add a new page to a book, you add the content of your last life each time you look back at your life after death with clairvoyance. This can take hours or even days, depending on the person's individuality.

There are moments in human life that are similar to this. When a person experiences a strong fright, for example, when they suffer a fall during a mountain climb or are in danger of drowning, their whole life probably passes before them like a tableau, and even materialistically thinking people have experienced this and stated it, such as the criminal anthropologist Benedikt in Vienna. What is the cause of this experience? You all know the feeling we have when a limb has fallen asleep, this tingling sensation, children might say: It's like seltzer water in my fingers. As a clairvoyant, you can see that in such a numb limb, the etheric body has loosened so that the etheric hand hangs sideways when the hand is numb, and the same is true of the head when a person is under hypnosis. If a person is then given such a fright, the entire etheric body loosens for a brief moment. Because the etheric body is the carrier of memory and is otherwise constantly embedded in the physical body, in ordinary life it can only remember as much as the physical body allows. But in such moments, when the etheric body is free, that is, when the physical body is no longer an obstacle, then the memory comes fully to the fore.

Recently someone told me that he had been close to drowning, but did not have the memory tableau because he was unconscious. This is precisely the proof of this, because when a person is unconscious, the astral body is also out, which is the carrier of consciousness, so of course this memory cannot occur.

Now, after death, when the astral body is freed from the physical body and the etheric body, which remain as two corpses and release their substances back into the environment, a certain epoch begins: the so-called Kamaloka time. Kamaloka is not a place that is far from us. People who have died are always around us. The clairvoyant eye can always see them.

We can make this clear to ourselves by means of simple logic. What situation are we in after death? Let us think, for example, of a gourmet who, in life, had a passion, say, for beefsteaks. The physical body does not enjoy it, but the astral body, which is the carrier of desires, passions, sensations and so on, does need the physical body to obtain this pleasure; it is, so to speak, its instrument. Now, after death, he has discarded the physical body, so he no longer has an instrument, but still has exactly the same longing for the satisfaction of his desires.

It is the same situation as that of a person who, in a beautiful area, cannot find water far and wide and has to suffer from burning thirst. In the same way, the unquenched longing for physical pleasures burns in the astral body. As long as a person has not yet given up this, as long as his greed for this satisfaction exists, so long will his Kamaloka time last. Only when nothing draws him back into this world can he ascend into the actual spiritual world, the heavenly world.

One could well ask: Is the person conscious in this state of Kamaloka? Certainly, because the same forces that the person has in his astral body and that go out into cosmic space every night, live there in the harmony of infinity and thereby renew the used-up forces of the physical body again and again – it is precisely these forces that he now uses within himself in this state. So man must be conscious after death.

Now man ascends into the spiritual worlds and takes this essence, of which I have spoken to you, from his etheric body and a similar essence from his astral body with him.

The essence that he has acquired in his etheric body during his lifetime influences his emotional life in a moral sense, and what he has acquired in his astral body influences his desires and instincts. He now lives in the spiritual worlds for a certain number of years, then he descends again into the world, equipped with what he has worked for in this way, with a more or less purified etheric and astral body, and each new life he leads is, as it were, a new page in the book of his life. The more embodiments he has experienced and the better he has used them to refine himself and strive higher, the richer the new life is, and so the human being rises from life to life, and it perfects itself more and more. He is not separated in one life, nothing is a mere game of chance, but his lives are connected. Just as in daily life the work of one day prepares and influences that of the next, so our past is connected with the future, and so we create our own future through our behavior in the present. This is a law that runs through all nature, through the inanimate as well as the animate.

And this connection between events that happen later and those that happen earlier is called [“krama” — not “karma”]. A certain [krama] emerges from every course of life for every person. There is something deeply reconciling about this when viewed in the right way; because when we often see a hardworking, good person condemned to poverty and misery in life, and another, seemingly without any merit, living in happiness and joy, then we may well ask in vain how this can be, which seems so unjust! But if we know the law of [Krma], if we know that everyone prepares their own destiny, that [Krma] is a law of life, if we know that everything I do bears its fruit, if I do something foolish, evil, then the fruits will be the same, if I do good, then happiness and joy will be the result - then this law will be something deeply reconciling for everyone, and when it not only theoretically but truly illuminates a person's life, then it will unfold new powers in him, it will give him confidence, orientation and security in life.

Even with the redemption of Christ, the law can be perfectly reconciled as soon as it is properly understood. The theologians say: We speak of the redemption through Christ Jesus, but you speak of the fact that one must redeem oneself. You do not believe in the idea of redemption! — That is not true. Just as a merchant can draw up his balance sheet at any moment and still be able to enter new items every moment, so too can we enter new items in our book of life every moment. [Krma] is completely compatible with the freedom of will; we can enter bad or good items. Now, if we are strong enough, we can help a fellow human being. If we are even more powerful, we can help two, and so on. But an all-powerful being, such as Christ Jesus, who appeared in humanity, can help countless people through a single act that transcends time. Properly understood, the law of karma is completely in line with the Christian idea of salvation; it is also compatible with the whole of Christian teaching.

When the teaching about the nature and essence of man gradually penetrates humanity, when it is imbued and spiritualized by it, then new life and new development will flow through it. For humanity needs these teachings now. The souls of men would dry up under the conditions that were indicated at the beginning. Theosophy had to come, it was a necessity for the life of humanity. Even if it is still treated with hostility, what harm is done? Everything that is new and incomprehensible is treated with hostility at first and only later becomes taken for granted. Think of the postage stamp – no postal administrator came up with this simple idea, and when it first came up it was called 'brain-damaged'. That was only 70 years ago! And it was the same with the first railways. It was said that anyone who traveled on them would inevitably suffer severe nervous shocks.

Theosophy points to things, and it is important that they prove themselves in life when applied; and if Theosophy has proven its truth, then it will naturally find its way through the souls of men. [For it is the spiritual remedy for humanity!] Not through words, not through discussions – the recovery of spiritual life can only be found through action. And this proof is awaited by those who know what Theosophy should mean for humanity in the times to come. Knowledge that is put into practice is what we need. This knowledge cannot be found by the weak powers of our intellect alone, but must flow in from higher worlds in order to revitalize our culture, to give us strength and security in life, and to make us strong, creative human beings.