The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In a previous lecture,¹ we discussed spiritual science in relation to religious records. Today we shall attempt to enter more deeply into the Bible, at least in a few instances. The Bible is after all a religious document that today is known to every educated person. From the spiritual scientific point of view, it will be easiest if, in our approach, we start with the New Testament. In the earlier lecture, we discussed how certain critical comments concerning the Bible are to be understood in the light of spiritual science, in particular those concerned with the actual writing of the four Gospels and Scriptures in the Old Testament. Today we shall look at more positive aspects and, while bearing in mind what was dealt with in the previous lecture, go straight to the subject from the spiritual scientific viewpoint.

You will be aware that someone who, out of a heartfelt need of his Christian faith, turns to the four Gospels known as the Gospel according to Matthew, to Mark, to Luke and to John, comes up against what appear to be insoluble contradictions. A modern person, however great his faith, can have no notion of how differently one approached the Bible in an earlier more religious age. Nor can a person have any idea of the significance attached to the word Bible or to the expression, the Word of God. We must realize that for centuries the faithful were in no doubt that the writers of the religious records were inspired. Consequently, every word in the Bible was regarded as holy, as from divine inspiration only truth could come. People saw the Bible as dealing with great world questions, and they fastened onto every word, for it was impossible for them to believe that fault could be found in what men of God had written under divine inspiration.

Modern human beings find it difficult to transport themselves into such a mood and attitude. They read the Gospel of Matthew and that of Luke and find two different genealogies of Jesus of Nazareth. Already in the third place, above the name of Joseph, they find in Matthew the name Solomon, in Luke the name Nathan; going further they find many more names that differ, and ask, How is it possible that a document, which for centuries has been considered a source of Truth, can contain such contradictions?

Here we see the seed of all the doubts aroused by disparities in the Gospels and consequently doubt that they were in fact inspired. By subjecting the Gospels to detailed scrutiny we believe to have discovered what can be accepted as more or less genuine. In regard to the fourth Gospel, the conclusion is drawn that as it is so different from the others it cannot be a historical record at all. It is understandable that the modern person becomes critical when faced with contradictions that are impossible to explain away by even the most open-minded individual.

However, we must ask ourselves how it came about that no one for centuries, for millennia, noticed these contradictions that are now criticized. It is difficult to believe that only very stupid people ever handled the Bible. Perhaps it could be argued that only very few people had access to the Bible; before the art of printing, the majority of the faithful did not. Consequently, they could not pass judgment on something about which they were not informed by the leading few who did have access to the Bible. But are we really to believe that those few were all so stupid that they did not notice what is pointed out by today's critics?

Some historians maintain that only slowly, through the power of the church, did these documents come to be appreciated. Reverence for the Bible arose only gradually. It is said that the Bible cannot stand up to close historical investigation. Looking at events that took place in the early Christian centuries, the conclusion is drawn that the Ecumenical Council of Nicea² decided which Gospels were true, and there it was ordained: “These are the true Holy Scripts.” Unprejudiced investigation does not bear this out. Looking back we come to personalities who lived in the early days of Christendom. From them we learn that, for example, in the year A.D. 160 a so-called harmonizing of the Gospels took place. This meant collating the Gospels and bringing them to present a uniform picture, a procedure that was later repeated. And indeed, careful examination of the Gospels as they were in the second century showed that already then they contained what we know as the New Testament. We find that the early Church Fathers in particular spoke with the deepest reverence about the Bible, which suggests that they certainly had the belief that the Bible had been inspired by a higher spiritual source. Already in Origen³ we encounter the same reverent approach to the biblical records as is later to be found in the faithful, whether of learned or of simple faith.

When these things are considered, all prejudice must be set aside. In the early centuries the attitude of learned people towards Christianity was by no means the same as that of modern people. Today one risks being accused of repudiating the true words of the Bible, of being an agnostic and unfit to call himself a Christian by people with orthodox viewpoints. These people should recognize that to interpret the Bible in ways that differ from their own is not the equivalent of doubting its truth. It was the Church Father Augustine⁴ who said: “What is known today as Christian religion is ancient; in fact, what was the true primordial religion is today called Christianity.”

These words are in great contrast to the usual experience of those who interpret the Bible in the light of spiritual science. The hostility, often coming from family and friends, is nothing short of tragic. Spiritual scientific explanations are harshly rejected as having nothing to do with the Bible. Such reactions are based on complete ignorance of the Bible itself. It is also pretentious, for it proclaims an understanding of the Bible that cannot be faulted. If only such people would recognize that their attitude to the spiritual scientific explanations is in effect like saying: “What I find in the Bible is the only truth.”

Spiritual science, far from having a negative approach to the Bible, seeks to unravel its deep truths. The main concern is that these religious records should be properly understood. Those who simply find it more comfortable to remain within views to which they have become accustomed are not in a position to oppose spiritual science. Rejection of true explanations is often based on deep seated hostility, though sometimes it is simply too much effort to learn something new.

No Christian with any understanding of a certain passage from the Sermon on the Mount, often quoted by me, could maintain that attitude. The passage, when rightly translated reads: "Blessed are those who are beggars of the spirit, for within themselves they shall find the Kingdom of Heaven." No words could better or more beautifully express the inner feeling and disposition of the spiritual scientist than this passage from the Sermon on the Mount.

What do we mean by the inner disposition of the spiritual scientist? We mean an inner impulse to strive to develop the deepest kernel of our being, our spirituality. What builds our body comes from substances that surround us; likewise our inner being comes from the spirit that lives, and always did live all about us. Just as it is true that our body is, as it were, a drop from the sea of material reality, so is it true that our soul, our spirit, is a drop from the sea of the all-encompassing Universal Spirit. As the drop of water is of the same substance as the sea from which it is taken, so is that which lives in the deepest recess of the human soul godlike. Human beings are able to recognize God because God lives within them and human beings are themselves spiritual. Furthermore, if a person truly will, he can attain that spiritual world that is all about him. However, for that to come about something is needed—something which can be simply expressed by saying: Do not ever stand still. Human beings must experience progress, must be conscious of evolving, rather than merely having faith that it will happen. It means never to lose sight of the fact that not only have human beings developed to their present stage from inferior levels, but also that at every moment they can develop further.

In this instance we are not concerned with the fact that a person's external being has altered in the course of evolution, but rather with the fact that the human soul can climb upwards from stage to stage. In striving for perfection, a human being's soul is capable of improving from day to day. Today we may learn something new; we inwardly grasp something we did not know before; through our will we become capable of achieving something we could not manage before. If we remain at what we understand today, at what our will is capable of today, then we do not evolve. We must never lose sight of the fact that as well as the forces that are already developed within us, we possess others still slumbering. It is comparable to the seeds of new plants that slumber within the seed that has already become a plant. If we never forget that we possess such forces, our will grows stronger; it reaches higher stages of development and we become aware that our soul begins to evolve spiritual eyes and ears. We must not think of this as something trivial, but recognize that the development of the human soul and spirit is of universal significance.

When we see in the physical world, a relationship between animal forms and the noble human form, it does not justify the assumption that a person has developed from the animal, even if natural science has established that, as regards the physical structure, there is greater similarity between the lowest developed human being and the highest developed ape, than between the lowest and highest developed ape. This observation, however, led natural science to regard human beings as having descended from the ape. The famous natural scientist Thomas Henry Huxley⁵ spoke about it as a great heresy in 1859. This view influenced practically everything he wrote. However, those who recognize spiritual development say: Granted that man, in regard to his external bodily form, is closer to the highest evolved ape, than the latter to the lowest of its own species, it is equally true that a human being who has reached a certain stage in spiritual development is further from the lowest developed human being, than the latter from the highest evolved animal.

When evolution is followed through, the higher stages are seen to continue up into spiritual realms where what is described by spiritual science takes place, and which to spiritual sight is as much a reality as physical evolution is to physical sight. Spiritual knowledge has always existed. Natural science today only acknowledges an evolution that starts with the lowest animal form and continues up to that of man. Spiritual science is in hin agreement with that evolution. It also acknowledges the enormous difference between the lowest form of life, barely visible even through the microscope, and the perfect structure of the human organism. A person's physical structure does indeed pass through innumerable evolutionary stages from the most imperfect to the most perfect.

However, the spiritual scientist sees the evolution of soul and spirit as just as real. The difference he sees is just as great between the highly advanced human being, the initiate, and the person who has barely begun to develop his slumbering forces. An initiate is someone who has attained spiritual faculties by developing to ever greater perfection forces that are inherent in every human soul. The difference between the lower stages of soul development and those attained by an initiate is actually greater than the difference between the lowest living structure and that of human beings. A person who knows that initiates exist also knows that the possibility to develop spiritually is a reality.

With this insight there dawns in the human soul a feeling, an attitude that says: I look up to a godlike ideal of man, the seed of which slumbers within me. I know that in the future it will become reality, though as yet it is only slightly indicated. I know also that I must exert all my powers to attain that ideal. With this insight into spiritual development man becomes a “beggar of the spirit”; he feels himself blessed. In the spiritual scientific sense the passage from the Sermon an the Mount is a truly wonderful saying: “Blessed are those who are beggars of the spirit, for within themselves they shall find the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Those acquainted with old linguistic usage will not imagine that what is here meant by heaven is something existing in an unknown beyond. In those days heaven was understood to be wherever man is. Where we are is where heaven is, that is, the spiritual world. A blind person will see the world full of color when successfully operated upon; likewise a person whose spiritual eyes are opened sees around him a new world. What a person sees was actually always about him, but he sees it in a new way. He sees the way he must be able to see if he is to attain his higher humanity. He will know that heaven is not somewhere else, is not in another place or time. He recognizes the Truth when Christ says: “Heaven is in the midst of you.”

Where we are is the Kingdom of Heaven; it penetrates everything physical. As ice swims in water out of which it has condensed, so does matter swim in a sea of spirit out of which it has condensed. Everything physical is condensed, transformed spirit.

In the animal kingdom we see the physically imperfect side by side with the physically more perfect; in the human kingdom we see all stages of spiritual development: One person has forged ahead, another remained at a lower stage. This indicates how in the spiritual scientific sense, human beings are connected with evolution. One person's interest lies in the realm of modern science, another's in the realm of human cultural development from the savage to the highly advanced individual who has attained insight into the spiritual world around him. The initiates always had insight into all the stages of human spiritual development. One spoke of the initiate as of someone who possessed greater knowledge than anyone else. Such initiates were mentioned in every epoch. Let us make it clear in what sense one spoke of those initiated into the spiritual world.

We have often discussed the fact that in ancient times people had clairvoyant consciousness. The term "clairvoyant" did not refer to clarity, but to the fact that it penetrated through the external to the soul. A residue of this dull, dim consciousness can be seen in today's consciousness in dreams. Our clear waking consciousness developed from it. At the time when in general a person's consciousness was dull and dim, though clairvoyant, a few were initiates. In what sense did this consciousness differ from that of the rest of humanity? It differed because those who were initiates already experienced something of the type of consciousness that mankind in general attained today. They reached at an earlier stage something that belonged to the future. Already they saw the world the way humanity in general sees it today. That is to say, they investigated the world through the physical organs, through sight and hearing, and grasped things through the intellect. That is the sense in which they were initiates. An initiate attained ahead of time something that belonged to the future. There are also initiates today; who have already developed the higher clairvoyant consciousness, that is, the higher perception that mankind in general will possess in the future. The initiate was looked up to in ancient times by those who understood. They said to themselves: The initiate's outlook, his understanding of the would, is the outlook and understanding all human beings will possess in the future. He is the embodiment of a future ideal; through what he is, is revealed what we shall become. In the course of time the initiate will lead a great number of human beings to attain what he has attained.

In this sense, the initiate was a prophet or a messiah. He was also called a “first-born.” But those to be initiated had to pass through many stages. Before the stage of initiation was attained, many different degrees of learning and schooling of the will must be passed through. As a plant must go through many stages from root through leaf and blossom before bearing fruit, so a human being strove upwards in stages of ever greater insight, till finally the pupil became an initiate. He attained progress by going through certain schooling that anyone can adopt. Those who deny that such a schooling is possible do so out of ignorance. They have as yet not discovered that through schooling, a person's spiritual eyes and ears can be opened so that he attains a higher kind of perception. It is the task of spiritual science to provide knowledge of such schooling. In my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, you will find this subject is dealt with in great detail. There are many reasons why this knowledge is essential in our time. I will mention just one.

It is a tragedy that because human intellect and reasoning power have progressed too far, he is no longer able to believe in the ancient religious records. He no longer experiences them as the embodiment of the words of God. The fact that the human soul no longer receives the ancient knowledge causes it torment and depression. What is needed is the knowledge presented in a new form, and this is what spiritual science wishes to provide. Those who are initiates today are able—as were initiates in ancient times—to foresee humanity's future evolution. However, human development must follow certain rules. Just as one must adopt a definite method if one wishes to become an astronomer, likewise must a certain method be adopted if one is to develop spiritually. No one should wish to attempt to do so without guidance; that would be like wishing to become a mathematician without consulting any authority. Someone needs show the way, but no other kind of authority is required, and it is nonsense to talk about blind faith and dependence in relation to spiritual science.

Throughout the millennia, right back to antiquity, there were always books in existence, or rather not actual books, but traditions handed down by word of mouth, of the rules of initiation. These rules were not permitted to be written down. They consisted of indications that the candidate for initiation had to follow when setting out to attain all the stages of development that lead to initiation. Even today certain indications are not written down, but imparted directly to those worthy to receive them. These indications the neophyte must observe if he is to attain the highest goal. A principle of initiation was always in existence, that is rules for the birth of the spirit in man. He who dedicated himself to spiritual striving was guided through exercises and conduct of life an ever higher levels. Once the highest was attained, the initiate would reveal to him the deepest secrets.

One word more about this codex for initiation. Today things are different; the procedure of initiation also progresses. In ancient times, the neophyte was brought to a condition of ecstasy. This word had a different meaning; it did not indicate "being out of one's mind" but becoming conscious on a higher level. The spiritual guide led the neophyte to this condition of higher consciousness. Strict rules were observed; the prescribed length for the condition to last was three and one-half days. This procedure is no longer followed; today the consciousness is not subdued. But in ancient times a state of ecstasy, of rapture, was produced during which the neophyte knew nothing of what went on about him; to the external world he was like someone asleep. However, what was experienced in this condition differed considerably from the experiences of a contemporary person when the external objects disappear from his consciousness, on falling asleep. The neophyte experienced a world of spirit; all about him there was light, astral light. This is different from physical light; it appears like a sea of spirituality out of which spiritual beings emerge. If a very high stage had been attained, sound would also be experienced. What in the ancient Pythagorean schools was called “the harmony of the spheres” was heard. (What today we understand intellectually as universal laws are experienced as a kind of spiritual music at this level of consciousness. Spiritual forces are revealed as harmony and rhythm, but must not be thought of as ordinary music. The spiritual world, the heavenly world, resounds in the astral light.) In this world into which the neophyte was led, he learned to know stages of godliness that humanity will attain in a far distant future. During the three and one-half days a person experienced all this as reality, as Truth.

These things may sound extraordinary to many, but there are, and always were people who recognize that a spiritual reality exists that is as real as the one perceived through physical senses. After three and one-half days the initiate was guided back to the sense world enriched with knowledge of spiritual existence, and prepared to bear witness of the spiritual world. All initiates on their return to the ordinary world uttered certain words that were always the same: "Oh my God, how thou has glorified me!" These words expressed the sensation felt by the one just initiated as he set foot again in the everyday world. Those who guided the initiation knew all the stages by heart; later when writing came more into use certain things were written down. But there always existed a typical or standard description of the life of an initiate. One said as it were: "He who is accepted into the cult to be initiated must live according to certain rules and pass through the experience which culminates with the words: "Oh my God, how thou hast glorified me!"

If you could depict the way an initiate necessarily had to live, the way you could depict someone wishing to carry out experiments in a chemical laboratory, then you would obtain a picture typical of someone striving to attain a higher development, typical of someone to be awakened to a higher life. Such a codex of initiation always existed or was at least known by heart by those concerned with initiation. Knowing this, we can understand why the descriptions of different initiates of various people are similar This fact contains a great secret, a great mystery. The people always looked up to their initiates, insofar as they knew of them. What was said about initiates was not the kind of thing modern biographers relate about famous people; what was told was the course of the spiritual life experienced by the initiate. We can therefore understand why descriptions of the life of Hermes, Zarathustra, Buddha, Moses and Christ are similar It was because they had to experience a certain life if they were to become initiates. Their lives were typical of that of an initiate.

In the outer structure of the spiritual biography we can always see a picture of the initiate. We can now answer the question: Who were the writers of the gospels? In my book, Christianity as Mystical Fact, you will find this question answered in greater detail from the viewpoint of spiritual science, and also indications of the spiritual authenticity of the Gospels. Here I can only give a few hints! In my book is explained that what is written in the Gospels is derived from ancient records of initiation. Naturally what initiates wrote differs in regard to incidentals, but all essentials were always the same. We must realize that the writers of the Gospels had no other sources than the ancient codex of initiation. When we look into the details, we recognize in the Gospels different forms of initiation. They differ because the writers knew initiation from different regions. This we shall understand when we consider how the writers of the Gospels were connected with Christ.

The best way to form an idea of this connection is to think of the significant words at the beginning of the Apocalypse.⁶ The One who dictates the content to John is named "The First and the Last, the Alpha and Omega." This refers to that Being who is always present, through all changes from generation to generation, from human race to human race, from planet to planet; the Being that endures through all transformations. If we call this Being God, of whom a particle lives within each of us, then we sense our relationship to this Alpha and Omega. Indeed, we recognize it as the ultimate ideal, the ultimate goal of striving human beings.

At this point we must remind ourselves of a forgotten custom. Nowadays, names are bestowed more or less haphazardly. We do not feel any real connection between a person and his name. The further back we go in human history, the greater the importance and significance of the name. Certain rules were observed when a name was given. Even not so very long ago, it was the custom to consult the calendar, and give the newly born the name mentioned on the day of its birth. It was assumed that the child had sought to be born on the day that bore that name. When someone attained initiation he was given a new name, an initiation name that expressed a person's innermost nature, expressed what the spiritual leader had recognized to be his significance to the world.

As you know, we find in the New Testament many sayings attributed to Jesus. Their deeper meaning can be understood only if approached from the viewpoint of initiation and understanding of the significance of bestowing names. For example, if someone had reached an as yet not so high level spiritually, and one wished to give him a corresponding name, it would be one that expressed characteristics of the astral body. If a person had reached a higher level, the name would express characteristics of the ether body. If it was to express something that was typical, it would be derived from characteristics of the physical body. In ancient times, names were related to the person and expressed his essential nature. You will remember that in the Gospels Jesus often describes what He is in words that refer back to the word “I.” This you find particularly in the Gospel according to John.

We must now bear in mind that we distinguish four members in a person's being: physical body, ether body, astral body and “I.” The “I” will increase more and more. It is inherent in a person's “I” to develop towards initiation. In undeveloped people it is imperfect, in the initiate perfect and powerful. You will now understand from the way names were given that Christ did not refer to Himself as an ordinary human being with an ordinary human “I.” In John's Gospel He often indicates that He is identical with the “I am, as in the sentence, "I and the Father are One." He describes Himself as identical with the human being's deepest nature. This He does because He is the Eternal, the Christ, the Alpha and Omega.

