The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The point has often been made in our discussions that anyone who wants to understand life and existence cannot start from the premise that they are simple. I have often drawn attention to the complexity and diversity of the harmonious cosmos, of which human beings are an integral part, even if only for the reason that people are often heard to say that truth—and normally they mean truth concerning the highest things—has to be simple. People like it best if they are told that such truth about the highest things does not really need to be studied, but that we simply possess it without the need to acquire it.

Everyone—I have said this before—is willing to admit that they cannot understand the workings of a watch if they have not learnt how the cogs and the rest of the mechanism functions. Only as far as the great, magnificent and mighty workings of the cosmos are concerned do people wish comprehension without effort. The basic aim of the science of the spirit, however, is to permit us slowly and gradually to make real sense of the meaning of existence and life.

Today I want to add something to the things we have discussed previously, starting with concepts and ideas with which we are already familiar and with which we have often concerned ourselves. To begin with, we have to say from the standpoint of the science of the spirit that outer existence within which we live is maya, the great illusion. But I have emphasized that within a western world conception it cannot be our view that everything which surrounds us is illusion in the sense that it is unreal. Not the world as such which affects our senses, which we grasp with our reason, is maya; in its innermost being this world is true reality. But the way that human beings perceive it, the way it appears to human beings, turns the world into maya, turns it into a great illusion. And when through inner training of the soul we reach a stage at which we find the deeper foundation of the things which are revealed to the senses, which are subject to our reasoning, we will soon recognize the extent to which the outer world is an illusion. For it appears in its true light, as it really is, when we know how to supplement and penetrate it with those aspects which must remain hidden in our initial observation of the world.

It is precisely what makes human beings human, what gives them their dignity and purpose, that the cosmos does not treat them like immature children to whom truth is presented on a platter, but that it is taken for granted that they acquire truth through their own work—their life’s work. In a certain sense the cosmic powers count on our help in gaining truth, they count on our freedom and dignity.

Now the whole of human life as it initially progresses between birth and death is maya, an illusion. It has to be an illusion because when we view the world only as external physical objects and events we ignore the other aspect of the world and of existence in so far as it affects the human being; we ignore the things which human beings experience between death and a new birth.

Of course one might well say that one can understand human life between birth and death simply by observing it. Why is the other side, the life between death and a new birth, necessary? But even that is a false conception for the simple reason that the life between birth and death is a reflection of the life between death and a new birth. The things which we experience in the life preceding our present physical life are reflected in the life between birth and death.

In order to understand this reflection, it is necessary to consider two further things. The first is that we observe certain stages, certain highlights in our life between birth and death and investigate how these are reflections of the life between death and a new birth. At the same time it is necessary to realize that the life between death and a new birth is connected to a much greater extent with the unknown worlds to which we refer in the science of the spirit; with the events which occurred—before the development of our earth—on what we call Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon. These events on Saturn, Sun and Moon are connected much more closely with our existence between death and a new birth than with the life between birth and death. We might even say that the life between death and birth is influenced everywhere and in all its aspects by those foregoing lives which we know as the past planetary lives of Saturn, Sun and Moon. The effect of the latter on our hidden earth life between death and a new birth is in turn reflected in the lift between birth and death. Thus the life between birth and death is a reflection of the events which occur between death and a new birth; they, in turn, are influenced by events on Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon.

We have to examine certain key points, certain stages of our earth life if we want a more detailed understanding of this process.

The first event which belongs to our life on earth is what in human physical existence we describe as conception. This is followed by the embryonic stage. Only then does the birth of the human being, his entry on to the physical plane, occur. Now a peculiar circumstance is revealed to the science of the spirit. There is only one event in the whole of human life, in so far as it is spent in a physical body, which is solely connected with the earth, which is in a sense explicable purely from earth existence. That event is conception. Nothing in human life other than conception is fundamentally connected directly and exclusively with earth existence. I must emphasize the word ‘exclusively’. Conception has no connection with the life of Moon, Sun and Saturn; the causes of the event which occurs with conception originate in earth life.

Because external biology, external science, is concerned in the main only with physical existence, and from its perspective considers everything related to the life of the Moon, Sun and Saturn as folly, this external science can discover the truth in the physical sense of the word only about conception. That is why we find, when we read works such as those by Ernst Haeckel, that they emphasize those aspects which relate the human being to the processes in other organisms, and that those things are dealt with which are in some way connected with conception. Compare what I have just said with external science and you will find it to be true. When physical external science investigates the processes in the human being it usually descends to the level of the most simple cells. Such cells, forms from which human beings too originate (they develop from the fertilized egg), did not exist on Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon. They are to be found only on earth; and on earth the combination of cells takes place which is of such importance to external science.

This particular stage of our life is nothing but the reflection of a real event which takes place before conception and which is connected with human life. In the final period of our life between death and a new birth, but also at the time of physical conception, we are clearly in the spiritual world. Something is continually happening to us on a spiritual level and conception is nothing but a reflection, maya, of this happening. But the event which takes place in the spiritual world is one which occurs between sun and earth in such a manner that the female element is influenced by the sun and the male element is influenced by the earth. Thus the event of conception mirrors the interaction between sun and earth.

This event, which human beings frequently reduce to a level so degrading for mankind, therefore becomes the most significant of mysteries, the reflection of a cosmic event. It is of interest to draw attention to some details here. When a person approaches the time of his renewed entry to earth, a soul-like image of the parents through whom he will enter the earth is formed. How he comes to choose one particular set of parents we can discuss another time; this is connected with karma. But the thing to which I want to draw attention today is that the person progressing towards birth receives an image of the physical world primarily through the mother, he primarily sees the mother. He receives an image of the father—and I would ask you to consider this because it is important—because the mother carries an image of the father in her soul. Thus the father is seen through the image which the mother carries in her soul.

This is, of course, expressed in a somewhat simplified form, but it is essentially correct. These supersensory processes can only be put into words by characterizing them in their essential form. In order to prevent too fixed an image arising in your mind, I might add that if it is important for example that the soul and spiritual inheritance from the father’s side plays a special role, if special soul and spiritual characteristics of the father are to be passed on to the human being approaching birth, a direct image of the father can also be created. But the image of the mother weakens to the degree that the image of the father is directly observed.

The next step of physical existence on earth is the life between conception and birth. This stage too—we call it the embryonic stage—reflects an event which takes place in the spiritual world before the aforementioned process. While birth in physical life obviously follows conception, that of which birth is a reflection precedes the sun-earth process which is mirrored in conception.

The existence of human beings between conception and birth can certainly not be explained from the conditions prevalent on earth. To try and explain it on the basis of physical forces and laws is pure nonsense, because it is the reflection of a process before birth which is essentially influenced by the remains of the sun and the moon from an earlier stage than the earth. It is a process which takes place between the sun and the moon, and thus it is in essence a spiritual one.

The forces which are active here are primarily those in play between the sun and the moon. Outer science has still preserved an awareness of this fact by calculating the embryonic period in lunar months, saying that it occurs over ten lunar months.

In this sense we have to take into account that in our life between death and a new birth we are subject to real influences from the sun and the moon. And that in our subsequent physical life we reflect this process, which is a sun and moon process, between conception and birth.

It should be noted that the term ‘reflect’ is used here in a somewhat different sense from the spatial one. In spatial reflection the object and the image are simultaneously present, but here we have the real process taking place before birth. The reflection occurs later in time. It is thus maya of a spiritual process before birth.

The next thing to take into account is the period between birth and that frequently mentioned important time in human life when we start to unfold our ego-consciousness, when we consciously start to call ourselves ‘I’. This can be described as the real period of childhood. The period of early childhood—we can call it the infant period—is again a reflection of a process which lies even further in the spiritual past. The real process which is mirrored in the period when we start to babble without establishing the link between speech and ego-consciousness is a reflection of a process from before birth which extends even further into the cosmos. Here there is interaction between the sun and all the planets which belong to the sun, between the sun and its orbiting planets with the exception of the moon. The forces which are at play between the sun and its planets affect our life between death and a new birth, and what is created thereby long before our birth is reflected in the life of early childhood.

One can see from this that the child’s life is affected by the reflection of things which are even further removed from physical existence than the moon. This has a deeply significant practical result; it has the result that human beings must not be diverted in this period of their lives from the forces which they receive and need to utilize. Consider the situation. Cosmic forces at play between the sun and its planets affect us before birth. These forces are present in the child which has passed through birth and has entered earth life. They want to emerge from the child. They really are in the child. In this sense the child in its innermost being is a messenger from heaven and these forces want to emerge. In principle we can do no more than allow them the greatest possible opportunity to come out. That is basically all that we should attempt to do on an educational level in the human infant stage: we should not interfere with the forces which are trying to emerge.

Such a view provokes a humble attitude. Whilst people normally believe that they represent a great deal to the child, the real point is that the forces which want to emerge should be interfered with as little as possible. Not that the educating adults mean nothing to the child—they do, because what emerges is a reflection which must be made real by the educator, which must be given substance.

Our task as educators can be shown in the following way. If we have a reflected object we have to fill the image with something which gives it more inward strength than it has purely as an image. Human beings are indeed born as reflections and they have to acquire the substance to make that image real. That is what their development between birth and death is all about. The reflections of the processes which we obtained from the cosmos before birth want to emerge and must be interfered with as little as possible.

Through our action we must give them the substance of reality; we interfere with them by giving them the substance of false reality by attempting to correct them. They are spiritual by nature.

Now you can understand the great significance of the consequences which arise from this. The person who brings up a child needs to have in his own soul, which has its existence alongside the child, supersensory ideas and feelings. For all purely material ideas and feelings which we bring close to the child interfere with his or her development.

The question is often asked how best to bring up a child. As with so many things, it is not a matter of setting up a few principles which we carry around with us to guide our actions. It is important that we start with ourselves, that we make an effort to carry within us a fund of supersensory ideas, that we are permeated by attitudes and feelings which enter the supersensory. For they have a far greater effect than what we can achieve through outer intellectual principles, through intellectual pedagogy. A loving mind which is at home in the supersensory world and thus deepens all feelings, thereby introduces a certain—please do not misunderstand this word—religiousness into the upbringing of the child. Such religiousness consists of loving a being sent from the spiritual world, of raising our love of the child into a spiritual sphere with the feeling that in extending our hands to the child we are giving him or her something as representatives of those forces which are not to be found on earth but in the supersensory sphere.

We can think up all kinds of educational principles but they will bear little fruit for as long as this science proceeds along materialistic lines. Only the things which are the result of the science of the spirit will bear fruit for the true education of the child. And the most important thing is the way in which we develop ourselves. In the outer, material world we may achieve much by what we do. As educators we achieve much more by what we are. This should be well noted and could well serve as a motto for good education.

Then comes the age of boyhood and girlhood, an age when we are still being brought up, but in a different way from the period of infancy. That is the next stage to be considered. It includes the whole period from the time when human beings consciously begin to refer to themselves as ‘I’ up to the point when they are released from education as such, when they freely enter life—the time when as well or badly brought up people they have to enter the whirlpool of life.

This too is a reflection, maya on a physical level, of previous events. The reality again lies between death and a new birth. Here the whole planetary system, from the sun to Saturn—or Neptune if we choose modern astronomy—is at work. The whole of the planetary system works together with the stars in the heavens, and the interaction between the stars and the whole planetary system becomes the forces which are active in us during the time of our upbringing.

So little of the reality of human beings can be explained purely from processes on earth that the only way to comprehend them during their upbringing is if there is a clear understanding that forces are at work in them during their life as a whole which are not on earth, which are not even in the planetary system but which lie outside the planetary sphere and work in harmony with the stars.

When we meet a child which can already call itself T, which we approach, therefore, in a certain sense as human being, we must be quite clear that something lives in him or her which is a reflection of something which is active not only outside our earth but outside our planetary system.

That is why the things which have been said about the early upbringing of the child are true in far greater measure for the following periods of education. Namely, that good education will only come about when it is drawn from the science of the spirit, when the teacher is aware that outside the planetary system a world exists which unfolds in the human being, and when this world is more than theoretical knowledge in the teacher and informs his feelings and attitudes and he himself has experienced the truth of this world beyond the planets. The unsure steps of such a teacher are often better than the ingenious educational principles of a materialistic teacher. Because insecure steps, actions undertaken in ignorance, can be improved in the course of our life. But what we do because of what we are does not correct itself during life.

It would be a good thing if the following were included among the areas which would benefit from metamorphosis and change through spiritual science: an increasing understanding that those who want to become good teachers and educators—and that includes in principle all those who want to become parents—should do so through the assimilation of spiritual ideas in their soul. In order to become a good educator, the bulk of the work has to be undertaken on oneself. And it is more important for a teacher, for instance, to live wholeheartedly in the material to be dealt with in school the next day, before he enters school, than that he possesses the best possible educational principles on how to do this or that. After he has grown to love the subject, grown to live it inwardly in the spirit, he can even stumble in the lesson—although I do not want to recommend that—and he will do a better job than the person who enters school with all sorts of principles straitjacketed into his brain and who knows everything about the most correct way to set about things.

We know that at present in the world things still take place the other way round. Those who want to be teachers today are tested above all for the things which they know, for the content of the knowledge they have assimilated. It is almost true to say that they are tested on the things which they can find in books, on which they can establish a library. The things which can be looked up in a library, if one has been taught how to do so, are the things which are largely examined. In teachers’ examinations the important things ought not to be what the person concerned can easily find if he needs it, factual knowledge ought not to be the most important thing, but instead teachers ought to be examined in how in their attitudes, their feelings, they can establish a link with knowledge of, with feeling for the development of the universe as a whole. Attitudes towards human and cosmic development ought to be the yardstick for whether or not someone is a good teacher. Then, of course, those would fail the examinations who only knew the most facts and those would pass the examinations with flying colours who were good human beings in the spiritual sense.

That is also what will happen in the end. In the end we will have to move in the following direction: human beings who are not good, whose soul does not incline towards the spiritual life, will fail the teachers’ examinations in future however much they know, even if they have all the facts that are required today at their fingertips.

This area in particular, then, will provide the opening that will permit less emphasis to be placed on intellectual knowledge and more on the development of the soul as a whole. Let me repeat: in such a situation our value will not be determined by the influence we wield in the outer material world but by what we do. As educators we are of value above all by what we are.

It is important that we take account of everything which is related to the reality of the process reflected in conception. All of that belongs to the earth. But in so far as it lies before birth it belongs to the interaction of sun and earth, it takes place in the earth’s aura. A significant spiritual event takes place in the earth’s aura preceding human conception which is reflected in conception. What takes place between conception and birth is in reality the interaction between sun and moon, and this is essentially a repetition of events which took place earlier during the Old Moon period of the earth.

In the embryonic period a real event is reflected which is like a repetition of the events which took place on the Old Moon. Similarly the process which occurs between the end of childhood, the point when human beings consciously begin to refer to themselves as ‘I’, and birth is a repetition of the influence of the Old Sun. The things which occur even before that, which are reflected in the period when we are educated, are a repetition of the Old Saturn stage of the earth.

And then, when our education is finished, and we enter the world well or badly brought up, what processes are reflected at that point? Then processes are mirrored which lie even before the Saturn period, which are not part of the visible world at all to the degree that they have no correlation in the outwardly visible stars. The correlations of our experiences up to the end of our educational period are still visible. They are yet related to the outermost stars which can still be seen. But our subsequent experience, our subsequent development belongs to the invisible world. We are released from the visible cosmos when we have truly completed our education.

And then, of course, it is a matter of enriching, or of having already enriched our soul with the truths of the supersensory worlds. That is the only way to find our true path through life. Otherwise we are puppets, guided by forces which are not meant to do so. The person who is free to enter the world after the Saturn stage has been reflected in his development, and has no idea in his soul of a spiritual world, is not in his intended element but is carried along by invisible forces as the puppet is carried along by the forces contained in the strings of the puppet master.

To assimilate what spiritual science can give means becoming human, means not remaining a puppet of the sensory world but achieving the freedom which is the element in which human beings should live and work throughout their lives. Indeed, freedom can only be understood in concepts which do not originate in the sensory world. For nothing that is given us from the sensory world can make us free. This is what I had in mind when I wrote my Philosophy of Freedom where I emphasized how—even without reference to the ideas of spiritual science—the foundation of ethics, of morals has to be seen in terms of moral imagination; that is to say, it has to be discovered on the basis of moral imagination, on the basis of something that is not contained in any sensory world, although of course morals should not be considered as being purely imaginary. The whole chapter on moral imagination is an affirmation that human beings throughout life, in so far as they want to spend it in freedom, have to recognize their connection with something which is not a reflection of the sensory world but which has to arise freely in themselves, which they carry within themselves, which is more majestic than the visible stars, which cannot be gained from the sensory world but only through an inward creative process. That is the intention of the chapter on moral imagination.

These thoughts were again intended to show the numerous contexts within which we stand in life. As the life before birth is preparatory for its reflection, so the reflected image between birth and death is in turn a preparation for the spiritual life which follows between death and a new birth. The more we can take from this life into the life between death and a new birth, the richer the development of that life will be. Even the concepts which we have to learn concerning that life, concerning the truths between death and a new birth, these concepts have to be different to those which we have to learn from physical maya if we want to understand the latter. Some of the concepts which have to be acquired for an understanding of the other side of life as it passes between death and a new birth can be found in the Vienna lecture cycle of 1914, The Inner Nature of Man and Life between Death and Rebirth. It can sometimes be quite a struggle to formulate, step by step, the concepts and ideas which are required for this different life. And when you read such a lecture cycle in particular, you will notice the struggle to find expressions which adequately reflect these quite different conditions.

At this time in particular, when the deaths of dear members are affecting our anthroposophical life, I want to draw attention to one point. The occurrence of death plays a different role in the life between death and a new birth than does the point of birth in our present life between birth and death. The time of birth is not usually remembered by human beings under the ordinary circumstances of physical life. But the time of death leaves the deepest impression for the whole life between death and a new birth; it is remembered above everything else, it is always present but in a different form than the one seen from this side of life. From this side of life death appears as a disintegration, something of which human beings have fear and dread. From the other side, death appears as the luminous beginning of spiritual experience, as something which spreads sun-like over the whole life between death and a new birth, which warms the soul with joy and which is repeatedly looked back on with deep and warm understanding. That is the moment of death. To describe it in earthly terms: the most joyful, the most rapturous moment between death and a new birth is the point of death as experienced from the other side.

If from a materialistic point of view we have formed the idea that human beings lose consciousness with death, if we have no real conception of the way consciousness develops—I say this particularly today because we are thinking of dear ones who have died recently—if we find great difficulty in imagining the existence of a consciousness beyond death, if we believe that consciousness fades because consciousness appears to fade with death, then we have to understand: this is not true. For consciousness is exceedingly lucid after death, and only because human beings are unused to living in this extremely clear consciousness in the initial period after dying does something similar to a state of sleep occur immediately after death.

But this state of sleep is the opposite of the one which we enter in ordinary life. In ordinary life we sleep because our level of consciousness is reduced. After death we are unconscious in a certain sense because consciousness is too strong, too overLIFE whelming, because we live completely in the consciousness and need to accustom ourselves to this heightened state in the initial days. Then, when we succeed in orientating ourselves sufficiently to feel the emergence of the thought ‘that was you!' from the wealth of world thoughts, at the point when we begin to distinguish our past earth life from the wealth of world thoughts, then we experience in this wealth of consciousness the moment of which it can be said: we awaken. We might be awakened by an event which was particularly significant in our life and which is also of significance for events after our earth life.

Thus it is a matter of growing accustomed to supersensory consciousness, to consciousness which is not built on the foundations and supports of the physical world, but which is sufficient in itself. That is what we call ‘awakening’ after death. One could describe this awakening as a probing by the will which, as you know and also can see from the above-mentioned lecture cycle, develops particularly after death. I spoke there of a feeling-like will and a will-like feeling. When this will-like feeling starts to venture into the supersensory world, when it makes the first probe, then it starts to awaken.

Those are things which, circumstances permitting, we will discuss further.

As the last time we were able to meet together here, we put forward certain considerations connected mainly with special experiences,¹ we will turn our attention today to a more general outlook of spiritual science. I should like to start from something which you have all known fundamentally for a long time: that all spiritual-scientific observation is won by acquiring knowledge, not with the help of the instrument of the Physical body, but by liberating the soul and spirit from the physical instrument, so that, as soul and spirit they enter into direct union with the spiritual worlds.

Direct union with the spiritual worlds is broken in ordinary life and knowledge, because we must always employ the instrument of our physical body in the waking state whenever we wish to enter into relationship with the world, and in the sleeping state all our will is concentrated on our connection with the body, so that desire for the body spreads like a cloud in our soul and spirit during sleep, and hinders us in this state, and in ordinary life - from experiencing anything in the spiritual worlds, in which we indeed are.

Now it is essential that anyone occupying himself with spiritual science should recognise exactly the value of spiritual scientific activity as such, and its relation to the personal strivings, which through meditation and concentration of thought, feeling, and will-impulses, or in any other manner, lead man into the spiritual world. We must be clear about this above all for it is a deep and significant truth: that the unity which surrounds us in the ordinary world, does not exist in the same way in the spiritual world. I have already pointed out that this unity is founded within the whole structure of the psycho-spiritual human being. How most people strive again and again after this, asking: What is the unity of the world? How they only find satisfaction when they can lead everything back to one Principle!

As a matter of fact, the external world meets us most eminently as a whole, as a unified formation; and those people who to a certain degree are dominated by the ‘craze’ for unity, arrive at all possible abstractions in thought, while seeking the unitary principle of the world.

Such personalities are typical, they are like an old gentleman who met me one evening, and told me with the intense pleasure of a discoverer: At last he had found a unitary principle by which he could explain all the phenomena in the world. He was of the opinion, in his pleasure, that this unitary principle could be uttered in ten to twelve words, and he was so joyful over the matter, that he said: Now I can explain the whole cosmos. He would explain heaven, earth, and hell out of this unitary principle.

A little while ago, I was forced to recall this episode which occurred many years ago, when someone wrote to me urgently requesting a talk with me, because he had made the acquaintance of a man who was able to bring forward another such completely satisfactory view of the world in five minutes. I need hardly mention that a really earnest spiritual movement can have no time for such talks. But people who are thus possessed by this Unity-Demon, which is at the same time a kind of Easy-going Demon, are especially numerous in our day.

Because of this, we must put first, and take in the deepest sense, what is expressed in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: that as soon as we cross the threshold of the spiritual world, we are really led into a threefold experience. I have especially emphasised in this book, that the soul is as if split into three, and when the soul crosses the threshold of the spiritual world, nothing is left which makes it possible for one to believe in this Unity-demon, this comfort-loving Unity-demon.

Indeed, we feel, as soon as the threshold of the spiritual world is crossed, that we really enter with the whole of our being into three worlds. And we must not lose sight of the fact that after crossing this threshold, we have distinctly the experience of three worlds. In reality, we already belong to three worlds through the whole formation of our physical body. I might say that the co-operation of three worlds, which are relatively strongly independent of one another, is necessary for this wonderful structure ‘man’ which we encounter in the physical world. And if we consider the formation of our head, the formation of everything that belongs to the head, we must, even if we are merely speaking of the physical head, be clear that the formative forces of our head, and also the beings active and creative in these formative forces, belong to suite another world from that of the formative forces of our breast, for instance, and the formative forces of everything belonging to our heart, inclusive of the arms and hands. It is to a certain extent as if the formative forces of these material parts of man belonged to quite another world than the formative forces of his head. And again, the organs of the lower body and the legs belong to quite another world than the two other members we have named.

Now you can ask: What significance has all this? It has a great significance, for fundamentally speaking, in our present cycle of humanity, one only gets the pure, true and real results from spiritual science if the soul and spirit-nature is raised out of the head. So that this (c.f. diagram) is to some extent the clairvoyant aspect of a man, which, seen from the spiritual-scientific point of view has to be so regarded, that the spirit-soul part is here seen to be especially lifted out, and is at the same time, joined to the forces of the cosmos, as if by a spiritual electric attraction.

Thus all the parts a man—the ego and astral body down to the etheric body, must be drawn out. This withdrawal is of course connected with the evolution of the so-called Lotus-flowers. But the forces which set the lotus-flowers in motion lie in this part of the spirit-soul nature of man which is, or can be withdrawn.

The clairvoyance thus attained is a HEAD-CLAIRVOYANCE, and this can be a result of spiritual science in our time, for the revelations of head-clairvoyance are of service to humanity. Of a quite other kind is the clairvoyant results attained by raising the spirit-soul nature of the organ of the heart, arms and hands. This raising or up-lifting of these organs distinguishes itself inwardly and significantly from what takes place through what I might call “HEAD-CLAIRVOYANCE”. The up-lifting of the material heart-organ is brought about more through meditation which is related to the life of will; it is effected through humble surrender to the march of events. Whereas head-clairvoyance is effected more through thoughts, but also through ideas having an imaginative character, tinged with feeling.

It is generally the case that with reference to these two kinds of clairvoyance, the heart—or breast-clairvoyance—develops along with head-clairvoyance in the degree to which it should. Breast-clairvoyance leads more to the development of the will, to a connection with the actions of spiritual beings of the lower hierarchies, such as those incorporated in the various kingdoms of the earth; whereas head-clairvoyance leads more to vision, knowledge, perception in those higher worlds, in the sense that knowledge of these higher powers is necessary for the satisfaction of certain needs of knowledge, which must appear ever more and more in present humanity. The more we approach the future of our evolution on earth, the less will humanity be able to live, without their soul-life drying up, if they do not receive into their cognition the results of this clairvoyance.

Again a third kind of clairvoyance is that which arises, when what we call the spiritual-psychic part of man is loosened, and thus raised out of the rest of his being. Here in the lower part of the diagram I indicate the outward thrusting tendency. Even if the expression is not altogether aesthetic, yet I may perhaps venture to call this kind of clairvoyance, ‘Stomach clairvoyance.’

Whereas head-clairvoyance, for our cycle of humanity, leads in the most eminent sense to the attainment of results independent of man, stomach-clairvoyance leads to results connected especially with What transpires in man himself. That which takes place in man himself must naturally also be an object of investigation. In the sphere of physical investigation, there are also men who occupy themselves with anatomy and physiology. We should not think that this stomach-clairvoyance has not a certain value, in the highest sense of the word. It naturally has a value. But one must realize, that stomach clairvoyance can inform man but little of that which occurs impersonally in cosmic events; but that it informs him essentially about what man is, of what goes on—I might say—inside his skin.

With reference to what is moral and ethical, head-clairvoyance is relatively the most important. Hence I must ever speak of its opposites. Between the two stands breast-clairvoyance; between that of the head and of the stomach. As regards what is ethical, these two can be inwardly quite well distinguished. People who strive to come to a perception of higher worlds, in an impersonal way, as indicated in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, those who are not daunted at traveling this uncomfortable but secure path, will develop something impersonal in themselves, with reference to their clairvoyance, above all they will develop a high interest for objective world-knowledge, for what occurs in the world of cosmic and of historical events.

This head-clairvoyance speaks preferably of man himself, especially in that it draws attention to how he is placed within the process of cosmic and historical development, it notes what man himself is in the entirety of this cosmic process: What arises as head-clairvoyance will always have what I must call a universal scientific character; it will contain information which has importance—I beg you to note this word—for all mankind, not merely for one man or another.

Stomach-clairvoyance will be permeated especially with all kinds of human egoism, and will very easily mislead the clairvoyant in question to occupy himself much with the occult bases of his own destiny, of his personal worth and character. This results as a self-understood tendency from what is called stomach-clairvoyance.

Now a clear distinction has to be made between these two kinds of clairvoyance with reference to their intuitive nature. Whoever strives in the sense of what is given in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds to become free in soul and spirit from the perceptive-apparatus of the head, who can thus to a certain extent loosen the spiritual-psychic part of the head from the physical instrument, and is able to place himself with this spiritual-psychic head-part in the spiritual world, will have extreme difficulty in getting beyond shadowy-clairvoyant experiences. Such a passing out from the head is at first bound up with experiences which really have not even the colour, the substantiality of vivid memories, therefore they seem inwardly to be very colourless, and only after one goes ever further and further in the efforts which lie on this path, does the shadowy character of these experiences disappear, and their colourless, shadowy experiences become tinged with colour and sound, for the process carried out is this, that we first move out of our head, and are then really in a world which we have difficulty in perceiving.

For while we gradually and slowly acquire the possibility of living outside our head, these inner forces of life grow stronger, and the consequence is, that the forces streaming in from the whole orbit of the cosmos are drawn together. Picture to yourselves that forces must be drawn together from out the whole orbit of the cosmos—and when we draw together all the forces from the entirety of the orbit of the cosmos, we get that tinging with colour and sound I have mentioned. Think how we might picture this. You have here a surface (a), highly coloured, a spherical surface. Now think of this spherical surface as extended over a larger surface (b.c.). The colour will then become paler—and if we extend it still further, the colour will become ever paler and paler, if we contract this surface, then supposing it to be a pale yellow here (at the extremity,) it would become a strong, saturated yellow, because the colour is then more concentrated.

Now head-clairvoyance confronts the whole cosmos. And, spread out over the whole cosmos is that which man mast first concentrate and unite by means of his life-forces into what he himself is clairvoyantly, as being; so that only by a laborious process of inner development he gradually gives a tinge of colour to the shadowy nature of his experiences. And when for a long, long time he has taken the trouble to experience that general experience which only gives him the sensation of being outside the body; and when he has been aware of this general experience for a long time, and has gained the feeling more and more of a more intense, though not yet a coloured and resounding inner experience, then the regions of the cosmos gradually draw near to this head-clairvoyance.

