The Rudolf Steiner Archive

At the end of the two public lectures I have given in this city, I emphasized that anthroposophy should not be considered a theory or mere science, nor as knowledge in the ordinary sense. It is rather something that grows in our souls from mere knowledge and theory into immediate life, into an elixir of life. In this way, anthroposophy not only provides us with knowledge, but we receive forces that help us in our ordinary lives during physical existence as well as in the total life that we spend during physical existence and the non-physical existence between death and a new birth. The more we experience anthroposophy as bringing to us strength, support and life renewing energies, the more do we understand it.

Upon hearing this, some may ask, “If anthroposophy is to bring us a strengthening of life, why do we have to acquire so much of what appears to be theoretical knowledge? Why are we virtually pestered at our branch meetings with descriptions about the preceding planetary evolutions of our earth? Why do we have to learn about things that took place long ago? Why do we have to acquaint ourselves with the intimate and subtle laws of reincarnation, karma and so on?”

Some people may believe that they are being offered just another science. This problem, which forces itself upon us, demands that we eliminate all easy and simplistic approaches toward answering it. We must carefully ask ourselves whether, in raising this question, we are not introducing into it some of the easy-going ways of life that become manifest when we are reluctant to learn and to acquire something in a spiritual way. This is an uncomfortable experience for us and we are forced to wonder whether something of this attitude of discomfort does not find expression in the question that is being asked. As it is, we are led to believe that the highest goal that anthroposophy may offer us can be attained on easier roads than on that taken by us through our own literature.

It is often said, almost nonchalantly, that man has only to know himself, that all he has to do in order to be an anthroposophist is to be good. Yes, it is profound wisdom to know that to be a good person is one of the most difficult tasks, and that nothing in life demands more in the way of preparation than the realization of this ideal to be good. The problem of self-knowledge, however, cannot be solved with a quick answer, as many are inclined to believe. Therefore, today, we will shed light on some of these questions that have been raised. We then will come to see how anthroposophy meets us, even if only by appearance, as a teaching or as a science, but that it also offers in an eminent sense a path toward self- knowledge and what may be called the pilgrimage toward becoming a good person. To accomplish this we must consider from different points of view how anthroposophy can be fruitful in life.

Let us take a specific question that does not concern scientific research, but everyday life—a question known to all of us. How can we find comfort in life when we have to suffer in one way or another, when we fail to find satisfaction in life? In other words, let us ask ourselves how anthroposophy can offer comfort and consolation when it is really needed. Obviously, what can be said here only in general terms must always be applied to one's own individual case. If one lectures to many people, one can only speak in generalities.

Why do we need comfort, consolation in life? Because we may be sad about a number of events, or because we suffer as a result of pains that afflict us. It is natural that, at first, man reacts to pain as though he is rebelling inwardly against it. He wonders why he has to stand pain. “Why am I afflicted by this pain? Why is life not arranged for me in such a way that I don't suffer pain, that I am content?” These questions can only be answered satisfactorily on the basis of true knowledge concerning the nature of human karma, of human destiny. Why do we suffer in the world? We refer here to outer as well as to inner sufferings that arise in our psychic organization and leave us unfulfilled. Why are we met by such experiences that leave us unsatisfied?

In pursuing the laws of karma, we shall discover that the underlying reasons for suffering are similar to what can be described by the following example relating to the ordinary life between birth and death. Let us assume that a youngster has lived until his eighteenth year at the expense of his father. Then the father loses all his wealth and goes into bankruptcy. The young man must now learn something worthwhile and make an effort to support himself. As a result, life hits him with pain and privation. It is quite understandable that he does not react sympathetically to the pain that he has to go through.

Let us now turn to the period when he has reached the age of fifty. Since, by the necessity of events, he had to educate himself at an early age, he has become a decent person. He has found a real foothold in life. He realizes why he reacted negatively to pain and suffering when it first hit him, but now he must think differently about it. He must say to himself that the suffering would not have come to him if he had already acquired a sense of maturity—at least, to the limited degree than an eighteen year old can attain one. If he had not been afflicted by pain, he would have remained a good-for-nothing. It was the pain that transformed his shortcomings into positive abilities. He must owe it to the pain that he has become a different man in the course of forty years. What was really brought together at that time? His shortcomings and his pain were brought together. His shortcomings actually sought pain in order that his immaturity might be removed by being transformed into maturity.

Even a simple consideration of life between birth and death can lead to this view. If we look at the totality of life, however, and if we face our karma as it has been explained in the lecture two days ago, we will come to the conclusion that all pain that hits us, that all suffering that comes our way, are of such a nature that they are being sought by our shortcomings. By far the greater part of our pain and suffering is sought by imperfections that we have brought over from previous incarnations. Since we have these imperfections within ourselves, there is a wiser man in us than we ourselves are who chooses the road to pain and suffering. It is, indeed, one of the golden rules of life that we all carry in us a wiser man than we ourselves are, a much wiser man. The one to whom we say, “I,” in ordinary life is less wise. If it was left to this less wise person in us to make a choice between pain and joy, he would undoubtedly choose the road toward joy. But the wiser man is the one who reigns in the depth of our unconscious and who remains inaccessible to ordinary consciousness. He directs our gaze away from easy enjoyment and kindles in us a magic power that seeks the road of pain without our really knowing it. But what is meant by the words: Without really knowing it? They mean that the wiser man in us prevails over the less wise one. He always acts in such a way that our shortcomings are guided to our pains and he makes us suffer because with every inner and outer suffering we eliminate one of our faults and become transformed into something better.

Little is accomplished if one tries to understand these words theoretically. Much more can be gained when one creates sacred moments in life during which one is willing to use all one's energy in an effort to fill one's soul with the living content of such words. Ordinary life, with all its work, pressure, commotion and duties provides little chance to do so. In this setting, it is not always possible to silence the less wise man in us. But when we create a sacred moment in life, short as it may be, then we can say, “I will put aside the transitory effects of life; I will view my sufferings in such a way that I feel how the wise man in me has been attracted by them with a magic power. I realize that I have imposed upon myself certain experiences of pain without which I would not have overcome some of my shortcomings.” A feeling of blissful wisdom will overcome us that makes us feel that even if the world appears to be filled with suffering, it is, nevertheless, radiating pure wisdom. Such an attitude is one of the fruits of anthroposophy for the benefit of life. What has been said may, of course, be forgotten, but if we do not forget it, but practice such thoughts regularly, we will become aware of the fact that we have planted a seed in our soul. What we used to experience as feelings of sadness and attitudes of depression will be transformed into positive attitudes toward life, into strength and energy. Out of these sacred moments in life will be born more harmonious souls and stronger personalities.

We may now move on to another step in our experience. The anthroposophist should be determined to take this other step only after he has comforted himself many times with regard to his sufferings in the way just described. The experience that may now be added consists of looking at one's joys and at everything that has occurred in life in the way of happiness. He who can face destiny without bias and as though he had himself wanted his sufferings, will find himself confronted by a strange reaction when he looks at his joy and happiness. He cannot face them in the same way that he faced his sufferings. It is easy to see how one can find comfort in suffering. He who does not believe this only has to expose himself to the experience.

It is difficult, however, to come to terms with joy and happiness. Much as we may accept the attitude that we have wanted our suffering, when we apply the same attitude to joy and happiness, we cannot but feel ashamed of ourselves. A deep feeling of shame will be experienced. The only way to overcome this feeling is to realize that we were not the ones who gave ourselves our joys and happiness through the law of karma. This is the only cure as, otherwise, the feeling of shame can become so intense that it virtually destroys us in our souls. Relief can only be found by not making the wiser man in us responsible for having driven us toward our joys. With this thought, one will feel that one hits the truth, because the feeling of shame will disappear. It is a fact that our joy and happiness come to us in life as something that is bestowed upon us, without our participation, by a wise divine guidance, as something we must accept as grace, as something that is to unite us with the universe. Happiness and joy shall have such an effect upon us in the sacred moments in our lives and in our intimate hours of introspection that we shall experience them as grace, as grace from the divine powers of the world who want to receive us and who, as it were, embed us in their being.

While our pain and suffering lead us to ourselves and make us more genuinely ourselves, we develop through joy and happiness, provided that we consider them as grace, a feeling that one can only describe as being blissfully embedded in the divine forces and powers of the world. Here the only justified attitude toward happiness and joy is one of gratitude. Nobody will understand joy and happiness in the intimate hours of self-knowledge when he ascribes them to his karma. If he involves karma, he commits an error that is liable to weaken and paralyze the spiritual in him. Every thought to the effect that joy and happiness are deserved actually weakens and paralyzes us. This may be a hard fact to understand because everyone who admits that his pain is inflicted upon himself by his own individuality would obviously expect to be his own master also with regard to joy and happiness. But a simple look at life can teach us that joy and happiness have an extinguishing power. Nowhere is this extinguishing effect of joy and happiness better described than in Goethe's Faust in the words, “And thus I stagger from desire to pleasure. And in pleasure I am parched with desire.” Simple reflection upon the influence of personal enjoyment shows that inherent in it is something that makes us stagger and blots out our true being.

No sermon is here being delivered against enjoyment, nor is an invitation extended to practice self-torture, or to pinch ourselves with red hot pliers, or the like. If one recognizes a situation in the right way, it does not mean that one should escape from it. No escape, therefore, is suggested, but a silent acceptance of joy and happiness whenever they appear. We must develop the inner attitude that we experience them as grace, and the more the better. Thus do we immerse ourselves the more in the divine. Therefore, these words are said not in order to preach asceticism, but in order to awaken the right mood toward joy and happiness.

If it is thought that joy and happiness have a paralyzing and extinguishing effect, and that therefore man should flee from them, then one would promote the ideal of false asceticism and self-torture. In this event, man, in reality, would be escaping from the grace that is given to him by the gods. Self-torture practiced by ascetics, monks and nuns is nothing but a continuous rebellion against the gods. It behooves us to feel pain as something that comes to us through our karma. In joy and happiness, we can feel that the divine is descending to us.

May joy and happiness be for us a sign as to how close the gods have attracted us, and may our pain and suffering be a sign as to how far removed we are from what we are to become as good human beings. This is the fundamental attitude toward karma without which we cannot really move ahead in life. In what the world bestows upon us as goodness and beauty, we must conceive the world powers of which it is said in the Bible, “And he looked at the world and he saw that it was good.” But inasmuch as we experience pain and suffering, we must recognize what man has made of the world during its evolution, which originally was a good world, and what he must contribute toward its betterment by educating himself to bear pain with purpose and energy.

What has now been described are two ways to confront karma. To a certain extent, our karma consists of suffering and joys. 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 not only shows us what is related to our lives in a joyful and painful manner. But as the result of the working of karma, we meet many people during the course of our lives with whom we only become slightly acquainted, and people with whom we are connected in various ways during long periods of our lives as relatives and friends. We meet people who either cause us pain directly, or as a result of some joint undertaking that runs into obstructions. We meet people who are helpful, or to whom we can be helpful. In short, many relationships are possible. If the effects of karma, as described.the day before yesterday, are to become fruitful, then we must accept the fact that the wiser man in us wants certain experiences. He seeks a person who seems accidentally to cross our paths. He is the one who leads us to other people with whom we get engaged in this or that way. What is really guiding this wiser man in us when he wants to meet this or that person? What is he basing himself on? In answer, we have to say to ourselves that we want to meet him because we have met him previously. It may not have happened in the last life; it could have happened much earlier. The wiser man in us leads us to this person because we had dealings with him in a previous life, or because we may have incurred a debt in one way or another. We are led to this person as though by magic.

We are now reaching a manifold and intricate realm that can be covered only by generalities. The indications here stem from clairvoyant investigation. They can be useful to anybody since they can be applied to many special situations.

A strange observation can be made. We all have experienced or observed how, toward the middle of our lives, the ascending growth-line gradually tilts over to become a descending line, and our youthful energies begin to decline. We move past a climax and from there on we move downward. This point of change is somewhere in our thirties. It is also the time in our lives when we are living most intensively on the physical plane. In this connection, we can fall prey to a delusion. The events that from childhood precede this climax were brought with us into this incarnation. They were, so to speak, drawn out of a previous existence. The forces that we have brought along with us from the spiritual world are now placed outside ourselves and used to fashion our lives. These forces are used up when we reach this middle point.

In considering the descending curve of our lives, we perceive the lessons that we have learned in the school of life, that we have accumulated and have worked over. They will be taken along into the next incarnation. This is something we carry into the spiritual world; previously, we took something out of it. This is the time when we are fully engaged on the physical plane. We are thoroughly enmeshed with everything that comes to us from the outside world. We have passed our training period; we are fully committed to life and we have to come to terms with it. We are involved with ourselves, but we are primarily occupied with arranging our environments for ourselves, and in finding a proper relationship to the world in which we live. The human capacities that are seeking a relationship to the world are our power of reasoning and that part of our volitional life that is controlled by reason. What is thus active in us is alien to the spiritual world, which withdraws from us and closes up. It is true that in the middle of our lives we are the farthest removed from the reality of the spirit.

Here occult investigation reveals a significant fact. The people with whom we meet, and the acquaintances we make in the middle period of our lives are curiously enough the very people with whom we were engaged during the period of early childhood in one of our previous incarnations. It is an established fact that, as a general rule, although not always, we meet in the middle period of our lives, as a result of karmic guidance, the very people who were once our parents. It is unlikely that we meet in early childhood the persons who were once our parents. This happens during the middle of life. This may appear as a strange fact, but this is the way it is. When we attempt to apply such rules to the experience of life, and when we direct our thoughts accordingly, then we can learn a great deal. When a person at about the age of thirty establishes a relationship to another, either through the bonds of love or of friendship, or when they get involved in conflict, or in any other experience, we will understand a great deal more about these relationships if we consider hypothetically that the person may have once been related to the other as a child is to his parents.

In reversing this relationship, we discover another remarkable fact. The very people with whom we have been associated in our early childhood, such as parents, sisters and brothers, playmates and other companions, as a rule are the very people whom we have met in the previous or one of our previous incarnations around our thirtieth year. These people frequently appear as our parents, sisters or brothers in the present incarnation.

Curious as this may appear to us at first, let us try to apply it to life. The experience of life becomes enlightened if we look at it in this way. We may, of course, err in our speculation. 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 arrange karma 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 realize the danger that we are exposed to and the many misconceptions that may creep in. We must educate ourselves to remain open-minded and unbiased.

You may now ask what the relation is to the people we meet during the declining curve of our lives. We have discovered that at the beginning of our lives, we meet people with whom we were acquainted during the middle period of a previous life, while now during the middle of our lives, we recognize those with whom we were involved at the beginning of previous existences. But how about the period of our descending life? The answer is that we may be led to people with whom we were involved in a previous life, or we may not yet have been involved with them. They will have been connected with us in a previous life if we are meeting under special circumstances that occur at decisive junctures of a life span, when, for example, a bitter disappointment confronts us with a serious probation. In such a situation, it is likely that we are meeting during the second period of our lives people with whom we were previously connected. Thereby conditions are dislodged and experiences that were caused in the past can be resolved.

Karma works in many ways and one cannot force it into definite patterns. But as a general rule, it can be stated that during the second half of our lives we encounter people with whom the karmic connections that are beginning to be woven cannot be resolved in one life. Let us assume that we have caused suffering to someone in a previous life. It is easy to assume that the wiser man in us will lead us back to this person in a subsequent life in order that we may equalize the harm that we have done. But life conditions cannot always permit that we can equalize everything, but perhaps only a part of it. Thereby matters are complicated, and it becomes possible that such a remainder of karma may be corrected in the second half of life. Looking at it this way, we are placing our connections and communications with other people in the light of this karma.

But there is something else that we can consider in the course of karma. This is what I have called in my two recent public lectures the process of maturing and the acquisition of life experiences. These terms may be used with utter modesty. We may take into account the process by which we become wiser. Our errors may render us wiser and it is really best for us when this happens because during one lifetime we do not often have the opportunity to practice wisdom. For this reason, we retain the lessons that we have learned from our errors as strength for a future life. But what really is this wisdom and the life experience that we can acquire?

Yesterday I referred to the fact that our ideas cannot be taken immediately from one life to another. I pointed to the fact that even a genius like Plato could not carry the ideas of his mind into a new incarnation. We carry with us our volitional and soul powers, but our ideas are given us anew in every life, just as is the faculty of speech. The greater part of our ideas live in speech. Most of our ideas are derived from our faculty to express ourselves in a language. The ideas we conceive during the time between birth and death are always related to this particular earthly existence. This being so, it is true that our ideas will always depend on the where and how of our incarnations, no matter how many we have to live through. Our wealth of ideas is always derived from the outer world, and depends on the way karma has placed us into race, family and speech relationships.

In our ideas and concepts we really know nothing of the world except what is dependent on karma. A great deal is said with this statement. This means that everything we can know in life and acquire in the form of knowledge is something quite personal. We never can transcend the personal level with regard to everything we may acquire in life. We never come quite as far as the wiser man in us, but we always remain with the less wise man. If someone believes that he can, by himself, know more about his higher self from observations in the outer world, he is being led by his laziness into an unreal world. Thereby we are saying nothing less than that we know nothing of our higher self as a result of what we acquire in life.

How can we gain an understanding of our higher self; how do we come to such knowledge? To find an answer, we must ask ourselves the simple question, “What do we really know?” First of all, we know what we have learned from experience. We know this and nothing else. Anyone who wants to know himself and does not realize that he carries in his soul nothing but a mirror of the outer world may delude himself into believing that he can find his higher self by introspection. What he finds within, however, is nothing else than what has come in from outside. Laziness of thinking has no place in this quest. So we must inquire about the other worlds into which our higher self is embedded, and thereby we learn about the various incarnations of the earth and the world picture described by spiritual science.

Just as we try to understand a child's soul with regard to its outer life conditions by examining the child's surroundings, so must we ask what the environment of the higher self is. Spiritual science gives us insight into the worlds in which our higher self lives by its accounts of the evolution of Saturn and all its secrets, of the Moon and Earth evolution, of reincarnation and karma, of devachan and kamaloka, and so on. This is the only way we can learn about our higher self, about that self that extends beyond the physical plane. He who refuses to accept these secrets is as playful as a little kitten in regard to himself. It is not by petting and caressing oneself that one can discover the divine man in oneself. 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.

The very things that are uncomfortable to learn make up knowledge of self. In reality, true anthroposophy is true knowledge of self. Properly received, the science of the spirit enlightens us about our own self. Where is this self? Is it within our skin? No, it is poured into the entire world, and what is in the world is linked to the self; also, what once was in the world is connected with this self. Only if we get to know the world can we also get to know the self.

Anthroposophical knowledge, although it may appear first as mere theory, points to nothing less than a path to self-knowledge. He who wants to find himself by staring into his inner being may be motivated by the noble desire to be good and unselfish. But in reality, he becomes more and more selfish. In contrast to this, the struggle with the great secrets of existence, the attempt to emancipate oneself from the complacent personal self, the acceptance of the reality of the higher worlds and the knowledge that can be obtained from them, all lead to true self-knowledge.

While contemplating Saturn, Sun and Moon, we lose ourselves in cosmic thoughts. Thus, a soul thinking in anthroposophy exclaims, “In thy thinking cosmic thoughts are living.” He then adds to these words, “Lose thyself in cosmic thoughts.”

A soul creating out of anthroposophy says, “In thy feeling cosmic forces are weaving,” and adds in the same breath, “Feel thyself through cosmic forces.” These universal powers will not reveal themselves when we expect them to be flattering or when we close our eyes and pledge to be a good human being. Only when we open our spiritual eye and perceive how “cosmic forces” work and create, and when we realize that we are embedded in these forces, will we have an experience of our own self.

Thus, a soul that draws strength from anthroposophy will say, “In thy willing cosmic beings are working,” and he will quickly add, “Create thyself through beings of will.”

The meaning of these words can be realized if self-knowledge is practiced in the right way. If this is done, one recreates oneself out of the cosmic forces.

These thoughts may appear to be dry and abstract, but they are not mere theory. They have the inherent power of a seed planted in the earth. It sprouts and grows; life shoots in all directions and the plant becomes a tree. Thus it is with the experiences we receive through the science of the spirit that we become capable of transforming ourselves. “Create thyself through beings of will.” Thus, anthroposophy becomes an elixir of life. Our view of spirit worlds opens up, we draw strength from these worlds and once we can fully absorb them, they will help us to know ourselves in all our depth. Only when we imbue ourselves with world knowledge can we take hold of ourselves and gradually move from the less wise man in us, who is split off by the guardian of the threshold, to the wise man in us. This, which remains hidden to the weak, can be gained by the strong through anthroposophy.

In thy thinking cosmic thoughts are living;
Lose thyself in cosmic thoughts.
In thy feeling cosmic forces are weaving;
Feel thyself through cosmic forces.
In thy willing cosmic beings are working;
Create thyself through beings of will.

The purpose of these lectures is to give a survey of findings of spiritual-scientific research which enable us to grapple with the most significant riddles of human life—as far as this is possible within the limits to which understanding of the higher worlds is subject in our time. We shall start today from more familiar phenomena and then endeavour to reach higher and higher spheres of existence, to penetrate into deeply hidden riddles of man's life. We shall not start from any concepts or ideas so firmly established as to resemble dogmas, but refer, quite simply at first, to matters which everybody will feel to be connected with everyday life.

All Spiritual Science is based upon the assumption that underlying the world normally known to us, there is another—the spiritual world. It is in this spiritual world underlying the world of the senses, and in a certain respect also the world of soul, that we have to look for the actual causes and conditions of what takes place in those other worlds.

It will certainly be known to everyone here that there are definite methods which a man may apply to his life of soul and which enable him to awaken certain inner faculties slumbering in normal daily life, so that he is finally able to experience the moment of Initiation. He then has around him a new world, the world of spiritual causes and conditions underlying the world of the senses and the world of soul. It is as when, after an operation, a man hitherto blind finds around him the world of colours and light. In normal life today man is shut off from this world of spiritual realities and beings, and it is upon this world that we shall endeavour to shed light in these lectures.

On two sides—the outer and the inner sides as we may call them—man is shut off from the spiritual world. When he directs his gaze to the outer world, he perceives in the first place what is there presented to his senses. He sees colours and light, hears sounds, is aware of warmth and cold, smells, tastes, and so on. This is the world immediately around him. In contemplating this world we become aware, to begin with, of a kind of boundary. Through direct perception, direct experience, man is unable today to look behind the boundary presented to him by colours and light, sounds, scents and so forth. A trivial illustration will make this clear. Suppose we are looking at a surface painted blue. Under ordinary conditions, of course, we cannot see what is behind this surface. A shallow thinker might object that it is only a matter of looking behind the surface! But this is not so in respect of the world outspread around us, for it is precisely by what we perceive that an outer spiritual world is concealed from us and at most we can feel that colour and light, warmth, cold, and so on, are external manifestations of a world lying behind. But we cannot, at a given moment, penetrate through the colours, lights and sounds, and experience what lies behind them. We have to experience the whole outer spiritual world through these manifestations. But after a little reflection we shall be able, consistently with the most elementary logic, to say: Even if modern physics or other branches of science declare that behind the colours there is vibrating etheric substance, it soon becomes obvious that what is thus assumed to lie behind the colours is something added by thought. Nobody can actually perceive what physics declares to be vibrations, movements, of which colour is merely an effect; nor can anybody say with certainty whether there is reality in what is alleged to lie behind the sense-impressions. It is, at first, mere conjecture. The external world of the senses is spread out before us like a tapestry and we have the feeling that behind this tapestry there is something into which our faculty of perception cannot penetrate.

There, then, is the first boundary. We find the second when we look into our own being. Within ourselves we find a world of joy and sorrow, of happiness and suffering, of passions, impulses, desires, and so forth-in brief, everything that we call our life of soul. We usually sum this up by saying: ‘I feel this pleasure or that pain; I have these impulses, desires, or passions.’ But surely we also have the feeling that behind this inner life of soul something is hidden, something that is concealed by our soul-experiences just as something belonging to the outer world is concealed by our sense-perceptions. For who can fail to recognise that when we wake in the morning, joy, sorrow, happiness, suffering and other such experiences, rise up as if out of an unknown realm, and that in a certain respect man is given up to them? And is there anyone who, if he reviews his whole life of soul, could deny that there must be within him something deeper, something at first hidden from himself, out of which his joy, suffering, happiness, grief, and all his soul-experiences, stream forth—and that these, no less than the external sense-perceptions, must be manifestations of an unknown world?

And now let us ask: If two such boundaries are actually there, or may at least be presumed to be there, have we not, as human beings, certain possibilities of penetrating through them? Is there something in a man's experiences which enables him to break through this tapestry of sense-perceptions, just as he would break through a membrane covering something lying behind it? And is there something that leads into greater depths of our inner nature, behind our sufferings, behind our joys, behind our passions? Are we able to make a further move into the outer world and also into the inner world?

There are two experiences which actually enable us to break through the film covering the outer world and the resistance in the inner world. Something like a membrane is pierced and we are able to enter the world hidden behind the veil of the sense-perceptions. This world can reveal itself to us when in the course of certain normal processes of life there come entirely new experiences-experiences giving rise to the feeling that external perceptions through the senses are disappearing, that the tapestry of the outer world is being broken through; then we may say that we are penetrating a little way into the world lying behind sense-perceptions.

This experience is one that is decidedly not beneficial for human life as a whole; it is the state usually known as ecstasy—when this term is used in the original sense. It causes a man momentarily to become oblivious to the impressions of the sense-world, so that for a time he is not aware of the colours, sounds, scents, and so forth, around him and is insensitive to ordinary sense-impressions. Under certain circumstances this experience of ecstasy can lead a man to a point where he actually has new experiences, experiences by no means of everyday occurrence. Let it again be emphasised that ecstasy in this form should not be regarded as a desirable state; it is being described here simply as a condition that is possible. The not unusual state of being “out of oneself” as the saying goes, should not be called ecstasy. In one of two possible conditions a man becomes impervious to the impressions conveyed by the senses; he simply falls into a swoon in which, instead of sense-impressions, black darkness spreads around him. For a normal man that is really the safer condition of the two.

There is also a form of ecstasy in which a man is not only surrounded by dense darkness, but this darkness becomes filled with a world hitherto quite unknown to him. Do not say at once that this may be a world of illusion, of deception ... or, if you like, let it stand at that for the moment ... we will not assume that this world has any real meaning, but call it a world of apparitions, of phantasms. The actual point here is that what is seen may indeed be a world—whether of pictures or illusions—which has not previously been known. A man must then ask himself: ‘Am I able, with all my capacities, to construct such a world for myself out of my ordinary consciousness?’ If this world of pictures is such that he can say to himself: ‘I am incapable of constructing such a world of pictures out of my own experiences’—then obviously the pictures must come to him from somewhere. We will decide later whether this world has been magically conjured up before him as delusion, or whether it is reality. The point is that there are states in which a man sees worlds hitherto unknown to him.

Now this state of ecstasy is bound up with a quite special drawback for normal human beings. It is evident from the experience itself that this ecstatic condition can be induced by natural means only if what the man in question calls his Ego, his strong, inner self, through which he holds all his separate experiences together, is, as it were, extinguished. His Ego is entirely suppressed; it is as though he were outside himself, poured out into the new world which fills the darkness around him. Countless human beings have already had the experience I am describing, or at least are capable of having it.—More will be said about this in later lectures.

There are two aspects to be noted in connection with this experience of ecstasy. The one is that the actual sense-impressions vanish, also the experiences a man has when he feels and can say: ‘I see that colour, I hear these sounds,’ and so on. In the state of ecstasy he is never aware of his Ego, he does not distinguish himself from the objects around him. Fundamentally speaking, it is only the Ego that can distinguish itself from surrounding objects. Therefore in ecstasy a man cannot distinguish whether he is having to do with mirage or reality—for on that the Ego alone can decide.

In ecstasy there is a loss or at least a considerable diminution of Ego-consciousness and a fading of sense-perception; these two experiences run parallel. The tapestry of the sense-world seems to crumble, to dissolve it is as if the Ego—which otherwise seems to encounter a barrier constituted by the tapestry of the sense-world—were flowing right through the sense-perceptions and living in a world of pictures which presents something entirely new. In the state of ecstasy a man becomes aware of beings and happenings hitherto unknown to him, which he finds nowhere in the physical world, no matter what comparisons he makes. The essential point is that he experiences something entirely new.

Something happens in ecstasy that is like a breaking through of the external boundaries around man. Whether this new world is illusion or reality will become evident at a later stage.

Let us now ask ourselves whether we are also able to get behind our inner world, behind the world of our passions, impulses and desires, of our joys and sufferings, sorrows, and so on. This too is possible. Again, there are experiences which lead out beyond the realm of ordinary soul-life, if we deepen this soul-life inwardly. This is the path taken by many of those who are called mystics. In this process of mystical deepening a man first turns his attention away from the world of the senses and concentrates it upon his own inner experiences. Mystics who resolve not to enquire into the external causes of their interests, their sympathies and antipathies, their sorrows, joys, and so forth, but who are attentive only to the experiences ebbing and flowing in their souls, penetrate even more deeply into their soul-life and have quite definite experiences, differing from those ordinarily known.

Again I am describing a condition known and accessible to countless human beings. I am speaking, to begin with, of experiences that arise when normal conditions have been transcended to a very slight degree only. The essence of such experiences is that the mystic who sinks more and more deeply into himself transforms certain feelings into something quite different. If, for example, a normal man—one who is utterly alien to any kind of mystical experience—suffers a painful blow from another man, his resentment will be directed against him. That is the natural reaction. But one who practices mystical deepening will have a quite different feeling. Such a man feels: You would never have had to suffer this blow if at some time you had not brought it upon yourself. Otherwise this man would not have crossed your path. You cannot therefore justifiably turn your resentment against one who was brought into contact with you through happenings in the world in order to give you the blow you have deserved.—Such persons, if they deepen their different experiences, acquire a certain feeling about their soul-life as a whole. They say to themselves: ‘I have known much grief, much suffering, but at some time or other I was myself the cause of it. I must have done certain things, even though I cannot remember them. If I have not deserved these sufferings in my present life, then obviously there must have been another life when I did the things for which I am now making compensation.’

