The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We will try to understand the physical body somewhat more exactly. At the present time we distinguish within the constitution of man four members: physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. In studying the physical body we must now enter into greater detail. Man was already something when he came into the Old Saturn existence from a far-distant past. The physical body is the oldest and most developed member at present possessed by man. It is fourfold, which is not the case with the other bodies. On Old Saturn the groundwork was already laid as a germ. The etheric body was first added on the Old Sun. There the physical body evolved a stage further. The astral body was added on the Old Moon and the physical body underwent a still further stage of development. On the Earth the ego was now added, and the physical body went through a fourth stage. So we may say that the physical body is, as it were, in the fourth grade, while the etheric body is in the third, the astral body in the second and the ego in the first.

This is why it is only the physical body as such that has self-awareness, not the other three bodies. In the moment when man closes his physical sense organs in sleep, awareness of self ceases: when he opens them to what is outside, self-awareness returns. Man gains consciousness of self because his organs enable him to observe his surroundings. Only the physical body is so far advanced that it is able to open its organs to what is outside. If the etheric and astral bodies were able with their organs to observe their surroundings, man would attain self-awareness in them also. But for this, organs are necessary. The physical body has self-awareness only through its organs. These organs of the physical body are the senses.

Let us consider the senses in their successive stages. There are in fact twelve senses.³⁴ Of these, five are already physical and two others will become physical during the further development of the Earth.

The five senses which we already have are smell, taste, sight, touch and hearing. In time man will develop two other senses into proper physical senses. These two are located in the pituitary gland (hypophysis) and the pineal gland (epiphysis). These will develop the two future senses in the physical body which will then have seven senses. To understand the successive stages of the senses we must make it clear that in so far as man is a being conscious of self, he is on a descending curve. So though the body is on an ascending curve, the senses are on a descending curve.³⁵

Of the higher principles in man, Atma developed on Old Saturn, Buddhi on Old Sun and Manas on Old Moon. There was a time when the Monad assembled itself bit by bit, and then in the Lemurian Age entered into its self-constructed house. Now the Monad has descended to the fourth stage, Atma, Buddhi, Manas, Kama-Manas. This descending curve is expressed in the development of the senses. Actually, in the beginning, on Old Saturn, only one sense was present, the sense of smell. The senses that developed later had to descend from higher to ever lower regions.

In Nature we differentiate the solid, the fluid, the gaseous, the warmth ether, light ether, chemical ether and the life ether. These are the seven stages of matter. In his descent man experienced these stages from above downwards. At the beginning of evolution the first human life-germ could only manifest itself in the Life Ether. What corresponds to this stage as sense, is the sense of smell. Then man possessed the first sense, that of smell, of which only an after effect is present today. The solid has its life, as we saw a few days ago on the Maha-para-nirvana plane, the fluid on the Para-nirvana plane, the gaseous on the Nirvana plane, the Warmth Ether on the Buddhi plane, the Light Ether on the Mental plane, the Chemical Ether on the astral plane, the Life Ether on the physical plane. We can therefore also speak of the atomistic ether.

An object can only be smelt when it impinges on the organ of smell, comes into contact with it. The organ of smell must unite itself with the material. To smell means to perceive with a sense that enters into a relationship with the material itself.

As second stage we have the Chemical Ether. Here the sense of taste develops. This depends on dissolving what is to be tasted. We have to do, not with matter itself, but with what is made out of it. This is a chemical, physical process through which matter is changed into something different. The tongue can do this: it can first dissolve and then taste.

The third stage is to be found in the Light Ether. There sight develops. Now we do not perceive what is broken down by chemical, physical processes, but we perceive a picture of the object which is brought about by the external light.

The fourth is the Warmth Ether. In this, the sense of touch is developed. Here one no longer perceives a picture. Warmth is a passing condition of the body, a condition experienced only in the moment. We are speaking here of the sense of touch as the perception of warmth and cold; it is in fact a ‘Warmth sense’.

Fifthly we have what is of the nature of air. This corresponds to the sense of hearing. Here we no longer perceive a condition of the body in question, but what the body says to us. Now we enter into the inner nature of the body. At the sound of a bell it is not the bell itself that interests us, not the outer form, the matter, but what it has to disclose of its inner nature. Hearing is a uniting with what reveals itself as the spiritual in matter. At this stage the life of the senses goes over from the passive to the active. The passively received sound becomes in man active in speech. Through speech man gives utterance to his soul being.

As the sixth stage we have the fluid element. The sense organ corresponding to the fluid is the pituitary gland. This is situated in the brain in an elongated cylindrical form.

As seventh stage we have the solid. The appropriate sense organ is the pineal gland.

As now, when man speaks he influences the air, so later he will gain an influence over what is fluid.³⁶ The ‘I think’, and thought in general, will express itself in the air and indeed in forms, for example as crystals. At the next stage feeling will also be involved with thinking. Development will work backwards. The warmth of the heart will then express itself in oscillations, and flow outwards together with thought. And the last stage will be achieved by man when he will create actual beings which remain; when through the word he will externalise what he wills. The expression of feeling is merely a transition. When man becomes creative through the will, then the beings which he brings forth will have actual existence.

In times to come man will bring forth into his surroundings what he feels. This will be imparted to the fluid element. The entire fluid element of the planet which will follow next (the future Jupiter) will be an expression of what people feel. Today man sends out words; they are inscribed into the Akasha. There they remain, even though the airwaves vanish. Out of these words the Future Jupiter will later be formed. When therefore today man uses evil, blasphemous language, then on Jupiter terrible formations will be brought about. This is why one should be so very careful of what one says, and why it is so immensely important that man should be master of his speech. In the future man will also send out his feelings; the conditions of the fluids on Jupiter will be a result of feelings on the Earth. What man speaks today will give Jupiter its form; what he feels will engender its inner warmth; what he wills determines the separate beings inhabiting Jupiter. The Future Jupiter will be constructed out of the basic powers of the human soul.

Just as today we can trace the rock formation of the Earth back to earlier conditions, so will the rock formation of the Future Jupiter be the result of our words. The ocean of Jupiter, the warmth of Jupiter, will arise out of the feelings of present-day humanity. The beings of Jupiter will arise out of human will. Thus the inhabitants of a previous planet create the basic conditions for its successor. And beings who today still [Gap in text ...] hover over the earth, as was once the case with the Monads, will enter into incarnation on the Future Jupiter. There will then exist a kind of Jupiter-Lemurian race. Beings will be there which we have created as the Pitris did. Just as we inhabited the grotesque forms of the Old Moon, so these beings will inhabit the forms which we develop by means of our pineal gland.

We are building the house for future Monads. A similar procedure took place when the development of the human being led over from the Old Moon to the Earth. This makes absolutely clear how everything external is actually created from within outwards.

It is difficult to distinguish the pure physical body from what has been formed through human error. A hunchback owes his deformity to the astral, to Karma. The external form, the physiognomy and so on, are dependent on Karma. Modifications of the physical body are therefore dependent on the higher bodies. When one eliminates everything that depends on Karma we find that the physical body is in fact wisely ordered. All forms of illness are errors which find their expression in the physical body. All illnesses have been wrong-doing in the past, all wrong-doing will be illness in the future. When human beings become truly worthy, the bodies of the beings they create will be equally imbued with wisdom.

All wisdom, feeling and will, in the next evolution, will actually be present as form and being. The physical body is called a temple in all ancient religions because its structure is so filled with wisdom. It is not correct to speak of the physical body as the lower nature, for what is lower in man does in fact lie in the higher bodies which today are still in infancy.

Here we can consider an important karmic connection. We live in a materialistic age and this is the result of a preceding age. This materialistic age has accomplished much, not only outwardly but also inwardly. We may think for instance of the decrease in mortality through hygienic measures. This is actually a step forward, brought about by hygienic means. Such external progress is always a karmic result of progress which earlier has been made inwardly. These steps forward in the physical are the result of inner steps forward in the Middle Ages. Today therefore it would be quite wrong to look back on the ‘dark’ Middle Ages. Our most significant materialists have been educated idealistically; for instance, Haeckel, Büchner, Moleschott. This is why their systems are thought out so admirably; but this they owe to their idealistic education. Present day materialism is actually the outer expression of the preceding idealistic period.

Now too we must work in preparation for the future. Just as the karmic result of the earlier idealistic period made its appearance in materialism, so again a new beginning must be made in regard to Idealism and spiritual impulses. It was in accordance with this law that the leading personalities acted when they called the Theosophical Movement into life.

The 14th century was the time of the creation of towns. Within a few hundred years independent towns had developed in all civilised European countries. The burgher is the founder of materialism in practical life. This comes to expression in the Lohengrin myth.³⁷ Lohengrin, the emissary of the Grail Lodge, was the wise leader who took hold in the Middle Ages and prepared the way for the establishment of towns. The swan was his symbol; the initiate of the Third Grade is the Swan. Consciousness is always represented as something feminine. Elsa of Brabant represents the consciousness of the materialistic civic sense. The spiritual life had, however, to be saved; this happened through the fact that Christian Rosenkreuz³⁸ founded the Rosicrucian Order. Spiritual life remained in the Mystery Schools. Today materialism has been driven to uttermost extremes. This is why in our time something new must break in. At that time the same movement took hold which today through Theosophy makes popular the elementary teachings of spiritual life in order to create once again a new inner impulse that will later be able to reveal itself outwardly. The inner always comes later to outer expression. An illness is the karmic result of earlier wrongdoing, for instance, lying. When something of this kind becomes outer reality, it manifests as illness. Epidemics can be traced far back to the misdeeds of a people. They are something imperfect which from being inward has been exteriorised. The sixth sense is the Kundalini light radiating warmth;³⁹ the seventh is the synthesizing sense.

• 34. See The Wisdom of man of the Soul and of the Spirit. The Twelve Senses and the Seven Life Processes (Golden Blade 1975).
• 35. Theosophy teaches that all development proceeds in cycles, first on a descending curve from spiritual to material and then back on an ascending curve from material to spiritual. In a lecture to the same audience in Berlin 17.10.1904 Rudolf Steiner says ‘Theosophical writings have described certain evolutionary developments as ascending and descending ... during the descent development is slowed down while during the ascent it becomes ever faster. This accelerated development does not apply to the whole physical plane but only to individual beings.’ In a lecture in Berlin 27.1.1908 there is a further clarification: ‘... so that when we are at a particular moment of our development we can always say: Yes, there are certain forces there that draw into man and pass out of him, forces that descend and forces that rise. For every such force there is always a moment when it changes from a descending to an ascending force. All forces that become ascending forces have been at first descending. They descend down to man, so to speak, and in man they achieve the strength to rise’.
  In this sense ‘when the body is on the ascending curve the senses are on the descending curve’ should be understood as meaning that the physical body in general is on the rising curve because it has passed the deepest point of its material densification, while the senses are on the descending curve since there are two senses which still have to develop as physical senses.
• 36. For further clarification of this passage see lecture 12.6.1907 Occult Seals and Pillars (typescript).
• 37. The Lohengrin figure first appears in Eschenbach's ‘Parzifal’ as a knight of the Grail and son of Parzifal. The saga was further developed in a poem in middle high German dating from the end of the 13th century. A simpler form is Conrad von Würzburg's Schwanenritter. See also Rudolf Steiner's lecture 29.3.1906 on Parzifal and Lohengrin (Typescript).
• 38. See: The Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz lecture 1912-13.
• 39. see lecture 18.10.1904 in History of the Middle Ages (Typescript)

If we consider man's being in its entirety we have to begin with the physical body, then the etheric, then the astral body. The physical body of man can be seen by everyone. The etheric body becomes visible when the physical body is suggested away by a strong act of will. Then the space of the physical body remains filled with the etheric body. The occultist considers the etheric as actually being the lowest body. It is the body according to which the physical body is formed. Taking the descending line, the form of the etheric body is the reverse of the physical. It is only in the ascending line that they are identical. A woman has a masculine etheric body and a man a feminine etheric body.

Around the etheric body appears the astral body. It is the outer form for the entire content of the soul; for passions, emotions, impulses, desires, joy, unhappiness, enthusiasm and so on. It manifests itself in forms of every description. The surrounding part shows cloud formations; it radiates the most varied colours. Frequently somewhat tattered formations are attached to it. The forms and colours are different and changing. Green shows sympathy and compassion for one's fellow men. The lower levels of the population show much red in the astral body, brownish red, brick red, blood red. Especially with droshky-drivers one can see such a red, indicative of the lower passions.

With every human being all the fluctuations of the astral body are enclosed in an egg-shaped sheath. This has an underlying blue colour and shows, as an important factor, a dark violet spot in the middle of the brain. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky calls this egg-shaped sheath the auric egg. In the case of little children the auric egg is predominant; in their case many bright, luminous clouds of colour appear within it. In the lower parts however little children also have dark clouds, indicating lower impulses. This is the inherited Karma that they have in common with their ancestors—‘the sins of the fathers’. These sins of the fathers are inherited down to the seventh generation. People's characteristics can be traced back as far as the seventh generation of forefathers. After the seventh generation heredity dies out. One reckons three generations to a century. The man of today therefore still shows certain good or bad qualities coming from what was good or bad in his ancestors of the 17th century. Thus one can look backwards on one's forefathers as far as two hundred years or rather more.

To see how the auric egg has been formed we must consider the development of a cosmic body. The condition of the Earth lying nearest to our present studies is characterised as the physical condition. In Theosophical literature a condition of form is called a Globe and one therefore speaks of the physical Globe. As physical Globe the Earth is the fourth Globe in a development of seven states of being. Three other conditions preceded the physical Globe and a further three are still to follow. Before the Earth became physical it was astral. Everything living upon Earth was at that time present only in the astral. When man has gone through the Sixth and Seventh Root-Races (epochs) he will have become so spiritualised that he will again have an astral form. This future astral condition of form however will contain all the fruits of evolution.

Seven conditions of form together make up a Round. At the present time the Earth is going through its fourth Round and this is the mineral. During this time it is the task of mankind to work upon the mineral kingdom. A man is already working on the mineral kingdom when he takes a flint and hammers it into a wedge-shaped tool with which he makes other objects, when he transports rocks and builds pyramids out of the stones, when he makes tools out of metals, when he conducts electric current in a network over the earth; in all this man is working upon the mineral kingdom. Thus man puts into service the whole mineral kingdom. He makes the Earth into something entirely of his own devising. When the painter turns his mind to a combination of colours he is also working upon the mineral kingdom. We are now in the midst of this activity, and in the course of the next races (epochs) the Earth will have become completely transformed, so that eventually there will be no single atom on the earth that has not been worked upon by man. In earlier times these atoms became more and more solidified; now however they are becoming increasingly separated. Radioactivity did not exist in earlier times and could not therefore be discovered. It has only existed for a few thousand years, because now the atoms split up more and more.