This is a matter for slow, selfless development. It must be especially stated, that a STUDY OF SPIRITUAL SCIENCE is indispensable to this development. It must be emphasised again and again, that when it is given out, spiritual science, can indeed be understood. It cannot be emphasised often enough that one need not be a clairvoyant to understand spiritual science. One must of course be clairvoyant to arrive at results, but once they are there, one need not be clairvoyant. UNDERSTANDING of spiritual science must precede personal vision. Here one can say: the opposite path is correct to that which is correct in the physical-sensible world. In the physical-sensible world, we first have correct perceptions, then we pass over to a thoughtful consideration of these, and we then form our scientific judgments. This must be reversed in the ascent to the spiritual world. There, we must first develop ideas—we must make every effort to live into spiritual science objectively; otherwise we can never be certain that any observation we make in the spiritual world is interpreted by us in the right sense. Hence knowledge must precede vision, and this is what is so infinitely disagreeable to many; the fact that they have to study spiritual science. Many consider this an incomprehensible demand. For it is relatively easy to have perceptions; but to interpret them aright—for this it is necessary that one enters rightly,—objectively, selflessly—into spiritual science.

Now just the opposite is the case in what we have called: stomach-clairvoyance. In this, we start from that spiritual-psychic principle which first worked on the bodily, physical nature; for spirit lies at the basis of everything that exists in the world. If we have eaten let us say a piece of cabbage—we are mostly vegetarians here—and it is then worked over in our organism, one has then not merely to do with the physical-chemical process, carried out by the stomach with its forces and juices, but behind all these the etheric body, astral body, and ego are active. All these processes have spiritual processes behind them. It would be quite false to believe that any material processes exist which have not a spiritual process behind them. Picture this to yourselves: Suppose you lie down after a more or less opulent mid-day meal, and become clairvoyant, but clairvoyant in such a way, that the spiritual-psychic part of the digestive organs rise up especially out of the organs of digestion. Then, while your stomach and the other organs digest correctly, you live with your spiritual-psychic nature in the spiritual-psychic realm, and whereas you usually remain unconscious of the spiritual process carried out in your etheric body, astral body, and ego, this enters your consciousness if you are clairvoyant and then, because you experience yourself in this spiritual-psychic realm, you can see all this working, constructing, and creating of the spiritual-psychic force during digestion; you see it as it projects itself out into the world, and it appears to you reflected in pictures in the external ether. Then you get the most beautiful clairvoyant forms, because you have not now to draw the colours so much out of the cosmos, but because you have the whole process concentrated within your own skin. So that something wonderful takes place around you in the most glorious most magnificent sequences of colour and form, which need be nothing else than the process of digestion or some other bodily process transpiring in the spiritual organs of man.

This kind of clairvoyance is distinguished from the other, especially through the fact, that whereas the other clairvoyance starts from shadow forms, and only laboriously acquires a tinge of colour and tone, this starts off with the most magnificent grandeur possible. One can equally well express it as a law: if clairvoyance begins with magnificent forms, especially with coloured forms, then it is a clairvoyance that relates to processes which transpire within the personality. I emphasise this, because it can be of value for the investigation of the spiritual world. Just as anatomy and physiology investigate the digestive and other processes, so clairvoyance is also of great value to investigate in this way the spiritual nature standing behind human processes. But it would be bad, if one gave oneself up to any deceptions, if one cherished illusions, and did not interpret things in a right manner.

If one believed that such a clairvoyance, appearing without the necessary preparation, could give more than what takes place in man and is projected into the objective world, if one believed that through such a clairvoyance, one could approach the creative world-powers, the dominant spiritual forces, one would greatly err. Just as little as the riddles of the world can be solved by the investigation of human digestion, just so little can the riddles and secrets of the cosmos be approached by developing this stomach clairvoyance.

Thus you see how much belongs necessarily to our gaining a really right orientation to the world we enter through the freeing of our spiritual-psychic powers. No one need have any aversion to stomach-clairvoyance through the observations which have been made. But each one should be quite clear how such clairvoyance is related to what real spiritual clairvoyance can become, and how one should hold oneself far removed from any over valuation of what is gained through a clairvoyance that can only have a personal content. Only when in things which have a personal content, we look away from what is personal, and observe them in the way the anatomist or physiologist considers, the objects he studies with the help of the microscope, or learns through his investigations,—only then have these things a special value. In any case no religious feelings should be connected with these things even in the remotest degree; they can only be connected with the results of head-clairvoyance. Man becomes ever more correct in regard to the other clairvoyance, the more he fulfills the demand, that it should be dealt with in every case only in an objectively scientific sense, as are the results of anatomy or physiology.

Not everything which is found along the path of clairvoyance, is—I venture to use this radical expression—worthy of veneration; but all is worthy of being learnt. That is what we must keep in mind. I have already said: that for our cycle, it is especially important to incorporate the results of head-clairvoyance with the general spiritual civilisation of man; this is really important. Today, I will mention one side of the matter with reference to this. We are living at a time, in which humanity must prepare gradually to transcend mere philosophical Idealism, and pass on to a true consciousness of the spiritual worlds, of the general spiritual world in which we live just as we live in the physical world.

Now let us start from an experience of head-clairvoyance, which we shall easily understand if we have entered but a little into the things said in the Munich Cycle (footnote, Secrets of the Threshold;) held recently and which were dealt with further in my book The Threshold of the Spiritual World. I especially mentioned there, that our thinking undergoes a transformation the moment we make ourselves free; especially when with reference to our thoughts we free ourselves from the physical instrument of the head. I expressed it grotesquely at the time by saying, if we became free in this manner, our thoughts have no longer the character which they have in ordinary, everyday life. In ordinary, everyday life we must have the feeling—unless we are demented—that we are Master of our thought-world, that if we have two thoughts, it is WE OURSELVES who unite or separate these thoughts.

When we remember something, we are conscious: we pass over with our inner life from a present experience to a past experience. We always have the feeling; it is we ourselves who stand behind the web and woof of our thoughts. ... This ceases the moment we make the spiritual psychic principle free in our head, when we develop a thinking freed from the body. On that occasion, I put it as follows, I said: It is as if we put our head in an ant's nest, and a peculiar whirling then arises. This is how thoughts begin to play one into the other. If in ordinary life, we have two thoughts, and unite them, as for example, the thoughts ‘rose’ and ‘red’, we know that we are master in our own thought-world, able to unite the two ideas: the rose is red. This is not the case when we are outside our bodies. Life enters our thoughts, the thought's own life. Each thought becomes a being. One thought runs towards another, the other runs away from it.

So the thought-world acquires a life of its own. Why does it acquire a life of its own? What we experience in the ordinary thoughts of the everyday are only images, shadows of thoughts. You can read this in my book Theosophy. As soon as we develop body free thoughts, each thought becomes like a husk, and an elemental being slips into the husk. The thought is no longer in our power; we put it out, like a feeler, it goes forth into the world, and an elemental being slips into it ... Our thoughts are filled in this way with elemental beings ... and these whirl and struggle in us. So that we can say: If we stretch the spiritual-psychic part of our head into the spiritual world, (it is outside us only, because we are situated within the physical head), if we thus stretch it into the spiritual world, we no longer experience such thoughts as we experience in the physical world, but we experience the LIFE OF BEINGS. We plunge our head just as I have said into an ant's nest—We experience the life of beings.

This is fundamentally the case right up to the highest hierarchies, and if we wish to experience angel, archangel, or even archai, it must be the same, we must live in our thoughts in the way described and in the beings in them. We send our thoughts out, and a being slips in, and is active in them. If we perceive the beings of Venus, or Saturn, it is as I have said, we let our thoughts slip our, and the Venus, and Saturn beings slip in. We ought not to be the least afraid of having thoughts of the Hierarchies in us, but twist accustom ourselves to live with our heads in the higher Hierarchies. We must say to ourselves: Our thinking ceases, and our head becomes the stage for the activities of the higher hierarchies.

Now, in the philosophy of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel thought has been developed up to the purest thought-clarity. In this philosophy is really contained that to which thought could rise at the beginning of the 19th Century. The task of raising thought to this height was then fulfilled. The next task is however that man should go beyond this, and really enter into this whirling, weaving life of thought. We are living at a time when man is called to do this: to perceive the higher Hierarchies. We have to be taken up by the world of the higher Hierarchies, and we must strip off the fear of thus living and weaving in the higher Hierarchies.

The life of the 19th Century was quite filled by this fear, this horror of life in the higher Hierarchies. Human beings carried this so far, they did not know it, but fundamentally they carried it so far, that they prayed: O, my dear Ahriman, guard me lest my life in thought is claimed by the activity and life of the higher Hierarchies; otherwise, some devilish Saturn or Sun-being might enter into them:—You say: Surely no one thought like this in the 19th Century; but I can prove to you that people did think like this.

Ludwig Feuerbach, a philosopher of the 19th Century who especially combated the idea of immortality, opposed all belief in a super-sensible world, because he held this to be the belief of phantastic, mystical dreamers, and considered it harmful for the whole of mankind. Ludwig Feuerbach wrote the following sentences; I beg you to inscribe them particularly well in your souls;

“The active man, busy with the affairs of human life, has no time to think of death, and hence, no need for immortality; if he thinks of death, he only sees in it the warning to arrange wisely his allotted span of life, not to waste precious time on unworthy objects, but to apply it to the fulfillment of the tasks he has set himself to do.”—

“If far from the earth in heaven, on Uranus, or Saturn, or elsewhere, man first found his fulfillment, then there would be no science, or philosophy at all. Instead of what is generally deduced, abstract truths and beings would form the content of our spirit, instead of thoughts, cognitions and ideas, these pure spiritual entities and objects which would then inhabit our head would be our heavenly brothers, Saturn and Uranus-beings would then be the inhabitants of our head. Instead of mathematics, logic metaphysics, we should have in us the most exact likeness of these heavenly inhabitants. These heavenly beings would insert themselves especially between us and the subjects of our knowledge and thought, they would obstruct our vision of every object, and bring about an eternal, complete eclipse of the sun in our spirit.”

The ‘Sun’ for Feuerbach is: his thought.

Thus he has a complete picture of what would happen. He has however such an unholy horror of it, that he prays to the good Ahriman to reserve him from Saturn and Uranus dwellers becoming inhabitants of his head.

“They would be nearer and more closely related to us than thoughts, ideas, and concepts, for they are not purely spiritual or abstract entities like these, but sense-like spiritual beings, beings who merely express the nature of the force of imagination. Our whole spirit would then be but a dream, a vision of a more beautiful future. Therefore those whom the gravity of understanding hinders from floating around on the surface of the unlimited ocean of imagination will realise that in the depths of our spirit, the living light of the Angels and of all similar heavenly beings is extinguished, as in an atmosphere, un breathable by them.”

If these beings then were to enter into our thoughts, our spirit would be a dream—thus writes Feuerbach. He only feels secure when in the region of thoughts, and if the life of the Angels, or other heavenly Entities were to enter these thoughts, he would feel insecure. This is the prayer to Ahriman: that he might guard man from a knowledge of the spiritual worlds. This happened in the forties of the nineteenth century through Ludwig Feuerbach, the enemy of any spiritual view of the world. What does this signify? It signifies nothing else than that the time is ripe for us to raise ourselves to the spiritual worlds; we have but to take in earnest what this man puts before us, we have then found the way into the spiritual worlds. We only need not fight it by a union with Ahriman. Thus you see: It is not the fault of heaven that spiritual science has not penetrated the culture of our time, for it has penetrated the heads of its opponents. Spiritual science wants to enter the world; The fault therefore does not lie with the heavens. The Gods are giving wisdom to man: Spiritual science has come. As human beings under the leadership of Ahriman has resisted it, it is now up to us not to resist any longer, but to have the courage to accept spiritual science, with full, true, earnestness.

One must say this to oneself as regards this development of the 19th Century; One must say: It is as if laid down afore time in the spiritual world, that a spiritual age would come after a materialistic age, and it is for humanity now to open its mind, and its feeling, to receive this spiritual world into itself. That point of view which is so eminent a materialistic view and found in Ludwig Feuerbach, its characteristic, clever, and infinitely philosophically-endowed advocate, is like an attack, a revolt against what is to enter humanity. Spiritual forces come down from above, the forces of understanding, of knowledge have really to rise up from below. The expression which Ludwig Feuerbach discovered for himself is a most characteristic one, that: the solar eclipse of the soul would have to follow, if thoughts ceased to be thoughts, if the beings of Uranus, Venus and Saturn, and so on, played into them ... that is if the higher Hierarchies played into them. A solar-eclipse of the spirit would then take place; these people have an unholy fear of this. This solar eclipse of the spirit is not brought about however by heavenly Beings, who desire especially to bring their light to man. The darkness has been caused by human beings, by their uniting with Ahriman; and because they have spread a cloud of fear around them like an aura, they have sought to bring off their attacks against the penetration of the spiritual world. It is clear from this, that the darkening has proceeded from man, and we must acknowledge that darkness has laid hold of humanity more and more—a darkening of a free knowledge, an opposition to the light of the spirit.

This is something humanity has itself prepared, and one can see how in the course of the 19th Century, a certain love of all short-sighted, inconsequent thoughts appeared, and a love for everything that did not have to be thought out to an end. A preference and sympathy arose for all those things for which man will not have finally to give account. People loved ever less and less an unprejudiced, impartial, knowledge and thinking, and it is therefore not surprising when this love of the nebulous, of the unclear, of the unfinished in thought gradually assumed an ever more morally assailable character in public life. In so far as this character was countenanced, sympathy for the life of thought became dull; and then passed over into a general attitude. Through this an opposing force in chief was installed more especially against a spiritual science which strove for clarity on all sides.

Spiritual science has true sympathy and love above all for consequent, finished, thoughts, not for half-thoughts; it never holds with what is unclear and dark, but must ever reach out to that which spreads light widely, not to that which sends an apparent light into narrow places only. In this connection, we have still to fight our way through many things.

These are points I wished to bring forward in our studies today, in order to show how in the course of the century, thoughts through Ahriman gave occasion for the denial of the spiritual worlds, but how these worlds have themselves worked within the thoughts of him who denied them because—the time had come ‘The time has come’: this saying from Goethe's Fairy Tale is here in its right place.

It must be substantiated in the near future.

• 1. “The Problem of Death in Connection with the Artistic grasp of Life” February 5–7, 1915

Automated Translation

In these days when death is so constantly a source of pain, I want to deal with certain aspects of Spiritual Science in connection with the problem of death. Today I shall give a kind of introduction to these problems; tomorrow I shall go more closely into the subject and on Sunday pass over from these problems to more general questions of the artistic conception of Life. This will then lead us back to matters connected with our Building.

Manifold indeed are the connections within which we are placed in life. Just as the life before birth is a preparation for its reflection in this life, so this reflection between birth and death is a preparation for the spiritual life which comes afterwards, between death and a new birth. The more we are able to carry over from this life into the life between death and a new birth, the richer may be the development in that life; for the actual concepts which must be acquired of that life, the concepts of the truths of existence between death and a new birth must be very different from the concepts we must acquire of earthly Maya if we want to understand this Maya. Some of the necessary concepts will be found in the lecture-course given last year in Vienna. (The Inner Life of Man between Death and a New birth.) You will find there what new concepts must be acquired for understanding the other side of man's life which takes its course between death and a new birth. It is often exceedingly difficult to work out the concepts and ideas that are applicable to this other kind of life, and in reading such a lecture-course you will realise that it has been a question of wrestling for terms which in some way give expression to these totally different conditions.

At this time especially when the deaths of very dear Members are occurring in our anthroposophical life, I want to call attention to the following.—

The part played in the life between death and a new birth by the moment of death is different from the part that is played by the moment of birth in our present life between birth and death. The moment of birth is that point which, in ordinary circumstances, is not remembered by the human being. In Ordinary life, birth is not remembered. But the moment of death is the point which leaves behind it the very deepest impression for the whole of life between death and a new birth; it is the point that is remembered most of all; in a certain sense it is always there, but in a quite different form from that in which it is seen from this side of life. From this side of life, death appears to be a dissolution, something in face of which the human being has a ready fear and dread. From the other side, death appears as the light-filled beginning of experience of the Spirit, as that which spreads a sun-radiance over the whole of the subsequent life between death and a new birth; as that which most of all warms the soul through with joy in the life between death and a new birth. The moment of death is something that is looked back upon with a deep sense of blessing. Described in earthly terms: the moment of death, viewed from the other side, is the most joyful, the most enrapturing point in the life between death and a new birth.

If, out of materialism, we have pictured that the human being loses consciousness with death, if we can form no true idea of the continuation of consciousness—(I emphasize this today because the incentive is community with dear ones who have recently gone away from us through death.) if it is difficult to picture that consciousness exists beyond death, if we believe that consciousness is darkened (as appears to be the case after death)—then we must realise: it simply is not true. The truth is that the consciousness is excessively bright and it is only because the human being is still unaccustomed, during the very first period after death, to live within this excessively clear consciousness, that there sets in, to begin with, immediately after death, something like a kind of sleep.

This state of sleep, however, is the very opposite of the state of sleep through which we pass in ordinary life. In ordinary life we sleep because consciousness is dimmed; after death we are, in a certain sense, unconscious because the consciousness is too strong, too forceful; because we live wholly in consciousness. And what we have to do during the first days is to live over into this condition of excessive consciousness. We have to find our bearings and orientation within this condition of superabundant consciousness. When we succeed in so finding our bearings that, as it were, out of the fullness of the cosmic thoughts, we feel: thou wast that ... the moment when, out of the fullness of the cosmic thoughts, we begin to distinguish our past earth-life within this abundance of consciousness, then the moment is experienced of which we can say: we awaken. It may be that we are awakened by an event that has been particularly significant in our earthly life and is also significant in the happenings after our earthly life.

It is, therefore, a process of getting accustomed to the supersensible consciousness, to the consciousness that does not rest upon the foundation and support of the physical world, but that is working and active in itself. This is what we call the “Awakening” after death. This awakening consists in the will stretching out to find its bearings, the will, which as you know and can realise from the lecture-course already mentioned, may unfold strongly after death. I spoke of will that is coloured by feeling, of feeling that is coloured by will: when this life of feeling that is coloured by will stretches out to find its bearings in the supersensible world, when the first sally is made, then the awakening has come.

If we want to think of the experiences that are connected with the problem of death, we must realise, above all, that the real being, the being who rules and weaves within man, is profoundly unknown to him. This true being is not only unknown in respect of the deeper side of a man's own hidden existence, but it is unknown too, in respect of many things that play very significantly indeed into the experiences of everyday life. We must be absolutely clear that even with the most important instruments of knowledge we possess for the physical world—with the senses—we look almost entirely from outside, and that in this looking from outside, what may be called our skin shuts us off from beholding our real, true being. As soon as we begin to judge of our true being, as soon as we try to form a picture of this true being, we are obliged to apply our intellect, our power of forming mental images. In the course of our development within the physical body, however, both these faculties are strongly influenced from the Ahrimanic as well as from the Luciferic side; and the nature of all these influences that are exercised from the Ahrimanic and Luciferic sides upon our intellect, in so far as it is bound to the brain, is such, that they are able in the highest degree to cloud the judgment we form about our own being.

All self-knowledge is really comparable with the extreme case I quoted in the last lecture, of the university professor who himself tells the story of how, in his youth, he crossed the street and suddenly saw coming towards him a young man with a dreadfully unsympathetic face; he tells of the shock he received when he realised that he was seeing himself through two mirrors that were revealing his own physiognomy, as if it were coming towards him. This shows that he had no inkling of his external appearance, which was exceedingly unsympathetic to him: I have told you how he narrates a second similar instance. But really it is no different with what we call our more intimate self-knowledge. Our Ego and astral body which set out on the journey through the worlds when the date of Death has been passed—these members of our being are removed from our sphere of observation during physical life, for when we wake from sleep the Ego and astral body are not revealed to us. They are not revealed to us in their true form but in such a way that they are mirrored by the pictures of the Ego and astral body that are sketched by the etheric body and physical body. Between sleeping and waking we should be able to see our astral being and our Ego in their true form if we were not in the unconscious condition of sleep. The dreams, too, which occur in ordinary life are only faulty interpreters of our real being, because they are, after all, reflections of what goes on in the astral body around the etheric body, and because it is essential, first, to understand the language of dreams if we are to get at their correct meaning. If we understand the language of dreams, we can, certainly, acquire knowledge about our true being from the processes of dream. But in ordinary life we are accustomed simply to accept the pictures presented by the dream. This, however, is no more sensible than if we were simply to follow the signs of printed letters and not really read at all.

Our true being is withdrawn from us during life between birth and death. We must realise here that in our astral body—and in our Ego too—there lie all those feelings and all those stirrings of will which lead us to our actions, to our deeds, but also to our judgments, to our conceptions of things in the world. There, in the depths of our being, there at the seat of our astral body and our true “I”, we have a whole world of emotions, a whole world of feelings, of impulses of will; but what we form in everyday life as our own view of these emotions, impulses of will and feelings, stand mostly—mostly, I say—in a very distant connection with what we truly are, in our innermost being.

Take the following case—It may happen in life that two people live together for a long time and that through the strange forces playing out of the unknown regions of the astral body and Ego of the one person into the astral body and Ego of the other (these forces remain in the hidden regions), the one has in relation to the other a real desire for torment, a kind of need for cruelty. It may be that the one person who has this desire for torment, this need for cruelty, has no inkling whatever of the existence of these emotions in the astral body and Ego; he may build up about the things he does out of this urge to cruelty, a whole number of ideas which explain the actions on quite other grounds. Such a person may tell us that he has done this or that to the other person for one reason or another; these reasons may be very clever and yet they do not express the truth at all. For in ordinary life, what we all-too-often picture as the motives of our own actions, indeed of our own feelings, frequently stands, as I say, in a very, very distant connection with what is really living and weaving in our inner being. It may be that the Luciferic power is actually preventing the person concerned from realising the nature of this urge for cruelty, of these impulses to do all kinds of things to the other person, and that under the influence of this Luciferic power everything he says about the reasons merely spreads a cover over what is actually present in the soul. The reasons we devise in our consciousness may often be cut out for hiding from us, disguising what is actually living and working in the soul. These reasons are too often of a character which indicates a desire for self-justification, for we should find ourselves just as antipathetic as the professor of philosophy of whom I told you. We should not at all like what is in our soul if we had to acknowledge what kind of instincts and emotions are really holding sway. And because we have to protect ourselves from the sight of our own soul-being, we discover, with the help of these reasons, all kinds of things that guarantee us protection, because they deceive us about what is actually the ruling force in the soul. Just as it is true that the external world becomes a Maya to us because of the peculiar character of our faculty to form mental pictures, it is also true that what we have to say about ourselves in ordinary life is, to a very, very great extent, Maya.

Certain instincts and needs of our innermost being in particular mislead us into constantly deceiving ourselves about our own being. Take the case of a person who is terribly vain, who suffers from a form of megalomania. Such people are by no means few in number. This is admitted. If, however, as described above, a mask were not laid over what really is in the soul, it would be much more generally admitted that vanity and megalomania exist in many souls who have not the very slightest inkling that it is so.

Megalomania gives rise to many wishes ... but when I say ‘wishes’, you must understand what I mean.—the wishes do not become conscious, they remain wholly in the depths. Such a person may wish to exercise a controlling influence upon someone else, but because he would have to admit that this desire for control over the other is born of vanity and megalomania, he will not admit it. He then appeals—unconsciously of course,—to those powers of seduction which Lucifer is able to exercise all the time upon the human soul. And under the unconscious influence of Lucifer, such a person never gets to the point of saying to himself: ‘What I have in me, producing the desire for action, is really vanity, megalomania.’ He never says this, but on the contrary, he will often discover, under the influence of Lucifer, a whole system for explaining the feelings of which he is darkly aware but the true character of which he will not admit. He may have certain feelings for some other person but he cannot acknowledge them, because what he really wants is to control this other person and he is unable to do so because this other person, perhaps, will not allow himself to be controlled. Then, under the influence of Lucifer the soul discovers a system, discovers that the other person is planning something malicious; the first person then proceeds to paint a mental picture of the details that are being planned against him; he finally feels that he is being persecuted. The whole system of judgments and ideas is a mask that is there merely for the purpose of covering with a veil what must be prevented from emerging out of the inner life of soul.—It is a real Maya.

In connection with a series of actions, a man once said to me that he had done them out of an iron sense of duty, out of infinite devotion to the cause he represented. I was bound to say to him in reply: “The opinion you have about the motives of your procedure and of your actions is no criterion whatever. Only reality is the criterion, not the opinion one may have. The reality shows that the impulse, the urge to these actions was to gain influence in a certain direction.” I said to the man quite baldly: “Although you believe that you are acting out of an iron sense of duty, you are really acting under the impulse to acquire influence and you misinterpret this way of acting as being selfless, done purely out of a sense of duty. You are not acting out of this motive but because it pleases you to act so, because it brings you certain pleasure—again, therefore, out of a certain inner impulse.”

Our opinion, our mental picture of ourselves may be extremely complicated; it may not resemble in the very remotest degree what is really dominating and weaving in the soul. It may be extremely complicated. You will admit at once that such things must be known when it is a question of living in a world of truth and not in a world of Maya; you will also admit at once that it is necessary now and then to speak of such things in a radical way! The reasons which as genuine, true reasons, drive us to our actions, can only become clear to us slowly and by degrees, when through Spiritual Science, we really have knowledge of the secret connections existing between the human being and the world.

Let us take a definite case,—You will all know that there are people in the world who are called gossips, chatterboxes. If we ask these chatterboxes why they flock together in their cafes or elsewhere and talk, talk, talk, talk (they often talk a great deal more than they can answer for,) we shall hear many reasons why it is necessary for them to discuss this, that or the other. We can get to know people whom we then meet rushing along the street, hurrying somewhere or other in order to arrive quickly ... and when we find out what they are after, we discover that it is nothing but the most futile, useless, silliest chatter. If such people are asked about their reasons, they will give reasons which often sound exceedingly laudable and fine, whereas the most that can be said is that these reasons are well able to conceal the real facts of the case. And now we will consider these “real facts of the case.”

What is happening when we gossip or chatter? (when we speak, it is, of course, the same.) What is happening? Through our organs of breathing and speech we set the air into movements which correspond with the forms of the words. We generate in ourselves those physical waves—and naturally the corresponding ether-waves too, for when we speak something very significant is happening in the etheric body—we generate these waves in the air and ether which corresponds with our words, which give expression to our words. Picture it quite precisely to yourselves: While you are sitting there—no, pardon me, not you!—while a man is chattering with his cup of coffee before him on the table, he is bringing his whole inner organism into movement, that inner organism which corresponds with the form of expression, with the external physical and etheric form of expression of his words. Something is actually welling up and weaving in him; he generates this in himself, but he also is aware of it, he feels it. He feels this self-movement of the physical and etheric bodies because the astral body and the Ego are continually coming up against it. The astral body is continually coming up against the ether-waves and becoming aware of them; and the Ego is continually coming into contact with the physical waves of the air; so that while we are speaking, astral body and Ego are continually contacting something, touching something. in this contact, in this impact, we become aware of our Ego and of our astral body, and the most agreeable sensation the human being can have is that of self-enjoyment. when the astral body and the Ego contact the etheric body and the physical body in this way, the process is similar to what happens on a small scale when a child licks a sweet—for the pleasurable sensation in licking the sweet consists in the fact that the astral body is coming into contact with what is happening in the physical body, and the human being becomes aware of himself in this way. He becomes aware of himself, has self-enjoyment in this process. Those who sit down at a table in a cafe in order to gossip and chatter for an hour or two, simply hurry there to find self-enjoyment. It is self-enjoyment that is being sought in such cases.

We cannot become aware of these things if we do not know that man's being is fourfold and that all the four members are involved in every activity in the external world.

There are other, different examples. From the example of chattering we have seen how the human being has the urge to self-enjoyment caused by the impact of his astral body and Ego upon the etheric body and the physical body. But he also, frequently feels the need for his astral body merely to contact the etheric body, just the etheric body. In order that the astral body may contact the etheric body, this etheric body must produce movement, it must produce inner activity. These processes go on even more in the subconsciousness than do other processes. There is an impulse in the human being, of which he is not conscious, to make an impact with his astral body upon his etheric body. This impulse lives itself out in very curious ways. We find that certain young men—and in recent times young ladies too—simply cannot rest until what they write is printed. People sometimes find it exceedingly pleasant to see their writings in print, but it is pleasant chiefly because they succumb to the worst possible illusion, namely, to the illusion that what is printed is also read: It is by no means always the case that writings are read when they are printed, but it is at least believed that they are, and this is an exceedingly pleasant sensation. Many young men and, as I say, many young ladies too, simply cannot bear it, they are constantly on edge ... until their writings are printed. What does this mean?

It means this,—When writings are printed and actually read—which happens in the rarest cases today—when writings are printed, our thoughts pass over into other human beings, live on in other human souls. These thoughts live in the etheric bodies of the other human beings. But in us the idea takes root: ‘The thought you yourself had in your etheric body is now living out there in the world.’ We have the feeling that out there in the world our own thoughts are living. If the thoughts are really living in the world, if they are actually present there—in other words, if our printed writings are also read—then this exercises an influence upon our own etheric body and we impact what is living out there in the world. Inasmuch as it is living in our own etheric body, an impact takes place with our own astral body. This is quite a different impact from when we merely impact our own thoughts; the human being is not always strong enough to do this, because these thoughts must be called forth from the inner being by dint of energy. But when the thoughts are living in the world, when we can have the consciousness that our own thoughts are living out there in the world, then our astral body—to the best of our belief at least—comes into contact with a part of ourselves that is living in the outside world. This is the supreme self-enjoyment. But this form of self-enjoyment lies at the basis of all seeking for fame, all seeking for recognition, all seeking for authority in the world. At the root of this impulse for self-enjoyment there lies nothing else than a need to impact with our astral body objective thoughts of our etheric body, and in the impact to become aware of ourselves. You see what a complicated process between astral body and etheric body lies at the root of things that play a certain role in the outer world.

Naturally these things are not said for the purpose of making moral judgments into scarecrow. They are not of this nature at all, for everything that has been mentioned belongs to the category of characteristics that are quite normal in life. When we speak, it is absolutely natural that there should be self-enjoyment—even when speaking does not consist in gossiping. It is quite natural too that when we allow something to be printed, not out of thirst for fame but because we feel it a duty to say something to the world,—that then too we impact the thoughts of our etheric body; in such a case the same process is at work. We must not draw the conclusion that these processes are always to be shunned, always to be regarded as something lacking in morality,—for I simply mean them to be taken in a symbolic sense. If the human being were to flee from everything that presses in upon him from the side of Lucifer and Ahriman, he would have to come out of his skin as soon as he realised it—I mean this symbolically too: Lucifer and Ahriman exercise no other forces upon us than those that are justified, normal forces in human life; only it is the case that Lucifer and Ahriman put them into operation in the wrong place. I have said this in different lecture-courses.