Through this inner deepening of experience the soul changes its former attitude, focuses more upon itself, seeks within itself what it previously sought in the outer world. This is obviously the case when someone says to himself: ‘The man who gave me the blow was led to me precisely because I myself was the cause of it.’ Such people pay more and more attention to their own inner nature, to their own inner life. In other words, just as an individual in a state of ecstasy looks through the outer veil of sense-perceptions into a world of beings and realities hitherto unknown to him, so does the mystic penetrate below his ordinary Ego. It is the ordinary Ego that rebels against the blow which comes from outside; but the mystic penetrates to what is below this Ego, to something that actually caused the blow. In this way the mystic reaches a stage where he gradually loses sight altogether of the outer world. Little by little, any concept of the outer world vanishes and his own Ego expands as it were into a whole world. But just as we will not decide at the moment whether the world revealed in ecstasy is mirage, reality or phantasy, neither will we decide whether what the mystic feels as compared with the ordinary life of soul is reality or whether it is he himself who is the cause of his sorrow and suffering. It may all be so much dreaming, but it is nevertheless an experience that may actually come to a man. The point of importance is that on two sides—outwards and inwards—he penetrates into a world hitherto unknown to him.

If we now reflect that in a condition of ecstasy a man loses grasp of his Ego, we shall realise that this is not a state to be striven for by one who is leading an ordinary life, for the possibility of achieving something in the world, our whole power of orientation in the world, depends upon the fact that in our Ego we have a firm centre of our being. If ecstasy deprives us of the possibility of experiencing the Ego, then for the time being we have lost our very selves. And on the other side, when the mystic attributes everything to the Ego, makes himself the culprit for whatever he has to experience, this has the detrimental effect of making him look within himself for the ultimate cause of everything that happens in the world. But thereby he loses the faculty of healthy orientation in life, burdens himself with guilt and is unable to establish any right relationship with the outer world.

Thus in both directions, in ordinary ecstasy and in ordinary mystical experience, the power of orientation in the world is lost. It is therefore a good thing that man encounters barriers in two directions. If he brings his Ego to expression in the outward direction, he encounters the barrier of sense-perceptions; they do not let him through to what lies behind the veil of the sense-world and that is beneficial for him because he is normally able to keep full possession of his Ego. And in the other direction the inner experiences in the life of soul do not let him through below the Ego, below those feelings which lead to the faculty of orientation. He is enclosed between two barriers in the outer world and in the inner world of soul and in normal circumstances cannot penetrate beyond the point where orientation in life is possible for him.

In what has been described a comparison has been made between the normal state of life and the abnormal states of ecstasy and uncontrolled mystical experience. Ecstasy and mystical experience are abnormal states, but in everyday life there is something which helps us to be aware of the barriers referred to very much more clearly-namely, the alternating states of waking and sleeping through which we pass within 24 hours.

What is it that we do in sleep? In sleep we do exactly the same, in a certain respect, as we do in the abnormal state of ecstasy described above. The ‘inner man’ in us spreads into the outer world. That is what actually happens. Just as in ecstasy we pour out our Ego, lose hold of our Ego, in sleep we lose not only our Ego-consciousness but we lose even more—which is beneficial. In ecstasy we lose only our Ego-consciousness, but still have around us a world of hitherto unknown pictures, a world of spiritual realities and beings. In sleep there is no such world around us, for everything in the way of perception has gone. Thus sleep differs from ecstasy in this respect: in sleep, together with the extinction of the Ego, a man's faculty of perception-whether physical or spiritual-is also extinguished. Whereas in ecstasy the Ego alone is extinguished, in sleep the faculty of perception and the consciousness too, are obliterated. Man has not only poured his Ego into the world, but he has also surrendered his consciousness to this world. What remains behind of man during sleep is what there is in him apart from the Ego and apart from consciousness. In the normal sleeping man we have before us a being in the physical world who has discarded both his consciousness and his Ego. And whither has the consciousness, whither has the Ego, gone? Having had an explanation of the state of ecstasy, we are able to answer this question too. In the state of ecstasy we have around us a world of spiritual realities and spiritual beings. But if we also relinquish consciousness, then at that same moment dense darkness surrounds us—we sleep. Thus in sleep, as in ecstasy, we have surrendered the Ego, and further—this is the characteristic of sleep—the bearer of our consciousness and its manifestations. This is our astral body; it is poured out into the world of spiritual beings and facts revealed in the state of ecstasy. We may therefore say that man's sleep is a kind of ecstasy—a condition in which he is outside his body not merely in respect of his Ego, but also in respect of his consciousness. In the state of ecstasy, the Ego, which is one member of the human being, has been abandoned; and in sleep another member too is abandoned, for the astral body goes out of the physical body as well, and with this departure of the astral body the possibility of consciousness is eliminated.

We have, then, to picture man in sleep as consisting on the one side of the members still lying in the bed—the physical body and the etheric body—and on the other side, of the members outside the sleeper which have been given over to a world that is to begin with an unknown realm; these members are the Ego, which in ecstasy is also surrendered, and a second member as well, which in ecstasy is not surrendered: the astral body.

Sleep represents a kind of division of man's being. Consciousness and Ego separate from the outer sheaths and what happens in sleep is that man passes into a state in which he no longer knows anything about the experiences of waking life, in which he has no consciousness at all of what outer impressions have brought to him. His inner self is given over to a world of which he has no consciousness, of which he knows nothing. Now for a certain reason of which we shall hear a great deal, this world to which man's inner self is given over, into which his Ego and his astral body have passed and in which he has forgotten all the impressions of waking life, is called the Macrocosm, the Great World. While he is asleep man is given over to the Macrocosm, poured out into the Macrocosm.

During ecstasy he is likewise given over to the Macrocosm, but then he knows something of it. It is characteristic of ecstasy that a man experiences something—whether pictures or realities—of what is spread around him in a vast domain of space in which he believes himself lost. He experiences something like a loss of his Ego but as though he were in a realm hitherto unknown to him. This identification with a world which differs from that of everyday life when we feel, subject only to our bodies, justifies us from the outset in speaking of a Macrocosm, a Great World—in contrast to the ‘little world’ of our ordinary waking life, when we feel ourselves enclosed within our skin. That is only the most superficial view of the matter. In the state of ecstasy we have grown into the Macrocosm, where we see fantastic forms, fantastic because there is no resemblance with anything in the physical world. We cannot distinguish ourselves from them. We feel our whole being as it were expanded into the Macrocosm. That is what happens in ecstasy. With this conception of the state of ecstasy we are able—by analogy—it least-to form an idea of why we lose hold of the Ego in that state.

Let us picture the Ego of man as a drop of coloured liquid. Assuming that we had a very tiny vessel just able to contain this drop, the drop would be visible by its colour. But if the drop were put in a large vessel, let us say in a basin of water, the drop would no longer be perceptible. Apply this analogy to the Ego which in the state of ecstasy expands over the Macrocosm, and you will be able to conceive that the Ego feels itself becoming weaker and weaker as it expands. When the Ego spreads over the Macrocosm, it loses the faculty of self-awareness, rather as a drop loses its identity in a large vessel of water. So we can understand that when man surrenders himself to the Macrocosm, the Ego is lost. It is still there, only being outpoured in the Macrocosm it knows nothing of itself.

But in sleep there is another factor of importance. As long as a man has consciousness, he acts. In the state of ecstasy he has a kind of consciousness, but not the guiding Ego. He does not control his actions; he surrenders himself entirely to impressions made upon him. It is an essential feature of ecstasy that the man concerned is actually capable of actions. Watched from outside, however, it is as though he had entirely changed. It is really not he himself who is acting; he acts as if under quite different influences. For many beings appear and exert influence upon him. There lies the danger of ecstasy. Because what man sees is a multiplicity, he comes under the control now of one being, now of another, and seems to be disintegrating. This is the danger of the state of ecstasy. Man is indeed given over to a spiritual world but it is a world which tears him asunder inwardly.

If we think of sleep, we must admit that the world we there enter has a certain reality. The existence of a world can be denied only as long as no effects of it are observed. If it is insisted that there is someone behind a wall, this can be denied as long as no knocking can be heard; if there is knocking, commonsense can no longer deny it. When effects of a world are perceived it is not possible to regard that world as pure fancy.

Are there, then, any perceptible effects of the world which we see in ecstasy but not in normal sleep? Of the effects of the world in which we are during sleep we can all convince ourselves when we wake in the morning. Our condition then is different from what it was the previous evening. In the evening we are tired, our forces are exhausted and must be replenished; but in the morning we wake with fresh forces which have been gathered during sleep. When with his Ego and astral body a man is given up to another world, he draws from that world-which in ecstasy is perceived but in normal sleep is obliterated-the forces he needs for the life of day. How this actually happens need not concern us now; what is important is that this world brings us forces which banish fatigue. The world out of which stream forces which get rid of fatigue is the same as the world we see in ecstasy. Every morning we become aware of the effects of the world we perceive in ecstasy but not in sleep. When there is a world which produces effects we can no longer speak of a non-reality.

Out of the same world into which we gaze in the state of ecstasy, and which in sleep is obliterated, we draw the forces strengthening us for the life of day. We do this under quite special circumstances. During this process of drawing forces from that spiritual world we do not perceive ourselves. The essential feature of sleep is that we achieve something but have no awareness of ourselves during this activity. If we had any such awareness the process would be carried out far less efficiently than it is when we are not conscious of it. In daily life too there are matters where we do well to say to many a man: ‘Hands off!’ Everything would go wrong if they interfered with it. If a man were to play a part in this difficult operation of restoring the forces exhausted during the previous day, he would ruin everything because he is not yet capable of being a conscious participant. It is providential that consciousness of his own existence is snatched away from man at the moment when he might do harm to his own development.

Thus through forgetting his own existence on going to sleep man passes out into the Macrocosm. Every night he passes over from his microcosmic existence into the Macrocosm and becomes one with the latter inasmuch as he pours into it his Ego and his astral body. But because in the present course of his life he is capable of working only in the world of waking life, his consciousness ceases the moment he passes into the Macrocosm. That is why it has always been said in occult science that between life in the Microcosm and in the Macrocosm lies the stream of forgetfulness. On this stream of forgetfulness man passes into the Great World, when on going to sleep he passes out of the Microcosm into the Macrocosm. So we can say that during every period of sleep, man surrenders two members of his being—the astral body and the Ego—to the Macrocosm.

And now let us think of the moment of waking. At the moment of waking a man begins again to feel pleasure, pain, and whatever urges and desires he has recently experienced. That is the first experience. The second experience is that his Ego-consciousness returns. Out of the vague darkness of sleep the soul-experiences and the Ego re-emerge. We have therefore to say that if man consisted only of those members which remained lying in bed through the night, he would not, on waking, be able to be aware of past experiences in the life of soul such as pleasure, suffering and so on, for what has been lying there is in the truest sense in the same condition as a plant. It has no soul-experiences. But neither has the ‘inner man’ during sleep, although this inner man is the bearer of such experiences. From this we can realise that in ordinary life, before suffering, pleasure, sympathy, antipathy, and so forth, can actually be experienced, the astral body must dive down into the sheaths of man which remain lying in bed; otherwise he cannot become aware of any such experiences. We can therefore say: The part of our being—consisting of astral body and Ego—which at night is poured out into the Macrocosm and gives rise to our inner experiences, becomes perceptible to us in normal life only through the fact that on waking we descend into the sheaths which have remained lying in bed.

What lies there is again twofold. One part of it is what we experience on waking as our inner life. In the Macrocosm during sleep we cannot be conscious of the play of our feelings, or, in brief, of our soul-experiences. But when on waking we penetrate once again into the members of our being which have remained lying in the bed, we can experience not only our inner feelings but also the outer world of sense-impressions. We perceive the red of the rose; delight in the rose is an inner experience; perception of the red colour is an outer experience. Therefore what is lying there in bed must be twofold: one part must mirror to us what we experience inwardly, and the other part perceives an outer world. If there were only the one without the other, we should simply experience on waking either an inner world alone or an external world alone. A panorama of outer; impressions would be before us and we should not feel pleasure or pain; or conversely, we should feel only pleasure and pain and have no perception of anything in the external world. We dive down on waking, not into a unity, but into a duality. In sleep, a duality of being has poured into the Macrocosm, and on waking we dive down into the Microcosm, another duality. What enables us to experience an outer picture of the sense-world is the physical body, and what enables us in waking life to have an inner life of soul, is the etheric body. If, on waking, we were to penetrate into the physical body only, we should confront outer pictures, but we should remain inwardly empty, cold and apathetic, having no interest in anything around us or presented in the pictures. If we were to penetrate into the etheric body only, we should have no outer world, but only a world of feelings, surging up and ebbing away. And so on waking we enter a twofold being—we enter into the etheric body which acts as a mirror of the inner world, and into the physical body, the medium for the impressions of the outer world of the senses.

Actual experiences therefore justify us in speaking of man as a fourfold being. Two of his members—Ego and astral body—belong, during sleep, to the Macrocosm. In waking life the Ego and astral body belong to the Microcosm that is enclosed within the skin. This ‘little world’ is the medium for everything we have before us in the normal waking state, for it is the physical body which enables us to have an external world before us, and the etheric body which enables us to have an inner life.

Thus man lives alternately in the Microcosm and in the Macrocosm. Every morning he enters into the Microcosm. The fact that in sleep he is poured out, like a drop in a large vessel of water, into the Macrocosm, means that at the moment of passing out of the Microcosm into the Macrocosm, he must pass through the stream of forgetfulness.

By what means, then, can man, provided he deepens himself inwardly, to a certain extent induce those conditions that were described at the beginning of the lecture? In ecstasy, the Ego is poured into the Macrocosm, while the astral body has remained in the Microcosm. In what does the mystical state consist? Our life by day in the physical and etheric bodies, in the Microcosm, is remarkable in the extreme. We do not actually descend into these bodies in such a way that we become aware of their inner nature. These two sheaths make possible our life of soul and our sense-perceptions. Why is it that on waking we become aware of our life of soul? It is because the etheric body does not allow us actually to look within it, any more than a mirror allows us to see what is behind it and for that very reason enables us to see ourselves in it. The etheric bodies mirrors our soul-life back to us; and because it does so, it appears to us as if it were the actual cause of our soul-life. The etheric body itself, however, proves to be impenetrable. We do not penetrate into it, but it throws back to us an image of our life of soul. That is its peculiarity. The mystic, however, through intensifying the life of soul, succeeds in penetrating to a certain extent into the etheric body; he sees more than the mirrored image. By working his way into this part of the Microcosm he experiences within himself what in the normal state man experiences poured over the outer world. Thus the mystic, through inner deepening, penetrates to some extent into his etheric body; he penetrates below that threshold where the soul-life is in other circumstances reflected in joy, suffering, and so on, into the interior of the etheric body. What the mystic experiences in passing the threshold are processes in his own etheric body. He then experiences something that is somewhat comparable with the loss of the Ego in the state of ecstasy. In the latter case the Ego becomes evanescent, as it were, having been poured into the Macrocosm, and in mystical experience the Ego is ‘densified.’ The mystic becomes aware of this through the fact that the principle adopted by the ordinary Ego of acting in accordance with the brain-bound intelligence and the dictates of the senses, is ignored, and the impulses for his actions arise from inner feelings issuing directly from his etheric body and not, as in the case of other people, merely reflected by it. The intensely strong inner experiences of the mystic are due to the fact that he penetrates right into his own etheric body.

Whereas in the state of ecstasy a man expands his being into the Macrocosm, the mystic compresses himself within the Microcosm. Both experiences, whether that of perceiving in ecstasy certain happenings and beings in the Macrocosm, or that of undergoing unusual inner experiences as a mystic, are related to each other, and this relation may be characterised quite simply in the following way. The world we see with our eyes and hear with our ears arouses in us certain feelings of pleasure, pain, and so on. We feel that in normal life all this is interconnected. The joy in the outer world felt by one person may be more intense than that felt by another, but these are differences of degree only. The intense sufferings and raptures of the mystic are vastly different in quality. There are also great differences in quality between what the eyes see and the ears hear and what is experienced by a person in ecstasy, when he is given over to a world that is not like the world of the senses. But if we could have from someone in ecstasy a description of his raptures and torments, we should be able to say that the person in ecstasy may derive from his vision of beings and events experiences such as those of the mystic. And if, on the other hand, we were to hear the mystic describing his emotions and feelings, we should say that something of the kind may equally well be experienced in ecstasy.

The world of the mystic is a real world. Similarly the beings encountered in the state of ecstasy are subjectively real, in the sense that they are actually seen. Whether the experiences are illusions or realities is at the moment beside the point. The person in question sees a world that is different from the sense-world; the mystic experiences joys, emotions and torments which are not comparable with anything known in everyday life. The mystic does not, however, see the world that is revealed to one in the state of ecstasy, and the latter has no experience of the world of the mystic. Both worlds are independent of each other.—It is a strange relationship, but an explanation of the world of the one may be found in the light of the experiences of the other. If a normal person were actually to experience the world described by one in the state of ecstasy, the shattering effect would be comparable with the intensity of the experiences undergone by the mystic.

We have thus pointed to a certain connection between the worlds of mystical and ecstatic experience. Both inwardly and outwardly, man encounters the world of the spirit.

What has been described today will seem to many of you to be airy hypothesis, but we shall try in the next lectures to answer the questions: To what extent are we able to penetrate into a real world by working our way through the tapestry of the outer world of sense? How far is it possible to get beyond the world experienced by a man in the state of ecstasy and penetrate into a real outer world, and to penetrate below the inner world of the mystic into a realm that lies below the human Ego but in which there is also reality? The next lectures will speak in greater and greater detail of the paths leading into the spiritual world through the Macrocosm and through the Microcosm.

The relation between man's waking and sleeping states has been broadly described, and it was said that he draws from the latter the forces he needs during waking life in order to sustain his life of soul. These things are much more complicated than is generally supposed and today, as the result of spiritual research, there will be something more detailed to say about the difference between man's waking life and the state of sleep. Let me mention in parenthesis that there is no need to speak of all the hypotheses, some more interesting than others, that are advanced by present-day physiology in order to explain the difference between the two states. It would be easy to speak of these theories but this would only divert us from genuinely spiritual-scientific study of the two states. All that need be said is that modern science concerns itself only with the part of man which, during sleep, remains behind in the physical world. The fact that the Ego and astral body emerge from the physical and etheric bodies when man goes to sleep can be reality only to spiritual investigation, to the eyes of a seer. The whole process is completely foreign to modern physical science—which need not, however, be severely criticised on that account; in a certain respect it is justified in asserting a one-sided point of view. Man's Ego and astral body are in a spiritual world while he is asleep and in the physical world when he wakes and comes down into the physical and etheric bodies.

Let us now consider the sleeping human being. Quite naturally, normal human consciousness regards sleep as an undifferentiated state that is not a subject for further investigation. The question is rarely asked whether, during the time man spends at night in a spiritual world, an influence on his body-free soul is exerted by several forces, or by a single force only which permeates the spiritual world. Are we able to distinguish various forces to which he is exposed in that world during sleep? Yes, several quite different influences can be distinguished. The influences do not, of course, primarily affect the members that remain lying in bed, but they affect man as a being of soul when his astral body and Ego have emerged from his physical and etheric bodies.

By considering certain familiar experiences and facts we will now explore the different influences which are exerted upon the sleeping human being. A man has only to be more attentive to what happens to him when he goes to sleep and he will notice how the inner activity through which, during the day, he moves his limbs and brings his body into movement with the help of his soul, begins to flag. Anyone who practises a little self-observation at the time when he is about to go to sleep will feel that he can now no longer exercise the same control over his body. A kind of lethargy begins to overpower him. First of all he will feel incapable of directing the movement of his limbs by the will; control of speech is then lost. Then he feels that the possibility of entering into any connection with the outer world is slipping away from him, and all the impressions of the day gradually disappear. What disappears first is the ability to use the limbs and especially the instruments of speech, then the faculties of taste and smell, and finally of hearing. In this gradual cessation of the inner activity of the soul, man experiences the emergence from his bodily sheaths.

In saying this we have already indicated the first influence that is exerted upon man as a preliminary to sleep; it is the influence that drives him out of his physical and etheric bodies. Anyone who practises self-observation will notice how a power seems to be overcoming him, for in normal life he does not order himself to go to sleep, to stop speaking, tasting, hearing, and so forth. A power is now asserting itself in him. This is the first of the influences to be exerted from the world into which man passes at night; it is the influence which drives him out of his physical and etheric bodies. But if this were the only influence to be exerted, the outcome would be absolutely calm, unbroken sleep. This is of course known in normal life; it is the state induced by the first influence connected with sleep. But there are other kinds of sleep.

We all know the state of dream, when chaotic or clear pictures obtrude themselves into sleep. Were only the first influence at work, the influence that draws man into a spiritual world, sleep unbroken by any dream would be the result; but another influence becomes evident when sleep is broken by dreams. Two influences can be distinguished: the one extinguishes consciousness inasmuch as it drives us out of our bodily sheaths, and the second conjures the world of dreams before the soul, thrusts this dream-world into our sleep.

But some people have yet a third kind of sleep. Although this third kind occurs only rarely, everyone knows that it does occur; it is when a man begins to talk or act in sleep without the consciousness that is his in waking life. Usually he knows nothing the next day of the impulses which have driven him to such actions during sleep. The condition can be enhanced to the point of what is usually called sleepwalking. While he is walking in his sleep a man may also have certain dreams; but it is not so in the majority of cases; in a certain sense he acts like an automaton, impelled by obscure urges of which he need not have even the consciousness of dream. Through this third influence he enters into contact with the outer world as he does by day, only now he is unconscious. Such actions in sleep are therefore subject to a third influence.

Three influences, then, to which the human being is exposed during sleep can be clearly distinguished; they are always present, and spiritual investigation confirms this. In the great majority of people, however, the first influence predominates; most of their sleep is unbroken by dreams. The second influence, giving rise to the state of dream, takes effects at intervals in nearly everybody. But in by far the greater number of people these two states are so predominant that speaking and acting during sleep rarely occur. The influence that takes effect in a sleep-walker is present in every human being but in a sleep-walker this third influence is so strong in comparison with the other two that it gets the upper hand. Nevertheless every human being is liable to be exposed to all three influences.

These three influences have always been recognised in Spiritual Science as distinct from each other. In man's soul-life there are three domains, the first being mainly subject to the first influence, the second more to the second influence and the third more to the third influence. The human soul has a threefold nature, and it can be subject to influences of three distinct kinds. The part of the soul that is subject to the first influence which drives the soul out of the bodily sheaths, is known in Spiritual Science as the Sentient Soul; the part affected by the second influence which drives the pictures of dream into man's life of soul during sleep is known as the Intellectual or Mind-Soul; the third part, which in the case of most people does not assert its unique character during sleep because the other two influences predominate, is called the Consciousness or Spiritual Soul. Thus three influences are to be distinguished during the state of sleep; the three members of the soul which are subject to these three influences, are: Sentient Soul, Intellectual or Mind-Soul, Consciousness-or Spiritual Soul. When man is transported by one force into dreamless sleep, an influence from the world into which he passes is being exerted on his Sentient Soul; when his sleep is pervaded by dream-pictures, an influence is being exerted on his Intellectual or Mind-Soul; when he begins to speak or to act in his sleep, an influence is being exerted upon his Consciousness-Soul.

So far, however, we have considered only one aspect of man's life of soul during sleep. We must now describe the aspect of soul-life that is the opposite of the sleeping state. Let us think of a man who is returning from sleep to waking life in the physical world. What is happening to him when he wakes? At night a certain force is able to drive him out of his physical and etheric bodies because he succumbs to it. In later stages of sleep he succumbs to the other two influences—those that are exerted on the Mind-Soul and on the Consciousness-Soul. But when these influences have been exerted, the man is different; he undergoes a change during sleep. The evidence of the change is that at night he was fatigued but in the morning has become able to cope with his life in the physical world. What has happened to him during sleep has made this possible.

The same influence which makes itself felt in certain abnormal conditions in the dream-world is present through the whole of sleep, even when there are no dreams. The third influence, which takes effect in a sleep-walker but in other cases does not operate, is the one that is exerted on the Consciousness-Soul. When the influences on the Mind-Soul and Consciousness-Soul have taken effect, man is strengthened and energised; he has drawn from the spiritual world the forces he needs for his life during the next day in order to recognise and enjoy the physical world. It is primarily the influences exerted on the Mind-Soul and on the Consciousness-Soul which strengthen man during sleep. But when he is thus strengthened, the same influence which drove him out of his physical and etheric bodies brings him back again into them when he wakes in the morning. The same influence is being exerted then in the opposite direction, and it is exerted on the Sentient Soul. Everything connected with the Sentient Soul has become exhausted by the previous evening. But in the morning, when we are fresh again, we take renewed interest in the impressions of the physical world—colours, lights, objects—which will become causes of interest, pain or pleasure, inspire sympathy or antipathy in us. We are given up to pleasure, to pain, in short to the external world. What is it that is kindled in us when we are thus given up to the external world? What is it that feels pleasure and pain? What is it that has interests? It is the Sentient Soul. In the evening we feel the need of sleep, we feel that our lively participation in the outer world is exhausted; but in the morning it is refreshed again. We feel that the same manifestations of the Sentient Soul which flag at night, revive and reassert themselves in the morning. From this we can recognise that the same force which bore us out of ourselves brings the waking soul back again into the body. What at night seemed to be dying away is as if reborn. The same force is operating, but now in the one, now in the opposite, direction.

If we wished to make a diagrammatic sketch of what happens, it might be done in the following way, but I emphasise that it is meant only as an indication.

I have indicated by a dot the moment of going to sleep, when man is drawn into the subconscious; and by drawing loops I have indicated his surrender to the state of sleep and his awakening from that state. The lower loop indicates the course of life during the waking state and the upper loop the sleeping state. We can therefore say of the moment of going to sleep that a force, working on the Sentient Soul from the spiritual world, is drawing us into that world. This is indicated by the first section of the upper loop in the diagram. The second section of the same loop indicates the influence that is exerted upon the Intellectual or Mind-Soul, causing dreams. And the third section of the loop indicates the influence or force that is exerted on the Consciousness-Soul. In the morning, the same force that has drawn us into the sleeping state drives us out of it and into the life of day. This is the force that works upon the Sentient Soul. The same applies to the influences exerted on the Mind-Soul and on the Consciousness-Soul. During the night man moves around a kind of circle. On going to sleep he moves towards the region where the influence upon the Consciousness-Soul is strongest. From that point he moves again towards the force that works upon his Sentient Soul and brings him back into the waking state.

Thus there are three forces which work upon man during sleep. Since early times these three forces have been given definite names in spiritual science. These names are familiar to you, but I beg you now not to think of anything in connection with them except that they stand for the three forces which during sleep work upon these three parts of the human soul. It we were to go back to ancient times we should find that these designations were used originally for these three forces; and if the designations are now used in other ways, they have simply been borrowed. The force which works upon the Sentient Soul and at the times of going to sleep and waking drives man out of his bodily sheaths and eventually into them again, was designated in one of the ancient languages by a name that would correspond with the word “Mars”. The force which works upon the Mind-Soul after the man has gone to sleep and again before waking, that is to say, in two different periods, was designated by the word “Jupiter.” It is the force which drives the world of dreams into the Mind-Soul. The force which works upon the Consciousness-Soul during sleep and under special circumstances would make a man into a sleep-walker, was designated by the name “Saturn.”

We may therefore say, using the terminology of ancient spiritual science: “Mars” sends man to sleep and wakes him; “Jupiter” sends dreams into his sleep; and dark “Saturn” stirs into unconscious action during sleep a man who cannot withstand its influence. For the time being we will think of the original, spiritual significance of these names as denoting forces that work upon the human being during sleep, when he is outside his physical and etheric bodies in the spiritual world, not of their significance in astronomy.

Now what happens when man wakes in the morning? He actually enters a quite different world which he normally regards today as the only one belonging to him. Impressions from outside are made upon his senses, but he is unable to look behind these impressions. When he wakes from sleep, the whole tapestry of the sense-world lies outspread before him. But not only does he perceive this external world with his senses; together with every perception he feels something. However slight the pleasurable sensation may be on perceiving, for example, some colour, nevertheless a certain inner process is always present. All external sense-perceptions work in such a way that they give rise to certain inner states; everyone will realise that the effect of violet is different from that of green. It is the Sentient Body that enables the sense-impressions to be received; it causes men to see yellow, for example; but what we experience and feel inwardly as a result of the impressions made upon us by the red, violet or yellow colour—that is caused by the Sentient Soul. A fine distinction must be made between these functions of the Sentient Body and the Sentient Soul.

In the morning the Sentient Soul begins to be given up to the impressions of the outer world brought to it by the Sentient Body. The part of us (Sentient Soul) which during sleep was exposed to the Mars influence is given over on waking to the external world of the senses. Spiritual science again gives a special name to the whole of the external sense-world in so far as it arouses certain feelings of pleasure or pain, joy or sadness in our souls. But under that name we must think only of the influence working upon our Sentient Soul from the tapestry of the outer world of the senses; this force does not let us remain cold and impassive but fills us with certain feelings. So that just as the first influence exerted on the Sentient Soul after we go to sleep is given the name of Mars, the influence which takes effect on waking is called the force of “Venus”.

Similarly, an influence from the physical world is exerted during waking life upon the Intellectual or Mind-Soul when it is within the bodily sheaths. This is a different influence; it is the influence which enables us to withdraw from external impressions and to work upon them inwardly, to reflect upon them. Notice the difference there is between the experiences of the Sentient Soul and those of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. The Sentient Soul has experiences only as long as a man is given up to the outer world; it receives the impressions of the outer world. But if for a time in waking life he pays no attention to the actual impressions of the outer world, if he ponders over them and lets the feelings of pleasure, pain, and so forth, merely echo on within him, then he is given over to his Mind-Soul. Compared with the Sentient Soul it has rather more independence. There are influences which enable a man during waking life not merely to stand gazing at the tapestry of the sense-world but to turn his attention away from all that, to form thoughts whereby he combines external impressions in his mind and enable him to make himself independent of the influences of the outer world. These are the influences of “Mercury.”

The influence of Mercury works during the day upon man's Intellectual or Mind-Soul just as the influence of Jupiter works upon it during sleep at night. You will notice that there is a certain correspondence between the influences of “Mercury” and of “Jupiter”. [* See, Human Questions and Cosmic Answers, lecture 2.] In the case of a normal person today the Jupiter influences penetrate into his life of soul as dream-pictures. The corresponding influences during waking life, the Mercury influences, work in a man's thoughts, in his inner, reflective experiences. When the Jupiter influences are working in a man's dreams, he does not know whence his experiences come; during waking consciousness, however, when the Mercury influences are working, he knows the source of them. In both cases, inner processes are being pictured in the soul.—Such is the correspondence between the influences of Jupiter and those of Mercury.

