The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Nowadays, anyone who lectures on the Christ runs into quite a variety of viewpoints. These fall roughly into two main groups, and a speaker must take them into account, especially if he plans to talk on the subject in the sense intended for this evening's lecture. That is, in the same sense in which other questions and other problems have been dealt with here before. I am referring, of course, to the spiritual scientific or anthroposophical viewpoint.

The first group of views is one that bases itself firmly on the premise that Christ is a real force in life. This might be called the religious viewpoint, which all the Christian confessions share in common. We will find on closer study however that no matter how liberal and tolerant it may seem in some respects, it has little use for any but its own view of the Christ. The various proponents of the religious standpoint are simply unwilling to grant that any progress in thinking about Christ is possible.

The other viewpoint is also one held by thoroughly dedicated modern searchers after truth. In accordance with a certain scientific trend, it maintains that a study of the Christ event, of what is reported to have taken place in Palestine at the beginning of the Christian era, if pursued with the same reliable historical methods that are applied to the study of other events, does not bear out the assumptions made about the Christ.

We realize that this way of looking at things has long been gaining favor. We also know that in the course of recent centuries increasing emphasis has been laid on comparing the Gospels, and that the discrepancies people have discovered in them have forced them to conclude that the Gospels could not be taken as historical documents. After a long period of trying to distill a somewhat reliable picture of Christ Jesus from the Gospel accounts, there have come to be many people today, both in Germany and elsewhere, who cannot reconcile speaking of a historical Jesus or of a historical Christ Event with their scientific consciences.

So we find present day positions ranging all the way from a separating out of those facts in the Gospels that can be historically proven, to out-and-out rejection of the historical Christ Jesus. This has given rise to the opinion that, though Christ may still live today for religious-minded people who feel that their faith lifts them to Him, for an ever more rigorously developing science the Christ idea, the concept of Christ, must vanish entirely. Many people are presently convinced that the Christ force will not continue to play any role at all in future, though these same people do not by any means believe that the day will ever come when religion will be lost to humanity.

Certain facts of the time, however, make it seem unlikely that the belief I have referred to will be proven true, for we can note a strange phenomenon. In our day, it is by no means only the religious-minded and people of feeling, for whom the Gospels have shown themselves a source of uplift and of schooling, who speak of something in the nature of a Christ idea. Earnest, educated, truth-loving men are putting their whole souls into pointing to something that can only be identified as Christ. It is characteristic that the modern American freethinker, Ferguson, voicing what many of his contemporaries feel, can say that Christ is again “the pioneer of a new age” who will unite Europe and America and look with profoundest understanding into the soul of every human being—that He is the one and only right man for the present. Ferguson, a person otherwise famed for his free-thinking views, speaks of Christ exactly as though He went about from one man to the next wielding direct influence upon us. Freethinking spirits are thus beginning to feel the Christ Being directly related to modern humanity. Even though little attention is paid to it as yet, we will find that this tendency, this searching for a force that can only be called the Christ, will make sure headway. John Fiske, a man who did his utmost to further Darwinism in America, stated that all religions assert two basic truths. The first is that all things are related. This is a truth proclaimed by every religion, one that no thoughtful person can deny. The second truth is that what we call good and evil derives from forces external to the human spirit.

I quote these men expressly because they are both personalities whose whole thinking and feeling are firmly rooted in the present, but they do not rest satisfied with an external view of things. Instead, they have worked their way through to deeper forces of existence. The forces at work in the world are not just physical and chemical: they are also spiritual in nature.

For one who takes his stand on a spiritual-scientific view of the world, the concept of Christ just characterized appears to be merely a first dawn glimmering, a preparation for something quite different still to come. I hope I will not be misunderstood in speaking as I have of this preparatory, Twentieth Century form of the Christ concept. Spiritual science has to steer clear of any taint of sectarianism and other such attitudes because they simply do not belong to this age. The spiritual scientist takes the same attitude in speaking of what is to come in human evolution as does the natural scientist who predicts an eclipse of the moon or a transit of Venus: he is not assuming a prophetic role. There are forces in life that can be spiritually investigated in exactly the same sense that natural forces operative in the physical world can be investigated.

It will be helpful to gain a perspective on the past history of the Christ idea, which has indeed undergone tremendous changes through the centuries. If we follow it back to its origin, we come upon a strange fact of the early days. We find popular Christianity spreading through the regions ruled by Rome in a way that enables us to say that, while the old Roman culture developed among the upper levels of the population and then grew decadent, we see those on whom life left its mark, those whose lot it was to suffer, slowly and gradually finding their way into popular Christianity. Jesus of Nazareth is increasingly idealized, to the point that he is looked on as divine. The various confessions that made up this popular Christianity tended more to feeling than to thoughts and concepts. But alongside this popular form we find those most enlightened spirits of the time who concerned themselves with Christianity devoting their loftiest ideas, their most significant concepts, to answering the question, “Who, actually, is this Christ?”

Let us single out, from the abundance of answers given by these illumined spirits, one or two for consideration here.

In Gnosticism, a form of thought to which anthroposophy by no means advises returning but simply studies as a phenomenon of past history, we find many different shadings of certain lofty concepts, all centering in an attempt to grasp the Christ idea. In the main, it can be characterized by saying that this Gnosticism, this longing to grasp the Christ idea with the help of the Ioftiest concepts, is a most marvelous form of spiritual development. Of course, those who adopt the modern view that every last facet of humanness gradually evolved from nature's lower orders, from animals, and rose by stages from the most primitive to ever higher animal forms, are bound to consider the Gnostic doctrine a fantastic dream. But Gnostics, too, traced evolution back even further than does the modern natural scientist. They said that we find a period in ancient times in which all animals, even the highest, were present on the earth, and man could have seen them if he too had been there at that time. The Gnostics, however, had in mind a period of evolution in which the human kingdom had not yet appeared, but they did not conclude from this that men developed out of animals, but rather that they descended later from the spiritual world. They maintained that animals. plants and minerals had also descended from the spirit. had materialized out of spiritual realms, so that we have to ascribe a spiritual origin to animals, plants and minerals as well. But there was a period when man had not yet taken on physical form, a time when he was still waiting in the spiritual world for the moment when the earth provided certain other conditions such as would make human life possible here.

This does not mean that man was not in existence at that time. Man did exist: not, however, as a visible entity, but as a spiritual one. He lived in the spiritual environment of the earth, but had not yet descended onto it, for the conditions of that ancient time were not such as would have made human development possible. Thus, the Gnostics assumed that there was a most important moment, later than that of the descent of the other kingdoms when titan descended to the earth. It was the Gnostic conviction that if man had incarnated with the other lesser kingdoms, one all-important facet of his being, that is the capacity we know as free, independent human thinking would not have developed. In short, man would lack his true human ego that works front a central focus outward into the world and develops between birth and death. The animal's development is kept within certain limits, but man is capable of progressing in an entirely different way as a result of education and experience. In order to achieve this, said the Gnostic, man entered into a more intimate connection with the element of matter than he would have done if he had remained an unfree being, dependent, as the other creatures around him were on his endowment at birth. Man plunged more deeply into matter in order to become less dependent on what he brought into existence with him. Gnosticism held that this deeper involvement in matter took place at a certain moment in very early times, that is, the moment the Bible pictures as the Fall, meaning thereby the fall into matter just described. But by no means every impulse inherent in human nature was believed to have joined in that descent; instead, something of a superhuman element remained in the spiritual world. While mankind was experiencing all this, something that was part of man but did not accompany him in his descent because he plunged so deeply into physical embodiment stayed on in spiritual worlds. Thus, there was still present in the world above a part of man that had dwelt there when all humanity still lived as one in realms of spirit.

On the basis of these assumptions the Gnostics then proceeded to study the Christ Event. A certain moment, described in the Bible as the baptism by John, was of special interest to them. They felt that the human being whose development brought him to that baptism was indeed a most extraordinary man, but nevertheless just a human being. After he had been baptized, something occurred that is hard for modern minds to grasp. Perhaps we can think of it in the sense that many a person has had something happen to him at a certain moment about which he could only say that his whole life was changed in consequence. Many people date their lives from such a moment, feeling it to have been one in which they were spiritually reborn. This is something that can happen to any and every human being. If one pictures this experience raised to a unique and ultimate peak, one understands how the Gnostics felt about the baptism by John in the River Jordan. That element of humanness that had been part of man front the earliest beginnings of his race but which had been waiting in the spiritual world, now left that realm and made its way down to earth, to take up its abode in the unique human being, Jesus of Nazareth. For the next three years Jesus of Nazareth was not just a changed human being. He was one in whom that reserved element of humanness, held over from the very beginning of man's earth life, had come to dwell for the eventual fructification of humanity. In other words, Jesus of Nazareth became the bearer of the superhuman being, Christ for the three years of His earthly life. So the Gnostics held that what had hitherto dwelt in the spiritual world had come into a human body, like a seed planted in the earth. Like a planted seed, which must decompose in order to germinate, this spiritual impulse entering the earth had to pass away in order to spring, seed-like, into hundred-arid thousand-fold fruitfulness. This spiritual element had to pass through death exactly as a seed dies. Far from failing to bear, it poured itself into earth's spiritual-evolutionary stream, where it will be found living on in many kinds of fruiting.

So we find in the Gnostic doctrine a pre-history of mankind leading up to the moment of Christ's coming and a post-history following upon the Event of Golgotha. It is history centered in the living action of the Christ impulse as Christ enters into human souls. To the Gnostic, the Christ impulse was history indeed history's whole content and the source of its ongoingness. If this view sounds alien to the contemporary mind, it must be stated that precisely modern natural science, whose ideas are colored by materialism only now at the outset, will press forward ever more vigorously to an understanding and eventual grasping of the reality that underlay the Gnostic concept.

In order to show how close the present is to taking up again what Gnosticism offered, let me just point out the following—something that is of course only an elementary first step. Science has thought for a long time that it stands on a solid footing. Basing itself on a truly impressive Darwinism, it felt impelled to assert that everything human developed out of animal origins, and that the driving force behind that development was the “struggle for survival.” It said that all the various creatures were launched into life together, but fell to fighting, with the not too surprising result that, as time went on, the more perfect species got the better of the less perfect. Man was the final product of this perfecting process. “The survival of the fittest” became the slogan of the Darwinists. Now, however, researchers are finding themselves forced to adopt quite a different concept in their honest searching of facts. They are now saying that as we study man afresh and compare him with the most developed animals, we can by no means assume that he evolved in straight-line descent from these species. Instead, we have to trace him back to a primeval form no longer to be found upon the earth. These researchers now believe that such a primeval form once existed and that while man and animal both evolved front it, they did so in two different directions. Outstanding investigators have brought forth a further fact. They put the question: How could man develop as differently as he has when all the while animals, too, were evolving? Strange to say, they have not hit upon a “fight for survival.” They assume that man and his form were in a specially protected place where he could continue under the same conditions which originally brought forth that form, whereas all other creatures were caught up in a downward trend. Thus, man today is being traced back to an invisible primeval form that developed as it did because it was protected in a realm where man did not have to take part in a struggle to survive. These researchers subscribe to only one remaining fiction. They believe the protecting realm to have been a physically perceptible locality.

Gnosticism, too. assumes just such a primeval form. But instead of picturing it as having existed on the physical plane, it assigns it to the spiritual world, which was, in fact, able to afford it protection.

If one can conceive the idea that man was a late-corner to the earth, one can also conceive the following thought. Tracing the course of history, we find that a hitherto undivided human race split up into various nations and races and that many different confessions came into being, each shaped in accordance with the feeling of a particular group. In earlier times humanity was so constituted that a person could develop only what was implanted in him by virtue of belonging to a certain tribe. The spiritual force, however, the spiritual being that made man human in the first place, enables him to find the human being in his fellow man instead of what heredity has made of him. Man had to have this capacity restored to him. It was an impulse that could be taken up again only when humanity grew ripe for it.

So we encounter lofty and remarkable concepts of evolution in the first Christian centuries. It must be said that what we are witnessing in present-day natural science as the beginning of something that must eventually outgrow the Chrysalis stage, was already anticipated by the Gnostics in the grandiose conceptions reached by them as they thought about these matters. This could happen only because there is such a thing as evolution in man's history.

If we look back to a period that lies still closer to the time of man's descent to earth, we come upon a wholly different kind of soul life. Comparing it with the soul life of the present we must say that the latter is oriented toward a sense-based and brain-conditioned way of experiencing, whereas earlier times brought us a marvelous heritage of knowledge in the form of pictures. The fact that this heritage exists proves what spiritual scientific research also discovers to be true that human souls did not always perceive their surroundings as they do today, but were once clairvoyant. At that time man did not feel himself so involved with his own ego. Instead, he felt that he was part and parcel of everything around him. A dreamlike state of consciousness brought him into profound contact with the world about. Primeval man's way of knowing things was through a dreamlike clairvoyance that revealed their mysteries to him. His was an experience akin to dreaming as we know it today. Thus, it was possible for a humanity recently descended from spiritual heights to experience the secrets of the spiritual world in what may be called a clairvoyant dream-state.

Evolutionary progress meant, however, an ever-deepening descent of man into physical existence, accompanied by an ever further loss of that ancient clairvoyant capacity, though this need not be thought of as a tragedy. For if man had not lost his old clairvoyance he could never have advanced to the stage of free self-awareness that alone provided the basis for conscious personal experience.

The loss of the old clairvoyant insight that once gave access to secrets of the spiritual world came about gradually. Even when mankind had become thoroughly at home in the physical world, clairvoyant knowledge was still kept alive in sanctuaries that preserved the heritage of the ancient Mysteries, the treasure of wisdom that had come down to them through the ages. After the Christ Event had taken place and entered the stream of earth-evolution, the Gnostics still hoarded that age-old treasure of wisdom won by humanity's clairvoyant insight, and they formed their idea of Christ in accordance with it. Their concept may, therefore, be described as a reminiscence of knowledge gleaned in olden times, not as the product of free, conscious selfhood. They simply applied what men of ancient days had known to explain the Christ phenomenon. The period during which Gnosticism flourished coincided with the dimming of clairvoyant insight. This made it impossible for those who followed after. in the Middle Ages, to go on working with the heritage of Gnostic wisdom as a means of understanding Christ.

Instead, something else took the place of Gnosticism. We find people who lived in the centuries after its demise just as eager to grasp the Christ phenomenon, but wanting henceforth to rely on their own human powers of understanding, on a scientific approach. And we see the most enlightened spirits of the Middle Ages turning from Gnosticism to the teachings of Aristotle for the basis of their understanding of the Christ.

They found themselves forced to say that Aristotle's world conception brought them to a standstill at a certain point, that true spiritual understanding of the Christ was out of reach of human knowledge.

In one respect, however, the view of the world held in the Middle Ages rests on one of Aristotle's main ideas. Aristotle would never have thought of going as far as modern materialism has gone. When we look into his idea of the way soul and body work together, we do not find him subscribing to any such belief as that a man's inner life is conditioned by the heredity that comes to him from parents, grandparents, etc. His view was rather that every person born into the world is given a drop out of the ocean of divinity to unite with his body, that a soul-spiritual core always detaches itself front the universal spirit and enters human beings at their birth. But Aristotle, who was distinguished by a quality seldom met with in our day, that is, the habit of drawing the real consequences of his musing and investigating, does not stop at this point. He goes on thinking, and comes to believe that when a soul passes through the gates of death it does so as a now well- established entity, and as such ascends into the spiritual world. Though prior to birth it did not exist as a separate being, after death it lives on in the world of the spirit as an individual.

What kind of after-death experience does this soul now undergo, as Aristotle sees it? None whatever, since it lacks a body to make that possible. Now its sole content is the memory of its life on earth. It lives on in eternity looking back on its earth-life with the good and evil it has done, wholly given up to memory pictures.

Here, in Aristotle, may be found the origin of the doctrine of eternal punishment in hell. lt began in his concept and made its way into Catholic dogma during the Middle Ages. But let me say at once that it was not possible for Aristotle as a man of his time to do other than picture the soul as an unchanging entity doomed to gaze forever at its earthly deeds.

Modern spiritual science, anthroposophy, recognizes, of course, that the soul can do more after death than just look back as though in memory-pictures on its previous earth-life. It knows that the soul does not have to stay forever in that state. Instead, it sees man taking with him into the spiritual world as the finest fruit of his earth experience the possibility of transforming or building further on the good and bad deeds he committed here: nor does he stay forever in the spiritual world. Rather is he born again into a new incarnation and has opportunities to work out some karmic compensation for what he did or failed to do in previous lives. The soul passes through the gates of death taking with it the impulse to seek further incarnations for the sake of working out a balance. Aristotle could not accept such an idea because he had always thought that every birth meant a detaching of spiritual substance to form the soul. But spiritual science bears witness to the fact that our present lives derive from past incarnations.

So Aristotle may be said to have stood in the way of his own insight. He whom wise men of the Middle Ages called “the precursor of Christ in understanding nature,” did not get as far as the reincarnation concept. We see how he stopped short of the mark in regard to the question of immortality and how for him life's fruit was just eternal contemplation. The inevitable outcome of this was that people could not see into the spiritual world or gain any understanding of the nature of the Christ. For the thinking of the Middle Ages, Christ disappeared into the realm of belief which is closed to knowledge. The age-old tradition of Gnosticism was finally lost. Aristotle could not serve spiritual understanding of the Christ. Thus, a line came to be drawn between what can be known and what must remain a matter of belief. One consequence of Aristotelian thought that lived on was the idea of eternal suffering in hell.

It remained for people of more recent times to take the third step in a gradual weakening of faith. They have come to rely more and more on what can be grasped with the physical senses. The effect of this on the Christ concept has been to make Christ an ever less important figure and to render the prevailing idea of Christ more and more materialistic. Where Gnostics once assumed a spiritual principle, and where the Middle Ages in their turn experienced Christ in a mood of purest faith and devotion, the present sees at the beginning of the Christian era not a human being ensouled with a cosmic element but, increasingly, “the simple man of Nazareth,” a man more or less like any other human being. Nobody remembers anything of what the Gnostics had divined. People want to think of Christ in the same materialistic way they think about other historical events. The fact that they regard Him as a mere human being makes it necessary to apply the same methods to the study of His appearance that are generally applied in ordinary historical research.

It might have been recognized that the historical approach to the whole question is the easy way out because what could possibly be easier than to take the Gospels and show how they contradict each other! This reduces things to simplest terms. But then wouldn't the researchers have had to assume that their predecessors were the greatest dunces ever for having failed even to notice such obvious contradictions?

At any rate, the Gospels were certainly not taken as a schooling, a schooling that enables the soul to lift itself to spiritual perception of the Christ. So it is not surprising that history was pressed into service as a yardstick and that a movement has grown up, associated here in Germany with the theologian, Drews, that denies Christ completely. This happened at the very moment when spiritual science entered the contemporary scene.

Spiritual science bears witness to the fact just referred to, that human beings and what they carry within them are not products of a single life, but of many past lives. Man once lived wholly in the spiritual world. Then he left it to descend to earth, but he was to have more than one life in a physical body. When he had digested the fruits of an incarnation during an interval spent in the spiritual world, he descended again into physical embodiment. The law that pertains here has often been the object of our study. It teaches us how deeply involved man is in the whole ongoing process we call history. Life only begins to make real sense when we assume that we have all been living on the earth in order to take what was given us in the beginning, make it our own, and then go on developing with the march of the centuries toward ever greater perfection. A closer study of these matters brings something quite remarkable to light, to be described here as man's mission on the earth.

I must stress again today, as I have so often done before, that the consciousness that man has thus far developed has by no means reached its final form. Man can really take his development in hand: the right spiritual training can lift him to spiritual perception. That is quite within the realm of possibility if he schools his soul in meditation. Just as one can put oneself, by staring intently at a shining object, into a state where one is aware of nothing else (though this is not a recommended practice!), so do we achieve a single-minded, but in this case quite free condition, when we deliberately concentrate all our attention on some soul-spiritual content to the exclusion of all else. Then forces begin to ray out in our souls through which we attain what may be called a body-free condition. Such a person is then really able to say from experience, “I am no longer perceiving with my eyes or thinking with my brain. I am experiencing as a spiritual being, independent of a body, I perceive what lives and has its being in the spiritual world.”

This elevation to the level of spiritual perception can be achieved with proper schooling. The rigorous discipline that leads to it has been described in several of my books.

It is easier to enter the spiritual world if one has trained one's feeling life to avoid all sorts of over-excited and emotional states and reactions. A person who confronts the world with calmness and equanimity keeps unsquandered reserves of feeling alive within him. The spiritual light, which meditation kindles in us, radiates into such reserves. A person full of selfish demands will never make a disciplined spiritual investigator. But those who achieve real empathy with their fellow-men, who know what selfless love is, who are not absorbed exclusively in their own feelings, have a soul-surplus that can be charged with forces garnered from spiritual schooling. The light of clairvoyance is engendered in feeling that keeps itself free of egotism.

When a person has progressed to the point of being able to live in the spiritual world he can gradually learn to clothe his experiences in ordinary concepts. Handed on in that form, any healthy mentality can grasp them. It is no more necessary for everyone to be a spiritual investigator than for each of us individually to make laboratory tests to see whether what science says is true or not. Those charged with communicating the results of spiritual-scientific research do not shy away from commonsense thinkers. Really healthy minds readily see the truth of statements made by the spiritual investigator. The only people who dispute his findings are those who approach them filled with prejudice. This holds true in the case of spiritual science, which is the fruit of clairvoyant research. It enables human beings to gain access to a world of spiritual experience.

The insight that spiritual scientists can presently achieve by means of a heightened consciousness will—to some degree at least, and in certain fields f be attainable by all men in future. It will fall to the lot of Twentieth Century humanity to realize that the soul develops, that it passes through life after life in the course of earth's evolution, and in so doing absorbs from the various cultural epochs what each such epoch has to offer.

If one looks nowadays with a more than ordinarily perceptive eye at the human race all over the earth, one becomes aware that it possesses two human qualities that were simply not present in antiquity. This is a fact susceptible of proof. The two new qualities are commission and conscience, and they will go on developing more and more fully as man submits his soul-life to spiritual schooling. Compassion and conscience were new acquisitions at a certain point in evolution.

Much that is called compassion is not worthy of the term. True compassion is the capacity to forget oneself and enter another's being so completely that one feels his suffering as he feels it. One's own ego is quite forgotten in such fellow-feeling; one lives entirely in the other's experience. Suppose for a moment that nature were so to arrange matters that at the moment when a person freed himself from narrow self-concern he had the same experience morally that comes to him every day when he falls asleep. When he can no longer maintain control of his body and his brain ceases to serve his soul as its instrument and he goes to sleep, consciousness disappears. A person can, of course, also fall unconscious from compassion. But that would be egotistical in the extreme, for then he could not surrender himself wholly to another's feelings. In that sense, falling unconscious would amount to a moral failing, whereas compassion is one of the two means whereby a person breaks free of himself without losing consciousness. Conscience is the other. It speaks to our innermost being; the listener follows the bidding of a voice that penetrates to where his ego lives. He subjects the self to something larger than itself. Compassion and conscience are thus forces that man is presently engaged in developing. Consciousness will build further on the foundation of the forms that compassion and conscience have thus far taken, going on to develop the spiritual vision that was previously attainable only in abnormal states of consciousness. To say this is not to make a prophecy but to state a fact determined by strictly scientific means.

As he realizes what effect compassion and conscience have upon the human soul. Twentieth Century man will have a certain direct experience in a perfectly ordinary state of consciousness. He will understand something that might be put in the following way. We see that at birth man inherits something from his ancestors. Spiritual being though he is, he must incarnate physically in a given family and clothe himself in hereditary qualities. Long before we had such a thing as science, people were familiar with heredity, but they gave it an entirely different name. Their term for it was “original sin.” Anyone who understands what the Old Testament meant by original sin knows that the term conveyed a much fuller meaning than science has as yet ascribed to it because it applies to moral as well as physical qualities. Those in whom compassion and conscience have borne fruit will say, however, that although birth saddles us with predispositions that cannot be thrown off, we are also endowed with something that is not bound up with matter and that enables us to rise above ourselves and enter the spiritual world. There is one realm—the realm of one's own soul—where there will be direct spiritual vision. Human beings will affirm that although they are tied on the one hand to physical matter, on the other the soul harbors a radiant helper capable of lifting us beyond ourselves, it is a feeling that suggests the following comparison. Suppose there were someone who found it hard to believe that air everywhere surrounds us and fills every empty space. All he has to do to convince himself is to create a vacuum and observe how the air rushes into it. Just such an empty space is created in the soul by compassion and conscience, both of which detach us from our ego. Into that vacuum streams the spiritual entity whom we know as the Christ. This gives us personal experience of the fact that we can receive Christ into ourselves. Christ Who is present in the spiritual atmosphere just as air is present in the physical atmosphere and flows into every Space it finds empty.

On this high level, normal consciousness can indeed become spiritual vision, and no one who has this experience will consider it subjective. He will instead recognize that there must be such a possibility. He will realize that there was a time when it was still unknown and a moment when it became possible for the first time. He will be aware that what he is experiencing made its way down to earth from spiritual realms and united with it as the Christ impulse. This Christ impulse will inevitably come to be looked upon by Twentieth Century man as a force that entered earth evolution at a particular moment in time as a real historical event. That will usher in a period when it will no longer make sense to say that Christ is merely an idea. Instead, people will say that the Christ experience can be conceived as taking place only in this or that individual soul, just as philosophers maintain that there could be no such thing as color without eyes to perceive it. But colors do not owe their existence to perceiving eyes; the truth is rather that eyes are created by the light-world. The fact ought therefore to be stated thus: “No eyes without light.” It is equally true that without the historical Christ human beings could not experience Christ or the Christ-power within them. So they will know Christ to be a spiritual being and realize that this Being once actually lived on earth as a fact of history and sacrificed Himself to become one with the earth. They will be able to make their way into the spiritual world and discover Christ there.

Goethe often found just the right way of putting some fact or other, and perhaps we might borrow one of his sayings to express what we have been discussing here; it can serve us as a pointer. Goethe said that the eye was built by light to perceive the light: the eye was conjured forth by light from organs that were originally indeterminate. He goes on to make a further statement that calls attention to the impulse we harbor to discover God within us:

“Were not our eyes profoundly of the sun
How could they behold the light?
Were not our strength from God's own being won.
How could we feel so in Things divine delight.”

Just as the eye is conjured forth by light, so man's power to see God is conjured forth by God Himself as He lives and moves within and all about us. Those whose own Christ-likeness enables them to experience the Christ in beauty of feeling and insight will know that this is possible only because Christ once descended to earth and lived here, an historic figure. Just as the sun's light conjures forth eyes in human bodies so does the historic Christ conjure forth Christ-life in the souls of men.

