The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From time immemorial, people have felt the affinity between artistic imagination and supersensible knowledge, with what can be called seeing consciousness, or, if one is not misunderstood, which would be easy, seership. For the spiritual researcher of the present day, who, starting from the point of view of the present, attempts to penetrate into the spiritual world, this relationship between artistic creation and supersensible knowledge is much more significant than the other, often emphasized relationship between the visionary life, which is fundamentally based on pathological conditions, and that which is really only in the soul, without the help of the body, is vision.

Now we know that poets, artists in general, sometimes feel a very close relationship between the whole nature of their work, between their experience and vision. In particular, artists who seek their way into the supersensible regions through creative work, fairy-tale writers or other artists who seek to embody the supersensible, rightly tell of a truly living experience, of how they have their figures visibly before them, how they stand before them in action, making an objective, concrete impression when they deal with them. As long as such a confrontation with that which is poured into artistic creation does not take away the composure of the soul, as long as it does not turn into compulsive visions over which human will has no power and composure cannot dispose, one can still speak of a kind of borderline event between artistic vision and seership. In the field of spiritual scientific research alone, a very definite boundary can be seen – and that is the important thing – between artistic creation with its source, artistic imagination, on the one hand, and seeing with the eyes closed on the other. Those who are unable to recognize this clear boundary and make it fruitful for their own work will easily end up where many of my artist colleagues have been who were actually afraid of being limited in their work by allowing something of the visionary to enter their consciousness. There are people who are true artistic natures, but who consider it necessary for artistic creation to have impulses well up from the subconscious or unconscious of the soul, but who, like a fire, shy away from the fact that something of a supersensible reality, which confronts clear consciousness, may shine into their unconscious creativity.

In relation to their experience in artistic enjoyment, reception and comprehension, and in relation to the experience of the supersensible worlds through supersensible vision, there is now subjectively an enormous difference in this experience. In the soul in which it finds expression, artistic activity, reception and vision, leaves intact the directing of the personality through the senses to the external world with the help of outer perception and with the help of imagination, which then becomes memory. One need only recall the peculiar nature of all artistic creation and enjoyment, and one will say to oneself: Certainly, in artistic reception and also in artistic creation, there is perception and conception of the external world. It is not present in such a crude way as it is usually present in sensory revelations; there is something spiritual in the way of perceiving and creating, which freely intervenes and rules over perception and imagination and over what lives in the artist as memory and the content of memory. But one could not dispute the justification of naturalism and individualism if one did not know about the connection with perception. Likewise, one can be convinced that in the soul, hidden memories, subconscious things, what is in man as memory, participates in artistic creation and enjoyment. All this is absent in what, in the sense of modern spiritual research, is the content of truly supersensible knowledge. Here we are dealing with a complete detachment of the soul from sensory perception, and also from ordinary thinking and from that which, as memory, is connected with thinking. Yes, that is precisely the great difficulty in convincing contemporaries that there can be something like an inner experience that excludes perception and ordinary thinking and remembering. The natural scientist, in particular, will not admit that this could be the case. He will always claim: “You say that nothing flows into your seeing. I see that you are mistaken: you do not know how hidden content rests in memory and comes up in a sophisticated way. That is because those who object to it do not occupy themselves with the methods by which one attains the ability to see and which show that the impression of the spiritual world can be directly present where nothing is incorporated from reminiscences, from mysterious memories. The training consists precisely in finding the way to free the soul from outer impressions and ideas based on memories. This establishes a firm boundary between artistic creation and the production of supersensible knowledge, since the soul, the human ego in which supersensible knowledge lives, does not actually draw on the organization of the body, which does play a part when it comes to artistic creation.

But because of this state of affairs, the question arises all the more: What is the relationship between the impulses that arise from the subconscious depths of the soul and are woven into artistic creation and enjoyment, and what is born out of the pure spiritual world in the form of direct impressions from supersensible knowledge? — To answer this question, I would like to start from some experiences with art for the seer himself. These experiences with the arts in general are characteristic right from the start. It then becomes evident that anyone who has learned to live in the supersensible life, to gather supersensible knowledge, really is able to exclude for certain periods of time all sense impressions and the memories that follow on from them. These can be excluded, cast out of the soul. When someone who is immersed in supersensible vision also tries to clearly perceive all this when confronted with a work of art, what he is accustomed to perceiving when confronted with an external sensory phenomenon, a completely different experience arises. When confronted with a sensory phenomenon, the seer is always able to exclude sensory perceptions and memories, but not when confronted with a work of art. Even though everything that can be perceived or imagined is of course excluded, the seer is always left with important inner content that he can neither exclude nor wants to exclude. The work of art gives something that turns out to be related to his seership. This raises the question: what is the source of this relationship?

One comes to this realization when one seeks to grasp what is active in man when he sees purely spiritually in supersensible knowledge. Then one comes to realize what inadequate ideas we have about ourselves and our relationship to the external world when we remain in ordinary consciousness. We believe that our thinking, feeling and willing are strictly separated from one another. Psychology does trace these activities back to one another, but not with the right skill. But the one who experiences the actual complexity of the soul life as it presents itself in seership knows that such a distinction between imagining, feeling and willing does not even exist, but in ordinary consciousness and life there is in every imagining a remnant of feeling and willing, in every feeling a remnant of imagining and willing, and in every willing there is also an imagining, even a perceiving in it; there remains in the willing a remnant of perception, which is hidden in it, subconscious. This must be borne in mind if one wishes to understand the process of seeing. For from what has been said, you will gather that in the act of seeing, the faculty of imagining and perceiving is silent, but the faculties of feeling and willing are not. However, it would not be a true vision if the person only developed feeling and willing, as in ordinary consciousness. On the contrary, when man passes over into the seer state, all volition as it is in ordinary life must be silenced. Man enters into the state of complete rest.

What is meant here by the term 'vision' does not imply the fidgety act of placing oneself in the spiritual world, as in dervishry, but the complete silencing of all that expresses itself as volition in ordinary life, as the power of emotional feeling. In that which a person allows to pass from volition into action, something of the emotional feeling still lives on. This feeling, also in relation to the revelation in the will, must remain silent. But the emotional feeling as such does not remain silent, and above all, the impulse of the will does not remain silent. Perception and imagination remain silent, but the impulses of emotional feeling and will are justified, only entering into a state of calm soul condition, and therefore developing their perceiving and imagining character differently than usual. If one were to dwell only in feeling, or in a false mystical inner living out of the will, then one would not enter into the spiritual world. But in the calm state of soul, what are otherwise emotional feelings and impulses of the will are lived out in a spiritual way. Feeling and volition are so lived out that they appear before the human soul as objective spiritual beings endowed with powerful thoughts, while the rest of perception and imagination, which otherwise remained unnoticed in feeling and volition, comes to revelation and becomes capable of placing itself in the spiritual world. Once one has realized this, that as a seer in feeling and willing one lives as otherwise one lives in thinking and perceiving — not in unclear thinking and feeling, not in nebulous mysticism, but as clearly as otherwise in thinking and perceiving — one can enter into a fruitful dialogue with art, although only by realizing how worthless such generalizations are, as they are expressed, for example, by the word art.

Art encompasses very different areas: architecture, sculpture, music, poetry, painting and more. One could say that if one wanted to establish the relationships between the different arts with the experience of the seer, then the diversity of the arts becomes much more meaningful to one than what philosophy would like to summarize under the name of art. By achieving the possibility of experiencing the world's thought content and spirit content with the help of thinking, emotional feeling and willing, one arrives at being able to establish a remarkable relationship with architecture.

I said that in this vision, ordinary perception and thinking cease, but a kind of completely different thinking arises that flows from feeling and willing, a thinking that is actually thinking in forms, that could directly, by thinking, represent forms of the distribution of power in space, proportions in space. This thinking feels akin to what is expressed in architecture and sculpture when they represent true artistic creations. One feels particularly at home with the thinking and perceiving in architecture and sculpture because the shadowy abstract thinking that the present so loves ceases, falls silent, and a representational thinking sets in that can but allow its content to pass over into spatial forms, into moving spatial forms, into stretching, over-arching, bending forms, in which the will flowing in the world is expressed. The seer is compelled not to grasp with the intellect what he wants to cognize from the spiritual world, as is done in the rest of science. One would recognize nothing spiritual there. One is mistaken if one believes that one recognizes in the spiritual, because one cannot penetrate into the spiritual world with ordinary thoughts. He who wants to penetrate into the spiritual world must have something as a thinker, which creates plastic or architectural, but living forms in himself. Through this one comes to the conclusion that the artist enters into an experience of forms in the subconscious. They strive upwards, fill his soul, are transformed into ordinary ideas, which can be partly calculated; they are transformed into that what is then artistically formed. The architect and the sculptor are intermediaries for what the seer experiences as perception and imagination in the spiritual world. What the seer grasps as form for his life of thinking and perceiving creeps into the architect's organization. Down in the depths of the soul, it rises in waves and becomes conscious. This is how the architect and sculptor create their forms. The only difference is that what underlies the architectonic and sculptural work as the essential form-giving element arises from subconscious impulses, and that the seer discovers these impulses as what he needs to grasp the great interrelations of the spiritual world. Just as one otherwise has imagination and perception, so the seer has to develop gifts that point to what permeates and trembles through the great structure of the world. And what he, as a seer, sees through and lives through, that lives in an unconscious way in the architect and sculptor, permeating his work as he creates it.

In a different way, those who have had supernatural experiences and are seeking a connection to poetic and musical creativity can identify with his experiences. The seer gradually comes to feel his inner self quite differently than the ordinary consciousness, which presents and perceives the sensual world around us: He feels within himself in his feeling and willing.

Those who can practise self-observation know that one is only in one's self in feeling and willing. But the seer raises feeling and willing out of himself, and in that feeling and willing provide him with perceptions and perceptions, he comes away from himself in his feeling and willing. But something else occurs. He finds himself again. With the clear consciousness of having stepped out of his body, of perceiving nothing with the help of his body, he finds himself again in the outer world, intuitively passing into what he has perceived in moving forms and shaping into images. He carries his self into the outer world. By doing so, he learns, as it were, to say to himself: Through truly inner experience from experience, I can recognize that I have stepped out of my body, which has always been the mediator of my relationship to the outer world, but I have found myself again by immersing myself in the spiritual world. By becoming an inner experience, the seer finds that he is compelled to receive his will and feeling from the spiritual world again, to receive himself again out of the supersensible world. He must do this by once more receiving a feeling and a will — but a transformed feeling and will that does not take the body for help — a feeling that is intimately related to the experience of music, so related in fact that one could say: It is even more musical than the comprehension of music itself. It is such a feeling that it is as if one's soul were pouring out into sounds, becoming a melody, a vibration, in the presence of a symphony or another work of music.

With poetry, it is the case that one is in one's volition. That is what the poetry wants, which one learns to perceive as true poetry precisely in this way, by finding one's volition there. Feeling in music, volition in true poetry.

In a peculiar situation, in a particularly significant situation, is the relationship between seers and painters. The matter is such that neither the one nor the other occurs, but something else, something even more characteristic. In the presence of real painting the seer has the feeling — and he could be a painter himself, for we shall hear that artistic creation and supersensible insight can exist side by side — the painter comes to meet him from some indefinite region of the world, brings a world of line and color and he approaches the painter from the opposite direction and is obliged to transpose what the painter brings with him, what he has transferred from the external world into his art, as imaginations into what he experiences in the spiritual world. The colors the seer experiences are different from those of the painter, and yet they are the same. They do not interfere with each other. If you want to get an idea of this, take a look at the sensual-moral part of Goethe's theory of colors about the moral effect of colors. It contains the most elementary description, It describes with inner instinct what emotional effects are awakened in the soul by individual colors. It is through this feeling that the seer comes out of the spiritual world, through this feeling that one really experiences every day in the higher world.

One should not think that the seer speaks in the same way as a painter speaks of colors when describing the colored aura. He experiences the feeling that one otherwise experiences with yellow and red, but it is a spiritual experience and should not be confused with physical visions. The worst misunderstanding arises on this point. For the seer, the experience is similar to painting in that one can speak of an encounter with something similar that comes from the opposite direction, where understanding is possible because the same thing comes in from the outside that is created from within. I always assume that it is a matter of artistic creation, with which communication is possible if, before that, not naturalism but art is there. The seer is compelled to imagine what he experiences, to illustrate it, roughly speaking. This happens when he expresses in colors and forms what he experiences: there he encounters the painter. And again, if you were to ask the painter, how do we relate to one another? the painter would have to answer: Something lives in me! As I went through the world with my ordinary eye and saw color and form, and artistically transformed them, I experienced something within me that had previously surged in the depths of my soul; it has come to consciousness and become art. The seer would say to the painter: What lives in the depths of your soul lives in things. By going through the things, you live with the soul in the spirit of things. But in order to retain the strength for painting and to consciously experience what you experienced by going through the things outside, so that what comes to the senses is not extinguished in you, you have to keep the impulses that create painting alive in the subconscious. The point is that the unconscious impulses now rise to consciousness. The seer says: “I walked through the same world, but paid attention to what lives in you. I looked at what arose in your subconscious and brought what was unconscious to your consciousness.

It is precisely with such an understanding that something will confront the human soul as a great and significant problem that may not otherwise always be properly observed. When one becomes familiar with what has just been characterized through inner experience, something comes up that touches life deeply. This is the mystery of the incarnate, this wonderful human flesh color, which is actually a great clairvoyant problem. It reminds one so much that such clairvoyance, as I mean it, is actually not so completely alien and unknown to ordinary life; it is just not heeded. I would like to express the paradoxical but true sentence: every person is clairvoyant, but this is also denied in theory where it cannot be denied in practice. If it were denied in practice, it would destroy all life.

