The Rudolf Steiner Archive

During the course of our branch of life, when we acquire the concepts of the nature of the human being and of human evolution, when we learn, for example, that the human being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an I, then we have indeed gained something over and above the knowledge that exists in the world today, but we cannot yet say that with such more or less theoretical knowledge we have acquired what 'theosophy can actually be for a human being in truth. Theosophy only becomes what it should be for the individual and for the human community when it is put into practice, when it becomes a way of life. On such occasions, when I am able to see my dear friends again, I also like to take the opportunity to draw attention to how those ideas, world and human laws that we otherwise acquire in the course of our annual lives play their great role in human life. So today we also want to do such a contemplation of the influence of Theosophy on life.

Sometimes the question arises, especially for those who know little about Theosophy: Yes, there is talk of facts and truths of a supersensible nature, but how can a person who has not yet become clairvoyant talk much about these spiritual worlds, how can he know something about these worlds, except that these things are told to him? This is a very common prejudice, but it is quite unfounded. Without being clairvoyant, one cannot see the astral body of a person, for example, but what happens in this astral body can be experienced in one's own existence, and in this respect 'Theosophy is extremely effective.

I will give an example of a case where a person can experience having an astral body. You know that in everyday life people are accustomed to doing many things without thinking about them, and that they are also accustomed to doing many things that are not at all in their own interest. Consider how much people do from morning till night without thinking, without really thinking about it, without being present with their thoughts; how much people do in such a way that afterwards they say, “I do not entirely agree with what I did.” Can we not say then that we do something that we only partially consider, only partially accompany with thoughts? In particular, our inclinations underlie those habits that we have taken on from the outside and that we would not have if we had educated ourselves.

Thus, life viewed in a materialistic sense appears as if it does not matter whether we do things that we agree with or not, things that we can justify ourselves to others for or not. For the clairvoyant eye it is not so. For the clairvoyant eye it turns out that with every deed, with every action, the part that is not so that we could morally justify ourselves with regard to it makes an impression on our astral body. Such an action has a kind of setback effect on our astral body. And so one can say of such a person: He has so many cracks, so many pits in his astral body, because he does many such things that, if he thought about them, he would not morally justify.

I am not thinking here of professional matters, but of habitual actions. Every such impact affects the astral body and because it no longer disappears as it is, it continues to affect the etheric body, leaving an imprint like a seal and remains there, so that the person walks around with seal imprints in his etheric body. Up to this point, a person who is not clairvoyant can say that he cannot know this; but what happens here is experienced by the person. In a certain way, these things remain present, actually throughout the whole of the following life, and now have an effect on the person again, so that he sometimes says: If only I didn't remember the whole of my life! — Or he shows a sullenness to all those around him, and this grumpy nature has an effect on his health. It is extremely important to be clear about such things, because it often happens, for example in our thirty-seventh year, that something occurs that makes us inwardly grumpy, upset, melancholy, without any external cause, and this then has a damaging effect on our health, destroys our digestive system and so on. In the twentieth year, the reason may have been laid that the impression of the astral on the etheric body has been effected.

So we can say: only a clairvoyant can see what is in the astral body, but a person experiences in life what becomes of it. Many a person would not go around sullen, with a certain helplessness of soul and a shattered physical system, if people would consider that what does not immediately become effective as a result of our actions in the visible world enters into our invisible part and then later becomes visible. A person who says, “I will observe whether what the clairvoyant says is correct,” can see and feel that what the clairvoyants say is true in this way.

Let us assume the opposite case, that man can consider more, think further, than is reflected in his actions. In this case, everyone is an idealist. He knows that not all ideals can be realized, but only some of them. If we have great ideas, we must be content that we can only realize a part of them. If we are capable of thinking far beyond what life allows us, this also has an effect on the astral body, but differently, so that the person is imbued with healthy powers, making him strong, inwardly firm and calm. If, for example, a person was an idealist around the age of twenty and did not listen to the materialists, if he retained faith and trust in ideals, then this is shown by the fact that at a later age he does not get worked up by every little accident, nor by being unwell, that he stands firm and lets things pass him by more than is the case with others.

What gives us strength and peace are the thoughts we have that go beyond what life allows us to realize in terms of ideals. Doctors are already officially aware of this, but they don't know how to really enable people to have positive thoughts about things that go beyond everyday life to a fairly large extent.

Of course there are popular writings that are praised as beneficial for mental health. They tell you that you have to have strength, inner peace, steadiness, not to stray with your thoughts, and the like. For some, such writings on mental health are a very good start. But you won't get very far with them if you want real nourishment for your soul. Such writings by Duboc, Ralph Waldo Trine and so on are quite good for a start. Compared to the real requirements of mental health, they are as if we were asking: How do we have to live in a physical way to be healthy? — and then get the answer: Then you have to eat food that is beneficial to your health, food whose substances can easily be absorbed into your organism. Quite right! But anyone who seriously wants to get to the bottom of the matter will ask: What kind of food is that? Please tell me in more detail what I should be eating!

Such writings, which relate to mental health in the same way as these rules relate to physical health, may be quite good for the beginning, but for the further course of mental searching, not much can be done with them. In contrast, spiritual science gives us thoughts that are formulated in the most precise way, very definite thoughts about how man has developed in every age, how he is developing in the present. This is revealed to us more and more from the theosophical wisdom, so that we can say: spiritual science gives us many opportunities to go far beyond with our thoughts what we can realize. Therefore, it is Theosophy that makes us strong people in our souls, who, when something happens in our environment that threatens to upset us, can draw from within something that gives us balance.

It is not important whether something that happens in our environment reaches our ears so that we are disturbed, but rather whether we take an interest in it and turn our attention to the process. This applies not only to external things, but also to our inner state, in which we sometimes go through the world elated and sometimes saddened to death, thereby undermining our moral and physical health. There are many painful conditions of the soul that can be compared to the clattering of the mill: the miller who works in the mill no longer hears the clattering. So you can surrender to any such pain, even the smallest, to hear the clattering of your own mill, so to speak, or you can turn your attention away. You can't get over it if you have an empty soul. You can only do that if you have something of a spiritual nature that you can draw from.

Let us take an example. There are two people, one of whom lives like this: in the morning he does his usual work in the office, in the afternoon he has a drink and entertains a small conversation, in the evening he has another drink and then goes to bed. If anything occurs to disturb his usual course of life, such a person will immediately be overwhelmed by it: he hears the clattering of his own mill or his own pain. For he has nothing in his soul, nothing that he can bring out to drown out the clattering.

Another person lives just as much in his daily duties, only he has many great thoughts within him, as given to us by spiritual science. These then resound from within him, and he no longer hears the clatter. It is not as if we have to exert ourselves or spend a long time to bring it out, but it comes out all by itself because we have developed strong feelings for it. Thus we will suffer less from the disturbances of life and find more and more comfort in what has accumulated in the soul through years of spiritual striving. This is a possession of a special kind, the only one that no one can take from us. What we otherwise acquire in the world, or what otherwise comes to us in the world, belongs to what can be taken from us. But what we acquire for the spirit is the only possession that can never be taken from us.

People are accustomed to saying: Death makes everything equal. – That is certainly true, but it is equally true that no situation can be imagined to which what has been said here does not apply equally. Nothing in the world can help, not whether one is rich or whether one is the descendant of a rich noble family – if one wants to attain this spiritual possession, one must travel the same path, one and the same path. Not only does death make everything equal, it is the spiritual life before which all are equal. This gives the spiritual life a far-reaching significance, for it gives rise to something that lifts us above the deceptive appearance of sense.

Someone may object: a brick can hit me and I can then become a cripple, or I can injure my brain so that I become an idiot. —But anyone who can make the treasures of Theosophy his own in such a way that he carries them in his soul knows that such an event is only a temporary condition. Even if the brain were broken, it would be no different than if we wanted to do something and the instrument broke; for example, if we wanted to hammer in a nail and the hammer broke. There is nothing we can do but pick up another hammer; and so we do with the brain. Consciousness can lose its tools, but in a new life we can rebuild them, so that we are not disturbed in our sense of eternity by the loss of this spiritual possession. It is not a matter of knowing something, but of how it penetrates our hearts, and it is able to penetrate our hearts in such a way that we keep the fruit of it and that it also leads us beyond the loss of this tool.

All this is a testimony to the fact that we can say in a certain respect: It affects our astral body, which we have just characterized. Only the clairvoyant can know how it works, but everyone experiences the consequences in their everyday life. A person who performs many actions for which he cannot morally answer, and who becomes grumpy as a result, will be particularly vulnerable to pain in difficult life situations. If, on the other hand, a person can say to himself in the face of the same incidents: They are of little consequence compared to my inner experiences, my ideals – then this certainty will have a healing effect. He will then always hold fast to that which lives in him as the eternal. When the spirit of eternity approaches us in this all-encompassing way, as it does in Theosophy, then we are secured for all situations in life.

Now, my dear friends, there are other things by which we can well convince ourselves that the spiritual that we take in, that we allow to permeate us, is intimately connected with our entire happiness in life, with our ability to cope with life. Just as a person can have good moods, so can he also be exposed to bad moods that may go through his whole life and never let him be happy, that dominate the whole inner soul structure. The spiritual researcher says: Such moods have an effect in the supersensible nature of man; in the etheric body such moods have an effect, are reflected in the physical body and affect the blood. The effect of a mood in the human etheric body is felt in the blood, and the result is that such a mood, which does not allow a person to be happy throughout his life, impairs blood circulation and makes his blood heavy. Here we have an example of how the effects of what is going on in the soul can be felt in the physical body. Even someone who is not clairvoyant can notice this and say to themselves: I suffer from my physicality. This comes from my overall mood. If I could change my overall mood, then a healing influence could be exerted on my whole constitution.

One might think that it is important for a person to free themselves from their physical body. But it is not about simply demanding that people recognize that the body is dependent on the spirit. Rather, it is about the reality that we do not have to be dependent on the body through the power of the spirit. We become independent by making it an instrument of our spirit.

Not the materialist who believes in the teachings of materialism is the worst, who believes in the doctrine of “power and matter,” but the worst is he who is dependent on power and matter, for example, when he can only live in this place in winter and only in that place in summer, making himself completely dependent on matter in order to avoid being neurasthenic. Therefore, it is not just a matter of not believing in this teaching of force and matter, but of becoming independent of matter. What kind of life is it when a person can only live in a big city in winter and only in the countryside in summer? For such a person, prayer does not help and faith does not help, because he is a materialist, he is dependent on “force and matter”.

When we allow thoughts that arise from spiritual research to take effect on us, our connection with the spiritual world becomes apparent. But we see something else as well. When we are really unhappy, in a way that would overwhelm anyone, it becomes apparent that a theosophist can cope with it. Let us assume, for example, that a person who has turned eighteen and has been living off his father now experiences the father going bankrupt. He is then forced to work. He can perceive this as misfortune. He will live with this for fifty years and become someone respectable. He can say, “Thank God this misfortune happened, otherwise I would have become a good-for-nothing.” If you are no longer in the midst of adversity, you can see the adversity as a tool for education. We must be able to say to ourselves: It is we ourselves who, through our karma, have brought this misfortune upon us because we need it in this life for our education. At least a person who can think in such terms will not grumble against the governance of the world in unhappy hours, but will recognize its wisdom. But little by little this prepares moods for us that work in a completely different way than those we have when we feel completely dependent on “force and matter”. Now we know that we depend on the spiritual guidance of the world. This is communicated to the mood, and then, through the influences on the etheric body, we withdraw from dependence on “force and matter”. Then we do not need to go to the Riviera to raise our spirits, but our spiritual possessions enable us to shape our tools in such a way that we can be independent of external influences.

In the soul health writings of Ralph Waldo Trine and others, you will not find how to achieve this mood. Pouring into the mood the wisdom of 'Theosophy' makes us independent of matter and force, opening up a source that elevates us above space and time. Then we withdraw from the power of matter and work back on the instrument of our body. In this way, we gradually acquire a practical knowledge of life through spiritual science. My dear friends, not everyone believes this right away, because very few people today, when everyone is so dependent on material and power, are inclined to see things this way. They should be convinced by experience that this is so, because experience will be able to provide them with more and more proof of life. This is the result of spiritual science in general, that it has an effect on the very ordinary external management of life.

I will substantiate what spiritual science teaches by means of examples; I will cite some of the trivialities of life. For example, the fact that we now live on the physical plane with external matter means that in certain cases we must have the ability to perceive the spirit everywhere around us in external matter. After all, matter is only an illusion, maya; everything is condensed spirit. So that we have to sense spirit in our ordinary life among the objects of matter. We must therefore be able to develop an external relationship with it, so that we are able to enter into intimate relationships with things, so to speak. There are people who wash their hands often, and there are those who rarely wash their hands. Now, in a certain respect, there is an enormous difference between the one and the other. Man is permeated by the supersensible in a very different way in the various parts of his body. For example, the chest and thighs are not permeated by the etheric body in the same way as the hands. Powerful rays of the etheric body emanate from the fingers. Because this is the case with the hands, we can develop a wonderfully intimate relationship with the outer world through them. People who wash their hands often have a more delicate relationship with their surroundings, are more delicately receptive to them, because the spirit materialized in the blood has the effect of making the human being more sensitive in his hands. Pachyderms, as they are called, in relation to the outer world, do not often wash their hands. You see how little such robust people are open to the peculiarities of their fellow human beings, while those who wash their hands more often enter into a more intimate relationship with their environment. If a person were to try to achieve the same thing in another place, for example on the shoulders, it would be shown that if he were to wash them as much, he would become neurasthenic. What is healthy for the hands is not healthy for the shoulders. The human being is organized in such a way that he is able to enter into this intimate relationship with the environment through the hands.

It would also be detrimental if a person were inclined to wash their face just as often. Treating the face in this way would not be beneficial to health. With other parts of the human body, the situation is quite different. People who are not properly trained in spiritual science, materialistically thinking doctors, for example, do not notice the difference and recommend cold washes to children; such things are fanatically pursued. It should be known that nothing is more mischievously done! This is the basis for a great deal of neurasthenia, that one's health is impaired in such an abstruse way. The hands can tolerate it, but the rest of the body becomes receptive to material things as a result. There you see the effect of materialism. I am speaking here of the rule. Where it is a matter of a temporary cure, the matter is different.

Not only do even the youngest children try to wash it off in a systematic way – they are tormented every morning – but people do not stop there. They walk around in the sun to take light baths, to let the material of the external world take effect on them. We should be glad that we are able to work from the inner center outwards and should not make ourselves more and more dependent on the material. This exposure of oneself with all parts is the same as when the miller would do anything to hear the clatter of his mill all the time and was not satisfied that he no longer hears it. Of course, the cases where it is a temporary cure are to be excluded. If this is practised in youth, then man is thereby made to allow the slightest influence to take effect in his organism. He hardens himself, that is, he hardens himself in such a way that he is finally quite “hardened” and no longer feels any external influences.*)

Such insights do not simply arise from ordinary life practice – that is not possible. This can only be judged when one knows the whole person. And that man is a complicated being, and that with regard to his individual members the most diverse relationships exist between the physical, etheric and astral bodies and so on, you can see that from very simple things. Today it may have seemed a little funny to you what was said in connection with the fact that man has a very special relationship with his astral and etheric bodies to the physical body. On the other hand, you may have heard that the distance or illness of a particular organ brings a person close to a condition that resembles idiocy. But if you now give such a person the thyroid juice of a sheep, for example, he will again become a thinking person instead of an idiot. This is a well-known fact. These facts are only correctly judged by the

#\ Oioha Aazii HNote on page DAR. 111 Spiritual Science. Why is that so? Yes, you see, that is so because not only in the thyroid gland, but also in the far greater number of glandular organs, there are tools that are built from the etheric body. We need our tools in the physical world to get things done. As we need a hammer to drive in a nail, so we need the tools for what they are given to us. If they are removed, we no longer have the tool. But that is no proof that the ability to replace their effect. But we must know that such an effect is only possible if the etheric body comes into function.

In the case of organs related to the astral body, we cannot possibly change anything in the organs by replacing the secretion. I have seen that people who had a defective brain ate sheep brains or the like without any improvement in their intellect, because the brain is an organ related to the astral body. There we see how spiritual science also sheds light on these things. You cannot understand people if you cannot go into these higher, supersensible aspects of people, and then you basically don't know at all what comes into consideration.

When you read medical books today, it is described as if a person loses their mind through illness or the absence of the thyroid gland. No, he only loses interest, becomes dull and does not apply his mind. You don't become stupid because you can't think. If you have no interest, your mind remains intact. What is lost is the living interest that a person takes in things, the interest to draw attention to things. A person who has no interest pays no attention to anything because he lacks the tool. We don't give him a brain with a thyroid gland, but we do give him a tool for taking a lively interest in the things of the world. People are judged quite wrongly when they know nothing at all about the transcendental world, and a great deal of what is taught in our scientific and popular books is at this level. If you read that a person becomes cleverer through the loss of the thyroid glands and through eating thyroidin, then it is not true. It is true that his attention is awakened. Everywhere it can be seen from the consequences: what is said from clairvoyant research is not fantastic. Even if not everyone can see it, one can prove that what the clairvoyants see is there. It is everywhere. I recommend that you always remember the sentence: If you cannot see for yourself what is being investigated in clairvoyant research, you can experience it in the world. - In this way you can indirectly obtain evidence for what is communicated in spiritual science.

I have now told you a number of things about the way in which the human astral body can show its influence in relation to life. I have told you how the ether body affects life. I would now also like to say a few words about the ego, from which you can build a bridge from theosophical theory to the reality of life. You are all familiar with a widespread phenomenon in life that is described in two words because it manifests itself in two ways: shedding tears and being sad.

What does it mean in human life to feel sadness caused from outside, which manifests physically in tears, or to have an inner soul experience that also manifests in tears? Man has something within him by which he can not only experience what is going on in his own body, but can also, in his ordinary, normal consciousness, experience and empathize with what is going on in his environment. We are then involved in our surroundings when we are sad about this or that loss, sad to the point of crying. What does that prove? That we can take into ourselves what lives in our surroundings and carry it within ourselves in our hearts. It means that we have an I within us that is mysteriously and magically connected to our entire environment. Through this magical connection of people with what does not live in them, a connection with the outside world is experienced. The ego can be in itself in two ways: firstly, in an egotistical way; then it comes down in particular to us gaining relief from pain through tears. Because we do not want to have any [true] part. Secondly, however, sadness can also be fully justified because we pour something that lives in our environment into ourselves. That is why tears mean the most to a person when he can be sad about things that concern him as little as possible. There are people who cry out of mere selfishness because they cannot bear what is happening in their lives or cannot bear their own loss. Of course, there are also people who cry over things that do not concern them, so that the world says: he howls like a dog over a passage in a novel or in a drama. And this possibility can create a certain splendor in him, which may also emanate from his grief to all other tears and other sadness, because the more we are moved by everything else, the greater is our sadness. And in his grief, man is in a sense led to his ego in a non-selfish way. What has no ego cannot cry or be sad. The claim that animals also cry is therefore basically nonsense. It is much more correct that animals do not cry and cannot be sad like humans. A dog only seems sad because it no longer receives everything it got when its master was still around. Psychologists are right when they say that animals can only howl, but humans can weep. For crying and sadness can be the strongest proof that the deepening of the self is within us and that through this we come into contact with what is around us. Therefore, there is a condensation of our self, which then comes out in tears. Because this is so, we can say that, basically, crying and tears are something that is connected with the innermost essence of human nature.

When a person rediscovers their inner stability, the best way for them to express this state is to give way to tears. The words spoken by Faust in 'Faust' after he returns from attempting suicide and removes the poison cup from his mouth are spoken from the depths of his soul: “The tear welled up, the earth has me again!” It is the 'I' that speaks at this moment. This is expressed in this word: “The tear wells up, the earth has me again.

Therefore, what we experience in mourning with our surroundings is connected with the innermost being of the human being. And what is connected with the innermost being demands that we take it with the right seriousness and that we can become sad about the misery in our surroundings, but never through the merely imagined misery. All those dramas that merely stage misery can only produce unnatural emotions. We can only connect all the unreal misery on the stage with our human dignity if the meaning is connected with the fact that the hero, even if he falls, emerges as a victor. We can only bear the dramas that depict misery if we see the victory of good. Then it has a right to our sadness and our tears, because it so rightly sinks into our innermost being the sorrow of reality. |

It is quite different with regard to another experience of our ego, which we can call by many names. What is expressed in laughter, merriment, joy, perhaps even in jokes – in our sense of the comic – is the other way around. To laugh at a fool in reality is inhuman, but to laugh at the imagined foolishness is actually infinitely liberating. You should experience foolishness because it has a healing effect – you can even experience this good mental healing in the circus – because it is, in turn, a discovery of your own self. When we are able to laugh, we rise above the situation. We become aware of our own inner worth, and in this way we rise up. There is something tremendously healing in the burlesque jokes of the Punch and Judy show, to the comedians who commit all sorts of follies, getting entangled in all sorts of contradictions, while laughter at folly, when it is real, betrays the monster.

The ego shows itself strangely in its healthy relationship to the environment. We are inclined to weep when faced with misery, real misery, not the depicted. The opposite is true when we laugh and joke. Here we are monsters when we laugh at the follies that reside in a person as natural characteristics. But they are healthy and contribute to the healthy education of the person when we can take pleasure in the depicted burlesque and comic. For this points to the healthy ego within us.

There you see how the healthy in the environment can also be understood when we realize that we also have an ego. Now we ask: Does this also show in our materialistic humanity in relation to art? Yes, it shows very characteristically and actually. If people were really confronted with what is presented, for example, in Hauptmann's or Sudermann's dramas, how many would faint! In the presentation they can endure what in real life would plunge them into sadness and move them to intervene. This is not possible on stage. Where does such a reversal of facts come from? It comes from the fact that in our materialistic age people live mostly on the periphery, where the I does not reveal itself. Indeed, what can make us most sad is what happened as the most terrible thing in the evolution of the world in the Mystery of Golgotha, in the suffering, in the whole tragedy of Christ Jesus. And we can be most jubilant where the victory, the victory of life over death, which was directly portrayed for the realms of eternity, was won in the resurrection. No other victory exists in which the highest hallelujah is so united with the deepest sadness, all suffering in the death on Golgotha and all the glory of the Easter season in the resurrection - there is no other event in which both the deepest sadness and the highest exultation are so expressed.

Therefore, there is no deeper wisdom than that which Paul proclaimed with regard to this event: Not I, but the Christ in me! — There we see how we find the right focus to make the I in us as firm as possible, by permeating the I with what the Christ-Revelation is. When Theosophy is permeated with Christianity, it also penetrates into our I, thus giving us the greatest possible security in life, the greatest strengthening of life. For it is only through the understanding of Christ, as we attain it through spiritual science, that we get the right center of gravity within us.

If, then, Theosophy is to have such an effect, as you will also find indicated in my “Occult Science in Outline”, then an attempt is made to give something that can pour such firmness into people as is in the saying: Not I, but Christ in me! —, by which more and more the human being can be transformed, so that that consciousness of eternity can well up in us, by which we can say: What can be taken up into us cannot be taken from us.

Then we feel such a word as that uttered by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the great discoverer of Theosophy, we feel what it means, what he says: When I feel and understand my connection with the Eternal - and nothing can convey this connection to us more than Theosophy - when I feel and understand my connection with the Eternal - so says Johann Gottlieb Fichte - and if we also grasp this connection, we too stand on the earth and say with him: “I look to you, you rocks, and to you, mountains; come crashing down and bury my body except for the last speck of sunlight and destroy everything that is my physical tools - and I defy you, for you are not eternal; but I am connected to the eternal, I am eternal!

Thus speaks man, who comprehends the value of the wisdom of the Eternal. Thus speaks man, who has absorbed theosophy within himself, to his corporeal, astral, and etheric totality, for the elevation of his existence, for his incorporation into the spiritual worlds, of which he must only know that he is spirit from their Spirit. For man is not only flesh of the flesh, but is spirit of the spirit of eternity.

Theosophy teaches us that the processes in operation between death and a new birth are connected with the conditions prevailing in the Cosmos. A very significant difference has here to be considered. Changes may take place within us during physical existence, but not, in the same sense, during the period between death and a new birth. Suppose, for example, between birth and death we have been related in some way to a human being, or have shared experiences with a friend. And now, after his death, we have learnt from him something that was not a common experience between us on the Earth. How is a relationship established after death? How can our feelings towards him give expression to sympathy or antipathy? When we ourselves have passed through the gate of death and are followed, later on, by someone with whom we had a certain relationship in physical life, this must necessarily remain unchanged for a long time after death; for after death we cannot add anything new to the old relationship. After passing into the spiritual world we are still subject to our own, individual karma. The time when this karma can be transformed comes only in a new life and can only be adjusted or fully discharged in a new incarnation. An individual among the Dead cannot, in spiritual existence, work upon the other Dead in such a way as to change their life. But it is possible for a man still living on the Earth to have an effect upon one who has passed through death. Take the following case as an example.—Two human beings who love one another have different attitudes to Theosophy: one of them loves and the other hates it; hence there is a spirit of opposition between them.

If the human being is able to speak of the freedom of his will, this is because the “I”-consciousness takes far deeper paths than does the astral consciousness; in the depths of soul, therefore, a man often yearns for what, in his conscious life, he hates. How can we be of help to one of the Dead? We must be united with him by a spiritual bond. We can help, for example, by quietly reading to him; uniting ourselves with him inwardly and lovingly, we can take him with us through a sequence of thoughts, we can send ideas and imaginations up to him in the higher worlds. Such services of friendship are always helpful. Reading in this way is of benefit, although in earthly life the man may have been too indifferent, too easy-going; we can lighten his sufferings even when there was no evidence in his life that he longed for these things. Much blessing is often sent from the physical plane into the spiritual worlds, in spite of the great gulf which separates the life between birth and death from the life between death and a new birth. Many living people will feel that they are intimately connected with the Dead; they will also be conscious that they help the Dead. The first souls with whom we come into contact after death are those with whom we had already formed close ties on the Earth, not those who were unknown to us on Earth. A direct continuation of the earthly life takes place after death. The soul is inside whatever it perceives, fills it through and through.