“Unless the soul of man were Christ-like, how indeed could it experience the Christ? lf Christ had not lived as an historic figure how could man's soul ever come to know that most glorious feeling: feeling for the Christ?” Such will be the tenor of Twentieth Century comment. At the very moment when orthodox science reaches the point of denying Christ any historical reality, spiritual science will say without relying on documents that because man can experience Christ he knows that Christ did indeed live historically as a life-giving force, as the sun in that spiritual realm whence human evolution draws its nutriment.

Our consciousness withdraws into darkness when we try to follow within ourselves what is outside in the world. Man cannot be observed as if in a retort. Processes of the inner world elude consciousness.

That is one side of it; the other is what lives in the soul. We only experience soul life when we experience it in the outer world. Only, you cannot experience it in other people. As soon as it becomes external, for example, experienced in others, the soul life withdraws. The soul then disappears into an indeterminate darkness.

Natural laws are concepts of spiritual beings. For the ordinary person, concepts and ideas are only abstractions.

Spiritual science knows only one tool, the human soul. It is not something fixed, closed; there are forces and abilities slumbering in it.

Waking and sleeping.

We do not have a passive relationship to the outside world, but feel sympathy and antipathy. Sense of truth. As soon as you observe passions, they change. Self-knowledge transforms the person. - Mystics turn their gaze away from the outside world and into the interior. A small example: you can ask in the face of adversity: What forces and abilities have I developed since then? Without this, we would not have been drawn into a chain of events.

Discoveries of what is changing at the bottom of the soul, of what is there, cause temptations and trials. The little guardian of the threshold. This is how man gets behind himself to the core of human nature. Just as the outer world is built up by the spiritual world, it is built up internally by one's own karma. Just as the edelweiss only grows on mountains, so each being has its destiny according to its nature.

Since Redi, there has been a different belief in science. Nothing alive without a germ of life. So one will ask later: How is it possible that in the past people did not believe in Theosophy? Everything has the same basis, the great Monon, in the inner as well as in the outer world. We are incorporated in the spiritual and in the outer world. Common spiritual is behind both. The world becomes transparent on both sides.

The present time is one as it has never been there. The development of the future pushes up to individuality in the future. Through our own soul, we must find the best way to live. Steam propels us forward; truth is also a driving force, not an abstract concept. In Fichte, for example, there was already a presentiment of the spiritual world and of the possibility of transformation as human beings – soul power, as early as 1811. [...] Even thousands of years ago, Zarathustra came to the same conclusion.

It is difficult to communicate with someone who expresses himself differently than we do. To clarify our own spiritual secrets, it is important to measure our own thinking, feeling, and willing against the spirits of others.

The usual newer historical research does not even know how to determine the lifetime of Zarathustra; they place him in the time of the Buddha, the ancient Greeks place them 5000 years before Christ: as far back as possible or not very far back. Theosophy places him in pre-Asian culture, but his influence can be seen into Christian times.

All soul life has been greatly modified, and the development of what has come into being is now a satisfying study. Man's spiritual development would have to undergo the same investigation to shed light; one has to go back to earlier states of mind, where people became aware of a different environment than they are now. There was a kind of clairvoyant consciousness, an often misused word, an image consciousness. The images that go up and down in the usual forms mean little, they are a leftover remnant of a completely different state of consciousness. The earlier image consciousness can be related to the external reality in the spiritual world behind the sensory world, when the object consciousness was still in its infancy, of an intermediate world between waking and sleeping, through symbols that related to the real spiritual world.

A certain ability is achieved at the expense of another. We have to go back up, but to a form of clairvoyance imbued with intellectuality. First the intellect was lost. Myths, sagas, legends are the oldest records of ancient clairvoyance. The images of the gods in mythology were initially only images. There were two spiritual currents: one from ancient India, the other, more northern, from ancient Persia. These went alongside one another in the older millennia, flowing together in ancient Greek culture. That is why the pessimism of the ancient Indians is so characteristic. The ancient Indian found it uncanny when he saw spiritual beings behind external things. He called them asuras. The last impulse of this, which was therefore so significant, appeared in Buddha. Through an unspiritual tendency towards the inner, he was transported into Maya, and so he had to come out of it into Nirvana. Nirvana has nothing of what the senses offer. Nirvana is the last great call of the senses as this development of humanity is felt to be a descent. This too is shot through with pessimistic anti-reality muzzling.

In ancient Greece, this submergence was not felt in quite the same way. In the Dionysian culture, the Greeks felt what was not yet present in the culture transplanted to Greece from ancient India. Zarathustra developed precisely the opposite, the Persians wanted to lend a hand to direct reality, a transition to a new, joyful future for humanity. He had gained something new, new human soul forces. Zarathustra pointed out to the Persian people that the physical world is not only Maya. To him, the outer world was like the garment of a spiritual world, the sensual world like a carpet. The spiritual world lies behind the sensual world; the spiritual world is behind everything. This is not only meant as a pantheistic reference to spiritual wisdom, but as a concrete insight into the spiritual world. Behind the most important sensual reality, the spiritual importance is hidden. And just as the sun has its great aura, so does man have his small aura: Ahura Mazdao, later Ormuzd. He no longer finds the good through mere mystical insight. These are dying forces, therefore the devas are evil to him, the asuras are the right thing.

This reversal can be explained from the development of culture. Ahuras are the Indian Asuras. There is spirituality in and behind all sensuality, especially behind the center. The Greek Apollo is the Greek translation of the Mazdao culture. Both currents came together when the greatest impulse for humanity came, in Christ.

At that time, in Zarathustra's time, completely different signs were needed, a completely different writing to make sense of this. This ancient writing was in the heavenly bodies. Zarathustra attributed both contradictions to something higher. He needed symbols. During the day, the sun passes through part of the zodiac; the day sun is Ormuzd, the night sun is Ahriman. Ormuzd is associated with one half of the zodiacal signs and Ahriman with the other. There is a common basis for good and evil. In an ever-widening arc, the circle becomes flatter and flatter, finally becoming a straight line, infinity. A circle with an infinite diameter is a representation of the infinite passage of time. The past holds back, the future is for progress, uplifting. The entire zodiac is actually a line, imagined as a minimized circle. “Zaroana akarena” is the image of infinite time.

Thus, the writing in the stars represents what is in the spiritual world. Zoroaster is not an abstract spirit who only moves in generalities; that is why lower spirits are under Ormuzd. Today's man is comfortable and wants to ascend to the highest God right away. The six or seven Amschaspands were, as it were, messengers. Goethe mentions in his Faust: Sons of the gods, preserve the beautiful, and so on. It is the same. Ahriman also has five to six evil spiritual entities; that makes twelve in total.

Each constellation is an expression of one of the forces. Ormuzd, for example, works through [the] lion as a good disposition, through the ram as wisdom. In this way, the spiritual beings enter into people, as it were. But people are not as wise as their little finger, which knows that it is nothing without the whole organism. So the powers of the human soul enter into the person and continue in the person, becoming materially condensed in what is in the person. Thus, a person can be an Ormuzd or an Ahriman person. The new physiology, which dissects the human being, says [anatomically and physiologically]: twelve pairs of brain nerves emanate from the brain. Thus, the materialized twelve Amshaspands have been found again after millennia. Both ages join hands.

There are 28 to 31 Izeds, spirits that perform subordinate functions that are effective in the cosmos and in human nature. In the human head, these are the mental abilities [= the Amshaspands] and the abilities that emanate from the spinal nerves and, for all I care, return [the Izeds]. Then, in the Feroars, we see the spiritual archetypes that underlie everything else.

Plato says: All sensual things are based on archetypes. But here it is meant more abstractly. Plato speaks of the spiritual world, Zoroaster of the spirit world. But Plato still had a living feeling for today's views. Zoroaster saw in the outer light what is inner wisdom, as does spiritual science today.

Pythagoras learned from the Persians the correct attitude towards the spiritual and the moral world. This is quite different from the way it is in Egypt or in the Dionysian mysteries. There, the masculine and the feminine, Osiris - Isis, Apollo - Aphrodite, are valid. Such sexual opposites can be found everywhere. Even with the ancient Hebrews, Lucifer, evil, is indicated by the feminine. Only Zoroaster has it the other way around, taking the organic, moral contrast of good and evil in images, not from nature.

Therefore, Zoroaster must be important in the present day in order not to reduce everything to the opposites of the sexes, as it is today. Hence the scent that emanates from Zoroastrianism. Through purification, through moral cleansing, heroic, moral strength develops, not philistine morality like today's. The ancient Persian is not contemplative, he is hardworking, lays his hands on the treasures of the earth. Thus he becomes the companion of Ormuzd, who always wrestled with Ahriman. Such was the case with this simple cultured people. Through moral purification the obstacles are overcome.

I will speak, come and listen to what is highest in the world. I speak not of it with an evil tongue, but of the opposite. Listen to what I mean, otherwise you will hear bad things at the end of the world. – Thus speaks Zoroaster. It is not enough to study the Gathas literally; one should put oneself in Zoroaster's feelings and thoughts. This requires a sense of history. One should be grateful to Ahriman.

Dear attendees! Since I have repeatedly been allowed to speak in this city about topics of spiritual research, it will not be inappropriate to address the important question of where the truths of this spiritual research come from and where the sources of error lie. This must be recognized as something important, especially with regard to supersensible research, since orientation regarding truths and errors in every field of human life is of undeniable importance, and since, as is easy to see, in a field that takes us into such uncertain and error-prone regions, this orientation is of particular necessity. Spiritual research leads us to those areas from which the most important questions and riddles of life arise, initially less those questions and riddles of life that arise from the various fields of science - these are actually, insofar as we are dealing with science in the ordinary sense of the word, much more remote than the questions and riddles of spiritual research, which we encounter, so to speak, at every step we can take in life. In a sense, these riddles and questions of life can beset us at every moment of our existence. If we look at what spiritual research can give to life, albeit from a broad perspective, it initially comes down to two important questions. The first question is contained in the significant word 'man's fate'; the other is contained in the word that is so closely connected with all man's longings, with all his doubts, with all his hopes: the word 'immortality'. It is not as if spiritual research were exhausted by answering the two questions or riddles indicated, but the wide field of this research interests wide circles above all because its results are summarized in an appropriate answer to these questions.

Human destiny! What questions and what riddles lie in these words. We see a human being born into existence. We can predict from the little caring environment he has around him that hardship and misery will accompany his existence. And when we see him growing up with only limited mental abilities and emotional traits, we can say that he will perhaps become a rather unhelpful member of human society and that in many respects he will perhaps be a burden to himself and a torment to his soul. On the other hand, we see a person come into life surrounded by caring hands from the very beginning. We may see certain special gifts and abilities emerging in him early on, and we can predict that he may spend his life in happiness, that he can become a useful member of human society, that he may experience his life in enthusiasm and inner bliss, and all this suggests the question of why, which external science can answer so little.

The other question is that of immortality. It comes to us from life, but at first it confronts us in an egotistical way: that man desires survival after this life from his hopes, his longings, from a satisfied or unsatisfied life. Frequently, this question is raised out of selfish desires; but it need not be so. It can approach us as objectively as any other scientific question. We see this particularly when we consider how, in the course of the nineteenth century, more and more people had to break with the old traditions and beliefs, who not only doubted the survival of human activity after death, but who even believed that they had certainty that with death, consciousness of the human being closes forever, that the soul life, so to speak, gives itself up in it. Such people often belonged to spiritually highly striving beings. They said to themselves: I do not claim an egoistic survival after death; I can resign myself to the thought that what I have worked for will be handed down to humanity after my death. Selfless devotion of their acquired knowledge and the happiness they had experienced was their endeavor when the gate of death closed before them.

It is precisely in the face of such a world view that the question of immortality approaches us in a truly scientific way, for we can indeed say: Is it compatible with all that we otherwise know as the laws of existence, that the human being really is approaching a conclusion in his work and striving when the gate of death closes? Perhaps one could agree with such devotion for ethical reasons, but from the point of view of the laws of world economy it is different. We need only have a little feeling for what is achieved in the world by human souls, and we will say to ourselves: In the course of human life, the powers of the souls themselves create substantial facts, facts that, since the souls are individual, take on an individual character. We cannot readily see such individual creations, as they arise from the human soul, incorporated into the general stream of human development without having to admit that the world economy has a break, for we must feel that the best, the noblest, the most important thing our soul can work for is individual, in the sense that only the one soul can work for it within itself. We may give much to the general public, but our best would completely disappear from the world when the human being ceased to exist, when the gates of death closed. Without taking into account our desires, our hopes and longings, we are faced with the necessity of contemplating the immortal in human nature in the face of all that is mortal.

So the question arises before our soul, but if this question is to be answered, a science is needed that goes beyond the sensual, beyond the outer, physical nature. For nothing can give us an answer as to why these or those facts present themselves to us when we enter life. The question of destiny is not answered by physics and natural science. These must remain indifferent when they consider their facts, how these facts approach human hearts and souls. The why cannot fall within the scope of external science, nor can the question of immortality, since science depends on concepts of the mind that are bound to the instrument of the brain. What it can observe arises with death, disappears with death; if it cannot penetrate into the [gap in the transcript], we have no hope of seeing the question of immortality answered by it.

The way in which attempts are now being made to find answers to such questions in the present day (through spiritual science) is, however, not at all popular in the present day. Prejudice after prejudice favors a spiritual research activity; and perhaps the reasons will emerge from the lectures themselves, why there is so much resistance in the wider circles of the present, one may say, not only theoretical resistance, but even hatred, against what is emerging in a scientific way as spiritual research, in order to solve the characterized riddles of life and to find many other things that are connected with them.

Today we will talk about how man can truly look into the worlds from which the answers to such questions arise. We cannot get by in this world with the ordinary powers by which we know the outer world; and if man were not able to develop other powers than the ordinary powers of knowledge, there would be no possibility for him to penetrate into such worlds. All questions converge in the one: Is there a possibility for man to develop other powers of knowledge than those which [outer] science uses, which are thus exhausted in the observation of the senses and the mind bound to the brain? If man were only a being of the senses, it would be impossible for such powers to exist. Only someone who admits that the sense body of man, that which one can see with the eyes or grasp with the hands, is permeated by another entity, a supersensible entity, can come to the assumption of such powers. And basically, a logical certainty that it is so is provided by a very everyday observation, the kind of observation that is only rarely made because man does not consider what he experiences all the time to be worthy of special observation.

The mystery of death remains interesting for people because it comes unexpectedly, suddenly, and frighteningly; but what happens every day in the same way, the state of transition between waking and sleeping, is paid less attention to; nothing comes up to people that awakens uncertainty in them, because the same thing happens to them again and again in this state of transition. But for those who want to undergo a deeper observation of life, it is precisely the state of change [between waking and sleeping] that becomes particularly significant. We can say: Would it not be logically absurd to think that what takes place in the soul in terms of passions, drives and desires, longings and hopes, images and ideas from morning till evening, that all this sinks into nothingness when we fall asleep and is recreated from nothingness when we wake up? That would be absurd; nevertheless, no external sensory observation, no mind bound to the brain, will ever find in the sleeping human body that which surges up and down in the soul during wakefulness.

So at least initially the hypothesis can be put forward that there is a spiritual element in human nature that leaves it during sleep and moves back into it when we wake up, when the human body is then left by the soul, this inner truth moves into spiritual worlds during sleep. When sleep is over, the spiritual element comes back from the spiritual world into the physical body. This cannot be observed with the mind, but it will become clear if one only thinks logically. Now, of course, such an assumption can only be valid, only then convincing, if one can grasp that which is invisible and leaves the human body during sleep, if one can prove its real reality. How this happens is what we will now deal with.

Let us observe how a person presents themselves when they are asleep. We become unable to move our external limbs. All the senses die away, the body is overcome by a heaviness, the powers that it has in the waking state are withdrawn from it. We see, so to speak, our body falling away from us as we fall asleep. But we also perceive how consciousness dies with this loss of physicality, how it slowly fades and is then surrounded by complete darkness. But if the soul-spiritual, which permeates the body during the day, is present, then we have to say that it is not capable of developing inner forces during sleep, not even the kind of forces that could give it inner knowledge of itself. It is so weak in the normal human being that it cannot become aware of itself if it does not have the instrument of the body. If such a spiritual-soul element is present, for the real, that it feels that it is losing its body, then we must say: this is of such a nature that it needs the tool of the body to develop consciousness, to evoke forces. And when it is left to itself, it is not strong enough to develop an inner life; it can only do so if it opposes the resistance of the body.

But this does not mean that proof of its existence has been provided. This proof will only be provided if man can succeed in making this inner life, which otherwise makes use of the body, so strong that it can develop inner life and consciousness even without the bodily. Even for the proof of the spiritual and soul life, everything depends on whether the human being can develop a spiritual life without the help of this outer corporeality, of sensory perceptions. What would such a spiritual life be like? It would be something similar to sleep and yet different from it. When we fall asleep, we feel our inner life cease, our consciousness fade away. It fades away because the external sensory impressions are silent. We would have to be able to artificially induce this moment through arbitrariness, that is, be able to silence the external sensory impressions and still evoke a state that is not unconsciousness but is consciousness. This state is or would be similar to sleep in that we command all external senses and the brain to stand still and yet consciousness does not occur. The spiritual researcher must bring about this state in himself.

We will understand this best if we compare it to another state that is similar and yet quite different. When man is able to develop spiritual-soul forces outside of his body, to perceive in a spiritual world, then he penetrates into a world that lies beyond the mind bound to the brain, beyond the senses; then a supersensible world speaks to him in his being, as the senses speak to his being when he makes use of the senses. In this way man would become a spiritual researcher; and if such a world could be experienced in this way, then man would penetrate into the spiritual world, then proof would be supplied that everything outwardly visible is based on a spiritual substance. If this is the case, then this spiritual must always be there, then the visible world that surrounds us must be based on a spiritual. The only reason for this is that it does not show itself because we cannot perceive it. We experience the invisible spiritual world like a blind person experiences colors.

Now there is a state that is not considered in spiritual science, that is not applied by it, but that can serve us in our understanding of the actual spiritual state in the present, that is the state that is usually referred to by the term 'mediumship'. Please do not misunderstand me; the human being as a medium is not, as the spiritual researcher wishes, to come to a conclusion. How does human nature become a medium? Mediumistic experiences are brought about by the fact that the ordinary expressions of the soul, the life of will, the life of feeling, are suppressed by some process or other, so that the person is as if put into a kind of sleep. Under certain conditions, however, human nature can be induced to make statements, even to speak and write, without the person knowing about it and without consciously observing the processes. Thus, spiritual expressions can occur that can only be attributed to an entity whose intelligence has descended. Nor should one be advised to do what is called the development of mediumistic qualities. They are present in some personalities even without special training.

Let us consider again: What happens to a person who, in this way, comes to spiritual expressions as a medium? His own soul life is tuned down, completely extinguished, that is, his conscious soul life; he knows nothing of his revelations. We find something there that can otherwise only come from the conscious soul. We can say that we see there what is the everyday expression, how it spreads like a veil over the subconscious soul activity, which in turn is connected with the physical body and expresses itself when the conscious soul activity is suppressed. Thus, soul activity rests in the depths of human nature; we can bring it out when we make conscious soul activity completely passive.

This is not the way of spiritual science; but it shows us not only that there is soul activity where there is consciousness, but also that spiritual-soul activity is in human nature and shows itself when we suppress consciousness. This process, which produces the medium, is exactly the opposite of what should happen for the spiritual researcher. While the soul activity, the consciousness, is being reduced for the medium, it must be strengthened for the spiritual researcher, and this is done by the person evoking intense soul processes, soul processes that are usually referred to as 'concentration of thought', 'meditation' or 'contemplation'. These processes, which we shall endeavor to explain more fully, take place in an inwardly active spiritual life and ultimately lead to certain states of mind that represent three stages, three stages that one ascends to fully enter the spiritual worlds.

I ask you not to be put off by the words. The words used here are not used in the sense in which they are not liked to be heard in ordinary life. So you must not understand anything by them other than what I will explain afterwards.

We can describe the three stages as imagination, inspiration and intuition. All three stages are achieved by an increase in the life of the soul, by an inward strengthening. When a person lives in the ordinary, everyday life with nature and other people, he gets his impressions through the senses and then processes them with the mind. In this way, a person is concerned above all that what he imagines, senses and feels corresponds to external things; he forms such ideas to which he can attach the hallmark of truth through agreement with the outside world. As long as he remains in this state, an inner, spiritual life cannot develop. A certain concentration, meditation, that is, contemplation, must occur.

In order to avoid abstractions, we shall give a brief and precise description of how such an inward arousal of higher spiritual powers is achieved. (Please refer to my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds?”). What is described in this book will be hinted at here. Concentrated thinking proceeds in such a way that one first tries to free oneself from all external sensory impressions, to develop strong powers to keep one's eyes from colors and light. All sensory impressions must be suppressed so that one becomes completely inattentive and uninterested in the outside world. Then, through special training of the will, one silences all the memories that have accumulated in the course of one's life. One tries to become free of all worries and suffering; in a word, one tries to be within oneself. What kind of exercise of the will is needed to find such a state can also be seen in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds?”.

It is possible to make the will so strong that the outer senses and the mind are silent. Just as one can learn in ordinary life to turn one's attention away from objects, so one can arbitrarily suppress all impressions from outside by strengthening one's willpower. On the one hand, this brings about a moment similar to falling asleep; however, it must not come to unconsciousness. This is achieved by taking, through the power of the soul, into one's own soul, images that one has prepared for oneself. Such images are best when they do not correspond to any external events or things.

We will now place such a particular image before our souls, an image that is one of many thousands that the spiritual researcher uses for himself, but which can show the principle: that a person imagines he has two glasses in front of him, one filled with water and the other empty. He pours, so we want to imagine, from the filled glass into the empty some water, but this would not make the filled glass emptier and emptier, but always fuller and fuller, and the more we pour out, the fuller it becomes. It is an absurd notion, but it can be an allegorical notion for something that confronts us enigmatically in life. What is meant here is what we call love. Does the loving soul, which lovingly gives to the needy, which, so to speak, gives from itself what is contained within it, does it become emptier because of this? No, what is given out of love always makes us fuller and richer. That is the quality of love, that we give our own being and yet become richer and richer.

If we imagine this property of love through the symbol of the water glasses just characterized, then we have done something similar to what we did in geometry. If we look at a circular medal, we can put it down and then imagine a circular shape. So you can be completely unaware of the intrinsic nature of a thing, but you can visualize and draw the circular shape and completely disregard what you have in front of you. In the circle, everything that relates to the circular nature becomes clear. Figuratively, you have extracted something that is in this thing. This is how one visualizes things in geometry, and one also does this in spiritual research in a higher sense.

You extract from a process the nature of love, which encompasses such mystery and unfathomability that no human being can exhaust it, you take out the quality of becoming ever richer and you focus the soul on the symbol. You can also form other symbols. Such images are better for the meditative life than representations taken from the external world; in them, the soul still clings to the external world. But if we choose such images that have nothing to do with the external world, then we can live with distraction from everything external in our inner life. We live there when we direct all our soul powers for a while towards the one image. We can also use other symbols for such inner work, and the spiritual researcher has to do such an exercise a thousand times. Wisdom as such is not luminous, but we can imagine it under the image of a luminous sun and surrender to the symbol that expresses the idea of inner warmth. We can experience something in the process that we also feel when we imagine wisdom inwardly. We can also imagine love for the warmth spreading throughout the world.

Many, many examples of such images could be given. Someone could easily come along and say: So the spiritual researcher wants to indulge in ideas that are not true! But they are also not there to depict something external; they do not want that, but they want to bring the soul life within them to activity. While in our everyday life, or when we are occupied with scientific matters, we may have content in our soul that we cannot see, while our soul life is spread over many things, in meditation we draw together all our soul forces and focus them on this one idea; this makes it particularly strong when we make an effort to hold on to this idea and do not let anything else into our soul for a long time.

For the actual accomplishment of the matter, comprehensive inner measures are necessary, which you can also find in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” Especially effective are moral intuitions, impulses of the will, which the soul symbolically visualizes and to which it surrenders with the same love and enthusiasm that are otherwise awakened by things that stimulate us from the outside and make an impression on us. All training for true spiritual research is based on this kind of strengthening of the inner life, [in a] gathering of all the soul into a single idea; at times one works on this idea. This is meditation. And this meditation rises to contemplation when we are able to dwell vitally in such an inner soul content for a longer period of time, as we are otherwise in a comfortable space with our physicality. When we come to bring ourselves equally consciously into such a voluntarily induced state of soul, then we live in inner contemplation. Through this, that which in human nature is not dependent on the tool of corporeality is inwardly activated.

This provides real proof that there is such an inner spiritual realm, and it brings us closer to proving that it is something real that withdraws during sleep, that it is only too weak in ordinary life, but shows itself inwardly animated when we bring it to inner activity through such exercises as those described.

When a person has practiced this for a while, the point is reached when he finds that even when he does not artificially conjure up such images, does not artificially conjure up the symbols, his inner life is prepared in such a way that it generates such images from the subconscious, so to speak. This is the important moment, it is like a rebirth of the soul's life when, without our artificially inducing it, we see image after image emerging from the depths of our soul, emerging before us like a second world, a world outside the world.

But now the important thing begins, so that man may be led to the truths and not to the errors of spiritual research. A world of images rises from the depths of the soul, a world of images that someone who is not familiar with these things, but is familiar with today's view of such conditions, will take as visions, hallucinations, delusions. Today's world view believes that in such things, which go beyond ordinary life, it can only perceive the pathological. But the path to the truth of spiritual research consists in the fact that it can only emerge from a practiced life of the soul that knows how to distinguish between delusions and realities, including those in the realm of the soul. Therefore, every genuine schooling in spiritual research must lead to the moment when the described occurs, a strong inner will can be made in the person who wants to become a spiritual researcher, a decision that will not be present if the condition occurs pathologically.

This can be seen by observing ordinary life. Many of you will have noticed how people with a morbid mental life, when they have delusions, are far more convinced of the truth, of the reality of their own ideas, than of the reality of the outside world. It is often easy to dissuade people from a conviction, but with someone whose mental life is a morbid one, it would be a wasted effort. What happens then? What happens is that what a person has created through the power of his own soul life, he loves out of a strong feeling; in his imagination he also brings with him the longing for it to be reality, and so a world is built up before him, but one that he has only created himself. As soon as a person takes such a world as truth, he cannot be a spiritual researcher. Such a strong willpower is necessary when, through meditation training, the images that we call imaginations arise; a strong resolve is needed that is precisely opposed to unhealthy ideas, that now says to itself: All that you feel rising up in you as a world of images, even without your intervention, is nothing more than a mirror image of your own soul life. What you have within you, you have brought forth through your own efforts, and it presents itself to you. They are nothing but shadowy images of your own being. And it is not only the ability that belongs to the spiritual researcher, that one can bring it to the point where imagination occurs, more important is the strong will training in the face of this world, to always hold fast to the images of enchanting beauty, that they are only shadowy images of our own self.

