The Rudolf Steiner Archive

At the time when materialism—mainly theoretical materialism—was in its prime, in the middle and still to some extent during the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the writings of Buchner and Vogt (‘bulky Vogt’ as he used to be called) had made a deep impression upon people who considered themselves enlightened, one could often hear a way of speaking that is occasionally also heard today, because stragglers from that epoch of theoretical materialism are still to be found in certain circles. When people do not flatly deny the possibility of a life after death, or even here and there admit it, they are wont to say: Well, there may be a life after death but why should we trouble about it during life on Earth? When death has taken place we shall discover whether there is indeed a future life, and meanwhile if here on Earth we concern ourselves only with the affairs of earthly existence and take no account of what is alleged to come afterwards, we cannot miss anything of importance. For if the life after death has anything to offer we shall then discover what it is!

As I said, this way of speaking could be heard time and time again and this is still the case in wide circles today; in the way the subject is expressed it may often, in a certain respect, almost seem acceptable. And yet it is utterly at variance with what is disclosed to spiritual investigation when the facts connected with the life between death and rebirth are considered in their spiritual aspect. When a man has passed through the gate of death he comes into contact with many and infinitely varied forces and beings. He does not only find himself living amid a multitude of super-sensible facts but he comes into contact with definite forces and Beings—namely, the Beings of the several higher Hierarchies. Let us ask ourselves what this contact signifies for one who is passing through the period of existence between death and the new birth.

We know that when an individual has spent this period of life in the super-sensible world and passes into physical existence again through birth, he becomes in a certain way the moulder of his own bodily constitution, indeed of his whole destiny in the life on Earth. Within certain limits the human being builds and fashions his body, even the very convolutions of his brain, by means of the forces brought with him from the spiritual worlds when he enters again into physical existence through birth. Our whole earthly existence depends upon our physical body possessing organs which enable us to come in touch with the outer physical world, to act and moreover to think in that world.

If, here in the physical world, we do not possess the appropriately formed brain which, on passing through birth we formed for ourselves out of the forces of the super-sensible world, we remain unable to cope with life in this physical world. In the real sense we are fitted for life in the physical world only when we bring with us from the spiritual world forces by means of which we have been able to build a body able to cope with this world and all its demands. The super-sensible forces which man needs in order to fashion his body and also his destiny are received by him from the Beings of the higher Hierarchies with whom he has made contact between death and the new birth. What we need for the shaping of our life must be acquired during the time that has preceded our birth since the last death. Between death and the next birth we must approach, stage by stage, the Beings who can endow us with the forces we need for our physical existence.

In the life between death and rebirth we can pass before the Beings of the higher Hierarchies in two ways. We may recognise them, understand their nature and essential characteristics, be able to receive what they can give us and what we shall need in the following life. We must be able to understand or at least to perceive what is being offered us and what we shall subsequently need. But we might also pass before these Beings in such a way that, figuratively speaking, their hands are offering gifts which we do not receive because it is dark in the higher world in which we then live. Thus we may pass through that world with understanding, with awareness of what these Beings are offering us, or we may pass through it without understanding, unaware of what they wish to bestow. Now the way in which we pass through this spiritual world, which of the two ways we necessarily choose in our life between death and the new birth, is predetermined by the after-effects of the previous life and of earlier lives on Earth. A person whose attitude in his last life on Earth was unresponsive and antagonistic to all thoughts and ideas that may enlighten him about the super-sensible world—such a person passes through the life between death and rebirth as if through a world of darkness. For the light, the spiritual light we need in order to realise how these different Beings approach us and what gifts we may receive from them for our next life on Earth—the light of understanding for what is here coming to pass cannot be acquired in the super-sensible world itself; it must be acquired here, during physical incarnation on Earth. If, at death, we bear with us into the spiritual life no relevant ideas and concepts, we shall pass unknowingly through our super-sensible existence until the next birth, receiving none of the forces needed for the next life. From this we realise how impossible it is to say that we can wait until death itself occurs because we shall then discover what the facts are—whether indeed we shall encounter any reality at all after death. Our relationship to that reality depends upon whether in earthly life we have been receptive or antagonistic in our souls to concepts or ideas of the super-sensible world that have been accessible to us and will be the light through which we must ourselves illumine the path between death and rebirth.

Something further can be gathered from what has been said. The belief that we have, so to say, only to die in order to receive everything that the super-sensible world can give us, even if we have made no preparation for it—this belief is utterly false. Every world has its own special mission. And what a man can acquire during an incarnation on Earth he can acquire in no single one of the other worlds. Between death and the new birth he is able, in all circumstances, to enter into communion with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. But in order to receive their gifts, to avoid having to grope in darkness through life there or in fearful loneliness, in order to establish contact with those Beings and receive their forces, the ideas and concepts which are the light enabling the higher Hierarchies to be visible to the soul must be acquired in earthly life. And so an individual who in earthly life during the present cycle of time has rejected all spiritual ideas, passes through the life between death and rebirth in fearful loneliness, groping in darkness. In the next incarnation he will fail to bring with him the forces wherewith to build his body efficiently and mould his organs; he can fashion them in an imperfect form only and consequently he will be an inadequate human being in his next life.

We realise from this how Karma works over from one life to the next. In one life a man deliberately scorns to develop in his soul any relationship with the spiritual worlds; in the next life he has no forces wherewith to create even the organs enabling him to think, feel or will the truths of spiritual life. He remains dull and indifferent to spiritual things and spiritual life passes him by as though in dream—as is so frequently the case today. On the Earth such an individual can take no interest in spiritual worlds; and his soul, after passing through the gate of death, is an easy prey for the Luciferic powers. Lucifer makes straight for such souls. Here we have the strange situation that in the next life in the spiritual world, the life that follows the dull, unreceptive one, the deeds and the Beings of the higher Hierarchies are indeed illumined for such an individual but in this case not as a result of what he acquired in earthly life but by the light which Lucifer sends into his soul. It is Lucifer who illumines the higher worlds for him when he passes into the life between death and rebirth. Now, he can, it is true, perceive the higher Hierarchies, recognise when they are offering their gifts to him. But the fact that Lucifer has tainted the light means that all the gifts have a particular colouring and character. The forces of the higher Hierarchies are then not exactly as the human being could otherwise have received them. Their nature then is such that when the human being passes into his next life on Earth he can certainly form and mould his body, but he moulds it then in such a way that although he becomes an individual who is, admittedly, able to cope with the outer world and its demands, in a certain respect he is inwardly inadequate, because his soul is tinged with Lucifer's gifts or at least by gifts that have a Luciferic trend.

When we come across individuals who have worked on their bodies in such a way that they are able to make effective use of their intellect and acquire certain skills which will help them to raise their status in the world, although to their own advantage only, snatching at what is in their own interest, dryly calculating what is beneficial to themselves without any consideration for others—and there are many such people nowadays—in these cases the seer will very often find that their previous history was what has been described. Before they began to display their dry, intellectual, sharp-witted character in life, they had been led through their existence between death and rebirth by Luciferic beings who were able to approach them because in the preceding incarnation they had lived an apathetic, dreamy existence. But these traits themselves had been acquired because such individuals had passed through an earlier existence between death and rebirth groping in darkness. The Spirits of the higher Hierarchies would have bestowed upon them the forces needed for fashioning a new life, but they were unable to receive these forces; and that in turn was because they had deliberately refused to concern themselves with ideas and concepts relating to a spiritual world. That is the karmic connection. Such examples do certainly occur; they appear before the eyes of spirit only too frequently when with the help of powers of spiritual investigation and knowing the conditions of human life, we penetrate into higher worlds.

It is therefore wrong to say that here on Earth we need concern ourselves only with what is around us in earthly existence because what comes later will be revealed in all good time. But the form in which it will be revealed depends entirely upon how we have prepared ourselves for it here.

Another possibility may occur. I am saying these things in order that by understanding the life between death and rebirth, life between birth and death may become more and more intelligible.

When we study life on Earth with discernment, we see many human beings—and in our time they are very numerous—who can, as it were, only ‘half think’, whose logic invariably breaks down when faced with reality. Here is an example: A certain free-thinking cleric, an honourable man in all his endeavours, wrote in the first Freethinkers' Calendar as follows: Children ought not to be taught any ideas about religion for that would be against nature. If children are allowed to grow up without having any ideas about religion pumped into them, we find that they do not of themselves arrive at ideas of God, immortality, and so forth. The inference to be drawn from this is that such ideas are unnatural to the human being and should not be drummed into him; he should work only with what can be drawn from his own soul. As in many other cases, there are thousands and thousands of people nowadays to whom an utterance such as this seems very clever, very subtle. But if only genuine logic were applied the following would be obvious: If we were to take a human being before he has learnt to speak, put him on a lonely island and take care that he can hear no single word of speech, he would never learn to speak. And so anyone who argues against children being taught any ideas about religion would logically have to say that human beings should not have to learn to speak, for speech does not come of itself. So our free-thinking cleric cannot propagate his ideas by means of his logic, for both he and his logic come to a halt when confronted by the facts. His logic can be applied to a small area only, and he does not notice that his idea, assuming one can get hold of it, cancels itself out.

Anyone who is alert to his surroundings will find that this inadequate, pseudo-thinking is very widespread. If with the help of super-sensible research we trace the path of such an individual backwards and come to the regions through which his soul passed between the last death and the last birth, when this illogical mentality was caused, the seer often finds that this type of human being, in his last life between death and rebirth, passed through the spiritual world in such a way that he encountered the spiritual Beings and forces while under the guidance of Ahriman; and that although those Beings would have bestowed upon him what he needed in life, they could not make it possible for him to develop the capacity for sound thinking. Ahriman was his leader and it was Ahriman who contrived that the gifts of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies could only be received by him in a form that would finally result in his thinking coming to a halt when confronting actual facts, and in his inability to make his thinking exhaustive and valid. A large proportion of those human beings—and their number is legion—who are incapable of genuine thinking today owe this to the fact that in their last life between death and rebirth they were obliged to submit to Ahriman's guidance; they had somehow prepared themselves for this in their last earthly life—that is to say, in the incarnation preceding the present one.

And what was the course of that preceding life as viewed by a seer? It is found that these were morose, hypochondriacal individuals, who shied away from facts and people in the world and always found it difficult to establish any relation with their environment. Very often they were intolerable hypochondriacs in their previous life; on medical examination they would have been found to be suffering from the type of illness occurring very frequently in hypochondriacs. And if we were to go still further back, to the life between death and rebirth that preceded the hypochondriacal incarnation, we should find that during that period such human beings were obliged again to forego the right guidance and could not become truly aware of what the gifts of the higher Hierarchies would have been. And how had they prepared themselves for this fate in the life preceding the last two incarnations? We should find that they had developed what it is certainly true to call a religious, pious attitude of soul but an attitude based on sheer egoism. They were people with a pious, even mystical nature emanating from egoism. After all, mysticism very often has its origin in egoism. An individual of this type might say: I seek within myself in order that there I may recognise God. But what he is seeking there is only his own self made into God! In the case of many pious souls it becomes evident that they are pious only in order that after death one or another of their spiritual inclinations may bear fruit. All that they have acquired is an egotistic attitude of soul.

When in the course of spiritual research we trace the sequence of three such earthly lives, we find that in the first, the basic attitude of the soul was that of egotistic mysticism, egotistic religiosity. And when today we observe human beings with this attitude to life, we shall be able, by means of spiritual investigation to trace them back to times when souls without number developed a religious frame of mind out of sheer egoism. They then passed through an existence between death and rebirth without being able to receive from the spiritual Beings the gifts which would have enabled them to shape their next life rightly. In that life they became morose and hypochondriacal, finding everything distasteful. This life again prepared them for the ensuing one when, having passed through the gate of death, Ahriman and his hosts became their leaders and the forces with which they were imbued manifested in the following earthly life as defective logic, as an obtuse, undiscerning kind of thinking.

Here, then, we have another example of three successive incarnations. And we realise again and again what nonsense it is to believe that we can wait until death to establish connection with the super-sensible world. For how this connection is established after death depends upon the inner tendencies of soul acquired here on Earth towards the super-sensible world. Not only are the successive earthly lives connected as causes and effects, but the lives between death and the new birth are also connected in a certain way as causes and effects. This can be seen from the following.

When the seer directs his gaze into the super-sensible world where souls are sojourning after death, he will find among them those who during part of this life between death and rebirth are servants of those Powers whom we may call the Lords of all healthy, budding and burgeoning life on the Earth. (In the very lengthy period between death and rebirth, innumerable experiences are undergone and in accounts of the present kind, parts only can be described.) Among the dead we find souls who for a certain length of time in the super-sensible world co-operate in the wonderful task—for wonderful it is—of pouring, infusing into the physical world everything that can further the health of beings on the Earth, can help them to thrive and blossom. Just as in certain circumstances we can become servants of the evil spirits of illness and misfortune, so too we can become the servants of those spiritual beings who promote health and growth, who send down from the spiritual world into our physical world forces that help life to flourish. It is nothing but a materialistic superstition to believe that physical hygiene and external regulations are the sole means of promoting health. Everything that happens in physical life is directed by the beings and powers of higher worlds who are all the time pouring into the physical world forces which in a certain way work freely, upon human or other beings, either promoting or harming health and growth. Certain specific spiritual powers and beings are responsible for these processes in health and illness. In the life between death and rebirth man co-operates with these powers; and if we have prepared ourselves in the right way we can experience the bliss of co-operating in the task of sending the forces which promote health and growth, from the higher worlds into this physical world. And when the seer enquires into why such souls have deserved this destiny, he becomes aware that in physical life on Earth there are two ways in which human beings can execute and think about what they want to achieve.

Let us take a general look at life. We see numbers of human beings who carry out the work prescribed for them by their profession or office. Even if there is no radical case of any one of these people regarding their work as if they were animals being led to the slaughterhouse, it is at least true to say that they work because they are obliged to. Of course they would never neglect their duty—although of course anything may happen! In a certain sense it cannot be otherwise in the present phase of man's evolution; the only urge such people feel towards their work is that of duty. This does not by any means suggest that such work should be criticised root and branch. It should not be understood in this sense. Earth-evolution is such that this aspect of life will become more and more widespread; nor will things improve in the future. The tasks that men will have to carry out will become increasingly complicated in so far as they are connected with outer life and men will be condemned more and more to think and do only that to which duty drives them. Already there are hosts of human beings who do their work only because duty forces them to it, but on the other hand there will be people who look for a Society such as ours in which they can also achieve something, not simply from a sense of duty as in everyday life but for which they feel enthusiasm and devotion. Thus there are two aspects of a man's work: has it been thought out or done as an outer achievement merely from a sense of duty, or has it been done with enthusiasm and inner devotion, solely out of an inner urge of his own soul? This attitude—to think and act not merely out of a sense of duty, but out of love, inclination and devotion—this prepared the soul to become a server of the beneficent Powers of health and salutary forces sent down from the super-sensible world into our physical world, to become a servant of everything that brings health and to experience the bliss that can accompany these circumstances.

To know this is extremely important for the general well-being of man, for only by acquiring during life the forces that will enable him to co-operate with the Powers in question will he be able to work spiritually for an ever intensifying process of healing and betterment of conditions on the Earth.

We will now consider still another case, of one who makes efforts to adapt himself to his environment and its demands. This by no means applies to everybody. There are some people who take no trouble to adjust themselves to the world and are never at home with the conditions either of spiritual or outer physical life. For example, there are individuals who notice an announcement that here or there an anthroposophical lecture will be given; they go to the place but almost as soon as they get seated, they are already asleep! In such cases the soul cannot adapt itself to the environment is not attuned to it. I have known men who cannot even sew on a button to replace one that has been torn off; that again means that they cannot adapt themselves to physical conditions. Countless cases could be quoted of people who cannot or will not adapt themselves to life. These symptoms are very significant, as I have said. At the moment, however, we will think only of the effects upon the life between death and rebirth.

Everything becomes cause and everything produces effects. A man who makes efforts to adapt himself to his environment, someone, that is to say, who can actually sew on a button or can listen to something with which he is unfamiliar without immediately falling asleep, is preparing himself to become, after death, a helper of those Spirits who further the progress of humanity and send down to the Earth the spiritual forces which promote life as it advances from epoch to epoch. After death we can experience the bliss of looking down upon earthly life and co-operating with the forces that are perpetually being sent to the Earth to further its progress, but this is possible only if we endeavour to adapt ourselves to our environment and its conditions. To be rightly and thoroughly understood Karma must be studied in details, in details which reveal the manifold ways in which causes and effects are connected here in the physical world, in the spiritual world and in existence as a whole.

Here again light is thrown upon the fact that our life in the spiritual worlds depends upon the mode of our life in the physical body. Each world has its own specific mission; no two worlds have an identical mission. The characteristic phenomena and experiences in one world are not the same in another. And if, for example, a being is meant to assimilate certain things on Earth, it is on Earth that he must do so; if he misses this opportunity he cannot acquire them in some other world. This is particularly the case in a matter which we have already considered but of which it will be well to be thoroughly aware. The matter in question concerns the acceptance of certain concepts and ideas needed by man for his life as a whole. Let us take an example that is near at hand. Anthroposophy is a timely and active force in our epoch. People approach and accept Anthroposophy during their life on Earth in the way known to you, but again the belief might arise that it is not necessary to cultivate Anthroposophy on Earth, for one will be in a position after death to know how things are in the spiritual worlds; that moreover the higher Hierarchies will also be there and able to impart to the soul what is necessary.

Now it is a fact that having passed through the phase of development leading to the present cycle of evolution, the human being, with his whole soul, has been prepared to contact on Earth the kind of anthroposophical life that is possible only while he is incarnated in a physical body. Men are predestined for this and if they fail they will be unable to establish relationship with any of the spiritual Beings who might have been their teachers. One cannot simply die and then, after death, find a teacher who might take the place of what here, during physical life on Earth, can come to souls in the form of Anthroposophy. We need not, however, be dejected by the fact that many individuals reject Anthroposophy and it is therefore to be assumed that they will not be able to acquire it between death and the new birth. We need not despair about them for they will be born in a new earthly life and by that time there will be a strong enough stimulus towards Anthroposophy and enough Anthroposophy on the Earth for them to acquire it. In the present age despondency is still out of place, but that should not lead anyone to say: I can acquire Anthroposophy in my next life and so can do without it now. No, what has been neglected here cannot be retrieved later on.

When our German Theosophical Movement was still very young I was once giving a lecture about Nietzsche, during which I said certain things about the spiritual worlds. At that time it was customary to have discussions and on this occasion someone got up and said that such matters must always be put to the test of Kant's philosophy, from which it would be evident that we can have no knowledge of these things here on Earth and can begin to know them only after death. That, quite literally, was what the man said. As I have repeatedly emphasised, it is not the case that one has only to die in order to acquire certain knowledge. When we pass through the gate of death we do not experience anything for which we have not prepared ourselves. Life between death and rebirth is throughout a continuation of the life here, as the examples already given have shown. Therefore as individuals we can acquire from the Beings of the higher Hierarchies only that for which we have prepared ourselves on Earth—perhaps by having become anthroposophists. Our connection with the Earth and our passage through the life on Earth have a significance which nothing else can replace.

A certain form of mediation is, however, possible in this connection and I have already spoken of it. A person may die and during his lifetime have had no knowledge at all of Spiritual Science; but his brother or his wife or a close friend were anthroposophists. The man who has died may have refused to have anything to do with Anthroposophy during his life; perhaps he consistently abused it. Now he has passed through the gate of death and Anthroposophy can be conveyed to him in some way by other personalities on Earth. But there must be someone on Earth who passes on the knowledge to him out of love. Connection with the Earth must be maintained. This is the basis of what I have called ‘reading to the dead’. We can render them great benefit even if previously they would listen to nothing about the spiritual world. We can help them either by putting what we have to say into the form of thoughts, conveying knowledge in this way, or we may take an anthroposophical book, visualise the personality concerned, and read to him from it; then he will learn. We have had a number of striking and beautiful examples in our Movement of how it has been possible in this way to benefit the dead. Many of our friends read to those who have died. I recently had an experience that others too may have had. Someone asked me about a friend who had died very recently and it seemed that he was trying to make himself noticed by means of all kinds of signs, especially at night, creating disturbance in the room, rapping and so on. Such happenings are often indications that the dead person wants something; and in this case it was quite evident. In his lifetime the man had been very erudite but had always rejected any knowledge of the spiritual world that might come his way. It became obvious that he would greatly benefit if a particular Lecture Course containing the subject-matter for which he was craving, were read to him. In this way very effective help can be given beyond death for something left undone on Earth.

The fact that can convince us of the great and significant mission of Anthroposophy is that Anthroposophy can bridge the gulf between the living and the dead, that when human beings die they have not really gone away from us but we remain connected with them and can be active on their behalf. If it is asked whether one can always know whether the dead soul also hears us, it must be said that those who do what has been described with genuine devotion will eventually become aware from the way in which the thoughts which they are sending to the dead live in their own souls that the dead person is hovering around them. But this is an experience, a feeling, of which sensitive souls alone are capable. The most distressing aspect is when something that might be a great service of love is not heeded; in that case it has been done unnecessarily for the person concerned, but it may still have some effect in the general pattern of worlds. In any case one should not grieve excessively about such lack of success. After all, it happens even here that something is read to people who do not listen!

These things may well give a true conception of the seriousness and worth of Anthroposophy. But it must constantly be emphasised that the conditions of our life in the spiritual world after death will depend entirely upon the manner of our life here on Earth. Even our community with others in the spiritual world depends upon the nature of the relationship we sought to establish with them here. If there has been no relationship with a human being here on Earth it cannot be taken for granted that any connection can be established in the other world between death and rebirth. The possibility of being led to him in the spiritual world is as a rule dependent upon the contact established here on Earth—not necessarily in the last incarnation only but in earlier lives as well.

In short, both objective and personal relationships established here on Earth are the decisive factor for the life between death and the new birth. Exceptions do occur but must be recognised as such. What I said here at Christmastime (in Lecture Five) about the Buddha and his present mission on Mars is one such exception. There are numbers of human souls on the Earth who were able to contact the Buddha—even in his previous existence as Bodhisattva—as a result of inspirations received from the Mysteries. But because the Buddha was incarnated for the last time as the son of Suddodana, then worked in his etheric body as I have described¹ and has now transferred his sphere of activity to Mars, at the present time the possibility exists that even if we never previously came in contact with the Buddha, we can establish a relationship with him in the life between death and rebirth; and we can then bring the results of that contact with us into the next incarnation on Earth. But that remains an exceptional case. The general rule is that after death we find those individuals with whom we had actual contacts here on Earth and continue these relationships in that other state of existence.

What has now been said is closely related to the information given during this Winter about the life between death and the new birth, and the aim has been to show that if Anthroposophy remains simply a matter of theory and external science, it is only half of what it ought to be; it fulfils its true function only when it streams through souls as a veritable elixir of life and enables these souls to experience in depth the feelings that arise in a human being when he acquires some knowledge of the higher worlds. Death then ceases to appear as a destroyer of human and personal relationships. The gulf between life here on Earth and the life after death is bridged and many activities carried out with this in mind will develop. The dead will send their influences into life, the living their influences into the realm of the dead.

My wish is that your souls will feel more deeply that life is enriched, becomes fuller and more spiritual when everything is influenced by Anthroposophy. Only those who feel this have the right attitude to Anthroposophy. What is of prime importance is not the knowledge that man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego, that he passes through many incarnations, that the Earth too has passed through the several incarnations of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon, and so forth. The most important and essential need is to allow Anthroposophy to transform our lives in a way commensurate with the Earth's future. This feeling can never be experienced too deeply, nor can we bestir ourselves too often in this connection. The feelings we bear with us from these meetings and then move through life under the stimulus of the knowledge of the super-sensible worlds acquired here—these feelings are the really important element in anthroposophical life. Merely to have knowledge of Anthroposophy is not enough; knowledge and feeling must be combined. We must realise, however, how false it is to believe that without any understanding of the world we can do it justice. Leonardo da Vinci's saying is true: “Great love is the daughter of great understanding.” He who is not prepared to understand will not learn how to love.

