The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When asked about the concept of God, an Indian faces a completely different situation than a European. He designates the Supreme as “Brahman” or does not speak about it at all. We have cultivated less mystical experience over the centuries, but more abstract thinking.

Today's humanity is so little accustomed to thinking of the intermediate stages between humans and the supreme God that modern man cannot easily imagine these intermediate stages. The mystics recognized intermediate beings between humans and the supreme deity: seraphim, cherubim, thrones, wisdoms, powers, authorities, principalities, archangels and angels. In the past, people tried to recognize such beings. First of all, they wanted to get to know the beings that are above humans.

Even on earth, we enter into relationships with beings that do not live on the physical plane, but on the astral or mental plane. Man lives on these three planes; but there are beings that do not descend to the physical plane, and there are others that do not even descend to the astral plane, but only dwell on the mental plane, such as the devas, the gods of the Indians. The mystic who has gained an insight into these beings will not be satisfied with an idea of the supreme and sole God if it is not based on a gradual ascent. The modern European is no longer familiar with this concept.

What is the relationship between God and man? How is it that the deity created man and that the world has only developed little by little? Such questions occupy European thought. These questions are extremely difficult to answer. In order to be able to shed some light on them, one needs at least some knowledge of what is called yoga: inner development. In the ancient mysteries, one had to go through catharsis for this purpose. The student was told: You can only educate yourself about the immortality of the soul when you no longer have any desire for immortality. This was taught in the ancient mysteries.

Man must face these questions as he does mathematical questions. In doing so, passion and feeling do not come into it; that is why man makes a very objective distinction. We must cultivate dispassion for all questions, even the highest ones. If desire did not have a say in these questions, then there would be agreement, even on such questions as the concept of God. The Pythagorean demanded that his disciple undergo catharsis first. This was also the case with gnosticism. The gnostics called their teaching on these questions 'mathesis'. The gnostic teaching on these questions was called mathesis because it was dispassionate like mathematics.

The more passion must fade, the more calm the soul must become in order to properly address these questions. Then, above all, man asks: What is the relationship between the divine and the world itself?

If we go back in time, from our point of view, we want to see if we encounter divine beings. Before us, three realms arose: the mineral, plant and animal realms. Man has all the properties of these three realms within him. He has the laws of the mineral realm within him; he is a physical-chemical laboratory; that is his mineral nature. He has life and the power to reproduce. Furthermore, he has an animal nature because he has sensation. He can, for example, feel an external impact within himself. How did man come to include the four realms within himself? He has developed to his present position at the expense of the other realms.

Before man became human, he had the three other realms within him. All minerals, all plants, all animals were even more perfect than they are today. We can illustrate this with an example: a liquid that is composed of four different liquids has certain properties as a result; we now extract a liquid as an essence. In this way, the human being has been extracted from the other realms as essence. His ascent is bought at the cost of the other realms sinking lower.

If we go back even further, the animal kingdom has not yet been extracted, but the mineral and plant kingdoms are even more perfect than later on. The animal kingdom had not yet been extracted as essence; it only developed at the expense of the mineral and plant kingdoms. It goes further back in time to the moment when the mineral kingdom still contained the plant, animal and human kingdoms as the mineral kingdom. One must also recognize this emotionally, only then does one understand compassion for all beings. The theosophist says to himself: I left that animal behind on my own path so that I could develop; I developed at the expense of other beings, so compassion must arise from such insights.

The same applies to the human realm. If the sacred is to develop, then so many must be pushed down into decadence. For every saint, there are several criminals in the world. If there were only one intermediate state, there would be no development. Development is a drawing out of the finer elements from the earlier state.

Our present development consists in man working the world with his mind. Everything he does serves to work the mineral kingdom, whether it is through mechanical engineering or by digging a mine, and so on. New forces are constantly being discovered to work the mineral kingdom. The artist works the spirit into the mineral kingdom. He brings together what lives in the mineral kingdom to form new structures. We cannot yet incorporate life into any being through the spirit, but man works in the mineral kingdom through his spirit. He used to reject the mineral kingdom so that he would later have material to work with. Now he permeates the whole mineral kingdom with his spirit; he will thereby redeem it. In this way he makes amends for what he did wrong in the past. Gradually the whole mineral kingdom will be dissolved in the spirit, processed. An absorption of the mineral kingdom by the spirit will be brought about.

Thus, in the first cycle, a realm is rejected that will be processed again in the fourth cycle: the mineral realm. In the second cycle, the plant realm is rejected, which will be processed in the fifth cycle. The animal realm was rejected in the third cycle and will be taken up again in the sixth cycle. In the seventh cycle, the human being will redeem the human realm. In this way, development also takes place on a smaller scale.

When a saint develops, other people are pushed down. But by hurrying ahead, he can later help the others to catch up on what they have missed, to redeem them. This is how life and development come about.

This awareness must fill people with an all-embracing compassion for the world. They should never want to acquire a higher level of development without wanting to help others in the process. We must redeem the subordinate beings. We are obliged to live to redeem these beings, because we have made our whole development at the expense of the rest of the world. Everything has emerged, repelled from another, so that the other could develop higher.

If we go back in development before the different realms were repelled, we find spiritual entities. The mineral kingdom, as it was in the beginning, before the plant, animal and human kingdoms developed out of it, was also repelled from something else before. So we have an opposition between the physical world and the spiritual world, which, by developing higher, has pushed away the mineral kingdom. The spiritual entities have pushed away the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms so that they could develop higher. Then they became our guides and creative spirits. This is the Arupic opposition between the physical and the spiritual world, or between the earthly and the divine world.

If we go back [even further], we come to a God who was all-perfect. We here in Europe ask ourselves: Why did this deity create the world, separate something from himself? If we were to make the decision to make every single thought as perfect as we are, that would mean that we make a first free decision, namely: to transfer our perfection to each of our thoughts. The beginning of the work of the Godhead was similar. The Godhead made the decision to make each member perfect in its own content, as it itself is. It can only do this by giving some of the members the opportunity for development. These can only become perfect by gradually making themselves as perfect as the Godhead itself is. But this necessarily requires that some develop at the expense of other members. If a single member of the Godhead were to make itself as perfect as the Godhead itself is, then that member would fill the whole Godhead. Should this happen suddenly in an instant, it could only achieve this at the expense of the destruction of all other members. Only slow development makes it possible for the individual member to gradually emerge in perfection.

This can also be observed in the life of the soul. When we grasp a thought, all other thoughts recede into the realm of the unconscious. Real development is only possible over time. When a single link emerged from the bosom of the Godhead, another had to recede and become less perfect than it had been in the bosom of the Godhead itself. This is how the difference between good and evil came about. It is not possible for good to arise without its opposite, evil, also arising. Good has developed at the expense of evil. One part of the Godhead was to develop to perfection, so another part had to be repelled. The advanced must continually urge the backward to catch up. Originally, the emergence of individuals took place and, accordingly, the repulsion of others, who then had to catch up. Above humanity were higher spiritual entities that had developed at the expense of others. These entities, which are higher, catch up with the entities that are lower. This is how evil came into the world, which is precisely what gives us the opportunity to attain higher perfection. By transforming evil into good, we create development.

There is no other way to make every single link of the Godhead similar to the Godhead itself. It must not occur to us, with any power we have now, to want to embrace the Godhead. Our human mind is not the highest thing in us; it has been eliminated so that other, higher faculties can develop. It has been eliminated from above and should be replaced by other faculties. It will rise again and again.

We live in the Godhead and develop into the Godhead. Beings are always being replaced and led to higher levels. We do not want to grasp the divinity with our minds. Our opinion of the divinity must develop into an ever more beautiful opinion. Truth cannot be grasped as a limited concept. Truth is alive. I live in the divinity, but I can only grasp the divinity to the extent that my experiences reach. I can only recognize the divinity to the extent that I can perceive it, not beyond what I perceive.

The development should take place because God, in his infinite love, wanted to make all his individual members as perfect as he himself is. It was a free decision, not a necessity. It was a sacrifice. As a result, we have a development of the individual members of the Godhead towards Godlikeness. Through their work, what lies as a possibility of perfection in them comes to light.

In order to lead the right spiritual life, we need to consider two aspects: our own perfection and our work in the service of humanity. It may seem as if our own perfection promotes selfishness. To a certain extent it does. But the theosophist must constantly try to help his fellow human beings. It is not for nothing that it is said: “When the rose adorns itself, it also adorns the garden.” - Self-perfection should not be undertaken in an egotistical sense. Our motto must be: “Take nothing without having the will to give for it.” You will receive all the more from the world the more you are willing to give to the world. - People who want to get ahead in life may find that they make the most progress by living by these words. Usually, one believes that one can only get ahead through study. But one advances by the slightest act of compassion. When people can bring themselves to do a kindness, then what they previously sought in vain through study comes to them. You have to make life a lesson.

People form their principles based on judgments. However, one must unlearn the views that have been formed out of likes and dislikes. One must form one's judgment on the basis of experience. A somewhat advanced occultist systematically gets rid of his sympathies and antipathies. With each new person, he lets himself be told what he sees in that person. The theosophist will express as few opinions as possible, but will let facts speak that he has experienced on the physical plane or on other planes. More and more, he will unlearn to have opinions and learn to have experiences. When we progress in knowledge in this way, our whole being is transformed. The spiritual seeker tries to train his thinking so that life speaks to him from it. He does not say to himself, “This is a criminal, this is a saint,” or, “This is a good deed, this is a bad deed.” Rather, when he thinks of the criminal, he considers how the criminal may have come to his deed, whether he himself may be partly to blame. The criminal may have been related to him in a past life, for example, he may have been his student whom he did not educate properly.

The undeveloped person uses his or her powers of thought to criticize, while the developed person seeks out different perspectives. He seeks out the connections between cause and effect.

Before the masters the voice can speak, the wound must unlearn.

In this way we not only create the possibility for ourselves to behave quite objectively, but we also create a firm core for ourselves. A person who is unsympathetic to me, to him I lose myself. If I suppress my feeling of antipathy, I allow him to stand by his point of view and remain by my own point of view. In this way one gains an absolutely firm support. If you give in to your likes and dislikes, you become unloving precisely because of that; but not through the objective relationship – then self-observation can begin in a fruitful way. Then we can learn an enormous amount from the world if we let things stand in their place.

Even the wisest can learn a lot from a child if things are left in their place. Usually, the one who wants to become more perfect says of some things: I cannot do that, because one must do the perfect thing. It is not always right to follow one's perfection as a first principle, for example, not if it greatly hurts others. Resignation is also part of the pursuit of perfection, for example, all killing hinders occult development. But with regard to our present culture, one often has to renounce a degree of perfection. By isolating oneself, one can become more perfect, but perhaps one inflicts suffering on others in the process. It is a rather dangerous way to look at one's own perfection only in an abstract sense. We should work in the cultural environment in which we live and not fall out of our culture. We only gain inner freedom by walking through the world with composure, becoming objective. We should strive for spiritual progress coupled with resignation in the right way. You gain a lot of mental strength, for example, by not asking about something you would like to know. Then you must firmly resolve not to ask. In the same way, you can suppress the urge to communicate or break a habit. Pay attention to the smallest details of life, for in the contemplation of the small things lies the right means of development. We must never bother the world just for our own sake, but only for the sake of others. The more you listen to others, the freer you become. The ability to form a first judgment is connected with this. One must not simply allow one's previous experiences to determine what happens afterwards. This is the 'belief' in the theosophical writings, which clears the way for objective action in the outer world. One must, as it were, perfect oneself between the lines of life. What furthers the development of the human being the most is that of which the other person is least aware.

There is nothing in the study of myths that leads so deeply into theosophical thinking as the Nordic saga poetry. If the European can think his way into it, he can find his way from there and penetrate ever deeper into the esoteric realms. An understanding of these sagas of Nordic myth can only be attained in advanced stages of life. The Nordic myths were essentially the subject of the Nordic mysteries. A distinction is made between Western European and Northern European mysteries. In Scandinavia and Russia there were the Drottenmysterien, in England and the West the Druid mysteries. Both mysteries have disappeared. “Druid means ‘oak’. The priest or sage in the Nordic world was called ”the oak.”

The replacement of the Nordic belief in gods is communicated to us in a beautiful mystery. In the conquest of the oak by Boniface, we see Christianity's struggle with the Druid mystery. The basic tenor of the Nordic mysteries is tragic. There is something tragic about all the myths of Central Europe and the North. The Twilight of the Gods represents the downfall of the Nordic world of gods. After their downfall, a new sun god, a new Baldur, is to assert himself. In the other, non-Nordic mysteries, there is always a hopeful and confident element.

What was experienced in advance in the mysteries was to be fulfilled. The Apocalypse predicts a future in which Christianity is to be fulfilled. In the Nordic myth, something different had been predicted. There, the downfall of the Nordic gods was experienced through Christianity. It is from this point of view that the new mystery must be understood, through the four stages.

The first step is that of the first Nordic sub-race of the fifth root race. In Central Europe, Christianity was spread among the fifth sub-race of the fifth root race. Four sub-races preceded this. The secret of the four sub-races is that they show how Christianity was to replace what preceded it in the fifth sub-race.

We now go back into a dark past, to the first sub-race of the fifth root race on Nordic soil. There were the Drotten initiations in the north at that time. In primitive temples, half nature, half building, a sacred tent was erected, in which two deities were depicted as ruling the world: Hu and Ceridwen. Hu is Osiris, Ceridwen is Isis, the human being is Horus. There were three degrees of initiation: first, [Eubaten]; second, bards; third, druids. Those who were initiated into the three degrees underwent a transformation such that, by awakening their higher abilities, they became the god Baldur. The mystic had to say to himself: “You must become the resurrected Baldur, who was killed by the god Loki.” Then the initiation mead was handed to him and the initiation ring was given. The mead is analogous to the Indian Soma drink.

In the Nordic initiation, the initiate was first made aware of the development of the Earth and the conditions that preceded it on the earlier planets. On Earth, we should learn until we go beyond the possibility of error. Our life will then be transformed into a kind of rhythm, in relation to only very bright mental activity.

Logical thinking has only gradually emerged from a developmental process. Later, a general human sense of morality will develop as logical thinking is developing now.

What is error on one planet is disease on the next. What remains error on Earth today will be disease on the next planet, to the same extent that the beings capable of error have been left behind. We would not have the harmonious organism today if this harmony had not been developed out of the chaos of the moon. We owe the wonderful organization of our body to the development of the moon. The illnesses that still exist in our time are what remained behind from the error present on the moon. This is what did not reach perfection in the development of the moon. That was the view of the Druid mysteries. For what was left behind, a plant was taken as the descendant of the moon's development. Our plants grow out of the mineral earth. The whole moon was a living being. The plants developed on this living being. There was no actual mineral kingdom, but only a stone plant kingdom and an animal kingdom that lies somewhere between today's plant and animal kingdoms.

Mistletoe was the symbol of what was left of the moon. It draws its nourishment from the living. It is the symbol of all entities and products that hold back or harm the earth. Loki, who still ruled on earth from the moon, had brought to earth what should have found its actual phase of development on the moon.

Baldur is the god of the sun, the bringer of all life, the active powers of the sun. Loki is his necessary opponent. Baldur was frightened by heavy dreams that were to come true afterwards. All creatures take an oath not to harm Baldur, except the mistletoe; no one can kill him, only the harmful in the development of the earth. That is why mistletoe is thrown from Hödur to Baldur. Hödur is the blind, mechanical necessity which must make use of what has been left behind earlier in order to overcome Baldur. That was one part of the mystery. The other part was that blind, mechanical necessity was overcome by the introduction of harmony through the Christ experience. In Christ a new Baldur must arise.

There was a society of twelve great initiates. A thirteenth was their leader. He was not yet ahead of the twelve others at that time. These initiates were called Sige or Sig. When he reached a certain age, he was able to surrender his individuality to a higher individuality, to receive a higher individuality within himself. This is one of the highest mysteries - in the case of Christ Jesus, the descent of the dove. Sig's individuality was replaced by the individuality of Odin or Wotan. This is the same one who had already lived as a great initiate at the time of the Atlanteans. During the downfall of the Atlantean race, what was then tropical Europe gradually became a cold, foggy realm. The remains of the Atlanteans emerged from the ice land. The emergence of Wotan is presented in such a way that initially the ice masses are there. From this, what comes across from the Atlantean world saves itself. The cow Audhumbla licks the ice masses.

Wotan goes through two incarnations, through Buri and Bör. Then he becomes Wotan because of the chela individuality of the chela Sig. Everything that was in the chela Sig becomes what is associated with the name Sig. In the first sub-race, it is Wotan, who is confronted by Hönir or Wile and Loki or We.

Wotan had to undergo a difficult test after he had incarnated. For nine days after he had been wounded on the side where the heart is located, he had to hang on the gallows. Then Mimir came and taught him the runic writing - a model of the Christ fact. Then came his resurrection. This was the initiation of the first sub-race of the fifth root race.

Wotan now presented the origin of mankind in the mystery itself. First our earth was created, but without the minerals and plants. Everything was contained in a great individuality, the giant Ymir. He was overcome by Wotan, Wile and We. From him - the Adam Kadmon - the whole earth was created. From his skullcap they made the vault of heaven and so on. It was the macrocosmic man. From him the gods form the earthly structures. Dwarves also emerge from the giant's body and live inside the earth.

From the plant people the three gods find, from Ask and Embla - from ash and elm - they shaped the physical man. The three gods build the shells of the people:

Wotan or Odin - Sthula sharira
Wile or Hönir - Linga sharira
We or Loki - Kama/Karana sharira

Wotan-Odin gave the spirit, Hönir-Wile gave life and the lawfulness, Loki-We gave warmth and color, the Kama.

This is how the human shells of the gods were constructed. The dwarf is the little human being who is actually the spiritual being. This was the spark that came to fertilize the human being from the middle of the Lemurian period, which will develop into Manas, Buddhi and Atma. The human ego must first develop in the depths, otherwise it would be immediately transformed into a rigid mineral by the sunlight.

The initiation for the second sub-race was as follows: Wotan is said to have the potion of wisdom, and the second sub-race is said to develop slowly up to the same stage. The wisdom is formed by the giant Suttung. He guards the potion of wisdom. The giant's daughter is Gunnlöd. Wotan cannot get to the potion of wisdom. Therefore, he transforms himself into a snake and enters the sanctuary of Gunnlöd. There he remains for three days. The snake is the self, endowed with wisdom.

What happened in the Lemurian period is now repeating itself. The three gods find the dwarf Andwari as Hreidmar's son, Pike and Otter. Otter has the shape of an otter. He is slain by Loki. The father is to receive the hide of the Otter, decorated inside and out with gold. This signifies the permeation of man with the gold of wisdom. Before that, the sthula sharira, the linga sharira and the karana sharira have been formed. Loki kills what was on earth before, the otter, and brings in wisdom, the gold.

Besides the other gold, there was also a golden ring. Before he came into our present earthly development, man was in completely different circumstances. At that time he did not receive the impressions through the gates of the senses. The ring signifies being locked up in the sensations of the senses, which make the self into a special being – the Nibelungen ring.