This mistake is repeatedly made by those who have not undergone proper training and who, for whatever reason, come to a certain inner vision of images: they mistake this world for a real world because it can be a beautiful one, because in it, the human being feels happy. A spiritual researcher must be able to dispense with such a way of thinking. What must be formed in the course of training is the strong decision, and when this decision itself is made into a kind of meditation, when one repeatedly immerses oneself in this decision and applies all the soul's powers to all as shadow images, then this determination is strengthened and one acquires the ability to erase the imaginative world again; one can erase it again through an inner strength; then one has reached an important stage of spiritual research.

What you can achieve is as follows: you can say that it can be compared to what we call forgetting our thoughts in ordinary life. You know that everything you have experienced rests in your consciousness. How could a person live if all his experiences, pain and joy, were always present in his memory? But you know that what has long been forgotten can from time to time be recalled in the soul. Just as an idea from ordinary life plunges into oblivion, so too must the whole imagination be pushed into oblivion, into the unconscious, through the strong willpower discussed. This requires a strong mastery of the human being over himself, because the human being is intimately connected with what he has produced through his power. He has achieved a strong victory over himself when he is able to erase everything he has produced on the first level of spiritual knowledge.

Only then do we live in our true self, only then have we developed stronger forces within us than before. If we cannot do this, we know that we are still too weak to truly penetrate into spiritual worlds. Experiencing truths in the spiritual world is only possible if the experiences are brought about through spiritual training. When we have succeeded in doing this, then the images come up again in a completely different way – like forgotten images come up again, but in the same way as they were – so the imaginations come up again in a changed way. Before, they were images, like visionary or fantastic images; afterwards, they come up in such a way that we know we are now dealing with a real world, with a supersensible world. Before, they were images; now they are processes that are real, like the processes of the sense world.

Now someone might say that one could indeed now indulge in self-suggestion. What gives us assurance that things are real when we have become so master of ourselves? Yes, the way we experience things - nothing else can give us assurance, but this is the same way that gives us proof of the realities of the external, sensual life. There is no other proof! This can best be appreciated by pointing out Schopenhauer's main error. One can fully acknowledge a mind like Schopenhauer's even when pointing out his main error. When he says that the world around us is only in our imagination, then he makes this mistake, because one can distinguish in the world - but only who distinguishes life - whether something is imagination or reality. Imagine glowing iron. You will not get burned by imagining it. But if you perceive and touch the real glowing iron, you will get burned by it. Nothing can prove reality to us as much as direct experience. Full experience is the only thing that gives proof of reality. It has been said: Why should not what comes before the soul be suggestion, since man so easily succumbs to suggestion? One can imagine drinking lemonade; there is no reality here, but one enjoys the taste of the lemonade as if it were reality. One can admit this, but it is not a matter of a partial experience, but of a full experience. One can experience the taste in one's imagination, but one's thirst is not quenched by it! The full experience, the quenching of thirst, presupposes reality, not imagination.

Just as man can only receive the evidence of reality through experience in the external sense world, so he only acquires the ability to distinguish between reality and deception in the spiritual world through strict spiritual training. In the manner described, the spiritual researcher comes to a stage where he is confronted with a new kind of being, of facts that lie behind the sense world. By strengthening the life of the soul, real spiritual eyes are created in one's own soul life, so that man may find a new world.

Also with regard to his own life, man can only come to reality through such imagination. If a person first forms such imaginations, as they have been described, with regard to his own life, if he imagines this or that in a symbolic way, what he has experienced, if he meditatively delves into his own past life, then this life can come to his soul in a kind of images. If he is then able to gain control over these images, if he can erase this life by conjuring it up before his soul, he has won the victory over himself. Just as he [now] sees something occurring externally that is real, but he has erased everything that is connected with his present life – when he follows this process, he comes to something that belongs to him but not to his present life. There he actually ascends to what we call his previous life on earth, and he arrives at the realization of his previous lives on earth. For this is what spiritual science leads us to: our previous earthly lives, and in so doing it provides us with proof that our entire life, in repeated earthly lives and in the intervening periods in the purely spiritual realm, is a continuous process. This idea may be unappealing to the mind, but it is something that will become part of our culture in the future.

But then the question of fate dissolves in a strangely strange way, in that we know: this is not the first time we have lived this life and we still have many more lives on earth ahead of us. Back then, [in earlier lives on earth], we prepared ourselves for what now determines our destiny. And the question of immortality gains its proper illumination when we look at the gate of death in such a way that we pass through it, then live in a purely spiritual world, in order to enter a new life on earth with all that we have acquired, which yields the fruits of earlier lives. Then we are not talking in general terms about immortality, which is composed limb by limb. We gain from the certainty that we see our own lives, certain abilities that teach us to see that another and yet another life must follow. Thus genuine spiritual scientific research leads us to the truth, but the right path must be taken in the sense indicated.

All such knowledge then leads further to that stage where we not only see what arose in images, but also acquire the ability to experience in a non-pictorial way, so to speak: inspiration. Through inspiration, we penetrate into the meaning of things and entities, and through intuition, the next level of inner life, we become one with things, we experience what lies invisibly in things as spirit.

One can say in response to such an argument: Yes, when the spiritual researcher enters into a spiritual world and can say from this spiritual world how the riddle of fate is to be solved, can say: Yes, an immortal lives in you – this applies only to the spiritual researcher. That is not the case. The truth about the nature of spiritual research must also become clear if it is to become a factor in our culture.

What does the spiritual researcher gain when he enters higher worlds? He comes to recognize his essential soul core, to be able to say to himself: When the hair turns pale, when the body gradually withers, then a soul core weaves within me, which I feel becoming stronger and stronger, acquiring strength in life, then living in an intermediate life [between death and a new birth], and then coming to life again in a new earthly life. One could say: Only the spiritual researcher can experience this certainty. What then do other people have to gain from it, who can only use their intellect? If we want to recognize this, we have to realize that everything that the spiritual researcher brings is nothing other than the experience of the spiritual world. But an urge and an impulse asserts itself in him immediately; it is the urge to bring down everything one experiences in the spiritual world into the concepts of the real world. The true spiritual researcher is not satisfied with his journey into the spiritual worlds until he can clothe in logical forms what he knows from the spiritual worlds — so that his experiences are understandable to all people. And the spiritual researcher has no certainty about immortality, no certainty about destiny, until he can express his experiences in general ideas and concepts.

How does he relate to his ideas then? He relates to them as a painter who is learning to paint, who is learning how to handle colors, who is learning everything that belongs to the art of painting, relates to the picture that he brings onto the canvas. What the painter learns is all his own business at first. But then the picture is before us. Two people can stand before this picture. One may be inclined to spiritualize everything, then he will understand the secrets that the person has placed in the picture. The other would only look at the color combinations in the picture. Just as the painter relates to his picture and is not satisfied until his skill is reflected in it, so the spiritual researcher relates to his experience when he has conveyed it to other people in an understandable way. This picture, when it is painted by the true spiritual researcher, is such that every understanding observer who stands before it can understand it - explanations would only disturb, because the picture must be grasped inwardly. If a person has only enough impartiality and free power of judgment, he can accept it as a mental image, which he can absorb; he then has everything that the spiritual researcher was able to fathom in the spiritual world. One must be clear about the fact that in what the spiritual researcher puts into his picture, there is nothing that cannot be grasped with the mind, with the means of healthy thinking.

Everything we need for the strength of life, everything we need at all, cannot come to us through the research of science, but through spiritual science - through what we absorb when the spiritual researcher presents his perceptions in ideas. The strange thing is that the spiritual researcher does not receive what he needs for his life through his research, but through what he can have in common with ordinary people: Only when the spiritual researcher has made the seen comprehensible to other people does he gain security in life, orientation in relation to fate and satisfaction. Through spiritual research, one gains insights into the entire world; but what the research can be, the spiritual researcher cannot gain from it if it cannot be presented in comprehensible forms. And the spiritual researcher cannot be served by anything other than what he can make useful to the non-spiritual researcher. There must be spiritual researchers; and you will see from my book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” that every person can come to a certain level of this knowledge. In order to acquire what the soul needs for the security of life, for the joy of living, for the security of its roots in the immortal, what the soul needs so that man can look forward to old age with peace of mind, can be recognized through the results of spiritual research, and in this the spiritual researcher attains nothing more than the other; and only then does the spiritual researcher have something of his ideas when he has presented them in the forms of common sense.

That is the truth about spiritual research; that is the truth about the relationship of spiritual research to life, and it must be firmly held that from this spiritual research itself only that has value which can be so placed in life. The spiritual researcher who can live in the spiritual world may see many things, but what he sees there has value only if he can also judge it. Some people can indeed come to visions through exercises if they do not go through everything that has been characterized as the true way today; they can come to see many things – but what value, what significance the vision has, whether it has any truth value, can be quite unknown to them personally. One must first be able to judge what one sees; one must first be able to appreciate it in its significance for life. But where does one gain this possibility? Through nothing other than the power of judgment and morality that one has already acquired in ordinary life before entering the spiritual world. He who has a moral sense will enter the spiritual world with it and be able to judge things rightly. The one who is foolish or immoral will only be able to judge what he sees wrongly. Therefore, a person's value is not increased if he is able to see the supernatural through all kinds of means. Even the spiritual researcher is only valuable through that which makes a person valuable, through sound judgment and moral strength. But the havoc that unhealthy judgment and immorality wreak when the spiritual researcher enters the spiritual worlds with them will be shown to us tomorrow when we speak of the errors of spiritual science.

The question could be raised: Yes, but what then are the truths of spiritual research? Just as it is impossible to list the truths of another science in an hour, it is equally impossible to list the truths of spiritual science in an hour. It should be shown how man comes to the truth in spiritual research and not to error, how man, through the development of the forces slumbering in him, creates spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, to use Goethe's words, in order to see into a spiritual world. Now one cannot say that this is a rule as truth, that this is a rule as error; one can only say that the soul of man will mature on this path to see truths and not errors. This path should be spoken of today. Tomorrow the sources of error will be clearly explained. Today's and tomorrow's lectures belong together. Today's lecture should show how the human soul can strengthen itself spiritually in order to perceive the spiritual world, just as the eye and the mind can perceive the sensual world. In this way, the human soul perceives everything. That it is born out of the external world of the senses and at the same time [is] in the spiritual being, a saying by Goethe tells us:

If the eye were not sunlike,
How could we behold the light?
If the power of God did not live in us,
How could we be enraptured by the divine?

It is true, in ourselves there must be an eye, with all its power, for us to behold the light; the eye must be solar. And for a person, there must be an inner activity of God's life so that he can perceive God.

But such a saying in the Goethean sense is not meant as it would be said by [Schopenhauer], for example: the world is a representation. We would be far from the meaning of Goethe's saying if we believed that we should create the whole external world only as an imitation of the inner world, as some philosophers claim. This must be said, as Goethe says: Man would have no eyes if sunlight did not permeate space. And just as it is true that we only recognize light through the eye, it is equally true that we only have an eye because light floods space, for it is light that has brought out the eye in the first place. Beings that had eyes but have lived in caves for many generations lose the organ of the eye, the eyes atrophy. The eye is a creature of light. Thus the fact that we have organs for light, through which we can have it, is at the same time proof of the existence of light. The fact that man can experience spiritual things in himself, that he can awaken supernaturality in himself, is proof that the supernatural is not only in him and that he does not dream it, but that the spiritual that interweaves all space and time has brought forth the spiritual in us in the first place, as light brings forth the eye.

Thus we can supplement Goethe's beautiful saying, which points us to our inner light and sun, to our inner divinity, with a saying that is from the inner spirituality of man for the outer reality of the spiritual. We can summarize the result of our reflection on the reality of that spiritual in which we rest, as we rest as sense beings in the material world; we can summarize it by juxtaposing Goethe's saying with the other saying:

If the world were not [endowed with the sun],
How could eyes blossom for the being?
If existence were not God's revelation,
How could people come to be filled with spirit?

Dear attendees! In the field of spiritual research, which was discussed here yesterday, it is even more necessary than in any other field of knowledge of life to search for the sources of error. It is especially necessary for the reason that on the paths of truth, of which we spoke yesterday, error lurks at every turn, so to speak, and because the nature of error in relation to the exploration of the spiritual worlds is quite different from that in the exploration of the sensual world in which man lives. It may be said that, to a certain extent, an old saying of the great philosopher Aristotle can serve as a motto for the seeker of truth on his way into the spiritual worlds. This saying sounds simple at first, but it is quite difficult to follow. It reads:

Only he can know the truth who has ceased to love his own opinion.

This saying applies to all of life's experiences and wisdom, but it applies to a particularly high degree in the field we are dealing with here. In our external life, what is contained in this saying is disregarded everywhere, so to speak. What do we hear people emphasize more often than: This is my point of view on any given matter, this is my opinion. And particularly in our time it is emphasized again and again that it is justified, and only justified, if every human being asserts his point of view, so to speak, his opinion about some matter. Of course, one can admit such a demand of life up to a certain limit, but to the real truth, namely to the truth in the spiritual field, such a point of view cannot lead. For one's own opinion – one has formed it in life entirely according to one's personal education, the personal circumstances in which one has lived, according to the part of the world that has just come across one; and it does not actually take much to realize that this opinion, which an individual personality has formed, can at least have only a narrow validity under all circumstances.

Now, in the realm of intellectual life, the fact that we bring our opinions, our view of life, our point of view with us when we engage in research intervenes in a completely different way than in any sensual realm. In ordinary life, where we are dealing with external things, we can say that error corrects itself at every turn. If we form a false opinion about this or that being or this or that process in the sensory world, we only need to let the appearance of this being or this fact itself affect us, and the incorrect judgment is, so to speak, eliminated. We cannot approach a matter with an incorrect judgment without the matter itself proving us wrong. In the spiritual realm, it is quite different. There it is a matter of course that all beings, all facts receive their very special coloration from that which we bring with us as our own soul constitution, as that which lives in our soul. And we carry a wrong opinion into the spiritual world with us; it lays itself like a veil over the corresponding observation. And if we want to hold on to this wrong opinion, then the spiritual fact, which is veiled by our opinion, cannot convict us of lying. It wraps itself in the garment of our wrong opinion and appears to us in a completely false form.

If, on the other hand, we want to point to mediumship as the antithesis of true spiritual research – without recognizing it as justified for spiritual research and without expecting to gain anything from it – then this is only for the sake of explanation. Those people who, in the manner already discussed yesterday, want to receive messages from the spiritual worlds through mediums or somnambulists are usually very concerned that their medium does not pick up, let us say, spiritual-scientific truths or any convictions from certain points of view about the spiritual world. For the people who make use of mediums are justifiably afraid that in the event that the medium has absorbed certain thoughts about the spiritual world into the ordinary consciousness and soul life, the fact that when the medium is put into his sleep-like state, what he has absorbed comes out again in his revelations, that, so to speak, the personal interferes with what the medium is supposed to reveal. And such people believe that they can only come to real, factual revelations of the spiritual world that stands behind the physical world when they have eliminated all personal feeling from the medium, when there is, so to speak, no predisposition at all to put anything personal into his revelations.

What do such people strive for? [They strive] to eliminate the personal, everything that comes from elsewhere than from the subconscious depths of the medium. That is why most is given to such revelations of mediums of which one can be certain that the mediums have not been in contact with the matter concerned in any way. If the medium speaks in a language of which one knows that it is unknown to him, then most is given to such revelations, and rightly so. What such persons strive for, who make use of mediums, can serve as an explanation. For even if spiritual research does not use anything that comes from this side, it is still true for the true spiritual researcher, who makes himself an instrument to penetrate into the spiritual worlds, that he must strip away the personal, that is, that which is only attached to his own soul life and is peculiar to his own soul life.

This is a more difficult task than is usually believed, because it requires something that is, so to speak, extremely difficult for ordinary consciousness to understand. It is necessary [that which] is called in spiritual research “the encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold”. The threshold here refers to that which demarcates the realm of the sense world from the spiritual world. What is this “Guardian of the Threshold” if we start from ordinary life and its relationship to truth? Because basically, this Guardian of the Threshold is the sum of those forces and powers that prevent people from true self-knowledge in their ordinary lives and that lead them to this self-knowledge if they want to become a spiritual researcher. But in everyday life, self-knowledge is not an easy thing, and precisely because the human soul clings to what it has formed from its experiences, from everything it encounters. And this is precisely how the various points of view arise, the struggles of opinions, where materialism and spiritualism, realism and idealism, and many other points of view, which people advocate with devotion, but which make it impossible for people to understand each other, especially with regard to the most important things.

What is the actual situation regarding these points of view? Anyone who considers the human soul in relation to the rest of existence will be able to see, when he delves into the matter, that idealism, materialism, realism and so on arise as human opinions because man always has only a limited and then forms his opinion from this; and he loves this opinion of his, and it is actually love that inspires him for this opinion and makes him think that this opinion is the only possible one and fights against other points of view. This love is basically self-love. That which we have achieved, which is so closely connected with us that we actually become the thing itself - it is understandable that we love it. If we give it up, we give up ourselves. That is the significance of clinging to certain points of view in life: everyone feels that if they give them up, they give up themselves, because their whole self has taken on the coloration of the point of view. A person cannot but affirm this point of view.

There are people who, through their lives or the direction of their science, through their preoccupation with purely external things, which live in their ideas, people who are accustomed to only fix their eyes on what is material about things, become materialists; their attention is diverted from everything that is not material, and they are materialists, not because idealism is wrong. For anyone who really understands the arguments will soon see that materialists have good reasons for their assertions. But idealists also have good reasons for their views, and only someone who is biased in his materialistic direction actually sees bad reasons for idealism. Man only opposes idealism and insists on materialism when he adopts the habits of thinking that he only has to do with material things. Other people are, so to speak, less affected by the hardness and density of matter. They are more directly pointed to the struggles and victories of human life through their abilities and circumstances. Such people become idealists. They see the reasons that speak for idealism, and since they have never learned to pay attention to the reasons that speak for materialism, they regard materialism as the great error that must be fought.

And so one could characterize all spiritual directions; one would always have to lead them back to what the people have in the way of abilities and circumstances. But those who have come to a broader horizon, like Goethe, knew, and this is known by anyone who can look at the different worldviews impartially. Goethe knew that all points of view have a certain one-sidedness and that basically, for and against each point of view, much can be argued. Some people, however, also realize this, and then they easily come to the conclusion that the truths lie between the different points of view, so that a balance can be found, so to speak. But anyone who wants to know the truth in this area can be compared to a person who sits between two chairs. But the right thing would be to use both chairs, depending on the circumstances. To this end, he who is able to relate human opinions to their relationship to the all-encompassing world will come.

[Goethe says]: Truth does not lie between the different points of view, but between these lies the task, the path to truth. What does that mean? It means that when considering the individual world views, one must say that materialism is fully justified in the material realm, and that those who want to explain the material world with spiritualism will not uncover anything. Concepts of materialism belong in the world of materialism, and the mistake of materialism is not that materialism is used to explain the material, but that one also wants to explain the spiritual realm with materialism. It is the other way round for spiritualism. The enthusiastic idealist will speak everywhere of the spiritual and spiritual forces; he is like someone who looks at a clock and does not want to explain the mechanism of the clock in a mechanical way, but seeks a demon inside it that moves the hands forward. This is what one comes to and must come to if one wants to come to the truth about the different worldviews, which are only opinions after all: that one is able to see the justification and limitations of the different views.

What prevents man from doing this? Depending on the field of the world and of life, man loves his point of view with true self-love; he cannot get out of himself, cannot put himself in the place of another point of view. That is why it is so resented when one looks at Haeckel and puts oneself in his mind and does not everywhere have the tendency to fight Haeckel from a spiritual or ideal point of view, and when one turns to other minds and looks at them just as objectively. The true spiritual researcher must be able to put himself in the shoes of the positive and negative aspects of the various points of view. For it is a peculiarity of human nature that when a person applies such a method to his soul, as was discussed yesterday, then his opinions and points of view change with him. We can observe this very well, especially with the opposing points of view - idealism and materialism.

Someone who rejects everything spiritual, who is a strict materialist, will not apply any method to his soul as described yesterday; all of this is nonsense and folly to him. From his materialistic point of view, he is right. But the one who, as a spiritual researcher, not only sees the material effect in life, but can look into the whole mechanism of life, into the spiritual forces that stand behind the sensual, knows that it is not the material opinion that prevents this person, who rejects all methods of spiritual research, from coming to it. Man can deny the spiritual world if he wants. But this spiritual world does not only exist in a separate spiritual realm; this spiritual world is also present everywhere in the sensual, material world. Even in the matter that the materialist alone observes, spirit is present everywhere. But this spirit, which only lives in the material, is the spirit, the power that, when it works through man – and it does so when he has the thinking habits of moving only in the material – causes him to be incapable of directing his soul's reflection, his soul's direction, to the spirit at all. There is something in all material existence that has such an effect on us that it draws us away from the spirit, distracts us. There we see how error works.

In our studies of spiritual research, as they now try to engage in the spiritual cultural life of the present, we call this spirit, which lives in matter and works there as a force that darkens man's view of the spiritual world, the Ahrimanic spirit. This spirit is the same one that Goethe portrays in Faust as Mephisto, who accompanies Faust, who accompanies every human being, because every human being has to deal with the material world. This, then, is the power that darkens our view of the spiritual world. Materialists can indeed deny the spirit with their concepts, but it would be a serious mistake to believe that they can do any harm to the reality of the spirit. It takes revenge on them and obscures their views. This is the peculiar effect in the soul of the materialist, that this spirit erects a wall, that man cannot see the spiritual world; so the materialist denies the spiritual world because the spirit of matter inspires him to do so. You can deny him, but you cannot escape him, and what is buzzing around in the world as materialism is actually the inspiration of the [Ahrimanic] spirit. Goethe was right when he has Faust confront the mothers in such a way that Mephisto presents the spiritual realm as a nothing. But Faust says: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All.” – The materialist should admit to himself that he belongs to a certain group of people about whom Mephisto says:

The devil this little group never sees

And even if he had them by the collar.

It is precisely the material spirit that the little people do not feel and that inspires their materialism. In this way, if we go deep enough, we see how materialism cancels itself out, because it is itself a product of the spirit.

Let us now take the idealist's point of view. He wants nothing to do with materialism; he has formed ideas and feelings that only lead him into spiritual spheres. It would certainly not occur to him to apply what has been said to himself, but the one-sidedness of the idealistic point of view is evident precisely in these points. If the idealist, who rejects matter, applies the method mentioned yesterday to himself and gains access to the spiritual world, his way of thinking and feeling, his whole attitude, confronts him there; he carries it into this world, and the result is that this person can enter the spiritual world, but he sees everything through the spectacles of his opinions and ideas, and [he sees] that there are a great many such beings in the spiritual world that are called demonic natures, which do not appear in the external world but live in the spiritual world. These beings are too insignificant for our world – and who distract man from the world to which he nevertheless belongs, since he is born as a human being in a physical body; so the idealist, if he is narrow-minded, is very easily driven into certain methods in the world that we call demonic. He is so firmly rooted in this that, whereas he used to understand nothing of matter, so to speak, he now shuns it. People then end up in all kinds of false ascetic directions. He wants nothing more to do with matter, and his error leads him to an estrangement from the world to which he really belongs. He falls into loneliness.

This example shows us that errors in the spiritual realm are more disastrous than in the sensual realm. In the sensual world, errors are corrected; in the spiritual realm, however, errors are like realities that confront us, although these realities themselves are brought in by us. We cannot get through them. All errors [in the spiritual realm] affect our personality like realities. In the sensual realm, one can become free of errors through refutation; in the spiritual realm, there is no way but through struggle, for one must fight against that which appears as real. In the field of spiritual research, therefore, the fight will not be a mere logical one, but an ongoing spiritual work, a fight against the powers of error, for there are the powers of error.

The question now arises: How can we find the way to become efficient fighters against error in the spiritual field? We can do this through true self-knowledge! How do we go beyond the one-sidedness of materialism, spiritualism, idealism and realism in our [ordinary] lives? By making the decision once in our lives to see how we actually came to our opinions. This is a momentous decision, less difficult to grasp than to carry out. When we trace our lives back in strict introspection and ask ourselves how we came to this or that school of thought, when we examine how our attitudes and opinions arose, then we, so to speak, put ourselves together, then there comes a point where it can become difficult for us, where our minds feel great resistance. Whether one was a materialist or idealist or insisted on some other opinion that one thought was the only right one – then one feels: one has only received this opinion through one's own experience. Then comes the moment when one first feels what opinions and worldviews actually are.

As long as you interact with the world without prejudice and carry your views with you, you don't even notice how much you love your opinions; but once you withdraw from the world and realize how you have become a materialist, how you have become a spiritualist, then you come to the point of saying to yourself: Yes, basically, when you no longer have these or those thoughts, what remains of you? Then you become completely empty? You feel how you gradually cut yourself out of yourself. What then comes is that terrible moment in life when you see yourself disappearing, when you turn your gaze to the formation of your opinion. But no one can come to a worldview who does not practice self-knowledge. Then you stop insisting on your opinion, only then do you understand the saying of the old wise man Aristotle:

Only those can recognize the truth who have ceased to love their own opinion.

Then you really start to love your opinion when you have to give it up, just as you really feel love for a being when you lose it. The moment you recognize the origin of your opinion and learn to give it up, that's when you really love it. That is what our mind experiences.

If you now come to the realization that all these points of view are valid, you feel for a while as if you are floating in the air between the different points of view, standing without a floor in the world with your soul's existence. It exercises self-knowledge if you look at it as worldly wisdom without crossing the threshold. But there is a direct path from this self-knowledge, if it is energetically carried out, really into the world, to which attention was drawn yesterday. For the one who is left with no play on words by what has been described, who experiences it inwardly, with inner pain, who experiences it with all his energy, who has warmth for what happens in the world, who cannot stand coldly before the world, such a person, in this self-inspection, will experience one of the meditations that were pointed out yesterday. Because such introspection is an important kind of meditation. If it is done often, then something arises that is similar to the imagination that was shown yesterday, but such an imagination that refers to ourselves. And what then arises as a result of the introspection of ordinary life, if one takes introspection that far – what then arises is: one sees how one is in one's own being. Before, you only knew your opinion, but now you see how far you have brought each part of the soul that lies below your conscious life, that goes from life to life, in the present life.