When the Fourth Round comes to an end the entire mineral kingdom will have been worked upon by the hand of man. When it has been completely worked through by man, then, in order that the fruits of this work can be manifested, the Earth must pass over into an astral condition in which forms can develop. The Earth then passes over into a Mental Globe and then into the Higher Mental condition, the Arupic. It then disappears altogether out of these conditions into a shorter Pralaya. It then enters once more into a new Arupic condition, that of the next, the Fifth Round; then into a Rupic condition and then into an astral condition. After this it appears physically once more. Everything which man worked into the mineral kingdom during the Fourth Round reappears and grows up as the plant kingdom; for instance [the] Cologne cathedral will appear as a plant in the next Round.

Between the last Arupic condition of the Fourth Round and the first Arupic condition of the Fifth Round the earth goes through a Pralaya. Then in the Fifth Round the previous mineral kingdom appears in all its forms as the plant kingdom. In the Arupic condition of the Fifth Round everything is contained that man has worked over in the mineral Round. At first this reappears in the Arupic condition in the pure Akasha. This condition is in fact called ‘Akasha’. In the beginning of each new Round everything is to be found in the Akasha; later there are only imprints. Thus in these imprints we have the whole Earth with all its beings. In the transition from the Third to the Fourth Round, all the beings which came into existence in the Third Round also reappear.

With further development out of the Akasha everything has to assume a denser form. This takes place in the Rupa condition of the earth. This more material form is called in occultism, for example in certain passages from H.P. Blavatsky, the ether. In this Ether-Earth everything is contained. All beings were contained in thought, but nevertheless in the background the Akasha exists as a foundation. The ether densifies further to the Astral Light. In this Astral Light radiates the third Globe (condition of form), the Astral-Earth; it radiates in the purest Astral Light, and this Astral Light is in fact entirely composed of the same substance in which later man's auric egg shines out. This is especially the case with quite young children who are only a few months old. After this the Earth passes over into its present physical condition. Then, as the actual Earth, it becomes ever more and more physical. In the same degree however in which it becomes ever more physical, it separates off from itself the individual auric eggs for mankind. These differentiate themselves as though, in a vessel filled with water, one part of the water freezes to ice while the other part rises up in pearl-like water drops. Thus on the one side the physical earth separates off and on the other side the auric eggs become, as it were, pearl-like drops for human evolution.

At first the auric egg seems to be undifferentiated. Actually however it is not undifferentiated. It may be compared with the following: If we have a solution of cooking salt it appears as a uniform grayish mass; if we let it stand the beautiful cubic crystals of salt are precipitated. In the auric egg those forces were inherent which produced the etheric body, the Linga Sharira. Out of what became solid earth there also emerged later what had already gone through a development on the Old Moon. This contained as predisposition what eventually became the lower kingdoms as far as the first vertebrates, up to the snake. The vertebrate animals which followed were not there on the Old Moon; they were first added on the Earth. Thus the invertebrate animals emerged from the Earth when it densified to a physical condition, as did also the plants and mineral kingdom.

At the time when all these separated forms had emerged, mankind had entered into the Lemurian Age. The ever densifying human being developed from the first, the Polarian race, to the race of the Hyperboreans. This was followed by the Lemurian Age; it was then that the development of the vertebrate animals entered its first stage, and it is from that time that they have continued to evolve.

So we have to distinguish: firstly Akasha, secondly Ether, thirdly Astral Light, fourthly Earth, fifthly the Auric Egg.

This is called a spiral (Wirbel). Until the Earth stage, the fourth condition of form, the Earth became ever denser. At the price of this increasing densification, the Astral Light became individualised after the solid had thrust itself out. The Auric Eggs of human beings are the individualised Astral Light. One can therefore read in the Astral Light, not the deeds, but the emotions bound up with them; these one can read in the Astral Light. For example, Caesar conceived the idea of crossing the Rubicon and this roused in him certain feelings and desires. What took place at that time corresponds to a combination of astral impulses. The physical deeds on the physical plane have vanished for all eternity. Caesar's advance can no longer be seen in the Astral Light, but the impulse which drove him to it has remained there. The karmic (astral) correlations with what takes place on the physical plane remain in the Astral Light. One must accustom oneself to look away from all physical perceptions and only to see the karmic impulses. One must hold fast to these and consciously transpose them back into the physical. There is no purpose in looking for something which might be seen, as though one were looking at a photograph.

The greatest impulses of world history can however no longer be read in the Astral Light, for the impulses of the great initiates were passionless. Whoever therefore reads only in the Astral Light, for him the whole work of the initiates is absent: for example the content of the book ‘The Great Initiates’ by Edouard Schuré could not have been found in the Astral Light. Such impressions are only inscribed in the Ether. What one can read in the Astral Light in connection with what the initiates have done is based on an illusion, because one can only read the results of the lives of the great initiates in the impulses of their pupils. Pupils and even entire peoples have experienced strong and passionate emotions in regard to the actions of the great initiates and these have remained in the Astral Light. But it is so difficult to study the deepest motives of the great initiates because they are only present in the ether.

Cosmic events—metamorphoses such as those of Atlantis—remain at a still higher level, no longer in the Ether, but in the actual Akasha. That is the Akashic Chronicle. This latter is nevertheless connected in a certain way with the most earthly concerns of mankind. For the human being is connected with the great happenings of the Cosmos. Every single person is to be found sketched, as it were, in the Akashic Chronicle. What is present there continues further and works its way into the Ether and the Astral Light. The individual human being becomes ever more clearly discernible the more one seeks for him in the lower spheres. And one must study all these spheres in order to understand the real mechanism of Karma.

Today we are going to explain how Karma works and make clear to ourselves how it is connected with the so-called three worlds. All other worlds, with the exception of these three, hardly come into consideration when it is a question of human development; the relevant three are the physical, astral and mental worlds. During the day condition of consciousness, we are in the physical world; there, in a certain sense, we have purely and simply the physical world before us. We must only direct our senses outwards in order to have the physical world as such before us. But the moment we look on the physical world with interest, approach it with feeling, we are already partly in the astral world and only partly in the physical world. Only the beginnings of living purely in the physical world are present today in human life; for example, when one simply contemplates a work of art without experiencing any wish to possess it. Such a contemplation of a work of art is an important act of the soul, when, forgetful of self, one works as though on a spiritual task. This living purely in the physical world, forgetting oneself, is very rare. It is only seldom that nature is looked at in pure contemplation, for usually many other feelings are involved. Nevertheless, this selfless living in physical nature is of the very greatest importance; for only so can man have a true consciousness of self. In all other worlds the ordinary man is still immersed in a world of unconsciousness.

In the physical world man is not only aware of his self, he can also become selfless. His day-consciousness is however not yet selfless if he is unable to forget himself. Here the physical world is not the hindrance, but the playing in of the astral and mental worlds. If, however, he forgets himself, the separateness vanishes and he finds his ‘self’ spread out into what is outside. But it is only in physical life that present day man can develop this consciousness of self without separateness. Consciousness of self we call the ego. Man can only become conscious of self within an environment. Only when he gains senses adapted to a particular world can he become self-conscious in that world. Now he only has senses for the physical world but the other worlds continually play into the consciousness of self and cloud it. When feelings play into it, it is the astral world; when one thinks, the mental world plays into the consciousness.

Most people's thoughts are nothing more than reflections of the environment. It is very rare to have thoughts which are not so connected. Man only has such higher thoughts when senses awaken for the mental world, so that he not only thinks the thoughts, but perceives them around him as beings. He then has the same consciousness of self in the mental world as that possessed by the Chela, the Initiate. When someone tries to eliminate first the physical world around him, then all impulses, passions, changes of mood and so on, usually no thoughts are left. Let us only try to picture everything that influences man inasmuch as he lives in space and time. Let us try to call up before the soul everything connected with the place where we live and the time in which we live. Everything that the soul continually has within it as thoughts is dependent on space and time. All this has a transient value. One must therefore pass on from the reflected impressions of the senses and allow an enduring thought content to live in one in order gradually to develop devachanic senses. A sentence such as that from ‘Light on the Path,’ “Before the eyes can see they must give up tears”,^* holds good for all times and all places. When we allow such a sentence to live within us, then something lives in us which is beyond space and time. This is a means, a force, which gradually allows devachanic senses to awaken in the soul for the eternal in the world.

Thus man has his share in the three worlds. It is only gradually however that he has come into this situation. He was not always in the physical world; only by degrees did he become physical and acquire physical senses. Previously he was on the higher planes. He descended from the Astral Plane to the Physical and before this from the Mental Plane. The latter we divide into two parts, the Lower Mental or Rupa Plane, where everything is already differentiated, and the Upper Mental or Arupa Plane, where everything's undifferentiated in a germinal condition. Man has descended from the Arupa Plane through the Rupa Plane and the Astral Plane to the Physical Plane. Only on the Physical Plane did he become conscious of self. On the Astral Plane he is not conscious of self and on the Rupa and Arupa Planes still less so. On the Physical Plane man for the first time came into contact with external objects in his immediate surroundings. Whenever a being encounters external objects, this marks the beginning of self-awareness. On the higher planes life was still completely enclosed within itself. When man lived on the Astral Plane the only reality he had arose out of his own inner life. This was in its very nature a picture consciousness. Even though this was a vivid experience it was nevertheless only a picture that arose within him. Of this, present daydreams are only a weak reminder. When for instance an astral human being approached salt, this affected him unconsciously and a picture of it would have arisen within him. If he approached someone who was sympathetic to him he would not have seen him externally, but a feeling of sympathy would have arisen within him. This life in the astral was one of absolute selfhood and separateness. Only on the physical plane can man relinquish his separateness, in that through the medium of his senses he perceives objects, merges himself with his surroundings, with the Not-I. Therein lies the importance of the physical plane. If man had not set foot on the physical plane, he would never have been able to relinquish his separateness and turn his senses outwards. This is actually where work on the development of selflessness begins. Everything except pure contemplation of physical things belongs more to the Ego. One must accustom oneself to live on higher planes just as selflessly as man has begun to do on the physical plane, albeit up to now but rarely. The objects of the physical plane compel man to become selfless and to give something to the object, which is Not-I. In regard to wishes, to that which lives in the soul, man still orders his life in accordance with his desires. On the physical plane he must learn to renounce, to free his wishes from self. That is the first step.

The next step is to order himself not according to his own wishes but according to those coming to him from outside. Further, when man consciously and out of his own will does not act in accordance with the thoughts that arise within him, but surrenders himself to thoughts which are not his own, then he soars upwards to the Devachanic Plane.

We must therefore seek in the higher worlds for something lying outside us in order to relate ourselves to it as we do to objects in the physical world. Hence, we must consider the wishes of the Initiates. The occult student learns to know the wishes which are right for humanity and he orders himself in accordance with them, just as through external compulsion one orders oneself according to sense objects. Culture and the education of wishes lead us to the Astral Plane.

When one becomes selfless in thoughts, allowing the eternal thoughts of the Masters of Wisdom to pass through our souls—through concentration and meditation on the thoughts of the Masters—then one also perceives the thoughts of the surrounding world. The occult student can already become a Master on the Astral Plane, but on the Mental Plane this is only possible for the higher Masters.

In the first place man stands before us in his physical nature. He lives at the same time in the Astral and Mental Worlds, but has self-awareness only in the physical world. He must traverse the entire physical world until his awareness of self has absorbed everything that the physical world can teach him. Here man says to himself: ‘I’. He connects his ‘I’ with the things around him, learns to expand his ‘I’ through contemplation; it flows outwards and becomes one with the objects which he has completely comprehended. If we had already comprehended the entire physical world we should no longer need it, for then we should have it within us. At present however man has within him only a part of the physical world. The human being who is born as a Lemurian in his first incarnation, who is just at the point of directing his ego towards the physical world, knows as yet but little of it. When however he comes to his last incarnation, he must have united the entire physical world with his ‘I’.

In the physical world man is left to himself, here nobody leads him, he is in very truth god-forsaken. When he came forth from the astral world the Gods forsook him. In the physical world he had to learn to become his own master. Here therefore he can only live, as he actually does live, swinging pendulum-wise between truth and error. He must grope about and seek his way for himself. Now for the most part he is groping in the dark. His gaze is turned outwards; he has freedom of choice, but he is also exposed to error. On the Astral Plane man had no such freedom; there he was subject to compulsion from the powers standing behind him. Like a kind of marionette he still dangled on the strings of the Gods; they still had to guide him. In so far as man today is still a soul being, the Gods still live in him. Here freedom and unfreedom are strongly mixed. His wishes are continually changing. This ebb and flow of wishes proceeds from within. Here it is the Gods who are working in man.

Man is still less free on the Rupa Plane of the Mental World, and even less free on the Arupa Plane of the Higher Mental World. Man gradually becomes free on the Physical Plane the more, through knowledge, he has become incapable of error.

To the same degree that he works on the Physical Plane and learns to know it, he gains the faculty of carrying up into the Arupa Plane what he has learned to know in the physical world. The Arupa Plane is in itself formless, but gains form through human life. Man gathers the results of the lessons he has learned on the Physical Plane and carries these, as firmly established forms in the soul, up into the Arupa Plane. This is why in the Greek Mysteries the soul was called a bee, the Arupa Plane a beehive and the physical earth a field of flowers. This was taught in the Greek Mysteries.

Now what was it that drove the soul down on to the Physical Plane? It was desire, craving: in no other way does one descend to a lower plane except through desire. Previously the soul was in the Astral World; this is the world of wishes. Everything which the Gods in the Astral World have implanted into human beings was purely a world of wishes. The most outstanding attribute of these Pre-Lemurian beings was the wish for the physical. Man at that time had a real craving for the physical: he had within him an unconscious, blind craving for the physical. This craving is only to be appeased through its satisfaction. Through the ideas, through the aspects of knowledge which he gains, this craving for the physical disappears.

After death the soul goes to the Astral Plane and thence to the Rupa and Arupa Planes. What the soul has gained it deposits there. What it has not yet brought with it, what is still unknown, drives it down again; this engenders the longing for new incarnations. How long the soul remains on the Arupa Plane depends upon how much the human being has gained on the Physical Plane. In the case of the savage this is very little and so in his case there is only a weak flashing up on to the Arupa Plane. Then he descends again to the physical world. One who has learned everything in the physical world no longer needs to leave the Arupa Plane, no longer needs to return to the Physical Plane, for he has fulfilled his duty in the physical world.