During the period of Kamaloca, the ether-form of man expands as far as the orbit of the Moon. All human beings occupy the same space; they are not “in each other's way” during the Kamaloca-period. After this period of Moon-existence we inhabit the Mercury sphere; then the Venus-sphere, then the Sun-sphere; here we live within a sphere of higher spirituality, for the astral elements of the Moon-sphere have been overcome. Life in each of the planetary spheres depends upon the mood and quality of soul acquired during the Moon-period; the life of those who have unfolded the quality of moral fellow-feeling differs from the life of those who are egoists. The former open themselves to humanity. Above all we shall be able to form a connection with those with whom we were together in earthly life. The nature of these relationships will depend upon whether we have been a comfort or a source of trouble to the others. A man of inferior morality will become a spiritual hermit; a truly moral man, on the contrary, a sociable inhabitant of the Mercury-sphere.

During the following Venus condition, we expand to the outermost circumference of the Venus-sphere. A man who in earthly life had no religious feelings, who had received into himself nothing of the Eternal, the Divine, who during the Mercury-period had no bonds with other human souls, will become a hermit even during the Venus-period; but there too he is a sociable being if, during the Mercury-period he was together with other kindred spirits and warm mutual relationships existed between them. Atheists become hermits in the Venus-period; monists are condemned to live in the prison-house of their own souls, so that the one is shut off from the other. A hermit has a dull, torpid kind of consciousness from which other human souls are excluded. A sociable being has a bright, clear consciousness which, finds its way into the other being. Man ascends higher and higher into the world of the stars; but the more dimly he lives through these regions, the more rapidly he skims through the ages and therefore returns the more quickly to reincarnation—this applies, for example, to those who were criminals or idiots in their previous existence. On the other hand, the clearer consciousness has been in the world of the stars, the more slowly does the soul return to incarnation. Man must have been fully conscious out in the Cosmos if he is to be capable of building and shaping the physical brain of his subsequent life.—The condition of existence in which he becomes an inhabitant of the Sun-sphere sets in about a century after death. During this Sun-period it is possible to acquire a certain relationship to all human beings. If a man has consciously received the Christ Impulse, the way to all other human beings is open for him. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, union can be achieved with the Christ Impulse, the supreme spiritual Power. But a man who has not received the Christ Impulse remains a hermit, even in the Sun-sphere.

When a human being with his aura is revealed to the clairvoyant during the Moon-period of existence, a seed or kernel, enclosed in a kind of auric cloud, is perceived within the vast ether-body. This aura is dark and remains so, even during the Mercury-period. During the Venus-period, one side of the auric cloud lights up; and if, as clairvoyants, we then observe the human being, we perceive that if he was a moral, religious man, he is able, from that time onwards, to have real contact with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. If he was a good and righteous man he lives in spiritual contact with higher Beings during the Venus-period; if he was an unrighteous man he cannot know or recognise these higher Beings and is thus condemned to the pain of isolation.

Before the Mystery of Golgotha, in the first epoch of post-Atlantean culture, conditions were such that the Throne of Christ was to be seen upon the Sun. Those who had been good and righteous in their lives found their way to the Christ on the plane of Sun-existence. In the age of Zarathustra, the Christ was already on His way to the Earth and could not be found on the Sun. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ has been united with the Earth. If, on the Earth, men have not received the Christ Impulse, they cannot find Christ between death and a new birth. When a man has become a Sun-dweller and has taken the Christ Impulse into himself, a multitude of facts, known as the Akasha Chronicle of the Sun, lie open before him. If, on the Earth, he had not found Christ, he cannot read the Akasha Chronicle on the Sun. We can learn to read this great script if, on the Earth, we have accepted the Mystery of Golgotha with warmth of heart—and then, on the Sun, we are able to perceive the Deeds of Christ on the Sun through the millennia. Existence today is such that we are strong enough to become Sun-dwellers.—Later on we enter the sphere of Mars, then the spheres of Jupiter and Saturn and then, finally, the world of the fixed stars. On the path of return to the Earth, the ether-body of man shrinks and shrinks in size—until it is so tiny that he can incarnate again in a new human germ-cell.

Up to the period of Sun-existence, we stand under the leadership of Christ. From the Sun-existence onwards we need a Leader whose task it is to guide us to the further realms of cosmic space. Lucifer now comes to our side. If we have fallen prey to him on the physical plane, it is bad for us; but if on the Earth we have lightly understood the Christ Impulse, then we are strong enough on the Sun to follow even Lucifer without danger. From then onwards he has charge of the inner progress of the soul, just as on this side of the Sun, Christ has had charge of our ascent. If on the Earth we have received the Christ Impulse, Christ is the Keeper of the soul on the path to the Sun. Beyond the periphery of the Sun-sphere, Lucifer leads us out into the Cosmos within the periphery of the Sun, he is the Tempter.

If during the Sun-period we have been armed with the Christ Impulse, Christ and Lucifer guide us as Brothers. Yet how differently words spoken by Christ and by Lucifer are to be understood! As a wonderful precept there are the words of Christ: “In you lives the spark of the Divine, ye are Gods.” (John 10:34). And then, Lucifer's words of temptation: “Ye shall be as Gods.” (Genesis 3:5) These are similar utterances—but, at the same time, in dire antithesis! Everything depends upon whether here, on the Earth, man stands at the side of Christ or at the side of Lucifer.

Theosophy gives us a deep and profound understanding of the world. A certain knowledge must come to us in the physical body. On the Earth we must acquire understanding of Christ and Lucifer through Theosophy—otherwise we cannot pass with consciousness into cosmic space. The time is now beginning on the Earth when men must know quite consciously whether it is Christ or Lucifer who, after death, whispers these words into the soul. In the life between death and a new birth we must unfold a true understanding of Christ in order that we shall not be condemned to wander through the Cosmos in a state of sleep.

Theosophy must be an influence, too, in little things. More and more it will become apparent whether, or not, forces of life have been acquired between death and a new birth. There will be human beings born with dried up, withered bodies, because owing to their antagonism to Theosophy they have been unable to gather life-forces from the Cosmos. Understanding of Theosophy is necessary for the sake of Earth-evolution itself! If men have opened their souls to Theosophy, the knowledge that before this life they were in a spiritual world, will bring them happiness. “The starry heavens above me the moral law within me”—this realisation alone gives the world its greatness. Man says to himself: “In the world of the stars I received the essence and content of my inner life; what I lived through in the cosmic expanse flashes up now within my soul. The existence of evil impulses in my soul is due to the fact that during my sojourn in the world of the stars I did not try to receive its forces or the Spirit-Power of Christ.” We have, indeed, yet to learn how to achieve union with the Macrocosm. Today the human being can have only a dim premonition of what happens between death and a new birth. He feels: In earthly existence I live within my soul and bear in my Spirit the forces of the starry heavens. If a man meditates deeply on this concept it will become a great and might power within him.

This evening's public lecture will discuss re-embodiment and karma, and it may be appropriate for us to choose a topic for our branch lecture that delves deeper into some questions of the law of karma and, in some respects, provides a more intimate supplement to what can only be given in general terms in the public lecture.

Karma, the great law of existence, the law of fate, can be discussed, so to speak, in the very first rudiments of spiritual science, because it is something that belongs to the most elementary things in the world view. But the more intimate questions are such that, in order to understand them, a familiarity with spiritual science is needed that can only be found if one has worked for a while in a study group and has not acquired empty theories, but what flows quite unnoticed from the spiritual teachings into the human soul: a certain kind of sensations and feelings. This is something that every spiritual aspirant soon notices: that spiritual science is something other than just another worldview, because it gives us concepts and ideas that are transformed into feelings and sensations in our hearts, and that we become different people through it, people with a completely different way of relating to our fellow human beings.

This kind of preparation is meant when we speak of a relative inner maturity, which one acquires in this way through spiritual science. We know that karma initially means the spiritual causation of a later event, a later quality or ability in a person, through a previous one. It does not matter whether this spiritual causation occurs in a life between birth and death, or whether it extends through the various earthly lives as the great law of fate for humanity, so that the causes for something happening in one life lie in a previous life or one that lies far in the past – this law, this all-encompassing law of fate, is what we call karma. If one wants to consider the details of karma, one can talk for many months and even longer, and only slowly and gradually can one grasp the things associated with it. Therefore, in a lecture one can only state the facts of the law of karma in a narrative way, and then the maturity of the spiritual seeker shows itself in that he can accept these things as facts, as results, and then reflect on them further and seek them out in life. The individual life shows the effects of karma in the most diverse ways; only the human view of life usually does not go very far. People usually observe themselves or their fellow human beings with attention for only a short period of life, because their view is not sharpened by the spiritual eye.

I would first like to discuss how little this is the case, so that you can get an idea of how the spiritual view can be developed in ordinary life. This will be done by means of a kind of personal experience. Some of you may already know that I have spent fifteen years of my life as an educator, with a wide range of educational responsibilities, including perhaps difficult ones, where problems arose that could only be solved through prolonged observation and study. It is obvious that in the course of such activities I had the opportunity to make observations, not only of the children directly under my charge, but also of their relatives, their cousins, who were always around. One sees how they grow up, and one can observe a large circle of people entering the world. Now, anyone who has followed life a little, sharpened with spiritual vision, can perceive many things in such details. For example, during the time when I was engaged in that activity, a widespread but then extremely respected medical bad habit was in vogue, which consisted of wanting to keep the children “in good shape” by giving them a small glass of red wine every day. It was fashionable at the time for doctors to have the little tykes take a glass of red wine with each meal. This prescription was conscientiously followed by the parents. Now I had the opportunity to observe such children, those who had been treated this way and those who had not. When you are in the prime of life, you can observe people who were still children when you met them in a variety of ways. The children who were treated to this wine back then are now people between the ages of twenty-six and twenty-eight.

So I have had the opportunity, in the most diverse ways, not only to look at a few years, but also to survey larger periods of time. The people who were one to three years old when I met them and are now twenty-eight years old can be divided into exactly two groups: those who were given their glass of red wine to “strengthen them for life,” and those who were not given it. The former have become people who today, in the physical sense, have to struggle terribly with their nervous system - in spiritual terms, with their astral body. They have become people who lack what is called: holding firmly to a goal in life, having backbone; while those who went without wine in their youth have become people who have backbone, who are firmly grounded, who know what they want, who don't need to go here and there for recreation when their business allows them the least, and who, because they have become fidgety people, don't get that recreation after all. The others, on the other hand, have become firmer individuals. I do not just want to point out how it is when you approach such a person again after years, but rather that life looks a little different when you look at it in terms of the connection between cause and effect, not just as far as the person's nose reaches, but also the larger and deeper connections of causes and effects.

This, too, is the highest form of observation of life when we try to observe people with regard to the qualities that are of an inner, karmic nature. Unfortunately, it is a fact that people do not usually connect the beginning of a person's life with its end. People do observe children, but who has the patience, where they have the opportunity to do so, to observe what follows the way a person's soul life was in the first childhood years and then again what life is like when the course of life is coming to an end? And yet there is a very definite karmic connection between the beginning and the end of life. Certain things that occur at the end of life or in the second half of life are based on very specific causes in the early years or youth of life.

Let us take a specific case, for example a person who, in early youth, is angry, hot-tempered, and easily inclined to become angry about something that happens in his or her environment. This anger, and especially the sudden anger that occurs in children, can take on two forms. It can be, so to speak, merely what is called a bad habit, which in a sense is merely an outburst, a rage-like outburst of excessive selfishness. But it can also be something else. One must learn, especially as an educator, to distinguish these two types from each other. A child's outburst of anger can also be what we encounter when a child sees an injustice happening around him. A child does not yet have the power of judgment, cannot yet say to himself with his mind what is happening. If one were to try to explain that what is happening is not wrong, one would soon become convinced that the child cannot yet understand this. Therefore, it is grounded in the world order, in the spiritual guidance of the world, that what later appears as the power of judgment comes to light in childhood in the form of affects, emotions. The child cannot yet understand what is happening, but it becomes angry. This anger, this affect is a preceding soul proclamation of what later is the power of judgment. These two types of anger and irascibility must be clearly distinguished from each other. Anger in the first case must be treated in such a way that the child lives out this anger as much as possible by really feeling the effects of this anger in the right way and also the wrong of the anger. For if, for instance, out of love, one always does for the child the things by which it gets the fulfillment of its will, then anger misses its effect. Anger always has an effect in the soul. Where anger arises in the soul and is not resolved by achieving what it strives for, it strikes back into the inner being. And that is good. That is why popular language, which often has a keen sense for such things, calls anger “poison” in various places where the German language is spoken. To be angry is to poison oneself. This word is truly taken from the facts of mental life. Anger enters the soul, and through the effect of anger within, when it strikes back, the excess egoism is pushed out. So even anger has its good. It is an educator of the human being, it works like a poison that dampens excessive selfishness.

Something quite different is the anger that arises when a child sees an injustice. This anger is a judgment in advance. It is justified. In this case, one must not merely try to punish – by punishing one would merely drive the anger back inside – but one must try to use this emotion in the child to gradually teach him understanding, to teach him the power of judgment. This anger can be overcome by developing the power of judgment. If a child becomes angry when witnessing an injustice, then the following would happen: The child would be introduced to a kind of understanding that the injustice is done by human nature; depending on his maturity, he would be given an explanation of what happened. Then such anger will also have its right effect. It will prepare the child to judge the world, because it is a harbinger of the power of judgment. This is said to draw attention to the fact that man is not always unjustifiably angry. Anger has its value for the development of man. Man must purify himself, he must overcome anger. Anger is something that has a beneficial effect when it is overcome. Man could never ascend to perfection without overcoming anger.

Now one might ask: Why is there anger in the world government? There is anger because one becomes strong by overcoming it; one becomes more powerful over oneself by overcoming it. If you observe someone who had that noble anger in their youth, in the years when idealism arises, when something filled them with anger because they were not yet able to see the deeper connections, then in their later years, you can see that in old age the good effect of this arises. On the other hand, anyone who in youth was unable to overcome anger, to purify himself, to become master of his passions, will not easily attain in later years that mild activity which touches so pleasantly. For mildness is precisely the effect of anger overcome. Mildness in old age is the effect of anger overcome in youth.

A quite different effect is produced by the soul quality of devotion, which likewise makes its appearance in youth. It consists in man's acquiring a feeling for what he is not yet able to comprehend. Wrath is a rejection of what we cannot yet understand; devotion is a looking up to what we cannot yet comprehend, an attitude of respect for what we are not yet equal to. No one can come to knowledge who cannot worship that which is above him in devotion. Devotion is the best path to knowledge. Men would never come to knowledge if they had not first worshipped from the dark background those spiritual powers that stand above them. Devotion is a force that leads up to what one wants to achieve. Therefore it is basically necessary that devotion be developed. The person who, in later life, can look back on many moments of devotion will look back on them with bliss. If it has occurred to you that in your early childhood you have heard your family talk about a family member who is said to be very revered, and if as a child you have also taken this feeling in, and the day approaches when you can see this personality for the first time – if you then have a holy awe to press the latch of the door behind which the revered person is to appear, that too is a very devout feeling, and we will have much of it in later life if we have had several such moods in our youth.

Devotion is the reason, the karmic cause of the power of blessing in later life, in the second half of life. That power, which flows out and enables us to be a comforter to others, is gained through nothing other than a devotional mood in youth. Look around you, wherever there is a person who comes to others who are sad, who then only needs to be there to comfort the sad with his mere presence, to be their comforter, to spread active love - you will find: the karmic cause for this active power lies in those devotional moods of youth. The power that is poured into the soul of the growing person as devotion is something permanent in him; it runs like a current through the soul and comes to light as a blessing power at a later age. We could consider many cases where the law of karma is already working distinctly between birth and death.

Let us now take a closer look at the law of karma in a specific case in a particular life. Suppose a young person had been studying. At the age of eighteen, the father would have gone bankrupt. The young person would therefore have to stop studying, he would be torn out of the profession for which he had been prepared; he would have to take a different career path. Now, of course, all professions are equal; we are only interested in the facts of the change of profession. So the young man had to become a merchant. Now, if you are not a student of life, you will say: Well, the event happened, and you will observe what happened before and what happened after. But only someone who really observes life with a keen eye will discover a connection between what came before and what came after. If the young man is now in the other profession and everything goes normally – I will not say that it always goes normally, but it can go normally – we will be able to see something different in the later years of life. At first, the profession is new to him. He grasps what is relevant to him. But already in the twenty-first year it will become apparent that something is different about this man compared to a man who has been prepared for the commercial profession from the very beginning: in the twenty-first year it already becomes apparent that he has less interest in what is incumbent upon him in his profession. Certain feelings arise in his soul and separate him from what he should be doing, so that he cannot do what is demanded of him with true satisfaction. If one now investigates the cause of this, one will perceive the following: When a particular point is reached where the course of life is changed, a life knot, for example when a change of occupation occurs, then according to the law of karma little is noticeable in the first few years. But then it comes, so that in the twenty-first year feelings, sensations, moods assert themselves, which can be explained from what comes from the preparations for the other profession in the eighteenth year, feelings that he has taken up but not led to realization. At first he suppressed them, but then they asserted themselves to such an extent that he no longer felt satisfied with his new profession. What was placed in him three years before the change of career will emerge three years after that change in such a way that the person concerned can no longer find the right satisfaction. And from there, things can happen in such a way that in the twenty-second year, the fourteenth year of life is repeated, and in the twenty-third year, the thirteenth. It can also turn out differently because everything in life intersects. In the twenty-third year, for example, he can start a household; interests arise that intersect with the past ones and make them run differently. But the law is still valid. Even when a new interest arises, the earlier interests are still there, having been deflected. From such an example you can see the course of the life process as it presents itself to spiritual science. It is the least that one can gain all kinds of insights through spiritual science; but the most important thing is that through it one can penetrate into the life process. Let us suppose – I never relate cases that have not occurred; one must acquire the habit of never inventing anything, but always choosing cases that have actually occurred – so a mother comes to me who has to lead her only son into another profession because his father has been taken from him. In today's world, the right thing is hardly likely to happen, because true observation of life can hardly be reconciled with today's view of life. If such a mother becomes acquainted with spiritual science, she learns to reckon with the law of karma and can become a good friend of the young man who is to be guided through the years of such a career change. This was the case some time ago. A mother came to me and said, “What is my best life's work?” I said she should use the next few years to gain her son's trust. Then she could use spiritual science to educate his mind so that she could help him when certain events occur. The feelings of piety that had been implanted in his soul would assert themselves strongly in all later years, and she would be able to see correctly what would certainly happen. If one day the son comes home and says, “I don't know what to do with my life, my job gives me no satisfaction,” then she will be able to trace it back to what happened earlier. She will recognize the cause and will instinctively find out how to help her son overcome his difficulty. She will certainly be better able to do so than if she had no idea how karma works and only believed that mood swings and depression arise out of something trivial. Nothing comes into being without a cause; but often the causes lie much closer than one might think. We just have to observe such a node, trace life back from there and see what takes a different course. It is like this: Imagine you have a violin string. You have stretched it and stroke it with a suitable object. The string produces a certain sound. If you now hold it in the middle, something happens on both sides: the string vibrates on both sides. There are events in life of which one can observe how what happens before is reflected afterwards.

The middle of life is also such a crossroads. What is prepared in youth comes out in old age. It is necessary to pay attention to these things so that one can gradually really get a feeling that spiritual science is not impractical, but that one's whole life can be shaped practically from a spiritual point of view. A mere life of love is of no use if wisdom is not combined with love. Love must combine with wisdom, with the realization of what is right. Love alone is not enough to live by.

We can mention another case that occurred in the first half of the eighteenth century and has been carefully examined. A mother raised her little daughter. She had seen how this little daughter started to take things, to steal. But she could not bring herself to punish her in her love, which is, after all, an excellent quality. The little daughter stole once or twice, a third time and did other things; and if you follow the course of her life, you will see that the child became a famous poisoner. Here you have love that is not united with wisdom. Love must be imbued with the light of wisdom. Love can only truly unfold when it is imbued with wisdom. How else can a friend help a young person to develop, to guide them through important moments in their lives, if one knows that there is a law that sometimes shows the causes of an event quite clearly, causes that would not be understood without knowledge of the law? It would be right not just to know in general terms that there is a law of karma, but to follow karma in detail by acquiring a correct worldview. The student of spiritual science must seriously endeavor to familiarize himself with the concrete working of these laws and know how they manifest in life. This is the most important thing: not to bandy phrases about Karma, but to get involved in observing the laws in life. This is necessary!

Now I would like to tell you something else. One can also single out a few cases that relate to karma that passes from one life to another. Of course, here too one can only limit oneself to individual cases. So let us consider a question regarding a person's inner karma, which comes about because basically a person must always be a dual entity in life. If you observe life, you will have to say to yourself: when a person comes into existence through birth, two things have to be distinguished. One is what he has inherited from his ancestors. For example, Schiller inherited the shape of his nose from his grandfather; but what is specifically Schiller's, he has not inherited, but that comes from his previous incarnations, his previous embodiments. On the one hand, there is the hereditary stream of that which is passed on through generations; on the other hand, there is that which the person takes from one life to the next. Those who have acquired an eye for the spiritual will always ask themselves how much a person has from their parents and how much comes from their previous incarnation.

In a rational sense, one cannot teach differently unless one can make this distinction. The art of education will only receive the right form when people have learned to distinguish between these two currents. Only at the end of the evolution of the earth will these two currents flow together so that the human being will be able to find the body into which he fits. At the present time this is not yet possible. If a complete fitting together of outer physicality and inner individual organization were to take place in our present time, it would be impossible for a person to die before normal age due to inner causes; because dying is not something accidental, but a disharmony, then premature dying could not occur, since harmony would prevail in man. But as it is, this disharmony between what has been inherited and what has been brought from a previous incarnation can become so strong that it causes death to occur earlier.

If people would only pay a little attention to spiritual teachings, they could grasp reincarnation with their own hands today – this is not to be taken figuratively, but literally – if only materialistic theories would interpret the corresponding facts correctly instead of incorrectly. This can be demonstrated in certain cases. There are people who have not progressed very far in their development, so that their feelings are still completely rooted in their sentient soul. Their whole consciousness is connected with the sentient soul. And this can be seen from people's outward gestures: they betray certain causes that lie in the astral body. When a person is still completely immersed in the sentient soul, when he feels really good inside, it happens, for example, when he has had a good meal, that he slaps his body with pleasure. This is a sign that he still has a too strong sentient soul. When a person is deeply immersed in the mind soul, this also manifests itself. Because the sense of truth is located in the mind, a person who is immersed in the mind soul or mind will pat himself on the chest when affirming a truth. A person who is deeply immersed in the consciousness soul will touch his nose when he is deeply pondering something. What relates to the sentient soul is expressed in the lower body; what relates to the mind or emotional soul is expressed in the chest, and what relates to the consciousness soul is expressed in the head: one also scratches behind the ears. I only mention this to show how what is in the astral body is expressed in the physical body.

Now the following can occur. Man can take into his consciousness the highest feelings and ideas and ideals that he can have at all in this cycle of time; for example, our ethical ideals, which alone should be proof enough for man of the existence of a spiritual world. If we are inspired by an inner voice for these ethical ideals, and devote ourselves to these high ideals, the stimulus for this cannot come from outside. Now this can go so far that a person elevates something that he feels without ideals to the level of these ideals, so that he does not live according to a particular idea out of a sense of duty, but because he can no longer do otherwise. For the one who allows himself to be permeated by a moral idea, it will come about that he becomes so immersed in this idea that he commands himself what is right in its sense. Thus the ideals must light up in the consciousness soul, then they flow down and become instincts.

When this happens, when man has so imbued his feelings with his ideals, then something special asserts itself. These instincts strive to express themselves all the way to the physical body. But between birth and death, man can no longer work on his physical body. So certain currents go through the chest to the head. If someone is enthusiastic about an ideal, is glowing for it and full of fire, so that he feels with love: that should happen - he will devote himself to it in this life, will do anything for it. But that is not all. Through this activity, currents go up to the upper part of the human head. These are forces that seek to work up to the physical body; but they can no longer change the head in this life, because even if one ennobles oneself in such a way, one's physical body is no longer capable of being shaped. But these forces still flow upwards. These currents remain with the person in his soul, and when the person passes through death and a new birth, he brings them with him into a new existence. This is where phrenology finds its individual justification: these acquired forces emerge in the bumps on the skull. You cannot say that this bump expresses this in general, but rather that which the individuality has often associated with it in this way during the previous life and which could no longer reshape the body, that is expressed here.

So these predispositions go through life between death and new birth, and we really grasp what the person has so often let flow into himself in the previous life. You really grasp reincarnation and karma when you feel the different bumps and humps on the head. But we must be aware that each person has their own laws; these humps must not be judged in general, but on an entirely individual basis. So, for example, we take a hump and know: it is the work that the person did on their soul in their previous life. So you can grasp karma and reincarnation, grasp them with your hands! In this way, you can learn from spiritual science right down to the shape of the body.

Just as the physical form lives on from a previous life into a later one, so do other things carry over. However, one must not look at all these things in a fussy way. One must not believe that the law of karma is as cut as a civil code; it can only be understood through extensive studies.

Let us consider a great misfortune that causes deep pain. We often look at it wrongly because we only ever look at the effect. We then see that an event has occurred that has made us unhappy and thrown us off course. We only see the effect. However, we should look for the cause. We might find the following: Yes, in a previous life there was the possibility of acquiring this or that ability. But we did not do it, we neglected it. So we passed through the gate of death without having acquired this ability. Now, in the following life, those forces, which are already karmic forces, drive us to misfortune. If we had acquired that ability in the previous life, the power would not have driven us to misfortune. It is through this misfortune that we now acquire this ability. Suppose this misfortune befalls us in the twentieth year, and in the thirtieth year we look back on it and ask ourselves: What made us acquire these or those abilities? Thus we recognize the purpose of this misfortune. We gain infinitely if we look at things not as an effect but as a cause for what they make of us. That is also an achievement of the doctrine of karma, to look at things as a cause. All these things are details of the law of karma. So you see that one should participate in anthroposophical life because one can learn a lot that otherwise remains only a general concept.