In the waking life of day there are also influences which work upon the Consciousness-Soul. What are the differences between Sentient Soul, Intellectual or Mind-Soul, and Consciousness-Soul? The Sentient Soul operates when we are merely gazing at the things of the external world. If we withdraw our attention for a time from the impressions of this outer world and work over them inwardly, then we are given over to the Mind-Soul. But if we now take what has been worked over in thought, turn again to the outer world and relate ourselves to it by passing over to deeds, then we are given over to the Consciousness-Soul. For example: As long as I am simply looking at these flowers in front of me and my feelings are moved by the pure whiteness of the rose, I am given up to my Sentient Soul. If, however, I avert my gaze and no longer see the flowers but only think about them, then I am given over to my Intellectual or Mind-Soul. I am working in thought upon the impressions I have received. If now I say to myself that because the flowers have given me pleasure I will gladden someone else by presenting them to him and then pick them up in order to hand them over, I am performing a deed; I am passing out of the realm of the Mind-Soul into that of the Consciousness-Soul and relating myself again to the outer world. Here is a third force which operates in man and enables him not only to work over in thought the impressions of the outer world, but to relate himself to that world again.

You will notice that there is again a correspondence between the activity of the Consciousness Soul in the waking state and in sleep. You have heard that when this influence is being exerted in sleep a man becomes a sleep-walker; he speaks and acts in his sleep. In the waking state, however, he acts consciously. At night, in sleep-walking he is impelled by the force of dark “Saturn.” The influence which during waking life works upon man's Consciousness-Soul in such a way that independence can be achieved in conditions of ordinary life, is called in Spiritual Science the force of the “Moon”. Here again, please forget whatever mental pictures you have hitherto connected with this word. You will presently understand the reason for these designations.

Thus we have found that man's soul in waking life and in sleep has three different members, that it is subject to three different influences. During the night when man is in the spiritual world he is subject to the forces designated in Spiritual Science as those of “Mars”, “Jupiter” and “Saturn”; his threefold life of soul by day is given over to the forces designated as those of “Venus”, “Mercury” and “Moon”.

This is the course traversed by man in the 24 hours of day and night. And now we will think of a series of phenomena which belong to a quite different domain but which for certain reasons can be studied in connection with what has been said. These reasons will be made clear as the lectures proceed. Please remember that many things said at the beginning of this Course will be explained only at a later stage.

You are all familiar with the ideas held by modern astronomical science of the course of the Earth around the Sun and also of the other planets belonging to the solar system. What is said in treatises of the usual kind represents, in the view of Spiritual Science, only the most elementary beginning. What takes place in the physical world is for Spiritual Science a symbol, an external picture, of inner, spiritual processes and what we are accustomed to learn about our planetary system from elementary astronomy can be compared, as regards what really underlies it, with what is learnt by a child about the movements of a clock. We explain to him what the twelve conventional figures stand for, and what the rotation of the two hands—one slow and the other quicker—means. The child will eventually be able to tell us from the position of the hands when, let us say, the time is half-past nine. But that would not mean very much. The child must learn a great deal more, for example, to relate the movement of the hands to what is happening in the world. When the hour-hand stands at six and the minute-hand at twelve, he must know what time of the day this signifies—namely that at a certain season of the year, if it is early morning, the Sun will be rising then. He must learn to relate what is presented on the face of the clock to conditions in the world and to regard what the clock expresses as a picture of them.

We are taught as children that the Sun is at the centre of the solar system and that the planets revolve around it-first the planet now called Mercury, then the planet now called Venus, [*In former times the names of these two planets came to be reversed. See later paragraphs of this lecture.] then the Earth plus Moon, then Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Astronomical maps of the heavens show us where Saturn or Jupiter or Mars are to be found in certain months of the year. When we have learnt to know the relative positions of the planets at definite times of the year, we have learnt as much about the heavens as a child has learnt about the clock when from the position of the hands he is able to say that the time is half-past nine.

But then we can go on to learn something else. Just as a child learns to recognise what conditions are indicated by the position of the hands of a clock, we can learn to recognise macrocosmic forces penetrating invisibly into space behind a great cosmic timepiece. We realise then that our solar system, with the planets in their different positions and mutual relationships, gives expression to certain macrocosmic powers. From this timepiece of our planetary system we can pass on to contemplate the great spiritual relationships. The position of every planet will become the expression of something lying behind and we shall be able to say that there are reasons for the various relationships in which, for example, Venus stands to Jupiter, and so on. There are actual reasons for saying that these conditions are brought about by divine-spiritual Powers, just as there are reasons for saying that the cosmic timepiece is constructed according to a definite plan. The idea of the planetary movements in the solar system then becomes full of significance. Otherwise the cosmic timepiece would seem to have been constructed haphazardly. The planetary system becomes for us a kind of cosmic clock, a means of expression for what lies behind the heavenly bodies and their movements in the solar system.

Let us first of all consider this cosmic clock itself. The idea of the planetary system having formed itself is easily refuted. You will all have been taught in school about the formation of the planetary system. You will have been told, in effect, that a gigantic nebula in the universe once began to rotate and then the Sun, with the planets around it, were formed by a process of separation from the nebula itself. This will probably have been demonstrated by an experiment. It is easy to rotate a drop of oil on the surface of water in a bowl. Tiny drops separate off and rotate around a larger drop which remains at the centre. The teacher will point out that this represents, on a minute scale, the formation of a planetary system and nobody will question it. But a sharp-witted pupil might say to the teacher: “You have forgotten something that in other circumstances it might be convenient to forget, but not in this case. You have forgotten your own part in the experiment because it is you who have rotated the drop of oil!”—For the sake of logic the most important factor of all should not be forgotten. It should at least be assumed that a colossal power in cosmic space brought the whole solar system into existence through rotation. The experiment in itself points to the fact that there must be something behind what is rotating; it points to the existence of forces which cause the movement that is perceptible to the eye. In the same way there are forces and Powers behind the great cosmic edifice of our solar system.

And now we will think of the outer aspect of this solar system. (See diagram). The Earth revolves around the Sun

at the centre. I will leave out details. At a certain time of the year the Earth stands at one point and at another time somewhere else. The Moon revolves around the Earth and the planets usually called Mercury and Venus are nearer to the Sun and revolve around it. I emphasise here that in the course of time a change has taken place in the names of these two planets. [* This change of names must be kept closely in mind when references are made to the two planets.] The planet that is called Mercury today was formerly called Venus, and the planet called Venus today was formerly called Mercury. Venus, (formerly Mercury) is nearer the Sun than the planet now called Mercury (formerly Venus). Then, farther away than the Earth, the diagram indicates Mars, Jupiter and Saturn revolving around the Sun. The relative positions are not strictly correct but that does not matter here. We will leave the other planets out of consideration today.

Now let us assume that as it revolves the Earth comes to a position between Mars and the Sun. This will very seldom be the case but we will assume for the moment that it is so. Then, in the space between Earth and Sun there will be the planets Mercury and Venus, and on the other side of the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Leaving aside the Earth, the sequence will be: Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, on one side; Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, on the other. A looped line (see diagram) drawn around the heavenly bodies is a lemniscate,

with the Sun at the centre of the loops-it is the same line as the one indicating the cycle of man's waking and sleeping life.

Thus it is possible—though not generally the case—for the planets to be arranged in the solar system in an order similar to that followed by man in completing the cycle of waking and sleeping. Taking the moment of going to sleep and that of waking as the centre, the same spatial order can be indicated for the planetary system as for the daily life of man.

The perspective here revealed is one of mighty forces underlying the order of our planetary system, regulating the great cosmic timepiece as our own lives are regulated through the course of 24 hours. The thought will then not seem absurd that mighty forces are operating in the Macrocosm—forces analogous to those which guide our lives during the day and night. As the outcome of such thoughts the same names came into use in ancient science for the forces of the universe as for the forces which work upon our own lives. The force which in the Macrocosm drives Mars around the Sun is similar to the one that sends us to sleep. The force in the Macrocosm which drives Venus around the Sun is similar to the one which regulates the Sentient Soul by day. Far-off Saturn, with its slight influence, seeing to resemble those weak forces that work, in special cases only, upon the Consciousness-Soul in people who are sleep-walkers. And the rotation of the Moon around the Earth is due to a force similar to that which regulates our conscious deeds in waking life. The spatial distances signify something that comes to expression in a certain respect in our own time-regulated life.—We shall go into these things more deeply and it is only a matter today of calling attention to them.—If we consider, quite superficially, that Saturn is the most remote planet and has accordingly the weakest effect upon our Earth, this can be compared with the fact that the forces of dark Saturn have only a slight effect upon the sleeping human being. And similarly, the force which drives Jupiter around the Sun can be likened to that which penetrates comparatively seldom into our lives, namely, the dream-world.

Thus we find a remarkable correlation between human life, the Microcosm, and the forces working in the great cosmic clock, driving the several planets round the Sun in the Macrocosm.

In very truth the world is infinitely more complicated than is supposed. Our human nature is comprehensible only if we take account of its kinship with the Macrocosm. Knowing this, spiritual researchers in all epochs have chosen corresponding designations for the Great World and the Little World—the latter being the seemingly insignificant bodily man enclosed within the skin.

I have only been able today to give a faint indication of correspondences between the Microcosm (man) and the Macrocosm (the solar system). But it will now be evident to you that such correspondences do indeed exist. As though from afar I have alluded to Beings whose forces work through space and regulate the movements of our planetary system just as the movements of the hands of a clock in the physical world are regulated. We have only so much as glanced at the frontier of the region where we may hope that spiritual worlds will reveal themselves to us. In the coming lectures we shall learn to recognise not only the planets as the hands of the great cosmic clock but also the actual Beings who have brought the whole solar system into movement, who guide the planets round the Sun and prove to be akin to what goes on in the human being himself. And so we shall come to understand how man is born as a Little World, a Microcosm, out of the Great World, the Macrocosm.

To obviate any possible misunderstanding, I want to emphasise that the aim of yesterday's lecture was not that of proving anything in particular but merely to point out that certain observations led spiritual investigators of bygone times to designate by similar names certain processes and objects in space and certain processes and happenings in our own daily and nightly experiences. The main purpose of the lecture was to introduce concepts that will be required in our further studies. The lectures given in this Course must be regarded as a whole, and the early lectures are in the widest sense intended to assemble the ideas and conceptions needed for the knowledge of the spiritual worlds that is to be communicated in those that come later. Today, too, we shall take our start from familiar experiences and pass on gradually to more remote realms of spirit.

We have heard in previous lectures that in respect of his inner being, in respect, that is to say, of his astral body and Ego, man lives during the sleeping state in a spiritual world and on waking returns into his physical and etheric bodies. It will be evident to anyone who observes life that when this transition from the sleeping to the waking state takes place, there is a complete change of experience. What we experience in the waking state denotes no actual perception or knowledge of the two members of our being into which we descend on waking. We come down into our etheric and physical bodies but have no experience of them from within.

What does a man know in ordinary life about the aspects presented by his physical and etheric bodies when seen from within? The essential fact of experience in the waking state is that we view our own being in the physical world from without, not from within. We view our physical body from outside with the same eyes with which we look at the rest of the world. During waking life we never contemplate our own being from within, but always from without. We really learn to know ourselves as men only from outside, regarding ourselves as beings of the sense-world.

There is, of course, an actual state of transition from sleeping to waking life. How, then, would it be if we were really able, on descending into our etheric and physical bodies, to contemplate ourselves from within? We should see something quite different from what we see in the ordinary way: we should know the intimate experiences sought by the mystic. The mystic endeavours to divert his attention entirely from the outer world, to shut out the impressions invading his eyes and other senses and to penetrate into his inmost being. But leaving aside experiences of this kind, we can say that in daily life we are protected from the sight of our inner being, for at the moment of waking our gaze is diverted to the external world around us, to the tapestry presented by the senses—the tapestry of which our physical body, when observed during waking life, is a part. Thus in the waking state the possibility of observing ourselves from within, eludes us. It is as though we had been led unknowingly across a stream: while we sleep we are on this side of the stream, when we are awake, on yonder side. If we were capable of perceiving anything from “this side”, we should be able to perceive our Ego and our astral body as we perceive outer objects in waking life; but again we are protected from perceiving our own inner being in sleep, for at the moment of going to sleep the possibility of perceiving ceases and consciousness is extinguished.

Thus between our inner and our outer world a definite boundary is drawn, a boundary which we can cross only at the moments of going to sleep and waking. But we can never cross this boundary without being deprived of something.

When we cross the boundary on going to sleep, consciousness ceases and we cannot see the spiritual world. On waking, our consciousness is at once diverted to the outer world and we are unable to perceive the spiritual reality underlying our own being. The boundary that we cross, the boundary that causes the spiritual world to be darkened at the moment of waking is something that interpolates itself between our Sentient Soul and our etheric and physical bodies. The veil that covers these two members on waking, the veil that prevents us from beholding the spiritual reality underlying them, is the Sentient Body, which enables us to see the tapestry presented by the outer world. At the moment of waking the Sentient Body is wholly concerned with the outer world of the senses and we cannot look within our own being. This body, therefore, constitutes a frontier between our life of inner experience and what spiritually underlies the world of the senses.

We shall realise that this is necessary, for what a man would see if he were to cross this stream consciously is something that must be hidden from him in the course of his normal life, because he could not endure it; he needs to be prepared for the experience. Mystical development does not really consist in penetrating by force into the inner world of the physical and etheric bodies, but in first making oneself fit for the experience and passing through it consciously.

What would happen to a man who were to descend unprepared into his own inner being? On waking, instead of seeing an external world, he would enter into his own inner world, into that which spiritually underlies his physical and etheric bodies. In his soul he would experience a feeling of tremendous intensity, known to him in ordinary life in a very faint and weakened form only. That is what would come over a man if he were able, on waking from sleep, to descend into his own inner being. An analogy—without attempting to prove anything—will help you to have an idea of this feeling.

There is in man what is called the sense of Shame, the essence of which is that in his soul he wants to divert the attention of others from the thing or quality of which he is ashamed. This sense of shame in connection with something he does not want to be revealed is a faint indication of the feeling which would be intensified to overpowering strength if he were to look consciously into his own inner being. This feeling would take possession of the soul with such power that it would seem to be diffused over everything encountered in the external world; the man would undergo an experience comparable with that of being consumed by fire. Such would be the effect produced by this feeling of shame.

Why should it have this effect? Because at that moment a man would become aware of the perfection of his physical and etheric bodies compared with what he is as a being of soul. It is also possible to form an idea of this by ordinary reasoning. Anyone who with the help of physical science makes a purely external study of the marvelous structure of the human heart or brain, or of each single part of the human skeleton, will be able to feel how infinitely wise and perfect is the arrangement and organisation of the physical body. By taking one single bone, for example the hip bone, which combines the utmost carrying capacity with the least expenditure of effort, or by contemplating the marvelous structure of the heart or brain, it is possible to have an inkling of what would be experienced if one were to behold the wisdom by which this structure was produced and were then to compare with this what man is as a being of soul in respect of passions or desires! All through his life he is engaged in ruining this wonderful physical organism by yielding to his desires, urges, passions and various forms of enjoyment. Activity destructive to the wonderful structure of the physical heart or brain can be observed everywhere in life. All this would come vividly before a man's soul if he were to descend consciously into his etheric and physical bodies. And the soul's imperfection compared with the perfect structure of the sheaths would have an overwhelmingly paralysing effect upon him if he were able to compare what is in his soul with what the wise guidance of the universe has made of his physical and etheric bodies. He is therefore protected from descending into them consciously and is deflected, on waking, by the tapestry of the sense-world outspread around him; he cannot look into his inmost being.

It is the comparison of the soul with what it would perceive if it had sight of what spiritually underlies the physical and etheric bodies that would evoke the intense feeling of shame; preparation for this is made in advance through all the experiences undergone by the mystic before he becomes capable of penetrating into his inmost being. To realise for himself the imperfection of his soul, to realise that his soul is weak, insignificant, and has still an infinitely long path to travel, is bound to arouse a feeling of humility and a yearning for perfection, and these qualities prepare him to endure the comparison with the infinitely wise structure into which he penetrates on waking. Otherwise he would be consumed by shame as if by fire.

The mystic prepares himself by concentrating on the following thoughts: “When I behold what I am and compare it with what the wise guidance of the universe has made of me, the shame I feel is like a consuming fire.” This feeling gives rise outwardly to the flush of shame. This feeling would intensify to such an extent as to become a scorching fire in the soul if the mystic has not the strength to say to himself: “Yes, I feel utterly paltry in comparison with what I may become, but I shall try to develop the strength that will make me capable of understanding what the wisdom of the universe has built into my bodily nature and to make myself spiritually worthy of it.” The mystic is made to realise by his spiritual teacher that he must have boundless humility. It may be said to him: Look at a plant. A plant is rooted in the soil. The soil makes available to the plant a kingdom lower than itself but without which it cannot exist. The plant can bow to the mineral kingdom, saying: I owe my existence to this lower kingdom out of which I have grown. The animal too owes its existence to the plant kingdom and if it were conscious of its place in the world would in humility acknowledge its indebtedness to the lower kingdom. And man, having reached a certain height, should say: I could not have attained this stage had not everything below me evolved correspondingly.

When a man cultivates such feelings in his soul, the realisation comes to him that he has reason not only to look upwards but to look downwards with thankfulness to the kingdoms below him. The soul is then filled with this feeling of humility and realises how infinitely long is the path that leads towards perfection. Such is the training for true humility.

What has been described above cannot of course be exhausted by concepts and ideas; if that were the case the mystic would soon have mastered it. It must be experienced, and only one who experiences such feelings over and over again can imbue his soul with the attitude and mood necessary for the mystic.

Then, secondly, the would-be mystic must develop another feeling which makes him capable of enduring whatever obstacles may lie in his path as he strives towards perfection. He must develop a feeling of resignation in respect of whatever ordeals he will have to endure in order to reach a certain stage of development. Only by proving himself victorious over pain and suffering for a long, long time can he develop the strong powers needed by his soul to overcome the inevitable sense of inferiority in face of what a wise World-Order has incorporated in the etheric and physical bodies. The soul must say to itself over and over again: ‘Whatever pain and suffering still await me, I will not waver; for if I were willing to experience only what brings joy, I should never develop the strength of which my soul is actually capable.’ Strength is developed only by overcoming obstacles, not by simply submitting to conditions as they are. Forces of soul can be steeled only when a man is ready to bear pain and suffering with resignation. This strength must be developed in the soul of the mystic if he is to become fit to descend into his inner being.

Let nobody imagine that Spiritual Science demands that a man living an ordinary, everyday life shall undergo such exercises for they are beyond his power. What is being described here is simply a narration of what those who voluntarily embark upon such experiences can make of the soul, that is to say, they can make the soul capable of penetrating into their own inmost being. In the course of normal life, however, the Sentient Body intervenes between what it is possible for the mystic to experience inwardly and what is actually experienced in the external world. That is what protects a man from descending into his own inner self without preparation and being consumed by a feeling of shame. In the normal course of life a man cannot experience what is thus screened from him by the Sentient Body, for there he has already reached the frontier of the spiritual world. A spiritual investigator seeking to explore the inner nature of man must cross this frontier; he must cross the stream which diverts normal human consciousness from the inner to the outer world. This normal consciousness, while insufficiently mature, is protected from penetrating into man's inner self, protected from being consumed in the fire of shame. Man cannot see the Power which protects him from this experience every morning on waking. This Power is the first spiritual Being encountered by one who is about to pass into the spiritual world. He must pass this Being who protects him from being consumed by the inner sense of shame; he must pass this Being who deflects his inward-turned gaze to the external word, to the tapestry of sense-phenomena. Normal consciousness becomes aware of the effect of this Being, but man cannot see him. He is the first Being who must be passed by one who desires to penetrate into the spiritual world. This spiritual Being who every morning stands before man and protects him while he is still immature from sight of his own inner self, is called in Spiritual Science, the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold. The path into the spiritual world leads past this Being.

Our consciousness has thus been directed to the frontier where we can dimly divine the existence of the Being known to the spiritual investigator as the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold. Here already is an indication that in waking life we do not see our true being at all. And if we call our own being the Microcosm, we must add that we never see the Microcosm in its pure, spiritual form, but only the part that our own being reveals in the normal state. Just as when a man looks in a mirror he sees an image, a picture, and not himself, so in waking consciousness we do not see the Microcosm itself but a reflected image of it. We see the Microcosm in its mirror image.

Do we ever see the Macrocosm in its reality? Again we can take our start from familiar experiences, leaving aside for the moment what a man undergoes in the course of the twenty-four hours of the day. We will think of the very simplest experiences that come to a man in the outer world of the senses. In that world he perceives an alternation between day and night-how the Sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening; he perceives how the sunlight illumines all the objects around him. What is it, then, that man sees from sunrise until sunset? Fundamentally speaking he does not see the objects themselves at all, but the sunlight which they reflect. In the dark we cannot see an object without illumination. Let us take the eye as representative of the other senses. What we see during the day are, in reality, the reflected rays of the Sun. This is how things are from morning until evening. But man has only a very imperfect perception of the cause which enables him to see objects in the outer world at all. If we look at the Sun directly, our eyes are dazzled. The very cause to which we owe the faculty of perceiving the outer sense-world, dazzles us. Thus during the day it is the same with the Sun outside as it is on waking with our own inner self. The forces within ourselves enable us to live and to perceive the outer world, but our attention is diverted from our own inner being to the outer world. It is the same with the Sun; it enables us to perceive objects but dazzles us when we attempt to look at it. Nor during the day can we perceive everything that is connected with the Sun. We see what the Earth reveals to us in the reflected sunlight.

Our solar system is composed not only of the Sun but also of the planets. By day the sight of them is denied us; the Sun dazzles our vision not only of itself but also of the planets. We look out into space knowing that although the planets are there, they evade our observation. Just as by day we are prevented from seeing our own inner self and by night the sight of the spiritual world is denied us in ordinary sleep, so, by day, when our gaze is directed outwards, the causes of our sense-perceptions are hidden from us. What lies behind the Sun and connects it with the other bodies belonging to the solar system, with the Beings whose outer manifestations we call Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and so on—whatever living co-operation there is between the Sun and these heavenly bodies is hidden from us by day. What we perceive is the effect of the sunlight. When we compare this state with the state in which the world around us exists by night, from sunset to dawn, we can perceive in a certain way what belongs to our solar system. We can look up to the starry heavens and among other stars behold the planets at times when they are visible; but while we can see them in the night sky, the Sun itself is invisible. We must therefore say what by day makes the sense-world visible to us, by night takes from us the possibility of seeing it. At night the whole of the sense-world is invisible.

Is it possible to discover, in connection with the nocturnal state, something analogous to the State of the mystic when he descends into his own inner world? In the modern age there is little consciousness of this analogous state, but there is something of the kind. It consists in the fact that, like the mystic, a man develops certain qualities of humility and resignation and other feelings too, the nature of which we can grasp by picturing the simplest of them. Man has these feelings in normal life-in a weak form, like the sense of shame, but nevertheless he has them. By enormously enhancing these feelings he prepares himself to have experiences by night which differ entirely from those of normal consciousness.

We all know that our feelings in spring are different from those we have in the autumn. When buds are bursting in spring and giving promise of the beauty and splendour of summer, the feelings of a healthy soul will not be the same as they are in autumn; with the approach of spring we feel the awakening of hope. The feeling is only slightly developed in an ordinary, normal man, but it is present, nevertheless. Towards autumn, the mood of hope and awakening connected with spring will be transformed into one of sadness, of melancholy; when we see the leaves falling, when we see bare, skeleton-like branches instead of the bright flowering shrubs of summer, our souls are steeped in melancholy; there is sadness in our hearts. In the course of the year, if we move in step with the phenomena of outer Nature, we can experience a cycle in our life of soul. But as these feelings are faint and feeble in normal life, man's sensibility to the transformations that take place from spring to summer and autumn and from autumn to winter is only slight.

Once upon a time—and it is still so today—a pupil of spiritual knowledge who was to take the opposite path to that of the mystic was trained in such feelings; in contrast to the mystic's descent into his own inner being, he was taught to live with the cycle of outer Nature. He learnt to feel with great intensity, no longer faintly as in ordinary life, the awakening of Nature and the sprouting of vegetation in spring; then, when he was able to surrender himself wholly to this experience, the feeling of dawning hope in spring became one of joyful exultation in summer. He was trained to have this experience of exultation. And again, when a man was so far advanced as to experience in complete self-forgetfulness the melancholy of autumn, he could pass on to experience a feeling of winter, intensified into a feeling of the death of all Nature at midwinter.

Such were the feelings awakened in the pupils who had undergone training in the old Northern Mysteries, of which only the external side is still known and that merely as tradition. The pupils were trained by special methods to accompany in their own life of feeling the cycle of Nature throughout the year. All the experiences which came to these pupils, for example on Midsummer Night, were indications of the crescendo of hope to exultation shared with Nature. The festival of Midsummer Night was intended to portray the enhancement of the feeling of awakening in spring to that of joyous exultation in the superabundant life of summer. And at the winter solstice the pupil learnt to experience—as an infinitely enhanced feeling of autumn—the decline and death of Nature.

Such feelings can hardly be felt with equal strength by a man today. As a result of the progress of his intellectual life during recent centuries, present-day man has become incapable of undergoing the intense, overpowering experiences which the best representatives of the original peoples of Middle, Northern and Western Europe were able to endure.

Having undergone such training, the pupils who had thus intensified their inner experiences found themselves possessed of a particular faculty—however strange this may sound—the faculty of seeing through matter, just as the mystic is able to penetrate into his own inner self. They were able to see not merely surfaces of objects but they were able to gee through the objects, and above all, through the Earth.

This experience was called in the ancient Mysteries: seeing the Sun at Midnight. The Sun could be seen in its greatest splendour and glory only at the time of the winter solstice, when the whole external sense-world had so to speak died away. The pupils of the Mysteries had developed the faculty of seeing the Sun no longer as the dazzling power it is by day, but with all its dazzling brilliance eliminated. They saw the Sun, not as a physical but as a spiritual reality, and they beheld the Sun Spirit. The physical effect of dazzling was extinguished by the Earth's substance, for this had become transparent and allowed only the Sun's spiritual forces to pass through. But something else of great significance was connected with this beholding of the Sun. The fact of which only an abstract indication was given yesterday, was then revealed in all its truth, namely, that there is a living interplay between the planets and the Sun inasmuch as streams flow continually to and fro—from the planets to the Sun and from the Sun to the planets. Something was revealed spiritually that may be compared with the circulation of the blood in the human body. As the blood flows in living circulation from the heart to the organs and from the organs back again to the heart, so did the Sun reveal itself as the centre of living spiritual streams flowing to and fro between the Sun and the planets. The solar system revealed itself as a spiritual system of living realities, the external manifestation of which is no more than a symbol. Everything manifested by the individual planets pointed to the great spiritual experience just described, as a clock points to the time of occurrences in external life.

All that man learns to experience by enhancing his sensibility withdraws, as the spiritual aspect of space, from the ordinary sight of day. It is also concealed by the spectacle presented at night. For what does man see at night with his ordinary Faculties when he looks up to the heavens? He sees only the external side, just as he sees only the external side of his own inner being. The starry sky we behold is the body of spiritual reality lying behind it. Wonderful as is the spectacle of the starry sky at night, it is nothing but the physical body of the cosmic spirit, manifesting through this body in its movements and in its outward effects. Once again for ordinary human consciousness a veil is drawn over everything that man would behold were he able spiritually to see through the spectacle presented to him in space. Just as we are protected in ordinary life from beholding our own inner being, we are also protected from beholding the spirit underlying the outer, material world; the veil of the sense-world is spread over the underlying spiritual reality. Why should this be so?

If a man were to have direct vision of the spiritual Macrocosm without the preparation that has been described—it is the opposite process to that undergone by the mystic—a feeling of the most terrifying bewilderment would come over him, for the phenomena are so mighty and awe-inspiring that the concepts evolved in ordinary life would be quite incapable of enabling him to endure this utterly bewildering spectacle. He would be overcome by a tremendous enhancement of the fear he otherwise knows only in a weak form. Just as a man would be consumed by shame if, without preparation, he were to penetrate into his own inner being, he would be suffocated by fear if, while still unprepared, he were to confront the phenomena of the outer world; he would feel as though he were being led into a labyrinth. Only when the soul has prepared itself through ideas and thoughts which lead beyond the realm of ordinary experience can it prepare itself to endure the bewildering spectacle.

Man's intellectual life today makes it impossible for him to undergo what could at one time be undergone by individuals belonging to an original population of Northern and Western Europe through an intensification of the feeling of spring and autumn. Intellectuality was by no means as general in those times as it is today. Men's thinking is utterly different from what it was in those olden days, when it was far less developed. But with the gradual evolution of intellectuality, the capacity for this experience of Nature was lost. It is, however, possible for man to have it indirectly, as if in reflection, when these feelings can be kindled, not by actual experience of the happenings in external Nature but by accounts and descriptions of the spiritual aspects of the Macrocosm.

At the present time, therefore, it is necessary for descriptions to be provided such as those contained, for example, in the book, Occult Science—an Outline, which has just been published. I say this without boasting, simply because circumstances make it necessary. Such descriptions are of realities which cannot be outwardly perceived, which underlie the world spiritually and can be seen by one who has undergone the requisite preparation. Let us suppose that such a book is not read in the way that books of another kind are read today, but that it is read—as it should be—in such a way that the concepts and ideas it presents in an unpretentious form induce in the reader feelings which are experienced in the very greatest intensity. Such experiences are then similar to those that were induced in the old Northern Mysteries.

The book gives, for example, an account of the earlier embodiments of the Earth, and if read with inner participation, a difference of style will be recognised in the descriptions of the Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon conditions. By letting what is there said about Old Saturn work upon us, we shall induce a feeling consonant with the mood of spring, and in the description of the Old Sun-evolution there is something analogous to the emotion of exultation once experienced on Midsummer Night. The description of the Old Moon-evolution may evoke the mood of autumn and the whole style of the description of Earth-evolution proper will induce a mood similar to that prevailing when the time of the winter solstice is approaching. At the right place in the description of Earth-evolution an indication is given of the central experience connected with the mood of Christmas. [* See pp. 216-18 in the 1962-3 edition ofOccult Science—an Outline.]

This knowledge can be given today in the place of experiences which man is no longer capable of undergoing because he has now risen from an earlier life in feeling to intellectuality, to thinking; hence it is through the mirror of thinking that feelings originally kindled by Nature herself must be influenced. This is how writings should be composed if they are to convey what it is the aim of Spiritual Science to convey, and the moods they generate must be consonant with the course of the year. Theoretical descriptions are quite senseless for they simply lead to spiritual matters being regarded just as if they were recipes in a cookery book!

