The Rudolf Steiner Archive

If we speak about the riddles of existence from the point of view that was characterized here yesterday, then one question in particular must arise for every person in the present who has somehow come close to such a consideration; it is the question: What is the relationship between what has to say in relation to the present-day results of natural science, which over the past few centuries have led the intellectual life of humanity from triumph to triumph and have basically led to everything around us today appearing as a result, as a fruit of natural science. Not only is our external, material existence completely imbued with what natural science has given us, but scientific thinking has gradually penetrated into human thinking, feeling and sensing, into the whole of human spiritual life, giving it a colouring so that one can say: Anyone who wants to speak about the question of spiritual life today and who would have to contradict the scientific results of the present day would, in principle, be met with little credence. Natural science has provided a body of knowledge that, through its intrinsic value, through its relationship to the human-natural sense of truth, to common sense, penetrates our soul in such a way that one must rightly say: There must be a mistake somewhere if a world view feels compelled to contradict these scientific findings. What is to be presented here in terms of the world view is now fully in line with the legitimate results of scientific research at present, although it must of course go beyond this result in almost all respects when it comes to approaching a solution to the great question of existence, the significant riddle of life. And what are these great riddles of existence? They are not those that impose themselves through one or other scientific consideration; the greatest riddles of the world do not impose themselves on man from science alone, but they impose themselves at every turn in life; they are, so to speak, before our soul at every moment; and basically we can summarize these riddles of existence in two questions. Although what is meant here by spiritual science is not exhausted by these two questions, it must be said that, after all, for human interest, for that which man actually wants from spiritual science, all these spiritual scientific considerations ultimately aim at the two great riddles, which can be described on the one hand as the riddle of death, which is at the same time the riddle of life, and on the other hand the riddle of fate. ultimately] to the two great riddle-questions, which can be designated on the one hand by the word: the riddle of death, which is at the same time the riddle of life, and on the other hand the riddle of fate; the riddle of death, which is at the same time the riddle of fate. Surely, my honored audience, this riddle, [the riddle of death] arises for man from his hopes, from his desires, perhaps also from his fear and dread. It looms before the human soul, and it raises the question of what it is that can withstand the transitory existence of its body, what, for example, can be described as something immortal in the face of the temporary. This question is not raised scientifically, however, when it is raised as it usually flows out of the soul, where, in a certain sense, the solution to the question presents itself in concern about the fate of the soul after death, even if it is not admitted. [Man says to himself]: It would be unbearable to think of an annihilation of existence [after death], where one imagines all sorts of sophisticated reasons [for the continuation of the soul] in the face of the passing away of the body. In contrast to this, it must be emphasized that those people who, in the course of the nineteenth century, have managed to say that it is a special kind of selfishness for a person to demand that what he has in his soul as content should last beyond death, must certainly inspire a certain respect. There are certain selfless, if materially minded, noble natures who say: What I have worked for, what I have taken in my soul, I give to general human life, I sacrifice it on the altar of the human community. And so, in a sense, this [attitude] must be regarded as nobler than the one that, out of fear and dread, out of hope and desire, builds itself a belief in an immortality.

But the riddle of death comes from a completely different perspective, and that is truly the human riddle of life, where one reflects on the economy of the world, where one reflects on the nature of the accumulated forces that have come to light in the world. Man acquires - one can look at this quite impersonally - in the course of his life, from year to year, from week to week, a certain [inner] soul content; who could deny that this content in a normal person becomes ever richer, ever more inward, ever more permeated with energy. Now, those who think that the soul's content must be given to the whole [human] race must be confronted with the question: Is it really [even] possible to give away the best, what man has become within himself? Because that [which man must absorb in order to advance his soul personally] is something that is so connected with the individual life that it is impossible to give it to the general public. We can give much to the general public, but it is impossible to give away what is most essential, and precisely this most essential, which can only be achieved through personality, only through individuality, would have to disappear, would have to fade into nothingness if the human soul life, where the gate of death closes, disappears as an individual soul being. So, from the economy of life, this question arises quite objectively.

The second question that arises as a life riddle, which confronts us at every turn, [is that of fate]. It is this: [We see] that a person is surrounded by adversity and misery from the cradle, and that things will not change; this riddle of fate will confront us even more starkly when we see someone with limited abilities growing up and have to say of them: he will be of little use to society. Another will be surrounded by worries from the cradle on – [so that we can foresee]: he can become a significant member of society. These are questions that may not occupy the theoretical mind much, these are questions that in some respects ordinary science cannot even approach; but should it not be just as necessary to raise this question as other sciences seek to answer? These questions do not only occupy the theoretical mind, but the whole of human life. Inner happiness, inner support, inner security, inner joy of work in life depend on the answer that a person can give himself here. The one who believes that he can dismiss this question will notice in the course of his life that something occurs that he cannot explain, as if it came from this question; insecurity, nervousness, and instability can arise if someone does not find a way to find perspectives for a solution to this question. When approaching this question, spiritual science cannot simply take the results of natural science; it must go beyond them in every respect. We shall see why. But by going beyond the results of natural science, spiritual science, as it is meant here, retains - and this it must in the sense of modern times - the same discipline of thinking and feeling, [of research], the same way of confronting the world, which is in natural science. Oh, my honored audience, this has shown us yet another result: it has [in the course of the last century] produced a certain education of human thought, and this education is spreading. He who seeks a Weltanschhauung today, may not sin against this education of human thinking. Even though he who does not want to trouble himself with natural science can stand aside, he who wants to penetrate our culture must be able to justify it before the justified demands of natural science. (That which wants to take hold of our culture must be able to stand before justified thinking). On the other hand, however, we see how great the longing is to arrive at something in the indicated direction, beyond all traditions [about these questions], and especially in the thinking natural scientist we see that what is so often justifiably believed today is by no means considered sufficient. Hundreds of examples could be given to show how today's thinking natural scientists are striving for a worldview that can give them what they are seeking.

Of the many examples, one in particular: if we consider a speech given on July 22, 1909, by the man who had been president of Harvard University in America for forty years, a naturalist, a chemist, Charles Eliot, a man of character At the time, he spoke of the need to move forward from natural science to conquering the great soul question, and he presented it to his listeners as a matter of course, what he wanted to express as the existence of an independent soul alongside the physical life. He said: Man has always recognized in his fellow man an independent soul, a spirit that has its essence in itself, as which man experiences himself when he wants to get to know himself, as which man knows himself - [something separate from the body]. But precisely the way in which such a man attempts to move from the habits of scientific thinking into the spiritual can teach us how necessary it is for a special spiritual science to address the issue. If one follows Eliot's arguments, one actually comes to a strange thought. Although he takes it for granted that a soul being exists that is separate from the body, he never speaks of it other than: Yes, the soul is there. — Soul, soul, and always only soul. What would it be like if he applied the same approach to the field of natural science? It would be as if one did not want to construct this plant, these laws, but rather the whole external natural event, by saying: There is a nature. - The natural scientist [is not content with that]; he goes into [the details], the individual laws, the particular concrete existence of the same.

[Likewise, spiritual science does the same. It delves into the soul and seeks to penetrate the spiritual world and to get to know supersensible beings and facts. ] And that will be the task of spiritual science in the future, to be able to go into the details of spiritual life like natural science. Many people today still do not want to know that it is possible to penetrate into the spiritual world and to get to know supersensible entities there that never come to physical embodiment. That is precisely the task of spiritual science; in undertaking this, it proceeds in its field according to the same method as natural science in its. What matters is the similarity of the observation. Suppose, for example, someone wanted to observe the life of a plant, how it grows, how it produces leaves and flowers and finally the fruit. Is the human being satisfied with how plant growth comes to an end? No, when he gets there, he says to himself: the germ is the end of the plant's growth and at the same time the beginning of a new plant. End and beginning are linked together, and we then see the whole of life at work when we are able to link the end to the beginning.

In the same way, spiritual science does it [only applied to the soul]. It should be emphasized how such a consideration is fundamentally fruitful in the context of everyday life. Nothing could be more revealing of the fruitfulness of such a consideration than to reflect for a moment on the saying of an important man who occupied himself a great deal with the riddles of the maturing soul: a saying of Goethe. Goethe said, “In old age one becomes a mystic.” He did not want to present a gray theory, he wanted to present a way of life with it, he wanted to say: That which one has acquired in the course of one's life, regardless of where one has stood, what has become the content of the soul, what one has basically become has become, so that I have gradually become not only richer but also more mature, has matured inwardly, has taken on an inner energy, and detaches itself more and more from the outer life, gaining more and more independence. We are still relatively young, and everything that lives in us wants to be expressed in action; but we also know that something is increasingly forming in the soul, which the soul regards as its content to be experienced in solitude, through which it builds a world of its own, apart from the outside world. This deepening of our inner life, through the drawing in of a higher human being who reaches into our outer activity, is what Goethe meant by his saying. We become inward, soul-spiritual inward. Something similar takes place within our soul life as takes place outwardly-sensually in the plant, where the leaves and flowers gradually wither and the germ separates. What is sensually and physically separated and what becomes the starting point for a new plant life has its analogy in what is inwardly and spiritually separated, in what Goethe wanted to draw attention to, namely that the human being becomes a mystic, and this spiritual-spiritual soul is an accumulated power. One proceeds entirely according to the scientific method when one connects it with the beginning of the human body, and when one does that, then it must be done in such a way that one sees how, when a child comes into existence, it is gradually developed out of unknown foundations, which then later in the course of life comes to light. I have said here before how anyone who regards the human being as growing from birth to maturity in such a way that he believes that everything that unfolds would come into the line of inheritance, that he proceeds just as inaccurately as people , say, in the sixteenth century, when numerous people, including scholars, believed that a physical being – lower animals, earthworms – can develop from [the mere] river mud. It was a great achievement when, in the seventeenth century, Francesco Redi pointed out that this was based on an inaccurate observation and that all life emerges only from life.

Just as Redi behaved at the time, so does the spiritual researcher in relation to the soul and spirit. He shows that it is a mistake to assume only the physical, the line of inheritance, but that in truth one must see a spiritual unfolding into the spiritual-soul. One then sees how, in fact, the soul and spirit have more significant work to do in the early days of childhood than in later life. No matter how proud a person is of what he develops as intellect and spiritual ability, he is no longer so clever in the later stages of life that he is able to do what has to happen in the early days of childhood. The brain must first be made plastic; there the I has to work tremendously harder to develop a very specific ability. [A spiritual core works on the development of abilities.] There you can see: just as you see the new plant developing from the germ, so you can see maturing in a new human life the new abilities crystallizing out of the still plastic matter. [This is the very same view as in natural science.] From this arises – through a meaningful view of life – repeated earthly life. We see the spiritual-soul core of the human being passing through the gate of death, withdrawn from human observation, and emerging again to work on its physical-corporeal being until it has brought it to what then is it? What then is this? The materialist will say: It is a sum of material processes, from which the spiritual-mental then develops. He who thinks that the spiritual man can develop out of processes that arise out of bodily ones has no sense for the contemplation of what the inner soul life is. Anyone who has an appreciation of this [and wants to characterize it] will perhaps first have to resort to an image in order to construct the relationship between the soul and the body. This image could be the following: if we walk along a wall and we find mirrors hanging at individual points on the wall, we walk up to them and we always see ourselves in the mirror. But it would not occur to anyone to explain this reflection as their very own being, and it depends very much on the mirror whether and what is seen. Just as a person stands before his mirror, where the exterior of the mirror only reflects what he is, so the spiritual-soul life relates to the bodily-physical. The physical body is not a dead mirror, but a living mirror, but it is like a mirror that makes it possible for us to know something of the spiritual soul. But when we are asleep at night, we do not look at ourselves in this mirror. The further we penetrate into the everyday observation of the soul life, the more we will perceive how the spiritual-soul, when it has become independent, becomes aware of itself as in a mirror. But as long as we have not attained this independence in the first years of childhood, and as long as we are unaware of it, our soul and spirit work on our physical and material being, making it plastic so that we can recognize ourselves. Thus we see that through what we have worked for in an earlier life we become the architects of our present life.

Another contemplation of life can shed light on the question of fate. A person who has the right sense for self-contemplation will, when looking back on his life, ask himself: Would you have become what you are if you had not met this or that fate? Only a superficial view of life can separate you from what has been worked on you as fate. If you retrace your life [back to birth], you will realize that what becomes conscious to itself [the inner selfhood] cannot have started in childhood, so you will say to yourself: It must have been much earlier than that. One goes beyond one's consciously experienced destiny into earlier times; one recognizes oneself as the smith of one's destiny and one will not be far from the thought that one has also brought one's destiny in its causes from earlier lives.

Only if one does not look at life thoroughly can one be dissatisfied with such a view. One can say: the world view makes that which causes such pain and suffering to man into something that one has built oneself. But one is only dissatisfied when one looks at the surface; the more one knows that one has built one's own destiny, the more one comes to terms with one's destiny, the more satisfied one is. One is just not always a true observer of one's destiny. (A bad fate is often a necessity for moving forward.) Suppose someone has lived recklessly off his father's pocket alone until the age of eighteen, then the father loses his fortune, the young man has to work to support himself, and is forced to lead a different life. He will rightly consider this a bad fate; but when the man reaches the age of fifty, he will say, “Thank God; I would have become a good-for-nothing; my misery back then made me a decent person.” This shows that fate is a necessary part of our development. Thus, what one might feel as a reproach against this world view could perhaps be summarized by saying that if one can be an objective judge of what it can mean to have created one's own hardship and misery, one will not be dissatisfied, not only seeing misery in it, but also seeing developmental factors in it.

But is there, still apart from actual spiritual-scientific results, [a possibility] to imagine that there is a connection between the deepest core of the human soul, [what one is], and that, [what one experiences as] fate? Such an analogy also occurs in natural science. One need only imagine: Can a mountain plant flourish in the lowlands? It is transplanted [by its nature] into the appropriate environment. [There is a certain attraction between the mountain plants and their environment.] Thus man is transplanted into his destiny, for that is where he has to flourish. So there is always an inner bond between what he brings from a previous life and the following life. We always remain within the thinking habits of natural science, even within spiritual science, when we answer the riddle of death that man passes through the gate of death, leading a purely spiritual life until he enters into life again through birth; [we see a spiritual-soul core forming and perfecting itself in the spiritual world in the present life]. Thus we do not regard immortality as an unbroken line, but we see immortality as composed of individual links, and we see from the essence of the spiritual soul how the destiny of man is explained by this passing through of the spiritual-soul core through the various lives, [earthly life and spiritual life]. This already results in a purely external view of life. But when the pure spiritual-scientific method is applied, what could be regarded as a belief is fully confirmed when it is understood in the way it has just been developed.

Yesterday it was shown how the spiritual researcher is able to develop higher powers within himself. [Only someone who has developed his soul can become a spiritual researcher.] There are various moments. Some of these were already mentioned yesterday. Naturally, it is impossible to cover everything that a person experiences in the course of a lecture, even a sketchy one; but individual aspects can be hinted at, and one important point can be pointed out, which I have already tried to describe in [my] book [“How to Know Higher Worlds” and in] “A Path to Knowledge of the Human Being”. Reference has been made to a discovery that the person who is educating himself spiritually makes, [to the development that man undergoes]. What he experiences [there] he experiences figuratively [at first]; but this experience is the expression of a significant reality, of that which takes place in reality. In my book, I try to describe as vividly as possible what often comes unexpectedly as an image; when you have developed your soul sufficiently long and energetically, the moment comes when something can happen in a hundred different ways, but it can also happen in such a way that you feel: Now something is happening to you that you have never had any experience of before. It can be as if you feel within a complex of forces, as if lightning [strikes], passes through you and had blown up everything material. From that moment on, you feel [how you have come into a different relationship with the body], how you have become free and independent in your inner experience from that which is physically attached to you. One feels, as it were, consciously driven out and one feels as one can only feel when one has experienced the falling away of the body in death. That is why the words were used in the mystical life: one approaches the boundary of death.

Only from this moment on do you know what it means to experience yourself inwardly and at the same time know: It is not linked to the inner physicality, from which you feel liberated; now you know what it means to stand before the mirror. [Thoughts are not brain products]; you now know the spiritual and soul reality; but you are detached from something else at this moment, and that is the essential thing. One knows that one is detached from the body, but one is also detached to a high degree from what one has known as the spiritual-soul, from what one was in, in which one has experienced oneself, [from what one has addressed as oneself]. The mystics who have known it have spoken in such a way that one approaches the external necessity of existence. You only understand the mystics when you know this yourself; yes, you have this experience in this moment – it is a significant discovery. Just as you can only stand by and watch a foreign body, you feel that you can only be a spectator in the things you used to feel you were an actor in; you feel yourself as a spectator in the face of a spiritual-soul life. One feels it oneself as a kind of corporeality outside oneself, feels that there are processes in it over which one has no control. One feels, as it were, chained, forged to a being, to which one must remain until the gate of death and in relation to which one feels oneself outwardly as a spectator. One feels a new thinker awakening in oneself, the old will one feels snatched away, facing it. What matters more than a sensational result is that he - a person developing in this way - can really have such experiences, that he can know himself in a spiritual world; and when he knows himself there, one thing becomes clear to him. It becomes clear to him that with the new being that he has now peeled out of his previous soul life, he stands much closer to the outer physicality than he used to. We are close to the outer physicality. Today's materialist is familiar with the phenomenon of blanching, of blushing; we have experienced physical processes there; these can be thought of as being intensified; one can also refer to circumstances that come to light when one observes a person over a longer period of their life. We find that if a person has an inner life that does not remain purely theoretical, he becomes the master of his life; [the soul acts on the body; facial features change]. But these are all trivialities compared to the feeling that arises at the moment when one has, so to speak, detached oneself from one's soul and spirit, that one has within oneself the powers to create physically. [You feel that you have the strength to shape the physical body], then you feel the forces that are present in the child when it forms the plastic body, [physically develops the abilities]. This experience is not easy, it is quite difficult to bear. One cannot change this body, but one feels: one has gathered forces through one's life that can forge another body. One feels, as it were, the foretaste of the forces that will work on one's destiny in a subsequent life. One feels as if one has been detached, but one has also gained certainty about the spiritual-soul experience, [the spiritual-soul core]. As surely as oxygen and hydrogen are separated, so through the separation that one makes through this meaningful self-experiment, one recognizes that the spiritual-soul is mixed in the human body, a spiritual-soul core, and that the human being reaches out into a new life by carrying the potential for it within himself. Certainty arises for us when we do things this way. There are, however, no experiments that we can do in the laboratory; the only experiment is self-development, self-inspiration, and the only experiment to penetrate into the supersensible worlds is the spiritual-soul itself. He must make himself the instrument of penetration. Then he will actually gain knowledge about the connection of his destiny in the present life and in past lives. Just as the person who believes that he is a product of nature is in error [believes that he is even in the mirror, so the one who seeks his ego in the physical is in error], so is the one in error who experiences the following: It happens to him that he cannot find objects, for example, the buttons he needs to put on his clothes; he gets angry and assumes that someone has misplaced them. [He asks], “Who has done this to me, where should I look?” Then he looks more closely and finds that he himself is the cause, that he has had to search. What he has to do now is the result of what he himself did the day before. [So it is with our destiny.] We face our destiny; we face it in love and in hate; we do not draw it to ourselves because we have forgotten that we have caused it [ourselves]. But a true contemplation of life expands our memory, and we find that it is carpentered by ourselves.

