The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear Friends,

In the lecture this afternoon the life between death and a new birth was pictured as a journey, and we considered the sense in which the positions of certain stars in the heavens can be taken as viewpoints whence we may behold this journey of man through certain spiritual regions. Before proceeding further, we will study in a little more detail how we must picture this journey through regions indicated for us by certain heavenly bodies.

It might seem that the super-sensible existence of man between two earthly lives has been adequately presented in such a book as Theosophy. For the early stages of study, that is quite true, but you will surely agree that knowledge must also progress and expand. As we go further in our study we have constantly to bear in mind the oneness of the Universe, we have to remember that there is an unbroken, harmonious interplay between the super-sensible and the sensible worlds. The conditions of existence in the different regions through which man passes between death and a new birth express themselves outwardly in the relationships of space and of time that exist between the heavenly bodies concerned. When, therefore, we speak of these spiritual regions in terms of heavenly bodies, we are using a correct picture. There is a connection between the place of a visible star in the heavens and some particular region of super-sensible life. As an objection to this it could be said that the life which stretches between death and a new birth cannot be conceived in terms of space or at most only to a very limited degree. That is perfectly true, but super-sensible existence is nevertheless reflected into space. The world that is beyond space and beyond time, plays into space and into time; and as man's thinking and ideation have necessarily to be in terms of space and time, the imagery of the stars in the heavens is an excellent one for giving a picture of the super-sensible. One thing, however, we must not omit to make clear. We are taught in physics that the processes we have in the physical world—processes that are subject to the force of gravity—undergo a change, when we go out into space. Physical science tells us the exact proportion in which the force of gravity decreases. We are taught that the force of gravity (and also the intensity of light) decreases in proportion to the square of the distance. Science will not, however, admit that the same is true in relation to all knowledge of material things which has been acquired here on Earth. Science has derived this knowledge from the Earth; and if the figures which apply to gravity and light in the immediate environment of the Earth have to be modified as we go out into space, it is not unreasonable to suppose that only so long as we remain in the actual environment of the Earth are we justified in applying the scientific knowledge of to-day. Just as the power of gravity decreases in proportion to the square of the distance, so does the truth of our conclusions decrease, the further we are away from the Earth. When the astronomer or astro-physicist tries with ordinary thinking to determine, for instance, what is happening in some nebula out in cosmic space, it is just the same as if one set out to calculate, according to the conditions prevailing on the Earth, the weight of a stone in that nebula far away in the heavens. It ought not therefore to surprise us when Spiritual Science says: Here on Earth things present such and such an aspect, but out in the cosmos they are in reality quite different. On Earth we see the Moon as it appears in the sky. In reality the Moon is a cosmic colony of many Beings—I described it to you in the last lecture. It is the same with all the stars and constellations. This fact must be borne in mind throughout our present study.

The lectures so far have brought us to the point where, during his life between death and a new birth, man passes into the Sun sphere. In this region the spirit-form of the lower part of the human being is transformed into the head of the next earthly life. It must of course be remembered that man's path between death and new birth is such that he passes through all these planetary spheres twice. After death he passes, first of all, into the Moon sphere, then he goes on into the Mercury sphere, the Venus sphere and the Sun sphere. That is as far as we came in our description. In the Sun sphere the lower man begins to be transformed into the upper man. The limb structures are transformed—spiritually, of course, at this stage—into the future head-system. This work of metamorphosis is a work of infinite grandeur and sublimity. Those who study the human head merely as a physical structure have no notion of all the manifold work that has to be performed in the Cosmos in order to bring into being the spirit-germ of the human head,—which later on will unite with the physical embryo. After this work has been begun in the Sun sphere, man passes into the Mars sphere, then into the Jupiter sphere and into the Saturn sphere. The Saturn sphere is really the last, for Uranus and Neptune do not come into consideration here. During all this time, work is proceeding upon the spirit-germ of the head. Man's path then leads him still further out into the cosmic expanse, out into the wide ocean of the cosmos, where the work of metamorphosis continues, until the time comes for him to take the path of return. Then, going back through the regions of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars to the region of the Sun, he comes again at length to the sphere of the Moon. Of the path of return we shall hear later on; at this point we will consider the experiences through which the human being passes, after his time in the region of the Sun is over.

Before he reaches the Sun sphere, man's experiences are for the most part closely connected with himself. In the last lecture I told you how man wears a physiognomy which expresses his good and bad qualities and how this enables him to see other beings similar in nature to himself. I told you how he gradually changes his spirit-form and comes to resemble the beings who belong to the super-sensible world, and how then he is able to behold the Beings of the Third Hierarchy and the Beings also of the second Hierarchy. If we want to describe the human being up to the stage of the Sun existence we must fix our attention on his spirit-form or figure, and describe that. But having entered the Sun region man undergoes an experience which I called living his way into the Cosmic Music, the Music of the Spheres. He hears, in cosmic harmony and cosmic melody, the meaning, as it were, of all the interworking of the starry worlds. For this working together of the stars, which is at the same time an expression of the working together of the Spiritual Beings that are in these regions—this it is, ultimately, that comes to revelation in cosmic harmony and cosmic melody. It is chiefly the life of feeling in its spiritual metamorphosis that is quickened and stimulated in the Sun existence. Every experience man has is like cosmic melody and cosmic harmony vibrating through his entire being. What we need at this stage of life between death and a new birth is not anything of the nature of theory, nor indeed anything that lends itself at all to expression in words. What we need is to feel—with a universal feeling that fills our being through and through—the harmonies and melodies born from the inter-workings of the different orders of Beings in the Cosmos.

Then a further experience comes to us, an experience which reveals unmistakably the connection between the physical world of sense and the super-sensible, superphysical world. When we pass into the Sun existence where the melodies and harmonies of the spheres—the whole Music of the Spheres—sound to us from every direction of the Cosmos, we are still aware of the last remnants of one of the spiritual faculties we possessed during earthly existence, we can still feel the last remnants of speech. At this stage of existence between death and a new birth, our spirit-form has already fallen away and we have come to resemble in form the cosmic sphere itself; our form has undergone metamorphosis into what will become head in the next incarnation. Everything about it that was still reminiscent of the form we bore in earthly existence has by this time fallen right away. But the faculty of soul that enabled us to speak, to make our thought articulate in words, follows us, and being present with us in memory brings a kind of discord into the Music of the Spheres. Yes, discord is introduced into the Music of the Spheres, by reason of the fact that man carries right up into Sun existence the remnants of his faculty of speech. And this discordant element that is brought by man into the Sun existence becomes the basis for the work of certain higher Spirits whose task it is to help forward Earth existence from the Cosmos. For it is when they see what comes to expression in human speech and language as it is to-day, that they take knowledge of how things have degenerated on the Earth and grown corrupt. In none of its European or American forms to-day is speech a faculty that emerges from the being of man with elemental power. It may be that what speech once was will be able to come again on Earth in the following way. Some of us are learning Eurythmy. What happens when one learns Eurythmy? To-day we lightly utter words without the faintest inkling of how the configuration of the words is connected with the inner life and experience of the soul. To speak words to-day is really nothing but an acquiescence in convention. It never occurs to people that when they say “a” (ah)—as a sound, by itself—they are expressing something which as pure sound springs from astonishment or wonder in the soul. When we utter the sound “b,” we mean that we are covering something, enveloping it, wrapping it round. Consonantal sounds invariably signify forms; vowel sounds express feelings, the inner life and being of the soul. The “b” sound is primordially connected with an act of covering. “B” is really the “house.” If I say “a” (ah), this is an expression of a wonder that is felt in the very depths of the soul. The consonantal sound of “t” expresses a settling oneself down, making a halt, staying there. “D” is the same, but has a gentler shade of meaning, less abrupt. Suppose I utter the (German) word “Bad.”* [* English “bath.”] If I were to go back to the origin of the word, to the time when it was still felt and seen, I would have to say: The water is around me like an enveloping sheath: “b.” It is comfortably warm: ah! (Now I am at the sound “a.”) I shall stay in it: “d.” The whole experience is contained in the word itself. To speak in such a way seems to us almost absurd, for nowadays no actual experience is any longer connected with words. If we wanted to experience the word “B-a-d” we should have to say: “The house in which I feel wonder, in which I sit.” In reality speech is filled through and through with soul; man's inner experience of soul streams into and permeates it.

In days of yore this was felt and known. In the original, primitive tongues, speech was born from perception of feeling and of form—feeling in the vowel, form in the consonant. To-day these elements are no longer associated with speech; it has become a mere matter of convention. In Eurythmy, however, the sounds—“b,” “a,” “d”—are changed back again into the gestures that correspond to them. In making the gestures, the Eurythmist begins again to experience speech. One may cherish the hope that if love for Eurythmy is born in ever widening circles, humanity will be able to find its way back to what was contained in primitive tongues,—to a speech that is felt and seen. So will Eurythmy in the future be something more than it is to-day; it will be man's guide and show him how the life of soul and spirit can be borne along on the surging waves of speech. To-day we have come to the point when speech is so little articulated—let alone, ensouled—that numbers of people cannot really be said to “speak” at all. They “spit” the words out! Speech as it is to-day is certainly not born from the life of soul! It is enough to make one despair, when one has to listen to words that have no longer any soul in them, any life,—nay, are not even articulated.

So it comes about that in our day a shrill discord sounds up from Earth into the Cosmic Music when man enters the Sun existence after death. And this quality that has crept into speech makes manifest to certain Spiritual Beings the degeneration that earthly existence has suffered, showing them too at the same time how the right forces and impulses can be found that will lead once again to an ascent.

Man continues his wandering and comes into the Mars existence. What do we mean when we say: Man conies into the Mars existence? It is now no longer possible, you must remember, to speak of man in his spirit-form, for by this time he is wholly changed; he has become a spiritual image of the great cosmic sphere. On and on leads the path, through the spheres of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, out into the surging waves of the Cosmos. In the Mars region the human being lives among the “population” of Mars—if I may so express myself. The inhabitants of Mars are discovered to be either discarnate human souls or Beings of the Hierarchies, but above all those of the Hierarchies from whose entire being Cosmic Speech sounds forth into universal space. For man is now in the region where Cosmic Music becomes Cosmic Speech. At first he hears it; then he is himself interwoven into the Cosmic Speech. Instead of the imitative speech of humanity, he hearkens to a speech that is creative, a speech out of which things are born and have their being. During man's passage through the sphere of Mars he acquires conscious knowledge of the Beings who people this region. The spiritual population of Mars consists of Beings who are the Knowers of the Cosmic Speech. There are other Beings too,—for example. Beings who are warlike in nature. But so far as man is concerned, the most important Beings in the Mars sphere are those who in their whole nature are Cosmic Word. They are the Guardians of the Cosmic Speech.

Man's journey then leads him into the region of Jupiter where dwell the Beings who are the guardians of the Cosmic Thoughts. These Beings radiate thought-beings into our planetary system and its environment. Through this region also man must pass, and he is involved there in a process of metamorphosis which I can only describe in a rather prosaic way.

Picture to yourselves that man becomes a kind of image of the cosmic sphere; that is to say, his whole being is really the spirit-germ of the head as it will be in his next life on Earth. In the Sun existence, having experienced the shrill discord set up by earthly speech, he learns to lay aside this earthly speech. During his passage through Mars he becomes part of the Cosmic Speech, he grows one with it, and begins also to lay the foundation for an understanding of Cosmic Speech. For it is like this. The metamorphosis of the lower man has begun—the legs into the lower jaw, the arms into the upper jaw, and so on. In community with the Beings of the Hierarchies the human being builds the spirit-germ of his future head. But, to begin with, this head is built for understanding the Cosmos—not the Earth! It learns first to understand Cosmic Speech, Cosmic Thoughts. Cosmic Thoughts and Cosmic Speech find a home in the human head; just as here on Earth man knows of minerals, plants and animals, so, during his journey through the spheres of Mars and Jupiter, he is made acquainted with the mysteries of the spiritual Universe. We shall never have a true feeling or perception of the nature of man until we realise in clear consciousness that between death and rebirth the human being has learned to know the names of the wonderful and majestic Beings of the higher Hierarchies, has learned to understand the work and creative activities of these Beings in the Cosmos, has learned to follow in his thought—not little everyday problems of personal life, such as, How am I to get back to Amsterdam?—but such a question as: How is one world-epoch born out of another through the workings of the higher Hierarchies? So much for man's experience in his passage through Jupiter.

Now comes the passage through the Saturn existence. Saturn bestows upon the human being what I will call Cosmic Memory—for in the Saturn sphere dwell those Spiritual Beings who preserve the memory of everything that has ever come to pass in our planetary system. Saturn is the mighty bearer of the memory of all the happenings of our planetary system. Just as in the Mars sphere man learns the speech of the Gods, and in the Jupiter sphere the thoughts of the Gods, so in his first passage through the Saturn existence he learns to know all that lives in the memory of the Gods of our planetary system. Hence it comes about that man's head in the spiritual spheres—which is the spirit-germ of his future earthly head—receives incorporated into it everything that enables him to be a citizen of the Cosmos and to live in the Cosmos among the Beings of the higher Hierarchies, even as he lives on earth among the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms.

Then, having been so deeply enriched in his spirit-existence that he has learned to understand the speech of the great world, the speech of the Macrocosm in the widest sense of the word, man passes out of the spheres of planetary activity and enters the sphere of activity of the Fixed Stars. Here the work upon the primal germ of the human head, the pre-figuring and shaping of it, is brought to completion by influences pouring in from infinitudes of spiritual worlds.

The time has now come for man to take the path of return. He comes again, first, into the Saturn sphere. The fact that during his earlier sojourn in the Saturn sphere he received into himself the planetary memories, enables the foundation to be laid now in his head for the faculty of memory that will be necessary in his life on Earth. The cosmic memory implanted into his being is, as it were, made “earthly.” Cosmic memory is transformed again into the germ of the faculty of human memory. And in the Jupiter sphere, all that man acquired through having perceived the thoughts of the Gods, is transformed on the path of return into the faculty to conceive human thoughts which can then be reflected in ordinary consciousness when the germ of the head unites with the physical embryo.

On the return path through the Saturn sphere the detailed elaboration of the metamorphosis of the lower man into the various parts of the head-organisation can also begin. This is a wonderful work,—one human being working upon another, in accord too with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. Verily, the work that is wrought here for the forming of the human head is like the creation of a whole world. For in the sphere of existence between death and rebirth of which I am now speaking, each single human head is seen to be a wonderful world,—a world of infinite variety and detail; and the work upon it calls for the devotion of human beings who are linked together by destiny, with the co-operation also of Beings of the Hierarchies who, knowing the mysteries of the Cosmos, understand how such a human head must be built and formed.

Wonderful it is beyond all telling, to come in this way to a knowledge of what is in man. Nor can such knowledge ever lead to pride or conceit. Yonder, between death and a new birth, the world in which we live sees to it that we do not succumb to pride! It would be, my dear friends, an absurdity to fall victim to human pride and arrogance among the Beings of the Hierarchies, among Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones! The human being must remain for ever little in comparison with the Beings among whom he works. And when in this earthly existence a man comes to learn of what he is in the great Macrocosm between death and a new birth, he has good reason to say to himself: “You have not brought very much with you into earthly existence! You have no great cause to pride yourself upon your present condition; nor have you any occasion to be particularly proud of what you were among the Gods!” What can grow within us as the result of looking upon the life of man between death and a new birth is a sense of responsibility which makes us say: “We must strive with all our might to be worthy even here on earth, of being ‘man.’” For this is indeed what we feel, when we measure the significance of being “man” by the work performed upon the human being by the Gods in the period that lies between death and a new birth.

Going now further on his path of return, man comes again into the Mars existence, where the work upon his being continues. It is here that the spirit-germs for the new body are added—for the breast system and for the limb structures, as they will be in the next earthly life. For it is really so, that the foundations of the limbs of the previous earthly life come forth as the foundations of the head in the new incarnation, and so now during man's passage through the planetary world on the way to his next earthly life the germs for breast system and limb structures have to be laid anew. It must of course always be remembered that these germs are spiritual; the whole process is a spiritual process. As man passes again through Mars existence, the lofty spirituality with which he was imbued during his first passage through the Mars sphere, and which enabled him to experience the cosmic Word, is now transformed into spiritual substance of a somewhat lower order—into that spiritual substance from out of which, later on, the human Ego manifests itself. It is also during this return journey through the Mars sphere that the spirit-germ of the larynx and lung formations are added.

Man comes then again to the Sun. The second passage through the Sun sphere is significant in the highest degree. Since he completed his first sojourn in the Sun existence, man has passed through the spheres of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, to the world of the Stars, and then made the return journey through Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. All this time his whole being has been given over to the Cosmos; he has become one with the Cosmos, one with the World-All. He has been living in the Cosmos; he has learned cosmic speech, he has learned to weave cosmic thoughts into his being, he has been living, not within his own life of memory—that only dawns for him later—but within the memory of the whole planetary system. He has felt himself one with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies in his memory of the cosmic thoughts and of the cosmic speech. Now however, when he returns once again to the Sun, he begins to shut himself off more as an individual being. Very faintly the feeling dawns that he is becoming separate from the Cosmos. This is connected with the fact that the first foundations of the heart are now being laid within him. The return journey continues. For the second time man passes through the Venus sphere and the Mercury sphere, where the spirit-germs of the other organs have to be implanted within him.

At the moment of entrance for the second time into the Sun existence—all these happenings and processes take a very long time, and long before man enters upon earthly existence he experiences, as we shall see, what is for him a very significant turn of destiny—at the moment when, out in the Cosmos, the spirit-germ of the heart is laid within our being on the return journey to the earth, there is of course not yet a physical heart. True, there is already an indication of a physical heart form, but it is surrounded and inter-woven with all that constitutes the worth of the human being as the outcome of his previous earthly lives. The fact that we receive into ourselves in the Sun sphere the first germ of the physical heart is less important than the fact that in this germ of the heart is concentrated all that we are morally, all our qualities of soul and spirit. Before the spirit-germ of the heart unites with the embryonic germ of the future body, the heart in man is a spiritual being, a moral being of soul and spirit out in the Cosmos; only later does this moral being of spirit and soul—which man now feels living within him, which man has, as it were, acquired in the course of his return journey to Earth—unite with the embryo. This concentration, in the germ of the heart, of his whole soul-and-spirit being is experienced by man in communion with the sublime Sun Beings—those Sun Beings who rule over the creative forces of the planetary system and therewith of earthly existence. Let me try to describe it to you in a picture. The expressions may sound strange but they are really appropriate.

At the time when this cosmic heart is bestowed upon man, he is living among those Spiritual Beings of the Hierarchies in whose hand lies the leadership of the whole planetary system in its connection with earthly existence. The experience is one of infinite grandeur and splendour. It is difficult to find words to describe what the human being experiences in this phase of existence. In a certain respect his feeling resembles a feeling he can have in physical existence. For just as in physical existence he feels that he is bound up with his heart-beat, with the whole activity of the heart, so, out in the Macrocosm, through his macrocosmic spiritual heart, he feels himself at one with his whole being of soul and spirit. The moral being of soul and spirit which he has become at this moment of his experience is, as it were, a spiritual heart-beat within him. His whole being seems now to be in the Cosmos, in the same way as his heartbeat is in him; he becomes aware also of a kind of circulation in connection with this heart-beat. Just as on Earth we feel in the heart-beat the blood circulation and breathing which give rise to it, so, when on the return journey through the Sun existence we begin to be aware of the beating of our spiritual, macrocosmic heart, it feels to us as though streams or currents were uniting this spiritual heart-beat with the Beings of the Second Hierarchy. Even as the blood flows to the heart from the veins in the physical organism, so into our being of spirit-and-soul pour the words of the Exusiai, Kyriotetes, Dynamis,—what they have to say concerning the World and the World's judgement upon man. The words and sounds of the spirit of the World-All are the circulation that now centres itself in this spiritual, macrocosmic heart, in this human being of soul and spirit. There, at the centre, beats the spiritual heart of man. And the beat of the spiritual heart of man is the heart-beat of the world in which he is living. The blood-stream of this world is the deeds of the creative Beings of the Second Hierarchy, the forces which stream out from them. And just as the blood-stream on Earth centres itself in the heart where it is unconsciously experienced by man, so at this point of time between death and a new birth it is given to man, as a grace bestowed, to hold and cherish within him a cosmic heart—one of the organs of perception, one of the cosmic hearts, created out of the pulse-beat of the Macrocosm, even the deeds of the Beings of the Second Hierarchy. For let it be remembered that the physical heart is a sense organ, which perceives the movement of the blood, not a “pump” as the physiologists imagine. The spirituality and vitality of the human being—these it is that cause the movement of the blood.

The return journey continues—through the Mercury and the Venus spheres. But before this, indeed in that cosmic moment when the human being feels himself living in very truth within the spiritual heart of the Cosmos, his gaze has already fallen upon the hue of generations, at the end of which stand the parents who will give him birth. The connection with the line of generations is, as you see, made relatively soon. We are born of father and mother, our parents again have each of them father and mother, and these too have their father and mother. This takes us back about a hundred years. But we must go further back, through many centuries; for long before a human being is born on Earth, he has united himself with the line of generations which culminates in the family into which he is born. It is quite early that the connection with the line of generations is determined, namely, when man is passing through the Sun existence for the second time. And in his passage through the cosmic colonies of Venus and Mercury he can, so to speak, arrange for his destiny to be brought as closely as possible into line with the outer experiences that must come to him through being born into a particular family and a particular nation.

After this, man comes again into the sphere of the Moon. Let me remind you how during his first passage through the Moon sphere man's thoughts were directed, for good and also for ill, to the primeval Teachers of the human race, to the starting-point of earthly existence, when superhuman Teachers imparted superhuman wisdom to the men of Earth. When he comes down into the Moon existence for the second time, there is less inducement for him to turn his attention to what was on Earth long ago. For now the period of time that man spends—above, in the Cosmos—in this Moon existence, is the same period of time as takes its course on Earth below between conception and birth. Man's embryonic life runs hand in hand with a particular cosmic development. Up there in the Moon sphere he is passing through a definite phase of evolution while below, stage by stage, the physical embryo is being prepared—the physical embryo with which he then gradually unites.

How does this macrocosmic life of the human being take its course during this second period of evolution in the Moon sphere? What does man accomplish there?

In all the experiences I have been describing, man's consciousness is far clearer and more awake than the ordinary consciousness of his life on Earth. It is most important to distinguish the various degrees of human consciousness. Consciousness during dream-life is dull, consciousness during waking life is clear, consciousness after death still clearer. As a dream is to reality, so is all our life on Earth in comparison with the clarity of our consciousness in the life after death. Moreover, at each new stage in the life after death, consciousness becomes still clearer, still more alert.

When we pass through the Moon existence on the upward journey, consciousness grows clearer owing to the fact that in the Moon sphere we come into the environment of the wise, primeval Teachers of humanity. Clearer and ever clearer grows our consciousness as we pass on through the spheres of Mercury and Venus; and its clarity continues to be intensified every time we enter a new sphere of the heavens. But when we are returning again and approaching a new life on Earth, consciousness is dimmed and darkened stage by stage. During the phase of Mercury existence on the return journey, we still have a consciousness that is clearer than any consciousness can be in ordinary earthly existence. But when we come to the Moon sphere, and are in an environment that reveals to us what man was at the beginning of earthly evolution, then our consciousness begins to be obliterated. In the same sphere where, on the upward journey, the super-sensible world first lit up for us in a clearer consciousness than was possible on Earth, consciousness is now dimmed. We are returning to the Earth and consciousness becomes ever dimmer and dimmer, until it remains in us only as growth-force—the power of growth that is present in the little child, the dreaming little child. Consciousness has dimmed into dream! This is the moment when the being of soul-and-spirit can unite with the physical embryo. In order that this momentous event may come to pass, in order that the human being at a certain point of his development make connection with the physical embryo, he must pass through a Moon evolution in communion with the primeval Teachers of humanity, while the physical embryo down below is passing through its ten lunar months in the body of the mother. And the Moon evolution that he has to undergo consists in this—that a whole host of the Teachers of mankind are engaged in the task of dimming down the cosmic consciousness which the human being still possessed during his Mercury existence, toning it down to the dream consciousness in which he lives at the beginning of his life on Earth.

Physical man, with all that we can see of him here on Earth, is, in truth, only to be understood in the light of a knowledge of super-sensible man. And super-sensible man can never be explained by the facts of Earth, but only by the facts of the great World, the Macrocosm. My object in these lectures has been to show you how earthly man is born as Spirit-man out of the Spiritual Cosmos.

It remains for us in the lecture tomorrow to study in this connection the significance of earthly life itself, in so far as the being who is spiritual and superhuman passes over into this earthly life. We shall come to understand the significance of the fact that when he passes through the gate of death the human being carries out again into the spiritual world what remains to him of all he has acquired and experienced in earthly life. Having, therefore, learned to understand, in some of its aspects, the spirit nature of man, his super-sensible being, we will return tomorrow to the study of the connection between super-sensible man and physical man.

My dear Friends,

We have tried, so far as is possible in a few short hours, to picture the journey of man through the super-sensible world. For that is the world in which man verily lives his life between death and a new birth. But in the physical world too, where man is living in his physical and etheric bodily nature,—here too his forces extend into the super-sensible world. In the physical world he feels his super-sensible existence more or less as a riddle; and unless he be able to find at least a partial solution to the riddle, his soul will not attain inner harmony, inner balance, inner security. Nay, more, his life will lack energy and vigour; and human love that is really worthy of the name will be beyond him.

A study of man as he is on Earth presents an aspect in relation to his super-sensible being which can give us insight into the reason why the Divine-Spiritual worlds have sent him down to this world of the physical senses. It is, after all, in the physical world that appeal has to be made to man to interest himself in knowledge concerning the super-sensible world. We would have to deal quite differently with the riddles of the super-sensible world if we were going to speak of them to the dead, to those who are passing through their existence between death and a new birth. It will accordingly be well, in bringing our study to a certain conclusion to-day, to take the indications that have been given in the last few days concerning the mysteries of the super-sensible world, and let them light up again in our hearts in connection with the sojourn of man on Earth.

Let us think, to begin with, of man as he is here in earthly life,—of ourselves, that is. We have in the first place our senses. Our senses give us information of all that is around us; they are the occasion of our earthly joy and happiness and also of our earthly suffering and pain. We are apt to forget how very much sense impressions and sense experiences signify in life. Studies such as we have been pursuing in this course of lectures take us beyond the life of the senses into spiritual regions, and it might well seem that the tendency of Spiritual Science would be to lead to an undervaluing of the life of the senses, making us feel that it is, after all, of secondary importance and that we should flee from it even while we are still in earthly life. Such a feeling can never be the final outcome of Spiritual Science. It can only serve to bring home to us that there is an inferior way of taking the life of the senses incompatible with the dignity and nobility of human existence, but that it is possible for man to lose the life of the senses in its less worthy aspects, and find it again in its deeper meaning from a higher, super-sensible angle of vision. We would naturally shrink from studying things in their spiritual aspect if we were obliged to tell ourselves that all the loveliness and wonder of the world of nature which makes such a deep impression on our souls, all the beauty of plants, of the blossoming flowers, of the ripening fruits, all the majesty of the starry heavens, mean so little in human life that they must be regarded as beneath our notice in comparison with spiritual-scientific knowledge. This is not so at all. If you look back to the impulses given by Initiates and Masters in different epochs for the enhancement of the dignity of human life, you will find that the words uttered by Initiates never undervalue the beauty, the splendour, the majesty of the earthly life of the senses. Wonderful, full of poetry and artistic imagination are often the words used by Initiates to express the most lofty super-sensible truths! Think only of the image of the lotus flower—to take one example among many—and you will realise that the Initiates have never considered it unworthy to speak of the development of spiritual life in imagery drawn from the world of the senses. They have invariably held that in the contemplation of the sense-world something is immediately present, or can at any rate be discovered, that leads man on to the highest.

The sense-world, however, as man perceives it in ordinary consciousness, cannot in itself afford him satisfaction. And for this reason. The impressions that come to man through his eyes, ears and other senses, are indeed connected with his Ego, with its whole life and development, but they can do nothing to promote the inner stability of the Ego. There they cannot help man. We turn our gaze outward to the beauty and splendour of the flowers; we have before us a world of infinite variety. We turn our gaze inward, to our Ego; and for ordinary consciousness it seems, to begin with, as if this Ego is vanishing away from us. It seems to be just a point within us, a spiritual point, capable of saying little more than the mere word “I.” Nor can we wonder at this. We need only consider how man's senses have to be wholly surrendered to the world if they are to mediate between him and the world. The eye, in order that it may see, must renounce itself. It must be completely transparent if the splendour and beauty of the outer world of sense is to shine through it in all the lustre and radiance of colour. It is the same with the other senses. We really know nothing of our senses. Is there, then, any way by means of which we can begin to know and understand what they are in their real nature? There is indeed, but here again we must tread the path which leads to the super-sensible world. Knowledge even of the senses has to be sought in the super-sensible world.

You are familiar with the descriptions I have given of the paths which lead to the higher worlds. Try to picture livingly the consciousness that can develop into Imaginative cognition. In a certain respect we withdraw from physical perception of the outer world when we enter into Imaginative cognition. But the most interesting thing of all that happens on this path is the following. I will describe it for you in a picture.