In regard to his astral being, man today still half belongs to the astral world. The astral sheath has been half broken through and he perceives the world of the physical through his senses. When he succeeds in living on the Astral Plane as he now lives on the Physical Plane, when he learns to make observations there in a similar way, then he also carries the perceptions of the Astral Plane up to the Arupa Plane. What he then bears upwards from the Astral Plane streams however still higher from the Arupa Plane up to the next higher, the Buddhi Plane. That too which he achieves on the Rupa Plane through meditation and concentration he takes with him up to the Arupa Plane and there gives it over to still higher Planes.

That part of man which is astral is opened half towards the physical world and half towards higher worlds. When it is opened to the physical world he allows himself to be directed by the perceptions of the sense world. From the other side he is subject to direction from above. The same is the case with his mental body. The latter is also partly directed from outside and partly directed from the inner world by the Gods, the Devas. Because this is so man must dream and sleep.

Now we can also understand the nature of sleeping and dreaming. To dream means to turn towards the inner Deva-forces. Man dreams almost the whole night only he does not remember it. During sleep the mental body is continually guided by the Devas. Man has as yet no consciousness of self on the higher planes, hence in dream he is not self-conscious. He begins to be so on the Astral Plane. In deep sleep he is on the Mental Plane. There he has absolutely no self-consciousness. It is only on the Physical Plane that man is awake. Here his ego is present and finds its full expression. The astral ego cannot yet fully express itself on the Physical Plane and must therefore at times leave the body. Man must sleep in order that this can take place. The conditions of dreaming and sleeping are only a repetition of earlier development. On the Astral Plane he was in a state of dream, on the Mental Plane he slept. He repeats these conditions every night. Only when he has acquired senses for the other planes does he no longer dream and no longer sleep, but he then perceives realities. The occult pupil learns to perceive such realities on the Astral Plane. He then has a reality around him. Whoever carries his development to a still higher stage is surrounded by a reality even in deep sleep. Then begins continuity of consciousness.

One must understand this sequence of delicate concepts; then one comprehends why man, when he has been on the higher planes again descends. What he does not yet know, what he has not yet recognised, what the Buddhists call Avidja, not-knowing, drives him back into physical existence. Avidja is the first of the forces of karma. According to Buddhistic teaching there are twelve Karmic forces which drive man down. These together are called Nidanas. As man gradually descends, the way in which Karma takes hold becomes apparent. Avidja is the first effect. It is the opposite pole to what meets man on the physical plane. Because he treads the physical plane and there unites himself with something, a reaction is called forth. Action always calls forth reaction. Everything that man does in the physical world also produces a reaction and works back as Karma. Action and reaction is the technique, the mechanism of Karma.

• *. The original English of Mabel Collins is “Before the eyes can see they must be incapable of tears.”

When the physical body is discussed most people have a very unclear, confused idea of what it actually is. In point of fact what we have before us is not just the physical body but a combination of the physical body with higher forces. A piece of rock crystal is also physical but in its very nature this is something quite different from the human eye or heart, which are also physical. The eye and heart are parts of the physical body, but they are intermixed with man's higher members and through this, something is brought about which is completely different from other aspects of the physical. In water we find oxygen and hydrogen but they look quite different from when we see them separated. Then we are aware of their difference. In water we have before us a mixture of both. What meets us in the physical body of man is also a mixture comprised of the physical, etheric and astral bodies.

The physical human eye is similar to a camera, for, as with the camera, there appears within it a picture of the surrounding world. Only when one abstracts from the physical eye everything that is not to be found in the camera, does one discover what is the specific nature of the physical eye. So too one must abstract from the entire physical body everything that is not purely physical: only then does one have what in occultism is called the physical body. In itself it can neither live, think nor feel. There then remains a very wisely ordered, extremely complicated automaton, a purely physical apparatus. This, alone, was all there was of human existence at the Old Saturn stage. At that time the eyes were present only as little cameras. What was produced as [a] picture of the surrounding world came to the consciousness of a Deva being. In the middle of the Saturn evolution the so-called Asuras (the Archai) were sufficiently advanced to make use of the apparatus. At that time they were at the human stage. They made use of the automata and the pictures they produced. The Asuras themselves were not within the apparatus but outside and only made use of the pictures as we make use of photographic apparatus in order to take pictures of a landscape. Thus the physical body of man was at that time an architectural structure of a physical apparatus operated from outside. This is the first stage of human existence.

The second stage of development was the permeation of this physical apparatus with the etheric body. It then became a living organism. That also found expression in the configuration of the body. The automaton was built up out of a fairly firm undifferentiated mass, similar to what today is a jelly-like substance, like a soft crystal.⁴⁰ In the second Round of evolution in the Old Sun existence, the physical automaton was imbued with the etheric body. In this Round the solar plexus developed. It is so called because still today only rudiments of the organ are present. It fashions a nervous system into the physical apparatus. In the case of the plant something similar is present. That is the second stage.

But these stages are not final; evolution gradually progresses. Even today the solar plexus is an active agent in certain animals which have not developed a spinal cord. All invertebrate animals are single forms from left behind stages of what was laid down earlier. It was only on the Earth that man cast out from himself the vertebrate animals. In earlier times his organism was still somewhat similar to that of the crab at the present day. Man has progressed beyond that earlier stage whereas the crab has remained stationary. It is an astonishing fact that the whole inner formation of the crab has a certain similarity to the human brain. There is actually a similarity between the internal formation of the crab and the human brain. Like the human brain the crab too is enclosed in a hard shell. After man had developed a spine and had metamorphosed the upper vertebrae, he cast off the hard shell. The crab has not developed further. It has adapted itself to its environment by means of a hard shell that it had to have and which serves the same purpose as does the protective covering of the whole body in man.

The third stage is that in which the whole is transformed by the astral body working within it. This organic transformation is connected with the development of the heart and the circulation of the blood. The heart of the fish has remained stationary at a halfway stage.⁴¹ The development of the heart is proportionate to the degree in which there is an increase in the inner warmth of the body; this signifies nothing other than a drawing of the astral into the body.

The spinal cord with the brain is the organ of the ego. This is surrounded by the threefold protective sheath of the astral, etheric and physical bodies. After the organ of the ego (spinal cord and brain) had been prepared, the ego laid itself in the bed made ready for it, and spinal cord and brain appear as organs in the service of the ego.

The four-fold man is put together in this way. It is the Pythagorean square.

1. The spinal cord and brain are the organ of the ego.
2. The warm blood and the heart are the organ of Kama (astral body).
3. The Solar plexus is the organ of the etheric body.
4. The actual physical body is the complicated physical apparatus.

Thus has the four-fold being of man been constructed.

In occultism what we have now described is again called a spiral (Wirbel), something that builds from outside inwards and unites with what builds up from within. Physical body, etheric and astral bodies have built up the human being. Then the ego makes itself felt and this builds from within outwards. These are the four constituents of man. Here we find in the outer an imprint of the four-fold man. All further development is of such a nature that the human being, starting from this point of the ego, consciously experiences what previously he went through unconsciously.

Today, in order to realise that this is so, one must in the first place investigate what took place when our ego was being developed. In order to do this we must, as it were, take up our position under a certain organ. This is most aptly expressed in the Buddha legend. It says in the legend that Buddha remained seated under the Bodhi tree until he attained illumination in order to rise to higher stages, to Nirvana. For this Buddha had to place himself under the brain, under the organ of consciousness. That means the paths he had previously traversed unconsciously he had to traverse again consciously. Under the large brain there lies, more towards the back of the head, the small, tree shaped brain (the cerebellum). Under this brain Buddha placed himself. The cerebellum is the Bodhi tree. This shows how what is said in such profound legends is actually taken from human evolution.

Everything that is now known only by means of anatomy was at that time known in quite another way. The occult investigator made his researches with the help of the Kundalini light. The pupil was prepared for this in the following way. He came to a Master. If the latter found him trustworthy he received as instruction, not actually a teaching—today it has become different, today man must find his way by means of intellect and concepts—but the Master spoke somewhat as follows: ‘Every day for about six weeks you must spend several hours in meditation and give yourself up to some sentence of eternal value, completely sinking yourself into it.’ At present man cannot do this because life in modern civilisation makes too many demands on him. At that time the pupil meditated six to ten hours daily. He cannot do this nowadays without withdrawing from the whole life around him. At that time however the pupil required hardly any time for external needs. He found his nourishment in outer nature. He therefore made use of his time for meditation, perhaps uninterruptedly for ten hours. By this means he very soon progressed so far that he brought his body, which at that time was less dense, into such a condition that the Kundalini light was awakened within him. This is for the inner being what sunlight is for the outer world. Actually we do not see external objects, but reflected sunlight. The moment when, with the help of the Kundalini light, we can illuminate the soul, it becomes as visible as an object shone upon by the sun. So for the yoga pupil the whole inner body gradually became illuminated. All ancient anatomies were seen from within, through inner illumination. Thus the (Indian) monks, who clothed their experiences in legends, spoke of what they had perceived through the Kundalini light.

Now we must ask ourselves how the different parts of the human body are worked upon. In regard to what belongs to the brain and spinal cord, man first works consciously on the physical plane through the human ego [Gap in the text ...] He has at present no influence on anything else. He has for instance no influence on the circulation of the blood. Such things are developed by degrees. Here other beings co-operate, Deva beings, so that all creatures having a blood circulation are dependent on Deva forces for its regulation. The astral body is permeated and worked upon by different Deva forces. The lowest work on the astral body. Higher forces work on the etheric body and still higher Devas on the physical body, the most perfected body possessed by man. The astral body is strikingly less perfect than the physical body. The physical heart is indeed very clever; the stupid one is the astral body, that directs into the heart all kinds of heart poisons. The most perfect part of man is the physical body, less perfect is the etheric body and still less perfect is the astral body. What is only in its beginnings, the ‘baby’ in man, is the ego Organisation. This is the four-fold man, which contains the ego as the temple contains the statue of a god.

The whole development of human culture is nothing other than the working of the ego into the astral body, the education of the astral body. Man enters into life filled with desires, impulses and passions. In so far as he masters these impulses, desires and passions, he is working his ego into the astral body. When the Sixth Root-race, the Sixth Epoch, has reached its conclusion, the ego will have completely worked into the astral body. Until then the astral body will continue to be dependent on the support of the Deva forces. As long as the ego has not permeated the entire astral body, so long must the Deva forces support the work.

The second stage of development, which follows that of the cultural, is the development of the esoteric pupil. He works the ego into the etheric body. Through this the Deva forces are gradually released by the work of his own ego. Then he also gradually begins to see into himself.

We can now ask: what is the significance of the astral body, for what purpose does man have an astral body? It is to give him the possibility, by way of his desires, to do what otherwise he would not have done, and to betake himself to the physical plane. For before man can acquire objective knowledge on the physical plane he must direct to it his wishes and desires. Without these he would have been unable to develop an objective observation of the world or a sense of duty and morality. Only after a gradual transformation of his desires can these be changed into duties and ideals. Man can only pursue this path by means of the driving, organising power of the astral body.

The etheric body is the bearer of thoughts. What is thought within man, is etheric outside, just as what is desire within him, is astral outside. But it is only when pure thinking begins that etheric substance is radiated into the astral impulses. As long as thinking is not yet pure thinking we have astral substance surrounding the etheric form. So thought-forms, as they are called, are made out of a kernel of etheric substance surrounded by astral substance. Along the paths of the nerves stream the so-called abstract thoughts, which however are in reality the most concrete, for they are etheric forces. As soon as man even begins to think, he is already working the ego into his etheric body. When a man dies it becomes clear that the physical body has nothing to do with the ego. Every connection between the physical body and the ego is broken off after death. Previously this connection took place indirectly through the other bodies. When these are no longer there the corpse has no further relation to the ego. Then the outer Deva forces receive it and it is again absorbed into the physical environment. The word ‘verwesen’ (decay) does not mean only a passing away, but a return to the ‘Wesen’ (being) out of which the body came forth. This is what may be said in respect of the physical body. The Dutch word ‘Lichaam’ does not mean ‘Leichnam’ (corpse) but the physical body which has to be carried about.

The etheric body is to a great extent in a similar situation to the physical body. It is taken up in the same way by the Devas and then again dissolved into general circulation. But there remains from the etheric body what the human being himself has worked into it and this does not dissolve. It is this which later, at the time of reincarnation, forms a central point, around which what is to be added is crystallised. This small part of the etheric body remains present in the case of everyone. In the same way there remains from the astral body as much as the human being has worked into it. Only during the last third of the Sixth Root-Race will the entire astral body be retained by all people of normal development.

Thus development begins by man's working consciously on his astral body. The task of the Chela, the occult pupil, consists further in the transformation of his etheric body. The stage of chelahood is completed when after death the entire etheric body remains intact. The sojourn in Devachan is necessary in order to make possible a renewal of the forces of the etheric body. The small portion of the etheric body which to begin with man carries into Devachan can grow into the complete etheric body, because the necessary conditions are created there.

This makes comprehensible the varying length of the sojourn in Devachan. When the human being stands at the beginning of his development and has transformed but very little of his etheric body he can only remain in Devachan for quite a short time. The part of the etheric body that is lacking must be replaced for him by the external Devas. When he develops further he sojourns for a progressively longer time in Devachan; thus the time that he spends there increases in proportion to his own development. People, however, who are more advanced sometimes reincarnate earlier for other reasons, for instance, because they are needed in the world.

When the Chela dies, the entire etheric body is present. Thus at this stage the Chela can renounce Devachan because the etheric body has been completely worked through. Then, after quite a short time, re-birth takes place. He waits at first in the astral world, as in a place of transition, until he receives a definite mission from his Master. Then he can again take possession of his etheric body in order to reincarnate once more.

Until this stage is reached a duality is necessary for evolution, i.e. that which man is unable to develop inwardly for himself is built into him from outside. Help must be brought to him from without. Thus in Devachan the etheric body is once more made complete by external Deva powers. The Physical Plane and Devachan are polar opposites. Between them lies Kamaloka, a place of transition, a transitional stage, an intermediary condition that causes the human being to be connected with what he has worked into his astral body. The astral body leads man on to the Physical Plane, where he directs his attention outwards. Here desires are cultivated by contact with external things. When a person dies his craving for outer objects does not immediately cease, although he no longer has organs bringing him into connection with them. The desire remains but the organs are lacking. In Kamaloka he must break himself from this longing for the outer-world. Kamaloka does not actually belong to normal development; it is only a stage where habits must be relinquished. It is because man can no longer satisfy his wishes, because he no longer has organs for the physical world, that Kamaloka comes about.