That is the true expansion of true human self-reflection. Of course, natural science can penetrate into many things, but not into the realms of the spiritual and the soul. The aforementioned Charles Eliot said that the old worldview dealt with human suffering and said, “You will find a balance after death.” According to Charles Eliot, the new world view should not deal with death and misery, but with joy and life. We have to admit that without doubt. But can one simply say that one should construct a world view based on natural science that only deals with joy and life? You may say it, fine, you [may refuse to deal with suffering and death], may turn your eyes away from suffering and death - but suffering and death deal with us, they will get to us, and only the one who can look at suffering as a developmental factor, who can basically say to the question: You have experienced happiness and joy, pain and suffering. What would you rather give up of what you have experienced: [suffering or joys]? – I would give up joy for pain and suffering, because I actually owe my realization to them – he would speak correctly because he has acquired true realization. What makes us understand knowledge as a developmental factor, death, from which a new germ of life develops, which pushes away the shell like withered leaves, makes us see death as the event that guarantees us a new life. We would not be able to use what we should use for a new life, [the germ], if we did not have death, [if we did not go through death]. Once education is placed in this world view, it will become a practice of life, a kind of life sap; one will be able to symbolize oneself through the process, the withering of the plant, how the spiritual-soul core becomes more and more energetic, in which new life forces want to work. This will give the courage to face life. This realization will be an elixir of life. I have always pointed out the objection that is raised. Systematic investigations show us how mathematical talent was inherited in the Bernoulli family, and musical talent in the Bach family. The question now is this: Is anything of all these scientific results negated? Does something need to be denied? Through a simple comparison, we can see how everything that can legitimately be said about science can be admitted. [Spiritual science does not deny anything that science says.] The spiritual researcher is not a superstitious person; he is a person who does not want to raise objections, who does not need to reject what is justified. It is fully admitted that there is justification in the facts of heredity, [but alongside the materialistic cause there is also a spiritual one]. Let us assume that someone were standing before us and another personality said: I will answer the question as to why the personality standing before me actually lives. Well, because it has lungs inside and air outside, because it breathes. Quite right, he is right. But someone else comes along and says: Yes, but I know something else why he lives; I once happened to see how he hanged himself, I cut him down. My cutting him down is the reason that he is still alive today! Through this comparison, everything that constitutes the relationship between spiritual science and natural science is made clear. If someone comes along and says: We see the talents of a great general because his [Napoleon's] mother, when she was carrying him, had the inclination to like to be on battlefields, we can admit that, but that does not exclude the possibility that the other is also true, [that spiritual and mental connections are also present]. If we only realize this relationship between spiritual science and natural science sufficiently comprehensively, then we will no longer make the objections that we otherwise hear.

But even otherwise, these objections do not have sufficient logic. We see that genius is always at the end of the line of inheritance. Certainly we can see that the external bodily tools descend from the ancestors, but the individuality had to seek out the bodily tools. [This is proof against inheritance]. But if someone bases an assertion on this that everything only happens in the line of inheritance, saying that someone has inherited this or that quality from his ancestors because the ancestors also had it, that cannot actually be proof in the real sense. It is, in the logical sense, no more proof than saying that if someone has fallen into water, they are wet. At most, external, real proof could also be found logically if one had the genius not at the end but at the beginning of the line of inheritance, so that one could show how the genius is passed on - but one will hardly dare to do that. It can be seen that the assertions are not based on logic, but on certain habits of thought that tend to seek the reasons for everything in the corporeal, and so it must be said: it is the task of science to show what is transitory in man, and thus also to conclude its task; for how should science actually proceed? It makes use of the senses, but these cease with the death of the human being. How then can one use tools that are lost at death to gain insights into the supersensible world? How can one accomplish this with the intellect if the brain to which the intellect is bound is lost at death? It is only possible to penetrate into the spiritual, supersensible worlds if it is possible to appeal to those powers of the soul that are not bound to the senses, to the physical brain. And although it is true, and cannot be disputed, that once Du Bois-Reymond said that we understand the sleeping human being, but that we no longer understand him from a scientific point of view when the ray of consciousness enters him – [What constitutes joy and suffering can no longer be researched] – one must also admit that the solution to the riddle of life cannot be found in this way, which leaves a possibility for a solution open where natural science ends. If one does not do this, then one must despair of solving this riddle of life.

[Where natural science ends, spiritual science begins.] Therefore, there must be a spiritual science that does not want to deny the legitimacy of natural science in any way, but that has to research in the same [strict] way by developing the powers of the soul. Then knowledge comes about in the human being that is also life; it is something that pours out like a spiritual-soul elixir of life, through which we gain courage and security in life, through which we first know what we are as human beings and feel ourselves as spirit itself, as we feel ourselves within the physical-material world, as the same thing that lives out there. When we recognize the nature of the spiritual and the soul, we feel just as much a part of the spiritual and the soul as a link in the spiritual and the soul, which lives and weaves through the world everywhere, [so that we can say: what is in us as laws also lives outside, we are a part of the world]. Spiritual science should bring life and knowing life to modern culture, and that is what modern man needs. Old faith can no longer satisfy him for the simple reason that man has gone through the education that natural science can give him, and because he will demand that what is said about the spirit be said in the same way as what is said about natural science. And this finally leads us to recognize that, on the one hand, what Goethe says is absolutely justified: that because we have the ability to perceive light within us, we also recognize external light; and because we have a divine light within us, we can also recognize the divine. Goethe says:

If the eye were not solar,
The sun could not see it,
If we did not have the power of God within us,
How could we be delighted by the divine?

Goethe then points out how we [always] have a spiritual soul within us and, because we have it within us, it is, as it were, transferred out into the world and we can see it outside; if we had no eye, it is true, then everything would be dark; it is true that if we did not have a spiritual eye, we could not admire the divine outside of us. But Goethe did not just take the side of those many people who only want to recognize the spiritual and soul in man himself, but he took the side of those who knew that because light measures space, we have the eye; [because the eye is solar, we see the sun. That light floods space is the cause of the eye. If there were no light outside of us, the eye could not have become established in our lives! And so we can conclude this evening's reflections, which were intended to show us how man can attain spiritual knowledge by invigorating the forces within him, by saying that not only is the spiritual soul within us, but there is a guarantee that just as we are born out of the physical world, we are also born out of the spiritual soul [that the world lives through].

If the world were not endowed with the sun,
How could eyes blossom for the beings;
If existence were not the unveiling of God,
How could human beings come to be filled with God?

Dear attendees! At the beginning of today's lecture, I would like to present two images to your minds: one that you may know from the course of your life and the other that may arise on the basis of the lecture held here the day before yesterday. One of the images that I would like to evoke in your minds is Raphael's Sistine Madonna, which you all know well. We see this wonderful picture, the Madonna with the Christ Child, and we first try to intuitively place ourselves in what this picture wants, namely by looking at this picture more closely, we see how figures rise out of the mysterious mysterious cloudy sky that extends over the Madonna and Child, figures arise, let us say angelic figures, which appear to us as spiritual companions of the child, who is held by the mother.

And then the feeling can arise in our soul: the painter mysteriously wanted to depict something as a background from which the human riddle stands out, and not just this human riddle, insofar as the human being is placed in the universe, but also, through the fact that the child is added to the mother, insofar as the human being reaches out to create from within himself.

Let us first place this picture objectively before our soul and see if today's lecture, which is supposed to deal with the human riddle and the riddles of the world, could provide anything like a point of contact with what the artist has undoubtedly created here out of a deep feeling about the riddle of the world. And we realize that Raphael is picking up on something that has always occupied people like a riddle of the world when we consider that the whole configuration of this picture, everything that lives in this picture, is like a re-emergence reappearance on a higher artistic and religious level of what already confronts us in the ancient Egyptian land, born out of Egyptian feeling and thinking about the human riddle, in the form of Isis holding the child Horus in her arms.

And so we could cite many more examples of similar symbolisms, showing how the riddle of the world, the riddle of the connection between the human being and the world, is symbolized in the human mother with the child at different times. This is the first image that we want to paint for our souls to prepare us for today's lecture.

The other image should emerge from what we looked at the day before yesterday. Let us imagine a clairvoyant person who has developed his soul to such an extent by developing the powers and abilities that lie dormant within the inner being of today's normal person that he can produce those images, those thoughts within himself that make it possible for the higher worlds to appear to him in their facts, in their essences, so that out of the twilight darkness, out of the bosom of the world's existence, a completely new world steps forth before his soul, new in relation to the outer physical world, a world that shows people that behind our physical things there are entities and forces that are the very foundations of this physical existence, and entities and forces that step out of this bosom of world existence and that truly have no less concrete, real existence than that which we can hear with our ears and see with our eyes. This is how we imagine the clairvoyant in relation to the world, stepping out of the twilight of spiritual existence into a new world of forms, of higher realities, created in knowledge through him, as it were, as a document of what the human soul is capable of in terms of establishing its relationship with the world.

Is it not something that we can describe in the clairvoyant as a spiritual birth, as something on a higher level, on a more spiritualized level, which we find so wonderfully symbolized on the physical level in the Madonna with the Child? For that is what we want to contemplate today, my dearest audience, how man enters into this world around him.

The most diverse minds in the development of humanity have always reflected on this, have examined how man's relationship to the surrounding world actually is. Today, because older ideas in this direction are rather far removed from contemporary human thinking and it is difficult to bring to life not only the concept of such older ideas but also the right nuance of feeling that these old ideas conjure up before us, I do not want to tie in with older ideas, for example, only with the idea that a man often misunderstood today, Paracelsus, had about the relationship between man and the world. Like many others, he regarded the human being as a microcosm, as a small world, in contrast to the great world, the macrocosm. But we only want to recall with a few words what all those who regarded the human being as a small world, as a microcosm, in relation to the great world, the macrocosm, actually thought.

They had the idea that all laws, all the various chains of facts that spread out into the world, not only in the physical world but also in the spiritual world, that all these chains of facts and laws are contained in man as if in an extract, as if in another form on a small scale, that man himself is, as it were, such an extract, such an essence of the existence of the world in all its individual forms. Everything that can be found in the world can be rediscovered in man. As I said, we don't have to go that far if we want to present this idea of the small world of man, of the microcosm in relation to the macrocosm, as one that the best minds have had.

We need only recall a personality who was close to us in relatively recent times, whom we were able to mention here the day before yesterday in a different context. We need only pick up where Goethe left off and that wonderful friendship between Schiller and Goethe. When this began, Schiller felt an intense need to rise to the peculiar way in which Goethe viewed the world, how he had shaped the relationship between man and the world for himself. So Schiller writes at the beginning of the beautiful, great friendship, so significant for intellectual history:

For a long time now, I have been observing, albeit from a considerable distance, the course of your intellectual life and looking up to it with ever-renewed admiration. What you saw in the face of a great nature is this: you endeavor to get to know all the details of nature, of the surrounding world, in order to build up spiritually, through the combination of these details from the totality of phenomena, the most complicated being that stands before us, man. Schiller calls this a truly heroic idea, as it had emerged from his contemplation of Goethe's genius.

What is Schiller thinking of? He is thinking of the fact that Goethe studies the whole world around him, finding the same law everywhere in this thing and a different law in that thing. And then, when you create a harmony in your mind, where these laws, which are distributed among the most diverse beings and things in the world, work together, then you can roughly have an idea, an idea, of what really lives spiritually in a human being. And Goethe himself sensed so rightly that in man, more or less externally and internally, the whole universe has created something like a mirror image of itself.

We see this when Goethe, for example, points it out in his beautiful book about Winckelmann: When man lives in all of nature and becomes aware of healthy nature as a whole, when harmonious pleasure gives him pure, free delight, then the universe itself, if it could contemplate itself through man, would exult as having reached its pinnacle and would admire its own becoming and essence. And in another passage, Goethe says: When man looks at the nature around him and takes everything around him, in terms of measure and number and order and harmony, he is able to create within himself a higher nature in nature, something that transcends nature and yet is the meaning of this world, of this nature. That is what Goethe had in mind.

Thus we see that even a spirit of the modern world, even if it expresses this only in such general ideas, is thoroughly imbued with the fact that everything that is scattered around in the world works together in man, and that out of man a new world is born, which, when we come to think of it, must appear to us as an essence, an excerpt, a small world compared to the great world.

In the most real conceivable way, the theosophical or spiritual scientific world view shows us the world of the supersensible, as explored by the methods mentioned the day before yesterday, in connection with the sensible that spreads out perceptibly before our sense organs. In the most real sense, this research shows us that everything that seems to answer the great riddles posed by the universe is indeed present in man. Man himself can be regarded as the magic key by which we can unlock the most intimate secrets of the world around us. To gain an insight into what has just been said, we must first consider some aspects of the human soul, as we have already discussed in another lecture.

Since we are always dealing with new listeners, we must first say a few words about the nature of man, and then show how this nature of man, when viewed so completely, in all its parts and members, as is possible through theosophy or spiritual science, appears to us as a true extract, as an extract of the whole development of the world according to physical and spiritual facts and entities.

If we look at the human being in the theosophical sense, in spiritual science, we see that he is not the single-membered being that external, sensory observation shows us, that only adheres to the outer organs of perception and to the mind, the intellect, which links the outer perceptions together.

But if we now ask ourselves: how does the physical body of man differ from the rest of physical nature? How does it differ from the mineral world, when we consider that this physical body of man, which in all its parts as a physical body contains nothing other than what the rest of physical nature contains outside? If we look at even the most beautiful form of a mineral, at some particularly wonderfully shaped mineral as a crystal, if we look at this mineral form! It exists as a form, as a whole, as it presents itself to us, through the physical and chemical substances and forces, and does not perish through these physical and chemical substances and forces. This form must be destroyed from the outside, whether by external intervention of some kind or other, or by the intervention of the world around it; the form of the mineral, held together by its own forces and laws of a physical nature, must be destroyed from the outside.

This is not the case with the human form, nor is it the case with the form of any living being. The human form of the physical body – we will not consider the other living beings, which concern us little today – does not follow at all the way man lives, between birth and death, these physical and chemical substances and forces that are in him. When does the physical human body follow the physical substances and forces? When? Then it follows the physical substances and forces when the human being departs at death, when the physical body is a corpse. Then they stir and emerge in their full validity – these physical substances and forces within him. According to the spiritual scientific view, between birth and death man has within him at every moment a fighter against the disintegration of the physical body.

Therefore, from the point of view of spiritual science, we speak of a second part of the human being that permeates this physical body and is a fighter against the disintegration of the physical body in each of us. The fact that the physical substances and forces between birth and death or between conception and death do not follow their own laws, but as it were contradict themselves, is because the etheric or life body, as the second link of the human being, is this constant fighter against decay. In terms of spiritual science, we have to imagine that at death the physical body is abandoned by the etheric or life body. As a result, the physical substances and forces become active and dynamic. But the etheric body enters its world.

For someone who relies solely on their intellect, this etheric body is, at best, a mere speculation, at most something that can be achieved through thinking. Today there are already many people who, based on pure scientific knowledge, have long since abandoned the view that one is dealing only with a conglomeration of physical substances and forces in a human being. These people speculate and think their way to something that is behind physical substances and forces, and instruct them in their particular organization in every living being. So for such thinking it remains speculation.

For the development of the human being that was unveiled here the day before yesterday, for what we can call the developed consciousness of the seer, this etheric or life body is a reality, something that belongs to him, that confronts him when, for example, he has developed imaginative thinking. Then he can perceive how a truly real being emerges from the physical human body in death. But no one should form an idea of this etheric or life body as if it were actually a kind of physical body, only very thin, very nebulous. No, in no way can it be perceived physically; it can only be perceived by the open eye of the seer, it is only visible and perceptible to spiritual eyes. This is therefore the second link of the human being, and it is of great importance that this double of the human physical body be regarded as a special real entity.

From the point of view of spiritual science, the objection may not be raised: One can indeed recognize that these life phenomena that occur in man are something special; but they are precisely functions, activities of the physical body, its complicated interaction. No! For spiritual science, the opposite is the case; that which occurs physically, which appears as a physical activity of the organism, is an emanation of the spiritual. Everything that occurs in the physical body, be it blood circulation, the regular activity of the respiratory system, or the activity of the digestive system, is the result of the forces that have developed out of this etheric body or life body. It is the higher part, and we will have to explain in more detail how we think of the next link in the human being, how we have to regard the higher links as the active, the doing part, so to speak.

Even in terms of the material, for spiritual science, the physical body is something that has crystallized out of the etheric body in the course of development, just as a piece of ice crystallizes out of water . It is thus, as it were, a condensation of the etheric body, and all the forces that keep the blood circulating, all the forces that are active in the physical body, are born out of the etheric body. This etheric body or life body – and I ask you not to confuse the term “ether” with what physicists call “ether”, because the hypothetical ether of physics has at most the name in common with it – is shared by humans and plants. Plants and every living being also has such a life body or etheric body.

But now we rise to the third link of the human being. We get an immediate idea of this when we imagine a person standing before us and ask ourselves: Is this person standing before us really nothing more than what the outer eyes can see and the ears can hear in his voice, what the hands can feel? Is there nothing else within these skin? Well, this person's soul can tell us that there is something quite different within these skin: a creature, a sum of desires, instincts and passions, a sum of pleasure and suffering, of ideas, of moral ideals, of intellectual ideas – all of this lives there before us.

And for primitive man, what has just been mentioned is truly a higher, more direct reality than what lives as muscles or bones or blood in his body, of which he may have only a very vague idea as a primitive man. Much closer to his soul, much more real to him is what has just been mentioned, as a sum of pleasure and pain, of instinct, desire and passion. We describe this sum as the third element of the human being, and we now want to use this third element to clarify how spiritual science must relate to what we are citing here as real elements of the human being.

The materialistic thinker or even the merely realistic thinker will say: Instinct, desire and so on are produced by the interaction of forces in the human body. What we call the third link would only appear as a result of physical activity, just as the advancing of the hand of a clock appears as a result of the mechanical arrangement of the movement. For someone endowed with clairvoyant consciousness, in the sense mentioned the day before yesterday, this third aspect of the human being is what is called – please do not be put off by the term – the astral body. This is a fact. For while in death the etheric body is clairvoyantly seen to separate from the physical body, thereby leaving the physical body to the physical substances and forces, the developed consciousness of the observer sees the astral body of the evening when the person falls asleep, moving out of the physical body and the etheric body, which remain connected during ordinary sleep, and this astral body, this third link of the human being, this sum of drives, desires, passions, instincts and pleasure and suffering, passes into a world in which the person cannot perceive, but in which he lives between the moment of falling asleep and the moment of waking up.

Now, of course, someone who only wants to rely on his senses may ask: Can you imagine that mere passions, mere desires, mere instincts are floating somewhere? Yes, that is precisely what humanity will gradually have to incorporate more and more into its thought habits if it wants to advance to a real knowledge of the supersensible world, that an existence of this soul-like being for itself is quite possible, just as just as we have seen earlier that the physical body appears as a kind of condensation of the etheric body, so too the etheric body appears as a condensation of this soul-spiritual structure, which we now address as the astral body.

You can form an idea from ordinary life, when you decide to think impartially and confidently, of how the soul and spirit affect the physical. We take two well-known inner soul experiences, we take what is called the sense of shame and what is called the sense of fear. Shame — the person blushes; fear — the person turns pale. What do these sensations mean in the first instance, in physical terms? The blood of someone who, as we say, blushes, has a very specific movement to fulfill; it is driven, so to speak, from the inside of the body to the surface; the opposite occurs when someone turns pale with fear.

Only those who engage in errant speculation could seek the causes of mental states in the physical. The unbiased and clear-thinking person will ask: What is happening in the soul? A sense of shame is a soul experience, something purely of the soul; a sense of fear is something purely of the soul. What do they do? They produce a physical activity, they produce an activity in the movement of the blood, it is a physical process, brought about by something of the soul. That is the natural way of thinking in this field, that is, so to speak, the last remnant of how we have to think about the soul in its effect on the material. Just as the movement of the blood and its location are truly changed under the influence of the soul, so we must now only imagine that basically all material events are caused and conditioned by their soul-spiritual causes, which lie behind them and which the human being only does not perceive as easily everywhere as in this primitive case, but which can serve as an example.

Now spiritual science shows, when you become more and more involved in it, that not only external activities and processes are caused by spiritual and soul forces, but that matter itself crystallizes out of the spirit, so that everything that physically confronts us in terms of substance and force appears to us, roughly speaking, as a condensation of the spiritual and soul. And so this astral body of man is that which we must hold fast in its independence, which we have to address as an independent link that creates means of expression in the physical and etheric bodies.

And within this astral body we then see the fourth link of the human being. When we look at the astral body, we can say that although it is not as developed in animals as it is in humans, the human being shares this body with the animal. Just as the human being shares their physical body with the mineral world and their etheric body with plants, they share their astral body with animals. But then there is a fourth element of the human being, through which man is the crown of earthly creation, whereby he differs from all the creatures and entities that are closest to him in the physical world. This is what we call the actual “Ichträger” in spiritual science.

I have already mentioned this here before; today it is only to be [referred to] so that we can treat the subject as we have posed it. There is a name in our language that differs from all other names. You can say “bell” to every bell, “desk” to every desk, “clock” to every clock - everything can be given a name from the outside. There is only one thing that cannot be named, and in our language this one thing bears for every human being the name, the simple name 'I'. The name 'I', if it is to describe the innermost part of your own being, can never reach your ear from the outside; no one can ever call out 'I' and mean you.

Here, in the very naming, you have something that can lead you to the character of this most human link of the human being, the fourth link, through which man is the crown of earthly creation. Those who have felt that the human inner being announces itself, that it must be experienced from within, through spiritual perception, have always seen in this I-being something like a drop from the ocean of divine substance. That is why this “I” or “I am” was designated by certain religions, which had an insight into these things, as the ineffable name of God in the human breast, ineffable to the outer world; it can only resound when the divine in man becomes aware of itself. What carries this “I” in man, this I, which, for example, is elevated to the divine by the God of the Old Testament in the famous word [Jehovah], we therefore also call the “I-bearer”, the innermost part of man, by which he differs from the entities and forces around him.