When, in meditation—in accordance with the exercises given in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment—you draw near to the world of Imagination, when, that is, as a result of your strivings, your etheric being begins to emerge from your physical being and this first super-sensible member begins itself to possess a kind of consciousness, you can as it were, “catch” yourself at a stage that lies between ordinary sense-perception and Imaginative vision. You have not yet advanced to a fully developed Imaginative vision, but you are on the way to it. We will now suppose that a man who is already on the way to Imaginative vision goes into some high mountainous region that is particularly rich in primeval silicious rock. Forces of soul will be readily quickened in him where there is an abundance of quartz-containing silicious rock. Certain inner faculties of soul can, as it were, suddenly spring to development as a result of a vivid impression caused by silicious rock on high mountains. Ordinarily, this kind of rock is slightly transparent, slightly translucent. But when our faculties of soul have pressed forward to the stage of which I have spoken—at that moment silicious rock becomes wholly transparent. We climb up on to a high mountain, and behold, the silicious rock appears to us with the transparency of glass. We feel moreover that something is streaming out from our own being and uniting with it. Here, at the outermost surface of the Earth, by a kind of natural surrender of our consciousness we become one with the whole Earth's surface. It is as though our eyes were sending out rays that enter right into the silicious rock; and in that moment we begin to feel ourselves one with the whole Earth. When we have this experience, beginning at the same time to feel ourselves one with the whole World, with the Cosmos, then, if we are to attain, not to a dream, nor to any abstract thought, but to a first actual realisation of oneness with the Cosmos, we must carry the experience further. An inner consciousness can light up within us which I may perhaps express in the following words. “Thou, O Earth, art not alone in the World-All! Thou, O Earth, together with me and all the other beings upon thee, art verily one with the great World-All!” Living in this experience of oneness with the silicious rock, we no longer see the Earth separated from the rest of the Universe. We see the Earth as an ether-sphere, emerging from the sphere of the cosmic ether.

This is a first feeling that can come over us. Many an ancient song, many an ancient myth, brimful of wonderful revelations, rings to us across the ages from a literature born in the time when mankind was possessed of instinctive clairvoyance. People read these songs and myths to-day, and like to persuade themselves that they are uplifted in heart and soul by what they read. But the truth contained therein eludes them. It is quite impossible to experience, or to have any insight into the real mood and feeling of the Bhagavad Gita, for example, or of other Indian and Oriental literature, without having at least begun to learn, through spiritual knowledge, in how real a sense man can become one with the Earth and thereby one with the Cosmos. Many a time the mood of such a song will have been born from a realisation of oneness with the Cosmos, a kind of “going in consciousness” with the light—even with the light that penetrates the hard silicious rock, so that now the light enfills and permeates it with the human soul itself, making this hard rocky substance into a cosmic eye through which man gazes out into the wide expanses of the Cosmos.

It is indeed so, that when out of real knowledge we begin to describe super-sensible man, we find ourselves quite naturally turning away from abstract, theoretical expressions. We cannot help speaking a language in which the whole feeling-content of the human soul is united with the ideas. In all our study of super-sensible man we must realise in the depths of our hearts that knowledge of the super-sensible cannot be clothed in words without making will and feeling one with the thoughts and ideas, without letting our whole being pour into the words. Life has, we all know well, to be endured and much that life brings is hard to bear. But for one who is conscious of the deeply human quality of super-sensible knowledge, the thing that is hardest of all is to listen to this super-sensible knowledge being expressed in theories and abstractions. The pain that is caused him by hearing people speak of the super-sensible world in a theoretical manner, is just like the physical pain caused to a finger by putting it into a flame.

When further progress has been made in super-sensible knowledge, when, through Imagination, we understand the working of the super-sensible forces in the human being during earthly life, then we can go on to attain the knowledge that belongs to Inspiration. Through Inspiration we can gaze into what man was before birth, before he descended to earthly existence, and also into what he will be when he has passed through the gate of death. We can look upon all that I have been describing to you in these lectures,—the journey through the different planetary regions, where the forming of the “physiognomy” takes place, and then the process of metamorphosis from an earlier to a later earthly life. At the stage of Inspiration we can follow the human being in his whole journey through the several starry worlds.

Now this knowledge, by means of which we can penetrate to the depths of our inner being, receives a new quality, a new colouring when we realise that what has been described in connection with the life stretching between death and a new birth lives within us even during our life on this physical Earth. It is all there within man when he is on Earth—tiny and insignificant as he appears from a spatial point of view, standing there in his physical body, enclosed by his skin. Within him live all the splendours of the Cosmos, and we must not omit to tell of these when we are describing the true and essential being of man. Man belongs to the worlds of the stars and to yet higher worlds—the worlds of the Hierarchies. And in such measure as our knowledge is able to penetrate to what is thus living within us—this earthly heritage of what we were in our true being, between death and a new birth—we can at the same time do something more. We can penetrate to the depths of our Earth planet, to the veins of the metals—lead ore, silver ore, copper ore—we can learn to perceive what lives in the rocks through the presence there of the metals and their ores. Seen with the eyes of sense, the metallic substances are little more than indications of different kinds of earth. But if we are able to gaze into the Earth with that spiritually sharpened perception which we owe to the super-sensible part of our being, the metallic substances in the Earth can give rise to wonderful experiences. The copper, silver and gold within the Earth begin to speak a language full of richness and mystery. Then something happens which brings us, men living on the Earth, into close kinship with the living soul of the Earth herself. The metallic ores tell us something; they become for us cosmic memories.

Think for a moment how it is with you when in quietude of soul—inwardly active quietude of soul—you let old memories rise up within you, memories which bear on their wings many an event of long ago. You feel as if you were living through past experiences, as if you were together again with many a one who has been dear to you in the course of your life, maybe with many a one long since gone hence. You are wafted right away from the present moment, you are living in the sorrows and joys of days gone by.

An exactly similar experience arises—but on a majestic scale—when, imbued with a spirit-knowledge that is also felt, you become one with the veins of metal in the Earth. It is not now as it was with the silicious rock which carried you out with seeing eyes, out into the cosmic spaces; in this new experience it is as though you became one with the very body of the Earth. And as you listen inwardly to the wonderful story told by the metals, you say to yourself: “Now I am one with the inmost beat of the soul and heart of the Earth herself. I have memories which are not my own personal memories; memories of the Earth herself are sounding into my being,—memories of earlier times, of ages when she was not yet the Earth we know, when there were no animals, no plants upon her surface, least of all any minerals in the bosom of the Earth. I remember, together with the Earth, those ancient days when the Earth was one with the other planets of our planetary system. I remember ages when there was no separate Earth, because the Earth was not yet dense, not yet firm in herself as she is to-day. I remember the time when the whole planetary system was a living organism of soul, and human beings indwelt this living organism, in quite a different form.” Thus do the veins of the metals in the Earth lead us to the Earth's own memories.

Now this experience leads us on to see quite clearly why it is that we have been sent down to the Earth by the Divine Beings who rule over the World-Order.

Living thus in the Earth's memories, we feel for the first time the true measure of our thinking. Having once taken hold in this way of the Earth's memories, we feel how our thinking is bound up with the Earth. And the moment we make the Earth's memories our own, we have around us the Beings of the Second Hierarchy, the Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes. This, then, is the way whereby we can have around us even in earthly life those Beings who, as we have heard, are round us again during a certain period of our life between death and a new birth. We know now with full conviction that we come in contact with these Beings of the Second Hierarchy while we are incarnated on Earth between birth and death. The task of these Beings is not only that of working together with us between death and rebirth at the metamorphosis of our being; they have also their part in the whole forming and shaping of the Cosmos. We are able now to see how these Beings of the Second Hierarchy are entrusted by the spiritual World-Order with the task of bringing about in the Earth what is wrought there by virtue of the metallic ores.

Let us look back once more at the experience we had with the silicious rock. We were not then able to grasp the fact of which I am now going to speak, for at that stage it was not sufficiently clear. Only now at last does full clarity come from the marvellous experience of perceiving the Earth's memories in the veins of the metals. Having once reached this further stage, we can go back again and understand something which perhaps, to begin with, we did not understand. When our consciousness is borne out into the universe on the wings of the light that fills and pervades the silicious rock, the Beings of the Third Hierarchy—Angels, Archangels and Archai—are all around us. We know now that what the ordinary eyes of sense tell us when we go up a high mountain is not really true. Neither do our eyes tell us true when we descend into the deep places of the Earth and gaze upon the veins of the metals. On a high mountain, among the silicious rock, around and over the rocky peaks weave the Angels, Archangels and Archai; and when we go down into the Earth we find the Beings of the Second Hierarchy moving in the paths of the veins of the metals. Once again therefore we can say to ourselves that even during earthly life we are in the company of spiritual Beings who are connected with our own innermost being in the life which extends from death to a new birth.

In our life after death we pass consciously, after a time, into the world of the Angels, Archangels and Archai. In the discarnate state we unfold a consciousness in which we know that these Beings of the Third Hierarchy are around us, just as on Earth the three or four kingdoms of Nature are around us. When, in this higher state of consciousness, we behold the Angels, Archangels and Archai, all that the senses on Earth can perceive has of course vanished, for our senses have been given over, with our body, to the elements. Between death and a new birth we can see nothing that the senses perceive in earthly life. But the Angels, Archangels and Archai tell us—I can use this expression, for it exactly accords with the reality—the Angels, Archangels and Archai relate to us the story of what they are doing down below on the Earth. They tell us that they are not only active in the life which we ourselves are now sharing with them. They whisper softly into our souls: “We take our share too in the creative work of the Cosmos, we are creative Beings in the Cosmos and we look deep down in the Earth and behold in what earthly forms the silicious rock and kindred substances are fashioned.” And then man realises, when he is among the Angels, Archangels and Archai, that he must come down again to Earth. He learns to know these Beings of the Third Hierarchy between death and a new birth, and he hears them speak in wonderful manner of their deeds upon the Earth. He knows then that he can only behold these their deeds, by descending to Earth, clothing himself in a physical, human body and partaking in the world of sense-perception.

The deepest mysteries of sense-perception—not only of perceptions connected with the silicious rock on high mountains, but the deepest mysteries of all sense-perception—are revealed to us in wonderful words by the Beings among whom we live between death and a new birth. The beauties of material Nature on Earth are so full of greatness and mystery that the memories we take with us through the gate of death are only seen in their full and true light when we hear the Angels, Archangels and Archai describing to us all that our eyes have been able to see, our ears to hear and our other senses to perceive down here in earthly life.

Such is the connection between the physical and the super-physical; such too the connection of man's physical life with his superphysical life. The universe is full of splendour, and it is right that what we see in material existence should delight and uplift us. Its real mysteries we learn to know when we have passed through the gate of death. The more we have learned to rejoice in the physical world, the more deeply we have entered into all the joys which the sense-world has to bestow, the greater the measure of understanding we shall bring to the world of the Angels, who are waiting to tell us of these mysteries which here on Earth we do not yet understand and shall only learn to understand when we have passed over into the superphysical world. The same is true of our relation to the Second Hierarchy, the Exusiai, Kyriotetes, Dynamis, among whom we also live for a certain period between death and a new birth. We can, on Earth, come into a special relation to these Beings when, following the path of the light into the veins of the metals in the Earth, we awaken within us the Earth's memories. But here again, only when we have come over yonder into the region of the Beings of the Second Hierarchy are we able to understand all the experiences we have had on Earth in connection with the metals.

One of the most wonderful experiences man can have is to be able to investigate and prove the manifold connections that exist between the metals and the health of man, and I have good hope that the Anthroposophical Movement will do a great deal to open up the truly beautiful aspect of this field of knowledge. Every metal and every metal-compound has its relation to the health of man. As man goes through life, whether in health or disease, he is in connection all the time with that which gives to the Earth her memories—namely, the metals and their various compounds. We must get beyond mere theorising as to the healing influences of lead and lead compounds, of copper and copper compounds, and so forth. These substances are all extremely significant and important remedies, if we know how to prepare them in the right way, and we must not be satisfied with speaking in an abstract manner of the wonderful connections between the metals and the being of man. A feeling of holy awe does indeed even now arise within us when we contemplate the veins of metal in the depths of the Earth, but we must go a step further and develop also a deepened insight into the marvellous connection of the metals with the being of man—a connection which is revealed to us only when we have first studied the human being in health and in disease. As I indicated, it is to be hoped that the Anthroposophical Movement will be able to spread this knowledge in the hearts and minds of men, for it is of the greatest importance. In times gone by it was not so important, because men knew instinctively the connections, for example, between the lead-process or the silver-process with some process in the human head. In days of yore these connections were spoken of a great deal. Nowadays people read what was written long ago without understanding a single word. Approaching it from the point of view of modern science, they talk of it as if it were nothing but empty abstractions. When through Anthroposophical knowledge man attains to the deepened feeling and insight which can come to him in contemplation of the wonderful connection between the metals of the Earth and the sickness and health of the human being, then indeed he will carry up into the spiritual world through the gate of death something that will help him to understand the speech of the Second Hierarchy. The greatest mysteries of the world will be able to reveal themselves to him, precisely because he has prepared himself in this way on Earth and brings with him the necessary understanding. For it is really so, my dear friends. We learn what Anthroposophy has to teach us not merely for the sake of satisfying human curiosity, but in order that the knowledge may bear fruit after we have passed through the gate of death. For only what we learn and receive through spiritual science can bring us into a right relation, between death and a new birth, to those Spiritual Beings whom we must needs contact with our whole being, since it is they who are then our cosmic environment.

It is thus possible to give a detailed picture of how we come into relation with the Beings of the Hierarchies between death and a new birth. But there is still a further experience that can befall us as we pass through those regions, and it must now be described.

When we can grasp the connection between the metals in the Earth and the being of man in health and disease, secrets of Nature are revealing themselves to us. Within these secrets something more lies hid. We hear the Beings of the Second Hierarchy speaking of the nature of gold, silver, lead, copper and the other metals. But in our relation to the great spiritual world, it is with us now as it is here on Earth when we are beginning to learn to read and it dawns upon us that learning to read will enable us to fathom many a world-mystery which might otherwise remain for ever beyond our ken. I say this only by way of comparison, for the speech through which we learn to understand the Beings of the Second Hierarchy in a certain sphere of existence between death and a new birth—the speech which tells of the metals and their relation to man in health and disease—will only be true when, in the spiritual world, we can hear it, not as prose, but as cosmic poetry,—let me rather say, when we ourselves rise to the level of cosmic poetry. At first we listen in much the same way as someone with no appreciation of poetry may listen to the recitation of a poem. But just as we can, on Earth, learn—unless we are quite devoid of poetic feeling—to appreciate what is contained in the swing of the verse, in the rhythm, in the whole artistic form of the poem, so is it possible for us, after death, to rise from the prose to the poetry of that world beyond the Threshold, from the speech of the Second Hierarchy which tells us of the relation of the metals to man in health and disease, to a higher stage, where we understand the mysteries of moral existence in the Universe,—that moral life in which not only human souls but the divine souls of all the Beings of the Hierarchies are involved. We have come to a region where the mysteries of the life of soul begin to lie open before us.

Then we can go a step further. I have described the experiences that can be ours when we go up a mountain, and again when we go down a deep mine. It was all still and quiet; we contemplated the crystals at rest on the ridges of rock, and the veins of the metals at rest in the bosom of the Earth. Now we can go further and contemplate something else that is usually only regarded from the prosaic aspect of utilitarian considerations. Such considerations are not to be despised; we must always have our feet planted firmly on the Earth if we want to penetrate into the spiritual world healthy in soul and body. But suppose we are looking at a metal that is passing, under the influence of intense heat, from the solid into the liquid condition. Then, if we can get beyond the utilitarian point of view, wonderful revelations will be vouchsafed to us. If we walk through foundries and watch how the iron becomes glowing and fluid in the furnaces, above all if we can watch metallic ores such as antimony ore being led over from the solid into the liquid and by and by into other conditions, then if we can receive deep into our soul the impression of this destiny of metallic substance in fire, an entirely new element will be born in the spiritual knowledge that has awakened within us; we shall receive a strong and profound impression of the mysteries of our own existence.

Think of the human being in relation to the animal. (I have frequently spoken of this.) Anatomical comparisons, such as are made to-day, comparing the bones, muscles, and even the blood of man and animal reveal the existence of certain affinities. But the secret of what it is that places man higher than the animal cannot be discovered until we give attention to some facts that have more significance than is generally realised. The spine of the animal lies in the horizontal direction, parallel with the surface of the Earth, whereas man stands upright. The faculty of speech is denied to the animal, whereas man not only speaks, but from speech evolves thought. When we observe how the faculties of speaking and thinking begin to unfold in a little child and how its body rises into the upright position that it may have the right orientation for human life on Earth, we are then beholding the marvellous forces by means of which the child finds its bearings in the dynamics of the universe. And then we see how the forces of orientation living in the limbs of a little child express themselves also in the melody, in the articulation of speech. We see the human being building and forming himself in the sense world. We see the formative forces working calmly and quietly within him. Wonderful it is beyond all telling to watch month by month how the little child gradually leaves off crawling and begins to stand upright, how his limbs and body orientate themselves to the dynamics of the universe! Then the faculties of speaking and thinking begin to emerge, as it were, from the bodily nature. There is no more beautiful sight than to watch a little child learning to walk, to speak and to think. But now if on the one hand we can contemplate this process in all its wonder and calm majesty, beholding it with mind at rest, sensitive to its surpassing beauty, and if on the other hand we are able to look with a higher power of vision at the metals melting in the fire, then we can perceive there, in its spirit form, the force by means of which the child can learn to walk and to speak. The archetype of this power is revealed to us when the flames lay hold of the metal, melt it and make it fluid. The more fluid, the more volatile the metal becomes, the more clearly are we able to perceive the inner resemblance between this process—which really constitutes the destiny of the metal—and the process which, smelted and volatilised in the fires of the Cosmos, enables the little child to walk, to speak and to think.

We know now that the activity of the Beings of the First Hierarchy—the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones—is a two-fold activity. They speak to us out of that spiritual world into which we pass during the middle period of our life between death and a new birth, they reveal to us there the mysteries of planetary life; and they work down also into the visible world. Here, in the visible world, the influences of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones are active in the little child as he learns to walk, to speak and to think, and we behold also their working wherever fire has part in the process of the Earth, wherever metals melt and are fused in fire. Our Earth has been built up by the smelting and fusing of metals in the cosmic fire. In the smelting of the metals by the cosmic fires, we see the deeds of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones within the earthly world. We gaze back into remote ages of the past when the metals, all aglow and incandescent through the power of fire, played an essential part in the coming-into-being of the Earth's body. The Thrones, above all, were active in this process, though with them worked always the Seraphim and Cherubim. The Cherubim it is who play the chief part in the unfolding of the child's faculties of walking, speaking and thinking. But everywhere the Beings of the First Hierarchy work and weave together in unison.

With this kind of knowledge, death in earthly life is linked on to resurrection in the life beyond the Threshold. For when such knowledge reveals the kinship of the cosmic fires by which the metals are melted, with the powers that make man truly man, then the whole world becomes one and we realise that there is no difference between the earthly life that stretches from birth to death and life in the spiritual world beyond the Threshold. The life between death and a new birth is a metamorphosis of earthly life. By knowing how the one passes over into the other, we realise that the one is but a different form of the other. When the soul is deepened by this knowledge, then an understanding of still other mysteries can be added. This further understanding can also be reached on quite another path.

If you think about what I have told you of the connection of the melting and dissolving of metals in fire with the unfolding of the faculties of walking, speaking and thinking in the little child, if you place these pictures before your imagination, meditating upon them and deepening thereby your understanding, then a power will quicken and strengthen your soul and enable you to find the solution of a great riddle—the riddle of the working of karma, or human destiny. In between what happens when a child learns to walk, to speak and to think and what happens when metals become fluid and volatile under the influence of great heat,—amid all the sulphurous and phosphoric glow and gleam of colour in the burning metal, amid the working of the right and true transition from animal to man that takes place in the little child as he learns to walk, to speak and to think, karma stands revealed. There lies the way to a true understanding of karma. Karma is a super-sensible reality that works straight into the very deeds and actions of man's life.

Rising up therefore in this way in meditation, we learn to know the mysteries of destiny that weave through our life. On the one side we have the picture of the destiny of the metal in the fire, on the other side the picture of the essential and primordial destiny of man when he descends to Earth, expressed in the learning to walk, to speak and to think. Within these pictures man can find revealed as much of the riddle of destiny as he needs for his life.

So it is, that for the riddle also of human destiny super-sensible man speaks into the world in which “sensible” man is living. Of this too I wanted to speak to you, for it belongs essentially in our study of super-sensible man. Such a study can never be merely a matter of assimilating theories. In order to understand the being of man we must reach out on every hand to the mysteries of the universe—mysteries of Nature and mysteries of Spirit. For man is intimately and closely bound up with all the mysteries of the Natural as well as of the Spiritual Universe. Man is in truth a universe in miniature. Only it must not be imagined that what takes place out in the great expanses of the Cosmos takes place in exactly the same way in the microcosm. The majestic flames of cosmic fire that rise up from the molten metals stream out to the boundaries of cosmic space—for boundaries there are! Try, my dear friends, to picture to yourselves these cosmic fires in which the metals are being smelted and made volatile. What is thus made volatile streams out into cosmic space, to return once again in powers of light, radiations of warmth and light. And what thus returns from cosmic space enables the tiny child who cannot yet speak or walk but only crawl, to become a child who stands and walks. Upward and outward radiate the streaming forces from the molten metals, and when they have gone far enough out into the cosmos they turn and come back again and are then the forces which enable the child to stand upright. Here you have a picture of ascending and descending cosmic forces, as they work in the universe, and of their many metamorphoses and variations.

You will now also be able to understand the true meaning of something which in days of yore was connected with the science of those times, namely, the priestly sacrifice. The sacrificial flame, together with what was burning in it, was sent forth into cosmic spaces to the Gods that it might come down again thence to work in the world of men. As he stood before the fire on the altar the priest would say: “To thee, O Flame, I commit what is mine on Earth, that the Gods may receive it when the smoke rises upward. May that which is borne upwards by the Flame be changed into divine Blessing and pour down again to Earth as creative and fructifying power!”

Thus, as we listen to the words of the priest of olden time, who is speaking of super-sensible worlds, we may hear how he too gives utterance to the cosmic mysteries in the midst of which man stands.

This, my dear friends, is what I wanted to say to you about the super-sensible nature of man, anthroposophically perceived and understood.

Translated by Luise Boeddinghaus

At present there is a general opinion that there are certain limits to human knowledge, not only temporary knowledge owing to the fact that one had not achieved everything in the time that has already passed, and one would have to leave some things for the future, but in quite a general sense one speaks today of limits of perception, limits to knowledge for humanity. One thinks that man is constituted in such a way that he can only know about certain things, while other things are above his ability to know about them; and that it is mainly the facts of the so-called supersensible world which man is supposed not to be able to perceive and for which he has to be satisfied with what is called a belief, an assumption arising out of obscure feelings and such like. Particularly the endeavours of the past centuries and of the present time, which have yielded the greatest successes in the field of natural science and which have also brought about the greatest practical results, are considered proof by contemporary humanity that one has to come to a halt at that which can be observed by the senses, which can be proved by experiments and so forth, namely the sense perceptible real world. This is, when one speaks of man, only that world which man traverses between birth and death, or conception and death.

Now it cannot be denied that natural science owes its great successes to the fact that it has limited itself to the exploration of every aspect of the sense world and does not in any way draw any conclusions from the sense world to the supersensible world. But on the other hand there is connected with this, as one believes, fully proven acceptance of limits to knowledge altogether, something inwardly immeasurably tragic for the sensitive human being, something tragic which today does not yet come to the consciousness of many people, but which lives in many human souls in vague feelings, in all sorts of subconscious sensations, making them unsure in life, even unsure and unable in outward actions, in relationships to their fellow human beings and so on. For it is gradually felt more and more that the limits at which one wants to stop in this way are not only those of an outward supersensible world, but that with these limits to knowledge, if rightly perceived, there is still something quite different involved. Man gradually feels that his own true being must be of supersensible nature, that his true being which as man gives him his value and dignity must be found in the spiritual, in the not-sensible. If one calls a halt to all knowledge before the supersensible, then one calls a halt before human self-knowledge. Then one renounces insight into the most precious, the most valuable in the human being himself.

But thereby one also undermines one's real inward self-confidence. Whereby does man feel himself to be part of the natural world which today has been so successfully explored? Only because he bears this world of nature within himself in his outer physical body. Everything that exists in our surroundings as natural substances and natural laws we carry within us, at least most of it. Through this we can feel connected with physical nature. We would not feel that we existed in this physical nature if we were not part of it with our own body, or if we could not explore ourselves as physical beings. But in the same way it is with the supersensible, with the as truly felt spiritual inner being of man, even though men do not as yet bring it to full consciousness. If we cannot feel ourselves as belonging to a spiritual world, as beings who take into themselves and bear within themselves the forces and substances of the spiritual, then we cannot accept ourselves as spiritual human beings at all. But then we must lack the self-confidence towards that which after all we feel to be our most precious, our most dignified, that by which we actually are human beings, indeed want to be human beings. This has another side to it. We feel that that which we call our moral impulses, which we call the content of our moral-spiritual forces, does not flow out of natural life, certainly not out of what takes place in muscles and bones. We feel them to be coming from a spiritual world, but we experience uncertainty about this whole spiritual world if we have to call a halt before the supersensible with our perception.

And in this way present day humanity cannot really build a bridge between that which in outer nature is to it a brutal - as I would like to call it—fact, and that which flows to it out of the most intimate spiritual inner life as the content of the moral world order. One does not have the courage to bring to full clarity what it is that the human soul has to contend with here. Natural science has worked thoroughly towards being able to say something, albeit hypothetically, about the present day creatures out of which man is supposed to have developed. One describes, at least hypothetically, how once upon a time our present world is supposed to have developed out of the world mist. Hypotheses are also made about the end of our planetary system or the system altogether to which we belong. One imagines this whole system which exists in time as somehow contracting, constituting itself out of natural substances and natural forces. One imagines physical man then emerging out of a part of these forces at a certain time. Electricity, magnetism, warmth and so on, they can be outwardly observed, there the thinking human being feels safe with the content of his consciousness. But when the need arises in him to think of that which does not come from his physical nature, the moral spiritual impulses as working in the world, when he must think of as working in the world what he brings about out of a spiritual elemental force, what now must also be in the world, when he must have experiences in the world which must not pass away together with that which passes away with the physical—then man has no stand to say to himself out of that which is accepted by the limits to knowledge: these moral forces are just as valid as that which comes out of the brute forces of physical nature.

From this there come to man today not only theoretical doubts but insecurity of the whole soul life, insecurity apparent everywhere even though people deceive themselves about this. For this is the very character of present civilization that one deludes oneself about the deepest questions of civilization. But in the subconscious these questions are nevertheless active, they express themselves—albeit not in theories, but in the whole tenor of soul, in the confidence and capability of the soul life. That is the inner tragedy which can actually be noticed in the depths of every soul, even of the most superficial. And this is where then that arises which can seem paradoxical in the present time, there arises the longing in many people just for supersensible knowledge! One might say in the spiritual realm it is just the same as with hunger and thirst. One doesn't long for food and drink when one is satisfied, but one longs for them when one is hungry. And from an inmost need present humanity longs for the supersensible because it doesn't have it. While on the one hand philosophers and natural scientists today want to prove more and more that there are unsurpassable limits and borders before the supersensible, we see on the other hand an insatiable thirst of already many human souls for supersensible knowledge, and the number of these people will get ever greater.

To come to this supersensible perception there is a point of view, or I could rather say a method of investigation of which I would like to speak to you today. But I do not want to speak to you of a method of investigation of the supersensible which today one often wants to achieve in a very easy way, but I shall speak to you of a method of perception which, although it is an absolutely intimate matter of the human soul, but in this just as scientific, indeed as exact, not only as an outer scientific result, but as the mathematical or geometric results of science itself.

But while one is striving towards such knowledge and just comes to a knowledge of that which is the supersensible in man, one immediately enters something which right from the start causes all kinds of doubts, causes uncertainties right from the start.

When we look outside we soon notice that the natural scientists and philosophers who speak of limits to knowledge are right as concerns the immediate outer perception. So we must look inside. But when we look inside and we remain within the ordinary consciousness, with that which we have in ordinary life and also in the usual science, then in the beginning nothing confronts us either than a kind of thought picture of the outer world again. When one is completely honest in one's striving for self-knowledge and asks oneself: What is there, when instead of looking out into the world you look back into yourself, what is there actually inside you?—Then one will have to realize that one finds the world inside again, albeit in a picture. What one has experienced has imprinted itself onto our life of concepts, of feeling. We experience as it were a thought picture and feeling picture of that which is outside as well. We have only directed our gaze backwards. This gives us at first nothing new, but only in a dimmed down way in picture form that which is outside too. Only as a general feeling man senses that he is present in these weaving thoughts, ideas and sensations as an I, as a self. But that is so general and undefined, that initially he cannot do much with it.

That is why in the Middle Ages, in the times when one approached self-knowledge, knowledge of the human soul, in a more intensive way, one didn't initially pay much attention to that which one can gain by a merely backward directed self-observation during the ordinary consciousness, but one tried to achieve knowledge of the soul in a different way. This different way is actually interesting, and I must start from this different, often much desired way of knowledge of the soul, so that we can understand one another about the knowledge of soul which I actually mean. But I mention beforehand that I only start from this other knowledge of soul in order to explain what I want to bring, but that I don't want to attribute a special value to it. Therefore nobody should believe that because I start from the dream I already give it value for knowledge. However, this dream life is immensely meaningful.

Those who at some stage have sought knowledge of soul through the dream life, will have noticed that in a certain sense the soul life appears much more characteristically in a dream than when one merely looks into oneself and, as one often says, wants to observe oneself. You have observed the dreams and have initially found two types of dream. As you know, the dream conjures up weaving pictures of a fantastic reality which is initially not as abstract as the thoughts we have in our day consciousness.

But the dream creates initially something which appears enigmatical, on the one side by its composition, on the other side by its content.

