The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today we will lead on from the lecture of the day before yesterday to certain matters which can promote a deep personal understanding of Anthroposophical life. If we survey our life and make real efforts to get to the roots of its happenings, very much can be gained. We shall recognise the justice of many things in our destiny and realise that we have deserved them. Suppose someone has been superficial and thoughtless in the present incarnation and is subsequently struck by a blow of fate. It may not be possible, externally, to connect the blow of fate directly with the thoughtlessness, but a feeling arises, nevertheless, that there is justice in it. Then again, looking back on our life, we find blows of fate which we can only attribute to chance, for there seems no explanation for them whatever. These two categories of experience are to be discovered as we survey our life.

Now it is important to make a clear distinction between apparent chance and obvious necessity. When a man reviews his life with reference to these two kinds of happenings, he will fail to reach any higher stage of development unless he endeavours to have a very clear perception of everything that seems to him to be due to chance. We must try, above all, to have a clear perception of those things we have not wished for, which go right against the grain. It is possible to induce a certain attitude of soul and to say to ourselves: How would it be if I were to take those things which I have not desired, which are disagreeable to me, and imagine that I myself actually really wanted them? In other words we imagine with all intensity that we ourselves willed our particular circumstances.

In regard to apparently fortuitous happenings we must picture the possibility of having ourselves put forth a deliberate and strong effort of will in order to bring them about. Meditatively as it were, we must induce this attitude to happenings which, on the face of them, seem to be purely fortuitous in our lives. Every human being today is capable of this mental exercise. If we proceed in this way, a very definite impression will gradually be made upon the soul; we shall feel as though something were striving to be released from us. The soul says to itself: ‘Here, as a mental image, I have before me a second being; he is actually there.’ We cannot get rid of this image and the being gradually becomes our ‘double.’ The soul begins to feel a real connection with this being who has been imagined into existence, to realise that this being does actually exist within us. If this conception deepens into a vivid and intense experience, we become aware that this imagined being is by no means without significance. The conviction comes to us: this being was already once in existence and at that time you had within you the impulses of will which led to the apparently chance happenings of today. Thereby we reach a deeply rooted conviction that we were already in existence before coming down into the body. Every human being today can have this conviction.

And now let us consider the question of the successive incarnations of the human being. What is it that reincarnates? How can we discover the answer to this question?

There are three fundamental and distinct categories of experiences in the life of the soul Firstly our mental pictures, our ideas, our thoughts. In forming a mental picture our attitude may well be one of complete neutrality; we need not love or hate what we picture inwardly, neither need we feel sympathy or antipathy towards it. Secondly there are the moods and shades of feelings which arise alongside the ideas or the thoughts; the cause of these moods in the life of feeling is that we like or love one thing, dislike or abhor another, and so forth. The third kind of experience in the life of the soul are the impulses of the will. There are, of course, transitional stages, but speaking generally these are the three categories. Moreover it is fundamentally characteristic of a healthy life of soul to be able to keep these three kinds of experiences separate and distinct from one another. Our life of thought and mental presentation arises because we receive stimuli from outside. Nobody will find it difficult to realise that the life of thought is the most closely bound up with the present incarnation. This, after all, is obvious when we bear in mind that speech is the instrument whereby we express our thoughts; and speech, or language, must, in the nature of things, differ in every incarnation. We no more bring language with us at the beginning of a new incarnation than we bring thoughts and ideas. The language as well as the thoughts must be acquired afresh in each incarnation. Hebbel⁵¹ once wrote something very remarkable in his diary. The idea occurred to him that a scene in which the reincarnated Plato was being soundly chastised by the teacher for his lack of understanding of Plato would produce a very striking effect in a play! A man does not carry over his thought and mental life from one incarnation to another, and he takes practically nothing of it with him into his postmortem existence. After death we evolve no thoughts or mental pictures but have direct perceptions, just as our physical eyes have perceptions of colour. After death the world of concepts is seen as a kind of net stretching across existence. But our feelings, our moods of heart and feeling these we retain after death, and we also bring their forces with us as qualities and tendencies of soul into a new earthly life. For example, even if a child's life of thought is undeveloped, we shall be able to notice quite definite tendencies in his life of feeling. And because our impulses of will are linked with feelings we also take them with us into our life after death. If, for instance, a man succumbs to a mistaken idea, the effect upon his life of feeling is not the same as if he devotes himself to the truth. For a long time after death we suffer from the consequences of false mental presentations and ideas. Our attention must therefore turn to the qualities and moods of feeling and the impulses of will when we ask ourselves what actually passes on from one incarnation to another.

Suppose something painful happened to us ten or twenty years ago. In thought today we may be able to remember it quite distinctly and in detail. But the actual pain we felt at the time has all but faded away; we cannot re-experience the stirrings of feelings and impulses of will by which it was accompanied. Think for a moment of Bismarck⁵² and the overwhelming difficulties we know he had to face when he took his decision to go to war in 1866; think of what tumultuous feelings, what teeming impulses of will were working in Bismarck at that time! But even when writing his memoirs, would Bismarck have been conscious of these emotions and resolves with anything like the same intensity? Of course not! Man's memory between birth and death is composed of thoughts and mental pictures. It may be, of course, that even after ten or twenty years a feeling of pain comes over us at the recollection of some sorrowful event, but generally speaking the pain will have greatly diminished after this lapse of time; in thought, however, we can remember the very details of the event. If we now picture to ourselves that we actually willed certain painful events, that in reality we welcomed things which in our youth we may have hated, the very difficulty of this exercise rouses the soul and thus has an effect upon the life of feeling. Suppose, for example, a stone once crashed down upon us. We now try with all intensity to picture that we ourselves willed it so. Through such mental pictures—that we ourselves have willed the chance events in our life—we arouse, in the life of feeling, memory of our earlier incarnations. In this way we begin to realise that we are rooted in the spiritual world, we begin to understand our destiny. We have brought with us, from our previous incarnation, the will for the chance events of this life.

To devote ourselves in meditation to such thoughts and elaborate them, is of the highest importance. Between death and a new birth too, much transpires, for this period is infinitely rich in experiences—purely spiritual experiences, of course. We therefore bring with us qualities of feeling and impulses of will from the period between death and a new birth, that is to say, from the spiritual world. Upon this rests a certain occurrence of very great importance in the modern age, but one of which little notice is taken. The occurrence is to be found in the lives of many people today, but it is usually passed by unnoticed. It is, however, the task of Anthroposophy to point to such an occurrence and its significance. Let me make it clear by an example.

Suppose a man has occasion to go somewhere or other and his path takes him in the wake of another human being, a child perhaps. Suddenly the man catches sight of a yawning chasm at the edge of the path along which the child is walking. A few steps further and the child will inevitably fall over the edge into the chasm. He runs to save the child, runs and runs, entirely forgetting about the chasm. Then he suddenly hears a voice calling out to him from somewhere: ‘Stand still!’ He halts as though nailed to the spot. At that moment the child catches hold of a tree and also stops, so that no harm befalls. If no voice had called at that moment the man would inevitably have fallen into the chasm. He wonders where the voice came from. He finds no single soul who could have called, but he realises that he would quite certainly have lost his life if he had not heard this voice; yet, however closely he investigates he cannot find that the warning came from any physical voice.

Through close self-observation many human beings living at the present time would be able to recognise a similar experience in their lives. But far too little attention is paid to such things. An experience of this kind may pass by without leaving a trace—then the impression fades away and no importance is attached to the experience. But suppose a man has been attentive and realises that it was not without significance. The thought may then occur to him: At that point in your life you were facing a crisis, a karmic crisis; your life should really have ended at that moment, for you had forfeited it. You were saved by something akin to chance, and since then a second life has as it were been grafted onto the first; this second life is to be regarded as a gift bestowed upon you and you must act accordingly. When such an experience makes a man feel that his life from that time onwards has been bestowed upon him as a gift, this means that he can be accounted a follower of Christian Rosenkreutz. For this is how Christian Rosenkreutz calls the souls whom he has chosen. A man who can recall such an occurrence—and everyone sitting here can discover something of the kind in their lives if they observe closely enough—has the right to say to himself: Christian Rosenkreutz has given me a sign from the spiritual world that I belong to his stream. Christian Rosenkreutz has added such an experience to my karma. This is the way in which Christian Rosenkreutz chooses his pupils; this is how he gathers his community. A man who is conscious of this experience knows with certainty that a path has been pointed out to him which he must follow, trying to discover how he can dedicate himself to the service of rosicrucianism. If there are some people who have not yet recognised the sign, they will do so later on; for he to whom the sign has once been given will never again be free from it.

Such an experience comes to a man because during the period between his last death and his present birth he was in contact with Christian Rosenkreutz in the spiritual world. It was then that Christian Rosenkreutz chose us, imparting an impulse of will which leads us now to such experiences. This is the way in which spiritual connections are established. Materialistic thought will naturally regard all these things as hallucinations, just as it regards the experience of Paul at Damascus as having been an hallucination. The logical conclusion to be drawn from this is that the whole of Christianity is based upon an hallucination, therefore upon error. For theologians are perfectly well aware that the event at Damascus is the foundation stone of the whole of subsequent Christianity. And if this foundation stone itself is nothing but an illusion, then, if thought is consistent, everything built upon it must obviously be fallacy.

An attempt has been made today to show that certain happenings, certain experiences in life may indicate to us how we are interwoven in the spiritual fabric of world existence. If we develop the memory belonging to our life of feeling, then we live our way into the spiritual life which streams and pulses through the world. Theoretical knowledge alone does not make men true Anthroposophists; those who understand their own life and the life of other human beings in the sense indicated today—they and they alone are true Anthroposophists. Anthroposophy is a basic power which can transform our life of soul. And the goal of the work in our groups must be that the intimate experiences of the soul change in character, that through the gradual development of the memory belonging to the life of feeling we become aware of immortality. The true theosophist or Anthroposophist must have this conviction: If you really will, if you apply the forces within you in all their strength, then you can utterly transform your character. We must learn to feel and experience that an immortal element holds sway in ourselves and in everything else. An Anthroposophist becomes an Anthroposophist because his faculties remain receptive his whole life long, even when his hair is white. And this realisation that progress is possible always and forever will transform our whole spiritual life today.

One of the consequences of materialism is that human beings become prematurely old. Thirty years ago, for example, children looked quite different; there are children today of ten or twelve years of age who give the impression almost of senility. Human beings have become so precocious, especially the grown-ups. They maintain that lies such as that of babies being brought by the stork should not be told to children, that children should be enlightened on such matters. But this enlightenment itself is really a lie. Those who come after us will know that the souls of our children hover down as bird-like spirit forms from the higher worlds. To have an imaginative conception of many things still beyond our comprehension is of very great importance. As regards the fact in question it might be possible to find a better imaginative picture than the story of the stork. What matters is that spiritual forces operate between the child and his parents or teachers, a kind of secret magnetism must be there. We must ourselves believe in any imaginative picture we give to the children. If it is a question of explaining death to them, we must point to another happening in nature. We can say: ‘See how the butterfly flies out of the chrysalis. The same thing happens to the human soul after death’ But we must ourselves believe that the world is arranged in such a way that the forces in the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis present us with an image of the soul going forth from the body. The world-spirit has inscribed such a picture in nature to draw our attention to the process. It is tremendously important to be always capable of learning, of remaining young, independently of our physical body. And that is the great task of theosophy that has become Anthroposophy: to bring to the world the rejuvenation which it needs. We must get beyond the banal and the purely material. To recognise soul and spirit as powers operating in life—this must be the aim of the work in our groups. We must be permeated more and more with the knowledge that the soul can gain mastery over the external world.

• 51. Hebbel ... diary: ‘After his soul journey Plato is now possibly being caned at school for—not understanding Plato.’ Hebbel's diaries Nr. 1335.
• 52. Bismarck: ‘Gedanken und Erinnerungen’ (Thoughts and Memories), 1898, 2 volumes.

I had good reason to emphasise at the end of each of the two public lectures⁵³ that Anthroposophy must not be regarded merely as a theory or a science, nor only as knowledge in the ordinary sense. It is rather something that can be transformed in the soul into actual life, into an elixir of life. What really matters is that we shall not only acquire knowledge through Anthroposophy, but that forces shall flow into us from Anthroposophy which help us not only in ordinary physical existence but through the whole compass of life, which includes physical existence and the discarnate condition between death and a new birth. The more we feel that Anthroposophy bestows upon us forces whereby life itself is strengthened and enriched, the more truly do we understand it. When such a statement is made, people may ask: If Anthroposophy is to be a power that strengthens and infuses vigour into life, why is it necessary to absorb all this apparently theoretical knowledge? Why do we have to bother in our group meetings with all sorts of details about the preceding planetary embodiments of the earth? Why is it necessary to learn about things that happened in the remote past? Why are we also expected to familiarise ourselves with the more intimate, intangible laws of reincarnation, karma and so forth? Many people might think that Anthroposophy is just another kind of science, on a par with the many sciences existing in outer, physical life.

Now with regard to this question, which has been mentioned here because it is very likely to be asked, all considerations of convenience in life must be put aside; there must be scrupulous self-examination to find whether or not such questions are tainted by that habitual slackness in life which we know only too well; that man is fundamentally unwilling to learn, unwilling to take hold of the spiritual because this is inconvenient for him. We must ask ourselves: Does not something of this fear of inconvenience and discomfort creep into such questions? Let us admit that we really do begin by thinking that there is an easier path to Anthroposophy than all that is presented, for example, in our literature. It is often said lightheartedly that, after all, a man need only know himself, need only try to be a good and righteous human being, and then he is a sufficiently good Anthroposophist. Yes, my dear friends, but precisely this gives us the deeper knowledge that there is nothing more difficult than to be a good man in the real sense and that nothing needs so much preparation as the attainment of this ideal.

As to the question concerning self-knowledge, that can certainly not be answered in a moment, as so many people would like to think. Today, therefore, we will consider certain questions which are often expressed in the way indicated above. We will think of how Anthroposophy comes to us, seemingly, as a body of teaching, a science, although in essence it brings self-knowledge and the aspiration to become good and righteous human beings. And to this end it is important to study from different points of view how Anthroposophy can flow into life.

Let us consider one of life's vital questions. I am not referring to anything in the domain of science but to a question arising in everyday existence, namely, that of consolation for suffering, for lack of satisfaction in life.

How, for example, can Anthroposophy bring consolation to people in distress when they need it? Every individual must of course apply what can be said about such matters to his own particular case. In addressing a number of people one can only speak in a general sense.

Why do we need consolation in life? Because something may distress us, because we have to suffer and undergo painful experiences. Now it is natural for a man to feel that something in him rebels against this suffering. And he asks: ‘Why have I to bear it, why has it fallen to my lot? Could not my life have been without pain, could it not have brought me contentment?’ A man who puts the question in this way can only find an answer when he understands the nature of human karma, of human destiny. Why do we suffer? And I am referring not only to outer suffering but also to inner suffering due to a sense of failure to do ourselves justice or, find our proper hearings in life. That is what I mean by inner suffering. Why does life bring so much that leaves us unsatisfied?

Study of the laws of karma will make it clear to us that something underlies our sufferings, something that can be elucidated by an example drawn from ordinary life between birth and death. I have given this example more than once. Suppose a young man has lived up to the age of eighteen or so entirely on his father; his life has been happy and carefree; he has had everything he wanted. Then the father loses his fortune, becomes bankrupt, and the youth is obliged to set about learning something, to exert himself. Life brings him many sufferings and deprivations. It is readily understandable that the sufferings are not at all to his liking. But now think of him at the age of fifty. Because circumstances obliged him to learn something in his youth he has turned into a decent, self-respecting human being. He has found his feet in life and can say to himself: ‘My attitude to the sufferings and deprivations was natural at the time; but now I think quite differently about them; I realise now that the sufferings would not have come to me if in those days I had possessed all the virtues—even the very limited virtues of a boy of eighteen. If no suffering had come my way I should have remained a good-for-nothing. It was the sufferings that changed the imperfections into something more perfect. It is due to the suffering that I am not the same human being I was forty years ago. What was it, then, that joined forces in me at that time? My own imperfections and my suffering joined forces. And my imperfections sought out the suffering so that they might be removed and transformed into perfections.’

This attitude can even arise from quite an ordinary view of life between birth and death. And if we think deeply about life as a whole, facing our karma in the way indicated in the lecture yesterday, we shall finally be convinced that the sufferings along our path are sought out by our imperfections. The vast majority of sufferings are, indeed, sought out by the imperfections we have brought with us from earlier incarnations. And because of these imperfections a wiser being within us seeks for the path leading to the sufferings. For it is a golden rule in life that as human beings we have perpetually within us a being who is much wiser, much cleverer than we ourselves. The ‘I’ of ordinary life has far less wisdom, and if faced with the alternative of seeking either pain or happiness would certainly choose the path to happiness. The wiser being operates in depths of the subconscious life to which ordinary consciousness does not extend. This wiser being diverts our gaze from the path to superficial happiness and kindles within us a magic power which, without our conscious knowledge, leads us towards the suffering. But what does this mean: without our conscious knowledge? It means that the wiser being is prevailing over the less wise one, and this wiser being invariably acts within us so that it guides our imperfections to our sufferings, allowing us to suffer because every outer and inner suffering removes some imperfection and leads to greater perfection.

We may be willing to accept such principles in theory, but that is not of much account. A great deal is achieved, however, if in certain solemn and dedicated moments of life we try strenuously to make such principles the very lifeblood of the soul. In the hurry and bustle, the work and the duties of ordinary life, this is not always possible; under these circumstances we cannot always oust the being of lesser wisdom—who is, after all, part of us. But in certain deliberately chosen moments, however short they may be, we shall be able to say to ourselves: I will turn away from the hubbub of outer life and view my sufferings in such a way that I realise how the wiser being within me has been drawn to them by a magic power, how I imposed upon myself certain pain without which I should not have overcome this or that imperfection. A feeling of the peace inherent in wisdom will then arise, bringing the realisation that even when the world seems full of suffering, there too it is full of wisdom! In this way, life is enriched through Anthroposophy. We may forget it again in the affairs of external life, but if we do not forget it altogether and repeat the exercise steadfastly, we shall find that a kind of seed has been laid in the soul and that many a feeling of sadness and depression changes into a more positive attitude, into strength and energy. And then out of such quiet moments in life we will acquire more harmonious souls and become stronger individuals.

Then we may pass on to something else ... but the Anthroposophist should make it a rule to devote himself to these other thoughts only when the attitude towards suffering has become alive within him. We may turn, then, to think about the happiness and joys of life. A man who adopts towards his destiny the attitude that he himself has willed his sufferings will have a strange experience when he comes to think about his joy and happiness. It is not as easy for him here as it is in the case of his sufferings. It is easy, after all, to find a consolation for suffering, and anyone who feels doubtful has only to persevere; but it will be difficult to find the right attitude to happiness and joy. However strongly a man may bring himself to feel that he has willed his suffering—when he applies this mood of soul to his happiness and joy he will not be able to avoid a sense of shame; he will feel thoroughly ashamed. And he can only rid himself of this feeling of shame by saying to himself: ‘No, I have certainly not earned my joy and happiness through my own karma!’ This alone will put matters right, for otherwise the shame may be so intense that it almost destroys him in his soul. The only salvation is not to attribute our joys to the wiser being within us. This thought will convince us that we are on the right road, because the feeling of shame passes away. It is really so: happiness and joy in life are bestowed by the wise guidance of worlds, without our assistance, as something we must receive as grace, always recognising that the purpose is to give us our place in the totality of existence. Joy and happiness should so work upon us in the secluded moments of life that we feel them as grace, grace bestowed by the supreme powers of the world who want to receive us into themselves.