This then arises from the spiritual world itself. You come to realize what you actually are as a human being; you never came to this realization in ordinary life. We only rarely occupy ourselves with ourselves, but when we descend into ourselves, we spiritually face ourselves. This self-knowledge is what we have called “the encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold”. For that which rests in the part of the soul that goes from life to life does not show itself in ordinary life, and as long as it does not show itself, we cannot enter the spiritual world. In ordinary life, our own nature veils the spiritual world from us; at the moment we want to enter the spiritual world, we have to have the aforementioned encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold, we have to objectively face our own being, which we now face in a reincarnated being.

Then we come to see the depth of our own being, which we were spared in life, and it may be said: This world institution is beneficial, that this guardian of the threshold hides himself for ordinary life, because you can easily imagine that a person is not always strong enough to give up that which he must love most; a fear and terror of himself, so to speak, would overtake the unprepared and unripe person for true self-inspection to such an extent that it would have to bring irregularity into his inner soul life. Therefore, all true schooling for the path into the spiritual world is such that the disciple is made ready for the encounter with the “Guardian of the Threshold”. The mere enunciation of what has just been said can never be intimidating. It is only when one has one's own beingness before one that one feels that it is that which, if not faced and recognized, would prevent one from ever entering into truth into the spiritual world. We only see the spiritual world clearly when we have placed this Guardian of the Threshold within us, when we contemplate him as another being, that is, when we have been reborn. Only then can we judge how what we have been up to now is the source of all error.

Then the great, powerful fact arises before us, which can be formulated in the question: Where do the errors of spiritual research come from? They come from what we personally are; that is mixed with truth and error. We can only separate these when we can look at ourselves objectively. Only when we have ourselves in the world we are looking into, can we find a way to fight the powers of error. But there is still another difficulty, because the feeling of facing nothingness increases when one enters the spiritual world. As long as one is connected in some way with the external world, that external world is always the cause that one still loves one's own individuality too strongly. But when you look at yourself, when this peculiarity has become something like an object of the external world, then the evil temptation approaches us, that we are seized by an infinite love for our self - and never is the spiritual researcher more in danger of falling into error than now. Therefore, it takes all courage to tear all self-love out of the heart from this moment on; one must tear it out of the heart if one wants to fight errors.

So we can say that basically moral courage is the deciding factor at a certain level of spiritual realization when it comes to overcoming errors, and then we see how it becomes possible to fight the errors when we feel the source of the errors, our personal self, standing before us. If we can do this, then we will also be able to turn a healthy gaze back into ordinary life; then we will find that both those demonic powers and those Ahrimanic powers that inspire materialism, and also the enthusiastic powers, that all these spiritual powers and spiritual entities are the revelations of the spiritual world. Only then do we face the full reality. Only then do we gain a sound judgment of those who fall into errors of spiritual science, that they do not want to believe in real spiritual powers in the historical course of human development, but speak of ideas that guide the course of history.

In the nineteenth century, historians appeared who spoke of ideas in history. Those who understand the facts in this area know that ideas live in people, but that they cannot work to understand them. These ideas can no more work in history than a painter can paint a picture. And when in our time a doctrine arises that seeks to replace a historical and personal Christ, saying that one can believe in the idea of Christ, this doctrine is based on the view that ideas can have an effect, that ideas are not merely the expression of real beings. But only when we recognize the spiritual Powers standing behind them, can real life be understood.

When one accepts such a world-view, one need not be a spiritual researcher oneself to see whether his teachings are true. Man must pass through self-knowledge, for the assurance and elevation of his life. It is absolutely true that when the spiritual researcher forms and fashions what he has researched into human ideas, then everyone who is unbiased enough can understand these images. And that is why it must be emphasized that the true path of the listener to the spiritual researcher is not to devotedly surrender to the authority of the spiritual researcher, but rather the true relationship of the listener to the confessor is one that arises out of the free judgment of the listener. The spiritual researcher can only come to a correct judgment about what he sees if he applies his common sense, his healthy thinking, and if this thinking is morally and intellectually sound. But this brings us to the point where we can not only speak of the errors themselves, but also of the errors that arise in the dissemination of spiritual research, and these are very important. It is not possible to specify individual errors and how to avoid them. Rather, it can only be said that whoever advances more and more conscientiously to true spiritual research will avoid the errors that lurk everywhere. We will fight error when we recognize ourselves. Errors also arise when there is not the right relationship between those who profess and the spiritual researcher himself. Here too we have all kinds of points of view. A large number of our contemporaries reject everything that comes from spiritual research. The spiritual researcher can understand such points of view. That is why he finds so much opposition, because spiritual research is something that is new to our culture and that thinking is not yet attuned to. That is one way in which spiritual research is encountered today. A number of these people do come, however, when they realize the errors of materialism and gradually approach the results of spiritual research. It is different with the confessors. Just as much as criticism of the spiritual researchers, they experience, on the other hand, false confession, which recognizes authority and does not see that everything can be tested. The spiritual researcher does not shy away from a close examination, only from those examinations that arise from a superficial scientific approach, but not from a thorough one. It is the right approach to take what the spiritual researcher offers, to be inspired and then to examine it with the mind through which it can be examined. But besides the dismissive people, there are many who find it easier to simply believe instead of examining. And it is from these people that the kind of confession comes that leads above all to error after error in the spread of spiritual research. Because one does not check, but accepts what the spiritual researcher gives, the spiritual researcher is considered something of a higher animal by such a believing confessor. Because he looks into the spiritual world, he is considered a higher being.

It is correct to not see such a spiritual researcher as a special being. The value of a spiritual researcher does not depend on his ability to see into a spiritual world, but on his moral and intellectual qualities. This is, so to speak, an area of purely human research, because its results are connected with all the hopes and longings of man, and just as one is not held in higher esteem for pursuing mathematical or geometrical science, so one should not be held in higher esteem for being a spiritual researcher. When one peers into the spiritual world, one does not yet need to have a judgment about what is seen; one can look in and see many things and tell the greatest nonsense and the greatest errors from this world. Only then, when one regards the spiritual researcher, so to speak, as nothing more than an instrument through which spiritual truths flow into the world, and then checks for oneself, only then does one have the right relationship to the spiritual world. Otherwise, how could charlatans so easily set themselves up alongside the real spiritual researchers? But those who do not want to examine cannot distinguish between what has been conscientiously gained and what has been gained by false and even fraudulent means.

The spiritual researcher can only save himself from his confessor by not being tempted to become overconfident in the faith that is placed in him. There are natures that, when they see that they are being regarded as something special, communicate all kinds of things that have only been obtained by false means. That is why charlatanry and humbug are often indistinguishable. And much less harmful in terms of the dissemination of spiritual research are the critical opponents, as long as they are not driven by their longing than the blindly faithful followers. In no other field is belief in authority worse and more harmful than in the field of spiritual research, and in no other field is this belief so at home. A healthy dissemination of spiritual research and spiritual science in our time, which wants to avoid errors within what it disseminates, must above all be concerned with eliminating blind faith from all dissemination of spiritual science.

However, we are still far from this ideal in many respects because of the complacency of the many, because they no longer check whether what the spiritual researcher says is justified. If they like what is offered, they accept it on blind faith in authority. It is always possible to apply common sense to what is presented in spiritual science, and when one sees that the spiritual researcher is endeavoring to place the results of his research in such strict [gap in the transcript] images, when does not tend towards enthusiasm on the one hand or carelessness on the other, but when one sees how he treats all matters of spiritual research in the same logical way as external matters, only then is he a true spiritual researcher. Then, when he sees more and more souls of the present and the future incline towards spiritual research in this way, then the objection cannot be raised that [Jelder should be a spiritual researcher. Just as not everyone needs to become a botanist to understand botanical research, not everyone needs to become a spiritual researcher either – although anyone can become one.

But the ideas of spiritual research must spread more and more, because we live in a time when souls long for what only spiritual science can give. Its facts are what souls long for today and will long for more and more. He who can grasp the spirit of the time knows that certain needs of the soul can only be satisfied if spiritual science finds its way to the hearts and souls. But since the time itself will ensure that there will be enough spiritual researchers, and since one only needs logical mind and a sense of truth [to see the results of spiritual research], then through these spiritual researchers one will find the way that open up the perspective for everyone to enter the spiritual worlds, that spiritual world from which man can come security, joy, hope for the life in which he is, and that which opens up when the gate of death closes. That security, which can develop with the approach of wisdom towards old age, when our body decays, to prepare to go through a spiritual existence, to come back to this earth to continue its work - that security, that certainty will these souls, these personalities find in the spiritual world.

This perspective will arise for more and more souls of the present and the future: the opportunity to look into this spiritual world. And a time will come when truly every single person, not just the spiritual researcher, will stand there in such a way that [he] will take a very simple stand against all denial of the spiritual world. These people will become so great as the force of the reasons for spiritual research [for the same] continues to grow. Such secure souls will behave towards the deniers of the spiritual world as Goethe once behaved when the philosophy that came from Greek thought, which could not come to terms with the laws of movement, came before his soul. They said that there was no movement, that it was only apparent, that when a body moves, it is actually at rest in every moment; but movement is not composed of rest, so there is no movement. There was such a school of philosophy! Goethe, when he heard about this philosophy, said:

They may see what they want,

You remain calm, remain silent;

And if they deny you movement,

Walk around in front of their noses.

In this way, movement is proven by the evidence of walking in front of their noses.

If one could delve a little into the certainty of the souls that must come, which will gradually feel the force of the spiritual-scientific proofs, such souls will then confront the deniers of the spirit just as surely as Goethe confronted the deniers of the movement. Such souls will then perhaps say to those who disdain to regard as foolishness the science of the spirit:

Adversity may arise,
but you remain calm, remain cheerful,
and if they deny the spirit,
do not brood over it.
Yes, in the end even agree with them,
their spirit is in a bad way.

Question and Answer

Question: Is the soul of the deceased aware of the life just concluded?

Rudolf Steiner: In “Occult Science”, we have attempted to characterize the nature of consciousness. Those who want to inform themselves must let the presentation given there take effect on them. [One can answer the question] with an absolute “Yes”, but this “Yes” needs to be explained, and that is only possible through a detailed presentation.

Question: Why are new embodiments always necessary, in other words, why is there never any rest?

Rudolf Steiner: The questioner probably regards rest as something desirable, which underlies the question. What can be meant by the concept of rest here? Rest that is the rest of death or some other kind of behavior? It is impossible to find out what is meant by 'calm' here. Of course, not all of life's mysteries can be solved in a lecture, and many things must remain unsaid. Of course, the embodiments do not continue uninterruptedly from eternity to eternity; they once took a beginning from a purely spiritual existence, and at the end of the earth we will be in a different spiritual state, no longer returning to the earthly existence. But in the meantime, we have to undergo incarnations. Repeated earthly lives are necessary because only in this way can a person approach the all-round development and realization of his potential, approaching his goal in an ascending and descending wave. That is precisely the course of earthly development; the earth never remains the same after a certain number of centuries; consider all that has changed, not only in culture, since the founding of Christianity! One experiences great intervals, not short ones, between two successive earthly lives. The soul is therefore in a position to always experience something new.

Question: In which incarnation will we be resurrected on Judgment Day, in the first or in the last?

Rudolf Steiner: Incarnation is not fixed; one must be clear about how the word “incarnation” is meant here: how “resurrection” is meant. One must first understand St. Paul's teaching on the spiritual body. This has nothing at all to do with the physical body. Only then can an answer to this question be given.

Question: What dreams at night, the soul or the brain?

Rudolf Steiner: This is easy to answer from what was said yesterday. The soul is in the astral world during sleep, and the human being experiences his dreams inwardly; of course it is not the brain that dreams, but the soul.

Question: What consolation can a person who is not clairvoyant find in the doctrine of reincarnation, since only the spiritual researcher can see his past incarnations and the other person would have to despair because he cannot see for himself?

Rudolf Steiner: In the lecture it was said: It does not depend on doing research in the spiritual worlds oneself, but rather, when these things are expressed in concepts, everyone can understand them and the spiritual researcher himself has no more from them than what he gains from his clairvoyance by expressing them in concepts. The doctrine of re-embodiment is something that gives life security and content. So this question is already answered in the lecture. One should also read the booklet 'Reincarnation and Karma'. Then one will find what can give the soul security and comfort, and that it has been ensured that the non-spiritual researcher also has the opportunity to understand it. Question: I have already taken part in two introductory courses, but I still do not understand how it is possible that some people are doing badly, some are doing well; often highly developed people are doing badly, while the rich libertine finds no punishment, but still lives a joyful life.

Rudolf Steiner: The latter does not follow from the doctrine of reincarnation, because it is not the case that life always advances, but [that] it ascends and descends, as [it] just [the] causes [it] yield. That a rich libertine would find an even more joyful life, such a question arises from a complete misunderstanding of the overall course of human life. If someone observes another person or themselves and finds another person noble or themselves quite noble, or afflicted by suffering and misfortune, the judgment they make in the given moment is by no means always decisive.

I will give you a comparison: Let us imagine a young person who has lived off his father's pocket until the age of eighteen, let us assume that it was not a bad life. When he is 18 years old, his father loses his fortune. He was not doing badly before, but he gets into this bad situation; now he has to learn something proper when he has not learned anything proper before. Now, at this time of his life, he will consider this stroke of fate as something quite difficult, quite undeserved. When he is 50 years old, he may look back and say to himself: If that hadn't happened back then, I would now be a good-for-nothing and would know nothing about the world. At 50 years old, he will judge [it] quite differently than at 18 years old.

We are usually not the right judges of our own clumsiness. Later, however, we will judge more objectively, especially from the spiritual world in the time between death and birth, or in subsequent earthly lives, when one can already look back; because everyone will achieve that; humanity is developing; everyone will be able to look back, which now only the spiritual researcher can do. Then one will say: That which seemed inexplicable at first, that was precisely the reason why I had to strongly resist, why I released forces that became the most important for further development, for ascent. In ordinary life one will see that already; one experiences many things. Many a person who, as a prospective spiritual researcher, looks at life more intimately and in more depth, will know how to tell about it. Then you look back on what brought you joy, pleasure and many other things, and you look back on the struggles, evil and pain you went through. You look back on all kinds of things. You will say to yourself: I am grateful to fate for the many joyful experiences I have had. But would you rather give up your joys or your sufferings? Then you may perhaps come to the realization: I would rather give up my joy and bliss, because I owe my pain and suffering my realization. You first have to know what becomes of the causes.

In short, one should not make the judgment of such a question so easy. Spiritual science has a deeply satisfying answer to all such questions.

Question: Would the same result be obtained if, for example, the astral body were perceived in the same way by several spiritual researchers?

Rudolf Steiner: This question cannot be answered meaningfully with a simple “yes” because what the spiritual researcher perceives in a kind of imaginary vision is only to some extent based on complete objectivity. What applies in the sensory world, that one can look at things from a different point of view, applies to a higher degree in higher worlds. If two people write a travelogue about the same area, there will still be a great difference. But one need not doubt altogether that these areas exist. And if we look into the ever-flowing, fleeting astral body, then it is understandable that the external image is different, even though the reality is quite the same. Therefore, one can answer this question in the affirmative, even if the external images are different, but no more different than when two people form an image of a physical-sensory object; seeing and representation are different in a certain way. Everything depends on the objectivity of the observer; it is always assumed that real spiritual researchers describe things.

Question: Must not the stripping away of the standpoint be taken so far that even what is peculiar to the human species is eliminated? [...]

Rudolf Steiner: The first question concerns the generic. What exactly is the generic? When we speak of the generic, we often imagine something quite abstract. But the concept of 'generic' can only be applied in the right sense to the realm of nature that is below the human being. Within the animal kingdom, the concept of the generic is fully justified because it cannot be a mere concept for a one-sided observation. For when people who are full of whims and fancies find that there are only individual dogs, and thus no such thing as “dog nature” or “wolf nature”, the retort is that if one only allows the individual being, for example the individual being “wolf”, to count, and not what reigns in it supersensibly, thus only recognizes the material, then the refutation is easily given. If a wolf only eats lambs, it shows that it does not become a lamb just because it eats lambs. But in the animal kingdom, we are interested in what lives in the species, just as we are interested in the individual, the ideal, in the human being. Therefore, only humans have a biography.

Some will find this strange because one can also have a biography of animals. It should not be denied that a mother dog can give a biography of her dogs, a mother cat a biography of her cats. But that is not the point. A teacher can also ask children to present the biography of their pens. But what is biographical in the individual is only found in humans. The concept of the species only makes sense in the case of humans if one lives in an abstract philosophy. On the other hand, the ideal in the human being is not exhausted in the species. What adheres to the human being through the people, the tribal characteristics, belongs to him in a different direction than to the animal. This species-like quality is even stripped away from the ideal; in the true sense of the word, one cannot even speak of it. At the beginning of the development of the earth, man was entirely a generic being, but in that lay the idea that individuals would all become ideal, so that the generic aspect plays a secondary role in man.

Question: Without doubt, the one who is to face the Guardian of the Threshold has to overcome great dangers that he does not know in advance; how can he protect himself, or is there no protection?

Rudolf Steiner: The path is followed in a concrete way if one follows what is given in “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Through this, the qualities are also implanted in the soul to enable one to pass the encounter in the right way. There are still great difficulties, but one has also acquired stronger forces.

Question: What can be said about Mohammed and his mission? Why did he have to come 600 years after Christ?

Rudolf Steiner: It is not possible to answer this question briefly; it would lead to the greatest misunderstandings. The answer would have to be given from the fundamentals. 600 years after the Christ Impulse, Mohammed gave content to such a human community, which was predisposed, on the one hand, to the sometimes fantastical mind and, on the other, to the fine elaboration of the intellect. Compared to the Christ impulse, it was something of a setback, an atavism. This shows how development generally occurs: in advances and setbacks. The nature of this Mohammedanism must be understood from the whole nature of development: the Christ impulse, the greatest religious impulse, which must gradually become part of the evolution of the earth, while the Mohammedan impulse had to oppose it before.

Question: Are the Theosophists in favor of cremation? Rudolf Steiner: Theosophists do not take sides for this

or that party, but these things are a matter of knowledge. One says what is true and right, and then everyone can build their own view of what they want to take up into life as impulses of will.

Such questions cannot be answered in absolute terms. The various stages of human development are different, and the same is not best for all times, but people change, and with that, the emergence or lack of emergence of human institutions changes. On the whole, for the time that has passed, and for a large number of people in the future, cremation is not an important [right?] thing, although the propagandists of cremation are, so to speak, pioneers of the future. But people have to mature, everything has only relative validity, so also the question: bury or burn for one age or another. For spiritual contemplation, many things appear different than for external perception.

Question: How do you reconcile the view that all people have already experienced life on earth with the fact that the earth used to be less and less populated?

Rudolf Steiner: This is a mere mathematical calculation, and it will be seen that what has been said is simply a bold assertion. The question comes up almost after every lecture. The intervals between two lives are not the same for all people. Sometimes there are many more people embodied in one age than in another shortly before. Let us assume that in the seventeenth century 100 souls were incarnated and in the sixteenth century 100 as well, and the intervals between their embodiments were different, then in the nineteenth century the 100 from both groups may have incarnated again, so there are 200 in the nineteenth century. Because the intervals are different due to the entire karma of the souls, there is an increase in certain periods of time. The conscientious person cannot speak of anything else. The time since the last incarnation is on average longer than the time that separates us, for example, from the discovery of America. But if it is claimed that the number of people is increasing, then one must first ask: How can this be proven by external things? For example: Who has studied the increase for China; so what is the population of the whole earth; or what worlds have perished; or what was before the discovery of America, and long before America was discovered? So with conscientious research, this claim cannot be made in the physical world.

Question: What does the speaker say about Adventism, where the world history is explained from Daniel and Revelation of John, and now the time is coming when Christ promises his return and the world will change socially and politically?

Rudolf Steiner: It is a well-known phenomenon that the sects today take the “viewpoint of all viewpoints” and are completely in love with their point of view, to a much greater extent than is the case with other people. And to give someone who belongs to a sect an explanation for this or that symbol, or to dissuade them, or to make something understandable, is usually a pure impossibility for this incarnation. But anyone who fully grasps the Aristotelian principle that 'only by disregarding one's own opinion can one arrive at the truth' has the right point of view. Anyone familiar with spiritual science knows that when you look at things more deeply, they cannot be taken quite so literally and in quite such a way as they often are from such a point of view. Nevertheless, nothing should be said against the piety and the cozy intimacy of the souls who are caught up in such a point of view, and one can have the highest respect for it. But in such sects one does not go beyond the point of view, which narrows the truth. Those who look back at the development of mankind will find that there have always been sects that have said the same thing. They said: In fifty years the return of Christ will be here. He did not come, but that did not refute the teachings; and however often the refutation occurred through the facts, it did not harm the point of view. It was no means a means of somehow refuting such a “point of view of points of view”.

Question: Is there any contradiction between spiritual science and positive Christianity?

Rudolf Steiner: The questioner usually understands positive Christianity to mean what he understands by Christianity. I cannot go into this further, I would have to talk a lot about the Christ impulse, the Christ presence.

Question: How can the doctrine of rebirth be understood empirically or philosophically?

Rudolf Steiner: I must refer you to the literature, “Occult Science” and so on; because one lecture would not be enough to answer this question; even if I would be able to give some lectures this very night, some listeners might not be able to; I do not want to boast!

Question: Is there a third cognitive faculty?

Rudolf Steiner: Imagination, inspiration, intuition; I am a little surprised that questions are being asked as if it were a fact that the lecture had not been listened to at all; after all, my answer was a detailed response to this question.

Question: Is there a real and practical difference between soul and spirit?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, it follows from Theosophy that they should not be lumped together. This lumping together happened quite recently in history; a council decreed that soul and spirit are not two different things, lumped them together; since then they have no longer been distinguished, not even in science; although science is not aware that it is following an ecclesiastical dogma. There is a real difference in the relationship to the body. The relationship of the spirit to the body is different from the relationship of the soul to the body and vice versa.

Question: Should not someone who grows up in the theosophical view, who first gets to the bottom of the view of this view, become free of it?

Rudolf Steiner: That is as if someone who has just eaten had to eat again immediately, because outwardly nothing has changed in this person, at least not in many cases, because he has just eaten. One attains self-knowledge when one stands outside of one's personal self; that is, one attains freedom through self-knowledge. If you now want to become free again, where you have already become free, this is even less justified than with the meal. But then you have already achieved liberation; there is no need to become free a second time after you have just become free. The point of view cannot be compared with mere materialism or individualism, because spiritual research uses all the different points of view, but not to stand on them, but to characterize them. And the truth is not in the middle, but by the reasons that can be given for it, these points of view appear to illuminate the real truth from different sides. Only those who get stuck in abstractions can apply what is applicable to one thing to another. But just as in real life you don't just have the general human characteristics, but are first a child, then a man, then an old man, and can't ask whether you have to shed the stage of childhood again, so the question of self-knowledge is there once, but not again. There is then knowledge in the world within, and from that point on, self-knowledge begins for the human being; that is the conclusion of self-knowledge, the self-knowledge that is acquired selflessly by the individual and thus has a selfless character.

Dearly beloved! For many years now I have been privileged to give one or more lectures here every year on the subject of what I dare call the spiritual-scientific world view. The friends of our spiritual-scientific world view were of the opinion that even in our fateful times such a lecture should be given here in this city again.

You will understand, dear ladies and gentlemen, that from the point of view of the spiritual-scientific world view, a consideration of our time must direct our feelings and emotions to what moves us in our immediate present as its most fateful content. We see various nations of the earth fighting with each other. Above all, we see Central Europe, as if locked in a great, mighty fortress, struggling for the most sacred goods. Every human soul must then, even if it wants to turn its thoughts to the most important, perhaps the highest riddle questions of existence, take with it the feelings that come from the events, which undoubtedly carry something tremendously significant in their womb , demand confidence, strength, hope from us, and above all demand of us that we survey the facts with open eyes, that we also allow the forces to come before our soul with open eyes, which come into play in the present.

Now it is truly not my intention to add yet another reflection to the already overwhelming literature and the abundant lectures on our current events. Tonight's discussion will cover a number of other topics that have often been discussed in our present time. It has already been said, and not without good reason, that one should not allow one's clear and certain view of the conflicting interests at stake in the present to become clouded, to become obscured by all kinds of mysticism, all kinds of metaphysical, that one must be clear about the fact that the present struggle owes its existence to political causes, social causes and the interests of the peoples, and that one should certainly not speak of the fact that the spiritual life can somehow be called fruitful among the causes of the present events.

Now, of course, the spiritual scientist in particular has every reason, my dear audience, to be careful not to fall into all sorts of speculation about how the world spirits themselves came into conflict with each other or the like. But one thing must always be emphasized: Even in those ancient times, at the beginning of the Middle Ages, when our ancestors, our Germanic ancestors, the inhabitants of Central Europe, were confronted with the old Roman Empire, which was coming to an end, even then people could say: It is only a question of the spheres of interest , on the one hand the Germanic peoples of Central Europe, on the other the peoples of Southern Europe, and one should not let one's clear view be clouded by all kinds of considerations of intellectual currents or the like when considering the immediate issue.

Of course, for the immediate present, for the view that only looks at the immediate present, it is so, it is fully justified. Nevertheless, the following may perhaps be considered. One will be able to say: Yes, certainly, just as English and German interests, political interests, are correctly viewed as being opposed to each other and have led to war, so in those days Central European and Southern European interests were opposed to each other; but if one considers the whole history that followed those events, one will still have to say: Yes, Europe was shaped back then as it had to be shaped so that the entire cultural development with all its content that has since taken hold could take place. And everything that happened intellectually afterwards was already in the womb of events back then. The way in which Christianity took root in Europe depended on the validity that the Germanic peoples were able to establish for themselves at the time. All subsequent culture, in which we are only beginning to immerse ourselves, was shaped by what happened at that time.

It is incumbent upon people of the present day not to live their lives only instinctively in the same way as people of that time, for example. Times have moved forward, and now it is a matter of allowing what is happening before one's soul, even from a certain higher point of view – I do not want to say that it underlies the events, I would like to emphasize that – but what is expressed in the tremendous struggle that has never been seen before in human development, to be seen with open eyes, that is, with full consciousness, I want to emphasize that.

This is one thing. The other thing, however, my dear audience, is this: that anyone who considers the spiritual events of the present and the past, insofar as the present has developed out of this past, will see that not only at the present time, but basically for a long time already, a struggle, a wrestling of the peoples of the earth, of the people of the earth for spiritual goods is taking place, a wrestling that has often been neglected in its special nature, and perhaps especially in the last few decades. But what is happening today, what has to be fought for today in blood and death, must remind us to take a look at what is going on in souls and how in what souls strive for and want, there is also a field of battle on our earth.