There are two things which man experiences as pictures in a dream. Initially pictures of experiences which we went through during our life on earth, reminiscences from life. This arises and shows us the one or other thing which we experienced many years ago. But what there asserts itself rises up next to other things in a connection with was not supplied by life. Occurrences which took place ten years ago are tied together with others which took place the other day. The most removed from one another comes together. By putting together fragments of life, dreams create impossible pictures, chaotic pictures. Everything which outer life gave to us by way of occurrences which we experienced is conjured up to us in dream in a chaotic fashion. That is one kind of dream. The other kind is that in which our own bodily condition is conjured up before us in a kind of symbolic image. Who would not have dreamt of suffering from the heat of a boiling hot stove? He has seen the flickering flames; he awakes and has strong palpitations of the heart. Or we dream that we are walking past a fence. We see how one or two poles are damaged and then we wake up with toothache. In the one case, when we dreamt of the boiling hot stove with its heat, it was a picture of our heart which was palpitating strongly. In the other case, when we dreamt of the fence, it was a picture of our row of teeth which somehow gave us pain. And someone who can penetrate more deeply into these things knows that a certain area of dreams is characterised by inner organs being shown to us symbolically in the dream. However, one must be quite knowledgeable about all the facts which come into play, if one wants to recognise in the symbols what actually expresses itself of the inner being of man in them. Then one will find that there is hardly an organ or an inner process which cannot be conjured up for us inwardly by dreams.

Now former psychologists who have worked with dreams have developed a very valid view about the relationship of man to dreams. They said to themselves: that which we bear within us, we can only feel, but we do not see it, we don't have it in front of us like an outer object. But when we have our own heart beat in front of us in the picture of a boiling hot stove, then we have at least a picture in our consciousness that we make for ourselves, that looks like the picture of an outer object. We have to be separated from the outer object if a picture of it is to arise in us. That which one is oneself, even if it is one's own body, one feels, one feels it sometimes painfully when something organic is not in order, but one does not look at it. When one looks at something in picture form one must be outside of it. And so the former psychologists, which still existed in the 19th century, argued: If I am dreaming in symbols about my own body and its processes, I cannot be in my body, for then I would not experience it. Therefore I must be outside my body in such a case. The picture in any case shows me something of an independent soul-spiritual life over against the body. And furthermore they argued: When I dream in any, however hidden way, of reminiscences of life, then the outer natural existence as it is would have to present itself to me. But there something is constantly changing; there the dream conjures up for me the most fantastic relationships. There again I must be inside, for nature as it usually surrounds me would not be able to show me the occurrences which I have experienced with it, nor the occurrences of human life which I have experienced, in quite a different order.

In this way something was put together of which one could say: It was a valid conviction for these former psychologists, that there they caught something of the soul in a condition where it is separated from the physical body. For firstly man cannot be united with his body if the occurrences of the body, even though only in symbols, in the dream appear to be separated. He must then be outside his body. But again, we must also be inside the reminiscences of our experiences, be together with them, when we have the second kind of dream, for nature does not alter the connection in which experiences have occurred. That we must alter ourselves. Therefore we must be outside, outside our body, when we have the first kind of dreams, and in the same way we must be inside our experiences in the second kind. That means we must actually be outside our physical body with our experiences of soul when we dream. In so far that which former psychologists said to themselves is absolutely indisputable, one cannot say anything against it.

But something else has to be said. The dream cannot give me any sure knowledge about the self. It can lead us to the way of how one can come to such a certainty. Because what we are inside during the time between going to sleep and awakening when we are outside the body: that, which the dream is showing us there, that we certainly are not; for those are on the one hand pictures of our bodily interior, even symbols of this bodily interior, thus that again which is taken from our bodily interior. How can we, when sleeping we are outside our body, be the same which we are in the interior of our physical body? So something else must be the case. We must be something outside our body, but that does not assert itself. We are initially not able to lay hold of the actual nature of the soul in the sleeping state. That conceals itself and masks itself at first; it surrounds itself with pictures of its own bodily nature and shows itself in relationship to its own life in arbitrary compositions of its experiences. The former psychologists have rightly deduced that we are outside our body when we dream, but that the dream shows us something about this being which is outside our body, that is not the case, although they believed it. Because it doesn't show us anything except what we have formerly experienced within the body, and our own body in symbols. Therefore if we are something outside our body, then this is masked in the dream, then the dream is wearing a mask in respect of this. If we want to discover our own being, then we must be able to take this mask off the dream, that is off the soul—for the dream is this mask.—Up to here a more intimate view of the dream leads us onto a path. As former psychologists realised that the dream ultimately doesn't show anything besides what it takes out of the sense world, they of course also had their doubts. And just as one could not believe to have certainty by means of an ordinary backward looking self-observation, so one was also not satisfied with that which the observation of the dream world could give one. Over against this there now appears that which I always call the anthroposophical world view or anthroposophical way of investigation. This initially maintains: If the dream shows us that we are something outside our body, then it proves itself to be too weak by itself to show, to reveal its own being. To reveal itself it uses bits and pieces of reminiscences of life, of symbols of its own bodily nature. Therefore we have to strengthen the soul life so that we come to that which in the soul life stands masked before us in the dream. This one can do. One can do it by copying the dream in full consciousness by a systematically exact so-called meditative life as I have described it in my book “Knowledge of Higher Worlds” and other writings. But not copying it by artificially creating dreams, but awakening in the soul in full consciousness that which in dream arises spontaneously from the subconscious. One comes to this by accustoming oneself to proceed in the same way as the dream proceeds spontaneously—to proceed by imagining things which one knows well symbolically in inner meditation. The dream conjures up symbolically for us our own bodily nature.

One now practices—as neither our own inner being nor outer nature give us symbols—strictly systematically to imagine symbolically. In this way concepts are by force of will brought into a symbol by us, just as the dream conjures it up or us spontaneously. It must be created by inner activity, but that means, the dream must be strengthened.

In outer life we give ourselves over to passive observations and perceptions. Then the inner activity is shadowy. Everyone really senses how shadowy the abstract concepts are, how the thoughts are given over to the outer world and then proceed in a shadowy way. Everyone speaks of the shadowy thought compared to concrete reality. But when one now rises to imagine symbolic things, one has to create these symbols.

And when one is a fully conscious human being and no fool, then one knows that one makes them oneself. Then one is by no means a dreamer but a normal waking person, nay even more than a normal waking person. To the dreamer the symbols come spontaneously, to the waking person the conceptual images come through outer stimulation. The waking person who makes alive within himself that which dreams give, who places before the soul symbols with all inner strength and imitates the dream in full consciousness, awakens himself as it were to a higher activity of thinking and imagining and with this to an altogether higher activity of soul than one has in ordinary consciousness. That however must then be really practiced quite systematically.

And likewise the other side of dream can be imitated. We take experiences from our life that can be separated from one another by years. We can combine them in such a way that the one stands next to the other, but now not chaotically as in dream but from a point of view which may perhaps be from fantasy, but which we quite consciously determine, which is not imposed on us by our inner being, but which we ourselves create inwardly. And in this way we gradually educate ourselves to remain in an inner life of soul; to remain strongly in a life of soul which proceeds totally from the inner activity.

Today one usually underestimates what actually happens there with the human being when he does such exercises, because one does not love the inner activity of thinking, because one already finds it very active when one lives in thoughts induced by outer observation. But he who in all seriousness becomes a true imitator of dream in full consciousness, experiences that he strongly intensifies his inner mobility of soul, that he definitely strengthens it. But he is, if he is no fool but a sensible human being, fully conscious that he himself is making all these pictures and life associations, that is, that he is living in illusion. With a dream one first has to wake up in order to realize the illusion of the dream from the point of view of waking life. The dream can only be unmasked from the point of view of waking; the dreamer imagines the content of the dream to be reality, although his feeling for reality is not such a fictitious one. He who becomes an imitator of dream becomes aware of how a living inner being, something active, quickening is awakened in him, but how he has a content which is absolutely self-image, illusion. Therefore he comes to the point of not bothering with that which is present in him as content, but to concentrate on that which works within him, is active within him. In short, that which we usually only have as a general feeling of ego or self becomes a strongly felt inner activity. If one wants to become a spiritual scientist and not a vague mystic, one must remain conscious and exact. But if one persists in this one will also come more and more to experience the nature of the illusionary. One knows: You imagine nothing, but you have an imagination. Through this one will also the possibility one day to develop the capacity of soul with which one truly doesn't imagine anything and is yet as active as one has learnt it in the imitation of dream.

I point you here to an activity of soul which must absolutely be cultivated by the investigator of spirit. One usually believes, and those who judge things superficially often say it: spiritual investigation is something where man gives himself up to his thoughts and fantasies—that is easy, while to do research in the laboratory, the clinic and the observatory is difficult, something where you have to renounce things.—But this is not so. Because that which one has to acquire as such an inner capacity of soul requires at least just as much time, nay sometimes much longer time of inner work than any outwardly acquired scientific ability as is common in natural science today. Those who want to gain knowledge about that which is here called spiritual investigation should not raise the objection: In natural science one must not be a dilettante if one wants to have a say, there one must really understand something.—What the spiritual investigator alleges is usually regarded as though it were gained effortlessly compared to that which in natural science is reached with much trouble. But it is only the path which is different. In natural science outer observations and facts are used to come to a conclusion, while the spiritual scientist must first develop his own inner capacity for observation. He develops it as an imitator of dreams but in such a way that in the meditative activity that which in dream is conjured up is overcome by him. In dream we do not become conscious of an activity, the images of the dream conjure it up for us; but on the first step of supersensible knowledge the illusion is totally perceived. One knows: you don't imagine anything—but one notices the inner strengthened, empowered activity and in the end learns by a lot of practicing how one can call up this activity without first needing an illusionary activity for this, without first having to imitate the dream. So it is in imitation that one develops this capacity of soul. Once the capacity is there, one knows what one can do with it. Because then one is in a state where one has an empty but very much awake consciousness, but also inner activity. After one has discarded the illusion of this activity, one has initially no content. But the state in which one lives just as one gets to the point of developing the capacity of inner activity without initially also having a content, this state demands a strong inner struggle. And actually this struggle which one needs for this is the touchstone and test whether this spiritual investigation is an honest and true one. For at that moment when one just gets ready to live with empty consciousness, with normal waking consciousness without this waking consciousness having a content, at this moment an unspeakable pain, an unlimited privation spreads itself over the whole soul life. All that one can otherwise experience as pain in the world is really insignificant compared with this spiritual soul pain which one experiences at this moment of cognition. And one has to overcome this pain. For it is this pain which is the expression of a force which has its physical counter image in all sorts of forms of deprivations: in hunger, which instructs us to eat, in thirst, which forces us to drink and so on. Now we feel something in the soul which has to come towards us and we feel it as an unspeakable pain. But when we live for a while in this pain, when we feel our inner being itself as one filled with pain, that is, when we are for a while pain, when our own human being is for our consciousness for a while nothing else but a conglomerate of pain, then this consciousness no longer remains empty, then this consciousness fills itself, and it now fills itself not with sense content which we receive through eyes, ears and so on, but it now fills itself with spiritual content. And we receive as the first thing which comes to us as spiritual content in this way our own spiritual being as a unified spiritual organisation—but living in time, not in space—as it extends from birth or conception up to the present moment to which we have lived the earthly life. Just as we can look into a spatial perspective and see objects which are far away again in perspective, so we can learn to look from the present moment of our life into our own past. We don't see the bodily at that moment, we only remember it, but we have to remember it, otherwise we are destroyed in our consciousness. But he who wants to become an investigator or spirit may not become a person inclined to fantasy nor a confused mystic, he must use his consciousness and his good sense just as a mathematician would for a mathematical problem. But just as we normally see objects of space in perspective, so we now look into a time perspective.

Everything that we have experienced in our existence now stands before us in a time tableau, but in a living time tableau. But not only that which we ourselves have experienced now stands before us thus, but also that which shows us how we have come into being, how inner spiritual soul forces have built up our body from birth or conception, how the sculptural forces are which have worked on our body. We see ourselves outwardly. But that which we see there, through which our own soul life stands before our soul, that now also differs qualitatively from the experience of this time tableau.

When one looks back on one's life in the usual way, one experiences the happenings as they come towards one: one experiences for instance how a person has come towards one, how he has approached one, lovingly or with hatred, how he did this or that as he came towards one. One experiences oneself in this memory picture in the way the outer world has come towards one.

In this other memory picture however, which now stands there in real pictures of which one knows that they reflect the own spiritual nature of the human being just as the usual memory pictures reflect the outer nature, in this other memory tableau is reflected to us how we have approached the outer world. There is shown how one was oneself when for instance one approached another personality. How in our soul forces unfolded which found their satisfaction, their delight, their happiness just through that personality. One really looks at oneself how one was as earthly human being. And then one sees how now in the reality both sides in which the dream was masked flow together.

Now the dream becomes a fully conscious reality. It even becomes more than the ordinary consciousness sees. One initially sees the spiritual entity which lives inside the body, which during sleep is independent of it, indeed which is the creator of the body. This one sees. And then one realises, this spiritual entity also contains, but in a spiritual way, metamorphosed, something like the laws of nature but—you are already protesting against it—in a spiritual existence. Into that which one here experiences the moral world is already entering. In this the moral laws are already present in such a way that one now knows: in the same way in which one's own spirituality works, the moral laws are working. There the moral laws begin to stand with equal validity next to the laws of nature.

But with this one only gets as far as the experience of man's own spiritual existence in earthly being. If one wants to go further one has to develop still other capacities in the soul.—The particulars about this you can read up in the above mentioned books, for this can only be achieved by the practicing of many details. Here only the principle shall be described.—Imagine that at a certain time of day you are remembering back to the morning when you got up, or woke up. If you try hard, the course of the day up to this moment can stand before your soul. Now if you don't place the course of the day in such a way before your soul that you start with the morning, then go on to the experiences of the forenoon and so on, but if you place the course of the day backwards before your soul, so that you start at the certain time and now trace it backwards, then you can also say that you get up to the night when you have slept. But there you then don't add anything, there something remains empty, and that which connects again with the backwards imagined happenings is the last experience before going to sleep, and then you can again place the course of the previous day before your soul.

In short, when the human being remembers in this way in ordinary life, there always remain gaps between the conscious experiencing—the gaps which we lived through unconsciously during sleep. Now in order to go further with the exercises which can link up with this backward experiencing, it is necessary to develop a very strong sense of reality. Such a sense of reality is initially not very prevalent among present day people. It is even something which is not all that easy to achieve, because in relation to remembering people usually remain with that which in some way is closely connected with their personality. In their thoughts they do not connect the threads towards the outer world so strongly, that these threads to the outer world connect with their memories. The human being usually has no inclination at all to live in the outer world, in reality in the outer world, with his memories. How much this is the case, of this one can convince oneself in daily life. I have known people who for instance have seen a lady in the morning who had interested them very much, and when one asks them: What colour was the lady's dress?—they don't know it. Therefore it is as though they had not seen the lady at all, for if they had seen her, they would surely also have seen the colour of her dress. How tenuously is one thus connected with the outer world, if in the afternoon one doesn't even know what colour the dress of a person was whom one had seen in the morning! Indeed, I have even known people who had been in a room and who didn't know afterwards whether there were pictures in the room or not.

One can have the most unbelievable experiences in this regard. Therefore he who wants to acquire a sense of reality must first train himself to live fully also in the outer sense reality, so that that which he passes by stands before him as it is out there in the real world. Truly, the investigator of spirit does not become a man of phantasy; he must acquire a sense of reality to the point that it cannot happen to him that he doesn't know in the afternoon what dress the lady was wearing to whom he was speaking in the morning. He must really be able to live with a sense of reality already in the sense world.

Only when one trains oneself to connect that which one remembers of things to the outer world of reality, then one develops the sense which can achieve a fruitful remembering back for such a spirit knowledge. Because for human beings' usual capacity of remembering the memory picture before the last going to sleep can very easily be joined to that after the last awakening. Without any difficulty people simply leave out that which lies between these two pictures as a night-abyss, they tie the picture of the first happening after waking up directly onto the last happening before going to sleep. They usually don't even notice with a lively consciousness that something lies between the two. But if one wants to acquire such a consciousness that one connects that which one has experienced inside with the picture which is there from the outer world, then one must realise that that which one experiences in the morning after waking up is connected with the whole of nature which makes an impression on us, is connected with the rising sun, with all the impressions one has through the rising sun and so on—and that which one has as the last happenings before the last going to sleep is connected with something which in nature doesn't belong together, namely with that which one experienced after the last awakening. There one will notice with the pictures that are standing next to each other: there is something missing!—But by practicing this, by awakening again capacities of soul that don't exist in ordinary life, one gains the strength that as one looks back to where one now has the first picture after the last awakening and wants to proceed to the last picture before the last going to sleep, one now does not see a stretch of darkness in between, but sees that this darkness is beginning to light up spiritually, that something places itself into this darkness.

Just as in the day waking states one only follows that which one has experienced, so there suddenly comes something in between the first experience after the last awakening and the last experience before the last going to sleep of which one now says: you remember something—only something which you haven't known before. It is just the same as in normal remembering, except that one hadn't known anything before of that which now surfaces. Now one begins to remember that which one has previously missed by sleeping through it, even while sleeping through it in dreamless sleep. The empty time which one is conscious of between the last experience before going to sleep and the first after waking up, this is now filling up. And just as our ordinary consciousness is filled with the experiences of natural existence, so our consciousness is now filled with that which surfaces like a remembrance, but of a remembrance of which one now knows that one has experienced it in the unconscious.

Our consciousness is now filled with the soul content which hasn't taken part in the outer experiences but has withdrawn from the outer experiences, has gone asleep. Now one learns to recognise how the sleeping soul is in reality when it doesn't have the strength to bring its experiences which it has during sleep in the spiritual world to consciousness in such a way as man in day waking life brings to consciousness the happenings of physical life. Now one really gets to know the inner being of man as spirit and soul, and at this moment one sees beyond the earthly life. And one will only now be able to connect that, which one sees in the described way like a great but concrete memory tableau of one's earthly life up to this point, to that which one was as a soul-spiritual human being in a purely spiritual world before one descended into this physical world through birth or conception.

And in the same way another experience joins this one. If one develops another capacity together with all this during one's practicing, a capacity which normally is not seen as a capacity of knowledge but which is one too, if one develops that which is love of soul, full devotion to that which meets one, so strongly that this love remains with one even when one now looks at one's own self, that one can love that which appears as something new in the soul with a truly devoted love—then the possibility develops to free oneself in the waking state in full consciousness in one's inner experiencing from the bodily. But at this moment when one has freed oneself from the bodily in one's inner experiencing, one knows how it is with the human being when he lives his life without his body. And in a picture the fact of the passing through the gate of death, of dying, stands before one's soul. If one has once realised what it means to experience oneself free of the body in one's spiritual forces, then one also knows what one is in the spiritual existence after one has left the body and has passed through the gate of death. And one also gets to know the environment which will then be there for man. One learns to know how together with the body when it has been laid aside that falls away which connects us to the sense world. But that remains, which formerly has fashioned us as a human being, the soul-spiritual of man.

In this way one gets to know the experiences which one has had with other people. But that which was within these sense experiences, how soul has found soul, what happened in the relationships with other people, those that were closer to one and those who were more distant, that which happened in space and time—the eternal-spiritual one gets to know, how it rids itself of the earthly form of experiencing.

And more and more the soul now experiences that which was spiritually present within it as relationships to other people. And that which otherwise is only the object of belief, certainty of knowledge. This human beings experience when they themselves have passed through the gate of death. That which the human soul usually longs for as immortality, only enters real human knowledge in this way. But only by recognising the truly eternal in man by exercising our forces to such an extent that we recognise this eternal in our existence in the pre-earthly, spiritual-soul existence, we also gain that for ourselves which gives us certainty about life after death. There is no longer a word for the pre-earthly as something eternal in the human soul in today's civilisation because we only know the one half of eternity, we speak of immortality. Older languages had the other side, the not-yet-being-born, that is, our existence before we entered earthly life. But only both sides—not-yet-being-born and immortality constitute eternity. And it is a fact that man has to pay for his longing for immortality, that it becomes a mere belief if he wants to forgo knowledge of not-yet-being-born, because he will only understand eternity when he recognises both sides of eternity, the not-yet-being-born as well as the immortality of his being in unity. With this then man has advanced to a real taking hold of that which he is, to a real self-knowledge.

I have to emphasise again and again on such occasions that such a spiritual investigation can indeed only be made by someone who has acquired the relevant capacities by exercising or in another way through destiny, but when the results of such an investigation are made known, they can be as plausible to everyone as for instance the results of astronomy. And just as one doesn't have to be a painter in order to experience the beauty of a picture—for if that would be necessary, only the painters would be able to experience it—just as little does one necessarily have to be a spiritual investigator oneself in order to take up the knowledge of spiritual investigation, although one can become one up to a certain degree, because man wants truth and not confusion and error. Just as one can stand before a painting and admire its beauties with one's healthy judgement, so one can experience that which is presented by spiritual investigation, if one does not oneself put obstacles in one's way, such as prejudices and the like. One can understand it when one dedicates oneself to it with one's sense of truthfulness, and the accusation of those who say of the adherents of spiritual science that they only believe blindly is absolutely unjustified. Especially in the present time Anthroposophy will be able to give human souls if by using their sense of truth or by investigation in the indicated way to come to a self-knowledge of the human being, that for which they pine as I have said in the introduction to today's lecture. Even though this demand of the times does not yet come to consciousness in many people, even if it only shows itself undefined or even just in unfitness in life—it is there in that which expresses itself so clearly in the civilization of the present time. Natural science and many philosophical word views speak of insurmountable borders of knowledge. With this the border which leads to man himself is insurmountable. But man cannot in perpetuity do without true self-knowledge.

In tomorrow's lecture I shall continue where I have left off today and depict the ethical-religious life, how it is enriched and made more inward within the human being. With this I shall then tomorrow give the application to the immediate practical life. In today's lecture I wanted first to show how this demand of our time, which as a demand of heart and soul appears in ever more and more people in the present civilisation with its boundaries to knowledge, can be met by a real spiritual knowledge, by a knowledge of that which man wants to know about his own immortality and that which is connected with it, nay must know, because only in this way a true self-knowledge can be achieved, and only with this true self-knowledge a getting hold of oneself and a feeling of self can be connected. Because only through this man will be able to stand before his own soul with its eternal nature, that he acquires knowledge of how he as spiritual-soul being is woven into the spiritual-soul sphere of the world, just as he has his existence in the physical world a physical being. Only when he has acquired a knowledge of himself as spirit amongst spirits, will he also be able to acquire true inner security. Only when the human being knows his worth and dignity in the world, he stands in the world with that consciousness of himself as man, which out of an undefined feeling he can acknowledge as the only right human consciousness. And only because human beings will seek again for such a light of self-knowledge and spiritual knowledge of the world, only through this the hunger of the present time for a true penetrating of the own human nature will be able to be satisfied. For humanity will not be able to manage with all the demands of the progressing civilisation unless it realises: self-knowledge of man cannot be anything else but knowledge of spirit, for man can only feel himself as true man if he recognises himself as spirit amongst spirits, just as he can feel himself in his transient earthly existence as physical being amongst physical beings.

This is the 4th of 7 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at The Hague, in November of 1923. The title of this series of lectures is: The Supersensible Human, Anthroposophically Comprehended, and published in English as: Supersensible Man, and At Home in the Universe. This lecture is also known as: Anthroposophy / Spiritual Science as a Human and Personal Way of Life. This lecture first appeared in English in The Golden Blade of 1950.

The road that leads to a knowledge and understanding of the spiritual world differs in many respects from the method of knowledge that meets with general acceptance to-day.

As I have explained on other occasions, not only is it possible in our time to travel on this road, but there is in the man of the present day a deep need—yes, a hunger—for knowledge of the super-sensible. Certain preparatory inner experiences are, as you know, required in order to awaken in man the hitherto slumbering consciousness of the spiritual world and of the eternal in his own being. Man cannot, therefore, follow this path of knowledge without its affecting him in his innermost soul. Here we have at once a radical difference from the way of cognition to which we are accustomed.

Consider for a moment the scientific knowledge we acquire to-day by the activity of the intellect—and all present-day knowledge is so acquired, whether it be based on observation or on experiment. Where, to begin with, is this knowledge? For the most part, in books, in writing. The path of knowledge is in consequence well-defined, and man has continually to accept—and is often glad to accept—the limits marked out for recognised knowledge. How readily, when entering into some question of practical life, a man will defer to books—or shall we say, for it sounds a little better, will seek the requisite knowledge along purely scientific lines! This knowledge once acquired, he is, of course, ready to be himself—to be man—again. He has no wish to remain, in life, in the mood that accepts without question, maintaining even with a certain pride: it has been scientifically proved. ... When anyone brings forward something he has discovered out of his own experience, it will frequently happen that one who is au fait in scientific matters will immediately reply: But that does not tally with what is already known and proved, with what has been established as scientific fact. Knowledge has become severed from direct personal experience, so much so indeed that it is regarded as genuine only if acquired and experienced quite apart from any relation to what springs from the heart of man.

The path of knowledge which leads to a recognition of the spiritual world and of the eternal in the human being has quite another character. It calls upon the personal in man; he cannot so much as take one step upon it without heart and soul being directly concerned. And I want to-day to speak of the results for the life of man when knowledge is in this way brought into immediate connection with the personal in the human being.

Knowledge of the spiritual world is not just a continuation or extension of the knowledge that prevails to-day; rather does it imply a change in the whole way of experiencing knowledge.

Let us look a little more closely at a distinctive feature of the knowledge that has made such advances in our day and generation. Do not think I want to criticise this method of knowledge. It has achieved a very great deal on its own ground, and has brought to humanity quite remarkable blessings of a material kind, although it must be admitted that these are, in the present age of civilisation, somewhat heavily cancelled out! Present-day knowledge has, throughout, this characteristic: it starts from the assumption that things are either “true” or “untrue”, and sets out to decide between the alternatives by the exercise of the intellect. We make a point, do we not, of being logical and of basing our conclusion on the facts of experience. Once we have come to see that some scientific statement is true or untrue, then it stands there before us in its truth or untruth and our personality has very little concern with it. We can of course—and should—be filled with enthusiasm for the truth, and turn with loathing from error and falsehood; but if we compare our personal relation to the scientific findings of our time as regards their truth and falsehood with other relations of life, we find a considerable difference.

Let me take a simple, practical example. When we satisfy our hunger, we are doing something in which we are ourselves personally involved; the satisfied hunger cannot be said to stand before us as something objective to ourselves. Whereas when we come to a conclusion between truth and untruth in the realm of science we seek rather to keep our personality out of the decision. If yesterday we were in error on a certain matter, and to-day are no longer so, the implication is, we have arrived at a conclusion, but in doing so we have not essentially changed in our personal being. If, on the other hand, we have eaten something we never tasted before, and have enjoyed it, then we are not quite the same as we were.

Now it will be found that the concepts “true” and “untrue”, “true” and “false” become changed when we begin to have immediate experience of the truths of spiritual science. As we gradually find our way on this new path of knowledge, we stop saying: This is true, that is false. The criterion holds good for the material world; there we can rightly let it be our guide. Few people, however, are aware of its origin. If we trace back the word “true” in the various languages, we make an interesting discovery. The abstract concept, it denotes to-day is comparatively new; it is a product of evolution. In earlier times, anything to which man felt he owed acknowledgement and assent was said to be “what the Gods willed.” The world was divided for man into what the Gods have willed and what the Gods have not willed. In many languages the word “true” still retains this older meaning as well. “True” meant “true to the Divine Order”; the abstract meaning came later. When the intellect took command in the field of knowledge, men forgot the origin of the word “true”. And so to-day we have this completely impersonal relation to knowledge.

The new way of knowledge, however, leads us again to associate something actual and vital with what we assent to or reject. In spiritual science we are not content to say of something that it is true or correct; we ascribe to it a quality, an effectual quality. We speak of knowledge being sound, wholesome—or unwholesome, and to be discarded. The concepts “true” or “correct”, and “untrue” or “incorrect”, which are really valid only for the physical world, are replaced by the concepts “sound” and “unsound”. We are thereby obliged to come into a nearer, more personal relation with the whole of knowledge. For we must needs regard as desirable what is sound and wholesome, we incline to it; on the other hand, we turn away from, we reject, so far as we are able, what is unsound or unhealthy. And as we begin to discern in the field of knowledge whether ideas enrich life or impoverish it, strengthen and aid life, or render it sick and feeble, we begin to realise how intimate is the connection of ideas with life. The knowledge of the present day we approach rather as we do a person to whom we are more or less indifferent, with whom we have merely a conventional relation. Not so with the Spiritual Science I am representing here. We approach it in the way we would a friend whom we love.

As we come to apprehend the truths of the pre-earthly life of man—the life he had as a being of soul and spirit in a purely spiritual world—or as we take our way into the realms of the spiritual world through which man lives between death and new birth, we begin to feel deeply connected with these worlds and with all that they contain; we feel impelled to unite our very being with what we recognise as sound and healthy knowledge, giving us a sound, healthy outlook on life, while on the other hand we naturally reject and cast behind us views that we cannot help seeing are unhealthy, unsound.

Let me illustrate my point by comparison once again with a familiar everyday experience. Normally, man takes nourishment, and this, when it has undergone change inside him, enables him to replace what he has used up in his body; and in this metamorphosis of the means of nourishment man has a feeling of well-being. Conditions, however, may arise, owing to which he is unable to take food—perhaps because his organism is not in a state to digest it, or for some other reason. When this is so, man feeds on what is in his own body; he begins, so to say, to devour himself. Certain illnesses are associated with this condition. This is not unlike what happens with us in the pursuit of knowledge. As we gradually acquire knowledge of the spiritual world, we come to feel how, through such knowledge, we are being brought together with the spiritual world, we are becoming one with it; we are finding our way to the Gods, and to our own immortal soul, finding our way to what we shall experience in the spiritual world when we have passed through the gate of death, and to what we experienced there before we came down to earth. It is almost as though we had offered up our own existence, surrendered it in devotion to the world; but that thereby our life had become richer, inwardly richer. We have become the world, and in so doing we begin to apprehend ourselves for the first time in our full human inwardness. We discover that the whole being and existence of man depends on his coming together with the world in this way. Similarly, too, we learn to understand how the lack or neglect of such truths is like having to live in the world without the organs for receiving nourishment, driven to feed on our own body.

