The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today and tomorrow evening, we will have much to talk about, in reference to Goethe, that may interest the student of spiritual science with regard to the inner workings of the human soul, its development and its relation to the world. Since our task in these two lectures will be to consider the above questions only in the light of Goethe, it seems to me expedient to speak now, independently of Goethe, as we are accustomed to doing, from the sources of spiritual science, about the inner life of the human soul, its development, and its relationship to the world. It will be necessary for me to assume that you are somewhat familiar with the basic elements of the human soul life.

When we consider the human soul in its development, we must objectively distinguish between the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul. When we speak of the sentient soul, we do not just mean that part of our soul that is able to connect with the outside world through perception, through sensory impressions, but we also mean the seat of everything we can call instincts, desires, passions, and also the seat of everything that are impulses of will in the human soul. It is most useful, if we want to form an idea of what the sentient soul actually is within our mental life, to imagine how everything volitional, everything that gives us impulses from within , is seeking a relationship with the outside world, is the essential part of the sentient soul, and how it is attached to the sentient soul that it is the most important mediator of receiving external impressions of perception. That is why it is called the sentient soul. When a person receives a sound or a color impression, the sentient soul is in control. Even when passions arise, in the case of affects, anger, fear, anxiety, it is essentially the sentient soul that rules.

What we call the intellectual or mind soul first works its way out of the sentient soul and is, in certain respects, somewhat more serene than the sentient soul. The abilities to clothe in ideas what is felt in the sentient soul, to clarify what is experienced as instincts, as affects, into a more human form of soul life, are already present in the mind soul. When, for example, affects that otherwise only aim at self-preservation are clarified into goodwill, or even loving behavior towards the environment, we are already dealing with the soul of understanding or mind. In the soul of understanding, the I reveals itself to us as the actual center of our soul life.

In the further development of the I, where we feel ourselves to be truly inwardly human beings, asserting ourselves in the center, we form our perceptions and thoughts into great ideas with which we comprehend nature, or into ideas of duty or moral ideas. We speak of the consciousness soul in everything with which we relate to ourselves in this way. There are no dividing walls between the individual soul members, but it is necessary to distinguish between these three members because each relates to the outside world in a different way.

If you take the consciousness soul first, for us humans this is the highest soul element for the time being, but at the same time it is the soul element that has, to a certain extent, separated itself the most from the whole rest of the world. It is the most independent soul element.

When a person delves into the consciousness soul, he can be most lonely in his soul life, shutting himself off from the outer world. It is the soul element that, by its very nature, has erected the most barriers to the environment, so that it is most strongly predisposed to fall into error and error. It is most detached from the universe. But this part of the soul can only fall into error to a limited extent. This is the most important thing in what we call the consciousness soul. It expresses itself above all as logical thinking, as the dissection of concepts, and also proceeds as computational thinking, as everything that man has in a certain respect as an ability of his own, and which is not found in animals.

The powers of the sentient and rational soul play up into the consciousness soul. The drives, desires and passions, the volitional impulses of the sentient soul, the feelings and intellectual judgments of the rational soul penetrate into it. But in the consciousness soul, all this is processed by logical thinking. That is why it is excellent in the consciousness soul that we form our opinions. And because the consciousness soul is the most isolated, people are so very separate from each other in terms of opinions. When we speak of what we have in common because it is formed within our community, our family circle, because it is common practice in our environment, we speak of such things that are located in the intellectual or emotional soul. But even the things that are only located in the consciousness soul migrate into the intellectual soul, for example, an opinion we have formed can become a habitual opinion. Or an ability can be transformed into skill, into habit. Then they have descended into the mind soul.

The consciousness soul is also the most isolated because through the consciousness soul, the human being directly extends the horns of feeling into the environment. When we consider what we want to do, we live in the mind soul. When we look at what is around us, we extend the horns of feeling of the consciousness soul directly through the senses and come back to what makes us the most isolated being. Because of what our senses offer us, we become the most isolated beings. Thus man isolates himself precisely because, through the consciousness soul, he must relate to the outside world in a very local and temporary way. But opinions cling most intensely to the consciousness soul. An opinion asserts itself first and becomes firmly established in the consciousness soul. Therefore, in terms of opinions, man is an isolated being. In terms of habits, people understand each other better. Man is most independent, but also most isolated, in the consciousness soul, therefore we cannot really find access to what is in the consciousness soul of another person. We do not even know whether everyone sees the color red or blue in the same way as we do.

But leaving that aside, let us now just assume the content of the consciousness soul, which consists of opinions. If we take something that may seem extremely logical, something that we can imagine we base these opinions on in the most logical way possible, these logical reasons cannot be applied to our fellow human beings. Logical arguments do not initially have an effect on external life, and it is even normal for them not to have an effect. Therefore, it is easy to convert people to our opinions at a young age, in childhood. Later on, this is less and less the case. This is because the child not only confronts us with his consciousness soul, but also with his mind soul and his sentient soul. He confronts us with his entire personality. And the way we convince them depends more on all the other soul aspects than on the consciousness soul. The will and feelings are involved. If people's direction of will and feelings differ, then the most diverse points of view can be justified in the most logical way. Nevertheless, in the present cycle of human development, people are only truly independent with regard to the consciousness soul, and less so with regard to the other soul aspects. Consider how opinions are formed: the human being is completely free to form this or that conceptual context as his opinion. He is less free when the content of the intellectual soul comes into play. Here the human being does not feel at all free, otherwise his feelings and perceptions could not play many tricks on him. We can be completely in agreement with ourselves in our opinions that this or that should actually displease us, but the mind speaks differently, allowing us to take pleasure in the matter after all. The fact that the mind can be in discord with opinions can show us that man is not as free in terms of feeling as he is in terms of opinions. The strongest unfreedom the human being feels is in regard to everything concerning the will and so on, everything that is in the sentient soul. The discord is sometimes very great between the most glorious intentions, between the opinion that this or that is not good, and the urge, the affect towards it. A drastic example is the following: A teacher who has an angry child realizes in the soul of understanding that the anger must be expelled. Since he does not succeed in doing so in a good way, he throws the inkwell at the child's head, and he himself becomes angry. There we have the most beautiful discord.

What is it in the life of the soul that happens, that this discord can come about? It is the case that we are actually only isolated and independent in relation to the consciousness soul in our present state of development, but that between the consciousness soul, at the boundary to the mind or feeling soul, there is an influence on the soul, an influence of higher superhuman beings. And again, at the boundary between the intellectual soul and the sentient soul, we have such an influence of external forces of superhuman entities, likewise between the sentient soul and the sentient body.

I am now describing the state that presents itself in our time, in our century. It is different for other times. Man can also easily be convinced that other forces come into play where the will comes into play. When we think, we are with ourselves. We can sit down in a corner and be with ourselves in thought. When a person has to exercise a volitional impulse, he has to move his hands and feet, he has to produce a physical action, an act. If you move from one thought to another, your consciousness remains present. Today, people have no idea of the transition that takes place when, for example, they grasp the thought: I want to grab the watch – and then carry out this thought. Here we have a completely different context than in the transition from one thought to another, where the whole sequence can be followed by the consciousness. This is an example of how other forces intervene to help us. At the boundary between the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul, entities intervene that we call angels or angeloi. They are the ones who condense what would otherwise only be conscious in opinions and concepts, and condense them into what can be called sensations and feelings. The term 'sensation' fluctuates somewhat. What is felt and sensed internally is already a condensation of thought. There are forces behind us that help us.

Let us now turn to the other boundary between the intellectual soul and the sentient soul. Here we have even higher beings that intervene. They are the ones who stir our will, who strengthen our thoughts into willpower: they are the archangels or archangeloi. But when we enter into relationship with our environment on our own initiative, then it is the spirits of personality; there we already feel the resistance of the world when we intervene in its structure. Thus, in the intermediate realms between the individual soul forces, there are guiding spiritual entities that permeate us and have the task of transforming into deeds and forces what, left to himself, a person can only experience within himself as thoughts.

Now, when we enter into these subconscious regions of the soul's life, there is indeed the possibility that the struggles that take place and must take place within the spiritual world will also enter the arena of our consciousness. Where the angelic beings intervene, the luciferic beings, who are the opponents of the angels, are also close behind. If only the angels were to intervene, our minds would reach out to what is beautiful, only to what corresponds to our human dignity. The luciferic beings lead us to what we ourselves do not agree with in calm reflection, but which carries us away. Where the archangels intervene, the Ahrimanic beings can also intervene, leading us to transform our judgment into error and our search for truth into falsehood. As human beings, we are given free will to think logically. But the moment we develop feelings and impulses of will, other beings, including those that counteract the emerging beings, intervene. This is the point that everyone who is in any way familiar with occult research should basically educate themselves about.

Where man stands in normal life today, it is already so arranged that the forces of the luciferic and ahrimanic entities, which counteract the angels and archangels, are nevertheless directed towards the good in all their effects. We need not seek to be wiser than the Ruling Power of the World and ask: Why do human beings need the entities of Lucifer and Ahriman? Man could not be so free if he were not given a counterpoise in these two powers to balance the angels and archangels. Man must have the opportunity to tell a lie so that he can arrive at the truth independently. As an independent being, he must gain truth for himself, and so Ahriman must be there. Man must resist Ahriman and take the path to truth. In this way man has become an independent being, in whom the sense for truth is inherent. The highest rulers of the world have already arranged matters so that the opponents, Lucifer and Ahriman, do not have too much to deal with. They are there to drive people to a strong degree of impure urges, desires and also incorrect judgments for the sake of their freedom and development of consciousness, but these can be balanced out in the course of karma and cannot disrupt the earthly mission. It is one of the most beautiful and profound insights that man gradually comes to through occult studies and esotericism, that he realizes: that everything that is untrue and bad can ultimately be transformed into good.

The question that everyone must ask is: apart from this circumstance, is there any reason why man must go through all incarnations and only reach perfection through every error? Yes, there is a reason. It would be going too far to show that man has become such through his previous lives on earth that he can only mature gradually. Now he is only independent with regard to the consciousness soul. But a time will come when, despite all his tendency to err, man will have a firm direction in his actions and work. If people did not yet have this, they would be in constant dispute and quarrel. As humanity is now, it is ripe to acquire the freedom for the consciousness soul, but people are not yet ripe to become free in relation to the mind soul and sentient soul. Progress arises from the fact that development can never take place in a completely straight line. We can see in all cultures how some souls are ahead of the pack, taking the lead, anticipating what other souls will only be able to acquire in later times. Today, human souls are only mature enough to become free in relation to the consciousness soul. But spiritual wisdom gradually leads to the mind and sentient soul also being freed and isolated, so that people no longer have to look to tradition and habit to find the good, but that the impulse for good flows from their own soul. This is also a necessary interpretation of Paul's words: “Not I, but Christ in me.” When the Christ lives in people, they will also be allowed to be free in relation to the intellectual and sentient soul. People have already achieved a certain dispassion when it comes to the most trivial logical matters and mathematical calculations. Here passion has already been banished so far from the human heart that people can find the truth for themselves. But for that which is within the mind and sentient soul, people are still very much in tune, even considering the tuning as the essential, because there Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces play a role everywhere.