It is in this sense that Anthroposophy should find entry into our souls, in order that from this influence which proceeds from our own being a stream of spirituality may find its way into Earth-evolution, creating harmony between spirit and matter. Life on the Earth will, it is true, continue to be materialistic—indeed outer life will become increasingly so—but as man moves over the Earth he will bear within his soul the realisation of his connection with the higher worlds. Outwardly, earthly life will become more and more materialistic—that is the Earth's karma—but in the same measure, if Earth-evolution is to reach its goal, souls must become inwardly more and more spiritual. My purpose today was to make a small contribution towards understanding this task.

• 1. See Lectures Three, Five and Six of the course, The Gospel of St. Luke

We have undertaken to study the life between death and rebirth from certain points of view and the lectures given during the Winter¹ endeavoured to present many aspects of this life; moreover it has been possible to make important additions to the more general descriptions contained in the books Theosophy and Occult Science—an Outline Today we shall occupy ourselves chiefly with the question: How is the information given, for example, in the book Theosophy on the subject of the life between death and rebirth related to what has been said in the course of the lectures given during the Winter?

In the book Theosophy there is a description of the passage of the soul after death through the Soul-World. This Soul-World is divided into a region of ‘Burning Desires’ (Begierdenglut), a region of ‘Flowing Susceptibility’ (fliessende Reizbarkeit), a region of ‘Wishes’ (Wunsche), a region of ‘Attraction and Repulsion’ (Lust und Unlust), and then into the higher regions of ‘Soul-Light’ (Seelenlicht), of ‘Active Soul-Force’ (tatige Seelenkraft), and the true ‘Soul-Life’ (das eigentliche Seelenleben). That was how the Soul-World through which the soul has to pass after death was described. Thereafter the soul has to pass through what is described as the Spiritland and this sphere, too, with its successive regions, is described in the book Theosophy by using certain earthly images: the ‘continental’ region of Spiritland, the ‘oceanic’ region, and so forth.

In the course of these lectures descriptions have been given of how the soul, having passed through the gate of death, lays aside the physical body, then the etheric body, and then expands and expands, lives through regions which for reasons that were explained may be called the region of the Moon, then that of Mercury, of Venus, of the Sun, of Mars, of Jupiter, of Saturn, and then of the starry firmament itself. The soul or, let us say, the actual spiritual individuality of the human being concerned, continually expands, lives through these regions which enclose ever more extensive cosmic spaces and then begins to contract, becoming smaller and smaller, in order finally to unite with the seed which comes to it from the stream of heredity. And through this union of the human seed which the individual acquired through heredity with what has been absorbed from the great macrocosmic spheres, there arises the human being who is to embark on the course of earthly life, the being who is to live through his existence between birth and death.

Now as a matter of fact, what was said in the book Theosophy and in the lectures was fundamentally the same, and your attention has been called to this. In Theosophy the description was given in certain pictures more closely related to inner conditions of the soul. In the lectures given here during the Winter the descriptions dealt with the great cosmic relationships connected with the functions of the several planets. It is now a matter of harmonising the two descriptions.

During the first period after death the soul has to look back upon what was experienced on Earth. The period of Kamaloka, or call it what you will, is a period during which the soul's life is still concerned entirely with earthly conditions. Kamaloka is fundamentally a period during which the soul feels bound to disengage itself gradually from any direct connections still persisting from the last incarnation on Earth. In the physical body on Earth the soul has experiences which depend upon the bodily life, indeed very largely upon sense-impressions. If you ‘think away’ everything that sense-impressions bring into the soul and then try to realise how much still remains in it, you will have a picture of a very meagre content indeed! And yet on final consideration you will be able to say: When the soul passes through the gate of death, everything given by the senses comes to an end and whatever is left can at most only be memories of earlier sense-impressions. If, therefore, you think about how much of what is yielded by sense-impressions is left in the soul, it will be easy for you to form an idea of what remains of these impressions after death. Recall any sense-impressions experienced, for example, yesterday, while they are still comparatively vivid, and you will realise how pale they have already become compared with their former vividness; that will give you some idea of how little of what the sense-impressions have conveyed is left to the soul as remembrance. This shows you that basically all the soul's life in the world of the senses is specifically earthly experience. When the sense-organs fall away at death, all significance of the sense-impressions falls away as well. But because the human being still clings to his sense-impressions and retains a longing for them, the first region through which he passes in the life after death is the region of Burning Desires. He would like still to have sense-impressions for a long time after death, but this is impossible because he has discarded the sense-organs. The life spent in longing for sense-impressions and being unable to enjoy them is life in the region of Burning Desires. It is a life that does actually burn within the soul and is part of the existence in Kamaloka; the soul longs for sense-impressions to which it was accustomed on Earth and—because the sense-organs have been laid aside—cannot have them.

A second region of the life in Kamaloka is that of Flowing Susceptibility. When the soul lives through this region it has already ceased to long for sense-impressions but still longs for thoughts, for thoughts which in life on Earth are acquired through the instrumentality of the brain. In the region of Burning Desires the soul gradually realises that it is nonsense to wish for sense-impressions in a world for the experience of which the necessary sense-organs have been discarded, a world in which no being can possibly have sense-organs formed entirely of substance of the Earth. The soul may long since have ceased to yearn for sense-impressions but still longs to think in the way that is customary on Earth. This earthly thinking is discarded in the region of Flowing Susceptibility. There the human being gradually recognises that thoughts such as are formed on Earth have significance only in the life between birth and death.

At this stage, when the human being has weaned himself from fostering thoughts that are dependent upon the physical instrument of the brain, he is still aware of a certain connection with the Earth through what is contained in his Wishes. After all, wishes are connected with the soul more intimately than thoughts. Wishes have their own distinctive colouring in every individual. Whereas thoughts differ in youth, in middle life and in old age, a particular form of wishing continues throughout a man's earthly life. This form and colouring of wishes are only later discarded in the region of Wishes. And then finally, in the region of Attraction and Repulsion, man rids himself of all longing to be connected with a physical body, with the physical body which was his in the last incarnation. While a man is passing through these regions, of Burning Desires, of Flowing Susceptibility, of Wishes, of Attraction and Repulsion, a certain longing for the last earthly life is still present. First, in the region of Burning Desires the soul still longs to be able to see through eyes, to hear through ears, although eyes and ears no longer exist. When the soul has finally cast off any such longing, it still yearns to be able to think by means of a brain such as was available on Earth. Having got rid of this longing too, there still remains the desire to wish with a heart as on Earth. Finally, the human being ceases to long for sense-impressions or for thoughts formed by his brain or for wishes of his heart, but a hankering for his last incarnation on Earth taken as a whole, still lingers. Gradually, however, he then rids himself of this longing too.

You will find that all the experiences in these regions correspond exactly with the passage of the expanding soul into the region called the Mercury sphere, an expansion through the Moon sphere into the Mercury sphere. On approaching the Mercury sphere, however, the soul encounters conditions described in the book Theosophy as a kind of spiritual region of the Soul-World. Read the description of the passage of the soul through this region and you will see from what is said about the kind of experiences undergone there that what is generally called the unpleasant element of Kamaloka already comes to an end in the region of Soul-Light. This region of Soul-Light corresponds with what I have said about the Mercury sphere. If you compare what was said about the life of the soul when it has expanded to the Mercury sphere with what is contained in the book Theosophy about the region of Soul-Light, you will realise that endeavours were made to describe this region first from the aspect of inner influences of the soul and then from the aspect of the great macrocosmic conditions through which the soul passes.

If you read what is said in Theosophy about the ‘Active Soul-Force’, you will realise that the inner experiences undergone in that region are in keeping with what is decisive during the passage through the Venus sphere. It has been said that if the soul is to pass in the right way through the Venus sphere it must have developed certain religious impulses during earthly life. In order to progress through the Venus sphere with companionship and not in compulsory isolation, the soul must be imbued with certain religious concepts. Compare what was said about this with the description given in the book Theosophy of the region of Active Soul-Force and you will find that they agree, that in one case the inner aspect of the conditions was described, in the other, the outer aspect.

The highest region of the Soul-World, the region of pure Soul-Life, is experienced by the soul in passing through the region of the Sun. So we can say that the sphere of existence in Kamaloka extends to and somewhat beyond the Moon sphere; then the more luminous regions of the Soul-World begin and extend to the sphere of the Sun. The soul experiences in the Sun sphere the region of true Soul-Life. We know that in the Sun sphere after death the soul comes into contact with the Light-Spirit, with Lucifer, who on Earth has become the tempter, the corrupter. When the soul has expanded into the cosmos it comes more and more closely into contact with those forces which now enable it to develop what is needed for the next incarnation on Earth. Not until the soul has passed through the region of the Sun has it finished with the last earthly incarnation. As far as the region of Attraction and Repulsion is concerned, that is to say the region between the Moon and Mercury, the soul is still burdened inwardly with yearning for the last life on Earth; moreover even in the regions of Mercury, Venus and the Sun the soul is not yet completely free from the ties of the last incarnation. But then it must finally have finished even with everything that transcends merely personal experience; in the Mercury region with whatever moral concepts have or have not been acquired, in the region of Venus with whatever religious conceptions have been developed, in the region of the Sun with whatever understanding has been acquired of the ‘human-universal’ quality in existence—that which is not confined to any particular religious creed but is concerned with a religious life befitting all mankind. Thus it is even the higher interests that can develop in the further evolution of humanity with which the soul has finished by the time it enters into the region of the Sun.

Then the soul passes into cosmic-spiritual life and finds its place in the Mars region. This region corresponds with what is described in Theosophy as the first sphere of the ‘Spiritland’. This description portrays the inner aspect of the fact that the soul is spiritual to the extent of being able to behold as something external to itself the ‘archetype’, as it were, of the physical bodily organisation and of physical conditions on the Earth in general. The archetypes of physical life on Earth appear as a kind of ‘continental’ mass of the Spiritland. The external configurations of a man's different incarnations are inscribed in this ‘continental’ region. There we have a picture of what, in terms of cosmic existence, the human soul has to experience in the Mars region. It might seem strange that this Mars region which has repeatedly been described in these lectures as a region of strife, of aggressive impulses until the beginning of the seventeenth century, should be said to be the first region of Devachan, of the true Spiritland. Nevertheless this is the case. Everything that on Earth belongs to the actual material realm and causes the mineral kingdom to appear as a purely material realm is due to the fact that on Earth the forces are engaged in perpetual conflict among themselves. This also led to the result that at the time when materialism was in its prime and material life was assumed to be the sole reality, the ‘struggle for existence’ was regarded as the only valid law of life on Earth. That is, of course, an error, because material existence is not the only form of existence evolving on Earth. But when the human being assumes embodiment on Earth he can only enter into the form of existence that has its archetypes in the lowest region of what is, for the Earth, the Spiritland. Read the description of the lowest region of Spiritland as given in the book Theosophy. I want to quote this particular chapter today in connection with our present studies. Towards the beginning of the description of the Spiritland you will find the following passage.²

“The development of the spirit in Spiritland takes place through the man throwing himself completely into the life of the different regions of this land.”

Thus as the result of our studies in the course of the Winter we could now say that from the Mars region onwards the human soul begins to live more deeply into spiritual conditions of existence.

To continue:

“His own life as it were dissolves into each region successively; he takes on, for the time being, their characteristics. Through this they permeate his being with theirs, in order that his being may be able to work, strengthened by theirs, in his earthly life. In the first region of the Spiritland, man is surrounded by the spiritual archetypes of earthly things. During life on earth he learns to know only the shadows of these archetypes which he grasps in his thoughts. What is merely thought on the earth is in this region experienced, lived. Man moves among thoughts; but these thoughts are real beings.”

Again, a little later:

“Our own embodiments dissolve here into a unity with the rest of the world. Thus here we look upon the archetypes of the physical, corporeal reality as a unity, to which we have ourselves belonged. We learn, therefore, gradually to know our relationship, our unity, with the surrounding world, by observation. We learn to say to it: ‘That which is here spread out around thee, thou art that.’ And that is one of the fundamental thoughts of ancient Indian Vedanta wisdom. The sage acquires, even during his earthly life, what others experience after death, namely, ability to grasp the thought that he himself is related to all things, the thought, ‘Thou art that’. In earthly life this is an ideal to which the thought-life can be devoted; in the Land of Spirit it is an immediate reality, one which grows ever clearer to us through spiritual experience. And man himself comes to know more and more clearly in this realm that in his own inner being he belongs to the spirit-world. He is aware of himself as a spirit among spirits, a member of the Primordial Spirits, and he will feel in his own self the word of the Primordial Spirit: ‘I am the Primal Spirit.’ (The Wisdom of the Vedanta says, ‘I am Brahman’, i.e. ‘I belong to the Primordial Being in Whom all beings have their origin’.)”

From this passage it is clear that when, during the life between death and rebirth man enters into the Mars region, he grasps the full significance of the saying, ‘Tat tvam asi’, ‘Thou art that’, and of the other saying, ‘I am Brahman’. ‘Tat tvam asi’, ‘Thou art that’, is only an earthly rendering of what is a self-evident experience in the Mars region, the lowest region of Spiritland. If we now ask whence the wisdom of ancient India derived the deeply significant affirmations, ‘Tat tvam asi’, ‘Thou art that’, ‘I am Brahman’, we have now identified the region in question and those Teachers in ancient India are revealed to us as beings belonging to the Mars region but transferred to the Earth. To what was said years ago in the book Theosophy about the Mars region, the lowest region of Devachan, there can now be added what we have heard in these lectures. Namely, that at the dawn of the modern age the Buddha was transferred to this same region, the Mars region. Half a millennium before the Mystery of Golgotha, the Buddha—regarded as one who was to prepare spiritually for this Mystery—had come to the Earth, to the territory where Mars wisdom had been proclaimed since times primeval. And centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha he was, as we know, sent by an act of Rosicrucian wisdom to the Mars region in order to continue working there. (See Lecture Five.) In ancient times Brahmanism belonged intrinsically to the Mars region of the Cosmos. At the beginning of the seventeenth century after the Mystery of Golgotha, Brahmanism passed over into the Buddha-impulse and the reflection of this on Earth was the absorption of Brahmanism into Buddhism in the cultural life of India.

What takes place on Earth, therefore, is in a wide and ample sense an image of happenings in the Heavens.

If you have read the chapter in Theosophy which deals with what you now know to be the Mars region and in which a self-evident expression is the ‘I am Brahman’, you will be able, if you read that chapter again, to picture how an event here on Earth is also an event in a region of the Cosmos, how this event can be understood, and how the Buddha-impulse as a cosmic happening is related to the circumstances described in the relevant chapter of that book. We shall realise that our studies during the Winter were closely linked with the theosophical work we began more than ten years ago. We then described the ‘Spiritland’ and a ‘continental’ mass of Spiritland; the lowest region of Spiritland was characterised in relation to the inner life of the soul. The description given was such that if you have understood it, you will realise that the Buddha-impulse has its place in the lowest region of Spiritland as described in these lectures. Here is an example of how the details of spiritual research harmonise with each other.

If we now pass on to consider the cosmic aspects of the second region of Spiritland as described from the inner point of view of the soul, we shall find that this second region, the ‘oceanic’ region of Spiritland corresponds with the Jupiter region. Further, if we pass to the third region of Devachan, the ‘Airy’ region of Spiritland, we shall find that it corresponds with the influences of the Saturn region. What was described in Theosophy as the fourth region of Spiritland already extends beyond our planetary system. There the soul expands into still wider spaces, into the starry firmament itself. From the descriptions that were given from the inner standpoint of the soul, it will be quite clear to you that the experiences of the soul in the fourth region of Spiritland could not be undergone in any realm where the spatial relationship to the Earth is still the same as that of the planetary system. There is something so utterly foreign in what is conveyed by the fourth region of Spiritland that it can never correspond with what can be experienced even within the outermost planetary sphere, the Saturn sphere.

Therefore the soul passes into the starry firmament, that is to say into distances more and more remote both from the Earth and also from the Sun. These distant realms are described in the account of the three highest regions of Spiritland traversed by the soul before it begins to draw together again and to pass, in the reverse order, through all the preceding conditions. On this journey the soul acquires the forces by means of which it can build up a new life on Earth.

In general it can be said that when the soul has passed through the Sun region it has finished with every element of ‘personality’. What is experienced beyond the Sun region, beyond the region of Soul-Life in the true sense, is spiritual; it transcends everything that is personal. What the soul then experiences as ‘Thou art that’—and especially in our time as the Buddha-impulse in the Mars region—is something that seems strange here on Earth, though it is not so on Mars; it is the impulse denoted by the word ‘Nirvana’. This means liberation from everything that is significant on the Earth, for the soul begins to realise the great cosmic significance of universal space. In living through all this the soul emancipates itself entirely from the element of personality. In the Mars region, the lowest region of Spiritland, where the soul acquires understanding of the ‘Thou art that’, or, as we should put it today, receives the Buddha-impulse, it frees itself from everything that is earthly. After the soul has become inwardly free of this—and the Christ Impulse is needed here—it also liberates itself spiritually by recognising that all ties of blood are forged on Earth and therefore belong by nature to the Earth. But the soul then passes on to new conditions.

In the Jupiter region, conditions which force the soul into some particular creed are dissolved. We have heard that the soul can pass through the Venus region with companionship only if it had adopted a creed; without religion in some form it would be lonely and isolated. We have also heard that the soul can pass through the Sun region only when it has learnt to understand the creeds of all religions on the Earth. In the Jupiter region, however, the soul must liberate itself entirely from the particular creed to which it belonged during life on Earth. This was not an essentially personal attachment but something into which it was born and was shared in company with other souls. Thus the soul can pass through the Venus region only if it has acquired religious ideas in earthly life; it can pass through the Sun region only if it has developed some measure of understanding of all such beliefs. The soul can pass through the Jupiter region only if it is able to liberate itself from the particular confession to which it belonged on Earth; merely to understand the others is not enough. For during the passage through the Jupiter region it will be decided whether in the next life the soul will have to be connected with the same creed as before, or whether it has experienced everything that can be offered by one particular creed. In the Venus sphere the soul garners the fruits of a particular faith; in the Sun sphere the fruits of an understanding of all forms of religious life; but when it reaches the Jupiter region the soul must be able to lay the foundation for a new relationship to religion during the next life on Earth.

These are three stages experienced by the soul between death and the new birth: first it experiences inwardly the fruits of the faith to which it belonged in the last life; then the fruits of having developed the capacity to appreciate the value of all other religious beliefs; and then it must free itself so completely from the beliefs held in the last life that it can wholeheartedly adopt a different religion. This cannot be achieved by attaching equal value to all creeds; and we know that on its return journey through these regions the soul comes once again into the Jupiter region and there prepares the traits enabling it to live in the fullest sense in a different religion in the next life. In this way the forces which the soul needs in order to shape a new life are gradually impressed into it.

If you now read what is said in the book Theosophy about the third region of the Spiritland, the ‘airy’ or ‘atmospheric’ region, you will find again what has been said here in connection with the Saturn region. In this region, companionship and the avoidance of terrible loneliness is possible only for souls already able to exercise a certain degree of genuine self-knowledge, of completely unbiased self-knowledge. Only by being able to put self-knowledge into practice can the soul find entrance to the regions beyond Saturn, therefore even beyond our solar system and leading into that cosmic life from which souls must bring the qualities that ensure progress on the Earth. If souls were never able to live in companionship in realms beyond the Saturn region progress on Earth would not be possible. Think, for example, of the individuals sitting here today. If the souls incarnated in the world at the present time had never passed beyond the Saturn region between death and rebirth, culture on Earth would still be at the stage reached, for example, in the epoch of Ancient India. The Ancient Indian culture was able to progress to that of ancient Persia only because in the intervening periods souls had passed beyond the Saturn region; and again, the progress from Ancient Persian culture to Egypto-Chaldean culture was made possible by impulses for progress brought into the Earth from the realms beyond the Saturn region. What human beings have contributed to the progress of culture on Earth has been gathered by their souls from realms beyond the Saturn region.

The external progress of mankind originates in the new impulses brought from beyond the Saturn region; in this way the various culture-epochs progress and new impulses take effect. But as well as this there is the stream of inner experiences which is to be distinguished from the progress of external culture and has its ‘centre of gravity’ in the Mystery of Golgotha. When we know that the stream of experiences in man's inner life of soul on Earth has its centre of gravity in the Mystery of Golgotha, while on the other hand this Mystery of Golgotha is connected with the Sun region, a question arises; it is a question that might well occupy our minds for a very long time but we will at least consider it today. It is good that on the basis of what can already be found in lectures and lecture-courses, we should be able to form our own thoughts about such questions—thoughts which can then be rectified by reports of investigations given here.

On the one hand we have the fact that Christ is the Sun Spirit who united Himself with the life of the Earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. You will find the most detailed account of this in the lecture-courses entitled The Gospel of St. John—in its Relation to the Other Three Gospels, particularly to the Gospel of St. Luke, given in Kassel, and From Jesus to Christ. And now we have heard of the other fact, namely that all external progress on Earth from one culture-epoch to the next is dependent upon influences from beyond the Saturn region. A question arises here: Progress on Earth from one culture-epoch to another is dependent upon influences connected with a world beyond the Saturn sphere—a world altogether different from the one where progress is brought about by the stream of spirituality that flows through the evolution of humanity, that approached humanity in ancient times, has its centre of gravity in the Mystery of Golgotha and thereafter took its course in the way often described. How do these two facts harmonise? The truth is that they harmonise completely.

You need only picture to yourself that our Earth evolution as it is today was preceded by the earlier incarnation of the Earth, namely Old Moon. Now think of Old Moon as we have often described it, followed by the present Earth. Midway in the process of evolution between Old Moon and Earth something like a condition of cosmic sleep took place. During the transition from Old Moon to Earth, everything that had existed on Old Moon passed into a kind of germinal state from which, at a later stage, everything in existence on Earth came forth. But all the planetary spheres also came forth from that cosmic sleep. During the epoch of Old Moon, therefore, the planetary spheres were not in the state in which they exist today. Old Moon passes into the cosmic sleep and out of this condition the planetary spheres develop into what they now are. Everything that evolved in the Cosmos between the era of Old Moon and that of the Earth is contained within the range of the Saturn sphere. The Christ Impulse, however, does not belong to what evolved in the Cosmos during the period of transition from Old Moon to Earth, but it already belonged to the Old Sun and remained in the Sun sphere when Old Moon eventually separated from it. The Christ Impulse continued to evolve onwards towards the Earth but remained united with the Sun sphere after the Saturn sphere, the Jupiter sphere and so forth, had separated from it. And so, in addition to what the human soul was, before the Mystery of Golgotha, it now has within it something that is more than all that is contained in the planetary spheres, something that is founded in the depths of the Cosmos, that does indeed come over from Sun to Earth but belongs to far deeper regions of the spiritual world than do the planetary spheres. For these planetary spheres are a product of what took place when Old Moon evolved to become Earth. What streams to us from the Christ Impulse, however, comes from Old Sun which preceded Old Moon.

From this we realise that external culture on Earth is connected with the Cosmos, whereas the inner life of soul is connected in a much deeper sense with the Sun. Thus in all these connections—in their spiritual aspect too—there is something of which the following can be said: When we look out into the stellar spheres there is revealed to us, as it were outspread in space, a world that is embodied in culture on Earth because souls of men have entered into these stellar spheres between death and rebirth; but when we gaze at the Sun we behold something that has become what it is today because behind it there is an infinitely long period of evolution. In an age when it was not yet possible to speak of a connection between culture on Earth and the stellar worlds as can be done today, even then the Sun was already united with the Christ Impulse. Thus everything brought from the stellar worlds for the promotion of culture on the Earth is to be regarded as a kind of Earth-body which needed to be—and actually was—ensouled by what came to the Earth from the Sun, namely by the Christ Impulse. The Earth was ensouled when the Mystery of Golgotha took place; it was then that culture on Earth received its ‘soul’.

The death on Golgotha was only seemingly a death; in reality it was the birth of the Earth-Soul. And everything that can be brought to the Earth from cosmic expanses, also from beyond the Saturn sphere, is related to the Earth-Sphere as the Earth-Body is related to the Earth-Soul.