It is different on the intellectual plane. Here we can dispute and argue about idealism and materialism, and so forth; to one we may feel kindly disposed—to another perhaps not, but we do not suffer on that account; none of them affects us deeply. But when we have learned to apprehend sound spiritual truths, then ideas that have a materialistic orientation give us pain; for we know, such truths leave man to feed upon himself.

Now we shall find that the experience I have described enables us to distinguish spiritual truths in yet another way, for it brings home to us that truth is related to love, that healthy and sound knowledge is related to selflessness in man—not the selflessness that loses the self but that leads rather to the possession of the self in the true sense. When man has learned to go out of himself and into the world, becoming in this way not empty but filled with world content, then it is that he finds his true manhood.

Devotion, loving devotion to the spiritual facts of life, becomes a characteristic of one who is able to receive spiritual knowledge. We do not, as a rule, find that the pursuit of purely intellectual knowledge has any specific effect on character; but when a man has probed to the heart of spiritual knowledge, he knows that he cannot apprehend such knowledge without its affecting his character, without its entering—to speak in a paradox—into the flesh and blood of his soul, developing in him an inclination to selflessness, to love. He comes also to understand that when man receives knowledge that lacks this health-giving impulse, it drives him—spiritually speaking—to feed on himself, and from this he can learn the true nature of egoism.

The effect upon character is one of the most important results that can accrue from spiritual knowledge. Abstract intellectual knowledge is like an artificial root; it has been constructed by the intellect—no plant can grow from it. This is true of all the scientific knowledge that men respect and revere to-day, useful though it be, and by no means to be disparaged. From a real root grows a real plant; and from a real knowledge, whereby man can unite his spirit with the Spirits of the World, grows little by little the complete man who knows what true selflessness—selfless love—is, and what egoism is, and from this understanding derives impulses to act and work in life—the impulse, where it is right, to be selfless; or again, where he perhaps has need to draw forth something from his own being in preparation for life—there, openly, without any disguise, to develop egoism.

A certain clairvoyance will be found to enter into this self-observation, and into the way it is led over into deed and action. From the root of spiritual knowledge springs the plant of the higher man, the man of soul and spirit. Spiritual knowledge leads therefore quite naturally and inevitably to morality. As regards present-day knowledge, we tend to be proud of the fact that it has no connection with morality or ethics. We assume as a matter of course that we have to examine the inorganic processes in Nature in accordance with their laws, looking in them for cause and effect and not expecting to find in them any ethical working. We boast that we can even go on to apply these methods to living processes, to our study of the plant, of the animal and of the human being, allowing ourselves to concede the presence of a moral element only when we come to consider the deeper impulses that rise up in human hearts and souls: impulses of which, however, we cannot say that they are able to demonstrate their independent existence by accomplishing the transition to objective reality.

Knowledge of the spirit, on the other hand, leading as it does to an intensive development of the experience of selflessness, of that loving devotion to the matter in hand, without which spiritual knowledge is unattainable, and on the other hand to a fine perception of the nature of egoism, brings us right into the moral world-order. The moral world-order begins to be for us an immediate reality. Let us examine a little how this comes about.

We begin to speak no longer merely in an abstract way of a pre-earthly life of man, but actually to look into the spiritual world in which we lived before we descended to Earth, even as we look out: with our physical eyes on our physical surroundings; and we find that we are surrounded there by beings who never take on a physical body, just as here in the physical world we have around us beings who have, like ourselves, a physical body. The spiritual world and its beings become actual and objective; we begin to be familiar with them.

What is the secret of our bodily existence on earth? Even as through the years of childhood, from birth onward, we are continually being impelled, unconsciously or half consciously, to find our way into our body, to grow increasingly one with it, so do we in like manner, throughout our physical life on earth, gradually approach the world, feeling our way towards it by means of our physical organs. When we are active and creative, we—so to speak—lose ourselves in our body; soul and spirit are surrendered to the body and we lose consciousness of them. The content of the world is communicated to us through our bodily nature. Materialism is quite right as far as earthly consciousness is concerned, for we are obliged to make use of the body as long as we remain in the earthly consciousness, and so have to be content with perceiving only what is bodily. If, however, man wants to comprehend the spiritual world and his own super-sensible being, he has to undergo in himself a development wherein the body acts as a hindrance. For the body would wrench us away from the spiritual world, would alienate us from it, driving us back again and again upon ourselves and our own egoity; whereas in spiritual knowledge we have to come right out of ourselves—rather as we do when we love another human being. And in so far as we become able to do this, a deeply significant truth begins to dawn upon us, namely, that man passes through repeated earthly lives.

As a matter of fact, many of the feelings and impulses that we carry in our soul are there as a result of earlier lives on earth; only we do not observe them as such because we remain in our body. Suppose we meet someone, and the meeting leads to a friendship that alters the whole course of our life. When we look back over the earlier years, we discover with the eye of the spirit what we could never find by the aid of bodily vision alone: namely, that our whole life up to the moment of meeting him was a search for that person. One who is already a little older and looks back in this way is able to see his life as the working out of a plan; he recognises how, when he was quite a little child, his life took a direction that was to bring about eventually the meeting with this friend. We can go further in this kind of observation of life and discover that all we do, though it may seem to result from the working of earthly physical forces, is in reality guided from elsewhere. We come in fact to recognise that the life we are now living is dependent on earlier lives on earth. And between these have been also lives in a spiritual world.

Now we can come to a knowledge of the other lives we have lived on earth only when we learn to imbue with love the faculty of cognition. It is by no means so easy as some people think, to discover the man we were! For he is a complete stranger to us now. Only a selfless, love-imbued faculty of cognition can grasp this other person, so that he enters into our consciousness.

This is how it is with all stages of higher, spiritual knowledge. Our knowledge has to become a loving knowledge, intimately bound up with our personality, a knowledge that simply cannot be at all without our personality taking part in it. And as we grow into this larger world, and learn to look beyond birth and beyond death, to look also beyond and behind the world of the senses—for in the plant, animal, and mineral kingdoms we begin to behold beings, spiritually active beings—as we do this, we come into a kingdom of reality, where the ethical impulses that inhere in our knowledge have place. I will give you an example.

Destiny, we say, is hard to bear. So little good seems often to result from actions that spring from the highest motives, whilst others that flow from evil motives reap marvelous success! How is this? The reason is that this physical world of the senses, not-withstanding that we have taken for ourselves a fragment of it to form, as it were, a garment for our souls, has in it no moral impulses. The moral and ethical impulses that are behind our actions have no place there; they are wiped away out of whatever we do or make in the physical world; the nearest approach to moral working is a purely formal compensatory effect. But this physical world is permeated throughout with spirit; we carry our moral or immoral actions into the world of the spirit. And here, even as we found that “true” comes to mean for us sound or healthy, we recognise that when man devotes himself to moral truth, he becomes in his inner being, strong, well developed; whereas when he gives himself up to error he becomes a cripple in soul and spirit.

In the present cycle of evolution this does not find expression in the physical body (there we carry the results of what we did and achieved in our previous life on earth); but when we have laid down our physical body and gone through the gate of death, then there is no longer anything to prevent our soul and spirit from assuming the physiognomy we have acquired from the ethical quality of our experience. There in the spiritual world we, as soul and spirit, are strong and well-developed, or crippled and weak. Then, later on, comes the time for us to resume a physical body; and in forming it we build, from within, our own destiny. For we may, on the one hand, be able, having brought from an earlier life a harmonious soul-and-spirit nature, to form the new body in perfect order and proportion, so that we can employ it in good and useful activity; or, coming into incarnation, as it were, as a moral cripple, we may find ourselves able only to form and guide the new body in a clumsy and awkward fashion, from embryo up to adult age. And now this inner destiny becomes our outer destiny. For it is clear to an unprejudiced observation that whatever befalls us from without is closely connected with what we ourselves have prepared as our inner destiny. In all our intercourse with the world outside, we make use of the body as an instrument, and according as we use it skillfully and well, or badly and clumsily, we occasion, at any rate in part, the events that befall us. And then, in the further lives that follow, come new compensation and balancing-out. Thus in the spiritual world we find the formative forces that belong to our moral life. The moral world becomes for us a reality.

We see how an ethical impulse cannot in one earth-life effect a change in the physical body, but when it passes over into the next life on earth, can work there quite definitely as a health-giving influence, no less truly than heat works in the physical world, or light, or electricity. That we imagine the moral world—order to be no more than a man-made abstraction is due to the fact that we take cognisance only of the physical world, tracing everything back there from effect to cause; we can, however, equally well recognise this law at work in the spiritual world; only there we have to trace the effects, as they show themselves in one life, back to causes in an earlier life on earth. In other words, we need to know the level on which the law of cause and effect has to be applied to human destiny.

Now all that sounds very well, someone might say, but as things are, men have not this spiritual knowledge of which you speak; only a researcher in the spirit can see into the spiritual world-others must be content with the words and ideas in which he clothes his perceptions. To this I would reply: To paint a picture, one must be an artist; but to experience the beauty and inner content of the picture one need not be an artist, one has only to approach the picture with a sincere and open mind. It is the same with spiritual knowledge. In order to “paint” in ideas, one must be a researcher in the spirit; but once the picture is painted, it stands there for others to behold. And if these, who are not themselves “artists”, are free from prejudice and are sincere seekers after truth, they will receive health and healing from the descriptions of the spiritual world.

We are actually, at the present day, in a peculiar position in this respect. Spiritual Science, in the sense we understand it here, is, comparatively speaking, a new thing in our civilisation. The person who is able to represent it from immediate experience, stands alone; and all he can do is to clothe it in words and ideas, and impart these to his fellow men. It might even be thought that what he has to say concerns himself alone! In any case, that is how the position is to-day. One earnestly hopes it will soon alter, for Spiritual Science has power to quicken and awaken man inwardly. As things still are, however, mankind remains to-day a recipient only of spiritual knowledge.

For him who acquires spiritual knowledge, the case is very different. There comes a point where he has to undergo a pain with which no other pain can be compared. It is at the moment when he passes beyond his own spiritual experience between birth and death and launches out into the vast ocean of eternity in which we shall be when we have gone through the gate of death, and in which we were before we descended through birth to physical life on earth. An indescribable pain is involved in leaving, on the path of knowledge, the world of the physical senses, and entering the world of the spirit. The whole being is, as it were, steeped in pain. And now a remarkable thing happens. At first the higher knowledge seizes hold of the traveler in his entire being; but then, it wrests itself free of him with unbelievable force and certainty.

Since we have set out in this lecture to show where the personal has place in the path of knowledge, you will allow me, I think, to describe at this point what is, on the face of it, an entirely personal matter. As we shall find, however, what seems most personal in it has nevertheless an impersonal character. It is an experience that can befall anyone who comes into a similar situation.

To begin with, as I said, the knowledge of the spiritual takes hold of the entire human being. Ordinary intellectual knowledge is a concern of the head, the intellect. It is in the head alone that we have to exert ourselves. True, the acquisition of this kind of knowledge often obliges one to sit still for long hours at a stretch, so that one may be glad to break off for sheer weariness! It is nevertheless true to say that ordinary knowledge does not call upon the whole human being. But if we try to acquire, with the aid of the intellect alone, knowledge of the spiritual and super-sensible, it evades us like a dream; its great and far-reaching conceptions slip from our grasp. When we have, so to speak, pressed forward to the spiritual world, when we have passed what is spoken of as the Guardian of the Threshold, we have the greatest trouble to bring to consciousness—not the content; that one can acquire as a matter of knowledge—but the experience.

It is a fact that very many people become able, comparatively quickly, to have experiences in the spiritual world. But presence of mind is needed to grasp these experiences. With the majority of persons it happens that before they can give their attention to some experience, it is gone again. Presence of mind is altogether indispensable for the attainment of spiritual knowledge, as you will know from my book How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. When one succeeds in acquiring knowledge of things that are beyond space and beyond time, they seem like a dream, and only with the greatest difficulty can one lift them on to a higher level of consciousness. They vanish-away like a dream if one tries to grasp them with the head alone.

Now it is important for one who speaks about the spiritual world in ideas to have always the spiritual world before him as he speaks; and he can acquire the habit of standing in this way within the spiritual world only if his whole being participates in the knowledge. Everyone will find his own way of doing this. I, for example, find it necessary to fix the results of spiritual knowledge by jotting down either brief notes or symbolical drawings. I need hardly say, I mean by this nothing of a mediumistic nature, but a perfectly conscious and deliberate action. Putting down some note at once ensures that the activity is not confined to the head alone but is shared in by the whole human being. It is of no consequence whether later on one refers to these notes: the point is, to make them. I can assure you I have used up whole cartloads of notebooks in this way and never looked at them again. What has been seen in the spiritual world is more strongly retained when the experience is allowed to flow into an impulse of will that leads to the activity of writing; for ultimately, all depends on experiencing the truths of the spiritual world—let me say—”organically”, experiencing them with one's whole being.

Initiation-knowledge of the present day has perforce another characteristic, which need not continue indefinitely and was not present in earlier and other paths to initiation. I mean the following. Suppose one has produced some spiritual knowledge, and later on has occasion to come back to it. If one is, let us say, as old as I am, and produced some 40 years ago much of what one has to communicate, then as far as the inner spiritual activity is concerned, it is almost as though one had to deal with something one was reading for the first time in an old book. Please understand me aright. Knowledge one has oneself produced many years ago becomes as strange to one as a book one has never seen before. It is not remote in the way that we feel abstract knowledge to be remote, but spiritually it severs itself from one. A man who stands outside initiation-knowledge, may feel how this knowledge, when he receives it, becomes united with his very being; but for the one who has produced it, it separates itself from him; he feels as if he had before him another human being.

Many a book, I assure you, by one or other of our friends, strikes me as more familiar than the books I wrote myself in earlier years. In fact, I read these only when I must: for instance, to revise them for a new edition. The teaching of the spiritual researcher severs itself from him and becomes objective; he is quite unable to feel any particular pleasure or satisfaction in it—as one might naturally expect in other circumstances! This has nothing to do with the knowledge as such; it arises only from the fact that one is obliged in the present day to attain the knowledge in solitude. In earlier times, when the path of initiation knowledge was far more instinctive and less conscious, it could not rightly be pursued in solitude. There were societies for the fostering of initiation knowledge. Such societies exist even in our time, but they merely carry on a tradition. If to-day one speaks from direct personal experience in knowledge, one is compelled to stand alone.

How was it arranged in societies of this kind? And how will it be in the future, when knowledge of the spiritual will be received again into civilisation and be called upon to enter once more into all the practical spheres of life? For spiritual knowledge will be able to do this, when once man begins to take hold of it. The societies of which we have spoken were ordered in the following way. An agreement was come to, freely and willingly on the part of all, that one of their number should undertake a particular field of knowledge, another, another field, and so on. One, for example, would concentrate all his powers on inquiring into the influence exercised upon the life of man by the world of stars, another on investigating the path leading from pre-earthly existence into the sphere of the earth.

This plan made it possible for the several fields of knowledge to be investigated in detail. For if it takes ten years to get to know something of the influence of the stars on human life, it takes, not ten years, but a lifetime to explore in detail even a few steps of the way from pre-earthly into earthly life. There was accordingly good reason for distributing among different persons the several realms of knowledge. Each made a deep study of the field of knowledge upon which he set himself to concentrate, and for the rest, allowed himself to take the knowledge from his companions. He had thus the double experience; he knew what it was to produce knowledge himself inwardly, and he had also the experience of receiving knowledge he had not himself produced.

When men learn to be more open-hearted and to approach knowledge with real warmth of soul, then it will afford them the same kind of experience one may have from the painting of a great artist. Man's own natural feeling for reality will enable him to take hold of what lives in the idea he has not himself produced; he will have a direct inner experience of the idea. He will undergo also the pain and suffering of which I told you—all the phases of inner personal experience that come from meeting spiritual knowledge face to face. This can be achieved by one who receives spiritual truths; he can grasp them, take hold of them with the entire forces of his soul. Such an experience is, however, in large measure denied to the spiritual researcher of the present day; he has to forgo it in so far as he produces the knowledge.

The fruits of spiritual knowledge can accrue to those who receive the truths with warmth of heart. And within the societies of earlier times provision was always made for the receiving of knowledge. When a particular field of spiritual research was allotted to one member—or the member chose it for himself—then, as far as that field was concerned, he went without the receiving which gives so much help and enrichment to life; on the other hand he experienced the blessing of receiving, in that he received knowledge from his companions who undertook other fields of research. Something, of the kind must come again in the future.

Do not think I speak out of a desire to attach importance to my own experiences; I want rather to draw your attention to the fact that in order to reap the fruits of spiritual knowledge, one does not need to have produced the knowledge oneself. Let a man follow the exercises—in meditation, concentration, etc.—described in my book, How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Then, if he succeeds in rousing himself to inner activity of soul, and takes but a few first steps towards an understanding of life, his heart will be open to receive what the spiritual researcher can give, and what he receives will unite itself with him in quite an intimate manner, for it speaks directly to the personal in him, and he will find the way, as personal man, to the deep sources of life whence the eternal in his own being is derived; he will enter into the experiences man has in the spiritual world before his life on earth, and into those also that await man when he has passed through the gate of death and come again into the spiritual world. And as he makes this knowledge his own, a second higher man will grow up within him.

On this path of knowledge we learn to feel, as it were, at home in the spiritual world in the way we feel at home in the world of nature, with its secure and stable laws. The fact that we have muscles and bones unites us with nature; our own physical nature makes us feel at home in the physical nature of the world around. And when we begin to apprehend the reality of spiritual conceptions and to see their content as part of the spiritual world, then we begin to feel at home in a divine spiritual world—even as with our body we feel at home in the world of the senses. And it is this feeling at home in the spiritual world that is so important, for thereby we attain to a knowledge of ourselves as having eternal spiritual existence in the eternal divine spiritual world.

For not only is it true that mankind in general is rooted in a spiritual world. Every single human being, just through that which is most personal in him, just through that which he, as an individual, can experience by being on earth in a particular place and at a particular time, is rooted in, and belongs to, a spiritual world which bears the stamp of eternity. As we come to realise this, we begin to feel as though a voice were calling to us: “Make not yourself a cripple in soul and spirit!” For not merely man in general, but each single human being, is relied upon to play his part.

It is also through what is most individual and personal in him that man finds his way to religion, and to all true artistic experience. Hence it is that Spiritual Science leads directly into a religious mood of life. You will find abundant evidence in our literature of how Christianity is deepened, and can stand forth in its true light and in its true being, when we try to understand the personal experiences of the Christ Who appeared in a personal form.

Attaining thus by a personal path to our own eternal being, we know how to give personality its right place and meaning in the world, conscious that each one of us is needed and reckoned upon as single personality. Knowledge of the spirit has become for us a human and personal path in life. We feel inwardly seized and quickened by the content of spiritual knowledge, in the same way that our body is seized and quickened by the power of the blood.

The meaning we have been led to discern in our personal, our individual existence, may perhaps be best conveyed in a picture. A meeting has been called, and we are summoned to attend the meeting, because it is important for just that to be said in it which we alone can contribute. Suppose we take some action which has the result of preventing our being present. We are not there; we—who are expected, who are looked for—do not appear.

Whatever we do and accomplish under the impulse of spiritual knowledge serves, we shall find, to enrich our life; we begin indeed to recognise how our path in life leads always in a direction where we are needed and expected. In the world where spiritual beings are at work, creating and fashioning our individual existence, we begin to see that we are counted upon to do our part, and we understand that the only way we can fulfill what is expected of us and join with our companions in a higher spiritual world, is by following this personal path of life into the spiritual world, and finding within us, as we tread the path, the higher eternal man, the soul and spirit of our being.

Thus does this human knowledge of the spirit bring us face to face with the challenge: Are we going to arrive in that place where it is given to human beings to unite in a common experience of the spiritual—for we are expected there, we are awaited—or, having passed through many births and deaths, shall we come at length to a point where the word of reproach rings out: You were expected, and you did not come!

In connection with the public lectures and public gatherings, it always affords me a satisfaction also to be able to address this Group here in The Hague, and I shall try this evening to say some things that may be to you a more intimate continuation, a supplement, of what I was able to express in the public lectures. (Lectures given in The Hague, Rotterdam, and Delft, Holland, from October 31 to November 6, 1922)

In order to have knowledge of the spiritual world and for the acquirement of an inner life with the spiritual world, it is necessary most of all to see in the right light that which one might call the concealed aspects of human existence. Indeed, the concealed aspects of human existence are the more important aspects for the comprehensive judging and evaluation of human life. This may not be admitted willingly by people who merely think superficially and materially, but it is none the less true. No one can become acquainted with human existence, unless he is able to enter into its concealed aspects.

One could, perhaps, if I may thus express myself, demur against the Gods and say that they have put the most precious thing for man into the concealed aspects of his life; that they have not afforded him what is most precious in the visible aspect of life. If this had been done, man would in a higher sense remain impotent. We acquire spirit-soul strength, which then can permeate our whole being, through the very fact that we must first achieve our genuine human dignity and our human nature, that we must first do something in the realm of our soul and spirit in order to become man at all in the right sense of the word. And in this victory, in this necessity of having first to accomplish something to become man, in this lies that which can fill us with strength, which can permeate with forces the innermost depth of our being.

In order, therefore, to explain more definitely this leading theme which I have introduced today, I will speak to you again from a certain viewpoint about that concealed aspect of human existence which is enveloped in the unconsciousness of sleep. And then I will bring to your attention something of that which lies enveloped in states of existence that remain unconscious during earth life: those states of existence in pre-earthly life and the life after death.

The sleep life takes place in such a way for man that, after the transition through dreams—which have, however, but a very dubious existence and a very dubious significance for human life, if one simply accepts them as they present themselves—he falls into the unconsciousness of sleep, out of which he emerges only on awakening, when he immerses himself with his ego and his astral body in the ether body and physical body; that is, when he makes use of both these principles as a tool in order to perceive his physical environment and then to work within this physical environment through his will. But that which lies beyond birth and death is enveloped in that very part of man's being which becomes unconscious when he falls asleep... And the conditions which the human being experiences there I will describe to you as though they were conscious. They can become conscious only to the imaginative, the inspirative, and the intuitive consciousness. But the difference between this and what every man experiences in the night is only a difference in knowledge. The individual who, as a modern initiate, looks into the sleep life knows how it is, but this does not make the life of sleep into something different for him from what it is for every man, even for the one who passes through it quite unconsciously. Thus our description can be in conformity with reality when we describe that which remains unconscious as though the human being experienced it consciously. And this is what I shall now do.

After the transition through dreams—as I intimated before—man passes, as regards the normal consciousness, into unconsciousness. But the reality of this unconscious state, as it manifests itself to the higher, supersensible knowledge, is that, directly after falling asleep, man enters into a sort of contourless existence. If he should realize his condition consciously, he would feel himself poured out into an etheric realm. He would feel himself outside of his body, not limited, however, but widely diffused; he would sense or observe his body as some object outside of himself. If this condition should become conscious, it would be filled, as regards man's soul nature, with a certain inner anxiety or uneasiness. He feels that he has lost the firm support of the body, as though he stood before an abyss.

What is called the Threshold of the Spiritual World has to exist for the reason that the human being must first prepare himself to have this feeling, the feeling of having lost that support which the physical body affords, and to bear that anxiety in the soul which is caused by his facing something entirely unknown, something indeterminate.

As I stated, this feeling of anxiety does not exist for the ordinary sleeper; it is not in his consciousness, but he does pass through it, nevertheless. That which constitutes anxiety, for instance, in every-day physical existence is expressed in certain processes, even though they be subtle processes of the physical body: when man senses anxiety, certain vascular activities in the physical body are different from what they are when he feels no anxiety. Something occurs objectively besides what the human being feels as anxiety, restlessness, etc., in his consciousness. This objective element of a soul-spirit anxiety man experiences while he enters through the portal of sleep into the sleep state. But with the feeling of anxiety something else is connected: a feeling of deep longing for a Divine-Spiritual Reality that streams and weaves through the cosmos.

If man should experience in full consciousness the first moments after falling asleep—or even hours, perhaps, in the case of many persons—he would be in this state of anxiety and of longing for the Divine. The fact that we feel religiously inclined at all during the waking life depends first of all upon the fact that this feeling of anxiety and this longing for the Divine which we experience in the night have their after-effects upon the mood of the day. Spiritual experiences projected, so to speak, into physical life fill us with the after-effect of that anxiety which impels us to crave to know the Real in the world; they fill us with the after-effect of the longing we bear while asleep, and they express themselves as religious feelings during the waking hours of the day.

But such is the case only during the first stages of sleep. If sleep continues, something peculiar occurs; the soul exists as though split, as though split up into many souls. If the human being should experience this condition consciously—which only the modern initiate can completely behold—he would have the sensation of being many souls and consequently think that he had lost himself. Every one of these soul beings, which really are merely shadowy images of souls, represents something in which he has lost himself. In this state of sleep the human being has a different appearance according as we observe him before or after the Mystery of Golgotha. Namely, the human being requires cosmic aid from without in regard to this condition, if I may so express it, of being split into many soul reflections.

In olden times, preceding the Mystery of Golgotha, the initiates, the old initiates, gave to the people indirectly through their pupils, through the teachers whom they sent out into the world for mankind, certain religious instructions which evoked feelings during their waking life. And these instructions, which were expressed by the people in ritual acts, strengthened their souls so that the human being carried, in turn, a sort of after-effect of this religious mood over into his sleep life.

You can see the reciprocal action between being asleep and being awake! On the one hand the human being, in his longing for the Divine during the first stage of sleep, experiences that which induces him to develop religion during waking life. If this religion is developed during the waking life—and it was developed through the influence of the initiates—it has its effect again upon the second stage of sleep: through the after-effect of this religious mood the soul has then sufficient strength to bear the sensation of being split—at least to exist at all amidst this plurality.

This truly is the difficulty that irreligious people have: they have no such aid during the night in regard to this being split into many souls and thus they carry these experiences over into the waking life without the strength that religion affords. For every experience we have during the night has its aftereffect in the waking life. It has not yet been a very long time since irreligion and non-religiousness began to play so large a, part among mankind as it did during the last century, the 19th century. People still experienced the aftereffect of the influence of what earlier, more sincere, religious times meant to the human being. But, since the irreligious times continue, the ultimate result will be significant: people will carry the after-effect of this splitting of their souls from their sleep state over into their waking life, and this will principally contribute to the fact that they will not have the forces of coherence in their organism to distribute properly the nourishing effect of the food in their organism. And mankind will be afflicted with significant diseases in the near future as a consequence of this irreligion.

We must, indeed, not think that the spirit-soul part of our being has no bearing upon the physical! Its relation is not such that irreligious development will be immediately punished with disease by some kind of demoniacal gods—life does not run its course in such a superficial manner—but there does exist, nevertheless, an intimate relation between our experience in the realm of soul and spirit and our physical constitution. In order to possess health during the waking hours of the day, it is essential that we carry into our sleep life the feeling of our unity with the divine-spiritual Beings, in whose realm of activity we immerse the eternal kernel of our own being. And it is only by a right existence within a spirit-soul world between falling asleep and awakening that we can produce the right and health-bringing forces of a spirit-soul element, so necessary for our waking life.

During this second stage of sleep the human being acquires, not a cosmic consciousness, but a cosmic experience in lieu of the ordinary physical consciousness. As stated before, only the initiate goes through this cosmic experience consciously, but everyone has this experience in the night between falling asleep and waking up. And in this second stage of sleep the human being is in such a state of life that his inner nature carries out imitations of the planetary movements of our solar system. During the days we experience ourselves in our physical body. When we speak of ourselves as physical human beings, we say that inside of us are our lungs, our heart, our stomach, our brain, etc. ... this constitutes our physical inner nature. In the second stage of sleep the movement of Venus, of Mercury, of the sun, and of the moon constitute our inner spirit-soul nature. This whole reciprocal action of the planetary movements of our solar system, we do not bear it directly within us, not the planetary movements themselves; but facsimiles, astral facsimiles of them then constitute our inner organism. To be sure, we are not spread out into the entire planetary cosmos, but we are of extraordinary size, compared with our physical size in the daytime. We do not bear within us the real Venus each time that we are in the state of sleep, but a facsimile of its movement. In the second stage of sleep, between falling asleep and awakening, that which occurs in the spirit-soul part of our being consists of these circulations of the planetary movements in astral substance, just as our blood circulates through our physical organism during the day, stimulated by the movement of breathing. Thus through the night we have circulating within us as our inner life, so to speak, a facsimile of our cosmos.

Before we can experience this circulation of the planetary after-effects we must first experience the splitting of the soul. As I said before, the people of olden times, previous to the Mystery of Golgotha, received instructions from their initiates, in order that they might be able to bear this splitting of the soul and that the soul should find its way within these movements which now constituted its inner life. Since the Mystery of Golgotha something else has taken the place of this old teaching. Namely, something has occurred which the human being can now appropriate inwardly to himself as a feeling, a sentiment, a soul life, and a soul mood, when he really feels himself one with the deed which was accomplished for mankind by the Christ Being through the Mystery of Golgotha here on earth. The individual who truly feels his unity with the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha to the degree that in him are fulfilled the words of St. Paul: “Not I, but the Christ in me”, he has, through this unity with the Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha, developed something in his feeling which has its after-effect in sleep, so that he now has the strength to overcome the splitting of his soul and the power to find his way in the labyrinth of the planetary orbits which now constitute his inner self. For we must find our way, even though we are not conscious in our inner being of that which constitutes for the soul the planetary circulation in place of the blood circulation during the day, which now continues in the physical body we have abandoned.

After this experience, we enter the third stage of sleep. In this third stage we have an additional experience—of course, the experiences of the preceding stage always remain and the experiences of the next stage are added thereto—in the third stage is included, what I should like to call the experience of the fixed stars. After experiencing the circulation of the planetary facsimiles we actually experience the formations of the fixed stars, that which in former times, for instance, was called the images of the Zodiac. And this experience is essential to the soul aspect of the human being, because he has to carry the after-effect of this experience with the fixed stars into his waking life in order to have the strength at all to control and vitalize his physical organism at all times through his soul.