When someone commits suicide he has identified his ego with the physical body. For this reason the longing for the physical body is all the more intense. It seems to him that he is like a hollow tree, like someone who has lost his ego. He then has a continual thirst for himself.

When a man is put to death by violence he is in a similar situation. In the case of someone who meets a violent death he continues seeking for his physical body until the time when he would otherwise have died. This seeking can bring about harmful reactions. In such a case it can happen that a man who meets his end by violence is filled with a terrible rage against those who have caused his death. Then in the murdered man the blow is changed into a counter blow. Thus from the astral world, the souls of Russians executed for political reasons fought against their own countrymen on the side of the Japanese. This happened in the Russo-Japanese war; it is however not a general rule.

• 40. In Marie Steiner's notes: ‘formed out of an undifferentiated gelatinous mass like a mineral protoplasm’.
• 41. Fish have a heart with two compartments consisting of atrium and ventricle.

The present lecture is inserted into this course to shed light on many things spoken of in the other lectures. It will deal with the activity and the nature of the Devas.

At the present time it is very difficult to speak about the Gods or Devas because even those people who still have a positive attitude towards religion and still believe in the Gods, no longer have any living relationship to divine spiritual beings. This living relationship to the Gods, to beings, that is to say, who are exalted far above human beings, has disappeared in the course of the age of materialism. Especially during the materialistic age, which developed from the turning point of the 15th and 16th centuries on into our own time, this living connection with the Gods has been lost. It makes little difference whether a person takes his stand on Darwinian materialism or whether he speaks about the Gods in a more or less religious sense. It is much more to the point to become livingly aware that we ourselves have ascended from lower stages of existence and have yet to ascend to higher stages. We must realise that we have a relationship both with what is below and what is above.

Instruction about the Gods was first systematised by Dionysius the Areopagite,⁴² the pupil of the apostle Paul. It was however not written down until the 6th century. This is why scholars deny the existence of Dionysius the Areopagite and speak about the writings of the Pseudo-Dionysius, as though it was in the 6th century that old traditions were first put together. The truth of the matter can only be substantiated by reading in the Akashic Chronicle. The Akashic Chronicle does however teach that Dionysius actually lived in Athens, that he was initiated by Paul and was commissioned by him to lay the foundation of the teaching about the higher spiritual beings and to impart this knowledge to special initiates. At that time certain lofty teachings were never written down but only communicated as tradition by word of mouth. The teaching about the Gods was also given in this way by Dionysius to his pupils, who then passed it on further. These pupils in direct succession were intentionally called Dionysius, so that the last of these, who wrote down this teaching was one of those who was given this name.

This teaching about the Gods, as given by Dionysius, encompasses three times three ranks of divine beings. The three highest are: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. The next degree: Dominions, Mights, Powers. The third degree: Primal Beginnings, Archangels and Angels.

In the Bible the words ‘In the Beginning’ often occur. They refer to the Primal Beginnings or Archai. ‘In the Beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’ This means: The God of the Beginnings, who stands at this stage, created heaven and earth. It was one of the Archai belonging to the Third Rank of the Hierarchies.

Above the Seraphim stand divine Beings whose nature is so exalted that the human power of understanding is not able to comprehend them. After the Third Rank follows the Fourth Hierarchy: Man, as the tenth in the entire sequence.

The names of the Hierarchies do not refer to individuals but to certain stages of consciousness of the great universe, and the Beings move from one stage to another. Eliphas Levi perceived this clearly and laid stress on the fact that with these names one has to do with stages of development, with Hierarchies.

The basis of the Organisation of the Church goes back also to the same Dionysius who formulated the teaching about the Gods. The Church Hierarchy was to be an outer image of the inner Hierarchy of the World. This grandiose thought could only have been carried through if the time had been ripe for an understanding of all this in its true form. Dionysius had bequeathed to his pupils such a teaching in regard to the Church, so that, could it have been realised, a powerful and magnificent Organisation would have come into being. At that time the attempt was made to promulgate the teachings in such a way that the thread was never broken from one teacher to the next, who then also carried on the name. It is therefore not so astonishing that as late as the 6th century a Dionysius committed the teachings to writing. These teachings however could not find general understanding because for this humanity was not yet ripe. They therefore remain as a kind of testament.⁴³

The further we go back the more living are the concepts man had about Beings standing above humanity.

Now let us develop certain concepts as to how man—the ordinary person in the average cultural environment of our time—meets the Gods. After death the human being first goes through Kamaloka, the condition in which he gradually gets rid of the habits of earthly life and frees himself from his desires. It is actually only in its first stages that the sojourn in Kamaloka is often frightening and terrible. Later man goes through that period of Kamaloka when he has to purify himself from the more delicate connections with the earthly world. This sojourn in Kamaloka is not only important for the person in question; as we shall see, the activity of human beings in the higher conditions of Kamaloka can also be made use of in the world outside them. After Kamaloka man enters into the Devachan condition, where, using the faculties he has won for himself, he works over everything which is necessary in order to build up a new etheric body. On the Arupa Plane of Devachan he has to lay aside everything that he gained by his experiences on the Physical Plane. This is why in esotericism the Greek priests called the soul a bee, the Arupa Plane a beehive and the Physical Plane the flowering meadow.

There is however no need for man to be inactive in the higher regions. During the time he is passing through Kamaloka and the lower Devachanic Planes it might appear that he has nothing else to do than to allow what he began earlier to come to fruition. But man is not inactive there; what he experiences in these conditions is significant for the whole world.

The new incarnation of the human being only has a purpose if he meets conditions which are totally different from the earlier ones. In normal circumstances he returns when the whole situation is so different that what he finds around him is entirely new, so that what he adds to his previous achievement is entirely new. This happens in that period of cosmic time when the sun has progressed from one constellation of the Zodiac to the next. For instance, about 800 BC the sun in spring entered the constellation of the Ram or Lamb and this continued until 1800 AD. Now, at the beginning of spring, it stands in the constellation of the Fishes. Two thousand, six hundred years elapse before the sun passes from one constellation of the zodiac to the next. During this time conditions undergo a fundamental change.

Reincarnation is connected with these epochs, during which the human being is usually incarnated once as a masculine and once as a feminine individuality. In any particular incarnation one is in fact only half a human being. A masculine and a feminine incarnation belong together. Owing to the entirely different physical conditions on the earth a new incarnation is not without purpose. If for example someone was incarnated at the time of Homer (in the sign of the Ram or Lamb, Jason, the Golden Fleece) he would have experienced something quite different from what he would experience now.

These incarnations taken by themselves might appear to be part of a completely mechanical process. There is however nothing outward that is not brought about from within. One must accustom oneself to speak everywhere of a real spirit, to seek for it, and to perceive what is actually happening.

When one looks at the flora and fauna of Europe in our epoch one has to differentiate three zones: a western, a central and an eastern zone. The eastern zone coincides with the Slavonic peoples, the central with the Germanic and the western with the Latin peoples. The materialist believes that human beings have adapted themselves to their circumstances, but this is not so. The different peoples have themselves created their physical conditions. The Folk Spirit works first on the earth, on the plants and the animals into which he enters. The Western European territory has been prepared by the Latin peoples, the Central European by the Germanic, the Eastern European by the Slavonic peoples. Thus human beings first build themselves the house in which they later reside. Now let us ask: When does man work upon the external configuration of the earth? As with everything else in the earthly world, destiny too is prepared by man for himself, and this is partially the case here.

In Kamaloka man is actually engaged in collaborating with work on the animal kingdom, in the transformation of species. The force which brings this about is called by natural scientists ‘adaptability’. Everything however that is called adaptability conceals human activity on the other side of existence. Everything which appears as metamorphosis in the animal kingdom, influencing and altering animal instincts so that animals undergo transformation, takes place through human beings in Kamaloka who are preparing for their next incarnation. There man works on his own house in preparation for his next life. In Kamaloka man works on the fauna and in Devachan on the flora. The transformation of the plant world is the result of Devachanic forces. And the physical world which also changes, the outer conditions of Nature, are influenced from the Arupa Plane, (Higher Devachan). There, man is a co-worker on the rocks, on the mineral kingdom of the earth. It is certainly necessary to have some measure of occult powers in order to make such observations in the appropriate place. It is not by chance that miners [Steiner refers to miners of metals and minerals, not coal] in particular make such observations underground. Novalis's⁴⁴ famous occult faculties are connected with the fact that he was a mining engineer.

When one considers that in the super-sensible regions man is developing certain forces, although while there he has not as yet his full consciousness, one understands that these forces are guided by higher beings, by the Devas. We distinguish different stages of Devas: astral, Rupa-mental and Arupa-mental. Astral Devas have as their lowest member the astral body, just as we have the physical body. Like man, the astral Deva consists of seven members. He possesses therefore, as the seventh, yet another member which is higher than Atma. The Devas are all constituted according to the same principles as man. As development progresses to higher planes a being gains conscious mastery over the corresponding lower planes. On the physical plane today man is only master of the mineral kingdom. There he himself can construct something, but he cannot yet construct a plant or an animal. In the mineral kingdom he has the component parts clearly before him. On the next stage he consciously brings forth the plants (Fifth Round) and then the animals (Sixth Round) and finally he consciously brings forth himself (Seventh Round).

The beings whom we call Devas can do much more than human beings of the Seventh Round. They can make use of regions that lie below their own world. They can, for a particular purpose, form for a short time the body that they need. Thus an astral Deva, if he so wish, can incarnate physically at a definite time.

We can only form definite ideas about the Devas when we take our start from human activity. Up to a certain point, man is free, able to do as he pleases. People however do not work harmoniously together, and therefore the various forces which proceed from human beings must be brought into harmony. What people do must have a general effect, and this must be made to serve a useful purpose in the world. The beings who bring this about are the Devas. They also regulate collective karma. As soon as people unite in a common purpose they have a collective karma which binds them together and leads them on their way, weaving a common karmic thread.

Thus in Russia there existed the sect of the Dukhobors⁴⁵ (warriors of the spirit) who were deeply religious. In naive, but in very beautiful, form they possessed the teachings of Theosophy. These people were banished and apparently no longer had any visible influence. Materialists will say: ‘What purpose could this have served?’ The Dukhobors perished. But all those who were united in this sect will in their next incarnation be united by a common tie, in order later to pour into humanity what they have learned. In such a way groups which have come together work on humanity in subsequent incarnations. The idea that was embodied in their lives then flows out again into the world. One finds the same idea in a deeper form in another such group.

Thus there existed for instance in the Middle Ages the sect of the Manicheans.⁴⁶ The secret of the Manicheans was that they realised that in the future there would be two groups of human beings, the good and the bad. In the Fifth Round there will no longer be a mineral kingdom, but instead a kingdom of evil. The Manicheans knew this. They therefore made it their task already then so to educate people that later they might become educators of the evil men. Again and again a deeper profundity is seen in the sect of the Manicheans.

We have to distinguish the separate wills of individual human beings from the powers which stand behind them in order to unite these individual wills into a common will. In this way we have a collective Karma.

The Rosicrucians spoke about Beings who are connected with groups of people. The physical body belongs to the single human being; the astral body on the other hand already belongs to a group. In one part of his astral body man is connected with a Group Soul. What he cannot yet do for himself is today done for him by a Deva. They are still working on man's astral body. The Devas co-operate even more strongly in what man achieves today through work on his etheric body. We have seen that in a part of Kamaloka man's forces are used in the service of the animal kingdom, but they are guided by the Devas. Thence man is progressing ever further on his way to Devachan.

A special class of Devas are the Planetary Spirits—the Dhyan-Chohanic beings who earlier reached the stage which human beings will only attain much later. They stand at the stage that will only be reached by man in the Sixth and Seventh Rounds. A Planetary Spirit is engaged with others in creative work on certain aspects of planetary evolution.

At present man is active on the physical, astral and devachanic planes. Everything is activity. Now what significance have the Planetary Spirits for man in any particular situation? The activity which is at present being carried out by man, was carried out by the Planetary Spirits during previous stages of evolution, during previous planetary conditions. What they then absorbed they now have within them as wisdom. This enables them to become the teachers of the next planetary epoch. Those Devas who were actively engaged in the formation of the earth were not yet able to recognise the underlying laws; this was only possible for beings at the higher stage of Wisdom. Above the stage of Wisdom is the stage of Will, of manifested activity. The Spirits of Wisdom (Kyriotetes) and the Spirits of Will (Thrones) are the actual leaders of planetary evolution.

At the time when man was still an astral being, before the Lemurian Age, the Devas worked within him and built into him in advance what came forth from him later. Before the Lemurian Age there rose up in the inner being of man a picture of his environment. Feelings of sympathy and antipathy also arose in picture form within him. All this was brought about by the Devas. At that time he was governed by the regency of the Devas. Later he assumed in some measure the regency over himself, becoming a subordinate member in the service of the Devas. Now he is to some extent Godforsaken. Only in the part that is not Godforsaken do the Devas still work within him. The Chela consciously brings to life within him that world which man in the Pre-Lemurian Age had learned to know in pictures. Then desires and passions approached him in the form of auric pictures in which lived the thoughts of the Devas, but it was all in deep twilight consciousness. Now after all this had been lost, man had to struggle to attain conscious seeing of an external world. The further development of Chela-ship consists in gaining this also in complete awareness. He retains throughout full consciousness. The medium, that is to say, mediumship, is a relapse into an earlier age.

What the human being experiences on the physical plane is the skeleton of his creative activity; the foundation for the following periods of evolution. Through his contact with the outer world, faculties are formed within him according to which later planetary activity is ordered, after man himself will have become a planetary spirit.

In our speech we create the foundation for later planetary conditions. What we speak today will actually be present there as foundation, just as the rocks and stones form the foundation of the earth. In one sphere the experiences pass through an involutionary process so that in another sphere they may be able to evolve. An individuality is divine in so far as he is able to breathe out again what he has taken in. The Devas become Devas as soon as they are able to give back again what they have previously absorbed.

It is a primeval wisdom that was absorbed earlier and is now being given back. It is ‘Theosophy’ in as much as the Gods themselves were once the teachers of mankind.

Karma is the law. The Deva is the one who brings the law into application. The angel of the rotation of time brings about the application of the law governing groups of human beings. The single person in a group acts instinctively. The Deva guides the Folk Soul; he is in fact the Folk Soul. The Folk Soul is no abstraction, but a living spirit.