In the third sub-race, Wotan and those who belonged to him were initiated once more. He had brought the Cup of Wisdom into the home of the gods. There the potion or cup of wisdom was guarded by Mimir. He had the wisdom that led us forward. At the transition from the Lemurian race, man had only one eye through which he was not yet closed off from the outside world. With it he could perceive what was useful or harmful to him. When man closed himself through the ring of sensuality, this eye receded. The gift he now received had to be bought by a sacrifice. Wotan had to buy the new gift by sacrificing the cyclopean eye - not one of the other two eyes.

The Wälsungs and their descendants from Wotan, Sigmund, Sigurd, Siegfried, that is the race of the initiates within the fourth sub-race. In Siegfried the last of the initiations takes place. He conquers the dragon, that is, the lower nature. He now becomes invulnerable to everything lower. He purifies himself through catharsis, through the consciousness of the higher. He must pass through the fire of passion. In this way he acquires Brunhilde. He remains vulnerable only at the point where one carries the cross. It was said that the next initiate would not be vulnerable there.

In the old Norse mythology, King Atli – Atlanti – emerges from the Atlantean era. He is the great Atlantean initiate. He only shies away from the representative of the Christian initiate, the Pope.

All the knowledge that is brought to people in theosophical literature naturally comes from one source. To the question “How do you get it?”, the answer must be: Yoga is the path to higher knowledge, and to participation in the higher worlds in general. “Yoga” means union with the divine source of existence, with the spiritual sources of the world. The one who practises yoga is called a yogi, that is a person who seeks to develop within himself the abilities and powers to penetrate into the spiritual worlds.

There is a great difference between the man who has grasped the idea of Yoga and he who seeks to acquire knowledge today. The latter seeks to bring as much of the outer world as possible into his own mind. The yogi, on the other hand, seeks out all the sources of knowledge that come from spiritual life itself. He starts from the fact that there is development, that man's development, as it is now, is a stage, and that there are forces and abilities slumbering within him that still have to come out, and that if we bring them out, we can truly enter into higher worlds. If you want to become a yogi, you must acquire an unconditional belief in the upward development of the human being, not a blind faith, but the active belief that you can move upwards, that you can develop forces that have not yet been expressed. But this cannot happen overnight. Yoga is a path that consists in many ways of renunciation, and it must be sought with patience and perseverance. It is very difficult for people in today's cultural life to achieve yoga. That is why the theosophical movement was necessary. When Subba Rao was asked how long it takes to achieve initiation, he said: “It can take seventy incarnations, sometimes only seven, for some it takes seventy years, for some seven years, and there may be people who achieve it in seven days, and some even in seven hours.

Of course, it depends on the level of maturity of a person. A person may be further along than he or she realizes. Internally, a person can already be empowered to exercise his or her will and mind in the spiritual world. It may be that someone in a previous incarnation was much further along than he has come today. Perhaps in this incarnation, due to the conditions of the physical body, what was already within him could not come out; now the previously attained powers must be brought out through the powers of the present life. For example, someone might have been a wise priest with magical abilities. This would now have to be brought out in the later incarnation through the powers of that incarnation. Perhaps the brain development in the later incarnation is not so far advanced as to make this possible. It could also be that other forces are missing, perhaps love and kindness; then the earlier forces cannot be brought out again. That is why it takes less time for one person and more time for another to reach initiation. It is a matter of exploring what is already within us by creating the most intimate inner life possible.

The concept of yoga must be removed more and more from everything external and tumultuous, and it must be realized that yoga will happen in the seclusion of the innermost life. Above all, it should be kept in mind that higher spiritual qualities should never be developed without strengthening the character at the same time. Imagine a yellow and a blue liquid mixed together, then a green liquid would result. Just as the yellow and blue liquids, when mixed, produce a green one, so the spiritual and physical powers of man are united. When the spiritual nature is extracted, the physical nature remains behind, so to speak, as a sediment. Much depends on the two natures being mixed [correctly]. It is because the higher nature is connected with the lower nature that man is a particular man. In yoga training, the higher nature is drawn out, and all those qualities that are bad in man come to the fore if absolute character development does not go hand in hand with it. If you aspire to yoga, you have to be prepared for the strangest things to happen in your life. These are the temptations of Saint Anthony. If you seriously begin with yoga exercises, then you have to be prepared for all sorts of things to come out of the lower nature. Some people who were truthful before start lying, cheating, becoming unreliable in character. This happens when the strictest sense of yoga training is not required of students to constantly strengthen their character. Opportunities for wrongdoing then arise as if by magic. That is why all genuine yoga schools first look at the development of morality. Annie Besant repeatedly says to Westerners: spiritual training without moral elevation of character can only lead to wrong paths.

Yoga consists of raising certain things that a person otherwise does unconsciously into consciousness. A person usually performs the breathing process unconsciously; the yogi raises it from the subconscious into consciousness. The yoga training that places the greatest emphasis on the breathing process from the outset, the Hatha Yoga training, only leads to a certain point of development; then it breaks off. It does not go further than the realization of the astral. From the very beginning, one should not follow the Hatha Yoga path, but the Raja Yoga path. This path regards a process such as the breathing process as part of a larger whole. It also involves bringing the things that we previously performed unconsciously into consciousness. We pay no attention to a large part of our thought processes. We have to learn to follow our inner thought process with attention. We can do this by bringing about complete calm within us in relation to the outside world. Then we have to bring thoughts into this calm ourselves and focus our attention on a particular

thought. It is best to devote ourselves to thoughts that contain a force. This conscious immersion in a thought is called meditation. What matters is to live intimately with a thought. You can meditate with a specific valuable thought content. You have to rest completely on it in all silence. You could also do it with an everyday thought, for example with the thought “table” and realize what that is. Most people do not realize what a table is, namely that a weight mass is distributed over several legs. You can search to understand the concept of the table in a contemplative way.

Look at certain pictures by great painters [...]. With some, you feel satisfied when you see floating figures, but with others you feel no satisfaction at all. With some pictures, you feel that the painter literally lived within the figures, while with others you feel that he only saw the figures from the outside.

A European man of culture will find it very difficult to immerse himself in such a concept for a long time. But the real yogi must immerse himself more and more in the concept. As we live inwards, forces develop in our soul that were not there before. When we rest in a concept with the soul, then these forces come out. You have to have the reins in your hand and look at your soul life in such a way that you always have the reins in your hand. A good preparation for this is this quiet resting in thought. The thoughts of life call the inner soul to the most diverse affects. You have to learn not to be led by the soul forces, but to lead them. You have to learn to strengthen your inner self more and more so that you can hold back an outburst of anger, so that you can hold back hatred. We have to get all our affects and passions under control so that nothing gets out of hand with us. We have to achieve complete mastery and restraint of our inner self. This is achieved through quiet devotion to the thought.

To meditate, it is necessary: first, to fix a thought in itself; second, to identify with the thought; third, to remain within it for a while. You have to enter into a thought, for example, the concept of the table, and identify the will with it. Then Samadhi occurs, which is immersion in the object.

The regulation of the breathing process is connected with such training of thought. If this alone is tackled from the beginning, it is Hatha Yoga. If it forms part of the other training, it is Raja Yoga. The yogi must observe certain times for breathing, and then he enters into a rhythmic life. The seven degrees of the Persian initiation are based on this: Ravens, Occult, Strugglers, Lions, Persians, Sun-runners, Fathers. Those who had come so far as to make their lives completely rhythmic were called Sun-runners. In this way, the human being integrates himself into the whole rhythm of nature. The sun returns to the same point every year. Everything happens rhythmically with it. Everything in life is based on rhythms. If a person wants to achieve something, he must bring rhythm into his life. The plants and animals are connected to the seasons in a very specific way. In the human being, everything is initially subject to the arbitrariness of the astral body, and this makes his life unrhythmic. This brings disorder into his life. He must now make it rhythmic again.

If I meditate every day at a certain hour, for example at seven o'clock in the morning, I bring rhythm into my life. But if I meditate at ten o'clock or at some other time instead of at seven o'clock, then the rhythm is disturbed. Even if a person decides to say a prayer every day at seven o'clock in the morning, again at noon and before going to bed, then these are three fixed points that bring rhythm into our lives. Part of the rhythmization of life is also the rhythmization of the breathing process. This is connected with very deep things that exist between man and the universe. Plants and humans belong together in a certain way. The human being inhales oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide; the plant does it the other way around. Throughout evolution, there is a connection between the nature of plants and that of human beings. The plant grows rhythmically according to natural laws. It is still completely chaste because it does not yet have the astral life within it. On the one hand, it is higher than the human being, but on the other hand, it is lower. As an ideal, it stands before man. Man must become similar to it by rhythmizing the breathing process. When one inhales and holds the breath longer, one develops carbonic acid in oneself, and thus approaches the nature of plants.

When the yogi gradually begins to consciously live in what he had previously done unconsciously, then new worlds open up around him. He then experiences new worlds. If we were asleep, we would not hear the most glorious music. So, at first, man is a sleeper in relation to the spiritual worlds. And just as waking up is like waking up to melodies, there is a waking up in the spiritual world through the breathing process. When you consciously enter into the breathing process, imaginative knowledge begins. Ordinary seeing is material knowledge. Imaginative knowledge consists in our ability to evoke images that are not mere visions, but that are grounded in the very basis of existence. Even when you look at the ordinary world, you basically only have images. Everything in the external world is an image. The images of the external world correspond to material knowledge. The images that arise through the yoga process are stimulated internally, stimulated in the right way.

What matters in this whole world, which then arises in us, is that it is inwardly true. That is the difficulty in the yoga training. As long as a person has personal desires, he cannot easily distinguish truth from untruth in this world. Hence the need to become selfless. In the Pythagorean schools, people were made to understand: You can only learn about life after death when you are completely indifferent to whether you live after death or not. All personal aspiration is eliminated in relation to this one question. When personal desire is eliminated, where imagination is needed, then truth is expressed in imagination.

The third stage is the stage of rational will. Here you also learn how the truth is made, the will by which something is willed. The fourth stage is the stage of intuition. The yoga training is about reining in everything that is in us: desire, urge, craving and passion. As long as we do not control this, truth makes us illusory. Above all, absolute inner calm, patience, endurance and steadfastness are required in the practice of yoga.

Certain character traits are essential. We must never lose our harmony with our surroundings, otherwise our progress will be at an end. If the smartest person fell asleep and then woke up on Mars, he would be unable to use his abilities on Mars. He would be considered insane there. All madness is a lack of harmony with the environment; then you can't get ahead if that happens. Not a drunken person should you become, as Plato says, but a sober person, and in no way neglect your everyday duties. This is absolutely necessary for the practice of yoga.

Then it is important to develop humility. Only under the influence of the highest humility can one speak correctly of the experiences in the higher worlds. A very high degree of humility must go hand in hand with the yoga training. The oriental disciple can easily gain a sense of respect and appreciation for the teacher. In this case, it is very important. The deepest trust in the teacher is necessary for the yoga training because one must have a fixed point. In a sense, the yoga student leaves the whole rest of the world. His relationship to the world changes. All things then take on a new meaning.

He becomes alien to his surroundings. He must transform all things. A certain spiritual alchemy takes place with him. He must now do everything out of an inner sense of duty. He treats everything from a new point of view. The way he relates to things changes completely. In a sense, the person becomes estranged from his surroundings. If he does not develop full strength of character, he can easily lose touch with his environment.

The fixed point for the yoga student was always the teacher, who was a point of reference for him, whom he calls his guru, whom he regards as the embodiment of the deity in man. In reality, divine beings do exist in higher human natures. It seems obvious to the Oriental that a higher being lives in the guru. This is not the case in the West. If someone seeks a yoga training in the West, then he will also find the opportunity to reach his goal in the West.

The greatest evil in yoga training would be impatience. But you overcome that when you recognize reincarnation and karma as realities. We must live with the feeling that we actually see this present life between birth and death as one among many.

In a transcript by Anna Rebmann, the following table is attached:

Dear attendees! In the past, almost every year I have been able to give a lecture in this city in the field that I have recently taken to calling spiritual science. Since our friends have also requested such a reflection in these fateful times, it shall be given this evening. But you will understand that in our present time, when all our feelings, our emotions and our thoughts are focused on the great events, on those events that claim so many hopes, so much confidence, on the events that undoubtedly most significant events are now unfolding, events that are also causing so much pain and suffering. You will understand that at this time, such a reflection, especially if it is to be based on the spiritual scientific worldview, must also be made in view of the fateful events of our time. But it cannot be my task to add yet another of the numerous reflections that are being set forth today in lectures on the things that are so powerfully moving our time. Rather, it must be my task to say, from the point of view of spiritual science, from which I have always spoken here, what can be said in brief about our time from precisely this point of view.

It has been emphasized many times that the present struggle, the present mighty struggle, in which, in fact, apart from smaller tribal and linguistic differences, 35 different peoples of the earth are at war with each other; it has been said often that this mighty struggle is caused above all by the present-day commercial, economic, social and political antagonisms, and that it is of primary importance to look clearly and energetically at reality and the values in question and not to obscure these considerations with metaphysical speculations. From the standpoint of spiritual science, one can only agree with such a view and never oppose it.

But spiritual science also wants to stand on the standpoint of reality. This is one way in which this evening's meditation will differ from those that are so often practiced, in that it takes into account the realistic admonition of our contemporaries, while also considering that this mighty struggle is, after all, part of the whole course of human development, in which, above all, great impulses are at work that can only be achieved through spiritual contemplation. One could also say: At that time, when the Germanic tribes of Central Europe threatened the southern empires, the Roman Empire at the beginning of the Middle Ages, only the Roman spheres of interest with their social and political intentions were confronted with what was to come from Central Europe. Of course, at the time, one could justifiably speak in this way. But if we look at things today, and judge from a higher point of view, as we must today, because the world has advanced, we would see that if these struggles had not taken place back then, the reorganization of Europe through these struggles, which were initially caused by the Roman spheres of interest, of course, took place in a certain way —, then the whole Western development up to our time would have taken on a different face. That is one thing.

The other thing, however, is that anyone who follows the intellectual development of nations, the intellectual development in history, must really come to the conclusion, without indulging in any fantasies, without speculating, that what is now being fought out between thirty-five nations of the earth is, in fact, certainly the most significant thing imaginable for the present. It is not words that will fight it out, nor thoughts and human philosophies, but the bravery of the armies. But behind all this, one can see another struggle, a struggle of spiritual forces, a struggle of world views. And without going into what has often been said, I should perhaps emphasize that history will one day regard it as the most absurd of claims that Central Europe somehow provided the immediate cause of this world war. It will be seen more and more clearly, especially when viewed from a higher perspective, that Central Europe and particularly the German people are involved in a purely defensive struggle. But if we look at this defensive struggle, then from a certain point of view we can see how this struggle is one part of a great, mighty defensive struggle that German intellectual life, intellectual impulses, have already had to fight out in part, and in part have to fight out with ever-increasing strength, against that which is also a kind of intellectual encirclement of Central European intellectual life. What I mean by this, I would like to characterize it with a symptom that may not seem very meaningful to you. But one could cite many things and one would always find the same thing.

What we in many respects count among the greatest and most significant things that the spiritual life of modern times has taken up, is called the “idea of development,” the “worldview of development.” And no one tires of emphasizing how significant it was for the whole development of the spiritual life of humanity that people learned to see how not the individual entities of the world around us stand side by side, but that they have developed apart; how one can trace a developmental series from the lowest creatures up to humans.

The one who, out of the deepest impulses of the supporting forces of the German spirit, spoke of such a development in a deeply inward sense is none other than Goethe. And it may be said that, since Goethe, German culture has had a wonderful, to use a Goethean expression: a spiritual doctrine of development. This spiritual doctrine of development has not been taken up into the general world view, nor into the European world view. In contrast, it takes five to six decades for the general consciousness of modern cultural humanity to accept the doctrine of development - but in what form - in the form of Darwinism.

When something like this is said, it still seems to have a chauvinistic coloring for many today. But future times will see it in all the power that is inherent in it. Darwinism has given the idea of development a materialistic [utilitarian] slant; and in this slant, which has been forced upon it, the idea of development has been incorporated into modern cultural ideas by an entirely English thinker. And the deeper German developmental idea is definitely faced with the necessity of defending itself. In the future, the world will realize that it is not necessary to say that Darwinism is something wrong, something incorrect, but that it will be necessary to take the deeper foundations, the more vigorous knowledge from the sources of German intellectual life for the developmental idea as well. In other words, it will be necessary to forge weapons that can defend the spiritual goods of Central Europe against the attacks that are being waged in countless fields, as in the field just mentioned, against this Central European intellectual life. And just as it is not important, when one is in the midst of a struggle between nations such as that which exists today, to wage war with these or those words, so to speak, between individual nations, whether words of hatred or sympathy, but rather, as is much more natural, to take the position that one has to defend what one recognizes as one's fatherland, as one defend one's family without disparaging anything else, so in the field of spiritual struggles, which, as everything shows, we will face in the near future in a tremendous way, it is important to be fully imbued with what the forces of this Central European, especially German, intellectual life are. In these forces there will be weapons that will be needed in the future. I cannot go into more detail, but I would like to suggest that the current struggle of external weapons will only be the beginning of what is to come in terms of spiritual struggles, and that the ill-intentioned, malicious, defamatory views that are hurled at German culture from all sides already show us the beginning.

If we now want to talk about these things from the point of view of spiritual science, it is of course incumbent upon us to at least characterize this point of view of spiritual science with a few words. Even though today, as in other lectures that I have also given in this city, I cannot go into the details of this spiritual science, which is to enter the development of time and the world as something new, and even though I will not be able to say anything conclusive in favor of spiritual science, I would still like to indicate with a few words, with a few points of view, what spiritual science wants.

Spiritual science wants to be a real science of the spirit. Above all, it wants to show how the human soul life, that which we call our innermost human nature, is connected with the real and true spirit that flows and weaves through nature and humanity. And just as natural science renewed the world view of humanity a few centuries ago, so spiritual science today wants to enter into the spiritual development of humanity in a very similar way, albeit from a different point of view.

I would like to draw attention to the following: if you were to say to someone who knows nothing about chemistry, who has never heard of chemistry and only knows water – of course, we can only imagine such a person hypothetically – that in this water, which is liquid and extinguishes fire, extinguishes fire, there is a gas in it that can be separated out, that is hydrogen; this hydrogen burns, it is not liquid but gaseous, so the person who has never heard of chemistry may consider this to be a highly fantastic idea. Natural science has made this into a very ordinary, even trivial, idea today. There was certainly a time when those who claimed such things were thought of as fantasists.

Today, on the other hand, anyone who knows nothing of spiritual science is considered a fantasist who says: When we have the human body with its soul before us, it presents itself in such a way that we cannot recognize the essence of what is directly connected to it while this essence is inside the body itself. One must separate it by the spiritual-scientific method, the spiritual-soul from the physical-bodily, as one separates hydrogen from water by chemical methods, if one wants to recognize it. This spiritual-scientific method does not take place in an external laboratory, but in the intimate processes of the human soul itself.