Those who lived at the time of Christ saw Him as a Divine Being who carried about Hirn a physical body, a being in whom the spirit is the all-important, whereas in human beings the physical is the all-important. For human beings the outstanding characteristic was expressed in the name. When we ponder this we find that it opens the door to many of the mysteries contained in the Bible. We shall understand what it means when Moses stands before Jehovah as messenger and asks: “Whom shall I tell the people has sent me?” And we hear the significant words: “Tell the people that the ‘I am’ sent thee.” What does Jehovah refer to? He points to the deepest and most significant aspect of a person's being, to that which lies deeply hidden in every human soul, to the human's “I.” We find that when we come to this fourth member, then the “I” is a name we must bestow an ourselves. The godlike within human beings must speak. It begins to speak in what appears to live in human beings as a mere point , aa a tiny insignificant seed, which can however develop to infinite greatness. It is this aspect of a person's being that gave Moses his task and said: “Tell them that the ‘I am’ sent thee.” A divine seed lies within every human soul enveloped inthe physical, etheric and astral bodies. It appears as a mere point to which we say: “I am. But this member of our being, which appears so insignificant, will become by far the most important. The essence of the human being teils Moses: “I am the I am.”

This illustrates the significance connected with the giving of a name. Whenever a reference is made to the “I am” it is also a reference to a certain moment in humanity's evolution that is indicated in the Bible, and often referred to in my lectures: the moment when physical man became an ensouled being. Physical man, as he is today, has developed from lower stages. Only when the Godhead had endowed him with a soul was man able to develop higher stages of his being. What descended from the bosom of the Godhead sank into the physical body and developed it further. In the Bible this moment is indicated in only a few words; it actually stretched over long epochs. Before that time, the human bodies did not possess what is essential—essential also for physical man today—if the “I” is to develop: the ability to breathe through lungs. A human being's physical ancestors did not originally breathe through lungs, which only developed in the course of time from a bladder-like organ. The human being could receive a soul only when he had learned to breathe through lungs. If this whole event is summed up in one sentence, you have the saying in the Bible: "And the Lord God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." In regard to the name Jehovah, we find that it means something like blowing, or rushing wind. The word Jahve expresses the inrush of breath with which the spirit, the “I” drew into man. The physical breath enabled man to receive his soul.

Therefore, in the name Jahve is expressed the nature of the inrushing breath with which the “I am the I am” poured part of its Being into human beings. What we are told in the Bible truly represents a world event depicting the entry into a human being of the eternal aspect of his nature. Whether we think of man as he is today or as he was thousands of years ago, the nature, the “Being of the I” (Ichwesen) always was. Think of the highest revelation of this “Eternal I,” when all external aspects are irrelevant. Think of a human being in whom can be recognized the most inward nature of the “Eternal I” in all its greatness and might, and you have an idea how the first followers of Christ saw Hirn. What in ancient time was revealed on earth only as a spark, was revealed in Jesus of Nazareth in its highest glory. He was the greatest initiate because He was the most Godly, so that He could say: “Before Abraham was, I was.” He incorporated that which existed before Abraham,⁷ Isaac⁸ and Jacob.⁹ He is that to which striving mankind looks up as the greatest ideal. They are those mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount as: “Blessed are those who are beggars of the Spirit, for within themselves they shall find the Kingdom of Heaven.” These words applied to the followers of Christ. But how could they give a description of the life of the highest God incarnated? What description would be worthy of Hirn? Only the one that was contained in the canon of initiation, describing the rules of initiation. There was described the way the one to be initiated must from stage to stage pass through certain experiences which culminated in the words: “Oh my God, how thou hast glorified me!” (The transcript of this lecture ends at this point.)

• 1. unknown reference
• 2. Council of Nicaea was called by Emperor Constantine. It formulated the Nicene Creed in A.D. 325.
• 3. Origen (c. 185–A.D. 254) was an early Christian Church Father and writer.
• 4. Augustine, Saint (354–430) a Christian theologian and writer. The most prominent of the Latin Fathers of the Church.
• 5. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895). He supported Darwin's theory of evolution. He coined the word “agnostic.” He also was a natural scientist.
• 6. Apocalypse was a prophetic revelation about Armageddon. Jewish and Christian writings appeared in Palestine between 200 B.C. and A.D. 1500.
• 7. Abraham, the biblical father of the Hebrew people and first of the patriarchs, was regarded as the founder of the ancient Hebrew nation.
• 8. Isaac, the son of Abraham and Sarah.
• 9. Jacob of the Old Testament was the son of Isaac and Rebecca and was the father of the twelve patriarchs.

Dear attendees,

When a person looks beyond the usual work of the day, which is his duty from morning to evening, then those great questions, those great questions with what we can call human destiny, which a person must face when he considers the highest goals, may well come to his soul.

One of these questions is undoubtedly that concerning the nature of knowledge. The question of what distinguishes man from the beings around him is connected with his dignity and his nature. And when man asks himself about the value and significance of knowledge for the knowledge gained from daily experiences, he does not need much reflection. Even where knowledge does not relate to daily life, it is of the utmost value to him. Am I just an idle spectator of these insights into the laws of the world and so on? Do insights then still have value?

These are questions that arise before our soul this evening and should be considered in context. Firstly, the question of the value, meaning and essence of the human being; secondly, the question of mortality or immortality. Will the human being preserve himself beyond mortality? It is not vanity that raises this question, but the urge for higher knowledge. We see life sprouting and budding all around us, everywhere. But we also see death everywhere. In spring we see fresh germs rising, which grow larger and larger in summer. And when we look at autumn, we see a dying that spreads more and more over the winter. Geological excavations are witnesses to the fact that life was there, that death was there, and if we look back to Greek or another culture; where once there was fresh, joyful Greek life, death has poured over this artistic life. On the pictures of Raphael and Michelangelo, which give us such pleasure today, death will spread. Bit by bit, it will disappear. And chemistry and physics speak of the death of entire plant systems; everywhere, death is poured out.

A question arises: Is what has passed away futile? Has it fallen into nothingness? Is everything completely gone? You can use the cheap excuses: There is always something new coming, spring and so on. — Of course, but then you have to think more deeply. According to this interpretation, you can say: the forms change, but not in such a way that the old ones send something over to the new ones. The real question, however, is whether something of what lives and moves in the old passes over to the new. Especially with humans, we are interested in that.

We can assert one thing in the face of death: that the ordinary means of science cannot suffice to comprehend what extends beyond death. We initially comprehend only through our sensory organs. All science is tied to the knowledge of these organs, and these organs are precisely what death puts an end to. It is not surprising that ordinary science comes to a standstill at death; if ordinary science is not sufficient to answer the questions about death, then one must approach what spiritual science is, which is usually called theosophy.

We can only communicate if we take a look at the difference between ordinary science and spiritual science. How far can human knowledge go?, ordinary science asks; man can only go up to a certain limit, and this limit is formed by the organs. Spiritual science says: human knowledge is unlimited, according to the law of development. Development is the magic word. Form has developed out of other forms, and will continue to develop into ever different forms. In the human soul slumber forces and abilities, of them spiritual science speaks.

But what must we do to cross the boundary that is drawn for people today by their organs? Is it contradictory to say that forces and abilities lie dormant in people and that these can be developed? Is it contradictory to say that a blind person could have an operation that would open up colors and light to them? In the same way, organs can be opened in a person that open up spiritual light and spiritual colors for him, which is precisely an awakening. This applies to the person as well as to the blind man who has undergone the operation. There are as many worlds as the person can open up through his organs. Once these organs have been opened up, then the person can understand the nature of death.

Wakefulness and sleep, life and death, are four important words. The human mind easily passes over the first two, because people are too accustomed to them to think about them. The spiritual researcher is aware of the relationship between sleep and death, as it is often felt and has often been felt. What actually happens when a person passes from consciousness to unconsciousness? To answer that, we have to imagine the essence of a human being: firstly, the physical body, which humans have in common with all of nature; the same laws and so on. However, the physical body only follows these physical and chemical laws at the point of death. So there must be something in the physical body, a fighter that prevents the physical body from following these laws during life. Secondly, there is the etheric body.

The etheric body is shared with all living things, for example, the plant world. Thirdly, the astral body is shared with the entire animal world. It is the carrier of desires and passions. Fourthly, there is a small name that can never be used to refer to another being. This little word can only come from within oneself. That little word is 'I'. What lives in the I in man is the same as what lives in the whole universe; it is a part of it; but of course not “God”. From waking up to falling asleep, these members permeate each other. But when falling asleep, the human being, who is endowed with spiritual organs, can observe how the ego and the astral body withdraw into a spiritual world.

Why do the astral body and the ego leave the etheric body and the physical body?

We perceive only what our astral body experiences when we experience it as a reflection in our etheric body. Therefore, the astral body must submerge into the etheric body in the morning so that we can experience the world in the mirror image. The entire life of the soul arises through the interaction of the astral body with the physical and etheric bodies. Why do we get tired in the evening? Because our astral body is well able to interact with the etheric body, but because it tires, because the astral body cannot gain the strength to present all this to us from the physical body, it therefore plunges into the spiritual world every evening to get strength to build up our entire soul life during the day. We truly dive into our true home from evening till morning.

What can the astral body do with the powers it draws from the spiritual world? It can build up our soul life with them. Let us see how it builds up our soul life. What is necessary for the art of writing? We had to make many attempts to achieve this ability. We do not remember all the unsuccessful attempts we may have made, all the love we may have received in the process, with every writing. Abilities develop from such attempts; these are abilities of our own soul life. When the astral body submerges into the etheric body, our organs, both physical and etheric, are uninvolved. Think of the miracle of the heart, the larynx and so on. We could still have such subtle soul abilities as a musical sense, for example; we could not use them if we did not have the corresponding organ.

The work a person does on their astral body is complicated. It happens when a person receives impressions from outside. These are experiences of the soul that take place within the astral body, affects and so on. At a lower level, the ego is like the slave of the astral body, but this ego can work its way out. Let us compare a lower and a developed person. The latter rules over his astral body. The ego rules over, governs him, wresting him from the urges, desires and passions. We call this inner processing of external impressions. The ordinary person sees, tastes, smells what comes to him from outside, whether it is pleasant or unpleasant. But another person who processes such impressions in moments of stillness, only such a person can become richer and richer.

But one should not always work inward, for that would be to creep into one's inner being. That would not be the only right thing to do. Now one must go out of oneself again. What we feel inwardly becomes a store of wisdom that can be applied to the outer world, so that concepts and ideas arise within the human being, that is knowledge. First, these impressions must be collected, then processed within, and then applied to the outside world. Only then is a person in a position to let something new flow into them. Something opens up in our knowledge; sensory impressions tell us what is pleasant and what is unpleasant. But the I finds moral values by way of knowledge.

There it is, what martyrs died for. These concepts, these valuable contents, which man thus receives, were more valuable to him, more important than his life. These contents can be found by the ego if it makes itself independent of the organs, of the outside world. If this content is to permeate us completely, then we must be able to express what we have gained in this way. We cannot conjure it into our organs. It could not be absorbed into our flesh and blood. Only through a specific law could this happen.

In the seventeenth century, people still believed that lower animals were created from substances that surrounded these animals. This was scientifically assumed. For example, how bees arise: from rotten oxen, when you beat them, the bees grow out of them; from horses, hornets; from donkeys, wasps. This was written in the seventeenth century. In the seventeenth century, Francesco Redi said: Only from the living can the living arise. Today this is a matter of course, like all views that first have to be accepted. Only from the spiritual-mental can the spiritual-mental arise. “The earthworm arises from river mud.” This sentence represents the same ‘spiritual’ point of view as if one wanted to say: a person has all character traits, talents and so on from their father, mother, grandfather and grandmother.

You have to go back to the spiritual and mental seeds. But that is the past life. We have to look back at the life before the present one, and look forward to the life after the present one. That is the law of re-incarnation or reincarnation. This law will spread just like the one of Francesco Redi, who was almost burned at the stake in those days. Today it is no longer fashionable, at least not everywhere; today such creative minds are called fantasists or dreamers, perhaps even fools. Maybe so, but in a short time it will be accepted that spiritual-soul things can only arise from spiritual-soul things, just as living things can only arise from living things.

We are dealing with souls that have already gone through death once. It is different from sleeping at night. Now, after death, there is a transition through the spiritual world. Experiences that could not be utilized during life are now utilized, they are built up into a spiritual body. Now we build new organs for ourselves, we do not return to the old organs, as we do the morning after sleep. Now we build into the organs what we have conquered through knowledge.

The abilities of a young child become more and more apparent. Every human being is an individual puzzle to us. The result of the knowledge of the previous life is the human being. It comes out bit by bit; what the person has worked on is sent down from one life to the next.

You grow with what you create. This goes with you into the next life. With the insights gained in one life, man builds himself a scaffolding, so to speak. But nothing new would be built if what had been built once did not disintegrate. Thus we see in death a piece of life that life can always show us at a higher level. Passing through death, we can always build something new. And at the center is the self.

Why no memory? The I is the first supersensory faculty in us. Once we have recognized and understood the I, we can look back. This realization of the self brings consciousness of past lives on earth. From the life when the I is not just a word, from then on, one remembers the I. Immortality is of no use if you have no knowledge of immortality; the more you know about your self, about the inner core of your soul, the more, the higher knowledge you have of immortality. Thus, knowledge becomes the source of immortality. This doctrine of reincarnation gives us strength and security in our daily lives.

If yesterday was clear and open to you,
If today you feel free and strong,
You may hope for a tomorrow
That will be no less happy.

Orphic Primal Words: («Demon»)

As on the day you were born into the world,
The sun stood in greeting to the planets,
You have thrived and prospered ever since,
According to the law by which you came into being,
That is how you must be, you cannot escape it,
So said the Sibyls, so said the seers,
And no time and no might dismember the form that is shaped, which develops itself alive. (Goethe)

If a school of thought should be successful in the course of human evolution, a school of thought, which does not find acceptance or may even not enjoy the knowledge of the so-called authoritative circles, of the ruling spiritual circles, then it has to fight with the reluctant powers all the time which distinguish themselves within the human civilisation.

We only need to remind of that which happened as Christianity had to assert itself against old ideas, against an old spiritual current in the world. We need only to remind that in the beginning of the new school of thought Galileo, Copernicus, Giordano Bruno had to fight against the so-called authoritative circles. We are allowed to suppose that the school of thought inaugurated by Giordano Bruno had to fight against traditions.

In a similar situation is today that school of thought that is represented under the name theosophy in the literature, in talks and the like since several years. If you remember of the destiny of such schools of thought more or less unknown at the moment of their appearance, you find that the way how the ruling circles, the so-called authoritative circles face them, indeed, changes with the fashions of civilisation that, however, the essential part, the lack of understanding, combined with a certain narrow-mindedness, appears over and over again. It is no longer standard today to burn heretics, and in particular liberal circles would protest to be lumped together with such people who burnt heretics. But it may less depend on that. Today the burning of heretics is no longer really trendy. But if we examine the attitude, from which the persecution of heretics arose, and the reasons of such a persecution and compare it with that which takes place in the soul of somebody who fights against the theosophical school of thought more or less today or opposes against it, then we find a similar attitude and similar inner soul processes with the adversaries.

We do not want to enter into discussion with the whole circle of the adversaries of the theosophical world view. We want to confine ourselves rather to that which is connected with our contemporary scholarship; we want to consider the relation of our contemporary scholarship to the theosophical or spiritual-scientific world view as I call it since some time.

Perhaps, it is not meaningless if one starts this consideration with small symptoms. I start with a very widespread small encyclopaedia, a so-called pocket encyclopaedia, which says on its title-page or at least in its preface that it is collated by the best scientific people. If we open it under the catchword “Theosophy,” we find as an explanation only two words: “God-seeker, dreamer.” Such a kind of learnt consideration of the theosophist is now no longer common in all similar reference books, of course. But somebody does probably not become cleverer from this short remark who wants to get to know something about theosophy also not from the other similar reference books.

I have tried to examine in the real philosophical reference books at least externally what is to be found there. I do not want to give an anthology of quotations from such reference books. I would like to give an example only what is to be found in the Dictionary of Philosophical Concepts and Terms, published in Berlin in 1900. In one of the newest works which lists the most of theosophical concepts the following you can read: [Gap in the shorthand notes.] ... these are about three lines with these names. Who wants to get an idea of theosophy from this short representation has to say to himself: also in such philosophical dictionaries we find nothing else than a not correct translation of the term and some names.

Also, otherwise, it does not look especially good if we want to orientate ourselves about that which is represented here as theosophy what the contemporary scholarship knows about that. But the easier this contemporary scholarship wants to condemn theosophy on account of a few little things which it has picked up from any theosophical brochure. We can make the strange experience: a shrug and the remark, “what the theosophical literature spreads is nothing else than warming up a few Buddhist concepts,” or: “it is nothing else than spiritistic superstition expressed somewhat differently.” You can hear such things in abundance. What you hardly hear, however, is a real answer to the question: what is, actually, theosophy? You will find—maybe not only in coffee parties—that which has really happened in a coffee party recently which is, however, not at all so untypical for the standpoint of our contemporaries to theosophy.

There a lady said to another: how is it that you have become a theosophist? This is something terrible, something awful. Take into account what you do to your family; consider how you are in contradiction to that which other people think.—She was silent for a few seconds and said then: what is really theosophy? This did not happen in learnt circles, but you could find something of that kind also in the learnt circles. You can find the judgement again and again that theosophy is nothing scientific at all that it is only enthusiasm of some fantastic people that they bring forward assertions which one cannot prove.

I want to criticise by no means where I want to characterise the relation of our scholarship to theosophy, not even our relation to the circles of scholars. Because nobody else than that who has an overview of our present bringing up of scholars from the theosophical point of view knows better that from this education, from the concepts and ideas of it nothing else can arise than a high-spirited and a somewhat snooty shrug about that which theosophy asserts and which can really appear to that scholarship—because it cannot understand it better—as rapture and as a completely unscientific gossip.

We really want to be fair towards this scholarship. The theosophist stands on a point of view and has to stand on one which I want to show at an example which has not taken place on theosophical ground which could have taken place, however, easily on theosophical ground. The theosophist is in a similar position to the contemporary scholarship rejecting the sneering and the reproach of rapture, as just in the example the recently deceased philosopher Eduard von Hartmann to the materialistic-Darwinist interpretation of nature. I do not want to take sides of the Philosophy of the Unconscious by Eduard von Hartmann.

But over and over again one would have to point to the way how he faced his adversaries.—In 1869, the Philosophy of the Unconscious appeared, a book of which the theosophist not needs to take sides exactly, a book which was, however, a courageous action at that time. Just the relation of this book to the scholarship of that time can give an example how today the spiritual scientist or theosophist faces his adversaries. This Philosophy of the Unconscious was a courageous action in a certain way. At that time, the waves of the materialistic science surged when the materialistic science had grown up into a kind of materialistic religion,

Books like Energy and Matter by Büchner, other books by Vogt, Moleschott and the like who considered energy and matter, the purely sensuous existence as the only one, they caused great sensation, have experienced many editions and conquered hearts and souls. In that time, everybody was regarded as being a poor devil and a fool who did not join in this choir of materialism who spoke about a self-creative spirit. In this time, when one was of the opinion that Darwin’s work delivered the scientific way of thinking for materialism, in this time, when philosophy itself was a word which one considered as something that was overcome, in this time, Eduard von Hartmann let his Philosophy of the Unconscious appear, a philosophy which has one advantage in spite of its big shortcomings that it attributes the world directly to something spiritual everywhere, looks for the basis of something spiritual in all phenomena, even if the spiritual is considered as something unconscious, even if it takes a particularly high rank.

One thing is certain: there the spirit offers sharp resistance to the materialistic attitude. While at that time the Darwinist school of thought explained nature completely from energy and matter, Eduard von Hartmann tried to understand it in such a way that the spirit should become evident as the inner effectiveness of a spiritual work.—Then those came who believed to be entitled to look down with a shrug on everything that spoke of spirit and judged: there was never anything dilettantish like this Philosophy of the Unconscious. A man speaks there, actually, who has learnt nothing about all the phenomena which Darwinism now explains so scientifically.