If you think of all these things you will perceive the infinite variety and complexity of those threads in life which play over from human soul to human soul and again outwards from the human soul into the world. How infinitely complicated it all is but at the same time you will realise how little, how very little real knowledge the human being derives from what he perceives and pictures concerning his relations to other human beings and to the world. The picture we have of ourselves is only a tiny fragment drawn from what we experience. And this picture, to begin with, is Maya. Only when we make Spiritual Science into an actual asset of life, not into mere theory, do we really get behind Maya and reach some enlightenment upon what is actually going on within us. But things do not change by our possessing a tiny and mostly untrue fragment of the web in which we are involved in relation to the world; the things are as they are. All these hidden forces, this hidden web from soul to soul, from the human being to the various agents of the world—it is all there, and every minute of sleeping and waking life it is playing into the human soul. You will be able to judge from this how much has to be done in order to reach a true knowledge of the being of man.

Studies of this kind have to do with those shades of feeling which are requisite for a true experience of what belongs, not to earthly incarnation, but to eternity. For by unfolding such shades of feeling we become aware of the basis of the conflicts which appear in life. These conflicts that are brought by life and rightly become subjects for treatment in literature and the other arts, are due to the fact that there is an unknown, hidden ocean of will in which we are swimming in life, and that only a tiny fragment—mostly distorted at that—comes into our consciousness. But we cannot live in accordance with this tiny fragment; we must live with our whole soul in accordance with the great and manifold ramifications which exist in life. And this brings the conflicts. How can the tiny fragment that is also in many cases distorted, how can this tiny fragment come into a true relationship to human life, how can it really understand what is actually going on in human life: Because it is incapable of this, the human being inevitably comes into conflict with life. But where reality is in play, there too is truth. Reality does not direct itself according to the pictures we take of it. And the moment there is opportunity for it reality pitilessly corrects the Maya of our ideas. And this kind of corrective which reality bestows upon the Maya of our ideas, supplies most significant material for treatment in art, in poetry.

In pursuance of the line of thought contained in this lecture, I want now to start from a point that is connected with a work of art; in the lecture tomorrow we shall pass on to a study of the life between death and a new birth, and then on Sunday to a theme dealing with art in connection with our building. I do not want to start from a work of art chosen at random but from something that gives a very concrete picture of what I shall present to you as knowledge of the reality of the spiritual life. The reason for choosing this particular example is that, for once, reality has been hit upon in a certain small, but excellent piece of writing. An occultist alone is able to judge about the reality, but in this small work we see how when the human being as a clairvoyant tries to penetrate into the deeper problems of life, he simply cannot avoid touching the occult sides of life, he cannot avoid touching those depths which send their waves up into the life we often pierce so shallowly with the Maya of our thoughts. What I regard as important from the point of view of art and of occultism really occurs only at the end of a tale of which I want to speak merely as an example. Therefore I shall merely give a brief outline of the tale and read the concluding passage only. It is not a question of speaking merely of a piece of literature but of speaking of this particular work, because here for once a writer has presented something that might actually happen, in absolute accordance with true occult laws.

As the tale was written in the sixties of the 19th century, you will gather from what I say, how what we speak of as Spiritual Science has really always been prepared for and reflected in a certain way in human consciousness. Unconsciously, at least, in many a soul there has been reflected what must enter into the culture of the Earth and become more fully conscious through Spiritual Science. It may be that such a soul actually knew something about this, but the time was not ripe for voicing this knowledge in a form other than the unpretentious form of literature. At the present day people are much more ready to condone the introduction of occult truths in the form of stories or poems ... in the age of materialism they are much more ready to condone this than they will condone somebody who comes out with the direct truth and declares that such things are realities. If people can say to themselves: “Well, after all, this is only romance,” they will often accept it. The tale that was written in the sixties of last century is more or less as follows.—

It is written as if one of the characters were narrating it himself; it is a “first person” story, as we say. This character tells of his acquaintance with Mlle. de Gaussin in Paris (which is the scene of the tale). He tells how at a certain period he paid daily visits to the house of this Mlle. de Gaussin who is a much-feted singer; he gets to know all kinds of people who are admirers of the lady of the house—among them a man who is practically always to be found in Mlle.de Gaussin's salon. The narrator perceives that the feelings of this other man for her are more than mere friendship, and he also realises that these feelings are not reciprocated by the singer. Everything that happens results in a conflict.—There is a man who ardently loves the singer; his love is not returned, but he is not actually rejected; in reality he is brought nearer and nearer to her, but as a result of this he becomes more and more restless and inwardly shaken.

The narrator of the story (it is, as I say a ‘first person’ tale), notices all this. He is friendly with the other, and as he (the narrator) is engaged and is to be married during the next few weeks, it is quite natural, as the other man is also friendly with him, that there is no question of jealousy. One day the narrator has it all out with the other man whose eyes are then opened and he feels bound to have a talk with the singer. The result of this talk is that he goes no more to the house—but, although he has promised not to think about the lady any more, and to forget her, he is incapable of seriously turning his mind to other things, of getting rid of his inner restlessness; the thoughts that were there during his friendship with the lady keep on returning. He leaves the town and lives away for a time. During this period the narrator of the story has married and has been obliged to go on a journey. On this journey he meets the other man in a hotel, in a pitiful state. The other man tells him how he has left Paris and how he tried for a time to live alone; how he went for a ride one day outside his estate and had the ill-luck to come across the lady with her traveling company who were also away from Paris; how all his feelings came to life again and how he now goes about with two revolvers in order one day to put an end to his life.

The narrator still has kindly feelings towards the other man and invites him to his new home, hoping to get him to think of other things. The man accepts the invitation which is just the thing to provide him with a sympathetic milieu as a guest; but he simply cannot get hold of himself, he gets more and more depressed, and finally reaches the point where he has resolved to commit suicide. The two friends have a talk together and the narrator succeeds in getting the other to promise that he will defer his intention. The narrator says that he himself has to go away and because he does not want to say: ‘wait until I come back’—fearing that the other might not wait but might shoot himself in the meantime—he gets the other to make him a solemn promise. He says: “Look after my wife until I get back.”

When the other man has given the promise, the narrator goes off to Paris with the idea of asking the singer to come to the country and do something to make the situation less miserable. He reaches Paris and travels back with the singer to the country. They get to the hedge around the narrator's country estate. At this moment the narrator notices that a man who had been standing at the hedge, has run back. As they approach, there is a shot. The other man had kept his promise, had faithfully looked after the wife, but had sent a peasant to keep watch at the hedge. The peasant signals: ‘Now he is coming’—and then the man shoots himself. The narrator brings the singer into the house—and from this point I will read you the words themselves.¹

“We reached the chateau in the evening. When I got to the park, a peasant who was waiting for us ran with lightning speed towards the house, and hardly had we got half-way up the avenue, than a shot rang out. So set was I upon the success of my project that the meaning of this shot never entered my head. Amazement was not long to be withheld from me; we went on; nobody came out; the driver cracked his whip and I sprang out, Mlle. de Gaussin after me. The first thing we heard was a scream from my wife's maid who came towards us deathly white, with the cry: ‘He has shot himself dead’. We hurried to the Marquess' room which was full of people; I sent them all out, shut the door and stood with Manon de Gaussin beside the young man's body which lay on the ground. She stared at it for some minutes, then gave a scream and sank to the ground on her knees beside the body. She did not faint. She took his hands, laid hers on his forehead (the wound was in the middle of the chest), looked at me, then at him, and suddenly began to sing in a loud voice. This filled me with dread; I thought she had lost her reason.

Meanwhile one of my agents who knew a little about first-aid and was accustomed to render simple medical assistance, had arrived. I shall never forget the fear that came over his face when he saw the dead Marquess and the singer beside him. She was now silent, stood up, looked at me a long time and left the room. I followed to find out what she might want. She said: ‘I must have a room in which I am quite alone.’ I led her to the first good room, sent to fetch her maid and hurried to my wife. I heard to my relief that she had gone for a walk; I went to meet her and told her what had happened. As we had often talked about the Marquess and had anticipated the possibility of an end like this, she was less shocked than troubled. I led her back to the chateau and proceeded to give orders about the Marquess. The body had been placed on the bed and his servant was sitting by it, weeping bitterly. He said: ‘My master told me that he must not shoot himself until you had returned. This reassured me. Then he arranged secretly with the man John that he should wait for the carriage. The man did this and had hardly run back with the news that the carriage had entered the park than my master stood up, made a mark in the book he was reading, put his hand in his pocket, gave John a coin, took the pistol from the table and went into the other room; the moment he had closed the door behind him, he was dead.’

I began to reproach myself. Perhaps I might have been able to save him if I had acted more quickly. If Manon de Gaussin had arrived at the right moment this tragedy might, possibly, have been avoided. And I also thought: Perhaps providence has wished to protect him from something that would have been still worse, if the singer had decided to marry him, as I believe she would have done,—although she told me only afterwards that the disastrous consequences of such a step would have been unendurable and would simply have brought misery.

I went to Manon de Gaussin. She was calm and collected. There was nothing very unusual about her. She talked to me about the Marquess's frame of mind and his natural disposition towards such a sad ending of his life. So calm and collected was she that I felt the inner shock must have been very great, and I feared the reaction. I introduced her to my wife; we dined together and then retired.

The next morning I was struck by the change that had come over her. She said she felt well, but there was something so strained about her appearance, and in herself she seemed so broken, that her statement belied itself. She talked about leaving soon and asked if she might be given a different room for that night. This was arranged; we spent the day quietly and she only went to bed when all arrangements for her departure had been completed.

The next day she did not come down to breakfast. her maid asked me to go to her mistress in her room. She received me with a faint smile and was so pale and hollow-eyed that I could not conceal my amazement.

‘Dear friend,” she said, “You find me looking ill and don't want to say so?’

‘Don't you think that is natural?’

‘Yes, you are always full of feeling, reserved. But no secrecy helps now. I feel death within me.’

‘Dearest friend!’—I cried out in dismay.

‘I feel death; for two nights now I have seen the Marquess—awake—coming here—he is drawing me to him!’

I looked at her attentively. There was no over-strain in her eyes, nothing maniacal in her voice.

She went on: ‘When I saw him lying there in his blood, the feeling that I was the cause of this tragedy became so strong in me that I cried out because I could bear it no longer. It was as though something were shouting with unbelievable strength into my ears: “You are guilty: You have killed him!” In order not to hear this voice I began to sing louder and louder, but yet I did not deafen the voice. I heard it unceasingly. During the night I could not sleep, I lay and looked at the shadows cast by the furniture in the light of the lamp. Then the door sprang open. A narrow, dark streak appeared. Through this streak the Marquess entered, as it were through a thread of cloud as thin as paper; his eyes were closed, he hovered or came slowly towards me, stood beside the bed, as corporeal as you, and with closed eyes. I did not want to look at him but he forced me to do so; I was compelled to turn my eyes towards him. Then he suddenly opened his and looked at me. I could not bear it, and I lost consciousness. Last night it was the same. I can bear it no longer. I feel that he is sucking the life out of me with his eyes.’

I tried with all the arguments of physics, philosophy and religion to get her to dismiss the phenomenon from her mind. She remained resolute ... ‘I am determined to go away,’—she said. ‘Perhaps his shade is fettered only to this house.’ I opposed this. I could not allow her to travel alone and I could not leave my wife who was expecting her confinement. I therefore proposed to Manon de Gaussin that she should move into my agent's house and I promised to watch by her bed the next night. She finally let herself be persuaded into this, got up and walked around the room like a wraith.

In the evening when she had gone to bed, her maid called me to her. I put a table with night-lights near the bed, with a screen around it, and after talking to her for a little, began to read a book. She seemed to be sleeping; the lights burnt badly. I cleaned them, drank some wine and water and looked at the door. Suddenly—it was made of wood and was not firm—it sprang open; the catch may not have been working. I was about to go over softly and shut it noiselessly when, turning to Manon de Gaussin, I saw her sitting upright in bed with staring eyes. She stretched out her arms towards mine and pointed straight in front of her with her finger:

‘There he comes!’

There was absolutely nothing to be seen.

‘Where?’ I said.

I released myself from her and went to the corner.

‘Here?’

‘Come,’ she screamed, ‘he is standing in front of you!’

With one leap I was by her side.

‘Hold my eyes closed, I cannot bear it he is standing there, he is touching your knee!’

I pressed both her hands over her eyes. She breathed with effort, but there was nothing to be seen.

After a while she took her hands away. ‘I must see if he is still there’, she said softly.

‘Dear friend there is nothing here,’ I answered, and released her. She looked around.

‘He has gone away again: O, if he comes once again it will be better for him. We will slip through the doors together.’

This idea made me shudder. She lay back and declared that the next day she would certainly go away into a convent. I tried to talk her out of this.

‘Go to Paris,’ I said—‘You will forget there.’

She interrupted me.—‘I have deserved it; I have also deserved that you should make such a proposal to me. That I shall never forget! Him perhaps I shall forget, if he ceases to torment me, but my guilt—that is fast smelted!’

‘Your guilt amounts to nothing,’ I said. ‘That he loved you was destiny; the fact that you did not love him was not in your power to change. That you were able to believe you had cured him was only too natural in his deranged state.’

‘O’ she cried, ‘can a mother who lets her child fall into the water ever console herself? Do you think that guilt is only constituted by evil intent? If it were so, could one not wash away all regret with the thought of higher necessity? If God makes us guilty, it is also his will that we shall bear the consequences. It has been decreed that I shall hear these chains rattling to all eternity.’

I had soon exhausted my arguments. She left the chateau, and I did not accompany her. The birth of a son tore me away from all dark thoughts. I gave a feast in honour of this joyful event; the christening, and care for my wife took up my time so completely that everyone will understand why I did not make enquires about the unhappy, beautiful creature of whom, however, I thought from time to time. One day I received a packet from Paris. It had been addressed to me in the care of my business manager. It contained a little case and a letter, both sealed. I opened the letter first; there were only a few lines.

Dearest friend:

When you receive this I shall be dead. I knew that the Marquess would call me to him. Although he came no more to disturb my nights, I had some thing in my soul that took the place of him. Tell your wife that I have no pleasanter memory than that of her kindness to me. Guard your son from people like me. Give me a quiet little corner for the photograph enclosed. You need not break the seal. I do not want to destroy it; it must not fall into wrong hands. If you do look at it, think that perchance, even I had a heart

Manon de Gaussin.

I opened the case and the face of the unhappy girl who had announced her death to me in advance streamed out with all the magic she had possessed in the days of her prime. Tears started into my eyes and I thought of all the happy hours I had spent in her house.

Here we have a true description of the etheric body of a dead man appearing to someone else. It is an absolutely true description. Immediately after the death, Manon de Gaussin saw the wandering etheric body of the dead man. I simply wanted to show you how this phenomenon is treated in a story written in the sixties of last century. It is the phenomenon of the appearance of the etheric body of a dead man, and it can teach us about the secret, hidden relationships that may hold sway between human beings. We will pass on tomorrow to further studies. Try to feel how behind what existed in Manon de Gaussin's consciousness as a fragment of Maya, a wide realm was playing, and how out of this wide realm, in the hours she lived through directly after the Marquess' death, a phenomenon appeared to her in the form of a meeting with the etheric body of the dead man.

Truly, the etheric body is more intimately connected with the manifold circumstances in which we are interwoven within the universe than the pictures we bear in our self-knowledge and in our consciousness.

• 1. “Tales” by Herman Grimm: “The Singer.”

Yesterday I told you the story of Manon de Gaussin because it gives an actual description of the working of the etheric organisation, the etheric body, after death. One cannot, of course, quote every novelistic description in such a connection because, naturally, a writer might evolve the most unreal ideas and one would then be quoting something that is incorrect. But I chose an example where, in a way that accurately corresponds with the facts of such a case, the working of an etheric body is described.

The first truth encountered by spiritual-scientific knowledge is that when the human being passes through the gate of death, etheric body, astral body and Ego are loosened from the physical body; a kind of intermediate condition then sets in, a condition in which, on the one side, the physical body is still there and, on the other side, with a connection between them; etheric body, astral body and Ego.

We know that then, after a comparatively short time, the etheric body frees itself, and the Ego, together with the astral body of the human individuality, has to enter upon the further journey through the cosmos in the period between death and a new birth.

We must realise that the etheric organisation, the etheric body, is destined to maintain the earthly body of the human being through the whole maximum age of life. A human being who has reached advanced age, has of course, the same etheric body as when he was a child. When a human being has to leave the physical plane prematurely in some incarnation and the etheric body has then separated from the astral body and the Ego, then this etheric body is in a different condition from the etheric body of a human being who has reached a certain maximum age and who has therefore been able to use the forces of this etheric body through many decades of his earthly life. when a human being dies prematurely, the forces that are still present in the etheric body would, if his karma had allowed him to remain on the earth, have been used during the further course of his life. The using of these forces denotes a continual wearing out of the etheric body. Therefore an etheric body which separates from one who has died early, contains many unused forces; these forces are preserved in the etheric body. They are forces which have gone over into the spiritual world but which would have been able, for a long time yet, to maintain a physical life.

Naturally, these forces are not destroyed when a human being has passed through the gate of Death. For nothing—and still less in the spiritual world than in the physical world—is destroyed. All the forces in existence change into other forms. The law of the conservation of force has assumed great significance in physical science since the year l842 when it was discovered by Julius Robert Mayer. A force is applied in the simplest action, for example, when the hand is rubbed over some surface. This force is not lost; the surface gets warm; the force of the pressure and of the rubbing is changed into warmth. No force is lost; forces change their character. Similarly, no force is lost in the spiritual world. So that we may say: forces of the etheric bodies of those who have died prematurely pass over into the spiritual world and, as they have not been used for the earthly life, are used for the purpose of the human individuality who is living on as Ego and astral body.

These forces which would otherwise have been used for the individuality in his life on the Earth, are used in the spiritual world and remain in the elementary world. (The etheric body itself is dissolved within the elementary world.) In the elementary world they form a real source and reservoir of force. This is very significant, for it sheds light, in a most concrete way, upon the connection between the physical world and the spiritual world.

For real knowledge it is not enough to picture merely in the abstract that the physical world is connected with the spiritual world, and that the spiritual world is behind the physical world. There is variety and differentiation in the spiritual world which lies behind the physical world. Art that is born of clairvoyance and has an important part to play in human evolution on the earth owes a great deal to these unused etheric bodies. Significant stimuli for clairvoyant knowledge and for the knowledge that is inspired by Spiritual Science are provided by these etheric bodies in the elementary world.

Please realise this thoroughly.—In a certain sense we have to thank those who have died prematurely for the fact that their etheric bodies have been given over to the elementary world and that many spiritual influences can therefore proceed from these etheric bodies. I think I need hardly say that such influences can proceed only from souls whose end has come in the course of natural karma and never from a soul who has in any way willed his own death, through suicide. In such a case things are entirely different; fruitful forces of the etheric body are destroyed by decisions emanating from that maya of consciousness of which I spoke yesterday—and all decisions taken during earthly life in regard to death emanate from this Maya. I say this only in parenthesis.

In a very special way the etheric bodies of which I have spoken are at the basis of the spiritual stimuli which may come to us. The spiritual movement we serve will owe, as we may well realise, a very very great deal to what it is able to receive from this side. Perhaps it is not necessary for me to indicate how significantly our knowledge can be enriched in the direction of the love and the reverence we bring to our Dead by the realization of such facts and by our learning to understand how we have to thank those who have died in early youth, and how we have to thank those who have died in mature age, who have taken up into their individuality those forces which, in other circumstances, are unused forces of the etheric body.

When somebody dies in advanced age—and we have also had to experience such a case recently—he has taken up into his astral body forces which would otherwise still be in the etheric body. He has, as it were, made human what, under other circumstances is cosmic. And because this is so, there goes out from him, from his individuality, the stimulus of which I have spoken; he can be particularly influential because these stimuli can then be received by specific human hearts, also by the hearts of those who do not proceed from Spiritual Science or from clairvoyance but abandon themselves to the ordinary impulses of life. into the souls of such men too there can be received—I say ‘there can be received’—those forces—now less cosmic but just because of that, more human—which flow into the spiritual world in which the soul is always imbedded.

We have now mentioned one detail that is connected with the “Death Spectrum” as I will call it—this etheric organisation which remains when Ego and astral body are released. I will call it the “Death Spectrum” ... it contains the forces I have described, but much else as well. In order to study what else is contained in this death spectrum we must resort to such matters as I tried to bring before you yesterday, derived from Grimm's tale.

It will have been clear to you from what I said, and also from the whole treatment of the subject in that case, that between Manon de Gaussin and the man who shot himself, there existed a karmic tie which was, of course, the outcome of previous earthly lives spent together. Karmic connections of this kind are indicated in nearly all imaginative writings. Such writings—above all, the most impressive of them—take their start from the fact that these karmic connections arising from previous earthly lives have not been wholly lived out. Manon de Gaussin meets the man who loves her. She does not understand his love and out of the maya of her consciousness she resists the full and complete living-out of karma. Hence there arises that conflict which is very adaptable to artistic treatment; out of the maya of consciousness human beings rebel against what is karmically predestined.

They cannot, of course, do away with it. I am not saying that karma can be got rid of, for it must certainly be lived out in a subsequent incarnation. The human being certainly cannot escape from karma, or at least only in the very rarest cases, and in such cases the karma has to be transformed. But in one incarnation the soul may resist the full living-out of karma. Consequences then arise such as those which are dealt with in this tale. The one human being leaves the physical plane, and karma has not taken the shape it should have taken. But this “should” of karma is inscribed in the nature of the man. Karma should have been fulfilled in a certain way. We may resist karma in one incarnation because we do not recognise it, and then we postpone it until a later incarnation. Nevertheless it was there within us ... it was actually within us. We wipe karma away, as it were, from the one life, wipe it away from the happenings of the life between birth and death.

And so what Manon de Gaussin and the man who loved her would have experienced if they had fully lived out their karma, is wiped away from their lives. It is wiped away from the physical events of life. But from the death spectrum it cannot be wiped away or effaced. It remains in the death spectrum as will, and then it happens that after the death of the human being concerned this death spectrum follows the will of the karma that has not been lived out. So that when Manon de Gaussin seeks and finds rest at the proper moment, this death spectrum comes to her because there is living in it the will which should have brought about the union of the two. The death spectrum—so far as this is possible—fulfils what ought to have been but has not been fulfilled.

The connection described in the tale has, in this respect, been truly portrayed. This death spectrum, therefore, also contains the karma that has not been lived out, and after the death of the human being something takes shape in the elementary world that is like a picture of this karma. We have to do with two aspects—please realise this—When a human being dies with karma that has not been lived out, he will have to live out this karma in a subsequent incarnation ... this will happen at some time in the future. But in the death spectrum there arises something that is like a prophetic picture of what will have to come about at some time, what ought to have come about but has not. Clairvoyant vision of the death spectrum therefore brings an experience of destiny, of karma that has not been lived out.

It may be said that in the etheric spectrum of the human being after death something happens that could have happened in life, but has not. A picture of happenings which could have been happenings of life may be experienced in this death spectrum. This is a very significant esoteric connection. The human individuality (Ego and astral body) passes over almost immediately after death to a kind of cosmic existence and for some days is still connected with the death spectrum (the etheric body), so that the karma-will of the individuality is playing from the cosmos into the death spectrum. Then, after a few days, what belongs to the cosmic spheres is loosened from what has received its specific, unique character from the connection with the physical human being and has only assumed the form of the physical human being because it has been enclosed within the human physical body. The Ego and the astral body have not this physical form of the human being; but the death spectrum, the etheric body has, in a certain respect, also the physical form of the human being. The death spectrum loses this human form only in the course of days. When the soul has been freed from the physical body it loses this human form. The physical body, through its forces, has preserved this death spectrum in its form; but now that the spectrum is outside the physical body, it takes on other forms, determined by the external forces of the cosmos.

It is therefore understandable that a true description of the emergence of the human individuality together with the etheric body from the physical body must indicate the death spectrum rising up, as it were, in the form which has been that of the physical body. if, therefore, somebody wants to describe the moment of death truly, he will describe how the etheric body rises up like a kind of cloud, still manifesting the form of the physical body with its arms and other limbs, and how this gradually dissolves into the more spiritual forces working in from the cosmos. This is a transformation, a metamorphosis, a transition.

The picture revealed by clairvoyance is difficult for us, because in physical life the human being is bound to time and space, and indeed to those forms of time and space which are at our disposal precisely when we are in the physical body, namely, ordinary three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time, with its past, present and future. And so, many people are inclined to connect with purely spiritual perceptions, three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time with its past, present and future. We can speak of time and space in connection with the spiritual world too; but there they are altogether different. The difficulty is that words coined for the physical world are inadequate and imperfect when used for portrayal of the spiritual world.

In conceptions of time in the physical world, the past is ... well, the past. The past lies behind us and we can only preserve it in memory. It is only the present that can be there before us in immediate perception. In the spiritual world it is not like this, nor even in the elementary world; there the past can be before us just as the present is before us in the physical world.

In the spiritual world, therefore, we can look at what is past, what has happened, what can only be preserved by the physical individuality in memory. When we have passed through the Gate of Death we can look from a later point of time at an earlier point of time. It is just as if, from a later period, we were looking at what is physically past as something that is immediately present, just as from this point where I am standing I can look, physically, into the corner. The past is actually there, living before us, surrounding us.

This conception is made particularly vivid by events like one that happened among us recently, when we attended the cremation of a dear friend, and when her consciousness first came to itself at the moment when the fire seized the physical body. At this moment the consciousness began to be active. But before the physical body was given over to cremation the burial service was held, and it could be seen that this burial service was vividly present to the Dead, as vividly as when something is before us in space. [‘Rudolf Steiner and our Dead.’ Phil. Anthr. verlag (not yet in translation)]

Such things belong, of course, to the very deepest esotericism among us. But in the course of many years we have been striving to make it possible to speak among ourselves of things that are veiled in mysteries just as one speaks of ordinary everyday occurrences. What may be said now is this: that when these difficult days of the war are over, our esoteric life at all events will have to assume a much stronger and more intimate character then, things called forth by the suffering through which humanity has passed—I do not mean the individual suffering which springs from egotism but the general suffering undergone by mankind as a whole. Because of this general suffering it will be possible for much to be deepened in other directions, in directions upon which silence has perforce now to be maintained because human beings are living in a time of general transition.

Let us think more intimately still of the emergence of the human individuality—of the Ego and the astral body with the etheric body—let us think of the emergence of the threefold man from the physical body. This is a process which lasts for days, beginning when the human being passes through the gate of Death. This process shows very vividly indeed how cosmic forces may exist in the human etheric body, but it also reveals, as we have seen, the karma that has not been lived out. This is a process that is individually different in different human beings; it is not the same in two human beings. That is why it is so difficult to describe these things. They are not the same in two cases; they are everywhere different.

It is of course the case that other elements, as well as this process, are contained in the death spectrum, but I cannot describe everything at once. If we know of two characteristic phenomena contained in this death spectrum we already have a more intimate picture than when we are only able to associate the term ‘etheric body’ with this death spectrum. Karma that has not been lived out is contained within this death spectrum—and this makes it possible to deal with conflicts in written works of art, to connect this karma that has not been lived out with processes that take place after death. All that a purely exoteric writer can do is to portray the conflict that has taken place in life, and then let his characters die. But when—as for example in Shakespeare's works—account is taken of esoteric connections in life (as I have said on different occasions in indicating what was behind Shakespeare), when a writer shows how things are connected with deeper laws of life and his descriptions take account of what lies behind the external happenings, then a work like Hamlet can come into being. in what comes from the spirit of Hamlet's father we see a great deal of karma that has not been lived out, that is being transformed. The dramatic conflict for the main character of the play, for Hamlet, begins through the intervention of the father's karma which has not been lived out. So an artist who is convinced of the connection of the physical with the spiritual world will often feel compelled not to let his human characters simply fade out at death—as monistic and materialistic thinkers picture to themselves—but to indicate that this passing through death is a beginning of new events and happenings that are still more concrete than the concrete happenings of life between birth and death.

In order to show how art can seek enrichment by using earthly life as the starting-point for the continuation which then proceeds in the spiritual life, I have spoken about the tale from which I also read an extract yesterday. It is interesting to find how the experience of karma that has not been lived out can come to a man, how he can describe it. And he may feel compelled to say at the end of his work: ‘Here I feel the karma that has not been lived out.’ Then he may feel the urge to portray, in an elementary, real Imagination, how this karma lives itself out. This can be done if life is taken in its totality and not merely in its physical aspect.

In this connection I want to speak of yet another writing although I can indicate its content only very briefly, still more briefly than yesterday, because it is a novel of two volumes (“Invincible Powers”, by Herman Grimm). You will see that what is said here also portrays an element of karma that has not been lived out. I will indicate as briefly as possible how the story gives expression to this.