While our pain and suffering bring us to ourselves, make us more fully ourselves, through joy and happiness—provided we consider them as grace—we develop the feeling of peaceful security in the arms of the divine powers of the world, and the only worthy attitude is one of thankfulness. Nobody who in quiet hours of self-contemplation ascribes happiness and joy to his own karma, will unfold the right attitude to such experiences. If he ascribes joy and happiness to his karma he is succumbing to a fallacy whereby the spiritual within him is weakened and paralysed; the slightest thought that happiness or delight have been deserved weakens and cripples us inwardly. These words may seem harsh, for many a man, when he attributes suffering to his own will and individuality, would like to be master of himself, too, in the experiences of happiness and joy. But even a cursory glance at life will indicate that by their very nature joy and happiness tend to obliterate something in us. This weakening effect of delights and joys in life is graphically described in Faust by the words: ‘And so from longing to delight I reel; and even in delight I pine for longing.’⁵⁴ And anybody who gives any thought to the influence of joy, taken in the personal sense, will realise that there is something in joy that makes us stagger and blots out our true being.

This is not meant to be a sermon against joy or a suggestion that it would be good to torture ourselves with red-hot pincers or the like. Certainly not. To recognise something for what it really is does not mean that we must flee from it. It is not a question of running away from joy but of receiving it calmly whenever it comes to us; we must learn to feel it as grace, and the more we do so the better it will be, for we shall enter more deeply into the divine. These words are said, therefore, not in order to preach asceticism but to awaken the right mood towards happiness and joy.

If anyone were to say: joy and happiness have a weakening, deadening effect, therefore I will flee from them (which is the attitude of false asceticism and a form of self-torture)—such a man would be fleeing from the grace bestowed upon him by the gods. And in truth the self-torture practised by the ascetics, monks and nuns in olden days was a form of resistance against the gods. We must learn to regard suffering as something brought by our karma, and to feel happiness as grace that the divine can send down to us. Joy and happiness should be to us the sign of how closely the gods have drawn us to themselves; suffering and pain should be the sign of how remote we are from the goal before us as intelligent human beings. Such is the true attitude to karma, and without it we shall make no real progress in life. Whenever the world bestows upon us the good and the beautiful, we must feel that behind this world stand those powers of whom the Bible says: ‘And they looked at the world and they saw that it was good.’ But inasmuch as we experience pain and suffering, we must recognise what, in the course of incarnations, man has made of the world which in the beginning was good, and what he must contribute towards its betterment by educating himself to bear pain with purpose and energy.

What has been described are two ways of accepting our karma. In a certain respect our karma consists of suffering and joys; and we relate ourselves to our karma with the right attitude when we can consider it as something we really wanted, and when we can confront our sufferings and joys with the proper understanding. But a review of karma can be extended further, which we shall do today and tomorrow.

Karma does not reveal itself only in the form of experiences of suffering or joy. As our life runs its course we encounter in a way that can only be regarded as karmic—many human beings with whom, for example, we make a fleeting acquaintance, others who as relatives or close friends are connected with us for a considerable period of our life. We meet human beings who in our dealings with them bring sufferings and hindrances along our path; or again we meet others whom we can help and who can help us. The relationships are manifold. We must regard these circumstances too as having been brought about by the will of the wiser being within us—the will, for example, to meet a human being who seems to run across our path accidentally and with whom we have something to adjust or settle in life. What is it that makes the wiser being in us wish to meet this particular person? The only intelligent line of thought is that we want to come across him because we have done so before in an earlier life and our relationship had already begun then. Nor need the beginning have been in the immediately preceding life it may have been very much earlier. Because in a past life we have had dealings of some kind with this person, because we may have been in some way indebted to him, we are led to him again by the wiser being within us, as if by magic.

Here, of course, we enter a very diverse and extremely complicated domain, of which it is only possible to speak in general terms. But all the indications given here are the actual results of clairvoyant investigation. The indications will be useful to every individual because he will be able to particularise and apply what is said to his own life.

A remarkable fact comes to light. About the middle of life the ascending curve passes over into the descending curve. This is the time when the forces of youth are spent and we pass over a certain zenith to the descending curve. This point of time—which occurs in the thirties—cannot be laid down with absolute finality, but the principle holds good for everyone. It is the period of life when we live most intensely on the physical plane. In this connection we may easily be deluded. It will be clear that life before this point of time has been a process of bringing out what we have brought with us into the present incarnation. This process has been going on since childhood, although it is less marked as the years go by. We have chiseled out our life, have been nourished as it were by the forces brought from the spiritual world. These forces, however, are spent by the point of time indicated above. Observation of the descending line of life reveals that we now proceed to harvest and work over what has been learnt in the school of life, in order to carry it with us into the next incarnation. This is something we take into the spiritual world; in the earlier period we were taking something from the spiritual world. It is in the middle period that we are most deeply involved in the physical world, most engrossed in the affairs of outer life. We have passed through our apprenticeship as it were and are in direct contact with the world. We have our life in our own hands. At this period we are taken up with ourselves, concerned more closely than at any other time with our own external affairs and with our relation to the outer world. But this relation with the world is created by the intellect and the impulses of will which derive from the intellect—in other words, those elements of our being which are most alien to the spiritual worlds, to which the spiritual worlds remain closed. In the middle of life we are, as it were, farthest away from the spiritual.

A certain striking fact presents itself to occult research. Investigation of the kind of encounters and acquaintanceships with other human beings that arise in the middle of life shows, curiously, that these are the people that a man was together with at the beginning of his life, in his very earliest childhood in the previous incarnation or in a still earlier one. The fact has emerged that in the middle of life as a rule it is so, but not always—a man encounters, through circumstances of external karma, those people who in an earlier life were his parents; it is very rarely indeed that we are brought together in earliest childhood with those who were previously our parents; we meet them in the middle of life. This certainly seems strange, but it is the case, and a very great deal is gained for life if we will only try to put such a general rule to the test and adjust our thoughts accordingly. When a human being—let us say at about the age of thirty—enters into some relationship with another ... perhaps he falls in love, makes great friends, quarrels, or has some different kind of contact, a great deal will become comprehensible if, quite tentatively to begin with, he thinks about the possibility of the relationship to this person having once been that of child and parent. Conversely, this very remarkable fact comes to light. Those human beings with whom we were together in earliest childhood—parents, brothers and sisters, playmates or others around us during early childhood—they, as a rule, are people with whom we formed some kind of acquaintanceship when we were about thirty or so in a previous incarnation; in very many cases it is found that these people are our parents or brothers and sisters in the present incarnation. Curious as this may seem, just let us try to see how the principle squares with our own life, and we shall discover how much more understandable many things become. Even if the facts are otherwise, an experimental mistake will not amount to anything very serious. But if, in solitary hours, we look at life so that it is filled with meaning, we can gain a great deal. Obviously we must not try to arrange life to our liking; we must not choose the people we like and assume that they may have been our parents. Prejudices must not falsify the real facts. You will see the danger we are exposed to and the many misconceptions that may creep in. We ought to educate ourselves to remain open-minded and unbiased.

You may now ask what there is to be said about the descending curve of life. The striking fact has emerged that at the beginning of life we meet those human beings with whom we were connected in the middle period of life in a previous incarnation; further, that in the middle of the present life, we revive acquaintanceships which existed at the beginning of a preceding life. And now, what of the descending curve of life? During that period we are led to people who may also, possibly, have had something to do with us in an earlier incarnation. They may, in that earlier incarnation, have played a part in happenings of the kind that so frequently occur at a decisive point in life—let us say, trials and sufferings caused by bitter disillusionments. In the second half of life we may again be brought into contact with people who in some way or other were already connected with us; this meeting brings about a shifting of circumstances, and a lot that was set in motion in the earlier life is cleared up and settled.

These things are diverse and complex and indicate that we should not adhere rigidly to any hard and fast pattern. This much, however, may be said: the nature of the karma that has been woven with those who come across our path especially in the second half of life is such that it cannot be absolved in one life. Suppose, for example, we have caused suffering to a human being in one life; we could easily imagine that in a subsequent life we shall be led to this person by the wiser being within us, so that we may make amends for what we have done to him. The circumstances of life, however, may not enable compensation to be made for everything, but often only for a part of it. This necessitates the operation of complicated factors which enable such surviving remnants of karma to be adjusted and settled during the second half of life. This conception of karma can shed light upon our dealings and companionship with other human beings.

But there is still something else in the course of our karma to consider, something that in the two public lectures was referred to as the process of growing maturity, the acquisition of a real knowledge of life. (If the phrase does not promote arrogance it may be used.) Let us consider how we grow wiser. We can learn from our mistakes, and it is the best thing for us when this happens, because we do not often have the opportunity of applying the wisdom thus gained in one and the same life; therefore what we have learnt from the mistakes remains with us as strength for a later life. But the wisdom, the real knowledge of life that we can acquire, what is it really?

I said yesterday that we cannot carry our thoughts and ideas with us directly from one life to the other; I said that even Plato could not take his ideas straight with him into his next incarnation. What we carry over with us takes the form of will, of feeling, and in reality our thought and ideas, just like our mother tongue, comes as something new in each life. For most of the thoughts and ideas live in the mother tongue whence we acquire them. This life between birth and death supplies us with thoughts and ideas which always come from this particular earth existence. But if this is so, we shall have to say to ourselves that it depends upon our karma. However many incarnations we go through, the ideas that arise in us are always dependent upon one incarnation as distinct from the others. Whatever wisdom may be living in your thoughts and ideas have been absorbed from outside, it is dependent upon the way karma has placed you with regard to language, nationality and family. In the last resort all our thoughts and ideas about the world are dependent on our karma. Very much lies in these words, for they indicate that whatever we may know in life, whatever knowledge we may amass, is something entirely personal, and that we can never transcend the personal by means of what we acquire for ourselves in life. In ordinary life we never reach the level of the wiser being but always remain at that of the less wise. Anyone who flatters himself that he can learn more about his higher self from what he acquires in the world, is harbouring an illusion for the sake of convenience. This actually means that we can gain no knowledge of our higher self from what we acquire in life.

Very well, then, how are we to attain any knowledge of the higher self? We must ask ourselves quite frankly: What do we really know? First of all, we know what we have learnt from experience. This is all we know, and nothing else! A man who aspires to self-knowledge without realising that his soul is only a mirror in which the outer world is reflected, may persuade himself that by penetrating into his own being he can find the higher self; certainly he will find something, but it is only what has come into him from outside. Laziness of thinking has no place in this quest. We must ask ourselves what happens in those other worlds in which our higher self also lives, and this is none other than what we are told about the different incarnations of the earth, and everything else that Spiritual Science tells us. Just as we try to understand a child's soul by examining the child's surroundings, so must we ask what the environment of the higher self is. But Spiritual Science does tell us about these worlds where our higher self is, in its account of Saturn and its secrets, of the Moon and Earth evolution, of reincarnation and karma, of Devachan and Kamaloca and so on. This is the only way we can learn about our higher self, about the self which transcends the physical plane. And anyone who refuses to accept these secrets is merely pandering to his own ease. For it is a delusion to imagine you can discover the divine man in yourself. Only what is experienced in the outer world is stored inside, but the divine man in us can only be found when we search in our soul for the mirrored world beyond the physical. So that those things which can sometimes prove difficult and uncomfortable to learn are nothing else but self-knowledge. And true Anthroposophy is in reality true self-knowledge! From Spiritual Science we receive enlightenment about our own self. For where in reality is the self? Is the self within our skin? No, the self is outpoured over the world; everything that is and has been in the world is part and parcel of the self. We learn to know the self only when we learn to know the world.

These apparent theories are, in truth, the ways to self-knowledge. A man who thinks he can find the self by staring into his inner being, says to himself: You must be good, you must be unselfish! All well and good. But you will soon notice that he is getting more and more self-centred. On the other hand, struggling with the great secrets of existence, extricating oneself from the flattering self, accepting the reality of the higher worlds and the knowledge that can be obtained from them, all leads to true self-knowledge. When we think deeply about Saturn, Sun and Moon, we lose ourselves in cosmic thought. ‘In thy thinking cosmic thoughts are living,’⁵⁵ says a soul who thinks Anthroposophical thoughts; he adds, however, ‘Lose thyself in cosmic thoughts!’ The soul creating out of Anthroposophy says: ‘In thy feeling cosmic powers are weaving,’ but he adds: ‘Experience thyself through cosmic powers!’ not through powers which flatter. This experience will not come to a man who closes his eyes, saying: ‘I want to be a good human being.’ It will only come to the man who opens his eyes and his spiritual eyes also, and sees the powers of yonder world mightily at work, realising that he is embedded in these cosmic powers. And the soul that draws strength from Anthroposophy says: ‘In thy willing cosmic beings are working,’ adding: ‘Create thyself anew from Beings of Will!’ And this will really happen if we grasp self-knowledge in this way. Then we shall really succeed in creating ourselves anew out of world being.

Dry and abstract as this may seem, in reality it is no mere theory but something that thrives and grows like a seed sown in the earth. Forces shoot out in every direction and become plant or tree. So it is indeed. The feelings that come to us through Spiritual Science give us the power to create ourselves anew. ‘Create thyself anew from Beings of Will!’ Thus does Anthroposophy become the elixir of life and our view of spirit worlds opens up. We shall draw strength from these worlds, and when we have drawn these forces into our being, then we shall know ourselves in all our depths. Only when we imbue ourselves with world knowledge can we take control of ourselves and advance step by step away from the less-wise being within us, who is cut off by the Guardian of the Threshold, to the wiser being, penetrating through all that is hidden from those who do not as yet have the will to be strong. For this is just what can be gained by means of Anthroposophy.

• 53. public lectures: Vienna 6th and 7th February 1912, on Death and Immortality in the Light of Spiritual Science, and The Essence of Eternity and the Nature of the Human Soul in the Light of Spiritual Science. These lectures were not printed. See the corresponding lectures given in Berlin, 26th October 1911 and 21st March 1912, in ‘Menschengeschichte im Lichte der Geistesforschung’ (Human History in the Light of Spiritual Research) GA 61 Dornach, 1962.
• 54. ‘And so from longing to delight I reel ... ’: Goethe ‘Faust’, Part 1, Woodland and Cave.
• 55. ‘In thy thinking cosmic thoughts are living’: Benedictus' words in Rudolf Steiner's second mystery play ‘The Soul's Probation’, Scene 1.

There was one point in the lecture yesterday about which I should not like misunderstanding to arise, but a conversation I had today indicated that this might be possible. It is, of course, difficult to formulate in words these matters connected with the more intimate workings of karma, and one point or another may well not be quite clear at the first time of hearing. In the lecture yesterday it was said that we have to regard our sufferings as having been sought out by the wiser being within us in order that certain imperfections may be overcome, and that by bearing these sufferings calmly we may make progress along our path. That, however, was not the point on which misunderstanding might have occurred. It was the other point, namely, that happiness and joy must not be regarded as due to our own merit or individual karma, but deemed a kind of grace whereby we are interwoven with the all-prevailing spirit. Please do not think that the emphasis here lies in the fact that joy comes to us as a mark of favour from the divine-spiritual powers; the emphasis lies in the fact that these experiences are made possible through grace. That is what our attitude must be if we are to reach a true understanding of karma. Happiness and joy are acts of grace. A man who imagines that the happiness and joy in his karma indicate a desire on the part of the gods to single him out and place him above the others will achieve just the opposite. We must never imagine that happiness is allotted to us as a mark of favour or distinction but rather as a reason for feeling that we have been recipients of the grace outpoured by the divine spiritual beings. It is this realisation of grace which makes progress possible; the other attitude would throw us back in our development. Nobody should ever believe that joy comes to him because of special karmic privileges; he should far rather believe that it comes to him because he has no privileges. Joy and happiness should move us to deeds of compassion and mercy, which we shall perform more effectively than if we are suffering the pangs of sorrow. What brings us forward is the realisation that we must make ourselves worthy of grace. There is no justification for the very prevalent view that one whose life abounds in happiness has deserved it. This is the very attitude that must be avoided. Please take this as an indication so that no misunderstanding may arise.

Today we will extend and widen the scope of our studies of karma, and talk about karma and our experiences in the world, so that Spiritual Science may become a real life force within us. Observation of life and its happenings will reveal, to begin with, experiences of two kinds. On the one hand we might say to ourselves: ‘Yes, a misfortune has befallen me, but thinking about it, I can see that it would not have come my way if I had not been careless or negligent.’ This realisation, however, will not always be within the power of ordinary consciousness; many a time we shall find it impossible to see any connection between the misfortune and the circumstances of our present life. With regard to much that befalls us, ordinary consciousness can only conclude that it was pure chance, unconnected with anything else. It will also be possible to make this distinction concerning undertakings which may either be successful or the reverse. In many cases we shall realise that failure was inevitable because of laziness, inattentiveness, or something of the kind, on our part; but in many others we shall be quite unable to discover any connection. It is a useful exercise to take stock of our own experiences and distinguish between things which have failed through no fault of our own, and others which succeed contrary to our expectations. We will try to get to the bottom of these matters, and of events which, on the face of them, seem to be due to pure chance, without any apparent cause, and also things we have done that are seemingly unrelated to our actual faculties. We will now make a close study of all these things.

We will proceed in rather a curious way. As an experiment, we will imagine that we ourselves have willed whatever may have happened to us. Suppose a loose tile from the roof of a house happened to crash down on us. We will picture, purely by way of experiment, that this did not happen by chance, and we will deliberately imagine that we ourselves climbed on that roof, loosened the tile and then ran down so quickly that we arrived just in time to be hit by it! Or, let us say, we caught a chill without any apparent cause; how would it be though, if we had given it to ourselves? Like the unfortunate lady who, being discontented with her lot, exposed herself to a chill, and died of it! In this way, therefore, we will imagine that things otherwise attributable to chance have been deliberately and carefully planned by ourselves. And we will also apply the same procedure to matters which are obviously dependent upon the faculties and qualities we happen to possess. Say some arrangement does not work out as planned. If we miss a train, for example, we shall not blame external circumstances but picture to ourselves that it was due to our own slackness. If we think of it in this way, as an experiment, we shall gradually succeed in creating a kind of being in our imagination, a very extraordinary being, who was responsible for all these things—for a stone having crashed upon us, for some illness, and so forth. We shall realise, of course, that this being is not ourselves; we simply picture such a being vividly and distinctly. And then, after a time, we will have a strange experience with regard to this being. We shall realise that though it is a creature we have only conjured up, yet we cannot free ourselves from him nor from the thought of him, and strange to say he does not stay as he is; he becomes alive and transforms himself within us. And then, when he has gone through this transformation, we get the impression that he really is there within us. And then we become more and more certain that we ourselves have had something to do with the things thus built up in imagination. There is no suggestion whatever that we once actually did them; but such thoughts do, nevertheless, correspond in a certain way with something we have done. We shall tell ourselves: ‘I have done this and that, and I am now having to suffer the consequences.’ This is a very good exercise for unfolding in the life of feeling a kind of memory of earlier incarnations. The soul seems to feel: I myself was there and prepared these things myself.

You will readily understand that it is not easy to awaken the memory of previous incarnations. For just think what mental effort is required to recall something only recently forgotten; genuine mental effort is required. Experiences which occurred in earlier incarnations have sunk into the depths of forgetfulness and much has to be done if they are to be remembered. One such exercise has just been described. In addition to what was said in the public lectures, let it be said here that a man will notice a kind of memory arising in his feeling: in former times you prepared this for yourself!