It is not my responsibility to get involved in political matters. But I may touch on the fact that in the future all the declamations and sophistries that are practiced today about the causes of the war, about what one or the other did to bring about the war, that this will crystallize, especially when deeper and deeper into the future, which may not be so very far away, the situation will be understood, that it is a matter of a defense that the peoples of Central Europe, in particular the German people, have to lead against powerful nations that do not want to let it happen. It is also clear to the objective observer and will become ever clearer that the German people have to fight a defensive battle. I call attention to this for the reason that the word defensive struggle must also be applied to the spiritual goods that are to be given from the depths of the German national soul to the world, but which must be defended against attacks that no longer present themselves as attacks but which are nevertheless attacks in a spiritual sense, so to speak, on the stage of world events.

To illustrate what I actually mean, let me give an example that seems rather remote, but is only an example. For more than a century, our German intellectual culture has included a certain area of intellectual property, the tremendous value of which is unfortunately still not fully recognized. For a long time now, when speaking of a thorough-going Weltanschhauung in harmony with the present time, reference has been made to the idea of evolution. It is said that humanity has advanced to the point of realizing that individual forms of life do not stand side by side, but that individual forms develop side by side. With tremendous magnitude – to use this expression – in a spiritually appropriate way, Goethe, at the end of the eighteenth century, out of the depths of German thinking, of German intellectual research, placed this developmental idea into world development, into world culture. And it may be said that the way in which Goethe has placed the idea of development in the spiritual world culture is one of the greatest things that has emerged in the development of humanity, at least in the spiritual realm, even if one compares it with everything that Goethe achieved as a poet.

Now it must be said that not everything that Goethe gave to humanity has directly flowed into the great stream of spiritual progress. Basically, few have yet recognized the full value of Goethe's spiritual achievement. On the other hand, the idea of evolution has entered world culture through Darwinism, I would say in a purely external, more materialistic-utilitarian form, from a non-German ethnic group.

Of course, one cannot say that there is something like struggle and war when looking at things so externally and superficially. But if you look at them internally, it is clear that something greater has simply been pushed back by the intellectual and external power of a less significant, English-influenced Darwinian idea. That is one thing. But countless examples of this could be cited. Countless things could be cited – we need not concern ourselves here with the deeper reasons – that within German culture impulses have been given that are being oppressed as such, even waged against, that are to be replaced by those who have surrounded them. The intellectual encirclement began long ago. And it will be, one may say a world luck - if the word is not misunderstood - it will be a world luck, if that which we are now experiencing in such a hard way makes us aware that we also need spiritual weapons. The future will teach that we need spiritual weapons to protect the deeper against the less deep. For those who look a little deeper, what is happening today out of blood and death is only a beginning; a beginning of a struggle that will also take place on the spiritual scene.

Now many things can help to find the way in the confusion that has arisen in relation to spiritual currents - the word is of course itself challenged today, but it may still be used because it best describes the present situation. And today's reflection is intended to point the way.

Spiritual science is by no means something - as it is meant here - that is already recognized in wider circles today. Rather, spiritual science is something that is even regarded as folly, as fantasy or reverie in wider circles. But the spiritual scientist does not allow himself to be deterred by this. When Copernicus put forward the new natural scientific world view in relation to their first thoughts, when Copernicus and Galileo appeared, what they had to say to humanity was also seen as fantasy in the eyes of those who wanted to hold on to what corresponded to their habitual thinking. He who observes the way in which truth advances through the world knows that spiritual science today is in exactly the same position as natural science was several centuries ago. And he finds it understandable, indeed self-evident, that it is still regarded by the vast majority of people today as fantasy, as reverie or worse.

Now, in earlier lectures, I have had a variety of things to present here from the field of spiritual science, how the view should be directed to something else. Today I can only present, not prove, but only hint at, some basic ideas that may interest us today, the spiritual-scientific views.

Sometimes we speak of the soul of the nation. However, the soul of the nation is a concept that can, it is to be hoped, be placed in a new light by spiritual science. What is the soul of the nation in our more or less materialistically thinking times? Well, if one wants to raise oneself to the concept of the national soul at all, one says: one looks at the qualities that always emerge in a national community, that is, what a group of people, who are called a nation, have in common, and one then comes to an abstract concept and does not think of anything further, of anything real, when one speaks of the national soul.

The spiritual scientist, however, speaks of the soul of a nation as something very real, as something one can call personal reality, as something personally real. The spiritual scientist speaks from his spiritual scientific research that just as we are surrounded in the physical world by the realm of minerals, plants, animals and human beings, we are surrounded by higher realms of the soul and spirit, by beings of a supersensible world. He does not speak of these beings of a supersensible world as if they were abstract concepts, but he speaks of these entities as if they were real realities. Just as someone in ancient times who had no idea about the nature of the atmosphere could believe that there was nothing around where we live, while the modern person knows, of course, that he is surrounded by air, so the person who is familiar with spiritual science knows that, in relation to our soul and spirit, we are surrounded by spiritual beings everywhere. But not in the sense of pantheism, but in the sense of a spiritual world that is populated by spiritual beings everywhere. And we also count the folk soul among such spiritual beings, we count the individual folk souls of the various peoples. We speak of real and individual beings when we speak of the folk souls of the individual peoples. I can only hint at this briefly today because time is limited.

But what the national soul has as an entity can only be understood by considering the relationship of this national soul to the individual soul within such a nation. And here we immediately come to an area where all of today's psychology is quite inadequate in the face of spiritual research. With this consideration, especially with regard to the contemplation of the soul, one stands at the beginning of a completely new way of looking at things with spiritual science. The person who speaks of the soul in the usual way of soul science today speaks of the soul as if it were a simple thing in which will, feeling and thinking and so on surge up and down. For the spiritual researcher, this is just as if one were to speak of color in general or of light in general. Anyone who has heard a little about physics knows that we can get behind the nature of light by observing the rainbow band of the entire spectrum, by observing how light manifests itself in connection with the phenomena of the world, let us say in a sevenfold or, for the sake of simplicity, in a threefold way. On the one hand, light manifests itself in the spectrum in such a way that we have, so to speak, reddish yellow on the outside, green in the middle, and blue-violet on the other side. And it is precisely through this that we come to understand the way in which light works. This enables us to look at light in terms of the way it works and to know that light really does live in the seven colors of the spectrum.

Just as the physicist today takes this for granted, so too will the science of the soul one day take for granted, but also as a scientific necessity, a threefold mode of action of the soul. And there we call that in the field of spiritual science, which, as it were, expresses itself in the soul as reddish-yellow expresses itself in light; we call that in spiritual science, in relation to the soul, the sentient soul. And we call that which, as it were, constitutes the center of the soul, as green is the center of the band of colors, the mind or feeling soul. And we call that which, as it were, appears on the other side as the manifestation of the soul, as blue-violet appears in the band of colors, the consciousness soul. And spiritual science must stand on the standpoint that one recognizes the soul from this structure just as one recognizes the mode of action of light from the color band. And just as light expresses itself everywhere, in every link, in every nuance of the color band, so the threefold effect of the soul expresses itself through what we call our self, our actual I. Truly, there will come a time when there is a science of the soul, as scientific as today's physics is, when the spectrum of the soul will be characterized as the sentient soul, as the mind or feeling soul, as the consciousness soul.

And if we now look at the individual peoples of Europe, we find: What characterizes them – but now in a real way, not in the abstract way that it is characterized by the previous ethnology – what characterizes these peoples is how the folk soul, the real, real folk soul, relates to the individual soul, the soul of the individual human being who belongs to the community of peoples.

And here we find, first of all, that the whole nature of the Italian people can be understood in a luminous way through this – I cannot go into this in detail now, but if it were described in full, one would see how what was previously ethnology would would step forward in a radiant way. The Italian people are characterized by the fact that the folk soul, insofar as it belongs to their nationality, intervenes in the individual soul of the Italian people, insofar as it belongs to their nationality, in such a way that this intervention occurs primarily in the sentient soul. Everything that has emerged as Italian culture is, comparatively speaking, the expression of a dialogue between the Italian folk soul and the sentient soul of the individual members of the Italian people. And all the one-sidedness, but also all the greatness of the Italian development, is based on the fact that the link of the soul life, the nuance of the soul life, which we call the sentient soul, is inspired and impelled in a one-sided way by the forces of the Italian folk soul.

Now one might think that I am only talking about abstract concepts with all these things. This is absolutely not the case. For spiritual science further shows us that these three members of the life of the soul, which have been enumerated, are really connected with the whole being, the comprehensive being of the human soul. And from the research in spiritual science, we can say that what we call the sentient soul initially forms the expression of all passions, all impulsive aspects of human nature; that it is the expression of the sensations that well up from the center of the human soul. But at the same time, it is also the part of the human soul that, as elementary as it is, as much as it is initially at a childlike stage, so it is connected with that which passes through births and deaths of the human soul, which belongs to the eternal part of the human soul, which passes through the gate of death and enters the spiritual world after death. Much more than the other aspects of the soul's life is that which unfolds in the sentient soul, that which belongs to the eternal in the soul.

But it also belongs to the eternal that the sentient soul contains only that which is linked to the eternal in the temporal, so that the human being directly lives this eternal as elementary life. If I could expand on this further, which would take many hours, it would point out to us how, precisely through this dialogue and these interactions between the Italian folk soul and the individual soul as a sentient soul, great Italian painting came into being, Dante's poetry came into being, who, let us say, gave a picture of the eternal in his “Divine Comedy”. All these bearers of Italian culture have given these things in such a way that one must say: What they have given is the result of the interaction of the national soul with the sentient soul of the individual, through everything that is accessible to the sentient soul of the individual soul. These things will be characterized in more detail when we turn to other nations and compare their characteristics with those of the Italian people.

But now something very peculiar happens. Apart from the general facts that I have just mentioned, we must also bear in mind that each age, each historical epoch, is assigned, as it were, the effect on a particular part of the human soul as a special mission in the course of time. It cannot be said that the wisdom that rules in the development of the world is always the same in all ages, so that the sentient soul, the soul of understanding or mind, the consciousness soul can work in the same way. That which comes from the human soul must meet the demands of world culture. And now, a deeper consideration of the spiritual development of newer peoples and especially of Europe shows that the activity of the sentient soul was essentially concluded by the middle or end of the sixteenth century, and that therefore the greatness of a people that is based on the sentient soul must be concluded by the sixteenth century. This in turn explains why everything that has been formed within Italian culture since that time, up to the present day, gives the impression of being outdated, and this can be said quite objectively. When we refresh our soul – and this is deeply satisfying for everyone – by drawing on the essence of southern Europe, as so many artists, as Goethe and others have done, it is due to the greatness of the Italian national spirit, which in the sixteenth century; the other is all after-effects, and it could easily be shown how it is prepared in the depths of the historical impulses, that what has since been asserted as Italian greatness must sound so hollow and empty. These things can now only be hinted at, as I said.

Some things, because they have to be briefly mentioned, have to be stated somewhat radically; but if you follow the lines of thought that are presented here, you will see how much more easily they can penetrate into the understanding that we must seek in the present, the understanding of the interrelationships between the peoples of Europe.

If we now consider the French national soul, we have to look for the essential peculiarities in the fact that there is an interaction between the very real national soul and the intellectual or emotional soul.

And everything that French culture has ever achieved can be explained by this peculiar interaction between the national soul and the intellectual or emotional soul of the individuals who belong to the French nation. This also explains why the French are particularly predisposed to combining and assembling facts, and to applying even the most profound concepts only in a way that is convenient for this world. This explains why even in the poetry of the French people, even when it rises to the classical heights, there is still an effort to construct as systematically as possible, for example in drama, to proceed as far as possible according to certain rules; this is the peculiarity of the intellectual soul. This intellectual or emotional soul brings to manifestation in the soul that which, so to speak, half points to the eternal of the soul, but which, on the other hand, points to the completely transitory temporal, which the soul experiences only in the physical world, in connection with the physical between birth and death.

Recently, some psychological societies have once again been pondering why the French mind in particular is so materialistic, why, let us say, even the greatest philosopher of the French people, Descartes – or Cartesius – constructed a philosophy entirely according to the model of mathematics. This is for no other reason than that the whole culture of the French mind comes from the interaction between the soul of the people and the soul of the mind or soul. How often are we Germans quite peculiar when we try to establish harmony between meaning and form in poetry, when we try above all to allow the content to flow into the form in such a way that the content creates its form, how are we when we now look at the same thing in the artistic products of the intellectual or emotional soul of the French, where it is especially important to build rhythm and rhyme in a systematic way. The French have a completely different feeling for rhythm and rhyme than we Germans do. We Germans are quite capable – and Goethe showed this throughout many of his dramas – of creating rhyming rhythms without rhyme. The French, who want to be justifiably French poets, find this quite impossible. Everything that makes up the peculiar character of French poetry, that which makes up the peculiarity of French characters, comes from the interaction of the French national soul with the intellectual or emotional soul of the individual.

If we now turn to the English people, we find that the individual Briton who seeks his connection with the national soul in his nationality is subject above all to an interaction between this national soul and the consciousness soul. Now this consciousness soul is that which, in relation to the outer man, in relation to everything that man is in his dealings with the world of the senses, is the most highly developed part of the soul. But at the same time it is the only thing that is limited to the world we pass through between birth and death. We can, so to speak, look up to the loftiest expressions of the British spirit, we will find everywhere that its expressions come from the interaction of the British national soul with the consciousness soul of the individual British, which, so to speak, is directed into the physical world with its best powers.

This peculiarity of the British character will become even more apparent to us if we now immediately mention the peculiarity of the interaction between the German national soul and the soul of the individual German. There we see – and we shall understand this later through individual expressions of the German nature – there we see that just as light manifests itself in all color nuances, just as reddish yellow, green, blue violet are all expressions of light, so the soul as a whole is the expression of the self, of the I. And that which constitutes the substance of the German people is rooted entirely in the ego, in the self. And the interaction between what we call the German national soul and the individual German, insofar as he stands within his nationality, is the interaction between the national soul and the ego. Hence the peculiarity of the German soul, that it is not one-sidedly attuned to the revelations of the sentient soul, the intellectual soul or the mind soul or the consciousness soul, but that it expresses itself sometimes in this way and sometimes in that; that it strives for universality, for the all-embracing, and that at the same time it strives for inner depth, always wanting to experience more deeply all the different nuances of the soul life in a living way. It can be said that just as the I, the self, is the deepest part of the human being, and the sentient soul, the mind or emotional soul, and the consciousness soul are its expressions, so it is with the German, insofar as he belongs to his people , that in relation to the most intimate part of his mind, in relation to the depths of his soul, when he rises to the best that can flow from the German nature, he holds a dialogue with his deepest soul with the spirit of his people. Thus he also has a feeling, sometimes only an instinct, but on the heights of humanity also a clear consciousness of this confrontation with the spiritual powers of the world.

If we now look back again at the peculiarities of the British people, it becomes clear to us – and I would like to give an example that has greatness, because no one will accuse me of citing Shakespeare to denigrate him, and I would of course consider myself to be a madman, like anyone else, would consider myself a fool if I were to doubt Shakespeare's greatness in the slightest; of course I count Shakespeare among the best poets in the world – but it is one thing to recognize the foundations of the world's effectiveness and another to form value judgments.

Let us consider one of Shakespeare's most characteristic works, the work in which Shakespeare's thoughts and feelings can come to us so fully from his soul, let us consider his “Hamlet”. Let us see how real riddles of the world and of humanity are brought to our soul in Hamlet. “To be or not to be, that is the question.” The ghost of Hamlet's father appears; one might say that the dead intrude into the world of the living. But do we recognize Shakespeare's greatness on the one hand precisely in the fact that he is able to present his characters in such a wonderfully sharply outlined way, in a typical and completely individual characterization, showing us precisely that the part of his soul that is called the consciousness soul is directed towards the external-historical. What is solid in the world about the human being on two legs and reveals itself through the human being is characterized by Shakespeare from the consciousness soul with a wonderfully sharp contour. That is the remarkable thing, that he has become one of the greatest, that he was able to characterize a world from the consciousness soul as it stands before us. That is the characteristic.

But let us look at him just at the point where he wants to touch the boundary that leads beyond the sensual world into the supersensible. He wants to touch it. He wants to cross over this boundary. Hamlet's soul shows what happens to a person who wants to cross over this boundary. The question is raised: to be or not to be? He looks towards the other world, but how far does Hamlet get? He only gets to the threshold, he looks into that land from which no traveler has yet returned.

In this we have the entire workings of the consciousness soul in that the poet is great at characterizing what is in the physical world; but uncertainty immediately befalls the soul when it wants to go beyond the physical world. Shakespeare in particular shows us how he also emerged from the interaction of the folk soul with the consciousness soul.

If we now compare this with an episode in the greatest world poem, which is also the greatest German poem and the greatest German intellectual achievement, we conjure up the scene in the second part of Goethe's “Faust” where the question of “to be or not to be” also arises before the human soul, and the spiritual world and the sensual-material world stand before the human soul full of significance. Mephisto is there, he has the key to the spiritual world, but he is the representative of the materialistic view, he is the representative of those beings who only see the material, the transitory, out of the spirit. He has the key, just as science has the key to the higher secrets, but, if it is only filled with materialism, it cannot enter into these secrets. Goethe even depicts Mephisto as having to place himself in relation to the higher mysteries. And Mephisto addresses to Faust a question that touches so closely on the Hamlet question: “You will enter the indefinite, you will come to nothingness.” There is a reference to that which is to assert itself in Faust as spirit. And Faust replies to Mephisto: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All.”

You see, this is the answer that comes from the depths of the I, the I that knows it is connected to the world spirit, the I that is directly strengthened by the fact that it is the German I that experiences the interaction between the national soul and what lives as the self in the soul. Doubt alone enters into the one-sidedness of the consciousness soul, the Hamlet doubt, precisely that which is truly experienced as the deepest. Then certainty enters and says: Because I experience the divine that flows and is through the world in my own inner being, I know that I must find the All in your [Nothingness]. That is the significant thing, that precisely this nature of the German essence has been expressed in the greatest German intellectual achievement. And what I have discussed in this one scene from Faust, it goes, like the spirit of Faust, through the whole of Faust. That is the significant thing, that at this point this influence of the folk soul into the depths of the soul is expressed through all the nuances of the soul.

But that is also what is so difficult for other Europeans to understand. It is this that appears to the other Europeans as an enigma. And enigmas that cannot be solved are best banished from the soul by such means as are now being used in the sophisticated and defamatory declamations that are being directed from all sides out of hatred towards the German national character, because it cannot be understood.

But from this interaction of the national soul with the individual soul of the human being, insofar as this human being is rooted in his nationality, follows what I would like to call the ever-rejuvenating power of the German spirit, of the German national soul. For by cultivating his innermost being, by being able to hold a dialogue with the national soul, the German always draws closer to this national soul. And when any cultural period has expired, when a cultural period has become decrepit and dies, then a new interaction of the German national soul with the national spirit occurs, a rejuvenation of the whole being. But through this direct contact with the national soul, the German essence not only rejuvenates that which lives within the German spirit itself, but also that which, as spiritual culture in the world, must also flow into the German essence.

Let us see how Christianity flowed into the old, worn-out cultures at the end of ancient times. Oh, one can observe how this Christianity adopted old forms, ancient forms of religions in the Greek and Roman folk. How that which was Greek philosophy was superimposed like a religious element, superimposed over that which was carried into human development as a living impulse as the deed of the living Christ.

And then we see how Christianity enters into the self-refreshing and rejuvenating spirit of the German being. This can be observed in individual phenomena. For example, let us see how the “Heliand” was written in the ninth century, a German way of presenting the events in Palestine that are grouped around Christ Jesus. If we allow this remarkable ninth-century poem to take effect on us, it shows us above all the peculiarity that here, out of the German spirit, the events surrounding Christ Jesus are described, who has taken Christ Jesus completely into his own mind, who sees a longing, an ideal in it, to live in his own soul life in such a way that the forces of Christ permeate this own soul life. Everything that is German soul should be permeated with Christianity. This is the source of the feeling that arises when reading the Heliand and letting it take effect in one: All this is related to us, the eternal of Christ is described to us in such a way that it does not appear as renewing, as rejuvenating an old culture, but rather that it appears as if the power of Christ itself is absorbed in its youthfully fresh achievement and is directly present, rejuvenating itself.

And then we see how, for example, such profound poetry, which of course did not originate on German soil in its first form, like Parzifal – and I could name others – how such poetry has been seized by the German essence, how it has been deepened, how the adventurous nature that was formerly associated with Parzifal appears to us in the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach and later in those of other writers, and how we see Parzifal as a representative of the striving human soul in general. We see in it something that lives in such a way that its striving is intimately connected with the forces in the human soul that strive for the highest, for the path to the spiritual. And we see, for example, how medieval religious spiritual life is grasped so profoundly by the power of what I have just explained. We see, for example, in the work of Meister Eckhart, this profound German mystic, how he constantly speaks of the fact that the divine must merge with the soul itself, that the soul can feel how God lives in it. Yes, that everything the soul experiences as thinking, feeling and willing can be experienced as if God Himself were thinking, feeling and willing in it. To let God rule completely within oneself becomes the ideal of German mysticism, the ideal of Meister Eckhart and others.

And if we follow the course of this spiritual current, we find numerous expressions by him that show us the same way of thinking. One of his expressions, I would just like to present it to you now for the reason that it can show this way of thinking so extraordinarily characteristically. It is a saying by Angelus Silesius:

I die and do not live either. God himself dies in me,
And what I am supposed to live, he also lives for and for.

Here we have direct proof of the intimate union of the individual human soul with the all-embracing spirit of the world. And do we not see in this an expression of an infinitely profound idea of immortality, an idea of immortality that can confront us, so to speak, in gigantic grandeur? Here Angelus Silesius says: I die and do not live either, God Himself dies in me. But when God Himself dies in me, it means that the event of death is experienced by the God who lives in me; then death can only be an appearance, because God cannot die in me! One sees that this profound German mystic grasps even the thought of death in connection with the divine, living permeation of the world, and he comes to the certainty of immortality from the experience of the divine world within himself. This stems from the fact that the German cannot remain with an old realization, but, as is so magnificently expressed in Faust, always strives for the sources of life. And even if he has studied everything, like Faust himself, he strives beyond everything, he strives for direct contact with the spirit of the world. For that is the peculiar nature, that is the essence, that the self seeks interaction with the national soul in German intellectual life. Therefore, out of this nature of its essence, the true German mind also feels in harmony with the eternal forces of the world that lie beyond death.

That is why we find such profound words in the works of Jakob Böhme and later in those of Fichte, in different ways in both, but both striving in the same direction. They said: He who grasps the essence of death from the depths of the human soul actually grasps that which is already immortal within mortal human nature. That which we carry with us through death is the self, which we have within us even while we live here on earth between birth and death. Therefore, Jakob Böhme, and later Fichte in the manner of Jakob Böhme, regards it as the highest goal to become aware of that which passes through the gate of death, that which lives in man as the eternal, to become aware of it already in earthly life, so that that which can be recognized as the fully developed eternal can be carried through the gate of death, out of the mortal body. And here Jacob Böhme expresses in a wonderful way the saying that is so characteristic of the peculiarity of the German national character as described. He says:

He who does not die before he dies
Perishes when he dies.

These are profound words! For it should be said: Those who are unable to unite during their life on earth in the body with the immortal, cannot in a proper way achieve the consciousness of their unity with the spirit freed from the body after death.

He who does not die before he dies
Will perish when he dies.

These words are spoken with such depth of feeling, and they are spoken by someone who wants to unfold her best powers by allowing the spirit and soul of her nation to weave into her own depths what it wants to give her.

In this respect, the Russian national spirit is incomprehensible, quite incomprehensible, precisely in terms of what is most deeply characteristic of the German national soul. This Russian national spirit, whose characteristic peculiarity, however strange it may seem to some, may appear strange to some, but since I can only characterize many things very briefly, sometimes radical words must be used -, this Russian national spirit, whose peculiarity in relation to Western European and, above all, Central European intellectual culture is arrogance, pride. When people often speak of the modesty of the Russian national spirit, this is based, in relation to what we see as characteristic, on a complete misunderstanding of the innermost impulses of this Russian national spirit. If one can see in the Italian people how there is an interaction between the national soul and the soul of the individual; if one can see in the French people how there is an interaction between the national soul and the soul of the mind or emotions; in the British people how there is an interaction between the national soul and the consciousness soul of the individual; and in the German being, a direct experience of the national soul in the self of the individual, then one must say: the Russian being, to this day he lives in such a way, despite all the forces he carries within himself, that the Russian national soul has not yet found its way into the individual soul. That is why someone who is completely immersed in Russian national identity, whether as a philosopher or as an artist, does not experience the kind of intimate coexistence that the German seeks through the characteristics just described within his being.

The Russian person does not know this flowing in of the forces of the national soul into one's own soul, into the individual soul. The Russian person sees something in the national soul that hovers over the individual souls like a mist. A Russian person, even a profound philosopher like Soloviev, who is the greatest philosophical mind of the Russian people, does not speak as a German would, for example, saying: I have my trust in the deepest core of my soul, which is within me, and it can connect with the divine that flows and weaves through the world. And so he is certain of true spiritual progress for humanity because he feels the power within him through which God reigns in him, which finds expression in the great creations of the German spirit.

That conversation, which every German, the simplest, most original German instinctively feels, is basically quite unknown even to a philosophical Russian person. And so we see, especially in the case of the most outstanding spirit of the Russian people, of the Russian world-view striving, in Soloviev, who died in 1900, we see in this great philosopher: when we go through his works, then one has to – forgive the expression – get out of one's Western European skin in order to live one's way into what one encounters there. It has greatness – that should not be denied, greatness should be acknowledged wherever it is to be found in the world – but it has greatness in such a way that when Solowjow, for example, speaks of what should happen through Russian culture should come, it will come as if from the heights of the mist, as a kind of nourishment, as something that should be sprinkled down by grace at a certain time into the deeds of the Russian people. He is waiting for a miracle. When God Himself works from the heights of the beyond into people, then people will move forward.

The Russian sees the folk spirit above the individual souls; he does not see it working in the three characterized soul powers, let alone really being able to grasp that intimate experience of the spirit in the individual soul itself, which is precisely the characteristic of the Central European folk striving. Therefore, we also find in the great philosopher the peculiarity that the folk soul does not grasp with its powers either the sentient soul, the intellectual soul, the emotional soul, or the consciousness soul. We find in Solovyov the peculiarity that these individual soul powers are at work in him. We see how they string together one idea and one sensation after another according to rules that we in Central Europe would never be able to perceive as logic or inner necessity. We see, as it were, the spirit of the people, revered by the Russian people, hovering in airy heights. And we see: there the souls can be active with their chaotically whirling soul forces. That this can be made clear precisely in the case of one of the greatest minds of the Russian world is remarkable.