It is a fact that, during the night, every human being first experiences an etheric preliminary state of cosmic anxiety and longing for the Divine, then a planetary state, as he feels the facsimiles of the planetary movements in his astral body, and he has the experience of the fixed stars in that he feels—or would feel if he were conscious—that he experiences his own soul-spiritual inner self as a facsimile of the heavens, of the fixed stars.

Now, my dear friends, for the one who has insight into these different stages of sleep, a significant question arises, I might say, every night. The human soul, the astral organism, and the ego being, leave the physical body, their inner self is filled with facsimiles of the planetary movements and of the constellations of the fixed stars. The question arising now is this: “How is it that every morning, after each sleep, the human being returns to his physical body again?”

And it is here where the science of initiation discovers that the human being would actually not return if, on entering the planetary movements and the constellations of the fixed stars, he did not also live his way into the forces of the moon while expanding outward into the facsimiles of cosmic existence. He lives his way into the spiritual forces of the moon, into those cosmic forces which are reflected in the physical moon and in the moon-phases.

While all other planetary and fixed star forces actually draw the human being out of his physical body, it is the lunar forces which again and again return him, when he wakes, to his physical body. The moon is connected in general with all that brings the human being from his spiritual life into the physical life. It, therefore, makes no difference—the physical constellation is not the thing to be considered, although a certain significance attaches thereto—whether we have to do with new moon, full moon, the first or last quarter of the moon; in the spiritual world the moon is always present. It is the lunar forces which lead the human being back into the physical world, into his physical body.

You can see, my dear friends, that, as I briefly describe to you the experience the human being has between falling asleep and awakening, I am, upon the whole, giving you something of a general description of his sojourn in the spiritual world. And this is the state of the matter. Fundamentally, we experience every night a reflection of the life between death and a new birth. If we look into pre-earthly life with the imaginative, the inspirative, and the intuitive consciousness, we see ourselves first of all as spirit-soul human beings in a very early state of pre-earthly existence. We see ourselves possessed of a cosmic consciousness. Our life there is not a reflection of the cosmos, as is our sleep life, but we are actually diffused through the real cosmos. About the middle of our life between death and a new birth we feel ourselves as spirit-soul beings, fully conscious—in fact with a much clearer and more intensive consciousness than we could possibly have anywhere upon the earth—surrounded by divine-spiritual Beings, by the divine-spiritual Hierarchies. And, just as we work with nature's forces here on earth, just as we use external objects of nature as tools, so in the same way does work take place between us and the Beings of the higher spiritual Hierarchies.

And what manner of work is this? This work consists in the fact that the spirit-soul human being, conjointly with an enormous number of sublime spiritual Beings of the cosmos, is weaving the cosmic spirit-germ of his physical human body in the spiritual realm. However peculiar this may seem to you—to weave the physical human body as spiritual germ out of the whole cosmos—it is the greatest, the most significant piece of work conceivable in the cosmos. And not only does the human soul in the state described work at this, but the human soul works at it conjointly with whole hosts of divine-spiritual Beings. For, if you visualize the most complicated thing that can be formed here on earth, you find it primitive and simple in contrast with that mighty fabric of cosmic vastness and grandeur which is woven there and which, compressed and condensed through conception and through birth, becomes permeated with physical earth matter and then becomes the human physical body.

When we refer to a germ here on earth, we think of it as a small germ which afterwards becomes relatively large. But, when we refer to the cosmic spirit-germ in relation to the human body as a product of the spiritual, this germ is of gigantic size. And from that moment on, which I have pointed out to you, when the soul is coming towards its birth, the soul-spiritually magnificent human germ is gradually diminishing. The human being continues to work at it with the aim constantly in view that this will be woven together, pressed together, condensed into the physical human body.

It was really not without reason that the older initiates—through a kind of clairvoyance which, to be sure, is no longer suitable to us, although the more recent science of initiation shows the same fact—that the older initiates called the human body the Temple of the Gods. It is the Temple of the Gods, for it is woven out of the cosmos by the human soul conjointly with divine Beings each time between death and a new birth. Later on—in a manner still to be described—the human being is given his physical form. While the human being is weaving the spirit-germ of his physical body at the stage indicated, he is, as regards his soul being, in a condition, in a mood, that can only be compared with what the modern initiates call intuition. The human being lives with his soul within the activity of Gods. He is wholly diffused in cosmic-divine existence. In this state halfway between death and a new birth he is participating in the life of the Gods.

But then, as the human being proceeds on his way, as he comes closer to conception or birth, a change takes place. In a certain way, his consciousness is then impressed with the fact that the divine-spiritual Beings of the Higher Hierarchies are withdrawing from him. And there appears to him only something like a revelation, like a reflection, as if the Gods had withdrawn and only their nebulous images were still standing before the human soul, and as if a kind of veil were being woven as a nebulous imitation of that which in reality had been woven before. The intuitive consciousness he formerly possessed now changes to a cosmic inspired consciousness. The human being lives no more with the divine-spiritual Beings of the Higher Hierarchies; he lives with their manifestation. But in place of this an inner ego develops more and more within the soul consciousness. During the climax, I might say, of life between death and a new birth, the human being lives entirely with the divine-spiritual Beings of the Higher Hierarchies; the ego has no inner strength; it becomes conscious again of its inner self only when the Gods withdraw and only their manifestation remains. The glory of the Gods, their radiation, enters a kind of inspired consciousness; but, as a recompense, the human being feels himself as a self-existent being. And that which now awakens first in him is, I might say, an eager desire, a kind of craving.

Midway between death and a new birth, the human being works at the spirit-germ of his physical body, so to speak, out of a deep inner satisfaction. Although he realizes that the ultimate goal will be his physical body in his next earthly life, he is not permeated with an eager desire, but only—we might say—with admiration for this physical human body, considered from a universal standpoint. At the moment when the human beings is living no more in divine worlds, but only in the manifestations of divine worlds, the eager desire arises in him to reincarnate upon the earth. Just while the ego consciousness is becoming continually stronger does this eager desire awaken. We withdraw, so to speak, from the divine worlds and come closer to what we shall become as earthly human beings. This eager desire becomes continually stronger, and what we see around us is also undergoing a change. Prior to this, we were living in nothing but Beings, in the divine-spiritual Hierarchies; we knew ourselves to be one with them. When we spoke of our inner self we were really speaking of the cosmos—but the cosmos itself consisted of Beings, Beings in sublime stages of consciousness with whom we were living. Now an outer glory is to be seen, and in this outer glory the first images gradually appear of that which, ultimately, are the physical reflections of the divine-spiritual Beings. This glory emanates from the Being which man knew there beyond as the Sublime Solar Being, and in this glory appears, so to speak, the sun as seen from without, or as seen from the world. Here on earth we look up to the sun. There, while descending to the earth, we at first see the sun from the other side. But the sun emerges, the fixed stars emerge, and behind the fixed stars the planetary movements emerge. And with the emergence of the planetary movements a quite definite kind of forces emerges: the spiritual forces of the moon; they now take control of us. It is these lunar forces which, little by little, carry us back into the earthly life.

Such is actually the aspect of things which the human being beholds on his descent from cosmic worlds to earthly existence: that, after an experience of divine-spiritual Hierarchies, he proceeds to images of them. But these images of Beings gradually become star-images, and the human being enters into something which, I might say, he first sees from behind: he enters that which is manifest from the earth as the cosmos. The details of what the human being there consummates can be discerned, and the modern science of initiation can penetrate quite deeply into what man there experiences.

Just through details in this domain do we begin to become acquainted with life. For no one knows life who is able to see the human being in connection with earthly existence alone. What great value does our connection with the earthly existence have for us then? During the enormously long stretches of time between death and a new birth the earth, at first, really means nothing to us, and that which gleams towards us, as the external, so to speak, is transmuted into entire worlds of Gods, in which we live during these long stretches of time and which appear externally to us again as stars only when we are nearing the earth for another earthly existence.

What the human being at first wove, as the spirit-germ of his physical body, he knows, for the time being, to be one with the whole universe, with the spiritual universe. Later, when he sees only the manifestation of the divine-spiritual worlds, this germ gradually becomes his body, which is now also a facsimile of the cosmos. And out of this—his body—arises the eager desire for an earthly existence, for an ego consciousness in his body.

This body now still contains much which is untouched by the earthly existence, for it is a spirit body. As regards this body, the fact still remains entirely undetermined at a certain stage whether, for instance, the human being will be a male or a female personality in his next earthly existence. For, during this whole time between death and a new birth, up to a very late stage, before we are born upon the earth, there is no meaning in the question of man or woman. The conditions there differ entirely from those that are reflected on earth as man and woman. There are also conditions which occur in the spiritual existence and are reflected on the earth; but that which appears on earth as man and woman acquires significance only relatively late, prior to our descent to earth. When the human being, according to certain former karmic connections, thinks it best to experience his next incarnation on earth as a woman, we can trace in detail how, on his descent to the earth in order to unite with the physical embryo, he chooses that time which is known here on earth as the time of full moon.

We can say, therefore, when we are looking from any region here on earth at the full moon, that we then have the time which the beings choose for their descent to the earth who desire to become women, for then only is this decision made. And the time of new moon is the time which beings choose who wish to become men.

Thus, you see, the human being enters his earthly existence through the portal of the moon. But the force which the male requires in order to enter life on earth is then flowing out into the cosmos; we move toward it as we come in from the cosmos, and this force is radiated by the moon when it is known as new moon for the earth. The force which the female requires is radiated from the moon when it is the full moon; then its illuminated side is turned toward the earth, and its unilluminated side is toward the cosmos—and this force, which the moon can send out into the cosmos from its unilluminated side, the human being requires if he wishes to become a woman.

What I have now been describing to you shows that the ancient concept of astrology, which nowadays has been brought to a complete decadence by the ordinary astrologers, was well grounded. Only, we must be able to achieve an inner view of the connection of things. We must not look merely at the physical constellation in a calculating manner, but must see into the corresponding spiritual element. There it is really possible to enter into details.

As you know, the human being descends from the cosmos in a definite state. From the spiritual cosmos he enters the etheric cosmos. Now I am still speaking of the etheric cosmos alone; the physical aspect of the stars is, in this connections, taken less into consideration, as is, likewise, the physical aspect of the moon. The essential moment when the human being decides to descend to the earth depends, as I have stated, upon the phase of the moon during this descent, and thus it may happen that he exposes himself to a decisive new moon in order to become a man, or to a decisive full moon to become a woman. But then—since the descent is not made so very rapidly, but he remains exposed for some time—if he is descending through the new moon as a man, he may still, for one reason or another, decide to expose himself to the coming full moon. Thus he has made the decision to descend as a male; he has made use to this end of the forces of the new moon; but, during his descent, he still has at his disposal the remainder of the moon's cycle, the phase of the full moon. He then fills himself with lunar forces in such a way that they do not affect his condition as man or woman, but rather the organization of his head, and what is connected with the organization of his head from without, from the cosmos, if that constellation occurs of which I have just spoken. Thus, after the human being has made the decision; “I shall become a man through the time of the new moon”, and continues living in the cosmos, so that he has not passed completely through the lunar influence but is still exposed to the next full moon, then, through the influence of the lunar forces in this condition he will, for instance, have brown eyes and black hair. Thus we may say that the manner in which the human being passes the moon determines not only his sex, but also the color of his eyes and hair. If, for instance, the human being has passed the full moon as a woman and is later exposed to a new moon, the result may be a woman with blue eyes and blond hair.

Grotesque as this may seem, we are absolutely predestined by the manner of our experience through the cosmos, as to the way in which our soul-spirit organism works its way into our physical and our etheric organism. Prior to this time there has been no decision made as to our becoming a blond or a brunette; this is determined only by the lunar forces as we pass them, on our descent from the cosmos into earthly existence.

And just as we pass by the moon, which really guides us into earthly existence, so do we pass by the other planets. It is not immaterial, for example, whether we pass Saturn in one or another way. We may pass by Saturn, for instance, when the constellation is such that the force of Saturn and the force of Leo in the Zodiac co-operate. Because of our passing the region of Saturn just as its force is being increased through Leo in the Zodiac, our soul will—conditioned, of course, by our preceding karma—acquire the strength to meet intelligently the outer contingencies of life so that they do not defeat us over and over again. If, however, Saturn is being dominated more by Capricorn, we shall become weak human beings that do succumb to the outer contingencies of life.

All these experiences we bear within us as we prepare from the cosmos our earthly existence. Of course, we can overcome this through an appropriate training, but not by voicing the opinion of the materialists that all this is nonsense, that we need not pay any attention to it at all. On the contrary, it can be overcome by the fact that we develop these forces, really develop them. And in the future mankind will learn again, not only to insure that a child shall have good milk to drink and good food to eat—although no objection is to be made to this—but mankind will learn again to observe whether this or that person has within him forces of Saturn or Jupiter active under this or that influence.

Let us suppose that we find that a human being has within him, through his karma, forces of Saturn under the most unfavorable influence—of Capricorn or of Aquarius, for instance—so that he is exposed to all life's difficulties. Then, in order to strengthen him we shall search most carefully for other forces within him. For instance, we shall ask ourselves whether he has experienced the passage through the sphere of Jupiter, of Mars, or through any other sphere. And we shall always be able to correct and annul one condition by means of the other.

We shall simply have to learn to think of the human being not only in relation to what he begins to eat and drink in the earthly existence, but we shall have to consider him in relation to what he becomes, because of his having passed through the cosmic worlds between death and a new birth.

When the human being is close to his earthly course of life, then he experiences a sort of loss of his being. You know from my description that he was connected with what he has woven as the spirit-germ of his physical body. Into this spirit-germ he has woven, besides, the experiences during the descent through fixed stars and planets. At a definite stage, actually quite close to conception and birth, this spirit-germ is no longer there. It has, in the meanwhile, descended with its forces as a system of forces to the earth. It has fallen from the human being. It has united itself on the earth independently with the physical substance of heredity which the ancestors, father and mother, afford. What is being woven there in the organism descends to the earth sooner than the human being himself as a spirit-soul being. And then, when the human being realizes that he has actually surrendered to the parents that which he himself had woven in the cosmos, he is able, in the last stage prior to his earthly existence, to take to himself from the etheric world what is essential for his own etheric organism—since there is no longer a necessity to do any more weaving on his physical body, which is essentially complete and has been surrendered to and been made a part of the flow of heredity. Now he draws together his etheric organism; and, together with this latter, he unites with that which he himself has prepared through his parents. He takes possession of his physical body, in which all this cosmic fabric of the spirit-germ is drawn together, and which is interwoven with what the human being himself united with it as he descended through this or that stellar region. It is, indeed, not arbitrarily that he passes through new moon or full moon and causes himself to become man or woman, or to have black or blond hair or blue or brown eyes, but all this is intimately connected with the results of his preceding karma.

This shows you that, whereas the human being in the sleep state experiences as his inner nature merely facsimiles of the planetary world, the world of the fixed stars, he now passes through these worlds in their reality between death and a new birth. He passes through these worlds; they become his inner nature. And it is always the lunar forces which bring us back to the earth. They differ essentially from all other stellar forces in this respect, in that they bring us back to the earth. In the sleep state they bring us back to the earth; they bring us back also after we have experienced all that I have briefly described, in order to enter once more a life course on the earth.

But let us consider once again that which is there outside of the physical body, in the form of astral body and ego organization, between falling asleep and awakening. It is not fabricated from physical bones and physical blood; it is a spirit-soul entity. But our whole moral intrinsic quality is woven into it. Just as we consist, when awake, of bones, blood, and nerves, so does that which leaves us during sleep and returns on awakening consist of the actualized judgments of our moral deeds. If I have accomplished a good deed during the day, its effect is reflected in my sleep body within the spirit-soul substance that leaves me during sleep. My moral quality lives within this. And, when the human being passes through the Portal of Death, he takes with him his whole actualized moral evaluation. It is a fact that, between birth and death in the earthly life, the human being creates within himself a second being. This second human being, who leaves the body every night, is the result of our moral or immoral life, and we take it with us through the Portal of Death. This result, which is merged with our eternal essential being, is not the only element we possess within the spirit-soul substance which passes out of us during the night. Just after death, however, when we are first in the ether body and then in the astral body, we hardly see anything in ourselves but this moral entity of our being. Whether we were good or bad, this is what we behold; we are this. Just as here on earth we are a, human being in whom the skin forces, or the nerve forces, or the blood forces, or the bone forces predominate, so, after death, we are, to our own perception, what we were, morally or immorally.

And now after death we proceed on our way, first through the sphere of the moon, then through the sphere of the fixed stars... until the time arrives when we can begin to work with the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies on the spirit-germ of our future physical body. But, if we were to take this moral element up into the highest worlds, where we are to weave our future physical organism in its spirit-germ, this physical organism would turn out to be a monstrosity. For a certain length of time between death and a new birth, the human being must be separated from what constitutes his moral quality. Indeed, he leaves his moral quality behind in the moon sphere.

It is an actual fact that, when leaving the moon sphere, we leave our moral and immoral human being in the moon sphere and enter into the pure sphere of the Gods, where we can weave our physical body.

I must now revert again to the difference between the times prior to the Mystery of Golgotha and those following it, including the present. The older initiates made very clear to their pupils—and through them to all mankind of the civilization of that time—that, in order to be able to find the transition from the world which I called in my book Theosophy the soul-world, and which we really experience in its entirety while still in the moon sphere, into the world which I called the spirit-land, the human being must develop on earth the feelings that enable him to be led upward by the spiritual Sun Being, after having left behind the whole bundle of his moral after-effects in the moon sphere.

All that history relates to us in regard to the first three Christian centuries, and even the fourth century, is fundamentally a falsification; for in those centuries Christianity was quite different from the thing described. It was something quite different for the reason that within it there held sway the conception which came from understanding the ancient science of initiation. From this wisdom of initiation it was known that, in the life after death, the sublime Sun Being led the human being out of the moon sphere, after he had left behind his moral bundle, and, on his return, led him back again into the moon sphere. This gave the human being the strength—which he could not have had through himself—to make this moral being a part of himself, at a certain time before his birth, in order to fulfill his destiny on earth within his soul, and to prevent it from entering his body. For otherwise, the human being would be born a monstrosity and be utterly diseased in his body. This moral bundle had to be taken over again in the moon sphere, during the descent, in order that it should not enter into the body.

Those initiates who were living at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, and even in the three or four centuries following thereafter, said to their pupils: Previously the sublime Sun Being was only above in the spiritual worlds. But, as mankind progressed, the ego consciousness has become so bright upon the earth that it becomes all the more obscured in the spiritual world. In other words, the brighter our ego consciousness is by means of the physical body only, here below on the earth, the darker is it above. The human being would no longer come into contact with the Sun Being, he would not find through his own power the transition after death from the moon sphere to the higher spheres, had the Christ not descended and passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. The Being whom the human being met formerly after death only in the spiritual world has now descended; He has lived here upon earth ever since the Mystery of Golgotha; and now the human being can establish a relation to Him according to the words of St. Paul: “Not I, but the Christ in me”. In this way the human being takes strength from the earth with him, strength given to him by the Christ here on this earth, which enables him to leave behind in the moon sphere his moral being which he creates within himself and to proceed to higher spheres, there to work on the spirit-germ of his physical body. It also gives him the strength on his descent through the moon sphere to take up his karma again of his own free will, take up the after-effects of his good and evil deeds. In the course of historical evolution, we have become free human beings. But the reason we have become such is that the Christ force we have acquired has enabled us through free inner strength to take over our karma on our descent through the moon sphere. No matter whether we like this or do not like it here on earth, we do this at the stage I have described, if we have become true Christians on earth.

I have been endeavoring, my dear friends, to show you a little of the way in which the modern science of initiation can see into worlds which we might call the concealed aspects of human existence, to show you how really everything pertaining to the human being can be elucidated only as we are able to see into these concealed aspects. And at the same time I tried to show you in connection therewith what the Christ Impulse means to mankind of the present time; for we will have constantly to revert to it. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, we cannot be a whole human being, unless we find the way to this Christ Impulse. Therefore it is necessary that Anthroposophical spiritual science shed light more and more upon the Christ Impulse in the right way. For the manner in which light was shed on the Christ Impulse in the past, when man's consciousness was obscured, would, if continued, deprive a large part of mankind—just think of the Orientals, think of the inhabitants of other continents—of the possibility of embracing Christianity. But that Christianity which is rooted deeply in Anthroposophical spiritual science will actually—if once the essence of spiritual science, as it is here intended, is understood thoroughly—be eagerly grasped particularly by the Orientals, who are endowed with an ancient spirituality, even though it is in decadence.

In this way only can that peace prevail on earth which must proceed from the soul and spirit of men, and which is so indispensable to the earth, as every impartial person feels today. We shall have to be much more convinced of the fact that all present-day thinking concerning outer institutions is really worthless, and that it is very necessary on the other hand, to appeal directly to human souls. But we can appeal to the souls only if we are able to say something to them about the true home of the soul, about the experiences of the human being that lie beyond his physical existence, in those states of consciousness I have been describing to you today. Even if those states of consciousness do not exist during the earth life, their effects do exist. Oh, my dear friends, the one who has insight into life sees in the countenance of every human being a reflection of cosmic destinies which the individual has experienced between death and a new birth!

I have described to you today how destiny—whether one has become a man or a woman—can be understood by means of the cosmos, even how the color of the eyes and hair can be understood only when we can look into cosmic existence. Nothing in this world is comprehensible unless it can be understood by means of the cosmos. The human being will feel himself to be truly a human being only when we can inform him through true spiritual knowledge of his relation with that which is back of the sensuous-physical existence. Even though the human beings on earth are not yet aware of it, mankind unconsciously thirsts for such a knowledge. What is developing convulsively today in all domains, be it the domain of the spiritual, the externally juridical, or the economic life, all is ultimately a result of the spiritual. Only as the human being learns again to know of his relation with extra-physical existence, can all this be transformed from forces of decadence into upward moving forces. For physical existence is meaningless unless seen in connection with super-physical existence. The physical human body becomes significant only then when we can see it, so to speak, as the confluence of all those sovereign forces that are woven between death and a new birth. This is the tragic character of materialistic knowledge of the world that, in the final analysis, it does not know matter itself. We lay the human body upon the dissecting table; we examine it most carefully as to its tissues and its individual physical component parts. This is done in order to acquire a knowledge of matter. But we do not learn to know it in this way, for it is the product of spirit, and only as we are able to trace it back to those stages where it is woven out of spirit do we know it. Human beings will comprehend precisely this physical-material existence only when their souls are led cosmically into the realm of soul and spirit.

If we permeate ourselves with the consciousness that we should comprehend more and more our connection with the spirit-soul realm of the cosmos, we then become true Anthroposophists. And you, my dear friends, will surely not ridicule me when I say that the world is in need today of true Anthroposophists who will bring about an ascent for humanity through that consciousness which results from experiencing the spiritual, even though at first we should only grasp it as a reflection and not ourselves have attained to clairvoyant knowledge. We need not be clairvoyant in order to work beneficently after we possess spiritual knowledge. Just as little as a person needs to know what constitutes meat when he is eating it and it nourishes him, just as little does a person need to be clairvoyant in order to be efficacious through his work and through his whole association with the life of the higher worlds. If we accept spiritual science before we are clairvoyant, it is as though we were consuming it. Fundamentally, clairvoyance adds nothing to what we can become for the world through spiritual knowledge. It satisfies merely our knowledge. This knowledge must, indeed, exist. Of course, there have to be people who examine the composition of meat, but this knowledge is not required in order to eat. Likewise there must be clairvoyant persons today who can investigate the nature of man's connection with the spiritual world; but, in order to bring about that which is essential to mankind, it is necessary that we be healthy human souls. If they are informed of the science of the spirit, they will sense the digestive power of the soul nature; they will appropriate this spiritual science, digest it, and assimilate it into their work. And this is what we need today throughout the civilized world: external human work which is spiritualized through and through in the right and true sense.

Appendix

In connection with this lecture that Rudolf Steiner gave on November 5, 1922, in The Hague, he addressed the members of the Anthroposophical Society in the following words:

“And now, my dear friends, after these explanations permit me to add some remarks to today's lecture which are, to a certain degree, connected with the lecture itself. Pardon me for speaking of my own anxieties. These anxieties of my own, to be brief, have to do with the possibility of being able to go on with the building of the Goetheanum, in Dornach.

My dear friends, the fact is that since the building of the Goetheanum has been begun, and it is in large part completed, it must be continued to completion. What if this could not be done? This is bound up with the very fact that this Goetheanum is a symbol today for that spiritual movement which is to be born into the world through Anthroposophy. If there had never been a circle of friends through whom the beginning of the building of the Goetheanum could be brought to realization, then Anthroposophy would have had to find some other avenue of expression. Today the building of the Goetheanum cannot simply be discontinued without damage. And it is this, my dear friends, that weighs heavily on my soul; for, if the results of what I have said in this regard remain the same as they have thus far, it will not be months, but only weeks for the moment to arrive when we shall come to a complete stoppage in Dornach.

Naturally, I cannot make such a statement without remembering with heartfelt gratitude that in this very country individual friends have made sacrifices in a most devoted manner for what has been accomplished thus far in building the Goetheanum. My thanks for this are profound and heartfelt, and I know that many of our friends have done their utmost in this matter. This I must, naturally, presuppose. But, on the other hand, I cannot do otherwise than to emphasize the fact—without wishing to criticize anything—that the worry weighs heavily on my soul over the fact that we shall not be able to continue with the building of the Goetheanum unless we receive abundant help on the part of a greater number of our friends, and that this Anthroposophical Movement, which has been active these last years at all possible points of the periphery, will tie without a center.

Therefore, my dear friends, I cannot but tell you what is at stake. Anthroposophy as such has spread very much in the world; and I assure you that, even here in Holland, the dear friends present today are only a very small part of the people who are in touch with Anthroposophy. We can judge this by the sale of our literature and we can see how, in many ways, Anthroposophy has become important to many persons.

On the other hand, something different can be observed—we can voice this without malice, even though we may create an impression of malice—we know that, on the other hand, the enemies of truth have made their appearance. And these, my dear friends, are well organized. Among them exist strong international ties. The enemies of Anthroposophical work are as well organized as our Anthroposophical Movement—pardon me for saying this—is badly organized! This is something we have yet to realize.

How is it that we have to say today that, in a few weeks, the Goetheanum may be without any means for its progress toward completion? You may have everything possible on the periphery—Waldorf Schools, etc.—all this is naturally void of power if there is no center. But for this center the right heart is lacking among the membership!

Let it be understood that I am not saying that this or that person is not giving all he has or, perhaps, does not have; it is not in the least my intention to go into such details. But, if our souls possessed the same enthusiasm for Anthroposophy which our opponents of all shades have today for anti-Anthroposophy, we should be very differently established. Then it would not be so difficult to collect the pennies, trivial in comparison with the wealth of the world—in spite of the impoverished world of today—to finish the Goetheanum. But the right heart for this is really lacking, my dear friends; yet we cannot do otherwise than to save this symbol in Dornach from failure. It can be saved from ruin if we can combine a strong enthusiasm with all our longing for Anthroposophical knowledge.

In these remarks I am not referring to any individuals. But, on the whole, the prevalent spirit within our circles is to start things with great apparent enthusiasm. The building of the Goetheanum was begun with enthusiasm. This enthusiasm has vanished, particularly in those who in the beginning displayed great enthusiasm. And these very persons have left this problem of going on to me alone. It has in many instances become characteristic, my dear friends, that people cannot remain enthusiastic; that something flares up—and those who shared in this sudden blaze leave the fire and do not keep feeding it. The warmth of heart dies out. And then come those worries. And, in view of the seriousness of the matter, my dear friends—why should I not call attention in this intimate circle to such a thing? The seriousness of the cause demands it. On the other hand there really exists the necessity to extend spiritual science as such. Be assured, a heavy responsibility rests on the one who is able to state at all that it depends on the conditions of the cosmos, in one way or another, whether a human being becomes a man or a woman, whether he has blue eyes and blond hair or brown eyes and black hair. I mention this only as an example. A statement like this cannot he made carelessly. It requires years of research before one arrives at the point of making such a statement, for one who does this without being conscious of his responsibility will usher disaster into the world. But it is necessary today, on the one hand, to extend this spiritual science; on the other hand, my dear friends, new cares spring up because of the developments in the periphery, when the enthusiasm does not persist, through the very fact that these things are there. New establishments are founded, and they have to be cared for. The worries have to be borne. These two things do not coincide unless the Society, as bearer of the Anthroposophical Movement, is a reality built on firm inner ground. Societies, that are realities built on firm ground, can surely accomplish great things! But it is imperative to observe that along with the need to deepen spiritual science more and more, there moved along, at the same time, an increasingly badly organized Society, a will displaying less and less enthusiasm for making the Society itself an instrument.

And the first thing for which I repeatedly beg our friends, since we are confronted by urgent necessity, is that they shall make the Society into a living, active being in the world.

This is highly essential, my dear friends. It is greatly to be desired that the center in Dornach shall not crumble, but that friends shall be found who will give us help.

There is, for instance, the wonderful possibility of gradually achieving significant results in the field of medicine, of therapeutics through the discoveries of remedies, based on spiritual science. But all this depends on the existence of the center in Dornach. The moment the Dornach center breaks down everything breaks down, and it is this that I want our friends to be conscious of, for it has in many instances disappeared from their consciousness. And I must say, it has really become an extremely heavy burden for me, a crushing burden.

I am saying this for the reason, my dear friends, that you may find the opportunity to think with me about these things in your good heart; for these things have to be thought out.”

Our study today will be devoted to how a soul can raise itself into spiritual worlds. One who does his exercises regularly with patience and enthusiasm must also make progress; it's just a matter of him becoming aware of his progress.