There are oddballs today who think: How come I have to deal with a complete stranger's ego? They want to remain completely within the realm of the naturalistic; they want to remain true naturalists, so they say to themselves: I have memorized the facial oval and other things, and because I have learned from various experiences that a person is hidden in such shapes, I conclude that there will be a human ego behind this nose shape. One finds such arguments today among “clever people”. But that does not correspond to the experience one comes to when one observes life from one's own participation in life. I do not conclude that there is an ego from the shape of the face and so on. I have the consciousness of an ego because the perception of what confronts one as a physical human being is based on something other than the perception of crystals or plants. It is not true that inanimate natural bodies make the same impression as a human being. It is different with animals. What stands before you as a sensual human object cancels itself out, makes itself ideationally transparent, and through real clairvoyance one sees its ego directly every time one stands before a human being. That is the real fact. This clairvoyance consists in nothing more than extending this way of facing the human being with one's own subject to the world, in order to see if there is anything else to see through in the way of the human being.

You cannot get real impressions from clairvoyance without considering what the other person's perception is based on, which is so different because it is based on clairvoyance of the other soul. In this clairvoyance, the complexion plays a special role. For the external observer, it is a finished product, but for the one who sees supernaturally, the experience of looking at the incarnate changes. For him, there is an intermediate state. It comes about by turning one's clairvoyance, which extends to the other areas of the world, to the human form in such a way that the incarnate, which is so calm, oscillates between opposites and the intermediate state. One perceives paleness and a blush that is as if it radiated warmth. In this, that one sees people blushing and turning pale, the middle state is within. Associated with this experience of being in motion is the fact that one knows one is also immersed in the outer being of the person, not only in his soul, in his ego. One plunges into what the person is through his soul in his body, through the incarnate. This is something that leads one to the relationship between artistic perception and supersensible knowledge. For that which becomes so mobile in the perception of the incarnate lies unconsciously in the artistic creation of the incarnate. The artist needs only to be subtly aware of this. Only by being able to experience this will an artist be able to place the fine, living vibration in the center of the incarnate parts.

In this way, painting shows how the sources of artistic imagination and supersensible knowledge collide. In ordinary life, they collide when one does not even notice it, in the realm of language. Nowadays, language is usually viewed in a very intellectual way, even scientifically; but the life of language is present in us in a threefold way. Anyone who approaches language with a seer's eye and has to express what they perceive in the spiritual world must first acquire a feeling for language that could be described as a sense of loss. When people talk to each other, and also when they engage in ordinary science, everything they say is a debasement of language below the level at which language should be. Language as a mere means of communication is debasement. One senses that language actually comes to life in its own essence where poetry flows through it, where what emerges from the human soul flows through language. This is where the spirit of language itself is at work. The poet actually discovers the level of language for the first time, perceiving ordinary language as a neglect of the higher level of language. It is easy to understand how a subtle poet like Morgenstern could come to the conclusion that there is actually a perceptible lower limit to speaking, which is very common, the limit that can be called chattering. He finds that chatter has its basis in ignorance of the meaning and value of the individual word, that the chatterer comes to distort the word from its fixed contours and make it unclear. Morgenstern senses that this is a deep secret of life that is being expressed. He says that language takes revenge on the unclear, on the vague. That is understandable, since he was able to bridge the gap between poetry and seeing, just as he finds their affinity with sound, image, architecture, and so on.

This same affinity underlay the entire work of Goethe, who at one time in his life did not know whether he should become a poet or a sculptor. But the seer experiences what is the content of the spiritual experience for him outside of language. This is something that is difficult to explain because most people think in words, but the seer thinks without words and is then compelled to pour what is wordless in the experience into the already firmly formed language. He has to adapt to the formal relationships of language. He need not feel this as a constraint, for he will discover the secret of creating language. He can make himself understood by stripping away the conceptual aspect of language. It is therefore so important to understand that it is more important how the seer says it than what he says. What he says is conditioned by the ideas that each of us brings in from the outside. He is obliged, in order not to be regarded as a fool, to clothe what he has to say in viable sentences and chains of thought. For the highest realms of the spirit, it is important how the seer says something. The one who came up with the how of expression, who came up with the fact that the seer has to be careful, to say some things briefly, others more broadly, and others not at all, that he is obliged to formulate the sentence from one side in one way, then to add another from the other side. It is the way it is formulated that is important for the higher parts of the spiritual world. Therefore, in order to understand, it is important to listen less to the content, which is of course also important as a revelation of the spiritual world, and more to penetrate through the content to the way in which the content is expressed, in order to see whether the speaker is merely linking sentences and theories, or whether he is speaking from experience. Speaking from the spiritual world becomes visible in the way something is said, not so much in the content, if it is theoretical, but in the way it is expressed. In such communications from the forms of language, the artistic element of language can have an effect on what inspires the seer to rise to the level of the process of language creation, so that he recreates something of what was present when language emerged from the human organism.

What is the reason that what arises in the visionary consciousness is brought into the spirit world through artistic creation, but lives in the artistic imagination in an unconscious and subconscious way? — Artistic creation is, of course, conscious, but the impulses, the driving force, must remain in the unconscious so that artistic creation is uninhibited. Only he can understand what is at stake here who knows that the ordinary consciousness of man is, for certain reasons, destined for something other than for entering into the full world.

On the one hand, our ordinary consciousness proceeds from the observation of nature. But what it delivers to us does not arise from our concepts; they do not penetrate into the realm where, in space, matter haunts, as Dz Bois-Reymond says. And again: what lives in the soul cannot be fulfilled with reality. No matter how deeply mystical the experience, it always hovers over reality. Man comes to the full world neither by seeing nature nor by seeing into the soul. There is an abyss there that usually cannot be bridged. It is consciously bridged in the seeing consciousness, in artistic creation. There, self-knowledge must become something other than what is usually called that. Mystical insight finds that it has achieved enough when it is said: “I have experienced the God, my higher self, within.” Real self-knowledge aims to see how what one otherwise experiences in the mere point of the ego lives creatively in the organism. We are not merely conceiving and perceiving beings in that we have perception and perception; we also continually breathe out and in. While we are facing the world in waking consciousness, we are always breathing out and in, but ordinary consciousness is unaware of what is going on within us. Something wonderful is happening that can only be recognized by the seeing consciousness, when one looks not only at nebulousness, at the abstract I, but at how this I lives, forming in the concrete. The following then takes place.

When breathing out, the cerebral fluid passes into the medullar canal, into a long sack which has many stretchy, tearable points; it pushes downwards, pushing against the veins of the body. What is going on here I describe as an external process. Ordinary consciousness cannot penetrate it, but the soul experiences it subconsciously, this spreading out of what comes from the brain into the veins of the body, and when breathing in, the backflow of the venous blood into the veins of the back through the spinal canal, the penetration of the cerebral fluid into the brain, and what happens there as a play between nerves and sensory organs. Ordinary consciousness is shadowy here, knows nothing about it, but soul and spirit are involved. This process appears chaotic. What pulsates back and forth takes place in musical form in every human being. There is inner music in this process. And the creative element in music is to be raised up into the outer conscious form of the music by what the musician has become accustomed to experiencing as the music of his soul body. In it lives the tone, the subconscious life-giving power of the music in which the human soul weaves. Our psychology is still quite elementary; the things that shed light on the artist's life have yet to be explored in harmony with the faculty of vision. The human experience is a complex one. It is this subconscious knowledge of the soul that is the actual impulse of artistic imagination, in that the musical life plays out between the spinal cord and the brain, where the blood and cerebrospinal fluid rush in, so that the nerve is set into vibration, which rises up towards the brain. If this is brought into connection with the possibility of higher perception, then there is more inner music in it that is enjoyed than in the objective impulse from which the human soul is born, in that the human being enters into physical existence through birth or conception from the spiritual life. The soul enters into existence by learning to play on the instrument of the physical body.

And what happens when all this movement takes place, this vibration of the brain water that comes up? What takes place there in the interaction between nerves and senses? — When the nerve wave strikes the outer senses — not yet the sensory perception, mind you — when the nerve wave simply strikes in the waking state, there lives unconsciously and is drowned out by perception: poetry! Between the senses and the nervous system is a region where man unconsciously creates poetry. The nerve wave rolls into his senses - unconsciously it runs, one can determine this physiologically - this life runs in the senses and is poetry-producing: man lives creating poetry within himself. And the poetic creation is the bringing up of this unconscious life.

I have described this in the breathing process. During exhalation, we must bear in mind that the cerebral fluid in the body presses downwards in the forces that come from the body to meet it, and in the forces through which the human being places himself in the external world. We are constantly standing in a certain static position in the outer world, whether we are standing with legs apart, with arms bent, or whether we are crawling as a child, or whether we transform this static position of crawling into the static position of standing upright: we are in a state of inner equilibrium. The inner forces with which the waves that are exhaled meet us are based on what is formed in sculpture and architecture. The emotional feeling that lives in a person when they move but keep that movement still is expressed in the sculpture. This is an inner experience that is connected to the forms of the body. One recognizes this only when one is accustomed to developing perception and thinking into calm formal ideas. One learns that from the body do not come chaotic forces, but forms that show that the human being is integrated into the cosmos. By looking at more external forces, which the soul experiences subconsciously, one has more to do with plastic imagination. Between the two lies a strange unconscious realm that the soul has down in its depths. As the nerve impulse vibrates between body and brain, it is in contact with the warm blood, which is actually the cold, intellectual part of the human body. In such warmth and spirituality lie unconsciously the sources of artistic creation, which impulsates the painter as he brings his impressions, raised from the subconscious, onto the wall in colors. Man stands unconscious in the spiritual world, which is only opened up through seership.

It was not for nothing that in ancient times the body was seen as a temple for the soul. There was an indication of how architecture is related to the balance of the whole body and the whole cosmos.

Art should express what the artist is only able to put into his work because his soul experiences it in connection with the world, because his body is a microcosmic image of the whole macrocosm. If this is to be brought to consciousness, it can only be done through the gift of second sight. Why does the ordinary aesthetic, built on the model of natural science, prove so barren? The artist cannot do anything with this school aesthetic, which wants to bring the unconscious in human nature to consciousness in the same way as ordinary natural science. What lives in artistic creation brings the vision to consciousness, only the artist must not be afraid of the vision, as so many are. The two areas can live separately side by side in the human personality because they can be so distinct. It is possible for the soul to live outside the body in the spiritual world: then it can observe how that which otherwise remains in the subconscious is crystallized into artistic creation, but also how that which can be artistically experienced by the seer, separate from his seership. Only artistic fertilization can come from this experience and can only benefit the artist, just as artists can also fertilize the seer's vision. The seer who has artistic sense or taste will be saved from allowing spiritual science to be shot through with too much of the philistine. He will describe this spiritual world flexibly, will be able to shape the how of spiritual science, of which I spoke, more appropriately than someone who, without artistic sense, has appropriated entry into the spiritual world. There is no need, as there is for many artists, to develop a fear of seeing. I am speaking of the serious fear, not just the fear of being said to be an anthroposophist. I am speaking of the very common fear in principle that seeing would impair the immediacy of artistic creation. In reality, this impairment does not exist. But we live in an age in which, through the historical necessity of human development, the soul is pushed to transform into consciousness what was naively present in the subconscious. Only those who increasingly transform the unconscious into the free grasp of the conscious understand the times in which we live.

If this demand of the time is not met, humanity will enter a cultural cul-de-sac. Art cannot be recognized by ordinary science, which is why aesthetics is rejected by artists. But a science that seeks to understand is developing a seership that does not take the dew from the flowers of art. The seer is agile enough to grasp art. Therefore, anyone can grasp it as a fact of today's world that a bridge must be built between artistry and seership; they can emphasize this as a necessity, as Christian Morgenstern beautifully emphasized it in words that point to the need for a turnaround. He says: “He who only wants to immerse himself in what can be experienced today from the Divine-Spiritual through feeling, not penetrating through knowledge, is like the illiterate person who sleeps all his life with the primer under his pillow.”

Often one wants to sleep with the primer of world knowledge under one's pillow all one's life, so as not to have one's original elementary creativity weakened by visionary science. Whoever grasps the science of prophecy as it can be understood today, in keeping with the times, will understand that, in the spirit of Morgenstern, one must emerge from illiteracy and build bridges between artistry and seership, and that through this new light will fall on art and new warmth will come through art to seership. So that as the fruit of the right efforts in a healing future, a deeply meaningful impulse can work through visionary light and artistic warmth into the development of humanity in the future.

From time immemorial, people have sensed that there is a certain affinity or at least a relationship between the impulses of artistic imagination, artistic creation and enjoyment, and supersensible knowledge. Whoever encounters artistic individuals will realize that there is a widespread fear among creative artists that artistic work could be disturbed by approaching the conscious experience of the supersensible world, from which artistic imagination receives its impulses, as it is striven for in spiritual-scientific supersensible knowledge. On the other hand, it is well known that certain artistic natures, who approach their artistic production with what appears to shine from the supersensible world, experience something like vision within the activity of their creative imagination. Fairytale writers or other artistic individuals who want to deal more with the phenomena from the supersensible world shining into the world of the senses know how the figures appear before their eyes, but are entirely spiritual, so that they have the feeling that they are in contact with these artistic figures, or that these figures are in contact with each other. Insofar as full consciousness is present, through which one can always tear oneself away from what overcomes one in a visionary way, spiritual science can also speak of vision in such a case. It must be said that there are points of contact between artistic creation, artistic imagination and the seeing consciousness that is able to place itself in the spiritual world in a cognizant way. Nevertheless, especially in the face of a spiritual-scientific view such as the one meant here, one feels the need to emphasize that the artist should not allow his originality to be robbed by what is consciously taken in from the spiritual world. In such a view, one overlooks the essential relationship between artistic imagination and the visionary perception of the spiritual world. For what is meant here by this visionary perception is the kind that develops quite independently through mere soul activity, independently of the physical bodily tool. To what extent it is possible for the soul to place itself in the spiritual world free of the body, I cannot explain today. I would just like to say in advance that what arises in terms of kinship and relationships between genuine artistic creation and enjoyment and true, genuine seership is of more interest to anthroposophical spiritual researchers today than the relationship between seership and visionary states, or abnormal states, which, even if attempts are made to describe them as clairvoyance, are nevertheless only related to physical conditions and do not represent solely mental experiences. But to understand this real relationship between artistic imagination and visionary power, it is necessary to look at what, in the strictest sense of the word, separates the two, and that is a very significant one.