The difference between books on Spiritual Science and other kinds of literature lies not so much in the fact that unusual things are described but mainly in how things are presented. From this you will realise that the contents of Spiritual Science are drawn from deep sources and that in accordance with the mission of our time, feelings must be quickened through thoughts. You will realise then that it is also possible today to find something that can lead again out of the prevailing confusion.

Now when guided by such principles, a man sets out along the path leading into the labyrinth of happenings in the spiritual Macrocosm, this is something that was prophetically foreshadowed among the original peoples of Northern Europe. The faculties enabling them to read the great script of Nature were still active in these peoples at a time when the Greeks had already reached a high stage of intellectuality. It was the mission of the Greeks to prepare what we today must bring to an even more advanced degree of development. A book such as Occult Science could not have been written in the days of ancient Greece, but Greek culture made it possible, in a different way, for one who ventured into the labyrinth of the spiritual Cosmos to find a thread that would guide him back again. This is indicated in the legend of Theseus who took the Thread of Ariadne with him into the labyrinth. Now what is the Thread of Ariadne today? The concepts and mental pictures of the super-sensible world we form in the soul! It is the spiritual knowledge that is made available to us in order that we may penetrate safely into the Macrocosm. And so Spiritual Science which, to begin with, speaks purely to the intellect, can be a Thread of Ariadne, helping us to overcome the bewilderment that might come if we were to enter unprepared into the spiritual world of the Macrocosm.

So we see that if a man wishes to find the spirit behind and pervading the outer world, he must traverse with full awareness a region of which in normal life he is unconscious; he must traverse consciously the very stream which in everyday life takes consciousness from him. If then he allows himself to be affected by feelings kindled by the cyclic course of Nature herself or by concepts and ideas such as those referred to, if, in short, he achieves real self-development, he gradually becomes capable of fearlessly approaching that spiritual Power who is at first invisible. Just as the Inner Guardian of the Threshold is imperceptible to ordinary consciousness, so too is this second Guardian, the greater guardian of the Threshold, who stands before the spiritual Macrocosm. He becomes more and more perceptible to one who has undergone due preparation and is making his way along the other path into the spiritual Macrocosm. He must fearlessly and without falling into bewilderment pass this spiritual Being who also shows us how insignificant we are and that we must develop new organs if we aspire to penetrate into the Macrocosm. If a man were to approach this Greater Guardian of the Threshold consciously, but still unprepared, he would be filled with fear and despair.

We have now heard how with his normal consciousness man is enclosed within the frontiers marked by two portals. At the one stands the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold, at the other, the Greater Guardian of the Threshold. The one portal leads into man's inner being, into the spirit of the Microcosm; the other portal leads into the spirit of the Macrocosm. But now we must realise that from this same Macrocosm come the spiritual forces which build up our own being. Whence comes the material for our physical and etheric bodies? All the forces which there converge and are so full of wisdom, are arrayed before us in the Great World when we have passed the Greater Guardian of the Threshold. We are confronted there not by knowledge only. And that is another point of importance. Until now I have been speaking only of knowledge that can be acquired by man but it does not yet become insight into the actual workings and forces of the Macrocosm. The body cannot be built out of data of knowledge; it must be built out of forces. Once past the mysterious Being who is the Greater Guardian of the Threshold, we come into a world of unknown workings and forces. To begin with, man knows nothing of this realm because the veil of the sense-world spreads in front. But these forces stream into us, have built up our physical and etheric bodies. This whole interplay, the interactions between the Great World and the Little World, between what is within and what is without, concealed by the veil of the sense-world—all this is embraced within the bewildering labyrinth. It is life itself, in full reality, into which we enter and have then to describe.

To-morrow we shall begin by taking a first glimpse into that which man cannot, it is true, perceive in its essence, but which is revealed to him as active workings when he passes through the one or the other portal, when he passes the Lesser and the Greater Guardians of the Threshold.

The lecture yesterday concluded with an allusion to the two frontiers within which man's normal consciousness is enclosed, and today we will begin by speaking of the regions lying beyond these frontiers. Man finds these regions when, as the result of inner development, he passes either the Lesser or the Greater Guardian of the Threshold.

Today we shall try to make clear what kind of experiences come to a man when, after passing the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold, he descends consciously into his own inner being. We know that in ordinary life this descent occurs every day and that at the moment of waking it becomes impossible for us to perceive or be aware of our own inner being. To understand this it is necessary to have clearly in mind something that is essentially and inwardly connected with the whole of man's development.

In the course of his life man develops from one stage to another. Even during his life between birth and death he undergoes development which leads him beyond the initial stages of life when his faculties and capacities are of little account, to others when they are considerably enhanced. How does this development proceed in everyday life? Sleeping and waking play an essential part. When we think of the daily experiences man has in his youth in connection with learning and picture how these experiences are transformed into faculties, we must turn our minds to the condition of sleep which alone makes this transformation possible.

Every night on going to sleep our souls take with them something from daily life; what we take with us—the fruit of our experiences—is transformed during sleep in such a way that it becomes our abilities and capacities. To take a concrete example. What efforts we were obliged to make day after day when we were young, in order to learn to write! But we are not in the least aware of those past experiences when we take up a pen today to give expression to our thoughts. All our earlier efforts to shape the letters have been transformed into the capacity to write. The power which has transformed all these daily experiences into the faculty of writing is actually present in the depths of the soul but can operate only when we ourselves are not consciously there.

From this we may conclude that in our souls there is something that is higher than all our conscious life. Forces higher than those available in our conscious life become active during sleep; experiences are transformed into faculties and the soul becomes more and more mature. A deeper being is working within us at our further development; when we go to sleep, this being receives the day's experiences and re-moulds them, so that in a later period of life they are at our disposal in the form of faculties.

But we bring out of sleep much more than we ourselves brought into it through our conscious experiences. During the day we use up forces by participating in what is going on around us. In the evening we feel fatigue because these forces are exhausted, and during sleep they are replenished; many forces flow into us during the night other than those we have acquired as the result of our daily activity. Our life during sleep is therefore the source of innumerable forces we need for waking life.

Thus we develop from stage to stage, but there is a definite limit to this development. Every time we wake in the morning we find the same physical and etheric bodies, and we know that fundamentally speaking we can do very little by means of our own forces to transform these two bodies or to develop them to a higher stage. Admittedly, anyone with knowledge of life realises that it is possible even for the physical body to be transformed to a certain extent. If we observe a person who for ten years has devoted himself to acquiring deeper knowledge which he has not allowed to remain mere theory but which had laid hold of his inner life, then after those ten years we can form an idea of the inner metamorphosis that has taken place by comparing his present with his earlier appearance and perceiving how the knowledge acquired has produced a change even in his features; the development which proceeded in his soul has also helped to shape his bodily appearance. But this outer development is very limited, for we are confronted every morning with essentially the same physical and etheric bodies, possessing the same aptitudes as at birth. Whereas, relatively speaking, we can do a great deal to develop our powers of intellect, of mind and of will, we can transform our outer sheaths, our physical and etheric bodies only to a slight extent. Nevertheless inner forces must be active through the whole of life between birth and death, and these forces must be continually re-kindled if life is to continue. We see at the moment of death what becomes of the physical body when the etheric body is no longer working in it. The physical and chemical forces inherent in the physical body as such assert themselves from the moment of death onwards and dissolve, disintegrate, it. That this cannot happen during life is due to the etheric body, which is a faithful fighter against the disintegration of the physical body. At every moment our physical body would be ready to disintegrate if fresh forces from the etheric body were not continually supplied to it. The etheric or life-body in turn receives what it needs in this respect from still deeper inner forces, from the astral body, which is the vehicle of happiness and grief, of joy and sorrow. Thus the corresponding inner body is perpetually working at the outer body. The outwardly visible part of us is sustained all the time by the inner forces. How the astral body works on the etheric body and the etheric body on the physical-that is what a man would see if he were able to descend consciously into the physical and etheric bodies on waking; but he is diverted from this perception by external objects and happenings.

However, by developing his soul to the stage enabling him to experience consciously the moment of entry into the etheric and physical bodies on waking, a man can acquire a certain knowledge of what actually works creatively on his inner being during sleep.

We become conscious of the driving forces of our manhood when we are able to descend into our inner being. What must we do if this is to be achieved with conscious awareness? We must prepare ourselves in such a way that at the moment of waking external impressions transmitted by the eyes, ears, and so forth, do not disturb us, do not immediately force themselves upon us. We must train ourselves to be able to pass out of the state of consciousness prevailing in sleep, in such a way that we are able to ward off all external impressions. When we can do that we pass the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold.

What is it that we see if we pass through the portal leading into our own inner being? As genuine mystics we learn to know something of which hitherto we had no notion. The descriptions given in most theosophical manuals of the astral, etheric and physical bodies are hardly more, if viewed from an inner point of view, than very approximate indications, although these can serve as pointers. Genuine knowledge of these bodies into which we descend on waking is only possible as the result of a patient and prolonged approach from every angle to the great truths of existence. We will endeavour today to penetrate into these mysteries from one particular side.

Although man does not need to see the external forces which work on him, he learns to know by instinct that what is usually called the ‘soul’ is quite different from current ideas of it. He learns to realise that the human soul is indeed little, but that it can be compared with something very great; also that the individual capacities which the soul may possess are very slight compared with the capacities of that great Being with whom, however, it may feel itself akin. The knowledge acquired on descending into the physical and etheric bodies is that on waking we emerge from another world in which there is a Being akin to our own soul, only infinitely mightier. Thus on waking the human soul feels insignificant after passing the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold and may say to itself: I am paltry indeed, for if I now had within me nothing more than I have imparted to myself, if I had not been outpoured in the spiritual world, and if the beings of that world had not let forces stream into me, I should be in a state of dire bewilderment. The soul realises its need of the forces which have streamed into it the whole night long; and that what has thus streamed into it is akin to its own three inherent forces. They are: firstly, the Will. Everything of the nature of Will is one of the fundamental forces of the soul, the force which guides us in this way or that; secondly, Feeling. This is the force which brings it about that the soul is attracted by one thing, repelled by another, experiences joy or pain as the case may be; thirdly, Thinking: the capacity to form ideas of things.

These three basic forces of the soul are the really valuable assets which we can develop and elaborate between birth and death. By strengthening our will we become capable of taking vigorous and effective hold of life. If we develop the force of feeling, we shall realise with ever greater certainty what is right and what is wrong; to witness justice and righteousness will give us joy and we shall feel pain at the sight of wrong-doing. If we develop our power of thinking we shall acquire wise understanding of the phenomena of the world.

Through the whole of our life we must work at these three basic forces of the soul. But when we wake in the morning in the condition that has been described, having passed the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold, we realise that whatever qualities of willing, feeling and thinking we can develop in our lives are trifling compared with the powers of Thinking, of Feeling and of Will pervading the spiritual world out of which we pass at the moment of waking. We realise too that we need what our soul has absorbed during the night, for what we ourselves are able to develop consciously during the life of day would not take us very far. As a gift from spiritual worlds, from the higher forces of Cosmic Thinking, Cosmic Feeling and Cosmic Will, there must stream into us all night long what must descend with us into our inner being. When we first become conscious of having absorbed Cosmic Will, Cosmic Feeling and Cosmic Thinking, we realise that it is not we ourselves who have acquired these three basic forces but that without our co-operation they stream into us during sleep. Furthermore, these three forces are transformed in our soul and assume different aspects.

We become aware that what we know in our souls as will is only a faint reflection of the Cosmic Will that we bring with us; we know that this, as it streams into us, is transformed into the force which enables us to move about, to have mobile limbs. There streams into us the faculty which can be observed in external manifestation when we see somebody performing his daily work. What we draw into ourselves from the Cosmic Will becomes visible in the movement of our limbs, in our mobility. It reveals itself as an inner force, streaming into us. We now know in very truth that Cosmic Will streams through the universe and through us, that we become mobile beings and have independence because this Will has streamed into us during sleep. Then throughout the day we use up this Cosmic Will. In ordinary life we do not feel the in-streaming of the macrocosmic Will but when we have passed the Guardian of the Threshold we feel it working on within us, we feel that we have become one with the Cosmic Will, that we are membered into the Will of Cosmic Worlds.

What we know in everyday life as the power of feeling has also been drawn from an infinite reservoir of Cosmic Feeling; this too streams into us and is so transformed as to become inwardly perceptible to us, provided we are sufficiently mature; it is as if this Cosmic Feeling were permeating us with something comparable only with what is called light. We become inwardly illumined; what streams into us as this working of Cosmic Feeling is inner light, although without clairvoyance it is not outwardly visible as light. But a man who has passed the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold realises that what is needed for his life of inner experience, namely light, is nothing else than a product of Cosmic Feeling absorbed by him during sleep. From this it is evident that when a man is given up to his own inner life and being, he experiences something quite new about his soul, namely what his inner self is able to be as a result of all that streams to him out of the Macrocosm. And it is only when he feels the forces of Cosmic Feeling streaming into him that the astral body is there before him as a reality.

The forces of thinking are such that they work as a regulator between what streams to us as the power of movement and the inner light. A certain equilibrium must be established between the inner light (feeling) and the will. If the right relationship between the urge to activity and the inner light were disrupted, the bodily nature of man would not be properly provided for from within. A man would be doomed to perish if either the one or the other were present in excess. Only if the true equilibrium has been established can man so unfold his faculties that the right forces serve his outer existence.

So we see that the effects of sleep work upon our inner being and through our outer sheaths from morning until evening, enabling us to cope with the demands of existence. With this in mind we can say: in truth our soul is paltry as compared with what there is in the Macrocosm into which our being pours during sleep, yet our soul is akin to it. The great universe is pervaded by Cosmic Will, Cosmic Feeling, Cosmic Thinking, and thinking, feeling and willing unfold to higher and higher stages within our own soul.

Another, immediately following, experience can be expressed by saying: Even though today my soul is paltry as compared with the great Cosmic Soul, it will eventually grow to be like it. My soul and its faculties of thinking, feeling and willing are still insignificant but will eventually grow to be comparable with this mighty Cosmic Thinking, Feeling and Will.

This experience is followed by another which gives us the certain knowledge that what confronts us as the mighty Macrocosm was once like our own soul; the Macrocosm too has developed out of small beginnings into this stupendous greatness.

A fruit of these two feelings in the soul of the true mystic is a thought that can be expressed as follows: How would it have been if those Beings who have created what is today outspread in the universe, who bestow so much upon us—how would it have been if they had done nothing in the past to promote their own development? Once, in the infinitely distant past, their forces of thinking, feeling and will were just as trivial as our own and today their power is such that they no longer need to receive strength from the Macrocosm; they give, only give. What should we ourselves have become if they had done nothing to develop to these lofty stages?—Without them we could not have existed! If we know how to value our existence, a feeling of infinite thankfulness towards these great Beings is born in our souls and streams through and through us. Every true mystic knows this experience as a reality. It cannot be compared with what is felt in everyday life as gratitude and is an experience of the very greatest significance. What the outer world now calls Mysticism really amounts to nothing more than a collection of phrases. The genuine mystic knows this experience well and asks himself: What would you be if the Beings who existed before you and were once like you had not raised themselves to such heights that at night they are able to let stream into you the forces you need in the bodily existence into which you will pass when you wake in the morning? Nobody who has not in the deepest ground of his heart this feeling of thankfulness to the Macrocosm has become a true mystic.

And another feeling follows.—If we today stand at the beginning, as those Beings themselves once stood, in order to achieve the goal of our existence must we not work at ourselves and do everything possible so to transform our paltry thinking, feeling and willing that some day we need not only take, but also give, and become able to pour out forces such as are poured into us when we are given over to the Macrocosm during sleep? This feeling is then transformed into an overwhelming obligation to promote the development of the soul. As genuine mystics we have the feeling: You are neglecting this duty unless you try with all your might to develop the lowly powers of your soul to the height revealed to you as an attainable ideal when you gaze consciously into the macrocosmic source of those powers. If you do nothing for your own development, if you resist it, then you will be helping to prevent other beings from developing as you have developed; you will be contributing to the decline of the world instead of to its progress.

From this we realise that the ordinary experiences of our soul—desires, impulses, urges, passions, and so on—are transformed in a remarkable way, that what we commonly know as gratitude becomes immeasurable thankfulness to the Macrocosm and what we commonly feel as duty becomes a feeling of infinite obligation.

These are the feelings that stream through us when we pass the Guardian of the Threshold and enable us to recognise the astral body as a reality. If these feelings are really alive in a man and he gives himself up with greater and greater intensity to the feelings of thankfulness and obligation towards the evolving world, if he lets these feelings pulsate through his soul, then the eyes of seership open in him; the true form of his own astral body, which on waking in his ordinary consciousness was hitherto hidden from him, stands before big eyes—the astral body that was born out of the Macrocosm. If we are to see all this and to realise with sufficient strength the truth that spirit lies behind all material existence, then we must pass the Guardian of the Threshold.

We must also become aware of the reverse side of what has been described as the good or light side.

We have heard that the Cosmic Will streams through us as the power of activity, of movement, that Cosmic Feeling streams through us as light. If this were not so we should not exist, nay we could not exist, as men. And now let us compare these cosmic forces with those of the thinking, feeling and will which have been developed by the soul up to the present. To the eyes of spirit the extent to which we have fallen short of achieving strength of will, intelligence in thinking, sound and healthy feeling, becomes clearly evident, especially at the moment of waking from sleep. It is found that everything we have done in the way of acquiring intelligence may be united with what streams into us as light out of the Cosmic Feeling, and that what we have neglected in the development of our own intelligence acts like a brake. The stream of Cosmic Feeling flowing into us is diminished to the extent we have neglected to work at the development of our own powers of thinking. If we are to make progress, our thinking must have the right relationship to what we absorb into ourselves from Cosmic Feeling.

Theoretical reflection might easily be tempted to believe that what our human intelligence acquires for itself corresponds to what streams into us from Cosmic Thinking. Only a theorist would speak in this way, for it is not in accordance with the reality. Many mistakes are made by combining like with like. Human intelligence actually corresponds to Cosmic Feeling as absorbed in sleep. The greater human intelligence becomes, the more is it illumined by the inner light that has its source in Cosmic Feeling. But darkness streams into this light of Cosmic Feeling if we neglect the development of our thinking, of our intelligence. If a man is too lazy to develop his thinking properly the punishment for such sins of omission will be that darkness streams into the inner light. Whatever a man neglects to do in the way of developing his intelligence brings upon him the punishment that he himself draws something from his inner light and promotes darkness in it.

Thus does the spirit work at our inner being. But someone may say: It is a cause of great uneasiness that attention is beginning to be directed to such things. Have human beings not hitherto existed quite happily between the two frontiers, in the span of life that stretches between the Lesser and the Greater Guardian of the Threshold? After all, the spiritual Powers of whose existence people have hitherto had no inkling, have taken good care of their welfare; could not this continue as it is?—Even if they do not put it into words, people think today that they would prefer to let life remain just as it has been hitherto. They say: If we were to look into ourselves we should become aware how light and darkness mingle within us. Up to now the spiritual Powers have taken care that all this proceeds as it should; if we now try to take a hand, we may do harm, so we had better leave it alone.—The attitude of many people today is that they will go on eating and drinking and leave everything else to the gods.

In point of fact there would be something in this attitude if conditions had remained as they were originally. Until their present stage of evolution men could draw adequate forces out of sleep; these were macrocosmic forces, stored up by great spiritual Beings. So it was hitherto. But in these matters we must not be content with abstractions; we must keep strictly to reality. And the reality is that the fundamental, spiritual conditions of our life change from epoch to epoch. Those Cosmic Powers to whom we are given over every night during sleep have from the beginning of human existence counted upon the expectation that light will also stream upwards from human life itself to the light that streams down from above. The Cosmic Powers have no inexhaustible reservoir of light; their reservoir is one from which the stream of forces will constantly diminish unless from human life itself, through efforts to transform thinking, feeling and willing and to rise into the higher worlds, fresh forces, new light, were to flow back into the great reservoir of Cosmic Light and Cosmic Feeling. We are now living in the epoch when it is essential for men to be conscious that they must not merely rely upon what flows into them from Cosmic Powers but must themselves co-operate in the Process of world-evolution.

It is no ordinary ideal that Spiritual Science is now setting before itself; it does not work in the same way as other movements where people enthuse about some ideal but are only capable of preaching about it to others. No such impulse is working in those who regard Spiritual Science as a world-mission; they are prompted by the knowledge that certain forces in the Macrocosm are beginning to be exhausted, that we are moving towards a future when too little would flow down from above if men did not themselves work at the development of their souls. Such is the epoch in which we are living. For that reason Spiritual Science must come into existence in order to induce men to replenish, from their side, the down-streaming forces that are becoming exhausted. This knowledge is the source from which Spiritual Science draws its impulse and if it were not for these facts, Spiritual Science would leave human evolution to take care of itself. But Spiritual Science foresees that if in the coming centuries there are not enough human beings who strive to reach the higher worlds, this would result in the human race receiving less and less forces from above. Human life would wither and dry up, just as a tree lignifies when no more living sap flows through it. Until now, forces from outside have been instilled into the human race. Those people who live on unthinkingly, recognising only the outer world of the senses, know nothing about the changes that are taking place behind this material world, one of which is that because the spiritual forces are becoming exhausted, it is necessary for such forces to be produced by men themselves. If the further evolution of mankind were left to those who cling to the outer physical world alone, universal desolation would be the result. Spiritual Science must now be promulgated in order that men may be able to decide themselves whether they wish or do not wish to co-operate in the necessary work.

We will now look back upon all our sins of omission, upon everything that acts as an impediment in our soul to the forces flowing into us from above. All sins of omission in thinking penetrate into the inner light in the form of darkness. The same applies to sins of omission in respect of feeling and of will. Force and strength derived from Cosmic Will, light derived from Cosmic Feeling, order and harmony from Cosmic Thinking—all this is impaired by our sins of omission in respect of feeling, thinking and willing.

Thus we become aware of what is working within us. Into all this there is interpolated what we ourselves are with all our impotence—which is due to our failure to do better. In this way we reach true self-knowledge. What we have become on account of our sins of omission and that for which compensation has to be made, appears like a dark shadow in a radiant picture. What we have failed to become stands before the eyes of our soul and reveals itself clearly in that it sends out its rays in three directions. The hindrances we cause to the evolutionary process through what we have neglected in respect of our will, in respect of our thinking and in respect of our feeling—all this is revealed. In these three directions our imperfections become manifest. Each has something definite to say to us.

Firstly, there is the obstacle raying from our own will into the stream of Cosmic Will flowing through us; what we have neglected to do in respect of our own will now confronts us as an obstacle. We must say to ourselves: By everything you have left undone you are fettered to the Earth's forces of decline, to all that is driving the Earth towards destruction.—Of our sins of omission in respect of thinking, we say to ourselves: Because of these sins of omission you will have no possibility of establishing harmony between your will and your feeling.—And of our sins of omission in respect of feeling, we say to ourselves: The march of world-evolution will pass you by as if you were not there. You have done nothing to help world-evolution and it will therefore take back what was once bestowed upon you.

Thus we see before us, distinct from each other, all the forces through which we are fettered to the Earth, and we see cosmic evolution pass us by because we have contributed nothing towards it through our own efforts. Then we feel how these forces which chain us to the Earth and the forces which pass us by, are tearing our true being asunder. In this moment of passing the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold we feel our sins of omission to be the destroyers of our soul's existence.

There is only one means of counteracting this destruction, only one means can at this crucial moment enable us to stand firm. It is that we ourselves must take a vow that nothing shall be neglected in future. After all, the indications are plain enough. They tell us, at the moment we are passing the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold: These forces are dragging you down; therefore you must work to develop your will, to develop your powers of thinking and of feeling.—We may even feel grateful to this terrifying vista for it makes possible the eventual fulfillment of our vow.

Having spoken of the necessity of the feeling of thankfulness and the feeling of obligation, we can now speak further of what is called the mystic vow. Before the spectacle of his own inadequacy, everyone must register the vow that in future he will work at his soul to his utmost capacity in order to make up for past negligence. This vow gives life a new content, in keeping with true and effective self-knowledge; a man no longer broods but works actively at his own self. This experience can take a twofold form. As long as we are only aware of it as a mental process, something is still lacking in us, is still fettering us, and there is still reason for cosmic evolution to pass us by. In such a case the experience has been in the astral body only. But if the feelings of thankfulness and duty are experienced over and over again, they will be transformed ultimately into definite vision which becomes an inner experience, and then a force, a power. This force arises through the astral experience being mirrored in the etheric body and reflected to us by the latter. An image of ourselves is now before us as an external reality, standing out as it were from a background. The background shows us how the forces of light and activity in which we are immersed during sleep work into our sheaths. What we have made of ourselves stands out from this background. Just as in outer reality, animals, plants, minerals, confront us, so now our own self confronts us in its true form. Our own inner being becomes as it were perceptible in the outer world. Hitherto when we descended into our own being, our attention was diverted to the outer world. The impressions from this world flowed into us, making it unnecessary for us to see what we are now obliged to see, if we resolve to take our share in working for the progress of mankind.

Our own inner self is portrayed as it were against this background. All that fetters us to the Earth, all that binds us to the perishable, appears to us in astral vision as a definite image, the image of a distorted bull, dragging us down. All the forces which otherwise produce harmony, reveal in the image of a distorted lion the disharmony consequent upon our sins of omission in feeling. Everything that passes us by as the result of our sins of omission in thinking, appears to us in the image of a distorted eagle. These three images are permeated by the distorted image of our own self, indicating what we have to correct and put right in the future in order to contribute to world-evolution what it requires of us. Three distortions of animal forms and one of ourselves—how these three separate images or pictures are related to one another reveals the measure of the work lying ahead of us.

Thus when we pass the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold we have true self-knowledge, for there stands before us an image of what we have become; this self-knowledge is a stimulus for our whole future life. We shall only shrink from this experience—as would otherwise be very probable—if we hold the belief that what we do not see is not there. There are people who, when a slate falls from a roof, close their eyes instead of moving out of the way. Such people—they are like those who say they would prefer to avoid the experiences described by Spiritual Science-do not want to see what is happening, but nothing is altered by the fact that they do not see it! The one and only help at this stage is self-knowledge. Hitherto the Cosmic Powers were able to check the utter distortion of the image of our manhood, but in the future these Cosmic Powers will no longer suffice. We ourselves, in our image, are the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold. It is we ourselves who hinder the possibility of descent into our inner being; we ourselves must work at our own development. This knowledge alone makes it possible for the future decline of humanity into enfeeblement to be avoided, as well as the failure to fulfil its mission on the Earth.

We have now been led in thought through the region that may be called the region of our own Sentient Body into which we descend on waking from sleep. But in normal existence we are not aware of it because our consciousness is diverted. If, on waking, we refuse to admit the impressions from outside, we experience what has been described. We have spoken-but only very briefly-of our astral body. What has now been described is the inner aspect presented by part of our human nature, namely, our Sentient Body (Empfindungsleib). We have reached the boundary where the Sentient Body borders on the Etheric Body. The image or picture we behold shows us what we truly are. The form we there behold is only an image but it is all that is needed. Discussions about the non-reality of a mirror-image are worthless. If a man wants to know what he really looks like, discussion about this is futile. What we behold is of course only a reflection, a mirror-image, in the etheric body, but it helps us to acquire self-knowledge, and therein lies its value. Error would begin only if the clairvoyant were to believe the mirror-image to be another entity, another reality coming towards him, if he were unaware that it is only a picture revealing his inner self. Were the clairvoyant to take the picture to be a real bull, or some four-headed creature, he would be like a man whose nose displeases him and who, on seeing it in a mirror, tries to punch it! Things must not be taken to be what they are not. A man who does not rightly understand the mirror-image lends himself to hallucinations. Whoever regards the image as being something in space and not a mirror-image which in fact it is, has succumbed to hallucination. Before seership begins it is therefore important to have acquired the faculty of grasping the true values of things through reason. Clairvoyance should not be induced in anyone who would be liable to take for reality what is merely a reflection, or to confound spiritual realities with the realities of outer, physical space. Hence it is of great importance that nobody should embark upon genuine spiritual training without possessing the faculty of intelligent thinking which enables him always to form a correct estimate of what he is seeing. It is not vision alone that is important, but also the power to appraise what is seen. We shall encounter Beings who really do exist outside us, but to begin with we experience only our own astral world; the pictures that have been described today are only mirror-images of our own inner being which is revealed to us as an external world. To realise this is the outcome of self-knowledge. As soon as a man descends into his own inner being he is bound to see images; but it would be hallucination if what is simply a reflection of one's own inner being were taken to be something different.

Along the path to be described tomorrow we shall encounter spiritual Beings, for this path reaches down into the etheric body; the same holds good for the path that leads past the Greater Guardian of the threshold.

Today, then, we have reached the point of considering the stream which passes into the realm of our experience at the moment of waking. We have described the consciousness that deviates from the normal and is experienced by the mystic when at the moment of waking he diverts his attention from everything outside him in the world of the senses and penetrates into his inner being.

A rather difficult task confronts us today but my listeners will be willing to submit to the greater demands made upon them if it is said at the outset that this study will enable us during the next few days to feel firmer ground under our feet. In Spiritual Science, unless we are content to remain with abstractions, we must also listen from time to time to information belonging to the higher regions of spiritual knowledge. It may also be added that our study today will in no way consist of deductions or theoretical inferences, but of matters which have always been known to those who have penetrated more deeply into these subjects. We shall therefore be dealing with knowledge possessed by actual individuals.

We heard yesterday how a man would be able to find his bearings within the inner Organisation of his astral body if he could, on waking, descend consciously into this astral body; and we were able to form an idea of what it means to pass the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold. In point of fact, what was said yesterday was rather hypothetical, for actually in normal life the moment never comes when merely through waking a man can penetrate consciously into his inner being. At most he can prepare himself by mystical deepening for conscious entry into his external bodily sheaths. What this means, and the preparation it entails, will only become clear in the course of these lectures. For normal consciousness it may happen—very occasionally—that a man has such moments of conscious awakening as a result of conditions belonging to his previous incarnations. This can and does happen to certain individuals. They wake up with a certain sense of oppression. This sense of oppression is due to the fact that the inner man, who during sleep felt outspread and free in the Macrocosm, returns again into the prison of his body. There may also be another feeling. Under these abnormal conditions a man feels a better being at the moment of waking than during the course of the day; he feels that there is something within him that he might call his better self. Again the reason for this is that on waking a feeling has remained with him that something has streamed into him during sleep from worlds higher than the world of his own sensory experiences. These are feelings that may arise under abnormal conditions even in ordinary life and what has now been said can be regarded as a confirmation of statements made in the lecture yesterday. Nevertheless it is only the genuine mystic to whom the experience can come in its full intensity.