The principles indicated should not be ignored, for if we follow them we shall find that more and more light will be shed upon life, so that we grow stronger and stronger. Once the feeling has arisen that we ourselves were there and carried out the deeds ourselves we shall have quite a different attitude to events confronting us in the future; our whole life of feeling will be transformed. Whereas formerly we may have experienced fear and all the other similar feelings when something happened to us, we now have a kind of inner memory. And now when something happens, our feeling tells us that it is for a purpose; and that it is a memory of an earlier life. Life becomes much more tranquil and intelligible, and that is what men need, not only those who are sustained by a longing for Anthroposophy, but those too who are outside. It is no excuse to say: How can earlier incarnations matter if we cannot remember them! The right attitude towards earthly existence will certainly awaken memory, only it is a memory belonging to the heart, to the life of feeling, that must be developed, not the kind of memory that is composed of thoughts and concepts.

I considered it important during this particular visit to bring home to you how much can be given practical application, and how Anthroposophy can become actual experience in those who pursue it actively.

Now in addition to what accrued in earlier incarnations other factors are also of importance in a man's karma. We have a life between death and a new birth too, and this is by no means uneventful, it is filled with happenings and experiences. And the consequences of these experiences in the spiritual world appear in our earthly life, but in a peculiar form which often makes us inclined to attribute such occurrences to chance. Nevertheless they can be traced to significant experiences in the spiritual world.

I want to speak to you therefore of something which may seem remote from the first part of the lecture. But you will see that it is important for every human being and that what appear to be chance happenings may be deeply indicative of mysterious connecting threads in life.

I am now going to speak of an historical fact that is not preserved in history books but is in the Akashic Record. To begin with I have to draw your attention to the fact that the souls of all of us here now have been incarnated many times in earthly bodies, among the most diverse conditions of life, in ancient India, Persia, Egypt and Greece; again and again we have experienced different environments and conditions of existence, and there is purpose and meaning in the fact that we pass through one incarnation after another. Our present life could not be as it is if we had not lived through these other conditions. An extraordinary experience fell to the lot of men living in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of our era, for very exceptional conditions broke in upon humanity at that time—roughly speaking not quite seven hundred years ago. Conditions were such that the souls of men were completely shut off from the spiritual world; spiritual darkness prevailed, and it was impossible even for highly developed individuals to achieve direct contact with the spiritual world. In the thirteenth century even those who in earlier incarnations had been initiates were unable to look into the spiritual world. The gates of the spiritual world were closed for a certain period during that century, and although men who in former times had received initiation were able to call up memories of their earlier incarnations, in the thirteenth century they could not themselves gaze into the spiritual worlds. It was necessary for men to live through that condition of darkness, to find the gates to the spiritual world closed against them. Men of high spiritual development were, of course, also in incarnation at that time, but they too were obliged to experience the condition of darkness. When about the middle of the thirteenth century the darkness lifted, strange happenings occurred at a certain place in Europe. The name of this place cannot now be given, but sometime it may be possible to communicate it in a group lecture. Twelve men in Europe of great and outstanding wisdom, whose spiritual development had taken an unusual course, emerged from the condition of twilight that had obscured clairvoyant vision. Of these twelve wise men, seven, to begin with, have to be distinguished from the others. These seven men had retained the memory of their earlier initiations and this memory, together with the knowledge still surviving, was such that the seven men recapitulated in themselves conditions they had once lived through in the period following the Atlantean catastrophe—the ancient Indian epoch of culture. The teachings given by the seven holy Rishis of India had come to life again in the souls of these seven wise men of Europe; seven rays of the ancient wisdom of the sacred Atlantean culture shone forth in the hearts of these seven men who through the operations of world karma had gathered at a certain place in Europe in the thirteenth century and had found one another again. To these seven came four others. In the soul of the first of these four the wisdom belonging to the ancient Indian culture shone forth—he was the eighth among the twelve. The wisdom of the ancient Persian culture lived in the soul of the ninth; the wisdom of the third period—that of Egyptian-Chaldaean culture—lived in the soul of the tenth, and the wisdom of Greco-Roman culture in the soul of the eleventh. The wisdom of the culture as it was in that particular age—contemporary wisdom—lived in the soul of the twelfth. In these twelve men who came together to perform a special mission, the twelve different streams in the spiritual development of mankind were represented. The fact that all possible religions and all possible philosophies belong to twelve basic types is in itself a mystery. Buddhism, Brahmanism, Vedanta philosophy, materialism, or whatever it may be—all of them can be traced to the twelve basic types; it is just a matter of being quite exact. And so all the different streams of man's spiritual life—the religions, the philosophies and world conceptions that are spread over the earth—were united in that council of the twelve.⁵⁶

After the period of darkness had passed and spiritual achievement was possible again, a thirteenth came in remarkable circumstances to the twelve. I am telling you now of one of those events which take place secretly in the evolution of mankind once and once only. They cannot occur a second time and are mentioned not as an indication that efforts should be made to repeat them but for quite other reasons. When the darkness had lifted and it was possible to develop clairvoyant vision again, the coming of the thirteenth was announced in a mysterious way to the twelve wise men. They knew that the time had come when a child with significant and remarkable incarnations behind him was to be born. Above all they knew that one of his incarnations had been at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. It was known, therefore, that one who had been a contemporary of the events in Palestine was returning. And the birth of the child in these unusual circumstances during the thirteenth century could not have been said to be that of a person of renown. In speaking of previous lives there is a deplorable and only too widespread tendency to refer back to important historical personages. I have come across all kinds of people who believe that they were incarnated as some historical personage or figure in the Gospels. Quite recently a lady informed me that she had been Mary Magdelene, and I could only reply that she was the twenty-fourth Mary Magdelene I had met in my life. In these matters the greatest care must be taken to prevent fantastic notions arising.

History tells us very little about the incarnations of the thirteenth. He was born many times with great and profound qualities of heart. It was known that this individuality was to be born again as a child and that he was destined for a very special mission. This knowledge was revealed to the twelve seers who took the child entirely into their charge and were able to arrange that from the very beginning he was shut off from the outside world. He was removed from his family and cared for by these twelve men. Guided by their clairvoyance they reared the child with every care in such a way that all the forces acquired from previous incarnations were able to unfold in him. A kind of intuitive perception of this occurrence has arisen in men who know something of the history of spiritual life. Goethe's poem The Mysteries⁵⁷ has been recited to us many times. Out of a deep, intuitive perception Goethe speaks in that poem of the council of the twelve, and he has been able to convey to us the mood of heart and feeling in which they lived. The thirteenth is not brother Mark but the child of whom I have been telling you, and who almost immediately after his birth was taken into the care of the twelve and brought up by them until the age of early manhood. The child developed in a strange and remarkable way. The twelve were not in any sense fanatics; they were full of inner composure, enlightenment and peace of heart. How does a fanatic behave? He wants to convert people as quickly as possible; while they, as a rule, do not want to be converted. Everybody is expected immediately to believe what the fanatic wants them to believe and he is angry when this does not happen. In our day, when someone sets out to expound a particular subject, people simply do not believe that his aim may be not to voice his own views but something quite different, that is, the thoughts and opinions of the one of whom he is writing. For many years I was held to be a follower of Nietzsche⁵⁸ because I once wrote an absolutely objective book about him. People simply cannot understand that the aim of a writer may be to give an objective exposition. They think that everyone must be a fanatic on the subject of which he happens to be speaking.

The twelve in the thirteenth century were far from being fanatics, and they were very sparing with oral teaching. But because they lived in communion with the boy, twelve rays of light as it were went out from them into him and were resolved in his soul into one great harmony. It would not have been possible to give him any kind of academic examination; nevertheless there lived within him, transmuted into feeling and sensitive perception, all that the twelve representatives of the twelve different types of religion poured into his soul. His whole soul reflected the harmony of the twelve different forms of belief spread over the earth.

In this way the soul of the boy had to bear a great deal, and consequently it worked in a strange way upon the body. And it is precisely for this reason that the process of which I am telling you now may not be repeated: it could only be enacted at that particular time. Strange to say, as the harmony within the boy's soul increased, his body became more delicate—more and more delicate, until at a certain age it was transparent in every limb. The boy ate less and less until he finally took no nourishment at all. Then he lay for days in a condition of complete torpor: the soul had left the body, and returned into it again after a few days. The youth was now inwardly quite changed. The twelve different rays of human outlook were united in one single radiance, and he gave utterance to the greatest, most wonderful secrets; he did not repeat what the first, or the second, or the third had said, but gave forth in a new and wonderful synthesis all that they would have said had they spoken in unison; all the knowledge they possessed was gathered into one whole, and when he uttered it, it was as though this new wisdom had just come to birth in him. It was as though a higher spirit were speaking in him. Something entirely and essentially new was thus imparted to the twelve wise men. Wisdom in abundance was imparted to them; and to each, individually, greater illumination concerning what had been known to him hitherto.

I have been describing to you the first school of Christian Rosenkreutz, for the thirteenth is the individuality known to us by that name. In that incarnation he died after only a brief earthly existence; in the fourteenth century he was born again and lived then for more than a hundred years. All those things again appeared in him that had developed in him in the thirteenth century. Then his life had been brief, but in the fourteenth century it was very long. During the first half of this later incarnation he went on great journeys in search of the different centres of culture in Europe, Africa and Asia, in order to gather knowledge of what had come to life in him during the previous century; then he returned to Europe. A few of those who had brought him up in the thirteenth century were again in incarnation and were joined by others. This was the time of the inauguration of the rosicrucian stream of spiritual life. And Christian Rosenkreutz himself incarnated again and again.

To this very day he is at work—during the brief intervals, too, when he is not actually in incarnation; through his higher bodies he then works spiritually into human beings, without the need of spatial contact. We must try to picture the mysterious way in which his influence operates.

And I want to begin here by giving an example. Those who participate consciously in the occult life of the spirit had a strange experience from the eighties on into the nineties of the previous century; they became aware of certain influences emanating from a remarkable personality (I am only mentioning one case among many). There was, however, something not quite harmonious about these influences. Anyone who is sensitive to influences from contemporaries living a great distance away, would, at that time, have been aware of something raying out from a certain personality, which was not altogether harmonious. When the new century dawned, however, these influences became harmonious. What had happened? I will tell you the reason for this.

On the 12th August 1900 Soloviev had died—a man far too little appreciated or understood. The influences of his ether body radiated far and wide, but although Soloviev was a great philosopher, in his case the development of the soul was in advance of that of the head, the intellect; he was a great and splendid thinker, but his conscious philosophy was of far less significance than that which he bore in his soul. Up to the time of his death the head was a hindering factor and so, as an occult influence, he had an inharmonious effect. But when he was dead and the ether body, separated from the brain, rayed out in the ether world, he was liberated from the restrictions caused by his thinking, and the rays of his influence shone out with wonderful brilliance and power.

People may ask: How can such knowledge really concern us? This very question is an illusion, for the human being is through and through a product of the spiritual processes around him; and when certain occultists become aware of the reality of these processes, that is because they actually see them. But spiritual processes operate too in those others who do not see. Everything in the spiritual world is interconnected. Whatever influence may radiate from a highly developed Frenchman or Russian is felt not only on their own native soil, but their thought and influence has an effect over the whole earth. Everything that happens in the spiritual world has an influence on us, and only when we realise that the soul lives in the spiritual world just as the lung within the air, shall we have the right attitude.

The forces in the ether bodies of highly developed individualities stream out and have a potent effect upon other human beings. So too, the ether body of Christian Rosenkreutz works far and wide in the world. And reference must be made here to a fact that is of the greatest significance to many people; it is something that transpires in the spiritual world between death and a new birth and is not to be ascribed to chance.

Christian Rosenkreutz has always made use of the short intervals of time between his incarnations to call into his particular stream of spiritual life those souls whom he knows to be ripe; between his deaths and births he has concerned himself as it were with choosing those who are ready to enter his stream. But human beings themselves, by learning to be attentive, must be able to recognise by what means Christian Rosenkreutz gives them a sign showing them that they may count themselves among his chosen. This sign has been given in the lives of very many human beings of the present time, but they pay no heed to it. Yet among the apparently chance happenings in a man's life, there is for many people one in particular that is to be regarded as an indication that between death and a new birth Christian Rosenkreutz has found him mature and ready; the sign is given by Christian Rosenkreutz on the physical plane, however. This event may be called the mark of Christian Rosenkreutz. Let us suppose a man is lying in bed—in other places I have mentioned different forms of such a happening, but all of them have occurred—for some unaccountable reason he suddenly wakes up and, as though guided by instinct, looks at a wall that is usually quite dark. The room is dimly lit, the wall is dark, when suddenly he sees written on the wall: ‘Get up at once!’ It all seems very strange, but he gets up and leaves the house, and hardly has he done so when the ceiling over his bed collapses; although nobody else would have been in danger of getting hurt, he himself would inevitably have been killed. The most thorough investigation proves that nobody on the physical plane warned him to get up. If he had remained lying there he would certainly have been killed.

Such an experience may be thought to be an hallucination or something of the kind; but deeper investigation will reveal that these particular experiences—and they come to hundreds of people—are not accidental. A beckoning call has come from Christian Rosenkreutz. The karma of the one called in this way always indicates that Christian Rosenkreutz bestows the life he may claim. I say explicitly: such occurrences occur in the lives of many people at the present time, and it is only a question of being alert. The occurrence does not always take such a dramatic form as the example quoted, but numbers of human beings nowadays have had such experiences. Now when I say something more than once during a lecture, I do so quite deliberately, because I find that strange conclusions are apt to be drawn from things that are half or totally forgotten. I am saying this because nobody need be discouraged who has had no such experience; this might not be the case, for if he searches he will certainly find something of the kind in his life. Naturally I can only single out a typical example. Here then we have in our life a fact of which we may say that its cause does not lie in the period of actual incarnation; we may have met Christian Rosenkreutz in the spiritual world. I have laid particular stress on this outstanding event of the call. Other events, too, could be mentioned, events connected directly with the spiritual world that occur during the life between death and a new birth; but in our spiritual context this particular event should be of special significance for us as it is so intimately connected with our spiritual movement.

Such a happening surely indicates that we must develop quite a different attitude if we want to have a clear vision of what actually plays into life. Most human beings rush hectically through life and are not thoughtful and attentive; many people say that one should not brood but engage in a life of action. But how much better it would be if precipitate deeds were left undone and people were to brood a little their deeds, then, would be far more mature! If only the beckoning call were heeded with composure and attentiveness. Often it only seems as if we were brooding. It is precisely through quiet composure that strength comes to us—and then we shall follow when karma calls, understanding, too, when it is calling. These are the things I wanted to call your attention to today, for they do indeed make life more intelligible.

I have told you of the strange event in the thirteenth century, purely in the form of historical narrative, in order to indicate those things which men must heed if they are to find their proper place in life and understand the beckoning call of Christian Rosenkreutz. To make this possible the preparation by the twelve and the coming of the thirteenth were necessary. And the event in the thirteenth century was necessary in order that in our own time and hereafter such a beckoning or other sign may be understood and obeyed.

Christian Rosenkreutz has created this sign in order to rouse the attention of men to the needs of the times, to indicate to them that they belong to him and may dedicate their lives to him in the service of the progress of humanity.

• 56. all possible religions and all possible philosophies belong to twelve basic types: see Rudolf Steiner's ‘Human and Cosmic Thought’, 4 lectures Berlin, January 1914; Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1967.
• 57. see note 29.
• 58. Nietzsche because I once wrote an absolutely objective book about him: ‘Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom’, Rudolf Steiner Publications, New Jersey, 1960.

Friends have expressed the wish that I should speak today on the subject of the lecture here a year ago,⁵⁹ when it was said that the initiation of Christian Rosenkreutz took place in very special circumstances in the thirteenth century, and that since then this individuality has worked unceasingly throughout the centuries. Today we shall hear more about the character and the person of Christian Rosenkreutz as we study the great task which devolved upon him at the dawn of the intellectual age in order that provision might be made for the future of humanity.

Anyone who makes his mark in the world as a leading occultist, like Christian Rosenkreutz, has to reckon with the conditions peculiar to his epoch. The intrinsic nature of spiritual life as it is in the present age, developed for the first time when modern natural science came upon the scene with men like Copernicus,⁶⁰ Giordano Bruno,⁶¹ Galileo⁶² and others. Nowadays people are taught about Copernicus in their early schooldays, and the impressions thus received remain with them their whole life long. In earlier times the soul experienced something different. Try to picture to yourselves what a contrast there is between a man of the modern age and one who lived centuries ago. Before the days of Copernicus everyone believed that the earth remains at rest in cosmic space with the sun and the stars revolving around it. The very ground slipped from under men's feet when Copernicus came forward with the doctrine that the earth is moving with tremendous speed through the universe. We should not underestimate the effects of such a revolution in thinking, accompanied as it was by a corresponding change in the life of feeling. All the thoughts and ideas of men were suddenly different from what they had been before the days of Copernicus. And now let us ask: What has occultism to say about this revolution in thinking?

Anyone who asks from the standpoint of occultism what kind of world conception can be derived from the Copernican tenets will have to admit that although these ideas can lead to great achievements in the realm of natural science and in external life, they are incapable of promoting any understanding of the spiritual foundations of the world and the things of the world, for there has never been a worse instrument for understanding the spiritual foundations of the world than the ideas of Copernicus—never in the whole of human evolution. The reason for this is that all these Copernican concepts are inspired by Lucifer. Copernicanism is one of the last attacks, one of the last great attacks made by Lucifer upon the evolution of man. In earlier, pre-Copernican thought, the external world was indeed maya, but much traditional wisdom, much truth concerning the world and the things of the world still survived. Since Copernicus, however, man has maya around him not only in his material perceptions but his concepts and ideas are themselves maya. Men take it for granted nowadays that the sun is firmly fixed in the middle and the planets revolve around it in ellipses. In the near future, however, it will be realised that the view of the world of the stars held by Copernicus is much less correct than the earlier Ptolemaic view.⁶³ The view of the world held by the school of Copernicus and Kepler is very convenient, but as an explanation of the macrocosm it is not the truth.

And so Christian Rosenkreutz, confronted by a world conception which is itself a maya, an illusion, had to come to grips with it. Christian Rosenkreutz had to save occultism in an age when all the concepts of science were themselves maya. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Copernicus' Book of the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres⁶⁴ appeared. At the end of the sixteenth century the rosicrucians were faced with the necessity of comprehending the world system by means of occultism, for with its materially-conceived globes in space the Copernican world-system was maya, even as concept. Thus towards the end of the sixteenth century one of those conferences took place of which we heard here a year ago in connection with the initiation of Christian Rosenkreutz himself in the thirteenth century. This occult conference of leading individualities [See ‘East in the Light of the West’, Chapter IX, etc. Rudolf Steiner Publication Co. and Anthroposophic Press, N.Y., 1940.] united Christian Rosenkreutz with those twelve individualities of that earlier time and certain other great individualities concerned with the leadership of humanity. There were present not only personalities in incarnation on the physical plane but also some who were in the spiritual worlds; and the individuality who in the sixth century before Christ had been incarnated as Gautama Buddha also participated.