Those who create with artistic imagination will not, as is the case with ordinary sensory perception and reflection on what is perceived, comprehend the external sensory world and reproduce it within themselves: they will change it, idealize it, or whatever else one wants to call it. It does not depend on the direction. Whether one conceives realistically or idealistically, whether one is an impressionist or an expressionist, it does not matter, but in everything artistic there is a transformation of what is otherwise recreated by the human being from reality. But what remains alive in artistic creation is what can be called the perception of the external world. The artist adheres to the perception of the external world. What remains in this artistic creation is the image of the ideas that are based on external perception, and what is connected with it in the ability to remember, in the memory. In the artist, everything he has taken in during his life continues to have an effect in the subconscious, and the better that which settled in the soul as an experience continues to have an effect in the soul, the richer the artistic production will be as the personality is directed towards external sensory impressions, the ability to imagine and remember will live in artistic fantasy. This is not the case with the soul life in the vision-gifted personality that penetrates into the spiritual world through supersensible intuition. The essential point is that one can only penetrate into the spiritual world if one can silence both outer sense perception and the faculty of imagination, which runs into memory. Memory, the faculty of perceiving external sense impressions, must be completely silent during supersensible cognition. It is difficult enough to make our contemporaries understand that it is possible for the human soul to achieve such a degree of arousal of its dormant powers, that soul life can still be present in full vividness when the faculty of imagination and perception are suppressed. Therefore, the endeavor for supersensible knowledge, if it is methodically developed, must not be objected that one is dealing with the arbitrary vision only with something reminiscent of the memory, which surges up from the subconscious. The essential thing is that he who, as a spiritual researcher, wants to penetrate into the supersensible world, should learn the method that makes it possible to shut out the memory faculty so completely that his soul lives only in present impressions, into which nothing is mixed from reminiscences arising from the subconscious, so that the soul, with what it presents and experiences, stands in a world that it consciously attempts to penetrate, so that nothing remains unconscious.

When we consider that much mystical, so-called theosophical striving has a yearning for everything that is vague and nebulous, we can understand how what is meant here by seership can be confused with it, even by those who believe they are followers. But that is not the point, but rather what is meant by this seership.

Here we can see how fundamentally different this kind of vision is from artistic creation. Both are based on different states and moods of the soul; but the one who strives for supersensible knowledge in the sense meant here will have special experiences with art.

First of all, a cardinal experience. One cannot be a spiritual researcher from morning till night. Gazing into the spiritual world is tied to a specific time; one knows the beginning and end of the state in which the soul penetrates into the spiritual world. In this state, the soul is able, through its own power, to completely disregard the impressions of the outer senses, so that nothing remains of all the things that the outer senses see as colors and hear as sounds. It is precisely through this gazing into the nothingness that perception of the spiritual world arises. I would like to say: The seer can extinguish everything that comes to him from the outside world, everything that surges up from ordinary memory into mental consciousness, but he cannot extinguish certain impressions that come to him from works of art that really come from the creative imagination, even if he puts himself into this state. I do not mean to say that the seer in such states has the same impressions of the works of art as the non-seer. He has them in non-seer moments. But in seer moments he has the possibility of completely erasing the sensual and the reminiscent with regard to the outside world, but not with regard to a work of art that he encounters.

These are experiences that specify themselves. It turns out that the seer has certain experiences with the individual arts. It is precisely in the details of the effect that words such as “art” lose their usual meaning. From the point of view of supersensible knowledge, the individual arts become realms in themselves. Architecture becomes something different from music, painting and so on. But to get an overview of what seer-like experience is in relation to art, it is necessary to point out that the question suggests itself: if the seer must suppress the effects of the external world and that which belongs to the memory, what remains for him?

Of the three soul activities mentioned in the science of the soul, only two are ever active in the human soul. Imagination and perception are not present, but feeling and willing are, although in a completely different way than in ordinary life. One should not confuse supersensible knowledge with the nebulous, emotional melting into the spiritual world, which must be called mysticism. It must be clearly understood that supersensible knowledge, although it springs from feeling and willing, is something other than feeling and willing. It must be borne in mind that, for seer-knowledge, feeling and willing must fill the soul so completely that the soul is at rest, and that all the other faculties of the human being are also in complete rest. This must occur in a way that is not otherwise possible for the human being through feeling and willing: Feeling and willing must develop entirely inwardly. In the case of seeing, volitional impulses usually develop in revelations to the outside. Dervish-like states and the like are opposed to the knowledge of the spiritual world.

As feeling and willing develop inwardly, a soul activity full of light and sharply contoured springs up from them. A soul activity sprouts up, the formations of thought are similar. The ordinary thought image is something faded. Something objective, but no less imbued with reality than ordinary thinking, sprouts for the seer out of feeling and willing.

The experiences with art in particular can be used to characterize what the seer experiences in detail in his soul abilities. By trying to put himself in the place of the architect in his architectural forms and proportions, in what the architect encloses in his buildings, he feels a kinship with these architectural proportions and harmonies, with that which develops in him, in the seer, as a completely different thinking than the shadowy thinking of ordinary life. One would like to say: the clairvoyant develops a new thinking that is related to nothing so much as to the forms in which the architect thinks and which he fashions. The thinking that rules in ordinary life has nothing to do with true seership. The thinking that rules in seership includes space in its creative experience. The seer knows that with these forms, which are living thought forms, he enters into the supersensible reality behind the sense world, but that he must develop this thinking that lives out in spatial forms. The seer perceives: In all that lives in the harmony of measure and form, will and emotional feeling are active. He learns to recognize the forces of the world in such measure and number relationships through the designs that live in his thinking. Therefore, he feels related in his thinking to what the architect designs. In a certain sense, a new emotional life awakens in him — not that of ordinary consciousness — and he feels akin to what the architect and sculptor create in forms. For supersensible knowledge, a representational intellectuality is born that thinks in spatial forms that curve and shape themselves through their own life. These are thought-forms through which the soul of the seer plunges into spiritual reality; one feels akin to what lives in the forms of the sculptor. One can characterize the seer's thinking and new perception by considering his experiences with architecture and sculpture.

The seer's experiences with music and poetry are quite different. The seer can only develop a relationship to music if he penetrates even further into the sphere I have just described. It is true that this new spiritual intellectuality initially develops out of the feeling and will that are turned inwards. One is able to penetrate into the spiritual world through the experience that one penetrates only through the soul; the soul does not use the physical organization for this. Then comes the next step: one would only penetrate incompletely into the spiritual world if one did not advance to the next level. This consists not only in developing this spiritual intellectuality, but also in becoming aware of one's being outside of the body in the spiritual reality, just as one is aware here of one's existence in the physical world, of one's feet on the ground, of one's grasping at objects and so on. By beginning to know oneself in the spiritual world and to think and feel as I have just said, one comes to develop a new, deep feeling and volition, but a volition in the spiritual world that is not expressed in the sense world. By experiencing this volition, one can only make certain experiences with music and poetry.

It becomes apparent that what is experienced in music in supersensible knowledge is related in particular to the new emotional feeling that is experienced outside the body. Music is experienced differently in the visionary state than in ordinary consciousness: it is experienced in such a way that one feels united with every single note, every melody, living with the soul in the surging, sounding life. The soul is completely united with the tones, the soul is as if poured out into the surging tones. I may well say that there is hardly any other way to get such a precise, such a pictorial view of Aphrodite rising from the sea foam than by considering the way the human soul lives in the element of the musical and rising from it, when it grasps itself in the visionary.

And just as the creatures of the air flutter around Aphrodite as she rises above the sea, approaching her as manifestations of the living in space, so for the seer the musical is joined by the poetic. As he feels himself with his soul as if set apart from the musical element and yet again as if within it, as if identical with it, the poetic element is added to the musical for the seer. He experiences this in an intense form. What he experiences depends on the degree to which he is trained in seership. It is a peculiar thing about poetry. Through language or other means of poetry, the poet expresses what comes to the visionary faculty from poetry. A dramatic person, for example, whom the poet brings to the stage, whom he lets say a few words, is formed from these few words into the complete image of a human personality. That is why, in all that is unreal in poetry, that which is mere empty phrase, that which does not push out of creative power but is made, things seem so unpleasant to the seer: he sees the grotesque caricature in that which is not poetry but still seeks to create something in empty phrases. While the plastic is transformed into spiritual intellectuality, the poetic is transformed into the plastic and the representational, which he must look at. He looks at what is true, what is formed from the true creative laws by which nature creates, and sharply separates this from what is merely created out of human imagination, because one wants to create poetry, even if one is not connected in fantasy with the creative powers of the universe. Such are the experiences in relation to poetry and music.

Supernatural insight experiences painting in a peculiar way. It stands alone for supernatural insight. And because the seer — to use a trivial comparison — is obliged, as the geometrician is obliged to use lines and a compass, to visualize what he could have in mere conception, to make the conception tangible, the seer is also obliged to translate the experience of the spiritual world, what he experiences without form, into a formed, dense world. This happens when he experiences what he experiences in this way in such a way that he transforms it into inner vision, into imagination, and fills it, if I may say so, with soul-material. He does this in such a way that, so to speak, he creates the counterpart to painting in the inner, creative, visionary state. The painter forms his imagination by applying the inner creative powers to sensual perception, which he experiences as he needs them. He comes in from the outside until he transforms what lives in space in such a way that it works in lines, forms, colors. He brings this to the surface of the painterly perception. The seer comes from the opposite direction. He condenses what is in his visionary activity to the point of emotional coloring; he imbues what is otherwise colorless, as if illustrating inwardly with colors, he develops imaginations. One must only imagine in the right way that what the painter brings from one side comes from the opposite side in what the seer creates from within.

To imagine this, read the elementary principles in the last chapters of Goethe's Theory of Colours about the sensual-moral effect of colors, where he says that each color triggers an emotional state. The seer receives this emotional state last, with which he tinges what would otherwise be colorless and formless. When the seer speaks of aura and the like and cites colors in what he sees, one should be aware that he is tinting what he experiences inwardly with these emotional states. When the seer says what he sees is red, he experiences what one otherwise experiences with the red color; the experience is the same as when seeing red, only spiritually.

It is the same thing that the seer sees and that the artist conjures onto the canvas, but seen from different sides. In this way the seer meets the painter. This meeting is a remarkable and significant experience. It reveals painting to be a special characteristic of supersensible knowledge. This is particularly evident in the case of an appearance that must become a special problem for every soul: the incarnate, the color of human flesh, which actually has something equally mysterious and appealing for those who want to penetrate inwardly into such things, allowing one to see deeply into the relationships of nature and spirit. The seer experiences this incarnate in a special way. I would like to draw attention to one particular aspect.

When speaking of clairvoyance, people think that it refers to something that only a few twisted people have, something that is completely outside of life. It is not so. That which is earnest looking is always present in life. We could not stand in life if we were not all clairvoyant for certain things. It is important that the serious seer does not mean something that is outside of life, but that it is only an enhancement of life in certain ways. When are we clairvoyant in our ordinary life? We are clairvoyant in a case that is so little understood today because, from a materialistic point of view, all kinds of craziness have been formed about the way we grasp a foreign ego when we are confronted with a foreign body. There are already people today who say: You only perceive the soul of another human being through a subconscious conclusion. We see the oval of the face, the other human lines, the color of the face, the shape of the eyes. We have become accustomed to finding ourselves face to face with a person when we see something physical like this, so we draw the analogy that whatever is in such a form also contains a person. — It is not so; that is what supersensible knowledge shows. What appears to us in the human form and coloring is a kind of perception, like the perception of color and form in a crystal. The color, form and surface of a crystal present themselves as themselves. The surface and coloring in a human being cancel each other out, making themselves transparent, ideally speaking. The sensory perception of the other person is spiritually extinguished: we perceive the other soul directly. It is an immediate empathy with the other soul, a mysterious and wonderful process in the soul when we stand face to face with another person in our own humanity. There is a real stepping out of the soul, a stepping over to the other. This is a clairvoyance that is present in life always and everywhere. This kind of clairvoyance is intimately connected with the mystery of the incarnate. The seer becomes aware of this when he rises to the most difficult seerical problem: to perceive the incarnate in a seerical way. For the ordinary view, the incarnate has something resting about it; for the seer, it becomes something moved within itself. The seer does not perceive the incarnate as something finished, he perceives it as an intermediate state between two others. When the seer concentrates on the coloring of the person, he perceives a continuous fluctuation between paleness and a kind of blush, which is a higher blush than the ordinary blush, and which for the seer merges into a kind of radiance of warmth. These are the two borderline states between which the coloring of the person oscillates, with the incarnate lying in the middle. For the seer, this becomes a vibrating back and forth. Through the paleness, the seer understands what the person is like inwardly, in their mind and intellect, and through the blush, one recognizes what the person is like as a being of will and impulse, how they are in relation to the external world. What is in the inner character of the person vibrates to a higher degree.

One should not imagine that the path to seeing things spiritually consists of 'developing' oneself and then seeing all people and all things spiritually. The path into the spiritual world is a multifaceted and complicated one. Coming to understand the inner being of another person is the main problem of the experience of incarnation.

Thus you see that the seer has the most diverse experiences with the arts. What is meant here is still somewhat shaded for us by an appearance that is suitable for pointing out the way in which seership stands in life: the relationship of seership to human language.

Language is actually not a unified thing, but something that exists in three different spheres. First, there is a state of language that can be seen as a tool for communication between people and in science. One may call the seer's experience paradoxical, but it is a real one: the seer perceives this use of language as a means of communication and expression for ordinary intellectual science as a kind of demotion of language, even as a debasement of language to something that language is not in its innermost nature. The seer's perception reaches to a different conception. Language is the instrument through which a people lives in community. What lives in language, in the way it is shaped into different forms, in the way sounds are articulated and so on, is, when viewed correctly, artistic. Language as a means of expression of a people is art, and the way language is created is the collective artistic creation of the people who speak that language.