A mother comes with her daughter from America to Europe. The father died some time ago in America. on their journey in Europe they meet a man who is a descendant of an old noble family, a family firmly rooted in the traditions of aristocracy. Many things happen from which it at once becomes evident to those who observe the spiritual connections of things that between the man "“Arthur” and the two women whom he happens to see in the street while they are going to a theatre, there are karmic links. Anyone who watches the events from the point of view of Spiritual Science observes this immediately. These karmic ties lead to very intricate situations. They take their course in such a way that the whole present age, European culture that has grown old and the still young American culture, are described in a great tableau. The whole present picture of Europe and America is described with poignant concreteness and self-surrendering love. The representatives of these two kinds of culture are Arthur and the two other personalities who have been mentioned. The whole of the present time is described in these souls and many things happen which, to those who bear the spiritual connections in mind, immediately appear as consequences of the karma playing between them. The external milieu, pictured in the interplay between the American outlook upon life and the atavistic European outlook, is connected on the one side with the new, fresh, untouched culture of America, and, on the other, with the atavistic European culture that is simply subsisting on tradition. In this whole milieu there is something that is reflected in the souls of the characters and causes conflict after conflict. Arthur's father who has died, owned an estate; his whole outlook had been imbued with old traditions of the aristocracy; with his money, or rather, with the disappearance of his money, he was a product of the old traditions of aristocracy, he had been obliged to sell the estate—as happens so frequently in Europe today. The estate has been sold, so that Arthur does not inherit it. In the noblest way—which is not always the case in such affairs—an improvement is brought about in the situation as a result of the attitude taken by the Americans to European conditions. Naturally, Emmy has money and she is able to retrieve the estate for Arthur. This happens, at all events is about to happen. But an upstart of uncertain origin has remained on the scene; he is not quite sure of his parentage but he goes about on the estate like a tramp. The estate does not, of course, belong to him, but he has a delusion that he is the master of it—and now the idea comes into his head that the estate must become his property. His point of view is that as the estate has been re-acquired, his rights have been violated. But his ‘rights’ are only a decadent delusion—he regards himself as the master of the estate which has long been mortgaged to the Bank. He goes about as mentally deranged people are allowed to go about when they are not dangerous. A conflict begins, in that this man is furious about the acquisition of the property and actually shoots Arthur on the estate when opportunity offers. Now Emmy has already had terrible experiences; this other experience is added to them and as a consequence of it an illness already present in germ, develops. She is in her twenties. Her mother brings her to Montreux and in her illness she is cared for there by an American who is extraordinarily well portrayed, a Mr. Wilson and some others who are in Montreux. The description of this Mr. Wilson is a wonderful piece of writing; the whole of North America seems to be personified in him ... it is all made wonderfully alive. But in spite of the care she receives—from the doctor too, who comes into her life and is a kind of rival to Arthur, an old friend of his—she cannot be cured. She dies ... and her death is described. In the light of Spiritual Science, therefore, let us observe that here we have, in the sense, a case of karma which in many respects has not been lived out; we have to do with conflicts arising, in the main, between America and Europe; it is a case of karma that simply has been brought to an end by a shot from a gun. Anyone who realises this will naturally ask, if he is not materialistically minded:—“Where is the reality, what happens to this unlived-out karma immediately after death, where will it continue?”—This further continuance of karma that has not been lived out will be felt by a man who is not a materialist. If he is an artist he will feel compelled to give some indication about it, and we actually find such an indication at the end of the writing. I need only read a few lines.—Arthur is dead, he has been shot. Mother and daughter go to Montreux. Emmy is ill for some time and in her last dream Arthur appears to her. It is evident at once that this is no ordinary dream-picture but an actual intervention of the real Arthur in the physical world. The moment of death is described as follows:—

“Between midnight and dawn she thought she had wakened.

Her first glance at the window through which the faint light was streaming into the room, was free and clear, and she knew where she was. Her mother who was sleeping near her, heard her breathing. The next minute, however, with a weight she had never before experienced, overwhelming fear came over her. It was no longer the thoughts that had been troubling her the last days, but it was as if a gigantic hand were holding all the mountains of the earth over her on a thin thread. And at any moment the hand might open and hurl down the great masses which would lie upon her for all eternity. She tried to look within herself and outside herself, seeking for a glimmer of light; but none came. The light from the window had vanished, her mother's breathing was no longer to be heard, and a suffocating loneliness surrounded her. It was as if she would never reach life again. She wanted to call out but could not; she wanted to move but no limb obeyed her. Everything was still and dark and no thought would come in this terrible monotonous state of fear in which even remembrance had departed ... and then, finally, one thought returns: Arthur!

Wonderful to tell, it was as though this single thought had changed into a point of light, visible to the eye. And as the thought grew to infinite longing, so did this light grow and expand, and suddenly seemed to divide, unfold and take on a form ... Arthur was there before her she saw, and finally recognised him. It was certainly he himself. He smiled and was close beside her. She did not notice whether he was naked or clothed, but it was he; she knew him too well; it was he himself, no phantom who had assumed his shape. He stretched his hand towards her and said: ‘Come:’

Never had his voice seemed so sweet and attractive as now.

With all the power of which she was capable, she tried to raise her arms towards him; but she could not.

He came still nearer and stretched his hand closer to her: ‘Come!’ he said once again.

To Emmy it was as though the power with which she tried to bring one word through her lips would have been able to move mountains, but she could not utter even this one word. Arthur looked at her and she at him. One movement of a finger now and she would have touched him. And now the most terrible thing of all: he seemed to be going away again: ‘Come!’ he said for the third time. With the feeling that he had spoken for the last time, that the dreadful darkness would again hide the heavenly vision of him, she was filled now with a fear that split her as the frost splits trees and made the final effort to raise her arms to him; but the weight and coldness which held her captive were not to be overcome. And then, as a bud breaks and a flower grows before our eyes, shining arms came forth from her own arms, shining shoulders from her shoulders; these arms stretched towards Arthur's arms and he, grasping her hands with his hands and slowly hovering backwards, drew her with him, together with the whole shining form that has arisen from the body of Emmy.”

This moment of death, this emergence of the etheric body, the passing over of the death spectrum into the cosmic realms, is wonderfully described. In this death spectrum, spiritually and concretely described as it emerges from the body, there is contained the will that is taking shape; this death spectrum contains the karma that was not lived out between Arthur and Emmy. I quote this second example because you saw from the tale yesterday how the death spectrum comes to the still living personality. But here we have to do with two purely spiritual entities, with the etheric body of Arthur which has already undergone many transformations in the spiritual world and with Emmy's emerging death spectrum. It is therefore an old relationship, karma that has not been lived out, that is playing between Arthur's etheric body and Emmy's death spectrum which is just passing into the spiritual world. Something that has not been played out in life, something that is unlived-out karma, is proceeding here in the spiritual world.

We must really try to grasp in its reality what is present as the first moment after the human individuality has passed through the gate of Death. The unlived-out karma is freed from the individuality—the individuality can only live out his karma in a subsequent incarnation—it is freed, and becomes cosmic: cosmic happenings are the result of it. And in much that happens in the clouds, on the mountains, in the springs, but also in much that happens in the subconscious processes of the soul-life of human beings living on the earth, unlived-out karma is being expressed, karma that has taken over into the spiritual world and is like a wellspring in this death spectrum. For these cosmic happenings play continually into human life; we are permeated by them, interwoven in them.—Thus we must distinguish between what becomes cosmic when the human being passes through the gate of Death, and what remains individual. What remains of the physical body becomes preeminently cosmic, this passes over—slowly in earth burial more quickly in cremation—into the elementary, the more physical-elementary world of earth; and it is a gross, materialistic idea to believe that this then simply disappears or functions like the chemical elements. This is nonsense, and we shall see tomorrow how it goes on living in the planet, how significant it is for the planet.

It lives on in the planetary life. The chemists' knowledge of what becomes of the physical body amounts to nothing at all; for the earth has its essential subsistence from the fact that human beings have died upon it—its more important forces are derived from this source. The earth has its subsistence from the physical nature of human beings who have died. here, therefore, something becomes cosmic from the physical body; the other becomes cosmic from the etheric body. And I have tried today to indicate what becomes cosmic from the ether-aura; what remains, and has become cosmic lives on as individuality in the higher spiritual world. You will find it mentioned in more detail in the books “Theosophy” or “An outline of Occult Science.” This lives on as individuality and I will speak about it tomorrow. But we must realise that what lives on individually begins to live in new conditions which differ essentially from the ordinary conditions of earthly existence.

Careful study of the Vienna lecture-course on the life between death and a new birth will give you a conception of what happens during this period. We cannot really understand the nature of the conditions which prevail between death and a new birth if we have not made these conceptions alive within us. The Time that is presented to our physical outlook as past, present and future, continuing onwards in a straight line, is really a physical Maya. At death we enter into a different world, where the past exists not only in memory, but is actually present; it is all around the human being who is living in conditions where his inner being is revealed as his outer being; his inner being of soul is there in direct manifestation—the being who has shaped the body as well as the physical incarnation between birth and death.

The way in which we must approach one who has passed through the Gate of Death is not an act of external perception but an inner sharing of his experiences. The individuality is fully present when the Gate of Death has been passed, although, as I have said, the human being has to find his bearings and direction within his superabundant consciousness. But what he is in himself, the essential core of his being, is there as a real presence, although it may not as yet be connected with his consciousness. It is there. What a man is in his essential being can be seen, and the experiences shared.

When I have spoken during the sad occasions caused by the recent loss of dear friends, I have always tried to speak out of their being. I will give one or two indications—as far as this is permissible here—concerning the last three friends who have died. I have tried simply to speak out of these souls themselves, as it were to let them speak with me. And when I look back I realise that there were very good reasons for speaking quite differently in each of the three individual cases—for human beings are individually different. I admit quite frankly that this was not in my consciousness when the words were coined. It came entirely out of the situation itself. Moreover words which have to be coined for Spiritual Science and also for the life into which Spiritual science leads us, are coined and unfold in the best and truest way when they are absolutely uncolored by any wish emanating from life. if we are to sneak truly and accurately in the domain of Spiritual Science we must keep entirely aloof from any wish to coin this or that in a particular way. We must hold at a distance every wish that things might be this or that.

When it is a question of speaking at the cremation of a dear friend there is naturally no wish to speak the words that were actually uttered. In such circumstances the words will certainly not be spoken out of any wish, but only out of the necessity. For naturally, the only wish that could be present in such a case is that such words should not have to be spoken. This attitude helps the coining of the words. To me it was very significant—and I say this without any pretensions whatever that in the case of dear Frau Grossheintz I had to speak simply as the organ of expression for this soul.

A soul who had passed through a long earthly life, who in her last years, with so much determination and energy, had united all her forces with the impulses of Spiritual Science ... united them in a way that perhaps only a few among us have done ... who had made Spiritual Science one with her own initiatives in life—such a soul then passes through the Gate of Death into a life that arises not as a theoretical life but as a life of real and vital impulses, born of Spiritual Science. This life is actually there, even if the soul has not yet wakened sufficiently to be aware of it. It is the characteristic element in the being who is becoming free. And so you will admit that the words I had to speak (at the cremation) actually contain what I will call: transformed Spiritual Science, Spiritual Science that has become will, that has become feeling. This soul had had a long earthly life and passed through the gate of Death with mature etheric forces. One was compelled in this case, to speak entirely out of the soul itself. The main words necessarily took a form as if the soul itself were speaking:

In Weltenweiten will ich tragen
fuhlend Herz, dass warm es werde
Im Feuer heil 'gen Kraftewirkens;

In Weltgedanken will ich weben
Das eigne Denken, dass klar es werde
Im Licht des ew'gen Werde-Lebens;

In Seelengrunde will ich tauchen
Ergeb'nes Sinnen, dass stark es werde
Fur Menschenwirkens wahre Ziele;

In gottes Ruhe streb'ich so
Mit Lebenskampfen und mit Sorgen,
Mein Selbst zum hohern Selbst bereitend;

Nach arbeitfreud'gem Frieden trachtend,
Erahnend Welten-Seins im Eigensein,
Mocht' ich die Menschenpflicht erfullen;

Erwartend leben darf ich dann
Entgegen meinem Seelensterne,
Der mir im Geistgebiet den Ort erteilt ...

The inner mobility and life of this soul is revealed in that the first time (at the beginning of the service) the words had to be: “Entgegen meinem Seelensterne,” and at the end of the service: “Entgegen meinem Schicksaltsterne.”

It is the nearness one must have to the soul who has passed through the Gate of Death which calls forth such words—words which are characteristic of the being of the individuality after death.

What I have to say concerning the other two cases will be said tomorrow.

In connection with many painful events that have recently happened we have been considering the Problem of Death.

I should like to call your attention today first to something of a more general character which is connected with the problem and which can be discovered through the means given us by Initiation Science. One must picture to oneself that when the human being passes through the gate of death he comes into a world which is quite different for him from what is often imagined. It is a tendency in human nature which may very well be understood, to picture the realm on the other side of death, the spiritual kingdom into which we enter through the Gate of Death, as being similar to the kingdom of the mind and senses in which we live between birth and death. I say it is an understandable tendency to picture this kingdom on the other side of death somewhat as a kind of continuation of the kingdom here. But one is then in error. For it is difficult to find words from the treasures of our speech which make it possible to characterise the experiences between death and a new birth, words which are even in a slight degree adequate. I have, as you know, often mentioned that our speech is calculated for the physical world and we must, as it were, adjust our relation inwardly to the words if we wish to make them words capable of expressing that which lies on the other side of death.

Moreover the mode in which these words come forth from the soul when the soul must characterise something which lies on the other side of death is quite different from the mode in which words come forth from us in the world of the mind and senses. This mode of expressing oneself about the spiritual world, its beings and its phenomena is much more a self-surrender to this spiritual world and a letting oneself be bestowed upon the words.

Such words as I have communicated to you in respect of persons who have died were not formed as one forms words when one wants to bring something to expression in the outer physical world, but they were so formed as if they poured into one's soul from the being in question. So that the being gives them, pours them in, and we now have the feeling that—we are expressing something or other that we see through these words, but we have throughout the feeling: through us something is expressing itself, something that uses us to a certain extent, as its organ, in order to express itself, in order to objectify itself in spiritual speech. So it is quite a different proceeding, it is a self-surrender with one's soul to the being with whom one is concerned, and such a self-surrender that the being finds the possibility of expressing with our instruments its own inner nature and its own inner experiences. When one frames the word it is not like the adapting of oneself to something external, but like a surrender of the word to the being in question, like a placing of the word at this being's disposal, so that the being can then itself make use of our words.

Thus it is quite a different method of placing oneself in objectiveness, from the method here in the world of the mind and senses. One of the very first conditions, therefore, of gaining a right relation to the spiritual world, is a certain mobility of the inner nature, a certain adaptability to the most varied individuals, a continuous possibility of going out from oneself and betaking oneself into other individuals. If one really wants to express with a certain surety of aim—if I may put it thus—that which is in the supersensible world and lives therein, as is the case with one who has gone through the gate of death, one must first and foremost be healed of what can be called the earthly ego-delusion. One must have succeeded in thinking of oneself as little as possible, in setting oneself as little as possible in the central point of the universe. One must, if one has a strong predilection for speaking a good deal about oneself, for brooding a good deal over oneself, conquer this tendency; since this much speaking of oneself, much brooding over oneself, is actually the very worst path to self-knowledge. If one has the tendency to speak much of oneself, to judge everything so that first of all one is mindful of how one is oneself placed in the world, and what one signifies to the world, if one has this tendency, then one is badly fitted for finding oneself rightly in the spiritual world or for bringing anything at all of the spiritual to expression.

One is most occupied with oneself in the spiritual sense when in the earthly sense one is least so occupied, thinks about oneself least, for what in the earthly sense is the most interesting of all to us, the connection of the world with our own person, is for the spiritual world the most devoid of importance. So we shall always find that the way into the true spiritual reality becomes very difficult when at every opportunity we must find occasions, according to our inner nature, to speak of ourselves, to speak of what we could be worth to the world, if need be, and so forth—less or more.

If we employ these methods in ordinary life, which is also ruled inwardly by spiritual forces and impulses, we do not get on well. Here one can find the most remarkable connections. I have met with people who for instance greatly lamented that they found it extraordinarily difficult to get up, that the decision to lift themselves up was very difficult. I have even made the acquaintance of people who have calmly acknowledged that if there were no external circumstance compelling them to rise, on the whole they would prefer not to get up at all. One can always find an inner connection between the whole being of man and such a predilection. These people as a rule would be those who tell one much, very much about themselves, who have a great deal to say about what is sympathetic or antipathetic to them, what they have come across in this or that place, to their benefit or detriment ... and similar things. One who desires to prepare himself properly for a really objective grasp of the spiritual world must pay attention to such connections. For we must observe life if we wish to enter into reality. And you may be quite sure of this: as human beings, through our natural predisposition, there is nothing as a rule to which we are less disposed, than to take life objectively. We are to nothing so much inclined as to take ourselves in too much earnest and to observe outer life with too little earnestness. One only struggles through quite gradually to words which can then become really true guiding lines of life, and with great geniuses one can often see how they go through a great deal, in order then to impress their whole life-wisdom into a single word. Then this signifies something quite different from what it would when spoken by just anyone in the ordinary daily course.

I once drew attention—it was in connection with the lectures which I held in Norrköping—to how easily one can utter the great, the impressive words of the aged John: “Children, love one another.” But it means something quite different if a foolish person, some youngster says it, or if John says it at the end of a full life in which much, very much had been undergone here upon earth.

It is not only a matter of whether the saying is true, but also from what background of the soul it is spoken, from what background it arises. Goethe, too, from a rich, full life, wrestled through to a beautiful saying, the deep meaning of which one must fathom, though it cannot be understood as people imagine, using it in every situation of life. To understand it thus is—I should like to use the paradoxical term—far too simple, for to understand it thus is possible for every child. But as it must be understood, as Goethe understood it upon the foundation of a rich, and over rich life-experience—I refer to the words, “Know thyself and live in peace with the world”—is not possible to every child. But the linking together of these two sentences shows us that there is no self-knowledge which does not really lead to the sentence “Live in peace with the world.”

I really wanted to review all these things as much as possible in detail since they are far more important than you at first believe. But I must indicate them and leave much to your own meditation. I should like only to point out that, according to the statements of many persons there is a lack of material for meditation. put there is really no lack of it, if one only has the goodwill to let the meditation material be found in life, offer itself as such from life.

Now he who passes through the portal of death is directly, through this fact, removed from all the illusory relationships in which he lives, in which he is ensnared here, so long as he dwells in the physical body. He is removed from them for they were forced upon him as we know through the fact of his being incorporated in the physical body. He is above all removed from many functions which had become sympathetic to him in the life between birth and death, and which naturally, since he lacks the physical body, he can no longer carry out after death. The whole mode of living, of the relation to the universe, becomes a completely different one, and you can get an idea when you meditate upon the Vienna cycle “Life between Death and a New Birth”, of the quite different manner in which one must place oneself to the world if one desires to make concepts about this life between death and a new birth. One must only try, falteringly to coin the words which were sought for there, to experience them quite intimately. In such matters this is imperatively necessary.

I have already pointed out recently that the moment of death is really not to be compared with the moment of birth into physical human life except superficially. In the ordinary course of life, if one is not supported by clairvoyant knowledge, one does not remember back to the physical birth in the physical body. Through the capacities given us by the earth we remember no further back than the fact of being born—not even so far. If there are people today who believe that they know everything through the senses, they do not reflect that they cannot know the very origin of their earth-life through sense-impressions. They can only know it by being informed about their birth or by being told on the foundation of an often not consciously but in fact unconsciously accepted inference. There are only these two methods of knowing that one has been born if one has not the aid of clairvoyant forces;—to have it related to one, or to make a deduction, an inference—other men were born, I am similar to other men, therefore at some time I too was born. A correct deduction.

And any other method of arriving at the fact of one's own birth with earthly forces, except to be told about it, or to make this inference by analogy, any other method than these two does not exist for the faculties of earth, so already by the effort to come to a knowledge of our own birth we discover that it is not possible to find a foundation for the truth of it in mere experience of the senses. The moment of death is utterly dissimilar from the moment of birth, for one can always behold the moment of death, whereas one cannot with ordinary earthly faculties in the physical body behold the moment of birth. In the spiritual world in the time between death and new birth one can always behold the moment of death from the instant when one has brought it for the first time to one's consciousness. There it stands although not perhaps as we see it with its terror, from this side of life, but it stands there a wonderfully beautiful event of life, as a coming forth of the soul and spirit nature of the human being from the physical-sensible sheath, it stands there as the liberation of the Willing and Feeling impulses from the fleeting, the objective fleeting Thought-being.

That directly after death a person is not in a position to behold this moment of death immediately, is connected with the fact that we have, not too little consciousness, after death, after the entrance of death, but on the contrary, that we have too much consciousness. Only remember what is said in the Vienna lectures, that we find ourselves not in too little wisdom but in too much wisdom, in an unending, overflowing wisdom pressing upon us from all sides. To be without wisdom is impossible to us after death. This comes over us like a light, flooding us from every direction, and we must first succeed in circumscribing ourselves, in orientating ourselves, where to begin with if we are not orientated. Thus through this circumscribing of the whole highly-pitched consciousness down to the degree of self-consciousness which we can bear in accordance with our earthly preparation for death, we come to that which we call “the awakening” after death.

We awake directly after death too vividly, and we must first diminish this awakening to the degree corresponding to the faculties which we have prepared for ourselves through our experiences in our various earth-incarnations. So it is a struggle to stand our ground in the consciousness breaking in upon us from all sides.

And now comes something in which we must all—both after death and also if we would rightly enter Initiation—first cure ourselves, as it were, of the habits of the physical-sensible life. In order to be thoroughly understood I should like to link this on to something. When we began in Berlin to carry on our movement of Spiritual Science in quite a small circle, we were at first joined by various people. We were at that time a very small circle. One day not long after we had begun to work, a member of this circle came and explained that he must withdraw again. He had seen that we were not on the right path, for it was not a matter of seeking all the things that we sought, but of seeking Unity. That was an idee fixe with this person. In a long conversation he developed the fixed idea of Unity and then left us in order to seek unity. He thought to arrive at the supersensible just through this seeking for Unity, through this idee fixe of Unity. But the idea of oneness or unity is something only resulting from the last abstractions of the outer physical life. This striving after oneness is in fact the most material towards which one can strive. It is precisely of this oneness-striving that one must be cured if one wishes to stand correctly in the spiritual world. Here in the sense world it is so easy to say: we must seek oneness everywhere, we must seek unity in the plurality, in the multiplicity. But that is something which only has significance for the physical sense world here. For when we pass through the gate of death then we do not have multiplicity, but something which comes before our soul as an overwhelming consciousness. When we have passed through the portal of death we have nothing but oneness around us, continuous oneness. It is then a matter of rightly finding plurality, multiplicity. We must strive there for nothing else than to come out of oneness into multiplicity.

Now I should like to give you a correctly formed idea of how a person comes into multiplicity out of oneness. Let us suppose that one passes through the portal of death, enters into this world of surging spiritual life of wisdom. One enters first into this world, which to begin with stupefies us when we awaken there. We do not distinguish ourselves within it at all. So much is it oneness that we do not distinguish ourselves in it, we do not make a differentiation between ourselves and the universe, but rather we belong completely to the universe; all is one.

But now let us answer the question, and I pray you to ponder not a little but very much upon the answer that I will give. Now we reply to a question: What actually is this oneness into which we are there received? Remember all the beings of the higher hierarchies of which nine are known to you, or ten if we count mankind. In each hierarchy is a whole host of beings. These all think. It is not man alone who thinks. All the beings of these higher hierarchies think. Consider therefore this whole host of beings in whom we are received when we have stepped through the portal of death. They are around us, for in stepping through the portal of death we are received by the complete fullness of being. At first we do not perceive them. We are within them, but we do not perceive them. That which surges around us at first is just this oneness. But what is this oneness? It is the thoughts of all the hierarchies merging into one another. What all the hierarchies think together; this thought-world of the hierarchies indistinguished as to what one hierarch, what the other hierarch thinks;—this is the Light-Being of Thought that surges round us, this oneness.

Therefore we live in the thoughts of the hierarchies flowing together to a oneness. Therein we live.

And now what is the further course of our life after death? Our concern is to gain a relation to the separate beings, to lift ourselves out of the ocean of thought where all the thoughts of the hierarchies flow together, and to gain a relation to the single beings, to the multiplicity. After death we must not only gain a relation to the commingled unity of the surging Thought-essence of the hierarchies—for that is given to us, but we must work through so that we gain a relationship to the single beings of the hierarchies. How do we gain this?

Now at first we are flooded with this ocean of the thoughts of the hierarchies merging and flowing together. Through what we have acquired for ourselves in our physical body there condenses at the gate of death to which we look back, our own inner being lifting itself out of the material coverings. That gives us strength of will. That gives a will-impulse of a feeling nature, and a feeling-impulse of a will-nature. These we inwardly become aware of in beholding the being which ascends from the body which we are after death. Through this we are in the position to some extent of attracting our “will-rays.” And when we place such a will-ray somewhere, which we create out of the force of death, which is born with death, then we obliterate at another place, and at a third place, etc. at various places through the strength of our will-impulse we obliterate the thought-world surging around us. And inasmuch as we obliterate it there comes to meet us in the hollow space of the surging ocean of thought, if I may say so, the thought of a hierarch, the being that lives within it in the spiritual world.

Whereas here in the physical world we exert ourselves to find a thought for the thing which we see, in the spiritual world, where, as I have pointed out, thought stands in profusion at one's beck and call, we must obliterate the thought, drive it away. Then the beings approach us. We must be master of the thoughts, then the beings approach us. And the strength to become master of the thought, to cast the thought out of our field of sight, as it were, whereby the being approaches us in the sea of the surging thought-world, this strength we receive through the fact that as a beautiful beginning of our spiritual life after death the vision of dying, of death itself, comes to meet us, and becomes our teacher in the obliterating. For death becomes to us after death the teacher of obliterating, the stimulator of that will force wherewith we must obliterate the thoughts in the surging sea of light.

Herewith is indicated the entirely different manner in which the human being stands to his surroundings after death and before; how he must proceed in the world of the senses by establishing himself there, having the atmosphere around him and then being obliged to wait until something comes into the atmosphere. On the other hand, after death he must so proceed that he has the Light-sphere of Thought around him and within it he must then himself obliterate the thoughts that lie before him in his field of vision, in which the beings concerned then appear to him. For here one has to do with beings, as I have indicated in my book, “The Threshold of the Spiritual World.” Thus one comes out of unity into multiplicity. Monism in the sense understood by many people is only a world-concept for the Gate of Death. For there in the most marked degree an urgent necessity arises for seeking multiplicity. To seek oneness is a last fetter, a theoretical fetter of life as understood by the senses.

But what is it then that we actually accomplish there? Well, it is an activity by which we make room for the hierarchies to approach us. Our being, as you know, is then spread over the whole universe (I have repeatedly spoken of this,) and we make room by creating these hollow places, as it were, so that what is objective to us after death, can appear. Never can what is objective in the spiritual world appear to us if we take our own being into the spiritual world; we can only discern the other in the spiritual world if on the spot where the other is to appear we obliterate our own being; and that happens in this way.

This is an inner characterization of the process which is also necessary if we wish to reach the dead in the manner I described to you at the beginning of the lecture, where one has to acquire the power of letting the dead speak, of letting the dead express themselves. One must then try to drive away one's thinking and feeling from where the dead is, to drive away oneself, and where one has driven that away, impulses come forth from the depth of being which, without our will, place the words in our mouth which must come to us if we wish to express the objective being of one who is not incorporated in the physical body.

You see, that which here in the physical world is in a way the weakest in man, willing and feeling, (they are the weakest parts of the human soul and the most unclear), over which we are least master, gains a special significance if we are to perceive in the spiritual world. On the other hand, that which here in the physical world is the strongest of all, thought-concepts—we prefer to live, as you know, in illusion and concepts, since there we can be most dominant—is the weakest in the spiritual world. One cannot make much beginning there with illusions, for illusions still disguise for us this overflowing oneness of thought-essence. Our concern is not an exercising of the life of thought, but a development of our life of will and feeling, and this too is the essential in meditation. In meditation it does not matter so much what we picture, but, as I have emphasised repeatedly, to picture with inner strength. it is a matter of inner energy, of feeling and sensation while we meditate, that is, of a will element which we develop in meditation, and which we develop more strongly if we have so to exert ourselves as in meditation we ought to exert ourselves, spiritually exert ourselves. What is most opposed of all to real progress in the spiritual world is the longing to dream, the longing to form illusions about outer reality, because in this way we make our will continually weaker and weaker. One makes the will weakest of all if one cultivates the parasites of the life of idea, if one makes illusions for oneself over all sorts of external things. Above all, the way into the spiritual world does not draw near to us by our holding life at a distance, but by understanding that not an impoverishment of the outer life, but only an enrichment, can lead into the spiritual world. People would like so much to grow into the spiritual world through weakness and not through strength. One grows into the spiritual world by weakness if the outer world, the world of life, does not interest one, when one cannot fulfill the Goethe maxim “Know thyself, and live in peace with the world.”

I should like to point out before I go further in these studies of death, that in all human activity of an artistic nature there must lie as foundation a “playing in” of that activity of the human soul which is necessary for this human soul after death. As regards artistic activity it is precisely the will-element which must be impregnated into the artist from the spiritual world, not so much the element of observation. In our age of the decay of art and especially of artistic labour, the opposite is taking place. In our age of degeneration that element is being elaborated even in the artistic world, which makes the conceptual life more sophisticated. Therefore in our age, artists are becoming more and more dependent on models and copies. They can do extremely little if they have no models or copies. Hence in our age it will come about more and more that the artist will isolate himself in his art. But it can never reach real art if one isolates oneself in art. That is the opposite of what ought to be.

What happens, then, if someone is creating a human being through art, in painting or sculpture, and he does not occupy himself with the inner forces which build up this human being, with the dynamic forces, but merely goes out and gets a model and uses the model as one uses things in looking at them? He is then departing from the real principle of artistic creation. Artistic creation begins when one creates an inwardly willed picture of how the nose stands out here, of how the forehead is vaulted there; one does not see the things outwardly, but can penetrate into them inwardly. That is what matters.

And so in a special way it is also the case with nature. In nature it is a matter of really living within the activities of nature. And here I will call your attention to something which the human being immediately experiences when he has passed through the portal of death, which here, in the physical world, however, remains more or less unknown to him.