The occultists of the East rightly believe—for they know it to be the truth—that the Buddha who in his twenty-ninth year rose from the rank of Bodhisattva to that of Buddha, had incarnated then for the last time in a physical body. It is absolutely true that when the individuality of a Bodhisattva becomes a Buddha he no longer appears on the earth in physical incarnation. But this does not mean that he ceases to be active in the affairs of the earth. The Buddha continues to work for the earth, although he is never again present in a physical body but sends down his influence from the spiritual world. The Gloria heard by the shepherds in the fields intimated from the spiritual world that the forces of Buddha were streaming into the astral body of the child Jesus described in the St. Luke Gospel. The words of the Gloria came from Buddha who was working in the astral body of the child Jesus. This wonderful message of peace and love is an integral part of Buddha's contribution to Christianity. But later on too, Buddha influences the deeds of men—not physically but from the spiritual world—and he has co-operated in measures that have been necessary for the sake of progress in the evolution of humanity.

In the seventh and eighth centuries, for example, there was a very important centre of initiation in the neighbourhood of the Black Sea, in which the Buddha taught, in his spirit body. In such schools there are those who teach in the physical body; but it is also possible for the more advanced pupils to receive instruction from one who teaches in an ether-body only. And so the Buddha taught those pupils there who were capable of receiving higher knowledge. Among the pupils of the Buddha at that time was one who incarnated again a few centuries later. We are speaking, therefore, of a physical personality who centuries later lived again in a physical body, in Italy, and is known to us as St. Francis of Assisi. The characteristic quality of Francis of Assisi and of the life of his monks—which has so much similarity with that of the disciples of Buddha—is due to the fact that Francis of Assisi himself was a pupil of Buddha.

It is easy to perceive the contrast between the qualities characteristic of men who like Francis of Assisi were striving fervently for the spirit and those engrossed in the world of industry, technical life and the discoveries of modern civilisation. There were many people, including occultists, who suffered deeply at the thought that in the future two separate classes of human beings would inevitably arise. They foresaw the one class wholly given up to the affairs of practical life, convinced that security depends entirely upon the production of foodstuffs, the construction of machines, and so forth; whereas the other class would be composed of men like Francis of Assisi who withdraw altogether from the practical affairs of the world for the sake of spiritual life.

It was a significant moment, therefore, when Christian Rosenkreutz, in the sixteenth century, called together a large group of occultists in preparation for the aforesaid conference, and described to them the two types of human beings that would inevitably arise in the future. First he gathered a large circle of people, later on a smaller one, to present them with this weighty fact. Christian Rosenkreutz held this preparatory meeting a few years beforehand, not because he was in doubt about what would happen, but because he wanted to get the people to contemplate the perspectives of the future. In order to stimulate their thinking he spoke roughly as follows: Let us look at the future of the world. The world is moving fast in the direction of practical activities, industry, railways, and so on. Human beings will become like beasts of burden. And those who do not want this will be, like Francis of Assisi, impractical with regard to life, and they will develop an inner life only. Christian Rosenkreutz made it clear to his listeners that there was no way on earth of preventing the formation of these two classes of men. Despite all that might be done for them between birth and death, nothing could hinder mankind being divided into these two classes. As far as conditions on the earth were concerned it is impossible to find a remedy for the division into classes. Help can only come if a kind of education could be brought about that did not take place between birth and death but between death and a new birth.

Thus the rosicrucians were faced with the task of working from out of the super-sensible world to influence individual human beings. In order to understand what had to take place, we must consider from a particular aspect the life between death and a new birth.

Between birth and death we live on the earth. Between death and a new birth man has a certain connection with the other planets. In my Theosophy you will find Kamaloka described. This sojourn of man in the soul world is a time during which he becomes an inhabitant of the Moon. Then one after the other, he becomes an inhabitant of Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and then an inhabitant of the further expanses of heaven or the cosmos. One is not speaking incorrectly when one says that between two incarnations on the earth lie incarnations on other planets, spiritual incarnations. Man at present is not yet sufficiently developed to remember, whilst in incarnation, his experiences between death and a new birth, but this will become possible in the future. Even though he cannot now remember what he experienced on Mars, for example, he still has Mars forces within him, although he knows nothing about them. One is justified in saying: I am not an earth inhabitant, but the forces within me include something that I acquired on Mars. Let me consider a man who lived on earth after the Copernican world outlook had become common knowledge. Whence did Copernicus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno and others acquire their abilities in this incarnation? Bear in mind that shortly before that, from 1401–1464, the individuality of Copernicus was incarnated as Nicholas of Cusa,⁶⁵ a profound mystic. Think of the completely different mood of his docta ignorantia. How did the forces that made Copernicus so very different from Nicholas of Cusa enter this individuality?

The forces that made him the astronomer he was, came to him from Mars! Similarly, Galileo also received forces from Mars that invested him with the special configuration of a modern natural scientist. Giordano Bruno too, brought his powers with him from Mars, and so it is with the whole of mankind. That people think like Copernicus or Giordano Bruno is due to the Mars forces they acquire between death and a new birth.

But the acquisition of the kind of powers which lead from one triumph to another is due to the fact that Mars had a different influence in those times from what it exercised previously. Mars used to radiate different forces. The Mars culture that human beings experience between death and a new birth went through a great crisis in the earth's fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was as decisive and catastrophic a time on Mars in the fifteenth and sixteenth century as it was on the earth at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Just as at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha the actual ego of man was born, there was born on Mars that particular tendency which, in man, comes to expression in Copernicanism. When these conditions came into force on Mars, the natural consequence would have been for Mars to continue sending down to earth human beings who only brought Copernican ideas with them, which are really only maya. What we are seeing, then, is the decline of the Mars culture. Previously, Mars had sent forth good forces. But now Mars sent forth more and more forces that would have led men deeper and deeper into maya. The achievements that were inspired by Mars at that time were ingenious and clever, but they were maya all the same.

So you see that in the fifteenth century you could have said Mars' salvation, and the earth's too, depended on the declining culture of Mars receiving a fresh impulse to raise it up again. It was somewhat similar on Mars to what it had been like on the earth before the Mystery of Golgotha, when humanity had fallen from spiritual heights into the depths of materialism, and the Christ Impulse had signified an ascent. In the fifteenth century the necessity had arisen on Mars for the Mars culture to receive an upward impulse. That was the significant question facing Christian Rosenkreutz and his pupils; how this upward impulse could be given to the Mars culture, for the salvation of the earth was also at stake. Rosicrucianism was faced with the mighty task of solving the problem of what had to happen so that, for the earth's sake, the Mars culture should be brought once more onto an ascending path. The beings on Mars were not in a position to know what would bring about their salvation, for the earth was the only place where one could know what the situation on Mars was like. On Mars itself they were unaware of the decline. Therefore it was in order to find a practical solution to this problem that the aforesaid conference met at the end of the sixteenth century. This conference was well prepared by Christian Rosenkreutz in that the closest friend and pupil of Christian Rosenkreutz was Gautama Buddha, living in a spirit body. And it was announced at this conference that the being who incarnated as Gautama Buddha, in the spiritual form he now had since becoming Buddha, would transfer the scene of his activities to Mars. The individuality of Gautama Buddha was as it were sent by Christian Rosenkreutz from the earth to Mars. So Gautama Buddha leaves the scene of his activity and goes to Mars, and in the year 1604 the individuality of Gautama Buddha accomplished for Mars a deed similar to what the Mystery of Golgotha was for the earth. Christian Rosenkreutz had known what the effect of Buddha on Mars would signify for the whole cosmos, what his teachings of Nirvana, of liberation from the earth, would signify on Mars. The teaching of Nirvana was unsuited to a form of culture directed primarily to practical life. Buddha's pupil, Francis of Assisi, was an example of the fact that this teaching produces in its adepts complete remoteness from the world and its affairs. But the content of Buddhism, which was not adapted to the practical life of man between birth and death, was of great importance for the soul between death and a new birth. Christian Rosenkreutz realised that for a certain purification needed on Mars the teachings of Buddha were pre-eminently suitable. The Christ Being, the essence of divine love, had once come down to the earth to a people in many respects alien, and in the seventeenth century Buddha, the prince of peace, went to Mars—the planet of war and conflict—to execute his mission there. The souls on Mars were warlike, torn with strife. Thus Buddha performed a deed of sacrifice similar to the deed performed in the Mystery of Golgotha by the bearer of the essence of divine love. To dwell on Mars as Buddha was a deed of sacrifice offered to the cosmos. He was as it were the lamb offered up in sacrifice on Mars, and to accept this environment of strife was for him a kind of crucifixion. Buddha performed this deed on Mars in the service of Christian Rosenkreutz. Thus do the great beings who guide the world work together not only on the earth but from one planet to another.

Since the mystery of Mars was consummated by Gautama Buddha, human beings have been able, during the period between death and a new birth, to receive from Mars different forces from those emanating during Mars' cultural decline. Not only does a man bring with him into a new birth quite different forces from Mars, but because of the influence exercised by the spiritual deed of Buddha, forces also stream from Mars into men who practise meditation as a means of reaching the spiritual world. When the modern pupil of Spiritual Science meditates in the sense indicated by Christian Rosenkreutz, forces sent to the earth by Buddha as the redeemer of Mars stream to him.

Christian Rosenkreutz is thus revealed to us as the great servant of Christ Jesus; but what Buddha, as the emissary of Christian Rosenkreutz, was destined to contribute to the work of Christ Jesus—this had also to come to the help of the work performed by Christian Rosenkreutz in the service of Christ Jesus. The soul of Gautama Buddha has not again been in physical incarnation on the earth but is utterly dedicated to the work of the Christ impulse. What was the word of peace sent forth from the Buddha to the child Jesus described in the Gospel of St. Luke? ‘Glory in the heights and on the earth—peace!’ And this word of peace, issuing mysteriously from Buddha, resounds from the planet of war and conflict to the soul of men on earth.

Because all these things had transpired it was possible to avert the division of human beings into the two distinct classes, consisting on the one hand of men of the type of Francis of Assisi, and on the other of men who live wholly as materialists. If Buddha had remained in direct and immediate connection with the earth, he would not have been able to concern himself with the ‘practical’ people, and his influence would have made the others into monks like Francis of Assisi. Through the deed of redemption performed by Gautama Buddha on Mars, it is possible for us, when we are passing through the Mars period of existence between death and a new birth, to become followers of Francis of Assisi without causing subsequent deprivation to the earth. Grotesque as it may seem, it is nevertheless true that since the seventeenth century every human being is a buddhist, a franciscan, an immediate follower of Francis of Assisi for a time, whilst he is on Mars. Francis of Assisi has subsequently only had one brief incarnation on earth as a child; and he died in childhood and has not incarnated since. From then onwards he has been connected with the work of Buddha on Mars and is one of his most eminent followers.

We have thus placed before our souls a picture of what came to pass through that great conference at the end of the sixteenth century, which resembles what happened on earth in the thirteenth century when Christian Rosenkreutz gathered his faithful around him. Nothing less was accomplished than that the possibility was given of averting from humanity the threatened separation into two classes, so that men might remain inwardly united. And those who want to develop esoterically despite their absorption in practical life can achieve their goal because the Buddha is working from the sphere of Mars and not from the sphere of the earth. Those forces which help to promote a healthy esoteric life can therefore also be attributed to the work and influence of Buddha.

In my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, I have dealt with the methods that are appropriate for meditation today. The essential point is that in rosicrucian training, development is such that the human being is not torn away from the earthly activities demanded of him by his karma. Rosicrucian esoteric development can proceed without causing the slightest disturbance in any situation or occupation in life. Because Christian Rosenkreutz was capable of transferring the work of Buddha from the earth to Mars it has become possible for Buddha also to send his influences into men from outside the earth.

Again, then, we have heard of one of the spiritual deeds of Christian Rosenkreutz; but to understand these deeds of the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries we must find our way to their esoteric meaning and significance. It would be good if it were generally realised how entirely consistent the progress of theosophy in the West has been since the founding of the Middle European section of the Theosophical Society.⁶⁶ Here in Switzerland we have given lecture cycles on the four Gospels.⁶⁷ The substance of all these Gospel cycles is potentially contained in my book Christianity as Mystical Fact, written twelve years ago. The book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment describes the Western path of development that is compatible with practical activities of every kind. Today I have indicated that a basic factor in these matters is the mission assigned to Gautama Buddha by Christian Rosenkreutz, for I have spoken of the significant influence which the transference of Buddha to Mars made possible in our solar system. And so stone after stone fits into its proper place in our Western philosophy, for it has been built up consistently and in obedience to principle, and everything that comes later harmonises with what went before. Inner consistency is essential in any world conception if it is to stand upon the ground of truth. And those who are able to draw near to Christian Rosenkreutz see with reverent wonder in what a consistent way he has carried out the great mission entrusted to him, which in our time is the rosicrucian-christian path of development. That the great teacher of Nirvana is now fulfilling a mission outside the earth, on Mars—this too is one of the wise and consistent deeds of Christian Rosenkreutz.

A Concluding Indication

In conclusion, the following brief practical indication will be added for those who aspire to become pupils of Christian Rosenkreutz.

A year ago we heard how the knowledge of having a certain relationship to Christian Rosenkreutz may come to a man involuntarily. It is also possible, however, to put a kind of question to one's own destiny: ‘Can I make myself worthy to become a pupil of Christian Rosenkreutz?’ It can come about in the following way: Try to place before your soul a picture of Christian Rosenkreutz, the great teacher of the modern age, in the midst of the twelve, sending forth Gautama Buddha into the cosmos as his emissary at the beginning of the seventeenth century, thus bringing about a consummation of what came to pass in the sixth century before Christ in the sermon of Benares.⁶⁸

If this picture, with its whole import, stands vividly before the soul, if a man feels that something streaming from this great and impressive picture wrings from his soul the words: O man, thou art not merely an earthly being; thou art in truth a cosmic being!—then he may believe with quiet confidence: ‘I can aspire to become a pupil of Christian Rosenkreutz.’ This picture of the relationship of Christian Rosenkreutz to Gautama Buddha is a potent and effective meditation.

And I wanted to awaken this aspiration in you as a result of these considerations. For our ideal should always be to take an interest in world happenings and then to find the way, by means of these studies, to carry out our own development into higher worlds.

• 59. a year ago, when it was said: see pages 36 et seq. [27 Sep 1911]
• 60. Nicholas Copernicus: 1473 – 1543.
• 61. Giordano Bruno: 1548 – 1600.
• 62. Galileo Galilei: 1564 – 1642.
• 63. earlier Ptolemaic view: Claudius Ptolemy, circa 100 to 180 AD., astronomer, mathematician and geographer in Alexandria.
• 64. Copernicus: Book of the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres: De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium Libri VI, Nurnberg 1543.
• 65. before that, from 1401 – 1464, the individuality of Copernicus was incarnated as Nicholas of Cusa: the relationship of these two individualities was presented in greater detail in the lectures given in 1909, ‘Das Prinzip der spirituellen Oekonomie im Zusammenhang mit Wiederverkoerperungsfragen. Ein Aspekt der geistigen Führung der Menscheit’ (The Principle of Spiritual Economy in Relation to Questions of Reincarnation. An Aspect of the Spiritual Guidance of Mankind), GA 109/111 Dornach, 1965. Nicholas of Cusa: 1401 – 64. Wrote his work ‘De docta ignorantia Libri III’ in 1440.
• 66. since the founding of the Middle European section of the Theosophical Society: see Rudolf Steiner ‘The Anthroposophical Movement, its History and Life-Conditions in Relation to the Anthroposophical Society; an Occasion for Self-Recollection’, 8 lectures Dornach, June, 1923; London, 1933.
• 67. Here in Switzerland we have given lecture cycles on the four Gospels: ‘Das Johannes-Evangelium’ (The Gospel of St. John), 8 lectures, Basle, November 1907, in ‘Menschheitsentwicklung und Christuserkenntnis’ (Human Evolution and Knowledge of Christ) GA 100 Dornach, 1967; ‘The Gospel of St. Luke’. 10 lectures, Basle, September, 1909, Rudolf Steiner Press London, 1975; ‘The Gospel of St. Matthew’, 12 lectures, Berne, September 1910, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1965; ‘The Gospel of St. Mark’, 10 lectures, Basle, September, 1912, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1977.
• 68. sermon of Benares: Buddha's first sermon after his enlightenment: ‘The eightfold path, the cause of suffering and the alleviation of suffering.’

The Theosophical Society, founded by H.P. Blavatsky,¹ had the task of adding an occult element to the awakening European interest in oriental spirituality which had been greatly stimulated in the mid-19th century by Schopenhauer and other major thinkers. ‘The Secret Doctrine’² by H.P. Blavatsky was the sensational work which caused the rapid expansion of the Theosophical Society in the English-speaking world. It made no effort to take account of Christianity. An attempt by Rosicrucian occultists to place Christianity at the centre of the new movement, in which the author's mediumistic faculties were to have been used, had been deflected earlier. And yet it was required that Western and Eastern wisdom should be brought into harmony. The ancient wisdom was to live on in the future development of mankind, whose salvation was guaranteed by the Mystery of Golgotha. Similar to the way that Christianity in the past, still young and vigorous in belief, had assimilated science through the wave of Arabism, turning observation of nature into the science of nature, present mankind, fallen prey to materialism and parched, had to be revitalised by being permeated with the knowledge of ancient wisdom. This took place by way of a knowledge of Buddhist philosophy with the result that the teaching of karma and reincarnation found entry to many souls and penetrated their understanding. The scientific works of Max Muller,³ Deussen⁴ and other significant philosophers opened up to Europeans a world of overwhelming spirituality and vivid imaginations. The key to the understanding of these worlds, however, still had to be given to intellectual science.

The work done by Blavatsky and her pupils in this respect was insufficient. Suitable personalities to act as mediators in this task still remained to be found. Through the particular constitution of her physical organism H.P. Blavatsky had been an instrument which was particularly open to the influences of the spiritual world. Her strong will made her suitable to carry out difficult tasks in the service of mankind; but her thinking was disjointed and her character often degenerated into emotionalism, and when her emotions broke loose catastrophe ensued and sometimes even the direction of her striving was reversed. It would not be wrong to say: as an instrument open to spiritual influence, occult forces fought for her possession.

In order to turn knowledge of the occult worlds into a science of the spirit which might in time be learnt by people through serious study, a person had to devote himself to this transformation who had his character and temperament completely under control, who also had a grasp of the knowledge of his time and command of the individual fields of knowledge to an extent which enabled him to reply to the most fierce criticism. An iron and yet flexible physical organism were required in order to withstand the onslaught against him.

Such a person was Rudolf Steiner.⁵ His youth was spent in what might be called convivial seclusion and constant study. Hardly grown up, he supported himself by giving lessons and then as an educator. On this foundation his lecturing and writing activity developed while he was still a young man. Since recognition of the spirit was quite natural to him, he quite consciously set himself the task of raising all the objections which the critical materialist brings to bear on revelations of the spirit and to spare himself nothing which might be the smallest deviation from this line. This he called ‘crawling into the skin of the dragon.’ He felt this difficult task to be his duty. Otherwise he would have considered himself as lacking the right to fight to the end the difficult battle for mankind, of wresting victory from abstract intellectualism. Only then would he be able to present the deed of the Buddha and the deed of the Christ as a harmonious unity; only then, when he himself had gained victory over the inner adversary and his hidden ways, would he be able to point the path of salvation through Christ's deed. Thus armed, he made his appearance as representative of the ancient mystery teachings as they had been revealed to him in the light of Christ's deed.

The Theosophical Society was alarmed. It saw the deep effect of Steiner's teachings on souls in search of Christ. It did not want to expose its members to this, did not want to expose them to the danger of taking in Steiner's teachings, thus abandoning the orientalising stream. His topics for the Congress of the Federation of European Sections, arranged to take place in Genoa,⁶ contained as their subject: Buddhist wisdom and Western esotericism. They opposed this subject with an Indian boy, the incarnation in the flesh of Christ Jesus according to their teaching. No common ground for scientific debate as it should have taken place at the Congress in Genoa could be found to cover such a gaping divergence; and now that Rudolf Steiner's significance had been recognised such a debate was deemed much too dangerous an undertaking. It was better to avoid such hot issues altogether. The congress was cancelled at the last minute for reasons which never became clear.