There was a lot of counter writings at that time. One also appeared by an unknown author. Its title was The Unconscious from the Standpoint of the Theory of Evolution and Darwinism. It was a thorough refutation of the Philosophy of the Unconscious. The author showed that he was familiar with the latest development of natural sciences. Ernst Haeckel said in a brochure that it would be a pity that the author did not call himself, because he himself could have presented nothing better against Eduard von Hartmann than what is in this writing. Oscar Schmidt wrote a brochure and said that no naturalist would have been able to say anything better against the limitless dilettantism of Eduard von Hartmann than the anonymous author of this brochure. “He may reveal his name to us and we consider him as one of ours.”—The brochure was soon out of stock and the second edition appeared with the name of the author. That was enough to silence the people. It was Eduard von Hartmann. Since that time the chorus was silent of those who had written about the dilettantism of the Philosophy of the Unconscious.

You can argue something against such a procedure, but you cannot deny that it was thoroughly effective. Somebody who was regarded at first as a man who knows nothing has shown to the scientific circles that he could be cleverer than they could ever be. Let me use this trivial expression, it would be good even if somewhat anachronistic to do the same. But that who is at the summit of the theosophical world view could also easily, very easily write together all that stuff which one can today produce against theosophy. This has to be emphasised above all: theosophy is nothing that is directed against the real, true science if it is properly understood. Theosophy is able to understand the true, real science any time as Eduard von Hartmann could understand his adversaries. The reverse is not so easy in the one and the other case. However, we have also to understand where from this could come that way.

If I held a lecture only about that which our scholars know about theosophy, then this lecture could have become rather short, and I would have hardly needed to stand before you longer than for a few seconds. But I would like to go deeper; I would like to speak of the reasons why our contemporary scholarship can know so little about theosophy which opens a new way of thinking about the matters of the world.

If we look around today in our contemporary scholarly literature, we find that these considerations differ, already externally, from all the literature about hundred years ago. If we take a book which has, for example, the title: “The Origin of the Human Being, the Human Being and His Position to the World,” we hardly find anything else than that once the human being did not live on earth that he began his existence on earth in a childish, half animal condition. Then we are made aware of the fact that animal ancestors lived before this time on earth and that these developed to the present-day human being.—If we take another book which should inform us about the secrets of the universe, then we find that it deals with that which you can see through the telescope and what you can achieve with mathematics. In other words: everywhere something that I have called factual fanaticism in my book Goethe’s World-View, that factual fanaticism which keeps to the sensuous facts—to the sense-perceptible facts, at most to that which the armed senses can perceive.

Everything belongs to that which is presented today in the most detailed way in any possible popular writing, and what the human being is solely able to provide of the riddles and secrets of the world on account of scientific facts. If we look around in the circles which draw their knowledge only from such books, then we find that there are, actually, all kinds of intermediate stages that, however, these intermediate stages are to be found between two extremes. The one extreme is the sober scholars. They only accept as scientific what they can see and infer with their reason from the seen. There the world is explored with instruments in all directions. There one searches for written documents, there the time and the development of humankind is investigated according to pure facts. The one is said to be natural sciences, the other is said to be history.

In history you find quite strange things sometimes. In particular if one deals with experiences of spiritual science. You find that there are people who write thick books about the old Gnostics, for example, or about any branch of ancient spiritual wisdom who do not want at all to know anything about this spiritual wisdom itself. They look at this purely historically; they only register the written documents and are contented with it. Today one does not need to be a gnostic to write about Gnosticism. Today scholarly circles regard this almost as a principle. And as the best principle is regarded to be possessed as little as possible from the matters about which one writes, actually. If you take this factual fanaticism on one side, you have nearly what induces such scholarly circles to say: we can notice these matters, we know these matters; what goes beyond them is the object of faith. Everybody can believe or not believe what he wants.—The result of this attitude is a certain indifference to all the objects, thoughts and beings which go beyond the only sensuous facts. Then one says: if anybody needs them for his faith, we leave them to him, but science has nothing to do with them.

A thick dividing wall is raised there between science and faith, and science should be nothing else than what can be perceived purely with the eye and with the ear, nothing else than the consideration of facts and what one abstracts from it. Anything else should not be investigated.—Then, however, something else appears which possibly says: it is not right that science stops anywhere, but this is right that the human being develops more and more and that he unfolds more and more forces in his works, so that he can know everything that there are no limits of knowledge. Indeed, the last objects of knowledge are to be attained only in infinite distance, but they are in such a way that we can approach them more and more. Limits must not be raised anywhere. It seems to be a summit of arrogance if such representatives appear who claim that this ability slumbers in every human being. Develop it and you will see that the objects which once were objects of your faith can become objects of your knowledge, of your wisdom. It is not different with the objects which refer to the immortality of the soul, to the spiritual world, to the big and to the small world in space and to the whole development of the human being; it is not different from the matters which we also meet in the usual natural sciences.

Or, what does a human being, who takes a popular book about astronomy, know from own experience about that which the book says to him? I ask you: how many knowing people are among those who believe in the materialistic history of creation? How many are among those who swear on the materialistic spirit who have seen through a microscope and know how to investigate these matters? How many are there who believe in Haeckel and how many who know in this field? Everybody can become a researcher if he has the time and the energy for it. This also applies to the spiritual matters.

It is brainless if one says that the matters come to an end. It is brainless as well if one says that you have to believe what is in Haeckel’s history of creation, that you yourselves cannot investigate this. In no other sense theosophy speaks of objects and matters of the higher world. One has been accustomed to use the term theosophy for this spiritual science. Not because it has God solely as the object of its consideration, but because it makes a distinction between the external sensuous human being who sees, hears, smells, tastes with his five senses, and combines the sense-perception with his reason—and the other human being who lives in this bodily human being who slumbers in it and can be woken and uses such spiritual organs, spiritual sensory tools, as the body has the physical sensory tools. As the body sees with the physical eye, the mind sees with the spiritual eye. Like the body hears with the physical ear, the mind hears with the spiritual ear.

If the human being takes care of his spiritual development himself, these spiritual organs of perception can be trained, so that the inner human being is able to look into a spiritual world. Because one calls such an inner human being the divine one, I make the difference. What the external sensuous human being beholds, gives sensuous wisdom, what the inner divine human being beholds is, in contrast to sensuous wisdom, theosophy, divine wisdom. Thus it is meant if one speaks of theosophy. One does not speak of theosophy, because God is the object of research, because God is something that becomes obvious to the occultist only at the end of the things, on the summit of perfection. The theosophist will dare least of all to investigate God, although we know that we live, work and exist in Him.

Just as little as somebody, who is sitting on the beach and dives his hand in the sea, believes that he can exhaust the whole sea, the theosophist believes just as little that he can embrace God. However, like somebody, who is sitting on the beach and gets out a handful of water, knows that the scooped water is of the same being as the whole big encompassing sea, the theosophist also knows that he carries a divine spark in himself that is of the same kind and being as God. The theosophist does not claim that his being can embrace God, he does also not claim that in his human soul the infinite God lives, or that the human being himself is God.

He will never come up with such a thing. However, what he says, what he can experience and get to know is something different, this is just this that in the human being a part of God lives, which is of the same kind and being as the whole godhead, as well as the handful of water is of the same kind as the whole encompassing ocean. As the water in the hand and the water in the sea are of the same kind and being, also that which lives in the soul is of the same kind and being as God. Therefore, we call heavenly what is inside of the human being, and we call the wisdom divine wisdom or theosophy which the human being can investigate in his innermost core.

This is a thought process which everybody would have to admit if he wanted to think only logically. Often someone objects to theosophy: you demand that the human being goes through a development. However, not everybody is able to verify everything the theosophy maintains.—Somebody who understands the matters will never maintain that any human being if he can have only the necessary patience, force and endurance cannot get to that condition which single human beings have got in the course of human development. But something else is in the so-called proofs of theosophical truths. Something is to be found in the theosophical literature and in theosophical talks or can be heard, otherwise, somewhere within the theosophical movement about which somebody who has a modern education says to himself: these are assertions. One can accept them, but no theosophist does prove them; he just maintains them.—This speaking of proofs is something that appears over and over again that one objects to theosophy over and over again. How is it?—It behaves as follows.

What theosophy spreads as a higher spiritual wisdom can be investigated if those forces which slumber in every human soul are woken. These forces and abilities, which we call the forces and abilities of the seer, of the spiritual beholding, are necessary to investigate the matters. If one wants to investigate, to discover the facts of the spiritual world, these abilities and forces are necessary. However, it is something different to understand what the spiritual researcher has found. Mind you, one needs the forces of the seer to find the spiritual truths, but that one only needs the clear, logical human mind going up to the last consequences to understand them.

That is essential. Someone who states that he cannot understand what theosophy maintains has not yet thought enough about it. On the contrary, we can better understand what science maintains today. Just what we understand, if we stop at true science, about the facts of nature, about the matters of the apparently lifeless and of the living nature—even if we take the facts of the history of civilisation—if we want to understand them, we can never understand them if we approach them only with the materialistic scholarship which is nothing else than materialistic fantasy. We can understand what true science delivers to us if we know the true science of the spiritual world. To somebody who sees deeper science as it is presented by Ernst Haeckel, for example, becomes only understandable if one has theosophy as a precondition, as a basis.

A comparison should make clear what I want to say. Imagine that you have a picture before yourselves which shows any scene, any saint’s legend. You can try to understand this picture in double way. Once you place yourselves before the picture and try to let revive in your soul what has lived in the soul of the painter. You try to rouse in your soul what the picture shows as spiritual contents. Something lives in it that raises your soul, makes it lofty, and invigorates it. However, you can still react differently to this picture. You can go and say that this does not interest you. Also what the painter has imagined does not interest you particularly. However, you want to get to know how he mixed the paints which substances are mixed in the paint which he painted on the canvas. You want to test how this is there on the canvas, how much of the red and green paints were used where straight and where crooked lines were applied.

These are two different approaches to a picture. It would be brainless to say about the one: you look at something that is false.—No, he looks at something that is absolutely true. He looks how the paint sticks to the canvas and how it is composed. He looks whether and how the paints have cracked et cetera. This can be real truth. Then there the other comes and says to the first: this is not the right thing what you think. This is only a thought. You can objectively find what I investigate.

I want to give an additional example, so that we understand each other precisely. Somebody plays a sonata on a piano. You listen to this sonata with musical ear; you indulge in the marvellous realm of sounds which this sonata delivers to you. This is a way how you can investigate what takes place here. However, another way could also be the following. Anybody comes there and says that this does not interest him which one hears with the musical ear. But there stands a piano, in it strings are stretched. These strings move. I want to hang up little paper tabs on these strings. They jump off if the string moves and thereby I can study where the strings move and where they are in rest. I want to completely refrain from that which you hear there with your ear. One cannot prove that objectively.

As well as this second viewer behaves to the first viewer; the characterised scholars behave to the theosophists. No theosophist thinks of denying scholarship. Just as little as that who goes into raptures about the spiritual contents of a picture says that that is not true which the other investigates about the paints, just as little that who has a musical ear will say that that is not true which the other investigates with the little paper tabs—because it is true, it is true what the naturalist investigates about his material. Nothing should be argued against it. But that escapes these natural sciences which is essential in the world process. Just as that which is essential escapes somebody who looks only at the little paper tabs and what also escapes somebody who only investigates the paint and maybe still the material, the canvas.

Then some people come and say: there is something subjective, this lives only in the soul and cannot be proven objectively. One has to investigate what can be really found. Outside only the oscillatory etheric matter, the oscillatory substance exists. Indeed. One answers as a theosophist to such people: if you only investigate the matter, you only find your matter outside, as well as that who blocked his ears can only find what one can see in the little paper tabs.

Still a few years ago one got up the objectivity of science to mischief. It is this the so-called atomistic theory where one calls that subjective which the human being perceives as sensory sensation what he perceives as sound, colour et cetera, and traces it back to objective processes. These processes should be oscillations of any substance. At that time—as an example—one called it always only red. Red, one said, is only in your eye. Outside in space is nothing else than an oscillation of the ether of so and so many millions oscillations.—This pseudoscience, which is no longer science but religion, transformed the world of perception into a huge sum of atoms which are in oscillatory movements.

This nonsense of transforming everything that we experience as colour-fresh and lively contents into abstract processes which are nothing else than calculated things, nothing else than results of brooding and speculation, this nonsense lately withdraws somewhat. We see that already the atom and its oscillatory movement is regarded by reasonable naturalists only as a calculation approach and in the better circles of thinkers one does no longer take care of the inaccuracy of the atomic hypotheses et cetera. But it has collected in the brains of the human beings to look at the world as an objective nothing, as only materialistic oscillation processes, so that it has penetrated the theosophical movement and theosophy itself in the first years. We had to experience that the most spiritual movement was severely infected by materialism. We had to experience that one could read in the most different theosophical books over and over again that this is this or that vibration. In particular the English books did not get tired to talk about vibrations.

It is a characteristic of our time that this materialistic tendency could come into the most spiritual movement. We still have much to do for long time to overcome this childhood disease of theosophy. However, only if the time has come when within theosophy one no longer speaks about moving atoms, then that cleverly thought-out construction of monads has disappeared which whirl down from the heights and take in everything—an absurd materialistic idea.

One has to realise that theosophy concerns the recognition of the spiritual as such and one has to be aware of the fact that one lets the materialistic science have the swinging little paper tabs and lets it investigate the paints and the canvas. Theosophy deals with the development of the higher senses, the knowledge of the higher senses, it includes what the human being sees, summarises, surveys with the higher soul forces, and what he hears with the musical ear—the swinging string expresses it spatially. If you have understood this, you know to some extent what theosophy is.

Hence, we have also to completely renounce to believe that a kind of harmony is possible between the modern scholarship and theosophy. It is not possible.—This harmony only comes if scholarship itself has progressed so far that it can understand theosophy. Indeed, we have to do it with the chemical investigation of the paints, with the investigation of the lines, with the investigation of the canvas, with the investigation of the little paper tabs on the moved strings, but this does not exclude that with the higher development of the spiritual forces the higher spiritual is revealed to us in that which we investigate externally. The modern scholarship is far away from understanding this matter.

One becomes mild towards this scholarship if one sees, for example, that somebody who has been born out of this scholarship cannot understand anything that is scholarly in the deepest sense and has originated from spiritual science at the same time. I know that I say something extremely offensive for many listeners who have learnt physics. But it is something symptomatic about which I have to speak. Which physicist would not disparage what one calls Goethe’s theory of colours. It is a matter of impossibility to speak about it, but times will come—and they are not far , when one recognises the objections against Goethe's theory of colours as outdated prejudices. You can read further details about Goethe’s theory of colours in my book about Goethe’s World View.

Goethe’s theory of colours was born out of a spiritual world view and for that who can understand this, this theory of colours is the proof of Goethe’s deep thinking. But it does not start from the prejudice that colour is an oscillatory ether. It stands rather on a ground which can be circumscribed as I try it now. I ask you to follow me in my subtle thought process. If anybody sees the red colour outside, his eye sees red at first. Now there comes the physicist and says: this red colour is only subjective. This is a process in space or in the brain. However, what is real outside is nothing but an oscillatory movement of the ether.

If now anybody comes who says: what you see there is only an oscillatory movement of the ether, then reply the following: try to imagine this oscillatory movement of the ether. Is this colourless? It must be colourless, because you want to explain the colour from the oscillations. Hence, what is outside must be colourless. Then I ask: does it still have maybe other qualities; does it maybe have the quality of heat? There the physicist answers: heat even comes from oscillatory movement. However, these people are funniest if they say: these oscillations do not have sensory qualities, but only those qualities which we can think.

If one regards now that which the senses say as subjective, one must also regard that which one thinks as subjective. Then one must also say: what you have calculated there as an oscillatory nebulous mass is subjective all the more, is never perceived, but is only calculated. Everything is calculated subjectively. Who realises that that which we experience in ourselves is objective and that the objective can become the most subjective has a right to speak about the fact that also the calculated has an objective existence. He also does not regard red and green, C sharp and G as only subjective phenomena.

Now I have said a number of matters which are dreadful heresies to scientifically thinking people. One talks a lot that times have changed. Yes, times have changed since Giordano Bruno. At his time the dogma of infallibility was not yet valid. Today the dogma of infallibility is valid, as you know, in certain Catholic circles. But this dogma of infallibility is not born only out of Catholicism. It came into being as an external law, as an external dogma. However, the infallibility dogma also lives as an attitude in the minds of the materialistically thinking, monistic freethinkers. They regard themselves—I do not say that everybody regards himself as a little pope—but as so infallible that they regard everything as superstitious that does not come from their circles. If one counters these infallible physicists and psychiatrists—they do not say that they are infallible, but one feels it , then he is dismissed. He is no longer burnt, but he is made a fool with the means which is trendy today.

The theosophist does not necessarily look for approval. Compared with truth approval is something indifferent. Who has understood the truth of a mathematical theorem does not care whether a million people agree or not. Truth is not decided by majority. Someone who has recognised a truth has recognised it and needs no approval. Thus the theosophical movement prefers the careful supporters. It does not want to have children but such human beings who form a judgement, with all care, after the most profound examination. The demand to be careful is something that gives me the deepest sympathy.

From that which I have tried to show you can infer that theosophy is far away to criticise the contemporary scholarship. Should the theosophist fight against it? He would do something very foolish, because it would be as if that who looks at a picture with displeasure wanted to fight against somebody who studies the chemical composition of the paints. If, for example, an appearance like Ernst Haeckel is defended from theosophical side, this does not need to be wrong. One can defend him if one recognises him from a higher point of view sees how he appears there and knows how to classify the matters in the world evolution. The theosophist is able to give the right position to the contemporary development in any field.

Thus the relation of the newly arising spiritual current is which tries to look at the world in such a way as single extraordinary spirits looked always at it. But it was not possible during the last centuries to give this spiritual science as it was given once. What one calls theosophy today is a small part of encompassing world wisdom, of occult science. This is something that has always existed with extraordinary human individualities since millennia, even since there are human beings. In the form, however, as single great spirits have owned it, it could not been given to the big mass. Nevertheless, it was not withheld from the big mass.

If you check the legends and myths of the nations impartially, you see that these legends and myths are the metaphorical expressions of a science which contains more wisdom than the present-day science offers. This science would regard it as fantasy if one said that wisdom is in these fairy tales. This world wisdom has been announced in the most different religions; depending on how the one or the other people needed it according to its temperament and the climate. If we have an overview of everything that was given to humankind in the most different forms, we are led to a common core, to encompassing world wisdom. Today not everything can be already handed over to the bigger part of humankind, because somebody who rises toward this world wisdom has to go through particular inner ordeals. This world wisdom can be handed over only to somebody who goes through these ordeals. In former times also the elementary part was handed over only in the closest circle to well prepared pupils with the corresponding intellectual, moral and mental qualities. There are even today persons who regard it as wrong to deliver the occult profundities by theosophy to the big mass of the human beings. However, the reproach is unfounded because there is no alternative today. Who understands the structure of the spirit of the present age knows that inner truth and wisdom of the religious world view feel alienated because one can no longer understand them.

This was different once. Then the wisdom which is announced today by theosophy was the property of the single human being. One gave the big mass the appropriate wisdom in pictures. The feeling nature of the big mass was suited to take it up in the pictures. The big mass could live with these pictures only. Truth was in the religions, truth was in the basic religious views. Theosophy only makes this clear again to us in the deepest way. The human being could understand it with his feeling in ancient times. Our time demands that he can also understand what is contained in the religions.