You will understand that with such a movement, which is built on the foundation of spiritual wisdom and where the deeper powers of the human soul are to be awakened for the purpose of isolation, not only curiosity about the spiritual worlds may be connected – that may not actually be the impulse for spiritual research – but also a sense of responsibility. Through this movement, every ability of human beings to shape the future is brought into our time. A germ of the future is being called forth that is not yet ripe in the general public. We must bear this in mind and be clear about how we have to be careful to ensure that, even if the soul may be beautiful and sympathetic within the spiritual movement, we must still be vigilant in the face of impending dangers and must awaken the feeling of responsibility. If the soul approaches spiritual things immaturely, there is still danger. Not everyone notices this danger. Those who are a little more deeply involved in the movement know and must know – if they do not want to break down under the unbearable – how they must always be on guard to say only what has passed through their soul not once or ten times, but a hundred times! It is difficult to find words that are adequate with regard to spiritual matters. A definite opinion must form in the whole circle of Anthroposophists: the opinion that they demand of those who represent the movement that they take the truth in this sense seriously. One must not believe that as a speaker every evening one can simply stand there without letting these truths pass through one's soul again and again, so that they are properly shaped down to the last word. The difficulty that lies in being able to open one's mouth only for spiritual truths is one thing. The other is that those who are in such a movement must, in a certain way, even make sure that this feeling is present in the representatives of the movement. But even those who are not yet deeply involved have to be careful that certain things do not happen to their soul, and people should ask themselves again and again: Am I mature enough to represent a spiritual movement? Do I have to place myself in the movement in such a way that the things of the spiritual world have an even stronger effect on me? No one should be discouraged, but everyone should awaken the feeling in themselves: Even if I have done what is good and right through the compulsion of tradition and education, there is a limit beyond which not only the angels, archangels and spirits of the personality stand when the right is represented, but where Lucifer and Ahriman also stand. Time and again, we see people who were truthful begin to tell lies when they are confronted with spiritual truths, because they have not sufficiently said to themselves: Above all, you must prepare yourself, you must let the spiritual truths take effect on you, you must not let yourself speak! — One must be aware of such responsibility. But it would be cowardly to say: Then I do not want to place myself in the spiritual movement. It is not by evading the duty to observe caution that one behaves correctly, but by observing this duty correctly. Much of what has been said at all times characterizes the progressive spiritual movement.

There are the great lights that are supposed to help people move forward. But where there are strong lights, there are often very strong shadows as well. Hence the not always unjustified accusations against those who are supposed to bring down the truths of the spiritual world to the physical plane. In every such movement, those who wanted nothing more than to let spiritual truths flow down into the physical world were joined by those who did not want to exercise self-criticism, who did not want to tame pride and vanity. They became like those we see so abundantly within spiritual movements, and to whom one must say: Unfortunately, the outside world cannot always distinguish between such bearers and those who are the true bearers. The opposite also sometimes happens. Our spiritual science movement should call on people to judge freely and sweep away everything that merely relies on external authority. As long as society still feels that it depends on the mouth through which it speaks, our ideal has not yet been achieved. We should only listen to what this mouth speaks because the things make sense to us when we listen to it with a sense of truth and unbiased logic. Our movement is highly suited to nurturing and developing people's free judgment; but there is a strong tendency, which can be called 'laziness' with regard to faith, that runs through our time. The laziness of faith creates great obstacles for the spiritual science movement. Believing something because someone has said it delays free judgment, the free human soul life, and independence in relation to the mind soul. It is so convenient not to have to think and just accept some truth because someone has said it; it is much more convenient to believe the person than to examine what the person is saying.

I have often said: It is only possible to make suggestions within the spiritual movement. But take everything we can find in history, for example, about Zarathustra: none of it will be refuted by what is said here about Zarathustra, if you really take everything. It can be examined, and the more rigorously it is examined, the more pleasing it is to those who want to represent the spiritual movement in an objective way. The will to examine is what they want. But it is infinitely more convenient to believe, to simply refer to what this or that clairvoyant said. This is a danger for the real or so-called clairvoyant if he is not yet really established. There is already a temptation to say what people believe. It is easy for him to slide into that, into which it is generally easy to slide when it concerns the ascent into the supersensible world. One ascends into a world in which it really cannot be controlled as easily as in the physical world. If you want to check with the mind, the angels and archangels intervene at the border areas, so it takes quite a lot to check it out. When it comes to faith, it often depends only on the impression one has of the person. How easily people can be influenced in terms of faith can be seen from mass suggestion.

Mass suggestion is something about which the most wonderful discoveries can only be made in the future. In earlier times it was quite different because the consciousness soul was not yet free. Today man is in the liberation of the consciousness soul, but is still completely in the bondage of the mind soul. How is suggestion made? Not only by what is pleasant or unpleasant about a personality; but also, for example, by the fact that someone has taken up an office, has five children to care for and now feels compelled to remain in office. Today, people often prefer to listen to everything that is obtained from the supersensible world in a charlatan-like manner rather than to what is based on solid research. For the former has two characteristics. First of all, it is tremendously trivial. For example, what writing mediums write down is usually such that one could just as easily think of the subject oneself, only it is made credible to man by the way it is taught to him. Man then believes that something is playing into it from the spiritual world. It is precisely their triviality that makes these things pleasant for people. Or they have the other property of being so incomprehensible that no one can understand anything about them. The things that are particularly incomprehensible are then often considered particularly mystical. At the borderline between the supernatural and the sensual, the charlatanry can be combined with what is based on serious research. It must be emphasized that only he is doing his duty who is alert to his own soul, who is especially careful about everything that can dull the instincts, so that we believe we are promoting the affairs of humanity when we are only promoting our own, or that the untruth, the lie, the temptation of Ahriman, is inadvertently mixed into what we say.

Only those who are constantly vigilant with regard to all this, only those who always say to themselves: 'If you join a spiritual movement, there is a great danger that you will become vain and proud' – only they can make progress. That goes without saying. Therefore, you cannot reproach a person for that, only if the person in question does nothing at all to suppress these traits. There is a tremendous temptation not to be completely truthful when you are dealing with people who believe you. You can make up all kinds of stories if they believe on authority. Then it is easy. You must not reproach anyone for the fact that when approaching the spiritual world, the tendency to lie arises in him, but that should not excuse him from himself, rather he should make every effort to expel it from his soul. That is the meaning of: know thyself. You have to seek the lonely hours when you can come to say to yourself: there is a danger looming again, so be on your guard. If you do not have these lonely hours, if you are uncomfortable with not being able to confess something good to yourself, if they are not the starting point for fighting your faults with all your might, then you are on the slippery slope, then you will roll down instead of climbing up.

These are the things we have to face if we want to recognize our position in occult research, the research that is the highest gift of grace flowing into the physical world from the spiritual worlds, for which we should have the greatest sense of responsibility.

The duty to enter the spiritual world with a part of humanity, because only in this way is progress possible, and at the same time the feeling of responsibility should awaken in us, the feeling: it is a duty, once I have learned the matter, to participate in it. It is often said that the representatives of spiritual science do not pay enough attention to moral considerations. They are often made, as they are today, so that in the progress of our spiritual movement, through which we are to be led to the spiritual sources, we may also hear of the impulses that come from those spiritual sources.

It has to be emphasized repeatedly that Theosophy must be lived, that, by way of Theosophy, the human being not only learns this or that, but that he learns to think differently, to feel, to perceive emotionally in regard to his whole environment. This will become a reality for someone who accepts the theosophical impulses in the right spirit. He has to learn to feel empathy, to experience living with all beings, but mostly this needs to apply in relation to other human beings. However, we learn best to empathise with human beings when we first learn to do this with the rest of the world.

Slowly man learns to know the whole world that surrounds him. He slowly learns, that he is surrounded everywhere by spiritual beings, that he walks through spiritual beings everywhere. He learns to understand this in regard to feeling and in regard to sensation. He learns to know what surrounds us in the three realms of nature. He learns to know the beings in the mineral realm, the plant realm and the animal kingdom. He strides differently through the meadows and forests, over the fields and open country from someone who has not gone through theosophical training.

When looking at the other beings, one could at first believe that the animal beings do not have a soul like human beings. The Ego of man, man’s soul, is certainly different from an animal’s Ego, in that the Ego of man lives on the physical plane. When we look at an animal as such, then each individual animal has a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. Human beings have in addition to these three bodies an Ego. During his waking state man’s Ego is contained in him. The animal, however, does not have an Ego on the physical plane. For this, we have to go a bit deeper into the so called astral world. On the astral plane we will find a population of animal Egos, just like we have a human population here on the physical plane. Just as one man meets another here, a clairvoyant is able to meet self-contained personalities on the astral plane—these are the animal Egos.

One has to imagine it thus—imagine the ten fingers of a human being stretched through a wall. They are moving. We can see the ten fingers moving, but not the human being himself. He is hidden behind the wall. We are not able to explain to ourselves how the ten fingers can get through the wall and move. We have to assume that there is some being to which they belong. It is the same with animals in the physical world. All animals of similar shape have one group-Ego. Here in the physical world we see the animals roam about, and what we are seeing has a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. If we see here in the physical world, for example, lions, then these lions are externalized organs of those lion-Egos that live in the astral world. The lion-Ego, the group-Ego of physical lions, is a similarly self-contained being on the astral plane as we are self-contained beings here. Thus each group of animals has an Ego on the astral plane: a lion-Ego, a tiger-Ego, a vulture-Ego are on the astral plane. The single animals exist here in the physical world like fingers stretched through a wall.

When we observe the individual animals here, many of them appear to be extraordinarily smart. These animals are being managed from the astral plane where the animal-Egos, the group-Egos, are located. The population of the astral plane is much more clever than human beings. The animal group-Egos on the astral plane are very wise beings. Observe the bird-migration, whereby the birds migrate through the various regions, how their flight is arranged, how during autumn they move to warmer regions and how they gather together again in spring. If we deeply look into these wise arrangements, we have to ask ourselves: who is hidden behind the wall, who arranges all of this?—These are the group-Egos. When we watch a beaver building, then we will see that the beaver built more wisely than the greatest engineering art.

One has observed the intelligence of bees at work by giving sugar instead of honey to them. Then they were watched. They cannot take along the sugar, so they go and fetch other bees. First they fly to a source of water, from which each bee carries a drop of water, drenches the sugar with it and transforms it into a kind of syrup. This is then carried to the hive. The spirit of the beehive is behind the work of the bees. The individual bees belong to a single bee personality, just like our limbs belong to us. Only it is the case that each bee is more separate from the others, and our individuals limbs are closer together, more compact. We walk everywhere through entities invisible for us, through the animal group-Egos, who evade physical observation.

As we begin to empathise with beings of which man has not the slightest idea, we can also empathise with the plant souls. The plant-Egos live in an even higher world than the animal-Egos. The plant-Egos, those self-contained group-Egos, to each of which a series of plant belongs, are on the so-called Devachan plane. We can also tell the place where these plant-Egos actually are—all plant-Egos are at the centre of the Earth. The animal Group-Egos are circumventing the Earth like the trade-winds, while the plant-Ego’s are in the centre of the Earth. They are beings that all penetrate each other. In the spiritual world the law of permeability holds sway—one being passes through another. We see the animal group-Egos pass across the Earth like the trade-winds and observe how they, out of their wisdom, perform what we consider to be the deeds of the animals. When we observe the plants, then we see the head of the plant, the root, is extended to the centre of the Earth, because there, at the centre of the Earth, is their Group-Ego.

The Earth itself is an expression of soul-spiritual entities. The plants appear to us, from a spiritual viewpoint, to be something like the nails on our fingers. The plants belong to the Earth. One who observes the individual plants, can never see them completely. Each plant belongs to the sum of entities, that make up the plant-Egos. Thus we can immerse ourselves into the feelings and emotion of the plants themselves. The part of the plant that grows out of the earth, that strives from within the earth to the surface, has a different nature from what grows under the earth. If you cut off the bloom, stalk and leaves of a plant, then that is something different from pulling out the root. If you cut off a plant this will create a certain type of well-being, like a pleasure for the plant soul. This pleasure it similar to what is felt, for example, by a cow whose young calf suckles at its udder. The plant part that grows out of the earth really is something similar to the milk of animals.

When we walk through the fields in autumns and the stalks are falling under the scythe of the reaper, when the scythe strikes the sheaves, then feelings of well-being, akin to ecstasy, breathe across the fields. It is something immensely significant when the reaper goes through the field with his scythe, and we not only can watch the falling sheaves with our physical eyes, but we can see feelings of pleasure stroking the Earth.

However, when you rip out a plant by its root, this causes pain for the plant soul. The laws that apply in the physical world are not the same as those in the higher worlds. We will gain different insights when we ascend to the spiritual worlds. Sometimes also here in the physical world the principle of beauty contradicts the principle of pain or joy. It is possible that someone, driven by beauty concepts, rips out a few white hairs, although it will hurt him. This applies to plants too. It might look more tidy to rip out a plant by its root, it might be more beautiful, but it will still hurt the plant.