By using language as a means of everyday communication, we degrade it. Anyone with a sense for what lives in language and is revealed in our subconscious knows that the creative aspect of language is akin to the poetic, to art in general. Anyone with an artistic nature has an unpleasant feeling when language is unnecessarily tuned down to the sphere of ordinary communication. Christian Morgenstern had this feeling. He was not anxious to build a bridge between artistry and seership; he did not believe that artistic originality would be lost through the penetration of the intellectual world; he felt that the poetic in him was akin to the plastic and the architectural. He, who expresses what he feels about language by characterizing chatter as an abuse of language, says: “All chatter is based on uncertainty about the meaning and value of the individual word. For the chatterbox language is something vague. But it gives it back to him in abundance: the (vague, the “swimmer.” One must feel what — in order to feel like him — Morgenstern felt as the language-creative: that where language in prose becomes a means of communication, its degradation to a mere purpose takes place.

Thirdly, the experience of the seer with language characterizes what is experienced in the spiritual world. What is seen there is not seen in words, it is not expressed directly in words. Thus, it is difficult to communicate with the outside world in a seerly way, because most people think theoretically and in terms of content in words and cannot imagine a life of the soul that goes beyond words. Therefore, those who experience the spiritual world perceptively feel a certain compulsion to pour into the already formed language that which they experience. But by silencing what otherwise lives in language — the power of imagination and memory — they can awaken in themselves the creative powers of language itself, those creative powers that were active in the development of humanity when language first arose. The seer must place himself in the state of mind when language first arose, must develop the dual activity of inwardly forming spiritual images that he has seen, and immersing himself in the spirit of speech formation so that he can combine the two. It is therefore important to realize that the words of the seer must be understood differently than words usually are. In communicating, the seer must make use of language, but in such a way that he allows what is creatively active in language to arise again, by responding to the formative forces of language. This makes it important that he shapes the spoken word by emphasizing certain things strongly and others less, saying certain things first and others later, or by adding something illustrative. A special technique is necessary for those who want to express spiritual truths in language, when they want to express what lives within them. Therefore, the seer needs to take into account the “how” of how he expresses himself, not just what he says. It is important that he first forms, it depends on how he says things, especially the things about the spiritual world, not just on what he says. Because this is so little taken into account, and because people remember the words by what they otherwise mean, the seer is so difficult to understand. He has a need — this is all only relative — to develop the ability to create language so that he expresses the supersensible through the way he expresses himself. It will become more and more necessary to realize that the important thing is not the content of what is said, but that through the way the seer expresses himself, one has the vivid impression that he is speaking from the spiritual world. Thus, even in ordinary life, language is already an artistic element. The seer also has a special relationship to language.

Now the question arises: What is the basis for such a relationship between the seer and the artist? How is it that basically the seer cannot detach himself from the impression of a work of art? The reason for this is that in the work of art something akin to supersensible knowledge appears, only in a different guise. It is due to the fact that the inner life of man is much more complicated than modern science is able to imagine.

I would like to present this from a different angle, where, however, apparently scientific language is used, and which points to something that must be developed more and more in order to bridge the gap between, on the one hand, the ordinary observation of reality and, on the other hand, the experience in artistic imagination and supersensible knowledge. I will ask: What is it that enables the creative musician to bring forth from his inner being that which lives in his notes? Here we must realize that what is usually called self-knowledge is still abstract. Even what mystics or nebulous theosophists imagine is something very abstract. If one believes that one experiences the divine in one's soul, then this is something very unclear and nebulous before the real, concrete seership. This becomes clear that on the one hand man has his inner experience, his thoughts, feelings, volitional impulses; he can immerse himself in them, call it mysticism, philosophy, science. If one learns to recognize the living, one knows: All this is too thin, even if one tries to condense it inwardly. Even with intense mysticism, one always flutters above reality, does not come close to true reality, only experiences inner images, experiences the effects of reality, and does not experience reality through ordinary contemplation of nature, which faces material processes.

It is true what Dz Bois-Reymond says: that contemplation of nature can never grasp what haunts space. When the natural scientist speaks of matter that exists in space, it does not yield to what we use to grasp reality. For ordinary consciousness, it remains the case that on the one hand we have the inner life, which does not penetrate to reality, and on the other hand we have external reality, which does not yield to the inner life. There is an abyss in between. This abyss, which one must know, is an obstacle to human knowledge. It can only be overcome by developing supersensible vision in the soul, the kind of vision that I have shown today in its relationship to the artistic.

When this vision develops, one enters into an external relationship with oneself and with material reality, which is present as a body. The body becomes something new, it does not remain the brittle, the one that does not surrender to the inner self. The inner self does not remain the one fluttering above reality, but it impregnates itself, permeates itself in its own corporeality with what has material existence in the body. But all material existence contains spiritual existence.

Let us try to visualize this with the help of musical art. While a person is developing musical or other ideas and perceiving them in ordinary consciousness, complicated states are taking place in his physical interior. He knows nothing about them, but they take place. The clairvoyant consciousness penetrates to this inward, complicated, wonderful physical experience. The cerebral fluid, in which the brain is otherwise embedded, pours out into the spinal cord sac when we breathe out, penetrates down, pushes the blood to the lower abdominal veins, and when we breathe in, everything is pushed up. A wonderful rhythm takes place, which accompanies everything we imagine and perceive. This breathing, this plastic art in its rhythm, pushes in and out in the brain. A process takes place that plays a part in human experience. It is something that goes on in the subconscious and of which the soul is aware. Modern physiology and biology are still almost completely ignorant of these things, but this will become a broad science,

In times that can no longer be ours, spiritual life had to be sought in a different way. But the time for seeking spiritual science in the Oriental-Indian way is past; it can be studied afterwards, but the belief that one must go back to Indian methods is completely mistaken. That is not for our time; it would lead humanity astray. Our methods are much more intellectual, but one may see by studying what ancient India was seeking. A large part of the training for higher knowledge in India consisted of a rhythmically ordered breathing process: they wanted to regulate the breathing process. If you compare what they were seeking with what I have just said, you will find that the yoga student wanted to experience within himself what I have described by inwardly feeling the path of breathing. The Indian experienced this by trying to feel the breathing process as it rose and fell.

Our methods are different. Those who follow this with understanding will find that we are no longer to immerse ourselves in the organism in this physical way, but to try to grasp what flows down through the meditative nature of the intellect and what flows up through the exercises of the will, and in this way to try to oppose ourselves to the current with our soul life and to feel it as it flows up and down.

A certain progress in human development depends on this. This is something of which science and everyday consciousness know nothing, but the soul knows it in its depths. What the soul knows and experiences there can, under special circumstances, be brought up into consciousness. It is brought up when the human being is an artist in relation to music. How does this happen? In the ordinary human condition, which one could also call the bourgeois condition, there is a strong connection between the soul and spirit and the physical and bodily. The soul and spirit are strongly tied to the processes just described. If the equilibrium is a labile one, if the soul and spirit are detached, then one is musical or receptive to it through this construction, which is based on inner destiny. The special artistic gift in other fields also depends on this unstable relationship. Those who have this gift are able to bring up what would otherwise only take place down in the soul — in the depths of the soul we are all musical artists. Those who are in a stable equilibrium cannot bring up what takes place there: they are not artists. Those who are in a labile equilibrium — now, as a scientific philistine, one could speak of degeneration — those who are in a labile equilibrium of soul and body, bring up more of what is playing in the inner rhythm, darker or lighter, and shape it through the tone material. If we look at the flow of nerve impulses from bottom to top towards the brain, we first encounter what we characterize as musical. How the optic nerve spreads out in the eye and connects with blood vessels remains in the subconscious. Something is going on that is extinguished when a person is confronted with the external world. When confronted with the external sensory world, the external impression is extinguished. But what takes place between nerve waves and sensory processes has always been a poet; the poet lives in every human being. And it depends on the state of the soul-body balance whether what takes place remains down there or whether it is brought up and poured into poetry.

Let us again consider the radiating process, the wave that strikes downwards, and strikes against the branching of the blood wave: this expresses the placing of our own equilibrium into the equilibrium of our environment. The subconscious experience is particularly strong here, in which the human being moves from the crawling child into upright balance. This is an enormous subconscious experience. The fact that we have this, which is only caricatured in the ape, and which becomes significant for humanity, that the line through the center of the body coincides with the center of gravity, is an enormous inner experience. There one unconsciously experiences the architectural-sculptural relationship. When the downward nerve wave encounters the blood flow, architecture and sculpture are unconsciously experienced, and it is again brought up and shaped to a greater or lesser extent by unstable or stable conditions.

The painting and what is expressed in it is experienced inwardly where nerve and blood waves meet. The artistic process is conscious, but the impulses are unconscious. The visionary consciously immerses himself in what underlies the artistic imagination as an impulse, as an inner experience, which is not characterized in such an abstract way as it is done today, but so concretely that one can find every single phase in the configuration of one's own body. The ancients sensed correctly that, with regard to architecture, every form and every measure is present in one's own self-insertion into the external world. Ancient architecture originates from a different sensing of these proportions than Gothic architecture, but both originate from a sensing of one's own equilibrium with the conditions of the macrocosm. In this way, one recognizes how man, in his own construction, is an image of the macrocosm. That is why the body has been called the temple of the soul. There is much truth in such expressions. Thus we can say that basically the sources from which the artist draws, who is to be taken seriously and has a relationship to reality, are the same sources from which the seer draws, to whom only that which is to remain an impulse in its effect now appears in consciousness, while when the impulse remains in the subconscious, he brings up what is brought to view by the artist.

From this it can be seen that these areas of human experience are strictly separate. Therefore, there is no reason for the anxiety that believes that the artist's originality will be lost through the gift of second sight. The gift of second sight is developed in the same states that can be separated from artistic creation and experience, but the two cannot affect each other if they are properly experienced. On the contrary.

We are at a time when humanity must become more and more aware and conscious, more and more free. That is why the light of art must be poured out by the artist himself, and in this way a bridge will be built between art and vision, which will not interfere with each other.

It is understandable that the artist feels disturbed when art history develops according to the pattern of modern natural science or the rational aesthetics as it is understood today. A knowledge that penetrates real art with vision does not yet exist today; one day artists will not feel disturbed by it, but fertilized by it.

Anyone who works with a microscope knows how to proceed in order to learn how to see. Just as one first penetrates oneself from within with the ability to work properly with a microscope – in this way, the inner view stimulates the outer view, does not hinder it – so will a time come when true seership impregnates and permeates the elementary productive capacity of the artist.

Sometimes, however, what is meant by vision is misunderstood because one thinks of supersensible science and knowledge too much in terms of ordinary sensory science and knowledge. However, people who approach spiritual science sometimes feel disappointed: they do not find convenient answers to their down-to-earth questions, but they do find other worlds that sometimes have much deeper riddles than those in the world of the senses. Through an introduction to spiritual science, new riddles arise that cannot be solved in theory, but promise to dissolve vividly in the process of life and thus create new riddles. If one lives into this higher liveliness, one remains related to art. Hebbel demands conflicts that must remain unresolved, and he finds Grillparzer philistine when, despite all his beauty, he resolves conflicts in a way that only makes sense to someone smarter than his hero. — This is the ultimate goal of true vision: it does not create cheap answers, but rather worldviews that complement the ones we perceive with our senses. Of course, profound artists have already sensed this. In his recently published book “Stufen” (Stages), Morgenstern expresses the idea that anyone who, like the artist, really wants to get to the spiritual must be willing to absorb and unite with what can already be comprehended today, through supersensible knowledge, of the divine-spiritual. He says: “He who only wants to immerse himself in what can be experienced of the Divine-Spiritual today, not penetrating it with knowledge, is like the illiterate person who sleeps all his life with his primer under his pillow.”

This characterizes the point in our culture we are at. If one is able to respond to what is needed in our time, one will, like Morgenstern, have to come to the conclusion: one must not remain illiterate towards clairvoyant knowledge; as an artist, one must seek connections to clairvoyant knowledge. Just as it is significant when the visionary element sheds light on artistic creation, it is equally significant when artistic taste can inspire what, as a form of visionary philistinism, still has nothing artistic and at best something amusing about it. For the true spiritual expert of the future, the bridge that can be built between artistry and vision is more important than any pathological visionary.

Whoever sees through this knows that it will flourish for the good of present and future humanity if more and more spiritual things and spiritual knowledge are sought. The light of vision must shine in art, so that the warmth and grandeur of art may have a fertilizing effect on the breadth and grandeur of the horizon of vision. This is necessary for art, which wants to immerse itself in true existence, as we need it to be able to master the great tasks that must increasingly approach humanity from indeterminate depths.

It was certainly out of a profound understanding of the world in general but above all out of a deep feeling for art, that Goethe coined the words: “The man to whom nature begins to reveal her open secret feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest exponent—art.” Without sacrificing any of the spirit in Goethe's words we may perhaps complete what he said by adding: “The man to whom art begins to reveal her secret feels an almost invincible antipathy towards her least worthy exponent, the science of aesthetics.” That science is not what I wish to dwell upon today. It seems to me not only true to the spirit of Goethe's words but wholly in sympathy with it if we speak of art and the experiences we can have, and may frequently have had, in connection with art, in the way we like to relate those we had, or still have, with a trusty friend.

When human evolution is in question we speak of “original sin”. Today I don't want to enlarge upon whether the shadow-side of man's life—important as that side is—can be exhausted if we speak of original sin in the singular. But it seems to me that in connection with a perceptive feeling for art and the creations of art it is necessary to speak of two original sins. Certainly one of these is the copying, the reproduction of the physical, that is, of what belongs purely to the world of the senses. The other seems to me to be the wish to express, represent or reveal, through art, the super-physical,. But it becomes very difficult to approach art either perceptively or creatively if both physical and super-physical are rejected. Yet the following seems to me to be in keeping with a sound human feeling: Anyone wishing in art for the physical alone can hardly get beyond a refined form of illustration, imitation which may indeed be raised to the level of art but can never become true art. And it can well be said that it reflects a life of soul run wild when anyone is willing to be satisfied by the merely illustrative element, of copying the physical or what is given in any other way by the sense world alone. It is due, however, to a kind of possession—possession by one's own understanding and reason—when there is a desire for the embodiment of an idea, for the artistic embodiment of what is purely spiritual. Interpreting a world-conception poetically, or through pictorial art, is not compatible with cultured taste; rather does it correspond to a state of barbarism in man's life of feeling Art itself, however, is deeply rooted in life; were this not sort through the whole way in which it arises it would have no justification for existence. For in face of a purely realistic world-conception art must exhibit all manner of unreality and into it must play many of the illusions of life. It is precisely because art is obliged to introduce into life what for a certain understanding is unreal, that, in some way or other, its roots must go deep down into life.