And again and again we must remind ourselves of the momentous words spoken by Lessing in his Testament. Oh, this Testament of Lessing's, which is called 'The Education of the Human Race'! He explains how the whole development of humanity is a great unity. And he expounds an idea which, through spiritual science, will be elevated to the rank of a scientific truth: the idea of the repeated earthly lives of human beings. There are very clever people today who say: Well, Lessing created great things, but then he grew old. One need not attach so much importance to the fact that he came up with the idea that the soul always carries over again into a later epoch that which can be made fruitful in a later epoch by an earlier one. But Lessing truly did not grow old and decrepit, nor did he become weak-minded, as very clever people say, even if they do not say it in relation to this 'Education of the Human Race'. Rather, it was precisely at this point that Lessing grasped in the deepest sense what the human soul experiences when it can experience the rule of the world spirit within itself as the most characteristic of its deepest experiences. From this consciousness Lessing spoke the weighty word as in a testament: “I feel as a human soul through its own content, through its own essence; I too have surged from time to time, from eternity to eternity.” Through what I am, I am immortal. And now he concludes: “Is not all of eternity mine?”

There is a conception of the spirit, a cultural conception, which is the direct consequence of this ever-rejuvenating power of the German national soul.

Let us compare this with the belief of the great Russian philosopher, Solowjow, that what man can achieve can only be achieved by a miracle giving the Russian people their mission themselves. If we compare these two beliefs, we have every reason to understand why what is Russian in nature cannot understand what is Western European, what is Central European, and especially what is German in nature. And therein lies the entire arrogance, the entire arrogance of the Russian intellectuals, these Russian intellectuals who have been talking for a long time about how what the West has achieved in terms of culture is actually rotten, ripe for destruction, and that it must be replaced by something that could emerge from the forces of the Russian character into world culture. This was not given much consideration in times that were not as war-torn as our present fateful times, but it has always been the basic tenor of Russian intellectual life that Western culture is rotten.

We have seen the most diverse minds, Khomyakov, Katkov, Aksakov and so on, appear in Russian intellectual life in the nineteenth century. They all repeatedly say: Western European intellectualism must perish. One of these minds even went so far as to say: In this Western European culture, everything has been led by the impulses of art to that human-selfish, to that egoistic individualism, which leads people apart and founds everything that is to be established on violence, on servitude and hatred.

According to important Russian minds of the nineteenth century, these are the characteristics of Western European culture: “violence, servitude and hatred”. While, according to the same minds, Russian culture is said to be based on “freedom, concord and love”.

Now, Solowjow was an important mind, an important spirit. And precisely because he was so great, the feeling that he had to develop from his intimate connection with the Russian essence was that he says: the national soul still hovers above us. We have not yet connected with it in our individual souls. God must perform a miracle, must radiate down to us that which is to be our mission.

But he was convinced that it is up to the Russian people to redeem the world, because Western European culture has reached its death throes, because it has become decrepit. So he, Soloviev, says further: We do not want to destroy this Western European culture, but we want to heal it.

What has just been said about Russian culture should not be seen as a special impulse within the spirituality of the Russian people. For precisely in Russia, what is to be mentioned can be counted among the symptoms that arise from the instincts of nationality. Therefore, in Solowjow, as in his Slavophile predecessors (although he fought against them), we see a connection between what they, out of their arrogance, characterize as the mission of the Russian people; we see how they deduce the whole course of future politics from it. We see them, out of these impulses, demanding that Russia expand ever further and further against the West, that Constantinople become a Russian city, that the Sea of Marmara become a Russian lake, and so on. Everything that we are experiencing today, everything that underlies the attack that the Russian essence is also politically waging against the Central European, the German essence, everything is completely permeated, in terms of feelings and emotions, especially in the best Russians, by what has just been characterized, by the haughty conviction that Russia alone can save European culture, indeed world culture.

It is precisely the contrast between the German and the Russian nature that makes it possible to understand what the driving forces of our present world culture are and what struggles the German nature will be drawn into in the future, which will most certainly come.

Dear attendees, one can refer back to Goethe's “Faust” when one wants to show what is mentioned here as the rejuvenating forces of the German national soul, what has been characterized as such. Don't we see Faust standing there – Goethe wrote this scene in the 1770s , the words have become almost trivial, having been heard so often and probably already declaimed by everyone themselves – we see Faust standing there, wanting to escape from everything he has absorbed from the forces of the past, because he wants to connect directly in his soul with living knowledge, we hear his words:

Alas, I have now studied philosophy,

law and medicine,

and unfortunately also theology

to the full, with great effort.

There I stand, poor fool that I am,

and am no wiser than before!

Goethe wrote this from his own consciousness, from what he himself felt in the seventies of the eighteenth century.

Then came what can truly be called a 'rejuvenation of the German spirit' through German idealism. Goethe himself, like Faust, strove to absorb the sources of life with his thinking, feeling and willing into his soul. Then the great German idealistic philosophy, which had been pushed back precisely by the invasion of the French and also the Russian worldviews, came to Central Europe itself. Then came what must be seen as an achievement: the fact that these struggles again made it possible for the greatness of this German philosophical idealism to be discussed in wider circles.

And so they came, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, who tried to present law and medicine to the German people in a rejuvenated way. And they were not only philosophers, for Schelling wrote a yearbook for medicine; Fichte wrote a treatise on the state. And they all wanted to be theologians. The German intellectual powers that emerged from the depths of the German soul after Goethe wrote these Faust words were tremendous.

Alas, I have now studied philosophy,
law and medicine,
and unfortunately also theology
to the full, with great endeavor.
There I stand, poor fool that I am,
and am as wise as before!

But let us now assume that Goethe did not write these words of Faust in 1772, but only in 1840, after a new philosophy, a new jurisprudence, a new theology had passed through the German soul. Do you think that Goethe, if he had written the beginning of Faust in 1840, only after emerging from the Faust mood, would have written the words as follows:

Now, thank God,
I have studied with Fichte, Schelling, Hegel;
so there I am, I wise man,
and no longer need to be as stupid as before?

Even in the 1790s, despite all this greatness that had passed through German culture, Goethe would certainly have said:

I have now, alas! studied philosophy,
law and medicine,
and unfortunately theology as well
with great zeal and effort.
There I stand, poor fool that I am,
and am no wiser than before!

And again, just as before, Faust would have longed for the sources of life and sought his refuge in the living spirit that was to appear to him. The German does not crave knowledge that has grown old; he always craves that knowledge that has flowed from the depths of the soul and emerged into the visible world. He craves the rejuvenating power of the German spirit itself, as it lives in the interrelationship between the German national soul and the German soul of the individual.

That is what one must feel, ladies and gentlemen, if one wants to visualize the fundamental character of the German spirit. And one may say: it has actually been felt, felt even by those who now dare to say the most defamatory, hateful and poisonous things about the peculiarity of the German spirit in the most diverse languages.

Let us look, for example, to the West. It is very strange: if we go to the far West, we find an excellent spirit of the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson, as is natural for an English-writing writer, names the English as the first people in the world. Yet in numerous passages of his writings, he shows us that he values the Germans more than the English. And today, we can reflect on some of what this English-writing writer said, because it would be unpleasant for us to give a characteristic of our own nature in our own words. Emerson, who had a sense of the rejuvenating power of the German national soul, said the following about Goethe:

One [quality] in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public:

— spoken in English in the nineteenth century, mind you —

that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth.

Now, I would like to say: What more could you want? In English, you hear that Goethe is the representative of Germanness, that he expresses something that he has in common with the whole nation: “that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth.”

In England and America, people respect talent, but they are only satisfied when it works for or against a party of their conviction. In France, people are delighted when they see brilliant ideas, regardless of where they lead. In all these countries, however, talented men write as far as their gifts reach. If what they present stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours. The German mind possesses neither the French vivacity nor the Englishman's understanding, honed for the practical, nor, finally, the American adventurousness. What it does have, however, is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?” The German public demands of a writer that he stand above things and simply express himself on them. Intellectual agility is present, well and good: what does it advocate? What is the man's opinion? Where does he get his ideas?

The English [...] only see the individual, they do not know how to grasp humanity as a whole according to higher laws.

The Germans think for Europe.

The English do not appreciate the depth of the German genius.

Dear attendees, the entire nature of this presentation shows what I have tried to characterize for you today from the perspective of spiritual science. Emerson senses something of this intimate connection between the self of the individual German and that which passes through the world as the Spirit of Truth, as an ideal that indeed hovers over German development. Emerson also sensed this, as he says in the following words:

For this reason, the distinctive terms used in higher conversation are all of German origin. While the English and the French, who are mentioned with distinction because of their acumen and erudition, approach their studies and their point of view with a certain superficiality and their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they have taken up and with the way they express themselves, is not too deeply connected, Goethe, the head and content of the German nation, speaks, not because he has talent, but the truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out from it. He is wise in the highest degree, though his wisdom may often be obscured by his talent. However excellent what he says is, he has something in his eye that is even better. [...] He has that fearsome independence that springs from contact with the truth.

From many of the hateful words we hear today, my dear audience, if you are sensitive to such tones, you can discern what Emerson calls “the fearsome independence that springs from the truth”. That independence that is so unbearable to those who cannot muster sympathy for such things. One truly does not need to be chauvinistic to express these things. They arise not only objectively for the observer who stands in the midst of the spiritual essence, they also arise for those who can rise above the peculiarities of their nation.

But one also has such feelings in other places, and in order to illustrate to some extent what I have discussed from spiritual scientific research, I would also like to add the following: Perhaps you know that one of those who spoke the most brutal, hateful, venomous words against the German 'barbarians' was the Belgian-French poet Maeterlinck, Maeterlinck, who himself found so much recognition within the German character. I would like to draw attention to a peculiar compatriot of Maeterlinck. And I would like to tell you a little about this compatriot in a very brief way. So, he is a fellow countryman of Maeterlinck, and a Franco-Belgian poet. When he talks about the influence that an archetypally German spirit, an archetypally German soul, has had on him, when he talks about the influence that Novalis has had on him, this Franco-Belgian poet says some very strange and significant things. It was some time ago, but it is still characteristic to hear a Belgian who writes in French talk about what the soul of Novalis has become for him. This Belgian says: “Isn't Novalis, out of his German uniqueness, a spirit who created something that cannot even be expressed, that is not limited to the earthly at all!”

And so this Belgian writer comes up with something special to describe the purely spiritual influence and the deep impression that Novalis makes on him. He thinks of saying: When you read Schiller or Shakespeare, you find everything that is poetically depicted in Schiller and Shakespeare, but it is only of interest to what is experienced by people on earth. But if one wants to characterize what the soul of Novalis wrote, one would have to assume that spirits from the spiritual heights, spirits from other planets would be interested in it. What Schiller and Shakespeare said is only of interest to people on earth; what Novalis wrote must also interest angels, it must also interest beings that have never heard of the earth. So significant, so deeply connected is what Novalis wrote with the spiritual forces of the German national soul. He characterizes the nature of the influence that the original German, Novalis, has had on him very peculiarly, and he says:

But if he needed other proof, it would lead him among those whose works almost stir silence. She would open the gate of the realm where some loved her for her own sake, without worrying about the small gestures of their bodies. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness rises [by one step] and where all those who are restless about themselves [feel] attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances with our higher worlds. She would go with him to the boundaries of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably [only] begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are [only] in the invisible, where he must be on his guard unceasingly. On these heights alone, there are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and ideas [that resemble and are] as commanding as she is. There, humanity has ruled for a moment, and these dimly illuminated peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth in the spiritual realm. Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a [strange] reason; but [the people I am talking about have come out of the small village of passions in their works and said things that are also of value to those who do not belong to the earthly community [count].

This French-writing Belgian feels impressed by Novalis. He feels the magic breath of the German spirit as it flows from Novalis to him. If one were to believe what Maeterlinck, his fellow countryman, said about German “barbarism” after the outbreak of the war, one would not believe that this Belgian would have said: Oh, these useless screamers, who only resort to phrases, they should remain silent when it comes to matters of the mind!

In truth, it is difficult to question one's soul and to discern its weak childish voice amidst the useless clamor that surrounds it.

Yes well, my dear attendees, the French-writing Belgian whom I have quoted here has already spoken, but I have somewhat mystified you. It is the same person who said what I read about Novalis; it is Maeterlinck himself. He only spoke in this way in the healthy days of his soul. One can only believe when reading that it was said by a completely different personality. This is what has become of those who once felt something of the magic breath of the German soul. Maeterlinck himself wrote about Novalis in this way.

From this we can see what will be necessary to defend the German soul against the misjudgment of its essence, with the weapons that we ourselves must take from it as its members. And this defense will truly become more and more necessary. What good does it do that the German soul, having also become part of external culture, has already been understood! That which separates it from those who have become its enemies will speak ever louder if it is not defended by the German essence itself. And what we hear today, one will have to be convinced, as [what we have heard] is in some respects only a beginning, especially with regard to the deeper currents of human life.

I would like to give another example. Shortly before the outbreak of this war, an Englishwoman wrote a book about Germany. Yes, you see, an Englishwoman who differs from many of her compatriots in that she really got to know the German character. Because she was in Germany for eight years. She got to know universities, clinics, hospitals, educational institutions, all kinds of places. But she also got to know the German character, which, as an emanation of the German soul, must after all be present in every soul, even if it masks and hides itself in ordinary life. The book was written shortly before the war. As I said, not in Berlin, not in Cologne or Leipzig, but in England and in English, the following was said about Germany:

We read a great deal [...] about the new Germany and its new spirit. But there is no new Germany and no new spirit. What exists is the mature work of generations, which has always been. Blinded by the sudden splendor of Germany's prosperity, we are inclined to forget that, except for prosperity, it has rarely occupied a place other than one of the very top among nations. In religion and philosophy, Germany has shone at a time when everything around it was dark; in literature, it has made an epoch-making impact; in music, it has always dominated. [...]

German literature, German religion, German philosophy are books with seven seals for us. What we do know is how many dreadnaughts Germany has and how much its trade has increased. What is really important is not the dreadnaught, but the brain of its builder, the courage and talent of its commander. What is really important is not the increase in sales, but the human qualities that prompted it.

Forty years ago, Germany was fighting for its existence, and it is still fighting for it today. It is completely wrong to believe that Germany is already at its peak. It is fighting a quiet but determined battle against powerful rivals whose power and experience was gained generations ago.

At every border and across the water, the opponents sit, commercially and politically, eagerly awaiting the moment when Germany slackens just a little, so that they can pounce on her and overwhelm her. Germany knows this very well.

It would be good if those who are now reflecting on the cause of the war were also listened to, if those who say what the mood within Germany should be towards those who lurked in the period leading up to this war were also listened to.

And if we ask, my dear attendees: How do you understand German culture when you would like to destroy this German culture with more or less pride or from other points of view? A few more characteristics on this point at the end. There is, for example, a true Russian intellectual of the present day. If one picks up his latest book, one can get the impression, from the last words he says about Goethe, that he counts Goethe among the greatest in the development of humanity. We know how Goethe is connected with what must be called the rejuvenating forces of the German national soul. We know that his Faust, if not in an artistic sense, then at least in terms of the power of its characterization of humanity, rises above all other works of world literature. We know how nonsensical it would be to characterize Goethe without first seeing the great spirit of modern times that reigns in Goethe and from which his Faust could emerge. Mereschkowski, the Russian intellectual who certainly knows Faust and German culture as well as he can know it, judges Goethe from what I have just called the characteristic arrogance of the Russian intellectual. He judges the same Goethe about whom Emerson speaks as I read earlier, daring to say the following words:

When Goethe speaks of the French Revolution, he suddenly bends to the earth, as a giant might be crushed by an evil spell and shrink to the size of a dwarf; from a Hellenic demigod he becomes a German bourgeois and – may the shadow of the Olympian have mercy on me – a German philistine, a “Herr von Goethe”, a privy councillor of the Duke of Weimar and a decent son of the decent Frankfurt shopkeeper.

With certain people, it does not matter that such words may be correct, if one is a pedant, but it does matter whether the person who finds it appropriate to speak such words about Goethe understands the greatness of Goethe at all. Sometimes it does not matter what one says, but whether one is at all capable of saying something specific about a particular object or a particular person.

I said: One must seek the Russian national spirit as if floating above the Russian individual soul. But this means that this individual Russian soul, let us say, can easily live as if “down there” without being touched by its national spirit, without also having that confidence and security that arises from the way of dealing with the national spirit, as we were able to characterize it with the German national soul. Therefore, permeated by poetic values, but nevertheless like a worldview, what Mereschkowski calls the “barfoot worldview” as a newest kind of Russian worldview could arise. Now, we know how this barefoot worldview basically arises from the mood that must come when one feels so completely grounded and cannot find the connection with the folk soul, to see within the spirit, so to speak, to that which man is outside of the spiritual. Materialism has not yet taken this completely seriously, but it is characteristic that this Russian individual spirit has taken it seriously in his world view. And so he denies everything spiritual and comes to what an important Russian poet addresses as a characteristic of man. I would truly not mention this if it only occurred here and there. But it is something that the spirit of the East comes to, which characterizes the impulses that live there.

Yes, what is he to you, this human being? Do you understand? He takes you by the collar and crushes you under the nail like a flea! Then you may feel sorry for him! ... Yes! Then you may reveal all your foolishness to him. He will put you on seven different forms of torture for your pity. He will wrap your intestines around his hand and pull all the veins out of your body, one inch per hour. ... Oh you... Pity! Pray to God that you will be beaten without any mercy, and that's it! ... Pity! ... Ugh!

And Maxim Gorky says that these words are spoken entirely from his soul, because this is how he perceives what a person can find as his value when he looks at himself for what he actually is.

One must put such things together with the many things that have come from the East, the arrogance and the arrogance of Russian intellectualism in the course of the last few years, the outgrowth of which is the mood that speaks today of blood and death.

Among the Russian intellectuals I mentioned earlier, we must also mention Yushakov, who has written books that have not found a large audience but which nevertheless show what has been in the minds of many intellectuals in Russia. Yushakov has the following ideas about the course of world culture. I would like to briefly present these ideas to you. He says: This West, everything that this West of Europe has achieved in culture, is over. If you look over to the East, you find that there is actually still something in it of rejuvenation, of germs from which something can develop. But the West cannot develop this. This West has always shown [...] a gap in the text].

[In contrast, at the end of the nineteenth century, Yushakov writes about the Russian-English question in Asia: As far as Russia's mission in Asia is concerned, what the English are doing there is rotten through and through. What Russia is doing there is infinitely more spiritual.

The English – Yushakov says – have behaved towards Asia as if they believed that the Asian peoples existed only to “clothe themselves in English fabrics, fight each other with English weapons, work with English tools, eat from English vessels and play with English baubles”.

Russia alone, Yushakov believes, is capable of feeling an affinity with this Asia, which is now lying prostrate, groaning under the rape of Europe, because it cannot yet grasp the inner human being, which has been made sick and aged by the ego, like the European West.

It is an interesting book, published in 1885, about the relations between England and Russia. It highlights the superiority and arrogance of Russian over Englishness. In 1885, Yushakov has the following idea:

This West, it is over for him. If you look to the East, there is still something that can be developed, the West, especially England, have caused the darkening of India, Persia.

What have the English done in Asia? They have arrogated to themselves everything that was once established in Asia by the power of Ahriman. They have crept in where Ormuzd was at work. They have sat down everywhere where there was light to enjoy the fruits of that light. But what have the Russians done? The Russians have gone everywhere where Asia has been impoverished, where Asia was threatened and impoverished, where people had come down, where people were oppressed and oppressed, where people were plunged into poverty and darkness. Russia has taken care of these people. That is why Russia has its mission in Asia. Therefore, the world struggle between Russia and England must break out in Asia. Russia must be reinstated in the rights of Ormuzd against Ahriman, after it has behaved in this way, while the English have only interfered in what has been established in Asia in terms of fertility, greatness and beauty, and have exploited it.

This is how this Russian speaks about England. And he says: England exploits millions of Hindus. Its greatness and power depend on the people there. I do not wish anything similar for my fatherland. I can only rejoice that it is sufficiently far removed from this sad state of affairs.

Could one not actually wish that the Russians of today, who admire the English, would take a little time to study this book by Yushakov, which was only published in 1885 and deals with relations between Russia and England? It could be interesting at all sometimes if people would get to know something of the driving forces that have worked and will continue to work on the forces that have led to what is now around us, that reaches our souls.

I believe, my dear audience, that what I have said, based on the spiritual-scientific foundations of the nature of the German being, can be substantiated, even if it is illustrated by this or that. And I could cite similar evidence to support what I have said for a long, long time. One could cite such things for so long that no one in the room would be listening.

All of this, however, would illuminate the one truth that is so important now, when we first have to forge the weapons to defend what is also being attacked spiritually and what will be increasingly surrounded, all of this would lead us to the one great truth with which one must come to terms, the truth that the German, by virtue of his immediate national character, could see the direct relationship, the experienced relationship of the individual soul with the national spirit.

And when we see how this German idealism always worked in the whole mood of the German people and its great representatives, especially in the time that we can call the great epoch of the German spirit, how there are seeds, and when we see what is all that is contained in these germs, then we may say to ourselves: We can also trust in the inner strength of the German character, just as we trust in the germs that must unfold into blossoms and fruits in nature; we may have confidence in the German spiritual life. And we know that in many respects it still contains the germs, and that it contains the power of perpetual rejuvenation, that this power is its own. And we know from this what those who, at great sacrifice in the east and in the west, have to defend that which is enclosed as in a large fortress in Central Europe.

But there is also a way to direct the soul's eye to the inner forces of the spiritual world. Then one does not look at this German people as it may be looked at today by the enemies of the German spirit, but rather in such a way that one says to oneself: the German spirit has not yet been fully realized. It has powers within it that are only germinal powers, that must first fully develop in the future. Therefore, from such considerations, however imperfectly they may be presented, as they could only be presented in a lecture in such a short time, nevertheless that which can be summarized in certain feelings emerges, feelings that give the German soul confidence and courage and hope, precisely from the depths of this being.

On the one hand, we are completely convinced today that we have no need to give courage and confidence to those who have to suffer and bleed for the great events of the time based on certain, genuine knowledge and insight – the whole course of events within the realm of the German being, the Central European being, shows that this is not necessary. European being, shows how the Germans went to war, how they knew how to wage this war. No, not to talk about it, but to talk about what reigns and works in the innermost being of the German soul, so that it gives us [and those in the field] certainty about the future and fills us with hope. It is to point this out that today's reflections were made. And that is why I would like to summarize, because the feelings are the most important thing, the feelings that underlie the individual words of this evening. I would like to summarize some of the feelings that, as I believe, can arise for German feeling and sentiment precisely from the contemplation of the German essence and its connection with the German national spirit:

The German spirit has not yet been fulfilled,
What it should bring to the world.
It lives hopefully in future concerns,
It hopes for future deeds full of life; —
In the depths of its being, it feels powerful
Hidden things that must still mature.
How can a wish for his end, without understanding,

The word initiation belongs to the field of theosophy. When one speaks of theosophy or spiritual science, one should not have the feeling of dealing with something that has only come into being recently. Theosophy is as old as thinking, the yearning of humanity for something eternal, something lasting, which, as a supersensible element, underlies everything that is transitory. In the course of his existence, man becomes more and more familiar with the things and beings around him, insofar as they make an impression on him, hindering or promoting his volitional impulses. He comes to a more or less clear understanding of these things through the forces that prevail behind them; he cannot get to know that which is hidden behind the visible in this way.

Spiritual science is now based on two solid pillars. They may seem like hypotheses to someone who has not yet penetrated spiritual science, but they are certain facts for someone who is increasingly immersed in it.

The first pillar is the belief that behind everything the mind can perceive as the visible world, there is an invisible world, and the second pillar is that man is able to penetrate into this world of the invisible and hidden. Those people who are completely fascinated by materialistic views will consider such a pursuit as fantastic. The judgment of our contemporaries says that in the childhood stage of humanity, people dreamt of something inexplicable behind appearances; because they could not see, they dreamt of gods, ghosts! But today, through science, man has penetrated into the laws of existence, he stands on the manly stage of his existence and could no longer hold on to such childish views.

It is absolutely true that our admirable science has offered us the opportunity to see everything that transcends the knowledge of the physical plane quite differently from how our ancestors saw it. But if, at the same time, it wants to replace the views of our ancestors about the knowledge of the invisible, if, for example, it presents only the most perfect knowledge of the physical as the ideal of natural science, then it is no longer true for us.

Anyone who, knowing the laws of mechanics, looks at a watch, for example, will be able to say, based on this law: This is how the wheels turn, this is how the entire mechanism of the clock moves. He can explain the clock completely from itself. But can we therefore say that the watchmaker is superfluous? If we should ever be able to explain the world like a clock from itself completely and utterly, that does not make what lies behind the world unnecessary.

Others say that there may well be something transcendental behind the sensual, but that we are limited in our knowledge and that human beings are not capable of penetrating into the knowledge of this transcendental. Therefore, they say, there is no need to concern ourselves with it. All this belongs to the realm of faith or belief, and should remain where it belongs.

Spiritual science, however, says the opposite. It says that it is possible for man to gain knowledge of these worlds, that he can make himself capable of penetrating into the supersensible. Admittedly not with the abilities and means that the naturalistic researcher applies in his research; with those one cannot penetrate into the realm of the supersensible. But there are dormant powers in man that he can develop. When he develops them, something occurs for him that can be compared to the operation of a person born blind. It is a tremendous event for a person born blind when the bleak darkness that has surrounded him until now disappears and the world of light and colors emerges for him out of the darkness. A world that has always been around him and that he could not perceive, he can now perceive. But it is an even more powerful, glorious, and higher event for a person when, through inner awakening, through rebirth, inner spiritual senses are awakened in him. Goethe was well informed in these matters. He says: There are many unrecognized and unacknowledged worlds around us, spiritual worlds, and no man today has the right to deny them because he does not recognize them. That would be just as logical as if the blind wanted to deny the world of colors and light around him because he cannot perceive them.

We can develop the ability to perceive the worlds around us. Goethe points this out when he says: Our eyes were indifferent, as yet non-seeing organs. The moment the elemental powers of light conjured up the eyes, a new world of light and color was there for the human being. The development is endless and goes on and on, and when man develops these non-sensory, these supersensible spiritual senses, then new, unknown, unrecognized worlds open up for him, but they were always around him.