These reflections can show us that the presentation given in the book Theosophy—in rather different words and from a different point of view—contains what has been described as the cosmic aspect in the lectures given this Winter. You need only be reminded that in the one case the account is given from the point of view of the soul, and in the other from that of the great cosmic conditions, and you will find that the two descriptions are in complete harmony.

The conclusion which I should like to be able to draw from these lectures is that you realise how vast is the range of Spiritual Science and that its method must be to gather from every possible side whatever can throw light on the nature of the spiritual world. Even when additions are made to what had been said years ago, there need be no contradiction, for what is said is not the outcome of any philosophical argument or reflective thinking, but of occult investigation. Yellow today will still be yellow ten years hence, even though the essential quality of yellow as a colour is grasped for the first time ten years later. What was said years ago still holds good, although light is shed upon it from the new points of view which it has been possible to contribute during last Winter.

• 1. As well as referring to Chapter III in the book Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man in connection with this lecture, students are advised to turn to Occult Science—an Outline, Rudolf Steiner Press 1963 edition, Chapter III, pp. 74–101. (Note by translator.)
• 2. See Section III.4 in Theosophy: An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1963.

We stand today, as it were, at the starting-point of the foundation of the Anthroposophical Society in the narrower sense, and we should take this opportunity of once more reminding ourselves of the importance and significance of our cause. It is true that what the Anthroposophical Society wishes to be for the newer culture should not in principle differentiate it from that which we have always carried on in our circle under the name of theosophy. But perhaps this giving of a new name may nevertheless remind us of the earnestness and dignity with which we intend to work in our spiritual movement, and it is with this point in view that I have chosen the title of this course of lectures. At the very outset of our anthroposophical cause we shall speak on a subject which is capable of indicating in manifold ways the remarkable importance of our spiritual movement for the civilisation of the present day.

Many people might be surprised to find two such apparently widely different spiritual streams brought together, as the great Eastern poem of the Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of one who was so closely connected with the founding of Christianity, the Apostle Paul. We can best recognise the nearness of these two spiritual streams to one another if, by way of introduction, we indicate how at the present day, is to be found, on the one hand, that which appertains to the great Bhagavad Gita poem, and on the other the Paulinism which originated with the beginning of Christianity.

Certainly much in the spiritual life of our present time differs from what it was even a comparatively short time ago, but it is just that very difference that makes a spiritual movement such as Anthroposophy so necessary.

Let us reflect how a comparatively short time ago if a man concerned himself with the spiritual life of his own times he had in reality, as I have shown in my Basle and Munich courses, to study three periods of a thousand years each; one pre-Christian period of a thousand years, and two other millennia, the sum of which is not yet quite completed; two thousand years permeated and saturated with the spiritual stream of Christianity. What might such a man have said only a short time ago when contemplating the spiritual life of mankind when, as we have said, there was no question of a theosophical, or anthroposophical movement as we now understand it? He might have said: “At the present time something is making itself prominently felt which can only be sought for in the thousand years preceding the Christian era.” For only during the last thousand years before the Christian era does one find individual men of personal importance in spiritual life. However great and powerful and mighty much in the spiritual streams of earlier times may appear to us, yet persons and individuals do not stand out from that which underlies those streams. Let us just glance back at what we reckon in not too restricted a sense, as the last thousand years before the Christian era. Let us glance back at the old Egyptian or the Chaldean-Babylonian spiritual stream; there we survey a continuity so to speak, a connected spiritual life. Only in the Greek spiritual life do we find individuals as such standing out as entirely spiritual and living. Great, mighty teachings, a mighty outlook into the space of the Cosmos; all this we find in the old Egyptian and Chaldean-Babylonian times, but only in Greece do we begin to look to separate personalities, to a Socrates or Pericles, a Phidias, a Plato, an Aristotle. Personality, as such, begins to be marked. That is the peculiarity of the spiritual life of the last three thousand years; and I do not only mean the remarkable personalities themselves, but rather the impression made by the spiritual life upon each separate individuality, upon each personality. In these last three thousand years it has become a question of personality, if we may say so; and the fact that separate individuals now feel the need of taking part in the spiritual life, find inner comfort, hope, peace, inward bliss and security, in the various spiritual movements, gives these their significance. And since, until a comparatively short time ago, we were only interested in history inasmuch as it proceeded from one personality to another, we got no really clear understanding of what occurred before the last three thousand years. The history, for which alone we had, till recently, any understanding, began with Greece, and during the transition from the first to the second thousand years, occurred what is connected with the great Being, Christ Jesus. During the first thousand years that which we owe to Greece is predominant, and those Grecian times tower forth in a particular way. At the beginning of them stand the Mysteries. That which flowed forth from these, as we have often described, passed over into the Greek poets, philosophers and artists in every domain. For if we wish rightly to understand AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides we must seek the source for such understanding in that which flowed out of the Mysteries. If we wish to understand Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, we must seek the source of their philosophies in the Mysteries, not to speak of such a towering figure as that of Heraclitus. You may read of him in my book, Christianity as Mystical Fact, how entirely he depended upon the Mysteries.

Then in the second thousand years we see the Christian impulse pouring into spiritual development, gradually absorbing the Greek and uniting itself with it. The whole of the second thousand years passed in such a way that the powerful Christ-impulse united itself with all that came over from Greece as living tradition and life. So we see Greek wisdom, Greek feeling, and Greek art slowly and gradually uniting organically with the Christ-impulse. Thus the second thousand years ran its course. Then in the third thousand years begins the cultivation of the personality. We may say that we can see in the third thousand years how differently the Greek influence is felt. We see it when we consider such artists as Raphael, Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci. No longer does the Greek influence work on together with Christianity in the third thousand years, as it did in the culture of the second; not as something historically great, not as something contemplated externally was Greek influence felt during the second thousand years. But in the third thousand we have to turn of set purpose to the Greek. We see how Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo and Raphael allowed themselves to be influenced by the great works of art then being discovered; we see the Greek influence being more and more consciously absorbed. It was absorbed unconsciously during the second thousand years, but in the third millennium it was taken up more and more consciously. An example of how consciously this Greek influence was being recognised in the eyes of the world is to be found in the figure of the philosopher, Thomas Aquinas; and how he was compelled to unite what flowed out from Christian philosophy with the philosophy of Aristotle. Here the Greek influence was absorbed consciously and united with Christianity in a philosophic form; as in the case of Raphael, Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci, in the form of art. This whole train of thought rises higher through spiritual life, and even takes the form of a certain religious opposition in the cases of Giordano Bruno and Galileo. Notwithstanding all this, we find everywhere Greek ideas and conceptions, especially about nature, cropping up again; there is a conscious absorption of the Greek influence, but this does not go back beyond the Greek age. In every soul, not only in the more learned or more highly educated, but in every soul down to the simplest, a spiritual life is spread abroad and lives in them, in which the Greek and Christian influences are consciously united. From the University down to the peasant's cottage Greek ideas are to be found united with Christianity.

Now in the nineteenth century something peculiar appeared, something which requires Anthroposophy to explain it. There we see in one single example what mighty forces are at play. When the wonderful poem of the Bhagavad Gita first became known in Europe, certain important thinkers were enraptured by the greatness of the poem, by its profound contents; and it should never be forgotten that such a thoughtful spirit as William von Humboldt, when he became acquainted with it, said that it was the most profoundly philosophical poem that had ever come under his notice; and he made the beautiful remark, that it was worth while to have been allowed to grow as old as he to be enabled to become acquainted with the Bhagavad Gita, the great spiritual song that sounds forth from the primeval holy times of Eastern antiquity. What a wonderful thing it is that slowly, although perhaps not attractive as yet to large circles, so much of Eastern antiquity was poured out into the nineteenth century by means of the Bhagavad Gita. For this is not like other writings that came over from the ancient East which ever proclaim Eastern thoughts and feelings from this or that standpoint. In the Bhagavad Gita we are confronted with something of which we may say that it is the united flow of all the different points of view of Eastern thought, feeling and perception. That is what makes it of such significance.

Now let us turn back to old India. Apart from other less important things, we find there, in the first place, three shades, if we may so call them, of spiritual streams flowing forth from the old Indian pre-historic times. That spiritual stream which we meet with in the earliest Vedas and which developed further in the later Vedantic poems, is one quite definite one—we will describe it presently—it is, if we may say so, a one-sided yet quite distinct spiritual stream. We then meet with a second spiritual stream in the Sankhya philosophy, which again goes in a definite spiritual direction; and, lastly, we meet a third shade of the Eastern spiritual stream in Yoga. Here we have the three most remarkable oriental spiritual streams placed before our souls. The Vedas, Sankhya, and Yoga.

The Sankhya system of Kapila, the Yoga philosophy of Patanjali and the Vedas are spiritual streams of definite colouring, which, because of this definite colouring, are to a certain extent one-sided, and which are great because of their one-sidedness. In the Bhagavad Gita we have the harmonious inter-penetration of all three spiritual streams. What the Veda philosophy has to give is to be found shining forth in the Bhagavad Gita; what the Yoga of Patanjali has to give mankind we find again in the Bhagavad Gita; and what the Sankhya of Kapila has to give we find there too. Moreover, we do not find these as a conglomeration, but as three parts flowing harmoniously into one organism, as if they originally belonged together. The greatness of the Bhagavad Gita lies in the comprehensiveness of its description of how this oriental spiritual life receives its tributaries from the Vedas on the one side, on another from the Sankhya philosophy of Kapila, and again on a third side from the Yoga of Patanjali.

We shall now briefly characterise what each of these spiritual streams has to give us.

The Veda stream is most emphatically a philosophy of unity, it is the most spiritual monism that could be thought of; the Veda philosophy which is consolidated in the Vedanta is a spiritual monism. If we wish to understand the Veda philosophy, we must, in the first place, keep clearly before our souls the fact that this philosophy is based upon the thought that man can find something deeper within his own self, and that what he first realises in ordinary life is a kind of expression or imprint of this self of his; that man can develop, and that his development will draw up the depths of the actual self more and more from the foundations of his soul. A higher self rests as though asleep in man, and this higher self is not that of which the present-day man is directly aware, but that which works within him, and to which he must develop himself. When man some day attains to that which lives within him as “self,” he will then realise, according to the Veda-philosophy, that this “self” is one with the all-embracing self of the world, that he does not only rest with his self within the all-embracing World-Self, but that he himself is one with it. So much is he one with this World-Self that he is in two-fold manner related to it. In some way similar to our physical in-breathing and out-breathing does the Vedantist picture the relationship of the human self to the World-Self Just as one draws in a breath and breathes it out again, while outside there is the universal air and within us only the small portion of it that we have drawn in so outside us we have the universal, all-embracing, all-pervading Self that lives and moves in all things, and this we breathe in when we yield ourselves to the contemplation of the spiritual Self of the World. Spiritually one breathes it in with every perception that one gets of this Self, one breathes it in with all that one draws into one's soul. All knowledge, all thinking, all perception is spiritual breathing; and that which we, as a portion of the world-Self, draw into our souls (which portion remains organically united to the whole), that is Atman, the Breath, which, as regards ourselves, is as the portion of air that we breathe in, which cannot be distinguished from the general atmosphere. So is Atman in us, which cannot be distinguished from that which is the all-ruling Self of the World. Just as we breathe out physically, so there is a devotion of the soul through which the best that is in it goes forth in the form of prayer and sacrifice to this Self. Brahman is like the spiritual out-breathing. Atman and Brahman, like in-breathing and out-breathing, make us sharers in the all-ruling World-Self. What we find in the Vedantas is a monistic spiritual philosophy, which is at the same time a religion; and the blossom and fruit of Vedantism lie in that which so blesses man, that most complete and in the highest degree satisfying feeling of unity with the universal Self powerfully weaving through the world. Vedantism treats of this connection of mankind with the unity of the world, of the fact of man's being within a part of the whole great spiritual cosmos. We cannot say the Veda-Word, because Veda means Word, but the Word-Veda as given is itself breathed forth, according to the Vedantic conception, from the all-ruling unitary Being, and the human soul can take it into itself as the highest expression of knowledge. In accepting the Veda-Word the best part of the all-mighty “Self” is taken in, the consciousness of the connection between the individual human self and this all-mighty World-Self is attained. What the Veda speaks is the God-Word which is creative, and this is born again in human knowledge, and so leads it side by side with the creative principle which lives and weaves throughout the world. Therefore, that which was written in the Vedas was valued as the Divine Word, and he who succeeded in mastering them was considered as being a possessor of the Divine Word. The Divine Word had come spiritually into the world and was to be found in the Veda-Books; those who mastered these books took part in the creative principle of the World.

Sankhya philosophy is different. When one first meets with this, as it has come down to us through tradition, we find in it exactly the opposite of the teaching of the Unity. If we wish to compare the Sankhya philosophy to anything, we may compare it to the philosophy of Leibnitz. It is a pluralistic philosophy. The several souls mentioned therein—human souls and the souls of Gods—are not traced back by the Sankhya philosophy to unitary source, but are taken as single souls existing, so to speak, from Eternity; or, at any rate, their origin is not traced back to Unity. The plurality of souls is what we find in the Sankhya philosophy. The independence of each individual soul carrying on its development in the world enclosed within its own being, is sharply accentuated; and in contrast to the plurality of souls is that which in the Sankhya philosophy is called the Prakriti element. We cannot well describe this by the modern word “matter,” for that has a materialistic meaning. But in Sankhya philosophy we do not mean to convey this with the “substantial” which is in contrast to the multiplicity of souls, and which again is not derived from a common source. In the first place, we have multiplicity of souls, and then that which we may call the material basis, which, like a primeval flood, streams through the world, through space and time, and out of which souls take the elements for their outer existence. Souls must clothe themselves in this material element, which, again, is not to be traced back to unity with the souls themselves. And so it is in the Sankhya philosophy that we principally find this material element, carefully studied. Attention is not so much directed to the individual soul; this is taken as something real that is there, confined in and united with this material basis, and which takes the most varied forms within it, and thus shows itself outwardly in many different forms. A soul clothes itself with this original material element, that may be thought of like the individual soul itself as coming from Eternity. The soul nature expresses itself through this material basic element, and in so doing it takes on many different forms, and it is in particular the study of these material forms that we find in the Sankhya philosophy. Here we have, in the first place, so to speak, the original form of this material element as a sort of spiritual primeval stream, into which the soul is first immersed. Thus if we were to glance back at the first stages of evolution, we should find there the undifferentiated material elements and immersed therein, the plurality of the souls which are to evolve further. What, therefore, we first find as Form, as yet undifferentiated from the unity of the primal stream, is the spiritual substance itself that lies at the starting-point of evolution. The first thing that then emerges, with which the soul can as yet clothe itself individually, is Budhi. So that when we picture to ourselves a soul clothed with the primal flood-substance, externally this soul is not to be distinguished from the universal moving and weaving element of the primeval flood. Inasmuch as the soul does not only enwrap itself in this first being of the universal billowing primal flood but also in that which first proceeds from this, in so far does it clothe itself in Budhi. The third element that forms itself out of the whole and through which the soul can then become more and more individual, is Ahamkara. This consists of lower and lower forms of the primeval substance. So that we have the primeval substance, the first form of which is Budhi, and its second form which is Ahamkara. The next form to that is Manas, then comes the form which consists of the organs of the senses; this is followed by the form of the finer elements, and the last form consists of the elements of the substances which we have in our physical surroundings. This is the line of evolution according to Sankhya philosophy. Above is the most super-sensible element, a primeval spiritual flow, which, growing ever denser and denser, descends to that which surrounds us in the coarser elements out of which the coarse human body is also constructed. Between these are the substances of which, for instance, our sense organs are woven, and the finer elements of which is woven our etheric or life-body. It must be carefully noticed that according to the Sankhya philosophy, all these are sheaths of the soul. Even that which springs from the first primeval flood is a sheath for the soul; the soul is at first within that; and when the Sankhya philosopher studies Budhi, Ahamkara, Manas, the senses, the finer and the coarser elements, he understands thereby the increasingly dense sheaths within which the soul expresses itself.

We must clearly understand that the manner in which the philosophy of the Vedas and the Sankhya philosophy are presented to us is only possible because they were composed in that ancient time when an old clairvoyance still existed, at any rate, to a certain extent. The Vedas and the contents of the Sankhya philosophy came into existence in different ways. The Vedas depend throughout on a primeval inspiration which was still a natural possession of primeval man; they were given to man, so to speak, without his having done anything to deserve them, except that with his whole being he prepared himself to receive into his inner depths that divine inspiration that came of itself to him, and to receive it quietly and calmly. Sankhya philosophy was formed in a different way. That process was something like the learning of our present day, only that this is not permeated by clairvoyance as the former then was. The Veda philosophy consisted of clairvoyant knowledge, inspiration given as by grace from above. Sankhya philosophy consisted of knowledge sought for as we seek it now, but sought for by people to whom clairvoyance was still accessible. This is why the Sankhya philosophy leaves the actual soul-element undisturbed, so to say. It admits that souls can impress themselves in that which one can study as the super-sensible outer forms, but it particularly studies the outer forms, which appear as the clothing of those souls. Hence we find a complete system of the forms we meet with in the world, just as in our own science we find a number of facts about nature; only that in Sankhya philosophy observation extends to a clairvoyant observation of facts. Sankhya philosophy is a science, which although obtained by clairvoyance, is nevertheless a science of outer forms that does not extend into the sphere of the soul: the soul-nature remains in a sense undisturbed by these studies. He who devotes himself to the Vedas feels absolutely that his religious life is one with the life of wisdom; but Sankhya philosophy is a science, it is a perception of the forms into which the soul impresses itself. Nevertheless, it is quite possible for the disciples of the Sankhya philosophy to feel a religious devotion of the soul for their philosophy. The way in which the soul element is organised into forms-not the soul element itself, but the form it takes-is followed up in the Sankhya philosophy. It defines the way in which the soul, more or less, preserves its individuality or else is more immersed in the material. It has to do with the soul element which is, it is true, beneath the surface, but which, within the material forms, still preserves itself as soul. A soul element thus disguised in outer form, but which reveals itself as soul, dwells in the Sattva element. A soul element immersed in form, but which is, so to say, entangled in it and cannot emerge from it, dwells in the Tamas-element; and that in which, more or less, the soul element and its outer expression in form, are, to a certain extent, balanced, dwells in the Rajas-element. Sattva, Rajas, Tamas, the three Gunas, pertain to the essential characteristics of what we know as Sankhya philosophy.

Quite different, again, is that spiritual stream which comes down to us as Yoga. That appeals directly to the soul-element itself and seeks ways and means of grasping the human soul in direct spiritual life, so that it rises from the point which it has attained in the world to higher and higher stages of soul-being. Thus Sankhya is a contemplation of the sheaths of the soul, and Yoga the guidance of the soul to higher and ever higher stages of inner experience. To devote oneself to Yoga means a gradual awakening of the higher forces of the soul so that it experiences something not to be found in everyday life, which opens the door to higher and higher stages of existence.

Yoga is therefore the path to the spiritual worlds, the path to the liberation of the soul from outer forms, the path to an independent life of the soul within itself. Yoga is the other side of the Sankhya philosophy. Yoga acquired its great importance when that inspiration, which was given as a blessing from above and which inspired the Vedas, was no longer able to come down. Yoga had to be made use of by those souls who, belonging to a later epoch of mankind, could no longer receive anything by direct revelation, but were obliged to work their way up to the heights of spiritual existence from the lower stages. Thus in the old primal Indian times we have three sharply-defined streams, the Vedas, the Sankhaya, and the Yoga, and today we are called upon once more to unite these spiritual streams, so to say, by bringing them to the surface in the way proper for our own age, from the foundations of the soul and from the depths of the Cosmos.

You may find all three streams again in our Spiritual Science. If you read what I have tried to place before you in the first chapters of my Occult Science about the human constitution, about sleeping and waking, life and death, you will find there what in our present-day sense we may call Sankhya philosophy. Then read what is there said about the evolution of the world from Saturn down to our own time, and you have the Veda-philosophy expressed for our own age; while, if you read the last chapters, which deal with human evolution, you have Yoga expressed for our own age. Our age must in an organised way unite that which radiates across to us in three so sharply-defined spiritual streams from old India in the Veda-philosophy, the Sankhya philosophy, and Yoga. For that reason our age must study the wonderful poem of the Bhagavad Gita, which, in a deeply poetical manner, represents, as it were, a union of these three streams; our own age must be deeply moved by the Bhagavad Gita. We should seek something akin to our own spiritual strivings in the deeper contents of the Bhagavad Gita. Our spiritual streams do not only concern themselves with the older ones as a whole, but also in detail. You will have recognised that in my Occult Science an attempt has been made to produce the things out of themselves. Nowhere do we depend on history. Nowhere can one who really understands what is said find in any assertion about Saturn, Sun, and Moon, that things are related from historical sources; they are simply drawn forth from the matter itself. Yet, strange to say, that which bears the stamp of our own time corresponds in striking places with what resounds down to us out of the old ages. Only one little proof shall be given. We read in the Vedas in a particular place, about cosmic development, which can be expressed in words somewhat like the following: “Darkness was enwrapt in darkness in the primal beginning, all was indistinguishable flood-essence. Then arose a mighty void, that was everywhere permeated with warmth.” I now ask you to remember the result of our study of the evolution of Saturn, in which the substance of Saturn is spoken of as a warmth-substance, and you will feel the harmony between the so-called “Newest thing in Occult Science,” and what is said in the Vedas. The next passage runs: “Then first arose the Will, the first seed of Thought, the connection between the Existent and the Non-existent, ... and this connection was found in the Will ...” And remember what was said in the new mode of expression about the Spirits of Will. In all we have to say at the present time, we are not seeking to prove a concord with the old; the harmony comes of itself, because truth was sought for there and is again being sought for on our own ground

Now in the Bhagavad Gita we find, as it were, the poetical glorification of the three spiritual streams just described. The great teachings that Krishna himself communicated to Arjuna are brought to our notice at an important moment of the world's history—of importance for that far-distant age. The moment is significant, because it is the time when the old blood-ties were loosening. In all that is to be said in these lectures about the Bhagavad Gita you must remember what has again and again been emphasised: that ties of blood, racial attachment and kinship, were of quite special significance in primeval times, and only grew less strong by degrees. Remember all that is said in my pamphlet, The Occult Significance of Blood. When these blood-ties begin to loosen, on account of that loosening, the great struggle began which is described in the Mahabharata, and of which the Bhagavad Gita is an episode. We see there how the descendants of two brothers, and hence, blood relations, separate on account of their spiritual tendencies how that which, through the blood, would formerly have given them the same points of view, now takes different paths; and how, therefore, the conflict then arises, for conflict must arise when the ties of blood also lose their significance as a help for clairvoyant perception; and with this separation begins the later spiritual development.. For those to whom the old blood-ties no longer were of significance, Krishna came as a great teacher. He was to be the teacher of the new age lifted out of the old blood-ties. How he became the teacher we shall describe tomorrow; but it may now be said, as the whole Bhagavad Gita shows us, that Krishna absorbed the three spiritual streams into his teaching and communicated them to his pupil as an organised unity.