Now it may be said that from a certain boundary of perceptive feeling—from a lower boundary up to one that is higher, which in many people has to be first developed—artistic feeling in life makes its appearance everywhere. Even if not in the form of art itself this feeling arises when, in the ordinary physical existence met with in the world of the senses, what is super-physical and occult somehow makes its presence known. It arises within the super-physical, the result of pure thought, what is feelingly perceived and experienced in spirit—not by means of empty symbols or lifeless allegories but as if it would itself take on life in a physical form—lights up in a form that is perceptible to the senses. That what is ordinarily physical in everyday life has within it the super- physical, as if conjured there by magic—this is perceived by everyone who confines his mood of soul within the two boundaries mentioned.

We can certainly say this: If I am invited by anyone into a room with red walls, I take something for granted about the red walls which has to do with artistic perception. When I am taken into a red room and am face to face with the man who invited me there, I shall have the quite natural feeling that he is about to tell me all kinds of interesting things. If he does not do so I shall feel that my being invited into the red room had something insincere about it and I shall go away dissatisfied. If anyone receives me in a blue room and by his chattering stops me from getting a word in edgeways, the whole situation will make me uncomfortable and I shall complain that in the very colour of his room the man has been lying to me. One is constantly coming across such things in life. On meeting a woman in a red dress we shall feel that she rings untrue if she seems shy; and a woman with curly hair will appear genuine only if rather pert and if she is not pert we shall feel disappointed. It goes without saying that things need not be like that in in life; it is right that life should lead us away from such illusions. But there is a certain limited sphere in our mood of soul in which our feelings tend in this direction.

Naturally, too, these things are not to be taken as universal laws; they may be differently perceived by many people. The fact remains, however, that everyone in life, when confronting the external things of the sense-world, has a feeling that they contain, enchanted within them, what is spiritual—a spiritual situation, a spiritual attitude, a spiritual mood.

It may really appear as if what is seen here to be a demand of our soul, and which so often in our existence affords us bitter disappointment, must call for a special sphere of life to be created for the satisfaction of these particular needs. This special sphere seems to me that of art. Art fashions out of the rest of life precisely what satisfies the tendency lying within the limits of perception mentioned above.

Now it may be that we can fully realise what is experienced in art only by investigating more deeply the processes taking place in the soul, either in artistic creation or in the enjoyment of art. For we need only to have lived a little with art, we need only have made some attempt to get on intimate term with it, to find that the soul-processes in the artist and the lover of art we are about to describe are in a certain sense inverted yet in reality the same. What I am wanting to describe is experienced in advance by the artist; he experiences to begin with a certain process of the soul which then resolves itself into another process; whereas the man who just enjoys works of art experiences first the second process I refer to, and only afterwards the one from which the artist makes his start. Now it seems to me that the difficulty in approaching art psychologically lies in people not going deeply enough into the human soul to grasp what actually evokes the need for art. Perhaps ours is the first age fitted for giving clearer expression to this artistic need. For whatever we may think about a great many of the trends in the art of recent times, whatever we may think about impressionism, expressionism, and so on—the discussion of which often springs from a source that has nothing to do with art—whatever we may think about all this, one thing cannot be denied. We cannot deny that since these trends have prevailed, artistic perceptions, artistic life, out of certain regions of the soul far down in the subconscious and formerly not drawn from thence, have now been brought more to the surface of consciousness. Today there is of necessity more interest in the artistic and art-appreciating processes of man's soul—promoted by all the talk about things such as impressionism and expressionism—than was the case earlier, when the artistic concepts of the scholar were very far from what was actually living in art. In recent times, where the study of art is concerned, concepts, conceptions, have arisen which in a certain respect—at least in comparison with former days—come very near the creations of present-day art.

The life of the soul is really infinitely more profound than is generally supposed. Few people have any idea that, subconsciously and unconsciously, the human being has in the depths of his soul a number of experiences seldom spoken of in ordinary life We have to go deeper down into this life of the soul to discover the mood lying between those two boundaries. Our life of soul swings, as it were, between the various conditions, which all more or less represent two different types. On the one hand there is in man's soul something that seems to surge freely from its depths, something that often torments it, though quite unconsciously. It is something that, when the soul is especially susceptible to the mood mentioned, has a constant urge to discharge itself into consciousness as vision—though this should not take place in the case of a soundly-constituted human being. Our life of soul, when it has a tendency to this mood, is always striving, far more than we recognise, to transform itself in the sense of this vision. A healthy life of soul consists simply in confining the wish for visions to the striving for them, so that they may never actually arise.

This striving after the vision, which in reality exists in the soul of each of us, can be satisfied if we confront the soul with an external impression, an external form—for example, a work of sculpture—containing what is striving to arise but should not succeed in doing so when the soul is sound: the morbid vision. This work of art then, this outer form of what is thus striving to arise, will confine in a beneficial way to the depths of the soul what is actually wanting to become vision. We offer the soul, as it were from outside, the content of the vision, but we offer it a real work of art only if we are able out of our legitimate striving for the vision to divine what form, what plastic impression, we have to offer the soul to compensate for its longing after the visionary. I believe that many of the modern ways of approach which meet us in what is called expressionism get near this truth, and that explanations of them show a groping after what I have just been saying. People do not go far enough, however; they do not look sufficiently deeply into the soul, nor do they come to know that irresistible desire for that is visionary which is actually In the souls of us all. This is however, only the one side, and on becoming familiar with artistic creation and the appreciation of art, we can very well see how there is a source of artistic work which reflects this need of man's soul.

But there is another source of art. The source of which I have just been talking lies in a certain constitution of the human soul, in its desire to have what is visionary as a spontaneous conception. The other source lies in this—that secrets magically conjured within nature herself can be discovered only by allowing oneself, not to make scientific assumptions which are not needed, but to perceive what these deep mysteries really are in the nature that surrounds us.

These deep mysteries in nature around us, when spoken of, may perhaps appear very strange to the consciousness of present-day people. Yet there is something that precisely from our time onwards will make the kind of kind of mysteries to which I refer more and more recognized by the general public. There is in nature something which is not just the growing, sprouting life that delights the healthy souls in nature, there is also what we call death, destruction, what is constantly destroying and overcoming one life by another. Whoever is able to perceive this will also find—to make this excellent example—when confronting the human figure that this figure in its outer realisation in life, is all the time being killed by a higher kind of life. It is the secret of all life that there is ceaseless extermination of lower life by one that is higher. The human form, permeated as it is by the human soul, the human life, is continuously being killed, overcome, by this human life, this human soul. This happens in such a way that the human form may be said to bear something within it which, if left to its own life, would be quite different. It cannot pursue its own life, however, because within it a higher life, a life of another kind, is always deadening it.

On approaching the human form the sculptor, if only unconsciously, discovers this secret through his perception. He finds that this human form is wishing for something that does not come to expression in the human being but is killed by a higher life, the life of the soul. The sculptor conjures forth from the human form what is not existing in the actual man, something missing in the actual man hidden by nature. Goethe perceived something of this kind when he spoke of “open secrets”. We can go further and say: This secret is underlying the wide realms of nature everywhere. Strictly speaking no colour, no line, appear in nature without something lower being overcome by what is higher. The reverse can also be true; the higher can be overcome by the lower. It is always possible, however, to break the spell and to re-discover what has thus actually been overcome—and this is what constitutes artistic creation.

If , on reaching what has been overcome and then freed from enchantment, we know how to experience it in the right way, it becomes artistic perception.

About this same artistic perception I should like to say something more precise.

A great deal in Goethe's work still has to be brought to light, and that often contains truths very important from the point of view of man. Take Goethe's theory of metamorphosis which starts out with how, for example, the petals in a plant are merely transformed leaves, and which is then extended to all forms in nature. When once what lies in this theory is brought fully to light by a more comprehensive development of natural science than was possible in Goethe's day, when through an all-embracing perception nature has been unveiled, Goethe's theory of metamorphosis will be capable of fuller life and of far wider application. I may say that the understanding of this theory of his is still very limited; it is capable of wide extension.

If we keep to the human figure the following may be said by way of illustration: Whoever studies the human skeleton finds, even when studying it quite superficially, that this human skeleton consists of two definite members; this might be carried further but would lead us too far afield for today. The skeleton consists firstly of the head, which to a certain extent merely rests on the remaining skeleton, and secondly of that remaining skeleton. Anyone sensitive to the metamorphosis of form, anyone. who can see how one form passes over into another—in the sense Goethe meant when he said the green leaf passes over into the colourful petal—will be able, on extending this mode of observation, to see that the human head is a whole, the rest of the organism another whole, and that one is the metamorphosis of the other, In a mysterious way the whole of the rest of man may be said—when suitably perceived—to be capable of transformation into a human head. And the human head is something which in a rounded and more developed form contains the entire human organism,. The remarkable thing is, however, that when we are capable of perceiving this when inwardly we are able really to transform the human head into the appearance of man himself, the result in both cases is something quite different, In the one case, when the head is transformed into the whole organism, something appears which shows man as a kind of ossified being, contracted, narrowed, driven throughout. into a sclerotic condition. If we let the rest of the organism work upon us so that it becomes head, we get something in appearance very unlike an ordinary man but reminding us of one only in the forms of the head, Something appears that in its growth shows no tendency to form the bony structure of the shoulder-blades, but aims at becoming wings, at spreading indeed above the shoulders, and from the wings. developing upwards over the head to appear like a kind of hood that is trying to seize hold of the head in such a way that what in the human form constitutes the ear is spread out and joined up with the wings, In short, there appears a kind of spirit-form and this spirit-form rests enhanced within the human form. This it is which, if we develop further the perception of what Goethe foreshadowed in his theory of metamorphosis, throws light into the mysteries of human nature. From this example we can see how nature in all her various spheres has the characteristic of striving—not abstractly but visibly, concretely—to be something absolutely different from what is presented to our senses. When our perceiving is thorough, nowhere do we have the feeling that any form, anything at all in nature lacks the possibility of developing beyond what it is into something quite different. Such an example as this shows particularly well how in nature one life is constantly being overcome, and even killed, by a higher life.

We do not bring to visible expression what is thus perceived as a double man, as this twofold quality in man's growth, only because something higher, something superphysical, so unites these two sides of the human being, so balances them, that we have the ordinary human form, The reason why nature—not now in an outward, spatial way but inwardly and more intensively—seems to us so magical, so mysterious, is because in each of her works she is wanting to offer us more, infinitely mores than she can, and because she puts together her several parts, all that she organises, in such a way that a higher life swallows up the life inferior to it, allowing it only partial development. Whoever directs his perception to this, will everywhere find that this open secret, this magical quality running through the whole of nature is—like the inward striving after the vision, but here working from outside—what stir a man up to take his stand somewhere beyond nature, to choose something special out of the whole, and from there to let shine forth what nature is seeking to do in one of her works—what can become a whole but has not become so in nature herself.

Perhaps I may mention here that in the Anthroposophical Society's building at Dornach, near Basle, an attempt has been made to realise in plastic form all that has just been indicated. We have tried to make a sculptural group in wood to represent what may be called the typical man; but this group represents the typical man in such a way that what otherwise is only tendency, and held in check by higher life, first comes to expression in the whole form only in gesture which is then brought back into a state of rest. The endeavour has been made plastically to awaken this gesture which in the ordinary human being is kept under—not the gesture made by the soul but the one that is killed before it leaves the soul, the one held under by the life of the soul—and then to bring it to rest again. Thus it has been sought first to set the resting surface of the human organism in movement through gesture and then to return it to a state of repose. Through this one came quite naturally to see that something had to be given greater prominence. This something, a potentiality in every man but obviously held under by the higher life, is the asymmetry existing in us all—no-one's right and left sides being formed alike. But when this has been given greater prominence and what is held together in a higher life has been set free, then with a slightly humorous touch it has to be united with another, higher stage; then it is necessary for what approaches us in a natural way from outside to become reconciled. It becomes necessary to atone artistically for the offence against naturalism—for this stressing of asymmetry and for this translating into gesture of various things which have then to be brought to rest again. This inner offence had to be atoned for by our showing, on the other hand, the overcoming brought about when, through metamorphosis, the human head passes over into the sombre, constricted form which, in its turn, is overcome by the representative of man. This form is at the feet of the representative of man and thus can be felt as member, as part of him. The other form we had to create in addition expresses what feeling demands when not the head but the rest of the human form becomes powerful—as indeed it is in life though held in check by higher life—when all that generally remains in a stunted state is too prolific in its growth; what, for example, is characteristic in the shoulder-blades, what unconsciously is in a man's very formation, in him as a certain Luciferic element, an element that strives to get outside man's essential being. If all that lies in the human form, as arising from impulses and desires, takes actual shape—whereas otherwise it is overrun by a higher life, by the life of the understanding, the life of the reason, which develops and comes to realisation in the human head—then this makes it possible for us to free nature from enchantment, to capture from nature its open secret, by ourselves separating again the parts which nature killed by making them into a whole. Thus the onlooker is obliged in his heart to bring about what nature has already done before him. Nature has done all this, she has brought harmony to man in such a way that his various single members are combined in a harmonious whole. By setting free what has been enchanted into nature, we at the same time break nature up into her super-physical forces. Then there is no need to seek through dry allegory, nor in a way that is intellectual and without artistic feeling, for any idea, anything thought out, anything purely superphysical and spiritual, behind the objects of nature. One just asks nature quite simply: How would you develop in your various parts were your growth undisturbed by a higher life? We come to the rescue of something superphysical that has been held in the physical by enchantment and free it from the physical bonds that held it spellbound. We actually come to be naturalistic in a supernatural way.