• 42. In the Acts of the Apostles Chapter 17 v.34 he is mentioned as a pupil of St. Paul. At the end of the 5th century there appeared in Syria under his name the following writings: The Celestial Hierarchies and On the Hierarchy of the Church which in the 9th century were translated from the Greek into Latin by Scotus Erigena.
• 43. For detailed descriptions of the spiritual hierarchies see Rudolf Steiner: The Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the Physical World, Zodiac, Planets, Cosmos, and The Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies and in the Kingdoms of Nature
• 44. See The Christian Mystery, Novalis the Seer lecture 22.12.1908 in the Anthroposophical Quarterly 1967.
• 45. Knights of the Spirit or Fighters for the Spirit. They also called themselves ‘Christians of the Spirit’ and believed essentially in inner revelation. The sect arose in the middle of the 18th century and was later dispatched to Trans-Caucasia. Towards the end of the 19th century many of them emigrated to Cyprus and Canada. Tolstoi, who had a strong inner link with them, wrote about them in Followers of Christ in Russia in the year 1895.
• 46. The Manichaeans. Founded by Mani (215 or 216 – 276 A.D) originating in Asia Minor. ‘A powerful spiritual stream to which belonged the Albigenses, Waldenses, and Cathars of the Middle Ages. More distantly connected were the Templars and, through a remarkable interweaving of connections, the Freemasons. This is where the Freemasons actually belong although they had allied themselves with the Rosicrucians.’ Thus run the notes of a lecture by Rudolf Steiner on the Manichacans given in Berlin 11.11.1904. See also Albert Steffen: Mani.

Again and again we must make clear to ourselves that this sojourn in Devachan is nowhere else than where we ourselves are in physical life. For Devachan, the astral and the physical world are nothing other than three interpenetrating worlds. We can form the most correct idea of Devachan if we think of the world of electric forces before electricity had been discovered. There was a time when all this was contained in the physical world, only it was then an occult world. Everything that is occult has at some time to be discovered. The difference between life in Devachan and that in the physical world is that man in his present epoch is endowed with organs enabling him to perceive the physical world but not with organs that enable him to behold the phenomena of Devachan.

Let us imagine ourselves in the soul of someone living between two incarnations. He has given over his physical body to the forces of the earth and relinquished his etheric body to the life-forces. Furthermore he has given back that part of his astral body into which he himself has not worked. He then finds himself in Devachan. He no longer has as personal possession what the gods had worked into his etheric and astral bodies; all this has been cast aside. He now possesses only what he himself has achieved in the course of many lives. In Devachan this remains his own. All that man has done in the physical world serves the purpose of making him more and more conscious in Devachan.

Let us take the relationship of one person to another. It can be said that this is simply a natural one, for instance the relationship between brothers and sisters who have been brought together through natural circumstances. It is however only partially natural, for moral and intellectual factors are continually playing in. Through his Karma man is born into a particular family; but not everything is conditioned by Karma. The natural relationship, into which nothing else is intermixed, we have in the case of the animals. In the case of human beings there is always a moral relationship also, through Karma. The relationship between two people can however also exist without this being conditioned by nature. For instance a bond of intimate friendship can arise between two people in spite of outer hindrances. As a rather extreme case let us assume that they were at first mutually somewhat unsympathetic to one another and that they found the way to each other on a purely intellectual and moral basis, soul to soul. Let us contrast this with the natural relationship between members of a family. With the relationship of soul to soul we have a powerful means of developing devachanic organs. In no way can devachanic organs be more easily developed at present than by such relationships. Such a relationship is unconsciously a devachanic one.

What a person develops in his present life in the way of soul faculty through friendship of a purely soul nature, in Devachan is wisdom, the possibility of experiencing the spiritual in action. To the extent to which someone enters livingly into such connections he is well prepared for Devachan. If he is unable to form such relationships he is unprepared; for just as colour escapes a blind man, so does soul experience escape him. To the degree to which man fosters purely soul relationships do organs of vision develop in him for Devachan. So that the statement holds good: Whoever lives and moves here in the life of the spirit, will over there perceive just as much of the spiritual as he has gained here through his activity. Hence the immeasurable importance of life on the physical plane. In human evolution no other means of awakening the organs for Devachan exists other than spiritual activity on the physical plane. All this is creative and comes back to us as devachanic sense organs for the devachanic world. As preparation there is nothing better than to have a purely soul relationship with other human beings, a relationship whose origin is in no way based upon natural connections.

This is why people should be brought together into groups, in order to unite on a purely spiritual basis. It is the will of the Masters to pour life in this way into the stream of humanity. What takes place with the right attitude of mind signifies for all the members of the group the opening of a spiritual eye in Devachan. One will then see there everything which is on the same level with what one had united oneself with here. If on the physical plane one has attached oneself to a spiritual endeavour, this actually is among those things which retain their existence after death. Such things belong just as much to the dead as to the one who has survived him. He who has passed over remains in the same connection with the one still on earth and is indeed even more intensely conscious of this spiritual relationship.

Thus one educates oneself for Devachan. The souls of the dead remain in connection with those who were dear to them. The earlier relationships become causes which have their effects in Devachan. This is why the devachanic world is called, the world of effects and the physical world the world of causes. In no other way can man build his higher organs than by implanting the seeds for these organs on the physical plane. For this purpose man is transferred to earthly existence. What the much quoted phrase, ‘To overcome separate existence’ means, will now become clear to us. Before we descended to physical existence we lived with the content of our astral body which was brought about by a Deva. In earlier times sympathy and antipathy in the human being were stimulated by the Devas; he himself was not responsible. Then at the next stage man said to himself: Now I have entered into the physical world as a being who must find his own way. Formerly I was not able to speak the word ‘I’, now I have become for the first time a separate entity. Previously I was indeed a separate entity, but also a member of a devachanic being. On the physical plane I am a separate entity for myself, an ego, because I am enclosed in a physical body.

The higher bodies flow into one another: for instance Atma is in truth a one-ness for the whole of humanity, like an atmosphere shared in common. Nevertheless the Atma of the single human being is to be understood as if each one were to cut a piece for himself out of the common Karma, so that, as it were, incisions are made in it. But the separateness must be overcome. This we do when we form human attachments of a purely soul nature. By so doing we do away with the separateness and recognise the unity of Atma in everything.

By establishing such human relationships I awaken sympathy within me. I then undertake the task of selflessly fitting myself into the world plan. Through this the Divine is awakened in man. That is why we look out into the world.

Today we are surrounded by physical reality, by sun, moon and stars. What man had around him in the Old Moon existence, he has today within himself. The forces of the Moon now live within him. Had man not existed on the Old Moon he would not have possessed these forces. This is why the Egyptian occult teaching in esoteric centres called the Moon Isis, the Goddess of Fertility. Isis is the soul of the Moon, the precursor of the Earth. Then all the forces lived in the environment which now live in plants and animals for the purpose of reproduction. As now fire, chemical ether, magnetism and so on are around us and surround the Earth, so the moon was surrounded by those forces which enabled man, animal and plant to propagate. The forces which at present surround the Earth will in the future play an individualised role in man. What now constitutes the relationship between man and woman was on the Old Moon external physical activity, such as volcanic eruptions are today. These forces surrounded man during the Moon existence and he drew them in through his Moon-senses, in order to evolve them now. What man developed on the Old Moon through involution emerged on Earth as evolution. What man developed after the Lemurian Age as the sexual forces, is due to Isis, the soul of the Moon, which now lives on further in man. Here we have the relationship between the human being and the present moon. The moon has left its soul with man and has therefore become a mere slagheap.

While we are gaining experiences on the Earth we are gathering the forces which during the next Planetary Evolution will become our own being. Our present experiences in Devachan are the preparatory stages for future epochs. Just as man today looks up to the moon and says: ‘You have given us the forces of reproduction,’ so in the future he will look up to a moon that has arisen out of our present physical earth and as a soul-less body of slag will circle round the future Jupiter. On Future Jupiter man will develop new forces which today on the Earth he takes into himself as light and warmth and all physical sense perceptions. Later he will ray out everything which he had previously perceived through the senses. Whatever he had taken in through his soul will then be reality. So the theosophical conception does not lead us to underrate the world on the physical plane, but to understand that we must draw out of the physical plane what we need to have, experiences which will later radiate outwards. The warmth of the earth, the rays of the sun, which now stream towards us, will later stream out from us. As at the present time the sexual forces emanated from us, so it will be with these new forces.

Now let us make clear to ourselves the significance of the Devachan conditions which follow one another. At first Devachan is only short. But ever more and more spiritual organs are being formed in the Mental Body, until at last when his comprehension has embraced the wisdom of the Earth, man will have completely fashioned the organs of the devachanic body.

This will come about for the whole of mankind when all the World-Rounds are completed. Then everything will have become human wisdom. Warmth and light will then have become wisdom. Between the Earth Manvantara and the following Planetary Evolution man lives in Pralaya. Outwardly there is nothing whatever, but all the forces which man has drawn forth from the Earth are within him. In such a Life-Period the outer turns inwards. Everything is then present as seed and its life is carried over to the next Manvantara. Broadly speaking this is a similar condition to that in which we, in the moment of retrospect, forget all that is around us and only remember our experiences in order to preserve them in memory and later make use of them. So in Pralaya mankind as a whole remembers all experiences in order to put them to use once more.

There are always such intermediate conditions which, as it were, consist of memories, and so the devachanic state is also an intermediate one. The initiate already now sees before him those facts which man only gradually has around him in Devachan. It is an intermediate condition. All similar conditions are of an intermediate nature. The initiate describes the world as it is on the other side, in Devachan, in the intermediate state. When he gets beyond Devachan and reaches a still higher condition he again describes an intermediate state.

The first stage of initiation consists in the pupil learning to penetrate through the veil of the external world and to look at the world from the other side. The initiate is homeless here on the earth. He must build himself a home on the other side. When the disciples were with Jesus ‘on the mountain’, they were led into the devachanic world, beyond space and time; they built themselves a ‘tabernacle’—a home. This is the first stage of initiation.

At the second stage of initiation something similar occurs, but on a higher level. At this stage the initiate has a state of consciousness corresponding to the intermediate period between two conditions of form (Globes), a state of Pralaya that comes about when everything is achieved that can be achieved in the physical condition of form and the Earth is metamorphosed into a so-called astral condition of form (Globe).

The third stage of initiate-consciousness is that which corresponds to the intermediate state between two Rounds, from the old Arupa-Globe of the previous Round to the new Arupa-Globe of the following Round. The initiate is in the Pralaya between two Rounds when he raises himself into the third stage. He is then an initiate of the Third Degree. So we can now understand why Jesus had to reach the third stage before he could place his body at the service of Christ. Christ stands above all the spirits who live in the Rounds. The initiate who had raised himself above the Rounds could place his body at the service of Christ.

The human ego-consciousness was to be purified and healed through Christianity. Christ had to raise and purify the self-centred ego, so that when it has reached self-consciousness it may die selflessly. This he could only do in a body which had become one with ... [Gap in text ...]. Thus only an initiate of the third grade could sacrifice his body for the Christ.

In our time it is extraordinarily difficult to attain to a complete awareness of these lofty conditions. The profoundly wise Subba Row⁴⁷ had his own knowledge; he describes three such stages of discipleship.

We see the moon as the lifeless residue of ourselves and we ourselves have in us the forces which once gave the moon its life. That is also the reason for the special sentimental mood in all poets who sing the praises of the moon. All poetical feelings are faint echoes of living occult streams deeply hidden in man.

A being can however become entangled in what should actually remain behind as slag. Something must remain behind from the Earth that is destined to become later what the moon is today. This must be overcome by man. But someone can have a liking for such things and so unites himself with them. A person who is deeply bound up with what is purely of the senses, of the lower instincts, connects himself ever more strongly with what should become slag. This will come about when the number 666⁴⁸ is fulfilled, the number of the Beast. Then comes the moment when the Earth must draw away from further planetary evolution. If however the human being has connected himself too strongly with the forces of the senses, which should now detach themselves, if he is related to them and has not found the way to attach himself to what is to pass over to the next Globe, he will depart with the slag and become an inhabitant of this body of slag, in the same way as other beings are now inhabitants of the present moon.

Here we have the concept of the Eighth Sphere.⁴⁹ Mankind must go through Seven Spheres. The Seven Planetary Evolutions correspond to the seven bodies.

Old Saturn corresponds to the physical body
Old Sun corresponds to the etheric body
Old Moon corresponds to the astral body
The Earth corresponds to the Ego
Future Jupiter corresponds to the Manas
Future Venus corresponds to the Buddhi
Future Vulcan corresponds to the Atma

Beside these there is an Eighth Sphere to which everything goes that cannot make any connection with this continuous evolution. This already forms itself as predisposition in the devachanic state. When a human being uses the life on earth only to amass what is of service to himself alone, only to experience an intensification of his own egotistical self, this leads in Devachan into the condition of Avitchi. A person who cannot escape from his own separateness goes into Avitchi. All these Avitchi men will eventually become inhabitants of the Eighth Sphere. The other human beings will be inhabitants of the continuing chain of evolution. It is from this concept that religions have formulated the doctrine of hell.

When man returns from Devachan, the astral, etheric and physical forces arrange themselves around him according to twelve forces of karma which in Indian esotericism are called Nidanas:

They are as follows:

In the next lecture we shall study these important aspects of karma in more detail.

• 47. His teachings appeared published as Esoteric Writings.
• 48. See Rudolf Steiner The Apocalypse of St. John lecture 11 (1908).
• 49. More details in The Occult Movement in the 19th century and its relationship to World Culture (1915).
• *. In the Sanscrit words j is pronounced as dj.

Everything that is taught today in Theosophy was also contained in the schools of the Rosicrucians in the 14th century. But the inner schooling of the Rosicrucian stream was a strictly occult one. With such an occult training very little consideration was given to the language, to the way in which things were expressed. In the world of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries there lived certain unassuming men who were not especially well-known as scholars and who also held no particular social position, but who carried on the occult stream of the Rosicrucians. They were never many. There were never more than seven real initiates at one time; the others were occult pupils of various grades. The Rosicrucians were the messengers of the White Lodge. From them went out in very truth events of world significance. Everything of importance that happened during this time could eventually be traced back to the lodges of the Rosicrucians. Outwardly quite other personalities made the history of Europe, but seen from within, the latter were the instruments of occult individualities. Even Rousseau and Voltaire were such instruments of occult individualities standing behind them. These occultists could not themselves appear under their own names. The impulse which, in the carrying out of their mission, they gave to other people could be outwardly a very simple, inconspicuous one. Sometimes the short meeting with such an unassuming man provided the opportunity for the right impulse to be given to these instruments of the occult individuals. Up to the time of the French Revolution occult forces stood behind significant statesmen. Then they gradually withdrew, for men were now to become masters of their destiny. For the first time, in the speeches of the French Revolution, men speak as men.