How must this pupil appear to us? He looks up on the one side to his father, and on the other side to his father's brother the children of the two brothers are now no longer to be together, they are to separate now a different spiritual stream is to take possession of the one line and the other. Arjuna's soul is filled with the question: how will it be when that which was held together by the ties of blood is no longer there? How can the soul take part in spiritual life if that life no longer flows as it formerly did under the influence of the old blood-tie? It seems to Arjuna as if everything must come to an end. The purport of the great teachings of Krishna, however, is to show that this will not be the case, that it all will be different. Krishna now shows his pupil—who is to live through the time of transition from one epoch to another, that the soul, if it is to become harmonious, must take in something of all these three spiritual streams. We find the Vedistic unity interpreted in the right way in the teachings of Krishna, as well as the principles of the Sankhya teaching and the principles of Yoga. For what is it that actually lies behind all that we are about to learn from the Bhagavad Gita? The revelations of Krishna are somewhat to this effect: There is a creative Cosmic Word, itself containing the creative principle. As the sound produced by man when he speaks undulates and moves and lives through the air, so does the Word surge and weave and live in all things, and create and order all existence. Thus the Veda principle breathes through all things. This can be taken up by human perception into the human soul-life. There is a supreme, weaving Creative-Word, and there is an echo of this supreme, weaving Creative-Word in the Vedistic documents. The Word is the creative principle of the World; in the Vedas it is revealed. That is one part of the Krishna teaching. The human soul is capable of understanding how the Word lives on, in the different forms of existence. Human knowledge learns the laws of existence by grasping how the separate forms of being express, with the regularity of a fixed law, that which is soul and spirit. The teachings about the forms in the world, of the laws which shape existence, of cosmic laws and their manner of working, is the Sankhya philosophy, the other side of the Krishna teaching. Just as Krishna made clear to his pupil that behind all existence is the creative cosmic Word, so also he made clear to him that human knowledge can recognise the separate forms, and therefore can grasp the cosmic laws. The cosmic Word, the cosmic laws as echoed in the Vedas, and in Sankhya, were revealed by Krishna to his pupil. And he also spoke to him about the path that leads the individual pupil to the heights where he can once again share in the knowledge of the cosmic Word. Thus Krishna also spoke of Yoga. Threefold is the teaching of Krishna: it teaches of the Word, of the Law and of reverent devotion to the Spirit.

The Word, the Law, and Devotion are the three streams by means of which the soul can carry out its development.

These three streams will for ever work upon the human soul in some way or another. Have we not just seen that modern Spiritual Science must seek for new expression of these three streams? But the ages differ one from the other, and in many different ways will that which is the threefold comprehension of the World be brought to human souls. Krishna speaks of the Cosmic Word, of the Creative Word, of the fashioning of existence, of the devotional deepening of the soul,—of Yoga. The same trinity meets us again in another form, only in a more concrete, more living way—in a Being who is Himself to be thought of as walking the Earth—the Incarnation of the Divine Creative Word! The Vedas came to mankind in an abstract form. The Divine Logos, of whom the Gospel of St. John speaks is the Living and Creative Word Itself! That which we find in the Sankhya philosophy, as the law to which the cosmic forms are subject, that, historically transposed into the old Hebrew revelation, is what St. Paul calls the Law. The third stream we find in St. Paul as Faith in the risen Christ. That which was Yoga in Krishna, in St. Paul was Faith, only in a more concrete form—Faith, that was to replace the Law. So the trinity, Veda, Sankhya and Yoga were as the redness of the dawn of that which later rose as sun. Veda appears again in the actual Being of Christ Himself now entering in a concrete, living way into historical evolution, not pouring Himself out abstractly into space and the distances of time, but living as a single Individual, as the Living Word. The Law meets us in the Sankhya philosophy, in that which shows us how the material basis, Prakriti, is developed even down to coarse substance. The Law reveals how the world came into existence, and how individual man develops within it. That is expressed in the old Hebrew revelation of the Law, in the dispensation of Moses. Inasmuch as St. Paul, on the one hand, refers to this Law of the old Hebrews, he is referring to the Sankhya philosophy; inasmuch as he refers to faith in the Risen One, he refers to the Sun of which the rosy dawn appeared in Yoga. Thus arises in a, special way that of which we find the first elements in Veda, Sankhya and Yoga. What we find in the Vedas appears in a new but now concrete form as the Living Word by Whom all things were made and without Whom nothing is made that was made, and Who, nevertheless, in the course of time, has become Flesh. Sankhya appears as the historical representation based on Law of how out of the world of the Elohim, emerged the world of phenomena, the world of coarse substances. Yoga transformed itself into that which, according to St. Paul, is expressed in the words; “Not I, but Christ in me,” that is to say when the Christ-force penetrates the soul and absorbs it, man rises to the heights of the divine.

Thus we see how, in a preparatory form, the coherent plan is present in world-history, how the Eastern teaching was a preparation, how it gives in more abstract form, as it were, that which, in a concrete form, we find so marvelously contained in the Pauline Christianity. We shall see that precisely by grasping the connection between the great poem of the Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of St. Paul, the very deepest mysteries will reveal themselves concerning what we may call the ruling of the spiritual in the collective education of the human race. As something so new must also be felt in the new age, this newer age must extend beyond the time of Greece and must develop understanding for that which lies behind the thousand years immediately before Christ—for that which we find in the Vedas, Sankhya and Yoga. Just as Raphael in his art and Thomas Aquinas in his philosophy had to turn back to Greece, so shall we see how in our time, a conscious balance must be established between that which the present time is trying to acquire and that which lies further back than the Greek age, and stretches back to the depths of oriental antiquity. We can allow these depths of oriental antiquity to flow into our souls if we ponder over these different spiritual streams which are to be found within that wonderfully harmonious unity which Humboldt calls the greatest philosophical poem the Bhagavad Gita.

All the prayer formulas and words of wisdom that have come down to us from the great religions contain many of the profound secrets of existence. Only we have to understand that all the different religions had prayer but differed in so far as with some of them prayer took more the form of meditation, as it is called, whilst Christianity and some other religions had prayer in the true sense, as we know it today. Meditation is above all part of Oriental religions. It means to enter deeply into a spiritual content, and this is done in such a way that by entering deeply into this the individual concerned finds himself in accord with the worlds divine and spiritual ground and origin. Please understand me rightly. Some religions give their members formal meditations, which may be prayer-like formulas into which people enter deeply, so that they become aware of the stream of divine and spiritual life present in their souls, giving themselves to the divine ground and origin of the spirit at such moments. The formulas are essentially based on thoughts, however. Basically speaking, Christian prayer is no different, only the content is more based on inner responses and feelings. A Christian enters into the essence of the divine that streams through the world more by way of inner responses and feelings.

It should not be thought, however, that Christian prayer has always been, or indeed can be, taken the way it often is today. There is an exemplary Christian prayer in which Christ Jesus himself showed, as clearly as anyone can possibly show, what the mood of a Christian should be in prayer. It is simply this: ‘Father, if it can be done, let this cup pass away from me, but not my will but your will be done.’¹⁰³ Let us consider these words. In the first place it is a genuine petition―to let the cup pass, but at the same time wholly given up to the will of the divine spirit: ‘But not my will but your will be done.’ This mood, where we let the will of the divine spirit be alive in us as we pray, giving ourselves up to it, not wanting anything for ourselves but letting the divine spirit have its will in us, this mood must be present as an undertow, the basic note in our prayer if it is to be Christian.

It is quite clear that with this it is impossible to have an egotistical prayer. It is also impossible for other reasons to offer an egotistical prayer to God, for then one of us would ask for rain, his neighbour for sunshine, and both would be asking for purely egotistical reasons, not to speak of situations where two armies face each other about to do battle and each asks that it may be victorious, which is of course quite impossible. But if there is a basic mood of ‘not my will but your will be done’, we can ask for anything, for we are then giving ourselves up to the will of the divine spirit. I would like to ask for this, but I leave it to the divine spirit to decide if it shall come to be or not.

That is the basic mood of Christian prayer, and it is in this aspect that the most comprehensive, most universal prayer of Christian tradition arose—the Lord's Prayer, which tradition says was taught by Christ Jesus himself. It is indeed one of the most profound prayers in the world. Today we are no longer able to know the profound depths of the Lord's Prayer in its original language. But the thoughts it contains are so tremendous that it does not lose anything in any language.

When you consider the prayers of other nations, you will find prayers to have been of the kind I have characterized wherever religions are in their prime, have reached their peak. However, once the religions had come down in the world those prayers assumed a character that was no longer entirely right. They have become magic formulas, means of idolatry. At the time when Christ Jesus taught his people to pray, many, many such magic formulas were in use, all of them having had profound meaning at their origin. Such magic incantations would always refer to things people liked in outward ways, asking for things in an egotistical way governed by personal wishes. The lord taught that Christians should not pray like that. That kind of prayer has to do with superficial things. A Christian should say his prayer in seclusion, that is, in his inmost soul, the part of it where the human being can make the connection with the divine spirit. We must understand, of course, that something lives in every human being that may be compared to a drop from the ocean of the divine, that there is something in every human being that is like God. It would be wrong, however, to think that a human being in himself is like God. When we say: something in the human being is like God, this does not mean the human being himself is equal to God, for a drop taken from the ocean is the same as the ocean in substance, but it is not the ocean. And so the human soul is a drop from the ocean of the divine, but it is not God, and just as the drop can unite with its own substance when you pour it into the sea, so does the soul, being a drop of divinity, unite with its God in a spiritual way during prayer or meditation. This union of the soul with its God is called ‘to pray in private’ by Christ Jesus.

As a first step we have characterized the mood of Christian prayer, the Christian human mood needed for this prayer. We can now contemplate the contents of the Lord's Prayer itself. The words were that the Lord's Prayer is the most comprehensive prayer. You will therefore feel the need, as I do, to take a very comprehensive look at the world in order to understand the Lord's Prayer. We'll have to take a long roundabout route to understand it. We need to consider the nature of the human being from a particular point of view. You know that we do this the way it has been done in spiritual research through the ages. Let us briefly consider it once more.

When we have a human being before us, we have first of all the physical body which has its substance and forces in common with all minerals and seemingly lifeless products of nature. But this physical human body is not the only thing we have in the space before us, which is what materialists may think; it is only the lowest principle of human nature. The next principle we discern is the ether body or life body of the individual, and this he has in common with the plants and the animals, for every plant, every animal and every human being must call the chemical and physical matter into life; they cannot give life to themselves. The third principle is the astral body, the bearer of pleasure and pain, drives, desires and passions and the notions we have in everyday life. Man could not have any of these if it were not for the astral body. He only has it in common with the animals. Animals, too, feel pleasure and pain, have drives, desires and passions, and so they also have this body. And so the human being has his physical body in common with the seemingly lifeless minerals, and his ether or life body with all things that grow and reproduce themselves, the whole plant world. He has his astral body in common with animal nature. Then he has one more thing and this is something that takes him beyond the three natural worlds of this earth, making him the apotheosis of creation. This is the fourth principle of his essential nature.

We find it if we give the matter a little thought. There is one name that differs from all others. You cannot say ‘I’ to anyone else. To everyone else I am a ‘you’, and everyone else is a ‘you’ to me. ‘I’ is a name the meaning of which can only arise in the inner soul itself. It can never come to you from outside if it refers to you yourself. People who lived with the more profound religions always knew this, at all times, and they would therefore say: ‘When the soul begins to give this name to itself inwardly, the god in man begins to speak, the god who speaks through the soul.’ The name ‘I’ cannot come from outside, it has to arise in the soul itself. This is the fourth principle of human nature.

Occultists of the Hebrew faith called this ‘I’ the name of God that may not be spoken. ‘Yahweh’ actually means ‘I am’. Whatever interpretation scholars lacking inner knowledge may give, in reality it meant ‘I am’, and that is the fourth principle of the essential human being. These are the four aspects that make up man in the first place. We also call them the four members of man's ‘lower’ nature.

Now to understand the whole nature of man you will have to go back a little in human evolution. This takes us to many different peoples that preceded us—ancient German and central European development, the Graeco-Latin and Chaldean peoples, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians and Hebrews, the Persian peoples and all the way back to the people with whom our present civilization started, the Indians. They, too, had ancestors but those lived somewhere quite different, on the continent which now is the bottom of the sea between Europe and America, on Atlantis. This was washed away by tremendous floods, the land went down in a mighty natural event that lives on in the myths and legends of all nations as the Flood.

But even Atlantis was not the earliest civilized land on earth. Going back a long way we come to the region where man developed his present-day form, a land that lay more or less between today's Indochina, Australia and Africa. This was ancient Lemuria, a land where conditions were very different from those we know today. People do not usually realize how great and comprehensive the changes have been that occurred on earth in the course of human evolution. There we come to a time when man's lower nature did already exist. Creatures consisting of the four members—physical body, ether body, astral body and I-nature—went about on earth then. They were organized at a higher level than the highest animals of today, but they were not yet human—animal-humans, but definitely not like today's animals. Our animals are degenerate descendants that have developed from those animal-humans by lagging behind and by involution. Something very special happened among those animal-humans which lived at that time.

They were ripe at that time to receive the power into them which is our higher power of soul. We might put it like this: lower human nature united with the human soul at that time. This human soul had until then rested in the keeping of the godhead, being an inherent part of the godhead itself. Up above, therefore, in the realm of the spirit, there was the divine spirit, and down below were the fourfold human forms, which had been maturing up to this point and were now ready to receive droplets of this divine spirit. We can get an idea of what happened then by using a picture. Think of a glass of water. You take a hundred tiny sponges and try gradually to take up a drop of the water with each of these sponges. You then have a hundred drops which previously had been completely one with the water and are now distributed among one hundred small sponges. This is a simple image to show you how the process of ensoulment went at that time. Until then the soul had rested within the great universal divine spirit like a drop in our glass of water. The physical human forms then acted the way our small sponges do. Droplets of the spirit separated out from the universal divine substance; they became individual, and as souls were like drops in those enveloping forms. They then began to develop the human being as he is today, an entity with soul and body. Those souls incarnated for the first time then. Afterwards they went through many, many incarnations, developing their human body into the form it has today. The event which happened at that time, however, was that parts of the divine principle united with the lower members of human nature. They progressed with every incarnation, became more perfect with every incarnation, to reach a certain culmination at a future time.

We call this part of higher nature which came in as a power at that time, changing lower nature and in the process of change rising to a higher level itself, the core of man's essential nature: spirit self, life spirit and spirit man, or manas, buddhi, atman. These are the elements of the divine spirit through which man gradually transforms his lower into his higher nature, step by step. With his power of manas he restructures the astral body, with buddhi the ether body, and with the power of atman he restructures the physical body. He has to transfigure them all, making them spiritual, if he is to reach the goal of his evolution one day. And so we once had four members—physical body, ether body, astral body and I—and at that time were then given the seed potential for higher development which is really something that flows from the highest spirit—the threefold higher nature of man, the divine core of our being, the divine potential in man. We can look at this higher part of human nature in two ways. One is to say: that is the higher nature of man, and man is developing towards it in the course of evolution. Or we consider it to be part of the divine spirit from which it has come, the divine element in the human being. A Christian will primarily consider it in this second way, and we are going to do this as well now and see if we can discern the essence of these higher powers in human nature. We'll start with the highest principle, the element which in man is called the power of atman. What I am going to tell you now is not some kind of external definition, for I want to characterize the true nature and essence of this higher principle of human nature. The principle that becomes power of atman is, in so far as it is a power that comes from the divine spirit, will-like by nature. Think of your own powers of will, of the part in you that is able to will, and you have a shadowy reflection, a shadowy picture of the element that comes from the power of atman, from the divine. The human will is the human being's least developed power today. The will is, however, able to develop more and more, until the time comes when it reaches its culmination and is able to achieve what is known in all religions as ‘the great offering’ or ‘the great sacrifice’.

Imagine yourself standing before a mirror and looking into it. Your image is exactly like you in every aspect of your physiognomy, your gestures; it is like you in everything, but it is a dead image of you. You stand in front of it as a living entity and come face to face with your dead image which is like you in everything except for your livingness, your substance and content. Imagine now that your will has developed to the point where it would be capable of deciding to give up your own existence, your own essential nature and give it over to your mirror image. You would then be able to sacrifice yourself wholly, so that your mirror image may be given your life. Such a will is said to ‘emanate’, to let its own essence go. It is the highest development of the will, known to Christians as the ‘divine will of the father’.

The human will, then, is today the least developed of our soul powers. It is, however, in the process of developing such power that it will be able to achieve ‘the great sacrifice’. That is the true nature of the potential which lies in the power of atman—will-like nature in so far as it is an out-flowing of divine essence.

Let us now consider the second principle of man's higher nature—the buddhi or life spirit—looking at it as an out-flowing of the divine spirit, which is the view taken in Christianity. You will find it easiest to get an idea if it if you now consider not the power that flows out to give life to the mirror image but to the mirror image itself. In the mirror image the original being is perfectly repeated; it is the same, and yet not the same. If you apply this to the world, to the whole universe—how the divine world will in one point is reflected in all directions.

Think of a hollow sphere, as it were, that is reflective inside. The one point inside is reflected inwards infinitely many times. Everywhere, in infinite recapitulation, the divine world will; mirror images everywhere, aspects of the divine.

Look at the cosmos, the universe like this, as a mirroring of the infinite world will. The divine world will is not in any one entity that exists but is it reflected everywhere in infinitely many ways. The mirroring of the godhead—with the godhead remaining at the point where it is but at the same time giving life to every point in which it is reflected by making ‘the great sacrifice’―that is the ‘kingdom’ in Christian terminology. And this term ‘the kingdom’ refers to the element which in man is the buddhi. If you consider the universe with regard to the creative, productive principle that flows from the divine origin, then the element that comes immediately next to the atman is the buddhi, the divine spark. As a ‘kingdom’ it is universal and cosmic.

And let us now turn our attention from this to the details of the kingdom. We first considered it as a whole. Now we come down to detail. In what way do we distinguish the one from the other? With the ‘name’, as it is called in Christian terminology. Each is given a name, and that is how distinction is made between the many different things, the individual aspects of the kingdom. To a Christian, the ‘name’ is something which is often called the ‘idea’, the particular nature of a thing. Just as an individual person is distinguished from another by name, so the name is felt to be such that it also holds part of the mirrored divine essence. A Christian has the right relationship to this name if he understands that every aspect of the kingdom is an out-flowing of the divine, and knows with every bite of bread that it is an out-flowing, a mirror and a part of the godhead. A Christian should clearly understand this in relation to even the least of things. In human nature, the individual spirit brings it about that each becomes an individual compared to others. What the name is in the kingdom, man has in his individual spirit self or manas because he is a separate part of the godhead, has a separate name, a name which for each individual goes through all incarnations.

So we now have this threefold nature before us as an out-flowing of the divine spirit, and in this sense atman is the will of the godhead, buddhi or the life spirit the kingdom of the godhead, and manas or the spirit self the name of the godhead.

Let us now consider the four lower members of human nature, beginning with the physical body, which is the lowest. It has the same material substances and forces as outer physical nature, but is also constantly converting those substances and forces. These move in and out of the human physical body, and its very existence depends on their moving in and out. It can only continue by continually renewing and changing itself using the outer physical substances. It forms a whole with the rest of physical nature. Just as you cannot cut off this finger and have it remain what it is—it will shrivel up as soon as you separate it from the rest of the body and is what it is only because it is part of the whole organism—so you cannot separate the physical human body from the earth and have it remain as it is. Man thus is an entity that is connected with the elements of the earth. Physical substances and forces move in and out, and this makes him such that he can only maintain his essential nature through them. This characterizes the physical body.

The second member is the ether or life body. Here we must understand that it is the principle which calls the merely physical substances and forces to life. It bears the powers of growth and reproduction, the signs of life altogether, and also something entirely different—all the qualities of the human being that are of a more lasting nature than his short-lived drives, desires and passions. What makes him different from them? If you want to grasp this difference, think back to the time when you were eight years old. Think of everything you have learned since then, all the concepts and ideas, experiences and events that have enriched your soul—it is a tremendous amount. But now you need to think about something else, and that is how slowly, at a snail's pace, something else is going. Remember that you had a violent temper as a child, and consider if this temper does not still come through at times, with your inclinations or your temperament still largely the same. All this has not changed as much as your experiences have. You might compare the things you learn, experience, with the minute hand of a clock, and the changes in character, temperament and habit with the hour hand. This difference exists because the former are sustained by the astral body, whereas the latter, which move so slowly, are sustained by the ether body. If your habits change, that is a change in your ether body. When you have learned something, it is a change in your astral body.

For someone who becomes a pupil of genuine occultism in the higher sense, training is not a matter of external learning, for all occult training takes place in the ether body. You therefore have done more for your actual occult training if you have managed to change just one deep-rooted character trait than if you have gained any amount of external knowledge. Distinction is therefore made between the exoteric, which is sustained by the ether body, and esoteric, which is what the ether body needs. The ether body also sustains memory as a quality, not as the memorizing of things. If your memory is to get clearer, for instance, this involves changing the ether body; if it gets less good, this is a change in the ether body, a change in your power of memory. Something else is also of infinite importance for us. The way human beings are now, they live in two directions. Each belongs to a family, a tribe, nation and so on, and has certain qualities in common with others, qualities that relate him to that context. French people have different ones from Germans, these again others than the English, and so on. They all have certain tribal characteristics in common. But apart from this each has his own individual characteristics, and with these goes beyond nation or tribe, becoming an individual person. You are part of a community because of particular qualities of the ether body. The ether body has the qualities through which you are a member of a nation, a race, and humanity as a whole. But to find the things that take you outside this community, you have to look to the astral body. This makes people individual.

A person's whole life in the community therefore depends on his ether body finding the right balance with the ether bodies of the people with whom he has to live. If it cannot find it, the person cannot live in that community, something will go wrong and he'll be on the outside. The human ether body thus has the task of adapting to other ether bodies. The astral body gives the individual aspect; it must above all live in such a way that the person does not commit personal sins. The astral body goes astray in one direction or another because of personal sins; those are the failings of the astral body. Being out of harmony with the community, those are failings of the ether body. When esoteric Christians were accurate in their use of words they would call the failings of the ether body ‘trespass’ or ‘fault’, something that upsets the balance in relation to others. A failing of the astral body, which arises from one's individual nature, was called ‘falling into temptation’. The astral body is subject to temptation in its drives, passions and desires. It falls into error by falling to temptation within itself. That was the distinction made between ‘fault’ and ‘falling into temptation’ in esoteric Christianity.

Now to the fourth member of the essential human being—the I. We spoke of the physical body, which exists on the basis of metabolism, exchange of substances; the ether body, which may have committed faults; the astral body which may fall into temptation. Now the I. It is the very source and origin of self-seeking, of egotism. It was the I which brought it about that the element which was at one in the great divine spirit has entered into many individuals. It was due to the I that it fell away from oneness and entered into individual. Christian gnosis therefore considered the I to be the actual origin of egotism and selfishness. For as long as the individual entities were at one in the godhead, they could not go against one another. They could only do this when the ‘I’s had become separate. Before, they could only will as the godhead willed. This way of developing in opposition to others which is egotism is called the failing of the I, and in Christian tradition the moment when this soul descends into the body is exactly defined as the Fall, biting into the apple. The actual failing of the I is called ‘evil’. The failing of the fourth member thus is evil. Only the I can fall into evil, and this came about when the bite was taken of the apple. In Latin, the word malum means both ‘apple’ and ‘evil’.

So, to sum up once more, the physical body is the same as the physical elements all around it and sustains itself in the continual exchange of substances and forces, in metabolism. The ether body is the principle which maintains the balance with other members of the community; it may commit faults. The astral body, which should not fall to temptation, and the I, which must not fall victim to egotism, to evil.

This fourfold principle unites with the threefold higher principle which is the divine core of being:

Think of prayer as the human being uniting himself with the godhead, doing so in seclusion. The original concept in Christendom was that the soul was seen as divine, a droplet from the ocean of the godhead. And this soul must plead that it may return again to its origin. This origin of divine human nature is given the name ‘father’. And the goal towards which the soul strives, where it will be united again with the principle that is called the ‘father’, is the devachan or heaven.

And now we think of the prayer of prayers—an appeal that individual human nature may find the way to divine father-nature.

This prayer had to plead that the three higher principles of human nature might be able to develop, ask that the ‘will’, the highest out-flowing of the divine, might come to realization in man; that the second principle of divine nature, the ‘kingdom’, might spread in the human being; that the third principle, the ‘name’, might be felt to be holy. This would therefore relate to the three higher principles, the divine nature in man. And for the four lower members of human nature one would ask: let my physical body be given the substances it needs to sustain itself. Let the ether body find the balance between its fault and the fault of others, so that it may live in harmony with the others. The prayer would have to be a plea that temptation would not drag down the astral body, and that the I might not fall into the evil that flows from egotism.

In a prayer of prayers, you must ask to be united with the father. You should do this in such a way that the individual aspects of your sevenfold nature are there before you in your prayer:

‘Our father, who are in heaven.’

You first invoke the father, then make the petitions that relate to the three higher principles:

‘Hallowed be your name, let your kingdom come to us.’