Our contemporaries, however, are not inclined to recognize this. Spiritual science encounters much opposition, it is said that it deals with dreamt, fantastic objects. The spiritual scientist can best see how justified it is that people of the present day make this accusation against spiritual science. But it is necessary today to present this spiritual science to people. Humanity will recognize it, it just needs time.

When we speak about the development of such organs and abilities that lie within the human being and that open up new worlds for the human being, we are dealing with people who could be called “we-people” or “man-people”.

When we pick up newspapers or magazines that deal with these things, they say, “We cannot recognize,” or, “One cannot recognize.” They consider the spiritual scientist to be immodest when he says, “We can recognize.” But what is immodest? To want to decide something that one knows nothing about. It is logical to only talk about and decide something that one knows something about.

The source is already indicated, from where what spiritual science says is taken. It is taken from those worlds that can be entered when man develops his spiritual senses. The ordinary knowledge that man has consists of a series of judgments and so on, which man strings together, and this thread constantly slips out of his hand, constantly leaves him. It also leaves him when he sinks into sleep, when happiness and suffering, joy and pain, everything that surrounds him in his daily life, disappears for him. But no one can say, if he possesses logic, that this sum of joy and suffering, of pain and sorrow, etc., disappears in the evening and reappears in the morning. It survives the state of sleep, and man must ask himself: Where then is man's soul, that which we feel as our inner being, that which enchants and moves us, where are these inner powers while we sleep until the moment when they move back into man and become scouts for the world around us? Where is that which conjures up a world of dreams for us, of light, color, warmth and cold? Where is it during the state of sleep? There knowledge escapes man and it also escapes him when death occurs, when that mysterious hour occurs in which man leaves his physical cover forever. Has then the whole content of the soul gone with those physical organs when man no longer retains any physical organs? There it is again, where knowledge of the senses escapes man. Man can say: there must be something behind it, but the man who lives in the world has no need to know what death's gate closes, what sleep hides, we are here to create, to work in the visible world, what do we care about the invisible? But if man could develop his full activity in the sensual, then that could well apply, then he could say: may there be something after death! But the knowledge of what lies beyond death has the greatest significance for life. For the forces in the invisible continually extend into the world of the senses, and we can make use of them if we gain access to the supersensible world. The person who knows nothing of it will gradually, as he lives estranged, be weak and powerless in the knowledge of the supersensible world even in the sensual world. Every object, every being in our environment is permeated by the supersensible world, and we behave weakly and powerlessly if we know nothing of this supersensory. Take, for example, a piece of iron: it contains supersensible magnetic power. If we know nothing of this power, we can only use this iron halfway. And so, everywhere in the sensible, supersensible forces and entities lie dormant. Knowledge of the supersensible is necessary for the human being; it is not something that merely satisfies curiosity. The human being needs this knowledge for his work and activity in this world.

This supersensible world can be reached by developing the powers and abilities that lie dormant in people. Spiritual science points people to these powers and abilities and shows them how to develop them. Spiritual science is not new; there have always been initiates in humanity, and initiation is nothing more than the development of these supersensible powers in people. However, very few people know that there have always been initiated people who were prepared in initiation or secret schools and were able to use the powers and abilities developed there to have experiences in the supersensible worlds just like ordinary people in the sensual world. Such people were always called initiates.

Only those who had passed exact tests in moral, intellectual and spiritual respects could be admitted to such a school, so that they would be able to use those powerful experiences that open up to man when he has crossed the gates to the higher worlds in the right way for the benefit of his fellow human beings. Therefore man had to pass tests; he could only become a disciple if he passed such tests. Of course, people imagine them differently than they actually lie behind them. A person can become initiated if he is able to cross the great secret threshold that lies between the sensual and the supersensual. Initiation is nothing more than what in everyday life would be an operation for someone born blind, but even greater and more powerful, because the senses that make a person capable of perceiving the spiritual worlds are operated on for the person to be initiated. These senses are present in every human being in the germ, they only need to be developed, and that is what is called initiation.

The elementary knowledge that is imparted in Theosophy is only the foundation for a much, much higher knowledge. Even this elementary knowledge of Theosophy today is already one that could not be imparted to wider circles until recently. For it is not without danger for people when they approach this knowledge, although these dangers are often wrongly assessed and exaggerated. The abilities that lie dormant in every soul are those that must be developed: we call them thinking, feeling and willing. Every soul has these abilities. It is a fact that through the habitual exercise of these faculties, when man develops them in the right way, he becomes able to open up a whole range of worlds.

These three abilities can be trained to penetrate ever higher and further into the spiritual worlds if the person has patience and energy to devote to their training. When the person has risen to a certain level, only then are they ready to become an initiate.

We distinguish preliminary stages and actual initiation. However, there is something else associated with it that justifies keeping this knowledge secret from the general public. It still exists as a secret in the sense that for those who are not yet known, for those who have not yet penetrated, what Theosophy communicates initially seems strangely paradoxical; one must not associate anything magical with it. However, there is something else associated with it that justifies the fact that this knowledge still has to be kept secret from the general public. Even what is communicated gives the impression of being fantastic and strange, so that many consider it immature; the spiritual scientist is well aware of this and it cannot be otherwise. But when a person ascends to the sources that underlie everything here in the world of sense, then the human being's judgment about the world and life is so radically transformed that one can say it must seem completely and utterly paradoxical to the ordinary person, so that he cannot do anything with it.

One must be prepared slowly and gradually to be able to bear the truth, and a large part of the secret training consists of learning to bear the great, all-encompassing truths. Initiation comes to him who is prepared and developed to be able to bear these truths. The time must come when a larger number of people, for their good and further development, must have the opportunity to receive this initiation.

Thus we speak first of a preliminary training. In this training, there must be a development of thinking, feeling and will. The former is easily neglected. There is often a greed to be able to look into the supersensible worlds. But those who are to make such knowledge possible for people must first insist that firm, secure thinking be developed first, a thinking that is free of sensuality. What is sensuality-free thinking? If we recall how much of our thinking is built on sensuality: we see the world around us, we absorb its impressions through our senses. An image remains in the person, a memory remains of it, then we think about it; we calculate, everything that is reminiscences of external impressions in our thinking, if we disregard what has been ignited by the outside world, then so little remains that a philosopher says: “It is impossible for a person to develop a thought that is not fueled by the outside world.” Plato had a strange inscription placed above his Temple of Truth: “No stranger to geometry may enter here.” This is not to be taken literally, but rather to mean that one does not necessarily need to learn geometry in order to penetrate into the supersensible world, nor did Plato mean that with this inscription, but that everyone must think as one must think in geometry if one wants to penetrate into the higher worlds. A child, when it learns 2 x 3 = 6 with beans or on the fingers, learns the truth that 2 x 3 = 6. But it is not necessary for a person to learn thinking based on a number in this way. Using points instead of beans is much more useful. It is necessary to arrive at this truth through inner contemplation and to thus obtain contemplation that is free from the senses. For example, a circle is constructed through thinking that is free from the senses. A circle that I draw on the board is a series of chalk mountains when I look at it under the microscope; it is not a circle, the senses cannot give it, it must be there in the inner vision. One must seek the circle in a vision free of the senses.

There is such a thinking free of sensuality in all fields, even if it is denied by some people, for example, for the living beings around us. This has been proven by Goethe. He says in his “World View”: Just as man can construct a triangle, so he can also construct a plant, he calls this the original plant. The archetypal plant is a spiritual being and Goethe says: With this plant in mind, one can follow all plants in their becoming, growing and flourishing. People do not easily understand what Goethe means by this. Schiller was once with him at a lecture given by the naturalist Batsch. The subject was botany. As they were leaving, Schiller said to Goethe, “It is strange how we look at the world in a fragmented way, with no one pointing out the great unifying bond.” Goethe, who had already developed his morphology at the time, replied that there could be another way of looking at it, and drew his “primordial plant” in front of Schiller. Schiller said that this was just an idea, and Goethe replied to him quite sadly: “But then I have my idea in mind.”

He was clear that this was no mere idea. What he had grasped in the primal plant was not just a thought, but he was clear that the plants were created from the spiritual worlds according to this image of the primal plant. How the plants came into being has been grasped here by the human spirit. This is a living thinking into the world of thinking that is free of the senses. We have within us a source from which the whole material world has sprung, and we can resurrect this source. But we can only do so if we have the strength to let the spirit come forth from us. Man can also shape the evolution of history, the course of human development out of himself.

There have been thinkers of this kind. People thought they were fantasists, for example Hegel in his philosophy of history. That is a purely ideal history of humanity. Not all the details in it are to be represented by me, but the principle applies, this attitude underlies the work. There is a kind of mathematics of history, and those who allow themselves to be fertilized and inspired by it will see that it is possible to speak of inner mathematics in relation to history as well.

But all this is not necessary for today's man; but it was demanded in all secret schools in the first stage a thinking free of sensuality in all fields. Elementary Theosophy gives this. How it speaks about the various members of human nature, we do not see them when it presents the development of man, these are images from spiritual experience. Man must live into them with his whole thinking. This is done so that man learns to detach himself from sensuality with his thinking. Initiation is needed to explore the supersensible worlds, but understanding does not require it; only ordinary human logic is needed. For every simple mind, for the most uneducated, there is access to that which Theosophy gives in terms of sensuality-free thinking.

And we should not undervalue what is given to us in theoretical theosophy. The student who approaches the higher worlds is told: first familiarize yourself with what is communicated by those who know about man, his development, his past and future. You must become thoroughly familiar with it. Why is that? Because only those who have trained their thinking in these areas can be protected from certain dangers of supersensible knowledge. When a person enters these invisible worlds, he experiences feelings that are completely unknown to those who do not experience them. He feels in the depths of his soul as if he were standing on a sheet of ice. The ice melts away on all sides, and he sees that the ice has now melted and there is water under his feet. That is how the person feels, because everything he has known so far, his sensory experiences, prove to be a collection of illusions; they melt like ice that has become water. The person realizes that all the ideas he has known so far through his senses are not the real ones. He feels as if he has no grounding. There is a certain difference, the analogy is flawed, like all analogies. Nothing special is happening in the external world when the person who is being initiated undergoes this, but something tremendous is happening within the person. It is not what we see and hear that changes, but all the ideas we have had about it so far sink into the indefinite. It is as if everything we have previously considered to be truth is no longer truth.

This is heightened by another impression. When a person crosses the threshold of the higher worlds that separates the physical from the supersensible, they perceive something completely new. Things and experiences that they could not have dreamt of before approach them. This cannot be compared to anything that a person perceives in the sensory world. But there is one thing that is the same in both worlds and in all worlds that are accessible to man: it is thinking, the kind of thinking that man acquires when he thinks without sensuality. He needs this thinking up there to distinguish illusions from reality, deception from truth. Here in the physical, wrong thinking is corrected by the things themselves; if someone wanted to turn a machine, an incorrect crank, the machine would not work properly or would stand still. In the higher worlds, however, we are solely the beings who have to give ourselves our firm direction. There we cannot distinguish between illusion and reality, between deception and truth, if we are unable to give ourselves this fixed direction through our trained thinking; if we are incapable of doing so, we cannot find our way in these higher worlds. Our thoughts are what will guide us safely, for they are the same here in the physical and there in the spiritual worlds.

Only when the disciple has overcome this preliminary stage is he ready to cross the threshold that leads to the higher worlds, which he cannot see without the supersensible organs of perception that he has developed. Here too we must describe a field that is quite unknown to many: feelings must be developed by moving from mere thinking, from ideas, to what is called imagination, images. Through this imagination, true feeling is trained so that we can pass through things to their eternal, immortal essence, in the sense that Goethe says: “All that is transitory is but a parable.” We become accustomed to seeing things in this way, as a parable for the eternal, when we become students.

Today, we can hear the magic word “evolution” being bandied about everywhere. People talk about how man, a subordinate being, has risen, has become more and more perfect, and has evolved from a lower being to his present form. They put forward abstract ideas. Those who really want to penetrate the development of the world and of man must learn to transform their concepts into images. Only in this way can he penetrate behind the veil; we must learn this, the teacher makes clear to the pupil what is meant by it, in such a dialogue, which is never held, but which nevertheless belongs to a development of the pupil that lasts for months, sometimes years: 'Look at the plant, it thrusts its roots into the earth, stems rise from the earth, leaves, finally flowers and calyxes. The corolla rises towards the sun, and within it rests the fruit. By stretching its calyx towards the sunbeam, its innermost part is drawn out, so that it can produce new seeds and thus new plants. The plant owes its ripening to the kiss of the sunbeam, so that it can produce something similar. Now compare the human being with the plant, but in such a way that you compare the human being's head with the plant's root. What the plant extends purely and chastely toward the sunbeam, its organ of fertilization, the human being shamefully hides and extends toward the earth. The human being is the transformed plant; he freely extends the head, which represents the root of the plant, out into the cosmos to absorb those forces as the plant also absorbs them when it receives the power from the sunbeam to produce seeds. We thus understand a saying of the great Plato: 'The soul of the world is crucified on the cross of the body of the world'. The soul of the world develops through the living beings; it lives in plants, animals and human beings. These are its bodies, the kingdoms of nature. We find this symbolically indicated in the cross. The three kingdoms are in the downward-pointing beam, the plant with its roots in the earth, the upper beam is man, who freely stretches into the cosmos what is at the plant root, in the middle the animal, the crossbar, which corresponds to the horizontal position of the animal. That is the deepest meaning of the cross in all religions. This was made clear to the disciple. Man has risen from the plant. Look at the plant, why is it allowed to stretch freely towards the sunbeam? The whole substance of the plant is chaste, free from desire, but it has no consciousness through which it can perceive like man. It sleeps like man in the night. Man has bought the consciousness he now has by permeating the pure, chaste plant substance with passion and desire. The plant substance has become flesh in him. In this substantial that has become flesh, man lives in waking consciousness. Now look into the future, when the human being will have transformed himself. He will have purified the impure, desire-filled fleshly substance; human nature will become pure and chaste again. Then the lower organs of desire will have fallen away, he will be equipped with higher organs and a higher consciousness, and he will stretch out his pure, chaste organs of fertilization towards the spiritual sunbeam of the holy love lance. He who can look into the process of world evolution knows: There are organs in the human body that will wither away, that will wither away, and those that will be developed higher and higher, that will bring forth similar things in a pure and chaste manner, equipped with a higher consciousness. This real ideal, which stands before the eyes of the human being as a disciple, as something that will truly reach all of humanity, gives a different concept of development than abstract concepts. When we turn to this real ideal, which is called the Holy Grail, when we survey this development, then we pursue such a development not only with thoughts, not only with the mind, but our feelings are carried away. Shivers run through the one who follows the course of human development in this way, and what we then feel is something that passes like a breath through the soul. Then we develop inner organs in our soul and new worlds appear to us – through such intimate processes of the inner being, the spiritual organs are awakened. As thinking was developed before, so now feeling is developed.

If the student has the energy to go further and further, to experience the world in images within himself, then the world of the spiritual rises, the world of the astral. This is the preparation for crossing the threshold.

Then the will is developed through the so-called occult writing. What is found in the whole of the Apocalypse, in the Gospel of John, such images belong to the occult writing. When we immerse ourselves in it, we educate our will to enter the spiritual worlds. The first seal is one that brings to mind the beginning and end state of our becoming on earth. We are introduced to the state of the earth when the temperature was much higher than on today's earth. Even then, man was connected to the earth; even then, he was united with the earthly body in a different form. This is expressed in the man whose feet are in the metal flow. They consist of liquid metal. Just as other spiritual beings created in fire in the human being at that time, so will be the final state of man. The earth will be fire again, and man will be able to create with the power of fire. This is indicated by the fiery sword that comes out of the mouth. In these images, everything is of profound significance, every sign, every number. Such a seal refers to the deep secrets of existence. When man familiarizes himself with this writing, he penetrates into the spiritual essence behind the phenomena of our existence. In this way, the will of man becomes one with the will of nature; magical powers flow out from man into the cosmos, his will plunges into every being, he feels one with the whole cosmos, he merges into the whole cosmos. He gradually becomes one with the powers of the beings around us. If a person patiently works his way through occult writing, then his will, by penetrating the whole cosmos, becomes not only volitional, but also seeing and, in particular, hearing. Then it becomes truth what Goethe expresses when he speaks of the spiritual worlds, he speaks of the way the will is developed, as just described. Then it is truth:

The sun resounds in the ancient way
In brother spheres of song,
And its prescribed journey
she completes with a thunderclap.

Those who wanted to understand it have sought mystery in these words, but they are borrowed from reality. The spiritual sun resounds for those who have developed the spiritual ear, that is, who have a developed will and have expanded it to include spiritual hearing, which is higher than astral vision. And in the words: “The young day is already born for spiritual ears,” even the expression “spiritual ears” is true. This is not a mythical image; it is truer than one generally assumes.

Today we have been talking about the principle of initiation; tomorrow we want to talk about its so-called dangers.

The awakening of the individual can only be achieved through patient and energetic progress. Step by step, spiritual science reveals the lofty goal that man can achieve. Man should not merely reflect on his inner self, that is mere phrase. He must merge in the universe, in the cosmos, for that contains our ego.

By patiently absorbing the beings around us, we develop our inner selves in such a way that we learn to embrace the whole cosmos with love.

Then we may recognize our higher self. We have arisen in the womb of the world, we must connect with the secrets of the world's womb, we must recognize them. In the harmony between the inner and outer world, in the balance between the life that we feel as our deepest within us and what we recognize as the highest outside of us, we can find bliss, knowledge and peace. Initiation is something that not only reaches into the inner being of the human being, but also reaches far out into the world. Every step you take must be in harmony with the beings that belong to you, except for you. It is not by looking into your inner self, but by breaking away from your selfish ego, that you reach a higher level of being. As a guiding principle, as a motto for each person to be initiated, there are Goethe's words, which express that a person can only create harmony when he frees himself from his own ego. Only then can he find his own center when he aligns the inner and the outer in concepts.

For all power strives onward into the distance
To live and work here and there
But on every side the stream of the world
the stream of the world, and sweeps us along with it.

In this inner storm and outer battle, the spirit hears a word that is difficult to understand:
From the force that binds all beings, man frees himself who overcomes himself.

The sources of what we call spiritual science, which we visited yesterday, are, on the one hand, criticized by our contemporaries as fantastic and dreamy, if not even more severely, and on the other hand, they are criticized in a very specific way, which we shall deal with today. It consists in the fact that when the subject of initiation is broached, certain dangers are also mentioned that are said to be associated with what is called spiritual science. However, those who speak of these dangers usually have very dark, hazy ideas about what they are supposed to think about these dangers. This cannot be otherwise, because most of them do not have much concept of the content, the task and mission of spiritual science in our time. If we want to shed light on these dangers, we must first distinguish between the fear that our contemporaries have of the general proclamation of spiritual science; this must be distinguished from the dangers of spiritual science that really do exist in some cases, which arise for the one who wants to go to the higher worlds himself, who seeks access to knowledge in the invisible, supersensible.

Then there is talk of how it is dangerous to talk about such things at all, to spread such teachings and to twist people's minds. One reproach, which is made over and over again by a completely misleading view that remains on the surface, is made against Theosophy; it consists of the fact that by dealing with Theosophy, man is alienated from life. It is said that he is led into a world-unrelated, world-distant life, that he is deprived of interest and sympathy for true life. Many a family that sees one of its members turn to Theosophy because they believe they will find the satisfaction there that their previous life could not give their heart and soul says: Theosophy has taken that person from us. — It is dangerous when such people are driven into an ascetic, unworldly way of life, because then their relatives say it is Theosophy that has driven them into it. But there is a good deal of intolerance behind such an assertion. Such people believe that only the way they want to live is justified, and that it is asceticism not to live exactly the same way as they do; anyone who does not exactly share their idea and outlook on life practices asceticism. But when you look at the lives of some people, at what a man and woman do from morning till night – we are not talking here about those who are really involved in practical life – when you see how the lives of some people are exhausted in soupers and dinners and other trivial pleasures, then you understand that a person who seeks higher things cannot live this life. If someone withdraws from this life, people say that he has fallen into unworldly asceticism and that he is preoccupied with all kinds of abstract, confused ideas. They cannot imagine that for someone living their life must be the greatest asceticism. A person who has come to know the sources from which the life of reality flows that surrounds us would have to mortify himself greatly if he had to participate in what is called life in such circles. It would be a real asceticism for him. Not because he has become alienated from life, but because he knows life in its real form, so he does not mortify himself by participating in it.

However, people in such circles will think that a person who occupies himself with such complicated ideas is somehow deprived. They are not thinking correctly, because he is not denying himself anything. As long as a person finds pleasure and enjoyment in such trivial everyday things, such a way of life is not for him. It is not a matter of changing his life, but his feelings and perceptions must have changed. He must know that true life only flows where the higher reasons for existence are to be found.

Then some families see one of their members rush to the ways of life of Theosophy. They say: Theosophy has snatched this person from us. Is that so? Those who know how to examine the souls of people will find that this is not the case. The very member who turns to Theosophy was initially repelled by what was going on around him. Then it somehow became aware of Theosophy and found there exactly what it lacked in its circles. Is it now right to say that Theosophy has driven it out of its circles? Theosophy has given it what its circles could not give it. Longing souls, searching for a true purpose in life and not finding it where life has led them, they seek it where they can find it. While such souls have been driven away, one now thinks they have been taken! Theosophy does not agitate; there would be no Theosophical movement if there were not people who have been driven out of today's life and now go to what is offered to them from the other side.

However, a certain danger arises when such people come to Theosophy immaturely and are then literally blinded, literally crushed by what they encounter there. One must not forget that the basis of Theosophy is a coherent and strict thinking, a firmly structured logic that searches step by step for the structure of the world building. There is not much real logic in our lives, no matter how much we boast about how wonderfully far we have come! Even where man seeks advice in popular and other sciences about the questions of existence, one finds only a short-meshed logic. Anyone who is accustomed to rigorous thinking and examines the results of science, when he is forced to follow the lines of thought as science is usually disseminated today, will often feel physical pain from the brutal, rough conclusions. Because as admirable as what science has discovered through its instruments and methods is, the content of thought is usually an incredibly short.

Thus it happens that the man who stands in everyday life is as a rule little practiced, little prepared for real logical thinking. The importance of the collision of people with Theosophy is usually underestimated when the soul is accustomed to having the dull trains of thought that people have today, and then there is the collision with the penetrating sequences of thoughts that confront people in spiritual science. A person with a sensitive soul, when feeling rules in his heart, notices that true nourishment flows towards him, that a wonderful light shines towards him. When he realizes his inability to grasp it with his trains of thought, it has a devastating, debilitating effect on his soul. This affects the nervous system; especially when he can only rush into theosophy in festive moments, can only take a piece and then has to go back to life. There he feels the unhealthy contrast; there arise those dissatisfied, sick souls, which we see emerging today in many cases from contact with the spiritual teachings.

But we see even more. Those who understand the signs of the times see a bleak picture of the future. Humanity today lives in darkness and chaos in many ways; they judge life without knowledge of the driving forces of life, which have arisen solely as a result of human attitudes. Those who believe that attitudes have no effect on life do not know what real facts of thought are. They have an effect on life right down to the health of a nation. Anyone who is aware that materialism has held sway in the innermost depths of humanity for so long, at a time when great contemporary issues were being worked out, knows that it has produced something that is often wrongly judged. One admires many a writer who gives a dazzling account of many a discussion on the most varied areas of life; and one does not know that he speaks or writes empty phrases. The knowledgeable person could show in many cases what is behind this cleverness. Sometimes there is really something behind it that could be called idiocy. Today you can be idiotic and still be a clever writer. Decades ago, someone said that it is no longer considered special for someone to write long, beautiful poems, because today our language is so advanced that it thinks for people. The general level of education today is such that someone who has perhaps studied it since the age of sixteen and absorbed all the judgments that are bandied about can write wittily and yet be weak-minded. This is a seemingly paradoxical assertion, but factually it is true. This should be seen only as a symptom of how superficially life is lived today; how little there is in-depth power of judgment; how little they are able to grasp the forces that stand behind life. These are the leading spirits! And what about those who are the led? If we judge the state of mind of those who often experience this confrontation with what Theosophy gives, we have to say: if they had remained within their previous lives, they might have remained reasonably intelligent people; but now they come to Theosophy, and it is as if a mighty light shines into a room where there is much impurity.

This was not seen as long as it was dark. But now, when the knowledge of the true sources of life shines into the darkness, the contrast of the one with the other may cause someone who would otherwise have remained a sober, reasonably reasonable person to be unable to bear the light of knowledge and now go completely mad. There is a danger here! But can one say that Theosophy is to blame? Is it not rather the materialistic school of thought that has brought man to this state? And should not spiritual science bring this light to mankind because of these dangers? Even if one or the other may suffer harm, it must not be denied, because humanity must receive it for true progress and salvation.

However, there are also real dangers for those who seek access to the higher worlds. Unfortunately, we can only read too much about this in some theosophical writings, and they have been written far too blackly there. We do not want to gloss over anything, but we want to watch calmly and objectively to see what the situation is regarding these dangers.

There is a particular difficulty at the threshold, because there are difficult deceptions, hallucinations, to be distinguished from what is reality and truth: that which is most difficult for a person to overcome certain prejudices and premonitions that he brings with him from ordinary life. When people hear that there is a way to penetrate into higher worlds, they are often seized by an enormous greed and passion; but to strictly follow what was emphasized in yesterday's lecture, to strictly train thinking, feeling and willing, that does not seem necessary to them. But it must be said to those that today, just as a thousand years ago, this is an indispensable condition and must be strictly adhered to by all teachers of the mystery schools. Those who did not engage in thinking free of sensuality were not allowed to join the secret training. This cannot be followed so strictly today, because those who were the guardians of knowledge in the past gave humanity no opportunity at all to come to this knowledge without fulfilling this condition. Today, however, it is different. Through a thousand and one channels, knowledge flows to humanity. But it is amazing how even great minds in the field of science are completely unaware of this ancient knowledge of humanity!

What man cannot learn through science is the solution to the world's riddles. It is often only through science that questions arise for man. Questions are raised that have existed for man since time immemorial; and man would be consumed with longing for answers if theosophy did not provide the answers. A true leader of truth cannot, for example, put Haeckel's “Welträtsel” (World Mysteries) out of his hand without the feeling: here not only are no mysteries solved, but new ones are presented. Questions are raised that did not even exist for prehistoric man. People would have to burn with longing if Theosophy could not give them answers to all their questions. Today's science is more a questioner than an answerer.