The question now is whether it is possible to go further. What has been experienced in the way described is the inner side of the astral body, of the spiritual part of man. But it is possible to descend still more deeply, into parts of human nature which manifest in ordinary life in a form less purely spiritual. Nevertheless, their foundations are spiritual, for that is true of everything in the outer world. The question is whether it is possible to descend even further, into the physical body, and whether there is anything between the astral body and the physical body. Yes, as is made clear in anthroposophical literature, between the physical and the astral bodies there is the etheric body, so that in descending to that level we should encounter our etheric body and perhaps also traces of our physical body, which otherwise we see only from without but which we can recognise from within when we penetrate into it consciously.

Generally speaking, however, it is not good, nor is it without danger, to take a further step in mystical deepening beyond those mentioned yesterday. Everything spoken of then can be carried out cautiously by one who has acquired some knowledge of what is contained in the book>Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment or in the second part of Occult Science—an Outline.¹ Up to this point a man can progress independently. To go further along the path leading into the inner self, however, is not without danger; moreover it cannot be done at all in the way in which a man of the present day likes to acquire his spiritual knowledge. Accordingly a different path to knowledge is chosen in our time.

In modern civilisation it is no longer right to take the path leading to a deeper descent into the inner being without troubling about any other considerations. The fundamental characteristic of spiritual life today is that man subordinates himself to a certain degree only and wishes to tread his path of knowledge in the fullest possible freedom. We shall see that there is a path into the spiritual world which takes this desire into full account: it is the Rosicrucian path of knowledge. This is the true path of modern times. It did not exist in those Mysteries of antiquity where man was initiated into the deeper secrets of existence. There were Mysteries in which a man was simply led past the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold into his own inner being and there were others in which he was led out into the Macrocosm, necessarily in a kind of ecstasy. These were the two most usual paths in ancient times. The path of descent into the inner self was followed especially in those places of Initiation which are called the Mystery Sanctuaries of Osiris and Isis. And now, in order to explain what man can experience by descending into his inner being, we will speak of the experiences undergone by a pupil of the Osiris and Isis Mysteries. As we shall hear in the next lectures, it is possible today to attain the Initiation which brings knowledge of these Mysteries, but the path leading to that Initiation differs from what it once was.

In ancient Egypt something was necessary against which human nature, as it is today, would rebel. It was necessary in those times that at the point when the candidate for Initiation was to penetrate into the higher worlds—or even shortly before—he should not attempt to progress independently along his own path of knowledge but should entrust himself to an initiated teacher, to a Guru—the term used in oriental philosophy. Otherwise the path was too dangerous. As a general rule, even the steps towards mystical deepening described yesterday were undertaken under the guidance of a Guru.

What was the real purpose of this guidance by an initiated teacher? When we descend in the morning into our bodily nature, our soul is received by three Powers which have been called by names take from ancient terminology—the names of Venus, Mercury and Moon. Man can deal by himself with what is generally understood as the Venus influence when he is descending into his inner being. A certain training in humility and selflessness will enable him to hold his own in face of the Venus power. Before setting out on the path into the unknown realm of his own inner being he must suppress all impulses of egoism and self-love and cultivate selflessness. He must make himself into a being who feels love and sympathy, not for his fellow-men only but for all existence. Then, if need be, be can safely surrender himself in his conscious descent to the power known as that of Venus.

But it would be more dangerous if a man were to leave himself unaided at the mercy of the Mercury powers. In the ancient Egyptian Initiation he was therefore under the guidance of a great teacher whose own earlier experiences made him capable of being a leader because he was fully conscious of the way in which these Mercury powers could be controlled. A candidate for Initiation was therefore guided by a Hermes- or Mercury-priest. This entailed strict submission to whatever demands the teacher made upon the pupil. The pupil was compelled to make the resolve to eliminate his own Ego completely, to submit to no impulses of his own and to carry out meticulously what the Hermes-priest instructed him to do. It was essential for the pupil of the Osiris and Isis Mysteries to submit to this domination which would be repugnant to a man of today and to which, moreover, he need not subject himself. Obedience to the teacher through many years was necessary, not merely in the pupil's outer actions, but in those Mysteries he was compelled to entrust himself to the teacher's guidance even in his thoughts and feelings, in order to be able to descend without danger into a deeper level of his own inner being.

The lecture yesterday described what is meant by acquiring knowledge of the inner nature of the astral body. We will now consider what the pupil of the Osiris and Isis Mysteries was able, with the help of his teacher, to experience in connection with the etheric body. The elimination of his Ego caused him to see with the spiritual eyes of the teacher, to see himself through the teacher's eyes, to think the teacher's thoughts and to become a kind of external object to himself. In this way remarkable experiences came to him. They were experiences in which he felt as if his life were going backwards in time, as if his whole being—which he was now seeing with the spiritual eyes of the Hermes-priest—were spreading out and expanding; and simultaneously he felt as if he were going backwards in time into periods preceding his present life. Gradually he came to feel as if he were going back many, many years, a span of time very much longer than his life since birth. During this experience he saw, through the eyes of the initiated priest, first of all himself, and then, far out beyond, many generations whom he felt to be his forefathers. For a certain time the candidate for this Initiation had the feeling that he was moving backwards along the line of his ancestors—not as if he were identical with them, but as if he were hovering above them—moving backwards to a definite point, to a primeval ancestor. Then the impression faded—the impression of seeing earthly figures with whom his existence was in some way related.

The teacher had now to make clear to the candidate what it was that he had actually seen. Only in the following way can this become intelligible.—When we come into existence, having passed through the spiritual world between death and rebirth, we bear within us not only the characteristics derived from our preceding life but also our inherited traits. We are born into a family, into a people, into a race; we bear the inherited qualities of our ancestors. These qualities are not derived from the last incarnation but have been inherited from generation to generation. Now why is it that a man, with his inborn nature, incarnates in a particular family, in a particular people or race? Why, on descending to birth, does he seek out certain definite, inherited characteristics? He would never do so if he had no relation at all to them. In point of fact he was already connected with these attributes long before his birth. If we were to start from a particular individual and go back to his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and so on, we should find—if we were able to follow the line with inner vision—the inherited characteristics through a whole series of generations, as far back as one in particular, where all trace of heredity would vanish. The inherited characteristics are still present in their most attenuated form until finally they are lost altogether.

Just as we see the inherited characteristics finally disappearing, so by starting from an individual we can see how the qualities of the son are most similar to those of the father, rather less similar to those of the grandfather, still less similar to those of the great-grandfather, and so on. In the ancient Egyptian Mysteries of Osiris and Isis the priest led the candidate for Initiation back as far as the ancestor who still possessed characteristics which had been transmitted, through heredity, to the pupil himself. It was revealed to the pupil that man is connected in a certain way with his inherited qualities. Thus he established a relationship, spiritually, with that primeval ancestor from whom some quality in himself was derived. It was also revealed to him that the human being spends a long time preparing for himself in the spiritual world the qualities he is ultimately to inherit. Nor does he merely inherit them; in a certain sense he actually inculcates them into his ancestors. He continues to work through the whole series of generations until finally that physical body can be born towards which he feels drawn. Strange as it may seem, we ourselves have worked out of the spiritual world at the physical bodies of our own forefathers, in order gradually to shape and mould the attributes we finally receive at birth as inherited characteristics.

These things are revealed when a man descends into his own etheric body; it then becomes evident to him that the etheric body has a long history behind it. Long, long before entering existence through birth, he was himself working in the spiritual world at the preparation of the etheric body he now bears. He began to work at this etheric body when the most ancient ancestor from whom he still inherits qualities, came to the Earth. When it is said that man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and so on, this is merely an indication. The only possibility of learning about it in greater precision is to acquaint ourselves with the information given by those who have themselves descended consciously into their bodily sheaths.

Thus man learns to move in the regions through which he passed before entering physical existence. He comes to know a portion of his life before birth, a portion which comprises centuries; for centuries have elapsed since the time when, between his last death and present birth, he began to form the archetype of his etheric body. It was then that there was laid into his blood the first seed of those special characteristics which were progressively elaborated, until the etheric body had reached the point of being able to absorb these characteristics at birth.-That is one side of the experience. What we inherit is a reconstruction, so to speak, of everything we ourselves have had to do previously in the spiritual world in order to be able to enter into physical existence. Therefore the qualities that are concentrated as it were in the present etheric body and were given their stamp through the foregoing centuries, have always been called the “Upper”—meaning the heavenly or spiritual man. This is the technical expression for the fact that by penetrating into his etheric body man learns to know his “upper” nature. The expression “heavenly” or “spiritual” man was also used because it was realised that these attributes had been formed and fashioned from the spiritual world through which the man had passed during the period between his last death and the present birth.

And now as to the other side of the experience.—When the pupil had been led to a certain stage by the priest of Hermes, he was confronted by something that may at first have seemed strange, but was explained by his teacher as a phenomenon that should not be altogether unknown to him. The pupil soon recognised that he was being confronted with something he himself had left behind, something intimately connected with him, though it now faced him as a foreign entity. What was this? We shall understand it best by considering the moment of death in the light of what spiritual investigation discloses. At that moment a man discards his physical body; his Ego and astral body remain—namely, those members of his being which every night pass into the state of sleep—and also, for a short time, what we are now trying to study from within, namely, the etheric body. For a few days after death man lives in these three members of his being. But then the main part of the etheric body passes away from him like a second corpse. It is always said—and I myself have constantly indicated it—that what then departs as a second corpse is dispersed in the etheric world; the man takes with him only an extract, a seed, of it into the life he is now beginning between death and his next birth. What there passes over as a second corpse into the universal ether needs a considerable time to dissolve; and it is the last traces of the dissolving etheric body of his previous life that the candidate for Initiation finds as a foreign entity when he has passed backwards spiritually to the point where he arrives at the last ancestor from whom he has inherited any quality. There he makes contact with the last remnants of his previous etheric body. And now, if he continues the process of Initiation, he must penetrate as it were into this last etheric body of his, which he has left behind. Then he lives backwards through further years—almost, but not quite as long as the period he previously lived through until he encounters his earliest ancestor. The time is in the ratio of five to seven. The man now lives through a time in which he finds, as it were in ever denser form, what confronts him as the last remnant from his past life; as it becomes more and more definitely formed, its resemblance to his last etheric body grows until he finally recognises the form his etheric body had assumed at the moment of his last death. And now, after this form has still further condensed, has more and more assumed human shape, he is face to face with his last death. At that moment, for one who is initiated, there is no longer any doubt that reincarnation is a truth, for he has actually gone back to his last death. Thus we have now come to know what man finds as a remnant of his last earthly life. In spiritual science this has at all times been called the “Lower” or the “earthly” man. The pupil now connected the “Upper” with the “Lower” man; he followed the “Lower” to the point where he reached his last life on Earth.

Thus during his Initiation the pupil passed through a cycle leading from his last earthly life to his present earthly life. He united himself in an act of spiritual vision with what he had become in his previous incarnation. In spiritual science this process has always been called a “cycle” and it was originally expressed by the symbol of the snake biting its own tail. This same symbol was used in connection with many happenings, among them for the experience just described, the experience undergone by one who was initiated in the Mysteries of Osiris and Isis.

Obviously, therefore, there is much more to be said about the etheric body than merely stating that it is one member of man's being. The essential nature of the etheric body can only become known by descending into our own inner self; we then come to know the two beings who are united in every man, and we also recognise how karma works. We are then able to explain to ourselves how it happens that we enter existence through birth in a quite definite way. We were obliged as it were to wait from the preceding death until the new birth, until the old etheric body had dissolved; only then could a beginning be made with forming the new one. This makes it evident that in fact a man has not completely got rid of the products of his dissolved etheric body. And by descending into his own inner being he may also find the other part which has actually dissolved, because he has retained an extract of it. If this were not the case it would be impossible for him to find any trace of it again.

When these things are communicated gradually, even in public lectures on Spiritual Science, you will realise how well-founded they are. You are now at the point where you can see the reason for the statement made, even in exoteric lectures, that an extract or essence of the etheric body remains. All these data are the result of spiritual investigation and are based upon the deepest imaginable foundations.

Thus a man has gone back as far as his last death, and in following the process we have heard of certain qualities which one who is entering into deeper forms of mystical experience learns to know through his Initiation. Yesterday we heard of astral qualities—the feeling of infinite gratitude on the one side and, on the other, the feeling of greatly enhanced obligation and responsibility experienced by the mystic in his astral body. Today we have beard of the “Upper” and the “Lower” man, the “Above” and the “Below”, experienced by the mystic when he descends into his etheric body.

The further steps on the path of Initiation then lead the pupil to the point where, after having arrived in his spiritual retrospect at his last death, he can go further and come to know his last earthly life. But again this is by no means an easy matter. Under his teacher's guidance the pupil is once again reminded that he must not go further until he has achieved complete forgetfulness of self; for it is impossible to make real progress as long as there remains any shred of personal self-consciousness of this present incarnation, this present life between birth and death. As long as a man still calls anything his own he cannot attain knowledge of his preceding incarnation. In the ordinary, normal life between birth and death he cannot come to know the being who in the preceding incarnation was a completely different personality. He must be capable of regarding himself as some quite different being—that is the important point—and yet not lose hold of himself when obliged to have this experience. He must be capable of transformation to the degree of being able to feel himself slipping as it were into a quite different bodily sheath. Having attained the degree of selflessness where everything to do with the present incarnation is forgotten, and having utterly given himself up to the teacher, the pupil is then able to pass back through the last incarnation from the death to the birth. Then he experiences, not the things that were seen externally during that last incarnation, but what he made of himself by his endeavours during that life. What the eyes saw, the ears heard and what confronted him in the outer world is experienced in a different way. What is now experienced are the efforts he made in the bygone incarnation with the object of advancing a step forward.

Having re-experienced these efforts the pupil is led back again by the teacher to his present incarnation. The step from the previous to the present incarnation is taken rapidly and then the pupil finds his bearings again. He now has a strange feeling of being two personalities, as if he has brought an additional one with him from the spiritual world into his present personality. This gives rise to the feeling of living in the physical body. A man cannot experience himself in the physical body except by feeling that he has entered it with the fruits of a preceding incarnation.

I have repeatedly reminded you that in normal everyday life a man sees the physical body only from outside. Now for the first time he realises what it means to see the physical body from within. To see himself within his own physical body is only possible in the light of the experiences of his preceding incarnation. But that is not enough; only little can be learned from it about the present physical body. When the teacher has brought the pupil to the point of standing consciously within his own being together with his previous personality, he must take him back once again over the path already followed. The pupil now retraces the path from the penultimate birth to the penultimate death; he undergoes again what he experienced in his “Upper” and “Lower” being, and through the penultimate death reaches back to the penultimate incarnation. A single cycle brings him back to the last incarnation only; thereupon the second cycle must be undertaken, bringing him back to the penultimate incarnation. This gives rise to the feeling of being a third personality who is included in the two preceding personalities.

The cycle can be repeated again and again, until the pupil reaches an epoch lying far, far back in the evolution of the Earth, a far distant age of civilisation. Then he finds that as an earlier personality he was incarnated in preceding epochs of culture, for example in the Greco-Latin epoch; earlier still in the Egyptian, in the ancient Persian, in the ancient Indian, and even further back in the Atlantean and the Lemurian epochs. There is then no more possibility of having such experiences as have been described. A man can follow his own course through every conceivable civilisation and race, right back to the beginning of his earthly evolution, to his very first incarnation on the Earth. Then it is found that all the earlier incarnations continue as forces in what may be called the inmost essence of the physical body. So you see, when it is said in exoteric language that man consists of physical, etheric and astral bodies, this means that he consists of something which, when viewed from within, seems like a number of consecutive incarnations superimposed one above the other. In point of fact, all our incarnations are at work in the inmost nature of our physical body. And when we speak of the etheric body we must bear in mind that, viewed from within, it appears as a cycle running backwards from the present birth to the last death. The qualities and characteristics of the sheaths into which we descend in mystical experience are revealed.

When a man has retraced his course right back to his first incarnation, he experiences a great deal more as well. At this point of his retrospective journey he discovers that in a certain epoch of the Earth's evolution he was in an entirely different environment, that the Earth itself was quite different when he was living in his first incarnation.

When we look out into the world today, three kingdoms of Nature confront us: the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms. We also have these three kingdoms within us. We have within us the animal kingdom because we possess an astral body which in a certain way permeates our external, physical body with force and energy; we have within us the plant kingdom because we possess an etheric or life-body, of which something similar may be said; we have the mineral kingdom within us because we take mineral substances into ourselves and let them pass through our organism. When we ascend far enough into the spiritual world to reach our first incarnation while experiencing the physical body from within, we become aware that at that time the Earth has just reached the point of its development when the mineral kingdom in its present form first came into existence and it was therefore possible for us to pass through our first physical embodiment because we were able to take mineral substance into ourselves.

You may say: Yes, but was this mineral kingdom not in existence earlier than the plant and animal kingdoms? Anyone who thinks correctly will realise that ordinary coal is something that has come from the plant; first it was plantlike and then became mineral. Under conditions different from those of today the plant kingdom could exist before there was a mineral kingdom. The mineral kingdom was a later formation. Under different conditions the plant kingdom was already in existence before there was any mineral kingdom. The mineral kingdom was a product of hardening—hardening of the plant kingdom. And at the time of the formation of the mineral kingdom on our Earth, man had his first earthly incarnation. The mineral kingdom has evolved through long periods of time, during which man has been passing through his earthly incarnations. It was then that he first took the mineral kingdom into himself. Before then his bodily make-up was of a quite different consistency, without mineral substance. For this reason it was at all times said in spiritual science that in its evolution the Earth progressed to the point where the mineral kingdom was formed and at the same time man took the mineral kingdom into himself.

So we see how by descending into his own being deeply enough to have knowledge of his physical body from within, man comes to a point where he emerges, comes forth from, himself. What else could be expected? Through our astral body we are related to the animals, through our etheric body to the plants and through our physical body to the minerals. No wonder that when we descend as far as to the physical body we come upon the mineral kingdom and pass into it. Not indeed into the mineral kingdom as it is now, but as it was at the time when it came into existence in the ancient Lemurian epoch. Our present epoch followed that of Atlantis, and the Lemurian epoch preceded Atlantis. Before the great Atlantean catastrophe the face of the Earth was quite different from what it is today. We lived on a great continent stretching between Europe and Africa on the one side and America on the other. This was the Atlantean epoch. In a still earlier epoch the configuration of the Earth was again different. Human beings-we ourselves in earlier incarnations-lived on a continent stretching between Australia, Africa and Asia. This was ancient Lemuria, the name also used by modern science. That was the time when man passed through his first incarnation and when the mineral kingdom of the Earth took shape. That too was the time when the present Moon in the heavens separated from the Earth.

Thus we have seen that by descending into and acquiring knowledge of our own being through genuine mystical deepening under the guidance of a teacher, we also emerge from ourselves in a certain sense. The path leads us out of ourselves to the Mineral Earth whence we have derived our physical substance.

This is the one path that I wanted to describe to you, the path which could be followed and was indeed followed by many human beings in the ancient Mysteries of Isis and Osiris. It could only be followed under the guidance of a teacher to whom the candidate for Initiation subjected himself entirely. Unless the individual had submitted his Ego entirely to his teacher he would never have been able to tread the path that has been described, for he would have come to know only the very worst sides of his inner being, what he had made of himself through his own self-seeking Ego.

During the next few days we shall describe the other path by speaking of the Northern Mysteries, where man was led, not into himself but out of himself, into the heavens. Then, as well as these two paths which owing to the progressive development of human nature and its consequent insistence on freedom are no longer suitable, we shall study the path that is right for modern humanity: the Rosicrucian path.

It only remains to be said that certain later mystics strove to find help solely in themselves when they had no Guru or teacher to follow so strictly. They were able to find help in a different way and it is interesting that the path they trod can be explained in the light of what has here been described. Think, for example, of Meister Eckhart, the medieval mystic. He was one who had no leader or teacher as did candidates in the ancient Mysteries of Isis and Osiris. The descent into his inner being would have been fraught with great dangers for him had he persisted beyond a certain point in these efforts to achieve inner deepening by his own method. At a certain moment he could scarcely have escaped the claims of his Ego. For the danger on this descent into a man's inner being is that his Ego may assert itself for its own selfish aims. Long speeches may be made about finding the God within. But people who talk in this vein have usually not made much real progress. If they had, they would inevitably discover that the self-seeking Ego asserts itself with terrific force. It may often be found that such people, when following the ordinary conventions of life, are good and decent characters, but directly they practise mystical deepening and ignore influences from outside, their inner self asserts itself. If education has hitherto made them desire to speak the truth it may happen that as soon as their self-seeking Ego asserts its claims, they begin to lie profusely; they become underhand, more intensely selfish than others. Such traits may often be observed in mystics who have been badly guided, who like to speak constantly of the need to find the “higher man” within themselves. In such cases, however, it is not a “higher man” but a being inferior even by conventional standards. It behoves everyone to protect himself from claims made by his own self-seeking Ego. And mystics with good and healthy propensities, such as Meister Eckhart, tried to do so. In the Egyptian Mysteries the candidate for Initiation was guarded in this respect by the priest of Hermes who had taken charge of him. Meister Eckhart had no leader or teacher in that sense of the word; Tauler had one from a certain time in his life onwards. [* See Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, by Rudolf Steiner. The teacher who came to Tauler was known as the ‘Friend of God from the Oberland.’] By what means did Meister Eckhart protect himself against the claims of his own Ego? Like nearly all medieval Christian mystics who had no actual Guru because the time was approaching when human nature would rebel against it, Eckhart protected himself by inducing a feeling of the greatest intensity: Now you are no longer yourself; you have become a different being; a being other than yourself is thinking, feeling and willing within you. Let your whole self be filled with Christ!—Eckhart made the saying of Paul a reality: ‘Not I, but Christ in me.’ He was one who had experienced this transformation; he had laid aside his own self. He eliminated his Ego and felt himself filled with a different Ego. The word Entwerdung (as the opposite of “becoming”) was a beautiful expression used by medieval mystics. Mystics such as Meister Eckhart, or the writer of the work known as Theologica Deutsch, let a higher man, a being able to quicken and inspire, speak in them. Hence their constant insistence that their aim was to surrender the self entirely to the being they experienced within them.

From this we see how with the approach of the modern age the medieval Christian mystics put in the place of an external Guru, an inner leader: the Christ.

We shall hear in the next lecture what has now to be done in order that a man rooted in the spiritual life of today may find the path enabling him to maintain intact the character and constitution of his soul. We have spoken of the path taken in the Northern Mysteries in order to experience the Macrocosm into which man enters on going to sleep. We shall begin tomorrow by describing the process of going to sleep and then pass on to speak of the macrocosmic spheres into which man finds his way through methods belonging to the modern path of knowledge leading into the higher worlds.

• 1. Notably Chapter V. Knowledge of Higher Worlds. Concerning Initiation, p. 222 in the 1962-3 edition.

At the conclusion of what was said yesterday on the subject of the deeper mystical path, it was necessary to speak of the chief danger encountered on this path by anyone who attempted to tread it without a leader in times before the methods of Initiation now available, were in existence. In order to indicate still more explicitly how great these difficulties were, I want to add the following.-

We have heard that the difficulties are mainly due to the fact that on descending into his inner being, a man becomes almost entirely filled by his egoistic impulses. The Ego awakens with a strength that would place everything in its service; everything would be viewed in accordance with the colouring given it by this reinforced Ego. For this reason it was essential in the process of the ancient Initiation that the strength of the, Ego-feeling, the Ego-consciousness, should be subdued. The Ego had as it were to be given over to the spiritual leader or teacher. This subjugation of the Ego was effected in such a way that through the power emanating from the spiritual leader, the Ego-consciousness of the candidate for Initiation was reduced, to begin with, to one-third of its ordinary strength. That is a very considerable reduction, for it can be said, broadly speaking, that with the exception of the very deepest stage of all, our consciousness in sleep is reduced to about one-third. But in the ancient Mysteries the process was carried further than that; the consciousness was reduced to a quarter of a third (that is, to one-twelfth), so that finally the candidate was actually in a condition resembling death. To outer observation he was exactly like a dead man.

But I must emphasise that this Ego-consciousness did not fade away into nothingness. That was not the case. On the contrary, only then was it possible to realise through spiritual perception the intense strength of human egoism; for even when Ego-consciousness was reduced to one-twelfth, a powerful force of egoism still came forth spiritually from the individual. And strange as it may sound, in order to hold in check this outpouring egoism, to keep a spiritual hold on the man whose Ego was thus subdued, twelve helpers were needed for the teacher or leader.—That is one of the so-called secrets of higher Initiation in certain ancient Mysteries. It has been mentioned here only in order that a man may know what is found when he descends into his own inner being. Left to his own resources he would develop traits twelve times worse than those he possessed in ordinary life. These traits were held in check in the ancient Mysteries by the twelve helpers of the priest of Hermes.—This is said merely to supplement the references made at the end of the lecture yesterday.

Today we will turn our minds to the other path that a man may take, not by descending into his inner self at the moment of waking, but by consciously experiencing the moment of going to sleep, consciously experiencing the condition during which he is given over to sleep. We have heard how man has then expanded as it were into the Macrocosm, whereas in his waking state he has plunged into his own being, into the Microcosm. We also heard that what a man would experience if his Ego were to pour consciously into the Macrocosm, would be so dazzling, so shattering, that it must be regarded as a wise dispensation that at the moment of going to sleep man forgets his existence altogether and consciousness ceases.

What man can experience in the Macrocosm opening out before him, provided he retains a certain degree of consciousness, was described as a state of ecstasy. But it was said at the same time that in ecstasy the Ego is like a tiny drop mingling in a large volume of water and disappearing in it. Man is in the state of being outside himself, outside his ordinary nature; he lets his Ego flow out of him. Ecstasy, therefore, can by no means be considered a desirable way of passing into the Macrocosm, for a man would lose hold of himself and the Ego would cease to control him. Nevertheless in bygone times, particularly in certain parts of Europe, a candidate who was to be initiated into the mysteries of the Macrocosm was put into a condition comparable with ecstasy. This is no longer part of the modern methods for attaining Initiation, but in olden times, especially in the Northern and Western regions of Europe, including our own, it was entirely in keeping with the development of the peoples living there that they should be led to the secrets of the Macrocosm through a form of ecstasy. Thereby they were also exposed to what might be described as the loss of the Ego, but this condition was less perilous in those times because men were still imbued with a certain healthy, elemental strength; unlike people today their soul-forces had not been enfeebled by the effects of highly developed intellectuality. They were able to experience with far greater intensity all the hopefulness connected with Spring, the exultation of Summer, the melancholy of Autumn, the death-shudder of Winter, while still retaining something of their Ego—although not for long. In the case of those who were to become initiates and teachers of men, provision had to be made for this introduction to the Macrocosm to take place in a different way. The reason for this will be evident when it is remembered that the main feature in this process was the loss of the Ego. The Ego became progressively weaker, until finally man reached the state when he lost himself as a human being.

How could this be prevented? The force that became weaker in the candidate's own soul, the Ego-force, had to be brought to him from outside. In the Northern Mysteries this was achieved by the candidate being given the support of helpers who in their turn supported the officiating initiator. The presence of a spiritual initiator was essential, but helpers were necessary as well. These helpers were prepared in the following way.—

Through a special kind of training, one individual underwent with particular intensity the experiences arising from inner surrender, for example to the budding life of nature in Spring. Certainly, any human being can have something of the same feeling, but not with the necessary intensity. Therefore individuals were specially trained to place all their forces of soul in the service of the Northern Mysteries, to forgo all the experiences connected with Summer, Autumn and Winter, and to concentrate their whole life of feeling on the budding life of Spring. Others again were trained to experience the exuberant life of Summer, others the life characteristic of Autumn, others that of Winter. The experiences which a single human being can have through the course of the year were distributed among a number, so that individuals were available who in very different ways had strengthened one aspect of their Ego. Because they had cultivated one force in particular to the exclusion of all the rest, they had within them a superfluity of Ego-force, and now, in accordance with certain rules, they were brought into contact with the candidate for Initiation in such a way that their superfluity of Ego-force was transmitted to him. His own Ego-force would otherwise have become progressively weaker. Thus the one who in the process of Initiation was to experience the whole cycle of the year, lived through all the seasons with equal intensity; the Ego-force of these helpers of the initiating priest streamed into him so effectively that he was led on to a stage where certain higher truths connected with the Macrocosm were revealed to him. What the others were able to impart poured into the soul of the candidate for Initiation.

To understand such a process we must be able to form an idea of the intense devotion and self-sacrifice with which men worked in the Mysteries in those olden times. The exoteric world today has very little conception of such fervent self-sacrifice. In earlier times there were individuals who willingly developed one side of their Ego with the object of placing it at the service of the candidate for Initiation and thus being able eventually to hear from him a description of what he had experienced in a condition that was not ecstasy in the usual sense, but—because extraneous Ego-force had poured into him—a conscious ascent into the Macrocosm.

Twelve individuals-three Spring-helpers, three Summer-helpers, three Autumn helpers and three Winter-helpers were necessary; they transmitted their specialised Ego-forces to the candidate for Initiation and he, when he had risen into higher worlds, was able to give information about those worlds from his own experience. A team or ‘college’ of twelve men worked together in the Mysteries in order to help a candidate for Initiation to rise into the Macrocosm. A reminiscence of this has been preserved in certain societies existing today, but in an entirely decadent form. As a rule in such societies special functions are also carried out by twelve members; but this is only a last and moreover entirely misunderstood echo of acts once performed in the Northern Mysteries for the purposes of Initiation.

If, then, a man endowed with an Ego-force artificially maintained in him, penetrated into the Macrocosm, he actually ascended through worlds. [* See Note on terminology (at the end of this work) with reference to the different terminology employed for these worlds.] The first world through which he passed was the one that would be revealed to him if he did not lose consciousness on going to sleep. We will therefore now turn our attention to this moment of going to sleep as we did previously to that of waking.