Thus occult science is forced to come out a little bit, to contribute something to the verification of the religions, to give the elementary part of spiritual truth at least. A time would be dreary and desolate if humankind were alienated from all knowledge of the spiritual worlds and from any relation to them. Only that who does not understand the case can believe that humankind could exist without relation to the spiritual, without belief in spirit and immortality. Like the plant needs food juices, the soul needs something spiritual that forms its basis. Theosophy does not want to found a new religion. But it wants to bring truth home to the human being again in a form which is suited to the modern human being, in the form of thinking comprehension. Thus theosophy brings the old truth in new form to our contemporaries, unperturbed by those who, going out from the materialistic superstition, turn against this spiritual current.

As well as the external natural science rests upon that which it investigates and calculates with the help of the microscope and telescope, theosophy uses the most significant instrument of which Goethe speaks: what the skilled ear of the musician is, this is the human soul compared with all tools , and further:

Nature, mysterious in day’s clear light,
lets none remove her veil,
and what she won’t discover to your understanding
you can’t extort from her with levers and with screws.

Faust I, verses 672–675

Who understands the world is the most perfect instrument, and supported on the spiritual beholding theosophy will produce such instruments more and more.

The answer to the question: what do our scholars know about the real basis of theosophy is: nothing.—They can know nothing because all their ways of thinking can bring them to nothing else than to look at theosophy as a fantastic stuff. Who has understood, however, that scholarship cannot get involved in theosophy, which has gone out from quite different bases, also understands that this scholarship will be in need to illuminate the structure of spirit more intensely. This scholarship provides such flowers. But a real comprehension of the soul only can make such things comprehensible, which the modern scholarship knows.

Or: what has somebody to think who regarded Goethe, Schopenhauer, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and others as great spirits if this materialistic scholarship has brought it so far that you can find in a little book about Goethe’s illness, about Schopenhauer’s illness—also in other works—these illnesses considered from the point of view of the materialistic psychiatry? One calls a particular type of insanity manic depression, schizophrenia another, and paranoia a third one. These three forms of insanity are taken to show that one can also find symptoms of insanities with the great spirits who are regarded as leaders of humankind. One found the symptoms of manic depression with Schopenhauer, paranoia with Tasso, Rousseau and others. Indeed, the same author has called an even bigger number of people feeble-minded. He is the author of the book On the Physiological Idiocy of Women which concerns one half of the whole humankind. It would be easy to consider the author from his own viewpoint and to scrutinise him.—However, one must not laugh at these matters. The materialistic science must get to this because these are partial truths. But one can get only to the right insight if one sees the spirit working behind it. Then one sees that often a higher spiritual development must be purchased for the same symptoms, as on the other side health for other symptoms. One is able to do this only if one explains them from the theosophical standpoint.

I would like to tell something else. You know that I have pointed to ancient times of development when our civilisation did not yet exist when there has been a continent between this Europe and America, the continent of the old Atlantis. I have already pointed to the fact that this Atlantis has been found again by the naturalists. In the magazine Kosmos, 10th issue, a naturalist speaks of animals and plants which lived on this Atlantis. Indeed, such a naturalist admits this, but he does not admit that other human beings lived in those days. He does not admit that the old Atlantean land was covered by a wide nebulous sea that the ground was not covered by such an air as it forms our atmosphere today, that the expression which the old Central European peoples have in their myths: Niflheim, nebulous home, means something real that our Atlantean ancestors lived in a nebulous country. I have sometimes pointed to that.

Few days ago a lecture was held in a famous society of naturalists in which was pointed out to the fact that most probably in the time of our Atlantean ancestors on the earth very large land masses were covered with fog. One concludes this speculatively from different other phenomena. Above all, it is pointed out to the fact that the plants, which need sunshine which grow in the desert, are of a later date and did not yet exist at that time, while those, which need little sunshine which could exist at Niflheim, the nebulous home, are the older ones.

Here you see that natural science lagging behind says to you what theosophy has said before. We have a time ahead when also the other matters must be gradually admitted by these natural sciences. Theosophy does not have to get used to the fantastic, objective atomic theories, but the facts which theosophy announces from the higher standpoint will be proven by the external natural sciences. This is the course of the future development. Even if the modern scholars know nothing about it, their own progress leads them to it.—No thinker should doubt that one can see more, can behold more with a developed soul than with mere senses and mere intellect.

It is the recognition of the developed human being as the most perfect instrument to investigate the world—theosophy wants this to be accepted. Everything else results automatically. If you say that the human being has reached the highest levels and will not keep on developing, then you do not need theosophy. If you say, however, the laws which have held sway in the past, will also hold sway in the future, single human beings have always stood higher than others of their surroundings—if you admit this, then you have already a theosophical attitude, in principle. One does not become a theosophist because one uses the words theosophy, brotherliness, unity et cetera. Brotherliness is something that all good people understand.

If I see people always talking about brotherliness and then also behold them feeling an inner lust if they talk about brotherliness, harmony, unity, then I always think of the oven and the first principle of the Theosophical Society which demands to establish the core of a general human fraternisation. It is for nothing if one says to the oven: dear oven, heat the room and make it warm.—If one wants that the oven gives off heat, then one must put heating material into it and kindle it. One must put heating material into it. This is the spiritual force, the ability to behold on account of the development of the higher worlds. By the development of the spiritual world that truth and wisdom in the human souls take place which must lead as wisdom and knowledge automatically to the general human brotherhood. Then we arrive at that which is expressed in the first principle of the theosophical program if the human being can be an instrument to behold into the spiritual worlds. If the organs of perception concealed in the human being are got out of the soul, theosophy is a progress which one is able to pursue. If one compares this theosophical attitude with the attitude of theosophists, of great, lofty personalities who lived in prehistoric time, then we find it also in a sentence from Herder’s pen: our tender, feeling and sensitive nature has developed all senses which God has given it. It cannot do without them, because that which results from the whole use of the organs shines to all. These are the vowels of life and so on.

Even if we only take the external physical senses into consideration, we can say in the theosophical sense, nevertheless: the physical and spiritual senses must be developed, because by the harmony of the spiritual and physical organs of perception the vowels not only of life, but also those of the eternal, infinite, spiritual life are kindled.

You read in Goethe’s poem The Secrets:

From the power which ties all beings
escapes that human being
who overcomes himself.

The human being is neither free nor not free, he is developing.

Notes:

Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), German philosopher

Eduard Oscar Schmidt (1823–1886), German zoologist. Goethes Verhältnis zu den organischen Wissenschaften (1853), Descendenzlehre und Darwinismus—The Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism (1873)

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825–1898)), Swiss poet and historical novelist

manic depression: Steiner uses the obsolete term “zirkuläres Irresein” (circular insanity, French: folie circulaire). This form of insanity is today called manic depression or bipolar disorder.

author of the book On the Physiological Idiocy of Women: Paul Julius Möbius (1853–1907), German neurologist. Über das Pathologische bei Goethe (1898). Über Schopenhauer (1899)

Atlantis: cf. R. Steiner CW 11 Cosmic Memory

Kosmos: Theodor Arldt (1878–1960), German geographer. Das Atlantisproblem

Today I want to develop something of the human future. We have to understand the perspective in such a way that we do it in the sense of a natural law, because the initiate looks at the laws of the world. One must not imagine that these goals will be achieved without human intervention. For if we look back into the past, we find that humanity in its rounds and races has developed quite lawfully.

People were guided by divine beings. But now we are living in a time in which the guidance is transferred to humanity itself, whereas in the past humanity was guided by great beings who did not need to incarnate.

That is the task of our root race, that people should come to the point where they have to take on the role of God. In those days, the masters were the great guides who were beyond the Ma/gap in the transcript], who cooperated; they knew the laws of Kama-Manas, which they had brought down from Mars.

But now more human entities are involved when our fifth root race is developed to the seventh. Humanity will come to the point where it will itself perform divine functions. Then people will know the laws of effectiveness.

We can only vaguely grasp it: we live in the development of the intellect. All we have is something that extends into us from the past; or something that already extends into us from the future is what we already use. The masses use the intellect. What can this intellect do? It can describe what is in front of it as an object, what the senses perceive; but there can be no intellectual science [of the spirit], there must be an object. It imprints its intellect on nature, but it needs raw material. Artistic ability already shines out of the future. The intellect, however, needs material; the intellect needs combining, it will not be able to do more as long as the earth is physical.

But now a new state is approaching, a new metamorphosis of the earth, first ethereal, but then astral; at first there is no resistance facing us. Man will then no longer build machines out of wood and iron, piece by piece. The world will then be pliable and flexible. The clairvoyant sees it in colors, comparable to our feeling. Then he will be able to create freely in the astral realm; there is no external matter, he will create from the astral substance.

Manas - German 'wisdom', more than knowledge; wisdom creates from intuition. How to create a picture from intuition to put it into the substance.

Man then creates out of the astral substance, he then has the ability to shape with wisdom; and that is because man has been on the physical globe - fourth round - and has acquired the ability on it.

Freemasonry - Architecture

When he builds a church on this fourth round in the physical, he masters the material; he acquires abilities; because the church disappears, but the ability is not lost. This ability arises on the astral globe, rising in astral images. There it takes on a strange character. Man then does not build stone on stone - form and material are not needed. Just as the plant brings forth a new form out of its own power, so is this kind of creating, with real bringing forth out of oneself. There is no difference between human creation and vegetable form. His work will sprout and flourish like that of the plant. Then there will be the human, animal and plant kingdoms; but then he will create alive — which happens today in the organic — but only in the astral.

In the next metamorphosis, the astral will disperse, and man will then be only a pure spiritual being. He can then create even higher than the plant does; the plant feels nothing in doing so, but then man will create as a spiritual being. Everything he creates physically here will happen there with full consciousness. There is a sense of pleasure in what is being created, he no longer distinguishes himself from what he is doing today with the animal [gap in the transcript]

He will not only bring forth life, he will bring forth everything with feeling. He will become a being that feels itself. Man will not only build churches, as he does today, but the buildings will have life in them. He will no longer create form, he will create thought itself. His works of art will be living beings – animality in the realm of the spiritual. Everything will flow together with animality.

Then there will only be two kingdoms, humanity itself and the animal kingdom.

Now we come to the next metamorphosis: here man has reached the highest level –

Animalism has disappeared here. Everything he has separated out during his descent into matter, he will have to absorb back into himself.

The mineral kingdom was once united with us, permeated with us. The lion's fury, the fox's cunning, man had all this within himself; he descended into animalism, which was once his brothers.

When he had cast off the mineral kingdom, he became softer, then he cast off the plants, he was able to refine himself step by step. He created the kingdoms. For every saint there is a criminal, otherwise the saint would not have progressed. Man must push the others down, but he must also bring them up again. One may develop, but not for one's own sake, only to develop in order to pull the others up with oneself again. He must balance everything again. Then our round is over. This thought is in the mind of the master, no other thought, and if such a thought is our ideal, we will develop in the following way.

A twilight state now sets in.

In the fifth round we do not need to apply the laws of chemistry and minerals, because man then works in the astral as in the next astral state of the fourth round, but this astral will then be physical again in the lowest globe.

The earth will then be seen with physical eyes again, but it will be the lowest realm, the plant kingdom. There will be no chemical law or substance, but an intertwined plant kingdom.

Man is all growth, plant-like. Just as he feeds on mineral substances in the physical world of the fourth round - today - he will then only feed on plants.

Man [is] then a large plant.

Through his activity will emerge

Churches – everything [will] then only grow. He will sink the seed for a church or a building, and it will grow. Then the earth will receive an even higher ability, a higher realm will be added. Today he lives in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, he only feels mind. But above the mind, a new realm will be established in the fifth round.

Today there is blood relationship, physical coexistence, but that will no longer exist, it will cease. It would then seem completely unthinkable to us to belong to a community if it did not belong to all of humanity.

The moral - [gap in the transcript]

Today we speak of races and peoples, that would be nonsense there. Man will create his kingdom, his community, but according to the principles of reason. Moral communities.

One thing will be their basic principle. Life will be organized according to the principles of fulfilled karma. Karma is only conditioned by birth and death, but that already stops in our sixth root race in the fourth round; already on the astral plane there are no more embodiments, no birth and death.

Fifth round no karma. Man goes over with a certain karma, and then people will be divided according to their karma.

This explains something that is inexplicable in Europe: the caste spirit. In India this was already the case with the Brahmins. They came with a certain karma, they were higher beings.

One should not criticize the caste spirit, because one must know the matter. Our next globe - of the fourth round - is the model for the physical globe of the fifth round, and here man appears in his highest state, 'glory'.

Then a state of slumber sets in and the sixth round begins. Here the beings live in such a way that the animal kingdom is the lowest realm. The animal kingdom has the same mind in itself. Now an even higher realm is added - the spiritual ability to go beyond mere morality. That was the realm of Zarathustra, Christ, Buddha, which is why they are called artificial six-rounders. Plato was an artificial five-rounder.

Therefore, such beings lead a double life, they tower far above humanity with their spirituality. We do not have to address the great strangers and donors of our goal right away, there are countless degrees - an artist is in the sense of development. If there had only been Christ and Plato, there would be no evolution, but that is why some have to stand out in order to catch up with the others.

It seems unfair at first, but only time does that, but he who is exalted above time finds the great harmonies. Otherwise it would be meaningless - like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The harmonies must arise through disharmony. Therefore some must hasten ahead of the multitude.

From the discussion

Mercury is now in a state of becoming lighter between the fourth and fifth metamorphosis.

Martian beings Kama-Manas in their lowest form, they are now entering the astral state from the third to the fourth round. With our solar system, a whole host of planets are in different stages; what we see with our physical eyes can be thought of as seven or eight times greater in the astral.

The fifth round will develop manas.
The sixth round will develop buddhi manas
The seventh round will develop atma.

On the moon, for example, beings have descended so low that they appear on earth as enemies of humanity.

Steadfastness, equanimity, patience, trust, control, concentration of thoughts and actions –

the two-petalled lotus flower between the eyes develops insight into karma and one's own incarnations. All people today are reincarnated Atlanteans.

In the sixth round, the destruction of souls that have lagged so far behind that they are considered black magicians; they fall away. This is to be seen as a punishment because people already have a higher consciousness; they will then be banished in a shell in order to be carried away again later; but they have to wait so long and remain preserved in a thick shell; however, this is a terrible state, there is nothing more difficult than standing still. Then they enter a development in order to work their way through it again under terrible torments. Fate is already decided in the fifth round, but the Atma still has to be developed. So that from the sixth on, the Atma would not have been able to develop its deepest self. But fate is decided. - The “Laue in the Apocalypse. But whoever is imbued with real knowledge today, from what we have heard today, one cannot become a black magician with this thought.

The first 12 chapters in the gospel of John

In modern theology, clear distinction is made between the first three gospels and the gospel of John. The first three are called the synoptic gospels, whilst the latter is often said to be a composition for teaching purposes and of no historical value. What matters is, however, that everything said relating to the Christ in the gospels is a profound symbol which at the same time is an important historical fact. In reality the first three gospels differ from the gospel of John because they were written by disciples who were less profoundly initiated, whereas the gospel of John was written by the most deeply initiated disciple.

The gospel of John actually makes no direct mention of John, only referring to him as the disciple whom Jesus loved. This is a key word for the one who was most deeply initiated. To indicate that some disciples were the most intimate initiates it would be said that the master loved them.

The disciple who wrote down the gospel of John first of all described something he had himself experienced. Chapters 1 to 12 are experiences in the astral world, chapter 13 and those that follow experiences at the devachanic level. This is highly significant and characteristic of the whole of it. John described experiences on the astral level because he took the view that it is only possible to understand what Christ Jesus accomplished on this earth if one considers it in the light of the spirit. The things the master did and said could only be understood if one put oneself in a higher state of consciousness. Inner development can enable human beings to gain true vision in the astral world. This is only achieved by doing specific meditations. The individual must close himself off from the outside world. He must let eternal truths arise in his soul. A new world then opens up all around him.

What Christ Jesus did on earth could only be properly judged by going into a higher world. Things experienced with Jesus in the physical world only became clear if seen in astral terms. To gain living experience of what Christ Jesus had done, one had to use suitable Christian meditation to enter into a state where the soul gained understanding of the Christ.

John said so first of all in his introduction. This is a meditative prayer from the beginning to ‘and the darknesses did not comprehend it.’ When the soul gains living experience of what lies in those words, the powers arise that enable us to grasp the content of chapters 1 to 12. ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was a god.’ This ancient truth was presented in visible form in all the ancient mysteries, above all those with an Egyptian bias.

Words sound in air-filled space, otherwise we would not hear them. The figures of the words we speak are in that space. If the air could be suddenly made to go rigid as I speak the waves that buzz around in the air would fall down as rigid solid bodies. A mystery teacher would tell his pupil: ‘Just as a human being speaks, wresting his inner life away and passing it into the air, so the cosmic soul also spoke, but into much more subtle matter, into Akasha matter, and this would then become solid.’ Everything around us is condensed word of god. And so, the mystery teacher said, the world all around us is frozen word of God, a frozen logos. ‘In the beginning was the word and the word was with God.’ It was still within itself, it was itself a god. Then it filled space and froze. This logos is now present in everything. Everywhere around us we have the crystals of the logos. But as life evolved, the logos arose from its state of slumber, as it were. In man it became the light of insight. When we gain insight, God, who has originally descended into the world, comes to us out of this world. One must enter wholly into this, penetrating so deeply into the world that one realizes: The logos lives in the world.

Originally there was the creation of the physical human being. The spiritual human being entered into this physical human being. Then light shone into the darkness. But the darknesses did not at first comprehend it. When a human being develops further, there comes to him the content of astral truth vision. He then sees clearly what Christ Jesus was, and what his teaching signified: that the time was ripe in those days to bring forth a reverse Adam. Man had descended into his body, and with this came birth and death. Light then entered into the darkness.

There was need to help humanity to understand again that life is the victor in the struggle with death. John the Baptist thus came as a forerunner. The Baptist made it known that a new kingdom would take all that was old and still wholly in the sign of the original creation by divine powers. Until then it was said that the god would destroy those who went against his laws. The new kingdom was one, however, which man would find in himself through living experience of the god. The idea of the old covenant had been that humanity had to obey God's commandment. The new covenant was that human beings should follow the god in them of their own free will. This is the love of goodness. It was prophetically foretold; it had to increase. The Christ as the representative of the new covenant had to increase; John, being only his forerunner, had to decrease.

Two major elements came together at this point. John saw this in his vision where everything appeared in form of images. At the same time the actual Baptist and his historical mission appeared to his inner eye. The whole mission of Christianity now presented himself to him. He described this in the first chapter.

Let us go back to very early times, at least 2000 years before Christ. Wise individuals had advanced so far that they were initiated into the mysteries. One symbol used was the offering of the water. The mystery priest used water as a symbol. It is a law that man shuts himself off from the higher world of the spirit if he takes alcohol. Someone wishing to enter the worlds of spirit in a living way must not drink wine, not even the wine of the offering.

The marriage in Cana characterizes the Mission of Christianity. The ancient mystery priests had the most sublime teachings, given out of profound understanding in the spirit. But one thing that was lacking in pagan culture was the conquest of the physical world. Their tools were still extremely primitive, the whole of outer civilization was primitive. People had not yet gained a relationship to the things that had to happen directly down here on earth. They had to learn to control the earth and this meant they had to be limited to the physical. They had to grow strong and hallow the lower human being.

This culture was prepared for by great teachers who spoke of the significance of the physical level. Egyptian art was great in its spiritual concepts but not in the form it took at the physical level. The whole of Greek art consisted in bringing the human being down to the physical level. Roman law also brought humanity down to the physical level. The cult of Dionysus was connected with all this. The representative of wine was actually shown as a god. The story of the marriage in Cana shows the introduction of wine into human evolution in sublime fashion. The true purpose was to show that water is greater than wine. It was transformed into wine because humanity had to be taken down to the physical level.