The stones are also lifeless only in the physical world—in the higher worlds they too have their group-Egos. In the upper areas of Devachan, the group-Egos of the minerals exist. They too experience joy and pain. We will not find out anything about this by way of speculation, but only through the Science of the Spirit.

If we observe a worker in a quarry breaking up stone by stone, we could believe that this would cause pain to the stone soul. But this is not so. Just when a stone is blasted, then feelings of pleasure burst forth from the stone in all directions. Out of the quarry, where rock is blasted apart, strong feelings of well-being stream out on all sides. When we have a glass of water and add salt to it, and the salt dissolves, then feelings of desire and pleasure will stream through the water. Joy streams through the water when the dissolution of salt is being observed from a spiritual viewpoint. But if we allow the dissolved salt to settle and harden again, then this happens under pain. Likewise, it would cause pain to the stone soul if we could amalgamate the rock again that was blasted apart.

In their secret writings, in their religious scriptures, the seers have always shared their secret knowledge with human beings. But the people have lost the ability to understand these secret scriptures. Let’s imagine ourselves back into the ancient periods of time of our earthly evolution. We see the stones of our solid mountain ranges, that are built up from various clay strata, basaltic stones and so on. When we go even further back, we find that things on Earth become more and more soft. Then we come back to a time, where the Earth was filled with mighty masses of fiery warmth, where the iron, where all metals, all minerals, were dissolved in the spiritual. The human being was also a spiritual being at that time. To allow man to develop further, to receive his current shape, those soft masses needed to solidify. The mountain ranges emerged, the mineral masses dissolved out of the soft substance, and the Earth became the dwelling place of today’s human beings. The lifeless rock masses crystallised themselves out of the fiery liquid Earth like the salt out of the salt solution. Everything shaped itself so that the firm masses were formed out of the liquid state. This did not happen without pain. The whole hardening process of the globe was connected with the pain of the stone soul.

In the future Earth will become spiritualised again. The Earth will again fragment, as is already indicated by radium today. The process of dissolution of the Earth will begin, a spiritualisation, a deification, an adoption in the place of children will happen. Let us hear what the Apostle Paul says, “The whole Earth, all beings, are sighing under pain, waiting to be adopted as children”.¹

What we have got here is a representation of what happens on Earth, where the stone soul suffers under pain until the condition occurs when the stone soul will be adopted in place of a child. One could feel pain within one’s soul when those, who are announcing the religious scriptures to man, dream all sorts of things into them, because they do not want to make an effort to penetrate deeply into these records. Those people who are leading mankind are really violating their duty if they do not want to penetrate deeply into the religious scriptures.

The apostle Paul knew what the processes on Earth meant. Theosophy must lead mankind in our modern time into the depth of religious scriptures. It is sad if those who are called upon to be the representatives of the scriptures, make no effort to immerse themselves in them—they do not even have the will to understand them. All the arrogance of the present that says, “we’ve finally made such magnificent progress”,² must disappear. There are so many who believe that our ancestors knew nothing! Then people come and interpret the scriptures of Paul—religious scriptures—as they want to, but filled with arrogance they feel that they know more than our ancestors. But how do these words affect us, “All creatures are sighing under pain, awaiting to be adopted as children”? when we allow the insight of the feeling stone soul to affect us, how it awaits in pain to be adopted in place of a child? Human beings with a materialist mindset believe that when they walk outside they walk through air, wind and fog, through oxygen and nitrogen. But a person who has spiritual knowledge, knows that he is walking through spiritual beings everywhere, that with every breath he takes in spiritual beings and absorbs them.

So we have seen, how the animal-Egos circumvent the Earth like the trade-winds, how the plant-Egos are gathered together in the centre of the Earth, how the Earth itself feels something when we rip out plants, and how the Earth itself is alive and ensouled and has feelings. Everything outside is ensouled and imbued with life.

In the same way as the physical body is born out of the physical substances and powers, our spiritual limbs are born out of the vast cosmos. Then we begin to see a small world within us that rests inside the vast world. This creates a blissful feeling in us. Only when we learn to empathise with the minerals, plants and animals, will we learn to feel how our Ego rests within the whole cosmos.

Thus we can see how Theosophy leads us into the spiritual foundations of existence. It is something that transforms our sense of life, our life impulses in such a way that through it we become different human beings. The theosophical concepts are seeds, will-impulses for real experiences.

• 1. St Paul says, “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain.” In Luther’s translation it literally says: “The creatures are fearfully awaiting the revelation of the children of God”, Letter to the Romans, VIII,19
• 2. Goethe, Faust I, Scene 1, night; “Excuse me, but it is a great delight, On the spirit of the ages to set our sight, To see how wise men have thought before us, and we’ve finally made such magnificent progress.”

We have repeatedly to emphasize that knowledge of the spirit must become a living knowledge—by which we mean that a man should not simply come to know various things through spiritual science, but learn to think, feel, perceive, differently about everything around him. This begins when, in the right way, a man takes into him theosophical impulses. He must learn to feel with, and live with, every being. This, certainly, must apply most of all to his fellowmen, but we learn to have sympathy with other men when we can feel for the rest of the world. A man gradually gets to know the whole surrounding world; gradually he learns that everywhere around him there are spiritual beings, that all the time he is actually walking through them. He realizes this through his feeling, his perception. He learns to recognize what surrounds us in the three kingdoms of nature, learns about the beings in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. Then as he goes about in meadows and woods, through the ploughed fields and open country, he experiences it all in a different way from the man who knows nothing of what spiritual science can tell.

Looking at the other beings it might at first be thought that those of the animal kingdom had no soul such as man possesses. It is true that the human ego, the human soul, is different from that of the animal. The human soul lives on the physical plane. When we study the animal as such, each single animal has a physical body, an etheric body, and an astral body. Besides these members, each man when awake has an ego within him. The animal does not have its ego on the physical plane; for that, indeed, we must look deeper, into the so-called astral world. As here on the physical plane the population consists of human beings, we find the astral plane to be populated by the egos of the animals. And just as down here a man meets other men, the seer on the astral plane meets the egos of the animals—as separate personalities. We may picture it in this way. Imagine a man's ten fingers thrust through a screen and in movement. We see the moving fingers but not the man, for he is hidden by the screen. We cannot imagine that the fingers have come through the screen and move about on their own. We have to assume the intervention of some kind of being. So it is with the animals in the physical world. All animals of the same formation share a Group soul, a Group ego. Here on the physical plane we see the animals moving around, and each has a physical body, an etheric body and an astral body. What physically we see, lions for example, are the outwardly projected organs of the lion ego living in the astral world. The lion ego, the Group ego of all physical lions, is just as much a separate entity as is the human being when on earth. Each group of animals has an ego on the astral plane; on that plane is found the lion ego, the tiger ego, the ego of the vultures, and so on. The single animals here on the physical plane are like the fingers thrust through a screen. When we watch the single animals many of them appear extraordinarily clever, but they are directed from the astral plane where the animal group egos are to be found. The astral plane is populated by beings who are far cleverer than man; these animal egos are very wise beings. Look at the birds in flight, how they sweep over the different regions, and how well-ordered they are; how in autumn they go off, in their flocks, to some warmer climate, coming back again with the Spring. When we see the wisdom in this ordering, it prompts us to ask: Who is thus in command behind the screen? The answer is the group egos. If we watch a beaver building, we see there is more wisdom in what it builds than in the greatest engineering feat. And the intelligence shown in the way the bees work has also been the object of study. For instance, when given sugar in place of honey it is seen that, as they cannot take up sugar, they fetch other bees and fly off to the nearest water. Each bee brings a drop of water to dissolve the sugar, thus transforming it into a kind of syrup which is then carried into the hive. And behind this work is the spirit of the beehive. The single bees all belong to one personality, in the way that our limbs belong to us—only the bees are more spread out than our more closely connected, more compact limbs. We are walking about all the time through beings we do not see, through the animal egos invisible to our physical eyes.

Just as this describes what we begin to feel with regard to these unsuspected beings, so it is where the souls of the plants are concerned. The plant egos dwell in a higher world than the animal egos. The separate group egos of the plants live on what we call the devachanic plane. We can even state the place where they actually are—in the very centre of the earth, whereas the animal group souls circle round the earth like trade winds. All these plant egos at the centre point of the earth are mutually interpenetrating beings, for in the spiritual world a law of penetrability prevails and all beings pass through one another. We see the animal group souls moving over the earth like trade winds, and how in their wisdom they carry out what appears to be done by the animals. Studying the plant we see that its head—the root—is directed towards the center of the earth where its group ego is to be found. The earth itself is the outward expression of soul and spirit beings. From the spiritual point of view the plants seem like the nails of our fingers. The plants belong to the earth, and when we look at them singly we do not see a complete entity, for the single plant is just one among the whole number of beings constituting a group ego. In this way we can enter into what the plants themselves feel. The part of the plant that springs up out of the earth, what from within the earth strives up to the surface, is of a different nature from what is growing under the earth. There is a difference between the cutting off of blossoms, stalk, leaves, and the tearing up of a root. The former gives the plant soul a feeling of well-being, of pleasure, just as it gives pleasure to a cow, for example, when the calf sucks milk from her udder. There is actual similarity between the milk of animals, and that part of a plant which pushes its way out of the earth. When in late summer we go through fields where corn is being cut, where the blade is passing through the corn stems, then the whole fields breathe out a feeling of bliss. It is an intensely significant moment when we not only watch the reaping with our physical eyes, but perceive the feeling of contentment sweeping over the earth as the corn falls to the ground. But when the roots of the plants are pulled up, then that is painful for the plant souls. In the higher worlds the same laws do not hold good which are valid in the physical world. When we rise to the spiritual worlds our conceptions become different; even here on the physical plane there is sometimes opposition between the principle of beauty and that of pain or pleasure. It is possible that, impelled by a feeling for beauty, someone might pull out their white hairs, that indeed would be painful. And it is like that in the case of the plants. When the roots are pulled up this may make for neatness—yet the plants suffer.

Even stone is without life only on the physical plane. All minerals have their group egos in the higher worlds, on the higher devachanic plane, and these, too, feel pain and pleasure. Only spiritual science can teach us about these matters; speculation is of no avail. Looking at a quarry, and watching the splitting off of each block of stone, one might imagine this to cause pain for the stone ego. But it is not so. With the actual splitting of stone, there gushes out in all directions a feeling of pleasure. Out of the quarry from which the blocks are being cut there streams deep satisfaction on every side. And if we put salt into a glass of water so that it dissolves, then, too, a feeling of pleasure flows through the water. We see this pleasure stream through the water if, with eyes of the spirit, we watch the salt dissolve; but when the salt is becoming crystallized again the pleasure turns to pain. And it would be painful for the stone ego were we able to remold the severed blocks into their original bed.

These mysteries have always been made known to the people by the seers, out of the secret writings of their ancient religious records; but people have lost the capacity for understanding them. Let us think ourselves back into long past ages of our earth evolution. We see rocky masses of mountains, heaped up in layers of clay, basalt, and so on; and as we go further and further back we find everything on earth becoming softer. At length we come to a time when the earth was just one mass of fiery warmth, when iron, all metals, all minerals in fact, were merged in the spiritual. At that time man also was a spiritual being; if he was to go on evolving to his present form, these soft masses had to solidify. Thus the mountain ranges came into being, the minerals detached themselves from the soft substance, and the earth became the fit dwelling place for human beings as they are today. The mighty heaps of lifeless rock crystallized out of the fire-streaming earth, just as dissolved salt turns again into crystals. It has all been one great process of transformation, the passing over of the fluid condition into solidified masses. That did not happen without suffering. The densification of our earthly globe has been closely bound up with pain for the soul of the rock.

In the future the earth will become spiritualized again. It will be entirely broken down into fragments—as radium can already show us today. A process of dissolution will arise for the earth, a spiritualizing process, a becoming divine—in effect, the assuming of a childlike state. Let us hear what the Apostle Paul has to say: how the whole earth and all beings groan in pain for the “glorious liberty of the children of God.” In Romans VIII, verse 19, we read “For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God”; and in verse 22, “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.”