Something quite significant, which is connected with the law of karma, should still be pointed out. A person who comes into spiritual science and hears that there is the possibility of acquiring spiritual abilities, of growing up to the gift of clairvoyance, might ask: Why is it always so difficult to learn what spiritual science says? This question may be justified, but it really does arise mostly from a misunderstanding on the part of many people who become acquainted with spiritual science only superficially, a misunderstanding they have about the connection between physical and spiritual life. They know that physical life is by no means inserted into human life unnecessarily. It has its mission, just like the life between death and a new birth in the spiritual world.

Let us ask ourselves the question: What about two people, one of whom, due to his karma from a previous life, is unable to develop his clairvoyant gift in this incarnation, but has to content himself with diligently acquiring anthroposophical knowledge through study, so that he can see how these things are to be understood – so he could only progress through study – and another to whom the opportunity was given to develop his clairvoyant gifts and to penetrate into the spiritual world? The latter could have the following attitude. He says to himself: I see into the spiritual world, I can see spiritual beings, why should I then still study books? I know there is a spiritual world, so why should I study anthroposophy? It is unfounded and boring. It is a recurring fact that people who are karmically fortunate enough to be clairvoyant say to themselves: We don't want to learn anything more now; why should we study now what is only given in dry terms? One person is able to study all the harder, but he cannot acquire the gift of clairvoyance; the other despises study, but his karma is so favorable that he can become a clairvoyant. What about these people after death, what is the overall picture? A person who has attained the gift of clairvoyance between birth and death, who could see into the spiritual world and see different things, but did not want to learn the theoretical concepts, who did not want to grasp the spiritual scientific information with logical thinking, who despised all of this, has nothing of it after death. He is no better informed than he was without the gift of clairvoyance that he had during his lifetime. That person is even better off who has not yet been able to see clairvoyantly in his physical life, but who was not prevented from forming a logical concept of the spiritual world by reading.

However, this is not meant as an instruction to be lazy and do nothing to develop the spiritual senses. No one can know whether he will not yet acquire the gift of clairvoyance before his death. For those who have studied the spiritual-scientific world view, these concepts now transform into real insights. What one acquires here through concepts will not be lost, it remains. There is an obligation: No matter how highly initiated one is, if one could see so highly but could not penetrate what one has seen with concepts, one would still gain nothing from it. Man should not stop at mere looking, but should invest everything with concepts drawn from physical life. Human beings are called upon to really absorb within themselves all that they can experience on earth. That which is lacking in the spiritual world must be acquired in the physical world and must be carried up.

The above is connected with something much more significant. There is something that people could never have learned in the spiritual world. No event could ever have been learned in the spiritual world if man had not been led down to the physical earth and gone through the incarnations. All spiritual beings that do not incarnate cannot learn about one event: that is death. There is no death in the astral world and even higher; one cannot experience it there. Hence there is the old principle in esoteric philosophy: If gods want to learn how to die, they have to go to Earth to learn it. This is a very profound truth. And there is something else connected with death: Man would never have attained self-awareness. Only by repeatedly passing through the gate of death and shedding his covers at the end of each incarnation does he come to true awareness of the self. Man must learn to overcome death. Without death entering the world, man would not have come to know self-awareness. Thus death had to become the great teacher of the physical world. This is connected with a great event. If it had never descended to physical earth, if it had always remained up in the spiritual spheres, man would never have been able to experience what is the greatest event in the evolution of the earth: the Mystery of Golgotha.

The Christ event can only be experienced between birth and death. And precisely therein consists the greatness of this event, that a God descended from the heights of heaven and shared the fate of men. Only on earth could He fulfill this mystery. Never could the Mystery of Golgotha have been established anywhere in the spiritual world. To teach people the victory over death, a God had to descend from spiritual heights to die on earth. And this event, understood by man on earth, is the greatest thing that can flow into the earthly incarnation of man. This is the greatest thing that man can take with him when he leaves the physical earth through the gate of death. Man could never comprehend the magnitude of the Christ if he had not learned on earth what the Christ is. When he has learned this on earth, he can retain it and take it with him into the spiritual world.

Humanity could never have come to know the Christ if He had not descended, developed the physical body and had the opportunity on earth to understand the death of a God. This event had to take place, for it is of significance for all future times. Humanity will in turn develop backwards in the spiritual world. Before, it knew nothing of the Christ Impulse; on earth it had to learn it, and now it will be carried up, taken along by all those who on earth have acquired an understanding for it. With this understanding, which is gradually acquired on earth, with that event in the soul, man lives on in the following incarnations and also in those lives that elapse between death and birth. People will understand more and more what Golgotha is. The Christ will live more and more. And when the earth is physically destroyed, when only the souls, the spirits of people remain, they will look back on the evolution of the earth and say: We had to go through a development in a world where we prepared ourselves for the Christ. Then this mystery came, the development continued, we understood the event of Palestine better and better, we digested it in our lives between birth and death, and when this great mystery was understood, the earth was ripe to disappear again, because we incorporated what was the most important thing in the whole earth evolution. We had to be on earth, we had to go through it to experience what cannot be experienced anywhere else. Now it has been carried up into the spiritual world, but the origin of what is now in the spiritual world was down there.

This is how your souls will feel when they have gone through many incarnations, when the earth as a physical planet has died and people will have ascended to a new existence. What is the most important heirloom of earth's evolution? What is the most important thing that we have taken with us, and that can only be experienced and lived on earth? The Mystery of Golgotha. Now we have the Christ in us. That is the significance of the sacrifice, that the Christ descended and underwent that event which people experience as death: to become ever more self-aware, to gain ever more strength, in order to take on the karma of the power of the Christ to an ever greater extent.

Thus we see how karma works in this significant instance, and how the understanding of the Christ is connected with the entire earthly karma of humanity. And humanity is to receive the Christ within itself. Man cannot fulfill earthly karma without having attained this understanding of the Christ. And the achievement of the goal on earth will be a karmic effect of the acquisition of the understanding of Christ. Thus we can say: We will understand the smallest as well as the greatest event when we consider the law of karma.

In our literature, we already have a rich and extensive body of material from which we can educate ourselves about the various facts that spiritual science is now able to bring down from the supersensible worlds, and our branches are able to work with the help of this material. Therefore, it will be advisable if, when we meet in person, we also talk about how this material may relate to our soul life, how we introduce it into life, how we ourselves can find refreshment, enlivenment and invigoration, in short, it will be advisable if, on such occasions, we focus more on the affairs of our spiritual movement, because, by the nature of things, we can only meet in person less often.

Many of you will notice that even today, when you immerse yourself in spiritual science or anthroposophy, you still face many difficulties. Isn't it true that you first find your way into spiritual science through the needs of your soul, in that the soul must ask questions about the most important riddles of life? One finds one's way into spiritual science in particular when one looks at today's life with all that it can give, and sees how little the various spiritual directions, be they religious or scientific, can really provide satisfying answers in the deeper sense to the great riddles of life. And then, when one has found one's way into this spiritual-scientific movement through one's urge for knowledge, through one's longing for knowledge, when one has immersed oneself for a while in what has been extracted from the spiritual worlds to date, then difficulties often arise, difficulties of the most diverse kinds. They are different for everyone, so it is not easy to describe them in a few words. Our friends often say: By finding my way into spiritual science I have indeed gained something extraordinarily valuable, something meaningful for life; but it has also isolated me in a certain way, torn me away from the views, from the community of other people, it has also made life difficult for me, so to speak. Those who, by the very nature of their spiritual striving, are dependent on the opinions of the outside world feel this particularly strongly. This really gives rise to the most diverse difficulties.

With other friends, after they have immersed themselves in spiritual science for a while, something arises that one might say is like timidity, something that causes anxiety, fear of all kinds of questions: how to cope with life and so on. Many of you have no doubt had similar questions arise in you. Such questions are often questions of feeling and perception. I would like to take such difficulties in our inner soul life as my starting point for today's reflection.

The right context of these manifold feelings, which can be different for everyone, the real connections, are sometimes difficult to see. We must always bear in mind that we, as people who feel drawn to anthroposophical truths, are still a very small group. We are in the midst of a life struggle that is being waged outside our circles with means that are sharply different from ours. And anyone who reflects a little on what Anthroposophy seeks to achieve in life will be able to see how fundamentally different the goals of thinking, feeling and willing become under the influence of Anthroposophical ideas from the goals that the vast majority of humanity sets itself today. And since thoughts and feelings are real facts, we must realize that our small group, that is, each one of us, is in a mass of energy that is still relatively small compared to the, one might almost say, in most cases completely opposite thoughts, perceptions and feelings of the rest of humanity. Even if the difficulties of life that arise for us take the most diverse forms and do not immediately show that they are connected with what I have just described, they are nevertheless connected with it; and we must try to how we can cope with such difficulties, with the difficulties that arise from the fact that we remain true to the cause of anthroposophy, but as a result come into conflict with the rest of the world.

As I said, things obscure themselves, and they do not always show the right face. What we have to introduce into our souls, as it were, as a remedy, in order to find more and more inner harmony despite the contradictions of the outer world, thereby strengthening the soul so that it can withstand the often arises in the form of disharmony, that is: a clear, correct view of the relationship between those who profess or are interested in anthroposophy and the rest of humanity. To think clearly and sharply about this matter purifies our soul so that we can also be strong when external powers that are full of contradictions beset us. If you think about it from a narrow perspective, you might say: Yes, but what does it help me if I am now clear about what separates Anthroposophy from the rest of the world? After all, it doesn't change my circumstances! It would be a mistake to think so; for our life circumstances may not change overnight through clear thoughts, insightful thoughts, but the strength we gain through such clear thoughts in the direction just indicated, these clear thoughts, they strengthen us little by little in such a way that they do change our life circumstances. Sometimes, however, we do not yet find the possibility to develop really clear, sharp and therefore sufficiently strong thoughts in this direction.

With regard to what we want to achieve through spiritual science or anthroposophy and what we want to achieve not only for ourselves but for the world - and we must once bring this before our soul as one of these clear thoughts before our soul, today's civilized humanity lives in a terrible, more or less conscious or unconscious lie, and the effect of this lie within civilized humanity is tremendous. This is actually saying something very significant, and let us try to clarify this point a little more.

It is hardly possible for a truly thinking person with a completely healthy mind to regard what exists today as general culture in the so-called civilized world without realizing that this culture lacks much, that above all this culture has no impulses for life that are sufficient for itself. Yet there is much in this culture that is far-reaching in its ideals. What a wealth of ideals there are in our time, as people call them, the reasons for founding associations and clubs that set themselves programs through which these or those ideals are to be expressed! All of this is extremely well-intentioned, so well-intentioned that one can say: Those people who, under the influence of these or those ideals, join together in smaller or larger associations from all walks of life, want to do good from their point of view, and these people's attitude is to be fully respected. But these people mostly live under the inhibiting influence of a certain constraint, arising from unconscious timidity, from unconscious spiritual cowardice, precisely in the face of what is most important for humanity today. We say: the most important! What humanity needs today is spiritual knowledge and the introduction of certain spiritual insights into our lives.

This was indeed a big question in the course of the 19th century. You know that there are spiritual laws, laws about the spiritual worlds. At all times certain people knew about this, and of course even in the course of the 19th century, when spiritual science had not yet appeared in the form in which it is now appearing, there were so-called occult societies, which were more or less worthy of the name, which wanted to cultivate occult truths, spiritual truths, in the most diverse ways, and which also had a certain insight into what spiritual truths mean for the world. Now, in the middle of the nineteenth century, a crisis occurred in relation to the deepest impulses of modern human development. This crisis consisted in a particular rise of materialism in all areas, in the area of knowledge, in the area of life. Materialism reached a high tide. We know, of course, that numerous people emerged who wanted to establish a comprehensive world view based on scientific materialism. But this theoretical materialism would not have been the most pernicious aspect; rather, it is the practical materialism, the materialism that is particularly involved in ethical and social life and in the religious feelings of people, that has led humanity to a crisis in the course of the 19th century. And those who still knew something, precisely from the more or less reputable occult societies mentioned, directed their attention, especially from the middle of the 19th century onwards, to how one could remedy the rampant materialism. In certain circles, those who had spiritual-scientific insight - only not yet the kind that alone can be effective and that is striven for in the form that we humbly attempt to strive for - those, that is, who had an ancient traditional or otherwise somehow outdated spiritual insight into the development of humanity, they asked themselves: How do we help from the point of view of what, like a disaster, dawns on modern humanity through materialism? And they said to themselves: We can help by providing people with proof that just as there are sensual facts in our environment, so too are there spiritual facts and spiritual beings in our environment. But, I would like to say, people were only accustomed to experimental thinking and to external experience and perception. And so these people with spiritual insights, who had concerns like those mentioned, knew of no other solution than to prove the spiritual world in the same way that one proves the natural processes of the external sensory world. And so then all kinds of things were tried. And we see movements emerging in the course of the 19th century that are aimed at convincing people of the existence of a spiritual world. The crudest of these movements, I might say, is the spiritualist movement. While scholars today find it difficult to get to grips with the relatively transparent methods of our spiritual science, truly brilliant scholars of the 19th century seriously studied spiritualism.

Now, spiritism has the peculiarity that it should work in an external way, through something that can be presented to the external senses like a chemical or physical experiment. To a large extent, this method, which seeks to emulate the spiritual science of natural science, is already bankrupt today – to a large extent, I say – and it will become more and more apparent that it is bound to fail, because, of course, you cannot let people see the spirit with their own hands, figuratively speaking. Therefore much of what has been done by certain so-called occult societies in the course of the nineteenth century and up to our day, through all kinds of mysterious machinations, has done more to discredit spiritual scientific research than to support it. And so we see that especially among the best-intentioned people, who have insight, especially in social matters, but also in other areas relating to the practical conduct of life, there is much that has to happen from the present on into the future. We see that people who understand this are almost shocked when it is said that the most important impulses needed in our time and in the near future must come from true spiritual insight, from the realization that real spiritual forces and spiritual beings are in our human environment just as there are sensory facts and sensory beings. People who are well-meaning about the progress of humanity are truly shocked. Let me give you an example first. We can learn a lot from examples like these that deal with comprehensive life phenomena. When we turn our gaze to a great movement, it also shows us clearly what we, each and every one of us, actually encounter every day in small ways.

A truly important man who was truly sincere about the social progress of humanity was murdered in Paris the day before the outbreak of this unfortunate world war: Jaurès. Jaurès was certainly one of the most honest personalities of the present day in the field of social endeavor, and he was also one of those who, with all human insight, sought to gain insight into the present conditions of life and into the reasons why they are increasingly leading to absurdity, increasingly and increasingly to impoverishment and immiseration in the spiritual and material spheres of humanity. And he strove with all his might to find ideas and thoughts that he could convey to people, so that, in a joint effort, the great issues of the present day could be resolved to some extent. We can learn much from personalities such as Jaurès, for we learn most when we see the great defects of our own time from the spiritual-scientific point of view, when we realize the necessity of thinking clearly about them, and when we see these defects embodied, not in small but in great personalities, in whom we can be convinced, above all, of their pure intentions and honest striving for knowledge, and also of a certain ability to understand the times. We have much more to gain by testing the damage of our time on people whom we respect and esteem than by testing it on people whom we respect less because we cannot ascribe to them a benevolent and good attitude in the highest sense. Now such people, who have devoted all their thoughts, feelings and willpower to the service of humanity, to the service that must be performed in raising humanity to a higher social level, such people as Jaurès find it extraordinarily difficult – and he is truly no exception, but we see the best people of our time in this difficulty – such people find it truly difficult to talk about things like our spiritual science. And it is precisely these very gifted people who would only be able to achieve what they want to achieve for humanity if they could say: Everything that I can achieve with my ordinary means of thinking and scientific means only provides me with impulses that are too weak to really take hold of life; I have to realize that all these impulses that I want to provide to humanity on my way have no foundation. First I must create a foundation for myself; I must penetrate and suffuse what I have believed up to now with the deeper foundations of spiritual science. I must recognize spiritual facts, real spiritual facts.

You see, the person who does not recognize such spiritual facts and who forms all kinds of thoughts and ideals about how human progress can be promoted today is like the person who has a garden in front of him with many plants that are beginning to show signs of dying, and he does this, that, and much more, and strives all the time - but he achieves nothing. Yes, one plant is a little better, the other a little worse, but overall the plants are not getting better. Why does it not get better? Because some disease may have seized the roots, which he does not check. It is the same with the social endeavors of people like Jaurès. They put an enormous amount of effort into it, and they also achieve an enormous amount with regard to the surface, but they do not penetrate to the roots, because in the roots of our present human life, there is a lack of recognition of a real spiritual world. And no matter how many seemingly well-founded social insights are established, they will not bear fruit for humanity in reality if they are not based on those insights that can only come from spiritual science. Therefore, real progress for present-day humanity will only be possible when spiritual science can be recognized to the extent that the most important part of spiritual science for our time – the recognition of real spiritual entities and spiritual forces – no longer encounters any difficulties among people, especially among the best people. Let us just realize that the best people, those of good will, have difficulties precisely with regard to the most important thing in our cause: the recognition of the spiritual world as such.

I called attention to a point over there in Zurich that makes this particularly clear. There is a person who has spoken very favorably about our spiritual science and has even had what he said printed. This man has also taken courage before a very educated audience and no longer regards what lives within our spiritual movement as mere folly. But this man cannot help but stop precisely at the most important thing, at the recognition of the spiritual world. What does he say? “We must seek to understand it [this spiritual movement], at least in the circle gathered around Steiner, rather as a religious movement among our contemporaries, if not of an original but only of a syncretic kind, but still directed to the bottom of all life; we may judge it as a movement to satisfy the , and thus as a movement beyond realism, which clings to the sensual; we may recognize in it, above all, a movement that points people to self-reflection on the moral problems that face them, and that aims at a work of inner rebirth, ing out of a scrupulous attention to self-education; one need only read Steiner's book An Introduction to Theosophy to notice the earnestness with which man is pointed to the work of his moral purification and self-perfection."

I am not reading these words to you out of some kind of silliness, but because we really want to see clearly how the outside world relates to our aspirations. We see that he is a well-meaning person who, however, regards our movement as a syncretic one because, above all, he does not know it. He does not know how it is a thoroughly new movement simply because it is also based on something that is new in the world: on the new direction of natural science, which is, after all, its foundation. He cannot give any information about this because he does not understand it; but he is well disposed towards our movement. And if you now let this whole lecture, which he has given - “The Thought World of the Educated” - sink in, you can see that the man reflects that a spiritual education of the human being is necessary in our time, and he finds one of the attempts to promote this spiritual movement of humanity in our movement. But then he says, and this is the characteristic thing: “In its speculation directed to the supersensible, it is further a reaction against materialism; in doing so, however, it easily loses the ground of reality and gets carried away in hypotheses” — he believes that real spiritual knowledge is hypotheses, not knowledge - “in clairvoyant fantasies, in a realm of dreams, so that it no longer has sufficient strength for the reality of individual and social life.”

You see, despite his benevolent judgment, he says afterwards: “But after all, we want and must register Theosophy as a corrective phenomenon in the course of education in the present day.” He feels compelled to stop short of all that, without which our movement cannot be conceived without, and what we bring right at the start: supersensible facts; because without man gaining connection with supersensible facts, humanity cannot be brought out of the impasse into which it is now mired. But even well-meaning people believe that – while our movement is seeking firm ground under its feet, without which all other social ideals are left hanging in the air – this movement leads to the realm of dreams, that it no longer has “sufficient strength left” in terms of shaping social life. As I said, this is not due to ill will or mistrust, but rather to a mistrust that arises from unconscious timidity, unconscious discouragement in the face of the recognition of spiritual facts. It is the clear lack of insight, or rather, it is clear that it is the lack of insight into what spiritual science can contribute to the foundation of social striving.

And so, of course, people like Jaurès find themselves in life today without any possibility of recognizing, from the thoughts they have absorbed from their education and from their entire contemporaneity, that everything that happens physically is dependent on spiritual worlds, and that man, in the sphere in which he is called upon to intervene in life, for example also with regard to social life, can only intervene correctly if it is made possible for him by knowing the spiritual laws by which the spiritual world can be introduced into the physical. And the fact that such men are confronted with this impossibility, that this is really a widespread modern-day phenomenon among the best people of the present time, is due to the significant, albeit unconscious, but no less significant life-lies in our age. These life-lies can be found almost everywhere.

Let us consider the case of Jaurès, as a typical example. He was a man who stood before the rest of humanity and sought by every means of social knowledge to improve what he rightly recognized as leading people only to a dead end. There stands a man before the rest of humanity who, in order to gain the necessary insights in this field, really familiarizes himself with all historical facts, who studies the history of past times and wants to learn from the facts of earlier times what can happen in the present, so that mistakes that have clearly shown themselves to be mistakes in earlier social experiments by humanity can be avoided. In all his endeavors, Jaurès, like others, is confronted with the impossibility of truly recognizing a spiritual world, of truly recognizing that through human beings, continuous streams of spiritual life flow down from the spiritual world into this world. One of the fine essays that Jaurès wrote is about the relationship between socialism and patriotism in the Jaurès sense. There Jaurès tries to show how historical events intervene in the development of humanity and have an effect on it. After he has brought various things before his mind that had an effect in the Roman Empire, in order to learn from them how to act in the present, what had an effect in the Greek world, in order to learn from it how to act at other times, after he has really brought various things before his mind with an extraordinarily thorough urge for knowledge, he also brings a chapter from more recent times before his mind. A remarkable chapter is in this book Jaurès, which deals with the proletariat and patriotism, and it is interesting to present this little chapter to oneself in order to see what is actually going on in the souls of the best people around us today.

In this chapter, Jaurès's aim is to show that in recent social progress, it is not land that is the main thing, but industry and so on, but we will not go into these things; the important thing is that here he is forced to refer to the personality of Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans. Now imagine, a man who lives entirely in the ideas of the present points to the Virgin of Orleans, a personality whom everyone who knows modern history knows – anyone who objectively recognizes the fact will have to admit – that the map of Europe today would simply be completely different if she had not intervened. Of course, Jaurès also sees this. He says:

Here we see a man who is condemned because he, steeped in the materialistic thinking of the present, can only think on the basis of materialistic principles, so to speak, but who, because he also wants to be historically honest, is forced to point to this remarkable phenomenon of Joan of Arc and to take it as seriously as we can see from his words. So Jaurès is confronted with the full historical significance of Joan of Arc. But now we ask ourselves: what, after all – and this may be taken too far, even for Jaurès personally, when we assert it – but for many others who act in Jaurès' spirit it is certainly not taken too far – what, for a person like that, who lives in such a social view of society as Jaurès did, be other than someone who, through a certain religious ecstasy, which one should not aspire to if one wants to remain a reasonable person, has arrived at the impulses that she has now arrived at? These people will certainly not recognize what must be clear to us from spiritual science: that at a time when the modern developed spirit knowledge that we have today could not yet be attained, streams of spiritual life flowed from the spiritual worlds through such more or less consciously active personalities such as the Maid of Orleans, that she was a medium, not for people, of whom mediums are so often misused in modern times, but for divine spiritual worlds that wanted to have an effect on the physical world. It had to be recognized that what came from the Maid of Orleans was of more value than what the others could and wanted to communicate from their human insights. That the spiritual world spoke through this Joan of Arc, of course, such people could not recognize. And yet, if they speak of the real facts, they must speak of such people as the Maid of Orleans, they must even recognize them. They must therefore attribute what is happening - just consider that: what is happening - to personalities whose spiritual life they do not recognize, whose spiritual life they certainly would not want to emulate.

Even if people do not want to admit it today – one can also numb oneself to this fact – this is nothing but the deepest lie of life. This is a real lie, and I am characterizing for you only one case of the lie that pulsates everywhere today through our social life, and which is due to the fact that people do not recognize what really is, what is most real, but must regard it as a fact through what the newer development of the spirit brings forth. Lies are now also facts, and they work accordingly. And even if they are well-meaning, earnestly striving, significant people, like Jaurès – since they are bound by the conditions of the times in such a lie of life, what comes from them cannot, nevertheless, have a liberating effect on humanity.

Yes, we are faced with this in a present-day fact of life, which we must allow to have a clear and distinct, a profound effect on our souls. We must have the courage to look at such life-lies with clear insight, and we must find the strength from this clear looking to sustain ourselves against all that comes from all sides, and which sometimes comes from one or the other side very masked and concealed from this life-lie. What real inner insight into the interrelationships of human life can people who live in such a lie actually gain? They must think: Oh, there are such strange characters who want to have a relationship with the spiritual worlds like the Maid of Orleans, and one must even ascribe historical significance to them; but one really does not have to present this as an example to follow, so that one can somehow introduce spiritual powers into the physical world! Much water will flow down the Rhine before wider circles of people understand and recognize the full gravity of the fact we have been talking about. Today, even the natural scientists have adopted the airs and graces that theologians once adopted towards Joan of Arc. For what Jaurès draws attention to at the end is part of the deep tragedy of the phenomenon of Joan of Arc at the time. The theologians of the day said: What she brings forth as her spiritual knowledge of the world does not correspond to what we recognize through our theology! In those days, the theologians spoke from the same attitude; and today, after a relatively shorter time than was the case with theology, the natural scientists are speaking from the same attitude. The Maid of Orleans of old replied to those who judged her from the standpoint of theology and said that she must justify her miracles and her mission from the Holy Books: There is more written in the Book of God than in all your books! These are historic words. But they are also words that are still valid today. From the standpoint of spiritual science, they can be used to counter all objections, theological and scientific: More is written in the Book of the spiritual worlds than all that the adversaries could dream up. And Jaurès adds to these words: “A wonderful word, which in a certain respect stands in contrast to the soul of the peasant, whose faith is rooted above all in tradition. How far removed is all this from the dull, narrow-minded patriotism of the landowner! But Jeanne hears the divine voices of her heart by looking up to the radiant and gentle heights of heaven.”