When we paint, we paint preferably that which is spread, one might say, over the surface of things. We paint light and shade. We paint colours. Now outer nature is furnished with light and colour from the fact that she does not accept them, but throws them back. Over there is the object and it throws us back light and colour. That is between us and the object. Mineral things are, for instance, minerals, because they cannot receive light and colour, within, because they reflect them externally. There within the colour, man lives with his soul. After death he withdraws into it at once; there he knows himself in light and colour, but here he does not know himself within them. When he comes before the landscape as landscape painter, he must have something of what is between him and the landscape, he must be able to rise into it, he must, as it were, bring something into the physical world which only actually becomes reality when the human being has passed through the gate of death. This gives the similarity between artistic creation and the standing within the spiritual world, although the artist is for the most part unaware that the spiritual world pulsates and flows through him, nor is he conscious of the necessity of being pulsated through by the spiritual world. Precisely on this account the design of our building has been made as it has been made, because we must pay attention as I have often said, just to what is not there, not to what is there. Just the hollow forms which have been left free have to be considered, not what is actually there. In so far, through carrying our stream of Spiritual Science into the practical domain, a beginning has been made which had to be made in our present epoch of culture.

You see, such inter-penetrations of the spiritual world into human life as through, let us say, the Death Spectrum, were by no means so unusual in times lying not so very far behind us. Today it is something unusual, and as a natural gift it will become more and more unusual. It will occur less and less as a natural gift. But the less the human being here in the physical world can form some kind of connection with the spiritual manifoldness, the more he will be fettered when he has passed through the gate of death. The possibility of creating those hollow forms would entirely cease if mankind should quite lose connection with the spiritual world, as must necessarily happen in the mere external progress of world events. We know that the old clairvoyance must become entirely lost. but if that inner relation to the spiritual world were not to be re-established through Spiritual Science, a man would gradually lose the possibility, after death, of actually living in the spiritual world, of having a real, actual existence. Through the backward-survey of his life, which always remains for him, where the beholding of death is something quite actual, he would be spell-bound, almost as if confined in a prison.

Therefore in the case of those who, if I may say so, go through the gate of death strengthened by Spiritual Science, it is to be seen that comparatively quickly after death they gain freedom, free activity in the spiritual world. Hence the point is for a man to replace by the strengthening of Spiritual Science what was earlier given to him by natural aptitude—the gaining of a relation to the super-sensible, to spiritual phenomena.

If from a natural aptitude one can see something like a Death Spectrum (and people in earlier times which do not lie so far behind us used always to see the death-spectrum—only it is a lost faculty)—one sees this death-spectrum through the separation from the body. This enables one to see the single, individual phenomena. These single phenomena are carved out of the oneness ... and that is the important thing ... this carving out of the oneness ... to learn how to do this. But the possibility of learning how to do it is entirely lost with the loss of the natural, atavistic clairvoyance, and it must be replaced by growing into Spiritual science. It will be this strengthening given by Spiritual Science, through which the necessary faculty for artistic creation in every sphere will be called forth in the future. The sculptor, the painter, the poet, will not be able to create if they do not strengthen themselves through Spiritual Science. Today people are still afraid of this. But the fear which comes to expression when a musician, a painter, a poet, says: ‘Since I have to engage in and struggle with all manner of things this kills the original artistic creative power in me’—can be heard everywhere. This is only a fear of the strength that is necessary if the domain of human art is really to last into the future. Men are still afraid today of what in their inner being must come forth precisely as the strongest force. Times will come in human evolution where artistic faculties must ripen through the strengthening acquired through Spiritual Science.

Then, at all events, there will be less of the scandalous thing that is prevalent today, namely, that in very early youth and out of nothingness, people vaunt themselves artists and are, in their own opinions, artists.

When this kind of art does not succeed, they think it is entirely due to lack of appreciation on the part of the world. This nonsensical state of things will gradually cease. The art of the future will be an art of maturity and it will not be until a comparatively late age in life that a man will feel inwardly mature enough to engage in art. it will no longer be believed that in later life it is impossible for a man to have the forces requisite for artistic creation—forces of youth as they are often called; far rather will it be found that only by the deepening and strengthening acquired through Spiritual Science can the forces that will lead to artistic creation in the future be liberated from the inner being. But people are still afraid of these forces today. They are afraid of what has to be attained. Many artists have a holy terror of this emergence of the inner depths of their being, and when they hear that it is not the external, earthly man, but the higher man within them who should be the creative artist, they are thrown into the most utter confusion. It is difficult to imagine more complete confusion than that of a certain modern artist when he realised that it is the Genius in the inner man, the being who belongs to the spiritual world, who is really the creator in the artist. An artist of modern times expressed his holy terror of the spiritual world in approximately the following words:

“Genius is a terrible disease. In the heart of every writer there is a monster who devours his feelings directly they have been born. Who will be victorious—the disease over the man or the man over the disease? A man must be great indeed if he is to hold the balance between his character and his genius. If a poet is not a giant, if he does not possess the strength of a Hercules, he must either forfeit his heart or his talent.”

The very flesh of one's soul, so to speak, creeps when such words are uttered. For they are simply an expression of the holy terror which exists in the human being in regard to things that are connected with the spiritual world. Moreover the last sentence is quite consistent, although the author is unaware of how consistent it is ... The fact that he speaks of giants, of Hercules, is very characteristic. It is very significant that precisely these words come into his mouth—or rather into his pen.

So the view may actually be held that the human being must be victorious by virtue of what he is in earthly life ... for this is contained in the words, whereas true knowledge will reveal that the healthy genius within a man will penetrate and take hold of him, will make him into its instrument.

Another modern writer refers and adds to the sentences I have just read, in strange, extremely strange words. He says: “Let us picture the tragic destruction of Laocoön as described in the Aenead. With natural horror and repugnance the citizens of Troy witness the gigantic snakes strangling Laocoön and his sons. The spectators feel fear, compassion and certainly wish to save the victims; however different their conditions of soul may be, nevertheless the moment of will undoubtedly plays a very important part ... but just imagine a sculptor in the midst of this shocked and excited crowd, a sculptor who sees the terrible catastrophe taking place before his eyes as the subject of a future work of art. Amid the general excitement of these shouting, frenzied, praying people, he remains the unruffled observer. All moral instincts in him are at this moment suppressed by the desire for aesthetic experience.”

This, forsooth, is supposed to be necessary for the creation of a work of art: A crowd of people who are not artists stand there with deep compassion, unable to help, and together with them, a simpleton, a dunderhead, who has no inkling of the pain caused by it all. And this dunderhead is supposed to be the true artist who is capable of portraying the scene; he stands there in his stupidity merely as an observer: Things have come to such a pass at the present time that people dare to demand of the artist that he shall be a dunderhead when faced with life's phenomena, in order that he may be “objective.” He must tear compassion and sympathy out of his heart; he must become a dull-headed simpleton and only then, according to what is said here, will he be able to depict something capable of interesting other human beings.

When people have it in them to evolve such a view of art, they cannot help being seized by the most terrible of all Ahrimanic forces. Such a view denotes the decadence of art that is produced by the fear and dread of spiritual reality. People do not know that if a man wants to be an artist he must feel events with still deeper sympathy, still deeper compassion and must be able, at a later moment to look at the same events objectively out of this deep sympathy, making us love them as we may love a being who is strange to us. Out of this still deeper quality of sympathy we must be capable of art that is creative. The perversion of outlook has reached such a point today that the opposite of truth is trumpeted forth to the world as consummate wisdom. And I am convinced that there are infinite numbers of people who consider this dullness very clever and who regard this laudation of insensitive stupidity in the artist as the final discovery of what art really is. Such is the present day and it is for us to seek in Spiritual Science that support and strengthening which enable us to realise that we ourselves are living in the world into which the human being also enters, in the natural course of events, when he passes through the Gate of Death.

For us, art is related to death; it is related to the higher life: to be related to death means to be related to higher life.

In order to enter the spiritual world we must in many respects be capable of ideas and mental pictures quite different from those which must fill us for the purpose of understanding the world we experience between birth and death. We must pierce through Maya not only in such a way that we take this Maya to be the same everywhere, thinking that when we have broken through it at one point we are already in the spiritual world. The density of Maya is different at different places in life. This we shall find when we confront diverse spheres of life.—Maya is woven out of different materials. Although it is Maya, it is woven out of different materials at different places in life.

Suppose we get to know a child in its physical existence; we form ideas about the being of the child, ideas built up from our experiences of meeting the child in the physical body. There could be no greater error than to carry this picture into the spiritual world for the purpose of really getting to know this being when it has passed through the Gate of Death.

In the death of Theo Faiss, a terribly touching karmic event has happened among us recently. It would be a false picture of him if we were merely to enlarge the idea we formed of this child as we met him in the physical world, if we were simply to project this picture into the spiritual world. In just such a being the very greatest maturity can be observed soon after death. We can find the forces which brought the child into the physical world through birth—and which have not been allowed by karma to live themselves out in the physical world—we can find these forces interwoven in the cosmic forces and we gradually realise that a mature soul has struggles through death to cosmic existence, is growing little by little towards the heavenly spheres. And when such a soul was a child in the last incarnation we can perceive that this soul is able, comparatively quickly, to develop to the point where it directs the forces that are now merging into the cosmos. Then we learn to know the human being as he is after death; it is as though with his own being he were directing the forces which were contained in his death spectrum and are now weaving themselves into the cosmos. Thus the human being grows into that creative activity which we may call the heavenly creative activity. Then his feeling that is coloured by will, and the element of will that is coloured by feeling, grow together with the universe outside him. Just as when we, as children in the physical body, gradually adapt ourselves with our sense-organs to the external world, just as we then grow into the faculty of vision, so do we grow, after death, into the essential realities we grow into the unfolding of will.

If we allowed these things to work upon us in the sense of Spiritual Science, we should observe, little by little, how the Maya of external life is woven with different strengths at different places. Maya is difficult to pierce in cases like the death of a little child, because most of the external manifestations disturb what must replace them if we are to have a true picture of what the human being is after death.

But there are also human beings with whom it is comparatively easy to pierce through the warp and woof of Maya; it is easy because the truth of their being has been able to connect itself deeply even with the Maya existing in them in the physical world between birth and death. There are such men, men who bring down treasures of inner, spiritual richness at their birth into the physical world and who are able to weave into their being and life what they have brought down from the spiritual world. They are those human beings whom we needs must love because of what the Creators in their love have made of them; often we do not ask why we love them; love for them is a matter of course. Such human beings are like living witnesses to the spiritual world, because even here in the physical world they are extraordinarily like their own spiritual being, and because the web of Maya only through the existence of love, of course, but through this very love—can very soon be dispersed, enabling us to gaze into the depths of the soul.

Our attitude to such human beings must have a certain delicacy, a certain intimate delicacy because they have brought down a very, very great deal from the spiritual world into physical existence and because then, after death, they stand like living witnesses to the profound truth that the impulses of the spiritual world live on in all the manifestations of this physical world. If we behold such human beings after their death, it is as though they were wanting to say to us: Thus were we before and the fact that we lived in such deep, and inward truth is now confirmed when we have passed through the Gate of Death.—Thus do they stand as apostles of faith after death too, as apostles of the faith which allows us to have belief in the life we spend here in the physical world.

Since the death of our friend Sybil Colaxxa, she too stands there like an apostle of the faith that the world in which we live is permeated with spirituality. And here it is necessary to explain why the strange thing happened in her case that the sight of her spiritual being confirmed what she revealed through the sheaths of external life in the physical world to everyone who knew and learned to love her. Hence the different tone in the words that had to be spoken out of her soul; it was because her essential quality as an individual was precisely that quality of which I have just spoken:

Mark well that the presentation of the past, the use of the imperfect tense, passes over into the present, the present tense, because observation of the life in the body harmonised with the vision of the life after death. This is expressed in the words themselves. Words that are coined out of the spiritual world contain their own necessity. Thus the words had to be: This Being filled with soul they voice, a voice which, eloquent more through the quality of the words than the words themselves, revealed what lay hidden within that soul, and is working on, existing. “... Existing” therefore, not “existed.”

(verkundet—the present tense—can also be used. Here the two periods of time flow together.)

Now let us think of a soul like Fritz Mitscher, a friend who, to our great pain, has died so recently. The nature of this soul can best be described by those who knew him in words which may sound abstract and dry, but which really do express it: he was an objective human being. Fritz Mitscher was an absolutely objective human being. There can hardly have been any occasion when he spoke about himself. Even if he ever did, it only seemed that he was speaking of himself in describing his relations to something or other in the external world. His “I” was practically never even on the horizon ... let alone at the centre of what he said. It is natural for an elder person when he is speaking with a younger one about all kinds of things in life to bring the conversation back to himself, but it was characteristic of Fritz Mitscher that when opportunity was there for him to speak of himself, he avoided it, and diverted the conversation from himself to what he had experienced round about him, describing it with the art he had acquired from Spiritual Science. In the true sense of the word he was an objective human being. He did not think about what he signified to the world, about the position of his own “I” in the world. His interests were all purely objective, interests which express themselves so characteristically when a man is little concerned about the position he gains in the world. Fritz Mitscher was one of those men who, from the very beginning, was passionately eager, even in passing conversation, to convey to others with absolute objectivity the truths he held most sacred; this eagerness was always present because he was one of those who are interested in the cause itself and not in the person and the position of the individual personality in the world. And when he spoke before an audience he entered into the subject with the greatest purity, never losing his way in the psychical impurity of speaking about himself. It was this that was so characteristic of him. And it was this that made him so eminently capable of grasping the world in such a way that through the medium of the idea, the thought, the mental picture, he really entered into the world; he did not become remote from the world but really entered into it. And so through thought, through idea, he lived right into world-connections, lived together with the world, lived in his “I”—because he spoke so little of himself—and not only in his skin, but right into the heart of things. it is really only human beings of this kind who truly understand ideals in the world, life in ideas and in morals. To live in ideas and ideals is not merely to have ideas and ideals; ideas and ideals are easily come by, they can be picked as easily as blackberries. What matters is not that a man has ideas and ideals, but that he has them in the purity of the life of thought, and human beings without number shirk this purity. They flee from thought in hosts. My dear friends, we need only call up the Imagination, the real imagination of pure thinking, of the life in pure thought, in sense-free thoughts and ideas; we need only picture this pure wellspring of soul-existence and then try to place the specters of human beings around it, and we shall find that in whole hosts they flee from this pure spring of the sense-free world of thought. They say: “But this is barren, dry, it is something that tears love out of one's heart, it is cold, icy.” And they flee in hosts; only a few stand steadfast in purity of soul. These few are the true philosopher-souls, the men who are really gifted for philosophy. And such men as Fritz Mitscher belong to them.

That is why it is almost a matter of course for such souls to grow into their connections in the most natural possible way—or, better said, for their karma to bring them into these connections. In the case of Fritz Mitscher this was so in a high degree. It could never be noticed in him that he sought any position out of an intention formed in physical life. He always allowed himself to be led to his tasks by the flow of karma. Here again you have those truly philosophical natures who will always have to be led to their tasks rather than that they will press forward to some task out of egotistical will. For these truly philosophical natures know all too well in their deep feelings and in their impulses too, that a man is, in reality, never ripe for a task, that only immeasurable vanity can give rise to the belief that he is mature, and he always anticipates in advance something that can only be achieved later on. when a man has only a little of this attitude, he feels in his life something of an inner calling. And the life then will be filled, as it were, with the: “Know thyself!” Knowledge of the self is best attained when a man speaks and thinks little of his “I”. his work and labours in life will then be permeated by the: “Know thyself, live with the world in peace!”

Such was Fritz Mitscher's motto. A life like this continues in the spiritual world and remains what it was, save that in the spiritual world the fruit grows from the seed. In such cases we must abandon the point of view—for it would be unreal—which would make us ask: “What would have come out of such a being if he had been able to stay longer in the physical world?” This is an unreal point of view. The real point of view leads us to the greatness, the wonder of such a soul being taken up into the spiritual worlds. What this soul is now called upon to achieve in the spiritual worlds is related to the experiences between birth and death as the fruit of the plant to the seed, so that the life here is actually revealed as a seed for the spiritual life after death. And so when a being who has lived in objectivity is seen after death, words which characterise this objectivity of outlook in life inevitably sink into the soul, but they are words which also characterise the relationship to the surrounding world, how the whole being stood right within the world. It was necessary to speak of Fritz Mitscher in this way. The characteristic element in these words was precisely this difference between the seed here and the plant which develops in yonder world. This is how I explain to myself the words being as they were

Fritz Mitscher was an individuality who became, in an outstanding degree, what many of our dead friends have actually become since they entered into the spiritual world. They become our most effective co-workers in the field of the spiritual life we have to cultivate; they become those to whom we look upwards with special gratitude when we have to think of the tasks of the present and future spiritual evolution, tasks that can be fulfilled only slowly and with difficulty within earth-existence with the forces that are incarnated in physical bodies. In thinking of friends who have passed through the Gate of Death, including our friend Morgenstern, it always seems to me to be right to ask that they will remain among us in order that through their forces much will be able to be done in our spiritual movement that it is impossible to do with earthly forces alone.

It is this that must be sent as a last greeting from the Earth to such individualities, and it must be expressed clearly and emphatically in connection with Fritz Mitscher, a dear friend who with his youthful forces will be our strong helper, a true consolation when consolation is needed. And it is often needed.

Especially during the most recent period of our work, creative activities and striving, so many things have made us realise how great are the hindrances of the physical plane—truly they are not imagined hindrances—how stubbornly the prejudices of human beings oppose what must be achieved among us, and how violent the opposition often is.

We need only take one such example.—People outside our stream of Spiritual Science write pamphlets ... Truly I am not saying these things for personal reasons, because I feel myself to be only a feeble instrument of the spiritual movement that has to bear us ... Pamphlet after pamphlet is written with the object of declaring that our adherents accept everything without putting it to the test, accept it in faith and belief and confidence; it is suggested that nothing exists among us except blind faith. Our movement is described by the outside world as if all our adherents were credulous simpletons, simply running after the confidence they feel. So it is in the outside world.

But within the precincts, this confidence—if we mean a confidence that exists in the deep foundations of souls and does not merely lie in words—this confidence is often by no means so conspicuous. There is a great contradiction between what we are accused of in pamphlets and what ought to exist in such rich abundance within the precincts of our society. There is yawning contradiction! I say what I have to say here without criticism and above all without bitterness, without in the least wanting to hit at any single personality—but concerning many things I said here in the autumn, it has been stated in writings that Dr. Steiner hawks about his occult researches into such matters—meaning matters about which I have spoken ... he hawks about his occult powers in connection with the things that were spoken about. If it has been possible for such a thing to have been written, then it is a clear proof of the fact that the element of which we are accused in the world is by no means so firmly rooted in the deeper forces of the souls among us, although in many ways it may exist in the upper maya of consciousness. Let it be said once and for always that the teaching presented here is based upon no principle of authority whatever, and belief in it as dogma is never demanded. It is given in order that it may be tested in all details. But for anyone to set himself up as a kind of judge as to what I myself should include in my occult investigations and exclude from them—this is a spiritual tyranny which most certainly is not born of the element that must be present in the Society, although up to a certain point it need not be present for the purpose of taking in spiritual Science; this is a spiritual tyranny emanating from unconscious lack of confidence. Confidence is not needed for the purpose of receiving teachings; but confidence is needed for the realization that it is not for the spiritual investigator to be told what he has to bring from the spiritual world but that it must be Presumed that the representative of Spiritual Science knows himself what he has to do; he has himself to decide what falls within the field of his investigations. Confidence is needed here; this kind of confidence can never be unprofitable to the movement, because it does not transcend the limits of the personal and does not touch the teaching. But a fact like this denotes—as many similar facts denote—that great obstacles and hindrances do exist and that within our spiritual movement we must carry out as a duty—far removed from anything that looks like desire in our work—what leads from insight into inner necessity. This duty will always be done, however sourly, it is done (‘sourly’ according to the ordinary meaning of the word.) But precisely when we realise that we may give to our dear Dead a kind of personal charge to be together with our forces, then there arises for our movement a feeling of security which the physical world could never afford.

And so, in thinking of our beloved Dead, there flows into our movement and into its impulses, something that is supersensible, not springing from what we have here, something that could never, in the physical world itself, give wings to our work. It is possible for supersensible impulses to flow into the Maya of our society-activities, for us to feel secure—because what we do, contains not merely the forces of the physical plane but supersensible forces too. Our beloved Dead have remained with us, although not in physical existence, and we therefore feel security in work which feels itself to be within the flow of spiritual evolution:

So do we speak with reality of our beloved Dead as companions, co-workers, as those who are invisibly among us. Thus concretely do we seize the invisible being, giving the hand physically for the last time to the friend in the visible world and then receiving this hand spiritually, after death from the supersensible world. In this exchange of hand-clasps we have the symbol for work within a Society that is not intended to be a mouthpiece for the physical world but is to call the supersensible worlds too, into its activities. For such work, for such activities, we want to build a centre on this hill. May there be a home here for this work!

Let us first try to bring to mind something that has often been considered in this or that context: that is the relationship of our thoughts, our ideas, to the world. How can we imagine the relationship of our thoughts to the world?

Let us imagine the world as an outer circle and ourselves in relation to it (see diagram on p. 30). At first, it will be clear to us all that we form a picture of the world in our thoughts. We spoke yesterday about how we arrive at conscious thoughts in the physical world. We want to use this circle (small inner circle) to represent what is present in our physical interior through our soul as our thoughts. And I want to say: this circle is intended to represent what we, as the content of our soul with the help of our body, perceive as our thoughts about the world.

Now we know from the various considerations that what we call thoughts actually rest in us on a certain reflection. I have often used the comparison that we are actually also awake outside our physical body, and that the physical body reflects what comes to our consciousness like a mirror. So when we think of ourselves as spiritual beings, we must not actually think of ourselves as being inside there, where – to put it bluntly – our thoughts emerge through our body, but we must think of ourselves as being outside our physical body even when we are awake. So that we actually have to think ourselves into the world with our spiritual-soul nature.

And what is actually mirrored? Well, when thoughts arise in us, something is mirrored in the universe. Let that which lives in the universe and is mirrored in us be indicated by this circle (green). Just as I have the yellow circle here in the human organism as a reflection of something in the universe, I want to indicate something that is mirrored in our thoughts by this green circle in the world itself. And we can say: That which is designated here by this green circle is actually the real thing, the reality, of which our thoughts are only the image, the image reflected back from our body. All this is meant, of course, only schematically.

If we understand in the right sense what actually happens when we confront the world, then we must say that something is generated in us: the whole sum of our ideas is generated in us as a mere image of something that is outside in the world. All that is in our intelligence is an image of something that is outside in the world.

Those who have always known something of the true state of such things in the world have therefore spoken of the truth of the human thought content being spread out in the universe as world thoughts, and that what we have as thought content is just an image of world thoughts. The thoughts of the world are mirrored in us. If our true being were only in our thoughts, then this true being of ours would, of course, be only an image. But from the whole context, it must be clear to us that our true being is not in our head, but that our true being is in the world within us, that we only mirror ourselves in the world thoughts within us. And what we can find in us through the mirroring apparatus of our body is an image of our true reality. All this has already been emphasized in various contexts.

When the physical body dissolves in death, the images that arise in us naturally dissolve as well. What remains of us, our true reality, is basically inscribed in the cosmos throughout our entire life, and it only projects a mirror image of ourselves through our body during our lifetime. Here, you see, lies the difficulty that philosophers continually encounter and cannot overcome with their philosophy, the main difficulty. These philosophers are given, in the first instance, nothing but that which they imagine. But consider that existence is precisely pressed out of the imagination, out of the content of consciousness. It cannot be in it, because what is in consciousness is only a mirror image. Existence cannot be in it. Now philosophers seek existence through consciousness, through ordinary physical consciousness. They cannot find it that way. And it is quite natural that such philosophies had to arise as the Kantian one, for example, which seeks being through consciousness. But because consciousness, quite naturally, can only contain images of being, one can come to no other conclusion than to recognize that one can never approach being with consciousness.

Those who look more deeply then know that of all that is present in consciousness, out there in the world is the true, the real, which is only reflected in consciousness. But what actually happens between the world and consciousness? As a spiritual scientist, one must understand what happens there. Certainly, it is only images that are created by the physical body. The physical body is created out of the universe. It develops during the course of life between birth and death to the point where it can create images, indeed it creates an image of the whole human being that we always encounter when we see ourselves in the mirror of our body. It is only an image, but it is an image. And what is the purpose of this image in the overall cosmic context? Yes, this image must come into being. You see, at the moment when we enter into existence through birth from the spiritual world, an epoch of our existence has actually come to an end in a certain sense. We have entered the spiritual world through a previous death, we carry certain forces into the spiritual world, we live out these forces until what in the fourth mystery drama has been called the midnight hour of existence between 'death and a new birth.

In the second half of life, between death and a new birth, we then gather strength. But where do these forces that we gather want to go? They want to build the new physical body, and when the new physical body is there, the forces that we partake of in the second half between death and a new birth have fulfilled their task. Because they want to represent this new body. They want to come together in the new body. One can say that entire hierarchies are working, struggling, to enable this person to enter into existence through birth from the spiritual universe, as I indicated in the second mystery drama through the words of Capesius. There we see what it evokes in the human mind when man becomes aware of what it means that entire hierarchies of gods are involved in bringing man into the world.

But I would like to say that with these powers, in that they bring about the human being, something very similar happens as it does with the old seeds of a plant: when the new plant has emerged, the old seed has fulfilled its task; it no longer claims to produce a plant. This plant is called upon by the cosmos to produce another seed. Otherwise there would be no further development, and plant life would have had to come to an end with this plant. Thus, if the pictorial consciousness did not arise here, human life would have to end with the renewal of life between birth and death. That which appears as the image of the world is the new germ that now goes through death and, through death, passes over into a new life. And this germ is now really such that it brings over nothing of the old reality, but that it begins at the stage of an image, at nothing, really begins in relation to reality, to outer reality, at nothing.

Please summarize a thought here that is of tremendous importance. Imagine for a moment that you are facing the world. Well, the world is there, you are there too. But you have emerged from the world, the world has created you, you belong to the world. Now life must go on. In that which is in you as reality, which the world has placed in you - this world that you look at within the physical plane - there is nothing that can continue life. But something is added: you look at the world, create an image for yourself, and this image gains the power to carry your existence into further infinite distances. This image becomes the germ of the future.

If you do not consider this, you will never understand that, alongside the sentence “Out of nothing, nothing comes into being,” the other sentence is also fully correct: “In the deepest sense, existence is always generated out of nothing.” Both sentences are fully correct; you just have to apply them in the right place. The continuity of existence does not end with this. If you, let us say, were to wake up in the morning and find that physically nothing at all of you had remained – this is indeed the case when one is approaching a new birth – but only had a full memory of what had happened, thus only the image, you would be quite content. Of course, deeper minds have always felt such things. When Goethe placed the two poems next to each other: “No being can disintegrate into nothingness,” and immediately before it was the poem that means: “Everything must disintegrate into nothingness if it wants to persist in being.” These two poems stand very close to each other in Goethe as an apparent contradiction, immediately one after the other.

But for ordinary philosophy, there is a pitfall here, because it must actually rise to the negation of being.

Now one could again raise the question: What is actually reflected here, if all that is reflected here are only the thoughts of the world? How can one then be certain that there is a reality out there in the world? And here we come to the necessity of recognizing that reality cannot be guaranteed at all through ordinary human consciousness, but that reality can only be guaranteed through that consciousness which arises in us in the regions where the imaginations are, and we get behind the character of the imaginations. Then we find that out there in the world, behind what I have indicated as green, there are not just world thoughts, but that these world thoughts are the expressions of the world beings. But they are veiled by the world thoughts, just as the human inner being is veiled by the content of consciousness. So we look into the world; we think we have the world in our consciousness: there we have nothing, a mere mirror image. That which is mirrored is itself only world thoughts. But these world thoughts belong to real, actual entities, the entities that we know as spiritual-soul entities, as group souls of the lower realms, as human souls, as souls of the higher hierarchies, and so on.

Now you know that, to a certain extent, the development of humanity on Earth falls into two halves. In the older times, there was a kind of dream-like clairvoyance. Through this dream-like clairvoyance, people knew that behind this world, which is ultimately grasped by people in their thoughts, there is a world of real spiritual entities. For in the old dream-like clairvoyance, people did not perceive mere thoughts, just as the newer clairvoyant, who, for example, through the methods of “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?” again enters into a relationship with the spiritual world, does not perceive mere thoughts either, but beings of the spiritual world. I have often tried to make this clear, so that I even said in one of the Munich lectures: You put your head into beings the way you would put your head into an anthill: thoughts begin to take on beings and come to life. That was how it was with people in the older days. In their perceiving consciousness, they not only lived in thoughts, but they lived in the beings of the world. But it was necessary - and we know from the various lectures that have been given why it was necessary - that this old clairvoyance, so to speak, dimmed and ceased. For that through which man received his present consciousness, which he needs in order to attain true inner freedom, presupposed that the old clairvoyance slowly dimmed and disappeared. There had to come a time when man was, as it were, dependent on what he, without any clairvoyance, can perceive in the world. He was then naturally cut off, completely cut off from the spiritual world, to put it in extreme terms.

Of course there were always individual spirits who could see into the spiritual world. But while the old clairvoyance was the general, the being cut off from clairvoyance now became, so to speak, the external culture of humanity for a period of time. And we, in turn, are seeking to imprint the consciously attained clairvoyance of this human culture again through our spiritual scientific endeavors. So that we can say: There are two developmental periods of humanity on earth, separated by an intermediate epoch. The first is a period in which dream-like clairvoyance prevailed: people knew that they were connected to a spiritual world, they knew that not only thoughts haunt the universe, but that there are world beings behind the thoughts, beings like ourselves who think these world thoughts. Then a time will come when people will know this again, but through self-achieved clairvoyance. And in between lies the episode where people are cut off. If we take a really close look at what has been said, we have to say that we actually have to expect that at some point in the development of humanity, people will realize that Yes, it makes no sense at all to think that there are thoughts in there in this brain. Because if there were only these thoughts, these images in there, and they did not represent anything, then it would be best to stop all thinking! Because why should one think about a world if this world contains no thoughts in itself?