Thus, we imagine the human being as he stands before us today, as a four-part creature, as the Pythagorean school already imagined him, as a being that consists first of all of the physical body, which we can see with our eyes and touch with our hands, which physical science investigates. This physical body should not be belittled in any way by the great and admirable results of theosophy or spiritual science, but fully recognized. We then have as the second link of the human being the etheric or life body, as the third link of the human being the astral body and as the fourth link the I-bearer.

During sleep, the I-bearer leaves the physical body and the etheric body with the astral body, the physical body and the etheric body remain in bed, the astral body and the I live in the world of the spiritual, gathering strengths to bring the phenomena of human life, which are expressed in fatigue, back into balance and to descend again into the physical or etheric body in the morning, in order to make use of the physical organs and to connect with the physical world outside through them.

In death, however, we see again how the physical body remains behind and the I, the astral body and the etheric body leave the human being. Later — this can only be told today — a large part of the etheric body detaches like a second corpse, so that the person only lives on with something like an essence of the etheric body, a spiritual existence, in which certain members of the astral body later detach themselves as a third, invisible corpse. This would now lead to a description of human life after death; today it should only be hinted at.

Thus, when we consider the human being in its entirety from a theosophical or spiritual scientific point of view, we have these four members before us. Now we want to weigh these four members of the human being a little in their mutual relationship, according to their values.

From a certain point of view, someone might say: The physical body is the lowest link in the human being, it is the external physical, the etheric body is already more spiritual and finer, the astral body even more spiritual, the I is the most spiritual. So we could say: the I is the most spiritual and perfect, the physical body is the most imperfect. But this is only true in one respect. In another respect – and this is what matters when we want to consider the human being in relation to the universe – the physical human body is precisely the most perfect link in human nature. If only we really look at it not with our mere intellect, but with our whole soul, immersing ourselves in its wonderful complexity, then we will see how this physical body is essentially more perfect in its way than the astral body.

Consider the astral body, the bearer of lust and suffering, of desire and passion, in its relation to the physical body only – one might say – in broad strokes, then you have to say to yourself: What a miracle this human heart is, what a miracle this human brain is, and the way all the individual physical organs of the human being strive together! What the human being's astral body, the seat of instinct, desire and passion, often does in the face of these wonderful harmonious voices of the individual physical human organs and their harmony! It is often the troublemaker, it is the thing that brings disorder and disharmony into the physical human body. Pleasure, desire - none of that adheres to the physical body, all of that adheres to the astral body.

And now consider what pleasures and passions the astral body urges people towards, how people actually perpetually attack their physical body through their passions, pleasures and desires, how many of the things people consume for pleasure are true poisons for the heart! How wonderful it is that this physical body has an organ in its heart that is so marvelously constructed that it can often withstand the attacks of the astral body for decades!

In its way, the physical body is the most perfect link that man has today, even if it is the lowest. Then comes the etheric body – it is one degree less perfect than the physical human body; the astral body is much less perfect, and the actual ego – oh, that is the baby among the links of human nature, is still the most imperfect part of human nature today, this ego, which man can hardly grasp, which for many is considered so incomprehensible that what was said the day before yesterday by the great philosopher Fichte applies: Most people would rather consider themselves a piece of lava on the moon than an ego; it takes something to grasp this ego, to consider it real, it is actually a point - one might say.

Consider how much you can think when you see a person in their physical form, how much you can think when anatomy, physiology and so on present the person to you! How much content the physical build of a person has, how little content the I has for most people! In the distant future, these higher, supersensible aspects of the human being will certainly become richer and richer, and the time will come when the ego will be just as real as the physical body is today. But the ego is now in the very beginning of its development. It is, so to speak, only a baby and must become more and more substantial as the human being develops from the present into the distant future. The astral body is more developed, but it is still imperfect in some respects. The good and evil of human nature rests in the astral body, and only when evil is completely overcome by good will the astral body have the perfection that the physical body already has today.

Therefore, in the sense of spiritual science, we regard the physical human body as the oldest link in human nature, as the link in human nature that existed before the other human links were present, in a very, very distant past. But now comes the essential part. Back then, in the very distant past, it was not physical, it was spiritual. And just as, in the comparison made the day before yesterday, ice gradually crystallizes out of water as a solid, so the original spiritual, which was as spiritual as today's I, the human spiritual I, gradually became the present physical human body, the complicated body, differentiating itself more and more and structuring itself more and more.

Thus we go back to a very distant past, when man actually had only the physical body of what he now has, but this in a spiritual sense. And so we are originally in a completely spiritual world, there is still nothing of what we today call material and physical. The human physical body, as it is visible to our eyes and tangible to our sense of touch today, is a condensation of an originally spiritual substance that rested in a spiritual environment, just as today our physical human body rests in its physical environment, in the physical external world. Yes, spiritual science also leads us back to a spiritual origin in relation to the physical human body; this physical human body has undergone transformations, metamorphoses, to its present stage.

The human existence in which the physical human body was spiritual in the most distant past, in its first stage, before an etheric body or an astral body had been added to it, not to mention an I, is called, however strange it may sound to you, because you immediately think of an external world body, the Saturn body of man. Spiritual science gave this name to that most ancient past of man when the physical human body developed out of the spiritual womb of the world. In this first stage of human existence, man's Saturn existence, the physical human body was still simple and primitive.

And now comes the second stage: the etheric or life body is integrated into the physical human body. For this, the physical human body must already have been raised to a higher level; it must be able to permeate the etheric or life body, so that we can say: At this second stage of human existence, the human being consists of a physical body and an etheric body. He is roughly on a par with today's plants, but he is not a plant. The human being never passed through the plant existence as it is today. Rather, even when he consisted only of the physical and etheric bodies and when he was at the level of the plant existence, he was quite different. This stage of existence is called in spiritual science the solar existence. These are expressions that have to be accepted because the heavenly bodies do indeed have something to do with what we call Saturn, solar existence and so on.

Then there is a third stage of human existence, the astral body joins the physical body and the etheric body, and the human being rises to the level of animality. In spiritual science we call it the moon existence. So now we have the human being before us at the level of animality, consisting of the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body.

But now something very peculiar occurs at each stage of this human existence. Originally, in the sense of spiritual science, only the human being actually existed. In the distant past, the human being, who has the most perfect physical body among the beings that surround us, developed this physical body, often transformed itself, and by transforming itself when it incorporated the etheric body, and again when it incorporated the astral body, it has reached ever higher perfection.

At each such stage, certain beings are left behind that cannot keep up with the development. At the time when man incorporated the etheric body into his physical body, certain human beings who previously had only a physical body remained at the stage where they had only a physical body. They did not acquire the ability to incorporate an etheric body, and so they remain, as it were, stuck in the cosmic evolution of the world. It is true that not only do young people in grammar school or secondary school have to repeat a year, but this concept of not keeping up applies to the whole of cosmic existence.

Those beings who remained at the first stage of human development, when the human being integrated his etheric body, are humans who are one step behind, they have been thrown out of human development, as it were, and have fallen into decadence. These beings are the ancestors of our present-day animals. Thus, at the beginning of evolution, of development, we have man as the firstborn of our creation and we have the animal world as the second-born creation, as that which did not come along and therefore always remained behind.

We must visualize very precisely how this lagging behind occurs in the course of development. The world view that adheres to the external substance will see the imperfect next to the perfect and, if it thinks correctly in a Darwinian-materialistic way, it will come to the conclusion that the perfect humans have gradually developed from the imperfect animal.

This conclusion is logically on the same level as if someone – it is only a comparison, but logically it is quite true – saw two people next to each other, one of whom is ragged and down-and-out, but the other is talented and applies this talent to the benefit of his fellow human beings, so that he has become a useful member of human society. He sees an imperfect and a perfect human being side by side and concludes: Since the perfect comes from the imperfect, the perfect man comes from the imperfect or at least from something similar. Facts can very soon refute him, can show him that the two people are brothers, that they perhaps have a common pair of parents, that one has risen by developing the abilities within him, while the other has descended.

This is how it is in all of creation. We have, so to speak, endowed the human being with the ability to integrate higher and higher members of his being in the very first, most original world design. He first received his physical body spiritually, in pure spirituality. This physical body became able, after some time, to integrate the ether body if it remained within the line of development. Those human ancestors, if I may use the term, of course in a different sense than in ordinary cultural history, who did not keep up, were still at the stage of the mere physical body at the time when man had already incorporated his ether body had already incorporated its etheric body, and always remained one step behind, so during the stage of the moon-being, the next stage, they first incorporated the etheric body when man was already incorporating the astral body. So they always remained one step behind. Those beings, then, who during the third stage of human existence, when man incorporated the astral body, still remained on the first stage, who therefore could not even take up an etheric body, were thrown out of the development and were later placed alongside humans as the plant kingdom.

Thus, when we look at the animal kingdom, we see, as it were, degraded humans who have not reached their developmental goal, humans who have fallen into decadence. Not does the present man descend from some animal creatures, but on the contrary, the animal creatures have descended in this way, in that they have not kept up with evolution, they have retained certain forms that man has progressed beyond, they have descended brothers of man. The entire plant kingdom contains within itself beings that are nothing other than what man has secreted from himself. So we see the animals as human beings and say: We have progressed beyond this stage, they have retained the stages by depriving themselves of the possibility of advancing to an ever higher stage, and in the same way we overlook the plant kingdom and say: It has been secreted from the human kingdom and descended. The fourth stage of human existence is when the physical body, after four transformations, the etheric body, after three transformations, and the astral body, after two transformations, has taken up the actual I. This is our present earthly existence. It is carefully prepared by four stages of the development of the physical body, which has become more and more perfect, so that it could become the carrier of the etheric body and the astral body, and these themselves have gradually become so perfect that they could become the carrier of that which now appears as the baby of human nature, as the spiritual that must be protected, so to speak, by its covers. It was only during this last pause that the I incorporated itself, although this also happened in the most distant past, to which no geology can lead today; only clairvoyant hindsight, achieved in the way described the day before yesterday, leads us back to where the other bodies, through transformation, could become protective covers for the I. It was at this same moment that the last supply, so to speak, arrived, which had remained at the very first stage of human existence; there the mineral kingdom appeared as the last of the realms. This was a tremendous moment in the ongoing development of humanity. When, within himself, man first saw his ego light up in a dull, dim consciousness, the mineral kingdom arose around him in its present form.

If we look at it spiritually, we must therefore imagine that the development was exactly the opposite of how it is usually imagined. Today it is of course easy to say from the point of view of a purely material world view: the plants need the mineral kingdom as a basis, the animals need the plant kingdom as a basis. Certainly, in their present physical forms they need this basis. But they did not need it in their spiritual stages of existence. When man was still spiritual, he did not need to eat and drink, nor did he need to breathe. When he began to breathe, the possibility of breathing already existed, even if it was different from today. When the plant kingdom was in its first stage, it did not yet need the soil of the mineral kingdom. It was only when the mineral kingdom was there that it formed the solid foundation, and then the other kingdoms also became more and more physical.

In their physical form, these realms emerged last. Our entire world was formed out of the spiritual, and now we see a wonderful affinity between the fourfold human nature and everything around us. We look at our physical body and then look out at the surrounding world of the mineral kingdom. We look at all crystals, at all minerals, regardless of whether they look back at us from the atmosphere above the earth, in cloud formations and air currents, regardless of whether these inanimate formations look back at us in the water waves of the stream or whether they come to meet us as a trickling spring, whether they face us as formed minerals or as plants and so on.

We see the whole physical world around us and ask ourselves: What are we related to? We are related in that what lives around us in the physical world is, in a certain sense, the stuff and substance of our organism when we look at it spiritually. What is around us outside has come about, so to speak, in such a way that it has separated out as the most incapable and coarse, which has not gone through all these stages of development from the physical body to the reception of the ether body and the astral body and so on. We can visualize this as if we have a substance in which some salt, for example a colored salt, is dissolved, and we bring the substance to cool. The salt falls down and covers the ground and is stored at the bottom as the coarsest. So we see how the mineral kingdom separates out from what, as spirit, forms the origin of all existence, as the coarsest - and this is related to our physical body. Then we see the plant body and look inside ourselves and know that we carry an etheric body within us; we know that the plant kingdom is the remaining etheric nature of man. We feel related to everything that is outside. We know from the animals: these are the remaining astral bodies, they are set aside from human nature. Finally, after this unusable material has been separated out, we have, as the beings who must be called the highest on the physical plane, rearranged and reshaped all these three ancestral stages of human development in such a way that, in the end, the I could be taken up into the protective sheaths as the actual spiritual being of the human being.

Thus we look around us and find everything that we have in our human existence in the realms of the world, the sensual and the supersensible, except for that which is our I, which we can only find in the spiritual itself. Thus, we see how, through this complete examination of humanity, we come to understand our relationship with the whole surrounding world in a way that, one might say, does not belittle but rather elevates the human being. Yes, we can even give a reason why this had to be so, why the other realms had to be singled out. Since time does not allow otherwise, we can only take a cursory look at our future.

We can ask: Why? Is there a reason why man has to separate the other kingdoms from himself in the course of development, and what is the significance of this? There is a significance that we can understand by making a comparison. Imagine that something coarse is mixed into a substance that has dissolved. If we want to have the substance in its pure form, we have to allow it to cool down. Thus, man had to bring himself up by separating out everything that was unusable to absorb an ego in the other realms; he had to create a foundation on which he could develop. In the future, of course, he will have the task of redeeming these other realms, he will have to gradually raise them to his own spirituality. This can only be mentioned today, because what should particularly come to our minds today is that in the human being before us, the whole physical and spiritual world, insofar as we can reach it at first, is not only reflected, but that he has this whole world around him because, basically, the other realms have been separated out of him, because, figuratively speaking, they are flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood, even if this is meant in a spiritual sense.

And so man feels his way into the whole of his environment, and on a higher level he regards everything that lives in him as born out of the spiritual womb of the world, and just as the bark around the living core of the tree is structured and protects it, so the spiritual in man has protected itself through the coarser natural kingdoms, as it were, as the bark of human existence, and just as the bark is only the lignified soft parts of the tree, the other kingdoms, that which surrounds man, that which has developed out of the original human nature in the sense described today. Thus man learns that he is born out of the bosom of the whole existence of the world. It is not surprising that at the stage of clairvoyant consciousness he feels like a begetter of new worlds, for the worlds that surround us and on which we walk have developed out of us in the distant past.

The future world that will be around man will also be born out of man. Clairvoyant consciousness gives birth to it spiritually and has it before it, and then it is as if, out of the twilight darkness of the spiritual womb of the world, figures emerge before the clairvoyant consciousness, which are still spiritual today and will only descend into the physical world in the future. We see the spiritual that is around us populating itself with spiritual forms, and this spiritual will appear to us as a higher realm compared to what is already mysteriously hinted at on a lower level in human creativity today, and there the image is put together in a wonderful way from the artist's intuition. Raphael also did this partly out of tradition: what emerges as a feeling is what Raphael has secretly incorporated into his painting about human destiny; the twilight of the womb of the world – the spiritual figures are born above, and as the sensual embodiment, as the most important physical embodiment of what dawn of the universe and becomes more and more perfect in his physical form, appears to us in the mother with the child, who has the strength to shape within herself the mysterious laws that have come into being through all human evolution, so that he brings forth his repetition from within himself.

Anyone who can feel something like this will understand how the spiritual in the clouds and the physical in the Madonna with the child, as a great symbol of human destiny in this mysterious child, comes to us, and then one learns in front of this picture that, even if it is unconscious in the artist, it is born out of the feeling and sense of how man is a world in itself, but one that is intimately related to the greater environment, a small world, a microcosm, in relation to the greater world. One feels how the artist has incorporated this into his painting, and one then feels how what man receives through his position in relation to the surrounding nature can come to us again in human creations, as for example in true art, man brings us something like a solution to the riddle of the world in his own way. And when this riddle of the world speaks to us symbolically through Raphael's Sistine Madonna, we feel very strongly the words of Goethe, which we have already quoted and which lead us so well into the microcosmic human being and into the macrocosmic wholeness of the world. We feel what Goethe felt when he presented this human being as the actual solution to the whole mystery of the world, in that he said that when a person perceives the healthy world in its entirety around them, takes measure and number and order and harmony together and generates a new, higher world from this world, they thus give meaning to the outside world. And in all its details, down to the deepest feeling, theosophy or spiritual science shows us that in fact man contains within himself in a certain respect everything that we find outside in the world, that man himself is the solution to the riddle of the world, that man is the answer when we ask about the actual riddle of the world.

In the highest sense, my esteemed audience, the question can be put like this: let us look out into the world! It appears wonderful to us in all its fields, in all its realms, it presents us with nothing but questions. Where is the answer? Everything asks us – where should we look if we want the answer? The answer is always before us. We only need to be able to interpret this answer in the right way, through spiritual science. This answer to the riddle of the world is “man”. This was also in the mind of the ancient poet when, beholding the world around him, he spoke the beautiful words:

Many mighty things live here on our earth; but nothing is mightier than man.

Public lecture in Vienna, November 22, 1889

Report in the “Chronik des Wiener Goethe-Vereins” of January 20, 1890.

On Friday, November 22, 1889, Mr. Rudolf Steiner opened the series of Goethe evenings with a highly interesting lecture on the “Goethe Archive in Weimar”.

Mr. Steiner is entrusted with the publication of Goethe's scientific writings and had the opportunity to study the Goethe Archive in detail over the summer. He described in detail the natural history collection exhibited in the Goethe House and emphasized the great value of the scientific legacy. From it it would become clear by what route the poet had climbed to the heights of light, and that the master had been a tireless researcher in every field and was considered the spiritual center of the age.

The lecturer started from the idea that we have a twofold task to fulfill in relation to Goethe. One of these is to grasp and appreciate the poet's magnificent appearance in all its aspects, to understand the origin of his writings from his soul life and to put the relationships of his works to each other in the proper light. But this purely historical side of the matter achieves only the lesser part of what we have to achieve in relation to Goethe. The far more important part is to be found in the fact that we, insofar as it is the task of each and every one of us, participate in the further development of our culture in the sense that has been opened up to us by Goethe. The cultural perspective that he has opened up for the future must be ours. We have to follow the lines of thought that find a magnificent beginning in him; we have to approach the questions of science, art, and the state from his point of view. We have to work our way up to that kind of vision through which he gained such penetrating insights, but through which he also found the blissful calm of the truly wise in the face of all the disharmonies of life. And this is the goal of the Goethe-Schiller Archives in Weimar. Whoever enters this classical place will be overcome by a breath of that mighty ethos that emanates from Goethe and spreads through all his works. Those who enter the workshop of Goethe's poetry and thought, who are able to follow in the footsteps of the spirit that led to the heights of his creativity by the hand of the treasures he left behind, will find their inner selves mightily uplifted by the impact of the ideal seriousness and high morality of Goethe's life and world view. He sees how every idea of this genius goes back to spiritual struggles that he has undergone in his inner being, how every conviction he has expressed is the conclusion of a spiritual process that we can follow in very many cases. We can often see from the notes he has jotted down the exact moment when an idea flashes in his mind, which then had a fruitful effect on his work. In particular, Goethe's scientific significance will be more clearly revealed to us through the Weimar publications than has been the case so far. The sheer shallowness that has so far dared to approach Goethe in a judgmental manner will be contemptuously rejected by all educated people, for whom new insights will arise from Weimar's handwritten treasures.

We also have important things to expect from the diaries. They will not only give us precise insights into the poet's external life, but also into the process of his inner development. They will show how he progresses from stage to stage, up to that “spiritual Montserrat” where he feels misunderstood and lonely, but enlightened by the deepest ideas. Goethe kept records not only of his external life, but above all of his inner life.

But the correspondence is also of particular importance. The intellectual life in Germany from 1790 to 1832 appears as a mighty organism, of which Goethe is the soul. He exerts a direct personal influence on the most important contemporaries, and they in turn have an effect on him. This magnificent network of intellectual interests will only become clear through the correspondence.

Above all, the publication of Goethe's scientific writings, diaries and correspondence will be an immortal monument erected by Weimar's high-minded princess. This is proof that in Weimar they know how to promote the legacy of the great German with just as much understanding as they once understood how to create the basis for the man on which he could build his way up to the heights of humanity.

It is thanks to Professor Suphan, the humane and amiable director of the archive, and to Schiller's noble descendants that, just over a year ago, Schiller's estate was also incorporated into the archive. Schiller belongs to Goethe. Through Schiller, the nation was finally opened up to Goethe. His view of the great friend is the ideal of all Goethe research.