And Steiner, who had already set out for Italy,—as had many others—was able to speak only to group meetings, to small circles. There was not time to arrange for stenographers to be present. But not everything was lost, due to the devotion of a number of members who were taking notes, whose hand, however, naturally weakened towards the end in the fire of the enthusiastically spoken word. The Locarno lecture and those held in Neuchatel in particular give us cause to remember our dear Agnes Friedlander, who died of pneumonia in 1942 in a concentration camp. She was among those whose soul was particularly deeply affected by the transforming impulse alive in the mystery of Christ.

The lectures themselves have only been preserved as fragments. No satisfactory transcripts exist. It seems like a counter-attack by adversary forces that no experienced stenographer was present. They exist—apart from the shortened Cassel lectures—partly as fragments and partly as notes which have been pieced together. Nevertheless, the essential framework has been preserved and the effort was made to place them into context. This effort is not always successful as far as the stylistic form is concerned, but the spirit is challenged all the more to sharpen its powers of thought and stimulated to embark on their study.

Besides emphasising the particular character of Spiritual Science after the event of Christ, the aim of the lectures held in 1911 and 1912⁷ was to bring out the significance of karma as the course of destiny and to enable us to penetrate into its intimate nature. Even if the overall course of those reflections has been preserved only as a series of remembered images—the notes were frequently too brief to convey the logical progression and the irregular collection of notes and headings tend to be little more than indications—the direction of the spiritual impulses given by Dr. Steiner has been preserved and perhaps justifies this attempted collection: they can deepen the soul by meditative work and continue to be active within us.

Marie Steiner

• 1. The Theosophical Society, founded by H.P. Blavatsky: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, nee von Hahn (Ekaterinoslav, Southern Russia, 1831 – 1891 London), founded the Theosophical Society together with Col. H.S. Olcott in New York in 1875, its headquarters moving in 1879 to India (Adyar, near Madras).
• 2. The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy. Volume 1, Cosmogenesis; Volume II, Anthropogenesis; London, 1888. A third volume was published from manuscripts by Annie Besant in London in 1897.
• 3. Max Muller: 1823 – 1900; one of the most important orientalists of the nineteenth century.
• 4. Paul Deussen: 1845 – 1919; philosopher and scholar of Indian culture.
• 5. Rudolf Steiner. His youth was spent: see Rudolf Steiner, ‘An Autobiography’, Rudolf Steiner Publications; New York, 1977.
• 6. Congress ... in Genoa: see Rudolf Steiner ‘The Anthroposophical Movement, its History and Life Conditions in Relation to the Anthroposophical Society’. Eight lectures in Dornach, 10th – 17th June 1923; London, 1933.
• 7. aim of the lectures held in 1911 and 1912 was to bring out the significance of karma: see the Berlin and Stuttgart lectures ‘Reincarnation and Karma: their Significance in Modern Culture’; London, 1960.

Why do we need Theosophy? As living beings on the physical plane, we are on a descent. Our body is not the same as in ancient times, our bodies are less ensouled, less sustained by the spirit. Just as the plant is permeated by water, so too was the etheric body active in us in ancient times. It permeated the physical body with its constructive powers. Today it has lost its power over the body. Salvation is only possible if we strengthen the spiritual in us. When the astral body permeates with the spiritual, then the human race will also become healthier. It is fate that the human physical body crumbles, but the etheric body can become stronger and have an effect on it. Now, however, people are heading straight for decadence. Theosophy works to revitalize and heal body and soul. What is particularly effective in healing is that which cannot be perceived by the senses or the brain alone. It seems nonsense to the world when we say that we should focus our thoughts on things that cannot be proven externally. But it is childish to want to prove theosophy by means of today's science.

In our thinking about the external world there is an element that is necessarily destructive and has a destructive effect on the physical body. Sleep improves this. Many phenomena of today's cultural life have a destructive effect, for example, in particular, the light images, which certainly damage the etheric body. Light images also excite sensuality. Real art can sensualize what comes from the higher worlds for the benefit of people. In the theosophical world view, we work in union with supersensible powers. Nothing gives a firm inner foothold like Theosophy. Some slave with a firm spiritual foothold in the time of the pharaohs and the Egyptian priesthood was safer in life than many a person in the present time. Today people strive for the stereotypical, for authority. But only through their own inner activity in the awakened inner being can the soul find a firm foothold. The theosophical mood gives people a hold and makes them content, because they have a firm support in their own inner being through what theosophy gives them, which is as necessary for the soul as daily bread is for the body.

We live on a planet that is heading towards disintegration. Gradually, lakes and rivers will dry up. Such changes are altering the face of the earth. Geology already indicates that we are already in a disintegrating epoch. The renowned geologist Sucß confirms that instead of rising, invigorating processes in the earth, decomposition processes are taking place. This is already happening throughout the great last developmental epoch of the earth. It is particularly intense in the small one since 1250. Some researchers and people who are ingenious in their field show some glimmer of insight. For example, Burdach. He notes a change since the Renaissance, but he knows nothing of the change in direction of the earth's axis at the time when the spirits of personality withdrew.

Different spiritual entities intervene in different ways at different times. This gives each age its own character, just as each age of life has its own special task. It would have a destructive, undermining effect if one were to introduce something that is not appropriate to the times, for example old Egyptian teachings that were anchored in the atavistic view of the people and have been preserved in a transformed form as a belief in a supersensible world. It is not what the mind sees, not the external world, that is the object of belief; this has its strong roots in earlier experiences of the soul. The spirits of personality, the archai, are not visible, and yet they are there and intervene. There was a particularly strong intervention of the archai in the Egyptian-Babylonian period. At that time, the spirits of personality were particularly attracted by the earth sphere. Now it is different. Now they are least attracted or sympathetically touched by what is happening on earth. They no longer intervene, not even in the character of people. Since the year 1250, things have changed. In the thirteenth century, an important and significant transformation of the earth's conditions took place. Since then, the archai have ceased to intervene so strongly. They withdrew to acts in the higher worlds. Before that, their activity had been more on the earth itself. Such events are to be appreciated accordingly, for since then other laws prevail.

All progressive spirits in the universe face opponents, in this case those who are retarded spirits of personality. These opponents, the evil spirits of personality, now gain the field. This is connected with the change in the position of the earth's axis around 1250. After all, the earth describes a conical movement in the course of millennia, a dancing movement. Since the fifth or sixth millennium BC, the Earth's axis has turned more and more. Scientifically, this is called the advance of the vernal point, the equinox. The distribution of spring, summer, autumn and winter was also different in the past, more even.

The love of personality, everything connected with it, has its good and bad sides. This also brought about the Renaissance, when it produced people who lived entirely in their personalities. It was all vehement towards the thirteenth century and long afterwards, well into the Renaissance, both in artistic natures and in Cesare Borgia and Pope Alexander VI. It had also been the same with the leaders of the Crusades. During that time, everything took place under the sign of the spirits of personality. The whole of history at that time is permeated by the evil spirits of personality. Man was, as it were, possessed by the spirits of personality.

The souls incarnated in the thirteenth century knew that people could not free themselves from their personality, and the opposing forces gradually made people as materialistic as possible. The people, who were permeated by the evil spirits of personality, could no longer look up to the spiritual worlds. In those days, the connection with the spiritual world was established through faith, and the scholastic church scholars also emphasized this. Faith and knowledge were now strictly separated. This continued to have an effect over the centuries. Kant was one of the last stragglers of that time, his followers were only parrot-like repeaters. Luther, however, still felt the vague influence of the evil spirits of the personality. He threw the inkwell against the materialistic spirit of the time.

This epoch is over. We live in the time of the archangels, with thoughts that can reach up into the region where the archangels and the opponents of the archangels are. The opponents of the archangels no longer assert themselves over great personalities as the archai used to. There are no longer personalities who, like Leonardo da Vinci, are in contact with the good spirits of the personality or, like Pope Alexander VI, with the bad ones. Today people are more stereotyped. Now they are chasing abstract ideals. More and more, these are ideas, opinions, feelings, through which people are obsessed by the opponents of the archangels. As a result, people become enthusiastic about abstract ideals, become fantasists, no longer love their own eternal self, but are driven by all kinds of lusts and passions. They merely cling to the earthly personality, they rave about some unreal fantasy. But only the striving for the spiritual world can truly fill the souls with content.

A secondary effect of the evil spirits of personality arises from wine. Wine becomes an opponent in the human body itself. Abstinence from wine is a consequence for anyone who wants to penetrate into the spiritual worlds. But enthusiastic anti-alcoholism and vegetarianism belong to the partial ideals. The same applies, for example, to enthusiasm for Greek physical culture, for the Olympic Games and so on. Today's fad for cold ablutions is also part of this, all enthusiasm for the physically tangible and the physically less tangible. This increases from the reverie of drunken people to the wild propensity for crime, because the opponents of the archai work in this way in the sensual world.

Each person must feel their place in the world, must experience something of what is surging into humanity in the characterized way. Otherwise, instability, insecurity, and loss of balance will become general. People who fluctuate between enthusiasm and materialism find no orientation. There was, for example, a Wagner admirer – you can be a fan of Wagner and understand nothing about it – who went barefoot to Bayreuth, then he became an ascetic, he slept on a wooden board with pebbles, and finally he became an opponent of Wagner together with Nietzsche. Instability of the soul expresses itself in neurasthenia; in contrast to this, a firm support is needed within the soul.

But we need something different from what people in the Middle Ages needed, for whom faith was enough. A seven-year-old child needs something different from a person who is seven times seven years old. Theosophy can tear us out of the passive mold that supports us without making us lose our footing. With stormy strides, the outward splendor of our civilization will crumble. The arts, sciences, everything will fall apart. The forms cannot remain, they scatter: time and the spirit are stronger than man with his desires and passions. Theosophy is a necessity, and the theosophist should realize within himself that it is a necessity.

The macrocosm, the great world, is just as much in a state of development as the microcosm, the human being, the small world. Just as the human being must develop his seven principles. These principles represent the totality of the hierarchies.

I. Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones
II. Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai
III. Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi
IV. Son of Man

The line of development of the macrocosmic principles is as follows:

First macrocosmic principle of development = Thrones
Second macrocosmic principle of development = Cherubim
Third macrocosmic principle of development = Seraphim
Fourth macrocosmic principle of development = Christ

or graphically:

In the case of the Earth, the root races are indicated below with 1, 2, 3 and so on. So schematically:

1. polaric root race - repetition of the Saturn principle: thrones
2. hyperborean root race - repetition of the sun principle: cherubim
3. lemurian root race - repetition of the moon principle: seraphim
4. atlantian root race - center of the earth: Christ
5. our root race - further development
6. presentiment of the Jupiter development
7. presentiment of the Venus development

The Christ principle thus continues to develop throughout the Jupiter period and is fully developed only around the middle of the sixth, the Venus epoch.

From the middle of the Atlantean period onward, the Christ principle can only take effect in its first germinal form. In the human being, this occurs through the formation of the first ego germ. The first direct, real influence in our time occurred in the Revelation on Mount Sinai, where the Christ revealed Himself to Moses under the name of Jahve or Jehovah. Then the direct connection of the Christ with the earth happened through the baptism in the Jordan and the three years in the bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. The Christ impulse has thus entered into humanity at the same time as the I-impulse. Christ therefore signifies the macrocosmic I.

The further development of the fifth, sixth and seventh principles on earth can therefore only be possible inwardly, as a kind of presentiment. No higher body than the physical body built up with the fourth macrocosmic principle can be given to man. Only on Jupiter do we receive the fifth and on Venus the sixth body, and so on. Compared to the Greco-Latin period, there is now something like an inner contradiction between spirit, soul and body in man, which will become more and more tangible the further development progresses. Sensitive people in particular can already feel this contradiction today.

Let us now look at the counteraction of the Luciferic spirits from this point of view. The Luciferic spirits originate from a higher hierarchy than that of human beings: the hierarchy of the Angeloi or angels, who, however, did not complete their overall development on the moon, where they underwent their human stage. Therefore, they remain unable to find the connection to the fourth macrocosmic principle in their further development. On the other hand, the Luciferic spirits on the moon have already developed their fourth and fifth principles, so to speak, with presentiments, but still without the macrocosmic fourth principle, without the Christ impulse, which was not yet present.

Let us now take the development of such Luciferic spirits who have attained the fifth principle on the moon. They know nothing beyond the fourth macrocosmic principle, and thus know nothing of the Christ. It is difficult to express in our language. One could say something like this: They turn with derision against the upper gods, who strive for the development of the Christ principle in humanity, and shout to them: You can only give man the fourth principle; but we can give him the fifth principle. That is indeed something higher, which they, just as we are doing in the fifth root race, have brought with them, as if in anticipation. But they lack the macrocosmic fourth principle, the Christ, of whom they know nothing. In a way, they are already precocious, anticipating something, but not in harmony with the cosmos. Normal development therefore presents the Luciferic spirits with something “simpler” that they deem themselves superior to. And there will come a time when, through the power of the higher principles, the fifth or even sixth principle, the Luciferic spirits will have great influence over humanity, which has fallen prey to them.

Can we not already correctly perceive this today in its signs everywhere? In art and science and so on, everywhere we encounter a certain premature higher development, but it seems to lack the inner core of truth, harmony with the eternal.

The leader of those spirits who have developed six principles in this way, who have thus come close to perfection on the moon, is the Antichrist, who can already look confusingly like the Christ.

Today, the majority of humanity has already fallen prey to the influence of the Luciferic spirits. Hence the necessity to now promote that which the human being on earth can only receive inwardly through meditation. Hence the necessity of Theosophy.

At the beginning of our fifth period, that is, at the end of the Greco-Latin period in the thirteenth century, humanity was completely cut off from the Hellenic faculty for a short time. Therefore, a great conference of the wisest people was held at the College of Twelve. The first seven of these were the holy rishis, each of whom had embodied one of the seven Atlantian stages of development. The other four sages embodied the first four sub-races of our time: the eighth the Indian, the ninth the ancient Persian, the tenth the Egyptian-Chaldean, and the eleventh the Greco-Latin; the twelfth took in everything that followed. Then there was a boy among them, a thirteenth, whom they took into their midst and all twelve let their wisdom flow into him in a certain way. The boy's body became completely transparent as a result. He had not eaten for quite some time. He lived only a short time under this powerful influence, but during that time, through what he had absorbed from all of them together, he was able to become the teacher of these twelve about the things they could not grasp individually. In particular, he was able to explain to them the Pauline event in a higher sense through his own insight. He then died and was reborn in the fourteenth century as Christian Rosenkreutz. He then lived for a hundred years and since then has been not only the teacher of the twelve wise men, but of all mankind. His task is to protect humanity against the influence of Lucifer.

These satanic influences are very strong and will grow considerably. But it can rightly be said of them: “The people never sense the devil, even when he has them by the throat.” However, the satanic influence will become more evident in the near future.

We are gathered here to seek the blessing of the spiritual powers that stand above our Theosophical movement, the blessing for a working group that has created a place of work for its own deepest satisfaction, which expresses the impulses of our will through the most diverse symbols: namely, devotion to the spiritual powers and the will to serve them in the right way. Much work of the mind and soul has been done to furnish these rooms worthily. The members will always receive the right impetus for their work surrounded by these symbols; but those who have rushed to witness the opening will take a lasting memory with them, as will those who are always connected in spirit with those who have sought a place of work here in order to send invigorating impulses.

Being part of a current such as our Theosophical movement, we must consider it a blessing of spiritual powers, because in the future this Theosophical movement is a necessity, and we may be first in this current, which must flow into the future development of humanity if it is not to dry up and wither. As occultists, we can see that such fertilization is inevitable. And that we in particular can feel obliged to lend a helpful hand in this fertilization, we want to consider as a grace.

The period between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries brought the waves of materialism, which is also a necessity, even if it could only bring blessings that are necessary for the physical world. Few among the leading minds of modern times could understand that from the necessary but also descending bonds of materialism, an ascent must again spring forth.

The theosophical movement is the outpouring of spiritual forces and truths from higher worlds. People should again know things that have been covered up for thousands of years.

If we want to examine the nature of the movement in which we stand, we can identify the most significant characteristic. It is as if the most beautiful and genuine human spirit had been at work in it, because three points, felt in the right way, immediately give the idea that it is something that is entirely in line with the demands of our time. These three points say nothing less than that a spiritual movement is to be introduced into the world in which every human being can participate. The most human current is characterized when it is said: This society forms the core of a universal human brotherhood — and so on. This says nothing less than: On earth, there can be no person who could not become a member of this society. But the most diverse creeds and philosophies are spread across the earth. These cannot all be errors. To claim that would be to accuse the wise order of the world. So it can only be a matter of seeking the objective core of all worldviews that leads to mutual understanding. As something of a motto, the following sentence has emerged from these principles: “No religion stands higher than truth.” The striving for truth can bring all people together, because it will promote mutual understanding. Then the third principle is already there in essence. But one could say that materialists are excluded from the society after all. They are only excluded if their materialistic belief is more important to them than the search for the forces that underlie all phenomena. We do not exclude the materialist, for no one who seriously wants to search has remained at the materialistic point of view. He only excludes himself because he does not want to search for the truth. Our movement does not need any other principles, for if everything is properly understood, there can be no abuse or degeneration within the theosophical movement, for it summarizes the great ideal of soul harmony and peace. Let us realize how peace and harmony can be brought to the world.

The Christian who has not become a Theosophist will have little understanding for that which elevates the Buddhist to the higher worlds. But the Christian who has become a Theosophist must endeavor to understand him, he feels it is his duty based on the guiding principles of the Theosophical movement, which he recognizes. And it becomes clear to the Christian that the life of Gautama Buddha on earth meant something when he knows that a person must have undergone countless embodiments before he can become a Buddha. The Buddhist knows that after attaining the dignity of Buddha, he no longer needs to return to Earth. In Kristiania, reference was made to the mission of Gautama Buddha. It was shown how this soul has a special task to fulfill on Mars. The Buddha has undergone the preliminary stage on Earth in order to play a similar role among the Martians as the Christ did on Earth - not through some kind of Golgotha mystery, not by going through a death, because the Martians have different living conditions than the Earthmen. It is therefore clear to the occultist that the belief of the Buddhists that Gautama Buddha does not need to return to earth in a physical body has its full justification. So we no longer fight their convictions, what is so close to their hearts, but want to show them the deepest interest.

When the Buddhist becomes a theosophist, he learns to recognize what is most sacred to the Christian. He recognizes that in the fact of a certain personality passing through physical death, there lies a world mystery, that the Christ descended from higher worlds for a unique incarnation, and will never again come into a physical body. He begins to understand that this mystery is the compensation for the battle between Christ and Lucifer. When the Buddhist learns this through theosophy, he says to himself: I understand what the Christian means in the deepest sense, I understand the unique incarnation of the Christ and see that the Christ was not on earth before he found a body through Jesus of Nazareth.