After the meditation it's good to begin a rest period, to make the soul quite empty, to just wait and see what Imaginations come to us from higher worlds. Much also depends on the mood or attitude of our soul; we should always approach our exercises with the greatest devotion. The experiences that set in depend upon the meditator's individuality and karma. I'd like to pick out two of them from a large number. One is of being lifted out into space, into endlessness. One feels as if one were expanded and lifted up; of course a leaving of one's body is connected with this. This experience gives rise to a feeling of bliss and happiness. While one is raised one sees a reddening; yellowish red clouds come towards us from which Shapes gradually crystallize. Then there's a second experience of diving down, of sinking into the depths, accompanied by a feeling of constriction and choking. The spiritual beings one feels in this immersion appear to one in blue-violet gleams. They give a man a feeling of reverent, shuddering fear and induce him to take a look at himself. They show a man what he's really like, all of his defects and mistakes and moral weaknesses in their whole magnitude and abominable nature. It's true that we're already pointed in this direction by the retrospect that we do every evening, but a man can't see things as clearly with his physical consciousness. These beings who emerge from the depths get us to see plainly what habitual mistakes and wrong thinking produce in us. The beings who appear to us in a bluish violet light and show us our errors belong to the angels, whereas the upper, reddish yellow light figures that pronounce their judgment like punishing justice belong to the archangels. These experiences can also approach a man in a different way, namely through sounds. When his judgment is pronounced by an archangel with a thunderous voice it's much more scary, much harder to bear. But when a man has come to this hour that sets in after he's experienced the Guardian of the Threshold then he must have gotten rid of the habit of being afraid.

Just to be understood, let's mention an example, though the Imagination could just as easily take on another form. A man can see the figures that ascend from the depths in blue-violet colour tones with sorrowful, pain-filled faces. These high beings feel sad about us and our mistakes; this arouses a feeling of boundless shame in us. If a man sees his errors and regrets his mistakes he will see that these beings' faces radiate joyfully. A man must feel this connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm. The beings who sink down on man as punishing justice and sometimes surround him evoke fear in him. But a feeling of joy can be added to this if these beings show him the possibilities that are in him and that he can develop. We can arrive at these experiences if we meditate it thinks me in the right way. But when a man sees how these figures out of balled-together reddish clouds try to join the bluish violet figures that are striving up from the depths, something like a conflict arises in him. He distinctly hears a voice that says: Don't believe that, believe what comes out of your own soul. That has the same value as what you see out in the cosmos.

That's Lucifer's voice, and this is the greatest temptation that a man can have, since Lucifer outshines all other beings in beauty, cunning and seduction. Like the blue-violet beings he climbs out of the depths. We should also realize that form is no longer of importance in these regions. The Spirits of Form who are called Elohim in the Bible are of importance on the earth. In spiritual worlds we find that we lift ourselves above them and can approach the Spirits of Movement.

One thing we should never forget: a feeling of deepest thankfulness towards higher beings and spiritual worlds. Just as an Essene saw the day-star approaching every morning full of thankfulness and prayed that it might appear, so we should return to the temple of our physical body every morning with reverent thanks to the spiritual beings who built it up so cleverly during the Saturn, Sun, Moon and earth periods, and in which alone we can acquire earth consciousness: Ex Deo nascimur. And then with this feeling of reverence and thankfulness that we've gained we become familiar with the spiritual, Godly element, with what frees us from the fetters of corporeality, brings us into the spiritual, super-sensible world and gets us into a blissfulness that's so great and tremendous that an esoteric doesn't dare to say the name of the very highest being: In ... morimur. And what's expressed in the last part of our rosicrucian verse: Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus is the self-consciousness that brings a man over into a new incarnation. But a living in the vowels and consonants of this wonderful verse will bring us much further than meditation on the three parts that consist of 2x3 and 1x4 words.

My dear guests!

I must ask you to excuse me for speaking in German and not in Dutch; however, I will have to show you a number of photographs to illustrate today's lecture, and they will not be in German, but international.

The anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement from Dornach has been working on this for the last twenty years or so. In the early years, however, the Anthroposophical Society was a member of the general Theosophical Society, but I never put forward anything other than what I currently represent. And when, after this anthroposophy had been tolerated for a while within the Theosophical Society, it was then found to be too heretical and was to a certain extent expelled, the Anthroposophical Society was founded as an independent society.

The anthroposophical movement definitely wants to reckon with the scientific attitude of the contemporary civilized world, it does not want to be anything sectarian or the like, but it wants to have a serious stimulating effect on the various sciences of our time, on the religious consciousness and also on the artistic and social life of the present.

By around 1909, the anthroposophical movement had grown to such an extent within Central Europe that it was impossible for it to work without its own building, and so a number of long-standing members came up with the idea of erecting their own building for anthroposophy. And when I was approached with the intention of erecting such a building, a very specific impulse immediately arose from the nature of anthroposophical work. Otherwise, if one had been forced by some spiritual movement to construct a building of one's own, one would have gone to some master builder and had him construct a Renaissance building or a Gothic building or a Greek building or something similar.

It would have been impossible for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to proceed in such an outward manner. For this is not something that merely seeks to spread a theoretical culture, but anthroposophically oriented spiritual science emerges from the source of the full human being. I have taken the liberty of explaining how it emerges from this source of full humanity in the two previous lectures here in this hall. But because this is so, because anthroposophy is not merely a one-sided theoretical science, but because it is something for the whole of human life in all its forms of activity, this anthroposophical movement also had to create its own architectural style out of its sources at the moment when it was faced with the necessity of erecting its own building. And we have succeeded in creating such a building. It is not yet finished, but it is already finished to such an extent that courses were held in it last fall and will be held again at Easter. We have succeeded in erecting such a building on the Dornach Hill near Basel in Switzerland.

I said that the style of this Goetheanum, the attempt at a new style of building, was also formed from the same sources from which spiritual science was born, naturally with all the dangers, with all the shortcomings with which such a first attempt at a new style must be associated. Anthroposophy really emerges from the sources of being, not from thoughts or mere experimental and intellectually extended investigations, from the sources of existence itself. Therefore, in all its work, it must connect itself with the creative forces that are active in nature itself, for example, because the ultimate creative forces in nature are, as I have explained in the previous lectures, themselves of a spiritual nature.

I may perhaps use a comparison. Take a nut. It has a nut kernel; this nut kernel is formed in a lawful way. But there is also the nutshell; it could not be otherwise as it is, since the nut is as it is. The same force that shapes the nut kernel also shapes the nutshell in a unique way. Just as the nut kernel is shaped by natural law, so is the nutshell.

In Dornach, anthroposophical spiritual science is taught from the podium. The results of anthroposophical spiritual science are explored. Artistic representations are offered which are an outward expression - artistic, not symbolic or straw allegorical, but artistic - of that of which spiritual science itself is the expression. Therefore, around all this, around the kernel, so to speak, the shell must also be formed, which is [formed] precisely out of the same laws.

Therefore, an architecture has been cultivated in Dornach that is [designed] from the same sense, from the same spirit as anthroposophical spiritual science itself. Sculpture is done there out of exactly the same spirit, painting out of the same spirit. When someone stands on the podium and speaks in ideas, it is just another form of expression of what the pillars speak, what the paintings on the walls speak, what the sculptures speak. Everything is, if I may put it this way, cast from a single mold.

People are so afraid that nothing artistic would be created in this way, but only something symbolic or allegorical. Well, ladies and gentlemen, in Dornach there is not a single symbol, not a single allegory, but everything is attempted to be given in artistic form. The aim is not to somehow embody the ideas that are presented through images, that would be inartistic. Rather, the one spiritual life that underlies it can be shaped artistically at one time, and at another time it can be shaped ideally, in thought, scientifically. Art in Dornach is not a didactic expression of a science, for example, but it is one representation, and science is the other representation of the same great spiritual unknown from which anthroposophical spiritual science draws everything it wants to give humanity.

The entire external design of the Dornach building had to be accordingly. Anyone who looks at this Dornach building will see a double-domed structure, with two circular cylinders standing side by side, but interlocking, and two hemispherical domes above them, which are joined together in the circular segment by a somewhat difficult mechanical construction. Since in Dornach what can be researched through spiritual science is to be brought to the world, this must be reflected in the building itself. The small domed building is a kind of stage in which mystery plays and the like are performed. Eurythmy is also performed, but many other things are planned. The podium for the speaker is located between the small and large domed rooms. The large dome room is the auditorium or audience room for almost a thousand people. This double-domed building expresses the fact that anthroposophical spiritual science has something to say to the world of the present and the future in spiritual, general human and social terms, which I took the liberty of discussing in the two previous lectures.

If you approach the building from the west [and] come towards the main portal, which is oriented to the west, you will first see the following view (Fig. 5). The bottom of the building is made of concrete; at the top is a terrace that leads around the building in a stylized curve. This wooden structure stands on this concrete foundation. The domes are covered with that wonderful Nordic slate that is found in the slate quarries that can be seen on the journey from Kristiania to Bergen, from the Vossian slate quarries. This slate fits in wonderfully with the main idea of Dornach. Concrete and wood are both processed in such a way that an architectural style emerges which can be characterized as the transformation of the existing geometric, symmetrical, mechanical, static, dynamic architectural styles into an organic architectural style. Not as if any organic form had been imitated in the architectural forms of Dornach, that is not the case, but rather I tried, in the sense of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, to become completely integrated into the natural creation of organic forms and to obtain organic forms which, by metamorphosing them, could then form a whole in the Dornach building; organic forms which are such that each individual form must be in the place where it is.

Imagine the nature of organic forms. Think of something seemingly quite insignificant in the organic form of the human organism: an earlobe. You will have to say to yourself: This earlobe, in the place where it is, could not be otherwise, as it is, if the whole organism is as it has just revealed itself. The smallest and the largest thing in an organic context has its very specific form at its place in the organism. This has been carried over into the building concept of Dornach.

I know very well how much can be objected to this organic principle of building from the point of view of the old architectural styles. But this organic building style was once coined in the Dornach building concept. It may be rejected from the old point of view, but after all, everything new was rejected from the old point of view. In any case, however, if one can make friends with the transformation of static-dynamic, geometric building forms into organic ones, then one will find that all transitions from one organic form to another - not organic [natural] forms, for nothing is naturalistically imitated - [can be experienced] with the same inner regularity as, say, the plant leaf that is at the bottom of the stem, metamorphoses when it appears further up the stem, always [is] the same form, but alternating with the greatest variety.

So in Dornach you will find certain organic forms carried into the building concept everywhere, as they are carved out of the wood here, as they appear here on the entrance pillars as capitals. Here on the side windows (Fig. 4, 12) you can see the same motif, on the windows of the side wing (Fig. 13) too, apparently no longer similar, but nevertheless the same metamorphosed, just as the motif of the green leaf reappears in the flower petal.

If you look at the building from the inside and the outside, you can get the impression: If any motif is near the gate, it is worked differently, so that you can see that the motif has less to bear against the gate, while it has to brace itself against the whole weight of the building. All of this, as it is taken into account in nature in the formation of the bones and muscle shapes, is definitely carried out in Dornach's building concept. Take a look at the bone form within the formation of the knee, it is designed in a wonderfully natural and ingenious way so that certain bones, which form the foundation bones, carry what lies on them. They are expanded and retracted in the right place. Feeling one's way into the forms of organic formation, of carrying, of weight, that was necessary in order to build Dornach.

Here (Fig. 5) you enter. Here is a room to put down your clothes, here is a staircase inside, through which you walk up. You can walk around this terrace and at the same time have a distant view over the countryside, the Swiss Jura.

The same picture, slightly shifted and closer (Fig. 6).

Here (Fig. 7) you can see the building as it presents itself to you from the southwest. Here the gallery, below the concrete building.

The building as you see it when you approach it from the north (Fig. 1), so that you have the large dome in front of you, [here] the small dome. Here the two domes are joined together.

From a point in the north, the building (Fig. 2). Here you can see a strange structure. This is the one that is most criticized. It is the building that stands near the building. I started by looking at the lighting and heating machines as if they were the kernel of a nut, and constructing a shell over it out of concrete, which is extremely difficult to work with artistically. Those who still criticize this building today don't consider what would be standing there if no effort had been made to create something artistic out of the artistically brittle concrete material: there would be a red chimney. I would like to ask people whether that would be more beautiful than what is certainly a first attempt to stylize something out of concrete, which has some shortcomings, but is nevertheless a first attempt to create something artistic in these things.

Here (Fig. 3) the building seen from the northeast. Here is a house that was already standing when we were given the building plot. A house that we very much hope we will be able to buy one day. You can imagine for what purpose we would like to acquire it; of course it disturbs the whole aspect of the building.

Here is the interlocking of the domes (Fig. 17). Here the main wing, here the main entrance (Fig. 10).

Here is the studio where the stained glass windows were made (Fig. 103). It was listed as a studio for grinding the stained glass windows.

Behind it is the boiler house again (Figs. 106, 107). In a neighboring village, Arlesheim, there is a particularly tastelessly built church. I have nothing to say against it, but it is honestly tasteless. Nevertheless, the Swiss Association for the Beautification of Swiss Buildings has managed to say that this [our] building disfigures this part of Switzerland: just take a look at the beautiful church in Arlesheim.

The ground plan (Fig. 20). Main entrance, organ room, auditorium. Here is the lectern. The stage area. Here are the two side wings with the individual rooms for the performing actors and other artists. Here you can see seven columns on both sides. Here in the curve six columns. These seven pillars are not formed out of some mystical urge in the number seven, but purely out of artistic feeling. Just as the violin has four strings, so the artistic feeling here has resulted from inner reasons that a certain artistic development and in turn an artistic conclusion can be achieved by developing just seven motifs. With these pillars, the risk was taken not to design the capital and architrave motifs as repetitions, but in a lively development. When you enter from the west portal, you come across the first two columns. However, they are symmetrical. But if you move on from the first to the second column, the capital of the second column, the base, the architrave above the second column is designed in a way that must be organic. It is designed in such a way that one had to live into the creation and creation of the forces of nature if one wanted to artistically shape the second pillar motif out of the first, the third again out of the second and so on, until a certain conclusion was reached in the seventh pillar motif.

Many visitors come to Dornach and ask: What does the individual chapter mean? You can't ask that at all about art. The essential thing is that one pillar emerges artistically and formally from the other pillar. Whereas in the static architectural style we are actually only dealing with symmetry, with repetitions of the same motif, here we are dealing with a living evolution from the first to the seventh column. I will show the columns later, then you can see this.

Section through the building (Fig. 21).

Original model, cut vertically in the middle (Fig. 22). I originally had to work out the whole building as a model, so that even the building plan, ground plan and elevation, as they were based on, were formed according to this model. This whole model is precisely the embodiment of the Dornach building concept, is conceived in the same way as spiritual science itself is conceived, is to a certain extent another expression for that for which the one expression is spiritual science itself.

Right next to the main entrance, the main portal in the west (Fig. 15). The pictures were taken at a time when construction was still in full swing.

A little further on from the main entrance (Fig. 12). Here the part containing the stairs to go up. Here is a house nearby. This house was built in a very special way. After all, we built the entire structure through the understanding of our anthroposophical friends. The fact that the Dornach hill was used to build this house is explained by the fact that a friend in Basel, near Basel, bought this building plot a long time ago to build a summer house for himself; he then gave us this plot as a gift. We were then able to build there. The friend also wanted to have his house here. And that's when I was given the task - various conditions made it necessary - to stylize a house, a family home with fifteen rooms, out of concrete material. It was a bit of a gamble. There are certainly still flaws in this house, which is formed out of the artistic nature of the brittle concrete material. But such things have to be done for the first time.

A side wing (Fig. 17). These two side wings are inserted like a crossbeam. Here the main motif is again metamorphosed. Everywhere the same and yet again something different, one could say, is contained in the building forms.

Front façade of a side wing (Fig. 14). Here again the motif that is at the main entrance, very widened, designed with rich material, here once more sparingly designed in the same metamorphosis. A certain law of symmetry is observed everywhere, but this is combined with asymmetry. This asymmetry gives the building an artistically pleasing effect and great variety.

Taken somewhat larger, the motif of the façade of one such side wing (Fig. 11).

We enter through the concrete entrance in the west, imagine (Fig. 23). Then we first come to the stairs leading up here. This would be the room where you put your clothes. Then you go to the front, here you enter the auditorium. Here I have dared to make the column shape organic.

[Then] for example this shape here (Fig. 24): There are three motifs standing perpendicular to each other. How did this form come about? Not through any kind of philosophizing, but purely out of feeling. You can say to yourself: anyone who has first entered through the main portal and then wants to come into the auditorium must be able to move in a certain way towards the thought and feeling of what he wants to hear in Dornach from an anthroposophically oriented spiritual view: Here you may enter for the security of your soul, to gain a firm foothold within yourself. Here you may enter in such a way that no illusions of life shall beguile you; that no kind of wavering shall come over you. This has been sensitively expressed here in this motif.

Then you see here a pillar supporting the staircase (Fig. 25). The staircase motif itself is designed in such a way that it is organically braced against the building, in this case against the exit. Here it is carried by a column that does not imitate organic motifs in a naturalistic way, but is just as organically shaped as the forms of living creatures in nature are shaped by the creative forces of nature. How this pillar stands up, how it supports something on one side, where the load to be carried is lighter, how it braces itself against this side, where the main load of the building lies, is expressed in the smallest things in the same way as the earlobe shape expresses the affiliation to the whole human organism. Every form in Dornach must be perceived as a necessity in its place.

Here (Fig. 26) is a motif that I have executed in the various metamorphoses. Here it is made of concrete, in the upper section of wood. It's a front piece for a radiator. As I said, in Dornach the individual forms emerge from each other in a metamorphic way, and there are no abstract forms that are merely appropriate to the underground art, but everything is realized in a strictly organic artistic way.

Here (Fig. 27) you can see the room that you enter when you climb the staircase that has just been built. This is a wooden building. Here is a pillar supporting the ceiling. Everything that immediately follows in the interior is handcrafted by a large number of our friends. It must be emphasized again and again that a large number of friends have gathered in Dornach over many years, all of whom have worked out these individual sculptural forms, which were given to them in the model, by hand. In a sense, the entire wooden structure is the handiwork of the anthroposophical friends. And that is something that could have been exemplary at the same time for the loving cooperation of a group of people.

If you now enter and look backwards in the auditorium, you can see the organ loft here. This is the model (Fig. 30). The idea is not to place the organ in a cavity, but to take the organ and shape the architecture accordingly. Additional motifs were then added during the elaboration.

Here is the interior (Fig. 29). When you enter the interior, you can see the organ porch where the singers stand. Here are the first three columns. I will explain the picture of the column formation in a moment. Above the columns are the architraves, which also show progressive motifs.

Here is the organ loft (Fig. 28).

Here is the space above the organ, sculpted out of wood (Fig. 33). Please take a look at the chapter. It is composed of simple forms. We will make the transition to the next and next capital and architrave forms. You don't have to think about how one capital emerges from another, but it is simply perceived like a leaf on the stem of a plant from which others now emerge metamorphically. Thus the next motifs here are always formed quite sensitively from the previous ones.

Here you have the simple capital motif of the first column (fig. 34).

The first column and the second column (Fig. 35). If you think of the simple motif from top to bottom, from bottom to top, you can imagine how it grows. The drops from above grow into this form, and from below the forms grow to meet them in more complicated shapes. It is the same with the architrave motifs.

Second column motif (fig. 36): already more complicated.

Second and third columns together (fig. 37): Again organically metamorphosed, the third column is obtained from the second column.

The third column on its own (Fig. 38).

Third and fourth pillars together (Fig. 39). What is still simple here has become more complicated. You make very special discoveries in the process. I simply let one motif emerge from the other according to artistic feeling. In doing so, I realized that it is only through this artistic approach that one can really understand the essence of evolution in nature. One usually imagines that the first forms in a developmental process are the simpler ones, which then become more and more complicated. This is not the case. If you work artistically, allowing one to emerge from the other, then you end up shaping the simpler into the more complicated, but when the complication has reached a certain level, things become more harmonious, but simpler again. This is how evolution works: from the simple to the complicated and then back to simplification. This discovery is surprising at first. You create something like this from the purely artistic and then find that it actually corresponds fully to the artistic creation of nature.

Consider the human eye: it is the most perfect, but not the most complicated. Certain organs of lower beings, the fan in the eye, the xiphoid process, are absorbed by the human eye. You come to that by yourself if you shape purely artistically.

Something very strange also happened to me. I said I had to form seven pillars, really not out of any mystical inclination. The seventh pillar turned out to be the end; you couldn't go any further, the motifs had been fulfilled. But later I discovered that if I took the convex shape of the seventh pillar and reshaped it a little artistically, it went straight into the concave, hollowed-out shape of the first pillar. I wasn't looking for that. It was the same with the sixth and second pillars, and also with the third and fifth pillars. I discovered that the capitals and the pedestal figures were something that emerged naturally from the work in the sense of an evolution. This is not something I was looking for. Even in nature itself, such surprising formal relationships arise. When you create artistically, you get these things that confront you from the individual forms, and you come to a deep respect for the mysterious working and weaving firstly in nature, but secondly in the world of forms itself, which you can penetrate imaginatively and artistically and by looking at it.

A column on its own has become relatively complicated (fig. 42). But you will see that by thinking of this motif in such a way that it grows from top to bottom, from bottom to top, something emerges that I did not aim for; but when people look at it, they will say: He has formed the staff of Mercury. I didn't want to form that, but it came out like that.

It spreads out, grows, thus creating this complicated motif (fig. 41), then the motifs become simpler.

Here you can see this motif (Fig. 43). Now I couldn't go any further in the complication. By thinking of it as growing and perceiving it as growing, I created this simpler motif.

The last two columns with their architraves above them (fig. 45). The column directly in front of the stage entrance (fig. 46).

In this way, you can see how the individual capitals came about, how the entire column motifs developed artistically in their evolution.

Here we are in front of a plinth (Fig. 48). I wanted to show these pedestals in turn, one after the other, how they develop apart in the same way as the capitals.

All pedestals (figs. 48-54). First becoming more complicated, then simpler again.

Here you can see from the auditorium into the stage area (Fig. 57). Here you can see the painted interior of the stage dome. Here the architrave above the columns of the auditorium. Here the auditorium closes off the stage area. Still in progress is the gap that connects the auditorium with the stage area (Fig. 56).

Another view from the auditorium, whose last columns you can see, into the stage area (Fig. 55). Here the painted stage dome. With regard to the painting of the two domes, however, I cannot give you such pictures, or rather I cannot give you pictures that speak as clearly as I can about the other. For with regard to the painting of the Dornach building, what I once described as the essence of modern painting has been very seriously striven for and followed, at least in the small dome room. Everything that is created in painting must be extracted from color.

The world of color is a world unto itself. The person who immerses himself in the world of color learns to recognize the creativity of each individual color; he learns to recognize the creativity that lies in the harmony of colors. Those who know how red affects human perception, how red speaks from within, those who know that blue has a formative, creative effect, come to shape the painterly world out of the colors

This is roughly what they tried to create when painting the small domed room in Dornach. The essential thing is always, if I may put it this way, the spot of color in a certain place. Although the figurative is born out of color, everything is originally conceived out of color. Light, dark and colors are actually the only things that are justified when you depict something painterly with the help of the surface; drawing is actually a mendacity. Take the horizon line: the blue sky above, the greenish sea below. If you paint it like this, then the horizon emerges by itself as the creature of the color encounter. And so it is with all lines in real painting. In painting, form is the work of color. This is what was attempted in Dornach.

There (Fig. 64) you first see what is under the dome, the architrave motif, directly above the group that is to be placed in the east of the building as the sculptural center of this building, so to speak. A motif from the small domed room (Fig. 66). I ask that these motifs be judged in the same way as those of the large domed room, except that six columns are intended on both sides; thus the whole shapes and designs are “ben other.

A capital motif of the small domed room (fig. 58-63).

The first thing in the painting of the small domed room when you enter it (Fig. 73). Of course, you will only get a real sense of what I can show you now when you feel this [photographic] reproduction in its defects, when you say to yourself: What is this actually? There should be color! Of course it is also color, everything is taken out of the color.

Here is a child flying towards a kind of fist figure (fig. 69). The child is red-yellow, the fist figure in blue.

Here fist (fig. 70), [here] the child (fig. 69). This fist figure roughly represents the civilization of the fifteenth, sixteenth century, in which we are actually all still immersed. However, that which takes shape from that civilization in external theoretical science is basically only a surface. The person who lives into the world view that has emerged through the newer natural sciences with his whole human being feels death strongly on the one side and budding, germinating life on the other. These two polar opposites confront us precisely from the present-day view of nature. Just take the following: The way we describe nature, we use terms that are basically taken from the dead, the mineral. Our natural scientists see an ideal in thinking of plant and animal life along the lines of the mineral, perhaps even being able to work experimentally in this direction. The idea of death is very strong (Fig. 71). On the other hand, if we delve into our self-consciousness, there is that life which is polar opposite to death, which we feel in particular when we allow the life of a child to affect us uninfluenced by knowledge. It is entirely in keeping with the feeling that a fist figure appears here, painted out of the blue.

[Here] the only word you will find in the entire structure: ICH (Fig. 72).

It is at this time, when this fist figure enters modern civilization, that we first really get to know the ego as the abstract content of self-consciousness. As you know, older languages still have the I in the verb. In this age, the ego is peeled out, set apart, when at the same time this culture appears, the political contrasts of which I have just described. This is the first motif that confronts us in the painting of the small dome.

Here Faust (fig. 70), here Death (fig. 71) as the contrast to the child. It is precisely the most modern cognitive and spiritual life that is to emerge in this motif, but out of the color, out of the yellow-reddish tone of the child, the blue tone of Faust, the brownish-blackish tone of this skeleton.

An angel-like figure above Faust (fig. 74). In a sense, everywhere below is a figure representing the more human, above it a spirit figure, the inspirer, the inspiring figure.

Here (fig. 75) is an image born out of the sensibility of Greek culture, i.e. more in the past. The fist figure was conceived out of modern culture, which we are still part of. Here is a kind of Pallas Athena figure, perceived from Greek culture, with the inspiring figure above it (Fig. 76).

Also such an inspiring, spirit-like figure (fig. 77).

Here (fig. 78) going further back an initiate of the Egyptian culture, above him the inspiring figure, so that everything worked out of the color is really intended here as figurative, which even represents the successive cultures and their evolution.

Here again two figures (fig. 79), and below them the figure that I will show you in larger size later. This is a kind of man of more recent times, a man of the present Central European culture. That which is ambivalent in this man of the present is expressed in his inspiration, which is above him. Here is a Luciferian figure. In this Luciferic figure there is to live all that which lives in that human nature, that through which man wants to go beyond himself, through which he falls into the rapturous, mystical, theosophical. The other, the Ahrimanic, through which he falls into the philistine, the intellectual-materialistic. These two opposites are in every human being today. Man seeks a balance between this duality. Everything in him that leads pathologically to fever, to pleurisy, is in this Luciferic form; everything that leads to sclerosis, to calcification, is in this Ahrimanic form.

Here (Fig. 81) you see one thing, in a sense the human being with those forces that age him, drive him towards sclerosis, drive him mentally towards intellectuality, towards materialism. Man would be like this, despite the fact that no one desires it so much, so Mephistopheleanahrimanic, if he had no heart, if he were merely a man of intellect. He is in all of us, but we also have a heart.

This (Fig. 80) is the one who represents us if we only had a heart and no mind. The Luciferic figure: rapturous, mystical, theosophical, everything that wants to go beyond the human being. Here is the human being who, with the help of these two again polar, contour-like opposing effects, really feels duality and can only bear it if the child is placed by his side. The man of the present in his ambivalent nature. Here (fig. 82) still somewhat larger, the same man who feels conflict within himself.

Here (figs. 83, 84) we come somewhat closer to the center. Here two figures, one painted more light, the other more dark. I have always taken the view that the Russian people's soul contains the man of the future. Today, only in the East is everything distorted. Today, through Lenin and Trotsky, the East is working towards the death of culture, towards the most terrible destruction. For all that which is at work in the East as forces of decline in the most terrible way can only lead to the destruction of all culture. But that is not what corresponds to the Russian national soul. And if nothing else would bring down Lenin and Trotsky, the Russian people's soul would one day bring them down. But the Russian people's soul is such that every Russian has his own shadow next to him. There is not only the ambivalent man as in Central Europe, who carries Lucifer and Ahriman within him, the enthusiastic and the materialistic, there is a man who has a second man beside him. This shadow must first be absorbed by the man of the future, but then he will also become the man of the future.

Here (Fig. 83) the inspiring angel, above it a centaur figure. When the man of the future will have attained his maturity, this figure will be that which may be put forward as the actual inspirer next to the angelic figure; today he is still centaur-like.

Here (Fig. 84) this centaur figure, the starry sky in between, so rightly sensing that evolution in the spirit which hovers between the angelic and the animal. Man stands, as it were, between the animal, which has assumed a human form in its passions and instincts, and the angelic, in which the ahrimanic is transformed into the spiritual and thereby receives its cosmic justification.

Here (fig. 85) from the other side, symmetrically situated, the angel, the centaur figure, carved out of the yellow.

Here you can see what is painted in the middle: a kind of representative of humanity (fig. 86). Anyone who sees this representative of humanity may feel as if it were an embodiment of the figure of Christ. This Christ figure in the middle is shaped as I had to place it according to my supersensible view of the Christ figure, which I believed, as this being really lived in Palestine at the beginning of our era. The traditional figure of Christ with the beard was only invented in the fifth or sixth century. Today we have to go back through spiritual scientific research to the time when Christ lived in Palestine in order to be able to discover his form through extrasensory vision. I make no claim to be believed authoritatively that this is the true figure of Christ, but I see it this way and I hold from the depths of my being that this is the figure of Christ. Below it, carved into a rock, is the figure of Ahriman. From the right arm of the

The figure of Christ emanates lightning bolts that snake around the ahrimanic figure. The Ahrimanic figure is everything that man would be if he had only reason, only intellect, only a materialistic attitude, not a heart. Above it is the figure of Lucifer, carved out of the red, all that which in man tends to rapture, to fantasy, to one-sided theosophy, to mysticism.