Yes, such an acknowledgment may sound good in the mouths of our contemporaries, but what is it in the mouths of even the best of our contemporaries? An acknowledgment of something that they more or less consider a work of fiction, a work of fiction that can make life more or less beautiful, but which they do not admit is real. And that is what the living lie does!

We can see, then, that we need clarity about the existence of this life-denying delusion. We encounter its effects everywhere, and it is preventing spiritual science from gaining the influence it should have. But more and more people will not only have to gain a theoretical insight into spiritual science, they will also have to find the strong inner strength to introduce spiritual science into the various branches of life. This could be demonstrated in the most diverse areas of life. And again, one can say that the true facts are masked here. For apparently one can object to everything that is said about spiritual science. Let us take an area of life that is most likely to be appreciated by humanity, for the simple reason that it is very close to external healing. You see, spiritual science could have an enormously beneficial effect if people would only bring themselves to allow the medical faculties, medicine and pharmacology to be influenced by this spiritual science. For modern scientific development has led more and more to medicine itself taking on a materialistic character. Of course, through this materialistic character it has also brought about many beneficial effects, and one need only point to the extraordinarily great progress that has been made in the field of surgery to find some justification for saying again and again what I also say: that one must admire the more recent advances in natural science. But there are other, no less important aspects of medical knowledge and skill that suffer tremendously under the materialistic approach and that can only approach a beneficial future by introducing spiritual-scientific knowledge into the relevant investigations.

Through such spiritual scientific knowledge, connections in the human organism are recognized for which today's medical science only knows the details. Of course, such things are often instinctively suspected by more insightful researchers; but progress cannot happen fast enough as a result, and one can say: if such a fantastic rejection of everything spiritual did not prevail in the medical field and medicine did not strive to be monopolized as a power by the corresponding authorities and governments, then, for the benefit of humanity, tremendous achievements would be made in the field of medicine on the basis of spiritual science. You may say: Well, nothing prevents a spiritual researcher from bringing about such progress! - That is precisely why things are masked, because it is simply not true. The materialistic practice of medicine as it prevails today does indeed prevent spiritual research from intervening. For it is a completely false belief that the spiritual researcher, who sees through things today, can help an individual person in all cases. He is prevented from doing so by the external materialistic practice of medicine, and will be prevented more and more if the materialistic practice of medicine continues for a long time. One cannot say to the spiritual researcher in the field of medicine: “Here is a problem, now solve it,” because his legs are not freed to dance. Certainly, there are many commendable efforts being made to counter the prevailing materialism in medicine; but these efforts are all insufficient because, above all, there is a lack of insight that one must not only must oppose materialistic medicine, but that above all it is necessary to work with what modern medicine has acquired: namely, the external aids that are needed in this particular field. But humanity would be amazed at the results if spiritual-scientific views were to be introduced into clinics and dissecting rooms today, and if spiritual-scientific views were to be applied to all the other resources and remedies of the medical profession. But efforts must also be made in this direction. The aim must not be to disregard materialistic medicine, but to bring spiritual science into this materialistic practice. And until that is done, it is not possible to help in individual cases. The reasons why this cannot be, cannot be discussed in such a short lecture; but it is so. Thus, in a field that is so closely related to the outward well-being of man, an enormous amount could be achieved if only there were a little unprejudiced thinking.

And with regard to the burning social questions, it would become evident that although many attempts are still being made to improve this or that in the social field, to improve these or those conditions of life, all these attempts will fail. Only when we come to base social knowledge on spiritual-scientific axioms, just as mathematics or geometry are based on axioms, only then will we find truly effective means.

And so we live in a world that, above all, our own soul, when we are seized by spiritual science or anthroposophy, must encounter with radically different thoughts and feelings. We live, as it were, in an atmosphere that demands of us a strong display of strength, a strong sense of self-preservation. And these are the deeper reasons why we can often become disheartened, feel lonely, and why perhaps one or the other cannot cope easily with life because of their commitment to spiritual science. But if we have a clear insight into the magnitude of that in which we are placing ourselves in the context of humanity as a whole, and how it appears only as something small today because we are still at the beginning, we can also find this strength, can then really find it. Everything great in the development of humanity must take a small beginning.

I would also like to point out here, as I have done in Zurich these days, how limited, illogical and incoherent our present-day thinking is. This is because, in the more recent development, natural science has had a blinding effect on this newer humanity. This natural science has produced magnificent, admirable results with regard to the external world of the senses, and those people who used to administer the spiritual wealth of humanity felt, I might say, pushed aside, pushed aside more and more. In particular, certain theologians have not fared well. It is wrong to simply reject out of hand what people have brought forth as theology through the development of humanity. This “theology” contains profound, significant basic truths about the human soul; even if they first have to be examined more closely by spiritual science in many respects, there are basic truths in it. Just because they are not advocated in a way that meets the needs of today's humanity, today in the thinking man and in the feeling soul the longing for an answer to the question of spiritual science must arise. But the theologians, who did not want to go along with such a spiritual-scientific endeavor, ended up in a strange state: they had truths, but these truths could not be applied to anything because the other sciences had taken away the objects for these truths. The theologians had truths about the soul – but the soul was taken away from them by natural science. And now theology perhaps expresses truths in words, but it does not concern itself with the objects; it even wants to let natural science examine the objects, because theologians are in many respects too idle to really take on natural science. And that is what we must see as significant in spiritual science: that this spiritual science completely takes on the natural sciences, gets involved in everything that natural science has acquired, and has its say by adding the spiritual scientific principles to the natural scientific endeavor. The theologians did not want to do this; they are sometimes there when it matters to participate, to hold the objects, inspired by a very strange attitude.

One who is considered an extraordinary theologian in certain circles, both as a professor, who he used to be, and as a pastor, has written a little book in which he reproduces religious lectures; and in this little book he expresses thoughts that one might find strange coming from him. One sees into the soul of an important man of the present time. Yes, I cannot say otherwise, one is sometimes overwhelmed by the thoughts that an important man can bring to light today! For example, in the very first lecture, this famous, important man says that one must approach natural science and give up the natural man; only the man of freedom may be retained as a theologian. But in this sense, freedom itself becomes a mere word! Does he not say that he leaves the soul's entire content to natural science? He retains nothing but a wisdom of words, and he even gives a rather cute reason for his attitude, saying quite dryly that this is his attitude. So here is a theologian who, in these lectures, wanted to describe to his audience the most modern form of Christianity, and he says right in the first lecture: “Man, as we encounter him in zoology, the two-legged, upright walking homo sapiens, equipped with the finely developed backbone and brain, is just as much a part of nature as any other organic or inorganic organic or inorganic formation, is part of nature, is composed of the same mass, the same energies, the same atoms, interwoven and governed by the same power; in any case, the whole physical life of man, however complicated it may be, is scientifically determined in its entirety, ordered according to law like everything else in nature, living and non-living. In this respect, there is no difference between a human being and a jellyfish, a drop of water or a grain of sand.

Theological lectures, lectures by a theologian, a pastor! But this theologian does not only speak in this way with regard to the physical; he continues: “The mental functions that are accessible to the scientific approach are subject to just as strict a lawfulness as the physical processes; and the sensations we have, as well as the ideas we form, are just as much forced on us by nature” – please note: the sensations and ideas! - “as the nervous processes that lead to sensations of pleasure and pain. They are just as much mechanical ideas as those of a steam engine.”

You see, the soul slips away from the natural scientists, and the theologian retains only the old theological phrase, for which he comes up with empty phrases; because the last pages, the last lectures now consist only of empty phrases, in order to wrap what has been discussed in theological phrases. But he does reveal the attitude that lies behind his present liberal attitude in the surrender of the objects. And here one is caught out by a quite remarkable attitude: think, he says, theologians must act as he does, one must go even further, he says: 'This determination of man by natural law concerns not only his bodily but also his mental functions. That is what theologians have always refused to admit,” — only he has gone further, he has risen higher, he now admits it - ‘because we confused the scientific concept of the soul with the theological one and feared unpleasant consequences for the faith.’

But now he has come so far that he no longer fears unpleasant consequences for the faith that he admits! Then he says: “But these arise precisely when one does not allow science to reach its full result;”. So now he says: Let us give in to this science, otherwise it will have unpleasant consequences! Otherwise it will have nasty consequences, this science. – And then we see him in a truly remarkable light: “because then you lose the trust of thinking people.”

There you have what the great theologian strives for today! People have come to those feelings in all these ways that I have described to you today - the best ones - with which they turn their trust to us when we speak of the spiritual; one should not lose that, and therefore not apply the real inner soul power, which could stand on the ground of spiritual insight! We see that if we catch people in what we might call their innermost being, if we do not thoughtlessly pass by such things, then people today turn out to be strange. We must have clear insights into this. On the basis of these clear insights, we should not be surprised that when such thoughts are cultivated by those who are officially called upon to provide the religious and spiritual education of humanity today, we have a difficult time placing ourselves in the world with something that is radically opposed to it.

We must always remind ourselves of the cause we are actually serving in the context of humanity by countering the seductive thoughts that come to humanity today from such quarters with those that alone can be fruitful. And such a thought can always lift us up again and make us strong again, even in the deepest depression. Such a thought is absolutely important in every second of our life, and it is important that we practise spiritual science in such a way that we show it as little as possible in our outer life, but absorb it so strongly and intensely within us that we ourselves have the strength to say to the tests it imposes on us: they must be there! Since our karma has led us to it, we also want to accept what it can impose on us as a test. For the opposing forces in the world of spiritual science are today tremendously difficult, and basically people do not know. For of course, this man has no idea of what the nature of thinking and feeling actually is and what can only be revealed by gaining a clear view from the spiritual science into the whole corruption and destruction of such thinking. Therefore, no blame can be attributed to him, he cannot be disregarded, but such a fact must be accepted quite objectively like an earthquake, like a volcanic eruption, which also has a destructive effect on humanity - albeit in a small area - with external physical means. But the man really cannot think. And in this he is only one example of the most important people of the present time who cannot think. He cannot think! Imagine him saying: 'Of course we hand the human body over to natural science, there is no other way; after all, what should we theologians do with it? We cannot examine the body, can we? That if you really examine the spirit, this spirit is a co-builder of the body, that you cannot separate the body at all and give it away as it were, as was explained yesterday in the public lecture, this man has no idea. He gives away the body; but he also gives away the soul – because it feels practically like a steam engine – he only retains, as he expressly says, for theology, the “human being as freedom”. He even generously gives away “man as nature”; he retains “man as freedom.” But now, after he has kept back man as freedom, he says, of course: “Man as nature loses his independence and freedom as a component of nature; everything he experiences, suffers, he must suffer according to the law of nature.”

Thus man loses this freedom through his nature. And now just think about what this theologian actually leaves out! First he says: man as nature, he gives that to nature and reserves man as freedom; but then he states: man as nature is such that, as a component of nature, he loses his independence and freedom, and “everything he experiences, he suffers, he must suffer entirely according to the law of nature.” Now he has absolutely nothing! It is therefore not surprising that he then only speaks in empty phrases. But the good man does not notice this, and he is a typical example of how the most important people today are unaware of the discontinuity of thought that is at work today. Humanity has now reached a stage of development where that which is to be thinking about physical life must be fertilized by those thoughts that also relate to the spiritual world; otherwise, those thoughts that relate to the physical world will break down in all places because people who have a say today are not familiar with the simplest facts of the world's interrelations.

We know that people today are in a period of transition. We are not speaking in the superficial sense in which one speaks of transitional periods now, but in a different sense. We are in those transitional periods in which the old atavistic clairvoyant instincts have died out and in which conscious entry into the spiritual worlds must be attained. This is an obvious fact for the spiritual researcher. But those old atavistic clairvoyant abilities that people had also gave them effective thoughts, insofar as they needed them in their cultural epoch. History reports only a little of the greatness that the Chaldean cultural epoch or the Egyptian cultural epoch had in terms of thoughts that intervene in human life. However little they may be able to withstand our criticism today, they existed for their time. Our time must again gain thoughts that are capable of intervening in reality! But it can only do so if it is fertilized by the spiritual world just as the ancient times were fertilized by the spiritual world. But people today are not being fertilized unconsciously. Therefore, consciousness must arise if spiritual-scientific knowledge is really to be recognized by people. And we ourselves have this man, whom one can so easily prove to be seized by the worst effects of the thoughtlessness of our time, that he causes immeasurable harm by infecting so many people with his thoughtlessness, and one has no ill-willed man; one even has an insightful man before him, namely one who has precisely that insight that one can have in our time if one cannot advance in a certain respect to the real spiritual world, in the sense that even people like Jaurès cannot advance. But even people like the one who gave these religious lectures, even people like that know that humanity today is at a dead end in some respects, that we cannot continue with the thinking, feeling and willing that the old attitudes and the old elements of world view have given us. And he also knows that in modern times this has led to materialism, and he knows that things have to change. And basically he is not at all radical, because he talks about the fact that the 19th century has led people to have such concepts as sportism, comfortism, and mammonism. The man talks about all these things, which are the dark sides of materialism, and he is quite prepared to say: sportism, comfortism, mammonism, as they emerged in the 19th century, must be fought. But the way he says it, it remains a phrase for, at the end of the first lecture – one does not trust one's eyes, one does not trust one's powers of perception – the following is stated. The following can be said today by an important, famous man. He begins by saying quite correctly: All the things that happen should be evaluated differently, 'they must no longer be the ultimate goal. There must be no more merchants for whom the acquisition of money is an end in itself; enjoyment of life must no longer become the content of life; there must be no more people who live only for their health.

So, he is very radical. From the point of view of spiritual science, we will certainly not put forward such radical things; we will rather leave people to their own freedom, and we know that if they understand karma and reincarnation and the rest of what spiritual science gives, they will find their way in life in detail. But this man, who knows that people have brought themselves to a deadlock, says quite radically that people should no longer earn more money, no longer enjoy life, no longer live at the expense of their health. I once came to a sanatorium run by a famous man, which had nervous patients. I could see whole crowds of nervous patients marching past as they went to lunch. It seemed to me that the most sickly, fidgety nervous patient was the famous director of the hospital himself! But now our man, our theologian, is radical, he says: the content of life must become different; no one should live only for his health and so on. But now the following lines: “That means” - he says, and with that he comes to the end of his lecture - “everything that has been done so far should be done, but something else should be considered in the process.”

That is life reform! Just think, this is the life reform of a person who looks so deeply into what is necessary: everything must become different, that is, nothing must become different, but everything must be thought about differently: “These things must not represent the innermost, the goal, the highest value. They must be striven for with the same energy, but they must be valued – that is, they must be thought of – on a different scale than before.

Well, there is nothing more to be added about these things! It is necessary to draw attention to them, for they are not found in a single person; they are to be found throughout the civilized world today. And what people experience in their destinies comes from nothing other than this defectiveness in thinking and intuiting; that is the karma of this defectiveness of thinking and intuiting! This is what we must first focus on. At least as scholars of the spirit, we must find the strength not to listen to the things that are sweeping and raging through the world today and that are recognized as “highest values” from other impulses . But in this respect one must really be able to see these main things without being clouded by all kinds of other feelings that rule the world today and under whose influence so much lying takes place. These things have their influence. We live in such a sphere - I have already said it in Zurich - that this man, who passes on such stuff to people, so that, by listening to him, these thought beasts enter into their hearts and minds, may say: “The content of this booklet consists of 12 speeches that I gave last winter in...” — now comes the city, which I do not want to name — “before an audience of more than a thousand people.”

But – the city is completely unimportant – it now goes to thousands! That must be seen through. And it is necessary to really put all the seriousness and the whole meaning of such a consideration before the soul.

And having extracted much from the spiritual world, we must recognize what this extracted material from the spiritual world must be for us; thereby also recognizing that we are, as it were, looking into the counter-image of the world-view that is prevailing in people today much more than we realize. Unfortunately, people live far too thoughtlessly today! That is what weighs so heavily on the soul: having to look at the widespread dullness, the dullness in which humanity lives in relation to what works and guides the course of human development. We must also obtain the necessary nuances of feeling for the kind of truth contained in spiritual science by allowing ourselves to be given these nuances of feeling from the contemplation of the counter-image. What is important, therefore, is not just to look for all kinds of fine words that sound good, as if they were high ideals to be presented to humanity; rather, it is to recognize above all that it is the spiritual world that must be opened up, something that the best of our contemporaries cannot recognize. There are good reasons – and why this is so cannot be explained here because it would be too long – there are good reasons why, for centuries, humanity has been reluctant to understand Christianity in a spiritual sense. In the first centuries of Christianity there was a gnosis. You all know that our spiritual science is not a revival of gnosis, but in those days gnosis first made the effort to arrive at a spiritual science; it was suppressed because people did not want to see the Christian truths in spiritual light. The same tendency then continued and has also taken hold in scientific endeavor. Humanity has also learned a great deal from the fact that it has fought against the possibility of understanding the spiritual for centuries. But now the time has come when it will be most difficult for those who are completely immersed in our present-day culture – which is still materialism, even if it is not admitted – to recognize a real spiritual world; not just a vague talk about the spiritual world, but a direct knowledge of a spiritual world. We must, however, realize that the acknowledgment of this spiritual world is one of the most important things, and that only then can the rest come, that which must come as a new foundation of the ethical, the social, and also the other practical order of life, when one creates foundations through spiritual science, through the acknowledgment of real spiritual facts and spiritual entities.

It gave me great satisfaction that we were able to meet here in St. Gallen again after a long time, and so I considered it my task today to add to what you can learn from our literature, some of what may need to be said personally, from soul to soul, within our movement, so that it is understood in the right sense. For within our movement it is not just a matter of absorbing this or that from spiritual science in a catechism-like way, but it is a matter of finding the right relationship of our soul to the knowledge from the spiritual world. Then spiritual science will not just be a science for us, but truly a way of life, it will be soul food for us. But it is soul food that does not undermine our spiritual health and spiritual but, on the contrary, stimulates it in such a way that, despite all the resistance of the outer world, the nature of which we have partly sought today, we can still place ourselves in the world in a harmonious way. My intention today was to speak to you about the attitude of soul towards spiritual science. And if it was necessary to present to you contemporary phenomena that can perhaps only be illuminated in this way by spiritual science, it was because only a clear, distinct insight into the course of the world in which we live can also allow us, as professors of the anthroposophical world view, to find the right inner attitude, which is harmony. And from this inner harmony, harmony in our lives will also arise. And that this harmony in our lives is brought about more and more through spiritual science is, after all, our spiritual scientific ideal. In the spirit of this ideal, I wanted to give you a small contribution today.

Translated by Alice Wulsin

Anyone who follows the evolution of the human spirit over the course of centuries, or perhaps millennia, will come to feel that this human spirit moves on to ever new achievements in the realm of knowing and in the realm of doing. There is no need to place too much emphasis on the word progress, for in the dismal time that has now befallen humanity this might call forth bitter doubt in many. If we observe this evolution of the human spirit, however, something else makes a clear impression on us, namely, that the forms and configurations taken by man's striving spirit vary essentially from century to century. And since today in our studies we are chiefly concerned with a striving for knowledge that wishes to penetrate humanity's evolution in a new way, we need only bear in mind, by way of example, how such conceptions, which are to some extent in conflict with the old ones, have difficulty gaining access to evolving humanity.

We should continually recall, for example, how difficult it was to bring the Copernican world view into people's habits of thought, habits of feeling—indeed, in certain realms this took centuries. This Copernican world view had broken with what people for a long time believed necessary to maintain as the truth about the structure of the universe on the basis of their sense perception. Then came the time when a person could no longer rely on what the eye saw as the rising and setting of the sun, as the sun's movement. He had to accept that, contrary to the visual appearance, the sun in a certain way, at least in its relation to the earth, stands still. Human habits of thought and feeling did not easily accommodate themselves to such sudden reversals of knowledge.

In the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to which our considerations this evening are devoted, we have to do with an even greater reversal of this kind. Those who believe themselves convinced on firm scientific grounds of the content of this spiritual science also believe it necessary for it to have a decisive influence now and in the further evolution of human thinking, sensing, and feeling. It could also be said, if you will allow me these few introductory words, that the introduction of something like the Copernican world view was a matter of dealing with countless prejudices, with traditional opinions. People believed that if anything else were to supersede these it would upset all kinds of religious conceptions and things of that kind.

Many other objections concerning what we are to discuss this evening get in the way. Here the problem is not simply the prejudices such as those that confronted the Copernican theory, for example. In this case there is also the problem that in our time many people, indeed the majority of those considering themselves enlightened and cultured, not only bring with them their prejudices and preconceptions; they are actually ashamed of having to take seriously the realm about which anthroposophy has to speak. Such an individual feels he has to apologize not only to the world in general but to himself if he admits that it is possible to know about the things that are to be spoken of today in as thoroughly scientific a way as about the outer structure of nature. He believes that he has to regard himself as foolish or childish.

These things must be considered if we are to speak today about an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Anyone speaking out of knowledge of this science knows the objections that must arise today by the hundreds and thousands. He already knows these objections, because doubt is felt today not only concerning the specific truths and results of this spiritual science; there is also doubt that knowledge of any kind can be acquired concerning the realm with which anthroposophy occupies itself. The possibility of developing conceptual beliefs in the soul, general conceptual beliefs about the realm of the eternal, is certainly still acknowledged as justified by many today; but it is generally considered something dreamy or sentimental to believe that a really factual knowledge can be developed about the facts that can be drawn from the sense world concerning the immortal and eternal in the nature of the human being. This is particularly the case among those who believe themselves to be forming their judgments out of the presently recognized mode of scientific conception.

This evening we will have nothing to do with the dreamy and sentimental. We will rather be dealing with a realm in which you could say that the student, particularly the scientific student, shrinks from its first conditions. I would like to touch very briefly on the fact that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has no wish to be sectarian. It is completely misunderstood by anyone who believes that it wishes to arise in the way some new kind of religious faith is founded. It has no such wish. It wishes to arise today as a necessary result of the world view brought by natural scientific development, a general, publicly accepted conception among the widest circles of humanity. This natural scientific development today supplies so many concepts, which are in their turn the source of feelings and sensations. It provides the concepts for the most widely held world view. This natural scientific mode of observation sets itself the task of examining and explaining what is yielded to the outer senses, of examining what is accessible to human understanding by way of the natural laws about facts given to the outer senses.

If only one takes a quick look at what is living, it is possible to see how everywhere today natural science must consider origins, going back to what the construction of the seed reveals concerning growing, becoming, flourishing. (Though this is more prevalent in other realms, it is most clearly apparent in the realm of the living.) If the natural scientist wishes to explain animal life or human life in this sense, he goes back to birth, he studies embryology, he studies that from which growing and becoming evolve. The natural scientist returns to birth, to the beginning of what unfolds before the senses. And when natural science seeks an explanation for the world, it goes back with various hypotheses—with the foundations laid by geology, paleontology, with what the individual branches of natural science can reveal—forming conceptions out of this about the birth of the universe's structure, you could say. Even if one or another may have doubts about the justification for such a way of thinking, it is always being striven for.

The thoughts are well known that people have presented in order to fathom, if not the beginning of earthly evolution, at least far distant epochs (those epochs, for example, before the human being walked the earth) in order to explain in some way out of what went before, out of what lay in a germinal state, what follows, the consequences that the human being takes in of his surroundings through his senses. The whole Darwinian theory, or, if one wishes to leave that aside, the theory of evolution, is based on the search for origins, looking for the emergence of something out of something else, I would say that everywhere we find this thought of going back to youth and birth for explanations.

Spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense finds itself in another position. And by its point of departure it calls forth a vague opposition. Opposition without people being conscious of it; one could say that it calls forth an unconscious opposition, an instinctive opposition. Such opposition is often much more effective than the opposition that is clearly recognized, clearly thought through. In order to arrive at conceptions at all, an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must not begin now with general, hazy concepts of spirit; to arrive at spiritual facts, it must make death its starting point. It thereby stands from the outset, you could say, in fundamental opposition to what is preferred today, namely to proceeding from birth, youth, growth, and the progress of development. Death encroaches upon life. And if you keep in touch with contemporary scientific literature, you can find everywhere that the conscientious scientist holds the view that death as such cannot be inserted in the series of natural scientific concepts in the same sense as other concepts.

The spiritual scientist must make death his actual starting point, death, the cessation, actually the opposite of birth. How death and all that is related to it encroaches upon life in the widest sense is the basic question. Death terminates what is perceptible to the senses; death dissolves what is becoming, what is developing before the senses. By the way that death encroaches on life, it can be conceived of as having no part in what is working and flourishing here in the sense world, springing forth and producing life. This is what yields the opinion that nothing can be known about what is concealed by death, as it were, cloaked by death. (Within certain limits this opinion is perfectly comprehensible, though totally unjustifiable.) And it is actually from this corner of human feeling that the objections rear up their heads, objections that obviously can be brought up against things that are the results of a science still in its youth today. For spiritual science is young, and for precisely these reasons just referred to, the spiritual scientist is in quite a different position from that of the natural scientist, even when speaking about things in the sphere of his own research. The spiritual scientist cannot proceed in exactly the same way as the natural scientist, who poses some fact and then proves it on grounds by which everyone is convinced: that it can be seen. The spiritual scientist, however, speaks about what cannot be perceived by the senses. Hence, in speaking about the results of his research, he is always obliged to indicate how such results can be reached.