Today we have come down to the physical level in every respect. If there is no moral development to go hand in hand with civilization at the physical level, physical achievements are destructive. Moral development will enable humanity to generate energies that will be very different from those that are now to be found at the physical level. Keely⁴⁴ set his engine in motion with vibrations created in his own organism. Such vibrations depend on a person's moral nature. This is the first hint of a dawn for a technology of the future. We will have engines in future that are only set going by energies coming from people who have moral qualities. Immoral people will not be able to set them going. Purely mechanical mechanism must be transformed into moral mechanism.

The approach used in the science of the spirit is preparing the way for this ascent. Christianity first had to guide humanity down. Now it must guide them upwards again. Wine must be transformed into water again.

John was able to see beyond physical reality. The deed accomplished by the Lord, his mission, thus appeared to John the disciple in the image of the marriage at Cana in Galilee. This is how one should read the first 12 chapters of the gospel of John. It does not say that Mary asked him but the mother of Jesus. This is a mystic term. In mysticism, ‘mother’ always refers to something that needs to be inseminated when the human being ascends to a higher level. Jesus had to take the whole of human consciousness, such as it had been until then, to a higher level. The consciousness of all humanity needed him to take it a step forward. This is why Jesus was able to say: ‘Woman, what have I to do with you?’ He would not have said this to his mother.

On the third day, a marriage took place. This means that John lay in the sleep of initiation for three days. There the vision of the marriage in Cana in Galilee occurred. In a sleep lasting three days he went through the events that took place in the world of the spirit. On the third day he experienced the vision of the marriage in Cana. All that follows are events he saw in his astral vision.

In the third chapter we have the talk with Nicodemus. In his astral vision it would always be the Lord himself who appeared to John. In the talk with Nicodemus we hear what was to happen to John. The Lord put things very clearly. Nicodemus did not at first understand him. It is John himself who needed to understand; it was explained to him in the vision that it was a matter of killing off the lower human being, with the higher human being coming alive. He gradually understood who Jesus actually was; that the powers of the world's origin, the father of the world, were alive in him. This is why we then have the words Jesus said about the father. The occult powers Jesus possessed appeared to John as an astral reflection of the actual events. John was thus learning the most profound truths through the Lord himself.

In the fourth chapter we have the meeting with the woman of Samaria. The Lord said to her: ‘You have had five husbands and the one you have now is not your husband’ She was to be raised to the higher self. For this, she had to go through the lower bodies. Those were the old husbands. She now had to be connected with the higher self. That was the new husband. In the story of the man who was born blind it became evident that it was his karma to be unable to see.

The first events described in John's gospel are astral experiences. Surely it is natural that John himself was not present, seeing that he perceived it all in image consciousness? John is not mentioned in the first 12 chapters. He was not yet the disciple, experiencing all these things in the astral level.

He then slept the initiation sleep. He was to rise to a higher degree. This happened as he lived through the experiences of the three days and on into the fourth day. The initiation took 3 ½ days. Then he saw his own initiation, his own resurrection. This was the raising of Lazarus.⁴⁵ Lazarus wrote the gospel of John. Martha and Mary were the states of consciousness in his soul, one divine, the other turned to life on earth. The description of the Lazarus miracle is the description of a higher level of initiation. The 12^th chapter prepares for the actual recognition of the Jesus personality. John himself then says: ‘Now I know him, who has raised me from the dead.’

John's higher development begins with the 13^th chapter. Every word in the gospel of John can be understood if we take it as John's living experience. He then became conscious in his I, and this was no longer an image consciousness. He consciously became the disciple whom the Lord loved.

• 44. Keely, John Worrel (182–1898), American engineer. Rudolf Steiner spoke of him on several occasions, e.g. in Ursprung und Ziel des Menschen. Grundbegriffe der Geisteswissenschaft (GA 53), Berlin, 30 March 1905; The Temple Legend (GA 93). Berlin, 2 Jan. 1906. Tr. J. Wood. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1985; Steiner R. Cosmic Being and Egohood (in GA 169), lecture given in Berlin on 20 June 1916. Typescript translation C 43 at Rudolf Steiner House Library, London; Polarities in the Evolution of Mankind (GA 197), Stuttgart, 8 Nov. 1920. Tr. not named. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1987. Considerable detail, but confusing, may be found in in Blavatsky, HP, The Secret Doctrine vol. 1.
• 45. John 11: 1-45. See also Steiner R. Christianity as Mystical Fact and The Mysteries of Antiquity (GA 8). Tr. H. Collison, rev. C. Davy, A. Bittleston. Bristol: RudoIfSteinerPress 1992.

Anthroposophy conducts its research in a field that is not presented to humanity by fanciful arbitrariness of enthusiastic personalities, but that stands questioning before every healthy human feeling, so that man can indeed close himself off from these questions by numbing his soul: But the impulses of the inner being will awaken again and again from the stupor and bear witness to the fact that dealing with these questions is a necessity of life. The feeling of being closed in then appears as an illness, and the healthy person strives for its cure as for the cure of physical illnesses.

Nevertheless, in the age of scientific thinking, this field was only illuminated by a few isolated flashes of light: for example,

Fortlage: (Eight psychological lectures Jena 1869):

When we call ourselves living beings and thus ascribe to ourselves a property that we share with animals and plants, we necessarily understand the living state to mean something that never leaves us and that always persists in us, both when we are sleeping and when we are awake. This is the vegetative life of nourishment of our organism, an unconscious life, a life of sleep. The brain is an exception here in that this life of nutrition, this sleep life, is dominated in it by the life of consumption during the breaks in waking. During these breaks, the brain is exposed to a great deal of consumption, and [consequently] enters into a state which, if it extended to the other organs, would bring about the absolute enfeeblement of the body or death. [...] Consciousness is a small and partial death; death is a great and total consciousness, an awakening of the whole being in its innermost depths.

Fortlage wrote a lot: such flashes of thought remain isolated in his writings. And Ed. v. Hartmann criticized him for having them. They come from the fact that flames of insight shine up from the depths of the soul, which would otherwise be over-illuminated. Anthroposophy consciously wants to steer towards the light and turn it into a science about a field that cannot become a science in any other way.

It must come to powers of knowledge that appear to ordinary life as powers of imagination, as dream powers. But in the depths of the human being, a “second man” works. And if he can only be dreamt of, then what otherwise remains in dreams must be raised to luminous knowledge, otherwise this second man remains something that is overslept throughout life. In order to become complete in its own field, natural science must develop those insights that only extend to the fields where access to the spiritual world opens up. One consciously comes to these fields when one lives with natural science. When one consciously develops inner life at its borderline places. Then a state unfolds that can be compared to what one has to imagine in the case of lower organisms that develop sensory organs from within. One arrives at the process of forming spiritual organs of touch. This life at the border areas can be observed again in energetic cognitive natures.

Vischer:

No spirit where there is no nerve center, where there is no brain, say the opponents. No nerve center, no brain, we say, if it were not prepared from below on countless levels; it is easy to mockingly talk about the spirit's churning in granite and limestone, no more difficult than it would be for us to mockingly ask how the egg white in the brain soars to ideas. The measurement of the differences in levels is fading from human knowledge. It will remain a mystery how it comes about that nature, under which the spirit must slumber after all, stands as such a perfect counterpoint to the spirit that we bump into bumps on it; it is a direction of such an appearance of absoluteness that with Hegel's otherness and being beside oneself, however witty the formula, it says next to nothing, and simply covers up the crudity of the apparent dividing wall. The correct recognition of the cutting edge and the thrust in this counterblow can be found in Fichte, but no explanation for it.

Inner experience must come to the fact that with such thoughts the soul lives at the border of knowledge. Here it can become aware of its life independent of the body, the life that is otherwise overslept. But a twofold insight must open up here. One must recognize the nature of thinking that is gained from the sensual world.

Gideon Spicker: (Philosophical Confession of a Former Capuchin Friar):

Whatever philosophy one professes – dogmatic or skeptical, empirical or transcendental, critical or eclectic – all, without exception, start from an unproven and unprovable proposition, namely, the necessity of thinking. No examination, however deep, can ever get behind this necessity. It must be accepted unconditionally and cannot be justified by anything; every attempt to prove its correctness always presupposes it. Below it yawns a bottomless abyss, a dreadful darkness illuminated by no ray of light. So we do not know where it comes from or where it leads. Whether a gracious God or an evil demon has placed it in reason, both is uncertain.

Philosophy as a science of the supernatural has often believed that it could solve the human essence riddle in thinking itself. But such an attempt to overstretch thinking leads to a kind of malnutrition of the soul. Only the realization that so-called metaphysics is a hunger for knowledge can save us.

A second insight, which is particularly important in more recent times, is that sensual knowledge can only lead to satiety of the soul. Here it is important to come to the realization that the spirit is the creator of the body; the latter is neither the tool of the body nor a parallel phenomenon associated with the body. What can be observed sensually in the body has its laws in the past workings of the spirit. In the present workings of the spirit, the germ of future bodily activity is present. It is not knowledge as such that man strives for in knowing, but the shaping of future life. Remembrance is brought about by a process that still has a relationship to the processes that represent growth, in which heredity has an effect. But in the process of waking imagination, there is also a mental side process that prepares the germ from which the spiritual entity that passes through death is formed.

One must be content to gain knowledge of the immortal human being through imagination. For in this, everything mortal is eradicated for perception. And only the immortal is retained in them.

Only with such imaginations can the soul live in the supersensible realm. It can know in this way that what it does and thinks in a later period of time represents a coexistence of itself with the spirit in an earlier one. It becomes familiar with a world in which it recognizes spiritual realms just as one recognizes material realms in the natural realm.

We just have to gain a correct understanding of the soul's relationship to the body. The wonderful ramification of the nervous system contains the element into which the human being is constantly dying. Death resides in the nerves. The breakdown of organic processes resides there.

I would like to call what I have in mind anthroposophy, preferably Goetheanism. In Goethe, the concepts gained from nature are still such that they can be digested by the soul. He himself has only come to a conception interwoven with nature. But anyone who penetrates his way of thinking will undergo a metamorphosis of soul phenomena: will, feeling, thinking. Psychologists have at best arrived at a classification. Feeling is will transformed; but this is done by the body. Thinking is transformed from will and feeling. If you discover feeling in thinking, then you are dealing with supersensible beings. With those who have been involved before one has gone through birth to sensual existence; if one discovers the will, then the previous earth life. The will of which one is aware in ordinary life, which moves limbs, etc., the will that one finds in the supersensible nature of the ideas, comes from previous earth lives.

Just one thing should be mentioned regarding the practical fruitfulness of anthroposophy. In 1914, financiers expressed the conviction that the war would only last a few months because economic resources would not last longer. A respected teacher of international law hopes that they were not mistaken regarding reconstruction. But there will only be no helplessness if reality is grasped. And reality includes the spirit. For economics touches the area where nature reaches its limits: in hunger, in education, etc., man must see essential things that he cannot conquer with the ideas gained from nature. A weak beginning has already been made with the insight into spiritual impulses.

Oskar Hertwig: (The Development of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance):

The interpretation of Darwin's theory, which is so ambiguous with its vagueness, also allowed for a wide range of applications in other areas of economic, social and political life. From it, everyone could, as from a Delphic oracle, draw their own conclusions about social, political, hygienic, medical and other issues, as they wished, and refer to the science of Darwinian biology with its unalterable laws of nature to support their assertions. But if these supposed laws are not such, should there not also be social dangers in their versatile application to other areas? Do they really believe that human society can use phrases such as “relentless struggle for existence”, “selection of the suitable, the useful, the expedient”, “perfection through breeding” etc. in their transfer to the most diverse areas, such as daily bread, for half a century without being influenced more deeply and lastingly in the whole direction of their idea formation! The proof of this assertion would not be difficult to obtain from many phenomena of modern times. Precisely for this reason, the decision about the truth or error of Darwinism also reaches far beyond the scope of the biological sciences.

Goetheanism has a view of nature that leaves room for the peaceful harmonizing influence of the spirit in the natural struggle for existence; the development of what is most suitable instead of the selection of what happens to be suitable; of what is ethically valuable and transcends mere utility; of what is spiritually willed in what is merely functional; of the perfection of the spirit in addition to that achieved through natural selection. But all this cannot be recognized by conveniently transferring the laws of nature to the spiritual realm. It must be investigated in the spiritual realm, as the laws of nature are investigated in the natural realm.

Why do people resist this? Between the natural and spiritual realms lies a field that must be worked through. If one wants to know immortality, one must go through the knowledge of death. When one is no longer afraid to overcome the fear of knowing death, one will be able to partake of the satisfaction that comes from life in immortality.

1. Introduction: On the spiritual necessity of anthroposophy.
2. It has always been there as flashes of inspiration from individuals. Continued.
3. What cognitive powers are necessary. Science cannot develop them.
4. The development of cognitive powers at the “places of knowledge” - Vischer.
5. The inability of mere thinking: G. Spicker. 6. The inability of sensory experience. 7. What the body – the nervous system – is. 8. Why only in imaginations. 9. The ramification of the nervous system and death. 10. Goetheanism. 11. Metamorphosis of soul life.
12. A practical perspective.
13. Why does one not want anthroposophy.

Anthroposophy is fully aware of its changeability over time.

Anthroposophy is linked to natural science, to being its complement and completion. It is not a doctrine of faith alongside other doctrines of faith, but the science of the spirit. Its origin in this way must be taken into account.

Thus its connecting power is not sectarian either. Yet such a connection is necessary because of the “secret”. But it must not be in the sense of the old mystery cults. In the “borderland” illusions must be distinguished from reality. “Inner opponents”.

Anthroposophy must grasp the meaning of the concepts differently than external science and also religion. It characterizes through the concepts. The so-called reality and the ideals.

In this way, anthroposophy comes to recognize the phenomena of the human spirit. Thomism. It stands in contrast to the most diverse recent attempts at creating religion. It recognizes how the forces that create religion are limited. The scientific disciplines that focus on the external world have repeatedly made such attempts at creating religion. Strauß. Ed. v. Hartmann.

For anthroposophy, sensual reality is an image of the spiritual. For this very reason, it leads the mind back to religious need. In this, too, it points man to something other than mere natural science: Mach.

The natural science direction always comes to treat religion like a prejudice. “Fear and adversity are the mothers of religion.” “Churches fill up and pilgrimages increase in times of war and devastating epidemics.” Attempts to make morality independent. - In 1873: cities, rural communities, the church faithful, one third of the French people. Albert Sorel: Histoire diplomatique de la guerre franco-allemande. W. James. Subliminal self.

Conflicts arise not from the essence of religion but from the former state of connectedness and non-separation. As late as 1822 the decrees against Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler were only repealed. Pater Secchi. In this subject, anthroposophy and religion will meet; in the soul experience they go different but parallel paths, each with equal right. Again and again I am confronted with the objection that Anthroposophy is not in harmony with the aims of certain schools of thought that strive for an internalization and deepening of Christian experience.

Bishop Ireland: “Religion needs new forms and ways of understanding in order to get in touch with modern times. We need apostles of thought and action.

The criticism is that the impulse for altruism is missing. Fate and repeated lives on earth. People say: an impersonal concept of God.

Some poetry will be recited now and a corresponding mood in profound sense can only be created because the largest part of the friends present here have lately been deeply concerned with material concerning the spiritual world in relation to the entire historical development of humankind. What will be presented here in this lecture will bring to our awareness how spiritual science or Theosophy is not only something merely announced to the world through the Theosophical Society but that Theosophy as a teaching is based on the greater occult truth and wisdom which has already flowed through ancient times through the best minds searching for the Higher Worlds. We can find personalities in olden and recent times who can in actual fact show that in their imagination, ideas, feelings and experience, in their life mood they were totally permeated with a world view we could call theosophical and from which they worked, and that their entire life's activity unfolded in harmony with this. One such extraordinary personality lived in Novalis during the last three decades of the eighteenth century.

Not even reaching thirty years of age was Novalis, and we hope that through the lecture of his “Hymns to the Night” an awareness will be able to develop, which speaks out of these Hymns—so complete, as it was only possible in the last three decades of the eighteenth century—in an all encompassing manner, the precise knowledge of these spiritual scientific truths.

Out of a highly respected aristocratic family, Friedrich von Hardenberg, called Novalis, was born on 2 May 1772. Whoever has the opportunity to visit Weimar must not hesitate to view the impressive Novalis bust. It belongs to the classic records of Weimar, and clearly expresses how closely the spiritual high culture was connected to this time, the end of the eighteenth century. Whoever views this extraordinary bust will, if he or she has any sensitivity for it, get the impression that, one could say, out of this sphere of humble humanity the physiognomy of his soul expresses that he was totally established in the occult, in the spiritual worlds. To add to this, Novalis is one of those personalities who is a living proof of the possibility to connect this spirituality, this self-elevation in the highest sense of human beings reaching the spiritual worlds, to connect this to a solid practical `standing on the ground' physical reality. Basically Novalis never entered an angry conflict with the still conservative traditions in which his family circle lived, but we can take into consideration, that this family always had an open receptivity for everything noble and good, also when coming into contact with unknown people.

When we study Novalis' biography—it is in itself a work of art—and we allow it to work on us, his father is shown as having a practical, applied nature. Novalis was actually in his civil life educated for a totally practical career, for which knowledge of law and mathematics was necessary. He became a mountain engineer. Here is not the place to explore how he actually became a delight in this career for those whom he worked. It is also not the moment now to show how the mathematical-materialistic sciences, which lay at the foundation of this career, not only in full theory and practice came to be controlled by him completely, but that he was a diligent mathematician. What is most important is that Novalis as a spiritual being allowed mathematics to penetrate into his inner development.

When mathematics showed him how it is suitable for the elevation of pure sense-free thought, then we have where relevant, to refer to a classic example as here with Novalis, where outer observation doesn't have a say. For him life in the mathematical imagination became a great poem which filled him with delights, allowing his soul to experience an elevation when he dived into numbers and sizes. For him mathematics became the expression of divine creation, divine thought as it flashes through space in powerful directions and in measures of power and crystallize out there. Mathematics became for his mindset the warmest way to the spiritual life, while for many people, who only know mathematics from outside, it remains cold. It is so much more meaningful that we meet this spirituality in Novalis in a gentleness and refinement, as we would not meet in one or other of the most important intellects.

Novalis was a contemporary of Goethe. One should not place the kind of spirituality within Novalis, on the same level as what Goethe had. Goethe came to it through a regulated, out of a Higher World directed course towards an initiation, up to a particular stage. Novalis, by contrast, lived a life which one can best describe by saying: This young man, who left the physical plane at the age of twenty nine and who gave the German intellectuals more than a hundred thousand others could give, he lived a life which was actually a memory of a previous one. Through a quite specific event the spiritual experiences of earlier incarnations appeared, presented themselves to his soul and flowed in gentle, rhythmically woven poems from his soul.

Thus we can see that Novalis understood how the human being's soul can be lifted up into a higher world. For Novalis it gave the possibility to see that waking everyday awareness is only a fragment in a current human life, and how the soul who in the evening leaves the daily awareness and sinks into unconsciousness, in actual fact sinks into the spiritual world. He was able to experience deeply and to know, that in these spiritual worlds which are entered by the soul at night, lived a higher spiritual reality, that the day with all its impressions, even the impression of sun and light, only formed a fragment of the entire spiritual worlds. The stars, surreptitiously sending away the light of day during the night, appeared to him only in a weak glow, while in him spiritual truths rose up in his consciousness, which for the clairvoyant appears illuminated in a dazzling bright astral light when during the night he shifts himself spiritually into this state. During the night the actual spiritual worlds appeared to Novalis and thus the night from this perspective became valuable.

What enabled his memories of an earlier incarnation to appear? How did it happen that the experiences of the occult world, which we can reveal today in occult knowledge, rose so uniquely in him? His life unloosened him from the soul in whose knowledge slumbered earlier incarnations. One must take the result, which these spiritual experiences lifted out of this soul, back into the light of a spiritual observation, if one wants to understand it. Only childlike folly could place these experiences on the same footing as Goethe's meeting and Friederikes zu Sesenheim. This would be a coarsely unrefined comparison.