But there are spiritual scientific methods by which man can truly become a spiritual scientist, by which he can come to separate his spiritual soul from the physical body so that it is outside, as hydrogen is outside of water. But then the spiritual researcher lives in this spiritual-soul realm. He learns to recognize the characteristics and nature of this spiritual-soul realm, that which goes through birth and death in man, that which passes through the gate of death into a spiritual world and then, after death, world with a higher consciousness, with a consciousness that the spiritual researcher learns to recognize when he applies the spiritual scientific method to his soul, just as the chemist learns the properties of water when he applies the chemical methods. A time will come when people will speak of these things as they speak today of the Copernican world view, which was also once regarded as fantasy, or of similar things.

Just as today the spiritual researcher has to present to humanity the truth that there is a spiritual core in us that passes through the gate of death to return to repeated lives on earth, to repeated and repeated lives on earth, so one day this will be a truth, as the idea of development in external natural science is considered true today. If today what the spiritual researcher has to say is quite naturally regarded as a dream, as a fantasy, from many sides, then those who have immersed themselves in these things may point out how, at a certain time, Copernicanism, which is generally recognized today, was regarded as contradicting the five senses. And so it is today. What spiritual science has to say about repeated lives on earth, about the independence of the soul, and so on, is said to contradict the five senses. And if you take a materialistic point of view, you say: the life of the soul is enclosed between birth and death.

One must compare such a view with another view that still existed in the Middle Ages: that the blue firmament arches over us, which is a conclusion, a boundary, a spatial boundary. Modern science shows us that this boundary is only formed by our ability to see, that space extends into an infinite world, that we are embedded in infinite space on the earth. When modern science dawned, the blue firmament was broken through and recognized as something that is evoked by human vision. Through spiritual science it will be recognized that the boundaries that seek to enclose life between birth and death are like the blue firmament in relation to space. Through spiritual science, people will learn to look beyond this temporal firmament, which is set by birth and death, and they will find human life embedded in a line of development from which it emerges again and again.

Between earthly lives lie realms of development of a purely spiritual nature. And so, by learning to experience himself in this way, the spiritual researcher has something to proclaim in spiritual science: in the spiritual and soul realm, the human being feels, not through philosophical speculation but through experience, a connection with the real spiritual world, which surrounds the physical, from which the spiritual-soul is released - spiritual science speaks of an experience of the spiritual world, a spiritual world in which spiritual beings are, as physical beings are around us here.

It is perhaps still somewhat unpopular today if one is obliged to present these basic concepts of spiritual science in this way. But we live in a time in which humanity is living in a time of transformation of all thinking. Just as a Copernicus or a Galilei had to be anticipated in the dawn of modern natural science, so one can see something in spiritual science that lies, as it were, in the bosom of our time.

If we now follow German spiritual life and really immerse ourselves in it, then from the point of view of spiritual science we will have to gain a very definite view of German spiritual life, of that which has constantly revealed itself in it. I cannot go into details now, only with regard to the last times of German spiritual life. Thus, I said, the peculiarity of spiritual science is that the spiritual researcher, through his special spiritual-scientific method, learns to experience himself in the spiritual-soul that has been freed from the physical body and now knows itself, not in time but in eternity.

Let us see, by visualizing this spiritual view, how the most German of philosophers, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, I would say, lived out his belief in immortality and his belief in the soul. Fichte, like his contemporaries, was not yet able to have a real spiritual science. But how he drew from the spiritual life and knew this life in connection with the life of his national spirit is shown in the speeches he addressed to his people in one of Germany's most difficult times. But I don't want to talk about that today, but rather about how Fichte expressed himself, for example, where he wanted to give a “directions for a blessed life” philosophically, about his doctrine of immortality and soul. There he says:

I cannot admit that one seeks the main thing in the immortal human life only after death. That which is most important to me is that we become aware in this life of the body within us of that which passes through the gate of death and then goes into a spiritual world and lives on in it. For this invisible element living in us, I want to live through this earthly life.

This is not yet spiritual science, but it is the germ of spiritual science. And this germ of spiritual science can be found wherever we look at the fruits of German intellectual life. Everywhere we find the urge, the longing, not to satisfy ourselves with the abstractions of thought, with the external spirit of science, from which the science of the senses or the combination of the sensual is born. The German does not seek only for concepts and ideas, but also for their connection with the living spirit. The German feels moved when he can realize that science is not an external absorption of knowledge, but that it is the true life of knowledge, which he strives for so that the soul communes with the spirit that pervades and permeates the world. In the real connection with what spiritually permeates and permeates the world, the German wants to see the ideal of his knowledge, that he does not just want to absorb ideas, not just concepts, a science that is like an image of something external. He wants to have something in his soul that flows like a spiritual lifeblood in him, like the God himself who lives in him. And this is expressed more intensely and powerfully in a creation that no nation in the world has; which may not stand at the pinnacle of world creation in an artistic sense, but in the way it expresses itself, in that the German does not strive for a merely external visual connection with the spirit, but for a confrontation, spiritual eye in spiritual eye, with the spirit. You know that by this creation I mean the Goethean “Faust” poetry.

Do we not see in Faust how his consciousness turns away from all that is mere external knowledge, what is mere derivation from something external? Do we not see how he strives for the source of life, the manifestation of the spirit; how he strives to confront this spirit eye to eye? How he turns away from the external and strives to experience supersensible worlds? The German can never be satisfied with something he has achieved as knowledge. This is best seen by looking at the following: the beginning of Goethe's “Faust” has become almost trivial. It reflects the mood of Goethe in the 1770s. We see how Faust wants to get out of a knowledge that is not connected to the living spiritual world. When we grasp its full depth, we are shaken when Faust speaks the words:

Alas, I have now studied philosophy,
jurisprudence and medicine,
and unfortunately also theology
thoroughly, with great endeavor.
There I stand, poor fool,
and am as wise as before!

Now let us see how this German intellectual life unfolds. Let us see how Goethe, in the 1770s, longs for the appearance of the earth spirit, for the sources of intellectual life, for higher self-knowledge, which is achieved by the soul immersing itself in the living spiritual of the transcendental world.

Then we see how greatly the German philosophers strove in this respect after Goethe's time. We see that, after Goethe wrote his “Faust”, German thought, German poetry and German music all seek to look at things from the deepest sources. We see the emergence of thinkers such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel; we see them connecting with Goethe; we see how they create something from a knowledge that is supposed to be more original than all that has gone before, that is also supposed to come from the very depths of the human soul; we see that they are creating a philosophy; and when we consider that Hegel created a “natural right” and that Schelling published a medical journal, that all these minds were searching for a renewal of science, despairing at Faust! They also sought to renew theology, for they all wanted to be theologians. We see how all this greatness, which has not yet been properly appreciated, springs from the fundamental forces of the German spirit, and we can perhaps say: Goethe could have stood there, after he had seen all this pass him by, and could have said: What I felt in despair back then in the 1770s has been brilliantly brought forth by the German spirit from the sources of life! And let us assume that Goethe had grown even older than he did; let us assume – and I believe that no one would dispute this hypothesis – that Goethe had begun in 1840 [or let us assume that he had been even younger ], to write “Faust” again after all that had happened in the meantime in German intellectual life, can we believe that the beginning of “Faust” around 1840 would have sounded like this:

Now, thank God, I have studied philosophy,
law and medicine, with Fichte, Schelling, Hegel
and, thank God, theology as well
with great zeal and assiduity,
and here I am, a wise man,
as wise as one can be.

Do you think the beginning of “Faust” would have sounded like that? Certainly not. It would have sounded exactly the same as in 1772. Exactly the same!

But what does that tell us? It testifies that it is in the essence of this quintessentially German, Goethean idea of Faust to regard everything that has already been achieved not as something that can satisfy the individual, but that a striving is rooted in this German spiritual life, where it is manifested precisely in its representatives, that every individual, in turn, has to go through, in every age, an eternal becoming, never being complete. This is the case because German intellectual life can only describe the grasping of the spiritual as a true one if the spirit is experienced. But it can never be experienced if one wants to grasp it in an established way. To experience the spirit, one must always approach the spirit in a renewed way. But this is a typically German trait, and at the same time it is what can be called the “supporting force of the German spirit”.

Not concepts, not ideas, not something acquired in reason is what the German strives for, but what is to be striven for is that which can be grasped again at any time in original power. Not the spirit in a coffin, but the ever-living spirit is striven for. So that we may say: Admittedly, we do not see an archetypally German striving in the older times in the same way that we see spiritual science today. But we see the seeds; in what lives in the best, we see the same striving for direct experience of the connection with the spirit. This is always being witnessed anew. That means: a real life of the spirit is presupposed, in which the individual stands. That means: the supporting power of the spirit lives in him in such a way that they hold secret dialogue, that he is touched by what the German spirit wants from him. And this we see continuing to have an effect even where German intellectual life has been pushed back on itself by attacks from left and right, from above and below; we see the original German being carried by the real spirit continuing to have an effect. I would like to mention just one of the many phenomena that could be cited from the second half of the nineteenth century.

One of the most important representatives of the German spirit in the second half of the nineteenth century, who has not yet been fully recognized today, is Herman Grimm, the son of one, the nephew of the other of the Brothers Grimm, the great researchers of myths and legends, the researcher of the German language. Herman Grimm is first known as a German cultural historian, as an art historian. If you now delve into Herman Grimm's art history, you come across something peculiar. There is nothing in Herman Grimm's writings of what could be called pedantic erudition, of external systematics, but there is something that originally springs from the spiritual. The most important thing that one can gain from the works of Herman Grimm must be read between the lines, it must be sensed from what is said. Why? Because in Herman Grimm lives the sustaining power of the German spirit, which is brought to life by him, and through which he lets himself be whispered in each individual case through an inspiration as to what he has to say about an artistic phenomenon. So that one cannot but feel the affinity between the one who writes and the one who inspires him, one feels like a living conversation of the German national spirit with the one who speaks to us through his books in terms of art history. This Herman Grimm, he prepared himself in a peculiar way for his art historical profession. In his youth, he wrote novellas and also a significant novel. The recognition of these things also belongs to the living German intellectual heritage. For it is not because of their German nature that they have been forgotten, but because attacks have been made on German intellectual property from outside.

I will briefly outline one of Herman Grimm's novellas. We will see shortly what the purpose of this is. The novella is called “The Songstress”. We are presented with a very beautiful characterization of a woman. We see a man in the woman's surroundings. The man is deeply in love with the woman; the woman cloaks herself more in a nobly flirtatious being. He suffers terribly. Herman Grimm wrote a so-called first-person novella with this novella. What he writes is as if the story were being told by a person who lives next door to the couple and experiences everything that happens. And so, in the novella, the author – but in reality, of course, his friend – describes the events that transpire. The singer's coquettish behavior finally drives the lover completely mad. He distances himself from her. He cannot bear the situation. Later, his friend meets him again and sees that he has completely fallen apart. He takes him into his house and sees that this person has come to the edge of the grave because of his love. He sees that he is on the verge of suicide at any moment. So he takes him into his house. But he sees that it is necessary to get the singer over there. He fetches her. And lo and behold, as he approaches the house with the singer, who is to come as the unfortunate man's last hope, so to speak, they hear a shot. The unhappy lover has shot himself, he is dead. The content of the novella is wonderfully beautiful in its characteristics; but that is not what matters to me now. What matters to me is what happens to the singer now that she has found only the dead, suicidal lover. The singer stays in the friend's house for some time. She explains to her friend that she cannot remain in this house, that she is experiencing terrible things in this house. The friend to whom she relates her experiences does not believe this, of course; he is a rationalist. He thinks as rationalists of the present day think. So she asks him to watch with her for one night. And there he is convinced of what is happening to this woman as a result of the death of her lover. He sees for himself how the woman straightens up. He sees a figure enter through the door; that is, he only recognizes it from the words, he does not see the figure, but through what the woman sees, he is convinced that this is indeed a subjective but true experience, that the woman is really in contact with the dead, that this is a matter of the working out of destiny, which throws its rays over death.

Not because I want to use a work of fiction to prove spiritual science, but because the spiritual scientist has to say: Herman Grimm describes like a spiritual science expert, Herman Grimm wants to describe that a person's destiny is not only understood between birth and death. This novella is wonderfully moving, deeply moving, because it describes a person's life beyond death.

Now this is not a temporary phenomenon in writing. In his great cultural-historical novel, Herman Grimm again describes a female character who also has to experience the death of her lover. He describes how real the death is, how the death of the hero occurs, how the spiritual figure rises out of the physical figure. Now Herman Grimm describes how - appropriately - this figure enters into the spiritual world and how a connection remains between the dead and what rises out of the physical body of the heroine. I describe these things because they show how, in German literature, where one is confronted with representatives of the Germanic spirit, the supporting power of the German spirit works in such a way that the novellist, the novelist, too, can do so if he wants to rise into the world of real, supersensible reality. We are shown how the best minds do not stop at outward, visible reality, but how they follow the human soul into the spiritual world. These representatives of the German character did not yet have spiritual science, but their souls were so directed that they sensed the supporting power of the German spirit, which wants to lead the German character to the experience of the spiritual. Therefore, one can have the strongest confidence in the development of spiritual science when one looks at what is there as a germ for this spiritual science in German idealism, in the German longing, not for the abstract but to the living spirit that lives in the supersensible world, just as the mineral world, the plant world, and the animal world live in the sensory world around us. This testifies to the fact that to be German means to be connected in a very specific way as an individual human being with a totality of spiritual life. And in this respect, German experience is not only easily misunderstood, but is attacked and will be attacked again and again. It is not easy for German experience, which is more profound than anything that has developed around it, to take up the weapons with which German intellectual life, which has been pushed into a corner, will have to defend itself over the course of millennia against the hostile forces that come from all sides through the conditions of life.

What then springs from these original German spiritual impulses? They can perhaps be best characterized by pointing to an older time. This German spiritual life did not first appear with this character in modern times, but already in the Middle Ages. If we go back to the mystic Angelus Silesius, he has left many sayings. One particularly meaningful saying is where he says: “Not I as a human soul experience death, in the depths of my human soul dwells God, and God experiences death in me.” The depth of such a saying is not immediately apparent. It proves the primal German thinking and feeling and sensing, which experiences in itself a being with the world spirit that permeates and interweaves everything. Let us only think of the words of Faust:

[Ehrlicher Geist, du gabst mir, gabst mir alles,
Warum ich bat. Du hast mir nicht umsonst
Dein Angesicht im Feuer zugewendet.
Gabst mir die herrliche Natur zum Königreich,
Kraft, sie zu fühlen, zu genießen. Nicht
You only allow cold, astonished visitors,
Allow me to look into their deep chests,
As into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
Before me, and teach me my brothers
In the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm in the forest roars and creaks, The giant spruce topples, crushing neighboring branches, And neighboring trunks, sweeping down, And the hill thunders hollowly with its fall;Then you lead me to the safe cave, show Then myself, and my own chest secret, deep wonders open up.)

That is what the German has always sought in his best representatives. That is what he has sought: to truly find in his soul, to find in his deepest inner being the living spirit, to live together with this living spirit. So that Angelus Silesius, in all his peculiarity, already expounds great ideas of immortality when he speaks of the experience of death. For God can only be felt as alive. But he who experiences God in this way within himself knows that he is immortal. For God must be immortal, therefore death can only be an appearance. From this feeling of the German soul, even the grasp of the immortal life for this German soul emerges. But that is what has given this German soul this certainty, this firm footing in its development. That is what has always brought this German soul, of all national souls, closest to what we today call spiritual science. I would like to bring this home to your souls from a certain point of view.

Let us compare this German spiritual life with Eastern spiritual life, not in its lower regions, but let us go up to the highest regions of Russian spiritual life. Let us try to visualize one of Russia's most outstanding minds, Soloviev. Soloviev, who really took everything that was in Russian intellectual life into his soul and gave it back as a world view – not just as what is called a “philosophical world view”, but in such a way that one feels the Russian life vibrating – gave something that lived in this deep soul. I can only refer here to his works, only a small part of which have been translated, I cannot go into all of them. But I would like to point out that this philosopher, who retained his faith throughout his life – the faith that lives in many Russians, that Western European life, and Central European life as well, is a dying life, the renewal of which can only come from Russia. He lives according to this error. But this error gives his philosophy its special character. And again and again, in rousing speeches, Solowjow assures his people of the creative and sustaining forces within them. Then came the end of his life. Solowjow ended his life by increasingly arriving at a meager worldview, which I will characterize by comparing it to what lives in a similar field in the German worldview.

Let us see what lives in the German world view: it is the certainty that the human soul can live together with the spirit of the world, that it can hold its dialogue with the spirit of the world. We have seen this in the representative figure of Faust. Solowjow does not speak of the certainty of spiritual experience in the way that a human soul speaks out of the Germanic nature. Rather, he speaks thus: Yes, the Russian people have a great mission, but it is fulfilled by a divine being from the other world, who, through grace, takes hold of the Russian people and gives them their mission. God must work in the Russian people. And the Russians are waiting for the miracle, for a god, a kind of manifestation of the light of Christ, to appear and call the Russian people to their task.

In Central European spiritual culture, people know that they can experience their soul, they can experience God in their soul. Soloviev is waiting for that which pushes and drives and urges him from outside; he is waiting for the miracle. But now, in the year of Solowjow's death, the remarkable thing is that Solowjow appeared before the Petersburg public with a speech that must have been wonderfully moving, because something deeply emotional spoke from his words, which so convinced the audience that this power of persuasion passed over to people like a magic breath. He said: “Everything that has ever been believed about humanity being able to find something within itself that would redeem it, that would lead it to a divine state, is a vain deception and illusion. All that is deception, what believes that humanity will ever find the strength within itself to experience the divine through what it is now. No, Solowjow emphasizes, everything that humanity has of strength now, everything that it has of seemingly highest culture, that must perish. “The whole world lies in ruins” - such are his words - for there is nothing in present-day humanity that could lead this humanity to a spiritual goal. Only when everything has perished will the God who redeems souls step in from outside the dissolved earth, the perished earth. We cannot find anything in our souls that points us to something we could seek ourselves.

And he also describes in detail what he expects. As in a powerful vision, he sees the Asian peoples approaching, he sees them waging war on Europe, he sees how, in the twentieth, twenty-first century, Christianity will have declined to such an extent that only one-tenth of those who are on earth will still be Christians, while the whole world will be flooded with a harsh, materialistic worldview, which is pouring over the world, because “the whole world is in a state of decay.” He who listened to what the greatest philosophical mind of the Russian people spoke out of a deep faith shortly before his death, just weeks before his death, might ask: What could have inspired the one who has passed away to say: My soul, through its own power, has lost all eternity.

Let us instead consider the will and testament of a German. There are still people today who scoff at Lessing's momentous will and testament, 'The Education of the Human Race', in which he describes how development continues through all times, how souls keep coming back. For Lessing was the first to incorporate the doctrine of repeated earthly lives into German spiritual life. People often say: Well, yes, Lessing was a great man, but when he wrote this 'Education of the Human Race', he was already an old man. Well, people always arrange what they want to acknowledge as they want. But Lessing did not weaken, rather he had ascended to a deep sense of this direct communion, this speaking of the human soul with the living spirit, which pours out its sustaining strength over the soul of the individual, so that the individual soul can live with it in the sustaining strength of the German spirit. Lessing said something like the following as the closing words of his will: Is it not clear to my soul, from what it experiences within itself, that it must keep coming back to a new life on earth in order to keep learning new things and developing ever higher? That would take a lot of time, well, isn't eternity mine? - That is what Lessing extracts from the depths of the human soul itself, that is what he lays down in his testament. This is a spiritual culture that comes to different words than the one that says: We will never find the strength from the human soul itself.