There is a rich literature concerning the realm about which I will be speaking with you this evening. Believing themselves called upon to do so, critics constantly raise the objection when reading my writings, for example, that the spiritual scientist maintains such and such a thing but gives no proof, although this actually shows only how superficially things are read! He does offer proof, but in a different way. To begin with, he tells how he arrived at his results; he must first indicate the path into the realm of facts. This path is generally unknown, because it is not the customary one for today's habits of thinking and feeling. It must first be said that the spiritual investigator is forced by his investigation to conclude that with the methods and procedures by which the ordinary scientist comes to his brilliant results (not rejected by the spiritual scientist but admired) we do not arrive at the super-sensible. It is precisely this experience, namely, the very limitations of the methods of natural scientific thinking, from which the spiritual scientist makes his start. This is not done, however, in the way so prevalent today, which is to declare that certain things, beyond which the ordinary scientist does not go, are the limits of human cognition. No, it is done in such a way that an attempt is made to come to definite experiences that can be attained only at these limits. I have spoken about these boundaries to human cognition particularly in my most recent written work, Riddles of the Soul.

Those people who have not taken knowledge as something that falls into their laps from outside, those who have wrestled with knowledge, wrestled with truth, have always at least certain experiences at these limits of human cognition. Here it must be noted that times change, that the evolution of humanity undergoes changes. Not so very long ago, the most outstanding thinkers and those struggling for knowledge, when they stood before boundaries of this kind, thought that one cannot go beyond these boundaries, that one must remain there. Those of you in the audience who have often heard me speak here know how little it is my habit to touch on personal matters. When the personal has a connection in any way with the question under consideration, however, one may venture to refer to it briefly. I may say that what I have to say about experiences of this sort at the boundaries of cognition is the result of more than thirty years of spiritual research. And it was more than thirty years ago that these very problems, these tasks, these riddles that arise at the boundaries of cognition, made a significant impression on me.

From the many examples that can be cited about such boundaries, I would like to take one that has been referred to by a real wrestler with knowledge, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the famous aesthetician who was also a philosopher of distinction, though perhaps little known during his lifetime and soon forgotten. A decade or so ago Friedrich Theodor Vischer wrote a very interesting treatise about a book, also very interesting, written by Volkelt concerning dream fantasies. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, in the course of this treatise, touched on a variety of subjects of no further interest to us here. But I would like to quote one sentence, a sentence that may perhaps be passed over in reading but a sentence that can pierce like lightning into the human heart and soul when these are permeated by a striving for knowledge, a true inner striving for knowledge. It is the sentence that burst upon Vischer when he was reflecting, meditating upon the nature of the human soul. Out of what he had gleaned about the human being from contemporary natural science, he deduced that the human soul cannot be merely in the body; this much is clear; but it is just as clear that it cannot be outside the body.

Here we have a complete contradiction, a contradiction that cannot easily be resolved. It is a contradiction that poses itself with immutable necessity if an individual is wrestling for knowledge in all earnest. Vischer was not yet able for the time was not sufficiently ripe—to press on from what we might call his position in knowledge, at these boundaries of knowledge, to press on from cognition in the ordinary sense of the word to inward experience of a contradiction of this kind. Yet from all directions today, from the most knowledgeable people, we hear a particular conclusion when they come up against such a contradiction. (There are indeed hundreds and hundreds of such contradictions du Bois-Reymond a physiologist of great intelligence, has spoken about only seven world riddles, but these seven can be multiplied by hundreds.) Our contemporary man of knowledge says that from this point on human cognition is able to go no further. He says this for the simple reason that at the boundaries of human cognition he cannot determine to go on from mere thinking, from mere mental activity, to experience.

It is necessary to begin at a place where such a contradiction obstructs the way, a contradiction not ingeniously thought out but one that is revealed by the riddle of the world; we must seek to live with such a contradiction again and again, to wrestle with it in everyday life, to immerse the soul in it entirely. We must have no fear while immersing ourselves in this contradiction (and a certain inner courage of thought is part of this), we must have no fear that this contradiction will be able to split asunder the conceptual powers of the soul, or that the soul will not be able to penetrate through it, and so on. I have described this very struggle at such boundaries in detail in my book, Riddles of the Soul.

When an individual comes to such a boundary with his whole soul, instead of with mere mental images, with mere clever thinking and mental strategies, he progresses further. He does not go further on a purely logical path, however, but on the path of living knowledge. I would like to describe what he experiences by means of a comparison, for the paths of the spiritual investigator are really experiences of knowledge, facts of knowledge. Language today has not yet acquired many words for these things, because words have been coined for what is acquired by outer sense perception. Hence what stands clearly before the eye of the spirit can often be expressed only by means of comparison. When we live into such contradictions, we feel as if we were at the border where the spiritual world breaks in; this is not to be found in sense-perceptible reality, where indeed it breaks in but does so from outside, as it were.

Now, whether or not this image is well-founded from a natural scientific point of view is not important here, for it can still be used by way of comparison. It is as if one of the lower forms of life had not yet developed the sense of touch but experienced only inwardly, experienced itself inwardly in constant stirrings of movement, in this way experiencing the borders of the physical world, the surfaces of single objects. A being that has not yet developed the sense of touch and experiences only the surfaces of sense-perceptible objects remains entirely shut within itself, unable as yet to feel, to touch, what is there outside it by way of sense impressions.

In the same way, a person struggling with knowledge feels himself purely soul-spiritually (we should not think here of anything material) when he comes to the kind of place I have just described. In the case of our rudimentary animal, the organism breaks through to the outer, sense-perceptible world by its impact with it, differentiating itself through the sense of touch, by which surfaces are touched and knowledge gained as to their roughness or smoothness, their warmth or cold. In the same way, when what has lived only inwardly opens itself to what is outside, the possibility is acquired to break through, as it were, just at the places we have described and to acquire a spiritual sense of touch. Only when a person has wrestled perhaps for years at these boundaries of cognition, struggling to break through into the spiritual world, can he first acquire real spiritual organs. I am speaking only in an elementary way of how this sense of touch is developed. To use these terms in a more definite way, however, we can say that by ever greater application of inner work, working away from being enclosed within oneself, spiritual eyes, spiritual ears develop. To many people today it still seems absurd to say that at first the soul is just as undifferentiated an organ as the organism of a lower animal, forming its senses out of its own substance and out of this substance developing soul concepts, spiritual organs differentiated as to their soul qualities, which then bring an individual face to face with the spiritual world.

It may be said that a systematically presented spiritual science, which is fully entitled to be called scientific, is something new in the progress of knowledge in human evolution. It is not new, however, in every respect. The struggle for it, the striving after it, is to be seen in the outstanding individuals of knowledge from the past. I have referred to one of these when I mentioned Friedrich Theodor Vischer. I would like to show from his own comments how he stood at such a border of knowledge, how he remained there, never making the transition from being inwardly stirred to actually breaking through the boundary to the spiritual sense of touch. Here I would simply like to read you a passage from Friedrich Theodor Vischer's works, in which he describes how he came to such a boundary where the spirit breaks through into the human soul in the course of his wrestling with natural scientific knowledge. This was at the time in which materialistically directed natural science posed many riddles for those struggling for knowledge in real earnest. Countless people claimed that the soul cannot be said to be anything but a product of material activity.

Here are his words: “No spirit where there is no nerve center, where there is no brain—so say our opponents. We reply: There would be no nerve center, no brain had they not been prepared for by countless stages from below upward; it is easy to speak mockingly of those who say that there is an echo of the spirit in granite and limestone. This is no harder than it would be for us to ask sarcastically how the protein in the brain rises to the level of ideas. Human knowledge cannot discriminate between stages. It will remain a mystery how it comes about that nature, beneath which the spirit must be slumbering, stands there as such a perfect counter-blow of the spirit that we bruise ourselves against it.”

Please take note of how this wrestler for knowledge describes how we bruise ourselves! Here you have the inner experience of bumping against something by one who wrestles for knowledge: “It is a forcible separation with the appearance of such absoluteness that with Hegel's ‘differentiation’ and ‘non-differentiation’ (ingenious as this formula is, though it says as good as nothing) the steepness of the apparent dividing wall is concealed. One finds the right appreciation of the cutting edge and the impact of this counter-blow in Fichte, but no explanation for it,”

Here we have a man's description of his struggle for knowledge in the time before there could be a decision, a spiritual scientific decision, not merely to come to this blow and counter-blow but to break through the dividing wall into the spiritual world. I can speak about these things only in principle here; you will find them described in detail in my books. Particularly in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in the second part of my Occult Science, you will find all the details concerning what the soul must take upon itself in the way of inner activity and inner exercise (if I may use the expression) in order really to transform what is undifferentiated in the soul into spiritual organs able to behold the spiritual world.

A great deal is necessary, however, if an individual really wishes to make investigations on this path. So much is necessary just because in our age, due to the habits cultivated in the natural scientific sphere, in the sphere of the natural scientific world view, habits that are perfectly justified in their own field, a particular way of thinking has taken root in human life, a way that is opposed to the one leading to the spiritual world. Thus it goes without saying that from the side of natural science things are heard that demonstrate an utter lack of desire to know the actual facts about the spiritual world.

I will give just one example (as I have said, you can find more exact information in the books I have mentioned) of how the human being has to make every effort to acquire a totally different way of conceiving things. In ordinary life people are satisfied with concepts, with mental images of which it may be said that these concepts, these mental images are such that they offer a likeness to some external fact or object. This cannot satisfy the spiritual investigator. Even mental images, concepts, become something totally different in his soul from what they are due to modern habits of thinking. If I may use another comparison, I would like to show how the spiritual investigator stands today in relation to the world. Those who are materialists, spiritualists, pantheists, individualists, or monadists, and so on, all believe that in some way they can penetrate the world riddle. They try with definite mental images, concepts, to reach a picture of world processes. The spiritual investigator is totally unable to look on concepts in this way; his attitude toward them must be such that he is always clearly conscious of how, in a concept, in a mental image, he has nothing beyond what can be had in the outer sense world when, for example, one particular side of a tree or some other object is photographed and then another picture is taken from another side, from a third side, a fourth side, and so on. The pictures are different from one another. If combined mentally, they together present the tree as a formed mental image. But it can easily be said that one picture contradicts another.

Just consider how completely different an object looks when photographed from one side or another. The spiritual I investigator looks at the conceptions of pantheism, monadism, and so on as if they were simply different ways of looking at reality. Spiritual reality does not actually reveal itself at all to the life of mental images, the life of concepts, in such a way that it is possible to say that any one concept is a faithful image. We must always go all around the matter, forming manifold concepts from various sides. By this means we become capable of developing a much more flexible inner soul life than we are accustomed to when regarding the outer sense world. By doing this it becomes necessary to make our concepts far more alive. They are no longer simply images, but by being experienced they become much more alive than they are in ordinary life and for the things of ordinary life.

Perhaps you will understand me better if I describe it in the following way. Suppose you have a rose cut from the rose bush; you form your mental image of it. You are able to form this mental image yourself. You will often have the feeling about this mental image that it expresses something real for you, that the rose is something real. The spiritual investigator can never make any progress if he is satisfied with the mental image that the rose is something real. Pictured as a blossom on a short stalk, the rose is not real in itself. It can be real only when on the rose bush. The rose bush is something real. And the spiritual investigator must accustom himself to regarding every individual thing, to remaining conscious in what limited sense an issue is something real. People form mental images of these things, believing them to be something real. When the rose is in front of him on its stalk, the spiritual investigator must feel that it is not real; he must have a feeling for, an experience of, the degree of unreality contained in this rose as mere blossom.

By extending this to our observation of the whole world, however, the conceptual life itself is renewed, and we do not thereby get the crippled, dead mental images with which the modern natural scientific world view is satisfied; we get mental images that are living with the objects. It is true that in proceeding from the present habits of thinking, we at first experience a great deal of disappointment, disappointment that arises because what is experienced in this way differs a great deal from present habits of thinking. When speaking out of knowledge acquired in the spiritual world, much has to be said that seems paradoxical when compared with what is generally said and believed today.

A person today may be very learned in the sphere of physics, let us say; he may be an exceptionally learned person who quite rightly excites admiration by his erudition; but such an individual may work with clear concepts that have not been produced nor worked upon in accordance with what I have described, that is, without endowing the conceptual world with life. I have said something quite elementary, but this elementary statement must in the case of the spiritual investigator be extended over the whole observation of the world. I will offer an example. At the beginning of the century, Professor Dewar delivered a very important lecture in London. This lecture could be said to show in every sentence the great modern scholar who was as well acquainted with the conceptions of physics as a modern physicist can be. From his modern conceptions of physics, this scholar seeks to speak about the final condition of the Earth and about some future condition in which much of what is present with us today will have died away. He describes this correctly, because he bases his lecture on really well-founded hypotheses: he describes how one day after millions of years a condition of the earth will have to arise in which a great drop in temperature will occur; this can be well calculated, and this drop in temperature will bring about changes in certain substances. This can be calculated, and he describes how milk, for example, will not be able to maintain its fluid condition but will become solid; how the white of an egg smeared on a wall will become so luminous that people will be able to read a newspaper by its light alone, since so much light will come from the white of an egg; and many other such details are described. The consistency of things that can sustain hardly any weight today will be materially strengthened so that hundreds of pounds will be able to be supported by them. In short, Professor Dewar gives an imposing picture of the future condition of the earth. From the standpoint of physics there is nothing at all to be said against it, but for anyone who has taken living thinking into his soul, the matter has another aspect. When he turns to the conceptual forms of the kind given by the Professor, an example enters his mind that in its methods and manner of approach is very similar to the Professor's deductions and way of thinking.

Suppose, for example, we were to take a man of twenty-five and observe exactly how certain organs, the stomach for example, change from year to year in the course of two, three, four, five years (today such an observation can be managed; I need only remind you of X-rays). They take on different configurations. We can describe this in the same way that the physicist does when he compares successive conditions of the earth and then calculates what the earth will look like after millions of years. This can also be done in the case of the human being. The changes in the stomach or heart, for example, are observed, and a calculation then made of how this man will look after perhaps 200 years according to these alterations. We get just as well-founded a result if it is calculated what this man will look like after 200 years by taking into account all the individual perceptions. The only thing is that the man will have died long before this! He will no longer be there.

You see what I mean. What is important here is that in a particular case we know from direct experience that calculations of this kind do not correspond with reality, because, when 200 years have passed, the human body with its transformations will no longer be there; yet this same kind of calculation is made in connection with the earth. No heed is paid to the fact that after two million years the earth as a physical being will have been dead for a long time, will no longer be there. Thus the whole learned calculation about this condition has no value at all as a reality, because the reality it is applied to will no longer be there.

These matters are very far-reaching. In the case of the human being you can just as well calculate backward as forward; you might, in accordance with the small changes taking place in two years, calculate how a man looked 200 years ago, but he was not there then either! With this same method, however, the Kant-LaPlace theory was formulated. This theory assumes that there was once a condition of fog, a calculation that was based on our present condition. The calculation is entirely correct, the perceptions are good enough; it is just that the spiritual investigator becomes aware that at the time this primeval fog was supposed to be there, the earth was not yet born. The entire solar system did not yet exist.

I wanted to bring these calculations to your notice to show you how the entire inner life of soul must be raised out of abstractions, how it must immerse itself in a living reality, how mental images themselves must be living. In my book, The Riddle of Human Being, I have made a distinction between conceptions corresponding to reality and those corresponding to unreality. To put the matter briefly, the spiritual investigator must point out that his path is such that the means of knowledge that he uses must first be awakened, that he must transform his soul before being able to look into the spiritual world. Then the results take on a form enabling one to see that the spiritual investigator is not speculating as to the immortality of the soul or whether the soul goes through birth and death. His path of investigation leads him to the eternal in the human soul, to what goes through birth and death; the path shows him what lives as the eternal in the human being. He therefore seeks out the object, the thing, the being itself. If we reach the being, we can recognize its characteristics just as we recognize the color of a rose.

Hence it often appears as if the spiritual investigator were asserting that such-and-such is so. For when he presents evidence he must always indicate by what path he arrived at these things. He has to begin where the other science ends. Then, however, a real penetration is possible into spheres that may be said to take death as their starting point, just as natural scientific spheres take their start from birth and youth. We must simply be clear that this death is in no way merely the final event, as it is ordinarily regarded from the viewpoint of outer sense perception. It is rather something that has its part in existence in the same way that the forces called into life with birth have their part in existence. We do not meet death only through its taking hold of us as a one-time event; we carry the forces of death in us—destructive forces, forces that are continually destroying—just as we carry in us the forces of birth, the constructive forces that are given to us at birth.

To have real insight into this we have to be able to pursue research at a boundary between natural science and spiritual science. Today I am only able to cite the results of such research, of course; I only wish to arouse your interest. Were I to go into all the details of what I am suggesting, I would have to offer many lectures. If an individual is to pursue what has been suggested here, he must approach a boundary between natural science and spiritual science. It is widely believed today, and has been believed for some time, that the human nervous system, the human nerve apparatus, is simply an instrument of thinking, feeling, and willing, in short, an instrument for soul experiences, (Science today has for the most part gone beyond this belief, but the world view of the general public usually remains at the standpoint abandoned by science some decades before.) An individual who develops the soul organs—the eyes of the spirit, the ears of the spirit—as I have described at least in principle, comes to recognize the life of the soul.

Whoever really discovers this soul life knows that to call the brain an instrument of our thinking is much the same as to maintain the following. Let us say that I am walking over ground that has become sodden, and in it I leave my footprints. These footprints are found by someone else, who then wishes to explain them. How does he do this? He assumes that underneath in the earth all kinds of forces are surging up and down, and because they surge in this way they produce these footprints. Of course the forces in the earth have nothing to do with the fact that these footprints have been produced, for I myself left them there, but the traces I left can now be reflected upon. This is the way that physiologists today explain what goes on in the brain, what originates in the brain, because all thinking, all mental activity and feeling correspond to something in the nervous system. Just as my tracks correspond with my footsteps, so something actually in the brain corresponds with the impressions of the soul; but the soul has first to leave its imprint there. The earth is just as little an organ for my walking or footprints as the brain is the organ for processes of thinking or mental activity. And just as I cannot walk around without firm ground (I cannot walk on air, I need ground if I want to walk) so the brain is necessary; this is not, however, because it calls forth the soul element but because the soul element needs ground and footing upon which it expresses itself during the time that the human being is living in the body between birth and death. It therefore has nothing to do with all that.

The brilliantly intellectual natural science of today will come to full clarity when this revolution in thinking comes about to which I have referred here. This revolution is more radical than the transition to the Copernican world view from the world view held previously. In face of the real world view, however, it is as justifiable as the Copernican world view was in relation to what preceded it. When we have pressed forward on the path of investigation of the soul, we will find that the processes in the brain, in the nervous system, that correspond to the soul life are not constructive. They are not there so that the productive, growing, flourishing activity is present in the nervous system as it is in the rest of the organism. No! What the soul brings about in the nervous system is a destructive activity. During our waking consciousness outside sleep it is a destructive activity.

Only by virtue of the fact that our nervous system is inserted within us in such a way that it receives constant refreshment from the rest of the organism can there be constant compensation for the destructive, dissolving, disintegrating activity introduced into our nervous system by thinking. Destructive activity is there, activity qualitatively of the same nature as what the human being goes through when he dies, when the organism is completely dissolved. In our mental activity death is living in us continually. You might say that death lives in us continually, distributed atomistically, and that the one-time death that lays hold of us at the end of life is only the summation of what is continually working in us destructively. It is true that this is compensated for, but the compensation is such that in the end spontaneous death is evoked.

We must understand death as a force working in the organism, just as we understand the life forces. Look today at natural science, so thoroughly justified in its own sphere, and you will find that it looks only for the constructive forces; what is destructive eludes it. Hence external natural science is unable to observe what arises anew out of the destruction, not in this case of the body, for the bodily nature is destroyed, but of a soul and spiritual nature, now constructive. This aspect is always lost to observation, being accessible only to the kind of observation I have previously described. Then it becomes evident that, having meanwhile brought our life to this point, the whole activity of our soul does not work only in conjunction with the ground on which it has to develop and which, indeed, it acts upon destructively (in so far as the soul forms mental images, in so far as it is active); instead, the whole of our soul activity is attuned to a spiritual world always around us, in which we stand with our soul-spiritual element just as we stand in the physical, sense-perceptible world with our physical body. Spiritual science is thus striving for a real connection of the human being to the spiritual world that permeates everything physical to the actual, concrete, real spiritual world.

Then the possibility truly arises for a more far-reaching observation of how what is working and weaving within us as soul, working destructively within the limits I described, is a homogeneous whole. What I have called the development of the soul presses on from ordinary consciousness to clairvoyant consciousness. I have spoken about this in my book, The Riddle of Human Being. This clairvoyant consciousness creates the possibility of possessing Imaginative knowledge. This Imaginative knowledge does not yield what belongs to the outwardly perceptible; it yields to the human being himself (I would like to look away from the other world for the moment) what is not perceptible to his senses. To avoid misunderstanding I recently called what can be perceived at first by an awakened knowledge of this kind the body of formative forces. This is the super-sensible body of the human being, which is active throughout the whole course of our life, from birth, or let us say, conception, until our physical death. It also bears our memories, yet it stands in connection with a super-sensible entity, with a super-sensible outer world.

Thus, our sense life with the rest of its consciousness is there as a mere island, but around this island and even permeating it we have the relationship of the human body of formative forces to the super-sensible outer world. Here, it is true, we reach the point of bringing the whole conceptual world (not any different now from the way I have described it) into connection with the physical brain that provides the ground for all this; but we arrive at the insight that the body of formative forces is the carrier of human thoughts, that thoughts develop in this body of formative forces and that in thinking the human being lives in this body of formative forces.

It is different if we go on to another experience of the soul, namely to feeling. Our feeling, our emotions, our passions, stand in a different relationship to our life of soul from that of our thinking. The spiritual investigator finds that the thoughts we usually have are bound up with the body of formative forces. This does not apply, however, to our feelings, our emotions. Feelings and emotions live in us in a much more subconscious way. Thus they are connected with something far more all-encompassing than our life between birth and death. It is not as though the human being is without thoughts in the part of his life about which I am now speaking; all feelings are permeated by thoughts. But the thoughts by which feelings are permeated do not, as a rule, enter man's ordinary consciousness. They remain beneath the threshold of this consciousness. What surges up as feeling is penetrated by thoughts, but these thoughts are more far-reaching, for they are found only when an individual progresses in clairvoyant cognition, when he progresses to what I call the Inspired consciousness (I am not thinking of superstitious conceptions here). You may study the particulars of this in my books.

If we go deeply into what is actually sleeping in regard to ordinary Consciousness (in the same way that from going to sleep to awaking a person sleeps in regard to the ordinary images of the senses) we see that it surges up just as dreams surge up into our sleep. Feelings actually surge up from the innermost depths of the soul; it sounds strange, but it is so. But this deeper region of the soul that is accessible to Inspired knowledge is what lives between death and a new birth. It is what enters into connection with the physical through our being conceived or born, what goes through the portal of death and has a spiritual existence among other conditions until the human being is reborn. Whoever really looks into what is living in the world of feeling with Inspired knowledge sees the human being not only between birth and death but also during the time the soul undergoes between death and a new birth.

The matter is not quite so simple as this, however; it is indeed like this, but it is also shown how forces arise in the soul that make it possible to look upon the feelings, emotions, passions, that make it possible to live in them. Just as in the plant we see what has arisen through the forces of the seed, so we see something that has not arisen with our birth or conception but that has emerged from a spiritual world.

I know very well how many objections can be made to a conception of this kind by those who accept the natural scientific world view. Those who are familiar with this world view will find it easy to say, “Here he comes and like a dilettante describes how the aspects of the soul he wishes to encompass come from a spiritual world; he even describes their special configurations, the colors of the feelings and so on, as if, on the one hand, there were hints in these feelings concerning our life before birth and, on the other hand, something in these feelings that is like the seed of the plant, which will become the plant of the next year. Doesn't this man know,” people will say, “about the wonderful laws of heredity presented by natural science? Is he ignorant of everything that those who created the science of hereditary characteristics have brought about?”

Even if the facts indicated by natural science are entirely correct, it is nevertheless the case that concealed in the emergence of heredity are the forces through which we have been preparing ourselves for centuries and which we ourselves send down. From grandparents and parents, constellations are built up that finally lead to the material result with which we then sheathe ourselves when we leave the spiritual world to descend into the physical. Whoever really keeps in mind the wonderful results of modern research into heredity will find that what spiritual science finds out about the soul (yet in a quite different way, it might be said, in the entirely opposite way) will be fully confirmed by natural science, whereas what natural science itself says is definitely not confirmed in the least by natural science. I can only suggest this here. When we then enter the sphere referred to as that of the will, this totally eludes the contents of man's ordinary consciousness. What does a person know about the processes going on in him when the thought, I want something, shapes itself into a movement of the hand? The actual process of willing is asleep in the human being. Regarding the feelings and emotions it could at least be said that the human being dreams within the human being. This is the reason that the question of freedom is so difficult, because the will is sleeping in relation to the higher consciousness. We come to knowledge about what is going on in the will in clairvoyant consciousness only by reaching the stage of actual Intuitive consciousness. By this I do not mean the vague, everyday consciousness called intuitive, but rather what I refer to in my writings as one of the three stages: Imaginative, Inspired, and Intuitive cognition.

Here we come into the sphere of the will, into the realm that is supposed to live and work within us. This must first be drawn out of the deep regions of the soul. Then we find, however, that this element of the will is also permeated by thoughts, by the spiritual (in addition, the ordinary thought stands by itself). But in bearing the will within us, there works into this will something in addition to what we have experienced in the spiritual world in our feelings, working between death and a new birth. Something is active there that we have experienced in the preceding life on earth. The impulses of earlier earthly lives work into the will nature of the human being. In what we develop or what we cultivate in our present willing live the impulses for our lives on earth to come. For real spiritual science, then, the whole of human life separates into the lives lying between birth and death and those which, because all physical existence has to be built up out of the world, are experienced in far longer periods in the spiritual world. Out of such lives, out of repeated earthly lives, repeated spiritual lives, the complete human life is composed. This is not some fantasy, it is not a capricious thought, but rather something we find when we learn to turn the eye of the spirit to the eternal, the imperishable, in the human soul.