Here (Fig. 87) you see this figure of Lucifer, the face painted entirely out of the red, above the figure of Christ.

The Ahrimanic figure (fig. 88), the countenance - the wings are bat-like in the Ahrimanic figure - bound by the lightning bolts emanating from the hand of Christ. Of course, it all depends on how you perceive it from the color.

Here is the head of the Christ figure (fig. 90). This is what is painted into the dome at the very east end of the small dome room. Below this painting - Christ, Lucifer, Ahriman - is a nine and a half meter high wooden group (Fig. 93); again in the middle is the representative of humanity, who can be perceived as Christ. Twice above it is the Lucifer motif, twice below it the Ahriman motif. And then out of the rock an elemental being, which looks at the Christ in the midst of Lucifer and Ahriman like a natural being.

Here (fig. 91) the first model of the Christ figure in profile, as I made it in order to base the wooden group, the sculpture on it.

En face the first model; it is somewhat defective (fig. 92). A model of the Ahriman figure (Fig. 99). A Lucifer figure (Fig. 101), at the side of the wooden figure in the middle.

Another Lucifer (Fig. 98). Above it, carved out of the rock, an elemental being bending its head, as it were, and looking at Christ in union with Lucifer and Ahriman. I have dared to form a face quite asymmetrically, so that it is carved out of the composition. This is usually done in such a way that the composition is made up of the individual figures. Here in the wooden group, the individual figure is always created from the meaning and spirit of the whole composition, hence this asymmetry. It is a completely asymmetrical face, but it has to be like this at the point in the composition where it is in the group.

Here you have the heating and lighting house (Fig. 106) standing on its own, the rear front completely adapted to the machines that are inside. The whole thing is only finished when the smoke comes out of the top. Then these extensions will also be perceived as justified. Artistically, one creates from the form and cannot give an abstract explanation as to why it is this way or that. Some people think they are leaves, others think they are ears. That's not the point, it's the form that matters, which adapts on the one hand to growing out of the boiler house and on the other hand to what happens in the boiler house.

The glass house in which the glass windows have been cut (Fig. 103). These windows are located in the auditorium. They are cut out of monochrome glass panes, i.e. glass panes tinted with a single color. They have a certain history: We had first ordered glass panes from a factory near Paris in the spring of 1914, but the shipment was so delayed that it simply disappeared on the battlefield; we never saw anything of it. We had to buy the panes a second time.

The idea is that the motif is now cut out of the single-colored glass pane using special machines. The pane is then inserted and the work of art is created in the sunlight that passes through. This is connected with the whole idea of building in Dornach. In buildings everywhere else, you have to deal with walls that close off the room. In Dornach you have walls that don't evoke the idea at all: You are closed off. Everything I have now shown you is actually designed to make the walls artistically transparent. The viewer or listener has the feeling in the building that the wall is transparent, artistically transparent through its form, and that he is in contact with the whole wide universe. This is expressed artistically and physically through these glass windows, which are actually only a kind of score, as they are worked out as glass etchings. They become works of art when the sunlight shines through them. In other words, what is inside the building expands into the outer, sunlit nature. The glass cutting had to be done in this studio, which now serves as the building office.

The door to the glass house (Fig. 104). Not even philistine door handles, but completely new door handles (Fig. 105).

[Now] a small sample of the stained glass windows. All kinds of motifs cut out of the single-colored glass pane, but they only make sense to enjoy when you are standing in front of them.

Here (Fig. 112) a pair of people, the feelings of this pair of people carried out in what is around them.

Another window motif, scratched out of the glass (fig. 110). The glasses are not all of the same color, but one color is always followed by another. So that when you enter the building, you can see the different colors from the various windows. The whole room is then illuminated with a symphony of colors, which is artistically perceived as being composed of the most diverse colors. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have taken the liberty of presenting to you the architectural concept of Dornach in the eighty pictures I have shown you. I have also taken the liberty of explaining to you how this Dornach building concept aims to replace merely static, geometric, symmetrical building with organic building. This had to happen because this spiritual science, as I have represented it here in my lectures, is not merely a one-sided science, but full of life; because it wants to draw fully from the source of world and human life. Therefore, it is not merely a phrase when it is said that religion, art and science and social life should be united with one another, but that the building in its new architectural style simply had to express the same thing out of the whole essence of this spiritual science that is expressed in the spiritual science itself through thoughts or laws.

My esteemed audience, through the willingness of a large number of understanding friends to make sacrifices, we have brought the building so far that last fall we were able to have about thirty experts, people of practice, hold courses in this building, and shorter courses are to be held again at Easter. However, the building is not yet finished. We can only express the hope that we will be able to complete this building, from which a spiritual-scientific movement, which will also bring the social liberation that is necessary for the people of the present and the near future, will emanate. For this, however, it will be particularly necessary to have the international understanding that I described yesterday as the basis for a world school association that works towards the liberation of spiritual life as one member of the tripartite social organism. It will be necessary for this spiritual life to be promoted and supported by the World School Association in an international way.

With regard to the building of Dornach, I know very well what can be objected to from older points of view, from old architectural styles. But if we never dared to do anything new, the development of humanity could not progress. And the impulse to move forward has to do above all with that which wants to emanate from Dornach as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Forward in the development of humanity, according to the goals that I indicated yesterday at the end of the lecture.

We know, in that we have also formed this outer shell of anthroposophical spiritual science in the building of Dornach, the Goetheanum, what all can be criticized about this building, what all can be objected to it. We have only one justification for ourselves, which is ultimately decisive for everything new: we must dare to try this new thing. And we always remember what is true: that what is justified will work its way through against all resistance if it is justified. If it is not justified, it will be eliminated and will do little harm to humanity. In the face of all opposition, it will become clear whether the building idea of Dornach is justified as an outer shell for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. We can only say: we think it is justified, and that is why we dared to do it!

Address by Rudolf Steiner before and after the cycle “What significance does the occult development of the human being have for his sheaths and his self?” (GA 145)

My dear Theosophical friends!

We are gathered here for the first time for a cycle after those of our friends who were able to recognize the current state of our Theosophical endeavors joined with the members of the former German Section of the Theosophical Society who – there is no other way to put it – were expelled from our Theosophical Society. It is necessary, my dear friends, at this moment, when I have the honor of welcoming you to this particularly solemn cycle, to add a few words to this warm, theosophically sincere greeting. This is necessary because our friends may often have the opportunity in the near future to speak a word here or there about the true facts of the events that have taken place recently among us and our friends.

We have been able to see from a variety of letters and statements that here and there it has not been felt as natural that we had to choose the mode for our events, for our internal events, not to admit members of the Theosophical Society, insofar as it is administered from Adyar, to these our internal events. It has been shown that this necessary measure has not been perceived as such everywhere, and that in some places it has been thought that we would have done better not to take this measure so strictly in order to maintain peace or the like. Nevertheless, my dear friends, when you really consider everything that has happened, you will be able to, and indeed must, defend to everyone that this measure had to be taken at the appropriate moment. You must only consider that the German Section did not, as one could formally interpret it, leave the Theosophical Society, but in reality was nevertheless expelled, expelled again for a reason that can be formally defined in the very special way that one could even dare to say that the German Section had violated some statutes of the Theosophical Society! For one will say: This German Section has expelled the members of the Star of the East, thus expellers of a particular opinion, from their body. It must be borne in mind that everything had previously been done from the other side, that the German Section could not help but no longer admit to the events of the German Section, not only the members of the Star of the East, but also the personalities who came into consideration within Germany as members of the Star of the East. For the moment the 'Star of the East' made its entry into Germany, it set itself with the declared intention of being hostile to the German Section; in particular, it endeavored to express the system which, among other things, was also expressed in such a - one might say - hidden, peculiar way in the last March 'Theosophist'. The personalities who had adopted the flag of the Star of the East tried to present our work to the world as if it had ever been our intention to exclude any spiritual opinion or point of view from our endeavors.

Thus, a full-scale attack, based solely on objective untruth, was launched against the German Section. And all the measures that were of a milder nature had remained ineffective against this subversive work, which repeatedly and increasingly came to the point of vilifying the entire character of our efforts before the whole world, so that we were forced, for the sake of the possibility of our work, to declare that we could not work with those personalities in Germany who had joined the “Star of the East”. Similar attacks were indeed made by personalities of the “Star of the East” from abroad. The measure that was then taken against the “Star of the East” was nothing more than a defensive measure, and anyone who presents it differently is not telling the truth about it. A necessary defensive measure, provoked by the fact that our work would not only have been disrupted but simply made impossible if we had not resorted to this measure. Our work can truly be characterized by pointing out that there were indeed lodges among us that worked quite differently than we did, but that not a hair on their heads was touched. We “chartered” all the lodges that took a completely different position from the one we ourselves held. But when, with the subversive activities of the Star of the East in mind, lodges were to be founded that were already attacking in their title, not only our work but also the truthfulness and honesty of our Theosophical beliefs, then the defensive measure was necessary for the reason that we would have become untrue people if we had somehow created such lodges.

Thus we were forced to either become untrue deep inside or take this defensive measure against the members of the Star of the East. The tactic can always be presented in a strange light if one first wants to force someone to act and then describes this action as unlawful. It may be said that it has actually happened in few measures in the world that one has behaved in such a way; but that was reserved for the present Theosophical Society to such a high degree.

If you also read the letter that Mrs. Besant wrote to the General Secretary of the Section at that time regarding the impending expulsion of the German Section, you will see this letter as nothing other than a real expulsion. You will have to say to yourself: If the German Section had not seen it that way, then it would have been on false ground.

But then you have to bear in mind that this was preceded by a circular letter from me to the General Secretaries, in which the actual state of affairs was explained in detail. This circular letter contained real documents for the assessment of the situation. It was a distressing experience that apart from the General Secretary of the Scandinavian Section, who has since resigned, there was not a single person in the body of General Secretaries and the General Council who was willing to respond to what I had put forward. Everything that came from the General Secretary was worded in such a way that it was assumed from the outset that all the representations from Adyar were the only authoritative ones that could serve as a basis for assessing the facts. It is a sad fact that resulted from my circular letter at the time. One could say that one might be overcome by a justified sense of pain at the fate of the Theosophical Society when one sees the general deafness of an entire body to the facts that have been openly stated.

And the crowning touch to the whole system was provided by a speech delivered by Mrs. Besant at the representative assembly at Adyar during this convention, in which she showed how completely she lacks any ability to gain a relationship with that necessary sense of duty that one must have to first examine the facts and then make an assertion. Mrs. Besant has, as is well known, made the assertion that my education was conducted by Jesuits. One cannot say anything that would more absurdly and foolishly belie the truth than this claim, which was hurled into the assembly by the leadership of the Theosophical Society at the same time when we had our lecture cycle in Cologne, in the presence of numerous friends, including some from this country, in which we were once again able to affirm how we were trying to stand firmly and truly on the good ground of the old Theosophical Society. My dear Theosophical friends, you should feel the full anomaly of such a fact. Not only that this had happened, but Mrs. Besant had the audacity, the unenviable audacity, to carp an answer to the facts I had presented in the booklet of “Mitteilungen,” where I was first forced to describe the facts, at the end of which she placed the words, these are her last words in this matter.

My dear Theosophical friends, based on our experiences so far, it is possible that there are still people in the Theosophical Society who could add something to this answer. In this answer, one could look for a word that would correspond to objective truth: one would find nothing, because in this answer, almost everything is turned upside down, and in such a way that with an enormous verbiage, this turning of things upside down has been carried out. It is truly wonderful that someone can be found who is capable of turning things upside down in such a way; each sentence includes something that is the opposite of what has taken place.

I did not refer to this document at all at the Berlin General Assembly or the meeting of the Anthroposophical Society, so as not to take up even more of the already heavily taken up time. And I do not want to go into this document today either, which everyone only needs to read to see the spirit in which it was written. I would like to go into just one point, because it cannot be immediately seen from the document itself. At the end there is a sentence that goes something like this: Dr. Steiner says that the pamphlet by Dr. Vollrath – he is referring to the printed pamphlet that was so unpleasantly discussed at the previous general assembly – contains nothing more than certain remarks that Mrs. Besant addressed to me regarding his expulsion. Anyone who can read can see. Here she says that this document from Dr. Vollrath's appeal... was present... indeed she says more, she says: “If that pamphlet contains nothing more than the document that Dr. Vollrath addressed to me, then it must be very harmless.” But the fact that she claims that the pamphlet must be harmless, that the repeated accusations contained in Dr. Vollrath's appeal to Mrs. Besant at the time, because she says that they were harmless. Well, these accusations included, for example, the point that Dr. Vollrath should have turned against me because I greedily enjoyed a large salary and because my exercises were so strongly black magic in nature that numerous people had become ill, some had even died... and that all those exercises were intended only to acquire magical powers and not knowledge and the like. Dr. Vollrath claims that he is willing to prove all these things if Mrs. Besant demands it. That was the document that Vollrath sent to Adyar. ... This letter

was produced by Mrs. Besant, and the above was an integral part of it. Mrs. Besant says about it: “If Dr. Steiner claims that this pamphlet contains only repetitions of that appeal of his, then this pamphlet must be very harmless.” So Mrs. Besant makes the world believe that the accusations that Dr. Steiner had wanted to enrich himself while refusing any salary, and that he had given exercises that were of a black magical nature, that made people ill and even killed them, these accusations, which were indeed made at the time, were called harmless by Mrs. Besant, in order to present the case to the world in her own way. Such are the things that Mrs. Besant has recently been dishing up to her followers in the February issue of “The Theosophist.”

I don't want to add anything else to these things for the moment; after all, the more you add, the less tolerable things become – I just want to ask whether our feelings in Berlin when our friends decided to work towards finally drawing a line under it were justified, whether we can assume, take for granted, that our friends would feel: It is impossible for me to speak to those who continue to call themselves confessors of Misses Besant. It would be a violation of all occult principles to speak to those people who have thrown one out – the expression may be used – who have presented one in such a way as Misses Besant has liked.

I am so reluctant to go into things like the March Theosophist that I don't want to do it. Because what is dipped in sugar-sweet sauce is the most hidden attack that can be imagined.

In principle – as you have seen from the statutes of the Anthroposophical Society – we take the view that anyone can join us. But those who are unable to see the truth of the matter we are dealing with declare in principle, even if [they want to join us], that they actually wanted to leave our organization. And the way the general secretaries have behaved proves that it would be untruthful of us to have taken other measures now than to have drawn a line between what we want and what is being done within this Theosophical Society, not according to the principles, but contrary to all the principles, of the old Theosophical Society.

But I may also say the other side of the matter, my dear Theosophical friends, to the whole affair. And actually it was only necessary so that our friends are not, so to speak, embarrassed when this or that is spoken in the future; it was only necessary to say the words that have just been spoken, as it were, as a background to what I have to say to you further as a kind of greeting. Actually, my dear Theosophical friends, I must admit that I myself, if I may speak to you for a moment – and the friendship you have shown me entitles me to do so to some extent – I myself feel that, in addition to everything that has been bitter and painful, I also feel it as a great liberation, as a liberation from a narrowness that has weighed heavily on me for years in the life of the Theosophical Society since that Congress of European Sections in Munich, where an attempt was made to bring a new note, then still timidly emerging, into the Theosophical Society, not on the basis of some national and one-sided opinion, but on a really broad basis of the present day. There one could hear the judgment: What you have done is not Theosophy, it is something quite different.

A society based on occultism, even if individuals may free themselves from its limits and boundaries to a certain extent, still has forces that work psychically or spiritually, and it was simply not possible within the framework of the Theosophical Society to bring to bear in all its breadth and adaptability for our present cycle of humanity that which is justifiably called occultism. And I hope that if we are granted the opportunity to continue the Anthroposophical Society, our friends will be convinced that our liberation from the Theosophical Society will not lead to a narrowing, but rather to an expansion of our occult endeavors. Much of what was impossible to achieve within the Theosophical Society because of its prejudices, because it was opposed to narrowly defined traditions, can be achieved in the Anthroposophical Society, and those who want to see will see that the breadth of perspective that we need in our present time is to be tried out now, so that what flows down from the spiritual worlds in our time, in the way of spiritual wisdom and spiritual will impulses, can benefit a part of humanity that has an understanding for it. That is why this first cycle, which is being held here before you, my dear Theosophical friends, and which is the first cycle of the established Anthroposophical Society, seems to me to be particularly worthy of celebration.

Address by Rudolf Steiner after the cycle “What significance does the occult development of the human being have for his sheaths and his self?” (GA 145)

As I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture cycle, this lecture cycle itself was a solemn, serious event for me in a certain way; a solemn, serious event because we have, so to speak, the first lecture cycle within the circle of our Theosophical friends after - let's call it today from the one aspect from which we can also look at it - after our liberation from that which, in a certain way, fettered us after all, fetters that we, if we really want to progress with the demands of the spiritual development of humanity, should have found increasingly unbearable and unbearable.

I think it was quite palpable at some points in this lecture cycle that certain inhibiting spiritual forces have now been cast off, and that many things – I don't know if it was felt much – that many things could be brought before the ears of our revered friends in a less inhibited way from the secrets of higher existence, more than was the case in earlier times, when we still carried around the sorrow - which in some respects was a sorrow for us - that thought forms were introduced into our society that came from sources that gave these thought forms, even if they had only spread to people through books, a certain inhibiting influence.

Because when we are dealing with spiritual matters, we are dealing with real forces. We are dealing with a liberation, with the fact that thoughts that used to inhibit us are now – I don't want to say how – withdrawing from our ranks, really withdrawing; thoughts that previously – I don't want to say how – worked within our work. Perhaps in the not too distant future the world will be able to see for itself what these thought forms and various elemental forces are that used to mingle with our ranks from some quarters, but in more recent times have poured into our work only in the form of a distortion veiled in the well-known objective untruths.

We will increasingly feel that what has happened is a liberation; but many things will have to be understood, my dear friends. We have noticed in particular in Germany that a certain movement with pretensions has emerged, the truthful description of which would be nothing short of an outrage; because the way, for example, our opponents in Germany have , which led to the necessary defense, showed everywhere, in every point, the opposite of what must be striven for by a real occult movement, showed everywhere a desire for tyranny poured into objective untruths. A true occultist can only come to want to have nothing to do with those whom he knows cannot belong to him; that is, not to want them in his ranks. That is the only principle that can prevail in an occult movement: positive work and the right not to want to take care of others who work on a different ground. That was the only thing that was claimed within our ranks. And the one who examines will be able to find this ancient, sacred criterion of real understanding of the occult realized precisely in our ranks.

Mocking real occultism was the demand that, for example, the German section had to accept anyone who, in their own opinion, but not in the opinion of this section, had to belong to it. What our opponents demanded of us in the past, and why they hurled every kind of untruth at us, was the same as the demand that people should not walk on their legs but on their heads; only in our time things are not pursued to their ultimate consequences.

It has come to the point that in the last “Mitteilungen” it had to be said that one of the representatives of the “Besant system” in Germany went so far as to say that he did not understand how that strange boy could have gone through the kind of development he was supposed to have gone through. Because, says the gentleman, Annie Besant parades with him as the coming Christ; the expression 'parades' was used; but anyone who has read the so-and-so many incarnations of that strange boy will already know that Annie Besant does not mean the Christ of the Gospels by this; she only says - says that gentleman - to European humanity that he who she does not consider the Christ is the Christ. Well, I believe that if it is possible for someone to write such things, it is proof enough for a cause that should not be further characterized.

So it can mean a relief, which is what happened. You may also have felt this way about this cycle, which was in a sense a solemn and serious one for me because it was the first in our new work, in our new creative endeavor; and indeed there could be nothing else but a feeling of gratitude for this work, which has offered us the opportunity to accept with a certain equanimity all that has come our way in such a repulsive and intrusive and often so brazen manner.

So let this series of lectures, my dear friends, who have taken part in it, be felt in your hearts as a kind of inauguration of a new period of our work. That is how I greeted you at the beginning of this cycle; and I think that in a way we were in agreement; and if we, my dear friends, have not seen some people sitting here who might have been here if events had not taken the turn they did, then another thing, if we feel it right, may lift us above all that: This lecture cycle has shown us, right before our eyes and close to our hearts, that the personality who is so

has become so dear to us and will remain so dear: our dear, highly esteemed Edouard Schuré, who has done so much for modern esotericism in the West in the form of an immensely valuable literature. That this personality has graced us with his presence at this lecture cycle of the Anthroposophical Society is a gift that we cannot value highly enough.

I just wanted to give color and nuance to the words of greeting that I am addressing to you at the end of this lecture cycle, to the effect that we feel united in our souls, in our hearts, in the old theosophical sense that we mean, even where we and that we will feel, feel like a spatial, a physical togetherness, as with such a cycle, as the starting point of a belonging together of souls, of hearts for the spiritually lasting, for that which may work on the spiritual development of humanity.

Anyone who chooses to address the themes that I shall address tonight and again on the 27th knows that many people today long for a new element in contemporary spiritual life, an impulse that could revitalize and transform important aspects of our present civilization. Such longings live especially in those who try to look deeply into their own inner being, stirred by the various signs in contemporary society indicating that, unless present trends change, our civilization is heading for a general collapse. These signs themselves, of course, are a result of many characteristic features of the cultural stream of Western Europe over the last few centuries.

What may be said about the supersensible worlds today may therefore be said to every human soul. It may be said even to a hermit, a recluse, who has withdrawn from the world. Above all, however, it may be said to those who stand fully and firmly in life: for what we are talking about is every human being’s concern.

But this is not the only point of view from which I wish to speak today and again on the 27th. I want to talk about how, if we let them work upon our souls, the fundamental issues facing our civilization affect our attitudes. Those who feel called upon to lead their fellow human beings will find much that is inwardly disturbing here and much that makes them yearn for a renewal of certain aspects of spiritual and cultural life.

If we consider humanity’s present cultural, spiritual situation, we may trace it back to two fundamental issues. One shines out in contemporary science and in the way in which scientific life has developed during the last three or four hundred years. The other shines out from the practical sphere of life, which, naturally, has been largely influenced by modern science.

To begin with, let us look at what science has brought in its wake more recently. At this point, to avoid any misunderstanding, let me state clearly that anthroposophical spiritual science—as I shall represent it here—must in no way be thought of as opposing the spirit of modern science, whose triumphant and important successes the exponents of spiritual science fully recognize. Precisely because it wishes to enter without prejudice into the spirit of natural science, anthroposophical spiritual science must go beyond its confines and objectives. Natural science, with its scrupulous, specialized disciplines, provides exact, reliable information about much in our human environment. But, when a human soul asks about its deepest, eternal being, it receives no answer from natural science, least of all when science searches in all honesty and without prejudice. This is why we find many people today who out of an inner religious need—in some cases more, in others less—long for a renewal of the old ways of looking at the world.

The outer sciences, and anthropology in particular, already draw our attention to the fact that our forebears, centuries ago, knew nothing of what splits and fragments many souls today; namely, the disharmony between scientific knowledge on one hand and religious experience on the other. If we compare our situation today with what prevailed in ancient times, we find that the leaders of humanity who cultivated science then—however childlike their science might appear to us now—also kindled the religious spirit of their people. There was certainly no split between these two spiritual streams.

Today, many souls long for the return of something similar. Yet one cannot say that a renewal of ancient forms of wisdom—whether Chaldean, Egyptian, Indian, or any other—would benefit our present society. Those who advocate such a return can hardly be said to understand the significance of human evolution, for they overlook its real mission. They do not recognize that it is impossible today to tread the same spiritual paths that were trodden thousands of years ago. It is an intrinsic feature of human evolution that every age should have its own particular character. In every age, people must seek inner fulfillment or satisfaction in appropriate though distinctly different ways. Because we live and are educated in the twentieth century, our soul life today needs something different from what people living in distant antiquity once needed for their souls. A renewal of ancient attitudes toward the world would hardly benefit our present time, although knowledge of them could certainly help in finding our bearings. Familiarizing ourselves with such attitudes could also help us recognize the source of inner satisfaction in ancient times. Now, this inner satisfaction or fulfillment was, in fact, the result of a relationship to scientific knowledge fundamentally different from what we experience today.

There is a certain phenomenon to which I would like to draw your attention. To do so is to open myself to the accusation of being either paradoxical or downright fantastical. However, one can say many things today that, even a few years ago, would have been highly dangerous to mention because of the situation that prevailed then. The last few catastrophic years [1914–1918] have brought about a change in people’s thinking and feeling about such things. Compared with the habits of thought and feeling of the previous decade, people today are readier to accept the idea that the deepest truths might at first strike one as being paradoxical or even fantastical.

In the past, people spoke of something that today—especially in view of our scientific knowledge—would hardly be acceptable. This is something that will be discussed again in a relatively short time, probably even in educated, cultured circles. I refer to the Guardian of the Threshold. This guardian stands between the ordinary world of the senses, which forms the firm ground of orthodox science and is where we lead our daily lives, and those higher worlds in which the supersensible part of the human being is integrated into the spiritual world. Between the sensory world—whose phenomena we can observe and in which we can recognize the working of natural laws with our intellect—and that other world to which we belong with our inner being, between these two worlds, the ancients recognized an abyss. To attain true knowledge, they felt, that abyss had first to be crossed. But only those were allowed to do so who had undergone intensive preparation under the guidance of the leaders of the mystery centers. Today, we have a rather different view of what constitutes adequate preparation for a scientific training and for living in a scientific environment. In ancient times, however, it was firmly believed that an unprepared candidate could not possibly be allowed to receive higher knowledge of the human being. But why should this have been the case?

An answer to that question can be found only if insight is gained into the development of the human soul during the course of evolution. Such insight goes beyond the limits of ordinary historical research. Basically, present historical knowledge draws only on external sources and disregards the more subtle changes that the human psyche undergoes.

For instance, we do not usually take into account the particular condition of soul of those ancient peoples who were rooted in the primeval oriental wisdom of their times, decadent forms of which only survive in the East today. Fundamentally speaking, we do not realize how differently such souls were attuned to the world. In those days, people already perceived external nature through their senses as we do today. To a certain extent, they also combined all of the various sense impressions with their intellect. But, in doing so, they did not feel themselves separated from their natural surroundings. They still perceived an element of soul and spirit within themselves. They felt their physical organization permeated by soul and spirit. At the same time, they also experienced soul and spirit in lightning and in thunder, in drifting clouds, in stones, plants, and beasts. What they could divine within themselves, they could also feel out in nature and in the entire universe. To these human beings of the past, the whole universe was imbued with soul and spirit.

On the other hand, they lacked something that we, today, possess to a marked degree, that is, they did not have as pronounced and intensive a self-consciousness as we do. Their self-awareness was dimmer and dreamier than ours today. That was still the case even in ancient Greece. Whoever imagines that the condition of soul—the psychic organization—of the ancient Greeks was more or less the same as our own can understand only the later stages of Greek culture. During its earlier phases, the state of the human soul was not the same as it is today, for in those days there still existed a dim awareness of humanity’s kinship with nature. Just as a finger, if endowed with some form of self awareness, would feel itself to be a part of the whole human organism and could not imagine itself leading a separate existence—for then it would simply wither away—so the human being of those early times felt closely united with nature and certainly not separate from it.

The wise leaders of the ancient mystery schools believed that this awareness of humanity’s connection with nature represented the moral element in human self-consciousness, which must never be allowed to conceive of the world as being devoid of soul and spirit. They felt that if the world were to be conceived of as being without soul and spirit—as has now happened in scientific circles and in our daily lives—human souls would be seized by a kind of faintness. The teachers of ancient wisdom foresaw that faintness or swooning of the soul would occur if people adopted the kind of world-view we have today.

You might well wonder what the justification for saying such things is. To illustrate that there is a justification, I would like to take an example from history—just one out of many others that could have been chosen.

Today, we feel rightfully satisfied with the generally accepted system of the universe that no longer reflects what the eye can observe outwardly in the heavens, as it still did in the Middle Ages. We have adopted the Copernican view of the universe, which is a heliocentric one. During the Middle Ages, however, people believed that the earth rested in the center of the planetary system—in fact, in the center of the entire starry world—and that the sun, together with the other stars, revolved around the earth. The heliocentric system of the universe meant an almost complete reversal of previously held views. Today, we adhere to the heliocentric view as something already learned and believed during early school days. It is something that has become part of general knowledge and is simply taken for granted.

And yet, although we think that people in the Middle Ages and in more ancient times believed uniquely in the geocentric view as represented by Ptolemy, this was by no means always the case. We only need to read, for instance, what Plutarch wrote about the system of Aristarchus of Samos, who lived in ancient Greece in the pre-christian era. Outer historical accounts mention Aristarchus’ heliocentric view. Spiritual science makes the situation clear.

Aristarchus put the sun in the center of our planetary system, and let the earth circle around it. Indeed, if we take Aristarchus’ heliocentric system in its main outlines—leaving aside further details supplied by more recent scientific research—we find it in full agreement with our present picture of the universe. What does this mean? Nothing more than that Aristarchus of Samos merely betrayed what was taught in the old mystery centers. Outside these schools, people were left to believe in what they could see with their own eyes. And why should this have been so? Why were ordinary people left with the picture of the universe as it appears to the eyes? Because the leaders of those schools believed that before anyone could be introduced to the heliocentric system, they had to cross an inner threshold into another world—a world entirely different from the one in which people ordinarily live. People were protected from that other world in their daily lives by the invisible Guardian of the Threshold, who was a very real, if supersensible, being to the ancient teachers. According to their view, human beings were to be protected from having their eyes suddenly opened to see a world that might appear bereft of soul and spirit.