In those words we are given a picture of what happens on earth, when the soul of the rock suffers pain until the coming of the state of “Children of God.”—It is enough to sadden one when those who should instruct others concerning the ancient religious documents just allow their fancy to run away with them, because they won't take the trouble to penetrate to the real meaning of what has thus been handed down. This unwillingness to get to the heart of the ancient teachings is considered by the leaders of mankind to be an absolute violation of duty. Paul, the Apostle, recognized what such processes on earth signify. In this later period of ours, spiritual science is destined to lead men into the depths of these old records. It is indeed sad when those whose very calling should entail the upholding of them, make no effort to study, and have no will to understand, their meaning. Present-day arrogance, summed up in the words: “We have made such wonderful progress”—this must all go. How many people there are who believe that our forebears knew nothing! And there are those who expound the epistles of Paul, and all religious documents, quite arbitrarily, with a feeling of pride that they know more than their forefathers. But how then are we to take the words: “the whole creation groaneth in pain waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God”? And what effect does it have upon us when we know how the soul of the stone suffers while awaiting that manifestation?—People of materialistic mind think that, there outside, they walk only through air, wind, mist, through oxygen and nitrogen. But those who have spiritual knowledge realize, everywhere, that they are breathing spiritual beings in and out—merging with them.

Thus we have seen how the egos of the animals encircle the earth like the trade winds; how the plant egos have their common dwelling place in the center of the earth; and how the earth—being in itself alive, with a soul capable of feeling—is affected by the uprooting of the plants. Everything outside is ensouled and filled through and through with life.—In the same way as the physical body is produced out of physical substances and forces, do our spiritual members come forth out of the great whole. From that we begin to perceive our self as a small world resting in the great world; and this arouses in us a sense of being blessed. It is only when we learn to feel with the minerals, plants, and animals, that we can also experience this feeling of being at rest within the whole vast universe.

And so we see how spiritual science leads us into the spiritual foundations of existence. It is something which transforms our feeling and our will for life, so that, as men, we become different. Anthroposophical conceptions are seeds, impulses of will on the road to true experience.

Answers to Questions after the Lecture

The Death of Animals

An animal's death is quite different from that of a man. In the case of man death has to do with the bringing down of his individual ego on to the physical plane and the identification of it with his physical body. A man speaks of his physical body as “I”—feels himself to be “I”. When at death he loses his physical body it is a perceptible process, and he feels he is losing something of value. For those accustomed to look upon the physical body as valueless, the loss is less severe.

The single animal has no such sense of “I am”. That is experienced by the group soul. The more a being is individualized, and the deeper its descent on the physical plane, the more difficult its regeneration becomes. The group soul feels the death of an animal as we should the loss of a finger—as something to be compensated for or replaced.

After long periods the animals on earth change. Species evolve. Darwinism has elaborated this hypothetically, but the following is really the case. When an animal species changes there is also a change of group soul; and when the species becomes extinct this, for the group soul, is similar to death. For example, the seer today can discern a kind of death rattle in the group soul of the ibex. But the group soul evolves and becomes, on the extinction of one animal species, the group soul of another—which is like a rebirth.

The Significance of Killing Animals

The higher evolution of the earth consists in killing ceasing altogether. Therefore the ideal from the standpoint of spiritual science is to refrain from killing.

The Effect of Transplanting a Yew Tree

It means terrible pain for the tree when it is uprooted. It is not possible, however, in the course of world evolution, entirely to eliminate pain. All higher beings are born in pain, without which there could often be no evolution. The spiritual leaders of mankind have allowed this suffering so as to enable men to arrive at their present state.

Today there are still many people who maintain that a spirit-soul life may exist after death, but they wonder why we should concern ourselves with it now. We can simply live on earth with all that it offers and simply wait and see whether other forms of existence do come about after death!

Spiritual science shows, however, that during life between death and rebirth man encounters certain beings. Just as here he meets the many beings of the various kingdoms of nature, so after death he meets the beings of higher hierarchies and certain elemental beings. If a person goes through life without any sense of judgment, this is due to the fact that between death and rebirth he was unable to meet those beings who could have given him the appropriate forces to enable him to be morally and intellectually effective in this life. But the possibility and the ability to meet certain beings between death and rebirth depends on the last life. If during earthly life we do not occupy ourselves with thoughts relating to the super-sensible, if during our life we have been completely immersed in the external sense world, if we only lived in our intellect inasmuch as it was directed to the physical world, then we make it impossible for ourselves between death and a new birth to encounter certain beings and to receive abilities from them for a subsequent life. The realm beyond remains dim and dark for us, and we are unable to find the forces of higher hierarchies in the darkness. Man, then between death and a new birth, passes by those beings from whom he should receive forces for his next earthly life.

From whence comes the light by means of which we can illumine the darkness between death and rebirth? Where do we find it? Between death and rebirth no one gives us any light. The beings are there and we can only reach them providing we have kindled the light in our last earthly life by means of our interest in the spiritual world. After death we are unable to penetrate the darkness unless we have taken the light with us through the gate of death.

This shows how incorrect is the statement that we need not concern ourselves with things of a spiritual nature, but that we can afford to wait for what happens. In fact, if we wait and see, we shall only encounter darkness!

Earthly life is not merely a transitional stage. It has a mission. It is a necessity for the beyond, as indeed the beyond is for earthly existence. The lights for the life beyond must be carried upward from the earth. It may also happen that down here people remain dull to the super-sensible world, that they simply miss the opportunity to develop certain faculties, that they fail to create instruments for the next incarnation.

A person who lacked a certain ability in this or that sphere during life goes through the gate of death. Now you see what a hopeless situation it all makes. If nothing were to intervene, the person would become less and less able. For if a person has deliberately dulled himself toward the spiritual world in one incarnation, he will be even less able in a following life to prepare organs for himself. If nothing else were to occur, things would take their course along an ever steeper slope of decline.

Something else, however, does intervene. A man who goes through life with deliberate dullness in one incarnation will find that Lucifer approaches him with his powers in the spiritual world after the second earthly life. If Lucifer did not approach him at this point, he would stumble through the thickest darkness. Because he has lived as described, Lucifer can approach him and can illumine the forces and beings needed for the next earthly incarnation. The result is that they are colored with luciferic light. Now following the dull existence, and after having been led by Lucifer between death and rebirth, he enters a new earth existence. He is now fully equipped with talents and abilities which prepare his organs so that everywhere he is open to luciferic temptations on earth.

Now such a person may be clever, but his cleverness will be cold and calculating; above all it will be permeated by selfishness, by egoism. This manifests itself to the seer in many instances where people are clever but actually cold and selfish in their activity. When one meets them they are always seeking their own advantage and do all they can to place themselves in the limelight. A consideration of such people shows that in the spiritual world they were led by Lucifer. In the pervious incarnation they led a dull existence that was followed by a stumbling in the darkness after death and this was preceded by yet another life on earth during which they deliberately closed themselves to the spiritual world.

Such an insight reveals a sad prospect for materialists. Our contemporaries who are materialistically inclined and reject all concern for the spiritual world and consider the soul life as ending with death, can expect an existence as just described. It is of little consequence to gather abstractly certain thoughts about the interrelations of various earth lives. An exact, concrete survey reveals the most manifold connections between former and later earth lives and the life in the spirit that follows each incarnation. We should hold onto the fact that life on earth is of considerable importance for life after death.

Life on earth has yet another significance. It is only on the earth that we can meet certain beings, and man belongs above all among them. Unless the link is established between man and man on earth, it cannot occur in the spirit world. The relationships between human beings are forged here and continue in the spiritual world. If we miss the opportunity to meet certain individuals on earth who were predestined to be in incarnation, we cannot make up for it during the period between death and rebirth.

Let us take the example of Gautama Buddha. He was that human personality who lived during the sixth century B.C. as the son of a king, and who rose in his twenty-ninth year from the rank of bodhisattva to that of Buddha. This means that he became a Buddha and no longer needed to incarnate in physical human form. The Gautama Buddha thus accomplished his last earthly life. A considerable number of people met this individuality on earth during that time, and also in earlier incarnations people had been in contact with the Bodhisattva. All these connections could be continued later in the spiritual world. The connection to Gautama Buddha, which bore the character of a pupil to teacher relationship, could be continued in the spiritual world. But there were souls who during the evolution of humanity never made a connection with Gautama Buddha on earth. These souls, even if they now have reached a considerable degree of development, cannot at all easily come in contact in the spiritual world with the being of Buddha, with the soul of the one who was incarnated as Gautama Buddha. For Gautama Buddha what may be called a replacement appears; he has a replacement if one has been unable to make a connection with him on earth.

The Buddha has had a special destiny since he rose to buddhahood and no longer needed to return to the earth thus continuing to dwell in a pure spiritual region. He remained in touch with earthly happenings, however, and worked from the spiritual worlds down into the earthly sphere. We know that the being of Gautama Buddha radiated into the Jesus child spoken of in the Gospel of St. Luke. The super-sensible being of Buddha streamed into the astral body of the Luke Jesus child. It worked from the super-sensible down into earthly realms. Human beings on earth could no longer find access to him. Only those could make a contact with the being of Gautama who, like Francis of Assisi, for instance, had gone through a higher form of development. Before he entered life on earth, and previous also to the last life between birth and death, the being of Francis of Assisi lived in a mystery center situated in the southeast of Europe. In this center there were no physical teachers, but teachers belonging to the super-sensible hierarchy of whom Buddha, or more accurately, of whom the soul that had been incarnated in Buddha, was one. The pupils in such mystery centers had already developed lofty faculties for beholding the super-sensible world. Such pupils are able to be taught by teachers who work only from the spiritual world. Thus Buddha taught in that mystery center, and Francis of Assisi in a former incarnation was his faithful and devoted pupil. At that time Francis of Assisi absorbed everything that later enabled him to receive the light-filled impulses of the higher hierarchies, and that then allowed him to appear in incarnation as the great mystic who was to exert such a strong influence on his age. This was all due to the fact that the soul of Francis of Assisi, through the higher faculties he possessed at the time, was able to establish a connection with the Gautama Buddha after the Buddha was able to work down from the super-sensible world upon him.

For ordinary human beings who are dependent on life as it unfolds through the senses and the intellect, such a meeting is not possible. In that case what has been said earlier applies. We cannot meet a person in the spiritual world unless we have first met him on earth.

The exception that we have just considered in relation to the Buddha brings forth yet another. Although it is impossible for ordinary individuals to meet others in spiritual realms with whom they have not had a previous connection on earth, yet if a person has received the Christ impulse and permeates himself with it, he can nevertheless meet the Buddha after death. For the position of this being is a special one.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century another planet was involved in a crisis of development similar to that of the earth when the Mystery of Golgotha occurred. As the Christ appeared on earth from higher realms at the time of Golgotha, so Buddha appeared on Mars during the Mars crisis of the seventeenth century. After Buddha had completed his incarnations it was no longer necessary for him to return to the earth, but he continued his activities in other realms. The Buddha wandered away from earthly affairs to the realm of Mars. Until then Mars had been the chosen center of forces designated by the Greeks as fearfully warlike. This mission of Mars came to an end in the seventeenth century. Another impulse became necessary and the Buddha accomplished a Buddha crucifixion there. The Buddha Mystery on Mars did not take the same course as the Christ Mystery on earth, but Buddha, the Prince of Peace, who, during his last earthly life had spread peace and love wherever he went, was transferred to the belligerent realm of Mars. The fact that a being who is fully permeated by forces of peace and love was transferred to a realm of strife and disharmony may in a sense be regarded as a crucifixion. For the seer two happenings come together in a most wonderful way. One beholds, on the one hand, the eighty-year-old dying Buddha, and this death has a deeply moving, deeply stirring quality. Buddha died in 483 surrounded by silver rays on a wonderful moonlit night, radiating peace and compassion. That was his last earthly hour. And then he was active again in the way described. The seer discovers him kindling the compassionate, silvery moral light of Buddha on Mars at the beginning of the seventeenth century. These two wonderful events are deeply related in the course of world history.