‘Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’

Then the four petitions that relate to the other four members of the essential human being:

‘Give us today our daily bread.’

‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.’

That is coming to terms with the people among whom we live.

‘Lead us not into temptation.’

Our astral body.

‘But deliver us from evil.’

Meaning from any out-flowing of egotism.

The seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer thus relate to the evolution of sevenfold human nature. From the depth of wisdom, going beyond the human being, the Lord's Prayer has been given to Christians as a Christian prayer, and in it lies everything that is known about the human being in theosophy. You only have to understand it and you have the whole of theosophical wisdom, in so far as it relates to man.

Prayers that do not just have a short-term effect but take hold of human souls through millennia, lifting up human hearts, have all arisen from the most profound wisdom. No such prayer has ever been given by someone putting together beautiful or uplifting words at will. They have been taken out of the most profound wisdom, for this alone gives them the power to influence human souls through millennia.

The objection that a simple mind will know nothing of this wisdom is pointless. The mind does not need to know any of this, for the power of the Lord's Prayer comes from that wisdom, and this influences human beings even if they do not know about it.

It merely has to be understood in the right way. Someone sees a plant and is delighted by it. Even the most naive mind will be delighted, though it knows nothing of the divine wisdom that lies in the plant. It is the same with the great prayers. You need not know the wisdom, and yet the prayer will have the power, the wisdom, the ability to lift us up, the sanctity of prayer. It may be born out of the greatest wisdom, but what matters is not to know that wisdom but to experience its power.

It is only in our time that the possibility exists to discover the things which Christ Jesus put into prayer and know again the power he put into it, especially the Lord's Prayer. It has been taken from the greatest depths of wisdom and knowledge about man and his sevenfold nature, and because of this it is great and powerful for even the simplest of minds, and even more uplifting for someone who is also able to gain the wisdom that lies in it. And it does not lose any of its power in the process, a power it has always had, touching us deeply and lifting our spirits. For the whole of theosophy, divine wisdom, lies in the Lord's Prayer.

The lord often spoke to the multitudes in parables. But when he was alone with his disciples he would explain the parables to them, for they had to gain the strength from the wisdom-filled explanation of the parables that would make them his messengers, make them know the means by which he himself gained the magical power that would make his work have the influence it was to have for millennia.

So this is something that can help us enter into the meaning of the Lord's Prayer.

• 103. Matthew 26: 39.

The name ‘Rosicrucian’ has an indefinite, vague air for anyone who studies the theosophical literature, as if there were a secret behind it. Many consider it to be a term for people who involved themselves in possible and impossible magic in the 18th century. Reading the works of people who want to study the Rosicrucians scientifically and historically one feels the kindly shrug of the shoulders when they write such things as: ‘There was a kind of brotherhood once that had noble ideals and ideas of moral progress.’ They may also refer to their symbolic formulas. But it is emphatically stated again and again in learned works that the Rosicrucians are degenerate. If the Rosicrucians had ever been what those people say they are, Rosicrucianism would be something that is utterly wrong. In reality it is one of the greatest treasures humanity has. Their secrets have never appeared in books. If something did come out, it was due to betrayal or the like, and such things might then easily be taken for foolishness or superstition. Such a view has nothing to do with what Rosicrucianism actually was. Rosicrucianism may be found encompassed in a book published in 1616. The author was called Johann Valentin Andreae. The title of the book was The chymical wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz.¹⁶² It describes the progress of someone who was becoming a Rosicrucian. Later Andreae published a book where it was impossible to tell if it was meant to be serious, a joke or a retraction.¹⁶³

Today we shall discover the things that may be said in public about the true nature of Rosicrucianism. There has always been initiation. People are at different stages of development. Some are far advanced and initiated into the most profound secrets of the world, people who know something about the way worlds evolve, how the earth evolved, and how human beings gradually reach higher and higher levels of development. When it is said that an initiate ‘has the knowledge’, this is often taken too lightly. To know the real secret of man, to know the future of man, is the greatest thing anyone can learn. Yes, there is a knowledge that actually has a deadly effect on someone who is unprepared. If it were simply told today, humanity would be lost. It would be split, with the greatest part destroyed, whilst a smaller part would benefit from the knowledge. The secret can never be elicited from initiates by anyone who does not have the right to know; not even if you were to torture them and make them into martyrs. No initiate would ever reveal the ultimate secret of the world to anyone who does not have the right to know. The very thought of having to reveal the secret would drive him mad or kill him. Let me give you a picture that gives the whole development connected with this secret in perspective—it is of an avenue that gets narrower and narrower, seemingly, though one day the great secret will be revealed to all humanity.

Rosicrucianism is one way of gaining initiation. It was established by Christian Rosenkreutz.¹⁶⁴ There are different ways of initiation. One was taught by the ancient Rishis in India; it is the Oriental yoga way. Then there was the gnostic Christian way, and the Rosicrucian way is the third. All three ways take people to the summit of initiation. But it is not usually taken into account that the mental and physical constitution of Indians and Europeans is utterly different. It would in fact be impossible for a European body to take the Indian way. People also fail to realize the difference in external influences. It is possible to see that in India, for example, some diseases—cholera, smallpox—take a very different course; they are different in hot compared to cold countries. The environment is completely different and therefore has a different influence on all the enveloping bodies of man. It was peculiar to think, therefore, to say that Europeans could go through yoga training. It was an error. People did not know, however, that the Rosicrucians had followed a way of development from the 14th century.

The Rosicrucian way is certainly not un-Christian. For many people who are firm and ardent Christians the gnostic Christian way is the right one they will reach the highest peaks by this route. But the number of such people is getting less. Rosicrucianism holds the most profound secrets of Christianity but also makes it possible to remove all the doubts raised in human minds today by popular or also less popular views. No one is protected from the most dreadful doubts today, which are coming to people from every direction. Christian training would not enable them to meet these doubts in the right way, protect and defend themselves from them. Do not take this lightly. If someone were to say, for instance, that he does not read Haeckel but stays firmly in the confines of his Christian view of the world, this would not achieve anything. We live in a world where people are full of our civilization. We are using natural laws when we go by train or use the newly developed sources of light.¹⁶⁵ However much a person may shut himself off—the thoughts that live in the spiritual environment come to him from every railway engine, every artificial flame. If someone were to limit himself entirely to reading the Bible, his astral body, his soul body, would nevertheless be surrounded by all kinds of destructive inner feelings during the night. You would not know what was making you nervous. Someone who knows the thoughts that reach us at an unconscious level does know. It is not a matter of materialistic science as such, but the whole atmosphere of mind and spirit in which we live. In the 12th century people still felt religious ardour, with the Church the spiritual and external focus of their lives. Having laboured hard, people would seek refuge in the house of the spiritual powers and find peace there. This has now changed. Rosicrucian training takes account of these facts, of everything modern man has to face.

What does Rosicrucian training consist in? You will meet high ideals in it. Anyone wishing to take up this training must turn to someone who has the requisite knowledge. Even as he takes the first steps the pupil will realize what really matters. Rosicrucian training completely transforms the human being. It is only by gaining the faculties for the higher world that he can be a citizen of it.

Seven elements, activities, are part of Rosicrucian occult training: 1) proper study; 2) acquiring imagination; 3) learning the occult script; 4) finding the philosopher's stone; 5) gaining knowledge of man himself, the small world or microcosm; 6) gaining knowledge of the macrocosm; 7) knowing godliness. The sequence may vary, with a teacher perhaps taking 5) as the fourth step, for instance, to suit the pupil's individual nature. You will ask if genuine Rosicrucianism still exists today. Yes, it does, and it will achieve its greatest significance in the future. The Rosicrucian brothers also have signs of identification. Not many of them are able to present themselves in public; some work entirely in secret. Anyone who seeks them will find them; and if someone does not find them he may assume that the time is not yet right for him. It [the meeting] will inevitably happen, however. It may often seem to be pure chance. It may happen, for instance, that you have to sit in a railway waiting room for 3 hours because snow is blocking the line. A stranger approaches you seemingly quite by chance. You have found your teacher. This is just one instance which I mention to you.

1) Proper study. What does this involve? You will be taken into worlds of which ordinary people have no idea. It will be necessary to gain your bearings in those worlds. It is not for people who are divorced from reality, lacking a firm basis to their thinking. Absolute certainty in one's thinking is a precondition. The individual has to look around, endeavouring to look about him with sound eyes, and must also be able to shut off his senses. This is something not everyone appreciates, not even the greatest philosophers. Eduard von Hartmann, for example, said over and over again: ‘Something coming from the senses is always present when we think; thinking without anything relating to the senses is impossible.’¹⁶⁶ It is unbelievably arrogant to say that thinking without anything relating to the senses is impossible. Methods of developing a way of thinking free from sensory elements are now presented in the spiritual scientific literature and in lectures.

People who are found to be suitable are guided towards deeper knowledge. The elementary part of this knowledge is in fact open to many people. The way of study presented today, leaving aside the sense-related aspects of the world, consists in training one's thoughts. These then have nothing to do with the world we perceive around us through the senses. Wanting to enter even more deeply, one must put one's mind to more powerful thought training. I have endeavoured to give directions for such a way of thinking in the two books The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity - A Philosophy of Freedom and Truth and Knowledge. It is like this—when he begins to study these books at some depth, the reader will find that one thought follows another in a sequence that is determined by necessity. All people seeking to gain higher things are thus given the means for genuine growth in the spirit.

2) Developing powers of imagination. Here the way ideas are formed differs from ordinary thinking. Think of Goethe's words ‘All things corruptible are but a parable’. When you see someone with a smiling or worried face you'll not say ‘a crease is developing in that face’, or ‘a tear runs down his cheek’. What you'll say is that this shows a cheerful and this a sorrowful soul. The outer reveals the inner aspect; it is a simile, a likeness of what lives in the soul. Anyone will accept this in the case of human beings. Everyone knows the difference between a human head and a picture of it. A geologist may describe the earth for you, concerning himself only with its purely physical structure. People do not know that the earth's body is the body of a living entity, and that particular plants reflect the happy and the sad earth spirit. Goethe knew to tell of this; he knew how to see the earth as a body and knew what lived in it. In his Faust, he made the earth spirit say:

In life like a flood, in deeds like a storm
I surge to and fro,
Up and down I flow!
Birth and the grave,
an eternal wave,
Turning, returning,
A life ever burning.
And thus I work at Time's whirring wheel,
God's living garment I weave and reveal.

Everything on earth is a likeness of what is happening in the inner earth. People walk about on the earth's body. From my body, the earth may say, grows the seed that gives human beings their bread. The words in John's gospel, ‘He who eats my bread has lifted up his heel against me’, speak of one of the most profound mysteries in the way we look at the world.

Imagination is gained by seeing everything as a likeness. It is, however, necessary to learn logical thinking first. But in Rosicrucian training no one will choose a different image. Each feels that everything is in the image of the eternal. Here I must use dialogue to speak of something that lies behind an image that was taught in medieval temples and then in the Rosicrucian schools. The teacher would say to the pupil: ‘Look at the plant putting its root down in the soil and turning its flower, the seat of its organs of fertilization, to the light of the sun. The calyx is given a chaste kiss by the sunbeam and a new entity comes into existence.’ Even Darwin said that the root of a plant may be compared with the head.¹⁶⁷ Man is an inverted plant. His organs of reproduction are turned towards the centre of the earth in shame. The animal is between man and plant. These three realms of nature are shown in the image of a cross (Fig. 5).¹⁶⁸

Plato said: ‘The world's soul has been crucified on the cross of the world's body.’/p>

The Rosicrucian teacher would then ask his pupil to compare matter as it exists in flesh with the chaste matter of a plant, telling him that a time would come when human beings would be cleansed of their passions and desires, maturing to a stage and shining out towards the sun of the spirit where they will be as chaste and without desire as the chaste plant. With this ideal they will cleanse their flesh, so that fertilization becomes chaste and pure. Medieval schooling represented this ideal in the holy grail. The chalice is a sacred symbol of what human sensuality must become if it is to be like the calyx of a plant. It will then receive the kiss of the white dove—the chalice is shown with the dove above it.

To make the world thus spiritual, seeing man's environment in such images, raises him to the point of vision in astral images. Imagination is developed out of heart and mind and out of feeling.

3) Learning the occult script. The occult script reflects the inner currents in nature. One such sign is the vortex. If you were able to see the whole of the Orion nebula you would have two sixes intertwined. You see a world that is dying and one that is becoming in the nebula. Things are like this everywhere. When a plant sheds a new fruit, nothing from the old plant passes on to the new one. Nothing but powers cause a new plant to develop. And once again you would only see the vortex swirling inwards and out. In the same way you might see an old civilization spiralling into itself and a new one snaking out. This spiritual process can help us understand such a sign that is part of the script (Fig. 6).

800 years before Christ was born the sun entered into the sign of the Ram or lamb. Every spring it moves on a distance. The spring equinox is now in the constellation of the Fishes. At that earlier time people thought the Ram brought all that was good, new strength and power in spring. They even connected the redeemer with this. In early Christian times, the cross and the lamb were their symbol for this. Before the sun was in the sign of the Ram in spring, it was in the sign of the Bull. The Egyptians venerated the sacred bull Apis at that time, the Persians the Mythras bull. After the Flood, the sun was in the sign of Cancer. Cancer was given this occult sign: (Fig. 6).

And so there are many such lines, and also colours. And so one learns the signs that take us into the forces and powers of nature. One learns to develop the will in the occult script.

4) Finding the philosopher's stone. This was felt to be a secret in the 18th century. Someone then also published something about it. It is something everyone knows. The philosopher's stone is at the same time the noblest thing man can attain to, can make of his organism in order to achieve higher development.

Let me give you a story from Vedanta philosophy for this.¹⁶⁹ People once wanted to see if man could also live without eyes. After a year the individual concerned said: ‘Yes, I have lived, but as a blind person? He then tried to live without ears and a year later reported: 'Yes I have lived without ears, but as a deaf person.’ The voice was taken away and he lived as a mute person. Then his breath was to be taken away as well and that proved impossible. He could not live without breathing. Our breathing gives us the air we need to live. ‘And god breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’¹⁷⁰ We take in oxygen with every breath and release carbon dioxide. In the plant, the cycle goes the other way round. The plant uses carbon to build its body. This is why we find fossilized plants in coal after thousands of years. Man has carbon in him; he breathes in oxygen, and the carbon dioxide which is produced is removed. Animals do the same. The Rosicrucian school teaches a special way of breathing, so that the person learns the process which the plant carries out in itself. One day man will be able to transform his carbon himself; he himself will transform the blue blood that is streaming back into red blood. Now he takes in plant nature; one day he himself will do what the plant does today. The Rosicrucian says: ‘Today your body is made of flesh; one day you will create it yourself through the breath. Plant nature will appear in you, but you'll not sleep the way plants do but will be clairvoyant with it.’

This is the ideal man is moving towards—to build his body of carbon. Ordinary coal is the philosopher's stone. When man's body has become star-like it will not be black coal but transparent carbon, clear as water. These are not just chemical processes but sublime ideals. The Rosicrucian goes through it in stages, and later the whole of humanity will ascend to this level.

5) Knowing the human being as microcosm. In all the rest of nature, the world is spread out; man is an extract of it. Everything is spread out in the world in letters, and man is the word. In the early 19th century Oken¹⁷¹ and Schelling¹⁷² presented the basic ideas of this, which were quite correct. They sought to gain understanding of the essence that lies in an organ. Oken got a bit grotesque when he said the tongue was a cuttlefish. Goethe said: ‘The eye is created by the light for the light.’¹⁷³ We only come to recognize the true nature of light when we find the principle in man that corresponds to light.

The teacher gives his pupil a leitmotiv, asking him to concentrate on a point, the organ that lies behind the root of the nose, and he comes to know the nature of dream consciousness in addition to his wide-awake conscious awareness. The human being gets to know the whole world when he deeply considers the spleen, liver and other things. When he has expanded his conscious awareness by thus entering into himself—it is dangerous to go broody—he will become one with the whole world.

6) Coming to know the macrocosm. Having perceived what I have just described, he will also perceive the creator behind all creation.

7) Getting to know godliness. At the 7th stage the individual reaches a point that calls forth universal feeling from the depths of the human soul and something he only has a right to know at this stage—the feeling of blessedness. It is only by gaining insight into macrocosm that he learns to enter into universal feeling. Entering into every individual thing in a clear and living way is godliness. There he discovers the soul that lies at rest behind nature. Someone once said to me: ‘I never thought a stone would feel anything if I split it.’ The spirit of the mineral world feels the greatest voluptuousness when a stone is split, a feeling of bliss. It may seem to us that the marble quarry is going through martyrdom; yet for the spirit of the stone is it the greatest bliss. Now you might ask why people are not told such details. Someone once said it would be most useful for people to know them. My reply was: 'People would want to gain things for themselves from this, and this secret must only be used in utterly selfless service to humanity.’

The Rosicrucians knew this secret, as do those who now walk this earth and serve human progress. They tell the things that will serve progress, they who know how the ‘chymical wedding’ may proceed.

• 162. Andreae, Johann Valentin (1586–1654), German protestant theologian. ‘The chymical wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, Anno 1459’, written in 1603. was published anonymously in Strassburg in 1616. See Steiner R. A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology, essay written in 1917 (in GA 35); P. M. Allen compiler and editor. Blauvelt: Rudolf Steiner Publications 1968.
• 163. Andreae's later works, including the allegorical Die Christburg (1626), were more pietistic.
• 164. See lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in Neuchatel on 27 and 28 October 1911. In Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz (in GA 130). Tr. P. Wehrle. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1984.
• 165. New York had the first electric street lighting in 1882.
• 166. von Hartmann, Karl Robert Eduard (1842–1906). His Philosophie des Unbewussten (1869) was translated into English by Coupland , with a new edition in 1931. At the beginning of the second volume (1882) we read: ‘We think either in images, in which case we rake sensory impressions and transformations and combinations of them directly from memory, or we think in abstract terms. Abstract notions have, however, merely been abstracted from our sensory perceptions, and we may discard as much as we like in the process of abstraction, so long as something actually remains. This has thus been part of the whole before from which the abstraction was made. Abstract notions thus are merely residues of sensory impressions and therefore take sensory by nature.’
• 167. Darwin, Charles (1809–1882). ‘Surely it is no exaggeration to maintain that a root tip which has the capacity for achieving movements of adjacent parts performs a function similar to that of the brain of a lower animal.’ Darwin C., assisted by Darwin F. The Power of Movement of Plants. New York 1892.
• 168. Plato (c. 427–c. 347 BC) Greek philosopher. After living for a time at the Syracuse court, Plato founded the most influential school of the ancient world, the Academy, in Athens. The world's soul has been crucified on the cross of the world's body. Rudolf Steiner would frequently refer to these words from Timaeus (chapter 8), but always in the form given by the Viennese philosopher Vincenz Knauer, who was a personal acquaintance, in his Die Hauptprobleme der Philosophie in ihrer Entwickelung und teilweisen Lösung von Thales bis Robert Hamerling. Vienna 1892, S. 96 (the passage is underlined in the copy of the work in Rudolf Steiner's library): ‘We know from mythology, in Timaeus, that god placed this world soul in the universe in the form of a cross and stretched the world's body upon it.’ The passage in Timaeus says that god split the world's soul in two halves, ‘brought the two parts together in the form of the Greek letter chi (Χ) and made each into a circle, so that the two met with their ends opposite to the middle, and each also met itself. He gave both parts the uniform movement of the circular orbit that took place in that same space, but made one of these circles the inner one, and the other the outer one’ (quoted from German translation by Otto Apelt, Der philosophischen Bibliothek Band 179. Leipzig 1919). See also Rudolf Steiner's discussion of this in Christianity as Mystical Fact (GA 8) (1902).
• 169. It has not so far been possible to trace this.
• 170. Genesis 2: 7.
• 171. Oken, Lorenz (1779–1851), German naturalist and natural philosopher, professor of medicine at Jena, later at Munich and then Zurich. The quote: ‘The tongue is a cuttlefish’ was freely rendered by Rudolf Steiner, basing on Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie. Jena 1831. Friedrich Frommann, 14. Buch: Zoologie, S. 424,466,496.
• 172. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775–1854). German philosopher.
• 173. ‘The eye owes its existence to light. Light creates an organ for itself from indifferent accessory animal organs, an organ to be like unto itself Thus the eye is created in the light for the light, so that the inner light may come to meet the outer.’ From the introduction to Goethe's Theory of Colour, An Outline. See Rudolf Steiner's Goethe the Scientist (GA 1).

Humanity originally had an all-embracing basic approach which then took different forms depending on the character of nations and the climatic conditions in which they lived. Like the Lord's Prayer, all religious formulae and confessions contain the basic ideas of what is known in the spirit. Some may say these are mere dreams, but they are indeed present. How did they get there, however? Here we must understand that the things we are taught today were not presented in the same way in earliest times. The formulas of religious confessions differed greatly through the ages. The earliest views were in images, not concepts like those we have today. Those images were held on to, in a way, and we find them again and again. Thus insight is always referred to as a light, and wisdom as flowing water. But why was it that earlier peoples were spoken to in images? Let us try and understand how religious teachers would speak to the people before Hermes, before Buddha, Zarathustra and Moses and before the Christ as greatest founder of a religion.

We have to distinguish between everyday and image-based consciousness. We have our everyday object-bound conscious awareness from morning till night. We then see things the way they present themselves to the senses. The other levels of consciousness are hidden from us to begin with. We have all heard of the state of dreamless sleep. This means something very different to an initiate than it does to an ordinary person. The initiate is in a conscious state from going to sleep to waking up. He perceives a world, though in a very different way than one normally does. Ordinary people know nothing of this condition. The level of consciousness one has in dream-filled sleep is better known. We will therefore let dream-filled sleep serve to explain dreamless sleep to us.

Dream-filled sleep shows everything in symbols. It is similar to the state of consciousness an initiate has in the world of the spirit. The initiate also sees images, though these, too, are constantly changing. On the physical plane everything has just one form—a table, for example, or a stone. But the higher we go the more do forms keep changing. The plant changes and moves, the animal even more so, and human beings are most capable of change of all. In the devachan everything is continually changing. One can do certain exercises that will make the colour lift away from a plant one is observing, so that it floats and moves freely in space. One then has to learn to guide such free-floating colours and also sounds to particular objects and spirits. The colour then gives expression to the inner life. The human aura works like this in colour and form. Inner life experience comes to expression in it. But it is never at rest. It is eternal motion, eternal motion being the essence of the higher world. This is also what makes the world of the spirit so confusing to anyone entering into it for the first time. An inexperienced individual is confused by the fleeting manifestations. No entity endowed with spirit can hide its inner life from those who see with the eyes of the spirit. An ordinary person has to consider the outer aspect to draw conclusions as to the inner life. In the world of the spirit, the inner nature of every entity lies openly revealed. There we are united with the inmost nature of things. Today only initiates can have this; they are able to add the inner nature of things to their outer aspect. It is something they do in full conscious awareness. A long time ago, people were able to do this unconsciously.

The further back we go the less were people able to do the things we can do—they could not calculate, nor count. They knew nothing of logic. That is how it was around the middle of the Atlantean period. The Atlanteans could do something else instead, however. Looking at a plant, for example, they could feel a quite specific feeling arise in them. Our own feelings are pale and shadowy compared to theirs. The early Atlanteans did not yet have such definite ideas of colour as we have. They would see a colour rise like a mist from a plant and float freely. Nor would they have seen the colour of a crystal. They would, for instance, see a corona of colours around a ruby, with the ruby itself just a break in it. Even earlier, human beings would not even see the outlines of people, animals and plants. But if they approached an enemy they would see a form arise that was coloured a browny red. A beautiful bluish red would indicate a friend. They thus perceived the inner life in single shades of colour.

If we go even further back, to Lemurian times, all will impulses were also different. The will still had magic powers, showing its relationship to the powers of nature outside. When someone held his hand above a plant and let his will be active, it would immediately begin to grow. When man enclosed himself in a skin, his powers became more remote from those of nature.