During his stay in Grüningen he became acquainted with a thirteen year old girl. Soul secrets played here which one could never, without abandoning the gentleness of a soul, call this a love relationship. Basically there was in Sophie von Kühn—that was her name—something like the lives of various beings. She became ill and soon died. The moment her spirit loosened from Sophie von Kühn, it wrestled with Novalis' inner life, awakening inner spiritual abilities.

Perhaps you could, when you allow yourself to admit it, obviously see the inability of a way of thought bound by outer experience coming to the fore here in what we must experience in judging these relationships, which can only be understood if we want to understand it in its spirituality, in our present materialistic time. People say science must be based on documentation; it must absolutely lead from everything concrete on the physical plane. Such natural scientists, who surely present a distorted side, the farcical side of natural science, have allowed us to experience what they believe in, that by presenting documents, Novalis basically had fallen prey to an illusion. The poetry is nice—they say—but show us the documents, let us look at who Herr von Rockenthien was where Sophie von Kühn lived. Look at—so the “Novalis adherents” said—various letters Sophie von Kühn wrote to Novalis. Sopie von Kühn made not only in every line but nearly in every word, a writing or spelling error! - concluding Novalis had fallen victim to a big deception.

In Jena, where she spent the last years, she also encountered Goethe—and made a deep impression on Goethe! Whoever can't comprehend that these unique words of Goethe are more valuable than documents which can be dug up—because all documents can lie—whoever wants to come with proof to show something, will not consider producing counter evidence, it will not help him, despite all his science.

What was the result for Novalis? Sophie von Kühn passed away and Novalis lived within a mood of: “I will emulate her in death” (Ich sterbe ihr nach!). Nevermore was he separated from her soul. Pouring out of the deceased soul of Sophie von Kühn came a force which he had in his own soul experienced as a mediator in the night, and within him rose enormous experiences which he depicted in his poetry.

Once again another feminine individual crossed his path: Julie von Charpentier. To him however, she was only the earthly symbol of Sophie von Kühn's deceased soul. Dissolved out of his soul were the elements of wisdom which he poured into the “Hymns to the Night”, through this first soul bond.

(Marie von Sivers (Marie Steiner) read the first two Hymns at this point.)

So far does this poem transport us into the worlds in which Novalis lived as a spirit, when he experienced from within the everlasting elements of wisdom.

You might often have heard that such reaching into the higher worlds is linked to a penetration of other secrets of existence. Out of this, a backward glance into the prehistoric times is necessary, where that, which now lives in the world, only existed as a sprig in the Divine and had not yet come down into an earthly form. When the soul of the natural kingdoms still existed in pure spirit, only perceptible in the astral world, all this contributed to the impressive images unfolding to Novalis the seer, when he glanced back. He saw the time when the souls of plants, animals and people were still companions of divine beings, when an interruption in awareness had not yet happened as it did later to human beings in the exchange between night and day—while nothing was influenced by any interruption, as is expressed in the words: birth and death. Everything living flowed in the spiritual-soul where there was no sense of death in this prehistoric past.

Then the thought of death struck into the life of these gods and divine earthly beings, and down into the earthly world the spirits moved. The godly beings were concealed in earthly bodies, the godly beings were enchanted into the mineral, plant and animal realms. Those who were able to return to the spiritual worlds found the gods within all phenomena, they recognised the earlier gods as linked to the human beings before an earthly existence began. They learnt what the life of a soul was, learnt to recognise that the day with its impressions creates a weaker fragment out of the great world of the beings whose existence was endurance, eternity. They learnt to become disenchanted by the world of nature.

This happened to Novalis' soul when he united his eternity to Sophie's soul by emulating her in death. In this emulation his spirit flourished. He experienced “die to live” and in him rose what he called his “magical idealism”.

(Now followed the recitation of the fourth hymn, from part 20, and the start of Hymn 5.)

In this way Novalis could glance back to a time in which gods moved among men, when everything took place spiritually because spirits and souls had not yet descended into earthly bodies. He perceived a point of transition: how death hit the world and how the human beings during this time placed death as their earthly shadowing and how he tried to brighten it up through fantasy and art. But death remained a riddle.

Then something of universal significance happened. Novalis could perceive the universal meaning of what had happened at that time on earth. Souls from the kingdoms of nature descended to the earth. Forgotten were the memories of their spiritual original existence, yet a unique spiritual Being remained in this universal womb of creation from which everything descended. One Being provisionally held back; it had held itself above and only provisionally sent its gift of grace downward, and then, when human beings needed it the most, it also descend into the earthly sphere. It remained in the spiritual spheres above the being of the spiritual light, this Being was hidden behind the physical sun. It held itself in heavenly spheres and descended when human beings needed to once again be able to rise up to spiritual worlds. It descended with the Mystery of Golgotha when Christ appeared in a physical body.

Humanity understands Christ in His universal unfolding when the life of Jesus of Nazareth is followed back to His spiritual origins, to the unsolvable riddle of death. The Greek spirit of death appears as a pondering muse, as an enigma which cannot be solved. Even the Greeks sensed that the riddle which is hidden in the youth's soul, found its solution with the Event of Golgotha, that here victory overcomes death and as a result a new impulse is given to humanity.

This Novalis could see and as a result there appeared to him, from the mystery of faith and the mystery wisdom, the Star which the old Magi had followed. As a result he understood the actual essence of what the Christ death implied. In the night of the soul the riddle of death revealed itself to him, the riddle of the Christ. This was it, which this extraordinary individual wanted to learn—through the memory of earlier lives—what the Christ, what the event of Golgotha signified for the world.

Hymns to the Night
I

Before all the wondrous shows of the widespread space around him, what living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light—with its colors, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? The giant-world of the unresting constellations inhales it as the innermost soul of life, and floats dancing in its blue flood—the sparkling, ever-tranquil stone, the thoughtful, imbibing plant, and the wild, burning multiform beast inhales it—but more than all, the lordly stranger with the sense-filled eyes, the swaying walk, and the sweetly closed, melodious lips. Like a king over earthly nature, it rouses every force to countless transformations, binds and unbinds innumerable alliances, hangs its heavenly form around every earthly substance.—Its presence alone reveals the marvelous splendor of the kingdoms of the world.

Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night. Afar lies the world—sunk in a deep grave—waste and lonely is its place. In the chords of the bosom blows a deep sadness. I am ready to sink away in drops of dew, and mingle with the ashes.—The distances of memory, the wishes of youth, the dreams of childhood, the brief joys and vain hopes of a whole long life, arise in gray garments, like an evening vapor after the sunset. In other regions the light has pitched its joyous tents. What if it should never return to its children, who wait for it with the faith of innocence?

What springs up all at once so sweetly boding in my heart, and stills the soft air of sadness? Dost thou also take a pleasure in us, dark Night? What holdest thou under thy mantle, that with hidden power affects my soul? Precious balm drips from thy hand out of its bundle of poppies. Thou upliftest the heavy-laden wings of the soul. Darkly and inexpressibly are we moved—joy-startled, I see a grave face that, tender and worshipful, inclines toward me, and, amid manifold entangled locks, reveals the youthful loveliness of the Mother. How poor and childish a thing seems to me now the Light—how joyous and welcome the departure of the day—because the Night turns away from thee thy servants, you now strew in the gulfs of space those flashing globes, to proclaim thy omnipotence—thy return—in seasons of thy absence. More heavenly than those glittering stars we hold the eternal eyes which the Night hath opened within us. Farther they see than the palest of those countless hosts—needing no aid from the light, they penetrate the depths of a loving soul—that fills a loftier region with bliss ineffable. Glory to the queen of the world, to the great prophet of the holier worlds, to the guardian of blissful love—she sends thee to me—thou tenderly beloved—the gracious sun of the Night,—now am I awake—for now am I thine and mine—thou hast made me know the Night—made of me a man—consume with spirit-fire my body, that I, turned to finer air, may mingle more closely with thee, and then our bridal night endure forever.

II

Must the morning always return? Will the despotism of the earthly never cease? Unholy activity consumes the angel-visit of the Night. Will the time never come when Love's hidden sacrifice shall burn eternally? To the Light a season was set; but everlasting and boundless is the dominion of the Night.—Endless is the duration of sleep. Holy Sleep—gladden not too seldom in this earthly day-labor, the devoted servant of the Night. Fools alone mistake thee, knowing nought of sleep but the shadow which, in the twilight of the real Night, thou pitifully castest over us. They feel thee not in the golden flood of the grapes—in the magic oil of the almond tree—and the brown juice of the poppy. They know not that it is thou who hauntest the bosom of the tender maiden, and makest a heaven of her lap—never suspect it is thou, opening the doors to Heaven, that steppest to meet them out of ancient stories, bearing the key to the dwellings of the blessed, silent messenger of secrets infinite.

III

Once when I was shedding bitter tears, when, dissolved in pain, my hope was melting away, and I stood alone by the barren mound which in its narrow dark bosom hid the vanished form of my life—lonely as never yet was lonely man, driven by anxiety unspeakable—powerless, and no longer anything but a conscious misery.—As there I looked about me for help, unable to go on or to turn back, and clung to the fleeting, extinguished life with an endless longing:—then, out of the blue distances—from the hills of my ancient bliss, came a shiver of twilight—and at once snapt the bond of birth—the chains of the Light. Away fled the glory of the world, and with it my mourning—the sadness flowed together into a new, unfathomable world—Thou, Night-inspiration, heavenly Slumber, didst come upon me—the region gently upheaved itself; over it hovered my unbound, newborn spirit. The mound became a cloud of dust—and through the cloud I saw the glorified face of my beloved. In her eyes eternity reposed—I laid hold of her hands, and the tears became a sparkling bond that could not be broken. Into the distance swept by, like a tempest, thousands of years. On her neck I welcomed the new life with ecstatic tears. It was the first, the only dream—and just since then I have held fast an eternal, unchangeable faith in the heaven of the Night, and its Light, the Beloved.

IV

Now I know when will come the last morning—when the Light no more scares away Night and Love—when sleep shall be without waking, and but one continuous dream. I feel in me a celestial exhaustion. Long and weariful was my pilgrimage to the holy grave, and crushing was the cross. The crystal wave, which, imperceptible to the ordinary sense, springs in the dark bosom of the mound against whose foot breaks the flood of the world, he who has tasted it, he who has stood on the mountain frontier of the world, and looked across into the new land, into the abode of the Night—truly he turns not again into the tumult of the world, into the land where dwells the Light in ceaseless unrest.

On those heights he builds for himself tabernacles—tabernacles of peace, there longs and loves and gazes across, until the welcomest of all hours draws him down into the waters of the spring—afloat above remains what is earthly, and is swept back in storms, but what became holy by the touch of love, runs free through hidden ways to the region beyond, where, like fragrances, it mingles with love asleep.

Still wakest thou, cheerful Light, that weary man to his labor—and into me pourest joyous life—but thou wilest me not away from Memory's moss-grown monument. Gladly will I stir busy hands, everywhere behold where thou hast need of me—praise the lustre of thy splendor—pursue unwearied the lovely harmonies of thy skilled handicraft—gladly contemplate the clever pace of thy mighty, luminous clock—explore the balance of the forces and the laws of the wondrous play of countless worlds and their seasons. But true to the Night remains my secret heart, and to creative Love, her daughter. Canst thou show me a heart eternally true? has thy sun friendly eyes that know me? do thy stars lay hold of my longing hand? and return me the tender pressure and the caressing word? was it thou did adorn them with colors and a flickering outline—or was it she who gave to thy jewels a higher, a dearer weight? What delight, what pleasure offers thy life, to outweigh the transports of Death? Wears not everything that inspires us the color of the Night? She sustains thee mother-like, and to her thou owest all thy glory. Thou wouldst vanish into thyself—in boundless space thou wouldst dissolve, if she did not hold thee fast, if she swaddled thee not, so that thou grewest warm, and flaming, begot the universe. Truly I was, before thou wast—the mother sent me with my brothers and sisters to inhabit thy world, to hallow it with love that it might be an ever-present memorial—to plant it with flowers unfading. As yet they have not ripened, these thoughts divine—as yet is there small trace of our coming revelation—One day thy clock will point to the end of time, and then thou shalt be as one of us, and shalt, full of ardent longing, be extinguished and die. I feel in me the close of thy activity—heavenly freedom, and blessed return. With wild pangs I recognize thy distance from our home, thy resistance against the ancient, glorious heaven. Thy rage and thy raving are in vain. Unscorchable stands the cross—victory-banner of our breed.

Over I journey
And for each pain
A pleasant sting only
Shall one day remain.
Yet in a few moments
Then free am I,
And intoxicated
In Love's lap lie.
Life everlasting
Lifts, wave-like, at me,
I gaze from its summit
Down after thee.
Your lustre must vanish
Yon mound underneath—
A shadow will bring thee
Thy cooling wreath.
Oh draw at my heart, love,
Draw till I'm gone,
That, fallen asleep, I
Still may love on.
I feel the flow of
Death's youth-giving flood
To balsam and ether
Transform my blood—
I live all the daytime
In faith and in might
And in holy fire
I die every night.

V

In ancient times, over the widespread families of men an iron Fate ruled with dumb force. A gloomy oppression swathed their heavy souls—the earth was boundless—the abode of the gods and their home. From eternal ages stood its mysterious structure. Beyond the red hills of the morning, in the sacred bosom of the sea, dwelt the sun, the all-enkindling, living Light. An aged giant upbore the blissful world. Fast beneath mountains lay the first-born sons of mother Earth. Helpless in their destroying fury against the new, glorious race of gods, and their kindred, glad-hearted men. The ocean's dark green abyss was the lap of a goddess. In crystal grottos revelled a luxuriant folk. Rivers, trees, flowers, and beasts had human wits. Sweeter tasted the wine—poured out by Youth-abundance—a god in the grape-clusters—a loving, motherly goddess upgrew in the full golden sheaves—love's sacred inebriation was a sweet worship of the fairest of the god-ladies—Life rustled through the centuries like one spring-time, an ever-variegated festival of heaven-children and earth-dwellers. All races childlike adored the ethereal, thousand-fold flame as the one sublimest thing in the world. There was but one notion, a horrible dream-shape—

That fearsome to the merry tables strode,
A wrapt the spirit there in wild fright.
The gods themselves no counsel knew nor showed
To fill the anxious hearts with comfort light.
Mysterious was the monster's pathless road,
Whose rage no prayer nor tribute could requite;
'Twas Death who broke the banquet up with fears,
With anguish, dire pain, and bitter tears.

Eternally from all things here disparted
That sway the heart with pleasure's joyous flow,
Divided from the loved ones who've departed,
Tossed by longing vain, unceasing woe—
In a dull dream to struggle, faint and thwarted,
Seemed all was granted to the dead below.
Broke lay the merry wave of human bliss
On Death's inevitable, rocky cliff.

With daring spirit and a passion deep,
Did man ameliorate the horrid blight,
A gentle youth puts out his torch, to sleep—
The end, just like a harp's sigh, comes light.
Cool shadow-floods o'er melting memory creep,
So sang the song, into its sorry need.
Still undeciphered lay the endless Night—
The solemn symbol of a far-off might.

The old world began to decline. The pleasure-garden of the young race withered away—up into more open, desolate regions, forsaking his childhood, struggled the growing man. The gods vanished with their retinue—Nature stood alone and lifeless. Dry Number and rigid Measure bound it with iron chains. Into dust and air the priceless blossoms of life fell away in words obscure. Gone was wonder-working Faith, and its all-transforming, all-uniting angel-comrade, the Imagination. A cold north wind blew unkindly over the rigid plain, and the rigid wonderland first froze, then evaporated into ether. The far depths of heaven filled with glowing worlds. Into the deeper sanctuary, into the more exalted region of feeling, the soul of the world retired with all its earthly powers, there to rule until the dawn should break of universal Glory. No longer was the Light the abode of the gods, and the heavenly token of their presence—they drew over themselves the veil of the Night. The Night became the mighty womb of revelations—into it the gods went back—and fell asleep, to go abroad in new and more glorious shapes over the transfigured world. Among the people who too early were become of all the most scornful and insolently estranged from the blessed innocence of youth, appeared the New World with a face never seen before—in the poverty of a poetic shelter—a son of the first virgin and mother—the eternal fruit of mysterious embrace. The foreboding, rich-blossoming wisdom of the East at once recognized the beginning of the new age—A star showed the way to the humble cradle of the king. In the name of the distant future, they did him homage with lustre and fragrance, the highest wonders of Nature. In solitude the heavenly heart unfolded to a flower-chalice of almighty love—upturned toward the supreme face of the father, and resting on the bliss-foreboding bosom of the sweetly solemn mother. With deifying fervor the prophetic eye of the blooming child beheld the years to come, foresaw, untroubled over the earthly lot of his own days, the beloved offspring of his divine stem. Ere long the most childlike souls, by true love marvellously possessed, gathered about him. Like flowers sprang up a strange new life in his presence. Words inexhaustible and the most joyful tidings fell like sparks of a divine spirit from his friendly lips. From a far shore, born under the clear sky of Hellas, came a singer to Palestine, and gave up his whole heart to the wonder-child:

The youth thou art who ages long hast stood
Upon our graves, so deeply lost in thought;
A sign of comfort in the dusky gloom
For high humanity, a joyful start.
What dropped us all into abyssmal woe,
Pulls us forward with sweet yearning now.
In everlasting life death found its goal,
For thou art Death who at last makes us whole.

Filled with joy, the singer went on to Hindustan—his heart intoxicated with the sweetest love; and poured it out in fiery songs under the balmy sky, so that a thousand hearts bowed to him, and the good news sprang up with a thousand branches. Soon after the singer's departure, his precious life was made a sacrifice for the deep fall of man—He died in his youth, torn away from his beloved world, from his weeping mother, and his trembling friends. His lovely mouth emptied the dark cup of unspeakable woes—in ghastly fear the birth of the new world drew near. Hard he wrestled with the terrors of old Death—Heavy lay the weight of the old world upon him. Yet once more he looked fondly at his mother—then came the releasing hand of eternal love, and he fell asleep. Only a few days hung a deep veil over the roaring sea, over the quaking land—countless tears wept his loved ones—the mystery was unsealed—heavenly spirits heaved the ancient stone from the gloomy grave. Angels sat by the Sleeper—delicately shaped from his dreams—awoken in new Godlike glory; he clomb the limits of the new-born world—buried with his own hand the old corpse in the abandoned hollow, and with a hand almighty laid upon it a stone which no power shall ever again upheave.

Yet weep thy loved ones tears of joy, tears of feeling and endless thanksgiving over your grave—joyously startled, they see thee rise again, and themselves with thee—behold thee weep with sweet fervor on the blessed bosom of thy mother, solemnly walking with thy friends, uttering words plucked as from the Tree of Life; see thee hasten, full of longing, into thy father's arms, bearing with thee youthful humanity, and the inexhaustible cup of the golden future. Soon the mother hastened after thee—in heavenly triumph—she was the first with thee in the new home. Since then, long ages have flowed past, and in ever-increasing splendor have stirred your new creation—and thousands have, away from pangs and tortures, followed thee, filled with faith and longing and fidelity—walking about with thee and the heavenly virgin in the kingdom of love, serving in the temple of heavenly Death, and forever thine.

Uplifted is the stone—
And all mankind is risen—
We all remain thine own.
And vanished is our prison.
All troubles flee away
Thy golden bowl before,
For Earth and Life give way
At the last and final supper.

To the marriage Death doth call—
The virgins standeth back—
The lamps burn lustrous all—
Of oil there is no lack—
If the distance would only fill
With the sound of you walking alone
And that the stars would call
Us all with human tongues and tone.