Theosophy was not founded on some arbitrary basis, but out of the deepest knowledge of the needs of humanity, which will need more and more what only Theosophy gives. Humanity cannot do without it.

Many people believe, however, that they can be satisfied with the materialistic views of our environment. They say: I find explanations for everything in them, I do not need anything from spiritual worlds. But there is something in man that can never say so in the long run. The wish, the innermost longing of the soul will always say no and no again to such an intellectual knowledge of the world around us. This longing of the soul cannot be appeased; it grows; it makes the person weak, ill, unable to work in life. There are many derailed souls today who are searching for something but repel what they are seeking. If what the soul longs for is not met with what spiritual science can give, then doubt, hopelessness, even despair takes hold of the soul.

Thus, out of the necessity of the time, Theosophy had to be proclaimed to our world. Then you often see that people are seized by greed, but they shy away from the hard work that the preparation requires; they are too lazy. They say: We want to uplift our souls, we want to flow into bliss! But you only give again in terms of ideas, in concepts! We do not want the mind, we want the soul! If only people would realize how they are making themselves their own worst enemies through the things they foster within themselves! It is precisely the calm, step-by-step realization that can satisfy their soul's longings; it is only satisfied when it quietly surrenders to these insights. There are therefore many souls in the world that could be called derailed souls, but which really stand in opposition to themselves as their own enemies.

And there are souls who carry within them the desire for higher knowledge, as described above, but who do not want to break out of their customary logic. They cannot enter the higher worlds. An increasing number of souls are afflicted. They rave about all kinds of spiritual concepts. The basis of this illness is attributed to Theosophy, while in reality it is the materialistic attitude that makes the souls ill. It is only the final clash with Theosophy that conjures up the illness. One does intend to penetrate more seriously into the higher regions of existence, but very soon slackens, especially when a serious test approaches. This test consists in the fact that one must see the dangers that surround life from all sides at the threshold, and which the human being had not seen before. If someone has his home near a powder factory, he may have lived there contentedly and quietly for years, but then hears about the powder factory and fears for his life every hour. He does not realize that seeing a danger is no reason to fear. Something external has not changed, only his knowledge about it has changed. It is the same when a person approaches the supersensible worlds. In this world are the sources of bliss and sublimity that cannot be compared with anything that people can experience in the sensual world. But there are equally powerful enemies of human nature there, horrible things; everything that lives in the sensual world that is dreadful cannot be compared with the dangers that surround people in these worlds. If he takes a look inside, then he experiences worlds of bliss – but at the same time he must experience the dreadful, the terrible, and he must experience it with cold blood.

The actual facts have not changed, only his feelings and perceptions; the facts were already there before he could recognize them, only his perception of the facts has changed. A person must remain fearless and calm. As simple as it seems, it is difficult to carry out. But if it is not carried out, feelings of fear and terror of the spiritual worlds arise in a person. This is not a matter of indifference, because these are real forces. There are beings in the spiritual world for whom the feelings of fear that we radiate are welcome nourishment. They suffer from emaciation if they do not receive this nourishment. They surround the person like vampires; when you give them nourishment in the form of feelings of fear and anxiety, they fill themselves up with it. The human being must be firm; he must have thoroughly overcome all feelings of fear if he wants to enter. He must also discard other feelings that he takes with him from the sensual world long before, because they become disadvantages, terrible obstacles in these worlds. These are all negative feelings: ambition, vanity, anger, hatred, annoyance, selfishness. Those feelings that mean little in ordinary life become real monsters in terms of their dangerous side. The person who enters these higher worlds and has not yet discarded these feelings provides welcome nourishment for these beings. He does not need to see them, but they destroy his physical health; they ruin his nervous system, his sleep. All this is true!

Even worse dangers arise. When a person is to be initiated through the methods the teacher gives him, when he has undergone his exercises and then sees what is approaching him, sees the dangers – and then gives up the attempt, then what is called in spiritual science occurs: the reflection of the human spiritual work. At the moment when man gives up the attempt, grotesque figures of a dreadful, quite impossible kind appear to him in visions. Man is as if enclosed by these figures. It forms itself around him like a clamp, made of such figures of horror.

All this could deter a person from seeking the path; but it must not deter anyone. That would be selfish. Anyone who has the opportunity to penetrate into the higher worlds must not miss these opportunities. It is easy to say: I am afraid of it. But man must be aware that by doing so he harms not only himself but the whole world. He has no right to let these abilities lie fallow. Just as the finger is not an independent part of the human organism, we are not independent either. And just as the finger cannot live only for itself, we cannot live only for ourselves. The whole world is one organism. We should work on ourselves and develop our powers. If we do not do this, we neglect a sacred duty towards humanity. Each one of us must realize that obstacles must be overcome. They must be overcome! If a person follows the instructions he receives energetically and correctly, then it is impossible for anyone to be in danger. There is no place for scaremongering when it comes to conscientious guidance. You have to know the dangers, but you must not be afraid of them. That must be a firm principle.

Of course, certain dangers also come from another direction. For example, anyone who carries social prejudices into the higher worlds — they are of no use there — and cannot discard them, will not be able to ascend without danger. Therefore, man must acquire a high degree of inner freedom and independence. Those who cannot do so can only advance to a small degree. It is not a matter of external independence here; a person can be as dependent as he likes externally, but internally the soul can be completely free. We must beware of the numerous misunderstandings that we encounter. Anyone who really wants to walk the path of truth should realize that a sentence can contain worthless words and that the same sentence can carry profound truth. Those who seriously want to follow the path must beware of empty phrases and mere set expressions, for although the highest light prevails in Theosophy, so too does the most extreme phrase-mongering and hollowness. This is a bad habit of our time, but it contains a real danger for Theosophy.

If we go back to the earliest times, we see that the leading personalities who have guided life have attached great importance to a person's judgment at a certain age; today, the very youngest can give their authoritative judgments. Above all, people today do not know that although one can achieve a great deal in terms of intellect, science and art at an early age, only someone who has reached the middle of their life is able to convey the experiences of the spiritual worlds to his fellow human beings in a truly correct way. That is why no secret school sends out anyone who has not passed the age of 35. As long as man still needs certain powers to build up his organism, he does not have them freely to put them into service. It is not permitted to communicate the occult teachings authoritatively to anyone before the powers are no longer needed for building up; only when the physical is in the process of declining in life is it permitted. Anyone who examines life will see the justification for this rule. Even a spirit such as Goethe: What he achieved before this point was a revival of what he had gathered from here and there; what would not have been there if Goethe had not been there, that only came about after the middle of his life. It means the greatest danger when we see how great truths are spoken of as mere phrases. For example, you can hear over and over again: You must be unselfish, you must sacrifice your personality to the All! — This is a profound truth if it is really understood; but it can be the most absurd phrase if this truth is presented without understanding. Egoism is not given to man by a wise world government for nothing; it is a means of education, it makes man richer and fuller; through it many a person is prevented from doing something that could harm him. It is a healthy force, it fills the personality with strength and energy, it is something wholesome! To say that one should discard it is a morbid phrase. Nevertheless, it is true that a sacrifice of the personality is necessary if we want to find the way up into the higher worlds.

How should this be understood? Let us take an example. Someone is asked to sacrifice all their cash. One person sacrifices fifty pfennigs, another twenty thousand marks. But both sacrifice everything they have. If these sacrifices are to help, then it is clear that twenty thousand marks will help much more than fifty pfennigs. So one must compare the sacrifice of a personality who has nothing within him, who perhaps has no particular ego at all, with the sacrifice of a personality who has accumulated within himself enormous energy and strength. What good does it do humanity to sacrifice a human being who is still nothing? The personality must first make itself strong and energetic; it depends on how it is sacrificed, not what is sacrificed. Man must know that egoism is a healthy force; it drives man to obey the sentence:

When the rose adorns itself,
It also adorns the garden!

A personality who first learned to develop the forces within himself and then sacrificed himself is a valuable sacrifice in the great course of life. But if a personality without strength and energy takes this word: You shall sacrifice yourself, as a word of life, it becomes a phrase here and, because it is empty, will produce a life without content. In this sphere there is a vampire of life; it sucks out the forces of life. It is necessary to see clearly in this sphere. In no wise must there enter into this work that sense of well-being which a man so easily experiences when uttering fine phrases. Here the man who really wants to ascend into the higher worlds needs care and patience, for only little by little can he learn to distinguish aright.

Another thing must be considered by those who develop the forces slumbering within them into higher abilities that lead them up into the higher worlds. All human beings have them; they are within each person as a germ, only most people develop them over long periods of time. If the development of these forces is accelerated, then everything else in human life is accelerated as well. Let us assume that a 20-year-old person would reach the point that he would otherwise have reached at the age of 80 in just five years. All the things written in his karma are compressed into one twelfth. Everything he will experience in the way of adversity and obstacles in life will occur in five years. This acceleration of life acts like a locomotive that rushes through a snowy area at breakneck speed compared to a slow one. The latter pushes the snow aside slowly, while the former will quickly stir it up. That is really how it is in life. That which would otherwise be experienced over a longer period of time now comes together, and so it becomes apparent to the person who begins to walk the path of knowledge that he must experience many things that seem strange to him, especially at the beginning. Bad habits, vices, passions suddenly arise; everything that lies at the bottom of the soul must come out. At every opportunity, the person will find passions and desires that he believes he has long since overcome. But they must appear in order to be completely overcome, to disappear completely. For the one who truly comes to the threshold, there stands a mighty one that shows in a great image everything that is still base in the depths of his soul. All passions stand in one image before the soul. This is the Guardian of the Threshold. He meets the Pathfinder, and he must face him without fear. If he is not fearless, he turns back, then those hideous images arise that imprison man. All his lower passions imprison him in the mirror image of the spiritual as in a chamber. This is not described to deter anyone from seeking the path, but only to enable the seeker to find the path in the right way.

No one should let this deter them. One must know that the very sight of these dangers is the greatest purifying agent. People usually have no idea how wisely they are guided. It is a powerful healing agent for the soul when it has to experience fear and hope, tension and release, agitation and reassurance. These feelings are extremely important, even in all art. These are important medicines for the soul. It heals from the dangers it has to go through, and we should be grateful to these teachers; after all, we cannot escape them. There are no dangers other than those that are also there for man. Only in relation to knowledge does it change for him. He learns about the facts, but the facts themselves do not change. When we learn this, we can set out on the path to the higher worlds without worry, without danger. If a person does this, then he is following an important mission. Our time needs spiritual knowledge. If it were denied to humanity, then general materialism would fill the hearts of men with doubt, despair, and a lack of comfort and hope. It would make people gloomy and despairing; it would affect their temperament, make life dull and stunted, and ultimately also make the physical part of the human being fall ill. Materialism would completely enervate people. For physical recovery, people need what spiritual science offers.

Only he can be a truly useful member in the progress of the human race who allows himself to be seized by the spiritual current. And it is justified for a person to sometimes worry about his own development; he must first acquire the true powers for himself, with which he will be able to help people, and he must have patience to acquire them. This must be emphasized in Theosophy. What matters is not a theory, but that it flows into life; it has in itself a healthy, energetic life, and it must be a remedy for humanity!

Reasons can be given for and against all things; the true secret scientist is not interested in this, he knows. Theosophy is given to humanity as a remedy. No matter how much it is attacked, it is destined to make man whole in body and soul when it is introduced into life. And it is in this recovery of life that it will express its affirmation. Therefore, when a person works on himself, he does not work for himself; he works for the whole of human progress, for the true and right salvation of humanity. And that this is achieved, that this is experienced, will then be the only sure proof of spiritual or secret knowledge.

Members' Lecture

It could seem to the earnest seeker of truth, and – basically, a certain satisfaction is missing within the /illegible abbreviation, then gap] – it could seem to the earnest seeker of truth as if it were possible truth, the realization, to be recorded in a certain way, proclaimed and then given to humanity; and on the other hand, it could seem as if it would be enough for a person to acquire this realization once and for all.

It may be said that from the very beginning of a way of looking at things, nothing seems more plausible than this, and yet it would be a mistake to believe that the one-time possession of a certain number of words could suffice for human striving. If someone who is embodied today, let us say, in one of the previous incarnations, perhaps within the ancient Egyptian culture, had come to high realizations and today would remember those high realizations, so that he would possess that again, could we then say that the realizations attained at that time would already be beneficial in the present embodiment through mere remembrance? We cannot say that. However strange it may seem to say this, given that there is only one truth, we must say that it is absolutely necessary for human development that different forms of truth come to man in different times, because human nature changes over time. It changes in such a way that the powers of cognition also change. Man does not pass from incarnation to incarnation in vain; he progresses from embodiment to embodiment because, as the world changes, he can absorb something new within himself and give the old a new form.

Therefore, it was necessary at all times for people to work their way up to such a higher level of knowledge in the mysteries, so that they were able to judge how the whole earth, with all its physical and spiritual aspects, has changed compared to earlier times, and how human souls change within this earth development. In occult wisdom, this is expressed in the words: There always had to be people who were able to read the signs of the times.

Now, what is particularly necessary to teach people, to proclaim, to recognize this necessity? This all only arises when one is able to fully survey the overall situation of development in any given time. Times change and actually change in shorter periods than is usually assumed. If we consider the development of humanity, we will be able to admit that the interesting periods for the present human being are those that roughly three millennia before the founding of Christianity and after the founding of Christianity, the first and second before and after / gap ]. We ourselves are at the end of the second millennium of the post-Christian era, and the third is approaching.

These six millennia, in which we are placed in such a peculiar way, are of very special importance. What is beneficial for man? What should the soul take particularly to heart? Much is included in the development of mankind during these millennia. Our souls, which have been embodied several times during this time, well, they will have gone through important things during these periods, and these periods are to be characterized to some extent today.

If we go back to the third millennium before the founding of Christianity, it is the time when the little Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, has just begun for people. What is man of this age like? So that we can say: Before that, for a larger number of people, the last remnants of the old, twilight clairvoyance were still [there]. They could see not only the physical world, but also through it into the spiritual world. They could delve into the soul and find what was spiritually at the root of it. They could get there in two ways. Behind the material world they saw the spiritual beings who were guiding and creating, who had not descended into an earthly incarnation. They knew – as we know – that there is earth, air and water, that there are spiritual hierarchies. And on the other hand, when they descended into the physical world of feeling, willing and thinking, they found the spiritual foundations in a second way.

This ceased before the beginning of the third millennium. Then man was increasingly forced to look into the physical world of the senses. In the past, he had directed his mystical gaze into the world of feeling and will; now he said, “I will, I think, I feel,” and could no longer perceive the spiritual realm behind pure human thinking, feeling and willing, from which everything and he himself has its origin.

But the development of the world took such a peculiarly even course; to the deeper view it proves to be permeated with wisdom everywhere. What had been taken from humanity on the one side was given to it on the other, namely, to find the way back into the spiritual world by applying what was given to it in the sensual world in the right way.

How did this happen? What was actually given to man by being pushed out of the spiritual world? - He was given self-awareness. Especially in the most important states in those times, he was without self-awareness; only when he looked into the sensory world did it come to him, but it was completely silent both in those moments when he could see the spiritual through the outer sensory carpet - everyone was then completely raptured, in ecstasy.

This was especially given to the initiates in the northern countries. In ancient times, we find initiation sites in the areas from Britain and Russia to Persia; in the west, the sites of the Druids; and in the east, the trotters. There was the possibility that they would enter into ecstasy, where they were enraptured but felt they were a link to the whole world. They were guided to follow the path of the stellar world, for example. It was not the case that people were banished to the innermost circle of earthly existence; they experienced the great world events. The sun has a different position around our Christmas time. The sun draws a certain part of its strength from earthly existence. What today's people feel only weakly when autumn comes and the vegetation fades, the melancholy of autumn, was intensified in those people to an immensely intense sensation, so that they experienced what the sun experienced, right down to the sun's lowest point.

All this was not only experienced by the soul as a concept, but also as a deep empathy. When this melancholy reached its highest pitch, it was given a substitute, as it were. The soul learned to feel. The outer world of the senses offered nothing joyful, but something like a counter-blow, which came like an elastic ball when it expands after being compressed on one side. The spiritual senses opened up, man was devoted to the spirit of the sun. He saw into, at least sensed, the hierarchies of existence. And when the sun sent more power to the earth again, the human being lived with /gap]. The sun had a certain symbol, and in the temple sites one could experience how the sun works by the shadow that the sun cast there, so that the service of the spirit was one that integrated itself into the service of nature. Man lived with it when the days made it possible for him to turn his gaze back to the world of the senses. He experienced this in jubilant joy until those days when the sun seemed strongest to him.

There were two moments in the course of the year: first, when he was also devoted to the spiritual in ecstasy, and secondly, when he was jubilantly devoted to the external; people were taught this in the Nordic mystery centers. At one point, he no longer felt the germs of the ego; he was poured out into the whole world.

It became less and less possible for people to put themselves in this mood. But something else was given to them. They could now place their I-consciousness more and more in their I, the ecstasy was taken away, the I was strengthened. The moment was prepared for people when the Being was to come who could not come to man in ecstasy, but could enter into the deepest inner being of man. The Christ-entity took on such a form that man could feel in his ego as if he could pour the entity into his ego. In the past, he was outside of himself, outside of the world from which he was taken. Through the appearance of Christ, it should be made possible for man to become aware of his own ego. When I relive what Christ experienced, I experience something divine within me. This could be prepared. It was prepared by the three millennia before the founding of Christianity. There we encounter Abraham. He had the mission [...] to rise with his I first to the deity that wanted to descend. The deity was only fully recognizable after it had descended. This was usually done by selecting, from the whole of humanity, the physical individual who was capable not of seeing God in ecstasy and not of having to delve into the human soul, but who, through his intelligence, was able to see God with some degree of clairvoyance. He had the physical instrument in his brain that, with the help of the physical instrument, he could summarize the external physical conditions and in this combination he understood: there is something underlying the whole world that underlies the human ego. Abraham was the first to recognize the deity as the world-I. This ability was connected to the physical body. In the beginning it was not connected to the physical instrument, but the person had to come to a body-free vision. That was Abraham's special mission. [His era is the third millennium BC.] The knowledge of God was comprehended to the physical level of the brain. In all ancient times, knowledge of God and the spirit was dependent on leaving the physical. With Abraham, a personality first appeared who could attain knowledge of God with the physical brain. He was able to implant this in the development of humanity.

This is expressed in the records in such a low mood that one is amazed and in awe. For example, we are told that Joseph came to dreams. This is supposed to indicate to us that he was an exception to the rule; they were not supposed to have insight through dreamlike clairvoyance. It was present in him as an inherited trait, so it could not be used in a direct line for development and was therefore rejected by his brothers. Such an ability – to see with the physical brain – could only be passed on through physical inheritance, because it was a physical ability.

The people who had this mission must have felt that this physical property was given by God. They showed those who were to find this mission that it was a gift from God by asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. He would have sacrificed the whole nation, because all the Hebrew people were to descend from him. By receiving Isaac back, he was given the opportunity to inherit the physical trait. The mission was given to the people as a gift. These things are so deeply presented in the occult documents. If we go back to the first millennium of the Kali Yuga, we find that through which humanity was given the self-awareness for clairvoyance.

But all this had to be increased. The next step was taken in the second millennium of the dark age, in that now, through special developmental processes, the one who had become able to perceive the external God from the mission through the inherited characteristics from external nature - Moses could perceive the ego-God, which man perceives in his own ego, [directly in the elementary events of the world]. The [second millennium of the Dark Age before Christ – the beginning of the Dark Age, the great Kali Yuga 3101 BC, the end of 1899 AD –] is the age of Moses, when the ego-God is perceived in nature.

Third millennium – [the first millennium BC]: The revelation of the same entity, the entity that gave Isaac back and that appeared in the burning bush, now incarnated in human form, is at the end. Prepared for this event to be understood, humanity was to become through those leaders who connect to the name of Solomon. His wisdom in the last millennium should be there so that humanity could understand how this entity incarnated humanly. So that in occult wisdom we call this millennium the Solomonic.

We have outlined these three ages as the first three in the Dark Ages. Then come ages that can only be understood if you know a certain law of human development. Earlier events repeat themselves in a certain way, but you have to know how. Some events repeat themselves like this: 1, 2, 3, then 3, 2, 1. You can only understand them if you know exactly how they repeat themselves. We must not apply any pattern, because it is precisely the fact that the repetition is different that gives rise to the diversity. The repetition of the first three ages was reversed; for those who were able to assess the overall world situation, it was clear that the first age after the founding of Christianity was a repetition of the age of Solomon. It was also a reincarnation of Solomon: the entire spirit that flowed from the wisdom of Solomon dominates the understanding that is gradually developing for the Christ impulse.

In the second millennium, the Moses impulse: the event at Sinai was actually repeated in reverse. When Moses perceived the I-Godhead in the burning bush, it was the perception of the Godhead outside through the elements of nature. The reverse event took place in the second millennium. It consisted of the I-Godhead now announcing itself through a deep insight into the souls. In the mysteries of the Middle Ages, the individualities who were allowed to experience this by descending into the soul lived. A reverse Moses experience: the ego-deity reveals itself to the Christian mystics in their own soul. Now the deity radiates out of the soul. Just as Moses had a kindred spirit, so he also had the other mystics as kindred spirits.

We live in a special age, in which [one] sees the conclusion of the second millennium approaching. In the third millennium, a repetition of the Abrahamic age will be announced, very slowly and gradually, but it will be characterized by the fact that the Abraham event is happening in reverse. What used to be found only in ecstasy was experienced by Abraham as self-awareness. Man will conquer the old clairvoyant abilities in addition to these abilities. Through the mission of Abraham, what was previously found directly has flowed into the brain. Man will have to step out of the immediate circle of his consciousness, preserving this consciousness to a spiritual knowledge with powers that are bound to the physical body.

In a sense, the fact that we are now in an important epoch brings about a decision for the knowledge of the third millennium. The Kali Yuga expired in 1899. Now we are moving towards the development of completely new abilities.

Humanity is moving in two currents. One goes through the mysteries, not the old ones, but the present ones. Through this current, man has to develop the ability to develop clairvoyant insight. Humanity cannot be without this path, because without it no orientation would be possible. Alongside this, there is another current within which humanity is changing in a natural way.

We must realize that these two currents are present. All the souls that are here today were also present in the past. When a soul in ancient Egypt came into existence through birth, it experienced something very specific and had to experience something specific. You cannot relive in a later age what you should have experienced earlier.

You will say: That is something terribly discouraging. What has been missed would be irretrievably lost. Now you come to the realization and yet you can't change it anymore. — This is so because through all previous incarnations, people were actually not in a position to miss anything. Only now is time beginning; in the past, people were guided from the spiritual world. In the ages that preceded the Kali Yuga, the old impulses were still in effect. Now [man] becomes free, he must take [his] own development into his own hands; in the age when it is only possible for man to miss something, it is also ensured that people become aware that they must not miss anything. With each incarnation, the human being becomes increasingly freer. One experiences two to three incarnations in such a time, and only the fifth is so far that it is irretrievably lost. Those who do not come to Theosophy today, without gaining consciousness, will be able to receive it in the next or the second next incarnation. An example that shows how it is true that it is not enough to communicate general truths, but that there is a need for individuals who can assess the overall situation. They know that a new era is now beginning for the benefit and development of humanity. For each time it is necessary to find the particular form of words. We still have to recognize how these abilities of people develop. These abilities, which people will grow into, will be found in the fact that people develop new soul abilities in addition to the old ones, namely ethereal clairvoyance. A certain number of people will walk the earth who, through natural development, will be able to see not only the physical body but also the etheric body. This ability faded with the approach of Kali Yuga. It is beginning again.

Two:} When people have acquired sufficient understanding, they will be able to judge in due time what is real. They will know how to deal with someone who says they see something that penetrates the physical body. We practice Theosophy because we feel a responsibility to make this understandable to people. It could also be that people get stuck in the materialistic swamp, then it would happen that those who see something like that would be regarded as sick people. They will be crushed by the materialistic view.

The prophecy will be wrong if these abilities are ignored. It depends on people how they can receive and understand an event when people will acquire an understanding of the experience that will develop in the first half of our century as a natural human characteristic. The first foundations of initiation will develop naturally. The first to receive this without initiation will show themselves between 1930, -40, -50. This is how progress manifests itself. For those who cannot yet experience this in such an early time, the opportunity arises to attain it in the next 2500 years. During this time, if humanity proves itself worthy, a sufficiently large number will have acquired this ability. It does not matter whether one lives in the life between birth and death or also in the time between death and a new birth. Because this event means something very important. People will experience a renewal of the event of Damascus and more and more will experience it in the next 2500 years. In the beginning, the Christ was physically incarnated, now the abilities of man are rising and he can perceive the Christ with more highly developed abilities. Once Christ was physically incarnated, and since that time the initiate has seen him in his etheric body. When this event occurs, when the illumination of Christ enters our earth, it means not only something for the time between birth and death, but just as Christ descended at that time to the souls that were between death and a new birth, so the event that we call the Christ event of the 20th century extends – he will descend to those who have acquired an understanding of it in the physical world.

If a person passes by without understanding, he does not bring with him the possibility of understanding Christ and he must wait until he can prepare himself in a new incarnation. Understanding must be developed here. Life here is important.

This understanding is, so to speak, the last thing we have to acquire through the brain from the Kali Yuga era. It will be a peculiar moment when the re-appearance of Christ occurs in the 20th century. Little by little, people are losing sight of the external Christian documents. Efforts are being made from all sides to pick apart the documents and to deny Christ altogether. Those who believe that they can preserve the old are short-sighted. With enormous speed, the view that the [truth of the] gospels cannot be determined will spread among so-called enlightened humanity. Those who resist it, who say: “Let [the] human being stop with [theosophy],” are as short-sighted as possible.

When the crisis has reached its peak, the Christ will be there for people. Then there will be no records for them and they will no longer be necessary. How many incredible things there were, so people will become; how many incredible things were seen, so people will know without historical records what Christ is, who will perceive him in clairvoyance. The theosophists will be tested in this age. It will be the case that in the next few decades simply everything will be proclaimed, and the materialists will be unable to believe anything else. /2 blank pages] It must be a sensual perception. Belief in a physical return will become established. Whether they will be ready to believe in the spiritual, or whether they will only believe it when it comes to them in a carnal form? A number of people will embrace the belief in the return of Christ and present themselves as false messiahs to the world.

People must now consciously take their development into their own hands. There have often been false messiahs in the past, and they have all been believed. At that time, it happened without any particular harm to humanity because people did not yet [have] their destiny in their own hands. Now they must learn to distinguish the real from the Maya.

The era in which the Christ will appear as an ethereal being is the time when the first ethereal clairvoyance will show itself and break off shorthand.]