Powers of thought are least like those of nature. Even earlier there were entities that would have considered it a monstrous thing to say: ‘I form an idea of something outside me.’ They would see the idea at work outside as an entity. Originally things made up ideas. Today we look at a watch and get an idea of it. But we would not be able to form the ‘watch’ idea if someone had not at one time formed the idea before there were any watches and then made a watch. It is the same with the ideas for all things. The ideas we have about the things in the world were realities in the far distant past. At that time they were put into the things. Everything arises according to such ideas, which is what people still do today when they are creative. The spirits that existed at the time were watching the master mechanic of things, as it were. They had a creative intellect. They were not yet incarnated in the flesh. The principle which dwells in the human body today was still in the keeping of the godhead at that time. Physical life already existed down below on earth, with life forms that were between today's animals and humans and were ready to receive the human soul. We can use a metaphor for this. If many tiny sponges are dipped in water, each will absorb droplets of water, and so the water is divided up into lots of single drops. The physical earth with its teeming throng of creatures was surrounded by spirit then where it is surrounded by air today. Individual souls only came into being when each had absorbed a droplet of the spirit. This also started the process in which man developed a separate object-related conscious mind.

Before that, the soul received everything as though from within from the cosmic soul, for the cosmic soul knew everything. That is the difference between knowledge now and knowledge then. The inner world goes down into the darkness of dreamless sleep when bright daytime consciousness arises. It is the astral body which perceives the outside world, seeing colours, hearing sounds, feeling pleasure and pain, but it cannot do this without the physical body. The astral body is the same as the one that once was part of common soul substance. If everyone were to go to sleep at the same moment and their astral bodies would be all mixed up, with the part of the general world soul that has not entered into individual bodies also mixed in, dreamless sleep would end, colours and sounds would arise in the astral bodies the way it was in the past when all souls still rested in the cosmic soul. Night, as we know it today, was then filled with light, filled with perceptions made in the world of the spirit. The whole of humanity once had this kind of astral perception.

What has humanity been perceiving since then? What has man gained for himself since? His self-awareness, the ability to say ‘I’ to himself. The whole of that earlier consciousness was only an enhanced dream consciousness, and people had no self-awareness. self-awareness was given to human beings when they descended into the body. And this is on the increase all the time. It is the content of present human evolution. ‘I am the I am’ has revealed itself to humanity. That is the true name of Jahveh,⁹⁰ or, more fully: ‘I am he who is, was and shall be.’ In those far distant times human beings had no awareness of this. Where did an ‘I am’ awareness exist then? In the spirit who had all the souls in it like drops in water. The holy spirit is the one who had I-consciousness before there was embodiment. It is the spirit as such which comes to I-awareness in human beings.

In that remote past, teaching was a pouring out of wisdom which came from inside, not outside. Between that time and our own there was an intermediate period, the Atlantean age. When this was at its mid-stage, human beings were able to see outlines of objects and life forms. But everything was still enveloped in a mist of colours for them, with sounds alive in it that had something to say, that were wise. A teaching then developed that later became religious teaching as we know it. Aeons of time ago⁹¹ they had a great school for adepts. Everything we learn today comes from those Turanian adepts.⁹² Pupils passed it on right to the present day. But people taught in a different way in those times. It had to be taken into account that humanity was in an in-between stage. Even the wisest men could not have counted up to five. But by reacting to their inner reality it was possible to illuminate them, teach them wisdom in images. They could not have been given the wisdom in words, for those would not have been understood. Human beings did not have the bright daytime consciousness that we have today. On the other hand it was easy to put them in a state where the godhead illumined them from inside. The teachers would put the pupils into a hypnotic state. This would not have been the hypnotic state used to cause so much mischief today, but it was similar. The teachers would use this sleep state to illuminate the pupils.

They had occult writing at that time, something we might also call occult language. We still have mantras that rank higher in value than thoughts. They are mere shadows, however, compared to the sound compositions of those early times. These were simple, but when a note was sounded, the lost capacity for illumination would be restored. The world of inner illumination then came to people artificially and they would see the cosmic spirits at work as in earlier times. The pupil would receive formulas and specific drawings from the teachers. This would give direct perception of cosmic secrets. This sign, for instance, would tell him how a new plant grows from a seed (Fig. 3).

Today people need to have this explained if they are to think or feel anything as they see it. In those days, the sign had an immediate effect on those who saw it or heard the beat of it. The founders of religions taught the formulas used in those times to the people of later ages.

The further we go back, the more was the cosmic soul still all one. In sleep, the astral bodies of all human beings are still fairly alike. In Atlantis the astral bodies were all alike in this way. It was then possible to give one original wisdom to all people. When the great flood had passed over Atlantean humanity, wisdom could no longer be the same for all. It was then necessary to teach in India the way the Indian body needed it, and differently in Persia and again in Egypt, differently for the Greeks and Romans, and do it differently again for the ancient Germans. But the origins live on in all true forms of religion. In Atlantis, illumination was to have life conveyed to one, not to be taught. The sign of the vortex would arouse an immediate inner response. Today our feelings need concepts to catch fire. The seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer would in the past have been presented like a scale of seven notes, connected with seven particular colours and smells.

The Atlantean pupil thus came to have living experience of the sevenfold nature of man. The Christ, the greatest of the religious teachers, put this into the Lord's Prayer. The power of the Lord's prayer is given to everyone who says it. It is not an actual mantra, though it may have mantric powers. It is a thought-mantra. It did of course have its greatest power in the original language, but because it is a thought-mantra it will not lose its power even if it is translated into a thousand languages. Just as we are able to digest food without knowing the laws that govern digestion, so we may have the benefit of the Lord's Prayer even if we do not have higher knowledge. Someone with higher knowledge will, of course, have even greater benefit of it.

That is the route which has been followed by religious truths. All our souls were somnambulant once in the cosmic soul. This then became differentiated and was drawn down into many bodies. Spiritual perception became obscured, as did the possibility of restoring people to the original state. The religious teachings, and especially the formulas taken from the world of the spirit are only an echo, being now in concepts and words. The wisdom of the Old Testament still speaks of primal ideas and ideas. A faint reflection of primal ideas lives on in ideas. But that original wisdom has not been lost. It still rests in our dormant souls. It is the task of the science of the spirit to bring it to clear conscious awareness. When man will have knowledge of the whole of the outside world after his last incarnation, he is received into the original clairvoyance and brings new illumination, clairvoyant consciousness with him. In the East, it is said that redemption is gained by giving oneself up to universal consciousness. But it will not be like that. Once, before man's first embodiment, there was no self-awareness. But it will be there after the last incarnation. Every drop of soul fluid takes on a specific colour, each a different one. Every one will in the end bring its own colour, and the water, formerly bright and clear, will shimmer in infinitely beautiful, luminous colours, each of which will be separate, however. Everyone brings his own colour, his individual conscious awareness that can never be lost. Universal consciousness will ultimately be all conscious awarenesses in harmony. The many will be one of their own free accord! We have to imagine this in its true nature. Every individual consciousness is then wholly within the universal consciousness.

This human evolution has its purpose. Yes, life has meaning, and the most beautiful meaning is that in the end the human being will lay down a piece of human existence on the altar of the godhead that he has gained for himself And from this the garment will be woven which the Earth Spirit is spinning, as Goethe put it so beautifully and in such rousing terms:

In flooding life and storm of activity up and down I flow, moving to and fro! Birth and the grave, an eternal sea, going one way and t' other, a burning life thus I work at the roaring loom of time making the godhead's living garb.⁹³

• 90. Exodus 3: 14
• 91. One of the sets of notes on the lecture has ‘about 200 000 years ago’.
• 92. Turan was the name of the realm beyond the Amu Daria (formerly Oxus) river in Central Asia.
• 93. Goethe, Faust 1, 4: 501-9.

Yesterday our theme was more connected with the external, exoteric aspect of spiritual science.¹⁷⁴ Today we will have some comments on the inner, esoteric aspect of spiritual science.

When one speaks to a large or also a smaller audience about the discoveries made in spiritual research, which is our mission today, people will soon ask where such knowledge comes from. How can one also come to learn something about the higher worlds oneself? The question is very much to the point. One has to understand, however, that one cannot make one's own observations at a very early stage, and certainly not before one is familiar with the important ideas in the science of the spirit. It is necessary first to make the acquaintance, in a way, of the general ideas and thoughts that are part of the anthroposophical approach. One must have made the effort to gain some idea, and it is possible for everyone to do so, that there is truth in anthroposophy. Finally one must have tried, using human logic, to grasp the inner connections in what is taught in the science of the spirit.

In principle there can be no objection today to someone wanting to ascend through the stages of higher knowledge himself. Yes, people talk a great deal of the dangers and obstacles one meets in occult development—which is the term used for our inner development. There is much talk of hatha-yoga and raja-yoga,¹⁷⁵ but this is really just theory. If the thing is done the right way, if the individual who guides such inner development is also entitled to do so, there is really no danger. It is important to do things the right way, that is what matters. A lecture like the one I am giving today is not designed to give instructions—please let me stress this—for these must always be from person to person. Giving such instructions is a tremendous responsibility, and receiving them one must understand that the chosen individual really deserves one's trust. This trust is absolutely essential.

Occult or inner human development will thus gradually take the individual through the stages of higher knowledge. Let me give you an outline of the essential aspects of this, for information, as I said, not in form of instructions.

When someone has reached the summit of understanding, when someone is up on the mountain top, he has an open view in all directions. That is how it is in physical existence and also in the process of gaining insight. One does not have that open view when one has not yet reached the top but is on the way up. As one climbs higher, one is able to perceive more and more, but a great deal continues to be hidden by the mountain. This image of a mountain is a good one for inner development. Everyone who seeks to ascend to levels of higher insight must start from a point that is right for him. This means, people are different on this earth, also in their physical, etheric and astral constitutions. The outer natures of a Hindu, a person from the Near East, a European or American differ, much more so than someone who does not have occult knowledge may think. Exercises suitable for the inner development of anyone who has the Hindu nature cannot be used in that way for a Western person. It was wrong, therefore, to transfer the Oriental yoga teaching to Europe. This has done much harm. A Hindu's much softer body can be developed in a very different way than a European organism which has grown much harder due to Western civilization. Human natures thus differ much more than you may think. An anatomist cannot tell you anything about this, but someone who is clairvoyant and looks inside knows how tremendously natures differ.

We can divide present-day humanity into three types. There are still those for whom the Oriental yoga initiation is essentially right, others for whom the gnostic Christian way is open, and finally those—and they are by far the greatest in number—for whom the way known as the Rosicrucian way from the 14th century is the right one. Please note, these ways do not lead to different insights, for once you are up on the summit all things are the same. But the ways that lead to the summit are and must be different.

Many things can be achieved by taking the gnostic Christian way, and it is possible to gain the most sublime insights. But the Rosicrucian way is suitable for modern people because they may find themselves in situations where doubts arise and trouble looms because of our present-day way of life, and these must be removed for the sake of the individuals concerned and for their work in the world. This is only possible if one goes through inner training based on the Rosicrucian method, which is the right one for the Western world.

Let me present some aspects of gnostic Christian initiation, so that you may see it as a field about which much can still be learned today. I am then going to go straight on to Rosicrucian training. We'll leave the Oriental yoga way aside for today.

The Christian way is laid down in a text that is little understood outside occult circles. The gospel of John gives a complete outline of the right way of Christian initiation.

John's gospel is one of the most profound texts in the world, but one has to be able to read it in the right way, that is, one should not think that just reading it is enough and the right thing to do. It is a book for life. Above all you have to understand that even the first words are not written just for people to read or for philosophical speculation. They are written for meditation. We have to have them the proper way, however, not in the usual translation. The first verses of John's gospel must be created out of the substance of the language so that one has not only the meaning of the sentences but also their sound quality. The sound quality or value still matters for genuine occult life.

To meditate, we enter deeply into particular formulas, sentences or even words. But meditation as an important means of inner development is not a matter of entering into something we are given by our occult teacher in a philosophical or intellectual way. It is a matter of entering into the actual sound qualities. If you were to think about a sentence your teacher has given you, you could only develop thoughts about it that you already have. You are, however, to have something new. That is the important point. Sentences given for meditation open up the gates to the world of the spirit for you. They are based on experience gained over hundreds of years. Every letter, every turn of phrase is known to have an effect on the soul. You therefore need to meditate those first sentences to the letter. Correctly translated they are:

In the origin was the word, and the word was with god, and a god was the word.

This was in the origin with god.

All things have come into being through it, and except by this, nothing of what has arisen has come into being.

In it was life, and the life was the light of humanity. And the light shone into the darkness, but the darkness did not grasp it.

There came to be a human being, sent by god, his name John.

He came to bear witness that he might bear witness to the light and that through him all might believe.

He was not the light but a witness of the light.

For the true light that enlightens all human beings was to enter into the world.

It was in the world, and the world came into being through it, but the world did not recognize it.

Into individual human beings (all the way to the I-human beings) it came, but the individual human beings (the I-human beings) did not receive it.

Those however who did receive it were able to reveal themselves through it to be god's children.

Those who put their trust in its name have come into being not out of the blood, not out of the will of the flesh, not out of the will of man, but out of god.

And the word came to be flesh and dwelt among us and we have heard its teaching, the teaching of the one son of the father, full of loving devotion and truth.

If we had more time together I could tell you many things about these first sentences. Hundreds and hundreds of people have gone through the things I am now telling you about this Christian initiation. It has become practical experience for thousands. Let me just briefly indicate some stages of Christian initiation.

The pupils would first of all be told: For weeks, months, years you must set some time aside every morning when you let these first lines of John's gospel come alive in your soul. Turn your attention away from everything that is going on around you during this time. You must turn blind and deaf to everything around you, and these words should arise in your soul as though you were hearing them, day by day, over and over again.

This exercise will first of all have a particular effect on the soul. Its magic brings it about that such a person suddenly finds his dreams becoming regular, assuming regular forms. And then a moment will come when the individual knows that he is not in a dream world. Instead he'll know that he has a new reality around him—imaginative astral reality. Just as in ordinary conscious awareness we see tree and shrub around us, so we now see the things experienced in yonder world. Initially like dream images, and then more and more in a living vision seen in the waking state, the pupil will see the first twelve chapters of John's gospel before him.

After this experience the teacher of Christian initiation will say to his pupil: ‘You must now prepare for the experience of the 13th chapter. Imagine a plant. This grows out of the mineral world. If it were able to think and have inner responses it would have to say to the mineral world: “I grow out of you. You may be a lower world than I am, but I could not possibly live without you.” And it would have to bend down to the mineral world in gratitude and say: “I thank you, stone! I owe to you my whole existence.”’ An animal would have to speak in the same way to the plant. And man would have to bend down to the lower worlds of nature and have the same inner response. And everyone who has advanced more on the social scale should bend down before those who are below him and say: ‘Without you I could not have life.’

The pupil has to practice giving himself up to this completely and do so for weeks and months. Then two symptoms will arise, which are the same for everyone. He will first of all experience both the external and the inner symptom as a particular fact. He will see himself as the thirteenth, who washes the feet of the twelve. In washing their feet, Christ Jesus sought to make this great truth apparent to the twelve. This wondrous inner experience comes to the human being in the process of initiation. It also goes as far as external symptoms. He will experience something that feels as if he was dipping his feet in water. Nobody needs to be afraid of this; it will soon pass.

When the pupil has gone this far, the teacher will come and say: ‘Now you must enter into another sphere of inner responsiveness. In life pain and suffering come to us from all directions. You must enter into a condition where you meet all the suffering and all the pain that are coming from all directions in this world as an upright human being, so that they cannot harm you. You must stay with these things for weeks and months.’ Then a time comes when an astral symptom shows itself. He'll see himself in a vision of the scourging, with a sensation rather like it felt all over the body, which will pass; but the result will be that the pupil lets this feeling enter into the whole of his body. With this he has reached a level of maturity where he is able to land upright as life plies its scourge.

For the third stage he is given the instruction: ‘You must now enter into an inner feeling of how things would be with you if you not only had to bear pain and suffering but had scorn and derision poured over all that is most sacred to you. You must be able to stand up, using the powers of your inmost soul, and have a centre in you that enables you to stand erect.’ A new vision will then come, where the pupil sees himself wearing the crown of thorns. The external symptom of this is a kind of headache. This indicates, right down into the limbs, that this great experience has come.

Then comes the fourth station. The earthly body must become an outside thing for the pupil. Most people feel it is their I. The body has to be like a piece of wood, something external. The pupil must learn to say not ‘I am walking through this door’, but ‘I carry the body through this door.’ His body must be very much an object to him. Having lived into this for weeks and months, the pupil will have a vision, an astral experience where he sees himself crucified. That is the fourth station. Stigmata will appear for a brief period during meditation as an external symptom on the hands, feet and in the right side—not the left, as is generally thought. They indicate that this degree of development has also entered into the flesh.

The stages that follow cannot be discussed, for we do not have words for them. The fifth stage is the mystic death, where the pupil will first truly have the experience of a black curtain between him and reality. He will feel lost in a way, utterly isolated, as it were, until insight is gained. It is as if the world of the flesh has vanished, and something like an impenetrable black curtain lies before the eye of the soul. This is a moment everyone must go through on this way to initiation. You encounter all the truly great suffering and pain that may rest deep down in the soul, and all the evil there is in the world. This is the descent into hell. Then it seems to the pupil as if the veil tears apart and he looks into the other world.

There follows the entombment, an experience where one feels at one with the planets, and the seventh level, of which we cannot speak, for the individual has to separate his thinking from his brain to have even an inkling of it. This is ascension into heaven.

My aim in giving you this description of Christian initiation was to help you understand what it is about. It is a way full of renunciation. It may be followed quietly, attracting no notice, and there are people among you who have gone through all this. It happens between the lines in life, as it were, and the more serious it is the less will it be visible on the outside.

People must go through the Rosicrucian initiation to be armed against anything that may come from the outside. Many of the things you read about this in books are apt to make you think that the Rosicrucians are really charlatans, for that is how learned people often describe them.

True Rosicrucians have recognized one another by a secret sign since the 14th century. They must never speak of the true nature of Rosicrucianism to an outsider. But from a particular point in time that came in the 19th century it has indeed become necessary to tell people the elementary aspects of Rosicrucian initiation. Human beings are very gradually growing up and developing the maturity they will need if they are to learn something about these things. We'll not be able to go into the question today as to why it has to be like this and why the more sublime secrets must still remain hidden.

Rosicrucian initiation is also in seven stages. These are 1) study, Rosicrucian study; 2) gaining imaginative perception; 3) learning the occult script; 4) finding the philosopher's stone; 5) living experience of the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm; 6) entering wholly into the macrocosm, and 7) godliness.

Let me say once again that I can only give an outline, and no more.

Study is not the kind of learning we generally know. Instead one has to discover that there is a way of thinking that is still fluid and real, keeping out all sensory perceptions of the world around us. Western philosophers deny the existence of such a way of thinking.¹⁷⁶ They say it is only possible to think if the thought still has a residue of sensory perception in it. Those gentlemen do not know that other people have been able to do this, and they do not wish to believe it because they themselves are unable to think in this way. Man must learn to forget everything, to leave everything aside that influences the senses from the outside, yet without being an empty vessel. This is possible if one enters wholly into a pure thought content that has no sensual connection, as given by the spiritual scientist, and reflects on the thoughts that evolve. I have shown this way in my books, writing them in such a way that one element arises from another, as in a living being, so that one thought follows organically from another. You give yourself selflessly to the thought, and an inner separation results. Anyone who wishes to move to a higher level must read things written out of the science of the spirit in this way. Anyone who does not wish to reach a higher level may read them like an ordinary book. The former is the case because higher perception takes the human being into other worlds. You are now living on the physical plan—plan, not plane, for like the plan of a house it has nothing to do with being level. You thus come to different plans, into different worlds. At first you live here in the physical world, then you enter into the astral, imaginative world. It is a world we may describe as follows. Imagine a plant, green, with a red flower. You do special exercises that enable you not only to see what the senses see but to perceive how a cold flame form arises from the plant, is it were. You perceive floating colours. You thus perceive spiritual entities that you cannot perceive with the ordinary senses. Everything evaporates from the surface of things and becomes the expression of purely astral events. This world is much more real than our sense-perceptible world, for the world of the senses has been created out of that world of the spirit. This physical world has condensed out of the astral world. Matter is condensed spirit to the true occultist, and we can dissolve it again. The whole of our sense-perceptible world is condensed astral reality.

Behind this astral world is yet another world which may best be described by showing you how human beings come to gain living experience of it. When someone does the exercises I have described in my books, his dreams will first of all become regular. Try and enter into the nature of dreams. What is a dream? Let me give you some examples. They are taken from life, for I do not speak of other things.

Someone has dreamt he has caught a tree frog and then finds he has taken hold of a corner of his bed covers. The dream symbolized the occurrence. Another example is someone dreaming that he's in a dark, musty hole of a cellar full of spiders' webs. He wakes up with a headache. Some dreams may involve high drama. A student is standing at the door of the lecture theatre. Another one comes in jostles him, and a duel is fought with pistols. The shot rings out—and the chair next to the bed has fallen over. This minor incident has come to symbolic expression in the whole dramatic story of the dream. A farmer's wife dreams she's going to town and entering a church where the priest's sermon is of sublime things. Just when it gets really sublime, the priest begins to change. It looks as if he is growing wings and then he suddenly begins to crow. At that moment the farmer's wife wakes up and the cock is crowing outside. The cock's crow has been transformed and taken symbolic form in the dream.

Dreams are thus highly creative. Everything is chaotic in them. But life is given to this world and everything becomes harmonious and regular if you gain the certainty, up to a point, that this represents a reality. This is how it first shows itself, and later one takes things perceived in the world of dreams across into everyday life. Something develops which we may call ‘continuity of conscious awareness’.

Human beings also have dreamless sleep. The Rosicrucian pupil next learns to perceive entities and events around himself in a sleep state. The revelations of the spirit world sound forth from the darkness of dreamless sleep. In the Pythagorean schools this was called the world of the music of the spheres. The world of the spirit sounds forth. If you really want to hear something about the devachan, this must be such that it is described to you as a world of sound. Goethe, who had this degree of Rosicrucian initiation, knew of this: ‘The sun proclaims its old devotion in rival song with brother spheres.’ That is either nonsense or a higher truth. The physical sun does not resound, but the spirit of the sun is a real, resounding entity. And Goethe stayed with the metaphor; in part 2 of Faust, he wrote: ‘Resounding now for ears of spirit the new day is already being born.’ He wrote like that because the music of the spheres of which the Pythagoreans spoke was a reality to him. I can only refer to these things briefly. All things will speak to us, a new revelation will come forth.

Those are the stages the Rosicrucian pupil can reach by means of exercises. The worlds are always completely different, and someone who only knows the physical world can have no idea of the things one can learn in other worlds. One thing is the same for all worlds, however, and that is logical thinking. Our perceptions are entirely different in the astral, in the devachanic world, but the laws of thinking are the same in all three worlds. A Rosicrucian pupil must therefore first learn this way of thinking, so that he may keep to the proper path and not lose his way.

The 2nd stage consists in gaining imaginative perception. I can only tell you a few things that should explain what is meant by this. When you see a tear rolling down a cheek, you conclude that the soul is filled with sadness. When you see a cheerful face you conclude that the soul is cheerful. You draw these conclusions in relation to people. When you want to ascend to imaginative perception you must do this in relation to the whole world. The life of plants, animals and stones should express the physiognomy of the world soul for you. Some things must be like our cheerfulness, other things like tears wept by the earth spirit. This must become very real to the person. And much can be experienced in this way. The secret of the holy grail, the ideal of medieval Rosicrucian pupils, is connected with this.

Let us take an example. The Rosicrucian pupil would meet his teacher who would give him an exercise to do. I am going to put this in the form of a dialogue, though it has never been spoken dialogue. But what it conveys was practised and became living experience. It is entirely true and absolutely correct in every detail. The pupil would come to his teacher who would say to him: ‘Look at the plant. It extends its root into the soil, it grows upwards, opening its calyx at the top, and in there are its organs of fertilization and reproduction. Chastely and nobly and in purity it lets the sun's ray kiss it; the light, the sacred lance of love, which penetrates the calyx as a sunbeam and calls forth the potential that lies in the plant's organs of fertilization. You would have the wrong idea if in comparing the plant with a human being you were to think that the root is the head and the flower the lower part. Man is an inverted plant.’