The human souls who have received the Christ impulse into themselves in the corresponding manner here on earth travel through the cosmic universe after death. We all go through these cosmic realms. To begin with, we go through the planets of our planetary system. We experience a Moon period, a Mercury period, a Venus period, a Sun period, a Mars period, a Jupiter period and a Saturn period. Following these we go into the surroundings of our planetary system and then later commence our return journey. Now we encounter those forces and the beings from whom we must receive what we need to build up our next earthly life. He who has received the Christ impulse on earth can also receive what streams from the Buddha in his passage through the Mars sphere. This belongs to the exceptional case in which souls who have not been together with Buddha in earlier incarnations nevertheless have the opportunity of meeting him between death and rebirth.

Supersensible perception reveals that a number of personalities who lived during the seventeenth century owed their remarkable talents to the fact that during their prenatal life in the spiritual world they received an impulse from Buddha. At present the ability to receive such talents is still limited among human beings because it is only comparatively recently that the Buddha accomplished the Mystery on Mars. In future, human souls will be more and more capable of receiving the Buddha impulse from the Mars sphere. But in the nineteenth century there were already some personalities—and this was disclosed to those able to perceive it—who were able to develop their faculties here on earth as a result of the influences they received from Buddha through their passage in the Mars sphere. The course of life between death and rebirth is indeed complex and wonderful.

Unless man is able to take with him the light to illumine his experience between death and rebirth, he stumbles in the dark. This also holds good for this exceptional case. A person who departs from the earth through the gate of death without having taken the Christ impulse into himself, who wished to know nothing of it, will not have the slightest intimation of the influences of Buddha during his next life in the spiritual world as he passes through the Mars sphere. For him it is as if the Buddha were not present. It should be borne in mind that we encounter the beings of the Higher Hierarchies, but whether or not we perceive them and establish the right connection with them depends on whether we kindled a light in our last earthly existence so that we do not pass them by and are able to receive impulses from them. That is why it is a complete fallacy to maintain that it is unnecessary to concern oneself with the beyond during earthly existence.

You will gather from the foregoing that from a higher aspect life on earth really constitutes a special case. We live embodied within a special organism on earth between life and death. Apart from an earthly incarnation one can speak of an “embodiment” between death and rebirth, or rather of an “ensouling.” What I have elaborated in connection with the spiritual world also applies to the earth. Consider that a human being living between death and rebirth may pass through the Mars sphere without entering it in the slightest connection with the beings who inhabit Mars. He does not see them, and they are not aware of him. This is true of the earth also. Beings belonging to other planets, just as man belongs to the earth, are continually passing through the earth sphere. The inhabitants of Mars spend the normal course of their life on Mars, and during their experience, which corresponds on Mars to the period between death and a new life but yet is different, they pass through the planetary spheres. So that in fact inhabitants of other planets are continually passing through our earth sphere. Human beings are unable to establish any contact with them because they live under quite different conditions and because they will in the main not have made the least connection with these beings on Mars.

What would be the conditions necessary in order to meet the beings from other planets as they pass through the earth sphere? One would have had to develop points of contact with them in their own planetary realms, but this is only possible if on earth one has already reached the stage of being able to contact beings other than those of the earth as a result of the development of super-sensible powers.

Thus the possibility is there for those who have undergone a higher development to encounter the beings who wander through from other planets. It may sound peculiar and yet it is so, that for those who have intercourse with the wanderers from Mars and learn to know of the nature of that planet, the strange theories that physics and astronomy weave about Mars inhabitants appear most comical, for the facts are quite different.

I bring forth these things so that you can widen your gaze from earthly existence into other realms extending beyond the visible beings that surround us to be beings who cannot be perceived unless we develop the organs to behold them. But between death and rebirth we also cannot establish a connection with conditions belonging to the mission of the earth unless we have first contacted them by way of the earth.

What is spiritual science or anthroposophy from a cosmic aspect? He who weaves theories might easily believe that spiritual science is something that can be taught and learned in all realms of the cosmos, but that is not the same. Each realm has its own particular task and it does not repeat itself in other realms. The creative powers have so made the earth that only here can certain things arise. Spiritual science can only arise on earth. Nowhere else can it be learned. It is a revelation of the super-sensible world but in such a form as can arise only here on earth.

One might well say that supposing all this to be true, surely one could be instructed about the super-sensible in the spiritual world in a form other than that of spiritual science! One can certainly think this, but it is not true. For if a person is at all predisposed to gain a genuine connection with higher worlds, he can do so only by means of spiritual science. If he fails to draw near to spiritual science or anthroposophy on earth, no other form of existence will help him to get to know it. But no other form of existence will help him to gain a genuine human connection with the super-sensible worlds, either.

This need not plunge us into despair about the many people who are still refusing to know anything about anthroposophy. They will return and establish a connection with it at a later stage. Anthroposophy has been established on the earth in such a way as to impart to people what has to be known about the super-sensible worlds in accordance with the nature of man. Only one form of communication is possible and that is by way of human beings. If a person goes through the gate of death without having heard anything of spiritual science on earth, he can become familiar with it through the fact that he knew a person who had a connection with spiritual science. This is a round-about path but a possible one.

Let us take the example of two people who were on friendly terms during their earthly life. One has made a connection with anthroposophy, the other not. The latter dies. The former can help him considerably by reading to him, by making him familiar with what surrounds him after death. A person can read an important work of spiritual science with the dead and, as the seer will confirm, the dead listens attentively.

It is also a fact that a simple person who has only just come in touch with spiritual science may be better able to read to a deceased person whom he genuinely loved than the seer who, though able to find the soul of the dead, had no affectionate connection with him in this life. From time to time it may also happen that seers give themselves the task of reading to the souls of the dead whom they have not known. Yet more often than not one is unable to read to a dead person with whom one has had no previous connection on earth.

These facts will impress upon you the importance of spiritual communities such as the anthroposophical one because here we find to a certain extent a replacement for what may be called a kind of living together and getting in touch.

Should such communities not exist, each soul after death would have to rely entirely on being read to by people close to them. Only such spiritual communities where spiritual ideals are commonly fostered can expand this sphere. Thus it can and does happen that one meets an anthroposophist who, because of what he has previously learned, is able in a special way, to read a spiritual content with much concentration or to let such thoughts pass through his soul. One might approach him, mention to him that a person who dies was also an anthroposophist, belonged to the same society, and show him a sample of the writing of the deceased. It may suffice that by seeing the writing or by hearing a favorite verse of the deceased, the more developed anthroposophist is able to read to such a soul in a most fruitful manner, though he did not know him on earth. It is indeed a fine task for a spiritual community to bridge so strongly the gap between the living and the dead.

Today anthroposophists still conceive of many tasks that lie merely on the physical plane because materialistic ways of thought are still prevalent among them, though theoretically they may have absorbed the science of anthroposophy. The true spiritual tasks will present themselves when spiritual science will have penetrated the soul more deeply. People will be found to take on the task of helping the dead so that they may evolve. A beginning has been made within our movement and what already has been achieved in this sphere can give us a high degree of satisfaction.

In fact, in certain circumstances when an anthroposophist goes through the gate of death carrying spiritual thoughts with him, he may be able to serve the dead and could become their teacher. This, however, is more complicated than is usually imagined. It is easier to do this from the earth because the communities that are formed after death depend entirely on the groups that were formed before death.

If two people, for instance, lived with one another on earth, the one an anthroposophist and the other not, the one who had an aversion towards spiritual science will long for it after death. If may happen that the anthroposophist who remains behind on earth concerns himself until his death with the departed soul by reading to him. Now after a certain period of time the anthroposophist also goes through the gate of death. He is then re-united with the other in the spiritual world. An echo of the earlier connection on earth is now felt, and this presents a difficulty. There was no difficulty as long as the one was on earth and the other in the spiritual world. Dissonances arise again as they did in the earthly relationship now that they are once more united. Just as on earth the one soul did not wish to know anything about spiritual science, so it becomes again the case in the world beyond. This shows to what extent the relationships after death are dependent upon the previous earthly connections. These matters are exceedingly complex and cannot be merely thought out intellectually.

Such instances clearly reveal the mission of spiritual science. The gulf between the living and the dead must be bridged. Under certain conditions the dead can also work into the earthly sphere, as the living are able to send their influence into the spiritual world, and we can investigate how the dead work into the physical world.

As a matter of fact, people know little of what surrounds them on earth. How do they view life? The events of life as they unfold are strung on a thread, as it were. Some are considered to be causes, others effects, but beyond this little thought is given to the matter. It may sound strange that the actual things that happen form the smallest content of real life. They only represent the external content. There is yet another sphere of life apart from the things that happen, and this is of no less importance for life.

Let us take an example. A person is in the habit of leaving home punctually every morning at eight. He has a definite way to go, across a square. One day circumstances are such that he leaves three minutes later than usual. He now notices something strange on the square, under the colonnade where he used to walk every day. The roof of the colonnade has collapsed! Had he left at the accustomed time, the falling roof certainly would have killed him.

There are many such instances in life. We often find that had circumstances been different, this or that might have taken quite another course. We are protected from many dangers. Much of what could happen does not come to pass. In life we consider the external realities, not the inner possibilities. Yet these possibilities constantly lie concealed behind the actual events. The events of a particular day only constitute the external reality of life. Behind them lies an entire world of possibilities.

Take the sea as an example. In it there lives a multitude of herring but for them to arise, not only as many eggs as herring had to be present. An endless number of eggs are destroyed. Only a relatively small number of herring come to life. So it is with the whole of life. What we experience from morning until night constitutes only a portion of an enormous number of possibilities. We are continually led past certain possible events that do not actually happen. When a possible event passes us by, this marks a special moment for us. Consider the instance of the man. If he had left his house at the usual time he would have been killed by the roof of the colonnade. Such possibilities constantly accompany us in life. Such a moment, when a man would have been struck had he arrived three minutes earlier, marks an opportune occasion for the spiritual world to light up in him. He may then have an experience that can bring him together with the dead. Today people are not yet aware of such occasions because fundamentally they only live on the surface of life.

Spiritual science aims gradually to become a life elixir. Man then will not only behold external reality but he will pay attention to the stirrings in his soul life. There he will frequently find the voices of the dead who still want something from the living.

As we have an example of how the living can influence the dead by reading to them, so we also see how the dead can influence the living. A time will come when man will converse spiritually with the dead. People will speak with the dead, and they will listen to the dead. Death only marks a change in the outer form of man; his soul develops further. At present we experience as yet a most imperfect condition of mankind inasmuch as men are unable to communicate with their fellow men who dwell in another form of life. When spiritual science is no longer a theory but has permeated souls, a living communion with the dead will continually be possible. In fact, conditions, which in a sense obtain only for the seer at present, will gradually become the common heritage of the whole of humanity.

You may say, “Well, that may be so for the seer. He can find human beings between death and rebirth.” Actually, this presents considerable difficulties today because the general lack of belief in the spiritual world, the lack of connection to the spirit, creates hindrances also for those who could establish a relationship to the spiritual world.

There are certain things that can take place unhindered only if they belong to the common possession of humanity. A man may be an outstandingly gifted master-builder. If nobody engages his services, he will not be able to build. This also can be the case for the seer. He may possess the faculties to ascend spiritually to the realm of the dead but if this process is hindered owing to the fact that communion with the dead is impossible for most people, the seer will only be able to succeed in establishing a contact in a few exceptional instances.

My dear friends, I wished to show you how spiritual science can be a life-giving impulse. More than anything we may learn theoretically, it is important to cultivate a feeling for the task of spiritual science in relation to the future of humanity. This enables each one who belongs to the anthroposophical movement to gain an impression of what he is really doing. He gains an impression of the tremendous task that has to be achieved by spiritual science or anthroposophy. This also enables one to connect oneself earnestly and worthily to spiritual science, not in a light-hearted way, as to something that is to refresh one but as an impulse which will become of ever increasing importance as mankind advances into the future. I wished to evoke a feeling for this by today's considerations.

The most important part of esoteric life is our exercises, through which we gradually work our way up into the spiritual world. The way we do them and our accompanying attitude is important as we work with higher worlds and beings.