The inner life remained in the background, in the occult schools. In the schools of the Rosicrucians these things were taught which are now known as the main teachings of Theosophy. The occult brotherhoods gave the impulse to every important discovery; only then did the events play their part in the outside world. Voltaire was in the most eminent sense, an individual directed by forward-striving brotherhoods, for the actual purpose of his being there was to set men on their own feet. Others stood in the service of the retrograde brotherhoods, as for example Robespierre in his later years. Everything which appears in anticipation of the future calls forth its opposite on the physical plane ...

In Rosicrucian schools therefore the same things were taught as through Theosophy today. In the outside world however there was no word of Theosophy. In the occult schools themselves value is only laid on language in order to teach the outside world. The occult pupil himself must learn to use the symbols, the signs. Thus in order to make themselves understood in the world, the initiates only have at their disposal the language used by the world at large. At the time when knowledge was still kept secret, there existed a certain system of symbols and anyone wishing to be initiated had to learn the language of symbols. No value was laid on the spoken word as a means of expression. Even at that time the teachings were there, but the descriptive expressions were frequently lacking. Such expressions for occult teaching are however present in the Eastern method, which is derived from the very earliest Indians, who had received their teaching from the ancient Rishis. These Indian expressions are not yet influenced by the materialistic age. The words which the Indians created are still full of the magic of the sacred primaeval language. Nevertheless what is of Indian origin cannot be made use of by us in Europe.

What is right for the Indian people is not right for Europe. To begin with an Indian impulse was necessary because Europe itself had developed too few expressions able to introduce such teachings. Even today we must still describe many things with Indian words. But everything in occult teachings that today is brought into the open was also possessed by the Rosicrucians in the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times. There were already appropriate expressions for the most fundamental teachings, but at that time it was not yet possible to speak openly about reincarnation and karma. These truths could however be allowed to flow subconsciously into European culture. Paracelsus and other mystics did not speak about reincarnation. This was quite natural. They were not able to speak about it. But for all that is concerned with earthly life between birth and death they also had in the west extremely apt expressions, though not, on the other hand, for the intervening conditions between two incarnations. One thing strongly emphasised at that time, was the importance of physical life for the development of the organs of the higher bodies. When we pursue the study of the sciences, when we develop intimate spiritual friendships, all this is a process of the development of forces which will one day become active as spiritual organs.

Three separate concepts have always comprised what, coming from outside, education on the physical plane should bring about in the three different bodies of man. These three aspects were called: Wisdom, Beauty and Power or Strength.

When in the outer court of the more exoteric Rosicrucian schools the pupils received instruction, they were told: ‘You are to be the workers of the future.’ Nothing was said about reincarnation. But the human being would also continue to work when not incarnated again in the physical body. The teaching implanted in them what should in the future work formatively upon the organs. It was said to the pupils: ‘Lead in your daily life in the outer world, a life of Wisdom, Beauty and Power, then in your higher bodies you will develop those organs which are for the future.’ In Freemasonry today, the masons of St. John still speak of the great importance of Wisdom, Beauty and Power, but they no longer know that thereby formative forces work on the etheric body, the astral body and the ego.

When in the Middle Ages a Freemason master builder built a cathedral or a church, his name was of absolutely no importance. He himself remained in the background. In the case of the ‘Theologia deutsch’⁵⁰ also, and for the same reason, the name of the author was not mentioned. He calls himself ‘the Frankfurter’. No amount of learned research can discover the name. The aim of these men was to work outwardly on the physical plane, leaving no trace of their names behind them, but only the fruits of their activity.

Let us suppose that someone had given the design and the impulse for the building of a great cathedral. He knew that the forms of the building would create in him an organ for the future. All such works will, in their effects, remain connected with the inmost part of the soul. As a rule however all these works in the outer world remain until he who created them finds them again and recognises them when he returns. Under the pulpit there is usually to be found a small picture of the architect; from this he recognises himself again. This is the bridge which is thrown from one incarnation to another.

Through Wisdom the etheric body was to be developed, through Beauty, to which Piety belonged, the astral body, and through Power the individual ego. The human being had to become a self-effacing imprint of the outer world. In ancient India nothing of this was yet known. Brahmanism aimed at a perfecting of the self in the inner life ... [Gap in text ...] ... But just in the middle of our Post-Atlantean epoch there appeared those teachers of religion who drew attention to the renunciation of the self. This was already taught by Buddha. It was developed still more intensively in the West through Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism. They sought the perfecting of the ego in the form that is also in the outer world, not so much in the inner life as this was cultivated in India. It was in this sense that the western occultist said to himself: ‘Thine ego is not only within thyself, but in the world around thee. The Gods have raised thee out of the mineral kingdom, out of the plant and animal kingdoms; but three kingdoms thou createst for thyself, the three kingdoms of Wisdom, Beauty and Power. These develop the organs of the higher man.’

The human being said to himself: ‘I stand here as the end result of a time when the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms sacrificed themselves for me; out of this foundation arose self-awareness, the ego. And just as the ego has been formed through these other kingdoms, so must it now itself develop the kingdoms of Wisdom, Beauty and Strength, in order by their means to mount still higher to a complete transformation of our etheric, astral and ego bodies.’ These three kingdoms are the kingdoms of Science, Art and inner Strength, by which is meant everything that lives itself out in the will. In these three domains the mediaeval esotericist saw the means for the further development of mankind. The transformation of the world was not given over to blind chance, but according to these three aspects of Wisdom, Beauty and Strength, the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms were to be transformed. When the Earth again becomes astral everything will have been transformed in accordance with these three aspects. Thus it was from this three-fold point of view that the freemasons of the Middle Ages and all esotericists built and worked.

In Indian esotericism twelve forces are differentiated which draw man down again into physical existence. The first of these forces is Avidja: ignorance. Avidja is what draws us down again into physical existence for the simple reason that we shall only have fulfilled our mission on the Earth when we have extracted from it all possible knowledge. On the other hand we have not fulfilled our mission as long as everything that we should learn from physical existence has not yet been extracted.

After Avidja what next draws us back is what the earth contains because we ourselves have made it, which therefore belongs to our Organisation. When a mason, for instance, has worked on the building of a cathedral, this has become a part of himself. There is a reciprocal attraction between them. What has an organ-creating tendency for the original instigator, whether it be the work of Leonardo da Vinci or the smallest piece of work, forms an organ in the human being and this is the cause of his return. All that the man has done, taken together, is called Sanskara or the organising tendency which builds up the human being. This is the second thing which draws him back.

Now comes the third. Before the human being entered into any incarnation he knew nothing of an outer-world. Self-awareness first began with the first incarnation; previously man had no consciousness of self. He had first to perceive the outer objects on the physical plane before he could develop consciousness of self. True as it is that what a man has done draws him back to the physical plane, so is it true that knowledge of things draws him back. Consciousness is a new force which binds him to what is here. This is the third element that draws him into a new earth-life. This third force is called Vijnana = consciousness.

Up to this point we have remained very intimately within the human soul. As the fourth stage appears what comes towards the consciousness from outside, what was indeed already there without man, but what he had first to learn to know with his consciousness—this was present outside in his previous existence, but only disclosed itself after his consciousness opened to it. It is the separation between subject and object, or, as the Sanscrit writer says, the separation between name and form (Nama-rupa). Through this man reached the outer object. This is the fourth force that draws him back, for instance the memory of a being to which he has attached himself.

Next comes what we form as mental image in connection with an external object: for example, picturing a dog is merely making a mental image, which is however the essential thing for the painter. It is what the intellect makes of a thing: Shadayadana.

Now there is a further descent into the earthly. The mental picture leads us to what we call contact with existence: Sparsha. Whoever depends on the object stands at the stage of Nama-rupa; whoever forms pictures stands at the stage of Shadayadana. The one however who differentiates between the pleasing and the unpleasing will reach the point where he prefers the beautiful to the unbeautiful. This is called contact with existence: Sparsha.

Somewhat different however from this contact with the outer-world is what at the same time stirs inwardly as feeling. Now I myself come into action: I connect my feeling with one thing or another. That is a new element. Man becomes more involved. It is called Vedana: Feeling.

Through Vedana something quite new again arises, that is, longing for existence. The forces which draw man back into existence awaken more and more strongly within himself. The higher forces compel all human beings to a greater or lesser degree; they are not individual. Eventually however, quite personal forces appear which draw him back again into the earthly world. That is the eighth force. Trishna = Thirst for existence.

Still more subjective than the thirst for existence is what is named Upadana: Comfort in existence. With Upadana man has something in common with the animal, but he experiences it more spiritually and it is the task of man to spiritualise what is gross in this soul element.

Then comes individual existence itself, the sum of all the earlier incarnations when he was already on the earth: Bhava = individual existence, the force of the totality of earlier incarnations. Previous incarnations draw him down into existence.

With this we have retraced the stages of the Nidanas up to individual birth. The esotericist differentiates two further stages which go beyond the period of individual existence. Here he differentiates a previous condition that gave the impetus towards birth, before man had ever been incarnated. This is called Jata: what before birth gave the impetus to birth.

The impetus towards birth is interconnected with a different impulse. It brings with it the germ of dissolution, the urge to extricate oneself from individual birth. What interests us is that this earthly existence of ours falls again into decay and we are freed, able to become old and die (jaramarana). These are the twelve Nidanas which work like strings, drawing us ever and again down into existence. (The meaning of Nidana is string, loop.) There are three groups which belong together:

The soul has three members: the consciousness soul as the highest member, then the intellectual or mind soul and the sentient soul. The first group of the Nidanas from Avidja to Nama-rupa is connected with the consciousness soul: the second group with the intellectual soul and the third, from Upadana to Jaramarana, with the sentient soul.

Vijnana is characteristic of the consciousness soul; Shadayadana of the intellectual soul and the last four are bound up with the sentient soul. These last four are present in both animal and man.

• 50. Written by a priest at the Deutschenherrenhaus at Sachsenhausen near Frankfurt am Main in 1497. Published by Luther in 1518. See also Rudolf Steiner Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age

If we wish to understand the whole way in which Karma works, a subject we are now going to approach, we must be able to form a conception of what is called Nirvana. Very much is involved in a complete understanding of the significance of Nirvana, but we will try to gain an introductory idea of it.

In any action carried out by man there is in fact very little present of anything that might be called freedom, for man is actually the result of his deeds in the past. This is the case in the widest sense of the word. So that he should become what he is, all the kingdoms of Nature had first to be created. The mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, which he once had within him, he gradually put out from himself. To this must be added what he acquired in the time following the first third of the Lemurian race. All that he carried out in the way of deeds, all that he experienced in his soul as thoughts and feelings, belong also to his past, become his Karma. We look into a past which at the same time shows its results in the forms around us. The whole of our surrounding world is nothing other than the result of past deeds. In this same way man is now making preparation for what will happen in the future.

We are nevertheless continually faced with things which are not altogether the results of past deeds, but which bring something new into the world. A certain man, let us say Mr. Kiem, is the result of past deeds. The Theosophical Society too is the result of past deeds and that he is brought into connection with it is also such a result. Something new arises however through Mr. Kiem's relationship to the Theosophical Society: this again is the cause of future deeds. When light shines against a stick, a shadow arises behind it. That is actually something new. When we observe this effect we say to ourselves, something has taken place that is new. The relationship of one thing to another is something new; the forming of the shadow.

Everything which a person usually thinks, he thinks about things, about what has come into being already. He can however turn his thoughts towards relationships of a kind that have not been brought about as the result of earlier causes, but that appear in the present. This happens very seldom, for people hang on to the old, to what has formed like strata around them. Relationships which make their appearance as something altogether new form very little of the content of human thoughts. Anyone wishing to work for the future must however have those thoughts which will produce new connections between one thing and another. Only thoughts dealing with such connections can yield something new. One sees this best in art. What the artist creates is not there in reality. The mere form worked upon by the sculptor is not in fact there; it is no product of Nature. In Nature there is only the form pulsed through with life. A mere form would contradict natural laws. The artist builds something new out of relationships. The painter paints what arises out of relationships: light and shade; he does not paint what is actually there. He does not paint the tree, but an impression which is called up by all he experiences with regard to the tree.

In practical actions also man usually produces nothing new. The majority of people only do what has already been done. Only a few people create out of moral intuition, in that they bring new duties, new deeds into the world. What is new comes into the world through relationships. This is why it is often said that the very nature of simple moral action lies in relationships. Such moral action consists for example in deeds brought about by a relationship based on goodwill. One finds with most actions that they are rooted in the old: even in the case of actions and events where something new makes its appearance, these too are generally rooted in the old.

With more exact investigation this usually become apparent. Only those actions are free which are in no way based on the foundation of the past, but where man only carries out actions in the world which are combined with the productive activity of his reason. Such actions are called in occultism: Creation out of Nothing.⁵¹ All other actions are produced out of Karma. Here we have two opposites: Karma and its opposite, Nothingness, an activity that is not rooted in Karma.

And now let us imagine a person whose actions, thoughts and feelings are conditioned by Karma; through deeds, thoughts ... feelings rising out of the past. One may then think of him having advanced so far that all Karma is eliminated and he is therefore faced with Nothingness. When he then does something one says in occultism: He acts out of Nirvana. For example, it was out of Nirvana that the actions of a Buddha or a Christ arose, at least in part. In the ordinary way a person approaches this only when he is inspired by art, religion or world-history.

Action arising out of intuition comes out of Nothingness. Whoever would attain to this must become completely free from Karma. He can then no longer draw his impulses from the usual sources. The mood which then comes over him is that of divine bliss, a state which is also called Nirvana.

How does the human being ascend to Nirvana? We must look back into Lemurian times. There we find man, as he is on the earth, at first going on all fours. These beings, in which at that time man, ‘pure man’, (as Monad) incarnated, went on all fours. Through the fact that the Monads incarnated in them, these beings gradually raised their front limbs and attained an upright position. Now for the first time Karma begins. Karma, as human Karma, first became possible when human beings made use of their hands for work. Before this man made no individual Karma. It was a very important stage of human development when man, from a horizontal, became a vertical being, thereby freeing his hands. In this way his development led over into the Atlantean epoch.

At the next stage man learned to make use of speech. To begin with he learned the use of his hands, later on, the use of language. Through his hands he filled the surrounding world with deeds; through speech he filled it with words. When a man dies there lives on all that he accomplished through deeds and words in the surrounding world. Everything that he accomplished in the way of deeds remains present as human Karma. What however he produced in the way of words not only remains as his individual Karma, but as something else essentially different.