These things do not preclude human freedom. If I build a house this year in which I will live for the next two years, I will be a free man in this house despite having built it for myself. Human freedom is not precluded by this. One earthly life determines the other that follows. Only through a lack of understanding could this be represented as an infringement on the idea of human freedom.

Thus, in spiritual investigation by making death our point of departure, we gradually arrive at the spiritual facts. If in spiritual investigation one makes death the foundation, just as physical investigation is based on birth and embryonic life, this observation reveals the most varied things in individual detail. I will point to something specific here, because I would not like to remain with the indefinite but rather to quote concrete results of anthroposophical research. In the ordinary life of the spirit we are able to differentiate between the forcible entry of death due to an external cause and death that comes from within through illness or by reason of old age. We are therefore able to distinguish two different kinds of death.

Spiritual investigation that goes concretely into the nature of death discovers the following. Let us take as an example the entrance into life of violent death, be it through accident or some other cause. The entrance of such an event brings about an end to life in this earthly existence. The development of spirit consciousness for the spiritual world after death depends on this one-time entrance of death, just as the consciousness we are able to develop in life depends on the forces given us at birth (in the way that I have described). The Consciousness we develop after death is of a different kind. The consciousness developed here on earth stands on the ground of the nervous system, just as when I walk around on the ground my foundation is the ground. In the spiritual world the consciousness after death has different foundations, but it is definitely a consciousness. If a man dies a violent death this is not something that merely lays hold of his mental images. The mental activity of ordinary consciousness ceases with death, and another Consciousness begins, but this lays hold of his will which, as we have seen, passes over into the next earthly life. The spiritual investigator possesses the means to investigate what can arise in an earthly life if, in a previous earthly life, there has been a violent death.

Now when we speak of such things today, people will obviously condemn this way of speaking as foolish, childish, fantastic. Yet the results are attained just as scientifically (and it is only such results that I present) as the results of natural science. If a violent death intervenes in a life, it shows itself in the following life on earth, where its effect produces some kind of change of direction at a definite period in that life. Research is now being done concerning the soul life, but as a rule only the most external things are taken into consideration. In many human lives, at a particular moment, something enters that changes a person's whole destiny, bringing him into a different path in life in response to inner demands. In America they call these things “conversions,” wanting to have a name for such events, but we do not always need to think in terms of religion. A person on another path of life may be forced into a permanent change of the direction of his will. Such a radical change of the direction of his will has its origin in the violent death of his previous life. Concrete investigation reveals the tremendous importance of what happens at death for the middle of the next life. If death comes spontaneously from within through illness or old age, then it has more significance for the life between death and a new birth than for the next earthly life.

I would like to offer the following example so that you may see that I am not speaking about anything vague here. In fact, I am speaking about details arising in life's conditions that can be gained by definite perceptions. Spiritual investigation, which is something new even for those convinced of the immortality of the human soul, makes us aware that we must not speak in merely a general way about immortality. Instead, by grasping the eternal in the human soul, human life as such becomes comprehensible. All the strange processes that are observable if we have a sense for the course taken by the soul life, for the course of the soul life in the human being, all the wonderful events find their place if we know we are dealing with repeated earthly lives and repeated spiritual lives. In the spiritual world (I say this merely parenthetically) the human being lives with spiritual beings—not only other human beings who are closely connected with him by destiny and have also passed through the portal of death, but with other spiritual beings to whom he is related in the same way that on earth the human being is related to three kingdoms: the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. The spiritual investigator speaks of particular individual spirits, particular individual spiritual beings, belonging to a concrete, individualized spiritual world, just as here we speak of individualized plant beings, animal beings, and human beings, in so far as they are physical beings between birth and death. It can be shattering to people when knowledge itself approaches the human soul in a totally different way. It is difficult to speak about these things so that they arise out of the dim depths of the spirit in a new way.

From what I have said you will have seen that knowledge about the spiritual world can be acquired. This knowledge has profound significance for the human soul; it makes the soul something different, as it were. It lays hold of the life of the soul, regardless of whether one is a spiritual investigator or has merely heard and understood the results of spiritual investigation and has absorbed them. It is of no importance whether or not one does the research oneself; the result can be comprehensible just the same. Everything can be understood if we penetrate it with sufficient depth. We only need to have absorbed it. Then, however, when we have grasped it in its full essence, it enters the human soul life in such a way that one day it becomes more significant than all the other events of life.

A person may have difficulties, sorrows, that have shattered him, or joy that has elevated him, or some truly sublime experience. It is not necessary to be indifferent to such experiences to be a spiritual investigator, someone who knows the spirit; one can participate as fully with the feelings as other people do who are not investigators of the spirit. But when someone penetrates with his essential being into what is given the soul by spirit knowledge, and when he becomes capable of answering the question, “What are the effects upon the soul of these spiritual results?”—when a full answer is given to the question of what the soul has become through this spiritual knowledge, then this event becomes more important than anything else in destiny, more important than any of the other experiences of destiny that approach the human being. Not that the others become less significant, but this one becomes greater than the others. Knowledge itself then enters through the human soul life in accordance with destiny. If knowledge thus enters through the human soul life, he begins to understand human destiny as such. From this knowledge comes the light that illumines human destiny.

From this moment on, an individual can say this: that if one has this experience of destiny so purely in the spiritual in this way, it becomes clear how one is placed into life in accordance with destiny, how our destiny hangs on threads spun out of previous lives, previous earthly lives and lives between death and a new birth, which again spin themselves out of this life and into a following life. Such an individual goes on to say that ordinary consciousness only dreams through its destiny; ordinary consciousness endures its destiny without understanding it, just as one endures a dream. Clairvoyant consciousness to which one awakes, just as we awake from a dream to ordinary consciousness, acquires a new relationship to destiny. Destiny is recognized as taking part in all that our life embraces, in the life that goes through all our births and deaths.

This matter should not be grasped in a trivial way, as if the spiritual investigator were to say, “You yourself are the cause of your own misfortune.” That would simply betray a misunderstanding and would even be a slander of spiritual investigation. A misfortune may not have its source at all in the previous life. It may arise spontaneously and have its consequences only in the life to follow and also in the life between earthly lives. We can see again and again that out of misfortune, out of pain and suffering, emerges a consciousness of a very different form in the spiritual world, Meaning enters the whole of our life, however, when we learn to understand our destiny, which otherwise we only dream our way through.

One thing particularly stands out when we bear in mind this knowledge of the spirit. We can no longer say, “If, after death, the soul enters another life, we can wait until this happens. Here we take life as it is offered us in the physical body; we can wait for what comes after death.” The matter is a question of consciousness. We may be sure that what happens after death is connected with the life we undergo in the body. Just as in a certain sense we have the Consciousness of our ordinary waking condition by means of our body, so after death we have a Consciousness that is no longer spatial, no longer built up out of the nervous system, but built up out of what has to do with time, built up out of looking backward.

Just as our nervous system in a way is the buttress and counterpart to our ordinary consciousness between birth and death, so our consciousness in the spiritual world between death and a new birth is founded on what takes place here in our consciousness. Just as here we have the world around us, so when we are dead we have before us our life as the significant organ. Hence, a great deal depends upon our consciousness in the physical body, which is able to extend into the consciousness we have after death. An individual may be occupied exclusively with physical conceptions grasped by the senses, as often happens in the habitual thinking of the present time; he may take into his consciousness and also in his capacity of memory, in everything playing itself out in his soul, concerns exclusively having to do with ordinary life. Such an individual, however, is also building up a world for himself after death! The environment there is built out of what a person is inwardly. A person born physically in Europe cannot see America around him, and just as he receives what he is born into physically as his environment, so to a certain extent he determines the environment, the place of his existence, through what he has built up in his body.

Let us take an extreme case, though one unlikely to happen. Let us take the case of someone who fights against all super-sensible conceptions, who has become an atheist, someone who doesn't even have any inclination to occupy himself with religion. Now I know that I am saying something paradoxical here, but it is based on good foundations anthroposophically: such an individual condemns himself to remaining in the earthly sphere with his consciousness, whereas another individual who has absorbed spiritual conceptions is transposed to a spiritual environment. The one who has absorbed only sense-perceptible conceptions condemns himself to remaining in the sense-perceptible environment.

Now we can work properly in the physical body because our physical body is, as it were, a sheath protecting us against the environment. And though we can thus work properly in the physical body when we are present in the physical world, we cannot do so if we hold to the physical world after death. We become destructive if we have physical conceptions in our consciousness after death. In speaking of the problem of heredity, I intimated how, when the human being is in the spiritual world, his forces lay hold of the physical world. Whoever condemns himself, by reason of his merely physical consciousness, to hold to the physical world becomes the center of destructive forces that lay hold of what is happening in human life and in the rest of universal life. As long as we are in the body, we are only able to have thoughts based on the sense-perceptible, we are able to have only materialistic thoughts: the body is a defense.

But how much greater a defense than we imagine! It seems strange, but to anyone who perceives the spiritual world in all its connections, one thing is clear: if an individual were not shut off from the surrounding world by his senses, if the senses were not curbed so that in ordinary consciousness he is incapable of taking up living concepts but takes up only those that are lifeless and designed to prevent him from penetrating into the spiritual environment, if an individual were able to make his conceptions active directly and did not have them merely within him after things have already passed through the senses, then even here in the physical world, if he were to develop his conceptual life, his conceptions would have crippling, deadening effects. For these conceptions are in a certain way destructive of everything they lay hold of. Only because they are held back in us are those conceptions kept from being destructive. They destroy only when they come to expression in machines, in tools, which are also something dead taken from living nature. This indeed is only a picture, but one corresponding with a reality. If an individual enters the spiritual world with merely physical conceptions, he becomes a center of destruction.

Thus I have to bring a conception to your attention as an example of many others: we should not say that we can wait until after death, because it depends on a person's nature whether he develops conceptions of the sense world or of the super-sensible world, whether he prepares for his next life in this way or that. The next life is indeed a very different one, but it is evolved from our life here. This is the essential thing that has to be comprehended. In spiritual science, we encounter something different from what is surmised. For this reason I must still make a few remarks in closing.

The belief might easily arise that anyone now entering the spiritual world must unconditionally become a spiritual investigator himself. This is not necessarily so, although in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have described much of how the soul must transform itself in order really to be able to enter. And to a certain degree, everyone is able to do this today, but it need not be everyone. What a person develops regarding the soul element is a purely intimate concern; what arises from it, however, is the formation of concepts of the investigated truths. What the spiritual investigator can give is clothed in conceptions such as I have developed today. Then it can be shared. For what a person needs, it is quite immaterial whether things are investigated by himself or whether he accepts them from some other credible source. I am speaking here from a law of spiritual investigation. It is not important to investigate the things oneself. What is important is for us to have them within us, for us to have developed them within. Hence, we are in error if we believe that everyone has to become a spiritual investigator.

Today, however, the spiritual investigator has the obligation (as I myself have had the obligation) to render an account, as it were, of his path of research. This is due not only to the fact that everyone today can, to a certain extent, follow the path I have described without harm, but it is also because everyone is justified in asking, “How have you arrived at these results?” This is why I have described these things. I believe that even those who have no wish to become spiritual investigators will at least want to be convinced of how spiritual investigators arrive at the results that everyone needs today, the results of those who wish to lay the foundation for the life which must develop in human souls for human evolution today.

The time is now over during which, in ancient times, so much was held back regarding spiritual research that brought about the evolution of the soul. In those ancient times, to impart what was hidden was strictly forbidden. Even today, those who know of these mysteries of life (of which there are not just a few) still hold these things back. Whoever has learned about these things merely as a student from another teacher does not under any circumstances do well to pass them on. Today it is advisable to pass on only what an individual himself has discovered, the results only of his own investigations. These, however, can and must be put at the service of the rest of humanity.

Already from the few brief indications I was able to give today it can become evident what spiritual investigation can mean for the individual human being, but it is not only significant for the individual. And in order to address this other aspect in closing with at least a few words I would like to point to something that is taken into consideration only a little today. There is a curious phenomenon to which I would like to direct your attention in the following way. In the second half of the nineteenth century we have seen the rise of a certain natural scientific orientation: the explanation of living beings connected with the name Darwin. Enthusiastic scholarly investigators, enthusiastic students have carried these things through the second half of the nineteenth century. Maybe I have already remarked upon the occurrence of a curious fact. Already in the 1860's, under the guidance of Haeckel, there developed a powerful movement based on a world view. This movement wanted to overthrow everything old and to restructure the entire world view in accordance with Darwinistic concepts. Today there are still numerous people who emphasize how great and significant it would be if there were no longer a wisdom-filled world-guidance but instead if the evolution of everything could be explained out of mechanical forces in the sense of Darwinism.

In 1867 Eduard von Hartmann published his Philosophy of the Unconscious (Philosophie des Unbewussten) and turned against the purely external view of the world represented by Darwinism. He pointed to the necessity of inner forces, although he did so in an inadequate way, in a philosophical way (he did not yet have spiritual science). Naturally those who were enthusiastic about the rise of Darwinism were ready to say, “That philosopher is simply a dilettante; we don't need to pay any attention to him.” Counterattacks appeared in which the “dilettante” Eduard von Hartmann was ridiculed and which asserted that the true, educated natural scientist need not pay any attention to such things.

Then there appeared a publication by Anonymous, which brilliantly argued against the publication of Eduard von Hartmann. The natural scientists who all thought as they did were in full agreement with this publication because Eduard von Hartmann was completely contradicted in it. Everything that could possibly be gathered from the basis of natural science was there used by the anonymous author against Eduard von Hartmann just as today so much is brought up against spiritual science. This publication was received very favorably. Haeckel said, “For once a real natural scientist has written against this dilettante, Eduard von Hartmann; here one can see what a natural scientist is able to do. I myself could write no better. Let him identify himself and we will consider him as one of us.” To state it briefly, the natural scientists spread a lot of propaganda in relation to this publication, which they welcomed highly because it solidified their position. The publication was very soon sold out, and a second edition became necessary. There the author revealed himself: it was Eduard von Hartmann!

In that instance someone taught the world a necessary lesson. Whoever writes about spiritual science today and reads what is written against it could without much effort invent everything that is brought against spiritual science. Eduard von Hartmann was able himself to make all the objections that the natural scientists made against him—and he did so.

But I mention this only in introduction to my main point. Oskar Hertwig is one of the most important students of Haeckel who entered upon the industrious, reliable, and great path of natural scientific investigation. Last year Hertwig published a very beautiful book, The Evolution of the Organism. A Rebuttal to Darwin's Theory of Chance (Das Werden der Organismen. Eine Widerlegung von Darwins Zufallstheorie). In this book he points to issues that were already raised by Eduard von Hartmann. Such a matter is pretty much without precedent: already the generation immediately following, which still grew up under the master, had to get away from something that had been believed could build a whole world view; it had even been believed that it could provide elucidation of the spiritual world. A good Darwinist contradicts Darwinism! But he does still more, and that is what is actually important to me.

Oskar Hertwig writes at the conclusion of his superb and beautiful book that the kind of world view that Darwinism represented does not stand there merely as a theoretical edifice; rather it intervenes in the totality of life, encompassing also what people do, will, feel, and think. He says, “The interpretation of Darwin's teaching, which because of its vagueness can have such varied meanings, permitted also a very varied application to other realms of economic, social, and political life. It was possible, just as it was from the Delphic Oracles, to use what was said as desired for specific applications to social, political, health-related, medical, and other questions and to support one's own assertions by basing them on the Darwinistically restructured biology with its immutable natural laws. If these supposed laws are not actually laws, however, could there not exist social dangers—because of their many-sided application in other realms? We had better not believe that human society can for centuries use expressions like, ‘a struggle for existence,’ ‘survival of the fittest,’ ‘the most suitable,’ ‘the most useful,’ ‘perfection by selection,’ etc., applying them to the most varied realms of life, using these expressions like daily bread, without influencing in a deep and lasting way the entire direction of idea formation! The proof for this assertion could easily be demonstrated in many contemporary phenomena. For this very reason the decision concerning the truth or error of Darwinism reaches far beyond the confines of the biological sciences.”

What arises in such a theory shows itself everywhere in life. Then a question arises from the realm of spiritual science that also intervenes in life. We live today in a sad time, in a tragic time for humanity. It is a time that has developed out of human conceptions, out of human ideas. Whoever studies interrelationships with the help of spiritual science knows about the connection of what we encounter externally today with what humanity is now tragically experiencing. A great deal is being experienced; people believe that they can encompass reality with their concepts, but they do not encompass it. And because they do not encompass it, because with natural scientific concepts reality can never be encompassed, reality grows over their head and shows them that human beings can take part in such events but that the result is the chaos by which we are surrounded today.

Spiritual science does not arise only through an inner necessity, though this is also true. It would have arisen through this inner necessity even if the outer events did not stand there as a mighty, powerful sign. Such signs are there, however, from the other side: that the old world views are great in the natural sciences but can never intervene formatively in the social, legislative, political spheres in the world, that reality grows beyond human beings, if that is what they want. These mighty signs point to the need for spiritual science, which seeks concepts that correspond with reality, concepts derived from reality and that are therefore also capable of carrying the world in the social and political realms. No matter how much one believes that the concepts customary outside spiritual science today will enable us to emerge out of the chaos, it will not happen; for within the reality the spirit prevails. And because the human being himself intervenes with his actions in this reality, in the social, in the political life, he requires the conceptions, the feelings, the will impulses that are drawn from the spirit in order to come to fruitful concepts in these realms. In the future politics and social science will need something for which only spiritual science can provide the foundation. This is what is particularly important for contemporary history.

In this lecture, which has already been long enough, I can only hope to offer a few impulses. I only wish to point out that what appears today as spiritual science in a systematic order is wanted by the best. If it were only up to me, I would not give a special name to this spiritual science. For more than thirty years I have been working on the greater and greater elaboration of the conceptions regarding reality that Goethe acquired in his magnificent theory of metamorphosis, in which he had already attempted to make the concept living as opposed to dead. At that time this was only possible in an elementary way. If one does not consider Goethe simply as a historical figure, however, if one considers him still as a contemporary, then today the Goethean teaching of metamorphosis transforms itself into what I call living concepts, which then find their way into spiritual science. Goetheanism is the term I would most like to use for what I mean by spiritual scientific investigation, because it is based on sound foundations of a grasp of reality as Goethe wanted it.

And the building in Dornach that is to be dedicated to this spiritual investigation, and through which this spiritual investigation has become more well known than it would have without the building, I would like most to call the Goetheanum, so that one would see that what arises as spiritual investigation today stands fully in the midst of the healthy process of the evolution of humanity. Certainly many today who wish to acknowledge the Goethean way of looking at the world will still say that Goethe was one who recognized nature as the highest above all and who also permitted the spirit to emerge out of nature. Already as a very young man, Goethe said, “Gedacht hat sie und sinnt beständig” (“She did think and ponders incessantly”), ponders incessantly although not as man but as nature. Even if one is a spiritual investigator one can agree with the kind of naturalism that, like Goethe, thinks of nature as permeated by spirit. And those who always believe that one must stop at the boundaries of knowledge, that one can't get any further there, can be repudiated with Goethe's words. Permit me, therefore, as I conclude here, to add the words that Goethe used concerning another accomplished investigator who represented the later Kantian view:

Into the inner being of nature—
No created spirit penetrates.
Blissful those to whom she only
Reveals the outer shell!

Ins Innere der Natur—
Dringt kein erschaffner Geist
Glueckselig, wem sie nur
Die aeussere Schale weist!

Next to these words Goethe placed others that show how well Goethe knew that when the human being awakes the spirit within himself, he also finds the spirit in the world and himself as spirit:

Into the inner being of nature—
No created spirit penetrates.
Blissful those to whom she only
Reveals the outer shell!
This I hear repeated for sixty years
And damn it but secretly—
Nature has neither core nor shell,
She is everything at once.
Above all simply examine yourself
To see whether you yourself are core or shell!

Ins Innere der Natur—
Dringt kein erschaffner Geist.
Glueckselig, wem sie nur
Die aeussere Schale weist!—
So hoer ich schon an die sechzig Jahre wiederholen
Und fluche darauf—aber verstojileri,—
Natur hat weder Kern noch Schale,
A lies ist sie mit einemmale,
Dich pruefe du nur zu allermeist,
Ob du selbst Kern oder Schale seist!

Spiritual science wishes to work toward the human being learning to examine himself as to whether he is core or shell. And he is core if he grasps himself in his full reality. If he grasps himself as core, then he also penetrates to the spirit of nature. Then in the evolution of humanity in relation to spiritual science something occurs that is similar to when Copernicus pointed from the visible to the invisible, even of this visible itself.

For the super-sensible, however, humanity will have to stir itself to grasp this super-sensible within itself. To do this one does not need to become a spiritual investigator. One needs, however, to remove all prejudices that place themselves before the soul if one wishes to understand what spiritual science intends to say out of such a Goethean attitude.

I wished to offer today only a few impulses to stimulate you further. From this point of view it is always possible at least to stimulate something, but if one wanted to go into all the details, many lectures would be needed. But I believe these few comments will have sufficed to show that something needs to be drawn out of the evolutionary process of humanity, something that will first awaken the soul to full life. No one needs to believe that this will shrivel the soul, that it will kill off anything, not even the religious life. As Goethe said:

Whoever possesses Science and Art,
Has also Religion,
Whoever possesses neither of the two,
Had better have Religion!

Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt
Hat auch Religion,
Werjene beiden nicht besitzt,
Der habe Religion!

So one can say, as the modern way of thinking is evolving, whoever finds spiritual scientific paths will also find the way to true religious life; whoever does not find the spiritual scientific path will be in danger of losing also the religious path so necessary for the future of humanity!

Translated by Alice Wulsin

In yesterday's public lecture, you will have noticed that something was said that is very significant concerning how spiritual knowledge is comprehended in human life. I have indicated that some of our contemporaries here on the physical plane take up conceptions coming primarily from the sense world, or gained with the intellect bound to the sense world. Such individuals want to know of nothing but the sense world, and I have indicated how such persons after death are in a certain sense bound to an environment that still reaches very much into the earthly, into the physical region in which the human being resides in the time between birth and death. Thus destructive forces are created within this physical world by those persons who, through their life in the physical body, confined themselves to the earthly-physical world long after their death.

Such an issue touches on deeply significant mysteries of human life, mysteries that for hundreds and thousands of years were carefully guarded by certain occult societies. They maintained that the human being was not yet mature enough to receive such truths, such mysteries (we will not look at the justification for this view today), and that becoming acquainted with them would result in great confusion. We will not say much today about the justification for keeping back from human beings these deeply incisive truths that are so significant for life, instead nurturing them only in the narrower circles of occult schools. It must be said, however, that the time has approached in which wider circles of humanity cannot and should not be without the communications of certain mysteries concerning the super-sensible world, of the kind that were mentioned yesterday. Indeed, more and more must be accomplished in communicating such matters to the public.

In earlier times, when humanity lived under different conditions, it was justifiable to hold back such mysteries within certain limits, but now this is no longer the case. Now, in what we know as the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, the conditions of human life are such that the human being will invariably pass through the portal of death as a destroyer unless in life here on earth he increasingly seeks for mental images, concepts, and ideas that are concerned with super-sensible matters. It is incorrect, therefore, to claim that one may just as well wait and see what happens after death. No, we must know between birth and death about certain matters concerning the spiritual world, in the way that I suggested yesterday, in order to step through the portal of death with these mental images, with these ideas.

In earlier times of humanity's evolution it was different. You know that until the sixteenth century, until the emergence of the Copernican view of the world, human beings believed something entirely different concerning the structure of the world. Obviously it has been necessary for human progress, and also for the penetration of human freedom into the evolution of humanity, that the Copernican world view appeared, just as now spiritual science must appear. A different physical view of the world prevailed in pre-Copernican times, a view that may be called erroneous today. This view believed that the physical structure of the world, that the earth, stands still, the sun moving around the earth, the stars moving around the earth, and that beyond the starry heavens there is a spiritual sphere inhabited by spiritual beings. With this view of the structure of the world the human being could still pass through the portal of death without being held back after death in the earthly sphere. This world view did not yet result in human beings becoming destructive in the earthly sphere after passing through the portal of death.

Only with the abrupt entry of Copernicanism, with its picture that the whole world spread out in space is also subject to the laws of space, with its picture that the earth circles around the sun, only with such pictures arising in the Copernican view is the human being chained to physical-sensible existence and prevented from rising appropriately into the spiritual world after death.

Today one must also know the other side of the coin of this Copernican world view, now that centuries have passed during which the human soul has been confronted again and again with the magnificent advance of this view. One side is as justifiable as the other. The Copernican world view is still valued today as a mark of sophistication. It has really become a philistine sophistication to regard the Copernican world view as the only teaching that can save souls. People still consider the other view to be foolish today, the view that through the Copernican world view the human being is chained to the earth after death unless he makes for himself a spiritual conception, as can be offered by spiritual science today. Nevertheless it is true. You already know from the Bible that many a thing that is foolishness to man is wisdom for the gods.

When the human being passes through the portal of death, his consciousness alters. It would be erroneous to believe that the human being loses consciousness after death. This curious idea is even spread around in some circles that call themselves “theosophical.” It is nonsense. On the contrary, consciousness becomes much more powerful, more intensive, but it is of a different kind. Even regarding the ordinary conceptions of the physical world it must be said that the conscious conceptions after death are something different.

First of all, after death the human being meets those persons with whom he is karmically connected in his life. The departed one may meet many human souls in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. Since there interpenetrability is the rule, not impenetrability, he passes through them and by them, if I may use the expression; for him they are not there. Those to whom he has some kind of karmic connection are there. Through life here on earth we must attain increasing growth into a general world connection, even after death. The founding of societies based purely on the spiritual is already a task of the present and of the future.

Why does one try to found a society such as the Anthroposophical Society? Why does one seek to unite human beings in a certain sense under such ideas? Because thereby a karmic bond is created between people who should find each other in the spiritual world, who should belong together in the spiritual world, something they would be unable to do if they carried on their lives in an isolated way here. Precisely by virtue of the possibility of sharing spiritual knowledge and wisdom with one another, a great deal is done for the life in the spiritual world. This then works back onto the physical-sensible world, which is continually under the influence of the spiritual world. What takes place here are actually only effects; the causes occur beyond in the spiritual world, even when we are here on the physical plane.