The occultist thus sees the inverted plant in man and the inverted human being in the plant, with the animal between the two. ‘Look at the plant. It is the arm of the cross that goes down, the animal is the horizontal arm, and man the vertical arm.’¹⁷⁷ That is the original significance of the cross. It is the symbol for plant, animal and man as three realms of nature. Plato therefore wrote that the world's soul was crucified on the world's body. And the teacher would go on to say to the pupil: ‘Look at the human being, the human being in the flesh. What is this human flesh? Compare it with the matter contained in a plant. Plant matter is chaste and pure. Human flesh is full of passion and desire. Man is higher up on the evolutional scale, but this also means that he has taken in passion and desire.’ And the occult pupil would begin to intuit a future human being whose flesh would be pure and chaste again, like the chaste calyx of a flower which holds out its organs of fertilization to the sunbeam's sacred lance of love. Then his productive powers would reach out to the spirit just as today the plant reaches out to the lance of love, to the light. Those who sought to achieve this went through a transformation of the flesh. And so the pupil was presented with the great ideal of the human being who one day will be as pure and chaste as the plant. This ideal is called the holy grail. It is one of the images that speak to the heart and the whole soul. The pupil was able to rise higher not through thoughts but through images that influence the whole soul, captivating heart, mind and soul. Only then can imaginative perception be achieved.

The 3rd level involves learning the occult script. Something exists in this world which in occult life is called the vortex. It is to be found everywhere in nature and in the world of the spirit. Imagine you are looking up to the Orion nebula, which is a distinctive spiral. If you were a seer you would see that a vortex emerges like a figure 6, with a second vortex that is darker. The two intertwine. This also occurs in the world of the spirit.

We live in the age that follows the great Atlantean flood. Before that, our earliest ancestors were human beings of a very different kind. People imagine today that in those times human beings were just as they are now. But the physical conditions were completely different then. Atlantis was always in darkness, enveloped in masses of dense fog. It is important for you to know this. Old German mythology holds memories of Niflheim [land of mist] and Nibelungs [creatures of the mist]. Under those conditions the human constitution was very different. The Atlanteans also had a completely different culture. You might get an idea of this if I were to give you details of the way people heard articulated sounds in all things at that time. There were no moral laws. If someone wanted to know how to relate to a neighbour, he could not appeal to some authority or other; he would listen to the waves and then he would know.

It was a culture of which no trace seems to remain. It perished. When did this happen? We can see that in the heavens. About 8 centuries before the Christ was born the sun rose in the Ram. It takes about 2160 years to move through a sign of the zodiac. The sun moved into the sign of the Ram, or the Lamb, about 800 years before Christ. People felt the new constellation had brought them the new fruitfulness of spring, something new and good. We see from this that they felt the Lamb or the Ram to be important. Many things point to this, among them the legend of the Argonauts, in which the golden fleece plays such a role. The Christ himself is called the Lamb of God. The lamb was the symbol for offering veneration. Before that, the sun had been in the sign of the Bull, hence the veneration of the bull in Egyptian and Persian culture. Even earlier the sun passed through the sign of the Twins. In accord with this, duality played a great role in the Persian teachings of Ormazd and Ahriman. Traces of this still persisted in ancient Germanic culture. Before that, the sun was passing through Cancer. This was the period that followed the Atlantean flood. A vortex had occurred in the realm of the spirit.

This constellation with the occult sign of Cancer can still be seen in the calendar today. Many such signs are known to man. In reality this is nothing but a recreation of primal forces of nature. If you train your heart and mind to understand the occult signs you will steel your will with this occult script. You get to know the ways of the spirits that are behind nature. A faint echo remains in symbolic signs such as the pentagram and hexagram. One occult sign you often read about is the swastika.¹⁷⁸ The strange explanations given for it are quite unbelievable. In reality it is nothing but the sign for the astral sense organs, the wheels or lotus flowers, several of which are potentially present in the astral body—in the heart, the larynx, between the eyebrows. Astral vision begins when the last named of these wheels begins to turn. The swastika is the sign for this astral organ of perception.

The 4th level is called preparing the philosopher's stone. This is a reality. At the end of the 18th century someone who had got hold of something, but not exactly the right idea, put quite a good description of the philosopher's stone in a journal. He actually did not know himself how good it was. At that time a number of things from the occult school were wrongly made public, and so someone also described the philosopher's stone. This is actually something familiar to everyone, and many people handle it daily without having an idea. To help you see what this is about, follow me in a brief line of thought. Consider human breathing. We inhale oxygen, which changes our blue blood to red, and we exhale carbon dioxide, which means we are all the time exhaling poisonous matter. Plants on the other hand take up the carbon dioxide exhaled by humans and animals and retain the carbon to build up their bodies. They release the oxygen, so that humans can inhale it again. This is a cycle. Occultists attached great importance to this process. If you dig up a plant form that has become coal today you can see that the plant built up its body of carbon. Humans take in oxygen, changing blue blood into red; plants take in carbon dioxide and return the oxygen which humans then take in again.

Let us try and see what happens when the breathing process is regulated in a particular way in Rosicrucian training. The way in which it is done can only be passed on from person to person, but it is possible to speak of the effect. ‘A steady drip will hollow the stone’, as the saying goes. And that applies with the process I am now describing. The occult pupil is instructed by his teacher on doing his breathing exercises out of the spirit. It is an instruction, therefore, to regulate his breathing process in a particular way and this makes it possible for the human mind to expand a little as time goes on. It is something of which human beings normally know nothing and has to do with something that happens in the plant. The plant now becomes at one with him. Normally human beings exhale carbon dioxide and take in oxygen. The pupil must bring this to mind consciously. In his breathing he consciously experiences the change from carbon to oxygen, blue blood to red blood. He learns to do something in himself that is normally left to the plant. He will then be able to build up his own body. He learns to do so by means of regular breathing. This, then, is a real process in which the human being learns to purify his flesh also at the physical level. The alchemy of the human body lies in this. The human being is transformed into the vehicle for a pure, chaste incarnation that may be compared to a plant. The pupil is aware of something sublime, light and bright. He knows he only had to go through the flesh. That is the transformation of coal into diamond. You'll now understand the significance of bringing rhythm into the breathing in Rosicrucian training and know what was meant by the philosopher's stone. The regulated breathing process is the way to the philosopher's stone.

I am only touching on things lightly, but you'll understand that something profound lies behind the search for the philosopher's stone, something connected with the transformation of the whole of mankind, so that human beings will be different from the way they are today—they and the whole earth. That is how great and strong and firm, morally great, the powers of soul must be if man is to make the flesh, too, part of the process of redemption. We also have to redeem everything that exists around us, all creation.

The 5th level is to enter deeply into the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm. A great occultist of medieval times, someone we must first learn to read, used a beautiful image to show the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm. Paracelsus said: You see there the individual letters. Man is the word made up of the letters. And so we have to see man spread out in the whole of nature, and man himself as a compendium of nature. Paracelsus referred to a cholera patient as Arsenicus, for example, for the powers active in him are the same as those active in arsenic.

But there is more. When someone concentrates really hard on a particular part inside him, the point between the eyebrows—this, of course, is only a reference point—he will have a particular experience in which he is taken into the inner events of the great world. These correspond to the part which in the human microcosm lies between the eyes. And so the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm has to be experienced bit by bit. Entering deeply into his inner life, the pupil must get to know the outside world.

At the 6th and 7th levels the Rosicrucian pupil comes to be at one with the whole world. He gains true knowledge of the outside world. And his feelings and his whole soul become one with the outside world to the same degree. This is the condition known as godliness. The earth's body is then his body. And the pupil achieves the stage known as being at one with the universe. It is a long road along one particular path. Those who have gone through it become messengers of the spiritual world, speaking from real experience.

It is a road anyone can follow today—certainly in principle. It will take a long time for some, and a shorter time for others. One of the best theosophists, the late Subba Row, said about the time needed, which people ask about so often: ‘It is true that one person needed 70 incarnations, another 7 incarnations, someone else again 70 years or perhaps 7 years; there have been people who achieved it in 7 months, and some in just 7 days, depending on their karma from former lives on earth.’ Setting out on the road one must be patient and persevere, knowing that one will be exposed to great dangers unless one has first gone through character training.

Let me give you an analogy. Take a green liquid produced by mixing blue and yellow. You can separate the blue from the yellow by using a chemical agent. Before that, the individual properties of the two solutions were not apparent. Now they show those properties. And that is how it is with the human being. High and low qualities are mixed. The lower ones are prevented from taking full effect because the higher ones have been added. If you now separate the two by doing the exercises you may find that someone who until now was more or less bearable grows malicious and cunning and also shows a whole lot of other bad characteristics. This is something you have to understand. The danger can definitely be prevented by doing specific preliminary exercises that establish a particular inner morality full of character.

The pupil must first learn to keep strict control of his thoughts. He must practise making one thought the focus of his inner life for a long period, the more intensely so the better. He must stick with it and let all thoughts follow from it. This exercise must be done for at least five minutes every day. The more the better, but one should not overdo it.

2) It is necessary to be able to take initiative in one's actions. This is done by the pupil doing one particular thing on his own initiative every day. It may be something quite small and insignificant, for instance watering one's flowers. After a time one takes up another initiative.

3) One has to gain mastery over pleasure and pain. There must be no more of being on top of the world one moment and down in the dumps the next. This mastery will make you more subtly receptive, but you yourself must be the master, not your inner responses.

4)There is need to be positive. A Persian legend about Christ Jesus will show you what is meant. The Christ was walking with some of his disciples. A dead, partly decomposed dog was lying by the roadside. The disciples turned away and said: ‘How horrible that creature is!’ The Christ stopped, however, and said: ‘Look how beautiful the animal's teeth are!’ You can look for and find something beautiful in the ugliest things, something great in the smallest of things. One must always look for the positive side.

5) One has to learn to be completely unbiased towards anything new. Absence of bias to the highest degree. People tend to say: ‘I've never heard of this before, seen this before; I don't believe it!’ We have to learn in the widest possible sense never to say something is impossible. There should be a place in our hearts where one allows it to be possible, say, that the church tower is at an angle if someone says it is at an angle. We should at least consider it to be possible if we hear such a thing.

The 6th level consists in bringing the 5 qualities into harmony.

The pupil will then have developed such inner strength that he will be protected from anything occult training might otherwise do to him. It would be wrong to set limits to occult training and say: ‘All I want is the ethical value.’ Anyone wishing to enter into the higher worlds must follow the indicated route. The road to the most sublime insights is also the way of greatest compassion. We must gain such compassion from insight, not with phrases. When someone has broken a leg all the people standing around full of compassion will be of no use, only the one individual who knows what to do and does it properly. Merely to preach theosophy is like standing in front of the stove and saying: ‘It is your duty to get the room warm.’ And it is the same if you tell people to practise brotherly love. Just as you have to put wood in the stove and put a match to it, so you have to give people what they need if their souls are to unite in one great brotherhood, and that is insight. True insight is the fuel for the great brotherly union among human beings. Today we have the age of materialism, and because of this people have gone their separate ways.

• 174. Public lecture on spiritual research and its mission given in Vienna on 21 February 1907. Rudolf Steiner spoke on the same subject in Berlin on 11 October 1906 (see Supersensible Knowledge (GA 55); tr. R. Stebbing. Hudson & London: Anthroposophic Press & Rudolf Steiner Press 1987.
• 175. Hatha-Yoga uses mainly external methods such as holding one's breath and special body positions. Raja-Yoga is the 6th to 8th stages on the way to salvation in Sankhya philosophy—concentration, meditation, complete absorption.
• 176. Rudolf Steiner was probably thinking mainly of E. von Hartmann. See note 166.
• 177. Rudolf Steiner often referred to this, e.g. in a lecture he gave in Basel on 22 Nov. 1907 (in GA 100); Typescript notes EN 50 at Rudolf Steiner House Library, London. There he said: ‘You draw the plant vertically, pointing to the earth, the human being also vertically, but pointing away from the earth, and the animal horizontally.’ Also in Berlin on 29 May 1905, in The Temple Legend GA 93); tr. J. Wood. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1985. This is in contrast to the drawing for the lecture given in Leipzig on 16 February 1907 (in this volume); see note 168.
• 178. The next public lecture Rudolf Steiner gave was the one on 29 April 1906 (in this volume). There followed the fundamental course of lectures he gave on 22 August–4 September 1906 in Stuttgart (At the Gates of Spiritual Science; GA 95).

When we speak of prayer in the Christian sense we have to understand above all that prayer is really nothing else but to enter deeply, giving oneself up, into the divine. In the great religions where people seek to achieve this giving up of self more by entering into deep thought, people speak of meditation; in religions where the devotion comes from the heart more than the head, more from the personal sphere, it is called prayer. In the Christian religion this devotion has gained personal character; in the old religions it was more unconscious and impersonal. People knew thousands of years ago that there is an eternal, divine principle. Example of slave who said to himself: One life of many. People of those times therefore had hope in life, courage, strength and certainty. It was a kind of looking out from life in time to life eternal. A time had to come, however, when the human being looked up to his god in a personal way. Exoteric Christian teaching is that a tremendous amount depends on the individual person who went from birth to death. This is also why meditation assumed the more personal aspect of prayer. But we should not forget that in the Christian faith there is an exemplary prayer: ‘Father, if it can be done, let this cup pass away from me, but not my will but your will be done.’¹⁰³

If you develop this mood, you have a Christian prayer. A prayer in which someone asks things for himself his personal affairs, is not a Christian prayer. You may have two armies about to do battle, with both praying for victory. Two farmers, one asking for rain, the other for sunshine. What is the god supposed to do? True Christian prayer has nothing to do with such personal wishes and desires. The personal prayer, the true prayer, may also include personal petitions, but the guiding principle must be: Not my will but your will be done. This exemplary Christian prayer of Christ Jesus, the Lord, thus gives the mood which prayer should have. There are many Christian prayers, but the Lord's Prayer, the prayer of prayers, is the one of which we can say that there is hardly anything else in the world that contains so much and such important things as this Lord's Prayer. And we then remember how Christ Jesus introduced this prayer. ‘Go into seclusion to say your prayers’, he said.¹⁰⁴

Everywhere, in all religions, you have formulas for meditation and magic formulas. Such magic formulas are of the same significance for meditation as actual meditations. People sought to give themselves up to their god in meditation with them, and they also wanted to give themselves up to their god by practising magic. Christ Jesus warned, however: ‘Do not pray for the things that happen in the streets; go deep down into your innermost being when you pray.’ Something of the divine nature lives in human beings, a drop of the divine spirit, and it is the same in substance as the godhead. The ocean as a whole and the drop of water are also the same in substance.

And so let us consider the universe and man in the way in which it was customary in the earliest esoteric schools. We'll go back to the time when the human bodies that were in the process of preparation were waiting, as it were, for the divine seed, the human soul coming down from the godhead. At that time the world was populated by plants and other things, including animal-human bodies. Man as he is today did not yet exist. The souls were gradually preparing the present-day body for themselves. A spiritual fluid was all around the earth. And now imagine someone taking a hundred tiny sponges and taking up a drop of the fluid in each. You now have a drop of the divine in each. Before, souls had been in the ocean of the godhead, now they were incarnated drops. Those souls were still very imperfect when they thus incarnated for the first time, but they already held the potential for man's higher nature—atman, buddhi, manas—which was to unfold and develop in life on earth. The animal-human being already had the four lower members at the time, but it needed the soul to transform them so that atman, buddhi and manas might arise.

Let us now consider this process of evolution esoterically, taking two points of view. Firstly, man grows increasingly more divine in atman, buddhi and manas; secondly, the drop of godhead is in him.

Let us first of all consider higher man in his divine aspect. In the Christian schools it was taught that one should first consider the highest aspect of the divine spirit; man would have risen to this when he came to the end of his evolution. Atman, the will, is this highest principle, will-like by nature. When man has reached perfection, his will shall be his greatest power. The will must then flow out from him. Every resolution made in the will shall immediately become action. Our atman is will-like by nature. In atman, the godhead first of all let its will flow into us. The divine will lives in us and in all things.

The second higher principle in us is the buddhi. Streaming down into man, the godhead goes from atman to buddhi. How does the divine will work? We can only gain understanding by considering the concept of offering or sacrifice. Imagine you are looking into a mirror. You see your own figure. This figure is similar to you. Now imagine a creative will in you. You would then have given everything you have, all of your life, all of your essential being to the image. You would then live in this image. This is how you may think of the creative sacrifice of the divine will. The divine will is not merely reflected in things, in the images, but sacrifices everything, putting it into them, and you so have the sacrificed divine will in the whole of cosmic space. A Christian thus sees a mirror image of the godhead, the divine will, in everything that exists in this world. You have the sacrificed godhead in the cosmic space, and this mirror image of the godhead was called the ‘kingdom’ in esoteric Christian terminology. The divine will multiplied millions of times and reflected again―that is what the ‘kingdom’ was to them. The creative atman, the buddhi living in us, the creative spirit in the world—that was the ‘kingdom’.

Look up now to see the part of the godhead that lives in the cosmos in its mirror image. This is able to identify the individual entity by its ‘name’ which is the manas, the spirit self, in us, it is our ‘name’. Manas is the name in us and in every single thing outside us. The name of every single thing was thus hallowed to man. And the pupil would be told: ‘You must clearly understand that when you eat a bite of bread that this, too, is something in which the godhead lies and it shall therefore be hallowed to you.’

In so far as our name is in God, it is manas, the name. Our buddhi thus is the kingdom. In our atman lives the divine will. These three are the divine elements in man. Man received these divine elements as part of his essential being, and in the world outside they are called name, kingdom and will.

And now, you see, the Christ wanted to teach his disciples by saying to them: the godhead was called the father, and the divine principle heaven. Union with the divine was only possible in that this divine principle now gave itself up to the three higher elements in man.

What does a Christian have to say, to bring this to expression?

Our father, who are in the heavens,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done on earth
as it is in the heavens.

The first three petitions of the Lord's Prayer thus speak in a quite specific way of man's three higher principles. These first three petitions have arisen from the higher spiritual nature of man.

Let us now consider the four lower members of man in esoteric terms—physical body, ether body, astral body and I.

The physical body is the one man has in common with all minerals, with physical matter and forces going in and out day by day. To develop his physical body, man must plead to be given the physical matter which is out there in the physical world. We have our ether body in common with all the people around us. The astral body is something more personal.

In the ether body we have things that are held in common in every family, in every nation. You belong more to a genus, a species, because you have an ether body. You are more of an individual because you have an astral body. You are a problem to the ether bodies around you if you are not in harmony with them, and this was called ‘trespass’ or ‘fault’ something we do to others with our ether body. But we also suffered harm ourselves because of this. Trespass is thus connected with the ether or life body. You commit a fault against someone near to you by injuring or damaging his ether body or life body. Take care not to do this, for only then will your own faults be forgiven.

What makes the astral body thrive? When the individual deviates from the true way he falls into temptation. The astral body is subject to temptation. Every way in which the individual sins is temptation.

The I is the fount of human independence but also of egotism, of selfishness. In this respect the I is the ‘evil’, which is the symbol for this. Malum is Latin for both ‘apple’ and ‘evil’. The Fall is the evil, the failing that arises from egotism.

When a Christian wants to ask that his four lower members may make good progress he will say, speaking for these entities:

Give us today our daily bread
and forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those who trespass against us,
and lead us not into temptation
but deliver us from evil.

These are the other four petitions in the Lord's Prayer.

These were the petitions Christians were instructed in the esoteric schools to ask, they are the four formulas for the four lower members of the human being. Consider the last four petitions in the Lord's Prayer with reference to man's lower nature, and you find you have four petitions for the lower members, just as you have the first three petitions for the higher principles of man. The seven petitions in the Lord's Prayer thus contain the doctrine of the sevenfold nature of man, as taught in the science of the spirit.

In all the great religions there is not a prayer, a formula that has not been taken from the whole profound world wisdom. These prayers have their profound effect for the very reason that they have been born from this. It is thanks to the original wisdom of the world that the great religions have had an influence through thousands of years.

The father stands for the original essence of the world. It cannot be put more beautifully than it has been put in the Lord's Prayer. Because of this the Lord's Prayer touches human hearts and has great strength. You can't say simple people know nothing of this wisdom. They gain just as much from it. It is the same as when they take delight in flowers, having no idea of the wisdom that has created them. And so their souls may take delight in the Lord's Prayer without grasping its wisdom. The knowledge that lives in the prayer may not be grasped, but it can give people this strength. Those who gave the prayers to humanity, took them out of the most profound wisdom; hence the power of the great cosmic prayer. It is the secret of these prayers that they were taken from original wisdom by initiates and the founders of religions.

Now the time has come when people must know the deeper meaning of these prayers. We should say the Lord's Prayer daily. Everything we need to know about the nature of man is in that prayer. And by doing so, a person would receive what theosophical wisdom has to say about the nature of man.

The esotericism of the school created by Paul the Apostle was profound. Outside, Christianity was presented in an exoteric way. Dionysius the Areopagite was asked by Paul to take care of this esoteric wisdom. And so the realm of the spirit was envisaged with the dominions, principalities and powers, and people said to themselves: if we live the way the Lord's Prayer demands, we rise through dominions, principalities and powers all the way to the cherubim and seraphim and to the godhead itself in the Lord's Prayer.

This gives you the three stages: ‘For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory’, three stages in the realm of the spirit.

It is difficult to speak particularly about the Amen. All I can say is that it is an ancient formula that has become a bit mutilated.

We have seen, therefore, in how far the Lord's Prayer with the powerful effect it has on the human soul represents the doctrine of the sevenfold nature of man. This makes it the most effective prayer. This rhythm which is touched on in the soul came to the awareness of people who had the esoteric knowledge that a Christian who has said the Lord's Prayer has prayed human theosophy, has lived in the prayer. This theosophy is nothing new; it is something that lives in all hearts and is grasped in the spirit so that the light of understanding may extend to the divine realm. If this happens in human hearts and souls, people will find the way to the greatest heights of the spirit which they are capable of reaching.

• 103. Matthew 26: 39.
• 104. Matthew 6: 6.

The spiritual science movement has not developed in our time as the wilful action of an individual or of someone or other. It has to do with the whole of human evolution and as such must be considered to be one of the most important cultural impulses. To gain insight into this mission of the spiritual science movement we need to enter into the past and future life of humanity. Individuals have gone through a process of evolution from the time when they first came down out of the keeping of the godhead and became individual souls, and humanity as a whole has also gone through a process of evolution.

Just consider the differences, the changes and development to be seen in the earth's surface through the millennia—how thoroughly everything has changed. ‘Humanity’, as we are wont to call it, is only the outcome of the ‘fifth root race’, as it is called. A different, earlier humanity preceding it was the fourth root race whose continent, Atlantis, lay somewhere between present-day Europe and America. Our forebears on Atlantis looked very different. They also had a completely different civilization. The ancient Atlanteans did not have a fully developed rational mind and way of thinking but were instead provided with subtle, somnambulant clairvoyant powers. Logic, rational thinking capable of making connections, science and art as we know them today did not exist in ancient Atlantis, for human beings then had a very different way of forming ideas, thinking and feeling. They would not have been able to make connections, calculate, count or read the way we do today. But somnambulant clairvoyant powers of the spirit lived in them. They were able to understand the language of nature, what God said to them in the lapping of the waves, what the woods were murmuring, and what the subtle scents of flowers brought to expression. They understood this language of nature and were in harmony with all nature. No legislation, no jurisdiction then served to make neighbour communicate with neighbour. No, the Atlanteans would go outside and listen to the sounds of the trees and the wind and they would tell them what they should do.