Of course, in the 19th century people were quite content with the world containing no thoughts, and yet they reflected on the world. But the 19th century simply spread thoughtlessness over the most intimate matters of life. It had the task of bringing this thoughtlessness. But we may still assume that at some point someone may have thought of it in the following way, saying to himself: It only makes sense if we assume that thoughts are not only in there in the brain, but that the whole world is full of thoughts. - If he had now been able to advance to our spiritual science, yes, then he would have said: “Of course, there are thoughts out there in the universe, but there are also beings that harbor these thoughts, just as we harbor our thoughts. They are the beings of the higher hierarchies.

But this time had to come first, so to speak, after humanity had made the deep fall into materialism, that is, into the belief that the world has no thoughts.

One might be tempted to view the person who formed these thoughts – In there, the thoughts can only be images of the great world thinking, one could be tempted to look for this person in boors. But it would not be quite right; because Hegel lived in a period in which, after all, through what had preceded in Fichte's opposition to Kant, one could, I would say, draw from newly emerged germs of spiritual consciousness. Hegel's philosophy could not have been conceived without a spark of spiritual thinking falling even into the materialistic age. Even if Hegel's philosophy is still in many respects a rationalistic straw from which spirit has been squeezed out, these thoughts of the logic of the world could only have been conceived out of the consciousness that spirit is in the world. That cannot be what is called Hegelian philosophy, it cannot be, when the tragic moment has come to say: there are thoughts in the world outside, and these thoughts are the real reality, the true, real reality... And where would the time be that had progressed so far that it had drawn the veil over everything spiritual, so to speak, and at the same time said to itself: Thoughts are the real thing in the world, and behind these thoughts there can be no spiritual beings anymore? One did not need to say it out loud, one only needed to feel it unconsciously, so to speak, then one stood there in the world and said to oneself: Yes, there is actually nothing to it with individual life! Individual life has, after all, only a value between birth and death. For that which really lives is not the thoughts of man, but the thoughts of the world, a world intelligence, but a world intelligence without essence. And I believe one could not imagine a greater tragedy than if, say, a Catholic priest had come to this inner realization, so to speak! |

What happens happens out of world necessity. Let us assume that a Catholic priest had come to this conclusion... He could easily have done so, because scholasticism has wonderfully trained the mind, and only if one has thoughtless, untrained thinking can one believe that thoughts are only in the head and not outside in the world. Then, so to speak, this Catholic priest would have undermined himself. For by only acknowledging the world thoughts as eternal, he would have wiped out the whole world, which was prescribed for him to believe through revelation as a spiritual world.

It can truly be said: Whatever can be presupposed through spiritual science also happens in the world. If we have the necessity somewhere to presuppose something as necessary and we have to say: a moment must once have existed in the world when something like this was felt, then that moment must have existed, most certainly. And even if it has passed by completely unnoticed, it has been there.

I would like to point out this moment, this moment when one can see how something that is not yet there, but wants to prepare, wants recognition, recognition of world thoughts, but does not yet want to know about what is behind these world thoughts as the world of the higher hierarchies, comes into a conflict.

In 1769, a pamphlet entitled “Lettres sur l'esprit du siècle” was published in London. It contained allusions to such a mood as I have characterized. And in 1770, another pamphlet appeared in Brussels entitled “Système de la nature. The voice of reason in the age and particularly against that of the other system of nature.” This ‘Autre système de la nature’ was that of Baron Holbach, against which this brochure is directed. This brochure said it wanted to take a stand against what Baron Holbach, as a materialist, advocated in his System of Nature. But the two brochures were hardly read, completely forgotten.

But now the strange thing turned out, that in 1865 a beautiful book appeared in Poitiers, by Professor Beaussire, entitled “Antécédents de Hégélianisme dans la philosophie Française”. This book, which appeared in 1865, was a two-volume work and had been written somewhat earlier than the two brochures mentioned, i.e. around 1760-1770, by the Benedictine monk Leodegar Maria Deschamps, who was born in Rennes in 1733 and died in 1774 as prior of a Benedictine monastery in Poitou. The first volume contained what Deschamps called at the time: “Le vrai système.” It was not published until 1865, together with parts of the second volume. It had been in manuscript form in the Poitiers library for so long. Nobody had paid any attention to it, except during the period in which it was written. What Deschamps – for the two pamphlets I mentioned also originated from him – wanted to express in 1769 and 1770 is now expressed in a strong first volume, which was published a century later by Professor Beaussire. That is what it contains. And the second volume contained a detailed correspondence and a presentation of all the efforts that Deschamps made at the time – let us put ourselves in the time when this was: namely before the outbreak of the French Revolution – described all the efforts that Deschamps made to somehow bring about the breakthrough of his “vrai système”. We learn there that the man really, I would say, stood between two fires: On the one hand, wherever his “vrai système” was discussed, he was warned that if the church found out about the “système”, he would be unconditionally subject to the harshest of punishments as a priest. On the other hand, even the so-called freethinkers showed very little interest in his writing. They were interested, but they did not want to do even the smallest thing that he asked: find a publisher. Rousseau, Robinet, Voltaire, the subtle Abbé Yvon, Barthélemy, even Diderot, they all knew this “vrai système”. It was even read to Diderot in his salon. He did not understand it immediately and therefore wanted to keep it to read through; but the good priest Deschamps was so anxious that he took it back because he did not want to put it into other hands. So he was always torn between these two things: on the one hand, he did not want his “vrai système” to be known; on the other hand, he wanted it to really take hold of humanity.

Now let us take a look at what Deschamps presented as his “vrai système” in his first volume. He really did present what I just spoke of, which was bound to come up at some point. He calls that which is in the head (see drawing on p. 40) by designating it as force, “intelligence”; and he calls that which is out there, what I have drawn here in green, “comprehension”. And the significant thing is that he recognized: Yes, if one now conceives this whole mass of thoughts of the world in the spiritual eye, it is a web of world thoughts. If you look at only the individual object, it actually only has meaning when it is placed in the whole fabric of world thoughts. Fundamentally, it is nothing in itself. That which is something, which is there, is the whole fabric of world thoughts.

And that is why Deschamps distinguishes between “le tout” and “tout.” He calls the whole fabric of world thought “le tout,” and he distinguishes “le tout” from “tout.” The first is the sum of all particulars. A subtle distinction, as you can see. “Le tout” is the whole, the universe, the cosmos; ‘tout’ is everything that is considered a detail. But what is considered a detail is at the same time, as he says, ‘rien’; ‘tout’ is ‘rien’; that is an equation. But ‘le tout’, that means in his sense: the universe of thought.

The more materialistically minded minds, like Robinet and his ilk, could not grasp what he actually meant. And so no one could understand him. It could come to pass, because, so to speak, the materialistic tendency was already there, that the works of this Benedictine prior were left to molder. Because, it is not true that in 1865 a professor published the work – after all, that is nothing special. They always did that, you know, they collected and published such old tomes, regardless of their content.

So the time that was to come, the time of materialism, had passed over what had taken hold in the lonely soul, the lonely spirit of a Benedictine prior.

It is probably difficult for today's humanity to learn to delve deeper into the corresponding expressions, which are truly wonderful expressions, namely through the way in which one is placed after the other here : “tout, rien” he calls at the same time, in that he goes further to describe the world, “etre sensible”; and then he forms the expression “neantisme” also “rienisme”, yes even “neantete” and “rienite”. And now consider the relationship between n&antisme, rienisme, n&antete, rienite, and what we call Maya, and you will see how closely all these things are related, and how, into the age of material ism, I might say, that which instinctively still remained from the earlier consciousness of looking into a spiritual world, of which the last remnant remained: “le tout,” the cosmic world of thought.

Of course, one must also recognize the greatness of such a thinker when he can no longer appeal to us 150 or 160 years later. I am convinced that if, for example, our dear female friends were to obtain these two volumes from some library, and if they were to work their way through the difficult philosophical part of the first half of the first volume and then read the second half of the first volume , they would become quietly furious at the views that Deschamps now develops regarding the position of women, for he has desperately unmodern views on the subject and, in the spirit of Plato, regards women from the point of view of communism. So we must not want to take everything in Deschamps' work at face value. But we must bear in mind what makes him such an interesting personality, especially if we want to consider the progress of the development of humanity. The important thing, however, is that in him we see, as it were, a spiritual view dying out. He is not even read, one could even say not even printed, although the most significant minds of his time knew him. Even a great mind such as Diderot did not even see fit to recommend its publication. All of this has been absorbed by the emerging materialism,

As you can see, we must work vigorously and energetically. For it is, after all, a matter of nothing less than bringing a new impulse to the spiritual development of humanity in the face of what, I might say, has emerged so surely and so strongly that, from a certain point in time, it has trampled to death everything that still reminded people of anything other than a more or less materialistically conceived world view.

And there was indeed tragedy in this personality of Deschamps. For he was, after all, a Benedictine priest. And the strange thing was this: Baron Holbach said in his “System of Nature”: Religion is the most harmful thing that the human race can have, religion is the greatest fraud, and should be eradicated as quickly as possible -; in contrast to this, Deschamps said: No, “le vrai systeme” must be adopted, and when people adopt “le vrai systeme”, then religion will disappear. But it must be preserved until people have accepted “le vrai systeme”. Then, so to speak, all the revealed truths behind it will be dropped, and in their place will be established the fabric of world thoughts. So this priest, who besides had to teach his boarding school boys the catechism and everything that religion had to offer every day, waited until his “vrai système” would become common property and religion would disappear as a result! There is something highly tragic about this.

When we stand today before the outer world, which in many respects believes itself to be beyond materialism, but which is terribly mistaken in this respect, then it is of course primarily a matter of teach people again that what we have as a world of perception within us is a reflection of the truth, and that we are actually always outside of our bodies with our true spiritual-soul nature. I have already discussed this here in another context. I also pointed out at the time that I had presented this from an epistemological, purely philosophical point of view at the last philosophers' congress in Bologna. Unfortunately, however, none of the philosophers at the time understood what was actually meant philosophically. Even the chairman of the congress, the famous philosopher Paul Deußen, is one of them. After my speech, he merely said: Yes, I have heard something about Theosophy. I have read a brochure that Franz Hartmann wrote against Theosophy. That was all Deußen could say about my lecture, Deußen, one of the most well-known and, in the field of Indology, most revered philosophers of the present day.

But we must be clear about the fact that it must really be the first step: to make plausible to the world consciousness of humanity this peculiar relationship of the spiritual and soul to the physical. Then the spirit that is at work in the course of human development will bring it about that people will recognize more than could be recognized in the 18th century, that people will see behind the “entendement” » the hierarchies and know that the «entendement» is that which the hierarchies live out as the thought content of the world, just as we live out the intelligence, «intelligence», through our being.

But some things will necessarily be connected with this change in the spiritual consciousness of humanity, which we have been talking about now and also in these days in a certain context. For what matters most of all for us – and I must keep emphasizing this – is not just to absorb knowledge, but to connect with every fiber of our spiritual and soul being with the results of spiritual research, so that we learn to think, feel and sense in the spirit of spiritual research. Then, wherever we are in life, wherever karma has placed us, whether we have a more material or a more spiritual occupation, we will truly carry into the individual branches of life that which is spiritually felt, felt and thought in us. |

And this must be said: anyone who expects a continuation, a real progress of culture from something other than such a spiritual deepening of humanity will wait in vain if it is left to him. The only thing that will really advance humanity is this spiritual deepening; for the events that otherwise take place can only be brought to a prosperous end if there are as many souls as possible that are able to feel, sense and think spiritually. Spiritual thinking must coincide with what is otherwise happening in the world if there is to be progress in the future of civilization.

What must be lived out as the karma of materialism, you are now experiencing when you look around at what is happening in the world. It is the karma of materialism being lived out. And the one who can look into things will find in all details - even in all details - the karma of materialism being lived out.

We will only find the way into a prosperous future if we find our way through what, I would like to say, under the leadership of Christ, in the balance between Ahriman and Lucifer, arises for the soul's perception, if we orient this perception of the soul to the results of spiritual science. And we must not deceive ourselves into thinking that this intuitive perception and feeling has not to be drawn from spiritual science, and that everything else in the present world is opposed to it, and that we ourselves oppose spiritual science when we do not find ourselves ready to go, so to speak, completely into its spirit. For only spiritual science deals with the human being as such, with the human being as such, in relation to present-day humanity. Everything in present-day humanity is moving towards the goal of denying the human being as such and presenting something other than the human being as that for which one should fight, for which one should work, and of which one should think.

As you know, my dear friends, I have been unable to go into the details of our contemporary phenomena since Christmas for reasons I am sure you can guess. But in general, at least, we must appeal again and again to the intuitive perception of those who want to stand in the realm of spiritual science: the greatest in the newer development contains the germs for what humanity must attain. The greatest thing has been achieved by the fact that, in certain currents of human culture, what can merely be called national culture, what can merely be called national aspiration, has receded. For the true inner impulse is for the national to be overcome by the spiritual in the course of human development. Anything that works towards the unification of world territories from a national point of view works against human progress. Precisely there, in the most beautiful measure, that which leads forward can occasionally develop where a part of a nationality lives, separated from the great mass of the nationality, cut off from an entire massif. How something really significant was achieved by the fact that, in addition to the Germans in the German Empire, there were also Germans in Austria and Germans in Switzerland, separated from the Germans in the German Empire. And it would be contrary not only to the course of what one otherwise thinks, but contrary to the idea of progress, to think that a uniformity under a national idea should unite these three limbs into a single nationality, disregarding precisely the great thing that comes from external political separation. And one cannot imagine how infinitely bitter and sad it is when the national point of view is asserted by certain quarters as the only one for the formation of political contexts, when, from a national point of view, demarcations are sought, separations are sought. One can stand aloof from all politics, but fall into mourning when this idea, which is contrary to all real progressive forces, comes to the fore.

A sad Pentecost, my dear friends, when such words are forced from the soul.

But let us hold fast to the other Pentecost, to which attention was drawn yesterday and the day before, to that Pentecost to which the third part of our saying refers: “Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.”

Let us hold fast to the awareness that the human soul can find the way into the spiritual worlds, and that in our epoch of development the point has come when it is predetermined in the spiritual world that a new revelation should flow into humanity, a scientific revelation of spiritual knowledge that can take hold of human souls and give them what they need now and for the future.

We may say it, my dear friends: when peaceful times come again in place of the present ones, we will be able to speak quite differently – if not some particularly repulsive karma should prevent it – than we have been able to speak on spiritual-scientific ground up to now. But all this presupposes that spiritual science is not just knowledge about us, but a real, a world-wide gift of Pentecost; that we really do not just unite spiritual science with our minds, but with our hearts. For then, through the union of spiritual science with the power of our hearts, what wants to come down from the spiritual world will gather into the fiery tongues that are the tongues of Pentecost.

What wants to come down from the spiritual world as the gift of Pentecost lures into the human soul, not the intellect, but the heart, the warm heart that can feel with spiritual science, not just know about spiritual science. And the more your heart is warmed by the abstractions of spiritual science, which sometimes seem to chill, even though we almost always try to present only the concrete, the better. And the more we can even unite such a thought, as was expressed just yesterday, with our hearts, the better!

We have said that as materialists we usually perceive only one half of the physical world: what grows, springs up and sprouts. But we must also look at destruction, although we must see that destruction does not impose itself on us as the one who sees destruction as a mere nothingness. In all that is like destruction, we must also see the ascent and rising of the spiritual. We must connect ourselves completely with what we can feel and inwardly experience through the results of spiritual science as the spiritual life, the spiritual. Then we will feel more and more the truth of the saying: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

We will have a scientific trust that we will be awakened to the spiritual world through the power of the spirit. And we will not feel with pride, but in all humility, what is to be brought into the world through spiritual science, but we will feel it especially in our hard time, in our time, which asks so many questions about our feelings that can only be answered when spiritual science can truly assert itself. I do not wish to stir up anyone's pride, but I would like to repeat a word that was once spoken when there was also much talk about what should happen through minds that had received something and were to carry it out. It was said to these minds - not to stir their pride either, but appealing to their humility -: “You are the salt of the earth.”

Let us understand the word for ourselves in the right sense: “You are the salt of the earth.” And let us become aware that precisely when the fruits, the fruits of the blood-soaked earth will be there in the future, these fruits will not flourish without spirituality: that the earth will need salt even more afterwards.

Take these words, imbued with heartfelt passion, into your own heart and soul on this Pentecost, when we want to truly imbue our entire being with the truth in the sense suggested: Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.

Today, we want to talk about some peculiarities of the occult development of the human being, in order to then prepare for something else. We are allowed to speak of this occult development because, basically, engaging with spiritual science is the beginning of a real occult development. Even if most people do not recognize the fact that simply occupying oneself with spiritual science is really the first step towards occult development, it is nevertheless the case. And it has been emphasized time and again, and must always be emphasized, that spiritual science is not meant to merely convey knowledge to us, a theoretical knowledge, but that spiritual science is meant to give us something that transforms our whole being, that makes something different out of our whole being than the external culture of the present can do.

Now we will gain an insight into the difficulty that spiritual science has in impressing itself not only on our memory but also on our whole cultural life of the present, if we familiarize ourselves with the peculiarities of spiritual scientific research, with the way in which the results of spiritual scientific research relate to us humans. They relate to us differently than other knowledge that we acquire in life. We acquire knowledge through our experiences, through our experiences; because even if we acquire scientific knowledge, it is either through direct or indirect experience. Wherever we acquire knowledge, we acquire it first through experience and then we store it in our memory, in our recollection. We keep these results of life.

We have often made it clear what it means, in more intimate terms, to store something in our memory, especially in recent times we have talked a little more about what memory is. In any case, for life, memory is an extraordinarily important thing. Just think: if we did not have memory, if we could not remember what we experienced yesterday, the day before yesterday, a year ago or ten years ago, how very different our lives would have to be. It is inconceivable to us that the ordinary life of the soul, taking place on the physical plane, could take place without memory.

But compare the power that enables you to retain experiences of the physical plane in your memory with the much lesser power that enables you to retain dream experiences in your memory. Consider how much more easily you forget a dream than experiences in the physical world. One may initially ask the question: Why do we forget dream experiences more easily than experiences of the physical world? Well, the answer to this question will also give us an important point of view for higher knowledge.

How are dream experiences acquired? They are acquired by not being completely inside the physical body. When we are completely inside the physical body, we do not dream. Then we experience through the senses on the physical plane and through the mind bound to the senses. When we dream, we must at least be partially outside the physical body. What does the physical body do when it works through the power of memory? Yes, as difficult as it is for a person to think at first, it is nevertheless true: every time a person has an experience and stores this experience in their memory through a thought, an imprint, a kind of cliché of the experience, is formed in our etheric body. But – and I have already discussed this – it is not the case that this imprint would photographically depict the experience. Just as the letter of a writing has nothing to do with the sound, what exists in our body as an imprint has just as little to do with the experience itself. The imprint is only a sign. And this sign is strangely similar to the human form itself. And if you take the upper parts of the human form, the head and at most a little of the upper body and the hands, you have what can be observed in the etheric body every time a person forms a memory of an experience.

So, we can say: I experience something; the experience remains with me, whether it be a small or a great experience, as a memory. An impression is formed, something like this (see drawing). Something like this arises in your etheric body every time a memory is formed, and if it were to be extinguished, you would no longer be able to remember the experience.

Think of how many things you remember in life! You have just as many thousands and thousands of such ethereal images of people within you. Your etheric body, and also your physical body, allow so many different images to be there. If two were the same, you would not be able to distinguish the experiences. If you observe a person occultly, you will find thousands and thousands of such images of people within him. But they do not only arise in the etheric body; a fine impression of each such human image also arises in the physical body, and these impressions also all remain, insofar as the person has memories. So thousands upon thousands of such homunculi are present in a person.

Let us say you are listening to today's lecture. Just by listening to this lecture, hundreds and hundreds of such homunculi are forming in your soul. These also make impressions in your physical body when you remember them later, and these impressions also remain.

But what about dreams? Yes, you see, in a dream the homunculus is formed in the etheric body, but

but it does not leave an impression on the physical body. It leaves a weak impression, or sometimes no impression at all. Then the person is well aware that he has dreamt, but he cannot remember what he dreamt. Dreams leave a weak impression, much weaker than any experience on the physical plane. This is why it is so difficult to retain a memory of them.

The strength of the memory therefore depends entirely on how strong the impression is that the homunculus of the etheric body makes on the physical body. However, what the spiritual researcher finds, what he experiences in the spiritual world, is initially such that it cannot make any impression on the physical body at all. For if an experience can make an impression on the physical body, then it is no longer a purely spiritual experience; then it has already been acquired with regard to the physical body. This must be the peculiar thing about the spiritual experience, that at first nothing at all happens in the physical body, while the spiritual is being experienced.

What follows from this? It follows that the spiritual researcher has to understand that there is no memory for the results of spiritual research. The experiences of the spiritual researcher cannot be memorized. They pass away the very moment they arise.

This is the difficulty of knowing anything of the spiritual world while living in the physical world and wanting to live only through the physical body. Since man has a poor memory even for dreams, which still have a loose connection with the physical body, it shows how understandable it must be that man has no memory for what he really experiences occultly.

There are now people who begin to apply to themselves the rules of my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds,” the rules that are called the rules of occult development. They may apply them for a very long time; but then, after years, they come and say, “I have practiced over and over again, I have done all kinds of exercises; I see nothing, I hear nothing of the spiritual world. My sense for the spiritual world does not want to open up. Perhaps what these people say is completely wrong; it can be completely wrong. The people in question may have long since found entry into the spiritual world and may have perceptions in the spiritual world. But these perceptions disappear the moment they are made, because these perceptions cannot be incorporated into the physical memory. The fact that one can know something from one's spiritual experiences depends on something quite different from memory. And I would now like to make clear to you what it depends on.

Imagine that you make a toy for a child. The child can enjoy this toy. You can make it today and the child can enjoy it. You take the toy and put it in the cupboard. Tomorrow you give it to the child again, and the day after tomorrow, and so on. And the child can always enjoy the toy that you made today.

But something else can also happen. Let us assume that you are not interesting the child by making a toy, but that you are putting something together for him out of random things. Or you might even just make something up for him by imitating gestures or something similar. Let us assume that you attract the child's attention by imitating something with your hands or fingers in a very specific way, by pre-evolving something, for example. You cannot put this in the cupboard, take it out again tomorrow and the day after and give it to the child again and again like a toy. What is to make such an impression on the child must be done afresh each time. You can make a doll and keep it; the child can have it again and again. But if you use something you have done yourself, through gestures or the like, to attract the child's attention, you must do it freshly each time.

This is something that can explain to us the difference between what we acquire on the physical plane and what can become memory, and what we experience on the spiritual plane and what cannot immediately become memory. When we have experiences on the physical plane, something like a homunculus forms in our etheric body and an imprint of it is imprinted in the physical body. It remains, like a doll with a child. You can store it and find it in yourself again and again. This then points to the experience of the past. The experience you have in the spiritual world passes. But you had to do something to bring it about. You had to use the rules that you apply to the soul in the sense of “How to Know Higher Worlds” to put the soul in such a state that the occult experience could occur. You can evoke this state in yourself again and again, so that you can have the experience again and again, but you cannot store it like a memory image. For the physical plane, experiences become memories by preserving after-images, by being remembered. The re-occurrence, the re-memory - if we now use the word “memory” in a figurative sense - of occult experiences can only occur if we create the same conditions through which we experienced the event for the first time.

Let us be clear about one thing: we really have to be infinitely more active and engaged with experiences in the spiritual world than with experiences in the physical world. In contrast to experiences in the physical world, something really forms in us that, I would say, gradually acquires the greatest density. Something internally diverse and manifold is this in us. These many people that you have inside you go through life with you and are something complete. This makes life in the physical world easier for you, because you are spared the work that you have to do over and over again in the occult experiences in the spiritual world if you want to have the experience again. You can only remember the conditions under which you brought about the experience, so never the occult experience itself, but only the way in which it was brought about. And you have to bring about these conditions again to have the occult experience again.

If we – and I say this not comparatively but in the real sense – if we go down a path and there is a church or a house at the end of that path and we go back, we can carry the memory of this image of the church or the house with us on the whole way back. This is because the experience of the church or the house is an experience on the physical plane. If a spirit had stood there instead, and the spirit would only manifest itself at this place, then it would be necessary each time to go to the same place again to see this spirit. One must bring about the same conditions, for one can only remember by which route, through which conditions, one arrived at this experience.

That is the strange thing about these things, that a good memory is of no immediate use for retaining occult experiences, but that on the contrary, something that supports us in ordinary life in consciously developing a good memory can be a hindrance to us in the occult. Certain people are born with a good memory right from the start. Now they live and have a good memory. Others have a less good memory. This is based on very specific karmic conditions: A good memory is something that comes into the world from a previous incarnation in such a way that the soul's penetration of the whole body is as late as possible, and that certain parts of the physical body remain untouched by the soul for as long as possible. In this case it is possible that, without our doing anything, these impressions, these homunculi, which I have described, are formed.

But when someone enters life through physical birth and their personality is so inwardly disposed for their individual physical experience that the impressions take complete possession of their physical body as quickly as possible, then they will not be able to develop a particularly good memory because they fill their memory with themselves; and then it is too hard for so many impressions of such homunculi to enter it. Therefore, we will preferably find a good memory in those people who, I might say, have an otherwise vague egoistic interest in the experiences of the physical plane.

On the other hand, memory can also be developed to a certain extent. But it can only be developed by stimulating attention and interest. Interest, attention and memory belong together. If you try to take a very intense interest in some experiences, in some area of life, to be very much involved with it with your whole self, your memory, your recollection of these experiences will also become better and better. So if someone wants to develop their memory for something, the best way to do it is to sharpen their interest in the subject as much as possible. There is nothing we remember for which we do not create an intense interest. Thus, attention and interest are something that can help us to improve a poor memory in the physical world.

For the right approach to occult experiences, so that these experiences do not constantly flash past us like dreams and we are unaware of them, loving attention and loving interest for the spiritual in general is of the utmost importance. Without this spiritual interest, without this loving attention, we cannot have spiritual experiences again and again that we have had once. It is quite possible to have an occult experience. It flits by. Only through this will one be able to create not memories, but the conditions under which one can have the experience again and again, and again and again, by intensifying one's interest in the events in the spiritual world.

That is why it is so important that we do not just acquire as much knowledge as possible about the spiritual world by way of memory; that is actually the least important thing. The more important thing is that we never pursue these matters of the spiritual world without love, never without the most intense interest. If we absorb knowledge from spiritual science indifferently, perhaps just so that we can boast about it or for some other reason, as we so often absorb other knowledge of the world, then it has no significance. What is important is the degree of love, of sympathy for the spiritual world that we acquire. That is the important thing, that is the meaningful thing. And that is why we try to present the events of the spiritual world from so many points of view, again and again from different points of view; because this way we are more and more encouraged to actively approach the knowledge of the spiritual world, and not to come to the desire to understand this knowledge of the spiritual world in the same way as the knowledge of physical things. That is actually the most fatal thing for the real occultist: when the longing arises in a person to gain spiritual knowledge, but when one desires to gain this knowledge in a different way than physical knowledge.

People would prefer to have books about the spiritual world, just as they have books about the physical world; they would like to acquire knowledge about the spiritual world in the same way that they acquire knowledge about the physical world. But it is not at all possible to acquire knowledge of the spiritual world in this way; instead, books that deal with the spiritual world must stimulate our inner activity each time anew, setting our inner powers in motion. Therefore, it is not the same as when we acquire knowledge about the physical world, where we have to repeat it over and over again in order not to forget, when we acquire knowledge about the spiritual world. When we read a cycle again and again or a spiritual science book, then that is actually not a repetition, but an immersing ourselves in the activity through which we arrive at the knowledge. And that is the most important thing, that is the essential thing. You see, if someone were asked to pray when they went to church, you would look at them rather strangely if they said: I don't need to pray today; when I was seven years, three months and two days old, I read the prayer once. I will always remember that I have prayed it; I do not need to pray it again, because I know that I have prayed it; I will just remember it now. You would look at this person strangely, you would make it clear to him that it is not important to remember the prayer once it has been said, but to keep bringing it up because it is alive in every renewal. This is precisely how we should understand our experience in occult science. We should not say, as we do about ordinary science: Yes, we have absorbed it, we remember it - but we want to get used to delving into the subject again and again, to going through the activity again and again. But people of the modern age do not like this at all. Rather, people of modern times love to stop at what they have once attained. Isn't it true that one feels most happy when one has acquired some knowledge and then carries this knowledge in one's inner “backpack,” as it were, through life, and when one needs it, takes it out and remembers it again. This is something that modern humanity is increasingly in danger of falling into. But in modern times, I would say, there is an immediate need to transform this sitting on the acquired content so that human work, human striving, corresponds to the

Only he earns freedom and life who
must conquer them daily.

This beautiful saying from Faust.

And it is truly the case that nothing more than the Faust attitude, which we have often considered here, awakens and stirs in the human soul that which gradually leads to the occult, to the occult attitude.

Goethe wrote the first great monologue of Faust in the 1770s, in keeping with his mood at the time. Today it has become trivial for many, but it is something that, when viewed in its originality, weighs on the soul with all the tragedy of life:

I have now, alas! studied philosophy,
law and medicine,
and, unfortunately! theology,
with great zeal.
There I stand, poor fool that I am!
And I am as wise as before.

Goethe wrote this himself, from his own nature, from the depths of his soul, as a young man in the 1770s. Then came the time when a high point of human philosophical development was experienced in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. But this high point of philosophical development was connected with legal development. Hegel wrote a natural law, Fichte wrote a natural law; Schelling published a medical journal. Something mighty and great has passed through the human soul, leading to Goethe's saying:

Have now, alas! Philosophy,
Jurisprudence and medicine,
And unfortunately! also theology,
studied thoroughly, with ardent endeavor.