If we devote ourselves to the emphasized principles, we learn something that is particularly opposed to a certain fear that is often found among Christians. The fearful person easily believes that his confession loses its luster when the merits of others are also highlighted. The Christian confession acquires a higher luster when one penetrates the individual religious beliefs in an occult way. Those who are so anxiously concerned that their confession might lose out when juxtaposed with the Buddhist faith should remember that there are still many unresolved questions for the Christian theologian, that, for example, it is still an important question as to whether the people who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha also share in the Redemption. But if the Christian adds what the Buddhist knows, he sees that they are the same souls that lived in a body before the appearance of Christ and keep coming back to Earth after the Mystery. Now one might ask: But what about the Buddha soul that was last incarnated six hundred years before Christ and did not return?

Occult research also provides us with a satisfactory answer here. We are shown that the Buddha was a messenger sent in advance who, belonging to a higher hierarchy, was sent down with the Venusians, so that one can rightly speak of a mission of the Buddha in preparation for the Christ. Every religion can understand every other religion if none wants to tyrannize the other out of selfishness. An orthodox Buddhist could want to raise his Buddha above all other beings, although no true Buddhist would do that. If someone wanted to be fanatical in the sense of a limited Buddhism, he could teach that there can be no other being that does not need to return to earth as a human being, except for the Buddha, so he must be the highest. This would give Buddhism an infinite advantage over Christianity, and then put it in second place. Then one religion would be fought by the other. But that would be an un-Theosophical act. For Theosophy is about spreading peace across the earth, through understanding and studying the same truths to lead to the realization of the importance of each. Therefore, let us remember that we cannot just profess our principles with our mouths and then turn them into their opposites.

We must be convinced that the establishment of a working group is not just something to be pleased about, but that it entails a great obligation, especially when it is undertaken to lay claim to the name of the founder, which belongs to the noble martyr who, through his way of working, has suffered and will suffer into the future more than any human being. I say: a man - for what the Christ suffered, a God has suffered. This is connected with the great dangers which the truth will have to undergo in the future. When we baptize ourselves with the name “Christian Rosenkreutz,” we must realize that it is difficult to keep this alliance. We are pledging a loyalty to which we may not be strong enough. Nevertheless, no one should be denied the opportunity to cultivate this loyalty in their soul, a loyalty that makes it necessary for us to take our future into our own hands in a certain direction. When we feel so drawn to something that is already there that we make it our own field of work, we appeal to the powers of idealism, which has already gained strength. But if we found something new, then we have as our ally all the separatism, all unearthly self-seeking: Lucifer has a new hope with every new foundation. Not so when we join something old. Therefore woe to us if we are not mindful of the saying: “The devil is never felt by the people, even if he has them by the collar.” But we can always remove him from our collar if we are of good will.

It is a great but dangerous moment when we associate the founding with a name that was borne by such a great martyr. The founders themselves must take the vow not to take the venture lightly, but to hold fast with all loyalty and with all their strength to what they have vowed. With each founding of a theosophical working group, one takes on a heavy responsibility. If one considers how little has been understood of the impulse given by Christian Rosenkreutz, one can appreciate that tremendous difficulties will arise for those who are willing to follow it.

No one contradicts the Orientals when they speak of the Maitreya Buddha in their own way. But once the principle of Christianity, which basically rests in the three principles of the Theosophical Society, is found across the earth, then strong powers will arise that will accumulate error upon error. Those who can remain loyal to Christian Rosenkreutz will belong to him.

We can already see in our time how difficult it is to understand Christianity and how little goodwill there is to grasp the essence of Christianity. The principles that prevail like good stars within the Theosophical movement and have been characterized today will contribute to both a deepening and a shaking up of the lukewarm. It is necessary to awaken the sense of responsibility. To permeate ourselves with this task is our goal at this point. Even in the narrowest space, many tests will still confront you!

In the moment when only the name of Christian Rosenkreutz is mentioned, the principle is represented: No religion is higher to us than the striving for truth. - Christian Rosenkreutz never demands any personal cult and sees to it that the teachings are brought close to the mind and understood. He does not demand blind faith in the masters. If we first use our own powers, then the possibility will arise to recognize the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of sensations through the truth. Belief in them is not demanded from the outset, because then belief in the masters would stand higher than truth. If ever something like unconditional belief in a master were demanded, the principles of the Theosophical Society would already have been broken.

You can tell whether something is true or not if you pay attention to certain methods. For example, it would have been easy when publishing the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” to write: These teachings are given under inspiration and so on, they come from the Master and the like. However, the principle of the theosophical movement is broken if the writer does not take responsibility for what is written. If it were claimed that a book was written without the responsibility of the author, you can be sure that there is no truth here, but a luciferic-Ahrimanic deception. Today, the Masters do not allow the writer to reject responsibility, so it is always a duty to consult one's reason and not to believe anything on authority. It is, of course, much more convenient to swear allegiance to a personality cult, because reason has to be worked at. Only those who critically examine what is given from the spiritual worlds can remain loyal to Christian Rosenkreuz. Therefore, bear in mind that a working group is being set up here that wants to remain loyal to the principles, beyond the personality of the teacher who is called upon at the time, in order to transform into something that can be grasped by human beings that which flows down from the spiritual worlds through Christ.

If you resolve to think and strive in this way, then I may call down the blessing of the spiritual beings, in whose existence we need not believe if we know ourselves to be in their current. May the good spirits reign here and bless this work, they, of whose existence I am as convinced as of the existence of all those who are sitting here in the physical body. And so this place of work is also inaugurated. Whatever good spiritual work is accomplished in a theosophical way will be able to prevent the darkness that would otherwise inevitably descend upon Christianity. May the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings reign.

In this lecture I want to speak of certain facts which belong essentially to the ethical and moral domain and help us to understand the mission of Spiritual Science in our time.

We are all deeply convinced of the great truth of reincarnation, of repeated earthly lives, and we must realise that this repetition has its own good purpose in the Earth's evolution. To the question, ‘Why do we reincarnate?’—occult research gives the answer that our experiences differ in each of the epochs during which we are reborn on the Earth. In incarnations immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe the experiences of the human soul were entirely different from those undergone in later pre-Christian epochs and in our own age.

I need only briefly mention that in the times directly after the Atlantean catastrophe, souls were endowed with a certain elementary clairvoyance in the bodies they then inhabited. This clairvoyance, once a natural faculty in man, was gradually lost, mainly as a result of the conditions prevailing during the Græco-Roman epoch of culture. Since then, man has developed in such a way that great progress has been achieved on the physical plane and during the course of the present post-Atlantean epoch clairvoyance will gradually be reacquired.

We are living in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of culture, the ancient Indian being the first, the ancient Persian the second, the Babylonian-Chaldean the third, the Græco-Roman the fourth; the sixth and seventh epochs will follow our own. And then another great catastrophe will befall the Earth and humanity, as was the case at the end of the Atlantean epoch.

Occult research is able to indicate the characteristic trend of human evolution in each of these post-Atlantean epochs of civilisation—including the fifth, sixth and seventh. The essential characteristic of our present fifth epoch is the development of intellect, of reason. The main characteristic of the sixth epoch will be that very definite feelings regarding what is moral and what is immoral will arise in the souls of men. Delicate feelings of sympathy will be aroused by compassionate, kindly deeds and feelings of antipathy by malicious actions. Nobody living at the present time can have the faintest conception of the intensity of these feelings.

The sixth epoch will be followed by the seventh, when the moral life will be still further deepened. Whereas in the sixth epoch man will take pleasure in good and noble actions, in the seventh epoch the natural outcome of such pleasure will be a moral impulse, that is to say there will be a firm resolve to do what is moral. There is a great difference between taking pleasure in a moral action and the doing of it. We can therefore say: our own epoch is the epoch of intellectualism; the essential characteristic of the following epoch will be aesthetic pleasure in the good, aesthetic displeasure in the evil; and the seventh will be characterised by an active moral life.

At the present time only the seeds of what will become part of mankind in future epochs are contained in the human soul and it can be said that all these aptitudes or predispositions in man—intellectual aptitudes, predispositions leading to feelings of sympathy or antipathy aroused by certain actions, to moral impulses—all these are related to the higher worlds. Every moral action has a definite connection with the higher worlds. Our intellectual aptitudes have a super-sensible connection with the astral plane. Our sympathies and antipathies for the good or the evil are connected with the sphere of Lower Devachan; and the domain of moral impulses in the soul is connected with Higher Devachan. Hence we can also say: In our present age it is mainly the forces of the astral world that penetrate into and take effect in the human soul; in the sixth epoch it will be the forces of Lower Devachan that penetrate more deeply into the soul; and in the seventh, the forces of Higher Devachan will work with special strength into humanity.

From this it is understandable that in the preceding fourth post-Atlantean epoch (the Græco-Roman) it was the forces of the physical plane that exercised the strongest influence upon the soul of man. That is why Greek culture was able to produce such wonderful sculptures, in which the human form was given such magnificent expression on the physical plane. Conditions in that epoch were therefore especially suitable for men to experience the Christ on the physical plane in a physical body. In our own, fifth epoch which will last until the fourth millennium, souls will gradually become able, from the twentieth century onwards, to experience the Christ Being in an etheric form on the astral plane, just as in the fourth epoch Christ was visible on the physical plane in a physical form.

In order to understand the nature of development in the sixth epoch of culture, it is well to consider what will be the characteristic qualities of the soul in future incarnations. To-day, in our intellectual age, intellectuality and morality are practically separate spheres in the life of soul. It is quite possible nowadays for a man to be very clever and at the same time immoral, or vice versa—to be deeply moral and anything but clever.

In the fourth epoch the future juxtaposition of morality and intellectuality was prophetically foreseen by a certain people, namely the Hebrews. They endeavoured to bring about on artificial harmony between morality and intellectuality, whereas among the Greeks such harmony was more a natural matter of course. To-day we can learn from the Akashic Chronicle how the leaders of the ancient Hebrew people strove to establish this harmony between intellectuality and morality. They wore symbols, of which they had such profound understanding that if they concentrated their gaze upon them and made themselves receptive to their influences, a certain harmony could be established between what was good in a moral sense and what was wise. The priests of the ancient Hebrew people wore these symbols on their breastplate. The symbol for morality was called Urim, the symbol of wisdom, Thummim.¹

If a Hebrew priest wanted to discover whether a certain action was both good and wise, he made himself receptive to the forces of Urim and Thummim; the result was that a certain harmony between morality and intellectuality was induced. Magical effects were produced by means of these symbols and a magical link established with the spiritual world.

Our task now is to achieve in future incarnations through inner development of the soul the effect that in earlier times was produced by means of these symbols.

Let us think once again of the phases of evolution through the fifth, sixth and seventh post-Atlantean culture-epochs in order to grasp how intellectuality, aestheticism and morality will come to expression in men's life of soul.

Whereas in the present fifth epoch, intellectuality can remain unimpaired even if no pleasure is taken in moral actions, in the sixth epoch, it will be quite different. In the sixth epoch, that is, from about the third millennium onwards, immorality will have a paralysing effect upon intellectuality. The mental powers of a man who is intellectual and at the same time immoral will definitely deteriorate and this condition will become more and more pronounced in the future evolution of humanity. A man who has no morals will therefore have no intellectual power for this will depend entirely upon moral actions; and in the seventh epoch, cleverness without morality will be non-existent.

At this point it will be well to consider the nature of moral forces in individual souls in their present incarnations. How is it that in our phase of evolution a human being can become immoral? It is because in his successive incarnations man has descended more and more deeply into the physical world and has therefore been impelled more and more strongly towards the world of the senses.

The more forcefully the impulses belonging to the descending phase of evolution work upon a soul, the more immoral it tends to become. This fact is confirmed by a very interesting finding of occult research. You know that when a man passes through the gate of death, he lays aside his physical and etheric bodies and for a short time has a retrospective view of his past life on earth. A kind of sleep then ensues and after a few months, or perhaps years, he wakens on the astral plane, in Kamaloka. Then follows the life in Kamaloka, when the earthly life is lived over again in backward order, three times as quickly.

At the beginning of life in Kamaloka a very significant experience comes to every individual. In the case of most Europeans or, speaking generally, of men belonging to modern civilisation, this experience takes the following form.—At the beginning of life in Kamaloka a spiritual Individuality shows us everything we have done out of selfish motives in the last life, shows us a kind of register of all our transgressions. The more concretely you picture this experience, the better. At the beginning of the Kamaloka period it is actually as though a figure were presenting us with the register of our physical life. The important fact—for which, naturally, there can be no further proof because it can be confirmed only by occult experience—is that the majority of men belonging to European civilisation recognise Moses in this figure. This fact has always been known to Rosicrucian research since the Middle Ages and in recent years it has been confirmed by very delicate investigations.

You can gather from this that at the beginning of his life in Kamaloka man feels a very great responsibility towards the pre-Christian powers for having allowed himself to be drawn downwards, and it is an actual fact in occult life that it is the Moses-Individuality who demands reckoning for the wrongs committed in our time.

The powers and forces which draw man upwards again to the spiritual world fall into two categories: those which draw him upwards on the path of Wisdom, and those which draw him upwards on the path of Morality. The forces to which intellectual progress is mainly due all proceed from the impulse given by a great Individuality of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch who is known to you all, namely Gautama Buddha. It is a remarkable discovery of spiritual investigation that the most penetrating, most significant, thoughts conceived in our present epoch have proceeded from Gautama Buddha. This is all the more remarkable inasmuch as until the days of Schopenhauer—therefore by no means long ago—the name of Gautama Buddha was almost unknown in the West. This is very understandable, for when Gautama Buddha was born as the son of King Suddhodana, he rose from the rank of Bodhisattva to that of Buddha, and to become a Buddha means that the Individuality concerned does not incarnate again on Earth in a body of flesh. The Bodhisattva-Individuality who became Buddha five or six centuries before the beginning of the Christian era has not since incarnated, nor can he incarnate, in a physical body. But instead he sends down his forces from the higher worlds, from the super-sensible worlds, and inspires all bearers of culture who are not yet permeated by the Christ Impulse. Consciousness of this truth was demonstrated in a beautiful legend written down by John of Damascus in the eighth century and well known throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. It is the legend of Barlaam and Joshaphat, which relates how he who had become the successor of Buddha (Joshaphat is a phonetic variation of ‘Bodhisattva’) received teaching from Barlaam about the Christ Impulse. The legend, which was subsequently forgotten, tells us that the Bodhisattva who succeeded Gautama Buddha was instructed by Barlaam and his soul was fired by the Christian Impulse. This was the second impulse which, in addition to that of Buddha, continues to work in the evolution of humanity. It is the Christ Impulse and is connected with the future ascent of humanity to Morality. Although Buddha's teaching is in a particular sense moral teaching, the Christ Impulse is not teaching but actual power which works as such and to an increasing degree imbues mankind with moral strength. (I Corinthians IV, 20)

In the fourth post-Atlantean epoch the Christ Being who descended from cosmic heights had first to appear in a physical body. In our fifth epoch the intense consolidation of intellectual forces will make it possible for man to behold the Christ as an etheric Figure. This is even now beginning in our century. From the thirties to the forties of this century onwards, individuals will appear who have developed in a way that will enable them to see the etheric Form of Christ, as at the time of Jesus of Nazareth they saw the physical Christ. And during the next three thousand years the number of those able to behold the etheric Christ will steadily increase, until in about three thousand years, reckoning from the present time, there will be a sufficient number of human beings on the Earth who will need no gospels or other such records, because in their own life of soul they will have actual vision of the Christ.

We must therefore clearly understand that in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch men were only capable of beholding the physical Christ; He therefore came in a physical body. In our own epoch and on into the third millennium, they will gradually grow capable of beholding the etheric Christ. He will never come again in a physical body.

If we bear in mind the fact that when a man of the present age who unites himself more and more deeply with the Christ Impulse passes into Kamaloka and is called to account by a figure personifying a moral force—by Moses—we shall understand how a transformation of the Moses-figure can be brought about. For what does Moses show us when he confronts us with the register of our sins and transgressions? He shows us what stands on the debit side of our Karma. For a soul of our epoch it is of great significance that through the inspiration of Buddha the doctrine of Karma can be comprehended, but that the reality of the working of Karma after death is revealed to us by the Old Testament figure of Moses.

As the influences of the super-sensible Christ pervade the souls of men to an ever-increasing extent, the figure of Moses will be transformed after death into that of Christ Jesus. This means that our Karma is linked with Christ, that Christ unites with our Karma.

It is interesting to realise that in the teachings of Buddha, Karma is an abstract matter, having an impersonal character. In the future incarnations of men, as Christ comes into ever closer connection with Karma, it will acquire the quality of being, of potential life.

Our earlier stages of evolution, our lives in the past, may be related to the words: Ex Deo nascimur. If we direct our development in such a way that after death, instead of Moses we meet Christ with whom our Karma is then united, this is expressed in the Rosicrucian Christianity that has existed since the 13th century, by the words: In Christo morimur.

Just as Buddha-hood can be attained only on the physical plane, the qualification for meeting Christ in death can likewise be acquired by the human soul only on the physical plane. A Buddha is first a Bodhisattva, but he rises to the rank of Buddha during a physical incarnation and it is then no longer necessary for him to return to the Earth. Understanding of Christ in the sense just explained can be acquired only on the physical plane. Hence during the next three thousand years men will have to acquire in the physical world the power to behold the super-sensible Christ, and it is the mission of the Anthroposophical Movement to create, first of all, the conditions which make understanding of Christ possible on the physical plane, and then the power to behold Him.

In the age when Christ works in the world of men as the etheric Christ it matters not whether we are living in a physical body or between death and a new birth, if on the physical plane we have acquired the power to behold Him. Let us suppose, for example, that because of his earlier death a man had no opportunity of beholding Christ in his present etheric Form. Nevertheless, if during his life in the physical world such a man had acquired the necessary understanding, vision of the Christ would be possible for him between death and rebirth. A man who keeps aloof from spiritual life and acquires no understanding of Christ will remain without such knowledge until he can acquire it in his next incarnation.

What has just been said will indicate to you that as humanity lives on through the fifth, sixth and seventh epochs of civilisation the Christ Impulse will gain increasing power on the Earth. We have heard that in the sixth epoch, intellectuality will be impaired through immorality. The other aspect is that a man who has paralysed his intellectual faculty as a result of immorality must turn to Christ with all the greater strength in order that Christ may lead him to morality and imbue him with moral strength.

What I have told you has been investigated particularly closely by Rosicrucians since the 13th century but it is a truth that has at all times been known to many occultists.

If it were to be asserted that there could be a second appearance of Christ on Earth in a physical body, according to occultism that would be equivalent to stating that a balance works more efficiently if it is supported at two points instead of at one. In very truth the three years' duration of Christ's life on Earth in the body of Jesus of Nazareth constitutes the fulcrum of Earth evolution; and just as there can be only one point at which the beam of a balance is attached, so too there can be only one fulcrum of Earth evolution.

The teaching of moral development is not the same as the impulse for such development.

Before the Event of Golgotha the Bodhisattva who was the successor of Buddha was present on the Earth in order to prepare for that Event and give teaching to those around him. He incarnated in the personality of Jeshu ben Pandira [See Jeshu ben Pandira, two lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at Leipzig on November 4th and 5th, 1911, and references in his later cycle, The Gospel of St. Matthew.], one century before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus we must distinguish between the Jeshu ben Pandira-incarnation of the Bodhisattva who was the successor of Gautama Buddha, and the incarnation at the beginning of our era of Jesus of Nazareth who for three years of his life was permeated by the cosmic Being we call the Christ.

The Bodhisattva who incarnated in Jeshu ben Pandira and in other personalities too, returns again and again, until in about three thousand years from now, he will attain Buddha-hood and as Maitreya Buddha live through his final incarnation. The Christ-Individuality was on the Earth in the body of Jesus of Nazareth for three years only and does not come again in a physical body; in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch He comes in an etheric body, in the sixth epoch in an astral body, and in the seventh in a mighty Cosmic Ego that is like a great Group-Soul of humanity.