The process of going to sleep is in very truth an ascent into the Macrocosm. Even in normal human consciousness it is sometimes possible, through particularly abnormal conditions, to become conscious to a certain extent of the processes connected with going to sleep. This happens in the following way.—The man feels a kind of bliss and can distinguish this consciousness of bliss quite clearly from the ordinary waking consciousness. It is as though he became lighter, as though he were growing out beyond himself. Then this experience is connected with a certain feeling of being tortured by remembrance of the personal faults inhering in the character during life. What arises here as a painful remembrance of personal faults is a very faint reflection of the feeling a man has when he passes the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold and can perceive how imperfect he is and how trivial in face of the great realities and Beings of the Macrocosm. This experience is followed by a kind of convulsion—indicating that the inner man is passing out into the Macrocosm. Such experiences are unusual but known to many people when they were more or less conscious at the moment of going to sleep. But a person who has only the ordinary, normal consciousness loses it at the moment of going to sleep. All the impressions of the day—colours, light, sounds, and so on—vanish, and the man is surrounded by dense darkness instead of the colours and other impressions of daily life. If he were able to maintain his consciousness—as the trained Initiate can do—at the moment when the impressions of the day vanish, he would perceive what is called in spiritual science the Elementary or Elemental World, the World of the Elements.

This World of the Elements is, to begin with, hidden from man while he is in process of going to sleep. Just as man's inner being is hidden on waking through his attention being diverted to the impressions of the outer world, so, when he goes to sleep, the nearest world to which he belongs, the first stage of the Macrocosm, the Elementary World, is hidden from his perception. He can learn to gaze into it when he actually ascends into the Macrocosm in the way indicated. To begin with, this Elementary World makes him conscious that everything in his environment, all sense-perceptions and impressions, are an emanation, a manifestation of the spiritual, that the spiritual lies behind everything material. When a man on the way to Initiation—not, therefore, losing consciousness while passing into sleep—perceives this world, no doubt any longer exists for him that spiritual Beings and spiritual realities lie behind the physical world. Only as long as he is aware of nothing except the physical world does he imagine that behind this world there exist all kinds of conjectured material phenomena—such as atoms and the like. For the man who penetrates into the Elementary World there can no longer be any question of whirling, clustering atoms of matter. He knows that what lies behind colours, sounds and so forth is not material but the spiritual. Certainly, at this first stage of the World of the Elements the spiritual does not yet reveal itself in its true form as spirit. Man has before him impressions which, although in a different form from those known in waking consciousness, are not yet the spiritual facts themselves. It is not yet anything that could be called a true spiritual manifestation but to a considerable degree it is something that might be described as a kind of new veil over the spiritual Beings and facts.

The form in which this world reveals itself is such that the designations, the names, which since olden times have been used for the Elements are applicable to it. We can describe what is there seen by choosing words used for qualities otherwise perceived in the physical world: solid, liquid or fluid, airy or aeriform, or warmth; or: earth, water, air, fire. These expressions are taken from the physical world for which they are coined. Our language is after all a means of expression for the physical world. If therefore the spiritual scientist has to describe the higher worlds, he must borrow the words from the language that was coined for the things of ordinary life. He can speak only in similes, endeavouring so to choose the words that little by little an idea is evoked of what is perceived by spiritual vision. In depicting the Elementary World we must not take the terms and expressions that are used for circumscribed objects in the physical world but those used for certain qualities common to a category of objects. Otherwise we shall lose our bearings. Things in the physical world reveal themselves to us in certain states which we call solid, liquid, aeriform; and in addition there is also what we become aware of when we touch the surfaces of objects or feel a current of air which we call warmth.

Things in the everyday world are revealed to us in these states or conditions: solid, liquid, aecriform or gaseous, or as warmth. These, however, are always qualities of some external body, for an external body may be solid in the form of ice or also be liquid or gaseous when the ice melts. Warmth permeates all three states. So it is in the case of everything existing in the outer world of the senses.

The fact is there are not objects in the Elementary World such as are found in the physical world, but in the Elementary World we find as realities what in the physical world are merely qualities. We perceive something there that we feel we cannot approach. The feeling might be described as follows: I have before me something—either an entity or an object of the Elementary World—which I can observe only by going round it; it has an inner and an outer side. Such an entity of the Elementary World is called ‘earth’. Then too there are things and entities which may be described as ‘liquid’ or ‘fluid’. In the Elementary World we can see through them, we can penetrate into them, we have a sensation similar to the sensation in the physical world of dipping the hand into water. We can plunge into them, whereas what is called ‘earth’ is something that offers resistance, like a hard object. The second state is described in the Elementary World as ‘water’. Whenever mention is made of ‘earth’ and ‘water’ in books on spiritual science, this is what is meant; physical water is only an external simile for what is seen at this stage of development. ‘Water’ is something that pours through the Elementary World, not, of course, perceptible to the physical senses, but intelligible to the higher senses, to the faculty of spiritual perception, of the Initiate.

Then there is something in the Elementary World comparable with what we call ‘airy’ or ‘aeriform’ in the physical world. This is designated as ‘air’ in the Elementary World. Then, further, there is ‘fire’ or ‘warmth’, but it must be realised that what is called ‘fire’ in the physical world is only a simile. ‘Fire’ as it is in the Elementary World is easier to describe than the other three states for these can really only be described by saying that water, air and earth are similes of them. The ‘fire’ of the Elementary World is easier to describe because everyone has a conception of warmth of soul as it is called, of the warmth that is felt, for example, when we are together with someone we love. What then suffuses the soul and is called warmth, or fire of excitement, must naturally be distinguished from ordinary physical fire which will burn the fingers if they come into contact with it. In daily life, too, man feels that physical fire is a kind of symbol of the fire of soul which, when it lays hold of us, kindles enthusiasm. By thinking of something midway between an outer, physical fire that burns our fingers, and fire of soul, we reach an approximate idea of what is called ‘elemental fire’. When in the process of Initiation a man rises into the Elementary World, he feels as if from certain places something were flowing towards him that pervades him inwardly with warmth, while at another place this is less the case. An added complication is that he feels as if he were within the being who is transmitting the warmth to him. He is united with this elementary being and accordingly feels its fire. Such a man is entering a higher world which gives him impressions hitherto unknown to him in the world of the senses.

When a man with normal consciousness goes to sleep his whole being flows out into the Elementary World. He is within everything in that world; but he takes his own nature, what he is as man, into it. He loses his Ego as it pours forth, but what is not Ego—his astral qualities, his desires and passions, his sense of truth or the reverse—all this is carried into the Elementary World. He loses his Ego which in everyday life keeps him in check, which brings order and harmony into the astral body. When he loses the Ego, disorder prevails among the impulses and cravings in his soul and they make their way into the Elementary World together with him; he carries into that world everything that is in his soul. If he has some bad quality, he transmits it to a being in the Elementary World who feels drawn towards this bad quality. Thus with the loss of his Ego he would, on penetrating into the Macrocosm, transmit his whole astral nature to evil beings who pervade the Elementary World. Because he contacts these beings who have strong Egos, while he himself, having lost his Ego, is weaker than they, the consequence is that they will reward him in the negative sense for the sustenance with which he supplies them from his astral nature. When he returns into the physical world they transmit to him, for his Ego, qualities they have received from him and made particularly their own; in other words they strengthen his propensity for evil.

So we see that it is a wise dispensation for man to lose consciousness when he enters the Elementary World and to be safeguarded from passing with his Ego into that world. Therefore one who in the ancient Mysteries was to be led into the Elementary World had to be carefully prepared before forces were poured into him by the helpers of the Initiator. This preparation consisted in the imposition of rigorous tests whereby the candidate acquired a stronger moral power of self-conquest. Special value was attached to this attribute. In the case of a mystic, different attributes—humility, for example—were considered particularly valuable.

Accordingly upon a man who was to be admitted to an Initiation in these Mysteries, tests were imposed which helped him to rise above disasters of every kind even in physical existence. Formidable dangers were laid along his path. But by overcoming these dangers his soul was to be so strengthened that he was duly prepared when beings confronted him in the Elementary World; he was then strong enough not to succumb to any of their temptations, not to let them get the better of him but to repel them. Those who were to be admitted into the Mysteries were trained in fearlessness and in the power of self-conquest.

Once again let it be said at this point that no one need feel alarmed by the description of these Mysteries, for nowadays such tests are no longer imposed, nor are they necessary, because other paths are available. But we shall understand the import of the modern method of Initiation better if we study the experiences undergone in the past by very many human beings in order to achieve Initiation into the secrets of the Mysteries.

When the candidate in those ancient Mysteries, after long experiences connected with the Elementary World, had become capable of realizing that ‘earth’, ‘water’, ‘air’, ‘fire’—everything he perceives in the material world—are the revelations of spiritual beings, when he had learned to discriminate between them and to find his bearings in the Elementary World, he could be led a stage further to what is called the World of Spirit behind the Elementary World. Those who were initiates—and this can only be described as a communication of what they experienced—now realised that in very truth there are beings behind the Physical and the Elementary Worlds. But these beings have no resemblance at all to men. Whereas men on the Earth live together in a social order, in certain forms of society, under definite social conditions, whether satisfactory or the reverse, the candidate for Initiation passes into a world in which there are spiritual beings—beings who naturally have no external body but who are related to each other in such a way that order and harmony prevail. It is now revealed to him that he can understand the order and harmony he perceives in that world only by realising that what these spiritual beings do is an external expression of the heavenly bodies in the solar system, of the relationship between the Sun and the planets in their movements and positions. Thereby these heavenly bodies give expression to what the beings of the spiritual world are doing.

It has already been said that our solar system may be conceived as a great cosmic clock or timepiece. Just as we infer from the position of the hands of a clock that something is happening, we can do the same from the relative positions of the heavenly bodies. Anyone looking at a clock is naturally not interested in the hands or their position per se, but in what this indicates in the outer world. The hands of a clock indicate, for example, what is happening here in Vienna or somewhere in the world at this moment. A man who has to go to his daily work looks at the clock to see if it is time to start. The position of the hands is therefore the expression of something lying behind. And so it is in the case of the solar system. This great cosmic clock can be regarded as the expression of spiritual happenings and of the activity of spiritual beings behind it.

At this stage the candidate for the Initiation we have been describing comes to know the spiritual beings and facts. He comes to know the World of Spirit and realises that this World of Spirit can best be understood by applying to it the designations used in connection with our solar system; for there we have an outer symbol of this World of Spirit. For the Elementary World the similes are taken from the qualities of earthly things—solid, liquid, airy, fiery. But for the World of Spirit other similes must be used, similes drawn from the starry heavens.

And now we can realise that the comparison with a clock is by no means far fetched. We relate the heavenly bodies of our solar system to the twelve constellations of the Zodiac, and we can find our bearings in the World of Spirit only by viewing it in such a way as to be able to assert that spiritual Beings and events are realities; we compare the facts with the courses of the planets but the spiritual Beings with the twelve constellations of the Zodiac. If we contemplate the planets in space and the zodiacal constellations, if we conceive the movements and relative positions of the planets in front of the various constellations to be manifestations of the activities of the spiritual Beings and the twelve constellations of the Zodiac as the spiritual Beings themselves, then it is possible to express by such an analogy what is happening in the World of Spirit.

We distinguish seven planets moving and performing deeds, and twelve zodiacal constellations at rest behind them. We conceive that the spiritual facts—the courses of the planets—are brought about by twelve Beings. Only in this way is it possible to speak truly of the World of Spirit lying behind the Elementary World. We must picture not merely twelve zodiacal constellations, but Beings, actually categories of Beings, and not merely seven planets, but spiritual facts.

Twelve Beings are acting, are entering into relationship with one another and if we describe their actions this will show what is coming to pass in the World of Spirit. Accordingly, whatever has reference to the Beings must be related in some way to the number twelve; whatever hag reference to the facts must be related to the number seven. Only instead of the names of the zodiacal constellations we need to have the names of the corresponding Beings. In Spiritual Science these names have always been known. At the beginning of the Christian era there was an esoteric School which adopted the following names for the Spiritual Beings corresponding to the zodiacal constellations: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Kyriotetes, Dynameis, Exusiai, then Archai (Primal Beginnings or Spirits of Personality), then Archangels and Angels. The tenth category is Man himself at his present stage of evolution. These names denote ten ranks. Man, however, develops onwards and subsequently reaches stages already attained by other Beings. Therefore one day he will also be instrumental in forming an eleventh and a twelfth category. In this sense we must think of twelve spiritual Beings.

If we wanted to describe the World of Spirit we should have to attribute the origin of the spiritual universe to the co-operation among these twelve categories of Beings. Any description of what they do would have to deal with the planetary bodies and their movements. Let us assume that the Spirits of Will (the Thrones) co-operate with the Spirits of Personality (Archai) or with other Beings—and Old Saturn comes into existence. Through the co-operation of other Spirits the planetary bodies we call Old Sun and Old Moon come into existence.

We are speaking here of the deeds of these spiritual Beings. A description of the World of Spirit must include the Elementary World, for that is the last manifestation before the physical world; fire, air, water, earth, must also be considered. On Old Saturn, everything was fire or warmth; during the Old Sun evolution, air was added; during the Old Moon evolution, water. In describing the World of Spirit we must begin with the Beings. We call them the Hierarchies and pass on to their deeds which come to expression through the planets in their courses. And to have a picture of how all this manifests in the Elementary World we must describe it by using terms derived from this world. Only in this way is it possible to give a picture of the World of Spirit lying behind the Elementary World and our physical world of sense.

The Beings, the spiritual Hierarchies, their correspondences with the zodiacal constellations, the planetary embodiments of our Earth described by using expressions connected with the Elementary World-all this is presented in detail in the chapter on the evolution of the world in the book Occult Science—an Outline,¹ and we can now understand the deeper reasons for that chapter having been written in the way it has. It describes the Macrocosm as it should be described. Any real description must go back to the spiritual Beings. I tried in the book Occult Science to give guiding lines for the right kind of description of the World of Spirit—the world entered when there has been an actual ascent into the Macrocosm.

This ascent into the Macrocosm can of course proceed to still higher stages, for the Macrocosm has by no means been exhaustively portrayed by what has here been said. Man can ascend into even higher worlds; but it becomes more and more difficult to convey any idea of these worlds. The higher the ascent, the more difficult this becomes. If we want to give an idea of a still higher world it must be done rather differently. An impression of the world that is reached after passing beyond the World of Spirit may be obtained in the following way.—In describing man as he stands before us we may say that his existence was only made possible through the existence of these higher worlds. Man has become the being he is because he has evolved out of the physical world but above all out of the higher, spiritual worlds. Only a fantasy-ridden, materialistic mind can believe that it would be possible for a man to originate from the nebula described by the Kant-Laplace theory. Such a nebula could have produced only an automaton—never a man!

Around us, we have, firstly, the physical world. The physical body of man belongs to the world we perceive with our senses. With ordinary consciousness we perceive it only from outside. To what world do the more deeply lying, invisible members of man's nature belong? They all belong to the higher worlds. Just as with physical eyes we see only the material aspect of man, so too we see of the great outer world only what the senses perceive; we do not see those super-sensible worlds of which two—the Elementary World and the World of Spirit—have been described. But man, with his inner constitution, has issued from these higher worlds. The whole of man's being, his external, bodily nature too, has become possible only because certain invisible spiritual Beings have worked on him. If the etheric body alone had worked on man, he would be like a plant, for a plant has a physical and an etheric body. Man has in addition the astral body; but so too has the animal. If man had only these three members (physical body, etheric body, astral body) he would be an animal. It is because man has his Ego as well that he towers above these lower creatures of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms of nature. All the higher members of man work on his physical body; the physical body could not be what it is unless man also possessed these higher members. A plant would be a mineral if it had no etheric body. Man would have no nervous system if he had no astral body; he would not have his present structure, his upright gait, his over-arching brow, if he had not an Ego. If he had not his invisible members in higher worlds, he could not confront us as the figure he is.

Now these different members of man's organism and constitution have been formed out of different spiritual worlds. To understand this we shall do well to remind ourselves of a beautiful, profoundly wise saying of Goethe: “The eye is formed by the light for the light.” [* See Goethe's Studies in Natural Science. (Kürschner, Nationalliteratur, Vol. 35, p. 88). “The eye owes its existence to the light. Out of indifferent animal organs the light produces an organ to correspond to itself; and so the eye is formed by the light for the light so that the inner light may meet the outer.”] Schopenhauer, and Kant too, want to present the whole world as man's idea; this philosophy seeks to emphasise that without an eye we should perceive no light, that without an eye there would be darkness around us. That, of course, is true, but the point is that it is a one-sided truth. Unless the other side is added a one-sided truth is being regarded as the whole truth—than which there is nothing more pernicious. To say something that is incorrect is not the worst thing that can happen, for the world itself will soon put one right about it; but it is really serious to regard a one-sided truth as the absolute truth and to persist in so regarding it. That without the eye we could see no light is a one-sided truth. But if the world had remained forever filled with darkness, we should have had no eyes. When animals have lived for long ages in dark caves they lose their sight and their eyes go to ruin. On the one side it is true that without eyes we could gee no light, but on the other side it is equally true that the eyes have been formed by the light, for the light. It is always essential to look at truths not only from the one side but also from the other. The fault of most philosophers is not that they say what is false—in many cases their assertions cannot be refuted because they do state truths—but that they make statements which are due to things having been viewed from one side only. If you take in the right sense the saying that “the eye is formed by the light, for the light”, you will be able to say to yourselves that there must be something in the light that admittedly we do not see with our eyes but that has developed the eyes out of an organism which at first had no eyes. Behind the light there is something hidden. Let us say here: The eye-forming power is contained in every ray of sunlight. From this we can realise that everything round about us contains the forces which have created us. Just as our eyes are created by something within the light, all our organs have been formed by something that underlies everything we see in the world outside as external surfaces only.

Now man also has intellect, intelligence. In physical life he is able to use his intelligence because he has an instrument for it. Remember, we are speaking now of the physical world, not of what becomes of our thinking when we are free of the body after death, but of how we think through the instrument of the brain when we have wakened from sleep in the morning; after waking we see light through the eyes. In the light there is something that has formed the eye. We think through the instrument of the brain; thus there must be something in the world that has formed the brain in such a way that it could become an instrument of thinking suitable for the physical world. The brain has been made into an organ of thinking for the physical world by the power which manifests externally in our intelligence. Just as the light we perceive with the eye is an eye-forming power, our brain is the surface manifestation of a brain-forming power or force. Our brain is formed from out of the World of Spirit.

One who has attained Initiation recognises that if only the Elementary World and the World of Spirit existed, man's organ of intelligence could never have come into being. The World of the Spirit is indeed a lofty world but the forces which have formed the physical organ of thinking must have streamed into man from a yet higher world in order that intelligence might manifest outwardly, in the physical world.

Spiritual science has not without reason figuratively expressed this frontier of the world we have described as the world of the Hierarchies, by the word “Zodiac.” Man would be at the level of the animal if only the two worlds that have been described were in existence. In order that man could become a being able to walk upright, to think by means of the brain and to develop intelligence, an in-streaming of even higher forces was necessary, forces from a world above the World of Spirit. Here we come to a world designated by a word that is totally misused today because of the prevailing materialism. But in a past by no means very distant the word still conveyed its original meaning. The faculty man unfolds here in the physical world when he thinks, was called ‘Intelligence’ in the spiritual science of that earlier period. It is from a world lying beyond both the World of Spirit and the Elementary World that forces stream down through these two worlds to build our brain. Spiritual Science has also called it the World of Reason (Vernunftwelt). It is the world in which there are spiritual Beings who are able to send down their power into the physical world in order that a shadow-image of the Spiritual may be produced in the physical world in man's intellectual activity. Before the age of materialism no one would have used the word “reason” for thinking; thinking would have been called intellect, intelligence. “Reason” (Vernunft) would have been spoken of when those who were initiates had risen into a world even higher than the World of Spirit and had direct perception there. In the German language “reason” is connected with perception (Vernehmen), with what is directly apprehended, perceived as coming from a world still higher than the one denoted as the World of Spirit. A faint image of this world exists in the shadowy human intellect. The architects and builders of our organ of intellect must be sought in the World of Reason.

It is only possible to describe a still higher world by developing a spiritual faculty transcending the physical intellect. There is a higher form of consciousness, namely, clairvoyant consciousness. If we ask: how is the organ evolved which enables us to have clairvoyant consciousness?—the answer is that there must be worlds from which emanate the forces necessary for the development of this clairvoyant consciousness. Like everything else, it must be formed from a higher world. The first kind of clairvoyant consciousness to develop is a picture-consciousness, Imaginative Consciousness. This Imaginative Consciousness remains mere phantasy only for as long as the organ for it is not formed by forces from a world lying beyond even the World of Reason. As soon as we admit the existence of clairvoyant consciousness we must also admit the existence of a world from which emanate the forces enabling the organ for it to develop. This is the World of Archetypal Images (Urbilderwelt). Whatever can arise as true Imagination is a reflection of the World of Archetypal Images.

Thus we rise into the Macrocosm through four higher worlds: the Elementary World, the World of Spirit, the World of Reason and the World of Archetypal Images. In the next lectures I will deal with the World of Reason and the World of Archetypal Images and then describe the methods by which, in line with modern culture, the forces from the World of Archetypal Images can be brought down in order to make possible the development of clairvoyant consciousness.

• 1. Chapter IV, Man and the Evolution of the World, pp. 102-221 in the 1962-3 edition.

Yesterday we tried to acquire a certain insight into what is called the path out into the Macrocosm, into the Great World, in contrast to what has been said in the previous lectures about the mystical path, the path into the Microcosm.

The ascent into the Macrocosm leads the candidate for Initiation first of all into what has been called in Spiritual Science the Elementary World; then he rises into the World of Spirit, then into the World of Reason and finally into a still higher world which we will call the World of Archetypal Images (or Archetypes).¹ It was said that there are no longer any really adequate expressions for these worlds, for modern language has none and the earlier German word Vernunft (reason) is now used in a more trivial sense for something that has significance in the world of the senses only. Hence the old expression “Reason” used for the world above the so-called “World of Spirit” might easily be misunderstood.

Whatever was said in the last lecture could be no more than a sketch; it would of course be possible to speak of these worlds not merely for hours but for many months, whereas all that is possible here is to clarify our ideas of them as best we may. One other point shall now be mentioned, namely, that when a man rises in the way indicated yesterday into the Elementary World where he has a true perception of what are usually called the “Elements”—earth, water, air and fire—he also becomes aware that his own corporeality—including the higher members—is built out of this Elementary World. He also acquires knowledge of something else, namely, that the outer and inner aspects of the Elementary World differ somewhat from each other. Studying our own being with ordinary, normal human consciousness and not with clairvoyance, we find certain qualities which belong partly to our soul and partly to our outer constitution; these are the qualities of our temperament. We classify them as the melancholic, the phlegmatic, the sanguine and the choleric.

It was said yesterday that when a man passes into the Macrocosm he does not feel as if he were confronting objects as in physical existence but as if he were within every object in the Elementary World; he feels united with it. When we look at a physical object, we say: “The object is there; we are here.” And we remain sane and reasonable beings in the physical world as long as we can distinguish ourselves with our Egohood quite clearly from objects and other beings. But as soon as we penetrate into the Elementary World this distinction becomes essentially more difficult because, to begin with, we merge into the facts and objects and beings of that world. This was referred to yesterday in connection especially with the element of fire. We said that the fire of the Elementary World is not physical fire but something that can be compared with inner warmth of soul, inner fire of soul, although it is not quite the same. When we become aware of fire in the Elementary World it blends with us, we feel at one with it, within it. This feeling of oneness may also arise in the case of the other elements; the element “earth” is in a certain respect an exception. In the Elementary World what is called “earth” is something we cannot approach, something that repels us.

Now strangely enough, there exists in the Elementary World a mysterious relationship between the aforesaid four elements and the four temperaments, between the melancholic temperament and the element of “earth”, between the phlegmatic temperament and the element of “water”, between the sanguine temperament and the element of “air”, and between the choleric temperament and the element of “fire”. This relationship is expressed in the fact that the choleric man has a stronger inclination to merge with beings living in the “fire” of the Elementary World than with the others; the sanguine man is more inclined to merge with the beings living in the element of “air”; the phlegmatic man with the beings living in the element of “water”; and the melancholic man with the beings living in the element of “earth”. Thus different factors play a part in the experiences of the Elementary World. This helps us to realise that different people may give entirely different accounts of the Elementary World, and none of them need be quite wrong if he is relating his own experiences.

Anyone versed in these matters will know that when a man with a melancholic temperament describes the Elementary World in his own particular way, saying that there is so much that repels him, this is quite natural; for his temperament has a hidden kinship with everything earthy in the Elementary World and he overlooks all the rest. The choleric man will speak of how fiery everything appears, for to him it all glows in the elemental fire. You need not therefore feel any surprise if there is considerable variation in accounts of the Elementary World given by people possessed of a lower form of clairvoyance, for very exact self-knowledge is necessary before it is possible to describe that world as it really is. If a man knows to what degree his temperament is choleric or melancholic, he knows why the Elementary World reveals itself in the form it does, and then this self-knowledge impels him to divert his attention from the things with which, because of his natural make-up, he has the greatest kinship.

It is now possible for him to acquire concepts of what is called in Spiritual Science, true self-knowledge. This self-knowledge presupposes that we are able as it were to slip out of ourselves and look at our own being as though it were a complete Stranger, and that is by no means easy. It is relatively easy to acquire knowledge of soul-qualities which we have made our own, but to gain clear insight into the temperaments which work right down into the bodily nature, is difficult. Most people in life always consider themselves in the right. It is a very general egoistic attitude and need not be criticised too severely, for it is a perfectly natural tendency in human beings. How far would a man get in ordinary life if he had not this quality of firm self-confidence? But all the qualities that belong to his temperament go to form it.

To be detached from a particular temperament is extremely difficult, and we need much self-training if we are to learn to confront ourselves objectively. Every genuine spiritual investigator will say that no particular degree of maturity is any help in penetrating into the spiritual world if a man is incapable of accepting the fundamental principle that he can reach the truth only by ignoring his own opinion. He must be able to regard his own opinion as something of which he may possibly say: ‘I will ask myself at what period of life I formed this or that definite opinion’—let us suppose, for example, that it had a particular political trend. Before such a man can penetrate into the higher world he must be able to put this question to himself quite objectively: ‘What is it in life that has given my thought this particular trend? Would my thinking have been different if karma had assigned me to some other situation in life?’

If we can put this question to ourselves over and over again while trying to picture how our present personality has been produced, it becomes possible for us to take the first step towards emerging from the self. Otherwise we remain permanently enclosed within ourselves. But in the Macrocosm it is not as easy to be outside things as it is in the physical world. In the physical world we stand outside a rose-bush, for example, because of its natural make-up; but in the Elementary World we grow right into the things there, identify ourselves with them. If we are incapable of distinguishing ourselves from the things while we are actually within them, we can never understand conditions in that world. Our choleric temperament, for example, becomes merged in the element of fire. And we can no longer distinguish between what is flowing from us into a being of the Elementary World or from that being into us unless we have learned how to do so. We must therefore first learn how to be within a being and yet to distinguish our own identity from it.

There is only one being who can help us here, namely, our own. If we gradually succeed in judging ourselves as in ordinary life we judge another person, then we are on the right path. Now what is it that distinguishes a judgment about oneself from a judgment about another? We usually think that we ourselves are in the right and that the other person, if he holds a contrary opinion, is wrong. This is what happens in the ordinary way. But there is nothing more useful than to begin to train ourselves by saying: ‘I have this opinion, the other person has a different one. I will adopt the standpoint that his opinion is just as sound and valuable as my own.’—This is the kind of self-training that makes it possible for us to carry into the Elementary World the habit that enables us to distinguish ourselves from the things there, although we are within them.

Certain subtleties in our experiences are necessary if we are to ascend consciously into the higher worlds. This example too shows what justification there was for saying in the lecture yesterday that when a man ascends into the Macrocosm he always faces the danger of losing his Ego. In ordinary life the Ego is nothing but the aggregate of opinions and feelings connected with our personality and most people will find that it is exceedingly difficult to think, to feel or to will anything, once they have taken leave of what life has made of them. It is accordingly very important before attempting an ascent into the higher worlds to be acquainted with what spiritual investigation has already brought to light. It is therefore emphasised over and over again that nobody who has had experience in this domain will ever help to lead another into the higher worlds until the latter has grasped through his reason, through his ordinary, healthy faculty of judgment, that what Spiritual Science states is not nonsense. It is quite possible to form a sound judgment about the findings of spiritual investigation. Although it is not possible to investigate personally in the spiritual worlds without the vision of the seer, a healthy judgment can be formed as to the correctness or incorrectness of what is communicated by those who are able to see. On this basis we can study life and observe whether the statements made by the spiritual investigator make it more intelligible. If they do, then they can be assumed to be correct.

Such judgments will always have one peculiarity, namely, that we shall always, by holding them, transcend ordinary human ways of thinking in a certain respect. If we speak with unprejudiced minds our ordinary sympathies and antipathies are discarded and we shall find ourselves able to be in harmony even with people who hold the most contrary opinions. In this way we transcend the ordinary way of forming human opinions. Thus in Spiritual Science we gain something which we retain even when we have relinquished our ordinary opinions and which ensures that our Ego is not immediately lost when we enter the higher world for the first time. For the Ego is not lost when it is able to be active, when it can think and feel; it is only when thinking, feeling and perception cease that we have lost our bearings altogether. Thus a certain store of spiritual-scientific knowledge protects us from losing our Ego.

The loss of the Ego on entering the spiritual world would, however, have other consequences in many cases. We come here to something that must be briefly mentioned. These consequences often show themselves in ordinary life. It is important to know about them when describing the paths that can lead into the spiritual worlds.

The spiritual investigator must not be in any sense a dreamer, a visionary. He must move with inner assurance and vigour in the spiritual world as an intelligent man does in the physical world. Any nebulosity or lack of clarity would be dangerous on entering the higher worlds. It is therefore so very essential to acquire a sound judgment about the things of normal, everyday life. At the present time especially there are factors in everyday life which could be highly obstructive on entering the spiritual world if no heed were paid to them. If we reflect about our life and about influences that have affected us from birth onwards, we shall recall many things even by a superficial retrospect, but we shall also have to admit that very much has sunk into oblivion. We shall have to admit too that we have no clear or definite consciousness of influences that had a share in forming our character and educating us.

Would anyone refuse to admit that many influences have been forgotten? We shall not deny having had some experience just because it is not now present in our consciousness. Why do we forget such influences upon our lives? It is because with each new day, life brings something new into our path, and if we were obliged to retain every experience we should finally be quite unable to cope with life and its demands. I have shown you how even in the normal course of life our experiences finally coalesce into faculties. Whatever would it be like if every time we took up a pen we were obliged to relive the experiences we had when learning to write! These past experiences have rightly fallen into oblivion and it is well for us that this has been so.