Report in the “Chronik des Wiener Goethe-Vereins” of December 15, 1891

Goethe Evening, November 27

On this day, Dr. Rudolf Steiner (who is currently involved in publishing part of Goethe's scientific writings for the great Weimar Goethe Edition at the Goethe Archive in Weimar) gave a lecture on the “secret in Goethe's riddle fairy tale in the ‘Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderter’”.

After a brief introduction by the lecturer on the relationship between the “fairy tale” and the narrative, the conclusion of which it forms, and the indication of the fact that Goethe's view of the world and life is symbolically presented in it, Miss Adrienne Kola from the k. k. Hofburgtheater, so that despite the simplicity of the performance, not only the mysterious, mystical character that runs through the whole, but also the numerous individual highlights that the performance rises to, were fully expressed. One could hear it in the recitation of Miss Kola, to which one had to pay particular attention when it comes to an interpretation of the “Fairytale”.

Dr. Steiner followed the recitation with his own observations. The “Fairytale” presents, in a Goethean way, the solution of the same problem that Schiller also attempted in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man at that time: How does a person, dominated by the laws of nature and sensual existence, reach that highest state where he can partake of full, unrestricted freedom? Schiller undertook the solution of this task through a philosophical investigation, Goethe gave it in a vivid image filled with rich poetic content. The happy state that man will achieve when full freedom is his own is presented to us as the marriage of a young man to the beautiful lily, the queen in the realm of freedom. The young man rules, endowed with the three highest gifts that can belong to man: wisdom, piety and strength. The temple from which he rules the new kingdom rises above a river that separates the kingdom of freedom from that of natural necessity, sensual drive, passion, before that highest human goal is achieved. This river represents the state, custom, law and justice, which prevent people who have not yet been prepared for freedom from seizing it before they can understand and use it. Only at certain moments is it possible for man to cross over into that longed-for land. At noon, when the green snake coils itself over the river and serves as a bridge, and in the evening, at dusk, when the shadow of a great giant stretches across the river. The snake represents human selflessness and self-denial. Only in those moments when all selfish desires are stilled, when man selflessly loses himself in the objective world, is he worthy of freedom and also partakes of it. Opposite the snake are the so-called will-o'-the-wisps. They feed on gold, which (in the fairy tale) is the symbol of wisdom. But they cannot digest it and throw it away as worthless metal. The will-o'-the-wisps are the symbol of human selfhood, which becomes selfishness and does not take up the gold of wisdom for the sake of the latter itself, but only to shine and show off with it. False prophets, demagogues, teachers who lack the actual love of knowledge are meant by this. From their mouths, wisdom is an empty, insubstantial phrase. But if it is also grasped as such by a receptive mind, it is imbued with inner life and leads to the highest culture. The gold that the will-o'-the-wisp throws out is devoured by the snake and makes its body shine, so that in the space that it now illuminates, the light of the highest knowledge, which is indicated by the old man with the lamp, also shines. Only where there is receptivity for this light, i.e. in a space where there is already another light, does the same shine. The giant represents blind arbitrariness, the raw force of nature, which does not lead people into the realm of freedom through its own value and efficiency, but through those means that join them by chance, without inner necessity. This element, which is added to man merely by external natural force, is symbolized by the shadow, which man, after all, does not cast himself. When the time comes, that is, when man has grasped that he must not merely renounce his self for moments, but that selflessness must become his very nature and essence, then the state of complete bliss will set in. Then the snake does not merely lie across the river for a short time, but sacrifices itself and forms a permanent bridge from the realm of nature to that of freedom. The wanderers now cross over and over without compulsion, that is, they move equally well in both realms; they ennoble their natural obligations through freedom, and they perform their deeds of freedom as if they were to happen with natural force. A state of humanity has thus been achieved that Schiller strove for through the realization of his aesthetic society.

During the course of the lecture, Dr. Steiner shared three interpretations of the “fairytale” from Goethe's circle of friends, which were recorded by the poet himself in 1816, with the permission of Prof. Dr. Suphan, director of the Goethe and Schiller Archives.

Automated Translation

It gives me great joy to be able to greet you again today on my journey through and to be able to speak with you about some theosophical matters on this day. In doing so, we may touch on a topic that is more closely related to the emotional life and yet it points us upwards and can point us upwards into perspectives that will teach us about the connection between human beings and the great starry worlds, with what we call the macrocosm.

Today I would like to start with an observation, a motto that runs through human history and which, on the one hand, expresses man's longing to come close to his higher self, but on the other hand, says how little he can reach his divine self. In Greek history we find Socrates going about teaching people, directing them to virtue by means of simple concepts, to everything that is close to the human mind. Socrates, the Greek sage, wanted to turn the gaze of his contemporaries away from the external world of nature. While his predecessors thought about the underlying principles of the great natural phenomena and sought to explain them, it is said of Socrates that he is supposed to have said: What do we care about nature, the trees, the birds? They cannot teach us how to become better human beings. — This sentence contains an error. But what matters here is not whether Socrates makes a mistake, but what he wanted. He was one of the greatest sages in the world, who even paid for what he wanted with his life.

One of his maxims has been preserved. Its content strikes every human soul that wants to know itself: he taught virtue, morality. If man could truly understand it, he would act accordingly. If man departs from morality, it is only because he does not yet fully understand it. Virtue can be taught. The human heart objects that human nature is weak, that it often fails in virtue. He who gave this saying the form in which it lives in many hearts, lives in such a way that it is an expression of the deepest regret, of apology, Paul, gave this saying the form: Strong is the spirit, the flesh is weak. Many see what virtue consists in and yet cannot follow it. This dichotomy runs through all human nature. You only need to write this saying in your soul and you have recorded the dichotomy of human nature. There is something in man that transcends him: higher human nature transcends lower human nature.

Through Theosophy we are accustomed to seeing human nature not as something simple. The soul of man appears to us as a trinity. Here we must remember the development of our planet, its earlier incarnations, which it has gone through and in which man has also been developed with it. The first incarnation of our planet was the Saturn state. Here the germ was laid for the physical body of man. After this state had lasted a long time, the planet disintegrated and reappeared as the sun, with the powers of the life ether. In this state, the etheric or life body was added to the physical body in the germ. After a long time, the planet disintegrated and reappeared in the state of the moon. In this state, the astral body was added to the human physical and etheric bodies. And after this state had also gone through dissolution, the earth embodied itself in the form it has now. As a fourth principle, the germ of the self was now added to man.

Saturn, the sun and the moon are a trinity: the past of the earth. During this time, the human trinity has developed: physical body, etheric body, astral body. These are the human past. The I is the present. Its future lies in what it works out of the lower trinity, what spiritualization is achieved in the process. By penetrating and learning to control the astral body, the I transforms it into the spirit self or Manas. By penetrating the etheric body, the I transforms it into the life spirit or Buddhi. By penetrating the physical body, the I transforms it into the spiritual man or Atman. This is the upper trinity, the future of man.

Now the I is also threefold, for the soul has three aspects, three basic powers of which it consists, which can never be separated or torn out of it. These three powers are what we have called the sentient soul, the mind soul, and the consciousness soul. They are parts of the individuality that is gradually emerging into consciousness. We can also describe them in our own words as wisdom, individuality and morality. In the sentient soul, we feel the inner soul; the astral body can be regarded as the exterior of the sentient soul. The I, which is becoming conscious, struggles out of the soul of understanding. Within the adult I-forces, the consciousness soul is experienced as the inner self, the spiritual self as the outer self.

Is there anything that can suggest to us that what has just been said is true? To answer this question, let us consider what we have become through the stages of human development. We stand in the middle of the past lower triad and the luminous spiritual-soul triad. Today, we want to describe this triad with words taken from direct life, not as in the book “Theosophy”, where it is scientifically presented. What is it that can mean so much to us, our deepest spiritual shortcomings, our spiritual longings and dissatisfaction, what is this trinity when we look at our cleverness, individuality and virtue, at all our striving that can fill us with bliss or disharmony? This is the trinity that we can describe as faith, hope and love. They are the three fundamental powers of the soul that can never be taken from it. Faith – what is faith? Faith is a power of the soul that can never be completely wrested from the human soul, and it lives in every human being. There has never been a nation that did not have it, no religion has allowed itself to be deprived of speaking of it. It is the yearning for faith that permeates the world. The soul always wants to have something to hold on to. If this yearning for faith is not satisfied, then the tormented soul is in a bad way. If it is deprived of what it can believe in – as happens through materialism – then it is as if the human body were deprived of the air it needs to breathe. Only that the process of suffocation of the body takes a very short time, that of the soul takes a very long time.

One often reads sayings like: knowledge is power – and the like. Now, at the beginning of the Bible, a peculiar word has been found that has not yet been properly appreciated to this day. There is talk of the tree of knowledge and of the fruit of the tree of knowledge that is eaten. This is to be taken quite literally. Knowledge is nourishment, knowledge is nourishment for the soul. The soul eats of that which we absorb as concepts from Theosophy. It eats of that which it believes, and it has healthy nourishment only from that which Theosophy offers it.

Faith, say the scientists and materialists, is an outdated point of view. I only believe what I know, says the modern man. This is a mistake. Belief is not a regression into the past, because belief and knowledge do not form a contradiction. But knowledge is changeable and cannot satisfy the need for faith in the human heart. When material science claims that the world is composed of atoms and came into being by chance, the human heart quite rightly says: I cannot believe that, I find no satisfaction in this hypothesis. And because man cannot believe, because he has nothing to cling to with his sense of faith, that is why the human soul is not healthy, and this unhealthy soul makes the body sick. This is how nervousness in the modern sense arises and gets worse and worse. This is how the soul affects the body and the person who has become so affects his environment, which he drags down and makes sick, and his descendants. This is why humanity is degenerating more and more, and unfortunately it will continue to get worse and worse. It is materialistic science that gives people “stones instead of bread”. The soul has no nourishment, although the intellect is overflowing with knowledge. And such a person then goes around not knowing what to do with himself, he does not know what to hold on to, and just as if one were to take away the air to breathe, the human soul suffocates from not having any nourishment, no spiritual sustenance. Theosophy has therefore come into the world to provide humanity with nourishment.

When we come together to study Theosophy, we do not do so like other associations that deal with literature, fine arts, social problems and the like. We do not practice Theosophy out of curiosity, but to satisfy the urge to believe, to nourish the soul. Therefore, we allow the theosophical concepts, feelings and sensations to affect our soul.

If we now consider this in terms of the evolution of the world and of humanity, we must remember that during the lunar state of the earth the astral body was added to the human being. What is this astral body? It consists of forces that must always grasp something, that must always attach themselves somewhere. In their effect, these forces are what we experience as faith, as the power of faith. The astral body is the source of faith itself. It must therefore receive nourishment if it is to develop, if it is to live. The desire for nourishment is the yearning of faith. If this power of faith cannot be satisfied, if the faith is deprived of one thing after another that it could hold on to, if it is not offered good spiritual nourishment, then the astral body becomes ill and through it the physical man also. But if he receives satisfaction from the concepts, ideas and feelings that Theosophy draws from the truth, from the depths of world knowledge, then he has the spiritual nourishment that appeals to him, then he has his satisfaction. He becomes strong and healthy, and the person himself becomes healthy. The views have changed a great deal over the past century, right down to the word. A hundred and thirty years ago, a man was called nervous who was a strong fellow, with strong muscles and full of strength. Today, a nervous person is a dissatisfied, weak person, a sick person, one whose soul searches unsatisfied for what it can draw nourishment from. From all this it follows that we can justifiably call the astral body the body of faith.

A second basic power is love. No one lacks it, it is always there, it cannot be eradicated. Anyone who would believe that the greatest hater, the greatest egoist, has no love, is mistaken. To think so is quite wrong. The longing for love is always present here. Whether it is sexual love, love for a child, for a friend, or love for something, for a work, it is always there. It cannot be torn out of the soul because it is a fundamental power of the soul. But just as man needs air to breathe, so he needs the work of love, the activity of love, for his soul. Its opponent, its hindrance, is egoism. But what does egoism do? It does not allow love to work outwards, it presses it into the soul, again and again. And just as air must flow out when breathing, so that man does not suffocate, so love must flow out, so that the soul does not suffocate from what is forcibly pressed into it. Better said: the soul burns from its own fire of love within itself and perishes.

Let us now remember that on the old sun, the human being was given the ether body as an inclination, that this fiery, luminous, shining part of the sun is the ether body. In it, however, there is given only another aspect of love, that which love is in the spirit: light is love. In the ether body, therefore, love and the yearning for love are given to us, and we can justifiably call the ether body the body of love: light and love.

It is a true saying: love is the greatest good. But it can also have the most disastrous consequences. We see this in everyday life, and I will give you an example that has been experienced. A mother loved her little daughter very much, and out of love she let her do everything, no matter what she did. She never punished her and fulfilled her every whim. The little daughter became a poisoner, and out of love she became so. Love must be combined with wisdom, it must become an enlightened love, only then can it truly work for good. The theosophical teaching is called upon to bring this wisdom, to give this enlightenment. And when man has absorbed in himself what is said and taught concerning the evolution of the world, concerning this apparently so far, so distant lying, what is communicated about the connection of man with the macrocosm, then man will become such that his enlightened love will face his fellow man in order to see into him, to be able to understand him, and thus become enlightened human love.

We often hear that life is dull and empty. This feeling even causes a kind of discord in the body. This is the effect of the unsatisfied power of love. When the world rejects our love, we feel pain. When we do something out of love, we must do it because the soul needs it, just as the lungs need air. Not out of scientific curiosity or to present a scientific opinion to the world – we have more than enough of that, because there are a thousand questions waiting to be solved – but to give humanity a sense of fulfillment, that is why Theosophy came into the world. We still gather in small groups, but these groups will soon grow larger and larger, and we will one day be able to solve the thousand questions of today.

Who will solve the social question? Those who theorize and debate about it? Never. The theosophical worldview and love will solve it. And truly, as paradoxical as it may sound, humanity will soon no longer even be able to grow potatoes – because the potatoes are already getting worse and worse – it will not even be able to grow potatoes without Theosophy! How can this be explained? Much of what mankind does today is instinctive, based on a certain instinct. However, this instinct must increasingly disappear. Why? Because the time has come for it to become conscious. People will therefore not be able to know agriculture without learning the truths of theosophy about the nature of the earth, the forces at work in it, and so on.

"The third basic power is hope. The human soul must hope, everyone knows that. Unsatisfied and searching, people go around in the world, and all too often one finds people to whom everything seems stale, to whom nothing gives satisfaction, to whom one thing after another slips through their fingers. It is dark around them, without prospect, without hope – so they say.

A great man once said: “Virtue without hope is the greatest crime, eternity without hope is the greatest lie!” And yet the power of hope is written into the soul; it is an ineradicable force that no power will ever be able to wrest from man. But if mankind is deprived of what it needs to climb upwards, the souls that are robbed of it will lose their security, support and stability, and so people will collapse in insecurity, they will be stupid and senseless. The theosophical principles of karma and re-embodiment satisfy the human soul's need for hope. They offer the lasting, that which leads into the future. What is an act, what is a thought, a word, that is thought by man and then torn away? Man and his deeds, man and his thoughts belong together, and it is illogical to regard an evil deed, an insult, for example, as atoned for if the perpetrator has not made amends for it himself. The law of causation speaks here: Man's life is bound to man, and he must go from embodiment to embodiment.

Lessing left behind the book “The Education of the Human Race” as the final result of his entire life. The thought that is the culmination of this work is that man returns again and again. What else have great minds, such geniuses as Lessing, thought of as the doctrine of reincarnation, namely, that the human soul develops further from stage to stage, that it continues to experience that which it has caused, on and on. It will only take a short time before the doctrine of reincarnation and the doctrine of karma will also be recognized in external science. And with that, humanity will receive something again that has been taken away from it by materialistic science: hope.

Why do we understand the essence of past cultural epochs? It is not literature or art history that gives us what the Greeks left behind. Far too little do both bring, it would not even be necessary to know about it. We have the achievements of Greek culture within us simply because we were alive at the time, because we lived through this epoch of culture, and we could not be what we are today if we had not lived through this epoch at that time. Hebbel left behind notes of a thought that he was no longer able to shape dramatically. In a school, a professor was practicing Plato with his students. The reincarnated Plato is among the students and gets one very bad grade after another, even punishments, because he - the Plato - does not understand the Plato! Again, the idea of reincarnation comes from the soul of a genius.

If the fruit of virtue did not depend on man, what would be virtue? How could evil be atoned if man himself did not have to atone for it! Eternity would remain a lie if man himself did not depend on eternity, if it did not concern him. Continuity through incarnations and reincarnations, that is what constitutes hope, and only through this can the hopeless souls, who cannot satisfy their longing for hope, become whole.

The germ of the physical human being was laid on the old Saturn. How so? Spiritually it was laid there, namely in that which should continue: hope. Therefore, the physical body can justifiably be called the body of hope. The characteristic of the physical body is its density. When the waves of the soul's life beat against the human body over and over again and penetrate it more and more, it is permeated by hope, by the certainty that something will develop out of it that lasts forever, that is imperishable. This desire for the satisfaction of hope, for a continuation of life, is a consequence of the soul's power of hope, and it is deprived of nourishment by external science.

Theosophy, its concepts, ideas and perceptions, gives it back to it, and that is the great mission of Theosophy: to make people strong in faith again, happy in love and enduring in hope.

If we take only the truths that Theosophy transmits to us and give them to the soul's power of faith for nourishment, then Manas will arise by itself, the transformation of the astral body into Manas will take place by itself. If we take only the truths and give them to love for nourishment, then buddhi will arise by itself. If we take the theosophical truths and give them to hope for nourishment, then the spirit man, atman, will arise by itself.

That is why theosophy is studied and thought about, not out of scientific curiosity. It is wrong to say out of laziness that one does not need to know all this. For the theosophical truths have been taken from the truth itself, they have been brought down from the great All, they serve the human soul as living nourishment, like bread, like air. If man, if humanity is not to suffocate, if it is to fulfill its mission, this nourishment must be brought to it, and that right now, because it is so extraordinarily necessary. That is the purpose of the theosophical study, and not a thirst for knowledge, not curiosity, or something even worse perhaps.

It was not without purpose that at the end of each of the two public lectures, I emphasised that Theosophy must not be regarded merely as a theory or a science, nor even a specific form of what is usually known as a body of knowledge, but must be something that can be transformed in the soul into actual life, into an elixir of life. What really matters is that we shall not only acquire knowledge through Theosophy but that there shall flow into us, from Theosophy, forces which help us not only in ordinary physical existence but through the whole compass of life—which includes physical existence and the discarnate condition between death and a new birth. The more we feel that Theosophy bestows upon us forces whereby life itself is strengthened and enriched, the more truly we understand it. When such a statement is made, people may ask: If Theosophy is to be a power that strengthens and infuses vigour into life, why is it necessary to absorb all this apparently theoretical knowledge? Why must we be troubled in our group-meetings with details about the preceding planetary embodiments of the Earth? Why is it necessary to learn about things that happen in remote ages of the past? Why are we also expected to familiarise ourselves with the more intimate, intangible laws of reincarnation, karma and so forth? ... Many people may think that Theosophy is just another kind of science, on a par with the many sciences existing in outer, physical life.

Now in matters of this kind, all considerations of convenience in life must be put aside; there must be scrupulous self-examination as to whether or not such questions are tainted by that habitual slackness in life which may all too justly be expressed by saying: Man is fundamentally unwilling to learn, unwilling to take hold of the Spiritual because this is inconvenient for him. We must ask ourselves: Does not something of this fear of inconvenience and discomfort creep into such questions? Let us admit that we really do begin by thinking that there is an easier path to Theosophy than all that is presented, for example, in our literature! It is often said light-heartedly that, after all, a man need only know himself, need only try to be a good and righteous human being—and then he is a sufficiently good Theosophist. Yes, my dear friends, but precisely this gives us the deeper knowledge that there is nothing more difficult than to be a good man in the real sense and that nothing needs so much preparation as the attainment of this ideal.

As to the question concerning Self-Knowledge—that can certainly not be answered in a moment, as so many people would like to think. Today, therefore, we will consider certain questions which are often expressed in the way indicated above. We will think of how Theosophy comes to us, seemingly, as a body of teaching, a science, although in essence it brings self-knowledge and the aspiration to become good and righteous men. And to this end it is important to study, from different points of view, how Theosophy can flow into life.