But that is how we see the world today! We observe it and create our picture of the realms of nature—the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms—only to find this picture soulless and spiritless. When we form a picture of the orbits and the movements of the heavenly bodies with the aid of calculations based on telescopic observations, we see a world empty of soul and spirit. The wise teachers of the mystery centers knew very well that it was possible to see the world in that way. But they transmitted such knowledge to their pupils only after the pupils had undergone the necessary preparations, after they had undergone a severe training of their will life. Then, they guided their pupils past the Guardian of the Threshold—but not until they were prepared. How was this preparation accomplished? Pupils had not only to endure great deprivations, but for many years they were also taught by their teachers to follow a moral path in strict obedience. At the same time, their will life was severely disciplined to strengthen their self-consciousness. And only after they had thus progressed from a dim self-consciousness to a more conscious one were they shown what lay ahead of them on the other side of the threshold: namely, the world as it appears to us in outer space according to the heliocentric system of the universe. At the same time, of course, they were also taught many other things that, to us, have merely become part of our general knowledge of the world.

Pupils in ancient times were thus carefully prepared before they were given the kind of knowledge that today is almost commonplace for every schoolboy and schoolgirl. This shows how times and whole civilizations have changed. Because external history knows nothing of the history of the development of the human soul, we tend to be under a misapprehension if we go only by what we read in history books.

What was it then, that pupils of the ancient mystery centers brought with them before crossing the threshold to the supersensible world? It was knowledge of the world that, to a certain extent, had arisen from their instinctual life, from the drives of their physical bodies. By means of those drives or instincts, they saw the external world ensouled and filled with spirit. That is now known as animism. They could feel how closely a human being was related to the outer world. They felt that their own spirit was embedded in the world spirit. At the same time, in order to look on the world as we learn to do already during our early school days, those ancient people had to undergo special preparations.

Nowadays, one can read all kinds of things about the Guardian of the Threshold—and the threshold to the spiritual world—in books whose authors take it upon themselves to deal with the subject of mysticism, often in dilettantish ways, even if their publications have an air of learnedness about them. Indeed, one often finds that, the more nebulous the mysticism, the greater attraction it seems to exert on certain sections of the public. But what I am talking about here, what is revealed to the unbiased spiritual investigator concerning what the ancients called the threshold to the spiritual world, is not the kind of nebulous mysticism that many sects and orders expound today and many people seek on the other side of the threshold. Rather, it is the kind of knowledge which has become a matter of general education today.

At the same time, we can see how we look at the world today with a very different self-consciousness than people did in more ancient times. The teachers of ancient wisdom were afraid that, unless their pupils’ self-consciousness had been strengthened by a severe training of the will, they would suffer from overwhelming faintness of soul when they were told, for example, that the earth was not stationary but revolved around the sun with great speed, and that they too were circling around the sun. This feeling of losing firm ground from under their feet was something that the ancients would not have been able to bear. It would have reduced their self-consciousness to the level of a swoon. We, on the other hand, learn to stand up to it already in childhood.

We almost take for granted now the kind of world-view into which the people of ancient times were able to penetrate only after careful preparation. Yet we must not allow ourselves to have nostalgic feelings for ancient ways of living, which can no longer fulfill the present needs of the soul. Anthroposophical science of the spirit, of which I am speaking, is a renewal neither of ancient Eastern wisdom nor of old Gnostic teachings, for if such teachings were to be given today, they would have only a decadent effect. Spiritual science, on the other hand, is something to be found by an elementary creative power that lives in every human soul when certain paths that I will describe presently are followed. First, however, I want to draw attention to the fact that ordinary life, and science in general, already represents a kind of threshold to the supersensible world or, at any rate, to another world.

People living in ancient times had a quite different picture of life on the other side of the threshold. But what do we hear, especially from our most conscientious natural scientists, who feel thoroughly convinced of the rightness of their methods? We are told that natural science has reached the ultimate limits of knowledge. We hear such expressions as “ignorabimus,” “we shall never know,” which—I hasten to add—is perfectly justified as long as we remain within the bounds of natural science. Ancient peoples might have lacked our intense self-consciousness, but we are lacking in other ways.

To what do we owe our intense self-consciousness? We received it through the ways of thinking and looking at the world that entered our civilization with people like Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Bruno, and others. The works of such thinkers not only provided us with a certain amount of knowledge but, through them, modern humanity underwent a distinct training of soul life. Everything that the mode of thinking developed by these personalities has achieved in more recent times tends to cultivate the powers of intellect. There is also a strong emphasis on scientific experimentation and on accurate, conscientious observation. With instruments such as the telescope, the microscope, X-rays, and the spectroscope, we examine the phenomena around us and we use our intellect mainly in order to extract from those phenomena their fundamental and inherent natural laws. But what are we actually doing when we are engaged in observing and experimenting? Our methods of working allow only the powers of reasoning and intellect to speak.

It is simply a fact that, during the last centuries, it has been primarily the intellect that has been tapped to promote human development. And a characteristic feature of the intellect is that it strengthens human self-consciousness, hardening it and making it more intense. Due to this hardening, we are able to bear what an ancient Greek could not have born; namely, the consciousness of being moved around the sun on an earth that has no firm ground to uphold it. At the same time, because of this strengthened self-consciousness that has led to the picture of a world devoid of soul and spirit, we are deprived of the kind of knowledge for which our souls nevertheless yearn. We can see the world with its material phenomena—its material facts—as the ancients could never have seen it without appropriate preparation in the mystery centers, but we can no longer perceive a spiritual world surrounding us. This is why conscientious scientists confess “ignorabimus” and speak of limits to what we can know.

As human beings, we stand in the world. And, if we reflect on ourselves, we must inevitably realize that, whenever we ponder various things or draw conclusions based on experiment and observation, something spiritual is acting in us. And we must ask ourselves, “Is that spirit likely to live in isolation from the world of material phenomena like some kind of hermit? Does that spirit exist only in our physical bodies? Can it really be that the world is empty of soul and spirit, as the findings of the physical and biological sciences would have us believe and, from their point of view, quite rightly so?”

This is the situation in which we find ourselves at the present time. We are facing a new threshold. Although that circumstance has not yet penetrated the consciousness of humanity as a whole, awareness of it in human souls is not completely absent either. People might not be thinking about it but, in the depths of their souls, it lives nevertheless as a kind of presentiment. What goes on in the realm of the soul remains mostly unconscious. But out of that unconsciousness arises a longing to cross the threshold again, to add knowledge of the spiritual world to present self-consciousness.

No matter what name we might wish to give these things—that in most cases are felt only dimly—they nevertheless belong to the deepest riddles of our civilization. There is a sense that a spiritual world surrounding all human beings must be found again and that the soulless, spiritless world of which natural science speaks cannot be the one with which the human soul can feel inwardly united.

How can we rediscover the kind of knowledge that also generates a religious mood in us? That is the great question of our present time. How can we find a way of knowing that also, at the same time, fulfills our deepest need for an awareness of the eternal in the human soul? Modern science has achieved great and mighty things. Nevertheless, any unprejudiced person must acknowledge that it has not really produced solutions, but rather—one would almost have to say—the very opposite. Yet we should accept even this both willingly and gladly.

What can we do with the help of modern science? Does it help us to solve the riddles of the human soul? Hardly, but at least it prompts us to ask our questions at a deeper level. Contemporary science has put before us the material facts in all purity; that is, free from what a personal or subjective element might introduce in the form of soul and spirit. But, just because of this, we are made all the more intensely aware of the deep questions living in our souls. It is a significant achievement of contemporary science to have confronted us with new, ever deepening riddles. The great question of our time is therefore: what is our attitude toward these deepened riddles? What we can learn from the spirit of a Haeckel, Huxley, or Spencer does not make it possible to solve these riddles; it does, however, enable us to experience the great questions facing contemporary humanity more intensely than ever before.

This is where spiritual science—the science of the spirit—comes into its own, for its aim is to lead humanity, in a way that corresponds to its contemporary character, over the new threshold into a spiritual world. How this is possible for a modern person—as distinct from the man or woman of old—I should now like to indicate, if only in brief outline. You can find more detailed descriptions in my books How to Know Higher Worlds and Occult Science, and in other publications of mine.

First, I would like to draw attention to the point of departure for anyone who wishes to engage in spiritual research or become a spiritual researcher. It is an inner attitude with which, due to present circumstances, a modern person is not likely to be in sympathy at all. It is an attitude of soul that I would like to call intellectual modesty or humility. Despite the fact that the intellect has developed to a degree unprecedented in human evolution during the past three or four hundred years, a wouldbe spiritual researcher must nevertheless achieve intellectual humility or modesty. Let me clarify what I mean by using a comparison. Imagine that you put a volume of Shakespeare’s plays into the hands of a five-year-old. What would the child do? The child would play with the book, turn its pages, perhaps tear them. He or she would not use the book as it was meant to be used. But, ten-to-fifteen years later, that young person would have a totally different relationship to the same volume. He or she would treat the book according to its intended purpose. What has happened? Faculties that were dormant in the child have meanwhile developed through natural growth, upbringing, and education. During those ten to fifteen years, the child has become an altogether different soul being.

Now, an adult who has achieved intellectual humility, despite having absorbed the scientific climate of the environment by means of the intellect, might say: my relationship to the sense world may be compared with the relationship of a five-year-old child to a volume of Shakespeare’s plays. Faculties that are capable of further development might lie dormant within me. I too could grow into an altogether different being as far as my soul and spirit are concerned and understand the sense world more deeply.

Nowadays, however, people do not like to adopt an attitude of such intellectual modesty. Habits of thought and the psychological response to life as it is steer us in a different direction. Those who have gone through the usual channels of education might enter higher education, where it is no longer a question of deepening inner knowledge and of developing faculties of will and soul. For, during a scientific training of that kind, a person remains essentially at the level of his or her inherited capacities and what ordinary education can provide. Certainly, science has expanded tremendously by means of experimentation and observation, but that expansion has only been achieved by means of those intellectual powers that already exist in what is usually called modern culture. In furthering knowledge, the aim of science has not been to cultivate new faculties in the human being. The thought would never have occurred that anyone already in possession of our present means of knowledge, as given both by ordinary life and by science, might actually be confronting the world of nature in a way similar to how a five-year old responds to a volume of Shakespeare. Allowance has not been made for the possibility that new faculties of cognition could develop that would substantially alter our attitude toward the external world. That such new faculties are possible, however, is precisely the attitude required of anyone who wishes to investigate the spiritual world of which anthroposophy, the science of the spirit, speaks. Here, the aim is to develop human faculties inherent in each person. However, in order to bring these potentials to a certain stage of development, a great deal must be experienced first.

I am not talking about taking extraordinary or even superstitious measures for the sake of this soul development. Rather, I am talking about the enhancement of quite ordinary, well known faculties that play important roles both in daily life and in the established sciences. However, although those faculties are being applied all the time, they are not developed to their full extent during the life between birth and death. There are many such faculties, but I would like to characterize today the further development of only two of them. More detailed information can be found in the books mentioned previously.

First of all, there is the faculty of remembering or memory, which is an absolute necessity in life. It is generally realized—as anyone with a particular interest in these matters will know from books on psychology and pathology—how important it is for a healthy soul life that a person’s memory should be unimpaired and that our memory should allow us to look back over our past life right down to early childhood. There must not exist periods in our past from which memory pictures cannot rise to bring events back again. If someone’s memory were to be completely erased, the ego or I of such a person would be virtually destroyed. Severe soul sickness would befall such an individual. Memory gives us the possibility for past experiences to resurface, whether in pale or in vivid pictures. It is this faculty, this force, that can be strengthened and developed further. What is its characteristic quality? Without it, experiences flit by without leaving any lasting trace. Also, without memory, the concepts formed through such experiences would be only fleeting ones. Our memory stores up such experiences for us (here, I can give only sketchy indications; in my writings and published lectures you will find a scientifically built-up treatment of memory).

Memory gives duration to otherwise fleeting impressions. This quality of memory is grasped as a first step in applying spiritual-scientific methods. It is then intensified and developed further through what I have called meditation and concentration in the books that I have mentioned. To practice these two activities, a student, having sought advice from someone experienced in these matters or having gained the necessary information from appropriate literature, will focus consciousness on certain interrelated mental images that are clearly defined and easy to survey. They could be geometrical or mathematical patterns that one can clearly view and that one is certain are not reminiscences from life, emerging from one’s subconscious.

Whatever is held in consciousness in this way must result from a person’s free volition. One must in no way allow oneself to become subject to auto suggestion or dreaming. One contemplates what one has chosen to place in the center of one’s consciousness and holds it for a longer period of time in complete inner tranquility. Just as muscles develop when engaged in a particular type of work, so certain soul forces unfold when the soul is engaged in the uncustomary activity of arresting and holding definite mental images. It sounds simple enough. But, in fact, not only are there people who believe that, when speaking about these things, a scientist of the spirit is drawing on obscure influences, but there are others who believe it simple to achieve the methods that I am describing here, methods that are applied in intimate regions of one’s soul life.

Far from it! These things take a long time to accomplish. Of course, some find it easier to practice these exercises, but others have to struggle much harder. Naturally, the depth of such meditation is far more important than the length of time spent over it. Whatever the case might be, however, one must persevere in one’s efforts for years. What one practices in one’s soul in this way is truly no easier than what one does in a laboratory, in a lecture hall for physics, or an astronomical observatory. It is in no way more difficult to fulfill the demands imposed by external forms of research than it is to practice faithfully, carefully, and conscientiously what spiritual research requires to be cultivated in the human soul over a period of many years.

Nevertheless, as a consequence of such practice, certain inner soul forces, previously known to us only as forces of memory, eventually gain in strength and new soul powers come into existence. Such inner development enables one to recognize clearly what the materialistic interpretation is saying about the power of memory when it maintains that the human faculty of remembering is bound to the physical body and that, if there is something wrong with the constitution of the nervous system, memory is weakened, as it is likewise in old age. Altogether, spiritual faculties are seen to depend on physical conditions. As far as life between birth and death is concerned, this is not denied by spiritual science. For whoever develops the power of memory as I have described knows through direct insight how ordinary memory, which conjures up pictures of past experiences before the soul, does indeed depend on the human physical body. On the other hand, the new soul forces now being developed become entirely free and independent of the physical body. The student thereby experiences how it becomes possible to live in a region of the soul in such a way that one can have supersensible experiences, just as one has sense-perceptible experiences in the physical body.

I would now like to give you an explanation of the nature of these supersensible experiences.

Human life undergoes rhythmical changes between waking and sleeping. The moments of falling asleep and awakening, and the time spent in sleep, are interspersed with waking life. What happens in this process? When we fall asleep, our consciousness is dimmed down, in most cases to a zero point. Dreams sometimes “bubble up” from half-conscious depths. Obviously, we are alive during this condition for, otherwise, as sleepers, we would have to pass away every night and come to life again every morning. The human soul and spirit are alive but, during sleep, our consciousness is diminished. This diminution of consciousness has to do with our inability to employ our senses between when we fall asleep and when we wake up, and also with our lack of access to impulses that derive from our physical organs of will.

This dimming down of consciousness can be overcome by those who have developed the new higher faculty of which I have spoken of their given faculty of memory. Such people reach a condition, as they do in sleep, in which they no longer need eyes in order to see, nor ears in order to hear. They no longer need to feel the physical warmth of their environment, nor to use will impulses that under ordinary conditions work through the muscles and through the human physical organization generally. They are able to switch off everything connected with the physical body. And yet their consciousness does not diminish as is usually the case in sleep. On the contrary, they are able to surrender themselves in full consciousness to conditions normally pertaining only to the sleeping state. A spiritual researcher remains completely conscious. Just as a sleeping person is surrounded by a dark world of nothingness, so a spiritual researcher is surrounded by a world that has nothing to do with the sense world but is nevertheless as full and intense as the sense world. In the waking state, we confront the sense world with our senses. But when they are able to free themselves from the physical body in full consciousness—that is, when they can enter, fully consciously, the state normally gone through between falling asleep and waking up—spiritual researchers confront a supersensible world.

They thus learn to recognize that a supersensible world always surrounds us, just as the sense world surrounds us in ordinary life. Yet there is a significant difference. In the sense world, we perceive outer facts through our senses and, through those facts, we also become aware of the existence of other beings. Outer facts predominate while beings or existences make their presence felt within the context of these outer facts. But, when the supersensible world is opened to us, we first encounter beings. As soon as our eyes are opened to behold the supersensible world, real beings surround us. To begin with, we cannot call this world of concrete and real supersensible beings in which we now find ourselves a world of facts. We must gain such facts for ourselves by means of yet something else.It is an achievement of the modern anthroposophical science of the spirit that it enables human beings to cross a threshold once more and enter a world different from what usually surrounds us.

After one has learned to experience the state of independence from the physical body, one finally comes to realize not only that the soul during sleep lifts itself out of the body only to return to it upon awakening, but also that this return is caused by the soul’s intense desire for the physical body. Supersensible cognition enables us to recognize the true nature of the soul, whose re-entry into the physical body upon awakening is due to a craving for the body as it lies asleep. Furthermore, if one can make this true conception of falling asleep and awakening one’s own, one’s understanding expands to such an extent that one eventually learns to know the soul before it descends—through conception and birth—from the spiritual world into the physical body offered by heredity.

Once one has grasped the nature of the human soul, and has learned to follow it outside the body between falling asleep and waking up—at the same time recognizing the less powerful forces pulling it back into the body lying in the bed—then one also begins to know what happens to the soul when it is freed from the body and passes through the portal of death. One learns to understand that the reason why the human soul has only a dim consciousness during sleep is because it has a strong desire to return to the body. It is this craving for the body that can dull human consciousness into a state of total impotence during the time between falling asleep and awakening. On the other hand, once the soul has passed through death, this desire for the physical body is no longer there.

And once, through the newly developed faculty of enhanced memory, we have learned to know the human soul, we can follow its further progress beyond the portal of death. One then learns to recognize that, since it is no longer bound to a physical body and is therefore freed from the desire to return to it, the soul is now in a position to retain a consciousness of its own while in the spiritual world, a consciousness that differs from what is given through the instrument of the physical body. One comes to recognize that there were forces in the soul before birth that drew it toward a physical body while it was still in the spiritual world. That physical body, however, was as yet quite indeterminate; it cast a certain light toward the descending soul. Then one begins to see how the soul develops a strong desire to re-enter physical, earthly life. One learns to know—but in a different language—the eternal being of the human soul. This being becomes clear and, through it, one learns to understand something else as well.

One learns to cognize in pictures the soul’s eternal being as it goes through births and deaths. I have called those pictures imaginations. And one comes to recognize that, just as the body belongs to the sensory world, so too does the soul belong to a supersensible world; and that, just as one can describe the sense world with the help of the physical body, so can one likewise describe the supersensible world with its spirituality. One comes to know the supersensible world in addition to the sensory world. But, in order to attain this faculty, it is necessary to cultivate another soul quality, the mere mention of which—as a way of gaining higher knowledge—is enough to make a modern scientist wince. Certainly, one can fully respect the reasons for this, but what I have to tell you about the enhancement of this second soul faculty is nevertheless true.

As I said, the first power to be developed is the faculty of memory, which then becomes an independent force. The second power to be developed is the power of love. In ordinary life, between birth and death, love works through the physical organism. It is intimately connected with the instincts and drives of human nature and only in sublime moments does something of this love free itself from human corporeality. In those moments, we experience being freed from our narrow selves. Such love is a state of true freedom, in which one does not surrender to inborn instincts, but rather forgets the ordinary self and orients one’s actions and deeds toward outer needs and facts. It was because of this intimate connection between love and freedom that I dared to state publicly in my book, Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path (first published in 1892 and in which I tried to found a new sociology in philosophical terms), that, far from making people blind, love makes them see; that is, free. Love leads us beyond what otherwise blinds us by making us dependent on personal needs. Love allows us to surrender to the outer world. It removes whatever would hinder our acting in full freedom. The modern spiritual investigator must therefore develop such love—love that shines actively into ordinary life in truly free deeds. Gradually, love must be spiritualized, in the same way as the faculty of remembering had to be spiritualized. Love must become purely a power of the soul. It must make the human individual as a soul being entirely independent of the body, so that he or she can love free from blood ties and from the physical organization as a whole. Love of this kind brings about a fusion of the self with the external world, with one’s fellow human beings. Through love, one becomes one with the world.

This newly developed power of love has another consequence. It makes us “co-workers” in the spiritual world that we have been able to enter through the newly developed faculty of memory. At this point, we learn to know real beings as spiritual facts. When describing the external world, we now no longer speak of our present planetary system as having originated from some primeval cosmic nebula and of its falling into dust again—or into the sun again—in some remote future. We do not contemplate nature as being thus alienated from the world of spirit. And, if people today are honest, they cannot help becoming aware of the dichotomy between what is most precious in them on one hand, and the interpretation of the world given by natural science on the other. How often has one come across oppressed souls saying, “Natural science speaks of a world of pure necessity. It tells us that the world originated from a primeval mist. This condensed into the natural kingdoms—the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms and, finally, also the human kingdom. And yet, deep inside us, something rises that surely is of fundamental importance and value, namely, our moral and religious world. This stands before our souls as the one thing that makes us truly human. But an honest interpretation of the world of natural science tells us that this earth, on which we stand with our moral ideas like hermits in the universe, will disintegrate, will fall back again into the sun, it will end up as one vast cinder. A large cemetery is all that will be left and all of our ideals will be buried there.”

This is the point at which spiritual science enters, not just to grant new hope and belief, but resting entirely on its own sure knowledge, developed as I have already described. It states that the natural-scientific theory of the world offers only an abstract point of view. In reality, the world is imbued with spirit, and permeated by supersensible beings. If we look back into primeval times, we find that the material substances of the earth originated in the spiritual world, and also that the present material nature of the earth will become spirit again in future times. Just as, at death, the human being lays aside the physical body to enter, consciously, a spiritual world, so will the material part of the earth fall away like a corpse and what then is soul and spirit on earth and in human beings will arise again in future times, even though the earth will have perished. Christ’s words—taken as a variation of this same theme—ring true: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” Human beings thus can say, “Everything that our eyes can see will perish, just as the body, the transient part of the human individuality, does. But there will rise again from this dying away what lived on earth as morality. Human beings will perceive a spiritual world around them; they will live themselves into a spiritual world.”

In this way, deepening knowledge with spirit, anthroposophical spiritual science meets the needs of our present civilization differently from external science. It deepens knowledge and cognition to the level of deeply felt piety, of religious consciousness, giving human beings spiritual self-awareness.

Fundamentally speaking, this is the great question faced by contemporary civilization. But, as long as human beings lack the proper inner stability, as long as they feel themselves to be material entities floating about in some vacuum, they cannot develop a strong inner being, nor play a vigorous part in social life. Outer planning and organization, directly affecting social conditions, must be created by people themselves. Such outer social conditions are of great significance to the questions of present and future civilization—questions that lead us to search for true consciousness of our humanity. But only those with inner stability, which has been granted them through being anchored in the spirit, will be able to take their proper place in social life.

Thus, a first question is, how can people place themselves into present social conditions with inner firmness and certainty regarding matters of daily life? A second question concerns human relationships or what we could call our attitude toward our fellow human beings: the way in which each person meets his or her fellow human being. Here we enter a realm where, no less than in the realm of knowledge, modern civilization has brought us new riddles rather than new solutions. Only think of how the achievements of modern natural science have expanded the scope of technology! The technology, commerce, and transportation that surround us every hour of the day are all offspring of this new, grandiose way of looking at the sense-perceptible world. And yet we have not been able to find an answer in this age of technology to what has become a new, vital question; namely, how are we, as human beings, to live in this complex technical, commercial and traffic-ridden world? This question has become a by-product of modern civilization itself. The fact that it has not yet been resolved can be seen in the devastating political movements, the destructiveness of which increases the farther east we go, even right into Asia. Due to a working out of human instincts, nothing noble or elevating is being put into the world there. Rather, because the burning questions of our day have not been solved, havoc and destruction rule the day. There is no doubt that modern civilization would perish if what is emerging in the East were to spread worldwide. What is lurking there, intent on bringing about the downfall of modern civilization, is far more horrific than people living in the West can imagine. But it also testifies to the fact that something else is needed for the solution of the problem of contemporary civilization.

It is not enough for us to work within the bounds of modern technology, which is a child of the modern world outlook. We must also work toward attainment of another possibility. Human beings have become estranged from their old kinship to nature. In their practical activities and in their professional lives, they have been placed into a soulless, spiritually empty, mechanistic world. From cooperating with nature, they have been led to operating machines and to dealing with spiritless and mechanical means of transportation. We must find the way again to give them something to take the place of the old kinship to nature. And this can only be a world-view that speaks to our souls with a powerful voice, making us realize that there is more to human life than what can be experienced outwardly. Human beings must become inwardly certain that they belong to a supersensible world, to a world of soul and spirit, that always surrounds them. They must see that it is possible to investigate that world with the same scientific accuracy as the physical world, which is being studied and explored by outer science and which has led to this technological age. Only such a new science of the supersensible can become the foundation for a new, right relationship between people. Such a science not only will allow them to see in their fellow human beings what appears during the life between birth and death, but will make them recognize and respect what is immortal and eternal in human beings through their humanity’s close links with a spiritual world. Such a deepened knowledge will surely bring about a change for the better in how one individual perceives another.

Here is yet a third point of importance. It is the recognition that human life is not fully exhausted within the boundaries of birth and death, as the “ideology of the proletariat” would have us believe. Rather, what we are doing every moment here on earth is of significance not only for the earth, but for the whole of the universe. When the earth will have passed away, what we have carried into our daily tasks out of moral, soul-and-spiritual depths will arise to live in another world. Transformed, it will become part of a general spiritualization. Thus anthroposophical spiritual science approaches the problems of our time in a threefold way. It enables us to become aware of our spirituality. It helps us see in our fellows other beings of soul and spirit. And it helps us recognize that our earthly deeds, however humble and practical, have a cosmic and universal spiritual meaning.

In working towards these aims, spiritual science has been active not only in theory; it has also entered the sphere of practical life. In Stuttgart, there is the Waldorf school, which was founded by Emil Molt and which I was asked to direct. It is a school whose pedagogical principles and methods are based on insights gained through the science of the spirit I am speaking of here. Furthermore, in Dornach, near Basel, lies the Goetheanum, which houses our High School of Spiritual Science. This Goetheanum in Dornach is still incomplete, but we were already able to hold a large number of courses in the unfinished building during the autumn of last year.

Some time ago, on a previous occasion, I was also asked to speak about spiritual science here in Holland. At that time, I could say only that it existed as a new method of research and that it was something inherently alive in every human being. Since then, spiritual science has taken on a different form. It has begun to establish its own High School in Dornach. Last spring, I was able to show how what I could only sketch tonight as the beginning of spiritual-scientific research can be applied in all branches of science. On that occasion, I showed doctors and medical students how the results of spiritual science, gained by means of strict and exact methods, can be applied to therapeutics. Medical questions, which can often touch on other problems related to general human health, are questions that every conscientious doctor recognizes as belonging to the facts of our present civilization. They have become riddles because modern science will not rise from observing only what is sense perceptible and widen its investigations to include the supersensible, the spiritual world. During that autumn course, specialists drawn from many fields—including law, mathematics, history, sociology, biology, physics, chemistry, and pedagogy—tried to show how all branches of science can be fructified by anthroposophical spiritual science. Representatives of the arts were also present to demonstrate how spiritual science was inspiring them to discover new developments in their professions. Then there were others, too, drawn from such spheres of practical life as commerce and industry. These could show that spiritual science not only lifted them out of the old routines that led the world into the catastrophe of the last war, but also that it can help relate people to practical life in a higher sense. The courses were meant to show how spiritual science, far from fostering dilettantism or nebulous mysticism, is capable of entering and fructifying all of the sciences and that, in doing so, it is uplifting and linking each separate branch to become a part of a comprehensive spiritual-supersensible conception of the human being.

I shall have more to say next time about the practical applications of spiritual science, particularly with regard to education and the social question. Once I have done so, you will appreciate that anthroposophical spiritual science is not striving for some vague mysticism, removed from daily life, but wishes to grasp the spirit consciously. It wishes to do so for two main reasons—first, because it is essential for human beings to become aware of how they are related to their true spiritual origin and, second, because spiritual powers are intent on intervening in the practical and material affairs of daily life. Anyone, therefore, who tends to combine a life devoid of spirit with a truly practical life, or combine a spiritual attitude with isolation from daily life, has certainly not grasped the real nature of anthroposophical spiritual science, nor recognized the paramount needs of our present age.

We have found people who understand what the High School of Spiritual Science seeks to accomplish for the benefit of humanity along the lines already indicated. We have found people who appreciate the necessity of working in this way in view of the great problems facing our present civilization. Yet, due to difficult local circumstances, the completion of the Goetheanum has been greatly delayed. This building is still in an unfinished state and its completion will largely depend on continued help from friends who have the heart and the understanding to give their support for the sake of human evolution, so needed today. Nevertheless, despite these difficulties, more than a thousand people were assembled at the opening of our courses. Visitors can see in Dornach that spiritual science seeks to work out of the whole human being, that it does not wish to appeal only to the head. They can witness that it seeks to move ahead not only through what can be gained by experimentation and observation, but also by striving for truly artistic expression, free from empty symbolism or pedantic allegory. This is the reason why we could not possibly use just any arbitrary style for our building in Dornach. Its architecture, too, had to flow from the same sources from which spiritual science itself flows. Because it endeavors to draw on the whole human being, spiritual science is less one-sided than the other sciences, which work only on the basis of experimentation and observation. It is as exact as any other science could be and, in addition, wants to speak to the whole human being.

About the practical aspects, I shall have more to say next time. Today, I wanted to prepare the ground by showing how spiritual research leads us right into our present situation. When dealing with the practical side, I hope to show how our times are in need of what anthroposophical spiritual science has to offer. Such spiritual science seeks to complement the conscientious and methodical research into the world of matter, which it acknowledges more than any other spiritual movement. It is also capable of leading to a religious deepening and to artistic impulses, as did the old, instinctive science of the mystery centers, renewal of which, however, would no longer serve our present needs.

When dealing with the practical aspects, I shall have to show that spiritual science is in no way either antireligious or anti- Christian. Like all other true and religious aspirations toward an inner deepening, spiritual science strives toward the spirit.

This gives us the hope that those who still oppose spiritual science will eventually find their way into it because it strives toward something belonging to all people. It strives toward the spirit, and humanity needs the spirit.