If we concern ourselves with a great deal that is accomplished with propaganda, we could say that it is possible to establish all kinds of unions, but regardless of the initial great enthusiasm from which they derive they are usually dedicated minimally to spiritual concerns. Many associations have as their goal to transform the earth gradually into an earthly paradise. Even before these past three years there were numerous such associations in which people worked toward gradually transforming Europe into a social paradise! What is taking place now doesn't especially support the hope that things will go as these people intended.

On the other hand, however, the working together of the physical world with the spiritual is extremely complicated. Nevertheless, it must be said that when associations are formed under the light of spiritual science, people work together not only on the world of effects but on the world of causes that lie behind the sense-perceptible effects. One must permeate oneself with this feeling if one wishes to understand properly the infinitely deep significance for humanity of living together in spiritual work both in the present and in the future.

This cannot result from any sort of merely casual association; it is a holy mission laid upon humanity of the present and the future by the divine-spiritual beings who guide the world. There are certain conceptions about the super-sensible world that human beings will have to take up, because fewer and fewer super-sensible conceptions will come from the sense world. You could say that super-sensible concepts are more and more driven out of the sense world by the advance of natural science. Thus human beings would gradually be entirely shut off from the spiritual world if they received no super-sensible, spiritual concepts. They would condemn themselves after death to being completely united with the mere physical earth, to being united also with what the physical earth will become.

The physical earth will become a corpse in the future, however, and the human being will face the terrible prospect of condemning himself, as soul, to inhabit a corpse unless he resolves to learn about the spiritual world, to take root in the spiritual world. Spiritual science's undertaking is thus a serious, significant task. We must call this task before our souls as a holy thought every day so that we never lose our fervour for this justified concern of spiritual science.

Such conceptions can be enlarged upon more and more when we work with what has already come into our spiritual stream in the many concepts about this spiritual world. Everything that comes to us in such concepts enables us to become free from bondage to the earthly, to what is destructive in the earthly, in order to work in other directions. We will still continue to be united with the souls we have left behind on the earth to whom we are karmically connected, and we will also be united with the earth, but united from different places. Indeed, we are more intensively bound to the souls we have left behind on earth if we are connected with them from higher spiritual regions, if we are not condemned by a purely materialistic life to haunt the earth, as it were, when that is the case, we cannot be joined in love with anything on earth but are really only centers of destruction.

You see, my dear friends, if we gradually develop our consciousness here from childhood on—well, we know how this consciousness grows and develops, we don't need to describe it. After death totally different processes prevail so that we gradually acquire the consciousness that we must acquire for the life between death and a new birth. Here on earth we walk around and do things, we have experiences, but it is not the same after death, when this is no longer necessary. What is necessary, however, is that we disengage ourselves from the powerful intensive element that is united with us when we have relinquished the physical body. When we have passed through the portal of death, we have grown together with the spiritual world described here by spiritual science. We describe it as the world of higher hierarchies: Angels, Archangels, Archai, Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes, and so on; we describe it as the world of the higher hierarchies and the deeds and experiences of these hierarchies. Here the world is outside us, we are surrounded by the world of the mineral kingdom, of the plant kingdom, of the animal kingdom. When we have passed through the portal of death, these spiritual beings that we have enumerated as the higher hierarchies, and even the worlds of these beings, are within us. We are united with them, we cannot at first distinguish ourselves from them. We live in them through their permeating us.

This is a difficult concept, but we must accustom ourselves to it: here we are outside the world, there we are within the world. There our being spreads itself over the entire world, but we are not able to distinguish ourselves in it. After death we are stuffed full, as it were, with the beings of the higher hierarchies, and with what these hierarchies do. It is most important that we first be able to separate the nearest hierarchy by which we are permeated, the hierarchy of Angels, Archangels, and Archai, from the higher hierarchies. Over there we do not come to a proper ego-consciousness at all (I have already described this maturation of ego-consciousness from other points of view in cycles and lectures). We do not come to a proper ego-consciousness over there if we are unable to find the force in us to distinguish what is in us: an Angel? an Elohim? Which is a being from the hierarchy of Angeloi? Which is a being from the hierarchy of the Exusiai, the Spirits of Form? Over there we must learn to distinguish, we must have the power to separate what we want to know from what is united with us; otherwise it is in us, not outside us. Here we must come together with what is outside us, we must look at it; there we must disengage it from us, so that we may be united with it.

At the present stage of humanity's evolution, the world is such that we can release what we otherwise bear within us as if in a sleeping state only by acquiring spiritual concepts, those spiritual concepts that here people find so uncomfortable because they have to make a little bit of an effort, more effort than for ordinary concepts. If an individual acquires spiritual concepts, these concepts develop a tremendous force after death through which he gains the ability to recognize the spiritual world, to penetrate it. This is very important. People find it uncomfortable today to acquire spiritual concepts. They would rather go to presentations where slides are shown or something of that sort, so that they have to do as little super-sensible thinking as possible, since they can see everything. Or they like at least to go to presentations where they are told about things that they usually have before their eyes. But people avoid the effort of elevating themselves to concepts that are more difficult because they refer to no outer object, because their object is the facts to which they are related in the super-sensible world. Over there, however, they are the forces that first give the world to us in its reality.

Thus through spiritual ideas and concepts, we gain for ourselves the wisdom we need in order to have light on the other side; otherwise everything is dark. For what is acquired here as wisdom is light over there, spiritual light. Wisdom is spiritual light. In order that it may not be dark over there, we need wisdom. And if we do not acquire any spiritual concepts, we provide the best means to having no light in the spiritual world. Without light, one then moves out of the sphere that should be illuminated and comes back to the earth, where, being dead, one wanders around as a destructive center on earth. At best one can then be used by a black magician to give inspiration for very special projects and destructive works on earth.

Wisdom is therefore necessary so that one may have light after death. After death, however, an individual not only needs the ability to disengage himself from the beings of the spiritual world and have them before him but he also needs the capacity for love after death. Otherwise he would not be able to develop in the right way relationships to the beings that are seen through wisdom. One needs love. But the love that is developed here on earth is essentially dependent on the physical body; it is a feeling, which here in the physical world is dependent upon the rhythm of breathing. This love we cannot take over into the spiritual world. It would be a total illusion to suppose that the love developed here, especially at the present time, can be taken over into the spiritual world.

However one does take into the spiritual world all the force of the love from what one gains here in the physical world through sensory perception, through life with physical being. Love is already enkindled through the understanding that is developed here in the physical world for this physical world. And precisely such experiences as the experience of viewing the world with modern natural science—if one takes them up as feelings—develop love for the other side. Love may be something lofty or debased depending on the realm in which it unfolds. If you pass through the portal of death and must remain in the region of the earth as a destructive center, you have also developed a great deal of love, of course (for having to remain is a consequence of your having been united with purely natural scientific concepts), but you apply this love to the work of destruction, you love the work of destruction, and you are compelled to observe how you yourself love this destructive work.

Yet love is something noble when a person can rise to higher worlds and love what he conquers for himself through spiritual concepts. Let us not forget that love is something base when it works in a lower sphere, but it is noble and lofty and spiritual when it works in a higher, spiritual sphere. This is the essential point, the question of what it is approaching. Without being conscious of this, we cannot look at things in the right way at all.

You see, it is concepts such as these about the human being's life after death that an individual must make his own today. It is no longer adequate for humanity of the present time and it is especially inadequate for humanity of the near future for the preacher to say that they must believe this or that, that they must prepare themselves for eternal life. This remains inadequate if the preacher is never able to say something definite about the world the human being actually enters when he passes through the portal of death. In earlier times this was sufficient, because the natural scientific, naturalistic concepts did not yet exist, because human beings were not yet infected by the merely material interests that have gradually laid hold of everything since the sixteenth century.

In earlier times it was sufficient to speak to people about the super-sensible world in the way in which the religious faiths still want to speak. Today this will no longer do. Today people often get themselves into difficulties precisely because they wish to promote eternal bliss in an egoistic way through the religious faiths. This is done out of deep sympathy for humanity, it must be noted. In this way, however, people entangle themselves all the more in the physical-sensible, in the naturalistic world, thus obstructing the ascent after passing through the portal of death.

When this happens, an entirely different situation arises, one that makes it necessary to emphasize very strongly that in the present and in the future spiritual science must be pursued by humanity. People have a deplorable situation when they can create for themselves no spiritual scientific conceptions for the life after death. Spiritual science is at the same time something that one must try to spread. Thus out of deep sympathy for people, out of an inner compassion, spiritual science is something that must be spread further, because it is deplorable what happens when people resist spiritual scientific conceptions, when they resist by their lack of understanding.

We must be absolutely clear, however, that the spiritual world is present everywhere. Just think, the world in which the dead are with the dead, in this super-sensible world, the threads that join the dead to those still living, the threads that join the dead to the higher hierarchies, belong to the world in which we stand. Just as the air is around us, so truly is this world always around us. We are not separated from this world at all; only by conditions of consciousness are we separated from the world we cross into after death. This must be firmly emphasized, for even within our circle not everyone is clear about the fact that the dead will fully find the dead again, that we are separated only as long as we are in the physical body. The other is without the physical body, but all those forces must be acquired that bring us together with the dead through our disengaging ourselves from them. Otherwise they live in us, and we cannot become aware of them! We must also bring into the right sphere the force of love that is developed here through natural scientific conceptions, for otherwise this force becomes an evil force for us over there. Precisely the love that is developed through natural scientific conceptions is able to become an evil force. A force in itself is neither good nor evil; it is one or the other according to the sphere in which it manifests.

Just as we stand in connection with this super-sensible world in which the dead reside, so also is the super-sensible world projected into this physical-sensible world, though in a different way. Indeed, the world is complicated, and comprehension of it must be acquired slowly and gradually. But one must have the will to do so.

The spiritual world projects into our world. Everything is interpenetrated by the spiritual world. In the sense-perceptible there is everywhere a super-sensible element. The super-sensible element that has to do with man's own sense-perceptible nature must be of very special interest to him. Now I beg you to note the following very carefully, for it is an exceedingly important conception. We human beings consist of body, soul, and spirit, but that is by no means an exhaustive statement concerning our being. Our body, our soul, our spirit are what first approach our consciousness, as it were, but they are not everything standing in connection with our existence. Not in the least! What I am about to say is connected with certain mysteries of human becoming, of human nature, which must be known today and become ever better known.

When the human being enters into earthly existence through birth, acquiring his physical body, he does not gain only the possibility of giving his existence to his own soul. I beg you to consider this well. The human being by no means knows everything about this physical body. Many things go on in it about which he knows nothing! He gradually comes to know what goes on in this physical body, yet in a very unsuitable way, through anatomy and physiology. If we had to wait for nourishment until we understood the process of digestion—well, one could not even say that people would have to die of hunger, for it is unthinkable that one must know something about what the organs have to do in order to prepare food for the organism! Thus a human being comes into this world with the organism in which he has clothed himself but without extending down into this organism with his soul. The opportunity therefore exists a short time before we are born (not very long before we are born) for another spiritual being in addition to our soul to take possession of our body, of the subconscious part of our body.

A short time before we are born we are permeated by another being; in our terminology we would call it an Ahrimanic spirit-being. This is within us just as our own soul is within us. These beings spend their life using human beings in order to be able to be in the sphere where they want to be. These beings have an extraordinarily high intelligence and a significantly developed will, but no warmth of heart at all, nothing of what we call human soul warmth (Gemüt). Thus we go through life in such a way that we have both our souls and a double of this kind, who is much more clever, very much more clever than we are, who is very intelligent, but with a Mephistophelian intelligence, an Ahrimanic intelligence, and also an Ahrimanic will, a very strong will, a will that is much more akin to the nature-forces than our human will, which is regulated by the warmth of soul (Gemüt).

In the nineteenth century, natural science discovered that the nervous system is permeated by electrical forces. Natural science is right. But when natural scientists believe that the nerve-force that belongs to us as the basis of our conceptual life has something to do with electrical streams that go through our nerves, then they are incorrect. For the electrical streams, which are the forces put into us by the being I have just mentioned and described, do not belong to our own being at all. We carry electrical streams in us, but they are of a purely Ahrimanic nature.

These beings of high intelligence, but of purely Mephistophelian intelligence, and with a will more akin to nature than can be said of the human will, these beings once decided out of their own will that they did not want to live in that world in which they were destined to live by the wisdom-filled gods of the higher hierarchies. They wanted to conquer the earth, and to do this they need bodies; they do not have bodies of their own. They make use of as much of the human body as they can, because the human soul cannot entirely fill up the human body.

As the human body develops, these beings are able to enter this human body at a definite time before the human being is born, and below the threshold of our consciousness they accompany us. There is only one thing in human life that they absolutely cannot endure: they cannot endure death. Therefore they must always leave this human body, in which they have established themselves, before that body succumbs to death. This is a very harsh disappointment again and again, for just what they want to attain—to remain in human bodies beyond death—is thwarted. To do this would be a lofty achievement in the kingdom of these beings. Up until now they have not attained it.

Had the Mystery of Golgotha not occurred, had Christ not passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, conditions on earth would have been such that these beings would long ago have attained the possibility of remaining within the human being when he is karmically predestined for death. Then they would have completely triumphed over human evolution on earth, they would have become masters of human evolution on earth.

It is of tremendous and profound significance to have insight into the connection between Christ passing through the Mystery of Golgotha and these beings who want to conquer death in human nature but are not yet able today to endure it. They must always avoid experiencing in the human body the hour when the human being is predestined to die. They must avoid maintaining his body beyond the hour of death, of prolonging the life of his body beyond the hour of death.

This matter of which I am now speaking has long been known to certain occult brotherhoods. They knew these things well and withheld them from humanity (again, we do not want to discuss their right to do so). Today conditions are such that it is impossible not to equip people gradually with such concepts, which they will need when they have passed through the portal of death. Everything that the human being experiences here, even what he experiences below the threshold of consciousness, he needs after death, because he must look back upon this life, and in looking back this life must be entirely comprehensible. The worst thing is for him to be unable to do this. An individual will not have sufficient concepts to understand this life on looking back at it if he cannot shed light on a being that takes over a portion of our life. This is an Ahrimanic being, which takes possession of us before our birth and always remains there, always creating a figure around us in our subconscious. This will be the case unless we can again and again shed light upon it. For wisdom becomes light after death.

These beings are in general very important for human life, and knowledge of them must gradually lay hold of the human being, and will lay hold of him. Only it must lay hold of human beings in the right way. It must not be disseminated to humanity only by those occult brotherhoods who make it a power issue, intending thereby to enhance their own power. Above all it must not be guarded further for the sake of enhancing the power of certain egotistically minded brotherhoods. Humanity strives for universal knowledge, and that knowledge must be disseminated.

In the future it will no longer be wholesome for occult brotherhoods to be able to employ such things for the extension of their power. In the coming centuries human beings must increasingly gain knowledge of these beings. The human being in the coming centuries will have to know more and more that he bears such a double within him, such an Ahrimanic-Mephistophelian double. The human being must know this. Today the human being is already developing a great many concepts, but they are actually obscured, because the human being does not yet know how to deal with them in the right way. The human being develops concepts today that can have a proper basis only when they are brought together with the facts that lie at their foundation.

And here something is disclosed that in the future must really be followed up if the human race is not to experience endless hindrances, really endless horrors. This double about which I have spoken is nothing more or less than the creator of all physical illnesses that emerge spontaneously from within; and to know him fully is organic medicine, illnesses that appear spontaneously from within the human being come not through outer injuries, not from the human soul, they come from this being. He is the creator of all illnesses that emerge spontaneously from within; he is the creator of all organic illnesses. And a brother of his, who is not composed Ahrimanically but Luciferically, is the creator of all neurasthenic and neurotic illnesses, all the illnesses that are not really illnesses but only nervous illnesses, hysterical illnesses as they are described. Thus medicine must become spiritual in two directions. The demand for this is shown by the intrusion of views such as those of psychoanalysis and the like, where one keeps house with spiritual entities, as it were, but with inadequate means of knowledge so that one can do nothing at all with the phenomena that will intrude more and more into human life. For certain things need to happen, things that may even be harmful in a certain direction, because the human being must be exposed to what is harmful in order to overcome it and thereby gain strength.

As I have said, this double is really the creator of all illnesses that have an organic foundation that are not merely functional. In order to understand this fully, however, one must know a great deal more. One must know, for example, that our entire earth is not the dead product that mineralogy or geology thinks it to be, but it is a living being. Geology knows as much of the earth as we would know about the human being if we knew only the skeletal system. Imagine that you were unable to perceive other people with usual sense perception and instead there were only X-rays of our fellow human beings. Then you would know only the skeletal system of your acquaintances. You would know as much about the human being as the geologists and science in general know about the earth. Imagine coming in here and of all the respected ladies and gentlemen you find here you would see nothing more than bones. Then you would have as much consciousness of the people present here as science has of the earth.

The earth, which is known only as a skeletal system, is a living organism. As a living organism it works upon the beings who walk around on it, including human beings themselves. And just as the human being is differentiated within regarding the distribution of his bodily organs, so the earth is also differentiated regarding what it develops out of its living nature, by which it influences the people who walk around on it. When you think, you are not exerting your right index finger or your left big toe but your head. You know perfectly well that you do not think with your right big toe; you think with your head. Thus things are distributed in the living organism, which is differentiated. Our earth is differentiated in the same way. The same things do not at all stream out everywhere from the earth onto its inhabitants. In the different regions of the earth, something entirely different streams forth. There are different forces, among them magnetism and electricity, but also forces that enter more into the realm of the living. All these forces come up out of the earth and influence people in the most varied ways at different points on the earth. They influence the human being in various ways according to the geographical formation.

This is a very important fact. What the human being is initially as body, soul, and spirit has really very little direct relation to these forces that work up out of the earth. But the double about which I have spoken chooses to be related to these forces that stream up out of the earth. And indirectly, by way of mediation, the human being as body, soul, and spirit stands in relation to the earth, and to that which rays out at various points. This is due to the fact that his double cherishes the most intimate relationship to what streams forth there. There beings that take possession of the human being as Ahrimanic-Mephistophelian beings a short time before he is born have quite highly developed tastes. Some of these beings are especially pleased with the Eastern hemisphere: Europe, Asia, Africa. They choose to make use of the bodies of human beings born there. Others choose bodies born in the Western hemisphere, in America. What we have as a dim image in our geography is for these beings a living principle of their own experience. They choose their dwelling place according to this.

From this you will see further that one of the most important tasks of the future will be to foster again something that has been interrupted: geographic medicine, medical geography. With Paracelsus it was torn away from the ancient atavistic wisdom. Since then it has hardly been nurtured because of materialistic views. It must take its place again, and many things must become known again if we are to come to know the connection of the illness-producing being in man with earthly geography, with all the fusions, with all the outward radiations that emerge from the earth in the various regions. It is very important for the human being to become acquainted with these things, for his life depends on it. In a very definite way he is inserted into this earthly existence by this double, and this double has his dwelling place within, within the human being himself.

This has become so infinitely important only in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch and will become especially important to human beings in the very near future. For this reason spiritual science must now spread, and this is now especially important because the present time calls upon the human being to reach an understanding of these things in a conscious way in order to find a relationship to these things. The human being must become strong in this epoch in order to adapt his existence to these beings.

This epoch began in the fifteenth century, our present period beginning in 1413. The fourth post-Atlantean period, the Greco-Latin, began in 747 B.C. and lasted until 1413. This was a time when a milder incision in history took place. The fifth post-Atlantean epoch began at that time, and we continue to live in it now. Only gradually is it bringing forth its special characteristics in our time, although these have been in preparation since the fifteenth century. In the fourth post-Atlantean epoch it was chiefly the Intellectual Soul (Verstandes- und Gemütseele) that was developed; now it is the Consciousness Soul that is being developed in the general evolution of humanity.

When the human being entered into this epoch, the guiding spiritual beings had to consider his special weakness in relation to this double. Had the human being taken into his consciousness very much of everything connected with this double, it would have gone badly, very badly for the human being. Already in the centuries before the fourteenth century, the human being had to be prepared by being protected, so that he would take in very little of what was suggestive in any way of this double. Therefore the knowledge of this double that existed throughout earlier ages was lost. Humanity had to be guarded so that it would not take up anything of the theory of this double; not only this, however, but it had to come in contact as little as possible with anything connected with this double.

For this purpose a very special arrangement was required. You must try to understand what developed at that time. In the centuries preceding the fourteenth century, the human being had to be guarded from this double. The double had to be gradually withdrawn from man's circle of vision. Only now is he gradually permitted to come into it again, now when the human being must adapt his relationship to him. A really significant arrangement was required, which could be attained only in the following way. Since the ninth or tenth century, conditions in Europe were gradually adjusted in such a way that the European people lost a certain connection that they had formerly, a connection that was still important for human beings in earlier centuries, the sixth and seventh centuries A.D. Beginning in the ninth century and especially from the twelfth century on, the entire shipping exchange with America with the kind of ships there were at that time, was abolished.

This may sound very strange to you. You will say, “We have never heard anything like this in history.” In many respects, history is just a fable convenue a legend; for in earlier centuries of Europe development, ships continually sailed from the Norway of that time to America. Of course it was not called America it had a different name at that time. America was known to be the region where the magnetic forces particularly arose that brought the human being into relation with this double. For the clearest relations to the double proceed from that region of the earth that comprises the American continent. And in the earlier centuries people sailed over to America in Norwegian ships and studied illnesses there. The illnesses in America brought about under the influence of earthly magnetism were studied by Europe. And the mysterious origin of the older European medicine is to be sought there. There one could observe the course of illness that could not have been observed in Europe, where people were more sensitive with regard to the influence of the double.

Then it was necessary for the connection with America to be gradually forgotten, and this was essentially brought about by the Roman Catholic Church through its edicts. And only after the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch was America rediscovered in a physical, sense-perceptible way. This was only a rediscovery, however, which is so significant because the powers that were at work actually achieved their purpose: that nothing very much should be reported in the record of the ancient relations of Europe with America. And where it is reported it is not recognized, it is not known that these things relate to the connection of Europe with America in ancient times. The visits were nothing more than visits. That the Europeans themselves became the American people (as is said today when the expression “people” is confused with “nation” in an incomprehensible way) was possible only after the physical discovery of America, the physical rediscovery of America. Earlier there were visits that were made in order to study how the double plays a very special role in the differently constituted Indian race.

For a long time before the beginning of the development of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, Europe had to be protected from the influence of the Western world. This is the significant historical arrangement that was cultivated by wisdom-filled world powers. Europe had to be protected for a long time from all these influences; and it could not have been protected if the European world had not been completely shut off from America in the centuries before the fifteenth century.

The effort had to be made for a long time in the preparatory centuries to give something to European humanity that carried the finer sensitivity. You could say that the intellect, which had to take hold of its proper place in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch, had to be very carefully protected in its first appearance. What was supposed to be revealed to it had to be presented to it very gently. Often this refinement was similar to the refinement of education, where sound measures of punishment are also applied, of course. Everything to which I am referring pertains, of course, to greater historical impulses.

Thus it happened that Irish monks in particular who were under the influence of the pure Christian-Esoteric teaching developed in Ireland, worked in such a way that the necessity was perceived in Rome to cut Europe off from the Western hemisphere. For it was intended that this movement arising in Ireland should spread Christianity over Europe in such a way, in these centuries before the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, that people would not be disturbed by all that was emerging from the sub-earthly regions in the Western hemisphere. Europe was to be kept ignorant of all the influences from the Western hemisphere.

This is a good place to speak about these conditions. Columban and his pupil Gallus were essential individuals in the greatly significant mission movement that sought its success in Christianizing Europe by surrounding Europe at that time with spiritual walls, and allowing no influence to come from the direction I have indicated. Individualities such as Columban and his pupil Gallus, who founded the city where I am lecturing today and from whom it gets its name (St. Gallen) saw above all that the tender plant of Christianity could be spread in Europe only if Europe were Surrounded by a wall, as it were, in the spiritual respect.

Behind the processes of world history lie deep mysteries filled with significance. The history taught and learned in schools is only a fable convenue. Among the facts most important for an understanding of modern Europe is this one: that from the centuries when Ireland began to spread Christianity in Europe until the twelfth century, the Roman Church worked on the problem at the same time through papal edicts, which gradually forbade shipping between Europe and America, so that Europe completely forgot the connection with America. This lapse in memory was needed so that the early period of preparation in Europe for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch could be developed in the right way. And only when the materialistic period began was America discovered again to the West, as is related today. From the East, America was discovered under the influence of the greed for gold, under the influence of purely materialistic culture, which simply must be taken into account in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch, and to which man has to find a suitable relationship.

These things are actual history. And these things, I also think, clarify what is actually the case. The earth is really something that must be called “living being.” In accordance with geographical differentiations, the most varied forces stream up out of the various territories. Therefore people must not be separated according to territory but must receive from one another what is good and great in each territory and what can be produced just there. Hence a spiritual scientific world view is intent upon creating something that can really be accepted by all nations in all regions. For people must advance in the mutual exchange of their spiritual treasures. This is the important point.

On the other hand, there very easily arises from individual territories the endeavor to increase power and power and power. And the great danger emerging from the one-sided way in which the evolution of modern humanity is advancing can be judged from concrete, from truly concrete conditions, only when one knows that the earth is an organism, when one knows what is actually occurring from the various points of the earth. In Eastern Europe there is relatively little inclination purely toward what streams out of the earth. The Russians, for example, are fervently connected through the soil, but they receive quite special forces out of the soil, forces that do not come from the earth. The secret of the Russian geography consists of the fact that the Russian receives from the earth the light that is first imparted to the earth and then reflected back again from the earth. The Russian actually takes from the earth what streams toward it from outer regions. The Russian loves his earth, but he loves it because to him it is a mirror of the heavens. Because of this the Russian, even though he is so territorially minded, has something in this territorial inclination that is extraordinarily cosmopolitan although today this remains at a childlike stage—because the earth, moving through space, comes into relation to every possible part of the earth's environment. And when a person receives into his soul, not what streams upward from below in the earth but what streams downward from above and then upward again, then it is different from receiving streams directly from the earth, which are placed in a certain kinship to human nature. But what the Russian loves in his earth, with which he permeates himself, gives him many weaknesses, but above all it gives him a certain ability to conquer that double nature of which I have spoken previously. Therefore he will be called upon to offer the most important impulses to the epoch in which this double nature must finally be subdued, in the sixth post-Atlantean epoch.