From among many pressing questions, let us take one in particular.—I am not referring to anything in the domain of science but to a question arising in everyday existence, namely, that of consolation for suffering, for lack of satisfaction in life. How, for example, can Theosophy bring consolation to people in distress, when they need consolation? Every individual must of course apply to his particular case what may be said about such matters. In addressing a number of people one can only speak in a general sense.

Why do we need consolation in life? Because something may distress us, because we have to suffer, to undergo painful experiences. Now it is natural for a man to feel that something in him rebels against this suffering. He asks: “Why have I to bear it, why has it fallen to my lot? Could not my life have been without pain, could it not have brought me contentment?” A man who puts the question in this way can only find an answer when he understands the nature of human karma, of human destiny. Why do we suffer? And here I am referring not only to outer suffering but also to inner suffering due to a sense of failure to do ourselves justice or find our proper bearings in life. That is what I mean by inner suffering. Why does life bring so much that leaves us unsatisfied?

Study of the laws of karma will make it clear to us that something underlies our sufferings, something that can be elucidated by an example drawn from ordinary life between birth and death.—I have given this example more than once. Suppose a young man has lived up to the age of 18 or so, entirely on his father; his life has been happy and carefree; he has had everything he wanted. Then the father loses his fortune, becomes bankrupt, and the youth is obliged to set about learning something, to exert himself. Life brings him many sufferings and deprivations. It is readily understandable that the sufferings are not at all to his liking. But now think of him at the age of 50. Because circumstances obliged him to learn something in his youth, he has turned into a decent, self-respecting human being. He has found his feet in life and can say to himself: “My attitude to the sufferings and deprivations was natural at that time; but now I think quite differently about them; I realise now that the sufferings would not have come to me if in those days I had possessed all the virtues—even the very limited virtues of a boy of 18. If no suffering had come my way I should have remained a good-for-nothing. It was the suffering that changed the imperfections into something more perfect. It is due to the suffering that I am not the same human being I was forty years ago. What was it, then, that came together within me at that time? My own imperfections and my suffering ... and my imperfections sought out the suffering in order that they might be expunged and greater perfection attained.”

This attitude can, after all, arise from quite an ordinary view of life between birth and death. And if we think deeply about life as a whole, facing our karma in the way indicated in the lecture yesterday, we shall finally be convinced that the sufferings along our path are sought out by our own imperfections. The vast majority of sufferings are, indeed, sought out by the imperfections we have brought with us from earlier incarnations. And because of these imperfections, a wiser being within us seeks for the path leading to the sufferings. For it is a golden rule in life that as human beings we have perpetually within us a being who is much wiser, much cleverer than we. The “I” of ordinary life has far less wisdom and if faced with the alternative of seeking either pain or happiness, would certainly choose the path to happiness. The wiser being operates in depths of the subconscious life to which ordinary consciousness does not extend. This wiser being diverts our gaze from the path to superficial happiness and kindles within us a magic power which, without our conscious knowledge, leads us towards the suffering. But what does this mean—“without our conscious knowledge?” It means that the wiser being is gaining greater mastery and this wiser being invariably acts within us in such a way as to guide our imperfections to our sufferings, allowing us to suffer because every outer and inner suffering expunges some imperfection and leads to greater perfection.

We may be willing to accept such principles in theory, but that, after all, is not of much account. A great deal is achieved, however, if in certain solemn and dedicated moments of life we try strenuously to make such principles the very life-blood of the soul. In the hurry and bustle, the work and the duties of ordinary life, this is not always possible; under these circumstances we cannot always oust the being of lesser wisdom—who is, after all, part of us. But in certain deliberately chosen moments, however short they may be, we shall be able to say to ourselves: I will turn away from the hubbub of outer life and view my sufferings in such a way that I realise how the wiser being within me has been drawn to them by a magic power, how I imposed upon myself certain pain without which I should not have overcome this or that imperfection.—A feeling of the peace inherent in wisdom will then arise, bringing the realisation that even where the world seems full of suffering, there too it is full of wisdom! This is something that Theosophy has achieved for life. We may forget it again in the affairs of external life, but if we do not forget it altogether and repeat the exercise steadfastly, we shall find that a kind of seed has been laid in the soul and that many a darkling mood of distress or weakness will change into brightness, into a sense of vigour and strength. And then we shall have acquired from such moments, greater harmony and energy in the life of soul.

Then we may pass on to something else ... but the Theosophist should make it a rule to devote himself to these other thoughts only when the attitude towards suffering has become alive within him. We may turn, then, to think about the happiness and joys of life. A man who adopts towards his destiny the attitude that he himself has willed his sufferings, will have a strange experience when he comes to think about his joy and happiness. It is not as easy for him here, as in the case of his sufferings. It is easy, after all, to find the consolation for suffering, and anyone who feels doubtful has only to persevere; but it will be difficult to find the right attitude to happiness and joy. However strongly a man may bring himself to feel that he has willed his suffering—when he applies this mood-of-soul to his happiness and joy, he will not be able to avoid a sense of shame; he will have a thorough sense of shame. And he can only rid himself of this feeling of shame by saying to himself: “No, I have not earned my joy and happiness through my own karma!” This alone will put matters right, for otherwise the shame may be so intense that it becomes sheerly destructive in the soul. The only salvation is not to attribute our joys to the wiser being within us. This thought will convince us that we are on the right road, because the feeling of shame passes away. It is really so: happiness and joy in life are bestowed by the wise guidance of worlds without our assistance, as something we must receive as Grace, recognising always that the purpose is to give us our place in the totality of existence. Joy and happiness should so work upon us in the secluded moments of life that we feel them as Grace, Grace bestowed by the supreme Powers of the world who want to receive us into themselves.

Whereas through pain and suffering we are thrown back upon ourselves, brought nearer to perfection, through happiness and joy we have the feeling of peaceful security in the arms of the Divine Powers of the world, and the only worthy attitude is one of thankfulness. Nobody who in quiet hours of self-contemplation ascribes happiness and joy to his own karma, will unfold the right attitude to such experiences. If he ascribes joy and happiness to his karma, he is succumbing to a fallacy whereby the Spiritual within him is weakened and paralysed; the slightest thought that happiness or delight have been deserved, weakens and cripples us inwardly. These words may seem harsh, for many a man, when he attributes suffering to his own will and individuality, will resolve to be master of himself, too, in experiences of happiness and joy. But even a cursory glance at life will indicate that by their very nature, joy and happiness tend to obliterate something in us. This weakening effect of delights and joys in life is graphically described by the lines in Faust: “And so from longing to delight I reel; and even in delight I pine for longing.” Anybody who gives a single thought to the influence of joy, taken in the personal sense, will realise that there is something in joy which tends to produce a kind of intoxication in life and obliterates the Self.

This is not meant to be a sermon against joy or a suggestion that it would be good to torture ourselves with red-hot pincers or something of the kind. Indeed it is not so! To recognise something for what it truly is, does not mean that we must flee from it. It is not a question of fleeing from joy, but of receiving it calmly and tranquilly whenever and in whatever form it comes to us; we must learn to feel it as Grace and the more we do so, the better, for thereby we enter more deeply into the Divine. These words are spoken, then, not in order to preach asceticism but to awaken the right attitude of soul to happiness and joy.

If anyone were to say: Joy and happiness have a weakening, deadening effect, therefore I will flee from them (which is the attitude of false asceticism and forms of self-torture)—such a man would be fleeing from the Grace bestowed upon him by the Gods. And in truth the self-torture practised by the ascetics and monks in olden days was a form of resistance against the Gods. We must learn to regard suffering as something brought by our karma and to feel happiness as Grace breathed down to us by the Divine. Joy and happiness should be to us the sign of how closely the Gods have drawn us to themselves; suffering and pain should be the sign of how remote we are from the goal before us as intelligent human beings. Such is the true attitude to karma and without it we shall make no real progress in life. Whenever the world vouchsafes to us the good and the beautiful, we must feel that behind this world stand those Powers of whom the Bible says: “And they saw that it [the world] was good.” But in our experiences of pain and suffering we must recognise what, in the course of incarnations, man has made of the world which in the beginning was good and what he must amend by educating himself to resolute endurance of these sufferings.

I have been speaking merely of two ways of accepting karma. From one aspect, our karma consists of suffering and happiness; and we accept our karma with the right kind of will—as if we ourselves have willed it—when we adopt the true attitude to the suffering and the happiness that come our way. But we can do still more.—And this will be the theme of the lectures today and tomorrow.

Karma does not reveal itself only in the form of experiences of suffering or joy. As our life runs its course we encounter—in a way that can only be regarded as karmic—many human beings with whom, for example, we make a fleeting acquaintance, others who as relatives or close friends are connected with us for a considerable period of our life. We meet human beings who in our dealings with them bring sufferings and hindrances along our path; or again we meet others who give us the greatest help. The relationships are manifold. We must regard these circumstances too as having been brought about by the will of the wiser being within us the will, for example, to meet a human being who seems to run across our path accidentally and with whom we have something to adjust or settle in life. What is it that makes the wiser being in us wish to meet this particular person? The only intelligent line of thought is that we want to come across him because we have done so before in an earlier life and our relationship had already then begun. Nor need the beginning have been in the immediately preceding life—it may have been very much earlier. Because in a past life we have had dealings of some kind with this man, because we may have been in some way indebted to him, we are led to him again by the wiser being within us, as it were by magic. Here, of course, we enter a many-sided and extremely complicated domain, of which it is only possible to speak in general terms. But all the indications here given are the actual results of clairvoyant investigation. The indications will be useful to every individual because he will be able to particularise and apply what is said to his own life.—A remarkable fact comes to light. About the middle of life the ascending curve passes over into the descending curve. This is the time when the forces of youth are spent and we pass over a certain zenith to the descending curve. This point of time—which occurs in the thirties—cannot be laid down with absolute finality, but the principle holds good for everyone. It is the period of life when we live most intensely on the physical plane. In this connection we may easily be deluded. It will be clear that life as it was before this point of time has been a process of bringing out what we have brought with us into the present incarnation. This process has been going on since childhood, although it is less marked as the years go by. We have chiseled out our life, have been nourished as it were by the forces brought from the spiritual world. These forces, however, are spent by the point of time indicated above. Observation of the descending line of life reveals that we now proceed to harvest and work over what has been learned in the school of life, in order to carry it with us into the next incarnation. This is something we take into the spiritual world; in the earlier period we were taking something from the spiritual world. It is in the middle period that we are most deeply involved in the physical world, most engrossed in the affairs of outer life. We have passed through our apprenticeship as it were and are in direct contact with the world; we have our life in our own hands. At this period we are taken up with ourselves, concerned more closely than at any other time with our own external affairs and with our relation to the outer world. But this relation to the world is created by the intellect and the impulses of will which derive from the intellect—in other words, those elements of our being which are most alien to the spiritual worlds, to which the spiritual worlds remain closed. In the middle of life we are, as it were, farthest away from the Spiritual.

A certain striking fact presents itself to occult research. Investigation of the kind of encounters and acquaintanceships with other human beings that arise in the middle of life shows, curiously, that these are the persons with whom, in the previous or in a still earlier incarnation, a man was together at the beginning of his life, in his very earliest childhood. The fact has emerged that in the middle of life—as a rule it is so, but not always—a man encounters, through circumstances of external karma, those persons who in an earlier life were his parents; it is very rarely indeed that we are brought together in earliest childhood with those who were previously our parents; we meet them in the middle period of life. This certainly seems strange, but it is the case, and a very great deal is gained for life if we will only try to put such a general rule to the test and adjust our thoughts accordingly. When a human being—let us say, about the age of 30—enters into some relationship with another ... perhaps he falls in love, makes great friends, quarrels, or has some different kind of contact, a great deal will become comprehensible if, quite tentatively to begin with, he thinks about the possibility of the relationship to this person once having been that of child and parent. Conversely, this very remarkable fact comes to light.—Those human beings with whom we were together in earliest childhood—parents, brothers and sisters, playmates or others around us during early childhood—they, as a rule, are persons with whom in a previous incarnation we formed some kind of acquaintanceship when we were about 30 or so; in very many cases it is found that these persons are our parents or brothers and sisters in the present incarnation. Curious as this may seem, let us only try to see how the principle squares with our own life and we shall discover how much more understandable many things become. Even if the facts are otherwise, an experimental mistake will not amount to anything very serious. Contemplation of life during hours of quiet seclusion infuses it with meaning and brings rich reward; but no attempt must ever be made to arrange life according to our own predilections. We must not deliberately go in search of people who may happen to be congenial to us, whom we should have welcomed as parents. Preconceptions and predilections must never be allowed to give rise to illusions. You will realise that a real danger lies here. Countless preconceptions lurk within us but in these difficult matters it is a very healthy exercise to try to get rid of them.

You may ask me: What is there to be said about the descending curve of life? The striking fact has emerged that at the beginning of life we meet those human beings with whom in a previous incarnation we were connected in the middle period of life; further, that in the middle of the present life, we revive acquaintanceships which existed at the beginning of a preceding life. And now, what of the descending curve of life? During that period we are led to persons who may also, possibly, have had something to do with us in an earlier incarnation. They may, in that earlier incarnation, have played a part in happenings of the kind that so frequently occur at a decisive point in life—let us say, trials and sufferings caused by bitter disillusionments. In the second half of life we may again be brought into contact with persons who in some way or other were already connected with us; this meeting brings about a shifting of circumstances and much that was set in motion in the earlier life is cleared up and settled. These things are diverse and complex and indicate that we should not adhere rigidly to any hard and fast pattern. This much, however, may be said.—The nature of the karma that has been woven with those who come across our path especially in the second half of life, is such that it cannot be absolved in one life. Suppose, for example, we have caused suffering to a human being in one life; the thought may come easily that in a subsequent life we shall be led to this person by the “wiser being” within us, so that we may make amends for what we have done to him. The circumstances of life, however, may not enable compensation to be made for everything—but often only for a part. This necessitates the operation of complicated factors which enable such surviving remnants of karma to be adjusted and settled during the second half of life.

This conception of karma can shed light upon our dealings and companionship with other human beings. But there is still something else in the course of our karma to consider—something that in the two public lectures was referred to as the process of ripening, the acquisition of a real knowledge of life (if the phrase does not promote arrogance, it may be used). It is well to consider how we grow wiser. We can become wiser through our faults and mistakes and this is something for which we can only be thankful. In one and the same life it is not often that we have the opportunity of applying the wisdom gained from our mistakes and it therefore remains with us as potential power for a later life. But the wisdom, the real knowledge of life that we may acquire—what is it, in reality? I said yesterday that we cannot carry our thoughts and ideas directly with us from one life into the other; I said that Plato himself could not have taken his ideas directly with him into a later incarnation. What we carry over with us takes the form of will, of feeling, and in reality our thoughts and ideas, just like our mother-tongue, come as something new in each life. For most of the thoughts and ideas are contained in the mother-tongue, whence we acquire them. This life between birth and death yields us thoughts and ideas which really always originate from that same incarnation. Yes, but if this is so, we shall have to say to ourselves that it depends upon our karma!—However many incarnations we pass through, the ideas that arise in us are always dependent upon the one incarnation as apart from the others. Whatever wisdom may be living in your thoughts and ideas has been absorbed from outside, it is dependent upon your karma. Very much lies in these words for they indicate that whatever we may know in life, whatever knowledge we may amass, is something entirely personal, that we can never transcend the personal by means of what we acquire for ourselves in life. In ordinary life we never reach the level of the “wiser being” but always remain at that of the less wise. Anyone who flatters himself that he can learn more of his higher Self from what he acquires in the world, is harbouring an illusion for the sake of convenience. This actually means that we can gain no knowledge of our higher Self from what we acquire in life. Very well, then, how are we to attain any knowledge of the higher Self? We must ask ourselves quite frankly: To what does our knowledge really amount? It amounts to what we have acquired from experience—that and nothing more, to begin with. A man who aspires to Self-Knowledge without realising that his soul is only a mirror in which the outer world is reflected, may persuade himself that by penetrating within his own being he can find the higher Self; certainly he will find something, but it is only what has come into him from outside. Along this cheap, easygoing path no headway can be made. Rather we must ask about those other worlds where in truth the higher Self abides and the only available teachings here are those contained in Theosophy, for example, concerning the different incarnations of the Earth and the like. Just as we inquire about the environment of a child, about what is around the child, we must ask the same questions concerning the higher Self. Theosophy teaches us of the worlds to which the higher Self belongs, through telling us of Saturn and its secrets, of the Moon, of the evolution of the Earth, of Reincarnation and Karma, of Devachan, Kamaloca and so forth. By such teachings alone we can learn about the higher Self, about the Self which transcends the physical plane. And anyone who refuses to study these secrets is merely pandering to his own ease. For such a soul is always whispering: “Look within yourself—there you will find the Divine Man.” And what does such a man find? In reality nothing but experiences which have been gleaned from the outer world and then deposited within him! We find the Divine Man only when we seek for what is mirrored into this earthly world from realms outside and beyond it. Things which may sometimes be difficult and uncomfortable—they are true Self-Knowledge, true Theosophy! From Theosophy we receive illumination concerning the Self—our own higher Self. For where, in reality, is the Self? Is the Self within our skin? No, the Self is out-poured over the world; everything that is and has been in the world is part and parcel of the Self. We learn to know the Self only when we learn to know the world.

These apparent theories are, in truth, the ways to Self-Knowledge! A man who thinks he can find the Self by delving into his inner life and anchoring there, whispers to himself: “You must be a good and righteous man, you must be selfless!” ...Well and good, but it is often very obvious that such a man is becoming more and more egotistical. On the other hand, a man who wrestles with the great secrets of existence, who tears himself away from the wheedlings of the personal self and rises to what abides and can be found in the higher worlds—such a man is led to the true Self-Knowledge. When we think deeply about Saturn, Sun, Moon, we lose ourselves in cosmic Thought.—“Cosmic thoughts are living in thy thinking”—so says a soul who thinks in the sense of Theosophy; and he adds: “Lose thyself in cosmic thoughts.” The soul in whom Theosophy has become creative power, says: “In thy feeling, cosmic powers are weaving”—adding: “Experience thyself through cosmic powers.” ... not through powers which wheedle and cajole. This experience will not come to a man who closes his eyes, saying: “I want to be good and righteous.” It will come only to the man who opens his eyes of Spirit and sees the Powers of yonder worlds mightily at work, realising that he is embedded in these cosmic Powers. And the soul who gathers strength from Theosophy says: “In thy willing, cosmic Beings work,” adding: “Create thyself anew from powers of will!” In a man who has this conception of Self-Knowledge, transformation is wrought—through the might of cosmic realities.

Dry and abstract as this may seem, in truth it is no theory but something that thrives and grows like a seed of corn sown in the Earth. Forces shoot out in every direction and become plant or tree. So indeed it is. The feelings that come to us in Spiritual Science give us the power to create ourselves anew. “Create thyself anew from power of will!” Thus does Theosophy become the elixir of life and our gaze extends over the worlds of Spirit; forces pour into us from these worlds; we receive their forces and know ourselves, then, in all the depths of our being. Not until we bear World-Knowledge within us can we pass, step by step, away from the being of lesser wisdom within us, the being who is separated from the Guardian of the Threshold, to the “wiser being.” We penetrate through all that is concealed from one who does not yet desire the real strength but to which he can be led through Theosophy.

There was one point in the lecture yesterday upon which I should not like misunderstanding to arise, but a conversation I had today indicated that this might be possible. It is, of course, difficult to formulate in words, matters connected with the more intimate workings of karma and one point or another may well not be quite clear at the first time of hearing. In the lecture yesterday it was said that we have to regard our sufferings as having been sought out by the “wiser being” within us in order that certain imperfections may be overcome, and that by bearing these sufferings calmly we may make progress along our path. That, however, was not the point on which misunderstanding might occur.—It was the other point, namely, that happiness and joy must not be regarded as due to our own merit or individual karma, but deemed a kind of Grace whereby we are interwoven with the all-prevailing Spirit. Please do not think that the emphasis here lies in the fact that joy comes to us as a mark of favour from the Divine-Spiritual Powers; the emphasis lies in the fact that these experiences are made possible through Grace. That is what our attitude must be if we are to reach a true understanding of our karma. Happiness and joy are acts of Grace. A man who imagines that the happiness and joy in his karma indicate a desire on the part of the Gods to single him out and place him above others, will never achieve this goal. We must never imagine that happiness is vouchsafed as a mark of favour or distinction but rather as a reason for feeling that we have been recipients of the Grace out-poured by the Divine-Spiritual Beings. It is this realisation of Grace which makes progress possible; the other attitude would throw us back in our development. Nobody should ever believe that joy comes to him because of special merit in his karma; far rather he should believe that joy comes to him without such merit. Joy and happiness should move us to deeds of compassion and mercy—which we shall perform more effectively than if we are suffering the pangs of sorrow. The realisation that we must make ourselves worthy of Grace—that is what brings us forward. There is no justification for the very prevalent view that one whose life abounds with happiness, has deserved it. This is the very attitude that must be avoided. Please, then, take this as an indication, in order that no misunderstanding may arise.