The memory of ancient Atlantis or Niflheim [home of mists] has survived most beautifully in folk legends such as the Nibelungenlied¹⁰⁵ which have never been works of fiction produced at random. The word Nibel or Nifl indicates that the Rhine and all the rivers in the area are waters remaining from the masses of mists in ancient Atlantis. The wisdom that has survived from Atlantis is referred to as the treasure that lies hidden in the waters. We must also look for the nursery of the ancient adepts in that continent. Individuals went there who had the abilities needed to become pupils of the great minds we now call the ‘masters of wisdom and of the harmony of inner feelings’.¹⁰⁶

The location of the adept school, which had its flowering during the fourth sub-race on ancient Atlantis, must be sought in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Pupils were taught in a very different way there than they are today. It was then possible to have a tremendous influence go from one human being to the other with the power that still lay in words at that time. Today, a little bit of feeling for the inner, spiritual, occult power of words still survives among the people. You simply cannot compare the power words have today with the power they had at that time. It was something quite tremendous. The word in itself would awaken powers in the pupil's soul. A mantra such as we have it today does not have anything like the power which words had at that time, when they were not so full of thoughts. Powers of soul would arise in the pupil under the influence of those words. We might call it human initiation through the language of nature, with tremendous power. A definite language was then also spoken by burning substances such as incense.

The connection between the teacher's and the pupil's soul was much more direct in that place. Any written signs existing at the adept school of ancient Atlantis imitated natural processes. They were drawn in the air with the hand, and had an effect, also a lasting effect, on the mind and spirit of the people at that time. They would awaken powers in the soul.

Every race thus has its mission in human evolution. The mission of our own, the fifth main or root race, is to bring the manas element into the four elements of human nature, that is to awaken insight and understanding by means of concepts and ideas. Every race has its mission. The mission of the Atlantean race was to develop the I. Our own, the fifth root race of the post- Atlantean period, has to develop manas, the spirit self.

The achievements of Atlantis did not perish with it. The most important elements of everything that existed in the adepts' nursery was kept by a small core group of people when they left. This small group, guided by Manu, went into the area where the Gobi desert is today. There they recreated the earlier civilization and teaching, but now more for the thinking mind. The earlier powers of spirit were transformed into thoughts and signs. From there, from this centre, the different lines of civilization then went out like radii, like rays. First of all the wonderful, most ancient pre-Vedic civilization, where the wisdom that came streaming in was for the first time transformed into thoughts.

The second civilization to arise from the ancient adept school was the most ancient Persian civilization. The third was the Chaldean and Babylonian civilization with its wonderful star wisdom, the magnificent knowledge its priests had. The fourth civilization to come into flower was the Graeco-Latin with its personal colouring, and finally our own developed as the fifth. We are moving towards the sixth and seventh. I have thus identified our mission in human evolution. It is to transform into thoughts, to bring right down to the physical plane, the cosmic wisdom which has existed as such until now.

When an ancient Atlantean listened for the note that lay between the sounds he could hear around him, he would hear the name of something he had perceived to be the divine: Tao. In the Egyptian mysteries this note was transformed into thoughts, writings, signs—the Tao sign, the Tao books. Everything that exists as knowledge, writings, thought only came into the world in post-Atlantean times. It could not have been written down before, for it would have been beyond human understanding. We are now in the middle of manas development. Our race works to take cultivation of the intellect, and at the same time also of egotism, to its extremes. We may certainly say, even if it does sound grotesque: ‘There has never been so much power of understanding and so little inner vision in the world as there is now.’ Thought is furthest away from the inner essence of things, far removed from inner spiritual vision.

When a priest on Atlantis wrote signs in the air, the effect of this would above all be an inner experience in the pupil's soul. In the fourth, the GraecoLatin period, the personal aspect was more to the fore. The Greeks developed personal art. In Rome, the personal element came into government affairs and so on. In our time we live with egotism, a dry personal element, a dry intellect. It is, however, our mission to grasp the occult in the purest thought element. Grasping the spiritual in this, the finest distillate of the brain, is the true mission of our age. To make this thought so powerful that it will have something of an occult power—that is the task we have been given so that we may do what is needed for the future.

Massive fires destroyed ancient Lemuria, massive floods ancient Atlantis. Our own civilization will also perish, and this will be through the war of all against all—this lies before us. Our fifth root race will perish because of egotism taken to its extreme. But a small group of people will out of the power of thought develop the power of buddhi, life spirit, and take it on into the new civilization. Everything that is productive in the human being will grow and grow until his individual nature has risen far enough to reach the summit of freedom. Every individual will have to find a kind of guiding spirit in his inmost soul in our time, buddhi, the power of the life spirit. If we were to go into the future being able to take in civilization impulses only the way it has been done in earlier times, we would move towards humanity shattering into fragments.

What is it that we have in our present age? Each wants to be his own master. Egotism, selfishness is going to extremes. A time is coming when no authority will be accepted other than authority people are able to accept of their own free will, so that its power will base on freely given trust. The mysteries based on the power of the spirit are called ‘mysteries of the spirit’. The future mysteries built on a basis of trust, on the power of trust, are called ‘mysteries of the father’. We bring our civilization to its conclusion with them. This new impulse, the power of trust, must come, otherwise we shall shatter into fragments and shall have a general ego-based and egotistical civilization.

In the times of the mystery of the spirit, based on a power, authority and might of the spirit that did have its justification, individual great sages had wisdom in their possession. They could only initiate people who had gone through severe trials. We are now moving towards a future that will hold the mysteries of the father and have to make every effort to see that every individual is wise. Will this help against egotism and being shattered? Yes! For human beings can only be united if they gain the greatest wisdom, a wisdom in which there are no personal vagaries, opinions or standpoints but one common view. If people were to continue in the way of being different, having points of view, and so on, they would again and again go their separate ways. The most sublime wisdom, however, always creates the same view for all people. True wisdom is one wisdom that brings all people together again in the greatest possible freedom, with no coercion or authority. As the members of the great white brotherhood¹⁰⁷ are always in harmony among themselves and with humanity, so will all human beings be united in this wisdom at a future time. This wisdom alone will create the true idea of brotherhood. The mission of the science of the spirit therefore need be no more than to guide humanity towards this idea, now in the unfolding of the spirit self, later of the life spirit. The great goal of the spiritual science movement is to make it possible for human beings to be free and truly wise. Its mission is to let this truth and wisdom flow into human beings.

In the modern movement for a science of the spirit, one began with the most elementary teaching. Much that is important has been unveiled in the years since the movement started, and even more important things will be gradually unveiled. The work of the movement is therefore to let the wisdom of the great white brotherhood that had its origin in Atlantis flow out gradually. Such work has always been preceded by a long period of preparation. The great and unique event of the coming of Christ Jesus was thus prepared for by all the work of the founders of religions—Zarathustra, Hermes, Moses, Orpheus, Pythagoras. All their teaching had the same goal—to let wisdom come to human beings, though always in the form most appropriate for the people concerned. And it is not what the Christ said that was really new. The really new thing that came with the coming and teaching of Christ Jesus was that Christ Jesus had the power to bring to life everything which until then had only been teaching.

Through Christianity, humanity has gained the power that all may be united in acknowledging the authority of Christ Jesus and yet be utterly individual, and that human beings can unite and be brothers in their faith in Christ Jesus, his coming, his divinity. Between the mysteries of the spirit and those of the father we thus have the mysteries of the son, with the school of St Paul its planting site, the school put in the care of Dionysius the Areopagite. The school had its flowering under him, for Dionysius taught those mysteries in a very special way, whilst Paul spread the teaching exoterically.

Let us now provide an explanation from another direction, so that we may understand what it means to say: the mysteries of the father are coming. The teachers of the ancient Atlantean adept school were not human beings but spirits higher than man. They had completed their development on earlier planets. And these teachers, coming from ancient planetary evolutions, taught the mysteries of the spirit to a small select band. In the mysteries of the son, Christ Jesus himself would appear as the teacher on special occasions. He, too, was a teacher who was not human but a god. It will not be until we have the mysteries of the father that the teachers will be humans. Individuals who have developed faster than the rest of humanity will be the true masters of wisdom and of harmony. They will be called the fathers. In the mysteries of the father, therefore, the guidance of humanity will be no longer in the hands of spirits who have come down from other worlds, but in the hands of human beings themselves. This is the important point.

To prepare people to be a core group for this goal, to prepare them for a common wisdom, for authority based on trust, and to develop understanding, initially for a small core group of people—that is the mission of the science of the spirit. The evolution of material civilization reached its high point in the 19th century. This was the time when the science of the spirit first came into the world. A counter impulse to materialism, going in the opposite direction, toward the spirit, was created by this means and therefore existed. The science of the spirit is nothing new, nor the spiritual scientific movement—it merely continues what was there before. Materialism, egotism cause humanity to shatter into fragments, with individuals seeing only their own interests. Wisdom must bring human beings together again who have been separated by this. In utter freedom, with no coercion, people are brought together in wisdom. That is the mission of the spiritual scientific movement in our time. We must clearly understand that we need to gain wisdom in very real terms. We all know the story of the stove whose mission it is to get the room warm. We may present this to the stove in the most moving words, asking it to get the room warm, but it will not do so. It is only if we turn it on that it can fulfil its mission. And so there is little point in just talking about brotherhood and love of one another. Insight alone will take us closer to our goal. For every individual and for humanity as a whole, the road to wisdom, to brotherhood, can only be found through insight.

We have now considered this road, going through three kinds of mysteries. Science of the spirit must make it possible for a small core group of people to understand what has been said, so that understanding may come alive in the masses in the sixth race. This is the mission which the science of the spirit must accomplish. A small part of the fifth root race will anticipate evolution; it will spiritualize manas and unfold the spirit self. The greater part, however, will reach the summit of selfishness. The core group which develops the spirit self will be the seed for the sixth root race, and the ones who are most advanced among them, the masters who have come from the ranks of humanity, as we call them, will then guide the human race. This is the goal of the movement for spiritual insight.

• 105. Middle High German epic poem from the early 13th century, based on the legends of Siegfried and the Burgundian kings.
• 106. Rudolf Steiner was referring to highly evolved individuals who are of the greatest possible importance to humanity. 'These sublime entities have already followed the path which the rest of humanity still has before it. They now work as the great 'teachers of wisdom and of the harmony of man's inner feelings/ (From a letter to a member, Berlin 2 January 1905). See also Rudolf Steiner/Marie von Sivers Correspondence and Documents 1901–1925 (GA 262). Tr. C. von Arnim. London and New York: AP & RSP 1988.
• 107. In one set of lecture notes it says ‘of the white lodge’.

The truths of religious documents come from the depths of wisdom. Many people will say, however: ‘You give us something complicated; we want the gospel to be simple and naive. Great truths should not be complicated.’ In a way they are right, but not only simple but also wisdom-filled thinking must be able to find the most sublime truths. The point of view from which we consider these things cannot be high enough. In future we must let go more and more of the desire for ease and enter into the most profound insights with great seriousness.

Today we want to gain understanding of the promised spirit of truth. These words concern a secret initiation.

‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments,’ the Christ said. ‘Love’ here refers to the trust that exists between teacher and pupils in an esoteric relationship. The most profound secrets of the soul are passed from one individual to another, in a most intimate way. The words of the Bible we want to consider today are:

‘Do not let your hearts be troubled! You believe in god, you also believe in me. There are many rooms in my father's house ...’

‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask this father and he will give you another counsellor to be with you in all eternity—the spirit of truth whom the world has not the power to receive; for it does not see him and does not recognize him. You, however, recognize him; for he remains with you and shall be in you.’

‘He who has my commandments and keeps them is the one who loves me. And someone who loves me shall be loved by my father, and I shall love him and make myself apparent to him. Judas, not Iscariot, said to him: Lord, what has happened, that you will reveal yourself to us and not to the world? Jesus answered and said to him: Someone who loves me will keep my word; and my father shall love him, and we shall go to him and make our abode with him.’¹⁰⁸

‘Father’—that is the inmost power of soul. It is to be revealed to the close disciples. Judas asked: ‘What has happened, that you will reveal yourself to us and not to the world?’ Judas thus said openly that something was to be revealed to the close disciples.

Jesus said: ‘We shall make our abode with the father.’ This was the most important part of the pouring out of the spirit that began with the words: ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled!’ The Christ was going to prepare the abode for his close disciples: In my father's house there are many dwelling places.’

Let us gain insight into these words. The degree of conscious awareness which man has gained will never be lost again. One has to get out of the habit of any other idea. ‘Giving oneself up to the cosmic mind’ often means people wallowing in this, believing this to be redemption. There is no such cosmic mind and there never will be. The ability to say ‘I’ is now achieved by man. The the more he says ‘I’ and works out of the I to purify his three lower bodies—the astral body, ether body and physical body—the more strongly will he develop his I and develop into the future. A human being can thus become consciously selfless, because he wills it. The time will come when all human beings will have reached the summit of I-development. And yet they can selflessly take up the spirit of the community. We are sitting in this room together, and the common spirit in it is like a point from which everything radiates out together. But this common spirit may also radiate freely from every individual heart and move through this room. Let us remember how the godhead is reflected in the world. It has made the sacrifice and poured all its life into its mirror image. Let us now imagine that we, too, can pour our life into countless mirror images, so that each individual mirror image would say: I and my origin are one. That is how all human beings once came forth from the keeping of the godhead like mirror images of the godhead. They finally become empty ‘I’s, with astral body, ether body and physical body transformed, and they enter into the world of the spirit and utter the deepest secret of their being: ‘I and my father are one!’¹⁰⁹ The animal-humans of Lemurian times could never become spiritual by themselves, but only by taking up the divine droplets. At the end of their evolution, cleansed and purified, they will be able to say: ‘I and my father are one.’

We are gazing back into far distant times. There was still a great deal of volcanic activity on earth in Lemurian times. The creatures that lived then were very different. That was the time when man first received the element he was to develop as soul. Going back even further we see soul nature above and bodily nature below still as one nature. The two were united in god's keeping. Then the physical stream down below was left to itself and developed into the animal-man ofLemurian times. The upper developed in soul and spirit. The body had to be prepared first down below, so that it might receive the soul coming from above.

The spirit that prevailed in the common origin of both souls and bodies is the father spirit; that is the father.

The spirit that prevailed down below in the physical realm, whilst the spiritual went its separate ways up above, is the son spirit; that is the son.

And the spirit that prevailed up above in the soul sphere until it was able to descend into the physical realm, that is the holy spirit.

In Lemurian times, when the soul first incarnated, there was a pouring out of the spirit: ‘And god breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.’¹¹⁰ That was the first outpouring of the spirit, an unconscious outpouring. Man was to live in a dream for a long time yet. It was only in the second half of the Atlantean period that he gained the ability to calculate, to think logically, and to observe the world outside correctly in its relationships. In the first half of the Atlantean period, a human being would see another human being as a coloured cloud. The cloud would be reddish brown if the other individual was not sympathetic, was an enemy. A violet reddish cloud indicated a sympathetic individual, a friend. Other things would also be perceived like this. If a golden yellow cloud rose like a kind of misty form between the astral and the physical, this indicated that a useful metal was to be found here. A dull, bluish red cloud with strange lines to delimit it, of the kind which only a mineral can have, indicated a useless metal. Human beings gradually separated out more and more; limiting their feelings by having a skin, and external, physical sensory perception developed. In earliest Atlantean times, human beings had perceptions like those a fish or a snail has today—not a turtle or a crocodile. The new sensory perception developed when man began to breathe with a lung. The production of blood and inner I-activity were also connected with this.

A residual effect of the I on the blood can still be seen today if we go pale with fear or red with shame. This still shows direct I-activity. It is something that has remained from a time when the I had a powerful influence on the blood. Today the inner power of the I only shows itself in gestures, in going red or turning pale. Today people can gesticulate with their hands in their enthusiasm; then the blood was able to create organs out of the body under the I-impulse. The fingers developed in this way, for example. By the end of the Atlantean period, the human beings of that time were beginning to be similar to the human beings of today.

Blood bonds were stronger in the past than they are now. The bond between blood relatives was much stronger. An example would be the following. Two modern authors have given an excellent picture of the rural population, but in different ways. Anzengruber's¹¹¹ figures are clear-cut, almost as if cut in stone. Rosegger¹¹² takes many individual outward traits and combines them in a whole. He would make notes as he observed people and use these in his writing. Rosegger was wondering how Anzengruber was able to write about country people, seeing that he had never lived among them and observed them. Anzengruber told him the very reason that he was able to present the people so well was that he did not know them. All his forebears had been farming people, and so the ways of fanners were in his blood. He wrote about farmers his forebears had known, and he did so out of the blood.¹¹³

In earlier times, humanity consisted of many small groups. Reading Tacitus' Germania.¹¹⁴ one finds numerous small tribes listed who were related by blood and to whom the blood relationship meant something special. In the days of the Old Testament patriarchs, marriage was always within the tribe, with the same blood in everyone's veins. The memory of the descendants would then go right back to the times of their ancestors. The descendant would remember his ancestors the way we remember our own childhood. 900 years after Adam his descendants still remembered the events of his life. This explains why people are said to have lived to such great ages in the Bible.¹¹⁵ For as far back as a person could then remember, the I that went through generations would be called ‘Adam’ for example. A common I lived in the tribe, and it lived in the blood. Because of this the shedding of blood called for blood revenge. And the whole tribe would revenge itself for the blood of a single member by means of blood revenge.

Close marriage gradually changed and finally became distant marriage. The tribes became international. The principle of pure humanity gained the upper hand.

The son principle was active in the physical realm, in the love among relations that was based on blood. But the soul became progressively more individual, so that the blood was moving in wider and wider groups, getting further away from the tribal community.

All the ancient systems of government were based on the principle of blood relationship. The ten commandments of the Jews are tribal laws. Something connected with the Jewish people was not yet connected with the whole of mankind. Then the son spirit came to earth in the Christ and his blood flowed. Blood which until then had only created close bonds was poured out. This brought it about that all close bonds flowed out into a brotherhood for all humanity. The narrowly limited feeling of self where it was not yet possible to say: ‘Anyone who does not leave father and mother, wife, children, brother and sister and also his personal life cannot be my disciple’—such self-seeking had to run out from the redeemer's wounds. The capacity for love was gained as the blood of the Christ flowed, overcoming blood-brotherhood, tribe and nation. If we had been able to collect drops of blood by the cross, we would in all truth and reality have had the substance that thus transforms human beings. The goal is for human beings to find their relationship to all human beings, with love not only between brother and sister, but between human being and human being. The physical blood that flowed from the wounds of the Christ is the embodiment of the redeemer principle. This blood is a significant redemption symbol.

Humanity is to find the spirit again, fully and wholly. They had it once, but only dimly so, in a nebulous way. Later it assumed the form in which human beings see the world today. But they only see this world, only one side of things. With this view, man is cut off from the life of the spirit as if by a veil. He now needs to be taken beyond individual conscious awareness, which has made him an I, and gain awareness of the whole world again. This is why the blood of Christ was scattered—from narrow tribe to the wide world. The cross made it possible to achieve this. From the cross, the blood flowed into the whole of humanity. At the same time, however, the cross made the I grow more and more narrow and individual. All this has come to us through Christianity.

But when people are thus left to their own resources, with no tribe to give them context and with self-awareness enhanced, egotism must also increase. Christ Jesus foresaw this. He saw the coming of materialism, and made Christianity a bulwark against it.

In antiquity, everything rested on blood-brotherhood. This is clear from ancestor worship. Many legends were based on the figure of an ancestral hero such as Theseus¹¹⁶ or Cadmus.¹¹⁷ The principle governed both laws and commandments. Then, however, external institutions began to determine the life of the community. This only developed with the spread of Christianity, however. What do people see in the international idea today? A principle that is more powerful than the power of the state. The great powers that rule the world today are international. They are called money, transport, industry, and so on. Nothing to do with the blood-brotherhood of old any more. The other side of the coin is materialism. Egotistical thinking lives in a machine. How different were the ways in which ancient Greeks saw their god Zeus, remembering that the father principle lay at the base of all. Where do we find anything divine in public life today? Machines, railways and so on all serve egotistical aims. This will come to play a special role in the future. In the war of all against all it will go to extremes.

The Christ did create the bond that will unite all humanity, but something else has to come together with this act of redemption. Inner responses from person to person live in people who feel drawn to the Christ. His deed is the great bond that can unite the spirit again with the physical. Today people still control the physical world to serve their egotism. One day they must use it to serve the spirit. The spirit must unite with the son so that the two, united, become one with the father.

The Christ said: ‘No one comes to the father except through me.’¹¹⁸ Each should say: ‘I am as the branch on the vine.’¹¹⁹ Then the Christ overcomes the egotism in human organisms. The father spirit, the spirit of common origin, must enter into our individual selves, and then the I works on the father principle. Every I then builds its own house, and yet they are all united in the Christ principle. ‘There are many rooms in my father's house’,¹⁰⁸ said the Christ. These are the dwellings which human I-natures build for themselves. The Christ must, however, prepare the place, the dwelling place. And for this it is necessary for the spirit to come that unites human beings—the spirit of truth.

It is the purpose of theosophy to teach human beings the things they have in common; it is to bring the higher wisdom, the spirit of truth. People differ in their opinions for as long as they do not yet have the highest knowledge. The gnostics called mysticism ‘mathesis’, for in mathematics none can say he differs from someone else in his opinions. Two scientists can never disagree over a mathematical axiom. There it is not a matter of human wishes. For the great wisdom we must first rid ourselves of our wishes. Only those who seek to study the spirit of truth, wholly free from personal wishes, will be ripe to receive it. The highest knowledge unites human beings, there is no opinion or notion. The spirit of truth must shine upon people. Then they may indeed be dispersed through different dwelling places, but the spirit of truth will unite them. The common spirit must govern the truth held by individual I-natures if the house which the I builds for itself is to fit in with the spiritual principle. The Christ promised his disciples the spirit of truth at Pentecost. Then the disciples spoke in different tongues, then all nations learned to understand one another. Egotism may indeed wax more and more, but every human I will have the spirit of community if it partakes in the spirit of truth. Those who wish to achieve this must live in the spirit of John's gospel. That is true theosophy. Just as all plants turn to the sun as they grow, wherever they may be, so all I-natures will turn to the sun of the spirit, the spiritual light of truth.

• 108. Bible quotes from John 14: 1-2, 15-17, 21-23.
• 109. John 10: 30.
• 110. Genesis 2: 7.
• 111. Anzengruber, Ludwig (1839–1889), Austrian playwright and novelist. Rudolf Steiner wrote an obituary on him, published in Steiner R. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Literatur, 1884–1902. (GA 32) S. 16 ff..
• 112. Rosegger, Peter (1843–1918), Austrian poet and novelist
• 113. ‘Went for a walk with Anzengruber on another occasion ... We talked about writing and the subjects one had for writing. I said he must have lived in Upper Bavaria himself or at least had a great deal to do with the fanning people there. His figures were very reminiscent of this type of people. He put his pince-nez on his sharply curved nose and said: “Upper Bavaria? No, I have never really met those country people. At least not enough to know them.” Realizing that this surprised me: “I don't need that. Just need to see one of them from a distance, hear a few everyday words, observe perhaps one of his gestures—and I know that fellow inside out!”—“Strange!”—“My dear fellow,” he said, “you know it yourself. All outer occasions and situations are just the midwives. The writer must give birth himself. Farmers—ha! I'm a city man myself! But if as you say, I write better about country people than about city people, this is probably in the blood. Or in some bone or other, like inherited gout. My forefathers on my father's side were farmers in Upper Austria. And well, such things are still lurking about.”’ Gesammelte Werke von Peter Rosegger, Leipzig 1914–1916, 36. Band, Gute Kameraden—Persönliche Erinnerungen an berühmte und eigenartige Zeitgenossen, Seite 145 f
• 114. Tacitus, Cornelius (c. 55–166), greatest Roman historian. The second part of his work De origine et situ Germanorum, chapters 28-46, gives descriptions of the individual Germanic tribes.
• 115. E.g. Genesis, Chapter 5.
• 116. King ofThebes, hero who killed the Minotaur.
• 117. A Phoenician prince who killed a dragon and sowed its teeth. An army grew from them who fought one another until only five survived. Cadmus founded the city of Thebes with them.
• 118. John 14: 6.
• 119. John 15: 5 (variant).
• 108. Bible quotes from John 14: 1-2, 15-17, 21-23.