‘Forgetting’ is therefore something that plays an important part in human life. There are experiences which it is desirable for us to have undergone but which then fade away from our consciousness. Innumerable impressions-particularly those of early childhood-sink into oblivion, are no longer in our consciousness because life has caused us to forget them. Life has obliterated them because otherwise we should be unable to cope with its demands. It is good that we are not obliged to drag everything along with us. But in spite of being forgotten, these impressions may still be working in us. There may be impressions which, although they have vanished from our memory and we know nothing of them, are nevertheless driving forces in our life of soul. They may influence our soul-life so unfavourably that it is shattered and has a detrimental effect even on the body. Many pathological states, nervous conditions, hysteria and so forth, can be understood when it is known that the range of the conscious life does not represent the full extent of the soul's life. Anyone with a knowledge of human nature may often be able to call the attention of a person who tells him of innumerable things that make life difficult, to something that he has entirely forgotten but is nevertheless affecting his life of soul. There are ‘islands’ in the life of soul, unlike those we come across in the sea, where we have solid ground beneath us. But when in his life of soul a man comes across such an island which originates from unconsciousness influences, he may be exposed to all sorts of dangers. In ordinary life these islands can most easily be avoided when a man endeavours from a later point in his life to realise what has been affecting him, so that he is able to form a judgment of the experiences in question. It has a very strong healing effect if he can be given a world-outlook enabling him to understand these islands in the soul and to cope with them. If a human soul were led unprepared to these islands it would be thrown into utter confusion; but if a person is helped to understand his own being, it is easier for him to deal with them. The more understanding we can introduce into our conscious life, the better it is for our everyday existence.

Not only these unconscious islands in the soul, but many things of the kind confront one who enters into the Macrocosm. As we have heard, man enters into the Macrocosm every night when he goes to sleep but complete oblivion envelops whatever he might experience there. Among the many experiences he might have if he were to enter the Macrocosm consciously, would be the experience of himself. He himself would be there within the Macrocosm. He has around him spiritual beings and spiritual facts and he also has an objective view of himself. He can compare himself with the macrocosmic world and become aware of his own shortcomings, his own immaturity. This experience affords abundant opportunity for him to lose his self-assurance, his self-confidence. His best safeguard against such loss of self-assurance is for entry into the higher world to have been preceded by inner preparation, leading towards a mature realisation that imperfect as he now is, there is always the possibility of acquiring faculties that will enable him to grow into the higher world. He must train himself to realise his imperfections and he must also be able to sustain the vision of what he may become after overcoming these imperfections and acquiring the qualities he now lacks. This is a feeling which must come to the human soul when the threshold leading into the Macrocosm is crossed consciously. A man must learn to see himself as an imperfect being, to endure the realisation: When I look back over my present life and into my previous incarnations, I see that it is these which have made me what I am.—But he must also be able to perceive not only this figure of himself but also another figure which says to him: If you now work at yourself, if you do your utmost to develop the germinal qualities lying in your deeper nature, then you can become a being such as the one standing beside you as an ideal at which you can look without being overcome by awe or discouragement.

This realisation is possible only if we have trained ourselves to overcome life's difficulties. But if, before entering into the Macrocosm, we have taken care to acquire in the physical world the strength to overcome obstacles, to welcome pain for the sake of gaining strength, then we have steeled ourselves to get the better of hindrances and from that moment we can say to ourselves: Whatever may happen to you, whatever may confront you in this spiritual world you will come through, for you will develop ever more strongly the qualities you have already acquired for the conquest of obstacles.

Anyone who has prepared himself in such a way has a very definite experience when he enters the Elementary World. We shall understand this experience if we remind ourselves again that the choleric temperament is akin to the element of fire, the sanguine to the element of air, the phlegmatic to the element of water and the melancholic to the element of earth. When a man passes into the Elementary World, the beings of that world confront him in the form that corresponds with his own temperament. Thus choleric qualities confront him as if aglow in the element of fire, and so on. Because of his training it will then become evident that the strength of soul he has already developed triumphs over all obstacles and is also akin to a power in the World of Spirit. This power is related to that figure which, gathered together from all the four elements, confronts him in the World of Spirit in such a way that he beholds himself calmly and quietly as an objective being. The outcome of the resolve in his soul to overcome all imperfections is that this imperfect “double” stands before him but that the sight does not have the disturbing or shattering effect it would otherwise have upon him. In everyday life we are protected from this, for every night on going to sleep we should be confronted by this imperfect being and be overwhelmed by the sight if consciousness did not cease. But there would also be before us that other great figure who shows us what we can become and what we ought to be. For this reason consciousness is extinguished when we go to sleep. But if we acquire the maturity to say to ourselves: You will overcome all obstacles—then the veil that falls over the soul on going to sleep, is lifted. The veil becomes thinner and thinner and finally there stands before us—in such a way that we can now endure it—the form that is a likeness of ourselves as we are, and by its side we become aware of the other figure who shows us what we can become by working at our development. This figure reveals itself in all its strength, splendour and glory. At this moment we know that the reason why this figure has such a shattering effect is that we are not, but ought to be, like it, and that we can acquire the right attitude only when we can endure this spectacle. To have this experience means to pass the “Greater Guardian of the Threshold.” It is this Greater Guardian of the Threshold who effaces consciousness when we go to sleep in the ordinary way. He shows us what is lacking in us when we try to enter into the Macrocosm, and what we must make of ourselves in order to be able, little by little, to grow into that world.

It is so necessary for the men of our time to form a clear idea of these things, yet they resist it. In this respect our present age is involved in a process of transition. In theory, many people will acknowledge that they are imperfect beings, but usually they do not get beyond the theory.

In the spiritual life of today, if you examine for yourselves, you will everywhere find evidence of an attitude that is entirely opposed to the one of which we have spoken. Everywhere you will hear this or that opinion expressed about things in the world. Again and again you will be able to read and hear it said: “One” can know this, “one” cannot know that.—How often we encounter this little word “one” in modern writings! In this word man has set a limit to his knowledge which he believes he is unable to overstep. Whenever a person uses this little word “one” in such a way, it shows that he is incapable of grasping the concept of true human knowledge. At no moment of life should it be said that “one” can or cannot know such-and-such a thing, but rather that “we” can know only as much as is consonant with our faculties and present state of development; and that when we have reached a higher level we shall know more. Anyone who speaks about limits of knowledge shows himself to be a person who is incapable of grasping even the conception of self-knowledge, for otherwise he would understand that all of us are beings capable of development and so are able to acquire knowledge corresponding to the measure of our faculties at that particular time.

The spiritual investigator will accustom himself, in reading modern literature, to substitute “he” for “one”. For it is the writer in question who is saying this or that. Thereby the writer betrays how much he knows; but it begins to become doubtful when the writer goes further and actually puts into practice what he writes. Theories are dangerous only when put into practice. For example, if such a writer says: I know what it is possible for a man to apprehend and grasp so I need do nothing in order to make progress ... then he is simply putting obstacles along the path, is blocking his own development. There are, in fact, very many such people today. It belongs to the whole mode of feeling of human beings today that they actually like to make the veil constantly darker over the world which cannot be entered in the right way without passing that mighty figure, the Greater Guardian of the Threshold. This mighty Guardian denies us entrance unless we take this sacred vow: Knowing well how imperfect we are, we will never cease striving to become more and more perfect.—Only with this impulse is it permissible for anyone to pass into the Macrocosm. Whoever has not sufficient strength of will to continue working at himself must set about acquiring it.

That is the necessary counterpart to self-knowledge. We must acquire self-knowledge, but it would remain a sterile achievement unless it were linked with the will for self-perfecting. Through the ages there resounds the ancient Apollonian saying: “Know thyself!” That is true and right, but something more must be added to it. As was said yesterday, really erroneous ideas are not absolutely catastrophic because life itself corrects them; but one-sided truths, half-truths, present much greater hindrances. The call for self-knowledge must also be a call for constant self-perfecting. If we take this vow to our higher self we can confidently and without danger venture into the Macrocosm, for then we shall gradually learn to find our bearings in the labyrinth that inevitably confronts us.

We have now heard how our own nature is related to the Elementary World—we have also found that our temperaments are related to what confronts us in that world. But there is still something else in the Elementary World to which qualities of soul other than the temperaments are related. Within us there is that which is also outside us, for we have been formed out of the world that surrounds us.

From what can be perceived in the physical world (temperament) we must move forward to the Elementary or Elemental World, and then ascend to the World of Spirit. Again we can pass from there into a still higher world and of this we will speak briefly. As human beings we pass from incarnation to incarnation. If in this present incarnation we are melancholic, we can say to ourselves that in another incarnation—either in the past or in the future—we may have had or shall have a sanguine temperament. The one-sidedness of each temperament will be balanced in the different incarnations. Here we have arrived at the idea that we, as beings, are after all something more than appears, that even though now we may be melancholic, we are something else as well. As the same being we may have been choleric in an earlier life and may become sanguine in a following one. Our whole being is not contained in particular temperamental traits. There is something else as well. When a clairvoyant, observing someone in the Elementary World, sees him as a melancholic, he must say to himself: that is a transitory manifestation, it is merely the manifestation of one incarnation. The person who now, as a melancholic type, represents the element of earth, will in another incarnation represent, as a sanguine type, the element of air, or, as a choleric, the element of fire. Melancholics, with their tendency to introspective brooding, repel us when viewed from the vantage-point of the Elementary World; cholerics appear as if they were spreading flames of fire—as an elemental force, of course, not physical fire.

To avoid misunderstanding I must here mention that in manuals on Theosophy, the Elementary World is usually called the Astral World; what we call the World of Spirit in there called the lower sphere of Devachan-Lower Devachan. What is there called the higher sphere of Devachan—Arupa-Devachan—is here called the World of Reason.

When we pass from the World of Spirit into the World of Reason we meet with something similar to what has already been experienced if we are revealed to ourselves as beings who are mastering our temperaments and developing balance from one life to another. Thus do we approach the boundary of the World of Spirit. When we reach it we find spiritual facts and Beings expressed as if in a cosmic clock through the movements of the planets. The Beings are expressed in the constellations of the Zodiac, the facts in the planets. But these analogies do not take us very far; we must pass on to the Beings themselves—the Hierarchies.

Now we should be unable to form any conception of the still higher worlds unless with clairvoyant consciousness we were to pass on to the Beings themselves-the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, and so on.-In one incarnation a man may have a melancholic temperament, in another a sanguine temperament. His real being is more than either. His real being breaks through such classifications. If we are now clear in our minds that the Beings we designate as Seraphim, Cherubim, Spirits of Will, Thrones, and so forth, and who express themselves in physical space in the constellations of the Zodiac—if we are clear that these Beings are more than their names designate, then we are beginning to form a true concept of this upper boundary of the Macrocosm. A Being who confronts us in some particular clairvoyant experience, let us say as a Spirit of Wisdom, does not always remain at the same stage and therefore cannot always be denoted by the same name. For just as man develops, so do these Beings develop through different stages; hence they must be called now by one name, now by another. The Beings develop from stage to stage. The names may roughly be thought of as designations of offices. If we speak of Spirits of Will or of Spirits of Wisdom, it is rather as if here on Earth we were speaking of a councilor, privy councilor, or the like; the man may have been that to begin with and then something else. In the spiritual Hierarchies the same Being might at one time have been a Spirit of Wisdom, at another time a Spirit of Will, and so on, because the Beings develop through stages, through various ranks. As long as we remain in the World of Spirit they reveal themselves as Seraphim or Cherubim or of whatever rank it may be. But from the moment we become acquainted with the developing Being, from the moment we proceed beyond the title of office to a conception of the actual Being himself, we have ascended into a still higher realm, into the World of Reason (Vernunftreich). The forces of this world are the builders of man's organ of intelligence.

To reach a certain stage of knowledge it is always necessary to distinguish between the developing Beings themselves and their nature at a particular stage of their evolution. This must be done both in the case of Beings at an advanced stage of development who appear on Earth and of those who are only to be seen by clairvoyance in the World of Spirit.

We will take the example of Buddha, who lived, as you know, in the sixth century BC. Anyone who is versed in this subject must learn to distinguish between the Being who was called “Buddha” at that time and the designation of the office of Buddha. Previously, in his earlier incarnations, this Being was a Bodhisattva and only then, in his incarnation in the sixth century BC., did he rise to the rank of Buddhahood. Yet in the earlier periods of time he was the same Being who later became Gautama Buddha. But this Being evolved to further stages in such a way that for certain reasons it was no longer necessary for him to incarnate as a man of flesh. He lived on in another form. As a Bodhisattva he was associated for many millennia with Earth-evolution, then he became Buddha, and in that incarnation reached a stage from which he no longer needed to descend into incarnation in a body of flesh.² He is now a sublime Being visible only in the spiritual world to the eyes of a seer. This shows the distinction that must be made between the designation, “Buddha” and the Being who held the office of Buddha. Similarly, distinction must be made between the names we given to the Hierarchies and the Beings themselves, for they too ascend in rank—let us say from the rank of Thrones to the ranks of Cherubim and Seraphim.

Thus at the boundary of the World of Spirit, certain Beings touch this boundary from above and assume certain qualities; certain functions must be attributed to them. But when we ascend to a still higher world these Beings are revealed to us now in process of living development. It is similar to what happens to man in the physical world in the course of his incarnations. Just as we only really come to know a man by following him from one incarnation to another instead of taking account merely of his present incarnation, so do we only come to know the lofty spiritual Beings if we are able to look beyond what their deeds express, to the Beings themselves. To associate with spiritual Beings and to witness their evolution means to live in the World of Reason.

As was indicated yesterday, above the World of Reason there is a yet higher world, whence come the forces which enable us actually to pass from normal consciousness into clairvoyant consciousness that is equipped with eyes and ears of spirit. Why, then, should it be surprising to say that these qualities and faculties originate in worlds higher than the World of Spirit or even than the World of Reason? When clairvoyant consciousness awakens in a man, he becomes in actual fact a participator in the higher worlds. No wonder, then, that the forces for awakening this clairvoyant consciousness come from a world whence certain higher spiritual Beings themselves derive their forces. We derive our forces from the Elementary World, the World of Spirit, the World of Reason. If these worlds are to be transcended the forces for the ascent must be derived from even higher spheres.

It will now be our task to speak of the first world revealed to man when clairvoyant consciousness awakens in him. It is the world of Imagination. We shall show that the forces which form the organs in man for Imaginative consciousness come from the World of Archetypal Images, just as the forces from the World of Reason are those which enable man on the physical plane to be capable of intelligent judgment. Our next task will be to explain the connection between the first stage of higher knowledge and the spiritual World of Archetypal Images. Then we shall proceed to describe the worlds of Inspiration and Intuition and to show how in line with our modern culture, man can grow into the higher worlds, how he can become a citizen of those worlds in which he is the lowest being just as he is the highest being in the kingdoms surrounding him here on the physical plane. Here he looks downwards to plants, animals, minerals; in yonder worlds he can look upwards to Beings above him. As he pursues his path into the Macrocosm with newly awakened faculties, new Beings and realities enter perpetually into his ken.

• 1. See Notes on terminology at the end of the lectures.
• 2. See Dr. Steiner's Lecture-Course on the Gospel of St. Luke, notably lectures 3 to 7; also, Man in the Light of Occultism, Philosophy and Theosophy, notably lecture 9 lecture 10.

The contents of today's lecture will be better understood if we begin by considering once again what it is that happens when man wakes from sleep, but we shall pay special attention now to what is working out of the spiritual world at the building up of his nature and constitution. When man wakes from sleep his whole being passes out of the Macrocosm into the Microcosm. It is quite understandable that in his normal consciousness he has very little knowledge of the interaction between Macrocosm and Microcosm. In the ordinary way he supposes that what he calls his Ego is within himself. But in view of the fact that while he is asleep he is outside his physical sheaths with his astral body and his Ego, it is obvious that during the hours of sleep the Ego must certainly not be sought within the boundaries of the skin but that it has poured into the worlds of which we have spoken: the Elementary World, the World of Spirit, the World of Reason, and also into the still higher world we are to consider today—the World of the spiritual Archetypes of all things. The Ego has poured into the cosmic expanse; hence the entry into the body on waking in the morning must not be imagined as though the Ego merely slipped back into the body. A kind of contraction of the Ego takes place on waking; it contracts more and more and then passes into the physical and etheric bodies in a certain consolidated form. But what is perceptible to clairvoyant consciousness is that the Ego is not by any means wholly within man during the hours of waking consciousness. To clairvoyant consciousness the Ego is always present in a certain way in man's environment and coincides only partially with what is perceived as the human physical body. Accordingly we may say that the Ego, in its substantiality, is also always present around us. What the clairvoyant sees as a kind of light-aura may be called the Ego-aura. Man is always surrounded by a spiritual cloud of this nature. The Ego is not to be looked for at any particular spot but it pervades man's whole Ego-aura. In the morning the Ego approaches from all sides, from all the Beings and Realities of the worlds we have called the World of Reason, the World of Spirit and the Elementary World.

Now let us consider more exactly how the Ego slips into the body, and ask ourselves: How is it that on waking we are suddenly surrounded with sense-perceptions, such as impressions of colour and light? For example, suppose the first sense-impression we have on waking is a blue surface, the colour blue. What is the explanation of this impression? Ordinary consciousness is completely at sea here. The reason is that when the Ego is passing out of the Macrocosm into the Microcosm, a kind of barrier is created against the in-streaming spiritual forces, against everything we call the Elementary World. Something is held back with the result that only a portion of the Elementary World flows in. If we see a blue surface in front of us, then, through this blue surface all these forces are flowing in, with the exception of a part of the Elementary World. The part of the Elementary World that is held back comes into our consciousness as a mirror-image, a reflection, and this reflection is the blue colour. The elements of fire, air, water and earth (spiritually conceived as belonging to the Elementary World) stream through the eye with the exception of what we actually see. Sense-perception arises through the fact that our eye holds back part of the light from the Elementary World, our ear holds back part of the sound, our other organs hold back part of the fire or warmth; what is not held back, streams into us.

We can now supplement what was said in the previous lectures, that the “eye is formed by the light for the light.”

That is to say, the eye is not formed by what is reflected, but by what comes to us with the light—and that is part of the Elementary World. Moreover something also streams in from the World of Spirit, indeed from all the worlds of which we have spoken. Accordingly we may say: At this particular point certain forces are held back by the eye, and also by the other senses; what does not stream into us, what is held back, is the sum-total of our sense-impressions. Thus it is what we do not let through that we see or hear; but what we do let through is what has formed the physical organism of the eye, for example. We hold back certain forces and allow certain others to pass through—these latter being forces of the Elementary World. If we look at the eyeball in a mirror, then too we see only what it does not let through. Thus in the Elementary World there are forces which have formed our sense of sight and also our other senses. As sense-beings we are formed out of the Elementary World; the world we see when we are able to look into the Elementary World is the world which builds up our senses.

At the inner “wall” of our organ of sight there is a kind of second mirror, for there, from a further world, other forces flow in—with the exception of those that are reflected. There the elemental forces themselves are held back and reflected; they cease to function and it is only the forces of the World of Spirit that stream through and are not reflected. These are the forces that form, for example, the optic nerve. Just as the eye has its optic nerve, so has the ear its aural nerves from the forces streaming in from the World of Spirit. From there stream the forces of Beings who are the builders of the whole nervous system. Our nerves are ordered according to the laws of the planetary world outside, for the planetary world is the outer expression of spiritual realities and spiritual worlds.

If it is the case that the World of Spirit works at the forming of our nervous system, it follows that underlying our nervous system there must be a certain law and order corresponding to that of the solar system. Our nervous system must be an inner solar system, for it is organised from the Heaven World.

We will now ask ourselves whether this nervous system really functions as if it were a mirror-image of the solar system out yonder in the Macrocosm. As you know, our measurement of time is governed by the relation of the planets to the Sun and again in the yearly cycle by the passage of the Sun through the twelve constellations of the Zodiac. That is an arrangement of time based upon the law contained in the number twelve as a number which expresses the movements taking place in the solar system. There are also twelve months in the year, and in the longest months there are thirty-one days. That again is based upon the mutual relations of the heavenly bodies and is connected with our time-system. There is a certain irregularity for which there is a good reason, but we cannot go into it now.

Let us try to picture this remarkable time-system in the universe and ask ourselves how these cosmic processes would be reflected in our nervous system. If the forces underlying the Macrocosm are also the forces which have formed our nervous system, we shall certainly find a reflection of them in ourselves; and in fact we have twelve cerebral nerves and thirty-one pairs of spinal nerves. The cosmic laws are actually reflected in these spinal and cerebral nerves. The existence of a certain irregularity is explained by the fact that man is destined to be a being who is independent of what is going on outside him. Just as the Sun's passage through the constellations of the Zodiac takes place in twelve months, and this is reflected in the twelve cerebral nerves, so the days of the month are regulated in accordance with the circuit of the Moon—twenty-eight days. How is the connection of the thirty-one days in the month with the human nervous system to be explained? We have three additional pairs of nerves, i.e. thirty-one in all, which makes us independent beings; otherwise here too we should be governed by the number twenty-eight. Here you can glimpse a deep mystery, a wonderful connection between our nervous system and what is expressed in the great symbols of space—symbols which in themselves are mirrorings of spiritual Beings and activities.

We come now to the third part of the reflection. Our nervous system is built up by the World of Spirit. At the point where the nerves pass either into the brain or into the spine, again a reflection takes place. At this point the stream from the World of Spirit is held back in the nervous system and what we have come to know in the World of Reason penetrates through. The forces of the Hierarchies work through at this point and the World of Reason builds up for us the brain and spinal cord that lie behind the nerves. In our brain itself and its elongation, the spinal cord, we have the product of all the activity originating ultimately in the World of Reason. Anyone who is able to survey the World of Spirit clairvoyantly can find exact images of the great cosmic prototypes even in the smallest reflections in the cerebral nervous system and the spinal nervous system. But the World of Archetypes, or Archetypal Images, streams right through us without our being able to hold it back.

In what way are we able in ordinary life to be conscious of anything? By being able to hold it back. We become aware of a part of the Elementary World by holding it back. We are a product of the Elementary World in our sense-organs and in becoming aware of the activity and functioning of our senses we become aware of the Elementary World. We are a product of the World of Spirit and become aware of that world—but only in reflection—when we become aware of the world connected with our nerves. What does man know of the Elementary World? As much as is mirrored for him by the senses: light, sounds, and so forth. What does man know of the World of Spirit? Just what his nerves reflect for him. The Laws of Nature as they are usually called are nothing else than a shadowy image, a faint reflection, of the World of Spirit. And what man takes to be his inner spiritual life, his reason, is a weak reflection of the outer World of Reason; what is usually called intellect, intelligence, is a faint, shadowy reflection of the World of Reason.

Of what should we have to be capable if we desired to see more than what has been described here? We should have to be able to hold back more. If we wanted to experience consciously the influence of the World of Archetypal Images we should have to be able to hold back this world in some way.

It is only possible for us to have physical sense-organs—eyes, for example—by admitting the Elementary World into ourselves and then holding it back. We can only have a nervous system by admitting the World of Spirit into ourselves and then holding it back; we can only have a brain and reasoning faculty by admitting into ourselves the World of Reason and then holding it back; thereby the brain is formed. If higher organs are to be formed, it must be possible for us to hold back a still higher world. We must be able to send something towards it, as in our brain we send that which holds back the World of Reason. Thus man must do something if he wishes to develop in the true way. He must derive forces from a higher world if in the true sense he wishes to develop to a higher stage. He must do something to hold back the forces of the World of Archetypal Images which would otherwise simply pass through him. He must himself create a reflecting apparatus for that purpose. The method of Spiritual Science, starting from Imaginative Knowledge, creates such an apparatus in the way in which the man of today can and should do this. What man normally perceives and knows is the external physical world. If he desires to attain higher knowledge he must do something to create for himself higher organs. He must bring a world that is higher than the World of Reason to a halt within himself, and this he does by developing a new kind of activity which can confront the World of Archetypal Images and, to begin with, hold it back. He engenders the new activity by learning to undergo inner experiences which do not occur in everyday life. A typical experience of this kind is described in the book, Occult Science—an Outline (Chapter V). It comes about by picturing the Rose-Cross. How should we proceed in order to have as a true experience within us this mental picture of the Rose-Cross?

A pupil who aspires to be led to higher stages of knowledge would be told by his teacher to contemplate, as a beginning, how a plant grows out of the soil, how it forms stem, leaves, flower and fruit. Through the whole structure flows the green sap. Now compare this plant with a human being. Blood flows through the human being and is the outer expression of impulses, appetites and passions; because man is endowed with an Ego he appears to us as a being higher than the plant. Only a fantastic mind-although there are many such—could believe that the plant has consciousness similar to that of man and could reflect impressions inwardly. Consciousness arises, not through the exercise of activity but because an impression is reflected inwardly, and this, man—but not the plant—is able to do. Thus in a certain respect man has reached a higher stage of development than the plant but at the cost of the possibility of erring. The plant is not liable to error, neither has it a higher and a lower nature. It has no impulses or appetites that degrade it. We may well be impressed by the chastity of the plant in contrast to the impulses, desires and passions of man. With his red blood man exists as a being who, in respect of his consciousness, has developed to a higher stage than the plant but at the cost of a certain deterioration.

All this would be made clear to an aspirant for higher knowledge. The teacher would tell him that he must now attain what, at a lower stage, the plant reveals to him; he must gain the mastery over his appetites, impulses and so forth. He will achieve this mastery when his higher nature has won the victory over the lower, when his red blood has become as chaste as the sap of the plant when it reddens in the rose. And so the red rose can be for us a symbol of what man's blood will become when he masters his lower nature. We see the rose as an emblem, a symbol of the purified blood.

And if we associate the wreath of roses with the dead, black, wooden cross, with what the plant leaves behind when it dies, then we have in the Rose-Cross a symbol of man's victory of the higher, purified nature over the lower. In man, unlike the plant, the lower nature must be overcome. The red rose can be for us a symbol of the purified red blood. But the rest of the plant cannot be an emblem in this sense for there we must picture that the sap and greenness of the plant have lignified. In the black wooden cross we have therefore the emblem of the vanquished lower nature, in the roses the emblem of the development of the higher nature. The Rose-Cross is an emblem of man's development as it proceeds in the world.—This is not an abstract concept but something that can be felt and experienced as actual development. The soul can glow with warmth at the picture of development presented in the symbol of the Rose-Cross.

This shows that man can have mental pictures which do not correspond to any external reality. Those who are desirous of having normal consciousness only, where the mental pictures always represent some external reality, will speak derisively of the Rose-Cross symbol and insist that mental pictures are false if they represent no external fact. Such people will ask: wherever is there any such thing as the Rose-Cross? Do red roses ever grow on dead wood?—But the whole point is that we shall acquire a faculty of soul that is not present in normal consciousness; that we shall become capable of elaborating mental images and conceptions which have a certain relation to the outer world but yet are not replicas of it. The Rose-Cross is related in a certain respect to the outer world, but it is we ourselves who have created the nature of this relationship. We have contemplated the plant and the ascendancy attained by man and we picture this to ourselves in the image of the Rose-Cross. Then we inscribe this symbol into our world of mental pictures and ideas. The same could be done with other symbols.

In order that we may understand one another fully, I will speak about another symbol. Let us think of the ordinary life of a man through the days of his existence. Day alternates with night, waking with sleeping. During the day we have a number of experiences; during the night, without our being conscious of it, forces are drawn from the spiritual world. Just as we have experiences in our conscious life, in the night we have experiences in the subconscious region of our being. If with the object of acquiring knowledge we take stock of our inner life from time to time, we certainly ask ourselves the question: What progress am I making? Has every experience during the day actually brought me a step forward?—There are grounds for a man to feel satisfied if he makes only a slight advance every day, having his daily experiences and deriving new strength at night. A great deal must, of course, be experienced every day if he is actually to become more mature. Ask yourselves what progress you have made in this respect in a single day. You will find that in spite of innumerable experiences the advance made by the Ego from one day to the next is a very slow process in many cases and a great many experiences are unnoticed. If, however, we look back to the most favourable period of our life, to childhood, we see how rapidly the child advances in comparison what is achieved in later life. There are good grounds for stating that a traveler who devotes his whole energies to journeys round the globe in order to make progress through the acquisition of knowledge does not advance as far as a child advances through what he has learned from his nurse.

The advance made by the Ego can be indicated by a serpentine spiral. Two serpent forms, one light and one dark, wind around a vertical staff. The light curves represent the experiences of the day, the dark curves the forces working during the night. The vertical line indicates the advances made. Here, then, we have a different symbol representing the life of man.

We can make both complicated and simple symbols. The following would be an example of a simple one.—If we concentrate on a plant growing until the seed is formed and then gradually withering until everything except the seed has vanished, we can visualise this as a quite simple symbol of growth and decay.

In the Rose-Cross we have a symbol of man's development from his present stage to his purification; in the Staff of Mercury we have a symbol of man's development through the experiences of day and night and the advance made by the Ego.—Symbol after symbol can be created in this way.

None of them mirrors any external reality; but by surrendering ourselves in inner contemplation to the meaning of these symbols, we accustom our soul to activities which it does not otherwise exercise. These activities finally engender an inner force which enables us to hold back the World of Archetypes or Archetypal Images in the same way as we have held back the other worlds.

The symbols need not only be pictorial; they may also consist of words into which profound cosmic truths are compressed. When cosmic truths are compressed into symbolical sentences we have there a force by means of which we can mould the substance of our soul. By working thus upon himself man consciously builds up that which the external world has otherwise accomplished in him without his aid, forming his brain out of the World of Reason, his nervous system out of the World of Spirit, his sense-organs out of the Elementary World. He himself builds organs higher than the brain, organs which are not outwardly visible to normal consciousness because they lie in a realm beyond the physical. Just as the eyes have been formed out of the Elementary World, the nerves out of the World of Spirit, the brain out of the World of Reason, go out of the World of Archetypal Images higher spiritual organs are formed and moulded, organs which gradually enable us to penetrate into the higher world and to look into it. These organs simply represent a development and continuation of the activity carried out at a lower stage. These higher organs of perception appear in the shape of spiritual flower-forms budding forth from man and are therefore called ‘lotus-flowers’, or also spiritual ‘wheels’ or ‘chakrams’.

In anyone who practises such exercises, new organs may actually become visible to clairvoyant consciousness. For example, one unfolds like a wheel or flower in the middle of the forehead. This is the two-petalled lotus-flower; it is a spiritual sense-organ. Just as a physical sense-organ exists in order to bring to our consciousness the world around us, so do the spiritual sense-organs exist in order to bring to our consciousness the world which cannot be seen with normal physical eyes. These so-called lotus-flowers are forces and systems of forces which bud from man's soul.