Today we will amplify our study of karma and of certain experiences in the world, to the end that Spiritual Science may become a real life-force within us. Observation of life and its happenings will reveal, to begin with, experiences of two kinds. On the one hand we shall say to ourselves: “Yes, there a misfortune befell me, but thinking about this misfortune, I can see that it would not have come my way if I had not been careless or negligent.” This realisation, however, will not always be within the power of the ordinary consciousness; many a time we shall find it impossible to see any connection between the misfortune and the circumstances of our present life. With respect to much that befalls us, ordinary consciousness can only conclude that it was pure chance, unconnected with anything else. It will also be possible to make this distinction in respect of undertakings which may either be successful or the reverse. In many cases we shall realise that failure was inevitable because of laziness, inattentiveness, or something of the kind, on our part; but in many others we shall be quite unable to discover any connection. It is a useful exercise to take stock of our own experiences and distinguish between things which have failed through no fault of our own, and others where we shall ask with surprise: How could they possibly have succeeded?

We will try to get to the bottom of all these matters, and of events which, on the face of them, seem to be pure chance, without apparent cause. We shall therefore be considering fortuitous events and achievements seemingly unrelated to our actual faculties.

We will proceed in rather a curious way.—As an experiment, we will imagine that we ourselves have willed whatever may have happened to us. Suppose a loose tile from the roof of a house once crashed down upon us. We will picture, purely by way of experiment, that this did not happen by chance, and we will deliberately work on the idea that we ourselves climbed on that roof, loosened the tile and then ran down so quickly that we arrived simultaneously at the same spot as the falling tile! Again we will imagine that we ourselves have been responsible, deliberately responsible, for contracting, say, a chill for which there has been no perceptible cause ... rather like the case of the unfortunate lady who, being discontented with her lot, deliberately provoked a chill and died of it! In this way, therefore, we imagine that things otherwise attributable to chance have been deliberately and carefully planned by ourselves. And we will also apply the same procedure to matters which are obviously dependent upon the faculties and qualities we happen to possess. If, for example, we have missed a train we particularly wanted to catch, we shall not blame external circumstances but picture to ourselves that it was due to our own slackness. If we think this out by way of experiment, we shall gradually succeed in creating a kind of being in imagination—a very curious being, who was responsible for all these things, for a stone having crashed upon us, for some illness, and so forth. We shall realise, of course, that this being is not we ourselves; we simply picture such a being vividly and distinctly. And then a strange experience will be associated with this being. We shall realise that he is a creation of pure phantasy, but that we cannot liberate ourselves from him or from the thought of him—and strange to say, he does not remain as he was; although he becomes alive in us, changes his nature in us, nevertheless the impression is that he is actually present. More and more the certainty arises that we ourselves have had something to do with the things thus built up in imagination. There is no suggestion whatever that we once actually did them; but such thoughts do, nevertheless, correspond, in a certain way with something we ourselves have done. We shall say to ourselves: “I have done this or that and I am having now, for some reason or other, to suffer the consequences.” This is a very good exercise for unfolding in the life of feeling a kind of memory of earlier incarnations. The soul seems to feel: I myself was there and prepared these things myself.

You will readily understand that it is not easy to awaken remembrance of previous incarnations. For just think what mental effort is required to recall something even recently forgotten; genuine mental effort is required. Experiences which occurred in earlier incarnations have passed into the depths of forgetfulness and a great deal must come to the assistance of memory, if they are to be recollected! One exercise has now been described. Besides what was said in the public lectures, let it be added here that a man will notice this kind of memory arising in his life of feeling: in former time, you yourself made preparation for this or that! The principles indicated should not be ignored for if we obey them we shall find that more and more light will be shed upon life and that strength will constantly increase. Once the feeling has arisen that we ourselves were present, with our own acts, we shall have quite a different attitude to events confronting us in the future; our whole life of feeling will be transformed. Whereas formerly we may have felt anxiety or fear when something has happened to us, we now have a kind of inner remembrance. When something comes as a shock, our feeling tells us that it is for a purpose. And that is a kind of remembrance of an earlier incarnation! Life becomes much more tranquil, more intelligible, and that is what men need—not only those who are filled with the longing for Theosophy, but those too who stand outside. There is no sort of validity in the question people so often ask: How can earlier incarnations matter, since we do not remember them? The right attitude towards earthly existence will certainly awaken remembrance, only it is a memory belonging to the heart, to the life of feeling, that must be developed—not the kind of memory that is composed of thoughts and concepts.

I considered it important, during this particular visit, to bring home to you how much can be put into practical application and how Theosophy can become actual experience in those who pursue it actively.

Now besides what accrued in earlier incarnations, other factors too are of importance in a man's karma. For life also continues between death and a new birth and is, moreover, fraught with happenings and experiences during that period; the consequences of these experiences in the spiritual world appear in our earthly life—but in a peculiar form which often makes us inclined to attribute such occurrences to chance. Nevertheless they can be traced to significant experiences in the spiritual world.

I want to speak to you today of something which may seem remote from the first part of the lecture. But you will see that it is important for every human being and that seemingly chance occurrences may be deeply indicative of mysterious connecting-threads in life.

I am now going to speak of an historical fact that is not preserved in history books but in the Akasha Chronicle. To begin with I remind you that the souls of all of us have been incarnated many times in earthly bodies, among the most diverse conditions of life, in ancient India, Persia, Egypt and Greece; again and again our eyes have looked out upon different environments and conditions of existence and there is purpose and meaning in the fact that we pass through one incarnation after another. Our present life could not be as it is if we had not lived through these other conditions. A strange experience fell to the lot of men living in the thirteenth century of our era, for very exceptional conditions broke in upon humanity at that time—roughly speaking not quite 700 years ago. Conditions were such that the souls of men were completely shut off from the spiritual world; spiritual darkness prevailed and it was impossible even for highly developed individuals to achieve direct contact with the spiritual world. In the thirteenth century, even those who in earlier incarnations had been Initiates were unable to look into the spiritual world. The gates of the spiritual world were closed for a certain period during that century and although men who in former times had received Initiation were able to call up remembrances of their earlier incarnations, in the thirteenth century they could not themselves gaze into the spiritual worlds. It was necessary for men to live through that condition of darkness, to find the gates to the spiritual world closed against them. Men of high spiritual development were, of course, also in incarnation at that time, but they too were obliged to experience the condition of darkness. When about the middle of the thirteenth century, the darkness lifted, strange happenings transpired at a certain place in Europe—the name cannot now be given but sometime it may be possible to communicate it in a Group lecture. Twelve men in Europe of great and outstanding wisdom, whose spiritual development had taken an unusual course, emerged from the condition of twilight that had obscured clairvoyant vision. Of these twelve wise men, seven, to begin with, must be distinguished. Remembrance of their earlier Initiations had remained in these seven men, and this remembrance, together with the knowledge still surviving was such that the seven men recapitulated in themselves conditions they had once lived through in the period following the Atlantean catastrophe—the ancient Indian epoch of culture. The teachings given by the seven holy Rishis of India had come to life again in the souls of these seven wise men of Europe; seven rays of the ancient wisdom of the sacred Atlantean culture shone forth in the hearts of these seven men who through the operations of world-karma had gathered at a certain place in Europe in the thirteenth century and had found one another again. To these seven came four others. In the soul of the first of these four, the wisdom belonging to the ancient Indian culture shone forth—he was the eighth among the twelve. The wisdom of the ancient Persian culture lived in the soul of the ninth; the wisdom of the third period—that of Egyptian-Chaldean culture—lived in the soul of the tenth, and the wisdom of Graeco-Latin culture in the soul of the eleventh. The wisdom of culture as it was in that particular age—the contemporary wisdom—lived in the soul of the twelfth. In these twelve men who came together to perform a special mission, the twelve different streams in the spiritual development of mankind were represented. The fact that all true religions and all true philosophies belong to twelve basic types is in itself a mystery. Buddhism, Brahmanism, Vedanta philosophy, materialism, or whatever it be—all of them can be traced to the twelve basic types; it is only a matter of setting to work with precision and accuracy. And so all the different streams of man's spiritual life—the religions, the philosophies and conceptions of the world spread over the Earth—were united in that “College” of the Twelve.

After the period of darkness had passed and spiritual achievement was possible again, a Thirteenth came, in remarkable circumstances, to the Twelve. I am telling you now of one of those events which transpire secretly in the evolution of mankind once and once only. They cannot occur a second time and are mentioned not as a hint that efforts should be made to repeat them but for quite other reasons. When the darkness had lifted and it was possible again to unfold clairvoyant vision, the coming of the Thirteenth was announced in a mysterious way to the twelve wise men. They knew: a child with significant and remarkable incarnations behind him is now to be born. They knew that one of his incarnations had been at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. It was known, therefore, that one who had been a contemporary of the Events in Palestine was returning.—the birth of the child in these unusual circumstances during the thirteenth century could not have been said to be that of an individuality of renown.—In speaking of previous lives there is a deplorable and only too widespread tendency to go back to important historical personages. I have come across all kinds of people who believe that they were incarnated as some historical personage or figure in the Gospels. Only recently a lady informed me that she had been Mary Magdalene and I could only reply that she was the twenty-fourth Mary Magdalene I had met during my life! In these matters the most scrupulous care must be taken to prevent fantastic notions arising.

History tells us very little about the incarnations of the Thirteenth. He was born many times, with great and profound qualities of heart. It was known that this Individuality was to be born again as a child and that he was destined for a very special mission. This knowledge was revealed to the twelve seers who took the child entirely into their charge and were able to arrange that from the very beginning he was shut off from the outside world. He was removed from his family and cared for by these twelve men. Guided by their clairvoyance, they reared the child with every care, in such a way that all the forces acquired from previous incarnations were able to unfold in him. A kind of intuitive perception of this occurrence has arisen in men who know something of the history of spiritual life. Goethe's poem Die Geheimnisse has been recited to us many times. Out of a deep, intuitive perception, Goethe speaks in that poem of the College of the Twelve and has been able to convey to us the mood of heart and feeling in which they lived. The Thirteenth is not “Brother Mark,” but the child of whom I have been telling you and who almost immediately after his birth was taken into the care of the Twelve and brought up by them until the age of early manhood. The child developed in a strange and remarkable way. The Twelve were not in any sense fanatics; they were full of inner composure, enlightenment and peacefulness of heart. How does a fanatic behave? He wants to convert people as quickly as possible—while they, as a rule, do not want to be converted. Everybody is expected immediately to believe what the fanatic wants them to believe and he is angry when this does not happen. In our day, when someone sets out to expound a particular subject, people simply do not believe that his aim may be not to voice his own views but something quite different, namely, the thoughts and opinions of the one of whom he is writing. For many years I was held to be a follower of Nietzsche because I once wrote an absolutely objective book about him. People simply cannot understand that the aim of a writer may be to give an objective exposition. They think that everyone must be a fanatic on the subject of which he happens to be speaking!

The Twelve in the thirteenth century were far from being fanatics; they were very sparing with teaching clothed in words but because they lived in communion with the boy, twelve rays of light as it were went out of them into him and were resolved, in his soul, into one great harmony. It would not have been possible to give him any kind of academic examination; nevertheless there lived within him, transmuted into feeling and sensitive perception, all that the twelve representatives of the twelve different types of religion poured into his soul. His whole soul echoed back the harmony of the twelve different forms of belief spread over the Earth. In this way the soul of the boy had very much to bear and worked in a strange way upon the body. And it is precisely for this reason that the process of which I am telling you now may not be repeated: it could only be enacted at that particular time. Strangely enough, as the harmony within the boy's soul increased, the more delicate his body became—more and more delicate, until at a certain age of life it was transparent in every limb. The boy ate less and less until finally he took no nourishment at all. Then he lay for days in a condition of complete torpor: the soul had left the body, but returned after a few days. The youth was now inwardly quite changed. The twelve different rays of the mind of humanity were united in a single radiance and he gave utterance to the greatest, most wonderful secrets; he did not repeat what the first, or the second, or the third had said, but gave forth in a new and wonderful synthesis, all that they would have said had they spoken in unison; all the knowledge they possessed was gathered into one whole and when voiced by the Thirteenth this new wisdom seemed actually to have come to birth in him. It was as though a higher Spirit were speaking in him. Something entirely and essentially new was thus imparted to the twelve wise men. Wisdom in abundance was imparted to them, and to each individually, greater illumination of what had been known to him hitherto.

I have been describing to you the first School of Christian Rosenkreutz, for the Thirteenth is the Individuality known to us by that name. In that incarnation he died after only a brief earthly existence; in the fourteenth century he was born again and lived, then, for more than a hundred years. Thus in the thirteenth century his life was brief, in the fourteenth century, very long. During the first half of this later incarnation he went on great journeys in search of the different centres of culture in Europe, Africa and Asia, in order to gather knowledge of what had come to life in him during the previous century; then he returned to Europe. A few of those who had brought him up in the thirteenth century were again in incarnation and were joined by others. This was the time of the inauguration of the Rosicrucian stream of spiritual life. And Christian Rosenkreutz himself incarnated again and again.

To this very day he is at work—during the brief intervals, too, when he is not actually in incarnation; through his higher bodies he then works spiritually into human beings, without the need of spatial contact. We must try to picture the mysterious way in which his influence operates.

And here I want to begin by giving a certain example. Those who participate consciously in the happenings of the occult, spiritual life outspread around us, had a strange experience from the 'eighties on into the 'nineties of last century; one became aware of certain influences which emanated from a remarkable personality (I am only mentioning one case among many). There was, however, something not quite harmonious about these influences. Anyone who is sensitive to influences from contemporaries living far away in space would, at that time, have been aware of a certain radiance emanating from a certain personality, but a radiance not altogether harmonious. When the new century had dawned, however, these influences resolved into harmony. What had happened? I will now explain it to you.

On 12th August, in the year 1900, Solowioff had died—a man far too little appreciated or understood. The influences of his ether-body radiated far and wide, but although Solowioff was a great philosopher, in his case the development of the soul was in advance of that of the head, the intellect; he was a great and splendid thinker but his conscious philosophy was of far less importance and value than what he bore within his soul: to the very time of his death the head was a factor of hindrance and so, as an occult influence, a lack of harmony was perceptible. When Solowioff was dead and the ether-body, separated from the head was able to radiate more freely in the ether-world, when he was liberated from the restrictions caused by his own thinking, the rays of his influence shone out with wonderful brilliance and power.

People may ask: How can such knowledge really concern us? This very question is illusion, for the human being is through and through a product of the spiritual processes around him; and when certain occultists become aware of the reality of these processes, that is because they actually see them. But spiritual processes operate, too, in others who do not see.—Everything in the spiritual world is interconnected. Whatever influence may radiate from a highly developed Frenchman or Russian is felt not only on their own native soil, but their thought and influence has an effect over the whole Earth. Everything that comes to pass in the spiritual world has an influence upon us and only when we realise that the soul lives in the spiritual world just as the lung within the air, shall we have the right attitude!

The forces in the ether-bodies of highly developed Individualities stream out and have a potent effect upon other human beings. The ether-body of Christian Rosenkreutz, too, works far and wide into the world. And reference must here be made to a fact that is of the greatest significance in many human lives; it is something that transpires in the spiritual world between death and a new birth and is not to be ascribed to “chance.”

Christian Rosenkreutz has always made use of the short intervals of time between his incarnations to call into his particular stream of spiritual life those souls whom he knows to be ripe; between his deaths and births he has concerned himself, as it were, with choosing out those who are ready to enter his stream. But human beings themselves, by learning to be attentive, must be able to recognise by what means Christian Rosenkreutz gives them a sign that they may count themselves among his chosen. This sign has been given in the lives of very many human beings of the present time, but they pay no heed to it. Yet among the apparently “chance” happenings in a man's life there may be such a sign—it is to be regarded as an indication that between death and a new birth Christian Rosenkreutz has found him mature and ready; the sign is, however, given by Christian Rosenkreutz on the physical plane. This event may be called the mark of Christian Rosenkreutz. Let us suppose that a man is lying in bed ... in other places I have mentioned different forms of such a happening but all of them have occurred ... for some unaccountable reason he suddenly wakes up and as though guided by instinct looks at a wall otherwise quite dark; in the half-light of the room. He sees, written on the wall: “Get up now, this minute!” It all seems very strange, but he gets up and goes out of the house; hardly has he done so than the ceiling over his bed collapses; although nobody else would have been in danger of injury, he himself must inevitably have been killed. The most thorough investigation proves that no single being on the physical plane warned him to get up from the bed! If he had remained lying there, he would certainly be dead.—Such an experience may be thought to be hallucination, or something of the kind; but deeper investigation will reveal that these particular experiences—and they come to hundreds of people—are not accidental. A beckoning call has come from Christian Rosenkreutz. The karma of the one called in this way always indicates that Christian Rosenkreutz bestows the life he may claim. I say explicitly: such experiences occur in the lives of many people at the present time, and it is only a question of being alert. The occurrence does not always take such a graphic form as the example quoted, but numbers of human beings nowadays have had such experiences.

Now when I say something more than once during a lecture, I do so quite deliberately, because I find that strange conclusions are apt to be drawn from things that are half—or totally forgotten. I say this because nobody need be discouraged because he has had no such experience; this need not really be the case, for if he searches he will find something of the kind in his life. Naturally, I can only single out a typical occurrence. There, then, we have in our life, a fact of which we may say that its cause does not lie in a period of actual incarnation; we may have contacted Christian Rosenkreutz in the spiritual world. I have laid particular stress on this outstanding event of the call. Other events, too, could be mentioned, events connected directly with the spiritual world and to be found during the life between death and a new birth; but in our special circumstances we shall realise the significance of this event which is so intimately connected with our spiritual Movement.

Such a happening surely indicates that quite a different attitude must take root in us if we want to have a clear vision of what actually plays into life. Most human beings rush hectically through life and are not thoughtful or attentive; many say that one should not brood but engage in a life of action. But how much better it would be if precipitate deeds were left undone and people were to brood a little—their deeds, then, would be far more mature! If only the beckoning call were heeded with composure and attentiveness! Often it only seems as if we were brooding. It is precisely through quiet composure that strength comes to us—and then we shall follow when karma calls, understanding too, when it is calling. These are the things to which I wanted to call your attention today, for they do indeed make life more intelligible.

I have told you of the strange event in the thirteenth century, purely in the form of historical narrative, in order to indicate those things to which men must pay attention if they are to find their proper place in life and understand the beckoning call of Christian Rosenkreutz. To make this possible the preparation by the Twelve and the coming of the Thirteenth were necessary. The event in the thirteenth century was necessary in order that in our own time and hereafter, such a beckoning or other sign may be understood and obeyed. Christian Rosenkreutz has created this sign in order to rouse the attention of men to the demands of the times, to indicate to them that they belong to him and may dedicate their lives to him in the service of the progress of humanity.

I had good reason to emphasise at the end of each of the two public lectures⁵³ that Anthroposophy must not be regarded merely as a theory or a science, nor only as knowledge in the ordinary sense. It is rather something that can be transformed in the soul into actual life, into an elixir of life. What really matters is that we shall not only acquire knowledge through Anthroposophy, but that forces shall flow into us from Anthroposophy which help us not only in ordinary physical existence but through the whole compass of life, which includes physical existence and the discarnate condition between death and a new birth. The more we feel that Anthroposophy bestows upon us forces whereby life itself is strengthened and enriched, the more truly do we understand it. When such a statement is made, people may ask: If Anthroposophy is to be a power that strengthens and infuses vigour into life, why is it necessary to absorb all this apparently theoretical knowledge? Why do we have to bother in our group meetings with all sorts of details about the preceding planetary embodiments of the earth? Why is it necessary to learn about things that happened in the remote past? Why are we also expected to familiarise ourselves with the more intimate, intangible laws of reincarnation, karma and so forth? Many people might think that Anthroposophy is just another kind of science, on a par with the many sciences existing in outer, physical life.

Now with regard to this question, which has been mentioned here because it is very likely to be asked, all considerations of convenience in life must be put aside; there must be scrupulous self-examination to find whether or not such questions are tainted by that habitual slackness in life which we know only too well; that man is fundamentally unwilling to learn, unwilling to take hold of the spiritual because this is inconvenient for him. We must ask ourselves: Does not something of this fear of inconvenience and discomfort creep into such questions? Let us admit that we really do begin by thinking that there is an easier path to Anthroposophy than all that is presented, for example, in our literature. It is often said lightheartedly that, after all, a man need only know himself, need only try to be a good and righteous human being, and then he is a sufficiently good Anthroposophist. Yes, my dear friends, but precisely this gives us the deeper knowledge that there is nothing more difficult than to be a good man in the real sense and that nothing needs so much preparation as the attainment of this ideal.