We should have no greed for spiritual knowledge, but a mood should spread out in us like we feel in compassion and moral actions. Otherwise an esoteric is in great danger of becoming morally worse in exoteric life than he was before. That's why accessory exercises for the strengthening of intellectual and moral qualities are always demanded in addition to the actual meditations.

Another danger lies in wait for an esoteric in connection with the karma that he's trying to control and make good. Here one almost always finds that the one working intensively on his inner life becomes careless with respect to outer karmic phenomena and conditions. Previous karmic mistakes that an esoteric has become burdened with and that then between death and rebirth have given him a strong urge to make them good put him in situations and bring him in contact with people so that he can fulfill his karmic obligations towards them. In normal exoteric development, karma would unwind slowly or become partially worked out.

If a pupil is working at his esoteric development too much and does not pay attention to the outer situations that make up his destiny, then karma breaks in on him And what otherwise takes place in years or in various incarnations must now work itself out in a concentrated way with severe upheavals. Here one can get to the edge of despair and can also wreak havoc on one's surroundings and draw them into the karmic eruption. But even in the simplest initial exercises he has the consolation that there's forces that hold and support him also. We may and should always think of this.

Dear attendees, Anthroposophy is regarded by many people who have only been superficially introduced to it as a more or less fantastic attempt to penetrate into a realm of the world by way of knowledge, a realm that a serious scientist should not concern with. For in fact, anthroposophy seeks to find the means to penetrate through real knowledge into those supersensible worlds in which the immortal germ of the human soul is rooted, and from which the human soul can learn its true nature. Now it is well known that even today quite serious scientists are already dealing with all kinds of abnormal soul abilities that occur in many personalities, which indicate that in the human being, indeed, quite different world connections are revealed than those that can be mastered with the recognized scientific methods.

But these personalities, who preferably turn to the abnormal human soul and bodily abilities, which then register what comes to light through observation in a completely scientific way, seek laws for this, which alone only truly give the anthroposophical spiritual paths. Since it seeks to lead the ordinary, normal human cognitive faculties beyond their ordinary measure, the anthroposophical path of the spirit often appears to them as something fanciful, as something fantastic, and sometimes they even categorize it as superstition. But it cannot be said that those of a visionary, nebulous and mystical nature could find particular satisfaction in what is considered anthroposophy today.

This anthroposophy certainly does not want to take its scientific attitude and conscientiousness any less seriously and methodically than the recognized sciences themselves. And even if it is true that there are a great many people today who, simply because of a certain dissatisfaction with life, run to everything that is somehow called occult, it must be said that very soon such natures in particular will not be able to find satisfaction in the strict, methodical thinking that is sought in anthroposophy as well as in other fields of science. This does not, of course, prevent some people from simply dismissing it with a slight wave of the hand because of something unusual in anthroposophy, since those who are interested in anthroposophy belonged to the neurasthenic or hysterical types! And so it is somewhat difficult to speak briefly about the actual essence of anthroposophy in an introductory lecture. I would like to do it by attempting to subject the research paths of anthroposophy to a consideration before you today and then hint at some of the essential results.

From these words alone, you will have gathered that, at least in spirit, anthroposophy seeks to emulate and live up to the ideal of the strict scientific method that has emerged in the last three to four centuries of scientific research. Anthroposophy does not want to be in opposition to the legitimate paths of scientific knowledge. It only wants to extend what science gives for the sense realm into those realms that can be described as the supersensible world, but in doing so, if it does not want to proceed in a dilettantish manner, it faces two very formidable obstacles that hinder human knowledge.

The first shows how strict scientific knowledge comes up against certain limits, how it can indeed lead to satisfactory results when it deals with facts, but how it immediately encounters unsatisfactory ones when it wants to go beyond the realm of facts that can be perceived or combined by the human mind. We know that the most serious natural scientists are very particular that these boundaries should not be crossed by all kinds of fantasies. It is precisely in this respect that Anthroposophy initially places itself squarely on the ground of scientific thinking. It is clear, however, that the thinking that humans apply in ordinary life and in science is by no means only suitable for the realm of external facts. Now, some try to move on to pure thinking in order to fathom what lies behind the world of sense perceptions. But human thinking does not dwell only on facts. Rather, having been educated through the social culture of the last few centuries, it has gained its own character from these facts, and by leaving philosophical speculation, it enters into unsatisfied areas, into a kind of emptiness. This is the source of the many disputes among the philosophical systems of worldview. And it is the source of the feeling that if one philosophizes into the world with thinking that has escaped from facts, one can subjectively guide the direction and current of thinking, and therefore what can be achieved must remain unsatisfied because it must carry an element of subjective arbitrariness of the human being. That is the one pitfall of philosophical world view speculation.

But there are people who, out of the deepest longings of the human soul, who strive for the knowledge of the eternal, feel unsatisfied with mere knowledge of nature, who understand the unsatisfactory nature of philosophical speculation left to its own devices, and therefore turn to a more or less unclear mysticism, in the belief that they can penetrate into the depths of the human soul through inner contemplation and, through this inner contemplation within human nature, recognize the eternal of the human soul beyond death and birth.

Those who look at these often sincerely meant mystical aspirations with an open mind will also be able to see through the deceptions into which man falls precisely through these mystical contemplations. After all, what man takes in for his ordinary consciousness are only external impressions and perceptions. These communicate with the soul, they are presented. They are felt and sensed, and the results of them ignite the impulses of the will. But after all, everything that is in the soul through ordinary consciousness is a result of external perceptions. And those who believe that they can already bring something eternal out of the depths of the soul with this ordinary consciousness cannot examine the inner life of a person in an unbiased way. Those who know how impressions that the human soul felt decades ago, impressions that it was not fully aware of, are processed internally, transformed in the realm of ideas and imbued with emotional content, how then these ideas can be brought out of the soul after many years, having undergone a complete transformation. If one is not conscientious, one might succumb to the illusion that one has brought something divine out of the depths of the soul, when in fact one has only drawn up something transformed that had been slumbering there for a long time.

I had to mention these two pitfalls at the outset because, in an introductory lecture, I can only create a sense of the strictness with which anthroposophy seeks to penetrate the supersensible world and how it seeks to avoid illusory paths in both directions. Thus, Anthroposophy recognizes that one can penetrate into supersensible worlds in a satisfactory way neither by the path of left-to-itself philosophical speculation nor by mysticism. By clearly recognizing this precondition for its own task, anthroposophy comes to say: Man, who is sometimes guided so surely by the practical tasks of life from birth to death and who is led by them into the triumphs of science, cannot, if he understands himself correctly, believe that he can penetrate into the supersensible worlds through all of this. Therefore, Anthroposophy does not appeal to these ordinary powers of knowledge, nor to abnormal ones either, but says to itself, there are dormant cognitive abilities in every human soul that can be brought up through conscientious, strictly regulated, methodical inner soul exercises. You have to have intellectual humility. You have to be able to say: I look back: what was I like when I was a very young child, when the world passed before my soul like a dream, how did I have to develop my abilities from week to week, from year to year, how did I have to bring them out of the depths of my human nature.

Now anthroposophy shows that it is possible to take all the soul abilities that have developed since childhood and, as a mature human being, to take their development into one's own hands and lead them to higher abilities. This is what distinguishes anthroposophy from the other fields of knowledge: the latter take the ordinary cognitive abilities into account, but anthroposophy begins where these sciences end, by developing these abilities into supersensible cognitive abilities.

This does not happen through some fantastic method, nor through external action, but rather in such a way that the same strict method prevails in its training, which is otherwise only known when one truly understands the essence of science. Developing anthroposophy is no easier than conducting research in an observatory or medical clinic. The exercises take years of soul-searching for the individual. I have described these in more detail in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science”. The main thing is to develop the human thought life of ordinary life, to strengthen it inwardly. Just as one can strengthen a muscle when it is used for work, so one can strengthen the imaginative life of the soul when it is directed in a certain direction. The strengthening of the human imaginative life should be brought to the center of your consciousness so that it occupies a manageable complex. It is necessary that the human being experiences this imagination as he otherwise only regards an external sensory perception. We must look at this external perception impartially, objectively, we must take it as it is. Exactly the same relationship must exist in the soul towards that which is practiced as meditative, concentrating thinking.

For this reason, it is good if the person does not bring any ideas from memory to these soul exercises, because these have become intertwined and transformed, but takes a completely new sentence or saying from some source. Then the content of the image is incorporated into the soul life, and all the soul activity seeks to concentrate on this single content. All the powers at work in the soul are directed towards this content, and this applies to all exercises. They must be subordinated to the human will; there must be nothing of suggestion or dream-like in the activity. As strictly as one is consciously devoted to a mathematical operation, so must one concentrate on a particular thought. This enables us to concentrate on a particular thought in a way that is otherwise only possible with external sensory impressions, so that the inner idea acquires exactly the same vividness and vividness as an external experience. Through these deliberate efforts of thought, one comes to face thought itself quite differently. Only now do we learn to recognize that our ordinary thought life, devoted to external facts or memories, is bound to the human organism. This new thinking is inwardly pictorial. One's soul life leads into a pictorial experience, into an experience that I have called imaginative, not because mere imaginings are to be achieved, but because the human soul can indeed enter into an inner plastic image life and because it feels in it how it becomes more and more free from the body and gains more and more disembodied soul life.

But one thing must be clear: at first everything that is attained is an inner subjective experience. Those who approach anthroposophy seriously will see the enormous difference between this new thinking and the morbid, hallucinatory. Those who have only a superficial knowledge of anthroposophy point out, in a misleading way, that the higher soul abilities that are praised can be nothing other than what predominates as dream-like soul experiences in visions and so on. In truth, anthroposophy is directed towards the opposite pole of what is pathological. There, the person loses their ordinary consciousness; the hallucinator lives in their hallucinations; the suggestible person lives solely in the experience of this dream-like, illusory state. Those who direct their soul life towards real imagination know that at first they only experience images, but they always have a second personality, a consciousness, alongside them, just as they do in ordinary life and in science. They have their human personality with everyday, healthy common sense, which can constantly control and subject to criticism what arises as a second, imaginative consciousness.

But what must go hand in hand with such exercises, so that not only the concentration of thoughts is practiced, the directing of the soul's abilities to some complex of ideas, so that one may gain an inner strength, is the same arbitrariness in the opposite activity. One will soon notice when concentrating in this way that these thoughts take up one's attention, that one can become absorbed in them. Now one must learn to use one's free will in such a way that one can bring such ideas out of one's consciousness again and suppress them just as arbitrarily as one has taken them in. On the one hand, we see the invigoration of the soul life in the absorbed complex of ideas, and on the other hand, the redirection of the same. This empty consciousness is not a state of sleep, but a full consciousness that has consciously eliminated a mental image.

Once you have done these exercises, you will be able to survey your life from birth onwards, but inwardly. We have a current flowing in the depths of our soul from which we can bring up one or the other memory, but usually only in fragments and temporal fragments. But by reaching into the imaginative life of the soul, we grasp the individual elements of it all at once in a tableau, we have before us the basic forces that form it and how they have been working in man since birth. It is as if the time during which we usually review our memories had become a single moment. This is the first supersensible experience we have. We see through the entire stream of our life on earth. Man feels within himself a second supersensible body that cannot be developed with the physical one, it can only be recognized through imagination. Furthermore, it is something that is not limited as a single form in space, but something that runs in time, although it can be seen in a single tableau. I would like to call this second supersensible corporeality of the human being the formative forces body, the etheric body. One comes to see oneself inwardly, how one inwardly guides one's abilities, how one comes to one's moral forces, and so on. One learns to recognize oneself as a whole human being in the course of time. One cannot paint this formative body other than as a flash of lightning that can only be captured in a moment, as everything in constant motion allows only a momentary reproduction, as one cannot philosophically speculate on what one directly perceives if one continues in the described manner.