When a human being dies, his physical, etheric and astral bodies fall away from him and his ego passes over to the next incarnation. It is exactly the same with the planet Earth. What is physical in our Earth falls away at the end of the Earth-period and human souls in their totality pass over into the Jupiter condition, the next planetary embodiment of the Earth. And just as in the case of an individual human being the ego is the centre of his further evolution, so for the whole of future humanity the Christ-Ego in the astral and etheric bodies of men goes on to ensoul the Jupiter-existence. We therefore see how starting from a physical man -on Earth the Christ gradually evolves as Etheric Christ, as Astral Christ, as Ego-Christ, in order, as Ego-Christ, to be the Spirit of the Earth who then rises to even higher stages together with all mankind.

What are we doing when we teach Spiritual Science to-day? We are teaching what Oriental wisdom so clearly proclaimed when the Bodhisattva who was then the son of King Suddhodana, attained Buddha-hood. In those Oriental teachings was expressed the realisation that it was the task of the next Bodhisattva—who would eventually become a Buddha—to spread over the Earth the knowledge that would reveal Christ to men in the true light. Thus the Bodhisattva who incarnated in Jeshu ben Pandira and again and again in others, became the great Teacher of the Christ Impulse. This is indicated very clearly in the legend of Barlaam and Joshaphat, which tells how Joshaphat (i.e. the Bodhisattva) is instructed by Barlaam, the Christian teacher. The Oriental occult teachings call this Bodhisattva the ‘Bringer of the Good’—Maitreya Buddha. And we know from occult investigations that in this Maitreya Buddha the power of the Word will be present in a degree of which men of the present time can as yet have no conception. It is possible to-day through higher clairvoyant perception of the process of world-evolution to discover how the, Maitreya Buddha will teach after three thousand years have passed. Much of his teaching can also be expressed in symbolic forms. But to-day—because mankind is insufficiently mature—it is not yet possible to utter words such as those that will come from the lips of the Maitreya Buddha.

In the Eightfold Path, Gautama Buddha gave the great intellectual teachings of right speech, right thinking, right action, and so on. The words uttered by the Maitreya Buddha will contain a magic power that will become moral impulses in the men who hear them. And if there should be a gospel telling of the Maitreya Buddha, the writer of it would have to use words differing from those used of Christ in the Gospel of St. John: “And the Word was made Flesh.” The evangelist of the Maitreya Buddha would have to testify: “And the Flesh was made Word.”

The utterances of the Maitreya Buddha will be permeated in a miraculous way with the power of Christ. Occult investigations show us to-day that in a certain respect even the external life of the Maitreya Buddha will be patterned on the life of Christ. In ancient times, when a great Individuality appeared and was to become a Teacher of humanity, signs indicating this showed themselves in the early youth of the child in question, in special talents and qualities of soul. There is however a different kind of development in the course of which a complete change in the personality becomes apparent at a certain point in his life. What happens is that when this human being has reached a certain age, his ego is taken out of his bodily sheaths and a different ego passes into his body. The greatest example of this is Christ Jesus Himself, of whom in his thirtieth year the Christ-Individuality had taken possession. All the incarnations of the Bodhisattva who will become the Maitreya Buddha have shown that in this sense his life will resemble that of Christ.

In none of the incarnations of the Bodhisattva is it known, either in his childhood or youth, that he will become a Bodhisattva. Whenever the Bodhisattva becomes Buddha there is evidence that at the age of 30 or 31, another individuality takes possession of his body. The Bodhisattva will never reveal himself as such in his early youth, but in his thirtieth or thirty-first year he will manifest quite different qualities, because another Being takes possession of his body. Individualities who will take possession of the personality of some human being in this way and will not incarnate as children, are, for example, individualities such as Moses, Abraham, Ezekiel.

So too is it in our present century in the case of the Bodhisattva who later on, in three thousand years time, will become the Maitreya Buddha. It would be so much occult dilettantism to assert that this Being would be recognisable in his early years as the Bodhisattva. It is between his thirtieth and thirty-first years that he first reveals Himself through his own power, without having to be proclaimed by others. He will convince the world through his own power and it would be well to realise that if the Bodhisattva were alleged in some quarters to be revealing himself in a human being under the age of thirty, that very fact would be evidence of the fallacy of such a statement. Claims of the kind have frequently been made. For example, in the 17th century a certain individual proclaimed himself to be an incarnation of the Messiah, of Christ. His name was Sabbati Zewi and hosts of people from all over Europe, from Spain, Italy and France, made pilgrimages to him in Smyrna.

It is certainly true that in our time there is a rooted disinclination to recognise genius in human beings. But on the other hand, mental laziness is very prevalent, with the result that people are only too ready to acknowledge some individual as a great soul, merely on authority. It is important to-day for Anthroposophy to be presented in such a way as to be based to the smallest possible extent on belief in authority.

Much that I have said today can be substantiated only by means of occult investigation. Yet I beg you not to give credence to these things because I say them, but to test them by everything known to you from history—above all by what you can learn from your own experience—and I am absolutely certain that the more closely you examine them, the more confirmation you will find. In this age of intellectualism, I do not appeal to your belief in authority but to your capacity for intelligent examination. The Bodhisattva of the 20th century will not rely upon any herald to announce him as the Maitreya Buddha, but upon the power of his own words; he will stand on his own feet in the world.

What has been said in this lecture may perhaps be summed up as follows.—

In our period of evolution, two streams of spiritual life are at work; one of them is the stream of Wisdom, or the Buddha-stream, containing the most sublime teaching of wisdom, goodness of heart and peace on Earth. To enable this teaching of Buddha to permeate the hearts of all men, the Christ Impulse is indispensable. The second stream is the Christ-stream itself which will lead humanity from intellectuality, by way of aesthetic feeling and insight, to morality. And the greatest Teacher of the Christ Impulse will in all ages be the successor of that Bodhisattva who incarnates again and again and who, in three thousand years from now, will become the Maitreya Buddha. For the statement contained in Oriental chronicles is true: that exactly five thousand years after Gautama Buddha attained Enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, the Maitreya Buddha will incarnate on Earth for the last time.

The succession of Bodhisattvas and Buddhas has no relation as such to the cosmic Being we call Christ; it was a Bodhisattva—not the Christ—who incarnated in the body of Jeshu ben Pandira. Christ incarnated in a physical body once, and once only, for a period of three years. The Bodhisattva appears in every century until his existence as Maitreya Buddha.

The mission of Anthroposophy to-day is to be a synthesis of religions. We can conceive of one form of religion being comprised in Buddhism, another form in Christianity, and as evolution proceeds the more closely do the different religions unite—in the way that Buddha and Christ themselves are united in our hearts.

This vista of the spiritual development of humanity brings home to us the necessity of the impulse of Anthroposophy as a preparation for understanding the progress of culture and happenings in the great process of evolution itself.

• 1. According to the footnote in the German text of this lecture, Urim = Glanz (Radiance or Lustre) and Thummim = Wahrheit (Truth). Most English books of reference give “lights” and “perfections” as the interpretations, while acknowledging uncertainty. The Septuagint translates them as “manifestation” and “truth”. There is no unanimity as to whether the objects in question can be reliably identified, but the biblical references suggest that they were precious stones. Some scholars suppose that they were the twelve stones of the breastplate of the High Priest. What seems to be certain is that on these objects were engraved the names of the twelve tribes and that the High Priest used them as an oracle in order to ascertain the will of God. (See among other biblical references: Exodus 28, 9-30; Leviticus 8, 8.) Robertson Smith wrote in The Old Testament in the Jewish Church: “In ancient times the priestly oracle of Urim and Thummim was a sacred lot; for in I Sam. xiv:41 the true text, as we can still restore it from the LXX., makes Saul pray, If the iniquity be in me or Jonathan, give Urim; but if in Israel, give Thummim. This sacred lot was connected with the ephod, which in the time of the Judges was something very like an idol.” See in the Moffatt translation of the Bible I Sam. xiv. 18-43.
  
  —Note by D.S.O. and M.K.

Wherever we, as human beings, have striven for knowledge, whether as mystics or realists or in any way at all, the acquisition of self-knowledge has been demanded of us. But as has been repeatedly emphasised on other occasions, self-knowledge is by no means as easy to achieve as many people believe—anthroposophists sometimes among them. The anthroposophist should be constantly aware of the hindrances he will encounter in his efforts. But the acquisition of self-knowledge is absolutely essential if we are to reach a worthy goal in world-existence and if our actions are to be worthy of us as members of humanity.

Let us ask ourselves the question: Why is the achievement of self-knowledge so difficult? Man is a very complicated being. If we mean to speak truly of his inner life, his life of soul, we shall not begin by regarding it as something simple and elementary. We shall rather have the patience and perseverance, the will, to penetrate more deeply into the marvellous creation of the Divine-Spiritual Powers known to us as Man.

Before we investigate the nature of self-knowledge, two aspects of the life of the human soul may present themselves to us. Just as the magnet has North and South poles, just as light and darkness are present in the world, so there are two poles in man's life of soul. These two poles become evident when we observe a person placed in two contrasting situations. Suppose we are watching someone who is entirely absorbed in the contemplation of some strikingly beautiful and impressive natural phenomenon. We see how still he is standing, moving neither hand nor foot, never turning his eyes away from the spectacle presented to him, and we are aware that inwardly he is picturing his environment. That is one situation. Another is the following: a man is walking along the street and feels that someone has insulted him. Without thinking, he is roused to anger and gives vent to it by striking the person who insulted him. We are there witnessing a manifestation of forces springing from anger, a manifestation of impulses of will, and it is easy to imagine that if the action had been preceded by thought no blow need have been struck. We have now pictured two contrasting situations: in the one there is only ideation, a process in the life of thought from which all conscious will is absent; in the other there is no thought, no ideation, and immediate expression is given to an impulse of will. Here we have examples of the two extremes of human behaviour. The first pole is complete surrender to contemplation, to thought, in which the will has no part; the second pole is the impelling force of will without thought. These facts are revealed simply by observation of external life.

We can go into these things more deeply and we come then into spheres in which we can find our bearings only by summoning the findings of occult investigation to our aid. Here another polarity confronts us—that of sleeping and waking. From the elementary concepts of Anthroposophy we know that in waking life the four members of a man's being—physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego—are organically and actively interwoven, but that in sleep the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed, while the astral body and ego are outpoured into the great world bordering on physical existence. These facts could also be approached from a different point of view. We might ask: what is there to be said about ideation, contemplation, thinking—and about the will and its impulses on the one hand during waking life and during sleep on the other?

When we penetrate more deeply into this question it becomes evident that in his present physical existence man is, in a certain sense, always asleep, Only there is a difference between sleep during the night and sleep during the day. Of this we can be convinced in a purely external way, for we know that we can wake in the occult sense during the day, that is to say, one can become clairvoyant and see into the spiritual world. The physical body in its ordinary state is asleep to what is then and there happening and we can rightly speak of an awakening of our spiritual senses. In the night, of course, we are asleep in the normal way. It can therefore be said: ordinary sleep is sleep as regards the outer physical world; daytime consciousness at the present time is sleep as regards the spiritual world.

These facts can be considered in yet another light. On deeper scrutiny we realise that in the ordinary waking condition of physical life, man has, as a rule, very little power or control over his will and its impulses. The will is very detached from daily life. Only consider how little of all you do from morning to evening is really the outcome of your own thinking, of your personal resolutions. When someone knocks at the door and you say “Come in!”, that cannot be called a decision of your own thinking and will. If you are hungry and seat yourself at a table, that cannot be called a decision made by the will, because it is occasioned by your circumstances, by the needs of your organism. Try to picture your daily life and you will find how little the will is directly influenced from the centre of your being. Why is this the case? Occultism shows us that in respect of his will man actually sleeps by day, that is to say he is not in the real sense present in his will-impulses at all. We may evolve better and better concepts and ideas; or we may become more highly moral, more cultured individuals, but we can do nothing as regards the will. By cultivating better thoughts we can work indirectly upon the will but as far as life is concerned we can do nothing directly to it, for in the waking life of day, our will is influenced only in an indirect way, namely through sleep. When we are asleep we do not think; ideation passes over into a state of sleep. The will, however, awakes, permeates our organism from outside, and invigorates it. We feel strengthened in the morning because what has penetrated into our organism is of the nature of will. That we are not aware of this activity of the will becomes comprehensible when we remember that all conceptual activity ceases when we ourselves are asleep. To begin with, therefore, this stimulus shall be given for further contemplation, further meditation. The more progress you make in self-knowledge, the more you will find confirmation of the truth of the words that man sleeps in respect of his will when he is awake and sleeps in respect of his conceptual life when he is asleep. The life of will sleeps by day; the life of thought sleeps by night.

Man is unaware that the will does not sleep during the night because he only knows how to be awake in his life of thought. The will does not sleep during the night but it then works as it were in a fiery element, works upon his body in order to restore what has been used up by day.

Thus there are two poles in man, the life of observation and ideation, and the impulses of will; and man is related in entirely opposite ways to these two poles. The whole life of soul moves in various nuances between these two poles, and we shall come nearer to understanding it by bringing this microcosmic life of soul into relation with the higher worlds.

From what has been said we have learnt that the life of thought and ideation is one of the poles of man's life of soul. This life of thought is something which seems unreal to materialistically minded people. Do we not often hear it said: “Oh, ideas and thoughts are only ideas and thoughts!” This is intended to imply that if someone has [a piece] of bread or meat in his hand it is a reality because it can be eaten, but a thought is only a thought, it is not a reality. Why is this said? It is because what man calls his thoughts are related to what thoughts really are as a shadow-image is to the actual thing. The shadow-image of a flower points you to the flower itself, to the reality. So it is with thoughts. Human thinking is the shadowing forth of ideas and beings belonging to a higher world, the world we call the Astral plane. And you represent thinking rightly to yourself when you picture the human head thus—it is not absolutely correct but simply diagrammatic. In the head are thoughts but these thoughts must be pictured as living beings on the Astral plane. Beings of the most varied kinds are at work there in the form of teeming concepts and activities which cast their shadow-images into men, and these processes are reflected in the human head as thinking.

As well as the life of thought in the human soul, there is also the life of feeling. Feelings fall into two categories: those of pleasure and sympathy and those of displeasure and antipathy. The former are aroused by good deeds, benevolent deeds; antipathy is aroused by evil, malevolent deeds. Here there is something more than and different from, the mere forming of concepts. We form concepts of things irrespectively of any other factor. But our soul experiences sympathy or antipathy only in respect of what is beautiful and good, or what is ugly and evil. Just as everything that takes place in man in the form of thoughts points to the Astral plane, so everything connected with sympathy or antipathy points to the realm we call Lower Devachan. Processes in the Heavenly World, or Devachan, are projected, mainly into our breast, as feelings of sympathy or antipathy for what is beautiful or ugly, for what is good or evil. So that in our feelings for the moral-aesthetic element, we bear within our souls shadow-reflections of the Heavenly World or Lower Devachan.

There is still a third province in the life of the human soul which must be strictly distinguished from the mere preference for good deeds. There is a difference between standing by and taking pleasure in witnessing some kindly deed and setting the will in action and actually performing some such deed. I will call pleasure in good deeds or displeasure in evil deeds the aesthetic element as against the moral element that impels a man to perform some good deed. The moral element is at a higher level than the purely aesthetic; mere pleasure or displeasure is at a lower level than the will to do something good or bad. In so far as our soul feels constrained to give expression to moral impulses, these impulses are the shadow-images of Higher Devachan, of the Higher Heavenly World.

It is easy to picture these three stages of activity of the human soul—the purely intellectual (thoughts, concepts), the aesthetic (pleasure or displeasure), and the moral (revealed in impulses to good or bad deeds)—as microcosmic images of the three realms which in the Macrocosm, the great Universe, lie one above the other. The Astral world is reflected in the world of thought; the Devachanic world is reflected in the aesthetic sphere of pleasure and displeasure; and the Higher Devachanic world is reflected as morality.

 Thoughts: Shadow-images of Beings of the Astral Plane (Waking) Sympathy and Antipathy: Shadow-images of Beings of Lower Devachan (Dreaming) Moral Impulses: Shadow-images of Beings of Higher Devachan (Sleeping) 

If we connect this with what was said previously concerning the two poles of the soul-life, we shall take the pole of intellect to be that which dominates the waking life, the life in which man is mentally awake. During the day he is awake in respect of his intellect; during sleep he is awake in respect of his will. It is because at night he is asleep in respect of intellect that he is unaware of what he is happening with his will. The truth is that what we call moral principles, moral impulses, are working indirectly into the will. And in point of fact man needs the life of sleep in order that the moral impulses he takes into himself through the life of thought can become active and effective. In his ordinary life today man is capable of accomplishing what is right only on the plane of intellect; he is less able to accomplish anything on the moral plane for there he is dependent upon help coming from the Macrocosm.

What is already within us can bring about the further development of intellectuality, but the Gods must come to our aid if we are to acquire greater moral strength. We go to sleep in order that we may plunge into the Divine Will where the intellect does not intervene and where Divine Forces transform into the power of will the moral principles we accept, where they instill into our will that which we could otherwise receive only into our thoughts.

Between these two poles, that of the will which wakes by night and of the intellect which is awake by day, lies the sphere of aesthetic appreciation which is continuously present in man. During the day man is not fully awake—at least only the most prosaic, pedantic individuals are always fully awake in waking life. We must always be able to dream a little even by day when we are awake; we must be able to give ourselves up to the enjoyment of art, of poetry, or of some other activity that is not concerned wholly with crass reality. Those who can give themselves up in this way form a connection with something that can enliven and invigorate the whole of existence. To give oneself up to such imaginings is like a dream making its way into waking life. Into the life of sleep you know well that dreams enter; these dreams in the usual sense, dreams which permeate sleep-consciousness. Human beings need also to dream by day if they do not wish to lead an arid, empty, unhealthy waking life. Dreaming takes place during sleep at night in any case and no proof of this is required. Midway between the two poles of night dreaming and day dreaming is the condition that can come to expression in fantasy.

So here again there is a threefold life of soul. The intellectual element in which we are really awake brings us shadow-images of the Astral Plane when by day we give ourselves up to a thought—wherein the most fruitful ideas for daily life and great inventions originate. Then during sleep, when we dream, these dreams play into our life of sleep and shadow-images from Lower Devachan are reflected into us. And when we work actively during sleep, impressing morality into our will—we cannot be aware of this actual process but certainly we can of its effects—when we are able to imbue our life of thoughts during the night with the influence of Divine Spiritual Powers, then the impulses we receive are reflections from Higher Devachan, the Higher Heavenly World. These reflections are the moral impulses and feelings which are active within us and lead to the recognition that human life is vindicated only when we place our thoughts at the service of the good and the beautiful, when we allow the very heart's blood of Divine Spiritual life to stream through our intellectual activities, permeating them with moral impulses.

The life of the human soul as presented here, first from external, exoteric observation and then from observation of a more mystical character is revealed by deeper (occult) investigation. The processes that have been described in their more external aspect can also be perceived in man through clairvoyance. When a man stands in front of us today in his waking state and we observe him with the eye of clairvoyance, certain rays of light are seen streaming continually from the heart towards the head. Within the head these rays play around the organ known in anatomy as the pineal gland. These streamings arise because human blood, which is a physical substance, is perpetually resolving itself into etheric substance. In the region of the heart there is a continual transformation of the blood into this delicate etheric substance which streams upwards towards the head and glimmers around the pineal gland. This process—the etherisation of the blood—can be perceived in the human being all the time during his waking life.