From such a juxtaposition of different moods, one will understand that in the East, the Russian spiritual mood is asserting itself, which stands without understanding in relation to what is taking place in Central Europe, and which does not overlook everything that is emerging here as a living spiritual life, but always speaks of the decaying culture of the West. Thus, the so-called intellectuals justify, from a spiritual point of view, what they had always intended to do against the West, including politically. The terrible war in which we are engaged was caused as much by the moods of the East as by external interests. But these moods will not disappear with this war. In order to bring German intellectual life to bear, it will be necessary to forge weapons from the spirit, from which the greatest minds of Central Europe have taken their weapons, for this confrontation with the spirit must always be renewed.

And how, by a completely natural process, the enemies of this German intellectual life must be encircled – we can see this if we take a look at how German intellectual life is understood, the German intellectual life that I was able to sketch out in a charcoal drawing, the subject of much discussion. In defense of and in an effort to understand this German intellectual life, I would like to call to mind a Western spirit that truly belongs to the best [Western spirits] of the nineteenth century, an American who wrote in English, Emerson. He is truly not someone to invoke when one wants to describe the contrast between the West and German intellectual life based on prejudice. Emerson portrays the English people as the first world people; but strangely, he places the Germans higher. Despite Emerson's description of the English as the first world people, he says:

The English do not appreciate the depth of German intellectual life.
The German thinks for Europe.

But now I would like to mention something else that is very characteristic from the point of view on which I have based this reflection today. Emerson wrote two wonderful essays, one about Shakespeare and one about Goethe. Unfortunately, people today only read with half a mind, but it could be interesting if a number of people really did what I am about to suggest. It would be interesting to get involved in the essays that Emerson wrote and that bear the title “Representatives of the Human Race,” reading the two essays, one about “Shakespeare, or the Poet,” the other about “Goethe, or the Writer.” You will not believe that I am so brutal, or, one could also say, so “barbaric”, that I want to denigrate Shakespeare in any way, or that I do not revere him to the highest degree as one of the greatest poets of humanity. That is what he is, for Emerson too. And Emerson states that if you want to characterize the poet, you have to name Shakespeare as the representative poet. By comparison, you have to call Goethe the representative writer. Now, one should not just read what is there, but one should feel from the words what passed through the whole soul of the presenter when he gave the characteristics. Emerson tries to present Shakespeare as the representative of the poet in general, based on the characteristics of the English national soul, and then Goethe as the representative of the writer in general. And Emerson seeks to draw out the traits that one must consider if one wants to truly characterize Shakespeare inwardly. And with Emerson it is the case that when he is confronted with an appearance, he characterizes the one appearance with all the power of the word, as if there were nothing else, he immerses himself in the individual appearance. In Shakespeare, when he discusses Shakespeare, in Goethe, when he discusses Goethe. [It is a special gift.] And what is it that he seeks to express when he contemplates Shakespeare, Shakespeare the poet, [whom he regards as the most exquisite poet and this as the most exquisite of the English, and this as the most exquisite of the peoples]? He feels compelled to say, while characterizing Shakespeare: An original mind is not, as is usually thought, one that creates everything out of itself, but one that works as Shakespeare did, who goes everywhere and takes the intellectual property he can find. And now he shows how the whole of England thought like Shakespeare, how he was only the echo of his people. On the other hand, he tries to show how Shakespeare used French and Italian sources, how he gathered everything together to become Shakespeare, how he became the great man by organizing the great intellectual goods from other worlds and other peoples. That is what Emerson comes to through Shakespeare. And I would like to read you a few characteristic words:

Great men are distinguished more by their comprehensive minds [and] by the height of the vantage point from which they look down than by their originality. If we demand that originality which, like a spider, draws its own web from its own entrails, which itself finds the clay, forms stones from it and erects the house, then great men are by no means original. The essence of truly valuable originality does not lie in dissimilarity to others.

Thus Emerson characterizes Shakespeare in such a way as to show: I must show why Shakespeare is so unoriginal. “The essence of truly valuable originality does not lie in dissimilarity to others.”

And one saying, to which particularly much value must be attached in Emerson's characteristics of Shakespeare, is the following, which is not said by me, but Emerson speaks thus about Shakespeare:

It has become a kind of practical rule among writers that once someone has shown themselves capable of creating something original, they may then also discreetly steal the works of others.

So Emerson, when characterizing one of the greatest minds of the world order, needs nothing less than to excuse Shakespeare for being original, even by stealing from others and combining what has been stolen. You have to look a little deeper into what the impulses of human development are when you are standing in such a momentous world period as today.

And then we turn the page, especially in the beautiful translation by Herman Grimm, which he made of Emerson's essays on Shakespeare and Goethe. Let us now turn to Goethe. Again, Emerson delves into Goethe, absorbed in the essence of Goethe, as if nothing else existed. And what comes to Emerson's mind now to characterize Goethe as the representative of writing? He comes up with the following words: All of nature, every stone, everything that is and will be strives to be expressed. The whole world strives for expression. And favored human souls, whom other souls cannot emulate, who therefore stand alone, they find the words to express, in wrestling with the world spirit, what is wrestling with the world spirit.

With Shakespeare, Emerson describes how he [makes references everywhere].

With Goethe, he describes how Goethe himself is connected to the world spirit, which works in the individual realms of nature. Compare the one with the other. About Goethe, Emerson says:

In my eyes, the writer stands as a man whose position was foreseen in the construction of the world.

In direct contrast to the beginning of the world, he brings Goethe. Shakespeare he believes he has to excuse. And further he says of Goethe:

The position he took, he owes nothing, but he entered the world from his birth as a free, [supervising] genius.

About Shakespeare, he says:

It is easy to see that all the best that has ever been written and done in the world was not the work of one man, but the product of a vast, collaborative effort in which a thousand like one, all driven by a single impulse, lent a hand.

Shakespeare is explained entirely out of the environment, out of the world that surrounds him. Regarding Goethe, Emerson says:

He is all eye and instinctively turns to where the truth lies. Say something, and he will immediately know whether it is true or false. It is hateful to him to repeat the old wives' tales, even if they have had the good faith of humanity for a thousand years, and to be made a fool of by them. No one else needs to strain their eyes for him to show them whether something is true or a lie.

I believe, my dear audience, that one can feel something deep and meaningful by comparing Emerson's essay on Shakespeare with his essay on Goethe; one will feel everywhere that this American had a certain right to say: “The English [do not appreciate the depth of German intellectual life. The German thinks for Europe.] He tried to fathom it, but in fathoming it, he sensed something of what I wanted to characterize today as the living forces of the German spirit, which penetrate into every single soul; not that power that flows from the commonality of human beings, but from the direct intercourse of the individual soul with the spirit. And one can feel how Emerson is imbued with this sustaining power of the German spirit when, at the end of his meditation on Goethe, he speaks words that must be taken with feeling, not just with the mind. At the end of his meditation on Shakespeare, Emerson says:

It must be admitted that these were only imperfect histories of imperfect men. The world is still waiting for the poet-priest, the reconciler, who, unlike Shakespeare, does not play, who, unlike the body-burial Swedenborg, does not search in graves, but who will see and speak and act with equal enthusiasm. For knowledge will give splendor to sunshine; justice is more beautiful than secret preference, and love is compatible with all-embracing wisdom.

What feelings does Shakespeare inspire in Emerson? The feeling that we must wait for the coming of the one who will bring reconciliation.

What does the contemplation of Goethe inspire in him? He says at the end of the contemplation:

The secret of genius is not to tolerate a lie, to make everything we are aware of a truth; in the sophistication of modern life, in art and science, in [the] books and in people, to awaken faith , certainty and trust, and to honor each truth, as we begin and as we end, as we go along and as we go forward, by not only knowing it but by making it a rule of action.

Thus, it was not only Goethe but also Shakespeare who inspired Emerson not to wait for anyone. And the words I have just read are preceded by the following:

We too must write sacred writings to reunite heaven and earth.

We would say today: We have to immerse ourselves in spiritual science, in what human science can be. But Emerson does not grasp the depth of German intellectual life, and is fundamentally hostile to it.

This, however, is precisely why German intellectual life will be in a kind of defensive position for a long time to come. For it experiences strange things even with those of whom it is said that they are trying to penetrate into this German intellectual life. I would also like to give you a sample of this.

Those who are reasonably familiar with the intellectual life of the recent past may have been surprised that such high hopes were placed in some German minds before this war taught people, let's say, about someone like Romain Rolland, a different lesson. The people who admired him represent, to a certain extent, a break in the intellectual life of the present. Those who admired him could not really understand how he could speak so contemptuously of the Germans after the outbreak of the war. One has indeed been able to read strange articles in Germany about Romain Rolland. I will only refer to one work by Romain Rolland, “Jean-Christophe”. In this novel, Romain Rolland portrays a German, but you will see in a moment how. Even this description of Jean-Christophe is to be said: it is given by a person who has never been touched by the real inner strength of the spiritual life. What is Jean-Christophe in the two-volume novel? It is a German musician and how he develops in his Germanness. Romain Rolland wants to describe that. And he really does describe something, yes, you can't say otherwise, than a chaotic mixture of the destinies of various Germans such as Beethoven, Richard Strauss, Wagner, Gustav Mahler and so on. All of this is mixed up in the most impossible way, and that gives the completely impossible character of Jean-Christophe, who has been so much admired, but who shows himself to be nothing more than the result of an artist's inability to face reality, which not only records external nature but also penetrates into the depths of existence, and can see the impossibility of mixing up such chaos.

I am well aware that there may be many people who will interpret what I am about to say about Romain Rolland as “barbaric”. But I believe that I can take on what these people defend from their apparent aesthetic high ground when it comes to judging the particular aesthetic and artistic nature of people like Romain Rolland. [It has nothing to do with what Schiller said to Goethe. “People say that there is something immoral in Wilhelm Meister. No, the characters are as they have to be.”] For with Romain Rolland, you never know what the author says and what his characters say. Therefore, what his characters say can be seen as the attitude of Romain Rolland himself. This attitude comes across to us wherever he talks about Germanness. For example, he describes the father of Jean-Christoph.

I will now only quote a few significant things that we can say are a Frenchman's recent judgment of the German character. And I will cite evidence because there were people who said: This novel is the first great act since 1870 that will bring about the reconciliation of Germans and French. No political act is as important for this reconciliation as Romain Rolland's novel, so people said. Well, anyone who reads the novel will agree with me if I disagree. You can't say that Romain Rolland didn't want to say what his characters say, you just have to look at it from an artistic point of view. Because what we are hearing from this Romain Rolland, this “reconciler between Germanness and Frenchness”, has recently been presented to us in the most defamatory way as German “barbarism” from the West. So it is said of the father:

He was a fine speaker, well built, if a little heavy, and the type of what is considered classical beauty in Germany: a broad, expressionless forehead, strong regular features and a curly beard: a Jupiter from the banks of the Rhine.

Then he characterizes a number of chamber musicians, whom he considers typical of German chamber music, in the following way:

They played neither very accurately nor very in time; but they never went off the rails and faithfully followed the indicated expressive markings. They possessed that musical ease that requires little, and that perfection in mediocrity that is abundant in the race that is called the most musical in the world.

Romain Rolland characterizes Uncle Theodor, the stepson of Jean-Christophe's grandfather, as follows:

He was a partner in a large trading house that had business connections with Africa and the Far East. He was a typical example of the new type of German, who mockingly spurn the old idealism of the race and, drunk with victory, practice a cult that proves that they are not accustomed to living under that sign. But since it is impossible to suddenly change the centuries-old nature of a people, the suppressed idealism kept resurfacing in language, behavior, moral views, and Goethe quotes on the occasion of the slightest domestic events; and so, through the bizarre effort to reconcile the honorable principles of the old German bourgeoisie with the cynicism of these new shop-keepers, a strange mixture of conscientiousness and self-interest, a mixture that has a rather nauseating smell of hypocrisy, which amounts to making a symbol of all that is right, of all justice and truth, out of German strength, greed and the pursuit of personal interest.

That is Romain Rolland's description of certain Germans. We have heard it again through Romain Rolland. But then we are told about Jean-Christophe himself:

He lacked that compliant Germanic idealism that refuses to see and does not see what it would find embarrassing to discover, for fear of destroying the comfortable serenity of its judgment and the comfort of its life.

Of course, Romain Rolland sees German idealism, but he wants to show it in the light that, in his opinion, is the true light. He wants to characterize this German idealism somewhat, and there he says about this German idealism – since Romain Rolland is a good musician, his friends claim that he understands German music particularly well, he may refer to it –; Romain Rolland seeks to characterize German idealism as what the Germans delude themselves about as a blue haze that the Germans fear to see and therefore idealize. He sees in it something with which the Germans mask all kinds of things so as not to see reality. Then he says:

The Germans are not idealists for the reason that they falsify feelings.

– he speaks, I beg to be heard, he speaks as if it were a characteristic of Schumann and Wagner – that is not the problematic thing in music, that idealism fakes feelings, but that feelings are fake, that is shown in Schumann. The German feels fake. These are Romain Rolland's own words:

But it was precisely his example that led Christof to the realization that the worst falsity of German art did not lie where artists wanted to express feelings that they did not feel, but rather where they expressed feelings that they felt but that were false in themselves. Music is a relentless mirror of the soul. The more naive and trusting a German musician is, the more he reveals the weaknesses of the German soul, its insecure foundation, its [soft] sensitivity, its lack of candor, its somewhat devious idealism, its inability to see itself, to dare to look itself in the face.

He wants to get to the very heart of this German idealism. That is why he refers to Mrs. von Stael, who once characterized the Germans, as Romain Rolland reports. She said:

They are well-behaved. They use philosophical reason to explain the most unphilosophical thing in the world: respect for power and the habituation to fear that transforms respect into admiration.

Romain Rolland refers to these words of Mrs. von Stael.

Christof found this feeling in the greatest and the smallest [in Germany]

— he says. And then, to say something quite characteristic of the Germans, he adds:

from Wilhelm Tell, the deliberate, small-minded bourgeois with the muscles of a porter, who, as the free Jew Börne says, “to reconcile honor and fear, walks with downcast eyes before the post of ‘dear Lord’ Gessler, so that he can invoke the fact that he who disobeyed who did not see the hat,” up to the portly, seventy-year-old Professor Weiße, one of the most respected scholars in the city, who, when a lieutenant passed him, hastily gave way to him on the footpath and went down to the road.

[He hated the brutal militarism that he felt weighing on him, all those sabers clanking on the pavement, those pyramids of rifles and cannons set up in front of the barracks, ready to fire with their muzzles pointed towards the city.

We are hearing all of this again now. The novel already contains the same words that we are hearing again now, with the only difference being that later on, the French no longer thought that the muzzles were only pointed at their own German cities, but sensed that they could be pointed elsewhere.

But it cannot be said that Romain Rolland is entirely unjust towards the Germans, whom he characterizes in this way. He does find that these Germans have nothing of the true esthete. In music, he grants them some talent. He calls thinking “clear but cloudy,” and so on. But in the opinion of this Frenchman, who is considered one of the best minds in France today, the Germans do not have much of a sense of beauty. He describes a German girl: “The nose [gap in the text] up one side, down the other.” That, according to him, is the typical German girl. I also ask you to consider the following words:

The Germans are fortunate in their tolerance when it comes to physical imperfections: they manage not to see them; they can even come to embellish them with benevolent imagination, finding unexpected relationships between the [face] they want to see and the most magnificent examples of human beauty.

This refers to the face with the nose that I just described. It would not have taken too much persuasion to get old Euler to declare that [his] granddaughter had the nose of Juno Ludovisi.

But it cannot be said that Romain Rolland is or wants to be completely unjust. He also praises where he wants to praise and recognizes in the German character what he believes he can acknowledge. For example, after he has shown how this Jean-Christophe, who is such a talented fellow that he cannot stand it in the German world, that he strives outwards, because such a genius cannot flourish in the German world. After showing this, he finally invites him to be a guest of a professor, whom he wants to depict as a typical German. And what unfolds in the presence of this German professor is where Romain Rolland does praise the Germans, finding something praiseworthy in them. You see, the professor takes great pains to have his housekeeper prepare the best meal possible. And she, so convinced that she has achieved great art, leaves the door ajar to see how the gentlemen are enjoying their meal.

It was an exhibition of unforgettable, honest, unadulterated German cuisine, with the aromas of all the herbs, the thick sauces, the nourishing soups, the exemplary meat dishes, the monumental carp, the sauerkraut, the geese, the homemade cakes, the aniseed and caraway breads.

You can see that he also has something good to say about the Germans! And he particularly benefits from the meal that has now been taken and a real German, a singing German, is to be described. He describes him in such a way that you can see; he is actually wondering why this particular specimen can sing, and even sing well. He says that the German actually has no idea how to sing:

They are seized by the power of the song, and the song works through them as through an instrument. The spirit of the songs takes hold of them, and they obey it. For the soul of the German must do so. This soul obeys the song as the soldier obeys the general.

The so-called German militarism has grown deep into the soul of those who speak of it today with voluptuous expressions. He now describes a real singer by saying: He was a fat man who always sweated when walking, but especially when he made sounds. - He describes his nature, his figure. Then he says: He looked like a Bavarian, a particular variety of German. He says that there are many of these Bavarians, because they have “the secret of this human race, which came about through a system of pasta-eating similar to how poultry is fattened.”

He wants to find out what the people who are actually able to practice this German art of singing, which he also admires, look like.

Now, it is no wonder that this mixture of Beethoven, Strauss, Wagner and Mahler, who has the peculiarity of not having a spark of any of the four in his soul, cannot endure this artificial construct in Germany. He must get out of Germanness! It is said that although he did not know it, he is driven by German confusion to “Golden Paris”.

But instinctively his eyes looked towards the Latin South. And first of all to France. To France, the eternal [refuge] from German confusion.

Now it is described how the one who has to leave Germanness has to find his way in Latin culture. There he becomes a great mystic. I hope you will excuse me from pursuing the further paths. But we would find many a characteristic there of what must be called the misunderstanding of that which sustains and carries the individual German from the supporting power of the living spirit, with which the German essence feels connected.

Therefore, it may be said that it must be clear to all those who believe that humanity's future lies in the strong and vigorous representation of intellectual life through a world culture how the German spirit has not yet completed its mission in the world, but how this German spirit has laid the seeds from which it can be seen that they must continue to flourish ever more abundantly.

And that appears to us as the fundamental strength of the German spirit, that we know: we can only hope for the blossoms and fruits of the future. We stand confidently in the midst of it, in the living experience of the German spirit. This must also give us the strength for the necessary defense, for the defense of German intellectual life as well, which, as perhaps few today already suspect, is in a fundamental struggle, just as much as the external life of the immediate present.

It would be out of place to present a reflection that was only meant as a consolation. Who needed weak consolation or who needed words of strength or the like, when a nation that knows how to defend its goods with such strength has shown and has already held out for almost a year with strength and courage and a willingness to make sacrifices?