As to the question concerning self-knowledge, that can certainly not be answered in a moment, as so many people would like to think. Today, therefore, we will consider certain questions which are often expressed in the way indicated above. We will think of how Anthroposophy comes to us, seemingly, as a body of teaching, a science, although in essence it brings self-knowledge and the aspiration to become good and righteous human beings. And to this end it is important to study from different points of view how Anthroposophy can flow into life.

Let us consider one of life's vital questions. I am not referring to anything in the domain of science but to a question arising in everyday existence, namely, that of consolation for suffering, for lack of satisfaction in life.

How, for example, can Anthroposophy bring consolation to people in distress when they need it? Every individual must of course apply what can be said about such matters to his own particular case. In addressing a number of people one can only speak in a general sense.

Why do we need consolation in life? Because something may distress us, because we have to suffer and undergo painful experiences. Now it is natural for a man to feel that something in him rebels against this suffering. And he asks: ‘Why have I to bear it, why has it fallen to my lot? Could not my life have been without pain, could it not have brought me contentment?’ A man who puts the question in this way can only find an answer when he understands the nature of human karma, of human destiny. Why do we suffer? And I am referring not only to outer suffering but also to inner suffering due to a sense of failure to do ourselves justice or, find our proper hearings in life. That is what I mean by inner suffering. Why does life bring so much that leaves us unsatisfied?

Study of the laws of karma will make it clear to us that something underlies our sufferings, something that can be elucidated by an example drawn from ordinary life between birth and death. I have given this example more than once. Suppose a young man has lived up to the age of eighteen or so entirely on his father; his life has been happy and carefree; he has had everything he wanted. Then the father loses his fortune, becomes bankrupt, and the youth is obliged to set about learning something, to exert himself. Life brings him many sufferings and deprivations. It is readily understandable that the sufferings are not at all to his liking. But now think of him at the age of fifty. Because circumstances obliged him to learn something in his youth he has turned into a decent, self-respecting human being. He has found his feet in life and can say to himself: ‘My attitude to the sufferings and deprivations was natural at the time; but now I think quite differently about them; I realise now that the sufferings would not have come to me if in those days I had possessed all the virtues—even the very limited virtues of a boy of eighteen. If no suffering had come my way I should have remained a good-for-nothing. It was the sufferings that changed the imperfections into something more perfect. It is due to the suffering that I am not the same human being I was forty years ago. What was it, then, that joined forces in me at that time? My own imperfections and my suffering joined forces. And my imperfections sought out the suffering so that they might be removed and transformed into perfections.’

This attitude can even arise from quite an ordinary view of life between birth and death. And if we think deeply about life as a whole, facing our karma in the way indicated in the lecture yesterday, we shall finally be convinced that the sufferings along our path are sought out by our imperfections. The vast majority of sufferings are, indeed, sought out by the imperfections we have brought with us from earlier incarnations. And because of these imperfections a wiser being within us seeks for the path leading to the sufferings. For it is a golden rule in life that as human beings we have perpetually within us a being who is much wiser, much cleverer than we ourselves. The ‘I’ of ordinary life has far less wisdom, and if faced with the alternative of seeking either pain or happiness would certainly choose the path to happiness. The wiser being operates in depths of the subconscious life to which ordinary consciousness does not extend. This wiser being diverts our gaze from the path to superficial happiness and kindles within us a magic power which, without our conscious knowledge, leads us towards the suffering. But what does this mean: without our conscious knowledge? It means that the wiser being is prevailing over the less wise one, and this wiser being invariably acts within us so that it guides our imperfections to our sufferings, allowing us to suffer because every outer and inner suffering removes some imperfection and leads to greater perfection.

We may be willing to accept such principles in theory, but that is not of much account. A great deal is achieved, however, if in certain solemn and dedicated moments of life we try strenuously to make such principles the very lifeblood of the soul. In the hurry and bustle, the work and the duties of ordinary life, this is not always possible; under these circumstances we cannot always oust the being of lesser wisdom—who is, after all, part of us. But in certain deliberately chosen moments, however short they may be, we shall be able to say to ourselves: I will turn away from the hubbub of outer life and view my sufferings in such a way that I realise how the wiser being within me has been drawn to them by a magic power, how I imposed upon myself certain pain without which I should not have overcome this or that imperfection. A feeling of the peace inherent in wisdom will then arise, bringing the realisation that even when the world seems full of suffering, there too it is full of wisdom! In this way, life is enriched through Anthroposophy. We may forget it again in the affairs of external life, but if we do not forget it altogether and repeat the exercise steadfastly, we shall find that a kind of seed has been laid in the soul and that many a feeling of sadness and depression changes into a more positive attitude, into strength and energy. And then out of such quiet moments in life we will acquire more harmonious souls and become stronger individuals.

Then we may pass on to something else ... but the Anthroposophist should make it a rule to devote himself to these other thoughts only when the attitude towards suffering has become alive within him. We may turn, then, to think about the happiness and joys of life. A man who adopts towards his destiny the attitude that he himself has willed his sufferings will have a strange experience when he comes to think about his joy and happiness. It is not as easy for him here as it is in the case of his sufferings. It is easy, after all, to find a consolation for suffering, and anyone who feels doubtful has only to persevere; but it will be difficult to find the right attitude to happiness and joy. However strongly a man may bring himself to feel that he has willed his suffering—when he applies this mood of soul to his happiness and joy he will not be able to avoid a sense of shame; he will feel thoroughly ashamed. And he can only rid himself of this feeling of shame by saying to himself: ‘No, I have certainly not earned my joy and happiness through my own karma!’ This alone will put matters right, for otherwise the shame may be so intense that it almost destroys him in his soul. The only salvation is not to attribute our joys to the wiser being within us. This thought will convince us that we are on the right road, because the feeling of shame passes away. It is really so: happiness and joy in life are bestowed by the wise guidance of worlds, without our assistance, as something we must receive as grace, always recognising that the purpose is to give us our place in the totality of existence. Joy and happiness should so work upon us in the secluded moments of life that we feel them as grace, grace bestowed by the supreme powers of the world who want to receive us into themselves.

While our pain and suffering bring us to ourselves, make us more fully ourselves, through joy and happiness—provided we consider them as grace—we develop the feeling of peaceful security in the arms of the divine powers of the world, and the only worthy attitude is one of thankfulness. Nobody who in quiet hours of self-contemplation ascribes happiness and joy to his own karma, will unfold the right attitude to such experiences. If he ascribes joy and happiness to his karma he is succumbing to a fallacy whereby the spiritual within him is weakened and paralysed; the slightest thought that happiness or delight have been deserved weakens and cripples us inwardly. These words may seem harsh, for many a man, when he attributes suffering to his own will and individuality, would like to be master of himself, too, in the experiences of happiness and joy. But even a cursory glance at life will indicate that by their very nature joy and happiness tend to obliterate something in us. This weakening effect of delights and joys in life is graphically described in Faust by the words: ‘And so from longing to delight I reel; and even in delight I pine for longing.’⁵⁴ And anybody who gives any thought to the influence of joy, taken in the personal sense, will realise that there is something in joy that makes us stagger and blots out our true being.

This is not meant to be a sermon against joy or a suggestion that it would be good to torture ourselves with red-hot pincers or the like. Certainly not. To recognise something for what it really is does not mean that we must flee from it. It is not a question of running away from joy but of receiving it calmly whenever it comes to us; we must learn to feel it as grace, and the more we do so the better it will be, for we shall enter more deeply into the divine. These words are said, therefore, not in order to preach asceticism but to awaken the right mood towards happiness and joy.

If anyone were to say: joy and happiness have a weakening, deadening effect, therefore I will flee from them (which is the attitude of false asceticism and a form of self-torture)—such a man would be fleeing from the grace bestowed upon him by the gods. And in truth the self-torture practised by the ascetics, monks and nuns in olden days was a form of resistance against the gods. We must learn to regard suffering as something brought by our karma, and to feel happiness as grace that the divine can send down to us. Joy and happiness should be to us the sign of how closely the gods have drawn us to themselves; suffering and pain should be the sign of how remote we are from the goal before us as intelligent human beings. Such is the true attitude to karma, and without it we shall make no real progress in life. Whenever the world bestows upon us the good and the beautiful, we must feel that behind this world stand those powers of whom the Bible says: ‘And they looked at the world and they saw that it was good.’ But inasmuch as we experience pain and suffering, we must recognise what, in the course of incarnations, man has made of the world which in the beginning was good, and what he must contribute towards its betterment by educating himself to bear pain with purpose and energy.

What has been described are two ways of accepting our karma. In a certain respect our karma consists of suffering and joys; and we relate ourselves to our karma with the right attitude when we can consider it as something we really wanted, and when we can confront our sufferings and joys with the proper understanding. But a review of karma can be extended further, which we shall do today and tomorrow.

Karma does not reveal itself only in the form of experiences of suffering or joy. As our life runs its course we encounter in a way that can only be regarded as karmic—many human beings with whom, for example, we make a fleeting acquaintance, others who as relatives or close friends are connected with us for a considerable period of our life. We meet human beings who in our dealings with them bring sufferings and hindrances along our path; or again we meet others whom we can help and who can help us. The relationships are manifold. We must regard these circumstances too as having been brought about by the will of the wiser being within us—the will, for example, to meet a human being who seems to run across our path accidentally and with whom we have something to adjust or settle in life. What is it that makes the wiser being in us wish to meet this particular person? The only intelligent line of thought is that we want to come across him because we have done so before in an earlier life and our relationship had already begun then. Nor need the beginning have been in the immediately preceding life it may have been very much earlier. Because in a past life we have had dealings of some kind with this person, because we may have been in some way indebted to him, we are led to him again by the wiser being within us, as if by magic.

Here, of course, we enter a very diverse and extremely complicated domain, of which it is only possible to speak in general terms. But all the indications given here are the actual results of clairvoyant investigation. The indications will be useful to every individual because he will be able to particularise and apply what is said to his own life.

A remarkable fact comes to light. About the middle of life the ascending curve passes over into the descending curve. This is the time when the forces of youth are spent and we pass over a certain zenith to the descending curve. This point of time—which occurs in the thirties—cannot be laid down with absolute finality, but the principle holds good for everyone. It is the period of life when we live most intensely on the physical plane. In this connection we may easily be deluded. It will be clear that life before this point of time has been a process of bringing out what we have brought with us into the present incarnation. This process has been going on since childhood, although it is less marked as the years go by. We have chiseled out our life, have been nourished as it were by the forces brought from the spiritual world. These forces, however, are spent by the point of time indicated above. Observation of the descending line of life reveals that we now proceed to harvest and work over what has been learnt in the school of life, in order to carry it with us into the next incarnation. This is something we take into the spiritual world; in the earlier period we were taking something from the spiritual world. It is in the middle period that we are most deeply involved in the physical world, most engrossed in the affairs of outer life. We have passed through our apprenticeship as it were and are in direct contact with the world. We have our life in our own hands. At this period we are taken up with ourselves, concerned more closely than at any other time with our own external affairs and with our relation to the outer world. But this relation with the world is created by the intellect and the impulses of will which derive from the intellect—in other words, those elements of our being which are most alien to the spiritual worlds, to which the spiritual worlds remain closed. In the middle of life we are, as it were, farthest away from the spiritual.

A certain striking fact presents itself to occult research. Investigation of the kind of encounters and acquaintanceships with other human beings that arise in the middle of life shows, curiously, that these are the people that a man was together with at the beginning of his life, in his very earliest childhood in the previous incarnation or in a still earlier one. The fact has emerged that in the middle of life as a rule it is so, but not always—a man encounters, through circumstances of external karma, those people who in an earlier life were his parents; it is very rarely indeed that we are brought together in earliest childhood with those who were previously our parents; we meet them in the middle of life. This certainly seems strange, but it is the case, and a very great deal is gained for life if we will only try to put such a general rule to the test and adjust our thoughts accordingly. When a human being—let us say at about the age of thirty—enters into some relationship with another ... perhaps he falls in love, makes great friends, quarrels, or has some different kind of contact, a great deal will become comprehensible if, quite tentatively to begin with, he thinks about the possibility of the relationship to this person having once been that of child and parent. Conversely, this very remarkable fact comes to light. Those human beings with whom we were together in earliest childhood—parents, brothers and sisters, playmates or others around us during early childhood—they, as a rule, are people with whom we formed some kind of acquaintanceship when we were about thirty or so in a previous incarnation; in very many cases it is found that these people are our parents or brothers and sisters in the present incarnation. Curious as this may seem, just let us try to see how the principle squares with our own life, and we shall discover how much more understandable many things become. Even if the facts are otherwise, an experimental mistake will not amount to anything very serious. But if, in solitary hours, we look at life so that it is filled with meaning, we can gain a great deal. Obviously we must not try to arrange life to our liking; we must not choose the people we like and assume that they may have been our parents. Prejudices must not falsify the real facts. You will see the danger we are exposed to and the many misconceptions that may creep in. We ought to educate ourselves to remain open-minded and unbiased.

You may now ask what there is to be said about the descending curve of life. The striking fact has emerged that at the beginning of life we meet those human beings with whom we were connected in the middle period of life in a previous incarnation; further, that in the middle of the present life, we revive acquaintanceships which existed at the beginning of a preceding life. And now, what of the descending curve of life? During that period we are led to people who may also, possibly, have had something to do with us in an earlier incarnation. They may, in that earlier incarnation, have played a part in happenings of the kind that so frequently occur at a decisive point in life—let us say, trials and sufferings caused by bitter disillusionments. In the second half of life we may again be brought into contact with people who in some way or other were already connected with us; this meeting brings about a shifting of circumstances, and a lot that was set in motion in the earlier life is cleared up and settled.

These things are diverse and complex and indicate that we should not adhere rigidly to any hard and fast pattern. This much, however, may be said: the nature of the karma that has been woven with those who come across our path especially in the second half of life is such that it cannot be absolved in one life. Suppose, for example, we have caused suffering to a human being in one life; we could easily imagine that in a subsequent life we shall be led to this person by the wiser being within us, so that we may make amends for what we have done to him. The circumstances of life, however, may not enable compensation to be made for everything, but often only for a part of it. This necessitates the operation of complicated factors which enable such surviving remnants of karma to be adjusted and settled during the second half of life. This conception of karma can shed light upon our dealings and companionship with other human beings.

But there is still something else in the course of our karma to consider, something that in the two public lectures was referred to as the process of growing maturity, the acquisition of a real knowledge of life. (If the phrase does not promote arrogance it may be used.) Let us consider how we grow wiser. We can learn from our mistakes, and it is the best thing for us when this happens, because we do not often have the opportunity of applying the wisdom thus gained in one and the same life; therefore what we have learnt from the mistakes remains with us as strength for a later life. But the wisdom, the real knowledge of life that we can acquire, what is it really?

I said yesterday that we cannot carry our thoughts and ideas with us directly from one life to the other; I said that even Plato could not take his ideas straight with him into his next incarnation. What we carry over with us takes the form of will, of feeling, and in reality our thought and ideas, just like our mother tongue, comes as something new in each life. For most of the thoughts and ideas live in the mother tongue whence we acquire them. This life between birth and death supplies us with thoughts and ideas which always come from this particular earth existence. But if this is so, we shall have to say to ourselves that it depends upon our karma. However many incarnations we go through, the ideas that arise in us are always dependent upon one incarnation as distinct from the others. Whatever wisdom may be living in your thoughts and ideas have been absorbed from outside, it is dependent upon the way karma has placed you with regard to language, nationality and family. In the last resort all our thoughts and ideas about the world are dependent on our karma. Very much lies in these words, for they indicate that whatever we may know in life, whatever knowledge we may amass, is something entirely personal, and that we can never transcend the personal by means of what we acquire for ourselves in life. In ordinary life we never reach the level of the wiser being but always remain at that of the less wise. Anyone who flatters himself that he can learn more about his higher self from what he acquires in the world, is harbouring an illusion for the sake of convenience. This actually means that we can gain no knowledge of our higher self from what we acquire in life.

Very well, then, how are we to attain any knowledge of the higher self? We must ask ourselves quite frankly: What do we really know? First of all, we know what we have learnt from experience. This is all we know, and nothing else! A man who aspires to self-knowledge without realising that his soul is only a mirror in which the outer world is reflected, may persuade himself that by penetrating into his own being he can find the higher self; certainly he will find something, but it is only what has come into him from outside. Laziness of thinking has no place in this quest. We must ask ourselves what happens in those other worlds in which our higher self also lives, and this is none other than what we are told about the different incarnations of the earth, and everything else that Spiritual Science tells us. Just as we try to understand a child's soul by examining the child's surroundings, so must we ask what the environment of the higher self is. But Spiritual Science does tell us about these worlds where our higher self is, in its account of Saturn and its secrets, of the Moon and Earth evolution, of reincarnation and karma, of Devachan and Kamaloca and so on. This is the only way we can learn about our higher self, about the self which transcends the physical plane. And anyone who refuses to accept these secrets is merely pandering to his own ease. For it is a delusion to imagine you can discover the divine man in yourself. Only what is experienced in the outer world is stored inside, but the divine man in us can only be found when we search in our soul for the mirrored world beyond the physical. So that those things which can sometimes prove difficult and uncomfortable to learn are nothing else but self-knowledge. And true Anthroposophy is in reality true self-knowledge! From Spiritual Science we receive enlightenment about our own self. For where in reality is the self? Is the self within our skin? No, the self is outpoured over the world; everything that is and has been in the world is part and parcel of the self. We learn to know the self only when we learn to know the world.

These apparent theories are, in truth, the ways to self-knowledge. A man who thinks he can find the self by staring into his inner being, says to himself: You must be good, you must be unselfish! All well and good. But you will soon notice that he is getting more and more self-centred. On the other hand, struggling with the great secrets of existence, extricating oneself from the flattering self, accepting the reality of the higher worlds and the knowledge that can be obtained from them, all leads to true self-knowledge. When we think deeply about Saturn, Sun and Moon, we lose ourselves in cosmic thought. ‘In thy thinking cosmic thoughts are living,’⁵⁵ says a soul who thinks Anthroposophical thoughts; he adds, however, ‘Lose thyself in cosmic thoughts!’ The soul creating out of Anthroposophy says: ‘In thy feeling cosmic powers are weaving,’ but he adds: ‘Experience thyself through cosmic powers!’ not through powers which flatter. This experience will not come to a man who closes his eyes, saying: ‘I want to be a good human being.’ It will only come to the man who opens his eyes and his spiritual eyes also, and sees the powers of yonder world mightily at work, realising that he is embedded in these cosmic powers. And the soul that draws strength from Anthroposophy says: ‘In thy willing cosmic beings are working,’ adding: ‘Create thyself anew from Beings of Will!’ And this will really happen if we grasp self-knowledge in this way. Then we shall really succeed in creating ourselves anew out of world being.

Dry and abstract as this may seem, in reality it is no mere theory but something that thrives and grows like a seed sown in the earth. Forces shoot out in every direction and become plant or tree. So it is indeed. The feelings that come to us through Spiritual Science give us the power to create ourselves anew. ‘Create thyself anew from Beings of Will!’ Thus does Anthroposophy become the elixir of life and our view of spirit worlds opens up. We shall draw strength from these worlds, and when we have drawn these forces into our being, then we shall know ourselves in all our depths. Only when we imbue ourselves with world knowledge can we take control of ourselves and advance step by step away from the less-wise being within us, who is cut off by the Guardian of the Threshold, to the wiser being, penetrating through all that is hidden from those who do not as yet have the will to be strong. For this is just what can be gained by means of Anthroposophy.

• 53. public lectures: Vienna 6th and 7th February 1912, on Death and Immortality in the Light of Spiritual Science, and The Essence of Eternity and the Nature of the Human Soul in the Light of Spiritual Science. These lectures were not printed. See the corresponding lectures given in Berlin, 26th October 1911 and 21st March 1912, in ‘Menschengeschichte im Lichte der Geistesforschung’ (Human History in the Light of Spiritual Research) GA 61 Dornach, 1962.
• 54. ‘And so from longing to delight I reel ... ’: Goethe ‘Faust’, Part 1, Woodland and Cave.
• 55. ‘In thy thinking cosmic thoughts are living’: Benedictus' words in Rudolf Steiner's second mystery play ‘The Soul's Probation’, Scene 1.