We can look back at the time when man did not as yet speak, but only performed actions. Then actions were something which only came from the single personality. They ceased however to be only personal when speech began. For now human beings established understanding with one another. This is an extraordinarily important moment in Atlantean development. The moment when the first sound was pronounced, the Karma of humanity began in the world. As soon as human beings speak with one another something common to all flows out from the whole of mankind. Then the purely personal, individual Karma passes over into the general Karma of humanity. With the words which emanate from us we actually spread around us more than just ourselves. In what we speak the whole of humanity is living. Only when the deeds of our hands become selfless will they too become something for the whole of humanity. In his speaking however a man cannot be entirely selfish, for then what he says would have to belong to himself alone. A language can never be entirely selfish, whereas the deeds performed by the hands are mostly so. The occultist says: What I do with my hands can be simply my own concern; what I speak, I speak as member of a nation or a tribe.

Thus our life creates around us remains—personal, rudimentary remains, brought about by the deeds of our hands and general human rudimentary remains brought about by words. These must be clearly differentiated. Everything that surrounds us in Nature—in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—is there as the result of earlier deeds. What is now being built up around us by our deeds is actually something new coming into the world. Each single human being brings something new into the world, something new strikes in, and new impulses also strike in coming from mankind as a whole.

If therefore we must say: Man appeared on the earth in the middle of the Lemurian Age and for the first time created his own Karma, before this he had created no individual Karma; we must ask ourselves: Where then can this Karma come from, since its action played in as something new? It can only come from Nirvana. At that time something had to become active in the world that came forth from Nirvana, from that which is ‘created out of nothing’. The beings who at that time fructified the earth had to reach up into Nirvana. Those who fructified the four-footed creatures so that they became human, were beings who descended from the Nirvana plane. They are called Monads. This is why at that time beings of this nature had to come down from the Nirvana plane. The being from the Nirvana plane who is in us, in the human being, is the Monad. Here something new enters into the world and embodies itself in what is already there and which, for its part, is entirely the result of earlier deeds.

We thus differentiate three stages. The first consists in external deeds brought about through the hands; the second is what is brought about through the spoken word, and the third by what is brought about through thought. And thought is something far more comprehensive than the spoken word. Thought is no longer, as with language, different among the different peoples, but belongs to the whole of humanity.

So man ascends from actions, through words to thoughts, and in this way he becomes an ever more universal being. There is no general norm for action, no logic for deeds. Everyone must act for himself. But there is no purely personal speech. Speech belongs to a group. Thought on the other hand belongs to the whole of humanity. Here we have a progression from the particular to the universal in these three human stages: deeds, words, thoughts.

In so far as he expresses himself in the outer world, man leaves behind him traces of the spirit of the whole of humanity as thought; the traces of a human group soul as word; traces of his separate human being as actions. This is most clearly expressed by pointing out the effects of what is brought about through these three stages. An individuality is like a thread which goes through all forms of personal manifestation in the different incarnations. An individuality creates for further incarnations. A people as a speech-community creates for new peoples. Humanity creates for a new humanity, for a new planet. What a man does for himself personally has significance for his next incarnation; what a nation speaks has significance for the next sub-race, for the next incarnation of a people. And when a world will be there in which our entire thinking no longer lives purely as thinking, but makes its appearance in the results of this, thinking, then a new humanity, that is to say, a new planet, comes into being. Without these great perspectives we cannot understand Karma.

What we think, has significance for the next planetary cycles. Let us now enter into the following thoughts: Will the humanity, i.e., what remains of us, which will inhabit a future planet, will this humanity still think? Just as little as a new race will speak the same language as the previous one, just as little will the future humanity still think. It is laughable to ask in our thoughts what Divinity is. On the next planet man will not think, but will comprehend the surrounding world by means of another activity having a form quite different from thought on this planet. Thinking is something connected with us. When we explain the world by means of thought, this world-explanation is for ourselves alone. This is of immensely wide import because the individual sees how as a member of humanity he is also spun into the threads of karma and how he lives and weaves into the whole karmic web.

When the Eastern occultist expounds such things he says: Our whole life is of such a nature that we seem to be surrounded by the boundaries of speaking and thinking. If we do away with these, for the ordinary man hardly anything is left. That something is still left to him when he has gone beyond all this, is the result of esotericism. What then remains is the experience of Nirvana.

The Planetary Spirit who represents the Being of the World is now incarnated in thinking, but in the future will be incarnated in something else.

• 51. This spiritual-scientific concept of Rudolf Steiner is also to be found in the lecture Evolution, Involution and Creation out of Nothing 17.6.1909 (also contained in The Being of Man and his Future Evolution). See also lecture 15.9.1907 in Occult Signs and Symbols

In occultism we differentiate in man firstly his actions, in so far as by actions we understand everything which proceeds from any kind of activity connected with his hands; secondly speech and thirdly thoughts. Everything which in this sense he accomplishes with his hands brings about its karmic results in his next earthly existence. What we speak concerns not only ourselves alone, but also a group of human beings having the same language, and this affects the karma of the group or race. In words lies a greater responsibility than in deeds alone: for with them we are preparing the configuration of a future race. What we think works on even into a new formation of our earth. We therefore distinguish three stages. Firstly: Human action is individual, with the exception of those actions in man that arise from nothingness. Secondly: Man cannot speak for himself alone; words concern a group of human beings. Thirdly: Thoughts are the concern of the whole of humanity.

With this, something else is connected. When we act we stand quite alone behind our actions. When we speak we are not quite alone in our words. Behind our words a spiritual being is working with us, standing behind us. Just as truly as the words we utter are imprinted quite exactly in the Akasha, so is it true that with every word we utter we impinge upon the body of a spiritual being who is incarnated in this Akashic substance into which our words penetrate. We must take this up into our feeling life; this is why we must pay such heed to our words. When we think, we are seemingly quite alone within ourselves; nevertheless beings of a spiritual nature are active with us in our thoughts, beings still higher and more significant than those active in our speech.

More lies in these things than in a whole world-history. Through them much can be explained. Let us consider a thought within us. Behind this thought a spiritual being is present. If we imagine ourselves enveloped on all sides by the body of a spiritual being, we can realise that a thought is only the expression of the body of the spiritual being working into us. Every time a thought flashes through our soul it is an impression, a kind of foot-print of a higher spiritual being, just as if we were walking over damp ground, leaving footprints, and were to say: ‘Here a person walked’. This spiritual being is formed of the same substance as that of which thought consists. The thought in us can only become the imprint of a higher spiritual being because this higher being has a body formed of the same substance as our thoughts.

When our foot imprints itself in the damp earth, this imprint is a negative, a counter-image of our foot. So is it too with our thoughts. In the higher spiritual world there is a counter-image for every thought. Image and counter-image are as interconnected as seal and sealing wax. The substance is the higher spiritual being which corresponds in our analogy to the sealing wax. Now we call thought, in so far as it corresponds to the sealing wax, intuition, and the impression we call abstract thought. We can say when we think: ‘I feel the traces of what is happening in higher worlds.’ It is with regard to this fact that in religious writings, for instance in the Revelation of St. John, the expression ‘seal’ is used. This corresponds with reality. It is also because a higher being is working with us in our words that every word is the impression of a seal. With the mystics the counter-image is called Imagination. Thus we have three levels of the thought element: the intuitive, the imaginative and the ordinary abstract thinking.

When man develops further, when abstract thought itself develops to the stage on which the beings are incarnated who work with us when we speak, then he is a Chela, an occult pupil. To be a Master means: To work in the substance in which the beings are incarnated who work with us in our thoughts. Imagination gives the picture. This is why the great religious teachers of earlier times spoke pictorially, for imagination gives the picture, not abstract thoughts. In all religions, teachings were expressed in pictures. At first the picture is for man something of lesser importance, but when he understands how to form again for himself a picture out of every thought, then he has reached a higher stage. This is the pre-requisite for a quite new kind of perception. Everything depends on a man developing to the point at which he no longer thinks merely abstractly, but at all times has his thoughts in pictures.

As a rule man forms merely thoughts. The more highly developed man must think in pictures, in images; that means ‘to imagine’. In this expression there already lies what is meant: ‘By means of a certain power to make an imprint in something, (to imagine).’ In creative fantasy, in the case of poet and artist, we find only a weak reflection of imagination. When a man who is seeking higher development speaks, he will try in certain cases, while speaking, to have before him the counter-image, the Imago. This is the source of the mighty pictures in religious writings. Whoever develops himself so far that he can create such pictures has attained the stage of the spiritual beings who are involved in the creation of races. One who develops in himself not only pictures, but intuitions, is not only involved in the creation of races, but in the creation of the next planetary existence. From the pictures there will resound what later will be manifested on the earth, but whoever works out of intuition creates something which is not yet existent, which is nowhere manifested, that is to say he creates out of Nirvana. This concept is inherent in every apocalypse: What will be manifested in the future can only be created out of intuition.

Through abstract thinking one makes a copy of something that exists. Through Imagination a man allows himself to be fructified by the formative spirit within him. Imagination corresponds to hidden realities which have arisen through the fructifying impulse of higher beings; thus one can see these higher spiritual beings on the Astral Plane. The prerequisite for this is to develop a speech that is not the expression of abstract thoughts, but of pictures. This is why mediums also speak in imaginations, in pictures and symbols, but unconsciously. Behind them the spirit is forming the symbols. The occult pupil does this in full consciousness, nevertheless in a way that is not arbitrary. In so doing he allows himself to be fructified by the spirit.

Just as man develops himself to the stage when he can create pictures and receive intuitions, so before he came into existence the external world was active; and indeed in such a way that in everything which is around us as mineral existence, as purely physical nature, Intuitions are working as creative forces. The crystal is external in so far as it reveals itself to the senses; it is however created by means of Intuitions. Behind the entire physical world lies a cosmos of Intuitions and finally a being, the Planetary Spirit, who produces the Intuitions. Behind all language Beings of Imagination are working and with them the Spirit of the Race. In all living things, Beings at the same spiritual level are at work. Behind all plants Imaginations are active. The completed form of the plant comes forth from Imagination and behind it stands a spiritual being: and everything imbued with consciousness and perception has arisen out of Thought itself

Now let us look at the whole universe, to begin with in its physical aspect: Earth, Sun, Moon and stars, the Milky Way and so on. Behind it stands a great intuitive Spirit. It is the same Spirit that manifests in our actions; he also stands behind the whole universe. Christianity calls him the Father. Because he is so little known he is also called the Unknown God, and in theosophical literature the first Logos.⁵²

Behind everything living stands the Spirit of Imagination. It is the same Spirit who is also working in our speech; this is why the Christian religion calls Him the Word. Here something quite exact and actual is meant. This spirit who stands behind everything living is still working today in our speech, in each of our words, and is therefore rightly called ‘the Word’, another designation is: The Son or Christ. He is the Spirit who lives as imagination in everything that has life.

Then we ascend to what is conscious, what has a certain degree of perception, of consciousness, everything of an animal nature and what in man [Gap in text ...] This can already be grasped by thoughts. It is contained in every being. What takes place in the animal occurs in the first place within itself: abstract consciousness. All consciousness existent in the world also lives in man, in abstract thinking. Within himself man calls it ‘Spirit’; in so far as it works outside in the creative forces of Nature he calls it ‘Holy Spirit’. This is what underlies all perception and consciousness. Illness exists only in separateness. Spirit as such cannot be ill, but only when it is incarnated in lower bodies. The word ‘Heilig’ (healthy) means ‘heil sein’, to be well: it expresses the fact that the Spirit which flows through the world outside, is healthy. The Holy Spirit is nothing other than Spirit which is healthy through and through: this is why anyone who truly unites himself with the Holy Spirit (Heiliger Geist) receives the power of healing (heilen). This must be in harmony with the Holy Spirit flowing through the world. This is the Spirit which works from man to man as the true healer.

If we now turn our attention to the physical plane we find in the first place that we perceive through the senses. Behind is the great intuitive Spirit. Everything physically present has been made by this Spirit. Thus behind everything that lives in form as such, that can be perceived by the senses, stands the Father Spirit, the first Logos. Through merely observing we do not alter anything, but an alteration comes about when we act. Then we not only change what exists outside in the world, but also the forces working outside in the world. The moment we act we bring about an alteration on the physical plane. Behind these alterations however there lies also an alteration in the underlying force corresponding to the first Logos. This we influence by our actions; it remains, is there, cannot again be got rid of, unless it be eradicated by the same force which called it forth. And the alteration which is called forth through our deeds is what takes hold of us again as Karma. That which draws man into the physical world once more, if looked at from the point of view of Karma is called: Rupa. This is because it was accomplished in Rupa, through the body, through man's external nature. Thus we create in the body, in Rupa, when we work upon the outer Intuitions.

The second sphere in which today man is not entirely independent, but where another Spirit is working with him, is speech. Here we make impressions in a world behind which lies not only what is physical, but what has life. In the world of life the Imaginations about which we are speaking remain behind, formative forces which create new races. Our present race has been created out of what lay behind the words of earlier races. This is embodied in our race. In addition we have to consider everything which belongs in any way to Imagination. This shows us that with our words we produce impressions in the realm of the Son, in the realm of the second Logos. These return as the collective Karma of the whole race, for the word is not created by us alone; the Spirit of the Race is working with us. What is the foundation for this form of Karma? Where is the Spirit of the Race working? The Spirit of the Race is active in man's feeling, permeates the entire world of feeling. This resounds into what a human being has in common with his group.

What works in a much wider sense on Karma is feeling (Vedana). Thus firstly: Rupa, the corporality; secondly: Vedana, feeling. For those people who have not yet become Chelas, feeling has great importance where the perception of the second Logos and everything living is concerned. The aim of science is to study animals and plants apart from life. Even the greatest men of learning today have not yet advanced beyond the stage of comprehending life with feeling. It is the Imaginative understanding which first enables them to look into life itself.

In the outer world thought is connected with everything having sensation and consciousness. This has one thing in common with us: perception. The fact that we can in any way perceive the outer world in physical space as a world of colour and sound is only possible because we are able to transpose it into thoughts. We receive perceptions; we think about them. If there were no thoughts in the perceptions it would be the greatest folly on man's part to form thoughts about them. Thoughts would then be mere illusions if the perceptions had not arisen through thoughts. From the combination of perceptions it follows that in the first place perceptions are built up by thoughts which we can then extract from them: the laws of nature. These are nothing other than thoughts; it is the creative Spirit, the Holy Spirit. Perception is the boundary between the two, where our thoughts come in contact with the creative thoughts outside. Thus with a thought that we have we cannot work directly on life, but on the consciousness which in the outer world is itself thought.