Unto thee, O Mary
A thousand hearts aspire.
In this life of shadows
Thee only they desire.
In thee they hope for delivery
With visionary expectation—
If only thou, O holy being
Could clasp them to thy breast.

With bitter torment burning,
So many who are consumed
At last from this world turning
To thee have looked and fled,
Helpful thou hast appeared
To so many in pain.
Now to them we come,
To never go out again.

At no grave can weep
Any who love and pray.
The gift of Love they keep,
From none can it be taken away.
To soothe and quiet his longing,
Night comes and inspires—
Heaven's children round him thronging
Watch and guard his heart.

Have courage, for life is striding
To endless life along;
Stretched by inner fire,
Our sense becomes transfigured.
One day the stars above
Shall flow in golden wine,
We will enjoy it all,
And as stars we will shine.

The love is given freely,
And Separation is no more.
The whole life heaves and surges
Like a sea without a shore.
Just one night of bliss—
One everlasting poem—
And the sun we all share
Is the face of God.

6
Longing for Death

Into the bosom of the earth,
Out of the Light's dominion,
Death's pains are but a bursting forth,
Sign of glad departure.
Swift in the narrow little boat,
Swift to the heavenly shore we float.

Blessed be the everlasting Night,
And blessed the endless slumber.
We are heated by the day too bright,
And withered up with care.
We're weary of a life abroad,
And we now want our Father's home.

What in this world should we all
Do with love and with faith?
That which is old is set aside,
And the new may perish also.
Alone he stands and sore downcast
Who loves with pious warmth the Past.

The Past where the light of the senses
In lofty flames did rise;
Where the Father's face and hand
All men did recognize;
And, with high sense, in simplicity
Many still fit the original pattern.

The Past wherein, still rich in bloom,
Man's strain did burgeon glorious,
And children, for the world to come,
Sought pain and death victorious,
And, through both life and pleasure spake,
Yet many a heart for love did break.

The Past, where to the flow of youth
God still showed himself,
And truly to an early death
Did commit his sweet life.
Fear and torture patiently he bore
So that he would be loved forever.

With anxious yearning now we see
That Past in darkness drenched,
With this world's water never we
Shall find our hot thirst quenched.
To our old home we have to go
That blessed time again to know.

What yet doth hinder our return
To loved ones long reposed?
Their grave limits our lives.
We are all sad and afraid.
We can search for nothing more—
The heart is full, the world is void.

Infinite and mysterious,
Thrills through us a sweet trembling—
As if from far there echoed thus
A sigh, our grief resembling.
Our loved ones yearn as well as we,
And sent to us this longing breeze.

Down to the sweet bride, and away
To the beloved Jesus.
Have courage, evening shades grow gray
To those who love and grieve.
A dream will dash our chains apart,
And lay us in the Father's lap.

The idea of the “deed body” (Volume 2, pages 131ff.) is particularly characteristic of Bruno Wille's “Revelations of the Juniper Tree”. It shows how strongly the longing lives in the best of our minds to deepen present-day scientific thought in a way that corresponds to a more fundamental human urge for knowledge; but on the other hand, it also shows how powerless this longing proves to be when one recoils at the gates of what the theosophical current asserts itself to be today. It is the question of what is lasting, what is immortal in the human being, which the will approaches with its “deed body”. First of all, it should be made clear what this idea of the “deed body” means if it is isolated from the magnificent poetic description of Brunno W ille. The human being, like every other being, is the center of effects that can be regarded as his “deeds”. What I do makes an impression on my environment; it continues my existence beyond the limits of my form, as it were. What I add to the world in this way cannot be lost. For every effect becomes the cause of a new effect. And all these effects bear the stamp, the seal of my personality. They are only there because I am there. And they will be there in all eternity because I once was there. And just as the power of the All-Soul lives in my physical form and shapes me, so it forms the sum of my imperishable “deeds” and my “deed body” through me. Schön executes this will in the most diverse ways. He lets his hero say to the disbelieving friend: “When you speak, you like to move your hand and arm. In fact, on closer inspection, every one of your movements is characteristic. But every movement shakes the air. So your individuality is expressed in all possible air tracks.” And when the friend objects later: ‘Without a body should I live on? To believe that, I think too materialistically. Without a body, no spirit!’ the ‘All-seeing One’ replies: ”Agreed! But there is no lack of a body for your survival! The world offers you material for an immeasurably richer embodiment. Not in the sense that the old soul slips out of the old body into a new one. That is dualistic thinking. For me, body and soul are one – only viewed from different sides, one time from the outside, with the senses – the other time from the inside, directly. So body and soul can never separate. ... “Around the old body ‘the new one has developed out of it—just as a moth develops out of a caterpillar...’—”Your individuality may renounce a certain sphere of activity, this sensual manifestation, but that doesn't mean that it ceases to be effective altogether. No, it continues to work busily—and so it lives! Or do you want to call someone destroyed who continues to exercise his individuality in the same vigorous way, only in a slightly different field?” What Wille says here is, of course, all correct. But it is equally correct for the stone, the plant, the animal and the human being. The deeds of a worm do not differ essentially from those of a human being in the relationships that Wille cites. In the sum of the worm's actions, “individuality” is in the same sense as in the sum of human actions, if one goes no further than will. And this stems from the fact that he attributes soul and soul and soul again to everything, without distinguishing in the realm of the soul as one distinguishes things and beings in the realm of the senses. The question of the eternal in man is not exhausted if I merely show the eternity of his actions. For what matters in the case of man is not merely that he should exercise these actions, but that he should know them to be connected with his self, with his soul being. So the question must be: Do I know the eternal effects of my individuality as mine? Are the members of my “body of deeds” held together by my ego in some way? As long as I live physically, I recognize my physical head as mine. When its parts have decomposed in the earth, I can no longer do that. But will I do that with my “deed body”? There is no answer to this question if one is content with Willes's path. To get an answer, one must not only ask about the eternity of the effects, but also about the eternity of the cause. A comparison should clarify what is to be said here. I went to bed yesterday and got up today. I do not claim that I have survived the night because I believe that my actions of yesterday still express their effects today, but because I know that the cause of these effects will attach my actions today to those of yesterday. I cannot let my actions of yesterday speak for my continued existence, but I must find them again myself and connect them with my actions today. These effects of yesterday must be my destiny today if they are to have any significance for my permanent personal being. — In this sense, the eternal in man is only grasped when one acknowledges what the “All-Seer” clearly rejects with the words: “I do not assume re-embodiment, but always-embodiment.” This eternal embodiment of the “body of action” contradicts clear observation when one focuses one's eye on the specific human being, not on an indefinite soul. With regard to the human soul, one can only speak of duration if it can remember the cause of its actions. And it knows itself to be gone if it remains as if from yesterday to today. Only those who have allowed themselves to call death a brother of sleep have grasped this in the right way. The will shrinks from re-embodiment. It says to itself: “Body and soul are one to me... They can never separate” (page 163). But he himself said before: ”What is so peculiar about this hand - or my facial features - or even my shape? Is it the substances that compose them? These atoms will be discarded in a few years and replaced by new ones. Several times already, my body has been rebuilt with completely new building blocks. I now ask, can such a metabolism affect my characteristic essence? Can this essence be the mere product of substances combining? No! The material composition is only an external representation of the deeper essence” (page 151, volume 2). Certainly: body and soul are one; but only at a particular time. Just as little as this contradicts their unity, which is emphasized by the fact that the atoms of matter are discarded after a few years and replaced by new ones: just as little does it contradict it when the “deeper being,” which discards its atoms of matter at death, surrounds itself with new ones again after a time. It will then be one with them again. When one sees as clearly as Bruno Wille, then only a hindrance can be invented that makes one shrink from re-embodiment, and this hindrance lies merely in the unfamiliarity of the idea. — Well, this hindrance will gradually fade away. Without the idea of re-embodiment, Bruno Wille's expositions are an organism without a head. — The minds of our time have only one thing to get used to. They must learn to perceive that which they are compelled to assume. If one says that the material composition is only the outer representation of the deeper being, then one must not limit oneself to characterizing only this material composition and its similar continuation in the “body of action”, but one must progress to pursuing the deeper being itself. But for this the mode of thinking is not sufficient, which, despite all higher impulses, remains attached to material processes. For this, higher soul powers must be awakened, which slumber in man under ordinary circumstances, and which must then be applied to supersensible facts just as surely and consistently as the natural scientist applies his to the sensory facts. We act in the spirit of natural science only when we confront the whole of reality with all the powers of knowledge within our reach, but not when we allow our knowledge to be limited by the prejudices of our current natural science. Only when we recognize the permanence of the cause in the human being, and know that this being finds itself in ever new embodiments, and that the deeds of the previous embodiments are the fate for the subsequent ones: then we think in the realm of the human soul life as we think today as confessors of the scientific world view already in relation to the facts of material transformations. The great laws of reincarnation (re-embodiment) and karma (the interweaving of fate through re-embodiments) are concepts in the spiritual realm that are completely in line with all our present-day scientific concepts. (An in-depth discussion of reincarnation and karma will soon be given in this journal).

Thus, it is necessary to awaken the soul abilities that lie dormant in ordinary life, which make it possible to perceive the “deeper being” that finds its “external representation” in the material composition. A recently published booklet by the English theosophist C.W. Leadbeater, translated into German by Günther Wagner, deals with this “deeper essence”: “The Astral Plane: Its Scenery, Inhabitants, and Phenomena” (Leipzig, Th.Griebens Verlag, L.Fernau). It deals with the states that the “deeper being” of man undergoes when it is not externally represented in “material composition”, and with the things and beings that we get to know when we have awakened our dormant powers of perception to such states. I can already see in my mind's eye the sneer of all those who, in the arrogance of their “sober way of thinking,” look down mockingly on those who speak of an “astral world” and yet want to strictly adhere to a “scientific way of thinking.” For them it is clear that such a thing leads into the deepest abysses of superstition and obscurantism, which in their “enlightened” opinion dare to “cheerfully come out into the sunlight” again in our time, even though “sober thinking” has “come so gloriously far”. Well, today such uncomfortable “obscurants” have to console themselves with Voltaire's beautiful words: “Every new truth is like the ambassadors of civilized states at the courts of barbarians; they only find the recognition they deserve after many obstacles and insults.” — However, we should not be under any illusion: works such as Leadbeater's “Astral Plane” are difficult to understand at all within the currently prevailing modes of thought. They are misunderstood not only by those who dismiss them with a sneer as belonging to the realm of the darkest superstition, but often also by those who profess belief in them. Anyone who has no personal experience where the realm of sensory facts ends easily forms a completely false idea of the kind of reality that prevails in the regions Leadbeater speaks of. Where our sense organs receive no impressions, behind the threshold where gross material life ends, things look quite different from the way they do in our sensory world. But if an observer of supersensible realms wants to make himself understood, he has to speak in images taken from the sensory world. This is easily misinterpreted. People believe that the supersensible world really looks as the images taken from the sensory world, which the speaker must use, express it literally. Everything we know about the regions we are talking about here looks like the silhouettes of a real process on a wall. Leadbeater expresses this (page 4) clearly enough: “... it is easy to understand that an inexperienced visitor to this new world has great difficulty understanding what he sees in reality, and an even greater difficulty in expressing what he has seen in the very inadequate language of the ordinary world.” — Even greater obstacles stand in the way of proper understanding here, of course, if one wants to judge such things without having any inclination to engage at all with what is actually meant. In this case, our “sober” thinkers are those who proudly call themselves “enlightened.” In order to be constantly present, the deeper human being must be somewhere in the time when it is not present in “material composition”. Well, in this time it wanders through two regions of the world that do not belong to the sensual ones in the usual way. These are the so-called astral and devachan regions. Leadbeater's writing speaks of the former. These regions are always and everywhere present. We also live in them when our deeper being is represented in 'material composition'. They are just not sensually perceptible. Nevertheless, important things happen there that extend their effects into our sensory world. The mere sensual observer of the world can then only perceive these effects and knows nothing of their causes. But the one who has awakened the powers of knowledge for the processes in these regions in his “material” presentation hears these causes, and he alone can therefore find an explanation for the corresponding effects in the sense world. Certain higher insights are therefore only possible when these powers of knowledge are awakened, that is, for the one who can see into these regions. In Leadbeater's booklet, for example, there is an account of the communication between those initiated into higher knowledge — the so-called adepts — and their disciples. The results of such communication naturally extend into the sensory world. Those who have never heard of astral processes know nothing of the sources of such results. This applies especially to those who speak of the uselessness of supersensible research. A person must seek and investigate the world as much as possible if he wants to work in it. Otherwise he will grope in the dark in a world of effects whose causes remain incomprehensible to him. Those who are not concerned with the supersensible also do not understand the sensible; they know only a part of the full reality. It should also be emphasized here that Leadbeater's writing is not meant to tempt anyone to “swear by the master's words.” The author strongly objects to accepting the information as infallible dogma. Unconditional authority must be claimed least of all in these matters, especially when it comes to the characteristics of the individual observations. For, it must be frankly admitted, in these supersensible regions everyone brings with him his prepossessions from the sense world, and these affect and color his observations in a way that makes our illusions in the sense world seem quite insignificant by comparison. This goes so far that, for example, in the astral region one sees things that are not there at all and does not see other things that are there. No one has the right to speak specifically about individual exhibitions, because it may be your own fault if you cannot find something that someone else has seen. But what is there and has been observed can be talked about, even if someone else has not found it. Leadbeater's account, as he himself admits, cannot claim to be complete. His view is by no means unbiased. In his writing, one finds a preference for the state after death, while the phenomena before and during the birth of a human being have not been given the attention they deserve. Even if the former are perhaps closer to the interest of people, for the research and enlightenment of the supersensible phenomena, the highly interesting astral processes before and during the incarnation of a human being are incomparably more important. Likewise, Leadbeater leaves untouched an area in the astral region that corresponds to what we call “history” in our sensory field. For the astral region also has its history. For example, this “history” provides one of the reasons why the Theosophical movement emerged in the world in the last third of the nineteenth century. Only in the astral can the deeper reasons for this be found. Some of the complexities are presented by Leadbeater too simply and too clearly. Important insights into the connections between living beings that we can gain are completely missing. And what is said about the treatment of the so-called humors, the “fiery and watery temperaments” by medieval researchers (page 65), is incorrect. Every observer of these things in the supersensible region knows that important sources for the knowledge of what we call “temperament” are opened here. I need hardly say that I warmly recommend the writing to all who want to enter this field, although I could still greatly increase the list of what is missing. It is the clearest and, in some respects, best writing on this subject. (For my listeners in Berlin, I might mention that I will be giving a series of lectures on the “astral world” this fall. The time and place will be announced later.) — For us Germans, I would just like to add that we should finally replace the term “astral world” with another, since it is generally admitted that it is as misleading as possible.

[ 1 ] In Max Dessoir’s book, From Beyond the Soul¹ there is a brief section in which the systematic noetic investigation, or spiritual science, called “anthroposophical” and associated with my name, is stigmatised as scientifically untenable. Now it might well be argued that any dialogue between someone with the scientific outlook of Dessoir and an upholder of this anthroposophical method must be a waste of time. For the latter necessarily posits a field of purely noetic experience which the former categorically denies and relegates to the realm of fantasy. Apparently then one can speak of spiritual science and its findings only to someone who is antecedently convinced of the factuality of that field.

This would be true enough if the spokesman for anthroposophy had nothing to bring forward but his own inner personal experiences, and if he then simply set these up alongside the findings of a science based on sensory observation and the scientific elaboration thereof. You could then say: the professor of science, so defined, must refuse to regard the experiences of the spiritual researcher as realities; the latter can only expect to impress those who have already adopted his own standpoint.

[ 2 ] And yet this conclusion depends on a misconception of what I mean by anthroposophy.² It is quite true that anthroposophy relies on psychic apprehensions that are dependent neither on sense-impressions nor on scientific propositions based on these and these alone. It must be conceded therefore that prima facie the two types of apprehension are divided from one another by an unbridgable gulf. Nevertheless this turns out not to be the case. There is a common ground on which the two methodologies may properly encounter one another and on which debate is possible concerning the findings of both. It may be characterised as follows.

[ 3 ] The spokesman for anthroposophy maintains, on the basis of apprehensions that are not merely his private and personal experiences, that the process of human cognition can be further developed after a certain fixed point, a point beyond which scientific research, relying solely on sensory observation and inference therefrom, refuses to go. To avoid a lot of tedious paraphrases I propose, in what follows, to designate the methodology based on sensory observation and its subsequent inferential elaboration by the term “anthropology”; requesting the reader’s indulgence for this abnormal usage. It will be employed throughout strictly with that reference. Anthroposophical research, then, reckons to begin from where anthropology leaves off.

[ 4 ] The spokesman for anthropology limits himself to the method of relating his experience of concepts of the understanding with his experience through the senses. The spokesman for anthroposophy realises the fact that these concepts are capable (irrespective of the circumstance that they are to be related to sense impressions) of opening a life of their own within the psyche. Further, that by the unfolding of this energy they effect a development in the psyche itself. And he has learnt how the psyche, if it pays the requisite attention to this process, makes the discovery that organs of spirit are disclosing their presence there. (In employing the expression ‘organs of spirit” I adopt, and extend, the linguistic usage of Goethe, who referred to “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears” in expounding his philosophical position).³ These organs amount to formations in the psyche analogous to what the sense-organs are in the body. It goes without saying that they are to be understood as exclusively psychic. Any attempt to connect them with some kind of somatic formation must be ruled out as far as anthroposophy is concerned. Spiritual organs are to be conceived as never in any manner departing from the psychic and entering the texture of the somatic. Any such encroachment is, for anthroposophy, a pathological formation with which it will have nothing whatever to do. And the whole manner in which the development of these organs is conceived should be enough to satisfy a bona fide enquirer that, on the subject of illusions, visions, hallucinations and so forth, the ideas of anthroposophy are the same as those that are normally accepted in anthropology.⁴ When the findings of anthroposophy are equated with abnormal experiences, miscalled “psychic”, or “psychical”, the argument is invariably based on misunderstanding or on an insufficient acquaintance with what anthroposophy actually maintains. Moreover no-one who had followed with a modicum of penetration the manner in which anthroposophy treats of the development of spiritual organs could possibly slip into the notion of its being a path that could lead to pathological syndromes. On the contrary, given such penetration, it will be realised that all the stages of psychic apprehension which a human being, according to anthroposophy, experiences in his progress towards intuition of spirit, lie in a domain exclusively psychic; so that sensory experience and normal intellectual activity continue alongside of them unaltered from what they were before this territory was opened up. The plethora of misunderstandings that are current upon this aspect of anthroposophical cognition arise from the fact that many people have difficulty in focusing their attention on what is purely and distinctively psychic. The power to form ideas fails them, unless it is supported by some surreptitious reference to sensory phenomena. Failing that, their mental capacity wilts, and ideation sinks to an energy-level below that of dreaming—to the level of dreamless sleep, where it is no longer conscious. It may be said that the consciousness of such minds is congested with the after-effects, or the actual effects, of sense-impressions; and this congestion entails a corresponding slumber of all that would be recognised as psychic, if it could be seized at all. It is even true to say that many minds approach the properly psychic with hopeless misunderstanding precisely because they are unable, when it confronts them, to stay awake, as they do when they are confronted by the sensory content of consciousness. Such is the predicament of all in whom the faculty of vigilant attention is only strong enough for the purposes of everyday life. This sounds surprising, but I would recommend anyone who finds it incredible to ponder carefully a certain objection raised by Brentano against the philosopher William James. “It is necessary,” writes Brentano, “to distinguish between the act of sensing and that upon which the act is directed and the two are as certainly different from one another as my present recollection of a past event is from the event itself; or, to take an even more drastic example, as my hatred of an enemy is from the object of that hate.” He adds that the error he is nailing does “turn up here and there”, and he continues:

Among others it has been embraced by William James, who endeavoured to establish it in a longish address to the International Congress on Psychology in 1905. Because, when I look into a room, there is evidently not only the room but also my looking; because fancied images of sensible objects only distinguish themselves gradually from objectively stimulated ones; because, finally, we call some bodies beautiful, and yet the difference between beautiful and ugly relates to different emotions—therefore we must stop regarding physical and psychic phenomena as two different classes of appearance! I find it hard to understand how the speaker himself could be unaware of the weakness of these arguments. To appear simultaneously is not to appear as one and the same. For simultaneity is less than identity. That was why Descartes could recommend his readers, without fear of contradiction, to deny, at least to begin with, that the room which I see is, and to hold fast to the-fact-that-I-see-it as the one thing free from doubt. But if the first argument falls to the ground, then obviously the second one does also. For why should it matter that fancy differs from seeing only by the degree of intensity, since, even if the degrees of intensity were the same total similarity between fancying and seeing could prove no more than the similarity of fancying to a psychic phenomenon? Finally there is the argument from beauty. Surely it is a very odd sort of logic which draws, from that fact that pleasure in the beautiful is something psychic, the conclusion that that, with the appearance whereof the pleasure is connected, must also be something psychic! If that were so, every displeasure would be identical with what we are displeased about; and a man would have to be very careful not to regret a past mistakes, because the regret (being identical with the mistake) would repeat the mistake itself.