But we must be aware that the German spirit must be on guard just as much as external German life had to be on guard. And when we look more deeply into this spiritual life of the German, we find something of which we can say: This is the core and the root of Germanness: its yearning for the living spirit, its living together with the living spirit.

Those who revile the Germans today and say: We do not mean this German spirit when we revile them, must be told: You seem to us like someone who says: I know there is a person with strong hands, but when he uses these hands, we do not like it!

The French philosopher Bergson said in a Christmas speech that the German mind today shows that it can no longer grasp the living, it can only grasp the mechanistic. Today, only cannons stand against the French; only mechanisms are seen coming from Germany, and armies.

There is not much logic in what he says, as logic is generally missing today when the world situation is discussed so beautifully. You would have to ask this philosopher Bergson whether he expected the French soldiers to be confronted with recitations of Schiller's poems or with Novalis' works.

But a glance, which I could only hint at with weak words – a glance into the essence and life, into the roots of the German spirit, shows us that, looking at this spirit, we can say:

It has not only not completed; it shows that it is taking its ascending path to a fully blossoming and fruitful spiritual life. And anyone who can trust in inner strength can have the utmost confidence in what the German spirit is willing to accomplish. And anyone who has such an insight into the inner effectiveness of the German spirit also knows what great and powerful things must be defended with external weapons today; he knows that the soul of the German nation still has much, much more to bear.

Therefore, let me express what I wanted to express to you today in a few words, and what I ask you to take more from what underlies my words as feelings and emotions. Finally, let me summarize it in a few words that are based on my feelings, which should be words of confidence for the soul, from what can be known about the sustaining power of the German spirit, in the past and into the future. I would like to say: If you follow through in your thoughts what I have only been able to sketch with a few lines of charcoal, you will increasingly come to the feeling that I would like to express at the end with the words:

The German spirit has not fulfilled
What it should bring to the world.
It lives hopefully in worries about the future,
It hopes for future deeds full of life; —
In the depths of its being, it feels powerfully
Hidden things that must still mature. —
How can a wish for his end arise in the power of the enemy without understanding, so long as life reveals itself to him, which holds him in the roots of his being?

Handwritten summary of contents for the censors.

During the war, public events were subject to the supervision of the censorship authorities. For this purpose, Rudoif Steiner wrote the following table of contents for his lecture scheduled for June 16, 1915 in Düsseldorf (NZ 1564-1566).

Contents of the lecture to be given by Dr. Rudolf Steiner in Düsseldorf. The lecture has already been given in Berlin, Leipzig and in a similar form in Munich.

The lecture begins with the introduction of personalities who, in fateful times within the development of German culture, placed the security, the confidence, the true invincibility of the German being before the soul of the people by evoking the soul's deep permeation with the effective power of the ruling spirit. For them, this “spirit” was not a “concept” or an “idea,” as it is for the naturalistically thinking consciousness; for them, the spirit was a real being with which the soul maintains contact in its deepest interior, from which it draws spiritual life-force, just as the body draws physical life-force from the air through the lungs.

Thus Fichte stood in the midst of his people when they had to work their way up to freedom, supported only by their own strength, by showing how the German people, in contrast to the Romance peoples, already prove through their language that they are connected in their very essence to the innermost roots of the vital impulse of spiritual existence. The German does not feel spiritual life as something that is only recognized in the individual human soul, but as something that reigns over this individual soul as an independent being and that carries the individual soul.

From this consciousness, a creation within German culture has emerged that is only possible within the German people: Goethe's “Faust”. Faust strives out of dead knowledge towards an inner living contact with the essence of the spirit. In Faust, the most ancient German consciousness of nature and the world comes to life again in a newer way. One does not need to deny the great significance of Shakespeare; but one must still say that in Faust, everything human rises to a nobler height than in Hamlet. Consider how, when confronted with the truly spiritual, the latter can only fall back on doubt and uncertainty, on the hopeless question, “To be or not to be?” By contrast, when confronted with the power of evil, of material things, Faust asserts the inner certainty of victory of his connection with the spirit: “In thy nothing I hope to find the All.”

Those who belong to the nations that today do not want to revile German deeds enough, must have come to the same conclusion that Ernest Renan expressed in 1870, when they sensed the nature of this in the development of German culture. 70, that Germany has added something to the development of humanity in terms of “depth and extent” that “for those who have experienced it, it is as if they only know elementary mathematics compared to those who are proficient in differential calculus”.

This connection of the German soul with the sustaining power of the world-ruling spirit has, in minds like Herder's, evoked the consciousness of the world-significant task of German culture, of the fact that this culture has a contribution to make to the overall education of the human race, insofar as this illuminates the lofty goal of working “until everything has happened, until the genius of enlightenment has traversed the earth.”

This consciousness warmed Lessing's soul as he wrote his incomparable testament to the “education of the human race,” which elevated all contemplation of history to an experience of the eternal spiritual activity of the world through the human soul.

And this consciousness lives on to the present day in the most exquisite minds of the German people. It will now be shown how this fundamental strength of the German spirit has led to a deep world view and outlook on life in individual personalities of the nineteenth century. Herman Grimm's genuine German character is characterized; lesser-known personalities are also mentioned to show what particular German character is in thinking, feeling and experiencing.

Finally, it is suggested how, in the present day, the consciousness that comes from the sources, in which the German essence is intimately connected with the power of the spirit, may live in the German mind, and how this consciousness may trust in its power within the world of enemies, in the face of which it has to assert itself in our fateful days.

Throughout the millennia, different peoples have sought to satisfy their deepest needs in life through religion. In our time, it is easy to misjudge the significance of the religious aspirations of nations. It is easy for a modern person to harbor illusions about the nature of religion. Since one of the principles of Theosophy is to fathom the wisdom of religions, some light will also be shed today on the aims and tasks of the Theosophical movement in general.

At first, our topic was discussed by learned religious scholars from a cultural-historical point of view. In the past, such things were not considered at all. In the past, individuals were aware that they could find the truth in their religion. It was only in the course of the nineteenth century that people decided to compare different religions. This has revealed a remarkable fact: a consensus in the various religious beliefs of different human races. But they did not get much further than the assumption that the childlike imagination of the nations forms ideas about God and man in the same way. It has become common practice to see in the different religions of different peoples childlike stages of human spiritual development, and no more. If one delves deeper into the question hinted at here, one comes to the conclusion that one underestimates even the simplest religious ideas if one does not take them deeply and thoroughly. If you go deeper, you acquire the right kind of humility, the humility that says: You understand something of the great, powerful images, but there is still much you cannot fathom. You learn to recognize more and more by climbing the ladder of human development yourself.

Go down to ancient Egyptian culture. There you find the male deity Osiris and the female deity Isis. If you learn to understand the deity Osiris from the perspective of the Egyptian people, it reveals itself as a meaningful religious concept. It is said that Osiris was dismembered by his brother Typhon, and the individual pieces were buried in different places. The idea is associated with this that everything that lives on earth emerged from Osiris. Everything that happens on earth is seen as a resurrection of Osiris. When a person experiences their spiritual core, they say to themselves: Osiris rises within me. The earth is the dismemberment of Osiris. The human being is the resurrection of Osiris.

Now let us go up to the legends and myths of the Nordic world. There we meet the giant Ymir, who was overcome by Wotan, will and woe. We learn that he was dismembered, that the rocks were made from his bones, the streams and seas from his blood, the vault of heaven from his brain, and so on. This Earth is an enlarged, idealized human being. She is a sleeping giant.

We find similar ideas in the religions of different peoples everywhere. We should not believe that the religions of “lesser” peoples are childlike compared to our own. Let us take an example of how a sublime religion can be found in another nation. When the ancient Indians of North America were increasingly pushed back by the peoples of Europe, the latter believed that they were far superior to the North American Indians. At a meeting with the Europeans, a Native American chief gave a speech that beautifully reflects the religious beliefs of the Native American tribes. The way the chief spoke is how many representatives of these peoples spoke about God.

They had been promised land, but this had not been done. The chief now said the following to the representatives of Europe: You learn about God and what He says from books, in which small black characters appear. The white man only knows about his God from the black signs in the books, but the brown man recognizes the great spirit as it speaks to him from the whispering of the wind, from the lapping of the waves, [from lightning and thunder]. You promised us to give us land, but did not do it. Your God has not taught you to speak the truth, etc.

This is how many peoples thought about the great spirit before there was what we call religion. Religion comes from “religere”, to reconnect. We want to understand why religion is important for reconnecting.

Before our present human race populated Europe, Asia and Africa, it was preceded by the Atlantean population on the Atlantic continent, between America and Europe. This continent was inhabited by the Atlantean race. There they lived, the Atlanteans, with a peculiar spiritual life. What remains of Atlantean culture can be found in the seemingly wild, but in fact only backward culture on the periphery of the former Atlantis.

There they felt in a primitive and elementary way what one might call the equivalent of religion. What was the religion of the most ancient ancestors of early man is preserved in the form that we can find in the religion of China, in the so-called Tao religion.

When the Chinese pronounce the Tao, they feel something similar to how that Indian spoke of the great spirit. It was a completely different way of feeling and thinking; it was a sense of belonging to the whole world. Man did not feel like a special being, as we do today. Today's man does not think much of breathing in and out. The breathing process is carried out as a purely mechanical process. In the ancestors of yore, a feeling was awakened in response to breathing. They felt gratitude to the great spirit. They felt that he united with them with every inhalation. They united with him with every exhalation. When they felt their pulse, they attributed this power to the great spirit. They felt at one with the universal spirit. The breath was spirit to them, the blood that pulsed in their veins was spirit to them. They felt part of the great world spirit. One must try to feel what is going on in a human soul that feels itself as one piece with the great world spirit flowing through it, the divinity within itself, and within the divinity, how our ancestors were completely blissful in this sensation, one must learn to empathize.

There is only one feeling that comes close to this - when the Vedantist feels the “Tat twam asi”: “That art thou,” he says to the world around him. But in the main, our nature has lost the feeling of our ancestors. Sympathy for the whole world was called Tao. Tao is what lives in the wind, what lives in lightning and thunder, what lives in animals and plants, what is in man, what pulses through him as his life. It was a unified feeling. Our thinking is itself a product of development. Those who felt the Tao did not yet have this intellect. It is precisely a characteristic of our present race. When our race developed from the Atlantean race, intellectual thinking developed from the clairvoyant gift of the Atlanteans. Now people learned to think in terms. The consequence of conceptualization was that man strictly separated himself from his environment. This had a significance when man conquered intellect. The Atlanteans did not feel that they were separate from others. Tao was the blood, the air, Tao was the other human being. The feeling of separation arose in them through the intellect working within. Everything they felt in the world, they had to experience within.

The God who pulsed through man was a unity that flowed outside and flowed inside. Now the separation had taken place. Now the “religere” - “reconnect” had to occur, the religion that connected the outside with the inside. The entire fifth root race strives in religion to reconnect with the divine All-Spirit.

On the basis of what has just been said, one must ask oneself: How can man of our present cycle imagine his God? He must first seek him within himself. But when he realizes that this is the same God as out there, then he has achieved something in his own way, as the ancient Atlantean felt in Tao. This is expressed in the ancient, sacred religion that the Rishis taught their disciples, the religion that preceded the Vedas. The Vedas are only an echo of that ancient, sacred religion of ancient India. This religion of ancient India can be brought to life within oneself even without esoteric knowledge. For it lives everywhere between the lines and words. It is a religion of life, which assumes that the divine is found within the human being. Whereas in the past people felt the connection with the God in their environment, in ancient India people sought the God in the separate individual soul. They sought to develop themselves to the point of direct realization that what lives in the individual soul lives in all souls. If one could experience one's own divinity in this way, if one had found what led beyond all separateness; beyond the deception of separateness, then one called it the divine Brahman. One could not theorize about that. One had to experience it within oneself. Then one gradually came to recognize this unified divinity from three points of view. This is found in all religions, these threefold aspects, under which the Brahman is sought.

The three aspects of the divine are understood roughly as follows in the intimate life of the different religions: The divine spirit lives in you. But the divine spirit also lives outside in the universe. And a spark of this divine spirit lives in you. The spirit that lives in you when you have an urge, a passion, an ideal, also lived when it built the house in which you now feel and sense everything. The deeper you penetrate into the structure of human wisdom, the clearer it becomes how this divine spirit has worked in you. Your passions, your sense of truth, are still subject to error. But the human body is not subject to error. Only the soul makes mistakes. It continually attacks the wonderful organism that the Deity has built as a housing for man. The structure of the human body is perfect. Every bone, for example, is wonderfully designed. It is composed of fine beams in such a skillful way that no engineer today could imitate it. The thigh bone has a reciprocating structure that allows it to support the body with the least amount of force.

The higher bodies of man are much more imperfect than the physical. This perfect physical casing was built by the great spirit; then he was drawn into this shell like a spark. Now take this whole world of this structure that lives around you, apart from what lives in you as a soul, and you have the third aspect of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit. Then take your own soul and the souls of your fellow brothers and fellow creatures. That is the Son, the second aspect of the Godhead, the second form in which the Godhead appears. At the beginning of the world process, we have everything that surrounds us as the perfect world. That is the Holy Spirit. What now lives in it as soul, that is the Son. That which the Son will become and that to which we will come through the Son, what we will be at the end of the days, that is the first aspect, the Father. Religions look at the primal essence from these three aspects, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

You can go through all religions and you will always find this Trinity as the basic concept of all religions. The disciples were spoken to in this way countless times. When I speak, my words break free from my soul. They vibrate in the air. Then the vibrations go out to the other souls. Imagine that the organ of hearing is switched off – I speak – the words could be made visible – then you could see what I am saying. Imagine that you could turn the vibrating air into water and then into something solid. Imagine that you could very quickly condense the [vibrating] waves. Then the words would fall down as pieces of solid matter. They would lie at the bottom of the ground. This is how religion imagines everything around us, only by thinking the macrocosm formed similarly to how the words do here.

The macrocosm was once a very fine substance. Now the deity spoke a word, a primal name. The substance condensed, and so everything came into being. This is how rock crystal was formed too. The words of God were spoken into this substance, and it condensed. Everything was the thought of God, everything was spirit. That from which the spirit emerges is the original word. The Word of God that resounded into space was called the “Word”, the second aspect of the Deity. The thought of God that had condensed was the third aspect of the divine essence. The Word that resounded was the second aspect of the divine essence. God was in the Word and in the Word was God. (John 1:1) But before the Word can be spoken, something must precede it. That was the Father-God, the beginning. A deep connection has been recognized in all religions between what was in the beginning, the Father-God, and the life of the present. The Son is the life of the present. In the soul lives the Son as the Word. Veda - Edda means: the word. That which is called the actual revelation in the different religions always goes back to the word. The divine documents express this word. That is why they are also called the Word. In the religious records is that which the Spirit of God has spoken into the world. An echo of this lives in the human soul.

Another part of the core wisdom of all religions is the awareness that man is in a process of development, that he can reach ever higher and higher levels of development. The soul can increasingly resemble God. In my body, I see that the forces and materials of nature have worked together to create the perfect physical body for me. Plants and animals are experiments. A development has taken place. In the human being, the keystone of this development is opposed to us. In us, we carry the spirit germ like a bud. This is how we participate in the spiritual world. Thus, the human being lives in a physical environment and, on the other hand, grows into a spiritual world. Within himself, he has powers and abilities through which he is connected to the spiritual world. Stones, plants, animals are beings in different degrees of perfection. The soul also exists in various degrees of perfection, existing in a sequence. This begins with us. We are the most imperfect in the spiritual world. We have to live ourselves into a community with supersensible beings, with spiritual beings that form the connection between man and the Supreme Divinity, Devas, Dhyan Chohans, Angels, Archangels, etcetera. Everywhere, in all religions, there is the core of wisdom of a spiritual world, of a sum of entities of a supersensible nature. Just as man belongs to the rest of the [physical] world through his physical body, so he belongs to the spiritual world through his core of being.

Another core wisdom of all religions is that all development occurs in cycles, which can be compared to breathing in and out, day and night. The life of a human being, the life of the soul, also runs in such cycles. Man alternates between this side of existence, where he gathers experiences, and another where he lives in community with spiritual beings, in Devachan. In rhythmic succession, physical life on earth appears again and again, and again the life of the spirit. The idea that one earthly life is one among many is a common basic law of all developed religions.

It is a mistake to say that Christianity does not teach reincarnation. In its esoteric form, it teaches reincarnation. It just doesn't teach it on the outside. Christ spoke to his intimate disciples about reincarnation. When he was alone with his disciples, he explained many things to them on the mountain. He only spoke most intimately to his most intimate disciples, James, John, Peter, at the Transfiguration. The expression “building huts” is there. (Mk 9,5) These are the most intimate disciples who have risen to the level where huts are built. You experience what you experience when you can build huts. Space and time are overcome. Moses and Elijah appear. The deepest secret is shown to the disciples. Elijah is the Way. “El” means Way. Moses is the Truth, and Christ is the Life. He stands in the middle. The Way, the Life, the Truth. This ancient wisdom of the Christian religion stands here in bodily form; it appears to the disciples in the devachanic, raptured state. Christ said to them: Elijah has returned. They just did not recognize him (Mk 9:19). He spoke to them of reincarnation, but continued: “But do not tell anyone until I return” (Mk 9:9). The Second Coming refers to the point in human development when they will be ready to find the inner Christ.

Angelus Silesius points to the essence of this inner Christ and its significance:

A thousand times if Christ were born in Bethlehem and not in you, you would be a thousand times lost.

The inner experience of Christ enables us to grasp the Christ in the world. When people have come so far, then one can speak again of reincarnation. Until then, it should be kept secret. Among the Egyptian slaves, there was a living awareness: This is one life among many. In the other life, I will be like the one who now commands me. Thus he recognized the law of reincarnation and karma, the connection between cause and effect in the moral world. He felt this to be the law of his life. Then we understand the deep significance that the law of karma and reincarnation had in the souls.

But this humanity would have only looked up and lost the appreciation of the one life between birth and death. Once the soul had to go through a life where it knew nothing of reincarnation. About 1500 [or 2600] years is the period that elapses between two embodiments. In the 2000 years after Christ, the soul has gone through one such embodiment. Therefore, the disciples should not teach reincarnation until people could grasp the Christ within themselves.

The doctrine of reincarnation is contained in Christianity, not as a mere teaching, but as a legacy for the future. The teaching was not lost in Christianity by accident or disgrace, but was deliberately not taught for 2000 years. Man has grown out of the whole of nature. Goethe felt the Taoist feeling in the words he addressed to nature in the Hymn to Nature. This contains an examination of how he empathized with nature.

Man had to become a special being, but then he had to be reconnected to the divine. The search for the way back to the divine is what the old mystics of the Middle Ages called deification. This is how man expresses that he is eminently created for a development. In order for him to grow towards deification, the divine must be present in him in a seed-like way.

To make this one's content is to be a religious person. And to know what then lives in the soul and flows through it is theosophy. This is, in another form, what religions give to man. It makes religions understandable to him. Divine wisdom is the antitype of the soul's content, which itself is permeated and pulsated by the truth. The earlier religious conceptions were more or less the content of faith. This content of feeling must be raised into full, bright day-consciousness. The deepening of all religions into wisdom, so that it permeates us completely with its living content, so that the soul thereby reaches the goal of deification; that is what Theosophy will lead us to.