A certain portion of the earth's surface shows the closest kinship to these forces. If a person goes to this place, he enters their realm; as soon as he goes elsewhere, he is again outside their realm. For these forces are geographic; they are not ethnographic, not national, but purely geographic forces. There is a region where the force streaming up from below has the most influence on the double, and where, because with the outstreaming forces it enters most into kinship with the double, it is again imparted to the earth. This is the region of the earth where most of the mountain ranges run, not crosswise, from east to west, but where the ranges primarily run, from north to south (for this is also connected with these forces) where one is in the vicinity of the magnetic North Pole. This is the region where above all the kinship is developed with the Mephistophelian-Ahrimanic nature through outer conditions. And through this kinship much is brought about in the continuing evolution of the earth.

Today the human being should not move blindly through earthly evolution; he must be able to see through such relationships. Europe will be able to come into a proper relationship with America only when such conditions can be understood, when it is known what geographical determinants come from there. Otherwise, if Europe continues to be blind to these things, it will be with this poor Europe as it was with Greece in relation to Rome. This should not be; the world should not be geographically Americanized. First, however, this must be understood. Things should not be taken with such lack of seriousness as is so common today. Things have deep foundations, and knowledge is necessary today, not merely sympathy and antipathy, in order to gain a position in the connections in which present-day humanity is so tragically placed. Such things as we can discuss here more intimately can only be hinted at in public lectures. Yesterday I called attention to the necessity for spiritual science really to penetrate also into social and political concepts. For America's endeavor is to mechanize everything, to drive everything into the realm of pure naturalism, and gradually to extinguish European culture from the earth. It cannot be otherwise. Obviously geographical concepts are not concepts of a people as such. It is only necessary to think of Emerson in order to know that nothing is intended here as characteristic of a people. But Emerson was a man of European education through and through. This simply shows the two opposite poles that are developing. Precisely under such influences as have been characterized today, people such as Emerson develop, who develop as they do because they confront the double with complete humanity. On the other hand, people are developing such as Woodrow Wilson, who is a mere sheath of the double, through whom the double himself works with special effectiveness. Such people are essentially actual embodiments of the geographic nature of America.

These matters are not connected with sympathy or antipathy, or with any kind of partisanship. They are connected solely with knowledge of the deeper causes of what human beings undergo in life. But it will achieve very little for the salvation of humanity unless clarification is given about what is really active in these matters. And today it is very necessary to make a connection again with much that had to be torn apart at the turning-point of a new epoch when the way to America was blocked. And I would like to offer human beings such as Gallus as a symbol of what you can feel and experience here in so many ways. They had to create a ground for their activity through the barrier they had erected. Such things must be understood.

Spiritual science alone will create real historical understanding. But you see prejudice upon prejudice will naturally pile up. For how could one think otherwise than that such knowledge too would begin to be partisan! But this was one of the reasons that certain occult brotherhoods concealed these things, though this reason is a cowardly one. They were concealed for the simple reason that knowledge is often uncomfortable for people. People do not want to become universally human, and this is especially the case with those who are predisposed to unite themselves with geographic outstreamings.

Questions of public life will gradually become questions of knowledge, lifted out of the atmosphere into which they have been forced today by an overwhelming majority of humanity. They will be forced out of the mere sphere of sympathies and antipathies. What is effective will by no means be decided by majorities. But what is effective can only have its effect if people do not shrink back from receiving important facts into their consciousness.

You could say that I have spoken here today in this way because the genius loci of this place requires it of me. It has been pointed out to you in a special example that for people of the present it is not enough any more to know history, to take the ordinary textbooks in hand, for there one discovers only that fable convenue known today as history. What does one discover there about the important paths of exchange—particularly those lying in the dim origins of medicine—that still led from Europe to America in the early Christian centuries? What exists, however, does not really cease to be just because people later render their consciousness blind to it, like the ostrich that sticks its head in the sand so as not to see and then believes that what he fails to see is not there. A great deal is concealed from people simply by the fable convenue called “history,” a great deal whose influence is quite near to contemporary man. Spiritual science will bring much more to light about the historical course of humanity, for people want to be clear about their own destiny, about the connection of their souls with their spiritual evolution.

Much of what has been historically lost spiritual science can bring to light. Otherwise humanity will have to decide to remain ignorant about a great deal that is close at hand. And although the human being of the present is informed about everything but how he is informed!—he will be able to make a judgment about the present only from a spiritual scientific standpoint. For with all due respect (you know one always says “with all due respect” when one says something unflattering), humanity is informed today about all sorts of things by the press, but it is informed by the press in such a way that the essential aspect, the true aspect, the real aspect, that which matters, is hidden.

And the human being must come to this degree of the knowledge of reality! This is not in the least something either personal or impersonal directed against the press, but it is intended to show that the press is connected with the active forces of the present and cannot be otherwise. Things cannot be otherwise, but man must be conscious of them. The great error is for a person to believe he must criticize things. What he must do is characterize them. This is the point.

I have tried to give you today a picture of many kinds of impulses that are active in the individual human being and in humanity as a whole. Apart from the particulars about which I have spoken, I wanted most of all to call forth, through the kind of impulse I have touched upon, a feeling for how the human being must notice the way in which he is imbedded with his whole being in a concrete spiritual world, with concrete spiritual beings and concrete spiritual forces. I do this not only so that we grow into the world we enter after death and in which we live between death and a new birth but also, while we are here in the physical world, so that we may understand this physical world if we understand the spiritual world at the same time.

Medicine can endure only if it is a spiritual science, for illnesses come from a spiritual being that only makes use of the human body in order to profit from it, which it cannot do in the place assigned to it by the wise guidance of the world, against which it has revolted, as I have shown you. This is actually an Ahrimanic-Mephistophelian being within the human nature, which before birth is inhaled into the human body as into its home and leaves this human body only because it may not endure death under its present conditions, which cannot overcome death. Illnesses emerge because this being works in the human being. And when remedies are employed it means that something is given to this being from the outer world that it otherwise seeks through the human being. If I provide a remedy for the human body when this Ahrimanic-Mephistophelean being is at work, I give it something else. I stroke this being as it were. I come to terms with it, so that it lets go of the human being and becomes satisfied with what I have tossed into its jaws as a remedy.

All these things are just beginning, however. Medicine will become a spiritual science. Just as medicine was known as a spiritual science in ancient times, so it will again come to be known as a spiritual science.

Now, of course, I will also have called forth in you this feeling: that it is necessary not only to acquire a few concepts from spiritual science but to feel one's way into it; for in doing so one feels one's way also into the human being. The time has come when many scales will fall from people's eyes, even regarding outer history, for example, as I proved a couple of days ago in Zurich. There I at least showed that it is not perceived outwardly by the human being but is dreamed in reality, that one understands it only if one grasps it out of the dream of humanity not as something that is accomplished outwardly.

It is to be hoped that these things will then be carried further by the force that humanity has acquired in very small part (all too small) in what we call the anthroposophical movement. But this anthroposophical movement will be connected with what humanity will have to pursue in the future as its most important concerns. We must often remind ourselves of that simile that I have often used. The very clever people in the world think, “Oh, those anthroposophists; that is only a sect with all kinds of fantastic stuff, with all kinds of foolishness in their heads. The educated part of humanity need not bother itself with that.” This “educated part of humanity” thinks today about this sub-earthly, sectarian assembly among anthroposophists and theosophists in the same way, although modified by time, that the Romans, the distinguished Romans, felt when Christianity was spreading. The difference is that at that time the Christians had to be physically down below in catacombs; up above those things went on that were regarded by the distinguished Romans as the only right, while the dreaming Christians were down below. In a couple of centuries this was different. Romanism was swept away, and what had been down in the catacombs came up. What had ruled civilization was cast out.

Such comparisons must strengthen our forces, they must live into our souls so that we find strength in them, because we ourselves must still work in small circles. But the movement that is characterized by this anthroposophical stream must develop the force that can also actually come up. Once up above, to be sure, it finds little understanding for its spiritual basis. In spite of this, however, we must again and again think back to something like these conditions of the early Christians in the Roman catacombs. Despite the fact that it was sub-earthly, to a much greater degree than the anthroposophical movement is today, it nevertheless found its way to the surface. And many of those within this anthroposophical movement who have come to an understanding of spiritual concepts have already found the possibility in the sphere in which these spiritual concepts, which here are wisdom, unfold as light, of reckoning with that light.

And we must say again and again that among the membership that works together in the anthroposophical movement there always stand side by side those who are in the physical world and those who are already beyond in the super-sensible world, who have already passed through the portal of death and who are keepers today of what is gained here as spiritual wisdom. In this connection we can think of quite a number of members whose souls reside in the super-sensible. At this moment we remember Fraulein Sophie Stinde, one of our faithful coworkers on the building in Dornach. I think we will recall her today because it is a year ago in these days that her physical death-day took place, which is the super-sensible birthday for spiritual life.

What matters, my dear friends, is that we really strive to stand within the positive anthroposophical movement, to deepen in ourselves the feeling that we take up the concrete concepts about the spiritual world through what is really united with us. Now these are difficult times. We know that there are even more difficult times ahead. But whatever the conditions may be with regard to our being together on the physical plane, however long or short a time it may be until we meet again, let me say to you that we want to feel together and think together even if we are spatially separated from one another. We want always to be together in our spiritual scientific endeavors.

It is quite conceivable that some people find a topic like the one to be discussed today fruitless and perhaps even impossible to discuss because they believe that nothing fruitful can be created from such foundations, from foundations of social knowledge and social insight, in the face of facts.

Now, my dear attendees, the great catastrophe that befell our entire civilized world in the second decade of the twentieth century could well teach people the necessity of facing the latest development of civilization in order to perhaps come to a different insight than the one I have just characterized in my introduction. What has taken place in the civilized world during the last decades, the last 70 to 80 years, is precisely the failure to take into account the emerging social situation of humanity. If you look back over this period, you will find that precisely those personalities who belonged to the leading classes have, as fate has brought them, entered into some situation, into some professional or creative situation, and that they have worked in this situation in the way that circumstances have dictated for a long time, without taking into account whether it is necessary was necessary to look into these conditions, to intervene in these conditions themselves, one accepted what was offered without much ado, which then resulted in the great and powerful progress and triumph of modern civilization, and one left it to the broad masses of the working population, the proletariat, to criticize out of one-sidedness what had emerged from social conditions. The inconvenience of having to intervene gave rise in the leading classes to a certain desire to basically let things go as they were going under the influence of the rapidly developing production conditions, and those who exercised criticism were caught up in the wheels of social conditions; their unfruitfulness was evident in many areas. If we reflect on how we have failed, for a long time, to maintain an overview of what actually needs to be done, and on how circumstances today demand a different way of thinking, a different way of feeling about people than in the past, then one will surely come to the realization that now, when the time of the terrible catastrophe has come, that now one must begin with such a rethinking, such a re-sensing; that should be clear to anyone who is unbiased. At least in the West, the circumstances that caused 12 to 15 million people to go mad and as many to become cripples arose from impossible economic conditions. This is undoubtedly the case in the West, but in the East we have completely different civilization conditions, where psychological factors have played a greater role. It should be clear to everyone that this whole chaos, the state of war and the current crisis, has arisen from the sins of omission of the last decades.

We have the peace treaties. But ultimately, is the peace that has been made a real peace? It could only be a peace of significance if it offered the prospect of the old civilization of humanity being rebuilt. But let us look at the actual circumstances and see if they support this. In England, it dawned on people first, and in a very significant way. English thinkers have said many things about the bleakness of the current situation and what is needed to improve it.

Then, in October [1920], at the Second National Economic Conference, we heard it said that what had emerged from the war catastrophe was alarming and that it must be replaced by something else if the misery was not to grow ever greater. There were many men there who realized what the situation was really like.

We in our civilization today are like a person who takes comfort in the fact that he still has a coat that is just starting to get shabby, and so on. [Lücke in der Mitschrift?] So steht [es] mit demjenigen, was man als die Besserung ansieht. Es ist durchaus diese Besserung nur scheinbar, denn dasjenige, was geblieben ist aus der Zivilisation der Vorkriegsepoche, ist in einer gewissen Beziehung abgetragen, muss in furchtbare Zustände hineinführen, wenn nicht beizeiten daran gedacht wird, wirkliche Besserung zu schaffen.

A significant word rings in one's ears when one hears how a conscientious person has described the present situation, with the words: “Within the present conditions of European civilization, a great crime of an incomparable kind is being committed and we are all participants in this crime.” The word has been spoken in England, and one may say that such a word sounds in one's ears as something that seems quite true. Those people who reflect on the present conditions are struck first by the economic conditions, and one thinks, this gentleman will become master. One believes that one can master them in this or that way, and then it will spread to all other areas of civilization. However, within the economic conditions there are circumstances that easily, very easily show how, basically, it is not managed from some reasonable foundations, but from chaos, from a situation riddled with decay. Can it be called rationing at all when, for example, Switzerland, which needed a million tons of coal in the first half of 1920, obtained 4,000 tons of that million tons from America? One need only consider that Switzerland is surrounded by coal-producing countries and that it is an impossible way to manage the world when things are supplied as expensively as possible. Hundreds of such examples could be cited today; one could see the impulse from which economic efficiency actually flows. - About 4500 million pounds sterling are needed for reparations, etc. [gap in the transcript?]

All of this provides a horrifying overview, and one should not believe that any area, such as Switzerland, can be exempted from the consequences. It is now definitely the time, even if one resists it, in which the progress of civilization makes the world economy necessary.

If we also consider that these Central European countries, if they are to have any chance of working at all, need at least 100 million pounds sterling in credit, then the prospect before us will be a very sad one indeed. The economic situation is before our eyes; [from the same side] from which the economic situation is already clearly emphasized, something else also emerges. One could hear it in the conference of October 1920. Basically, it could not have turned out differently, because those who were gathered were diplomats, they were politicians all together, they all understood nothing of a national economy; it is necessary that economists offer their hand out of the economic conditions to improve them, to intervene in the improvement. Today it is admitted that the politicians, those who are only politically trained - and unfortunately they are poorly trained politically enough - are not at all in a position to intervene in the economic situation in any way that would improve it.

You see, my esteemed audience, the views that are finally being imposed by the necessities of the times on the few today, are the ones that want to put the threefold social organism into the world as an impulse to lead to ascent. It wants to take civilization as a whole, it wants to see how the various factors, the various elements of civilized life interact. We cannot look at economic life in isolation; we can only look at the whole, but then it shows us very clearly how radically different the individual areas are, and it is on this radical difference between the three areas of civilization that the threefold order of the social organism focuses, and from there it tries to contribute to the recovery of human development. These three areas are spiritual life on the one hand, economic life on the other, and in the middle of them we find what we can call state, legal or, in fact, political life.

When the newer life of civilization began, it was quite natural, indeed historically necessary, that what had developed out of the modern state should gradually take hold not only of political and legal life, but also of intellectual life, of education, teaching and the whole intellectual life. But today we are in an age where this has fulfilled its task and must make way for something different. It is absolutely the case that the forms of civilization are first young, then mature, and then grow old and decay. So the deepest cause of our current plight is actually that we do not realize that we are living in an abstract unitary state, that this is actually heading towards its [doom] period, and that something new must be born to take its place.

The goal is to carve out intellectual life and economic life from state life, so that three elements take the place of the abstract unitary state, which has confused everything: an independent state life with its own legal system, an independent intellectual life, and an independent economic life, which must and can grow and flourish under these conditions. The nature of an independent spiritual life must be such that the greatest possible development can take place of that which man brings with him into physical existence through his birth, whether it be spiritual or mental. That which is to be developed must be introduced into the other areas of life with the greatest strength, and it must be allowed to unfold completely freely.

In more recent times, the state has taken control of education and teaching; it has done its part – what has come of it? Those who are supposed to develop human abilities in teaching and education have found themselves dependent on what the state prescribed for them; in a sense, they were what the state needed for its enrichment, for fertility. But because the actual life in education and teaching was guided from outside, the content of teaching became alienated to what we see today – especially viewed by certain personalities – to an abstract scientificity, to an abstract intellectual life. These educators of humanity were unable to administer the teaching and education from their own hearts at the same time; so they had no choice but to live in an abstractness. The fact that many people do not want to admit this is the cause of our present misery.

What can help is spiritual life. The most important component of spiritual life is independence, spiritual self-reliance. May this come into its own administration, and into the power of those who are directly involved in education and teaching. Here we must strive to ensure that they can also administer this educational system freely and autonomously in their corporations and in their cooperation, so that we need not fear anything that arises from the educational system itself. Forced authorities are fought against. Anyone who is familiar with the conditions of intellectual life knows that a specialist naturally has the greatest influence because others need him in order to learn from him. Independence is what matters. Of course, the establishment of intellectual life is developed out of economic life. But in terms of the spiritual, this intellectual field must be completely independent of any other influence.

For millions of people, intellectual life has become an ideology. But you can't come to such a view if you experience that the spirit is not just something you have thought about, but something you have experienced; from this living life flows the state of the heart as it actually is. One hears quite justified statements that in recent times intellectual life has in a sense brought itself into a state of decadence, even brutalized, because it has striven for pure intellectualism, while the soul, the heart, has actually withered.

It is easy to say such things, but it is more difficult to see how one can follow suit. One can demand that the atmosphere of emotional education should be abandoned, etc. [gap in the transcript?] But one cannot simply draw a line under what has gone before. Modern life has its techniques, it has cultivated the intellect, the development of the mind, one-sided cleverness. The task is to direct the serious, profound question to the destiny of the human being: What brings harmony with the development of the heart and soul? ... (reference to spiritual science).

Such a science cannot be like it used to be, considering that the great task that one wants to set oneself there is to come to the spirit, to the true spirit; not to spiritualism, to theosophy, etc., but to a spirit that can permeate the whole human being, that can reconcile spirit with feeling. This is what has been seen in reality, and what now wants to happen from within, to enliven this spiritual life from the Goetheanum in Dornach. However, this does give rise to many annoyances for Dornach, because it has to take a stand on other contemporary endeavors that may come from good intentions but prove to be unfruitful. What do people strive for most in our time to strengthen the life of the mind, the life of morality, the deepening of religion? What is being striven for there? One wants to spread what one has acquired intellectually through all kinds of enterprises, such as public libraries, etc. — Dornach cannot go along with this because it recognizes the futility.

One must ask oneself: Did those who were leaders not see and know what the schools had achieved, did they not possess precisely what is taught at the universities? But did that prevent them from sailing headlong into the catastrophe of the twentieth century? And if those who were in possession of this education were not protected from it, but were also driven into it, can one hope that it will lead to something different when it is spread further? Do we want to deliver that to the millions as well, so that it will bear fruit to an even more devastating extent? This is what is being seen through in the field in Dornach, in order to carry it out to the people from there. First of all, it must be carried into the educational institutions, so that something different can come of it.

I just wanted to mention the reasons why this understanding of the necessity for the liberation of spiritual life can arise. It is precisely from this that the demand for a free spiritual life arises. Teachers from the lowest to the highest classes have to administer this spiritual life themselves; they themselves will have to set up the practical teaching institutions that exist; they will not be told what to teach, because it is said that they themselves must administer what is to be used in spiritual life. But then they are also forced to immerse themselves in practical life, to teach and educate, because they do not have to teach an abstract science, but rather that which really sustains life.

The free spiritual life must stand on one wing of the social organism. On this one wing of the social organism, it will be necessary to judge things for ourselves by putting ourselves in the place of the spirit. This will cause difficulties because people are unaccustomed to grasping such a spiritual life correctly; they only have a mere thinking about the spirit. But we cannot make a decision about whether to leave it or improve it; it must be understood that in this way life is fertilized in the right way from the spiritual side - it must become independent. That is on the one wing.

On the other wing is economic life. I would like to show you, by means of an external comparison, the difference between the living conditions in economic life and in spiritual life. (Example) In the economic sphere, the freedom that we have in spiritual life is not possible. In economic life, we are all, without exception, dependent on each other. In economic life, it is a matter of gradually acquiring what one has acquired through economic experience, through being connected to an economic sector. In the field of economic life, it is impossible to start from freedom. It can be strictly proved that it is impossible. (Example: the negotiations that have been conducted regarding the introduction of the gold standard.)

The opposite of what the clever people preached has occurred. What has emerged on a large scale in the global economy is now emerging on a small scale in the present day. As a rule, they will have the opposite effect on the economy as a whole and thus on economic life in general. In this regard, we need to take a somewhat unbiased look.

In earlier [decades and] years, we have the emergence of the social question. In this regard, quite clever people have also had strange thoughts. (Austrian minister M.) In the 80s, I had many a conversation with people from the business world. It was precisely in this area that people were the last to notice the pressure and the social unrest that had brought such misery and hardship. But those who were involved in the conversation said: We are powerless to intervene productively in economic life, etc. These things were simply accepted as an uncertain fate. Today, these things must be thought about on a large scale.

In the field of economic life, the most important thing is the price; because only when prices are such that people can exchange their things, then social life is truly present in a human way. Now it is very easy to say, with mathematical certainty, what must be the case with regard to [a] determination of prices, the original cell of economic life, and that is called: The person who produces something must receive so much for this production that he can maintain himself and those who belong to him, himself and his own, until he can produce the same product again (example: boots). This is, as I said, expressed in the abstract. It must be obvious; it is only a question of how this can be achieved in the reality of life. What must intervene here, and this must be taken very seriously, is that the individual human being can come to an economic judgment. The aim is for everyone to be able to work productively in a single field. Therefore, something must arise that leads to active participation in economic life and sets the living in motion. What I have called the “core of the social question” must come into being: the principle of association in economic life. (By way of explanation, an example from my own life.) Books are written, etc., sent to the printers, typeset, printed and shipped, with a great deal going to waste. Consider what that means! It means nothing other than that so many hands have been involved in producing the paper, typesetting, printing and so on. That is unnecessary work. (Example: publishing house, consumer economy.) Such examples point to what I have described in terms of my core points under the principle of association. The point is that those who participate in economic life – and that includes all people – join together, and that in itself results in an association. The individuals join together according to production and this with the consumer circles. Consuming, producing, if you take all this into account, you get very specific groups of this association. (World Economic Federation.) Within this economic association, negotiations take place from person to person, and that is where it comes about that people contribute everything they can; what they cannot do is supplemented by others.

If it is considered that price conditions are the decisive factor, it must be possible to intervene in this pricing; this cannot be done by theoretical decrees. The point is that it must be started from the other side. It cannot be regulated by decrees, but only by the living life, it can only be achieved by the associative economic life, which should be based on sound economic experience.

Neither in the intellectual nor in the economic life can parliamentarization be imposed, because only those who are knowledgeable and competent in both fields can act. Therefore, it must be negotiated from person to person, from corporation to corporation, so that the one who has experience is placed in the relevant position because he has experience, not because he is placed in a party that he does not represent, so that expertise and professional competence can be brought to bear.

There will be many objections. But these objections are overcome when one considers that, for example, only those who need a mild amount of freedom to pursue their profession might feel harassed by the associations. But when the matter is put into practice, it is no more difficult than exchanging money. (Bureaucracy removed.) These things are treated in a lively way, and so they can also be handled in a lively way. But what is meant by the associations would precisely free the human being, and then the other liberations in other areas would follow. (Applied in Stuttgart.)

One might object: on the one hand we have the spiritual life and on the other the economic life, so there is nothing left in the middle. We just have to wait and see what happens in the middle; there is a large, larger area there; humanity demands from its essence the decision from itself, from this middle. (Unification of people who have come of age, standardization of goods, time, and measure.) These things, which affect people themselves and for which people must stand up with their person – they must not become commodities. In economic life, one must accept what nature offers and manage accordingly; therefore, it must be independent of the state.

Much else will belong to it; we shall see what living right is. That which ought to arise there is not really there; the actual legal life has been corrupted. That which ought to be right, which only flows from people who have come of age, has withered away. People must have the opportunity to find an area where they can determine what lies in the judgment of mature people; one must not be afraid of it. (Quotation of an article from a newspaper.) Such a man cannot imagine that precisely because it is justified in the right way, these three limbs of the social organism come together to form a unity. It is the same in man; the unity, the living unity in man also consists of a threefold structure, and so it must be in the social organism. A man once objected: Yes, life must be a unity, and you cannot think of it differently, as a unified state; everything must go together. (Example: rural economy, women, servants, children, a number of carts working together in unity.) The unity comes about precisely because everyone does their part. We have seen that very enlightened people say: the people who put together this seemingly new form were politicians who understood nothing about economic life.

We just don't have the courage to face up to what people long for, to develop the impulse of will. We have to relearn. The great significant ideals, freedom, equality and fraternity, have so far not been able to lead people out of the chaos of the times. Very clever people have proved again and again how freedom and equality can exist, and how fraternity is affected by both. Freedom can be attained in the realm of spiritual life; equality will arise out of state life; and fraternity can be developed in economic life, genuine, practical fraternity. Thus one will have to say: by recognizing how these three great, significant ideals must flow into life, humanity will be led out of the terrible chaos through the threefold social order, if it is understood in the right way. Based on the feeling of the bitter need of the time and on decades of experience, it can be said that this threefold social order aims to lead humanity out of chaos by not forcing anything together, but by introducing these three ideals into their proper possessions, into a large social organism. And this viable organism will bring together what can arise: freedom in spiritual life, equality in legal life, fraternity in economic life.