But do you think that if Goethe had lived in 1840 and had begun his “Faust” only in 1840 instead of in 1772, do you think that because great and mighty things have been achieved in the cultural development of humanity, and that he had really searched in a truly philosophical way for what goes on in the human soul, do you think he would have said: “Now, thank God, I have found the answer!” studied philosophy, law and medicine and, of course, theology with Fichte, Schelling and Hegel: “There I stand now, I clever, wise man, and am no longer as foolish as before, but have become quite wise, as wise as one can only be”? Do you think that Goethe would have said that? Suppose it took much longer for the Earth's culture to develop, would this opening monologue of “Faust” have been written exactly the same way in 1840 as it was in 1772, exactly the same way? All these things are part of the real understanding of “Faust.” This great, gigantic idea cannot be understood if you do not grasp it in its details. And if Faust were to be started today, it would have to begin with the same words.

And once countless facts from the humanities have been brought to light, the following sentiment will no longer be shared: “Thank God I have studied philosophy, law and medicine, and thank God theology too, and of course theosophy as well, and am as wise as can be.” That would never be the true Faust mood! Only the one to whom the following applies would have the true Faust mood: “Only he earns freedom, like life, who must conquer it daily.” This is the mood that underlies “Faust” and at the same time shows us where the impulses lie that lead from the old, frozen culture to the new culture of humanity. Man must never cease to acquire something new and different, and I have also advocated this within the spiritual scientific movement to which we belong. It was truly terrible when one repeatedly heard in the old society: Yes, we need schemas, and when I presented this or that, then there should be schemas and tables hanging on the walls so that one has something to remember by. And people were dissatisfied when one came and basically reversed what was once there, what was established; since it always has to be acquired anew. Because it is this never-resting, never-ceasing striving forward that matters.

It can be said directly: By having driven out of itself a Faust, the newer culture has really built the bridge from the merely external materialistic culture to the new spiritual culture that must come over humanity.

But much, very much, in relation to the right view of life is connected with all this, with these peculiarities of the new knowledge, which must indeed be drawn from occultism, and which therefore makes demands on the active impulses of men. Thus it is connected with the principle of taking everything as it is finished, as it is complete, when people strive to preserve that which cannot be preserved. For example, something that I have really tried to explain for decades now, I can say, cannot be preserved; something that is called human freedom.

Freedom as an external institution, as an external condition in the human organization on earth, is something impossible, something unthinkable. Preserved in this way, as it was once conceived for a particular point in time, freedom would be a terrible fetter for man at the next point in time. Freedom is something that must constantly be unleashed as it arises, and man can only acquire freedom in each moment by developing within himself a sense of relating to the whole spiritual world. You can read about this in my book 'The Philosophy of Freedom'. There you will find that the whole mood is expressed there. There you can see that freedom is truly a key to that which leads into the spiritual world.

But it is obvious that freedom can only be understood by people who gradually develop the will to study spiritual science. Freedom cannot be understood by other people, because other people will always confuse certain peculiarities of external institutions with freedom, whereas freedom can only ever exist in the state that a person can acquire at any given moment.

We impair our freedom, namely, already through one thing by which we usually do not believe our freedom to be impaired: we impair our freedom already through our memory. For suppose, for a moment, that you have acquired certain sympathies and antipathies through the experiences you have undergone since your birth; then your freedom is already impaired by what has remained of these sympathies and antipathies. These acquired sympathies and antipathies, everything that is stored in the memory, impairs your freedom. And all knowledge that humanity strives for and that is then executed in order to become memory, that also distances us more and more from a real concept of freedom. On the other hand, with every acquisition of occult knowledge, one is brought closer to the true concept of freedom, genuine freedom.

But this whole thing is connected to something else: consider that with everything that takes root as memory, we are actually planting a homunculus within us. And everything that takes shape in us as a homunculus is really the case that by setting our inner life in motion, we do not get any further with our activity than this homunculus, than these impressions. We cannot get beyond them. If we could break through what has accumulated as memory, if we could really bring out of ourselves everything we have experienced since the time of our childhood, up to the time we can remember back to, we would break through something like a skin of life. But behind this skin of life is the spiritual world. There it is, right behind it! And by beginning to build up a picture of his own life from earliest childhood, by retaining from all his experiences that which makes up the content of his memory, he weaves a veil throughout his life, and this veil covers the spiritual world.

We could not stand in the physical world if we did not spin this web, for we are, insofar as we remember, this web itself.

But we arise as human beings in the physical world only by forming ourselves out of the veil, which we at the same time hold up before the spiritual world. It is really as if someone, well, I would like to say, wants to look at a stage and says: I want to look in there now. But he does it by hanging a curtain in front of it. In doing so, he covers up bit by bit what is behind it. That is what man does in life. The memories man stores up are a curtain that is hung over spiritual reality, woven before the spiritual world. This is a contradiction that we face in life, but it must not be blamed or criticized because it is the condition for our being in the physical life. It can only be characterized, but not blamed. If we did not spiritually weave the curtain before us, we would not be there in the physical world. And that is precisely what matters: that we know such a thing, that we do not mistake ourselves for a reality when we are only a curtain.

We immediately penetrate all deception by considering ourselves a curtain and not a reality, in the moments when we say to ourselves: You are actually only what stands before the true world, and your own form, what you yourself are, stands behind the form that you yourself weave throughout life. - When you keep this fact in mind, you stand in truth. Then you do not consider yourself to be reality, but only a curtain. But people are afraid of considering themselves a mere curtain. They want to consider themselves a reality in what they are. But that is why they cannot come to any clarity about the most important things in life.

All people thirst for preservation after death, for immortality, they all thirst to know something about the fact that they still exist after death. But they secretly think: if everything that is in me, that I have on the physical plane, perishes, what will then still be there? That this must go away after death, that the curtain not only tears, but must be dissolved, so that the human being can emerge: this is self-evident for the one who ascends in spiritual knowledge.

Thus we must accept such things, as they have been touched upon today, in such a way that we really say more and more to ourselves: For spiritual science, different human attitudes must be inwardly adopted than those in the culture up to now. There must arise a much greater striving for constant activity among people, for activity, for being there. The idea that one has grasped something and can retain it and carry it through life must disappear. If that disappears, all the other things that stand in the way of clear perception will disappear as well. I have often pointed out how people, even in science, have the most confused ideas about what is true. For example, you will often read in physiological works today that people sleep because they experience this or that in their waking state and become tired from it. Sleep would therefore be a result of fatigue. I have pointed out that the reindeer, which does not need to work very hard, should not have any need for sleep either. But if you listen to the reindeer, you will learn that if you do nothing at all, you feel most tired and you fall asleep without having done the slightest thing. From this you can see that fatigue has nothing to do with sleep, and sleep has nothing to do with fatigue, any more than day has to do with night.

At most, minds like Hume or Kant will have difficulties because they confuse what follows from each other. No one will consider the day as the cause of the night and the night as the cause of the day. Day and night arise one after the other. Day arises from the sun rising above the horizon, and night from the sun going below the horizon. The sun's standing above the horizon is the cause of day, and the sun's going below the horizon is the cause of night. Just as night is not the cause of day, or day the cause of night, so it is not essentially true that waking is the cause of sleeping or sleeping the cause of waking. Rather, it is rhythmic states that alternate, just as the positions of the sun above and below the horizon alternate, and these have nothing to do with a cause-and-effect relationship.

But just as it is true that the sun, when it goes below the horizon, causes twilight, and when it goes further down, causes darkness, so the truth is not that because we feel tired, we also want to sleep, but we feel tired because we want to sleep. We must have a desire for sleep, then we feel tired.

This seems to contradict everything that is thought today, but it is true, just as true as that day is not the cause of night and night is not the cause of day. So tiredness is not the cause of sleep. But just as night occurs when the sun goes down, so tiredness occurs because one wants to sleep. Here, cause and effect are completely confused and mixed up.

Today I want to draw attention to something else. There is an enormous difference between the relationship between day and night, the relationship between the sun and the earth, and the relationship between sleeping and waking in humans: you cannot imagine that the same thing can happen to the sun as can happen to humans. I mean, a person has a good meal and sleeps at the wrong time, or sleeps at the wrong time for some other reason. The sun does not do that. Because, think about what it would be like if the sun suddenly decided not to rise above the horizon at a certain time and everything that makes day into night happened all at once. You cannot possibly imagine that a constellation will arise in the universe that is analogous to man sleeping when he wants, arbitrarily arranging his waking and sleeping times. How far removed the sun is from that! It is impossible for the sun to overdo itself and stop shining in the middle of the day, so that night falls. As far as it is from anyone falling asleep during the day – it is easy, it just needs to be a little hot and one thinks that one has to sleep with the heat – so far away from freedom are natural necessity and natural law, so far away from the spirit is nature. But so far is the understanding that humanity has today, that the present time has, from the understanding that it will have to acquire through spiritual science.

We must always bear in mind that it is not only a serious but also a great task to find our way into the aspirations that spiritual science wants to bring to human culture. And there are many things that have not yet been overcome that will have to be overcome if spiritual science and its results are to be incorporated into the spiritual development of humanity.

Today, I would like to draw attention to two things – we will see more tomorrow – that must be acquired by anyone who wants to enter the field of spiritual science and make it fruitful for the spiritual life of the future: the first is a certain shyness, a certain reverence for the truth. One need only open one's eyes to see that, especially today, everything that happens in the world seems to be a revolt against this awe, against reverence for the truth. Those who have reverence for the truth will wait a long time before making an assertion about something or passing judgment on it. Today there is a tendency to do the opposite, to feel as little respect as possible for the truth, but rather to shape the truth to suit one's own convenience, to suit one's own feelings and perceptions. The ability to wait until the truth reveals itself as the chaste divinity of the human soul is a feeling that can be said to It is truly necessary for today's humanity to acquire it. But external culture resists this acquisition; it is a culture in which it is important to fabricate messages and to communicate all facts as quickly as possible, as today's journalism does. The opposite mood is present to that which our spiritual science must produce in us. The way in which the world is presented today through the press and the media is the opposite of what must be striven for by spiritual science, by those who mean well by humanity. This must be admitted by those who want to belong to the spiritual science movement. The first is reverence for the truth.

The second is reverence for knowledge. It must weigh heavily on the soul of those who recognize the impulses of the times and strive to introduce new impulses into the development of humanity that people do not take reverence for knowledge seriously enough. It is sad that people everywhere show that they do not have reverence for knowledge.

Particularly in our time, in view of the terrible events of the present, we do indeed see that people - most of all those who write and have it printed, but unfortunately the others do it too - judge as if the world were really created, say, in June or July 1914.

Strangely enough, when the events of the present are being discussed, one repeatedly hears the beginning of the story “In 1914” being repeated, and there the events are jumbled up and mixed up, and people believe that something can come of it. Nothing can come of it. One cannot understand why things are as they are in the present if one does not have the reverence for knowledge that leads to the times of the distant past and sees that the events of the present are the consequences of these distant pasts and are deeply connected with them.

The heart bleeds for those who are serious about the development of humanity when they see how thoughtlessly people judge the way cause and being are connected here or there. And these judgments are made by people whose judgments show that they basically do not know what is important.

Now one could object: You cannot demand that everyone should be able to judge. - Yes, certainly not. But what one can demand is reverence for knowledge, an awareness that one must first know something before judging.

This is something one would like to wish for people above all today: that they should not judge before knowing. It is one of the most terrible evils of the present day that people judge without knowing. It is what makes the products of contemporary culture so terrible, because you can see everywhere that they breathe exactly the opposite of what reverence for real knowledge is, what reverence for truth is.

Reverence for truth, reverence for knowledge, that is what we should acquire. I say: reverence for knowledge. I do not, of course, say reverence for scientific authority – so as not to distort things – but reverence for knowledge, especially for one's own knowledge. You have to acquire that first; then you can also have reverence for your own knowledge. As long as you do not possess it, you cannot, of course, have reverence for what does not exist. Then you also lack the necessary reverence in life.

But above all, it is important that we penetrate into our souls, that we experience new feelings and emotions, and that we do not try to make progress in the same way, now on the paths, on the paths of spiritual science, as has been attempted in material culture. Our serious task here must be to acquire the ability to distinguish.

When man in his spiritual development gradually approaches the perception of the higher worlds, then he must - as I have often mentioned before - form new ideas

about his whole relationship to these higher worlds. We are accustomed to judging our whole relationship to the world in

such a way as we find our relationship to the world here on the physical plane. Here on the physical plane we humans clearly feel that we stand in relation to the other creatures of the various realms of this world in such a way that we look down, as it were, on the beings of these other realms. We perceive them; we feel that we, as human beings, are the highest link in this physical world and perceive the other entities. We then form concepts and ideas, notions of these entities.

I would like to say that we stand there, the world is outside of us; we perceive this world, we take in, as it were, what it gives us, and we then carry it with us in our soul through the world. The objects are outside, the beings are outside of us, and what they communicate to us through our perception of them, we then carry with us in our soul.

If we wanted to speak from the point of view of the earth's other creatures, we would have to say: we can perceive the beings of the different realms, the plant, animal and mineral realms; we perceive them.

Now it is so obvious for a person, who has become so accustomed to seeing his relationship to the world, to apply this directly when dealing with entities of the higher orders, of the higher hierarchies, for example. Man imagines: when he moves up into the higher worlds, then the angels, archangels, spirits of personality and so on are spread around him just as minerals, plants and animals are spread around him in the physical world. But that is not exactly how it is, I would say. We have to get used to imagining our relationship to the other, the spiritual world in a different way the moment we cross the threshold into the spiritual world. We must take completely seriously what has been said more than once: that the moment we take just one step into the spiritual world, that is, expand our ability to perceive, we grow together in a certain way with the beings around us, that we spread ourselves over them with our own being. And I have often used the trivial, not very beautiful, but apt expression: we creep into the beings, we grow together with them. Towards the beings of the physical plane we always feel as if we were outside them, and what we perceive of them goes into us. Towards the beings of the higher worlds we must feel that we go into them. And just as the beings of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms allow themselves to be perceived by us, so we must allow ourselves to be perceived by the beings of the higher hierarchies; that is, we become objective objects of perception, beings of perception, for the beings of the higher hierarchies. I would like to say: just as the various animals are spread out for us out there in space so that we can look at them, we are looked at by the beings of the higher hierarchies. They look down on us. And that they look at us, we experience that; that is actually the perception of the higher beings. So one should always say - not: I perceive an angel - because that does not correspond exactly to the experience - but one should say: I feel, I perceive that I am perceived by an angel.

This experience is what we must consider carefully when we speak of the worlds that lie beyond the threshold of the spiritual world. Everyday language often has apt expressions for this, expressions that, I would say, are right in the middle of everyday life. When folk language draws our attention to the fact that, whatever we do, we are being observed – either, as we say in our modern consciousness, by God Himself, or, as we would have said in the past, by a being from the next higher hierarchy – as expressed, for example, in the beautiful folk saying:

Where I am and what I do,
God, my Father, is watching me.

This is indeed an apt expression for the facts discovered by spiritual science. And so, if one were to search the vernacular, especially for older expressions, one could draw the irrefutable conclusion from the very existence of such expressions that in earlier times, from an naive from a naive, original elementary observation of what is really the case with regard to the observation of man by the beings of the higher worlds, than man knows of this fact today in our materialistic age.

Now it seems obvious to ask how this is actually done when beings from the higher hierarchies observe us. It is quite interesting to reflect on this subject, even if it is perhaps a little out of the way. You will see tomorrow that we will ascend from this somewhat remote consideration to a very obvious subject, and so you will have to forgive me if today a somewhat remote consideration is adopted.

In addition to what I have just said, I would like to recall something else that has been discussed many times before. We human beings have, as an important soul ability during our life between birth and death, the memory within us, and I have often pointed out what all depends on the memory. At the moment when the memory of our recollections is broken, our entire coherent self would be disturbed. The continuing thread of our self would break. Such people - I have often pointed this out - who experience this, end up in very unfortunate life situations. So it can happen that someone suddenly has the thread of their memory broken by some elemental influences. This can happen without the mind or judgment suffering in the slightest; they can be preserved entirely. And so it may happen that such a person, no longer knowing who he was yesterday, no longer has the context of his experiences of yesterday, the day before yesterday and so on, but mind, goes to Basel, gets another ticket there, gets on the train and – well, now it would be difficult, but things have happened before – suddenly rediscovers who he actually is in Bombay. In between, he had done everything necessary to accomplish the journey from one place to the next, even to the place of a distant part of the world, quite cleverly. It was not his reason or his judgment that was lacking, but only the context of his memory. Such cases of illness have occurred many, many times. I myself have experienced it with a man I knew, how his memory was wiped one day and he traveled far around the world, then found himself in a Central European city after registering there, still with his memory wiped, in an asylum for homeless people. It took three weeks before he came to again, after his memory had returned.

This power of memory, this possibility of holding our experiences together, is one of the most important things we have on the physical plane. This power of memory is transformed at the moment when we either pass through the gate of initiation or when we pass through physical death. I will speak only of the latter case.

When we pass through physical death, we no longer need the kind of memory we had in the physical world, because we see there what has remained of events, what has been written in the Akasha Chronicle of the world. We need only look at something in the past; we do not need to remember. But the power of remembrance is there; it is only transformed into another, more active power of the inner soul life. The power is there.

It is very important that we have developed memory for our life on the physical plane in just the way we have it in the time between birth and death. It is of essential importance that our memory for the ordinary circumstances of life does not reach back into conditions that we have gone through between the last death and this time's birth. For only in this way can certain forces become condensed and, through this condensation, become the powers of memory, which function in just the same way as our memory between birth and death.

It is a purely human characteristic that we have such a memory, which essentially extends to the life between birth and death. No other being in the world has such a memory, has precisely such a memory, which works in such a way that when this being proceeds to its embodiment or - as we would have to say with angels - to its etherization, the memory lights up and then remains until another state, which with us humans is death. Other entities of other world orders have these same powers, which in us lie in the memory, developed in a completely different way.

Now it is extremely interesting to observe how, firstly, in relation to their ability to perceive, and secondly, in relation to their memory, we are very different from the entities of the next higher hierarchy, the entities of the hierarchy of the Angeloi. These angels perceive something different from what we humans accomplish, and certainly also from what underlies our deeds and actions on the physical plane; they look at us, they perceive us. We are objects of perception for them. But among other things, there is something particularly important that they perceive about us: that is the whole essence of our speech.

Our speaking is, after all, something more or less unconscious compared to what we regard as the process of our thinking, as the process of our ideas. Thinking in us humans occurs to a certain high degree consciously; speaking is not conscious to the same degree. It requires only a very slight self-observation to realize that we do not speak consciously to the same extent as we think consciously. If one wanted to speak as consciously as one thinks consciously - believe it or not - one would stutter something quite proper in the world. It is only because we do not always have to think about how to form one letter or another that we speak as fluently as we do. If we had to think first – I am not even talking about thinking in the physical body, but only in the astral body – if we had to think about what we have to do in our astral body when we form a t or a d or an h, then we would truly not be able to have the fluent speech that we have. It is precisely because we use language as something habitual that our consciousness does not pour over our speech in the same way that it pours over our thinking, over which it extends at least to a certain degree. To a certain degree, because consciousness does not extend completely over our thinking either.

Now, however, we actually represent something in the world precisely through our language. We humans just do not notice this. But just imagine you could withdraw to some cottage where you would have an apparatus through which you could perceive everything that is spoken by people on earth in one day; and to help you do that, let's assume the cottage would be set up so that you would not be disturbed by perceptions of anything else. So you would have some kind of apparatus that would only convey to you everything that is spoken on earth. So you would live entirely in what is spoken on earth.

Compare this with your environment as a human being. There you have the beings of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms: that is your real world. If you were to sit in your little house as I said, everything that is spoken there would be your world; that would be the kingdom that extends around you.

It does not actually take much to feel at home in this realm through occult development, which is then, however, not a little house but a spiritual state of development. You then feel so at home in it that you know: you are now in a region where – I would say, excluding what people on the physical plane put into their words through their often quite convoluted concepts, thus excluding the world of concepts – the angels listen to how people speak. So you are in a world where you know: now the angels are listening to everything that people say.

This is definitely a real experience; it is just not properly noticed by those who undergo occult development, because very soon, at first, the state occurs in which one is stunned by the confused chatter. This causes, I might say, a kind of paralysis; as a result it is not observed enough. But it depends on whether one strengthens oneself inwardly again accordingly, and then one becomes aware of something quite different. One does not hear all the chatter and perceives something quite different. One is then in the region in which speech lives as lawfully as, let us say, minerals live lawfully in their natural laws here on the physical plane. One no longer perceives the useless talk, but one perceives the laws according to which speech is spoken.

Now, however, one has to overcome certain difficulties, because these perceptions break off every few moments, because one – and now I come to the other – would have to have the memory of the beings from the hierarchy of the angeloi if one wanted to perceive the lawfulness that reigns in the world, of which I have just spoken. If we were to descend into the world above which we stand and which we know as the mineral world, where we only have the law of order, if we were to enter it, we would at first be just as stunned in the mineral world as we are when we hear all the confused talking of mankind on earth. But we have already gone beyond this state of stupor through our human development; we only perceive the laws of the mineral world. We would also perceive the laws of speech, but the memory of the beings from the hierarchy of the Angeloi is needed for this. And so one can now experience in a very vivid way what the relationship is, I would say, between one layer of the world and another.

That is actually the essential thing in perceiving higher worlds, that when one comes from one world layer into another world layer, one feels transported into completely different circumstances, into completely different inner laws. That is the essential thing, that when one passes from one world into another, one says to oneself: it is not just that one comes into different regions of one and the same world, but one comes into another world in such a way that one is transported to the region where the angels observe the laws of human language on earth. One enters a region where, I might say, quite different concepts of time prevail than in our physical world, a region in which a longer memory thread is therefore also necessary.

And so it happens that I want to discover something from the other side of life, which became clear to some people from the physical side in the course of the 19th century, for example Jakob Grimm: namely, certain laws in the development of human language. In this way, one comes to extraordinarily interesting insights into the inner laws of the universe.

You see, when one speaks as a human being, one does not pay attention to the unconscious character of speaking - to the inner power of a letter, of a sound. This inner power, the play of the inner forces of the letter, of the sound, takes place in the subconscious, and as a human being, with our consciousness, we are outside this region, in which what is subconscious for us is conscious when we speak. But for the region of the angels, it is conscious. Let us assume, for example, that we pronounce a word in which the sound \(s\), or the English \(th\), which is phonetically equivalent to our \(s\), plays an important role. When we pronounce such a word in which the \(s\) or a \(th\) plays an important role, we, with our human consciousness, do not think of the cosmic forces that lie in the \(s\) or \(th \) lies, but we think of the concept that expresses itself in this context, in which the sound is contained, because our consciousness is not in the region where the sound \(s\) develops an inner essence. For us, the sound lies outside of our consciousness and is not an immediate experience; for the consciousness of the angels, however, the sound is an immediate experience. The angel experiences something very special in the power of the sound.

Now, we with our physical consciousness have before us such a word, which, I want to say, has as an important component this sound \(s\), \(ss\) or \(th\); the being from the hierarchy of the angeloi, by perceives this sound uttered by a human being, remembers with his higher memory earlier states of human speech, in far-off times, and he must bring together this sound, which is in this word, with the sound from which it has become. And there, with an \(s\) or \(th\), such a consciousness of this being from the hierarchy of the angels immediately remembers a \(t\); that is to say, there was once a time when the \(th\) or the \(s\) was a \(t\) and there was an even earlier time when the \(t\) was a \(d\).

Now imagine such a memory. So I said: an angel hears a word in which there is an \(s\) or an \(th\); now he immediately remembers the form of the word that was there once, in which there was a \(t\) in the place where the \(s\) or \(th\) is now; and furthermore, he remembers that in even earlier times there was a \(d\) in the same place.

This arises from a very definite fact, namely, that such transformations of sounds take place according to a very definite law, that the sound progresses, and in fact progresses in such a way that it first develops its power mainly out of the astral.

Now it has the following tendency: when it has lived for some time in the word in such a way that it has developed out of the astral, that is to say, when man has mainly used or uses his astral to produce a sound, then in later times there are people who no longer strain the astral but mainly the etheric in the same place, so that the sound is deposited in the etheric. And when a time has passed in which the person has lived in the ethereal, he comes to place the sound more and more in the physical, to place it in the physical.

This is very regular: if, for example, we look at any word that is spoken in such a way that a sound, a main sound in the word, is deposited in the etheric, then we can find in later times find – quite apart from the meaning, for the word itself can change its meaning – that in the same word the sound is later deposited in the physical, and still later again in the astral; still later it would be deposited again in the etheric.

The sounds have a tendency to progress in the course of development. And just as we observe the progression of the plant world from the greening leaf in spring to the emergence of the flower, to the development of the fruit, and again to the decay, so the being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi observes the progression of the sounds in the kingdom that I have characterized as the kingdom of language. They are, I might say, variously stationed in speech, in the kingdom of speech. Before any sound that is once stationed in the astral, the being from the hierarchy of the angels finds after some time that this sound appears entirely in the etheric, and after some time again in the physical. When it observes a sound at any time in the physical, after some time it is in the astral. So that there is really a rhythmic movement to be observed in the development of sounds, if one considers the realm of language; a rhythmic movement goes around like this (see drawing). This is the underlying basis for the law of sound change, which some of you may well know, which Jacob Grimm characterized in the 19th century in his own way, from a more materialistic point of view.

If we take this example – the transformation of the d into the t, then into the s, which has the same value as dastth – if we take this example, we see that the d is brought about by the fact that the whole human being, with all his four limbs, creates a center of gravity for himself, so to speak, in the astral: in this way he brings about the d. He brings about the t by creating a center of gravity for himself in the etheric. The s or th he produces by creating a center of gravity in the physical.

You see the interesting basis for such a progression, such a transformation of a word through the ages. I would like to show this with an example that is close at hand. Take, for example, the word: \(ϑήρ\), dius, animal. That is the same word, only at different times. Here (Greek) we have the word with a \(th\) \((ϑήρ)\); that would be the same \((ϑ)\) as our \(s\), the same as the English \(th\). The development would take place in such a way that it tends to go over here (Gothic): the \(th\) would become a \(d\) and, as it develops further, the \(d\) would become a \(t\): it becomes more ethereal. Now we have here in fact \(ϑήρ\) (Greek); 'here we have “dius” (Gothic) and here we have “Tier” (German). So the word in Greek is \((ϑήρ)\), the word in Gothic is (dius), the word in German is (Tier). It is the same word, exactly the same word. In Greek, it was centered in the physical. It tended to pass over into the astral in the next language, in Gothic; it tended to pass over into the etheric, becoming the word for “animal” in German.

Take another word, another example. Let us take Greek, which is equivalent to Latin here – let us take the word 'decem', for example. Here in Latin we have the word in the astral. If the word had the tendency to go over to the ethereal up to Gothic, the d would have to change into a t; and “taihun” it is also in Gothic. As it developed from Gothic into German, from the ethereal into the physical, the t would change into z, so it would be “zehn” in German.

Another word, which is very interesting, by the way: take the Greek word “ϑάνατος”. Since it has the \(th\), it would emphasize the physical aspect. It would tend to move into the astral and would then have to have the tendency in Gothic to have an \(d\) because it is astral. It is also called “dauthus”. And now it should, by developing into German, tend towards the ethereal and have a \(t\). It has that too! It is called “Tod” (death).

Let us now start from a word that is ethereal up here and has a τ in Greek: “\(τρεις\)” (treis). In Gothic it should have a th or an s. And it has that, because it is called “threis”. Here it is in the physical, now it goes into the astral, and there it should have a d in German. It has that too, it is called: “drei”.

From this you can see that, if you disregard everything that lives in language, all the meanings that live in language, there is something else special in language: a triad that emerges, I would say, much like a melody stretched out in time, a triad that can be found. If you have the starting point somewhere, then the other sounds that stood in the same place in the word at a different time resound.

Now I have chosen the simplest transformation here. But that is perfectly sufficient, because otherwise it would only become a little too complicated. Such laws of transformation underlie all language development; regulated down to the last detail, they underlie all language development; only that in the actual development, the most diverse developmental impulses cross each other. It is interesting to observe how progress in the development of language combines, in that certain languages progress faster or even make any progress at all, and certain languages do not make this progress.

Take, for example, the Greek word «\(ϑάνατος\)» (thanatos), «death». The regular progression is from th to d to t. At the d stands the Gothic: «dauthus. The English «death» is at the d, it has remained in the Gothic and has not undergone the further progression. But in German the word is found with \(T\): “Tod”. And so it is in general; if we pay attention, we find everywhere that the English, in the development of certain letters, has retained the nature of the Gothic, only it has thrown off the inner vitality, the inner soul of the Gothic. This law has been so observed that it has remained everywhere at the level of the Gothic. So when we write our “Tod” (death), we have to find the backward step of the Gothic in English; we have to go back one step. In German, we have a \(T\) in the etheric here at “Tod” (death). For English, we have to go back to the astral, and there we have to have a \(d\). In English, we have a \(th\) at the end of the noun “death”. We have to go back to the physical. If we were to take the adjective “dead”, we would have a dam at the end. If we continue the \(d\), as is correct in German, we would write it correctly by continuing it one stage further around (see drawing): then we would have a \(t\) at the end here, instead of a \(d\). That is also how it is written, the adjective in German is 'tot', dead.

There you see into a realm that is just as much spread around us as the three natural kingdoms: the mineral, the vegetable and the animal; that also has laws, also has laws of development, like the mineral, the plant and the animal kingdom; only that the time periods in which the rhythm is fulfilled – which is precisely expressed by a triangle – are just that: long. And in order to always hear the previous step resonate with the sound, the memory of a being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi is needed.

But there is something else connected with this. When you consider this law, you will have to say to yourself: If we turn our gaze back to the ancient Greek and Latin language forms and look at them in relation to today's German, insofar as the words have approximately retained their meaning, we see everywhere that the Greek and Latin language forms are two steps behind today's German, and that the Gothic language form is one step behind.

Much in the development of the world is based on the fact that what develops over time also develops in such a way that it remains in space alongside what develops in the various stages of time. Just as in the animal kingdom, the lower animals stand beside those that have developed to a higher level, so the older forms of language remain alongside the newer ones, or, one could also say, like a wild population that exists for a while alongside a more developed population. Thus, that which develops apart remains in the space alongside that which develops further. But then such a state of being combined with many other impulses, which have an effect on it.