I believe that in all the various tendencies and endeavours of recent times, still very much in an elementary stage, which call themselves impressionism, I believe we may perceive in all these the longing of our time really to discover and give shape to secrets of this kind, to this kind of physical-superphysical. For a feeling is abroad that what is actually accomplished in art—in artistic creation and in the appreciation of art—must today be raised into fuller consciousness than has been the case in former epochs. What is accomplished, namely, that a suppressed vision is appeased or that nature is confronted by something which repeats her process—this has always been striven for. Actually these are the two sources of all art.

But let us go back to the time of Raphael. In his time the striving naturally took a different form from that of our day, of, for example, Cézanne or Hodler. What in art is represented by these two streams, however, has always been aimed at, though more or less unconsciously. But in former times it would have been looked upon as very primitive had the artist himself been unaware that in his soul something approaches nature, of a spiritual though unconscious kind, which when the artist seeks it in the physical-superphysical removes the spell from what has been enchanted into nature. Thus if we stand before one of Raphael's works we always have the feeling—if we are willing to attempt the interpretation of what otherwise remains in the obscurity of the subconscious without occasion for expression—the feeling that in this work of art we come to an understanding with something, and also indirectly with Raphael himself.

About all this we may have the feeling (as I said, there is no occasion to speak of it even in our own soul) that we have been together with Raphael in a former life on earth, when we learned from him many things that have entered deeply into our soul, and that this centuries-old connection with the soul of Raphael had become entirely subconscious—suddenly, however, springing into life again as we stand in front of his works. We believe we are face to face with something that took place long ago between our soul and that of Raphael.

From the artist of more recent times we get no such feeling, The modern artist leads one spiritually, as it were, into his studio; what there takes place comes very near to the level of consciousness and belongs to the immediate present. Because this longing, this need of the age, prevails, the rising conception that is actually a suppressed vision, seeks in our time satisfaction through art. On the other hand there meets us, though today in a rather elementary form, a breaking- up of what is otherwise union—an imitation of nature's own process.

What infinite significance everything gains that recent painters have attempted in order to study the various colours, to study the light in its variety of shades, and to discover how, ultimately, every effect of light, every shade of colour, aims at becoming more than it can be when forced into a whole where it is killed by a higher life. What have they not attempted in order that, starting from a feeing of this kind, light should be awakened to life, treated in such a way as to set free what, when the light has to serve in bringing about the ordinary processes and happenings in nature, remains enchanted within light. We are only at the very beginnings of all this. From these beginnings, which today are the expression of a legitimate longing, it will probably be possible, however, to experience that something in the realm of art becomes a secret—a secret which is then revealed. When put into words this sounds rather trite but many things that sound so hide secrets; we have to draw near these secrets, especially to perception of them. What I am meaning here answers the question: Why is it impossible to portray fire and air? It is quite clear that in reality fire cannot be painted. No one could have the true perception of the painter who would want to paint the glittering, glowing life that is only to be held fast by the light. It should never enter the head of anyone to want to paint lightning—still less to paint the air!

On the other hand we have to admit that everything contained in light conceals within it what is striving to become like fire, striving to develop in such a way that it says something, gives an impression of something welling up out of the light, out of each single shade of colour—just as human speech wells up from the human organism. Every effect of light wants to tell us something, every effect of light has something to say to some other effect of light nearby. In every effect of light there is a life which is overcome, deadened, by higher conditions. If our perception takes this path we discover what the colour feels, what the colour is saying, and what is being striven for in this age of “plain air” panting. If we discover the secret of colour this perception is widened and we find that, strictly speaking, what I have just been saying is perfectly valid; but not in the same way for all colours because the colours say very different things. Whereas the bright colours, the reds and the yellows, attack us and tell us a great deal, the blue colours take the picture more into the realm of form. Through blue indeed we enter form, enter essentially into the form-creating soul. We have been on the road to such discoveries but often we have stopped short halfway. Many of Signac's pictures seem so little satisfying—though in another respect they can give much satisfaction—because blue is always treated in the same way as, let us say, yellow or red, without any recognition that a patch of blue when next to yellow expresses something quite different in value from yellow beside red. This appears rather trivial to anyone with a feeling for colour, yet in a deeper sense people are only just beginning to discover such secrets. Blue, violet, are colours which take the picture right out of the realm of the expressive into that of the inner perspective. It is quite conceivable that, solely by the use of blue in a picture by the side of the other colours, one can produce a wonderfully intensive perspective without the aid of any drawing. It is possible to go further in this direction. We come then to recognise that a design might be called the work of colour itself., When anyone succeeds in putting movement into his use of colour so that, in a mysterious way, the design follows the guidance of the colour, he will notice that this is particularly the case with blue. It is less so with yellow and red for it is not in their nature to be led in that way to inner movement, to move from one point to another. If we want to have a form inwardly in movement—in flight, for instance—a form which by reason of its inner movement at one time becomes small inwardly, at another big, a form moving in fact within itself, then without having recourse to any rational principle or any, never justifiable, intellectual aesthetics, but proceeding from a quite elementary feeling, we shall find ourselves absolutely obliged to use and bring into movement various shades of blue. We shall notice that in reality a line is able to come into being, the design able to make its appearance, definite form to arise, only when we continue what we began when setting the blue colour into movement. For every time we pass from the realm of painting, of working in colour, to that of outline of form, we carry the physical over into what is essentially superphysical. Passing from the bright colours through the blue and from there somehow inwardly into the picture, we shall have in the bright colours the transition to a physical-superphysical, which may be said to contain a slight superphysical tone: this is because colour always has something to say, because colour has soul that is always superphysical. We shall then find that the further we go into the realm of drawing the more we enter the abstract superphysical, which, however, because it makes its appearance in the physical must take to itself physical form.

Today I can give you only an indication of these things. It is clear, however, that this is the way to understand how in one particular sphere the colour, the sketch, can be so used in creative art that in its application is everything of which I said it is held under the spell of nature, and from this spell we free the super-physical, which is hidden in the physical and deadened by a higher life.

How, if we look at plastic art we shall find that here both for plane surfaces and lines, there are always two interpretations only one of which, however, I shall be speaking about. To begin with, right feeling will not suffer the plastic surface to remain what it is, for example in the ordinary human form; there it is killed by the human soul, by the life of the human being, thus by what is higher. When we have first drawn out, spiritually, the life of the soul in the human form, we have then to seek the life of the surface itself, the soul of the soul of the form itself. We see how this is to be found if we do not bend the surface once only but a second time as well, so that we get a double curve. We notice how in this way we can make the form speak, how, deep in our subconscious, as opposed to what I have shown to be more an analysing tendency, there is also a tendency that is synthetic. The physical nature falls into what is genuinely physical-superphysical, which is overcome only by the higher stages of life. Inside those barriers of the soul of which we have spoken, we have as instinctive urge to free nature from enchantment in this way, in order to see how the physical-superphysical lies hidden in nature in as many different forms as, shall we say, crystals in their rock bed, which because they are in that rocky bed have their surfaces worn down. But a man has within him, often very decidedly so, just when in his subconscious this cleavage, this analysing, this breaking down of nature into the physical-superphysical is very pronounced—he has within him the faculty that may be called aesthetic synthesis, a tendency to synthesize in art.

The strange thing is that anyone with a capacity for rightly observing his fellow men will discover how they always use one of their senses in a very one-sided way. When with the eye we see colours, forms, effects of light, we are giving the eye a most one-sided development. In the eye there is always something resembling the sense of touch; the eye while looking is, at the same time, always feeling. In ordinary life this is suppressed. Because the eye is given this one-sided trend, however, if we are able to perceive such things, we still find the urge in us to experience what is thus suppressed, namely, what the eye develops as a sense of feeling, a sense of self, a sense of movement when we move through space and feel the motion of our limbs. What in the eye is thus suppressed of the other senses, we feel—although it remains quiescent—to be aroused by looking at the other man, What is thus aroused by what we see, what, however, is suppressed by the one-sided trend of the eye, it is this that is given form by the sculptor.

The sculptor actually models forms which the eye indeed sees but sees so dimly that this dim vision remains in the subconscious. The sculptor makes use of that point where the sense of touch is just passing over into the sense of sight. Therefore he must, or will anyway try to, reduce the quiescent form, which to the one-sided eye is only an object, to reduce this form to gesture that is always inciting imitation of itself, and then to bring back this gesture, that has been thus conjured up, into a state of rest. In reality what in one direction has been aroused and in another direction brought again to rest, what when we create or enjoy artistic work is active in us as a process of the soul, is always, from one aspect, like a man's in-breathing and out-breathing in ordinary life. This process drawn up from the human soul has, at times, a grotesque effect, although on the other hand it promotes a feeling of the vastness, the endlessness, of all that has been enchanted into nature. The development of art—we see this in certain attempts made in recent decades and especially in those of today—moves altogether towards penetrating these secrets and more or, less unconsciously putting such things into form. There is no need to talk much about them; they will increasingly find expression through art.

We shall perceive, for example, the following. In the case of certain artists it can indeed be said that more or less consciously or unconsciously they have perceived something of this kind—we understand the recently-deceased Gustave Klimt, for instance, particularly well if we allow such assumptions to hold good for his perceptions and his reason. Some day the following will be perceived. Let us suppose someone were to feel the desire to paint a pretty woman. There must then take shape in his soul some kind of image of her. Anyone, however, who is sensitive can perceive that, the moment he has made this fixed image of her, he has inwardly, spiritually, super-physically deprived her of life. The very moment we decide to paint a portrait of a pretty woman we have spiritually given her over to death, we have taken something away from her. Otherwise, we could look at the woman as she is in life, we would not give shape in our picture to what it is possible to present there artistically. For artistically we have first to kill the woman; then we must be able to bring to bear that light touch of humour in order inwardly to call her back to life.

Now anyone with a naturalistic approach cannot do this; naturalistic art suffers from the inability to adopt this lighter touch. Naturalistic art therefore offers us a great deal that has no life, that kills all that is higher in nature; and it lacks that light touch needed for giving renewed life to what in the first place it has to kill. In the case of many charming women it appears indeed as if they had not only been secretly killed but maltreated beforehand. This deadening process always moves in one direction and is connected with the necessity for creating anew that which, on a higher level of life, overcomes in nature what is striving for existence There is always first a deadening, then through this lighter mood a giving of fresh life. This process must take place both in the soul of the creative artist and in that of the art-lover, Anyone wishing to paint some cheery young mountain-peasant has no need to make a faithful copy of what he sees; he must above all be clear that his artistic conception has killed the young peasant or anyway benumbed him and that he must awaken fresh life in this stiff image by fashioning him in a way that brings him into new connection with the rest of nature. This was attempted by Hodler and. is entirely in sympathy with what artists are longing for today,

These two sources of art can be said to represent very deep needs, subconscious needs, of the human soul. The satisfying of what would become actual vision, but is not permitted to do so in a man of a sound nature, this always develops more or less into the form of art called expressionism—though the name is not of importance. What is created with the purpose of re-uniting what in some form has been broken up onto its physical-superphysical constituents, or has been deprived of its immediate physical life, will lead to impressionism. These two needs of the human soul have ever been the source of art; and by reason of man's general development in recent times, the first of these needs has taken the expressionistic path , the second the impressionistic. In all probability as we hasten towards the future this will increase very much. If our perception is extended, and not just our intellectual consciousness, the art of the future will be perceived as the intensifying particularly of these two trends. These two trends—and this must be constantly emphasized if we are to avoid certain misconceptions—do not represent anything in the least unsound. Men will fall into an unsound condition if, between those two boundaries, the healthy, primitive and natural pull towards the visionary is not satisfied through artistic expression. Or they will do so when what is always going on in the subconscious, namely, the breaking down of nature into what is physical-superphysical in her is not, through the true touch of artistic humour, constantly permeated by a higher life so that they are enabled to recreate in their artistic work what is creatively brought to expression by nature.

I firmly believe that the processes of art lie in many respects extremely deep in the subconscious, yet in certain circumstances it can be important for life to have living, telling conceptions of the artistic process such as have an effect upon the soul that no weak conceptions can exercise, conceptions which flow actually into the feeling. When in accordance with feeling these two sources of art hold sway in the human soul, we shall certainly realise out of what sound perception Goethe spoke when at a certain moment of life (such things always savour of one-sidedness) he felt the pure, genuine, artistic nature of music: “Therefore music represents what is supreme in art, because it has no possibility of imitating anything in nature, being in its own element both content and form.” (As I said, this is one-sided, for every art can reach these heights; but characterizations are always one-sided.) Every art, however, in its inherent element becomes its own content and form, when it does not wrest nature's secrets from her by subtle reasoning but discovers in the way indicated today, the physical-superphysical. I believe that in the soul there often takes place a quite secret process when we become aware of the physical-superphysical in nature. It was Goethe himself who coined the expression “physical-superphysical”; and in spite of his having called the secret “open” it can be discovered only when subconscious forces of the soul are able to sink themselves deeply into nature.

What is visionary comes into being in the soul because the superphysical experience is pressing to discharge itself, is surging up out of the soul. The outward experience that is spiritual experience, not through vision—which in spiritual science is purified till it becomes Imagination—but through Intuition. Through the vision we place what is within us to a certain degree outside, so that the inner becomes in us the outer. In Intuition we go outside ourselves—step out into the world. This stepping out, however, remains an unreality as long as we are unable to set free what is spell-bound in nature and is always wishing to overcome nature by a higher life. If we made our way into what belongs to nature when this is freed from enchantment, we then live in Intuitions. In so far as these Intuitions prevail in art, they are indeed connected with intimate experiences possible for the soul when, outside itself, it is united with external things. This is why Goethe, out of his actual, highly impressionistic art, could say to a friend: “I will tell you something that can explain people's attitude to my work. It can be really understood only by those who have had the same kind of experience as myself, those who have been in a similar situation.” Goethe already possessed this artistic perception. This is apparent poetically in the second part of his Faust, which up to now has met with but little understanding. He was able artistically to perceive that the physical-superphysical is to be sought in the recognition of how each part of nature is striving beyond itself to become a whole, through metamorphosis to become something different; it comprises with this something different, a new product of nature but is then killed by a higher life.