Freedom is a word that makes every heart beat faster, a word to which the ideals of our best human brothers have turned, for which the noblest spirits of humanity have devotedly sacrificed their work, their lives and their very selves. Freedom is that, about which great thinkers have said that it has something to do with the whole development of humanity. Hegel calls the history of man “a progression of people in the consciousness of freedom”. He says: If we look at the Orient with its mighty monarchy, we see how countless people languish in bondage and how only one is free. In later history we see how more and more people become free, and how through Christianity the inner aspiration to freedom has been placed in the heart and soul of every person, and how whole masses of people have shed their blood to make real what Christianity has presented as divine truth. The feeling of freedom in Christianity lies even deeper. The Lord said:

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free! (John 8:32)

If we enter the quiet study of the thinker and philosopher, we will see how the deepest minds have seen it as their task to explore what human freedom encompasses, for example Leibniz and Fichte. They asked: How should we relate to this central concept of our entire human spiritual life? Is man free, or is he under a necessary compulsion? Can we really face the criminal in the same way if we know that he was predestined to do an evil deed, or know that he was free, that he committed his deed of his own free will? — It could well be that, precisely because the question of freedom lies so deep, it is one of the deepest human riddles.

The theosophical worldview speaks of the ability of the human being to develop his higher senses. In its path of knowledge, it describes the most diverse qualities and virtues that one must acquire in order to come to knowledge; the last of these qualities is the will to freedom. This is part of the process if one wants to develop higher. If you want to approach this human puzzle in a completely natural and perfect way, you have to ask this question a little differently than it is usually asked. Usually one asks: Is man free, or is he under a necessary compulsion?

A large number of human thinkers say: People are free; another part of the thinkers says: No, anyone who believes that does not realize that in some way there must be a cause for everything a person does. — In truth, such a thinker says to himself that man is unfree, and that even if he appears to act freely, there is some condition behind it. If there were no particular reasons for an act, he would not do it. An example is given here of the donkey that stands in the middle between two bundles of hay and cannot decide which one to eat, and therefore starves to death because he is not free and the causes on the right and left are equal.

Perhaps one could say: Freedom is something that one first acquires; then man is neither completely free nor unfree. As he develops towards freedom, he becomes more and more free. The development of man is the way to his freedom. - There we come closer to the view of those who see the freedom of man as something that he can acquire through experience and knowledge. - Look at the child. We can always tell what will drive it to do a certain act under certain conditions. The question, “Is man free?” makes no sense, but the question, “Does man become freer through development?” does make sense.

With a mechanism, we can always say exactly what must happen according to the forces and conditions inherent in it. If we turn to plants, we cannot say so definitely what will happen to them. With animals, we can predict even less with certainty what they will do. Something like arbitrariness comes out even with the higher animals. If we then go up to man, we see more and more the area of necessity being restricted. In the savage, however, we see only a spark of freedom; but the more man develops, so that he comes to moral concepts, the less one can assume with certainty what he will do under given circumstances. — With the leaders of mankind, one cannot assume at all what they will do. They always do what is original. He who merely executes those things which the chain of necessity has brought up to him adds nothing new to the development of humanity. But he who brings something new from the source of illumination into humanity adds something that was not there before. Originality brings about progress, and originality must go beyond the realm of mere necessity.

Man can be understood in such a way that we divide him into the lower nature, which finds expression in the physical body; and into the higher, soul-like, spiritual nature, which at first only glows like a spark, but which increasingly becomes the ruler of his being. In a child, one finds many traits that speak to the heart but bear a strong resemblance to those of the parents, relatives, etc. But then the spark of originality and freedom begins to stir. The innermost part of the soul begins to express the person, the being itself, in what lives.

The more originality a person has, the more this is written into the features and movements of his entire being. Then the human being emerges from his inner being into his surroundings. First he writes his innermost being into his character; his facial features, his gestures become an imprint of his soul. The more perfect the human being becomes, the more he leaves the footprints of his existence on his surroundings; he influences ever widening circles. How does the human being acquire the ability to have this effect, first on himself and then on his surroundings?

Freedom is never arbitrariness, but something quite different. The drives and instincts are the purest tyrants, and if we follow them, we are subject to arbitrariness. Goethe said: Only he is worthy of freedom who has first gained mastery within himself and over himself. — First we must control the drives and passions, then we have a claim to real freedom.

We must rise from everyday knowledge to the knowledge of the interrelationships of the world. What is important here is not intellectual knowledge, but spiritual-soul knowledge; then this knowledge is the beginning of freedom. - When we enter into our existence, we are born into a body. At birth, man is already endowed with a certain amount of abilities and with a certain degree of perfection.

We ask: Where did this come from? — The laws of the spiritual powers of the world have built it up. We are placed into the world, and the laws of the world have worked on us and with us to this point. We must live ourselves into the laws of the world; we must rise to the creative powers in the world. By making the laws of the world our own, we free ourselves more and more. Knowledge of the laws of the world, absorption in the laws of the world, that is what makes us free. He who is forced to act is not free; but he who recognizes the laws of the world becomes free. To understand that one should do something is to act freely. As long as we do not recognize the highest divine, we act under compulsion. But when we recognize the divine, we act as co-knowers of the thoughts of God: then we become free.

Master Eckhart meant this when he spoke so beautifully and powerfully of freedom in his sense. There is much in this that, with a wonderfully intimate, fine power, detaches the understanding of freedom from the human being. It is impossible for one who is filled with knowledge of God to do evil; for him, good action becomes a matter of course.

In his letters “On the Aesthetic Education of Man”, Schiller developed a pure concept of freedom. The whole thing culminates in giving people a concept of human freedom.

In an epigram, Schiller has turned very sharply against the concept of virtue of Kant, who saw the suppression of instincts and passions as necessary.

If a person acts according to Kant's concept of virtue, then he is a slave to his ideals, to the necessity of reason. If he blindly follows his urges and passions, then he is a slave to his baser nature. In neither case is the person free; he only becomes free when he is able to achieve the middle state between the two. This conception of freedom is what makes Schiller so exquisitely refined. A person is only free when he has so ennobled his impulses and instincts that he will not want to do anything other than what his duty commands. In this way, by following his passions, man then follows the highest moral ideals.

Sensuality and morality, naturalness and spirituality then meet in such a person. One acquires such a state through an inner work on oneself. Such a state has been called: enthusiasm, that is, being in God; so refined have his instincts and passions that even the basest instincts only want what they should want under the divine law of the world.

Man is free to a certain extent, insofar as he has ennobled his instincts and desires, and unfree insofar as he has not yet done so.

Art should serve to educate people for freedom. — The eye, a sensual view, conveys enjoyment in works of art; but the soul also shines forth from the work of art. As we look with our senses, something spiritual flows into us at the same time. Art should elevate the sensuality of man to spirituality, deepen him.

It is a becoming of man from bondage to freedom. Among the means of education that are intended to lead to entry into the spiritual worlds, the will to freedom is also mentioned.

Many questions have been asked incorrectly; they must be asked correctly: this also applies to the question of freedom. It must also be asked correctly in order to understand how the laws of reincarnation and karma work. In the beginning, man must first learn to use his body as a tool to connect with the world around him. He must learn how to use himself as a lower human being. Through many lives he learns the way to freedom, the way to unleash the deepest nature of man, to live in the divine nature. There is a calm and security in living in freedom. The philosopher Fichte spoke the word that gives strength to the soul: “Man can do what he should; when he says he cannot, he does not want to.”

We must first learn to will; our deed becomes free when our will is imbued with knowledge. Freedom grows in man through continuous assimilation of knowledge. We absorb such power when we learn to view the laws of the world in the right way. Spirit and law must be in the world if we are to find spirit and law in the world. We take the lawfulness out of the world; therefore, the world lawfulness must already be there. If man wants to think thoughts about the world, then the world must be built according to thoughts. Those who shaped the world first placed thoughts into it.

The one who has recognized and appropriated the laws of the world acts as a conscious being in the freedom of the world and becomes an assistant to the gods in the world. Through knowledge of the law we become free; then we can act consciously.

Joy is a gift for the present; but we learn to appreciate suffering when it is gone, because suffering is a source of knowledge. A God who would take suffering out of the world would not be doing people any service. The path of suffering is the path of knowledge, and only knowledge makes us free.

Only those who must conquer it daily deserve freedom and life.

Development is the way to freedom. Christ called Himself the Way, the Truth – Knowledge – and the Life – Development.

Man must follow this principle: “Die to what is lower within you and awaken to what is higher.” “Die and become” is what has always worked through the whole education of humanity towards the development of freedom.

The Bible text says this; it tells us the great, serious, redeeming truth that by permeating ourselves with the will of the law, we make ourselves great participants in world events. In this sense, Christ Jesus says:

You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.

Among the many spiritual currents that have emerged in recent times to satisfy the deepest questions and riddles of existence is also theosophy. It has been about thirty years since this movement has spread more and more in different countries. It originated in India, but it is also spreading to other countries and is having an effect through what is called the Theosophical Society. This Theosophical Society is divided into individual sections and these sections can be found everywhere in the developed countries of the world. We have an Indian, an American, British, Dutch, French, Italian, Scandinavian, German section, and so on.

From this we see that Theosophy is no longer something that only a few people explore, but that it satisfies the longing and the need of the widest circles. Nevertheless, it must be said that it is often misunderstood; just saying the word “Theosophy” makes many suspect dark superstition, fantastic fantasies; and when obscure movements arise somewhere in the world, one can still experience today that the word Theosophy is always mentioned. Others think that Theosophy is unscientific; no science could profess it. From another side, Theosophy is even treated with fear, it is said to be a sect that is directed against Christianity; anyone who wants to remain a good Christian must not become a Theosophist. And finally, it is referred to with the word that we can read over and over again in the newspapers: “New Buddhism”, and if someone today attaches the word “Buddhism” to Theosophy, a large proportion of all Westerners will be greatly alarmed.

All these thoughts are prejudices; Theosophy is neither a renewal of blind superstition nor is it unscientific. Those who have a thorough and logical understanding of modern science will not only be surprised when they take a look at Theosophy, but will also realize, when they draw certain conclusions from the natural sciences, that these lead them to Theosophy and can only be understood through it. And if one says that Theosophy is a sect, then we shall see later, after we have discussed the essence of Theosophy in more detail, how far removed it is from having anything sectarian about it, and how it does not in the least conflict with today's deeply understood, comprehensible Christianity, and how little it has to do with any Buddhism, least of all with the Buddhism that was founded by Buddha 600 years before Christ. A strange misunderstanding has prevailed, which has already been clarified by H. P. Blavatsky in the “Secret Doctrine”. There are many books that have been written about Theosophy. One of these books, which has contributed enormously to the spread of Theosophical science, is Sinnett's “Esoteric Buddhism”. Mrs. Blavatsky said that this book is neither esoteric nor Buddhism, because something is only esoteric if it is passed from person to person. It is only possible to transmit the most intimate thoughts in the most intimate communication between teacher and student. What flows from soul to soul and is called esoteric can never be published. A book can never be esoteric Buddhism, but the book is not about Buddhism at all.

Within the world view known as Theosophy, there are certain teachings about the structure of the human being. Let us briefly repeat this teaching, which is the common property of all those who stand on the ground of spiritual science, this teaching, which has been saying for millennia that what is known only through the external senses, through the material view of man, is only a small part of the human being. This physical human body, which we perceive through our external senses, is shared by humans with all beings on earth, and with everything that surrounds humans, because even stones and crystals are made up of the same substances that are contained in the human body.

Now spiritual science says: This physical body is only one part of the human being, the second part, which is actually much more real and actual, because it creates and forms the physical body, is called the etheric body or life body. This is what humans have in common with all living beings that surround them here on earth, including plants. The physical body is nothing more than a mixture of physical substances that would be impossible and would immediately disintegrate if it were not held together by the etheric or life body. The etheric body has the task of protecting the physical body from decay.

The third link of the human being is, in the sense of spiritual science, the astral body. This astral body is the carrier of all desires, instincts and passions, in short, of all affects, of all that is inwardly mirrored within the human being, and this astral body the human being has in common only with animals, but no longer with plants.

Spiritual science then distinguishes a fourth element of the human being, by which he is the crown of creation, by which he differs from all the creatures around him. This fourth element is called the “I” in the English language, which works from within the human being. There is only one name that can never sound from the outside when it refers to the human being itself. This is why all great religions say: Here we have the ineffable name of God, a drop from the ocean of divinity that has flowed into every human being. Just as the individual drop of the sea is not the whole sea, the human soul is not the whole of divinity. Only because the Godhead begins to speak in the soul, with the pronunciation of the Zch, does the soul begin to speak within itself, or, as religions say: the god speaks in man.

Today, this spiritual science is made exoteric through public lectures and writings; it is no longer passed on esoterically as it used to be, from person to person. One of these spiritual schools where teaching was only passed on from person to person was the old Pythagorean school in Greece.

Now let us see how the I works within the human being. Let us consider a savage at the most primitive level. On one of his journeys, Darwin came across a tribe of wild people who were still cannibals. He wanted to make it clear to one of them that this was not allowed, and he had the interpreter tell him that it was bad to eat people. The savage replied that he did not know whether it was good or bad before he had eaten the person. We see from this example that at this stage of existence, the uneducated savage knows nothing but how to satisfy the basest instincts and desires of his astral body. But when he undergoes a higher development, when he comes to the realization: You must not follow these lower instincts and desires, when he recognizes moral and ethical laws and commandments, then his ego works on the ennoblement of his astral body. The primitive man, at the lowest level of existence, whose ego has not yet worked on the astral body, has only the one astral body that the powers gave him at his birth. The more highly developed man has two parts in his astral body: the part that he has ennobled through his ego, and the other part, which is still as the powers gave it to him. The part of the astral body that is a product of the ego is called the manas or spirit self.

Now, a person can also work on their etheric or life body. To understand the difference, let us think about what each of us knew as an eight-year-old child and what we have acquired since then. We have absorbed a tremendous amount of ideas and concepts since then. Let us now compare this sum of ideas with what has slowly changed in our temperament, passions, habits and character. If we compare the changes in the human astral body with the minute hand of a clock, we can compare the advancement, the changes in the etheric body with the hour hand of the clock. The processing of the etheric body takes place much more slowly. A child's violent temper or melancholy, for example, will in most cases continue to resurface time and again, even at a later age.

There are now impulses in intellectual development that have a strong effect on the etheric body, and through which it can also be transformed. Art, for example, is one of these impulses. When a person learns to look through the mirror of matter at the divine that speaks to him through the work of art, he transforms the etheric body and forms a part of the etheric body in such a way that it too is a product of the ego. And the more and more perfect the human being becomes, the greater the part of the etheric body that is ennobled, transformed by the I. This ennobled part of the etheric body is called Budhi, so that Budhi is what transforms the human being's life body into life spirit. The impulses that are most capable of transforming the etheric body are religious impulses, whether they come from Hermes, Zarathustra, Buddha, Moses, or any of the other great initiates of humanity. They are the great, powerful impulses that are able to transform the life body into the life spirit.

Even more powerful are the impulses that affect the student in the secret schools who is undergoing spiritual training. It becomes completely clear to the person undergoing this spiritual training that there is what is called a spiritual core of being. When man in the secret training is made a seer, then he works even deeper into his etheric body, he develops an ever greater core of wisdom that lives in him and is able to conquer death. When the disciple then received this Budhi, when he developed the life body more and more into the life spirit, then he was called an initiate, and the greatest initiates are the founders of religions. This great wisdom was given by them in images, so that the people who were taught by them could absorb this original wisdom. Thus Hermes gave the Egyptian people an image of the original wisdom, and the Rishis taught in a way that the ancient Indians could understand. This original wisdom was made understandable by Zarathustra for the Persian people, and it was Pythagoras who did the same for the Greeks. So it was with the greatest religious teacher, who was no ordinary initiate but carried a divine spirit within him, with Christ Jesus, to whom it was reserved to found the greatest and purest religion, which, when it is understood by all, will be the universal religion of mankind. We also understand a word of Christ Jesus: “If you do not leave father and mother” (Luke 14:26; Matt. 19:29) and so on. This is not spoken in order to destroy the sacred bonds of the family, but to found a brotherhood of all mankind, where people shall live together fraternally, although they are not physically brothers and sisters and bound by family ties. Thus Christ has cast the original wisdom of the world into this form.

If we look at Buddhism, it is what is tailored for the Indian people, and the one who brought this religion to the Indian people is called Buddha because he said: “I give you the Budhi, which in me stimulates the life body to become a life spirit.” But what Sinnett described in his book is not what the Buddha taught, but those teachings that figure in the secret schools as the Budhi for transforming the life body into the life spirit. Sinnett's error is therefore nothing more than a spelling mistake; he wrongly writes Budhi with two d's. However, it is not about Buddha and Buddhism, but about the transformation of the life body into the life spirit. In the secret training, the disciple also learns to work into his physical body. The physical body of man is the densest and therefore it is the hardest to work into it. Because it is the lowest of the four limbs of the human being, the highest power is needed to work into it. What does man know about his physical body, about the process of digestion, the blood circulation, the work of the muscles? It is not meant what the anatomist can determine about the physical body, but that one can see how the nerve currents flow, how breathing and blood circulation proceed, that it becomes light in the physical body. When a person consciously works on transforming the physical body, it is said that he has developed Atman when he gains control over the physical body through his I. Now there is a communal teaching that underlies all religious beliefs. Everything that the human being has not yet worked through the ego of his physical, etheric and astral bodies falls away from the human being and remains behind as a corpse. But what the I has worked into these outer shells, which we call the physical body, ether body and astral body, becomes the eternal core of the human being. And now spiritual science explains that there is a core of being formed by the ego, which is eternal, which must often re-embody itself, and will become more and more perfect as the human being goes through his normal course until he has come to the point of view where he has transformed the lower bodies, deified them, so that he will be taken up again into the bosom of the Godhead, where the soul once came from in primeval times. Man consists of two parts, the eternal essence and the perishable part of man. It is clear that he cannot immediately reach the level of perfection, that he must go through many, many lives. What we have sown in previous lives, we will now reap; man is born again and again until he stands at the height of humanity. We can understand many things if we look not at just one, but at many lives on earth. It makes our need and misery, luck and misfortune, clear to us, because all of this is prepared in previous lives. These are not fates, but consequences of our own actions. So we must not only understand karma in relation to the past, but also see it in the future. Then karma becomes a great comfort to us, something that gives us work in life and strength and comfort for the future. Thus karma becomes a practical point of view for life, a moral foundation for our lives. This is how religions have spoken to people, about the eternal essence and its re-embodiment.