A second organ of this kind may be formed in the region of the larynx, another near the heart, and so on. These spiritual sense-organs—the word inevitably implies a contradiction but there is no better expression in modern language which is coined for the physical world—these spiritual sense-organs can be cultivated by the patient and vigorous practice of immersing oneself in symbolic mental pictures which are not pictures of anything in the external world and which in this respect differ from the mental pictures of ordinary consciousness in that they do not mirror anything external but work in the soul and produce forces which can hold back the World of Archetypal Images just as eyes, nerves and brain hold back the other worlds that are around us.

But to have arrived at this point is not enough. Anyone possessed of the faculty of clairvoyant vision can perceive these higher sense-organs in man. But these organs themselves must now be further developed. So far they have been formed out of a world higher than those worlds out of which our human constitution is otherwise built up. Now comes the second stage, the preparation for actual vision. The form taken by the process of preparation is that anyone who has attained Imaginative Knowledge through the development of the lotus-flowers and is conscious of having attained it, now passes on to something rather more difficult, to a higher stage of inner work and effort.

The first stage consists in elaborating numbers of symbolic mental pictures—which are given in every school for genuine spiritual training and vary according to a man's individuality, so that the higher sense-organs may be developed with patience and endurance. At the next stage, as soon as the man has acquired a certain skill in picturing such symbols, he must reach the point of being able to exclude the pictures from his consciousness and to concentrate only upon the force within him that has created them. In forming the picture of the Rose-Cross we took account of the plant and of man, and only afterwards built up the symbol. Now we eliminate from our consciousness this symbol as well as that of the Staff of Mercury, concentrating upon the activity we ourselves have exercised in building up the pictures. This means that we direct our attention to our own activity, ignoring the product of it. This is even more difficult. We say to ourselves after having created a symbol: How did you do this?—Most people will need to make many, many attempts in order to pass from the symbol itself to the activity which created it. The process will take a very long time. Again and again it will be necessary to create the symbols until we reach the point where we can dismiss them, in order then to experience something quite new, without seeing anything external, namely, the activity which created them.

If after practising this for a long time we feel a kind of seething and eddying within us, a certain progress has been made. We can then actually experience the moment when we do not merely possess higher organs or lotus-flowers but see flashing before us a new realm of which hitherto we had no inkling; we have reached the stage where we have a new field of vision and have our first insight into the World of Spirit.

The experience is as follows.—We have already left the ordinary outer world, we have lived in a world of symbols, and now we eliminate the symbols and pictures; then we have black darkness around us. Consciousness does not cease but seethes and eddies, stirred by our own activity. At an earlier stage we held back the World of Archetypal Images, now we hold back the World of Reason too, but not in the same way as before; we hold it back from the opposite side. We hold back what otherwise flows into us. Previously we saw only the shadow-pictures of the World of Reason in our own intellectual activity; now we see the World of Reason from the other side; we see the Beings known as the Hierarchies. Little by little everything now becomes filled with life.

This is the first step to be taken. But that is not all. A further step consists in acquiring the power also to suppress our own activity. First of all the pictures have been suppressed and now our own activity. If he really makes the attempt the pupil will again realise how difficult this is; it is a longer process for it will usually happen that he then falls asleep. Yet if any consciousness at all is left to him, he has advanced to the point where he holds back not only the World of Reason but the World of Spirit too. He now sees the World of Spirit from the other side and the spiritual Realities and Beings in that world. Whereas the previous stage of knowledge, when the activity creating the symbols is held back, is known as Inspiration (Knowledge through Inspiration), this further stage, when we also eliminate our own activity, is called Intuition. Through Intuition we glimpse the true configuration of the World of Spirit which otherwise we see only in its shadow-pictures, the laws of Nature. We now become conscious of the Beings and their activities which have their outward expression in the realities and laws of Nature.

We have now described a path of knowledge differing somewhat from the one that is followed when a man simply becomes conscious of entering into or passing out of the World of Spirit when he goes to sleep or wakes. This method first creates the organs in that the World of Archetypal Images is held back and its forces used for the creation of these organs that are needed by man, and then he is led through Imaginative and Inspired Knowledge into the World of Spirit into which he is now able to gaze. But when he has reached the stage of Intuitive Knowledge, he can also grow into the Elementary World in such a way as not to enter it unprepared but fully prepared, seeing it before him as a final experience. Certainly this path is a hard one for many people because it demands much renunciation. A man must first practise for a long time with symbols and wait until the requisite organs are formed. But to begin with he cannot see with these organs. It is very often the case today that people do not want to go along a sure path but above all to see something quickly, to have rapid success. Success will surely come but it must be achieved by practising a certain renunciation. First we must work upon ourselves for a long time in order little by little to find entrance into the higher worlds; and truly, what we first see of the World of Reason and of the World of Spirit is a very colourless vista. Only when we come back from these realms into the Elementary World, when we are far advanced in Intuitive Knowledge—only then does everything acquire colour and vividness, because then it is all permeated by the Elementary World and its effects. It is only from the vantage-point of Intuitive Knowledge that these things can be described.

Moreover only when we have joy in building up the symbols, when we work with patience and perseverance at the development of the organs, can we be aware of a certain progress; but although at the beginning we see only little of the higher worlds, it is a sure path and one that protects us from illusions. The reward comes only later, but it is a path that is a safeguard against idle phantasy. If we have worked our way to the stage of Imaginative Knowledge, we already stand in the world immediately above our own; and we feel that we have membered into ourselves something from a higher world. Then we gradually rise to higher and higher stages and finally achieve a real understanding of the higher worlds.

You will find an outline of this process of development in the book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment and in the later part of the book, Occult Science—an Outline. The accounts given there are intended for a rather wider public and are therefore somewhat condensed. I wanted today to speak of certain more intimate matters which will add something to what is contained in those books on the subject of the path to higher knowledge.

I have tried to make it clear that in the Microcosm, in the nervous system, in the brain, men are mirror-images of the activities and Beings of the Macrocosm. It has been shown that before we begin to work on ourselves in order to unfold higher qualities, other work has already been applied to our development as human beings. We have realised that we are actually only continuing the work that has already been applied to us. Just as our physical constitution has been built up out of the higher worlds, so do we ourselves build up our ‘spiritual man’. We transcend our ordinary selves by advancing in our development. Nobody who takes the concept of evolution seriously can doubt that such further development is possible. Those who believe that what is actually there has risen from earlier Stages of existence to the present one must also admit that development can go forward. But because man has become a conscious being, he must also take his development consciously in hand. And he can tread in full consciousness the path of development that has been described. If he needs a teacher, he no longer needs him—as was the case when the old methods were in use—as one who takes something away from him or allows something to stream to him; in such circumstances those who were guided by the teacher were not independent. Today we have been learning about a path entirely in keeping with the consciousness of modern humanity, for one who takes this path entrusts himself to another in no other sense than a pupil entrusts himself to a tutor in mathematics. If he did not assume that the tutor knows more than he knows himself, he certainly would not go to him. In the same sense we entrust ourselves to a leader or teacher who gives us nothing more than indications. At every step we remain our own master while scrupulously following the indications given. We follow the indications given by the teacher as we should do in the case of those given by a tutor in mathematics, only now our whole soul is engaged; it is not a matter of applying our intellect to the solution of a mathematical problem. It is the essence of the new method of Initiation that it takes account first and foremost of the independence of the human being; the Guru is no longer a Guru in the old sense but only in the sense that he gives advice as to how progress can be made.

The successive epochs change and man is constantly passing through new stages of existence. The methods for promoting development must therefore also change. Different methods were necessary in earlier times. The method called the Rosicrucian after its most important symbol is the one most appropriate and fitting for the soul of modern man.

So we see how, in addition to the older methods, there also exists the appropriate modern method which leads man in the way indicated into the higher worlds. A mere outline has been given today. To-morrow we shall describe how man, if he works upon himself, grows step by step into the higher worlds and how they are gradually revealed to him. We have described what man has to do in order to apply the new methods and tomorrow we shall speak of what he becomes and what is eventually revealed to him.

In speaking yesterday of the so-called Rosicrucian path into the spiritual worlds it was said that this is the most suitable path for modern man and most in keeping with the laws of the evolution of humanity. We described how by adopting certain measures for his life of soul, man rises to Imaginative Knowledge, Knowledge through Inspiration and Intuitive Knowledge. If there were at his disposal nothing except the methods he deliberately applies to his soul, the ascent through these three stages would be as indicated yesterday. First of all the organs of spiritual perception would have to be developed, and only after a period of renunciation would he be able to rise from a kind of shadowy, hardly noticeable perception, to genuine experience.

In the present epoch of evolution man is not obliged to rely only upon what he deliberately does to his soul. Although in a far distant future he will have to rely upon this, the laws of evolution will then be quite different, so that from the beginning he will enter consciously into the spiritual worlds. Certainly this is also possible today but only because something comes to man's aid, namely the strengthening forces of sleep.

We have not yet spoken of the effect of the strengthening forces of sleep upon one who is undergoing this process of spiritual development. If during his development a man had not the help of sleep, he would require a very long time before being able to notice the delicate experiences that occur as a result of the methods indicated. But because his life alternates between waking and sleeping, the forces of sleep come to his help while he is developing the organs of higher perception referred to yesterday as the lotus-flowers. Although at first it is not possible to perceive anything by means of the lotus-flowers, nevertheless during sleep forces are imparted to man out of the higher worlds, out of the Macrocosm. It is due to these forces that sooner or later, after a man has turned again and again to the symbols and has so strengthened himself inwardly that his life of soul is greatly enriched, these organs make real experience of the spiritual world possible, with some degree of vision. When Imaginative Knowledge is actually attained, it already enables man to have a certain insight into the higher world.

For a comparatively long time man will need to experience in deep meditation pictures that are taken from life and speak to the heart, or certain formulae in which great world-secrets are briefly expressed. Then, first of all at the moment of waking, but also when he turns his attention away from the experiences of ordinary waking life, he will notice that something stands before his soul which arises like the inner pictures he has formed for himself but is there before him like flowers or stones seen in ordinary consciousness; he has before him actual symbols or emblems which he knows he has not himself created. During the period of preparation, and through the care he exercises in building up his symbols, he learns to distinguish between illusory and true pictures. A man who prepares himself conscientiously and above all has learned to eliminate his own personal opinions, wishes, desires and passions from his higher life, who has trained himself not to regard a thing as true simply because it pleases him but to exclude his own opinion—such a man can immediately distinguish between a symbol or picture that is true and one that is false.

An activity now begins of which it is important to take account in connection with distinguishing between true and false pictures. It can only be called thinking of the heart. This is something that comes about in the course of the development of which we spoke yesterday. In ordinary life we have the feeling that we think with the head. That of course is a pictorial expression, for we actually think with the spiritual organs underlying the brain; but it is generally accepted that we think with the head. We have a quite different feeling about the thinking that becomes possible when we have made a little progress. The feeling then is as if what had hitherto been localised in the head were now localised in the heart. This does not mean the physical heart but the spiritual organ that develops in the neighbourhood of the heart, the twelve-petalled lotus-flower. This organ becomes a kind of organ of thinking in one who achieves inner development and this thinking of the heart is very different from ordinary thinking. In ordinary thinking everyone knows that reflection is necessary in order to arrive at a particular truth. The mind moves from one concept to another and after logical deliberation and reflection reaches what is called ‘knowledge’. It is different when we want to recognise the truth in connection with genuine symbols or emblems. They are before us like objects, but the thinking we apply to them cannot be confounded with ordinary brain-thinking. Whether they are true or false is directly evident without any reflection being necessary as in the case of ordinary thinking. What there is to say about the higher worlds is directly evident. As soon as the pictures are before us we know what we have to say about them to ourselves and to others. This is the characteristic of heart-thinking.

There are not many things in everyday life that may be compared with it but I will speak of something that may make it intelligible. There are events which bring the intellect almost literally to a standstill. For example, suppose some event confronts you like a flash of lightning and you are terrified. No external thought intervenes between the event and your terror. The inner experience—the terror—is something that can bring the mind to a standstill. That is a good expression for it, for people feel what has, in very fact, happened. Similarly, we may fly into a rage at the sight of some act we see in the street. There again it is the direct impression that evokes the inner experience. If we begin to reflect about what happened we shall find in most cases that we form a different judgment of it. Experiences which arise when an action or inner state of mind directly follows the first impression are the only kind in everyday life that may be compared with those of the spiritual investigator when he has to say something about his experiences in the higher worlds. If we begin to reason, to apply much logical criticism to these experiences, we drive them away. And furthermore, ordinary thinking applied in such cases will usually produce something that is false.

Essential as it is first of all to undergo the discipline of sound, reasoned thinking before attempting to enter the higher worlds, it is equally essential to rise above this ordinary thinking to immediate apprehension. And just because it is necessary to have this faculty of immediate apprehension in the higher world, the preparatory training in logical thinking is essential, for otherwise our feelings would quite certainly lead us into error. With ordinary intellectual thinking we are incapable of judging rightly in the higher world, but equally we are incapable of judging rightly in that world if we have not first trained our intellectual thinking in the physical world, and then, at a suitable moment, are able to be oblivious of it. Some people consider that this characteristic quality of the higher kind of thinking, the thinking of the heart, is a reason for discarding ordinary logic altogether. They say that as it has eventually to be forgotten there is no need to assimilate it first of all. But in saying this they disregard the fact that logical thinking is a training for making oneself a different man. In logical thinking we experience above all a kind of conscience, and by developing that we establish in the soul a certain sense of responsibility towards truth and untruth, without which nothing can be achieved in the higher worlds.

Admittedly, there is great cause to disregard thinking during the ascent into the higher worlds, for in the ordinary life of today man experiences—or can at least experience—these three stages.—The majority of people are at the stage where in their normal consciousness an immediate, innate feeling tells them: this is right, that is wrong; you ought to do this, you ought not to do that. A man usually lets himself be guided by this kind of spontaneous impulse. Not many people take the trouble to reflect upon what are their most sacred treasures. Because they were born, let us say, in Middle Europe and not in Turkey, they have an inherent tendency to consider Christianity, not Mohammedanism, the true faith in Europe. This must not be misunderstood. Further reflection upon it leads to a true understanding of life. In by far the great majority of people an immediate feeling determines what they consider to be true or false. That is the first stage of development.

At the second stage man begins to reflect. More and more people will be prone to abandon their original feeling and to reflect about the circumstances and conditions into which they have been born. This is why there is so much criticism today of creeds and of sacred traditions from the past. All this criticism is the reaction of the intellect and the reasoning mind against what has been accepted out of feeling and left unproven by the intellect. Modern science is dominated by the same attitude of mind that adopts a critical attitude to whatever is innate or traditional. What is universally called science is, after all, essentially the work of the same soul-forces that have been characterised above. Everything is focussed upon outer knowledge and upon perceptions made either directly through the senses or through enhancements of sense-perceptions by means of instruments such as the telescope, microscope and so forth. The observations made are then formulated into laws with the help of the intellect.

Thus there are these two stages in the development of the human soul. In respect of what a man accepts as true he may be at the stage where he is guided by primitive, undeveloped feeling, feeling that is inborn or has been acquired through education. A second factor is what is called intellect, intelligence. But anyone who has a little insight into the nature of the soul knows that a very definite quality of this intelligence is that it has a deadening effect upon the emotional life. Is there any close observer who could fail to realise that all purely intellectual development deadens feeling and emotion? Hence those who out of certain primitive feelings—which are entirely justifiable at one stage of development—incline towards this or that truth are reluctant to let these beliefs be affected by the withering and devastating effect of intellectuality. This reluctance is understandable. If, however, it goes so far as to make people say that in order to rise into the higher worlds they will avoid all thinking and remain in their immature emotional life, then they can never reach the higher worlds; all their experiences will remain on a low level. It is inconvenient, but necessary, to train the power of thinking—which is of course invaluable for life in the external world, although for those who aspire to reach the higher worlds thinking serves merely as a preparation, as training. The validity of truths of the higher worlds cannot be established through logic. The thinking that is applied to machines, to the phenomena of outer nature, to the natural sciences, cannot be applied in the same way to experiences connected with the higher worlds. Anyone who understands this will not sing the praises of what is usually called ‘intellect’ in connection with knowledge of the higher worlds, for if anyone were to attempt to draw intellectual conclusions about these worlds he would only be able to produce commonplace truths of little depth, whereas for the external physical world the application of thinking is absolutely necessary. Without intellect we could not construct machines, build bridges or study botany, zoology, medicine, or anything else; its use in those domains is apparent inasmuch as it is applied to the immediate objects.

For higher development, intellect has approximately the significance that learning to write has in youth. Learning to write is the exercise of a faculty that must be behind us when it has to be applied; it has significance only when we have got beyond it. As long as we are still learning to write we cannot express our thoughts through writing; we must be able to write before we can learn anything from what is written. So it is too, with thinking. Anyone who wants to undergo higher development must for a certain time also undergo training in logical thinking and then discard it in order to pass over to thinking with the heart. Then there remains with him a certain habit of conscientiousness with regard to the acceptance of truth in the higher worlds. Nobody who has undergone this training will regard every symbol as a true Imagination or interpret it arbitrarily; but he will have the inner strength to draw near to reality, to see and interpret it rightly. The very reason why a thorough training is necessary is because we must then have an immediate feeling as to whether something is true or false. To put it exactly, this means that whereas in ordinary life we use reflection, in the higher worlds our thinking must previously have been developed sufficiently to enable us to decide spontaneously about truth or falsity.

A good preparation for such direct vision is a quality that must also be acquired and in ordinary life is present only to a very small extent. Most people will cry out if, let us say, they are pricked by a needle or if very hot water is poured over their heads. But how many really feel anything akin—I say expressly akin—to pain when a foolish or absurd statement is made? Countless individuals can tolerate that quite easily. But anyone who wants to develop the immediate feeling of one thing being true and another false, in such a way that the Imaginative world plays a part in the experience, must so, train himself that error causes him actual pain and that the truth also to be encountered in physical life gives him gladness and joy.

To acquire this quality is an exacting process and it is connected with the effort involved in the preparation for entry into the higher worlds. To be indifferent to truth and error is of course more comfortable than to feel pain in face of error and joy in face of truth. There is plenty of opportunity today to feel pain at the foolishness of the contents of many books! Pain and suffering in face of the ugly, the untrue and the evil, even when only in our environment and not actually inflicted on ourselves; pleasure in the beautiful, the true, the good, even when we are not personally concerned—all this forms part of the training for the thinking of the heart.

There is something else too which forms part of the training. Whoever ascends into the Imaginative world must acquire another quality that he does not possess in everyday life. He must learn to think in a new way about what is called contradiction or agreement. In the ordinary way many a man will feel when certain statements are made that the one contradicts the other. Yet we may find that two persons in exactly the same circumstances have quite different experiences. The description of this experience given by one of them may be altogether different from that given by the other; yet both of them may be right from their own standpoint. For example, one person may say: I have been in such and such a place; the air was bracing and I was much refreshed.—We listen to him and believe what he says. The other may say about the same place: It is no good; I lost all my energy there and found it a most unhealthy spot. Again we can only believe him. In fact, both of the two may be right. The first person was a robust, healthy individual, who being anxious to accomplish a great deal in a short time, was over-worked and fatigued. He was able to feel the refreshing effect of the air. The second, a sickly man, could not stand the bracing air and his condition deteriorated. Both statements are right, because the antecedents of the visits to the place were different. Contradictory statements may be reconciled if all the factors are taken into consideration.

But the matter becomes much more complicated when we rise into the higher worlds. In the physical world it may happen, for instance, that someone hears a statement in one lecture about a subject, and in another lecture something apparently different. Applying the standard recognised in ordinary life he says: This cannot be true, for the two statements contradict each other.—Suppose that in an earlier course of lectures someone has heard it stated that a human being descends to a new birth through astral space with extreme rapidity when he has to find the place where he is to incarnate. Such a case was observed and it was mentioned in a lecture. Elsewhere it has been said that the human being has worked for a very long time at the qualities and traits he finally assumes in the family and race into which be is born. It is easy to find contradiction here, yet both conditions are true to experience. The following analogy will help to resolve the apparent contradiction. Suppose that someone has for five or six days been carefully carving something for himself; on the seventh day, although he knows for certain that it had been finished the day before, be cannot find it and has to look everywhere for it. Both facts are true. And when incarnation is to take place something similar holds good in the higher worlds. Preparation has been made but because experiences in the higher worlds are so complicated, it is possible that just at the moment when a human being is about to descend from those worlds to unite with the etheric and physical bodies, he is still obliged to seek for them because a clouding of consciousness has taken place. Consequently he has now to seek for what he himself, with a higher grade of consciousness, had prepared.

From such an example we can see that something is essential when we rise into the higher worlds. We must always be mindful of the circumstance that in trying to enter into the realm of Imagination, the matter in question presents itself to us in a definite picture. If through the thinking of the heart we have acquired a strong enough feeling of the truth of this picture, it may happen that when, at another time, with trained clairvoyance, we follow a similar path, we arrive at a quite different Imagination, yet immediate feeling again says: That is true! We must be aware of this for it is naturally confusing to one who is entering the world of Imagination. But the confusion is cleared up if our attention is duly directed to it. We shall acquire the right attitude to this whole question by seeking for our Ego itself in the Imaginative world.

We have described how it is possible to look back upon the Ego from outside. On passing the Guardian of the Threshold the Ego is objectively before us. But we may look at this Ego once, twice, three times, four times, and each time obtain different pictures. According to conditions prevailing in the physical world we might say to ourselves: Now I have seen what I am in the higher world. And the second time: Now I have found myself again and am something different. And the third time again we find something different.—When through the training described we enter the Imaginative world and see a picture of our Ego, it is essential to know that twelve different pictures of the Ego can be seen. There are twelve different pictures of every single Ego, and only after contemplating it from twelve different standpoints have we a complete picture. This view of the Ego from outside corresponds exactly to what is reflected in the relationship of the twelve constellations of the Zodiac to the Sun. Just as the Sun passes through the twelve constellations and has in each a different power, just as it illumines our Earth through the course of the year and even of the day, from twelve different stations, so the human Ego is illumined from twelve different stations in the higher world.

Therefore in rising into the higher worlds we must realise the necessity of not being satisfied with one standpoint only. [* See Human and Cosmic Thought. Four lectures given in Berlin, January 1914.] We must train ourselves in this in order to escape confusion. We can only do so by accustoming ourselves in the physical world to realise that salvation is not achieved by contemplating any matter from one standpoint only.

There are people who are materialists, others are spiritists, others monists, others dualists, and so forth. The materialists insist that everything is matter; the spiritists assert that everything is spirit and attribute importance to spirit alone; the monists declare that everything proceeds from unity. In the outer world people fight and wrangle with each other on every possible occasion—the materialists against the spiritists, the monists against the dualists and so on. But everyone who wants to prepare himself for real knowledge must pay heed to the following facts.—Materialism has a certain justification; we must learn how to think, as the materialist does, in terms of the laws of matter, but this thinking must be applied to the material world only. We must comprehend these laws, for otherwise we cannot find our bearings in the material world. If someone were to attempt to explain a clock by saying: ‘I believe there are two little demons sitting inside it and making the hands go round. I do not believe in machinery,’—such a man would be laughed to scorn, for a clock can be explained only by applying the laws of the material world. Those who try to explain the movements of the stars by material laws are simply telling us of a mechanical system. The mistake does not lie in materialistic thinking itself but in the supposition that it can explain the whole universe and that there is no other valid kind of thinking. Haeckel does not err when explaining by the laws of materialistic morphology phenomena of which he has exceptional knowledge; if he had confined himself to a certain category of phenomena he could have performed an enormous service to humanity.

It can therefore be said that materialistic thinking has its justification, but in a certain domain only. Spiritual thinking must be applied to whatever is subject to the laws of spirituality and not to those of mechanics. When someone says: ‘You come along with a peculiar psychology alleged to have its own laws, but I know that there are certain processes in the brain which explain thinking’—he is introducing matters of a different nature, and in another domain he is making the same mistake as the man who believes in the two demons in the clock. As little as the clock can be explained by demons, as little can thinking be explained by movements of atoms in the brain. Again, anyone who attributes fatigue in the evening to the accumulation of toxins may be giving the right explanation as far as the outer facts are concerned, but as far as the soul is concerned he is explaining nothing whatever, for a spiritual explanation is essential there.

And then take monism. By attempting to explain the world only from the aspect of harmony, one is bound to arrive at unity, but it is abstract unity and means impoverishment. Philosophers whose only aim is to arrive at unity have in the end gained nothing at all. I once knew a man whose aim was to explain the whole world in a couple of sentences and he finally came to inform me with great glee that he had actually found two simple formulae which could explain every possible phenomenon in the world! This is an example of the one-sidedness of monistic thought. Such thinking must be widened through proceeding from very different points and finally reaching unity.

By adopting different standpoints we can educate ourselves to view things from many angles—a faculty that is so necessary for experiences in the higher worlds. We should spare no efforts to prepare ourselves to view the Ego from twelve standpoints. But there is little understanding today for such a degree of objectivity. Anyone who has attempted to achieve it will be able to tell of the remarkable reaction in the world when anyone sets aside his personal point of view and surrenders himself to the views held by another. For example: I myself have endeavoured to portray Nietzsche as he must be portrayed by anyone who sets aside his own opinion and personality and enters right into his subject. This is the only way of bringing about genuine understanding but people who read what I said and then my next book, insisted that in the latter I was inconsistent. They could not understand that I was not a disciple of Nietzsche, for I had portrayed him in a positive way. This is tantamount to saying that anyone who steeps himself in Haeckel in order to expound Haeckel's philosophy must also be one of his adherents.

This power of emerging from oneself in order to describe something objectively, as it were with the eyes of a different viewpoint, is a quality that it is necessary to acquire, for that alone can lead to far-reaching truth. Nobody gets anywhere near the real truth if he stands at a particular spot and gazes, let us say, at a rose-bush, but only if he photographs it now from one standpoint, now from another, and again from another. By such means we train ourselves to acquire what we need as soon as we rise into the higher worlds. Confusion is inevitable in the higher worlds if we enter them with personal opinions for then we immediately have delusive images of truth before us.

To develop the thinking of the heart we must have the power to go out of ourselves and look back upon ourselves from outside. In normal consciousness a person stands at a certain place and knows that in saying, “That am I”, he means the sum-total of what he believes and stands for. One who rises into a higher world, however, must be able to leave his ordinary personality behind, to go out of himself and say with the same feeling: “That is you.” The former ‘I’ must be able in the true sense to become a ‘you’, just as we say ‘you’ to another person. This must become an actual experience; it is attainable in the physical world through training. We must first do relatively simple things in this way, and then we earn the right to think with the heart. All true presentations of the higher worlds proceed from the thinking of the heart although outwardly they often seem to be purely logical expositions. Whatever is described in Spiritual Science has been experienced with the heart and must be cast into forms of thought intelligible to reasoning people.

That is where the thinking of the heart differs from subjective mysticism. Anyone may experience the latter for himself but it is not communicable to another, nor does it concern anyone else. True and genuine mysticism springs from the capacity to have Imaginations, to receive impressions from the higher worlds and then to co-ordinate these impressions by means of the thinking of the heart, just as the things of the physical world are coordinated by the intellect.

Something else is associated with this, namely that the truths imparted from the higher worlds are tinged with something like the heart's blood. However abstract they may seem to be, however completely they may be cast into forms of thought, they are tinged with the heart's blood, for they are direct experiences of the soul. From the moment a man has developed the thinking of the heart, he experiences something that seems like a vision; yet what he experiences is not a vision but the expression of a soul-and-spiritual reality, just as the colour of the rose is its outer manifestation, the expression of its material nature. The seer directs his gaze into the Imaginative world; there he has the impression, let us say, of something blue or violet, or he hears a sound or has a feeling of warmth or cold. He knows through the thinking of the heart that the impression was not a mere vision, a figment of the mind, but that the fleeting blue or violet was the expression of a soul-spiritual reality, just as the red of the rose is the expression of a material reality. Thus do we penetrate into the realities, into the spiritual Beings themselves, and we have to unite with them. That is why all research in the spiritual world is linked in a far higher sense and to a far greater extent than is the case in other experiences, with the surrender of our own personality. We become more and more intensely involved in the experience; we are within the Beings and things themselves. We must experience their good and bad qualities, also their beautiful and ugly qualities, what is true in them and what false. If we are really intent upon experiencing truth, we must not only perceive error but experience it in the Imaginative world with pain. We must not merely look at ugliness in such a way that it has no effect upon us, but we must experience it as inwardly hurtful.

The training described above is particularly suitable for people of the present day and through it we can learn to experience the good, the true, the beautiful, but also ugliness and error, without being involved in the latter, for the thinking of the heart is able to discriminate.

In giving descriptions from the spiritual worlds, in translating our experiences into terms of logical thought, we feel as if we were approaching a hill on which there are wonderful rock-formations which must be hewn out in order to build houses for men. In the same way our experiences in the spiritual worlds have to be translated into logical thoughts. When anyone wants to communicate to other human beings what he has experienced through the thinking of the heart, he too must translate it into logical thoughts. But logical thoughts are merely the language in which, in Spiritual Science, the thinking of the heart is communicated. There may be someone who finds difficulty in the communications of a genuine spiritual investigator, and says: “I hear only words; they convey no thoughts to me.” That may be the fault of the one who is speaking, but not necessarily so; it may be the fault of the listener who can hear only the sound of the words and is incapable of advancing from the words to the thoughts. It may be the fault of a person who clothes allegedly spiritual truths in thoughts that fail to convey to others any evidence of the thinking of the heart. But it may equally be the fault of the listener who is incapable of detecting truths behind the thoughts which are like words conveying the findings of the thinking of the heart.

Whatever can be communicated to mankind from the thinking of the heart must be able to be cast into clearly formulated thoughts. If this is not possible it is not ready to be communicated. The touchstone is whether the experiences can be translated into lucid words and clearly defined thoughts. Thus even when we hear the deepest truths of the heart stated in words, we must accustom ourselves to perceive behind them the thought-forms and their content. The student of Spiritual Science must acquire this faculty if he desires to help in spreading through mankind whatever can be revealed from the Spirit. It would be sheer egoism if anyone wished to have it for himself alone; mystical experiences, like intellectual experiences, must become the common heritage of mankind. Only by realising this can we understand the mission of Spiritual Science for mankind—a mission which must become more and more effective as time goes on.