When we thus penetrate into nature we come to true reality in a much higher sense than ordinary consciousness believes. What we here come to is the most conclusive proof that art has no need either to make merely a faithful copy of the physical or to bring to expression the superphysical, the spiritual, alone That would mean erring in two directions, But what art can shape, can express, is the physical in the superphysical, the superphysical in the physical. It is perhaps just this that constitutes man's naturalism in the truest sense of the term—that he recognises the physical-superphysical and can grasp it precisely through his being at the same time a super-naturalist. Thus, real artistic experiences can, I believe, be developed in the soul in such a way that they arouse understanding of art, appreciation of art, and that a man is enabled indeed to train himself to a certain extent to live in art as an artist. In any case a profound study of this kind of the physical-superphysical, and its realisation through art, will make Goethe"s words comprehensible—words arising out of deep perception and wide understanding of the world, words with which I began this lecture and now bring it to a close. These words will give a comprehensive picture of man's relation to art when once we are able to grasp in all its depths the relation of art to what is genuine, superphysical reality. Because human beings can never live without the superphysical, they will through their own needs be brought to realise more and more the truth of what Goethe has said: “The man to whom nature begins to reveal her open secret feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest exponent—art.”

Asuras remain behind on old Saturn. Satanic fire spirits on old Sun. The regent of fire spirits is Christ. Luciferic spirits fell behind on old Moon. Lucifer was at work in the Lemurian epoch, could be included in earth evolution, and worked as a liberator by giving men independence and enthusiasm for wisdom. Satanic Gods of hindrances began their work in the Atlantean epoch. Asuras are starting to work in the post-Atlantean epoch. They're the worst of the three and they mainly work into sexual life in the physical body. The many sexual aberrations today are to be ascribed to this strong influx. All forces of hindrances try to hold onto currently existing things that are still imperfect, carry them out and intensify them. Lucifers gave independence, egoity with egoism. Egoism, error and animal love are the first expressions of egoity, wisdom and highest spiritual love. We must bring about the respective transformations. The separation of the sexes took place in the third root race, it'll be overcome in the sixth root race; this must be prepared for in the sixth sub-race. Man's productive forces are becoming transformed. The productive force as such is the most sacred thing that we have, because it's directly divine. The more divine what we pull into the dirt is, the greater the sin. Later on the heart and larynx will be the productive organs in us. Just as the Word became flesh in Christ Jesus, so the flesh must become word when Christendom becomes perfected. That's the mystery of the Holy Grail, the holy love lance, the fertilizing sunlight that'll unite with Eva again. Rosicrucians' occult brotherhood is the seminary in which a human material must be educated for the coming age. A particularly bright light must always arise in especially dark times. Christ was born in the Oriphiel age. When Oriphiel rules again the spiritual light that was brought by Christian Rosenkreutz and is now being spread must have generated a host of clairvoyant men who are pioneers working consciously towards a goal. This will produce a separation into good and evil races. The fifth root race will perish through evil. Good and evil are still relatively undifferentiated and it's hard to see who's evil or good behind the flesh. When the forces of the masters and of the men who join them with their whole strength and will, and when the forces of the Gods of hindrances, Mammon, Satan, Asuras and their human followers intervene ever more mightily into human life and earth evolution, then good will develop into a divine good, and evil into a terrible Antichrist. Then every one of us needs world helpers and all the strength that he can only gain through the overcoming of suffering and evil. It's the aim of Theosophy and Rosicrucianism to summon men to this battle via such knowledge and to give them peace in the battle.

Occult training leads a man to freedom. He becomes the master of various beings who continually go in and out of his bodies by becoming their companion. These are phantoms in the physical body, ghosts in the etheric body, demons in the astral body and spirits in the ego. To learn to rule them a man must form a firm framework in the etheric body, just as there's a skeleton in the physical body. This framework for the etheric body is a pentagram with thinking in the head point, feeling in the arms and willing in the legs. One must also form a framework for the astral body, namely a hexagram with the head and heart points, two ears and two arms.

To arrive at this one must apply the following four principles: Learn to be silent and you'll get power; give up power and you'll get will; give up will and you'll get feeling; give up feeling and you'll get knowledge.

These are four stages to which a man ascends. Every suppression gives a certain power. If a man knows the spirits and beings who continuously rule and enslave him he no longer needs to be their slave. The first thing that a pupil must learn and do is pay attention to himself.

The mood of one's soul before and after an esoteric class must be quite different. It's not at all important whether a soul always remembers what it experienced in an esoteric class, but it must have the feeling that it took something with it. Just as one knows one's name, so one must bear what one received in an esoteric class in one's soul. One knows one's name when one is asked for it, even if one doesn't always repeat it to oneself. Likewise the stream of esoteric life must always rest in one's soul. Then esoteric life will deepen our soul ever more, and that's necessary for the coming time.

Our whole civilization has its origin in the spiritual world. That's where plans are made that govern our life on the physical plane. Down here we only see how one event after another takes place according to physical laws, but the great spiritual causes are hidden from us. It's events on higher planes of our existence that bring about physical events. Let's make this quite clear through an example.

An especially important event took place on the astral plane in November 1879. Since then esoteric life has taken on a quite different direction. The esoteric stream that lived in mankind since the 14^th century was replaced by a new one. Previously all occult life took place very quietly and hidden from the outer world under the direction of the archangel Gabriel (“annunciation”).

Something quite similar to a birth took place on the astral plane in 1879. What had slowly ripened since the 14^th century could now be carried into the world in a freer way, even though only for a few people. For Gabriel's rule was followed by that of the archangel Michael. He's the radiant sun that lets esoteric wisdom shine out into a small host of people. Materialism is included in the divine plan of creation and it has a purpose in the whole world. But the time has now come for the esoteric sun to shine brightly under Michael's radiant direction. For materialism's dark forces are increasing.

Michael's radiant rule will be followed by a dark, terrible age that starts about 2300. Together with Michael, a dark God has begun his rule—the God Mammon. For occultism Mammon isn't just the God of money. He's the leader of all base, black forces. And his hosts attack men's bodies and souls to corrode and ruin them. There's a lot of talk about bacteria today, and they influence a lot of things. In future they'll increase in a terrifying way, and many human bodies will waste away from terrible diseases and plagues. The brand of sin will be stamped on men's bodies for all to see. Another archangel—Oriphiel—will rule then. He must come to shake men up to their true vocation through terrible tortures. So that this can happen in the right way a small group of people must be prepared today to spread esoteric life in the black age 400–600 years from now.

One under Michael's rule who feels the urge to participate in spiritual life is called upon to serve archangel Michael and to learn under him so that someday he'll be mature enough to also serve the terrible Oriphiel in the right way. A sacrifice is demanded from those who want to dedicate themselves to a higher life. One should only want to receive spiritual life and experience an awakening if one later wants to use this to put oneself, one's will and everything one has in the service of mankind only.

In four to six centuries the small group of men who are being prepared today will serve the God Oriphiel so that mankind can be saved. If in that age men wanted to be spiritual leaders who hadn't been prepared to stand fast in all storms and to resist Mammon's hosts, they wouldn't be able to serve the God Oriphiel in the right way, and mankind would not be lifted out of their misery. So in order to do it we must work very earnestly now to fulfill our tasks then.

But when dark powers rage most terribly, the brightest light also shines. Oriphiel has ruled before. That was the time when Christ appeared on earth. Bad powers of degeneration and decadence were ruling everywhere on earth then. And the human race could only be shaken higher by terrible means. Oriphiel is called the archangel of wrath, who purifies mankind with a strong hand.

The story in the Bible where Christ swings a scourge to chase the money changers out of the temple has a deep meaning. Back when things were darkest on earth, Christ appeared as the savior of mankind. Oriphiel's reign ended 109 years after Christ's appearance, and he was replaced by Anael. Then came Zachariel, then Raphael; Samael ruled during the Renaissance and Gabriel from the 16^th century until 1879. Then Michael began to rule, and circa 2300 Oriphiel, the terrible archangel of wrath, will be ruling things. And as once before, spiritual light will shine into darkness brightly and radiantly. Christ will appear again on earth, although in a different form than before. We're called upon to receive him and to serve him.

When you, my sisters and brothers, let the spiritual life that streams into your soul live in you so that it reverberates in your meditations, you then have the right fruit. You should let what's received echo in your meditations. While you do that the spiritual powers of the world stream into you. The world is always flowed through by spiritual streams that proceed from the great masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings. The masters continuously pour streams of love and wisdom over humanity, but men's souls aren't always ready and open to receive them. But meditation words are magic words that open soul portals so that divine life can move in. That's why one shouldn't speculate with one's intellect about meditation words, but should open the soul for forces that are higher than merely intellectual ones. If one speculates about them with one's intellect then only forces that are already in one become active. But higher forces are supposed to awaken. One shouldn't want to solve riddles in one's meditation words, one should let them solve riddles, for they're much wiser than the intellect can ever be. That's why one should let them work on one and take in what they permit to flow into one's soul, let them live completely in one's soul.

Meditation words were born from the laws of the spiritual world and didn't arise through speculation. Something special lives in every vowel. Each of the vowels has a different sound value. And just as the soul feels the effect of sounds, so it should devote itself to the pictures that the words mediate to it. In meditation one should try to think as concretely as possible, and to be as far away as possible from abstract ideation.

Let's take a meditation formula that most of you know. In the first line:

Now one tries to permeate soft moonlight completely with one's love, to pour it into oneself, so that the mild light begins to radiate through the warmth of one's love, and in the flood of rays one feels the Godhead glowing in one's soul. In the following words:

But it's not only the pictures that live in the soul during meditation that draw us towards the divine and open the soul's portals. A deep wisdom and a high divine life has also been placed into the vowels. It makes a difference whether this or that vowel resounds in the soul. Let's take the vowel i. This always expresses a centralizing, a striving toward the center. The a means something quite different. It's an expression of an inner worship of the divine. The i strives towards the center of the universe, whereas the a(h) remains distant and bows before the Holiest in devotion. So if we look at our formula:

This is just one way of understanding the formula, and one small part of the deep wisdom that rests in it. It would be confusing if I wanted to tell you all the deep secrets that are hidden in it. There's no letter and no sign in it that doesn't have a deep, deep meaning. That's the way the divine word of creation resounded when it once let the universe arise. You once heard it sounding, but your souls weren't aware of it yet. At that time you descended from the spirit, and you'll go back there in full consciousness. Born out of the spirit, living in an earthly body, you'll return to the divine spirit of the world through the power of the spirit.

If it was our last esoteric lesson * the great laws of spiritual life revealed in the course of human development, they were the great spiritual powers that guide everything that happens on the physical plan. And which replace each other in their effectiveness, today we want to speak in a somewhat more intimate way of the laws of spiritual life, as it takes place within man himself.

The one in an occult training course is, in a sense, a waiter, a seeker. He is waiting for a new world to uncover him one day except for the one he has otherwise perceived. He is waiting for one day to say to himself, "I see a new world;" I will be able to say to himself; "I will be able to do so." Between all the things I have been able to perceive in the room so far, I see a fullness of spiritual beings that were previously hidden from me. -To make this quite clear to you, you must call the seven states of consciousness that man goes through in the course of his development before the soul. The first state of consciousness that man underwent was a dull, dawny degree of consciousness in which man felt one with the cosmos; We call Saturndasein this state. In the soldon, the level of consciousness decreased, but it became all the brighter for it. When man lived through the man's being, his consciousness was similar to what we experience as the last remnant in our dreams, it was a dull image consciousness. Here on earth we have the bright awareness of the day, which will remain when man rises again to the consciousness of images on Jupiter, so that we then have a bright consciousness of images there. Be. Even two higher states, the inspired and intuitive state of consciousness, will continue to rise to two higher states, the person. So our bright awareness of the day stands in the middle of the dull image consciousness of the moon and the bright image consciousness of Jupiter. And what the esoteric is waiting for to reveal itself to him one day is Jupiter consciousness. It will reach each of you once, at one earlier, at the other later, that depends on your abilities, on the degree of inner maturity.

Now, however, the consciousness of Jupiter in its first germs is already present in every human being. In a very delicate way, the future consciousness is already indicated, man is only unable to interpret it. This is precisely the esoteric life to a large extent that the disciple learns the subtle processes in himself and in his surroundings.

One still the old moon consciousness, in the other the new consciousness of Jupiter is already there, are the feeling of shame and the feeling of fear. In the feeling of shame, where the blood is pushed towards the periphery of the body, there is still one last remnant of the moon consciousness, and in the Feeling of fear, where the blood flows after the heart to find a fixed center, is annoedly announced by Jupiter consciousness. So normal daytime consciousness strikes out after two sides.

Shame---------Standard----------Feeling of anxiety

When we talk about Anything Feeling shame and the pubic blush rising in our faces, we experience something reminiscent of being a moon. Imagine a Modem Man. He could not yet «I» to say to himself, but lived in a dull, dawning image consciousness, embedded in astric forces and Beings with which he felt one and in harmony. Think of it, my sisters and brothers, one day with such a Modem Man the feeling suddenly dawns: I am a «I». I am different from the others, I am an independent being, and all the other beings in my environment look at me. -The whole lunar man would have glowed through from top to bottom a very enormous feeling of shame, he would have disappeared, trying to go down with shame, when he could have felt such a premature feeling of self. So we, my sisters and brothers, too, when a sense of shame arrives, would like to disappear, sink under the ground, dissolve our self-iness, as it were. Imagine how the ancient Modem man was embedded in harmony with the forces and Beings of his surroundings. When an enemy being approached him, he did not think, but he knew instinctively how to avoid it. He acted in a feeling that, if he had been conscious, he could have expressed as follows: I know that the legality of the world is not set up in such a way that this wild beast will now tear me apart, but the harmony of the world is such that it means it. Who must protect me from my enemy.