Now Gautama Buddha was the one who presented this teaching of reincarnation and karma, as we have now developed it, most purely. But if this teaching had always prevailed, humanity would never have reached today's level of culture. If we compare the time when this teaching was communicated to mankind with the present time, we see that the laborer at the Egyptian pyramid said to himself that this arduous life is one life among many, and he looked up to the eternal divinity, but in so doing he lost touch with the physical. People look to the spirit, but lose touch with the earthly, and it would never have been possible to achieve the level of civilization that surrounds us today. Man had to learn to love the one life between birth and death. Only because Christ Jesus appeared as such a powerful personality was it possible for man to develop his personality to such an extent that it brought him together with this world. This culture would never have come about without Christianity. The teaching of reincarnation was also taught by Christ Jesus, but esoterically, in parables. Only to his most intimate disciples did he say: “For a while, the teaching of karma and reincarnation must remain secret, but the time will come when it must be proclaimed again before all people. That time has come today. And this is the wisdom that Theosophy wants to bring to people today. That is why Theosophy is not a sect, but an instrument, a servant that leads to an understanding of the highest spiritual existence. That is why it is not unscientific, and precisely because Theosophy shows the common essence in Buddhism and Christianity and all other major religions, it is not a religious community at all, but an instrument for understanding every religion.

Goethe, who had such a penetrating insight into so many things, once said the following remarkable words about the fate of the Bible in more recent times: For many centuries, people did not actually get their hands on the Bible, but only got to know it indirectly. When wider circles began to take an interest in the Bible, people were more inclined to think critically about the Bible and its origin and much less to delve directly into its content and its effect, so that actually, as Goethe says, since the acquaintance with the Bible in wider circles, much less has been spoken out of the spirit of this document than has been spoken about it.

What Goethe felt a hundred years ago has intensified significantly over the course of this century. In research, it has become increasingly rare to immerse oneself in the spirit of this religious scripture without prejudice; instead, critical research is increasingly conducted to determine how the individual parts correspond, when and how each part originated, and what the external history of this work is. People are paying less and less attention to the spiritual content.

At the same time, Goethe remarks that basically the Bible is the book of books; so says Goethe, this so-called pagan. Yes, he says that it is not going too far to say that everything that lives in our attitudes and feelings, in our perceptions and ideas, in our way of thinking today, is based on the Bible. It is particularly noteworthy that even that in our civilization which has seemingly made us independent of the Bible is nevertheless, if you follow things closely, a result of the Bible. It is so easy to believe that modern science since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is merely an opponent of the Bible. But the power of thought, the direction of imagination, even if seemingly contrary to the Bible, are taken from the depths of the Bible.

Copernicus may have explored the heavens in a way that seemingly contradicted the Bible, but he drew the power of thought from the Bible. Yes, the thought forms of modern monism, of materialism, have gained their strength from the Bible. Those social parties that radically oppose biblical faith have also — this is recognized by anyone who understands the psychology of the soul — drawn the strength of thought and feeling from the Bible. This is most the case with so-called biblical criticism, which, after all, most strongly opposes the Bible. They have gone through this in the culture of the Bible. If one follows this intimate historical course of the new time, one could say in view of this:

Your good nature, in foreign veins,
will soon quarrel with you.

Goethe said this with reference to one of his students who, in certain views, opposed Goethe and became his critic. Thus, it is the thoughts that have taken root in people over the centuries in our Western culture that have made our thinking, feeling and willing strong, the thoughts of our ancestors that struggle with the ancestors in the veins of their descendants.

Among the parts of the Bible that have suffered the most from modern thinking is the Gospel of John, which for centuries was considered the most vivid source of Christianity. This is far less appreciated by modern Bible criticism than the first three, so-called synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The Bible critics try, to the best of their ability, to test the books of Scripture for their historical value. They say that if you examine the first three Gospels, which, if you ignore the details, agree, you will find a picture of Christ Jesus that turns out to be credible. If you add the Gospel of John, there are so many contradictions to the first three Gospels that it is impossible to reconcile it with the first three Gospels. The first three Gospels report historical facts that give a vivid picture of the one who walked around in Palestine. The fourth evangelist, they say, cannot be regarded as a presenter of historical truths. He is rather an enthusiast for the personality of Christ Jesus. His aim was to compose a significant hymn to Christ Jesus, to express in lyrical form what he felt to be the truth about this revered personality, and to merely wrap this in historical facts.

Thus, to many, the fourth gospel does not appear as a historical document, but as a teaching in which one can be edified, like a poem, but which is not suitable to say something about the one who was the founder of the Christian religion on earth. As this view became more and more widespread in the course of the nineteenth century, the scholar Bunsen said in the 1850s: If it were really the case that the Gospel of John could not be taken as a historical document, then it would be bad for historical Christianity.

It cannot be denied that in the first three gospels, Jesus is presented even more humanly than the personality that gradually unfolds in its greatness, but that in the fourth gospel, an accomplished being , who has descended from invisible heights, who has nothing more to learn from his surroundings, who is endowed with grace and truth from the very beginning, who himself carries the fullness of the Godhead within himself.

The first three gospels contain beliefs and doctrines. In the fourth gospel, the essence of Christ Jesus apparently speaks mostly of itself, of what he is supposed to be to humanity and his disciples. These are differences that everyone notices. Those who notice them are pushed to the question: How does this fourth gospel relate to the other three gospels? We must realize that these contradictions have actually always been present, but that through the centuries the wisest people have not taken offense at them. Anyone who does not subscribe to the view that only in the nineteenth century did people become wise knows that in the most ancient times the wisest people endeavored to establish a harmony between the Gospels and also thought that they had succeeded.

Every age understands every thing in the way that the age itself is characterized. In other ages, there was not this exclusively materialistic way of thinking, which has even crept into the criticism of religious writings. Another age did not have that preference for the “simple man from Nazareth”. The urge has arisen more and more to push Christ Jesus down to the level of humanity, to say more and more, “In Him there is indeed an ideal figure, but He is still human.” To measure Him against other people has increasingly become the thinking habit of our time. Other ages have not had this urge; throughout centuries of Christian development there was a different ideal, a different aspiration. In an inaccessible distance stood the Christ Being. All human learning, all depth of wisdom, all depth of feeling and sensing sought to lift themselves up to those heights where one could sense something of that Being. It was believed that only the purest, most refined knowledge could approach this Being. The urge of the older times was to lift oneself up in knowledge and feeling in order to sense the height of that being. Thus nothing other than the spirit of the age in which one thinks, feels and searches is reflected in the conception of the Gospels.

We are now once again in an epoch that wants to elevate people to a higher world. But even though it is only at the beginning, this epoch knows its goal precisely and also knows how to pursue it in detail. The aim of Theosophy is to grasp and understand the Gospel of John. It could well be that the Gospel of John will celebrate a kind of resurrection through the means of this research. Through spiritual research, we will come to understand the evangelist again, who so sublimely presents the essence of Christ Jesus. If we first immerse ourselves in the content using the means of spiritual research, this gospel indeed presents itself as the deepest book of humanity. This gospel has been taken as a book of life throughout many centuries. Perhaps it can become a book of life again.

Let us try to consider some of the things that arise for those who seek to understand in this area. It turns out that the Gospel of John is a writing that is in wonderful congruity with the Old Testament. The Gospel of John begins with the beginning of things, as does the Old Testament. There, the gods create heaven and earth from what was chaos at the beginning. The Gospel of John also begins with the words: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

Thus both documents refer us to the beginning. In both cases, humanity's gaze is directed towards the same thing. There is a congruence here, but one that nevertheless reveals a remarkable difference. In the Gospel of John, there is something actually new. In the Old Testament, we are transported to the starting point of humanity. In grand and powerful images, the genesis of the world is shown, up to the human being, who appears to us as the companion of other beings in the world of minerals, plants and animals, presented as an external, visible being. His development is traced back to the development of a people, the Jewish people. It is not a particular human becoming that is described, but rather humanity as it arises in the world, and then ascends to a people. A people is described as a whole. Only those who appreciate the guiding thread in the right way understand the Old Testament correctly. The meaning of the Old Testament lived in the soul of every single Jew. The individual human being feels himself as a member of the whole people. When the Jew wanted to express his innermost feelings, he spoke of his common bond with Abraham. When he wanted to speak of his transcendental nature, which extends beyond death, he spoke of his transcendental self going to Abraham's bosom. He did not feel the separate self, but rather the great national self, and that the common blood connected him with the nation, which leads up to the father Abraham. When he looked up to the Highest, he looked up to a Being Who revealed Himself through the blood of the whole people. Not only was the memory of the patriarch Abraham sacred to him, but also the feeling of unity with him. Further up, the beginning of the world was taken up, how one blood flowed in a coherent human whole and how the cosmic order, God Himself, permeates and spiritualizes such a group of people.

Let us contrast this with the Gospel of John. This also takes as its starting point the beginning of our entire development. However, it does not begin where the Old Testament begins, but rather, in a certain way, before that. The Old Testament places the emergence of the material world, of what can be seen, of what is there for the outer senses, at the very beginning. “And God said, ‘Let there be light!’” (Genesis 1:3) The author of the Gospel of John takes us further back, to an even earlier time, to a point when nothing material yet existed, when only the spiritual was there: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God” (John 1:1), which is nothing other than the spiritual, of which all material things are the manifestation. He says: It is true that the visible world began as it is described in the Old Testament. But it was preceded by a spiritual world. All the laws that were lived out in that primeval beginning are expressed not in any individual, but in the common blood that connects him to the whole people. If we go back to the spirit that precedes this sensual beginning of the world, we also come to that in man which is exalted above all sensuality, above all national context and to that which is found in every human being, in every human individuality. If we put ourselves in the place of the Jew for the God principle, we find: He felt united with the father Abraham when he traced back the whole line of blood.

In John, we find a tremendous advance in relation to this view. What does the Christ of John's Gospel say? In what he says, there is tremendous progress compared to the spirit of the Old Testament. If you examine what appears to us as the deepest human essence, then you need not go beyond the individual human being. The individual human being can stand alone, by himself; he finds the Father within himself, that from which he emerged.

I, my innermost being, I and the Father are one. (John 10:30)

This is the meaning of the herald's call, the revelation of the individual human being. How did Christ Jesus relate to the Jews who went up to the Father Abraham? He said exactly: This human ego lives in you; when you find the human “I” or “I am” in yourselves, the power of individuality, then everyone may say: There is something living in me that is out of time.

Before Abraham was, the I AM was.

What can be experienced in the innermost core of a person's being is more eternal than anything that can be experienced in the external world. We no longer go up to Abraham; we go up to that which will be eternal in us.

I and the Father are one.

Every single person finds access to the eternal through themselves. Thus we ascend to the very beginning of that which lives eternally in each individual.

Thus, the Gospel of John is the significant continuation of what is written in the Old Testament. It presents itself as a revelation of what was before the very beginning of what is presented in the Old Testament. To understand what is meant in the Gospel of John, we have to engage with the use of words. What is meant by the Logos, the Word? One scholar says of the beginning of the Gospel of John that it is not found in the other gospels. They simply tell, albeit steeped in miracle stories, what happened externally. It is said that the writer of the fourth gospel, on the other hand, was a philosopher. John must have known Philo. It can be said of him that he expresses similar speculations to those in the Gospel of John. He also says that the Word stands between the Creator of the world and man. From Alexandrian and Greek education, John drew the elements of his writing. From this, John had conceived that he would tell the story in the Gospel in such a way that the Christ is the Word made flesh. This had not occurred to any other evangelist.

Let us read the beginning of the Gospel of Luke with this in mind:

Since many have undertaken to set in order an account of the same words that have been handed down to us, as they were delivered to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word,

Here stands the exact same word or logos. It is said that one wants to retell it to those who have been “servants of the word”. In truth, something else is also there: “as those who have been eyewitnesses and servants of the word know”. — In Luke, there is also a way of speaking that John speaks of the word. He also says that those who know something from the beginning have been eyewitnesses of the word. Among the initiates, it was common at the time to speak of the being that lived in Christ as the Word and to call themselves servants of the Word. The author of the Gospel of John adopted the term “the Word” from the language of the initiates. Only spiritual science can explain what is actually meant by the “Word”. To understand this, we must consider the nature of man in terms of theosophy.

What is known from the external senses is only a part of the human being. Wherever spiritual science or theosophy has been present, there has been exactly the same division of the human being as is taught now. Spiritual science speaks of a second part of the human being, the etheric or life body. It says that the human physical body consists of the same substances as all of nature. But in the human body, these substances are combined in such a way that, if they followed their own laws, the physical body would disintegrate. However, the etheric body prevents this decay. The moment the ether body leaves the physical body, the physical body follows its own laws and decays. The fact that this does not happen during a person's lifetime is due to the fact that the physical body is imbued with the ether or life body.

If we consider that when we look at a person, we are not just looking at their physical and etheric bodies, but also at something that is much closer to them than their physical and etheric bodies, that they are permeated by a sum of pleasure and pain , joy and pain, drives and passions, wishes and desires, we have in it what spiritual science calls the astral body, the third part of the human being, which is much more original than the ether body and the physical body. Just as ice forms out of water, water in a different form, so the ether body and the physical body are a condensed astral body. Spiritual science shows that the etheric and physical bodies are denser astral bodies. The astral body is the cause of the etheric body and the physical body. The human being shares the physical body with all visible beings of nature, with minerals, plants and animals. The etheric body is shared with plants and animals, and the astral body with animals. But there is one thing that human beings have alone that makes them the crown of all beings. Everyone can only say a name to themselves, and that is the name 'I'. No one can pronounce the name 'I' if it is meant to refer to someone else. Everyone can only say this name to themselves. This is where the actual center of a person's nature is revealed; so that spiritual science imagines the human being as having four parts, with the 'I am' as the fourth. This is a power and entity of its own. Jean Paul describes in his biography how the thought first occurred to him: You are an I. He said: “There I looked into the most hidden sanctuary of my soul.” All religions based on spiritual wisdom have sensed this fact. The Hebrew people have also sensed it. Yahweh or Jehovah is nothing other than the “I am”. (Ex 3:14) He is the “I am” and points to the innermost core of human nature. In this ancient Hebrew people, the “I am” or Jehovah was felt to be something that expressed itself in the whole group. They applied this name to that which flowed down through the whole stream of Abraham's blood.

This “I am” – how was it seen? In those places of ancient times, which were called mystery schools, one can say that they were both church and school at the same time. In the mysteries, the mystery students sought to rise to the nature of the “I am”. There they were led from the sensual into the spiritual. A complete renewal of this fourth link of the human being occurred through the appearance of Christ Jesus. The term for this “I am” is the Logos or the Word. From the invisible worlds, the spiritual in the I announced itself, revealed itself in the I, permeated the I.

In terms of their physical body, human beings are an extract of the entire mineral world. This is why we call human beings a microcosm. Their etheric body is an extract of the life forces that live outside in the plant and animal kingdoms. Their astral body is an extract of all the astral forces that live in animals. The I is not related to the surrounding mineral, plant and animal world, but only to the invisible, divine spiritual world. It is an extract of the spiritual, a drop of the substance of the divine. A drop from the ocean of the divine is the I. Thus the Divine penetrates into man and sends its drop into the innermost part of man, and the expression of this Divine is the “I am”. This drop of the divine nature is even older than the astral body. It was in the bosom of the Divine before our astral body came into being.

“In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1), or the “I am”, that innermost power of the human being that represents the eternal. People should become educated so that everyone can find the drop of divinity within themselves if they seek this community within. Man should become educated so that he can find communion with God as an individual individuality within himself.

The knowledge of the Word penetrated into the world, it shone into the darkness of the astral, etheric and physical bodies. Only a few who were not born of the flesh understood it. They could reveal themselves as children of God. But now the eternal, all-embracing aspect of human nature, which was before Abraham, entered in, which every human individuality has. This supersensible power has become flesh in Christ Jesus. Thus, Christ Jesus is the power in the evolution of humanity that wants to lead humanity to the realization of its innermost being, of its “I am”. From this point of view, the Gospel of John and especially that most profound chapter in which so much is said about the “I am” becomes understandable. He says explicitly: “All I say of the ‘I am,’ I do not say of myself” (John 14:10), but He says that when people recognize the power of the “I am,” then they have something higher than all other powers. When you express the “I am,” you speak of the power that also lives in the Light of the world. “I am” lives in everything; it is what permeates the entire being of the earth in all realms. You can only properly explore what the earth gives you as food if you understand the ‘I am.’

I am the bread of life (John 6:48),
I am the vine (John 15:5),
I myself am planted by the Father, and the Father is the vinedresser (John 15:1).

Thus this chapter of John's Gospel presents itself as something that must give people strength and life. These powers are rooted in the Father, the spirit of the world: “I and the Father are one.” (John 10:30)

If we go far back in time, we come to times when blood ties played an increasingly important role. They were the basis of what we call love. Love existed only between those in whose veins related blood flowed. In those days, close marriage prevailed. Later, distant marriage replaced close marriage. At that time, only shared blood brought about love. As humanity developed through later eras, the peoples became more and more mixed. The Jewish people felt even more the togetherness of the common blood. But in those days, when Christianity arose, the time began when the peoples were mixed up. That was also the beginning of the time of a new love that is not based on blood. Christ Jesus said: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” (Matthew 10:37). “If anyone comes to me and does not hate (leave) his father, mother, wife, children, brothers, sisters, he cannot be my disciple.” This saying must be interpreted in such a way that at the beginning of the development of the earth, those who were related loved each other; but at the end of the development of the earth, people will love and recognize each other in soul love. That brotherly love that goes from soul to soul, that comes from the spirit, that is the love that takes its starting point from the power of Christ Jesus, which will gain more and more ground in humanity. Where the same blood flowed, there one felt as a member of a group ego. At the end of human development, one will feel as a member of the whole of humanity. One will then seek the “I am” not in the blood of the tribe or people, but in the spirit and in the truth. The Old Testament worships the God in the foundations of nature; in the New Covenant, God will be worshipped in that which is prior to nature, in the spirit and in truth. Even for those who were intimately connected with the Lord, it was not readily understandable how that other love should take the place of the love of blood. Only the Lord's favorite disciple understood this. The other evangelists still tell the whole line of descent to the father Abraham. But the one who came into the world as the being that was embodied in Christ Jesus, he could say: “Before Abraham was, the I AM was.” (John 8:58) That the favorite disciple had understood. He goes up to the extra-temporal in his presentation. There is no external contradiction between the Gospel of John and the other Gospels. It is only the difference between a subordinate and a higher point of view. We are dealing here with different perspectives. If we know this, then we also understand the old Bible interpreters. They knew that one can describe the truth from different points of view.

We so often find the expression “one” and “we” in today's scientific writings: “one cannot see this,” “we cannot see this,” and so on. These “one”s and “we”s take the standpoint of the blind man who wants to judge what can be seen or not seen. Man can judge only what he knows, but not what he does not know. The higher man rises in the spiritual world, the deeper he also looks into the spiritual world. John's perspective may differ from that of the other evangelists, but not the content.

The task of Theosophy is to reawaken understanding of this neglected gospel and to show people its power. Because this gospel has the greatest power, it will also play the greatest role in the future of humanity. Those who delve into the gospel of John will find something that lifts them above all the doubts of science.