Once the soul faculties have been strengthened, it becomes possible to suppress everything comprehended in its totality, as previously the individual pictorial components, so that one now produces an empty consciousness and becomes capable of exposing oneself to a world and waiting to see what now enters into this world. What enters the human soul is quite different from what is present in the world we are accustomed to in the senses. For what now enters the empty consciousness is the supersensible, the eternal spiritual of the human soul. One has received the power to survey the spiritual-soul realm! One experiences the moment of each individual memory, as it was before the soul had connected with a body through conception or birth. One experiences the spiritual-soul as it was when the human being was still rooted in the spiritual-soul. In this way, one gains an insight into what is given to the human being not only as a result of his physical body, but also in terms of the forces of heredity. One sees how these forces work their way into the physical body, but what was already there before it took possession of the body, before the first appearance of the body in a spiritual-soul world. We arrive at the creative aspect of the soul-spiritual by juxtaposing the mortal human body and that which works into the forces of inheritance. Then we will come ever closer to an understanding of the immortal part of the human being. This level of knowledge is the inspired one. Just as the breath is first in space and then processed in the body, so the spiritual-soul enters into the human mortal body, and by recognizing it, we speak of inspired knowledge.

In this way, the human being has gained the preparation not only to strengthen his world of thoughts, but also to advance his world of will through a spiritual training that goes beyond what is possible in ordinary life. On the one hand, it must be pointed out that one can only penetrate into the supersensible worlds by transforming the thinking of ordinary life, and so one recognizes that anthroposophy begins where ordinary science must end.

However, one only reaches one side of the supersensible existence. Just as the life of feeling is found between will and thinking in the complete human soul, so too must this life of feeling and will be further developed in a similar way. Again, it must be practiced with strict conscientiousness, just as one can also tear the will away from the human body. This then takes us to the other side, to the side of death, which leads beyond death to the human soul. The exercises of the will strive into the supersensible realm, and must therefore be linked to those parts that already fall from the supersensible into ordinary life. This, in turn, can be achieved in a wide variety of ways; I refer the reader to the books already mentioned. I would like to give only a few examples here, by means of which the liberation of the human will from its bondage to the body can be achieved.

In human life, the impulse of the will is permeated by our instinctual life. But we can arrive at exercises of the will precisely by considering how everything that is isolated in the intellect becomes a unified whole in the soul. When we think, the element of the will lives in our thinking. If we consider how our inherited thinking unfolds in ordinary life, we find that It adheres to the sequence, the course of events. We abandon ourselves to our thinking, more or less passively, to the course of events. Even if we free this thinking logically, it happens in such a way that we want to understand the course of events logically with our logic, but we do not move away from it! Only when we tear thought away from its usual mode of activity, when, for example, we imagine a drama piece by piece from the last scene to the first, or when we review the day in the evening backwards to the morning, going into as much detail as possible, so that we fully engage our soul life, or when, for example, when climbing several floors, we follow the staircase backwards to the first one, and thus gradually make a strong willpower a habit, you also tear the will away from ordinary life and achieve a transformation of the soul's will, until you learn to watch your own actions as you can watch a foreign personality. One must acquire a certain skill in walking alongside oneself and controlling oneself like a stranger, in exercising the will to undertake things that one then conscientiously carries out. In this way one comes to detach this will so completely from the physical that one knows: You now want outside of your body! The life of feeling then connects on both sides, it transforms like the life of thought and will.

But since it is the most intimate part of the human soul, it should not be artificially developed, but this life of feeling follows human development into the supersensible world.

We learn to develop the necessary enthusiasm for what we encounter in the spiritual worlds, seemingly for objective reasons. When the will is freed in the above way, one reaches the third stage of supersensible knowledge, which is called intuitive. There the word is applied when the soul is truly able to place itself in the spiritual world, free of the body. By ascending to this intuition, man becomes acquainted with that which continues to have an effect in him after it has come into the human body as his soul and spirit through conception and birth. He learns how the soul detaches itself from the human being, what is spiritual and soul-like, what is independent and immortal, what enters the gate of death when the body is left to decay – then what is intuitively seen enters the spiritual and soul world.

In the nineties, I tried to address the problem of freedom in my “Philosophy of Freedom” and to show that the question is not posed correctly. The truth is that man is dependent for a large number of actions, but that he stands out, develops into a free personality by learning to shape his will impulses, grasped in pure thinking. Only in these areas, in the impulses that underlie our truly free actions, do we have a presentiment of what also lives objectively in the human being and what enters the spiritual-soul world after death. In “Philosophy of Freedom” I called this the moral intuition. A higher stage of development is formed by cognitive intuition, in which we gain a complete overview of immortality, that the spiritual soul enters through the gate of death to further paths in the spiritual-soul world. After recognizing the eternal nature of the human soul in this way, one also gets to know the soul's environment before it enters the body and after it has left it. Not only does the outer world of the senses open up, but the developed powers of the senses can penetrate into the human soul. They are able not only to bring up what is nebulous and mystical, but also to see the truly eternal in the human soul. By having the spiritual and soul life of the human being concretely before us, we can distinguish the two worlds from each other, what belongs to the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily. By getting to know these two worlds, one learns, precisely through the characterized intuition, to know something else in the human being, which connects with human feeling and is recognized as the essence of human feeling. Then the observation extends to the past, in that one not only beholds the soul before birth. Rather, one looks at the repeated earth lives, at what the spiritual world has gone through. One gains the confidence that worlds will continue to be experienced in the future, in repeated earth lives of progressive development. This becomes clear to him who beholds the affiliation of the human soul to the supersensible world.

And he recognizes that which rises to a higher existence of forces, which carries the acquisitions of both worlds from life to life. But he recognizes not only the human entity, but also the spiritual-soul entity, free of illusion, which lies within the sense world, but which is not recognizable to the ordinary faculty of perception.

By developing these abilities over time, one learns to look at this physical-sensory world, not as if one could no longer fully trust common sense, but by developing the second personality alongside it, which has spiritual-soul senses that can see what it sees physically-sensually, also in a soulful way. One also learns to look at the cosmos differently. However, I am coming to something here where anthroposophy is even more antipathetic!

For example, in our ordinary lives we face the sun as a limited spatial being, we describe it in science in the familiar way. If we now acquire the higher cognitive abilities, then the sun presents itself to us in a different way. We learn to speak of something that is not limited within its contours. We get to know the sun-like, which permeates everything, which belongs to the human environment, which fills and permeates the world, which penetrates into human life. We can also clearly recognize this transformed sun-like quality in ourselves. It proves to be as related to us as any external object of perception. We come to understand how much that is sunny enters into the human being, how it strengthens all growth forces, how it makes us young, keeps us young, accompanies us through life, makes our nourishment a process, permeates us in ascending development — that is the result of the spiritual-sunny.

In contrast to this, we recognize the lunar. It permeates everything that is already stored in us from birth as the forces of aging, withering, dying, as descending life. From the mid-thirties onwards, the disintegrating forces in the human being gain the upper hand, the degenerative, retrogressive, morbid — all this lies in the lunar. We learn to recognize how everything in the cosmos affects the human being. In this way, we can see what we recognize from the relationship between man and the cosmos, beyond the stars. We arrive at a spiritual-soul cosmos through direct observation, not through analogical conclusions! There are no illusions here. Life immediately distinguishes reality from fantasies. Just as one can philosophically distinguish the mere idea of the heat of steel from the concrete touch of the hot iron rod, so does experience in the spiritual realm distinguish the merely conceivable from that which really is. And just as one progresses from imagination to inspiration, so one knows that one is progressing to a real world.

Thus, in a systematic development of the human powers of knowledge, the spiritual-soul cosmos with its immortal beings enters the ordinary world of the cosmos of the senses. In this way, by beholding the deeper-lying forces of the world and of human nature, one also comes to recognize how that which is in human nature transforms. As supersensible knowledge is attained, what otherwise appears in sharp contours dissolves. The human heart, lungs and so on dissolve into processes. One can only speak of the brain-lung-heart process. What is otherwise sharply defined in space becomes mobile. In this we see the sun-like and moon-like forces at work, and here the potential of anthroposophy is extended to include the fertilization of the individual sciences.

By looking into the process of becoming and building up in the human organism, into the becoming and degenerating plant and animal beings, by discovering the forces of the supersensible in the realm of dead stone, we find the relationships of the inner human being to the inner forces of the cosmos. There is a way in which anthroposophy can have a fruitful effect on the medical element. This is why we were able to start therapy with pathology. In Stuttgart and Dornach, we have a therapeutic institute based on anthroposophical principles. And it is possible to gain insights into irregular degradation processes and to recognize how this disease can be healed by building up forces. Instead of a medicine that only tries things out, we have a healing art that, on the one hand, takes in both the healthy and the diseased and, on the other, the healing. Here we have an example of how anthroposophy can have a fruitful effect on the individual sciences. [There is also a physical and biological institute in Stuttgart.] On the basis of scientific research, the supernatural is incorporated into the results. These forces also have a significance for technology and for practical life in a new form.

Anthroposophy also has a fruitful effect on the artistic side. This is manifested at the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science near Basel. When Anthroposophy draws on the deeper human soul forces, it has an effect on and from the whole person. Just as the nut is governed by the same forces within as it is in the shell, so the artistic framework that Anthroposophy needs must be like the shell around the kernel, arising out of the same impulses from which ideas flow when they are born of spiritual insight. This is how the new architectural style in architecture, sculpture and painting came about. In a further progression, it realizes what Goethe felt in his soul when he said: When nature begins to reveal its true secrets to us, we feel the deepest longing for its deepest interpreter, art. — Art is a secret manifestation of the deepest laws of nature. Not through allegories or abstract symbols, but through the creation of real art forms, it shows that anthroposophy is not a theory, but direct life that can have a fertilizing effect in all areas.

The Waldorf School in Stuttgart shows what can be achieved in the knowledge of the whole human being in body, soul and spirit. The great educators do not stand in opposition, but by grasping the full human being in the child, the highest pedagogical achievement in education is already achieved. The Waldorf School is not a school of world view, and religious education is also given in the various denominations. The Waldorf school is an institution in which the practical implementation of teaching from morning to evening is realized with pedagogical and didactic skill based on anthroposophical knowledge. Teachers know what is developing in each human being at each age, they can read the curriculum and teaching objectives from the human being, they do not graft anything into him, but they develop in the child what already resides in the human being.

Finally, I would like to point out how the scientific world view, due to its one-sidedness in social terms, has reached a kind of dead end. What is to take effect in social life cannot, as Marx says, work according to abstract laws; one must look at the whole human being, the fully developed human being. Today, the one-sidedness that comes from the man of sense and intellect has already become a fact, as we see in Eastern Europe. It is this that makes us long for an understanding of the whole human being, of body, soul and spirit. Only that which has a real effect on life in the social sphere can have a healing and salutary effect.

Anthroposophy will continue to develop in this direction. During the various presentations at the Anthroposophical Congress in Stuttgart in the summer of 1921, it was shown how experimental education must be supplemented by the results of spiritual anthroposophical research, and how a complete education can only be formed from this. The bankruptcy of national economics was demonstrated by Director Leinhas. He showed where the real life-giving forces for a healthy social organization must flow from. Anthroposophy does not want to lead to a mystical, nebulous cloud-cuckoo-land, to those who despise ordinary everyday life, but the spirit is so powerfully grasped that we can also work creatively in the physical-practical , because the spirit that created matter should not flee from it, it, which is life practice, can submerge everything in the physical-material existence, so that it becomes more and more perfect in its further development.

And so anthroposophy wants to offer the knowledge that a large part of our contemporaries yearns for, even if unconsciously. I would like to summarize everything that has been said so that I can characterize the essence of anthroposophy.

When we have the whole human being before us, we look at him through our senses themselves as a sensual being according to his outer form. But he does not stand before us in the one-sided revelation of a new being. In him lives a soul permeated by spirit. The human being needs a conception of life that permeates him from the spirit. In the last few centuries, we have achieved great things in the field of natural science. However, we are still far from realizing its ideals. While we fully recognize the achievements of science, anthroposophy recognizes that this science is concerned with the outer formations of the world. Just as the soul permeates and spiritualizes the human being, science also needs something that is inspired by the spirit. Anthroposophy further develops science. For it wants to be nothing other than the spiritual, blissful element for the body of natural science. And just as we encounter people in life with souls permeated by life and spirit, so anthroposophy strives for natural science to achieve knowledge that can gradually become a soul permeated by spirit.