There was one point in the lecture yesterday about which I should not like misunderstanding to arise, but a conversation I had today indicated that this might be possible. It is, of course, difficult to formulate in words these matters connected with the more intimate workings of karma, and one point or another may well not be quite clear at the first time of hearing. In the lecture yesterday it was said that we have to regard our sufferings as having been sought out by the wiser being within us in order that certain imperfections may be overcome, and that by bearing these sufferings calmly we may make progress along our path. That, however, was not the point on which misunderstanding might have occurred. It was the other point, namely, that happiness and joy must not be regarded as due to our own merit or individual karma, but deemed a kind of grace whereby we are interwoven with the all-prevailing spirit. Please do not think that the emphasis here lies in the fact that joy comes to us as a mark of favour from the divine-spiritual powers; the emphasis lies in the fact that these experiences are made possible through grace. That is what our attitude must be if we are to reach a true understanding of karma. Happiness and joy are acts of grace. A man who imagines that the happiness and joy in his karma indicate a desire on the part of the gods to single him out and place him above the others will achieve just the opposite. We must never imagine that happiness is allotted to us as a mark of favour or distinction but rather as a reason for feeling that we have been recipients of the grace outpoured by the divine spiritual beings. It is this realisation of grace which makes progress possible; the other attitude would throw us back in our development. Nobody should ever believe that joy comes to him because of special karmic privileges; he should far rather believe that it comes to him because he has no privileges. Joy and happiness should move us to deeds of compassion and mercy, which we shall perform more effectively than if we are suffering the pangs of sorrow. What brings us forward is the realisation that we must make ourselves worthy of grace. There is no justification for the very prevalent view that one whose life abounds in happiness has deserved it. This is the very attitude that must be avoided. Please take this as an indication so that no misunderstanding may arise.

Today we will extend and widen the scope of our studies of karma, and talk about karma and our experiences in the world, so that Spiritual Science may become a real life force within us. Observation of life and its happenings will reveal, to begin with, experiences of two kinds. On the one hand we might say to ourselves: ‘Yes, a misfortune has befallen me, but thinking about it, I can see that it would not have come my way if I had not been careless or negligent.’ This realisation, however, will not always be within the power of ordinary consciousness; many a time we shall find it impossible to see any connection between the misfortune and the circumstances of our present life. With regard to much that befalls us, ordinary consciousness can only conclude that it was pure chance, unconnected with anything else. It will also be possible to make this distinction concerning undertakings which may either be successful or the reverse. In many cases we shall realise that failure was inevitable because of laziness, inattentiveness, or something of the kind, on our part; but in many others we shall be quite unable to discover any connection. It is a useful exercise to take stock of our own experiences and distinguish between things which have failed through no fault of our own, and others which succeed contrary to our expectations. We will try to get to the bottom of these matters, and of events which, on the face of them, seem to be due to pure chance, without any apparent cause, and also things we have done that are seemingly unrelated to our actual faculties. We will now make a close study of all these things.

We will proceed in rather a curious way. As an experiment, we will imagine that we ourselves have willed whatever may have happened to us. Suppose a loose tile from the roof of a house happened to crash down on us. We will picture, purely by way of experiment, that this did not happen by chance, and we will deliberately imagine that we ourselves climbed on that roof, loosened the tile and then ran down so quickly that we arrived just in time to be hit by it! Or, let us say, we caught a chill without any apparent cause; how would it be though, if we had given it to ourselves? Like the unfortunate lady who, being discontented with her lot, exposed herself to a chill, and died of it! In this way, therefore, we will imagine that things otherwise attributable to chance have been deliberately and carefully planned by ourselves. And we will also apply the same procedure to matters which are obviously dependent upon the faculties and qualities we happen to possess. Say some arrangement does not work out as planned. If we miss a train, for example, we shall not blame external circumstances but picture to ourselves that it was due to our own slackness. If we think of it in this way, as an experiment, we shall gradually succeed in creating a kind of being in our imagination, a very extraordinary being, who was responsible for all these things—for a stone having crashed upon us, for some illness, and so forth. We shall realise, of course, that this being is not ourselves; we simply picture such a being vividly and distinctly. And then, after a time, we will have a strange experience with regard to this being. We shall realise that though it is a creature we have only conjured up, yet we cannot free ourselves from him nor from the thought of him, and strange to say he does not stay as he is; he becomes alive and transforms himself within us. And then, when he has gone through this transformation, we get the impression that he really is there within us. And then we become more and more certain that we ourselves have had something to do with the things thus built up in imagination. There is no suggestion whatever that we once actually did them; but such thoughts do, nevertheless, correspond in a certain way with something we have done. We shall tell ourselves: ‘I have done this and that, and I am now having to suffer the consequences.’ This is a very good exercise for unfolding in the life of feeling a kind of memory of earlier incarnations. The soul seems to feel: I myself was there and prepared these things myself.

You will readily understand that it is not easy to awaken the memory of previous incarnations. For just think what mental effort is required to recall something only recently forgotten; genuine mental effort is required. Experiences which occurred in earlier incarnations have sunk into the depths of forgetfulness and much has to be done if they are to be remembered. One such exercise has just been described. In addition to what was said in the public lectures, let it be said here that a man will notice a kind of memory arising in his feeling: in former times you prepared this for yourself!

The principles indicated should not be ignored, for if we follow them we shall find that more and more light will be shed upon life, so that we grow stronger and stronger. Once the feeling has arisen that we ourselves were there and carried out the deeds ourselves we shall have quite a different attitude to events confronting us in the future; our whole life of feeling will be transformed. Whereas formerly we may have experienced fear and all the other similar feelings when something happened to us, we now have a kind of inner memory. And now when something happens, our feeling tells us that it is for a purpose; and that it is a memory of an earlier life. Life becomes much more tranquil and intelligible, and that is what men need, not only those who are sustained by a longing for Anthroposophy, but those too who are outside. It is no excuse to say: How can earlier incarnations matter if we cannot remember them! The right attitude towards earthly existence will certainly awaken memory, only it is a memory belonging to the heart, to the life of feeling, that must be developed, not the kind of memory that is composed of thoughts and concepts.

I considered it important during this particular visit to bring home to you how much can be given practical application, and how Anthroposophy can become actual experience in those who pursue it actively.

Now in addition to what accrued in earlier incarnations other factors are also of importance in a man's karma. We have a life between death and a new birth too, and this is by no means uneventful, it is filled with happenings and experiences. And the consequences of these experiences in the spiritual world appear in our earthly life, but in a peculiar form which often makes us inclined to attribute such occurrences to chance. Nevertheless they can be traced to significant experiences in the spiritual world.

I want to speak to you therefore of something which may seem remote from the first part of the lecture. But you will see that it is important for every human being and that what appear to be chance happenings may be deeply indicative of mysterious connecting threads in life.

I am now going to speak of an historical fact that is not preserved in history books but is in the Akashic Record. To begin with I have to draw your attention to the fact that the souls of all of us here now have been incarnated many times in earthly bodies, among the most diverse conditions of life, in ancient India, Persia, Egypt and Greece; again and again we have experienced different environments and conditions of existence, and there is purpose and meaning in the fact that we pass through one incarnation after another. Our present life could not be as it is if we had not lived through these other conditions. An extraordinary experience fell to the lot of men living in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of our era, for very exceptional conditions broke in upon humanity at that time—roughly speaking not quite seven hundred years ago. Conditions were such that the souls of men were completely shut off from the spiritual world; spiritual darkness prevailed, and it was impossible even for highly developed individuals to achieve direct contact with the spiritual world. In the thirteenth century even those who in earlier incarnations had been initiates were unable to look into the spiritual world. The gates of the spiritual world were closed for a certain period during that century, and although men who in former times had received initiation were able to call up memories of their earlier incarnations, in the thirteenth century they could not themselves gaze into the spiritual worlds. It was necessary for men to live through that condition of darkness, to find the gates to the spiritual world closed against them. Men of high spiritual development were, of course, also in incarnation at that time, but they too were obliged to experience the condition of darkness. When about the middle of the thirteenth century the darkness lifted, strange happenings occurred at a certain place in Europe. The name of this place cannot now be given, but sometime it may be possible to communicate it in a group lecture. Twelve men in Europe of great and outstanding wisdom, whose spiritual development had taken an unusual course, emerged from the condition of twilight that had obscured clairvoyant vision. Of these twelve wise men, seven, to begin with, have to be distinguished from the others. These seven men had retained the memory of their earlier initiations and this memory, together with the knowledge still surviving, was such that the seven men recapitulated in themselves conditions they had once lived through in the period following the Atlantean catastrophe—the ancient Indian epoch of culture. The teachings given by the seven holy Rishis of India had come to life again in the souls of these seven wise men of Europe; seven rays of the ancient wisdom of the sacred Atlantean culture shone forth in the hearts of these seven men who through the operations of world karma had gathered at a certain place in Europe in the thirteenth century and had found one another again. To these seven came four others. In the soul of the first of these four the wisdom belonging to the ancient Indian culture shone forth—he was the eighth among the twelve. The wisdom of the ancient Persian culture lived in the soul of the ninth; the wisdom of the third period—that of Egyptian-Chaldaean culture—lived in the soul of the tenth, and the wisdom of Greco-Roman culture in the soul of the eleventh. The wisdom of the culture as it was in that particular age—contemporary wisdom—lived in the soul of the twelfth. In these twelve men who came together to perform a special mission, the twelve different streams in the spiritual development of mankind were represented. The fact that all possible religions and all possible philosophies belong to twelve basic types is in itself a mystery. Buddhism, Brahmanism, Vedanta philosophy, materialism, or whatever it may be—all of them can be traced to the twelve basic types; it is just a matter of being quite exact. And so all the different streams of man's spiritual life—the religions, the philosophies and world conceptions that are spread over the earth—were united in that council of the twelve.⁵⁶

After the period of darkness had passed and spiritual achievement was possible again, a thirteenth came in remarkable circumstances to the twelve. I am telling you now of one of those events which take place secretly in the evolution of mankind once and once only. They cannot occur a second time and are mentioned not as an indication that efforts should be made to repeat them but for quite other reasons. When the darkness had lifted and it was possible to develop clairvoyant vision again, the coming of the thirteenth was announced in a mysterious way to the twelve wise men. They knew that the time had come when a child with significant and remarkable incarnations behind him was to be born. Above all they knew that one of his incarnations had been at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. It was known, therefore, that one who had been a contemporary of the events in Palestine was returning. And the birth of the child in these unusual circumstances during the thirteenth century could not have been said to be that of a person of renown. In speaking of previous lives there is a deplorable and only too widespread tendency to refer back to important historical personages. I have come across all kinds of people who believe that they were incarnated as some historical personage or figure in the Gospels. Quite recently a lady informed me that she had been Mary Magdelene, and I could only reply that she was the twenty-fourth Mary Magdelene I had met in my life. In these matters the greatest care must be taken to prevent fantastic notions arising.

History tells us very little about the incarnations of the thirteenth. He was born many times with great and profound qualities of heart. It was known that this individuality was to be born again as a child and that he was destined for a very special mission. This knowledge was revealed to the twelve seers who took the child entirely into their charge and were able to arrange that from the very beginning he was shut off from the outside world. He was removed from his family and cared for by these twelve men. Guided by their clairvoyance they reared the child with every care in such a way that all the forces acquired from previous incarnations were able to unfold in him. A kind of intuitive perception of this occurrence has arisen in men who know something of the history of spiritual life. Goethe's poem The Mysteries⁵⁷ has been recited to us many times. Out of a deep, intuitive perception Goethe speaks in that poem of the council of the twelve, and he has been able to convey to us the mood of heart and feeling in which they lived. The thirteenth is not brother Mark but the child of whom I have been telling you, and who almost immediately after his birth was taken into the care of the twelve and brought up by them until the age of early manhood. The child developed in a strange and remarkable way. The twelve were not in any sense fanatics; they were full of inner composure, enlightenment and peace of heart. How does a fanatic behave? He wants to convert people as quickly as possible; while they, as a rule, do not want to be converted. Everybody is expected immediately to believe what the fanatic wants them to believe and he is angry when this does not happen. In our day, when someone sets out to expound a particular subject, people simply do not believe that his aim may be not to voice his own views but something quite different, that is, the thoughts and opinions of the one of whom he is writing. For many years I was held to be a follower of Nietzsche⁵⁸ because I once wrote an absolutely objective book about him. People simply cannot understand that the aim of a writer may be to give an objective exposition. They think that everyone must be a fanatic on the subject of which he happens to be speaking.

The twelve in the thirteenth century were far from being fanatics, and they were very sparing with oral teaching. But because they lived in communion with the boy, twelve rays of light as it were went out from them into him and were resolved in his soul into one great harmony. It would not have been possible to give him any kind of academic examination; nevertheless there lived within him, transmuted into feeling and sensitive perception, all that the twelve representatives of the twelve different types of religion poured into his soul. His whole soul reflected the harmony of the twelve different forms of belief spread over the earth.

In this way the soul of the boy had to bear a great deal, and consequently it worked in a strange way upon the body. And it is precisely for this reason that the process of which I am telling you now may not be repeated: it could only be enacted at that particular time. Strange to say, as the harmony within the boy's soul increased, his body became more delicate—more and more delicate, until at a certain age it was transparent in every limb. The boy ate less and less until he finally took no nourishment at all. Then he lay for days in a condition of complete torpor: the soul had left the body, and returned into it again after a few days. The youth was now inwardly quite changed. The twelve different rays of human outlook were united in one single radiance, and he gave utterance to the greatest, most wonderful secrets; he did not repeat what the first, or the second, or the third had said, but gave forth in a new and wonderful synthesis all that they would have said had they spoken in unison; all the knowledge they possessed was gathered into one whole, and when he uttered it, it was as though this new wisdom had just come to birth in him. It was as though a higher spirit were speaking in him. Something entirely and essentially new was thus imparted to the twelve wise men. Wisdom in abundance was imparted to them; and to each, individually, greater illumination concerning what had been known to him hitherto.

I have been describing to you the first school of Christian Rosenkreutz, for the thirteenth is the individuality known to us by that name. In that incarnation he died after only a brief earthly existence; in the fourteenth century he was born again and lived then for more than a hundred years. All those things again appeared in him that had developed in him in the thirteenth century. Then his life had been brief, but in the fourteenth century it was very long. During the first half of this later incarnation he went on great journeys in search of the different centres of culture in Europe, Africa and Asia, in order to gather knowledge of what had come to life in him during the previous century; then he returned to Europe. A few of those who had brought him up in the thirteenth century were again in incarnation and were joined by others. This was the time of the inauguration of the rosicrucian stream of spiritual life. And Christian Rosenkreutz himself incarnated again and again.

To this very day he is at work—during the brief intervals, too, when he is not actually in incarnation; through his higher bodies he then works spiritually into human beings, without the need of spatial contact. We must try to picture the mysterious way in which his influence operates.

And I want to begin here by giving an example. Those who participate consciously in the occult life of the spirit had a strange experience from the eighties on into the nineties of the previous century; they became aware of certain influences emanating from a remarkable personality (I am only mentioning one case among many). There was, however, something not quite harmonious about these influences. Anyone who is sensitive to influences from contemporaries living a great distance away, would, at that time, have been aware of something raying out from a certain personality, which was not altogether harmonious. When the new century dawned, however, these influences became harmonious. What had happened? I will tell you the reason for this.

On the 12th August 1900 Soloviev had died—a man far too little appreciated or understood. The influences of his ether body radiated far and wide, but although Soloviev was a great philosopher, in his case the development of the soul was in advance of that of the head, the intellect; he was a great and splendid thinker, but his conscious philosophy was of far less significance than that which he bore in his soul. Up to the time of his death the head was a hindering factor and so, as an occult influence, he had an inharmonious effect. But when he was dead and the ether body, separated from the brain, rayed out in the ether world, he was liberated from the restrictions caused by his thinking, and the rays of his influence shone out with wonderful brilliance and power.

People may ask: How can such knowledge really concern us? This very question is an illusion, for the human being is through and through a product of the spiritual processes around him; and when certain occultists become aware of the reality of these processes, that is because they actually see them. But spiritual processes operate too in those others who do not see. Everything in the spiritual world is interconnected. Whatever influence may radiate from a highly developed Frenchman or Russian is felt not only on their own native soil, but their thought and influence has an effect over the whole earth. Everything that happens in the spiritual world has an influence on us, and only when we realise that the soul lives in the spiritual world just as the lung within the air, shall we have the right attitude.

The forces in the ether bodies of highly developed individualities stream out and have a potent effect upon other human beings. So too, the ether body of Christian Rosenkreutz works far and wide in the world. And reference must be made here to a fact that is of the greatest significance to many people; it is something that transpires in the spiritual world between death and a new birth and is not to be ascribed to chance.

Christian Rosenkreutz has always made use of the short intervals of time between his incarnations to call into his particular stream of spiritual life those souls whom he knows to be ripe; between his deaths and births he has concerned himself as it were with choosing those who are ready to enter his stream. But human beings themselves, by learning to be attentive, must be able to recognise by what means Christian Rosenkreutz gives them a sign showing them that they may count themselves among his chosen. This sign has been given in the lives of very many human beings of the present time, but they pay no heed to it. Yet among the apparently chance happenings in a man's life, there is for many people one in particular that is to be regarded as an indication that between death and a new birth Christian Rosenkreutz has found him mature and ready; the sign is given by Christian Rosenkreutz on the physical plane, however. This event may be called the mark of Christian Rosenkreutz. Let us suppose a man is lying in bed—in other places I have mentioned different forms of such a happening, but all of them have occurred—for some unaccountable reason he suddenly wakes up and, as though guided by instinct, looks at a wall that is usually quite dark. The room is dimly lit, the wall is dark, when suddenly he sees written on the wall: ‘Get up at once!’ It all seems very strange, but he gets up and leaves the house, and hardly has he done so when the ceiling over his bed collapses; although nobody else would have been in danger of getting hurt, he himself would inevitably have been killed. The most thorough investigation proves that nobody on the physical plane warned him to get up. If he had remained lying there he would certainly have been killed.

Such an experience may be thought to be an hallucination or something of the kind; but deeper investigation will reveal that these particular experiences—and they come to hundreds of people—are not accidental. A beckoning call has come from Christian Rosenkreutz. The karma of the one called in this way always indicates that Christian Rosenkreutz bestows the life he may claim. I say explicitly: such occurrences occur in the lives of many people at the present time, and it is only a question of being alert. The occurrence does not always take such a dramatic form as the example quoted, but numbers of human beings nowadays have had such experiences. Now when I say something more than once during a lecture, I do so quite deliberately, because I find that strange conclusions are apt to be drawn from things that are half or totally forgotten. I am saying this because nobody need be discouraged who has had no such experience; this might not be the case, for if he searches he will certainly find something of the kind in his life. Naturally I can only single out a typical example. Here then we have in our life a fact of which we may say that its cause does not lie in the period of actual incarnation; we may have met Christian Rosenkreutz in the spiritual world. I have laid particular stress on this outstanding event of the call. Other events, too, could be mentioned, events connected directly with the spiritual world that occur during the life between death and a new birth; but in our spiritual context this particular event should be of special significance for us as it is so intimately connected with our spiritual movement.

Such a happening surely indicates that we must develop quite a different attitude if we want to have a clear vision of what actually plays into life. Most human beings rush hectically through life and are not thoughtful and attentive; many people say that one should not brood but engage in a life of action. But how much better it would be if precipitate deeds were left undone and people were to brood a little their deeds, then, would be far more mature! If only the beckoning call were heeded with composure and attentiveness. Often it only seems as if we were brooding. It is precisely through quiet composure that strength comes to us—and then we shall follow when karma calls, understanding, too, when it is calling. These are the things I wanted to call your attention to today, for they do indeed make life more intelligible.

I have told you of the strange event in the thirteenth century, purely in the form of historical narrative, in order to indicate those things which men must heed if they are to find their proper place in life and understand the beckoning call of Christian Rosenkreutz. To make this possible the preparation by the twelve and the coming of the thirteenth were necessary. And the event in the thirteenth century was necessary in order that in our own time and hereafter such a beckoning or other sign may be understood and obeyed.

Christian Rosenkreutz has created this sign in order to rouse the attention of men to the needs of the times, to indicate to them that they belong to him and may dedicate their lives to him in the service of the progress of humanity.

• 56. all possible religions and all possible philosophies belong to twelve basic types: see Rudolf Steiner's ‘Human and Cosmic Thought’, 4 lectures Berlin, January 1914; Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1967.
• 57. see note 29.
• 58. Nietzsche because I once wrote an absolutely objective book about him: ‘Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom’, Rudolf Steiner Publications, New Jersey, 1960.