So directly in harmony with the forces of space felt the old moonman. And if a feeling of self had awakened in him, it would have immediately disturbed this harmony. And the feeling of me actually, as it began to penetrate man on earth, has brought him more and more into disharmony with his surroundings. The Helllistener hears the universe ring out in a mighty harmony, and when he compares the sounds that penetrate from the individual people to him, so Today this gives a discord to all people, more to one, to the other, less so, but it is a discord. And your task is to resolve this discord more and more in harmony in the course of your development. Through the insoence this discord has arisen, but wisely it was set up by the spiritual powers that dominate and guide space. If people had always remained in harmony, they would never have come to self-employment. The discord was used so that man could achieve harmony freely, on his own strength. The self-confident feeling of self had to develop first at the expense of inner harmony. When the time comes when the consciousness of Jupiter lights up, and man again comes back in harmony connection with the forces of the cosmos, then he will save his self-conscious feeling with his self-confidence into the new state of consciousness, so that man then Independent self and yet will be in harmony with space.

We have now seen that the new consciousness of Jupiter is already being announced in the feeling of fear. But whenever a future state begins to occur before time, it is premature and not quite in place. This will be clear to you by an example. If a flower, which by its very nature should bloom in August, is brought to heap in a greenhouse as early as May, it will no longer be able to unfold in August, when its actual flowering period has come; Her powers will be exhausted and she will no longer fit into the conditions she should then get into. And in May, too, as soon as you remove it from the greenhouse, it will have to go to the bottom, because it does not fit into the natural conditions of this time of year. Straadeso it is with the sense of anxiety. It is still out of place today and much less so in the future. What happens when you feel an anxiety? The blood is pressed into the center of man, into the heart, in order to form a fixed center, in order to make man strong against the outside world. It is the innermost power of the I that causes this. This power of the I, which acts on the blood, which must become more and more conscious and on Jupiter, man will then be able to consciously direct his blood after the center and become strong. The unnatural and harmful thing about it, however, today is the feeling of fear associated with this blood flow. This must not be allowed to happen in the future, only the forces of the I, without fear, must work there.

In the course of human development, the outside world around us is becoming more and more hostile. More and more you must learn to confront your inner power with the encroaching outside world. But fear must disappear. And especially for those who undergo esoteric training, it is necessary, unavoidably, to free himself from all feelings of fear and fear. Only here does fear have a certain justification, where it alerts us to stand strong, but all the unnatural feelings of fear that torment people must disappear altogether. What should happen if man still has feelings of fear and fear, and Jupiter consciousness comes to an end? There, the outside world will face man much, much more hostile and terrible than it is today. A person who does not get used to fear here will fall there from a terrible horror to the other.

In order for man to fully grow up in the face of the evil forces of the future, he must have the innermost power of his self in his hands, he must be able to regulate the blood consciously in such a way. That it makes him strong against evil, but without fear of any kind. He must then have the power that drives the blood inward in his power. But even that other ability to pour the blood from the heart to the periphery must not be lost on it. Because the state of Jupiter will in some way also mean a return to the old moon consciousness. Man will come back into harmony with the great world laws and feel at one with them. He will regain the ability to flow together with the spiritual world powers, but not unconsciously and dawnfully as on the moon, but on Jupiter he will always maintain his bright awareness of the day and self-confident I-feeling and yet live in harmony. With the forces and laws of the world. The discord will then dissolve in harmony. And in order to be able to let oneness flow into the harmony of space, he must consciously learn to let the innermost power of his self radiate from the heart. He must therefore be able to consciously centralize the inner forces of his blood when an enemy confronts him, and he must also be able to radiate them consciously. Then only he will be up to future circumstances.

The one who is striving for an inner development must begin today to gradually get these forces more and more into his power. He does it by consciously learning his breath and moving in. When man draws his breath, the forces of the I enter into activity, which bring him into connection with the forces of the cosmos, those forces that radiate from the heart to the outside. And when man spends his breath and when he abstains from the breath, those forces of the I enter into activity, which push for the center points, after the heart, and there create a fixed center there. Thus, even today, when the disciple consciously does his breathing exercises in this sense, he learns to gradually master the powers of his self. No one can believe, however, that they independently carry out such exercises if they have not yet received instructions on them. Everyone will get them at right time. But even for those who do no such exercises, it is never too early to familidate themselves with the meaning of these exercises and to gain understanding of them. They will then become all the more fruitful for him later. So you, my sisters and brothers, are also to gain more and more understanding for the subtle processes within you and in the world as a whole and gradually grow into the future periods of human development.

* See therefore december 5 1907

It's the task of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch to develop spirit self. This occurs in the Indian age through the spirit self sinking into the sentient body. In the next Persian sub-race manas permeate the sentient soul and thereby enters a new element, the soul element. The result of this is that certain demons who previously had no power over men were liberated and became hostile. Demonology arises in this race; no demons had been mentioned in previous sagas and myths. In the third sub-race manas sinks into the intellectual soul of Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians and Semites. Nothing much changes, for manas remains in the same soul element. In the 4th, the Greco-Roman sub-race spirit self develops in the consciousness soul and also remains in the soul element. Christ Jesus comes down to earth. He has the power to overcome hostile demons. The Bible says that he bound Satan for a thousand years. Our fifth sub-race follows, and now manas steps into a new element again. It begins to live in its own element: spirit self in spirit self. Thereby new hostile powers are liberated that mankind didn't know before. And namely these enemies come out of man's own breast. Men hinder each other by influencing each other more than they ever had before. A case that was investigated occultly can serve as an example.

Four people lived together. The first one was a little feeble-minded and crazy. The second one was considered to be a very talented man, he was productive and worked outwardly. The third was a so-called average man and the fourth was a really highly developed man, although he couldn't express himself. What does this look like from an occult perspective? The first one has a very weak will but is otherwise normally disposed. The apparently average number three is inwardly deranged and streams this into the first one. What's with the second talented, productive man? He really only has the talent of being able to express something. The valuable content in everything he produced was a transfer of the knowledge and forces of wisdom of the 4th one, who however didn't have the ability to express himself. But when he stammered a sentence there was much more real force in there than in the brilliant words that streamed out from number two, impressing men so much.

It's a man's task today to free himself ever more from the restrictive influences in his environment, and also not to let any such influences go out from him. A man is supposed to become increasingly free. A man is supposed to recognize and realize the eternal laws of the good out of his own free will. The spiritual world only discloses itself to an inwardly free human being. When some esoteric pupils say that they're hearing voices who are telling them what to do in their daily affairs, they're deceiving themselves. The masters are silent about everyday matters. They only speak if a man rises above his existence to the great world laws concerning human and world evolutions. A man must learn to become quite free and independent in his small circle, so that he can enter the spiritual world as a free, self-conscious being, for only thereby can he become a usable member in human evolution.

Impatience slows development of the organs one needs to see into higher worlds. For many pupils already have spiritual organs developed before they know about them or know how to use them. It's like a sleeper who hears nothing because the ego and astral body have left his ears.

When we look at a rose its red color, form, etc. has a destructive effect on our retina. The rose sensation runs along our nerves and has a destructive effect on them. The astral body throws what the retina receives into the etheric body that thereby gets many impressions from outside daily.

What tears down the physical body builds things up in the etheric body. The latter builds itself up through impressions and experiences from outside. The astral body is also destroyed by outer impressions and then the I is supposed to build things up again. The astral body is harmoniously organized when it comes to a new incarnation and is then made disharmonious. That's the occult explanation for the fact that most children cry after they're born. Their astral body feels that entry into life destroys its harmony and it feels this as pain. This harmony can only be restored by the I, through the creation of thought pictures that the I throws into the etheric body via the astral body, and that are viable. Most of the impressions that we send to our etheric body in ordinary life are worthless as far as their vitality is concerned. We should create mental images that are clear and rightly structured and therefore are able to live. For instance, what the eyes receive from outside they throw onto the etheric body, on which the picture arises. The I then works on the etheric body from the other side via the astral body by forming a thought in this that it throws on the etheric body as an impression; and the main thing is that they should be the right, viable thoughts. These viable thoughts form our spiritual organs that'll make us clairvoyant. Just as Gods created our physical body harmoniously so that each organ and limb is at the right place, so we must form our astral and etheric bodies harmoniously and make our thoughts viable. This doesn't have to take long. An experienced esoteric often only needs a minute to harmonize his impressions again. One creates such organ-forming, vital impressions in one's etheric body through meditation, by immersing oneself in certain concepts, in eternal thoughts.

For instance, it's important for every pupil to meditate on the wisdom concept. This doesn't mean that he should form a firmly outlined, intellectual definition of wisdom. He should have mobile views about it that are easy to change. Wisdom and cleverness or erudition are very different things. Some beings don't think and yet are very wise. They execute plans very wisely, although they were created by other beings. There are also men who aren't clever or erudite but are wise. Now if one meditates on the wisdom concept in the right way some wisdom will flow into us, enlightenment from higher worlds will come to us.

A second concept that one should meditate on is love. What the average person calls love is often nothing but crass egotism. True love is always productive, as when an artist devotes himself creatively to his work. The Gods created our earth out of love as they devoted themselves entirely to the creation that they sweat out of themselves, as it were. What can unite love and wisdom is that I that always works at itself, that must always be egofied anew, as Fichte puts it. One only understands Fichte's philosophy rightly if one sees that the I must always create itself anew, must know itself anew. That's also what Meister Eckhart means when he says: What good is it to be a king if one isn't aware that one is one.

All things on higher planes throw shadows onto lower ones, and so I, wisdom and love work as thinking, feeling and willing on the next, lower plane. One who thinks intentively about it will realize that the I is changed into thinking, wisdom passes over into feeling, and productive love becomes will, that is the impulse to creativity, to devotion. To complement these three points and the triangle it's good to meditate on four other points and a square. Choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic beings create an etheric body for a man when he presses towards a new incarnation. Each man gets something from each of these beings, although one or the other usually predominates. This dominant temperament becomes manifest in a man's whole behavior, especially when he is young. For instance, phlegmatic beings are enemies of the philistine, petty things that a man would get into if he got too much from the melancholic beings. Choleric beings also become manifest in fire, sanguine ones in air, phlegmatics in water and melancholic beings in earth. Our earth is the outer expression for melancholy that has become physical. If one meditates on all of this one will someday lose consciousness of the outer world and will then know what eternity is and that birth and death are only changes. The etheric body will light up from the other side through the I and we'll see the effects of the eternal, live thoughts that we imprinted on it, namely, the clairvoyant organs that we can now use. If we're impatient and try to speed up this process the I illumines the etheric body, but we only see the outer impressions that were put into it, distorted pictures that are often horrible, or else beautiful, deceptive pictures. Therefore it's advisable to use the greatest care and patience in creating well formed, proper spiritual organs, for we're creating our future, our new earth with them. The Gods meditated our present planet, and what we create should be just as full of wisdom.

Every perusal of art also strengthens clairvoyant organs. For instance, when we look at a statue it's good to feel the forms and lines in one's thoughts. This strengthens our creative capacities.

Esoteric and exoteric lectures don't have to be very different as far as content goes, but one should keep in mind that the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings speak to us in an esoteric class. The important thing is in how an esoteric class is given and that we should let its effects live in our soul. Classes are given to us so that in life we like to think back to them and let them form a central core in our soul. They're complements to the exercises that an esoteric has to do.

We know that these exercises bring about colossal changes in the astral body that had previously been disordered and unstructured, although it was a harmonious whole, so that islands and pockets are created through which we begin to form organs. These astral organs are the canals through which the masters let communications from higher worlds flow into evolution to promote it. We intervene in the Gods' world order through this independent formation of astral organs, we challenge it by using forces that it had previously used for other things, and namely to protect the astral body from the effects of negative qualities.

An esoteric must try to be objective about his neighbor's qualities and be able to notice and tolerate their negative qualities without judging them. For instance, he should say: I see that this man is vain and ambitions, but at the present stage of his development these qualities are just as necessary as other, positive ones. We can compare things with a tree here. Even though the bark is the dying part of a tree-organism, it is necessary to protect the interior in which vital juices and forces circulate. Some of the forces must be used for bark formation, but not all, otherwise the tree would lignify, wither and die. But nature sees to it that the tree's inner life forces counteract this and regulate the process. That's the way things are with respect to a man's negative qualities such as ambition and vanity and their effect on the astral body, that make it look as if it had light rays in the form of needles coming out of it that become fainter and further out.

The divine world order sees to it that these needles don't go deeper into an ordinary person's astral body by sending forces out from within to the astral body's skin, like a tree towards its bark, and thereby makes these needles into an outer protective wall. Although an esoteric must be objective and lenient about these qualities in other men, he must be strict with himself and get rid of ambition and vanity. For he uses his protective forces for other things, so that his astral body wouldn't be able to prevent the needles from permeating it and eventually sickening the physical body.

Another negative quality that lazy people often have is envy. It arises in the soul because one compares one's achievements with those of other people and painfully feels their superiority This makes the astral body's substance cloudy and opaque. Divine forces counteract this in an ordinary person. Anger is another negative quality. It becomes manifest in the astral body as condensations with thorns. Since an esoteric no longer has the protective forces that other people have, he must develop others. Some people say that one should combat vanity, envy, etc. by fighting them directly. This would definitely not be the right thing for an esoteric. Fighting ambition and vanity would get him too involved with himself, and that would just worsen these errors. Instead, he should think about man's seven-fold nature and his various bodies intensively. If one does this every time that one especially feels these qualities, one will notice that they eventually disappear The cure for envy is to meditate on beauty in art and nature in some particular form that shouldn't have any thing to do with the envied person. If we occupy ourselves with something beautiful whenever we feel envy, it will gradually disappear. Some people get angry at city noise, but the really harmful thing there is the demons that the noise keeps in check. One must be able to live in noise without getting angry. An esoteric attains this by meditating intensively on the four sentences in Light of the Path or on other verses that were given to us. Then one will see that the noise and anger gradually disappear. Anger also has a very bad effect on an esoteric's physical body. When we transform our errors in this meditative way, we build a temple in us into which we can withdraw from noise, in which we gather forces, from which we can get strength, calm and enthusiasm. Thereby we'll feel ever more intensely that we're a big family gathered round the shining central point of the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings from which light and life flow down to us. Our goal will then float before us ever more as a shining star that nothing can darken anymore.