In modern times, the world has divided into two halves: the world of nature and the world of moral life. The law of nature is seen as something special, and the moral law as something special. This dichotomy in particular will not be able to exist in the long term. Man had to seek something deeper, something that encompasses both. He must not feel a dichotomy between inside and outside. He no longer feels this dichotomy if he understands the innermost core of the Gospel of John. We find the origin of the world within ourselves through the development of our innermost self. We come to something that encompasses the laws of nature and our innermost being. What the “I am” reveals to us was there as the original spiritual before the external world. The Logos, the Word was there before the outer world. — Thus there is a reconciliation between the external and the innermost nature of man. Especially the chapter of John's Gospel, where the “I am” is spoken of, will be an invincible conqueror of human nature. Only man has lost the thread of recognizing the purely spiritual in it.

Theosophy will again attempt to understand what was said by the one who gave the Gospel of John to mankind. When the revealed word is understood, all natural laws will be recognized as the revealed word, but the inner moral law will also appear as the revealed word. Whether one calls himself an idealist or not, if one judges the document of the spirit only according to what the senses see, then a materialistic attitude lives in us. This has been felt by deeper minds, and they sensed and longed for a time when humanity would learn to understand such things again, for example, Goethe and also Carlyle, who said: “We see in this day and age how external institutions have turned away from the spirit that originally emerged from the grasp of the spirit (religion), and how the spiritual seeks a refuge in the individual soul, or, where it does not find it, how it seeks it in external organizations and founds sect after sect and so on, in order to seek again ways to the original spirit.

But the future of humanity and of Christianity lies in learning to understand again a document such as the Gospel of John. We can follow different points of view in their relationship to the teachings about the world in the religious scriptures as humanity develops.

The first point of view is that of naive belief. The second is the point of view of clever people. When we arrive at the third point of view, people interpret the document of humanity in a mystical sense; they understand it as allegories, as symbols.

The fourth point of view is where we learn to recognize spiritual facts in their unambiguous nature through theosophy. Then one encounters such a document with the deep reverence that its inner greatness demands. This is how one will understand the Gospel of John in the future. In the future, spiritual science will again point the way to the true understanding of the Gospel of John and to the true form of Christianity.

The time has now come to make known in wider circles that which has been spoken of throughout the history of the evolution of mankind under the name of the Mysteries or Mysticism, the so-called Esoteric Wisdom.

For in the soul of man, behind what comes to the light of day lies a deeper wisdom which has hitherto remained unknown to mankind in general.

Let us be quite clear what it is men have always understood by the term “Mysteries” or the “esoteric.” All that has been brought about in the world through civilisation goes back ultimately to a few great personalities, a few leading individuals. For example, a construction like the Simplon tunnel can be traced back to the mental work of great individuals, who were not themselves directly concerned with the building of the tunnel but who made it possible, by their Intellectual discoveries, for others to build it.

The “practical” man would perhaps be of the opinion that such things are accomplished by an activity that is purely external. It would be the very greatest mistake to accede to such an opinion. Neither the engineers who conceived the plan, nor the workmen who carried it out, are the spiritual originators. If it were not for what is called Higher Mathematics as elaborated by Leibnitz, Newton and others, such works could never be there at all. These thinkers were necessary in order to bring into being what is called “technics.” If we go to the root of the matter, we shall find that such works could never have been achieved, nor any goods have been manufactured, without the soul of the Thinker.

If this is so with regard to the outer materialistic culture, it is true in still greater measure of the spiritual currents that flow through human history.

All the Religion and all the Art that has ever been brought to mankind, all the Justice that has ever borne rule in states, all the order and Morality that has lived among men leads back to great Initiates, leads back to hidden sources of Wisdom. This is what we find when we set out to look for the deeper origin of things.

Consider the works of Art which have succeeded each other through the centuries, and you will find that they can all be traced back to deeper sources. Whether we take a poet like Dante, or a mind and spirit like Goethe's, or a painter such as Raphael, or again some great religious event in history—all moral and religious streams, all art and all science, lead back into the hidden places, where was cultivated in secret that which is known as Mysticism or Esotericism.

And as with all other religions so with Christianity too we find its foundations in the esoteric. It is only an evidence of shortsightedness when the objection is raised, that Christianity is for simple hearts and should speak to the feelings and be comprehensible for all. That is a very shortsighted view. All religions, it is true, ultimately clothe their truths in sentences so full of power and impulse that no soul is too simple to receive them. What emerges finally, however, in this simple form, has its origin in the heights, with the so-called Initiates.

Throughout history there have always been Initiates. In ancient India it was the Rishis who taught a primeval Wisdom. In Persia Zarathustra was the teacher of Wisdom. We look to Greece, to Egypt, to Rome, everywhere we find to begin with, a religion of the people, but standing in the midst of the people are always those who may be called spiritual “Giants,” unknown to mankind by name. These are they who formed themselves into occult brotherhoods. Whosoever wished to be accepted into such a brotherhood had to undergo a strict and severe probation. The probation had no immediate relation to the intellectual life. It was far more a question of a man's wrestling his way through to an inner freedom of character, where feelings and passions had no power with him. Then he had to learn not to misuse his knowledge. Men who had passed through severe trials and tests of this nature became missionaries to the rest of mankind. They were not allowed to have any other feeling or purpose in their heart, save only this—to serve and help mankind. They had to be men who would make real the words—“He who would be first among you, let him be the servant of all”—And in intellectual striving also they must never lag behind but always press on to find the Higher Truths.

Today it is frequently said to one who believes in the possibility of knowing the Spiritual Worlds: But we human beings have boundaries to our knowledge. But inside the Mystery circles it was said: Thou has capabilities which slumber in thee; if thou develop them, then canst thou strive through to a Higher Knowledge.

The development a man was enabled to undergo by the training of his inner talents and capacities was called in the Mystery Centres a Second Birth. It was said that such a one experienced on a higher plane what a man born blind experiences here in the world of the senses when he has undergone an operation and can see. This “operation” on the soul, the re-birth in the Spirit, was performed for the Mystics in the Mysteries.

That which was called in the Mysteries the Kingdom of Heaven, into which the Mystic was led, was not in some other place. The Kingdom of the Spiritual World is here where man is. As many worlds are around us as we have ability to realize and grasp. It was no dry and abstract Wisdom that was received in the Mysteries, but a Wisdom which was at the same time Religion and Art.

In the Mysteries of Greece the spiritual eye of the Mystic was opened. It was shown to him how once in primeval times man had been half animal and how the soul had striven upwards to that stage of humanity upon which he now beheld himself. Three stages were shown to him. He saw first forms as they lived in a very distant evolution of mankind, then forms half animal and half man, and finally perfect human forms. These three types of the evolution of mankind stood before him in the Greek Mysteries and they found their expression in Greek sculpture. There was (1) the Zeus type, with the straight nose and with the eyes rounded out upwards; (2) the type of the God Mercury with woolly hair and snub nose; and (3) the type of the Satyr, with quite different eyes, different nose and different corners to the mouth. These three types stand before us in Greek art as an image of the stages of the evolution of mankind. At another time it was shown to the Mystic how the God himself descended into nature, how he evolved upwards through the mineral kingdom, plant kingdom and animal kingdom to the human kingdom and was then born anew out of the human heart. That was called the descent of the God, his Resurrection and his Ascension. The whole process was represented in the Greek drama. All that was represented in the drama came originally from the Mysteries.

Just as the trunk of the tree divides itself into different branches, so did religion, science and art become divided in the Mysteries. The ancient Mysteries which were celebrated in Greece—the Eleusinian—and the Mysteries of the Egyptian Priest-wisdom were called Mysteries of the Spirit. Those who stood high in these Mysteries as teachers and leaders had attained to the spiritual worlds; they associated with Spirits, they had intercourse with Spiritual Beings. Iamblichus shows us how the Gods descended in the Mysteries. Only after moral purification, and only when the intellect had been made clear and lucid, could one obtain admission into these places of wisdom.

This is how it was in the ancient heathen times, in the times of the Mysteries of the Spirit. Never without the most wonderful enthusiasm and the most inward devotion did the Mystics speak of that which could be experienced in the Mystery-schools. Aristides speaks thus: “I thought I touched the God and felt him near, I myself being at the time in a condition between waking and sleeping. My spirit was light, so as none can describe or realise who has not himself been initiated.” And in another passage he says: “It was as if the Spiritual World flowed and poured around me.” Plutarch says, “He who had received initiation in these Mysteries greeted the Godhead with the greeting of eternity.” Whoever had had this experience was called “re-born.”

We must now say a little about what formed the last act in every such Initiation into the Mysteries of the Spirit.

There had first to be the moral purification and the clarifying of the intellect. Then the pupil must learn to see with the eyes of the Spirit. Behind the consciousness which accompanies us through the waking condition, there is another consciousness. This consciousness does not sink into complete darkness when man falls asleep. Man remains conscious at night, he is there present. But the consciousness which accompanies him from morning until evening, that does not remain. There is however a way of overcoming the unconsciousness man has in sleep; there are methods whereby this end can be attained. By a culture of the soul which brings about certain intimate processes in the innermost being of the soul, man can win through to the possibility of finding new revelations in his dream life; he can experience things which he recognises in another way than with the eyes and ears of the senses. It is immaterial whether a man recognizes the truth in sleep or by day when awake; in either case he must learn to carry over into reality the world which he there experiences. When in this way he has come into the position of being able to see the Spiritual in the whole world, then he has attained the first stage of initiation.

At the second stage he has an experience which is like living in a flowing ocean of colour. At this stage there is a higher initiation; a consciousness is developed wherein is revealed to him a still higher Spiritual world. Today in ordinary life man is not capable of awakening the consciousness which lies behind the physical world.

In the last act of the Mysteries of the Spirit the pupil was put into a kind of sleep. Care had been taken in the preparation that when the day consciousness sank down, consciousness did not cease. For three days and three nights the man lay in another state of consciousness in the Mystery temple, citizen and participator in another world. Then he was awakened by the Priest. He received a new name. He was an Initiate, he had been “born again.” One could say of the Mysteries of the Spirit: “Blessed are they who have experienced them, blessed are they who now behold in the Mysteries of the Spirit.”

At the time of Christ Jesus, to the Mysteries of the Spirit were added the Mysteries of the Son, and these have been ever since the time of Christ. The Mysteries of the Father—the Mysteries of the Future—are only cultivated in a very small circle. The Mysteries of the Son are cultivated in the Rosicrucian Mystery which is also Christian, for those who require a Christianity that is armed to meet all Wisdom.

Today we will concern ourselves with the Mysteries of the Son, and see how they differ from the ancient heathen Mysteries. If we would grasp what a mighty step forward has been taken by the coming of Christianity, we must learn to understand two important utterances. The one is: “Blessed are they who believe, even when they do not see,” and the other: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” If we comprehend these utterances in all their depth, then we understand the very foundation of Christianity.

Whilst to the world at large Paul spoke in powerful kindling words, he also gave teachings to his intimate pupils which were transmitted first by word of mouth and then in writing, teachings that are connected with the name of Dionysius, who was known as Dionysius “The Areopagite.” We have here to do with something founded by Saint Paul himself, wherein was proclaimed the deepest wisdom. These teachings of Saint Paul were written down for the first time in the sixth century, in the writings of the so-called Pseudo-Dionysius. It is not so much the historical fact, but the content of these documents which is of interest for us.

An esoteric Christianity does exist. This is not admitted in certain circles, with the result that a peculiar place has been assigned to the Saint John Gospel. The Saint John Gospel is looked upon by theologians as a book which emanated out of poetic genius. They have however no understanding for what the Saint John Gospel means.

Whereas the three other evangelists relate the exoteric. Saint John relates what he experiences as an initiated seer, who could look into the Spiritual worlds. The writer of the Saint John Gospel wrote from the point of view of an initiate. Whoever looks upon it as a book that one should read and understand in the same way as one reads and understands any other book knows nothing of the Saint John Gospel. He alone has knowledge of it who can experience it. Most translators do not render the Spirit of it at all.

The first words of this Gospel, rightly translated, sound as follows:

1. In the primeval beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and with God was the Word.

2. The same was in the primeval beginning with God.

3. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.

4. In Him was the Life and the Life was the Light of men.

5. And the Light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not.

6. There was a man sent from God whose name was John.

7. The same came for a witness to bear witness of the Light, that all might believe on it.

8. He was not the Light, but a witness of the Light.

9. For the true Light which lighteth every man, was to come into the world.

10. It was in the world, and the world was made by It, but the world knew It not.

11. It came into each individual man (even into the ‘I’ man It came) but the individual man (the ‘I’ man) did not receive It.

12. Those who did receive It, through It they could reveal themselves as Children of God.

13. They who trusted in His Name were not born of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of human will, but of God.

14. And the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us and we have heard His Teaching, the Teaching of the only Son of the Father, filled with Grace and Truth.

These words with their mighty content—one should not take them and speculate over them, but rather allow them to work upon one in the same manner as countless human beings have done through the centuries. Early in the morning when the soul was still virginal, they have let these words resound in their soul, up to the passage: “And the Word become Flesh and lived among us ...” as above.

When a man does this day by day, then something shows itself in the soul which gives him new life, he is reborn, he is spiritually transformed. He sees around him a spiritual world of which he had previously no idea.

Everyone who takes the first verses of the Saint John Gospel and lets them work upon him for the education and training of his soul, experiences the Saint John Gospel itself in mighty pictures.

There before his spiritual sight stands John the Baptist, as he baptises the Christ; there he sees the picture of Nicodemus, as he has his conversation with the Christ. He sees how Christ cleanses the Temple, he has before him all the following scenes of the Saint John Gospel, he experiences the “stations” from the thirteenth chapter onwards.

In order for the pupil to receive aright the influence of these words and find the ‘word’ which is proclaimed by the Saint John Gospel, the teacher spoke as follows: “Thou must fill thy soul for weeks at a time with this one feeling. Think of the plant. It is rooted in the dead stone. If it had consciousness, it would have to bow down to the dead stone and say to it: ‘Without thee I could not live; out of thee I drew nourishment and strength: I owe to thee my being, I thank thee.’ The animal would have to speak in similar words to the plant: ‘Without thee I could not live, I incline myself towards thee in thankfulness, because out of thee I draw that which I require for my existence.’ And it is the same with all the kingdom. Man, who has attained to a higher stage of evolution, must also bow down, as the plant to the stone, to those who work for him, and thank them.” He who would become a Christian Initiate must develop this feeling during a period of many weeks—the feeling that he owes gratitude to him who stands beneath him. Then he experiences in the spirit the thirteenth chapter of the Saint John Gospel where this feeling is given sublime and eternal expression by Christ in the Washing of the Feet. Christ means to say: “Without you I could not be, I incline myself to you as the plant to the stone.” As an outer symbol the Initiate experienced at this stage a feeling as if water were flowing around his feet. It continued for a long time.

When he had gone through this, the Christian Mystic could experience the next stage of initiation. For this he must cultivate the power to endure all the storms and stresses of life. Then he experienced a second picture. He saw himself scourged, and could feel in his own body something like pain at certain points. This went on for many weeks. He experienced the scourging.

Now he could rise to the third stage. The teacher said to him: “Thou must cultivate a feeling which can endure that all thou holdest highest should be treated with scorn and derision.” The scorn and derision must be for him nothing, in comparison with his own inner strength and certainty. Then the pupil experienced two symptoms of Christian initiation. He experienced the crowning with thorns; spiritually he saw himself with the crown of thorns and experienced a kind of pain in the head which is the sign of this stage of initiation. Afterwards, as a fourth experience he had to develop the feeling that his body was no more for him than any other object in the world. He carried the body with him only as an instrument. In many Mystery-schools one learned to accustom oneself to speak in the following way: “My body goes through the door,” and so on. In this way the mystic experienced in himself the Crucifixion. He saw himself crucified. The outer symbol was that during the meditation stigmata appeared at the places of the wounds of Christ—in the hands, in the feet and in the right side. This is the blood-trial of the Mystic, the fourth stage of initiation.

After this the pupil rose to the fifth station which is called the mystic death, a sublime experience of a spiritual nature, of which no more than an indication can be given. There are moments for a pupil when the whole of the physical world surrounds him as with a black veil. In these moments he learns to know the origins of evil. This was called the descent into hell. Then came a strange and wonderful feeling as if the whole curtain were torn asunder. The mystic death—followed by the mystic awakening!

The sixth stage is the so-called Laying in the Grave. All that the earth bears must become as precious to man as his own body. The physical body of man could not exist separated from the earth. If it were removed even a few miles from the earth it would wither, as the hand would wither when separated from the body. What my body is for my finger, that the earth is for men. The independence man attributes to himself is an illusion. And just as man is dependent physically on the earth, so is he dependent spiritually on the Spiritual World. When man comes to feel his unity with the whole planet—then is he “laid in the earth,” then does he undergo the “burial.”

Hereon follows the seventh stage, the “Resurrection” and the “Ascension.” Man experiences here the Eternal. This stage does not admit of description. The Egyptian Priests (who were also their Wise Men) did not make use of the symbols of writing to describe such things. The Mysteries must find a way to tell what cannot be expressed in words. Through the power and might, through the magical power of the Saint John Gospel itself, these things can be experienced.

Such an initiation is the initiation of the Son. It has only been possible since Christ came to earth. The outward Christ who walked in Palestine is related to the inward Christ whom the mystic experiences, as the sun is related to the eye. If there were no eye, then could the sun not be perceived. But the sun produced the eye. Where there is no light, the organ for the light is also lost. The eye was gradually created by the Sun. The eye was created for the light by the light, says Goethe. Whosoever allows the Saint John Gospel to work upon him, develops the inner eye. But, as without the sun the eye would never have come into being, so would spiritual seership never have been there if Christ, the Spiritual Sun, had not walked the earth in person. No Christianity without the personal Christ Jesus: that is the essential and all-important fact.

All other founders of religion could say of themselves: “I am the way and the truth.” All were teachers. Christianity has brought no new teaching. But that is not important. The important thing is that Christians feel themselves bound together with the personal Christ Jesus, as in a family. That is what matters—that He was there, and has lived and has said: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”

Oriental teachers of religion have exoteric teaching and esoteric, in the same way as Christianity has. Christianity differs from them in that exoteric Christianity is more simple and popular, it speaks to the heart, to the feelings; while esoteric Christianity is essentially deeper than all oriental esoteric. The truth is, the Christian esotericism is the most profound which has ever been brought to mankind.

Christian esotericism was brought to the earth by that very Being Himself with whom one must be united. It is a question of belief in the divinity of Christ. In the ancient Mysteries one had to behold personally during the three days of initiation. What formerly was only present in the Mysteries—that is, in the Mysteries of the Spirit—has in Christianity become an historical fact. The events in Palestine are historical fact and at the same time symbol. Christianity is of such a nature that the simplest heart can grasp it; and yet the wisest man will never outgrow it. For the deepest teachings of Wisdom lie therein.

If we understand the Saint John Gospel as a Book of Life, so that we wish to live with it, and let it come to life within us, then we shall come to know esoteric Christianity. Such esoteric Christianity has always existed, it has always been active wherever Christianity has been able to manifest in a worthy and noble way, wherever Christianity has brought the blessings of culture and civilisation to mankind.

Into all those who had experienced union and fellowship with Christ Jesus there streamed such strength as enabled them to know that life will always gain the victory over death, and that death is never a reality.

Goethe said that the great World Powers invented death in order to have “much life” in the world. Christianity is a proof that there can arise in the soul a consciousness of the fact that Life is continually and always the Victor in the world.