The impulse illustrated by this triangle applies in particular to the development of the sounds \(d\), \(t\), \(th\) (\(s\), \(ss\)). A similar triangle also applies to the sounds \(b\), \(p\), and \(g\), \(k\), \(ch\). On the other hand, a triangle that would have to be drawn much larger applies to \(l\) and \(r\), for example. And for the vowels, if you want to follow the course of their development, completely different figures apply. But laws apply to all of them.

Let us assume, then, that what is temporal remains spatially juxtaposed; then it does not remain the case that in the newer simply the older lives on, because then we would still have the old Greco-Latin words alongside the newer ones that developed from them. For example, German developed in a straight line from Greek, at least in terms of most of its vocabulary. Did the Latin languages simply remain as they were? They did remain as they were, but not just as they were. They also underwent very extensive and significant changes: they rearranged the words, they did not leave the words as they were. While, for example, the word “\(ϑάνατος\)”, “death”, is simply the word that has developed further, this word is not as it was in Greek, it has not remained in Latin, but another word has because the original meaning that remained in the word “death” was not developed at all in the Latin languages; so that the word that one then has in the other language is not the same word at all. “Mort” is not the same word as ‘death’, but rather a very poor translation. But for what is actually contained in the word ‘death’, which has developed from ‘$advarog’, the Romance languages have no corresponding word at all. The word ‘death’ expresses something in which the corresponding ethereal really resonates. In the Romance languages, on the other hand, the same word has a completely different, non-ethereal resonance. It is very important to know that very significant transformations have taken place. From this you can see the ambiguity that lies in all lexicographic and grammatical translations, and the ambiguity that exists in the so-called exact understanding when translating from one language into another.

The underlying developmental laws here are extraordinarily profound and are connected to a different layer of consciousness than the one in which we usually live with our thinking, feeling and willing. But we do live to varying degrees in a different layer of consciousness with our thinking, feeling and willing. For example, we live almost entirely outside the layer of speech with our thinking. Our thinking has very little to do with our speaking. However strange it may sound, it is usually the case that when we have thoughts and utter a word, it has little more to do with the thought than the letters we write on paper have to do with the thought itself. Likewise, the spoken word is not much more connected to our thinking than a sign is to the thought.

The spoken word is much more closely connected with our feelings than with our thinking, and even more so with our intentions, because feeling belongs to a far more subconscious part of our soul than thinking, and intention belongs to an even more subconscious part of our soul life than feeling. When a person utters a word, it stands in relation to the thought, one might say, in such a way that it is not much more than a sign. It stands in a much more intimate relationship to feeling; it is much more closely connected with feeling; and it is especially connected with the will.

If people today were to develop the relationship between thinking and speaking, then, as speakers of different languages, they would not be able to experience the collisions they do today, because the relationship between language and thinking does not have the same intimate character as it has with feeling and willing. This is because feeling and willing will only develop in the same way in the future in humans what thinking has already developed today. Wherever feeling and willing come into consideration, this close connection with speech also comes into consideration to a very great extent.

We are now in the process of developing thinking to a certain extent as something objectively living for us through the evolution of the consciousness soul. And by the end of our time frame, people will have progressed to the point where they will no longer perceive the relationship between thinking and speaking as something particularly intimate. But it will take much longer before the relationship between speaking and feeling, and especially between speaking and willing, can be felt as something objective. For a much longer time people will persuade themselves that they have to identify themselves in their humanity with their language, with their speech character through their feeling and willing than through their thinking.

If we really visualize how a word has its own inner life, a life so regulated by laws, as the word “\(ϑάνατος\)”, which becomes “death” and later “Tod”, if we imagine that it lives on like that, then you really have the possibility to form an idea of how an organism lives from Greek through Gothic up to German, an organism lives as we otherwise find an organism living from its childhood stage through a later youth stage to the stage of old age. When such an organism in language has passed through the three stages and returns, it does not continue in the same way, but the whole thing spiritualizes. Mind you, when d in t, t in th (s, ss) passes over, it does not return to its original stage, but now makes a lateral ascent. So you must not imagine the triangle in the plane (drawing). As it comes across, the d, t, th continues in this way and now advances in the spiral, thus always entering into other layers. So you must not imagine that a word that has advanced to th returns to d, but then the word dies and hands over its transformative powers to another realm. The word is born in the physical, in the etheric or in the astral, makes its circuit, dies and then reappears at a higher level as a different force, transformed. So that a word that we can trace from the Greek, from “\(ϑάνατος\)” to “death”, to the German “Tod”, now has the potential to die as a word. The word “Tod” will die. At the end of the period we call our fifth post-Atlantic cultural period, it will no longer be there, it will have died. But the power that formed it will pass over to the power of the human soul at a higher level and help people to understand the nature of death in the sense of our spiritual science. In order that the power to understand the nature of death in the sense of our spiritual science may arise in our soul, the word had to be born in Greek, then had to undergo development into a youth in Gothic, in English 'death', had to undergo development in German to the later age: 'Tod', and will come to the point where it will die. It will die and give up its strength to more spiritual powers of the soul.

And so, just as we direct our gaze to the emergence of a lamb, or let us say, a cow, an ox or a bull, and see how they gradually develop, reach a climax and die again, so the angel looks at the emergence of a word, at the life of a word, at the dying of a word. That belongs to his world, to his observation, just as the observation of, say, the plant, mineral or animal kingdom belongs to our world.

These are aspects through which I wanted to draw your attention to a life that is unconscious to us, only touches our consciousness, but which, at its higher levels, immediately develops a real life of its own, immediately becoming a being. A window or a door opens for us, as it were, to look in on how beings develop, elemental beings that are then reflected in our world in the form of our words. The angel turns his spiritual eye to ancient Greece, where he sees an elemental being being born out of the physical, he sees it etheralize, astralize, and he will see it die as our fifth post-Atlantean developmental period draws to a close. He sees this being in its development, and the fact that this being develops has an effect in the physical world. And this effect consists in the fact that the ancient Greeks said “\(ϑάνατος\)”, the Goths said “dauthus”, the English say “death”, and we in German say “Tod”. The transformation of this word is the imprint of an evolving being that progresses in its development in the physical world, etheric world, astral world. What we perceive in language is the reflection of the life of higher beings from a higher world, the reflection of their inner development in the world in which we find ourselves in the time between birth and death.

This will be the starting point for our remarks tomorrow.

Man perceives in himself and in nature both what we call growth and what we call destruction, or perhaps dissolution. And he instinctively forms his ideas in such a way that he is permeated with a certain belief in reality when, whether in himself or in nature, he perceives building up—growth: He forms ideas about what in a sense goes outside reality, loses reality, by directing his glance to destruction, to dissolution; so that it seems quite natural to him to describe what thus goes outside reality, when he perceives it being dissolved, as gradually passing over into the so-called nothingness of the physical world.

I have often said that if we want really to arrive at ideas concerning the spiritual world, we must modify in many respects those ideas acquired in the physical world. We must have different ideas from those acquired in the physical world if we wish to enter at all with our thinking into the spiritual world. It is especially important that we should form a concept which is actually found everywhere in our study of spiritual science, but which we cannot too often bring before our souls—the concept of a connection during physical life between our consciousness and the corresponding processes in our physical organism, We shall never grasp the working of consciousness in the physical world unless we can connect it with the concept of destruction or dissolution. Were there only growth, only development in us as physical beings, we could never be conscious beings in the physical world. In this physical world what is represented in growth, in budding and sprouting, never leads to consciousness. Consciousness can begin only where the processes of growth are invaded by destruction, by processes of dissolution. On this basis we should make ourselves familiar with the ideas which initiation gives us concerning man's so-called evolution

We know that at first the child grows into the world as in a kind of dream. This dream-life of the child is, however, closely united with his growth, with all the sprouting and budding processes; and the younger the child whom we consider, the more do these budding and sprouting processes meet our eye. Only when the individuality in the human organism gains sufficient power to oppose the sprouting and budding, and can bring into them processes of dissolution, does fuller and more complete consciousness appear. We become conscious to the extent to which we are capable of pulling down in us what inner Nature builds up.

When anyone who has gone through initiation observes how consciousness arises in man, he finds that every conscious thought that is grasped, and every conscious feeling that asserts itself, are bound up with the fact that processes of destruction are contending with the building-up processes in the organism. When we look at conscious life we look at destruction; and we must accustom ourselves to have not merely a positive feeling for reality wherever we see a process of sprouting, budding, a process of growth, but we must rise to a feeling for the conscious life of the spirit by observing what part this conscious life of spirit plays in the physical world, by observing, that is, the processes of death and destruction. It is for this reason that we have to alternate the conscious processes with the unconscious processes of sleep, so that what we have destroyed during our waking life of thought may be built up again by the unconscious forces of nature in our organism. That is the swing of life's pendulum—that the soul force when it wakes to consciousness wears out and destroys what mere nature creates in the human organism; and that from the moment the soul, in sleep, forsakes the natural life of the body, from that moment the processes, activities, of sprouting and budding go forward. Hence it is not correct to believe that man's waking life is to be compared with life in summertime, when the earth is budding and sprouting. No! the earth itself as spiritual being wakes when towards autumn the dying processes begin, and it is during the winter that the earth is fully awake. During summer, during the budding and sprouting processes, we have the sleeping life of the earth. The Earth-Spirit sleeps during the summer and during the winter it wakes.

I have previously pointed out that it is due to spiritual initiation that the moment of time when man is destined to unite himself with what in earth-evolution should call up the fullest waking life—with the Christ Impulse—that this moment has been placed in the middle of winter, not in the summer, namely, the Christmas festival. On the other handy I have also called attention to how in more ancient times, when manes knowledge proceeded more from his participation in the sleeping condition of the earth, when his soul had to sink into the sleeping Earth-soul in order to have Imagination, the. dream-like Imagination of the old spiritual vision, then the corresponding festival, the John festival, had to be held during the heat of summer. This festival might be said to signify union in dream and ecstasy with the sleeping, dreaming spirit of the earth. The Christmas festival signifies a conscious union with the waking Earth-spirit. It is just through conceptions such as these, my dear friends, that we come to feel man's renewed connection with the cosmos We enter into this connection concretely, not by merely enthusing in a general way about man being a microcosm of the macrocosm, but by gaining accurate knowledge of how the mighty Earth-being sleeps and wakes, taking the whole year for this alternation, whereas man sleeps and wakes in the course of twenty-four hours.

And now we must turn our gaze with more precision to what we experience in the physical world as consciousness. Let us sketch diagrammatically the sprouting, budding life of our nervous system (see diagram). Clairvoyance actually sees the sprouting, budding life, for example, of the nervous system, especially of the brain, in this form of a fiery wave. Now the human life of soul is in truth outside this sprouting, budding life, Were I to draw the human soul-life as it is in the night, in sleep, I should have to draw it completely outside this figure; in waking life, however, we must picture the soul-life as permeating itself with this budding, sprouting, let us say, fiery life. Thus were the soul-life to permeate the physical organic life only, no consciousness would arise, flow does consciousness arise? For that, the soul must work upon the physical. In the physical to begin with are budding, sprouting processes of growth which are as it were distributed over the life of the nerves. It is these processes of growth that are now broken down and destroyed. A process arises similar to what takes place when the budding and sprouting plant gradually withers and decays; thus the soul life induces processes of destruction in this budding, sprouting life. The destructive processes I indicate here by holes in the shading.

When we are awake, therefore, our soul-life destroys the physical processes of growths breaks them down. Man as a rule knows nothing of this destruction. Clairvoyant vision alone perceives it and makes it possible to say: “Now that you have put yourself into relation with the spiritual world (I say expressly with the spiritual not the physical world) if you wish to have ideas you must destroy something in you.” What makes initiation such a shattering experience is that we perceive this destruction, that we know that If we bring ourselves into relation, let us say, with an Angel or an Archangel being of the spiritual world and want to gain some ideas concerning that being, that is, if we want to perceive the being truly, we must first destroy something in ourselves.

Not that anything is actually destroyed by initiation, but through initiation we become conscious of what is all the time being destroyed in the everyday process of perception. It is just the same when we put ourselves in relation with a flower or an animal, only in the usual course of life we are not aware of it. We begin to know of it only when these processes of destruction work back as reflection into the life of the soul. That is the change. Suppose, for examples you see a red flower. What you experience in the red flower causes you to call forth in yourself a process of destruction, You are, however, unaware of this. But what is destroyed is reflected into your soul and brings about that you have the red flower as an idea, as a perception. Thus you must first create in yourself a copy of the red flower by destroying the sprouting and budding processes, and while you destroy these you create what you then see. Conscious life consists in such processes of destruction, which again are followed by building-up processes It is an inner working at one's own organism and, strictly speaking, lies at the root of all works of human culture. When we instigate cultural work we also destroy something in nature. We cannot build a house if we do not go outside to get wood for it by a process of destruction, and what is thus the product of destruction, torn away from nature, we build up into our artistic creations. Strictly speaking, we do this in all works of art. We do just the same as the destroying, demolishing processes do to the budding, sprouting, which arrest processes of growth. What is embedded into the living organism as an inserted element of death forms the content of conscious being. Every time we display consciousness we are planting what is dead into what is alive, and the more conscious we become the more do we insert a dead man into our living man. Then sleep has the task of dissolving away these dead elements, all but certain remains which, persisting as processes throughout the whole of physical life, lie at the foundation of memory, Were everything to be dissolved by sleep, we should have no memory, no recollection. Thus you see if we want to acquire consciousness we have to recognise in our life a real winter. Consciousness means spreading the destroying, withering life of.nter over the budding, sprouting summer life, We have to make winter within us if we wish to become conscious. Thus we must in a sense learn to value the winter, because were it always summer in our life the spirit could not experience the physical consciously but would remain for ever unconscious.

Something more may arise out of these considerations, my dear friends. A materialistic observer of the world may easily say: It is not possible to look into the way in which consciousness works in the physical body. But when through spiritual science we learn that a parallel exists, in the way referred to, between the individual life of man and the life of the Earth-spirit, then we come to the following conclusion - that if we wish to have a concept of sleeping man and what he really is, all we need do is to imagine ourselves in the budding; sprouting life of summer where everything buds and blossoms. What goes on outside in the earth goes on in miniature and imperceptibly in manes physical nature. We should simply experience summer in man when we look at him asleep, and winter when we look at him awake. If we wish to know what happens to consciousness when it makes use of the physical body as instrument, we must observe how in autumn everything begins to dry up and wither, everything begins to die away, In the external picture we can make of winter we have a true idea of what the waking consciousness brings about in man's physical organism by using it as an instrument. That is why when the soul is outside the body and clairvoyant consciousness looks at the body out of which the soul has departed, it perceives the body as a budding, sprouting world. It is childish to believe that the clairvoyant, when outside the body with his soul, sees the body in the same way as in physical life we see another human being. We are wrong in thinking that the man lies there with his soul hovering above and that the soul looks back on the body and sees the man lying there beneath. That is not so. The moment the soul goes forth, the body becomes the world, a summer world; and if the soul remains clairvoyant on returning to the body, it experiences in itself the personal, individual winter.

We can thus discover an inner connection between the life of man and the life of the earth. When we consider the life of the earth and look first at summer time, outside us we see in this summer time what works and weaves in us in the same way but works and weaves during our sleeping condition. If we now seek to express in a few words the feeling of this working and weaving in sleep, we can do so as follows. All this is the world of coming to birth, of arising, And when we feel ourselves in this world, we can say, “OUT OF THE DIVINE WE ARE BORN”. For in so far as with our own forces we belong to this world, this budding and sprouting world, we must say: EX DEO NASCIMUR, Out of the Divine we are born. Man has been able to say EX DEO NASCIMUR at every stage of earth evolution and will be able to say it also in each future evolutionary stages

On the other hand it is essential for our own cycle of time, which follows the Mystery of Golgotha, that we should now understand that the forces of dying life work in us; melting forces, dissolving life, and that with this melting away, this dissolution of life, consciousness is connected. We find the consciousness of the earth, the waking earth-life, in the winter time. In order in winter to live with the earth in the physical world, we must dive down into what is dying, But since the Mystery of Golgotha, we do this by taking the Christ Impulse with us into what is dying: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR. We make this into a guiding motto through the other half of the year, when the earth is awake, awake in the dying life: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR.

Thus the earth's year is divided for us into two halves, into the half which has its culminating point at Midsummer, for which the saying holds good: EX DEO NASCIMUR, and the other half which has its culminating point at Christmas time, for which we have the saying: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR.

We should not think that the correct conception of man as the microcosm of the macrocosm is merely an abstraction, Nor should we think that we can do very much if we hold to abstract ideas about it. Rather should we be clear that we shall meet this conception more and more on really coming to the true life of the Spirit of the Earth. You see, when we observe the earth in winter with its dying, freezing life, this dying, freezing life is the expression of the thinking, feeling and perception of the waking Earth-spirit. But we must think of the Earth-spirit in connection with what surrounds us as our immediate world. We should picture the world, as it were, as a great spiritual being having the earth as physical instrument. And we get this idea of what the earth is thinking, especially of what it is thinking during winter, when we consider the whole manner in which the surroundings of the earth work into the earth. Imagine yourself on a night in winter, with your gaze directed to the stars, with perhaps the moon among the stars, and you have to say that the whole constellation of this starry world is an outward expression, a picture, of what is thought consciously on the earth, and we live in it because the cosmos enters into relation with the earth. You then see how we are standing in a living way within the thinking of the earth, in all that weaves and waves around the earth as earthly thinking, just as in summer, livingly with our own soul, we are within the earth-sleep;

Nevertheless, in summer we should take our place consciously in the life of the earth. We should call on. our astral forces so as not to succumb to the earth-sleep, Many people very easily fall asleep in the heat of summer, because during the universal sleep of the earth their astral forces are not strong enough to keep them awake. If we ourselves sleep during the summer time our activity is only equal in value to that of the earths In winter we should develop in the subconscious the forces for sleep which withstand the universal earth-life, whereas for the waking life during winter we need the forces lying more in the direction of the waking life of the Earth-spirit. So we might say we swing with our own life, with the lesser oscillations of our own life, within the yearly oscillations of the Earth-being, of the conscious Earth-being. And this conscious Earth-being is completely dependent on the star constellations There you have a living impression of the way in which our own soul-life is interwoven indirectly with the life of the stars in the sleeping and waking of the earth This gives us a living picture of what astrology is really meant to be, if it is at all to be taken seriously. Therefore, as I have often said Astrology is either the purest dilettantism, or it can only be striven for as an essential part in the deep study and knowledge of spiritual science.

Recently I have often emphasised, my dear Friends, how necessary it is that those who are drawn to spiritual science should acquire conceptions that will lead them from what is merely the content of thought into living reality, Think what entirely new sides of life open to us when we know that consciousness is based on a breaking-up, destruction, and that there has to be destruction for consciousness to have its physical instruments. For in very truth just as we cannot work in the physical world without destroying nature, so we cannot become conscious without the destruction in us of our processes of growth. Clairvoyance has to look upon these continuous processes of destruction, it has without bias to see how our whole life through, a gradual death is taking place for consciousness to be able to exist. Initiation consists in our receiving as it were a concentrated picture of this process of destruction spread out over the whole time between birth and death. This process is concentrated in actual physical death; were not physical death to come about, in the spiritual world after death we should never be able to develop consciousness. Death, the destruction of the physical and etheric bodies, is the primary condition for the development of consciousness in the time between death and a new birth. As a plant cannot be there if the root is not, so the consciousness between death and a new birth cannot exist if it is not rooted in the process of death. As in the first years of physical existence we have to strive for the possibility of destroying from the standpoint of the soul the early processes of budding and growth, consciousness only awaking to the extent to which we can embed the processes of destruction into the processes of growth—as only when the force of the destructive process has reached a certain stage a consciousness develops—so we have to destroy and discard the whole body. And the act we thus perform, this shedding first of the physical and then of the etheric body, is the starting point for the consciousness between death and a new birth. We acquire the faculty of consciousness between death and a new birth by being able to kill ourselves—we may be allowed to say this, for it corresponds with the truth—by being able, that is, to undergo the processes that take place in death. As life here between birth and death has its starting point in the merely plant-like life of the child, so the life between death and a new birth has its starting point in the process of death. We are here looking at strictly destructive processes, and it is important that we should adapt ourselves to the possibility of sharing in the life of the whole course of nature and that of the entire spiritual cosmos.

If you examine the modern life of spirit, my dear friends, you will find that in reality—I have pointed to this before—the development of man is gradually withdrawing more and more from the inner process of existence, and only the external world is considered. There is a growing disinclination to look at the whole of nature, the tendency being more and more to consider only half of her—the growing, budding and sprouting forces. Where annihilation begins, there existence is thought to cease. The materialist cannot think otherwise, since he can never form ideas about spiritual life in the physical world, because these ideas about spiritual life in the physical world begin just where the processes of destruction begin. He wants to investigate only the growing processes for to him they are the sole reality. When anything begins to wither he sets out to investigate what grows up over it, or he seeks in the dying process the chemical remains, that iso the material, the physical. The important point is that man has no wish to direct his attention to the other half, to the dying. Yet it is only from what passes away that men can acquire an insight into the existence of the conscious soul-life. This is a vastly important truth—that the modern world-outlook, because it has developed in the way indicated because it always directs attention to what is budding and sprouting, has deprived itself of the power to see the spiritual, the spiritual only betraying its presence in things when they begin to disintegrate. As long as there is budding and sprouting, the spiritual works within the beings, not appearing as spirit but manifesting externally through material processes. If the spiritual is to appear in the beings, processes of destruction must take place. The spirits of the blossoms, the elementary spirits of the plants, may not remain when the blossoms open and the flowers are developed, when the sun with its sounding waves charms forth the budding, sprouting life. “If it strikes you, you are deaf.” Read these words at the beginning of Part II in Goethe's “Faust” with understanding, The spirits must dive down, They can emerge only when the budding and sprouting life withdraws.

You see, the poetic perception of Goethe was so living that he thoroughly realised how the budding and sprouting that comes forth with the rising of the sun makes it necessary for the elves to recede. But this will become clear to us, my dear friends, that at the sight of the physically dying world there arises first the misty realm of the spirit and then the whole true spirit realm. It is not without meaning when in folklore we hear that to become spiritual the trees must first decay, that only when they are decaying do they let us see the spirit. If we go out into the country and see a decaying, dried-up tree-trunk, it is really showing for the first time its spiritual appearance. There must everywhere first be destruction before the spiritual is to appear.

Modern spiritual life, it is true, consists just in this—that souls have withdrawn from such an intimate living together with nature that they are able to feel the decaying forces and in them all that is spiritually alive. Hence it is that today when we speak of the spiritual, people can form no conception of it at all, for they only consider the world in so far as it buds and sprouts. When it ceases to do this, when decay sets in, for them it leaves the field of reality. If you speak to them of the realm of true life, if you say that the spiritual rises out of the dying, if you tell them all this, you will find that they are listening to something that has absolutely no meaning for them. It may actually happen that if you are speaking today to a gathering of people who have had no previous preparation through spiritual science and you talk of the spiritual living in the world, they have no notion of what is in question. To such people world-conceptions are a matter of complete indifference, They take no interest in discovering; what may be found at the basis of things:. One can have the same kind of experience that we once had at a lecture. You know that we try as far as possible to keep away those who are generally the least cultured of those attending our lectures, those who write for the newspapers. As a rule they understand the minimum of what is spoken about, But sometimes it happens that these very clever people of the present day cannot be kept away. One cannot always act in such a drastic way as was done recently at a certain place in Austria when a reporter came to the lecture and our chairman said to him: “You will certainly not understand anything and had better stay away.” The man had actually bought a ticket. It can't always happen like that, It happened on another occasion that a reporter wrote: “What is this spiritual science meant to be? It is obvious that one person pictures the world in one way and another somehow else, Everyone has a right to his opinion.” Thus in our time you find all over the place complete lack of interest mixed with utter frivolity whenever a world-conception is in question. And this was once written about a lecture: “One person sees the world as a box of bricks, another makes a brew of toads gall with tiger's intestines, a third is a monist, a fourth stares at the confusion without thinking at all, a fifth looks through two pairs of spectacles at the forces of the soul and so (says the writer) we could go on indefinitely.” He is completely indifferent to all these points of view.

This lack of interest towards a spiritual comprehension of the world is not diminishing, it is increasing, and will go on doing so unless a deepening comes about in the world through spiritual science, Deepening through spiritual science will prove of the greatest value, my dear friends, because it does not merely call upon man's faculty for forming concepts and ideas, but seizes upon his whole soul and permeates it so that he actually feels himself as microcosm in the macrocosm, and really experiences individually what has first to build itself up on the processes of destruction. We can attain an actual living-together-with-the-dead only when we can see in the destructive process of death a process that makes a foundation upon which the spiritual being of man rises after death—a process continuing to work up to the time of a new birth.

Thus spiritual science must mean both familiarizing ourselves with the truth of things and letting the truth of things take hold of our very being. Modern spiritual life is a withdrawal from the truth, a becoming apathetic It is becoming a matter of indifference whether there is real clairvoyant vision or whether “toads' gall is brewed with tiger's intestines”. In its culture and ethics modern spiritual life is on the way to the most frivolous and cynical indifference towards all existence that has to do with the depths of being, On the other hand, spiritual science is developing and can develop in a natural way, since the human soul, simply by interesting itself in the results of spiritual investigation, is taken hold of by the cosmic process, carried into it, interwoven with it. It is not necessary to be clairvoyant, but only to enter honestly into the experiences resulting from clairvoyance, getting to know spiritual science; then one will be laid hold of and carried along by what is received through anthroposophical concepts into a living mutual experience and mutual feeling with the cosmos, For this it is certainly necessary that spiritual science should not be looked upon as something adding to the enjoyment of life, but again and again we must penetrate further with our thought into what spiritual science gives. We need not be clairvoyant at first but must accustom ourselves to consider the things of life from many aspects, in the sense of spiritual science. Hence among us things are described from the most varied aspects. Then the experiences take hold of one and carry the soul in feeling if not with knowledge right into the life of the spiritual world, into the spiritual manifesting in the material.

But now my dear friends, in what spiritual science wishes to bring about in knowledge, in art, in religious feeling, and in ethical will—spiritual science takes its place in our spiritual life as something of which we have to be conscious that it is a new element in modern culture. Any anthroposophist must become conscious of this new thing. Yesterday I pointed this out in another connection—namely, that it is necessary for us to give a new form to the Christ Impulse, that our figure of the Christ is essentially different in form from that of Michelangelo's . Our thinking and feeling have to be thoroughly transformed in face of the new standpoint. Then men will begin to have an inkling of what life is as a whole—intensive, living life, For this has ceased. Wherever we look in our environment there is no longer the feeling Goethe expressed when he said: “Art must be the expression, the true expression, of living cosmic laws.” Art has to be an interpretation of the mysterious laws of nature. Today there is no longer any understanding for that. Hence one sees that in all spheres there is a gradual falling away from the real inner life of truth, in what appears as knowledge on the one hand, and on the other as art. In art today we are fond of speaking of compositions, of juxtapositions of individual parts. What art was in olden times, what it must again become—a creating out of the truth of the things themselves—has vanished. In the fullest sense there is an ahrimanic conspiracy against truth, which is spread abroad in the world, and this appears today in the sphere of art as well as in that of science. In the sphere of science we see everywhere a clinging to what is merely perceived by the senses.

In art, too, we see what resembles this. We see, in man, the possibility of feeling and perceiving the inner truth of things gradually dying out. Thus works of art can be produced and admired throughout the civilised world like “Jean Christophe”, the novel by Romain Rolland.

Anyone who creates out of true art, who feels inner truth, inner ruling truth, will never jumble together such a “work of art” as “Jean Christophe”; he would know that the individuality of a Beethoven, Richard Wagner, Strauss, Gustav Mahler, has its inner truth for each one of them. If we jumble them all together, we produce a vexatious chaos of decadent art like this tiresome “Jean Christophe”, which, however, to the regret of all concerned with real art, is admired throughout the civilised world. It is admired, let me say, because today there is a secret conspiracy against the real, essential truth. Indeed, people are no longer aware that they are sinning against the real, essential truth in admiring this so-called literary work and in letting pass as valid not the living individualities built up from a unity that is alive, but a chaotic, foolish work that is all patched together.

We must, my dear friends, be alive to the various sources of perversion out of which the soul willingly creates at the present time; we must calmly and courageously acknowledge what is thus perverted so as to bring to consciousness the significance of the impulse of spiritual science and its intervention in man's living world of truth. Then we shall understand. that we live in an age in which we must be clear that what confronts us as summer-life, budding, sprouting life, is EX DEO NASCIMUR; diminishing life, the destroying of the soul-life, but spirit issuing forth from this destruction in our life since the Mystery of Golgotha—IN CHRISTO MORIMUR. But in the future men must not remain standing on this ground; when this budding, sprouting life of summer when comes, when the Earth-spirit sleeps, we must find the strength to develop and carry into the sleep of the Earth-spirit a higher force arising from the life of soul resulting from clairvoyant knowledge. Then we have to say: As the world in summer is EX DEO NASCIMUR, so the world in winter; and since the Mystery of Golgotha, is IN CHRISTO MORIMUR.

But as we go to meet the sleep, the summer life, the sleep of the external organism of the earth, let us be conscious that we can carry into this time what we now experience out of this actual living together with the spiritual world, what the spirit carries into this time of the earth's sleep—the mood of Whitsuntide. If we have felt: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR aright, we shall bear the Whitsun mood into this sleep-condition of the earth by receiving the impulse spiritual science is able to give.

We are born out of the Divine; the summer life of budding, sprouting nature is witness to this We live with the Christ, and feel that we do, by living ourselves into the winter; when the earth wakes we take the Christ Impulse with us into the life of dying Nature: IN CHRISTO MORIMUR, But by going forward again to meet the summer with the Mystery of Golgotha, we carry the Whitsun mood into life so that it may awake in the darkness of summer, in the budding and sprouting and that amidst the sleeping Earth-spirits we ourselves awake in spirit: PER SPIRITUM SANCTUM REVIVISCIMUS.