The occult observer is able to see a continual streaming from outside into the brain, and also in the reverse direction, from the brain to the heart. Now these streams, which in sleeping man come from outside, from cosmic space, from the Macrocosm, and flow into the inner constitution of the physical body and etheric bodies lying in the bed, reveal something remarkable when they are investigated. These rays vary greatly in different individuals. Sleeping human beings differ very drastically from one another, and if those who are a little vain only knew how badly they betray themselves to occult observation when they go to sleep during public gatherings, they would try their level best not to let this happen!

Moral qualities are revealed distinctly in the particular colouring of the streams which flow into human beings during sleep; in an individual of lower moral principles, the streams are quite different from what is observable in an individual of noble principles. Endeavours to dissemble are useless. In the face of the higher Cosmic Powers, no dissembling is possible. In the case of a man who has only a slight inclination towards moral principles the rays streaming into him are a brownish red in colour—various shades tending toward brownish red. In a man of high moral ideals the rays are lilac-violet in colour. At the moment of waking or of going off to sleep a kind of struggle takes place in the region of the pineal gland between what streams down from above and what streams upward from below. When a man is awake the intellectual element streams upwards from below in the form of currents of light, and what is of moral-aesthetic nature streams downwards from above. At the moment of waking or of going off to sleep, these two currents meet, and in the man of low morality a violent struggle between the two streams takes place in the region of the pineal gland. In the man of high morality there is around the pineal gland as it were a little sea of light. Moral nobility is revealed when a calm glow surrounds the pineal gland at these moments. In this way a man's moral disposition is reflected in him, and this calm glow of light often extends as far as the heart. Two streams can therefore be perceived in man—the one Macrocosmic, the other, Microcosmic.

To estimate the significance of how these two streams meet in man is possible only by considering on the one hand what was said previously in a more external way about the life of the soul and how this life reveals the threefold polarity of the intellectual, the aesthetic and the moral elements that stream downwards from above, from the brain toward the heart; and if, on the other hand, we grasp the significance of what was said about turning our attention to the corresponding phenomenon in the Macrocosm. This corresponding phenomenon can be described today as the result of the most scrupulously careful occult investigation of recent years, undertaken by individuals among genuine Rosicrucians. These investigations have shown that something similar to what has been described in connection with the Microcosm also takes place in the Macrocosm. You will understand this more fully as time goes on.

Just as in the region of the human heart the blood is continually being transformed into etheric substance, a similar process takes place in the Macrocosm. We understand this when we turn our minds to the Mystery of Golgotha—to the moment when the blood flowed from the wounds of Jesus Christ.

This blood must not be regarded simply as chemical substance, but by reason of all that has been said concerning the nature of Jesus of Nazareth it must be recognised as something altogether unique. When it flowed from His wounds, a substance was imparted to our Earth, which in uniting with it, constituted an Event of the greatest possible significance for all future ages of the Earth's evolution—and it could take place only once. What came of this blood in the ages that followed? Nothing different from what otherwise takes place in the heart of man. In the course of Earth evolution this blood passes through a process of “etherisation.” And just as our human blood streams upwards from the heart as ether, so since the Mystery of Golgotha the etherised blood of Christ Jesus has been present in the ether of the earth. The etheric body of the Earth is permeated by the blood—now transformed—which flowed on Golgotha. This is supremely important. If what has thus come to pass through Christ Jesus had not taken place, man's condition on the Earth could only have been as previously described. But since the Mystery of Golgotha it has always been possible for the etheric blood of Christ to flow together with the streamings from below upward, from heart to head.

Because the etherised blood of Jesus of Nazareth is present in the etheric body of the Earth, it accompanies the etherised human blood streaming upwards from the heart to the brain, so that not only those streams of which I spoke earlier meet in man, but the human blood-stream unites with the blood-stream of Christ Jesus. A union of these two streams can, however, come about only if a person is able to unfold true understanding of what is contained in the Christ Impulse. Otherwise there can be no union; the two streams then mutually repel each other, thrust each other away. In every epoch of Earth evolution understanding must be acquired in the form suitable for that epoch. At the time when Christ Jesus lived on Earth, preceding events were rightly understood by those who came to His forerunner, John, and were baptised by him according to the rite described in the Gospels. They received baptism in order that their sin, that is to say, the karma of their previous lives—karma which had come to an end—might be changed; and in order that they might realise that the most powerful Impulse in Earth evolution was about to descend into a physical body. But the evolution of humanity progresses and in our present age what matters is that people should recognise the need for the knowledge contained in Spiritual Science and be able so to fire the streams flowing from heart to brain that this knowledge can be understood.

If this comes to pass, individuals will be able to receive and comprehend the event that has its beginning in the Twentieth Century: this event is the appearance of the Christ as an Etheric Being in contradistinction to the Physical Christ of Palestine. For we have now reached the point of time when the Etheric Christ enters into the life of the Earth and will become visible—at first to a small number of individuals through a form of natural clairvoyance. Then in the course of the next three thousand years, He will become visible to greater and greater numbers of people. This will inevitably come to pass in the natural course of development. That it will come to pass is as true as were the achievements of electricity in the nineteenth century. A number of individuals will see the Etheric Christ and will themselves experience the event that took place at Damascus. But this will depend upon such men learning to be alert to the moment when Christ draws near to them. In only a few decades from now it will happen, particularly to those who are young—already preparation is being made for this—that some individual here or there has certain experiences. If he has sharpened his vision through having assimilated Anthroposophy, he may become aware that suddenly someone has come near to help him, to make him alert to this or that. The truth is that Christ has come to him, although he believes that what he saw is a physical man. He will come to realise that what he saw was a super-sensible being, because it immediately vanishes. Many a human being will have this experience when sitting silent in his room, heavy-hearted and oppressed, not knowing which way to turn. The door will open, and the etheric Christ will appear and speak words of consolation to him. The Christ will become a living Comforter to men. However strange it may as yet seem, it is true nevertheless that many a time when people—even in considerable numbers—are sitting together, not knowing what to do, and waiting, they will see the Etheric Christ. He will Himself be there, will confer with them, will make His voice heard in such gatherings. These times are approaching, and the positive, constructive element now described will take real effect in the evolution of mankind.

No word shall be said here against the great advances made by culture in our day; these achievements are essential for the welfare and the freedom of men. But whatever can be gained in the way of outer progress in mastering the forces of nature, is something small and insignificant compared with the blessing bestowed upon the individual who experiences the awakening soul through Christ, the Christ who will now be operative in human culture and its concerns. Men will thereby acquire forces that make for unification. In very truth Christ brings constructive forces into human culture and civilisation.

If we look into early post-Atlantean times, we would find that men built their dwelling places by methods very different from those used in modern life. In those days they made use of all kinds of growing things. Even when building palaces they summoned nature to their aid by utilizing plants interlaced with branches of trees and so on, whereas today men must build with broken fragments. All the culture of the external world is contrived with the aid of products of fragmentation. And in the course of the coming years you will realise even more clearly how much in our civilised life is the outcome of destruction.

Light itself is being destroyed in this post-Atlantean age of the Earth's existence, which until the time of Atlantis was a progressive process. Since then it has been a process of decay.* What is light? Light decays and the decaying light is electricity. What we know as electricity is light that is being destroyed in matter. And the chemical force that undergoes a transformation in the process of Earth evolution is magnetism. Yet a third force will become active and if electricity seems to work wonders today, this third force will affect civilisation in a still more miraculous way. The more of this force we employ, the faster the earth will tend to become a corpse and its spiritual part prepare for the Jupiter embodiment. Forces have to be applied for the purpose of destruction, in order that man may become free of the Earth and that the Earth's body may fall away. As long as the earth was involved in progressive evolution, no such destruction took place, for the great achievements of electricity can only serve a decaying Earth. Strange as this sounds, it must gradually become known. By understanding the process of evolution we shall learn to assess our culture at its true value. We shall also learn that it is necessary for the Earth to be destroyed, for otherwise the spiritual could not become free. We shall also learn to value what is positive, namely the penetration of spiritual forces into our existence on Earth.

* See also the section at the end of the text, containing answers given by Dr. Steiner to questions.

Thus we realise what a tremendous advance was signified by the fact that Christ lived for three years on the Earth in a human body specially prepared in order that He might be visible to physical eyes. Through what came to pass during those three years men have been made ready to behold the Christ who will move among them in an etheric body, who will participate in earthly life as truly and effectively as did the Physical Christ in Palestine. If men observe such happenings with undimmed senses they will know that there is an etheric body that will move about in the physical world, but is the only etheric body able to work in the physical world as a human physical body works. It will differ from a physical body in this respect only, that it can be in two, three, nay even in a hundred, a thousand places at the same time. This is possible only for an etheric, not for a physical form. What will be accomplished in humanity through this further advance is that the two poles of which I have spoken, the intellectual and the moral, will more and more become one; they will merge into unity. This will come about because in the course of the next millennia men will become aware of the presence of the Etheric Christ in the world; more and more they will be influenced in waking life too by the direct working of the Good from the spiritual world. Whereas at the present time, the will is asleep by day, and man is only able to influence it indirectly through thought, in the course of the next millennia, through the power which from our time onwards is working in us under the aegis of Christ, it will come about that the deeds of men in waking consciousness too can be directly productive of Good.

The dream of Socrates, that virtue can be taught, will come true; more and more it will be possible on Earth not only for the intellect to be stimulated and energized by this teaching but for moral impulses to be spread abroad. Schopenhauer said, “To preach morality is easy; to establish it is very difficult.” Why is this? Because no morality has yet been spread by preaching. It is quite possible to recognise moral principles and yet not abide by them. For most people the Pauline saying holds good, that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. This will change, because the moral fire streaming from the figure of Christ will intensify recognition of the need for moral impulses. Man will transform the earth by feeling with ever-increasing strength that morality is an essential part of it. In the future, to be immoral will be possible only for individuals who are goaded in this direction, who are possessed by evil demons, by Ahrimanic, Asuric Powers and more-over aspire to be so.

In time to come there will be on Earth a sufficient number of individuals who teach morality and at the same time sustain its principles; but there will also be those who by their own free decision surrender themselves to the evil Powers and thus enable an excess of evil to be pitted against a good humanity. Nobody will be forced to do this; it will lie in the free will of each individual.

Then will come the epoch when the Earth passes into conditions of which, as in so much else, Oriental Occultism and Mysticism alone give some idea. The moral atmosphere will by then have gathered strength. For many thousands of years Oriental Mysticism has spoken of this epoch, and since the coming of Gautama Buddha it has spoken with special emphasis about that future condition when the earth will be bathed in a “moral-ether-atmosphere.” Ever since the time of the ancient Rishis it was the great hope of Oriental Mysticism that this moral impulse would come to the Earth from Vishva-Karman or, as Zarathustra proclaimed, from Ahura Mazdao. Thus Oriental Mysticism foresaw that this moral impulse, this moral atmosphere, would come to the Earth from the Being we call the Christ. And it was upon Him, upon Christ, that the hopes of Oriental Mysticism were set.

Oriental Mysticism was able to picture the consequences of that event but not the actual form it would take. The mind could picture that within a period of 5,000 years after the great Buddha achieved Enlightenment, pure Akashic forms, bathed in fire, lit by the sun, would appear in the wake of One beyond the ken of Oriental Mysticism. A wonderful picture in very truth: that something would happen to make it possible for the Sons of Fire and of Light to move about the Earth, not in physically embodiment but as pure Akashic forms within the Earth's moral atmosphere. But then, so it was said, in 5,000 years after Gautama Buddha's Enlightenment, the Teacher will also be there to make known to men what the nature of these wonderful forms of pure Fire and Light are. This teacher—the Maitreya Buddha—will appear 3,000 years after our present era and will speak of the Christ Impulse.

Thus Oriental Mysticism unites with the Christian knowledge of the West to form a wonderfully beautiful unity. It is also disclosed that he who will appear three thousand years after our era as the Maitreya Buddha will have incarnated again and again on the Earth as a Bodhisattva, as the successor of Gautama Buddha. One of his incarnations was that of Jeshu ben Pandira, who lived a hundred years before the Christian era. The being who incarnated in Jeshu ben Pandira is he who will one day become the Maitreya Buddha, and who from century to century returns ever and again in a body of flesh, not yet as Buddha, but as Bodhisattva. Even now there proceeds from him who later on will be the Maitreya Buddha, the most significant teachings concerning the Christ Being and the Sons of Fire—the Agnishvattas—of Indian Mysticism.

The indications by which the Being who is to become the Maitreya Buddha can be recognised are common to all genuine Eastern mysticism and to Christian gnosis. The Maitreya Buddha who, in contrast to the Sons of Fire, will appear in a physical body as Bodhisattva, can be recognised by the fact that in the first instance his early development gives no intimation of the nature of the individuality within him. Only those possessed of understanding will recognise the presence of a Bodhisattva in such a human being between the ages of thirty and thirty-three, and not before. Something akin to a change of personality then takes place. The Maitreya Buddha will reveal his identity to humanity in the thirty-third year of his life. As Christ Jesus began His mission in His thirtieth year, so do the Bodhisattvas, who will continue to proclaim the Christ Impulse, reveal themselves—in the thirty-third year of their lives. And the Maitreya Buddha himself, as transformed Bodhisattva, speaking in powerful words of which no adequate idea can be given at the present time, will proclaim the great secrets of existence. He will speak in a language that has first to be created, for no human being to-day could formulate words such as those in which the Maitreya Buddha will address humanity. The reason why men cannot be addressed in this way at the present time is that the physical instrument for this form of speech does not yet exist. The teachings of the Enlightened One will not stream into men as teachings only, but will pour moral impulses into their souls. Words such as will then be spoken cannot yet be uttered by a physical larynx; in our time they can be present only in the spiritual worlds.

Anthroposophy is the preparation for everything that the future holds in store. Those who take the process of man's evolution seriously resolve not to allow the soul's development to come to a standstill but to ensure that this development will eventually enable the spiritual part of the Earth to become free, leaving the grosser part to fall away like a corpse—for men could frustrate the whole process. Those who desire evolution to succeed must acquire understanding of the life of the spirit through what we to-day call Anthroposophy. The cultivation of Anthroposophy thus becomes a duty; knowledge becomes something that we actually feel, something towards which we have responsibility. When we are inwardly aware of this responsibility and have this resolve, when the mysteries of the world arouse in us the wish to become Anthroposophists, then our feeling is true and right. But Anthroposophy must not be something that merely satisfies our curiosity; it must rather be something without which we cannot live. Only then are our feelings what they ought to be, only then do we live as building stones in that great work of construction which must be carried out in human souls and can embrace all mankind.

Anthroposophy is a revelation of world-happenings which will confront the men of the future, will confront our own souls whether still in the physical body or in the life between death and a new birth. The coming changes will affect us, no matter whether we are still living in the physical body or whether it has been laid aside. Understanding of these events must however be acquired during life in the physical body if they are to take effect after death. To those who acquire some understanding of the Christ while they are still living in the physical body, it will make no difference, when the moment comes for vision of the Christ, whether or not they have already passed through the gate of death. But if those who now reject any understanding of the Christ have already passed through the gate of death when this moment arrives, they must wait until their next incarnation, for such understanding cannot be acquired between death and rebirth. Once the foundation has been acquired, however, it endures, and then Christ becomes visible also during the period between death and the new birth.

And so Anthroposophy is not only something we learn for our physical life but is of essential value when we have laid aside the physical body at death.

This is what I wished to impart to you today as a help in answering many questions. Self-knowledge is difficult because man is such a complex being. The reason for this complexity is that he is connected with all the higher Worlds and Beings. We have within us shadow-images of the great Universe and all the members of our constitution—the physical, etheric, astral bodies and the ego—are worlds for Divine Beings. Our physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego form one world; the other is the higher World, the Heaven world. Divine-spiritual Worlds are the bodily members of the Beings of the higher spheres of cosmic existence.

Man is the complex being he is because he is a mirror-image of the spiritual world. Realisation of this should make him conscious of his intrinsic worth. But from the knowledge that although we are reflected images of the spiritual world we nevertheless fall far short of what we ought to be—from this knowledge we also acquire, as well as consciousness of our worth as human beings, the right attitude of modesty and humility towards the Macrocosm and its Gods.

Rudolf Steiner's Answers to Questions at the End of the Lecture

Translated by George Adams

Question: How are the words used by St. Paul, “to speak in tongues” (Cor. I: 12), to be understood?

Answer: In exceptional human beings it can happen that not only is the phenomenon of speaking present in the waking state, but that something otherwise present in sleep-consciousness only, flows into this speaking. This is the phenomenon to which St. Paul refers. Goethe refers to it in the same sense; he has written two very interesting treatises on the subject.

Question: How are Christ's words of consolation received and experienced?

Answer: Men will feel these words of consolation as though arising in their own hearts. The experience may also seem like physical hearing.

Question: What is the relation of chemical forces and substances to the spiritual world?

Answer: There are in the world a number of substances which can combine with or separate from each other. What we call chemical action is projected into the physical world from the world of Devachan—the realm of the Harmony of the Spheres. In the combination of two substances according to their atomic weights, we have a reflection of two tones of the Harmony of the Spheres. The chemical affinity between two substances in the physical world is like a reflection from the realm of the Harmony of the Spheres. The numerical ratios in chemistry are an expression of the numerical ratios of the Harmony of the Spheres, which has become dumb and silent owing to the densification of matter. If one were able to etherealise material substance and to perceive the atomic numbers the inner formative principle thereof, he would be hearing the Harmony of the Spheres.

We have the physical world, the astral world, the Lower Devachan and the Higher Devachan. If the body is thrust down lower even than the physical world, it comes into the sub-physical world, the lower astral world, the lower or evil Lower Devachan, and the lower or evil Higher Devachan. The evil astral world is the province of Lucifer, the evil Lower Devachan the province of Ahriman, and the evil Higher Devachan the province of the Asuras. When chemical action is driven down beneath the physical plane—into the evil Devachanic world—magnetism arises. When light is thrust down into the sub-material—that is to say, a stage deeper than the material world—electricity arises. If what lives in the Harmony of the Spheres is thrust down farther still, into the province of the Asuras, an even more terrible force—which it will not be possible to keep hidden very much longer—is generated. It can only be hoped that when this force comes to be known—a force we must conceive as being far, far stronger than the most violent electrical discharge—it can only be hoped that before some discoverer gives this force into the hands of humankind, men will no longer have anything un-moral left in them.

Question: What is electricity?

Answer: Electricity is light in the sub-material state. Light is there compressed to the utmost degree. An inward quality too must be ascribed to light; light is itself at every point in space. Warmth will expand in the three dimensions of space. In light there is a fourth; it is of fourfold extension—it has the quality of inwardness as a fourth dimension.

Question: What happens to the Earth's corpse?

Answer: As the residue of the Moon-evolution we have our present moon which circles around the Earth. Similarly there will be a residue of the Earth which will circle around Jupiter. Then these residues will gradually dissolve into the universal ether. On Venus there will no longer be any residue. Venus will manifest, to begin with, as pure Warmth, then it will become Light and then pass over into the spiritual world. The residue left behind by the Earth will be like a corpse. This is a path along which man must not accompany the Earth, for he would thereby be exposed to dreadful torments. But there are Beings who accompany this corpse, since they themselves will by that means develop to a higher stage.

Reflected as sub-physical world:

Astral World—the province of Lucifer
Lower Devachan—the province of Ahriman
Higher Devachan—the province of the Asuras