For all these reasons there ought not to be much fear that the authority of James, which he unfortunately shares with that of Mach among German psychologists, will seduce many people into overlooking such a glaring distinction.

All the same, this “overlooking of glaring distinctions” is far from rare. The reason is that our faculty of ideation only operates vigilantly with the somatic component of representation, the sense-impressions; the concurrent psychic factor is present to consciousness only to the feeble extent of experiences had during sleep. The stream of experience comes to us in two currents: one of them is apprehended wakefully; the other, the psychic, is seized concurrently, but only with a degree of awareness similar to the mentality of sleep, that is, with virtually no awareness at all. It is impermissible to ignore the fact that, during ordinary waking life, the psychology of sleep does not simply leave off; it continues alongside our waking experience; so that the specifically psychic only enters the field of perception if the subject is awake not only to the sense world (as is the case with ordinary consciousness), but also to the existentially psychic—which is the case with intuitive consciousness. It makes very little difference whether this latter (the slumber that persists within the waking state) is simply denied on crudely materialistic grounds or whether, with James, it is lumped in with the physical organism. The results in either case are much the same. Both ways lead to ill-starred myopias. Yet we ought not to be surprised that the psychic so often remains unperceived, when even a philosopher like William James is incapable of distinguishing it properly from the physical.⁵

[ 5 ] With those who are no better able than James to keep the positively psychic separate from the content of the psyche’s experience through the senses, it is difficult to speak of that part of the soul wherein the development of spiritual organs is observable. Because this development occurs at the very point on which they are incapable of directing attention. And it is just this point that leads from intellectual to intuitive knowledge.⁶

[ 6 ] It should be noted however that such a capacity to observe the authentically psychic is very elementary; it is the indispensable precondition, but it assures to the mind’s eye no more than the bare possibility of looking whither anthroposophy looks to find the psychic organs. This first glimpse bears the same relation to a soul fully equipped with the spiritual organs of which anthroposophy speaks as an undifferentiated living cell does to a full-blown creature furnished with sense organs. The soul is only conscious of possessing a particular organ of spirit to the extent that it is able to make use of it. For these organs are not something static; they are in continual movement. And when they are not being employed, it is not possible to be conscious of their presence. Thus, their apprehension and their use coincide. The manner in which their development and, with that, the possibility of observing them, is brought about will be found described in my anthroposophical writings. There is one point however I must briefly touch on here.

[ 7 ] Anyone given to serious reflection on the experiences occasioned through sense phenomena keeps coming up against questions which that reflection itself is at first inadequate to answer. This leads to the establishment by those who represent anthropology of boundaries of cognition. Recall, for instance, Du Bois-Reymond’s oration on the frontiers of natural knowledge, in which he maintained that man cannot know what is the actual nature of matter or of any elementary phenomenon of consciousness. All he can do is to come to a halt at these points in his reflection and acknowledge to himself: “there are boundaries of knowledge which the human mind cannot cross”. After that there are two possible attitudes he may adopt. He may rest content with the fact that knowledge is only attainable inside this limited zone and that anything outside the fence is the province of feelings, hopes, wishes, inklings. Or he can make a new start and form hypotheses concerning an extra-sensory realm. In that case he is making use of the understanding, in the faith that its judgments can be carried into a realm of which the senses perceive nothing. But, in doing so, he puts himself in peril of the agnostic’s objection: that the understanding is not entitled to form judgments concerning a reality for which it lacks the foundation of sense-perception. For it is these alone which could give content to judgments, and without such content concepts are empty.

[ 8 ] The attitude of an anthroposophically oriented science of the spirit to boundaries of cognition resembles neither the one nor the other of these. Not the second, because it is in substantial agreement with the view that the mind must lose the whole ground for reflection, if it rests satisfied with such ideas as are acquired through the senses and yet seeks to apply these ideas beyond the province of the senses. Not the first, because it realises that contact with those “boundaries” of knowledge evokes a certain psychic experience that has nothing to do with the content of ideation won from the senses. Certainly, if it is only this content that the mind presents to itself, then it is obliged, on further introspection, to admit: “this content can disclose nothing for cognition except a reproduction of sensory experience”. But it is otherwise if the mind goes a step further and asks itself: What is the nature of its own experience, when it fills itself with the kind of thoughts that are evoked by its contact with the normal boundaries of cognition? The same exercise of introspection may then lead it to say: “I cannot know in the ordinary sense with such thoughts: but if I succeed in inwardly contemplating this very impotence to know, I am made aware of how these thoughts become active in me”. Considered as normally cognitive ideas they remain silent, but as their silence communicates itself more and more to a man’s consciousness, they acquire an inner life of their own, which becomes one with the life of the soul. And then the soul notices that this experience has brought it to a pass that may be compared with that of a blind creature, which has not yet done much to cultivate its sense of touch. Initially, such a creature would simply keep on knocking up against things. It would sense the resistance of external realities. But out of this generalised sensation it could develop an inner life informed with a primitive consciousness—no longer a general sensation of collisions, but a consciousness that begins to diversify that sensation, remarking distinctions between hardness and softness, smoothness and roughness and so forth.

[ 9 ] In the same way, the soul is able to undergo, and to diversify, the experience it has with ideas it forms at the boundaries of cognition and to learn from them that those boundaries are simply events that occur when the psyche is stimulated by a touch of the spiritual world. The moment of awareness of such boundaries turns into an experience comparable with tactile experience in the sense world.⁷ In what it previously termed boundaries of cognition, it now sees a pneumato-psychic stimulus through a spiritual world. And out of the pondered experience it can have with the different boundaries of cognition, the general sense of a world of spirit separates out into a manifold perception thereof.

This is the manner in which the, so to say, humblest mode of perceptibility of the spiritual world becomes experiential. All that has been dealt with so far is the initial opening up of the psyche to the world of spirit, but it does show that anthroposophy, as I use the term, and the noetic experiences it ensues, do not connote all manner of nebulous personal affects, but a methodical development of authentic inner experience. This is not the place to demonstrate further how such inchoate spiritual perception is then improved by further psychic exercises and achievements, so that it becomes legitimate to use the vocabulary of touch in this context, or of other and “higher” modes of perception. For a cognitive psychology of this kind I must refer the reader to my anthroposophical books and articles. My present object is to state the principle basic to “spiritual perception” as it is understood in anthroposophy.

[ 10 ] I shall offer one other analogy to illustrate how the whole psychology of anthroposophical spiritual investigation differs from that of anthropology. Look at a few grains of wheat. They can be applied for the purposes of nutrition. Alternatively they can be planted in the soil, so that other wheat plants develop from them. The representations and ideas acquired through sensory experience can be retained in the mind with the effect that what is experienced in them is a reproduction of sensory reality. And they can also be experienced in another way: the energy they evince in the psyche by virtue of what they are, quite apart from the fact that they reproduce phenomena, can be allowed to act itself out. The first way may be compared with what happens to wheat grains when they are assimilated by a living creature as its means of nourishment. The second with the engendering of a new wheat plant through each grain. Of course we must bear in mind that, in the analogy, what is brought forth is a plant similar to the parent plant; whereas from an idea active in the mind the outcome is a force available for the formation of organs of the spirit. It must also be borne in mind that initial awareness of such inner forces can only be kindled by particularly potent ideas, like those “frontiers of knowledge” of which we have been speaking; but when once the mind has been alerted to the presence of such forces, other ideas and representations may also serve, though not quite so well, for further progress in the direction it has now taken.

[ 11 ] The analogy illustrates something else that anthroposophical research discovers concerning the actual psychology of mental representation. It is this. Whenever a seed of corn is processed for the purposes of nutrition, it is lifted out of the developmental pattern which is proper to it, and which ends in the formation of a new plant, but so also is a representation, whenever it is applied by the mind in producing a mental copy of sense-perception, diverted from its proper teleological pattern. The corresponding further development proper to a representation is to function as a force in the development of the psyche. Just as little as we find the laws of development built in to a plant, if we examine it for its nutritive value, do we find the essential nature of an idea or a representation, when we investigate its adequacy in reproducing for cognition the reality it mediates. That is not to say that no such investigation should be undertaken. It can all be investigated just as much as can the nutritive value of a seed. But then, just as the latter enquiry throws light on something quite different from the developmental laws of plant growth, so does an epistemology, which tests representations by the criterion of their value as images for cognition, reach conclusions about something other than the essential nature of ideation. The seed, as such, gave little indication of turning into nourishment: nor does it lie with representations, as such, to deliver copies for cognition. In fact, just as its application as nutriment is something quite external to the seed itself, so is cognitive reproduction irrelevant for representation. The truth is that what the psyche does lay hold of in its representations is its own waxing existence. Only through its own activity does it come about that the representations turn into media for the cognition of some reality.⁸

[ 12 ] There remains the question: how do representations turn into media for cognition? Anthroposophical observation, availing itself as it does of spiritual organs, inevitably answers this question differently from epistemological theories that renounce them. Its answer is as follows.

[ 13 ] Representations strictly as such—considered as what they themselves originally are—do indeed form part of the life of the soul; but they cannot become conscious there as long as the soul does not consciously use its spiritual organs. So long as they retain their original vitality they remain unconscious. The soul lives by means of them, but it can know nothing of them. They have to suppress (herabdämpfen) their own life in order to become conscious experiences of normal consciousness. This suppression is effected by every sense perception. Consequently, when the mind receives a sense impression, there is a benumbing (Herablähmung) of the life of the representation, and it is this benumbed representation which the psyche experiences as the medium of a cognition of outer reality.⁹All the representations and ideas that are related by the mind to an outer sense reality are inner spiritual experiences, whose life has been suppressed. In all our thoughts about an outer world of the senses, we have to do with deadened representations. And yet the life of the representation is not just annihilated; rather it is disjoined from the area of consciousness but continues to subsist in the nonconscious provinces of the psyche. That is where it is found again by the organs of the spirit. Just as the deadened ideas of the soul can be related to the sense world, so can the living ideas apprehended by spiritual organs be related to the spiritual world. But “boundary” concepts of the kind spoken of above, by their very nature, refuse to be deadened. Consequently they resist being related to any sense reality. And for that reason they become points of departure for spiritual perception.

[ 14 ] In my anthroposophical writings I have applied the term “imaginal” to representations that are apprehended by the psyche as living. It is a misunderstanding to confound the reference of this word with the form of expression (imagery) which has to be employed in order to analogously suggest such representations. What the word does mean may be elucidated in the following manner. If someone has a sense-perception while the outer object is impressing him, then the perception has a certain inner potency for him. If he turns away from the object, then he can re-present it to himself in a purely internal representation. But the intrinsic strength of the representation has now been reduced. Compared with the representation effected in the presence of the object, it is more or less shadowy. If he wants to enliven these shadowy representations of ordinary consciousness, he impregnates them with echoes of actual contemplation. He converts the representation into a visual image. Now such images are no other than the joint effects of representation and sensory life combined. But the “imaginal” representations of anthroposophy are not effected in this way at all. In order to bring them to pass, the soul must be familiar with the inner process that combines psychic representation with sense-impression, so familiar that it can hold at arms length the influx of the sense-impressions themselves (or of their echoes in after-experience) into the act of representing. This keeping at bay of post-sense-experiences can only be achieved, if the man has detected the way in which the activity of representing is pre-empted by these after experiences. Not until then is he in a position to combine his spiritual organs with the act itself and thereby to receive impressions of spiritual reality.

Thus the act of representing is impregnated from quite another side than in the case of sense-perception. And thus the mental experiences are positively different from those evoked by sense-perception. And yet they are not beyond all possibility of expression. They may be expressed by the following means. When a man perceives the colour yellow, he has an experience that is not simply optical but is also affective and empathetic, an experience of the nature of feeling. It may be more or less pronounced in different human beings, but it is never wholly absent. There is a beautiful chapter in Goethe’s Farbenlehre on the “sensuous-moral effect of colours”, in which he has described with great penetration the emotional by-effects for red, yellow, green and so forth. Now when the mind perceives something from a particular province of the spirit, it may happen that this spiritual perception has the same emotional by-effect as the sensory perception of yellow. The man knows that he is having this or that spiritual experience; and what he has before him in the representation is of course not the same as in a representation of the colour yellow. But he does have, as emotional by-effect, the same inner experience as when the colour yellow is before his eyes. He may then aver that he perceives the spirit experience as “yellow”. Of course he could choose to be more precise, always being careful to say: “the mind apprehends somewhat that affects the soul rather as the colour yellow affects it”. But such elaborate verbal precautions ought to be unnecessary for anyone who is already acquainted through anthroposophical literature with the process leading to spiritual perception. This literature gives a clear enough warning that the reality open to spiritual perception does not confront the organ of spirit after the fashion of an attenuated sense-object or event, nor in such a way that it could be rendered in ideas that are intuitions of sense (sinnlich-anschauliche) as commonly understood.¹⁰

[ 15 ] Just as the mind becomes acquainted through its spiritual organs with the spiritual world outside of a man, so does it come to know the spirit-being of the man himself. Anthroposophy observes this spirit-being as a member of the spiritual world. It proceeds from observation of a part of the spiritual world to ideas of human being which represent to it the spiritual man as he reveals himself in the human body. Anthropology, too, coming from the opposite direction, proceeds to ideas of human being. Once anthroposophy has reached the stage of developing the methods of observation already described, it attains to intuitions concerning the spiritual core of the human being as that reveals itself, within the sense-world, in the body. The acme of this self-revelation is the consciousness that permits sense-impressions to persist in the form of representations. Proceeding, as it does, from experiences of the extra-human spiritual world to the human being, anthroposophy finds the latter subsisting in a sensuous body and, within that body, developing the consciousness of sensible reality. The last thing it reaches is the soul’s activity in representation which is expressible in coherent imagery. Thereafter, and at the end, so to speak, of its journey of spiritual investigation, it can extend its gaze further; it can observe how positive activity in representation becomes half-paralysed through the percipient senses. It is this deadened representation process that anthroposophy sees (illumined from the spirit-side) as characterising the life of man in the sense-world, in so far as he is a representing being. Its philosophy of man is the final outcome of prior researches conducted purely in the realm of the spirit. Through what has transpired in the course of those researches, it comes at its notion of the human being living in the sense-world.

[ 16 ] Anthropology investigates the kingdoms of the sense-world. It also arrives, in due course, at the human being. It sees him combining the facts of the sense-world in his physical organism in such a way that consciousness arises, and that through consciousness outer reality is given in representations. The anthropologist sees these representations as arising out of the human organism. And at that point, observing in that way, he is more or less brought to a halt. He cannot, via anthropology alone, apprehend any inner structural laws in the act of ideation or representation. Anthroposophy, at the end of the journey that has taken its course in spiritual experiencing, continues contemplating the spiritual core of man so far as that manifests itself through the perceptions of the senses. Similarly anthropology, at the end of the journey that has taken its course in the province of the senses, can only continue endeavouring to contemplate the way in which sensuous man acts on his sense-perceptions. In doing so, it discovers that this operation is sustained, not by the laws of somatic life, but by the mental laws of logic. But logic is not a region that can be explored in the same fashion as the other regions of anthropological enquiry. Logically ordered thought is answerable to laws that can no longer be termed those of the physical organism. Inasmuch as a man is operating with them, what becomes apparent is the same being whom anthroposophy has encountered at the end of its journey. Only, the anthropologist sees this being after the fashion in which it is illumined from the sense side. He sees the deadened representations, the ideas; he also concedes, in acknowledging the validity of logic, that the laws governing those ideas belong to a world, which interlocks with the sense-world, but is not identical with it. In the process of ideation carried on by a logical being, anthropology discovers sensuous man projecting into the spiritual world. By this route it arrives at a philosophy of man as a final outcome of its investigations. Everything that has led up to it is to be found purely in the realm of the senses.¹¹

[ 17 ] Rightly pursued, therefore, the two approaches, anthroposophical and anthropological, converge and meet in one point. Anthroposophy contributes the image of the living human spirit, showing how, through sense existence, this develops the consciousness that obtains between birth and death, while at the same time its supersensible consciousness is deadened. Anthropology contributes the image of sensuous man, apprehending in the moment of consciousness his selfhood but towering into a subsistence in the spirit that extends beyond birth and death. In this coincidence a genuinely fruitful understanding between anthroposophy and anthropology is possible. It cannot fail, if both disciplines, terminate in philosophy and humanity.

Certainly the philosophy of humanity which stems from anthroposophy will furnish an image of man delineated by methods quite other than those of the image furnished by the humanist philosophy stemming from anthropology. Yet close observers of the one image and of the other will find that their ideas accord, as the negative plate of a competent photographer accords with his positive print.

[ 18 ] These observations began by posing the question whether fruitful dialogue is possible between anthropology and anthroposophy. They have perhaps succeeded in showing that the answer, at least from the anthroposophical point of view, is in the affirmative.

• 1. See Introduction, p. 16.
• 2. An exposition in greater detail together with a justification of this conception of “organs of spirit” will be found in my book Vom Menschenrätsel (4th Edition) as well as in my writings on Goethe’s philosophical outlook.
  
  Editor’s Note. And the English reader should compare Coleridge (Biographia Literaria, Chapter XII): “...all the organs of sense are framed for a corresponding world of sense—and we have it. All the organs of spirit are framed for a correspondent world of spirit: though the latter organs are not developed in all alike.”
• 3. An exposition in greater detail together with a justification of this conception of “organs of spirit” will be found in my book Vom Menschenrätsel (4th Edition) as well as in my writings on Goethe’s philosophical outlook.
• 4. The inner experiences, which the psyche has to undergo in order to be able to make use of its spiritual organs, are dealt with in a number of my writings and particularly in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and the second part of >Occult Science: an Outline.
• 5. This quickening of psychic faculties which in ordinary life remain unawakened is dealt with in greater detail in my Vom Menschenrätsel.
• 6. See also Section II. The Philosophical Bearing of Anthroposophy.
• 7. The boundaries of cognition referred to are not only those, comparatively few in number, of which there is general awareness. A great many are encountered along the avenues of self-reflection—4 which have to be explored on the way to immediate relation with reality. See also Section III. Concerning the Limits of Knowledge.
• 8. All this is dealt with at greater length in the final section of Vol. 2 of my Die Rätsel der Philosophie, under the heading: “Sketch Plan for an Anthroposophy”.
• 9. See also Section IV. Concerning Abstraction.
• 10. See also Section V. Concerning the Nature of Spiritual Perception.
• 11. Compare Section II.

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.