Report in the “Frankfurter Nachrichten” of January 21, 1906

“The wisdom at the core of religions” was the subject of the third Theosophical lecture, which Dr. Rudolf Steiner from Berlin gave in the Gutenberg Hall on Friday.

All religions have certain similarities; they all have something fundamental in common. Only the theosophical school of thought, which is so much misunderstood, was called upon to shed new light on these mysterious things, for one of its main tasks is to research the wisdom teachings of all the religions of the world.

What is religion? The word means connection; through religion, the human soul is connected to the divine, it is the bridge between the soul and its spiritual-divine origin. All religions have become, have developed; they used to be different from what they are today. Recent natural science is convinced that a mainland once existed between Europe and Africa, between Africa and America – we call it Atlantis after the ancients – on which lived different people than we do today. They did not have the same intellectual powers as we do, but they had others that we lack, which are similar to the abilities that our soul develops in dreams. Their imagination was not based on sensory perception of things; instead, the outside world appeared to them in images, symbolically, as it does in dreams. They also felt their divine origin, because they felt at one with all life, with that of plants and animals.

This view of the Atlanteans is peculiar to all the early beginnings of religions. The soul's experience of all of nature, this empathic feeling for natural forces in higher spiritual vision, gave rise to the belief in the “Great Spirit”, which is revealed in every sound of nature. Then came the time when, out of the soul's dream state, out of symbolic contemplation, intellectual life in the modern sense developed. People scattered to different countries and adapted to their climate and other conditions. What had previously been felt as a spirit now had to take on a different form; religion had to be proclaimed in different forms to correspond to the changed circumstances. The Atlanteans developed the images from the soul world, but now the outside world approached man and was different everywhere. Consequently, the bond between the soul and its divine origin had to be knitted in new forms. Hence the diversity of religions, but also their common ground, the agreement regarding the basic truths, regarding the core of wisdom.

Spiritual leaders and guides of humanity, the “Brotherhood of Initiates”, have always existed, even among the Atlanteans; and it was they who proclaimed the wisdom core of the original religion to all times and all peoples and thereby preserved it. All the founders of religions, the authors of the Vedas, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the magi of the Chaldeans, the priests of the Babylonians, the world sages of the Greeks, the Zarathustras, Confucius, yes, the German mystics, Paracelsus, Angelus Silesius and Jakob Böhme – they were all, together with the greatest initiate, Jesus Christ, such guardians of humanity, such proclaimers of the religious core of wisdom. He explained what speakers understand by this core of wisdom using the example of the doctrine of the Trinity, which returns more or less developed in all religions.

In August 1831, Goethe sealed away the second part of his “Faust” as his spiritual testament to humanity. The importance he himself attached to this work is evident from the words he addressed to Eckermann: “Now I have actually fulfilled my life's work, whether I do this or that in the years that may now remain to me, it no longer matters.” The yearning thoughts and interests that he put into this life's work go back to the poet's earliest youth. It is said that not everything I will say about it today is in it, but it has worked and lived in his soul in his creative power. In 1827, he said that he had made sure in his second Faust that the soul-related aspects of the external images, the theatrical aspects, were such that they could appeal to the external, sensual view, but that for those with a deeper insight, the esoteric meaning would become quite clear. It is the predispositions, the moods, it is the whole constitution of his soul from which emerged what became image, figure in Faust. From his birth, Goethe was attuned to what may be called man's penetration into the spiritual world. Not to remain with what the outer senses and the mind bound to them give as knowledge and worldly wisdom, but to penetrate through the veil of the sensual world of observation, of the world of the mind, to the invisible, supersensible foundations of existence!

We cannot find in young Goethe the mature wisdom that has found its way into the second part of “Faust”; he could only give the most mature, profound and profound things at the end of his life. To those who later find his works incomprehensible, such as “Pandora” or “The Natural Daughter”, the youthful Goethe appears as a naive poet who has expressed great and powerful things in his works, including the first part of “Faust”. That is something that powerfully moves people; in the second part, he has woven quirks and incomprehensible stuff into it.

Then they praise Faust
And what else

In my works roars
In their favor,

The old Mick and Mack
Is very happy;

It means the pack of rags,
It would no longer be!

We want to follow how “Faust” grew out of Goethe's life, how he always tried to penetrate to the spiritual sources of external nature. Even as a boy, he sought to approach what he then understood as the great God of nature, as the spirit that rules over all natural phenomena. As a seven-year-old boy, he took a music stand, laid minerals, rocks, plants from his father's herbarium on it to hold the realms of nature together. — This expressed a feeling in the mood, the representatives of what nature is. For the seven-year-old Goethe, this was the altar at which he wanted to make his sacrifices to the great god of nature. He placed a small incense stick and a burning glass on top and waited for the rising morning sun to collect its rays and ignite the small incense stick to a sacrificial fire before the great god of nature.

We then see how his soul gradually matured to the mood – after the move from Frankfurt to Weimar – that he enthusiastically expressed in the prose hymn “Nature”. Here he expresses his reverence for the spiritual realm, in the words:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her – unable to step out of her, and unable to get deeper into her. Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and carries on with us until we are tired and fall out of her arms.

He knew himself so at one with everything excellent and everything seemingly deformed in nature that he said:

Even the most unnatural is nature, even the most clumsy philistinism has something of her genius.

And the other:

she invented death in order to have many lives.

What lies between these two times? Frankfurt and Weimar. How did he ascend to what we find in the powerful lyrical outburst in that prose hymn? From step to step, sometimes in unconscious urge, he has ascended in life. In his innermost being, at first unconsciously, he felt an irrepressible, invincible urge to know, which could not be hindered by anything, and which was connected with the whole of his life at every moment, pouring out, as it were, into the whole of his life, so that there can be no theory, no world of ideas for him at all, without his whole world of feeling and emotion being impregnated with his heart's blood. During his student years in Leipzig, he studied natural science, although he was destined for jurisprudence. In nature, he saw a kind of writing, in the natural world and natural facts, parables that express, speak like a writing, something that reigns as a secret in the outer sensual nature. Not through flashes of inspiration and fantasies did he want to penetrate the secrets of existence – he was born to the quiet walk through the world, which goes from step to step, from appearance to appearance. He did not want to grasp the phenomena of the world with a fanciful philosophy, even if the outer life, the passions, often rule more stormily and make invisible, so to speak, the actual, inner, calm, sure striving — this was always present in Goethe's life as a deep foundation. Now, towards the end of his time in Leipzig, a life event of the most serious kind occurred that immensely deepened his quest for knowledge: He fell dangerously ill. Where must knowledge lead us if it is to be true knowledge? It must lead us to where we penetrate into the secrets of life, as if led through closed gates, to those gates that life itself locks. Knowledge that would recoil from the problem of death could not satisfy the earnest striving of the human soul. The passing of death, which puts an end to everything that lives within the human mind and can be perceived with the external senses, imbued him with the seriousness in his quest for knowledge that his soul demanded.

In Frankfurt, where he now returned, it was other important experiences that strongly influenced him and about which he gives us hints in his autobiography “Dichtung und Wahrheit”. He came into contact with circles that were characterized by the earnest striving to connect what lives as spirit in ourselves with the great spirit of the world. At the center of those circles, which aspired from the depths of their souls to the depths of the world, was Susanne von Klettenberg. He turned to the study of very strange works, for example, “Aurea Catena Homeris”. Some of today's intellectuals would find only the most extravagant nonsense in it. Goethe did not. He did not find the kind of information one would find in a book on natural science, but rather things that affected him in such a way that he felt forces well up in his soul that he had to assume were otherwise dormant in man. He felt like a blind person born blind, in relation to the physical world, when he is operated on and his eyes open so that he can now perceive what was previously also present but not perceptible. He found symbolic thoughts in those books. The dragons, triangles, signs of the planets awakened in him a hunch that our soul can become like an organ for spiritual worlds.

He was still in this mood when he moved to Strasbourg. The first mood pictures of “Faust” emerged from this mood. So it is part of his soul, of his heart's blood, when we see Faust at the very beginning, how he has studied all the sciences - like Goethe in Leipzig - and then, unsatisfied by this, tries to penetrate into the supersensible world through a special method of spiritual research. Nostradamus, Sign of the World Macrocosm. He now lets Faust experience that his soul is still too small to develop within itself a sense for the great world. He seeks to evoke within himself the mood with which he can penetrate into what lives as a spiritual being, beyond earthly existence. He conjures up the earth spirit. From the answer that this gives him,

In the flood of life, in the storm of action I surge up and down, weaving back and forth! Birth and grave, an eternal sea, a changing weaving, a glowing life, that is how I create at the whirring loom of time and work the living garment of divinity.

It is clear that the earth spirit is a creative, productive force, that life is expressed in the elements of earthly existence, but one thing is missing: there are no passions or desires in it – only birth and death. He, the earth spirit, appears as an entity that expresses the higher, desire-free, purified forces of human nature in his character. It is an important law of the spiritual world that knowledge is not independent of moral endeavor. Knowledge in the higher sense can only be attained when our soul sheds that which is connected with desires, affects, inclinations, passions. The passions slumber in the depths of the soul, pervading the world of thought and knowledge. Goethe knew that the purity of the earth spirit is an ideal, but he also knew how difficult it is to fulfill. When the earth spirit then calls out to Faust:

You resemble the spirit you comprehend, not me,

sounds like the echo of his own inner being, which is aware of how far removed it is from the actual spirit of knowledge.

The body also hinders its materiality from revealing the pure forces that can approach the spirit. Faust feels: I am held down by what I do not see in my outer corporeality, not by the material forces, but by what is supersensible in corporeality. The embodiment of this supersensible in the physical is Mephistopheles; that is the spirit that he grasps for the time being. All the scenes in which he portrays how this companion and fellow attempts to lead Faust through the whole life of sensuality arise from him, always trying to pull him down from the regions of spiritual life into that which man as spirit and soul can only experience within the body. Step by step, Faust seeks to overcome Mephistopheles. Through the development of his own soul, he wants at all costs to penetrate into the spiritual world. But not through artificial, tumultuous means - spiritists - but seriously, piece by piece, [Goethe] lets the world affect him until he sees in all the details of nature something like characters that express the mysterious life of nature. After all that he had seen in the way of minerals and plants, he wanted to make a journey to India to look at what he had discovered in his own way, to read it again with the powers of the spirit that had now become his own. Appearance after appearance, fact after fact, he wanted to let it work on the soul, so that through the spiritual eyes and ears developed for the soul, the spiritual natural reasons for existence would leap out of the facts.

In Italy he examines everything to see if it can be a sign in the great cosmos. When he saw the works of art, he wrote, who had previously been a follower of Spinoza's theory:

There is necessity, there is God!

because he felt that there is a spiritual force behind art, that each individual work of art is a letter and that letter by letter, work of art by work of art, they fit together to teach us to read what, as a spirit, stands behind creative humanity in relation to art. Nature, plants, animals, everything, even in the mineral world, does not belong to dead material, but to the written character for the spirit behind it.

When Faust addresses the earth spirit:

Exalted spirit, thou gavest me, gavest me everything,
why I asked. Thou didst not in vain
turn thy face to me in fire

etc., it is as if he wanted to say: I now have a different relationship to the exalted spirit, which at the time touched me like a presentiment that made me unhappy because I could not realize it. I am beginning to understand you! The difference between the Promethean urge of the young Goethe and the overarching wisdom of the old Goethe is expressed in the fact that he does not want Faust to translate the first chapter of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word.” In contrast, in Pandora-1807, he writes:

From heaven descend
Word and deed, blessing each other,
Gift descends, unimagined before.

Man is more than what he locks up in himself, he is something that great cosmic forces fight for, forces of good and evil – prologue in heaven. The human soul is the theater of their struggle. The soul world is a world of spiritual colors and sounds: the new day is already born for spiritual ears, it trumpets, it sounds, the unheard does not hear itself.