Through thought we leave behind traces in all the spiritual beings who have brought about consciousness. What man builds up on the basis of perception in the way of thoughts, and what he produces as thoughts, has its repercussions on everything which makes perception necessary. Thirdly therefore we differentiate: Perception or Sanjna, the third element which has an effect on Karma.

Through all actions we call forth counter-actions as Karma, because we make an impact on the Intuitive World: Rupa.

Through all words we make an impact on the World of Creative Feelings around us: Vedana.

With our thoughts about perceptions we make an impact on the whole World of Thoughts outside us: Sanjna.

What we perceive around us will no longer be there when we appear again on Earth. Everything therefore which we think in connection with the world of perception will have no effect whatever on the future incarnation; only in this incarnation will it have a Karma-building force. Thought works upon our present character.

What comes forth from feeling, that is essentially connected with our surroundings; what enters into the world of Imagination, comes back to us in the following incarnation, in such a way that it appears within us as inborn tendencies and outside us as opportunities. Through our inborn tendencies we call towards us opportunities offered by the world, which form our destiny, through tendencies which have their source in Karma. Thoughts form the character: the tendencies or disposition lead karmically to the opportunities. Actions bring about the external destiny, all the bodily circumstances into which man is born. What we carry out through Rupa, our bodily nature, that is our actual destiny, that comes back to us karmically.

One can only create inborn tendencies for further incarnations consciously by reaching the stage of Imagination. Herein we find the secret of how the great founders of religions projected their influence beyond their own time. The pictures which they gave the people released dispositional tendencies for the following incarnations. Every picture that they instilled into the soul reappeared in the entire feeling-world of the human being. Either he wins such Imaginations for himself, or he receives them from his teacher. We win them for ourselves when we have gained control over our entire life of feeling: this is the case with the occult pupil. His feelings are subject to his own control; the rest of humanity is cared for in this respect by the founders of religions. A religion is the feeling-world of future races; outwardly therefore it can be submerged, for it lives on in human tendencies. Today tendencies are coming to the surface which were implanted in mankind in the 13th and 14th centuries. It is important that the materialistic images of the present day do not take root in human hearts, for in future times they would fill human beings with the most brutal instincts which are only directed to the world of the senses, if they were not opposed by spiritual ideas. Those desires and wishes live in man which are produced out of imagination. This is his desire-nature = Sanskara. Everything intuitive in man, the great impulses which he receives from the highest initiates, these actually overcome the Karma of Deeds. He who raises himself to Intuitions as such, penetrates through the physical world up to the Father Spirit. He who possesses intuitive knowledge can affect the Karma arising out of deeds. He begins to limit his Karma consciously.

For the ordinary person only those beings are comprehensible who also have consciousness. When he progresses to Imagination, life also becomes comprehensible; when he progresses to Intuition he can advance as far as the Intuitive forces.

A person can affect his Karma to the degree in which he himself possesses Intuition; or he must receive it from the high initiates in the form of great moral laws. Vijnana is the name used for the consciousness necessary for the overcoming of Karma. And now let us think of a man living in the world, carrying out his actions and dying. After his death something of him nevertheless remains here in this world which he has woven into it: Rupa, Vedana, Sanjna, Sanskara and Vijnana. These five are the balance of his account: his personal destiny as Rupa; the destiny of the nation into which he is born, as Vedana; the actual fact of his birth on this earth as Sanjna. In addition, working with Sanskara, the desire nature, and Vijnana, the consciousness. These are the five Skandhas.

What a man gives out into the world remains as the five Skandhas in the world. These are the foundation of his new existence. They have progressively less effect when he has consciously developed something of the last two. The more he has gained conscious power over Vijnana, the more does he gain the power of consciously incarnating in the physical body. In their essential nature the Skandhas are identical with Karma.

• 52. Compare Rudolf Steiner's notes for Edouard Schuré May 1906. Zeichnen und Entwicklung der drei Logoi in der Menschheit published in No. 14 of Nachrichten der Rudolf Steiner-Nachlassverwaltung Michaelmas 1965.

If we wish to obtain a more exact knowledge of how Karma comes about, we must go back a certain way in the development of humanity. If we transpose ourselves back some thousands of years we find Europe covered with ice. At that time, the glaciers of the Alps forced their way right down into the low-lying plain of Northern Germany. The districts in which we now live were then cold and raw. Here dwelt a race of human beings who made use of extremely simple and primitive tools. If we go back about a million years we find in the same territory a tropical climate such as today is only to be found in the hottest districts of Africa. In some parts there were huge primeval forests in which lived parrots, monkeys, especially the gibbon, and elephants. We should however hardly have met in our wanderings in these forests anything approximating to present day human beings and not even to those of periods some thousands of years later. Natural science can prove from certain strata of the earth which arose between these two epochs the existence of a type of human being in whom the front part of the brain was not yet as developed as it is today and whose brow receded far back. Only the back part of the brain was developed. We go back further to times in which people did not yet know the use of fire and made their weapons by grinding pieces of stone. The natural scientist likes to compare this stage of humanity with that of savages or of a clumsy child. Remains of such human beings have been found in the Neandertal and Croatia. They have a skull similar to that of the ape and the finds in Croatia reveal that before their death they were roasted, thus proving that cannibals lived there.

Now the materialistic thinker says: We trace man back into the times in which he was still undeveloped and clumsy and assume that the human being has developed from this childish stage of existence up to the present stage of human culture and that this primitive man has evolved from animals bearing a similarity to man. In this theory of evolution therefore he simply makes a leap from primitive human beings to animals similar to man. The natural scientist takes for granted that the more perfect has always evolved from the less perfect. This however is not always the case. If for example we trace the human being back to childhood we do not come to greater imperfection for the child is descended from father and mother. That is to say we come to a primitive condition deriving from a higher condition. This is important, for it is connected with the fact that already at birth the child has the predisposition to a later stage of perfection, whereas the animal remains at the lower stage.

When the natural scientist has gone back to the stage at which man had no frontal brain and no intellect he should say to himself: I must assume that the origin of man is to be sought elsewhere.

Just as a child is descended from his parents, so all those primitive human beings are descended from others who had already attained a high degree of development. We call these human beings Atlanteans. They lived on that part of the earth which is now covered with the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. The Atlanteans had even less frontal brain, an even farther-receding brow, nevertheless they still possessed something which differed from later human beings. They still had a much stronger, more vigorous etheric body. The etheric body of the Atlanteans had not yet developed certain connections with the brain; these arose later. Thus over the head there was still an immense etheric head. The physical head was comparatively small and embedded in an etheric head of immense size.

The functions which people now carry out with the help of the frontal brain were carried out in the case of the Atlanteans, with the help of organs in the etheric body. By this means they could enter into connection with beings to whom today access is barred to us, just because our frontal brain has been developed. With the Atlanteans a kind of fiery coloured formation was visible, which streamed out from the opening of the physical head towards the etheric head. He had access to all sorts of psychic influences. A head of this kind, which thinks as an etheric head, has power over the etheric, whereas a head which thinks in the physical brain only has power over the physical, over the putting together of purely mechanical things. He can make physical tools, while someone who still thinks in the etheric can cause a seed to grow and bloom.

The Atlantean civilisation was still in close connection with the growth forces of nature, of the vegetation, a power which present day man has lost. For instance, the Atlantean made no use of steam power to bring vehicles into motion, but used the seed power (samenkraft) of the plants. With this he propelled his vehicles. Only from the last third of the Atlantean epoch, from the time of the original Semites until the time when Atlantis was covered with the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, did the frontal etheric head develop the frontal brain. Through this man lost the power of influencing the growth of plants and gained only the capacity of the physical brain, of intellect. With many things he now had to make a new beginning. He had to begin to learn mechanical work. In this he was like a child, clumsy and awkward, whereas before in developing the vegetable kingdom he had achieved great skill. It is necessary for man to pass through the stage of intelligence and then to regain what he could do earlier. At that time, higher spiritual beings had an influence on the unfree will; through the open etheric head they worked through the intellect.

Going still further back we reach the Lemurian Epoch. Here we come to a stage in human development at which the union of the maternal and paternal principles takes place for the first time. This etheric head naturally branches out into the astral body which surrounds the human beings with its rays ... [Gap in text ...]. If one had found the means of lifting the head with the astral body out of such a human being something quite peculiar would have occurred. He would thereby have lost the possibility of holding himself upright; he would have folded up. Just the opposite procedure was taken with man at that time and through this he gradually raised himself to the upright posture.

In the Lemurian Epoch, however, man was still at a stage at which he did not yet possess what we are assuming could be lifted out of him. In this earlier period he did not yet possess this etheric head with the astral body. At that time, they were not yet there. Man as he wandered over the earth was then really a being folded together. The two organs now used for work, the hands, were then turned backwards and formed additional organs of movement, so that he went on four legs. One must picture two people of the present day, man and woman, entwined in one another, think away the upper half of the body, leaving only the lower half there. The human being was actually male-female. He also had at that time an astral and etheric body, but not the one which he had later. This was a different astral body, that is, such a one as had reached its highest perfection on the Old Moon. There, on the Old Moon, the astral body together with the etheric body had acquired the capacity of developing a physical body which then had a crab-like form. The human being could stand on one pair of legs and make a kind of leaping movement.

This astral body with the etheric body was then of quite another nature. It had a form which was not entirely egg-shaped, but more like a bell which descended like a dome over the human being who went on all fours. The etheric body provided for all the life functions of this Lemurian human being. In his astral body he had a dull twilight consciousness similar to that of our dreams. His consciousness was however unlike the reminiscences inherent in our dreams, for he dreamt of realities. When he was approached by another human being unsympathetic to him, there arose in him a sensation of light which indicated what was unsympathetic.

Already on the Old Moon man had some slight power of using both his front limbs for the purpose of grasping, so that now the time came for assuming the upright posture. His other living companions were, in the Lemurian Age, of the nature of reptiles; animals of grotesque shapes who have left no traces behind them. The ichthyosaurs and so on are descendants of these animals. It is a fact that at that time the earth was inhabited by beings reptilian in character; human bodies too were reptile-like. When eventually this reptilian human being assumed the upright posture, the formation of the head, quite open in front, out of which gushed a fiery cloud, became visible. This gave rise to the tales about the winged serpent, about the dragon. Such was man's grotesque form at that time, reptile-like. The Guardian of the Threshold, the lower nature of man, frequently appears in a form of this kind. It represents the lower nature with the open formation of the head. At that time, the union took place between these forms on the earth and the other beings already described. The astral body with the head formation united with the winged-serpent body with its fiery opening. It was the fructification of the maternal earth with the paternal spirit.

In this way there proceeded the fructification with the Manas forces. The lower astral body merged with the higher astral body. A great part of the astral body, as it then was, fell away. One portion formed the lower parts of the human astral body, and the other newly acquired astral body, connected with the head, united with the upper parts of the human being. What was then peeled off abandoned this astral body which was bound up with the form of the winged-serpent; it could no longer have any further development on the Earth. It formed, as a conglomerate substance, the astral sphere of the moon, the so-called eighth sphere. The moon actually provides shelter for astral beings which have come into existence through the fact that man has thrown something off.

This union of the paternal spirit with the maternal substance was described in Egypt as the union of Osiris and Isis. From it came forth Horus. The merging of the serpent form with the etheric head, with the newly acquired astral body and head formation, led to the conception of the form of the sphinx. The sphinx is the expression of this thought in sculpture.

There were seven kinds or classes of such forms, all of which differed somewhat from each other, from the finest, approximating to the highly developed formation of the human form down to those which were utterly grotesque. These seven kinds of human forms had all to be fructified. One must conceive the descent of the ‘Sons of Manas’ in this pictorial way. Only then can one understand how the astral body of man came into existence. It is composed of two different members.

If we consider human development we shall find that the one part of the astral body is continually endeavouring to overcome the other half, the lower nature, and transform it. In so far as man today consists of astral body with etheric body and physical body, it is in fact only the physical body which in its present state is a product which has reached completion. In the case of the etheric body also there are two parts that seek to merge into one another.

Now when man dies he gives over to the forces of the earth his whole physical body, but the etheric body divides itself into two members. The one member is derived from the upper formation and this man takes with him. The remainder falls away, for over this he can exert no mastery; it came to him from outside. He can only exert mastery over it when he has become an occult pupil. This part of the etheric body therefore in the case of the ordinary person is given over to the etheric forces of cosmic space.

What clings to the person from that astral body which came with him from the Old Moon compels him to spend a period of time in Kamaloka until he has freed himself from this point as regards that particular life. Then he still has that part of the astral body which has found a state of balance; with this he makes his journey through Devachan and back to physical life. This is why one sees bell-like formations in astral space rushing about with terrific speed. These are the human souls again seeking incarnation. When here with us such a bell-like human being darts through astral space and an embryo in South America is karmically connected with it, this human bell must immediately be there. So these returning souls rush through astral space. This bell formation is reminiscent of those which appeared in the Lemurian Age, only it has already found its state of balance with the higher astral body. We know that the human being develops by working from the ego upon the three other bodies. The ego is nothing other than what worked at that time in a fructifying way; the upper auric part with the etheric head. The members which the human being has developed are the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body.

Upper Etheric or Mental body
Astral body as Buddhi
Astral body
Lower Etheric body
Physical body

The physical body has arisen through a transformation and ennobling of that serpent-like body which we meet with in the Lemurian Age. This was male-female. The present day human being is also male-female. In the case of a man the basis of the upper members is female, with a woman the basis of the upper etheric body is of male formation. So actually the physical nature of the human being is also male-female.

The etheric body consists of two members, that part of human nature which originally came over from the Old Moon and its opposite pole. They were at first not yet joined together; later they approached one another and became united. The one is the pole of animality, the other the pole of the spiritual. The pole of animality is called ‘etheric body’, the pole of the spiritual, ‘mental-body’. The mental body is materialised ether.

Between them is the astral body and this too has arisen out of the union of a duality. Fundamentally it is also a two-fold formation. We have to differentiate in it a lower and a higher nature. The higher nature was originally connected with the mental body. This part of the astral body which has its seat in the mental body—what therefore has come into it from above—is the other pole of the lower astral body. One of the characteristics of the lower astral body is that it has desires. The upper part has instead of these, devotion, love, the giving virtue. This part of the astral body is called Buddhi. The description here given of the human being is as seen in this way in the Cosmic Light. When man himself works into his sheathes it is different. The one portrays his cosmic structure, the other how he himself works into it.

Thus Buddhi is the ennobled astral, the Mental the ennobled etheric and the Physical has its opposite pole in Atma.